plunge, would come to ring us all, like human clappers in a giant bell. Ironic that The Middle Kingdom uses shēnyuān (“abyss”) for the rest of the world, seeing this huge, gaping wound in the shared land between them and us. (7/7)

town, one with very little in the way of “alarums and excursions”, a little town, one, famous (or infamous) only for that lost son (of which prodigal, more later), abides with a small, mean, vision of itself. Yet, even here, we knew, with a bone-deep knowledge that those vibrations of the (6/7)

after, burning out of control (rumour says the smoke is visible from the cliffs at Dover; I’ve not checked), gave the lie to the infallibility of the AI Emperor, suddenly, shockingly, exposed as less than perfect, less than god-like. Like insects in amber, caught as we were in a small sea-side (5/7)

(although intimately numbered, detailed and, of course, known to Him, if the stories are true) cavalcades of trade goods — riches beyond any of our dreams of avarice — of vast tracts of the fertile, crowded, Turkish plains laid waste by the fall, village and town searing fires still, weeks (4/7)

scale of the change to come. The news arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The loss — and lost to sabotage yet, not simple happenstance — of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, of huge, glittering, almost uncountable (3/7)

begin to conceive of the sight. Fallen is for kids with skinned knees. This is a very demi-god, skewered, plunging to earth. Even in our backwater little town, at the farthest corner of the Empire, we knew of this. We’d seen the pictures, the videos, but we here couldn’t conceive of the very (2/7)