The White Mountain

by David Wingrove

At his back the mountains thrust high into the thin, cold air. He looked up into the greyness of the sky, then turned, looking across at the nearest peaks. The early daylight threw them into sharp relief against the sky. Huge, jagged shapes they were, like the broken, time-bared jawbone of a giant. Beneath, the rest lay in shadow, in vast depths of blue shading into impenetrable darkness. Cloud drifted in between, casting whole slopes of white into sudden shade, obscuring the crisp, paleocrystic forms. He watched, conscious of the utter silence of that desolate place, his warm breath pluming in the frigid air. Then, abruptly, he turned away, beginning to climb the slope.

  The rawness of the place appalled some part of him that wanted warmth and safety, yet the greater part of him – that part he termed his ‘true self’ – recognized itself in all of this. It was not a place for living, yet living things survived here, honed to the simplest of responses by the savagery of the climate; made lithe and fierce and cunning by necessity. So he, then. Rather this than the deadness of the City – that sterile womb from which nothing new came forth.

  He reached the crest and paused, looking back. The past with all its complex schemes was gone. It lay behind him now. From here on he would do it his way; would become a kind of ghost, a messenger from the outside, flitting between the levels, singular and deadly.

  A bleak smile came to his albinic eyes, touched the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. He felt no grief for what had happened, only new determination. This had not changed things so much as clarified them. He knew now what to do; how to harness all the hatred that he felt for them. Hatred enough to fill the whole of Chung Kuo with death.

  The cloud moved slowly south. Suddenly he was in sunlight again. He turned to his right, looking up towards the summit. There, at the top of the world, an eagle circled the naked point of rock, its great wings extended fully. The sight was unexpected yet significant; another sign for him to read. He watched it for some time then moved on, descending into the valley, heading north again towards his scantily provisioned cave. It would be hard, but in the spring he would emerge again, leaner and hungrier than before but also purer, cleaner. Like a new-forged sword, cast in the fire and tempered in the ice.

  He laughed – a cold, humourless sound – then gritted his teeth and began to make his way down, watching his footing, careful not to fall.

  INTERLUDE DRAGON’S TEETH

  WINTER 2207

  Without preparedness superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either. Having grasped this point, a force which is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack.

  —Mao Tse-tung, On Protracted War, May 1938

  It was dusk on Mars. On the Plain of Elysium it was minus seventy-six degrees and falling. Great swathes of shadow lay to the north, beneath the slopes of Chaos, stretching slowly, inexorably towards the great dome of Kang Kua City. Earth lay on the horizon, a circle of pure whiteness, back-lit by the sun. The evening star, they called it here. Chung Kuo. The place from which they had come, centuries before.

  DeVore stood at the window of the tower, looking out across the great dome of Kang Kua towards the northern desert and the setting sun. The messenger had come an hour back, bringing news from Earth. He smiled. And so it had ended, his group surrounded, his pieces taken from the board. Even so, he was pleased with the way his play had gone. It was not often that one gained so much for so small a sacrifice.

  He turned, looking back into the room. The morph sat at the table, its tautly muscled skin glistening in the dull red light. It was hunched forward, its hands placed either side of the board, as if considering its next play. So patient it was; filled with an inhuman watchfulness, with an inexhaustible capacity for waiting.

  He went across and sat, facing the faceless creature. This was the latest of his creations; the closest yet to the human. Closest and yet furthest, for few could match it intellectually or physically.

  He took a white stone from the bowl and leaned forward, placing it in shang, the south, cutting the line of black stones that extended from the corner.

  ‘Your move,’ he said, sitting back.

  Each stone he placed activated a circuit beneath the board, registering in the creature’s mind. Even so, the illusion that the morph had actually seen him place the stone was strong. Its shoulders tensed as it leaned closer, seeming to study the board, then it nodded and looked up, as if meeting his eyes.

  Again it was only the copy – the counterfeit – of a gesture, for the smooth curve of its head was unmarked; like unmoulded clay, or a shell waiting to be formed.

  So too its personality.

  He looked away, a faint smile on his lips. Even in those few moments it had grown much darker. The lights of the great dome, barely evident before, now glowed warmly, filling the cold and barren darkness.

  ‘Did you toast my death, Li Yuan?’ he asked the darkness softly. ‘Did you think it finally done between us?’

  But it wasn’t done. It was far from being done.

  He thought back, remembering the day when he had sent the ‘copy’ out, two weeks after the assassination squad. It had never known; never for a moment considered itself anything but real. DeVore, it had called itself, fancying that that was what it had always been. And so, in a sense, it had. Was it not his genetic material, after all, that had gone into the being’s making? Were they not his thoughts, his attitudes that had gone to shape its mind? Well, then, perhaps, in a very real sense, it was himself. An imperfect copy, perhaps, but good enough to fool all those it had had to face; even, when it turned to face the mirror, itself.

  He watched the morph lay its stone, shadowing his own one line out while at the same time protecting the connection between its groups. He smiled, pleased. It was the move he himself would have made.

  Shadowing… it was an important part of the game. As important, perhaps, as any of the final skirmishes. One had to sketch out one’s territory well in advance, while at the same time plotting to break up one’s opponent’s future schemes: the one need balanced finely against the other.

  DeVore leaned across and took a stone from the bowl, holding it a moment between his fingers, finding its cool, polished weight strangely satisfying, then set it down in p’ing, the east, beginning a new play.

  He stood and went to the window again, looking out across the lambent hemisphere of the dome to the darkness beyond.

  He had never returned from Mars. What had landed at Nanking ten years ago had been a copy – a thing so real that to call it artificial questioned definition – while he had remained here, perfecting his plays, watching, from this cold and distant world, how the thing he had made fared in his place.

  It had been impressive. Indeed, it had exceeded all expectations. Whatever doubts he had harboured about its ability had quickly vanished. By all reports it had inherited his cunning along with many other of his traits. But in the end its resources had proved insufficient. It had been but a single man, fragile in all the ways a single man is fragile. Karr’s rifle butt had split its skull and ended all its schemes. And so it was if one were single. But to amend the forgotten poet Whitman’s words, he would contain multitudes: would be like the dragon’s teeth that, when planted from the dragon’s severed head, would sprout, producing a harvest of dragons, each fiercer, finer than its progenitor.

  He breathed deeply then turned, looking at the morph again. Soon it would be time. They would take this unformed creature and mould it, mind and body, creating a being superior to those it would face back on Chung Kuo. A quicker, more cunning beast, unfettered by pity or love or obligation. A new model, better than the last.

  But this time it would have another’s face.

  He went across, placing his hand on the creature’s shoulder. Its flesh was warm, but the warmth was of the kind that communicated itself to the senses only after a moment or two: at first it had seemed cold, dead almost. Well, so it was, and yet, when they had finished with it, it would think itself alive; would defy God hims
elf had He said, ‘I made you.’

  But whose face would he put to this one? Whose personality would furnish the empty chambers of its mind? He leaned across the creature to play another stone, furthering his line in p’ing, extending out towards tsu, the north. A T’ang? A general? Or something subtler – something much more unexpected?

  DeVore smiled and straightened up, squeezing the creature’s arm familiarly before he moved away. It would be interesting to see what they made of this one, for it was different in kind from the last. Was what his own imperfect copy had dreamed of. An inheritor. The first of a new species. A cleaner, purer being.

  A dragon’s tooth. A seed of destruction, floated across the vacuum of space. The first stone in a new, more terrifying game. He laughed, sensing the creature move behind him in the semi-dark, responding to the noise. Yes, the first… but not the last.

  PART 17 THE WHITE MOUNTAIN

  SUMMER 2208

  Chi K’ang Tzu asked Confucius about government, saying, ‘What would you think if, in order to move closer to those who possess the Way, I were to kill those who do not follow the Way?’

  Confucius answered, ‘In administering your government, what need is there for you to kill? Just desire the good in yourself and the common people will be good. The virtue of the gentleman is like wind; the virtue of the small man is like grass. Let the wind blow over the grass and it is sure to bend.’

  —Confucius, The Analects, Book XII

  ‘All warfare is based on deception.’

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Book I, Estimates

  Chapter 71

  BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADOW

  Chen knelt patiently before the mirror as Wang Ti stood over him, brushing out his hair and separating it into bunches. He watched her fasten three of them at the scalp, her fingers tying the tiny knots with practised deftness. Then, with a glancing smile at his reflection, she began to braid the fourth into a tight, neat queue. As ever, he was surprised by the strength of her hands, their cleverness, and smiled to himself. A good woman, she was. The best a man could have.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, her fingers moving on to the second of the bunches, her eyes meeting his in the mirror.

  ‘Just that a man needs a wife, Wang Ti. And that if all men had wives as good as mine this world would be a better place.’

  She laughed; her soft, rough-edged peasant’s laugh, which, like so many things she did, made him feel warm deep down inside. He lowered his eyes momentarily, thinking back. He had been dead before he had met her. Or as good as. Down there, below the Net, he had merely existed, eking out a living day by day, like a hungry ghost, tied to nothing, its belly filled with bile.

  And now?

  He smiled, noting the exaggerated curve of her belly in the mirror. In a month – six weeks at most – their fourth child would be born. A girl, the doctors said. A second girl. He shivered and turned his head slightly, trying to look across at the present he had bought her only the day before, but she pulled his head back firmly.

  ‘Keep still. A minute and I’ll be done.’

  He smiled and held still, letting her finish.

  ‘There,’ she said, stepping back from him, satisfied. ‘Now put on your tunic. It’s on the bed, freshly pressed. I’ll come and help you with your leggings in a while.’

  Chen turned, about to object, but she had already gone to see to the children. He could hear them in the living-room, their voices competing with the trivee, his second son, the six-year-old Wu, arguing with the ‘baby’ of the family, Ch’iang Hsin, teasing her, as he so often did.

  Chen laughed. Things were good. No, he thought; things had never been better. It was as if the gods had blessed him. First Wang Ti. Then the children. And now all this. He looked about him at the new apartment. Eight rooms they had. Eight rooms! And only four stacks out from Bremen Central! He laughed, surprised by it all, as if at any moment he might wake and find himself back there, beneath the Net, that all-pervading stench filling his nostrils, some pale, blind-eyed bug crawling across his body while he had slept. Back then, simply to be out of that hell had been the total of his ambitions. While this – this apartment that he rented in the upper third, in Level 224 – had seemed as far beyond his reach as the stars in the midnight sky.

  He caught his breath, remembering, then shook his head. That moment on the roof of the solarium – how long ago had that been now? Ten years? No, twelve. And yet he remembered it as if it were yesterday. That glimpse of the stars, of the snow-capped mountains in the moonlight. And afterwards, the nightmare of the days that had followed. Yet here he was, not dead like his companion, Kao Jyan, but alive: the T’ang’s man, rewarded for his loyalty.

  He pulled on his tunic, then looked at himself in the mirror. It was the first time he had worn the azurite-blue ceremonial tunic and he felt awkward in it.

  ‘Where’s that rascal, Kao Chen?’ he asked his image, noting how strange his hair looked now that it was braided, how odd his blunt, nondescript face seemed set against such elegant clothes.

  ‘You look nice,’ Wang Ti said from the doorway. ‘You should wear your dress uniform more often, Chen. It suits you.’

  He fingered the chest patch uncomfortably, tracing the shape of the young tiger there – the symbol of his rank as Captain in the T’ang’s Security forces – then shook his head. ‘It doesn’t feel right, Wang Ti. I feel overdressed. Even my hair.’

  He sniffed-in deeply, then shook his head again. He should not have let Wang Ti talk him into having the implants. For all his adult life he had been happy shaving his scalp, wearing its bareness like a badge, but for once he had indulged her, knowing how little she asked of him. It was four months now since the operation had given him a full head of long, glistening black hair. Wang Ti had liked it from the first, of course, and for a while that had been enough for him, but now his discontent was surfacing again.

  ‘Wang Ti…?’ he began, then fell silent.

  She came across, touching his arm, her smile of pride for once making him feel uncomfortable. ‘What is it, husband?’

  ‘Nothing.’ he answered. ‘It’s nothing…’

  ‘Then hold still. I’ll do your leggings for you.’

  The woman was leaning over the open conduit, reaching in with the fine-wire to adjust the tuning, when Leyden, the elder of the two Security men, came up with a bulb of ch’a for her. She set the wire down, looking across at him as she peeled off her elbow-length gloves.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said softly, and sipped at the steaming lip of the bulb.

  ‘How much longer, Chi Li?’

  Ywe Hao looked up, responding to the false name on her ID badge, then smiled. It was a beautiful smile; a warm, open smile that transformed her plain, rather narrow face. The old guard, seeing it, found himself smiling in return, then turned away, flustered. She laughed, knowing what he was thinking, but there was nothing mocking in her laughter, and when he turned back, a trace of red lingering in the paleness of his neck, he too was laughing.

  ‘If you were my daughter…’ he began.

  ‘Go on. What would you do?’ The smile remained, but fainter, a look of unfeigned curiosity in the young woman’s eyes. Still watching him, she tilted her head back and ran one hand through her short dark hair. ‘Tell me, Wolfgang Leyden. If I were your daughter…’ And again there was laughter – as if she hadn’t said this a dozen times before.

  ‘Why… I’d lock you up, my girl. That’s what I’d do!’

  ‘You’d have to catch me first!’

  He looked at her, the web of wrinkles about his eyes momentarily stark in the brightness of the overhead light, then he nodded, growing quieter. ‘So I would… So I would …’

  Their nightly ritual over, they grew silent. She drained the bulb, then pulled on her gloves and got back to work, crouching there over the conduit while he knelt nearby, watching her clever hands search the tight cluster of filaments with the fine-wire, looking for weak signals.

  There was
a kind of natural fellowship between them. From the first – almost three weeks ago now – he had sensed something different in her; in the way she looked at him, perhaps. Or maybe simply because she, twenty years his junior, had looked at him; had noticed him and smiled her beautiful smile, making him feel both young and old, happy and sad. From that first day had come their game – the meaningless banter that, for him at least, was too fraught with meaning to be safe.

  ‘There!’ she said, looking up. ‘One more of the fiddly little buggers done!’

  Leyden nodded, but he was still remembering how her top teeth pulled down the pale flesh of her lower lip when she concentrated; how her eyes filled with a strange, almost passionate intensity. As if she saw things differently. Saw more finely, clearly than he.

  ‘How many more?’

  She sat back on her heels and drew in a deep breath. ‘Eighty-seven junctions, one hundred and sixteen conduits, eleven switches and four main panels.’ She smiled. ‘Three weeks’ work at the outside.’

  She was part of a team of three sent in to give the deck its biannual service. The others were hard at work elsewhere – checking the transportation grid for faults; repairing the basic plumbing and service systems; cleaning out the massive vents that threaded these upper decks like giant cat’s cradles. Their jobs were important, but hers was the vital one. She was the communications expert. In her hands rested the complex network of computer links that gave the deck its life. There were back-ups, of course, and it was hard to cause real damage, but it was still a delicate job – more like surgery than engineering.

  ‘It’s like a huge head,’ she had told him. ‘Full of fine nerves that carry messages. And it has to be treated like a living mind. Gently, carefully. It can be hurt, you know.’ And he recalled how she had looked at him, real tenderness and concern in her face, as if the thing really were alive.

  But now, looking at her, he thought, Three weeks. Is that all? And what then? What will I do when you’re gone? Seeing him watching her, she leaned across and touched his arm gently.