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The Kingdom of Four Rivers

Page 15

by Guy Salvidge


  Kai Sen crept toward the door, which lay ajar. The moon was high, the night bright. And voices, barely audible. Someone whispering in the courtyard. Kai Sen came up alongside the door and pressed his body against the wall, straining to hear what was being said. Two voices, one of which was familiar to him. It was Cheng. Looking back into the hall, Kai Sen saw that Cheng's bedroll was indeed unoccupied. But who was he talking to? The words passed over him. A midnight tryst perhaps? Ought Kai Sen to mind his own business and lie down again? But though he tried, he could not see which other bed was empty. The unknown voice was pleading, beseeching, but Cheng was firm.

  Footsteps approaching. Kai Sen was about to be apprehended. What to do? Hide behind the door? No, he would be spotted. Time's up. Kai Sen pushed the door open and stepped out into the courtyard. Cheng and another man, who was not familiar to Kai Sen, stopped in their tracks. The unknown man was brandishing a knife. For a moment there was a stalemate, and Kai Sen saw the man’s expression harden from one of surprise to a mask of murderous resolve.

  Cheng shouted, “Intruder!” and grappled the other man to the ground. Behind Kai Sen, people were stirring. The other man tried to stab Cheng in the side, but Cheng was too strong for him, smashing his arm against the ground. The knife clattered away, by which time Liang and the others were pushing past Kai Sen into the courtyard. The unknown man scrambled to his feet just as Cheng retrieved the knife and slashed the air where he had been. The man bolted out of the courtyard with Cheng in pursuit.

  “What happened?” Liang asked Kai Sen.

  “I don't know.”

  “Cheng, come back!” Tuan said.

  Cheng reappeared, his arm dripping blood. Ji Tao tended to her brother's wound while some of the men went in search of Cheng's attacker.

  The wound was not serious, and was soon bandaged. As the men returned without having found the intruder, Cheng began to retell his version of events. It became apparent that he had been on watch at the time:

  “I heard a noise outside the courtyard. I went to have a look, but I saw nothing. No sooner had I turned to come inside, I felt myself being tackled to the ground. Luckily Kai Sen came out and scared the intruder. I tried to catch him but he stabbed me in the arm and got away.” As he said this, Cheng stared intently at Kai Sen, his face expressionless.

  “Was it a native?” Tuan asked.

  “No, it wasn't a savage. He was a shield-dweller, but not one I know.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?” Rong Li asked.

  “No.”

  “What about you, Kai Sen? Did you see what the man looked like?”

  “Yes,” Kai Sen said. “He had black hair and he was quite small. It was too dark for me to see anything else though.”

  “It's a good thing you offered to take my watch,” Ji Tao said. “I don't know what I would have done.”

  “We're safe now,” Tuan said. “Cheng, my son will relieve you. Your courage is appreciated. You have my thanks.”

  “I wonder what he wanted,” Liang mused.

  “He had a knife,” Cheng replied. “Perhaps he intended to rob us.”

  Liang took over the watch and everyone else went back to bed. This time Kai Sen got no sleep at all. Over and over, his mind replaying what had happened. He reviewed it dozens of times, wondering whether he had perhaps been mistaken about what he had seen. But the more he thought about it, the surer he was. Cheng had definitely been talking to the intruder, and had only turned on him when he had seen Kai Sen. And what would have happened had Kai Sen not intervened when he did? Their motive can only have been murder.

  Which begged the question: why did Cheng want to murder someone in the travelling party? Who? Kai Sen himself? One thing was for sure: Kai Sen must avoid being alone with Cheng from now on. He could not get Cheng's expressionless face out of his mind. He had not been angry. He had not been surprised. He had been calculating how to neutralise the new threat. For hours, Kai Sen pondered this.

  The next day passed without event. For once, the rain held off entirely, and they made excellent progress. They would reach Baitang the next day. Kai Sen barely noticed the jungle passing on either side. By dusk, he had made a decision. It was not one he took lightly. He was going to tell Ji Tao that her brother had been lying. Perhaps he would tell Liang as well. But Kai Sen felt Cheng's eyes on him relentlessly, and he knew that he could not speak to the others directly. So he wrote Ji Tao a letter, knowing that Cheng would not be able to read it. This is what it said:

  Friend Ji Tao.

  I am telling you this because I think you are the only person I can trust. I hope that this trust is not misplaced. Your brother is lying about what happened in Zizhong. This is what really happened. I woke up because I heard voices in the courtyard, and I crept up to the door to listen to what was being said. Cheng and the other man were talking for at least a couple of minutes. When they approached the hall, I confronted them. Only then did Cheng raise the alarm and wrestle the other man to the ground. I am telling you this because I think that myself or someone in your family is in danger, perhaps your uncle Tuan. I do not know why Cheng was talking to the other man, but I do know that if I hadn't interrupted them, someone would have been killed.

  Please say nothing of this to your brother. I beg you. Thank you my friend.

  Signed Kai Sen.

  Kai Sen folded the letter and wrote open this when you know something is wrong on the front. Then he waited for Cheng's attention to be distracted for a few seconds, and in those seconds he pressed the letter into Ji Tao's unsuspecting hands and walked away. It was done. Now he could not bear to face her to try to read her expression. Kai Sen went into his tent and did not come out until morning.

  Then it was the day they would reach Baitang. The already familiar glow of a shielded city gladdened Kai Sen, for he knew that this journey was coming to an end. Over the course of the morning, he exchanged a few stolen glances at Ji Tao, but this furtive attempt at communication proved inconclusive. They followed the path of the Wu to Baitang's west gate. Spirits were high. Liang made a number of jokes, but Kai Sen was not listening. He was wondering what would happen to him now. All he wanted was a dark place to hide, alone with his thoughts.

  Through another vortex, and Kai Sen was inside the Outer Shield of Baitang. It looked much as Luihang had done. The air was cool, the temperature mild. But something was different. There was a small party of officials in green uniforms waiting near the guardhouse, and when Tuan tried to push his caravans through, the officials stopped him. But they didn't want Tuan. They wanted Kai Sen. He barely had a chance to look back at the Chens before he was whisked away into custody.

  Chapter Nine

  Kai Sen was not exactly in custody, it seemed. The officials were firm but polite. They led him through the bustling street to a waiting car. Not a caravan, not a gaur-drawn cart, but a car.

  It did not look like any car that had existed in Kai Sen’s time, however. It was shaped like a teardrop, lying horizontally on squat grey wheels. Its surface seemed to change colour in the light, like a puddle of oil. One of the officials held his hand out to it and the whole side lifted away, revealing a plush interior. Kai Sen was ushered inside. He sat down on a soft, white seat, and the officials sat alongside him in a semi-circle along the back of the vehicle. Then the side snapped shut with a sound like that of a suction cup. There were no doors and windows, as such: the whole surface of the car was opaque from the inside. There was no driver’s seat, nor any sign of a steering wheel or other such apparatus. And yet the car began to move along the boulevard almost immediately, in perfect silence. Through the curved, tinted wall of the car, Kai Sen could see that the people of Baitang were giving the car a wide berth. No one looked directly at it, but they could scarcely have been unaware of its presence.

  His escort numbered three officials. Their faces were pale and youthful, and they were all male. Each had closely cropped dark hair, a smooth face and a trim physique. Kai Sen cleared his throat to s
peak but he was silenced by a dismissive hand from one of the officials.

  Presently a screen blinked on in front of him. On the screen was the face and upper torso of a middle-aged woman in the same dull green uniform. Her hair was flecked with grey.

  “You are Kai Sen?” she asked.

  “That's correct.”

  The woman smiled curtly. “Excellent. I should introduce myself; my name is Shu Wen.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Shu Wen.”

  “I want to show you something, Kai Sen. What do you see outside?”

  “People.”

  “And what do they look like?”

  “They're going about their business, pushing carts and so forth.”

  “Are they looking at you?”

  “No, it’s like they can’t see, or don’t care.”

  “Wrong. They can see and they do care. But they are frightened, and so they avert their eyes. Do you know what they are frightened of, Kai Sen?”

  He shook his head.

  “Us. They are frightened of us. They are terrified and terrorized. Do you know why?”

  “No, I don't.”

  “Because we make it so. We make them afraid, we make them cower in fear. But I sense your discomfort. I am moving too fast for you.”

  “I’m confused,” Kai Sen admitted. “Why are they afraid?”

  Shu Wen shrugged. “We are the masters, they are the slaves. We hold the power of life and death over them. Is this not enough?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “You should see your face! You looked shocked.”

  “Yes, it’s just...I didn't expect any of this.”

  “What did they tell you, those peasants? That civilization had crumbled, that a few courageous families cling nobly to the remnants of a faded glory? I'm trying to imagine it from your perspective. You imagined that you had been abandoned in a primitive future, and in a sense this is true. The peasants were not lying, but this is not the full story. Let me put it to you another way: the empire never ended.”

  Kai Sen didn't know what to say, so he said nothing.

  “What year did you go under?” Shu Wen asked.

  “2070. I was born in 2036.”

  “2070? That makes you one of the First! This is incredible.” Shu Wen’s voice was getting louder and louder. She was almost shouting now: “But I didn’t think the technology had been refined by that stage! It wasn’t until the early twenty-one hundreds that the technique was perfected!”

  “What year is it now?” Kai Sen asked.

  “2362, which means that you slept for nearly three hundred years. What was the name of your institution?”

  “My institution? Uh, the United Medical Board.”

  Shu Wen frowned. “Medical Board? I haven’t heard of it. What did this Medical Board do?”

  Something told Kai Sen not to mention his illness. “It did a lot of things,” he said. “Resourcing, assets management, the like.”

  Shu Wen nodded. “You were one of the directors, I take it?”

  “Junior executive.”

  There was a look of respect in Shu Wen’s eyes. He had won her over. “Administrator Silex will want to see you immediately. I shall inform him that you are on your way.”

  The screen winked out.

  The car was passing through a densely populated district. Each face was turned away, although Kai Sen could see that some of the people were looking at the passing teardrop out of the corner of their eyes. Here, at last, was something resembling ordinary human life. He found this obscurely reassuring. But Kai Sen was aware, above all else, that he was dirty. He had recently become used to a rough outdoor lifestyle, of sleeping in tents and bathing in streams. But now he was getting the seat dirty with his filthy jeans and greasy hands.

  The busy district had been left behind, and now they were travelling through a beautiful and beautifully empty landscape. It was an image of a rural past that had never truly existed, except in the minds of backward-looking sages: fields of ripening wheat, backing onto a pristine river, under a benevolent sun. The occasional stone cottage punctuated the landscape, nestling between the untouched forest and the smooth green plains. There was nothing that could be labeled industrial, not even a smoking chimney. The single lane of the paved road winded its way into a gentle valley. Humanity’s hand was barely visible here, in a landscape where the impossible past merged with the perfect future. Kai Sen felt a great sense of peace, an encompassing finality.

  But beyond this vision, this dream, lay something entirely other: the hard red dome of Baitang Inner Shield, rising from the hillside as though surfacing from the folds of the earth. Shields within shields—while the Outer inspired peace and communion, the Inner invoked loathing and fear. As the car continued on its path, the Inner Shield leered overhead.

  The car slowed to a crawl as it came to a checkpoint. Out of the guardhouse stepped another man in the ubiquitous green uniform. Kai Sen could not hear what he was saying. Apparently satisfied that the correct procedure had been followed, the guard raised the barrier and the car passed through. Now the car was travelling through a wide tunnel on a downward incline, that presumably led beneath the Inner Shield. The sky closed over.

  And then he was in the real Baitang. It was as though his slumber of centuries had been erased. The tunnel that he had just passed through might as well have been a time machine, for now Kai Sen had stepped out of the past and into the future. He came to see that the shields enclosed not only space but time: in the jungle, primitive tribalism reigned; inside the Outer Shield, it was the medieval period; but here, beneath the Inner Shield, a form of hyper-modernity was in evidence.

  Teardrop cars in shades of purple, orange and red cruised the streets; in fact—wait—they were hovering above the ground. The central grid of roads must be powered in some unknown way, for now Kai Sen’s own vehicle was hovering too. It was a vertical city. High above, teardrop cars floated along on causeways that linked towers which reached toward the inner dome. And there were people, hundreds of them, minding their own business like they did in any modern city. The people were dressed flamboyantly in kaleidoscopic rainbowed hues. There were arcades, plazas, restaurants, galleries. There was a palisade of light enclosing a park of breathtaking beauty, in which couples reclined contentedly. Up ahead was a transparent, cylindrical column. It was a vast elevator, in which blobs of dazzling colour rose or fell slowly by some unknown means of conveyance. The blobs were teardrop cars and the column was the traffic intersection of the future.

  The screen switched on, partially blocking Kai Sen’s view of the city.

  “Impressive, isn't it?” Shu Wen asked.

  “It’s amazing,” Kai Sen agreed.

  “The ground levels are for less fortunate souls,” Shu Wen said, her eyes gleaming. “The rich lie high above.”

  “How many people live here?”

  “More than forty thousand in Baitang, not including the peasants of course. There are a further twenty-five thousand in Luihang, and almost ninety thousand in Zhenghe. Altogether, Four Rivers has close to two hundred thousand citizens.”

  “Not including the peasants, of course,” Kai Sen said.

  “Correct. The ratio of peasants to citizens is around three to one. But that still makes for far less than one million souls in total.”

  “Where did the millions go?”

  Shu Wen laughed. “In the ground, I expect! The peasants have a saying:

  ‘From nothing they came.

  To nothing they returned.

  Who can be blamed for that?’”

  “I see,” Kai Sen said. Now his own car was queuing at the great conveyor with dozens of other vehicles.

  “I’m not sure you do,” Shu Wen said. “But now you will be taken to the Aurica, where you will be given time to recuperate before your first meeting with the administrator. I will be in contact with you tomorrow.”

  “What should I do until then?”

  “Enjoy yourself,” Shu Wen said
. “I think you’ll find plenty of interest to keep you occupied.”

  “Thank you,” Kai Sen said. “You've been most helpful.”

  Shu Wen nodded and was gone; Kai Sen rose in an aura of heavenly light. All around him, other cars were rising and falling, each one spinning slowly in the grip of an invisible force. Up he went, passing through levels bathed in a cavalcade of transient flashing colours. Up, through levels filled with massive floating advertisements and glowing street signs. Up, until the inside of the Inner Shield drew close, until the radiant cylinder deposited him on the second level from the top. There were no pedestrians walking here. The promenade was devoid of life. There were few tear-drop cars on the road, and it wasn’t long before his own vehicle turned into a cul-de-sac, at the end of which lay a fabulous golden building: the Aurica. It was an impossible structure, which seemed to hang from nothing. It did not resemble anything Kai Sen had ever seen.

  One of the officials began to speak:

  “This is where you are to stay. One moment, please.”

  The car drove down into a narrow tunnel beneath the Aurica. Then the side of the car folded back and Kai Sen was ushered by the three officials toward a waiting lift. The three of them stood stiffly in the lift, as though bracing themselves for an explosion.

  “Why didn't you talk to me before?” Kai Sen asked them.

  No response. Not even a flicker of recognition registered on their faces.

  “Are you alive at all?” he pressed.

  “Are you alive?” one of them replied. So they could understand his question.

  “Yes, I am,” Kai Sen said. “At least I think so. But you—”

  He was cut short by the doors opening onto the reception. One of the officials gestured for him to exit the lift, which he did. The three officials made no move to follow suit. Then the doors closed. There was no one here except for a lone receptionist.

  The receptionist smiled, but beneath the veneer of sympathy, Kai Sen saw in him a cold humour. “Kai Sen, I presume?” the receptionist said.

 

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