Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (24 page)

"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 setup. 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
started 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 he. 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 to target only those who are guilty
of corruption or gross injustice?"

"And so it
is. But 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 on it.
But 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 in in droves."

She shook her
head. "You miss my point. I ..."

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 between them, 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 nor any
of them could do—could prevent it. Nothing but to say no right
now, to refuse to take another 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 shivered,
then went into the washroom and filled the bowl with cold water.
While she washed her face, 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 Lows, 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 was
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 bowl, 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 percent—that
her father was supposed to have "overlooked." It had seemed
such a small thing 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 favor. 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 canceled. 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 Level, 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 fall. 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 work, 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. 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 harbored other dreams.

She had joined
the
Ping Tiao
eight years ago, in its earliest days, just
before the War. Back then there had been a lot of talk about ultimate
goals and 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 now things had changed. Now it
was hard to say 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 did, to get
beyond the surface of each eye and see herself whole and clear. So
hard to do, it was. So hard. 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 them. 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 crashing down. And
yet it didn't feel right. No. Because it wasn't Jelka Tolonen's
fault, either, 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.

Well, maybe that
was how he saw it, but the truth was otherwise. It was as she had
said: he was lacking a dimension, lacking, essentially, any trace of
basic human feeling. The Han had a saying for the behavior of such
men,
Hou lion, hei hsin
—"Thick face, black
heart"—and it was never more true than of Turner. Only in
his case Thick Face, Black Heart had reached its ultimate, where the
face is so thick it is formless, the heart so black it is colorless.
His nihilism was pure, untempered by any trace of pity. And that was
why they should not be working with him; for while their paths might
coincide for a time, their aims were diametrically opposed.

In time they
would have to fight the man. That was, if he had not, in the
meantime, robbed them of the will to fight