Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
43
A New Palace
I LIKED THE LAKE DISTRICT and thought about going up to see what had changed in 2,000 years, but I guess you’d say in today’s jargon, it was an ugly divorce. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk a confrontation. Besides, Peninnah and I received a royal summons to have tea with the other Queen. I guess that wasn’t so terribly unusual. We were billionaires and were trotting around the world looking for places to put our money. We’d also made a substantial donation to a local medical foundation that provided services to the poor and underprivileged. I wondered what Her Majesty had in mind.
I found out immediately. We were ushered into a room lined with the Queen’s staff and a few notables we should have known. We were presented to the Queen and bowed appropriately. Then a herald of some sort stepped forward with a scroll and read off a list of my charitable contributions around the world as if he were reading the charges in a criminal case.
“Sir Bob, we recognize your contribution to the health and well-being of citizens of the world by investing you as an Honorary Knight Commander in the Order of the British Empire,” said the queen.
I bowed my head—low—and she put a nice necklace around my neck. I wondered how many demons had ever been knighted in the British Empire, and then decided it was probably best not to know.
After a brief reception, during which everyone who had been in the room stopped by to congratulate me and shake my hand, we were conducted into a small chamber where a table had been set with tea. We remained standing until the queen arrived and was seated, then joined her.
“You’ve been very busy, Bob,” she said. “A massive resort community in Japan. The redevelopment of entire neighborhoods in India. The support of medical and social institutions around the world. And, of course, your very secretive operations to help end child and sex trafficking.”
I was a little taken aback by that and glanced at Peninnah, whose eyes had also popped open. We had kept our work in that arena a secret, following reports of child trafficking, abductions, and missing teens, then moving in quietly to release the children to authorities—usually after there were no traffickers remaining alive in that cell to harm them. I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised to find the monarch of the British Empire knew about what we had done—or rather what my priestesses had done. I was not about to volunteer any information, though.
“What I am most interested in, though, is your ability to get things built quickly. And so, I am wondering if you would be interested in a commission here in Britain.”
“How may we serve your majesty?” I asked. I thought it was a bit unusual for the queen to get involved in a commercial development project, but I was a builder and architect. I was interested.
“I’d like you to build me a new temple… I mean palace, of course. I’m tired of these musty old stones.”
“Surely you have many homes to choose from,” I said.
“Oh, yes. We are rich in British heritage. There isn’t a one of my homes that isn’t twice my age or more.”
“You do seem to be blessed with longevity.”
“Would you die and leave your kingdom to my heirs?” she laughed. “Nor would I. Perhaps when Will is fifty or so, he’ll be ready to usurp the throne from his father. But you can imagine that I am a bit eager to have my new home built so that I can enjoy it for a while.”
“Certainly, your majesty. Uh… such a project could be costly,” I suggested.
“Not to worry. I started a Go Fund Me and have collected enough to cover the expenses,” she said. I nodded. Really? “I’ve had my surveyor locate a bit of crown property that could be developed. But I don’t want another stone edifice. If I never see another block of limestone in my life, it will be too soon.”
“So, you want a modern palace?”
“Yes. Lots of steel and glass, but it can’t look like an office high rise. It still needs to look like a queen’s palace.”
I nodded and began sketching things out on a napkin. Peninnah gave me a horrified look and I realized I was drawing on a linen napkin with the royal arms embroidered in one corner. Ah, well. I had too many ideas brimming forth to stop.
“Does your majesty prefer straight lines or futuristic curves?” I asked.
“I don’t mind round elements in regard to the floor plan, like the towers, but the vertical lines should be straight—even if not perfectly vertical. I can’t help but think Gaudí had a vision problem that caused everything he created to bulge like it had just overeaten. As much as I admire their genius, I would not like to live in a painting by Dali, either.”
I had to agree about the disturbing image. We left the queen with several sketches, including her own drawings on a royal napkin.
I hoped, frankly, that she lived as long as I did.
The following days were very busy as I brought in help and negotiated with various unions and contractors. The property just northwest of London was a lovely bit of real estate and we began by constructing a wall around the square mile, then moving inside to construct a second wall that would define the palace grounds. It was a slightly smaller scale of what I had built for the Khaan. I put into practice all I knew about feng shui and much of what was learned in building the palace at Xanadu. While it was a completely modern structure, it leaned more on the design of Asian palaces than European. In a way, it looked more like what I imagined a space station would look like.
The queen approved the designs and we were able to turn the construction over to our crews and continue our world tour, popping back to England nearly every month to oversee the project and have tea with the queen. I believe the project was keeping her young as she didn’t seem to age a day. She still looked only ninety.
People say ‘human traffickers,’ as if it is a respected vocation. Slavers, I say. I’ve never liked them and never will. When the slaves are women and children, I like them even less. I know that’s chauvinistic of me. Liz has told me so frequently. It shouldn’t take a woman or child in danger to make me against slavery. And it doesn’t, really. It just gets my goat when it is.
During the unCivil War, San Francisco was a hub of human trafficking. It was the port of entry for thousands of Chinese who came to work the mines and lay tracks for the railroad. Their situation was slavery in all but name. They came willingly, thinking they would earn money to bring their families to America. Most never saw their families again.
Other Chinese were imported to take advantage of the great opportunities in America and found themselves working on their backs in Chinese brothels. Most, but not all, of those were women. American men, I discovered, would fuck anything that was weaker than they were. That was the situation when I found Chin Li hiding in my wagon after a delivery to the Grand Hotel. Just for her to be this far away from Chinatown was a danger to her. My guards, however, had spotted her and hidden her under the seat of my wagon.
Ali, my bodyguard, had been a slave in an African empire when I found her and set her free. From that moment on, she refused to leave my side and joined the harem in the infinity room. She was devoted to the martial arts and founded a cadre of women who would act as my bodyguards when needed. That had been five hundred years ago, but her memories of being a slave were still fresh.
I drove out of San Francisco toward our pier south of the town. I’d lost control of Goat Island during the war, when the army thought they’d build a fort there. It hadn’t materialized ten years later, so I still made use of the dock as a waypoint when crossing the bay with my barge and wagon. As soon as we were on the water, I called the stowaway out to introduce myself.
Pardon my continued chauvinism. She was a living doll! No, I don’t mean that literally. I mean she was just adorable. Cute as a button. Cute as a bug’s ear. All those other exclamations of cuteness. I estimated she was barely fourteen, though my experience in judging the age of Chinese women was notably poor. This girl or woman triggered something in me that was far different than the horny goat was used to. I wanted to wrap her in a cocoon of silk and protect her from damage. I wanted to feed her and teach her. I wanted all the things that Nimia told me later a father would want for his little girl. Oh, my!
It turned out that she was not a little girl. She was twenty-two years old. Her life had been hell and she had run away from a brothel where she’d been kept since arriving in America. There were some questions regarding the legality of her arrival, as well. We found that despite all the regulations trying to bar the Chinese from immigrating to America, there were clandestine operations transporting people from China to San Francisco that were simply ignored by the authorities.
The advent of steam ships had cut the crossing time from the three to four months it had been when I sailed the routes, to a mere four to six weeks. These ships transported goods to and from China. The Chinese in San Francisco still subsisted on a diet that was mostly rice and most of the rice was imported from China. There were also passenger liners that crossed the Pacific and a number of Navy vessels that patrolled the shores. But through that traffic, there were still pirates and slavers who collected passengers—often offering legitimate passage for a large fee—and then stripped them of their wealth at sea and placed them in a network of mines, fields, and brothels to ‘work off their passage.’
Li had been one who took legitimate passage and discovered she had signed on to a brothel. While the whites in San Francisco rioted to get rid of the Chinese, they were also quick to patronize the brothels and gambling establishments—and laundries—run by the Chinese. The constant attacks on Chinese homes, businesses, and individuals in the street gave rise to protection gangs that patrolled with the dual purpose of protecting the businesses and keeping their property (slaves) at home.
This all sat poorly with me and I resolved to do something about it.
Maureen tried to prevent me from taking action. Coming from Ireland, she’d seen the same level of discrimination against the Irish, serving in a brothel herself. But she had no sympathy for the Chinese in the same situation. Racism knows no bounds of decency. She figured that she survived it, they could, too. Of course, Maureen was sapping the souls of her clients, too.
It seemed to me that the best course would be what I had always done: Hide at sea and capture the slavers. The problem was that I knew how to sail. I knew nothing about piloting a steamship, nor did I have one.
With Li’s help, we were able to identify the ship she had come on when it steamed into harbor. On close inspection, we discovered it had stopped at a different harbor where its illegal cargo had been rendered over to the network on land. Then, bearing only legitimate cargo to the docks in San Francisco, it had all the appearances of a profitable merchantman.
Li was quite brilliant at setting the strategy.
“Papa Bob,” she said as we sat at the table with some of my best fighters. I loved it when she called me that. It had a completely different meaning than when girls of the twenty-first century tried to call me ‘daddy.’ Li had quickly shown that it was her skill in the martial arts that enabled her to win her freedom. “We can move in silence at the place where people are stored. They will stay there for some days until the ship has left port so it is not implicated should they be caught. If we move quickly, we can overcome the guards and free the slaves.”
“And what do we do with these people once we free them?” I asked. That was definitely another problem. They certainly would not be welcome in San Francisco.
“Do you not have any place where decent hard-working people can make a home in a new world?” she asked innocently.
“I do not want to force people to leave this world for an unknown world.”
“They have already made that decision. Some few have relatives and friends in San Francisco who might want them returned. But most have left behind the world they knew to find a new life and a new world where they can be free.” She made sense. I agreed to the venture, and we set out to find the warehouse where the people were kept.
If any authority had been looking, they would have found this place immediately. I had to assume that meant it was profitable for them to not look. We might have problems on that end sometime later, but not this night. This night, twenty of my most capable warriors, led by Ali, joined Li and me to invade the warehouse and disable the guards. It was sickening. Over 300 people were in cramped quarters with barely enough rice to survive.
When we had cleared the warehouse of the guards, I announced what the situation was, with Li helping to explain to those who could not grasp the concept. Perhaps a dozen of the people held captive had family they wanted to join. The others were more than willing to enter the infinity room and start a new life. I opened the gateway and they filed through, welcomed by my wives and concubines, and shown the remarkable world the infinity room had become.
Of course, this was not the only problem to be overcome. It was only a day before workers in the underground trade came to gather slaves for their businesses. Those workers were never seen again. I’d been willing to simply stop their activity and let them go, but it was quickly obvious that the only way to stop it was to end them. Li, my precious little daughter, was a delighted executioner.
Once the slavers had been cleared, we took the people who had relatives to Chinatown and reunited them with their families. It was not long after they had returned that a rumor began to circulate that a swordswoman of the people had arrived in California and would right the injustices done to the Chinese.
There wasn’t much I could do about the rumors, which I honestly had nothing to do with. When the ship arrived again with another 300 Chinese slaves, we acted a bit differently. Oh, we still liberated the slaves and took them to the infinity room, but we also liberated the ship. The captain and his crew met Li. I was suddenly in possession of a fine steamship that still had cargo for delivery to San Francisco. The engineer on the ship, a person we deemed innocent of wrongdoing, gave me a crash course in piloting a steamship. The engineer found a home in the infinity room and emerged only to tend to the engines.
We headed to harbor and there I met the ship’s owner. He was disturbed to find that the captain and his main crew had perished from a plague aboard the ship and questioned whether the cargo should be dumped at sea. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the ship’s owner did not know of the captain’s secondary cargo. I talked him out of destroying the cargo. We unloaded with a crew of workers I brought from the infinity room into the lower hold, and we were paid handsomely. I was immediately offered employment as captain of the vessel to take a return shipment to China and make trade arrangements.
I agreed.
It didn’t seem reasonable to clean up only one end of the operation. Someone at the other end was illegally selling passage on the freighter to supply the slaves.
I loved Li. Truly as a daughter. She was passionate in her beliefs and untiring in her pursuit of justice for the downtrodden. She was legendary.
For example, while we were in Shanghai, we discovered that most of the agents selling passage to America were legitimately sending people to San Francisco as advertised. It was when a ship was well out into the Pacific that the change occurred. On the other hand, there were some who sold passage to people, knowing they would be enslaved. They often took their client’s property in exchange for passage. I let Li take care of closing their businesses.
The legend of the flying sword arose.
She was the best martial artist and especially swordswoman I had ever met except Zhi. The two worked together to hone her skills and Li soon exceeded her teacher.
We stealthily crept up on a steamer out of Shanghai that we’d seen loading passengers. It was a freighter and boarded far more passengers than such a ship should carry. I was laden with goods for San Francisco, including enough rice to feed Chinatown for a month. We left the harbor right behind the tramp and I cast a look-away spell both on our ship and on Li and her hand-picked cadre.
When we were right next to the steamer, Li led her squad aboard. She did not kill everyone on the crew, preferring to leave a skeleton crew to take the ship and its reduced cargo on to America. When the crew had been subdued, I boarded the ship and opened a gateway to the infinity room. I offered a return to the real world in San Francisco, but by that time, only a few were interested in leaving my paradise.
When the derelict steamer entered the harbor, the legend of the flying sword was enhanced.
The owner of my ship was thrilled with our cargo. We were transporting twice what the ship had carried under the former captain. After all, we weren’t carrying people as cargo. We returned to the sea and worked our way through the treaty ports of China, including Canton, Amoy, Foochow, and Ningpo. We found that with the influx of westerners into China, some of the human trafficking was conducted by whites who sought out young women to supply needs in several countries, not just the Americas.
In each port, we did our best to locate the buyers of girl children and stop their trade.
The legend of the Flying Sword spread.
Once we freed a shipload of young women, they were taken to the infinity room and given several choices. None wanted to return home, knowing their families would only sell them again. Surprisingly, none were particularly interested in going to America, as they felt it was a country of slavers. We took some few to Hong Kong, where the British were effectively keeping the slave trade to a minimum, but nearly all wanted to stay in the infinity room. I faced a sudden need for men in the infinity room.
We managed to get them, but that is a different story. This is the story of Chin Li, the Flying Sword.
We were in port in Hong Kong when she disappeared. I use that term advisedly. I knew where she was, but as far as our ship and the infinity room were concerned, she was gone. Using stealth and skill, I worked my way into the underbelly of Hong Kong and sought her out. She had acquired a nice but modest residence where she began training young women in the arts.
“There is a great need here, Bob,” she said. “I cannot return with you and simply leave these women to fate. Though the prospect of the infinity room is attractive, my life was not meant to be eternal.”
“Li, I love you as my daughter and have never regretted saving you in San Francisco, but it pains my heart to leave you here,” I said.
“Papa Bob, I honor you as my father and will always strive to make you proud.”
“My pride is in safe hands with you,” I said.
I made it back to the ship and we steamed out of port that night, without having loaded any cargo. I stopped at a port in Japan that was still open to trade with westerners and filled the cargo holds. Then I made my last crossing of the Pacific by steamship. In San Francisco, I resigned as captain and parted on good terms with the owner.
Over the years, I occasionally heard whispers of the Flying Sword from all over the Far East. It seemed Li had trained her army well.
It was sometime in the ’90s that I was watching TV, looking for re-runs of Kung Fu. That show always tickled me, though I ended up yelling at it from time to time because they got some things very wrong. I wondered what would have happened if Caine had ever met Chin Li. Well, if David Carradine actually had the skills he portrayed on television, it would be interesting, but I wouldn’t bet on him.
As I flipped through the stations, I came upon a cooking show with a guy who professed to have a dozen girlfriends or more. And he was right out in the open about it. They appeared on his show with him and all seemed very happy. In those years, any relationship that didn’t conform to the Christian Right Wing was deemed deviant and unacceptable. They’d lost the battle against interracial marriage, though there were still places where it could get a guy killed.
But to have an open relationship with a harem and have it accepted was something else. I imagined what it would be like to live openly with my wives and possessions and concubines, something we had not really been able to do in the natural world since Knossos. Now that would be the life.
This Brian fellow was said to be quite the martial artist, too. I watched the whole show and came back on a regular basis. There was just something about it that… Well, it didn’t have a plot. He just talked to people and cooked food. It didn’t have a script exactly, but he did have a recipe. And that was it.
What a life!
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