A single evening can leave its wound in the soul.’
—Meng Chiao, ‘Impromptu’, 8th century AD
For Rose and Ian
‘A new sound from the old keys.’
INTRODUCTION
Chung Kuo. The words mean ‘Middle Kingdom’ and, since 221 BC, when the First Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, unified the seven Warring States, it is what the ‘black-haired people’, the Han, or Chinese, have called their great country. The Middle Kingdom – for them it was the whole world; a world bounded by great mountain chains to the north and west, by the sea to east and south. Beyond was only desert and barbarism. So it was for two thousand years and through sixteen great dynasties. Chung Kuo was the Middle Kingdom, the very centre of the human world, and its Emperor the ‘Son of Heaven’, the ‘One Man’. But in the eighteenth century that world was invaded by the young and aggressive Western powers with their superior weaponry and their unshakeable belief in Progress. It was, to the surprise of the Han, an unequal contest and China’s myth of supreme strength and self-sufficiency was shattered. By the early twentieth century China – Chung Kuo – was the sick old man of the East: ‘a carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin’, as Karl Marx called it. But from the disastrous ravages of that century grew a giant of a nation, capable of competing with the West and with its own Eastern rivals, Japan and Korea, from a position of incomparable strength.
By the turn of the twenty-second century, Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom, had come to mean much more. For more than a hundred years the Empire of the Han had encompassed all the world, the Earth’s bloated population of thirty-six billion contained in vast, hive-like cities of three hundred levels that spanned whole continents. The Council of Seven – Han lords, T’ang, each more powerful than the greatest of the ancient emperors – ruled Chung Kuo with an iron authority, their boast that they had ended Change and stopped the Great Wheel turning. But war, famine and political instability, thought to be things of the past, returned to Chung Kuo with a vengeance.
A new generation of powerful young merchants – Dispersionists, formed mainly of Hung Mao, or Westerners – challenged the authority of the Seven, demanding an end to the Edict of Technological Control, the cornerstone of Han stability, and a return to the Western ideal of unfettered progress. In the face of assassination and counter-assassination, something had to give, and the destruction of the Dispersionist starship, The New Hope, signalled the beginning of ‘the War-that-wasn’t-a-War’, an incestuous power struggle fought within the City’s levels. The Seven won that War, but at a price they could ill afford. Suddenly they were weak – weaker than they had been in their entire history, four of their most experienced members having died in the space of six short years. In their place, the new T’ang were young and inexperienced, while the older T’ang had lost the confidence, the certainty, they had once possessed.
In the long years of peace before the War it had seemed inconceivable to challenge the Seven. But now…
For the Dispersionists, too, it was a costly war. Five years of struggle found them with most of their major leaders dead and more than two thousand of their number executed. One hundred and eighteen of their great Companies had ceased trading – their assets and holdings confiscated by the Seven – while many more, numbering hundreds of thousands, had been demoted ‘down the levels’ for being sympathetic to their cause.
But the War was merely the first tiny sign of the great disturbances to come, for down in the lowest levels of the City, in the lawless regions ‘below the Net’ and in the overcrowded decks just above, new currents of unrest – darker and deeper than those expressed by the War – have awoken. Currents which,