Ice and Fire: Chung Kuo Series (29 page)

DeVore shuddered. For once he had no words for it. Only that discomforting sense of
otherness. Even now, awake again, he felt it still: that sense of being uncomfortable
in his own skin. More
than uncomfortable. As if this form of his were somehow alien.

Yes. That was it. One form contained within the other, like Russian dolls. Some other
creature, flexing and unflexing within him. Wearing him like a coat. Unnatural. And
yet not unfamiliar.

He queried that in his thoughts. As if he could forget a thing like that.

Something dark and hard. Harder than diamonds. Darker than...

No. There was nothing darker than what he’d glimpsed. Nothing colder or more isolate.
It went beyond mere seeing.

A dream
, he told himself.
Only a dream
. But part of him knew otherwise. Part of him trusted to these messages. Saw the truth
in them. And awaited revelation, knowing it would
come.

Kim floated on his back in the water, his eyes closed. He had been thinking of Chung
Kuo, and of the people he had met in the Above. What had any of them in common? Birth,
maybe. That and death, and perhaps a mild curiosity about the state between. He smiled.
And that was it. That was what astonished him most of all. Their lack of curiosity.
He had thought it would
be different up here, in the Above. He had believed that simple distance from the
Clay would bring enlightenment. But it was not so. There was a difference in them,
yes, but that difference was
mainly veneer. Scratch away that surface and they proved themselves every bit as dull,
every bit as incuriously wedded to their senses, as the most pitiful creature of the
Clay.

The smile faded from his lips. Kim turned his body slowly in the water.

The Clay. What was the Clay but a state of mind? An attitude?

That was the trouble. They followed an idea only to a certain stage – pursued its
thread only so far – and then let it fall slack, as if satisfied there was no more
to see, no more
left to discover. Take the Aristotle File. They had been happy to see it only as a
game he had devised to test his intellect and stretch himself. They had not looked
beyond that. That single
explanation was enough for them. But had they pushed it further – had they dealt with
it, even hypothetically, as real, even for one moment – they would have seen at once
where he had
got it from. Even now they might wake to it. But he thought not.

It was strange, because they had explained it to him in the first place; had told
him how intricately connected the finances and thus the computer systems of Chung
Kuo were. It was they who had
explained about ‘discrete systems’ cut off from all the rest; islands of tight-packed
information, walled round with defences. And it was they who had told him that the
Project’s
system was ‘discrete’.

He had discovered none of that himself. All he had discovered was that the Project’s
files were not alone within the walled island of their computer system. There was
another file buried
inside the system – an old, long-forgotten file that had been there a century or more,
dormant, undisturbed, until Kim had found it. And not just any file. This was a library.
More than that.
It was a world. A world too rich to have been invented, too consistent – even in its
errors – to have been anything less than real.

So why had the Seven hidden it? What reason could they have had for burying the past?

Freed from the burden of his secret he had spent the last two nights considering just
this. He’d looked at it from every side, trying to see what purpose they’d had in
mind. And
finally he’d understood. It was to put an end to change. They had lied to end the
Western dream of progress. To bring about a timeless age where nothing changed. A
golden age.

But that left him with the problem of himself, for what was he if not Change personified?
What if not a bacillus of that selfsame virus they had striven so long and hard to
eradicate?

Kim opened his eyes and rolled over onto his front, then kicked out for the deeper
water.

He saw it clearly now. What he was made him dangerous to them – made him a threat
to the Seven and their ways. Yet he was also valuable. He knew, despite their efforts
to hide it from him,
what SimFic had paid for his contract. But why had they paid so vast a sum? What did
they think to use him for?

Change. He was almost certain of it. But how could he be sure?

Push in deeper
, he told himself.
Be curious. Is SimFic just a faceless force? A mechanism for making profits? Or does
it have a personality?

And if so, whose?

The name came instantly. He had heard it often enough of late in the news. Soren Berdichev.

Yes, but who is he? A businessman. Yes. A Dispersionist. That too. But beyond that,
what? What kind of man is he? Where does he come from? What does he want? And – most
important of all
– what does he want of me?

Kim ducked his head beneath the surface then came up again, shaking the water from
his hair, the tiredness washed suddenly from his mind. He felt a familiar excitement
in his blood and laughed.
Yes, that was it! That would be his new task. To find out all he could about the man.

And when he’d found it out?

He drifted, letting the thread fall slack. Best not anticipate so far. Best find out
what he could and
then
decide.

Soren Berdichev sat in the shadowed silence of his study, the two files laid out on
the desk in front of him. The
Wu
had just gone, though the sweet, sickly scent of his
perfume lingered in the air. The message of the yarrow stalks was written on the slip
of paper Berdichev had screwed into a ball and thrown to the far side of the room.
Yet he could see it clearly
even so.

He banged the desk angrily. This threw all of his deliberations out. He had decided
on his course of action and called upon the
Wu
merely to confirm what he had planned. But the
Wu
had contradicted him. And now he must decide again.

He could hear the
Wu
’s scratchy voice even now as the old man looked up from the stalks; could remember
how his watery eyes had widened; how his wispy grey beard had stuck out
stiffly from his chin.

‘
K’un
, the Earth, in the above,
Li
, the Fire, down below. It is
Ming I
, the darkening of the light.’

It had meant the boy. He was certain of it. The fire from the earth.
He veils
his light, yet still he shines
.

‘Is this a warning?’ he had asked, surprising the old man, for he had never before
interrupted him in all the years the elder had been casting the
I Ching
for him.

‘A warning,
Shih
Berdichev?’ The
Wu
had laughed. ‘The Book Of Changes does not warn. You mistake its purpose. Yet the
hexagram portends harm…injury.’

Berdichev had nodded and fallen silent. But he had known it for what it was. A warning.
The signs were too strong to ignore. So now he must decide again.

He laid his glasses on the desk and picked up the newest of the files containing the
genotype reports he had had done.

He spread the two charts on the desk before him, beside each other, then touched the
pad, underlighting the desk’s surface.

There was no doubt about it. Even without the expert’s report on the matter, it could
be seen at once. The similarities were striking. He traced the mirrored symbols on
the spiralling
trees of the two double helices and nodded to himself.

‘So you
are
Edmund Wyatt’s son, Kim Ward. I wonder what Edmund would have made of that?’

He laughed sadly, realizing for the first time how much he missed his dead friend’s
quiet strengths, then sat back, rubbing his eyes.

The genotyping and the Aristotle File, they were each reason enough in themselves
to have Kim terminated. The first meant he was the son of the traitor, Wyatt, the
second breached the special
Edict that concealed Chung Kuo’s true past. Both made Kim’s life forfeit under the
law, and that made the boy a threat to him. And so, despite the cost – despite the
huge
potential profit to be made from him – he had decided to play safe and terminate the
boy, at the same time erasing all trace of those who had prepared the genotype report
for him. But then
the
Wu
had come.

The sun in the earth. Yes, it was the boy. There was no doubt about it. And, as he
had that first time he had used the services of the
Wu
, he felt the reading could not be ignored. He had
to act on it.

A small shiver ran through him, remembering that first time, almost nine years ago
now. He had been sceptical and the
Wu
had angered him by laughing at his doubt. But only moments later
the
Wu
had shocked him into silence with his reading.

It had been the evening before his dinner with Edmund Wyatt and Pietr Lehmann – a
meeting at which he was to decide whether or not he should join their new Dispersion
faction. And there it
was. The fifty-ninth hexagram –
Huan
. He remembered how he had listened, absorbed by the
Wu
’s explanation, convinced by his talk of high goals and the coming of spring
after the hardness of winter. It was too close to what they had been talking of to
be simple chance or coincidence. Why, even the title of the ancient book seemed suddenly
apt, serendipitous
–
The Book Of Changes.
He had laughed and bowed and paid the
Wu
handsomely before contacting Edmund at once to tell him yes.

And so it had begun, all those years ago. Neither could he ever think of it without
seeing in his mind the movement of the wind upon the water, the budding of leaves
upon the branches. So how
could he argue with it now – now that he had come to this new beginning?

He switched off the underlighting, slipped the charts back into the folder, then picked
up his glasses and stood, folding them and placing them in the pocket of his
pau
.

The sun in the earth… Yes, he would leave the boy for now. But in the morning he would
contact his man in the Mid Levels and have him bomb the laboratory where they had
prepared the
genotypes.

Supervisor Nung sat himself behind his desk and cleared a pile of documents onto the
floor before addressing Kim.

‘Chan Shui is not here today,’ he explained, giving Kim the briefest glance. ‘His
father has been ill and the boy is taking some time off to look after him. In the
circumstances I have asked Tung Lian to look after you until Chan Shui is back with
us.’

The office was far more untidy than Kim remembered it. Crates, paper, even clothes,
were heaped against one wall, while a pile of boxes had been left in front of the
bank of screens.

‘Excuse me, Supervisor Nung, but who is Tung Lian?’

Nung looked up again distractedly, then nodded. ‘He’ll be here any moment.’ Then,
realizing his tone had been a little too sharp, he smiled at Kim before looking down
again.

A moment later there was a knock and a young Han entered. He was a slightly built,
slope-shouldered boy a good two or three years younger than Chan Shui. Seeing Kim,
he looked down shyly,
avoiding his eyes, then moved closer to the desk.

‘Ah, Tung Lian. You know what to do.’

Tung Lian gave a jerky bow. Then, making a gesture for Kim to follow him, he turned
away.

Walking back through the Casting Shop, Kim looked about him, feeling a slight sense
of unease, but there was no sign of Janko. Good. Perhaps he would be lucky. But even
if Janko did turn up,
he’d be all right. He would simply avoid the older boy: use guile and quickness to
keep out of his way.

The machine was much the same as the one he had operated with Chan Shui and, seeing
that the boy did not wish to talk to him, Kim simply got on with things.

He was sitting in the refectory at the mid-morning break when he heard a familiar
voice call out to him from the far side of the big room. It was Janko.

He finished his
ch’a
and set the bowl down, then calmly got up from the table.

Janko was standing in the doorway to the Casting Shop, a group of younger boys gathered
about him. He was showing them something, but, seeing Kim approach, he wrapped it
quickly in a cloth.

Kim had glimpsed something small and white in Janko’s hand. Now, as Janko faced him,
his pocked face split by an ugly smile, he realized what it had been. A tooth. Janko
had lost a tooth
in his fight with Chan Shui yesterday.

He smiled and saw Janko’s face darken.

‘What are you smiling at, rat’s arse?’

He almost laughed. He had heard the words in his head a moment before Janko had uttered
them.
Predictable
, Kim thought,
that’s what you are
. Even so, he remembered what Chan
Shui had said about not pushing him too far.

‘I’m sorry, Janko. I was just so pleased to see you.’

That was not the right thing, either, but it had come unbidden, as if in challenge,
from his darker self.

Janko sneered. ‘We’ll see how pleased you are…’ But as he moved forward, Kim ducked
under and round him and was through the doorway before he could turn. ‘Come
back here!’ Janko bellowed, but the bell was sounding and the boys were already filing
out to get back to their machines.

For the rest of the morning Janko kept up a constant stream of foul-mouthed taunts
and insults, his voice carrying above the hum of the machines to where Kim was at
work. But Kim blocked it all
out, looking inward, setting himself the task of connecting two of the sections of
his star-web – something he had never attempted before. The problems were of a new
order of difficulty and
absorbed him totally, but finally he did it and, delighted, turned, smiling, to find
himself facing Janko again.