The Marriage of the Living Dark

“No. I... don’t like it”

He looked back at the painting, then set his brush down. “No, I guess you wouldn’t” She moved away from him, going over to the window. Outside the sun was low above the hills. Darkness filled the bowl of the bay while directly below her, still in sunlight, was the rose garden - the very scene he had painted - but anodyne, innocent, without his curious take on it “I knew you’d come back.”

“Did you?” If so, it was more than she had known. She had begun to think she would never return.

“I... missed you.”

Did you? But this time she was silent

“Meg?”

She turned. He was watching her. Of course he was. He never stopped watching her. And maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why she had needed to get away.

“Meg?”

“Not now, Ben,” she said, a tiredness in her voice. “Not now.”

CHAPTER-6

siege mentality

Li Yuan stepped back from the rail and looked across at Zelic. “I wondered how they managed to feed so many. Now I know.”

The platform they were on was slowly descending. As it did, level after level came into view, like a series of massive baking trays in a giant’s oven, only these “trays” were filled with soil to form huge fields, three K to a side, in which were planted wheat and maize and rice. Huge arrays of lamps set into the underside of each level gave artificial sunlight to the plants below, while special channels moulded into the trays provided irrigation. Workers could be glimpsed out in those massive fields; long lines of them, their backs bent, their heads protected by straw-woven hats. That much, at least, seemed timeless. There were one hundred and ten levels in all, according to Zelic, though, owing to crop rotation, only four-fifths were functional at any time. That effectively took out twenty-two levels, but it still left a total growing area of eight hundred square li.

“Impressive,” said Li Yuan, wondering not merely at the ingenuity of it, but at the paranoia - the siege mentality - that had devised such a system. The Americans had built themselves a siring of castles to defend their border, like the kings of olden times. Yes, and like such kings they permitted no opposition. These were harsh times - how many times had he heard one or other of them say that? - and harsh times demanded harsh measures. Yet, as he knew from his own experience, one could not rule this way forever. One could only clench one’s fist for so long. One day all this would have to change. He sighed, thinking once again how hard it was to see another make the same mistakes he’d made and have his voice unheard.