Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Maybe it was need to know.

  Clicking on her clippers, Specialist Stone took the suit at his word and removed all of Prisoner Zero’s body hair, starting with his lower legs. When she got to his genitals she just kept going, moving aside his shrunken prick with casual insouciance before starting on his stomach and then chest, around the nipples and under his arms.

  Prisoner Zero stank, there was no doubt about that, the kind of stink she remembered from weekend visits to the Chicago Zoo with her father. Even the suit was close enough to notice it.

  “He needs a bath,” said the Lieutenant.

  “No,” the suit said. “What he needs is a shower.”

  “This is de-licing, right?” the Lieutenant asked, when Master Sergeant Saez had finished hosing Prisoner Zero down with water taken from a fire point.

  The suit shook his head.

  “Then why shave the body hair?”

  “Why?” The suit smiled at Lieutenant Ashcroft as if he were a child and a particularly simple one at that. “I’d have thought that was obvious,” he said. “We’re making it easier to attach electrodes.”

  Lieutenant Ashcroft wasn’t the only one to hope the man was joking.

  The first reference to Lampedusa occurred in a letter from Pope Leon III to Charlemagne, Emperor of the West, informing him of a battle between the Byzantines and an Arab army. In 1436 Alfonso of Aragon presented the island to Giovanni de Caro. In 1661, its owner, Ferdinand Tommasi, received the title of prince from the King of Spain. Seventy-five years later, when the English Earl of Sandwich visited the island, he found only one inhabitant.

  None of this the Lieutenant had known the evening before, as he piloted a helicopter across the darkening waters of the Mediterranean, with its cargo of three men in suits, five marines and one manacled prisoner.

  He had orders, a flight chart downloaded from the Italians, a map reference and GPS positioning in case he still couldn’t find the place. As it was, all he actually needed to do was play spot the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

  There’d been a suggestion that the USS Harry S. Truman should be positioned off Lampedusa’s south-western tip, between Punta dell’ Acqua and the Tunisian coast, but this was felt to be unnecessarily insulting to Tunis, and anyway everyone from the President down knew there was nothing the USS Truman couldn’t do equally well from the Sicilian side, thirty miles to the north-east…

  “Get to it,” the Master Sergeant had told a corporal as Lieutenant Ashcroft released the doors and the corporal had nodded at two marines. Together they’d manoeuvred the blindfolded prisoner into the doorway, down some steps and onto a small patch of withered lawn.

  Away to one side, a dozen SLRs whirred and a Fox Network reporter began her spiel to camera. Stating the obvious, as always. No one rushed forward or jostled for position. The rules for journalists had been set out in advance, in triplicate, to be signed by department heads.

  They were the chosen, flown by the Pentagon to a tiny island in the Mediterranean owned by Italy. And the Italians had been delighted to loan its western tip to the Pentagon. It said so on the press release.

  “Walk,” demanded the Master Sergeant and Prisoner Zero did, while two marines on either side gripped his upper arms. The swathe of crepe hiding the man’s eyes was held in place by a strip of duct tape that circled his entire skull. Plastic cuffs locked his wrists behind his back and a short length of shackle secured both ankles. His shoes were gone and so was the ring he’d worn on his little finger.

  Some of the finest linguists at the Pentagon were currently failing to come up with a translation of the flowing script engraved into its red stone, despite using the latest in translation software. This was because it was written in an old form of Persian. Prisoner Zero had no idea what it said either.

  He understood colloquial French, that much was now confirmed. A quick and dirty CAT scan having produced language recognition patterns for this, Arabic and rudimentary Berber.

  That he spoke English was known from his interrogation.

  If Prisoner Zero now failed to acknowledge a single order it was because he chose not to rather than because he didn’t understand what was being said. Master Sergeant Saez had his own opinion on that but had been told to keep it to himself, especially while the press were around.

  “So,” said the small man, walking over to where Prisoner Zero stood shivering and naked in the early morning light. “This is our man, right?”

  As if it could be anybody else.

  Lieutenant Ashcroft sighed, mostly at the fact that the Pentagon’s representative had excused himself the moment the lawyer came through the doorway and begun to introduce himself. Behind Miles Alsdorf stood Colonel Borgenicht, commandant of the newly named Camp Freedom. He was looking less than happy.

  “Yes, sir. This is Prisoner Zero.”

  Both Colonel Borgenicht and the lawyer paused to examine the man, water dripping from his naked body.

  “What happened to his hair?”

  “I shaved it off, sir.” The answer came from a Marine Specialist so short that she barely stood level with the White House lawyer, who had a career’s worth of Cuban heels and hand-made suits behind him, even back in the days when he couldn’t afford them.

  “And why exactly did you cut it off?” asked Miles Alsdorf. He was holding a very expensive briefcase in one hand and wore this year’s Rolex Presidential. Given what the White House was paying for his counsel on this matter, he could easily afford both.

  Specialist Stone looked towards Lieutenant Ashcroft. Only the Lieutenant was busy not meeting her eyes.

  “Because those were my orders, sir.”

  “And who gave this order?”

  “A man in a suit, sir. He didn’t give his name.”

  Miles Alsdorf’s frown was usually reserved for opposing counsel. “You do know, don’t you,” he said, speaking to the Colonel, “that the President himself is taking a personal interest in this case?”

  “So is the Secretary of Defense,” said Colonel Borgenicht. The current spat between the White House and the Pentagon was their business. He was a career officer and hoped to keep it that way.

  The corridor leading to his cage Prisoner Zero drew from memory, scratching it into the skin of his arm with a thumbnail. The only problem with this was that his map kept fading.

  At the end of the corridor was a door and through that door could be found the hotel’s swimming pool, its showers and changing rooms. Two marines had been in the process of emptying the pool, using an electric pump, when Prisoner Zero was marched by. Maybe they expected him to try to drown himself.

  He currently wore a pair of trousers made from coarse orange paper, designed to fasten with a cord. The cord was also made of paper and broke easily. The prisoner knew this because he’d broken it.

  He’d received four injections and been told he’d get antibiotics three times a day with his food. The cigarette burns on the inside of his thigh had been cleaned without comment by a marine paramedic, swabbed with some antiseptic and then dressed with a strip of synthetic skin. They were taking remarkably good care of him for someone they intended to kill.

  And they did still intend to execute him, because more lethal injections were scheduled for two weeks to the day, Thursday 12 July. Although, as Master Sergeant Saez had pointed out, if the Pentagon was allowed its way, Prisoner Zero would already be up against a wall.

  Fittingly enough, the wall Master Sergeant Saez had in mind was the one Prisoner Zero first noticed when Specialist Stone ripped free his blindfold the night before, and the prisoner found himself staring at a tourist hotel.

  Almost pink in the twilight, the wall was meant to look as if it had stood forever. Only a workman had plastered the thing too soon, certainly before the mortar holding the breeze blocks had had a chance to dry, and angular cracks now indicated stress points in the structure underneath.

  In the wall was a wrought-iron gate. This had been padlocked and sheeted on both sides with
steel plates which were held in place by bolts. Next to the gate was a flowerbed and this had been trampled down. After the wall, the door and the flowerbed, the next thing Prisoner Zero had noticed was a curl of dog shit on the earth, turning to ash with age.

  As Prisoner Zero scratched maps into his arm, Specialist Stone got busy painting out a window opposite Prisoner Zero’s cage. Obliterating a stretch of ragged cliff with blue sea beyond, the dissonance between ochre rock and the utterly flat blueness of the Mediterranean an indication of the depth of the drop.

  In one dimension, the blue was so close as to be part of the same, while in another it was obviously and entirely separate. As it was in the dimension beyond that.

  Gulls, dark-headed and greedy, spun on the thermals above the edge of the cliff and then dropped away, like bit parts in some conjuring trick. Butterflies danced beyond the glass and then they were gone, along with the cliff, gulls and his sight of the sea, whitewashed away with a heavy brush.

  It had all been very beautiful, in some ways more real than anything he’d ever seen, and yet Prisoner Zero had trouble working out what all this had to do with him. He should have been elsewhere. In America, most probably on the lawn of the White House with the latest rifle and laser sights. Saving the future from itself.

  “Are they treating you well enough?”

  Miles Alsdorf must have been told what to expect because his face expressed no surprise at finding his client held in a cage made by welding together huge sheets of steel mesh. The big surprise for Miles Alsdorf was that he’d won his fight for daily access.

  The cage had been welded into place in the middle of the hotel weights room, which had been cleared of dumbbells and a pair of dual-stack multigyms, although mats were still piled below a large window; now whitewashed, padlocked and covered with mesh left over from welding the cage.

  “Colonel Borgenicht’s just been explaining it to me,” Miles Alsdorf added, stepping into the room and shutting out the guards behind him. “They don’t want to lose you.”

  Silence greeted this comment but he kept smiling all the same. He’d defended New York cop-killers, three black teenagers accused of raping the daughter of a Texas senator and a self-confessed baby-smotherer, a twenty-three-year-old from Kansas too deep into heroin even to remember how she got pregnant. And once, about fifteen years before, he’d defended the butcher of Lyons, an octogenarian Nazi whose senility stopped him from even knowing that he’d committed the crime.

  “I’m Miles,” said the man, “Miles Alsdorf, remember? I’ve been retained as your lawyer. We need to appeal,” he added. “And the sooner the better.” Lifting his briefcase, he looked around for a place to put it and realized too late that there wasn’t one. So he put it down again and squatted on one side of the wire, while Prisoner Zero sat, his knees tucked up under his chin, on the other.

  Pulling a Dictaphone from his pocket, Miles described the cage in short, clipped sentences, making particular reference to the fact that the prisoner’s slop bucket had no lid and that visitors such as himself had nowhere to sit. And then something else occurred to him.

  “How are you supposed to know where Mecca is?”

  Prisoner Zero stared at him.

  “I thought people like you had to pray five times a day?”

  Like me?

  Only if they believe in God, Prisoner Zero wanted to say, but he didn’t; believe in God or say it either. He believed in cold equations, Quantum Foam and in time, which he knew had two mutually compatible shapes. The first spiralled out like an ice-cream cone, widening in circles from a single point at the bottom, the other was spherical.

  He’d chased down some of the equations twenty years before, thinking about little else towards the end and always reaching the same conclusion. Time was a marble.

  A book had held his proof. A cheap notebook mostly full of songs, with tattered corners and a vomit stain across the back. Its final pages were brittle and wavy from cat pee, where Miu had got trapped indoors one weekend and been reduced to pissing on Prisoner Zero’s notes and a pile of New Scientists in one corner. The nearest thing she could find to a litter tray.

  That would have been the last summer in Amsterdam. The year Johnny Thunders issued Hurt Me on the New Rose label. The year of New England.

  CHAPTER 13

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 13

  Emperors had killed themselves before, not often admittedly, although one famously threw himself off a cliff during a thunderstorm. And it was felt by many that the Librarian should have realized the cliff incident was about to happen, given that the old man had spent the previous week working himself up into thunder and lightning.

  At which point, someone offered the belief that the Librarian had known exactly what was about to happen and chosen not to interfere. The resulting discussion about the nature of free will lasted for roughly eighty years and led to the colonization of a new world as a third of the inhabitants on a world in the equatorial belt took themselves off into exile.

  No emperor had ever tried to starve himself, if this was what was happening, and there were arguments about that too. Some believed the latest Chuang Tzu was ill and should be treated or helped, and the feeling among these was that the Library should reach into the young man’s mind to send him to sleep, working its magic while the Emperor was unable to harm himself. Others saw what was happening as a battle between the new Chuang Tzu and the Library itself. Although what they were fighting over and exactly what weapons were being used was open to debate.

  And so Zaq found himself sitting with his back to his bed, the blade and tang held loosely in one hand. He’d taken to pissing against a pillar, as if he’d forgotten or no longer cared that an audience of billions might be watching. And while it was true that he still hid for the more serious ablutions he went to the commode alone, with none of the ceremony or retinue of attendants which usually accompanied him.

  It was into this stalemate that a man climbed, scaling the outer walls of the Purple City as if he’d been practising all his life. He wore green trousers and a red shirt, black gloves and no shoes, the soles of his feet having been modified both to increase his grip and do away with the need for footwear. His hair was black and worn tied back, much like Zaq’s own.

  The man was in his twenties. A mere child in the eyes of most who watched his climb. Hardly anyone in the Servitors’ City paid much attention to him at first. All the important people had been summoned by the palace master to discuss what could be created that was exquisite enough to bring the Emperor out of his depression.

  As expected the first concubine, chief cook and head musician had very different opinions, although not one was able to suggest something that hadn’t been tried a dozen times before.

  And so the man walked between the low houses traditional to the Servitors’ City until he reached the Manchu Gate, which led through the City of Ambassadors to the Tiananmen and Wu Gates, the last of which guarded the entrance to the palace.

  In fact, “palace” was really a misnomer for a complex of temples, courtyards and yellow-roofed pavilions, surrounded by a wide moat which lapped gently against a walkway that ran along the bottom of the walls.

  There were a thousand courtyards and nearly ten thousand rooms within the walled space of the Zigin Chéng, otherwise known as the Forbidden City. Of these, six pavilions, three gates and two bridges were significant and all of those were slung out along a north-south axis like fat weights on a fishing line.

  The first of the important pavilions was the Qianquing, known as the Dragon Gong. It had a two-tiered roof that turned up at the corners and its walls were cinnabar red, both inside and out, while the wooden beams which supported its yellow-tiled roof were painted green and red, again as propriety required. At each corner of the roof, carved dragon acroteria protected the Chuang Tzu from evil spirits

  Behind the Qiangquing was the Jiaotai Gong, where imperial seals were stored and the empress received homage. A small pavilion with a single roof
lay behind this, where the empress slept and received the emperor, when there was an empress, which there wasn’t.

  These three pavilions made up the imperial quarters and were copies of larger, ceremonial buildings further south. And whereas the private buildings were raised from the ground on a simple marble platform, the great ceremonial pavilions of Preserving Harmony, Central Harmony and Supreme Harmony stood upon a triple platform. So that the very first brick of Supreme Harmony, the greatest of the halls, was four times the average height of an imperial soldier.

  Begun in the fifteenth century, Earth era, on the site of an earlier city and laid out to strict Confucian lines, the original Forbidden City had taken fourteen years to build and required the toil of a hundred thousand artisans and the enslavement of a million Chinese peasants. No one knew how long it took the second Zigin Chéng to grow. There were a few who believed that acroteria, followed by yellow-glazed tiles, had twisted out of the ground like shoots from a seed.

  And there were others who believed that the city formed itself overnight while the first Chuang Tzu slept: Although these were divided into those who believed the outer city was formed new and fell into disrepair and those who believed it grew ready-aged, some walls already crumbled and courtyards fallen into disrepair.

  As with most things, the majority of the 2023 worlds’ 148 billion inhabitants never gave the matter a single thought. The City of Ambassadors and the Servitors’ City had been wrapped around the palace for over forty-five centuries and the palace had been wrapped around the beating heart of the emperor’s pavilions for just as long.

  Two hundred paces along the walkway, to the east of the Wu Gate, a sluice in the purple walls let through the Golden River, although iron bars closed off this route to all living creatures larger than a ten-year-old carp.