DeVore smiled blandly. Ebert was a shallow, selfish young man, but he was useful. He would never be T’ang, of course – it would be a mistake to give such a man real power – but it served for now to let him think he would.
‘Your brandy is excellent, Hans.’ DeVore walked to the window and looked out. The mountains looked beautiful. He could see the Matterhorn from where he stood, its peak like a broken blade. Winter was coming.
Ebert was silent, waiting for him.
‘What’s in it for you, you ask? This world. To do with as you wish. What more could you want?’ He turned to face the younger man, noting at once the calculation in his face.
‘You failed,’ Ebert said after a moment. ‘There were many of you. Now there’s just you. Why should you succeed this time?’
DeVore tilted his head, then laughed, ‘Ah, yes...’
Ebert frowned and set his glass down. ‘And they’re strong.’
DeVore interrupted him. ‘No. You’re wrong, Hans. They’re weak. Weaker than they’ve been since they began. We almost won...’
Ebert hesitated, then nodded. It was so. He recognized how thin the Families were spread now; how much they depended on the goodwill of those in the Above who had remained faithful. Men like his father.
And when his father was dead?
He looked up sharply, his decision made.
‘Well?’ DeVore prompted. ‘Will you be T’ang?’
Ebert stood, offering his hand.
DeVore smiled and set his drink down. Then he stepped forward and, ignoring the hand, embraced the young man.
Part 13
Artifice and Innocence
Spring 2207
‘The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it.’
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil
‘Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked touch of this flower down the dark and darker steps, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
of a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.’
—D. H. Lawrence, Bavarian Gentians
Chapter 54
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD
A bank of eight screens, four long, two deep, glowed dimly on the far side of the darkened room. In each lay the outline image of a hollowed skull. There were other shapes in the room, vague forms only partly lit by the glow. A squat and bulky mechanism studded with controls was wedged beneath the screens. Beside it was a metallic frame, like a tiny four-poster stretched with wires. In the left-hand corner rested a narrow trolley containing racks of tapes, their wafer-thin top edges glistening in the half-light. Next to that was a vaguely human form, slumped against a bed, its facial features missing. Finally, in the very centre of the room was a graphics artboard, the thin screen blank and dull, the light from the eight monitors focused in its concave surface.
It was late – after three in the morning – and Ben Shepherd was tired, but there was this one last thing to be done before he slept. He squatted by the trolley and flicked through the tapes until he found what he wanted, then went to the artboard and fed in the tape. The image of a bird formed instantly. He froze it, using the controls to turn it, studying it from every angle, as if searching for some flaw in its conception, then, satisfied, he let it run, watching as the bird stretched its wings and launched into the air. Again he froze the image. The bird’s wings were stretched back now, thrusting it forward powerfully.
It was a simple image in many ways. An idealized image of a bird, formed in a vacuum.
He sorted through the tapes again and pulled out three, then returned to the artboard and rewound the first tape. That done he fed the new tapes into the slot and synchronized all four to a preset signal. Then he pressed to play.
This time the bird was resting on a perch inside a pagoda-like cage. As he watched, the cage door sprang open and the bird flew free, launching itself out through the narrow opening.
He froze the image, then rotated it. This time the bird seemed trapped, its beak and part of its sleek, proud head jutting from the cage, the rest contained within the bars. In the background could be seen the familiar environment of The Square. As the complex image turned, the tables of the Café Burgundy came into view. He could see himself at one of the nearer tables, the girl beside him. He was facing directly into the shot, his hand raised, pointing, as if to indicate the sudden springing of the bird, but her head was turned, facing him, her flame-red hair a sharp contrast to the rich, overhanging greenery.
He smiled uncertainly and let the tape run on a moment at one-fifth speed, watching her head come slowly round to face the escaping bird. In that moment, as she faced it fully, the bird’s wing came up, eclipsing the watchers at the table. There it ended.
It was a brief segment, no more than nine seconds in all, but it had taken him weeks of hard work to get it right. Now, however, he was thinking of abandoning it completely.
This was his favourite piece in the whole composition – the key image with which it had begun – yet as the work had grown this tiny fragment had proved ever more problematic.
For the rest of the work the viewpoint was established in the viewer’s head – behind the eyes – yet for this brief moment he had broken away entirely. In another art form this would have caused no problems – might, indeed, have been a strength – but here it created all kinds of unwanted difficulties. Experienced from within the Shell, it was as if, for the brief nine seconds that the segment lasted, one went outside one’s skull. It was a strange, disorienting experience, and no tampering with the surrounding images could mute that effect, or repair the damage it did to the work as a whole.
In all the Shells he had experienced before, such abrupt switches of viewpoint had been made to serve the purpose of the story: used for their sudden shock value. But, then, all forms of the Shell before his own had insisted only upon a cartoon version of the real, whereas what he wanted was reality itself. Or a close approximation. Such abrupt changes destroyed the balance he was seeking – shattered every attempt of his to create that illusion of the really real.
Only now was he beginning to understand the cost – in artistic terms – of such realism: the limiting factors and the disciplines involved. It was not enough to create the perfect illusion; it was also necessary to maintain a sequential integrity in the experiencing mind. The illusion depended on him staying within his own skull, behind his own eyes, the story developing in real time.
There was, of course, a simple answer: one abandoned all breaches of sequential integrity. But that limited the kind of story one could tell. It was a straitjacket of the worst kind, limiting fiction to the vignette, briefly told. He had recognized this at once and agonized over it, but weeks of wrestling with the problem had left him without an answer.
Perhaps this was why all previous practitioners of the form had kept to the quasi-realism of a cartoon, leaving the experiencing imagination to suspend disbelief and form a bridge between what was presented and the reality. Maybe some of them had even tried what he was attempting now – had experimented with ‘perfected’, realistic images and had faced the same constricting factors. Maybe so, but he had to make a choice: to pursue his ideal of a perfect art form or compromise that vision in favour of a patently synthetic form – a mere embellishment of the old. It was no real choice at all, yet still he prevaricated.
He wound the tapes back and replayed, this time at one-tenth speed – five frames a second – watching the bird thrust slowly outward from the cage in an explosion of sudden, golden, living fire; seeing beyond it the girl’s fac
e, its whiteness framed in flames of red as it turned to face the screen.
He closed his eyes and froze the image. It was the best thing he had done. Something real and beautiful – a tiny, perfect work of art. And yet... He shivered, then pressed ERASE. In an instant it was done, the tapes blanked. He stood there for a long time afterwards, leaning against the machine, perfectly still, his eyes closed. Then, with a tiny shudder, he turned away. There was that much anyway – it was there – it would always be there, in his head.
He went over to the bed and sat, not knowing what he felt, staring intently, almost obsessively at the narrow ridge of flesh that circled his left wrist. Then he got up again and went out into the other room.
For a while he stood there in the centre of the room, his mind still working at the problem; but just now he could not see past his tiredness. He was stretched thin by the demands he had placed on himself these last few weeks. All he could see were problems, not solutions.
He took a long, shuddering breath.
‘Small steps,’ he told himself, his voice soft, small in the darkness. ‘There is an answer,’ he added after a moment, as if to reassure himself. Yet he was far from certain.
He turned away, rubbing at his eyes, too tired to pursue the thought, for once wanting nothing but the purging oblivion of sleep. And in the morning?
In the morning he would begin anew.
The Square was a huge, airy space at the top of Oxford Canton; the uppermost level of a complex warren of colleges that extended deep into the stack below. To the eternal delight of each new generation of students, however, The Square was not square at all, but hexagonal: a whole deck opened up for leisure. Long, open balconies overlooked the vastness of The Green, leaning back in five great tiered layers on every side, while overhead the great dome of the stars turned slowly, in perfect imitation of the sky beyond the ice.
Here, some seventeen years ago, so rumour had it, Berdichev, Lehmann and Wyatt had met and formed the Dispersionist party, determined to bring change to this world of levels, but whether the rumour was true or not, it was a place to which the young intelligentsia of all seven Cities were drawn. If the world of thought were a wheel, this was its hub, The Green its focus.
A line of oaks bordered The Green, hybrid evergreens produced in the vats of SynFlor, while at its centre was an aviary: a tall, pagoda-like cage of thirteen tiers, modelled upon the Liu he t’a, the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies at Hang Chou. As ever, young men and women strolled arm in arm on the vast lawn or gathered about the lowest tier, looking in at the brightly coloured birds.
The Square was the pride of Oxford Canton and the haunt of its ten thousand students. The elite of the Above sent their children to Oxford, just as the elite of a small nation-state had done centuries before. It was a place of culture and, for the children of First Level families, a guarantee of continuity.
No big MedFac screens cluttered The Green itself, but in the cool walkways beneath the overhang, small Vidscreens showed the local cable channels to a clientele whose interests and tastes differed considerably from the rest of the Above.
The overhang was a place of coffee shops and restaurants, CulVid boutiques and Syn-Parlours. It was a curious mixture of new and old, of timelessness and state of the art, of purity and decadence; its schizophrenic face a reflection of its devotees.
At the Café Burgundy business was brisk. It was a favourite haunt of the Arts Faculty students who, at this hour, crowded every available table, talking, drinking, gesturing wildly with all the passion and flamboyance of youth. The tables themselves – more than two hundred in all – spread out from beneath the overhang towards the edge of The Green. Overhead, a network of webbing, draped between strong poles, supported a luxuriant growth of flowering creepers. The plants were a lush, almost luminous green, decorated with blooms of vivid purples, yellows, reds and oranges – huge, gaping flowers with tongues of contrasting hues, like the silent heads of monsters. Beneath them the tables and chairs were all antiques, the wood stained and polished. They were a special feature of the Café, a talking point, though in an earlier century they would have seemed quite unexceptional.
Han waiters made their way between the packed tables, carrying trays and taking orders. They were dressed in the plain, round-collared robes of the Tang dynasty, the sleeves narrow, the long er-silks a dark vermilion with an orange band below the knee: the clothes of an earlier, simpler age.
At a table near the edge sat four students. Their table was clear but for three glasses and a bottle. They had eaten and were on their third bottle of the excellent Burgundy from which the Café took its name. A vacant chair rested between the two males of the party, as if they were expecting another to join them. But it was not so. All spaces at the table had to be paid for, and they had paid to keep it vacant.
There was laughter at the table. A dark-haired, olive-skinned young man was holding sway, leaning well back in his chair, a wine glass canted in his hand. The sing-song tones of his voice were rather pleasant, well modulated. He was a handsome, aristocratic man with a pronounced aquiline profile, a finely formed mouth, and dark, almost gypsy eyes. Strong limbed and broad shouldered, he looked more a sportsman than an artist, though a fastidiousness about his clothes somewhat redressed that impression. As he talked, his free hand carved forms from the air, the movements deft, rehearsed. He was older than the others by some four or five years, a factor that made them defer to him in most things, and often – as now – he monopolized their talk, leading it where he would.
His name was Sergey Novacek and he was a Master’s student and a sculptor. His father, Lubos, was a well-to-do merchant who, at his wife’s behest, indulged his only son, buying him a place at Oxford. Not that Sergey was unintelligent. He could easily have won a scholarship. It was simply a matter of prestige. Of status. At the level on which Lubos Novacek had his interests, it was not done to accept State charity.
Just now Sergey was telling them of the ceremony he had attended the previous day; a ceremony at which six of his sculptures had been on display. He had not long been fulfilling such commissions, yet he spoke as if he had great experience in the matter. But that was his way, and his friends admired him for it, even if others found it somewhat arrogant.
‘It all went very well, at first,’ he said, his handsome features serious a moment. ‘Everyone was most respectful. They fed me and watered me and tried their best to be polite and hide from themselves the fact that I was neither family nor Han.’ He laughed. ‘None too successfully, I’m afraid. But, anyway... The tomb was magnificent. It stood in its own walled gardens next to the house. A massive thing, two storeys high, clad all over in white marble, and with a gate you could have driven a team of four horses through.’ Sergey sipped at his drink, then laughed. ‘In fact, the tomb was a damn sight bigger than the house!’
There was laughter.
‘That’s so typical of them,’ said the second young man, Wolf, lifting his glass to his lips. He was taller and more heavily built than his friend, his perfect North European features topped by a close-cropped growth of ash-blond hair. ‘They’re so into death.’
Sergey raised his glass. ‘And a good job too, neh?’
‘For you,’ one of the girls, Lotte, said teasingly, her blue eyes flashing. It was true. Most of Sergey’s commissions were funerary – tomb statues for the Minor Families.
Lotte was a pale-skinned, large-breasted girl, who wore her blonde hair unfashionably long and plaited, in defiance of fashion. These things aside she looked exactly what she was – the twin of her brother, Wolf. Beside her, silent, sat the fourth of their small group, Catherine. She was smaller than her friends, more delicately built; a slender redhead with Slavic features and green eyes.
Sergey smiled. ‘Anyway. As I was saying. It was all going well and then the ceremony proper began. You know how it is; a lot of New Confucian priests chanting for the souls of the departed. And then the eldest son comes to the front and lights a candle for the ancesto
rs. Well... it had just got to that stage when, would you believe it, eldest son trips over his pau, stumbles forward and falls against the lines of paper charms.’
‘No!’ All three sat forward, Wolf amused, the two girls horrified.
‘Unfortunate, you might think, and embarrassing, but not disastrous. And so it might have been, except that in falling he dropped the lighted candle amongst the charms.’ Sergey laughed shortly and nodded to himself. ‘You should have seen it. There must have been two or three thousand charms hanging up on those lines, dry as bone, just waiting to go up in one great sheet of flame. And that’s exactly what they did. Eldest son was all right, of course. The servants pulled him away at once. But before anyone could do a thing, the flames set off the overhead sprinklers. Worse than that, no one knew the combination sequence to the cut-out and the key to the manual override was missing. It just poured and poured. We were all soaked. But the worst was to come. Because the garden was enclosed, the water couldn’t drain away. Much of it sank into the thin soil layer, but soon that became waterlogged, and when that happened the water began to pour down the steps into the tomb. Within minutes the water was up to the top step. That’s when it happened.’
He leaned forward and filled his glass, then looked about him, enjoying himself, knowing he had their full attention. ‘Well? What do you think?’
Wolf shook his head. ‘I don’t know. The eldest son fell in, perhaps?’
Sergey narrowed his eyes. ‘Ah, yes, that would have been good, wouldn’t it? But this was better. Much better. Imagine it. There we all are, still waiting for someone to switch the damn sprinklers off, our expensive clothes ruined, the ground a total bog beneath our feet, no one willing to show disrespect by leaving the gardens before the ceremony’s over, when what should happen but the unthinkable. Out floats the coffin!’
An Inch of Ashes (CHUNG KUO SERIES) Page 23