Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 37 Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

The jets came in low over the water, three in all. Each one as flat as a manta ray and utterly silent, their uncloaking timed for when the already sinking yacht reached midway along the gorge.

So far as Tris could tell all three were completely transparent, as if made from glass or carved from ice, and they materialized just as the shell of All Tomorrow's Parties finally tipped on its side, expelling Tris from her doorway in a massive fart of bubbles and river water.

Sweeping low, the jets banked hard and came back on themselves, targeting the river where the yacht had been. And suddenly there was no water and no river and no yacht, just emptiness, which filled as the river roared back in.

Either the jets really didn't see Tris or they didn't care. Or else, Tris told herself, as the current carried her rapidly downstream towards some rocks, they simply weren't looking for a girl with a blue marble in her mouth and pockets full of water.

The jacket was a classic, expensive probably, with an inner lining that clung to her body no matter how oversized the garment looked on the outside and a waist buckle that was busy trying to do itself up. Unfortunately the wrists were still significantly too big for her and the pockets seemed to be expanding to make space for more water.

Tris reached for the buckle.

Once she'd extracted the marble from her mouth and finished coughing up river, she had another go. Only this time, Tris took a hurried breath before dunking herself and tugged hard at the buckle. When the buckle refused to budge, Tris tried pulling the jacket over her head, which would have worked if only the lining didn't keep shaping itself around her to provide warmth. She was being killed by the thing's blind and stupid kindness.

"Shit...

"Prick...

"Pudenda..."

The one advantage, probably the only advantage, to being alone in the middle of nowhere was that her grandmother wasn't around to slap her if she swore. Which was just as well, as Tris was rapidly reaching levels of vocabulary even Doc Joyce didn't know she possessed.

"Fuck this," Tris said. And she yanked at the buckle so hard it made her knuckles almost pop with the effort.

"About time."

Quite how Tris made it over the rocks unscathed she didn't know until later, when she rolled herself onto a gravel bank under the gaze of broken grey cliffs and realized she hadn't made it through unscathed at all. One shoulder was a mess of bruises and her left heel had been sliced near the arch, cut open by a stone. Bleached skin gaped on both sides of the cut.

Staring too hard at the wound made Tris feel sick so she stopped looking, pulled herself completely out of the water and sat with her back to the cliff. It was time to work out where she was and relate that to where she should be, which was infiltrating the Forbidden City with the express purpose of killing the Chuang Tzu.

The gravel where Tris sat was built up on the quiet side of the river, while on the other bubbling foam scoured against a rock wall. This was the way it worked, Tris realized, looking upriver towards a different bend and at another bend beyond that, tracking the course she'd taken. The river roared into the bends and threw up gravel on the quiet side, reversing sides when the gorge curved a different way.

Her own bank began fifty paces behind her as a narrow strip of shingle bellied out into the river and then narrowed again to nothing a hundred paces ahead. Walking to safety along the edge of the river was definitely out.

And that was a problem, because the rock-face behind Tris's back was sheer beyond climbing, even for Tris, and both sides of the gorge seemed to rise endlessly through the charcoal of cliffs to a belt of green before fading into a pale grey that rose like a watercolour wash above the tree line.

She was going to have to go back into the water, but first... Digging a thumbnail into the latex over her hip, Tris tried to rip the top half free from the bottom of her jump suit without messing everything up too much. All that happened was that the material tore and she ended up with an over-long top and a ridiculously low-slung pair of trousers.

Having done what she needed, Tris washed her hands in the river and yanked up her trousers, tying torn strips of latex together at both sides.

It was time to get wet again.

Tris wasn't sure when she first noticed the light in the sky. It might have been on her second night or the third. Whichever night it was, she'd got hungry enough not to care too much about anything but finding food. At the time Tris was trudging along a strip of shingle and expecting it to end in a return to the cold water. And at the point she realized the gravel was there for good, she was several klicks from where she'd last scrambled ashore and her cut foot was warm enough to hurt; although it would mend soon, her wounds always did.

Warmth and food, these weren't exactly thoughts, more the things that went through Tris's head as she climbed a shingle bank and found herself stumbling towards the light across rough grass.

When it moved, Tris froze.

The weapon Doc Joyce had given her was either at the bottom of the river or else broken into its constituent atoms, which seemed more likely. And the knife she usually carried was where she'd left it, on the side in Doc Joyce's surgery. He'd assured her that the blade would wake every alarm system on Chinese Rocks and he was undoubtedly right. All the same she missed its weight on her belt.

To go forward or to go back?

Tris was still debating this question when the light ambled towards her and the answer became irrelevant. Compared to transparent jets, high-sided gorges and hunger so sharp it hurt, a knee-high stag with luminous antlers counted for less than zero.

Tiny fluorescent bonsai topped its lowered head and one front hoof pawed angrily at the damp grass in open threat, but Tris found it hard to take seriously a stag no higher than her hips, antlers included. Besides, she already knew about the petit juc; they appeared regularly enough in those sickly little feeds about the Emperor.

"Shoo," said Tris.

When the stag refused to move Tris decided to walk round it, which was how she found herself at the brow of a hill, staring towards a second, far brighter light.

"Now what?"

Rapture was known to be empty except for the three overlapping, interlinked areas of the city itself. No one lived in the walled palace except Chuang Tzu, his eunuchs, guards and servitors. A child of five knew that. The two outer cities looked from the air exactly like a single cell dividing down the middle, assuming both halves of a cell could be square and one half could contain the families of the servitors, the soldiers' camp followers and the shopkeepers, tradespeople and artisans needed to feed and clothe the inhabitants of the other, which housed the 2022 ambassadors to the Celestial Throne.

Maybe guards had been sent out to see if anyone had survived the crash, except it wasn't really a crash, more a bad landing, and those jets had obliterated the physical carcass of All Tomorrow's Parties along with the very water in which it sunk.

Tris hated not knowing what was going on. In fact, Tris hated it so much that most of the time she refused to admit to herself this was even a possibility. There were good reasons for that, reasons she studiously avoided, because if you didn't avoid them then the reasons had won.

"Fuck it," said Tris. Here she was, almost hallucinating with hunger, having been threatened by some midget stag with lights for antlers and still days away from where she needed to be, and already she was too scared to investigate what would probably turn out to be marsh gas or something equally stupid.

One of the first laws of exploring new worlds proved to be that it is a lot easier to walk uphill in the dark than it is to go down. Tris discovered this at the point her heel skidded on wet moss and she lost her balance, landing with a splash at the bottom of an absurdly short slope.

The light looked no closer but the grass was firm underfoot and the ground rose gently, so Tris set one shaky foot in front of the other and tuned her brain to a place where she'd crashed All Tomorrow's Parties slap bang in the middle of the imperial pavilions and mowed down the charging bannermen with a laser pistol she discovered at the very last minute, right next to the exit hatch.

Tris had once held a laser pistol.

It was very small and incredibly old. A collector's item, the owner said. He'd arrived one morning carrying a talking doll for her, a necklace of ever-changing stones for her mother and a knife for her father, even though everyone knew he was long gone and never coming back. Tris had hidden the knife when the grown-ups were talking and neither the man nor her mother ever asked where it went.

In the months to come Tris got a silver book and a bracelet which could answer questions on any subject beginning with a letter between "F" and "L." And for a while her mother was happy and their shack contained more food than Tris could ever remember seeing.

Sweet, sour and sometimes both, there were tastes and consistencies that worked perfectly while seeming to contradict each other. Cayenne ice cream, battered snails.

Endless food. New clothes.

It ended one morning when Tris trotted through to the kitchen to get some grapes and found instead the man standing at their small table, wrapping bread in the kind of foil that heated itself on demand. You just said the words and left it for thirty seconds. All explorers used it, he said. At least all explorers like him.

"You're going home..." Tris said.

Opalescent eyes looked at her, almost puzzled.

"How old are you?"

"Five."

"And how do you know I'm going?"

"Because I do," said Tris. She was still called Tristesse then. A name he'd casually attached to the sad-eyed brat after the first few days of living with her mother.

"Why don't you take me with you?" Tristesse suggested.

The man smiled. "You know what? I'm going to miss you." Putting his hands under Tris's arms, he lifted the child with one easy motion and stood her on the table next to the bread, so she could stare into eyes which were almost white and flecked with a thousand colours. "I really am."

"Why did you come here anyway?" It seemed an obvious question. Although from the look on the man's face you'd have thought it was the last thing he expected to be asked.

"I'm an artist," he said.

"Not an explorer?"

"Both," he said with a smile.

Tris thought about that. "What's an artist?"

"Someone who..." The man hesitated, as if debating the question with himself. "I collect objects," he said, "then wrap them up in memories and knot each one into a web."

"Did you find what you wanted?"

"Oh yes," he said, "you're one knot on the spider's web. A very special knot." Lifting her down, he picked up his bag. It was really a tube, almost as tall as she was, sealed at the bottom and sticky around the top. Tris had never seen another like it.

"You can keep the knife you stole," he said. "I've got this." And he produced the pistol, an intricate fusion of crystal and metal, so delicate that it could have been made by a spider itself.

Tris looked embarrassed.

"See you," he said.

"Will you?" Tris asked.

The man shook his head. "Probably not."

One step became another as Tris had walked her way through half a dozen daydreams and a fistful of memories, most of them making about as much sense in replay as they did the first time round.

The light, meanwhile, remained in the distance and with morning it vanished altogether. Tris wasn't too sure she could maintain her direction without the light to guide her. Equally, staying put meant losing a whole day's walking. So in the end Tris compromised. She walked all morning across grassland that climbed towards distant hills and then, come midday, she stopped, mostly because that way if she'd got the direction wrong she wouldn't have too far to walk back.

As compromises went it was barely adequate.

Making camp took Tris less time than it might have done if she'd been sensible enough to rescue anything useful from the yacht. "Get over it," Tris told herself. She'd had this discussion already and been forced to admit that rescuing more than herself would have been impossible. So she walked slowly around a huge boulder that protruded from the grass like weathered bone until she was sure which way the wind blew and then settled herself on the opposite side.

The third nightfall was less impressive than the second, which mirrored a rule Tris had already identified; new emotions devalued, going from intense through familiar to reach a kind of ghost state where one no longer really noticed them at all.

With darkness came the light and Tris was grateful, because it meant she'd been walking in the right direction after all. And the light might appear to be in the same place but Tris wasn't, because she was closer and that made her happy too.

Straightening her top and hitching up her frayed trousers, Tris set off uphill and walked until her foot hurt and then walked some more. The grass beneath her toes, having become soft, became rough again and began to alternate with heather and thorn. Tris had seen neither in real life. Heliconid lacked soil or open places where unnecessary plants could grow and had no ambassador to the Celestial Throne who could request help from the Library. All of the food in Heliconid came from the boxes or was raised on the levels under strip light.

And just when Tris had got used to tripping over clumps of heather in the dark and feeling wet thorn lash against her hips, the surface over which she walked changed again, becoming hard and warm with the heat it had retained from the recent day.

It was the remains of an ancient road, fifteen paces wide and so long that Tris reached five thousand, five hundred and fifty before she stopped counting, having lost her place enough times to know this figure might not be entirely accurate.

To break the monotony of the road, Tris began to count her paces again and then took a break from that to sing to herself, having become certain she was being followed. When the fifth peek over her shoulder revealed nothing but silvery darkness and a short stretch of black that faded swiftly from her sight, Tris decided not to look round again, though she sang a little louder and stamped her feet that much harder as she walked.

Shoulders loose, arms loose, stay alert. Tris knew how to walk the walk and she'd won more fights on Rip than she'd lost, the last of them against a grown man with a knife.

One thousand, two thousand... Her heels hurt so much the blisters must have burst and then burst again. Hunger ate at her stomach and she was dizzy with exhaustion. As if this wasn't enough, sweat was gathering beneath her latex top and running down the crack in her bottom.

"You're no bowl of rose petals either," said a voice.

Tris stopped. Looking round, she saw nothing but darkness and somewhere ahead the distant light.

"Flames," said the voice. "They're flames."

She looked again, seeing nothing.

"She heard you," a different voice said.

"Of course I did," said Tris.

"Well," said the first voice a moment later. "Now there's a surprise. Maybe she's from the Tsungli Yamen."

"The Bureau of Foreign Affairs? I doubt it. She's probably a thief. We should deal with her."

"I'm not afraid of you," Tris said.

"You should be."

"Well, I'm not."

"She's beyond being afraid," said the first voice. "I'm not sure it's worth my time being here any longer."

"I'm not talking to you anymore," Tris said. She did her thing with one foot in front of the other, and pretty soon she was striding ahead as if nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had because hunger and tiredness can do funny things. Hallucinations were the least of it.

"We should stop her." That was the first voice.

"No," said the second. "I think it's too late."

Tris stamped one foot in front of the other, ten thousand and one, ten thousand and two, ten thousand and three, ten thousand and four...

"It's not your choice," Tris told the blank air. "I'm leaving now." She said this with a certainty she didn't feel.

"Going where?" The voice seemed to come from far behind her.

"To the palace."

"Palace?" said a voice in front.

"She thinks he'll save her. They always do."

Tris grinned. It was a hard grin that bared most of her teeth. "No," she said, "I'm going to kill him."

"Interesting," said the voice in front. "If a little stupid."

"Tell me something," Tris said. "Do you two actually exist?"

There was a silence.

"You know," a voice said finally, "you're not really meant to be asking us questions."

"Well, I am," Tris said crossly. "So the least you can do is answer them."

"Oh, we're real enough," said the other voice, sounding amused. And behind her the night moved slightly, coming closer. Only it wasn't night, merely something that swallowed all light and left an improbable afterburn on the surface of the air.

"Come back," said the voice. "We're not finished yet."