He turned and looked down at the other body, knowing at once who it was. Gods! he thought, pained by the sight of his godson, Pei Chao Yang. Is there no end to this? He looked about him anxiously, searching the faces of the onlookers.
‘Who did this? Who saw what happened?’
There was a babble of contesting voices. Then one came clear to him. Fei Yen’s. ‘It was Chao Yang,’ she said, struggling to get the words out. ‘Chao Yang was the killer.’
Tolonen whirled about, confused. Pei Chao Yang! No! It couldn’t be! It was impossible!
Or was it?
Quickly he summoned two of the shao lin and had them turn Chao Yang over. Then he took a knife from one of them and knelt over the body, slitting open Chao Yang’s tunic. For a second or two he hesitated, then he plunged the knife into the chest and drew it to left and right.
His knife met only flesh and bone. Blood welled out over his hands. He dropped the knife, horrified, then looked across at Fei Yen.
‘You’re certain?’
She lowered her head. ‘I am.’
There was a commotion just behind her as the crowd parted. Li Shai Tung stood there, his horror-filled eyes taking in the scene. Those near to him fell back slowly, their heads bowed.
‘Chieh Hsia,’ Tolonen began, getting up. ‘I beg you to return to your place of safety. We don’t know…’
The T’ang raised a hand to silence him.
‘He’s dead?’
Li Shai Tung’s face was awful to see. He had lifted his chin in that familiar way he had when giving orders, but now he was barely in command, even of himself. A faint tremor in the muscles at his neck betrayed the inner struggle. His lips were pinched with pain, and his eyes…
Tolonen shuddered and looked down. ‘I am afraid so, Chieh Hsia.’
‘And the killer?’
The General swallowed. ‘I don’t know, Chieh Hsia. It seems…’
Fei Yen interrupted him. ‘It was… Pei Chao Yang.’
The T’ang’s mouth opened slightly and he nodded.
‘Ah… I see.’ He made to say something more, then seemed to forget.
Tolonen looked up again. He could hardly bear to meet the T’ang’s eyes. For the first time in his life he knew he had let his master down. He knelt, his head bowed low, and drew his ceremonial dagger, offering its handle to the T’ang in a gesture that said quite clearly, My life is yours.
There was silence for a moment, then the T’ang came forward and put his hand on Tolonen’s shoulder. ‘Stand up, Knut. Please, stand up.’
There was anguish in Li Shai Tung’s voice, a deep pain that cut right through Tolonen and made him tremble. He had caused this pain. His failure had caused it. He stood slowly, feeling his years, his head still bowed, the dagger still offered.
‘Put it away, old friend. Put it away.’
He met the T’ang’s eyes again. Yes, there was grief there – an awful, heavy grief. But behind it was something else. An acceptance of events. As if Li Shai Tung had expected this. As if he had gambled and lost, knowing all the while that he might lose.
‘The fault is mine,’ Li Shai Tung said, anticipating the General. ‘I knew the risks.’ He shivered, then looked down. ‘There has been death enough today. And I need you, Knut. I need your knowledge, your ability, your fierce loyalty to me.’
He was silent a moment, struggling to keep control, then he looked up again, meeting Tolonen’s eyes. ‘After all, Knut, I have another son. He’ll need you, too.’
More medics came, wheeling a trolley. General and T’ang stood there a moment in silence, watching as they placed Han Ch’in in the unit and sealed the lid. Both knew the futility of the gesture. Nothing would bring Han back now. When Li Shai Tung turned to face Tolonen again, his fists were clenched at his sides. His face was a mask of pain and patience.
‘Find out who did this. Find out how they did it. Then come to me. Do not act without my order, Knut. Do not take it on yourself to avenge me.’ He shivered, watching the medics wheel the trolley past. ‘Han must not die in vain. His death must mean something.’
Tolonen saw that the T’ang could say no more. He was at his limit now. His face showed signs of crumbling and there was a fierce movement about the eyes and beneath the mouth that revealed the true depths of what he was feeling. He made a brief, dismissive gesture of his hand, then turned away.
The General sheathed his dagger and turned to face the guests. Already the news of Han Ch’in’s death would be spreading through the levels of Chung Kuo. And somewhere, he was certain, a group of men would be celebrating: smiling cruelly and raising their glasses to each other.
Somewhere… Tolonen shuddered, grief giving way to anger in him. He would find the bastards. Find them and kill them. Every last one of them.
Chapter 33
KIM’S GAME
They had sedated the boy and moved him to the observation centre on the island of Corsica, three thousand li distant. There they cleaned and inoculated him, and put him in a cell.
It was a bare, unfurnished cell, a cube fifteen ch’i to a side. The ceiling was lost in the darkness overhead and there was no door, though a small window high up in one of the smooth, dark walls suggested that there was at least a way outside. From the ceiling and window came a faint glow, barely enough to warrant the name of light, while from the centre of the ceiling hung a six-eyed camera on a long, flexible neck.
The boy huddled against the wall beneath the window, staring up at the camera, his face both curious and hostile. He did not move, for when he did the camera would turn to follow him, like something living, two of its eyes focused constantly on him. He knew this because he had experimented with it; just as he had tried to climb the wall beneath the window.
In an adjacent room a man sat at a control desk, watching the boy on a screen. Behind him stood another. Both men were dressed in identical, tight-fitting suits of black. A fine gauze mesh of white was stretched across each of their faces like masks, showing only the eyes with their ebony lenses.
For a time there was nothing. Then the boy spoke.
‘Bos agas pen gweder? Bos eno enawy py plas why dos mes?’
The seated man translated for the benefit of the other.
‘Is your head made of glass? Is there light where you come from?’
T’ai Cho laughed. He was growing to like the boy. He was so quick, so bright. It was almost a pleasure to be his partner in these sessions. He half turned, looking up at the standing man, who grunted non-committally.
‘I need to see more, T’ai Cho. Some clear sign of what he’s capable of.’
T’ai Cho nodded, then turned back to the screen. ‘Ef bos enawy,’ he answered pleasantly. He be light, it meant, translated literally, though its sense was It is light. ‘Pur enawy,’ he went on. Very light. ‘Re rak why gordhaf whath, edrek.’ Too much for you to endure, I’m sorry. ‘Mes bos hebask. A-brys why mynnes gweles py plas my dos mes.’ But be patient. In good time you will see where I come from.
The boy considered, then nodded, as if satisfied.
‘Da,’ he said. Good.
‘What is that language?’ asked the standing man. His name was Andersen and he was Director of the Project. It was T’ai Cho’s job to convince him that his candidate was worth spending time and money on, for this was a department of the T’ang’s government, and even government departments had to show a profit.
‘Old Cornish,’ said T’ai Cho, half turning in his seat, but still watching the screen. ‘It’s a bastardized, pidgin version, almost devoid of tenses. Its grammatical structure is copycat English.’
He knew much more but held his tongue, knowing his superior’s habitual impatience. They had been brave men, those few thousand who had formed the kingdom of Kernow back in the first years of the City. Brave, intelligent men. But they had not known how awful life would be in the Clay. They had not conceived what vast transforming pressures would be brought to bear on them. Intelligence had knelt before necessity and the we
ight of all that life stacked up above them, out of reach. They had reverted. Regressed ten thousand years in as many days. Back to the days of flint and bone. Back to the age of stone. Now only the ragged tatters of their chosen language remained, its sounds as twisted as the bodies of their children’s children’s children.
Andersen leaned forward and tapped the screen with his long fingernails. ‘I want something conclusive. Something I can show to our sponsors. Something we can sell.’
T’ai Cho’s eyes left the screen a moment, meeting Andersen’s eyes. He had a gut instinct about this one. Something told him that this one was different from the rest: was, perhaps, what the Project had been set up to find.
But ‘something conclusive’ – could he get that? The Director’s eyes were inexpressive.
‘I’ll try,’ T’ai Cho said after a moment. ‘Tomorrow, first thing.’
Andersen nodded curtly and turned away. ‘Tomorrow, then.’
Tomorrow began early. T’ai Cho was up at fifth bell and at his post, watching the sleeping boy. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he increased the lighting in the cell. It was the boy’s fourth day here, but, like all those brought up from the Clay, he had no real conception of time. Day and night were as one down there, equally dark.
Slowly he would be taught otherwise. Would learn the patterns of the world above.
When he had first arrived they had placed food and drink in his cell. On waking he had seen it at once, but had merely sniffed, then left the two bowls untouched. On the second day, however, hunger and thirst had overcome his fear and he had eaten wolfishly.
T’ai Cho had seen this many times before. He had logged eight years in Recruitment and seen more than a dozen of his candidates through Assessment into Socialization. But never, until now, had he felt such conviction about a candidate. There was something about this one, a charisma, if that were possible in such a scraggy, scrawny creature; a powerful, almost tangible sense of potentiality.
They were pitiful to watch in the first few days. Most were like trapped animals gnawing at their bonds. Some went mad and tried to kill themselves. Some went into coma. In either case there was a simple procedure to be followed. A matter of policy. At the touch of a button on the control desk, the cell would be filled with a deadly, fast-acting gas. It would be over in seconds.
Kim, however, had quickly overcome his initial fear. When nothing had happened to him, he had begun to explore his cell methodically, growing in confidence as each hour passed and he remained unharmed. Curiosity had begun to have the upper hand in his nature. The material of the walls, the watching camera, the waste vent, the manufacture of the bowls – each had been subjected to an intense scrutiny; to an investigation that was, T’ai Cho thought, almost scientific in its thoroughness. Yet when T’ai Cho spoke to the boy he saw at once just how fragile that confidence was. The boy froze in mid-action, the hair rising from his flesh, then scurried back to his corner and crouched there, shaking, his big, round eyes wide with terror.
T’ai Cho had seen cleverness before, and cunning was second nature to these children from the Clay, but there was something more than cleverness or cunning here. It was not simply that the boy was bright, numerate and curious – there were clear signs of something more.
Many factors seemed to militate against the development of real intelligence in the Clay, malnutrition chief amongst them. When existence was stripped down to its bare bones the first thing lost was the civilizing aspect of abstract thought. And yet, in some, it surfaced even so.
In the last year, however, the Project had been under scrutiny from factions in the House who wanted to close it down. Their arguments were familiar ones. The Project was expensive. Twice in the last five years it had failed to show a profit. Neither did the fact that they had extended their network beneath the whole of City Europe mollify their critics. Why did they need the Project in the first place? At most it had produced five thousand useful men in twenty years, and what was that in the context of the greater scientific community? Nothing. Or as good as nothing.
In his darker moments T’ai Cho had to agree with them. After a day in which he had had to flood the cell with gas, he would return uplevel to his apartment and wonder why they bothered. There was so much inbreeding, so much physical suffering, such a vast break in the chain of knowledge down there. At times these seemed insurmountable barriers to the development of intelligence. The Clay was a nightmare made real. Was ti yu, the ‘earth-prison’ – the world beneath the earth; the place of demons. Down there intelligence had devolved into a killer’s cunning, blunted by a barbarous language that had no room for broader concepts. If he thought of it in those terms, what he did seemed little more than a game. A salving of conscience, maybe, but no more than that.
So they all felt, at times. But that feeling didn’t last. T’ai Cho had killed maybe a hundred boys like Kim, knowing it was best – pitying them for the poor trapped creatures they were; knowing they had no future, above or below. And yet he had seen the light of intelligence flash in their eyes: eyes that, by rights, should have been simply dull or feral. And each time it had seemed a miracle of sorts, beyond simple understanding. Each time it gave the lie to those who said the Clay bred true: that environment and genetics were all there was. There was more than that.
It was a thing none of them mentioned; almost a kind of heresy. Yet there was not one of them who didn’t feel it. Not one who didn’t know exactly what it was that informed and inspired their work here.
Man was more than the plastic of his flesh and the keyboard of his senses. More than a carrier of genetic codes. To Mankind alone was the diffuse and evasive spark of individuality given. It seemed a paradox, yet it was so. Each time they ‘saved’ one from the Clay it reaffirmed their faith in this. Man was more than po; more than the animal soul, the flesh that rotted in the ground at death. There was a spirit soul, a hun.
There, that was it. The unuttered thought they shared. A hun.
And so they did their work, trawling the dark depths for those special souls whose eyes flashed with the spark of life itself. Each one miraculous. Each one an affirmation. ‘We make a profit; provide a service for the Companies,’ they would argue, when put to it. But the real reason they hid from others. It was their dark, vocational secret.
He began. At his order a uniformed Mech entered the room and set a tray down on the floor beside the sleeping boy. On the tray were a number of different objects, covered by a thin black cloth.
The room was sealed again. T’ai Cho waited. An hour passed.
When Kim woke he saw the tray at once. He paused, abruptly alert, fully awake, the hairs on his neck bristling. He lifted his head, sniffing the air, then circled the tray slowly. With his back against the wall he stopped and looked up at the camera, a definite question in his dark eyes.
‘Pyn an jawl us wharfedhys?’ What now?
T’ai Cho, watching, smiled, then leaned forward and tapped out a code on the intercom in front of him.
There was a pause, then Andersen’s voice came back to him. ‘What is it, T’ai Cho?’
‘I think this will interest you, sir. I’m with the boy. I think you should see this for yourself.’
Andersen hesitated, then agreed. He cut the connection.
T’ai Cho sat back in his chair, watching.
The boy’s gaze went between the camera and the tray, then settled on the tray. Slowly, almost timidly, he moved closer. He looked up, his brow deeply furrowed, his big, round eyes filled with suspicion. Then, with a quick, sudden movement, he flicked the cloth aside.
It was a standard test and T’ai Cho had witnessed this moment fifty, maybe a hundred times. He had seen boys sniff and paw and try to taste the objects, then ignore them or play with them in a totally uncomprehending manner, but this time it was different – totally different from anything he had seen before. He watched in silence, aware all the while of the Director watching at his side.
‘This is wrong, surely? This is supp
osed to be a memory game, isn’t it?’
The Director reached out to switch on the intercom, but T’ai Cho put his hand in the way, turning to look up at him.
‘Please. Not yet. Watch what he does.’
The Director hesitated, then nodded. ‘But what exactly is he doing?’
T’ai Cho turned back to the screen and smiled to himself.
‘He’s doing what he does all the time. He’s changing the rules.’
At first the boy did not lift any of the objects but moved them about on the tray as if to get a better idea of what they were. Then, working with what seemed like purpose, he began to combine several of the objects. A small hand mirror, a length of plastic tubing and a twine of string. His hands moved quickly, cleverly, and in a moment he had what looked like a child’s toy. He took it to the wall beneath the window and raised it to his eye, trying to see outward. Failing, he sat down with the thing he had made and patiently took it apart.
The two men watched the screen, fascinated, seeing how the boy positioned his hand before the mirror and tilted it slowly, studying what effect it had on the image. Then, as if satisfied, he returned to the tray and took a heavier object in one hand. He hefted it a moment, thoughtfully, then reached for a second object and placed them at his side.
Scurrying across the floor, he retrieved the discarded cloth and laid it out on the floor of the cell. Then he placed the mirror face down on top of it. He laid the carved block halfway across the mirror, taking care with its positioning, then struck the back of the block firmly with the torch.
He picked the two halves of the hand mirror up carefully, checking the sharpness of their edges with his thumb. T’ai Cho, watching, moved his hand instinctively towards the touchpad, ready to fill the cell with gas should the boy do anything rash. But Kim was not out to harm himself. Using the edge of the mirror, he cut the twine into four pieces, then began to reconstruct his toy, placing a piece of glass at each end of the tube. He tested the angles of the glass five times before he was satisfied, then tightened the twine and went to the window again. This time he should be able to see out.
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