turbed by a single small stone falling cleanly into its center. A moment later the screen lifted smoothly from the desktop, tilting up to face him.
He gave the code again. At once the screen filled with information. He scanned through quickly, then sat back. It was an amended copy of his contract with SimFic, buying out their interest in him. And the new owner? It was written there at the foot of the contract. Kim Ward. For the first time in his life he owned himself.
He shivered, then took the file from the slot, replacing it with the one marked er, two.
As the screen lit up again, he nodded to himself. Of course. It would have meant nothing being his own master without this—his citizenship papers. But Li Yuan had gone further: he had authorized an all-levels pass that gave Kim clearance to travel anywhere within the seven Cities. Few people—even among the Above— were allowed that.
Two more. He stared at the tiny cards a moment, wondering; then he placed the third, marked san, into the slot.
At first he didn't understand. Maybe one of Li Yuaris servants had made a mistake and placed the wrong card in the package. Then, as the document scrolled on, he caught his breath, seeing his name in the column marked "Registered Head."
A company! Li Yuan had given him his own company—complete with offices, patents, and enough money to hire staff and undertake preliminary research. He shook his head, bewildered. All this ... he didn't understand.
He closed his eyes. It was like a dream, a dream he would shortly wake from; yet when he opened his eyes again, the information was still there on the screen, Li Yuan's personal verification codes rippling down the side of the file.
But why? Why had Li Yuan given him all this? What did he want in return?
He laughed strangely, then shook his head again. It always came back to that. He had grown so used to being owned—to being used—that he could not think of such a gesture in any other way. But what if Li Yuan wanted nothing? What if he meant what he had said in his note? What had he to lose in making such a gesture?
And what gain?
He frowned, trying to see through the confusion of his feelings to the objective truth, but for once it proved too difficult. He could think of no reason for Li Yuan's generosity. None but the one his words appeared to give.
He removed the file, then placed the last of the cards, marked si, into the slot.
What noui? What else could Li Yuan possibly give him?
It was a different kind of file—he saw that at once. For a start, Li Yuan's personal code was missing. But it was more than that. He could tell by the length and complexity of the file that it had been prepared by experts.
He gave the access code. At once the screen filled with brilliant colors, like a starburst, quickly resolving itself into a complex diagram. He sat back, his mouth wide open. It was a genotyping.
No. Not just a genotyping. He knew at once what it was without needing to be told. It was his genotyping.
He watched, wide-eyed, as the program advanced, one detail after another of the DNA map boldly emphasized on the screen. Then, lifting the details from the flat screen one by one, it began to piece the building blocks together until a holo-image of a double helix floated in the air above the desk, turning slowly in the darkness.
He studied the slowly turning spiral, memorizing it, his heart pounding in his chest, then gave the verbal cue to progress the file.
The next page gave a full probability set. It numbered just short of six billion possible candidates: the total number of adult male Hung Mao back in 2190. He shivered, beginning to understand, then cued the file again. The next display itemized close-match candidates. Ten names in all. He scanned the list, his mouth fallen open again. His father . . . One of these was his father.
One by one he was given details of the ten: genotypes, full-face portraits, potted biographies, each file quite frightening in its detail.
When the last had faded from the screen he called hold, then sat back, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. He felt strange, as if he were standing on the edge of a deep well, ill-balanced, about to fall. He shivered, knowing he had never felt like this before. Knowledge had always been an opening, a breaching of the dark, but this . . .
For once he was afraid to know.
He let the giddiness pass and opened his eyes again, steeling himself. "All right. Move on."
There was a full-second's hesitation and then the screen lit up. This time it gave details of the known movements of the ten candidates over a three-month period in the Winter of 2190, details compiled from Security files.
It narrowed things down to a single candidate. Only one of the ten had visited the Clay during that period. Only one, therefore, could possibly have been his father.
He swallowed dryly, then cued the file again.
The image appeared immediately, as sharp as if it had been made earlier that day. A youngish man in his late twenties or early thirties, a tall, slightly built man, fine-boned and elegant, with distinctly aristocratic features. His light-brown hair was cut neatly but not too severely and his dark-green eyes seemed kind, warm. He was dressed simply but stylishly in a dark-red pau, while around both of his wrists were a number of slender tiao tuo, bracelets of gold and jade.
Kim narrowed his eyes, noticing an oddity about the man. It was as if his head and body were parts of two different, separate beings; the head too large, somehow, the chin and facial features too strong for the slender, almost frail body that supported them. Kim frowned, then mouthed his father's name. "Edmund . . . Edmund Wyatt."
It was an old image. Looking at it, he felt something like regret that he would never meet this man or come to know him; for, as the file indicated, Edmund Wyatt had been dead for eight years—executed for the murder of the T'ang's minister, Lwo Kang. A crime for which he had later, privately, been pardoned. Kim shuddered. Was that the reason for Li Yuan's generosity? To square things up somehow? Or was a T'ang above such moral scruples?
He leaned forward, about to close the file, when the image of Wyatt vanished. For a moment the screen was blank; then it lit up again. GENOTYPE PREDICT: FEMALE SOURCE.
He called hold, his voice almost failing him, his heart hammering once more. For a long time he sat there, hunched forward in his chair, staring at the heading; then in a voice that was almost a whisper, he gave the cue.
First came the genotype, the puzzle pieces of DNA that would interlock with Edmund Wyatt s to produce his own. He watched as they formed a double-helix in the air. Then, dramatically, they vanished, replaced not by further figures, but by a computer-graphics simulation—a full-length 3-D portrait of a naked woman.
He gasped, then shook his head, not quite believing what he saw. It was his mother. Though he had not seen her in almost a dozen years, he knew at once that it was she. But not as she had been. No, this was not at all like the scrawny, lank-haired, dugless creature he had known.
He almost laughed at the absurdity of the image, but a far stronger feeling—that of bitterness—choked back the laughter.
He moaned and looked away, the feeling of loss so great that for a moment it threatened to unhinge him.
"Mother . . ." he whispered, his eyes blurring over. "Mother ..." The computer had made assumptions. It was programmed to assume a normal Above diet, normal Above life-expectations. These it had fed into its simulation, producing something that, had such conditions prevailed down in the Clay, would have been quite accurate. But as it was . . .
Kim looked at the image again, staring, open-mouthed at a portrait of his mother as she might have been: a dark-haired beauty, strong-limbed and voluptuous, full-breasted and a good two ch'i taller than she had been in life. A strong, handsome woman.