INTRODUCTION

Where did it all begin? When was the first step taken on that downward path that led to Armageddon? Perhaps it was on that fateful June day in 2043 when President James B. Griffin, last of the sixty presidents of the United States of America, was assassinated while attending a baseball game at Chicago’s rebuilt Comiskey Park.

The collapse of the sixty-nine states of the American Empire that followed and the subsequent disintegration of the allied Western economies brought a decade of chaos. What had begun as The Pacific Century’ was quickly renamed The Century of Blood’ – a period in which the only stability was to be found within the borders of China. It was from there – from the great landlocked province of Sichuan – that a young Han named Tsao Ch’un emerged.

Tsao Ch’un had a simple – some say brutal – cast of mind. He wanted to create a utopia, a rigidly stable society that would last ten thousand years. But the price was high. In 2062, Japan, China’s chief rival in the East, was the first victim of Tsao Ch’un’s idiosyncratic approach to realpolitik when, without warning – following Japanese complaints about Chinese incursions in Korea – the Han leader bombed Honshu, concentrating his nuclear devices on the major population centres of Tokyo and Kyoto. When the dust cleared, three great Han armies swept the smaller islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, killing every Japanese they found, while the rest of Japan was blockaded by sea and air. Over the next twenty years they would do the same with the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, turning the ‘islands of the gods’ into a wasteland, while the crumbling Western nation states looked away.

The eradication of Japan taught Tsao Ch’un many lessons. In future he sought ‘not to destroy but to exclude’ – though his definition of ‘exclusion’ often made it a synonym for destruction. As he built his great City – huge, mile-high spider-like machines moving slowly outward from Pei Ch’ing, secreting vast, tomb-like hexagonal living sections, three hundred levels high and a kilometre to a side – so he peopled it, choosing carefully who was to live within its walls. As the City grew, so his servants went out among the indigenous populations he had conquered, searching among them for those who were free from physical disability, political dissidence or religious bigotry. And where he encountered organized opposition, he enlisted the aid of groups sympathetic to his aims to carry out his policies. In South Africa and North America, in Europe and in the People’s Democracy of Russia, huge movements grew up, supporting Tsao Ch’un and welcoming his ‘stability’ after decades of chaos and suffering, only too pleased to share in his crusade of intolerance – his ‘Policy of Purity’.

Only the Middle East proved problematic. There, a great Jihad was launched against the Han – Muslims and Jews casting off centuries of enmity to fight against a common threat. Tsao Ch’un answered them as he had answered Japan just five years before. The Middle East and large parts of the Indian subcontinent were reduced to a radioactive wilderness. But it was in Africa that his policies were most nakedly displayed. There, the native peoples were moved on before the encroaching City and, like cattle, they starved or died from exhaustion, driven on by the brutal Han armies. Following historical precedent, City Africa was reseeded with Han settlers.

In terms of human suffering, Tsao Ch’un’s pacification of the globe was unprecedented. Contemporary estimates put the cost in human lives at well over four billion. But Tsao Ch’un was not content merely to eradicate all opposition, he wanted to destroy all knowledge of the Western-dominated past. Like the First Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, twenty four centuries before, he decided to rewrite the history books. Tsao Ch’un had his officials collect all books, all tapes, all recordings, allowing nothing that was not Han to enter his great City. Most of what they collected was simply burned, but not all. Some was adapted.

One group of Tsao Ch’un’s advisors – a group of Scholar-Politicians who termed themselves ‘the Thousand Eyes’ – persuaded their master that it would not be enough simply to create a gap. That, they knew, would attract curiosity. What they proposed was more subtle and, in the long term, far more persuasive. With Tsao Ch’un’s blessing they set about reconstructing the history of the world, placing China at the centre of everything – back in its rightful place, as they saw it. It was a lie, of course, yet a lie to which everyone subscribed… on pain of death.

But the lie was complex and powerful, and people soon forgot. New generations arose who knew nothing of the real past and to whom the whispers and rumours seemed mere fantasy in the face of the solid reality they saw all about them. The media fed them the illusion daily, until the illusion became, even for those who worked in the Ministry responsible, quite real, and the documents they dealt with some strange aberration – a mass hallucination, almost a disease that had struck the Western peoples of the great Han empire in its latter years. The officials of the Ministry even coined a term for it – ‘racial compensation’ – laughing among themselves whenever they came across some clearly fantastic reference in an old book about quaint religious practices or races of black – think of it, black! – people.

Tsao Ch’un killed the old world. He buried it deep beneath his glacial City. But eventually his brutality and tyranny proved too much even for those who had helped him carry out his scheme. In 2087 his Council of Seven Ministers rose up against him, using North European mercenaries, and overthrew him, setting up a new government. They divided the world – Chung Kuo – among themselves, each calling himself T’ang, ‘King’. But the new government was far stronger than the old, for the Seven made it so that no single one of them could act on any major issue without the consensus of his fellow T’ang. Adopting the morality of New Confucianism, they set about consolidating a ‘peace often thousand years’. The keystone of this peace was the Edict of Technological Control, which regulated and, in effect, prevented change.

Change had been the disease of the old, Western-dominated world. Change had brought its rapid and total collapse. But Change was alien to the Han. They would do away with Change for all time. Their borders were secured, the world was theirs – why should they not have peace and stability until the end of time? But the population grew and grew, filling the vast City and, buried deep in the collective psyche of the European races, something began to stir – some long-buried memory of rapid evolutionary growth. Change was needed. Change was wanted. But the Seven were set against it.

For more than a century they succeeded, and their great world-spanning City thrived. If a man worked hard, he could climb the levels into a world of space and luxury; if he failed in business or committed a crime he would be demoted – down toward the crowded, stinking Lowers. Each man knew his place in the great scheme of things and obeyed the diktats of the Seven. Yet the pressures placed upon the system were great and as the population climbed toward the forty billion mark, something had to give.

DAVID WINGROVE, May 2012