Daylight on Iron Mountain (9 page)

‘Thirty Banners, and every last man loyal to me, their commander.’

‘Exactly. So you and I are honoured. Alongside Chao Ni Tsu.’

Jiang Lei frowned. ‘In what way?’

‘In that we are the only
three
men on the planet whom Tsao Ch’un trusts. The rest…’

Amos laughed. A rich, deep laughter that made Jiang smile.

‘But come… let me show you around. Unless you’d like to rest after your journey?’

Jiang Lei shook his head. ‘No… please… I’d love to see. I’ve heard so much about this place…’

For the briefest moment Amos seemed to freeze, or at least to let some minuscule shard of doubt enter his eyes. Only as soon as it appeared it was gone, and he was exactly as before, charming, welcoming. The perfect host.

‘Come, then,’ he said. ‘While the sun is overhead.’

‘What’s the painting going to be about?’

Amos smiled. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘And you
have
to see it… before you can paint it?’

‘It comes in flashes. They all do. I understand it later. But while it’s happening…’

Jiang Lei looked from the canvas to the man and back again. ‘While it’s happening… ?’

‘I can’t tell you. It’s not something I can articulate. It’s just something that happens.’

‘And you trust it?’

‘Yes.’

There was nothing as yet. Or as good as. Just a black horizontal line. Which could have been anything. Only he saw how Amos stared at the canvas, intently, like he was conjuring visions from the air. He had been warned about it, warned about the intensity of the man. Schizophrenic, some said, yet he seemed perfectly normal. Most of the time.

They had finished their tour an hour back, and in all that time he had seen no one except Amos. Was he genuinely alone here?

The solitary madman.

‘Amos?’

‘Yes, Nai Liu?’

That use of his pen name made Jiang take a mental step back. Shepherd, it was said, did nothing whimsically. So what did he mean by using it? Did he mean to suggest some kind of bond between them – that they were both artists and therefore brothers in some fashion?

Jiang asked his question.

‘How did you come to know Tsao Ch’un? I mean, you two… it seems the most unlikely alliance.’

Amos smiled. ‘And so it is.’

‘I tried to look it up, but…’

‘There’s nothing there. I know. That’s because it’s all been erased. At the Ministry’s insistence. But come… let’s go inside. We can have a glass of wine, and I’ll tell you everything.’

Jiang Lei sat on the bed, looking about him. He had been given a small room beneath the eaves at the very top of the house, and from the small, scuttling noises he could hear, he was not alone in inhabiting it.

There wasn’t room for much – a small chest of drawers, a chair and the single bed on which he sat, tucked in beneath the tiny dormer window. On the chest of drawers was a wash jug in a bowl. Behind it, propped up against the wall, a large oval mirror stood, the backing silver blackened in places so that small holes seemed to be punched into the returning image of Jiang’s face. The rafters were exposed and the bare walls of the room had been whitewashed, but some years ago now, for it was flaking in places.

The room had a damp, woody smell, added to which was a sharp, underlying scent he could not recognize.

Jiang was not one to remark upon the quarters he was given, but this was strange. It had the feel of a child’s room, not the kind of room you’d place an honoured guest in.

Chun Hua, for one, would not have liked it. But then Chun Hua had not been invited. For this was business. Serious business.

He looked down, for that brief moment letting his mind stray back to their one snatched night together at Tongjiang. How awkward that had been. Not at all how he’d imagined. But then, why was he surprised? They had been strangers these past four years. To expect things to be as they were…

Even so, the warmth of her body beside his in the night had unsettled him.
Like the room, the furnishings, the bed, it had all been too much. Some part of him had drawn back, rebelling against the physicality of it. So unexpected. So… He would adapt. In time it would be as it had been. Or so he hoped.

Jiang stood, then took the slip case Amos had given him from his pocket and looked at it again. How strange – how wonderfully strange that tale had been.

As a teenage boy, Amos had designed games for the computer market – games that had made his reputation. Yet the one which had made his fortune – the very last of them before the Collapse – was a game called
World Domination
.

The selfsame game Jiang now held in his hands.

According to Amos, a rival company had been busy mapping the globe, street by street, building by building, replicating it in their virtual world. It was a bold and wonderful idea, but also an expensive one. When they went under, Amos stepped in, raising the capital to buy their replicated world and using it as the foundation – the detailed underpinning – for his own game; a game in which rival players strove to destroy the old earth street by street and build a new one over it. A world of mile-high cities.

It was, so rumour had it, Tsao Ch’un’s favourite game.

They had met in 2040, five years before the Collapse. Tsao Ch’un, it seems, had flown halfway round the world to meet him – here, in Dittisham.

It was then that it had all been conceived. Root and branch.

Jiang turned the cover over, noting the date of publication. 2039. Amos had sold over one hundred million units worldwide, making him enough money to buy his parents’ old house, Landscot, along with 500 acres of surrounding land. It was back then that the notion of a Domain had begun, long before the City had appeared over the horizon.

Jiang yawned. The wine had made him tired. That and the meal, which Amos himself had cooked, using vegetables picked from his own garden.

He set the game aside, then, unzipping his travel case, took out his nightgown.

It was a year and more now since he had last worn it. Back when he was still a general, rounding up the last few natives – Welshmen, they called themselves – and processing them.

That was all done now, finished. Until they started on America.

He had peeled off his silk
pau
and was pulling the gown up over his head,
when he heard footsteps on the gravel path below.

He finished dressing, then, leaning across the bed, looked down through the window at the darkened lawn.

There, in the light of the half moon, just a yard or two beyond the kitchen garden where the oak tree was, stood Amos with his back to the house. He was standing very still, hunched forward slightly, as if something had caught his attention.

Jiang looked past him, down to where the land ended on the shore of the bay.

No one. There was no one there. Only suddenly there was. Two of them, moving slowly, laboriously, climbing the slope, their long gowns hitched up about their ankles.

Two women, Jiang realized, seeing how the moonlight caught in their long, dark hair.

Jiang wondered where they had been. Whether Shepherd had, perhaps, sent them away while he was there, bringing them back overnight, then despatching them again once morning came, so that Jiang would not meet them.

Only why do that?

But then, Amos was strange. At least, that was what he’d heard. Only how much of that was true? What if he was just a very private man? What if he didn’t want other people to know his business?

Then why invite me here? Why not just meet me somewhere neutral? Somewhere free of all these impressions?

Jiang saw Amos greet them, hugging first one and then the other. Then, the two of them on his arms, he turned and came back up the path, dis appear ing inside the cottage.

Jiang went over to the door and stood there, listening. There was the low murmur of voices from below. A door closed, then there were sudden, urgent footsteps on the wooden steps.

Another door closed. For a moment there was silence, and then there was the sound of water passing through the pipes.

Someone was washing.

Jiang Lei looked to the timer inset into his wrist and yawned. It was just after one. He would sleep now, then ask Amos in the morning.

*

Waking with the dawn, Amos let Jiang sleep, instead going down to his basement workshop where he immersed himself in that morning’s news.

It was not the same news that was deemed fit for the general population. This was the real news, raw, uncensored. The same news that the Ministry’s First Dragon saw each day. The same that Tsao Ch’un himself digested every morning with his breakfast meal.

If the content of the general news channels was meant to reassure and encourage (and, of course, to praise the Great Father himself, from whom all bounty came), this assemblage of mayhem and destruction, betrayal, murder and sheer lunacy acted as a timely reminder that things were far from settled – and very far from perfect – in Tsao Ch’un’s City.

Men, after all, were still men. Nothing, it seemed, could change that.

Yet the problems could be contained. The madness could be channelled. All that was needed was an iron will and a determination not to let things get out of hand.

Among that morning’s items were two which particularly caught his attention. The first involved what they called a
k’uang wang
– one of the ‘frenzied’. These were men – for they were usually men – who snapped. In their frenzied madness, they ran amok among their fellow citizens, stabbing, slicing and causing as much pain as they could – as if to unload their own. This particular
k’uang wang
, however, had been extraordinarily inventive. A cook by trade, he had turned up at work that morning and proceeded to poison half the people in his deck, finishing matters off by chopping up the two Security guards who had been sent to detain him.

The second item was more sedate, less unusual, yet it still interested him; it spoke of a new phenomenon, one that was only recently emerging.

It seemed a boy had met a girl and, after a while, the two had fallen in love. In spite of the watching cameras and the even more watchful relatives of the girl, the two had managed to consummate their love. After a month or two, she began to show the obvious signs of pregnancy. All might have been well. The boy might have married the girl – he was certainly willing to – and they might all have lived happily ever after.

Only the girl was Han, the boy
Hung Mao
.

Just as soon as her condition became obvious, the girl’s uncles, furious that their family’s racial purity had been sullied, discovered who the boy was and burned the two alive in an oven.

The horrific brutality of the crime aside, it was that urge to purify the races – to mix but not to
mix
– that Amos found interesting. How did one break that chain of prejudice? Was it merely a question of time? Or had the seeds been sown when they had rid the world of the black and Asian races? Was it all doomed to fail? Would it all end in one gigantic bloodbath?

No one knew. But they were committed now. This melding of the races – this cheek-by-jowl approach to populating the levels – was what they had decided, and they must see it through now to the bitter end.

But there were signs that it was sometimes failing. Signs that, for all their efforts, humankind was not content with mere contentment. That whatever you gave them, they always wanted more.

Which, according to his mood, could be a good thing or a bad.

Why
should
mankind be content? Was
he
content?

Never.
Not for a single fucking second
.

He rarely swore, not even in his thoughts, but today…

Maybe it was Jiang’s presence, for the man had quite certainly thrown him. Amos had thought to find a fraud, a man pretending to be good. But Jiang Lei was the real thing.

An anomaly, then…

Today, he had decided, they would talk, exhausting themselves with words, so that tomorrow they might be tired of debate and come quickly to an agreement when decisions needed to be made.

Not that he wanted to force Jiang into agreement. It was just that his exper ience had shown that to dwell too long upon such matters would more likely compound errors than solve them.

Besides, if Jiang Lei fought his campaign the way he, Amos Shepherd, had decided they should fight it, then thirty Banners would be more than enough.

It was merely a question of focus. Of learning from past mistakes.

He returned upstairs. It was there, in the kitchen, as he was cooking breakfast, that Jiang Lei found him.

‘Amos… you slept well?’

‘Very well, thank you. And you?’

Jiang Lei laughed. A clear, light-hearted laughter. ‘You know, that’s the best night’s sleep I’ve had in years. That mattress was just so… not too soft, not too hard… and the down pillows…’

Amos smiled. ‘I’m glad. Would you like some breakfast?’

They sat outside, in the garden, to eat.

‘What’s the schedule for today?’

Amos was sitting facing him, his back to the view. ‘I thought we’d just relax. Talk about this and that. Just get to know each other.’

‘It’s just that… well, I thought…’

‘Let’s leave all that ’til tomorrow, yes?’ Amos studied him, then smiled again. ‘What did you think of him? Of Tsao Ch’un, I mean? You spent two days with him, right?’

Jiang Lei nodded, but he seemed suddenly defensive. ‘I…’

‘It’s okay. It’s all off the record here. No cameras. And no bugs. I don’t allow it. It’s part of our deal. Here I’m outside it all. My rules, not his. So tell me, did you think him somewhat… eccentric?’

‘No.’ There was no hesitation in Jiang’s answer. ‘I think it must be hard, living the way he does. I’d call it paranoid, only he has good reason to believe people are trying to kill him. Seventeen tasters dead. That’s a statistic the general public would be shocked to learn.’

‘And a dozen or more bodyguards…’ Only Amos was smiling broadly. ‘That stunt you did… throwing the cadre out of the back of your craft… that really amused him. Did he tell you that?’