Ice and Fire by David Wingrove Page A

bearded, his brow heavily lined with black make-up pencil, yet still his youth shone through, in his eyes and in the quickness of his movements.
    Tsu Ma reached out and ruffled his hair, smiling for the first time since the killing. ‘Did it frighten you, Tao Chu?’
    The boy looked down, abashed. ‘I thought…’
    Tsu Ma knelt down and held his shoulders, nodding, remembering how he had felt the first time he had seen the ritual, not then knowing what was happening, or why.
    Tao Chu looked up and met his eyes. ‘It seemed so real, Uncle Ma. For a moment I thought it was Grandpa Tiao.’
    Tsu Ma smiled. ‘You were not alone in that, Nephew Chu.’
    Tao Chu was his dead brother’s third and youngest son and Tsu Ma’s favourite; a lively, ever-smiling boy with the sweetest, most joyful laugh. At the ritual earlier Tao Chu had impersonated Tsu Tiao, playing out scenes from the old T’ang’s life before the watching Court. The practice was as old as the Middle Kingdom itself and formed one link in the great chain of tradition, but it was more than mere ritual, it was a living ceremony, an act of deep respect and celebration, almost a poem to the honoured dead. For the young actor, however, it was a confusing, not to say unnerving experience, to find the dead man unexpectedly there, in the seat of honour, watching the performance.
    ‘Do you understand why I had to kill the copy, Tao Chu?’
    Tao Chu glanced quickly at Li Yuan, then looked back steadily at his uncle. ‘Not at first, Uncle Ma, but Yuan explained it to me. He said you had to kill the guilt you felt at Grandpa Tiao’s death. That you could not be your own man until you had.’
    ‘Then you understand how deeply I revere my father? How hard it was to harm even a copy of him?’
    Tao Chu nodded, his eyes bright with understanding.
    ‘Good.’ He squeezed the boy’s shoulders briefly, then stood. ‘But I must thank you, Tsu Tao Chu. You did well today. You gave me back my father.’
    Tao Chu smiled, greatly pleased by his uncle’s praise, then, at a touch from Li Yuan, he joined the older boy in a deep bow and backed away, leaving the T’ang to their Council.
    From the camera’s vantage point, twenty li out from the spaceship, it was hard to tell its scale. The huge sphere of its forward compartments was visible only as a nothingness in the star-filled field of space – a circle of darkness more intense than that which surrounded it. Its tail, so fine and thin that it was like a thread of silver, stretched out for ten times its circumference, terminating in a smaller, silvered sphere little thicker than the thread.
    It was beautiful. Li Shai Tung drew closer, operating the remote from a distance of almost three hundred thousand li , adjusting the camera image with the most delicate of touches, the slight delay in response making him cautious. Five li out he slowed the remote and increased the definition.
    The darkness took on form. The sphere was finely stippled, pocked here and there with hatches or spiked with communication towers. Fine, almost invisible lines covered the whole surface, as if the sphere were netted by the frailest of spiders’ webs.
    Li Shai Tung let the remote drift slowly towards the starship and sat back, one hand smoothing through his long beard while he looked about him at the faces of his fellow T’ang.
    ‘Well?’
    He glanced across at the waiting technicians and dismissed them with a gesture. They had done their work well in getting an undetected remote so close to The New Hope . Too well, perhaps. He had not expected it to be so beautiful.
    ‘How big is it?’ asked Wu Shih, turning to him. ‘I can’t help thinking it must be huge to punch so big a hole in the star field.’
    Li Shai Tung looked back at him, the understanding of thirty years passing between them. ‘It’s huge. Approximately two li in diameter.’
    ‘Approximately?’ It was Wei Feng, T’ang of East Asia, who picked up on the word.
    ‘Yes. The