Lever.
“It’s all his fault,” he muttered, staring at the blank screen irritably, the fingers of his left hand tugging at the silk of his right sleeve. “If only he had not persuaded me to use that abominable wire.” It was true. Deep down he blamed Li Yuan for all of this. If he had only trusted to instinct and used older, more certain methods against Kennedy. I should have listened to my advisers, he thought. I should have had him killed, then none of this would have happened. No . . .but then how would I have slept?
There was a soft chime. The screen glowed gold. And then Li Yuan was facing him, concern on his face.
“Cousin Shih . . . how are you?”
“Li Yuan,” he answered, coldly, formally. At once the young T’ang’s face changed, frowning.
“What is it? What more has happened?”
In answer he held up the letter so that Yuan could see.
“Ah . . .” he said.
The last glimmer of doubt—and hope—died in Wu Shih’s breast. “You do not deny it, then?”
Li Yuan shook his head. “I never meant to use it. It was Wei Feng’s idea. He had a vision of the times to come. A dark, fearful vision. He had his sons swear to him on his deathbed. I tried—“ “Acch ...” Wu Shih’s face creased with pain and disappointment. “How could you, Yuan?”
Li Yuan looked down for a brief moment, like a son being chastised by his father. Yet when he looked up again, his eyes were clear. “I thought it might be necessary. The times—“ “The times excuse nothing, Yuan. Good and evil do not change with the times, morality is a constant. Besides, T’ang must be T’ang, not the puppets of other men. How else can they rule in confidence and in the fullness of their power?”
Li Yuan stared back at him, saying nothing.
“So. It has come to this, eh? When even we cannot trust each other.”
“I am still your friend, Wu Shih. Such trust as we had remains.” Wu Shih shook his head, then let the letter fall. “No,LiYuan. There is no trust between us anymore. Nor can we be friends, not after this.” A small, shivering sigh escaped him. “You shame your father’s memory.” Li Yuan’s face was hard, resentful. “No, Wu Shih. I have tried only to keep this great world of ours from slipping into chaos. My father would have seen the necessity. He, I’m certain, would have approved.” “There are other ways.”
“There are only those ways which work and those which fail. You say the times mean nothing, but I disagree. If a man must sometimes do evil to achieve great good, then that is a path he is compelled to follow. The Wiring Project, for instance.”
“An abomination!” Wu Shih said angrily. “I should never have agreed. After all, how are men to find merit if the choice between good and ill is denied them?
“You think there is a choice any longer, cousin? For any of us?” Wu Shih stared at the young T’ang, astonished to find such a thing coming from his lips. “Surely there is. If I thought—“ “You blame me for Kennedy’s death, neh?”
Wu Shih hesitated, then nodded.
Li Yuan looked away, coming to terms with that, then looked back at him. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe I counseled you unwisely. But were you or I to know how the future would unfold? Would you have guessed, two years ago, that he would take his life?”
“No ...”
“Nor I. And who’s to say that any other means would not have brought the same result? No, Wu Shih. You were riding a tiger. I thought you understood that.”
“Maybe . . .”
Li Yuan looked down, sighing. “So what now? I suppose you want me to reveal the existence of the letter to my cousins.” “I...” Wu Shih nodded. All the fire had gone from him now, all the anger drained into a great soup of despair. The future was black. Was ashes. “By the way,” Li Yuan asked quietly. “How did you find out?”
He looked up, surprised to find himself experiencing a twinge of shame.
“It was our cousin Wang,” he answered quietly.
“Ah . . .” Li Yuan smiled sadly. “I should have guessed. . . .”
it fell slowly, almost widiout warning, the panicked messages of its maintenance crew unheeded at first amid the general chaos down below, and when finally they were, it was already too late. It hit like a giant bomb, impacting at over twenty thousand ch’i per second. The results were devastating. The City crumpled beneath it like a paper cup crushed by a fist. More than three hundred stacks disappeared instantly, and for over fifty H around the devastation was phenomenal. How many tens of millions died in that first instant? How many more in the great shock wave and fireball that followed? The unthinkable had happened. An orbital had fallen from the sky and a hole the size of Lake Superior had been punched in City North America.
The City was burning.
they had gathered about the screen in the main room, Michael, Mary, and all of the remaining staff. Many had gone already, leaving to be with their families in this time of crisis, though how many of them would make it home was another matter.
The news was growing worse by the minute. Even before the crash things had been tense, but now it was as if the lid had come off. The City had gone mad. Remotes, sent into the Lowers by the media channels, sent back scenes of awful carnage before they sparked and blacked out.
Mary stared at the screen, chewing a nail and moaning softly as image
followed dreadful image. Something had finally snapped in them, or been
stripped away. It was like watching animals. Faces driven mad by fear ran
past, or came to stare into the lens—grinning gargoyle faces animated by
hate and an insane and violent anger. Faces that yapped and bit and
howled.
“We must do something,” she said for the dozenth time. Sure. But what? How did one cope with this kind of thing? Maybe one could only watch . . . yes, and pray that something survived once the baying ceased and a more human light returned to those feral eyes. The City was burning.
“Em...”
Michael touched her arm, then drew her aside, talking to her quietly but urgently. “Look, we have to get going. The cruiser’s here, up top. We’ve seats on one of the shuttles. If we go now—“ She shook off his arm. “Go? How can we go? Look at it! They need us, Michael.”
“Need us? You really think we can do anything about all that? No, Em, it’s gone. Fallen apart. And we’ve got to get out of here right now or we’ll go with it.”
She stared at him as if staring at a stranger. Gone? No, it couldn’t have gone. Not that quickly.
She looked back at the screen. Wu Shih was in the picture now, surrounded by his senior Security officers, standing at the edge of the great crater, examining a fallen stack, his face lined with grief, his eyes misted with tears.
“Gone ...” she said, understanding at last. “It has all gone, hasn’t it?” “Yes,” he said, squeezing her arm. “Look, Em ... I know you want to help, but there’s nothing we can do. Not from here. Europe. We’ll go to Europe, and then . . . well, maybe we can come back when it’s all died down. Maybe we can help rebuild.”
She stared at him, taken in by the lie even as she recognized it for what it was. There would be no reconstruction. Not after this. The City was burning.
st. louis was gone, and Springfield, and most of the area up to Peoria in the north and Evansville in the west.
Wu Shih stared at the makeshift map that had been laid out on the trestle table and shook his head in disbelief. The crater was marked on the map in black—a huge circle centered on a place called Pana. Beyond it was a band of red, shaped like the yolk of an egg, bulging more to the east and the plantations than to the west, where the City had taken the full force of the explosion. Where they were, in the east stack of Indianapolis, was on the very edge of that outer circle, just beyond the red, more than five hundred li from the epicenter, yet even here the damage was phenomenal. He had flown back over a landscape so changed, it seemed like something from a dream. Farther in, toward the epicenter, the stacks had melted down and formed strange shapes, like hideous parcels little taller than a man . . . but here they were almost untouched. Untouched, yet eerily silent.