Andersen leaned forward. ‘Do you think he’s seen this done before?’
‘Where? In the Clay?’ T’ai Cho laughed, then turned to look up at Andersen. ‘No. This is all first time for him. An experiment. Just think of how we learn things. How, as children, we watch others and copy them. How we have to be taught even the most basic of skills. But Kim’s not like that. He has no one to copy. He’s never had anyone to copy. It’s all had to come from within his own mind. That’s why it’s so astonishing, what he does. Can’t you see it? He treats the world like something new. Something yet to be put together.’
The boy took the makeshift periscope from his eyes and sat down slowly, clearly disappointed by what he had seen. Then he tilted back his head and spoke into the darkness overhead.
‘Pandra vyth gwres?’ Where am I?
He waited, but when no answer came he threw the viewing tube away from him and let his head fall onto his chest, as if exhausted.
T’ai Cho turned and looked up at the Director. ‘Well?’
Andersen stood there a moment longer, staring down into the screen, then looked back at T’ai Cho. ‘All right. I’ll get a six-month contract drawn up this afternoon.’
Beneath his white gauze mask, T’ai Cho smiled. ‘Then I’ll start at once?’
The Director hesitated, then nodded curtly. His eyes, usually so lifeless, seemed thoughtful, even, perhaps, surprised.
‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Begin at once. But let me know immediately if anything of interest happens.’
An hour later Andersen was at his desk. The directive he had been warned was on its way had now arrived. It lay there on the desk before him. Two months he had. Two months to turn things round. And the new financial targets they had given him were four times the size of the old ones.
He laughed bitterly. It would need a miracle. He hadn’t a chance of meeting the old targets, let alone these new figures. No – someone higher up had decided to pull the plug on the Project, he was certain of it. This was political.
Andersen leaned forward and spoke into his intercom. ‘Send through a standard contract. Six months’ term. For the new boy, Kim.’
He sat back again. A miracle… Well, maybe T’ai Cho was right. Maybe the boy was special. But would his specialty translate into cash? Anyway, he didn’t pin his hopes too greatly on it. Six months? If the Project folded Kim would be dead in two. He and a hundred others like him.
‘Politics!’ he muttered, wondering who was behind this latest directive and what he could do to get the deadline extended – who he could speak to to get things changed. Then, as the contract slid from the desktop printer he leaned forward and took his brush from the ink block, signing the Mandarin form of his name with a flourish at the bottom of the page.
The viewing-tube lay where Kim had thrown it, the lower mirror dislodged from the shaft, the twine hanging loose. Kim sat there, perfectly still, his arms wrapped about his knees, his head tucked down between his legs, waiting.
He heard it first. Sensed a vague movement in the air.
He scuttled back, then crouched beneath the wall, wide-eyed, the hair rising on the back of his neck. Then, as the facing wall began to peel back from the centre, he cried out.
What had been the wall was now an open space. Beyond the opening was a room the same as the one in which he sat. Inside, behind a narrow barrier of wood, sat a giant. A giant with a face of bone-white glass.
The giant stood, then began to come around the wall. Kim cried out again and tried to back away, but there was nowhere to run. He looked about him desperately, yelping, urine streaming down his legs.
And then the giant spoke.
‘Ow hanow bos T’ai Cho. My bos an den kewsel yn why.’ My name be T’ai Cho. I be the man talk to you.
The giant fell silent, then came into the room and stood there, his hands out at his sides, empty. It was a gesture designed to say, Look, I am no threat to you, but the man was almost twice as tall as the tallest man Kim had ever seen. He was like the gods Kim had seen in the Clay that time, yet his limbs and body were as black as the earth, his eyes like dark jewels in the pure, glassy whiteness of his face.
It was a cruel face. A face that seemed curiously at odds with the soft reassurance of the voice.
Kim drew back his teeth and snarled.
And then the giant did something unexpected. It knelt down. It was still taller than Kim, but it was less threatening now. Keeping its arms out at its sides, it spoke again.
‘My golyas why, Kim.’ I watch you, Kim. ‘My gweles pandra why canna obery.’ I see what you can do. ‘Why a-vyn bewa a-ughof?’ Do you want to live up above?
Slowly the darkness deep within him ebbed away. He took a breath, then answered. ‘My a-vyn.’ I want to.
The giant nodded. ‘Da. Ena why gweres-vy.’ Good. Then you help me. ‘Bysy yu dheugh obery pandra my kewsel.’ You must do what I say.
The giant reached up and removed the flesh from his face. Beneath it he wore a second face, the mouth of which smiled redly, showing perfect teeth. His inner mouth. So he was not made of glass at all.
Kim thought about what the giant had said. It seemed too all-inclusive. He shook his head. ‘Ny puptra.’ Not everything
The giant nodded. This time the words came from his inner mouth. The other flesh hung loose about his chin.
‘Ny puptra. Mes moyha taclow’ Not everything But most things. ‘May of gul styr.’ When it makes meaning.
He considered that. It did not commit him too much. ‘Da,’ he said softly.
‘Flowr,’ said the giant, smiling again. Perfect. ‘Ena bysy yu dheugh gortheby onen tra a-dherak pup ken.’ Then you must answer me one thing before all else. ‘Pyu dysky why fatel nyvera?’ Who teach you how to count?
Andersen sat behind his desk, studying T’ai Cho’s report. It was the end of the first week of Assessment. Normally there would have been a further seventeen weeks of patient observation, but T’ai Cho had asked for matters to be expedited. Andersen had agreed readily. Only that morning he had spoken to the First Secretary of one of the Junior Ministers and been told that his request for a referral hearing had been turned down. Which meant that the directive was final. Yet things were not all bad. He had been busy this last week.
He looked up. ‘Good,’ he said simply, then pushed the file aside. ‘I’ll countersign my recommendation. The board sits tomorrow. I’ll put it before them then.’
T’ai Cho smiled and nodded his gratitude.
‘Off the record,’ Andersen continued, leaning forward over the desk-top, ‘how high do you rate his potential? You say here that you think he’s a genius. That can mean many things. I want something I can sell. Something that will impress a top Executive.’
‘It’s all in there,’ said T’ai Cho, indicating the file. ‘He has an eidetic memory. Near perfect recall. And the ability to comprehend and use complex concepts within moments of first encountering them. Add to that a profound, almost frightening grasp of mathematics and linguistics.’
The Director nodded. ‘All excellent, T’ai Cho, but that’s not quite what I mean. They can build machines that can do all that. What can he do that a machine can’t?’
It was an odd thing to ask. The question had never arisen before. But then there had never been a candidate quite like Kim. He was already fluent in basic English and had assimilated the beginnings of algebra and logic as if they were chunks of meat to be swallowed down and digested.
The Director sat back and turned slightly in his chair, looking away from T’ai Cho. ‘Let me explain the situation. Then you might understand why I’m asking.’
He glanced at the operative and smiled. ‘You’re good at your job, T’ai Cho, and I respect your evaluation. But my viewpoint is different from yours. It has to be. I have to justify the continuation of this whole operation. I have to report to a board that reports back to the House itself. And the House is concerned with two things only. One – does the Recruitment Project make a profit? Two
– is it recruiting the right material for the market place?’
He held up a hand, as if to counter some argument T’ai Cho was about to put forward. ‘Now I know that might sound harsh and unidealistic, but it’s how things are.’
T’ai Cho nodded but said nothing.
‘Anyway, things are like this. At present I have firm approaches from five major Companies. Three have signed contracts for auction options when the time comes. I expect the other two to sign shortly.’
T’ai Cho’s eyes widened with surprise. ‘An auction?’
Andersen raised one hand. ‘However… if he is what you say he is, then we could fund the whole of this programme for a year, maybe more. That’s if we can get the right deal. If we can get one of the big companies to sign an exclusive rights contract.’
T’ai Cho shook his head, astonished now. An exclusive rights contract! Then the Director wasn’t talking of a normal sponsorship but about something huge. Something between two and five million yuan! No wonder he wanted something more than was in the report. But what could he, T’ai Cho, offer in that vein?
‘I don’t know…’ he began, then stopped. There was something Kim could do that a machine couldn’t. He could invent. He could take two things and make a third of them.
‘Well?’ said Andersen. ‘Say I’m Head of SimFic. How would you convince me to hand over twenty million yuan in exchange for a small boy, genius or not?’
T’ai Cho swallowed. Twenty million yuan! He frowned, concentrating on the problem he had been set, ‘Well, he connects things… Things we’d normally consider unconnected.’ He looked down, trying to capture in words just what it was that made Kim so special. ‘But it’s more than that. Much more. He doesn’t just learn and remember and calculate, he creates. New ideas. Wholly new ideas. He looks at things in ways we’ve never thought of looking at them before.’
‘Such as?’
T’ai Cho shrugged. It was so hard to define, to pinpoint, but he knew this was what made Kim so different. It wasn’t just his ability to memorize or his quickness, it was something beyond those. And because it was happening all the time it was hard to extract and say ‘he does this’. It was his very mode of thought. He was constantly inventive.
T’ai Cho laughed. ‘Do you know anything about astronomy?’
‘A little.’ Andersen stared at him strangely. ‘Is this relevant, T’ai Cho?’
T’ai Cho nodded. ‘You know what a nova is?’
Andersen shrugged. ‘Refresh my memory.’
‘A nova is an old star that collapses into itself and in doing so explodes and throws out vast quantities of energy and light. Well, Kim’s a kind of nova. I’m tempted to say a supernova. It’s like there’s some dense darkness at the very centre of him, sucking all knowledge down into itself, then throwing it all back out as light. Brilliant, blinding light.’
Andersen shook his head. ‘Old stars… Is there nothing more practical?’
T’aiCho leaned forward, earnest now. ‘Why don’t you bring him here, your Head of SimFic? Show him the boy. Let him bring his own experts, make his own assessments – set his own tests. He’ll be astonished, I guarantee you.’
‘Maybe,’ Andersen muttered, then repeated the word more strongly. ‘Maybe… You know, that’s not a bad idea at all.’
T’ai Cho put his request in the next day, expecting it to be turned down out of hand. Within the hour, however, he had received notification, under the Director’s hand, with full board approval. He was to be transferred from Assessment to S & I – Socialization and Indoctrination – for an eighteen-month tour of duty. And he was to be directly responsible for the new candidate, Kim Ward.
Normally personal involvement was frowned upon. It was seen as necessary to make a clean break between each section, but the Director had convinced the board that this was a special case. And they had agreed, recognizing the importance of nurturing the boy’s abilities, though perhaps the thought of twenty million yuan – a figure mentioned unofficially and wholly off the record – had proved an additional incentive to break with tradition just this once. Thus it was that T’ai Cho took Kim up the five levels to Socialization and helped him settle into his new rooms.
A week later T’ai Cho found himself at the lectern in a small hexagonal lecture room. The room was lit only at its centre, and then by the dimmest of lamps. Three boys sat at a distance from each other, forming a triangle at the heart of which was the spiderish shape of a trivee. T’ai Cho stood in the shadows behind the smallest of the boys, operating the image control.
It was a lecture about Chung Kuo and City Earth. Images of the vast hive-like structure appeared and then vanished. Exteriors, cutaways, sections. The first glimpse these children had ever had of the environment built above the Clay.
As T’ai Cho talked his way through the sequence of images he wondered whether they ever dreamed themselves back there, beneath the vast, over-towering pile of the City. How strange that would be. How would they feel? Like bugs beneath a house, perhaps. Yes, looking at these images even he felt awed. How, then, did it strike them? For this was their first sight of it – their first glimpse of how insignificant they were: how small the individual, how vast the species. A City covering the Earth like a glacier, broken only by ocean and mountain and plantations. A species almost forty billion strong.
Yes, he could see the awe in the faces of the two boys seated across from him. Their mouths were open wide in wonder and their eyes were screwed up, trying to take it all in. Then he glanced down at the small, dark-haired head just below his lectern and wondered what Kim was thinking.
‘It’s too big,’ Kim said suddenly.
T’ai Cho laughed. ‘It’s exactly as big as it is. How can that be too big?’
‘No.’ Kim turned and looked up at him, his dark eyes burning with intensity. The other boys were watching him carefully. ‘I didn’t mean that. Just that it’s too vast, too heavy a thing to stand on its pillars without either collapsing or sinking into the earth.’
‘Go on,’ said T’ai Cho, aware that something important was happening. It was like the construction of the viewing-tube, but this time Kim was using concepts as his building blocks.
‘Well, there are three hundred levels in most places, right?’
T’ai Cho nodded, careful not to interrupt.
‘Well, on each of those levels there must be thousands, perhaps millions of people. With all their necessities. Food, clothing, transportation, water, machines. Lots of machines.’ Kim laughed softly. ‘It’s ridiculous. It just can’t be. It’s too heavy. Too big. I’ve seen for myself how small the pillars are on which it all rests.’
‘And yet it is,’ said T’ai Cho, surprised by that single word ‘small’ and what it implied. Kim had grasped at once what the others had failed even to see: the true perspectives of the City. His imagination had embraced the scale of things at once. As if he’d always known. But this next was the crucial stage. Would Kim make the next leap of understanding?
T’ai Cho glanced across at the other boys. They were lost already. They hadn’t even seen there was a problem.
‘It exists?’ Kim asked, puzzled. ‘Just as you’ve shown us?’
‘Exactly. And you might also consider that there are vast factories and foundries and masses of other industrial machinery distributed amongst its many levels. At least one level in twenty is used for warehousing. And there are whole levels which are used to store water or process waste matter.’
Kim’s face creased into a frown of intense concentration. He seemed to stare at something directly in front of him, his brow puckering, his eyes suddenly sharply focused.
‘Well?’ T’ai Cho prompted when the silence had extended uncomfortably.
Kim laughed. ‘You’ll think I’m mad…’
‘No. Try me.’
‘Well… It must be something to do with its structure. But that can’t be the whole of it.’ Kim seemed almost in pain now. His hands were clenched tightly and his eyes
were wide and staring.
T’ai Cho held his breath. One step further. One small but vital step.
‘Then it must be built of air. Or something as light as air but… but as tough as steel.’
As light as air and as tough as steel. A substance as strong as the bonding between the atoms and so light that three hundred levels of it weighed a fraction of a single layer of clay bricks. A substance so essential to the existence of City Earth that its chemical name was rarely used. It was known simply as ice. Ice because, in its undecorated state, it looked as cold and fragile as the thinnest layer of frozen water. ‘Corrugated’ layers of ice – only a few hundred molecules thick – formed the levels and walls of City Earth. Moulded sheets of ice formed the basic materials of lifts and bolts, furniture and pipework, clothing and conduits, toys and tools. Its flexibility and versatility, its cheapness and durability had meant that it had replaced most traditional materials.
City Earth was a vast palace of ice. A giant house of cards, each card so unbelievably thin that if folded down the whole thing would be no thicker than a single sheet of paper.
Slowly, piece by piece, T’ai Cho told Kim all of this, watching as the boy’s face lit with an inner pleasure. Not air but ice! It made the boy laugh with delight.
‘Then the pillars hold it down!’ he said. ‘They keep it from flying away!’
Soren Berdichev glanced up from the pile of papers he was signing.
‘Well, Blake? You’ve seen the boy?’
His Head of Personnel hesitated long enough to make Berdichev look up again. Blake was clearly unhappy about something.
‘He’s no use to us, then?’
‘Oh, quite the contrary, sir. He’s everything the report made him out to be. Exceptional, sir. Quite exceptional.’
Berdichev set the brush down on the inkstone and sat back, dismissing the secretary who had been hovering at his side.
‘Then you’ve done as we agreed and purchased the boy’s contract?’
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