Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “I’m going to find her,” said Zaq.

  A hundred and forty-eight billion people wondered if this was a good idea.

  “And turn off the feed,” Zaq added, pushing himself to his feet.

  Silence greeted this order.

  “Do it.”

  “You’ll cause chaos.” The order had been shocking enough to make the Librarian reappear. So now he stared from a puddle. As unhappy to be talking to Zaq as Zaq was to listen.

  Walking to the edge of his terrace, Zaq stared down the wooded slopes of Wanshou Shan to a flickering wall of flame that had once been the greatest collection of classical paintings ever gathered into a single building.

  “It’s chaos already,” he said.

  Zaq found her at one end of a wooden pavilion in the Summer Gardens, kneeling with her back to him. She seemed be trying to crack open a small wooden chest. On the wall in front of her was a carved and gilded phoenix.

  Tris had changed into a yellow silk jacket with a dragon embroidered across the back in white-gold thread. On her head was balanced a simple black hat that looked like an upturned bowl with the bottom cut out.

  The sword was stuck through her belt.

  Flames licked against one window and the sky outside danced with embers that flickered and spun in the night wind. The Changlang had burnt easily, being old, fragile and made mostly from cedar, and sparks from that fire had danced and then fallen onto a nearby roof.

  A thousand golden butterflies rose in the night sky and threatened the roofs on which they landed. Zaq half expected the Library to fill the sky with clouds and batter the fires into submission but the night stayed almost clear and almost dark, with that silver tinge which came from the sun reflecting on distant worlds.

  The room in which Tris knelt stank of smoke, charring shutters and a petrochemical reek which was oil-based paint bubbling beneath early tongues of flame. It was a complex smell, heavy with hydrocarbon. And though Zaq would have liked to stay to savour its richness, he realized this was probably unwise.

  “So,” Zaq said, “what are you looking for?”

  “You…”

  Tris scrambled to her feet so fast she almost tripped. Only to realize that a dozen paces still separated her from the Emperor and anyway he was unarmed. So she drew her own blade and stepped away from the sandalwood box.

  “Nothing,” said Tris.

  You must be searching for something, Zaq almost said, then shrugged his reply away. Why would she tell him anyway?

  “So what now?” he said, hoping it sounded nonchalant.

  “Fuck,” Tris said. “I don’t know.” She tossed her blade from hand to hand. “What do you think?”

  “I think the world’s going to end.”

  “Only for you,” she said.

  Her juggling with the blade was very impressive. Unfortunately for the 148 billion waiting to be impressed, the Librarian had taken Zaq at his word and the feed was gone. Zaq’s head was empty and the single mirror on one wall showed only a burning room.

  It was a wonderful feeling.

  “Let’s dance,” he said.

  And Tris looked at Zaq then, seeing him for the first time. A man who looked not much older than she was but must be twice her age.

  “Dance?”

  Zaq indicated the embers swirling beyond the window. “You got anything better to do?”

  Tris was still working on an answer to this when the phoenix so lovingly carved into the panel behind her proved unable to live up to its own legend and crumbled onto a bed of embers.

  Through the open door ahead she could see the Changlang burnt down to a smouldering line. A dozen small pavilions between the wooden corridor and her also smouldered, ceramic roof tiles exploding in the flames into which they’d fallen.

  All around them bonfires lit the Yihe Yuan, until the Summer Gardens glowed with a richness they’d never possessed before and gilded pavilions grew ever more golden as they were varnished with flame.

  She should leave now, before it was—

  “Too late,” said Zaq.

  A huge shutter crumbled as its lacquered wood broke apart and the sudden inrush of air fed the blaze. More oxygen was all the pavilion needed to explode into flame, fire flowing across the floor like running water. Wooden panels on the ceiling began to char and the last unvarnished wall grew fat with flame as smoke fought to escape through doors and windows.

  The heat was beyond anything Tris had experienced. Almost beyond anything she could imagine. This had to be dying, Tris realized. And all the while the Emperor just stood opposite her, seemingly unmoved and unharmed, the flames now so close that his cloak had started to char at the edges.

  “You did this,” she said, each word tearing at her throat.

  He shook his head.

  “Yes,” said Tris, “you.” Stepping forward, she drew her blade to finish what she’d travelled the worlds to accomplish. She expected him to twist sideways or block the blow, to turn and run.

  Instead Zaq stepped forward, put out one arm to steady Tris as she began to fall and barely grunted when she used all that remained of her strength to ram the blade under his ribs and into his heart.

  Time froze?

  This was not strictly accurate. What actually happened was subjective in the way everything is when one gets down to that level. Time slowed to a crawl as the Library rewrote reality inside the skulls of Zaq and Tris, the handful of seconds separating Zaq from cardiac failure and the alveoli in Tris’s lungs from rupturing suddenly extending before both of them like a slow glide to infinity.

  And as the speed at which their thoughts began to operate ripped apart their neural nets, the flames which had been roiling around them slowed and slowed again until they barely crawled up the walls.

  “Why?” Zaq said. But then he knew.

  Because what Tris thought was what he thought and there were no boundaries between them. They looked at the world through the same eyes. And that world was fucked, seriously screwed, far weirder than either had imagined.

  Zaq saw…

  Well, he imagined that he saw himself. It looked like him only he couldn’t remember any such incident. He was in a bath, marble and old. The room was painted in flat greens, golds and reds but then his rooms were always painted in those colours.

  There were no servitors, he was naked and the water in his bath had turned cold. So cold that a scar on his wrist had grown blue and the skin around his nails become frayed and white. The fingers of his right hand, the one that gripped a knife, were so pale they seemed to belong to someone else.

  It was a very beautiful knife, with a wavy line along one edge from where it had been forged, and fragments of room reflected in the blade’s surface as if looking into a river or a bowl. Zaq had a feeling the knife might have been given to him by someone; he found it hard to remember.

  Actually, Zaq found it hard to think, full stop. In locking him into this moment the Library had trapped him inside such pain that it overwhelmed his sight and hearing, his sense of smell and his very self.

  “Hell,” said Tris.

  The Library nodded.

  “Remember now?” Tris said.

  She was talking about the room and the cold bath and about the boy who came through a door, a plate of dim sum on his tray and a rat perched on one shoulder. Through the eyes of that rat had peered a brain of a rodent and more billions of people than Tris could imagine. The servitor was about Tris’s age. In fact, Zaq was pretty certain that the servitor was—

  “Wrong,” said Tris. She could feel the knife in Zaq’s chest as clearly as he suffocated beneath her struggle to draw breath, both frozen into each other’s pain on the wrong side of death.

  “Look again,” she demanded.

  It was as if he refused to recognize himself or found it hard to care about what had happened to the boy with the rat. As if he saw life through a sheet of glass. Except…Tris corrected herself. It was a sheet of darkness and ice. And then, as Zaq finally remembered
sitting in the bath, Tris understood everything. (Something she could have done without, really.)

  “What?” Zaq said, looking up.

  The boy grinned, shut the door behind him and looked around at the ornate room and whistled. “Wow,” he said. “Fucking neat.”

  “Out,” said Zaq.

  “Zaq,” said the boy, “it’s me. I’ve blagged you some dim sum.” He held out the tray as if he expected the Chosen of Heaven to join him in eating congealed food.

  “There was this weird guy in the kitchens,” he added, oblivious to Zaq’s fiercest scowl, “wanted me to—”

  “Don’t,” said Tris.

  Zaq rose from the water, blade in hand.

  He was naked and so was the blade which took the boy’s head from his shoulders. As a spout of arterial blood pissed itself almost to the ceiling, Tris screamed and the boy began to crumple, his knees buckling as the torso toppled forward to hit the floor.

  How could you?

  From the far corner, the rat and the servitor’s head both stared at Zaq with looks that only grew less accusing when the rat blinked and death began to soften facial muscles and glaze the boy’s eyes.

  “But he’s not even—”

  “Of course he’s fucking real,” Tris shouted, her voice a wind which scoured the edges of Zaq’s mind. “They were all real,” she said. “Every servitor you killed, that concubine you raped…”

  She stopped, considered what she now knew. “You really didn’t—”

  “No,” said Zaq. “I didn’t know.”

  He saw it all now. The horror of what he’d done, which was as nothing to the horror of what he had been. A monster.

  “Who was he?” Zaq began to ask and realized he already knew. Tris had been too young to watch it happen on feed, little more than a baby. No, Zaq knew that was untrue. She’d been unborn when her—

  “Your father?”

  This didn’t seem possible, yet it was true and there was something else, something obvious.

  Eli ate the apple, said the Library, as if this explained everything. And strangely enough it did. Both of them instantly understood why it was always this fruit that tradition demanded. And with the memory of juice running down Zaq’s chin and Eli reaching out for his share the final piece fell into place.

  “My brother,” Zaq said. “Your father.”

  She’s your half niece, said the dark. You had different fathers. This seemed possible, even likely. Although, since Zaq could barely remember his mother, how anyone might expect him to remember the man who…

  I can still save you.

  “How?” said Tris, knowing it was to the Chuang Tzu that the strange voice had been speaking.

  I can loop time back to when you were young. Or we can let your flame pass to the next candle. The Library sounded regretful, as if things really hadn’t been meant to end like this.

  “Save us,” Tris said.

  The Chuang Tzu said nothing. He felt sick and stupid, ignorant to the point of wanting to disappear, to be anything other than what he was. He didn’t want to be young again or inflict his memories on the next Chuang Tzu. He wanted everything to be different.

  The Library thought about that.

  “Billions will die,” said Tris.

  “No,” insisted Zaq. “They will simply become someone else.”

  “Right,” said the Library. “Let me find the tipping point.”

  CHAPTER 59

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  Hassan sat back in his chair and pulled out a wallet, counting ten-dollar bills onto the table. The total got to forty dollars before he hesitated, added one more to the pile and slipped his wallet back inside his jacket.

  “Fifty dollars,” he said.

  It was an incredible sum for a boy who once scraped a living delivering bread and now survived on trading odd snippets of information with the police. For a girl who kept house, swept, cooked and spent most evenings persuading the drunk who was not her father that he didn’t want to hit her it was enough money to fund an escape.

  “Half now,” said Hassan, “and half later.” Pulling a small cigarillo from a leather case, he waited for Idries to produce a lighter. It was brass overlaid with chrome, the name of some Essaouria nightclub in enamel along one side. “We can meet at Café Lux afterwards.”

  “After what?” Malika demanded.

  “After you deliver this.” Hassan lifted a plastic bag onto the café table.

  “What’s in it?” said Malika.

  Idries snorted. “You don’t want to know.”

  “We do,” said Malika, “don’t we?” She stared at Moz, who looked doubtful.

  “It’s fifty dollars,” he said.

  “Well.” Malika’s voice was firm. “I want to know.” Moz and Malika looked at each other, Idries and Hassan temporarily forgotten.

  “Can we talk?” Moz said.

  “Talk all you like,” said Malika. There were tears in her eyes and her bottom lip jutted so far that she looked like a petulant child.

  “Give me a minute,” Moz said and Hassan raised his eyebrows, then shrugged and lolled back in his chair.

  “Don’t take all night.”

  “We’ve been through this,” said Moz, as soon as they turned the corner into a palm-lined side street. “I owe Hassan.”

  The eyes watching him were huge, magnified by a lifetime of unspilt tears. “Owe him what?” Malika asked.

  “I don’t know,” Moz said. “I’m just tired,” he added. “Tired of the fights and tired of watching my back. I’m tired of being locked into something I can’t win.”

  “And this will end it?”

  Moz shrugged. “It’s a start,” he said.

  When they got back inside, Moz sat and Malika stood behind him, her hands clasped demurely in front of her. Only Hassan and Idries were fooled.

  “Okay,” said Moz, “we’ll deliver the package.”

  “Good choice,” said Hassan.

  “Only first Malika and I get to look inside.”

  Hassan stopped smiling.

  “Why?” demanded Idries.

  “If we’re going to take the risk,” said Moz, “then we want to know it’s really kif and not opium. That’s fair.” He could see from Hassan’s face that the older boy thought it was anything but.

  “If you refuse to take it,” Hassan said, “Caid Hammou will be very cross.”

  Placing his hand over his heart, Moz bowed his head. “I’m not refusing,” he said seriously. “And I swear to carry the kif wherever Caid Hammou wants as soon as Malika and I have checked inside.”

  “It’s already packed,” complained Idries. “My uncle said it’s not to be unwrapped.”

  “Why not?”

  Only Moz could hear the told-you-so in Malika’s question.

  Hassan looked from Malika to Moz. “You really going to let a girl tell you what to do?” he asked.

  “She doesn’t,” Moz said with a smile. “She makes suggestions. I make suggestions. We do something in the middle. That’s how life works.” Celia would have been proud of him, if somewhat surprised at his wholesale stealing of her lines.

  They left Idries arguing with Hassan, probably for the first time ever. It seemed Idries was not keen to take the parcel either.

  “I need to get home now,” Malika said, wrapping her haik tight about her. She was finally learning what society required of those growing up. Lies and prevarication, hypocrisy and long sleeves.

  “Not yet,” said Moz. “We should go to Riad al-Razor. It’s time you met Jake properly.” It was on their way that Moz made his suggestion to Malika. He made it without having talked to Jake or Celia, although he didn’t think this would be a problem.

  Celia came to his room less often now that Jake had taken to visiting hers. There was undoubtedly a raw element of jealousy behind Jake’s decision to repair his relationship with his manager, but then there was an element of jealousy in everything Jake did. It was the dark side to his genius and Moz doubte
d he’d ever be any different.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Moz said. “They’ll like you.”

  He suspected that he’d have to explain to Jake that Malika was different and that girls from the Mellah weren’t like girls in New York and London, but then he realized that Celia would undoubtedly explain this for him. And anyway Jake would be returning to London soon. His notebook was full and he had taken to rereading the articles about himself in Sounds and NME every day now.

  And if Jake went then Celia would go too and they’d need people to look after the riad for them.

  “What are you thinking?” Malika said.

  Moz smiled. It was such a Malika question. Usually he’d have said “Nothing” because that’s what boys always replied, but Moz felt he owed her the truth. “Things,” he said. “You know, the future. Stuff like that.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Federal Nations support ship Eugene Newman was a Malika-class explorer, designed in Shanghai and built in high orbit by Atlas Interplanetary, a consortium put together fifty years before by His Excellency Caid Marzaq al-Turq.

  It was an old-fashioned double hull reaching the end of its useful life and only the fact it was named after the man who bluffed Beijing into not using slave labour to build the launch sites had allowed sentimentalists at the Agency to siphon off enough funds to extend its life far beyond the usual ten-year service period.

  No one was sure who came up with the idea to retrofit the Eugene Newman with a ZeroPoint/Casimir coil drive and make it the first ship in the Federated Nations fleet able to cross the galaxy in a single lifetime.

  Several old men claimed the credit but these were people who also claimed to have been friends with Jake Razor, the maniac, musician and mathematician notorious for having no friends, and so everyone discounted them.

  There was no doubt, however, about who suggested the destination. Lao Kaizhen, known in his childhood as Chuang Tzu because of his ability to lose himself in dreams, had grown up to exhibit that most Chinese of abilities, successfully mastering two entirely separate disciplines.