Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (35 page)

“Know who that is?” When Huang shook his head, she explained. “Madam Chauviteau-Zong.”

Huang's eyes widened, and he turned to get a better look.

“Remember my plans for vengeance?” Gamine's grin broadened. “Now I revenge myself on her every month, at least, shaming her into donating large sums of money to the House of the Eternal Blue Sky. I've got all her peers on the rolls of our regular contributors, and now Chauviteau-Zong is terrified that she'll lose her social standing if she doesn't contribute, as well.” Her gaze followed the ancient woman as she was helped into the hall by her servants. “She doesn't recognize me, of course.” Gamine sighed. “I wonder how many children went in and out of the gates of the Chauviteau-Zong estate over the years, how many times she and her friends played their little game.” Her eyes focused on the middle distance. “And I wonder what became of the others.”

Then Gamine snapped from her reverie and turned back to Huang.

“Oh, it's been some years now, but I remember reading about the death of your friend. . . . Well, not friend, I suppose, but still . . .” She trailed off.

Huang nodded. “Friend is as good a name for him as any, I suppose. It's all a long time ago now.” Kenniston An had died in a skirmish with Parley gang members not long after Governor-General Ouyang had been sent back to Earth in disgrace, when the Bannermen had been dispatched to act in concert with city guardsmen. But Kenniston had not died in vain, as the operation had netted Thompson Mary of the Diggers, along with the leaders of several other rival gangs. “A very long time.”

Gamine reached out and squeezed Huang's shoulder. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing to the rear of the hall. “The performance is about to begin.”

The Red Crawler Opera Company had taken the stage, and Mama Noh stepped forward and recited the preamble. The opera was a relatively new one, never before performed in Fanchuan, but already a roaring success at the Imperial Fuchuan Opera House in the east.

“Did you make this selection?” Huang asked in a whisper while the performance began.

Gamine smiled but shook her head. “It was Mama Noh's idea. She found it . . . amusing, I suppose.”

Huang looked somewhat embarrassed and took a deep sip of his wine.

“Don't worry,” Gamine said, laying her hand over his. “No one knows. Besides . . .” She smiled. “As you say, it was all a very long time ago.”

Huang chuckled and nodded.

Then the two fell silent, and along with the rest of the hall lost themselves in the performance. It was the story of a boy and a girl who had come together at a time when their people needed them most, and led an uprising that toppled a foul dictator and changed a world. Then the boy and girl had disappeared as mysteriously as they had first appeared, and were never heard from again.

It was all a fiction, of course, based on hearsay and rumor, but it had the ring of truth to it, and that was enough. It promised to be the most popular opera of the day. In time, perhaps, art would outlive history, and fiction would supplant fact. Perhaps, one day, audiences would never guess that the two people who gave their names to the piece had actually lived. Would never guess that there had ever been two such people,
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird
.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I'M THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WON'T BUY A DVD IF THE only special features are trailers for other movies, and who always feels a little cheated when the last words in a book are
The End
. I always like a little extra material to dig into after I finish a story, a peek behind the scenes.

With that in mind, I offer the following notes.

The world in which
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird
takes place is one in which I've set many stories and novels. Called the Celestial Empire, it is an alternate history in which China rose to world domination in the fifteenth century.

Iron Jaw and Hummingbird
begins in what our calendar calls the year 2515 in the twenty-sixth century, and which the calendars of the Celestial Empire alternatively refer to as the year 5152, the fifty-second year of the Tianbian Emperor, or the 254th Fire Star year.

The red planet Fire Star is, of course, Mars. Five centuries before Gamine and Huang were born, the spaceships of the Dragon Throne first touched down on its red sands. (The Aztecs were already there, but that's another story entirely.) The spaceships brought colonists, who with a process known as terraforming began the slow transformation of the red planet into a habitable world.

All the places to which Gamine's and Huang's journeys take them can be found on any map of Mars, like the one available at
www.google.com/mars
. The Tianfei Valley is the Valles Marineris, Bao Shan is Olympus Mons, the Three Sovereigns mountain range is the Tharsis Montes, the Forking Paths is the Noctis Labyrinthus, the Great Yu Canyon is Echus Chasma, and so on.

Some of the units of measure employed on Fire Star are roughly equivalent to those used on Earth today. For instance, a day on Mars—the time it takes for the planet to make a complete rotation and for the sun to return to the same point in the sky—is about half an hour longer than a day on Earth. Whenever reference is made to a “day” in this novel, then, it could as easily be a day on Earth or on Mars. The same is true of hours, weeks, and months.

Seasons and years, on the other hand, are a little more complicated. A year, in general terms, is defined as the time needed for a planet to make a complete rotation around the sun. On Earth, this is a little more than 365 days. Mars, however, is farther away from the sun, and takes more than 668 Martian days to make a complete rotation. As a result, the Martian year is almost twice as long as an Earth year (it's 1.881 Earth years long, to be precise). And the seasons are correspondingly longer as well, with spring lasting for some 194 days on Mars, as opposed to 93 days of spring on Earth.

In the interest of avoiding confusion, dates and ages in
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird
have been converted from Martian years to Earth years. It just seemed too confusing to say that Huang Fei was nine and a half years old when his parents sent him off to join the Green Standard Army, but that those nine and a half years were equivalent to eighteen years on another planet entirely.

(Anyone bothered by this can always convert them back. Simply divide the number of years in question by 1.881, and the resulting sum will be the number of Martian years.)

The story of Gamine and Huang is inspired in large part by the historical Boxer Rebellion, an uprising that took place in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Names like “the Society of Righteous Harmony” and “the Harmonious Fists” are shamelessly stolen from the pages of history, as is the idea of bandits and religious ecstatics colliding to start a revolution.

Likewise, the story of Gamine and Temujin on the Grand Trunk is an homage to (or stolen from, depending on how charitable one is) Rudyard Kipling's
Kim
. I had the great good fortune to finish work on this book while staying at Kipling's house in Vermont, Naulakha, where the author lived for four years in the 1890s. It was while living there that Kipling started work on
Kim
(and there that he wrote
The Jungle Book
for which, because of Disney's adaptations of the Mowgli stories, he is probably best known today). It seemed somehow fitting that I should end work on Gamine's story in the same house. And I got to sleep in Kipling's room and use his toilet. How cool is
that
?

 

Chris Roberson

Austin, Texas

CHRIS ROBERSON's novels include
Here, There & Everywhere
;
The Voyage of Night Shining White
;
Paragaea: A Planetary Romance
;
X-Men: The Return; Set the Seas on Fire
;
The Dragon's Nine Sons
; and the forthcoming
End of the Century
and
Three Unbroken
. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as
Asimov's
,
Interzone
,
Postscripts
, and
Subterranean
, and in anthologies such as
Firebirds Soaring
,
Live Without a Net
,
FutureShocks
, and
Forbidden Planets
. Along with his business partner and spouse, Allison Baker, he is the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the editor of the anthology
Adventure
,
Vol. 1
. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award three times—once each for writing, publishing, and editing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and twice for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story “O One”).

Chris and Allison live in Austin, Texas, with their daughter, Georgia. Chris is online at
www.chrisroberson.net
.