"It's beautiful. It really is, Shai Tung. How did you know I wanted one?"
The Pang laughed softly. "I cheated, Hal. I asked Beth. But the gift is for you both. Look carefully. The tree is a twin. It has two intertwined trunks."
Shepherd looked. "Ah, yes." He laughed, aware of the significance. Joined trees were objects of good omen; symbols of conjugal happiness and marital fidelity. More than that, an apple—p'ing, in Mandarin—was a symbol of peace. "It's perfect, Li Shai Tung. It really is." He shook his head, overwhelmed, tears forming in his eyes. "We shall treasure it."
"And I this." Li Shai Tung held up Shepherd's file. He smiled, then turned to the boy. "It was good to talk with you, Ben. I hope we might talk again sometime."
Ben stood and, unexpectedly, gave a small bow to the T'ang.
"My father's right, of course. You should destroy them. Now, while you still can."
"Ah ..." Li Shai Tung hesitated, then nodded. Maybe so, he thought, surprised yet again by the child's unpredictability. But he said nothing. Time alone would prove them right or wrong on that.
He looked back at Shepherd, who was standing now. "I must go, Hal. It would not do to keep Minister Chao waiting." He laughed. "You know, Chao has been in my service longer than anyone but Tblonen."
It was said before he realized it.
"I forget. . . ." he said with a small, sad laugh.
Shepherd, watching him, shook his head. "Bring him back, Shai Tung." he said softly. "This once, do as your heart bids you."
The T'ang smiled tightly and held the file more firmly. "Maybe," he said. But he knew he would not. It was as he had said. He was T'ang, yes, but he was also Seven.
WHEN THE T'ANG had gone they stood at the river's edge. The moon was high overhead—a bright, full moon that seemed to float in the dark mirror of the water. The night was warm and still, its silence broken only by the sound—a distant, almost disembodied sound—of the soldiers working on the cottage. Shepherd squatted down, looking out across the water into the darkness on the other side.
"What did you mean, Ben, earlier? All that business about dissolving walls and making it real. Was that just talk or did you have something real in mind?"
Ben was standing several paces from his father, looking back up the grassy slope to where they had set up arc lamps all around the cottage. The dark figures of the suited men seemed to flit through the glare like objects seen peripherally, in a dream.
"It's an idea I have. Something IVe been working on."
Shepherd turned his head slightly and studied his son a moment. "You seemed quite confident. Almost as if the thing existed."
Ben smiled and met his father's eyes briefly. "It does. Up here."
Shepherd laughed and looked down, tugging at the long grass. "So what is it? I'm interested. And I think the T'ang was interested too."
"What did he want?"
A faint breeze ruffled the water, making the moon dance exaggeratedly on the darkness. "What do you mean?"
"Why was I there?"
Shepherd smiled to himself. He should have known better than to think Ben would not ask that question.
"Because he wanted to see you, Ben. Because he thinks that one day you might help his son."
"I see. And he was assessing me?"
"You might put it that way."
Ben laughed. "I thought as much. Do you think he found me strange?"
"Why should you think that?"
Ben looked directly at his father. "I know what I am. I've seen enough of the world to know how different I am."
"On a screen, yes. But not everything's up there on the screen, Ben."
"No?" Ben looked back up the slope toward the cottage. They were hauling the first of the thin encasing layers over the top of the frame, the heavily suited men pulling on the guide ropes. "What don't they show?"
Shepherd laughed, but let the query pass. Ben was right. He did know what he was, and he was different. There was no point in denying that.
"You've no need to follow in my footsteps, Ben."
Ben smiled but didn't look at him. "You think I'd want that?"
Shepherd felt a twinge of bitterness, then shook his head. "No. No, I guess not. In any case, I'd never force that on you. You know that, don't you?"
Ben turned and stared out across the water fixedly. "Those things don't interest me. The political specifics. The who-runs-what and who-did-what. I would be bored by it all. And what good is a bored advisor? I'd need to care about those things, and I don't."
"You seemed to care. Earlier, when we were talking about them."
"No. That was something different. That was the deeper thing."
Shepherd laughed. "Of course. The deeper thing."
Ben looked back at him. "You deal in surfaces, Father, both of you. But the problem's deeper than that. It's inside. Beneath the surface of the skin. It's bred in the blood and bone of men, in the complex web of nerve and muscle and organic tissue. But you . . . well, you persist in dealing with only what you see. You treat the blemished skin and let the inner man corrupt."
Shepherd was watching his son thoughtfully, aware of the gulf that had grown between them these last few years. It was as if Ben had outgrown them all. Had done with childish things. He shrugged. "Maybe. But that doesn't solve the immediate problem. Those surfaces you dismiss so readily have hard edges. Collide with them and you'll realize that at once. People get hurt, lives get blighted, and those aren't superficial things."
"It wasn't what I meant."
Shepherd laughed. "No. Maybe not.' And maybe you're right. You'd make a lousy advisor, Ben. YouVe been made for other things than politics and intrigue." He stood up, wiping his hands against his trousers. "You know, there were many things I wanted to do, but I never had the time for them. Pictures I wanted to paint, books I wanted to write, music I wanted to compose. But in serving the T'ang IVe had to sacrifice all those and much else besides. I've seen much less of you and Meg than I ought—and far, far too little of your mother. So . . ." He shrugged. "Well, if you don't want that kind of life, I understand. I understand only too well. More than that, Ben, I think the world would lose something were you to neglect the gifts you have."
Ben smiled. "We'll see." Then he pointed up the slope. "I think they've almost finished. That's the third of the isolation skins."
Shepherd turned and looked back up the slope. The cottage was fully encased now, its cozy shape disguised by the huge white insulating layers. Only at the front, where the door to the garden was, was its smooth, perfectly geometric shape broken. There they had put the seal-unit; a big cylinder containing the air pump and the emergency generator.
A dozen suited men were fastening the edges of the insulator to the brace of the frame. The brace was permanently embedded in the earth surrounding the cottage; a crude, heavy piece of metal a foot wide and three inches thick with a second, smaller "collar" fixed by old-fashioned wing-screws to the base.
The whole strange apparatus had been devised by Shepherd's great-great-great-grandfather, Amos—the first of the Shepherds to live here—as a precaution against nuclear fallout. But when the Great Third War—"The War to End It All" as the old man had written in his journal—had failed to materialize, the whole cumbersome isolation-unit had been folded up and stored away, only the metal brace remaining, for the amusement of each new generation of Shepherd children.
"Gift wrapped!" Shepherd joked, beginning to climb the slope.
Ben, following a few paces behind, gave a small laugh, but it was unrelated to his father's comment. He had had an insight. It had been Amos's son, Robert, who had designed City Earth. His preliminary architectural sketches hung in a long glass frame on the passage wall inside the cottage.- But the idea had not originated with him. The seed of City Earth lay here, now, before them—physically before them—as they climbed the grassy slope. Here, in this outward symbol of his great-great-greatgrandfather's paranoia was the genesis of all that had followed.