The Middle Kingdom (58 page)

She watched Ben
bend down and examine the pipes beneath the sink. They were green
with moss, red with rust. He nibbed his finger against the surface of
one of them, then put the finger gingerly to his lips. She saw him
frown, then sniff the finger, his eyes intense, taking it all in.

He turned. Then,
surprisingly, he laughed. "Look."

There, in the
middle of the white-tiled floor, was a beetle. A rounded,
black-shelled thing the size of a brooch.

"Is it
alive?" she asked, expecting it to move at any moment.

He shrugged,
then went across and picked it up. But it was only a husk, the shell
of a beetle. "It's been dead for years," he said.

Yes, she
thought; maybe since the house was sealed.

There was
another door behind them, next to an old, faded print that was rotten
with damp beneath its mold-spattered glass. Beyond the door was a
narrow corridor that led off to the right. They went through, moving
slowly, cautiously, side by side, using their lamps to light the way
ahead of them.

They explored,
throwing open the shutters in each of the big rooms, but there was
nothing. The rooms were empty, their dusty floorboards bare, only the
dark outlines of long-absent pictures interrupting the blankness of
the walls.

No sign of life.
Only the husk, the empty shell, of what they'd come for.

Augustus. No one
talked of Augustus. Yet it was that very absence which made him so
large in their imaginations. Ever since Ben had first found that
single mention of him in the journals. But what had he been? What had
he done that he could not be talked of?

She shivered and
looked at Ben. He was watching her, as if he knew what she was
thinking.

"Shall we
go up?"

She nodded.

Upstairs it was
different. There the rooms were filled with ancient furniture,
preserved under white sheets, as if the house had been closed up for
the summer only, while its occupant was absent.

In one of the
big rooms at the front of the house, Meg stood beside one of the
huge, open shutters, staring out through the trees at the river.
Light glimmered on the water through gaps in the heavy foliage.
Behind her she could hear Ben, pulling covers off chairs and tables,
searching, restlessly searching for something.

"What
happened here?"

Ben stopped and
looked up from what he was doing. "I'm not sure. But it's the
key to things. I know it is."

She turned and
met his eyes. "How? How do you know?"

He smiled.
"Because it's the one thing they won't talk about. Gaps. Look
for the gaps, Meg. That's where the truth is. That's where they hide
all the important stuff."

"Like
what?"

His face
hardened momentarily, then he looked away.

She looked down,
realizing just how keyed up he was; how close" he had come to
snapping at her.

"There's
nothing here," he said, after a moment. "Let's go up
again."

She nodded, then
followed him up, knowing there would be nothing: The house was empty.
Or as good as. But she was wrong.

Ben laughed,
delighted, then stepped inside the room, shining his lamp about the
walls. It was a library. Or a study maybe. Whichever, the walls were
filled with shelves, and the shelves with books. Old books, of paper
and card and leather. Ben hurried to the shutters and threw them
open, then turned and stared back into the room. There was a door,
two windows, and a full-length mirror on the wall to his left. Apart
from that there were only shelves. Books and more books, filling
every inch of the wallspace.

"Whose were
they?" she asked, coming alongside him; sharing his delight at
their find.

He pulled a book
down at random, then another and another. The bookplates were all the
same. He showed her one.

She read the
words aloud. "This book is the property of Amos William
Shepherd." She laughed, then looked up into Ben's face. "Then
he lived here. But I thought. . ."

Ben shrugged. "I
don't know. Maybe he used this house to work in."

She turned,
looking about her. There were books scattered all about their
cottage, but not a tenth as many as were here. There must have been
five, maybe ten thousand of them here. She laughed, astonished by
their find. There were probably more books here—
reed
books—than there were in the rest of Chung Kuo.

Ben was walking
slowly up and down the room, looking about him curiously. "It's
close," he said softly. "It's very close now. I know it
is."

What's
close?
she wanted to ask him. What? What? What? But the question would
only anger him. He knew no better than she. He only sensed there was
something.

Then, suddenly,
he stopped and turned and almost ran outside into the corridor again.
"There!" he said, exultant, and she watched him pace out
the distance from the end of the corridor to the doorway. Fifteen
paces. He went inside and did the same. Twelve. Only twelve!

She saw at once.
The mirror. The mirror was a door. A way through.

He went to it at
once, looking for a catch, a way of releasing it, but there was
nothing. Frustrated, he pulled books down from the shelf and knocked
at the wall behind them. It was brick, solid brick.

For a moment he
stood before the mirror, staring into it. Then he laughed. "Of
course!"

He turned and
pointed it out to her. "Level with the top of the mirror. That
row of books opposite. Look, Meg. Tell me what you see."

She went across
and looked. They were novels. Famous novels.
Ulysses, Nostromo,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, Howard's End, Bleak House,
Daniel Martin, Orlando,
and several others. She turned back to
him and frowned. "I don't understand, Ben. What am I looking
for?"

"It's a
cryptogram. Look at the order. The first letter of the titles."

She looked,
doing as he said. D.A.E.H.R.E.V.O.N.O.T. T.U.B. Then she understood.
It was mirrored. You had to reverse the letters.

He laughed,
ahead of her, and reached up to find the button.

With a faint
hiss of escaping air the mirror sprang free. Beyond it was a room.
Ben shone his lamp inside. It seemed like a smaller version of "the
library, the walls covered with books. But in its center, taking up
most of the available floor space, was a desk.

He shone his
lamp over the desk's surface, picking out four objects. A letter
knife, an ink block, a framed photograph, and a large folio-sized
journal. The light rested on the last of these for some while, then
moved upward, searching the end wall.

Meg came
alongside him. "What are you looking for?"

"A window.
There must have been a window."

"Why? If he
really wanted to keep this room a secret, having no window onto the
outside would be the best way, surely?"

He looked at
her, then nodded. But she, watching him, was surprised that he hadn't
seen it for himself. It was as if, now that he'd found it, he was
transfixed by his discovery. She shone her lamp into his face.

"Meg. . .
." He pushed her hand away.

She moved past
him, into the room, then turned back, facing him.

"Here."
She handed him the journal, knowing, even before he confirmed it, who
it belonged to. Augustus. There was a space for it on the shelf on
her father's study, among the others there. She recognized the tooled
black leather of its cover.

Ben opened it.
He turned a page, then smiled and looked up at her.

"Am I
right?" she asked.

In answer he
turned the book and showed her the page. She laughed uneasily,
shocked, then looked back up at him. It was a picture of Ben. An
almost perfect portrait of him. And underneath, in Ben's own
handwriting, were a name and a date.

Augustus
Shepherd. Anno Domini 2120.

"But that's
you. Your handwriting."

He shook his
head. "No. But it's a clue. We're getting close, Meg. Very close
now."

BETH SHEPHERD
set the two bags down on the kitchen table, then went to the garden
door and undid the top catch. Pushing the top half back, she leaned
out and called to the children.

"Ben! Meg!
I'm back!"

She went inside
again and busied herself, filling the cupboards from the bags. Only
when she had finished did she go to the door again and, releasing the
bottom catch, go out into the rose garden.

There was no
sign of them. Perhaps they're indoors, she thought. But then they
would have heard her, surely? She called again, moving out through
the gate until she stood at the top of the lower garden that sloped
down to the bay. She put her hand up to her eyes, searching the
sunlit meadows for a sign of them.

"Strange. .
. ." she muttered, then turned and went back inside. She knew
she was back quite early, but they usually came when she called,
knowing she would have brought something special for each of them.

She took the two
gifts from her handbag and set them on the table. An old-fashioned
paper book for Ben—one he had specifically asked for—on
sensory deprivation. And for Meg a tiny Han ivory. A delicately
carved globe.

Beth smiled to
herself, then went down the steps and into the relative darkness of
the dining room.

"Ben? Meg?
Are you there?"

She stopped at
the bottom of the steps and listened. Strange. Very strange. Where
could they be? Ben had said nothing about going into town. In any
case, it was only a little after twelve. They weren't due to finish
their lessons for another twenty minutes.

Curious, she
went upstairs and searched the rooms. Nothing. Not even a note on
Ben's computer.

She went out and
put her hand up to her brow a second time, searching the meadows more
thoroughly this time. Then she remembered Peng Yu-wei. The android
tutor had a special location unit. She could trace where they were by
pinpointing him on Hal's map.

Relieved, she
went back upstairs, into Hal's study, and called the map up onto the
screen. She waited a moment for the signal to appear somewhere on the
grid, then leaned forward to key the search sequence again, thinking
she must have made a mistake. But no. There was no trace.

Beth felt her
stomach flip over. "Gods. . ."

She ran down the
stairs and out again.

"Ben! Meg!
Where are you?"

The meadows were
silent, empty. A light breeze stirred the waters of the bay. She
looked. Of course, the bay. She set off down the slope, forcing
herself not to run, telling herself again and again that it was all
right; that her fears were unfounded. They were sensible children.
And anyway, Peng Yu-wei was with them.

Where the lawn
ended she stopped and looked out across the bay, scanning the water
for any sign of life. Then she turned and eased herself over the lip,
clambered down the old wooden steps set into the clay wall, and ran
across toward the jetty.

It was gone. The
rowboat was gone.

Where? She
couldn't understand it. Where? Then, almost peripherally, she noticed
something. Off to the far left of her, jutting from the water,
revealed by' the ebb of the tide.

She climbed up
again, then ran along the shoreline until she was standing at the
nearest point to it. It lay there, fifteen, maybe twenty
ch'i
from
the shore, part embedded in the mud-bank, part covered .by the
receding water. She knew what it was at once. And knew, for a
certainty, that Ben had done this to it.

The android lay
unnaturally in the water, almost sitting up, one shoulder, part of
its upper arm, and the side of its head projecting above the surface.
It did not float, as a corpse would float, but rested there, solid
and heavy, its torn clothing flapping about it like weeds.

Poor thing, she
might have said another time, but now any sympathy she had for the
machine was swamped by her fears for her children.

She looked up
sharply, her eyes going immediately to the far shore and to the house
on the crest above the cove. They had been forbidden. But that would
not stop Ben. No. The sight of Peng Yu-wei in the water told her
that.

She turned, her
throat constricted now, her heart pounding in her breast, and began
to run back up the slope toward the cottage. And as she ran her voice
hissed from her, heavy with anxiety and pain.

"Gods, let
them be safe! Please gods let them be safe!"

BEN SAT at the
desk, reading from the journal. Meg stood behind him, at his
shoulder, holding the lamp steady above the page, following Ben's
finger as it moved from right to left, up and down the columns of
ciphers.

Ben had
explained it to her. He had shown her how the frontispiece
illustration was the key to it. In the illustration a man sat by a
fireplace, reading a newspaper, his face obscured, the scene
reflected at an angle in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Using the
magnifying glass he had found in the left-hand drawer, Ben had shown
her how the print of the reflected newspaper was subtly different
from the one the man held. Those differences formed the basis of the
cipher. She understood that—even the parts about the governing
rules that made the cipher change—but her mind was too slow,
too inflexible, to hold and use what she had been shown.

It was as if all
this was a special key—a coded lexicon— designed for one
mind only. Ben's. It was as if Augustus knew that Ben would come. As
if he had seen it clearly, as in a glass. It reminded her of the
feeling she had had in the room below this one, as she stood there
among the shrouded furniture; that the house was not abandoned,
merely boarded up temporarily, awaiting its occupant's return.

And now he was
back.

She shuddered,
and the light danced momentarily across the page, making Ben look up.