Chasing the Phoenix, page 16
“But if you have any other ideas, we will happily examine our manuals to see whether they are permissible or not and if so under what terms and conditions,” suggested a third.
Darger spun on his heel and left the room.
* * *
IN A savage mood, Darger pushed his way through the crowded streets of Crossroads, going nowhere in particular, burning off his anger with exertion. Until by random chance he found himself in the industrial area by the Long River. There, where mills and forges clustered to take advantage of the river’s water power and abundant opportunities to dump waste, he found that the Division of Sappers and Archaeologists had taken over the entire neighborhood. Every workyard and empty lot held broken war machines that teams of workers were in the process of repairing.
Darger leaned over the fence of a scrap metal facility where sheets of iron were being hammered out to patch several holes that had been blasted into a crushing wheel, and struck up a conversation with the burly woman overseeing the operation. “Why are you out of uniform?” he asked her.
“I was never in uniform in the first place,” the supervisor replied. “The joyous ones have directed every mechanic in the city to work for the invaders, and since I get paid the same for this labor as I do for peacetime work, I am content. Indeed, that is the particular genius of our form of government.”
“Pray, explain yourself.”
“Conquerors come and conquerors go. Sometimes Crossroads is an independent city-state, other times part of a larger confederation. However, because our government is made up of unimaginative and incorruptible functionaries, the day-to-day running of the city is consistent. You might say that we are currently under enemy rule. But this is a matter of semantics. Life goes on much as it always has. Thus, we feel no need to resist the foreign tyrant. Who in turn, confronted not by sullen resistance but by ready obedience, is not moved to punish us as he did the river cities, which are more conventionally governed. In this way, Crossroads endures.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must chastise that idiot of an apprentice who is banging away at a sheet of tin as if it were iron.”
Bellowing, the overseer turned away.
This conversation brightened Darger’s mood considerably. He was making a mental note to requisition the city’s wealthiest citizens to do manual labor (cleaning the streets, perhaps, or emptying latrines) so that Fire Orchid’s clan could collect bribes from them to be exempted from the odious task, when—
Crash!
He spun about to see that a spider had just slammed into the side of the scrapyard’s office, collapsing a wall and doing tremendous damage to itself in the process. Three legs on one side and one on the other were attempting to lift the machine up and then lurching down again. Fluids poured from ruptured metal.
Workers came running from every direction. A young man leaped up into the cab and turned the spider off. Hydraulics hissing, it settled to the ground.
Darger helped the supervisor lift the pilot out of his vehicle. The man’s eyes were open and he seemed alert, but he said nothing.
“Are you injured?” Darger asked.
The man considered. “No.”
“Shaken up?”
“A little.”
The supervisor pushed herself between Darger and the sergeant. “What is your name? How did this happen?”
“Sergeant Bright Prosperity of the Good Fortune Spider Corps. I was told to walk my spider to this location for minor repairs.”
“And then?”
“It walked into the wall.”
“Your spider walked into the wall,” the woman repeated.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Were you distracted? Did your machine malfunction?”
“No.”
“Well, then, why the hell didn’t you just stop?”
The man looked puzzled. “Nobody told me to stop the spider. Just to walk it here.”
As they spoke, Darger had been studying Sergeant Bright Prosperity’s face. His forehead had a light sheen of sweat and his cheeks were bright pink. “This man is running a fever,” he said. “We must send for a doctor immediately.”
The medics, when they arrived, looked unsurprised. “Yesterday, there were three cases,” one told Darger. “Today there are eleven. This is a classic progression of an emerging infectious disease. I do not look forward to tomorrow.”
“What are its symptoms?”
“It begins with a light fever, which is transitory, though the cheeks remain erythematic afterward. That’s it for physical symptoms. However, the disease leaves its victims extremely literal-minded. If you were to tell one to dig a ditch, he would continue to do so long after the task was obviously complete. Across a road … through a house … into a river … No folly is too ludicrous for them. Their judgment is consistently suspect. We have been hospitalizing those who come down with it, though they are physically hale, simply because it’s safer not to have them wandering about.”
“Would you say,” Darger asked, “that the victims of this disease act as though they cannot imagine doing anything else?”
“That’s it exactly, sir! Very well put.”
* * *
“YOU BASTARDS lied to me!” Darger roared.
Though the joyous ones had explained that they did not have a hierarchical structure, but only specialized responsibilities, and that therefore it did not matter which of them were summoned, Darger had nevertheless commanded the twelve who had first welcomed him to Crossroads to appear before him. He needed specific individuals to rail at.
They met in a conference room with lacquered walls and an enormous antique chrome-and-glass table, but nobody sat. Darger needed to pace back and forth, while the joyous ones were perfectly content to stand.
“We cannot lie, noble sir. It is an impossibility.”
“You withheld information, which comes down to the same thing.”
“We know many things, sir. It is not possible to tell you everything at once. Ask us anything you wish, and we will tell you all we know.”
“Tell me about the disease that has broken out among the Hidden Emperor’s soldiers—though not, I am told, among this city’s civilians—which leaves its victims pink-cheeked and totally devoid of imagination.”
“The joyous infection is a tailored encephalitis virus which targets specific areas of the neocortex, thalamus, and occipital cortex. It was created a hundred and fifty years ago by Doctor Modest Charity at the request of the city fathers of Crossroads. In his youth, Modest Charity was but an indifferent student. However, a chance encounter with the aged philosopher Dour Tortoise, who—”
“Stop. Why is it that only our soldiers are coming down with this illness?”
“All the city, save for ourselves of course, was vaccinated against it when Ceo Shrewd Fox learned of your approach.”
“This vaccine—where is it? Is there a large enough supply to protect those soldiers who have not yet come down with the disease?”
“Ceo Shrewd Fox took almost all of the vaccine with her when she left. A few doses were left behind which, at her direction, we placed in the tea that was served to the Hidden Emperor and his highest-ranking officers.”
“Why did she have you do that?”
“She did not tell us, sir.”
“Can more of the vaccine be created?”
“Undoubtedly, sir. The technology is well understood.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere! Summon your genetic engineers.”
“They are not here, sir. Ceo Shrewd Fox took them with her when she left. She said that when we were asked about them, we were to say that she left nobody in the city or indeed the region who could do what you desire.”
“Is this true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I begin,” Darger said, “to loathe and despise Ceo Shrewd Fox almost as much as I respect and admire her. Did she leave you any other directions?”
“Yes, sir. She told us to give you this letter.”
The joyous one produced an envelope. Darger removed the letter, unfolded it, and read:
To Ceo Powerful Locomotive, Cao White Squall, the foreigner who calls himself the Perfect Strategist, and/or whatever other flunkeys of the vile invader who falsely calls himself an emperor may read this, greetings.
By now, you are doubtless aware that I have made Crossroads into a trap for your forces. It is one you will find far more difficult to leave than it was to enter. Depending on how quickly you discovered the truth of the plague I have arranged for you, you may or may not know that the armies that scattered before you like leaves in the wind are currently approaching the city with resolute step, and that the river fleet you never even saw is even now sailing upriver to close that avenue of escape. When the joyous infection has rendered your army completely harmless, I will reenter the city and accept your surrender.
Perhaps you think you can fight your way out. I would not advise it. The joyous ones underwent many years of intensive training to learn how to function without imagination. I have seen how infected soldiers behave and it is not a pretty sight. If you doubt me, go ahead and try.
Out of mercy for your enlisted men, they shall not be prosecuted for their role in this war but will be allowed to complete their terms of service under my command. The architects of this assault upon the sovereignty of Three Gorges, however, must face justice in the form of a military tribunal. I have directed that the last remaining doses of vaccine in Crossroads be surreptitiously administered to the highest ranking of your officers, in order that you may contemplate this future while the joyous plague runs its course.
Enjoy the last days of your life.
Ceo Shrewd Fox
In Service of Three Gorges
Darger put down the letter and groaned. “Could this day get any worse?”
“Undoubtedly, sir,” one of the joyous ones said. “Though we cannot imagine how.”
10.
The Dog Warrior was once leading a group of soldiers against a greatly superior military force and, seeing that they were reluctant to engage, stopped in a small temple to pray. Calling upon heaven, he cried, “I will throw the dice three times—give me a sign of how the fight will go.” Three times he threw the dice, and all three times they came up sixes. Greatly heartened, the soldiers went on to fight and to win.
Later, he let one of his men examine the ivory cubes he had used. No matter how many times they were thrown, they came up all sixes. “Courage!” the Dog Warrior said. “And load the dice.”
—EXPLOITS OF THE DOG WARRIOR
THE MOST luxurious lodgings in all of Crossroads were those in Yellow Crane Tower. This famous structure had been erected during the Three Kingdoms period, thousands of years before. Wars and fires had destroyed it many times. Always it had been rebuilt, most recently in the Utopian era, though not always in the same place. Darger, who had been expecting a counterattack from the moment the city was taken, had made their headquarters within this landmark, hoping it would render the Three Gorges armies slightly more reluctant to attack them directly. Somewhere within its many floors, presumably, lived the Hidden Emperor and his entourage. White Squall had the second floor to herself, and Darger, as the third most influential servant of the emperor (and, with Powerful Locomotive still lingering in his coma, effectively even more so), had the floor above her. Yet Surplus did not find him there, but up on the tower’s roof.
The day was chill and overcast, and there was a slight drizzle. Darger stood with his hands clasped behind his back and stared down the dark and misty river in silence for a long time. Finally, he said, “The poet Li Bai climbed to this spot long ago, intending to write a poem, and discovered that Cui Hao’s most famous work, ‘Yellow Crane Tower,’ had been inscribed on the wall. Convinced there was no way he could match that accomplishment, he went away dejected and defeated. Later he returned to write his own equally great poem. Li Bai was a joyful man and a drunkard, while his best friend, the poet Du Fu, was his exact opposite, a pessimist and a melancholic. I like to think that it was Du Fu who, understanding depression as Li Bai could not, convinced him to return and take up his pen against the darkness.”
“You are in a fey mood, my friend.”
“We face imminent death and certain defeat. Now is the time for us to acknowledge that unanticipated and tragic turns of events do not only happen to one’s self and friends but to one’s enemies as well. That, at any rate, is my hope.”
“We have seen worse moments than this.”
“I let myself be played like a trout by Ceo Shrewd Fox. Hers was a deceit worthy of the Perfect Strategist,” Darger said, “if only he were real and a sadistic son of a bitch. Shrewd Fox will wait until we are completely helpless and then walk in to finish us off, wiping out the upper echelon—ourselves included—as effortlessly as she might swat a fly.”
“Aubrey, forgive me for asking this, but … exactly what are you doing?”
Darger showed just a flash of teeth. “I am working myself up into a state. Like a rat, I do my best fighting when I am cornered and all looks helpless.” Then he said, “Tell me. How is your new family doing?”
“Not well. Both Terrible Nuisance and Vicious Brute have caught the virus. Fire Orchid is caring for them and has banished me from all contact with the clan. She says she is trying to prevent my exposure to the plague to leave me free to find a cure for it, but I suspect she is merely trying to protect me. The irony here is that I am almost certainly immune. There are relatively few diseases that cross species from human to canine.”
“Then we cannot count on their capable assistance should we two be reduced to fleeing for our lives?”
“Alas, no.”
Darger sighed and then, turning his back on the river, said, “You have a purposeful air about you. Why did you seek me out?”
“To inform you that White Squall wishes to see us both. She says that it’s important. But no more.”
* * *
AS THEY made their way through Crossroads, Surplus was struck by how cheerful its citizens appeared and by contrast how dour were the emperor’s soldiers. The city’s moods seemed to shift with its smells: from bins of dried fruit and spices in the produce shops to fresh droppings and stale blood in the bird market, from food sizzling over charcoal braziers in the restaurants to barrels of stale cooking oil waiting to be carted away in the alleyways behind them. He and Darger stopped to admire a courtyard that was being decorated with lanterns and flowers. A man climbed down from a ladder to explain, “I am preparing for my mother’s eightieth birthday. Family and friends are gathering from a hundred li around for the celebration.”
“Doesn’t the war preclude such a gathering?”
“Not at all. The Three Gorges armies are not restricting travel—indeed, by guaranteeing the roads are free of bandits, they enable it. They examine all traffic passing through the territory they control to ensure that soldiers and weapons are not being smuggled out of Crossroads, of course. But this is only a minor inconvenience, much the same as the invaders making similar examinations of those entering the city.”
On they went, past tables of black tea, barrels of cured tobacco, bins of garbage, laundry being boiled, spilled beer. They paused outside a tavern where a brawl had broken out between off-duty soldiers and local rowdies. “Such behavior is inevitable during a plague,” observed a lean and ancient street vendor of winemellons. He or she had a face like old horse leather. “No real harm will come of it. Oh, a few teeth and fingers and perhaps an eye or two will be lost. Maybe a leg. But such things can always be grown back.”
Racks of fish drying, river mud, acrid cat trace, sweet buns baking, freshly watered ferns, face powder and perfume, the ruptured-sewer smell of fermenting bean curd. Passing by the door of a brothel, the two were almost knocked down by a pair of drunken young soldiers stumbling out. “Your mothers would be dismayed to see you frequenting such a place,” Darger admonished them.
“Always before, I avoided such dens of vice, for fear of catching a disease,” replied the first young lady. “The reward for which is I am going to contract the disease without experiencing the pleasure beforehand. So I resolved to rectify matters.”
The second made an impudent face. “I am not likely to see my mother again. Therefore I will do as I please. It does not matter what she would think of those things that she will never learn I did with the pretty boys here.”
Pepper, tar, hides curing, cloned zebra flesh burgeoning, hot canvas tents, unguent, heaps of medical waste. In this way, Darger and Surplus passed through Crossroads, gathering information as they went, witnessing the ordinary lives and joys of its citizens and the truculence and fear of its occupiers. It was as if there were two distinct cities, one superimposed over the other.
In due course, they came to a Utopian building, like most of its kind overlarge and underornate, situated by the waterfront beyond the city wall. This, White Squall’s sappers had emptied out and mercilessly cleaned. Before Darger and Surplus were allowed to enter, they had to don white lab smocks, gloves, sterile cloth booties that went over their shoes, caps to enclose their hair, and masks covering their noses and mouths. Then a similarly clad guide led them into the interior of the building, where there was a light well capped by enormous panes of glass such as no one had known how to make for centuries. In the center of a luminous circle of light was the bronze shell of the phoenix device, burnished so that it dazzled. Carefully arranged about it were its metal workings, piece by piece, all immaculately clean and, to Surplus’s eyes, perfectly enigmatic. Beyond those was a stack of lead bricks, which, according to legend, provided protection against those parts of the device that killed silently, invisibly, and at a distance. Those, assuredly, rested behind it.
A tall, slim figure in a lab smock rose up from where it had been crouching at the foot of the device. “Gentlemen. It was good of you to come.”
“You sent for us and so we are here,” Darger said, with a catch in his voice. Masked though she was, White Squall was strikingly beautiful. Surplus, knowing how enthralled his friend was to beauty, could well imagine his thoughts. “I hope you are well.”
