The Broken Wheel

Heng leaned back, a faint smile coming to his lips. "Yes. Afraid." He hesitated. "I'll play you again, Shih Novacek. One final game. But this time we'll make the stakes worth playing for. Two-hundred thousand. No. Two-hundred-and-fifty thousand."

Sergey looked about him at the watching Han, seeing the tension in every face. This was no longer about the money; for Heng it was now a matter of pride—of face.

He sat, placing his hands firmly on the edge of the table, looking back at Heng, fixing him in his gaze, his manner suddenly different—harder, almost brutal in its challenge.

"All right. But not for two-fifty. Let's have no half measures between us, Heng Chian-ye. If I play you, I play you for a million. Understand me?"

There were low gasps from all around the table, then a furious murmur of voices. But Heng seemed unaware of the hubbub that surrounded him. He sat staring back fixedly at Sergey, his eyes wide as if in shock. His hands were trembling now, his brow was beaded with sweat.

"Well?"

Unable to find his voice, Heng nodded.

"Good." Sergey leaned forward and took the cards; then, surprising them all, he handed them to Yi. "You deal, Yi Shan-ch'i. I want no one to say that this was not a fair game."

He saw Heng's eyes widen at that. Saw realization dawn in Heng's frightened face.

So now you know.

He kept his face a mask, yet inwardly he was exulting. I've got you now, you bastard. Got you precisely where 1 wanted you. A million. Yes, it was more than Heng Chian-ye had. More than he could possibly borrow from his friends. He would have no alternative. If he lost he would have to go to his uncle.

HENG YU TURNED in his seat, dismissing the servant, then went outside into the anteroom. Heng Chian-ye knelt there, on the far side of the room, his head bowed low, his forehead touched almost to the tiled floor. He crossed the room, then stood over the young man, looking down at him. "What is it, Cousin?"

Heng Chian-ye stayed as he was. "Forgive me, Uncle Yu, but I have the most grave request to make of you."

Heng Yu, Minister of Transportation for Li Shai Tung and Head of the Heng Family, pulled at his beard, astonished. Chian-ye was fourteen years his junior, the youngest son of his uncle, Heng Chi-po, the former Minister, who had passed away eleven years earlier. Several times over the past five years he had had to bail the boy out when he was in trouble, but all that had changed six months ago, when Chian-ye had come into his inheritance. Now that he had his own income, Chian-ye had been a much rarer visitor at his "Uncle" Yu's house.

"A grave request? At this hour, Chian-ye? Do you know what time it is? Can it not wait until the morning?"

Heng Chian-ye made a small, miserable movement of his head. "I would not have come, Uncle, were it not a matter of the utmost urgency."

Heng Yu frowned, confused, his head still full of figures from the report he had been studying.

"What is it, Chian-ye? Is someone ill?"

But he knew, every as he said it, that it was not that. Fu Hen would have come with such news, not Chian-ye. Unless ... He felt himself go cold. "It isn't Fu Hen, is it?"

Heng Chian-ye raised his head the tiniest bit. "No, honored Uncle. No one is ill. I ..."

Heng Yu sighed with relief, then leaned closer. "Have you been drinking, Chian-ye?" *

"I—" Then, astonishingly, Chian-ye burst into tears. Chian-ye, who had never so much as expressed one word of remorse over his own wasteful lifestyle, in tears! Heng Yu looked down at where Chian-ye's hand gripped the hem of his pau and shook his head. His voice was suddenly forceful, the voice of a Minister commanding an underling.

"Heng Chian-ye! Remember who you are! Why, look at you! Crying like a four-year-old! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"Forgive me, Uncle! I cannot help it! I have disgraced our noble family. I have lost a million yuan!"

Heng Yu fell silent. Then he gave a small laugh of disbelief.

"Surely I heard you wrong, Chian-ye? A million yuan⁷."

But a tiny nod of Chian-ye's bowed head confirmed it. A million yuan had been lost. Probably at the gaming table.

Heng Yu looked about him at the cold formality of the anteroom, at its mock pillars and the tiny bronze statues of gods that rested in the alcoves on either side, the unreality of it all striking him forcibly. Then he shook his head. "It isn't possible, Chian-ye. Even you cannot have lost that much, surely?"

But he knew that it was. Nothing less would have brought Chian-ye here. Nothing less would have reduced him to such a state.

Heng Yu sighed, his irritation mixed with a sudden despair. Was he never to be free of his uncle's failings? First that business with Lwo Kang, and now this. As if the father were reborn in his wastrel son to blight the family's fortunes with his carelessness and selfishness.

For now he would have to borrow to carry out his schemes. Would have to take that high-interest loan Shih Saxton had offered him. A million yuan! He cursed silently, then drew away, irritably freeing his pau from his cousin's grasp.

"Come into the study, Chian-ye, and tell me what has happened."

He sat behind his great ministerial desk, his face stern, listening to Chian-ye's story. When his cousin finished, he sat there silently, considering. Finally he looked back at Chian-ye, shaking his head.

"You have been a foolish young man, Chian-ye. First you overstretched yourself. That was bad enough. But then . . . well, to promise something that was not yours to promise, that was. . . insufferable."

He saw how Chian-ye blushed and hung his head at that. So there is some sense of Tightness in you, he thought. Some sense of shame.

"However," he continued, heartened by the clear sign of his cousin's shame, "you are family, Chian-ye. You are Heng." He pronounced the word with a pride that made his cousin look up and meet his eyes, surprised.

"Yes. Heng. And the word of a Heng must be honored, whether given mistakenly or otherwise."

"You mean—?"

Heng Yu's voice hardened. "I mean, Cousin, that you will be silent and listen to me!"

Heng Chian-ye lowered his head again, chastened; his whole manner subservient now.

"As I was saying. The word of a Heng must be honored. So, yes, Chian-ye, I shall meet Shih Novacek's conditions. He shall have the Ko Ming bronze in settlement for your debt. As for the information he wanted, you can do that for yourself, right now. The terminal is over there, in the corner. However, there are two things you will do for me."

Chian-ye raised his head slightly, suddenly attentive.

"First you will sign over half of your annual income, to be placed in a trust that will mature only when you are thirty."

Chian-ye hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod.

"Good. And second, you will resign your membership to the Jade Peony."

Heng Chian-ye looked up, astonished. "But, Uncle . . . ?" Then, seeing the angry determination in Heng Yu's face, he lowered his eyes. "As you say, Uncle Yu."

"Good," Heng Yu said, more kindly now that it was settled. "Then go to the terminal. You know how to operate it. The codes are marked to the right. But ask me if you must. I shall be here a few hours yet, finishing my reports."

He watched Chian-ye go to the terminal, then sat back, smoothing at his beard with his left hand, his right hand resting on the desk. A million yuan! That, truly, would have been disastrous. But this—this deal. He smiled. Yes, it was a gods-given opportunity to put a bit and brace on his reckless cousin, to school him to self-discipline. And the price? One ugly bronze worth, at most, two-hundred thousand, and a small snippet of information on a fellow student!

He nodded, strangely pleased with the way things had turned out, then picked up the report again. He was about to push it into the slot behind his ear when Chian-ye turned, looking across at him.

"Uncle Yu?"

"Yes, Chian-ye?"

"There seems to be no file."

Heng Yu laughed, then stood, coming round his desk. "Of course there's a file, Chian-ye. There's a file on everyone in Chung Kuo. You must have keyed the code incorrectly."

He stared at the screen. INFORMATION NOT AVAILABLE, it read.

"Here," he said, taking the scrap of paper from his cousin's hand. "Let me see those details."

He stopped dead, staring at the name that was written on the paper, then laughed uncomfortably.

"Is something wrong, Uncle Yu?"

"No . . . nothing. I ..." He smiled reassuringly, then repeated what Chian-ye had tried before, getting the same response. "Hmm," he said. "There must be something wrong with this terminal. I'll call one of my men to come and see to it."

Heng Chian-ye was watching him strangely. "Shall I wait, Uncle?"

For a moment he didn't answer, his head filled with questions. Then he shook his head absently. "No, Chian-ye." Then, remembering what day it was, he turned, facing him.

"You realize what day it is, Chian-ye?"

The young man shook his head.

"You mean you have been wasting your time gambling when your father's grave remains unswept?"

Chian-ye swallowed and looked down, abashed. "Sao Mu." he said quietly.

"Yes, Sao Mu. Or so it is for another .three-quarters of an hour. Now go, Chian-ye, and do your duty. I'll have these details for you by the morning, I promise you."

When Chian-ye was gone he locked the door, then came back to the terminal.

Ben Shepherd. Now what would Shih Novacek be doing wanting to know about the Shepherd boy? One thing was certain—it wasn't a harmless inquiry. For no one, Han or Hung Mao, threw a million yuan away on such a small thing. Unless it wasn't small.

He turned, looking across at the tiny chip of the report where it lay on his desk, then turned back, his decision made. The report could wait. This was much more important. Whatever it was.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Catherine

wOULD YOU MIND if I sat with you?"

He looked up at her, smiling, seeming to see her, to create her, for the very first time. She felt unnerved by that gaze. Its intensity was unexpected, unnatural. And yet he was smiling. "With me?"

She was suddenly uncertain. There was only one chair at his table. The waiters had removed the others, isolating him, so that no one would approach him.

She felt herself coloring. Her neck and her cheeks felt hot, and after that first, startling contact, her eyes avoided his.

"Well?" he said, leaning back, his fingers resting lightly on the casing of the comset on the table in front of him.

He seemed unreachable, and yet he was smiling.

"I... I wanted. . ." Her eyes reached out, making contact with his. So un-fathomably deep they were. They held hers, drawing her out from herself. ". . . to sit with you."

But she was suddenly afraid, her body tensed against him. "Sit where?" His hand lifted, the fingers opening in a gesture of emptiness. The smile grew broader. Then he relented. "All right. Get a chair." She brought a chair and put it down across from him.

"No. Closer." He indicated the space beside him. "I can't talk across tables." She nodded, setting the chair down where he indicated. "Better."

He was still watching her. His eyes had not left her face from the moment she had first spoken to him.

Again she felt a flash of fear, pure fear, pass through her. He was like no one she had ever met. So— She shook her head, the merest suggestion of movement, and felt a shiver run along her spine. No, she had never felt like this before—so— helpless.

"What do you do?"

Not "Who are you?." Nothing so formal as an introduction. Instead, this. Direct and unabashed. What do you do.⁷ Peeling away all surfaces.

For the first time she smiled at him. "I ... paint."

He nodded, his lips pinched together momentarily. Then he reached out and took her hands in his own, studying them, turning them over.

So firm and warm and fine, those hands. Her own lay caged in his, her fingers thinner, paler than those that held them.

"Good hands," he said, but did not relinquish them. "Now, tell me what you wanted to talk to me about."

About hands, perhaps. Or a million other things. But the warmth, the simple warmth of his hands curled about her own, had robbed her of her voice.

He looked down again, following her eyes. "What is it, Catherine?"

She looked up sharply, searching his face, wondering how he knew her name. He watched her a moment longer, then gave a soft laugh.

"There's little you don't pick up, sitting here. Voices carry."

"And you hear it all? Remember it?"

"Yes."

His eyes were less fierce now, less predatory in their gaze; yet it still seemed as if he were staring at her, as if his wide-eyed look were drug-induced. But it no longer frightened her, no longer picked her up and held her there, suspended, soul-naked and vulnerable before it.

Her fear of him subsided. The warmth of his hands . . .

"What do you paint?"

Until a moment ago it had seemed important. All important. But now? She tilted her head, looking past him, aware of the shape of his head, the way he sat there, so easy, so comfortable in his body. Again, so unexpected.

He laughed. Fine, open laughter. Enjoying the moment. She had not thought him capable of such laughter.

"You're a regular chatterbox, aren't you? So eloquent. . ."

He lifted his head as he uttered the last word, giving it a clipped, sophisticated sound that was designed to make her laugh.

She laughed, enjoying his gentle mockery.

"You had a reason for approaching me, I'm sure. But now you merely sit there, mute, glorious—and quite beautiful."

His voice had softened. His eyes were half-lidded now, like dark, occluded suns.

He turned her hands within his own and held them, his fingers lying upon her wrists, tracing the blood's quickening pulse.

She looked up, surprised, then looked down at his left hand again, feeling the ridge there. A clear, defined line of skin, circling the wrist.

"Your hand . . . ?"

"Is a hand," he said, lifting it to her face so that she could see it better. "An accident. When I was a child."

"Oh." Her fingers traced the line of flesh, a shiver passing through her. It was a fine, strong hand. She closed her hand on his, her fingers laced into his fingers, and looked at him.

"Can I paint you?"

His eyes widened, seeming to search her own for meanings. Then he smiled at her, the smile like a flower unfolding slowly to the sun. "Yes," he said. "I'd like that."

IT WAS NOT THE BEST she had ever done, but it was good, the composition sound, the seated figure lifelike. She looked from the canvas to the reality, sitting there on her bed, and smiled.

"I've finished."

He looked up distractedly. "Finished?"

She laughed. "The portrait, Ben. I've finished it."

"Ah . . ." He stood up, stretching, then looked across at her again. "That was quick."

"Hardly quick. You've been sitting for me the best part of three hours."

"Three hours?" He laughed strangely. "I'm sorry. I was miles away."

"Miles?"

He smiled. "It's nothing. Just an old word, that's all."

She moved aside, letting him stand before the canvas, anxious to know what he thought of it. For a moment she looked at it anew, trying to see it for the first time, as he was seeing it. Then she looked back at him.

He was frowning.

"What is it?" she asked, feeling a pulse start in her throat.

He put one hand out vaguely, indicating the canvas. "Where am I?"

She gave a small laugh. "What do you mean?"

"This . . ." He lifted the picture from its mechanical easel and threw it down. "It's shit, Catherine. Lifeless shit!"

She stood there a moment, too shocked to say anything, unable to believe that he could act so badly, so—boorishly. She glared at him, furious at what he'd done, then bent down and picked up the painting. Where he had thrown it down the frame had snapped, damaging the bottom of the picture. It would be impossible to repair.

She clutched the painting to her, her deep sense of hurt fueling the anger she felt toward him.

"Get out!" she screamed at him. "Go on, get out of here, right now!"

He turned away, seemingly unaffected by her outburst; then he leaned over the bed, picking up the folder he had brought with him. She watched him, expecting him to leave, to go without a further word, but he turned back, facing her, offering the folder.

"Here," he said, meeting her eyes calmly. "This is what I mean. This is the kind of thing you should be doing, not that crap you mistake for art."

She gave a laugh of astonishment. He was unbelievable.

"You arrogant bastard."

She felt like slapping his face. Like smashing the canvas over his smug, self-complacent head.

"Take it," he said, suddenly more forceful, his voice assuming an air of command. Then, strangely, he relented, his voice softening. "Just look. That's all. And afterward, if you can't see what I mean, I'll go. It's just that I thought you were different from the rest. I thought. . ."

He shrugged, then looked down at the folder again. It was a simple art folder— the kind that carried holo flats—its jet-black cover unmarked.

She hesitated, her eyes searching his face, looking for some further insult, but, if anything, he seemed subdued, disappointed in her. She frowned, then put the painting down.

"Here," she said, taking the folder from him angrily. "You've got nerve, I'll give you that."

He said nothing. He was watching her now, expectantly, those dark eyes of his seeming to catch and hold every last atom of her being, their gaze disconcerting.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, the folder in her lap, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes.

"What is this?"

"Open it and see."

For a long time she was silent, her head down, her fingers tracing the shapes and forms that stared up at her from the sheaf of papers that had been inside the folder. Then she looked up at him, wide-eyed, all anger gone from her.

"Who painted these?"

He sat down beside her, taking the folder and flicking through to the first of the reproductions.

"This is by Caravaggio. His 'Supper at Emmaus,' painted more than six hundred years ago. And this . . . this is Vermeer, painted almost sixty years later; he called it 'The Artist's Studio.' And this is by Rembrandt, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,' painted ten years earlier. And this is 'Laocoon' by El Greco—"

She put her hand on his, stopping him from turning the print over, staring at the stretched white forms that lay there on the page.

"I've—I've never seen anything like these. They're—"

She shivered, then looked up at him, suddenly afraid.

"Why have I never seen them? I mean, they're beautiful. They're real somehow."

She stopped, suddenly embarrassed, realizing now what he had meant. She had painted him in the traditional way—the only way she knew—but he had known something better.

"What does it mean?" she asked, her fingers tracing the pale, elongated forms. "Who are they?"

He gave a small laugh, then shook his head. "The old man lying down in the center, he's Laocoon. He was the priest who warned the Trojans not to allow the wooden horse into Troy."

She gave a little shake of her head, then laughed. "Troy? Where was Troy? And what do you mean by wooden horse?"

He laughed, once again that openness, that strange naturalness of his surfacing unexpectedly. "It was an ancient tale. About a war that happened three thousand years ago between two small nation states. A war that was fought over a woman." "A woman?"

"Yes." He looked away, a faint smile on his lips.

"How strange. To fight a war over a woman." She turned the page. "And this?" Ben was silent for a time, simply staring at the painting; then he looked up at her again. "What do you make of it?"

She gave a little shrug. "I don't know. It's different from the others. They're all so—so dark and intense and brooding. But this—there's such serenity there, such knowledge in those eyes."

"Yes." He laughed softly, surprised by her. "It's beautiful, isn't it? The painter was a man called Modigliani, and it was painted some three hundred years after those others. It's called 'Last Love.' The girl was his lover, a woman called Jeanne Hebuterne. When he died she threw herself from a fifth-floor window."

She looked up at him sharply, then looked back down at the painting. "Poor woman. I..." She hesitated, then turned, facing him. "But why, Ben? Why haven't I heard of any of these painters? Why don't they teach them in College?" He looked back at her. "Because they don't exist. Not officially." "What do you mean?"

He paused, then shook his head. "No. It's dangerous. I shouldn't have shown you. Even to know about these—"

He started to close the folder but she stopped him, flicking through the remaining paintings until she came to one near the end.

"This," she said. "Why have I never seen this before?"

Ben hesitated, staring at the print she was holding out to him. He had no need to look at it; it was imprinted firmly in his memory. But he looked anyway, trying to see it fresh—free of its context—as she was seeing it.

"That's da Vinci," he said softly. "Leonardo da Vinci. It's called 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist' and it was painted exactly seven hundred and eight years ago."

She was silent a moment, studying the print, then she looked up at him again, her eyes pained now, demanding.

"Yes, Ben, but why? And what do you mean, they don't exist? These paintings exist, don't they? And the men who painted them—they existed, didn't they? Or is this all some kind of joke?"

He shook his head, suddenly weary of it all. Was he to blame that these things had gone from the world? Was it his fault that the truth was kept from them? No. And yet he felt a dreadful burden of guilt, just knowing this. Or was it guilt? Wasn't it something to do with the feeling he had had ever since he'd come here, into the City? That feeling that only he was real? That awful feeling of distance from everything and everyone—as if, when he reached out to touch it all, it would dissolve, leaving him there in the midst of nothingness, falling back toward the earth.

He heard the old man's voice echo in his head—Ghosts? Why, there's nothing here but ghosts!—and shivered.

Was that why he had shown her these? To make some kind of connection? To reassure himself that he wasn't the only living, breathing creature in this vast mirage—this house of cards?

Maybe. But now he realized what he had done. He had committed her. Seduced her with these glimpses of another world. So what now? Should he back off and tell her to forget all that she'd seen, or should he take her one step further?

He looked at her again, taking her hand, for that one brief moment balanced between the two courses that lay open to him. Then he smiled and squeezed her hand.

"Have you ever read Wuthering Heights?"

She hesitated, then nodded.

"Good. Then I want you to read it again. But this time in the original version. As it was first written, three hundred and sixty years ago."

"But that's—" She laughed then looked down, disturbed by all of this. "What are you doing, Ben? Why are you showing me these things?"

"To wake you up. To make you see all of this as I see it." He looked away from her, his eyes moving back to the broken painting on the easel.

"I met someone yesterday. A Lu Nan Jen. You know, what they call an Oven Man. He painted, too. Not like you. He didn't have your skill with a brush, your eye for classical composition. But he did have something you haven't—something the whole of Han art hasn't—and that's vision. He could see clear through the forms of things. Through to the bone. He understood what made it all tick and he set it down—clearly, powerfully. For himself. So that he could understand it all. When you came up to me in the Cafe Burgundy I had been sitting there thinking about him—thinking about what he'd done, how he'd spent his life trying to set down that vision, that dream of his. And I wondered suddenly what it would be like to wake that in someone. To make it blossom in the soul of someone who had the talent to set it down as it really ought to be set down. And then there you were, and I thought. . ."

She was watching him closely now, her head pushed forward, her lips parted in expectation.

"You thought what?"

He turned back, looking at her. "What are you doing this afternoon?"

She sat back, disappointed. "Nothing. Why?"

"Would you like to come with me somewhere? Somewhere you've never been before?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Where?"

"Somewhere no one ever goes. Beneath here. Into the Clay."

ben had HlRED a man to walk ten paces in front of them, his arc lamp held high, its fierce white light revealing the facades of old graystone buildings, their stark shapes edged in deepest shadow.

Ben held a second, smaller lamp, a lightweight affair on a long, slender handle. Its light was gentler, casting a small, pearled pool of brightness about the walking couple.

Catherine held his hand tightly, fascinated and afraid. She hadn't known. She thought it had all been destroyed. But here it was, preserved, deserted, left to the darkness; isolated from the savage wilderness surrounding it.

As they walked, Ben's voice filled the hollow darkness, speaking from memory, telling her the history of the place.

"Unlike all previous architects, the man who designed City Earth made no accommodation for the old. The new was everything to him. Even that most simple of concessions—the destruction of the old—was, as far as possible, bypassed. The tallest buildings were destroyed, of course, but the rest was simply built over, as if they really had no further use for the past." He turned, looking back at her. "What we have now is not so much a new form of architecture as a new geological age. With City Earth we entered the Technozoic. All else was left behind us, in the Clay."

He paused, pointing across at a rounded dome the guide's lamp had revealed. "Have you ever noticed how there are no domes in our City, even in the mansions of First Level? No. There are copies of Han architecture, of course, though even those are quite recent developments, things of the last fifty years or so. But of the old West there's nothing. All that elegance of line has been replaced by harder shapes— hexagons, octagons, an interlacing of complex crystalline structures, as if the world had frozen over."

"But that. . ." She pointed up at the curved roof of the dome. "That's beautiful."

"It is, isn't it?"

She shook her head, not understanding. "But why?"

"The desire for conformity, I guess. Things like that dome induce a sense of individuality in us. And they didn't want that."

She shrugged. "I don't follow you."

Ben looked about him. The circle of light extended only so far. Beyond, it was as if the great stone buildings faded into uncreated nothingness. As if they had no existence other than that which the light gave them in its passage through their realm. Ben smiled at the thought, realizing that this was a clue to what he himself was doing. For he—as artist—was the light, creating that tiny circle of mock-reality about him as he passed.

He turned back, looking at the girl, answering her.

"When it all fell apart, shortly before City Earth was built, there was an age of great excess—of individual expression unmatched in the history of our species. The architects of City Earth—Tsao Ch'un, his Ministers, and their servants— identified the symptom as the cause. They saw the excesses and the extravagance, the beauty and the expression as cultural viruses and sought to destroy them. But there was too much to destroy. They would have found it easier to destroy the species. It was too deeply ingrained. Instead, they tried to mask it—to bury it beneath new forms. City Earth was to be a place where no one wanted for anything. Where everything the physical self could need would be provided for. It was to be Utopia—the world beyond Peach Blossom River."

She frowned at him, not recognizing the term, but he seemed almost unaware of her now. Slowly he led her on through the labyrinth of streets, the doubled lights, like sun and moon, reflected in the ceiling high above.

"But the City was a cage. It catered only to the grounded, physical being. It did not cater to the higher soul—the winged soul that wants to fly."

She laughed, surprised by him. But of course one caged birds. Who had ever heard of a bird flying free?

The walls closed about them on either side. They were walking now through a narrow back alley, the guide only paces in front of them, his lamp filling the darkness with its strong white light. For a moment it almost seemed they were walking in the City.

Unless you looked up. Unless you stopped and listened to the silence; sensing the darkness all around.

Ben had been silent, looking away. Now he turned, looking back at her.

"It was to be a landscape devoid of all meaning. A landscape of unrelated form."

He had paused and she had been obliged to stop with him. But all she wanted now was to get out, for all the strange beauty of this place. She felt uncomfortable here. Afraid, and vulnerable.

"We are creatures of the earth, Catherine," he said, his eyes sharing something of the darkness beyond the lamp's fierce circle. "Creatures of the earth and yet. . ." he hesitated, as if in pain, "and yet we want to fly. Don't you find that strange?"

She looked past him, at the old brickwork, itself a geometric pattern. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps we were always looking to create something like the City. Perhaps it's only the perfection of something we always had in us."

He looked at her fiercely, shaking his head in denial. "No! It's death, that's what it is! Death!"

He shuddered. She felt it through her hand. A shudder of revulsion. She hadn't understood before, but now she saw. Why he had isolated himself. Why he always seemed so hostile.

"You talk as if you're not from the City," she said. "As if. . ." But she left her question unasked. He would tell her if he wanted to.

"We keep the names," he said, "but they mean nothing anymore. They're cut off. Like most of us, they're cut off."

"But not you," she said after a moment.

He laughed but said nothing. It irritated her for once, that enigmatic side of him. She freed her hand from his and walked on. He followed, the light from his lamp throwing faint shadows off to one side.

She was angry. Hurt that he made no concessions to her. As if she meant nothing to him.

She stopped, then turned to face him.

He stood there, the lamp held high, the light throwing his face into strange lines, the shadows making it seem wrong—a face half in brightness, half in dark.

"Shall we go on?" he asked. But she could make out no expression on his face. His features were a rigid mask of shadow and light.

"I hate it here."

He turned, looking about him once again, the light wavering with the movement, throwing ghostly shards of brilliance against the windows of the buildings to either side. Dead, black eyes of glass, reflecting nothing.

She reached out and touched his arm. "Let's go back, Ben. Please. Back to Oxford."

He smiled bitterly, then nodded. Back to Oxford then. The name meant nothing to her, after all. But it was where they had been these last two hours. A place, unlike the bright unreality that had been built over it. A real place. For all its darkness.

IN HER DREAM she saw herself, walking beside him, the lamp held up above their heads, the shadowed, ancient town surrounding them, the floor of the City lost in the darkness overhead.

She saw the labyrinth again, saw its dark and secret rivers, the Isis and the Cherwell, flow silently, like blood in the veins of the earth. His words. His image for them. In her dream she stood there with him on the old stone bridge, her flesh connected to his at the palm. And when he lifted his lamp the water shone. Wine red, it shone; the water black as ink beneath the surface.

She woke, feeling hot, feverish, and switched on the bedside lamp. It was four in the morning. She sat up, rubbing her palms together, looking at them in amazement and relief. It had been so real. She had felt where her flesh sank into his and shared a pulse, seen the wine-dark flow where it passed beneath the stone arch of the bridge . . .

So real that waking seemed a step down.

For a while she sat there, shivering, not from cold but from a surreal sense of her other self. Of her sleeping, dreaming self who, like the figure in the dream, walked on in darkness, understanding nothing.

She closed her eyes, trying to recapture it, but the image was fading fast, the feeling of it slipping from her. Then the pulse of it faltered, died.

She got up, and went across to the canvas, then sat on the stool in front of it, the seat cold against her naked buttocks, her toes curled about the rounded bar. Her body was curved, lithe, like a cat's, while her fine, flamelike hair fell straight, fanning halfway down her back, her flesh like ivory between its livid strands.

She stared at the painting, studying it minutely.

It was dark. Reds and greens dominated the visual textures, sharply contrasted, framed in shapes of black that bled from the edge of the painting. Harsh, angular shapes, the paint laid thick on the canvas, ridged and shadowed like a landscape.

His face stared out at her, flecks of red and green like broken glass forming his flesh, the green of his eyes so intense it seemed to flare and set all else in darkness.

She had shown him seated in her chair, his shoulders slightly forward, his arms tensed, as if he were in the act of rising. His long, spatulate fingers gripped the arms firmly, almost lovingly.

There was a hard-edged abstract quality to the composition that none of her friends would have recognized as hers, yet something softer showed through, a secondary presence that began to dominate once that first strong sense of angularity and darkness diminished.

The painting lived. She smiled, knowing that in this she had transcended herself. It was a breakthrough. A new kind of art. Not the mimicry she had long accepted as her art, but a new thing, different in kind from anything she had ever done before.

Behind the firmness of the forms there was an aura. A light behind the darkness. A tenderness behind those harsh, sharp-sculpted shapes. His dark, fragmented face grew softer the more she looked, the eyes less fierce, more gentle.

She reached out with one hand to touch the bottom surface, her fingers following the line of whiteness where the figure faded into darkness. Below that line what at first seemed merely dark took on new forms, new textures—subtle variations of gray and black.

Buildings. Strange, architectural forms. Ghost images she had seen as real. All crowded there; trapped, pressed down beneath the thinnest line of white. Like a scar on the dark flesh of the canvas.

She tilted her head, squinting at the figure. It was stiff, almost lifeless in the chair, and yet there was the suggestion of pure force, of an intense, almost frightening vitality. A doubleness, there in everything: something she had not been aware of until he had shown it to her.

She relaxed, satisfied, and straightened her back, letting her hands drop to her knees. Then she stretched, her arms going up and back, her small, firm breasts lifting with the movement. She clawed the air with her fingers, yawning, then laughed to herself, feeling good.

Leaning forward, she activated the graphics keyboard beneath the painting's lower edge, then pressed one of the pads, making the canvas rotate a full 360 degrees.

Slowly the figure turned, presenting its left shoulder to the viewing eye, its face moving into profile.

She pressed PAUSE and sat back, looking. He was handsome. No, more than handsome: he was beautiful. And she had captured something of that. Some quality she had struggled at first to comprehend. A wildness—a fierceness—that was barely contained in him.

She shifted the focus, drawing out a detail of the wrist, the muscles there. She leaned forward, looking, touching the hard-edged textures of the projection, seeing what the machine had extrapolated from her intention.

She studied it a moment longer, then got to work, bringing the pallet around into her lap and working at the projection with the light-scalpels, making the smallest of alterations, then shifting focus again, all the while staring at the canvas, her forehead creased in a frown of intense concentration, her body hunched, curled over the painting, her hands working the plastic surface to give it depth.

When she had finished it was almost eight and the artificial light of the wake hours showed between the slats of her blinds, but she had worked all the tiredness from her bones.

She felt like seeing him.

Her robe lay on the chair beside her bed. She put it on and went across to the comset, touching his code from memory. In a moment his face was there, on the flatscreen by her hand. She looked down at him and smiled.

"I need to see you."

His answering smile was tender. "Then I'll be over."

The screen went dark. She sat there a moment, then turned away. Beside the bed she bent down, picking up the book she had left there only hours before. For a moment she stared at its cover as if bewitched, then opened it, and picking a passage at random, began to read.

She shuddered. It was just as Ben had said. There was no comparison. It was such a strange and wonderful book. Unseemly almost, and yet beautiful. Undeniably beautiful.

The novel she remembered had been a dull little morality tale—the story of a boy from the Clay who had been taken in by a First Level family and had repaid their trust by trying to corrupt the upright daughter of the house. In that version filial piety had triumphed over passion. But this . . .

She shook her head, then put the book down. For all its excesses, it was so much more real, so much more true than the other. But what did it mean? What did all of these things mean? The paintings, the strange buildings beneath the City, and now this—this tale of wild moors and savage passions? What did it all add up to?

Where had Ben found these things? And why had she never heard of them before?

Why?

She sat, a small shiver—like an after-shock—rippling down her spine. Things that existed and yet had no existence. Things that, if Ben were right, were dangerous even to know about. Why should such things be? What did they mean?

She closed her eyes, focusing herself, bringing herself to stillness, calming the inner voices, then leaned back on her elbows.

He was coming to her. Right now he was on his way.

"Then I'll be over."

She could hear his voice; could see him clearly with her inner eye. She smiled, opening her eyes again. He had not even kissed her yet. Had not gone beyond that first small step. But surely that must come? Surely? Else why begin?

She stood, looking about her, then laughed, a small thrill passing through her. No, he hadn't even kissed her yet. But maybe this time. Maybe . . .

BEN STOOD in the doorway, relaxed, one hand loosely holding the edge of the sliding panel, the other combing through his hair.

"Really . . ." he was saying, "I'd much rather treat you to breakfast."

He seemed elated, strangely satisfied; but with himself, not with her. He had barely looked at her yet.

She felt herself cast down. A nothing.

"I'd like to cook you something—" she began again, knowing she had said it already. Again he shook his head. So definite a movement. Uncompromising. Leaving her nowhere. A bitter anguish clenched the muscles of her stomach, made her turn from him, lest he see. But she had seen how his eyes moved restlessly about the room, not really touching anything. Skating over surfaces, as if they saw nothing.

As if what he really saw was not in her room.

She turned and saw that he was looking at the covered canvas. But there was no curiosity in his eyes. For once he seemed abstracted from the world, not pressed right up against it. She had never seen him like this before, so excited and yet so cut off from things.

She looked at him a moment longer, then shrugged and picked up her slender clutch bag. "All right. I'm ready."

They found a quiet place on the far side of the Green from the Cafe Burgundy. At first they ate in silence, the curtain drawn about them in the narrow booth, giving the illusion of privacy. Even so, voices carried from either side. Bright, morning voices. The voices of those who had slept and come fresh to the day. They irritated her as much as his silence. More than that, she was annoyed with him. Annoyed about the way he had brought her here and then ignored her.

She looked across the table's surface to his hands, seeing how at ease they were, lying there either side of the shallow, emptied bowl. Through the transparent surface she saw their ghostly images, faint but definite, refracted by the double thickness of the ice. He was so self-contained. So isolated from the world. It seemed, at that moment, that it would be easier for her to reach through the surface and take those ghostly hands than to reach out and grasp the warm reality.

She felt a curious pressure on her; something as tangible in its effect as a pair of hands pressed to the sides of her head, keeping her from looking up to meet his eyes. Yet nothing real. It was a phantom of her own creating—a weakness in her structure.

She looked away, stared down at her untouched meal. She had said nothing of her new painting. Of why she had called him. Of all she had felt, staring at that violent image of his face. He had shut her out. Cut off all paths between them. As she sat there she wished for the strength to stand up and leave him there sitting before his empty bowl.

As if that were possible.

She felt her inner tension mount until it seemed unendurable. And then he spoke, reaching out to take her hands in his own; the warmth of them dissipating all that nervous energy, destroying the phantoms that had grown vast in his neglect.

"Have you ever tasted real food, Catherine?"

She looked up, puzzled, and met his eyes. "What do you mean, real⁷."

He laughed, indicating her bowl. "You know, I've never seen you eat. Not a morsel." His hands held hers firmly yet without real pressure. There was a mischievous light behind his eyes. She had not seen him like this before.

"I eat," she said, making him laugh again at the assertiveness of her simple statement. "But I still don't understand you."

"Ah," he said. "Then the answer is no."

She shook her head, annoyed with him again, but in a different way. He was teasing her. Being unfair.

He looked down. "It's strange what becomes important. For no apparent reason. Things take hold. Won't release you."

He looked up again, all humor gone from his eyes. That intensity was back. That driven quality.

"And that's your obsession, is it? Food?"

She saw at once that her joke had misfired. In this, it seemed, he was vulnerable. Wide open.

Perhaps that was what obsession was. A thing against which there was no defense. Not even humor.

So, she thought. And this is yours. The real.

For a time he said nothing. She watched the movement in his dark expressive eyes. Sea moods beneath the vivid green. Surface and undertow. And then he looked out again, at her, and spoke.

"Come with me. I want to show you something."

ben's APARTMENT was to the north of Oxford Canton, on the edge of the fashionable student district. Catherine stood in the main room, looking about her.

"I never imagined . . ." she said softly to herself, then turned to find him there in the doorway, a wine-filled glass in each hand.

"You're privileged," he said, handing her a glass. "I don't usually let anyone come here."

She felt both pleased and piqued by that. It was hard to read what he meant by it.

It was a long, spacious room, sparsely decorated. A low sofa was set down in the middle of the plushly carpeted floor, a small, simply molded coffee table next to it. Unlike the apartments of her friends, however, there were no paintings on the wall, no trinkets or small sculptures on the tabletops. It was neat, almost empty.

She looked about her, disappointed. She had expected something more than this. Something like Sergey's apartment.

He had been watching her. She met his eyes and saw how he was smiling, as if he could read her thoughts. "It's bleak, isn't it? Like a set from some dreadfully tasteful drama."

She laughed, embarrassed.

"Oh don't worry. This is"—he waved his hand in an exaggerated circle—"a kind of mask. A front. In case I had to invite someone back."

She sipped her wine, looking at him sharply, trying to gauge what he was saying to her. "Well?" she said, "what were you going to show me?"

He pointed across the room with his glass. There was a panel in the far wall. A sliding panel with the faint indentation of a thumb-lock.

"The mystery revealed," he said. "Come."

She followed, wondering why he played these games. In all else he was so direct. So much himself. Then why these tricks and evasions? What was he hiding? What afraid of?

His fingers tapped out a combination on the touch-pad. The thumb-lock glowed READY and he pressed his right thumb into the depression. The door hissed back, revealing a second room as big as the one they were in.

She stepped through, impressed by the contrast.

For all its size it was cluttered, the walls lined with shelves. In the spaces between hung prints and paintings. A small single bed rested against the far wall, its sheets wrinkled, a simple cover drawn back. Books were piled on a bedside table and in a stack on the floor beside the bed. Real books, not tapes. Like the one he had given her. Her mouth opened in a smile of surprise and delight. But what really grabbed her attention was the apparatus in the center of the room.

She crossed the room and stood beside it.

"Is this what you do?" she asked, feeling the machine tremble, its delicate limbs quivering beneath her touch.

The scaffolding of the machine was laced with fine wires, like a cradle. Inside lay a lifesize marionette, a mock human, no features on its face, its palms smooth and featureless. The morph was like the machine, almost alive, tremblingly responsive to her touch. Its white, almost translucent surfaces reflected the ceiling light in flashes and sparkles.

It was beautiful, a work of art in itself.

"Does it do anything?"

"By itself, no. But yes, in a sense it's what I do."

She looked quickly at him, then back to the machine, remembering what Sergey had said about him being a technician, a scientist. But how did that equate with what he knew about art? All that intuitive, deeply won knowledge of his? She frowned, trying to understand, trying to fit it all together. She looked down at the base of the machine, seeing the thick width of tape coiled about the spools, like some crude relic from the technological past. She had never seen anything like it.

She circled the machine, trying to comprehend its function. Failing.

"What is this?" she said finally, looking back at him.

He stood on the other side of the machine, looking at her through the fragile scaffolding, the fine web of wiring.

"It's what 1 brought you here to see."

He was smiling, but behind the smile she could sense the intensity of his mood. This was important to him. For some reason very important.

"Will you trust me, Catherine? Will you do something for me?"

She stared back at him, trying to read him, but it was impossible. He was not like the others. It was hard to tell what he wanted, or why. For a moment she hesitated, then nodded, barely moving her head, seeing how much he had tensed, expecting another answer.

He turned away momentarily, then turned back. The excitement she had glimpsed earlier had returned to his eyes, this time encompassing her, drawing her into its spell.

"It's marvelous. The best thing I've done. You wait. You'll see just how marvelous.

How real"

There was a strange, almost childish quality in his voice-—an innocence—that shocked her. He was so open at that moment. So completely vulnerable. She looked at him with eyes newly opened to the complexity of this strange young man, to the forces in contention in his nature.

Strangely, it made her want to hold him to her breast, as a mother would hold her infant child. And yet at the same time she wanted him, with a fierceness that made her shiver, afraid for herself.

BEN STOOD at the head of the frame, looking down at her. Catherine lay on her back, naked, her eyes closed, the lids flickering. Her breasts rose and fell gently, as if she slept, her red hair lay in fine red-gold strands across her cheeks, her neck.

Stirrups supported her body, but her neck was encased in a rigid cradle, circled with sensitive filaments of ice, making it seem as if her head were caged in shards of glass. A fine mesh of wires fanned out from the narrow band at the base of her skull, running down the length of her body, strips of tape securing the tiny touch' sensitive pads to her flesh at regular intervals. Eighty-one connections in all, more than half of those directly into the skull.

The morph lay on the bed, inert. Ben glanced at its familiar shape and smiled. It was almost time.

He looked down at the control desk. Eight small screens crowded the left-hand side of the display, each containing the outline image of a skull. Just now they flickered through a bright sequence of primaries, areas of each image growing then receding.

Beneath the frame a tape moved slowly between the reels. It was a standard work—an original pat pi—but spliced at its end was the thing he had been working on, the new thing he was so excited about. He watched the images flicker, the tape uncoil and coil again, then looked back at the girl.

There was a faint movement in her limbs, a twitching of the muscles where the pads were pressed against the nerve centers. It was vestigial, but it could be seen. Weeks of such ghost movement would cause damage, some of it irreparable. And addicts had once spent months in their shells.

The tracking signal appeared on each of the eight small screens. Fifteen seconds to the splice. He watched the dark mauve areas peak on six of the screens, then fade as the composition ended. For a moment there was no activity, then the splice came in with a suddenness that showed on all the screens.

According to the screens, Catherine had woken up. Her eyes were open and she was sitting up, looking about her. Yet in the frame the girl slept on, her lidded eyes unmoving, her breasts rising and falling in a gentle motion. The faint tremor in her limbs had ceased. She was still now, perfectly at rest.

The seconds passed slowly, a countdown on the top-right screen showing when the splice ended.

He smiled and watched her open her eyes, then try to shake her head and raise her hands. Wires were in her way, restraining her. She looked confused, for a brief moment troubled. Then she saw him and relaxed. "How are you?" he asked.

Her eyes looked back questioningly at him. Green eyes, the same deep shade of green as his own. She looked quite beautiful, lying there. It was strange how he had not noticed it before. That he had seen it and yet not noted it.

"I don't understand . . ." she began, "I woke up and you were sitting next to me at the Cafe Burgundy. I'd had too much to drink and I'd fallen asleep. I... I had been dreaming. We were talking. . . something about colors. . . and then I turned and looked across at the pagoda. You said something about all the birds escaping, and, yes, across the Green, I could see that it was so. There were birds flying everywhere. They'd broken out of their cage. Then, as I watched, one flew right at me, its wings brushing against my face even though I moved my head aside to avoid it. You were laughing. I turned and saw that you had caught the bird in your hands. I reached across and . . ."

She stopped, her brow wrinkling, her eyes looking inward, trying to fathom what had happened., "And?"

She looked straight at him. "And then I woke up again. I was here." She tried to shake her head and was again surprised to find it encased, her movements re-

strained. She stared at the webbing trailing from her neck, as if it should dissolve, then turned, looking back at him.

"I shouldn't be here, should I? I mean, I woke up once, didn't I? So this. . ." confusion flickered in her face and her voice dropped to an uncertain whisper, "this must be a tape."

He smiled. "Good," he said softly. "That's just what I wanted to hear."

He moved around her and began to unfasten the connections, working quickly, methodically, his touch as sure and gentle as a surgeon's.

"I don't follow you, Ben. Which was which. 1 mean, this is real now, isn't it? But that part in the cafe . . ."

He looked down into her face, only a hand's width from his own.

"That was the tape. My tape. The thing I've been working on these last four months."

She laughed, still not understanding. "What do you mean, your tape?"

He undipped the band and eased it back, freeing her neck. "Just what I said." He began to massage her neck muscles, knowing from experience what she would be feeling with the restraint gone. "I made it. All that part about the cafe."

She looked up at him, her head turned so that she could see him properly, her nose wrinkled up. "But you can't have. People don't make tapes. At least, not like that. Not on their own. That thing before—that cartoonlike thing. That was a pai pi, wasn't it? I've heard of them. They used to have dozens of people working on them. Hundreds sometimes."

"So I've been told."

He moved behind her, operating the stirrup controls, lowering her slowly to the floor. Then he climbed into the frame above her, untaping the lines of wire and releasing the pads from her flesh one by one, massaging the released flesh gently to stimulate the circulation, every action carried out meticulously, as if long re-hearsed.

"I don't like teams," he said, not looking at her. Then, squatting, he freed the twin pads from her nipples, gently rubbing them with his thumbs. They rose, aroused by his touch, but he had moved on, working down her body, freeing her from the harness.

"I set myself a problem. Years ago. I'd heard about pai pi and the restrictions of the form, but I guess I realized even then that it didn't have to be like that. Their potential was far beyond what anyone had ever thought it could be."

"I still don't follow you, Ben. You're not making sense."

She was leaning up on her elbows now, staring at him. His hand rested on the warmth of her inner thigh, passive, indifferent to her, it seemed. She was still con-fused. It had been so real. Waking, and then waking again. And now this—Ben, crouched above her, his hand resting on her inner thigh, talking all this nonsense about what everyone knew had been a technological dead end. She shook her head.

His eyes focused on her, suddenly aware. "What's the matter?"

"I still don't understand you, Ben. It was real. I know it was. The bird flying at me across the Green, the smell of coffee and cigars. That faint breeze you always get sitting there. You know, the way the air circulates from the tunnels at the back. And other things, too."

She had closed her eyes, remembering.

"The faint buzz of background conversation. Plates and glasses clinking. The faint hum of the factories far below in the stack. That constant vibration that's there in everything." She opened her eyes and looked at him pleadingly. "It was real, Ben. Tell me it was."

He looked back at her, shaking his head. "No. That was all on the tape. Every last bit of it."

"No!" She shook her head fiercely. "I mean, I saw you there. Sitting there across from me. It was you. I know it was. You said . . ." She strained to remember, then nodded to herself. "You said that I shouldn't be afraid of them. You said that it was their instinct to fly."

"I said that once, yes. But not to you. And not in the Cafe Burgundy."

She sat up, her hands grabbing at his arms, feeling the smooth texture of the cloth, then reaching up to touch his face, feeling the roughness of his cheeks where he had yet to shave. Again he laughed, but softly now.

"You can't tell, can you? Which is real. This or the other thing. And yet you're here, Catherine. Here, with me. Now."

She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her gaze away, frightened and confused.

"That before," he said, "that thing you thought happened. That was a fiction. My fiction. It never happened. / made it."

He reached out, holding her chin with one hand, gently turning her face until she was looking at him again. "But this—this is real. This now." He moved his face down to hers, brushing her lips with his own.

Her eyes grew large, a vague understanding coming into her face. "Then . . ." But it was as if she had reached out to grasp at something, only to have it ' vanish before her eyes. The light faded from her face. She looked down, shaking her head.

He straightened up, stepping out from the frame. Taking his blue silk pau from the bed he turned back, offering it to her.

"Here, put this on."

She took the robe, handling it strangely, staring at it as if uncertain whether it existed or not; as if, at any moment, she would wake again and find it all a dream.

He stood there, watching her, his eyes searching hers for answers, then turned away.

"Put it on, Catherine. Put it on and I'll make some coffee."

SHE lay THERE on his bed, his blue silk pan wrapped about her, a mound of pillows propped up behind her, sipping at her coffee.

Ben was pacing the room, pausing from time to time to look across at her, then moving on, gesturing as he talked, his movements extravagant, expansive. He seemed energized, his powerful, athletic form balanced between a natural grace and an unnatural watchfulness, like some strange, magnificent beast, intelligent beyond mere knowing. His eyes flashed as he spoke, while his hands turned in the air as if they fashioned it, molding it into new forms, new shapes.

She watched him, mesmerized. Before now she had had only a vague idea of what he was, but now she knew. As her mind cleared she had found herself awed by the immensity of his achievement. It had been so real. . .

He paused beside the empty frame, one hand resting lightly against the upright.

"When I said I had a problem, I didn't realize how wrong it was to think of it as such. You see, it wasn't something that could be circumvented with a bit of technical trickery; it was more a question of taking greater pains. A question of harnessing my energies more intensely. Of being more watchful."

She smiled at that. As if anyone could be more watchful than he.

"So I began with a kind of cartoon. Ten frames a second, rough-cast. That gave me the pace, the shape of the thing. Then I developed it a stage further. Put in the detail. Recorded it at twenty-five a second. Finally I polished and honed it, perfecting each separate strand, rerecording at fifty a second. Slowly making it more real."

His hands made a delicate little movement, as if drawing the finest of wires from within a tight wad of fibers.

"It occurred to me that there really was no other way of doing it. I simply had to make it as real as 1 possibly could."

"But how? I can't see how you did it. It's . . ." She shrugged, laughing, amazed by him. "No. It's simply not possible. You couldn't have!"

And yet he had.

"How?" He grew very still. A faint smile played on his lips, then was gone. For a moment she didn't understand what he was doing with his body, with the expression on his face. Then, suddenly, her mouth fell open, shocked by the accuracy of his imitation, his stance, the very look of him.

And then he spoke. "But how? I can't see how you did it. It's . . ." He shrugged and laughed, a soft, feminine laugh of surprise. "No. It's simply not possible. You couldn't have!"

It was perfect. Not her exactly, yet a perfect copy all the same of her gestures, her facial movements, her voice. Every nuance and intonation caught precisely. As if the mirror talked.

She sat forward, spilling her coffee. "That's ..."

But she could not say. It was frightening. She felt her nerves tingle. For a moment everything slowed about her. She had the sensation of falling, then checked herself.

He was watching her, seeing how she looked: all the time watching her, like a camera eye, noting and storing every last nuance of her behavior.

"You have to look, Catherine. Really look at things. You have to try to see them from the other side. To get right inside of them and see how they feel. There's no other way."

He paused, looking at her differently now, as if gauging whether she was still following him. She nodded, her fingers wiping absently at the spilled coffee on his robe, but her eyes were half-lidded now, uncertain.

"An artist—any artist—is an actor. His function is mimetic, even at its most expressive. And, like an actor, he must learn to play his audience." He smiled, opening out his arms as if to encompass the world, his eyes shining darkly with the enormousness of his vision. "You've seen a tiny piece of it. You've glimpsed what it can be. But it's bigger than that, Catherine. Much, much bigger. What you experienced today was but the merest suggestion of its final form."

He laughed, a short, sharp explosion of laughter that was like a shout of joy.

"The art—that's what I'm talking about! The thing all true artists dream of!"

Slowly he brought down his arms. The smile faded on his lips and his eyes grew suddenly fierce. Clenching his fists, he curled them in toward his chest, hunching his body into itself like a dancer's. For a moment he held himself there, tensed, the whole of him gathered there at the center.

"Not art like you know it now. No . . ." He shook his head, as if in great pain. "No. This would be something almost unendurable. Something terrible and yet beautiful. Too beautiful for words."

He laughed coldly, his eyes burning now with an intensity that frightened her.

"It would be an art to fear, Catherine. An art so cold it would pierce the heart with its iciness yet so hot that it would blaze like a tiny sun, burning in the darkness of the skull.

"Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what such an art would be like?" Hi's laughter rang out again, a pitiless, hideous sound. "That would be no art for the weak. No. Such an art would destroy the little men!"

She shuddered, unable to take her eyes from him. He was like a demon now, his eyes like dark, smoldering coals. His body seemed transfigured; horrible, almost alien.

She sat forward sharply, the cup falling from her hands.

Across from her Ben saw it fall and noted how it lay; saw how its contents spread across the carpet. Saw, and stored the memory.

He looked up at her, surprised, seeing how her breasts had slipped from within the robe and lay between the rich blue folds of cloth, exposed, strangely different.

And as he looked, desire beat up in him fiercely, like a raging fire.

He sat beside her, reaching within the robe to gently touch the soft warmth of her flesh, his hands moving slowly upward until they cupped her breasts. Then, lowering his face to hers, he let his lips brush softly against her lips.

She tensed, trembling in his arms; then, suddenly, she was pressing up against him, her mouth pushing urgently against his, her arms pulling him down. He shivered, amazed by the sudden change in her, the hunger in her eyes.

For a moment he held back, looking down into her face, surprised by the strength of what he suddenly felt. Then, gently, tenderly, he pushed her down, accepting what she offered, casting off the bright, fierce light that had had him in its grasp only moments before, letting himself slip down into the darkness of her, like a stone falling into the heart of a deep, dark well.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Lost Bride

wELL, MINISTER HENG, what was it you wished to see me about?" Heng Yu had been kneeling, his head touched to the cold, stone floor.

Now he rose, looking up at his T'ang for the first time.

Li Shai Tung was sitting in the throne of state, his tall, angular body clothed in imperial yellow. The Council of Ministers had ended an hour earlier, but Heng Yu had stayed on, requesting a private audience with his T'ang. Three broad steps led up to the presense dais. At the bottom of those steps stood the T'ang's Chancellor, Chung Hu-yan. In the past few months, as the old man had grown visibly weaker, more power had devolved onto the shoulders of the capable and honest Chung; and it was to Chung that Heng had gone, immediately the Council had finished. Now Chung gave the slightest smile as he looked at Heng.

"I am grateful for this chance to talk with you, Chieh Hsia," Heng began. "I would not have asked had it not been a matter of the greatest urgency."

The T'ang smiled. "Of course. But please, Heng Yu, be brief. I am already late for my next appointment."

Heng bowed again, conscious of the debt he owed the Chancellor for securing this audience.

"It is about young Shepherd, Chieh Hsia."

The T'ang raised an eyebrow. "Hal's boy? What of him?"

"He is at College, I understand, Chieh Hsia."

Li Shai Tung laughed. "You know it for a certainty, Heng Yu, else you would not have mentioned the matter. But what of it? Is the boy in trouble?"

Heng hesitated. '"I am not sure, Chieh Hsia. It does not seem that he is in any immediate danger, yet certain facts have come to my notice that suggest he might be in the days ahead."

Li Shai Tung leaned forward, his left hand smoothing his plaited beard.

"I see. But why come to me, Heng Yu? This is a matter for General Nocenzi, surely?"

Heng gave a small bow. "Normally I would agree, Chieh Hsia, but in view of the father's illness and the boy's possible future relationship with Prince Yuan . . ."

He left the rest unsaid, but Li Shai Tung took his point. Heng was right. This was much more important than any normal Security matter. Whatever Ben said just now of his intentions, he had been bred to be Li Yuan's advisor; and genes, surely, would win out eventually? For anything to happen to him now, therefore, was unthinkable.

"What do you suggest, Heng Yu?"

In answer, Heng Yu bowed, then held out the scroll he had prepared in advance. Chung Hu-yan took it from him and handed it up to the T'ang who unfurled it and began to read. When he had finished he looked back at Heng.

"Good. You have my sanction for this, Heng Yu. I'll sign this and give the General a copy of the authority. But don't delay. I want this acted upon at once."

"Of course, Chieh Hsia."

"And Heng Yu . . ."

"Yes, Chieh Hsia?"

"I am in your debt in this matter. If there is any small favor I can offer in return, let Chung Hu-yan know and it shall be done."

Heng Yu bowed low. "I am overwhelmed by your generosity, Chieh Hsia, but, forgive me, it would not be right for me to seek advantage from what was, after all, my common duty to my Lord. As ever, Chieh Hsia, I ask for nothing but to serve you."

Straightening, he saw the smile of satisfaction on the old man's lips and knew he had acted wisely. There were things he needed, things the T'ang could have made easier for him; but none, at present, that were outside his own broad grasp. To have the T'ang's good opinion, however, that was another thing entirely. He bowed a second time, then lowered his head to Chung Hu-yan, backing away. One day, he was certain, such temporary sacrifices would pay off, would reap a thousandfold the rewards he now so lightly gave away. In the meantime he would find out what this business with the Novacek boy was all about, would get to the bottom of it and then make sure that it was from him that the T'ang first heard of it.

As the great doors closed behind him, he looked about him at the great halls and corridors of the palace, smiling. Yes, the old T'ang's days were numbered now. And Prince Yuan, when his time came, would need a Chancellor. A younger man than Chung Hu-yan. A man he could rely on absolutely.

Heng Yu walked on, past bowing servants, a broad smile lighting his features.

So why not himself? Why not Heng Yu, whose record was unblemished, whose loyalty and ability were unquestioned?

As he approached them, the huge, leather-paneled outer doors of the palace began to ease back, spilling bright sunlight into the shadows of the broad high-ceilinged corridor. Outside, the shaven-headed guards of the T'ang's elite squad bowed low as he moved between them. Savoring the moment, Heng Yu, Minister to Li Shai Tung, T'ang of City Europe, gave a soft small laugh of pleasure. Yes, he thought, looking up at the great circle of the sun. Why not?

CATHERINE STOOD in the doorway, looking across at him. Ben was sitting on the edge of the bed, his head pushed forward, his shoulders hunched, staring at the frame without seeing it.

He had awakened full of life, had smiled and kissed her tenderly and told her to wait while he brought her breakfast, but he had been gone too long; she had found him in the kitchen, staring vacantly at his hands, the breakfast things untouched.

"What is it?" she had asked. "What's happened?" But he had walked past her as if she wasn't there. Had gone into the other room and sat down on the bed. So still, so self-engrossed that it had frightened her.

"Ben?" she said now, setting the tray down beside him. "I've cooked breakfast. Won't you have some with me?"

He glanced up at her. "What?"

"Breakfast." She smiled, then knelt beside him, putting her hand on his knee.

"Ah . . ." His smile was wan; was merely the token of a smile.

"What is it, Ben? Please. I've not seen you like this before. It must be something."

For a moment he did nothing. Then he reached into the pocket of his gown and took something out, offering it to her.

It was a letter. She took it from him, handling it with care—with a feeling for its strangeness.

She sat on the floor beside his feet, handling the letter delicately, as if it were old and fragile like the book he had given her, taking the folded sheets and smoothing them out upon her lap.

For a moment she hesitated, a sudden sense of foreboding washing over her. What if it were another woman? Some past lover of his, writing to reclaim him—to take him back from her? Or was it something else? Something he had difficulty telling her?

She glanced at him, then looked back, beginning to read. After only a few moments she looked up. "Your sister?" He nodded. "She wants to come and visit me. To see what I'm up to." "Ah . . ." But strangely, she felt no relief. There was something about the tone of the letter that troubled her. "And you don't want that?" Again he nodded, his lips pressed tightly together. For a moment she looked past him at the books on the shelf beside his bed. Books she had never heard of before, with titles that were as strange as the leather binding of their covers; books like Polidori's Emestus Berchtold, Helme's The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, Poe's Eleanora, Brown's The Power of Sympathy and Byron's Manfred. She stared at them a moment, as if to make sense of them, then looked back at him.

Folding the sheets, she slipped them back inside the envelope, then held it out to him.

"I've come here to get away from all that," he said, taking the letter. He looked at it fiercely for a moment, as if it were a living thing, then put it back in his pocket. "This—" he gestured at the frame, the books and prints on the walls, the personal things that were scattered all about the room, then shrugged. "Well, it's different, that's all."

She thought of Lotte and Wolf, beginning to understand. "It's too close at home. Is that what you mean? And you feel stifled by that?"

He looked down at his hand—at the left hand where the wrist was ridged—then looked back at her.

"Maybe."

She saw how he smiled faintly, looking inward, as if to piece it all together in his head.

"Your breakfast," she said, reminding him. "You should eat it. It's getting cold."

He looked back, suddenly focusing on her again. Then, as if he had made his mind up about something, he reached out and took her hand, drawing her up toward him.

"Forget breakfast. Come. Let's go to bed again."

"Well? Have you the file?"

Heng Chian-ye turned, snapping his fingers. At once his servant drew nearer and, bowing, handed him a silk-bound folder.

"I think you'll find everything you need in there," Heng said, handing it across. "But tell me, Novacek, why did you want to know about that one? Has he crossed you in some way?"

Sergey Novacek glanced at Heng, then looked back at the file. "It's none of your business, but no, he hasn't crossed me. It's just that our friend Shepherd is a bit of a mystery, and I hate mysteries."

Heng Chian-ye stared at Novacek a moment, controlling the cold anger he felt merely at being in his presence. The Hung Moo had no idea what trouble he had got him into.

"You've made your own investigations, I take it?" he said, asking another of the questions his uncle had insisted he ask.

Novacek looked up, closing the file. "Is this all?"

Heng smiled. "You know how it is, the richer the man, the less there is on file. If they can, they buy their anonymity."

"And you think that's what happened here?"

"The boy's father is very rich. Rich enough to buy his way into Oxford without any qualifications whatsoever."

Novacek nodded, a hint of bitterness overspilling into his words. "I know. I've seen the College records."

"Ah . . ." Heng gave the briefest nod, noting what he had said.

"And the bronze?"

Heng Chian-ye turned slightly. Again the servant approached him, this time carrying a simple ice-cloth sack. Heng took the sack and turned, facing Novacek. His expression was suddenly much harder, his eyes coldly hostile.

"This cost me dear. If there had been any way I could have borrowed a million yuan I would have done so, rather than meet my uncle's terms. But before I hand it over, I want to know why you wanted it. Why you thought it worth a million yuan."

Novacek stared at him a moment, meeting the Han's hostility with his own. Then he looked down, smiling sourly. "You call us big-noses behind our backs, but you've quite a nose yourself, haven't you, Heng?"

Heng's eyes flared with anger, but he held back, remembering what Heng Yu had said. On no account was he to provoke Novacek. "And if I say you can't have it?"

Novacek laughed. "That's fine. You can pay me the million. In installments, if you like. However, I'll charge you interest on it. A hundred-and-fifty thousand a year." He looked up again, meeting Heng's eyes. "But that's rather more than what you get, so I hear. You might find it... difficult to make ends meet. It takes a fair bit to live as richly as you do."

Heng swallowed; then, almost brutally, he thrust the sack into the other man's hands.

Sergey watched Heng a moment, noting how angry he was and wondering about it, then looked down at the plain white sack he held, feeling the shape of the bronze through the flesh-thin cloth, a clear, clean sense of satisfaction—of fulfillment—washing through him.

"Good," he said. "Then we're clear, Heng Chian-ye. I'd say your debt to me.was settled, wouldn't you?"

Heng Chian-ye turned, taking three angry steps away from him before turning back, his face almost black with anger, his finger pointing accusingly at his tormentor.

"Take care, Novacek. Next time you might not be so lucky. Next time you could meet with someone who counts honor a lesser thing than I. And then you'll find out what the world really thinks of scum like you."

Sergey stared back at him, smiling insolently. "Go fuck yourself, Heng Chian-ye.

You've no more honor than a Triad boss's cock. The only reason you paid up was your fear of losing face in front of your friends. But that's your problem. I've got what I want."

Heng opened his mouth, as if to answer him in kind, then changed his mind. He laughed then shook his head, his voice suddenly colder, more controlled.

"Have you my friend? Have you now?"

THEY WENT to the Cafe Burgundy and took a table close to the Green, paying to keep the three chairs empty. Catherine sat to Ben's right, the tiered cage of the central pagoda behind her, forming a frame to her pale, flamelike beauty. "My bird," he called her now, and so it seemed fitting. He smiled, studying her profile, then turned and raised a hand to order wine.

He had been quiet all evening, pensive. A second letter had come. It lay inside his jacket pocket unopened. He could feel its gentle pressure against his chest; sense the hidden shape of it.

She, too, had been quiet, but for different reasons. Hers was a broody, jealous silence, the kind he had come to know only too well these last few days.

The waiter came and poured their wine, leaving the unfinished bottle in an ice bucket on the table between them. Ben leaned across and chinked his glass against hers.

She turned her head and looked at him. "What does she want?"

He almost smiled at that, knowing what she really thought. His unexplained absences. The letters. Even his moods. He knew she took these things as signs of his infidelity. But she wasn't certain. Not yet, anyway. And so the brooding silence.

He sipped at his wine then set the glass down. "Here." He took the letter from his pocket and handed it to her.

She narrowed her eyes, suspicious of him, then took the letter from his fingers. For a time she simply stared at it, not certain what he meant by giving it to her. Then she lifted it to her nose and sniffed.

"Open it," he said, amused by her hesitation. "Or give it back and I'll open it. It's from my sister, Meg."

She nodded, only half-convinced, but gave the letter back, watching as he slit it open with his thumbnail and drew out the four slender sheets of paper. Without even glancing at them, he handed them to her.

"Here."

She lowered her eyes, beginning to read, reluctantly at first, but then with a growing interest. Finally, she looked up again, her face changed, more open to him.

"But why didn't you say? That was cruel of you, Ben, leaving me in the dark like that. I thought. . ."

She blushed and looked away. He reached across and took the letter from her.

"Aren't you pleased, Ben? I think it's sweet of her to worry about you. She could stay with me, if you'd like. I've a spare pulldown in my room. She could use that."

He glanced at her, then returned to the letter. Finished, he folded it neatly and slipped it back into his pocket.

"Well?" she said, exasperated by him. "It would be lovely to meet your sister. Really it would."

He poured himself more wine, then drank deeply from his glass, emptying it. She watched him, puzzled.

"What's the matter? What aren't you telling me?"

He shook his head.

"Don't you like her? Is that it?"

He laughed. "What, Meg? No, she's . . ." He smiled strangely, looking down into his empty glass. "She's just perfect." He looked up at her, then reached across, and gently lifting her chin, leaned forward to brush his lips against hers.

She smiled. "That's nice. But what about her?"

"She'll stay with me," he said, dismissing the subject. "Now, what shall we eat?"

She stared at him a moment, then let it go. "I don't care. Surprise me."

He laughed, suddenly, inexplicably, his old self. "Oysters. Let's have oysters."

"Just oysters?"

"No. Not just oysters, but a whole platter of oysters. The very best oysters. More than we could possibly eat." He puffed out his cheeks and sat back in his chair, his hands tracing an exaggerated curve about his stomach, miming a grossly swollen gut. He laughed, then sat upright again and turned in his chair, snapping his fingers for a waiter.

The abruptness of the transformation both delighted and disturbed her. It hinted at a side of him she had not seen before, unless it was in that moment when he had mimicked her. She poked her tongue between her teeth, watching him. Laughter at a nearby table distracted her momentarily, making her turn her head. When she looked back he was watching her again, a faint smile on his lips.

"Sometimes you're just plain strange," she said, laughing. "Like this business about your family. What's wrong with talking about them? You never tell me anything."

He shrugged. "It isn't important. That's home. This is here. I like to keep them separate."

She looked down, wondering if he realized what he was saying. She felt hurt by his exclusion, somehow lessened by it.

"It's too close there"," he went on. "Too—" he laughed, a short, almost painful laugh, "too intense. You'll find that difficult to understand, I know. I don't hate it, it's just that I need distance from all that. Need something other than what I get there."

He had set down his glass and was pushing at the skin of his left hand with the fingers of his right, looking down at it as he smoothed and stroked the ridged flesh.

"And where, then, do I fit in? Am I real to you, Ben, or am I just something to be got?"

"Maybe," he said, meeting her eyes candidly. "Maybe that's all there is. Different kinds of getting."

She was about to speak—about to say something she would have regretted later—when the laughter rang out again, louder this time. She felt herself go cold, realizing whose voice it was that led the cold, mocking laughter.

Sergey . . .

She turned, seeing him at once. He was no more than twenty feet away from where they were sitting.

He turned in his chair, smiling at her. "Catherine! How lovely to see you!"

She could see that he was drunk. He pushed himself up unsteadily from his chair and came across, pulling out the empty chair beside her. Ignoring Ben, he sat, leaning toward her unpleasantly, almost threateningly, as he spoke.

"How are you, Catherine, my dear? It's quite a while since we saw you here, isn't it?"

He belched, then turned, a sneering smile lighting his reddened face.

"And who's this?" He feigned startled surprise. "My word, if it isn't our friend, the genius!" He made a mocking bow of politeness, but when he straightened up his face had hardened and his eyes were cold with malice.

"I've been wanting to have a few words with you, friend."

There was an ugliness in the emphatic way he said the last word. A hint of violence.

She watched, her irritation with Ben transformed into fear for him. She knew just how dangerous Sergey could be when he was in this kind of mood.

Ben smiled and turned to call the waiter over. Yes, she thought, that's best. End it now, before it gets out of hand. But instead of asking the waiter to remove Sergey, Ben ordered a fresh bottle of the house wine and an extra glass. He turned back, facing his antagonist.

"You'll have a drink with us, I hope?"

Sergey gave a snort of surprise and annoyance. "I really can't believe you, Shepherd. You're such a smooth shit, aren't you? You think you can buy the world."

"Sergey—" she began, but he banged his fist down hard, glaring at her.

"Shut up, Catherine! You might learn a few things about smiling boy here."

She turned away, shutting her eyes, wishing it would stop.

Sergey leaned forward, his whole manner openly hostile now. "You're not from here, are you, Shepherd?"

Ben was silent, musing.

"You're not, are you?"

Catherine opened her eyes and looked across. There was a faint smile on Ben's lips, a wistful little smile.

"I've been doing a little digging," Sergey said, leaning across the table toward Ben, his breath heavy with wine. "And guess what I found out?" He laughed coldly. "Our friend here bought his way into Oxford. Just like he buys up everything. They waived the rules to let him in."

Catherine shook her head. "I don't follow you. I—"

Sergey huffed, disgust written large on his face. "He's a charlatan, that's what he is. He shouldn't be here. He's like all the other parasites. The only difference is that he's not a Han." He laughed brutally, then turned and looked at her again, angry now. "Unlike the rest of us, Shepherd here has no qualifications. He's never passed an exam in his life. As for work—" The laugh was broken, the sneer in the voice pointed. At nearby tables people had broken off their own conversations to see what was going on. "He's never attended a single tutorial. Never handed in a single essay. And as for sitting the end of year exams, forget it. He goes home before all that. He's above it, you see. Or at least, his money is."

There was a flutter of laughter at that. But Sergey was not to be distracted by it. He was in full flow now, one hand pointing at his target as he spoke.

"Yes, he's a strange one, this one. He's rich and he's obviously connected. Right up to the top, so they say. But he's something of a mystery, too. He's not from the City. And that's why he despises us."

She stared at Sergey, not understanding. What did he mean? Everyone came from the City. There was nowhere else to come from. Unless . . . She thought of the handwritten letters—of the strangeness of so many things connected with Ben—and for a moment felt uncertainty wash over her. Then she remembered what he was doing: recollected what she herself had experienced in the frame.

"You're wrong, Sergey. You don't understand—"

Sergey pulled himself up, went around the table, and stood there, leaning over Shepherd. "No. I understand only too well. He's a fucking toad, that's what he is. A piece of slime."

She watched the two of them anxiously, terrified of what was going to happen. "He's drunk," she said pleadingly. "He doesn't mean it, Ben. It's the drink talking." But she was afraid for him. He didn't know Sergey, didn't know how vicious his temper was.

Ben was looking at her, ignoring the other man. He seemed calm, unaffected by the words, by the physical presence of the other man above him.

"Let him have his say, love. It's only words."

It was the first time he had called her love, but she scarcely noticed it. All she could see was that the very mildness of Ben's words acted to inflame Sergey's anger.

"You're wrong," he said icily. "It's more than words."

Ben turned and looked up at him, undaunted. "When a fool tells you you're wrong, you rejoice."

It was too much. Sergey lunged at him with both hands, trying to get a grip on his neck, but Ben pushed him away and stood, facing him. Sergey was breathing heavily, furious now. He made a second grab at Ben and got hold of his right arm, trying to twist it round behind his back and force him down onto his knees.

Catherine was on her feet, screaming. "No.¹ Please, Sergey! Don't hurt him! Please don't hurt him!"

Waiters were running toward them, trying to force a way through the crowd and break it up, but the press around the table was too great.

Using brute strength Sergey forced Ben down, grunting with the effort. Then, suddenly, Ben seemed to yield and roll forward, throwing his opponent off balance. Sergey stumbled and fell against a chair. When he got up, there was blood running from beneath his eye.

"You bastard . . ."

With a bellow of rage he threw himself at Ben again, but Ben's reflexes were much quicker. As Sergey lunged past him, he moved aside and caught hold of Sergey's right hand, turning the wrist.

The snap of breaking bones was audible, Sergey shrieked and went down onto his knees, cradling the useless hand.

For a moment Ben stood over him, his legs planted firmly apart, his chest rising and falling erratically; then he shuddered.

"I didn't mean . . ."

But it was done. The sculptor's hand was crushed and broken. Useless, it began to swell. Sergey pushed at it tenderly with one finger of the other hand, then moaned and slumped forward, unconscious.

Ben stepped back, away, his eyes taking in everything. Then he turned and looked at Catherine. She was standing there, her hands up to her mouth, staring down at the injured man.

"Ben . . ." she said softly, her voice barely in control. "Oh, Ben. What have you done?"

meg looked around her as they walked down Main toward the transit. The air was still, like the air inside a sealed box. It was the first thing she had noticed. There was no movement in the air, no rustling of leaves, none of the small, soft sounds that moving water makes, no hum of insects. Instead, small boys walked between the flower boxes with spray cans, pollinating the flowers, or watered the huge oaks that rested in deep troughs set into the floor. From their branches hung cages—huge, ornately gilded cages filled with bright-colored birds. But nothing flew here. Nothing bent and danced in the open wind.

"They like it like this," Ben said, as if that explained it all. Then he frowned and turned to look at her. "But it doesn't satisfy. Nothing here satisfies. It's all surfaces. There's nothing deep here. Nothing rooted."

It was Meg's first full morning in the City, though morning here meant little more than a change in the intensity of the overhead lighting. Outside, beyond the City's walls, it was still dark. But here that fact of nature did not matter. Throughout City Europe, time was uniform, governed not by local variation but in accordance with the rising and setting of the sun over the City's eastern edge.

Morning. It was one more imperfect mimicry. Like the trees, the flowers, the birds, the word lost its sharp precision here without a sun to make it real.

They went up fifty levels to the College grounds. This was what they termed an "open deck" and there was a sense of space and airiness. Here there were no tight warrens of corridors, no ceiling almost within reach wherever one went; even so, Meg felt stifled. It was not like being in a house, where the door opened out onto the freshness of a garden. Here the eyes met walls with every movement. She had forgotten how awful it was. Like being in a cage. "How can you stand it here?"

He looked about him, then reached out, taking her hand. "I've missed you, you know. It's been . . . difficult here." "Difficult?"

They had stopped in the central hexagonal space. On every side great tiers of balconies sloped back gently toward the ceiling, their surfaces transparent, reflecting and refracting light.

"You should come home, Ben. All this," she looked about her, shaking her head, "it's no good for you."

"Maybe," he said, looking away from her. "And yet I've got to try to understand it. It may be awful, but this is what is, Meg. This is all that remains of the world we made."

She began to shake her head, to remind him of home, but checked herself. It was not the time to tell him why she'd come. Besides, talking of home would only infuriate him. And perhaps he was right. Perhaps he did have to try to understand it. So that he could return, satisfied, knowing there was nothing else—nothing missing from his world.

"You seem depressed, Ben. Is it just the place? Or is it something else?"

He turned, half smiling. "No. You're right. It's not just the place." He made a small despairing gesture, then looked up at one of the great tiers of balconies.

Through the glasslike walls one could see people—dozens, hundreds, thousands of people. People, everywhere you looked. One was never alone here. Even in his rooms he felt the press of them against the walls.

He looked back at her, his face suddenly naked, open to her. "I get lonely here, Meg. More lonely than I thought it possible to feel."

She stared at him, then lowered her eyes, disturbed by the sudden insight into what he had been feeling. She would never have guessed.

As they walked on he began to tell her about the fight. When he had finished she turned to face him, horrified.

"But they can't blame you for that, Ben. He provoked you. You were only defending yourself, surely?"

He smiled tightly. "Yes. And the authorities have accepted that. Several witnesses came forward to defend me against his accusation. But that only makes it worse, somehow."

"But why? If it happened as you say it did."

He looked away, staring across the open space. "I offered to pay full costs. For a new synthetic, if necessary. But he refused. It seems he plans to wear his broken hand like a badge."

He looked back at her, his eyes filled with pain and hurt and anger. And something else.

"You shouldn't blame yourself, Ben. It was his fault, not yours."

He hesitated, then shook his head. "So it seems. So I made it seem. But the truth is, I enjoyed it, Meg. I enjoyed pushing him. To the limit and then . . ." He made a small pushing movement with one hand. "I enjoyed it. Do you understand that, Meg?"

She watched her brother, not understanding. It was a side of him she had never seen, and for all his words she couldn't quite believe it.

"It's guilt, Ben. You're feeling guilty for something that wasn't your fault."

He laughed and looked away. "Guilt? No, it wasn't guilt. I snapped his hand like a rotten twig. Knowing I could do it. Don't you understand? I could see how drunk he was, how easily he could be handled."

He turned his head, bringing it closer to hers, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"I could have winded him. Could have held him off until the waiters came to break things up. But I didn't. I wanted to hurt him. Wanted to see what it was like. I engineered it, Meg. Do you understand? I set it up."

She shuddered, then shook her head, staring at him intently now. "No." But his eyes were fierce, assertive. What if he had!

"So what did you learn? What was it like?"

He looked down at her hand where his own enclosed it. "If I close my eyes I can see it all. Can feel what it was like. How easily 1 led him. His weight and speed. How much pressure it took, bone against bone, to break it.

And that knowledge is . . ." He shrugged, then looked up at her again, his hand exerting the gentlest of pressure on hers. "I don't know. It's power, I guess." "And you enjoyed that?"

She was watching him closely now, forcing her revulsion down, trying to help him, to understand him.

"Perhaps you're right," he said, ignoring her question. "Perhaps I ought to go home."

"And yet something keeps you."

He nodded, his eyes still focused on her hand. "That's right. I'm missing something. I know I am. Something I can't see."

"But there's nothing here, Ben. Just look about you. Nothing."

He looked away, shrugging, seeming to agree with her, but he was thinking of the Lu Nan Jen, the Oven Man, and about Catherine. He had been wrong about those things—surprised by them. So maybe there was more, much more than he'd imagined.

He turned, looking back at her. 'Anyway, you'd better go. Your appointment's in an hour."

She looked back at him, her disappointment clear. "I thought you were coming with me."

He had told Catherine he would meet her at eleven, had promised he would show her more of the old paintings; but seeing the look on Meg's face, he knew he could not let her go alone.

"All right," he said, smiling, "I'll come to the clinic with you. But then I've things to do. Important things."

ben LOOKED about him at the rich decor of the anteroom and frowned. Such luxury was unexpected at this low level. Added to the tightness of the security screening it made him think that there must be some darker reason than financial consideration for establishing the Melfi Clinic in such an unusual setting.

The walls and ceiling were an intense blue, while underfoot a matching carpet was decorated with a simple yellow border. To one side stood a plinth on which rested a bronze of a pregnant woman—Hung Mao, not Han—her naked form the very archetype of fecundity. Across from it hung the only painting in the room—a huge canvas, its lightness standing out against the blue-black of the walls. It was an oak, a giant oak, standing in the plush green of an ancient English field.

In itself, the painting was unsurprising, yet in context it was, again, unexpected. Why this? he asked himself. Why here? He moved closer, then narrowed his eyes, looking at the tiny acorn that lay in the left foreground of the composition, trying to make out the two tiny initials that were carved into it.

AS. As what? he thought, smiling, thinking of all those comparatives he had learned as a very young child. As strong as an ox. As wily as a fox. As proud as a peacock. As sturdy as an oak.

And as long-lived. He stared at it, trying to make out its significance in the scheme of things; then he turned, looking back at Meg. "You've come here before?"

She nodded. "Every six months."

"And Mother? Does she come here, too?"

Meg laughed. "Of course. The first time I came, I came with her."

He looked surprised. "1 didn't know."

"Don't worry yourself, Ben. It's women's business, that's all. It's just easier for them to do it all here than for them to come into the Domain. Easier and less disruptive."

He nodded, looking away, but he wasn't satisfied. There was something wrong with all this. Something . . .

He turned as the panel slid back and a man came through, a tall, rather heavily built Han, his broad face strangely nondescript, his neat black hair swept back from a polished brow. His full-length russet gown was trimmed with a dark-green band of silk. As he came into the room he smiled and rubbed his hands together nervously, giving a small bow of his head to Meg before turning toward Ben.

"Forgive me Shih Shepherd, but we were not expecting you. I am the Senior Consultant here, Tung T'an. If I had known that you planned to accompany your sister, I would have suggested . . ." He hesitated, then not sure he should continue, he smiled and bowed his head. "Anyway, now that you are here, you had better come through, neh?"

Ben stared back at the Consultant, making him avert his eyes. The man was clearly put out that he was there. But why should that be if this were a routine matter? Why should his presence disturb things, even if this were "women's business"?

"Meg," the Consultant said, turning to her. "It is good to see you again. We expected you next week, of course, but no matter. It will take us but a moment to prepare everything."

Ben frowned. But she had said. . . He looked at her, his eyes demanding to know why she hadn't told him that her appointment was not for another week, but her look told him to be patient.

They followed Tung T'an into a suite of rooms every bit as luxurious as the first. Big, spacious rooms, decorated as if this were First Level, not the Mids. Tung T'an tapped out a combination on a doorlock, then turned, facing Ben again, more composed now.

"If you would be kind enough to wait here, Shih Shepherd, we'll try not to keep you too long. The tests are quite routine, but they take a little time. In the meantime, is there anything one of my assistants can bring you?" "You want me to wait out here?"

"Ben . . ." Meg's eyes pleaded with him not to make trouble.

He smiled. "All right. Perhaps you'd ask them to bring me a pot of coffee and a newsfax."

The Consultant smiled and turned to do as Ben asked, but Meg was looking at him strangely now. She knew her brother well. Well enough to know he never touched a newsfax.

"What are you up to?" she whispered, as soon as Tung T'an was out of the room.

He smiled, the kind of innocuous-seeming smile that was enough to make alarm bells start ringing in her head. "Nothing. I'm just looking after my kid sister, that's all. Making sure she gets to the Clinic on time."

She looked down, the evasiveness of the gesture not lost on Ben.

"I'll explain it all, Ben. I promise I will. But not now." She glanced up at him, then shook her head. "Look, I promise. Later. But behave yourself while you're here. Please, Ben. I'll only be an hour or so."

He relented, smiling back at her. "Okay. I'll try to be good."

A young girl brought him coffee and a pile of newsfax, then took Meg through to get changed. Ben sat there for a time, pretending to look at the nonsense on the page before him, all the while surreptitiously looking around. As far as he could see he was not being observed. At the outer gates security was tight, but here there was nothing. Why was that? It was almost standard for companies to keep a tight watch on their premises.

He stood up, stretching, miming tiredness, then walked across the room, looking closer at the walls, the vents, making sure. No. There was nothing. It was almost certain that he wasn't being observed.

Good. Then he'd delve a little deeper, answer a few of the questions that were stacking up in his head.

He went out into the corridor and made his way back to the junction. Doors led off to either side. He stopped, listening. There was the faintest buzz of voices to his right, but to his left there was nothing. He tried the left-hand door, drawing the sliding door back in a single silent movement. If challenged he would say he was looking for a toilet.

The tiny room was empty. He slid the door closed behind him and looked around. Again there seemed to be no cameras. As if they had no need for .them. And yet they must, surely, if they had a regular clientele?

He crossed the room with three quick paces and tried the door on the far side. It too was open. Beyond was a long narrow room, brightly lit, the left hand wall filled with filing cabinets.

Eureka! he thought, allowing himself a tiny smile. And yet it seemed strange, very strange, that he should be able to gain access to their files so easily. As if they weren't expecting anyone to try. His brow wrinkled, trying to work it out; then he released the thought, moving down the line of cabinets quickly, looking for the number he had glimpsed on the card Meg had shown at the gates. He found it without difficulty and tried the drawer. It opened at a touch.

Meg's file was missing. Of course . . . they would have taken it with them. Like a lot of private clinics most of the work was of a delicate nature, and records were kept in this old-fashioned manner, the reports handwritten by the consultants, no computer copy kept. Because it would not do ...

He stopped, astonished, noting the name on the file that lay beneath his fingertips. A file that had a tiny acorn on the label next to the familiar name. Women's business. . .

And then he laughed, softly, quietly, knowing now why Tung T'an had been so flustered earlier. They were here! They were all here¹. He flicked through quickly and found it. His file, handwritten like all the rest, and containing his full medical record—including a copy of his genetic chart.

He shivered, a strange mixture of pain and elation coursing through his veins. It was as he'd thought—Augustus had been right. Amos's experiment was still going on.

He stared at the genetic chart, matching it to the one he held in memory—the one he had first seen in the back of his great-grandfather's journal that afternoon in the old house, the day he had lost his hand. The two charts were identical.

He flicked through the files again until he came across his father's. For a time he was silent, scanning the pages, then he looked up, nodding to himself. Here it was—confirmation. A small note, dated February 18, 2185. The date his father had been sterilized. Sterilized without knowing it, on the pretext of a simple medical procedure.

A date roughly five years before Ben had been bom.

He flicked through again, looking now for his mother's file, then pulled it out. He knew now where to look. Anticipated what it would say. Even so, he was surprised by what he read.

The implant had been made seven months before his birth, which meant that he had been nurtured elsewhere for eight weeks before he had been placed in his mother's womb. He touched his tongue to his teeth, finding the thought of it strangely discomfiting. It made sense of course—by eight weeks they could tell whether the embryo was healthy or otherwise. His embryo would have been— what?—an inch long by then. Limbs, fingers and toes, ears, nose, and mouth would have formed. Yes. By eight weeks they would have been sure.

It made sense. Of course it did. But the thought of himself, in a false uterus, placed in a machine, disturbed him. He had always thought. . .

He let his hands rest on the edge of the drawer, overcome suddenly by the reality of what he had found. He had known—some part of him had believed it ever since that day when he had looked at Augustus's journal—even so, he had not been prepared. Not at core. It had been head knowledge, detached from him. Until now. He shuddered. So it was true. Hal was not his father, Hal was his brother. Like his so-called great-great-grandfather Robert, his great-grandfather Augustus, and his grandfather James. Brothers, all of them. Every last one of them seeds of the old man. Sons of Amos Shepherd and his wife, Alexandra.

He flicked through until he found her file, then laughed. Of course! He should have known. The name of the clinic—Melfi. It was his great-great-great grandmother's maiden name. No. His mothers maiden name. Which meant. . .

He tried another drawer. Again it opened to his touch, revealing the edges of files, none of them marked with that important acorn symbol. And inside? Inside the files were blank.

"It's all of a piece," he said quietly, nodding to himself. All part of the great illusion Amos built about him. Like the town in the Domain, filled with its android replicants. Like the City his son had designed to his order. All a great charade. A game to perpetuate his seed, his ideas.

And this, here, was the center of it. The place where Amos's great plan was carried out. That was why it was hidden in the Mids. That was why security was so tight outside and so lax within. No one else came here. No one but the Shepherd women. To be tested, and when the time was right and the scheme demanded it, to have Amos's children implanted into their wombs. No wonder Tung T'an had been disturbed to see him here.

He turned, hearing the door slide back behind him. It was Tung T'an.

"What in hell's name . . . ?" The Consultant began, then fell silent, seeing the open file on the drawer in front of Ben. He swallowed. "You should not be in here, Shih Shepherd."

Ben laughed. "No, I shouldn't. But I am."

The man took a step toward him, then stopped, frowning, trying, without asking, to ascertain how much Ben knew. "If you would leave now ..." "Of course. I've seen all I needed to see." The Han's face twitched. "You misunderstand . . ."

Ben shook his head. "Not at all, Tung T'an. You see, I knew. I've known for some time. But not how. Or where. All this. . ." he indicated the files. "It just confirms things for me."

"You knew!" Tung T'an laughed and shook his head. "Knew what, Shih Shepherd? There's nothing to know." "As you wish, Tung T'an."

He saw the movement in the man's eyes, the assessment and reassessment. Then Tung T'an gave a reluctant nod. "You were never meant to see any of this. It is why—"

"Why you kept the Shepherd males away from here." Ben smiled. "Wise. To make it all seem unimportant. Women's business. But old Amos wasn't quite so thorough here, was he?"

"I'm sorry?"

Ben shook his head. No, Tung T'an knew nothing of just how thorough Amos could be when he wanted to. The old town was an example of that, complete down to every last detail. But this—in a sense this was a disappointment. It was almost as if. . .

He laughed, for the first time seriously considering the idea. What if Amos had wanted one of them to discover all this? What if that, too, were part of the plan—a kind of test?

The more he thought of it, the more sense it made. The boarded-up old house, the hidden room, the enclosed garden, the lost journal. None of them were really necessary unless they were meant to act as clues—doors to be passed through until the last door was opened, the final revelation made. No. You did not preserve what you wished to conceal. You destroyed it. And yet. . .

And yet he had stumbled on this by accident. Coming here had not been his doing, it had been Meg's. Unless . . .

She had come a week early. Why? What reason could she have had for doing that. A week. Surely it would have made no difference?

Tung T'an was still staring at him. "You place me in an impossible situation, Shih Shepherd."

"Why so, Shih Tung? Think of it. You can't erase what I've seen, or what I know. Not without destroying me. And you can't do that." He laughed. "After all, it's what all of this here is dedicated to preserving, isn't it? You have no other function."

Tung T'an lowered his head. "Even so—"

Ben interrupted him. "You need say nothing, Tung T'an. Not even that I was here. For my own part I will act as if this place did not and does not exist. You understand me?" He moved closer to the Han, forcing him by the strength of his will to look up and meet his eyes. "I was never here, Tung T'an. And this conversation ... it never happened."

Tung T'an swallowed, aware suddenly of the charismatic power of the young man standing before him, then nodded.

"Good. Then go and see to my sister. She's like me. She doesn't like to be kept waiting. Ah, but you know that, don't you, Tung T'an? You, of all people, should know how alike we Shepherds are."

MEG SAT across from Ben in the sedan, watching him. He had been quiet since they had come from the clinic. Too quiet. He had been up to something. She had seen how flustered Tung T'an had been when he'd returned to her and knew it had to do with something Ben had said or done. When she'd asked, Ben had denied that anything had passed between him and Tung T'an, but she could tell he was lying. The two had clashed over something. Something important enough for Ben to be worrying about it still.

She tried again. "Was it something to do with me?" ;

He looked up at her and laughed. "You don't give up, do you?"

She smiled. "Not when it concerns you."

He leaned forward, taking her hands. "It's nothing. Really, sis. If it were important, I'd tell you. Honest."

She laughed. "That doesn't make sense, Ben. If it's not important, then there's no reason for you not to tell me. And if it is, well, you say you'd tell me. So why not just tell me and keep me quiet."

He shrugged. "All right. I'll tell you what I was thinking about. I was thinking about a girl I'd met here. A girl called Catherine. I should have met her, two hours back, but she's probably given up on me now."

Meg looked down, suddenly very still. "A girl?"

He squeezed her hands gently. "A friend of mine. She's been helping me with my work."

Meg looked up at him. He was watching her, a faint, almost teasing smile on his lips. "You're jealous, aren't you?"

"No—" she began, looking down, a slight color coming to her cheeks, then she laughed. "Oh, you're impossible, Ben. You really are. I'm curious, that's all. I didn't think. . ."

"That I had any friends here?" He nodded. "No. I didn't think I had, either. Not until a week ago. That's when I met her. It was strange. You see, I'd used her as a model for something I was working on. Used her without her knowing it. She was always there, you see, in a cafe I used to frequent. And then, one day, she came to my table and introduced herself."

A smile returned to her lips. "So when are you going to introduce her to me?" He looked down at her hands, then lifted them to his lips, kissing their backs. "How about tonight? That is, if she's still speaking to me after this morning."

BEN was sitting with Meg in the booth at the end of the bar when Catherine came in. He had deliberately chosen a place where neither of them had been before—neutral ground—and had told Meg as much, not wanting his sister to feel too out of place. Ben saw her first and leaned across to touch Meg's hand. Meg turned, seeing how Catherine came down the aisle toward them, awkward at first, then when she knew they had seen her, with more confidence. She had put up her flame-red hair so that the sharp lines of her face were prominent.

Looking at her in the half-light Meg thought her quite beautiful.

Ben stood, offering his hand, but Catherine gave him only the most fleeting of glances. "You must be Meg," she said, moving around the table and taking the seat beside her, looking into her face. "I've been looking forward to meeting you." She laughed softly, then reached out to gently touch Meg's nose, tracing its shape, the outline of her mouth.

"Yes," she said, after a moment. "You're like him, aren't you?"

She turned, looking at Ben. "And how are you⁷."

"I'm well," he said, noncommittally, taking his seat, then turning to summon a waiter.

Meg studied her in profile. Ben had said nothing, but she understood. The girl was in love with him.

She looked, as Ben had taught her, seeing several things: the fine and clever hands, the sharpness of the eyes that missed little in the visual field. An artist's eyes. And she saw how the girl looked at Ben: casual on the surface, but beneath it all uncertain, vulnerable.

Ben ordered, then turned back, facing them. "This, by the way, is Catherine. She paints."

Meg nodded, pleased that she had read it so well. "What do you paint? Abstracts? Portraits?" She almost said landscapes, but it was hard to believe that anyone from here would pick such a subject.

The girl smiled and glanced quickly at Ben before answering. "I paint whatever takes my interest. I've even painted your brother."

Ben leaned across the table. "You should see it, Meg. Some of her work's quite good."

Meg smiled. If Ben said she was good you could take it that the girl was excellent. She looked at Catherine anew, seeing qualities she had missed the first time: the taut, animal-like quality of her musculature and the way she grew very still whenever she was watching. Like a cat. So very like a cat.

The waiter brought their drinks. When he had gone, Ben leaned forward, toasting them both.

"To the two most beautiful women in the City. Kan Pei!"

Meg looked sideways at the girl, noting the color that had come to her cheeks. Catherine wasn't sure what Ben was up to. She didn't know him well enough yet. But there was a slightly teasing tone in his voice that was unmistakable, and his eyes sparkled with mischief. His mood had changed. Or, rather, he had changed his mood.

"This painting..." Meg asked, "is it good?"

Catherine looked down, smiling. There was no affectation in the gesture, only a genuine humility. "I think it is." She looked up, careful not to look at Ben, her cheeks burning. "It's the best thing I've done. My first real painting."

Meg nodded slowly. "I'd like to see it, if you'd let me. I don't think anyone has painted Ben in years. If at all."

The girl bowed her head slightly. There was silence for a moment, then Ben cleared his throat, leaning toward Meg. "She's far too modest. I've heard they plan to put on an exhibition of her work, here in the College."

Meg saw how the girl looked up at that, her eyes flying open, and knew it was not something she had told Ben, but that he had discovered it for himself.

She looked back at Catherine. "When is it being held?"

"In the spring."

"The spring . . ." Meg thought of that a moment, then laughed.

"Why did you laugh?" Catherine was staring back at her, puzzled, while from across the table Ben looked on, his eyes almost distant in their intensity.

"Because it's odd, that's all. You say spring and you mean one thing, while for me . . ." She stared down at her drink, aware of how strangely the girl was looking at her. "It's just that spring is a season of the year, and here ..." she looked up, meeting the girl's deeply green eyes, "here there are no seasons at all."

For a moment longer Catherine stared back at her, seeking but not finding what she wanted in her face. Then she looked away, giving a little shrug.

"You speak like him, too. In riddles."

"It's just that words mean different things to us," Ben said, leaning back, his head pressing against the wall of the partition. It was a comment that seemed to exclude Catherine, and Meg saw how she took one quick look at him, visibly hurt.

Hurt and something else. Meg looked away, a sudden coldness in the pit of her stomach. It was more than love. More than simple desire. The girl was obsessed with Ben. As she looked back at Ben, one word formed clear in her head. Difficult. It was what he had said earlier. Now she was beginning to understand.

"Words are only words," she said, turning back and smiling at the girl, reaching out to touch and hold her hand. "Let's not make too much of them."

six hours LATER", Catherine finished wrapping the present, then stood the canvas by the door. That done, she showered, then dressed and made herself up. Tonight she would take him out. Alone, if possible; but with his sister, if necessary.

For a moment she stood there, studying herself in the wall-length mirror. She was wearing a dark-green, loose-fitting wrap tied with a cord at the waist. She smiled, pleased by what she saw, knowing Ben would like it; then she looked down, touching her tongue to her top teeth, remembering.

A card had come that afternoon. From Sergey. A terse, bitter little note full of recriminations and the accusation of betrayal. It had hurt, bringing back all she had suffered these last few weeks. But it had also brought relief. Her relationship with Sergey could not have lasted. He had tried to own her, to close her off from herself.

She shivered. Well, it was done with now. His clash with Ben had been inevitable and, in a sense, necessary. It had forced her to a choice. Sergey was someone in her past. Her destiny now lay with Ben.

The bolt took her north, through the early evening bustle. It was after seven when she reached the terminal at the City's edge. From there she took a tram six stacks east, then two north. There she hesitated, wondering if she should call and tell him she was coming; instead, she pressed on. It would give him less opportunity to make excuses. She had her own key now—she would surprise him.

She took the elevator up to his level, the package under her arm. It was heavy and she was longing to put it down. Inside, she placed it against the wall in the cloakroom while she took off her cape. The smell of percolating coffee filled the apartment. Smiling, she went through to the kitchen, hoping to find him there.

The kitchen was empty. She stood there a moment, listening for noises in the apartment, then went through to the living room. No one was there. Two empty glasses rested on the table. For a moment she looked about her, frowning, thinking she had made a mistake and they were out. Then she remembered the coffee.

She crossed the room and stood there, one hand placed lightly against the door, listening. Nothing. Or almost nothing. If she strained she thought she could hear the faintest sound of breathing.

She tried the door. It was unlocked. She moved the panel, sliding it back slowly, her heart pounding now, her hands beginning to tremble.

It was pitch black within the room. As she eased the panel back, light from the living room spilled into the darkness, breaching it. She saw at once that the frame had been moved from the center of the room; pushed back to one side, leaving only an open space of carpet and the edge of the bed.

She stepped inside, hearing it clearly now—a regular pattern of breathing. At first it seemed single, but then she discerned its doubleness. Frowning, she moved closer, peering into the darkness.

Her voice was a whisper. "Ben? Ben? It's me. Catherine."

She knelt, reaching out to touch him, then pulled her hand back sharply. The hair. . .

The girl rolled over and looked up at her, her eyes dark, unfocused from sleep.

Beside her Ben grunted softly and nuzzled closer, his right arm stretched out across her stomach, his hand cradling her breast.

Her breath caught in her throat. Kuan Yin! His sister!

Meg sighed, then turned her face toward the other girl. "Ben?" she asked drowsily, not properly awake, one hand scratching lazily at the dark bush of her sex.

Catherine stood, the strength suddenly gone from her legs, a tiny moan of pain escaping her lips. She could see now how their limbs were entwined, how their bodies glistened with the sweat of lovemaking.

"I. . ." she began, but the words were swallowed back. There was nothing more to say. Nothing now but to get out and try to live with what she'd seen. Slowly she began to back away.

Meg lifted her head slightly, trying to make out who it was. "Ben?"

Catherine's head jerked back, as if she had no control of it, and banged against the panel behind her. Then she turned and, fumbling with the door, stumbled out—out into the harsh light of the living room—and fell against the table. She went down, scattering the empty glasses, and lay there a moment, her forehead pressed against the table's leg.

She heard the panel slide back and turned quickly, getting up, wiping her hand across her face. It was Ben. He put his hand out to her, but she knocked it away, her teeth bared like a cornered animal.

"You bastard . . ." she whimpered. "You . . ."

But she could only shake her head, her face a mask of grief and bitter disappointment.

He lowered his hand and let his head fall. It was an awkward, painful little gesture, one which Meg, watching from the other room, saw and understood. He hadn't told her. Catherine hadn't known how things were between Ben and herself.

Meg looked beyond her brother. Catherine had backed against the door. She stood there a moment, trembling, her pale, beautiful face wet with tears, racked with grief and anger. Then she turned and was gone.

And Ben? She looked at him, saw how he stood there, his head fallen forward, all life, all of that glorious intensity of his, suddenly gone from him. She shivered. He was hurt. She could see how hurt he was. But he would be all right. Once he'd got used to things. And maybe it was best. Yes, maybe it was, in the circumstances.

She went across and put her arms about him, holding him tightly, her breasts pressed against his back, her cheek resting against his neck.

"It's all right," she said softly, kissing his naked shoulder. "It's all going to be all right. I promise you it will. It's Meg, Ben. I'm here. I won't leave you. I promise I won't."

But when she turned him to face her, his eyes seemed sightless and his cheeks were wet with tears.

"She's gone," he said brokenly. "Don't you see, Meg? I loved her. I didn't realize it until now, but I loved her. And now she's gone."

IT WAS MUCH LATER when Meg found the package. She took it through to the living room; then, laying it on the floor, she unwrapped it and knelt there looking down at it. It was beautiful. There was no doubt about it. Meg had thought no one else capable of seeing it, but it was there, in the girl's painting—all of Ben's power, his harsh, uncompromising beauty. She too had seen how mixed, how gentle-fierce he was.

She was about to wrap it again, to hide it away somewhere until they were gone from here, when Ben came out of the bedroom.

"What's that?" he asked, looking across at her, the faintest light of curiosity in his eyes.

She hesitated, then picked it up and turned it toward him.

"The girl must have left it," she said, watching him, seeing how his eyes widened with surprise, how the painting seemed to bring him back to life.

"Catherine," he corrected her, his eyes never leaving the surface of the painting. "She had a name, Meg, like you and I. She was real. As real as this."

He came closer, then bent down on his haunches, studying the canvas carefully, reaching out with his fingertips to trace the line and texture of the painting. And all the while she watched him, seeing how his face changed, how pain and wonder and regret flickered one after another across the screen of his features, revealing everything.

She looked down, a tiny shudder rippling through her. Their lives had been so innocent, so free of all these complications. But now. . . She shook her head, then looked at him again. He was watching her.

"What is it?" he asked.

She shook her head, not wanting to say. They had both been hurt enough by this. Her words could only make things worse. Yet she had seen the change in him. Had seen that transient, flickering moment in his face when pain had been transmuted into something else—into the seed of some great artifice.

She shuddered, suddenly appalled. Was this all there was for him? This constant trading in of innocence for artifice? This devil's bargain? Could he not just be? Did everything he experienced, every living breath he took, have to be sacrificed on the bleak, unrelenting altar of his art?

She wished there were another answer—another path—-for him, but knew it was not so. He could not be without first recording his being. Could not be free without first capturing himself. Nor did he have any choice in the matter. He was like Icarus, driven, god-defiant, obsessed by his desire to break free of the element which bound him.

She looked back at him, meeting his eyes. "I must go after her, Meg. I must."

"You can't. Don't you understand? She saw us. She'll not forgive you that." "But this . . ." He looked down at the painting again, the pain returned to his face. "She saw me, Meg. Saw me clear. As I really am."

She shivered. "I know. But you can't. It's too late, Ben. Don't you see that?" "No," he said, standing. "Not if I go now and beg her to forgive me." She let her head fall, suddenly very tired. "No, Ben. You can't. Not now." "Why?" his voice was angry now, defiant. "Give me one good reason why I can't." She sighed. It was what she had been unable to say to him earlier—the reason why she had come here a week early—but now it had to be said. She looked up at him again, her eyes moist now. "It's Father. He's ill." "I know—" he began, but she cut him off.

"No, Ben. You don't know. The doctors came three days ago. The day I wrote to you." There was a faint quaver in her voice now. She had let the painting fall. Now she stood there, facing him, the first tears spilling down her cheeks.

"He's dying." She raised her voice suddenly, anger spilling over into her words. "Goddamnit, Ben, they've given him a month! Six weeks at most!" She swallowed, then shook her head, her eyes pleading with him now. "Don't you see? That's why you can't go after her. You've got to come home. You must! Mother needs you. She needs you badly. And me. I need you too, Ben. Me more than anyone."

MEMORANDUM: 4th day of May, A.D. 2207

To His Most Serene Excellency, Li Shai Tung, Grand Counsellor and T'ang of C/i'eng Ou Chou (City Europe)

Chieh Hsia, Your humble servant begs to inform you that the matter of which we spoke has now resolved itself satisfactorily. The girl involved, Catherine Tissan (see attached report, MinDis PSec 435/55712), has apparently returned to her former lover, Sergey Novacek (see attached report, MinDis PSec 435/55711), who, after pressure from friends loyal to Your Most Serene Excellency, has dropped his civil action against the Shepherd boy (see copies of documents attached).

Ben Shepherd himself has, as you are doubtlessly aware, returned home to tend his ailing father, abandoning his studies at Oxford, thus removing himself from the threat of possible attack or abduction.

This acknowledged, in view of the continuing importance of the Shepherd family to State matters, your humble servant has felt it his duty to continue in his efforts to ascertain whether this was, as appears on the surface of events, a simple matter of rivalry in love, or whether it was part of some deeper, premeditated scheme to undermine the State. Such investigations have revealed some interesting if as yet inconclusive results regarding the nature of the business dealings of the father, Lubos Novacek. Results which, once clarified, will, if of substance to this matter, be notified to Your Most Serene Excellency.

Your humble servant,

Heng Yu,

Minister of Distribution, Ch'eng Ou Chou (City Europe)

Heng Yu read the top copy through; then, satisfied, he reached out and took his brush from the inkblock, signing his name with a flourish on each of the three copies. One would go to Li Shai Tung. The second he would keep for his own records. The third—well, the third would go to Prince Yuan, via Nan Ho, his contact in the palace at Tongjiang.

Heng Yu smiled. Things could not have gone better. The boy was safe, the T'ang pleased, and he was much closer to his ambition. What more could a man ask for? Of course, not everything had been mentioned in the documents. The matter of the bronze statue, for instance, had been left out of the report on Sergey Novacek.

It had been an interesting little tale. One that, in spite of all, reflected well on young Novacek. Investigations into the past history of the bronze had shown that it had once belonged to his father, Lubos, who, to bail out an old friend, had had to sell it. Sergey Novacek had known of this, and hearing Heng Chian-ye talking of it, had set things up so that he might win it back. The matter of Shepherd, it seemed, had been a secondary matter, spawned of jealousy and tagged on as an afterthought. The statue had been the prime mover of the boy's actions. From accounts he had returned it to his father on his sixtieth birthday.

And the father? Heng Yu sat back, stroking his beard. Lubos Novacek was, like many of the City's leading tradesmen, a respectable man. His trade, however, was anything but respectable, for Lubos Novacek acted as a middleman between certain First Level concerns and the Net. Put crudely, he was the pimp of certain Triad bosses, acting on their behalf in the Above, buying and selling at their behest and taking his cut.

A useful man to know. And know him he would.

As for the Great Man—that pompous halfwit, Fan Liang-wei—Heng had enjoyed summoning him to his Ministry and ordering him to desist from his efforts to get Ben thrown out of the College. He had shown Fan the instrument signed by the T'ang himself and threatened him with instant demotion—even to the Net itself—should any word come back to him that Fan was pursuing the matter in any shape or form.

Yes, it had been immensely satisfying. Fan's face had been a perfect picture as he attempted to swallow his massive pride and come to terms with the fact of the boy's influence. He had been almost apoplectic with unexpressed anger.

Heng Yu gave a little chuckle, then turned to face his young cousin.

"Something amuses you, Uncle?"

"Yes, Chian-ye. Some business I did earlier. But come now, I need you to take these documents for me." He picked up two of the copies and handed them across. "This first copy must be handed directly to Chung Hu-yan and no one else, and this to Nan Ho at Tongjiang. Both men will be expecting you."

"Is that all, Uncle Yu?"

Heng Yu smiled. It was a moment for magnanimity. "No, Chian-ye. I am pleased with the way you have served me this past week. In view of which I have decided to review the matter of your allowance. In respect of past and future duties as my personal assistant, you will receive an additional sum of twenty-five thousand yuan per year."

Heng Chian-ye bowed low, surprised yet also greatly pleased. "You are most generous, Uncle Yu. Be assured, I will strive hard to live up to the trust you have placed in me."

"Good. Then get going, Chian-ye. These papers must be in the hands of their respective agents within the next six hours."

Heng Yu watched his cousin leave, then stood, stretching and yawning. There was no doubting it, this matter—of little substance in itself—had served him marvelously. He laughed, then looked about him, wondering momentarily what his uncle, Chian-ye's father, would have made of it.

And the matter of the Melfi Clinic?

That, too, could be used. Was something to be saved until the time was ripe. For though his uncle Heng Chi-po had been a greedy, venal man, he had been right in one thing. Information was power. And those who had it wielded power.

Yes. And never more so than in the days to come. For Chung Kuo was changing fast. New things were rising from the depths of the City. Things he would do well to know about.

Heng Yu, Minister to the T'ang, nodded to himself, then reached across and killed the light above his desk.

Which was why, in the morning, he had arranged to meet the merchant Novacek. To offer him a new arrangement—a new commodity to trade in, one he would pay handsomely to possess.

Information.

EPILOGUE I SUM HER 2207

Fallen Petals

The guests are gone from the pavilion high,

In the small garden flowers are whirling around.

Along the winding path the petals lie;

To greet the setting sun, they drift up from the ground.

Heartbroken, I cannot bear to sweep them away; From my eager eyes, spring soon disappears. I pine with passing, heart's desire lost for aye; Nothing is left but a robe stained with tears.

—LI SHANG-YIN, Faffing Flowers, ninth century A.D.

LI YUAN reined in his horse and looked up. On the far side of the valley, beyond the tall, narrow spire of Three Swallows Mount, a transporter was banking, heading for the palace, two li distant. As it turned he saw the crest of the Ywe Lung emblazoned on its fuselage and frowned, wondering who it was. As far as he knew his father was expecting no one.

He turned in his saddle, looking about him. The grassy slope led down to a dirt track that followed the stream for a short way, then crossed a narrow wooden bridge and snaked south toward Tongjiang. He could follow that path back to the palace or he could finish the ride he had planned, up to the old monastery, then south to the beacon. For a moment longer he hesitated, caught in two minds. It was a beautiful morning, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue; the kind of morning when one felt like riding on and on forever, but he had been out three hours already, so maybe it was best if he got back. Besides, maybe his father needed him. Things had been quiet recently. Too quiet. Maybe something had come up.

He tugged at the reins gently, turning the Arab's head, then spurred her on with his heels, leading her carefully down the slope and along the path, breaking into a canter as he crossed the bridge. He was crossing the long meadow, the palace just ahead of him, when a second transporter passed overhead, the insignia of the Marshal clearly displayed on the undersides of its stubby wings. Yuan slowed, watching as it turned and landed on the far side of the palace, a cold certainty forming in his guts.

It had begun again.

At the stables he all but jumped from the saddle, leaving the groom to skitter about the horse, trying to catch hold of the reins, while he ran on, along the red-tiled path and into the eastern palace.

He stopped, breathless, at the door to his fathers suite of rooms, taking the time to calm himself, to run his fingers quickly through his unruly hair; but even as he made to knock, Chung Hu-yan, his father's Chancellor, drew the door of the anteroom open and stepped out, as if expecting him.

"Forgive me, Prince Yuan," he began, without preamble, "but your father has asked me if you would excuse him for an hour or so. A small matter has arisen, inconsequential in itself, yet urgent."

Yuan hesitated, wondering how far he could push Hu-yan on this, but again Hu-yan pre-empted him.

"It is nothing you can help him with, Prince Yuan, I assure you of that. It is a ... personal matter, let us say. No one has died, nor is the peace of Chung Kuo threatened, yet the matter is of some delicacy. In view of special circumstances your father thought it best that he consult his cousin Tsu Ma and the Marshal. You understand, I hope?"

Yuan stood there a moment longer, trying to read something in Chung Hu-yan's deeply creased face, but the old man's expression was like a wall, shutting him out. He laughed, then nodded.

"I am relieved, Hu-yan. I had thought. . ."

But he had no need to say. It had been on all their minds these past few months. Where would their enemies strike next? Who would they kill? In many respects this peace was worse than the War that had preceded it; a tenuous, uncertain peace that stretched the nerves almost to breaking point.

He smiled tightly, then turned away, hearing the door pulled closed behind him. But even as he walked back he was beginning to wonder what it was that might have brought Tsu Ma so urgently to his father's summons. A personal matter. . . He turned, looking back thoughtfully, then shrugged and turned back, making his way past bowing servants and kneeling maids, hurrying now.

Maybe Fei Yen knew something. She was always hearing snippets of rumor that his own ears hadn't caught, so maybe she knew what this was. And even if she didn't, she had ways of finding such things out. Women's ways.

He laughed and broke into a run. And then maybe he would take her out in the palanquin. One last time before she was too far advanced in her pregnancy. Up to the monastery, perhaps. Or to the beacon.

Yes, they could make a picnic of it. And maybe, afterward, he would make love to her, gently, carefully, there on the grassy hillside, beneath the big open sky of northern China. One last, memorable time before the child came.

He stopped before her door, hammering at it and calling her name, laughing, all of his earlier fears forgotten, his head filled with the thought of the afternoon ahead.

"What is it, Yuan?" she asked, opening the door to him almost timidly, her smile uncertain. "Are you drunk?"

In answer he drew her to him, more roughly than he had meant, and lifted her up, crushing her lips with his own. "Not drunk, my love. No. But happy.

Very happy. . . ."

* * *

Li SHAI TUNG had taken his guests through to the Summer House. Servants had brought ch'a and sweetmeats and then departed, leaving the three men alone. Tolonen stood by the window, looking down the steep slope toward the ornamental lake, while Tsu Ma and Li Shai Tung sat, facing each other, on the far side of the room. So far they had said nothing of importance, but now Li Shai Tung looked up at Tsu Ma and cleared his throat.

"Do you remember the first time you came here? That day you went riding with Yuan and the Lady Fei?"

Tsu Ma met his gaze unflinchingly. "That was a good day. And the evening that followed, out on the lake."

Li Shai Tung looked down. "Ah yes, Yuan told me of that. . . ." He smiled; sourly, Tsu Ma thought, fearing the worst.

The old T'ang raised his head again, the smile fading altogether. "And you recall what we spoke of that day?"

Tsu Ma nodded, his mouth dry, wishing the old man would be more direct. If he knew, why didn't he say something? Why this torment of indirectness? "We spoke of Yuan's Project, if I remember accurately," he said, looking across at Tolonen momentarily, recalling that they had appointed the old man to oversee the whole business. But what had this to do with Fei Yen and him? For surely that was why he had been summoned here this morning at such short notice. He looked down, filled with shame for what he had done. "I am sorry, Shai Tung, I—"

But Li Shai Tung seemed not to have heard. He carried on, as if Tsu Ma had said nothing.

"We spoke afterward, too, didn't we? A week or so later, if I recall. At which time I made you a party to my thoughts."

Tsu Ma looked up, frowning. He had heard of indirection, but this . . . Then he understood. This had nothing to do with Fei Yen and him. Nothing at all. He laughed, relief washing through him.

Li Shai Tung stared at him, astonished. "I am afraid I find it no laughing matter, cousin." He half-turned, looking at the Marshal. "Show him the file, Knut."

Tsu Ma felt himself go cold again. He took the file and opened it, the faintest tremor in his hands. A moment later he looked up, his face a picture of incomprehension.

"What in Hell's name is all this?"

The old T'ang held his head stiffly, his anger barely controlled. "Inventions. Machines. Devices that would be the ruin of Chung Kuo. Every last one of them breaking the Edict in a dozen, maybe twenty, different ways."

Tsu Ma glanced through the file, amazed by what he saw, then shook his head. "But where did they come from? Who invented them? And why?"

Tolonen spoke up for the first time. "They're SimFic mainly. From the traitor Berdichev's papers. We saw them long ago—three, maybe even four, years ago— but in a different form. Li Shai Tung ordered them destroyed. But here they are again, the same things but better than before."

"Better?"

Li Shai Tung nodded. "You recall that we talked of a young boy. A clever one, by the name of Kim Ward. Well, this is his work. Somehow he got hold of these papers and worked on them. The improvements are his. In one sense it's quite amazing, in another quite horrifying. But the fault does not lie with the boy."

Tsu Ma shook his head, still not understanding how all of this connected, or why Li Shai Tung should consult him on the matter. "Then who?"

"That's exactly what I asked the Marshal to find out. He came upon these files by accident, you understand. Six months had passed and I wanted to know what was happening with Yuan's Project. So, secretly, without the Project Director's knowledge, the Marshal trawled the Project's files."

Tsu Ma leaned back in his chair. "I see. You didn't want Yuan to know that you were checking up on him?"

Li Shai Tung nodded. "It seemed best. It was not that I felt he would lie to me, just that he might act as a ... as a filter, let's say. But this. This shocked me."

"Then Li Yuan is responsible for this file? It was he who gave the originals to the boy to work on?"

"Yes. . . ." Bitterness and anger were etched starkly in the old man's face.

"I see____"

He understood. Li Shai Tung had asked for him because he alone could be trusted, for he alone among the Seven knew of the existence of the Project. Even Wu Shih was under the impression that Li Shai Tung was only considering matters. Yes, and he understood the necessity for that; for were it to become common knowledge it could only do them harm. Wang Sau-leyan, certainly, could be counted on to use it to ferment trouble in Council and try to break the power of the Li family.

But that was not really the issue at hand. No. The real problem was that Li Shai Tung felt himself affronted. His son had not acted as a son should act. He had lied and cheated, no matter the good intent that lay behind the act. Indeed, to the old man that was probably the worst of it. Not that these things existed, for they could be destroyed, as if they had never been, but that Li Yuan had sought to conceal them from him. It was this part of it on which he sought Tsu Ma's advice. For who was closer to his son than Tsu Ma? As close, almost, as a brother. ...

Li Shai Tung leaned closer. "But what should I do, Tsu Ma? Should I confront him with these . . . things?"

"No. . . ." Tsu Ma took a breath. "I would say nothing." "Nothing?"

He nodded, holding the old man's eyes. "What good would it do? Yuan acted from your best interests. Or so he believes. So I'm sure he believes. There was no desire to harm you, only an ... an eagerness, let us call it, an impatience in him, that can be set down to his youthfulness. Look upon these as folly. Arrange an accident and have all record of these things destroyed. The Marshal could arrange something for you, I'm certain. But say nothing. Do not damage what is between you and your son, Shai Tung."

The old man shook his head, momentarily in pain. "But he has lied to me. Deceived me."

"No. . . . Your words are too strong."

"It is unfilial____"

Tsu Ma swallowed, thinking of his own far greater deceit, then shook his head again. "He loves you, Shai Tung. He works hard for you. Unstintingly hard. There is nothing he would not do for you. In that he is anything but unfilial. So let things be. After all, no real harm is done."

His words came strong and heartfelt, as if it were himself he was pleading for, and when Li Shai Tung looked up at him again there were tears in the old man's eyes.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I am being too harsh." He sighed. "You are a good friend to him, Tsu Ma. I hope, for his sake, you are ever so." He turned, looking at the Marshal. "And you, Knut? What do you say?"

Tolonen hesitated, then lowered his head. "Tsu Ma is right. I had come here ready to argue otherwise, but having heard him I am inclined to agree. Say nothing. The rest I will arrange." "And the boy?"

Tolonen looked briefly to Tsu Ma, then met his master's eyes again. "I would leave the boy for now, Chieh Hsia. Li Yuan will discover for himself how dangerous the boy is. And who knows, that may prove the most important thing to come from all of this, neh? To learn that knowledge is a two-edged sword?"

Li Shai Tung laughed; but it was an unhealthy, humorless sound. "Then it will be as you say, good friends. It will be as you say."

FEI yen had been quiet for some while, staring out across the circular pool toward the distant mountains. Now she turned, looking back at him.

"Why did you bring me here?"

Li Yuan met her eyes, smiling vaguely, unconscious, it seemed, of the slight edge to her voice.

"Because it's beautiful. And . . ." He hesitated. A strange, fleeting expression crossed his features, then he looked down. "I haven't said before, but Han and I used to come here as boys. We would spend whole afternoons here, playing among the ruins. Long ago, it seems now. Long, long ago." He looked up at her again, searching her eyes, as if for understanding. "When I rode out this morning, I knew I had to come here. It was as if something called me."

She turned, shivering, wondering still if he was playing with her. If, despite everything, he knew. Behind him the ancient Buddhist stupa stood out against the blue of the sky, its squat base and ungainly spire like something alien in that rugged landscape. To its left rested the pale yellow silk palanquin he had insisted she be carried in, its long poles hidden in the waist-length grass, the six runners squatting nearby, talking quietly among themselves, their eyes averted. Farther up the hillside she could see the entrance to the ruined monastery where she had come so often with Tsu Ma.

It had all come flooding back to her; all of the old feelings reawakened, as sharp as ever. Why now? she had asked herself, horrified. Why, when I have finally found peace, does it return to torment me? She had listened to Yuan abstractedly, knowing Tsu Ma was once more in the palace, and had found herself wanting to run to him and throw herself upon his mercy. But it could not be. She was this man's wife. This boy's wife. So she had chosen. And now it could not be undone. Unless that was why the old man had summoned Tsu Ma.

For one brief, dreadful moment she imagined it undone. Imagined herself cast off, free to marry Tsu Ma, and saw the tiny movement of denial he would make. As he had done that time, here, beside the pool. She caught her breath, the pain of that moment returned to her.

I should have been your wife, Tsu Ma. Your strength. Your second self.

Aiya, but it was not to be. It was not her fault that she had fallen for Tsu Ma. No. That had been her fate. But this too was her fate. To be denied him. To be kept from him forever. To be married to this child. She looked down, swallowing back the bitterness.

"What is it, my love?"

She looked at him, for the moment seeing nothing but his youth, his naivete; those and that awful old-man certainty of his. Then she relented. It was not his fault. He had not chosen to fall in love with her. No, he had been nothing but kindness to her. Even so, her heart bled that it was he and not Tsu Ma who had brought her here today.

"It's nothing," she answered him. "Only the sickness."

He stared at her, concerned, real sympathy in his expression as he struggled to understand her. But he would never understand.

"Should we go back?" he asked softly, but she shook her head.

"No. It's all right. It'll pass in a while."

She looked away again, staring out toward the south and the distant beacon, imagining him there, waiting for her, even now. But there were only ghosts now. Distant memories. Those and the pain.

She sighed. Was it always so? Did fate never grant a full measure? Was it the lot of everyone to have this lesser satisfaction—this pale shadow of passion?

And was she to cast that to the winds? To choose nothing rather than this sometimes-bitter compromise? She shook her head, anguished. Oh, she had often thought of telling Yuan; had had the urge to let the words float free from her, like acids, eating into the soft dream of love he had built about him. And what had kept her from that? Was it pity for him? A desire not to be cruel? Or was it simple self-interest on her part?

She turned, looking at him again. Did she love him? Did she? No. But neither did she hate him. It was as she'd said so often to herself. He was a good man. A good husband. But beyond that. . .

She closed her eyes, imagining herself in Tsu Ma's arms again, the sheer physical strength of him thrilling beyond words, the strange, mysterious power of him enfolding her until her mind went dark and her nerve ends sang with the sweetness of his touch.

And could Li Yuan do that for her? She shuddered. No. Never in ten thousand years.

"If you would wait here a brief moment, Shih Nan, I will let my master know you are here."

Nan Ho, Li Yuan's Master of the Inner Chamber, returned the first steward's bow, then, when the man had gone, turned, looking about him. It was not often that he found himself in one of the mansions of the Minor Families and he was not going to miss this opportunity of seeing how they lived. He had seen the balcony on his way in; now he crossed the room quickly and stood there just inside the window, looking out across the grounds. Down below the chao tai hui—the entertainment— was in full swing, more than a thousand guests filling the space between the old stone walls.

He took a step further, out onto the balcony itself, fascinated by the range of outlandish fashions on display, amused by the exaggerated gestures of some of the more garishly dressed males, then froze, hearing voices in the gallery behind him. He drew in closer to the upright, drawing the long silk curtain across a fraction to conceal himself. It would not do to be seen to be so curious, even if he were here on the Prince's business.

At first he was unaware of the import of what was being said, then a single phrase made him jerk his head about, suddenly attending.

He listened, horrified, the laughter that followed the words chilling him. And as their footsteps went away down the stairs, he came out and, tiptoeing quietly across the tiled floor, leaned over the stairway to catch a sight of the men who had been talking, drawing his head back sharply as they turned on the landing below.

Gods.' he thought, all consideration of the business he had come for gone from his mind. He must do something, and immediately, for this matter would not wait. He must nip it in the bud at once.

He was still standing there, his hands gripping the marble of the balustrade, when Pei Ro-hen entered the gallery from the far end.

"Master Nan? Is that you?"

He turned, flustered, bowing twice, then hurried forward, kissing Pei's offered ring hand. He straightened up and after the briefest pause to collect his thoughts, came directly to the point.

"Forgive me, my Lord, but something has just happened that I must attend to at once. I was waiting, by the window there, when four men entered the gallery, talking among themselves. Not wishing to disturb them, I took a step outside, onto the balcony, yet what I overheard is of the gravest importance. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it threatens the security of our masters."

Pei Ro-hen had gone very still. There was a small movement in his normally placid face, then he nodded. "I see. And what do you wish to do, Master Nan?"

In answer Nan Ho went to the balcony again, his head bowed, waiting for Pei to come across. When the old man stood beside him, he pointed out across the heads of the crowd to four men who were making their way to one of the refreshment tents on the far side of the walled garden.

"Those are the men. The two in red silks and the others in lilac and green. If you could detain them on some pretext for an hour or two, I will see if I can bring the Marshal here. He will know best how to deal with this matter."

"Are you sure that is wise, Master Nan? Should we not, perhaps, simply keep an eye on them and prevent them from leaving?"

Nan Ho shook his head vigorously. "Forgive me, but no, my Lord. They must be isolated at the earliest opportunity, for what they know is dangerous. I cannot say more, but the safety of my masters is at stake here and I would be failing in my duty if I did not act."

Pei smiled, pleased immensely by this show of loyalty. "I understand, Nan Ho. Then go at once and bring Marshal Tolonen. I, meanwhile, will act my part in this."

KIM SAT there in the semidarkness, the room lights doused, the soft, pearled glow of the screen casting a faint, silvered radiance over his face and upper arms. He had worked through the night, then slept, waking only an hour past, entranced, fearful, filled with the dream he'd had.

Her eyes. He had dreamed of Jelka Tolonen's eyes. Of eyes so blue that he could see the blackness beyond them; could see the stars winking through, each fastened on its silver, silken thread to where he stood, looking through her at the universe. He had woken, shivering, the intensity of the vision scaring him. What did it mean? Why was she there, suddenly, between him and the stars? Why could he not see them clearly but through the startling blueness of her eyes?

He had lain there a while, openmouthed with astonishment, then had come and sat here, toying with the comset's graphics, trying to re-create the vision he had had.

A spider. As so often he had been a spider in his dream; a tiny, silvered, dark-eyed creature, throwing out his web, letting the threads fly outward to the stars on tiny spinners that caught the distant sunlight and converted it to silk, flying onward, faster and ever faster to their various destinations. But this time it had been as if a great wind were blowing, gathering all of the threads into a single twisted trunk, drawing them up into the blueness of those eyes that floated like twin planets above where he crouched. Only on the far side of those eyes, where the blue shaded into black, did the trunk seem to blossom, like the branches of a tree, a million tiny threads spreading out like the fine capillaries of a root system, thrust deep into the earth of the universe.

Kim shivered, staring down at the thing he had made, first in his dreams and then here in the flatness of the screen. So it had always been for him: first he would see something, then he would act on what he'd seen. But this? How could he act on this? How could he pass his web through the young girl's eyes?

Or was that what it meant? Was he being too literal? Did this vision have another meaning than all those that had preceded it?

He shook his head, then cleared the screen, only then realizing how fast his heart was beating, how hard it seemed suddenly to breathe. Why was that? What did it mean?

He stood, angry with himself. It was only a dream, after all. It didn't have to mean anything, surely? No, he was better off concentrating on finishing off the work for Prince Yuan. Another two, maybe three, days should see that done. Then he could send it through. He would ask Barycz for the favor.

He leaned forward, about to bring up the lights, when the screen came alive again. A message was coming through. He leaned back, waiting, one hand touching the keyboard lightly, killing the hardprint facility.

The words appeared in the official Project typescript, headed by the symbol of a skull surrounded by a tiny nimbus of broken lines. It was an instruction for him to go to the medical center at once for his three-month checkup.

Kim sat back thoughtfully. It was too early. He wasn't due his next medical for another ten days. Still, that wasn't so unusual. Not everyone was as punctilious as he. Even so, he would make sure it wasn't one of Spatz's tricks.

He tapped out the locking combination, then put in the code, touching Cap A to scramble it. Cap L would unscramble when the time came to unlock, but until then Prince Yuan's files would be safe from prying eyes. Yes, they could take the comset apart, component by component, and never find it.

He looked up at the watching camera and smiled, then, going across to the corner, poured water from the jug into the bowl and began to wash.

TOLONEN STOOD and came around his desk, greeting Prince Yuan's Master of the Inner Chamber.

"Master Nan, how pleasant to see you here. What can I do for you?"

Nan Ho bowed low. "Forgive me, Marshal. I realize how busy you are, but this is a matter of the most extreme urgency."

"So my equerry leads me to believe. But tell me, what has happened, Master Nan? Is the T'ang's life in danger?"

Nan Ho shook his head. "It is not the T'ang but young Prince Yuan who is threatened by this matter. Nor is it a matter of life but of reputation that is at stake."

The old man frowned at that. "I don't understand. You mean Prince Yuan's reputation is threatened?"

"I do indeed, Marshal. I was at Pei Ro-hen's mansion on my master's business, when I overheard something. A rumor. A most vile rumor, which, if it were to become common knowledge, might do irreparable damage not only to my master but to the Seven. Such damage might well have political consequences."

Tolonen was watching him, his lips slightly parted. "Could you be more specific, Master Nan? I mean, what kind of rumor is this we're talking of?"

Nan Ho lowered his eyes. "Forgive me, Marshal, but I would rather not say. All I know is that there are no grounds whatsoever for such a rumor and that the perpetrators have but one purpose: to create a most vile nuisance for the Family that you and I deem it an honor to serve."

He glanced up, seeing that his words had done the trick. At the thought of the Li Clan being harmed in any way, Tolonen had bristled. There was a distinct color at his neck, and his gray eyes bulged with anger.

"Then what are we to do, Master Nan? What steps might we take to eradicate this vileness?"

Nan Ho smiled inwardly, knowing he had been right to come direct to Tolonen. "Pei Ro-hen has detained the men concerned before they could spread their wicked rumor. He is holding them until our return. If, through them, we can trace the source of this rumor, then we might yet stand a chance of crushing this abomina' tion before it takes root."

Tolonen gave a terse nod, then went back to his desk, giving brief instructions into his desktop comset before he turned back.

"The way is cleared for us. We can be at Lord Pei's mansion in half an hour. One of my crack teams will meet us there. Let us hope we are not too late, neh, Master Nan?"

Yes, thought Nan Ho, the tightness at the pit of his stomach returning. For all our sakes, let us hope we can stop this thing before it spreads.

THE TWO MEN STOOD at the barrier, waiting while the Marshal's party passed through on the down transit. When it had gone they turned, their eyes meeting briefly, a strange look passing between them.

"Passes . . ." the guard seated beyond the barrier said, waving them on with one hand.

Mach flipped open the tiny warrant card he was carrying in his left hand and offered it to the guard. The guard took it without looking at him. "Face up to the camera," he said tonelessly.

Mach did as he was told, staring up into the artificial eye. Somewhere in Central Records it would be matching his retinal prints to his service record. A moment later a green light flashed on the board in front of the guard. He handed the card back, again without looking at Mach, then held out his hand again.

Lehmann came forward a pace and placed his card into the guard's hand. This time the guard's eyes came up lazily, then took a second look as he noted the pallor of the man.

"You sick or something?"

Mach laughed. "So would you be if you'd been posted to the Net for four years."

The guard eyed Lehmann with new respect. "That so, friend?"

Lehmann nodded, tilting his face up to stare at the camera.

"Four years?"

"Three years, eight months," Lehmann corrected him, knowing what was in the false record DeVore had prepared for him.

The guard nodded, reading from the screen in front of him. "Says here you were decorated, too? What was that for?"

"Some bastard Triad runner got too nosy," Lehmann said, staring back at him menacingly. "I broke his jaw."

The guard laughed uncomfortably and handed back the card. "Okay. You can go through. And thanks. . . ."

Out of earshot Mach leaned close. "Not so heavy, friend."

Lehmann simply looked at him.

Mach shrugged. "Okay. Let's get on with this. We'll start with the boxes at the top of the deck."

They took the deck elevator up, passing through a second checkpoint, then sought out the maintenance shaft that led to the first of the eighteen communications boxes that serviced this deck.

Crouched in the narrow tunnel above the floor-mounted box, Lehmann took a small cloth bag from the pocket of his tunic. Tilting his head forward, he tapped first one and then the other of the false lenses out into his hand, placing them into the bag.

Mach was already unscrewing the first of the four restraining bolts. He looked up at Lehmann, noting what he was doing. "Are you sure you ought to do that? There are cameras in these tunnels, too."

Lehmann tucked the bag away. "It'll be okay. Besides, I can't focus properly with those false retinas in place."

Mach laughed. "So Turner doesn't think of everything."

Lehmann shook his head. "Not at all. He's very thorough. Whose man do you think is manning the cameras?"

Mach slowed, then nodded thoughtfully. "Uhuh? And how do you think he does that? I mean, he's got a lot of friends, your man Turner. It seems odd, don't you think? I mean, how long is it since he quit Security? Eight years now? Ten?"

"It's called loyalty," Lehmann said coldly. "I thought you understood that. Besides, there are many who feel like you and I. Many who'd like to see things change."

Mach shook his head slowly, as if he still didn't understand, then got to work on the second of the bolts.

"You think that's strange, don't you?" Lehmann said after a moment. "You think that only you lower-level types should want to change how things are. But you're wrong. You don't have to be on the bottom of this shit-heap to see how fuck-awful things are. Take me. From birth I was set to inherit. Riches beyond your imagination. But it was never enough. I never wanted to be rich. I wanted to be free. Free of all the restraints this world sets upon us. Chains, they are. It's a prison, this world of ours, boxing us in, and I hate that. I've always hated it."

Mach stared up at him, surprised and, to a small degree, amused. He had never suspected that the albino had so much feeling in him. He had always thought him cold, like a dead thing. This hatred was unexpected. It hinted at a side to him that even Turner knew nothing of.

The second bolt came free. He set to work on the third.

"I bet you hated your parents, too, didn't you?"

Lehmann knelt, watching Mach's hands as they turned the bolt. "I never knew them. My father never came to see me. My mother . . . well, I killed my mother."

"You—" Mach looked back at him, roaring with laughter, then fell silent. "You mean, you really did? You killed her?"

Lehmann nodded. "She was a rich Han's concubine. An arfidis addict, too. She disgusted me. She was like the rest of them, soft, corrupt. Like this world. I set fire to her, in her rooms. I'd like to do the same to all of them. To burn the whole thing to a shell and pull it down."

Mach took a deep breath through his nose, then set to work again. "I see. And Turner knows this, does he?"

"No. He thinks I'm someone else, something else."

"I see. But why tell me?"

"Because you're not what he thinks you are either." Lehmann reached across him, beginning to unscrew the final bolt. "Turner sees only enemies or pale shadows of himself. That's how he thinks. Black and white. As if this were all one great big game of wei chi."

Mach laughed. "You surprise me. I'd have thought—" Then he laughed again. "I'm sorry. I'm doing what you said he does, aren't I? Assuming you're something that you're not."

The last bolt came loose. Between them they gently lifted the plate from the connecting pins and set it to one side. Beneath the plate was a panel, inset with tiny slip-in instruction cards. At the base of the panel was a keyboard. Lehmann tapped in the cut-out code he'd memorized, then leaned close, studying the panel. His pale, thin fingers searched the board, then plucked five of the translucent cards from different locations. He slipped them into the pouch at his waist, then reached into his jacket and took out the first of the eighteen tiny sealed packets. When a certain signal was routed through this board, these five would be triggered, forming a circuit that overrode the standard instruction codes. To the backup system it would seem as if the panel were functioning normally, but to all intents and purposes it would be dead. And with all eighteen boxes triggered in this way, communications to the deck would be effectively cut off.

He slotted the five wafer-thin cards into place, reset the cut-out code, then, with Mach's help, lowered the plate back onto the connecting pins.

"There," Mach said. "One down, seventeen to go. Pretty easy, huh?" "Easy enough," Lehmann said, taking one of the restraining bolts and beginning to screw it down. "But only if you've the nerve, the vision, and the intelligence to plan it properly."

Mach laughed. "And a few old friends, turning a blind eye." Lehmann turned his head slightly, meeting Mach's eyes. "Maybe. And a reason for doing it, neh?"

KIM HAD HEARD the alarm from three decks down but made nothing of it, yet coming out of the transit he remembered and, his pulse quickening, began to run toward his room.

Even before he turned the corner into his corridor he saw signs of what had happened. A long snake of hose ran from the corner hydrant, flaccid now. On the far side of it, water had pooled. But that was not what had alerted him. It was the scent of burning plastics.

He leapt the hose, took three small, splashing steps, then stopped. The door to his room was open, the fire-hose curving inside. Even from where he stood he could see how charred the lintel was, could see the ashy residue of sludge littering the floor outside.

"What in the gods' names . . . ?"

T'ai Cho jerked his head around the door. "Kim!" he cried, coming out into the corridor, his face lit up. "Thank the gods you're safe. I thought—"

He let himself be embraced, then went inside, facing the worst. It was gone. All of it. His comset was unrecognizable, fused into the worktop as if the whole were some strange, smooth sculpture of twisted black marble. The walls were black, as was the ceiling. The floor was awash with the same dark sludge that had oozed out into the corridor.

"What happened?" he asked, looking about him, the extent of his loss—his books, his clothes, the tiny things he'd called his own—slowly sinking in. "I thought this kind of thing couldn't happen. There are sprinklers, aren't there? And air seals."

T'ai Cho glanced at one of the maintenance men who were standing around, then looked back at Kim. "They failed, it seems. Faulty wiring, it looks like."

Kim laughed sourly, the irony not lost on him. "Faulty wiring? But I thought the boxes used instruction cards."

One of the men spoke up. "That's right. But two of the cards were wrongly encoded. It happens sometimes. It's something we can't check up on. A mistake at the factory . . . You know how it is."

Only too well, Kim thought. But who did this? Who ordered it done? Spatz? Or someone higher than he? Not Prince Yuan, anyway, because he wanted what was destroyed here today.

He sighed, then shook his head. It would take weeks, months perhaps, to put it all back together again. And if he did? Well, maybe it would be for nothing after all. Maybe they would strike again, just as he came to the end of his task, making sure nothing ever got to Li Yuan.

He turned, looking at his old friend. "You shouldn't have worried, T'ai Cho. But I'm glad you did. I was having my three-month medical. They say I'm fine. A slight vitamin C deficiency, but otherwise . . ." He laughed. "It was fortunate, neh? I could have been sleeping."

"Yes," T'ai Cho said, holding the boy to him again. "We should thank the gods, neh?"

Yes, thought Kim. Or whoever decided I was not as disposable, as my work.

NAN HO stood in the cool of the passageway outside the room, mopping his brow, the feeling of nausea passing slowly from him. Though ten minutes had passed, his hands still trembled and his clothes were soaked with his own sweat. In all his forty years he had seen nothing like it. The man's screams had been bad enough, but the look in his eyes, that expression of sheer terror and hopelessness, had been too much to bear.

If he closed his eyes he could still see it. Could see the echoing kitchen all about him, the prisoner tied naked to the table, his hands and feet bound tight with cords that bruised and cut the flesh. He bared his teeth, remembering the way the masked man had turned, the oiled muscles of his upper arms flexing effortlessly as he lifted the tongs from the red-hot brazier and turned them in the half-light. He could see the faint wisp of smoke that rose toward the ceiling, could hear the faint crackle as the coal was lifted into cooler air, even before he saw the glowing coal itself. But most of all he could see the panic in the young man's eyes, and he recalled what he had thought.

Forgive me, Fan Ming-yu, but I had to do this. For my master. The man had begun to babble, to refute all he had been saying only a moment before, but the torturer's movements seemed inexorable. The coal came down, slowly, ever so slowly it seemed, and the man's words melted into shrieks of fearful protest. His body lifted, squirming, desperate, but all of its attempts to escape only brought it closer to the implement of its suffering.

The torturer held back a moment. One leather-gloved hand pushed the man's hip down, gently, almost tenderly, it seemed. Then, with the kind of care one might see from a craftsman tracing fine patterns onto silver, he brought the coal down delicately, pressing it tightly against the man's left testicle.

Nan Ho had shuddered and stepped back, swallowing bile. He had glanced, horrified, at Tolonen, seeing how the old man looked on impassively, then had looked back at the man, unable to believe what he had seen, appalled and yet fascinated by the damage the coal had done. Then, turning away, he had staggered out, his legs almost giving out under him, the screams of the man filling his head, the smell of charred flesh making him want to retch.

He stood there a moment longer, calming himself, trying to fit what he had just seen into the tightly ordered pattern of the world he knew, then shook his head. It was not his fault. He had had no choice in the matter. If his master had been any other man, or if the Lady Fei had chosen any other man but Tsu Ma to be her lover, but . . . well, as it was, this had to be. To let the truth be known, that was unthinkable.

Tolonen came outside. He stood there, staring at Nan Ho, then reached out and held his shoulder. "I am sorry, Master Nan. I didn't mean it to upset you. It's just that I felt you ought to be there, to hear the man's confession for yourself." He let his hand fall, then shrugged. "There are more efficient ways of inflicting pain, of course, but none as effective in loosening a tongue. The more barbaric the means of torture, we find, the quicker the man will talk."

Nan Ho swallowed, then found his voice again. "And what did you discover?"

"I have a list of all those he spoke to. Few, fortunately. And his source."

"His source?"

"It seems you acted not a moment too soon, Master Nan. Fan Ming-yu had just come from his lover. A young man named Yen Shih-fa."

Nan Ho's eyes widened. "I know the man. He is a groom at the stables."

"Yes." Tolonen smiled grimly. "I have contacted Tongjiang already and had the man arrested. With the very minimum of fuss, you understand. They are bringing him here even now."

Nan Ho nodded abstractedly. "And what will you do?"

The Marshal swallowed, a momentary bitterness clouding his features. "What can I do? It is as you said, Master Nan. This rumor cannot be allowed to spread. But how prevent that? Normally I would trust to the word of such ch'un tzu, but in a matter of this seriousness it would not be enough to trust to their silence. A man's word is one thing, but the security of the State is another. No; nor would it serve to demote them below the Net. These four are men of influence. Small influence, admittedly, but their absence would be noticed and commented upon. No, in the circumstances we must act boldly, I'm afraid."

Nan Ho shuddered. "You mean they must die."

Tolonen smiled. "Nothing quite so drastic, Master Nan. It is a matter of a small operation." He traced a tiny line across the side of his skull. "An incision here, another there ..."

"And their families?"

"Their families will be told that they took an overdose of something. Pei Ro-hen's surgeons had to operate to save them, but unfortunately there was damage— serious damage—to those parts of the brain that control speech and memory. Most unfortunate, neh? But the T'ang, in his generosity, will offer compensation."

Nan Ho stared at the Marshal, surprised. "You know this?"

"I have already written the memorandum. It will be on Li Shai Tung's desk this evening."

"Ah, then the matter is concluded?"

"Yes. I think we can safely say that."

"And the groom? Yen Shih-fa?"

Tolonen looked down, clearly angry. "Yen Shih-fa will die. After we have made sure he has done no further mischief."

Nan Ho bowed his head. "I understand . . ." Yet he felt no satisfaction, only a sense of dread necessity; that and a slowly mounting anger at his young master's wife. This was her fault, the worthless bitch. This was the price of her selfishness, her wantonness.

Tolonen was watching him sympathetically. "You have served your master well, Nan Ho. You were right. If this rumor had taken root. . ."

Nan Ho gave the slightest nod. He had hoped to keep the details from Tolonen, but it had not proved possible. Even so, no harm had been done. Fan Ming-yu's insistence on the truth of what he had said—that Tsu Ma had slept with the Lady Fei—had shocked and outraged the old man. Nan Ho had seen for himself the fury in Tolonen's face as he leaned over the man, spittle flecking his lips as he called him a liar and a filthy scandal monger. And thank the gods for that. No. Not for one moment had the Marshal believed it could be true. Tsu Ma and the Lady Fei. No. It was unthinkable!

And so it must remain. For a lifetime, if necessary. But how long would it be before another whispered the secret to one they trusted? How long before the rumor trickled out again, flowing from ear to ear like the tributaries of a great river? And then?

"I am pleased that it has all worked out so well, Marshal," he said, meeting the old man's eyes briefly. "But now, if you need me no longer, I must see Pei Ro-hen. I have yet to complete the business I came here to transact."

"Of course," Tolonen said, smiling now. "You have done all that needs to be done here, Master Nan. I can deal with the rest." "Good. Then you'll excuse me."

He bowed and was beginning to turn away when Tolonen called him back. "Forgive me, Master Nan, but one small thing. This morning, as I understand it, was the first time Tsu Ma had visited Tongjiang for three, almost four months. Now, without saying for a moment that I believe it to be true, such rumors have no credibility—even among such carrion as these—unless there are some few small circumstances to back them up. What crossed my mind, therefore, was that this was possibly some old tale, renewed, perhaps, by Tsu Ma's visit this morning? I wondered . . ." He hesitated, clearly embarrassed by what he was about to say. "Well, to be frank, I wondered if you had heard any whisper of this rumor before today, Master Nan. Whether . . ."

But Nan Ho was shaking his head. "Maybe you're right, Marshal Tolonen, but personally I think it more likely that the T'ang's visit put the idea into the young groom's head, neh? Dig a little and I'm sure you'll find a reason for his malice. It would not be the first time that such mischief has come from personal disappointment."

Tolonen considered that a moment, then nodded, satisfied. "Well, it was just a passing thought. Go now, Master Nan. And may the gods reward you for what you have done here today."

IT HAD TAKEN the best part of six hours to work their way down through the deck, but now they had only this last box to deal with and they were done. Both men had been quiet for some time, as if the stream of talk between them had dried up, but now Mach looked across at his pale companion and laughed.

"What is it?" Lehmann asked tonelessly, concentrating on unscrewing the last of the restraining bolts.

"I was just thinking—"

Again he laughed. This time Lehmann raised his eyes, searching his face. "Thinking what?"

"Just about what you might have become. With your father's money, I mean. You could have been a right bastard, neh? Beating them at their own game. Making deals. Controlling the markets. Undercutting your competitors or stealing their patents. Did that never appeal to you?"

Lehmann looked down again. "I considered it. But then, I considered a lot of things. But to answer you, Shih Mach—no, it never appealed to me. But this . . ." He eased the bolt out and set it down. "This is what I've always wanted to do."

"Always?" Mach helped him remove the plate, then sat back on his haunches, watching.

"Since I can remember," Lehmann went on, tapping the cut-out code into the keyboard. "I've always fought against the system. Ever since I knew I could. In small ways at first. And later . . ."

Mach waited, but Lehmann seemed to have finished.

"Are you really as nihilistic as you seem, Stefan Lehmann? Is there nothing you believe in?"

Lehmann's pale, thin fingers hovered over the panel a moment, then quickly plucked the five tiny cards from their slots. Mach had watched Lehmann do this eighteen times now, noting how he took his time, double-checking, making absolutely sure he took the right ones. It was impressive in a way, this kind of obsessive care. And necessary in this case, because the configuration of each panel was different. But there was also something machinelike about the way Lehmann went about it.

He waited, knowing the albino would answer him when he was good and ready; watching him take out the tiny sealed packet and break it open, then slip the replacement cards into their respective slots.

"There," Lehmann said. "That's all of them. Do you want to test the circuit out?"

Mach was about to answer when there was a banging on the tunnel wall beneath them.

"Shit!" Mach hissed between his teeth. "What the fuck is that?"

Lehmann had turned at the noise; now he waited, perfectly still, like a lizard about to take its prey. Wait, he mouthed. It may be nothing.

There was silence. Mach counted. He had gotten to eight when the banging came again, louder than before and closer, almost beneath their feet. Moments later a head appeared at the hatchway farther along.

"Hey!" the guard said, turning to face them. "Are you authorized to be in there?"

Mach laughed. "Well, if we're not we're in trouble, aren't we?" The guard was pulling himself up into the tunnel, hissing with the effort. Mach looked to Lehmann quickly, indicating that he should do nothing. With the barest nod Lehmann leaned back, resting his head against the tunnel wall, his eyes closed.

The guard scrambled up, then came closer, his body hunched up in the narrow space. He was a young, dark-haired officer with the kind of bearing that suggested he had come out of cadet training only months before. "What are you doing here?" he asked officiously, one hand resting lightly on his sidearm. Mach smiled, shaking his head. "Don't you read your sheets?" The young guard bristled, offended by Mach's off-hand manner. "That's precisely why I'm here. I've already checked. There's no mention of any maintenance work on the sheets."

Mach shrugged. "And that's our fault? You should contact Admin and find out what asshole fucked things up, but don't get on our backs. Here." He reached inside his tunic and pulled out the papers DeVore had had forged for them.

He watched the guard's face; saw how the sight of something official-looking mollified him.

"Well? Are you satisfied?" Mach asked, putting out his hand to take the papers back.

The guard drew back a step, his eyes taking in the open box, the exposed panel. "I still don't understand. What exactly are you doing there? It says here that you're supposed to be testing the ComNet, but you can do that without looking at the boxes, surely?"

Mach stared back at him, his lips parted, momentarily at a loss, but Lehmann came to the rescue. He leaned forward casually and plucked one of the tiny cards from the panel in front of him, handing it to the guard.

"Have you ever seen one of these?"

The guard studied the clear plastic of the card, then looked back at Lehmann. "Yes, I—"

"And you know how they function?"

"Vaguely, yes, I—"

Lehmann laughed. A cold, scathing laughter. "You don't know a fucking thing, do you, soldier boy? For instance, did you know that if even a single one of these instruction cards gets put in the wrong slot then the whole net can be fucked up. Urgent information can be misrouted, emergency calls never get to their destinations. That's why we_xtake such pains. That's why we look at every box. Carefully. Meticulously. To make sure it doesn't happen. Understand me?" He looked up at the guard savagely. "Okay, you've been a good boy and done all your checking, now just piss off and let us get on with the job, neh? Before we register a complaint to your superior officer for harassment."

Mach saw the anger in the young guard's face, the swallowed retort. Then the papers were thrust back into his hand and the guard was backing away down the tunnel.

"That was good," Mach said quietly when he was gone. "He'll be no more trouble, that's for sure."

Lehmann looked at him, then shook his head. "Here," he said, handing him the plate. "You finish this. I'm going after our friend."

Mach narrowed his eyes. "Are you sure that's wise? I mean, he seemed satisfied with your explanation. And if you were to kill him . . ."

Lehmann turned, his face for that brief moment very close to Mach's, his pink eyes searching the Ping Tiao leader's own eyes.

"You asked if I believed in anything, Mach. Well, there's one thing I do believe in—I believe in making sure."

LI YUAN RODE ahead, finding the path down the hillside. Behind him came the palanquin, swaying gently, the six carriers finding their footholds on the gentle slope with a practiced certainty, their low grunts carrying on the still evening air.

Li Yuan turned in his saddle, looking back. The sun was setting in the west, beyond the Ta Pa Shan. In its dying light the pale yellow silks of the palanquin seemed dyed a bloody red. He laughed and turned back, spurring his horse on. It had been a wonderful day. A day he would remember for a long time. And Fei Yen? Despite her sickness, Fei had looked more beautiful than ever. And even if they had not made love, simply to be with her had somehow been enough.

He threw his head back, feeling the cool breeze on his neck and face. Yes, motherhood suited Fei Yen. They would have many sons. A dozen, fifteen, sons. Enough to fill Tongjiang. And daughters too. Daughters who would look like Fei Yen. And then, when he was old and silver-haired, he would have a hundred grandchildren; would gather his pretties about his throne and tell them of a summer day—this day—when he had gone up to the ruins with their grandmother, the Lady Fei, and wished them into being.

He laughed, enjoying the thought, then slowed, seeing lights floating, dancing in the darkness up ahead. Looking back he raised a hand, signaling for the carriers to stop, then eased his mount forward a pace or two. No, he was not mistaken, the lights were coming on toward them. Then he understood. They were lanterns. Someone—Nan Ho, most likely—had thought to send out lantern bearers to light their way home.

He turned, signaling the carriers to come on, then spurred the Arab forward again, going down to meet the party from the palace.

He met them halfway across the long meadow. There were twenty bearers, their ancient oil-filled lanterns mounted on ten-ch'i wooden poles. Coming up behind were a dozen guards and two of the young grooms from the stables. Ahead of them all, marching along stiffly, like a young boy playing at soldiers, was Nan Ho. "Master Nan!" he hailed. "How good of you to think of coming to greet us." Nan Ho bowed low. Behind him the tiny procession had stopped, their heads bowed. "It was but my duty, my Lord."

Li Yuan drew closer, leaning toward Nan Ho, his voice lowered. "And the business I sent you on?"

"It is all arranged," Nan Ho answered quietly. "The Lord Pei has taken on the matter as his personal responsibility. Your maids will have the very best of husbands."

"Good." Li Yuan straightened up in his saddle, then clapped his hands, delighted that Pearl Heart and Sweet Rose would finally have their reward. "Good. Then let us go and escort the Lady Fei, neh, Master Nan?"

Li Yuan galloped ahead, meeting the palanquin at the edge of the long meadow. "Stop!" he called. "Set the palanquin down. We shall wait for the bearers to come." As the chair was lowered there was the soft rustle of silk from inside as Fei Yen stirred. "Yuan?" she called sleepily. "Yuan, what's happening?"

He signaled to one of the men to lift back the heavy silk at the front of the palanquin, then stepped forward, helping Fei Yen raise herself into a sitting position. Then he stepped back again, pointing out across the meadow. "See what Master Nan has arranged for us, my love."

She laughed softly, delighted. The darkness of the great meadow seemed suddenly enchanted, the soft glow of the lanterns like giant fireflies floating at the end of their tall poles. Beyond them on the far side of the meadow, the walls of the great palace of Tongjiang were a burnished gold in the sun's last rays, the red, steeply tiled roofs like flames.

"It's beautiful," she said. "Like something from a fairy tale." He laughed, seeing how the lamplight seemed to float in the liquid darkness of her eyes. "Yes. And you the fairy princess, my love. But come, let me sit with you. One should share such magic, neh?"

He climbed up next to his wife, then turned, easing himself into the great cushioned seat next to her.

"All right, Master Nan. We're ready."

Nan Ho bowed, then set about arranging things, lining the lantern bearers up on either side of the palanquin, then assigning six of the guards to double up as carriers. He looked about him. Without being told the two grooms had taken charge of the Arab and were petting her gently.

Good, thought Nan Ho, signaling for the remaining guards to form up behind the palanquin. But his satisfaction was tainted. He looked at his master and at his wife and felt sick at heart. How beautiful it all looked in the light of the lanterns, how perfect, and yet. . .

He looked down, remembering what he had done, what he had seen that day, and felt a bitter anger. Things should be as they seem, he thought. No, he corrected himself; things should seem as they truly are.

He raised his hand. At the signal the carriers lifted the palanquin with a low grunt. Then, as he moved out ahead of them, the procession began, making its slow way across the great meadow, the darkness gathering all about them.

"Well, how did it go?"

Lehmann threw the pouch down on the desk in front of DeVore. "There was a slight hitch, but all the circuits are in place. I had to kill a man. A Security guard. But your man there, Hanssen, is seeing to that."

DeVore studied Lehmann a moment. "And nobody else saw you?"

"Only the guards at the barriers."

"Good." DeVore looked down, fingering the pouch, knowing that it contained all the communication circuits they had replaced, then pushed it aside. "Then we're all set, neh? Five days from now we can strike. There was no problem with Mach, I assume?"

Lehmann shook his head. "No. He seems as keen as we are to get at them."

DeVore smiled. As he ought to be. "Okay. Get showered and changed. I'll see you at supper for debriefing."

When Lehmann was gone he got up and went across the room, looking at the detailed diagram of Security Central that he'd pinned up on the wall. Bremen was the very heart of City Europe's Security forces; their "invulnerable" fortress. But it was that very assumption of invulnerability that made them weak. In five days' time they would find that out. Would taste the bitter fruit of their arrogance.

He laughed and went back to his desk, then reached across, drawing the folder toward him. He had been studying it all afternoon, ever since the messenger had brought it. It was a complete file of all the boy's work; a copy of the file Marshal Tolonen had taken with him to Tongjiang that very morning; a copy made in Tolonen's own office by Tolonen's own equerry, a young man DeVore had recruited to his cause five years earlier, when the boy was still a cadet.

He smiled, remembering how he had initiated the boy, how he had made him swear the secret oath. It was so easy. They were all so keen; so young and fresh and ripe for some new ideology—for some new thing they could believe in. And he, DeVore, was that new thing. He was the man whose time would come. That was what he told them, and they believed him. He could see it in their eyes; that urgency to serve some new and better cause—something finer and more abstract than this tedious world of levels. He called them his brotherhood and they responded with a fierceness born of hunger. The hunger to be free of this world ruled by the Han. To be free men again, self-governing and self-sustaining. And he fed that hunger in them, giving them a reason for their existence—to see a better world. However long it took.