Zaq had little trouble imagining the darkness. So little trouble that he sometimes borrowed the name for himself, putting it on and taking it off like a cloak.
His mind had been full of monsters for as long as he could remember. And though his mother referred to the menagerie inside his head as imaginary friends, this was wrong on so many counts that Zaq merely smiled.
The butterfly who came in the night was just pretend. That's what his mother said and his brother Eli agreed. As for being the new emperor...
Breakfast was withheld, then lunch and supper. Three days later, with the boy protesting bitterly and frozen to his bones with hunger, Maria gave up being cross and went to see Dr. Joyce again, letting Eli guide her down through the levels until she reached Razor's Edge. In a moment of unusual charity the elderly splice merchant suggested Maria prepare herself for the possibility that Zaq's claim was true.
One of the first things Zaq learnt after rebirth was how the very first Chuang Tzu awoke. With darkness and cold, small voices and words spoken without being understood.
Let me out, please...
CTzu 1/Year 127.
He woke once when he died and again when he was reborn. Neither time did the young Chinese navigator understand what had happened to him, though what had happened was that the recently promoted Major Commissar was decanted into memory by the darkness and held there while his body was recreated.
The recreation of his physical self was an idea the darkness took from the young navigator. An interesting idea and not one which the darkness had encountered before because the darkness was immortal, at least in terms that the Chinese officer might understand and Chuang Tzu was only the second sentient being the darkness had encountered.
It being the first.
What the darkness took from Chuang Tzu's unfrozen body was not exactly the man's memories, nor was it a straight map of his neural connections or the chemical pathways established in his body. It was a collection of fragile associations. A collection it used to re-create the fleeting, ever-changing illusion of stability which the Chinese officer regarded as himself.
The darkness created Chuang Tzu's new body from its map of the original, taking time to modify a few design errors and make a small number of almost unnoticeable improvements. Inside the navigator's cells telomeres became semi self-mending, DNA began to zip and unzip without introducing errors. Minor things.
"Wake," said a voice.
Chuang Tzu awoke. And found himself in a painting. There was no other way to describe it. Red Room at the Hall of Victory was a very famous painting, one found as a print in doctors' offices, police stations and classrooms across the Middle Kingdom. Party members tended to keep a copy at home, displayed prominently.
Grandfather Luo, very definitely an ex-Party member, had kept his in the outside privy, nailed crudely to the wall. There were some advantage of being too famous to kill.
The Red Room in question was small, higher than it was wide and decorated with carved panels that flaked gold leaf to reveal a red undercoat beneath. There were five panels to the north and south walls, which was an auspicious number, and every panel displayed a dragon curling in on itself.
Li Xiucheng, the real loyal prince, had died here and been found in this room, stripped of his clothes, his seal of office and the jade rings he wore. All stolen by those who were meant to be guarding him.
Until he woke in it, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu had been of the opinion that the Red Room existed only as Party propaganda. And then, as he rolled over on a couch, Chuang Tzu realized that waking here now did not necessarily make that incorrect. He could be dead or hallucinating or even in the process of dying and lost to a vision induced by oxygen starvation and the shutdown of his higher brain.
Everything about the room was right and yet, at the same time, utterly wrong. When the young navigator tried to lift away the golden blanket covering his body he found it stiff like a board, fitted to his shape and so heavy that he was forced to heave against its weight.
"See?" Chuang Tzu said to himself. "You're hallucinating."
And with that the blanket became lighter, then floppy. And just as Chuang Tzu began to notice that its surface was still scratchy this also changed, until the material become so soft that it was as delicate as goose down.
"Too soft," said the navigator, only half to himself, and felt the blanket become like an emperor's blanket, comfortable and yet not impossibly soft.
"I should be afraid," Chuang Tzu told himself.
Waking in a painting that changed to match his thoughts... How could he not be afraid? Yet fear was the last thing Chuang Tzu felt because he had dreamed his entire life of a world where what he wanted just was...
Of course, the want itself changed.
At eight he'd been desperate to live underwater. And when Grandfather Luo had decided that paying a pig man to spread night soil on their fields was unhygienic and had a septic tank sunk into the bank behind their farm instead, Chuang Tzu's ideas changed and he wanted his own tank, sunk into the reeds by Sky Lake, with the fat pipe as an underwater entrance and the thin pipe reaching up for air.
This was Chuang Tzu's second year in the village when things were not at their best.
After the water came dreams of flying. He would swoop down the valley and beneath him spread Grandfather Luo's farm and the small village his family used to own before people became polite enough to forget such things. Wind would howl in his face, lifting him higher and higher until he was just a dot against the winter sky. It was always winter when Chuang Tzu flew, even when he dreamt in summer.
These were waking dreams. A world behind his eyes more real than the one which his father's death and Grandfather Luo's disgrace forced him to inhabit.
Fantasies, Madame Mimi called them, a waste of his life. Once, after she'd shouted at Chuang Tzu for not feeding the chickens, Grandfather Luo was instructed to beat sense into the boy. So he took the boy to the ice hut, a broad leather belt with a swinging buckle dangling from his wizened hand.
"I don't want to do this," the old man said.
"So don't," said Chuang Tzu.
Grandfather Luo smiled. "I don't intend to."
They sat on a log together, looking out towards the road bridge. Across the river they could see hills and beyond these the western mountains. The evening was heavy with monkey cloud and the far end of the valley was already half hidden in shadow.
Darkness came slowly, touching the mountains last. And still Grandfather Luo sat in the gathering gloom, watching the distant peaks turn purple, and said nothing. It was night before the old man rose unsteadily to his feet and straightened up, putting one hand to his back.
"I'm old," he said.
The boy nodded.
"And this night air is not good for me."
At dawn Chuang Tzu fed the chickens and set off for school before either of his grandparents came down for breakfast. When they did, they found a jug of fresh water drawn from the well, ready for Madame Mimi to make tea.
"You should have beaten him earlier," she said. "I told you it would work."
"So you did," agreed the old man. "So you did..."
At the age of eleven other dreams began. In each Chuang Tzu was a hero, brave beyond imagining and strong enough to fight his way through torrents and climb sheer cliffs. This puzzled the boy, who much preferred intelligence and cunning, until he realized that every dream ended with him rescuing a girl and that rescuing her somehow involved removing her clothes.
Beyond the window of the painted Red Room were mountains, a whole range of them, or so Chuang Tzu had always assumed. A smear of grey and a slash of black, narrow strokes like some childish exercise in calligraphy to denote fir trees. A wash of blue, overlapped at the end where the brush turned back on itself.