Free Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove Page A

recognize.
    Jiang was not one to remark upon the quarters he was given, but this was strange. It had the feel of a child’s room, not the kind of room you’d place an honoured guest in.
    Chun Hua, for one, would not have liked it. But then Chun Hua had not been invited. For this was business. Serious business.
    He looked down, for that brief moment letting his mind stray back to their one snatched night together at Tongjiang. How awkward that had been. Not at all how he’d imagined. But then, why was he surprised? They had been strangers these past four years. To expect things to be as they were…
    Even so, the warmth of her body beside his in the night had unsettled him.Like the room, the furnishings, the bed, it had all been too much. Some part of him had drawn back, rebelling against the physicality of it. So unexpected. So… He would adapt. In time it would be as it had been. Or so he hoped.
    Jiang stood, then took the slip case Amos had given him from his pocket and looked at it again. How strange – how wonderfully strange that tale had been.
    As a teenage boy, Amos had designed games for the computer market – games that had made his reputation. Yet the one which had made his fortune – the very last of them before the Collapse – was a game called
World Domination
.
    The selfsame game Jiang now held in his hands.
    According to Amos, a rival company had been busy mapping the globe, street by street, building by building, replicating it in their virtual world. It was a bold and wonderful idea, but also an expensive one. When they went under, Amos stepped in, raising the capital to buy their replicated world and using it as the foundation – the detailed underpinning – for his own game; a game in which rival players strove to destroy the old earth street by street and build a new one over it. A world of mile-high cities.
    It was, so rumour had it, Tsao Ch’un’s favourite game.
    They had met in 2040, five years before the Collapse. Tsao Ch’un, it seems, had flown halfway round the world to meet him – here, in Dittisham.
    It was then that it had all been conceived. Root and branch.
    Jiang turned the cover over, noting the date of publication. 2039. Amos had sold over one hundred million units worldwide, making him enough money to buy his parents’ old house, Landscot, along with 500 acres of surrounding land. It was back then that the notion of a Domain had begun, long before the City had appeared over the horizon.
    Jiang yawned. The wine had made him tired. That and the meal, which Amos himself had cooked, using vegetables picked from his own garden.
    He set the game aside, then, unzipping his travel case, took out his nightgown.
    It was a year and more now since he had last worn it. Back when he was still a general, rounding up the last few natives – Welshmen, they called themselves – and processing them.
    That was all done now, finished. Until they started on America.
    He had peeled off his silk
pau
and was pulling the gown up over his head,when he heard footsteps on the gravel path below.
    He finished dressing, then, leaning across the bed, looked down through the window at the darkened lawn.
    There, in the light of the half moon, just a yard or two beyond the kitchen garden where the oak tree was, stood Amos with his back to the house. He was standing very still, hunched forward slightly, as if something had caught his attention.
    Jiang looked past him, down to where the land ended on the shore of the bay.
    No one. There was no one there. Only suddenly there was. Two of them, moving slowly, laboriously, climbing the slope, their long gowns hitched up about their ankles.
    Two women, Jiang realized, seeing how the moonlight caught in their long, dark hair.
    Jiang wondered where they had been. Whether Shepherd had, perhaps, sent them away while he was there, bringing them back overnight, then despatching them again once morning came, so that Jiang would not meet them.
    Only why do that?
    But then,