An Inch of Ashes (30 page)

DeVore tilted his head, then laughed, ‘Ah, yes...’

Ebert frowned and set his glass down. ‘And they’re strong.’

DeVore interrupted him. ‘No. You’re wrong, Hans. They’re weak. Weaker than they’ve been since they began.
We almost
won
...’

Ebert hesitated, then nodded. It was so. He recognized how thin the Families were spread now; how much they depended on the goodwill of those in the Above who had remained faithful. Men like his father.

And when his father was dead?

He looked up sharply, his decision made.

‘Well?’ DeVore prompted. ‘Will you be T’ang?’

Ebert stood, offering his hand.

DeVore smiled and set his drink down. Then he stepped forward and, ignoring the hand, embraced the young man.

Chapter 54

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD

A
bank of eight screens, four long, two deep, glowed dimly on the far side of the darkened room. In each lay the outline image of a hollowed skull. There were other shapes in the room, vague forms only partly lit by the glow. A squat and bulky mechanism studded with controls was wedged beneath the screens. Beside it was a metallic frame, like a tiny four-poster stretched with wires. In the left-hand corner rested a narrow trolley containing racks of tapes, their wafer-thin top edges glistening in the half-light. Next to that was a vaguely human form, slumped against a bed, its facial features missing. Finally, in the very centre of the room was a graphics artboard, the thin screen blank and dull, the light from the eight monitors focused in its concave surface.

It was late – after three in the morning – and Ben Shepherd was tired, but there was this one last thing to be done before he slept. He squatted by the trolley and flicked through the tapes until he found what he wanted, then went to the artboard and fed in the tape. The image of a bird formed instantly. He froze it, using the controls to turn it, studying it from every angle, as if searching for some flaw in its conception, then, satisfied, he let it run, watching as the bird stretched its wings and launched into the air. Again he froze the image. The bird’s wings were stretched back now, thrusting it forward powerfully.

It was a simple image in many ways. An idealized image of a bird, formed in a vacuum.

He sorted through the tapes again and pulled out three, then returned to the artboard and rewound the first tape. That done he fed the new tapes into the slot and synchronized all four to a preset signal. Then he pressed to play.

This time the bird was resting on a perch inside a pagoda-like cage. As he watched, the cage door sprang open and the bird flew free, launching itself out through the narrow opening.

He froze the image, then rotated it. This time the bird seemed trapped, its beak and part of its sleek, proud head jutting from the cage, the rest contained within the bars. In the background could be seen the familiar environment of The Square. As the complex image turned, the tables of the Café Burgundy came into view. He could see himself at one of the nearer tables, the girl beside him. He was facing directly into the shot, his hand raised, pointing, as if to indicate the sudden springing of the bird, but her head was turned, facing him, her flame-red hair a sharp contrast to the rich, overhanging greenery.

He smiled uncertainly and let the tape run on a moment at one-fifth speed, watching her head come slowly round to face the escaping bird. In that moment, as she faced it fully, the bird’s wing came up, eclipsing the watchers at the table. There it ended.

It was a brief segment, no more than nine seconds in all, but it had taken him weeks of hard work to get it right. Now, however, he was thinking of abandoning it completely.

This was his favourite piece in the whole composition – the key image with which it had begun – yet as the work had grown this tiny fragment had proved ever more problematic.

For the rest of the work the viewpoint was established in the viewer’s head – behind the eyes – yet for this brief moment he had broken away entirely. In another art form this would have caused no problems – might, indeed, have been a strength – but here it created all kinds of unwanted difficulties. Experienced from within the Shell, it was as if, for the brief nine seconds that the segment lasted, one went outside one’s skull. It was a strange, disorienting experience, and no tampering with the surrounding images could mute that effect, or repair the damage it did to the work as a whole.

In all the Shells he had experienced before, such abrupt switches of viewpoint had been made to serve the purpose of the story: used for their sudden shock value. But, then, all forms of the Shell before his own had insisted only upon a cartoon version of the real, whereas what he wanted was reality itself. Or a close approximation. Such abrupt changes destroyed the balance he was seeking – shattered every attempt of his to create that illusion of the really real.

Only now was he beginning to understand the cost – in artistic terms – of such realism: the limiting factors and the disciplines involved. It was not enough to create the perfect illusion; it was also necessary to maintain a sequential integrity in the experiencing mind. The illusion depended on him staying within his own skull, behind his own eyes, the story developing in real time.

There was, of course, a simple answer: one abandoned all breaches of sequential integrity. But that limited the kind of story one could tell. It was a straitjacket of the worst kind, limiting fiction to the vignette, briefly told. He had recognized this at once and agonized over it, but weeks of wrestling with the problem had left him without an answer.

Perhaps this was why all previous practitioners of the form had kept to the quasi-realism of a cartoon, leaving the experiencing imagination to suspend disbelief and form a bridge between what was presented and the reality. Maybe some of them had even tried what he was attempting now – had experimented with ‘perfected’, realistic images and had faced the same constricting factors. Maybe so, but he had to make a choice: to pursue his ideal of a perfect art form or compromise that vision in favour of a patently synthetic form – a mere embellishment of the old. It was no real choice at all, yet still he prevaricated.

He wound the tapes back and replayed, this time at one-tenth speed – five frames a second – watching the bird thrust slowly outward from the cage in an explosion of sudden, golden, living fire; seeing beyond it the girl’s face, its whiteness framed in flames of red as it turned to face the screen.

He closed his eyes and froze the image. It was the best thing he had done. Something real and beautiful – a tiny, perfect work of art. And yet... He shivered, then pressed ERASE. In an instant it was done, the tapes blanked. He stood there for a long time afterwards, leaning against the machine, perfectly still, his eyes closed. Then, with a tiny shudder, he turned away. There was that much anyway – it was there – it would
always
be there, in his head.

He went over to the bed and sat, not knowing what he felt, staring intently, almost obsessively at the narrow ridge of flesh that circled his left wrist. Then he got up again and went out into the other room.

For a while he stood there in the centre of the room, his mind still working at the problem; but just now he could not see past his tiredness. He was stretched thin by the demands he had placed on himself these last few weeks. All he could see were problems, not solutions.

He took a long, shuddering breath.

‘Small steps,’ he told himself, his voice soft, small in the darkness. ‘There is an answer,’ he added after a moment, as if to reassure himself. Yet he was far from certain.

He turned away, rubbing at his eyes, too tired to pursue the thought, for once wanting nothing but the purging oblivion of sleep. And in the morning?

In the morning he would begin anew.

The Square was a huge, airy space at the top of Oxford Canton; the uppermost level of a complex warren of colleges that extended deep into the stack below. To the eternal delight of each new generation of students, however, The Square was not square at all, but hexagonal: a whole deck opened up for leisure. Long, open balconies overlooked the vastness of The Green, leaning back in five great tiered layers on every side, while overhead the great dome of the stars turned slowly, in perfect imitation of the sky beyond the ice.

Here, some seventeen years ago, so rumour had it, Berdichev, Lehmann and Wyatt had met and formed the Dispersionist party, determined to bring change to this world of levels, but whether the rumour was true or not, it was a place to which the young intelligentsia of all seven Cities were drawn. If the world of thought were a wheel, this was its hub, The Green its focus.

A line of oaks bordered The Green, hybrid evergreens produced in the vats of SynFlor, while at its centre was an aviary: a tall, pagoda-like cage of thirteen tiers, modelled upon the
Liu he t’a
, the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies at Hang Chou. As ever, young men and women strolled arm in arm on the vast lawn or gathered about the lowest tier, looking in at the brightly coloured birds.

The Square was the pride of Oxford Canton and the haunt of its ten thousand students. The elite of the Above sent their children to Oxford, just as the elite of a small nation-state had done centuries before. It was a place of culture and, for the children of First Level families, a guarantee of continuity.

No big MedFac screens cluttered The Green itself, but in the cool walkways beneath the overhang, small Vidscreens showed the local cable channels to a clientele whose interests and tastes differed considerably from the rest of the Above.

The overhang was a place of coffee shops and restaurants, CulVid boutiques and Syn-Parlours. It was a curious mixture of new and old, of timelessness and state of the art, of purity and decadence; its schizophrenic face a reflection of its devotees.

At the Café Burgundy business was brisk. It was a favourite haunt of the Arts Faculty students who, at this hour, crowded every available table, talking, drinking, gesturing wildly with all the passion and flamboyance of youth. The tables themselves – more than two hundred in all – spread out from beneath the overhang towards the edge of The Green. Overhead, a network of webbing, draped between strong poles, supported a luxuriant growth of flowering creepers. The plants were a lush, almost luminous green, decorated with blooms of vivid purples, yellows, reds and oranges – huge, gaping flowers with tongues of contrasting hues, like the silent heads of monsters. Beneath them the tables and chairs were all antiques, the wood stained and polished. They were a special feature of the Café, a talking point, though in an earlier century they would have seemed quite unexceptional.

Han waiters made their way between the packed tables, carrying trays and taking orders. They were dressed in the plain, round-collared robes of the Tang dynasty, the sleeves narrow, the long er-silks a dark vermilion with an orange band below the knee: the clothes of an earlier, simpler age.

At a table near the edge sat four students. Their table was clear but for three glasses and a bottle. They had eaten and were on their third bottle of the excellent Burgundy from which the Café took its name. A vacant chair rested between the two males of the party, as if they were expecting another to join them. But it was not so. All spaces at the table had to be paid for, and they had paid to keep it vacant.

There was laughter at the table. A dark-haired, olive-skinned young man was holding sway, leaning well back in his chair, a wine glass canted in his hand. The sing-song tones of his voice were rather pleasant, well modulated. He was a handsome, aristocratic man with a pronounced aquiline profile, a finely formed mouth, and dark, almost gypsy eyes. Strong limbed and broad shouldered, he looked more a sportsman than an artist, though a fastidiousness about his clothes somewhat redressed that impression. As he talked, his free hand carved forms from the air, the movements deft, rehearsed. He was older than the others by some four or five years, a factor that made them defer to him in most things, and often – as now – he monopolized their talk, leading it where he would.