piece out again, fifteen or twenty inches from her eyes. It might be the best fake sheâd ever seen.
She packed it up again, feeling a scraping little fishhook of fear. One fake was enough to start rending the fabric of a deal like this. Through the tear would slip other fakes, and others behind them. It was impossible to have this many great pots. There must be fakes. Lots of them. More of them.
Ones she had already missed.
She went back to the first crate and started again. A Song celadon crackleware bowl. Then a Xuande stem cup, a Yongzheng incense burner, a Wanli plate. She was going too fast. She couldnât stop herself.
âXiaojie,â
she heard from the door. Miss. She half turned. It was the driver.
âOh yes,â she said. âSorry.â She looked at her watch. It was past time.
âDeng yixia,â
she said, Wait a moment, and quickly packed up the pots to make them safe for the night.
Back in her room she opened her laptop and dialed up the photos of the little cup, merged the images to move the three-dimensional model around. The emperor himself had commanded this design, drawing his inspiration from the twelfth-century Song painting of a chicken. She turned the image, looked at it from each side. If she could see the emperor with his cups, if she could feel his desire, sheâd understand this fake better. She would know this near-perfect thing more fully.
To see the Chenghua emperor, she had to go into the deeper level of her memory world, the one that was accessed by completely letting go of the present. This was the realm of memory in which pieces of the past showed themselves. Whether it was imagination or erudition or some mix of the two she didnât like to ask. It just happened.
To do it, she went back to her silence. She picked out her hearing aids and felt the instant blooming of an empty space. She was alone again. She cleared her mind. She willed herself through the gates and into her imaginary examination yard. She walked down the central avenue, then into the east quadrant. The streets of her world were empty. There were no people. There were soundsâleaves and wind and skating pebblesâbut never a human voice.
It was a bad idea to crowd the memory structure with people. In Rome, twenty-one hundred years ago, the anonymous author of the
Ad Herennium
âstill one of the greatest standing works on memoryâhad written: . . .
the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images while solitude keeps their outlines sharp.
So Lia saw the clean-swept lanes between her testing cubicles as wide, bare stones, always lit with changing shadows under the leaves of the trees, but empty of people. Though she did let Albert in. He was one of the few. Albert had been her stepfather for a few happy years; he had introduced her to porcelain. She had loved him, and in her memory world he was welcome.
But she had passed him back near the entrance, his image, never speaking, radiating kindness. She walked the silent avenues lined with all the rooms of her life, all the worlds of porcelain: the purist aesthetic of the Song; the
mi-se,
or secret color olive-green porcelain of the Tang; the ornate virtuosity of the Qing.
She came to the Ming Dynasty: hundreds of examination cells stuffed with data and pots and poems and remembrances. Here she was at the reign of Chenghua, ninth emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Marked on his cubicle door was the character
hai,
or child. She had chosen this character for his cubicle because when he was a man, a child was the thing he most wanted. All Lia had to do was open the door in her mindâs eye, and she saw him at the annual ritual at the Temple of Heaven, Peking; 1474 by the Western calendar. His personal name was Xuantong.
He was brought here once a year. Before the tallow candles and the brass figure of the god, he prayed on his knees through the night. This was the first phase of the
She packed it up again, feeling a scraping little fishhook of fear. One fake was enough to start rending the fabric of a deal like this. Through the tear would slip other fakes, and others behind them. It was impossible to have this many great pots. There must be fakes. Lots of them. More of them.
Ones she had already missed.
She went back to the first crate and started again. A Song celadon crackleware bowl. Then a Xuande stem cup, a Yongzheng incense burner, a Wanli plate. She was going too fast. She couldnât stop herself.
âXiaojie,â
she heard from the door. Miss. She half turned. It was the driver.
âOh yes,â she said. âSorry.â She looked at her watch. It was past time.
âDeng yixia,â
she said, Wait a moment, and quickly packed up the pots to make them safe for the night.
Back in her room she opened her laptop and dialed up the photos of the little cup, merged the images to move the three-dimensional model around. The emperor himself had commanded this design, drawing his inspiration from the twelfth-century Song painting of a chicken. She turned the image, looked at it from each side. If she could see the emperor with his cups, if she could feel his desire, sheâd understand this fake better. She would know this near-perfect thing more fully.
To see the Chenghua emperor, she had to go into the deeper level of her memory world, the one that was accessed by completely letting go of the present. This was the realm of memory in which pieces of the past showed themselves. Whether it was imagination or erudition or some mix of the two she didnât like to ask. It just happened.
To do it, she went back to her silence. She picked out her hearing aids and felt the instant blooming of an empty space. She was alone again. She cleared her mind. She willed herself through the gates and into her imaginary examination yard. She walked down the central avenue, then into the east quadrant. The streets of her world were empty. There were no people. There were soundsâleaves and wind and skating pebblesâbut never a human voice.
It was a bad idea to crowd the memory structure with people. In Rome, twenty-one hundred years ago, the anonymous author of the
Ad Herennium
âstill one of the greatest standing works on memoryâhad written: . . .
the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images while solitude keeps their outlines sharp.
So Lia saw the clean-swept lanes between her testing cubicles as wide, bare stones, always lit with changing shadows under the leaves of the trees, but empty of people. Though she did let Albert in. He was one of the few. Albert had been her stepfather for a few happy years; he had introduced her to porcelain. She had loved him, and in her memory world he was welcome.
But she had passed him back near the entrance, his image, never speaking, radiating kindness. She walked the silent avenues lined with all the rooms of her life, all the worlds of porcelain: the purist aesthetic of the Song; the
mi-se,
or secret color olive-green porcelain of the Tang; the ornate virtuosity of the Qing.
She came to the Ming Dynasty: hundreds of examination cells stuffed with data and pots and poems and remembrances. Here she was at the reign of Chenghua, ninth emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Marked on his cubicle door was the character
hai,
or child. She had chosen this character for his cubicle because when he was a man, a child was the thing he most wanted. All Lia had to do was open the door in her mindâs eye, and she saw him at the annual ritual at the Temple of Heaven, Peking; 1474 by the Western calendar. His personal name was Xuantong.
He was brought here once a year. Before the tallow candles and the brass figure of the god, he prayed on his knees through the night. This was the first phase of the
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