Ken Liu - Broken Stars

This copy of the Analects hadn’t been printed with Prince Lu’s clay movable type. Rather, it had been printed in Emperor Shizong of Zhou’s time, using the official carved plates, and had been passed down for generations into Zhu Dagun’s hands. Zhu Dagun felt physical, visceral pain as he took back his crumpled and wrinkled treasure and prepared to head in.

Yellow-Beard said, “This row of buildings in the north is where His Highness normally spends all his time. He doesn’t like to be disturbed, so I won’t go in with you. Don’t be afraid; our prince is amiable and kind. He’s not hard to talk to… Right, I still don’t know your name.”

“My surname is Zhu,” Zhu Dagun quickly said. “I’m the eldest of my siblings and named after Gun, father of the first Xia ruler. My courtesy name is Bojie.”

Yellow-Beard said, “Brother Bojie, I’ve been one of His Highness’s helpers since he first arrived in Jinyang. He granted me the name Friday.”

Zhu Dagun bowed. “Thank you, Brother Friday.”

Yellow-Beard returned the bow. “Not at all, not at all,” he said, before turning and leaving.

Zhu Dagun straightened his clothes, cleared his throat, scrubbed at his face, swallowed, and entered the building.

The room was very spacious. Black paper covered the windows, and fire-oil lamps illuminated the inside. Two long tables stood at the center of the room, covered with various jars and bottles. A man stood at one of the tables, head down, working on something.

Zhu Dagun’s palms sweated, his heart raced, and his legs wobbled. He hesitated briefly before gathering his courage, clearing his throat stickily, and dropping to a kowtow. “Your Highness! I… this criminal is—”

The man turned. Zhu Dagun kept his head down, afraid to look at his face. He heard Prince Lu say, “About time! Hurry and help me. I’ve been messing with this for days without any progress. Why is it so hard to find someone who understands middle school chemistry? What’s your name? What are you doing there on the ground? Get up already and come here.”

At Prince Lu’s string of words, Zhu Dagun hurriedly stood up and came over, his head down. He thought that this august prince sounded friendly and genial, like someone easy to approach, although he pronounced his words so strangely that Zhu Dagun had to repeat them to himself several times before understanding the prince; he wasn’t sure what topolect it was. “Your lowly servant is Zhu Dagun, a criminal.” Still keeping his eyes lowered, he made his way to the center of the room. Jars and bottles clanged over as he went, not because of carelessness or poor eyesight, but because the floor was so packed with random objects that he couldn’t take a step without kicking something over.

“Hey, Lil’ Zhu. You can call me Old Wang.” The prince stood on tiptoes to pat his shoulder. “You’re really tall. A hundred ninety centimeters, maybe? I heard you’re from Hanlin Academy. I really wouldn’t have guessed that by looking at you. Have you eaten? If not, I’ll get us some takeout to pad our stomachs. Otherwise, let’s cut straight to the chase. I still haven’t gotten results from today’s experiment.”

These words threw Zhu Dagun into a daze. He sneaked a glance up and discovered that the prince didn’t look like a prince at all. He was of medium height, pale and beardless, and wore a buttoned white cotton coat. His hair was cropped short like a beggar-monk’s. He looked to be in his twenties, yet his brow remained creased with worry even when he smiled. “Your servant doesn’t quite understand what you’re saying, Your Highness….” Zhu Dagun bowed anxiously, unsure of what story lay behind this strange prince.

Prince Lu laughed. “You think my accent is confusing, but all you guys sound like gibberish to me. When I first came, I couldn’t understand a single word. Your court speech sounds like Cantonese or Hakka, but nothing like the modern Shanxi and Shaanxi topolects. Since I wasn’t a historical linguist, I thought that all the topolects of ancient northern China wouldn’t sound very different from what I knew!”

This time, Zhu Dagun understood every individual word coming out of the prince’s mouth individually, but their combined meaning fluttered entirely from his grasp. Sweat trickled down his face. “Your servant lacks in erudition. What Your Highness just said…”

Prince Lu waved a hand. “That’s to be expected. You don’t need to understand anyway. Come and hold this flask in place. Oh right, put on a filter mask. You studied alchemy, so you should know that chemical reactions can release toxic gases, I think?”

Zhu Dagun stared.

The crystal bottles on the table held liquids that Zhu Dagun had neither seen nor smelled in his life. Some were red, some were green, some smelled burningly acrid, some stank unbearably. Prince Lu helped him put on a mask, then had him steady a small, wide-mouthed jar. “Take this rod and stir it slowly. Don’t stir faster than that under any circumstance, got it?”

Nervously, Zhu Dagun stirred the dark green fluid inside the jar. It smelled like the sea, and was hot like a bowl of pot herb soup. “This is dried seaweed ash dissolved in alcohol,” Prince Lu explained. “You ancients call seaweed kunbu . I got this Goryeo kunbu from the Imperial Physician. The Song of Medicine Recipes said ‘kunbu disperses goiter and breaks swelling’… oh, wait, The Song of Medicine Recipes is from the Qing dynasty. I got mixed up again.”

As he spoke, he took out another small jar and carefully removed the sealing clay. The jar was full of an acrid-smelling pale yellow liquid. “This is sulfuric acid. You alchemists call this ‘green vitriol,’ right? Also qiangshui , like in the Alchemical Classic of the Yellow Emperor’s Nine Cauldrons . ‘Bluestone is calcinated to obtain a white mist, which is dissolved in water to obtain strong qiangshui . The substance transforms the silver-haired into the ebony-haired. The choking white mist it emits instantly transports one into the realm of spirits, and after eighteen years one departs from senescence and returns to childhood.’ You should be familiar with that.”

Zhu Dagun nodded as if he was. “That’s right, Your Highness.”

“Just call me Old Wang. ‘Your Highness’ sets my teeth on edge. I’ll start now; keep stirring, don’t stop.” He set up a three-paned white paper screen to lean over the mouth of the flask, put on his mask, and slowly poured the green vitriol into the small jar. At first, all Zhu Dagun noticed was a stench that burned its way right through the cotton mask and up his nose, strong enough to make his brain ache and his eyes tear. Then he saw a miraculous purple cloud was floating up out of the jar, unfurling lazily. Zhu Dagun shivered in fright, but Prince Lu only laughed. “Finally! With this crude method for extracting iodine, that’s half my big plan taken care of! Don’t stop, keep stirring until the reaction finishes. I need to see just how much pure iodine I can extract from one pound of dried seaweed…. Are you interested in how I created sulfuric acid and nitric acid? This is the first step in the Long March of establishing basic industry, you know.”

“I’d love to hear,” Zhu Dagun said automatically.

Prince Lu seemed delighted. “I was pretty good at chemistry back in high school, and I majored in mechanical engineering as an undergrad, so I got a decent foundation. I couldn’t have made it this far otherwise. At first I wanted to use the alchemists’ method of making sulfuric acid from bluestone, but I couldn’t find more than two pounds of it in the city, not nearly enough. Then I happened to see the massive piles of pyrite ore in the iron foundry. Treasure, right for the taking! Heating pyrite gives you sulfur dioxide, and dissolving that gives you sulfurous acid; let that sit for a while and you get sulfuric acid. You can purify that in clay jars; it’s how the munitions factories in Communist Shanbei managed, back in the day.