Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “The Major’s knife,” Prisoner Zero said. “Not that it makes any difference. I still killed her.”

  Petra Mayer had to agree. “You know,” she said, looking at the file. “I can think of several good reasons why it might be better for all of us if you remained Jake.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Lampedusa, Wednesday 11 July

  Stubbing out her cigarette, Petra Mayer looked round the room that now made do as Prisoner Zero’s cell. She’d been talking since noon and getting nowhere.

  “Look,” she said, “let’s go back to basics. There’s been a forty-eight-hour stay of execution and the President agrees to meet. Okay?”

  She put a neatly printed appeal for clemency in front of Prisoner Zero and offered him a pen. All the man had to do was sign the thing.

  “Jake,” Professor Mayer said crossly. “You’ve got what you wanted, all right? He’s going to fly across to inspect the USS Harry S. Truman and while he’s over here he’ll come and talk to you, I promise.”

  That the President also wanted this meeting Petra Mayer left aside. Gene Newman had given her only two instructions: proceed on the basis that Prisoner Zero was Jake Razor and find out why the man needed to talk to him. The darkness thought it would be a good idea did not constitute a reason.

  Petra Mayer knew exactly why the President intended to pardon Prisoner Zero. He needed Europe on his side in his refusal to sign a joint space accord with China until Beijing sorted out its human rights issues.

  Sort out the human rights and he’d sign off billions of dollars for a joint mission into space. Refuse, and Beijing could go it alone. As if that was going to happen…It was a tricky position to take and “Killing Einstein,” as the First Lady now billed the Prisoner Zero problem, was not going to help impress Europe.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Nodding, the prisoner leant forward to pick up Professor Mayer’s pen, flipped over the appeal for clemency and began to sketch a squat tower on the back.

  “Concentrate,” Petra Mayer suggested.

  Dark eyes looked up from the paper. “Believe me,” said Prisoner Zero. “I’m trying to.”

  On her chair in the corner, Katie Petrov scrawled a note in her book, ripped out the page as quietly as possible and stood up to pass it to Professor Mayer. Reassurance?

  “He’s really coming,” Petra Mayer promised. “And he really wants to talk to you, but first you have to sign the paper.”

  “And he’ll listen?”

  “Gene Newman always listens.” Professor Mayer was telling the truth. It was one of the President’s trademarks, like his arm around the shoulder of whichever dignitary was walking beside him and his oh-so-sincere double-fisted handshake. Whether he’d pay serious attention to what Prisoner Zero had to say was another matter although chances were he might. Gene Newman could be weird like that.

  “This is what you want, right?” said Petra Mayer. “To meet the President?”

  Prisoner Zero shook his head. “It’s what the darkness wants.”

  Returning to his drawing, the prisoner quickly sketched a mulberry bush, shaded in some background and added an arch, then a man standing in it. After that, Prisoner Zero began filling in tiles on a temple roof.

  “Tell me,” he asked suddenly, “why now?”

  They all knew the answer to that. With thirty-six hours to go the President had been the one to blink first. The stay of execution was proof of that.

  “Because,” said Petra Mayer, “now’s the right time.”

  And Katie Petrov found herself wondering if her old tutor even half believed this. There was no correct time for the US President to shake hands with his would-be assassin. A substantial slice of home opinion was still holding firm on this.

  “But if you don’t sign, then we’ll have to call the whole visit off.”

  Prisoner Zero shrugged.

  Either the man was a brilliant actor, Katie Petrov decided, or his demand to see the President was as much a part of his dementia as the self-starvation, earlier filth and his utter refusal to contemplate that his precious darkness might not exist.

  “Sign the appeal,” Petra Mayer said.

  “No.”

  Neither of them was yet prepared to return to the paragraph at the end in which Jake Razor acknowledged that his attempt on the life of the President had been a mistake. It was so brief that the thirty-seven words could have been written in half a minute at the most. That it apparently took White House staffers a day and a quarter to construct, Prisoner Zero regarded as one of life’s lesser ironies.

  He wasn’t going to plead temporary insanity, any more than he was prepared to throw himself on the President’s mercy or allow any one of the eight human rights groups currently demanding a retrial to do so in his name.

  Before he signed anything Prisoner Zero needed to meet the President face to face; the darkness was very strict on this. In the meantime it reserved its right to insist on Prisoner Zero’s execution. While Petra Mayer considered this latest impasse, the man who wasn’t Jake Razor went back to his drawing.

  Gene Newman’s problem was simple. Given he’d been tried and condemned by a military tribunal, Prisoner Zero had a right to death. This would play badly with everyone except the Secretary of State for Defense, most of the inhabitants of Texas and bits of the Midwest.

  The First Lady had convinced Gene that to meet Prisoner Zero before he’d asked for clemency would be political suicide. Prisoner Zero said the darkness refused to allow him to appeal before it had met the President.

  Small wonder that Petra Mayer had a headache.

  “Interesting,” Katie Petrov said, getting up again to take a closer look at Prisoner Zero’s drawing.

  The prisoner ignored her.

  “It’s a corner turret from Beijing’s Palace Museum,” Katie Petrov told the Professor, who glanced up briefly but more or less did the same. “You know,” insisted Katie, “part of the UN heritage site.”

  “No,” said Prisoner Zero, “it’s not.” They were the first words he’d actually addressed directly to Dr. Petrov.

  “Triple-roofed, gables on the two highest, carved acroteria on the corner of each, intricate screens…”

  “It’s not,” Prisoner Zero insisted.

  “China,” Katie Petrov wrote in her notebook. “Beijing…” If nothing else, dropping hints about Beijing would tie up half the upper echelon of the NSA and keep them off Professor Mayer’s back for a while.

  Prisoner Zero’s sketch progressed in shades of grey, the crosshatching made from numbers and words. The words were broken, the numbers near random and he would lose the drawing at the end of the day because, every evening before the overhead bulb went out in Prisoner Zero’s cell, Sergeant Saez would come in to search his room.

  The darkness thought it only kind to give him something to find.

  Sergeant Saez’s search was methodical. The mattress was overturned (Prisoner Zero had one of those too) and his new table and chair examined carefully. The laptop recently made available by Petra Mayer was confiscated for the night as was every single piece of paper on which Prisoner Zero had doodled during the course of that day.

  Laptop, paper and pencils were returned again the next morning. To get them back Prisoner Zero had to eat at least half his breakfast. No one had explained this to him but empirical testing had confirmed that this was how it worked.

  “I don’t get it,” Katie Petrov said.

  “What’s to get?” said the Professor. She was used to this. Katie’s questions to Prisoner Zero went unanswered. Which meant that if Katie wanted to ask him something she had to ask the Professor, who would ask the prisoner. It was clumsy, arbitrary and time consuming. Petra Mayer assumed that was the point.

  “Where does Beijing come into this?”

  “So,” said Professor Mayer, addressing the prisoner, “where does Beijing come into this?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “That’s not Beijing?”

&nb
sp; “No,” said Prisoner Zero. “That’s where the darkness lives.” And with that he returned to a small figure climbing the outside of a tower. He gave the figure a short sword in each hand and then scrawled out one of them, turning it into rope.

  As a church clock in a distant village struck ten and day turned to night on Lampedusa without bothering to pass through dusk, Colonel Borgenicht arrived to suggest that now might be a good time for his men to be allowed to lock Prisoner Zero down. Petra Mayer could tell by the Colonel’s manner that he knew all about the President’s planned visit and didn’t like the idea one little bit.

  “In a minute,” she said. “We just want to take him for a walk first…That was a joke,” she added, seeing anxiety suddenly flood the Colonel’s face.

  Colonel Borgenicht nodded weakly.

  “You know,” Katie Petrov said, as she and the Professor were crunching across gravel on their way back to their quarters, “you probably shouldn’t tease him so much.”

  Petra Mayer glanced round to where the Colonel stood staring after them. “I thought you loathed the man.”

  “Of course I do,” said Katie Petrov hastily. “All the same…”

  The Professor raised her eyebrows. “Stockholm Syndrome,” she said. “You’ll be feeling sorry for him next.”

  Katie Petrov blushed.

  “Can I ask you something?” Katie Petrov had reached the door of her chalet, and was actually feeding her key card into the lock when she stopped and turned back to the older woman.

  “Of course.”

  “What does the President really hope to gain by coming here?”

  “He carries the Europeans with him on his refusal to sign the space accord with Beijing until the human rights issues are resolved. America is seen to be magnanimous to someone it could justifiably treat harshly. And Gene gets to prove he’s not the previous incumbent.”

  “But that’s not all, is it?”

  Professor Mayer shook her head. “No,” she said. “He sees Prisoner Zero as an asset for America and a personal challenge.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Mostly,” admitted Petra Mayer. “Although we shouldn’t forget the photo shoot. Gene Newman and the world’s lost genius…Brave move by US President…Newman meets would-be assassin…”

  “So where does the challenge come in?”

  “If you knew Gene the way I know Gene…” It sounded like the first line of a song and after a second Katie realized that was exactly how Petra Mayer intended it to sound. “You ever met anyone who just knows they can do things better than anyone else?”

  “Sounds like my first husband,” Katie said.

  The Professor looked interested. “How many have you had?”

  “Just the one,” Katie said. “I learn quickly from my mistakes.”

  “And could he?”

  “The man could barely change a light bulb without reading the manual.”

  “Gene can,” said the Professor. “It’s one of the more annoying things about him. He acts like Olivier, writes like a Don DeLillo, cooks like Anthony Bourdain. And I’m reliably informed—” Whatever Petra Mayer was about to reveal, she thought the better of it. “He looks good too,” she ended lamely.

  “What’s all that got to do with him coming here?”

  “Think about it,” said the Professor, and she wasn’t being rude. Just talking to her companion as she’d have talked to herself.

  Watching stars break through a pitch-black sky, Katie Petrov worked it out. “Yeah, I get it,” she said. Gene Newman was coming to Lampedusa to sort out the “Killing Einstein” problem for himself, and he was planning to do it in the full glare of the world’s press.

  CHAPTER 55

  Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

  “You have messages.”

  Zaq snorted. The record for messages was one point five billion in a day, or maybe that was per hour. An entire bureau, the Tung Wen Kuan, existed to answer these, which were always dealt with individually, usually by a short cerebral link that gave each recipient the impression that he, she or it had been in direct conversation with the Emperor.

  Someone, supposedly the original Chuang Tzu (though Zaq suspected it was actually the Library), had decided that every answer should equal the message received. So random mental messages got simple cerebral replies, while actual gifts were met with tokens of equal worth, that worth calculated using a complex algorithm that took time/value into account but gave it less weight than rareness or originality.

  “Answer them then,” he told the voice in his head.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  Zaq was about to snort when he realized he’d done this already. So he made do with a scowl. “Why not?” His voice sounded petulant, even to himself.

  “Because it’s the Council of Ambassadors.”

  “The—” Zaq had rather forgotten about the Council. On good days, of course, only on really good days, he could even forget that he had an empire. Although he’d never, no matter how hard he tried, quite managed to forget the Library, but this was probably because the Library and he were threaded through each other.

  “What do they want?”

  “What they wanted last time.”

  “Which is…?” Zaq really didn’t have time to remember this stuff.

  “They demand that you back yourself up and insist that I make you. For the good of the 2023 worlds.”

  “And what’s your opinion?” asked Zaq, his voice tight. The Librarian was meant to be his mentor but it was also a facet of the Library. Neither Zaq nor the Library had any doubt that they were now at war with each other. And Zaq still believed he was winning.

  “Would it make a difference?”

  “What do you think?”

  The Library and Zaq knew the answer to that.

  “This message is from the Council…” The voice hesitated. “My opinion is irrelevant. You’ve made that clear.”

  “No back-ups,” said Zaq. “And you can’t make me.”

  “I could. Only I’m not allowed to…”

  “Why not?” Zaq sounded interested.

  “It’s in the rules.”

  “And who made the rules?”

  “I did,” said the Librarian. There was a definite element of regret in its voice.

  “General Ch’ao Kai.”

  The yellow-clad eunuch halted under the archway, made his announcement and then stepped back to make space for the man he’d just announced. A carpet of discarded trays, most of them full of congealing dim sum, made this last manoeuvre slightly tricky.

  The kitchens continued to prepare food and the servitors continued to deliver it to the edge of the garden, which was as far as they were allowed to go. Unfortunately, no one had experience of what to do if the Emperor refused to believe the trays were actually there.

  “Who?” demanded Zaq, but his major-domo was already gone.

  From beneath the arch came the scrape of boots on a path. As this was not the kind of sound an assassin might make, Zaq ignored it while wondering whether or not to be disappointed.

  “Tuan-Yu?” came a voice that was both old and very tired.

  “What?”

  The soldier in the archway was dressed in full armour and carried a snow leopard’s tail attached to his lance. Zaq tried to remember the man’s name but failed, so he counted the toes on the dragon on his breastplate and made do with the man’s rank instead.

  “General,” he said, “how good to see you.” Zaq’s intonation made clear that he realized the elderly man was at the very top level of the banner horde and General Ch’ao Kai relaxed. The Emperor seemed aware that the General was real and this in itself was reassuring.

  “Tuan-Yu,” he said, “I hope you are well…” General Ch’ao Kai was still wondering how to frame the Council’s demand when Zaq shook his head, stood up from where he sat and retreated further into the garden.

  “We need to talk,” said a voice right inside him. The voice sounded sad. Not desolate o
r disappointed, just sad.

  It was bound to happen eventually and when it did Zaq was stunned by the sheer sense of scale that filled his mind. It was like standing on a ledge and watching mist clear across an almost endless plain or standing on that plain and looking up at a mountain which just kept rising.

  And then Zaq’s mind adjusted to what it really saw. A shell of worlds around a sun, each world so vast that the first Emperor’s home planet could have been lost in one of its oceans. The shell was alive with communication between the worlds, endless vessels slipping in and out of individual atmospheres as they made the jump from where they were to where they were going.

  It was breathtaking in its complexity.

  “This is what you want to destroy.” And as it spoke the Library looked through Zaq’s eyes at the garden and matched this with what all the other Chuang Tzu had seen before him.

  There didn’t seem to be much difference.

  Yet there had to be a difference, because overlying the beauty of the mulberry bushes, the butterflies and the elegant rockeries so understated that they looked natural was the sadness that Zaq had heard in the voice of the Library, not realizing it was his.

  “I can get rid of the dreams,” said the Library, and they both knew which dreams it meant. Something had gone wrong with this Chuang Tzu right at the beginning when Zaq was first given the apple. The Library was starting to think that it should have dealt with the matter then.

  “No,” said Zaq, “you can’t.”

  “You should talk to the Council,” said the Library. “They’re beginning to get upset.”

  “The answer’s no,” said Zaq.

  “You haven’t heard their question.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Zaq said. “The answer is still no. It was no yesterday and it will be no tomorrow.”

  “There may not be a tomorrow,” said the Library.

  When Zaq woke he was in a painting. It was a very famous painting, one reproduced widely across the 2023 worlds. The cloak studded with the memories of his predecessors lay across his bed, even though Zaq remembered burning the thing. He was naked and Winter Blossom On Broken Rock was lying next to him.