Rainbow Bridge (9 page)

The ugly rumour Dian had offered as tradegoods troubled them. It had the ominous, unlikely ring of truth; and that was very bad. But if Dilip was somehow in Chinese hands, alive or dead, there was nothing they could do. They certainly dared not use Dian as a double agent. Stick with Plan A: buy some power first. Power had to be their primary objective, and it wasn’t going to be easy.

‘Just keep Dian away from Allie,’ said Fiorinda.

“Agreed,” said Ax. “She doesn’t need a bright idea like that.”

They reverted to issues within their reach, while the stew got finished. What to do about Smelly? Marlon, Silver and Pearl, the next steps for the reborn Reich.

‘
And
he asked me to marry him,’ Sage confided. ‘Finally. He tried to brush it off as a joke, but I think I screwed it out of him.’

‘I think I said
please don’t laugh at me
, you bastard.’

The splendours and miseries of Fiorinda’s teenage life were clinging to her—

‘You should exchange rings.’

‘Tha’s a good idea. But I’m holding out for Hawaii on the beach at sunset.’

‘Don’t be crass, Sage,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Just do it.’

Sage was six inches taller in old money, and heavier in the bone. But the guitar-man had big hands, the exchanged rings fitted, which seemed a kind gesture on the part of fate. The men went outside, barefoot, to rinse their mouths and take a piss. They lay down together, without undressing much; Fiorinda in the middle, you notice she’s stopped complaining about that? ‘I keep thinking it’ll be nice when the fest is over,’ sighed Fiorinda. ‘It’s tiring me out. I want to get back our nice life of eating stolen chickens and picking slugs out of our hair.’ Body heat soon builds up, but never quite enough. Got to do something about the winter insulation in here.

‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Ax, resolutely optimistic. ‘Brace yourself. Something different and much better is going to happen instead.’

Winter Wind

Coming Up Like Thunder

Snow had been blown off the helipad, the blowers were still going. As he stepped down into white-out, white noise, Ax glimpsed through dancing powder the railway bridge over Richfield Avenue, at the western boundary of Rivermead. The windows in the rear section of the machine—captured from the English, no relation to those fantastic airships—had been blanked out. He wondered why he was being allowed to get his bearings now; then he saw the wall, rising from frosted winter pasture about a hundred metres away, pale and sheer, a bewildering affront to his senses. He had seen this development on tv, but the reality was something else. He was going to spend the day reading signs and gestures. Would they all be writ so large?

‘This way, please, Mr Preston,’ said the Australian sergeant. People’s Liberation Army insignia couldn’t always be trusted, but Ax didn’t feel he’d been given an honour escort. Not a visiting dignitary, not quite a prisoner, the soldiers marched him to a giant Chinatown arch (weirdly stripped of its natural, vibrant but scruffy inner city accoutrements): creamy pale, with a few courses of indigo, and dark red inscriptions. The wall was not so huge as it had seemed at the first shock, but it was three times Ax’s height and
growing.
He could see a constant stirring; just perceptible, very disturbing. Was the material alive? Maybe.

The inscription on the lintel was the opening sentence of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms:
In general, the world must unite when it has been long divided…
They liked that quote, he’d seen it often. Profound vertigo went through him. I know you, you fantastic monster. I heard of your birth, long ago, in the Utopian chatrooms of Pan-Asia. I wasn’t afraid of you then, I’m not afraid now, this feeling isn’t fear; and he’d been looking at the characters too long, he didn’t want them to know he could read.

Ceremonial guards, very smart in olive green with scarlet belts and shoulder boards, stood to attention on either side of a pair of huge doors, the same creamy, quivering material as the wall but shaped into hinges, studs and bars; an imitation, no, a
reference
to ancient bronze. The doors opened majestically, Ax and his escort passed into the gatehouse with no halt, no greeting, no perceptible security scan. They waited in a blank side room. The air was chill; the only furniture creamy, naked couches with scrolled ends, set against the walls. The soldiers stood face-front, chin up. The sergeant was a ginger-haired individual with a prominent nose, the private soldiers looked like Han Chinese. Ax wondered if he should try whistling “Waltzing Matilda”
?
Start a conversation about cricket? No.

No romancing the help. He’d decided not to play that game.

A flat screen in a scrolled frame, about two metres square, hung on the wall to Ax’s right. Never stay where they put you. He walked over there, no one stopped him, and watched a huge kaleidoscope of Barnard cells. They switched from disorder into order in intricate combination; a single pattern took over, and colonised the whole. It broke down, the process started again, subtly different in detail. The piece was called
Simplicity As A Result Of Complexity
, or that was how he read the characters; there was no translation.

He was beginning to wish he’d been more Ax Preston with his soldiers, after all, when a tall figure burst through an inner door (also pale, also moulded of a piece); incongruous as something leaping at him in a nightmare. A shock of stiff, contrived ringlets around a celebrity face from the international music scene: an olive fatigue jacket cast over the shoulders of a mandarin gown with rainbow striped sleeves. ‘Ax Preston!’ cried the newcomer, pumping Ax’s hand. Under the gown he wore yellow trousers, and a sarong with a fat Japanese rising sun print. ‘Delighted! Delighted!’

‘Pleased to meet you, too,’ said Ax. ‘I’m sure.’

‘You look amazed! Did nobody tell you I’d be here? I’m working with the AMID, the Expeditionary Force. It’s absolutely wonderful!’ A suspicious glance. ‘You do
recognise
me? We haven’t met, which is a crime, but you know who I am?’

‘Er, yeah? You’re Norman Soong, the er, rock show director, aren’t you?’

‘
Lieutenant Colonel
Soong.’ Striped sleeves whirled, Norman Soong thrust his shoulder board at Ax. ‘See my stars? All my people have ranks. It’s a great joke.’

‘But you’re still in the music business?’

The great man frowned in reproof. ‘Rock is more than music and more than business, as you above all should know!’ He released Ax’s hand and glanced around. ‘You don’t have a guitar with you?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, well, never mind. We’ll be meeting later. Enjoy your tour.’

Lü Xiaobao’s men didn’t get past the gatehouse. An HQ officer showed Ax around, a young woman who gave her rank as lieutenant, and spoke English with a bland US accent. He guessed she was something fast-track,
aide de camp
. She told him that the wall enclosing the festival site would extend to surround the ancient city of Reading, which was to be the new capital. Outlying built-up areas would be razed, the waterways would be securely managed against flooding. Temporary measures had already been taken to culvert the Thames at Rivermead site itself.

‘It was very impractical to live under permanent threat of inundation.’

Ax was wondering what the hell the presence of Norman Soong meant, and why there’d been no mention of him, ever, on Joyous Liberation news—

‘They were thinking of making Rivermead into a Lake town.’

‘That’s culturally correct, and we did consider it.’

Rumour had it that there were no actual women in the invasion force, only trannies, but as far as he could tell this was a real girl beside him: a serious, professional, girl-soldier.

‘You people move very fast.’

She nodded, with a shy smile, as if at a personal compliment.

How long does it take to “conquer” a country the size of England? A matter of days, if you have overwhelming military superiority and no outside intervention. You trounce the regulars a few times, occupy a few cities, execute the ruling junta, and announce that it’s over. Then you just have to crush the recalcitrants, and convince the silent majority they’re better off accepting their fate. These may be related tasks.

It was near the end of December, three months since that dawn when the airships had come zooming out of the Atlantic like a swarm of UFOs. Chinese forts were sprouting throughout the Occupied Zones, putting the definitive stamp of Sphere Instant Architecture on the English landscape; while “life returned to normal” for the masses. The rest of the country was “quiet”. So much for Joyous Liberation news. Ax knew things were uglier on the ground, he didn’t know how bad. Unofficial sources said Richard and Cornelius had made their base in East Anglia, and actives were crossing the ceasefire line at will, inflicting casualties and damage, inspiring Occupied-Zone terrorists. But no single event had caused him to accept the latest approach from Wang Xili, he’d just felt it was time. He’d tried to raise his value by reluctance, he hoped he hadn’t held out too long.

He’d frightened himself imagining the unburied dead, the charred marquees, but of course it was all gone. No trace of the massacre of thirty thousand righteous campers, who had lived here like Bangladeshi peasants. Purple domes, instant buildings all on the same pattern, stood in rows. They looked like upturned boats. Teams of soldiers, with shovels and with heavy machinery, were at work in the open spaces. Lieutenant Chu talked about gardens, how the English and the Chinese both love gardens, and recounted harmless facts about the invasion. The airships were classified as amphibious, for historical reasons. The invasion force was made up of
amphibious mechanised infantry divisions
, hence the English expression: ‘AMID’.

‘In English we are the 2
^nd
AMID army.’

‘The first AMID being the army that didn’t need to invade Taiwan?’

She smiled and nodded, pleased with him. Ax continued to air a limited fluency in
putonghua
(which delighted her), covertly read the notices that identified various sections, and tried to stop himself groping for vanished landmarks.

Now we must be in the Arena… Here the Zen Self tent stood, where Olwen Devi’s lab rats trained their brains for techno-mediated nirbhana. Maybe right here I parted from that extraordinary little babe Fiorinda, one morning in July, and went off to the Roving Presence tent, to visit the Pan-Asian Utopians. We talked about the fall of the old powers, the mandate that was passing into our hands—

The hope of a new dawn.

Yesterday’s snow lay on the bare earth, wherever it wasn’t being dug; nothing rested on the purple hulls. The wall was ever present, obliterating his old horizons.

‘Who were you thinking to keep out? The Mongol hordes?’

‘No,’ she said, with that unexpected frankness, their secret weapon. ‘These kind of walls aren’t for defence. We use them to impress, to awe the people.’

‘Right.’

He knew he was being observed. This is where the Counterculture died, Mr Preston. We penned them here, we moved in and cut them down without mercy. We have planted our HQ on their heartland; which was also yours. Do you accept our judgement? He thought of Silbury Hill demolished, Avebury and Stonehenge levelled, the White Horse scraped from the side of the vale at Uffington. Waves of useless fury drained through him, and he let them pass. Accept. Five thousand years isn’t a bad innings, everything tainted must go, what must be, must be.

At last the
aide de camp
brought him to the Palace of Rivermead, where the Countercultural government of England had made its last stand, after the fall of London. The gaudy, crumpled, lo-rise Palace had been built for Ax, out of mulched cars and other mad scraps, but it had no sentimental associations. Too many bad things had happened here, long before the Chinese arrived. He’d heard the place had been burned down but it seemed intact, except for one wing hidden by hoardings.

‘A fine, unusual post-modern building,’ said Lieutenant Chu, approvingly.

As they mounted the steps he glanced back, bad move. From this vantage the campground rose through the alien overlay, full of its dead. Horror shook him—