Chapter 22
No sooner had Zhao Meiyou finished than Qian Duoduo nodded. “Then let’s go.”
They were in their archaeologists’ uniform tonight: sharp suits, polished shoes, ready for a date, a murder, or a ride-or-die to the ends of the earth.
Qian Duoduo closed his hand over Zhao Meiyou’s, and together they stepped off the rooftop. On the first floor a party was in full roar. The headliner seemed to sense something, lifted his face from the hookah, and caught a glimpse through the window of two queers about to die for love. He grabbed a bottle off the table and hurled it outward, bellowing, “Don’t die, Zhao Meiyou!”
Drunks stumbled to the windows to whistle and scream at the two figures dropping fast. Zhao Meiyou wasn’t sure if someone had already unzipped to take a leak. Through the din he caught a single line clearly: “Fair winds!”
Wind shrieked in his ears. Neon bled into a river of color. They fell past window after window: pop jazz, burger grease, and hops drifting from ten thousand and one rooms. On balconies couples argued, partied, danced, or fucked. Someone had pegged underwear to the drainage pipes—polyester, cotton, synthetics—fluttering like pennants. On the way down they clipped a hover-cart hawking fast food; red-and-yellow takeout boxes bobbed into the night. In the Middle District you could see stars, hologram trick or not. Giant goldfish swam between eaves. Fireworks bloomed.
Down, and down. In the dreamlike unweighting of the fall, time and space lost their edges. The stars and moon snuffed out. A wet, briny tang came up through the air: rust and dirt, the scent of the sewers, like the sea.
Zhao Meiyou knew it too well. They’d reached the Lower District.
At some point Qian Duoduo had snapped open a black umbrella. Their descent gentled, and they alighted beside a stretch of rail gone to ruin. Vagrants had bedded down along the sleepers. Zhao Meiyou glanced around. “This is Level 15.”
Qian Duoduo grunted assent.
He hadn’t expected them to drop this deep. The boundary between the Middle and Lower Districts was Level 330, sewn tight with nanofilter mesh; you needed a card and a checkpoint to pass.
Yet they’d jumped and landed without so much as a scrape.
Folding the umbrella, Qian Duoduo said, “A piece from Young Master Liu’s husband’s collection. The canopy projects a quantum magnetic field with a five-meter radius—scrambles nano-surveillance.”
He tipped his chin at Zhao Meiyou. “Lead on.”
Below Level 15 was the city’s hot core, the Megalopolis underbelly—off-limits, in a sense.
Archaeologists passed around ways to dig deeper, but to someone born and raised in the Lower District like Zhao Meiyou, those were outlanders’ dumb tricks.
Qian Duoduo clearly knew it. Zhao Meiyou smiled, tugged him into the dark. They moved along dead streets where, now and then, a mercury lamp winked awake. At last Zhao Meiyou took him into a high-rise that had been empty for years. Dust caked the marble concierge desk. Beside it, a bouquet of plastic osmanthus bloomed on forever.
They stopped at an elevator. Zhao Meiyou pressed the down arrow. The indicator lit with a blessing—Safe travels—and with a ding the doors parted.
Inside was no cramped car. It was spacious, the plastic strip curtain rattling with the clack of mahjong tiles. Three automatic players sat at the table—mechanical rigs—while the seat of honor was taken by a woman well over sixty. She adjusted her tortoiseshell glasses, spotted Zhao Meiyou, and called, “Xi Shi? What brings you by?”
“Granny.” Zhao Meiyou pulled Qian Duoduo forward, clapped his shoulder, and grinned. “Brought my boyfriend to meet you.”
“Since when does a hog like you know how to nose out a prize cabbage?” the old woman said, genuinely taken aback. She rose, gave Qian Duoduo a once-over, and nodded, surprised. “Fine-looking. Good stock.”
“Uh-huh, that’s right.” Zhao Meiyou said, “I’m taking him to see my mother.”
“You should,” she said, nodding again and again. Then she stepped behind the table, grabbed a lever, and yanked. The elevator dropped. The rumble went on and on until the car chimed to a halt.
“Go on.” The old woman waved. “Safe travels!”
“Fair winds and following seas,” Zhao Meiyou chimed back, drawing Qian Duoduo out. “Bye, Granny!”
The elevator doors thundered shut.
“Granny ran a gambling house on Level 330, and she’s my mother’s godmother,” Zhao Meiyou explained as they walked. “She’s the one who taught me my sword tricks.”
Qian Duoduo hadn’t understood a word of their exchange. “What language was that?”
“An ancient Eastern dialect,” Zhao Meiyou said. “I told her you were my boyfriend and I was taking you to see my mother.”
“Here?” Qian Duoduo was taken aback. “To see your mother?”
“Call it symbolic,” Zhao Meiyou said. “My mother jumped.”
In a city like Megalopolis, you rarely found the body. The city was too vast, too deep. The underlevels were an endless graveyard. If you made it to the deepest places, that counted as reaching the headstone.
They’d arrived in a chalked clearing with a light so faint you couldn’t say from where it came. Circles were sketched on the ground with openings at the side, scorched inside their rims. Incense and joss paper still smoldered in some of them.
“People come to pay respects. Burn a little paper and go,” Zhao Meiyou said, studying Qian Duoduo. “Your turn now, Qian Duoduo. Which way from here?”
“Your granny—if you’re gone too long, she won’t worry?”
“Come on, Qian Duoduo. Down here we grow out of mud; our own mothers don’t worry,” Zhao Meiyou said, fishing for a cigarette before thinking better of it. “Besides, we said we were here to see my mom, and we didn’t bring so much as joss paper. Granny isn’t stupid.”
Qian Duoduo unclipped a cufflink, pressed it, and a wash of blue-gold light flared. “Follow the light.”
Level 1: the city’s bedrock, where Megalopolis began.
Zhao Meiyou had first come to Level 1 as a small child, like most Lower District kids did—out of curiosity.
The urban legends varied. In some, a nameless giant lay sleeping here, a war machine left behind from the Orion War. The very old remembered this as the city’s foundation, and told of pioneers who came this far, moved mountains, filled seas, and raised towering nuclear plants. There were myths: calamities subdued; a dictator piloting the last ship to the moon; the land given back to the first people.
A hundred absurd sagas, and Megalopolis was built atop them all: gods and ghosts, ruins and tech scraps, and fathomless chasms adored by all, dazzling and grand.
They threaded the dark hand in hand, one leading, one following, past a vent the size of a cathedral. The dying fan still turned, slow as sleep. Metal that big had a cold, rusted gleam like a giant’s eyelids. In the dusty, firefly air came the faintest chime, like wind bells.
After who knew how long, Qian Duoduo stopped. Zhao Meiyou felt his thumb draw a circle in his palm before he let go. Something thunked—like a breaker being thrown.
And Zhao Meiyou saw it.
A giant Buddha.
They stood on a sacred way of a kind, blue bricks stretching from their feet. Gold prayer wheels lined both sides, vanishing into the distance.
“Come,” Qian Duoduo said softly.
The way climbed, step by step, toward the Buddha’s chest. Following him, Zhao Meiyou felt as if they’d walked into an ultramarine abdomen. They were under the sea, in the mountain, inside a deep forest. The prayer wheels had stopped spinning. Somewhere a whale breathed. Static rasped through the air.
At the end of the sacred way, a vermilion gate waited in the statue’s chest—golden beast head biting the ring, eighty-one studs set into the wood. It looked like a door that should have weighed a ton, but, as if it sensed them, it creaked and swung open on its own.
As the headliner had said: there is an escalator in Megalopolis that runs from Level 1 all the way to Level 990.
Beyond lay a hall like an old temple. Where the gilded statue should have been, Zhao Meiyou saw the escalator.
A single shaft of light fell from some unfathomable height, pouring down to the escalator’s mouth.
The scene was uncanny. The escalator was old—department-store old. Not the stair kind, but the grooved belt made to catch shopping cart wheels. Murals flaked along the walls, gold leaf long since gone, and where arhats should have sat on either side, there were two neat rows of shopping carts.
The kind you saw in every supermarket, complete with the little fold-down child seat.
“Qian Duoduo,” Zhao Meiyou said, scanning the hall. “Is that… someone hanging over there?”
He meant the place where the light struck, the escalator’s entrance. In that bright white, a person hung by the neck, dressed in a spacesuit.
Qian Duoduo ignored him. One of an archaeologist’s rules: see nothing of the uncanny. He tugged a cart free and nodded at Zhao Meiyou to climb in. Then he brushed the hanged astronaut aside. The cart’s wheels bit the grooves; the escalator registered a weight. A display blinked on. Somewhere, a synthetic voice chimed, “Safe travels!”
“Fortune never comes twice! Misfortune never comes alone!”
“Today’s high, eighty-nine degrees; rain eighty-seven kilometers away.”
“Which lipo docs have immaculate taste? Here are our top picks—”
“A Sri Lankan passenger jet has crashed; over a hundred aboard feared dead…”
“Outside the long pavilion, along the ancient road—green grass stretching to the sky—”
“Auspicious & Lucky app. Scan the code to begin. May everything go your way!”
“Ring in the Double Holiday! Out with the old, in with the new! Half-price cashback—today only…”
The escalator hummed upward. They bathed in hard light, the babble closing around them. The shaft wasn’t wide—four abreast at most—and the light came from beyond the handrails, where two sheer walls of computer monitors rose like cliffs hewn by a giant axe.
Each screen played something different—ads, news, music, variety shows, dramas. No one speaker was loud, but the flood of information converged, molten and roaring, thunder and torrent.
Zhao Meiyou clicked his tongue and cupped Qian Duoduo’s ears.
They couldn’t hear each other at all. The escalator climbed. At last Qian Duoduo reached beyond the rail, gripped a set, and wrenched a monitor free from the wall.
Among the riot of color, this one was black.
It was a strange switch. At once, every other screen went dark. The monitor in Qian Duoduo’s hands booted up.
Zhao Meiyou exhaled. His skull still throbbed. “Qian Duoduo?”
Qian Duoduo surfaced from concentration, pressed a few points below Zhao Meiyou’s ear, and said, “We’ll be on here a while. Then we’ll reach Level 990—the entrance to Ruin 000.”
He let out a slow breath, as if only now relaxing. “From here to the threshold, there shouldn’t be any danger.”
Zhao Meiyou gave him a soothing hug. “Where’d you find the way in, Qian Duoduo?”
“Fragments of the Shanhai notebooks on the archaeologists’ black market. A few logs with murky provenance,” Qian Duoduo said. “Zhao Meiyou, after this point I don’t have a clue what we’ll face.”
“Mm,” Zhao Meiyou said.
When the monitor finished loading, a chime like bronze bells rang out. A mechanical voice—genderless—began to sing.
“Heavenly Gate thrown open, vast and free; with solemn grace they ride abreast to receive the offering.
“The stars hold favor; the frontier’s failing light bathes the purple canopy; pearls burn amber.
“Red lacquered avenues gleam; cut stone makes the hall.
“Adorned with jade-tipped sleeves they dance and sing, their bodies swaying like constellations, yearning toward the far horizon.”
With the ancient melody, light struck them.
Not the monitor’s blue—sunlight.
For a moment the sheer walls became panes of glass. The Lower District’s container towers lay beneath their feet. They were level with the four-hundreds. The rail authority was cutting a ribbon: snip of red silk, a maglev thundered directly toward them—a painless lying-on-the-tracks experience. The escalator climbed. They nearly had a view of the six-hundred-sixties and the city’s holographic sky.
The Lamplighter’s statue doused its lantern. A waterwheel filled the sky in radiant gold, a titan’s hammer smashing down. Light poured like a flood. In an instant the whole city blazed.
From the monitor, a voice: “Sunrise over Yang Valley; upon it stands Fusang.”
They watched the Megalopolis at dawn.
Among archaeologists there was a rumor of an escalator you could take from Level 1 all the way to Level 990; ride it and you’d see the entire city in cross section.
“So the legend’s true,” Qian Duoduo murmured, staring at the sun.
Zhao Meiyou studied the view and had to laugh. They’d spent half the night working their way down to the bottom; now—if not by the same path—they were climbing right back up.
Where did this escalator hide the rest of the time?
He picked out the universities of the Upper District where he and Diao Chan had spent seven years. The Upper District streets were orderly, nothing like the tangle below. He’d learned that campus by heart and had never once seen a hint of this machine.
“Qian Duoduo,” he asked, “you ever see this escalator in Megalopolis?”
Qian Duoduo shook his head. “It makes me think of a long poem.”
“I’m illiterate. Don’t dangle your learning—just say it.”
“Dante’s Divine Comedy,” Qian Duoduo said. “The last poet of the Middle Ages. Guided by Virgil and Beatrice, he travels downward through Hell, circle by circle, and in the deepest pit turns and climbs back to Paradise.”
Like their route to the Heavenly Gate: down from the heights and up again, a cycle.
The monitor in his hands spoke once more in a metallic voice:
“Ascending from earth to heaven and descending again, it gains the powers of the above and the below.
“As above, so below; as below, so above—thus is the miracle of the One made whole.”
An illiterate like Zhao Meiyou had no idea what those esoteric lines were on about. He watched Qian Duoduo slide into thought, touched a fingertip to the spot between his brows. “Don’t overthink it, Qian Duoduo. It’ll only give you a headache.”
He always liked to say that when he was trying to comfort someone—Don’t think about it.
If thought and reason are what make us human, what was this attitude of his? Evasion? Cowardice? Blind optimism, or numbness?
Some of it, maybe all, maybe none. Qian Duoduo looked at him. “Zhao Meiyou, aren’t you afraid?”
“Sure. How could I not be?” Zhao Meiyou seemed surprised by the question, but he answered. “Fear is a refusal to accept death. Who isn’t afraid of dying? Of course, there’s a difference between what your body fears and what your mind fears.”
“Then how do you tolerate not thinking?”
“In the face of real fear, people often can’t think at all, Qian Duoduo.”
“You don’t look like you’ve been scared stupid.”
Zhao Meiyou considered, fished out a pack, and lit a cigarette. “Sometimes you just don’t need to think so much. My mom used to tell me one thing: ‘The road’s right under your feet.’ Later we hosted a lecture—something like that—at the psychiatric hospital. At the end they had everyone say how they wanted to face death. Old Mr. De said he wanted to die in a girl’s arms. Diao Chan said at sixteen. Guifei—that is, Liu Qijue—refused to answer. I thought and thought and, well, following in my mother’s footsteps—like her eloping with dawn—if there’s someone with me when I die, that’d be enough.”
Qian Duoduo watched him. “So?”
“So I’m not dead yet, and there’s someone with me already.” Zhao Meiyou looked straight at him. “What’s left to be afraid of?”
Qian Duoduo blinked, as if unconvinced. “Carpe diem.”
“Sufficient unto the day,” Zhao Meiyou said around his cigarette, smiling. “If you keep thinking about tomorrow, the final tomorrow is death. Equality at last—for everyone.”
“The road is under our feet. We’re on it. So walk. Don’t keep worrying about feathering the gas, stomping the brake, signal lights, safety manuals, emergency exits… The terminus isn’t going anywhere. Everyone gets there.”
“No ambition, then?”
“If you mean pinning the gas at a buck-eighty, maybe not,” Zhao Meiyou said evenly.
“Then what’s your ambition?”
“You driving, me riding shotgun, and when we hit a red light, you turn and kiss me.”
Qian Duoduo: "..."
“Don’t tell me that isn’t bold.” Zhao Meiyou grew solemn. “Go ask the archaeologists which of them dares bag Qian Duoduo.”
After a long moment, Qian Duoduo said, “Zhao Meiyou, you don’t strike me as a love-above-all person.”
“I’m not. Before this I never thought about looking for a destined one.” Zhao Meiyou smiled. “I told you, Qian Duoduo. Live in the present. And right now, being with you is what matters most.”
He stressed the now. It wasn’t an archaeologist’s way of thinking. They hunt the past and the future, crossing history and the stars; on the timeline, the present is the least seductive point, trapped between opposites. It wasn’t their fault. In the twenty-fifth century, Megalopolis had outlived its brightest age. Myth and alchemy had been disenchanted long ago; all that remained were a few scattered gleams to scavenge. What did the present offer? Rites in tatters, a chop-suey of Franken-civilizations, a babble of noise, and the eternal silence of infinite space.
But someone like Zhao Meiyou, living at abyssal depths where every soul was a frog at the bottom of a well—
He said: Live in the present.
“Every present moment makes all past and future,” Zhao Meiyou said softly, looking at Qian Duoduo. “The me who loves you now—even if it’s only for a heartbeat—will live forever across the whole span of my life.”
The road underfoot. Holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road—this would be the road the two of them walked together. Laughing full-throttle, running down a drunk, knocking over a jewelry store window, robbing a bank, fleeing the end of the world—even if they burned to ash in the flames of a dying star—as long as you were driving and he was in the passenger seat, as long as you leaned over at the light and kissed him, then in that instant before the end, he would place his hand in yours.
The sun climbed. Morning broke.
“Yellow light,” Zhao Meiyou said, looking from the blazing city back to Qian Duoduo. “Are you going to give me a kiss?”
“…Have some ambition,” Qian Duoduo said at last. “One’s too few. Ask for ten thousand.”
“Mm. I love you too.”
Author’s note:
—“As above, so below” is from the alchemical Emerald Tablet.
—“Holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road”—Kerouac, On the Road.
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