Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  All he had to do now was make sure no one thought to look under his bed and to do that he needed to put his captors off entering the cage.

  “It’s obvious,” said the darkness.

  And it was.

  As Prisoner Zero stripped off his paper jump suit and squatted next to the doorway to his cage, he ran over the map of Camp Freedom he kept in his head. He was trying to work out if the others were here. He wasn’t sure who the others might be, but he was pretty certain who they weren’t.

  The Corporal, the one who liked kicking him, had mentioned that dozens of Prisoner Zero’s co-conspirators had been rounded up. Which was odd, because the prisoner was pretty sure the darkness had talked to no one but him and he had talked to no one at all.

  In all, he’d known maybe five people in Paris and most of those had politely ignored him. A state of existence Prisoner Zero had worked hard to achieve and he was beginning to regret upsetting its balance.

  All the same, thought Prisoner Zero as he began to smear shit onto the mesh, what choice did he have? And how could he possibly explain that lack of choice to the endless, interchangeable people who sat across tables from him and asked questions to which the answers had to be obvious?

  The US President had to die because the future demanded it. Prisoner Zero knew this to be true even if he could no longer remember exactly why. And if Prisoner Zero could not go to the President then the darkness really did require that he persuade the President to come to him.

  It had something to do with history.

  CHAPTER 22

  Darkness, CTzu 1/Year 78

  In the beginning there was darkness. A cold inevitability that woke the ice, sending shivers through its body, each shiver a billion kilometres of glass reflecting aimlessly in space.

  The darkness felt like electricity and tasted like strangeness. There was little in common between it and the mind which had woken into it and the darkness knew this.

  Chuang Tzu slept.

  And while he slept his icy sleep, something happened elsewhere. Lithium fissioned into helium, tritium and energy…Deuterium fused, as did tritium itself. When enough neutrons had been produced to create further fission Central Beijing vaporized, the resulting over-pressure expanding as shockwave and losing power as it went. Twenty-eight million people died almost instantly.

  None of this Chuang Tzu or the darkness knew because it happened fifteen generations removed in a world which had long since lost interest in the SZ Loyal Prince. More ships and better had been built and launched and there were those who’d denied the SZ Loyal Prince was still out there and some who claimed it had exploded mere weeks after the mission began.

  A whole cult had grown up around the idea that those chosen had been secretly executed or given over to experiments, that the televised launch had been stage-managed and the mission originally created to divert attention from war in Tibet. The darkness cared for none of this and though it tried to identify the small star venerated by the Chuang Tzu, whom it thought of only as the ice, this proved impossible. A fact the darkness understood to mean the star itself had been destroyed.

  Closer acquaintance with the ice showed that in all probability it would not regard the destruction of a star as commonplace at all. It would probably regard this as very worrying.

  And this the darkness found interesting, although not as interesting as the way the ice stored data, which was as interference patterns and reactions of chemicals, jumping sparks and webs of connections laid down as overlays on webs that had gone before.

  A million permutations produced the fraction of one thought. In the end, irritated by the slowness of data extraction, the darkness took to deconstructing thousands of thoughts at once. And yet it still took decades for the darkness to realize that the data was fragmented and difficult to extract simply because it was not laid down in a coherent form.

  So the darkness woke slightly and, having considered this, realized that the fragmentary nature of the data’s extraction was a side effect of the coldness from which it had to be extracted. Which meant, it seemed to the darkness, that the very medium which held the data also hindered its use. An idea that made the darkness look beyond the ice to the nature of the material frozen.

  The azimuth and angle of its looking was narrow and the fragment of the darkness designated to do the looking was less than one thousandth of the whole. But this was still sufficient for the darkness to realize that the ice was surrounded by separate and less coherent forms of data. Only the data in these forms was so corrupted that extracting it made mining the living ice look easy.

  There was a distinction between the types of data, their containers and the ripped container within which they all floated. So the darkness began with the most dense of the data hordes, examining the SZ Loyal Prince and its semiAI, running millions of routines in an attempt to understand its origins.

  A type II star, a sequence of nine planets (actually seven, as two did not rate that definition or, if they did, so did others not included in the nine), carbon-based life, relatively new, technologically simple. The darkness trawled opera from Peking, Rodin’s Kiss, music by Brahms, the pyramids and Sphinx, the Great Wall of China and a painting of a soup can without understanding what any of them might be (or that they were carried under protest from Beijing, their mix chosen to reflect global levels of culture).

  In the beginning there was darkness. A cold curiosity that waited for meaning, tasting numbers and extracting data from the chaos of eighteen hundred dead refugees, one rotting Colonel Commissar, a doctor frozen at the point of dying and a mind being slowly reclaimed from hibernation.

  The darkness felt like electricity and tasted like strangeness. There was little enough in common between it and the hibernating mind and the darkness knew this.

  So it reversed the process by which that mind became frozen.

  Chuang Tzu woke.

  Still strapped into position, his bladder cathetered, tubes entering his mouth and rectum and a claw from the side of the pod busy suturing a wound in his neck. The scream of the young Chinese navigator barely made it past the tube pumping whatever slop was being pumped into his stomach, passed through his colon and sucked from his body.

  The whole level was in darkness. A vast impenetrable blackness that hugged the glass lid of his pod and swallowed floor, ceiling and all four walls. The emergency lights were off. More terrifying still, no lights showed on the panel controlling the pod, not even standby.

  “Madame?” Major Commissar Chuang Tzu choked on the word and felt it return like an echo.

  “Madame?”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Help me,” said Chuang, adding, “Please.”

  “Okay,” said the darkness.

  Chuang Tzu slept and dreamt of home. That he considered Grandfather Luo’s farm home surprised him. He would have thought home was that flat in the Bund, the one he’d briefly shared with Wu. This was on the fifth floor of an ancient apartment block overlooking the harbour in Shanghai. And had the lift worked Wu’s purchase of the apartment would have been impossible.

  Although, to be honest, under the new rules no one owned anything outright in the Middle Kingdom. The flat was leased from Beijing for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, the payment for the lease charged over a period of twenty-five years. It was a common arrangement and open to easy abuse. Only one person was supposed to live in the apartment but two often did and sometimes three.

  When Wu’s sister came to stay and remained to live, muttering was heard from the concierge but that was mere habit. Had the concierge known about Chuang Tzu’s friendship with Wu there would have been more than muttering. So Wu’s idea that his friend should pretend to be close to his sister was a good one. It was just a pity that Wu found his sister and best friend together in bed.

  He went back to Grandfather Luo’s after that, saying nothing. Just turning up from the city with a case full of suits and the latest notebook semiA
I, its case cut from a single block of hardened glass. The suits had been useless, too thin to wear in winter and too fragile to survive work on the farm. Ripping them up for rags had given Chuang Tzu’s grandmother endless pleasure.

  Wu’s sister called him, and when her calls went unanswered she wrote a serious letter on rag paper full of regrets and fine sentiments. It was handwritten, in the classic cao shu style. Chuang Tzu never saw Madame Mimi, his grandmother, read the letter but everything changed after it arrived.

  She no longer mocked his poetry or hammered on his bedroom door at dawn because the hens needed feeding. She fed him first from the pot and darned and mended his clothes herself. Girls from the village started to turn up unexpectedly and when her grandson showed no interest in farmers’ daughters, the daughters and granddaughters of other exiles were invited to tea, or for supper or to stay the week.

  In the end, because Chuang Tzu was growing up and had learnt how to handle his grandmother, he made friends with Lin Yao, a quiet girl from Xingjian. Her name meant jade treasure and she was tall and thin, with straight hair and tiny breasts topped with the longest nipples he’d ever seen. Although it took him eight months to discover these and he wondered later if they were the reason she’d been so unwilling to let him slide his hand inside her shirt.

  For over a year the damp secrets of Lin Yao’s body remained unseen; touched occasionally as they lay on the hillside in the spray of a waterfall, their notebooks open if unused beside them, but always unseen.

  “You must taste the plum and split the peach,” Grandfather Luo would insist, almost crossly. The man had been a great radical in his time. Too famous to kill and too dangerous to be let loose. His contempt for the timidity of the generations which had come after his own was widely known and had lost him many friends. “How else will you know if you want to keep the bowl?”

  Madame Mimi had other views. As often happened, these conflicted not just with those of his grandfather but with themselves. A part of her was delighted that her grandson had found a girl traditional enough to wait for marriage. Another part suspected Lin Yao might be Uighur.

  Larger than France, Germany and Italy put together, China’s north-west province of Xingjian had long been Moslem, and though all China was now traditional Market-Leninist the old tribal ways continued, if quietly.

  She tried catching the girl out but Lin Yao answered carefully, revealing little, as careful answers usually did. And in the end, having watched the black-haired girl for weeks which turned to months and then became a year, Chuang Tzu’s grandmother decided that perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter.

  The girl lit joss sticks when required, ate pork dumplings if they were put in front of her and observed the important feast days. Sometimes appearances were enough.

  And every afternoon, Chuang Tzu and Lin Yao climbed the lower slopes of Ragged Mountain, in whose shadow Grandfather Luo’s farm existed, and walked together to the waterfall, their shoes crunching dry bracken underfoot or dragging through wet grass as the seasons bled into each other. Until finally even Madame Mimi was anxious for something to happen.

  “I won’t live forever,” she told her grandson one breakfast, her face as creased as an old poem. “And before I die I want to see your children.”

  Flames danced over an iron griddle and buds blossomed on the fingers of a cherry tree in the farmyard outside. The kitchen was as perfect as his grandmother could make, far removed from the glitzy chrome of Shanghai or the lightweight adventures of holidays on the moon.

  Most of those who visited Chuang Tzu’s grandmother assumed her house was a bid for reassurance, like most retreats into tradition. This was to miss the point. The stone-built farm with its small meadows and old orchard, wild deer and pheasants was Madame Mimi’s revenge. As was its décor of bamboo scrolls, paper screens and silk carpets.

  It was her revenge for the Westernized years spent in exile in Paris. For the child she later lost to a New York taxi and the Rue St. Honoré frocks she left behind on their much-publicized return to Beijing.

  She could remember the evening they decided to return. Sitting in the Chieng-Mai on Rue Frédéric Sauton, at one of those centre tables with a little glass screen on either side to keep conversations private. Two Americans in leather jackets had been sitting next to them, feeding a tramplike man who seemed more concerned with bolting his ground chicken and chilli than listening to what they had to say.

  Chuang Tzu’s father had been a baby then, his car seat slung on the floor beside their table. The Chieng-Mai was good like that. On the table between them lay a letter from the embassy offering her husband full immunity and the return of his family farm. All he had to do was come back to Beijing. They would not even try to control what he could say or limit his access to the Western press.

  Of course, the letter didn’t say there’d be no electricity or that the roads to the village would be allowed to become impassable and visas as good as prohibited to journalists wanting to visit the area.

  It had been Grandfather Luo’s choice. His decision.

  Now she felt amusement and regret and small shards of resentment that caught her unaware like paper cuts. So she made her life in the shape of memories which had been old when she was a child and lived out her exile from Paris within another exile, this one.

  When Chuang Tzu woke from the darkness for the third time it was to roll over and reach for the girl in his dreams. Only the girl was gone and the sheet under which he slept was hard and scratchy, a fact Chuang Tzu forgot as soon as she walked into his room both naked and smiling.

  Neither of which was likely or even possible. The last time he’d seen Lin Yao had been by the waterfall, as she sat half naked on her heels in his shirt, slow tears sliding down her cheeks to fall on summer grass.

  “You’re leaving,” she’d told him, back then.

  “No.” Lifting her narrow chin, Chuang Tzu kissed away the tears. It felt a very adult thing to do. “You’re wrong.” There was blood on the tail of his shirt, but much less than either of them had been expecting.

  Their first attempt at sex had been brief and clumsy, her anxiety and his nervousness leading to relief only when they simultaneously decided that perhaps the time was not right.

  “Swim?”

  Lin Yao had looked so surprised at his suggestion that Chuang Tzu almost smiled. Neither one had braved the pool in all the months they’d been walking from the farm to the waterfall and back. And though Grandfather Luo’s pig keeper said that snakes slept in its depths, neither Lin Yao nor Chuang Tzu believed him, any more than they believed that bathing in its icy water brought visions.

  It was the pool’s steep sides and the force of the waterfall that made them stick to the river that ran past the village.

  “Come on,” said Chuang Tzu, reaching for her hand. And that was what decided it. Lin Yao let her fingers lock around his and then, only half willing, she let herself be pulled to her feet and led to the lip of the pool. He undid her blouse and slid the sleeves down her arms, dropping her top onto the grass. Then he shrugged himself out of his own shirt and tossed it beside hers.

  “How are we going to do this?” asked Lin Yao, shivering.

  Chuang Tzu looked at her. “We jump,” he said.

  “And how do we get back?” Nodding at the long drop, Lin Yao indicated the problem.

  “We climb,” said Chuang Tzu, only then searching for the means to make this true. There were splits in the granite and narrow ledges, holes worn by water and the occasional bush busy clinging to the side. It should be possible, provided the first bit was not too slippery.

  “There are handholds,” he said.

  Lin Yao was doubtful.

  “Let me go first,” suggested the boy. “If it’s safe then you can go second.”

  Long black hair swept Lin Yao’s naked back as she shook her head. “No,” she said. “We jump together.”

  The drop was maybe twice their height, the depth of the pool unknown, and it wasn’t cl
ear to Chuang Tzu whether they were testing themselves or each other. Either way, Lin Yao twisted her fingers tight into his, stepped up to the lip and counted down from three.

  “Lift off,” said Chuang Tzu, and they jumped, falling forever until white water came up to hit them and the shock tore their hands apart.

  “Cold,” he gasped, voice frozen in his throat.

  Lin Yao nodded, unable to speak because an iron band was being tightened by unseen fingers around her ribs.

  Kicking towards the rock, the boy stopped when he realized Lin Yao had remained where she was. So he swam back, grabbed the girl’s wrist and dragged her after him, only letting go when Lin Yao reached round him to grab at a crack in the rock-face.

  “You go first,” he said. “You’re colder.”

  Lin Yao looked uncertain, as well she might. But she reached up and found a handhold, scrabbling with her toes as she pushed and pulled her body half out of the water. Her shoulders as she reached for a fresh hold were sharp as blades and her muscle stood out, root-like, beneath pale skin.

  “You all right?”

  “What do you think?” Lin Yao didn’t say anything else, just found another crevice in the rock and then another, her toes scrabbling to keep their hold. And as she finally pulled herself clear of the icy water, Chuang Tzu reached for the handhold she’d used to begin her climb and pulled himself close to the rock-face.

  “Keep going,” he said. “Don’t look down.”

  He was staring up at her, Lin Yao’s whole body foreshortened into legs, buttocks and a narrow, almost hairless gash of sex.

  Everything was a matter of perspective, Chuang Tzu realized. Ordinary things seen from extraordinary angles held their own meanings and messages. What her buttocks and sex said to him the boy was still working out when the girl scrambled over the lip of the pool and his perspective changed.

  “Well, that was stupid,” said Lin Yao.

  Chuang Tzu shrugged. “Quite probably.”