The Rose Field, page 52
Pan said, “Cariad…Can I speak to you?”
The dæmon said, “Leave us! Go away! It’s not good, it’s not good at all—you’re making everything worse—please just go away!”
“I want to protect my person. She’s coming to meet me. If she goes into the red building—”
“Don’t let her!”
“What will happen?”
“She will be like Brynmor.”
“So the disease—whatever it is—affects people but not dæmons?”
“Both. Differently, maybe. You think I’m not affected?”
“No,” he said, “no, no—I’m just confused. I’m sorry. I beg your pardon, all of you. I’m just trying to understand. But I’ll leave you now.”
Cariad went to Strauss’s head and began to stroke his damp hair, glaring at Pan all the time.
Dilyara watched him inscrutably. Then she said, “You. Dæmon. What your name?”
“Pan.”
“Pan, you come with me. I show you true thing.”
Brynmor nodded faintly. Cariad was as surprised as Pan, but then Dilyara got to her feet. There was a steady kind of dignity in all her movements, and Pan found himself admiring her as he followed out of the room and along a corridor.
She ran a little way, on the balls of her feet, in total silence, listening when she came to a corner. Pan darted after her and, along with Dilyara’s fox dæmon, slipped through the door she opened into a room with heavy blinds on all the windows. When she shut the door, they were almost in total darkness.
Dilyara struck a match. This was clearly one of the ruined laboratories, but he could see in the little flame that the benches had been cleared, and some kind of apparatus stood under a sheet. She pulled the sheet off and he leapt up to see better.
“No speak,” she said. “I show you true thing.”
She removed a tray of some substance from a thickly insulated cupboard, working quickly and silently. She adjusted the position of various stands and sheets of glass and then switched on a small anbaric torch before beckoning him to come close.
He crouched in front of it and saw the little darts of light she’d discovered.
“What are—” he whispered, but she shook her head fiercely.
“Dr. Bryn say this cloud chamber. But these little spirits. They come out of space. Now look. Be strong now.”
She reached over to the next bench and picked up something about the length of her thumb, wrapped in a torn curtain. Uncovering it, she showed Pan something that made him shrink back and feel sick: the body of a creature a bit like a guinea pig. He knew at once it was a dæmon. A dæmon’s body? How could there be such a thing? It was impossible. But there it was, and she was holding it with care, almost with reverence, he thought; certainly with respect.
He was about to speak, but held his tongue. She placed the dead dæmon next to the cloud chamber, and at once the little sparks, which had been moving in every direction either in straight lines or in smooth curves, suddenly swerved away and careered back across the glass, as if reacting to the dead dæmon with fear or revulsion. New sparks shot into the space and immediately seemed to rebound or even make a conscious choice not to go near that side of the tray.
“What does that mean?” he whispered.
Dilyara moved the dæmon, and little by little, as if cautiously, the sparks resumed their random crisscrossing.
“Whose…” Pan said, indicating the dæmon’s body.
Dilyara shrugged and wrapped it up again. “Merchant person. Dr. Bryn don’ know. Now you go, unnerstan? You leave now.”
Pan said, “Yes, I will. Thank you. I hope Dr. Bryn gets well soon.”
She began to put her apparatus away, and pointed at the corner of the laboratory, saying, “You go that way. No one see you.”
He found a fallen section of wall behind a cabinet, and slipped out into the corridor. Moving quickly and silently, listening first before turning a corner, Pan crept through the building looking for a way out. He saw no soldiers, but once he found a group of the merchant people blocking his way. They were talking in what he thought was Russian, in a way that made him think they were preparing for a meeting; they carried papers and files and briefcases, and they were standing outside a large double door. As he came close to them he moved more cautiously, but it was like his experience the evening before: no one seemed to see him. And their dæmons were passive, in pockets or on shoulders or at their feet, looking at him with sly eyes before looking away in silence.
One of the merchant people opened the door, and they went in and left the corridor empty. Pan moved on and found a broken wall, and climbed over the smashed bricks and twisted girders into the open air of the morning.
He took several breaths of the desert-scented air. High in the glaring blue sky a gryphon was flying steadily towards the east.
* * *
—
In the morning sunlight coming through the open flap of his tent, Marcel Delamare sat at the mahogany campaign chest that had accompanied him all the way from Geneva. It was a handsome piece of furniture that contained, as well as drawers for his clothes, an escritoire whose writing slope was backed by a mirror that acted as a shaving glass, and various small drawers for pens, or ink, or documents, or cuff links, or medicines, or money, or eau de cologne. It was transported in a packing case that needed two strong men to lift.
Olivier Bonneville stood nearby. He would have been sitting, but the only other chair was occupied by Abdel Ionides. Delamare looked cautious, but otherwise inscrutable; Bonneville looked haggard. He kept shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“And what are you offering?” said Delamare.
“Collaboration,” said Ionides. “You asked us for this before, if you remember, with my colleagues in Constantinople. We listened, but heard no more from you. Now circumstances have changed, and so might your view of them. If we pool our knowledge and our resources, we shall have a better chance of dealing with this phenomenon.”
“I don’t need your knowledge, or your help,” said Delamare, “and as for resources—all you seem to have is a rabble of semi-savage fighters and some weaponry that is out of date and poorly maintained. What do you mean by ‘this phenomenon,’ anyway? Which phenomenon are you talking about?”
“Dust. The Rusakov particle and its field.”
“Well, you see, we’re ahead of you there too. We already understand it, and what we are going to do is destroy it.”
“What do you understand about it?” said Ionides.
Delamare was intrigued by this man: he looked like a beggar, but spoke like a scholar, and his confidence was unshakable. It was easy enough to believe that he was speaking for the men from the mountains, and only a pity that the woman Pervani had not come instead of him.
“We understand enough,” said Delamare, “to know more than we once did. We thought the trade might be controlled, but circumstances have developed, and we know now that everything about it must be destroyed, for the safety of humankind.”
“I see,” said Ionides.
“And you, I believe, have similar—shall we say, ‘doctrinal misgivings’ about the matter.”
“You propose to begin, I understand, by blowing up the opening through which the rose trade has been carried on for so many years. And you have a new kind of bomb with which to do it. Correct so far?”
Delamare made no response, audible or visible.
“Correct, then,” said Ionides. “One might wonder, if that is your sole aim, why you have gathered an entire army and invaded a continent. One might think you had something in mind other than merely closing a hole.”
Delamare was conscious that Olivier Bonneville was still standing nearby, listening to them. The boy’s cheeks were red; he was either tired or embarrassed by something, though Delamare could not think what.
“Olivier,” said the President, “go and wait for General Pollock to finish the report he is writing. Then go to your tent and make a précis of it on one side of a piece of paper and bring that, and the full report, to me.”
Bonneville swallowed hard and left without a word. Delamare turned back to Ionides. “How do you know that young man?” he said.
“We met near Aleppo. There was a slight misunderstanding, which we solved to our mutual satisfaction. I haven’t seen him since. Again, Monsieur le Président, may I ask the question: Why have you gathered an army large enough to invade another world?”
“For the glory of the Authority. Why do you talk about ‘another world’?”
“Shall we talk plainly? You know as well as we do that these openings reveal other worlds. You want to close them permanently, because you have—in your phrase—doctrinal misgivings about such things. So far, I can understand you. What I don’t understand is taking an army to do what one platoon of soldiers could do in five minutes with a single bomb. The only possible reason for your expedition is to invade the other world through that particular opening. I mean, the world, for the sake of completeness and clarity, where the roses come from.”
“How does that concern you?” Delamare asked.
“I have a colleague, Dr. Leila Pervani, with whom I conducted research into the roses and the oil extracted from them. We are interested in the roses for reasons of experimental theology, or science, as they are now calling it. We have taken the chance of talking to you frankly, and you will respect that, because our friends the men from the mountains have a different view. They want, for reasons that seem good to them, to close the opening to that world permanently, as you say you do. They are not interested in exploration and discovery, in speculation, in science at all. We are.”
Delamare sat back. Of all the things he might have expected this man to say, this was the last. He watched Ionides with narrowed eyes, but said nothing.
Ionides went on. “I have come to you, Monsieur le Président, with a simple request. My colleague and I want to enter that other world without being prevented by you. That’s all. Once we have gone through the opening, we shall stay out of your way and pursue our own interests entirely.”
“But why should I let you do that?”
“Simple,” replied Ionides. “I can show you the only safe path through the wandering lake of Lop Nor.”
“The wandering lake…Do people still believe in that?”
“They do. With good reason. When the Tarim River changes course, the lake changes with it, since the Tarim is its only source. Varying rainfall from season to season, earth movements, irrigation and other human activity—all these things shake the course of the river like a whip. The old lake drains into a new one as new channels are cut by the changing currents. The result is a region of salt flats and marshes, unexpected deep water, invisible and fathomless bogs. Any traveler who tries to cross the lake region had better have a reliable guide. It seems to me, Monsieur Delamare, that by coming this way round the Tien Shan mountains, you have committed your army to a death march. You need a guide.”
Before he was sent away, Olivier Bonneville had noticed a strange expression on Delamare’s face. He did something with his eyes; Bonneville had seen it more than once in recent days, and it had appeared as soon as this visitor began talking. Without frowning or raising his eyelids, he seemed to make his eyes larger. The pupils seemed darker, the whites almost glowed. He looked scarcely human, more like a mask or a picture drawn by a clinical specialist to illustrate an extremity of obsessional madness. Bonneville marveled at how Delamare could look like that and yet remain in control of his smooth and courteous voice. Did he know, and do it on purpose to frighten and dominate? Or did he have no idea what his face was giving away? At any rate, he was looking at his visitor with just that expression.
Ionides was interested to see it, but he remained calm, cool, at ease. A few seconds passed. Delamare looked away; he turned to his desk and shifted through some papers. He picked one up and studied it, before turning back.
Finally he said, “You have painted a dramatic picture, Professor Xenakis. Oh, yes, I know who you are. Why should I believe that a failed mathematician and would-be expert on the cultivation of roses could guide anyone across dangerous territory? Even with the dangers clearly exaggerated to impress the credulous?”
“We have to take some things on trust in this world,” said Ionides, “and perhaps in every other. Dr. Pervani and I have been through the Lop Nor region several times. I have charts of each journey, and extensive notes on the geomorphology of the changing watercourses. Your alternative to a march guided by us is a journey into constant peril on unstable pathways, laced through by a hundred streams that can change in a moment from a trickle in a dry riverbed to a raging torrent that bursts its banks and carries rocks and trees away with it—all depending on rainfall days before in the mountains a thousand miles behind us. Haven’t you heard about the great army of the Cimmerian warrior Skandar, who tried to invade the Golden Empire through Lop Nor? Ten thousand men perished without a blow being exchanged. Or the fifteenth Golden Emperor himself, who led a vast body of soldiers through the region as he tried to annex the whole of Dzungaria, with the same result? No doubt you were told before you entered the Tien Shan mountains of the dangers from the abominable oghâb-gorgs, and no doubt you listened, because you had prepared a defense against them. A wise general does listen to advice. Will you not listen now, as we warn you about Lop Nor?”
Delamare’s mind was uncomfortably disturbed. His leadership of the High Council had been marked by success after success; his feat of gathering an army and moving it to this wild region, without any significant losses, had made his generals proud and his soldiers confident and eager to conquer; in his own mind, the President was conscious of a calm mastery of events and a deep clarity of purpose. So why was he disturbed? Worse than disturbed: something large, something meteorological in scale, was playing havoc in his head.
Lop Nor was the reason.
He had chosen this route because he was sure it would take them safely to Karamakan and the red building. The account Ionides had given him of the wild variability of the Lop Nor region had woken a number of fears that he had tucked away out of sight, mesmerized by his own successes. Yes, he knew the stories about armies destroyed by the swamps and quicksands, but they were examples of poor generalship. He prided himself on his ability to tell the difference between information and imagination: these stories had the taint of invention about them; he could smell it. There was only one flaw in the visitor’s account, one thing missing from his proposition.
“Why?” he said. “Why would you help us through Lop Nor? What would you gain by it?”
“Access to the red building,” said Ionides simply. “If we go with you, we shall get there. On our own, we shall not, because you will destroy us.”
“You say ‘we’ and ‘our.’ Is your companion nearby?”
Ionides merely smiled.
“So you’ve formally parted company with the men from the mountains.”
Ionides said, “But we have told you this: they are committed to destruction, and we are committed to discovery. If, as it seems, you want to conquer rather than merely destroy, there is a small hope that my colleague and I might have a short time to enter the other world and investigate the things we want to know about, without getting in your way. And I hope that you might find our discoveries valuable, or at least interesting.”
“So you accompany me and my army through Lop Nor, in return for our allowing you into the red building to carry on your research without impeding our project?”
“That’s correct,” said Ionides.
“And what about coming back?”
“Oh, that we can manage for ourselves.”
A little patch of clarity and stillness appeared in the sandstorm of Delamare’s thoughts. He could always kill this man and the woman whenever he needed to, after all. And no one would offer to guide an army into a region where they would face their own deaths.
“I think you could do with some refreshment,” he said. “We can discuss this further over a glass of Tokay. Will you join me?”
“Very kind,” said Ionides, and Delamare poured a glass of the golden liquid from a decanter in the campaign chest.
They toasted each other’s health.
“That young man,” said Ionides, “your secretary or whatever he is.”
“Olivier Bonneville. You said you’d met him?”
“It was a misunderstanding on both sides. No harm done. How did he come to be in your employment?”
“He was the son of a cousin of mine. She died a widow when he was young, and naturally I took him into my household. I am fond of him. I may say I love him like a son of my own.”
“It does you both credit,” said Ionides. “He is clever and enterprising. You know he was sheltering in the house of the nuncio at Aleppo?”
Delamare merely looked at him, his eyes a little narrower.
“And you know that Leila Pervani was staying there at the same time?”
Delamare smiled, but with curiosity.
“If you search his property,” Ionides went on, “you will find a passport belonging to Dr. Pervani in his possession. He stole it from her. She told me she was impressed.” He set his wineglass down and stood up. “Now I must go, my dear Monsieur le Président. I look forward to our joint enterprise.”
He bowed ironically, though it was hard for Delamare to tell, and left. In truth, the President was feeling as though he’d been wound in a cobweb while he wasn’t looking, and it wasn’t a feeling he was used to.
Thirty-Two
The Pieces Gather on the Board
Among the servants, clerks, secretaries, and emissaries who helped Mustafa Bey control his multifarious enterprises was a young woman called Tamar Sharadze. She was a graduate of the University of Tblisi, a statistician and expert on complex systems, and Mustafa Bey had admired and profited by her clarity of thought and singleness of purpose. Her dæmon was a small butterfly of intense blue, who spoke little. In the turmoil that followed the assassination, she was the best-placed person to make sense of the confusion, and showed a determination and authority no one had seen in her before. She made decisions and gave orders as if the great man himself were speaking through her. She saw without having to think about it where the most urgent matters were occurring, and how to deal with them; and before a week had passed, she might as well have been Mustafa Bey himself, reincarnated and purposeful.
