Many of them were wearing elaborate hearing aids and softscreen spectacles. Some of them were relatively spry, but others were supported by younger people — secretaries, or perhaps nurses — and they shuffled their feet, hardly able to walk. A few of them were even in wheelchairs, laden with oxygen bottles. And yet many had bizarre marks of youth: thick black hair, smoothed skin, sparkling new eyes. One of them — a few places ahead of her in the line — walked stiffly, and with a whir of servomotors, as some rudimentary exoskeleton beneath his Mao suit propelled him forward.
Jiang was startled and repelled. She had had much contact with the leadership since her flight, but always in meetings with one or two officials at a time; never had she witnessed the leadership en masse in this fashion. She wondered what tonnage of transplanted organs, bones, body fluids — manufactured, or excavated from youthful cadavers — had been installed in this crumbling leadership, to maintain its semblance of forward motion and life. Surely, she thought, nowhere in the world was there a government leadership so visibly tired and aged as the one arrayed around Chen’s corpse this morning.
At last she reached the corpse, and she stared, with little understanding, at the smooth, embalmed face of Chen Tong.
Now the eulogy was done. The vacated platform was taken by a fat middle-aged man in an off-white Mao suit, fitted with the elaborate collar of an imperial-era Confucian scholar. He was Gao Feng, a singer who had been popular two decades ago.
Xu Shiyou leaned close to her and whispered, his skin smelling of Western cosmetics: “Perhaps Chen Tong was a fan of Gao.”
The singer began to croon: We all have a family whose name is China…
There was a sharp, cloying smell, unwelcome in the stuffy air.
Jiang turned. The elderly Party leader behind her, his face imploded, was leaning on the arm of his aide and staring down at his trousers, from which leaked a slow rivulet of yellow fluid.
Now that the ceremonial was over, the leaders lingered, talking in small groups, their various attendants standing by impassively. It was an occasion without parallel in the West; there were no refreshments — no drinks, even — and no real focus to the gathering. But she could see, from the intensity of body language, the fierceness of expressions, that much business was being transacted here, between these rulers of the far-flung provinces of China.
Xu Shiyou drew Jiang Ling aside. “The Helmsman wishes to meet you, shortly. Now listen to me, Jiang Ling.”
She grimaced. “I always do, Xu.”
He snorted through his fleshy nose. “If only that were true. But listen now, Jiang, if never again; for this could be the most important moment of your life.”
“You say that,” she said, “to a woman who has flown in space?”
“I do,” he said seriously.
Xu continued to rise in the leadership, in part — she knew — thanks to the connection with herself, which he had been assiduous in maintaining and exploiting, and in part thanks to his own untiring efforts on his own behalf.
Xu had joined the Communist Party in his teens. He had been an electrical engineer, and had worked as a factory administrator for fifteen years, before starting to work his way through the ranks in various economic and diplomatic agencies. He was cultivated, able to chat freely in any of his three languages — Russian, Romanian and English — and, Jiang had observed for herself, he was able to charm and surprise many of those he encountered with his education and facility. He could recite lines from the U.S. Declaration of Independence as easily as verses of T’ang dynasty poetry.
Jiang would not admit to liking Xu Shiyou. Still less did she regard him as worthy of her trust. But she had come to understand, with a cynical analysis that surprised herself, that as long as she did nothing to tarnish her image as a new demi-god, his interests were identical to hers. Therefore, she decided, he was an ally…
So she said, “Give me your advice, Xu Shiyou.”
“Whatever the Helmsman says to you, you must endeavor to see the world through his eyes. You must suffer with him, sense his fears.”
“His fears?”
“Remember this: the Helmsman was born in 1904. Eleven decades ago: think of all he has seen, and suffered, in those years, his long and hard life matching the tortured history of our country. When the Helmsman came of age, China was a mere dish of loose sand, as Sun Yat-sen said: hopelessly divided by warlordism and chronic social disorder. There is, embedded deep in the bones of these, our senior leaders, a fear of falling back into such a state of humiliation and disunity.
“And now, in the twilight of his long life, the Helmsman faces chaos once more,” Xu said solemnly. “It is no secret that our losses in the attempt to liberate Taiwan were monstrous… And it is, of course, the peasants in the hinterland who suffered most. It is said that every family in China lost a son or daughter on the beaches of Taiwan. True or not, that has become a symbol, provoking unrest in the provinces.
“The answer to all this, of course,” said Xu, “is economic growth. Expansion. But we are contained, by the Americans and their allies. Our technology cannot match theirs. The puppet allies ring us, their satellites watch over us. And hence any conflict in the future like the Taiwan war must, inevitably, end in defeat for us.
“We must face stark facts. Every effort has been made to maintain ample food and decent housing. But the peasants have little spare income, little choice. The farmers see their cousins in the city acquiring private phone lines, houses, cars, softscreens, image-tattoos… And meanwhile, all the forecasts predict a worsening of the lot of the peasants, as new diseases spread, as even the water supplies shrivel…
“We are becoming desperate.”
“And it is the fault of the West.”
“Yes,” he said. “The West remains corrupt, increasingly decadent, and must ultimately rot from within…”
“Yes,” she said. In fact she did agree; based on her own observation, she believed this to be true.
“But when we face the West, Jiang, we face a lunatic; a lunatic more powerful than we are, who cripples us with his threat. What we must do is strike at him — hard, a single blow, which will remove his dominance — perhaps for all time.”
That confused her. “What do you mean?”
“We must seek a single hammer blow, which might change the shape of human destiny for ten thousand years… And that is what the Helmsman will say to you.”
An attendant came to call them forward. The Great Helmsman was ready to receive them.
“Be ready, Jiang Ling,” Xu said softly. “Be open.”
She approached, fear and fascination mixed in equal part.
He was a wisp of a man, she thought, a dried-out husk of a man, overwhelmed by the bulky technology of his wheelchair. She saw medical equipment, discreet, unlabelled black boxes, tucked into the frame of the chair, pipes and tubes snaking up into the Helmsman’s clothing. And she thought she could detect the liquid bulk of a colostomy bag under his jacket. A middle-aged woman, dumpy and plain — perhaps one of his daughters — stood at his side, her plump hand protectively on his thin shoulder. Occasionally, as the leaders paid their obeisance, he would react — nod, shake his head, stare — and the companion would lean, bringing her face closer to his, evidently attempting to decipher his meaning.
Jiang was called to approach. She did so, feeling still more nervous than the day she had been called to enter the first space capsule.
He lifted his head. The eyes in that battered face seemed to fix on her. His mouth worked, wordless.
The daughter began to intone, as if resuming a speech suspended halfway through. Without addressing Jiang directly, she spoke of the crimes of the United States, of atrocities committed during the recent conflict against hapless Chinese servicemen on the beaches of Taiwan. The people of the United States were foreign devils, of the type who had raped China repeatedly in the past. And they did not act alone, but in cooperation with their allies — even with their old foe Russia, even with the new young states which had budded off the corpse of the U.S., and which competed with it in other arenas. The world, it seemed, was polarized: China stood alone, ringed by her enemies, and it was ever thus…