Far off, the waves broke in a staggered line of white along the encircling breakwater. That line seemed frail and inconsequential from where he stood, yet he had flown over it earlier and seen the great ocean's swell; had seen waves fifty ch'i in height smash with ferocious power against the angled breakwater, and had felt more awe in him at that than at the sight of the great mid-ocean City they had built here over Sohm Abyss.
He turned. Above him, beyond the great spire of the central block, the night sky seemed dusted with stars—a billion stars that burned incandescently, like nothing he could ever have imagined. That too—so different somehow from the simulations—awed him. The reality of it. Until now it had all been in his head, like some complex three-dimensional chart. But now, seeing it with his own eyes, he understood what had been missing. Its vastness; its awe-inspiring vastness. It was something he had known but never grasped. Not until now.
He turned back, conscious of the faint yet discernible motion of the viewing platform. Down below, among the levels, one felt nothing, almost as if one were on dry land, but here the tidal swell of the great ocean could be sensed, despite the breakwaters, the huge chains of ice that kept the City anchored to the ocean's floor, ten ti down.
He looked down thoughtfully. Something in him responded to that: to the thought of those vast, unlit depths beneath the fragile man-made raft of the Ocean City; to all that weight and pressure. Something dark and antithetical to his thinking self, that looked back at him sometimes in the mirror, sharp-toothed and snarling.
He placed his hands flat against the thin layer of ice that separated him from the vastness outside and shivered. Darkness and Light. How often it came back to that—the most simple of all oppositions. Darkness and Light. As in the great Tao. And yet, ultimately, he did not believe in the Tao. Did not believe that dark and light were one and the same thing. No. For it seemed to him that the dark and light were locked in an ageless, unending struggle for supremacy: a struggle that could end only when one canceled out the other, in a blinding flash of searing light or in the abnegation of total nothingness.
And then?
He stepped back, amused. So what had existed before the universe? And what would be there after it was gone? These seemed logical enough things to ask, and yet, at the same time, they were nonsense questions. A grasping after straws. What pertinence did they have on the here-and-now of daily life? What use were they as tools?
No use at all. And yet he felt the need to ask them.
"Shih Ward?"
Kim turned. A Han was standing in the shadows beside the open door to the service elevator, his shaven head slightly bowed. His green SimFic one-piece was emblazoned with the number four, indicating his status within the SimFic hierarchy at Sohm Abyss.
"Is it time?" Kim asked, finding himself suddenly reluctant to leave the safety of the darkness.
The Steward looked up, meeting his eyes. "They are waiting below, Shih Ward. You must come now."
Kim bowed, then went across. Yet at the safety gate he stopped, looking down into the brightly lit heart of the Ocean City. Sohm Abyss was typical of the mid-Atlantic Cities. The thick outer wall formed a giant hexagon, linked by flexible walkways to a central hexagonal tower, topped by a slender communications spire. From above it had seemed like a bright and gaudy brooch cast thoughtlessly upon the darkness of the waters, but from where he stood it was more like a vast cat's cradle, the silvered walkways like the threads of a giant spider's web . . .
"Shih Ward!"
The slight sharpness in the Steward's voice reminded him of what he had become that morning. A thing. An entry on the SimFic Corporation's balance sheet. Turning back, he bowed apologetically, then stepped into the narrow cage. Obedient. Their servant.
Yet even as the gate irised shut, he realized suddenly that what they had purchased was but a part of him, and that that same unknown, uncharted darkness that lay beneath this great man-made artifact lay beneath all things, large and small alike.
Yes, and as for consciousness itself, what was that but a brightly lit raft, afloat upon the dark waters of the subconscious? A tiny, fragile edifice of man-made reason.
As the elevator began to descend, Kim turned and, looking up, studied the smooth curve of the Steward's shaven head, the folds of the green cloth covering his back, and wondered briefly whether the man was ever troubled by such thoughts, or whether status and material standing were his only measure of things.
If so, what was it like to be like that? To be content with how things seemed and not to question how things really were? What deep pool of inner stillness did one have to tap to become so inured to the greater mysteries? How did one let go of thinking and just be1. Or was it that? Was it not so much "letting go" as never properly grasping hold?
For a moment longer he picked at the problem, like a monkey poking inside an ant's nest with a twig, then he relented.
Curse or blessing, it was what he was. What SimFic had paid him for. To question it was pointless. No, what he had to do over the next five years was to find a way to use it without using himself up. To keep from becoming the thing they thought he was—a mere puzzle-solver and generator of ideas. In doing so, he would have to give them what they wanted, but at the same time he would also have to keep back something for himself. One thing, perhaps. One pure and singular vision.
The elevator slowed, then stopped. As the door irised open, admitting the babble of conversation from the room beyond, Kim recalled the silent, star-spattered darkness up above and smiled, knowing what it was.
KUSTOW walked back with Michael to the apartment he had hired on the south side of the stack, overlooking the fashionable Square. On the way they talked of many things—of Kennedy's new bodyguards and the significance of the new set of changes to the Edict—but mainly about whether Kustow too should run.
"Is that what you want, Bryn?"
"I guess so," Kustow answered. "Anyway, it doesn't look like there's much else open to me now. We're all out of favor as far as the Market is concerned, and we can't live off moonshine."
Michael turned, facing him. "That's not what I asked, Bryn. Is it what you really want?"
Kustow looked down, considering. "If I hadn't wanted to get involved, I guess I wouldn't have taken the first step, would I?" He looked up at Michael ruefully. "I think we both knew where this would lead. And Joseph Kennedy didn't pull any punches or tell any lies, did he?"
"I guess not."
"So that leaves me two options, to be precise. Both of them political. I can remain behind the scenes, as a shaper, or I can put myself up front."
"And you want to be up front?"
Kustow took a deep breath. "I'm not sure. IVe liked what weVe been doing. I mean, IVe enjoyed working with you and Carl and Jack. We make a good team. But going it alone, with a new team . . ." He shrugged. "I just don't know."
Michael was silent a moment. "People will expect you to run. As the party grows you'll lose status unless you're a Representative. You'll lose whatever you currently have. No, if you don't run you might find yourself muscled out, Bryn. At least, that's how I see it."
Kustow dropped his head, then nodded. He was frowning, looking down at his feet. When he looked up again there was a painful indecision in his face. "You know what it is, Michael? I'm afraid."
Michael laughed shortly, then frowned. Kustow was the biggest of them. The strongest. The most extroverted. It wasn't possible that he could be afraid. "Afraid of what?"
"Of the whole business, I guess. Of power and politics. I don't want to become another Carver, or Gratton, or Hartmann."