The White Mountain Read Free Page A

of thought. Lever stared back at him with mounting surprise.
    â€˜Shall I continue?’
    Lever laughed. ‘So you do know it. But how? Who showed it to you?’
    Kim handed it back. ‘I know because I wrote it.’
    Lever looked down at the folder then back at Kim, giving a small laugh of disbelief. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘You were only a boy.’
    Kim was watching Lever closely. ‘It was something I put together from some old computer records I unearthed. I thought Berdichev had had it destroyed. I never knew he’d kept a copy.’
    â€˜And you knew nothing about the dissemination?’
    â€˜The dissemination?’
    â€˜You mean, you really didn’t know?’ Lever shook his head, astonished. ‘This here is the original, but there are a thousand more copies back in Europe, each one of them like this, handwritten. Now we’re going to do the same over here – to disseminate them amongst those sympathetic to the cause.’
    â€˜The cause?’
    â€˜The Sons of Benjamin Franklin. Oh, we’d heard rumours about the File and its contents some time back, but until recently we’d never seen it. Now, however…’ He laughed then shook his head again in amazement. ‘Well, it’s like a fever in our blood. But you understand that, don’t you, Kim? After all, you wrote the bloody thing!’
    Kim nodded, but inside he felt numbed. He had never imagined…
    â€˜Here, look…’ Lever led Kim over to one of the tapestries. ‘I commissioned this a year ago, before I’d seen the file. We put it together from what we knew about the past. It shows how things were before the City.’
    Kim looked at it then shook his head. ‘It’s wrong.’
    â€˜Wrong?’
    â€˜Yes, all the details are wrong. Look.’ He touched one of the animals on the rocks in the foreground. ‘This is a lion. But it’s an African lion. There never were any lions of this kind in America. And those wagons, crossing the plains, they would have been drawn by horses. The petrol engine was a much later development. And these tents here – they’re Mongol in style. Red Indian tents were different. And then there are these pagodas…’
    â€˜But in the File it says…’
    â€˜Oh, it’s not that these things didn’t exist, it’s just that they didn’t exist at the same time or in the same place. Besides, there were Cities even then – here on the east coast.’
    â€˜Cities… but I thought…’
    â€˜You thought the Han invented Cities? No. Cities have been in Man’s blood since the dawn of civilization. Why, Security Central at Bremen is nothing more than a copy of the great zigurrat at Ur, built more than five thousand years ago.’
    Lever had gone very still. He was watching Kim closely, a strange intensity in his eyes. After a moment he shook his head, giving a soft laugh.
    â€˜You really did write it, didn’t you?’
    Kim nodded then turned back to the tapestry. ‘And this…’ He bent down, indicating the lettering at the foot of the picture. ‘This is wrong, too.’
    Lever leaned forward, staring at the lettering. ‘How do you mean?’
    â€˜ AD . It doesn’t mean what’s written here. That was another of Tsao Ch’un’s lies. He was never related to the Emperor Tsao He, or to any of them. So all of this business about the Ancestral Dynasties is complete nonsense. Likewise BC . It doesn’t mean “Before the Crane”. In fact, Tsao He, the “Crane”, supposedly the founder of the Han dynasty and ancestor of all subsequent dynasties, never even existed. In reality, Liu Chi-tzu, otherwise known as P’ing ti, was Emperor at the time – and he was twelfth of the great Han dynasty emperors. So, you see, the Han adapted parts of their own history almost as radically as they changed that of the