The Middle Kingdom (52 page)

Shepherd glanced
at his daughter, then looked back at his wife and gave a slight bow.
"I'm sorry. Yes ... my language. I forget when IVe been away.
But this . . ." He huffed angrily, exasperated, then turned to
his son again. "Come, Ben. There's much to be done."

IT WAS CALM on
the river. Ben pulled easily at the oars, the boat moving swiftly
through the water. Meg sat facing him, looking across at the eastern
shore. "Behind her, in the stem, sat Peng Yu-wei, tall, elderly,
and very upright, his staff held in front of him like an unflagged
mast. It was ebb tide and the current was in their favor. Ben kept
the boat midstream, enjoying the warmth of the midday sun on his bare
shoulders, the feel of the mild sea breeze in his hair. He felt
drowsy, for one rare moment almost lapsed out of consciousness; then
Meg's cry brought him back to himself.

"Look,
Ben!"

Meg was pointing
out toward the far shore. Ben shipped oars and turned to look. There,
stretching from the foreshore to the Wall, was a solid line of
soldiers. Slowly, methodically, they moved between the trees and over
the rough-grassed, uneven ground, making sure nothing slipped between
them. It was their third sweep of the Domain and their last. What was
not caught this time would be gassed.

Peng Yu-wei
cleared his throat, his head held slightly forward in a gesture of
respect to his two charges.

"What is
it, Teacher Peng?" Ben asked coldly, turning to face him.
Lessons had ended an hour back. This now was their time and Peng,
though chaperone for this excursion, had no authority over the master
and mistress outside his classroom.

"Forgive
me, young master, I wish only to make an observation."

Meg turned,
careful not to make the boat tilt and sway, and looked up at Peng
Yu-wei, then back at Ben. She knew how much Ben resented the
imposition of a teacher. He liked to make his own discoveries and
follow his own direction, but their father had insisted upon a more
rigorous approach. What Ben did in his own time was up to him, but in
the morning classes he was to do as Peng Yu-wei instructed; learn
what Peng Yu-wei asked him to learn. With some reluctance Ben had
agreed, but only on the understanding that outside the classroom the
teacher was not to speak without his express permission.

"You
understand what Teacher Peng really is?" he had said to Meg when
they were alone one time. "He is their means of keeping tabs on
me. Of controlling what I know and what I leam. He's bit and bridle,
ball and chain, a rope to tether me like any other animal."

His bitterness
had surprised her. "Surely not," she had answered. "Father
wouldn't want that, would he?"

But he had not
answered, only looked away, the bitterness in his face unchanged.

Now some of that
bitterness was back as he looked at Teacher Peng. "Make your
observation, then. But be brief."

Peng Yu-wei
bowed, then turned his head, looking across at the soldiers who were
now level with them. One frail, thin hand went up to pull at his
wispy gray goatee; the other moved slightly on the staff, inclining
it toward the distant line of men. "This whole business seems
most cumbersome, would you not agree, Master Ben?"

Ben's eyes never
left the teacher's face. "No. Not cumbersome. Inemcient's a
better word."

Teacher Peng
looked back at him and bowed slightly, corrected. "Which is why
I felt it could be made much easier."

Meg saw the
irritation and impatience on Ben's face and looked down. She knew no
good would come of this.

"You had
best tell me how, Teacher Peng." The note of sarcasm in Ben's
voice was bordering on outright rudeness now. Even so, Peng Yu-wei
seemed not to notice. He merely bowed and continued.

"It occurs
to me that, before returning the animals to the land again, a trace
could be put inside each animal. Then, if this happened again, it
would be a simple thing to account for each animal. Theft and disease
would both be far easier to control."

Peng Yu-wei
looked up at his twelve-year-old charge expectantly, but Ben was
silent.

"Well,
master?" he asked after a moment. "What do you think of my
idea?"

Ben looked away.
He lifted the oars and began to pull at them again, digging heavily
into the water to his right, bringing the boat back onto a straight
course. Then he looked back at the teacher.

"It's a
hideous idea, Peng Yu-wei. An unimaginative, small-minded idea. Just
another way of keeping tabs on things. I can see it now. You would
make a great electronic wall chart of the Domain, eh? And have each
animal as a blip on it."

The stretched
olive skin of Peng Yu-wei's face was relaxed, his dark eyes, with
their marked epicarithic fold, impassive. "That would be a
refinement, I agree, but ..."

Ben let the oars
fall and leaned forward in the boat. Peng Yu-wei reflexively moved
back. Meg watched, horrified, as Ben scrabbled past her, the boat
swaying violently, and tore at the teacher's
pau,
exposing his
chest.

"Please,
young master. You know that is not allowed."

Peng Yu-wei
still held his staff, but with his other hand he now sought to draw
the two ends of the torn silk together. For a moment, however, the
white circle of the control panel set into his upper chest was
clearly visible.

For a second or
two Ben knelt there in front of him threateningly, his whole body
tensed as if to act. Then he moved back.

"You'll be
quiet, understand? And you'll say nothing of this. Nothing! Or I'll
switch you off and drop you over the side. Understand me, Teacher
Peng?"

For a moment the
android was perfectly still, then it gave the slightest nod.

"Good,"
said Ben, moving back and taking up the oars again. "Then we'll
proceed."

AS BEN TURNED
the boat into the tiny, boxlike harbor the two sailors looked up from
where they sat on the steps mending their nets and smiled. They were
both old men, in their late sixties, with broad, healthy, salt-tanned
faces. Ben hailed them, then concentrated on maneuvering between the
moored fishing boats. There was a strong breeze now from the mouth of
the river and the metallic sound of the lines flapping against the
masts filled the air, contesting with the cry of gulls overhead. Ben
turned the boat's prow with practiced ease and let the craft glide
between a big, high-sided fishing boat and the harbor wall, using one
of the oars to push away, first one side, then the other. Meg, at the
stern, held the rope in her hand, ready to jump ashore and tie up.

Secured, Ben
jumped ashore, then looked back into the boat. Pen Yu-wei had stood
up, ready to disembark.

"You'll
stay," Ben said commandingly.

For a moment
Peng Yu-wei hesitated, his duty to chaperone the children conflicting
with the explicit command of the young master. Water slopped noisily
between the side of the boat and the steps. Only paces away the two
old sailors had stopped their mending, watching.

Slowly, with
great dignity, the teacher sat, planting his staff before him. "I'll
do as you say, young master," he said, looking up at the young
boy on the quayside, "but I must tell your father about this."

Ben turned away,
taking Meg's hand. "Do what you must, tin man," he muttered
under his breath.

The quayside was
cluttered with coils of rope, lobster pots, netting, and piles of
empty wooden crates—old, frail-looking things that awaited
loads of fish that never came. The harbor was filled with fishing
boats, but no one ever fished. The town beyond was full of
busy-seeming people, but no one lived there. It was all false: all
part of the great illusion Ben's great-great-great-grandfather had
created here.

Once this had
been a thriving town, prospering on fishing and tourism and the naval
college. Now it was dead. A shell of its former self, peopled by
replicants.

Meg looked about
her, delighted, as she always was by this. Couples strolled in the
afternoon sunshine, the ladies in crinolines, the men in stiff
three-piece suits. Pretty little girls with curled blond hair tied
with pink ribbons ran here and there, while boys in sailor suits
crouched, playing five-stones.

"It's so
real
here!" Meg said enthusiastically. "So alive!"

Ben looked down
at her and smiled. "Yes," he said. "It is, isn't it?"
He had seen pictures of the City. It seemed such an ugly, hideous
place by comparison. A place of walls and cells and corridors—a
vast, unending prison of a place. He turned his face to the breeze
and drew in great lungfuls of the fresh salt air, then looked back at
Meg. "What shall we do?"

She looked past
the strolling holidaymakers at the gaily painted shops along the
front, then looked up at the hillside and, beyond it, the Wall,
towering over all.

"I don't
know. . . ." She squeezed his hand. "Let's just go where we
want, Ben. Look wherever we fancy looking, eh?"

"Okay. Then
we'll start over there, at the Chandler's."

For the next few
hours they went among the high-street shops, first searching through
the shelves of Joseph Toms, Toys and Fancy Goods, for novelties, then
looking among the tiny cupboards of Charles Weaver, Apothecary,
sampling the sweet-tasting, harmless powders on their fingers and
mixing the brightly colored liquids in beakers. But Ben soon tired of
such .games and merely watched as Meg went from shop to shop,

unchallenged by
the android shopkeepers. In Nash's Coffee House they had their lunch,
the food real but somehow unsatisfying, as if reconstituted.

"There's a
whole world here, Meg. Preserved. Frozen in time. Sometimes I look at
it and think it's such a waste. It should be used somehow."

Meg sipped at
her iced drink, then looked up at him. "You think we should let
others come here into the Domain?"

He hesitated,
then shook his head. "No. Not that. But. . ."

Meg watched him
curiously. It was unusual to see Ben so indecisive.

"You've an
idea," she said.

"No. Not an
idea. Not as such."

Again that
uncertainty, that same slight shrugging of his shoulders. She watched
him look away, his eyes tracing the row of signs above the
shopfronts: David Wishart, Tobacconist; Arthur Redmayne, Couturier;
Thomas Lipton, Vintner; Jack Del-croix, Dentist & Bleeder, Stagg
& Mantle, Ironmongers; Verry's Restaurant; Jackson & Graham,
Cabinet Makers; The Lambe Brothers, Linen-Drapers; and there, on the
corner, facing Goode's Hostelry, Pugh's Mourning House.

Seeing Pugh's
brought back a past visit. It was months ago and Ben had insisted on
going into Pugh's, though they had always avoided the shop before.
She had watched him go among the caskets, then lift one of the lids,
peering inside. The corpse looked realistic enough, but Ben had
turned to her and laughed. "Dead long before it was dead."
Somehow that had made him talk about things here. Why they were as
they were, and what kind of man her great-great-great-grandfather had
been to create a place like this. He had not skimped on anything. One
looked in drawers or behind doors and there, as in real life, one
found small, inconsequential things. Buttons and pins and
photographs. A hatstand with an old, well-worn top hat on one peg, a
scarf on another, as if left there only an hour past. Since then she
had searched and searched, her curiosity unflagging, trying to catch
him out—to find some small part of this world he had made that
wasn't finished. To find some blank, uncreated part behind the
superficial details.

Would she have
thought to do this without Ben? Would she have searched so ardently
to find that patch of dull revealing blankness? No. In truth she
would never have known. But he had shown her how this, the most real
place she knew, was in other ways quite hollow. Was all a marvelous
sham. A gaudy, imaginative fake.

"If this is
fake, why is it so marvelous, Ben?" she had asked, and he had
shaken his head in wonder at her question.

"Why?
Because it's godlike! Look at it, Meg! It's so presumptuous! Such
consummate mimicry! Such shameless artifice!"

Now, watching
him, she knew he had a scheme. Some way of using this.

"Never
mind," she said. "Let's move on. I'd like to try on some of
Lloyd's hats."

Ben smiled at
her. "Okay. And then we'll start back."

THEY WERE
UPSTAIRS in Edgar Lloyd, Hatters, when Ben heard voices down below.
Meg was busy trying on hats at the far side of the room, the android
assistant standing beside her at the mirror, a stack of round,
candy-striped boxes in her arms.

Ben went to the
window and looked down. There were soldiers in the passageway below.
Real soldiers. And not just any soldiers. He knew the men at once.

Meg turned to
him, a wide-brimmed creation of pale cream lace balanced precariously
on top of her dark curls. "What do you think, Ben? Do you—"

He hushed her
urgently.

"What is
it?" she mouthed.

"Soldiers,"
he mouthed back.

She set the hat
down and came across to him.

"Keep down
out of sight," he whispered. "They're our guards, and they
shouldn't be here. They're supposed to be confined to barracks."

She looked up at
him, wide eyed, then knelt down, so that her head was below the sill.
"Tell me what's happening," she said quietly.

He watched.
There were ten of them down there, their voices urgent, excited. For
a moment Ben couldn't understand what was going on, then one of them
turned and he saw it was the captain, a man called Rosten. Rosten
pointed down the passageway toward the open ground in front of the
old inn and muttered something Ben couldn't quite make out.

"What are
they doing?"