Concessions were made, an uneasy peace maintained, but the divisions between rulers and ruled remained, their conflicting desires - the Seven for Stasis, the Dispersionists for Change - unresolved. Amongst those concessions the Seven had permitted the Dispersionists to build a starship, The New Hope. As the ship approached readiness, the Dispersionists pushed things even further at Weimar, impeaching the tai - the Representatives of the Seven in the House - and effectively declaring their independence. In response the Seven destroyed The New Hope. War was declared.
The five year "War-that-Wasn't-a-War" left the Dispersionists broken, their leaders dead, their Companies confiscated. The great push for Change had been crushed and peace returned to Chung Kuo. But the war had woken older, far stronger currents of dissent. In the depths of the City new movements began to arise, seeking not merely to change the system, but to revolutionise it altogether. One of these factions, the Ping Tiao, or "Levellers", wanted to pull down the great City of three hundred levels and destroy the Empire of the Han.
Among the ruling council of the Ping Tiao was a young Hung Mao, or "European" woman, Emily Ascher. Driven by a desire for social justice, Emily orchestrated a campaign of attacks on corrupt officials designed to destabilise City Europe. But her fellows on the council were not satisfied with such piecemeal and "unambitious" methods and when the new Dispersionist leader, DeVore, offered them an alliance, they grabbed it against her advice.
Once a Major in Li Shai Tung's Security service, Howard DeVore was instrumental in both the assassination of Li Han Ch'in and the "War" that followed. Based on Mars, he sent in autonomous copies of himself to do his bidding, using any means possible to destroy the Seven and their City. The House of Representatives, the Dispersionists, the Ping Tiao - each in turn was used then discarded by him, cynically and without thought for the harm done to individuals. Aided by a network of young Security officers he had recruited over the years, he fought a savage guerrilla war against his former Masters, his only aim, it seemed, a wholly nihilistic one.
Yet the Seven were not helpless in the face of such assaults. Tolonen, promoted to Marshal of the Council of Generals, recruited a giant of a man, Gregor Karr, a "blood" or to-the-death fighter from the lowest levels of the City, the "Net", to act as his foil against DeVore and the Dispersionists. Karr was joined by another low-level fighter named Kao Chen - one of the two assassins responsible for the attack on the Imperial solarium that had begun the struggle.
For a time the status quo was maintained, but three of the most senior T'ang died during the War with the Dispersionists, leaving the Council of Seven weaker and more inexperienced than they'd been in all the long years of their rule. When Wang Sau-leyan, the youngest son of Wang Hsien, ruler of City Africa, became T'ang after his father's suspect death, things looked ominous, particularly as the young man seemed to delight in creating turmoil among the Seven. But Li Yuan, inheriting from his father, formed effective alliances with his fellow T'ang, Wu Shih of North America, Tsu Ma of West Asia and Wei Feng of East Asia to block Wang in Council, outvoting him four to three.
Even so, as Chung Kuo's population continued to grow, further concessions had to be made. The great Edict of Technological Control - the means by which the Seven had kept change at bay for more than a century - was to be relaxed, the House of Representatives at Weimar reopened, in return for guarantees of population controls.
For the first time in fifty years the Seven began to tackle the problems of their world, facing up to the necessity for limited change, but was it too late? Were the great tides of unrest unleashed by earlier wars about to overwhelm them?
8
It certainly seemed so. And when DeVore managed to persuade Li Yuan's newly-appointed General, Hans Ebert, to secretly ally with him, the writing seemed on the wall.
Hans Ebert had it all; handsome, strong, intelligent, he was heir to the genetics and Pharmaceuticals Company, GenSyn -Chung Kuo's largest manufacturing concern - but he was also a vain, amoral young man, a cold-blooded "hero" with the secret ambition of deposing the Seven and becoming "King of the World", an ambition DeVore assiduously fed. While Ebert turned a blind eye, DeVore began to construct a chain of fortresses in the Alpine wilderness at the heart of City Europe, preparing for the day when he might bring it all crashing down. But that was not to be. Karr and Kao Chen, aided by a young lieutenant, Haavikko, uncovered the plot and revealed it to Marshal Tolonen, whose own daughter, Jelka, was betrothed to Hans Ebert. Tolonen, childhood companion of Ebert's father, Klaus, went straight to his lifelong friend and told him of his son's betrayal, allowing him twenty-four hours to deal with the matter personally.
Hans, meanwhile had been instructed by Li Yuan to destroy the network of fortresses. His hands tied, he did so, then returned to face his father. Klaus would have killed his only son, but Hans' goat-like helper - a creation of his father's genetic laboratories - killed the old man. Hans fled the planet and was condemned to death in his absence.
Li Yuan, it would seem, was saved. Yet the seed of destruction had been sown elsewhere, in the infatuation of his cousin Tsu Ma for Li Yuan's beautiful wife, Fei Yen. Their brief, clandestine affair was ended by Tsu Ma, but not before the damage was done. Fei Yen fell pregnant. Li Yuan was at first delighted, but then, when Fei Yen defied him and, late in her pregnancy, went riding, he destroyed her horses. She left him, returning to her father's house. There, alone with him, she told him that the child she was carrying was not his. Devastated, he returned home and, after his father's death, divorced Fei Yen, thus preventing her son - born two days after his coronation - from inheriting. The rift, it seemed, was final. He married again that day, taking three wives, determined to put the past behind him.
But time casts long shadows. Just as the brutal pattern of the tyrant Tsao Ch'un's thinking was imprinted in the restrictive levels of his great world-spanning city, so the blight of those twin betrayals - by his wife and by his most trusted man, his General, Hans Ebert - was imprinted deep in Li Yuan's psyche. A darkness settled within the young T'ang, leading him to pursue new and quite radical solutions to his City's problems -solutions like the Wiring Project.
As civil unrest proliferated and control gradually slipped from the Seven, as the lower levels of their great Cities slowly fell into the hands of the Triads and the false Messiahs, so the temptation to control the civilisation by other means grew. For Li Yuan there had long been only one solution. All of his citizens would be "wired" - a controlling device placed in every adult's head so they might be tracked and, if necessary, destroyed. It was a vile solution, but no viler, perhaps, than the alternative - to see the great Cities melt away and the rule of the Seven at an end.
As if to emphasise that necessity, new opposition groups sprang up one after another - the violently terrorist Yu, the North American-based Sons of Benjamin Franklin, the Black Hand, and many more, each wishing to destroy what was and replace it with their own vision of what a society should be. The demand for Change became a mad scramble for power. Yet still the Seven maintained control ... of a kind.