This story takes place in a world I first ran into in the
December 2013 issue of ANALOG’s sister magazine, ASIMOV’S. That story had the
intriguing, fascinating, and doubtless clumsy-title-in-English, “The Pearl
Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters”:
The ANALOG story seems to take
place in the same, though earlier Chinese dynasty-derived world that the ASIMOV’S story does. While
on reviewer seemed to think that “The Great Leap of Shin” took place on Earth
in some ancient historical past, for whatever reason both stories felt to me as
if they took place elsewhere in
space.
I can’t tell you for sure
what the author Henry Lien intended, but I do have evidence. In “Leap”, Master
Tian-Tai, a boy from the island of Pearl, arrives in the Imperial Palace just
as the master of the Great Leap, the Eunuch Mu Hai-Chen arrives as well.
Tian-Tai and his partners, martial arts skaters, ask to perform for the Eunuch
as a plea to save their island from the earthquake the Eunuch has planned to
initiate to prevent a larger earthquake that would level the Imperial city.
The Eunuch, unafraid of a
bunch of kids, agrees to let them try.
In order to do so, Tian-Tai
has brought his skating rink with him. The Pearl islanders do NOT skate on frozen water! They skate on a living substance reminiscent
of an oyster’s pearl: “...looked like milk, smelled like brine...Looked like
smooth tofu or sheets of milky liquid silk…Heard liquid crisp into solid as
skates ran over it. Not cold or wet. Smooth like glass. Or like firm white of
an eye. Pressed long nail into it hard, drew line in it, smoothed and healed
itself instantly…We told him that the pearl came from spiders. We did not want
to tell him that it came from the seas surrounding the island of Pearl because
we did not want to give Shin one more reason to try and invade Pearl…The pearl
felt alive under my slippers, bounced my foot up with each step I took off it.”
While it may be that this
substance exists on Earth, the story took me to another world, colonized
by descendants of Chinese explorers. This isn’t impossible as China has a
viable space program – as well as the person-power, the drive, and the push to
do something like this.
At any rate, the atmosphere of the story is its greatest
strength. Even if it does take place on Earth, the writer evokes a sense of
place deeply alien to me. The characters of the children from Pearl and the
Emperor’s Eunuch seem at first unlikely participants, but as I read, I could
see that they were the ONLY characters able to tell this small slice of this
much larger – one might say “operatic” – story.
Lien accomplished for me what every writer should seek to
do: he took me from this world of the mundane and catapulted me into another
world – and for me, onto another planet. If you can find the ASIMOV’S story,
read that as well, but if you can only read this one, do. You’ll find yourself
transported to another world.
(From brief correspondence with Mr. Lien, I know he’s at
work/recently completed a novel set here. I for one, cannot wait to read it!)
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