Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “How?”

  “I’m sure we need an ambassador somewhere. You stay, Mike goes…You can write the closing script nearer the time. Meanwhile think about redeploying Felicia. Make it a promotion.”

  “And me?”

  “You?” The President tipped his head to one side.

  “Should I expect to be redeployed?”

  “No.” Gene Newman shook his head. “This job belongs to you for as long as you want it.” He was working on the basis that Paula knew she’d got the job in spite of what happened in Paris and not because of it…

  “Paula was here.” The First Lady’s comment was not a question.

  “You’re right,” said the President. “So she was.”

  “And that’s why you’re sitting in the dark?”

  “It’s the overload of caffeine.”

  The First Lady looked around at the sitting room. “Did Paula have anything interesting to say?”

  “The man who tried to shoot me had been listening to the rain.”

  “I can think of better reasons.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you can.”

  “Is Paula about to become one of them?”

  “No,” said Gene Newman, and there was a firmness to his voice which his wife hadn’t heard in months. Being shot at seemed to agree with him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 11

  It was one of the more elegant ironies of immortality that memory could be captured within the lattice of a diamond and that this lattice could be produced by burning and compressing the body from which that memory was taken.

  Zaq wore all of the emperors who’d gone before him on his cloak and their memories were his memories, their ennui and hatreds were his also, as were their passions, loves and foibles. It made for a complicated sense of self and some days he would forget who he was and think of himself as just another memory.

  An actor in an old-style Beijing opera with a cast of one and an audience of billions.

  Other days were different, sometimes very different. On the morning of his fifteenth birthday Zaq decided he was alone, that the audience didn’t really exist and never had, he was alone in a pavilion with an uncertain and ever-changing number of rooms, surrounded by smooth-faced eunuchs, almond-eyed concubines, ponytailed warrior guards…

  All beautiful in their way, all elegant, all fake. As fake as the ambassadors in their city beyond the purple walls.

  He was alone.

  Zaq found it next to impossible to believe that no other emperor had realized this, so he skimmed their diamonds faster than was safe and ended up on his knees in a corridor, watched by a Manchu guard, vomiting soft-shelled crab onto pink marble. He had been right, though; none of them had realized.

  “If it is a truth.”

  The voice in his head came on his seventeenth birthday, in the evening when hunger was no longer quite so amusing and Zaq was beginning to wonder if he should have sent all his guards away. Retaining one of them might have made sense, except then he wouldn’t have been alone and being alone was what this was about.

  “Well,” Zaq demanded. “Is it true?”

  Even as a child he’d spoken rarely to the Librarian, preferring to trust in himself. Nothing in the years which had passed had changed his mind.

  “That depends.”

  Surprise me, thought Zaq.

  “Remember that concubine?”

  Of course he did. The long blade still lay on the tiles, covered with dust and surrounded by bits of its broken handle. His room had remained his alone since that morning, untidied and inviolate, four years’ worth of dirt crusting the floor and griming carved panels until the dragon frieze around the wall looked as if it had been painted with velvet.

  “The girl died.”

  “She wasn’t alive in the first place,” Zaq said.

  “Starvation,” said the Librarian. “She starved herself to death in the Restful Gardens.”

  “In the what?”

  A map of the Purple City came into his mind and then Zaq realized it wasn’t a map at all, it was an aerial view, showing the three state pavilions, slung out along a north-south axis, with his own quarters, three identical but smaller pavilions to the north of these.

  And to the north again, carved out of a sprawl of lesser pavilions, gates and temples was a walled garden he’d forgotten was even there. On the grass, next to a mulberry bush, lay a girl, her eyes closed and hair freed from the pins which had held it in place.

  “You know,” said Zaq, as he bent to retrieve the dusty blade. “I could have saved you the trouble.” Checking its weight, Zaq brought the blade up, waited on the moment and tossed it lightly at the wall, hitting a silk hanging of some mountain pool, the kind with a path skirting the water’s edge and a small wooden bridge on which stood two children.

  The only thing remotely unusual about the hanging was that rain sleeted from the top left corner, endless stitches of drizzle.

  “Was that necessary?”

  “You can mend it,” Zaq said. “Hell, just make another…”

  The Librarian shook its head. There was no other way Zaq could describe the feeling.

  “Why not?”

  “Because everything in this room is original.”

  “Including me?”

  The Librarian sighed.

  That evening rain lashed the Ambassadors’ City, flooding a thousand pavilions and forcing fifty to be abandoned completely. It fell at a slant, roughly left to right, and whole districts which had never been anything but temperate found themselves cowering under slate-grey skies and wondering if the sleet would ever end.

  Such weather was rare. In fact, even the cold immortals who made a point of knowing everything had to admit that a storm such as this was unknown. It was understood, because this was taught as a fact of verifiable truth on all 2023 worlds, that life around Star One relied for its very existence on the presence of the Chuang Tzu.

  No emperor/no climate, the equation was that simple.

  Few alive could still remember the arrival of the first colony ships. Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction.

  Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom. This became the second crisis to hit the worlds.

  The first happened no more than a decade after the colonists landed, when the original Chuang Tzu died. No one was watching the Emperor then because these were still early days in the life of the 2023 worlds. He died in the night, peacefully and in his sleep, having told the Librarian that this was what he wanted to happen because he was now very old and very tired.

  On fifty-seven worlds, which was the number then inhabited, colonists woke with headaches that got worse as the day went on. By the following week, half the children had nosebleeds or ruptured ears. While tens of thousands panicked, an elderly Indian scientist ran an analysis on the atmosphere, using a semiAI that had been out of date when her grandmother had loaded it onto the ship which brought her family from Calcutta. The answer was surprisingly obvious.

  The oxygen-nitrogen mix which the colonists had assumed was natural to all 2023 worlds was thinning, creating elegant day-glow where ultraviolet interacted with oxygen in the upper atmosphere as it leached away into space.

  The worlds were dying.

  It took a Tibetan monk to solve the problem and that he bothered at all required compromises with his conscience. Historically, at least, the Chuang Tzu represented everything the man hated about Han imperialism and cultural arrogance. All the same, the monk took a small child whose mother had recently died and presented it to the palace, walking right into the Celestial Chamber to leave the child on the throne, like a screaming sack of ru
bbish.

  The palace was empty, the guards gone. The monk was careful not to enquire where…He wasn’t afraid of dying, of course. He’d died a hundred times before and could remember most of his lives; at least those of his lives that had happened since he came close to the gates of enlightenment.

  Depositing the child, the man explained in simple terms the laws of reincarnation, paying particular attention to the rules governing the appointment of new lamas. He didn’t actually tell the silent air around him that emperors came under similar rules or that the ancient Chosen of Heaven had shared such selection procedures with the throne of the Dalai or Panchen Lama, but he might have suggested it.

  And he was careful to present reincarnation as real, inasmuch as anything could be real in a quantum universe where facts were both true, false and linked simultaneously.

  So now emperors came and went, living out their short reigns in the gaze of those who lived far longer. Maybe this transience was the inspiration for the butterfly cloak or maybe the butterflies had been taken from the mind of the very first emperor, a newly promoted commissar major who’d been nicknamed Chuang Tzu by his grandmother and not as a compliment.

  It was hard to know and probably irrelevant, but at some time during the centuries which followed the dreamer’s death it became a tradition for each new incarnation to be visited by a butterfly at night.

  CHAPTER 11

  Marrakech, July 1971

  Something of the desolation and misery of the esclave clung to the walls of Criée Berbere and unnerved those who came in search of bargains from the rug merchants who had taken the slave auctioneer’s place.

  The buying and selling of people had lasted well into the twentieth century and at one time the going rate in Marrakech was two slaves for a camel, ten for a horse and forty for a civet cat. Those days were gone but there were children in the souks whose grandparents and sometimes even parents had been owned by someone else.

  The passage behind Criée Berbere was narrow, high-walled and thick with smoke from a makeshift grill. The height of its walls trapped the grill’s thick haze and forced all who used the passage to pass through a cloud of thyme, onion and burning charcoal.

  And as the coals over which the skewers of lamb cooked were still a little too hot, the boy behind the grill offered that afternoon’s customers cheap paper tissues as protection for their fingers.

  He was doing his best not to look at the Englishman.

  David Giles sat in a locked doorway, near where the alley turned a corner. His Afghan coat was missing, the Tuarag cross was gone from around his neck and someone had pulled one jeans pocket inside out. He smelt a lot worse than when Moz last saw him but he’d been alive then, that was the difference.

  The previous afternoon, Call-me-Dave had been wandering fairly aimlessly from stall to stall in Djemaa el Fna, asking people if they knew somewhere inexpensive he could sleep. Since the second of the day’s calls to prayer had barely finished echoing from the square’s three minarets this seemed odd to Moz, but the man was a hippie and foreigners were odd by nature.

  “What’s wrong with your bus?”

  It took Dave Giles a second or so to work out that the boy meant his VW Caravette. “The police towed my bus away,” he said. “I’ve got to pay a fine.”

  “For using the mosque garden?”

  Dave Giles shrugged. “They didn’t say,” he said. “But I need somewhere to stay while my family send money.”

  Malika’s father had offered the man a space on their roof for ten dirham a day, which was nothing for a foreigner, but David Giles turned it down. He was looking for a place with a television. When ould Kasim asked Moz what was wrong with Derb Yassin, he told the old soldier that the foreigner wanted hot water.

  It seemed easier.

  A dozen heels must have brushed past the nasrani as people slipped between the leather and carpet souks and stepped over his outstretched feet while pretending not to notice he was there.

  Glancing round, Moz dropped to a crouch beside the foreigner and slid his good hand quickly inside the man’s shirt. He was definitely dead and his wallet on a string was gone. An irregular circle of white around one finger revealed he’d also lost his puzzle ring.

  In Call-me-Dave’s back pocket, however, Moz found a comic—Galactic Warrior—which he pocketed before turning to the boy with the grill, who was dicing onions on an upturned tile.

  “How long?” Moz asked.

  “How long what?”

  “Has the dead man been here.”

  The boy peered at him from under badly cut hair, his face suspicious. “Which dead man?” he said and went back to his onions.

  It took courage for Moz to talk to a policeman, even the kind who wore khaki shirts and carried only small guns. And by the time he found that courage a whole café full of officers knew the small one-armed boy wanted to talk to them.

  The café was just outside the gates of the Medina. A place of metal chairs, Formica tables and tiny floor tiles that felt like studs under feet. The walls hid behind sheets of reconstituted local marble better suited for public baths or cheap graves. Café Nouveau had been built in the last decade of French rule in a style that was already out of fashion on the mainland. The police used it because no one else did. Or maybe it was the other way round.

  “What do you want?”

  The one-armed boy didn’t answer the sergeant who spoke. He chose instead an officer with a kinder face, a man younger than the others at that table. So it was only by accident that Moz found himself talking to the most senior police officer present. A graduate who’d taken his degree in Paris. Which might have been enough to cause Aboubakr Abbas endless problems, except for the fact that his uncle had only just retired from the force and he’d spent a childhood hanging around staff canteens in the Hotel de Police in Gueliz.

  “What?”

  “I’ve found a body.” Moz’s words came out so quiet that he repeated them without being asked. “In a passage behind Criée Berbere.”

  “Man or woman?”

  The sergeant was waved into silence by Major Abbas.

  “A hippie,” said Moz, answering anyway.

  Major Abbas sighed. “What’s the name of this street?”

  “It doesn’t have one,” said Moz.

  The Major nodded. There was nothing unusual about that. A hundred different passages in the Old City made do without names and even the most modern government-produced maps left blank whole areas of the Mellah and much of the inner souk.

  “And you,” said the policeman, “do you have a name?”

  “Al-Turq,” Moz said, without thinking.

  Major Abbas shrugged, he’d heard stranger. Finishing his mint tea with a single gulp, the Major nodded to the others, half farewell and half to say they could stay where they were. “Show me,” he said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Lampedusa, Thursday 28 June

  It was sweat and dirt, not heredity, which gave Prisoner Zero’s hair its texture. Something the marine specialist cutting it understood because her boyfriend was black, while her Lieutenant and the Pentagon official standing beside him were not.

  After three swipes either side, Prisoner Zero was left with a greying Mohican, a fact that raised a half smile so private it never reached his face. And then the Mohican was gone, buzzed away in a clatter of cheap blades. The clippers were local, garishly chromed and came with five attachments, one for each setting. At the moment the blades were naked, resulting in a crop fine enough to draw blood when they caught a mosquito bite on the back of Prisoner Zero’s neck.

  It was his first morning at Camp Freedom and beyond the Mediterranean headland dawn was transmuting sullen waves to mercury, while a shoal of flying fish turned unseen to slivers of silver. No fishing boats were allowed near the Punta dell’Acqua, and the tiny cove below the headland had been closed with a chain across its entrance, much as might have happened five hundred years earlier.

  The mostly German tourists who ori
ginally occupied the hotel had been shipped to other resorts on Lampedusa or sent home.

  Where once Turkish raiders landed war parties and Sicilian princes banished their enemies the USS Harry S. Truman was now anchored. For the first time in months, pregnant Tunisian clandestini weren’t staggering through waves or crawling up narrow beaches, too tired even to beg for asylum. As a local Forza Italia spokesman said, sometimes good came from bad.

  “Now the beard.”

  More clippers, starting on Prisoner Zero’s jaw, at a point just below his left ear. Once again the hair came away in coarse strips, greyer than before. The marine wielding the clippers finished the left side and started on the right, leaving the man handcuffed to the chair with a long goatee that was almost a cliché of how a terrorist should look.

  Examining her handiwork Marine Stone shrugged, took a fistful of the goatee and switched her clippers back on. The prisoner’s face was pale from lack of sunlight and sallow, almost olive. He didn’t look like an Arab to her, but what did she know?

  She was just there to do what she was told.

  Lieutenant Ashcroft and the civilian were arguing security arrangements and it seemed to be the man in the suit who was making most of the complaints, all of them idiotic.

  The island of Lampedusa was seven miles long and two miles wide and its nearest land mass was North Africa, a mere seventy-one miles away, whereas Sicily, the island to which Lampedusa belonged in spirit if not geographically, was twice that distance. At its peak, during high summer, nine hundred North African asylum seekers a month washed up on what was Italian soil.

  “Body hair,” ordered the civilian and Specialist Stone glanced at her lieutenant for confirmation, realizing too late that this was a bad move. “Got a problem with that?” the civilian demanded.

  “Yes, sir.” Her voice was flat. “I have, sir.”

  “And your problem is what?”

  “He’s handcuffed to a chair. And wearing clothes, sir.”

  They shackled the naked prisoner to a bench in the hotel gym, face up, wrists fixed to the legs at one end and ankles to the legs at the other. “They” being Master Sergeant Saez and the man from the Pentagon. None of the current round of visitors wearing suits and shades had bothered to introduce themselves to Specialist Stone; she was only some lowly peon in marine intelligence.