The Dragon's Eye

by Joel Champetier

Genres: Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

A couple of hundred years in the future, there is a struggling Chinese colony on the planet of a double star not too far from Earth. One of their suns is the blinding and carcinogenic Dragon's Eye, which requires them to cover up and wear hats when it is in the sky. The colony has a huge, burdensome debt to Earth, and there is a question of rebellion and rumor of a possible declaration of independence. So a courier is sent in, disguised as a native, to bring back a highly placed spy--or at least his brain, so information can be recovered and Earth's interests preserved.

New China is where the book comes alive. We find ourselves in a world of sharply defined characters, distincly themselves, with lives outside the plot that nevertheless provides the constant movement of a first-class SF adventure. The Dragon's Eye is full of surprises and introduces a fine writer to the American audience.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: May 4, 2000

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 304

Sample

The Dragon's Eye

ONE




UTTER BEDLAM PREVAILED INSIDE NEW CHINA'S STARPORT. A COMPACT mass of Chinese immigrants clogged the corridors of the vast terminal, their exhilaration too great for them to pay any attention to the frantic waving of security guards or the screeching of loudspeakers. Heroically shoving and elbowing his way through, Réjean Tanner extricated himself from the jammed mob and managed to flee toward an area with some breathing room. There, he spotted Commander Wang Zhong, who had kept him a seat on one of the last uncrowded benches.
Tanner thanked his superior, then sat with a sigh of relief, worn out by the nerve-racking atmospheric reentry aboard the shuttle and by the hours spent waiting in the customs line. He massaged his forehead; he felt nauseous, and a hellish headache was splitting his skull open at the seams. After six weeks of interstellar travel, his body was proving unequal to the demands of the local gravity.
Out of sheer habit, he checked his watch. It showed nothing, of course. With a sigh of annoyance, he took off the nowuseless wristwatch: the ionization of New China's upper atmosphere prevented the orbiting of timekeeping satellites. A locally made watch would probably be his first purchase on New China.
Weariness also affected his superior. The usually stoic Commander Wang indulged in a rare display of petulance:
"Someone should have been waiting, at the very least an agent with a car. I tell you, Bloembergen's casualness verges on insolence!"
An hour crawled by. It was hot. Through the large bays, the orange star splashed with subdued gold the marquetry of the starport's floor, a stylized pattern of intertwined dragons. Wang dozed. Tanner began to feel impatient: how long were they going to stew here?
A small crowd of Chinese immigrants gathered near their bench. A young Han woman positioned herself near Réjean Tanner and, her voice amplified by a megaphone, directed the flow of immigrants to prevent another crush. To make it twice as much fun, she insisted on repeating each instruction in English and Mandarin, with a thick Cantonese accent, as if the megaphone's distortion wasn't enough to almost completely garble her words. Tanner tugged on the edge of her skirt.
"Can't you go and yell somewhere else with that thing?"
The young hostess eyed Tanner scornfully, surprised to find him a large red-haired fellow. A European ... One who spoke perfect Mandarin. Better than hers, at any rate.
"I'm doing my job," she answered curtly.
Wang urged Tanner to remain calm; it was neither the time nor the place for a scene. They trudged away, wearily dragging their bags toward a quieter part of the terminal. For naught, since joiners were hard at work there, repairing the floor's marquetry and applying a new coat of clear varnish, the particularly unpleasant stink of which boosted Tanner's migraine by an order of magnitude.
They observed through a large bay the thunderous landing of another shuttle. Fifty or so passengers, men, women, and children, exited from the shuttle, thrilled and disoriented, staring atthe sky or kissing the cracked concrete of the apron. The shuttle left again immediately in order to complete the transfer of the starship's three thousand passengers.
In a cloudless sky of yellowish green, the sun--Epsilon Bootis A--neared zenith and bathed the floating dust raised by the shuttle's liftoff in a soothing amber light. Farther away, eastward, an industrial park of the Earth Free Trade Area stretched beyond the concrete hangars of the starport. Even farther yet, the sea of shimmering green gold spread outward. Tanner rubbed his neck: hard to find the morning sun beautiful when one was so tired.
"Commander Wang?"
Wang and Tanner inspected the newcomer, a thin Caucasian, fashionably dressed. His pasty-white face made for an almost shocking contrast with his shoulder-length black hair. He held between his fingers a cigarette wrapped in yellow paper. Somewhat foppishly, he touched it to his mouth, then blew with a carefree air a smoke ring toward the ceiling. Tanner blinked, taken aback for a fraction of a second: on Earth, it was rare to find Europeans who smoked. The man inhaled again, then scowled, letting the smoke swirl in time with his breaths.
"I'm Francis Barnaby. I work for the Bureau."
"Well, well, none too soon," grumbled Wang.
Barnaby muttered a vague excuse. He seemed rather amused by the annoyance of the officer. He looked at Tanner:
"And you're the rookie?"
"Réjean Tanner."
Barnaby nodded, his ambiguous smile hard to decipher. His attention turned toward the bay, and as he gestured with a gloved hand he remarked:
"Say, there's that good old Eye ..."
He pointed east, where a green-tinged dot, so dazzling that a glimpse was enough to hurt one's retina, climbed above the horizon. The Eye of the Dragon: the other star in the Epsilon Bootis binary, a blazing A2 blue-white dwarf. Within all the windows flashed a fluorescing message: DO NOT LOOK AT THE EYE OF THE DRAGON! in English, pinyin, and even old Chinese characters.Outside, the starport employees stopped whatever they were doing and straggled back inside.
"No more work today," commented Barnaby.
Wang expressed his impatience: he was looking forward to a short rest and a bite to eat. Barnaby gestured for them to follow him, even offering, after a moment's thought, to carry Wang's luggage.
Wang took the lead and they crossed the entire starport, avoiding the immigration queues, walking past the stalls from which wafted the oily smell of fried breads, the sweetish fragrance of sherbets, and the spicy aroma of roasting chicken.
Barnaby was now taking an interest in Tanner's gaberdine. He was unceremoniously fingering the black hems and pinching the fabric.
"So, is this the new rage on Earth?"
"I guess so ... . I bought it especially for my posting here."
Barnaby gestured fatalistically.
"That's the drawback of living on such a remote colony: it's hard to keep up with what's in ... . pity, though: you won't be wearing it often. First, because it's too hot here. Second, because it's the best way to be spotted by Tewu agents."
"There are Tewu agents inside the EFTA?"
As soon as he closed his mouth, Tanner knew that he'd sounded naive. It was obvious that New China's intelligence service had observers within the free-trade enclave. But Barnaby refrained from making fun of his slip and merely shrugged.
"Of course, in the final analysis, your clothing matters little. For the Tewu, the mere fact you're European will be enough to arouse suspicion--"
Barnaby cut himself off and stopped the two newcomers in front of a bazaar's display.
"I suppose you don't have hats."
"Of course not," replied Commander Wang.
"Simply indispensable. And no shades, either, right?"
He sighed, as if exasperated by their thoughtlessness. He entered the bazaar and bought two sets of wraparound eyewear:"Not great, but they'll do for today."
He also bought a couple of large conical hats of aluminized plastic.
Outside, even the color of the sky had changed. If a soft green tint still prevailed along the western horizon, the sky shifted eastward to a vibrant electric blue. Tanner tried to spot the burning pinprick of the Eye, but the starport's facade blocked his view of it.
"Put on your glasses and don't look at the Eye of the Dragon," warned Barnaby as he got out his own sunglasses.
"We've already been told."
"You can't be told often enough. The Eye will quickly make you blind if you're not shielding your retinas with glass. Blindness is endemic here on New China. My own eyesight has been deteriorating ... ."
They walked briskly toward Barnaby's car, down an almost deserted street. Passersby were rare and it was impossible to tell the Chinese from the Europeans: gloves, glasses, and large hats effectively made everybody anonymous.
"I thought the glasses would be tinted," remarked Tanner.
Barnaby whooped with delight:
"I was waiting for that! Newcomers always expect us to be walking around in mirrorshades. I don't know why the media always show us like that on Earth. Maybe because it looks so cool ... . Of course, our glasses don't need to be tinted; they don't have to stop visible light, but the ultraviolet kind. The glass they use is quite efficient as a rule. As long as you don't stare the Dragon in the Eye--Hell! What's going on here?"
Half a dozen children were playing around Barnaby's car; two of them were even standing on the front hood. Barnaby swore in Mandarin and the kids ran off so fast one even lost his hat. Utterly exasperated, Barnaby shouted for him to come back. The youngster stopped, turned hesitantly, awkwardly protecting his forehead with arms and hands. Scared by the angry tone of the grown-up's voice, the child refused to come closer. Barnaby took out a coin from his suit. He called out more caressingly andcoaxed the youngster forward. Tanner was surprised: on Earth, no kid would have fallen for such an obvious trick.
Hard to say if it was a boy or a girl. Eight years old, if that. Beneath the thick black hair and the shades, snot trailed down the face's baby fat. A gloved hand grabbed the coin and slipped it into a pocket. Only then did the kid deign to accept his hat, which he tied on deftly.
"You shouldn't climb on cars," scolded Barnaby.
"It wasn't me."
"What are you doing outside at this hour? Shouldn't you be home?"
The child mumbled a few incomprehensible words. He then asked more intelligibly for another coin and Barnaby told him to scram. Swaggering proudly, the urchin headed back to taunt his friends, who hadn't gotten a coin.
Tanner was amazed: "Children playing without supervision? And not a grandparent or a teacher in sight!"
"This isn't Earth," replied Barnaby disdainfully. "Kids here are a dime a dozen."
He unlocked the door, then shoved their luggage inside the car's tiny trunk.
"Now, get inside quick. You don't have any gloves."
The stubby buildings of the starport vanished behind them as the car traveled down nondescript streets. If it hadn't been for the inscriptions in fluorescing paint, Tanner might have thought he was back in a commonplace terrestrial suburb. The other unexpected detail was the use of the old Chinese ideographic writing, as at the starport.
The trip was short, covering less than three kilometers. Barnaby parked the car in front of the European embassy, a handsome building in violet granite. After a second's thought, Tanner decided the granite was pink, in fact, and that it was the Dragon's Eye which stained it purple. Tanner extricated himself from the narrow backseat. Ignoring Barnaby's assurances that all their luggage would be brought to their quarters, Wang recovered a small aluminum case.
"This briefcase goes everywhere I go."
"Let me carry it, at least," offered Tanner.
Rather grudgingly, Wang accepted.
A liveried domestic appeared. Barnaby returned the keys to him and passed through the large doors of the European embassy, trailed by Wang and Tanner. Two guards immediately challenged the group. Barnaby carelessly flashed his identification. The guards hardly glanced at it, recognizing the agent. They used a sharper tone to ask Wang and Tanner for their papers. But their attitude changed when they saw Wang's black-bordered insignia. With due deference, they returned the documents and saluted.
"Good day to you, sir. Welcome to the European embassy, Commander."
Barnaby guided them through the cool hallways of the embassy, ending up in a well-appointed office where a young Chinese woman sipped a cup of tea while watching television. She reserved a warm smile for Barnaby, greeted Wang and Tanner with a cautious nod.
"So, Siqin, is the old man still there?" asked Barnaby.
The receptionist appeared chagrined.
"No, he left for the restaurant."
"I thought he was going to wait for me here."
"He said he preferred to wait over there, for you and"--she hesitated briefly--"your visitors."
She seemed captivated by carrot-haired Tanner.
"And Jay?" insisted Barnaby.
"They're all at the Quan Ju De. If you hurry, they'll still be waiting to start."
They walked back through the hall. Wang whispered to Tanner:
"What a reception! They let me rot for hours at the starport, me, a ranking officer! And they didn't even wait for me to go out for dinner."
Outside, the large orange sun sank in the west, while the blinding green-hued dot continued to rise. They left the protectionof the embassy's porch. The granite facade was almost blue now. Tanner looked at his hand, now tinged an unhealthy shade of purple.
"And keep your hands in your pockets. It's not far, we can walk."
"Is this the noon or evening meal?" asked Tanner. "I can't figure out what time of the day this is."
"Didn't they explain about the eight/six schedule?" replied Barnaby, betraying a hint of impatience.
"Sure, but it's hard to keep it all straight."
"The first step is to forget once and for all that New China's rotation period is eighteen terrestrial hours. Or more exactly, seventeen point nine. Just pay attention to clocks and calendars. Once you're used to it, you'll be able to reckon in terms of 'sectors.' One sector is worth three hours. There are six sectors per rotation period. We work for nine hours, a total of three sectors. We add five more sectors to make up an 'official' day of twenty-four hours. Of course, we're then borrowing two sectors from the next rotation period."
"Don't you take into account the local day or nighttime?"
"In a way, we do. Our week has six 'official' days, the equivalent of eight rotation periods. We set out to avoid exposure to the Eye of the Dragon as much as possible. We always get two working days without seeing the Eye. On the four days when the Eye shines for six of the nine working hours, two are rest days, so that exposure to the Eye is effectively minimized. Of course, we have to shift around the weekend, as the Eye moves in the sky. But right now, you're lucky: the weekend falls on the familiar Saturday and Sunday pair."
"Not simple," sighed Tanner.
"Sure, it is. Forget the theory and just stick to the calendar. Days of the week bear their usual name: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. No Wednesday. Though mind that this only applies to the Europeans in EFTA. Within New China proper, they do like the Chinese on Earth; they use numbers to identify the days of the week. But they keep the samekind of schedule. They bloody well have to: it's too hard to habituate the body to a cycle too different from the usual twenty-four hours without running into all kinds of problems ... . Well, here we are."
Outside, the front of the Quan Ju De--the "Abode of All Virtues"--was decorated with brightly glowing red, green, and yellow ideograms, as if transplanted from a historical neighborhood of Shanghai or San Francisco. Except that, here, instead of neon lights, it was the Eye of the Dragon which made the antique characters shine.
They left their hats in the cloakroom. Inside, the restaurant's formal atmosphere and red decor, featuring the repeated motif of a golden dragon, promised comfort and luxury. The familiar smells of garlic, sesame oil, and ginger drifted from the kitchens. Many families were present, with multitudes of children and a din to match. Barnaby headed for a large table at the other end of the room, where an enormous European--he must have weighed at least 150 kilos--was holding court along with a younger Chinese man, a young Chinese woman, and three kids, whose ages ranged from no more than ten to less than two. Three chairs remained empty.
All the guests turned toward the three arrivals. The fat European raised a hand, exclaiming:
"Ah, Francis! What the hell took you so long? We waited, waited, waited ... ." He turned toward Wang and Tanner. "I apologize for starting without you, but you know how it is with kids ... . Anyway, you're just in time, we ordered only moments ago. You'll see: the Quan Ju De has the best food on the island."
Barnaby seemed unimpressed by his superior's enthusiasm.
"In the meantime, let me introduce Commander Wang Zhong, our esteemed visitor, along with our new agent, Jean Tanner--"
"Réjean Tanner," he corrected.
Barnaby introduced the others at the table. The fat one was Bo Bloembergen, the chief of the European Bureau of External Affairs for the EFTA, in his late forties, with platinum-blond hairshining beyond a receding hairline, and a blue gaze peering sagely out of a fleshy face. The young "Chinese" was a Japanese, Jay Hamakawa, short and well muscled, with a brushcut. The young woman was Zhao, Bloembergen's wife, and the three children were theirs: the eldest, Xunxun, then Peter, and finally little Suzy.
A maître d' showed up to take the orders of the three newcomers. Barnaby was unable to settle on a dish.
"Don't spend another hour fooling around with the menu!" thundered Bloembergen. "The duck is fine."
Barnaby expressed his skepticism as to the quality of frozen duck imported from Earth.
"The comparison would be easier if New China consented to sell live ducks to the EFTA," the maître d' replied suavely.
"All right, all right," Barnaby finally decided. "Let's have the duck. With pancakes and soup?"
"Just like on Earth," the maître d' reassured him.
With that out of the way, Bloembergen leaned toward Wang:
"So, Commander, is this your first visit to New China?"
"No, it's my third, as I'm sure your services know full well," replied Wang in a neutral tone.
Bloembergen laughed:
"Don't take it that way, please, I'm just trying to make conversation." He turned toward Tanner. "And you, what do you think of New China?"
"I've only been here a few hours. Give me a few more to get used to it."
"Of course, of course ... But still, not too surprised? Is it your first trip away from Earth?"
"Actually, I was staying on Mars. I'll confess the gravity here is stronger than I expected."
"Really? But it's only 0.84 g. Well, I guess that if you were on Mars ... You'll get used to it soon; it's not like on Colony."
Bloembergen's tone was friendly, which did not prevent him from staring at his new agent with blue eyes as cold as a Mars morning. Tanner looked uneasily at Zhao, Bloembergen's youngwife. He was unsure whether the time, the place, or the company was appropriate for a discussion of the secret academy on Colony, where he had gone for advanced training.
Bloembergen guessed the cause of Tanner's misgivings. Turning expansive, he squeezed his spouse and shook her like a cherry tree:
"Come on, now, don't be shy; you can speak in front of Zhao, my sweet meadow flower. She works for us, of course."
The young woman endured the embrace with a wry smile. The older of the two boys explained to Tanner, "Dad is a spy, but we mustn't tell anybody, not even our best friends!"
Bloembergen guffawed and tousled his son's thick black mop of hair. Withdrawing his hand, he overturned a bowl of hoisin sauce on the plastic tablecloth.
"Bo!" cried out Zhao as she shrank to avoid getting sauce on her gown.
Bloembergen hastily cleaned the mess with a napkin.
"No problem, no problem!"
The children were giggling. Barnaby and Wang seemed exasperated. Jay was stoic.
"Be more careful, Bo," Zhao rebuked him in Mandarin, a reproving expression on her finely drawn face.
She was beautiful, decided Tanner. Not quite thirty years old, thin, exuding the untroubled serenity of the classical ideal. The unadorned white dress and the black hair falling free on her shoulders--so unlike the overly ornate look favored by fashionable Chinese women on Earth--only emphasized her poise.
"We were saying, Mr. Tanner," said Bloembergen, who refused to let himself be derailed so easily, "that you've mostly worked on Mars."
"In Tselinograd, yes, for two years. I was also an assistant in Intelligence at the European embassy in Beijing."
Bloembergen smiled contentedly. He knew all that, of course.
Appetizers were served, cold, then warm, followed by the skillet-fried duck's heart. Barnaby was mollified: the chef wassticking to the tried-and-true tradition. Protocol was followed to the letter: skin served first, cut into crispy pieces to be slipped inside a small, thin pancake. The duck flesh was served next and eaten the same way. Barnaby was unable to refrain from complaining: the meat was too lean. Bloembergen retorted he should be grateful for the characteristically Chinese fondness for good food, which alleviated the rigors of their exile far from Earth. True to his word, Bloembergen ate heartily, downing the pancakes with the help of impressive quantities of beer. Barnaby almost matched his gusto and Zhao was not far behind. Wang Zhong, ashen-faced with fatigue, took no more than a few sips from his beer. Hamakawa did not drink, and neither did Tanner, who was struggling with a bone-deep weariness and feared alcohol would finish putting him to sleep.
An impassive waiter set down in the table's center a soup made from cabbage and the duck's crushed bones. Tanner withdrew from the fray. The children, quiet at the meal's outset, were starting to act up. Suzy whined, Peter had gone to sleep under the table, and Xunxun kept asking if they would be leaving soon. Zhao whispered a few words in Bloembergen's ear, and the European stared glassily at his guests:
"Gentlemen, you seem tired ... . So I invite you to escort my delightful meadow flower back to our place, where you have rooms waiting for you. Yours until you find apartments. The three of us will stay behind; we have a few things to discuss."
Wang and Tanner didn't need any more persuading.
Peter was pulled out from under the table. Tanner took him in his arms and carried him to the cloakroom. The maître d' helped Zhao to equip her brood with hats, gloves, and shades. As they were going to leave, Wang glared at Tanner, his face stony:
"What about my briefcase?"
Tanner felt horribly stupid.
"I left it beside my chair."
"I would appreciate it, Operative Tanner, if you went back to get it."
Tanner managed a wan smile and hurried back into thedining room, still holding young Peter in his arms. A silly mistake, though understandable: he was tired and the dinner had been long. Wang had not seemed overly vexed, but Tanner knew that the commander didn't want to make a scene in front of Zhao. If his superior thought it necessary to hang on to his briefcase, its contents were surely important. Of course, the briefcase was equipped with a secured lock, but Bloembergen probably had the means to make a locked briefcase yield its secrets: X-ray machines, neutron scanners, echogram generators ...
Feeling extraordinarily foolish under the triple conjunction of Bloembergen's, Barnaby's, and Hamakawa's gazes, Tanner recovered the aluminum case--"I'd ... er ... This belongs to us--" then hastened to rejoin Wang, Zhao, and the two other children.
Outside, the show was pure magic. The sun had set and now the Eye of the Dragon shone in lonely splendor overhead. It was the midpoint of the Green Night.
It was called night, but it was a luminous night. Tanner had seen many videos of New China's auroras, he had marveled at pictures, but no recording and no picture could do justice to the fine chromatic gradations of the Green Night. Ethereal veils of yellow, scarlet, and violet snaked across the heavens like jellyfish tentacles, rippled, sliced into each other with an exquisite patience, piled ever upward in layers whose fuzzy contours faded, changed colors, stretched to fray like a fragile gauze torn by a heavenly gale. Then, in the sky, cleared for the space of a few seconds, the most brilliant stars came out shyly. After which new golden veils streamed through it, freshly powdered with immaterial green, cyan, and turquoise, shifting to a medley of argent, fiery red, and deep indigo.
"Don't look at the Dragon's Eye!" snapped Zhao.
Caught in the act, Tanner glanced away. He had barely glimpsed the Eye, but even that was too much for his retinas: wherever he looked, a host of glittering dots danced in front of him. He shivered: Barnaby hadn't understated the risks of becoming blind on New China.
They started walking, with Zhao carrying little Suzy and Peterstill sleeping in his arms, while Wang brought up the rear in the company of Xunxun, tired and whining. The heavens did not shine alone; few buildings were without fluorescent ideograms, or window frames, lintels or cornices coated with fluorescing paint. The street was alight with a riot of colors. The pedestrians shared in the gaudy display, especially the gangs of teenagers out for a night on the town, so bright in their fluorescent red and yellow robes and their improbable headwear that they seemed to illuminate the whole street. Even the hats of Zhao and the kids were bordered with luminous stripes. In his European-cut black gaberdine and his nonfluorescing hat, Tanner felt like a shadow among dancers spun from sheer light.
They trudged in silence. Zhao broke it only to encourage Tanner:
"The house is not far, only five minutes now. You can put Peter down and let him walk if he's too heavy."
"No, let him sleep. I envy him."
In fact, Tanner was starting to feel Peter's weight, after the last weeks spent in the spaceship's weak gravity field. Not to mention the briefcase, which seemed to gain mass with each step he took.
Suddenly, tires squealed on the concrete and a horn wailed. Out of nowhere, a car rushed by the small group. Reacting without thinking, Tanner backed away, though the car had not really tried to run them over. He still wasn't used to the planet's gravity, and he fell flat on his back, his shoulders absorbing the impact in a desperate attempt to protect Peter. Zhao cried out, her voice cutting through the fog of his pain and confusion.
Wang bent over Tanner, but the agent was already getting up.
"It's all right ... I stumbled ..."
"You're hurt," asserted Zhao.
"Nothing's broken, don't worry."
In Zhao's arms, little Suzy was bawling, scared by her mother's shout. Peter, pulled to his feet by Commander Wang, seemed too dumbfounded to think of crying. Tanner lookedaround him, still in a daze. Was he imagining those distant shouts? And where had all those people come from, now gathering a few paces away? When Suzy caught her breath to yowl some more, he heard sirens getting closer.
"What's going on?"
Zhao too was nonplussed. Before she could answer, police cars, sirens screaming at the top of their voice, emerged from a side street and braked, the abused tires screeching to a halt in front of a restaurant. A crowd was already forming, as if the building had suddenly emptied; some of the pedestrians without hats or shades were running to shelter in the lee of buildings away from the Eye. Around Tanner's little group, gangs of teenagers converged, joined the growing crowd. They were followed by vans with police markings.
Tanner, his heart still hammering, decided the pedestrians around them, so very ordinary-looking until then, were beginning to remind him of rioters. Zhao, her face blanching with worry, waved for Tanner and Wang to follow her into a dark corner. Standing back from the mob, resolved to defend his companions, Tanner waited.
The police vans stopped in front of the restaurant. Police squads, mostly Chinese, burst out. A loudspeaker ordered in English and Mandarin:
"Get away, there's a bomb in the building!"
Only a few people retreated. More teenagers, afire with excitement, were still rushing up. A minuscule car stopped on the sidewalk not far from Tanner. Inside, two young girls, their faces streaked with fluorescing makeup, goggled at the scene.
"Get back, get back!" yelped the loudspeaker.
A bomb-disposal robot rolled out the back of a van. A bottle arced above the crowd and smacked against the robot's camera. The cheap, plastic empty bounced ineffectively, and the camera swiveled toward the mob. Police officers waded through the crowd to reach the guilty parties. The mass of people heaved, shouts and insults flying on all sides. The policemen caught up with a young Chinese man, who struggled furiously. A girl cameto his help, screaming and clawing. More officers ran in, swinging their truncheons. The crowd closed in and Tanner missed the rest of it.
"Please leave the vicinity now," a voice was asking, distorted by echoes and amplification. "You are all in grave danger!"
The rioters showed no sign of obeying. Afraid the situation was taking a turn for the worse, Zhao motioned for Tanner and Wang to follow her down a badly lit alleyway. They met a few groups, but none that seemed hostile. They finally emerged in an almost-deserted street. Suzy was still blubbering, but Zhao seemed to feel better.
"Will you be all right?" asked Tanner.
Zhao smiled weakly.
"Yes. Well, guys, I'd call that a welcome befitting your rank."
"What happened?"
"I don't know. If I'd expected this, I would have called a taxi."
"A bomb threat," speculated Commander Wang. "By the Secessionists, perhaps?"
"I don't know," replied Zhao. "Everything's possible. Let's go, we're almost there; we can speak once we're home. I'm starting to be afraid."
Tanner and Wang followed Zhao silently through almost-deserted streets. The sirens had receded into the distance and the loudspeaker now seemed no louder than the chirping of the insects. As the effect of the evening's jolts faded, Tanner was overcome by a growing sense of disorientation, which the setting did nothing to alleviate. Green Night was ending and Dark Night was taking over. It was already much darker; only a few spires atop the tallest buildings still glowed. New China did not have a moon: for the coming hours, the unfurling of the auroras alone would clothe the stars.
New French edition copyright © 1999 by Joël Champetier and Editions Alire Inc. English translation copyright © 1999 by Joël Champetier