Ken Liu - Broken Stars

“With sulfuric acid taken care of, nitric acid wasn’t hard. The biggest problem was the limited supply of saltpeter, which we also needed to make gunpowder. I had to mobilize everyone in the Institute to scrape crusted urine off the bases of walls to refine into potassium nitrate. Our entire place reeked! Fortunately, people in this city have a habit of pissing anywhere there’s a wall. If it weren’t for that, we couldn’t have built the foundations of industry in Jinyang.”

Zhu Dagun flushed. “Sometimes the urges of the bladder are too great. Both men and women commonly take off their trousers and relieve themselves where they stand. Please humor the crude customs of the countryside, Your Highness.”

While they were speaking, the contents of the two jars had been combined into one, and the purple cloud had disappeared. Prince Lu spread the white paper screen out on the table and scraped the surface with a flat scrap of bamboo, removing a layer of purplish black powder. “The iodine in seaweed is easily oxidized in air under acidic conditions, creating elemental iodine. Very good, let me send them orders to follow my recipe and manufacture this in batches, and we’ll do the next experiment.” He crossed the room, sat down in front of the text tray in the corner, and began banging out a missive. Zhu Dagun walked over to look and discovered that this strange prince typed with lightning speed. He didn’t even glance at the characters, but typed blind with unfailing accuracy. “Your type tray looks like a different model, Your Highness,” Zhu Dagun blurted.

“Old Wang, call me Old Wang,” said Prince Lu. “The principle’s the same, but each terminal uses two sets of movable type. The bottom set is used for input and the top set’s used for output. Watch.” He pressed the carriage return to end his message and stood up to grab a crank handle and turn it. The crank turned a roller on which a seventeen-inch-wide length of calligraphy paper had been spooled, passing it smoothly over the text tray. The movable type in the tray, to which ink had been applied, suddenly began to rise and fall, stamping characters onto the paper.

Zhu Dagun bent down to pick up the paper and began to read. “The experiment data is correctly recorded. I’ve told the chemistry department to oversee it. Return .” He looked at the prince with admiration. “This is far clearer and more convenient! White paper and black ink simply reads better to the eye. When are you releasing this on the markets? We’ll support it with all our might!”

Prince Lu laughed. “This is only a prototype. Version two-point-one will use the same mechanism found in printers to stamp the output on the same line, instead of inking the characters all over the place and making it hard to read. You like the internet too? The thing I was least used to about this era was the lack of internet access, so I racked my brains to come up with this. I finally get to feel like a proper nerdy shut-in again.”

“Your August Highness—er… Old Wang,” Zhu Dagun corrected himself when he saw Prince Lu’s expression. “May your servant ask, from which prefecture did you originally hail? Are you a scholar of the Central Plains? You have an extraordinary air about you, after all.”

Prince Lu sighed. “The better question is, from what dynasty did I hail? The era I come from is one thousand sixty-one years, three months, and fourteen days distant.”

Zhu Dagun didn’t know if he was joking or raving. He did the arithmetic on his fingers and laughed obsequiously. “I see that you achieved the Way in Emperor Wu of Han’s time, and have lived on to today as an immortal!”

“Not one thousand years in the past,” Prince Lu said unhurriedly. “One thousand years in the future—and nine hundred billion forty-two universes away.”

Zhu Dagun didn’t understand Prince Lu’s ravings, and he didn’t have time to dwell on them, because the next experiment had begun. Prince Lu placed a silver-plated copper coin into a small carved wooden chest, set the cup of newly made iodine beside the coin, closed the lid, and lit a small clay brazier next to the chest to heat it a little. Soon, purple vapors came billowing out through the cracks in the chest. Heavens, we’re about to get some pills of immortality, Zhu Dagun thought, as he carefully waved the fan as Prince Lu instructed, afraid even to breathe too hard.

A while later, Prince Lu pushed the brazier aside, opened the chest, and reached in with a soft cloth. He carefully lifted the copper coin, cushioned on the cloth, revealing that its silver surface was coated with something yellowish. Zhu Dagun peeked inside the chest and didn’t see any pills of immortality, but Prince Lu did an excited dance. “It worked! It really worked! Look, this yellow stuff is called silver iodide. All I have to do now is scrape it off into a jar and put it somewhere dark. I can perform another magic trick with this: put this coin somewhere dark, expose it to light for about ten minutes, develop the image with mercury fumes, and fix it with salt water. Once it’s rinsed and dry, the coin will be covered with a picture of this room, identical in every last detail! This is the daguerreotype process, which takes advantage of silver iodide’s photosensitivity. But we’re storing up silver iodide for something else, so I’ll have to show you at a later date.”

“Without an artist, how can one obtain a picture?” Zhu Dagun asked, confused. “And… what miraculous powers does the yellow powder have? Does it impart health and sagehood on one who imbibes it?”

Prince Lu laughed. “It’s not that kind of magic. In my day, silver iodide had two main uses. One was photosensitivity, like I mentioned. The other, well, you’ll see.” He worked as he spoke, scraping the powder off the coin into a small porcelain bottle before pulling off his mask and stretching. “That’s all for now. I’m done for the morning. I’ll send out the instructions for manufacturing silver iodide, and then I can rest. You haven’t eaten, right? We can eat together later. You’re tall and strong, and pretty good with your hands—it must be all that alchemy experience. I have some things I want to ask you, so don’t wander off. I’ll be right back.”

Prince Lu sat down at the text tray and began to type at a rattling pace. Now and then he cranked out a length of calligraphy paper and read it, nodding to himself. Zhu Dagun just stood there in the room, afraid to touch anything and accidentally break it, or trigger some mighty magic.

At this point, he finally remembered why he was there. He reached for his sleeve pouch, felt the copy of the Analects there, and took a deep breath. “Your Highness, there’s something that I don’t understand,” he said, looking down. “I hope you can advise your servant.”

“Go ahead; I’m listening.” Prince Lu was still at the text tray, cranking the spool of calligraphy paper, too busy to spare a glance.

Zhu Dagun asked, “Your Highness, are you Han or Hu?” [16] Hu (胡) is an ancient Chinese term for non-Han ethnic groups, used mostly for Central Asians in the era this story takes place in.

“Don’t be pretentious, call me Old Wang,” came the reply. “I’m Han. I grew up in Beijing’s Xichen District. My ma’s Hui Muslim, but I took after my ba. I may have played in the Niujie and Jiaozi neighborhoods as a kid, but I can’t live without pork, so no dice.”

Zhu Dagun had already learned to ignore Prince Lu’s incomprehensible ramblings. “If Your Highness is Han, why do you live in Jinyang instead of the southern lands?”

“You wouldn’t understand even if I explained,” said Prince Lu. “I’m Han, but I’m not a Han from your era. I know perfectly well that, of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, Liang, Tang, Jin, Zhou, and even your so-called Great Han were founded by other ethnic groups, and most of your people are Hu too. But once my plan succeeds, I’ll be back at my point of departure, and this temporal node of your universe won’t have a thing to do with me, got it?”