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DO DRAGONS TEXT?

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Brenda W. Clough


Old Grandfather Cho had a phone. Everybody did—it was mandated by the Central Committee in Beijing. But in this season, scarce gasoline for the generator was better used to run the pump that lifted the water from the canal into the rice paddies at the foot of the mountain.

No one in Huanggangxin was interested in how the war with the United States was going. In addition to farming, Grandfather Cho was the village feng shui master. Analyzing the unseen movements of Lung, the earth dragon, kept Grandfather fully occupied whenever he wasn’t plowing, sowing, or transplanting young rice stalks.

But Grandfather was one of the most important men in the village, because the passage of the dragon under the earth generated feng shui, the unseen currents of chi that ran along and under the land. Only this past year, Lung had turned over in his sleep, deep under the mountain. This had made a bit of bank on the Fenghe River crumble, forcing the villagers to dig the mouth of the canal out again. Would it be necessary to cut a new access channel to the river’s water? Not only did every villager’s livelihood depended upon the rice crop fed by that water, but also the Central Committee was demanding more and more of the harvest for the troops.

It was a crucial decision, fully occupying Grandfather’s mind. So his phone was kept in his kitchen cupboard, behind the two chipped porcelain rice bowls and the single tin cooking pot. He never thought about it. The battery had flatlined last season.

Even when the tremendous noise woke the entire village one night, Grandfather merely ran out into the dirt lane with everyone else. It was pitch dark, but the glow from the mountain lit Huanggangxin bright as day. The pattering sound all around them was debris, dust falling from the night sky. “Gods, look at it,” Madam Liang yelled. “Half the mountain is gone!”

The top of the mountain glowed like iron in the forge. And it was visibly shorter, planed off flat. It couldn’t have been a bomb. Something had sliced off the tip of the entire peak. “Oh gods,” Madam Liang groaned. “What if it had hit us?”

“It’s the Americans,” Fengfeng said. Everything bad was the fault of the Americans. “Grandfather! Do you think Lung is hurt?”

“I’m certain he’s fine,” Grandfather Cho said, even though he wasn’t certain of anything. “Earth dragons are magical, remember. Mortal weapons don’t bother them.” But it was worrying. In the end the villagers agreed that the prudent thing to do would be to go up onto the mountain tomorrow, and make a small offering. A rice cake and an incense stick, just to show Lung that the village had nothing to do with it.

“And of course, Grandfather, you’ll be the one to make the prayer,” Fengfeng said.

“Knowing how the feng shui currents run doesn’t mean dragons listen to me,” Grandfather protested. But there was no one else. Grandfather Cho was the oldest man in Huanggangxin. And he knew how to sense the currents in the earth, close enough.

In the morning, the villagers set out. It had never been a big mountain, not like the big karst cliffs on the Li River. But now it was sadly diminished. The road wound back and forth up the wooded slope, and abruptly ended. Beyond, where the peak used to be, was flat as noodle dough. There were no trees, no birds or bugs. The very stone had been blasted and smoothed. Cautiously, Madam Liang patted the surface with her callused bare foot. “Ow! It’s hot! Like a baking stone, you could fry a scallion cake on it.”

“Melted away!”

“The Americans have a new and terrible weapon,” Fengfeng said. “A torch, or a bomb, or something. This is very serious.”

“We must inform the Central Committee,” Grandfather Cho said.

“Right away!”

No one wanted to loiter on this fearsomely deformed mountain. Grandfather wasn’t easy about it either, but he felt that Lung must be equally upset, having his roof pounded like that. Perhaps a rice cake and a stick of incense would be a comfort. He took the basket from Madam Liang and said, “Hurry back and phone Beijing. I’ll make the offering.”

“Don’t delay,” Madam warned.

When they were gone, Grandfather Cho retreated into the fringe of forest. There was a sharp demarcation between the blasted bare rock and the trees. Branches had been severed, even trunks split where the line of destruction had passed. The very precision was frightening.

Finally Grandfather found a flat rock, not too far from the edge but not nerve-rackingly close. He set the rice cake on it and stuck the incense stick upright into the dirt beside it. With a cheap cigarette lighter he lit the stick. The sweet smoke twirled away on the breeze and was lofted upward by the heat from the blasted stone.

Grandfather Cho had never addressed the earth dragon before, but it was always wise to be deferential. “Lord Dragon,” he prayed aloud. “Mighty under the earth. Remember that we, your subjects, have always respected you. Accept these humble offerings—”

He was staring down, at the rock and the rice cake. And suddenly the rock became real. It snapped into a powerful focus that Grandfather recognized, even though he had never seen it before. The rock became far more real than the rice cake, so that the rice cake looked like a smear of flour, the vapor from a sneeze.

Grandfather Cho reeled back a step. Oh gods, the path was doing the same thing. The ground under his bare feet was more than solid, assuming more dimensions, more reality, than a mortal could tolerate. His own feet looked thin and shadowy. He didn’t deliberately fall flat on his face. He had no choice, any more than the incense smoke did. Powerful currents were pushing at him.

YOU

The words reverberated through his body. Grandfather Cho clapped his hands over his ears but the voice reverberated through him anyway.

YOU, MORTAL

“Great lord,” Grandfather Cho choked.

HOW DARE YOU DESTROY MY MOUNTAIN

“It wasn’t us, your humble subjects. It was the Americans!”

Grandfather Cho dared to peer between his fingers. The earth dragon was there. It was so real that Grandfather Cho could not see it properly. He dimly discerned a long body, miles of it, undulating in and out of the solid rock as if it were smoke. But it really was smoke. The earth dragon was so much more real. Solid matter was no more than vapor to it. Its head was the size of a cliff. And the eyes—there were six, eight, twenty of them, the hot color of the sun at noon, all of them glaring at him. The ground under his belly was losing its substance. The dragon was so terrifyingly real that Grandfather Cho could feel himself melting.

THEN THEY MUST STOP

“Mighty Lung, they are using space weapons that we cannot—”

SEE TO IT

“It shall be as you command, great lord.” There was really no other reply to make. Grandfather lay trembling and sweating, silently praying he would survive this. Men were not meant to look at gods. Lung might have heard him, because the ground beneath him firmed up a little, like a jelly cooling and setting. The dragon must be moving away, deeper down into the ground. Removed from the presence of divine reality, the world gradually subsided into solidity again. Trembling, Grandfather Cho staggered to his feet and ran.

When he tottered back to Huanggangxin, however, the villagers were skeptical. “What does Lung think the Chinese Space Force is doing?” Fengfeng demanded. “They’re trying as hard as they can to defeat the Americans.”

“Did you phone the Central Committee?”

“I got a recording. Left a message.”

“We have to do something,” Grandfather insisted. “Or Lung will be even more angry.”

“It must have hurt, to lose the top of the mountain,” Madam Liang said. “But we’re farmers. What can we do?”

Nobody knew. But under the lash of desperation Grandfather Cho had an idea. “Let me charge up my phone,” he said. “I’ll call Ah Mei.”

“Good, good! Your smart granddaughter.”

“They know everything in Shanghai,” Madam Liang said.

Grandfather was confident. “She’ll know what to do.”

He took the phone out from behind the rice bowls. Then he had to search for the cable before he could plug it in. The battery had run all the way down, so it took all night to charge up. Ah Mei had put her number into the Saved Contacts, so that was no problem. But then there was the difficulty of actually reaching her. Ah Mei had a job with a game-design business in Shanghai. “Online multiplayer,” she’d said, words that meant nothing to Grandfather Cho, though it involved working even longer hours than farming.

But after several attempts he got through. “Hello, BaBa!” she cried, small and distant in his ear. Madam Liang helped him put the phone into speaker mode. Everyone nodded approvingly at her dutiful words. “Is your health good? How is the rice crop?”

“Fine, fine. But I have a different problem, Ah Mei. A big one. Maybe you can help me, huh?”

He was sitting on Fengfeng’s porch, where the signal was best, and the entire village eavesdropped without embarrassment as he described again his encounter with Lung. Ah Mei didn’t come home now except at New Year. She had become a city girl, with an office job and an apartment in a tower. “Come on, BaBa,” she said. “There aren’t any dragons under the earth. How could we have subways or underground fiber optics if there were?”

“Perhaps they don’t have any in the cities,” Madam Liang suggested, but the others hushed her.

“I saw him, Ah Mei. You have to help us. He’s mad about his mountain being bombed. Who can blame him? If we don’t do something, he’ll swim under the village and make the earth shake. He could destroy Huanggangxin in two minutes.”

She sighed so loudly that he could imagine her rolling her eyes. “Okay, I’ll play the game . . . how about you try this. Since Lung can swim through the earth, he could swim to America, right? Send him over there to shake apart Washington and New York.”

“He’s a local dragon,” Grandfather pointed out. “He’s lived in this valley all my life, and the life of my father before me. I don’t think earth dragons travel. Besides, what about the ocean?”

“Then what about text?”

“What?”

“There are earth dragons everywhere, right? Not just in the Fenghe River valley.”

“I don’t know.”

“There are earthquakes in the West. You say that earth dragons cause earthquakes. So there must be earth dragons in America.”

“That’s very smart,” Fengfeng whispered.

“And there’s a good chance that Lung has a way to talk to them. Like the way we have phones so I can talk to you. He has a phone, a magical internet, some way to communicate with his dragon friends.”

“That makes sense,” Grandfather admitted.

“Good! So go back, and ask Lung to contact the earth dragons in America. They can help. And, ooh, another brainstorm. Tell Lung there’s an earth dragon in the US named San Andreas.”

“Agh, a foreign name,” Grandfather Cho grumbled. “Fengfeng, do you have a pen? Okay, Ah Mei, spell it slowly . . . What is this San Andreas?”

“If there are earth dragons in the United States, this will be the biggest one,” Ah Mei said with confidence. “Tell Lung to ask San Andreas to roll over and wiggle a little. I bet he could push California right into the Pacific Ocean.”

“Oh, that would be very nice,” Grandfather Cho said. “The Americans would leave Lung alone after that.”

“They’d be way too busy to bother us,” Ah Mei said. “Look, I gotta run, BaBa. My boss is messaging me. Let me know what happens, okay?”

“You’re a good girl, Ah Mei.” And blip, she was gone.

“Wow, you have one smart girl there,” Madam Liang said. “She should get married.”

“Does anyone study feng shui in America?” Fengfeng asked.

On this point Grandfather Cho could speak. “Only in a minor way. Maybe arranging their restaurants or moving the furniture around. They don’t know anything about how the earth dragons cause the currents to flow. I’ll go back up the mountain and tell Lung. And, Fengfeng. Will we know if there’s an earthquake in California?”

“Oh sure.” Fengfeng grinned and held up his own phone.

“Good. If this works, I think we should tell the Central Committee.” Grandfather Cho looked out across the fields at the truncated mountain. “Lung could win us this war.”

“I’ll say that in my message,” Fengfeng said. “Bet you they’ll return my call.”


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