Those two were Ben Shepherd and Kim Ward, the former the most talented artist of his time, the latter the most gifted scientist. Growing up during these years of dramatic change, their work came to represent a level of creative life which, for more than a century, had been harshly suppressed by the Seven. The world into which they were born was culturally sterile: its science was at a standstill, filling in gaps in old research and perfecting machines developed centuries before;
its art even worse, having returned to principles more than 1500 years old. Its scientists were technicians, its artists artisans. Coming into this climate of creative atrophy - a climate carefully nurtured by the Edict and the "Rules of Art" - Ben and Kim could not help but be revolutionary.
Ben Shepherd, the great-great grandson of the City's architect, was born in the Domain, an unspoilt valley in England's West Country. There, in those idyllic surroundings, was nurtured his fascination with mimicry, darkness and "the other side" which was to culminate eventually in his development of a wholly new art form, the Shell. Over the years he would shamelessly draw upon his own life - the death by cancer of his father, the lost love of a young woman named Catherine, and his complex sexual relationship with his sister, Meg - weaving these elements together to create a powerful tale.
Kim Ward, on the other hand, was a product of the Clay, that dark land beneath the City's foundations. Rescued from that savage hell, he spent the formative years of his early youth in State institutions, surviving that brutal regime through an astonishing quickness of mind and a matching physical agility. His innate talents recognised by Berdichev, Head of the great SimFic Corporation and a leading Dispersionist, Kim was bought and then, almost as casually, discarded when Kim's darker side - rooted in his experiences in the Clay - emerged after one particularly provocative incident when he badly hurt another boy.
Fortunately Berdichev was not the only one to recognise Kim's unique intellectual talents and he found an unexpected benefactor in Li Yuan, who, when Ward emerged from a long period of character reconstruction, gave him both his freedom and the wherewithal to begin his own Company in North America. But that was not to be. The Old Men, seeing in Kim the means of achieving their dream of Immortality, deliberately set about destroying his business venture, hoping to force his hand. But Ward would not serve them.
Kim had other dreams, among them that of marrying the Marshal's beautiful daughter, Jelka. But Tolonen would not permit the match and sent his daughter away on a tour of the colony planets. Kim, devastated, swore to wait until she came of age and signed a seven year contract as a Commodity slave with the SimFic Corporation in a deal that would make him fantastically rich. And while he waited he would pursue his other dream - his vision of a great Web, first glimpsed in the dark wilderness of the Clay.
Shepherd and Ward, Shell and Web - the two were antithetical, representing in many ways those very things over which Li Yuan and DeVore had fought for so long -the "Two Directions" facing Mankind.
Ben's Shell was the image of inwardness, a body-sized sensory-deprivation unit designed to replace objective reality with a subjective experience that was more powerful than real life. Unlike reality, however, its very perfection was as seductive and consequently as addictive as the most lethal drug, its perfection a form of death by separation - a withdrawal from the world.
The Web, on the other hand, was the very symbol of outwardness, a vision of an all-connecting light: quite literally so, for Kim's Web was conceived as a means of linking the very stars themselves.
The safety of the past or the uncertainty of the future? Inwardness or outwardness? Connection or Separation? These choices, like the perpetual Yin and Yang of the ancient Tao itself, would determine Chung Kuo's future. Yet the shadows cast by past events would also play their part.
Back in the Summer of 2203, Li Shai Tung called together his relatives, his advisors and his closest friends, to celebrate the betrothal of his son, Li Yuan, to the Princess Fei Yen. But while outwardly he smiled and laughed, secretly the old T'ang had misgivings about the match. Fei Yen had been his murdered elder son's wife and, though the marriage had never been consummated, it felt wrong - an affront against tradition - to let his younger son, now heir, step into his dead brother's shoes so blatantly.
That same day, his son received two special gifts. The first was from Li Shai Tung's arch-enemy, DeVore. It was a wet chi set, a hardwood board and two wooden pots of rounded stones. Such a gift was not unusual, yet whereas in a normal wet chi set there would be one hundred and eighty-one black stores and one hundred and eighty white, DeVore had sent three hundred and sixty one white stones. Stones carved from human bone.
Symbolically the board was Chung Kuo, the stones its people. And white . . . white was traditionally the Han colour of death. DeVore was telling Li Shai Tung that he would fill the world with death.
But there was a second gift, this time from the Marshal's daughter, Jelka. Her betrothal present to Li Yuan was a set of miniature carved figures: eight tiny warriors - the eight heroes of Chinese legend, their faces blacked to represent their honour.
Shocked by the symbolic message of the first gift, Li Shai Tung was delighted by the second. A bad omen had been overturned. There would be death, certainly, yet there would also be heroes to fight against its final triumph.
Yes. It was written. When the board was filled with white, then, finally, would the eight black heroes come.
And so it transpired. When DeVore finally returned, at the head of a vast army of copy selves, it was Hans Ebert and the Osu - eight black heroes - who faced him and, aided by the Machine, a benign Artificial Intelligence, defeated the great arch-enemy. The mile-high city was destroyed, the rule of the Seven effectively ended. Li Yuan, for once totally indebted to his servants and allies, was forced to promise to build a new world, different and more humane than the old. But that was ten years back . . .
PROLOGUE: WINTER 2225
abandoned in whiteness
"The cold night drum. Its arrow points to dawn.
In the clean mirror I see my haggard face.
Outside the window, wind startles the bamboo.
I open the door. Snow covers the whole mountain.
The sky of falling flakes quiets the paths and the big courtyard is abandoned in whiteness.
I wonder whether you're like old Yuan An in his house, locked away inside, and calm?"
-Wang Wei,
"Winter Night, Facing the Snow,
Thinking of the Lay Buddhist Hu"
8th Century ad
abandoned in whiteness
It was Ta Hsueh, the Time of Great Snow, and in the hutong of Kuang Hua Hsien paper lanterns hung outside every house. Among the dim-lit, crowded thoroughfares people were preparing for the festival. Charms had been pasted to doorways beside small strips of red and gilt paper bearing the character fu -"happiness". People stopped to talk or called cheerfully to each other as they passed, "Ni hao?" and 'Tsai chiea'"