Authors: David Wingrove
At its purest – in those few, rare moments when the veil was lifted and he saw things clearly – he felt all human things fall from him; all feeling, all sense of self erased momentarily by that dark and silent pressure at the back of him. At such moments he was like a stone – a pure white stone – set down upon the board, a mere counter, played by some being greater than himself in a game the scale of which his tiny, human mind could scarcely comprehend.
A game of dark and light. Of suns and moons. Of space and time itself. A game so vast, so complicated...
He looked down, moved deeply by the thought: by the cold, crystalline-pure abstraction of such a vast and universal game.
‘Are you all right?’
Lehmann’s voice lacked all sympathy; it was the voice of mechanical response.
DeVore smiled, conscious of how far his thoughts had drifted from this room, this one specific place and time. ‘Forgive me, Stefan. I was thinking...’
‘Yes?’
He looked up. ‘I want you to track the woman for me. To find out what you can about her. Find out if it’s true what they say about her and Gesell.’
‘And?’
He looked down at the jade-skinned goddess once again. ‘And nothing. Just do it for me.’
She kept her silence until they were back in Gesell’s apartment. There, alone with him at last, she turned on him angrily, all of her pent-up frustration spilling out.
‘What in the gods’ names are we doing working with that bastard?’
He laughed uncomfortably, taken aback by her outburst. ‘It makes good sense,’ he began, trying to be reasonable, but she cut him off angrily.
‘
Sense?
It’s insane, that’s what it is! The surest way possible of cutting our own throats! All that shit he was feeding us about his inflexibility and our potential for growth. That’s nonsense! He’s
using
us! Can’t you see that?’
He glared back at her, stiff-faced. ‘You think I don’t know what he is? Sure, he’s trying to use us, but we can benefit from that. And what he said is far from nonsense. It’s the truth, Em. You saw his set-up. He
needs
us.’
She shook her head slowly, as if disappointed in him. ‘For a time, maybe. But as soon as he’s wrung every advantage he can get from us, he’ll discard us. He’ll crunch us up in one hand and throw us aside. As for his “weakness” – his “inflexibility” – we saw only what he wanted us to see. I’d stake my life that there’s more to that base than meets the eye. Much more. All that “openness” he fed us was just so much crap. A mask, like everything else about our friend.’
Gesell took a long breath. ‘I’m not so sure. But even if it is, we can still benefit from an alliance with him. All the better, perhaps, for knowing what he is. We’ll be on our guard.’
She laughed sourly. ‘You’re naive, Bent Gesell, that’s what you are. You think you can ride the tiger.’
He bridled and made to snap back at her, then checked himself, shaking his head. ‘No, Em. I’m a
realist.
Realist enough to know that we can’t keep on the way we’ve been going these last few years. You talk of cutting our own throats... well, there’s no more certain way of doing that than by ignoring the opportunity to work with someone like Turner. Take the raid on Helmstadt, for instance. Dammit, Emily, but he was
right
! When would we
ever
have got the opportunity to attack a place like Helmstadt?’
‘We’d have done it. Given time.’
He laughed dismissively. ‘Given time...’
‘No, Bent, you’re wrong. Worse than that, you’re impatient, and your impatience clouds your judgment. There’s more at issue here than whether we grow as a movement or not. There’s the question of what
kind
of movement we are. You can lie to yourself all you want, but working with someone like Turner makes us no better than him. No better than the Seven.’
He snorted. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it! What compromises have we had to make? None! Nor will we. You forget – if there’s something we don’t want to do, we simply won’t do it.’
‘Like killing Jelka Tolonen, for instance?’
He shook his head irritably. ‘That makes good sense and you know it.’
‘Why?
I thought it was our stated policy only to target those who are guilty of corruption or gross injustice?’
‘And so it is. What is Tolonen if not the very symbol of the system we’re fighting against.’
‘But his
daughter
...?’
He waved her objection aside. ‘It’s a war, Emily. Us or them. And if working with Turner gives us a bit more muscle, then I’m all for it. That’s not to say we have to go along with everything he wants. Far from it. But as long as it serves our cause, what harm is there in that?’
‘What
harm
...?’
‘Besides, if you felt so strongly about this, why didn’t you raise the matter in council when you had the chance. Why have it out with me? The decision was unanimous, after all.’
She laughed sourly. ‘
Was
it? As I recall, we didn’t even have a vote. That aside, I could see what the rest of you were thinking – even Mach. I could see the way all of your eyes lit up at the thought of attacking Helmstadt. At the thought of getting your hands on all those armaments.’
‘And now we have them. Surely that speaks for itself ? And Turner was right about the publicity, too. Recruitment will be no problem after this. They’ll flock to us in droves.’
‘You miss my point...’
She would have said more, would have pursued the matter, but at that moment there was an urgent knocking on the door. A moment later Mach came into the room. He stopped, looking from one to the other, sensing the tension in the air, then turned to face Gesell, his voice low and urgent.
‘I have to speak to you, Bent. Something’s come up. Something strange. It’s...’ He glanced at Emily. ‘Well, come. I’ll show you.’
She saw the way they excluded her and felt her stomach tighten with anger. The
Ping Tiao
was supposedly a brotherhood – a
brotherhood
! she laughed inwardly at the word – of equals, yet for all their fine words about sexual equality, when it came to the crunch their breeding took over; and they had been bred into this fuck-awful system where men were like gods and women nothing.
She watched them go, then turned away, her anger turned to bitterness. Maybe it was already too late. Maybe Turner had done his work already as far as Bent Gesell was concerned; the germ of his thought already in Gesell’s bloodstream, corrupting his thinking, silting up the once-strong current of his idealism, the disease spreading through the fabric of his moral being, transforming him, until he became little more than a pale shadow of Turner. She hoped not. She hoped against hope that it would turn out otherwise, but in her heart of hearts she knew it had begun. And nothing – nothing she or any of them could do – could prevent it. Nothing but to say no right now, to refuse to take one more step down this suicidal path. But even then it was probably too late. The damage was already done. To say no to Turner now would merely set the man against them.
She went through into the washroom and filled the bowl. While she washed she ran things through her mind, trying to see how she had arrived at this point.
For her it had begun with her father. Mikhail Ascher had been a System man: a Junior Credit Agent, Second Grade, in the T’ang’s Finance Ministry, the
Hu Pu.
Born in the Lowers, he had worked hard, passing the Exams, slowly making his way up the levels, until, in his mid-thirties, he had settled in the Upper Mids, taking a Mid-Level bride. It was there that Emily had been born, into a world of order and stability. Whenever she thought of her father, she could see him as he had been before it all happened, dressed in his powder-blue silks, the big, square badge of office prominent on his chest, his face clean-shaven, his dark hair braided in the Han fashion. A distant, cautious, conservative man, he had seemed to her the paradigm of what their world was about; the very archetype of order. A strict New Confucian, he had instilled into her values that she still, to this day, held to be true. Values that – had he but known it – the world he believed in had abandoned long before he came into it.
She leaned back from the sink, remembering. She had been nine years old.
Back then, before the War, trade had been regular and credit rates relatively stable, but there were always minor fluctuations – tenths, even hundredths of a percentage point. It was one of those tiny fluctuations – a fluctuation of less than 0.05 of a per cent – that her father was supposed to have ‘overlooked’. It had seemed such a small thing to her when he had tried to explain it to her. Only much later, when she had found out the capital sum involved and worked out just how much it had cost the
Hu Pu,
did she understand the fuss that had been made. The Senior Credit Agent responsible for her father’s section had neglected to pass on the rate change and, to save his own position, had pointed the finger at her father, producing a spurious handwritten note to back up his claim. Her father had demanded a tribunal hearing, but the Senior Agent – a Han with important family connections – had pulled strings and the hearing had found in his favour. Her father had come home in a state of shock. He had been dismissed from the
Hu Pu.
She could remember that day well; could recall how distraught her mother was, how bemused her father. That day his world fell apart about him. Friends abandoned him, refusing to take his calls. At the bank their credit was cancelled. The next day the lease to their apartment was called in for ‘Potential Default’.
They fell.
Her father never recovered from the blow. Six months later he was dead, a mere shell of his former self. And between times they had found themselves demoted down the levels. Down and down, their fall seemingly unstoppable, until one day she woke and found herself in a shared apartment in Fifty-Eight, a child bawling on the other side of the thin curtain, the stench of the previous night’s overcooked soypork making her want to retch.
Not their fault.
Yes, but that wasn’t what she had thought back then. She could still recall the sense of repugnance with which she had faced her new surroundings, her marked distaste for the people she found herself among. So coarse they were. So dirty in their habits.
No, she had never really recovered from that. It had shaped her in every single way. And even when her aversion had turned to pity and her pity into a fiery indignation, still she felt, burning within her chest, the dark brand of that fall.
Her mother had been a genteel woman, in many ways a weak woman, wholly unsuited to the bustle of the Lows, but she had done her best, and in the years that followed had tried in every way to keep the standards that her husband had once set. Unused to earning a living, she had broken with a lifetime’s habits and gone looking for work. Eventually she had found it, running a trader’s stall in the busy Main where they lived. The job had bruised her tender Mid-Level sensibilities sorely, but she had coped.
Emily shuddered, remembering.
Why do you do it?
she had asked her mother whenever she returned, tearful and exhausted, from a day working the stall, and the answer was always the same:
For you. To get you out of this living hell.
It was her hard work that had put Emily through college, her determination, in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, that had given Emily her chance. But for what? To climb the levels again? To take part in the same charade that had destroyed her father? No. She was set against that path. Secretly – for she knew that even to mention it would hurt her mother badly – she had harboured other dreams.
She had joined the
Ping Tiao
eight years back, in its infancy, before the War. Back then there had been a lot of talk about ultimate goals and of keeping the vision pure. But eight years was a long time to keep the flame of idealism burning brightly, especially when they had had to face more than their fill of disappointments. And all that time she had been Bent’s woman; his alone, fired by his enthusiasm, his vision of how things might be. But things had changed. It was hard to say now whether those ideals still fired them or whether, in some small way, they had become the very thing they once professed to hate.
She stared at her reflection in the mirror, trying, as she so often tried, to get beyond the surface of each eye and see herself whole and clear. So hard to do, it was. She looked down again, shaking her head. There was no doubting it. Her fall had opened her eyes to the evil of the world, a world in which good men and women could be left to fester in the shit-heap of the lower levels while the corrupt and the unscrupulous wallowed in undeserved luxury high above. A world unfit for decent beings. No, and she would never feel at ease in the world while such moral discrepancies existed.
She sighed and turned from the bowl, drying her face and upper arms. So maybe Bent was right. Maybe she was just being silly about the Tolonen girl. Maybe it
would
help bring this rotten pile come crashing down. And yet it didn’t feel right. Because it wasn’t Jelka Tolonen’s fault that she had been born into this world of levels. And so long as she had no proof that the girl was anything other than a pawn of circumstance, she would not feel happy undertaking such a task.
Not for herself, let alone for a bastard like Turner.
Besides, what
was
his motive? Why did he want the General’s daughter dead? Was it as he said, to weaken the General and thus undermine the T’ang’s Security forces? Or was it something personal? Some slight he’d suffered at the General’s hands?
She shivered again, remembering the moment on the mountainside beside Turner. To think that he thought they had something –
anything
– in common! She laughed and felt the laugh turn sour, recalling his words.
‘
Love, you mean? Human understanding? Goodness? Those things don’t exist. Not really. They’re illusions. Masks over the reality. And the reality is like these peaks – it’s beautiful, but it’s also hard, uncompromising and cold, like the airless spaces between the stars.
’