Kim had cleared his mind, ready for the game, when he heard the doors at the far end of the pool swing open and the wet slap of bare feet on the tiles, followed moments later by a double splash. He knew without looking who it was, and when they surfaced, moments later, close to him, acknowledged them with a smile, his eyes still closed, his body stretched out in the water.
"Daydreaming?" It was Anton's voice.
"That's right," he said, assuming a relaxed, almost lazy tone of voice. He had told no one of his game, knowing how the other boys responded to the least sign of eccentricity. Both Anton and Josef were some three years older than he and shared a tutorial class with him, so they knew how brilliant he was; but brilliance inside the classroom was one thing, how one behaved outside it was another. Outside they took care to disguise all sign of what had brought them here.
At times Kim found this attitude perverse. They should be proud of what they were—proud of the gifts that had saved them from the Clay. But it was not so simple. At the back of it they were ashamed of what they were. Ashamed and guilty. They had survived, yes, but they knew that they were here on sufferance. At any moment they could be cast down again, into darkness. Or gassed, or simply put to sleep. That knowledge humbled them; bound them in psychological chains far stronger than any physical restraint. Outside the classroom they were rarely boastful.
"Are you going to see the film tonight?" Josef sculled backward with his hands, his head tilted back, his knees bent, experimenting with his balance in the water.
Kim lifted his head and looked back at his friend, letting his feet drift slowly down. He was nine now but, like all of them here, much smaller, lither, than normal boys his age. He combed his hair back with his fingers, then gave his head a tiny shake. "What film is it?"
Anton laughed. "What do you think?"
"Ah. . . ." Kim understood at once. They had been joking about it only yesterday. "Pan Chao. ..."
Pan Chao! It sometimes seemed as if half the films ever made had been about Pan Chao! He was the great hero of Chung Kuo—the soldier turned diplomat turned conqueror. In A.D. 73 he had been sent, with thirty-six followers, as ambassador to the king of Shen Shen in Turkestan. Ruthlessly defeating his rival for influence, the ambassador from the Hsiung Nu, he had succeeded in bringing Shen Shen under Han control. But this, his first triumph, was eclipsed by what followed. Over the next twenty-four years, by bluff and cunning and sheer force of personality, Pan Chao had brought the whole of Asia under Han domination. In A.D. 97 he had stood on the shore of the Caspian Sea, an army of seventy thousand vassals gathered behind him, facing the great Ta Ts'in, the Roman Empire. The rest was history, known to every schoolboy.
For a moment the three boys' laughter echoed from the walls.
In the silence that followed, Kim asked. "Do you think he really existed?"
"What do you mean?" It was Anton who answered him, but he spoke for both the boys. How could Pan Chao not have existed? Would Chung Kuo be Chung Kuo were it not for Pan Chao? It would be Ta Ts'in instead. A world ruled by the Hung Moo. And such a world was an impossibility. The two boys laughed, taking Kim's comment for dry humor.
Kim, watching them, saw at once how meaningless such questions were to them. None of them shared his skepticism. They had been bewitched by the sheer scale of the world into which they had entered—a world so big and broad and rich—a world so deeply and thoroughly embedded in time—that it could not, surely, have been invented? So grateful were they to have escaped the darkness of the Clay, they were loath to question the acts and statements of their benefactors.
No, it was more than that: they had been conditioned not to question it.
"Forget it," he said, and realized that even in that he differed from them. They could forget. In fact, they found it easy to forget. But he could not. Everything—even his mistakes—were engraved indelibly in his memory, almost as if his memory had greater substance—were more real—than their own.
"Well?" Anton persisted. "Are you going to come? It's one we haven't seen before. About the fall of Rome and the death of Kan Ying."
Kim smiled, amused, then nodded. "Okay, I'll—" He stopped.
The three boys turned in the water and looked.
The doors at the far end had swung open. Momentarily they stayed open, held there by a tall, spindly youth with long arms, a mop of unruly yellow hair, and bright blue, staring eyes. It was Matyas.
"Shit!" said Josef under his breath, and ducked beneath the water.
Matyas smiled maliciously, then came through, followed by two other boys, smaller, much younger than himself. "Greaser" and "Sucker," Anton called them, though not in Matyas's hearing: names which captured not only the subservient nature of their relationship to Matyas but also something of their physical appearance. Greaser—his real name was Tom—had a slick, ratlike look to him, especially in the water, while Sucker, a quiet boy named Carl, had a small, puckered face dominated by thick,
fleshy lips.
It was whispered that the two of them "serviced" Matyas in a most original manner; but how much of that was truth and how much it was influenced by Anton's persuasively apt names was hard to gauge. All that was certain was that the two younger boys accompanied Matyas everywhere; were shadow and mirror to his twisted image.
Kim watched Matyas lope arrogantly along the edge of the pool, his head lowered, an unhealthy smile on his thin lips, until he stood across from him. There Matyas turned and, his smile broadening momentarily, threw himself forward into the water in an ungainly dive.
Kim glanced briefly at the two boys at his side. Like him, they had tensed in the water, expecting trouble. But it was always difficult to know with Matyas. He was no ordinary bully. Nor would he have got here and stayed here had he been. No, his deviousness was part of the fabric of his clever mind. He was a tormentor, a torturer, a master of the implicit threat. He used physical force only as a last resort, knowing he could generally accomplish more by subtler means.
However, Matyas had one weakness. He was vain. Not of his looks, which, even he would admit, tended toward ugliness, but about his intelligence. In that respect he had been cock of the roost until only a year ago, when Kim had first come to the Center. But Kim's arrival had eclipsed him. Not at once, for Kim had been careful to fit in, deferring to the older boy whenever they came into contact, but as the months passed and word spread that the new boy was something special, Kim saw how Matyas changed toward him.
Matyas surfaced directly in front of Kim, less than a forearm's length away, and shook his head exaggeratedly, sending the spray into Kim's face. Then he laughed and began to move around him in a leisurely but awkward breaststroke. Kim turned, keeping the older boy in front of him at all times.
"And how's golden boy, then?" Matyas asked quietly, looking up and sideways, one intensely blue eye fixing the nine-year-old.
Matyas himself was fifteen, almost sixteen. On his birthday, in a month's time, he would leave the Center and begin his service in the Above, but until then he was in a kind of limbo. He had outgrown the Center, yet the thought of losing his "position" as senior boy both frightened and angered him. Ning wei chi k'ou mo wei niu hou, the Han said—"Rather be the mouth of a chicken than the hindquarters of a cow"—and so it was with Matyas. He did not relish becoming a small fish once again—a "cow's ass." As a result he had been restless these last few weeks—dangerous and unpredictable, his sarcasm tending toward open cruelty. Several times Kim had caught Matyas staring at him malevolently and knew the older boy would never forgive him for robbing him—unjustly, Matyas believed—of his intellectual crown.