Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (28 page)

Confidential
high-level sources later made it quite clear that the
Ping Tiao
had had nothing to do with what was termed "the Lyons Canton
Massacre," but the media had a field day, attacking the
Ping
Tiao
for what they called its "cowardly barbarism and
inhumanity."

The effect was
immediate. The tide of opinion turned against the
Ping Tiao
overnight, and a subsequent Security operation against the terrorists
resulted in the capture and execution of over eight hundred members
of the faction, most of them identified by previously sympathetic
friends and neighbors.

For the
Ping
Tiao
those few weeks had been disastrous. They had sunk into
obscurity. Yet in the past few days they seemed to have put that
behind them. Fish emblems—the symbol of the
Ping Tiao
—had
been seen everywhere throughout the levels, painted on walls or drawn
in blood on the faces of their victims.

But the
authorities had hit back hard. MidText, for instance, had played
heavily on old fears. The present troubles, they asserted, were
mainly the result of a conspiracy between the
Ping Tiao
and a
small faction in the Above who financed their atrocities.

Ben froze the
tape momentarily, thinking back to what Li Shai Tung had said—
on that evening five years earlier—about knowing his enemy. It
was on this level, accepting at face value the self-deluding
half-truths of the MidText images, that Li Shai Tung had been
speaking. But these men—terrorists and Company men alike—were
merely cyphers, the scum on the surface of the well. And the well was
deep. Far deeper than the Seven dared imagine.

He let the tape
run. At once the babble began again, the screen filling once more
with images of riot and despoliation.

Vast crowds
surged through the lower levels, destroying guard posts and barriers,
wrecking storefronts and carrying off whatever they could lay their
hands on. Unfortunate officials were beaten to death in front of the
camera, or bound and doused in petrochemicals before being set on
fire. Ben saw how the crowd pressed in tightly about one such victim,
roaring their approval as a frail, graybearded magistrate was hacked
to death. He noted the ugly brutality in every face, and nodded to
himself. Then the image changed, switching to another crowd, this one
more orderly. Hastily made banners were raised on every side,
demanding increased food rations, a resumption of state aid to the
jobless, and an end to travel restrictions. "
Pien hua
!"
they chanted in their hundred thousands, "
Pien hua
!"

Change.'

There was a
burning indignation in many of the faces; in others a fierce,
unbridled need that had no outlet. Some waved long knives or clubs in
the air and bared their teeth in ferocious animal smiles, a gleam of
sheer delight in their eyes at having thrown off all restraints. For
many this was their first taste of such freedom and they danced
frenetically in time with the great chant, intoxicated by the madness
that raged on every side.

"
PIEN
HUA.' PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA!"

Ben watched the
images flash up one after another, conscious of the tremendous power,
the dark potency that emanated from them. It was primordial. Like
some vast movement of the earth itself. And yet it was all so loosely
reined, so undirected. Change, they demanded. But to what?

No one knew. No
one seemed capable of imagining what change might bring. In time,
perhaps, someone would find an answer to that question, would draw
the masses to him and channel that dark tide of discontent. But until
then, the Seven had been right to let the storm rage, the flood
waters rise unchecked; for they knew the waters would recede, the
storm blow itself out. To have attempted to control that vast upsurge
of feeling or repress it could only have made things worse.

Ben blanked the
screen, then stood, considering what he had seen. Wang Hsien's death
may have been the catalyst, but the real causes of the mass violence
were rooted much deeper. Were, in fact, as old as Man himself. For
this was how Man really was beneath his fragile shell of culture. And
not just those he had seen on the screen, the madness dancing in
their eyes, but all of Mankind. For a long time they had tried to
fool themselves, pretending they were something else, something more
refined and spiritual, more godlike and less animalistic than they
really were. But now the lid was off the well, the darkness bubbling
to the surface once again.

"Ben?"

He turned. Meg
was watching him from the doorway, the morning sunlight behind her
throwing her face and figure into shadow, making her look so like his
mother that, momentarily, he mistook her. Then, realizing his error,
he laughed.

"What is
it?" she asked, her voice rich and low.

"Nothing,"
he answered. "Is it ready?"

She nodded, then
came into the room. "What were you watching?"

He glanced at
the empty screen, then back at her. "I was looking at Father's
tapes. About the riots." She
looked past him. "I thought you weren't interested."

He met her eyes.
"I'm not. At least, not in the events themselves. But the
underlying meaning of it all—that fascinates me. Their
faces—they're like windows to their souls. All their fears and
aspirations show nakedly. But it takes something like this to do it,
something big and frightening. And then the mask slips and the animal
stares out through the eyes."

And the
Ping
Tiao,
he thought. I'm interested in them, too. Because they're
something new. Something the City has been missing until now. A carp
to fill an empty pool.

"Well. . .
shall we go out?"

She smiled.
"Okay. You first."

On the lawn
beside the flower beds, their mother had spread out a picnic on a big
red-and-white-checked tablecloth. As Ben came out into the open she
looked across at him and smiled. In the sunlight she seemed much
younger than she really was, more Meg's older sister than her mother.
He sat beside her, conscious of the drowsy hum of bees, the rich
scent of the blooms masking the sharp salt tang of the bay. It was a
perfect day, the blue above them broken here and there by big
slow-drifting cumuli.

Ben looked down
at the picnic spread before them. It all looked newly created. A wide
basket filled with apples lay at the center of the feast, their
perfect, rounded greenness suggesting the crispness of the inner
fruit. To the left his eye was drawn to the bright yellow of the
butter in its circular white-china dish and, beside it, the richer,
almost-honeyed yellow of the big wedge of cheddar. There was a big
plate of thick-cut ham, the meat a soft pink, the rind a perfect
snowy white, and next to that a fresh-baked loaf, three slices cut
from it and folded forward, exposing the fluffy whiteness of the
bread. Bright-red tomatoes beaded with moisture shared a bowl with
the softer green of a freshly washed lettuce, while other, smaller
bowls held tiny radishes and onions, peeled carrots, grapes and
celery, red currants and watercress.

"It's
nice," he said, looking up at his mother.

Pleased, she
handed him a plate. A moment later Meg reappeared, carrying a tray on
which were three tall glasses and a jug of freshly made, iced
lemonade. He laughed.

"What is
it?" Meg asked, setting the tray down.

"This,"
he said, indicating the spread laid out before them.

Meg's smile
faded slowly. "What's wrong? Don't you like it?"

"No,"
he said softly, reassuringly. "It's marvelous." He smiled,
then leaned forward, beginning to transfer things to his plate.

Meg hesitated,
then poured from the jug, handing him the cold, beaded glass. "Here."

He set his plate
down, then took the glass and sipped. "Hmm . . ." he said
appreciatively, his eyes smiling back at her. "Perfect."

Beside him his
mother was busy rilling a plate for Meg. She spoke without looking at
him.

"Meg tells
me you've been reading Nietzsche."

He glanced
across at Meg. She was looking down, a faint color in her cheeks. :
"That's right." He sipped again, then stared at the side of
his glass intently.

His mother
turned her head, looking at him. "I thought you'd read
Nietzsche."

"I did.
When I was eight."

"Then I
don't understand. I thought you said you could never read a thing
twice."

He met her eyes.
"So I thought. But it seems I was wrong."

She was silent a
while, considering, then looked back at him again. "Then you
can
forget things, after all?"

He shook his
head. "It's not a question of forgetting. It's just that things
get embedded."

"Embedded?"

He paused, then
set his glass down, realizing he would have to explain. "I
realized it months ago, when Father quoted something from Nietzsche
to me. Two lines from
Ecce Homo.
The memory should have come
back clearly, but it didn't. Oh, it was clear enough in one sense—I
could remember the words plain enough. I could even see them on the
page and recall where I was when I read them. But that was it, you
see. That's what I mean by things getting embedded. When Father
triggered that specific memory, it came back to me in context,
surrounded by all the other ragbag preoccupations of my
eight-year-old self."

Ben reached out
and took a tomato from the bowl and polished it on his sleeve; then
he looked up at his mother again, his face earnest, almost frowning.

"You see,
those lines of Nietzsche's were interlaced with all kinds of other
things. With snatches of music—Mahler and Schoenberg and
Shostakovich—with the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Klee,
the poetry of Rilke and Donne and Basho, and God knows what else. A
thousand intricate strands. Too many to grasp at a single go. But it
wasn't just a case of association by juxtaposition. I found that my
reading, my very understanding of Nietzsche, was colored by those
things. And try as I might, I couldn't shake those impressions loose
and see his words fresh. I had to separate it physically."

"What do
you mean?" Beth asked, leaning forward to take a grape from the
bunch.

"I mean
that I had to return to the text. To read the words fresh from the
page again. Free from all those old associations."

"And?"
It was Meg who asked the question. She was leaning forward slightly,
watching him, fascinated.

He looked down,
then bit into the tomato. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and
looked up again. "And it worked. I liberated the words from
their old context."

He popped the
rest of the tomato into his mouth and for a while was silent,
thoughtful. The two women watched him, indulging him as always,
placing him at the very center of things. The tomato finished, he
took a long sip of his lemonade. Only then did he begin again.

"It's as if
my mind is made up of different strata. It's all there—fossilized,
if you like, and available if I want to chip away at it—but my
memory, while perfect, is nonetheless selective."

Ben laughed and
looked at his sister again. "Do you remember that Borges story,
Meg? Tunes the Memorious'—about the boy with perfect recall;
confined to his bed, entrapped by the perfection, the overwhelming
detail, of past moments. Well, it isn't like that. It could never be
like that, amusing as the concept is. You see, the mind accords
certain things far greater significance than others. And there's a
good reason for that. The undermind recognizes what the conscious
intelligence too often overlooks—that there is a hierarchy of
experience. Some things matter more to our deeper self than others.
And the mind returns them to us strongly. It thrusts them at us, you
might say—in dreams, and at quiet moments when we least suspect
their presence."

"Why should
it do that?"

Ben gave a tiny
shrug. "I'm not sure." He took an apple from the basket and
lifted it to his mouth. "But maybe it has to do with something
programmed into us at the genetic level. A code. A key to why we're
here, like the cyphers in Augustus's journal."

As Ben bit
deeply into the apple, Meg looked across at her mother and saw how
she had looked away at the mention of Augustus and the journal.

"But why
Nietzsche?" Meg asked, after a moment. She could not understand
his fascination with the nineteenth-century German philosopher. To
her, the man was simply an extremist, a fanatic. He understood
nothing of those purely human things that held a society
together—nothing of love, desire, or sacrifice. To her mind,
his thinking was fatally flawed. It was the thinking of a hermit, a
misanthrope. But Man was a social species; he did not exist in
separation from his fellows, nor
could
he for longer than one
human lifetime. And any human culture was the product of countless
generations. In secret she had struggled with the man's difficult,
spiky prose, trying to understand what it was Ben saw in him; but it
had served only to confirm her own distaste for his thought.

Ben chewed the
piece of apple, then smiled and swallowed. "There's an almost
hallucinatory clarity about his thinking that I like. And there's a
fearlessness, too. He's not afraid to offend. There's nothing he's
afraid to look at and investigate at depth, and that's rare in our
culture. Very rare."

"So?"
Meg prompted, noting how her mother was watching Ben again, a fierce
curiosity in her eyes.

He looked at the
apple, then shrugged and bit again.

Beth broke her
long silence. "Are you working on something new?"

Ben looked away.
Then it was true. He had begun something new. Yes, she should have
known. He was always like this when he began something new—
fervent, secretive, subject to great swings of mood.