Cap’n Jin’s airship was never quite entirely docked.
Even when its mooring lines were looped around the iron rings sunk into the Su Causeway, the little craft trembled faintly, as if remembering clouds.
From most angles it looked like a river junk that had somehow grown a dirigible for a soul. A narrow wooden hull hung under a gas envelope stitched from patched silk and lacquered paper, its surface fluttering with inked sutras and fragments of weather reports. Thin brass ribs curved along the belly like a cage someone had half-finished and then forgotten to close.
From the underside of the hull, a cluster of engines protruded: pipes, gears, vents, and the occasional prayer-flag. They exhaled a steady, contented hum that sounded suspiciously like someone snoring.
That someone was Xiangyun.
Xiangyun, Who Sleeps With Engines
Xiangyun was the metaphysical engineer, the other half of the crew and, according to rumor, the one who had convinced the airship to exist in the first place.
She was small, sharp-shouldered, with hair that perpetually smelled of warm metal and rain on stone. Her work clothes were a patchwork of burn holes and ink stains. She slept in a hammock slung between two engine casings; she woke to the tick of gauges and the subsonic murmur of pataphysical equations.
“The engines like to dream,” she explained to anyone who asked. “If I’m not there to listen, they get anxious and the propellers forget which way is forward.”
She said this in the tone of someone discussing perfectly ordinary mechanics, which technically it was—not her fault if reality insisted on being literary.
The Vow of Partial Internet Access
Their usual route ran from Hangzhou out into the mountains, where the major maths, convents, and hermitages of the Song realm had taken a collective vow of partial internet access.
“We will know all things,” the abbots had proclaimed, “but not about each other’s relationships.”
Under this vow, monasteries were allowed:
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Cloud backups of sutra commentaries
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Access to mathematical journals and preprint servers
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Security patches for the temple routers
They were not allowed:
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Personal correspondence
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Love letters
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Cat pictures
The result, as Cap’n Jin often said, was that the monks knew the latest developments in abstruse topology but had no idea their cousins had had children.
“That’s why I fly,” he’d tell anyone who would listen. “Somebody has to bring them handbills, postcards, and angry letters from aunties. The Dharma may be for all beings, but so is gossip.”
He did it at his own expense, too. The monasteries fed him, the hermits brewed questionable herbal tonics in gratitude, but money? Rarely.
“The universe will repay me in scenic views,” he said cheerfully.
Enter Sammi and Eriko
On a bright, breezy morning, while Chef Wu was ladling out breakfast congee to commuters and the Causeway was settling into its daily rhythm, two familiar figures appeared at the airship’s dock.
Sammi arrived first, hair in a scarf the color of riotous sunrise, satchel clanking with notebooks and spare type blocks. She hopped up onto the gangplank as if boarding ships was just walking in a slightly more interesting direction.
Behind her, Eriko climbed more slowly, one hand on the rail, the other clutching a rolled-up sheaf of diagrams. The breeze made geometry of her sleeves.
Cap’n Jin, who had been checking a mooring knot that technically didn’t exist in Euclidean space, straightened.
“Well if it isn’t my favorite balcony-dwellers,” he called. His dark braid snapped in the wind like a flag. “Come to admire my majestic craft?”
“We’ve come to beg passage,” Sammi said. “I’ll admire as a free bonus.”
Eriko nodded, trying to look dignified despite the flush in her cheeks. “I have a number of…theoretical questions about pataphysical lift in small airships.”
“And I,” Sammi added, “have a number of practical questions about mountainous villages and the stories they are hiding from me.”
Cap’n Jin’s eyes sparkled. “A scholar and a storyteller. The engines will be thrilled. Come aboard.”
Xiangyun’s Crush, Inconveniently
As they crossed onto the deck, a hatch banged open and Xiangyun popped up like a startled cat.
“Who is putting non-standard weight on my carefully calibrated planks?” she demanded, wiping oil from her hands with a rag that might once have been white.
Then she saw Eriko.
The engines, which were linked sympathetically to her mood, dropped half a note in their hum. The whole airship seemed to inhale.
“Ah,” Xiangyun said, eloquently.
They had met before, of course—brief conversations at Chef Wu’s counter, snatches of talk about configuration spaces and guilty staircases. Eriko’s mind shone for Xiangyun like a lighthouse; the clear, precise way she spoke about impossible things made Xiangyun want to diagram her sentences and then frame the diagrams.
Now, seeing her on the deck, xiangyun’s heart did something complicated and non-Newtonian.
Eriko smiled politely. “Good morning, Engineer Xiangyun. It’s kind of you to permit us aboard.”
“Not kind,” Xiangyun said, then remembered to tack on, “I mean, it is kind, but it is also scientifically necessary. I’ve needed another observer for my engine notes.”
Sammi, who had the social perception of a gossip column in human form, clocked the way Xiangyun’s gaze hovered around Eriko like a satellite.
She stepped casually closer to Eriko, looping their arms together.
“As long as the scientific necessity includes both of us,” Sammi said, sweet as steamed buns but with a definite underflavor of mine.
Xiangyun’s eyes flicked to their joined arms, then away. Her jaw tightened, just for a heartbeat, before smoothing into a rueful smile.
“Of course,” she said. “The engines already know you come as a set.”
Behind them, the hull gave a faint creak of agreement.
Pre-Flight Metaphysics
Before every departure, Xiangyun performed a pre-flight check that looked, to the untrained eye, like a cross between a maintenance routine and a ritual.
She tapped each gauge three times, listening for the tiny answers. She checked the tension of the propeller chains, the alignment of the brass fins, the angle of the remains of last week’s rainbow still caught in the rigging.
“Is all this strictly necessary?” Sammi asked, watching her trace a pattern of concentric circles on the main engine casing with a stick of red chalk.
“Only if we want to arrive where we mean to,” Xiangyun said. “Airships don’t just move through space. They move through about-ness.”
Eriko’s eyes lit. “Intentional vectors?”
“Exactly.” Xiangyun turned to her, suddenly animated. “If your primary purpose is trade, you get one kind of path—stable, well-marked, full of other merchants. If your primary purpose is pilgrimage, different currents, more unpredictable weather, higher likelihood of birds with opinions. Our purpose—”
“—is delivery of letters and unasked-for enlightenment,” Cap’n Jin cut in. “So we get the scenic routes.”
“The pataphysical structure of a small airship,” Xiangyun continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “relies on being more narratively interesting than the ground. That’s what pulls us up.”
Eriko looked like someone had handed her a new axiom set for the universe.
“So lift is proportional,” she said slowly, “to story density per cubic meter.”
“Among other factors,” Xiangyun agreed. “Weight, temperature, number of unresolved romantic tensions on board—”
Sammi coughed.
Xiangyun winced, then added briskly, “—and the quality of the captain’s hat.”
Cap’n Jin touched his battered cap protectively. “This hat has seventeen successful landings in it.”
“And three very impressive crashes,” Xiangyun pointed out. “Which is why the engines respect it.”
Sammi grinned. Eriko flipped open her notebook and began scribbling equations with suspicious speed.
The Causeway, listening under their feet as ropes were cast off, decided it approved. A small airship leaving from its railings made the whole day feel more expansive.
Into the Mountains
When the propellers spun up, the ship rose with the air of a sigh fulfilled. The Causeway let them go, relishing the tug, then settled back as the hull cleared the last lanterns.
Hangzhou slid away beneath them: steampunk houses leaning over canals, the glint of Chef Wu’s tiger-oven, the long curve of the Su Causeway itself, stripes of shadow and stone.
The lake shone like a polished mirror, reflecting a second ship that flew upside down beneath it, keel kissing clouds. The reflection-ship winked at them and then dissolved into ripples.
Sammi pressed her face to the rail, laughing.
“You see that?” she called.
“Of course,” Xiangyun said. “Our airship has a counterpart in the water’s imagination. Very good luck. Unless you fly low.”
They rose over the city walls, over terraced fields, into the embrace of the mountains.
At each hermitage, Cap’n Jin brought them down with the swaggering grace of a man who trusted both his ship and dumb luck. Monks in practical robes trudged out to meet them, hands ink-stained from digital sutras printed on rice paper. They traded parcels: bundles of scrolls going out, sacks of tea and carefully wrapped jars of pickles coming in.
At one convent, a stern abbess inquired whether Cap’n Jin had, once again, smuggled any “unsuitable magazines” inside the bundles of algebraic geometry.
“Perish the thought,” Jin said, finishing a wink he never quite started.
The abbess opened the bundle and shook out three hand-printed zines with titles like “The Metaphysics of Staircases (Illustrated)”.
Sammi beamed from the deck. The abbess sighed but tucked them under her arm.
At a mathematicians’ retreat carved directly into the rock, Eriko disappeared for nearly an hour into a heated discussion about topologically interesting noodles. Xiangyun hovered at the edge of the group, listening more to Eriko’s questions than the answers.
When Eriko finally emerged, cheeks flushed, she found Xiangyun leaning against the railing, pretending to adjust a valve that didn’t need adjusting.
“How do you keep them from falling off?” Eriko asked, nodding toward the engines. “The equations, I mean. They’re all so… delicate.”
Xiangyun shrugged. “I don’t. I fall with them. I just make sure the ship falls in the same direction.”
“That sounds terrifying,” Eriko said—and then, softly, “and familiar.”
Their eyes met; something unspoken jumped between them, a spark that searched for tinder.
At that precise moment, Sammi appeared, shuffling a stack of hastily scribbled interviews.
“You two ready?” she chirped. “The hermits have run out of tea to offer and have started boiling their socks.”
Xiangyun stepped back. “Ready,” she said, voice only slightly tight.
Eriko reached for Sammi’s hand as they climbed back aboard. It was instinctive, casual, utterly clear.
Xiangyun watched their joined fingers. Then she squared her shoulders, patted the nearest engine casing, and whispered, “All right. We fly on unrequited parameters. We’ve done worse.”
The engine hummed in sympathetic, slightly melancholy agreement.
Picking Up Brother Wei
By late afternoon, mist had gathered in the valleys like thoughts that didn’t want to settle. Their final stop was an old monastery perched on a ridge, its roofs layered like stacked questions.
As they descended, bells rang—a slow, off-kilter pattern, like someone had dropped a standard chime sequence and put it back together wrong.
“That’s Brother Wei’s doing,” Cap’n Jin said. “He’s been here re-calibrating their alert system. Or mis-calibrating. Hard to say.”
They touched down on a flagged terrace. A small group of monks approached, led by Brother Wei himself, gear-halo gently spinning above his shaved head.
The halo was a delicate mechanism of interlocking brass cogs, suspended just beyond his skin. Today it ticked with a faint, uneven rhythm, as if one tooth somewhere was not quite catching.
“Ah, my accidental taxi,” Brother Wei greeted them. “I am in need of transportation.”
“To where?” Jin asked.
Wei smiled faintly. “To wherever the Su Causeway is.”
“That,” Jin said, “we can do.”
As the monks loaded a single modest bag onto the ship, Eriko studied Wei’s halo with the fascination of one engineer looking at another’s half-finished project.
“I thought you were undergoing retreat,” she said. “To correct your… percentages.”
“Indeed,” Wei sighed, climbing aboard. “It turns out you cannot integrate enlightenment by parts. The error term remains.”
“Can I write that down?” Sammi whispered, already doing so.
Wei sank onto a coil of rope, the halo whirring as if settling into a favorite groove. “They say the Causeway has acquired…opinions,” he said. “And that it remembers the old days when mountains were more metaphorical. I thought perhaps a change of supporting infrastructure might shake something loose.” He glanced up. “At the very least, I can get decent stew from Wu again.”
Xiangyun, who had a soft spot for all beings who lived partially embedded in machinery, patted his shoulder.
“The Su Causeway specializes in emotional load-bearing,” she said. “It’s a good place to rest your gears.”
The airship turned toward home.
Return to the Bridge with Opinions
By the time they reached Hangzhou, the sun was sliding behind the western hills, turning the lake into molten copper.
The Su Causeway rose ahead, stone spine glowing. From this height, it looked like a single, thoughtful brushstroke drawn across the water.
As the airship descended toward its moorings, the bridge felt the familiar tug of their approach. The stress currents in its stones adjusted. It tasted the incoming load: engines still buzzing with distant mountains, letters in satchels, one half-baked enlightenment with mechanical garnish.
Ah, thought the Causeway. The monk with the lopsided halo.
It remembered Brother Wei’s earlier visits—his meditative pacing, the way his thoughts had thrummed against its surface like a drum slightly out of tune. The Great Shaking had rearranged many things; perhaps it could shuffle his insights as well.
The ship bumped gently against the mooring posts. Ropes flew; hands caught.
Brother Wei stepped down onto the stone and stopped.
His halo ticked louder, sudden.
Beneath his feet, the Causeway experimented with a very small tremor—nothing anyone else would register, just the architectural equivalent of a throat-clearing. A ripple rolled along the stones, up through the soles of his sandals, into his spine.
“Mm,” he said.
The halo spun, hesitated, then clicked forward one notch it had never reached before.
Gear teeth met where they had always failed to meet. A tiny curl of displaced ignorance evaporated with a soft pop, like a soap bubble being punctured by a well-aimed koan.
Sammi, stepping down behind him, saw the gear ring adjust.
“Did your hat just fix itself?” she blurted.
“Enlightenment is not a hat,” Wei said automatically. Then he lifted a hand, touched the halo, and frowned in wonder. “But…something shifted.”
The Causeway, emboldened, tried another trick. It remembered the keen little quake from the day of the Thearch’s crossing and reproduced a gentler version: a barely audible thrum corresponding to the resonance of two people finally finding each other.
This time, the vibration carried not only through Brother Wei’s bones but through the brass of his halo. Several smaller cogs wobbled, then settled into new alignments.
Visually, the change was subtle; structurally, it was a minor revolution.
Brother Wei blinked.
For a moment, every sound on the Causeway—the merchants shouting, the distant hiss of steam, the plop of oars—fell into a pattern he could almost see. A web of interactions: stew leading to conversation, conversation to courage, courage to small earthquakes, earthquakes to slightly improved governance.
“Oh,” he said softly. “I see. Not all the way. But further.”
“How much further?” Eriko asked, eyes sharp with curiosity and concern.
Brother Wei considered, listening to the tiny ticks above his head.
“I would say,” he replied, “I am now approximately three-quarters enlightened, with a margin of error of… five percent.”
“That’s a notable improvement,” Xiangyun said.
“Is the remainder important?” Sammi asked.
“Very,” Wei said. “It is the part that keeps me from being insufferable.”
The Causeway preened a little, in a granite kind of way.
After Landing: Adjustments
Chef Wu, hearing the ship had returned, sent over a tray of stew and tea as a landing tax. The four of them—Sammi, Eriko, Xiangyun, Brother Wei—gathered near the moorings to eat, bowls cupped in hands gone cold from altitude.
“So,” Sammi said between spoonfuls, “how does it feel, Brother Wei? Any new revelations about the nature of reality? Subtle insights? Sudden desire to reorganize all the temple shoe racks?”
Wei flexed his toes thoughtfully. “Reality still appears annoyingly persistent,” he said. “But it feels… kinder. The errors seem less like failures and more like… annotations.”
Eriko’s gaze drifted along the length of the Causeway, up to their own crooked building with its round window-eye, now glowing softly in the dusk.
“The Su Causeway is good with annotations,” she said.
“It is,” Wei agreed. He turned his head, halo spinning with deliberate slowness. “And you two? Any shifts in your own…percentage?”
Sammi’s grin turned mischievous. “Oh, we are fully, gloriously, statistically-inappropriately in love.”
Eriko elbowed her, but didn’t deny it.
Xiangyun, watching, felt the familiar pinch in her chest. It hurt in that clean way that said: this feeling is real, even if it never lands where you wish. She took a deep breath, letting engine-smoke and stew-steam fill her lungs.
The engines, sensing her mood, shifted into a low, reassuring purr.
“You know,” she said slowly, “unrequited isn’t the same as unproductive. Pataphysically, I mean. An asymmetrical vector still moves the ship. Sometimes more efficiently.”
Eriko turned to her, expression serious. “You deserve symmetry too, though,” she said.
Xiangyun met her eyes, then laughed softly. “One miracle at a time. Today I got to show you how lift works. That’s already better than last week.”
Cap’n Jin, who had been quietly eavesdropping from the edge of the group, raised his tea cup toward the bridge.
“To small ships, overloaded stories, and load-bearing friendships,” he toasted.
The Causeway accepted the dedication, feeling the pressure of their feet as both literal and metaphorical. It carried their weight, their bowls, their half-fixed enlightenments, and their hearts with equal competence.
Coda: The Bridge’s New Project
That night, long after the last tram had rattled to its depot, the Su Causeway lay awake.
It replayed the day’s vibrations: the airship’s departure, the letters exchanged in mountain winds, Brother Wei’s halo click, Xiangyun’s quiet courage, Sammi and Eriko’s laughter spilling onto its stones.
Once, it had existed only to connect shore to shore, garden to garden, palace to poets. Now it found itself doing…more.
I am not merely a road, it realized, somewhat startled. I am also a…correction mechanism.
Not for morality or law—those flowed over it like rain. No, its gift seemed to be subtler: nudging souls and structures a few millimeters closer to where they fit, whether that was a rebellious apartment building, a slightly crooked monk, or a tiny airship that refused to obey normal physics.
Very well, the Causeway decided. If the mountains have their hermitages and the palaces their courts, I shall be the place where things align by accident.
Far above, Jin’s airship swayed gently at its moorings, half in this world, half in footnotes. Xiangyun slept with her hand on a warm engine pipe. Brother Wei dreamed of staircases that led simultaneously up, down, and inward. Sammi and Eriko, in their round-window apartment, lay tangled and content, the building humming approval under their bed.
The Su Causeway held them all, stone and story intertwined, quietly pleased with its new hobby.
Tomorrow, it thought, it would see what else needed a small, strategic shake.
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