The Middle Kingdom (41 page)

"What is
that language?" asked the standing man. His name was Andersen
and he was Director of the Project. It was T'ai Cho's job to convince
him that his candidate was worth spending time and money on, for this
was a department of the T'ang's government, and even government
departments had to show a profit.

"Old
Cornish," said T'ai Cho, half turning in his seat, but still
watching the screen. "It's a bastardized, pidgin version, almost
devoid of tenses. Its grammatical structure is copycat English."

He knew much
more but held his tongue, knowing his superior's habitual impatience.
They had been brave men, those few thousand who had formed the
kingdom of Kernow back in the first years of the City. Brave,
intelligent men. But they had not known how awful life would be in
the Clay. They had not conceived what vast transforming pressures
would be brought to bear on them. Intelligence had knelt before
necessity and the weight of all that life stacked up above them, out
of reach. They had reverted. Regressed ten thousand years in as many
days. Back to the days of flint and bone. Back to the age of stone.
Now only the ragged tatters of their chosen language remained, its
sounds as twisted as the bodies of their children's children's
children.

Andersen leaned
forward and tapped the screen with his long fingernails. "I want
something conclusive. Something I can show to our sponsors. Something
we can sell."

T'ai Cho's eyes
left the screen a moment, meeting Andersen's eyes. He had a gut
instinct about this one. Something told him that this one was
different from the rest: was, perhaps, what the Project had been set
up to find. But "something conclusive"— could he get
that? The Director's eyes were inexpressive.

"I'll try,"
T'ai Cho said after a moment. "Tomorrow, first thing."

Andersen nodded
curtly and turned away. "Tomorrow, then."

TOMORROW BEGAN
early. T'ai Cho was up at fifth bell and at his post, watching the
sleeping boy. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he increased the lighting
in the cell. It was the boys fourth day here, but, like all those
brought up from the Clay, he had no real conception of time. Day and
night were as one down there, equally dark.

Slowly he would
be taught otherwise. Would learn the patterns of the world above.

When he had
first arrived they had placed food and drink in his cell. On waking
he had seen it at once, but had merely sniffed then left the two
bowls untouched. On the second day, however, hunger and thirst had
overcome his fear and he had eaten wolfishly.

T'ai Cho had
seen this many times before. He had logged eight years in Recruitment
and seen more than a dozen of his candidates through Assessment into
Socialization. But never, until now, had he felt such conviction
about a candidate. There was something about this one. A charisma, if
that were possible in such a scraggy, scrawny creature. A powerful,
almost tangible sense of potentiality.

They were
pitiful to watch in the first few days. Most were like trapped
animals gnawing at their bonds. Some went mad and tried to kill
themselves. Some went into coma. In either case there was a simple
procedure to be followed. A matter of policy. At the touch of a
button on the control desk the cell would be filled with a deadly,
fast-acting gas. It would be over in seconds.

Kim, however,
had quickly overcome his initial fear. When nothing had happened to
him, he had begun to explore his cell methodically, growing in
confidence as each hour passed and he remained unharmed. Curiosity
had begun to have the upper hand in his nature. The material of the
walls, the watching camera, the waste vent, the manufacture of the
bowls—each had been subjected to an intense scrutiny; to an
investigation that was, T'ai Cho thought, almost scientific in its
thorough' ness. Yet when T'ai Cho spoke to the boy he saw at once
just how fragile that confidence was. The boy froze in midaction, the
hair rising from his flesh, then scurried back to his comer and
crouched there, shaking, his big, round eyes wide with terror.

T'ai Cho had
seen cleverness before, and cunning was second nature to these
children from the Clay, but there was something more than cleverness
or cunning here. It was not simply that the boy was bright, numerate,
and curious—there were clear signs of something more.

Many factors
seemed to militate against the development of real intelligence in
the Clay, malnutrition chief among them. When existence was stripped
down to its bare bones, the first thing lost was the civilizing
aspect of abstract thought. And yet in some it surfaced even so.

In the last
year, however, the Project had been under scrutiny from factions in
the House who wanted to close it down. Their arguments were familiar
ones. The Project was expensive. Twice in the last five years it had
failed to show a profit. Nor did the fact that they had extended
their network beneath the whole of City Europe mollify their critics.
Why did they need the Project in the first place? At most it had
produced five thousand useful men in twenty years, and what was that
in the context of the greater scientific community? Nothing. Or as
good as nothing.

In his darker
moments T'ai Cho had to agree with them. After a day in which he had
had to flood the cell with gas, he would return uplevel to his
apartment and wonder why they bothered. There was so much inbreeding,
so much physical suffering, such a vast break in the chain of
knowledge down there. At times these seemed insurmountable barriers
to the development of intelligence. The Clay was a nightmare made
real. Was
ti yu,
the "earth-prison"—the world
beneath the earth; the place of demons. Down there intelligence had
devolved into a killer's cunning, blunted by a barbarous language
that had no room for broader concepts. If he thought of it in those
terms, what he did seemed little more than a game. A salving of
conscience, maybe, but no more than that.

So they all
felt, at times. But that feeling didn't last. T'ai Cho had killed
maybe a hundred boys like Kim, knowing it was best—pitying them
for the poor trapped creatures they were; knowing they had no future,
above or below. And yet he had seen the light of intelligence flash
in their eyes: eyes that, by rights, should have been simply dull or
feral. And each time it had seemed a miracle of sorts, beyond simple
understanding. Each time it gave lie to those who said the Clay bred
true: that environment and genetics were olf there was. No, there was
more than that.

It was a thing
none of them mentioned; almost a kind of heresy. Yet there was not
one of them who didn't feel it. Not one who didn't know exactly what
it was that informed and inspired their work here.

Man was more
than the plastic of his flesh and the keyboard of his senses. More
than a carrier of genetic codes. To mankind alone was the diffuse and
evasive spark of individuality given. It seemed a paradox, yet it was
so. Each time they "saved" one from the Clay it reaffirmed
their faith in this. Man was more than po; more than the animal soul,
the flesh that rotted in the ground at death. There was a spirit
soul, a /urn.

There, that was
it. The unuttered thought they shared.
A him.

And so they did
their work, trawling the dark depths for those special souls whose
eyes flashed with the spark of life itself. Each one miraculous. Each
one an-affirmation. "We make a profit; provide a service for the
companies," they would argue, when put to it. But the real
reason they hid from others. It was their dark vocational secret.

He began. At his
order a uniformed mech entered the room and set a tray down on the
floor beside the sleeping boy. On the tray were a number of different
objects, covered by a thin black cloth.

The room was
sealed again. T'ai Cho waited. An hour passed.

When Kim woke he
saw the tray at once. He paused, abruptly alert, fully awake, the
hairs on his neck bristling. He lifted his head, sniffing the air,
then circled the tray slowly. With his back against the wall he
stopped and looked up at the camera, a definite question in his dark
eyes.

"Pyn an
jawl us wharfedhys?" What now?

T'ai Cho,
watching, smiled, then leaned forward and tapped out a code on the
intercom in front of him.

There was a
pause, then Andersen's voice came back to him. "What is it, T'ai
Cho?"

"I think
this will interest you, sir. I'm with the boy. I think you should see
this for yourself."

Andersen
hesitated, then agreed. He cut the connection.

T'ai Cho sat
back in his chair, watching.

The boy's gaze
went between the camera and the tray, then settled on the tray.
Slowly, almost timidly, he moved closer. He looked up, his brow
deeply furrowed, his big round eyes filled with suspicion. Then, with
a quick, sudden movement, he flicked the cloth aside.

It was a
standard test a'nd T'ai Cho had witnessed this moment fifty, maybe a
hundred times. He had seen boys sniff and paw and try to taste the
objects, then ignore them or play with them in a totally
uncomprehending manner, but this time it was different. Yes, totally
different from anything he had seen before. He watched in silence,
aware all the while of the Director watching at his side.

"This is
wrong, surely? This is supposed to be a memory game, isn't it?"

The Director
reached out to switch on the intercom, but T'ai Cho put his hand in
the way, turning to look up at him,

"Please.
Not yet. Watch what he does."

The Director
hesitated, then nodded. "But what exactly is he doing?"

T'ai Cho turned
back to the screen and smiled to himself. "He's doing what he
does all the time. He's changing the rules."

At first the boy
did not lift any of the objects but moved them about on the tray as
if to get a better idea of what they were. Then, working with what
seemed like purpose, he began to combine several of the objects. A
small hand mirror, a length of plastic tubing, and a twine of string.
His hands moved quickly, cleverly, and in a moment he had what looked
like a child's toy. He took it to the wall beneath the window and
raised it to his eye, trying to see outward. Failing, he sat down
with the thing he had made and patiently took it apart.

The two men
watched the screen, fascinated, seeing how the boy positioned his
hand before the mirror and tilted it slowly, studying what effect it
had on the image. Then, as if satisfied, he returned to the tray and
took a heavier object in one hand. He hefted it a moment,
thoughtfully, then reached for a second object and placed them at his
side.

Scurrying across
the floor, he retrieved the discarded cloth and laid it out on the
floor of the cell. Then he placed the mirror facedown on top of it.
He laid the carved block halfway across the mirror, taking care with
its positioning, then struck the back of the block firmly with the
torch.

He picked the
two halves of the hand mirror up carefully, checking the sharpness of
their edges with his thumb. T'ai Cho, watching, moved his hand
instinctively toward the touchpad, ready to fill the cell with gas
should the boy do anything rash. But Kim was not out to harm himself.
Using the edge of the mirror he cut the twine into four pieces, then
began to reconstruct his toy, placing a piece of glass at each end of
the tube. He tested the angles of the glass five times before he was
satisfied, then tightened the twine and went to the window again.
This time he should be able to see out.

Andersen leaned
forward. "Do you think he's seen this done before?"

"Where? In
the Clay?" T'ai Cho laughed, then turned to look up at Andersen.
"No. This is all first time for him. An experiment. Just think
of how
we
learn things. How, as children, we watch others and
copy them. How we have to be taught even the most basic of skills.
But Kim's not like that. He has no one to copy. He's never had anyone
to copy. It's all had to come from within his own mind. That's why
it's so astonishing, what he does. Can't you see it? He treats the
world like something new. Something yet to be put together."

The boy took the
makeshift periscope from his eyes and sat down slowly, clearly
disappointed by what he had seen. Then he tilted back his head and
spoke into the darkness overhead.

"Pandra
vyth gwres?"
Where am I?

He waited, but
when no answer came he threw the viewing tube away from him and let
his head fall onto his chest, as if exhausted.

T'ai Cho turned
and looked up at the Director. "Well?"

Andersen stood
there a moment longer, staring down into the screen, then looked back
at T'ai Cho. "All right. I'll get a six-month contract drawn up
this afternoon."

Beneath his
white gauze mask T'ai Cho smiled. "Then I'll start at once?"

The Director
hesitated, then nodded curtly. His eyes, usually so lifeless, seemed
thoughtful, even, perhaps, surprised.

"Yes,"
he said finally. "Begin at once. But let me know immediately if
anything of interest happens."

AN HOUR LATER
Andersen was at his desk. The directive he had been warned was on its
way had now arrived. It lay there on the desk before him. Two months
he had. Two months to turn things around. And the new financial
targets they had given him were four times the size of the old ones.

He laughed
bitterly. It would need a miracle. He hadn't a chance of meeting the
old targets, let alone these new figures. No—someone higher up
had decided to pull the plug on the Project, he was certain of it.
This was political.

Andersen leaned
forward and spoke into his intercom. "Send through a standard
contract. Six-month term. For the new boy, Kim."