"There's an awful lot to see."
Lever laughed. "That's true. But I think you've seen most of the more interesting parts."
Kim nodded. They had spent the day looking over Imm Vac's installations, but they had still seen only a small fraction of Old Man Lever's vast commercial empire. More than ever, Kim had been conscious of the sheer scale of the world into which he had come. Down in the Clay, it was not possible to imagine the vastness of what existed a wartha—up Above. At times he found himself overawed by it all, wishing for somewhere smaller, darker, cozier in which to hide. But that feeling never lasted long. It was, he recognized, residual; part of the darker self he had shrugged off. No, this was his world now. The world of vast continent-spanning cities and huge corporations battling for their share of Chung Kuo's markets.
He looked up. Lever was searching in one of the drawers of his desk. A moment later he straightened, clutching a bulky folder. Closing the drawer with his knee, he came around, thumping the file down beside Kim.
"Here. This might interest you."
Kim watched as Lever crossed the room and locked the big double doors with an old-fashioned key.
"You like old things, don't you?"
Lever turned, smiling. "I've never thought about it really. We've always done things this way. Hand-written research files, proper keys, wooden desks. I guess it makes us ... different from the other North American companies. Besides, it makes good sense. Computers are untrustworthy, easily accessed, and subject to viruses. Likewise doorlocks and recognition units. But a good, old-fashioned key can't be beaten. In an age of guile, people are reluctant to use force—to break down a door or force open a drawer. The people who'd be most interested in our product have grown too used to sitting at their own desks while they commit their crimes. To take the risk of entering one of our facilities would be beyond most of them." He laughed. "Besides, it's my father's policy to keep them happy with a constant flow of disinformation. Failed research, blind alleys, minor spin-offs of a more important research program—that kind of thing. They tap into it and think they've got their finger on the pulse." Kim grinned. "And they never learn?" Lever shook his head, amused. "Not yet they haven't." Kim looked down at the file. "And this?" "Open it and see. Take it across to my desk if you want." Kim flipped back the cover and looked, then turned his head sharply, staring at Lever. "Where did you get this?" "You've seen it before?"
Kim looked down at it again. "I have ... of course I have, but not in this form. Who . . . ?" Then he recognized the handwriting. The same handwriting that had been on the copy of the cancelled SimFic contract he had been given by Li Yuan. "Soren Berdichev . . ."
Lever was looking at him strangely now. "You knew?"
Kim gave a small, shuddering breath. "Six years ago. When I was on the Project."
"You met Berdichev there?"
"He bought my contract. For his company, SimFic." "Ah . . . Of course. Then you knew he'd written the File?" Kim laughed strangely. "You think Berdichev wrote this?" "Who else?"
Kim looked away. "So. He claimed it for his own."
Lever shook his head. "Are you trying to tell me he stole it from someone?" In a small voice, Kim began to recite the opening of the File; the story of the pre-Socratic Greeks and the establishment of the Aristotelian yes/no mode of thought. Lever stared back at him with mounting surprise. "Shall I continue?"
Lever laughed. "So you do know it. But how? Who showed it to you?" Kim handed it back. "I know because I wrote it."
Lever looked down at the folder, then back at Kim, giving a small laugh of disbelief. "No," he said quietly. "You were only a boy."
Kim was watching Lever closely. "It was something I put together from some old computer records I unearthed. I thought Berdichev had destroyed it. I never knew he'd kept a copy."
"And yet you knew nothing about the dissemination?" "The dissemination?"
"You mean, you really didn't know?" Lever shook his head, astonished. "This is the original, but there are a thousand more copies back in Europe, each one of them like this, hand-written. Now we're going to do the same over here— disseminate them among those sympathetic to the cause."
"The cause?"
"The Sons of Benjamin Franklin. Oh, we'd heard rumors about the File and its contents some time ago, but until recently we'd never seen it. Now, however—" He laughed, then shook his head again in amazement. "Well, it's like a fever in our blood. But you understand that, don't you, Kim? After all, you wrote the bloody thing!"
Kim nodded, but inside he felt numbed. He had never imagined . . .
"Here, look . . ." Lever led Kim over to one of the tapestries. "I commissioned this a year ago, before I'd seen the File. We put it together from what we knew about the past. It shows how things were before the City."
Kim looked at it and shook his head. "It's wrong."
"Wrong?"
"Yes, all the details are wrong. Look." He touched one of the animals on the rocks in the foreground. "This is a lion. But it's an African lion. There never were any lions of this kind in America. And those wagons crossing the plains, they would have been drawn by horses. The gasoline engine was a much later development. And these tents here—they're Mongol in style. North American Indian tents were different. And then there are these pagodas—"
"But in the File it says—"
"Oh, it's not that these things didn't exist, it's just that they didn't exist at the same time or in the same place. Besides, there were Cities even then—here on the east coast."
"Cities? But I thought—"
"You thought the Han invented Cities? No. Cities have been in Man's blood since the dawn of civilization. Why, Security Central at Bremen is nothing more than a copy of the great ziggurat at Ur, built more than five thousand years ago."
Lever had gone very still. He was watching Kim closely, a strange intensity in his eyes. After a moment he shook his head, giving a soft laugh.
"You really did write it, didn't you?"
Kim nodded, then turned back to the tapestry. "And this"—he bent down, indicating the lettering at the foot of the picture—"this is wrong too."
Lever leaned forward, staring at the lettering. "How do you mean?"
"A.D. It doesn't mean what's written here. That was another of Tsao Ch'un's lies. He was never related to the Emperor Tsao He, nor to any of them. So all of this business about the Ancestral Dynasties is a complete nonsense. Likewise B.C. It doesn't mean 'Before the Crane.' In fact, Tsao He, the 'Crane,' supposedly the founder of the Han Dynasty and ancestor of all subsequent dynasties, never even existed. In reality, Liu Chi-tzu, otherwise known as P'ing Ti, was Emperor at the time—and he was the twelfth of the great Han dynasty emperors. So, you see, the Han adapted parts of their own history almost as radically as they changed that of the West. They had to—to make sense of things and keep it all consistent."
"So what do they really mean?"
"A.D. . . . that stands for anno Domini. It's Latin—TaTs'in—for'the year of our Lord.'"
"Our Lord?"
"Jesus Christ. You know, the founder of Christianity."
"Ah . . ." But Lever looked confused. "And B.C.? Is that Latin too?"
Kim shook his head. "That's 'before Christ.' "
Lever laughed. "But that doesn't make sense. Why the mixture of languages? And why in the gods' names would the Han adopt a Christian dating for their calendar?"
Kim smiled. When one thought about it, it didn't make a great deal of sense, but that was how it was—how it had been for more than a hundred years before Tsao Ch'un arrived on the scene. It was the Ko Ming—the Communists—who had adopted the Western calendar; and Tsao Ch'un, in rewriting the history of Chung Kuo, had found it easiest to keep the old measure. After all, it provided his historians with a genuine sense of continuity, especially after he had hit upon the idea of claiming that it dated from the first real Han dynasty, ruled, of course, by his ancestor, Tsao He, "the Crane."