The Art of War (27 page)

The effect was immediate. The tide of opinion turned against the
Ping Tiao
overnight, and a subsequent Security operation against the terrorists resulted in the capture and execution of over eight hundred members of the faction – most of them identified by previously sympathetic friends and neighbours.

For the
Ping Tiao
those few weeks had been disastrous. They had sunk into obscurity. Yet in the past few days they seemed to have put that behind them. Fish emblems – the symbol of the
Ping Tiao
– had been seen everywhere throughout the levels, painted on walls or drawn in blood on the faces of their victims.

But the authorities had hit back hard. MidText, for instance, had played heavily on old fears. The present troubles, they asserted, were mainly the result of a conspiracy between the
Ping Tiao
and a small faction in the Above who financed their atrocities.

Ben froze the tape momentarily, thinking back to what Li Shai Tung had said – on that evening five years earlier – about knowing his enemy. It was on this level, accepting at face value the self-deluding half-truths of the MidText images, that Li Shai Tung had been speaking then. But these men – terrorist and Company men alike – were merely cyphers: the scum on the surface of the well. And the well was deep. Far deeper than the Seven dared imagine.

He let the tape run. At once the babble began again, the screen filling once more with images of riot and despoliation.

Vast crowds surged through the lower levels, destroying guard posts and barriers, wrecking storefronts and carrying off whatever they could lay their hands on. Unfortunate officials were beaten to death before the camera, or bound and doused in petrochemicals before being set on fire. Ben saw how the crowd pressed in tightly about one such victim, roaring their approval as a frail, grey-bearded magistrate was hacked to death. He noted the ugly brutality in every face, and nodded to himself. Then the image changed, switching to another crowd, this one more orderly. Hastily made banners were raised on every side, demanding increased food rations, a resumption of state aid to the jobless and an end to travel restrictions. ‘
Pien hua
!’ they chanted in their hundred thousands, ‘
Pien hua
!’

Change!

There was a burning indignation in many of the faces; in others a fierce, unbridled need that had no outlet. Some waved long knives or clubs in the air and bared their teeth in ferocious animal smiles, a gleam of sheer delight in their eyes at having thrown off all restraints. For many this was their first taste of such freedom and they danced frenziedly in time with the great chant, intoxicated by the madness that raged on every side.

‘PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA!’

Ben watched the images flash up one after another, conscious of the tremendous power, the dark potency that emanated from them. It was primordial. Like some vast movement of the earth itself. And yet it was all so loosely reined, so undirected. Change, they demanded. But to what?

No one knew. No one seemed capable of imagining what Change might bring. In time, perhaps, someone would find an answer to that question – would draw the masses to him and channel that dark tide of discontent. But until then, the Seven had been right to let the storm rage, the flood waters rise unchecked; for they knew the waters would recede, the storm blow itself out. To have attempted to control that vast upsurge of feeling or repress it could only have made things worse.

Ben blanked the screen, then stood, considering what he had seen. Wang Hsien’s death may have been the catalyst, but the real causes of the mass violence were rooted much deeper. Were, in fact, as old as Man himself. For this was how Man really was beneath his fragile shell of culture. And not just those he had seen on the screen, the madness dancing in their eyes, but all of Mankind. For a long time they had tried to fool themselves, pretending they were something else – something more refined and spiritual, something more god-like and less animal than they really were. But now the lid was off the well, the darkness bubbling to the surface once again.

‘Ben?’

He turned. Meg was watching him from the doorway, the morning sunlight behind her throwing her face and figure into shadow, making her look so like his mother that, momentarily, he mistook her. Then, realizing his error, he laughed.

‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice rich and low.

‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘Is it ready?’

She nodded, then came into the room. ‘What were you watching?’

He glanced at the empty screen, then back at her. ‘I was looking at Father’s tapes. About the riots.’

She looked past him. ‘I thought you weren’t interested.’

‘I’m not. At least, not in the events themselves. But the underlying meaning of it all…
that
fascinates me. The faces – they’re like windows to their souls. All their fears and aspirations show nakedly. But it takes something like this to do it. Something big and frightening. And then the mask slips and the animal stares out through the eyes.’

And the
Ping Tiao
, he thought. I’m interested in them, too. Because they’re something new. Something the City has been missing until now. A carp to fill an empty pool.

‘Well… shall we go out?’

She smiled. ‘Okay. You first.’

On the lawn beside the flower-beds, their mother had spread out a picnic on a big red and white checked tablecloth. As Ben came out into the open she looked across at him and smiled. In the sunlight she seemed much younger than she really was, more Meg’s older sister than her mother. He went across and sat beside her, conscious of the drowsy hum of bees, the rich scent of the blooms masking the sharp salt tang of the bay. It was a perfect day, the blue above them broken here and there by big, slow-drifting cumuli.

Ben looked down at the picnic spread before them. It all looked newly created. A wide basket filled with apples lay at the centre of the feast, their perfect, rounded greenness suggesting the crispness of the inner fruit. To the left the eye was drawn to the bright yellow of the butter in its circular, white china dish and, beside it, the richer, almost honeyed yellow of the big wedge of cheddar. There was a big plate of thick-cut ham, the meat a soft pink, the rind a perfect snowy white, and next to that a fresh-baked loaf, three slices cut from it and folded forward, exposing the fluffy whiteness of the bread. Bright red tomatoes beaded with moisture shared a bowl with the softer green of a freshly washed lettuce, while other, smaller bowls held tiny radishes and onions, peeled carrots, grapes and celery, redcurrants and watercress.

‘It’s nice,’ he said, looking to his mother.

Pleased, she handed him a plate. A moment later Meg reappeared, carrying a tray on which were three tall glasses and a jug of freshly made iced lemonade. He laughed.

‘What is it?’ Meg asked, setting the tray down.

‘This,’ he said, indicating the spread laid out before them.

Meg’s smile faded slowly. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like it?’

‘No,’ he said softly, reassuringly. ‘It’s marvellous.’ He smiled, then leaned forward, beginning to transfer things to his plate.

Meg hesitated, then poured from the jug, handing him the cold, beaded glass. ‘Here.’

He set his plate down, then took the glass and sipped. ‘Hmm,’ he said, his eyes smiling back at her. ‘Perfect.’

Beside him his mother was busy, filling a plate for Meg. She spoke without looking at him.

‘Meg tells me you’ve been reading Nietzsche.’

He glanced across at Meg. She was looking down, a faint colour in her cheeks.

‘That’s right.’ He sipped again, then stared at the side of his glass intently.

His mother turned her head, looking at him. ‘I thought you’d read Nietzsche.’

‘I did. When I was eight.’

‘Then I don’t understand. I thought you said you could never read a thing twice.’

He met her eyes. ‘So I thought. But it seems I was wrong.’

She was silent a while, considering, then looked back at him again. ‘Then you
can
forget things, after all?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not a question of forgetting. It’s just that things get embedded.’

‘Embedded?’

He paused, then set his glass down, realizing he would have to explain.

‘I realized it months ago, when Father quoted something from Nietzsche to me. Two lines from
Ecce Homo.
The memory should have come back clearly, but it didn’t. Oh, it was clear enough in one sense – I could remember the words plain enough. I could even see them on the page and recall where I was when I read them. But that was it, you see. That’s what I mean by things getting embedded. When Father triggered that specific memory, it came back to me
in context
, surrounded by all the other ragbag preoccupations of my eight-year-old self.’

Ben reached out and took a tomato from the bowl and polished it on his sleeve, then looked up at his mother again, his face earnest, almost frowning.

‘You see, those lines of Nietzsche were interlaced with all kinds of other things. With snatches of music – Mahler and Schoenberg and Shostakovich – with the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, the poetry of Rilke and Donne and Basho, and god knows what else. A thousand intricate strands. Too many to grasp at a single go. But it wasn’t just a case of association by juxtaposition – I found that my reading, my very understanding of Nietzsche, was coloured by those things. And try as I might, I couldn’t shake those impressions loose and see his words fresh. I had to separate it physically.’

‘What do you mean?’ Beth asked, leaning forward to take a grape from the bunch.

‘I mean that I had to return to the text. To read the words fresh from the page again. Free from all those old associations.’

‘And?’ It was Meg who asked the question. She was leaning forward, watching him, fascinated.

He looked down, then bit into the tomato. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and looked up again. ‘And it worked. I liberated the words from their old context.’

He popped the rest of the tomato into his mouth and for a while was silent, thoughtful. The two women watched him, indulging him, as always placing him at the very centre of things. The tomato finished, he took a long sip of his lemonade. Only then did he begin again.

‘It’s as if my mind is made up of different strata. It’s all there – fossilized, if you like, and available if I want to chip away at it – but my memory, while perfect, is nonetheless selective.’

Ben laughed and looked at his sister again. ‘Do you remember that Borges story, Meg? “Funes The Memorious” about the boy with perfect recall, confined to his bed, entrapped by the perfection – the overwhelming detail – of past moments. Well, it isn’t like that. It could never be like that, amusing as the concept is. You see, the mind accords certain things far greater significance than others. And there’s a good reason for that. The undermind recognizes what the conscious intelligence too often overlooks – that there is a hierarchy of experience. Some things matter more to our deeper self than others. And the mind returns them to us strongly. It thrusts them at us, you might say – in dreams, and at quiet moments when we least suspect their presence.’

‘Why should it do that?’

Ben gave a tiny shrug. He took an apple from the basket and lifted it to his mouth. ‘Maybe it has to do with something programmed into us at the genetic level. A code. A key to why we’re here, like the cyphers in Augustus’s journal.’

As Ben bit deeply into the apple, Meg looked across at her mother and saw how she had looked away at the mention of Augustus and the journal.

‘But why Nietzsche?’ Meg asked, after a moment. She could not understand his fascination with the nineteenth-century German philosopher. To her the man was simply an extremist, a fanatic. He understood nothing of those purely human things that held a society together – nothing of love, desire or sacrifice. To her mind his thinking was fatally flawed. It was the thinking of a hermit, a misanthrope. But Man was a social animal; he did not exist in separation from his fellows, nor
could
he for longer than one human lifetime. And any human culture was the product of countless generations. In secret she had struggled with the man’s difficult, spiky prose, trying to understand what it was Ben saw in him, but it had served only to confirm her own distaste.

Ben chewed the piece of apple, then smiled. ‘There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity about his thinking that I like. And there’s a fearlessness, too. He’s not afraid to offend. There’s nothing he’s afraid to look at and investigate at depth, and that’s rare in our culture. Very rare.’

‘So?’ Meg prompted, noting how her mother was watching Ben again, a fierce curiosity in her eyes.

He looked at the apple, then shrugged and bit again.

Beth broke her long silence. ‘Are you working on something new?’

Ben looked away. Then it was true. He had begun something new. Yes, she should have known. He was always like this when he began something new – fervent, secretive, subject to great swings of mood.

The two women sat there, watching him as he finished the apple, core and all, leaving nothing.

He wiped his fingers on the edge of the cloth, then looked up again, meeting Meg’s eyes. ‘I was thinking we might go along to the cove later on and look for shells.’

She looked away, concealing her surprise. It had been some while since they had been down to the cove, so why had he suggested it just now? Perhaps it was simply to indulge her love of shells, but she thought not. There was always more to it than that with Ben. It would be fun, and Ben would make the occasion into a kind of game, but he would have a reason for the game. He always had a reason.

Ben laughed and reached out to take one of the tiny radishes from the bowl. ‘And then, tomorrow, I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.’

Warfleet Cove was a small bay near the mouth of the river. A road led towards it from the old town, ending abruptly in a jumble of rocks, the shadow of the Wall throwing a sharp but jagged line over the rocks and the hill beyond. To the left the land fell away to the river, bathed in brilliant sunlight. A path led down through the thick overgrowth – blackberry and bramble, wildflowers and tall grasses – and came out at the head of the cove.