The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

A. A. ATTANASIO Ink From the New Moon

Here, at the farthest extreme of my journey, in the islands along the eastern shores of the Sandalwood Territories, with all of heaven and earth separating us — here, at long last, I have found enough strength to pen these words to you. Months of writing official reports, of recording endless observations of bamboo drill-derricks and cobblestone canals irrigating horizons of plowed fields, of interviewing sooty laborers in industrial barns and refineries roaring with steam engines and dazzling cauldrons of molten metal, of scrutinizing prisoners toiling in salt-canyons, of listening to schoolchildren sing hymns in classrooms on tree-crowned hilltops and in cities agleam with gold-spired pavilions and towers of lacquered wood — all these tedious annotations had quite drained me of the sort of words one writes to one’s wife. But, finally, I feel again the place where the world is breathing inside me.

Forgive my long silence, Heart Wing. I would have written sooner had not my journey across the Sandalwood Territories of Dawn been an experience for me blacker than ink can show. Being so far from the homeland, so far from you, has dulled the heat of my life. Darkness occupies me. Yet, this unremitting gloom brings with it a peculiar knowledge and wisdom all its own — the treasure that the snake guards — the so-called poison cure. Such is the blood’s surprise, my precious one, that even in the serpent’s grip of dire sorrow, I should find a clarity greater than any since my failures took me from you.

You, of course, will only remember me as you left me — a sour little man for whom being Third Assistant Secretarial Scribe at the Imperial Library served more as punishment than privilege; the husband whittled away by shame and envy, whom you dutifully bid farewell from our farm’s moon gate on the avenue of chestnuts. All so long ago, it seems. What a humiliation that the only way I could support you was to leave you. And for such an ignoble task — to examine the social structure of rebel provinces that have repudiated our finest traditions. I was so embittered that for most of my journey I referred to the region as the Sandalwood Territories of the Dawn, as if their secession from the Kingdom had happened only in their minds, two hundred years of independence from us an illusion before the forty-five centuries of our written history. Even their name for themselves seemed sheer arrogance: the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies. As if there could be any true autocracy but the Emperor’s. Still, the Imperial Court had selected me to regard them as if they possessed authenticity, and I had to humble myself or face the ignominy of losing even this menial job.

I never said any of this to you then. I could barely admit it to myself. Yet, I need to say it clearly now — all of it, the obvious and the obscure — to make sense of my life and yours. Yes, I do admit, I was ashamed, most especially in your eyes. Only you, Heart Wing, know me for who I truly am — a storyteller hooked on the bridebait of words, writing by the lamp of lightning. Even so, my books, those poor, defenseless books, written in the lyrical style of a far-gone time! — well, as you know too well, we reaped no livelihood from those printed pages. My only success as a writer was that my stories won you for me. After our blunderful attempt to farm the Western Provinces, to live the lives of field-and-stream poets — a defiance of destiny and station that cost us your health and the life of our one child — after that, all my pride indeed soured to cynicism and self-pity. I felt obliged to accept the Imperial post, because there seemed no other recourse.

From that day, eighteen moons ago, until now, the shadow of night has covered me. I was not there to console you in your grief when our second child fell from your womb before he was strong enough to carry his own breath. By then, the big ship had already taken me to the Isles of the Palm Grove Vow in the middle of the World Sea. There, I sat surrounded by tedious tomes of Imperial chronicles about the Sandalwood Territories, while you suffered alone.

Like you, I never had a taste for the dry magisterial prose of diplomacy and the bitter punctuations of war that is history. What did it matter to me that five centuries ago, during the beginning of our modern era in the Sung Dynasty, the Buddhists, persecuted for adhering to a faith of foreign origin, set sail from the Middle Kingdom and, instead of being devoured by seven hundred dragons or plunging into the Maelstrom of the Great Inane, crossed nine thousand li of ocean and discovered a chain of tropical islands populated by Stone Age barbarians? Of what consequence was it to me that these islands, rich in palm, hardwoods, and the fragrant sandalwood beloved of furniture makers, soon attracted merchants and the Emperor’s soldiers? And that, once again, the Buddhists felt compelled to flee, swearing their famous Palm Grove Vow to sail east until they either faced death together or found a land of their own? And that, after crossing another seven thousand li of ocean, they arrived at the vast Land of Dawn, from whose easternmost extreme I am writing to you?

Surely, you are pursing your lips now with impatience, wondering why I burden you with so much bothersome history, you, a musician’s daughter, who always preferred the beauty of song to the tedium of facts. Stay with me yet, Heart Wing. My discovery, the hard-won clarity gained through my poison cure, will mean less to you without some sharing of what I have learned of this land’s history.

We know from our school days that the merchants eventually followed the Buddhists to the Land of Dawn, where the gentle monks had already converted many of the aboriginal tribes. Typical of the Buddhists, they did not war with the merchants but retreated further east, spreading their doctrine among the tribes and gradually opening the frontier to other settlers. Over time, as the Imperialists established cities and trade routes, the monks began preaching the foolishness of obeisance to a Kingdom far across the World Sea. “Here and now!” the monks chanted, the land of our ancestors being too far away and too entrenched in the veil of illusion to be taken seriously any more. Though the Buddhists themselves never raised a weapon against the Emperor, the merchants and farmers eagerly fought for them, revolting against Imperialist taxation. And out of the Sandalwood Territories of the Dawn, the settlers founded their own country: the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies.

There are numerous kingdoms here in the USA, each governed by an autocrat elected by the landowners of that kingdom. These separate kingdoms are, in turn, loosely governed by an overlord whom the autocrats and the landowners elect from among themselves to serve for an interval of no more than fifty moons. It is an alien system that the denizens here call Power of the People, and it is fraught with strife, as the conservative Confucians, liberal Buddhists, and radical Taoist-aboriginals continually struggle for dominance. Here, the Mandate of Heaven is not so much granted by celestial authority as taken by wiles, wealth, or force, grasped and clawed for.

I will not trouble you with this nation’s paradoxical politics: its abhorrence of monarchs, yet its glorification of leaders; its insistence on separation of government and religion, yet its reliance on oaths, prayers, and moralizing; its passionate patriotism, yet fervent espousal of individual endeavor. There are no slaves here as at home, and so there is no dignity for the upper classes, or even for the lower classes, for all are slaves to money. The commonest street sweeper can invest his meager earnings to form his own road-maintenance company and after years of slavery to his enterprise become as wealthy as nobility. And, likewise, the rich can squander their resources and, without the protection of servants or class privilege, become street beggars. And not just men but women as well, who possess the same rights as men. Amitabha! This land has lost entirely the sequence of divine order that regulates our serene sovereignty. And though there are those who profit by this increase of social and economic mobility, it is by and large a country mad with, and subverted by, its own countless ambitions. In many ways, it is, I think, the Middle Kingdom turned upside down.

The rocky west coast, rife with numerous large cities, is the industrial spine of this nation, as is the east coast in our land. On the seaboard, as in our kingdom, refineries, paper mills, textile factories, and shipbuilding yards abound. Inland are the lush agricultural valleys — and then the mountains and beyond them the desert — just as in our country. Where to the north in our homeland the Great Wall marches across mountains for over four thousand li, shutting out the Mongol hordes, here an equally colossal wall crosses the desert to the south, fending off ferocious tribes of Aztecatl.

Heart Wing, there is even a village on the eastern prairie, beyond the mountains and the red sandstone arches of the desert, that looks very much like the village on the Yellow River where we had our ruinous farm. There, in a bee-filled orchard just like the cherry grove where we buried our daughter, my memory fetched back to when I held her bird-light body in my arms for the last time. I wept. I wanted to write to you then, but there were irrigation networks to catalog and, on the horizons of amber wheat and millet, highways to map hundreds of li long, where land boats fly faster than horses, their colorful sails fat with wind.

Beyond the plains lies the Evil East, which is what the Dawn Settlers call their frontier, because said hinterland is dense with ancient forests no ax has ever touched. Dawn legends claim that the hungry souls of the unhappy dead wander those dense woods. Also, tribes of hostile aboriginals who have fled the settled autocracies of the west shun the Doctrine of the Buddha and the Ethics of Confucius and reign there, as anarchic and wild as any Taoist could imagine.

When our delegation leader sought volunteers to continue the survey into that wilderness, I was among those who offered to go. I am sorry, Heart Wing, that my love for you was not enough to overcome my shame at the failures that led to our child’s death and that took me from you. Wild in my grief, I sought likeness in that primeval forest. I had hoped it would kill me and end my suffering.

It did not. I had somehow imagined or hoped that there might well be ghosts in the Evil East, or at least cannibalistic savages to whom I would be prey, but there were neither. So, I survived despite myself, saddened to think that all our chances bleed from us, like wounds that never heal.

The immense expanse of forest — poignantly beautiful even in its darkest vales and fog-hung fens — turned out to be haunted only with the natural dangers of serpents, bears, and wolves. As for the tribes, when they realized that we had come merely to observe and not to cut their trees or encroach on their land, they greeted us cordially enough, for barbarians. To win their hospitality, we traded toys — bamboo dragonflies, kites and firecrackers. I knew a simple joy with them, forgetting briefly the handful of chances that had already bled from me with my hope of fading from this world.

On the east coast, Buddhist missions and trading posts overlook the Storm Sea. By the time we emerged from the wild-woods, a message for me from the west had already arrived at one of the posts by the river routes that the fur traders use. I recognized your father’s calligraphy and knew before I read it — that you had left us to join the ancestors.

When the news came, I tried to throw myself from the monastery wall into the sea, but my companions stopped me. I could not hear beyond my heart. We who had once lived as one doubled being had become mysteries again to each other. I shall know no greater enigma.

For days, I despaired. My failures had lost all my cherished chances, as a writer and a farmer, as a father and, now, as your mate. With that letter, I became older than the slowest river.

It is likely I would have stayed at the monastery and accepted monkhood had not news come announcing the arrival of strangers from across the Storm Sea. Numb, indifferent, I sailed south with the delegation’s other volunteers. Autumn had returned to the forest. Disheveled oaks and maples mottled the undulant shores. As we ventured farther south, hoar frost gradually thinned from the air, and stupendous domes of cumulus rose from the horizon. Shaggy cypress and palm trees tilted above dunes.

Like a roving, masterless dog, I followed the others from one mission to the next among lovely, verdant islands. Hunger abandoned me, and I ate only when my companions pressed food on me, not tasting it. In the silence and fire of night, while the others slept, my life seemed an endless web of lies I had spun and you a bird I had caught and crippled. In the mirrors of the sea, I saw faces. Mostly they were your face. And always when I saw you, you smiled at me with an untellable love. I grieved that I had ever left you.

The morning we found the boats that had crossed the Storm Sea, I greeted the strangers morosely. These were stout men with florid faces, thick beards, and big noses. Their ships — clumsy, worm-riddled boxes lacking watertight compartments — featured ludicrous cloth sails set squarely, leaving them at the mercy of the winds. At first, they attempted to impress us with their cheap merchandise, mostly painted tinware and clay pots filled with sour wine. I do not blame them for underestimating our sophistication, because, not wishing to slight the aboriginals, we had approached in a local raft with the tribal leaders of that island.

Soon, however, beckoned by a blue smoke flare, our own ship rounded the headland. The sight of her sleek hull and orange sails with bamboo battens trimmed precisely for maximum speed rocked loose the foreigners’ arrogant jaws — for our ship, with her thwartwise staggered masts fore and aft, approached into the wind. The Big Noses had never seen the likes of it.

Ostensibly to salute us, though I am sure with the intent of displaying their might, the Big Noses fired their bulky cannon. The three awkward ships, entirely lacking lee-boards, keeled drastically. Our vessel replied with a volley of Bees’ Nest rockets that splashed overhead in a fiery exhibit while our ship sailed figure-eights among the foreigners’ box-boats.

At that, the Big Noses became effusively deferential. The captain, a tall, beardless man with red hair and ghostly pale flesh, removed his hat, bowed, and presented us with one of his treasures, a pathetically crude book printed on coarse paper with a gold-leaf cross pressed into the animal-hide binding. Our leader accepted it graciously.

Fortunately, the Big Noses had on board a man who spoke Chaldean and some Arabic, and two of the linguists in our delegation could understand him slightly. He told us that the captain’s name was Christ-Bearer the Colonizer and that they had come seeking the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom in the hope of opening trade with him. They actually believed that they had traveled twenty-five thousand li to the west, in the spice islands south of the Middle Kingdom! Their ignorance fairly astounded us.

Upon learning their precise location, the Colonizer appeared dismayed and retreated to his cabin. From his second in command, we eventually learned that the Colonizer had expected honor and wealth from his enterprise. Both would be greatly diminished now that it was evident he had discovered neither a route to the world’s wealthiest kingdom nor a new world to be colonized by the Big Noses.

Among our delegation, much debate flurried about the implications of the Colonizer’s first name — Christ-Bearer. For some centuries, Christ-Bearers have straggled into the Middle Kingdom, though the government always confined them to select districts of coastal cities. Their gruesome religion, in which the faithful symbolically consume the flesh and blood of their maimed and tortured god, disgusted our Emperor, and their proselytizing zeal rightly concerned him. But here, in the USA, with the Dawn-Settlers’ tolerance of diverse views, what consequences will ensue when the Christ-Bearers establish their missions?

I did not care. Let fat-hearted men scheme and plot in faraway temples and kingdoms. Heart Wing! I will never see the jewel of your face again. That thought — that truth — lies before me now, an unexplored wilderness I will spend the rest of my life crossing. But on the day when I first saw the Big Noses, I had not yet grasped this truth. I still believed death was a doorway. I thought perhaps your ghost would cross back and succor my mourning. I had seen your face in the mirrors of the sea, a distraught girl both filled and exhausted with love. I had seen that, and I thought I could cross the threshold of this life and find you again, join with you again, united among the ancestors. I thought that.

For several more days, I walked about in a daze, looking for your ghost, contemplating ways to die. I even prepared a sturdy noose from a silk sash and, one moon-long evening, wandered into the forest to hang myself. As I meandered through the dark avenues of a cypress dell seeking the appropriate bough from which to stretch my shameless neck, I heard voices. Three paces away, on the far side of a bracken screen, the Big Noses whispered hotly. I dared to peek and spied them hurrying among the trees, crouched over, sabers and guns in hand and awkwardly hauling a longboat among them.

The evil I had wished upon myself had led me to a greater evil — and, without forethought, I followed the Big Noses. They swiftly made their way to the cove, where the Imperial ship had moored. I knew then their intent. The entire delegation, along with most of the crew, had gone ashore to the mission, to interview the aboriginals who had first encountered the Big Noses. While they drafted a report for the Emperor and the local authorities about the arrival of the Christ-Bearer in the USA, the Big Noses had hatched a nefarious plan and would meet little resistance in pirating our ship.

Clouds walked casually away from the moon, and the mission with its serpent pillars and curved roof shone gem-bright high on the bluff — too far away for me to race there in time or even for my cries to reach. Instead, I ducked among dunes and scurried through switching salt grass to the water’s edge even as the Big Noses pushed their longboat into the slick water and piled in. With a few hardy oar-strokes, they reached the Imperial ship and began clambering aboard unseen by the watch, who probably lolled in the hold sampling the rice wine.

I stood staring at the ship perched atop the watery moon, knowing what I had to do but hardly believing I had such strength. I, who had iron enough in my blood to strangle my own life, wavered at the thought of defying other men, even the primitive Big Noses. Truly, what a coward I am! I stood rooted as a pine and would have watched the pirates sail our ship away, watched it depart into the dark like a happy cloud scudding under the moon — except that a scream and a splash jolted me.

The Big Noses had thrown the watch overboard. I saw him swimming hard for shore and imagined I beheld fear in his face. His craven face galled me! The watch, flailing strenuously to save his own miserable life, would make no effort to stop the barbarians from stealing the life of his own people! For I knew that we would lose nothing less if the Big Noses stole our ship and learned to build vessels that could challenge the USA and even the Middle Kingdom.

I dove into the glossed water and thrashed towards the ship. I am a weak swimmer, as you know, but there was not far to go, and the noise of the watch beating frantically to shore muted my advance. With moorings cut, the ship listed under the offshore breeze. The Big Noses, accustomed to climbing along yardarms to adjust their sails, struggled with the unfamiliar windlasses and halyards that control from the deck the ribbed sails of our ship, and so I had time to clutch onto the hull before the sails unfurled.

After climbing the bulwark, I slipped and fell to the deck right at the feet of the tall, ghost-faced captain! We stared at each other with moonbright eyes for a startled moment, and I swear I saw avidity in his features as malefic as a temple demon’s. I bolted upright even as he shouted. Blessedly, the entire crew was busy trying to control the strange new ship, and I eluded the grasp of the Colonizer and darted across the deck to the gangway.

Death had been my intent from the first. When I plunged into the hold and collapsed among coils of hempen rope, I had but one thought: to reach the weapons bin and ignite the powder. I blundered in the dark, slammed into a bulkhead, tripped over bales of sorghum, and reached the weapons bin in gasping disarray. Shouts boomed from the gangway, and the hulking shapes of the Big Noses filled the narrow corridor.

Wildly, I grasped for the flintstriker I knew lay somewhere near the bin. Or did it? Perhaps that was too dangerous a tool to keep near the powder. The Big Noses closed in, and I desperately bounded atop the bin and shoved open the hatch there. Moonlight gushed over me, and I confronted the horrid faces of the barbarians rushing towards me — and there, at my elbow, a sheaf of matches.

I seized the fire-sticks and rattled them at the Big Noses, but this did not thwart them. The oafs had no idea what these were! Those brutes dragged me down, barking furiously. I gaped about in the moonglow, spotted a flintstriker hanging from a beam. Kicking like a madman, I twisted free just long enough to snatch the flintstriker. Alas, I had inspired their fury, and heavy blows knocked me to the planks.

Stunned, I barely had the strength to squeeze the lever of the flintstriker. My feeble effort elicited only the tiniest spark, though that proved sufficient to ignite a match. The sulfurous flare startled my assailants, and they fell back. Immediately, I lurched about and held high the burning pine stick while gesturing at the powder kegs behind me. The Big Noses pulled away.

With my free hand, I grabbed a bamboo tube I recognized as a Beard-the-Moon rocket. I lit the fuse and pointed it at the open hatch. In a radiant whoosh, sparks and flames sprayed into the night. The cries of the Big Noses sounded from the deck, and the men who had seized me fled. A laugh actually tore through me as I fired two more Beard-the-Moon rockets. I was going to die, and now death seemed a fate worthy of laughter.

Perhaps the longtime company of Buddhists and Taoists had affected me after all, for I had no desire to kill the Big Noses. I waited long enough for them to throw themselves into the sea before I ignited the fuses on several heaven-shaking Thunderclap bombs. My last thought, while waiting for the explosion to hurl me into the Great Inane, focused on you, Heart Wing. Once I had committed myself to using death as a doorway, your ghost had actually come back for me, to lead me to the ancestors in a way that would serve the Kingdom. I thanked you, and the Thunderclap bombs exploded.

Yet, I did not die — at least, not in an obvious way. Later, when I could think clearly again, I realized that your ghost had not yet done with me. Who else but you could have placed me just where I stood so that my body hurtled straight upward through the open hatch and into the lustrous night? I remember none of that; however, the watch, who had made it to shore, claims that when the Imperial ship burst into a fireball, he witnessed me flying, silhouetted against the moon.

He found me unconscious in the shallows, unscathed except for singed beard and eyebrows and clothes torn. Like a meteor, I had fallen back to earth, back to life. I had fallen the way stars fall, from the remote darkness where they have shivered in the cold down into the warm, close darkness of earthly life. That night, I fell from the gloom of my solitary grief into the dark of terrestrial life, where we all suffer together in our unknowing.

Slapped alert by the watch, I sat up in the moon-dappled shallows and experienced my forty summers fall away into emptiness. The ship was gone — just as you are gone, Heart Wing, and our daughter gone into that emptiness the Buddhists call sunyata, which is really the void of our unknowing, the mystery that bears everything that lives and dies.

How foolish to say all this to you, who dwells now in the heart of this emptiness. But I, I have been ignorant, asleep. I needed reminding that time and the things of felling shall not fall into darkness but into a new freedom we cannot name and so call emptiness. All of reality floats in that vacancy, like the spheres in the void of space, like these words floating in the emptiness of the page. Words try to capture reality, yet what they actually capture are only more words and deeper doubts. Mystery is the pre-eminent condition of human being — and so, it is also our freedom to be exactly who we are, free to choose the words our doubts require.

No one in the delegation understood this when I returned to the mission to account for myself. Grateful as they were for my stopping the theft of the Imperial ship, they believed the explosion had addled me. I think the monks knew what I meant, but these monks belong to the “just so” sect of Ch’an Buddhism, so they would be the last to let on.

Be that as it may, I sat there quite agog and amazed, awakened to the knowledge that the freedom to be who I am means, quite simply, that I am alone — without you. For now, it is meant that this is so. For reasons I will never truly understand, death is denied me. So, what am I to do with this life, then, and this loneliness? This freedom to be, this freedom whose chances bleed from us, creates new imperatives. In the place of my failure and shame waits a gaping emptiness wanting to be filled with what I might yet be.

As I meditated on this, the delegation wrote an official missive admonishing the Big Noses for their attempted thievery and threatening to report them to the Emperor. The Big Noses, all of whom had escaped the explosion and fled to their ship, replied with a terse letter of halfhearted apology. With no other Imperial vessel anywhere in the vicinity and none of the Autocracies’ forces nearby, our host, the monastery’s abbot, urged us to accept the apology.

The delegation decided, in an effort to both placate and hurry the Colonizer on his way, to load his ships with all the porcelain in the mission, several remarkable landscape paintings, a jade statue of Kwan Yin, goddess of serenity, as well as bales of crops the Big Noses had never before seen, notably tobacco, peanuts, and potatoes. By then, inspired by my lack of family and career, I had decided to take the poison cure required by my sorrow: I have, dear wife, forsaken my return to the Middle Kingdom to go with the Colonizer on his return voyage across the Storm Sea to his homeland.

Do you chastise me for being so foolish? Indeed, the decision weighed heavily, as I had hoped to return to our homeland and administer the rites myself at your gravesite. But if what I have learned of the emptiness is true, then you are no more there than here. The path of the Way is a roadlessness without departure or arrival. I have decided, Heart Wing, to follow that path, to fit the unaccomplished parts of my life to the future and embrace the unknown.

The delegation strove in vain to dissuade me. They fear that I have gone truly mad. But I do not care at all. I know you would understand, Heart Wing, you whom I first won with the bridebait of stories written by the lamp of lightning. So, as absurd as this may be, I sit here now, writing to you on the quarterdeck of a leaky vessel named Santa Maria.

I can tell from the way he looks at me that the Colonizer is still angry that I deprived him of his booty, and I know he has only taken me on board with the expectation of getting useful information from me. However, for now, our ignorance of each other’s language offers me a chance to win the Big Noses’ respect by my deeds — and to watch and learn about these barbarians.

In time, I will understand their language. I will inform their monarch of the wonders of the Middle Kingdom, of the achievements of the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies, of the glory of our people. And I will write again from the far side of the world, from so far east it is the west, where sun and moon meet. And from there, I will send back to the Kingdom and the USA stories everyone will read, stories of another world, written in ink from the new moon.