As the foundation of the building creaked and settled once again and dust rained down through fingerling cracks in the ceiling, soiling his rugs from Persia and Turkey, Phineas stared at the collapsed doorway to his bunker. A ruin of concrete occupied the space where a golden door had once been hinged, and upstairs, his lavish apartment was surely demolished. He frowned and chewed his lip as he regarded the broken window to the light well that had been his only means of seeing the reflected sky. The polished silver mirrors that lined the walls of the shaft had shattered and the well had filled up with brick and rubble. He sighed and pursed his lips disapprovingly as pulverized mortar poured in like sand to the bottom of an hourglass, slowly counting down to the moment when Phineas’ air would become scarce and then nonexistent.
He waited in minutes of silence that stretched into hours. He tried to distract himself by rereading for the umpteenth time passages from books by the philosopher Jean Reynaud and the skeptic Chuang Chou, gifts, translated into English. But Phineas couldn’t stop worrying about his followers, wondering who, if any, had survived the comet’s poisonous tail. And more importantly: When would they rescue him?
To his minions, Phineas was Yueguang Tongzi. A great scientist and the Prince of Moonlight predicted in the Sutra on the Extinction of the Dharma. And his people, they considered themselves members of the Way of Former Heaven, poor slaves who had fallen off the wheel of reincarnation and had been stuck here forever when the wheel began moving again. But the leaders among his followers were affiliates of the White Lotus Society — a triad with dreams of an anarchist revolution. If they knew Phineas was nothing but a charlatan, they didn’t let on. They sailed along in his boat of falsehood, adrift on a sea of lies, paddling in the same ruinous direction.
“The future is a deep river, flowing,” his predecessor, Professor Franz Der Ling had explained. “I have found a way to navigate the bends, the rapids.”
Phineas had thought the late Professor Ling to be a madman, a raving lunatic who rambled on and on about Gaussian reduction, polynomial interpolation, and the Greek island of Antikythera — just another intellectual prisoner banished to the stockades of Hong Kong where Phineas had been sentenced to nine months for selling phony treasure maps. Another jailed respite in his long history of arrests for schemes and petty crimes against the Crown of Britannia who had smashed China’s Celestial Empire long before he’d been born. And during his many stints behind bars he’d been locked up with liars and thieves, smugglers and spies, but never an innocent man. Or a genius.
Professor Ling happened to be both.
“My invention has made me an exile in my own country,” The professor had said. “The British think I’ll use it to rally the people, to incite a rebellion, or call down the Golden Horde from the Steppe. So when you get out, you must find it for me — use the device and tell me my fate. When will I ever be free?”
Phineas closed the book in his lap and walked to the sturdy bank vault that had been added to his comet shelter years ago. He entered the combination that only he knew, turned the handle, and opened the iron door with both hands. Inside was his most prized possession, its secret location in the Chinese countryside gifted to him by the professor. The machine was the size of a hatbox, but made from silver, gold, and curious alloys inscribed with Chinese characters describing zhou yi.
When Phineas had first laid eyes on the device, he had no idea what it was, though he recognized the word change. He’d hoped the machine was an auto-abacus, the kind of pinwheel calculator that Chinese clockmakers had tinkered with in hopes of predicting lottery numbers. But Professor Ling had been an adjunct of the Royal Laboratory of Psychical Research so Phineas assumed the thing must be some kind of automatic writing machine, something from the burgeoning field of pyschography.
Now as Phineas sat with the device on his lap and opened the lid, he marveled at its intricate construction just as he had all those years ago. He stared in awe at the countless iron gears, the copper wiring, and scores of spinning tumblers carved from yarrow root with calligraphic writing on four sides, all driven by an ornate silver handle.
“My invention can predict the future,” Professor Ling had said as his wild eyes flashed beneath matted hair that hadn’t been washed or cut in a decade. “But because the machine uses the primitive, subconscious mind, it can never interpret the operator’s own future. You must use it on my behalf!”
Phineas had no intention of returning the device. Though he remembered skeptically asking the box when the professor would be free, turning the handle, and observing how the word tsum yut appeared.
“Yesterday?” He’d muttered. So much for the future.
It was only after Phineas learned that Professor Ling had died the day before, only then did he realize that the old man’s invention did indeed speak the truth. The professor had created a difference engine based on the ancient Book of Changes. But instead of divulging sixty-four vague answers left up to interpretation, his device broke those answers into four-thousand and ninety-six specific words.
Professor Ling had forged an I-Ching machine.
Three nights had passed since the apparition of the Broom Star, and Phineas began to worry. He still had brass bottles of oxygen (though he felt an occasional draft, which was chilling, yet comforting to have a meager source of air), tins of canned salmon and caviar, canisters of sea biscuits and pilot bread, crates of apples, pears, and lychee, and stores of water as well as casks of fine wine made from rice and barley, enough to last a month — two if he rationed. But where were his followers? His devotees, many of them silver miners, were men with ashen skin experienced in plumbing the noxious pits beneath Mount Rainier. Surely they’d risen up by now and were employing their steam drillers, working their way toward his rescue as planned.
Two years ago the I-Ching machine had predicted that the Vile Star would cleanse the Heavens, that the great comet would bring death to all but the very rich and the very poor. That the sky wanderer would poison those above, drain the Pacific, and would cause drops of iron to rain on Britannia for a full day. Upon hearing the news, some of Phineas’ followers had given him everything to build this shelter — their homes, their possessions, (even their daughters), making them destitute and Phineas wealthy beyond measure, a faithful gesture to ensure everyone’s survival, a win-win in his mind.
Phineas held the machine and asked, “Are my beloved followers alive?” As he waited and then turned the handle he desperately wanted to ask when will they rescue me, but he knew that asking about himself was folly. He’d tried once, out of curiosity, and the machine returned an error message: Cuowu. Now as he listened to the whir of the gears and tumblers, he thought about his followers until the machine settled on the Chinese words for Healthy and Strong.
Phineas breathed a sigh of relief. He’d rarely, if ever, doubted the machine, but then the device had never predicted something as imperious as the end of the world. He asked again, “Are my followers, especially my lieutenants, the ones I hand-picked to lead in my absence, are they guiding my people? What are they doing?” He knew his question was somewhat muddled, but as Professor Ling had once said, “Diction is less important than intent. The machine interprets the beating of your heart, the quaking of your thoughts.”