Dragon Dance (14 page)

He realized he was trying to provoke Bei Pen, and realized too the unfairness of it. The system of peace and order which had stemmed from the Laws of Bei-Kun had been better than most. It was tolerably certain any succeeding situation was going to be a lot worse than the old. But he could not help himself.

“They drifted down out of the sky like scraps of paper,” he said. “But that's all they were, weren't they? Just scraps of paper.”

The other priests had left. Bei Pen said: “Illusion
prevails until doubt enters. Then illusion is no more than a thicket of gossamer, and doubt is a charging bull.”

“Which amounts to saying it's all fake really, all a pretence. You could do fantastic things like growing peaches on top of a mountain, controlling weather, but they only worked as long as you could keep the mental ranks solid behind you. The moment your grip on that weakened, everything started to collapse.”

Brad suddenly looked up. “When you had the showdown with Li Mei, did you have any idea what might come of it?”

“Not might come, but must. I knew it much earlier than that. From the moment two boys came through the fireball from another world into this one.”

“And yet you had us brought here from Li Nan!”

“That which must happen, will happen. But to see the future is not to know the ways of reaching it, which are infinite. And I was curious.”

Simon demanded: “Can you see our futures?”

“I have not looked.”

“Then will you?”

Bei Pen shook his head. “No.”

Simon's mind was full of confused resentments and anger. He felt the voice come into his head, the other mind touch his. “Be at peace.” Resentment flared into fury, and he flashed back defiance: “Get out!”

The voice went but, strangely, in going took his anger with it. He did not know, and never would, whether or not Bei Pen could have forced his will if he had chosen to; but he knew with certainty that it was something which would never happen. His freedom of will was as precious to Bei Pen as to himself. This was someone he could trust, now and always. The revelation which followed was a proof of that, trusting him as he trusted. He looked and saw not the Bei Pen he thought he knew, but the real man—old, so old, withered and bent not by decades but by centuries.

He saw something else and cried out: “You're not Chinese!”

“No,” Bei Pen said. “I was not born in this land, Si Mun. I was born in yours.”

•  •  •

He had been born in England, in the year 1967 from the founding of Rome. He had grown up in a Christian community and had become a Christian
priest. Then, as a young man, he was befriended by the Roman governor of the Britannic Isles, a man who later succeeded to the purple and took him with him to Rome.

It had been a pleasant existence, but gradually he came to find the pleasantness cloying and unsatisfactory. There were questions, about life, about the universe, which he did not find easy to pursue in the complacent flippant atmosphere of the imperial capital. It was then he met a traveller from the east, who told him of the wonders of the Middle Kingdom.

So he left Rome and made the long and difficult journey to the land of the Chinese. There he studied both their new inventions and the wisdom of the sages: Confucius, the Buddha, Lao-tzu. Out of this study, after many years, he formed the Laws.

Brad, who had been listening closely, said: “Did you say 1967 from the founding of the city? In our world, we dated from the birth of Christ, which happened in the Roman year 753. So in our world you would have been born in
A.D.
1214. In Somerset, England? Near Ilchester?”

“I do not know how you know it, but yes. Close by the town of Ilchester.”

“So it does fit!”

“Everything fits,” Bei Pen said, “providing one knows the pattern.”

“Fits?” Simon asked. “What fits?”

“The Laws of Bei-Kun and the fireball. They're part of the same thing.”

“Are you saying the fireball was responsible for Bei-Kun being born in Somerset? That's crazy.”

Brad's face had the happy look which came when he had worked out a particularly tough problem.

“He was a genius—you could say, a super genius. They called him Doctor Mirabilis, the Wonderful Teacher. He studied everything: alchemy, mechanics, the black arts. He was said to have made a bronze head, which spoke three times. It said “Time is,” then “Time was,” finally “Time's past,” and burst into smithereens. That sounds a bit farfetched, but he did leave records suggesting some interesting experiments—filling a balloon made of thin sheet copper with what he called liquid fire so that it would float, for instance; and making a flying machine with flapping wings.

“But he didn't get on too well with the church authorities. They probably didn't like the black arts
business. He was kept in close confinement for ten years. Then another pope pardoned him, but he'd learned his lesson. He kept a low profile after that.”

Brad looked at Bei Pen. “At least, that's what happened in our world. But things were different in this one. Here the church didn't have any power to discipline him. And he found nothing in Rome to sharpen his wits on. So he travelled to China which, in the thirteenth century, was full of ideas and new developments. The combination of that with a Western super-genius produced the Laws. They were called after him. The Laws of Bei-Kun. Bacon—Roger Bacon!”

“That was my name,” Bei Pen said. “It is a long time since I heard it spoken. And it is true that I have learned many things, over many lifetimes. Come, there are things to show you.”

•  •  •

The portico leading to the pagoda made sense now—an echo of the Roman world that Bei-Kun, Bacon, had abandoned. Inside it was bare and monochrome: ceiling, walls, and floor in shades of blue which deepened in hue from top to bottom. Stairs led both up and down; as they went down, the blue
deepened still further. Oil lamps flickered behind blue glass.

The basement was larger in area than the ground floor, with curved outer walls. It was as though the upper part of the building was a flower, and they were inside the bulb. A velvet curtain was so darkly blue that at first it seemed black. Bei Pen parted it and beckoned them to follow him through.

Simon started to move, then stopped, halted by a feeling of dread and awe that was like a heavy weight. The wordless voice spoke—“There is nothing to fear.” Brad, too, had halted. Simon took his arm and led him through the curtain.

They were in a bare blue room, lit by four blue lamps. They squatted on rugs on the polished wooden floor, equidistant from one another on the periphery of a circle, looking inwards. Silence pressed down, and Simon was aware of his own ragged breath. Although nothing had been said, he knew he must not move, not even turn an eye. Out of the stillness and emptiness in front of him, he was aware of something being born.

It came as a kaleidoscope of images, filling the centre of the room but shifting so fast that they
were no more than fleeting glimpses in a chaotic blur. Gradually the images became clearer, longer lasting. He was able to distinguish familiar things: landscapes, cities, animals and birds, people. . . . Some scenes came and went, beneath changing skies. He saw a boat very like the
Stella Africanus,
a bearded face that could be Bos. . . .

Now he was looking into a room. He knew it well—the clock on the wall, the curtains stirring in a breeze, the bronze fox crouching beside the open fire. He had stroked its head when he was scarcely able to walk. There had been a fireguard then, with firelight glowing through it.

And he knew the figure in the Windsor chair, listening to a play on the radio as he had often watched her do. She looked older, more tired, and her hair was whiter. He saw where her gaze rested: on a picture on the mantelshelf in a Victorian silver frame, a photograph of himself.

The scene faded. He wanted to call it back, but the emptiness swallowed it from within. Another scene took shape.

There was no fire in this room. It was barer and larger, and the painting on the wall was a violent
abstract which would have made his grandmother shake her head in disapproval. Sunlight flooded in from a verandah, and there was a faraway snore of surf. A deeply tanned man in Bermuda shorts knelt on a Mexican rug. He looked a bit like Brad did when something was absorbing him. He was playing with a child just starting to walk, a boy.

That scene went in turn, and Bei Pen stood up. They followed him through the curtain, up the stairs and out of the pagoda. The wind seemed colder and carried darts of rain.

Standing beneath the portico, Simon said: “More illusions?”

Bei Pen shook his head. “Those places are as real as this.”

“But they're on the other side of the fireball! So even if they aren't illusions, they might as well be. Why show them to us?”

“When you found the fireball, you stumbled by accident on a manifestation of something which was unravelled here over long years of study. The universe is infinite, and there is an infinity of universes, existing side by side, like threads in a limitless carpet. Rarely, very rarely, two threads may touch, and
fray. The fireball was such a fraying. An accident—if anything in the universe is accidental—and one which would not repeat itself in aeons. If ever. But that does not mean the way back is barred to you. By the power of first mind, which is modelled on the Mind that created and keeps in being everything that is, threads can be brought together. You can be returned to your own world, if that is what you wish.”

Bei Pen left them and went back in to the pagoda. Simon felt dazed. It took time for the realization of what they had been told to penetrate fully, but when it did he had no doubts. Bei Pen would not lie to him or deceive him. They could return to the world on the other side of the fireball. He said to Brad: “He can do it, if he says he can. I'm sure of it. He's giving us time to make our minds up, but there's no need for that, is there? Let's go right in and tell him yes.”

Brad was staring at the sky above the foothills. When Simon started to speak again, Brad shushed him. He was listening to something, and in a moment Simon picked it out himself: the distant growl of an engine.

Simon said incredulously: “A plane?”

Soon they could see a dot in the sky. Other dots emerged from cloud to join it, and the growling grew louder. Simon counted four, flying in rough line formation. He said: “There are no dragons here, and nowhere they could land. So what's it in aid of?”

They came on slowly. This world had a long way to go before it reached the stage of Harriers and Phantoms. Slowly, but steadily . . .

The first bomb dropped a long way short, as did the second; but the third and fourth landed near the edge of the plateau. The boys hit the ground and remained there while the brief but violent bombardment lasted. The blast from one impact struck Simon's back like a giant's flail. Then the roar of engines dwindled, and they got to their feet and looked around.

The most obvious result of the raid was a crashed plane, forty or fifty yards away. It was still burning fiercely: the scorched figure of the pilot sat upright in a tangle of wires from which the bamboo struts had burnt away. He must have misjudged his altitude.

Looking away, Simon saw a bomb crater in a
field, a flattened greenhouse, a wrecked dormitory hut. He said to Brad: “Was it worth it? One plane down, at least—very possibly more. I wouldn't fancy flying over those mountains on a single engine. In return for trivial damage like this.”

“The amount of damage isn't important, is it? Getting here was enough—letting loose another raging bull in the gossamer thicket of illusion. Most of the rest of the priests will leave now, maybe all except Bei Pen. And the weather will get worse. We could be knee-deep in snow by tomorrow morning.”

“You think it's getting near the end?”

“It's a funny thing, isn't it?” Brad said. “That there should be such incredible mental power, and that it should be so vulnerable. Yet I suppose it's all in conformity with the law of suggestion. Maybe the pagoda could hold out for a while—that's where the power must be strongest—but eventually that will go, too.”

“The important thing is that
we
can go. And I suggest we don't waste much time about it.”

There was a pause, before Brad said: “I'm not going back.”

Simon stared at him. “Are you mad? We're stuck
on top of a mountain which you reckon will be hit by blizzards within hours, in the middle of a hostile continent, with complexions that stick out like cream on custard, and with you in particular wanted dead or alive—preferably alive so that Li Mei can take her time over the death bit. . . . You do realize that, don't you? You're not still hooked on her?”

Brad said: “I didn't mean I want to stay here. He told us: there's an infinity of worlds. If he can put us back in the one we came from, he can put me in some other.”

“Which could be a lot worse than the one we're in right now. Have sense.”

“I'll take a chance on it.”

Simon said bitterly: “Just because your dad's remarried and has another son!”

“Unworthy of you, chum.” Brad's tone was surprisingly mild, though. “It doesn't matter. You go back to Gran. I'm moving on.”

•  •  •

Simon followed Brad, fuming. There was, he knew, no point in pursuing the argument; he had come to know the strength of Brad's obstinacy during their three years of adventuring. He thought of the night
of the Indian feast, just before the Chinese slavers arrived, when he had accused himself of weakness of character for following Brad's whims. This was one whim he certainly wasn't going to follow. He had vowed then, not for a moment believing it to be possible, that if they ever got back to their own world, he would cheerfully wave him good-bye. Well, he was ready to wave good-bye right now. He was going to go back, whatever crazy notion Brad might have.