Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (58 page)

Erkki touched
her arm gently, making her look at him. "Shall I bring a cage?
There's one in the house. We could catch it and take it back with
us."

She shook her
head then looked back at it. "No. Let it go free. It belongs
here, not there. Look at it—it wasn't meant to be caged."

Nor are we, she
thought, wondering how long ago the trap had been set on her own
kind, the bars secured on every side. But she could do this much:
could leave this tiny fragment of wildness here where it belonged. To
make a pet of it. . . She shuddered. It would die if they put it in a
cage.

"Come,"
she said, "let's get back. The storm is coming."

At the summit
she stopped again, looking about her. Gulls circled overhead, their
cries shrill, bad-tempered. She pulled her jacket close about her.
The wind was growing stronger, more blustery. To the northeast storm
clouds were gathering, dark and threatening, massing above the City.
A storm was coming, just as her uncle had said. She laughed. Let it
come! Let the heavens open! She would greet it here, if need be. Then
she turned and saw Erkki watching her.

"Okay. I'm
coming. Just a little longer . . ."

He nodded and
started down. For a moment longer she stood there, looking about her,
imagining herself mistress of all she saw. Then, with a sigh, she
followed Erkki down toward the lights of the house.

* *
*

DIRECTOR SPATZ
sat back in his chair, pointing directly at the screen.

"Well,
Ellis? What in the gods' names is that?"

The man standing
just behind him shrugged. "We're not sure as yet, Director, but
we're working on it. At first we thought it might be some kind of
star chart, considering the boy's interest in astronomy. But we've
run it through the computer for a possible match and there's
nothing."

For a moment
both men were silent, staring at the screen. There were forty-six
points in all, most of them linked by straight lines to three or four
other lines. They formed a tight cat's cradle on the screen,
elliptical in structure, like the upper half of a skull.

Spatz huffed
loudly. "You're absolutely certain it has nothing to do with
what we're working on?"

"Absolutely.
Apart from the fact that we've barely begun work on the actual
positioning of the wires, those points simply don't correspond to the
areas of the brain we'd be looking to use. In my opinion it's only
coincidence that it has that shape."

"Hmm."
Spatz leaned forward and blanked the screen, then turned, looking up
at his assistant. "I know what you think, Ellis, but you're
wrong. He's up to something. I'm sure of it. So keep looking. I don't
want your team to relax until you've found out what he's doing."

Ellis bowed.
Once outside the room, he drew a long breath, then shook his head.
The Director's obsession with the boy was bordering upon the insane.
He was convinced that the boy had been introduced for one of two
reasons—to spy upon him or to ensure that the Project failed.
Either way he felt threatened. But the truth was far simpler.

He had been
studying the boy for ten days now and was convinced that he was
genuine. He had watched Kim working on several of his own projects
and had seen how he applied himself to problems. There was no faking
that, no way of counterfeiting that
quickness of mind. But Spatz would not hear of it. Second-rate
himself, he would not have it that a mere boy—and a Claybom boy
at that—could be his intellectual superior.

But Spatz wasn't
to have it all his own way. Ellis had seen the directive that had
come down only moments before he had gone in to see the Director. And
there was nothing Spatz could do about it.

He laughed, then
walked on. No, not even Project Director Spatz would have the nerve
to countermand Prince Yuan's direct command.

* *
*

kim WAS lying on
his back in the pool, his eyes closed. It was late and the pool was
empty, but from the gym nearby came the harsh hiss and grunt of the
men working out on the exercise machines.

For a time he
simply floated, relaxing for the first time that day; then, rolling
over, he kicked out for the side, glancing up at the cameras
overhead.

Did they watch
him even here? He smiled and ducked his face under, then lifted it,
throwing the water out from him in a spray. Almost certainly. Even
when he was pissing they'd have a camera on him. Spatz was like that.
But he wasn't atypical. There were many like Spatz. The City bred
them in the hundred thousands.

He pulled
himself up and sat on the side, moving his legs lazily in the water.
He had always been watched—it was almost the condition of his
existence—but he had never come to like it. At best he used it,
as he did now, as a goad, challenging himself to defeat its
constrictions.

In that the
reports on him were accurate. In this one respect the Clay
had
shaped him, for he was cunning. And not just cunning, but
inventive in his cunning, as if the very directness of his mind—that
aspect of him that could grasp the essence of a thing at once and use
it—needed this other "twisted" part to permit its
function. He smiled and looked down, wondering, as ever, what they
made of his smiles, what they thought when they saw him smile so, or
so.

He looked up,
looked directly into the camera. What do you see,
Shih
Spatz?
Does the image you have of me bear any relationship to the being that
I truly am?

No, he answered,
looking away. No
relationship at all.
But then Spatz had no
idea what Chung Kuo would be like if the Project succeeded. All that
concerned him was his own position on the great social ladder, and
whether he rose or fell. All else was irrelevant.

Kim stretched
his neck, then yawned. He had slept little these past few nights,
trying to see through the mesh of details to the heart of the
problem.

What
would
Chung Kuo be like if everyone were wired?

He had run
various scenarios through his head. For instance, the Seven might
limit the use of wiring to known criminals and political dissidents.
Or, at the other extreme, they might wire everyone, even their wives
and cousins. Not only that, but there was the nature of the wiring to
consider. Was it to be a simple tracing mechanism, or would it be
more complex? Would they be content to use it as a method of policing
Chung Kuo's vast population, or would they seek to change behavior by
its use?

This last caused
him much concern, for the wire held a far greater potential for
manipulation than Li Yuan probably envisaged. When one began to
tinker with the human mind there was no limit to the subtle changes
one might make. It was possible—even quite simple—to
create attractions and aversions, to mold a thousand million
personalities to a single mental template and make the species
docile, timid, uncreative. But was that worse than what was happening
anyway? It could be argued that Chung Kuo, the great Utopian City of
Tsao Ch'un, had been created for that very purpose, to
geld
Mankind and to keep the curious beast within his bars. In such a
light this latest step—this plan to wire each individual—was
merely a perfection of that scheme. Restraint alone had failed. The
bars were not enough. Now they must put the bars—the
walls—within, or see the whole vast edifice come crashing down.
It was an unsettling thought.

Against this he
set three things: his 'duty* to Li Yuan; his certainty that with him
or without, this thing would be; and, last, the simple challenge of
the thing.

He had tried to
convince himself that he owed nothing to any man, but the truth was
otherwise. His fate had always been in the hands of others. And
wasn't that so for all men? Wasn't even the most basic thing—a
man's existence—dependent upon a consensus among those he lived
with, an agreement to let him
be?
Hadn't he learned that much
in the Clay? No man was truly free. No man had any rights but those
granted him by his fellows. In Li Yuan's favor, the Prince at least
had recognized his worth and given him this chance. Surely that
deserved repayment of some kind?

As to the second
matter, he was certain now that only total catastrophe could prevent
Li Yuan's scheme from becoming a reality. Indeed, catastrophe now
seemed the sole alternative to the Wiring Project. The fuse had been
lit long ago, in the Seven's refusal to confront the problem of
massive population increases. Their reluctance to tackle that
fundamental, a decision shaped by their veneration of the family and
of the right of every man to have sons, had hampered any attempt to
balance the slow increase in resources against the overwhelming
increase in demand and make of Chung Kuo the Utopia it was meant to
be. But that was nothing new; it was an age-old problem, a problem
that the emperors of Chung Kuo had been forced to face for more than
two thousand years. Famine and plague and revolution were the price
of such imbalance, and they would come again— unless the tide
were turned, the great generative force harnessed. But that would not
happen without an evolutionary change in the species. In the
meantime, this—this artificial means—would have to do.
The Seven had no option. They would have to wire or go under.

And the
challenge? That, too, he saw in moral terms. As he conceived it now,
the scheme presented mainly technical problems that required not the
kind of inventiveness he was good at but the perfecting of existing
systems. In many ways it was a matter of pure organizational
complexity, of breaking down the Wiring Project into its constituent
parts and then rebuilding it. The end, however, was not unachievable.
Far from it. Most of the technology required already existed. He
could have said as much to Prince Yuan at their first meeting, but
the challenge— the real challenge—lay in directing the
research, in determining not the
quality
of the eventual wire,
but its
kind.

And there,
perhaps, he overstepped the brief Li Yuan had given him, for he had
not been asked to consider what the wire should be capable of; he had
been asked only to determine whether the scheme would work. Again he
was to be simply the tool—the vehicle—for another's
needs, the instrument by which their dreams might become realities.
As ever, he was supposed to have no say in the matter. Yet he
would
have his say.

Kim stilled the
movement of his legs in the water and looked up.

"Joel!"

Hammond stood
there on the far side of the pool. "Kim. I thought I'd find you
here."

Kim clambered up
and went around the pool to greet him.

"How long
have you been there?"

"I've just
got here. You looked deep in thought. Troubles?"

They were both
conscious of the watching cameras. Kim shrugged and smiled, moving
past the older man, taking his towel from the rail; then he turned,
looking back at him. "What brings you here?"

Hammond held out
a wafer-thin piece of printout paper. "This came."

Kim took it. A
moment later he looked up, his dark eyes wide with surprise. "This
is for real?"

"Absolutely.
Director Spatz confirmed it with Prince Yuan's secretary. I'm to
accompany you. To keep you out of trouble."

Kim laughed,
then handed the paper back, pulling the towel up about his shoulders.
"But that's amazing. An observatory. Does that mean we'll be
going into space?"

Hammond shook
his head. "No. Quite the opposite, in fact. The observatory at
Heilbronn is situated at the bottom of a mineshaft, more than three
li
underground."

Kim looked away,
then laughed. "Of course. It makes sense." He looked back.
"When do we go?"'

"Tomorrow.
First thing."

Kim smiled, then
drew closer, whispering. "Was Spatz angry?"

Hammond bent
down, giving his answer to Kim's ear. "Angry? He was furious!"

* *
*

JELKA WOKE.
Outside the storm was raging, hurling gusts of rain against the
windowpane. Throwing on her nightgown she went out into the
passageway. The night growled and roared beyond the thick stone walls
of the house. She stood there a moment, listening, then started as
the window at the far end of the passage lit up brilliantly. Seconds
later a huge thunderclap shook the house.

She shivered,
then laughed, her fear replaced by a surge of excitement. The storm!
The storm was upon them!

She hurried down
the great stairway, then stood there in the darkness of the hallway,
the tiles cold beneath her naked feet. Again there was a flash,
filling the huge, stained-glass window at the far end of the hallway
with brilliant color. And then darkness, intense and menacing, filled
by the tremendous power of the thunderclap that followed.

She went on,
finding her way blindly to the door at the far end of the passageway.
Usually it was locked, but for once she found it open. She stood
there a moment, trembling. Here behind the thick stone of the outer
wall, it was still, almost silent, only the muted rumble of distant
thunder disturbing the darkness. When the next flash came, she pulled
the door open and went up into the tower.

At once the
sound of the storm grew louder. She went up the narrow, twisting
steps in darkness, her left arm extended, steadying herself against
the wall, coming out into a room she had not seen before. Blindly,
she began to edge toward the center of the room, away from the hole
in the floor, then froze as a blaze of light filled the room from the
narrow window to her left. The accompanying thunderclap exploded in
the tiny space and, in the momentary brilliance, she glimpsed the
sparse contents of the room.

She saw herself
briefly in the mirror opposite—a tiny figure in an almost empty
room, her body framed in searing light, her face in intense shadow,
one arm raised as if to fend off the thunder, the dark square of the
stair hole just behind her.