Rainbow Bridge by Gwyneth Jones Page A

He’d decided not to play that game.
    A flat screen in a scrolled frame, about two metres square, hung on the wall to Ax’s right. Never stay where they put you. He walked over there, no one stopped him, and watched a huge kaleidoscope of Barnard cells. They switched from disorder into order in intricate combination; a single pattern took over, and colonised the whole. It broke down, the process started again, subtly different in detail. The piece was called Simplicity As A Result Of Complexity , or that was how he read the characters; there was no translation.
    He was beginning to wish he’d been more Ax Preston with his soldiers, after all, when a tall figure burst through an inner door (also pale, also moulded of a piece); incongruous as something leaping at him in a nightmare. A shock of stiff, contrived ringlets around a celebrity face from the international music scene: an olive fatigue jacket cast over the shoulders of a mandarin gown with rainbow striped sleeves. ‘Ax Preston!’ cried the newcomer, pumping Ax’s hand. Under the gown he wore yellow trousers, and a sarong with a fat Japanese rising sun print. ‘Delighted! Delighted!’
    ‘Pleased to meet you, too,’ said Ax. ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘You look amazed! Did nobody tell you I’d be here? I’m working with the AMID, the Expeditionary Force. It’s absolutely wonderful!’ A suspicious glance. ‘You do recognise me? We haven’t met, which is a crime, but you know who I am?’
    ‘Er, yeah? You’re Norman Soong, the er, rock show director, aren’t you?’
    ‘ Lieutenant Colonel Soong.’ Striped sleeves whirled, Norman Soong thrust his shoulder board at Ax. ‘See my stars? All my people have ranks. It’s a great joke.’
    ‘But you’re still in the music business?’
    The great man frowned in reproof. ‘Rock is more than music and more than business, as you above all should know!’ He released Ax’s hand and glanced around. ‘You don’t have a guitar with you?’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Well, well, never mind. We’ll be meeting later. Enjoy your tour.’
    Lü Xiaobao’s men didn’t get past the gatehouse. An HQ officer showed Ax around, a young woman who gave her rank as lieutenant, and spoke English with a bland US accent. He guessed she was something fast-track, aide de camp . She told him that the wall enclosing the festival site would extend to surround the ancient city of Reading, which was to be the new capital. Outlying built-up areas would be razed, the waterways would be securely managed against flooding. Temporary measures had already been taken to culvert the Thames at Rivermead site itself.
    ‘It was very impractical to live under permanent threat of inundation.’
    Ax was wondering what the hell the presence of Norman Soong meant, and why there’d been no mention of him, ever, on Joyous Liberation news—
    ‘They were thinking of making Rivermead into a Lake town.’
    ‘That’s culturally correct, and we did consider it.’
    Rumour had it that there were no actual women in the invasion force, only trannies, but as far as he could tell this was a real girl beside him: a serious, professional, girl-soldier.
    ‘You people move very fast.’
    She nodded, with a shy smile, as if at a personal compliment.
    How long does it take to “conquer” a country the size of England? A matter of days, if you have overwhelming military superiority and no outside intervention. You trounce the regulars a few times, occupy a few cities, execute the ruling junta, and announce that it’s over. Then you just have to crush the recalcitrants, and convince the silent majority they’re better off accepting their fate. These may be related tasks.
    It was near the end of December, three months since that dawn when the airships had come zooming out of the Atlantic like a swarm of UFOs. Chinese forts were sprouting throughout the Occupied Zones, putting the definitive stamp of Sphere Instant Architecture on the English landscape; while “life returned