The Middle Kingdom (42 page)

He sat back
again. A miracle. . . . Well, maybe T'ai Cho was right. Maybe the boy
was special. But would his specialty translate into cash? Anyway, he
didn't pin his hopes too greatly on it. Six months? If the Project
folded Kim would be dead in two. He and a hundred others like him.

"Politics!"
he muttered, wondering who was behind this latest directive and what
he could do to get the deadline extended— who he could contact
to get things changed. Then, as the contract slid from the desktop
printer he leaned forward and took his brush from the ink block,
signing the Mandarin form of his name with a flourish at the bottom
of the page.

THE VIEWING TUBE
lay where Kim had thrown it, the lower mirror dislodged from the
shaft, the twine hanging loose. Kim sat there, perfectly still, his
arms wrapped about his knees, his head tucked down between his legs,
waiting.

He heard it
first. Sensed a vague movement in the air. He scuttled back, then
crouched beneath the wall, wide eyed, the hair rising on the back of
his neck. Then, as the facing wall began to peel back from the
center, he cried out.

What had been
the wall was now an open space. Beyond the opening was a room the
same as the one in which he sat. Inside, behind a narrow barrier of
wood, sat a giant. A giant with a face of bone-white glass.

The giant stood,
then began to come around the wall. Kim cried out again and tried to
back away, but there was nowhere to run. He looked about him
desperately, yelping, urine streaming down his legs.

And then the
giant spoke.

"Ow hanow
bos T'ai Cho. My bos an den kewsel yn why."
My name be T'ai
Cho. I be the man talk to you.

The giant fell
silent, then came into the room and stood there, his hands out at his
sides, empty. It was a gesture designed to say,
Look, I am no
threat to you,
but the man was almost twice as tall as the
tallest man Kim had ever seen. He was like the gods Kim had seen in
the Clay that time, yet his limbs and body were as black as the
earth, his eyes like dark jewels in the pure, glassy whiteness of his
face.

It was a cruel
face. A face that seemed curiously at odds with the soft reassurance
of the voice.

Kim drew back
his teeth and snarled.

And then the
giant did something unexpected. It knelt down. It was still taller
than Kim, but it was less threatening now. Keeping its arms out at
its sides, it spoke again.

"My golyas
why, Kim."
I watch you, Kim.
"My gweles pandra why
canna obery."
I see what you can do.
"Why a-vyn bewa
a-ughof?"
Do
you want to live up above?

Slowly the
darkness deep within him ebbed away. He took a breath, then answered.
"My avyn."
I want to
.

The giant
nodded. "Da. Ena why gweres-vy."
Good
.
Then you
help me.
"Bysy yu dheugh obery pandra my kewsel."
You
must
do what I say.

The giant
reached up and removed the flesh from his face. Beneath it he wore a
second face, the mouth of which smiled redly, showing perfect teeth.
His inner mouth. So he was not made of glass at all.

Kim thought
about what the giant had said. It seemed too all inclusive. He shook
his head. "Ny puptra."
Not everything.

The giant
nodded. This time the words came from his inner mouth. The other
flesh hung loose about his chin. "Ny puptra. Mes moyha taclow."
Not
everything. But most things.
"May ef gul styr."
When it makes meaning.

He considered
that. It did not commit him to much. "Da," he said softly.

"Flowr,"
said the giant, smiling again.
Perfect.
"Ena bysy yu
dheugh gortheby onen tra a-dherak pup ken."
Then you must
answer me one thing before all else.
"Pyu dysky why fatel
nyvera?" Who
teach you how to count?

ANDERSEN SAT
behind his desk, studying T'ai Cho's report. It was the end of the
first week of Assessment. Normally there would have been a further
seventeen weeks of patient observation, but T'ai Cho had asked for
matters to be expedited. Andersen had agreed readily. Only that
morning he had spoken to the first secretary of one of the junior
ministers and been told that his request for a referral hearing had
been turned down. Which meant that the directive was final. Yet
things were not all bad. He had been busy this last week.

He looked up and
grunted. "Good," he said simply, then pushed the file
aside. "I'll countersign my recommendation. The board sits
tomorrow. I'll put it before them then."

T'ai Cho smiled
and nodded his gratitude.

"Off the
record," Andersen continued, leaning forward over the desktop,
"how high do you rate his potential? You say here that you think
he's a genius. That can mean many things. I want something I can
sell. Something that will impress a top executive."

"It's all
in there," said T'ai Cho, indicating the file. "He has an
eidetic memory. Neat perfect recall. And the ability to comprehend
and use complex concepts within moments of first encountering them.
Add to that a profound, almost frightening grasp of mathematics and
linguistics."

The Director
nodded. "All excellent, T'ai Cho, but that's not quite what I
mean. They can build machines that can do all that. What can he do
that a machine can't?"

It was an odd
thing to ask. The question had never arisen before. Hut then there
had never been a candidate quite like Kim. He was already fluent in
basic English and had assimilated the basics of algebra and logic as
if they were chunks of meat to be swallowed down and digested.

The Director sat
back and turned slightly in his chair, looking away from T'ai Cho.
"Let me explain the situation. Then you might understand why I'm
asking."

He glanced at
the operative and smiled. "You're good at your job, T'ai Cho,
and I respect your evaluation. But my viewpoint is different from
yours. It has to be. I have to justify the continuation of this whole
operation. I have to report to a board that reports back to the House
itself. And the House is concerned with two things only. One—does
the Recruitment Project make a profit? Two—is it recruiting the
right material for the marketplace?"

He held up a
hand, as if to counter some argument T'ai Cho was about to put
forward. "Now I know that might sound harsh and unidealistic,
but it's how things are."

T'ai Cho nodded
but said nothing.

"Anyway,
things are like this. At present I have firm approaches from five
major companies. Three have signed contracts for auction options when
the time comes. I expect the other two to sign shortly."

T'ai Cho's eyes
widened with surprise. "An auction?"

Andersen raised
one hand. "However. . . if he is what you say he is, then we
could fund the whole of this program for a year, maybe more. That's
if we can get the right deal. If we can get one of the big companies
to sign an exclusive rights contract."

T'ai Cho shook
his head, astonished now. An exclusive rights contract! Then the
director wasn't talking of a normal sponsorship but about something
huge. Something between two and five million yuan! No wonder he
wanted something more than was in the report. But what could he, T'ai
Cho, offer in that vein?

"I don't
know—" he began, then stopped. There
was
something
Kim could do that a machine couldn't. He could invent. He could take
two things and make a third of them.

"Well?"
said Andersen. "Say I'm head of SimFic. How would you convince
me to hand over twenty million
yuan
in exchange for a small
boy, genius or not?"

T'ai Cho
swallowed.
Twenty million
yuan! He frowned, concentrating on
the problem he had been set, "Well, he connects things . . .
things we'd normally consider unconnected." He looked down,
trying to capture in words just what it was that made Kim so special.
"But it's more than that. Much more. He doesn't just learn and
remember and calculate, he
creates.
New ideas. Wholly new
ideas. He looks at things in ways we've never thought of looking at
them before."

"Such as?"

T'ai Cho
shrugged. It was so hard to define, to pinpoint, but he knew this was
what made Kim so different. It wasn't just his ability to memorize or
his quickness, it was something beyond those. And because it was
happening all the time it was hard to extract and say "he does
this." It was his very mode of thought. He was constantly
inventive.

T'ai Cho
laughed. "Do you know anything about astronomy?"

"A little."
Andersen stared at him strangely. "Is this relevant, T'ai Cho?"

T'ai Cho nodded.
"You know what a nova is?"

Andersen
shrugged. "Refresh my memory."

"A nova is
an old star that collapses into itself and in doing so explodes and
throws out vast quantities of energy and light. Well, Kim's a kind of
nova. I'm tempted to say a supernova. It's like there's some dense
darkness at the very center of him,

sucking all
knowledge down into itself then throwing it all back out as light.
Brilliant, blinding light."

Andersen shook
his head. "Old stars. ... Is there nothing more practical?"

T'ai Cho leaned
forward, earnest now. "Why don't you bring him here, your head
of SimFic? Show him the boy. Let him bring his own experts, make his
own assessments—set his own tests. He'll be astonished, I
guarantee you."

"Maybe,"
Andersen muttered, putting his hand up to his mouth. Then he repeated
the word more strongly. "Maybe. You know, that's not so bad an
idea after all."

T'AI CHO put his
request in the next day, expecting it to be turned down out of hand.
Within the hour, however, he had received notification, under the
Director's hand, with full board approval. He was to be transferred
from Assessment to S and I— Socialization and
Indoctrination—for an eighteen-month tour of duty. And he was
to be directly responsible for the new candidate, Kim Ward.

Normally
personal involvement was frowned upon. It was seen as necessary to
make a clean break between each section, but the Director had
convinced the board that this was a special case. And they had
agreed, recognizing the importance of nurturing the boy's abilities,
though perhaps the thought of twenty million
yuan
—a
figure mentioned unofficially and wholly off the record—had
proved an additional incentive to break with tradition just this
once. Thus it was that T'ai Cho took Kim up the five levels to
Socialization and helped him settle into his new rooms.

AWEEK LATER T'ai
Cho found himself at the lectern in a small hexagonal lecture room.
The room was lit only at its center, and then by the dimmest of
lamps. Three boys sat at a distance from each other, forming a
triangle at the heart of which was the spiderish shape of a trivee.
T'ai Cho stood in the shadows behind the smallest of the boys,
operating the image control.

It was a lecture
about Chung Kuo and City Earth. Images of the vast hivelike structure
appeared and then vanished. Exteriors, cutaways, sections. The first
glimpse these children had ever had of the environment built above
the Clay.

As T'ai Cho
talked his way through the sequence of images he wondered whether
they ever dreamed themselves back there, beneath the vast,
overtowering pile of the City. How strange that would be. How would
they feel? Like bugs beneath a house, perhaps. Yes, looking at these
images even he felt awed; How, then, did it strike them? For this was
their first sight of it—their first glimpse of how
insignificant they were: how small the individual, how vast the
species, Man. A City covering the Earth like a glacier, broken only
by ocean and mountain and plantations. A species almost forty billion
strong.

Yes, he could
see the awe in the faces of the two boys seated across from him.
Their mouths were open wide in wonder and their eyes were screwed up,
trying to take it all in. Then he glanced down at the small,
dark-haired head just below his lectern and wondered what Kim was
thinking.

"It's too
big," Kim said suddenly.

T'ai Cho
laughed. "It's exactly as big as it is. How can that be too
big?"

"No."
Kim turned and looked up at him, his dark eyes burning with
intensity. The other boys were watching him carefully. "I didn't
mean that. Just that it's too vast, too heavy a thing to stand on its
pillars without either collapsing or sinking into the earth."

"Go on,"
said T'ai Cho, aware that something important was happening. It was
like the construction of the viewing tube, but this time Kim was
using concepts as his building blocks.

"Well,
there are three hundred levels in most places, right?"

T'ai Cho nodded,
careful not to interrupt.

"Well, on
each of those levels there must be thousands, perhaps millions, of
people. With all their necessities. Food, clothing, transportation,
water, machines. Lots of machines." Kim laughed softly. "It's
ridiculous. It just can't be. It's too heavy. Too big. IVe seen for
myself how
small
the pillars are on which it all rests."

"And yet it
is," said T'ai Cho, surprised by that single word small and what
it implied. Kim had grasped at once what the others had failed even
to see: the true perspectives of the City. His imagination had
embraced the scale of things at once. As if he'd always known. But
this next was the crucial stage. Would Kim make the next leap of
understanding?

T'ai Cho glanced
across at the other boys. They were lost already. They hadn't even
seen there was a problem.

"It
exists?" Kim asked, puzzled. "Just as you've shown us?"