She moved back slightly, looking down at him, sensitive to the unusually guarded tone in his voice. “Confidential? I thought everything you did was confidential. Why, you’re the great master of all secrets, aren’t you?” Normally he would have laughed and played along with her, but this time he looked away, his face troubled. “This is no joking matter, my love. It’s deadly serious.” He looked back at her. “I am to report to the First Dragon himself first thing tomorrow morning. The I Lung has an appointment with the T’ang, Tsu Ma. It seems the very future of the Ministry is at stake.”
“I see. So—“
He leaned toward her, putting a finger to her lips. “No, sweetheart. Not a word. If I could tell you, I would. You know that. But for once it’s best you don’t know. Not until it’s over.”
“Then I’d best leave you to it, neh?”
“It would be best.”
“And tomorrow? Will you be here for dinner?” He hesitated, then shook his head. “It would be nice, but I think it might be difficult. There’s so much to be done. The I Lung has given me a new appointment. I’m afraid I may be away rather a lot in the coming months.” She studied him a moment, seeing how tired he looked, how drawn, and felt a stab of concern for him. “So what’s new?” she said, trying to coax a smile from him. “The day you aren’t busy you’ll be dead, and then it’ll be my turn to be busy, clearing up after you.” He laughed. “Look, I’ll try. But you must try too. Your mother—“ “That woman...”
“Please, Hannah. I know you two don’t get on, but you could make an effort, if only to help me.”
“Okay,” she relented, “I’ll try.” Then, leaning close, she kissed his brow gently. “I hope it all goes well tomorrow.” He held her to him briefly. “You and I both, my love. You and I both.” Back in her own rooms she locked the main door, leaving the key in the lock, then went through to her study. The package was on the desk where she had left it, the jade-handled kitchen knife beside it. She switched on the desk lamp, then stood there, staring at it. Three men had died because of this. Three men . . . and who knew how many others? She took a long, shuddering breath, then set to work, cutting through the fine silk wrapping.
Inside was a plain white folder and inside that. . . She took the handwritten pages out and set them on the desk beside the wrapping, then pulled up a seat and began to read, speaking the words aloud.
“The Aristotle File . . . being the true history of the West, 384 b.c. to a.d. 2087.”
She stopped, a shiver passing down her spine. The true history . . . Then it was true. All the whispers and mumbled half tales were true. She flicked through quickly, reading a paragraph here, a few words there, then stopped again, looking up, finding it suddenly difficult even to take a breath.
So it was all a lie, one vast deception. It was unthinkable, impossible, and yet she knew it was true. All her life she had suspected it—and now she knew.
She sat back, feeling strange, almost insubstantial, the room, the very chair on which she sat, somehow changed from what they’d been only a moment before.
She understood . . . the deaths, the urgency of the pursuit. This file—this truth—was a ticking bomb, waiting to explode. Even to know of its existence was, she knew, a capital offense. And yet to deny it, wasn’t that also a kind of death?
The darkness shimmered before her eyes.
She shuddered, filled by the vision that had come to her. There was her world, like a giant crystal globe, adrift in the vacuum of space. From afar it seemed to glimmer in the starless emptiness, lit from within by the shining, translucent figures of forty billion ghosts, their pale, tormented eyes pleading for release.
Ghosts, yes . . . these were the hungry ghosts of Han legend: those poor, unfortunate wretches who could find no rest, neither in this world nor the next. Her eyes met theirs, understanding for the first time the insatiable craving that drove them, the dissatisfaction that had eaten away at them until there was nothing left of them but this— this shell, this pale imitation of being. There they all were, the spirits of the lost and abandoned. She watched them, saw how they burned, without sound or heat, the pale light of their consumption slowly guttering toward extinction, and understood that this could not go on. To be bom into this world was to be stillborn. To live here was intolerable. But hadn’t she always known that? Hadn’t she, at the back of everything, always known the falseness of it all?
She moaned. Lies, all of it lies, and her father a custodian—an intimate—of that great deception. That, perhaps, was the worst of it: that such a good, kind man—such a funny, caring man—could serve so foul an end. For there was no doubt of it, a lie so vast, so all permeating, was evil.
Secrets—she was used to secrets—but lies were different. Lies corroded.
They were a disease of the inner self. They ate the marrow from the bone. Besides, what purpose had life if its lessons could be doctored, its lived experience rewritten by those who followed after? How could they learn to be better people if the past were forever denied to them? She shivered, her distress giving way to indignation. How could they have done this? Who gave them the right? And how many deaths, how much suffering, had the Ministry caused in policing the Lie? Her father ... it all came back to her father. What was it the Han said?
Ah, yes. She said the rhyme aloud, her voice a whisper.
“A dragon begets a dragon.
A phoenix begets a phoenix.
The son of a rat, from the day of his birth, Knows only how to dig a hole in the ground.” So what was she? Dragon, phoenix, or the daughter of a rat? Or was it really that simple? All agreed that her father was loo shih—was a genuine, straightforward man—and yet his whole life was an intricate lie, a social mask, constructed to conceal his work for the Thousand Eyes. And she had inherited something of his manner. Even today, in getting hold of the File, she had used lies and deceptions. So where did one draw the line? Where did the small lie end and the Big Lie begin?
Hannah looked back down at the File. Words, that’s all it was. Mere words. Yet this was potentially more dangerous, more destructive to the status quo, than an army of a million men. Why, if this were known to all... She grew still, the idea growing in her. If this were known to all. . . But why not? Why did it have to be like this—passed furtively from hand to hand in fear of discovery? Why couldn’t it be done more openly, more effectively! There had to be a way.
Setting the title page aside she began again, reading the opening words and then reading them again, letting them burn into her mind, knowing—even as she did—that things would never be the same.
kao chen looked up from his cluttered desk and met his Duty Captain’s eyes. “What now? Not another instruction from our merchant friend!” The Captain bowed, handing a sealed package across. “No, sir. It’s from General Rheinhardt. I was told to give it to you urgently.” Chen sat back, letting the package fall onto the pile in front of him. “As if we’ve not enough . . . Okay. Tell the General’s messenger that I’ll get onto it at once.”
“Sir!”
When his Captain had gone, Chen sat there a moment, looking about him at the stacks of files and papers that cluttered his desk and balanced precariously on the tops of the filing cabinets that seemed to fill his tiny office. Forms! So many official forms to be filled out! He was behind, badly behind, but then who wasn’t in Security these days? The truth was that there was too much crime and too few of them to deal with it, and the recent slackening of the Edict had only made things worse. As more and more people found themselves out of work, so the problem grew—exponentially, it seemed. And always there was more to do, less time to do it in.