A Tartar bow and a quiver full of arrows gathered dust on a gable high overhead. Not having seen a bow before, the servitor imagined it was some kind of single-stringed musical instrument.
The tray was his passport through the pavilions of the inner court. An ebony and jade passport laid with a glass cup, squat iron teapot and pre-warmed gold platter on which sat five types of dim sum, each one representing all that was best of the cuisine of the original Middle Kingdom.
Sous Chef Chang San had been careful to tell the servitor the significance of each morsel and how it related to the others on the plate. As well as jiaozi dumplings, Szechwan huntun and char siu bao (steamed buns with roast pork), there was har gao and, obviously enough, the sous chef's special pork dumplings.
The young man doubted if the sous chef really expected him to explain this to the Emperor. Failing that, however, there seemed little reason for Chang San's manic intensity or the way he demanded the servitor repeat back the descriptions to prove that he knew which of the slowly congealing lumps of food was which.
"You won't forget?"
"Of course not."
Chang San smiled thinly. "Be sure you don't." He wouldn't put it past the young man to claim the cooking as his own. There was something untrustworthy about the servitor's eyes, which were much too wide apart and possessed an unsettling insolence. Worse than this, his nails were filthy and Chang San found it hard to believe that any previous emperor would have been willing to take food served by someone with dirty hands.
"So," said the young servitor, as he casually broke a piece of crust off a deep-fried huntun and fed it to his rat, "what do you think?" But Null merely wrinkled its whiskers and looked round for more.
After the rat had dined on the oily edges, its master ate what was left of the filo base and most of the chilli and chicken filling, chewing the food with interest as he slid the rat back into his sleeve and rearranged the dim sum so that the plate still looked full.
"For the Emperor," he told a guard, and the man stepped back from a gold, red and green arch which was decorated with calligraphic banners praising the Chuang Tzu as the intermediary of heaven.
"For the Emperor..." Having called out these words, the man slammed his halberd into the tiles so hard that the weapon almost bounced out of his hand.
The interloper expected to find more guards in the Hall of Union but instead he found himself alone, facing a wooden throne. The throne was gilded, flanked by four lesser thrones, two on either side and all positioned a pace behind the throne of the Emperor. For reasons which were not immediately clear the lesser thrones were hidden under silk. Only the central one was uncovered.
It fitted him perfectly.
"You shouldn't be sitting there."
"Tell me about it," said the servitor and the voice in his head laughed a little sadly, or maybe it was bitterly. The servitor had always known that it was not really a voice, merely what his mind translated as a voice. It had been a long time since he'd expected other people to hear the things he heard.
Directly over the dais on which the throne sat was a panel painted with cryptograms representing Wu Wei, the fundamental Taoist principle of responding spontaneously and fluidly to any circumstance.
Above the panel hung a ceiling so ornate it made the servitor's head spin just to look at the intricacy of the gilded carving. He could make out endless dragons and, he thought, a phoenix, but most of the central carving was geometric, endless repetitions of a simple form.
A pale silk carpet covered the dais but the actual floor of the pavilion was dark stone pitted with age and scuffed with the feet of nearly five thousand years of ambassadors presenting their credentials.
The twenty-seven most commonly used seals rested inside a glass cabinet, some were soapstone, a few sandalwood but most were jade. All but three were in Manchu, one of those being in a language no one had ever identified.
Watched by at least a billion the servitor carried his tray across the courtyard to the third and last of the private pavilions. Heavenly Purity housed another, significantly more important, seat of power, the Lesser Throne from which the Emperor greeted ambassadors on their first arrival.
It was in this pavilion that his concubines should live, in eighteen bedrooms, arranged nine on both sides, each bedroom containing three beds, fifty-four in all.
All but one were deserted.
And it was this last that the Emperor had made his own. Neither the servitor nor the billions watching knew which room housed the Chuang Tzu because the feed was strangely imprecise about this.
"For the Emperor," said the servitor.
The officers who moved to intercept him wore scale armour made from star-shaped pieces of what looked like steel sewn at the points to a silk jacket, each attachment being protected by the body of the star next to it. An intricate and time-consuming way to create armour. Except that the officers' armour was summer-weight, carbon-based and required no tempering. It still swallowed the light, though, and presented itself with a solidity belied by its actual lightness.
"From the kitchens," the servitor said, lifting his tray slightly higher. Stepping between the guards, he swept through a door that opened as if his entry was expected and found himself in an anteroom, facing another guard in armour even more light-swallowing than that of the men he'd just left behind.
General Ch'ao Kai watched the young man walk towards him across an unlit floor, while outside drizzle cut across Rapture's sky and a cold wind slid through the pavilion and ate into his bones, more potent than fear.
"Everything's going to be all right," the servitor said, and then he nodded, repeating himself in little more than a whisper as billions of watchers begged leave to disagree. He spoke, of course, to the rat now frozen within his sleeve, liking the darkness but made fearful by the levels of anxiety radiating from its master.
"Food for His Celestial Excellency."
The General inclined his head just enough to include the young man within his gaze. He was hereditary leader of the guard, custodian of the inner door and an elder clansman of a lesser banner. It was true he commanded few fighting troops but with no enemy these were unnecessary. Quarrels might happen between the 2023 worlds but the worlds themselves could not fight each other, since each was dependent on all others for the fine gravitational balance which kept them in stable orbit.
One of the earliest of the Chuang Tzu had made this clear. Besides, in an empire of plenty where was the need for violence? No single culture had ever monopolized all 2023 worlds but a constant homogenization now more or less guaranteed the cultural equivalent of convergent evolution. The smallest differences might still seem massively significant, but major differences had long since been etched smooth by familiarity and time.
"What do you have there?"
The servitor glanced down at his tray. Now seemed a good time to state the obvious. "Five different kinds of dim sum," he said. "This is har gao and this Szechwan huntun, that's char siu bao..." He counted off the tiny offerings one at a time, silently giving thanks to the absent sous chef.
In the end it was the tray rather than the food which persuaded General Ch'ao Kai that the man spoke the truth. Inlaid ebony and a single slab of flawless mutton-fat jade. Only an emperor would be served on such a tray.