Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 7 Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 7 [The Future]

"What are you looking at?" demanded Zaq.

And while he was still wondering why his jade-framed mirror refused to answer, the young Emperor remembered. He'd promised to smash the glass if it ever spoke to him again and, as he'd pointed out at the time, neither of them could afford that much bad luck.

General Ch'ao Kai stood in front of the huge glass. Almost as if protecting it from the teenager's latest tantrum. The General was doing his best not to look disgusted.

Zaq had just returned from the Ambassadors' City, his disguise strewn on the floor behind him. No one was interested in plotting to overthrow him. They were interested in body modification, who'd lived the longest and which world was the richest, most highly cultured or threw the best parties. Politics seemed beyond them.

The week before, Zaq had trawled through the back alleys of the Servitors' City, in the clothes of a cook, searching the inns and brothels for co-conspirators. Needless to say he found none. Both cities were in agreement that the Chuang Tzu's existence was beneficial to the well-being of the 2023 worlds. So certain of this fact had tonight's group been that most ambassadors at the party had trouble even understanding his suggestion.

"Morons," Zaq said, wiping off the last of his make-up with the back of his hand. Outside his window rain lashed the glass and hammered pregnant drops against the roof, always a sign that the Emperor was upset. And who wouldn't be? Zaq had returned to his pavilion expecting to be allowed to sulk in peace and found five naked concubines arranged artistically on his bed.

"Kill them," the boy ordered.

Zaq was back in full costume, complete with court sword, his hair pulled into a black ponytail and tied with ribbon. Only servitors wore queues and although visiting ambassadors were told that the tradition carried over from ancient days when servitors still believed they might be lifted to heaven by their plaits, this was untrue. The Manchu had demanded it. A sign of servitude. One that had allowed the heads of the Han to be dragged easily across the chopping block.

He knew this for a fact. The Library had told him.

"Kill them," Zaq said. "I mean it."

General Ch'ao Kai tugged at the edge of his padded silk jacket, always an indication that he was worried. Any minute now the leopard's tail hanging from his ceremonial lance would start swinging in rigidly controlled fury. He'd served five emperors and Zaq was his least favourite. The old man would never be unprofessional enough to say so but he didn't need to.

The old man's anger was very convincing.

"Do you want me to do it myself?" Zaq's voice was hard, his face set.

This wasn't meant to be a difficult question, although it became obvious from the turmoil in General Ch'ao Kai's eyes that the old soldier was having trouble working out the right answer.

The Emperor sighed.

That is, Zaq sighed. And because Zaq was in his seventh year as the Chuang Tzu, when he sighed it was as Emperor and so he was watched by forty-three billion people, a figure that rose rapidly as others realized what might be about to happen.

At the age of eleven Zaq had his favourite poet thrown to the wolves. The man was skilled in verse, diplomatic to a fault and Zaq liked him. So, as tantrums went, this was not particularly sensible or even original. A drunken Muscovite had done something very similar more than five thousand years earlier and gone down in history as Ivan the Terrible.

In fact Zaq got the idea from the Library while skimming the life of Ivan Vasilyevich, a man who seemed to have inherited his throne from his father. This seemed so unlikely to Zaq that he considered asking the Librarian if the Library might have got it wrong.

Only the Library never got anything wrong. It was the single most accurate data source in the 2023 worlds and its content had the status of law. The fact its core was alien was regarded as a good thing; because whichever race created the Library had long since died and this meant the Librarian had no in-built allegiance to any one world, species or cultural grouping.

In fact, its only allegiance seemed to be to the concept of Chuang Tzu and this it displayed, first and foremost, in a ruthless and sometimes cruel adherence to the truth.

The Library's core could talk to Zaq directly, but the Librarian could manifest in any of the mirrors scattered through the Forbidden City, although there were many of these.

The poet hadn't been real, of course. No one in the Purple City was real except for Zaq, but he hadn't realized that back then. In fact, he'd only realized it within the last three days, but the more Zaq thought about it the more he knew it was true. The others were just puppets and backdrop, so much bleeding meat controlled by the multiple mind that was his Library.

The Library was to the Librarian what Zaq was to the Chuang Tzu, the reality behind the façade. Zaq wasn't sure if he was meant to have discovered this.

Year of the dragon.

Season of the bitch.

This morning, his thirteenth birthday, he'd been pulled from sleep by a polite cough and come awake to find himself surrounded by five naked concubines. A present from the Librarian presumably.

He'd sent them away and returned from the Ambassadors' City to find all five in his bed again, arranged picturesquely under the sheet. Sloe eyes and high cheekbones above hamster cheeks, hair as dark as obsidian and perfect breasts tipped with nipples as rare as unflawed amber. Having taken a long look, Zaq shut his own eyes and realized he couldn't remember a single thing about any of them.

All he got were generalities.

A sense of beauty.

An awareness that if he sent them away another five would probably take their place, as anonymous and as beautiful as those he'd just dismissed.

"Get me a knife," Zaq told the nearest concubine.

Huge eyes watched him, impossibly large. When she spoke it sounded like water running over rock.

"What kind of knife, Excellency?"

Any kind was what Zaq was about to say but he changed this, fighting for specifics. "A sharp one," he said, although that should have been obvious.

Without another word, the naked girl slid from under the sheet and padded across the marble floor towards a doorway. Zaq tried to remember how the room next door might look and decided it was gold, green and red. Most rooms in his palace were gold, green and red.

"Excellency..." She held out a long steel blade fixed into a mutton-fat hilt, topped with a ruby the size of a quail's egg. For a moment Zaq debated telling the concubine to stab herself. His only problem being that she'd do it. In the seven years that had passed since Zaq left Razor's Edge to become Chuang Tzu he had run out of unreasonable demands.

Everything he asked for was given.

"Turn around," he told the girl.

The General was watching now, his glance slipping between the blade, Zaq's face and the perfect back and buttocks of the girl, as if a line existed between the three, invisible but unbreakable.

"And again."

The order was intentionally ambiguous, obscure. But the concubine instantly did what Zaq wanted her to do, confirming for Zaq that the girl now turning to face him, her bare mons as flawless as her buttocks, was nothing more than a fleshly manifestation of the Library.

A mere aspect of the palace. Soft furnishings.

He could sink his knife beneath one of those upturned breasts or slice open her perfect stomach. There were other things, perverted things, that he could do but even Zaq tired at the banality of those thoughts.

"You may go," he told the concubine.

Her eyes flicked towards the main door and Zaq nodded, wrapping his cloak tight around him until he was almost completely buried in its yellow folds.

"You too," he told the others, meaning all of them. And they went, one by one, their eyes dark and devoid. "And don't let them come back," Zaq shouted after the General. "You hear me?"

He stamped across his room and stopped pointedly in front of the mirror. "Tell the Library I'm going to kill the next person to come in here." To make his point, Zaq hurled the long blade at the glass but it just bounced off the wall, its handle shattering when it hit the floor.

For five days Zaq refused to leave his room and his audience drifted away until all that remained was a small core of the old and aimless, those who lived almost exclusively through the butterfly life of one much younger and infinitely more fragile.

That was the deal. The Chuang Tzu lived in absolute, terrifying splendour for the length of his natural life and, in so doing, absolved all others of the need to consume quite so conspicuously.

As each emperor burnt out within one natural life (this also being part of the deal), those watching got to see eight, maybe more Chuang Tzu be selected, raised to the Dragon Throne, grow old and die. Of course, this applied only to those who retained their corporeal bodies. The cold eternals had mostly seen maybe twenty or more emperors come and go before even this became too little to make remaining alive attractive.