"Well?" he asked. "Have we a deal?"
She looked up at him. "Have I a choice?"
"Yes. You can walk out of here, right now. I'll not stop you. But if you do, Mach will come after you with everything he's got. Because he'll not feel safe until you're dead."
"And you?"
DeVore smiled. "Oh, I'm safe. I'm always safe."
SLOWLY the great globe of Chung Kuo turned in space, moving through sunlight and darkness, the blank faces of its continents glistening like ice caps beneath huge swirls of cloud. Three hours had passed by the measure of men; and in Sichuan Province, in the great palace at Tongjiang, Li Shai Tung sat with his son in the dim-lit silence of his study, reading through the report General Nocenzi had brought. Li Yuan stood at his father's side, scanning each sheet as his father finished with it.
The report concerned a number of items taken the previous evening in a raid on a gaming club frequented by the sons of several important company heads. More than a dozen of the young men had been taken, together with a quantity of seditious materiaclass="underline" posters and pamphlets, secret diaries and detailed accounts of illicit meetings. Much of the material confirmed what Tolonen had said only the day before. There was a new wave of unrest; a new tide, running for change.
They were good men—exemplary young men, it might be said—from families whose ties to the Seven went back to the foundation of the City. Men who, in other circumstances, might have served his father well. But a disease was rife among them; a foulness that, once infected, could not be shaken from the blood.
And the disease? Li Yuan looked across at the pile of folders balanced on the far side of his father's desk. There were three of them, each bulging with handwritten ice-vellum sheets. He had not had time to compare more than a few paragraphs scattered throughout each text, but he had seen enough to know that their contents were practically identical. He reached across and picked one up, flicking through the first few pages. He had seen the original in Berdichev's papers more than a year earlier, among the material Karr had brought back with him from Mars, but had never thought he would see another.
He read the title page. "The Aristotle File, Being the True History of Western Science. By Soren Berdichev."
The document had become the classic of dissent for these young men, each copy painstakingly written out in longhand.
His father turned in his seat, looking up at him. "Well, Yuan? What do you think?"
He set the file down. "It is as you said, Father. The thing is a cancer. We must cut it out, before it spreads."
The old T'ang smiled, pleased with his son. "If we can."
"You think it might already be too late?"
Li Shai Tung shrugged. "A document like this is a powerful thing, Yuan." He smiled, then stood, touching his son's arm. "But come ... let us feed the fish. It is a while since we had the chance to talk."
Li Yuan followed his father into the semidarkness of the arboretum, his mind filled with misgivings.
Inside, Li Shai Tung turned, facing his son, the carp pool behind him. "I come here whenever I need to think."
Li Yuan looked about him and nodded. He understood. When his father was absent, he would come here himself and stand beside the pool, staring down into the water as if emptying himself into its depths, letting his thoughts become the fish, drifting, gliding slowly, almost listlessly in the water, then rising swiftly to breach the surface, imbued with sudden purpose.
The old T'ang smiled, seeing how his son stared down into the water; so like himself in some respects.
"Sometimes I think it needs a pike."
Li Yuan looked up surprised. "A pike in a carp pool, Father? But it would eat the other fish!"
Li Shai Tung nodded earnestly. "And maybe that is what was wrong with Chung Kuo. Maybe our great carp pool needed a pike. To keep the numbers down and add that missing element of sharpness. Maybe that is what we are seeing now. Maybe our present troubles are merely the consequence of all those years of peace."
"Things decay . . ." Yuan said, conscious of how far their talk had come, of how far his father's words were from what he normally professed to believe.
"Yes . . ." Li Shai Tung nodded and eased himself back onto the great saddle of a turtle shell that was placed beside the pool. "And perhaps a pike is loose in the depths."
Li Yuan moved to the side of the pool, the toes of his boots overlapping the tiled edge.
"Have you made up your mind yet, Yuan?"
The question was unconnected to anything they had been discussing, but once again he understood. In this sense they had never been closer. His father meant the boy, Kim.
"Yes, Father. I have decided."
"And?"
Yuan turned his head, looking across at his father. Li Shai Tung sat with his feet spread, the cane resting against one knee. Yuan could see his dead brother, Han Ch'in, in that posture of his father's. Could see how his father would have resembled Han when he was younger, as if age had been given him and youth to Han. But Han was long dead and youth with him. Only old age remained. Only the crumbling patterns of their forefathers.
"I was wrong," he said after a moment. "The reports are unequivocal. It hasn't worked out. And now this—this matter of the sons and their 'New European' movement. I can't help but think the two are connected—that the boy is responsible for this."
Li Shai Tung's regretful smile mirrored his son's. "It is connected, Yuan. Without the boy there would be no file." He looked clearly at his son. "Then you will act upon my warrant and have the boy terminated?"
Li Yuan met his father's eyes, part of him still hesitant, even now. Then he nodded.
"Good. And do not trouble yourself, Yuan. You did all you could. It seems to me that the boy's end was fated."
Li Yuan had looked down; now he looked up again, surprised by his father's words. Li Shai Tung saw this and laughed. "You find it odd for me to talk of fate, neh?"
"You have always spoken of it with scorn."
"Maybe so. Yet any man must at some point question whether it is chance or fate that brings things to pass, whether he is the author or merely the agent of his actions."
"And you, Father? What do you think?"
Li Shai Tung stood, leaning heavily upon the silver-headed cane he had come to use so often these days; the cane with the dragon's head, which Han Ch'in had bought him on his fiftieth birthday.
"It is said that in the time of Shang they would take a tortoise shell and cover it with ink, then throw it into a fire. When it dried, a diviner would read the cracks and lines in the scorched shell. They believed, you see, that the tortoise was an animal of great purity—in its hard-soft form they saw the meeting of yin and yang, of Heaven and Earth. Later they would inscribe the shells with questions put to their ancestors. As if the dead could answer."
Li Yuan smiled, reassured by the ironic tone of his father's words. For a moment he had thought. . .
"And maybe they were right, Yuan. Maybe it is all written. But then one must ask what it is the gods want of us. They seem to give and take without design. To build things up only to cast them down. To give a man great joy, only to snatch it away, leaving him in great despair. And to what end, Yuan? To what end?"
Yuan answered softly, touched to the core by his father's words. "I don't know, Father. Truly I don't."
Li Shai Tung shook his head bitterly. "Bones and tortoise shells. . ." He laughed and touched the great turtle shell behind him with his cane. "They say this is a copy of the great Luoshu shell, Yuan. It was a present to your mother from my father, on the day of our wedding. The pattern on its back is meant to be a charm, you see, for easing childbirth."
Yuan looked away. It was as if his father felt a need to torture himself, to surround himself with the symbols of lost joy.
"You know the story, Yuan? It was in the reign of Yu, oh, more than four thousand years ago now, when the turtle crawled up out of the Luo River, bearing the markings on its back."