The Marriage of the Living Dark

“I’ve already done it”

“Yes ...” She patted his arm. Of course. Daniel thought of everything. “Come then, lef s go and see Han Ch’in.”

Han Ch’in was waiting for them in the tent they’d set up in the meadow. He was leaning over the map table, checking the positions of his forces against the latest reports of DeVore’s movements.

“So where is he?”

Han Ch’in turned and bowed respectfully. “Thaf s what I’m trying to work out, Mu

Ch’in Ascher. According to our spies in the field there have been three

sightings in the last two hours. But it doesn’t make sense. There’s no way he

could have got from one location to another so quickly.” “Then he’s using

copies.” “Thafs what I thought But that contradicts my father’s

information.”

“Then perhaps Li Yuan’s spies were wrong.”

Han Ch’in hesitated, then shook his head. “Our information was the best The very best If DeVore had copies, we’d have heard. No. Something else is going on. Something we don’t quite understand just yet.”

“Hmmm ...” Emily took the report from Han Ch’in and studied it, then looked to the map. “I see what you mean. If s as if he’s jumping from place to place.” “Wearing seven-league boots, eh?” And Han Ch’in laughed. But then he grew serious again, listening to a report coming in on the transmitter in his ear. He gave a tiny nod then looked to Emily. “Father’s coming in. Right now. But they’ve been attacked. Two of our ships were hit” “Aiya ...” Emily turned, looking to Daniel. “Daniel, go and organise a welcoming party. Stretchers and surgeons. And be quick ...” But Daniel was already gone. Emily turned back, looking to Han Ch’in, then, without a word, both of them hurried from the tent, heading for the makeshift landing pads at the far end of the meadow.

As it limped in over the brow of the hill, Emily could see at once that Li Yuan’s cruiser had been badly hit There was a great dark gash down one side of the craft, and as the sunlight glinted against its hull she could see the tell-tale pock-marks of shellfire.

As it settled awkwardly on the pad, the hatch hissed open. Medical crews, standing to the side, barely waited for the ramp to unfold before scrambling on board.

Emily waited, heart in mouth, staring at the darkness of the hatchway. For a moment nothing, then a figure stepped out into the sunlight. A woman, clutching a child to her breast Behind her, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder, was a middle-aged man.

Shepherd! It was Ben Shepherd and his sister!

As they came down the ramp, Emily went across to greet them. But even before she could say a word, a mobile stretcher rattled out and down the ramp, four orderlies hastening to get the stretcher’s occupant to the tent where they could give him attention.

“If s Li Yuan,” Ben said, even as Emily recognised the ring upon the hand that lay outside the blankets. “He took a piece of shrapnel. I staunched the bleeding, but...”

And now that she looked at Ben she saw how the whole front of his shirt was covered in blood.

“He’s dying,” Ben said.”No,” she said, over-insistent “No, we can save him.”

“You can keep him alive, yes.”

Emily stared at Ben, frightened by his words. “What do you mean?”

“Half of his brain’s gone, thaf s what I mean. So even if you did save him, it wouldn’t be Li Yuan you’re saving. You’d do better to reactivate his cfang.” The coldness in Shepherd’s voice surprised her, yet there was something in his eyes that contradicted that This had hurt him. Hurt him badly. ‘It can’t...” she began.

“Can’t what? End like this? Of course it can. You think he was immortal?”

“No, if s just...”

But she couldn’t say. Not to Shepherd, anyway. To have been reconciled - to have found such a good friend in such awful times; an unexpected friend, and then to have had him snatched away like this. It was unfair. But then Shepherd was right. The world wasn’t fair. The world was as it was. It was up to them to make it fair or unfair.

She wiped away the tear that had rolled down her cheek, then nodded. “Is that why he went? To fetch you?”

“So it seems.”

Emily shivered. ‘1 thought you were enemies.”

“We were. And then we weren’t. Something changed him. Changed him profoundly. He was ... different” “Yes,” she nodded. It was exactly how she’d felt in his presence. As if Li Yuan had somehow found the thing each one of them was looking for. Yet even then he’d fought Even then he’d still concerned himself with the business of the world. To put things right. Yes, and to stop DeVore from triumphing, because unless he could be stopped nothing mattered.

Against DeVore, inaction was not an option.

But now Li Yuan was dying. Li Yuan, who had been their beacon of hope in these final days.

And when he dies, will hope die too?Touching Ben’s arm again, Emily hurried past him, heading for the operating theatre, wishing as she’d never wished for anything before that Ben was wrong.

A faint mist swirled about the pit and then was gone, sucked outward it seemed, like a tide receding, and as it did, so the greenery about the pit began to shrivel up and die, a false autumn making the trees shed their leaves with an unheard sigh.

It was cold now. A frost rimed the bare earth. And overhead, where a hole was slowly forming in the atmosphere, one could see the stars winking mercilessly in the blackness of the vacuum.

At the far end of the valley a cruiser lifted and, banking as it rose, headed south. Towards the Wilds. Towards the final confrontation.

The wind was blowing strongly now, tearing at the thorny shrubs that clung to the mountain’s slope and threatening to prise Emily from the rocky crevice in which she stood, peering out over the edge of the valley wall. Huge black clouds had formed on the horizon. There was a distant rumbling. Flashes of lightning regularly lit the darkening evening sky.

She was still standing there, one hand shielding her eyes, when Daniel came to her.

“Ifs over,” he said, raising his voice to combat the noise of the growing storm. “Ah...” She felt an immense sadness. It was as if the world itself had ended with his death. The last Pang. The last great ruler of the Earth. The last aristocrat There was a time when she would have applauded that But not now. Daniel nudged her gently. “Look,” he said, pointing down the slope and to the left She looked. There was a swirl of dust and grain and then a man appeared, as if he had stepped from the air.

“Floraforms,” Daniel said, leaning close and speaking into the shell of her ear.

“They’ve been forming all afternoon.” Emily turned, wide-eyed, to stare at

Daniel. “Why didn’t you

say?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

They both watched a moment as the man-like shape walked on a pace or two, small swirls of black wisping from his arms and legs and back. He stopped, looking down at the palms of his hands, then he shimmered and was gone, a great swirl of seed and dust and grain marking where he’d been. Emily shivered. The world was growing strange. Stranger than she could ever have imagined as a child.

“What do you think they want?” she asked, shouting across at Daniel.

“To be,” he answered. “I think they’re trying out their powers. Seeing what they can do.”

She watched a moment longer. Saw how it tried the shapes of animals and birds, each time reverting to a swirl of dust, then looked to Daniel again. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back. If s time we paid our respects.” Daniel nodded. But he did not say what he’d been thinking. Emily, he knew, had not seen it properly, but he had. The shape the floraform had made had not been just any man, it had been Michael. Somehow it had sensed Emily’s presence there and - who knew how? - had drawn the memory from her. But why? What did it mean by it?

He walked on, following her back up the mountainside, his eyes flicking from side to side, looking for any sign of threat among the stones and shrubs. Not that it mattered now.

They had made him up and dressed him in his finest robes, then placed him in his coffin. The same coffin he had brought with him from America. Han Ch’in stood to the left of the coffin, Kuei Jen to the right as Emily entered the tent They half turned to look at her and smiled - the same sad smile that made her realise for the first time how close in blood these two men were, though one was now a woman. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Han Ch’in met her eyes, a great dignity in his own. “They say he did not suffer.”

“No ...”

She walked across, then stood beside the dead man’s head, looking down into his pale, uncaring face.

And so it ends.

Each man a story. Each man a patchwork of things known and things hidden from the sight of others. Though few men lived as much within the public eye as a Tang, an Emperor.

She looked up, meeting Kuei Jen’s eyes. “Your father was truly a Son of Heaven.”

Kuei Jen stared back at her strangely, then shrugged. “He was a very human man.

With human frailties. I would remember him thus, not as an Emperor.”

“But in the end ...” she began.

“In the end he was a great man,” Han Ch’in said. “And yet Kuei Jen is right Indeed, my father knew it at the last A stronger man might have done better with the burden he was given. A more determined man.” Emily sighed. How strange, at this moment, to find such words in the mouths of Li Yuan’s sons. At such a time one might have expected even the most honest man to fall into platitudes.

“It was his request,” Kuei Jen said, noting the puzzlement in Emily’s eyes. “That we spoke honestly of him after his death. No lies. No plastering over of the cracks. And it is better thus, I feel.”

“Perhaps.”

She looked back at Li Yuan’s face, so peaceful now that it was freed of all responsibility. How dreadful that must have been, to have carried that burden all those years. To find oneself responsible not just for oneself and one’s immediate family, but for all men.

Father to forty billion orphans.Emily shuddered, seeing it for the first time as it must have seemed to the young Tang. No wonder he had turned his back on it, for to face that every day would have broken even the stoutest spirit. No wonder he sought consolation between a woman’s legs.

It was only human, after all. One needed to be a kind of god to take on such a burden.

Or not to care at all. Like DeVore.

She bowed respectfully, then backed slowly away, nodding to each of Li Yuan’s sons in turn.

And then out, out into the late evening air, past the flickering torches and the bare-headed guards. Out into the flickering light of the growing storm. Out On the last night of the world.

Dawn came bleak and white, a thin mist veiling the mountainside. Down in the meadow there was the cough and whine of turbo engines starting up, the bark of orders as the dead Tang’s forces were loaded into the waiting craft Han Ch’in stood on the brow of rock overlooking the meadow, Kuei Jen at his side. He was to lead the attack today. They were only waiting for the word and they would go.

“Come on ...” Han Ch’in said impatiently. “He can’t hide a whole fucking army.” “Be patient, brother,” Kuei Jen said. “They’ll find him. And then we’ll have him.”

But Han Ch’in’s patience had run out “If s wrong,” he said, making a fist of his right hand. “He should have seen it, Jenny. He should have been there to see DeVore strung up, all justice done.”

Kuei Jen looked down, affected by the naked violence of his brother’s emotion. It was how he felt At least, how the dormant male within him felt “He will be watching us.”

Han Ch’in shuddered with indignation. “I wish I could believe that...” He stopped and turned, then relaxed. “Oh, if s you, Daniel.” Daniel hastened down to them. “It’s come.” Han Ch’in’s face lit. “We know where he is?” Daniel grinned fiercely. “We have a fix on him.” “Where, dammit, boy! Where is he?” Daniel laughed. “He’s coming here. The fucker’s coming here!”

Kuei Jen buckled on his body armour, kissed his children goodbye, then walked over to the tent where his father’s coffin lay. Guards formed a human barrier about the tent, their heads bowed in respect for the great man who lay dead within.

Kuei Jen pulled back the flap and stepped inside. The lamps had burned themselves out long ago, yet in the darn’s light he could see the coffin clearly.

He took two steps then stopped.

“Aiya ...”

The word was a breath of disbelief. The coffin was empty. Or almost so. For where his father’s body had lain was now a single white feather. He stepped across, gaping at the sight, then turned, looking about him, as if at any moment his father would step from the air.

But Li Yuan was gone.

Kuei Jen swallowed, then reached in, picking up the feather almost reverently, feeling how soft its down was, like silk, the white so pure it almost hurt the eyes.

He knew what this meant Knew because, like all Han, he had learned the legend as a child. Even so, some rational part of him was loathe to believe that it was true.

An immortal. His father had become an immortal. That was what the feather meant He let it fall, then, turning, hastened to the flap and stood there, bellowing across the field, calling for Han Ch’in.

CHAPTER-22

nightfall in the paradigm world

The head lifted out of the blackness of the desktop and smiled.

“Yuan? You fancy lunch?”

Li Yuan grinned back at his elder brother, then eased back in his hydraulic chair. “I’ve a few things to do here, but yes. Where d’you want to meet?” “Yang’s. In Kennedy Avenue. I’ll be there at one.”

“Make it half-past”

“Okay.”

The head winked, then reformed back into the blackness of the surface. Li Yuan looked up, across the busy trading room. Nearby his partner, Cho Yi, was hard at work, head down, the lead that connected him directly to the terminal flexing and unflexing as he ducked this way and that He was a big man, a southerner from Hunan, and like all of his uncles on his mother’s side, he had gone bald in his late twenties. Now, in his early seventies, he seemed eternal, unchanging. Yuan smiled. Cho was one of those people who had a very basic approach to things. When he read a letter, his lips formed the words, when he talked, he spoke as much with his hands as with his mouth, and when he was plugged in, his whole body responded to the datastream, as if all those computer-simulated images really existed somewhere.

But for all that, Cho was a genius, and more than half the reason why Spring Day was so successful. It was Yuan’s father’s firm, but Cho was senior partner. And rightly so. Without him they’d have been sunk long ago. Cho looked up and, finding Yuan watching him, did a double-take. He raised a hand, as if to say “I won’t be a minute”, then, with a flourish on the keyboard in front of him, cut connection, the wire snaking back into the console with a swish and a clunk. “What is it?” Cho asked.

“I’m meeting Han Ch’in for lunch. Half one at Yang’s. You want to come? We could get the dung to cover.”

The clung was a computer simulant, designed by Cho and programmed to operate the way Cho operated, complete down to the last idiosyncrasy. When the dung was running there was no way - in the short term - that anyone could tell the difference from Cho himself. But Cho, Yuan knew, did not like to leave things in the hands of mere machines.

“I don’t know,” Cho said, frowning, the lines in his forehead like the lines in a piece of old carved ivory.

“This once,” Yuan pleaded. “You know how much Han loves your company. Put a limit on the dung’s transactions. An hour, Cho. What can go wrong in an hour?” Cho answered him sternly. “A tremendous amount But this once I’ll come If s ages since I saw Han. Whaf s he doing now?” Yuan smiled. Even this - this small chit-chat - was a concession on Cho’s part. When the market was open he liked to be dealing one hundred per cent of the time. Making money. Building their tiny empire. While he talked they missed out on deals, and on the commission on those deals. While they talked, Spring Day stood still. “He’s a Major now,” Yuan answered; then, gesturing to his own wire, he said.

“But let him tell you. Come Cho. Lefs make money.”

Across town, in the eastern suburbs of Beijing, DeVore was sitting in the back of a glide, his legs stretched out in front of him, the plush white leather and silk interior extending for yards in every direction. The screen between him and the driver’s compartment was blacked out, the screen showing the state of the markets, the colourful 3-D diagrams changing every moment All was stable. World trade was flourishing. And with the arrival of President Newell in Beijing tomorrow, there was every indication that things would stay that way, especially if he and President Wei agreed to extend the bilateral agreement. And that seemed almost a formality.

Yet things were not as they seemed.

DeVore spoke to the air. “Tell Wyatt to meet me at the Park. And tell him to bring the woman. I want to check her out myself.”

The woman would be crucial. President Newell liked only a certain type. And if Wyatt was right, the woman was just that type. Getting her into the reception was the easy part. Getting her into Newell’s bed would be much harder.