Melissa Hardy - Excerpt from Geomancer's Compass

excerpt geomancer's compass

Miranda looked down at the lo’pan in her hand. She counted the ivory rings surrounding the yin/yang symbol – eighteen. She peered at the Chinese characters inscribed on the rings, but could untangle no meaning from them. “I suppose I really should have paid more attention to Old Huang, after all!” Closing her eyes, she let her fingers drift over the surface of the compass, thinking, as she did, of her brother, David. At Lin’s funeral he had told her that he was working hard to learn Braille before his eyesight completely failed. Blind by age thirteen! How would it be to have sight and to lose it, to know what you are missing? It made her sad. More than sad. Angry. “Poor David!” she murmured, shaking her head. She replaced the lo’pan in its case, but did not close the lid. Then she picked up her enviro-mote, using it to close her mini-blinds and power up her computer, before logging onto the New Age Portal and keying in the words Feng Shui. When the screen popped up, she did a search for ‘geomancer’s compass’. Listed among her options was a virtual tour. She clicked on it, ticked the payment box which enabled her bank to access her account to pay the provider, and downloaded the tour onto a card which she then inserted in her I-spex. She put on the spectacles, and pressed the Power button on the right ear piece.

There was the usual sense of dislocation and head-spin that one experiences upon being bumped into a virtual environment – Miranda, who was prone to car sickness, wished that she had thought to take a Gravol – then suddenly she was standing in what appeared to be a cavernous room at the centre of a large 3D circular structure. The only illumination came from a spotlight that dangled high over her head. The pale silvery light extended just beyond the edge of the structure, then pixilated out into blackness. She looked down to find herself standing on a medallion composed of a black and white yin/yang symbol. It appeared very far down indeed, farther than it should given her sixty two inches – that was typical of V.R., the impression, upon entering a virtual environment, that one had suddenly shot up a foot in height. Slowly she pirouetted – no point in moving quickly; that would only give her vertigo. The symbol was not painted onto the centre piece, but was composed of black and white tesseras, the tiny tiles that make up a mosaic. It was about four feet in diameter. Around this central medallion spun concentric circles, made of some kind of medal, possibly brass, one after the other. Again they did not appear to be not painted, like the circles emanating from a bull’s eye, but crafted separately, then joined to the whole. Miranda squatted carefully down and ran her hand over the surface of the circle closest to the centre. Like her compass, it was densely covered with writing; in this case, however, the writing was in English. She dropped to her hands and knees and peered closer. “Fire, earth, lake, heaven. . . ,” she read haltingly, crawling, as she did, in a clockwise direction.

“South, Southwest, West, Northwest. . . .” A voice from beyond the circle of light.

Miranda glanced sharply up. Too sharply. Her head spun. “What?”

“That is the Lo-shu you are reading,” the voice continued. “The Later Heaven Circle. It is the vehicle of divination and represents change and movement.” The voice sounded like it belonged to an old man who spoke fluent English, but with a pronounced Chinese accent.

Miranda pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes, trying to slow her head spin. “What are you?” she croaked. “Are you a disembodied voice or an avatar?

“An avatar,” replied the voice. “In the original sense of the word.”

2010/melissahardy.com