"PIEN HUA.' PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA! PIEN HUA!"
Ben watched the images flash up one after another, conscious of the tremendous power, the dark potency that emanated from them. It was primordial. Like some vast movement of the earth itself. And yet it was all so loosely reined, so undirected. Change, they demanded. But to what?
No one knew. No one seemed capable of imagining what change might bring. In time, perhaps, someone would find an answer to that question, would draw the masses to him and channel that dark tide of discontent. But until then, the Seven had been right to let the storm rage, the flood waters rise unchecked; for they knew the waters would recede, the storm blow itself out. To have attempted to control that vast upsurge of feeling or repress it could only have made things worse.
Ben blanked the screen, then stood, considering what he had seen. Wang Hsien's death may have been the catalyst, but the real causes of the mass violence were rooted much deeper. Were, in fact, as old as Man himself. For this was how Man really was beneath his fragile shell of culture. And not just those he had seen on the screen, the madness dancing in their eyes, but all of Mankind. For a long time they had tried to fool themselves, pretending they were something else, something more refined and spiritual, more godlike and less animalistic than they really were. But now the lid was off the well, the darkness bubbling to the surface once again.
"Ben?"
He turned. Meg was watching him from the doorway, the morning sunlight behind her throwing her face and figure into shadow, making her look so like his mother that, momentarily, he mistook her. Then, realizing his error, he laughed.
"What is it?" she asked, her voice rich and low.
"Nothing," he answered. "Is it ready?"
She nodded, then came into the room. "What were you watching?"
He glanced at the empty screen, then back at her. "I was looking at Father's tapes. About the riots." She looked past him. "I thought you weren't interested."
He met her eyes. "I'm not. At least, not in the events themselves. But the underlying meaning of it all—that fascinates me. Their faces—they're like windows to their souls. All their fears and aspirations show nakedly. But it takes something like this to do it, something big and frightening. And then the mask slips and the animal stares out through the eyes."
And the Ping Tiao, he thought. I'm interested in them, too. Because they're something new. Something the City has been missing until now. A carp to fill an empty pool.
"Well. . . shall we go out?"
She smiled. "Okay. You first."
On the lawn beside the flower beds, their mother had spread out a picnic on a big red-and-white-checked tablecloth. As Ben came out into the open she looked across at him and smiled. In the sunlight she seemed much younger than she really was, more Meg's older sister than her mother. He sat beside her, conscious of the drowsy hum of bees, the rich scent of the blooms masking the sharp salt tang of the bay. It was a perfect day, the blue above them broken here and there by big slow-drifting cumuli.
Ben looked down at the picnic spread before them. It all looked newly created. A wide basket filled with apples lay at the center of the feast, their perfect, rounded greenness suggesting the crispness of the inner fruit. To the left his eye was drawn to the bright yellow of the butter in its circular white-china dish and, beside it, the richer, almost-honeyed yellow of the big wedge of cheddar. There was a big plate of thick-cut ham, the meat a soft pink, the rind a perfect snowy white, and next to that a fresh-baked loaf, three slices cut from it and folded forward, exposing the fluffy whiteness of the bread. Bright-red tomatoes beaded with moisture shared a bowl with the softer green of a freshly washed lettuce, while other, smaller bowls held tiny radishes and onions, peeled carrots, grapes and celery, red currants and watercress.
"It's nice," he said, looking up at his mother.
Pleased, she handed him a plate. A moment later Meg reappeared, carrying a tray on which were three tall glasses and a jug of freshly made, iced lemonade. He laughed.
"What is it?" Meg asked, setting the tray down.
"This," he said, indicating the spread laid out before them.
Meg's smile faded slowly. "What's wrong? Don't you like it?"
"No," he said softly, reassuringly. "It's marvelous." He smiled, then leaned forward, beginning to transfer things to his plate.
Meg hesitated, then poured from the jug, handing him the cold, beaded glass. "Here."
He set his plate down, then took the glass and sipped. "Hmm . . ." he said appreciatively, his eyes smiling back at her. "Perfect."
, Beside him his mother was busy rilling a plate for Meg. She spoke without looking at him.
"Meg tells me you've been reading Nietzsche."
, He glanced across at Meg. She was looking down, a faint color in her cheeks. : "That's right." He sipped again, then stared at the side of his glass intently.
His mother turned her head, looking at him. "I thought you'd read Nietzsche."
"I did. When I was eight."
"Then I don't understand. I thought you said you could never read a thing twice."
He met her eyes. "So I thought. But it seems I was wrong."
She was silent a while, considering, then looked back at him again. "Then you can forget things, after all?"
He shook his head. "It's not a question of forgetting. It's just that things get embedded."
"Embedded?"
He paused, then set his glass down, realizing he would have to explain. "I realized it months ago, when Father quoted something from Nietzsche to me. Two lines from Ecce Homo. The memory should have come back clearly, but it didn't. Oh, it was clear enough in one sense—I could remember the words plain enough. I could even see them on the page and recall where I was when I read them. But that was it, you see. That's what I mean by things getting embedded. When Father triggered that specific memory, it came back to me in context, surrounded by all the other ragbag preoccupations of my eight-year-old self."
Ben reached out and took a tomato from the bowl and polished it on his sleeve; then he looked up at his mother again, his face earnest, almost frowning.
"You see, those lines of Nietzsche's were interlaced with all kinds of other things. With snatches of music—Mahler and Schoenberg and Shostakovich—with the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Klee, the poetry of Rilke and Donne and Basho, and God knows what else. A thousand intricate strands. Too many to grasp at a single go. But it wasn't just a case of association by juxtaposition. I found that my reading, my very understanding of Nietzsche, was colored by those things. And try as I might, I couldn't shake those impressions loose and see his words fresh. I had to separate it physically."
"What do you mean?" Beth asked, leaning forward to take a grape from the bunch.
"I mean that I had to return to the text. To read the words fresh from the page again. Free from all those old associations."
"And?" It was Meg who asked the question. She was leaning forward slightly, watching him, fascinated.
He looked down, then bit into the tomato. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed and looked up again. "And it worked. I liberated the words from their old context."
He popped the rest of the tomato into his mouth and for a while was silent, thoughtful. The two women watched him, indulging him as always, placing him at the very center of things. The tomato finished, he took a long sip of his lemonade. Only then did he begin again.