Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 16 Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 13 [The Future]

The first of the imperial pavilions was simpler than the servitor had expected. Still vast, but simpler. A double-eaved hipped roof rested on red walls, while fretted shutters that hinged from the top were held open by ropes, the windows below being surprisingly ordinary and papered from inside. An empty bed, built from brick and covered with a silk mattress, stood against one wall. The silk was crumpled and scrolls lay unopened next to it on the floor.

A Tartar bow and a quiver full of arrows gathered dust on a gable high overhead. Not having seen a bow before, the servitor imagined it was some kind of single-stringed musical instrument.

The tray was his passport through the pavilions of the inner court. An ebony and jade passport laid with a glass cup, squat iron teapot and pre-warmed gold platter on which sat five types of dim sum, each one representing all that was best of the cuisine of the original Middle Kingdom.

Sous Chef Chang San had been careful to tell the servitor the significance of each morsel and how it related to the others on the plate. As well as jiaozi dumplings, Szechwan huntun and char siu bao (steamed buns with roast pork), there was har gao and, obviously enough, the sous chef's special pork dumplings.

The young man doubted if the sous chef really expected him to explain this to the Emperor. Failing that, however, there seemed little reason for Chang San's manic intensity or the way he demanded the servitor repeat back the descriptions to prove that he knew which of the slowly congealing lumps of food was which.

"You won't forget?"

"Of course not."

Chang San smiled thinly. "Be sure you don't." He wouldn't put it past the young man to claim the cooking as his own. There was something untrustworthy about the servitor's eyes, which were much too wide apart and possessed an unsettling insolence. Worse than this, his nails were filthy and Chang San found it hard to believe that any previous emperor would have been willing to take food served by someone with dirty hands.

"So," said the young servitor, as he casually broke a piece of crust off a deep-fried huntun and fed it to his rat, "what do you think?" But Null merely wrinkled its whiskers and looked round for more.

After the rat had dined on the oily edges, its master ate what was left of the filo base and most of the chilli and chicken filling, chewing the food with interest as he slid the rat back into his sleeve and rearranged the dim sum so that the plate still looked full.

"For the Emperor," he told a guard, and the man stepped back from a gold, red and green arch which was decorated with calligraphic banners praising the Chuang Tzu as the intermediary of heaven.

"For the Emperor..." Having called out these words, the man slammed his halberd into the tiles so hard that the weapon almost bounced out of his hand.

The interloper expected to find more guards in the Hall of Union but instead he found himself alone, facing a wooden throne. The throne was gilded, flanked by four lesser thrones, two on either side and all positioned a pace behind the throne of the Emperor. For reasons which were not immediately clear the lesser thrones were hidden under silk. Only the central one was uncovered.

It fitted him perfectly.

"You shouldn't be sitting there."

"Tell me about it," said the servitor and the voice in his head laughed a little sadly, or maybe it was bitterly. The servitor had always known that it was not really a voice, merely what his mind translated as a voice. It had been a long time since he'd expected other people to hear the things he heard.

Directly over the dais on which the throne sat was a panel painted with cryptograms representing Wu Wei, the fundamental Taoist principle of responding spontaneously and fluidly to any circumstance.

Above the panel hung a ceiling so ornate it made the servitor's head spin just to look at the intricacy of the gilded carving. He could make out endless dragons and, he thought, a phoenix, but most of the central carving was geometric, endless repetitions of a simple form.

A pale silk carpet covered the dais but the actual floor of the pavilion was dark stone pitted with age and scuffed with the feet of nearly five thousand years of ambassadors presenting their credentials.

The twenty-seven most commonly used seals rested inside a glass cabinet, some were soapstone, a few sandalwood but most were jade. All but three were in Manchu, one of those being in a language no one had ever identified.

Watched by at least a billion the servitor carried his tray across the courtyard to the third and last of the private pavilions. Heavenly Purity housed another, significantly more important, seat of power, the Lesser Throne from which the Emperor greeted ambassadors on their first arrival.

It was in this pavilion that his concubines should live, in eighteen bedrooms, arranged nine on both sides, each bedroom containing three beds, fifty-four in all.

All but one were deserted.

And it was this last that the Emperor had made his own. Neither the servitor nor the billions watching knew which room housed the Chuang Tzu because the feed was strangely imprecise about this.

"For the Emperor," said the servitor.

The officers who moved to intercept him wore scale armour made from star-shaped pieces of what looked like steel sewn at the points to a silk jacket, each attachment being protected by the body of the star next to it. An intricate and time-consuming way to create armour. Except that the officers' armour was summer-weight, carbon-based and required no tempering. It still swallowed the light, though, and presented itself with a solidity belied by its actual lightness.

"From the kitchens," the servitor said, lifting his tray slightly higher. Stepping between the guards, he swept through a door that opened as if his entry was expected and found himself in an anteroom, facing another guard in armour even more light-swallowing than that of the men he'd just left behind.

General Ch'ao Kai watched the young man walk towards him across an unlit floor, while outside drizzle cut across Rapture's sky and a cold wind slid through the pavilion and ate into his bones, more potent than fear.

"Everything's going to be all right," the servitor said, and then he nodded, repeating himself in little more than a whisper as billions of watchers begged leave to disagree. He spoke, of course, to the rat now frozen within his sleeve, liking the darkness but made fearful by the levels of anxiety radiating from its master.

"Food for His Celestial Excellency."

The General inclined his head just enough to include the young man within his gaze. He was hereditary leader of the guard, custodian of the inner door and an elder clansman of a lesser banner. It was true he commanded few fighting troops but with no enemy these were unnecessary. Quarrels might happen between the 2023 worlds but the worlds themselves could not fight each other, since each was dependent on all others for the fine gravitational balance which kept them in stable orbit.

One of the earliest of the Chuang Tzu had made this clear. Besides, in an empire of plenty where was the need for violence? No single culture had ever monopolized all 2023 worlds but a constant homogenization now more or less guaranteed the cultural equivalent of convergent evolution. The smallest differences might still seem massively significant, but major differences had long since been etched smooth by familiarity and time.

"What do you have there?"

The servitor glanced down at his tray. Now seemed a good time to state the obvious. "Five different kinds of dim sum," he said. "This is har gao and this Szechwan huntun, that's char siu bao..." He counted off the tiny offerings one at a time, silently giving thanks to the absent sous chef.

In the end it was the tray rather than the food which persuaded General Ch'ao Kai that the man spoke the truth. Inlaid ebony and a single slab of flawless mutton-fat jade. Only an emperor would be served on such a tray.

"Are you expected?"

"I couldn't say."

"You...?"

"How would I know?" The young servitor shrugged and General Ch'ao Kai suddenly got a sense of having seen the man before. As the palace was as full of servitors as it was of eunuchs and the General made a point of paying less than zero attention to either, this seemed more than likely.

"Put down the tray," General Ch'ao Kai demanded, "then face the wall with your legs apart and your hands clasped behind your head."

"No," the servitor said. "I couldn't possibly do that."

"Why not?" General Ch'ao Kai was so shocked by the answer that he forgot to be furious, although a thin sliver of his mind retained the insult and readied itself to be offended.

"Because it would upset my rat," said the servitor, "that's one reason." Shaking his sleeve, he waited for a narrow white face to show its nose and whiskers. "This is Null," he said. "Unfortunately his sister died."

"Sister?"

"Void," said the servitor. "There's another reason," he added. "Slightly better. I'm not allowed to let this tray out of my hands."

"You're not--"

"In case the food is poisoned." His shrug was slight, an acknowledgment of the absurdity of this suggestion. "The order was very clear."

"And who gave this order?"

"The Library itself," said the boy, pretending not to notice a slight widening of General Ch'ao Kai's carefully kohled eyes. Only the Emperor spoke directly to the Library, its voice being the one single element missing from what watchers were allowed to experience of the Emperor's life inside the Forbidden City.

It spoke to the worlds, but only through the Librarian.

"You spoke to the avatar?"

"No, sir." The servitor shook his head.

General Ch'ao Kai had two choices. He could strike the servitor down for blasphemy or he could open the door. As well as being undignified, striking him down seemed unwise, particularly if the servitor was telling the truth.

Fifteen billion people held their breath.

"In you go then." General Ch'ao Kai made his decision sound like a command. "Don't let the food go cold."

The servitor glanced wryly at the congealing filo parcels but kept silent and just nodded to the ornately armoured General as the door opened and he stepped into the dirt and chaos that was Zaq's room.

"Here," he said. "I've brought you some--"

What he brought went unannounced because Zaq catapulted himself naked from a sunken bath, scooped his long knife off the floor and spun round to face his visitor, just catching a glimpse of General Ch'ao Kai's shocked face before the door closed itself and he was alone with the intruder.

"Wait," the servitor said, backing away.

Thunder shook the sky outside and lightning lit the windows. And as Zaq slashed with his blade, a howling wind ripped blossoms from cherry trees and toppled the spire of a distant pagoda.

"Wait!"

The voice belonged to the servitor and it was in Zaq's head, echoing around the darkness that the Chuang Tzu contained within him. This shouldn't have been possible because no one was allowed in Zaq's head except the Library, and he resented even that.

"Get out," he screamed, as fire split an oak outside, cleaving five hundred years of careful nurture. "Go now."

"Zaq," said the man.

"You mustn't call me that." Zaq's voice had risen to a howl to make itself heard over the roaring wind outside and tears blinded him, the blade in his hand feeling wrong since he'd smashed the handle six years before.

Opening his mouth to shout for General Ch'ao Kai, Zaq shut it again. He'd banned the General from entering this room. Come to that, he'd banned everyone. Here was where he was meant to be safe.

"Out," he demanded, and blinked as a rat jumped from the stranger's sleeve.

Instead of backing towards the door as Zaq expected him to do, the servitor casually tipped the tray sideways, spilling dim sum, cup and squat iron teapot onto the tiles. This done, he gripped the now-empty tray by one corner and swung the thing hard towards Zaq's wrist.

If the blow had hit flesh, both bones in Zaq's forearm would have broken because the Chuang Tzu had no codes that added strength to his simple, calcium-based skeleton; in fact, he had no physical enhancements at all.

Such things were rendered unnecessary.

As the edge of the heavy tray neared Zaq's wrist, smoke streamed up his spine, across his shoulder and down his arm, setting hard as steel and dark as jet. So unobtrusive was the Emperor's symbiont that the armour was in place before Zaq even realized he was wearing it.

Ebony split and mutton-fat jade hit the floor, the base of the tray mixing with earlier fragments from the knife handle. Without hesitation, Zaq slashed with his blade, his armour adding strength to the blow. Razor-edged steel met unprotected flesh and sliced deep, silencing the servitor's scream with the scrape of a blade across larynx.

Zaq's coat splattered red and then the servitor pitched forward, hitting the floor on his knees. It was, Zaq had to admit, all very convincing. The headless body at his feet gasped at him like a dying carp, shat itself and shuddered its way into oblivion. The blood on Zaq's cloak was suitably warm and when Zaq tasted it he got salt and a sweetness that reminded him of something just beyond the edge of memory.

"Librarian."

"Highness."

Zaq sighed. Sulking might not be quite the way to describe how the Librarian behaved after he'd been out of contact with it for more than a day but to Zaq it seemed to come close. In this he was wrong. The speed at which the Library lived was quantum, simultaneously past and present. What Zaq saw as a retreat into formality was merely a side effect of temporal distance.

On one level, the absence of a few weeks was sufficient for the Library to have had several billion thoughts, many of them relevant. On another, a few weeks was less than a single thought in the mind of a creation so old it could remember time changing direction at least twice.

"Send cleaners," said Zaq, his voice bored. "I need someone to clear up this mess."

"Tell the General."

"No."

A few years back, Zaq had worked out that the Librarian always knew what he'd decided to do before he did. And when he'd challenged the Library on this, it had admitted this was true, while insisting there was nothing sinister in the fact. Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent.

The Library had sounded almost amused while it explained this; as if Zaq was somehow missing the point.

"You summon help," Zaq said, looking round at the chaos of his room. "After all, everything's you really."

"Me?"

"All of this." Zaq gestured at the body at his feet, then at servitors sweeping away floods in the courtyard below.

"That wasn't me," the Library said. "You want to know why he was here?"

"Does it matter?" Zaq asked.

"So you don't want to know who he was?"

"He was you," Zaq said. "Like everyone else in this place. You know that as well as I do."

"No," the voice in his head said, sounding almost sad. "You're wrong. That was you, more or less..."