Rainbow Bridge by Gwyneth Jones Page B

to normal” for the masses. The rest of the country was “quiet”. So much for Joyous Liberation news. Ax knew things were uglier on the ground, he didn’t know how bad. Unofficial sources said Richard and Cornelius had made their base in East Anglia, and actives were crossing the ceasefire line at will, inflicting casualties and damage, inspiring Occupied-Zone terrorists. But no single event had caused him to accept the latest approach from Wang Xili, he’d just felt it was time. He’d tried to raise his value by reluctance, he hoped he hadn’t held out too long.
    He’d frightened himself imagining the unburied dead, the charred marquees, but of course it was all gone. No trace of the massacre of thirty thousand righteous campers, who had lived here like Bangladeshi peasants. Purple domes, instant buildings all on the same pattern, stood in rows. They looked like upturned boats. Teams of soldiers, with shovels and with heavy machinery, were at work in the open spaces. Lieutenant Chu talked about gardens, how the English and the Chinese both love gardens, and recounted harmless facts about the invasion. The airships were classified as amphibious, for historical reasons. The invasion force was made up of amphibious mechanised infantry divisions , hence the English expression: ‘AMID’.
    ‘In English we are the 2 nd AMID army.’
    ‘The first AMID being the army that didn’t need to invade Taiwan?’
    She smiled and nodded, pleased with him. Ax continued to air a limited fluency in putonghua (which delighted her), covertly read the notices that identified various sections, and tried to stop himself groping for vanished landmarks.
    Now we must be in the Arena… Here the Zen Self tent stood, where Olwen Devi’s lab rats trained their brains for techno-mediated nirbhana. Maybe right here I parted from that extraordinary little babe Fiorinda, one morning in July, and went off to the Roving Presence tent, to visit the Pan-Asian Utopians. We talked about the fall of the old powers, the mandate that was passing into our hands—
    The hope of a new dawn.
    Yesterday’s snow lay on the bare earth, wherever it wasn’t being dug; nothing rested on the purple hulls. The wall was ever present, obliterating his old horizons.
    ‘Who were you thinking to keep out? The Mongol hordes?’
    ‘No,’ she said, with that unexpected frankness, their secret weapon. ‘These kind of walls aren’t for defence. We use them to impress, to awe the people.’
    ‘Right.’
    He knew he was being observed. This is where the Counterculture died, Mr Preston. We penned them here, we moved in and cut them down without mercy. We have planted our HQ on their heartland; which was also yours. Do you accept our judgement? He thought of Silbury Hill demolished, Avebury and Stonehenge levelled, the White Horse scraped from the side of the vale at Uffington. Waves of useless fury drained through him, and he let them pass. Accept. Five thousand years isn’t a bad innings, everything tainted must go, what must be, must be.
    At last the aide de camp brought him to the Palace of Rivermead, where the Countercultural government of England had made its last stand, after the fall of London. The gaudy, crumpled, lo-rise Palace had been built for Ax, out of mulched cars and other mad scraps, but it had no sentimental associations. Too many bad things had happened here, long before the Chinese arrived. He’d heard the place had been burned down but it seemed intact, except for one wing hidden by hoardings.
    ‘A fine, unusual post-modern building,’ said Lieutenant Chu, approvingly.
    As they mounted the steps he glanced back, bad move. From this vantage the campground rose through the alien overlay, full of its dead. Horror shook him—
    ‘One more thing you should see before you meet General Wang, Mr Preston. This is the Memorial Hall of the September Offensive. Please step inside.’
    He stepped inside. There was an antechamber, with a display of the first