Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 49 Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

As Tris and Luca headed towards the end of their bridge, Zaq sat under his willow in the walled garden, holding a peach and watching butterflies flicker in and out of sight, not yet warmed enough by the sun to do more than make small hops from one flower to another, wings beating lazily.

"Almost time," Zaq said.

Inside his head a boy stood over the broken body of a girl and Zaq knew, beyond doubt, that the boy had just died there in the dusty graveyard and the man who walked away was never more than a ghost. It was unfair, unjust and, for all Zaq knew, destined to produce only failure, but he still let it happen.

Sometimes the Chuang Tzu surprised even himself with his ability to make others cry. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, Zaq stared round at the mulberry bushes fat with purple fruit.

"Wait," he told a butterfly.

The way it was meant to work was that the Chuang Tzu would reach out his hand and the butterfly would alight, bringing its message. After delivering the message the butterfly would die. As would anyone else in the garden unwise enough to reach for a butterfly without being the Chuang Tzu.

Only the reborn could communicate in this fashion with the Library and live. Since Zaq refused to reach out and welcome the hovering butterfly it fluttered at the edge of his vision, puzzled but willing to wait.

It was a very small butterfly, presumably to reassure Zaq that the Librarian's question was not really that important, a mere trifle that Zaq could make disappear simply by answering.

If Zaq didn't reach out his hand soon the butterfly would die anyway and another would take its place. The creatures had very short life-spans. A point he was meant to ponder as all emperors had pondered before him; except that Zaq was busy refusing to be emperor, he was being Zaq.

Which was the cause of his original war against the Library. And maybe this was his last chance to be himself before everything changed.

The peach Zaq held was fresh, perfect in its plumpness and the bloom of its unmarked skin, so perfect, in fact, that it reminded him of the servitor girl whose name he'd now forgotten. There were a dozen peaches like it on a small tree so close to the willow that he could almost reach for fruit without moving and a dozen trees within easy walk if that tree would not do.

The garden held a strange place in the affections of the Library; Zaq could think of no other way to put it. Maybe it was because of the link between gardens and perfection, gardens and heaven, gardens and the afterlife. Actually, there was no maybe about it. Zaq knew this was true because he'd asked the Librarian.

When the Library first talked with Major Commissar Chuang Tzu, who was obviously not the original Chuang Tzu, merely the original for the purposes of the Library who'd never met Homo sapiens before and had not realized the universe was still inhabited, its creators having moved.

When it first trawled though the young Chinese officer's deepest memories it had noticed the single-minded importance put on a vegetable garden and the wild grasses growing on a hillside above a waterfall. A search through the AI and the memories of the cold eternals aboard the SZ Loyal Prince revealed that most faith systems on the world from which the ship originated bound heaven and gardens together.

So the darkness (as it then was) gave the Chinese officer the garden he'd known only in the abstract. A place of butterflies, messages and memories. Zaq didn't need to hear the message and he already knew what it would say, some riff on what General Ch'ao Kai had said yesterday.

He had time to change his mind. The situation was not irreversible. The best way to make peace with the Library was accept his role as Emperor and reinstate the imperial guard.

Let them kill this assassin.

All General Ch'ao Kai needed was permission to mobilize his troops.

Nothing Zaq hadn't already heard. And, more to the point, nothing he hadn't already refused to contemplate. Zaq wanted an end to this and his orders stood. He was to be regarded as invisible. All of those living within the Forbidden City were to go about their everyday business as if he had never been. He would remain in the garden and wait for his assassin.

Zaq smiled and a billion people wept at his sadness.

A moment or two later he changed his mind.

"Oh, come on then."

Holding out his hand, Zaq watched the butterfly make its short journey from mulberry leaf to Zaq's wrist, dying in a tiny flash of electricity.

"Back yourself up." The order was stark, except it wasn't an order. The Council of Ambassadors couldn't give orders, they could merely make suggestions. Ones that the Emperor was entirely free to ignore. Of all the suggestions they'd relayed to the Librarian, this was certainly the shortest.

"No," said Zaq, "I don't think so."

Backing himself up meant returning to Baohe Dian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, to be examined by the imperial doctors. After which he would sign orders making General Ch'ao Kai regent for the eight minutes it would take Zaq to be read, found adequate and recorded. Maybe the Library had a host already prepared, a second Zaq blissfully sleeping away his non-life in a glass tank somewhere.

Zaq had in mind the pods originally found on the SZ Loyal Prince, which he'd visited. This was rare among emperors, who mostly sat quietly in the Butterfly Garden or retired to the silence of the Library to practice calligraphy, draw endless misty mountains or note down their carefully composed words of wisdom.

Of course, for them the SZ Loyal Prince was historical abstraction, not somewhere they'd called home for the first seven years of their lives. Zaq was aware that as Chuang Tzu he had been less than impressive. Rapture still existed and the 2023 worlds were healthy, true enough, their peoples no more bored or less happy than under the putative rule of any of the other, earlier emperors.

Only he'd intended to be so much more and would have been if he'd had the courage of the assassin who struggled so hard through the snow and storms Zaq sent against her. This small, cropped-haired figure wrapped in a cheap jacket and torn trousers, who talked to the air, slept oblivious and alone on a storm-tossed bridge and rose the next morning, equally oblivious as to why the storm now stilled. Zaq was exhausted from trying to live up to the assassin's expectations.

"Oh well," he said, climbing to his feet. Turning, Zaq hurled the peach he held against the grey up-stroke of a willow. It was a perfect shot and the fruit burst as it exploded against pale bark, staining the willow's trunk with a smear of darkness.

Zaq would have given anything for the peach to contain a maggot, to be bruised or rotten at the stone, but that would never happen. Perfection was required for the Emperor, even in the Butterfly Garden, and the Library was there to ensure perfection was what he got.

The maggot, the bruising and the rot were inside Zaq's head. He didn't think anyone had much doubt about that.

"Go back," Tris suggested.

The words popped out of her mouth in that way words sometimes do. A fleeting thought suddenly translated into speech with no filter betwen original thought and open mouth.

"Go...?" Luca looked amused, tired and almost dead on his feet, but very definitely amused. "Go where?" he asked.

"Home?" Tris didn't intend a question, that just happened to be the way it inflected. "You should go back," she added, more decisively. "You're exhausted. I can manage from here."

"Manage?" His smile became a sad grin. "Of course you can manage," Luca said. "I'm not here to help you."

"You're not?" demanded Tris.

Luca shook his head. "You're helping me," he said. And in that moment he sounded like an adult talking to a very small child. An intelligent, well-loved child, but a child all the same.

Moving Tris gently to one side, Luca stepped off the bridge and onto solid rock. "There's no way I could have escaped the village before you arrived."

"Why not?"

Luca's look was kind, if slightly exasperated. The look of someone who really didn't quite know where to begin. In the end, all Luca said was, "Rapture wouldn't let me."

"Why not?"

"The storms, the plateau, the ravine, the bridge... They're linked, you know." He glanced at her. "You do know that, don't you? That everything on Rapture is tied to everything else and all of it tied to the happiness of the Emperor."

"Really?" Tris said.

"At all levels," said Luca. It was obvious that this was news to Tris. "Didn't anyone ever explain quantum interdependence?"

Helping Tris onto the rock, Luca brushed snow from her blue jacket and peeled frost from her eyebrows. He did this without thinking, the way a father might do it for a daughter and Luca knew, at a theoretical level, that treating Tris this way made for problems because he'd already bedded her, creating the template for an entirely different if less complex relationship.

Luca knew this only at a theoretical level because he'd met very few people from the 2023 worlds. In fact, to be honest, the only person with whom he'd talked closely was Tris and he questioned whether she really represented that culture at all.

The girl certainly didn't fit his image of a hyper-educated, sexually sophisticated, slightly blasé member of the richest society yet existing, which was how the Always Knowledgeable and Correct Empire of the 2023 worlds sold itself, mostly to itself.

"Which world do you come from?" Luca was sure he'd asked Tris this question before and had memories of not understanding her answer.

A second snow-covered plateau extended for at least a day and maybe longer beyond the bridge. Because there were few hills and no actual valleys, the snow had spread evenly across the undulating surface and the flakes were so dry they barely stuck to Tris's and Luca's shoes, although this dryness meant the plateau's surface was forever sifted by the wind.

And yet even the wind seemed to be in their favour, shifting to the west to blow gently against their backs and coax them on their way.

"Something's changed," said Tris.

"No," Luca said. "Everything's changed. Take a look around you."

The sun was beating down on the snow and a billion diamonds of light flickered in its brightness. The whole thing looking like nothing so much as a crust of solidified foam.

"This is good, right?" Tris asked.

"Well." The Baron shrugged. "It's certainly different."

In the end the plateau didn't so much finish as fall away into a slope that got steeper and steeper until suddenly it stopped being a slope. This happened at a point where the crust over which they walked slipped over the horizon and vanished altogether from sight.

"Walk backwards," Luca suggested. "You'll find it easier if you know where you've come from." Gripping his sticks, Luca strode to the start of the steepness, turned to face Tris and then stepped back, jamming both thorn sticks deep into the snow. He would like to believe that what he hit was earth, but chances were it was compacted snow, ice or bare rock because the ends of his sticks slid slightly.

"And dig deep," he added.

Tris did as she was told, turning as Luca had done and stepping back, feeling for a foothold that seemed further away than it ought to be. Her sticks slipped a little and then locked into place.

"If you feel yourself slip," said Luca, "ram both sticks into the snow and keep hold." The twine from his trap was gone, lost along the way, and this was irritating because he'd have liked Tris's sticks to be lashed to her wrists and he lacked the strength to tear fresh strips from his cloak. Tris had almost no idea how tired Luca was and he hoped to keep it that way.

Afternoon slid into evening, the high cirrus having cleared to reveal the silver shimmer of a sky filled with worlds around the distant sun, as if some insane mosaicist had decorated the inside of a globe with tiny tesserae and then not bothered to fill in between the tiles.

"So many worlds," Tris said.

Luca smiled.

Somewhere stacked in the back of her brain, Tris had Doc Joyce's breakdown of how and why. Obviously not the deep physics, the stuff that allowed each tesserae to retain its position within the globe while replicating gravity and retaining a workable atmosphere. All who claimed to understand this lied, their explanations quick and dirty hack around what little was left of preZP physics.

She learnt quickly, Tris was proud of this fact. Unfortunately the speed at which Tris assimilated ideas was something her grandmother never quite seemed to grasp. Her childhood refrain, You just never learn, do you?, being so far from the truth that Tris had seen little merit in pointing out that actually she learnt everything until there was nothing left to learn.

When Tris finally ran out of facts at home she went searching. No one ever thought to ask why and, if they had, Tris probably wouldn't have been able to answer. But the vanishing acts had grown in length, from missed afternoons through whole days to nights when she didn't come home and weeks that went by in a blur of cheap drugs, cheaper sex and bad conversation.

Translated, this meant reflex accelerators, fear inhibitors and a wide range of near opiates. Not to mention turning tricks against the wall at the back of Schwarzschilds for some tourist tom too blitzed to notice that Tris held him between her thighs instead of inside her.

The queens were cleaner, less animal, usually.

Many of those who put Tris up against a wall talked to her first, about their worlds and what made them come to one of the lowest levels of the Rip, a place most guides suggested they avoid. And once she even extracted a snatch of conversation from a gene splicer so silent even Doc Joyce had long since assumed the man was mute.

"Stop," said Luca and hands gripped her hips, halting Tris. "We're here."

Tris wanted to ask, where? There were so many things Luca assumed she knew when for most of this trip she'd merely been guessing. He was getting older and more tired, less happy to have her around. It was a look Tris knew well. One she'd seen each evening as a small child in the face of her mother, when the woman realized another day was gone and Tris's father had not returned. That, in all probability, he never would and she was left with a small child, a leaking shack and a mother-in-law who'd retreated into a world of her own.

And then one night, instead of looking resigned, Tris's mother had collected together the few things she actually owned and left. Tris wasn't even surprised.

"Keep staring ahead," said Luca. "You can't afford to turn round and you mustn't look down. Keep the moment close. And let everything else go."

Tris knew exactly what he meant. At least she hoped she did. "We're going to jump, right?"

"Not quite," said Luca, reaching into his satchel. For once the conditions were on their side. A whole strip of snow along the lip of the drop had slipped, exposing naked rock. This enabled Luca to find a flaw into which to ram the first of four steel pegs he produced from his bag.

"I'm going first," Luca told Tris. "And you're going to follow... The problem is I've only got a handful of these." He nodded to the spike. "So you're going to have to collect them as you go."

"How?"

"Easy," said Luca. "Just twist the top."

So Tris did, only too aware of the sheer drop towards which she shuffled, edging backwards so slowly she barely moved. Tris found the spike by dropping to a crouch and reaching behind her, fingers closing on cold metal.

It was stuck fast in the rock.

"Twist the top," Luca said again.

And Tris felt the spike slide free.

"We had hundreds once," said Luca, "thousands, maybe more." He sounded tired, old beyond his wish. "They were for building."

"You brought them with you?"

"It's possible," Luca admitted.

Holding the narrow spike in one hand, Tris twisted the top with her other.

"It's broken," she said.

Luca shook his head. Whatever was meant to happen took place at a level invisible to human eyes.

"It's working," he promised her.

She held a fortune in her hand, Tris realized, while another three fortunes lay at her feet. Doc Joyce would have restrung her entire body and thrown in new bones and buckytubes for her brain for one chance to work out what the spikes did and how.

Even fake tek was worth something. Certainly enough for the Doc to manufacture idiot-looking artifacts that tourists bought time and again, just in case they turned out to be real.

Tris grinned.

"What?" Luca said.

"Nothing that matters." Glancing back at the plateau, Tris was bemused both by the distance and the breath-catching beauty of a landscape she and Luca had crossed without really noticing. She was tired now. Almost as tired as Luca and the Baron was so tired that at times he seemed almost transparent.

"Focus," Luca said crossly. He nodded to the spike still gripped in her fingers. "And put that back."

Tris did, twisting the top to lock the spike in place.

"Right," said Luca. "Empty your head of everything but locating the next spike, reaching for it with one foot and letting the spike take your weight. You'll be roped to me and I'll be fixed to the cliff face with this." Luca pulled a final piece of climbing equipment from his bag. This spike had an eye at the top through which a rope could pass.

"One last thing," said the Baron. "You don't move until I tell you."

Tris understood that bit.

"A little to the right." Luca was doing his best not to sound worried. "Left a bit. That's it. The next spike's below your foot."

They'd been hanging on the edge of the drop for almost fifteen minutes and hardly made any progress at all. In fact, the lip over which they'd climbed was barely out of Tris's reach. All Tris had to do to follow Luca was remove the first and original spike, tuck it into her waistband and shift her weight so she could hang from a second spike, while using one foot to feel for a third that Luca had already fixed into the cliff.

"I know where it is," said Tris.

"Then use it."

Darkness was coming in faster than either had expected and Luca was running out of reassuring clichés about the first step being the most difficult, things getting easier, it just being a matter of practice...

"I thought you did this all the time in the Rip," Luca said, irritation winning out over tact.

"That's jumping," said Tris. "It's different."

Give her a rope long enough and she'd have been halfway down the cliff before Luca had finished fixing his wretched spikes.

"You must have climbed on Rip," said Luca.

"Of course I did," Tris said. "That was up, though. This is down..." All the same she twisted the spike, slid it from the rock and pushed it into the waistband of her thin trousers. She was climbing in her rope sandals, Luca having insisted that this would be better than bare toes.

"Well done," said Luca.

"Yeah," Tris said, "and you can fuck off too." But she said it too quietly for Luca to hear.