Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Testing each plank before putting her weight on it meant it took Tris the best part of an hour to cover a distance she could have walked in five minutes at her normal speed. And when the blizzard cleared and the far end of the bridge remained resolutely out of sight, Tris agreed with Luca that they’d have to do it differently.

  “Okay,” she said, as she untied the rope knotted around her waist and handed it to Luca. “I need you to lengthen this.” Tris didn’t know how Luca would do it, she only knew he could.

  “Much better,” said Tris, when he returned the end to her.

  Retying the rope around her waist, Tris tested the knot by yanking it as hard as she could. “We don’t have time to check every step,” Tris said, sounding more sure than she felt. “So I’m going to walk normally and you’ll save me if I fall through. And if you fall through then I’ll save you…Although that’s not as likely.”

  Afterwards Tris came to believe that she’d walked the bridge for weeks, maybe months, suspended over a nothingness so deep that, even on the afternoons the snow cleared, she never saw the bottom.

  In fact, it took less than three days. Seventy-two hours during which a final figure of ninety-eight billion people watched Tris slip into a mental state little higher than stupefaction. It was during the last of these days that Tris decided she would burn the Chuang Tzu’s precious pavilions around his ears.

  She didn’t remember telling Luca this, although she remembered his answer. Which was that the idea probably acquired its all-encompassing appeal from the fact that she was dying of cold.

  The sheer strangeness of Tris’s journey was enough to make even those who scorned the feeds decide to make an exception. Rumour in the 2023 worlds was a strange beast, widely recognized and little understood, except by a few ancient mememagicians who studied more for the sake of study than from hope of surpassing the early masters.

  Somehow, during those seventy-two hours, the idea that watching a girl from a non-world walk a bridge might be culturally required reached tipping point, jumping from those who would watch anything rather than live themselves to those who treated all external input with suspicion. From here, the tale of her ridiculous quest passed to the cold immortals, who found meaning not in her intention to kill an emperor who waited impatiently for her arrival but in the sheer innocence of her battle against his weather.

  She became, without knowing it, the container for a billion conflicting interpretations of what it meant to be alive.

  A few million bet on her survival, others set out for Rapture to offer their help or to attempt to duplicate her journey, but most just watched from the corner of their minds, not letting Tris’s journey take up too much of their thoughts but never forgetting it either.

  In a civilisation once described by one of its oldest minds as an endless dinner party at which no one knew who were guests and who the waiters, what occasion was being celebrated or who was paying for the meal, Tris’s battle with herself engrained itself into the conversation.

  It helped, of course, that no one knew who the girl was or why she talked to a companion no one else could see. There were no eight degrees of separation, nor sixteen, thirty-two or sixty-four…She was tabula rasa, which was interesting and in its own way quite terrifying to worlds in which everyone knew each other, even if they didn’t.

  CHAPTER 44

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  The deal offered to Jake was simple.

  Exile.

  Jake would leave Marrakech, taking Celia with him. Riad al-Razor would be sold, within the month if possible and certainly by the end of that summer. As it turned out, Major Abbas was able to recommend a discreet and trustworthy agent who could be relied on both to find a suitable buyer and handle any legal matters that might arise.

  And it would be best if their Peugeot was included in the price of the sale. Did Jake have any problems with the suggestions so far?

  De Greuze said nothing during all of this. The revelation about Jake’s family had shifted his priorities and he wasn’t about to mess with the grandson of a known philanthropist with the direct ear of the American President. All the same, he’d already palmed one of the nude photographs of that boy which Jake had dealt so casually from the pile with his thumb, leaving a really rather beautiful fingerprint.

  Jake and Celia were sitting on the pink-painted wicker sofa, de Greuze had pulled up the largest chair without being asked and Major Abbas had announced that he preferred to stand. Moz had been sent to the kitchen to make mint tea.

  “Here,” he said, banging his tray onto the table.

  Celia smiled. “I’ll have mine unsweetened. You’d better check with the others.” When the tea was poured into glasses, she made him go back for a plate of pastries, mostly chopped pistachio mixed with honey and variations on baklava.

  Moz was preparing himself to be furious when he noticed that de Greuze and Major Abbas were more furious still. It was like a card game in which everyone but him knew the rules.

  “Give me your bank details,” said the Major to Jake. “I’ll have the money sent on.” They were still discussing the finer points of the deal.

  “No.” Celia shook her head. “Arrange a dollar bank draft and have it sent to these people.” The card she pulled from her leather satchel gave the address of a New York attorney who specialized in handling the more difficult kind of celebrity client. “I’ll tell them to expect the money.”

  Jake only made the grade with that firm because of his family, his musical career to date not being enough to rate him client status. A fact both the attorney and Celia had been careful never to point out.

  When Major Abbas made the mistake of looking doubtful Celia told him in painstaking and patronising detail which Marrakchi bank could act as go-between, what kind of commission they would expect and how long it would take to organize. “I’m sure the agent you have in mind can handle it.”

  If Jake were going to lose the riad and be banished from Marrakech, which effectively was what had just happened, then Celia wasn’t about to retire without leaving a few scars.

  “So we just leave?” Jake said. He didn’t seem to be asking the question of anyone in particular. “And take Moz with us.”

  “That wasn’t what I said,” the Major replied, dipping his hand into a pocket and removing a packet of small cigars. Smoke spiralled towards the sky as he looked from Jake to Moz, noticing the similarity of their haircuts, jeans and general slouch. He should have seen it before.

  “This boy is under-age,” Major Abbas told Jake. “He also lacks a passport. Anyone attempting to take him out of Morocco would be breaking the law. You understand me?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Good. Were such a thing to happen…It would be very inadvisable for that person to come back to Marrakech again.”

  Jake assumed that the land agent was in the Major’s pay and would organize matters so that Riad al-Razor was sold cheaply to a member of the Major’s immediate family. This assumption was untrue. Being unmarried and an only son, the Major had no family.

  The agent Major Abbas had in mind was actually a brother of his deputy who would probably sell the house to a cousin of his own. The money would then be split into three sums, with the first and largest going to the American bank mentioned by Celia, a second and smaller amount going into the agent’s own account and a third and equivalent sum going to the Major.

  Had Celia been Moroccan or even au fait with the etiquette of buying houses in North Africa, there would have been a fourth sum, made by splitting the largest sum two thirds–one third. The second of those sums would have been declared to the authorities as the price of the riad, becoming liable to any taxes that might be appropriate, and the first would have gone straight into Jake’s pocket.

  Nobody shook hands when the Major and de Greuze left. Instead Jake stood under the arch of the front door and watched the petite taxi pull away from where it had been parked against the wall of a mosque.

  “I reckon we’v
e got till the end of the week,” he told Celia. “I’ll go buy a VW. You find the kid some new clothes…” And that was when Moz finally realized a deal had been struck and that, at no point, had anyone let him have the slightest say in the matter.

  He would be leaving Marrakech with the others. Jake and Celia had known from the beginning that Malika was beyond saving.

  “No,” said Moz, tears in his eyes. “I won’t.”

  “Won’t what?” Celia sounded puzzled.

  “I’m not leaving,” Moz said. “You can’t make me. And it was a lie. I wasn’t here. I was with—”

  Malika’s name was lost in the sound of Jake backhanding the boy across his face, swearing loudly and stamping inside, slamming the front door behind him.

  “Fuckwit,” said Moz.

  Celia sighed. “That wasn’t clever,” she said. Moz thought she was talking about Jake but he might have been wrong. She might well have been talking about him.

  CHAPTER 45

  CIA HQ Langley, Monday 9 July

  Paula Zarte shut her office door and then changed her mind. She’d made a point of operating an open-door policy and saw no reason to signal that this might be about to change. In practice, the only people who asked to see her were those she’d have seen anyway.

  The difference was previous heads of the CIA had operated a section-heads-only policy and this was obvious and known. Paula had made it clear that anyone in the Agency who felt the need could ask to see her. The end result was the same but she’d acquired a reputation for openness that had reached the Washington Post and done much to cement the belief that things within the Agency had changed.

  “Sit,” she said, indicating a chair better suited to One Washington Circle or the Mercer in SoHo. Agent Wharton glanced doubtfully at the white leather but did what he was told. He sat on the very edge of the chair and leant forward, with a file of notes on his knee.

  “You took Bill Hagsteen to see the President?”

  Agent Wharton nodded.

  “How did it go?” Paula Zarte watched the young man turn the question round in his head, examining it from every angle.

  When he was certain it was safe, Agent Wharton said, “It went well.”

  “Good.” Paula Zarte smiled. “What did they talk about?”

  This elicited a much longer silence. “Warren Zevon mostly,” Michael Wharton said finally. “About the round-up of musicians playing on his last album. A bit about John Hyatt…”

  Paula Zarte’s office looked out onto a lawn set with sprinklers and a high-tech security system that relied on everything from pressure pads across paths to infrared sensors and directional mikes. A very beautiful and meticulously tended lawn, it had to be mown twice a week with a hand mower because anything more sophisticated might upset the security system.

  Standing up from her desk, Paula Zarte went across to the window and looked down at two men walking across the grass. They were both nu-school CIA, thin and fit, probably teetotal and dressed like fashion plates in something understated but expensive.

  They made her feel antique.

  Her life had improved in the last few weeks. Mike had stopped coming home at midnight and was muttering about maybe taking the kids to Orlando for Christmas. He’d hate the place and so, she imagined, would the kids, being precisely the wrong age. She was pleased all the same.

  They weren’t back to sex yet, although Paula could see that happening. Maybe they should be the ones to go to Orlando and leave the kids with her mother. The kids would probably prefer that anyway.

  Paula’s Puerto Rican bodyguard was gone, fast-tracked to the next level and reassigned to San Francisco. Doubt and the faintest trace of bitterness had filled Felicia’s eyes when Paula described this as a well-deserved promotion, but the new job was a good one and what else could Paula do?

  Felicia had traced Mike to a hotel in Baltimore and found out far more than Paula now wanted her to know. Of course, Paula had been the one who’d asked Felicia to do it. And it had been the President’s offer of an ambassadorship in Central America that brought Mike to heel. He wasn’t stupid, he knew exactly what that meant.

  “They talked about Warren Zevon?” Paula said over her shoulder, watching the two young agents close an outside door behind them. She was due to address their section head shortly. As yet she had no idea what to tell him.

  “Mostly…The President also wanted to know about something called the Stiff Tour.”

  “The Stiff what?”

  “‘If it ain’t stiff it ain’t worth a fuck’…” Agent Wharton spread his hands apologetically. “It was a seventies thing in England apparently. Bill Hagsteen played drums briefly in a support act. That was when he first toured with Jake Razor.”

  “He’s absolutely sure it’s the man he knew?”

  “Prisoner Zero? Yes, absolutely. Bill Hagsteen told the President he was kicking himself for not recognizing Jake from the start. You know, in Paris, when he and his…When they went looking for Jake.”

  “He and his what?” Paula Zarte asked.

  “Partner,” Agent Wharton mumbled and Paula sighed. He was even younger than she’d imagined.

  “Jim James, the photographer, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And where’s Bill Hagsteen now?”

  “Downstairs, ma’am. In one of the holding rooms.”

  “Let him wait.” Paula turned back to her desk and reached for a file, then changed her mind. Agent Wharton wasn’t the person to talk to about its contents. In fact, Paula Zarte was beginning to resign herself to the fact there might not be a right person to talk to, and that included Mike.

  The big question and the one Paula didn’t really feel competent to answer was should that also include the President? If she could read Gene’s mind, which would he want—for Prisoner Zero to be Jake Razor or for the man to be some North African kid grown old and bitter?

  She was coming close to making real enemies of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General and the Pentagon. And it was a tough call, even for someone whose job it was to make such calls.

  Prisoner Zero was still on death row, put there by a military commission and with an execution date set at least one week before the start of Ramadan, because the last thing America needed was to execute an Arab on the eve of a major Islamic fast.

  Only now everyone thought Prisoner Zero was American, which presumably meant that America could do what they wanted with him. Except if Gene pardoned him half the world would decide it was because he wasn’t Arab after all.

  “Cancel the briefing,” she said. Paula was talking to a squawk box on her desk and not Agent Wharton, who looked up guiltily and then relaxed once he realized he wasn’t the one being addressed.

  “Send my apologies,” Paula added. “Oh, and organize a secure video link to all the section chiefs for six p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Okay, Steve? I want hearts and minds for all areas on local responses…

  “No,” Paula said heavily. “Not the execution. The equations.” Steve Duffy was pretty, enthusiastic and ticked off the boxes for a handful of the government’s affirmative action requirements, being trailer poor, dyslexic and gay. Unfortunately he was also none too bright.

  “And get me Professor Mayer on the secure line, then Vice Questore Pier Angelo…the Italian,” she said, “and the President’s private secretary. In that order.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

  “I’m winning,” Zaq said. “So you might as well go away.” Every looking glass the Emperor passed showed him the same thing…

  A man with a scroll under his right arm and long scholarly robes tumbling down that side, his long fingers stroking a poet’s chin. The Librarian had the obligatory beard of a Taoist thinker and thin moustaches that draped into wisps of white hair.

  And every time the Chuang Tzu caught a mirror’s eye, the Librarian would open his mouth to say something and then close it as the Emperor strode by.

  In
his other hand the Librarian carried a long halberd, its blade facing towards the floor. The left side of his body was armoured with plate mail over padded leather and a steel helmet switched to a scholar’s cap along a line bisecting the middle of his forehead.

  The split between warrior and scholar represented the classic virtues required of the Emperor’s tutor and, by extension, of the Emperor himself. Zaq was only too aware that his own chao pao militated against mockery of the old man’s costume.

  An embroidered dragon coiled across the front of Zaq’s formal court robes, which were for a duke, first class. Zaq changed his clothes every day now, switching ranks at random and varying the path of his early morning walks through the outer pavilions.

  He did this for amusement and because he knew that it worried the Library. Sometime soon, Zaq would have to face the glass and listen as the Librarian explained what Zaq already knew. That a young assassin, crazed with cold and loneliness, was working her way across the bridge between plateaux. A dark-haired, thin child who held conversations with the air and carried a large knife with which to rip out the heart of the Chuang Tzu.

  Everyone Zaq met in the palace thought he was hiding from the danger facing him. Zaq could see it in their faces and hear it in the way conversations stilled as he swept through the corridors.

  They were wrong.

  Zaq knew all about the cold assassin and he assumed the Library knew about the prisoner trapped on a sun-baked island who carried the emperor’s dreams. War could be a very complex business and weapons were not always what they seemed.

  “Majesty…”

  “Excellency,” Zaq corrected. The soldier should be able to work out for himself that he stood in front of a duke and not an emperor. Zaq tried hard to recall the man’s name, screwing up his face as he did so.