Beneath the Tree of Heaven

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The City, Burning

Wu shih paced to and fro, waiting to be put through to his cousin. He was

angry and tired and in no mood for compromise. It had been a long,

sleepless night, and the next day or two seemed likely to bring only fresh

outbreaks of violence. All attempts to stem the unrest that had followed

Kennedy’s on-air suicide had failed, even an appeal for calm by Mary

Lever.

“It’s all his fault,” he muttered, staring at the blank screen irritably, the fingers of his left hand tugging at the silk of his right sleeve. “If only he had not persuaded me to use that abominable wire.” It was true. Deep down he blamed Li Yuan for all of this. If he had only trusted to instinct and used older, more certain methods against Kennedy. I should have listened to my advisers, he thought. I should have had him killed, then none of this would have happened. No . . .but then how would I have slept?

There was a soft chime. The screen glowed gold. And then Li Yuan was facing him, concern on his face.

“Cousin Shih . . . how are you?”

“Li Yuan,” he answered, coldly, formally. At once the young T’ang’s face changed, frowning.

“What is it? What more has happened?”

In answer he held up the letter so that Yuan could see.

“Ah . . .” he said.

The last glimmer of doubt—and hope—died in Wu Shih’s breast. “You do not deny it, then?”

Li Yuan shook his head. “I never meant to use it. It was Wei Feng’s idea. He had a vision of the times to come. A dark, fearful vision. He had his sons swear to him on his deathbed. I tried—“ “Acch ...” Wu Shih’s face creased with pain and disappointment. “How could you, Yuan?”

Li Yuan looked down for a brief moment, like a son being chastised by his father. Yet when he looked up again, his eyes were clear. “I thought it might be necessary. The times—“ “The times excuse nothing, Yuan. Good and evil do not change with the times, morality is a constant. Besides, T’ang must be T’ang, not the puppets of other men. How else can they rule in confidence and in the fullness of their power?”

Li Yuan stared back at him, saying nothing.

“So. It has come to this, eh? When even we cannot trust each other.”

“I am still your friend, Wu Shih. Such trust as we had remains.” Wu Shih shook his head, then let the letter fall. “No,LiYuan. There is no trust between us anymore. Nor can we be friends, not after this.” A small, shivering sigh escaped him. “You shame your father’s memory.” Li Yuan’s face was hard, resentful. “No, Wu Shih. I have tried only to keep this great world of ours from slipping into chaos. My father would have seen the necessity. He, I’m certain, would have approved.” “There are other ways.”

“There are only those ways which work and those which fail. You say the times mean nothing, but I disagree. If a man must sometimes do evil to achieve great good, then that is a path he is compelled to follow. The Wiring Project, for instance.”

“An abomination!” Wu Shih said angrily. “I should never have agreed. After all, how are men to find merit if the choice between good and ill is denied them?

“You think there is a choice any longer, cousin? For any of us?” Wu Shih stared at the young T’ang, astonished to find such a thing coming from his lips. “Surely there is. If I thought—“ “You blame me for Kennedy’s death, neh?”

Wu Shih hesitated, then nodded.

Li Yuan looked away, coming to terms with that, then looked back at him. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe I counseled you unwisely. But were you or I to know how the future would unfold? Would you have guessed, two years ago, that he would take his life?”

“No ...”

“Nor I. And who’s to say that any other means would not have brought the same result? No, Wu Shih. You were riding a tiger. I thought you understood that.”

“Maybe . . .”

Li Yuan looked down, sighing. “So what now? I suppose you want me to reveal the existence of the letter to my cousins.” “I...” Wu Shih nodded. All the fire had gone from him now, all the anger drained into a great soup of despair. The future was black. Was ashes. “By the way,” Li Yuan asked quietly. “How did you find out?”

He looked up, surprised to find himself experiencing a twinge of shame.

“It was our cousin Wang,” he answered quietly.

“Ah . . .” Li Yuan smiled sadly. “I should have guessed. . . .”

it fell slowly, almost widiout warning, the panicked messages of its maintenance crew unheeded at first amid the general chaos down below, and when finally they were, it was already too late. It hit like a giant bomb, impacting at over twenty thousand ch’i per second. The results were devastating. The City crumpled beneath it like a paper cup crushed by a fist. More than three hundred stacks disappeared instantly, and for over fifty H around the devastation was phenomenal. How many tens of millions died in that first instant? How many more in the great shock wave and fireball that followed? The unthinkable had happened. An orbital had fallen from the sky and a hole the size of Lake Superior had been punched in City North America.

The City was burning.

they had gathered about the screen in the main room, Michael, Mary, and all of the remaining staff. Many had gone already, leaving to be with their families in this time of crisis, though how many of them would make it home was another matter.

The news was growing worse by the minute. Even before the crash things had been tense, but now it was as if the lid had come off. The City had gone mad. Remotes, sent into the Lowers by the media channels, sent back scenes of awful carnage before they sparked and blacked out.

Mary stared at the screen, chewing a nail and moaning softly as image

followed dreadful image. Something had finally snapped in them, or been

stripped away. It was like watching animals. Faces driven mad by fear ran

past, or came to stare into the lens—grinning gargoyle faces animated by

hate and an insane and violent anger. Faces that yapped and bit and

howled.

“We must do something,” she said for the dozenth time. Sure. But what? How did one cope with this kind of thing? Maybe one could only watch . . . yes, and pray that something survived once the baying ceased and a more human light returned to those feral eyes. The City was burning.

“Em...”

Michael touched her arm, then drew her aside, talking to her quietly but urgently. “Look, we have to get going. The cruiser’s here, up top. We’ve seats on one of the shuttles. If we go now—“ She shook off his arm. “Go? How can we go? Look at it! They need us, Michael.”

“Need us? You really think we can do anything about all that? No, Em, it’s gone. Fallen apart. And we’ve got to get out of here right now or we’ll go with it.”

She stared at him as if staring at a stranger. Gone? No, it couldn’t have gone. Not that quickly.

She looked back at the screen. Wu Shih was in the picture now, surrounded by his senior Security officers, standing at the edge of the great crater, examining a fallen stack, his face lined with grief, his eyes misted with tears.

“Gone ...” she said, understanding at last. “It has all gone, hasn’t it?” “Yes,” he said, squeezing her arm. “Look, Em ... I know you want to help, but there’s nothing we can do. Not from here. Europe. We’ll go to Europe, and then . . . well, maybe we can come back when it’s all died down. Maybe we can help rebuild.”

She stared at him, taken in by the lie even as she recognized it for what it was. There would be no reconstruction. Not after this. The City was burning.

st. louis was gone, and Springfield, and most of the area up to Peoria in the north and Evansville in the west.

Wu Shih stared at the makeshift map that had been laid out on the trestle table and shook his head in disbelief. The crater was marked on the map in black—a huge circle centered on a place called Pana. Beyond it was a band of red, shaped like the yolk of an egg, bulging more to the east and the plantations than to the west, where the City had taken the full force of the explosion. Where they were, in the east stack of Indianapolis, was on the very edge of that outer circle, just beyond the red, more than five hundred li from the epicenter, yet even here the damage was phenomenal. He had flown back over a landscape so changed, it seemed like something from a dream. Farther in, toward the epicenter, the stacks had melted down and formed strange shapes, like hideous parcels little taller than a man . . . but here they were almost untouched. Untouched, yet eerily silent.

Only corpses filled these levels.

He moved away from the table, looking about him at the huge, gutted shell of the place. In some ways it was worse here than on the edge of the crater. There, at least, the transformation had been so great as to defy the imagination. Here, however, it was only too easy to imagine the suffering. Here everything was scorched and blackened. Ash and debris scrunched underfoot wherever one trod. And the bodies . . . He shuddered, then closed his eyes, remembering, seeing the two bodies again, as if they were etched on his inner lid. They lay together on their backs, their knees up, their arms in a strange begging position, almost like dogs performing tricks. Looking closer he had noticed how their features had been erased—their faces made anonymous by the heat. Blackened tar covered their grinning skulls.

And the stench . . .

They were flying men in to pile up the dead, but it was a hopeless task.

They were piled everywhere one looked, and to burn them . . . He put his hand up to his face and began to sob. It was like what had happened on Mars. As if it were all happening again. Punishment . . , this was the punishment of the gods. Destruction . . . endless destruction. And nothing untouched. General Althaus came across, and bowed. “Am I needed here, Chieh Hsia? If not...”

Wu Shih shivered and then looked up, not bothering to wipe his tear-stained face, noticing the ash that stained his hands an unfamiliar black.

“No,” he answered wearily. “You’d best go. There’s nothing for us here.

Let’s save what can be saved.”

kemp ran down the corridor, his silks flapping, his breath gasping from him.

He had woken to a violent screaming from downstairs and to the smash of breaking vases. Locking his bedroom door behind him he had hurried to the House com, flicking through the viewing cameras with mounting panic. There were strangers in the house, roaming his corridors, thin-faced young men in faded one-pieces, humang— punks—by the looks of it. The screaming came from the downstairs scullery where three youths were taking turns fucking his youngest maid. He watched a moment, his heart thudding in his chest, then switched, looking to the main gate. The guard hut was empty. “Aiya!” he moaned softly, the bastards had deserted him! Then, knowing he had little time, he went to the door on the far side of the room and, taking the key from his pocket, opened it and slipped through, locking it on the other side.

The bathroom was a big, echoing room. On the far side, high up, was a window. He went across, picked up the bath chair, and set it down beneath the window. Climbing up, he looked out. The gap was narrow—maybe too narrow—and the drop . . . ten, twelve ch’i at least, maybe more. If he fell he’d break his hips, maybe his back, yet to stay... He sniffed. Fire. They had set fire to the Mansion. He whimpered, then began to pull himself up, the effort almost beyond him. Fear gave him strength, however, and for a moment he was balanced on the ledge, half in, half out.

Behind him the door-lock rattled. There was a shout of triumph.

“In here! The fucker’s in here!”

He cried out, terrified suddenly, and struggled to edge farther out.

Stuck . . . Aiya! I’m stuck!

Behind him the door thudded, as someone threw himself against it. There was more shouting, and then silence. A moment later a shot rang out. There was the sound of metal clattering across the floor behind him, and then the door burst open.

He couldn’t turn. Stuck there, he could only imagine them coming up beneath him. He closed his eyes, expecting another shot, but it didn’t come. Instead there was laughter. An awful mocking laughter. “Lao jen!” one of them taunted. “Laojen!”

Old man .. .

He heard the creak of the bath chair as one of them climbed up onto it, then his legs were tugged violently and he fell back, cracking his chin as he fell.

He lay there, stunned, his back numb. As his mouth filled with blood, he looked up through blurred and doubled vision into three young and snarling faces. “Laojen ...” one of them said gently, almost tenderly, putting a hand behind his neck as if to support him. And then the first blow fell, smashing his nose, blinding him with pain. “Lao jen...”

the imperial cruiser lifted slowly, the two guard ships already in position half a li up. Wu Shih, seated inside, looked out through the portal, frowning in stunned disbelief at the infernal scene below. It was hard to imagine that anyone had ever lived there. Hard to believe . . . As they edged out over the ruins, the cruiser hovered a moment, maneuvering about the outjutting edge of a fallen stack. As it did, a rocket streaked up from below and hit the cruiser near the tail. The explosion rocked the ship, yet miraculously, when the smoke cleared, it was still there. Slowly, very slowly, it began to spin, a trail of black smoke snaking from its gaping rear. For a moment it lifted, as if it was going to clear the outcrop, then it struck with a sickening crunch and began to fall back to the earth.

Inside, Wu Shih turned, staring back at the jagged hole that had appeared just behind where he was sitting. He was vaguely aware of someone screaming close by, an awful, ragged sound, but it was muted by the ringing in his ears. It was cold suddenly—bitterly cold—though the cabin itself was on fire. Smoke swirled like an ill-focused hologram. Out, he thought. I have to get out. .. .

In a haze he tried to release his belt, but for some reason his fingers were numb and wouldn’t work. Looking down he saw blood on his silks, a glint of bone through the bloodied flesh of his left arm. No, he thought. Not possible . . .

On the ground below soldiers were staring up, mouths agape, as the ship began to descend. A moment later they were scrambling for cover as small arms fire and mortars began raining down on them from nearby vantage points.

“It’s the Hand!” someone yelled. “It’s the fucking Black Hand!” There was shouting now and screams. Overhead the two escort cruisers had returned and were trying to get into the fight. The Pang’s ship struck the ground nose first, its reinforced frame buckling.

Trapped in his seat Wu Shih groaned and closed his eyes. Alive. I’m still alive. But the smoke was much thicker now that the ship had come to rest, and the flames . . .

He opened one eye. Two lines of blood lay like sticky threads across his vision, distorting it. He coughed, the pain like a tiny bomb exploding in his chest.

The flames . . .

He swallowed painfully. His silks were on fire. And his legs . . . both of his legs were crushed.

He groaned. Help me ... for the gods’ sake help me, I am a Son of Heaven.

. . .

Yet even as soldiers ran to assist, there was a small explosion and the whole ship lit up brightly. A mortar had hit it dead center. Watching from above, the captain of the second cruiser saw the missile strike and winced, knowing there was no chance anyone would have survived. “Oh, shit. . .” He groaned softly. “Oh, fucking shit! Kuan Yin preserve us now!”

the hatch was closed, the engines warming up. In an hour they would be in Europe.

Mary sat at the window seat, Michael beside her. In a few minutes the window shields would come down and that would be it. America would be like a dream. Something that had happened in another life. It was dark now; even so, the sky above the distant City was bright. Rumor had it that the imperial palace was a gutted ruin and that Wu Shih himself was dead . . . shot by an assassin, or murdered in his bed by one of his guards—the details were obscure. The only certainty was that it was all over for the great T’ang and his City.

Flames flickered in the thick glass of the portal, like snakes, evanescent. . . .

She had been so close to doing something real. So close to changing

things.

Dreams, she thought. Nothing but dreams.

She turned, pressing Michael’s hand briefly, giving him an encouraging smile. Home—for her this was a return home, but for him . . . For Michael this was a nightmare, a journey into darkness and uncertainty. As the window shields came down, she ducked her head, catching her last sight of America.

Of America . . . and of the City, burning.

INTERLUDE I SUMMER 2213