Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The plan was simple.

  President Newman would arrive by helicopter at a field outside the village. He would walk up the hill, rather than take a jeep. This was his choice and against the express advice of his Secret Service men. A side effect of this was that extra snipers had to be found to cover the lower slopes of Monte Alberto Sole, stretching the Colonel’s resources even thinner.

  He would walk along a short section of Via Smith, from which cars and pedestrians had been banned, and enter Piazza Solforino from the north, crossing the cobbles with the press and token public behind their barricades to his right. In the middle of the square he would stop and take a salute from Colonel Borgenicht, before pausing to examine the seventeenth-century bell tower silhouetted against the twilight.

  Professor Mayer would then bring out Prisoner Zero, who was to be clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and unmanacled. To bring the prisoner to the President was, in Colonel Borgenicht’s opinion, a very basic breach of protocol, since all those President Newman intended to meet should be ready and waiting.

  The President had insisted, however. He didn’t want any shots of an exhausted-looking Prisoner Zero standing beside an ill, elderly looking Petra Mayer.

  “All you do is shake hands.” If anything, the Colonel’s voice was even tighter. “You step forward, shake hands, step away. Nothing else. And you don’t speak until you’re spoken to.”

  “It’s going to be fine,” Petra Mayer said. “We’ve been through all this.” She turned to the prisoner, who looked almost normal in Levi’s, Nike trainers, a Gap sweatshirt and two weeks’ growth of hair. “You know what to do, right?”

  Prisoner Zero smiled at the small woman with the three gold bangles and a beak-like nose. A crow, Malika would have called her, and in all probability would have been right.

  “Well?” Colonel Borgenicht said.

  The prisoner shrugged. Whether or not he knew what to do was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the darkness did.

  President Newman’s helicopter was small, single-bladed and pale blue with the President’s seal fixed either side, on both doors. Since that model went into service only in black, camouflage or jungle green, Colonel Borgenicht imagined the craft had been given a rapid paint job. It also flew low over Villaggio Valera on its way to the field, which the Colonel was sure had not been in the flight plan.

  “Shouldn’t you be with your men?” Petra Mayer nodded to an honour guard who stood at attention in the twilight.

  The Colonel knew Professor Mayer was trying to get rid of him. Most probably so she could talk to the prisoner in private.

  “I’m going,” he said, adding “ma’am” as an afterthought.

  Prisoner Zero and the Professor watched the thick-set black officer march out to a prearranged spot, halt with what looked like a complicated stamp of his boots and come to attention.

  “The President is entering the square.” The voice in Petra Mayer’s ear bead was clipped and military, and she watched Colonel Borgenicht nod to himself from his position in the middle of the square as he heard the same message. A ripple of tension ran through the crowd, heads turning and photographers surging forward as they realized what those wired for sound had already been told.

  Gene Newman, looking relaxed in light fawn slacks, tan shoes and a summer-weight jacket, strode under an arch and into view, the First Lady half a pace behind him.

  He was a Hollywood star who happened to be President. A brilliant mind, a sharp politician, an adequate husband. Most of all, he was a man of the people. Hands stretched out to him, voices called.

  Stepping off the path that had been marked discreetly in chalk, Gene Newman reached the barriers and grasped the hand of an old woman, shaking it warmly. From first seeing the crowds until that moment, his eyes had been on a young Sicilian woman in her twenties, a small boy glued to her hips, his thin arms tight around her neck. She had a face straight from La Dolce Vita and breasts full enough to die for.

  But the second the old woman behind the girl thrust out her own hand, all Gene Newman’s attention locked on to her. “You have a beautiful village,” he said, in Italian bad enough to disgrace a child, and around the grandmother, daughter and child, members of the European press practically cooed in delight.

  He was brilliant, Petra Mayer had to give her old pupil that. Ruthless, intellectually arrogant in private and occasionally promiscuous but a good president all the same. He didn’t talk to the girl next either, instead he pulled a stupid face at her child, then reached out and gripped the toddler’s nose lightly between thumb and first finger.

  The boy might have burst into tears or buried his head in his mother’s shoulder, but this was Gene Newman and the kid just grinned as the President grinned back and a dozen flash guns fired in the dying sun. Only then did President Newman turn to the mother. His words were few and his Italian rudimentary, but he left her staring after him with something approaching open hunger.

  The man could have kept a team of anthropologists in research papers for life on how power made middle-aged men unfeasibly attractive to women in their twenties.

  “Ma’am,” said Colonel Borgenicht, his voice tight in her ear. “You’re on…”

  This was Petra Mayer’s signal to walk Prisoner Zero out into the middle of the square. The sniper rifle in the bell tower would be covering him from beginning to end and the man behind the sights was the best America had to offer, on special loan from the CIA. Whatever happened, that rifle would remain trained on Prisoner Zero’s skull. If necessary, the sniper would shoot through anyone who got in the way.

  From the look in the eyes of the Colonel when he told her this, Petra Mayer knew he meant every word.

  “Time to go,” Prisoner Zero said brightly, pushing himself away from the church wall, and Petra Mayer did her best not to look shocked.

  Marzaq al-Turq, sometimes living as Jake Razor and now answering only to Prisoner Zero, stepped into the square and began his walk across the dusty cobblestones of Piazza Solforino. Camera flash burnt his eyes and the weight of history hung like a yoke around his shoulders but he barely noticed.

  “Look this way…”

  “Over here!”

  “Hey, Jake…”

  Prisoner Zero could hear the demands of the press over the beat of his own heart and he could taste nightfall in the air and smell dog shit, diesel, a distant fire and the stink of sweat that rose from his body. A scrawled echo of the only day that had really mattered in his life.

  All the things he’d hoped to develop from Jake’s notes remained unfinished. He didn’t understand the shape of time, not really. All he had was a matrix of multi-dimensional intimations filtered through a three-dimensional brain, a flicker book masquerading as film.

  He was no closer to finding the missing name of God.

  “The missing name of what?”

  The question came from a man standing in front of him. Gene Newman, President of the United States, the man who refused to sign a space accord with Beijing and the person Prisoner Zero had been instructed to kill.

  “You have to take America into deep space,” Prisoner Zero said. “You can’t let China go it alone.”

  “That’s what this is all about?”

  “I think so.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  Prisoner Zero shook his head.

  “I can’t sign the accord,” said the President. “Not the way things are in China at the moment. You know how many people Beijing has in prison camps?” He was on firmer ground here. Gene Newman was always on firm ground when it came to statistics.

  The man looked at him.

  Gene Newman sighed. “That’s different,” he said.

  Around them people were looking anxious. Well, Colonel Borgenicht, the First Lady and Petra Mayer were looking anxious and they counted as people.

  Cameras were flashing, voices shouting. But all the President’s attention was on one emaciated figure in front of him. Prisoner Zero didn’t
look a threat to anyone. He looked like someone trapped in a life where genius was not enough.

  “You can change history,” said Prisoner Zero. As he moved closer to the President than he was meant to get Colonel Borgenicht began to glance between his Commander in Chief and the bell tower.

  The Colonel was anxiety made flesh.

  “We should put that man out of his misery,” said the President. “We’ll talk about the other stuff later. Let’s do the shake.” He spoke as if Prisoner Zero regularly did camera calls. As if the world’s gaze came naturally to them both.

  “You okay?” he added, watching Prisoner Zero sway. The last thing President Newman needed was for the man to collapse in front of the cameras. He could see the papers now. TORTURED PRISONER COLLAPSES AT FEET OF PRESIDENT. That would be one of the politer headlines.

  “Sure,” said Prisoner Zero.

  “Then let’s get this over with.”

  The President reached for a shake, cameras whirring, before Prisoner Zero even had time to take the hand offered. “We faked your signature,” said the President, trapping Prisoner Zero’s hand between both of his. “And backdated the appeal. Petra has explained that to you, hasn’t she?”

  “You…?”

  “Look into the lenses,” President Newman told Prisoner Zero, “shake my hand and smile.” And the prisoner did just that. He shook the offered hand, turned to the press and gazed into a bank of cameras, overtaken by a firestorm of flash.

  Mulberry bushes, a stream almost wide enough to be called a river and, over it, a tiny bridge formed from a perfect quarter circle, painted red, green and gold.

  A boy running.

  Prisoner Zero wasn’t too sure where that was happening until he heard Colonel Borgenicht’s voice bark in his ear. The order was for everyone, President Newman was to be protected.

  The boy slid to a halt in front of the President, dropping to one knee and pointing his Leica at the man. He had a badge around his neck which read “Presse” and his grin was wide, his eyes dark. He reminded Prisoner Zero of someone and Prisoner Zero was still wondering if that someone was him when Gene Newman held up his hand.

  “It’s okay,” he said, to no one in particular. “Give the kid some room…Where are you from?”

  The boy thought about it. “Xingjian,” he said.

  Gene Newman laughed. “I meant which paper?”

  “El View.”

  “Not one I know.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  The boy looked about twelve. No, the President caught himself. Eighteen, twenty…Half his own staff looked like children these days.

  “You want us to shake again?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Okay,” Gene said. He thrust out his hand to Prisoner Zero. “Let’s give the kid what he needs.”

  Light, such as Prisoner Zero had never seen.

  A click of the camera, a flash and then somewhere very distant a grown man screamed; but the sound of Colonel Borgenicht’s outrage was already fading and Prisoner Zero was not its cause anyway.

  CHAPTER 58

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

  “You’re too late.”

  The girl shuffled off a stolen cloak, discarding it onto the gravel behind her like a shadow. Her feet were bare and bleeding and she wore little more than the rags of a blue padded jacket and torn silk trousers. Around her narrow hips was a length of twine. It was through this that a child’s sword was stuck.

  “Too late for what?” she said. Pulling the blade from her makeshift belt, Tris crossed the elegant half-moon bridge in a handful of steps and halted a few paces from where Zaq sat on his rock.

  A very elegant rock, carved from jade.

  The Emperor was crying and when Tris took a closer look she saw that his face was screwed up like that of an anguished child. Scrolls littered the ground around his feet.

  “Something wrong?” Tris said.

  This was meant to be ironic. Tris was holding her blade and she could see in his eyes that the Emperor knew why she was there. All the same, he took her question seriously.

  “He thought he was dreaming me,” Zaq said. “He thought I was the darkness.”

  “Really?” said Tris. “And should I know what you’re talking about?” Tris had less than no idea what the man’s words signified.

  “You came to stop me. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “I came to kill you,” said Tris. “Stopping you isn’t enough.” She looked from the rock to her blade and then back again. “You need to stand up,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” Tris said crossly.

  Zaq shrugged, then wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know.”

  “Because I can’t kill you if you’re sitting down.”

  “Is that in the rules?”

  “Well,” said Tris, somewhat reluctantly. “It’s in mine.”

  “Then I’m going to stay right here,” said Zaq. “I mean, what would you do?”

  Tris frowned. “You can’t sit there forever,” she protested.

  “Maybe,” said Zaq. “Maybe not.”

  In Tris’s opinion the Emperor wasn’t giving her the attention she deserved. She had a firm idea of how this should go and the Chuang Tzu begging for his life, expressing disbelief or at the very least demanding her reasons came high on that list.

  “You know,” Zaq muttered after a while, “I probably could…I mean, I don’t really eat and sleep scares me.” He was ticking the points off on his fingers as he went. “My muscles retain their tone whether or not I exercise. I don’t know if I can actually control my waste functions but it seems possible. After all, I can control everything else.

  “You should try dangling your feet in the stream,” he added, when Tris just stared at him. “It might help the blisters.”

  “What’s with the butterflies?” Tris asked eventually. Once curiosity finally overcame her irritation, it seemed an obvious enough question.

  Zaq looked up from his scroll. There was ink on his fingers and his brush had splayed at the bristles where he’d been pressing too hard. His ink stone was broken in three and he’d taken to grinding one of the broken ends directly into a saucer of water. Tris was sure that wasn’t how it was meant to be done, but then what did she know?

  “Try one,” he suggested.

  And then Zaq went back to his scroll, alternating perfect circles with sketches of crude flying machines which hovered around a small hill town.

  “Go on,” he said a moment later. “Here. I’ll show you how.” Reaching out, Zaq held his hand absolutely still until a butterfly skimmed across the grass towards him.

  “Watch,” Zaq said.

  And as Tris watched, the flicker of purple stamped on the Chuang Tzu’s outstretched fingers, the man blinked and the butterfly fell dead, twirling to the ground like a fallen leaf.

  “You try it.”

  Tris held out her hand to a butterfly and across the 2023 worlds 148 billion people sucked in their breath as Tris’s body arched backwards and she hit the ground at Zaq’s feet.

  “That was stupid,” he said.

  Flames licked up both sides of the Changlang, a 2572-foot corridor built along the northern shore of a lake which bordered the Emperor’s Summer Gardens outside the Forbidden City.

  Only a few of the famous paintings lining its walls looked likely to survive the inferno now sweeping the wooden corridor’s entire length. Tris’s calling card.

  Zaq hated it when people wouldn’t stay dead.

  “This is between me and her,” Zaq said. Although he said this to himself since the Librarian was no longer talking to him.

  It was muddling and strange and more frightening than he’d expected and Zaq wasn’t quite sure why he was still there. If America joined Beijing, the Loyal Prince would no longer be solely Chinese. Most probably it would not even be called the Loyal Prince. Someone else would discover the 2023 worlds. There’d be no first Chuang Tzu, never mind
a fifty-third…He’d rewritten history and changed everything.

  So why wasn’t everything changed?

  Unless, of course, the man he needed to kill had not been killed. The more Zaq thought about this the more certain he became that this was what had happened.

  He was trapped here, waiting for the American Emperor to die. And his own assassin was out there somewhere. No one else could have fired the Changlang and few would want to, fewer still would dare and none but the girl could have made it this far.

  He blamed the Library.

  The plateau should have stopped her, as it had a thousand before. And if not the plateau then the ice bridge. She’d got past both, which was unknown, and survived the stamp of a butterfly when none but the reincarnated could do that and live.

  All 2023 worlds knew this and so did Zaq, because he’d patched himself into a feed. So now he watched himself staring into space, talking to nothing and sitting on the step of a pagoda while the Dragon Throne sat empty behind him.

  There was little need for her to burn the buildings of the Summer Gardens. All of the doors had been left unlocked and the shutters open. The guards who might have stopped her had been absent since Zaq dismissed them months before. But she had burnt the Changlang anyway, stalking the length of its corridor with her head high, a blade stuck in her makeshift belt and her face grim. The only incongruous thing about the figure who swept through in a storm of fire had been her hands. She’d dragged them across the walls and paintings like a child rattling her stick against a fence.

  And everywhere Tris’s fingers had touched flames sparked.

  Zaq looked pitiful sitting on those steps. A tearful young man in a dirty blue cloak and tunic, his chin in his hands and his attention focused, when it focused at all, on the burning line of the Changlang.

  He wanted to be braver. Most of all, he wanted to be born someone else, someone completely different. A person the girl didn’t want to kill.