He shivered and threw the knife down, then reached inside. As he did the child opened its eyes and put its arms up to him.
"Gods . . ." he whispered, cradling it awkwardly against his chest, amazed by the living warmth of it. "Kuan Yin preserve us..."
There was no printing on the label, only three handwritten characters - Chuang Kuan Ts'ai - "fitting up the coffin".
He frowned, angry suddenly, wanting to go at once and confront the Registry Official, to curse him for his carelessness. . . then he stopped, pondering the situation.
The child was dead. Officially dead. The forms were signed, the paperwork filled out. If it had not cried out just then he would have fed the crate into the Oven's mouth.
"Dead," he said, surprised by the strangeness of the word in his mouth, then held the child out, away from him, studying it. It was a pretty little thing, a faint wisp of dark hair covering its scalp. If it had been his . . .
He took a long breath. No one knew. No one but him. He could kill the child or save it. And if he saved it?
Slowly he drew the child back towards him, cradling itgentiy, tenderly against his chest, then looked down into its face, conscious of its dark eyes staring back at him.
"Well, little Chuang," he said softly, a smile lighting features that had never before that moment smiled. "Now what are we to do with you?"
Part One - Spring 2232
china on the rhine
"Orchids in spring and chrysanthemums in autumn: So it shall go on until the end of time."
- Honouring The Dead, Li Hun, 2nd century bc "Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself."
- Beyond Good And Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886
CHAPTER-1
days of ease
Tom stood at the prow of the imperial barge, one hand shielding his eyes against the sun's glare, the other gripping the rail as he looked south. It was stiflingly hot and traffic on the Rhine was heavy, but all gave way before the golden barge and the great banner which hung limply in the air above its prow.
He gazed up at it. Once, so his father said, the Ywe Lung would have flown, the great wheel of seven dragons circling snout to tail, their eyes forming a seven-starred hub at the centre, but those days were long past. For ten years now this new flag had flown throughout the great northern city - a red dragon, emblazoned across a full white moon, like a bloodied eye staring out from the starless black.
Tomorrow, for the first time, he would meet the owner of that dragon, the great T'ang, Li Yuan himself. Tomorrow, when they docked at Mannheim, on the marbled shore before the San Chang, the imperial palace, he would step down and ritually embrace his father's oldest friend.
A heavily-laden junk was passing thirty yards to port, its sails furled, its engine chugging softly. Its dozen or so crew members - shaven-headed Han - stared curiously, almost insolently, back at him, knowing from his Hung Mao face that he was not one of the imperial family.
He looked beyond them. Crowds packed the embankment everywhere he gazed, drawn by the passing of the T'ang's own vesseclass="underline" young and old, male and female, their bare-arsed children - round-faced and endlessly identical - propped up before them on the long stone wall. The people, the unending masses of the people.
Tom frowned. He had lived all his life on the river, on the shore of the peaceful Dart, but this was different. This huge winding waterway could swallow up a thousand Darts. Nothing in his sixteen years could have prepared him for this. No, not for the masses that packed its banks for hundreds of miles to either side, nor for the endless rows of identical one-storey houses with their high grey walls and their orange-red terracotta-tiled roofs.
He closed his eyes, searching - for that brief moment searching in his mind - for Sampsa, but for once there was no second presence in his head. He sighed and glanced down at his hands where they gripped the rail. It was as his mother said: he had grown too insular, too self-enclosed.
He half-turned, looking to where his father's women sat on the upper deck, ensconced in huge, cushioned chairs, a pale silk awning shading them. Catherine, wearing a dark green dress that matched her eyes, stared languidly into space, as if in trance, her flame red hair let down despite the heat. Beside her his mother slowly fanned herself, her own dark, lustrous hair gathered in a tight bun at her neck. As he watched, a steward brought iced drinks then, bowing, backed away.
He studied them, surprised once again by the strength of feeling - that strange bond of familiarity - which linked him to them. They had had the worst of it these past six months while his father had been away. Not that life was hard in the Domain - far from it - yet he had seen how much they missed his father's presence. As if the place were empty without him.
Empty . . . The idea made him realise just how fortunate they were to have the Domain; how tranquil his existence was. In their slow progress up-river they had passed through the crowded hutong of the northern city and he had glimpsed something of the people who inhabited that endless systems of canals and narrow alleyways. So different those lives were, so circumscribed. Alone in his head, watching them, he had begun to reflect upon his own existence. Had he been born within that sprawl, his life might well have been one of endless misery, endless struggle. He would have been but another mute, another face to be fed. As it was he had a name. Useless as his tongue was, he was still a Shepherd, and that counted for something in this world. Yet what was he to do with it? Was he to follow his father's example? Or was there something better for him to do? Something linked, perhaps, to what he'd newly seen?
He sighed, his thoughts grown vague, and turned back, staring out at the crowded shore again. Here, half a day's sail from Mannheim and the San Chang - the Imperial Palaces -the river's banks were dominated by the factories of the four great Companies - SimFic, GenSyn, MedFac and NorTek -each massive complex surrounded by sprawling warrens of cramped workers' houses, all of it constructed in the traditional Han style his father had first envisaged a dozen years ago.
The thought made him smile, for this was his father's world, grown from his head, just as surely as the old world had been the dream of Old Amos Shepherd, two centuries before. This was Ben Shepherd's world: his dream of China on the Rhine.
Tom laughed silently, wondering if anyone else thought that strange, or whether he alone understood just how deeply - how profoundly - his father had changed, had subverted, history. The fiction - that sensory network of lies his father had presented to the world as The Familiar - had now become reality.
But so it was. It was the way of men to make their dreams into realities. Heaven or Hell, it did not matter. Such was the species' glory . . . and its curse.
Tom stared at the web-like shape of the great NorTek complex and sighed, wondering what Sampsa was doing at that moment, wishing he could see through his eyes. Even now Ward, Sampsa's father, was up there in space somewhere, preparing to test-fire his lasers. And if they worked . ..
If they work, then another dream begins.
For a moment he wondered about Ward. He had seen the man so often - working, playing and at rest - but still he did not fully understand what drove the Clayborn, no more than he understood his own father. SimFic had bought the ailing European arm of the great NorTek Corporation and given the gutted company to Ward. And it had proved a wise move. These days the city was full of Ward's subtle inventions, put out under SimFic's licence. It was hard to think of a single aspect of modern life that was untouched by his clever mind. Yet what Tom knew - knew because he had seen, through Sampsa's eyes - was that Ward himself thought such innovations trivial, a waste of time and talent.