Chapter 17: Rum Tunnel

The address Qian Duoduo had given Zhao Meiyou was very close to his rental apartment, right in the Thirty-Three Layer District.

The Lead Actor had once told him about this spot: “That famous suspended maglev line in the Lower District, with an abandoned train car stopped on it. You need to head to the front of the train, where there’s a brake lever that only shows up on rainy days. And the most important condition is that you can’t be wearing underwear when you pull it.”

The street where Zhao Meiyou lived was an elevated suspended walkway. It had originally been a maglev line, one of the key transport routes when the Metropolis was first built. The tracks and cars were both generously sized, and after they were abandoned, the Lower District residents had simply built a new neighborhood right on top of the rails. The train cars themselves had been illegally built up with extra levels, turning into shanties made of corrugated metal.

The rain was still falling as Zhao Meiyou strolled along with a cigarette dangling from his lips, his overcoat draped over his shoulders. He couldn’t be bothered with an umbrella, but luckily his archaeologist uniform was waterproof. His leather shoes splashed through puddles, sending up sprays of iridescent water.

Qian Duoduo was already waiting for him at the end of the street, right where the train’s engine compartment used to be. In a nearby train window, an elderly woman had set out her potted electronic osmanthus on the sill—she was an early riser. Qian Duoduo was helping her move the pots, while faint wisps of steam drifted from a nearby vent. From inside the car came an old tune: Mist Over the Blossoms.

He wasn’t using an umbrella either. He was bent over, speaking softly to the old lady as rainwater rolled down his hair.

Zhao Meiyou stubbed out his cigarette and waited there until the old woman went back inside. Only then did he walk up. “Morning, Brother Qian.”

“I saw you coming,” Qian Duoduo said. “Why didn’t you come over?”

“I stole sausages from her place as a kid.” Zhao Meiyou grinned. “She holds a grudge. Spots me and she’ll chuck a slipper at my head.”

Ahead lay the end of the street, blocked by a red wall. Qian Duoduo stepped forward and brushed away the moss, revealing a red metal box embedded with glass—a fire hydrant. He opened it up, but instead of a sprinkler system, there was just a hand lever inside.

Zhao Meiyou got it right away. This was the “brake lever” The Lead Actor had mentioned.

He hesitated a bit. After all, the way The Lead Actor had described entering the site was utterly shameless. After a moment, he spoke up. “Brother Qian, I heard from a friend that the prerequisite for entering this site is…”

“This coordinate leads to more than one site,” Qian Duoduo cut him off. “The one I’m taking you to now is a different one.”

With that, he grabbed Zhao Meiyou’s hand and yanked the lever. That familiar sensation of dislocation washed over him.

When Zhao Meiyou came back to himself, he found he was sitting inside a train car.

It was a very old-fashioned steam locomotive. He could hear the whistle blasting from the smokestack and the rhythmic clack of the wheels over the rails. Long benches lined the interior, cushioned in green velvet, with low tables protruding from the sides. Crisp white tablecloths held vases of blooming camellias.

The windows were half-open, suggesting the train wasn’t moving all that fast. A breeze ruffled the gauzy curtains.

The air carried the acrid tang of gunpowder left over from an explosion, mingled with the scent of camellias.

The wind picked up.

Zhao Meiyou gazed out at a vast starry night.

“It’s also known as the Butterfly Nebula,” Qian Duoduo said.

Far off burned a fiercely hot central star, its surface at a quarter-million degrees Celsius and blazing with radiant light. A golden phantom shimmered in the heat, swelling like a dream that had lasted for eons.

“Where are we?” Zhao Meiyou heard himself ask. “Out in space?”

“I call it the Rum Tunnel,” Qian Duoduo replied. “Long ago, I borrowed some abilities from a few archaeologists: ‘Leap,’ ‘Splicing,’ and ‘Acceleration.’ When I tried combining them, I found I could splice sites together, speed up the flow of time, and even perform leaps.

“In the end, I used Creation to build this train. As long as you’re riding in it, you can shuttle between sites without needing the coordinates from the real-world Metropolis.”

Zhao Meiyou sort of got the gist. He pushed the window all the way open. “So this whole universe is just another site?”

“You could think of it that way, but technically it’s not a site,” Qian Duoduo explained. “To me, it’s more like the backdrop for the Rum Tunnel.”

“The Rum Tunnel?”

“That’s the track this train runs on—it connects all the different sites. As for why I call it rum… it’s a personal interest in astronomy.”

The view outside the window shifted abruptly. Maybe it was the difference in spacetime flow rates; the train seemed to be crawling along, but they were hurtling through the cosmos at incredible speeds.

In the distance, a magnetar spat flames like the scales of a colorful butterfly, set amid immense molecular clouds. Suddenly, Zhao Meiyou caught a whiff of alcohol.

“That’s Sagittarius B2,” Qian Duoduo said, reaching out the window as if to grab it. “A celestial body made of gas and dust, right at the heart of the galaxy. There’s a staggering amount of ethanol there—trillions of liters of alcohol floating in that nebula.”

He pulled his hand back and opened his palm. The scent in the air intensified. Zhao Meiyou sniffed. “Rum.”

“Rum and raspberries,” Qian Duoduo said, a faint smile touching his expression. “Rum and raspberries, with just a hint of lemon air freshener.”

The alcohol seeped into his lungs, turning into a fine stream of warmth that flowed back up his throat and filled his chest. Zhao Meiyou took a deep breath. “All right—I get it. Rum Tunnel. So what’s the first stop?”

“We’re already here,” Qian Duoduo said. “Jupiter Restaurant.”

Among archaeologists, “Jupiter Restaurant” was known as Site A99. The site’s danger level was paradoxical—both high and low. As the name suggested, the main feature was a restaurant.

One that operated out in space.

More precisely, on the rings of Jupiter.

“What’s that thing?” Zhao Meiyou peered at a multi-limbed creature floating by the window, like a cross between an octopus and a jellyfish. Its transparent head seemed packed with glass orbs. “Aliens?”

Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers, and a guidebook-like booklet appeared in his hand. He flipped it open to a page. “It’s the restaurant’s greeter. A semi-living organism, basically like a vending machine.”

“Semi-living? Vending machine?”

Qian Duoduo reached out and touched one of its suckers with his fingertip. The tentacles writhed, drawing out a few milliliters of his blood. The red drops traveled through transparent veins to the brain, where they were injected into one of the glass orbs.

The “greeter”—whatever it was, octopus or jellyfish—opened its mouth and spat out the now-colored orb. Qian Duoduo caught it, cracked it open, and handed half to Zhao Meiyou.

It wasn’t a glass orb. Zhao Meiyou watched as Qian Duoduo took a bite; juicy light leaked between his fingers, along with plentiful seeds.

It was a pomegranate with a transparent rind.

“A Jupiter Restaurant specialty: Diamond Pomegranates,” Qian Duoduo said, flipping through his guidebook and pointing to a page for Zhao Meiyou. “Give it a try? Not bad.”

Jupiter was a gas giant, its atmosphere rich in methane that turned to diamonds under the influence of massive lightning storms. That’s why diamonds rained down there, pooling into diamond lakes on the surface.

Zhao Meiyou took a bite. It wasn’t very sweet, but wonderfully refreshing. “Diamond Pomegranates, a Jupiter specialty cultivated by the restaurant and irrigated by diamond rain”—just as the guidebook described. It tasted like rainwater.

A long line snaked outside the restaurant: spacecraft and space cars of every variety hovering in the vast cosmos, along with bizarre aliens who navigated the vacuum without any vehicles. “No fixed archaeologist is exploring Site A99 right now,” Qian Duoduo said. “Had breakfast? We could get in line.”

“Looks fun.” Zhao Meiyou was already chatting with some kind of alien through the window. Incredibly, they could communicate. The creature even gave him something like a cigarette. He sniffed it. “No permanent archaeologist here?”

“There was one before. Got his brain eaten by an Orion Alpha Star Person, I think.” Qian Duoduo eyed the smoke in his hand. “I’d suggest not lighting that up. It’s poisonous.”

That explained the site’s oddly mixed danger rating.

“The one chatting you up is a Druson from some planet or other. Too tricky to pronounce,” Qian Duoduo said, closing the guidebook and handing it to Zhao Meiyou. “Drusons love eating Earthling livers. That smoke’s laced with anesthetic—on their world, they use this tobacco as a seasoning. Probably wants to marinate you first.”

As he spoke, he snapped his fingers again, and an oddly shaped gun materialized in his hand. “Conversely, Drusons taste pretty good to human palates. Like fugu belly.”

He leaned out the window and pulled the trigger. The alien who’d been talking to Zhao Meiyou took a bullet to the head.

The train rolled past. Qian Duoduo dragged the body inside, then steered to the restaurant’s back door—a takeout window sort of setup. “Make it two sides fried, three-quarters rare, with parsley and fennel,” he said, tossing the stripped alien onto the counter.

Moments later, the window slid out a takeout meal: what looked like a pair of massive double cheeseburgers. It smelled delicious.

Zhao Meiyou watched Qian Duoduo unwrap it and take a huge bite.

Zhao Meiyou: “Good?”

Qian Duoduo: “I’m starving.”

Zhao Meiyou: “Enjoy.”

The line at Jupiter Restaurant stretched on forever. In the end, they decided to head to the next site. The train plunged into something like a wormhole tunnel, where viscous, brilliant star cluster fragments floated around them like rippling mirrors. Qian Duoduo grabbed Zhao Meiyou’s hand as it strayed toward the outside. “Don’t touch anything. The site we’re heading to next is extremely dangerous.”

Before the words had even faded, the train banked sharply. They emerged from the tunnel, and utter silence fell. Even the whistle and rails went quiet. Everything around them turned black and white, devoid of sound—like an old line-drawn comic or a silent film. Zhao Meiyou looked out the window and saw they were deep in a forest.

The sky and ground seemed soaked in black, while between them grew enormous, pure-white trees.

Or at least, they might have been trees. Zhao Meiyou squinted for a moment and realized their texture was too rigid, their surfaces impossibly smooth and featureless.

They weren’t made of wood.

They were made of bone.

This was a forest of skeletons.

No one knew what creatures had died to form it—or perhaps every life in the universe had perished, sky and soil included, leaving only these tombstone-like, silent colossal trees.

Qian Duoduo produced paper and pen from somewhere and wrote: Don’t speak.

Zhao Meiyou realized that he and Qian Duoduo seemed to have dissolved into this black-and-white scene as well, transformed into ink-line sketches of living beings. Were they still alive? Or already dead? He glanced at his hand and felt something profoundly off.

His hand no longer had the thickness of flesh and blood.

It was just a line.

The train glided forward in utter silence, with only the scenery whipping past the windows to indicate that its speed was steadily increasing. Qian Duoduo wrote at a furious pace, but it was as if a breeze swept through the compartment—the black ink faded from the paper almost as soon as it dried, vanishing into the wind. Zhao Meiyou could barely make out fragments of what he had scribbled.

……when the reed beds had been devoured clean▅▅▅▅declaring the end of an era▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅using moonlight to make salt the Eyes▅▅▅enormous Eyes……the last astronaut was▅▅▅trapped in insect eggs that froze the dimensions and▅▅▅the snake recited the inscription to the giant▅▅▅▅▅Site 631▅▅▅▅▅▅dormant▅▅▅▅▅the first line of poetry would never end▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅▅

Zhao Meiyou couldn’t make sense of it. At his level of illiteracy, this word puzzle might as well have been written in ancient scripture.

Then a ferocious gale arose—or at least, that’s what it felt like. Zhao Meiyou realized that the scenery outside the windows had vanished at some point, or rather, that the blackness had been erased, leaving only blinding white. He could no longer distinguish sky from trees or earth amid the all-consuming whiteness. It rushed forward relentlessly, swallowing the train car before his eyes. Then Qian Duoduo’s head vanished, followed—presumably—by his own. Even his eyes were devoured. Was it blinding light or the darkness of pure white? There was no way to know. Everything dissolved into a storm of untraceable static snow.

……

When Zhao Meiyou regained consciousness, he found they were still seated in the train car. The vehicle now hurtled through the vastness of space, and not far from the window, he spotted the giant.

Well, given the scale visible from here, the train was probably quite a distance away—far enough that Zhao Meiyou could make out the giant’s entire upper body. He couldn’t even guess at its true size. He saw a star, like a diamond dangling from its earlobe.

The giant was painting.

Perhaps the edge of the universe was black and white. Zhao Meiyou gazed at the artwork. The canvas stretched endlessly in every direction, so vast that even the giant seemed like a small child before it. It wielded what looked like a pencil—or at least, that was the closest human word for the tool in its grasp.

Zhao Meiyou stared at the painting, boundless as it was, and suddenly realized—the scene depicted there was the skeleton forest they had just passed through.

“We just emerged from that painting,” Qian Duoduo said. “That’s Site S30. You must have sensed it: inside the site, we were reduced to two dimensions.”

“I feel…” Zhao Meiyou tried to steady his voice, but his vocal cords betrayed him. The words came out like syllables dancing wildly in the air, distorted music from a DC motor on the fritz. “…like~~I’m singing—”

“That’s a lingering effect of Site S30,” Qian Duoduo explained after a moment’s thought. “Every archaeologist who makes it out carries some residual traces. Imagine you’re a mainframe computer, and S30 is an unknown network. When you disconnect, you find unfamiliar programs have been installed on you at some point—but they’re incomplete fragments that fade away on their own after a while.”

Zhao Meiyou’s voice was still that eerie, melodic warble: “What~did you write~in the site~?” He winced and clapped a hand to his forehead, waving the other to cut himself off.

He resorted to gestures: Why aren’t you affected?

Qian Duoduo read the signs easily. “Because S30 used to be my primary stomping grounds for exploration.”

Zhao Meiyou: Used to be?

Qian Duoduo gazed into the depths of the starry void. The train was speeding away at high velocity; the giant and its canvas were shrinking in the distance. “What Site S30 truly is remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the field. The danger level for exploration is off the charts, so few archaeologists have ever ventured there. The best we can infer so far is that a civilization once existed here.”

“A lost civilization.”

Zhao Meiyou gestured: How so?

“That giant—the first archaeologists to reach Site S30 named it Prometheus,” Qian Duoduo said. “In her field notes, she proposed a theory: it’s a machine created by that civilization.”

“For some reason, the civilization either perished or emigrated en masse. Whatever the case, no signs of life remained at its birthplace. They compressed everything—converted it to two dimensions—and the giant recorded it all on this infinite canvas.”

“Site S30 has claimed the lives of many top archaeologists. Some went mad inside from who-knows-what; others entered and never left.” Qian Duoduo glanced at Zhao Meiyou. “You noticed it, right? That instant when we got ‘erased.'”

Zhao Meiyou nodded.

“That’s the only reliable escape method they’ve figured out. Archaeologists discovered that the giant repeatedly revises one section of the painting—the skeleton forest we just crossed. When it erases part of the canvas, anyone successfully wiped away can break free from the site.”

Zhao Meiyou gestured: Sounds risky.

“Exactly. No one can predict when it’ll make changes. Time flows strangely here; some archaeologists who got lost ended up as part of those trees.” Qian Duoduo paused. “When I was building the Rum Tunnel, I got lost in there once.”

Zhao Meiyou: How’d you get out?

“…I don’t know.” A flicker of confusion crossed Qian Duoduo’s eyes. Then he asked abruptly, “Did I say something to you back in the site?”

Yes, Zhao Meiyou signed. But it was too profound. I don’t know the signs for it.

Qian Duoduo snapped his fingers, and paper and pen materialized in front of Zhao Meiyou. “Write it down.”

Zhao Meiyou gripped the pen and lifted his wrist, hesitating for a long moment.

Qian Duoduo sighed. “You forgot, didn’t you? No one can remember…”

Zhao Meiyou hesitated, then scrawled a few words on the paper.

Qian Duoduo fell silent as Zhao Meiyou slid the sheet toward him. It held disjointed fragments that formed no coherent sentence.

Astronaut, insect eggs, inscription, poetry.

And a large, scribbled-over blotch of▅▅▅▅▅that defied interpretation.

Qian Duoduo pointed at the▅▅▅▅▅. “What’s this?”

Zhao Meiyou signed: No idea. It just feels like something similar is stuck in my head. This is how it came out.

Qian Duoduo clutched the paper, lost in thought.

By now, the giant and the canvas had faded from view. Countless planets wheeled past the windows. Finally, Zhao Meiyou leaned over and snatched the paper from Qian Duoduo’s hand. “Don’t~overthink it. Too much worry stunts your~growth and gives you headaches.”

His speech was nearly back to normal, the singing quality almost gone. Qian Duoduo watched as he folded the paper into an airplane and tossed it out the window.

With another snap, the paper plane ballooned into a massive hot-air balloon. It rose, then burst in a spectacular shower of fireworks.

“You seem to have gotten one thing wrong.” The fireworks scattered colorful light across the compartment, bathing everything in a dreamy haze. Qian Duoduo chuckled softly.

“Zhao Meiyou, I’m taller than you.”