No Contest

Remo hung up and was lured onto the balcony by the whine of servomotors. He cleared the snow off the wooden chairs and relaxed into one. Chiun joined him and they sat together in comfortable silence.

Remo thought he might have enjoyed the scenery of the Fiordland National Park, if he could just see past the fiberglass, animatronic trolls that battled continuously on the hotel grounds outside a plywood castle gate. Every hour the trolls were joined by a shabby collection of costumed warriors who charged one another for five minutes shouting badly scripted dialogue.

They were hotel staff—apparently the cast included any costumed employee who could be spared from actually running the hotel at any given moment. One battle was all little people with oversize rubber feet. Another fight sequence happened while most of the staff was busy checking in a busload of new arrivals, so the only human participants were three men in rubber tree suits—they couldn’t move their legs and kept falling flat on their face—and a college kid in a plastic spider suit. The trees taunted the spider incessantly.

The spider’s torso was shedding black foam chunks.

“Shoddy,” Chiun declared.

“But distracting. I think there’s some mountains behind the actors, but I can’t tear my eyes away to look. They’re being hard on the spider girl, don’t you think? She’s not the slob. It’s not her fault she has to wear a suit that’s falling apart.”

Chiun found himself pleasantly absorbed in the farce. It was as good as whatever would be on the television, at least, and when the actors took a break his eyes wandered up to the glittering mountains. They were majestic, and this was a comfort to Chiun, who dwelled in the land of America, where fakery ran rampant. Where even nature was housed in amusement parks and treated as staged entertainment.

Wryly he thought about how far the fingers of American influence reached around the world. The clumsy vignette playing out in the snow reeked of American influence.

Chiun felt the flutter of dread touch his lungs, lightly brush his heart and fade away again. This episode was subtle enough that it escaped his attention until it was repeated, and he didn’t know from whence it had come.

Chiun felt Remo become aware of his discomfort, but Remo said nothing, and Chiun allowed his awareness to reach into the mountains, into its core of ancient volcanic stone. He imagined the mountains’ warm heart—a trickle of magma. It was all that remained of the magnificent burst of lava and fire that made this mountain and this land…

Somehow he felt that his imagination was steering him incorrectly. The mountain was old and cold, even to its very core. Whatever burned inside once was burned out. But there was something inside the mountain. A thrum. A rhythm.

A pulse. It came from the earth, from far away, carried by the hollow volcanic fluke like a stethoscope that stretched to a patient that was thousands of miles away.

“Chiun?”

He heard his name, but he sensed no urgency, and he was intrigued by his fantasy. From whence did he conjure it? What was its meaning? He imagined himself as a puff of dust that could seep into the earth until it found the hollow, straw-like fluke, and then follow it into the earth and under the ocean to the source of the pulse.

“Chiun?”

Chiun arrived at the source of the pulse, and he saw what created the pulse, and he sensed that the pulse was growing more rapid, and he wanted to shout a warning to himself, to Remo, to someone, but he was in another place, on a balcony of a hotel, a place for tourists, and the sun was hot. The air smelled of the tropic ocean. Something that did not know him was calling his name, taunting him.

“Chiun!”

“Stop it!”

He struck the thing away!

And he found himself looking into the eyes of his pupil, Remo. The sun was gone. The air was frigid. He was on a different hotel balcony before the farcical amusements and the cold, old mountain.

“Jesus, Little Father, what’s the matter?” Remo was holding the old man’s hand. He had caught it before the slap could obliterate the patio glass, and now he released it gently.

“It is a bad omen,” Chiun said.

“What? This stupid show?” Remo laughed without joy.

“It was something I saw. Maybe just an old man’s daydream.”

“Maybe not. You’ve got me worried.”

Chiun smiled, and he looked a little tired. “You are a good son.”

“Cut the crap and tell me what you saw.”

“There is no crap for me to cut. I tell you sincerely, Remo, that you are a good son.”

Remo frowned. “Now I’m really worried. Spill it. Please.”

“I don’t know what I saw,” Chiun said. “I meditated and felt myself in the mountain. I heard the beating of a heart, not originating in this mountain but audible there. It came from far away—that way.” Chiun turned and extended a wrinkled old finger to the north-northeast.

“Uh, Chiun, we’re in New Zealand. Everything is out that way.”