Daylight on Iron Mountain

by David Wingrove

  ‘If I could turn back time…’

  ‘Yes,’ Shepherd said, softer than before. ‘And yet you can’t.’

  Li Chao Ch’in was silent for a time, staring at his hands, then looked up at Shepherd again.

  ‘We won,’ he said quietly, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe we won.’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘I know. But that’s the easy part.’

  EPILOGUE Lilac Time

  SUMMER/WINTER 2098

  ‘Going to see the river man

  Going to tell him all I can

  About the ban

  On feeling free.’

  —Nick Drake, ‘River Man’, 1969

  LILAC TIME

  Jake stood beneath the arch, getting his breath, looking out across the sunlit veranda towards where the children were playing.

  It was late morning and he had woken from a dream. A rare dream. Of Corfe. One that bore no resemblance to his usual fogged and half-formed recollections. No. This once he had been there, looking back from the ridge-way, the castle’s shape cut cleanly against the blue of the sky.

  In the dream he had felt the wind tickling the hairs on his arm, felt the sun’s warmth on his back through his thick cotton shirt. Late summer, back in the days, before China had come.

  One of the children noticed him; saw him standing there in the great curve of the moon door, and ran over to him.

  It was Cath’s youngest, Beatrice. The vivacious nine-year-old was wearing a special blue silk dress for the occasion. She looked like a Han princess, her dark hair coiled in a bun, a delicate pink and blue butterfly brooch securing it.

  The Han clothes the children wore these days confused him sometimes; made them all look the same, but Beatrice was different. She was her own person. A real character. Which was why she was one of his favourites.

  He bent down, his ancient features creased into a smile. ‘Hey, sweetheart. You been here long?’

  She grinned back at him. ‘We’ve been here hours, Yeh-yeh… Auntie Meg said we weren’t to make too much noise. She said that you and Nanna needed your sleep, but it gets awfully boring being quiet!’

  He laughed. ‘Well, now you don’t have to. Now you can make as much noise as you like!’

  He watched her run away and rejoin her playfellows, eager to tell them the good news.

  Jake stretched and yawned.

  Maybe it was just the day. Birthdays always got him thinking, and Mary’s birthday more than most. They would all be here later on – family and friends. Here to celebrate, before it was all gone. Before…

  He stopped himself.

  Savour it while you can. Before the world is nothing but ghosts.

  Jake turned, looking back at the big, three-tiered house. Peter had done well for himself. Very well. Only there was something overbearing about these big Han mansions that set his teeth on edge. Grand they might be, and elegant… but they were dauntingly uncomfortable. All those big vases and formal chairs. Like living in a giant waiting room.

  ‘Yes, but waiting for what?’ he said quietly, and laughed.

  He was still chuckling when Beth came out.

  ‘Daddy… why didn’t you say you were up?’

  ‘I’ve only just surfaced. I’ve left Mummy in bed. Thought she could do with an extra hour.’

  Beth smiled at that, then leaned in, embracing him and kissing his cheek warmly, the scent of plum blossom washing through his senses.

  Again, it was distinctly Chinese.

  As she stepped back he looked at her, studying her face.

  In her fifties now, Beth was still a lovely woman. There were signs of ageing, sure, at her neck and in the skin of her arms, but the crow’s feet about her eyes only enhanced her beauty. Or so he thought.

  ‘What’s Peter up to?’

  Her smile was beautiful.

  ‘Organizing things. You know how Peter is. He’s been up since dawn.’

  Dawn, Jake thought. Lights up, more like. But he said nothing. He’d promised Mary he’d not cause any trouble today or say all the wrong things like he sometimes did. No. He was going to be on his best behaviour. But it still rankled, beneath the surface. The fakeness of this world of theirs.

  ‘I… had a dream,’ he said hesitantly, looking away, not wanting her to see how much it had troubled him.

  ‘A dream?’

  ‘Of the old days. It woke me.’

  ‘Ah…’

  Yes, ‘Ah…’ he thought, and wondered how they managed that particular trick – the not-thinking-of-how-it-was trick. They seemed to find it easy, whereas he…

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said quietly, looking to her again, conscious of the camera on the eaves nearby. ‘I won’t misbehave.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, as if to a little boy, then leaned close to kiss him again. ‘Now I must go through and help the others.’

  ‘You should have got caterers,’ he said. ‘All that work…’

  But Beth would have none of it. ‘You know how much Meg and Cath like to do it all themselves. And besides, it’s not just about preparing the food. It’s the talk. We get so little chance to catch up on things.’

  ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘A nine-course meal. Lots of things you’ll like, don’t worry.’

  Maybe and maybe not, he thought, but he’d been hoping that they’d do a barbecue, like in the old days. Only that too was fraught with danger. Anything that touched upon the past.

  He watched Beth go, then, with one last wistful glance across at the children, turned and went back inside.

  Jake had been sitting in the low armchair this last hour and more, half dozing in the sun. Mary, the subject of all this activity, was sitting forward in the chair to his right, laughing and joking, as full of life as she always was on these occasions and acting as though the last thirty years had changed nothing.

  He didn’t know how she did it, but he sometimes wished he felt more comfortable in his skin – like she did. She and her brood, all of whom were here today. When you counted the in-laws, it came to four daughters, three sons and a full seventeen grandchildren, not to speak of two great-grandchildren.

  Not bad going, he thought, looking about him, for a man who’d lost everything.

  It was some while since he’d thought about it, but today, for some reason, it had all come flooding back. That first day of his new life. That fated day when he had walked into the village and been taken in by them. Tom and Mary and all the rest. His friends. The best friends he’d ever had.

  Maybe it was that dream of Corfe that had set this off – this brooding, sentimental mood – but he could not shake it.

  Across from him, Peter was talking about how his employers, GenSyn, had survived the Collapse. How Tsao Ch’un’s man, Chao Ni Tsu, had selected a small elite of companies, buying stock heavily in the weeks before the Collapse to keep them afloat; maintaining them as going concerns until the time came when they could be useful again, in the reconstruction.

  It wasn’t something that was generally known, not something the authorities particularly wanted known, but it wasn’t forbidden. Not like most of it.

  Jake’s thoughts drifted momentarily.

  In his head he could see it vividly: could see the slope below the farmhouse, the land stretching away to the sea, which lay there in the bright morning sunlight like a sheet of beaten brass. And halfway down, almost hidden by the vegetation, Ma Brogan’s house. Sweet woman that she’d been.

  He sighed, then looked to his son again. Did Peter ever think of that? Did he remember anything of those years? Or was it gone, no traces left, erased as if it had never been, the tape wiped?

  The conversation had moved on. Now they were talking about the new biography of Tsao Ch’un that had come out a month or so ago. ‘A Reassessment’ as it had been subtitled, published with the Ministry’s permission. A regular monster of a book, more than a thousand pages long. Jake had seen a copy of it on the kitchen table. Peter’s probably. It was a runaway bestseller a
nd several of the family had read it. There was to be a TV series. But…

  May he rot in hell…

  The truth was, Jake didn’t want to know why Tsao Ch’un had done what he did. The only thing that mattered was the suffering he’d caused, and no apologist could excuse that. Suffering on a scale that was unimaginable. And the deaths…

  The whispered ‘truth’ was that four billion had died to get Tsao Ch’un’s City up and running. Four billion. The thought of it was staggering. And now they wrote books on him, reassessing his life and motives. As if one could reassess such a monster.

  Jake looked down. He could do with a drink. Only his children conspired to keep him from drinking these days, lest he ‘embarrass himself’.

  Embarrass you, more like…

  He looked across again, noting the animation in Peter’s face as he talked. He’d been a good son all these years. The very model of filial piety. That was just it. Peter had absorbed this world. Had become an intrinsic part of it, from hairstyle and mannerisms down to the silken pau he wore. More Han than the Han.

  ‘Peter…?’

  Peter turned and looked to him, smiling. A smile of infinite tolerance. ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Do you ever think of Boy?’

  It was not the kind of question one should ask. Only he felt compelled. He wanted to know.

  ‘Boy?’

  Jake held his son’s eyes a moment, then looked away. He didn’t remember. He genuinely didn’t seem to remember.

  Your dog, he wanted to say. Don’t you recall? You loved that dog and they shot it. Those bastards killed it without a thought. Those bastards you work for now. Those same bastards who won’t let you wear denim or listen to rock music.

  It was unsayable. It was all unsayable. Like in that Ray Bradbury novel. What was it called now?

  He shook his head. ‘It’s okay, lad. It doesn’t matter…’

  Even if it does…

  Peter watched him a moment, smiling still. A smile of infinite tolerance and respect. Not a Western smile at all. Oh, Jake knew his son loved him. There were endless little kindnesses that testified to such. But it was in a Han fashion, like everything in their world.

  How he yearned for something pure, something untainted. A broad West Country accent, maybe, or a jug of ale – real ale – something peppery and strong and not the processed piss they served up as beer in this great world of levels.

  One couldn’t buy such things, not for a prince’s fortune.

  Jake eased back a little, letting his head press back into the silken cushions and closing his eyes, as if he were dozing. But he was wide awake now. Not sleepy in the least.

  So just what DO you remember?

  It was a game he played a lot these days. To fill the void and stop himself from slowly losing touch.

  The idea was a simple one. He had to remember ten things he had forgotten. To go down into that dark labyrinth of the mind and haul them out into the glare of the sun, remembered.

  Like the Jesuits long before him, he set himself strict rules. For a start, nothing could be ‘remembered’ twice. The point of it was, after all, to recover ‘new’ memories. To dredge up fragments that, until that moment, had been lying there hidden, discarded in the dark.

  Yes, and to reverse the flow. To counter that great drift towards forgetting, if only in my own head.

  To begin with, he was to allow himself only two musical referents. Beside which were four other specific categories – art, film, books and sport. That left four slots for more general remembrances. Things from history, or science maybe, or…

  The first came to him at once. A memory of the US President, Barack Obama, on the steps at his inauguration, standing where Martin Luther King had stood before him to give his landmark speech. Back when there’d been black men in the world. Before the Han had erased them.

  Jake sighed, for as so often was the case, the memory came to him not pure and isolated, but embedded in some other thing. That was the thing about memory.

  He could recall where he’d been when he’d seen that ancient footage. Could see the big old television set in the corner of his grandparents’ living room, could smell the musty smell of that house.

  He had always been sharp of mind. That was what had made him such a good web-dancer. But for a long time he had not exercised those skills. The long years since had eroded something of his sharpness.

  He relaxed, concentrating, letting his mind do what it did best.

  A work of art… something… Dutch?

  It came to him at once, and with it the memory of actually seeing it, facing him across the room, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The canvas had been massive, the figures life-size. They had spent a long weekend there in Amsterdam, he and Alison. He remembered walking right up to the painting. Remembered standing there, staring into those thick layers of paint, as if he might step through into the canvas itself.

  Rembrandt… The Nightwatch…

  Which brought his third, and with it, in his head he heard the sound of an electric violin and thought of a drunken afternoon spent in the company of Old Josh, King Crimson’s Starless And Bible Black blaring from the speakers. West Country boys, as Josh liked to remind anyone who’d listen.

  Jake smiled, recalling Josh’s face. That mischievous smile he sometimes had…

  And focused again. A book this time, maybe. Something unusual…

  He had it at once, almost as if the book itself had leapt out from the shelf into his hand.

  In his mind he turned it, studying the orange and white cover. Such a slender, magical little book it was.

  Chinua Achebe… Things Fall Apart.

  He remembered finding it on one of the shelves in the hallway of the house in Church Knowle, intrigued by the writer’s name. Remembered how he’d meant to sample a paragraph or two and put it back, and how he’d spent the rest of the day curled up on the old sofa in the back room, immersed in Achebe’s evocative little tale of clashing cultures.

  Back when Annie was alive…

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him.

  ‘Dad?’

  Jake looked up, half startled. ‘Wha…? Oh… oh, it’s you, Meg. I thought…’

  For a moment he had been back there. For a moment…

  ‘I thought you might like to go inside for a bit, Dad. Have a little lie down before the guests arrive.’

  It was kind of her. Thoughtful even. Only he didn’t want to go back inside. He was quite happy where he was, lost in his memories. But he knew what they were thinking. If he got tired he’d get cranky. So best let him have an hour or two before the party got going.

  ‘All right, sweetheart,’ he said, letting her help him up out of the chair. ‘You finished doing the food?’

  She smiled and took his arm, leading him through. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. It’s all done. Looks lovely, it does. We’ve really done Mum proud, see if we haven’t.’

  He nodded, sure that what she said was true. Except that wasn’t what he wanted to ask. Looking at her, he felt something else bubble up out of the darkness.

  ‘Meg?’

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘I…’

  He stopped, his mouth suddenly dry. His eyes met hers briefly, wide, startled eyes that stared out of his old face.

  ‘Dad?’

  He looked away, giving the vaguest little shrug.

  Inside, in the shadows of the guest room, he let her take off his slippers and get him stretched out on the bed. Then, with a peck on the forehead, she was gone, leaving him alone.

  Jake lay there, staring up into the dark.

  For one crazy moment he had been about to ask her how it had felt all these years, watching her sisters give birth to child after child, while she…

  He hesitated to say it, even in his own head, but the words still came.

  While she was barren…

  Not that she seemed bitter. Of all Tom’s girls, she had been closest to him, a real darling of a daughter-in-law and
now that she was older, the very image of his own Annie.

  When he thought about it, he couldn’t believe that she didn’t rage against her fate, at some deep and instinctive level, the same way he raged against his. That she masked her childlessness in the same way that the rest of them masked their past lives; hiding them away, lest they prove too damaging.

  Forgetting. Yes. It was all a process of forgetting.

  Jake put out his hand and found hers, there in the darkness next to him. Closing his fingers about hers, he lay there, eyes shut, listening to her breathing.

  Somewhere, far off, there were noises, but it could have been a thousand miles away.

  Or a hundred fathoms deep.

  He wanted to talk to her, to tell her how she had kept him sane all these years; how, without her there to whisper to in the darkness, he would have gone mad.

  No, he would not have survived, head games or otherwise. It would have been a slow suffocation. Death by inches.

  Yes, and even the word was banned now. Inches and feet, yards and furlongs, bushels and pecks… It was all chi and sheng now. The conquest complete.

  For a moment he drifted. Unaware of what he was doing, he began to hum a tune.

  And stopped. Was he imagining it, or had he once sat in a bar, somewhere downlevel, listening to some weird hybrid of traditional Han music and Western rock? What had that been about? Some strange experiment, perhaps – an attempt to soften the blow? If so, it hadn’t lasted long, for the music they played now on the radio was totally Han, and thus totally anodyne – a mixture of traditional music, cloyingly sweet pop and stirring martial themes.

  Piss poor the lot of it!

  It was like this latest business with TV. According to the authorities, next year was the four hundredth anniversary of television. Four hundred! It was laughable. Completely laughable. Only no one was laughing. According to the powers-that-be, television had been invented back in 1699. It was ‘a fact’.

  And that was it. That was what made him catch his breath. The sheer audacity of it all. The lie so huge it seemed impossible to swallow. Yet swallow it they had.