Jiang stood, then took the slip case Amos had given him from his pocket and looked at it again. How strange – how wonderfully strange that tale had been.
As a teenage boy, Amos had designed games for the computer market – games that had made his reputation. Yet the one which had made his fortune – the very last of them before the Collapse – was a game called World Domination.
The selfsame game Jiang now held in his hands.
According to Amos, a rival company had been busy mapping the globe, street by street, building by building, replicating it in their virtual world. It was a bold and wonderful idea, but also an expensive one. When they went under, Amos stepped in, raising the capital to buy their replicated world and using it as the foundation – the detailed underpinning – for his own game; a game in which rival players strove to destroy the old earth street by street and build a new one over it. A world of mile-high cities.
It was, so rumour had it, Tsao Ch’un’s favourite game.
They had met in 2040, five years before the Collapse. Tsao Ch’un, it seems, had flown halfway round the world to meet him – here, in Dittisham.
It was then that it had all been conceived. Root and branch.
Jiang turned the cover over, noting the date of publication. 2039. Amos had sold over one hundred million units worldwide, making him enough money to buy his parents’ old house, Landscot, along with 500 acres of surrounding land. It was back then that the notion of a Domain had begun, long before the City had appeared over the horizon.
Jiang yawned. The wine had made him tired. That and the meal, which Amos himself had cooked, using vegetables picked from his own garden.
He set the game aside, then, unzipping his travel case, took out his nightgown.
It was a year and more now since he had last worn it. Back when he was still a general, rounding up the last few natives – Welshmen, they called themselves – and processing them.
That was all done now, finished. Until they started on America.
He had peeled off his silk pau and was pulling the gown up over his head, when he heard footsteps on the gravel path below.
He finished dressing, then, leaning across the bed, looked down through the window at the darkened lawn.
There, in the light of the half moon, just a yard or two beyond the kitchen garden where the oak tree was, stood Amos with his back to the house. He was standing very still, hunched forward slightly, as if something had caught his attention.
Jiang looked past him, down to where the land ended on the shore of the bay.
No one. There was no one there. Only suddenly there was. Two of them, moving slowly, laboriously, climbing the slope, their long gowns hitched up about their ankles.
Two women, Jiang realized, seeing how the moonlight caught in their long, dark hair.
Jiang wondered where they had been. Whether Shepherd had, perhaps, sent them away while he was there, bringing them back overnight, then despatching them again once morning came, so that Jiang would not meet them.
Only why do that?
But then, Amos was strange. At least, that was what he’d heard. Only how much of that was true? What if he was just a very private man? What if he didn’t want other people to know his business?
Then why invite me here? Why not just meet me somewhere neutral? Somewhere free of all these impressions?
Jiang saw Amos greet them, hugging first one and then the other. Then, the two of them on his arms, he turned and came back up the path, dis appear ing inside the cottage.
Jiang went over to the door and stood there, listening. There was the low murmur of voices from below. A door closed, then there were sudden, urgent footsteps on the wooden steps.
Another door closed. For a moment there was silence, and then there was the sound of water passing through the pipes.
Someone was washing.
Jiang Lei looked to the timer inset into his wrist and yawned. It was just after one. He would sleep now, then ask Amos in the morning.
*
Waking with the dawn, Amos let Jiang sleep, instead going down to his basement workshop where he immersed himself in that morning’s news.
It was not the same news that was deemed fit for the general population. This was the real news, raw, uncensored. The same news that the Ministry’s First Dragon saw each day. The same that Tsao Ch’un himself digested every morning with his breakfast meal.
If the content of the general news channels was meant to reassure and encourage (and, of course, to praise the Great Father himself, from whom all bounty came), this assemblage of mayhem and destruction, betrayal, murder and sheer lunacy acted as a timely reminder that things were far from settled – and very far from perfect – in Tsao Ch’un’s City.
Men, after all, were still men. Nothing, it seemed, could change that.
Yet the problems could be contained. The madness could be channelled. All that was needed was an iron will and a determination not to let things get out of hand.
Among that morning’s items were two which particularly caught his attention. The first involved what they called a k’uang wang – one of the ‘frenzied’. These were men – for they were usually men – who snapped. In their frenzied madness, they ran amok among their fellow citizens, stabbing, slicing and causing as much pain as they could – as if to unload their own. This particular k’uang wang, however, had been extraordinarily inventive. A cook by trade, he had turned up at work that morning and proceeded to poison half the people in his deck, finishing matters off by chopping up the two Security guards who had been sent to detain him.
The second item was more sedate, less unusual, yet it still interested him; it spoke of a new phenomenon, one that was only recently emerging.
It seemed a boy had met a girl and, after a while, the two had fallen in love. In spite of the watching cameras and the even more watchful relatives of the girl, the two had managed to consummate their love. After a month or two, she began to show the obvious signs of pregnancy. All might have been well. The boy might have married the girl – he was certainly willing to – and they might all have lived happily ever after.
Only the girl was Han, the boy Hung Mao.
Just as soon as her condition became obvious, the girl’s uncles, furious that their family’s racial purity had been sullied, discovered who the boy was and burned the two alive in an oven.
The horrific brutality of the crime aside, it was that urge to purify the races – to mix but not to mix – that Amos found interesting. How did one break that chain of prejudice? Was it merely a question of time? Or had the seeds been sown when they had rid the world of the black and Asian races? Was it all doomed to fail? Would it all end in one gigantic bloodbath?
No one knew. But they were committed now. This melding of the races – this cheek-by-jowl approach to populating the levels – was what they had decided, and they must see it through now to the bitter end.
But there were signs that it was sometimes failing. Signs that, for all their efforts, humankind was not content with mere contentment. That whatever you gave them, they always wanted more.
Which, according to his mood, could be a good thing or a bad.
Why should mankind be content? Was he content?
Never. Not for a single fucking second.
He rarely swore, not even in his thoughts, but today…
Maybe it was Jiang’s presence, for the man had quite certainly thrown him. Amos had thought to find a fraud, a man pretending to be good. But Jiang Lei was the real thing.
An anomaly, then…
Today, he had decided, they would talk, exhausting themselves with words, so that tomorrow they might be tired of debate and come quickly to an agreement when decisions needed to be made.
Not that he wanted to force Jiang into agreement. It was just that his exper ience had shown that to dwell too long upon such matters would more likely compound errors than solve them.
Besides, if Jiang Lei fought his campaign the way he, Amos She
pherd, had decided they should fight it, then thirty Banners would be more than enough.
It was merely a question of focus. Of learning from past mistakes.
He returned upstairs. It was there, in the kitchen, as he was cooking breakfast, that Jiang Lei found him.
‘Amos… you slept well?’
‘Very well, thank you. And you?’
Jiang Lei laughed. A clear, light-hearted laughter. ‘You know, that’s the best night’s sleep I’ve had in years. That mattress was just so… not too soft, not too hard… and the down pillows…’
Amos smiled. ‘I’m glad. Would you like some breakfast?’
They sat outside, in the garden, to eat.
‘What’s the schedule for today?’
Amos was sitting facing him, his back to the view. ‘I thought we’d just relax. Talk about this and that. Just get to know each other.’
‘It’s just that… well, I thought…’
‘Let’s leave all that ’til tomorrow, yes?’ Amos studied him, then smiled again. ‘What did you think of him? Of Tsao Ch’un, I mean? You spent two days with him, right?’
Jiang Lei nodded, but he seemed suddenly defensive. ‘I…’
‘It’s okay. It’s all off the record here. No cameras. And no bugs. I don’t allow it. It’s part of our deal. Here I’m outside it all. My rules, not his. So tell me, did you think him somewhat… eccentric?’
‘No.’ There was no hesitation in Jiang’s answer. ‘I think it must be hard, living the way he does. I’d call it paranoid, only he has good reason to believe people are trying to kill him. Seventeen tasters dead. That’s a statistic the general public would be shocked to learn.’
‘And a dozen or more bodyguards…’ Only Amos was smiling broadly. ‘That stunt you did… throwing the cadre out of the back of your craft… that really amused him. Did he tell you that?’
Jiang looked stunned. ‘No.’
‘His sense of humour is… how should I put this… raw. People getting badly hurt… that amuses him. That probably makes him a sociopath, but it’s not enough to label him so. He’s a multifaceted man. What he’s trying to do… the idea of a world state shared by both our kinds… that’s rather heroic, wouldn’t you say? Visionary.’
Jiang Lei said nothing. He was still reeling from the fact that Tsao Ch’un knew what he’d done to Cadre Wang.
‘The bastard deserved it,’ Amos said, reaching for his coffee. ‘And it was a nice touch… good aiming by your men.’
Jiang looked to him. ‘You speak as if you saw it.’
‘And so I did. Tsao Ch’un sent me a copy, along with your file.’
‘Oh…’
‘You can see it if you want. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.’
Jiang Lei hesitated, then asked, ‘The two women who arrived… last night…’
‘My wife and daughter… you’ll meet them later.’
‘Ah…’ Jiang hesitated, then, changing the subject: ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand about Tsao Ch’un. His obsession with animals and insects – with killing them off.’
Amos nodded. ‘Now that I do know. It dates back to his childhood, to the time when he was the youngest of six brothers.’
‘He had five brothers? But I thought…’ Jiang fell silent. There was clearly a lot he didn’t know.
‘The eldest, Hsiao, was something of a bully. It was Hsiao who had his brothers dig a pit and throw Ch’un into it. And then, as if that were not enough, he had them pour jars of insects into the pit with him. All manner of nasty crawly things. Things that bit and things that stung, and others – perhaps the worst of all as far as he was concerned – that merely flapped and clicked.’
Shepherd looked down. ‘Three days he spent in that pit. Three whole days. Something broke in him. Trust, certainly, but more than that. One thing I’m sure of. Whatever Tsao Ch’un is now was forged in that pit.’
Jiang’s voice was almost a whisper now. ‘How old was he when this happened?’
‘Just six. You can imagine. And when they finally came back for him and lifted him up out of the pit, he swore silently that he would kill them – every last one.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. And when he learned that most animals carry some form of parasite or another, he put them too on his list of things he would kill when he was older.’
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘No. I got the story from one of his retainers. An old Han servant who had been with him since he was a child. He’s dead now, but I have no reason to doubt the truth of what he told me… Anyway, years later, when finally we met, the thing that was uppermost on his mind was how we might keep his City free of infestation. To me the answer was obvious. We had to seal the City off, hence the Net, the seals, the de-infestation chambers. Especially the last, which I conceived very much as a kind of airlock.’ Amos laughed. ‘Spaceship Earth, I used to call it.’
‘And the hexagonal shape of the stacks?’
‘I took that from my hives. I’ve kept bees since I was four. It’s such a strong shape, the hexagon. I’m astonished it never caught on architecturally.’
Jiang smiled. ‘I think you had the last laugh, neh?’
‘Maybe. As it is, the City is a vast recycling plant, a huge biosphere. It has to be. I used to liken it to a fish tank, awaiting its fish.’
Amos turned, looking back at the whiteness that surrounded the valley on all sides. ‘It looks so permanent, don’t you think? But it will all fall apart one day. Not today. Nor ten years from now. Not even a hundred years from now. But one day our descendants will wake up and it will have gone. We’ll have moved on. On to another stage of our perpetual development. But don’t tell your Master that. He doesn’t want to know. Ten thousand years, that’s what he wants.’ He laughed, robustly. ‘As if I could promise him that!
‘Anyway,’ he said, a moment later. ‘Let’s hunt. I’ll get my gun… and one for you… in case you change your mind.’
Jiang Lei had a short nap after lunch. Refreshed, he sought out Amos again, and found him beneath the oak tree, working on his painting.
It had changed greatly. Almost a third of the large canvas was now filled. Jiang walked over, standing behind Shepherd, squinting at the painting, trying to make out what it was.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t the view across the bay. It had the look of something symbolic. And the figures…
Amos’s figures were tiny. They were dwarfed by the canvas, like travellers in some vast wilderness.
‘Here,’ Amos said, handing Jiang a magnifying glass. ‘Don’t you like the detail?’
Jiang stepped closer, taking the glass, then looked. And looked again, his eyes widening. ‘But those…’ He laughed uncomfortably. ‘I don’t understand. Why have you turned them into insects?’
Amos looked to him and smiled. ‘Our conversation earlier suggested it. Tsao Ch’un may have kept the real insects out of his City, but the true insects got through. You recognize them, then?’
Jiang did indeed. As he studied them, he was struck by how clever Amos’s imagination was. Here was the whole of Tsao Ch’un’s court; all of his so-called friends and advisors, all of his stewards and servants, every last one of them captured perfectly, their faces pasted on to an array of verminous creatures. Faces of greed and lust and ambition. Faces stripped of their masks and revealed to the world in miniature.
He would have said it was wonderful, only it wasn’t. There was something quite awful about it, something utterly repellent.
Amos seemed to sense his reaction. ‘You don’t have to like it, Jiang Lei. It’s not meant to be liked. It has no Wen Ch’a Te, eh? No elegance. But sometimes that’s a virtue. Not to be liked. That is the condition that the great man aspires to.’
Jiang handed him the glass. He was about to say something, but Shepherd got there first.
‘I read those poems that you wrote. You know, the ones you didn’t want published. The spiky ones. They’re by far your best.’
&nb
sp; ‘But…’
‘You destroyed them, I know. But Tsao Ch’un had a spy-eye watching you. It was in your tent. Size of a very small bug. He used to watch you for hours. I didn’t know why, back then, but now I do. He made his mind up early when it came to you.’
Jiang looked down. If there’d been a spy-eye in his tent, then it was not just the poetry Tsao Ch’un would have seen. He had been faithful to Chun Hua, true, but that did not mean he had not relieved himself now and then. When things got really bad. And Tsao Ch’un would have seen that.
He felt… humiliated.
But Amos had moved on. ‘I promised you earlier that I’d introduce you to my girls. Let’s do that now. They’re working down by the water. We grow our own tobacco, you know.’
Jiang followed Amos down.
The slope dipped sharply at first, then rose a little. Beyond that it fell away again, ending at the water’s edge. There, to one side, behind a low wooden fence, the two women were at work, their hair tied back.
Amos stopped, then cleared his throat. The two women looked up.
Both were tanned from the sun, their long hair dark and lustrous, and both had beautiful green eyes – deep, sea-green eyes. The only difference was their age.
Like twins, they were. Twins separated by twenty years.
‘Alexandra… Beth… this is my good friend, Jiang Lei.’
The two climbed to their feet, then came across, smiling as each in turn took his hand and shook it.
‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ Alexandra, the elder of the two, said. ‘I’m sorry we weren’t here to welcome you yesterday.’
Beth, had looked down shyly, saying nothing.
‘We’ll see the girls at dinner tonight,’ Amos said, stepping carefully over the fence, then crouching to examine the leathery-looking plants. ‘Did you know our friend here is a poet? Probably the best Han poet of his age. His pen name is Nai Liu.’
‘Really?’ She seemed to look at him anew. ‘Then maybe you’ll read us some of your poems later, Enduring Willow…’
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