The Middle Kingdom (69 page)

Andersen
hesitated, conscious of the other tutors listening. "In my
office, T'ai Cho. Now!" Then he turned and left.

Tai Cho looked
about the table at his fellow tutors, but there were only shrugs. No
one had heard anything.

Andersen came to
the point at once. "Kim was attacked. This morning, in the
pool."

Tai Cho
shivered, the whole of him gone cold. "Is he hurt?"

Andersen shook
his head. He was clearly very angry. "Not badly. But it might
have been worse. He could very easily have died. And where would we
be then? It was only Shang Li-Yen's prompt action that saved the
boy."

Shang Li-Yen was
one of the tutors. Like all the tutors, part of his duties entailed a
surveillance stint. Apparently he had noted a camera malfunction in
the pool area and, rather than wait for the repair crew, had gone to
investigate it personally.

"What did
Tutor Shang find?"

Andersen laughed
bitterly. "Six boys skylarking! What do you think? You know how
they are—theyd sooner die than inform on each other! But Shang
thinks it was serious. The boy Matyas was involved. It seems he was
very'agitated when Shang burst in on them. He was standing at the
poolside, breathing strangely, his face flushed. Kim was in the water
nearby. Only the quick actions of one of the other boys got him out
of the water before he went under again." Anger flared in the
Director's eyes again. "Fuck it, T'ai Cho, Shang had to give him
the kiss of life!"

"Where is
he now?" T'ai Cho asked quietly, trying to keep his emotions in
check, yet wondering how accurate Andersen's assessment of "not
badly hurt" really was.

"In his
room, I believe. But let me finish. We had Kim examined at once and
there were marks on his throat and arms and on his right leg
consistent with a fight. Matyas also had some minor bruises. But both
boys claim they simply fell while playing in the pool. The other boys
back them up, but all six stories differ widely. It's clear none of
them is telling the truth."

"And you
want me to try to find out what really happened?"

Andersen nodded.
"If anyone can get to the bottom of it, you can, T'ai Cho. Kim
trusts you. You're like a father to him."

T'ai Cho lowered
his eyes, then shook his head. "Maybe so, but he'll tell me
nothing. As you said, it's how they are."

Andersen was
quiet a moment, then he leaned forward across his desk, his voice
suddenly much harder, colder, than it had been. "Try anyway,
T'ai Cho. Try hard. It's important. If Matyas was to blame I want to
know. Because if he was I want him out. Kim's too important to us.
WeVe got too much invested in him."

T'ai Cho rose
from his seat and bowed, understanding perfectly. It wasn't Kim—the
boy—Andersen was so concerned about, it was Kim-as-investment.
Well, so be it. He would use that in Kim's favor.

KIM'S ROOM was
empty. T'ai Cho felt his stomach tighten, his pulse quicken. Then he
remembered. Of course. The film. Kim would have gone to see the film.
He glanced at his timer. It was just after ten. The film was almost
finished. Kim would be back here in fifteen minutes. He would wait.

He looked about
the room, noting as ever what was new, what old. The third-century
portrait of the mathematician Liu Hui remained in its place of honor
on the wall above Kim's terminal, and on the top, beside the
keyboard, lay Hui's Chiu
Chang Stum Shu,
his Nine Chapters on
the
Mathematical Art. T'ai Cho smiled and opened its pages.
Kim's notations filled the margins. Like the book itself, they were
in Mandarin, the tiny, perfectly formed pictograms in red, black, and
green inks.

T'ai Cho flicked
through inattentively and was about to close the book when one of the
notations caught his attention. It was right at the end of the book,
among the notes to the ninth chapter. The notation itself was
unremarkable—something to do with ellipses—but beside it,
in green, Kim had printed a name and two dates.
Tycho
Brahe.
1546-1601.

He frowned,
wondering if the first name was a play on his own. But then, what did
the other mean? Bra He. ... It made no sense. And the dates? Or were
they dates? Perhaps they were a code.

For a moment he
hesitated, loath to pry, then set the book down and switched on the
terminal.

A search of the
system's central encyclopedia confirmed what he had believed. There
was no entry, either on Tycho or Brahe. Nothing. Not even on close
variants of the two names.

T'ai Cho sat
there a moment, his fingers resting lightly on the keys, a vague
suspicion forming in his head. But what if . . . ?

He shook his
head. It wasn't possible. Surely it wasn't? The terminal in T'ai
Cho's room was secretly "twinned" with Kim's. Everything
Kim did on his terminal was available to T'ai Cho. Everything. Work
files, diary, jottings, even his messages to the other boys. It
seemed sneaky, but it was necessary. There was no other way of
keeping up with Kim. His interests were too wide ranging, too
quicksilver, to keep track of any other way. It was their only means
of controlling him—of anticipating his needs and planning
ahead.

But what if?

T'ai Cho typed
his query quickly, then sat back.

The answer
appeared on the screen at once.

"SUBCODE?"

T'ai Cho leaned
forward and typed in the dates, careful to include the spacing and
the dash.

There was the
briefest hesitation, then the file came up. "BRAHE, Tycho."
T'ai Cho scanned it quickly. It was a summary of the man's life and
achievements in the manner of a genuine encyclopedia entry.

T'ai Cho sat
back again, astonished, then laughed, remembering the time long
before when Kim had removed the lock from his cell without their
knowing. And so again, he thought. But this was much subtler, much
more clever, than the simple removal of a lock. This was on a whole
different level of evasiveness.

He read the
passage through, pausing thoughtfully at the final line, then cleared
the file and switched the terminal off. For a moment he sat there,
staring sightlessly at the screen, then he stood up and moved away
from the terminal.

"T'ai Cho?"

He turned with a
start. Kim was standing in the doorway, clearly surprised to see him.
He seemed much quieter than normal, on his guard. There was an
er-silk scarf around his neck and his wrist was bandaged. He made no
move to come into the room.

T'ai Cho smiled
and sat down on the bed. "How was the film?"

Kim smiled
briefly, unenthusiastically. "No surprises," he said after
a moment. "Pan Chao was triumphant. As usual."

T'ai Cho saw the
boy look across at the terminal, then back at him, but there was no
sign that Kim had seen what he had been doing.

"Come
here," he said gently. "Come and sit with me, Kim. We need
to talk."

Kim hesitated,
understanding at once why T'ai Cho had come. Then he shook his head.
"Nothing happened this morning."

"Nothing?"
T'ai Cho looked deliberately at the scarf, the bandage.

Kim smiled but
said nothing.

"Okay. But
it doesn't matter, Kim. You see, we already know what happened.
There's a hidden camera in the ceiling of the pool. One Matyas
overlooked when he sabotaged the others. We saw him attack you. Saw
him grab you by the throat, then try to drown you."

Still Kim said
nothing, gave nothing away.

T'ai Cho
shrugged, then looked down, wondering how closely the scenario
fitted. Was Kim quiet because it was true? Or was he quiet because it
had happened otherwise? Whichever, he was certain of one thing.
Matyas
had
attacked Kim. He had seen for himself the jealous
envy in the older boy's eyes. But he had never dreamed it would come
to this.

He stood up,
inwardly disturbed by this side of Kim. This primitive, savage side
that all the Clayborn seemed to have. He had never understood this
aspect of their behavior: this perverse tribal solidarity of theirs.
Where they came from it was a strength, no doubt—a survival
factor—but up here, in the Above, it was a failing, a fatal
flaw.

"You're
important, Kim. Very important. You know that, don't you? And Matyas
should have known better. He's out for what he did."

Kim looked down.
"Matyas did nothing. It was an accident."

T'ai Cho took a
deep breath, then stood and went across to him. "As you say,
Kim. But we know otherwise."

Kim looked up at
him, meeting his eyes coldly. "Is that all?"

That, too, was
unlike Kim. That hardness. Perhaps the experience had shaken him.
Changed him in some small way. For a moment T'ai Cho studied him,
wondering whether he should bring up the matter of the secret files,
then decided not to. He would investigate them first. Find out what
Kim was up to. Then, and only then, would he confront him.

He smiled and
looked away. "That's all."

BACK IN His ROOM
T'ai Cho locked his door, then began to summon up the files,
beginning with the master file, referred to in the last line of the
BRAHE.

The Aristotle
file.

The name
intrigued him, because, unlike Brahe, there had been an Aristotle: a
minor Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C. He checked the
entry briefly on the general encyclopedia. There were less than a
hundred and fifty words on the man. Like T'ai Cho, he had been a
tutor, in his case to the Greek king Alexander. As to the originality
of his thinking, he appeared to be on a par with Hui Shih, a
contemporary Han logician who had stressed the relativity of time and
space and had sought to prove the existence of the "Great One of
All Things" through rational knowledge. Now, however, both men
existed only as tiny footnotes in the history of science. Greece had
been conquered by Rome and Rome by the Han. And the Han had abandoned
the path of pure logic with Hui Shih.

T'ai Cho typed
in the three words, then leaned back. The answer appeared on the
screen at once.

"SUBCODE?"

He took a guess.
ALEXANDER, he typed, then sat back with a laugh as the computer
accepted the code word.

There was a
brief pause, then the title page came up on the screen.

THE ARISTOTLE
FILE Being the True History of Western Science. T'ai Cho frowned.
What was this? Then he understood. It was a game. An outlet for Kim's
inventiveness. Something Kim had made up. Yes, he understood at once.
He had read somewhere how certain young geniuses invented worlds and
peopled them, as an exercise for their intellects. And this was
Kim's. He smiled broadly and pressed to move the file on.

Four hours
later, at three bells, he got up from his seat and went to relieve
himself. He had set the machine to print and had sat there, reading
the copy as it emerged from the machine. There were more than two
hundred pages of copy in the tray by now and the file was not yet
exhausted.

T'ai Cho went
through to the kitchen, the faint buzz of the printer momentarily
silenced, and put on a kettle of
ch'a,
then went back out and
stood there by the terminal, watching the paper spill out slowly.

It was
astonishing. Kim had invented a whole history; a fabulously rich,
incredibly inventive history. So rich that at times it seemed almost
real. All that about the Catholic church suppressing knowledge and
the great Renaissance—was that the word?—that split
Europe into two camps. Oh, it was wild fantasy, of course, but there
was a ring of truth—of universality— behind it that gave
it great authority.

T'ai Cho
laughed. "So that's what you've been up to in your spare time,
Kim Ward," he said softly, then laughed again. Yes, it made
sense now. Kim had been busy reshaping the world in his own image—had
made the past the mirror of his own logical, intensely curious self.

But it had not
been like that. Pan Chao had conquered Ta Ts'in. Rome had fallen. And
not as Kim had portrayed it, to Alaric and the Goths in the fifth
century, but to the Han in the first. There had been no break in
order, no decline into darkness. No Dark Ages and no Christianity—oh,
and what a lovely idea
that
was: organized religion! The
thought of it...

He bent down and
took the last few sheets from the stack. Kim's tale had reached the
twentieth century now. A century of war and large-scale atrocity. A
century in which scientific "progress" had become a
headlong flight. He glanced down the highlighted names on the
page—Rontgen, Planck, Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Baird,
Schrodinger—recognizing none of them. Each had its own subfile,
like the BRAHE. And each, he knew, would prove consistent with the
larger picture.

"Remarkable!"
he said softly, reading a passage about the development of radio and
television. In Kim's version they had appeared only in the twentieth
century—a good five centuries after the Han had really invented
them. It was through such touches—by arresting some
developments and accelerating others—that Kim made his story
live. In his version of events, Han science had stagnated by the
fourth century A.D. and Chung Kuo had grown insular, until, in the
nineteenth century, the Europeans—and what a strange ring that
phrase had; not Hung Moo, but "Europeans"—had kicked
the rotten door of China in.

Ah, and that
too. Not Chung Kuo. Kim called it China. As if it had been named
after the First Emperor's people, the Ch'in. Ridiculous! And yet,
somehow, strangely convincing too.

T'ai Cho sat
back, rubbing his eyes, the sweet scent of the brewing ch'a slowly
filling the room. Yes, much of it was ridiculous. A total
fantasy—like the strange idea of Latin, the language of the Ta
Ts'in, persisting fifteen hundred years after the fall of their
empire. For a moment he thought of that old, dead language persisting
through the centuries by means of that great paradox, the Church—at
one and the same time the great defender and destroyer of
knowledge—and knew such a world as the one Kim had dreamed up
was a pure impossibility. A twisted dream of things.