Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Rum Tunnel

The address Qian Duoduo had given Zhao Meiyou was close to his rented room, in Level 33.

Headliner had described the place once: “That famous elevated maglev in the Lower District—there’s an abandoned train parked on it. You have to walk all the way to the engine. There’s a brake lever you can only see on rainy days. And the most important condition is, when you pull it, you can’t be wearing underwear.”

The street where Zhao Meiyou lived was strung in the air—a suspended street built atop the old light-rail line, once a key artery when Megalopolis was young. The cars and track had been oversized, and when the line was abandoned the residents of the Lower District raised a new neighborhood right on the rails. The carriages sprouted illegal additions, sheet-metal stacked into crooked tenements.

It was still raining. A cigarette clamped between his teeth, Zhao Meiyou walked with his coat thrown over his shoulders. He couldn’t be bothered with an umbrella; fortunately, the archaeologist’s uniform shed water. His leather shoes sank into dips and sent up oil-slicked splashes.

Qian Duoduo was already waiting—at the far end of the street, where the engine would have been. A window a little way off belonged to a family whose matriarch, an old woman up early as always, had just moved her electronic osmanthus onto the sill. Qian Duoduo was helping her adjust the pot as a nearby vent breathed out thin steam. From inside the patched-together carriage came an old song—“Flowers in the Fog.”

He had no umbrella either. Bent at the waist, speaking softly to the old woman, he let the rain stripe down his hair.

Zhao Meiyou stubbed out his cigarette and waited until she went back inside before he came forward. “Morning, Qian Duoduo.”

“I saw you.” Qian Duoduo glanced over. “Why didn’t you come up?”

“I stole their cured sausage when I was a kid.” Zhao Meiyou grinned. “She holds a grudge. If she sees me, the slippers come out.”

The street dead-ended here in a red wall. Qian Duoduo stepped up, pushed aside moss, and exposed a red box with a glass inset—a hydrant. He opened it. Inside was no sprinkler hookup, but a single lever.

Zhao Meiyou understood. This was the “brake lever” Headliner had mentioned.

He hesitated. The method Headliner had described for entering the ruin was shameless in a way that stuck in the craw. He cleared his throat. “Qian Duoduo, I heard from a friend the way in requires…”

“This coordinate feeds into more than one ruin,” Qian Duoduo cut him off. “I’m taking you to a different one.”

He caught Zhao Meiyou’s hand and yanked the lever. The familiar jolt of dislocation hit.

When he came to, Zhao Meiyou found himself seated in a carriage.

A very old steam train—he could hear the smokestack’s whistle and the wheels clacking on iron. The carriage held two rows of long benches upholstered in green velvet. A low table cantilevered from the side with a white cloth and a vase of red camellias just past bloom.

The windows were half-open. The train couldn’t be moving very fast; the breeze lifted the gauze curtains.

The air held the tang of spent powder, the faint chemical aftertaste of an explosion—threaded with the scent of camellias.

Wind swept through.

Zhao Meiyou lifted his head and saw a sky of stars, a universe unrolled.

“That’s the NGC 6302 Nebula,” said Qian Duoduo, following his gaze. “Four thousand light-years from Earth, in Scorpius. The death shroud of a star—superheated gas boiling out into space.”

“It’s also called the Butterfly Nebula.”

Far ahead, an extremity-hot central star flooded space with searing light. A gilded phantom burned and billowed, expanding like good time on the scale of eons.

“Where are we?” Zhao Meiyou heard himself ask. “Space?”

“I call it the Rum Tunnel,” Qian Duoduo said. “A long time ago, I borrowed a few abilities from other archaeologists—warp, stitch, accelerate. I tried combining them. Turns out you can splice ruins together, speed their time flows, and slip between them.”

“In the end I used Creation to build this train. Sit in the car, and you can shuttle through ruins without ever touching the Megalopolis coordinates back in reality.”

Zhao Meiyou followed most of it, more or less. He pushed the window fully open. “So this universe is a ruin too?”

“You could say that, though strictly speaking, no.” Qian Duoduo considered. “Think of it as the backdrop of the Rum Tunnel.”

“The Rum Tunnel?”

“The track this train runs on. It links the ruins. As for the rum—just a bit of my amateur astronomy.”

The view snapped over without warning. Maybe time ran at different speeds out there; the train itself seemed unhurried, yet they were hurtling through the universe.

Far off, a magnetar flared, like a shower of iridescent butterfly scales. In the sweep of a titanic molecular cloud, Zhao Meiyou suddenly smelled alcohol.

“That’s Sagittarius B2,” Qian Duoduo said, reaching his hand out the window as if to catch it. “A body of gas and dust near the galactic center. It’s loaded with ethanol—trillions of liters of it drifting in the cloud.”

He drew his hand back and opened his fingers. The scent in the air thickened. Zhao Meiyou recognized it. “Rum.”

“Rum and raspberry,” Qian Duoduo said, the corner of his mouth tilting. “Rum and raspberry—and a hint of lemony air freshener.”

The alcohol slipped into the lungs and came back up as a thread of heat through the esophagus, warming his chest. Zhao Meiyou inhaled. “All right—I get it. The Rum Tunnel. So what’s the first stop?”

“We’ve arrived,” Qian Duoduo said. “The Jupiter Restaurant.”

Among archaeologists, the “Jupiter Restaurant” was cataloged as A99—dangerous and not, depending on your luck. As the name promised, the ruin was a restaurant.

Open in space.

More precisely, perched on Jupiter’s rings.

“What is that?” Zhao Meiyou asked, staring at a multi-limbed creature drifting past the window—something between an octopus and a jellyfish, with a brain like a transparent sack of marbles. “An alien?”

Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers. A travel guide materialized in his hand. He flipped it open. “It’s the restaurant’s live sign, a semi-organism—think vending machine.”

“A semi-organism vend—what?”

Qian Duoduo touched a finger to one of the octopus’s suckers. The tentacle writhed. A few milliliters of his blood were drawn off, the bead visible as it was pumped through a clear vessel and injected into one of those “marbles.”

The sign—whatever it was—opened its mouth and spat out the tinted sphere. Qian Duoduo caught it, cracked it in half, and handed a piece to Zhao Meiyou.

Not glass at all. He watched Qian Duoduo take a bite—light ran wet over his fingers, seeds rich and bright.

A pomegranate, its skin perfectly clear.

“House specialty. Diamond pomegranate,” Qian Duoduo said, flipping through the guide and tapping a page for Zhao Meiyou. “Try it. Not bad.”

Jupiter is a gas giant. Its atmosphere is rich in methane, which, under the lash of lightning, becomes diamond. So it rains diamonds there. Where the stones fall, they pool into diamond lakes.

Zhao Meiyou ate. Not very sweet, but clean and cold. “Diamond pomegranates are a Jupiter cultivar irrigated by diamond rain”—as the guide explained. They tasted like rain.

Outside, the line stretched long. Ships of every imaginable kind hovered in the deep, and beings that needed no conveyance slid through vacuum on their own. “A99 doesn’t have a resident archaeologist at the moment,” Qian Duoduo said. “Did you eat breakfast? We could queue.”

“Looks fun.” Zhao Meiyou had already struck up a conversation through the window with a being of some species he couldn’t name. Miraculously, they could communicate. The alien handed him something that looked like a cigarette. He sniffed it. “No one’s stationed here full-time?”

“There was, but they say an Alpha Orionian ate his brain.” Qian Duoduo glanced at the cigarette in his hand. “I’d advise against smoking that. It’s poisonous.”

Which explained A99’s peculiar danger grading—high and low at once.

“The one chatting you up is a Drulsian from a planet I can’t pronounce,” Qian Duoduo added, shutting the guide and passing it across. “Drulsians are fond of human livers. The smoke they gave you is laced with a sedative. Back home they use that tobacco as seasoning. Odds are they’re marinating you before dinner.”

He snapped his fingers again, and a pistol with a strange profile dropped into his palm. “That said, Drulsians are very agreeable on the human palate. Think fugu belly.”

He leaned out the window and squeezed the trigger. The alien who’d spoken to Zhao Meiyou took a bullet to the head.

The train rolled past. Qian Duoduo hauled the body in, then eased the car around to the restaurant’s back door, a window like a takeout counter. “Both sides seared, rare, with parsley and fennel.” He tossed the skinned alien onto the ledge.

A moment later, a to-go order slid out—two sandwich rounds the size of double burgers. The smell was genuinely tempting.

Zhao Meiyou watched Qian Duoduo rip the paper and take a massive bite.

“Well?” Zhao Meiyou asked. “Good?”

“I’m starving,” Qian Duoduo said through his mouthful.

“Enjoy.”

The line for tables wasn’t moving; in the end, they opted for the next ruin. The train slid into a tunnel like a wormhole, with thick, iridescent shards of starfield floating on every side, like liquid mirrors. Zhao Meiyou reached out; Qian Duoduo caught his hand. “Don’t touch anything. Where we’re going is dangerous.”

He hadn’t finished the sentence when the train lurched. They slipped out of the tunnel. Silence slammed shut around them. Even the whistle and the wheels went mute. Everything outside turned black and white, without sound—like an antique pen-and-ink strip or a silent film. Trees crowded close in a forest they hadn’t seen until it was there.

Sky and earth looked ink-soaked. Between them rose colossal trees, pure white.

If they were trees. Zhao Meiyou squinted. The texture was wrong—too hard, too smooth, no grain at all.

Not wood.

Bone.

A forest of bones.

No one knew what species had died. Or perhaps every species had. The sky, the soil, life itself seemed dead. Only the trees remained: white markers the size of cathedrals, mute as gravestones.

Qian Duoduo produced paper and a pen from nowhere and wrote: Don’t speak.

Zhao Meiyou realized that he and Qian Duoduo had dissolved into that black-and-white frame as well, reduced to figures inked with a dip pen. Were they alive? Already dead? He looked at his hand and felt a strangeness.

His hand had no flesh, no weight—only a line.

The train moved without a sound. Only the flicking rush of images outside suggested their speed was still climbing. Qian Duoduo wrote quickly, but it was as if a wind lived here, scouring the page. The black letters weathered and blew away. Zhao Meiyou could only make out scraps.

…when the reed beds were gnawed to nothing ▅▅▅▅ the end of an age was declared ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅ salt boiled from moonlight the eye ▅▅▅ the enormous eye… the last astronaut was ▅▅▅ insect eggs congealed his dimension and ▅▅▅ the serpent read the epitaph to the giant ▅▅▅▅▅ No. 631 ▅▅▅▅▅▅ sleeping ▅▅▅▅▅ the first line of the poem will never end ▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅

He couldn’t make sense of it. For a man of his minimal literacy, this crossword-from-hell was written in the language of gods.

A wind hit—if wind was what it was. The view outside vanished, or perhaps the black was gone. Only a stabbing white remained. He could no longer tell what in that whiteness was sky, tree, or dirt. The white ate everything, fast. He watched the carriage swallowed, then Qian Duoduo’s head, then—surely—his own. His eyes were devoured. Was that absolute light or the white of a black so deep it inverted? He couldn’t know. Everything went to static, snow devouring proof.

…

When he returned to himself, they were still in the car, the train gliding through deep space. Just beyond the window floated the giant.

Well—at this scale, the train must have been far off. Far enough that Zhao Meiyou could see the giant’s entire upper body. He couldn’t say how large the being was, but he saw a star at the level of its ear, a diamond stud.

The giant was drawing.

Perhaps the end of the universe was black-and-white. The canvas had no borders. Not above, not below, not to any side. Before it, even the giant seemed a child. It drew with a pencil. Or what a human mind could only call a pencil.

Zhao Meiyou stared at the picture—limitless—and felt a sudden jolt of recognition. The scene was the bone forest they had just passed through.

“We just came out of that drawing,” Qian Duoduo said. “That’s ruin S30. You must have felt it: inside, we were two-dimensional.”

“I did.” Zhao Meiyou fought to keep his voice steady, but his throat betrayed him. The words tumbled out as if syllables had learned to dance, like distorted music from a DC motor. “…I—I sound like I’m… singing—”

“Aftereffects,” Qian Duoduo said. “Everyone carries some residue out of S30. If you’re a host machine, S30 is an unknown network. When you come back, you find programs running that you’ve never seen before. They’re not complete programs, either. Give it some time. They uninstall themselves.”

“W—what… were you writing in there?” Zhao Meiyou winced at his own lilting lilt and chopped himself off with a hand.

He switched to signing: Why aren’t you affected?

Qian Duoduo could read sign. “Because S30 used to be my home court.”

Used to be? Zhao Meiyou signed.

Qian Duoduo looked into the deeps. They were pulling away fast. The giant and the canvas dwindled. “S30 has been an open question for years. Not many archaeologists have worked it—too dangerous. Best we can infer is that a civilization existed there once.”

“A civilization that’s gone.”

How do you mean? Zhao Meiyou signed.

“The giant—the first archaeologist to enter S30 called it Prometheus,” Qian Duoduo said. “In her notes she offers a hypothesis: the giant is a machine, made by that civilization.”

“For reasons unknown—catastrophe, or a diaspora—the life that seeded that world vanished. They compressed everything, converted it to two dimensions, and had the giant record it on that endless canvas.”

“S30 has killed some of the very best. Some went mad inside. Some never came out.” He glanced at Zhao Meiyou. “You noticed it—just now, for a moment, we were erased.”

Zhao Meiyou nodded.

“That’s the escape method they finally settled on. While the giant works, there’s one part it keeps revising—the bone forest we just crossed. When it rubs that section out and an archaeologist gets caught in the erasure, you can slip free.”

Sounds risky, Zhao Meiyou signed.

“It is. You can’t know when it will alter the drawing. Time runs strange there. Some who lose their way become part of those trees.” He paused. “When I was building the Rum Tunnel, I lost myself once.”

How did you get out?

“…I don’t know.” A flicker of bewilderment passed through Qian Duoduo’s eyes. “Did I say something to you in there?”

You did. Zhao Meiyou signed back. But it was too deep. I don’t have signs for it.

Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers. Paper and pen appeared before Zhao Meiyou. “Write it.”

Zhao Meiyou lifted the pen and held it above the page for a long time.

Qian Duoduo sighed. “You forgot. No one can hold onto it…”

Zhao Meiyou hesitated, then scratched out a few words.

Qian Duoduo fell silent, mid-sentence. Zhao Meiyou slid the paper across. On it were only scattered fragments.

Astronaut. Eggs. Epitaph. Poem.

And a big blacked-out smear of ▅▅▅▅▅.

Qian Duoduo tapped the ▅▅▅▅▅. “What’s this?”

Don’t know. Just something like it in my head. That’s how it came out.

Qian Duoduo pinched the paper and stared.

By now the giant and the canvas had dwindled to nothing. A thousand worlds spun outside the window. Finally Zhao Meiyou leaned over and tugged the paper from his fingers. “Don’t—overthink it. Overthinking stunts growth. Gives you a headache.”

His voice was smoothing out; the singsong had mostly faded. Qian Duoduo watched him fold the paper into a plane and toss it into the wind.

A snap. The paper plane ballooned into a hot-air balloon, rose, and burst, spilling itself into fireworks.

“You’ve got one thing wrong,” Qian Duoduo said, as color washed their compartment, dream-bright and soft.