Ice and Fire: Chung Kuo Series (19 page)

The boy gave a little shudder, then turned his head slowly, until he was looking into
T’ai Cho’s face. ‘Then why? Why are you going away?’

T’ai Cho looked back at him, searching the child’s dark eyes for evidence of betrayal
– for some sign that this was yet another act – but he saw only hurt there and
incomprehension.

‘I’ve seen your secret files,’ he said quietly. ‘Brahe and Aristotle.’

There was a small movement in the dark pupils, then Kim dropped his eyes. ‘I see.’
Then he looked up again, and the expression of concern took T’ai Cho by surprise.
‘Did
it hurt you, reading them?’

T’ai Cho shivered, then answered the boy honestly. ‘Yes. I wondered why you would
create a world like that.’

Kim’s eyes moved away, then back again. ‘I never meant to hurt you. You must believe
me, T’ai Cho. I’d never deliberately hurt you.’

‘And the File?’

Kim swallowed. ‘I thought Matyas would kill me. He tried, you see. That’s why I left
the note in the book. I knew that if I was killed you’d find it. But I didn’t
think…’

T’ai Cho finished it for him. ‘You didn’t think I’d find it before you were dead,
is that it?’

Kim nodded. And now I’ve hurt you…’ He reached out and gently touched T’ai Cho’s face,
stroking his cheek. ‘Believe me, T’ai Cho. I wouldn’t hurt
you. Not for anything.’ Tears welled in his big dark eyes. ‘I thought you knew. Didn’t
you see it? Don’t you understand it, even now?’ He hesitated, a small shudder
passing through his frail, thin body, then spoke the words almost in a whisper. ‘I
love you, T’ai Cho.’

T’ai Cho shivered, then drew Kim against him once more. ‘Then I’d best stay, hadn’t
I?’

The Casting Shop was a long, wide room with a high ceiling. Along its centre stood
six tall, spiderish machines with squat bases and long, segmented arms; each machine
three
times the height of a grown man. To the sides were a series of smaller machines, no
two of them the same, but all resembling to some degree or other their six identical
elders. Between the big
machines in the centre and the two rows of smaller ones at the sides ran two gangways,
each with an overhead track. Young men moved between the machines, readying them,
or stood in groups, talking
casually in these last few minutes before the work bell rang.

Kim stood in the doorway, looking in, and felt at once a strange affinity with the
machines. He smiled and looked up at T’ai Cho. ‘I think I’ll like it here.’

The Supervisor was a Han; a small man named Nung, who bowed and smiled a lot as he
led them through to his office at the far end of the Casting Shop. As he made his
way between the machines, Kim
saw heads turn and felt the eyes of the young men on his back, but his attention was
drawn to the huge, mechanical spiders that stretched up to the ceiling.

‘What are they?’ Kim asked the Supervisor once the partition door had slid shut behind
them.

Supervisor Nung smiled tightly and looked to T’ai Cho. ‘Forgive my unpreparedness,
Shih
T’ai. I was only told of this yesterday evening.’

It was clear from the manner in which he ignored Kim’s question that he felt much
put out by the circumstances of Kim’s arrival.

‘What are they?’ T’ai Cho asked, pointedly repeating Kim’s question. ‘The boy would
like to know.’

He saw the movement in Nung’s face as he tried to evaluate the situation. Nung glanced
at Kim, then gave the slightest bow to T’ai Cho. ‘Those are the casting grids,
Shih
T’ai. One of the boys will give a demonstration in a while. Kim…’ He smiled insincerely
at the boy. ‘Kim will be starting on one of the smaller
machines.’

‘Good.’ T’ai Cho took the papers from the inner pocket of his er-satin jacket and
handed them to the Supervisor. ‘You must understand from the outset that while Kim
is
not to be treated differently from any other boy, he is also not to be treated badly.
The boy’s safety is of paramount importance. As you will see, Director Andersen has
written a note under
his own hand to this effect.’

He saw how mention of the Director made Nung dip his head, and thought once more how
fortunate he was to work in the Centre, where there were no such men. Yet it was the
way of the Above, and
Kim would have to learn it quickly. Here status counted more than mere intelligence.

The qualms he had had in Andersen’s office returned momentarily. Kim was too young
to begin this. Too vulnerable. Then he shrugged inwardly, knowing it was out of his
hands.
Mei fa
tzu
, he thought.
It’s fate
. At least there was no Matyas here. Kim would be safe, if nothing else.

When T’ai Cho had gone, the Supervisor led Kim halfway down the room to one of the
smallest and squattest of the machines and left him in the care of a pleasant-looking
young Han named
Chan Shui.

Kim watched the partition door slam shut, then turned to Chan Shui, his eyebrows forming
a question.

Chan Shui laughed softly. ‘That’s Nung’s way, Kim. You’ll learn it quickly enough.
He does as little as he can. As long as we meet our production schedules he’s
happy. He spends most of his day in his room, watching the screens. Not that I blame
him, really. It must be dreadful to know you’ve reached your level.’

‘His level?’

Chan Shui’s eyes widened with surprise. Then he laughed again. ‘I’m sorry, Kim. I
forgot. You’re from the Clay, aren’t you?’

Kim nodded, suddenly wary.

Chan Shui saw this and quickly reassured him. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Kim. What you were
– where you came from – that doesn’t worry me like it does some of them round
here.’ He looked about him pointedly, and Kim realized that their conversation was
being listened to by the boys at the nearby machines. ‘It’s what you are that really
counts. And
what you could be. At least, that’s what my father always says. And he should know.
He’s climbed the levels.’

Kim shivered.
Fathers
… He gave a little smile and reached out to touch one of the long, thin arms of the
machine.

‘Careful!’ Chan Shui warned. ‘Always make sure the machine’s switched off before you
touch it. They’ve cut-outs built into their circuits, but they’re not absolutely
safe. You can get a nasty burn.’

‘How does it work?’

Chan Shui studied Kim a moment. ‘How old are you?’

Kim looked back at him. ‘Nine. So they say.’

Chan Shui looked down. He himself was eighteen, the youngest of the other boys sixteen.
Kim looked five, maybe six at most. But that was how they were. He had seen one or
two of them before,
passing through. But this was the first time he had been allocated one to ‘nursemaid’.

The dull, hollow tones of the work bell filled the Shop. At once the boys stopped
talking and made their way to their machines. There was a low hum as a nearby machine
was switched on, then a
growing murmur as others added to the background noise.

‘It’s rather pleasant,’ said Kim, turning back to Chan Shui. ‘I thought it would be
noisier than this.’

The young Han shook his head, then leaned forward and switched their own machine on.
‘They say they can make these things perfectly silent, but they found that it increased
the number of
accidents people had with them. If it hums a little you can’t forget it’s on, can
you?’

Kim smiled, pleased by the practical logic of that. ‘There’s a lesson in that, don’t
you think? Not to make things too perfect.’

Chan Shui shrugged, then began his explanation.

The controls were simple and Kim mastered them at once. Then Chan Shui took a slender
phial from the rack beside the control panel.

‘What’s that?’

Chan Shui hesitated, then handed it to him.

‘Be careful with it. It’s ice. Or at least, the constituents of ice. It slots in there.’
He pointed to a tiny hole low down on the control panel. ‘That’s what these
things do. They spin webs of ice.’

Kim laughed, delighted by the image. Then he looked down at the transparent phial,
studying it, turning it in his fingers. Inside was a clear liquid with a faint blue
colouring. He handed it
back, then watched closely as Chan Shui took what he called a ‘template’ – a thin
card stamped with a recognition code in English and Mandarin – and slotted it into
the
panel. The template was the basic computer programme that gave the machine its instructions.

‘What do we do, then?’ Kim asked, his expression as much as to say,
Is that all there is to it?
It was clear he had expected to control the grid manually.

Chan Shui smiled. ‘We watch. And we make sure nothing goes wrong.’

‘And does it?’

‘Not often.’

Kim frowned, not understanding. There were something like a hundred boys tending the
machines in the Casting Shop, when a dozen, maybe less, would have sufficed. It made
no sense.

‘Is all of the Above so wasteful?’

‘Wasteful? What do you mean?’

Kim stared at him a moment longer, then saw he didn’t understand. This, too, was how
things were. Then he looked around and saw that many of the boys working on the smaller
machines wore
headwraps, while those on the central grids chatted, keeping only a casual eye on
their machines.

‘Don’t you get bored?’

Chan Shui shrugged. ‘It’s a job. I don’t plan to be here forever.’

Kim watched as the machine began to move, the arms to extend, forming a cradle in
the air. Then, with a sudden hiss of air, it began.

It was beautiful. One moment there was nothing in the space between the arms, the
next something shimmered into existence. He shivered, then clapped his hands together
in delight.

‘Clever, neh?’ said Chan Shui, smiling. He lifted the wide-bodied chair from the grid
with one hand. Its perfectly transparent shape glimmered wetly in the overhead light.
‘Here,’ he said, handing it to Kim.

Like most of the furniture in the Above, it weighed nothing. Or almost nothing. Yet
it felt solid, unbreakable.

Kim handed the chair back, then looked at the spiderish machine with new respect.
Jets of air from the segmented arms had directed the fine, liquid threads of ice as
they shot out from the base
of the machine, but the air had only defined the shape.

He looked at Chan Shui, surprised that he didn’t understand – that he had so readily
accepted their explanation for why the machines hummed. They did not hum to stop their
operators
forgetting they were switched on; the vibration of the machine had a function. It
set up standing waves – like the tone of a bell or a plucked string, but perfect,
unadulterated. The
uncongealed ice rode those waves, forming a skin, like the surface of a soap bubble,
but a million times stronger because it was formed of thousands of tiny corrugations
– the menisci formed
by those standing waves.

Kim saw the beauty of it at once. Saw how East and West had come together here. The
Han had known about standing waves since the fifth century
BC
: had understood and utilized the laws of
resonance. He had seen an example of one of their ‘spouting bowls’ which, when its
handles were rubbed, had formed a perfect standing wave – a shimmering, perfect hollow
cone of
water that rose a full half
ch
’
i
above the bowl’s bronze rim. The machine, however – its cybernetics, its programming,
even its basic engineering – was a product of
Western science. The Han had abandoned those paths millennia before the West had found
and followed them.

Kim looked around; watching as forms shimmered into life in the air on every side.
Tables, cupboards, benches and chairs. It was like magic. Boys moved between the machines,
gathering up the
objects and stacking them on the slow-moving collection trays that came along the
gangways, hung on cables from the overhead tracks. At the far end, beyond the door
where Kim had entered, was the
paint shop. There the furniture was finished – the permapaint bonded to the ice –
before it was packed for despatch.

At ten they took a break. The refectory was off to their right, with a cloakroom leading
off from it. There were toilets there and showers. Chan Shui showed Kim around, then
took him back to one
of the tables and brought him
ch’a
and a soypork roll.

‘I see they’ve sent us a dwarf this time!’

There was a loud guffaw of laughter. Kim turned, surprised, and found himself looking
up into the face of a beefy, thick-set youth with cropped brown hair and a flat nose.
A
Hung Mao
, his
pale, unhealthy skin heavily pitted. He stared down at Kim belligerently, the mean
stupidity of his expression balanced by the malevolence in his eyes.

Chan Shui, beside Kim, leaned forward nonchalantly, unimpressed by the newcomer’s
demeanour.

‘Get lost, Janko. Go and play your addle-brained games on someone else and leave us
alone.’

Janko sniffed disdainfully. He turned to the group of boys who had gathered behind
him and smiled, then turned back, looking at Kim again, ignoring Chan Shui.

‘What’s your name, rat’s arse?’

Chan Shui touched Kim’s arm. ‘Ignore him, Kim. He’ll only trouble you if you let him.’
He looked up at the other boy. ‘
Se li nei jen
, neh, Janko?’
Stern in appearance, weak inside
. It was a traditional Han rebuttal of a bully.

Kim looked down, trying not to smile. But Janko leaned forward threateningly. ‘None
of your chink shit, Chan. You think you’re fucking clever, don’t you? Well, you’ll
get
yours one day, I promise.’

Chan Shui laughed and pointed to the camera over the counter. ‘Best be careful, Janko.
Uncle Nung might be watching. And you’d be in deep shit then, wouldn’t you?’

Janko glared at him, infuriated, then looked down at Kim. ‘Fucking little rat’s arse!’

There was a ripple of laughter from behind him, then Janko was gone.

Kim watched the youth slope away, then turned back to Chan Shui. ‘Is he always like
that?’