THE DOCTORS were gone, his ministers and advisors dismissed. Now, at last, the great T'ang was alone.
Li Shai Tung stood there a moment, his arm outstretched, one hand resting against the door frame as he got his breath. The upright against which he rested stretched up like a great squared pillar into the ceiling high overhead, white-painted, the simplicity of its design emphasized by the seven pictograms carved into the wood and picked out in gold leaf—the characters forming couplets with those on the matching upright. Servants had opened the two huge white-lacquered doors earlier; now he stood looking into the Hall of Eternal Peace and Tranquility. To one side, just in view, stood a magnificent funerary couch, the gray stone of its side engraved with images of gardens and pavilions in which ancient scholars sat enthroned while the women of the household wove and prepared food, sang or played the ancient p'i p'a. Facing it was a broad, red-lacquered screen, the Ywe Lung—the circle of dragons, symbolizing the power and authority of the Seven— set like a huge golden mandala in its center.
He sighed heavily, then went inside, leaving the great doors ajar, too tired to turn and pull them closed behind him. It was true what they had said: he ought to get to bed and rest; ought to take a break from his duties for a day or so and let Li Yuan take up his burden as Regent. But it was not easy to break the habits of a lifetime. Besides, there was something he had to do before he rested. Something he had put off far too long.
He crossed the room and slowly lowered himself to his knees before the great tablet, conscious of how the gold leaf of the Ywe Lung seemed to flow in the wavering light of the candles, how the red lacquer of the background seemed to hum. He had never noticed that before. Nor had he noticed how the smoke from the perfumed candles seemed to form words—Han pictograms—in the still, dry air. Chance, meaningless words, like the throw of yarrow stalks or the pattern on a fire-charred tortoise shell.
He shivered. It was cold, silent in the room, the scent of the candles reminding him of the tomb beneath the earth at Tongjiang. Or was it just the silence, the wavering light?
He swallowed dryly. The ache in his bones was worse than before. He felt drawn, close to exhaustion, his skin stretched tight, like parchment, over his brittle bones. It would be good to rest. Good to lie there, thoughtless, in the darkness. Yes . . . but he would do this one last thing before he slept.
Reaching out, he took two of the scented sticks from the porcelain jar in front of him and held them in the thread of laser light until they ignited. Then, bowing respectfully, he set them in the jar in front of the tiny image of his great-greatgrandfather. At once the image seemed to swell, losing a degree of substance as it gained in size.
The life-size image of the old man seemed to look down at Li Shai Tung, its dark eyes magnificent, its whole form filled with power.
His great-great-grandfather, Li Hang Ch'i, had been a tall, immensely dignified man. For posterity he had dressed himself in the imperial style of one hundred and ten years earlier, a simpler, more brutal style, without embellishment. One heavily bejeweled hand stroked his long white, unbraided beard, while the other held a silver riding crop that was meant to symbolize his love of horses.
"What is it, Shai Tung? Why do you summon me from the dead lands?"
Li Shai Tung felt a faint ripple of unease pass through him.
"I... I wished to ask you something, Honorable Grandfather."
Li Hang Ch'i made a small motion of his chin, lifting it slightly as if considering his grandson's words; a gesture that Li Shai Tung recognized immediately as his own.
Even in that we are not free, he thought. We but ape the actions of our ancestors, unconsciously, slavishly. Those things we consider most distinctly ours—that strange interplay of mind and nerve and sinew that we term gesture—are formed a hundred generations before their use in us.
Again he shivered, lowering his head, conscious of his own weariness, of how far below his great-great-grandfather's exacting standards he had fallen. At that moment he felt but a poor copy of Li Hang Ch'i.
"Ask," the figure answered, "whatever you wish."
Li Shai Tung hesitated, then looked up. "Forgive me, most respected Grandfather, but the question I would ask you is a difficult one. One that has plagued me for some while. It is this. Are we good or evil men?"
The hologram's face flickered momentarily, the program uncertain what facial expression was called for by the question. Then it formed itself into the semblance of a frown, the whole countenance becoming stem, implacable.
"What a question, Shai Tung! You ask whether we are good or evil men. But is that something one can ask? After all, how can one judge? By our acts? So some might argue. Yet are our acts good or evil in themselves? Surely only the gods can say that much." He shook his head, staring down at his descendant as if disappointed in him. "I cannot speak for the gods, but for myself I say this. We did as we had to. How else could we have acted?"
Li Shai Tung took a long, shuddering breath. It was as if, for that brief moment, his great-great-grandfather had been there, really there, before him in the room. He had sensed his powerful presence behind the smokescreen of the hologrammic image. Had felt the overpowering certainty of the man behind the words, and again, recognized the echo in himself. So he had once argued. So he had answered his own son, that time when Yuan had come to him with his dream—that awful nightmare he had had of the great mountain of bones rilling the plain where the City had been.
Back then, he had sounded so certain—so sure of things—but even then he had questioned it, at some deeper level. He had gone to his room afterward and lain there until the dawn, unable to sleep, Yuan's words burning brightly in his skull. Are we good or evil men?
But it had begun before then, earlier that year, when he had visited Hal Shepherd in the Domain. It was then that the seed of doubt had entered him; then—in that long conversation with Hal's son, Ben—that he had begun to question it all.
He sat back, studying the hologram a moment, conscious of how it waited for him, displaying that unquestioning patience that distinguished the mechanical from the human. It was almost solid. Almost. For through the seemingly substantial chest of his great-great-grandfather he could glimpse the hazed, refracted image of the Ywe Lung, the great wheel of dragons broken by the planes of his ancestor's body.
He groaned softly and stretched, trying to ease the various pains he felt. His knees ached and there was a growing warmth in his back. I ought to be in bed, he thought, not worrying myself about such things. But he could not help himself. Something urged him on. He stared up into that ancient, implacable face and spoke again.
"Was there no other choice then, Grandfather? No other path we might have taken? Were things as inevitable as they seem? Was it all written?"
Li Hang Ch'i shook his head, his face like the ancient, burnished ivory of a statue, and raised the silver riding crop threateningly.
"There was no other choice."
Li Shai Tung shivered, his voice suddenly small. "Then we were right to deny the Hung Mao their heritage?"
"It was that or see the world destroyed."
Li Shai Tung bowed his head. "Then. . ." He paused, seeing how the eyes of the hologram were on him. Again it was as if something stared through them from the other side. Something powerful and menacing. Something that, by all reason, should not be there. "Then what we did was right?"