Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “From the kitchens,” the servitor said, lifting his tray slightly higher. Stepping between the guards, he swept through a door that opened as if his entry was expected and found himself in an anteroom, facing another guard in armour even more light-swallowing than that of the men he’d just left behind.

  General Ch’ao Kai watched the young man walk towards him across an unlit floor, while outside drizzle cut across Rapture’s sky and a cold wind slid through the pavilion and ate into his bones, more potent than fear.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” the servitor said, and then he nodded, repeating himself in little more than a whisper as billions of watchers begged leave to disagree. He spoke, of course, to the rat now frozen within his sleeve, liking the darkness but made fearful by the levels of anxiety radiating from its master.

  “Food for His Celestial Excellency.”

  The General inclined his head just enough to include the young man within his gaze. He was hereditary leader of the guard, custodian of the inner door and an elder clansman of a lesser banner. It was true he commanded few fighting troops but with no enemy these were unnecessary. Quarrels might happen between the 2023 worlds but the worlds themselves could not fight each other, since each was dependent on all others for the fine gravitational balance which kept them in stable orbit.

  One of the earliest of the Chuang Tzu had made this clear. Besides, in an empire of plenty where was the need for violence? No single culture had ever monopolized all 2023 worlds but a constant homogenization now more or less guaranteed the cultural equivalent of convergent evolution. The smallest differences might still seem massively significant, but major differences had long since been etched smooth by familiarity and time.

  “What do you have there?”

  The servitor glanced down at his tray. Now seemed a good time to state the obvious. “Five different kinds of dim sum,” he said. “This is har gao and this Szechwan huntun, that’s char siu bao…” He counted off the tiny offerings one at a time, silently giving thanks to the absent sous chef.

  In the end it was the tray rather than the food which persuaded General Ch’ao Kai that the man spoke the truth. Inlaid ebony and a single slab of flawless mutton-fat jade. Only an emperor would be served on such a tray.

  “Are you expected?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “You…?”

  “How would I know?” The young servitor shrugged and General Ch’ao Kai suddenly got a sense of having seen the man before. As the palace was as full of servitors as it was of eunuchs and the General made a point of paying less than zero attention to either, this seemed more than likely.

  “Put down the tray,” General Ch’ao Kai demanded, “then face the wall with your legs apart and your hands clasped behind your head.”

  “No,” the servitor said. “I couldn’t possibly do that.”

  “Why not?” General Ch’ao Kai was so shocked by the answer that he forgot to be furious, although a thin sliver of his mind retained the insult and readied itself to be offended.

  “Because it would upset my rat,” said the servitor, “that’s one reason.” Shaking his sleeve, he waited for a narrow white face to show its nose and whiskers. “This is Null,” he said. “Unfortunately his sister died.”

  “Sister?”

  “Void,” said the servitor. “There’s another reason,” he added. “Slightly better. I’m not allowed to let this tray out of my hands.”

  “You’re not—”

  “In case the food is poisoned.” His shrug was slight, an acknowledgment of the absurdity of this suggestion. “The order was very clear.”

  “And who gave this order?”

  “The Library itself,” said the boy, pretending not to notice a slight widening of General Ch’ao Kai’s carefully kohled eyes. Only the Emperor spoke directly to the Library, its voice being the one single element missing from what watchers were allowed to experience of the Emperor’s life inside the Forbidden City.

  It spoke to the worlds, but only through the Librarian.

  “You spoke to the avatar?”

  “No, sir.” The servitor shook his head.

  General Ch’ao Kai had two choices. He could strike the servitor down for blasphemy or he could open the door. As well as being undignified, striking him down seemed unwise, particularly if the servitor was telling the truth.

  Fifteen billion people held their breath.

  “In you go then.” General Ch’ao Kai made his decision sound like a command. “Don’t let the food go cold.”

  The servitor glanced wryly at the congealing filo parcels but kept silent and just nodded to the ornately armoured General as the door opened and he stepped into the dirt and chaos that was Zaq’s room.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ve brought you some—”

  What he brought went unannounced because Zaq catapulted himself naked from a sunken bath, scooped his long knife off the floor and spun round to face his visitor, just catching a glimpse of General Ch’ao Kai’s shocked face before the door closed itself and he was alone with the intruder.

  “Wait,” the servitor said, backing away.

  Thunder shook the sky outside and lightning lit the windows. And as Zaq slashed with his blade, a howling wind ripped blossoms from cherry trees and toppled the spire of a distant pagoda.

  “Wait!”

  The voice belonged to the servitor and it was in Zaq’s head, echoing around the darkness that the Chuang Tzu contained within him. This shouldn’t have been possible because no one was allowed in Zaq’s head except the Library, and he resented even that.

  “Get out,” he screamed, as fire split an oak outside, cleaving five hundred years of careful nurture. “Go now.”

  “Zaq,” said the man.

  “You mustn’t call me that.” Zaq’s voice had risen to a howl to make itself heard over the roaring wind outside and tears blinded him, the blade in his hand feeling wrong since he’d smashed the handle six years before.

  Opening his mouth to shout for General Ch’ao Kai, Zaq shut it again. He’d banned the General from entering this room. Come to that, he’d banned everyone. Here was where he was meant to be safe.

  “Out,” he demanded, and blinked as a rat jumped from the stranger’s sleeve.

  Instead of backing towards the door as Zaq expected him to do, the servitor casually tipped the tray sideways, spilling dim sum, cup and squat iron teapot onto the tiles. This done, he gripped the now-empty tray by one corner and swung the thing hard towards Zaq’s wrist.

  If the blow had hit flesh, both bones in Zaq’s forearm would have broken because the Chuang Tzu had no codes that added strength to his simple, calcium-based skeleton; in fact, he had no physical enhancements at all.

  Such things were rendered unnecessary.

  As the edge of the heavy tray neared Zaq’s wrist, smoke streamed up his spine, across his shoulder and down his arm, setting hard as steel and dark as jet. So unobtrusive was the Emperor’s symbiont that the armour was in place before Zaq even realized he was wearing it.

  Ebony split and mutton-fat jade hit the floor, the base of the tray mixing with earlier fragments from the knife handle. Without hesitation, Zaq slashed with his blade, his armour adding strength to the blow. Razor-edged steel met unprotected flesh and sliced deep, silencing the servitor’s scream with the scrape of a blade across larynx.

  Zaq’s coat splattered red and then the servitor pitched forward, hitting the floor on his knees. It was, Zaq had to admit, all very convincing. The headless body at his feet gasped at him like a dying carp, shat itself and shuddered its way into oblivion. The blood on Zaq’s cloak was suitably warm and when Zaq tasted it he got salt and a sweetness that reminded him of something just beyond the edge of memory.

  “Librarian.”

  “Highness.”

  Zaq sighed. Sulking might not be quite the way to describe how the Librarian behaved after he’d been out of contact with it for more than a day but to Zaq it seemed to come close
. In this he was wrong. The speed at which the Library lived was quantum, simultaneously past and present. What Zaq saw as a retreat into formality was merely a side effect of temporal distance.

  On one level, the absence of a few weeks was sufficient for the Library to have had several billion thoughts, many of them relevant. On another, a few weeks was less than a single thought in the mind of a creation so old it could remember time changing direction at least twice.

  “Send cleaners,” said Zaq, his voice bored. “I need someone to clear up this mess.”

  “Tell the General.”

  “No.”

  A few years back, Zaq had worked out that the Librarian always knew what he’d decided to do before he did. And when he’d challenged the Library on this, it had admitted this was true, while insisting there was nothing sinister in the fact. Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent.

  The Library had sounded almost amused while it explained this; as if Zaq was somehow missing the point.

  “You summon help,” Zaq said, looking round at the chaos of his room. “After all, everything’s you really.”

  “Me?”

  “All of this.” Zaq gestured at the body at his feet, then at servitors sweeping away floods in the courtyard below.

  “That wasn’t me,” the Library said. “You want to know why he was here?”

  “Does it matter?” Zaq asked.

  “So you don’t want to know who he was?”

  “He was you,” Zaq said. “Like everyone else in this place. You know that as well as I do.”

  “No,” the voice in his head said, sounding almost sad. “You’re wrong. That was you, more or less…”

  CHAPTER 17

  Marrakech 1975

  The house at the end of Moz’s alley remained empty. No one had lived in it since the dog woman died and her companion went home to England. So now it was to be sold, but before this could happen the place needed repairing, otherwise it couldn’t be sold to a nasrani and no one but a foreigner would be willing to pay the price the dog woman’s family in England had decided it was worth.

  “Ask Hassan,” Malika insisted. Caid Hammou decided who got building work in the Mellah, and Moz needed money because his mother needed medicine. He knew this because Malika had told him so.

  “Hassan won’t—”

  “Ask him,” she insisted, and then she smiled as the jellaba-clad boy shuffled his feet in front of her. “If you don’t,” she said, “I’ll ask him for you.”

  Smashing down an internal wall and carrying away the rubble was Moz’s first real job. He was thirteen, ould Kasim had agreed his hand could be untied and he got the work because Hassan found it funny that Moz was asking for his help.

  “You want what?”

  In the background Idries smirked.

  “Dar el Beida,” said Moz. “I heard they need someone to help rebuild the dog woman’s house.”

  “And you understand building?”

  “I can learn.”

  It wasn’t until later that he discovered that Hassan was taking not just ten percent in commission from what little Moz earned. The older boy had also been given a handful of dirham by his uncle, who hired the foreman who actually employed Moz. He had to give another ten per cent to the foreman for the hire of a sledgehammer.

  Moz laboured for the whole of that autumn, far harder than he’d ever worked in his life. And at the end of each day his body ached and clear liquid bled from the blisters on his hands and fingers, but Moz kept working and did as he was told, pissing into a bucket to help temper concrete for the maallan and always remembering to let the urine run over his fingers first, so that their blisters would heal and he could move the rubble faster…

  It made no difference in the end.

  The ring was gold and had an inscription around the inside, “all my love always.” It took Moz most of that winter to find someone who read Turkish and in the end it was only bloody-mindedness that made him try the cigar seller in Gueliz.

  There was a second ring; this was fatter but had the same words around the inside and Moz found it inside an envelope sealed and hidden at the back of a drawer stuffed with bras his mother had long since become too thin to wear and knickers washed to a faded and ghostly greyness.

  He put those back where he found them.

  In the same drawer was a make-up bag stuffed with names Moz had seen on advertisements in shop windows in the New Town. The bag was plastic and had a broken zip. A line of words pressed into the clear plastic read “Made in Hong Kong.” Moz had no idea where Hong Kong was but then he hadn’t known Dido owned any make-up.

  Dido was what his mother insisted he call her.

  For a while, when he was younger, he’d decided this was because Dido wasn’t his real mother. He’d mentioned this theory to ould Kasim, Malika’s father, trying to catch the man out. All ould Kasim had done was grin sourly, take another gulp from his cracked tea glass and grin again.

  “You’d be so lucky.”

  A rabbi and his son buried Moz’s mother in the Jewish cemetery. Moz would have preferred to have her interred in the New Town in the cemetery off Boulevard De Safi but the priest to whom he spoke wanted money. So Malika went to her rabbi and told him that Moz’s mother was Jewish and so the man agreed to bury her in the cemetery next to Bab Rhemat and pay for it himself.

  Malika and Moz had agreed she should tell the rabbi that Dido had married a gentile and been cut off from her family. Moz knew the meaning of gentile, and that Jews only liked to marry each other, from when he’d run errands for the maallan who owned a bread oven on the edge of the Mellah.

  In the event, the rabbi just asked if she was certain about his mother’s faith and then took over the rest of the arrangements. Twenty-four hours later it was done. Malika’s father drove the rabbi away with drunken curses and threats of violence when he came calling a week later to see how Moz was coping with his grief. The rabbi came a handful of times after that but Moz was never there, and when the Jew left the boy a letter ould Kasim tore it into pieces and threw them in a gutter.

  “You found her?”

  Moz nodded. He was sitting on the roof with his face to a cold sun and his body throwing an impossibly etiolated shadow across the dirty red tiles behind him. Malika stood backlit in front, a black space where the winter sky should be. All he could see was a man’s shirt washed so thin that even if the light had not been behind her Moz would probably have been able to see her legs silhouetted through the cloth.

  The shirt came from a suitcase that once belonged to her mother, like everything else Malika ever owned. Malika was twelve that year. Moz was one year older.

  “It’s hard,” Malika said. “You know, things like that. I remember.”

  What Moz wanted was for Malika to go away and leave him in peace but she’d never been very good at that. So while he was still doing his best to ignore her, Malika dropped to her heels in front of Moz and reached out to tap his knee. The briefest touch.

  “That your bed?” Her nod took in a single blanket and an old pillow stuffed with feathers up against the wall that ran along the back of their flat roof. His other jellaba lay in a discarded heap next to the pillow. It was the one he’d worn for his mother’s funeral. Malika had washed it for him. She’d done it without being asked.

  “Obviously.”

  If Malika heard the sharpness in his voice she pretended not to mind. “It’ll rain soon,” she said. “You’d be better coming back inside.”

  Moz looked at her. “It hasn’t rained in two years.”

  “Soon,” she said, “it will. You can’t sleep up here forever.”

  Moz wanted to say that he could, he would sleep where he wanted and nothing she could say would change that. She wasn’t his…

  “It hurts,” she said. “I know that.”

  Holding his head against her bony shoulder, Malika let the boy cry himself out and then pretended not to notice whe
n he pulled away and shuffled sideways so she could no longer see the tears on his face.

  “Do you want me to do it?” There was, it seemed, no limit to the number of questions she could ask him. And as she always pointed out, Moz was not in a position to complain given the number of questions he asked himself.

  “What?”

  “The room.”

  Moz shook his head. “I’ll do it.”

  “When?”

  When I’m ready, that was what he wanted to say. Only he would never be ready. Her illness had been getting worse for a long time and Malika had been the one to realize the end was approaching. Not saying anything, but offering to fetch shopping for Dido or carry her bread to the local oven until even Moz understood what was happening and went cap in hand to Hassan for a job.

  They had the autumn, three months in which Moz learnt more about Dido than he’d ever known before. She still refused to tell him where his father had gone or why, but Moz learnt that his mother’s father was English and had married a German woman after the war. He wasn’t sure which war and Dido was too tired to explain properly, but he asked and kept asking until he found a man in the Mellah who’d fled Germany and he told Moz what the boy needed to know.

  “Come on,” Malika said, climbing to her feet. “We’d better do it together.”

  It made Moz feel sick to go through his mother’s few possessions. And only the fact Malika was there stopped Moz from giving up. He offered Malika the green dress and Dido’s red skirt and the shoes, both pairs.

  “You could sell them at the clothes souk,” she told him.

  “Keep them.”

  “It might upset you.” Malika’s face was serious, her mouth screwed into a smile that made her look sadder still. She was holding the shoes in one hand and looking between these and the boy who was on his knees emptying a cardboard box.