The Middle Kingdom (34 page)

Kim had watched
them all gasp and fall back as the flame leapt from his hand and
spread among the gathered wood, muttering darkly between themselves,
their eyes filled with fear and fascination. But Kim had known. He
had crouched there, still and silent, watching as the fire kindled,
like some strange living creature jumping from one dark surface to
another, consuming all it touched. Like the unspoken thoughts in his
head, he realized. Yet this had a voice, a crackling, popping,
sputtering voice, its breath strangely thick and dark, curled like a
beard, yet evanescent—vanishing into the dark above the blaze.

For a brief
moment it seemed he understood; held in his head a key to the pattern
of all things. Then it, too, was gone, drawn up into the darkness
overhead.

He felt
misplaced. Torn from the light and cast down into darkness. But if
misplaced, what then? How could he change things?

Run
away,
a
small voice inside him called out. Run
far away. To a place where
the darkness ends,

He looked out
beyond the fire, blinded by its brilliance, seeing nothing but the
afterimage of the flames. The darkness was unending and eternal.
There was nothing but the darkness. . . .

No, he reminded
himself. Not true. There is a place of brightness. Up there. A
wartha.

Among the gods.

Not only that,
but there was a way. A single door into the brightness. A one-way
door that often led to death, or so the men said. A door that only
the youngest and the bravest took.

Kim looked down
at his hands again. He was young, but was he brave enough? Was he
prepared to risk everything on a single gamble?

He thought of
the escapade with the mirror and the fire-stick and his spirits rose.
Then the image of himself, scared and cowering on the rocks, came
back to him. His stomach knotted. He wanted it. Wanted the brightness
like he wanted life itself. But he was afraid. Dreadfully, awfully,
numbingly afraid. He felt he could not do it—would die before
he took the first step.

Better to stay
here a thousand years. . . .

A cold shiver
passed through him, ice beneath the firelight on his face and chest
and limbs. No, not that. Death was preferable to that.

He looked up. On
the far side of the fire, beyond Rotfoot, stood Baxi, watching him.
For a moment their eyes met and locked and some kind of raw
understanding passed between them. And in the moment before he looked
away, Kim saw a crude kind of affection there in the older man's
eyes: a strange, almost wistful tenderness that he found unsettling.

Far
away,
said the voice inside.
To a place where the darkness ends.

Kim rose and
turned to face the darkness. The heat lay on his naked back, like the
promise of comfort, but now his face was cold and the tension in him
was worse than it had ever been. For a moment longer he hesitated,
need and fear at war within him. Then, with a violent shudder, he
nodded to himself and jerked away from the fire, his decision made.

He would go.
Now. Before the darkness took him back.

THE sign was
ancient. Time had turned the whiteness of its paint a mottled gray,
had faded the dark, heavy lettering.

Where the bolts
held it to the wall a red-gold rust had formed two weeping eyes.

Kim looked up at
it, struggling to understand. Like so much else it was a mystery; a
symbol of all the things denied him. He studied the strange yet
familiar shapes of the letters, wondering what they meant, filling
the gap, the darkness of incomprehension, with his own meanings. The
first letter was easy. It was an arrow, facing to the left. There was
a gap and then the second, its double curves facing away from the
arrow like a straight-backed woman's breasts. The third was a ring.
The fourth a drawn bow. The fifth? Two steep hills, perhaps, linked
by a valley. The sixth again was easy. It was an upright column, like
the column beyond the wall. The seventh? He felt the seventh was like
the fifth, yet its difference—its lack of an upright strut—was
significant. A gate, maybe. Or two interlocking flints—perhaps
the sign for war. Then, after another gap, came the last of them; an
eye with a dark, curled eyebrow overhead, linked at the eye's left
corner.

But what did it
mean in total? What message had it once conveyed?

He looked about
him, then ducked beneath the rotten lintel, pushing through the gap
in the wall. There, like some vast subterranean serpent breaching the
far wall of the ruined building, stood the column, its silvered
surface gleaming in the half-light.

Kim stumbled
forward and stood before it, his eyes drawn upward to where it met
the ceiling of the Clay far overhead. There were many such pillars
spread regularly throughout the Clay, but this one, Kim knew, was
slightly different from the others. It was a gate. An entrance into
the Above.

Long ago they
had chased a boy from another tribe across the nearby hills and
trapped him here, between the walls of this old, ruined building.
Faced with certain death, the boy had turned, gone to the pillar, and
pressed his hands against it.

Miraculously the
pillar had opened. A narrow aperture had formed in its perfect
roundness, a dim, fierce light burning out from the space within.
Fearfully, with a backward glance at them, the boy had gone inside.
At once the opening had closed,

throwing the
space between the walls into an intense and sudden darkness.

They had camped
there some while, waiting for the boy to come out, but he never had.
And when one of the older boys grew brave enough to approach the
pillar and press against it, they could all see that the space inside
was empty.

It had eaten the
boy.

For a time he
had believed this version of events, and in truth part of him still
believed it, making him cower there, terrified to enter. But the
newly woken part of him reasoned otherwise. What if the boy had not
been killed? What if he had been taken up into the Above?

They were huge
assumptions. Hunches, not certainty. And the boy had gone inside only
because he had had no option. But what of himself? There were no
knives awaiting him should he turn away. Only the darkness. Only the
fetid Clay.

He grimaced and
closed his eyes, tormented by indecision. He didn't want to die. He
didn't want to be wrong.

Is
death any
worse than this?

The thought came
like a voice in his head, and with the voice came the realization
that he was no longer a single creature. There were two of him,
sharing a single skull, a single body. One dark, one light. One kept
him here, the other craved escape. Here, at the gate to the Above,
they would have to fight it out between them.

For a time the
darkness had him and he stood there, thoughtless, his animal self
shuddering uncontrollably, a gobbet of spittle dribbling down his
chin. Then, with an abruptness that -caught the animal unaware, Kim
threw himself at the column and scratched at its surface, trying to
find an opening.

He could hear
himself gibbering with fear, and in another moment he would have
backed away, defeated, but suddenly the aperture slid open with an
outbreath of air and he tumbled in, onto the smooth, uncluttered
floor, his hands going up to cover his eyes against the brilliance.

The brightness
hurt him. It cut into his head like a flint. Then the door hissed
shut behind him, trapping him. He whim-

pered in fear
then lay there, shivering, his legs drawn up beneath him, waiting to
die.

Yet what
happened next seemed worse than death. The light in the room pulsed
gently and a deep voice boomed out, filling the narrow space.

"Kewsel
agas hanow, map!"
Speak your name, boy!
"Agas
hanow!"

Kim gagged, then
shat himself. His muscles went into spasm. For a while he could do
nothing to control them. Again he was an unthinking animal, there on
the floor inside the alien column. A stinking piece of quivering meat
and bone. Then the bright thing in him bobbed up again and floated on
the surface of his awareness. His name? What was his name?

"Laga . .
." He could not say it. He'd had too little practice. In any
case, it was wrong. Lagasek—Starer—was not his name; or,
if his name, then his name only in the darkness. It was not the name
his mother had given him. Not the name he wished to take with him
into the light.

He tried again.
"Kim," he said finally, the word strange, more awkward in
his mouth than in his head. His voice barely sounded the K and the
rest of it was inaudible.

"Kewsel
arta," said the voice. Speak
again.
It seemed much warmer
than before; more soothing.

"Kim,"
he said more clearly, then lay there, perfectly still, wondering what
would happen.

"Da, Kim,"
said the voice. Good. "Praga bos why omma?"
Why be you
here?
"Praga prak why entradhe hemma pylla?"
Why did
you enter this pillar?
"Gul nebonen sewya why?"
Does
someone pursue you?

"Nyns,"
he answered. No.

"Nyns,"
the voice repeated, and then chuckled to itself. What it said next
was difficult to follow. The words were alien to Kim, like the
nonsense utterances of his nightmares. "We've a fluent one
here." This last seemed not to be directed at Kim.

Kim sat up,
looking around him. Then he stood and went to the curve of the wall
across from where the opening had been. No, he hadn't been mistaken:
there was a shape in the wall's otherwise unblemished face. A pattern
of light, almost too faint to see. He stood beside it, trying to
figure it out.

"Ah,"
said the voice. "My gweles why cafos an matrix." I
see
you've found
the ... But the last word was new. It was like the
other words—alien.

Kim twitched and
turned about sharply. The creature with the voice was watching him,
then. Was close by. He stared up into the dimly lit tunnel overhead
and tried to make out something in the darkness, but it seemed empty.

"Matrix?"
Kim asked, pronouncing the word carefully, as if feeling the shape of
it in his mouth.

There was
laughter—soft, warm laughter—then the voice came back.
"My bos ken tyller," it said, as if that explained
everything. I
be somewhere else.
"Ha an tra a-dherak why
bos un matrix."
And that thing before you be a matrix.
"Ef
gul pycturs ha patron."
He make pictures and patterns.

Kim struggled to
understand, but could grasp nothing of what the voice was saying.
Pictures? Patterns? How did it make these things?

"Gasa-vy
dysquehs why."
Let me show you.

The faint area
glowed, then seemed to explode with color.

Kim shrieked and
leapt backward, scrambling away until his back was against the far
curve of the wall.

"Ef ny
a-wra pystyk why. Golyas. Kensa un fas."
He won't harm you.
Watch. First a face.

The screen
formed a face. A typical face from the Clay, seen in partial
darkness, its scars and deformities nothing unusual. Kim nodded, his
eyes watching the matrix closely.

"Nessa, un
patron. Un semple patron. Tyby kettep myn bos un men." Next,
a
pattern. A simple pattern. Imagine each point be a stone.
"My
muvya an meyn formya un form. Un patron." I
move the stones
to form a shape. A pattern.

When the image
on the screen re-formed it showed three lines of three points. A
square.

"Den
lufyow, le un bys," said Kim.
Two hands, less a finger.
It
was the most he had said until then.

"Ahah,"
said the voice, and this time Kim could hear a second voice speak
softly in the background. "Numerate, this one. That's rare."
The hair on his neck stood up, hearing that foreign tongue again, and
his lips peeled back, his dark self hostile to it, knowing it for the
language of the light.

Unknown to him,
however, he had taken his first step into the Above. And when the
voice sounded again its tone was slightly different: less cozy, much
more businesslike.

"Dos ogas
an matrix, Kim. Dos ogas ha my deryvas why fatel muvya an meyn a
drodhe."

Come near the
matrix., Kim. Come near and I'll tell you how to move the stones
about.

KLAUS
EBERT, Head of GenSyn, Chung Kuo's second largest company, looked
down at the corpse on the dissecting table and slowly shook his head.
"No, Knut. I've never seen its like."

He pointed out
its internal structure—the lack of a spleen; the simplification
of the respiratory system; the artificial latticework of the rib
cage; the replacement of the stomach and intestinal system by a
single sac, sealed off and unconnected to the anus. Most obvious of
all was the flat, compact battery, like a black lacquered hipflask,
placed where the human liver should have been.

"I'll have
my experts look at this, but it's not GenSyn, that's certain. It
isn't even organic. It's just a machine; too simple to function
longer than a few months. It can't digest. It can't even process
blood. Whoever built it designed it for rapid redundancy."

Ebert turned,
facing the General, his face ashen.

"Gods,
Knut, but it's so like me, isn't it? Looking at it there, it feels
like part of me has died."

The General
studied his old friend a moment, then looked back at the
part-dissected corpse. It was a perfect copy. Too good in some
respects. He had seen the films of it before his men had neutralized
it—saw how cleverly it had mimicked Ebert's voice and
mannerisms. And if there had been something unnatural about it,
something just a bit too animated about its speech, its gestures,
that was only noticeable in retrospect. It had been good enough to
fool Ebert's personal staff. But the eyes. . . When the thing had
been cornered in Ebert's private suite, those eyes had burned, like
the eyes of an addict.