Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 43 Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

"You forgot this..."

The voice came out of nowhere. At least, that's what Tris thought until she realized it was the man she'd left sleeping, if "man" was the right word, which she was beginning to doubt.

"...and you'd better put that down."

Tris looked at the blade she held and then at the half light obscuring the entrance to her rocky overhang, where Luca was unwrapping himself into existence. The Baron had the manners not to point out that the child's sword Tris held was his.

She'd once spent a whole winter wanting his look. She'd been a kid back then, impressed by an older girl's quick and dirty body change. Of course, being a kid, Tris hadn't realized the new body was meant to look like Luca and she doubted if the other girl did either.

"What did I forget?" demanded Tris crossly. There was stuff in bed she'd have given a miss if she'd known she was going to see Luca again. Things like his bite to her throat and leaving one of her nails in his back.

Stepping around the blade, Luca smiled. "You left your marble on the chest."

Tris sighed. "It was a present," she said. "And it's not a marble."

"Oh." Luca looked thoughtful. "What is it then?"

"It's the memory," said Tris, "from my yacht."

"You had a yacht?"

"You saw it, remember? A C-class, X9 interchange." All objects of value in the 2023 worlds were grown individually, that's what Tris had always understood. And yet the owner of All Tomorrow's Parties still gave his ship a number. No wonder Doc Joyce hated him.

"Where did you get a yacht?"

Tris wanted to say, Don't I look like a girl who might own an X9 interchange? Unfortunately they both knew the answer to that.

"I stole it," said Tris, taking the marble from Luca. "Then we crashed into a lake except it was really a river. This is what's left."

They ate wild hare, roasted in the ashes of a fire Luca built in the mouth of the overhang. He took the wood from a long-dead thorn, snapping branches as easily as Tris might have broken twigs and igniting the fire with a snap of his fingers. He also set the trap. A slight thing that was little more than a noose, a thorn branch bent double and a V of twig to peg the thorn to the ground.

"That's it?" Tris had asked.

"Sure," said Luca, "it's enough."

He'd already discarded his leather satchel and was unbuckling his cloak at the time, fussing with a silver knot on its left shoulder. "It used to untie itself," he said. The cloak was already large enough but when Luca unfolded it once and then twice it became very big indeed.

"Find me a long stick," he said.

Tris almost said, Find one yourself. But she restrained herself and after setting the trap outside, she helped Luca make a bivouac from his cloak, the stick she'd found and a dozen small rocks arranged around the edge. Since the cave-like overhang already kept out the worst of the wind Tris wasn't sure this was necessary.

It was when she was putting the last of the stones into place that Luca came back with the hare. "Here," he said, "kill this."

"You do it," said Tris.

Luca shook his head and offered her the animal, which he had by the ears. "I'm not allowed to."

"But you eat meat?"

A nod, quick and totally unashamed.

"That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe not," said Luca, "but that's the way it is."

"Why?" Tris demanded, but she took hold of the hare, only just avoiding one of its back legs which raked towards her wrist. "Tell me--"

"Do you always ask too many questions?"

"Yeah," said Tris, "always."

Luca sighed. "The thing is," he said, crouching down to sit on his heels, "if I started killing I'm not sure I'd be able to stop. You wouldn't like that. So why don't you kill it, I'll cook it and we'll both eat the thing?"

"You're not human, are you?" Tris said, realizing as she said it that this might be a tactless question.

"Nor are you," said Luca, his voice matter-of-fact. "Actually, most people aren't. Not in any sense humans would understand... Now hurry up and kill the hare, anything else is cruel."

"We could let it go," Tris said. "That wouldn't be cruel."

"You need to eat," said Luca. "That's one point. The second is that the animal's half dead with fright so you have a duty to kill it." He nodded towards the small rock she'd only just put into place around the edge of his bivouac.

"Use that," he said. "And hold it the other way up or its ears will come off in your hands when you hit it."

Grabbing the hare by its back legs, Tris hung the animal upside down and thumped it hard with a stone on the back of its head without giving herself time to think. Shitting black raisins at her feet, the animal turned from something living to meat.

"You do the rest," Tris said.

Fifteen billion people watched her toss the dead hare at Luca's feet, although Tris didn't know this. Which was just as well, because the first thing she did after stalking from the camp and dry-vomiting away her disgust, was drop her silk trousers and raise the hem of her padded jacket, letting rivers of steam melt frosted blades of grass.

"Moron," she said.

And all the while, buzzards circled overhead and a lizard clung to rock, either dead or too catatonic with cold to move. There was no single camera watching Tris and Luca. Indeed, the concept "camera" meant nothing to Tris. If she'd stopped to wonder how feeds were fed she'd have decided by magic.

The truth was far stranger. Every living thing on Rapture watched everything else, from the cat that slunk across the yellow roof of the Emperor's pavilion to the single butterfly delivering a message as it touched his wrist. And the Library drew together these threads and, from them, created a seamless feed that was life in the Forbidden City.

Ripping a leg from the roasted body of the hare, Luca held it out as an offering. "Try it," he suggested.

They ate in silence.

It sleeted that night and again the next morning. What had started as sleet became hail, driven on a chill wind that roared down a valley into their faces. They had to set their next bivouac quickly and break it down just as fast, Luca converting their crude tent back into his cloak with a sleight of hand that Tris somehow always missed.

"You sure this is the right way?"

"No," said Luca, "I'm not."

"We should have brought a map."

Luca stared at the hail and sleet breaking up the world around them. "No point," he said. "Coordinates have zero meaning at this level." It was the last thing he said that day.

And Tris was ready to believe he'd forgotten her existence, except that once she slipped while stepping from rock to rock and Luca grabbed her so fast she barely saw his hands move. She slept in his arms that night as snow piled up against one side of the bivouac, although there was nothing sexual in his stroking of her hair and both retained their clothes.

"No," Luca had told her, when Tris first knelt to scrape snow from the hillside, making space for their bivouac. "Don't dig."

"Why not?"

"Sleeping on snow is warmer," he told her. "Here..."

Tris caught his knife.

"Stab the ground."

Shock echoed up Tris's arm and only the fact Luca's knife had a crossbar stopped Tris slicing her hand on the blade.

"That little sword of yours could break stabbing this stuff," said Luca. "It's permafrost. You need to know these things."

He read the question in her face.

"Because," Luca said, "you're meant to be doing this on your own."

The dreams were worse that night. So terrible that when she woke Tris would not allow herself to remember a thing. All she could feel was their numbness, as if the permafrost over which she slept had entered her soul. Having eaten the last scraps of roast hare without tasting, Tris reached for Luca and pulled him close.

"I'm not sure this is wise," said Luca, opening one eye.

Tris reached down with her hand. "You know what?" she said. "I'm not sure I care."

Afterwards, Luca scrambled out from under the cloak and disappeared behind a low strand of bushes. "Now you," he said on his return.

"It'll hold."

"No." The Baron shook his head. "It won't... From here on when we climb we're tied together. You want a piss, I'm this far away." He held his hands so, indicating distance.

In fact the gap between Luca and Tris as they climbed the first snow bank was greater than Luca had said it would be, if not by much. And Tris wore the stolen blade across her back, because Luca had insisted she take a long stick of thorn in each hand, so that if Tris missed her step she could jab her sticks into the snow and avoid sliding back the way she came. He also made her walk first, on the grounds that if she did slip he might be able to catch her.

The dreams haunted her again that night and followed her into the day. All Tris got were glimpses from the side of one eye. Patches of snow that kept pace, stalking the edge of her vision where endless flakes of falling snow lost themselves in a perpetual half glow that ice fields seemed to bring with them.

Once she saw something stranger.

Amber eyes like Luca's, but staring from the face of a huge cat. She told Luca about this and in return he told her about snow blindness, hypothermia, oxygen starvation and their collective responsibility for her hallucinations. He left out the pain, Tris noticed, and after a few minutes she zoned him out and concentrated on climbing the icy slope in front of her.

Every now and then, Tris would thrust one hand inside the front of her padded jacket and nestle it under her armpit in an attempt to thaw out her fingers and once, when Luca was looking at something else, she thrust both hands between her legs. The pain of her fingers unfreezing hurt so much that tears crystallized on her cheeks like pearls.

Around midday they stopped climbing, the snow underfoot levelled out and then began, very gently, to dip in the opposite direction.

"That was it?" said Tris as she unknotted Luca's rope and dropped her end in the snow. "That was your cliff?"

Luca frowned. "Tristesse," he said heavily, "we've barely started."

He wouldn't look at her for the rest of that afternoon and, come evening, he just scooped out a shallow dip in a snowdrift, did whatever he did to his cloak and buried the edges of the newly created bivouac beneath the snow to keep them secure. He made no attempt to start a fire, nor did he invite Tris inside when finally he crawled under the cloth.

After a few minutes, Tris clambered inside anyway.

They slept like husband and wife, back to back, not touching. It was an old, sour joke from her grandmother. One she'd failed to understand until that night, the night the snow tigers came.

When the first animal padded silently out of the darkness, Tris was restless and already awake. The tiger came in a gap between falls of snow. A handful of white shadow and smoke-grey stripes, paws the size of plates carrying it over a skim of frozen crust, its tail brushing the snow as it loped out of the darkness and halted outside Luca's make-shift tent.

The others came in the seconds which followed.

It was their breathing Tris heard first. "Me?" she asked, in case there was some mistake. And the biggest of the tigers nodded, fat strands of spittle drooling onto pale snow.

"Malika," it said when Tris stayed where she was.

"I'm Tris," said Tris. She wasn't too sure they'd got that bit.

"Malika," repeated the tiger.

She went to it anyway, crawling from beneath Luca's bivouac and walking barefoot over the snow crust, leaving lonely footprints behind her. All three were beautiful, elegant beyond anything life had let Tris imagine. Their eyes amber and their claws tallow, like ancient ivory.

"You're beautiful," she said.

The biggest tiger's casual nod seemed to suggest that this was obvious.

"Can I feel?" Reaching out Tris tangled her cold fingers into warm fur. And as soon as her hand gripped the tiger's mane, the beast began to move, slowly but decisively.

"She's going," said a voice.

"Not much we can do about it now." That voice was different. Come to that, so was the voice before. Rougher, speaking words Tris barely understood.

"Doesn't matter," the first voice said. "We've got enough."

The snow had stopped burning Tris's feet. Her fingers felt normal. She no longer felt the need to clamp her hands between her legs or across her chest, hiding them in the darkness of her underarms. Even her smell was gone, that stink of bruised flesh and ripped pain.

"Damn," said a voice.

"You tell me," Luca said. He was sitting outside his bivouac, cupping his hands around a flame that leapt between his thumbs, like electricity arcing between points. Tris had just asked him why she was standing bootless in the snow.

He didn't seem that surprised to see her or that pleased either. "Knew you'd be back," he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Where else could you go?"

Tris knew this was untrue and wanted to explain how difficult it had been to leave the tigers, how painful wrenching her hands from the flame of their fur, but she was too busy looking at Luca's face.

Someone had clawed ragged lines across his cheek, four gashes that ran from near his ear to the side of his chin. And to judge from the holes in the snow and the discarded pink-streaked, compacted handfuls of ice around his feet, Luca had been trying for some time to staunch the bleeding.

"The tigers attacked you?"

The Baron stared at her. He looked thinner than yesterday, which was thinner than the day before. His eyes were huge and his mouth twisted into something between anger and disgust. He seemed to be waiting for something.

"An apology would be good," he said at last.

"For what?"

"Oh." Luca shrugged. "I don't know... How about for trying to rip off half my face and disappearing into the wilderness for two hours?"

"Me?"

"Yeah," said Luca, "you." One hand went up to touch his face.

"It can't have been me," said Tris. "I wasn't even here."

"Yes, you were," said Luca. "And it was." Scooping up snow, he held it to his cheek and then tossed away the soiled handful. "You want to tell me why you did it?"

"I... wasn't... here." Tris left a gap between each word, just in case Luca needed time to digest their sense. "And," Tris added, speeding up, "if I wasn't here, then I couldn't have done it, could I?"

"So where were you?"

"With the snow tigers," said Tris. "I heard them breathing. And when I looked outside they were waiting for me. They were beautiful," she said. Tris wanted to say more but sadness had tightened her throat. She should have stayed with them, she knew that now.

The tigers were right.

Luca sighed. "Maybe you were having nightmares," he said.

Moss spiralled along the main cables where fat cords had been twisted together and weather-bleached ropes hummed in the wind that whistled along the canyon, keeping the suspension bridge mostly clear of snow.

Two rusting iron rings had been set into a rock-face behind Tris. What happened at the other end was impossible to say because everything but the first ten paces of the bridge was lost in a flurry of snow.

"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.