Quiller Bamboo

I looked down into the valley. The soldiers were making better headway but there were no probes breaking their line yet.

'Why?'

'I don't like the idea of you leaving cover. At least not yet.'

'Look, that colonel can't get here in time. No one can do anything. We're on our own now.'

Insects down there, ants on the move. But they'd be much bigger when they got here and they'd be carrying assault rifles.

'You haven't been party to Signals. General Yang has committed himself totally to saving this well-loved and eminent man. Colonel Zhou was chosen for his reputation for high intelligence and courage.' A beat. 'It would do us no good to underestimate him, do you understand?'

I thought about it. 'All right, we'll stay put for thirty minutes, if those are your instructions.'

I wouldn't have listened to those bastards Loman or Fane or Welford but I would listen to this man. He wouldn't give up on us.

'They are not my instructions. It's more important than that. I value your life, perhaps more than you do.'

Point taken. Thirty minutes.'

'Please stay open.'

I turned back to the cave. I didn't care much for trekking north from here myself, but if we left the cave it was the only direction we could take, and it was uphill and rough going and there might not be another refuge for miles and we couldn't go that far, we couldn't go for miles, he was a diabetic and he'd been drugged and manhandled and put into shock and all he wanted to do was sit here and think about his windmills and his solar-powered people's cars, thousands of them, millions, enough for all those millions of lucky ants.

I sat down facing him. 'How do you feel?'

'Very well.' Spoke in a monotone: he was still under.

'So tell me some more about the new Communism. Why should it fall to China to bring about these great changes?'

'It is the ideal cradle for change. The Chinese created a civilization before all others; we are a cultured people. We possess vast territories; vast manpower, vast natural resources.'

'I see. But this man Xu Yun, your potential leader — he's going to start things off with a lie, so you've said, telling the people he's going to give them democracy and then leading them down the same old garden path. I'd call him a bloody hypocrite.'

Turning his head to look at me, saying with great force — 'But there is no other man to lead us!'

'No one but a bloody hypocrite?'

Something was happening. I didn't know what it was.

'He is for the people.'

So was Chairman Mao, for God's sake, he had you walking about with your noses stuck into a little red book, don't you remember that?'

He was changing, Xingyu. Eyes different, looked different. He was surfacing, and I snapped the string of the pendulum and let it fall.

'Mao was wrong. He was for the people in the beginning-'

'They're always for the people, Baibing, it was the People's Liberation Army that murdered the people in Tiananmen Square, their own army, surely you remember that.' I went on talking, because something was happening to Xingyu Baibing and this wasn't a political argument anymore, it was something much bigger than that. 'Communist leaders are always the same, you know that, they're either shoving your nose in a book or a gun down your throat. They-'

'But I was told other things.'

Breakthrough.

I didn't say anything.

He sat staring at me, but now there was intelligence in his eyes; he'd lost that look of a zombie. I didn't know what had happened to him but it could have been that the effect of the drugs had worn off or that I'd challenged him for the first time instead of listening to his precious manifesto, correction, let me correct something, I did know what had happened, they'd only got so far, Trotter and his Dr Chen, only so far with him, and this man's integrity of mind had resisted them and gone on resisting because all his life he'd had the convictions of a revolutionary, a rebel born for the barricades and the stuff had gone in all right, the Utopian bit, but it hadn't stuck, there hadn't been time before Chong had got there and blown the whole thing up, this man wasn't brainwashed, he'd just had a half-baked manifesto shoved into his subconscious and he'd brought it all out again, got rid of it, and the change that had come into his eyes was because he'd surfaced from the effects of drugs and was coming back into beta waves.

'I was told other things,' he said again.

'Yes. But you can forget them now.'

'He is a very persuasive man.'

'Yes. And a bloody Communist.'

I understood something else: Trotter had known he hadn't got far enough with Xingyu; there hadn't been time to saturate his brain with the tenets of the manifesto to the point where he could safely go in front of the cameras in the Great Hall of the People and spread the new Communism right across the nation, and that was why the jeep had followed us away from the temple and the shots had come and the windshield was smashed and the mirror had gone flying, because if Dr Xingyu Baibing couldn't go on the screens with his mind fully indoctrinated then he couldn't be allowed to live.

Glow on the roof of the cave from the distant searchlight.

'His practical ideas,' Xingyu said, 'have a certain merit. His technical ideas.'

I looked at him. We'd need to do a little work.

'Yes, But the West is also waking up to things, and if there's still time to save life on earth, it won't be run as a slave planet. This man Xu Yun — what are your thoughts about him?'

He looked surprised. 'He is a Communist too, as I have told you.'

'That doesn't answer my question.'

'My thoughts, then, are that' — He hesitated, and I thought, Christ, we haven't got any time left for this — 'while he is genuinely for the people-'

'Listen, Baibing, Chairman Mao was for the people and he brought them to their knees and Deng Xiaoping was for the people and he ordered a bloodbath in Tiananmen and now you're saying that Xu Yun is for the people and you think he's going to turn out to be a fucking saint?' I shifted closer to him, got down on my hands and knees to face him. You are the only hope left for China, Baibing, the most powerful voice in the land, but the Communist credo has rubbed off a little on you, even on you, and you've got to understand that any man getting up on his feet in a Communist state and talking about the good of the people — the people — the people — has got to be told to shut up and sit down and if he won't shut up and sit down then he's got to be taken away and shot before he becomes too dangerous.' Lowered my voice. 'Baibing, you're a man of enormous intelligence and you have got to get rid of the idea that Communism in your country will ever see its people with anything more to their name but a half-empty rice bowl. That man Xu Yun will have nothing to offer you but servitude, suffering, and blood in the streets. Are you listening to me?'

In a moment: 'Yes.'

Silence again, and in the silence I could hear the sound of the engines below, and voices now, carried on the wind, as the light across the roof of the cave grew stronger.

'So what are your thoughts on Xu Yun?'

'He is potentially dangerous. He-'

'Can you trust him, then?'

'No, I cannot-'

'He's a Communist, Baibing. What are your thoughts on that?