The Middle Kingdom Read online

  THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

  1

  Son of Heaven

  2

  Daylight on Iron Mountain

  3

  The Middle Kingdom

  4

  Ice and Fire

  5

  The Art of War

  6

  An Inch of Ashes

  7

  The Broken Wheel

  8

  The White Mountain

  9

  Monsters of the Deep

  10

  The Stone Within

  11

  Upon a Wheel of Fire

  12

  Beneath the Tree of Heaven

  13

  Song of the Bronze Statue

  14

  White Moon, Red Dragon

  15

  China on the Rhine

  16

  Days of Bitter Strength

  17

  The Father of Lies

  18

  Blood and Iron

  19

  King of Infinite Space

  20

  The Marriage of the Living Dark

  The Middle Kingdom was first published in Great Britain in 1989 by New English Library.

  This revised and updated edition published in special edition hardback, trade paperback, and eBook in Great Britain in 2012 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © David Wingrove 1989, 2012

  The moral right of David Wingrove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 730 6

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 184887 731 3

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 708 4

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WX1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE Yin/Yang-Winter 2190

  Yin

  Yang

  PART SIX A Spring Day at the End of the World – Spring 2196

  Chapter 26 Fire and Ice

  Chapter 27 The Silkworm and the Mulberry Leaf

  Chapter 28 A Game of Static Patterns

  Chapter 29 The Moon Dragon

  PART SEVEN Beneath the Yellow Springs – Spring 2198

  Chapter 30 Brothers

  Chapter 31 The Light in the Darkness

  Chapter 32 Machines of Flesh

  Chapter 33 Kim’s Game

  Chapter 34 Wuwei

  In Times to Come…

  Character listing

  Glossary of Mandarin terms

  Author’s note and acknowledgements

  Credits

  For Hilary and Clarissa –

  for nursing this ungainly epic into being,

  and for your endless kindnesses.

  INTRODUCTION

  Where did it all begin? When was the first step taken on that downward path that led to Armageddon? Perhaps it was on that fateful June day in 2043 when President James B. Griffin, last of the sixty presidents of the United States of America, was assassinated while attending a baseball game at Chicago’s rebuilt Comiskey Park.

  The collapse of the sixty-nine states of the American Empire that followed and the subsequent disintegration of the allied Western economies brought a decade of chaos. What had begun as The Pacific Century’ was quickly renamed The Century of Blood’ – a period in which the only stability was to be found within the borders of China. It was from there – from the great landlocked province of Sichuan – that a young Han named Tsao Ch’un emerged.

  Tsao Ch’un had a simple – some say brutal – cast of mind. He wanted to create a utopia, a rigidly stable society that would last ten thousand years. But the price was high. In 2062, Japan, China’s chief rival in the East, was the first victim of Tsao Ch’un’s idiosyncratic approach to realpolitik when, without warning – following Japanese complaints about Chinese incursions in Korea – the Han leader bombed Honshu, concentrating his nuclear devices on the major population centres of Tokyo and Kyoto. When the dust cleared, three great Han armies swept the smaller islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, killing every Japanese they found, while the rest of Japan was blockaded by sea and air. Over the next twenty years they would do the same with the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, turning the ‘islands of the gods’ into a wasteland, while the crumbling Western nation states looked away.

  The eradication of Japan taught Tsao Ch’un many lessons. In future he sought ‘not to destroy but to exclude’ – though his definition of ‘exclusion’ often made it a synonym for destruction. As he built his great City – huge, mile-high spider-like machines moving slowly outward from Pei Ch’ing, secreting vast, tomb-like hexagonal living sections, three hundred levels high and a kilometre to a side – so he peopled it, choosing carefully who was to live within its walls. As the City grew, so his servants went out among the indigenous populations he had conquered, searching among them for those who were free from physical disability, political dissidence or religious bigotry. And where he encountered organized opposition, he enlisted the aid of groups sympathetic to his aims to carry out his policies. In South Africa and North America, in Europe and in the People’s Democracy of Russia, huge movements grew up, supporting Tsao Ch’un and welcoming his ‘stability’ after decades of chaos and suffering, only too pleased to share in his crusade of intolerance – his ‘Policy of Purity’.

  Only the Middle East proved problematic. There, a great Jihad was launched against the Han – Muslims and Jews casting off centuries of enmity to fight against a common threat. Tsao Ch’un answered them as he had answered Japan just five years before. The Middle East and large parts of the Indian subcontinent were reduced to a radioactive wilderness. But it was in Africa that his policies were most nakedly displayed. There, the native peoples were moved on before the encroaching City and, like cattle, they starved or died from exhaustion, driven on by the brutal Han armies. Following historical precedent, City Africa was reseeded with Han settlers.

  In terms of human suffering, Tsao Ch’un’s pacification of the globe was unprecedented. Contemporary estimates put the cost in human lives at well over four billion. But Tsao Ch’un was not content merely to eradicate all opposition, he wanted to destroy all knowledge of the Western-dominated past. Like the First Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, twenty four centuries before, he decided to rewrite the history books. Tsao Ch’un had his officials collect all books, all tapes, all recordings, allowing nothing that was not Han to enter his great City. Most of what they collected was simply burned, but not all. Some was adapted.

  One group of Tsao Ch’un’s advisors – a group of Scholar-Politicians who termed themselves ‘the Thousand Eyes’ – persuaded their master that it would not be enough simply to create a gap. That, they knew, would attract curiosity. What they proposed was more subtle and, in the long term, far more persuasive. With Tsao Ch’un’s blessing they set about reconstructing
the history of the world, placing China at the centre of everything – back in its rightful place, as they saw it. It was a lie, of course, yet a lie to which everyone subscribed… on pain of death.

  But the lie was complex and powerful, and people soon forgot. New generations arose who knew nothing of the real past and to whom the whispers and rumours seemed mere fantasy in the face of the solid reality they saw all about them. The media fed them the illusion daily, until the illusion became, even for those who worked in the Ministry responsible, quite real, and the documents they dealt with some strange aberration – a mass hallucination, almost a disease that had struck the Western peoples of the great Han empire in its latter years. The officials of the Ministry even coined a term for it – ‘racial compensation’ – laughing among themselves whenever they came across some clearly fantastic reference in an old book about quaint religious practices or races of black – think of it, black! – people.

  Tsao Ch’un killed the old world. He buried it deep beneath his glacial City. But eventually his brutality and tyranny proved too much even for those who had helped him carry out his scheme. In 2087 his Council of Seven Ministers rose up against him, using North European mercenaries, and overthrew him, setting up a new government. They divided the world – Chung Kuo – among themselves, each calling himself T’ang, ‘King’. But the new government was far stronger than the old, for the Seven made it so that no single one of them could act on any major issue without the consensus of his fellow T’ang. Adopting the morality of New Confucianism, they set about consolidating a ‘peace often thousand years’. The keystone of this peace was the Edict of Technological Control, which regulated and, in effect, prevented change.

  Change had been the disease of the old, Western-dominated world. Change had brought its rapid and total collapse. But Change was alien to the Han. They would do away with Change for all time. Their borders were secured, the world was theirs – why should they not have peace and stability until the end of time? But the population grew and grew, filling the vast City and, buried deep in the collective psyche of the European races, something began to stir – some long-buried memory of rapid evolutionary growth. Change was needed. Change was wanted. But the Seven were set against it.

  For more than a century they succeeded, and their great world-spanning City thrived. If a man worked hard, he could climb the levels into a world of space and luxury; if he failed in business or committed a crime he would be demoted – down toward the crowded, stinking Lowers. Each man knew his place in the great scheme of things and obeyed the diktats of the Seven. Yet the pressures placed upon the system were great and as the population climbed toward the forty billion mark, something had to give.

  DAVID WINGROVE, May 2012

  PROLOGUE

  YIN/YANG

  WINTER 2190

  ‘Who built the ten-storeyed tower of jade?

  Who foresaw it all in the beginning,

  when the first signs appeared?’

  ‘Tien Wen’ (‘Heavenly Questions’) by Ch’u Yuan, from the Ch’u Tz’u (‘Songs Of The South’), 2nd century BC

  YIN

  In the days before the world began, the first Ko Ming Emperor, Mao Tse Tung, stood on the hillside at Wu Ch’i Chen in Shen-hsi Province and looked back at the way he had come. The Long March, that epic journey of twenty-five thousand li over eighteen mountain ranges and through twelve provinces – each larger than a European state – was over and, seeing the immensity of China stretched out before him, Mao raised his arms and addressed those few of his companions who had survived the year-long trek.

  ‘Since P’an Ku divided heaven from earth, and the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors reigned, has there ever been in history a long march like ours? In ten years, all China will be ours. We have come this far – is there anything we cannot do?’

  China. Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. So it had been for more than three thousand years, since the time of the Chou, long before the First Empire.

  So it had been. But now Chung Kuo was more. Not just a kingdom, but the Earth itself. A world.

  In his winter palace, in geostationary orbit 160,000 li above the planet’s surface, Li Shai Tung, T’ang, Son of Heaven and Ruler of City Europe, stood on the wide viewing circle, looking down past his feet at the blue-white globe of Chung Kuo, thinking.

  In the two hundred and fifty-five years that had passed since Mao had stood on that hill in Shen-hsi province, the world had changed greatly. Then, it was claimed, the only thing to be seen from space that gave evidence of Man’s existence on the planet was the Great Wall of China. Untrue as it was, it said something of the Han ability to plan great projects – and not merely to plan them, but to carry them out. Now, as the twenty-second century entered its final decade, the very look of the world had changed. From space one saw the vast Cities – each almost a continent in itself; great sheets of glacial whiteness masking the old, forgotten shapes of nation states; the world one vast, encircling megalopolis: City Earth.

  Li Shai Tung stroked his long white beard thoughtfully, then turned from the portal, drawing his embroidered silk pau about him. It was warm in the viewing room, yet there was always the illusion of cold, looking down through the darkness of space at the planet far below.

  The City. It had been playing on his mind much more of late. Before, he had been too close to it – even up here. He had taken it for granted. Made assumptions he should never have made. But now it was time to face things: to see them from the long perspective.

  Constructed more than a century before, the City had been meant to last ten thousand years. It was vast and spacious and its materials needed only refurbishing, never replacing. It was a new world built on top of the old; a giant stilt village perched over the dark, still lake of antiquity.

  Thirty decks – 300 levels – high, each of its hexagonal, hive-like stacks two li to a side; there had seemed space enough to hold any number of people. Let Mankind multiply, the Planners had said; there is room enough for all. So it had seemed, back then. Yet in the century that followed, the population of Chung Kuo had grown like never before.

  Thirty-four billion people at last count, Han and European – Hung Mao – combined. And more each year. So many more that in fifty years the City would be full, the storage houses emptied. Put simply, the City was an ever-widening mouth, an ever-larger stomach. It was a thing that ate and shat and grew.

  Li Shai Tung sighed then made his way up the broad, shallow steps and into his private apartment. Dismissing the two attendants, he went across and pulled the doors closed.

  It was no good. He would have to bring the matter up in Council. The Seven would have to discuss population controls, like it or no. Or else? Well, at best he saw things stabilized: the City going on into the future; his sons and grandsons born to rule in peace. And at worst?

  Uncharacteristically, Li Shai Tung put his hands to his face. He had been having dreams. Dreams in which he saw the Cities burning. Dreams in which old friends were dead – brutally murdered in their beds, their children’s bodies torn and bloodied on the nursery floor.

  In his dreams he saw the darkness bubble up into the bright-lit levels. Saw the whole vast edifice slide down into the mire of chaos. Saw it as clearly as he saw his hands, now, before his face.

  Yet it was more than dreams. It was what would happen – unless they acted.

  Li Shai Tung, T’ang, ruler of City Europe, one of the Seven, shuddered. Then, smoothing the front of his pau, he sat down at his desk to compose his speech for Council. And as he wrote he was thinking.

  We didn’t simply change the past, as others tried to do, we built over it, as if to erase it for all time. We tried to do what Mao, in his time, attempted with his Cultural Revolution. What the First Han Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti, tried to do, two thousand four hundred years ago, when he burned the books and built the Great Wall to keep the northern barbarians from the Middle Kingdom. We have not learned from history. We have preferred to ignore its couns
el. But now history is catching up with us. The years ahead will show how wise a course we set. Or blame us for our folly.

  He liked the shape of his thoughts and set them down. Finished, he got up and went back down the steps to the viewing circle. Darkness was slowly encroaching on City Europe, drawing a stark, dividing line – a terminator – across its hollowed geometric shape, north to south.

  No, he thought. We haven’t learned. We have been unwise. And now our own Long March is fast approaching. The bright days of ease – of unopposed rule – lie in our past. Ahead lies only darkness.

  The old man sighed again, then straightened, feeling the imaginary cold in his bones. Chung Kuo. Would it survive the coming times? Would a son of his look down, as he looked now, and see a world at peace? Or was Change come again, like a serpent, blighting all?

  Li Shai Tung turned, then stopped, listening. It came again. An urgent pounding on the outer doors. He made his way through and stood before them.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Chieh Hsia! Forgive me. It is I, Chung Hu-Yan.’

  Coming so hard upon his thoughts, the tone of panic in his Chancellor’s voice alarmed Li Shai Tung. He threw the doors open.

  Chung Hu-Yan stood there, his head bowed low, his mauve sleeping gown pulled tightly about his tall, thin frame. His hair was unbraided and uncombed. It was clear he had come straight from his bed, not stopping to prepare himself.

  ‘What is it, Chung?’

  Chung fell to his knees. ‘It is Lin Yua, Chieh Hsia. It seems she has begun…’

  ‘Begun?’ Instinct made him control his voice, his face and his breathing. But inside, his heart hammered and his stomach dropped away. Lin Yua, his first wife, was only six months into her pregnancy. How could she have begun? He took a sharp breath, willing himself to be calm.