Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (68 page)

This time the
bird was resting on a perch inside a pagoda-like cage. As he watched,
the cage door sprung open and the bird flew free, launching itself
out through the narrow opening.

He froze the
image, then rotated it. This time the bird seemed trapped, its beak
and part of its sleek, proud head jutting from the cage, the rest
contained within the bars. In the background could be seen the
familiar environment of the Square. As the complex image turned, the
tables of the Cafe Burgundy came into view. He could see himself at
one of the nearer tables, the girl beside him. He was facing directly
into the shot, his hand raised, pointing, as if to indicate the
sudden springing of the bird; but her head was turned, facing him,
her flame-red hair a sharp contrast to the rich, overhanging
greenery.

He smiled
uncertainly and let the tape run on a moment at one-fifth speed,
watching her head come slowly round to face the escaping bird. In
that moment, as she faced it fully, the bird's wing came up,
eclipsing the watchers at the table. There it ended.

It was a brief
segment, no more than nine seconds in all, but it had taken him weeks
of hard work to get it right. Now, however, he was thinking of
abandoning it completely.

This was his
favorite piece in the whole composition—the key image with
which it had begun—yet as the work had progressed, this tiny
fragment had proved ever more problematic.

For the rest of
the work the viewpoint was established in the viewer's head, behind
the eyes, yet for this brief moment he had broken away entirely. In
another art form this would have caused no problems—might,
indeed, have been a strength—but here it created all kinds of
unwanted difficulties. Experienced from within the Shell, it was as
if, for the brief nine seconds that the segment lasted, one went
outside one's skull. It was a strange, disorienting experience, and
no tampering with the surrounding images could mute that effect or
repair the damage it did to the work as a whole.

In all the
Shells he had experienced before, such abrupt switches of viewpoint
had been made to serve the purpose of the story: were used for their
sudden shock value. But then, all forms of the Shell before his own
had insisted only upon a cartoon version of the real, whereas what he
wanted was reality itself. Or a close approximation. Such abrupt
changes destroyed the balance he was seeking, shattered every attempt
of his to create that illusion of the really real.

Only now was he
beginning to understand the cost—in artistic terms—of
such realism, the limiting factors and the disciplines involved. It
was not enough to create the perfect illusion; it was also necessary
to maintain a sequential integrity in the experiencing mind. The
illusion depended on him staying within his own skull, behind his own
eyes, the story developing in real time.

There was, of
course, a simple answer: abandon all breaches of sequential
integrity. But that limited the kind of story one could tell. It was
a straitjacket of the worst kind, limiting fiction to the vignette,
briefly told. He had recognized this at once and agonized over it,
but weeks of wrestling with the problem had left him without an
answer.

Perhaps this was
why all previous practitioners of the form had kept to the
quasi-realism of a cartoon, leaving the experiencing imagination to
suspend disbelief and form a bridge between what was presented and
the reality. Maybe some of them had even tried what he was attempting
now, had experimented with "perfected," realistic images
and had faced the same constricting factors. Maybe so, but he had to
make a choice—pursue his ideal of a perfect art form or
compromise that vision in favor of a patently synthetic form, a mere
embellishment of the old. It was no real choice at all, yet still he
procrastinated.

He wound the
tapes back and replayed, this time at one-tenth speed—five
frames a second—watching the bird thrust slowly outward from
the cage in an explosion of sudden, golden, living fire; seeing
beyond it the girl's face, its whiteness framed in flames of red as
it turned to face the screen.

He closed his
eyes and froze the image. It was the best thing he had done.
Something real and beautiful—a tiny, perfect work of art. And
yet . . . He shivered, then pressed ERASE. In an instant it was gone,
the tapes blanked. He stood there for a long time afterward, leaning
against the machine, perfectly still, his eyes closed. Then, with a
tiny shudder, he turned away. There was that much anyway. It was
there—it would
always
be there—in his head.

He went to the
bed and sat, not knowing what he felt, staring intently, almost
obsessively at the narrow ridge of flesh that circled his left wrist.
Then he got up again and went out into the other room.

For a while he
stood there in the center of the room, his mind still working at the
problem; but just now he could not see past his tiredness. He was
stretched thin by the demands he had placed on himself these last few
weeks. All he could see were problems, not solutions.

He took a long,
shuddering breath. "Small steps," he told himself, his
voice soft, small in the darkness. "There is an answer," he
added after a moment, as if to reassure himself. Yet he was far from
certain.

He turned away,
rubbing at his eyes, too tired to pursue the thought, for once
wanting nothing but the purging oblivion of sleep. And in the
morning? In the morning he would begin anew.

* *
*

THE SQUARE was a
huge, airy space at the top of Oxford Canton, the uppermost level of
a complex warren of Colleges that extended deep into the stack below.
To the eternal delight of each new generation of students, however,
the Square was not square at all, but hexagonal, a whole deck opened
up for leisure. Long, open balconies overlooked the vastness of the
Green, leaning back in five great tiered layers on every side, while
overhead the great dome of the stars turned slowly in perfect
imitation of the sky beyond the ice.

Here, some
seventeen years earlier, so rumor had it, Berdichev, Lehmann, and
Wyatt had met and formed the Dispersionist party, determined to bring
change to this world of levels. Whether the rumor was true or not,
the Square was a place to which the young intelligentsia of all seven
cities were drawn. If the world of thought were a wheel, this was its
hub, and the Green its focus.

A line of oaks
bordered the Green, hybrid evergreens produced in the vats of
SynFlor; while at its center was an aviary, a tall, pagoda-like cage
of thirteen tiers, modeled upon the Liu
he t'a,
the Pagoda of
the Six Harmonies at Hang Chou. As ever, young men and women strolled
arm in arm on the vast lawn or gathered about the lowest tier,
looking in at the brightly colored birds.

The Square was
the pride of Oxford Canton and the haunt of its ten thousand
students. The elite of the Above sent their children to Oxford, just
as the elite of a small nation state had done centuries before. It
was a place of culture and for the children of First Level families,
a guarantee of continuity.

No big MedFac
screens cluttered the Green itself, but in the cool walkways beneath
the overhang, small Vidscreens showed the local cable channels to a
clientele whose interests and tastes differed considerably from the
rest of the Above.

The overhang was
a place of coffee shops and restaurants, CulVid boutiques and
SynParlors. It was a curious mixture of new and old, of timelessness
and state-of-the-art, of purity and decadence; its schizophrenic face
a reflection of its devotees. At the Cafe Burgundy business was
brisk. It was a favorite haunt of the Arts Faculty students, who, at
this hour, crowded every available table, talking, drinking,
gesturing wildly with all the passion and flamboyance of youth. The
tables themselves—more than two hundred in all—spread out
from beneath the overhang toward the edge of the Green. Overhead, a
network of webbing, draped between strong poles, supported a
luxuriant growth of flowering creepers. The plants were a lush,
almost luminous green, decorated with blooms of vivid purples,
yellows, reds, and oranges—huge gaping flowers with tongues of
contrasting hues, like the silent heads of monsters. Beneath them the
tables and chairs were all antiques, the wood stained and polished.
They were a special feature of the cafe, a talking point, though in
an earlier century they would have seemed quite unexceptional.

Han waiters made
their way between the packed tables, carrying trays and taking
orders. They were dressed in the plain, round-collared robes of the
Tang Dynasty, the sleeves narrow, the long er-silks a dark vermilion
with an orange band below the knee: the clothes of an earlier,
simpler age.

At a table near
the edge sat four students. Their table was empty but for three
glasses and a bottle. They had eaten and were on their third bottle
of the excellent Burgundy from which the cafe took its name. A vacant
chair rested between the two males of the party, as if they were
expecting another to join them. But it was not so. All spaces at the
table had to be paid for, and they had paid to keep it vacant.

There was
laughter at the table. A dark-haired, olive-skinned young man was
holding sway, leaning well back in his chair, a wineglass canted in
his hand. The singsong tones of his voice were rather pleasant,
well-modulated. He was a handsome, aristocratic man with a pronounced
aquiline profile, a finely formed mouth, and dark, almost gypsy eyes.
Strong-limbed and broad-shouldered, he looked more a sportsman than
an artist, though a fastidiousness about his clothes somewhat
redressed that impression. As he talked, his free hand carved forms
from the air, the movements deft, rehearsed. He was older than the
others by some four or five years, a factor that made them defer to
him in most things; and often—as now— he monopolized
their talk, leading it where he would.

His name was
Sergey Novacek and he was a Masters student and a sculptor. His
father, Lubos, was a well-to-do merchant who, at his wife's behest,
indulged his only son, buying him a place at Oxford. Not that Sergey
was unintelligent. He could easily have won a scholarship. It was
simply a matter of prestige. Of status. At the level on which Lubos
Novacek had his interests, it was not done to accept state charity.

Just now Sergey
was telling them of the ceremony he had attended the previous day, a
ceremony at which six of his sculptures had been on display. He had
not long been fulfilling such commissions, yet he spoke as if he had
great experience in the matter. But that was his way, and his friends
admired him for it, even if others found it somewhat arrogant.

"It all
went very well, at first," he said, his handsome features
serious a moment. "Everyone was most respectful. They fed me and
watered me and tried their best to be polite and hide from themselves
the fact that I was neither family nor Han." He laughed. "None
too successfully, I'm afraid. But, anyway . . . The tomb was
magnificent. It stood in its own walled gardens next to the house. A
massive thing, two stories high, clad all over in white marble, and
with a gate you could have driven a team of four horses through."
Sergey sipped at his drink, then laughed. "In fact, the tomb was
a damn sight bigger than the house!" There was laughter.

"That's so
typical of them," said the second young man, Wolf, lifting his
glass to his lips. He was taller and more heavily built than his
friend, his perfect North European features topped by a close-cropped
growth of ash-blond hair. "They're so into death."

Sergey raised
his glass. "And a good job too, neh?"

"For you,"
one of the girls, Lotte, said teasingly, her blue eyes flashing. It
was true. Most of Sergey's commissions were funerary—tomb
statues for the Minor Families.

Lotte was a
pale-skinned, large-breasted girl, who wore her blond hair
unfashionably long and plaited, in defiance of fashion. These things
aside, she looked exactly like what she was—the twin of her
brother, Wolf. Beside her, silent, sat the fourth of their small
group, Catherine. She was smaller than her friends, more delicately
built; a slender redhead with Slavic features and green eyes.

Sergey smiled.
"Anyway. As I was saying. It was all going well and then the
ceremony proper began. You know how it is: a lot of New Confucian
priests chanting for the souls of the departed. And then the eldest
son comes to the front and lights a candle for the ancestors. Well...
it had just got to that stage when, would you believe it, eldest son
trips over his
pau,
stumbles forward, and falls against the
lines of paper charms."

"No!"
All three sat forward, Wolf amused, the two girls horrified.
"Unfortunate, you might think, and embarrassing, but not
disastrous. And so it might have been, except that in falling he
dropped the lighted candle among the charms." Sergey laughed
shortly and nodded to himself. "You should have seen it. There
must have been two or three thousand charms hanging up on those
lines, dry as bone, just waiting to go up in one great sheet of
flame. And that's exactly what they did. Eldest son was all right, of
course. The servants pulled him away at once. But before anyone could
do a thing, the flames set off the overhead sprinklers. Worse than
that, no one knew the combination sequence to the cutout and the key
to the manual override was missing. It just poured and poured. We
were all soaked. But the worst was to come. Because the garden was
enclosed, the water couldn't drain away. Much of it sank into the
thin soil layer, but soon that became waterlogged, and when that
happened the water began to pour down the steps into the tomb. Within
minutes the water was up to the top step. That's when it happened."