Rainbow Bridge (48 page)

‘They’ve never suspected me,’ said Fiorinda, off on her own track. Most of the stolen tech was in pieces; vivisected. ‘We should have had more faith in our own cover-up. They believed the same as US Intelligence believed, same as Fred Eiffrich did. I’m Rufus’s daughter but I was his victim, helpless, didn’t inherit a scrap of his mutant brain. They killed my father’s other children out of idle curiosity, or as a precaution, or just to see what their Rufus DNA brains were like—’

I am free, she thought. Elder Sister has set me free.

It flashed through her mind that if the bastard Chinese had plans for another A-team, which was all too possible, seeing this collection, they would get nowhere.

Not as long as I live. I shall stop that from happening.

I—

‘They didn’t come to England to save the world from a second A-team, Sage. They saw the Second Chamber as a threat all right, and maybe,
maybe
they saw our Counterculture as a breeding ground for Neurobomb material. But deep down dirty the massacres were camouflage. They made it look like righteous ideology, when really they were here to protect a secret monopoly. And strip our assets, of course. I bet they plan to scoop up Europe’s best evil neurophysicists and mind/matter techs, take them home and rehabilitate them—’

As she gets older, thought Sage, occasionally she’s going to look a lot like her dad. He wasn’t horrified, he’d long accepted that Fiorinda and Rufus would always be close. Alight with her fire, he felt the latency of mind/matter fusion in his own brain and wondered if he could ever join her, where they were now, under his own steam? If he could reach her by tech alone, could he do this without killing himself?

File that one.

‘The
di
is mind/matter based,’ he said. ‘Has to be. I saw that at once when I dared to think about it. We are idiots, Fiorinda. If they remotely suspected trouble, they wouldn’t have come near without some kind of forbidden fallback defence—’

‘The
bastards
. The bare-faced, conniving
bastards
.’

They stood together, looking up at the character
shū,
on the towers, on the panels. ‘It means the code,’ said Fiorinda. ‘The 0s and 1s of reality.’

‘Yes.’

They thought of Anne-Marie and her little boys, of uncounted thousands cut down here at Reading and elsewhere; of Toby Starborn’s cruel fate. The need to hit back with equal savagery boiled through them, and vanished into the purity of the fusion high. Let it go, accept: because this is the
good
news. Normal human villainy killed those people. The Chinese have nothing, and now we will win Ax’s game.

‘I didn’t like the way DK ended up being Vengeance,’ said Sage at last. ‘He was not the type.’

‘Nor did I,’ said Fiorinda. ‘But I don’t know.’ She smiled, remembering the Mixmaster, thinking he’d have liked the irony. ‘Maybe it works.’

The best revenge is to live well.

A baby screaming and screaming; crew packing up with their teeth clenched. Fiorinda crooned and rocked Cosoleth, to no avail. George sat with Allie on the dirty sofa, seeming to absorb her shock and grief into his broad frame.

‘You all
knew
it would be like that,’ cried Allie, tears streaming.

‘Somethen’ like. An’ we woulder tried harder to tell you, but we thought you were better off only facing it the once—’

‘It’s okay,
it’s okay
. I needed to know what had happened, and now I do. I know where he is. He isn’t lost, he’s found. Oh God, oh, God—’

Coz’s piercing yells shifted from frightened to angry, which was an improvement, though the noise did not diminish. ‘Hush little baby,’ coaxed Fiorinda, ‘poor Coz, it was too much, I am such a trial to you. What the hell did I do to spook her, Bill?’ she asked, over the baby’s head. ‘I’m a klutz at b-loc, I always lose my short-term memory, I’ve no idea what was happening back here.’

‘You didn’t have time to do anything much,’ said Bill.

My God, was it only half a minute, is that all?

Sage came back into the room. He’d gone out for some quiet, to make a phone call and tell Ax it had gone well. She looked at him, and he nodded, blue eyes wide.

Now we’ll see. Are we falling or flying?

What The Thrush Said

The straight half of Mr Preston knelt among drifts of creamy silk, smiling at Elder Sister, who faced him, cross-legged, her hair loose and tousled on her shoulders; from which the robe she wore was slipping in very pretty disarray. She touched a shallow crease, hardly a scar, that ran across his upper ribs, on the left.

‘What’s this? A souvenir of what?’

He wondered if she’d ever been wounded on active service. When would that have been? The nineteen eighties, before her Principal Dancer days? Vietnam border skirmishes? Or later, in her career as General Li? Forget it, can’t rely on anything I’ve been told, or ever will be told. Her life will be wrapped in cloud as long as she stays in power. If she falls it’ll be different, but no more truthful.

‘It’s very stupid.’

‘It looks stupid. I don’t like the position at all.’

‘It was in Cambridge, in the thing we call the Deconstruction Tour.’

‘The first, most violent phase of your Cultural Revolution. Nobody here seems to have any idea what that meant in China. You seem to think it was none of our business. It was terribly shocking, it wasn’t our image of the English at all. And then there was a young man, a guitar-player from a
rock band
, whom we were told was controlling the masses. He was restoring order, yet also leading the people in the destruction of greed, selfishness, ignorance and decadence, the four poisons that were killing the planet. That was a road we could understand. We in China were suffering hell from the environmental problems of the Fall.’

‘The Crash. Is this the view of the Chinese, or Elder Sister talking me up?’

She grinned, and touched the same finger to his lips. ‘We knew that absolutist change was the only way forward. And he looked very Chinese.’

‘Do you want to hear about my wound, or not?’

‘No, I want to talk about you, because it makes you uncomfortable and I love to see you uncomfortable. You don’t understand how powerful it was. In China this is the Ur-story. There’s a peasant boy, who becomes a soldier in a time of decay and corruption, he raises the people against an unjust regime. He is an outlaw hero who gathers an army. He’s going places, unlike your Robin Hood.’ She paused for thought. ‘He’s a peasant, or at least very poor, but he has the right ancestors, that’s important. I’ve heard that Fiorinda comes from an old gentry family?’

‘Haha, yeah. On her mother’s side. The Slaters haven’t been personally involved in putting roofs on houses since around the time of the Peasants’ Revolt.’

‘Oooh, a peasants’ revolt. When was it, what happened?’

‘’Bout eight hundred years ago. A charming young king told them he loved them, promised them everything, lured the leaders into the open and the regime clobbered them,
mercilessly
.’

‘Ah, too bad. You laugh, but you shouldn’t despise legitimacy. My name is “Li”, I have found that surprisingly useful. Your daughter’s name should be Slater. Now, let’s return to my peasant boy. He takes over kingdom after kingdom until he holds all China. He declares a new dynasty, he institutes sweeping and compassionate reform. Heaven accepts him, and phoenixes are seen in his gardens.’

‘I didn’t like the pension plan.’

They were alone in her private quarters, with the fabulous artworks. The Fu dais where she’d shown him her map of the world was beyond their lamplight, hidden by the antique screens. Elder Sister sighed, stretched her arms above her head, and reached over, lithe and smooth as young girl, to the hookah. She took a deep pull of smoke, watching him, eyes half-closed, sidelong.

‘Hm.’

She was very good at sensing resistance.

‘We were told you had “invented post-modern warfare”. It was fascinating. This idea of using war without terrorism, when war
is
terrorism.’

‘Now I know you’re laughing at me. General, you couldn’t begin to sound the depths of my ignorance. Richard and Corny did it all. I didn’t know I was on the world’s stage. I was on local tv, in our storm-in-a-thimble, making phrases in the hope of stopping what I saw as hideous.’

‘Again,’ said Elder Sister, rather tartly, ‘you don’t understand. It
was
our business. We had embarked on a plan to unite the world. We needed to overrun country after country, without leaving a disastrous trail of low-intensity urban warfare behind us. We’d have been fools not to watch Europe; to see how a successful unifying power emerges when a country has fallen apart. Military genius is innate, like musical talent. Soldiers know it when they meet it. You may have been ignorant, but you have that genius, and we learned from you.’

She offered the mouthpiece: he took it, shaking his head. ‘You’ll have to be more plausible. The PLA can’t possibly have been studying my battle plans.’

‘Our suborbital transports are expensive: we use them sparingly. But it’s because of Ax Preston that we rarely, rarely use air strikes. We fight on the ground. It does not hamper us, we have invincible superiority, but it reduces the terror remarkably.’

Touché
.

He lay down beside her on the silken pillows, and blew smoke rings into the lamplight. Everything about Elder Sister raised the ghost of a past self he’d almost forgotten. He didn’t want those days or that mindset back, fuck no. But she gave him access to emotions that no one, not a soul, had ever shared; and that touched his heart.

‘The mission was to save the world; to save civilisation, from real and present danger. And to nurture the Good State, so it could survive and grow on the other side of the Crisis. I struggle to remember what it felt like to be twenty-six, and convinced I could achieve those things. I’m a different person, several times over.’

‘I know about
that
,’ she said. She seemed to smile inwardly, nostalgically, her profile calm and grave. Then she turned on him like a tigress, phoenix eyes snapping, a storm of black hair. ‘So! You admit you have a mission. Then
why are we arguing
?’

‘I wasn’t aware that we were arguing.’

She was close to getting genuinely annoyed, this planet-destroyer in bed with him, beautiful and naked among her swirls of embroidered satin. Be careful, he thought. Show no fear, but never cross the line. Have I crossed it?

‘
Ax!
Now you are being insufferable—!’

‘Hey. I don’t think you can call me insufferable on a first date.’

She withdrew. She sat up, smoothed back her hair, and arranged her robe. No more fun and games, said the expression on that flushed, lovely face, not quite bare of make-up, free of any sign of ageing. Here we go. He wondered how the dice were going to fall, would she give him the opening he needed, or derail him?

‘I want you to be my President of Europe.’

That’ll do. He sighed, and marshalled his thoughts. She knew that what he said tonight would be different, that he had finally stopped fencing. She gave him time.

‘Ax?’

‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Dead straight.’

He wanted to ask if they could continue this in English, but if you can’t say it in
putonghua
it’s not worth saying, so scratch that. Leave your ego at the door, try not to sound too stilted, avoid complex sentences, trust your intuition.

‘Elder Sister, I would like to work for you; I want to serve the World State. But I can’t take a, what amounts to a post on your staff, unless you are going to listen to me. I have to be able to say what I think, and you have to be ready to listen. Otherwise I’m not the man for the job. I wouldn’t last a week—’

He got no further.

‘This sounds to me,’ said Elder Sister, in a level tone, lowering the hand she had sharply raised, ‘like the prelude to a well-honed petition. You may speak. What is it you want to ask?’

‘All right,’ Ax sat up and shrugged his own robe together. Dressed for business, the planet-destroyer and her spirited new favourite faced each other.

‘Everything Weng Jiang and his team told you about the Landsturm is true. The whole affair was an unqualified success. However, you could still be running into trouble. In these countries the masses did not labour under oppression and decay for generations, as is the case in the East of Europe. Civic collapse is a recent thing. The masses are steeped in eco-revolution; emotionally and intellectually the cadres are passionately on your side. They are Utopians, they believe in the World State. But if crucial issues are not treated thoughtfully there’ll be a backlash.’

She nodded, focused and intent. ‘This is the kind of thing I need to hear. What do you mean by “backlash”? I will deal with recalcitrance.’

‘There are countries in Western Europe that still have nuclear capability.’

‘Hm.’ She thought about that. ‘I believe not. A long way from readiness, at the least. For instance, the last British nuclear deterrent was decommissioned under David Sale’s government. It passed for a Quixotic gesture, I saw it as a practical move. Better to destroy the weapons that principle forbids you to use, than have them lying about “just in case”, while rabid Countercultural terrorists prowl the nation.’

‘I agree. The nuclear threat was an extreme example.’ Ax paused. ‘The danger of a public setback is real. The Sphere’s growth has been from success to success, and that’s what your great plan needs, to sweep it to completion.’

‘Go on.’

‘As I see it, your job is to make sure that the will to hold back isn’t there. To rule by consent, not to crush ambition; to encourage the spirit of partnership. If you bind your natural supporters to you, in confidence and gratitude, populations won’t be alienated by the police actions you may have to take. Recalcitrance will wither away.’

‘So all the modesty and reticence was a trick. You see yourself as the counsellor who shall keep this hot-headed Napoleon on the right path!’

‘This is not a trick,’ he said, ‘this is honest advice. Before I realised who you were my intuition told me to trust you; I trust you now. I know there’s a contradiction, I’ve turned my back on violence, you are a military leader. I still want you to succeed. I’m in awe of your victories, your talents, your courage; and your decency, so far as war allows decency. But in some respects you will have to change your ways if—’