The Apex Book of World SF Part 18

I pondered the matter for a whilst. When I did not answer, He Chan-Li said, "I will pay you, Mr Brooks. I will pay you well." There was something in her voice--something she could no longer hide--worry, perhaps?

I said, "I'll take the case. But I make no guarantees."

She nodded, looking relieved. "This is a recent picture."

I took the glossy paper, raised it to the light. He Zhen was smiling the careless smile of teenagers all over the world, displaying white, perfect teeth--probably enhancements, but they didn't look artificial. The expensive kind, then.

"That's all you have?" I asked.

"Yes. The tracking implant is at my house; I can give you the address where the security company found it. Is that enough?"

I shrugged. "It's going to have to be."

"I see. I'll take you to my house, Mr Brooks, and you can see for yourself."

I shook my head. "I'll come in my own time." In truth, there were several things I needed to do before leaving, things I could not let her see.

He Chan-Li raised an eyebrow. "Some would say this is arrogance."

I shrugged. I could maintain the polite facade my lover Mei-Lin had once taught me, but not for long. At heart, I remained an American, and the elaborate subtleties of Xuya were forever beyond me. "It is my way."

He Chan-Li looked displeased, though only a slight tightness of the mouth betrayed that. "Indeed." She waited for me to say something, but I did not. At length she rose, with a smile I knew was fake. "By the time you arrive at my house, Mr Brooks, I may be gone. I have a business meeting."

I nodded, did not speak.

"Someone will take care of you there," He Chan-Li said.

As she turned to leave my office, I saw, for a moment only, the emotion she was trying to hide from me.

It wasn't worry. It was raw, naked fear; a fear so strong that I could almost smell it.

Afterward, I stared at the walls of the office for a whilst. I should have refused the case. There was too much I did not know, too much I was going to have to pry out of the client. But I needed the money.

Being an American in Xuya--a real American, a practising Protestant, and not one of those who'd converted to Taoism or Buddhism--meant you were on your own. No company would employ you; those few landlords who rented to you would do so at exorbitant rates. It was hard to get by--which was why I'd taken He Chan-Li on, against my better judgment.

I did not know where He Zhen was. But it was entirely possible she had not left Fenliu--as the daughter of a wealthy woman, she would be a prime target for ransom. I hoped that was the case. I hated travelling abroad--Greater Mexica had stringent entry requirements, demanding either proof of familial ties or of religion, and whilst the impoverished United States were softer on immigration, I had no wish to return to a place where there was a warrant on my head.

Before I left for He Chan-Li's house, I started a search on my computer, feeding it the names of He Chan-Li and of the fiance. It was not an entirely legal search, since the program would trawl through administrative records as well as on the network; with luck, I would have some results by the time I came back.

He Chan-Li's house was in the richer suburbs of Fenliu. I took the mag-lev train from my shabby building, through the centre of the city and its skysc.r.a.pers of gla.s.s--the heart of Xuya's economic dominion on North America--and then into the residential neighbourhoods. The view on either side of the train became apartment buildings decorated by red and yellow lanterns, which in turn gave way to individual houses with slanted roofs and white-washed walls.

At the address He Chan-Li had given me was a thick wall of bricks covered by garlands of wisteria. When the door opened, I was surprised to find an old woman in traditional Xuyan dress: robes heavily embroidered with peaches, the ancient symbols for long life. Behind her, un.o.btrusive, stood a servant in livery.

The old woman said, "My name is He Lai. My daughter told me you would come here." He Lai's face was tanned by the sun and wrinkled like an overripe plum. She exuded a serenity I found uncanny.

"He Chan-Li told me someone would be waiting for me. I expected a servant, not a member of the family."

He Lai shrugged. "It is not menial work, to welcome a guest into your home."

There were ponds covered with lilies and lotus flowers, and weeping willows with long branches trailing in the water: a beauty that seemed to belong to another time, to another place. But I saw the small, un.o.btrusive control panels that controlled the security system and knew that this was no pleasure garden. It was a fortress.

"Here." He Lai was pointing to a small pavilion by the side of a bigger building--that last presumably being the main house. "Those are my granddaughter's quarters. We have touched nothing since she left--I kept the servants away from here."

"Thank you," I said, and realised she was looking at me, waiting for something.

"You will find her?" She sounded worried.

"You have any idea of where she might be?"

"She confided in me--but she told me nothing about leaving. I would have thought--" He Lai shook her head. "I ought to know the risks, living in that house. Two years ago, a gang kidnapped my daughter's maid and held her for ransom."

"And?"

She would not look at me. It had ended badly, then. "I'll do my best," I said. "But you know I can promise nothing."

"I know. But you can understand how I feel."

I remembered sitting in the doctor's waiting room, waiting for the diagnosis of my lover, Mei-Lin, and how badly I had wished that it would be nothing, that Mei-Lin would live. I did understand how frightening it was, to be in the dark.

So I said nothing, made no false promises. I bowed to He Lai, simply. And then I slid the door open and entered He Zhen's rooms. A servant followed me, no doubt to make sure I stole nothing.

It was everything I'd expected a Xuyan room to be: a low bed of ebony with a lacquered pillow laid over the sheets; a few pieces of furniture arranged in a pattern for long life; a laptop on the mahogany desk; and in one corner of the room, a shrine to the spirits of the ancestors, with ashes in the incense burner.

I knelt to check the shrine, triggering a flood of blue light from the neons above it. The ashes were old. It did not look as though the missing girl had gone back to her room. I had not expected it.

Several engravings adorned the walls: Chinese paintings, reproductions from the Ming dynasty--including the most famous of all, the eunuch Si-Jian Ma's s.h.i.+ps departing from Nankin on the journey that would lead him to discover America long before any European set foot on those sh.o.r.es.

I opened the drawers of the bedside table and found a jewellery box filled with pearls and jade pendants, as well as a sheaf of yuans, neatly tied together--enough to pay my rent for several months.

I rifled through the jade pendants until my hands snagged on something--a small item that had been carefully hidden at the bottom of the drawer. I raised it to the light: it was a twisted knot of jade in an abstract pattern, one that was familiar, although I was not sure why. It did not seem like a traditional Xuyan pendant, unlike the rest of the jewellery.

Apart from that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

And yet....

I turned again to look at the room, at the small things that were not quite right. Someone else might have missed it, but I'd seen enough rooms like this to know where the subtle sense of wrongness came from. Someone had been there before me. Someone who had attempted to put everything back into place, but had only partially succeeded.

According to He Lai, the servants had touched nothing; it could have been He Chan-Li, but I doubted that.

Odd. A place like this, with its state-of-the-art security, would be hard to get into. Why go to all that trouble?

I opened the laptop. It was the latest fad from Greater Mexica: sleek metal outside with a corn-yellow keyboard inside and a touchpad adorned with a stylised b.u.t.terfly--symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the Mexica G.o.d of knowledge and computers. The laptop beeped as I started it up, but it did not ask for any pa.s.sword or fingerprint.

Ah, well. You never knew. Likely whoever had ransacked the room had also erased everything from the hard disk, but he might have been sloppy.

I took the laptop, slid it back into its embroidered case. I also picked up the pendant and turned to the servant, who for the whole duration of my search had silently stood in a corner. "Can I take this?"

He shrugged. "You'll have to ask the mistress."

Before I left the room, I snapped a few high-res pictures. My instincts were telling me I'd missed something, but I couldn't figure out what.

I'd expected He Lai to be waiting for me outside. She wasn't. In her place was another Xuyan: a dapper man dressed in red silk robes. He had no insignia of rank, but I was not fooled. There was steel in his bearing and in his gaze; not someone you'd want to cross.

"I suppose you are the investigator Mother hired to track down He Zhen," he said.

I did not miss the way he referred to He Chan-Li; in Xuyan, it could only mean one thing. "You would be the fiance?" I asked.

He smiled, displaying yellow teeth. "Wen Yi."

"Jonathan Brooks," I said grudgingly, still looking at him. He was not pure Xuyan--although his skin had the waxy yellow cast I a.s.sociated with Xuya, his features were distinctively Chumash Indian, the original inhabitants of Fenliu. "What are you doing here?"

Wen Yi smiled again--in an angelic way that was starting to get on my nerves. "I wanted to talk to you."

"You are talking to me."

He looked amused. "You Americans are so uncivilised. Sometimes I wonder why you come into Xuya at all."

I did my best impression of a smile, though it was thoroughly insincere. "Some of us like it here." Not entirely true: I'd never have moved past the Rocky Mountains if I hadn't had a fifteen-year jail sentence hanging over my head in Virginia. The United States took foreign sympathies very seriously, and even though Mei-Lin was only half-Xuyan, the state police had judged our love a crime. "What are you doing here?" I asked.

Wen Yi looked surprised. "I'm family."

"Not yet."

"Almost," Wen Yi said. "The marriage was to take place in a month."

There was something in the way he spoke--it wasn't the absolute confidence the sentence brooked. It was--anger? I'd learnt to read Xuyans, to see beneath what Americans thought a smooth, calm facade. Had I been asked what Wen Yi felt, I would have said rage. But why?

"When did you last see He Zhen?"

"We had...a meeting scheduled seven nights ago, but she never came."

"What kind of 'meeting'?"

"I do not know," Wen Yi said. "She said she had important things to tell me, but would not say what."

Liar. Smooth and smiling, but a liar all the same. He had seen her that night, I was ready to bet.

"Can you tell me about her?" I asked.

"A lovely girl," Wen Yi said.

"Is that all you have to say about her? You two were engaged."

He shrugged. "An arranged marriage, Mr Brooks. You know how things go in Xuya."

"A marriage for the sake of Leiming Tech?" I said. "You don't sound so worried that He Zhen's gone."

He raised mild eyes to me, but I could feel the anger simmering within. "I am worried, Mr Brooks. You would do well to remember that."

"Is that a threat? If that is all you have to offer--"

Wen Yi was not looking at me. He said, "She was a beautiful, charming girl. When she laughed, it was as if the sun had risen in the room."

"You think she's been kidnapped? That she's run away?" I didn't believe that. Running away required planning; He Zhen would have taken her laptop, as well as the money in the drawers of the bedside table.

He started. "No. She'd never run away. She was such a devoted daughter."

"I see."

"If you have any information on her whereabouts," he slipped me a glossy card, "call me."

And that was likely all he had come here for. He played the part of the besotted fiance very badly--save for his worry at her disappearance, which sounded genuine. Which did not mean anything--he could still be afraid that I'd find out he was behind all of it.

I watched Wen Yi walk away; when he was gone, I went into the main building, where I found He Lai waiting for me. She had a lacquered box in her hands. "My daughter said you should have this."

Inside the box was the tracking implant. I bowed to thank her, and asked, "You knew her well?" I asked.

He Lai's eyes watched me, expressionless. "She was my only granddaughter. How could I not know her?"

"How was she, in the days before she disappeared?"

"She was in high spirits, but then the engagement had just been finalised after a year--"

"How did she feel about the wedding?" I asked.

"She was happy," He Lai said. "Wen Yi is a man of status in the community. She was going to be an adult--"

"And move away from this house?" I asked, and when I saw her wince, I knew I was right. "So she and your daughter did not get on."

"Zhen always showed proper deference." He Lai looked defiantly at me.

"I do not doubt that," I said. But there were other ways to disobey. Still, it was looking more and more unlikely that He Zhen had run away. Whatever her quarrel with her mother, He Zhen would have been out of He Chan-Li's reach in a month. Raising a furore in Fenliu would have been counterproductive.

And whatever had happened to He Zhen, why had her room been searched? What had they thought to find there, and had they found it?

All questions to which I had no answer.

I raised the pendant I'd found in the drawer, dangled it before He Lai's eyes. "Does this mean anything to you?" I asked.

He Lai's face twisted. "It's Zhen's favourite."

"It's not Xuyan," I said.

"No. Zhen's father brought it back from a business trip in Tenocht.i.tlan. It's a glyph that means 'Good Omen' in Nahuatl."

"I thought He Zhen was very young when her father died."