The Art of War

by David Wingrove

  Chen hesitated, then smiled and nodded. ‘Let it be so.’

  The rest of the Ping Tiao leaders had gone straight to the cruiser, clearly unnerved at being out in the open, but the woman, Ascher, held back, stopping at the rail to look out across the open mountainside. DeVore studied her a moment, then joined her at the rail.

  ‘The mountains. They’re so different...’

  He turned his head, looking at her. She had such finely chiselled features, all excess pared from them. He smiled, liking what he saw. There was nothing gross, nothing soft about her: the austere, almost sculpted beauty of her was accentuated by the neat cut of her fine, jet-black hair, the trimness of her small, well-muscled body. Such a strong, lithe creature she was, and so sharp of mind. It was a pity. She was wasted on Gesell.

  ‘In what way different?’

  She continued staring outward, as if unaware of his gaze. ‘I don’t know. Harder, I suppose. Cruder. Much more powerful and untamed than they seem on the screen. They’re like living things...’

  ‘They’re real, that’s why.’

  ‘Yes...’ She turned her head slightly, her breath curling up in the cold air.

  He inclined his head towards the cruiser. ‘And you... you’re different, too. You’re real. Not like them. This, for instance. Something in you responds to it. You’re like me in that. It touches you.’

  Her eyes hardened marginally, then she looked away again. ‘You’re wrong. We’ve nothing in common, Shih Turner. Not even this. We see it through different eyes. We want different things. Even from this.’ She shivered, then looked back at him. ‘You’re a different kind of creature from me. You served them, remember? I could never do that. Could never compromise myself like that, whatever the end.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know.’

  He smiled. ‘Have it your way. But remember this when you go away from here, Emily Ascher. I know you. I can see through you, like ice.’

  She held his gaze a moment longer, proudly, defiantly, then looked back at the mountains, a faint smile on her lips. ‘You see only mirrors. Reflections of yourself in everything. But that’s how your kind think. You can’t help it. You think the world’s shaped as you see it. But there’s a whole dimension you’re blind to.’

  ‘Love, you mean? Human understanding? Goodness?’ He laughed, then shook his head. ‘Those things don’t exist. Not really. They’re illusions. Masks over the reality. And the reality is like these peaks – it’s beautiful, but it’s also hard, uncompromising and cold, like the airless spaces between the stars.’

  She was silent a moment, as if thinking about what he had said. Then she turned back to him. ‘I must go. But thank you for letting me see this.’

  DeVore smiled. ‘Come again. Any time you want. I’ll send my cruiser for you.’

  She studied him a moment, then turned away, the smallest sign of amusement in her face. He watched her climb the steps and go inside. Moments later he heard the big engines of the cruiser start up.

  He turned and looked across towards the snow-buried blister of the dome. Lehmann was standing by the entrance, bare-headed, a tall, gaunt figure even in his bulky furs. DeVore made his way across, while behind him the big craft lifted from the hangar and turned slowly, facing the north.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Success,’ Lehmann answered tonelessly. ‘We’ve found the combination.’ He let his hand rest on Lehmann’s arm momentarily, turning to watch the cruiser rise slowly into the blue, then turned back, smiling, nodding to himself. ‘Good. Then let’s go and see what we’ve got.’

  Minutes later he stood before the open safe, staring down at the contents spread out on the floor at his feet. There had been three compartments to the safe. The top one had held more than two hundred bearer credits – small ‘chips’ of ice worth between fifty and two hundred thousand yuan apiece. A second, smaller compartment in the centre had contained several items of jewellery. The last – making up the bulk of the safe’s volume – had held a small collection of art treasures: scrolls and seals and ancient pottery.

  DeVore bent down and picked up one of the pieces, studying it a moment. Then he turned and handed it to Lehmann. It was a tiny, exquisitely sculpted figure of a horse. A white horse with a cobalt-blue saddle and trappings, and a light brown mane and tail.

  ‘Why this?’ Lehmann asked, looking back at him.

  DeVore took the piece back, examining it again, then looked up at Lehmann. ‘How old would you say this is?’

  Lehmann stared back at him. ‘I know what it is. It’s T’ang dynasty – fifteen hundred years old. But that isn’t what I meant. Why was it there, in the safe? What were they doing with it? I thought only the Families had things like this these days.’

  DeVore smiled. ‘Security has to deal with all sorts. What’s currency in the Above isn’t always so below. Certain Triad bosses prefer something more... substantial, shall we say, than money.’

  Lehmann shook his head. ‘Again, that’s not what I meant. The bearer credits – they were payroll, right? Unofficial expenses for the eight garrisons surrounding the Wilds.’

  DeVore’s smile slowly faded. Then he gave a short laugh. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It makes sense. Security has to undertake any number of things which they’d rather weren’t public knowledge. Such things are costly precisely because they’re so secretive. What better way of financing them than by allocating funds for non-existent weaponry, then switching those funds into bearer credits?’

  DeVore nodded. That was exactly how it worked.

  ‘The jewellery likewise. It was probably taken during the Confiscations. I should imagine it was set aside by the order of someone fairly high up – Nocenzi, say – so it wouldn’t appear on the official listings. Officially it never existed, so no one has to account for it. Even so, it’s real and can be sold. Again, that would finance a great deal of secret activity. But the horse...’

  DeVore smiled, for once surprised by the young man’s sharpness. The bearer credits and jewellery: those were worth, at best, two billion yuan on the black market. That was sufficient to keep things going for a year at present levels. In the long term, however, it was woefully inadequate. He needed four, maybe five times as much simply to complete the network of fortresses. In this respect the horse and the two other figures – the tiny moon-faced buddha and the white jade carving of Kuan Yin – were like gifts from the gods. Each one was worth as much as – and potentially a great deal more than – the rest of the contents of the safe combined.

  But Lehmann was right. What were they doing there? What had made Li Shai Tung give up three such priceless treasures? What deals was he planning to make that required so lavish a payment?

  He met the albino’s eyes and smiled. ‘I don’t know, Stefan. Not yet.’

  He set the horse down and picked up the delicate jade-skinned goddess, turning it in his hands. It was perfect. The gentle flow of her robes, the serene expression of her face, the gentle way she held the child to her breast: each tiny element was masterful in itself.

  ‘What will you do with them?’

  ‘I’ll sell them. Two of them, anyway.’

  Yes, he thought, Old Man Lever will find me a buyer. Someone who cares more for this than for the wealth it represents.

  ‘And the other?’

  DeVore looked down at the tiny, sculpted goddess. ‘This one I’ll keep. For now, anyway. Until I find a better use for her.’

  He set it down again, beside the horse, then smiled. Both figures were so realistic, so perfect in every detail, that it seemed momentarily as if it needed only a word of his to bring them both to life. He breathed deeply, then nodded to himself. It was no accident that he had come upon these things; neither was it instinct alone that made him hold on to the goddess now. No, there was a force behind it all, giving shape to events, pushing like a dark wind at the back of everything. As in his dreams...

  He looked up at Lehmann and saw how he was watching h
im.

  And what would you make of that, my ultra-rational friend? Or you, Emily Ascher, with your one-dimensional view of me? Would you think I’d grown soft? Would you think it a weakness in me? If so, you would be wrong. For that’s my strength: that sense of being driven by the darkness.

  At its purest – in those few, rare moments when the veil was lifted and he saw things clearly – he felt all human things fall from him; all feeling, all sense of self erased momentarily by that dark and silent pressure at the back of him. At such moments he was like a stone – a pure white stone – set down upon the board, a mere counter, played by some being greater than himself in a game the scale of which his tiny, human mind could scarcely comprehend.

  A game of dark and light. Of suns and moons. Of space and time itself. A game so vast, so complicated...

  He looked down, moved deeply by the thought: by the cold, crystalline-pure abstraction of such a vast and universal game.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Lehmann’s voice lacked all sympathy; it was the voice of mechanical response.

  DeVore smiled, conscious of how far his thoughts had drifted from this room, this one specific place and time. ‘Forgive me, Stefan. I was thinking...’

  ‘Yes?’

  He looked up. ‘I want you to track the woman for me. To find out what you can about her. Find out if it’s true what they say about her and Gesell.’

  ‘And?’

  He looked down at the jade-skinned goddess once again. ‘And nothing. Just do it for me.’

  She kept her silence until they were back in Gesell’s apartment. There, alone with him at last, she turned on him angrily, all of her pent-up frustration spilling out.

  ‘What in the gods’ names are we doing working with that bastard?’

  He laughed uncomfortably, taken aback by her outburst. ‘It makes good sense,’ he began, trying to be reasonable, but she cut him off angrily.

  ‘Sense? It’s insane, that’s what it is! The surest way possible of cutting our own throats! All that shit he was feeding us about his inflexibility and our potential for growth. That’s nonsense! He’s using us! Can’t you see that?’

  He glared back at her, stiff-faced. ‘You think I don’t know what he is? Sure, he’s trying to use us, but we can benefit from that. And what he said is far from nonsense. It’s the truth, Em. You saw his set-up. He needs us.’

  She shook her head slowly, as if disappointed in him. ‘For a time, maybe. But as soon as he’s wrung every advantage he can get from us, he’ll discard us. He’ll crunch us up in one hand and throw us aside. As for his “weakness” – his “inflexibility” – we saw only what he wanted us to see. I’d stake my life that there’s more to that base than meets the eye. Much more. All that “openness” he fed us was just so much crap. A mask, like everything else about our friend.’

  Gesell took a long breath. ‘I’m not so sure. But even if it is, we can still benefit from an alliance with him. All the better, perhaps, for knowing what he is. We’ll be on our guard.’

  She laughed sourly. ‘You’re naive, Bent Gesell, that’s what you are. You think you can ride the tiger.’

  He bridled and made to snap back at her, then checked himself, shaking his head. ‘No, Em. I’m a realist. Realist enough to know that we can’t keep on the way we’ve been going these last few years. You talk of cutting our own throats... well, there’s no more certain way of doing that than by ignoring the opportunity to work with someone like Turner. Take the raid on Helmstadt, for instance. Dammit, Emily, but he was right! When would we ever have got the opportunity to attack a place like Helmstadt?’

  ‘We’d have done it. Given time.’

  He laughed dismissively. ‘Given time...’

  ‘No, Bent, you’re wrong. Worse than that, you’re impatient, and your impatience clouds your judgment. There’s more at issue here than whether we grow as a movement or not. There’s the question of what kind of movement we are. You can lie to yourself all you want, but working with someone like Turner makes us no better than him. No better than the Seven.’

  He snorted. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it! What compromises have we had to make? None! Nor will we. You forget – if there’s something we don’t want to do, we simply won’t do it.’

  ‘Like killing Jelka Tolonen, for instance?’

  He shook his head irritably. ‘That makes good sense and you know it.’

  ‘Why? I thought it was our stated policy only to target those who are guilty of corruption or gross injustice?’

  ‘And so it is. What is Tolonen if not the very symbol of the system we’re fighting against.’

  ‘But his daughter...?’

  He waved her objection aside. ‘It’s a war, Emily. Us or them. And if working with Turner gives us a bit more muscle, then I’m all for it. That’s not to say we have to go along with everything he wants. Far from it. But as long as it serves our cause, what harm is there in that?’

  ‘What harm...?’

  ‘Besides, if you felt so strongly about this, why didn’t you raise the matter in council when you had the chance. Why have it out with me? The decision was unanimous, after all.’

  She laughed sourly. ‘Was it? As I recall, we didn’t even have a vote. That aside, I could see what the rest of you were thinking – even Mach. I could see the way all of your eyes lit up at the thought of attacking Helmstadt. At the thought of getting your hands on all those armaments.’

  ‘And now we have them. Surely that speaks for itself ? And Turner was right about the publicity, too. Recruitment will be no problem after this. They’ll flock to us in droves.’

  ‘You miss my point...’

  She would have said more, would have pursued the matter, but at that moment there was an urgent knocking on the door. A moment later Mach came into the room. He stopped, looking from one to the other, sensing the tension in the air, then turned to face Gesell, his voice low and urgent.

  ‘I have to speak to you, Bent. Something’s come up. Something strange. It’s...’ He glanced at Emily. ‘Well, come. I’ll show you.’

  She saw the way they excluded her and felt her stomach tighten with anger. The Ping Tiao was supposedly a brotherhood – a brotherhood! she laughed inwardly at the word – of equals, yet for all their fine words about sexual equality, when it came to the crunch their breeding took over; and they had been bred into this fuck-awful system where men were like gods and women nothing.

  She watched them go, then turned away, her anger turned to bitterness. Maybe it was already too late. Maybe Turner had done his work already as far as Bent Gesell was concerned; the germ of his thought already in Gesell’s bloodstream, corrupting his thinking, silting up the once-strong current of his idealism, the disease spreading through the fabric of his moral being, transforming him, until he became little more than a pale shadow of Turner. She hoped not. She hoped against hope that it would turn out otherwise, but in her heart of hearts she knew it had begun. And nothing – nothing she or any of them could do – could prevent it. Nothing but to say no right now, to refuse to take one more step down this suicidal path. But even then it was probably too late. The damage was already done. To say no to Turner now would merely set the man against them.

  She went through into the washroom and filled the bowl. While she washed she ran things through her mind, trying to see how she had arrived at this point.

  For her it had begun with her father. Mikhail Ascher had been a System man: a Junior Credit Agent, Second Grade, in the T’ang’s Finance Ministry, the Hu Pu. Born in the Lowers, he had worked hard, passing the Exams, slowly making his way up the levels, until, in his mid-thirties, he had settled in the Upper Mids, taking a Mid-Level bride. It was there that Emily had been born, into a world of order and stability. Whenever she thought of her father, she could see him as he had been before it all happened, dressed in his powder-blue silks, the big, square badge of office prominent on his chest, his face clean-shaven, his dark hair braided in the Han fashio
n. A distant, cautious, conservative man, he had seemed to her the paradigm of what their world was about; the very archetype of order. A strict New Confucian, he had instilled into her values that she still, to this day, held to be true. Values that – had he but known it – the world he believed in had abandoned long before he came into it.

  She leaned back from the sink, remembering. She had been nine years old.

  Back then, before the War, trade had been regular and credit rates relatively stable, but there were always minor fluctuations – tenths, even hundredths of a percentage point. It was one of those tiny fluctuations – a fluctuation of less than 0.05 of a per cent – that her father was supposed to have ‘overlooked’. It had seemed such a small thing to her when he had tried to explain it to her. Only much later, when she had found out the capital sum involved and worked out just how much it had cost the Hu Pu, did she understand the fuss that had been made. The Senior Credit Agent responsible for her father’s section had neglected to pass on the rate change and, to save his own position, had pointed the finger at her father, producing a spurious handwritten note to back up his claim. Her father had demanded a tribunal hearing, but the Senior Agent – a Han with important family connections – had pulled strings and the hearing had found in his favour. Her father had come home in a state of shock. He had been dismissed from the Hu Pu.

  She could remember that day well; could recall how distraught her mother was, how bemused her father. That day his world fell apart about him. Friends abandoned him, refusing to take his calls. At the bank their credit was cancelled. The next day the lease to their apartment was called in for ‘Potential Default’.

  They fell.

  Her father never recovered from the blow. Six months later he was dead, a mere shell of his former self. And between times they had found themselves demoted down the levels. Down and down, their fall seemingly unstoppable, until one day she woke and found herself in a shared apartment in Fifty-Eight, a child bawling on the other side of the thin curtain, the stench of the previous night’s overcooked soypork making her want to retch.