The Skin Map (14 page)

Cosimo nodded. “We considered that, too, of course. But how many human lives would you trade for a stone building or two? Anyway, nothing emerged from the fire that would not have come about by other, less destructive, means. The fire merely lent speed and urgency to a process already begun. In short, there was no reason for all those thousands of innocent townsfolk to suffer and, as is most always the case with any disaster, it is those who can least afford to lose who lose the most.”

“Not to mention the enormous obstacle on the road to enlightened learning,” added Lord Castlemain.

“Sir?” wondered Kit.

“Saint Paul’s cathedral, of course,” replied Sir Henry, as if this should be self-evident.

“It is where London’s booksellers stored their wares,” explained Cosimo. “All the books on medicine, science, mathematics, history —everything lost. The fire would set learning back a hundred years, and at a time when reading was just beginning to catch on, as it were.”

This sounded reasonable. “So, until you can be sure you know the effects of what you’re changing, the best course is not to interfere too much.”

“Some change is unavoidable,” Cosimo allowed. “Merely by your presence, you alter the present reality of the world you are visiting. But just remember that every change, however small, has consequences. If the universe is altered enough, the effects can ripple through the entire Omniverse.”

“The what?
Omniverse
?” Kit shook his head. “Where
do
you get these words?”

“Omniverse,” repeated his great-grandfather. “Put simply, it is everything that exists. It is this universe and who knows how many others—because there may well be more than one.”

“That has yet to be proven,” said Sir Henry. “Though it does seem much the likeliest explanation.”

“Think of it as the grand total of all that is, was, or will ever be,” Cosimo told him. “It is the Great Universe which may contain an unquantifiable number of smaller universes—like seeds packed in a pomegranate.”

“Why do we need so many?” wondered Kit.

“I don’t know,” confessed Cosimo. “But we seem to have them all the same—each in its own dimension, separated from the others by the thinnest of skins.”

Kit thought for a moment, then said, “I understand about travelling to other worlds and how they aren’t in the same time zone, so to speak. But, if you already know where the ley lines are and where they go, why do you need the map?”

“You’re not thinking big enough,” Cosimo chided. “How best to describe it?” He put his chin in his hands and looked out the window a moment, musing. “I know!” he said suddenly. “You’re familiar with the London Underground train system, yes?”

“My home away from home,” remarked Kit.

“How many different lines make up the Underground system?”

“I don’t know—a dozen, maybe.”

“And how many stops?” inquired Cosimo. “In total, how many stations would you say there are?”

Kit shrugged. “A few hundred, I suppose—give or take.”

“Indeed,” affirmed Cosimo. “Now the lines on the London Underground are on different levels—some higher, some lower, and some very low—and they crisscross through the earth in three dimensions, linking up at various points along the way.”

“The connecting stations,” added Kit. “So you can change lines.”

“Yes, but not every line connects with every other—they merely connect wherever they will and there is no guessing where those connections might be. It is an ingenious system, but also very complicated. People can easily become confused when they use it, not so?”

“It has been known to happen,” granted Kit, who, as a regular victim of tube travel, knew the feeling only too well.

“The best way to avoid this confusion is to use a map—that rather clever schematic drawing with all its colours and crossing lines.” Cosimo’s gaze grew keen. “Now then, what if you attempted to travel from Whitechapel to Uxbridge without that little map? What if there was no helpful diagram posted above the door of the coach, no signs on the platforms, nothing to show where you were or where you were going. You’d be quite lost, would you not? You could not tell where the line went or how many stations the train might pass along the way, or whether those stations linked up to other trains on other lines, or how many other lines there might be, where those lines crossed, or where they led. So, here you are, riding the train without a clue where it’s going—how, I ask you, do you navigate your way out of that?”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” conceded Kit. “You need the map to find your way around a very complex system.”

“Exactly,” agreed Cosimo, warming to his argument. “Now, imagine if you will that you discovered a tube system that was several million times larger than the London Underground, and that there were an inconceivable number of individual lines linking billions of stations and a simply unimaginable number of trains. . . .”

“That would be some big system,” observed Kit.

“And just to make it more interesting, imagine that there was a time element involved so that you never knew when you arrived somewhere what year it might be, or even what century!”

“Awkward,” Kit allowed.

“That is very near the situation we are in, my son,” said Cosimo, leaning back on the bench. “As it happens, Sir Henry and I have visited and committed to memory a few of the lines and several of the stations in our local neighbourhood, as it were. But the far, far greater part of this gigantic system remains a complete and utter mystery—”

“We don’t even know how many other systems there might be,” added Sir Henry. “More than there are stars in the sky, it would seem.”

“Furthermore,” added Cosimo, “to even attempt to travel without the map beyond the few lines we know is incredibly dangerous.”

“Right, so what do you do if you get lost?”

“Dear boy, getting lost is the least of your worries,” his great-grandfather declared. “Consider—jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.” Cosimo spread his hands and shook his head. “Anything could happen. That is why the map is monumentally, vitally, crucially, life-and-death important.”

“Hear! Hear!” said Sir Henry with a tap of his stick. “We owe Arthur Flinders-Petrie the highest debt of gratitude.”

There was more he wanted to ask, but Kit felt his brain beginning to fuddle. Yet there was one worry that had been gnawing on his conscience. “Getting back to Wilhelmina,” he said. “What happens if, after all we do, we still can’t find her? Tell me the truth. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Who knows?” said Cosimo. “She could of course fall prey to any number of assaults, or she herself might cause unimaginable damage, unleashing catastrophe after catastrophe of unreckoned proportions—”

“Unwittingly, of course,” suggested Sir Henry.

“Or, she could merely settle into a new life as a peculiar stranger in a foreign land, get married, raise a family, and do no harm whatsoever. Then again, depending on the local circumstance, she could be burned at the stake for a witch.” Cosimo lifted an equivocal palm. “There is simply no way to predict the outcome.”

“The chief difficulty, you see, is that being out of joint with her temporal surroundings as she undoubtedly is, the young lady might introduce an idea or attitude alien to the natural course of development of the world in which she now finds herself.” Sir Henry, hands folded over his walking stick, turned his face to the coach window and took in the scenery. “It is such a very complicated business.”

“I’ll say. So, if she changed something in
that
world,” ventured Kit, who was finally beginning to grasp something of the awful magnitude of the problem, “the changes would spread throughout the universe.”

“Drop a stone into a millpond and watch the ripples multiply until the whole pond is disturbed.”

Cosimo nodded. “‘Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star,’” he declaimed.

Sir Henry smiled at the quotation. “I have never heard that. Who said it?”

“It’s from a poem by a chap named Francis Thompson—a bit after your time, I’m afraid. Nice, though, isn’t it? Here’s another: ‘The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, moves all the labouring surges of the world.’”

Turning once more to Kit, he said, “The point is that through some innocent action your girlfriend might, like Pandora of old, wreak havocs great and small throughout this universe and beyond.”

“Then we’d better find her fast,” said Kit. “Knowing Wilhelmina, she’s probably stirred up a whole field of flowers by now.”

CHAPTER 12
In Which a Notable Skin Is Honourably Inscribed

M
acau sweltered beneath an unforgiving August sun, and the Mirror Sea was calm. The tall ships in Oyster Bay, the few wispy clouds in the sky, the lazily circling seabirds—all were faithfully replicated in precise detail in their liquid reflections. And none of it evaded the hooded gaze of Wu Chen Hu as he sat on his low stool before the entrance to his small shop on White Lotus Street, above the harbour.

A small, nimble man of venerable age, his squat form swathed in a light green silk robe, he leaned against the crimson doorpost and smoked a long clay pipe, watching the aromatic wisps drift lazily up to heaven. Every now and then he turned his eyes to the bay to take in a familiar summer sight: a ship being rowed into harbour by its tender boat. During the dull summer season, when the gods slept and the weather was still, there was often not enough wind to drive the big trading ships into harbour, so they must be rowed by their crews—sometimes from many miles out at sea—into port.

The ship was Portuguese, of course: a large full-bellied sea hound with three skyscraping masts and a great curved scimitar of a prow. Fully laden with trade goods, it required three tenders to haul its bulk into the bay, while lifeless canvas hung limp on the spars. Soon the docks would shake off their slumber and resume the business of transporting goods from hold to shore. For the next few days at least, there would be work and money for the dockyard lackeys. And eventually work, too, for Chen Hu.

Sailors were the principal source of income for Wu’s Heavenly Tattau. Portuguese sailors were the chief contributors to his modest personal wealth.

From his lofty vantage point on White Lotus Street, he watched as the ship was slowly berthed and roped, and the gangplanks extended. There was a scurry of activity on deck as the cargo vessel was made secure. In a little while, the welcoming delegation arrived: a body made up of the harbourmaster and his assistants, several customs officials, heads of the various trading houses concerned, and the local labour broker. There would be the obligatory exchange of gifts, speeches read out, official documents presented and signed, and then—and only then—would the first voyagers be allowed to come ashore.

The dutiful servants of the emperor were highly skilled bureaucrats. Such ceremonies employed and honed the arts of official obfuscation and obscurantism that, from the highest sceptre-wielding magistrate to the lowest ink-dipper, served to protect someone’s position in the imperial pecking order. The Qing Dynasty revelled in its bureaucracy.

Wu Chen Hu knew all about bureaucracy. As one of the few private businessmen allowed to deal directly with foreign devils, he had attracted more than the usual amount of official interest in his affairs over the years. Everyone from tax officials to building inspectors knew, and respected, the House of Wu. He saw to it that the right palms were lubricated with the right measure of monetary grease to ensure that his business ran smoothly and with a minimum of interference.

He rubbed the back of his neck and put on his straw hat to shade his eyes, and continued to watch the ship. Soon—if not tonight, then surely tomorrow or the next day—the sailors would begin to find their way to his door. He thought of sending a boy or two down to the docks to advertise his services; better still, a girl. Sailors liked the young girls and followed them blithely.

But it was early yet. It was best to wait and see. If the expected trade did not appear, or proved a little too sluggish for his liking, he could send the girls.

Chen Hu finished his pipe and gently knocked the bowl against the leg of his stool to tap out the ashes, then rose and went into his shop. He removed his hat and knelt beside the hearth and took up the little iron kettle, filled it with water from the stoup, and set it on the brazier. He settled himself cross-legged with eyes closed and waited. When he heard the burbling sound of water beginning to boil, he counted out nine green leaves from a pouch at his belt and dropped them into the steaming water. A few moments later, the aroma rose to his nostrils and he removed the kettle from the coals. He was just pouring the fresh brew into a tiny porcelain cup when the room darkened.

He turned to see the shape of a large man silhouetted in the doorway.

From the ungainly and graceless stance, he could tell his visitor was a
gaijin
. He sighed, poured his tea back into the kettle, stood, tucked his hands into the wide sleeves of his robe, and moved to the door, using the shuffling gait that indicated humility.

“Good luck to you,” he said in his best Portuguese. “Please to come in.” He bowed low to his visitor.

“May good fortune follow you all your days,” said the stranger in a voice at once distinctive and familiar. He stepped back into the light and began unbuckling his shoes.

“Masta Attu! It is you!” cried the Chinese artisan.

“I have returned, Chen Hu,” replied the dark-haired gentleman with a reverential bow. Switching smoothly to English, he said, “Tell me, old friend, how fares the House of Wu?”

“All is well, Masta Attu,” replied Chen Hu with a wide, betel-stained grin. His facility with English was only slightly less assured than his Portuguese; both had been earned through long association with sailors. “How could it be otherwise now that you are here?”

“It is good to see you, too, Chen Hu,” replied Arthur Flinders-Petrie, his own grin wide and fulsome. “You are the very picture of health. Your daughter, Xian-Li—how is she? Well, I hope?”