Daylight on Iron Mountain

by David Wingrove

  They were, and all credit to them, perfectly reasoned. Only reason would be the first thing to go in a scenario like this, and these papers had been compiled by men who had little experience of war. Not a single one of them understood just how much chance would play a part in the days ahead; how much would depend on who could improvise the best. On who could ‘wing it’, as the Hung Mao used say. Whereas he… he had ‘winged it’ these many years, playing it by ear, doing the unexpected, outflanking his opponents.

  Which was why, right now, he needed to be alone. To hear no other voice but his own. To think things through while he still could, before all the disparate voices sullied the clarity of his thought.

  Simplicity. That was the answer. Or part of it.

  Maybe. Yet it did not help him come to a decision, and a decision must be made before this night was out.

  His duty was quite clear. He was Tsao Ch’un’s man. Hadn’t he prostrated himself before the emperor and sworn the oath of loyalty?

  He had. Only maybe those had been empty words. If so, then what was he? What purpose did he serve?

  Custodian, his thoughts answered him. You are custodian of it all.

  Yes, there was no doubting that. He was the custodian of this world. In his hands lay the fate of all, for it was he who was responsible for policing their knowledge of the past, and without that…

  Without it, it would fall. For Chung Kuo was not just the City, the plantations, the orbitals and all the rest of it that was visible to the eye. It was an idea, an idea that the Ministry – the Thousand Eyes – maintained and guarded on a daily basis and which he, as First Dragon, kept watch over.

  He was the glue that held it all together. And, because that was so, it was his duty to ensure that proper thought was given to the problem. For they had come to a major cusp in history – a moment when they must choose a path and follow it to the death.

  For all their sakes.

  For some time now he had known that it would come to this, but now that the hour was upon them, he realized that it was not anything like as simple as he’d thought. He needed to be certain that the decision he made was the right one, for if it were not then he and his great Ministry would vanish, as if they never had existed.

  And that could not be allowed. That was why he must make the right decision and make it before this night was over. Tomorrow would be too late.

  Only now, at this critical hour, he found himself thinking of his own small life, rather than the greater picture. Of his climb from nothing to the eminence he now commanded, rather than that abstract mesh of power and influence that had become his world.

  He put his hand out, feeling the warmth of the candle’s flame.

  Of the twelve dragons who shared his burden, not a single one of them knew him, nor understood him. They knew his history, of course. How could they not? For that was their business, after all, to know everything they could unearth about each other – but that was very different from understanding. To do that, they would have had to be him, to have suffered what he’d suffered, to have lost a world and been given only shadows in return.

  For what was this world if not a place of shadows? A waiting room, beyond whose door was death. And that was his secret. That he was dead inside, and had been these past twenty years and more.

  Even so, he might simply have remained what he had been – another empty, bitter man, obsessed with his loss, eaten away by it – had not chance intervened.

  His eyes widened at the thought. Chance was everything. And when it came one grasped it and hung on, as to the proverbial tiger’s tail.

  Chance, then, and loss. And no small loss at that, but the loss of everything that made a life worth living.

  He had always been ambitious. Hard-nosed, his mother said, and proud of it. As a young, married man, his business had thrived. He had grown rich. A big man in the Ho-nan town where he’d been born. Only that day, when the bombs fell, the poor were made level with the rich. What Shen Fu had so carefully built had been destroyed in one single blinding flash.

  His life, quite literally, was turned to ashes: wife, children, factory and all.

  Chance had it that he had been away that day, on business. A thousand miles away. In the general chaos he had made his way back, riding on the back of an army jeep against the tide of refugees, returning to find his home town levelled.

  He had not remarried. When the City came, he went through re-education, and, when the jobs were allocated in his stack, he chose the lowest of them, oven man, in charge of incinerating the dead. Why he had chosen that even he could not say. It was as if, for a time, he was asleep. And then one day he woke.

  Two officials from the Ministry had come, seeking a favour. And he had known, in an instant, that there was something else he could be. Something greater.

  It was purest chance. A favour they had called it, when in fact what they wanted was for him to cover their tracks. To do their dirty work for cash, and no questions asked.

  Seeming to agree with them, he had arranged things as they’d wished. Only, instead of keeping silent, instead of taking their money and doing as they’d asked, he had gone directly to their offices, where he had sat for the best part of three hours, refusing to see anyone but the Grand Master himself.

  That was where it had begun. The first link in the chain. For there, before that great man, he had betrayed them; had given them over, knowing the risk he took.

  It would have been easy, he knew, to be rid of him. To condone what had been done. The Ministry had destroyed ten thousand men greater than himself. But he was lucky. Chance and audacity favoured him that day. The great man was new to his post, a recent appointment, and he had arrived with a mission to reduce corruption in his command; to deal with any offenders harshly and without mercy.

  The matter itself was easy to prove. There were the four coffins for a start, and there was bound to be taped evidence.

  One of the watchers – an agent of the Ministry – had become obsessed with a woman he was watching, a young, high-spirited maid who had been forced by her parents into marrying an older man. It had begun one night when, after submitting to her husband’s brutal lovemaking, she had looked up past the sleeping man’s back and directly into the lens. Then she had smiled seductively and blown a kiss.

  After that, the observer had spent every evening watching her. Sensing she was being watched, or perhaps knowing that such behaviour would hook one such as he, she began to perform for the Ministry man when her husband was not there, stripping off her top and playing with her nipples.

  And other things.

  And he? He was hooked. Like a gasping fish he watched her, his infatuation growing by the hour, raging like a fire, until he knew he must have her.

  So he had crossed the line; had visited the woman, starting an affair with her.

  An affair that quickly grew out of control, so that one afternoon, as they lay there after making love, they talked of killing the husband and setting up home together uplevel.

  But fate turned against the unhappy couple. Unknown to them, an audit had been requested from that department of the great Ministry which – in secret – watched the watchers. And, as chance would have it, our young lover was among those chosen at random to be observed.

  Thus it was that their little scheme – the poisoning of the husband and the bribing of the official who issued the death certificate – was watched by the same two who later on had come to Shen Fu, begging a favour.

  Too late to prevent the deed, they could only put things right in one way: by killing all those involved and destroying all record of what had transpired, for it was unthinkable to hand the matter over to their great rivals, Security. It would have meant losing face, and the servants of the Ministry hated losing face.

  At any other time it would have ended there. Only the new Master listened to Shen Fu. After a brief investigation, he decided he could make capital of it, could use it to build his reputation as a stern yet honest man.
r />   And so the two were tried by a panel of their peers and sentenced to die.

  And Shen Fu?

  Shen knew that the opportunity would not come again, so when they offered him a job he grabbed it with both hands. With no word of his betrayal on his official file, he began that very week, a thousand miles from where he’d been, appointed at the lowest level, as a fen lei, a classifier.

  The First Dragon sighed and stared into the darkness.

  To be fen lei back then had been to watch a world – a whole culture – slowly vanish before your eyes.

  He could remember how it was.

  Standing there at his station in the great hall alongside a thousand other fen lei, spread out in row after orderly row, his job was to take one of the passing crates from the conveyor belt to his left and, breaking the plastic seal, tip it out onto the tray, a big trough a full two ch’i to a side. Then he quickly sorted through the contents, deciding what should be sent on to the ovens and what queried, returning all that was to be burned to the crate and, after sealing it again with a film of red plastic, placing it on the conveyor to his right.

  Looking back, most of it was incinerated. Tons and tons of the stuff, every hour of every day. The Ministry’s ovens, like those he had tended as an oven man, never cooled, and the truth was that very little ever got queried. Some of the fen lei, in fact, had simply taken off the clear seal and put on the red one without ever glancing at the contents, but that was not his way. He was fen lei, after all, a selecter, and his job was to select.

  What he did select he would put onto the shelf beneath the tray, where it would stay until the end of the day. It was mainly things he didn’t recognize, books in foreign languages, or objects he didn’t know the significance of. Anything that wasn’t obvious. Anything that made him think twice.

  Looking back, that had been an awful job. Soul-destroying if one had a soul. Only he hadn’t. He had lost his. What it did, however, was to open his eyes to the great size of the task that they were undertaking. It awed him to see so many objects being destroyed simply to serve an ideology. For ten hours a day he had laboured thus, processing what the chi lei, the collectors, brought in. Piles and piles of the stuff. Films and books, magazines and T-shirts, music and pictures, games and old computers, cameras and box files full of papers, old photo albums, tourist nick-nacks and endless other stuff; products of the old West, of a vast consumer society that was no more. Cast-offs from the Age of Waste.

  The dead-end products of a self-indulgent culture.

  They burned it all, leaving no trace.

  After three long years in the sorting hall, he had been moved. Had become chi lei.

  To be chi lei, now that had been an adventure, and if he’d had the capacity for enjoyment, he would have enjoyed it. As it was, his two-year stint in Collections brought him a certain infamy.

  Chillingly ruthless, he had led raid after raid upon First Level mansions, or into the Clay, that darkness beneath the City where most of the forbidden material came from.

  He demonstrated a lack of concern for his own safety that was almost heroic, coming away with items that other, less determined men would not have unearthed.

  ‘The Burrower’ they called him, or simply ‘Black Hands’ for his habit of wearing black cloth gloves, a habit he still maintained.

  Men grew to fear him, both those who had collections and those who worked alongside him as chi lei. For his ruthlessness extended to his colleagues, and at the least sign that any one of them was taking bribes, or hiding away any of the treasures that they found – and as the days went on and the ovens kept alight, so each individual item grew in value – he would kill them with his own hands. Then he would feed them to the ovens personally, with never a by-your-leave from his superiors. For they too, seeing his purity, feared him.

  As for those who had collections, especially those among the new Hung Mao elite who had a taste for special, ancient things, they barely slept for fear of him. Several of them – men whom he had raided – put out contracts on his life. But he led a charmed life, and besides, by now there was a small band of followers. Men faithful to him alone, inspired by his behaviour, men who were close by him all the time, vigilant against such attempts.

  Many had predicted that he would soar above the next three rungs of the ladder, becoming secretary to some great man within the Thousand Eyes, but it was not to be. Maybe it was his sheer unlikeability, that austere nature of his that let him down, or maybe some prejudice against the humility of his birth.

  Whatever it was, Shen Fu did not advance.

  Fear him they might, but many also hated him. Hated his puritanical manner, his absolutist stance. They might be the City’s eyes, its conscience, yet they were also men and they understood men’s weaknesses, whereas he…

  He seemed barely human. And they were right.

  It was thus that he found himself yen ching, an eye, that is, a watcher and given his own bank of screens to supervise.

  And for once he did not excel. The job was too narrow, the people that he watched too dull. When he tried to punish them for minor misdemeanours, he received no encouragement from his superiors, only a warning to back off and leave them be.

  On the surface, it was a bad time. A frustrating time. Or would have been, had he not taken the opportunity to learn his craft: to discover how to evaluate what people said, to analyze and sift, to read a body like a book and, in the last resort, how to trick a man into saying more than he intended. All these skills, learned at this time, would come in useful later when he had risen further.

  From yen ching he was promoted to fu, literally ‘next in rank’, the title given to an Assessor – one of those bored-looking officials who helped run the great sorting halls. Three years had passed in the limbo of yen ching when Shen was made fu. By then he had spent more than eight years in the Ministry and some of his early promise seemed not to burn so brightly. Even so, there were still those who believed in him. After a mere four months as fu he was recruited by the Institute.

  Nominally independent from the Ministry, the Institute for Historical Accuracy was, in effect, the very heart of the organization. Manned entirely by the elite of the Thousand Eyes, it was responsible for creating and enforcing – and revising – the history of Chung Kuo.

  For Shen Fu it was the job he had wanted since leaving the chi lei; a chance to influence what people thought, what they believed, how they saw their world.

  In a very real sense, the Institute was the single reason why the Ministry existed – why they burned things and watched people and sifted every word, every phrase that people uttered. It was all done to safeguard what the Institute had created. For at the Institute they made history. Literally so. Manufactured it and disseminated it. A fully consistent history in which the Han were dominant and the West… the West was nothing, its states and tiny kingdoms at best a gaggle of barbarians, vassals to the East.

  It was strange how even he, who had experienced the world before Chung Kuo, found it hard now to believe it had been so, because the fiction they had set up in its place was so strong and powerful. It was consistent in its detail, it undermined everything he knew, replacing it, such that for the majority of the time he was in a state of blissful ignorance, blissful acceptance. Only rarely, when he was tired or when some event had re-awoken something, did he recall the old world he had known. For the briefest moment, he would find himself stranded in a state of half-belief, a limbo of uncertainty.

  Though never for long.

  What’s more, it was true what many of the experts had predicted – it had indeed become easier as the years passed and many of those who remembered the Past – the real past – had died. The young who replaced them, newly born into the world, simply embraced things as they were, or rather, as they appeared to be. They had no reason to doubt what was told to them of their world. Whereas the old…

  Increasingly they watched the old, fearing they’d hand their secrets on, coming down ever harder on them f
or any relapse, any slip of the tongue, any flouting of the rules. ‘Making the break clean’, as they called it.

  He had been two years at the Institute, making his reputation anew. Just as he had begun to think that opportunity had passed him by, that he had attained the highest level that ambition and hard work might bring him, there was a chance meeting. Chang Li Chen, the Junior Dragon charged with drafting the proposed new Edict of Technological Control, was impressed enough to offer him the job of secretary to the great man.

  It was a chance he could not possibly say no to. Only he did. Why? He wasn’t sure. Only that his instinct was against it; that in the brief time he was in the great man’s company, he felt wrong somehow – that his destiny lay elsewhere.

  And so he began a period in his career when things went awry: when chance no longer favoured him; when, for the first time, he began to question whether he had been right to shun the great man’s offer. For one whole year his luck seemed to desert him and wrong decisions haunted him, until he arrived at his desk one day to find the whole office buzzing with the latest news.

  Chang Li Chen had been indicted. He was to be executed that night, along with seven of his closest aides, for taking bribes from several of the major companies – all of whom had stood to lose a great deal if the Edict had gone through in its proposed form. The scandal was so great that, for once, the media had got wind of the story. They were to run news items that very evening.

  Shen Fu was the one who was asked to deal with the media – to make sure that those who knew were quickly warned not to breathe a word; that it would be in their worst interests – their very worst interests – to pursue this. His death-like presence, there in their offices, convinced them. Say a single word, he told them, and your lives will be made a living hell. He, personally, would make sure of it. And they believed him.

  Not a word was said. Thanks to Shen Fu, the scandal passed, reduced to an internal problem by his timely actions.