"I've heard of this," Luca told Tris.
It occurred in a story his father had told him. About the first ambassador from Luca's people to set out for the Forbidden City. He began the trip without permission from the Tsungli Yamen, the Bureau of Foreign Affairs. And having packed his family gods into a lacquer trunk and commanded his servants to carry himself and his wife in separate sedan chairs, he set out for the capital of the 2023 worlds, leaving Luca's father in charge of his affairs.
Luca's father never told his son exactly what happened, but over the years Luca came to understand that it was a disaster. The sedan chairs were found ripped apart in a ravine near the start of the plateau. A silk changfu belonging to the ambassador's wife was discovered two days later, tied to a pole like a flag and rammed into the snow.
That was all Luca's father ever said.
The original Baron Pacioli had hated the 2023 worlds. No one in the worlds did what they were told, because there was no one but the Library to tell them what to do and the Library never told, it merely suggested.
This had taken Luca's father most of his life to understand. No families were bound to other families. No groups depended for employment or shelter on the obligation of others. Indeed, Luca's father wasn't sure the concept of family even existed on most of the 2023 worlds in any sense he understood.
People lived, they were fed by the Library and they died when they wanted. No codes enforced dress or behaviour. Names, sexes, body shapes and relationships were fluid and all could be changed without attracting approbation.
And in the middle of this chaotic fluidity lived the Chuang Tzu, his every move subject not just to age-old rules and regulations but to intense interest and speculation from the 148 billion individuals Luca's father assumed the Emperor existed to govern.
Because there was the other problem. So far as Baron Pacioli could work out, the Emperor issued no laws and delivered no judgements, no one needed his permission to do anything. The throne was powerless, his importance apparently token. Unless, of course, that stuff about the weather was true and chaos was what the Emperor required from his subjects.
"Which world?" Luca asked, suddenly turning back to face Tris.
"What?"
They were at the edge of the chasm and the rope bridge disappeared into the blizzard ahead of them. Luca and Tris had been standing like this for some time.
"Which world are you from?" said Luca. "They all have names, don't they?" He'd known those names once, as a small child.
"We've been through this." The girl's voice was entirely matter-of-fact. "I don't come from a world."
"You must," Luca said. "Where else could you be from?"
"Heliconid," said Tris. "You won't have heard of it."
In the end it was Tris who stepped onto the bridge. She had Luca's rope tied around her waist and both thorn sticks strapped across her back. She had her blade drawn and held in her right hand. For some reason Luca found this hysterically funny, although he wouldn't tell her why.
Testing each plank before putting her weight on it meant it took Tris the best part of an hour to cover a distance she could have walked in five minutes at her normal speed. And when the blizzard cleared and the far end of the bridge remained resolutely out of sight, Tris agreed with Luca that they'd have to do it differently.
"Okay," she said, as she untied the rope knotted around her waist and handed it to Luca. "I need you to lengthen this." Tris didn't know how Luca would do it, she only knew he could.
"Much better," said Tris, when he returned the end to her.
Retying the rope around her waist, Tris tested the knot by yanking it as hard as she could. "We don't have time to check every step," Tris said, sounding more sure than she felt. "So I'm going to walk normally and you'll save me if I fall through. And if you fall through then I'll save you... Although that's not as likely."
Afterwards Tris came to believe that she'd walked the bridge for weeks, maybe months, suspended over a nothingness so deep that, even on the afternoons the snow cleared, she never saw the bottom.
In fact, it took less than three days. Seventy-two hours during which a final figure of ninety-eight billion people watched Tris slip into a mental state little higher than stupefaction. It was during the last of these days that Tris decided she would burn the Chuang Tzu's precious pavilions around his ears.
She didn't remember telling Luca this, although she remembered his answer. Which was that the idea probably acquired its all-encompassing appeal from the fact that she was dying of cold.
The sheer strangeness of Tris's journey was enough to make even those who scorned the feeds decide to make an exception. Rumour in the 2023 worlds was a strange beast, widely recognized and little understood, except by a few ancient mememagicians who studied more for the sake of study than from hope of surpassing the early masters.
Somehow, during those seventy-two hours, the idea that watching a girl from a non-world walk a bridge might be culturally required reached tipping point, jumping from those who would watch anything rather than live themselves to those who treated all external input with suspicion. From here, the tale of her ridiculous quest passed to the cold immortals, who found meaning not in her intention to kill an emperor who waited impatiently for her arrival but in the sheer innocence of her battle against his weather.
She became, without knowing it, the container for a billion conflicting interpretations of what it meant to be alive.
A few million bet on her survival, others set out for Rapture to offer their help or to attempt to duplicate her journey, but most just watched from the corner of their minds, not letting Tris's journey take up too much of their thoughts but never forgetting it either.
In a civilisation once described by one of its oldest minds as an endless dinner party at which no one knew who were guests and who the waiters, what occasion was being celebrated or who was paying for the meal, Tris's battle with herself engrained itself into the conversation.
It helped, of course, that no one knew who the girl was or why she talked to a companion no one else could see. There were no eight degrees of separation, nor sixteen, thirty-two or sixty-four... She was tabula rasa, which was interesting and in its own way quite terrifying to worlds in which everyone knew each other, even if they didn't.
CHAPTER 44
Marrakech, Summer 1977 [Then]
The deal offered to Jake was simple.
Exile.
Jake would leave Marrakech, taking Celia with him. Riad al-Razor would be sold, within the month if possible and certainly by the end of that summer. As it turned out, Major Abbas was able to recommend a discreet and trustworthy agent who could be relied on both to find a suitable buyer and handle any legal matters that might arise.
And it would be best if their Peugeot was included in the price of the sale. Did Jake have any problems with the suggestions so far?
De Greuze said nothing during all of this. The revelation about Jake's family had shifted his priorities and he wasn't about to mess with the grandson of a known philanthropist with the direct ear of the American President. All the same, he'd already palmed one of the nude photographs of that boy which Jake had dealt so casually from the pile with his thumb, leaving a really rather beautiful fingerprint.
Jake and Celia were sitting on the pink-painted wicker sofa, de Greuze had pulled up the largest chair without being asked and Major Abbas had announced that he preferred to stand. Moz had been sent to the kitchen to make mint tea.
"Here," he said, banging his tray onto the table.
Celia smiled. "I'll have mine unsweetened. You'd better check with the others." When the tea was poured into glasses, she made him go back for a plate of pastries, mostly chopped pistachio mixed with honey and variations on baklava.