Free Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove Page B

Amos was strange. At least, that was what he’d heard. Only how much of that was true? What if he was just a very private man? What if he didn’t want other people to know his business?
    Then why invite me here? Why not just meet me somewhere neutral? Somewhere free of all these impressions?
    Jiang saw Amos greet them, hugging first one and then the other. Then, the two of them on his arms, he turned and came back up the path, dis appear ing inside the cottage.
    Jiang went over to the door and stood there, listening. There was the low murmur of voices from below. A door closed, then there were sudden, urgent footsteps on the wooden steps.
    Another door closed. For a moment there was silence, and then there was the sound of water passing through the pipes.
    Someone was washing.
    Jiang Lei looked to the timer inset into his wrist and yawned. It was just after one. He would sleep now, then ask Amos in the morning.
    *
    Waking with the dawn, Amos let Jiang sleep, instead going down to his basement workshop where he immersed himself in that morning’s news.
    It was not the same news that was deemed fit for the general population. This was the real news, raw, uncensored. The same news that the Ministry’s First Dragon saw each day. The same that Tsao Ch’un himself digested every morning with his breakfast meal.
    If the content of the general news channels was meant to reassure and encourage (and, of course, to praise the Great Father himself, from whom all bounty came), this assemblage of mayhem and destruction, betrayal, murder and sheer lunacy acted as a timely reminder that things were far from settled – and very far from perfect – in Tsao Ch’un’s City.
    Men, after all, were still men. Nothing, it seemed, could change that.
    Yet the problems could be contained. The madness could be channelled. All that was needed was an iron will and a determination not to let things get out of hand.
    Among that morning’s items were two which particularly caught his attention. The first involved what they called a
k’uang wang
– one of the ‘frenzied’. These were men – for they were usually men – who snapped. In their frenzied madness, they ran amok among their fellow citizens, stabbing, slicing and causing as much pain as they could – as if to unload their own. This particular
k’uang wang
, however, had been extraordinarily inventive. A cook by trade, he had turned up at work that morning and proceeded to poison half the people in his deck, finishing matters off by chopping up the two Security guards who had been sent to detain him.
    The second item was more sedate, less unusual, yet it still interested him; it spoke of a new phenomenon, one that was only recently emerging.
    It seemed a boy had met a girl and, after a while, the two had fallen in love. In spite of the watching cameras and the even more watchful relatives of the girl, the two had managed to consummate their love. After a month or two, she began to show the obvious signs of pregnancy. All might have been well. The boy might have married the girl – he was certainly willing to – and they might all have lived happily ever after.
    Only the girl was Han, the boy
Hung Mao
.
    Just as soon as her condition became obvious, the girl’s uncles, furious that their family’s racial purity had been sullied, discovered who the boy was and burned the two alive in an oven.
    The horrific brutality of the crime aside, it was that urge to purify the races – to mix but not to
mix
– that Amos found interesting. How did one break that chain of prejudice? Was it merely a question of time? Or had the seeds been sown when they had rid the world of the black and Asian races? Was it all doomed to fail? Would it all end in one gigantic bloodbath?
    No one knew. But they were committed now. This melding of the races – this cheek-by-jowl approach to populating the levels – was what they had decided, and they must see it through now to the bitter end.
    But there were