Authors: Gwyneth Jones
The AMID squad had departed in their ophidian, the Top Brass had quit the field in conventional-looking staff cars. The President Elect (maybe), of a liberated nation, stroked his Terrific Spotted Bengal in abstracted silence. What the fuck kind of pet is that for the man who claims he despises being a rockstar? Mum and her tutor had wandered off, Milly was talking to friends. Jordan and Shay sat on the grass eating leftover picnic, necking warm white wine, and idly watched Jordan’s little boys, Albion and Troy, getting yelled at by the groundsman—
‘It’s his baby, isn’t it? His wife and child, that’s what it looks like to me, Ax. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t think—’
‘Hahaha. Don’t criticise what you can’t understand, Jor. Six wickets, you ungrateful bastard. Aren’t you ever going to buy me a pint?’
‘Bet they’d been told to lie down.’
‘Nyah. Bet they didn’t have a choice.’
A Game Of Risk
The English had begun to trickle back into Reading City. There were local customers in the Three Guineas bar on the station, one bleak afternoon at the end of May, when the Triumvirate walked in with their baby. The landlady, who was filling bullet-holes with plastic wood, turned to see what had caused the silence. She dropped her pallete knife, wide-eyed: recovered it, and resumed her work. The boy polishing the brass rail didn’t miss a beat. The landlord finished drawing a pint of Pride, from a barrel on the bar. A print-out of a Civilian Freedom of Movement voucher changed hands: this season’s top currency.
They
settled in a booth, Fiorinda came to get the drinks in.
‘All right, Miss Fio?’ said the landlord: speaking softly, afraid to scare away a treasured wild thing, long vanished from these haunts.
‘Not too bad. If only the weather would pick up.’
‘Cold enough for June, eh? Bet you’re missing sleep with that young lady.’
Coz was in her sling, awake and interested. ‘Nah, she’s pretty good at night.’ Fiorinda grinned at the optics row. ‘Is any of that real?’
‘No chance. It’s all bathtub vodka and onion skin.’
‘Nice labels, though.’
‘Very imaginative.’
Time was this bar had been a real honey: futuristic sound and vision-tech subtly concealed, classic English Pub details preserved by Reich Royal fiat. This afternoon an old fruit machine lay buzzing on its side while two barpersons tinkered with its innards. A wall screen showed Joyous Liberation news with the volume turned down. They’d come home, and it was only a little heart-breaking.
‘I’ve looked it up,’ said Ax. ‘The fucker’s right.
Bengals
, stupid fake name, but it’s Min in the pictures. He’s not mine, he’s a pedigree cat, worth a stack of money, he belongs to some breeder.’
‘Don’t be daft Ax, you found him abandoned in an old shed.’
‘I’ll have to track them down and give him back. It’s no use, I can’t be a looter, it looks fucking shit.’
‘
Ax,
if helps to panic on a safe issue go ahead, but for God’s sake—’
‘Shut up, Fee. You’ll make him worse.’
He was hideously nervous, never remembered feeling like this in all his career. He must often have been equally as scared: maybe he’d never before hoped for so much. He combed back his hair with his fingers, mugging apology.
‘You’re
sure
nobody’s going to take my kitten?’
‘Over my dead body,’ said Fiorinda. Coz reached out a tiny hand from the sling, looked earnestly at Ax (a new trick), and added her reassurance. ‘Eh!
Eh!
’
They laughed, and the bar seemed to sigh in longing, oh let things be as they were, let us have our fucked-up little world back. It was a relief when a spruce young officer walked up and saluted, at a respectful distance; cap under her arm. One of Elder Sister’s invisible company, you can see them when you know what you’re looking for.
‘Do yourself a favour,’ murmured Sage. ‘Don’t mention Tibet.’
‘Not unless she brings up Lord Palmerston first.’
A flashing smile, and there, he’s gone. They watched the doors through which Ax had disappeared. ‘A breeder wouldn’t want Min back without his balls.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t tell him that, my brat.’ Rain scudded across the windowpanes, a train approached, they heard a blurred announcement. ‘Was it Scarlatti you were playing?’ asked Sage. ‘That night in the Insanitude?’
How long ago, how far away, the first time we waited together to find out if Ax had won his round. It was the death penalty referendum: if the people had voted
against
judicial murder, then Ax was in power. How strange to recall: but you were you, and I was I, and we didn’t know it but we both already loved him madly.
‘Yeah, Scarlatti.’ The music rose in her mind, K27, E minor, airy and calm.
He was delivered not to Rivermead Palace but to one of the barracks he’d thought looked like upturned boats. In a vestibule a white-gloved, dress-uniformed aide took his suitable gift (a hamper of moss-wrapped, rooted cuttings of prize English garden shrubs and herbaceous plants). Another showed him through double doors, told him, in English, that Elder Sister would be with him soon, and left.
He looked for the monks: no sign of them. He was alone, and the hairs rose on the back of his neck. He thought of Sage, walking alone into Rufus O’Niall’s castle at Drumbeg. Here I am in the flying saucer. What the fuck’s going to happen?
The walls of the large room were oval in profile, indigo and cream with a moving, twisting pattern; the floor was layered in silk carpets, like swatches of gleaming brocade. Wings of
di
rose into hollow peaks above his head, traced and ribbed in gold, apparently supported by deep red pillars like boles of cedarwood. Glorified version of an Inner Asian chieftain’s tent: that’s not Han, that says outsider, ruling China, but an outsider. Stop it, he told himself. Forget it,
she
decides what the signs mean. How English am I? The bed, the chairs, the pan-Asian artworks were eye-popping. He thought of Napoleon Bonaparte despatching cartloads of class-A plunder to the Louvre, and smiled, realising he’d known she loved luxury. He’d felt that in the Daoist Nun, fuck knows how. Under the central cone, separated from the furniture by amazing antique screens, there was a rectangular dais on shallow steps; inlaid with a Fu pattern in pale green. You looked for a throne up there, or at least a speaker’s desk; rows of chairs below. There were none. He sat cross-legged on the rugs facing the stage, feeling watched.
The music that broke the silence was so incongruous he thought it was an aural hallucination, and so familiar that for several bars he didn’t recognise it. What the fuck? Unless I’m completely losing it, that is
Queen
. That is
Freddie Mercury.
A pair of doors opened, in the wall behind the dais. A woman stood there and then ran, gracefully, lightly, up the steps and to the centre of the stage. She bowed to Ax, gold ribbons trailing from her hands: leapt into a flying kick, floated in the air for a moment, and landed like thistledown.
‘Don’t stop me now,’ she announced, with a dazzling smile, and took a pose of joyous defiance, one arm outflung, the other fist pressed to her heart. The intro started over and she
attacked
, gold ribbons whirling—in a choreography wonderfully matched to the music, to the über-partyboy’s daft lyrics, to the energy of the finest pop group the world has ever known. She was a tiger defying gravity, a racing car burning through the sky, she was a gymnastic, disciplined, daring, crowd-pleasing entertainer. Two hundred degrees, that’s why they call her Mr Farenheit—
‘Don’t stop me now,’ she sighed, drifting to one knee on the floor, as
Queen
faded out. Her ribbons tumbled around her. ‘I don’t want to stop at all.’
‘That was fabulous,’ said Ax, sincerely.
‘Would you sign me up?’
‘I’m humiliated, Elder Sister. I’m remembering in painful detail the gig at Warren Fen, when I do believe at one point some clown pretended to try and dance.’
The woman kneeling in the Manchu salute above him didn’t resemble the Daoist Nun at all, except that they were the same person. She wore pale-gold, to match her ribbons and the stage: gold slippers, slim trousers gathered at the ankle, a pearl-embroidered waistcoat over a full-sleeved cream silk shirt. Her hair was jet-black, worn in a feathery fringe and dressed with gold pins at the back; her face was oval, unlined, made-up for the stage. He would have guessed her age at around thirty, though she was supple as a teenager: he knew he had no idea. Head on one side, she examined him quizzically. ‘How did you know who I was?’
‘I don’t know who you are, Elder Sister.’
She smiled. ‘But you do.’
‘Then you are
Shi Huangdi
.’
They were speaking
putonghua
, he hoped he could survive.
Elder Sister jumped down and settled back on her heels: he turned to face her. ‘I am
Shi Huangdi
. At least, I am the person the brave old man Cornelius Sampson had guessed at; along with other “China Watchers”.’
‘So the One Man turns out to be a woman. That’s going to startle people. Is the truth well-known, everywhere but here in Europe?’
‘It’s getting to be known.’ She grinned, disarmingly. ‘The truth began to leak a while ago, and it doesn’t matter, it’s high time to go public. Some ignorant people, even in the Sphere, had started to say I was just the PLA’s cute mascot.’
I wouldn’t like to be those people, thought Ax.
‘They’re quite wrong… I am the army brat who became a sort of Emperor, very Romanly, by proclamation of the Praetorian Guard. Wang Xili will no doubt tell you the story, he keeps my scrapbooks. But I was not plucked from nowhere. I have had a respectable military career. You can find the details in the Outside World News Releases for the years of turmoil; which were also China’s harvest time.’
‘I see,’ said Ax; because she had paused for his reaction.
‘Look closely, you’ll find a female general called Li Xifeng: a battlefield commander in the Inner Asia campaign, promoted to the rank of Marshal after the Japanese Uprising Negotiation. General Li’s sex is rarely mentioned, there are no photographs, but that’s me. I’m also a Member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, Vice-Chair of the Military Commission, appointed Deputy to the Chief of General Staff, and Deputy Minister of Defense, by President Hu Jintao.’
He did not recall any General Li, never mind this fistful of honours.
‘The top level appointments were not made public internationally.’ She set her chin on her hand. ‘You’re wondering
why
it’s been a secret.’
‘Er, maybe—’
‘We’d learned our lesson in the twentieth century, Mr Preston. We’d had enough of the so-called international community’s opinion of Chinese “despotism” and “personality cult”. We took over, leaving the structures of the People’s Republic intact. We built the first phase of the Sphere. We absorbed our troubled satellites, we liberated Inner Asia. We fed the people, we restored order. Maybe you can imagine the way the Chinese masses feel about the person responsible for those victories,
primus inter pares
.’
‘I can figure it, a little.’
She nodded, seeming pleased by his reticence. ‘Our success was open to the world’s gaze, we kept our hearts and minds to ourselves. When China imposed control over the internet, at the birth of this century, we were reviled as barbarians. I think you’ll agree events have proved we were simply ahead of the game. We were the first to understand that the media of the information age could be used as an impenetrable screen, on which any kind of picture could be projected.’
He nodded again. He planned to do a lot of nodding, and speak very little.
‘As long as the so-called West was outside our rule the secret had to be kept, so that the international media didn’t revile me. It was kept. Now that’s no longer necessary… But you haven’t told me how you guessed.’
She waited, smiling and expectant, the nemesis of evening’s long empire; the wrath of God in ballet costume. He steadied himself: be confident.
‘I thought there was someone missing from the invasion force line-up. I was looking for a fifth Commanding General. When I came to Reading in December a Lieutenant Chu showed me round. At the end of my interview I overheard General Wang addressing the lieutenant as
jiejie
. I forgot about it, but when we went to Anglia, the mysterious Daoist Nun was also
jiejie
. Then I remembered, and I wondered, who does the First Marshal of China call “Elder Sister”?’
‘Oh. That simple.’
‘I wish I could make it a more interesting story. You came walking towards me, in the Warren Fen garden at night, I couldn’t see the Daoist Nun’s face, so I knew you were Lieutenant Chu, and that was intriguing.’
‘You looked at my desk on the boat.’ She frowned, delicately. ‘There are plenty of reasons why somebody could be using a lot of red ink, you know.’
‘I’m sure. But historically one of them—which stands out, to a foreigner who only knows a few things about Chinese tradition—has been if a person were the Emperor, adding commentary to official memorials.’
‘Hahaha. That’s quite true, and very silly.’
‘The clues were slight,’ admitted Ax. ‘Really, it was intuition. First I felt that there was someone hidden, then I felt a presence I could only explain one way.’
‘You should trust your intuition. It works faster than consciousness.’
‘Anglia puzzled me. I could understand why “Shi Huangdi” would be leading the invasion force. Taking the USA was not something the person who built the Sphere would leave to her officers. But why would the hidden ruler risk exposure and put herself in needless danger, the way you did in Rainbow Bridge, over a minor issue in the liberation of a tiny little country like England?’
Nemesis watched him with glowing dark eyes, Phoenix eyes, as the Chinese say, and he trembled. ‘You choose your words, Mr Preston, but to no avail. You feel conquered, I’m sure. Not liberated.’
‘You’re right, and it hurts. But I welcomed the invasion, Elder Sister. The Second Chamber regime was an evil I had utterly failed to defeat.’