Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The injured Brigadier tried to say something but the windscreen had pierced his throat and the words were drowned beneath a froth of blood.

  Charlie’s own fingers came away red and sticky. His eyes were both there but his fingers could touch tongue where they should have found cheek. When he checked his prisoner he found the man curled beside him on the seat.

  “Put down your gun.”

  The words were aimed at Agent Bilberg, who suddenly realized he’d picked up his own Colt and was now holding it to Prisoner Zero’s head.

  I don’t think so.

  That was what Charlie tried to say. He wasn’t sure how much of it the man in the expensive suit with the swept-back hair and dark glasses actually understood. Keeping his gun firmly in place, the young CIA man reached into his jacket and retrieved a tiny cell phone, which he flicked open, speed-dialling a number. The machine stayed dead.

  Charlie Bilberg glanced towards his Siemens and tried again, checking from the corner of his eye that he’d punched the right button. When nothing happened he tried it on vocal, his broken voice ordering it to dial seven.

  Again nothing.

  Agent Bilberg was still trying to work out what he was doing wrong when the rear door yanked open and Caid Hammou’s nephew Hassan leant across Prisoner Zero and took the gun from Charlie’s right hand. Two of the agent’s fingers broke as the man twisted the Colt from his grasp.

  The lock knife in Hassan’s other hand was French, the blade a mix of high-carbon steel, chrome and molybdenum. He held it strangely, jutting from his fist, so that he could reach in, twist away the gun and cut the CIA agent’s throat all in one go.

  “Nasrani,” Hassan said dismissively. “They get lost when their toys don’t work.” Picking up Charlie Bilberg’s cell phone, he tossed it to a thin-faced teenager. “Dump it,” he said. “Somewhere beyond Ben Guerir.” The town he named was on the road to Casablanca, about an hour north of Marrakech.

  “Turn it back on,” he added, “just before you dump it. Oh…and lose this as well.” Reaching into his pockets, Hassan produced a small box, then hesitated. “No,” he said, tossing it to the brother of the suicide bomber instead. “You,” he said, “lose this where it won’t be found.”

  “Will do.” The boy stripped off his stolen battledress and shrugged himself into his own jellaba, stuffing his uniform into a Nike holdall. He placed the cell-phone jammer on top and zipped the bag. “The debt is paid?”

  Hassan nodded his head.

  “What about that?”

  “Someone else can deal with him. Hurry it up.” He watched the boy walk towards a clump of palms, while he waited impatiently for the second teenager to change out of uniform.

  “Come on,” Hassan said. “They’ll be wondering where their petite taxi’s gone.” He meant the Americans or the Moroccan army or Sécurité…Whichever mix was waiting two kilometres ahead for a car so anonymous it contained no tracking devices.

  A minute later, both foot soldiers were gone, their absence marked by the high whine of small dirt bikes.

  “Well,” said Hassan. “You’ve really fucked up this time.” He scowled at the prisoner and then at the dead CIA agent on the seat next to him. “Let’s get this over with. What did you tell them?”

  “The truth,” said Prisoner Zero, in a voice that sounded like wind through broken pines.

  “And what did they do?”

  “Kicked the chair from under me and started all over again.” The prisoner smiled, and as smiles went it wasn’t entirely sane.

  “So what did you tell them then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So then they demanded the truth?”

  “Which I told them.”

  “So they kicked the chair from under you and started all over again?”

  “You know how it goes,” said Prisoner Zero.

  “Want to tell me what brought you back to Morocco?”

  Prisoner Zero thought about this and then thought some more. Finally he looked at the man who’d so recently cut Agent Bilberg’s throat and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “What wouldn’t I believe?”

  “The truth…”

  “No,” said Caid Hassan, nephew of Caid Hammou and de facto boss of the city’s biggest crime family. “Probably not.”

  Retrieving Agent Bilberg’s Colt, the elegantly dressed man dropped out the magazine and thumbed away all the bullets but one, then gave the gun back to Prisoner Zero and nodded at Brigadier Abbas.

  “Feel free,” he said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

  A circle can be begun at any point. The brush is held upright in one hand with the wrist held clear of both table and paper, the circle being drawn swiftly and confidently in one clean stroke.

  A circle may begin at any point. He had been told this as a child.

  It can begin far away in a strange land, where sun-bleached palms fill a tired grove and smoke rises from an ancient vehicle or it can begin closer to home, just outside the walls of the Zigin Cheng, or within the Forbidden City itself. It can begin with a word or a kiss, in flames or ice or the cold darkness of a night sky with the stars looking down on things that should not be seen.

  Although he was tired to the bone and restless with waiting for death the fifty-third Chuang Tzu was nothing like as old as he felt. He was, however, exhausted. And he had been fighting with himself for longer than he could remember and was still not sure who was winning. So while he wrestled with his darkness and watched butterflies flit across the walled garden from where he sat under a tree, he considered something rather miraculous.

  A killer was coming, the merest slip of a youth with barely enough life lived to cast a shadow. The Chuang Tzu was not sure whether to be upset or glad.

  Beneath his cloak, the Emperor wore a chao pao, a formal court robe. In his case this robe was blue and decorated around the neck, across the shoulders and above the hem with embroidered five-toed dragons, conforming to the regulations for a first- or second-rank prince.

  It was a wholly unsuitable garment for a man destined to wear imperial yellow and in choosing it the Chuang Tzu had offended almost everyone who was not already offended by his recent behaviour.

  He had tried and probably failed to change history. He had fought battles within himself that those outside never saw. And he had fought against the rules laid down by the Library. For any Chuang Tzu to be killed would be shocking and the shock of his death would be felt through the empire like reverberations through a hollow drum.

  All the same, there would be many who felt such an end was to be expected and that, on balance, the fifty-third Chuang Tzu deserved no less. The Emperor himself was one of these.

  Settling back against a willow, the Emperor took a deep breath and let fear flow with the breath from his body. To live or die, the choice remained his. A single clap of the hands would be enough to summon General Ch’ao Kai to the edge of the gardens.

  Once instructed, the General would post guards around the inner pavilions and the outer, around the Forbidden City and even in the two surrounding cities where the ambassadors and servitors lived.

  And the General had enough guards. Chuang Tzu had seen them exercising in front of the Wu-Men, a gate so vast that an entire army could muster in its shadow. Although why an assassin should want to kill the ruler of the richest, most cultured empire history had ever known was a mystery that Chuang Tzu hoped soon to have unravelled, once the two of them met.

  In the meantime he had his dreams.

  Dreams of a far stranger assassin arrested on the point of failure and put to questioning. It happened in a place of walls like the walls which surrounded Chuang Tzu’s city, only these were of beaten earth, lime dust and straw and the sun overhead was hotter than the one Chuang Tzu knew.

  The streets of this city were dirty and the trees lining the wider roads were shrivelled from drought and burnt along the edges of their fronds, but the wa
lls of both cities had one distinct similarity, despite their difference in magnificence and construction.

  Both were red.

  Because the Chuang Tzu knew that meaning could be found within coincidence and his daydreams were as significant as any which came in the night, he considered this point seriously and decided that the redness of the walls was probably important. And there was a chance, not a good chance admittedly, that he might come to understand this significance before he was killed.

  It would be a short reign, merely twenty years, and an inglorious one. And its end would be as strange as its start, which began with a butterfly and a small boy being sent to bed without supper.

  Mirrored eyes had swallowed the sight of endless, utterly identical small boys, a million Zaqs. The butterfly who stared at him was red, the size of a small plate and had fat black spots on each wing, though when Zaq looked closely he realized the spots were somewhere between purple and ultraviolet, their edges both fractal and recursive.

  There was a difference, apparently.

  Zaq had never met a butterfly the size of a bird. Actually, he wasn’t sure he’d ever met a bird.

  “In the Carboniferous period,” said the butterfly, “even mayflies had wingspans this big. Mind you, back then there was so much oxygen in the atmosphere that forests burned when wet…”

  That was when Zaq knew he was dreaming.

  “Yes and no,” the butterfly said.

  It rested on the edge of Zaq’s bed, which was actually a door that was held off the ground by rocks at each corner. A hundred or so holes had been drilled in the door, a hand-breadth apart, so that Zaq’s mattress could breath. His brother Eli was very proud of this.

  The butterfly looked around.

  And what it saw, kaleidoscope-like through the endless facets of its silver eyes, was what it expected to see. A shitty little shack built from sheet plastic and cheap blocks of polycrete, roofed with a rancid canvas awning in what had once been a landing pad for hoppers.

  There were two ways the butterfly knew this. The first was that a faded “H” could still be seen etched into the ledge on which Zaq’s mother had built her house, the second was that the butterfly could remember when Rip had briefly been fashionable. In those days tiny silver hoppers had buzzed around the non-world like blowflies.

  Opinion was divided on Rip’s exact provenance, but then opinion in the 2023 worlds was divided on most things, with a sizeable minority believing that the thousand-kilometre jumble of steel and extruded ceramic was an art form and the Razor’s Edge, that long scar down its side, a statement about futility.

  The hoppers were toys for the rich in worlds where such definitions had become meaningless, because poverty was an abstraction and hunger a life choice, like living dangerously, monogamy or dying of natural diseases.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  “You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  The small boy shook his head.

  Of course he didn’t. New emperors rarely did.

  When Zaq awoke he was lying in sunlight and such was his fear of the unexpected brightness that he rolled straight off his bed and underneath a table, crouching in the safety of its shadow. Somehow the whole of Rip had revolved, so that the glassed-over rip within which Zaq’s village squatted now faced a gap between the worlds above. Their village had become desirable overnight.

  Eli had tousled his hair, let him play with the rat and laughed at him, and when that didn’t work his mother sent Zaq to bed without supper. Since the shack had only one room, food was a rarity and what with there being no front door and holes in the roof and no one would be sleeping that night, this was more for show than anything else.

  “Zaq…”

  Morning came broken. And only the butterfly understood how Rip kept to its new orbit beyond the edge of the 2023 worlds, but then the butterfly knew why gravity still held long after the electricity was gone and most of the food boxes stopped producing food. There had been a systems failure on Rip forty-eight centuries earlier, four thousand eight hundred and three years to be exact.

  “What?”

  Zaq looked at his mother.

  “Four-thousand-eight-hundred-and-three…” She said the words without understanding because the highest number Maria knew was twelve, which had been her age when she met Eli’s father: A scavenger with scars older than she was and hard connections, the kind that paid him in knives, medicine and food.

  After Gabriel had come Eddie, who traded metals for food.

  “Scrap,” Zaq said, looking at the apple she held.

  “You miss Eddie?”

  For Zaq the question was meaningless. Eddie had been with his mother for less than eighteen months, leaving one morning to strip copper from level fifteen of the Rip and that had been it, Eddie never returned. Zaq had absolutely no memory of the hard-eyed man who fathered him and how could he? It was six months after Eddie’s disappearance before Maria began pulling afterbirth from between her legs, while Eli cut the cord and wiped slime from the new baby with his hands. This had been Zaq’s introduction to life and many on Rip had introductions far worse.

  “Four-thousand-eight-hundred-and-three,” Zaq said, tasting the size of the number. It sounded like something the ghost mothers might say. “The day is gone, the night comes in and my baby is lost…” Zaq knew all about the ghost mothers. Eli knew many scary stories and they stuck to the inside of Zaq’s head like flies to tar-paper.

  “Here,” Maria said. “This will make you feel better.”

  Across the hut, Eli froze. He was older than Zaq and had first choice of all the food. “Me,” he said.

  Three paces took the boy to where his brother sat with an old blanket pulled tight around him against the shivers. On Eli’s shoulder sat the rat he’d rescued from a shaft off the lower levels. Null had fallen through a hole and been unable to scrabble out.

  Maria hated the animal, but it was hard to scold Eli when he returned from most trips with a fistful of copper wire or a circuit tray which changed patterns every few seconds. She’d once swapped circuitry for enough slab meat to feed all three of them for a month.

  “Me first,” said Eli, his eyes fixed on the apple.

  “There’s enough for everybody,” his mother said.

  Maria was lying. A third of the apple was already rotten and most of what was left was mottled with bruising. She’d taken it as payment in the dark, realizing too late that the sticky sweetness on her fingers was a sign of corruption, not quality. Maria had never seen fruit before, but the man who gave it to her had sworn it would make her both clever and lucky.

  The tiny bugs living in its flesh were guaranteed to change her whole life for the better. Of course, the man had said, she could always give it to one of her sons, say the younger. The man’s voice had been soft when he said this, as sweet as ever Eddie’s had been.

  “Take a bite,” she told Zaq.

  He looked doubtful.

  “I’ll have it,” Eli said.

  “Zaq’s ill,” Maria insisted. “He gets first bite.”

  “I’m not,” said Zaq, shaking his head, mostly to stop his mother from putting her hand to his forehead to see if he had a fever.

  “Burning up,” she told him. “Eat it now.”

  “I’ve got a fever too,” announced Eli, but his brother had already bitten into the fruit and over-sweet juice was running down the small boy’s chin.

  “Yuk…”

  “It’s good,” Maria promised.

  “I feel sick,” said Zaq and passed the apple to Eli, who immediately took a bite before Maria could stop him.

  “You have some,” Eli suggested, seeing anger tighten his mother’s eyes.

  Maria shook her head. “Give it to Zaq,” she said.

  She was a good mother who shared her food and only ever stayed out nights if it was impossible to get back. Never once had she thought about selling, killing or abandoning either of her children, no matter how tir
ed they made her. There were, however, limits and both Eli and Zaq understood that these had just been reached.

  So Zaq did what he was told and ate everything, including the core, in silence, then licked his fingers and went with Eli to find fuel, anything that might burn. “Magnesium would be good,” said Zaq, but his mother was asleep and Eli was outside, lying on top of a girl Zaq had never seen before.

  The next morning Zaq woke with a rash, feeling sick and muttering about M-theory, Zero Point Energy and the luxury of oblivion. So Maria did something she’d never believed herself capable of doing. She took the gold ring Eddie had made her from circuitry, his lucky lump of black glass which she’d stolen and what was left of her beauty down twelve levels, looking for a medicine woman.

  What Maria found was Doc Joyce, a shambling figure dressed in rags and old sweat and what he wanted was none of the above.

  All he required in payment was a metal bolt Maria wore strung on a cord between her breasts. She didn’t stop to consider how he knew this talisman existed or where she kept it hidden. The ragged man was obviously a shaman, how could he not know? Waiting patiently, she stood as he undid the buttons on her dress and stared impassively at the hexagon of grey metal.

  Other men had gazed in rapture at her breasts. Not for some years, it was true, but even where she lived in the cold thin air that fed the upper levels of Rip, strangers would occasionally stop, catch their breath and wonder fleetingly—in between lust and the promise of forgetfulness—about the twists of life that gave a perfect ass, breasts and hips to a roofwhore with two children and a scar which disfigured half her face.

  Doc Joyce barely noticed her body as his fingers closed around the hexagon. The bolt was warm and would remain warm long after it was taken from between her breasts. And were he to pass electricity through the hexagon and introduce it to the cold then the object would remain cold even if Doc Joyce hung it on a cord and tucked it under his own rags. And the Doc always wore rags when visiting the intricate maze of shafts, narrow levels and hangars that made up this part of Rip. It helped to blend in with the scenery.