Luke paused thoughtfully. “Would you be willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement?”
Robert thought for a moment and looked at his empty plate. “Only if you sign too, and we both get a copy.” In a blink of an eye Luke pulled two contracts from his desk drawer. He took Robert’s plate and set the nondisclosure agreement contracts down in its place. “Read that, and if you’re still in the mood after reading the small print, sign them. I’ll stick my handle on it after you do.”
Robert quickly perused the single-page agreement, and then took out an expensive-looking fountain pen and signed. He handed the pen to Luke. “Your turn, Mr. Lucas.”
Luke signed and then gave his new partner a copy. “I think we’re in business now, Dr. Wu.”
“Do I get a secretary and everything?”
“What are you, some kind of skirt hound?”
“I’m being serious. We’re going to need someone good to handle all the paperwork. Someone we can trust to keep our secrets.”
Luke nodded. “Perhaps later, but you’re right. In fact, it might be a good idea to set up a small corporation to mantle our purpose with respectability. I don’t want anyone thinking we’re just a couple of grasping, amoral treasure hunters.”
“That’s right, take all the fun out of it for me. What’s next?”
Luke went to his desk and unlocked the file drawer. He pulled out a folder, relocked the drawer, and handed the file to Robert. “Read this. It’s a copy of Dr. Charles H. Gilbert’s journal. He was a professor at Hopkins Marine Laboratory at the turn of the last century. His handwriting is a little cramped, but at least he wrote legibly. I’m off to take a long shower. I smell like formalin and dead fish.”
Robert scrunched up his nose. “You’re telling me.”
Luke smiled and let it pass. While he shaved, Luke could hear Robert in the living room occasionally voicing what sounded like expletives of surprise. He couldn’t be sure because Robert spoke to himself in Chinese, which Luke found amusing.
When Luke came out of the bathroom, Robert was just finishing the journal. He looked up at his new friend. “This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever read. What do you have that backs this up?”
Luke took back the journal, went back to the file drawer, replaced the folder, and brought out another, fatter file. From this he handed Robert copies of Dr. Gilbert’s photographs and the folded copies of his rubbings. Robert spread the material out on the floor. Luke confessed. “But you were right. There was a verifying token buried with the stone tablet. I believe it’s Admiral Zhou Man’s personal jade seal, but I can’t be sure since I can’t translate the text or the chop. See what you think.”
Robert examined the numerous old pictures of the jade seal in the shape of a recumbent giraffe, and the detailed studies of the text engraved on the seal itself. The stone rubbings were full-sized and accomplished with great care given to represent the multilingual text with precision. Robert said he could read most all of the characters and he ventured that, from first glance at least, everything concerning the text seemed precise and authentic.
Luke went out to the kitchen, searched through the fridge, and found two beers. As he cracked them open he heard Robert in the next room give out with a long, expressive whistle. Then he called out, “You’ve hit the mother lode this time, Luke. This is, without a doubt, Zhou Man’s Imperial seal. Believe me, this is going to set the cat among the pigeons, historically speaking. You couldn’t find better proof of the existence of these artifacts, except, perhaps, to come up with the originals. Where do you suppose these treasures are now?”
Luke exited the kitchen and handed Robert a beer. “If I knew that, Dr. Wu, I wouldn’t need you, now, would I?”
Robert looked pleased with himself. “I’d like to think we would have come across each other eventually, but I’d rather be in on the ground floor, if you know what I mean.”
Luke sat down on the couch and leaned forward. “Well, as my grandfather used to say, fortune favors the lucky. Whether we find Zhou Man’s relics or not, this information is history in and of itself. But how it’s ultimately released to the world, and how it’s received, depends a great deal on the credibility of the people disseminating it. The slightest hint of commercial exploitation would taint all concerned, from Zheng He to Zhou Man, down through Dr. Gilbert to you and me.” Luke took a long, satisfying swig of beer.
Robert sat back on his haunches and gave a wry smile. “I do hope you appreciate the fact that there is still a whole predatory tribe of blood-in-the-eye racists prowling around out there. They won’t be too pleased to discover that what they thought was exclusively theirs belongs in effect to somebody else, culturally speaking. At least that’s how it’s ciphered in the antique framework of such things.”
“What do you mean by antique framework?”
“Well, Columbus claims the Americas in the name of Imperial Spain, and with little more than a stupid flag shoved in the sand and a few peaceful Indians as witnesses. So what do they do? They kill the Indians off with nasty diseases and outright homicide, and then steal all their stuff. And the ones they don’t kill, like the younger women and children, they turn into slaves and concubines. What a thrill for them.”
Luke got up and walked to his desktop iPod player and turned it on. Immediately the soft strains of Purcell softened the hard edges. He looked over his shoulder and cocked one eyebrow at Robert. “And your point is?”
“Isn’t it obvious? The Chinese set out with some of the largest sailing ships ever built, and all just to explore and trade with the known and unknown world, which they seem to have accomplished before Columbus was even a glint in his father’s piratical eye, so to speak. But the treasure fleet commissioned at great expense by Emperor Zhu Di didn’t set sail to steal treasure, quite the opposite, in fact: they brought their own treasure to trade with others. They left behind magnificent jade seals, and multilingual stele, and beautiful Ming porcelain and exotic flowers, jungle chickens, and perhaps a hundred other wonders as yet unsuspected. But the most important fact of all: the only graves they left behind when they moved on were their own. There is no record anywhere in this hemisphere, either oral or written, that indicates any experiences of hostile conflicts with these explorers, and believe me, violence is the kind of thing people have a tendency to remember the longest and in the most detail.”
Luke nodded. “With that as a given, and conflicts aside, why didn’t they stay on and colonize?”
Robert flashed a conspiratorial wink. “What makes you think they didn’t? The west coast of the Americas is veritably littered with Chinese DNA. The difference is that the Chinese were bright enough to assimilate themselves
