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"You may leave me now, Captain Zelic," he said softly. "I shall be all
right
Major Lanier has given his word."
With a reluctant nod, Zelic turned and left Li Yuan watched him go,
wondering
why he'd seemed so anxious. Then, steeling himself to make the best of
things,
he turned back, facing Lanier and the official.
"Well, Major, it seems I am in your hands. Lead on. I'm rather looking
forward
to seeing what you keep out there"
The room was arctic blue and chill, a huge, vault-like space, the walls
of
reflecting glass, the space between unfurnished. Overhead a sloping
ceiling of
smooth black ice, two hundred ch'i to a side, was supported by two
lines of
slender pillars.Into this room now stepped two white-coated
technicians, their
faces masked, their shaven heads reflecting back the cool blue light.
They
paused, conscious of the entity embedded in the perspex at the far end
of the
room, then slowly, hesitantly, began to walk toward it As they did, a
disembodied voice filled the great hall with a low bass resonance, like
the
voice of emptiness itself.
"Is it ready yet?"
A dozen paces from the far end of the room, they stopped and bowed, the
taller
of them answering.
'It is ready, Master."
There was a pause, then an echoing reply. "Good. That is... good"
The wall facing them was dark. Now it began to glow, a dim cold light
growing in
its depths, like a firefly trapped in a block of ice.
As the glow grew, a tiny figure was revealed, more an emaciated mummy
than a
man. One side of its skull was larger than the other, the mottled skin
stretched
tight across the bone. One eye was fixed and focused, staring mad, the
other
rolled slowly in its orb. The arms were thin and tiny, like a child's,
but the
hands were big, the fingers brown and elongated, the knuckles swollen
like dice.
It had a belly like a young baby's and long stringy legs that dangled
uselessly.
At the end of them the feet were black and rotted, one of them almost a
stump.
This was Josiah Egan, grandfather of the reigning king.
Slowly the two men set to work, freeing the great block of perspex from
its
position in the wall. That done, one of them turned and gestured to the
camera
overhead. At once six others entered the room at the far end - big,
heavily-muscled men in black one-pieces - bringing with them a large
flotation
tray. As the technicians stepped back, the newcomers lifted the heavy
block up
onto the thick-based tray, then slowly manoeuvred it across the floor.
"I died ..." the voice said, sending its low, bass echoes throughout
the room.
"Six times I died." And now they would bring it back to life again.
Two hours and it would be done. Two hours and twenty years of intensive
work
would be concluded. The technicians looked to each other and smiled.
"Would you like anything, Oaeh Hsid?"
Li Yuan turned from the painting he had been studying and smiled. "No
thank you,
Chang. I am fine. You see to your Mistress, neh?"
"Chteh Hsia."
With a low bow, Chang backed away, returning to Fei Yen who sat in the
corner of
that massive anteroom, both of Li Yuan's maids attending to her. Behind
her,
through a great silk curtain of red, white and blue, he could glimpse
servants
laying the tables and making their final preparations for the banquet.
My Court, he thought, looking about the room at the nine people
gathered there.
Once he had maintained a great household of five thousand servants, now
he was
reduced to this: a steward, a cook, a barber, a seamstress, two maids,
a
serving-boy and a bootmaker who doubled as his taster.
Not that he really missed such luxury, for with it had come a
stultifying sense
of confinement, of being a prisoner to ritual and obligation, yet it
was hard to
come to terms with such a reduction in social status, especially when
one had to
deal with such hsiao jen as these Americans, who judged a man not by
his innate
qualities but by how many "coats" he could stand beside his dining
table.
He turned back, looking at the massive painting once again, taking in
its
brutality, its heavy-handed symbolism, reminded, as he did, of his
visit to the
frontier post that afternoon, and experiencing again that same tiny
frisson of
shock he'd felt earlier.
Whatever it was he'd expected, it had not been that
Their faces ... He shivered, remembering his first sight of one of the
border
guards. The face had been rebuilt, the nose removed, the cheek bones
restructured to house a fine-mesh metallic filter. The mouth and throat
had also
been refashioned, two thick ridges of new muscle surrounding the neck,
sothat at
first sight it had seemed as though the man had been decapitated and a
new,
non-human head set upon his shoulders.
It was a blunted, dehumanised face, more mechanical in its appearance
than any
machine he had ever seen, yet human, for all that Yes, and it had made
him
re-evaluate what he'd seen. The trays, for instance. The trays weren't
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