Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (31 page)

Beth laughed,
surprised. "Goodness! What brings this on?"

Meg colored
slightly. "Nothing. It's just that I realized I didn't know."

"Well...
all right. I'll tell you." She took a deep breath, then began.
"It was like this. When I was eighteen I was a pianist. I played
all the great halls of the world, performing before the very highest
of First Level society—the
Supernal,
as they call
themselves. And then, one day, I was asked to play before the T'ang
and his court."

"That must
have been exciting."

"Very."
She took her daughter's hand and squeezed it gently. "Anyway,
that night, after the performance, everyone was telling me how well
I'd played, but I was angry with myself. I had played badly. Not
poorly, but by my own standards I had let myself down. And before the
T'ang of all people. It seemed that only your father sensed something
was wrong. It was he, I later found out, who had arranged the whole
affair. He had seen me perform before and knew what I was capable of.

"Well.
After the reception he took me aside and asked me if I'd been
nervous. I had, of course. It's not every day that an
eighteen-year-old is called to perform before one of the Seven. But
that wasn't an excuse. I told him how ashamed I was at having let the
T'ang down; and to my surprise and chagrin, he agreed with me. Right
there and then he took me into the T'ang's own quarters and asking Li
Shai Tung's forgiveness for intruding, made me sit at the piano again
and play. 'Your best, this time, Elizabeth,' he said. 'Show the T'ang
why I boasted of you.' And I did. And this time, with just your
father and the T'ang listening, I played better than I'd ever played
in my life."

"What did
you play? Can you remember?"

Her mother
smiled, looking off into the distance. "Yes. It was Beethoven's
Sonata in F Minor, the
Appassionato.
It was only when I had
finished that I realized I had just committed a capital offense."

Meg's mouth fell
open. "Gods! Of course! It's a prohibited piece, isn't it? Like
all of Beethoven's work! But what did the T'ang do?"

Beth looked down
at her daughter and ruffled her hair. "He clapped. He stood up
and applauded me. Then he turned to your father and said, 'I don't
know what that was, Hal, and I don't want to know, but you were right
to bring the girl back. She's in a class of her own.' "

"And?"

"And for a
year, nothing. I thought your father had forgotten me, though I often
thought of him and of what he had done for me that evening. But then,
out of the blue, I received an invitation from him, asking me to come
and visit the Domain."

Meg sat forward
eagerly. "And that's when it all happened?"

Beth shook her
head. "No. Not at all. I was flattered, naturally, but such a
request was impossible to comply with. I was only nineteen. It was
six years before I would come of age, and my mother and father would
have forbidden me to go even if I had asked them."

"So what
did you do?"

Beth laughed. "I
did the only thing I could. I sent him an invitation to my next
concert."

"And he
came?"

"No. What
happened next was strange. My father called on me. I hadn't seen him
in over six months; and then, the day after I'd sent the note to Hal,
there was my father, larger than life, telling me that he'd arranged
a husband for me."

Meg's mouth fell
open a second time. "A husband?"

"Yes. The
son of an old friend of his. A rich young buck with no talent and as
little intelligence."

Meg clutched her
mother's hands tightly. "And you said no. You told your father
you were in love with Hal Shepherd and wanted to marry him. Is that
right?"

Beth laughed.
"Gods, no.
I
had no say in it. Anyway, I wasn't in love
with your father then. I quite liked him. He was handsome and
intelligent, and I felt a kind of , . . affinity with him. But beyond
that nothing. Not then, anyway. What I didn't realize, however, was
that your father had fallen in love with me. It seems he had spent
that whole year trying to forget me, but when he heard about my
engagement, he went mad and challenged my intended to a duel."

Meg blinked. "He
did
what?"

"Yes,"
Beth laughed delightedly. "An old-fashioned duel, with swords."

"And?"
Meg's eyes were big and round.

"Well. . .
My father was horrified, naturally. My fiance wanted to fight, but
Hal had something of a reputation as a swordsman and my father was
certain he would kill my future husband. He asked Hal to call on him
to try to sort things out."

"And they
came to an arrangement?"

Beth leaned
forward. "Not straight away. Though that's not the story my
father told. You see, I listened secretly from the next room when
they met. My father was angry at first. 'You can't have her,' he
said. 'If you kill this man, I'll arrange a marriage with another.'
'Then I'll kill him, too!' Hal said. My father was taken aback. 'And
I'll find another suitor. You can't kill them all.' But Hal was
determined. His voice rang out defiantly. 'If I have to, I'll kill
every last man in Chung Kuo! Don't you see? I
want
your
daughter.' "

Beth laughed,
then sat back, her face suddenly more thoughtful, her eyes gazing
back in time. Then, more quietly. "Gods, Meg. You don't know how
thrilling it is to be wanted like that."

Meg watched her
mother a moment longer, then looked down, giving a small shudder.
"Yes . . . And your father gave in to Hal?"

"Gods, no.
He was a stubborn man. And a mercenary one. You see, he'd found out
how much Hal was worth by then. All this was a kind of playacting,
you understand, to put up the price."

Meg frowned, not
understanding.

"He wanted
a dowry. Payment for me."

Meg made a small
noise of astonishment.

"Yes. And
he got it, too. He threatened to stop Hal from marrying me until I
was twenty-five unless he paid what he asked."

"And did
he?"

"Yes. Twice
what my father asked, in fact."

"Why?"

Beth's smile
widened. "Because, Hal said, my father didn't know the half of
what he had given life to."

Meg was silent
for a while, considering. Then she looked up at her mother again.

"Did you
hate your father?"

Beth hesitated,
a sadness in her face. "I didn't know him well enough to hate
him, Meg. But what I knew of him I didn't like. He was a little man,
for all his talent. Not like Hal." She shook her head gently, a
faint smile returning to the corners of her mouth. "No, not like
your father at all."

"Where's
Ben?" Meg asked, interrupting her mother's reverie.

"Downstairs.
He's been up hours, working. He brought a lot of equipment up from
the basement and set it up in the living room."

Meg frowned.
"What's he up to?"

Beth shook her
head. "I don't know. Fulfilling a promise, he said. He said
you'd understand."

"Ah . . ."
Shells, she thought. It has to do with sheik.

And memory.

* *
*

BEN SAT in a
harness at the piano, the dummy cage behind him, its morph mimicking
his stance. A single thin cord of conduit linked him to the morph.
Across the room, a trivee spider crouched, its program searching for
discrepancies of movement between Ben and the morph. Meg sat down
beside the spider, silent, watching.

A transparent
casing covered the back of Ben's head, attached to the narrow
horseshoe collar about his neck. Within the casing a web of fine
cilia made it seem that Ben's blond hair was streaked with silver.
These were direct implants, more than sixty in all, monitoring brain
activity.

Two further
cords, finer than the link, led down from the ends of the collar to
Ben's hands, taped to his arms every few inches. Further hair-fine
wires covered Ben's semi-naked body, but the eye was drawn to the
hands.

Fine, flexible
links of ice formed crystalline gloves that fitted like a second skin
about his hands. Sensors on their inner surfaces registered muscular
movement and temperature changes.

Tiny pads were
placed all over Ben's body, measuring his responses and feeding the
information back into the collar.

As he turned to
face Meg, the morph turned, faceless and yet familiar in its
gestures, its left hand, like Ben's, upon its thigh, the fingers
splayed slightly.

Meg found the
duplication frightening—deeply threatening—but said
nothing. The piano keyboard, she noted, was normal except in one
respect. Every key was black.

"Call
Mother in, Meg. She'd like to hear this."

The morph was
faceless, dumb; but in a transparent box at its feet was a separate
facial unit—no more than the unfleshed suggestion of a face,
the musculature replaced by fine wiring. As Ben spoke, so the
half-formed face made the ghost-movements of speech, its lips and
eyes a perfect copy of Ben's own.

Meg did as she
was told, bringing her mother from the sunlight of the kitchen into
the shadows of the living room. Beth Shepherd sat beside her
daughter, wiping her hands on her apron, attentive to her son.

He began.

His hands
flashed over the keys, his fingers living jewels, coaxing a strange,
wistful, complex music from the ancient instrument. A new sound from
the old keys.

When he had
finished, there was a moment's intense silence, then his mother stood
and walked across to him. "What
was
that, Ben? I've never
heard its like. It was . . ." She laughed, incredulous,
delighted. "And I presumed to think that I could teach
you
something!"

"I wrote
it," he said simply. "Last night, while you were all
asleep."

Ben closed his
eyes, letting the dissonances form again in his memory. Long chordal
structures of complex dissonances, overlapping and repeating,
twisting about each other like the intricate threads of life, the
long chains of deox-yribonucleic acid. It was how he saw it. Not A
and C and G Minor, but Adenine and Cytosine and Guanine. A complex,
living structure.

A perfect
mimicry of life.

The morph sat
back, relaxing after its efforts, its chest rising and falling, its
hands resting on its knees. In the box next to its feet the eyes in
the face were closed, the lips barely parted, only a slight flaring
of the nostrils indicating life.

Meg shuddered.
She had never heard anything so beautiful, nor seen anything so
horrible. It was as if Ben were being played. The morph, at its dummy
keyboard, seemed far from being the passive recipient of
instructions. A strange power emanated from the lifeless thing,
making Ben's control of things seem suddenly illusory: the game of
some greater, more powerful being, standing unseen behind the painted
props.

So this was what
Ben had been working on. A shiver of revulsion passed through her.
And yet the beauty—the strange, overwhelming beauty of it. She
shook her head, not understanding, then stood and went out into the
kitchen, afraid for him.

* *
*

BEN FOUND HER in
the rose garden, her back to him, staring out across the bay. He went
across and stood there, close by her, conscious more than ever of the
naked form of her beneath the soft gauze dress she wore. Her legs
were bare, her hair unbraided. The faintest scent of lavender hung
about her. "What's up?" he asked softly. "Didn't you
like it?"

She turned her
head and gave a tight smile, then looked back. It was answer enough.
It had offended her somehow.

He walked past
her slowly, then stopped, his back to her, his left hand on his hip,
his head tilted slightly to the left, his right hand at his neck, his
whole body mimicking her stance. "What didn't you like?"

Normally she
would have laughed, knowing he was ragging her, but this time it was
different. He heard her sigh and turn away, and wondered, for a
moment, if it was to do with what had happened in the night.

She took a step
away, then turned back. He had turned to follow her. Now they stood
there, face-to-face, a body's length separating them. "It was .
. ." She dropped her eyes, as if embarrassed.

He caught his
breath, moved by the sight of her. She might have died. And then he
would never have known. He spoke softly, coaxingly, the way she so
often spoke to him, drawing him out. "It was what?"

She met his
eyes. "It was frightening." He saw her shiver. "I felt
. . ." She hesitated, as if brought up against the edge of what
she could freely say to him. This reticence was something new in her
and unexpected, a result of the change in their relationship. Like
something physical in the air between them. "Shall we walk?
Along the shore?" She hesitated, then smiled faintly. "Okay."

He looked up.
The sky was clouding over. "Come. Let's get our boots and coats.
It looks like it might rain."

An hour later
they were down at the high-water level, their heavy boots sinking
into the mud, the sky overcast above them, the creek and the distant
water meadows to their left. It was low tide and the mud stretched
out to a central channel which meandered like an open vein cut into a
dark cheek, glistening like oil whenever the sun broke through the
clouds.

For a time they
walked in silence, hand in hand, conscious of their new relationship.
It felt strange, almost like waking to selfconsciousness. Before
there had been an intimacy, almost a singularity about them—a
seamless continuity of shared experience. They had been a single
cell, unbreached. But now? Now it was different. It was as if this
new, purely physical intimacy had split that cell, beginning some
ancient, inexorable process of division.

Perhaps it was
unavoidable. Perhaps, being who they were, they had been fated to
come to this. And yet...