La Taupe et le Dragon (The Dragon's
Eye)
Joël Champetier
(Excerpt from chapter 1, p. 1-9)
Utter bedlam prevailed inside New China's starport. A compact mass of Chinese immigrants clogged the corridors of the vast terminal, their exhilaration too great for them to pay any attention to the frantic waving of security guards or the screeching of loudspeakers. Heroically shoving and elbowing his way through, Réjean Tanner extricated himself from the jammed mob and managed to flee toward an area with some breathing room. There, he spotted Commander Wang Zhong, who had kept him a seat on one of the last uncrowded benches.
Tanner thanked his superior, then sat with a sigh of relief, worn out by the nerve-racking atmospheric reentry aboard the shuttle and by the hours spent waiting in the customs line. He massaged his forehead; he felt nauseous, and a hellish headache was splitting his skull open at the seams. After six weeks of interstellar travel, his body was proving unequal to the demands of the local gravity.
Out of sheer habit, he checked his watch. It showed nothing, of course. With a sigh of annoyance, he took off the now useless wristwatch: the ionization of New China's upper atmosphere prevented the orbiting of timekeeping satellites. A locally made watch would probably be his first purchase on New China.
Weariness also affected his superior. The usually stoic Commander Wang indulged in a rare display of petulance:
"Someone should have been waiting, at the very least an agent with a car. I tell you, Bloembergen's casualness verges on insolence!"
An hour crawled by. It was hot. Through the large bays, the orange star splashed with subdued gold the marquetry of the starport's floor, a stylized pattern of intertwined dragons. Wang dozed. Tanner began to feel impatient: how long were they going to stew here?
A small crowd of Chinese immigrants gathered near their bench. A young Han woman positioned herself near Réjean Tanner and, her voice amplified by a megaphone, directed the flow of immigrants to prevent another crush. To make it twice as much fun, she insisted on repeating each instruction in English and Mandarin, with a thick Cantonese accent, as if the megaphone's distortion wasn't enough to almost completely garble her words. Tanner tugged on the edge of her skirt.
"Can't you go and yell somewhere else with that thing?"
The young hostess eyed Tanner scornfully, surprised to find him a large red-haired fellow. A European One who spoke perfect Mandarin. Better than hers, at any rate.
"I'm doing my job," she answered curtly.
Wang urged Tanner to remain calm; it was neither the time nor the place for a scene. They trudged away, wearily dragging their bags toward a quieter part of the terminal. For naught, since joiners were hard at work there, repairing the floor's marquetry and applying a new coat of clear varnish, the particularly unpleasant stink of which boosted Tanner's migraine by an order of magnitude.
They observed through a large bay the thunderous landing of another shuttle. Fifty or so passengers, men, women, and children, exited from the shuttle, thrilled and disoriented, staring at the sky or kissing the cracked concrete of the apron. The shuttle left again immediately in order to complete the transfer of the starship's three thousand passengers.
In a cloudless sky of yellowish green, the sun - Epsilon Bootis A - neared zenith and bathed the floating dust raised by the shuttle's liftoff in a soothing amber light. Farther away, eastward, an industrial park of the Earth Free Trade Area stretched beyond the concrete hangars of the starport. Even farther yet, the sea of shimmering green gold spread outward. Tanner rubbed his neck: hard to find the morning sun beautiful when one was so tired.
"Commander Wang?"
Wang and Tanner inspected the newcomer, a thin Caucasian, fashionably dressed. His pasty-white face made for an almost shocking contrast with his shoulder-length black hair. He held between his fingers a cigarette wrapped in yellow paper. Somewhat foppishly, he touched it to his mouth, then blew with a carefree air a smoke ring toward the ceiling. Tanner blinked, taken aback for a fraction of a second: on Earth, it was rare to find Europeans who smoked. The man inhaled again, then scowled, letting the smoke swirl in time with his breaths.
"I'm Francis Barnaby. I work for the Bureau."
"Well, well, none too soon," grumbled Wang.
Barnaby muttered a vague excuse. He seemed rather amused by the annoyance of the officer. He looked at Tanner:
"And you're the rookie?"
"Réjean Tanner."
Barnaby nodded, his ambiguous smile hard to decipher. His attention turned toward the bay, and as he gestured with a gloved hand he remarked:
"Say, there's that good old Eye"
He pointed east, where a green-tinged dot, so dazzling that a glimpse was enough to hurt one's retina, climbed above the horizon. The Eye of the Dragon: the other star in the Epsilon Bootis binary, a blazing A2 blue-white dwarf. Within all the windows flashed a fluorescing message: DO NOT LOOK AT THE EYE OF THE DRAGON in English, pinyin, and even old Chinese characters.
Outside, the starport employees stopped whatever they were doing and straggled back inside.
"No more work today," commented Barnaby.
Wang expressed his impatience: he was looking forward to a short rest and a bite to eat. Barnaby gestured for them to follow him, even offering, after a moment's thought, to carry Wang's luggage.
Wang took the lead and they crossed the entire starport, avoiding the immigration queues, walking past the stalls from which wafted the oily smell of fried breads, the sweetish fragrance of sherbets, and the spicy aroma of roasting chicken.
Barnaby was now taking an interest in Tanner's gaberdine. He was unceremoniously fingering the black hems and pinching the fabric.
"So, is this the new rage on Earth?"
"I guess so I bought it especially for my posting here."
Barnaby gestured fatalistically.
"That's the drawback of living on such a remote colony: it's hard to keep up with what's in pity, though: you won't be wearing it often. First, because it's too hot here. Second, because it's the best way to be spotted by Tewu agents."
"There are Tewu agents inside the EFTA?"
As soon as he closed his mouth, Tanner knew that he'd sounded naive. It was obvious that New China's intelligence service had observers within the free-trade enclave. But Barnaby refrained from making fun of his slip and merely shrugged.
"Of course, in the final analysis, your clothing matters little. For the Tewu, the mere fact you're European will be enough to arouse suspicion-"
Barnaby cut himself off and stopped the two newcomers in front of a bazaar's display.
"I suppose you don't have hats."
"Of course not," replied Commander Wang.
"Simply indispensable. And no shades, either, right?"
He sighed, as if exasperated by their thoughtlessness. He entered the bazaar and bought two sets of wraparound eyewear:
"Not great, but they'll do for today."
He also bought a couple of large conical hats of aluminized plastic.
Outside, even the color of the sky had changed. If a soft green tint still prevailed along the western horizon, the sky shifted eastward to a vibrant electric blue. Tanner tried to spot the burning pinprick of the Eye, but the starport's facade blocked his view of it.
"Put on your glasses and don't look at the Eye of the Dragon," warned Barnaby as he got out his own sunglasses.
"We've already been told."
"You can't be told often enough. The Eye will quickly make you blind if you're not shielding your retinas with glass. Blindness is endemic here on New China. My own eyesight has been deteriorating"
They walked briskly toward Barnaby's car, down an almost deserted street. Passersby were rare and it was impossible to tell the Chinese from the Europeans: gloves, glasses, and large hats effectively made everybody anonymous.
"I thought the glasses would be tinted," remarked Tanner.
Barnaby whooped with delight:
"I was waiting for that! Newcomers always expect us to be walking around in mirrorshades. I don't know why the media always show us like that on Earth. Maybe because it looks so cool Of course, our glasses don't need to be tinted; they don't have to stop visible light, but the ultraviolet kind. The glass they use is quite efficient as a rule. As long as you don't stare the Dragon in the Eye - Hell! What's going on here?"
Half a dozen children were playing around Barnaby's car; two of them were even standing on the front hood. Barnaby swore in Mandarin and the kids ran off so fast one even lost his hat. Utterly exasperated, Barnaby shouted for him to come back. The youngster stopped, turned hesitantly, awkwardly protecting his forehead with arms and hands. Scared by the angry tone of the grown-up's voice, the child refused to come closer. Barnaby took out a coin from his suit. He called out more caressingly and coaxed the youngster forward. Tanner was surprised: on Earth, no kid would have fallen for such an obvious trick.
Hard to say if it was a boy or a girl. Eight years old, if that. Beneath the thick black hair and the shades, snot trailed down the face's baby fat. A gloved hand grabbed the coin and slipped it into a pocket. Only then did the kid deign to accept his hat, which he tied on deftly.
"You shouldn't climb on cars," scolded Barnaby.
"It wasn't me."
"What are you doing outside at this hour? Shouldn't you be home?"
The child mumbled a few incomprehensible words. He then asked more intelligibly for another coin and Barnaby told him to scram. Swaggering proudly, the urchin headed back to taunt his friends, who hadn't gotten a coin.
Tanner was amazed: "Children playing without supervision? And not a grandparent or a teacher in sight!"
"This isn't Earth," replied Barnaby disdainfully. "Kids here are a dime a dozen."
He unlocked the door, then shoved their luggage inside the car's tiny trunk.
"Now, get inside quick. You don't have any gloves."
The stubby buildings of the starport vanished behind them as the car traveled down nondescript streets. If it hadn't been for the inscriptions in fluorescing paint, Tanner might have thought he was back in a commonplace terrestrial suburb. The other unexpected detail was the use of the old Chinese ideographic writing, as at the starport.
The trip was short, covering less than three kilometers. Barnaby parked the car in front of the European embassy, a handsome building in violet granite. After a second's thought, Tanner decided the granite was pink, in fact, and that it was the Dragon's Eye which stained it purple. Tanner extricated himself from the narrow backseat. Ignoring Barnaby's assurances that all their luggage would be brought to their quarters, Wang recovered a small aluminum case.
"This briefcase goes everywhere I go."
"Let me carry it, at least," offered Tanner.
Rather grudgingly, Wang accepted.
A liveried domestic appeared. Barnaby returned the keys to him and passed through the large doors of the European embassy, trailed by Wang and Tanner. Two guards immediately challenged the group. Barnaby carelessly flashed his identification. The guards hardly glanced at it, recognizing the agent. They used a sharper tone to ask Wang and Tanner for their papers. But their attitude changed when they saw Wang's black-bordered insignia. With due deference, they returned the documents and saluted.
"Good day to you, sir. Welcome to the European embassy, Commander..."
© 1997 Éditions Alire & Joël Champetier
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