SHU
SHU
Conflict Gems
A first floor room in a derelict building, South London. The ground floor had once been an electrical shop, long vanished generic; long boarded up. The first floor had been occupied fairly recently. A grubby patterned rug covered the floor in the front room. There was a grill-pan that had been used as a brazier, a sack of kindling, a down-at-heel three-piece suite; tattered bedspreads tacked for curtains over the windows. The venue had no connection with the Reich. Bill and George had picked it out for anonymity, and certain digital landscape advantages. If you peered from behind the left-hand bedspread you could see a scrap of Crystal Palace Park.
‘Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant and Vengeance… My arse in butter, who started that, I would like to know, are you trying to get us busted?’
‘V1, V2, V3, V4, oh, yeah, I remember I did it, well I meant to change them.’
‘If anyone’s picking up we’re screwed anyway, Sage.’
‘Okay, so, non-random codenames are go.’
Allie watched the Heads crew setting up for the break-in; Sage in their midst, his presence distanced by the immix buffer field, and by the silver blizzard of his eyes. Wearing the coding lenses he’d brought back from Hollywood, he looked like eerily like a giant sci-fi doll. She remembered how that deliberately slowed-down Cornish accent used to set her teeth on edge. Arrogant and hammered, a prince among his courtiers, he plays the lout, occasionally letting slip that this is the only way he can communicate with mortal meat puppets. How I used to hate him. Jargon washed over her, peppered by fragments of banter in English… Fiorinda sat across from Allie, in the other armchair: feet tucked up, a gold and brown shawl wrapped round her baggy shorts and tee-shirt, untouchable as her boyfriend. She didn’t seem to know it, she would smile and talk as if she thought she was normal, but the same look of horror and bliss that she’d worn on the mountain was in her eyes. She was in that chair and also somewhere else, riding shotgun for the geeks at a speed nothing could beat; their final defence. She would be somewhere else until this was over, for better or for worse. Cosoleth slept in her basket at Fiorinda’s feet. Allie huddled her Gucci jacket around her, rubbed her cheek against the antique red leather that she loved, and thought of Virginia Woolf, hearing the sparrows talk in Greek.
DK…?
Is that you…?
The über-geeks were convinced, from the information-space evidence Sage had recovered, that Dilip had been calling Allie, person-to-person, at the moment when his b-loc signal was captured. When they’d said this meant they could send her, virtually, to wherever ‘virtual Dilip’ was being held, she had been terrified it would be Xi’an. But everything had pointed to England. This was forbidden, the hell-stuff the Sphere must never dare to contemplate. Elder Sister was going to have this project in her immediate control. So the geeks had invaded the AMID’s datasphere, under Fiorinda’s protection, and pinpointed a physical location.
Dilip was at Ground Zero (Dilip on a memory stick, Dilip on a hard drive?). Ax had said it would be Reading. Where else? She’s a frontline General, she does her own dirty work. Here, in England, the bodies will be buried. Sage and his brother Heads speculated casually as they worked. Can we really blackmail the Chinese, will they cut a deal? If they’d massacred Counterculturals anywhere else they’d kept it quiet. But they’d imposed the mind/matter tech ban globally, ripping out whole sections of new industry; and the Sphere had complied, trusting souls.
This story’s got to be a major embarrassment—
‘We was robbed,’ said Bill Trevor, Bill without Clio round his neck for a change. ‘Fuckin’ wankers, ripped us off and trashed us. If there was any justice!’
‘It would be a Reich fucking world right now,’ agreed George.
Cheers and applause from the crew.
‘They can live it down,’ the Minister for Gigs gave his judgement, from far away. ‘I see the propaganda campaign: Elder Sister can be trusted with forbidden tech, so China was allowed to use it, secretly, but no one else.’
‘They could make that work,’ agreed Bill.
‘Or else they play the military deterrent card,’ suggested George. ‘Easy.’
‘They can do what the fuck they like, this changes nothing about their actual position, actual dominance. It’s an issue of style. But will they shoot the messengers, or invite us onto the board? Depends how cynical you are about Elder Sister—’
‘No offence to Ax, but I am cynical as shit,’ declared Bill.
Ax was off his own mission. Rob and the Babes and the kids, Chip and Verlaine, were well away from London. It would be hard to protect them if things went badly wrong, alibi or no alibi, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, and it’s not going to happen. Cosoleth was here because there was no safer place.
All this wicked free speech… Everything we say is heard, but it doesn’t matter anymore, tonight we share the licence of the dead. Allie closed her eyes.
It wasn’t Xi’an. She concentrated on feeling relieved.
Peter left his desk. He sat on the saggy sofa and asked Fiorinda what if she spotted something that had already slipped.
‘Could fix it retroactively? Make it so it hadn’t happened?’
Fiorinda scratched her toes, and wondered if the armchair had fleas. She was remembering a different bohemian dump, more flash than grunge; but funky… The basement of the Snake Eyes house in Lambeth, HQ of rock rebellion. I was sixteen and I’d just met them. Ax Preston picking guitar, in the pauses of the conversation. Singing, singing single notes, that I knew were talking to me—
Thoughts like this rise, when you’re about to go over the top.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can do practically anything in the datasphere, arrow of time no object, without going within a million miles of critical. But it would be a fuck of a job and if I started trying not to make mistakes I would fall in and drown—’
‘So you have to get into a Flow State, does that feel excellent?’
‘Yes it does, I’m there now. But I wouldn’t do this often. I wouldn’t make a habit of this if it were legal and decent, because it would drive me nuts. I don’t want to be nuts, I’ve tried it, it isn’t nice—’
Allie roused out of her frozen daze, and spoke calmly. ‘Cack.’
He looked round. ‘What?’
‘Leave Fio alone. She’s concentrating.’
Sage was finding out as much as he could about the situation at the remote site, live. He could trust what could be inferred about the data, could tell that ‘virtual Dilip’ hadn’t been copied for instance (now there’s a nasty thought). But it’s perilous to infer physical conditions from the digital activity of some place you’ve never seen. Peaceful isolation could be a server stuck away in a broom cupboard, or it could be some buzzing party central, where ‘Virtual Dilip’ was kept on show, in a cage of impenetrable firewalls. It didn’t move around; that was all he was sure of. But what was this isolated signal? A b-loc signal is a facet of a human consciousness, logically not separate from the original; or from any manifestation of itself. ‘Virtual Dilip’ was a paradox: but theoretically, marginally, Sage could examine the brainstate of the fragment at Ground Zero, through the entangled fragment he had collected from Lance Buckley’s recording; using the DK signature from his cache for reference. Allie had asked him what’s it like, and he had told her,
—like reconstructing a minor Hittite dialect, from a broken sliver of clay and a dictionary based a much richer language. Like astrophysics. (We have no proof that DK made that fatal call, though we all believe it now.) A tower of inference built on pure speculation, theory in search of an experiment—
Maybe not very comforting, and he felt bad about that. But he was not in a comforting mood. All he could do to keep up the backchat; he knew the crew found it reassuring. They were monitoring the security patrols, and they took him off-line irregularly, for a millisecond or so, when the iterations reached levels they didn’t like. Fiorinda is backstop, we don’t use her unless we must… About every nine and a half seconds, every thirteen or so seconds, and there was another, shorter cycle that kicked in not-quite-randomly. What shall we call this, neurophysical necromancy?
‘Okay, I’m done, best I can. Still active, and pronounced clear.’
‘What does “active” mean?’ asked Allie.
The geeks had changed gear. Sage was leaving his board, the moment was upon her. She imagined DK rescued, a living ghost, living out his days in peace. What would that be like? Like talking to a hologram?
‘It’s difficult to grasp,’ said Peter, seriously. ‘There’s no Dilip in the material present, so it’s a facet without origin. Active like a virtual movie avatar, kept the way they are; on standby. You can’t switch them off or they disintegrate.’
‘I couldn’t get a great deal.’ Sage turned his white-out blind eyes on her: Allie flinched. ‘Ah, sorry just about to take them out.’ He tipped the lenses onto his palm, dumped them in a tiny autoclave and came to sit by Cack on the sofa. ‘We won’t be landing in anybody’s lap or squabbling with furniture; an’ if there’s an exotic trap waiting to catch virtual invaders such as us, I didn’t spot it.’
‘Sage is he alive? Is it him? Is part of him still alive, somehow?’
George was frowning at Sage’s immix construct, reduced to code on a regular screen. He and the boss exchanged a steady look.
‘It’s time you got moving,’ said George.
‘Better if you don’t think like that, Allie,’ said Sage.
The Cumbrian b-loc sets had been programmed to match the pair that had been in the Few’s possession. Fiorinda and Allie kept their heads still, while the geeks made final adjustments. ‘Let me remind you,’ said Sage, donning his own set, ‘this has to be a short trip. You and I, Allie, won’t be able to get around. We don’t have a live path, we’re loc’d to the shade, I mean what remains of DK: standard b-loc footprint. If we move away from him, more than about a metre, two at max, we’ll loc’ out. The nine-seconds cycle is harmless, we’re too strange for it to spot. The thirteen-second probes are blunt instruments, they don’t care what we look like. We can survive two of them, we’ll loc’ in at the start of that cycle. It’ll seem longer, but that will be the limit. After that we’re playing chicken.’
He looked down at his sleeping daughter.
‘Last call. Are you still up for this, Allie?’
‘Don’t do that!’ she wailed. ‘Yes I am up for this.’
‘Sorry,’ said the boss, unperturbed. ‘My brat?’
Fiorinda smiled, spookily calm. ‘I’m ready.’
Support crew voices were suddenly talking in Allie’s head. V2 will return the call she missed, the day the Insanitude siege was broken. V1 and V3 are slaved to her, V2 never to be alone at the remote site… The Vs were the brain’s visual centres, because the visual cortex is God, but they’d somehow also become vintage nuclear submarines. V1, or Vanguard, was Fiorinda. Sage was V2, Vigilant, making Allie Victorious. Just the kind of name the commandos would give to the weakest link, but it didn’t wound her. She was far away, trying to think herself back to that moment, the unexpected, lost, hinge-moment, on which everything depended—
DK…?
Is that you…? Where are you…?
She didn’t remember getting the earbead ping, and failing to respond. The b-loc sets had been hidden in a bedroll. Nobody had seen Dilip root one out and take it with him on his firewatch. They’d been expecting an assault, on that last day: they hadn’t known it would end the siege. She remembered a sudden uproar, a surge of panic sweeping through the non-combatant havens, deep inside the palace. Dora and Felice stuffing Toots into a pet-carrier, and calling frantically for Ghost, the Snake Eyes’ other cat, who hadn’t been seen in days. Chez, Chip and Ver grabbing things, the children passive with terror; Rob yelling at the senior Babes, fuck the cat, come on! The smell of fire, the gusts of heat. She remembered realising that Dilip must be dead, but did not know where this knowledge had overtaken her. When we were running with the faithful barmies, no idea where they were taking us? When we saw the firestorm that everyone was screaming about—
I’m in the departure lounge.
They were in a dark room. Glowing red and green dots, like standby lights, hung suspended, dimly revealing a rectangular space, not huge; nearly square. In the centre, right in front of them, a pale polished block around two metres long, maybe a metre high; immediately suggesting an altar or a tomb. Hardware towers, giant servers or just filing cabinets, emerged from their hiding. The room was walled with them. There was a door, no windows. At waist-height, around three of the hardware walls, objects were laid on counters; most of them quite small; difficult to make out.
‘The exotic trap was in the nine-second cycle,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Dunno how, but I’ve blocked it.’
‘Ouch, sorry—’
‘But where is DK?’ whispered Allie.
Three seconds had passed.
‘He’s here,’ Fiorinda stared around, ‘He’s right here! But where?’
They could all feel the contact, the mental penumbra of a b-loc call—
The pale block, the funereal aura of this place, the nature of their mission, had them imagining Dilip’s ghost honourably entombed. Enshrined as a hero by the noble enemy; for Chinese reasons that they didn’t understand. Then they saw a shadow hovering over the catafalque, and realised the tomb was a big flatbed scanner, like the flatbeds they’d seen in Hollywood when they were making Rivermead. This version had no second housing for the controls, and the dome was almost invisible. But it was there, and the shade was firing up inside: reacting to their presence. Allie gasped and clutched at her head, felt the grip back at the home site and almost loc’d out. The shadow had become a human body, the head and neck contorted, eyeless, noseless, the limbs and trunk seared, shards of textile burned into the red and black meat. A headset was fused to the black-blistered scalp, the forearms fixed, hands like claws, as if reaching to pull it off.
There he is. There’s Dilip, where he has been all this time. Allie recovered first. ‘Thank God, he’s dead! He was always dead, we’ve been agonising over nothing, all we have to do is pull the plug. How do we pull the plug!’
Eight seconds had passed.
‘We’ve got to pull the plug!’ cried Allie again, but Sage and Fiorinda weren’t responding. She understood, blunderingly but fast, that there was worse to come—
The shade had heard her voice, it stirred and woke.
It was Dilip alive, a living image laid over the burned shell: his hair drawn back from the face they knew, his great eyes alight with recognition. They saw what Dian’s father had seen, a slender male figure in very closely fitting dark clothes: an impression of someone enduring, or taking on, great pain.
But the apparition was looking at them.
‘Ah!’ breathed the shade. ‘Did the Insanitude fall?’
They could not speak. Ten seconds had passed.
‘Have I been like this long? It’s hard to know, I have no memory. I don’t think I talked. I was conscious when they interrogated me. They had to vivisect, because if they shut me down I’m gone.’ It drew a deep breath, into vanished lungs. ‘You haven’t come to get me out, have you?’
‘No,’ said Sage.
But the shade had forgotten the question. It was fixed on Allie. It raised the burned shell’s blackened hand; Fiorinda and Sage saw it realise it could not touch her.
‘I wanted to say goodbye. I had the b-loc. I had always taken it with me when I had to leave you, those scary days, so I’d be able to say goodbye—’
‘Goodbye,’ echoed Allie, speaking to the long dead. No tears, but her knees were giving way, she couldn’t feel the floor and she’d forgotten why.
‘I called you but the fire came through so fast, I wasn’t thinking, I never meant you to see this hideous thing—’
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t—’
‘I lived too long in the departure lounge. I’m glad you came and found me.’ It forgot her. Dilip the free spirit, party animal, enduring great pain undaunted, smiled at Sage and the rock and roll brat. ‘My lord, my oceanic Fiorinda, is Ax okay?’
‘Ax is doing fine.’
‘Tell me one thing, are we winning?’
‘Yes,’ said Sage.
‘I don’t know where the controls are. You won’t leave me like this?’
Twenty seconds.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I won’t.’ The countdown stopped. Time was away somewhere. She sliced her hand through the top of the dome—which did not shatter, it rose like dew and vanished in the air—sprang up onto the scanner bed and seemed to take the shade by the shoulders. She kissed Dilip gently, and drew back. Sage and Allie, on either side, held his burned claws. He was thistledown, the way a b-loc virtual ghost always feels: there is no sensation, but your brain is puzzled.
Fiorinda pulled off the fused headset.
Allie and the ghost both disappeared. Allie was safe at the home site.
Dilip’s shade was just gone.
‘That was a cheap round,’ said Fiorinda, still crouched on the rim tomb, the ethereal laserdome beside her whole, but empty. ‘I know what it looked like, and felt like, but what happened was all software. You found him by geekery, you could have hacked the off-switch by geekery; just would have taken longer.’ She grinned, and shook herself. ‘They’ll never know I was here. Net damage to the fabric of reality derisory, only now I remember why this is a very dangerous drug.’
She jumped down from her perch. ‘What is this place? What else are they keeping in here? Shall we look at the grave goods?’
To Sage’s eyes she glittered as if her blood had turned to light. He shook his head. ‘Got to go, babe. Twenty-six seconds, realtime. I’m gonna get caught.’
‘Come on, live a little.’ She held out her hand, shining. Sage barely hesitated: he joined her where the countdown couldn’t hurt him. (back in the first-floor room he watched the contents of those servers zipping into Reich custody: cheap round for us, expensive for the tourists, but enough is enough, I’m about to pull you out, my brat—)
They grinned at each other, dropped the handclasp and walked around.
‘We’re inside one of Ax’s upturned boats,’ said Fiorinda.
‘Most likely. What d’you think shū means, exactly? In this context?’
The Chinese character was embossed on the sides of the catafalque; in large relief up on the towers, and button-sized on every winking control panel.
‘Text?’ she suggested. ‘Books, recorded knowledge?’
The objects on the counters were English Countercultural or forbidden tech artefacts. A magic crystal sitting on its barkcloth bag. A book of spells from the twentieth century; with fairies on the cover. Sage lifted a box-fresh b-loc headset; Adiabatic of Cambridge scrolled on the case. First-generation, a little clunky, but popular to the end, as near to a mass-market product as b-loc ever had. Adiabatic was supposed to have been comprehensively trashed and burned, when the English went crazy after the Insanitude fell, and smashed all the futuristic science. ‘You start to wonder—’ he murmured, and shook his head. Nah, forget it, we’ll never know what really happened. What really happened is a concept that the Chinese have erased.
‘They’ve never suspected me,’ said Fiorinda, off on her own track. Most of the stolen tech was in pieces; vivisected. ‘We should have had more faith in our own cover-up. They believed the same as US Intelligence believed, same as Fred Eiffrich did. I’m Rufus’s daughter but I was his victim, helpless, didn’t inherit a scrap of his mutant brain. They killed my father’s other children out of idle curiosity, or as a precaution, or just to see what their Rufus DNA brains were like—’
I am free, she thought. Elder Sister has set me free.
It flashed through her mind that if the bastard Chinese had plans for another A-team, which was all too possible, seeing this collection, they would get nowhere.
Not as long as I live. I shall stop that from happening.
I—
‘They didn’t come to England to save the world from a second A-team, Sage. They saw the Second Chamber as a threat all right, and maybe, maybe they saw our Counterculture as a breeding ground for Neurobomb material. But deep down dirty the massacres were camouflage. They made it look like righteous ideology, when really they were here to protect a secret monopoly. And strip our assets, of course. I bet they plan to scoop up Europe’s best evil neurophysicists and mind/matter techs, take them home and rehabilitate them—’
As she gets older, thought Sage, occasionally she’s going to look a lot like her dad. He wasn’t horrified, he’d long accepted that Fiorinda and Rufus would always be close. Alight with her fire, he felt the latency of mind/matter fusion in his own brain and wondered if he could ever join her, where they were now, under his own steam? If he could reach her by tech alone, could he do this without killing himself?
File that one.
‘The di is mind/matter based,’ he said. ‘Has to be. I saw that at once when I dared to think about it. We are idiots, Fiorinda. If they remotely suspected trouble, they wouldn’t have come near without some kind of forbidden fallback defence—’
‘The bastards. The bare-faced, conniving bastards.’
They stood together, looking up at the character shū, on the towers, on the panels. ‘It means the code,’ said Fiorinda. ‘The 0s and 1s of reality.’
‘Yes.’
They thought of Anne-Marie and her little boys, of uncounted thousands cut down here at Reading and elsewhere; of Toby Starborn’s cruel fate. The need to hit back with equal savagery boiled through them, and vanished into the purity of the fusion high. Let it go, accept: because this is the good news. Normal human villainy killed those people. The Chinese have nothing, and now we will win Ax’s game.
‘I didn’t like the way DK ended up being Vengeance,’ said Sage at last. ‘He was not the type.’
‘Nor did I,’ said Fiorinda. ‘But I don’t know.’ She smiled, remembering the Mixmaster, thinking he’d have liked the irony. ‘Maybe it works.’
The best revenge is to live well.
A baby screaming and screaming; crew packing up with their teeth clenched. Fiorinda crooned and rocked Cosoleth, to no avail. George sat with Allie on the dirty sofa, seeming to absorb her shock and grief into his broad frame.
‘You all knew it would be like that,’ cried Allie, tears streaming.
‘Somethen’ like. An’ we woulder tried harder to tell you, but we thought you were better off only facing it the once—’
‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I needed to know what had happened, and now I do. I know where he is. He isn’t lost, he’s found. Oh God, oh, God—’
Coz’s piercing yells shifted from frightened to angry, which was an improvement, though the noise did not diminish. ‘Hush little baby,’ coaxed Fiorinda, ‘poor Coz, it was too much, I am such a trial to you. What the hell did I do to spook her, Bill?’ she asked, over the baby’s head. ‘I’m a klutz at b-loc, I always lose my short-term memory, I’ve no idea what was happening back here.’
‘You didn’t have time to do anything much,’ said Bill.
My God, was it only half a minute, is that all?
Sage came back into the room. He’d gone out for some quiet, to make a phone call and tell Ax it had gone well. She looked at him, and he nodded, blue eyes wide.
Now we’ll see. Are we falling or flying?
What The Thrush Said
The straight half of Mr Preston knelt among drifts of creamy silk, smiling at Elder Sister, who faced him, cross-legged, her hair loose and tousled on her shoulders; from which the robe she wore was slipping in very pretty disarray. She touched a shallow crease, hardly a scar, that ran across his upper ribs, on the left.
‘What’s this? A souvenir of what?’
He wondered if she’d ever been wounded on active service. When would that have been? The nineteen eighties, before her Principal Dancer days? Vietnam border skirmishes? Or later, in her career as General Li? Forget it, can’t rely on anything I’ve been told, or ever will be told. Her life will be wrapped in cloud as long as she stays in power. If she falls it’ll be different, but no more truthful.
‘It’s very stupid.’
‘It looks stupid. I don’t like the position at all.’
‘It was in Cambridge, in the thing we call the Deconstruction Tour.’
‘The first, most violent phase of your Cultural Revolution. Nobody here seems to have any idea what that meant in China. You seem to think it was none of our business. It was terribly shocking, it wasn’t our image of the English at all. And then there was a young man, a guitar-player from a rock band, whom we were told was controlling the masses. He was restoring order, yet also leading the people in the destruction of greed, selfishness, ignorance and decadence, the four poisons that were killing the planet. That was a road we could understand. We in China were suffering hell from the environmental problems of the Fall.’
‘The Crash. Is this the view of the Chinese, or Elder Sister talking me up?’
She grinned, and touched the same finger to his lips. ‘We knew that absolutist change was the only way forward. And he looked very Chinese.’
‘Do you want to hear about my wound, or not?’
‘No, I want to talk about you, because it makes you uncomfortable and I love to see you uncomfortable. You don’t understand how powerful it was. In China this is the Ur-story. There’s a peasant boy, who becomes a soldier in a time of decay and corruption, he raises the people against an unjust regime. He is an outlaw hero who gathers an army. He’s going places, unlike your Robin Hood.’ She paused for thought. ‘He’s a peasant, or at least very poor, but he has the right ancestors, that’s important. I’ve heard that Fiorinda comes from an old gentry family?’
‘Haha, yeah. On her mother’s side. The Slaters haven’t been personally involved in putting roofs on houses since around the time of the Peasants’ Revolt.’
‘Oooh, a peasants’ revolt. When was it, what happened?’
‘’Bout eight hundred years ago. A charming young king told them he loved them, promised them everything, lured the leaders into the open and the regime clobbered them, mercilessly.’
‘Ah, too bad. You laugh, but you shouldn’t despise legitimacy. My name is “Li”, I have found that surprisingly useful. Your daughter’s name should be Slater. Now, let’s return to my peasant boy. He takes over kingdom after kingdom until he holds all China. He declares a new dynasty, he institutes sweeping and compassionate reform. Heaven accepts him, and phoenixes are seen in his gardens.’
‘I didn’t like the pension plan.’
They were alone in her private quarters, with the fabulous artworks. The Fu dais where she’d shown him her map of the world was beyond their lamplight, hidden by the antique screens. Elder Sister sighed, stretched her arms above her head, and reached over, lithe and smooth as young girl, to the hookah. She took a deep pull of smoke, watching him, eyes half-closed, sidelong.
‘Hm.’
She was very good at sensing resistance.
‘We were told you had “invented post-modern warfare”. It was fascinating. This idea of using war without terrorism, when war is terrorism.’
‘Now I know you’re laughing at me. General, you couldn’t begin to sound the depths of my ignorance. Richard and Corny did it all. I didn’t know I was on the world’s stage. I was on local tv, in our storm-in-a-thimble, making phrases in the hope of stopping what I saw as hideous.’
‘Again,’ said Elder Sister, rather tartly, ‘you don’t understand. It was our business. We had embarked on a plan to unite the world. We needed to overrun country after country, without leaving a disastrous trail of low-intensity urban warfare behind us. We’d have been fools not to watch Europe; to see how a successful unifying power emerges when a country has fallen apart. Military genius is innate, like musical talent. Soldiers know it when they meet it. You may have been ignorant, but you have that genius, and we learned from you.’
She offered the mouthpiece: he took it, shaking his head. ‘You’ll have to be more plausible. The PLA can’t possibly have been studying my battle plans.’
‘Our suborbital transports are expensive: we use them sparingly. But it’s because of Ax Preston that we rarely, rarely use air strikes. We fight on the ground. It does not hamper us, we have invincible superiority, but it reduces the terror remarkably.’
Touché.
He lay down beside her on the silken pillows, and blew smoke rings into the lamplight. Everything about Elder Sister raised the ghost of a past self he’d almost forgotten. He didn’t want those days or that mindset back, fuck no. But she gave him access to emotions that no one, not a soul, had ever shared; and that touched his heart.
‘The mission was to save the world; to save civilisation, from real and present danger. And to nurture the Good State, so it could survive and grow on the other side of the Crisis. I struggle to remember what it felt like to be twenty-six, and convinced I could achieve those things. I’m a different person, several times over.’
‘I know about that,’ she said. She seemed to smile inwardly, nostalgically, her profile calm and grave. Then she turned on him like a tigress, phoenix eyes snapping, a storm of black hair. ‘So! You admit you have a mission. Then why are we arguing?’
‘I wasn’t aware that we were arguing.’
She was close to getting genuinely annoyed, this planet-destroyer in bed with him, beautiful and naked among her swirls of embroidered satin. Be careful, he thought. Show no fear, but never cross the line. Have I crossed it?
‘Ax! Now you are being insufferable—!’
‘Hey. I don’t think you can call me insufferable on a first date.’
She withdrew. She sat up, smoothed back her hair, and arranged her robe. No more fun and games, said the expression on that flushed, lovely face, not quite bare of make-up, free of any sign of ageing. Here we go. He wondered how the dice were going to fall, would she give him the opening he needed, or derail him?
‘I want you to be my President of Europe.’
That’ll do. He sighed, and marshalled his thoughts. She knew that what he said tonight would be different, that he had finally stopped fencing. She gave him time.
‘Ax?’
‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Dead straight.’
He wanted to ask if they could continue this in English, but if you can’t say it in putonghua it’s not worth saying, so scratch that. Leave your ego at the door, try not to sound too stilted, avoid complex sentences, trust your intuition.
‘Elder Sister, I would like to work for you; I want to serve the World State. But I can’t take a, what amounts to a post on your staff, unless you are going to listen to me. I have to be able to say what I think, and you have to be ready to listen. Otherwise I’m not the man for the job. I wouldn’t last a week—’
He got no further.
‘This sounds to me,’ said Elder Sister, in a level tone, lowering the hand she had sharply raised, ‘like the prelude to a well-honed petition. You may speak. What is it you want to ask?’
‘All right,’ Ax sat up and shrugged his own robe together. Dressed for business, the planet-destroyer and her spirited new favourite faced each other.
‘Everything Weng Jiang and his team told you about the Landsturm is true. The whole affair was an unqualified success. However, you could still be running into trouble. In these countries the masses did not labour under oppression and decay for generations, as is the case in the East of Europe. Civic collapse is a recent thing. The masses are steeped in eco-revolution; emotionally and intellectually the cadres are passionately on your side. They are Utopians, they believe in the World State. But if crucial issues are not treated thoughtfully there’ll be a backlash.’
She nodded, focused and intent. ‘This is the kind of thing I need to hear. What do you mean by “backlash”? I will deal with recalcitrance.’
‘There are countries in Western Europe that still have nuclear capability.’
‘Hm.’ She thought about that. ‘I believe not. A long way from readiness, at the least. For instance, the last British nuclear deterrent was decommissioned under David Sale’s government. It passed for a Quixotic gesture, I saw it as a practical move. Better to destroy the weapons that principle forbids you to use, than have them lying about “just in case”, while rabid Countercultural terrorists prowl the nation.’
‘I agree. The nuclear threat was an extreme example.’ Ax paused. ‘The danger of a public setback is real. The Sphere’s growth has been from success to success, and that’s what your great plan needs, to sweep it to completion.’
‘Go on.’
‘As I see it, your job is to make sure that the will to hold back isn’t there. To rule by consent, not to crush ambition; to encourage the spirit of partnership. If you bind your natural supporters to you, in confidence and gratitude, populations won’t be alienated by the police actions you may have to take. Recalcitrance will wither away.’
‘So all the modesty and reticence was a trick. You see yourself as the counsellor who shall keep this hot-headed Napoleon on the right path!’
‘This is not a trick,’ he said, ‘this is honest advice. Before I realised who you were my intuition told me to trust you; I trust you now. I know there’s a contradiction, I’ve turned my back on violence, you are a military leader. I still want you to succeed. I’m in awe of your victories, your talents, your courage; and your decency, so far as war allows decency. But in some respects you will have to change your ways if—’
‘Hm.’
‘If I am to go on believing you are truly the person I want you to be.’
‘And who is that?’
‘The rightful son of heaven.’
Her phoenix eyes opened wide. He glimpsed the outlaw hunger of a young woman in soldier’s uniform, studying battles between dance rehearsals. The angry, enduring shame Wang Xili had warned him about; the whole story of Li Xifeng, which he could never know. That charming three-cornered grin broke out.
‘Well! It’s true what they say about you, Ax Preston.’
Ax reached for the hookah again. Good at spotting resistance, and very good at signalling when the imperial audience is over. ‘Oh yeah? What do they say?’
‘That you are an inspired flatterer.’
‘The golden rule is you can never be too blatant.’
Elder Sister burst into delighted laughter, and collapsed on her side, the robe falling open. ‘Oh dear. I am a child! The words “son of heaven” go straight to a centre in my brain! I have never taken heroin, I think it may be something like!’
Please God, nobody ever introduce this woman to smack.
She was a wanton dancing girl with sparkling eyes and dewy lips, giggling up at him, brass-nerved, wicked as if she’d been born English. He took her in his arms, the chemistry between them blossoming again, and kissed her parted lips. He was aching hard, extremely turned on, a very strange state to be in, but genuine. I saw you coming towards me, in the night garden—
The moth’s kiss first. ‘But I mean it.’ The bee’s kiss now.
Just before four a.m. Ax left the clouds of her bed, shrugging the robe provided for him over his shoulders. He located his clothes, tossed on a chair, and took his suit jacket through a looming maze of furniture to the open floor in front of the Fu dais. It was a relief to change his orientation. Her bed faced south, the dais faced south: but in Reading Arena everything should flow from east to west. Ax’s sense of direction was strong, and boosted by years of having had a brain implant. When he was aligned wrongly it nagged him. He sat with one knee up, the other leg folded under him, staring across the shadowy space, and listened to a thrush that had begun to sing, practice notes, an isolated phrase repeated, and then another…wishing he had a cigarette, his phone on the rug in front of him.
It was a toy he’d picked up at the fair in Cumbria, a sleek, curved haematite pebble, with no outward sign of tech. Just a phone, no features. Thoughts of the long, bewildering struggle drifted through his mind, fragments of the catalogue of failures and mistakes he rehearsed to himself when he was low. But it was all one now. In an hour or two it would be time for the Fajr… He felt very close to his religion tonight, strange as that might seem. To be the presence of God’s compassion on earth. To know that the world is a mosque; to walk in it humbly, reverently, as on holy ground. That’s all you need to be, that’s all you need to know. The rest, all the plotting and scheming, working the percentages; it’s so worthless.
But he didn’t think he would pray, not this dawn. Maybe not even in his heart. He wondered where the thrush was perched. Down by Travellers’ Meadow, where the great oak tree used to stand, that fell in the storm in Boat People Summer? No, the ragged wilderness down there was gone, like the lovely trees that used to grow beside the Thames. The bushes and briars ripped out; the river culverted.
He had spent the night love-making with a beautiful woman, at least twice his age; and she was an adept. He had received, he hoped he’d given, a great deal of pleasure. And now what? Hollow and empty as the hour, not even terrified, just tired and sad, he listened to the birdsong until his phone rang, bang on time.
Fuck! He dived for the pebble.
‘Hi, Scheherazade, how’s it going?’
‘I’m good. How are you?’
‘Ooh, we’ve had a great night. Didn’t miss you at all. We reached the fourth V, solved that, got some stuff, an’ Aeris, Barrett and Tifa all home free and clear.’
Aeris, Barratt and Tifa were characters in a classic Fantasy game, a great favourite with Fiorinda and Sage. The fourth V was Dilip. Not that Ax was ever going to be explaining this conversation at a public inquiry.
‘What about the big boss fight?’
‘Turns out there isn’t one…Ax, don’t stay too long, it’ll look bad. If I were you I’d leave before office hours.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
The phone was dead, and there was someone watching him.
‘Who was that?’
‘Sage,’ said Ax. He dropped the pebble into the pocket of his jacket.
‘What did he want?’
‘To tell me that he couldn’t sleep, I think. I’m sorry, Elder Sister. I should have had the phone switched off.’
She knelt close by him, with a dancer’s grace, warm from the bed, an incense-breathing shadow. The thrush was singing clearly now, flight upon flight of defiant joy, flung against the dark. ‘I’m not an ogre. You have a baby, suppose she had been taken ill. He was making you feel guilty, that’s not very dignified. Well, you may tell your partners I have no designs on their boyfriend.’
‘They know that. I’m sorry I gave you cause to have to say it.’
‘Though I would like to see you again.’
He nodded. He wasn’t about to say no, he couldn’t find the words for ‘yes’.
‘Elder Sister—’
‘My name is Li Xifeng,’ she corrected him gently.
Ax shook his head, smiling in apology. ‘I’m sorry, but you are jiejie. To me it’s your name, not a title. It reminds me of the Daoist Nun, and the way she came towards me in the night garden, that night in Anglia. When you called me friend Mohammad, because I’d given my coat to a cat. I’ll switch if you insist, but—’
‘Gracefully put,’ she said, ‘if not up to your own peerless standard.’
Fuck, now he’d insulted her. Better not dwell on it. Moving on.
‘Elder Sister, do you recall our conversation last night? About Europe?’
‘Of course.’
‘When you look back on it, I hope you’ll understand that I meant every word, and that I truly want to serve your cause. I’ve been thinking. I would like to arrange a meeting—if you’d be interested in talking privately to some Utopians, some of the significant delegates from the Landsturm. Would that be appropriate?’
She pondered.
‘Yes. I like the sound of that. We must see about arranging for them to come back to England, we should meet in London. Who would I meet?’
‘I’ll look into it, and send a list of suggestions to your office today.’
Last night there’d been nothing between them but random chemistry and the thrill of playing their roles. There was something more now; an orphan regret. It changed nothing, on either side. The emperor studied him from behind those beautiful eyes. He saw her putting his offer together with the phone call, and the alarming news Ax had delivered, so discreetly, a few hours before.
Taking it in, and deciding to let it go for the moment.
I will leave in good health, thought Ax. Even if she gets the emergency call. But viral pneumonia might be on the cards.
‘What is that bird?’ she said. ‘He sings every morning, from about this time until dawn; he was very loud in the spring. I am ignorant. Is that a nightingale?’
Another insomniac. Hey, compadre. ‘No, that’s a songthrush. Nightingales only sing for a short season in England, they’re pretty much over by now.’
‘Not so steeped in romance, then,’ said Elder Sister. ‘But he’s a fine, strong singer, and good company.’ She reached over to touch the bullet crease, smiling. ‘I don’t keep those souvenirs. My body is a peeled almond, its memories quickly fade. You should leave before sunrise, or people will talk, but that leaves us with an hour or so to spare. Why don’t you tell me the story of your heroic wound?’
The Sting
Ax returned to London, and sent his list of names along to Elder Sister’s office. It was received as if nothing untoward had been discovered. Days passed; still no reaction to the Sydenham strongbox raid, and this looked hopeful. As a rule, the state arrests you, gangsters come round and kill you. Rational big business keeps quiet about getting hacked, and waits for the ransom note. The geeks didn’t poke around too much, but they didn’t detect any increase in encrypted traffic between England and China. A week after the V team had freed Dilip, Ax sent a request to Wang Xili, Could the Triumvirate have a meeting with the Generals and Elder Sister, to discuss the unofficial Europe talks?
A response came within the hour: certainly, what a good idea.
They’d been staying at the Snake Eyes Commune; the old same place—which had become once more the HQ of the revolution. Cornwall was too far away, the Few and their leaders had felt like sticking together. They went to Chelsea on a warm, still afternoon, and walked from the Underground. The neighbourhood where Fiorinda had wandered, twelve years old and pregnant, looking for the address she’d somehow never learned, was quiet. The only people on these streets of slightly raffish privilege were Chinese soldiers. There were plenty of those: London was still an occupied city, and one of the Five Generals had his quarters here. At the armoured checkpoint, at the end of Wang Xili’s street they were greeted with beaming smiles and eager goodwill.
Wang himself received them, in the flat’s tiny hallway.
He was in uniform, elegant as always, but stiff with them: no sign of his lively charm, or his customary urbanity. No question the Chinese knew of the raid. Perhaps the collaborators were here to disclose, for their masters’ ears alone, the details of a conspiracy they had uncovered? From his manner, Wang didn’t appear to go for this explanation. He showed them into the gold-curtained living room.
‘I will inform Elder Sister that you have arrived.’
The Fiorinda gallery stared from every side, insistent on being noticed.
‘I’d forgotten it was this bad,’ said Sage. ‘It went out of my head.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I don’t care.’ Fiorinda wondered what she was doing up there. Standing in for Elder Sister? Maybe in China jiejie was everywhere. In England the personality cult behaviour that had begun to break out was severely discouraged. Perhaps Wang surrounded himself with glamour shots of a foreign rock babe, and thought of his own inamorata. She thought it didn’t matter much. She was deposed, dethroned, no longer the awful problem, and it was a very good feeling.
She had her tapestry bag, Sage carried his visionboard. It was okay that Cosoleth and Min were back at Snake Eyes, but it was a shame that Ax didn’t have his Gibson on his shoulder: because here they were at the end of the trail they’d embarked on as demoralised fugitives, clinging to their last treasures. They’d been in rags at Ashdown. Today they were rockstars, Sage and Ax in very fine pastel suits, Fiorinda in designer shalwar kameez: Eau de Nil green, with a silvery cobweb scarf over her hair. Not going to make a habit of it, but sometimes my prince deserves the solidarity of a little touch of hejab—
They belatedly realised they’d been standing in a dream, staring at each other like idiots: grinned ruefully and sat down. Ah remember Paris in the the springtime, in the long freeze, when we had nothing to do but be in love? They knew they’d been left alone in the faint hope that they might let something slip. They felt this boded well. We have them in a tizz.
‘Do you remember anything?’ asked Ax.
Fiorinda shook her head. ‘I don’t think it was all gold and shimmery like this, I have darker colours in mind. But it’s a blank. Oh, the bedroom was through there—’
She pointed, and memory stirred, faint and oddly poignant.
The door she pointed to opened. Wang held it wide for Elder Sister; Hu followed her. Imagine the Fifth Element, the world-conqueror, sitting in her General’s bedroom in this poky little flat, waiting to be summoned. But no doubt Li Xifeng had seen worse foxholes. She was not in uniform: she wore a crisp white shirt untucked, and blue jeans; her feet were bare. The Generals and their beloved leader sat down opposite the English Triumvirate, the low table between the two parties.
‘The meeting will be conducted in English,’ said General Hu.
Elder Sister looked long and hard at her Chosen One, and kept her eyes on him as she held out her hand to Wang, who swiftly opened the briefcase he had brought from the bedroom, and gave her a sheet of paper.
‘Now,’ said Elder Sister. ‘This list. Alain de Corlay, Naomi Erhlevy, Dominic and Mathilde Hategekimana, Märtha-Louise Behn, Fausto Lattani, Gerhard Bessard. I will not go on. All the names are well known to me, prominent in the decade of Crisis, some of them currently in high office. Have you anything to tell me about this clique, Ax? Something more than the rather vague remarks you made last time we met? About discontent, and what you called a backlash?’ She was not pleased with the word backlash. She bit it out, with a snap of her perfect teeth.
‘Not really,’ said Ax. ‘It’s as I said. Europe is in a poor state of repair, as a coherent entity, but there’s infrastructure that can be pulled together, and the will to join the Sphere is there. Those are some of your strongest supporters, people I think you should be talking to. What we’re hoping for is full partnership.’
‘There’s also a petition,’ said Fiorinda, ‘which so far comes only from us, and which we’d like you to consider, informally, this afternoon. We’d like the peaceful applications of neurophysics, the mind/matter tech you call shū, to be distinguished from the appallingly dangerous development which you call the “pernicious delusion”, and we have called the Neurobomb. We’d like to be able to share our shū technologies freely with other Sphere members.’
The Generals and the planet-destroyer took this on board. Wang and Hu were not quite stone-faced; it seemed they had thought of worse possibilities. Elder Sister showed neither fear nor relief. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I suppose this list—’ she whipped the paper with a flick of her wrist, ‘of “my best supporters”, is also a list of potential supporters for your petition. Is that all you have to say?’
‘I could add some new names.’
‘Add them.’
Ax began to list Sphere and Chinese luminaries, sufficiently unhappy about the global ban to be obvious; starting at the top. He spoke slowly, sticking to the names he was absolutely sure of. People under totalitarian rule say one thing and mean another, but the code’s transparent when you have the cipher. She raised a hand, before he ran out of the good stuff. He saw her recalibrating, finding her depth, not at all phased. A top predator challenged, completely fluid, completely open to her own best advantage—
‘So this is your game!’ cried Wang. ‘You expect Elder Sister to talk with the traitors who want to practice forbidden science!’
Elder Sister’s head snapped around, she silenced him with a phoenix stare of astonishment: from which Wang visibly recoiled.
Dried-up old Hu had the air of a man who was determined not to open his mouth at all. It was strange to think that he was probably around the same age as the woman clothed in youth, and crackling with energy, beside him.
‘I see you came equipped, Mr Pender, with the tools of your forbidden trade. I presume that means you have something to contribute to this discussion?’
‘Well, yeah, I do.’ Sage took the board from its case, and laid it on the table. ‘Hardly dyslexic at all, now,’ he remarked, with a friendly smile. ‘It’s clearing up nicely. But this isn’t going to be text-based. Where shall we start? I could show you the working record of a shoestring experiment we did last spring, when we sent someone, bi-location, to a low-orbit satellite. Dilip Krishnachandran,’ he added, deliberately, ‘was the guinea pig that time. A very brave guy, my friend DK. It was trifling of course, compared to what your taikonauts are up to in space, but we were pleased with it. That’s one way we could go… The other way is, we could look at a shorter trip, a place we found and the information I slurped up while I was there.’
It was quietly done. Insolent words, strangely at odds with the presence of the Triumvirate here, defenceless, simply asking for a hearing.
‘I presume you must be familiar with the mechanisms of b-loc? Maybe you have a version in development? Or were you just set up to capture anything that had the sig of forbidden tech, Hu?’
Please take this well, planet-destroyer. You’re what we have, art of the possible, we’ve worked with far worse people. Be the rightwise born world-conqueror Ax thinks you are, and be ready to deal—
‘Elder Sister, you once told me I shouldn’t make immersions, because I was meddling with the fabric of reality, and this was terribly dangerous. You’re right, mind/matter tech is terribly dangerous. It’s Galileo’s moons. It’s an extension of our human reach into realms that were mystic and unknowable an’ heaven only knows where it will lead us. But we seem to be on the same page vis à vis reaching into the unknown. Can we agree to that, and move on?’
Sage’s hands, with the long, square-tipped artist’s fingers, rested lightly on the closed board. The Generals kept quiet. Elder Sister looked to Ax, her expression hard to read. But Ax had nothing to add. Conquering the world is no account, a spectacle, a firework show. You just keep moving until your armies cover the board. If you want to rule the world, and make it anything approaching the Good State, that’s a different game, different rules. You know it. Your choice, Shi Huangdi.
Fiorinda thought of the courtesan. Did she really just randomly b-loc call him, to see what would happen, because of something Wang had let slip? And then what? What did the shade tell her? How was she caught? The way that kind of mystery is never solved until years later, when nobody cares. The way all these tumultuous events, in England, since the invasion, would blur into a paragraph. She looked at her own younger face up on the walls and had the eerie feeling that she must be hundreds of years old: a time traveller from an elder world.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘on the brink of modern China’s birth, a thinker called Lian Quichao asked, how can the nation be strong? When the people have knowledge, the nation is strong. How can the people have knowledge? When all the people under heaven read books and recognise characters, they will have knowledge. He spoke of written language. How strong will the World State be, when all the nations can read and write the code of reality?’
‘Well put,’ said Elder Sister. ‘A distant dream, but a good dream.’ She smiled, warm and clear. ‘I would like to see the low-earth orbit experiment, Sage. Soon; although not this afternoon. That sounds very interesting. As you are to become Sphere partners, your shū applications will be the property of the Sphere. And I will decide when and how the liberalisation occurs.’
‘Of course,’ said Ax.
The Generals relaxed, in a slow-taken breath. They must have been very scared. For a few days it must have looked as if the glorious unchecked rise of the whole great plan had hit a snag. Or, my God, worse, as if Elder Sister’s legend was about to get tarnished—
But it’s over, all smiles.
Fiorinda took a jewellery case from her bag.
‘You gave me some fine diamonds, Elder Sister. I have something here I would like to give to you. Our Crown Jewels are not personal property, nor State property. They belong to the reigning Sovereign, whoever that may be. We have decided this is ours to pass on, and that it ought to be yours.’
She offered the case. Elder Sister took it, opened it and set it down. A large unset white diamond lay in the velvet, a stellar brilliant, oval in shape; it had to be more than 100 carats. A very distinctive jewel.
‘This is the Koh-i-Noor.’
‘Yes,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Not quite a mountain. Some people say Queen Victoria shouldn’t have had it recut. But it’s not bad, is it?’
‘This was the property of the Queen of England,’ murmured Elder Sister. She looked at Fiorinda frankly. ‘You are too generous. This should be yours.’
‘The Moghuls used to say the Koh-i-Noor belongs by right to the ruler of the world.’ Fiorinda looked to Ax, and to Sage, they nodded. ‘We want that to be you.’
Elder Sister bowed a little, from the waist. ‘I am honoured. I am honoured by your trust, my three friends. I shall deserve it. I sincerely want to be the person Ax mentioned, ah, the other night.’
‘The baby clothes are lovely,’ said Fiorinda, discreetly accepting some kind of unspoken apology. ‘She’s still growing into some of them, which was truly thoughtful. I like “a girl is a boy, a woman is a man”. I like that: it unfolds.’
Elder Sister gazed for a moment longer on her new treasure, then she shut the case, and it was as if a light had gone out.
‘The meeting with the Utopian cadres will go ahead. England, and nominally Europe, will have partner status before next spring. This will entail the withdrawal of the 2nd AMID army, which I’m sure is high on your very bold, very Chinese agenda.’ She paused. ‘Now I will say something that goes no further than this room, and I will not elaborate. Until today we have been mortally afraid of each other, for no reason. From today, we share a sacred trust. Never again. Do you understand me?’
Never again.
On Ax’s second date with Elder Sister she took him into the garden that lay beyond the small doors in the Fu hall. Ax didn’t say anything, but she spotted that he didn’t like the marvellous scenery. She turned it off, leaving them with the real dimensions of a courtyard from old China: flowering shrubs in big pots, a rectangular pool bordered in dark green, shining stone. There were pretty fish in the pool, small grey and yellow koi; a little fat Buddha sat on a plinth in the middle.
She told him that the di had been the PLA’s downfall.
‘We had developed it long before the A-team experiments began, quite independently, from our own take on mind/matter. Deep in the heart of the semi-living particles there are transactions that pass the barrier between information space and normal space. The technology was secret because in China most people dislike the ideas you call “neurophysics”, they find them uncanny. It stayed secret because mystery had become a vital part of our aura. After the A-team event we were faced with a dilemma, but the right strategy seemed clear.’
‘Deny everything.’
‘Protect our superiority, and root out every threat. So we came to England as industrial spies, as well as conquerors. It was an error. We should have simply destroyed everything we found, then you would never have caught us out.’
The way they’d been caught out, the capture of DK’s virtual self, was not to be discussed. Can’t go there, loss of face territory; and that’s fine by me. He thought of the piled bodies he’d been shown in the Memorial Hall here at Reading, his reaction observed by the clinically attentive Lieutenant Chu. The destruction of Toby Starborn, and God knows how many others who had played forbidden music in her courts. They were one with the hecatombs of dead in the wake of her liberating progress: and the good tyrant felt no remorse. She has no reason to feel remorse, he reminded himself, because she is genuinely doing her best. He wondered how much she had known about what was going on in Cumbria. She’d certainly known about Sellafield, though not about the military option. Possibly she’d known about the forbidden tech up there; to an extent. And yet she’d held off, she’d given Ax a chance to talk them down—
She slaughters when she feels she must, for China. Accept that.
‘The di formula, and its relatives (yeah, he thought. Those expensive airships for instance?) will remain secret. They are part of our superiority. The western evolutionary lines, bi-location, and immersion code, will be vetted carefully and encouraged under close control. Would you really have tried to cause a global scandal? Shown us up for hypocrites?’
‘We didn’t believe it would come to that.’
She grinned, charmingly. ‘Oh no. You are our friends, you only wanted to show us that our security could be compromised, and that our secrets could be discovered. Ax, you keep forgetting that I know about you. You and that insolent “gentle giant” hacked the Internet Commissioners’ data quarantine. We know you did that, because you came to Asia, Hiroshima wasn’t it? Just to see if it could be done.’
‘We shouldn’t have. It was an arrogant, pointless trick. I have a mania for gambling. Oh, and my vanity is disgusting.’
She lay with her cheek pillowed on one slim, outstretched arm, watching him. ‘Deep in his heart, Ax Preston is convinced that he is the world’s model of rectitude. He can fail, he can make terrible mistakes, he never descends to moral error. It’s your great strength. It makes you, in your way, invincible. But as a result you don’t forgive people easily, and you take your own falls too hard.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Something I feel about you.’
A harvest moon had risen, full-bellied and yellow. It eased above the coping stones of the courtyard wall and Ax felt himself slipping backwards, falling off the curved flank of the world. Facing the wrong way… He understood, this time, that it was conflicted feelings causing the disquiet, not the feng shui of Reading Arena. A little touch of transient psychosis. He would lie here and make love with the woman who had ordered the Reading Massacre; who had arguably kept his friend (not Dilip, but something of Dilip) alive in the moment of burning to death; for months. And she had touched his heart. He looked into Li Xifeng’s eyes and saw someone who had ordered the massacres, who had condemned the prisoners, and was trying to stay human. He saw himself. An utterly different scale? Fuck that. She’s made ruthless choices, well so have we. What about when the invasion happened, and Ax Preston decided, in cold blood, to let the Chinese do his dirty work? Say I was helpless: I was not. I chose a certain course of action—
The confliction was getting to him. If she asked again, he would have to say no. But he knew that Elder Sister had divined this. There would be no third invitation, this was the last time. Talk, say whatever comes into your head.
‘Fiorinda can give me hell,’ he said, speaking to jiejie, the Daoist Nun, as to a true friend. ‘But I’m sure of her. She gives me hell the moment I step out of line, but she’s part of me. I’ll never be sure of Sage. I don’t know how to deal with how much I love him, I’m a bastard to him sometimes… Like when he insisted his dad had to know we were lovers. I didn’t get it. I said, if Joss wants to think we’re very good friends who share a girl, strictly no funny business, what’s the problem, it’s no big deal. This being Joss Pender, the software baron, you see—’
‘One of your most useful supporters.’
‘Yeah,’ Ax sighed, hard. ‘And a conservative type. It’s no big deal. God. Aeons ago now, in our catalogue of disasters, but I can hear myself saying it.’
‘There you go again. That doesn’t sound like a very shocking crime. Tell me, was it real? The time at Warren Fen, when A—’ She still had trouble giving Sage his name. ‘When Sage played “Apache” with you two. Norman says he was miming, but I couldn’t believe you three would do that.’
‘Hahaha.’
‘You were faking! You wankers!’ Elder Sister pounced on the English word with glee. ‘Ha! Now I know your secret and I shall destroy your legend!’ She fell on him, they tussled, it swiftly became very sexual. Ax reached for the six-pack he had tucked under a convenient cushion. He was old-fashioned about play-away sex, full jacket, accept no substitutes, no matter what. He’d used condoms last time.
Elder Sister’s slim hand came down over his.
‘No.’
‘Oh… Well, okay.’
He let it go and buried the implication: something he would not think about.
In the morning Lieutenant Chu drove him to Reading Station. He got out of the car. ‘Keep me on the path to lasting glory,’ said the spruce young girl-soldier.
‘You make too much of me,’ said Ax. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’
She looked up at him, wide-open. ‘You have become my superstition.’
Sage and Fiorinda picked him up at Bodmin in the old black Volvo. Fiorinda was driving, she did not move over. Sage was folded up in a knot in the rear seat, staring out of the back window. He didn’t speak, or look round.
‘Well,’ said Fiorinda, after several miles, ‘did you enjoy yourself?’
He’d thought about this conversation and contemplated lying, but there was no point, they’d be onto him at once. ‘Yes, in fact. I did. Very much.’
‘You going back again?’ asked Sage, dispassionately.
‘No. The dalliance is over.’
An orphan regret, a fear in case their future peace rested entirely on a planet-destroying ballet dancer’s infatuation for ‘Ax Preston’; and something that told him it would be okay. She is jiejie, she speaks to me as if she knows me, she came towards me in the night garden. She’s ruthless, but she won’t let me down.
They stopped at Ruthie’s to pick up Cosoleth. Ax had a flash, as he walked up the garden path in rich evening sun, between Ruthie’s dig-for-victory front beds of courgettes, tomatoes, bean tepees, spinach, onion sets, of a little girl in a blue dress and bare feet running towards him, a little girl of four or five years old, pearly teeth, eyes like stars, a bouncing mass of jet-black curls. The baby was a shock, but the grin was the same; except for a slight deficiency of teeth. The twin beeches were turning dark when they parked. The light had gone, September again already, and England’s still occupied; but wait, next spring. Wait.
Fiorinda took Coz indoors, at speed.
‘Sage? Please—?’
Sage had been loping for the back porch with a bleak, wounded expression, laden with the food trove he and Fiorinda had queued for in Bodmin Town. He dropped the bags, and grabbed the guitar-man. ‘Very fucking weird,’ muttered Ax, head down, shaken by afterburn, stung by the truth of what Elder Sister had said: I think my shit don’t stink…‘I swear I’ll never be a bastard to you again.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. Ssh. Whole thing, very fucking weird.’
But here we are.
Ah, summer, summer, always some kind of hell. Thank God it’s over.
