When the door was opened four men stood there, none of them the man he was looking for. Something was not right. He took a step back. "I’m sorry," he said. "I’m seeking the Honorable Chen. Perhaps he is not at home."
"Eh, but he is. He awaits you."
Guo pivoted to dart away, but a powerful hand clamped his wrist, and then another. "Don’t go," one of the men said cruelly, pulling him in and latching the door behind him.
A cold fatalism settled over Guo. He knew better than to show fear. And meanwhile he had his wits, and should he not deploy every power he had? Sometimes, the legends told, a man could prevail at times like this through words alone. Guo marshaled himself, sharpening his intelligence. He was prepared to speak-
But they were already advancing toward him.
Spencer and Kong were bent over a table in the back room of the Bureau of Cultural Relics, examining the mountain of microliths Kong had collected near the Shuidonggou site. Sorting them, grading them, packing them. Cobbles, flakes, hammerstones, points, and scrapers. From the Neolithic, pottery shards and beads.
"You see this?" Spencer examined a powerfully shaped stone scraper. "Beautiful. Late Paleolithic. Twenty-five, thirty thousand years." He placed it in one of the piles.
A secretary burst in with a sheaf of fax papers. "Datongle."
"Haode. " Kong took the papers. He scanned them at once, then turned his smile on Spencer. "Qianzheng!" He indicated the pages. "Visa! Visa!" He managed to get the word in English.
"Oh! Oh, my God! The visas for Eren Obo?" Spencer took the pages and grinned at them.
"Tai hao-le!"
"And what’s this?" Spencer pointed to the rest of the pile of fax pages. "Is this the literature search from your graduate student?"
But Kong only went off in a stream of Mandarin. Nevertheless his hand holding the pages aloft told Spencer they were practically the first scholars out here, the first since Teilhard. There’d been no surveys on archaic hunter-gatherer sites out here, no organized attempts to locate and date and describe and excavate anything besides Shuidonggou. No coherent picture at all of the nomadic foragers, or their transition to the Neolithic with its advent of settled life and agriculture. Nothing published-just the stuff on Shuidonggou itself.
Because, Christ, Spencer thought, they haven’t even looked! They don’t even know where to look. But I know. I know from the years of surveying back home. I know exactly where ancient people lived in this kind of terrain. Winters they lived in the alluvial fans, the creek margins-then in the summer they might have gone up in the mountains. Just like in the American West. Only, in America you’re lucky if you find a handful of intact sites in your whole career…
"Yanjiu jihui bu shao, " Kong exclaimed happily, tossing down the fax. His cellular phone rang and he pulled it off his belt and clicked it on. "Wei! Wei!"
Spencer sat, listening to Kong’s rapid Chinese, allowing his mind to drift. The opportunities in archaic desert cultures here were unbelievable, Christ yes, but he had to keep his mind on the real prize. Peking Man! Peking Man was the find that would make his career, that would get him noticed all over the world. He’d be back in at the conferences. He’d do papers, be quoted. And even though the agonizing reality was that he was now going to miss most of his son’s Halloween costumes and campfires and summer fireflies in jars, at least-when the boy had grown into a thinking adult-he would know his father had done something. He would know his father had brought back the first forebear, the man from the dawn of time. That would count for Tyler, someday. It had to.
He glanced at Kong, working the phone now, drumming his long fingers on the fax paper. Kong caught his eyes and grinned. It was amazing how he and Kong communicated, considering they couldn’t speak.
"Hao! Hao!" Kong shouted, and hung up. He folded the phone and clicked it back on his belt.
Adam pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it. "Dr. Kong," he said, "last night I wrote this letter to my son. Do you think I could use their fax machine before we go? Fax?" He pointed to the fax pages on the table.
"Keyi, " Kong said kindly, and pointed to the fax machine in the outer room.
"Dr. Lin?" She knocked again, harder. Was he there? It was late afternoon, they were leaving for Eren Obo the next day, she hadn’t seen him in hours. "Dr. Lin?"
Stirring sounds, then the faint sibilance of feet, and the door clicked open. "Xiao Mo." His eyes went wider. He’d been sleeping.
"Oh, I’m sorry," she said.
"It’s nothing." He yawned, straightened his shirt.
"I wanted to talk with you." She held her breath. He could tell her to come back later if he wanted.
He looked down at her strange light eyes, her rumpled clothing, her dusty athletic shoes. His own clothes were haphazard. He’d got up and covered himself in a hurry. "Come in."
She pushed past him into the cluttered room, still warm with the smells of sleep, and he saw her gaze move about. "I suppose I shouldn’t come here like this, just knocking on your door…"
"No, you’re welcome," he said, meaning it. "You’re always welcome."
"But I wanted to say something to you." She turned back toward him. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Could she just say it?
"Please." He indicated the two armchairs, the low table in between. "You’ll have tea?"
"Yes." She let her breath go in relief. "Thanks."
He stepped behind her and closed the door. She felt a thrill. They were alone.
"Iron Goddess of Mercy okay?" he asked, taking a small packet from the tea caddy.
"Oh yes, please."
"It’s strong."
"I know."
So she liked it that way too. He smiled, uncorked the thermos, and poured steaming water over the leaves, then put the cups on the table and lowered himself into the chair opposite her. "What’s happened?"
"Nothing. It’s not that anything’s happened."
He waited.
"Dr. Lin. Frankly speaking. I don’t know how to ask you this. I think perhaps it’s impolite to ask you. But I find that I need to know."
He made his voice quiet. "Whatever it is, Xiao Mo, put your heart at rest. It’s okay." He picked up her cup from the table and handed it to her. "Gei. " Then he took up his own cup, welcoming as he always did the black, bracing taste of bitter metal.
She sighed. "Dr. Lin. Are you-all this time, all these little things you say-are you trying to tell me something?"
Aiya-was she going to say it, just like that?
"Are you interested in me?" she blurted.
"Of course," he evaded. "You are our interpreter-"
"Dr. Lin!" she pleaded. "You know what I mean."
"What do you mean?" he asked softly.
"Are you interested in me!" she hammered. "The way a man is in a woman!"
There, she had done it, remarkable, broken all the rules of discretion and subtlety with which a new relationship ought to be forged. It was rash, ill thought out, un-Chinese. Oh. But exciting.
Nevertheless he was still Chinese, and had to turn it around. "Are you?" he said. "In me?"
She stared at him, aroused, exasperated. The American in her wanted to scream, but the Chinese thing to do was deflect. She closed her eyes. "Dr. Lin. Didn’t you ever have a dream, and in this dream you saw someone, let’s say someone you didn’t know very well, but in the dream you cared powerfully for them, maybe you even felt love, and when you awakened you knew immediately that this acquaintance was far more important than you had realized? Well? Have you?"
She opened her eyes and saw him looking at her, that hard look again.