Ice and Fire: Chung Kuo Series

by David Wingrove

  She went across and looked. They were novels. Famous novels. Ulysses, Nostromo, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, Howard’s End, Bleak House, Daniel Martin, Orlando and others. She turned back to him. ‘I don’t understand. What am I looking for?’

  ‘It’s a cryptogram. Look at the order. The first letter of the titles.’

  She looked, doing as he said. D.A.E.H.R.E. V.O.N.O.T.T.U.B. Then she understood. It was mirrored. You had to reverse the letters.

  He laughed, ahead of her, and reached up to find the button.

  With a faint hiss of escaping air the mirror sprang free. Beyond it was a room. Ben shone his lamp inside. It seemed like a smaller version of the library, the walls covered with books. But in its centre, taking up most of the floor space, was a desk.

  He shone his lamp over the desk’s surface, picking out four objects. A letter knife, an ink-block, a framed photograph and a large, folio-sized journal. The light rested on the last of these for some while, then moved upward, searching the end wall.

  Meg came alongside him. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘A window. There must have been a window.’

  ‘Why? If he really wanted to keep this room a secret, having no window onto the outside would be the best way, surely?’

  He looked at her, then nodded. But she, watching him, was surprised that he hadn’t seen it for himself. It was as if, now that he’d found it, he was transfixed by his discovery. She shone her lamp into his face.

  ‘Meg…’ He pushed her hand away.

  She moved past him, into the room, then turned back, facing him.

  ‘Here.’ She handed him the journal, knowing, even before he confirmed it, whose it was. Augustus. There was a space for it on the shelf on her father’s study, amongst the others there. She recognized the tooled black leather of its cover.

  Ben opened it. He turned a page, then smiled and looked up at her.

  ‘Am I right?’ she asked.

  In answer he turned the book and showed her the page. She laughed uneasily, shocked, then looked back up at him. It was a picture of Ben. An almost perfect portrait of him. And underneath, in Ben’s own handwriting, was a name and a date.

  ‘Augustus Shepherd. Anno Domini 2120.’

  ‘But that’s you. Your handwriting.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. But it’s a clue. We’re getting close, Meg. Very close.’

  Beth Shepherd set the two bags down on the kitchen table then went to the garden door and undid the top catch. Pushing the top half back, she leaned out and called to the children.

  ‘Ben! Meg! I’m back!’

  She went inside again and busied herself, filling the cupboards from the bags. Only when she had finished did she go to the door again and, releasing the bottom catch, go out into the rose garden.

  There was no sign of them. Perhaps they’re indoors, she thought. But then they would have heard her, surely? She called again, moving out through the gate until she stood at the top of the lower garden that sloped down to the bay. She put her hand up to her eyes, searching the sunlit meadows for a sign of them.

  ‘Strange…’ she muttered, then turned and went back inside. She knew she was back quite early, but they usually came when she called, knowing she would have brought something special for each of them.

  She took the two gifts from her handbag and set them on the table. An old-fashioned paper book for Ben – one he had specifically asked for – on sensory deprivation. And for Meg a tiny Han ivory. A delicately carved globe.

  Beth smiled to herself, then went down the steps, into the relative darkness of the dining room.

  ‘Ben…? Meg?’

  She stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened. Strange. Very strange. Where could they be? Ben had said nothing about going into town. In any case, it was only a little after twelve. They weren’t due to finish their lessons for another twenty minutes.

  Curious, she went upstairs and searched the rooms. Nothing. Not even a note on Ben’s computer.

  She went out and put her hand up to her brow a second time, searching the meadows more thoroughly this time. Then she remembered Peng Yu-wei. The android tutor had a special location unit. She could trace where they were by pinpointing him on Hal’s map.

  Relieved, she went back upstairs, into Hal’s study, and called the map up onto the screen. She waited a moment for the signal to appear somewhere on the grid, then leaned forward to key the search sequence again, thinking she must have made a mistake. But no. There was no trace.

  Beth felt her stomach flip over. ‘Gods…’

  She ran down the stairs and out.

  ‘Ben! Meg! Where are you?’

  The meadows were silent, empty. A light breeze stirred the waters of the bay. She looked. Of course, the bay. She set off down the slope, forcing herself not to run, telling herself again and again that it was all right; that her fears were unfounded. They were sensible children. And, anyway, Peng Yu-wei was with them.

  Where the lawn ended she stopped and looked out across the bay, scanning the water for any sign of life. Then she turned and eased herself over the lip, clambered down the old wooden steps set into the clay wall, and ran across towards the jetty.

  The rowboat was gone.

  Where? She couldn’t understand it. Where? Then, almost peripherally, she noticed something. Off to the far left of her, jutting from the water, revealed by the ebb of the tide.

  She climbed up again, then ran along the shoreline until she was standing at the nearest point to it. It lay there, fifteen, maybe twenty ch’i from the shore, part-embedded in the mudbank, part-covered by the receding water. She knew what it was at once. And knew, for a certainty, that Ben had done this to it.

  The android lay unnaturally in the water, almost sitting up, one shoulder, part of its upper arm and the side of its head projecting above the surface. It did not float, like a corpse would float, but rested there, solid and heavy, its torn clothing flapping about it like weeds.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she might have said another time, but now any sympathy she had for the machine was swamped by her fears for her children.

  She looked up sharply, her eyes going immediately to the far shore and to the house on the crest above the cove. They had been forbidden. But that would not stop Ben. No. The sight of Peng Yu-wei in the water told her that.

  She turned, her throat constricted now, her heart pounding in her breast, and began to run back up the slope towards the cottage. And as she ran her voice hissed from her, heavy with anxiety and pain.

  ‘Let them be safe! Please, gods, let them be safe!’

  Ben sat at the desk, reading from the journal. Meg stood behind him, at his shoulder, holding the two lamps steady above the page, following Ben’s finger as it moved from right to left, up and down the columns of cyphers.

  Ben had explained it to her. He had shown her how the frontispiece illustration was the key to it. In the illustration a man sat by a fireplace, reading a newspaper, his face obscured, the scene reflected at an angle in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Using the magnifying glass he had found in the left-hand drawer, Ben had shown her how the print of the reflected newspaper was subtly different from the one the man held. Those differences formed the basis of the cypher. She understood that – even the parts about the governing rules that made the cypher change – but her mind was too slow, too inflexible to hold and use what she’d been shown.

  It was as if all this was a special key – a coded lexicon – designed for one mind only. Ben’s. It was as if Augustus knew that Ben would come. As if he had seen it clearly, as in a glass. It reminded her of the feeling she had had in the room below this one, stood there amongst the shrouded furniture; that the house was not abandoned, merely boarded up temporarily, awaiting its occupant’s return.

  And now he was back.

  She shuddered, and the light danced momentarily across the page, making Ben look up.

  He smiled and closed the journal, then stood and moved past her
, leaving the big, leather-bound book on the desk.

  Meg stood there a moment, staring at the journal, wondering what it said, knowing Ben would tell her when he wanted to. Then she picked it up and turned, following Ben out.

  Always following, she realized. But the thought pleased her. She knew he needed her to be there – a mirror for his words, his thoughts, his dark, unworded ambitions. She, with her mere nine years of experience, knew him better than anyone. Understood him as no one else could understand him. No one living, anyway.

  He was standing there, at the window, looking down thoughtfully through the broad crowns of the trees.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m trying to work out where the garden is.’

  She understood at once. There had been a picture towards the back of the journal – a portrait of a walled garden. She had thought it fanciful, maybe allegorical, but Ben seemed to think it was an actuality – somewhere here, near the house.

  She stared at the book-filled wall above the desk, then turned back, seeing how he was looking past her at the same spot. He smiled and moved his eyes to her face.

  ‘Of course. There was a door at the end of the bottom corridor.’

  She nodded. ‘Let’s go down.’

  The door was unlocked. Beyond it lay the tiny garden, the lawn neatly trimmed, delphinia and gladioli, irises and hemerocallis in bloom in the dark earth borders. And there, beneath the back wall, the headstone, the white marble carved into the shape of an oak, its trunk exaggeratedly thick, its crown a great cumulus.

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said softly. ‘I knew he would be here.’

  He bent down beside the stone and reached out to touch and trace the indented lettering.

  AUGUSTUS RAEDWALD SHEPHERD

  Born December 7 2106

  Deceased August 15 2122

  Oder jener stirbt und ists.

  Meg frowned. ‘That date is wrong, surely, Ben?’

  He shook his head, not looking at her. ‘No. He was fifteen when he killed himself

  ‘Then…’ But she still didn’t understand. Only fifteen? Then, belatedly, she realized what he had said: the whole of what he had said. ‘Killed himself?’

  There was a door set into the wall behind the stone. A simple wooden door, painted red, with a latch high up. Ben had stood up, facing it, and was staring at it in his usual intent manner.

  Doors, she thought, always another door. And behind each door something new and unexpected. Augustus, for instance. She had never dreamed he would be so much like Ben. Like a twin.

  ‘Shall we?’ Ben asked, looking at her. ‘Before we set off back? There’s time.’

  She looked down at the headstone, a strange feeling of unease nagging at her. She was tempted to say no, to tell him to leave it, but why not? Ben was right. There was time. Plenty of time before they’d be missed.

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘But then we go straight back. All right?’

  He smiled at her and nodded, then went to the door, stretching to reach the latch.

  It was a workroom. There were shelves along one wall on which were a number of things: old-fashioned screwdrivers and hammers, saws and pliers; a box of nails and an assortment of glues; locks and handles, brackets and a tray of different keys. A spade and a pitchfork stood against the wall beneath, beside a pair of boots, the mud on them dried, flaky to the touch.

  Meg looked around her. At the far end, against the wall, was a strange upright shape, covered by an old bedspread. Above it, hanging from an old iron chain, hung a bevelled mirror. As she watched, Ben went across and threw the cloth back. It was a piano. An old upright piano. He lifted the lid and stared at the keys a while.

  ‘I wonder if it’s…’

  Some sense – not precognition, nor even the feeling of danger – made her speak out. ‘No, Ben. Please. Don’t touch it.’

  He played a note. A chord. Or what should have been a chord. Each note was flat, a harsh, cacophonic noise. The music of the house. Discordant.

  She heard the chain break with a purer note than any sounded by her brother; heard the mirror slither then crash against the top of the piano; then stepped forward, her hand raised to her mouth in horror, as the glass shattered all about him.

  ‘Ben!!!’

  Her scream echoed out onto the water beyond the house.

  Inside the room there was a moment of utter stillness. Then she was at his side, sobbing breathlessly, muttering to him again and again. ‘What have you done, Ben? What have you done?’

  Shards of glass littered his hair and shoulders. His cheek was cut and a faint dribble of blood ran towards the corner of his mouth. But Ben was staring down at where his left hand had been only a moment before, sounding the chord. It still lay there on the keys, the fingers extended to form the shape. But the arm now ended in a bloodied stump. Cut clean, the blood still pumping.

  For a moment she did nothing, horrified, her lips drawn back from her teeth, watching how he turned the stump, observing it, his eyes filled with wonder at the thing he had accidentally done. He was gritting his teeth against the pain, keeping it at bay while he studied the stump, the severed hand.

  Then, coming to herself again, she pressed the stud at her neck and sounded the alarm.

  Much later Meg stood at the bottom of the slope, looking out across the water.

  Night had already fallen, but in one place its darkness was breached. Across the bay flames leapt high from the burning house and she could hear the crackling of burning vegetation, the sudden sharp retorts as wood popped and split.

  Smoke lay heavy on the far side of the water, laced eerily with threads of light from the blaze. She could see dark shapes moving against the brilliance; saw one of the Security craft rise up sharply, its twin beams cutting the air in front of it.

  ‘Meg? Come inside!’

  She turned, looking back up the slope towards the cottage. Lamps burned at several of the windows, throwing faint spills of light across the white-painted stonework. Her father stood there, a dark, familiar figure, framed in the light of the doorway.

  ‘I’m coming, daddy. Just a moment longer. Please.’

  He nodded, somewhat reluctantly, then turned away.

  Meg faced the blaze again, looking out across the dark glass of the bay. She thought she could see small shapes in the uprush of flame, like insects burning, crackling furiously as their shells ignited in a sudden flare of brilliance. Books, she thought, all those books…

  Ben was upstairs, in his bed. They had frozen the stump but they had not saved the hand. He would need a new one now.

  She could still hear the chord he had sounded; still see his fingers spreading to form the shape. She looked away from the blaze. After-images flickered in the darkness. The eye moved on, but the image remained. For a time.

  She went indoors. Went up and saw him where he lay, propped up with a mound of pillows behind his back. He was awake, fully conscious. She sat at his bedside and was silent for a time, letting him watch her.

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Beautiful. The way the light’s reflected in the dark water. It’s…’

  ‘I know,’ he said, as if he’d seen it too.

  She looked away, noticing how the fire’s light flickered in the window pane; how it cast a mottled, ever-changing pattern against the narrow opening.

  ‘I’m glad you did what you did,’ he said, more softly than before. ‘I would have stood there and watched myself bleed to death. I owe you my life.’

  It was not entirely true. He owed his life to their mother. If Beth had not come back early then what she had done would not have mattered.

  ‘I only wrapped it with the sheet,’ she said. But she saw how he was looking at her, his eyes piercing her. She could see he was embarrassed. Yet there was something else there, too – something that she had never seen in him before – and it touched her deeply. She felt her lips pucker and her eyes grow moist.

  ‘Hey, little sis, don’t cry.’
/>   He had never called her that before; neither had he ever touched her as he touched her now, his good right hand caressing both of hers where they lay atop the bedclothes. She shuddered and looked down.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, as if in answer to something she had said, his hand squeezing both of hers. ‘Father says they can graft a new hand onto the nerve ends. It’ll work as good as new. Maybe better.’

  She found she could not look up at him. If she did she would burst into tears, and she didn’t want him to see her weakness. He had been so strong, so brave. The pain – it must have been awful.

  ‘You know, the worst thing was that I missed it.’

  ‘Missed what?’

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ he said, and there was genuine surprise in his voice. ‘I wasn’t quick enough. I heard the chain break and I looked up, but I missed the accident. It was done before I looked down again. My hand was no longer part of me. When I looked it was already separate, there on the keyboard.’

  He laughed. A queer little sound.

  Meg looked at him. He was staring at the stub of his left arm. It was neatly capped, like the end of an old cane. Silvered and neutral. Reduced to a thing.

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ he insisted. ‘The glass. The cut. And I felt… only a sudden absence. Not pain, but…’

  She could see that he was searching for the right words, the very thing that would describe what he had felt, what he had experienced at that moment. But it evaded him. He shrugged and gave up.

  ‘I love you, Ben.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, and seemed to look at her as if to gauge how love looked in a person’s eyes. As if to place it in his memory.

  After Meg had gone he lay there, thinking things through.

  He had said nothing to her about what was in the journal. For once he felt no urge to share his knowledge with her. It would harm her, as it had harmed him: not on the surface, as the mirror had, but deeper, where his true self lived. In the darkness.

  He felt angered that he had not been told; that Hal had not trusted him enough. More than that, he felt insulted that they had hidden it from him. Oh, he could see why it was important for Meg not to know; she responded to things in a different way. But to hide it? He clenched his fists, feeling the ghostly movement in the hand he had lost. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they understand him, even now? How could he make sense of it all unless he could first solve the riddle of himself?