He laughed—a cold, humorless sound—then gritted his teeth and began to make his way down, watching his footing, careful not to fall.
INTERLUDE I WINTER 2207
Dragons Teeth
Without preparedness superiority is not real superiority and there can be no initiative either. Having grasped this point, a force which is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack.
—mao tse tung, On Protracted War, May 1938
IT WAS DUSK on Mars. On the Plain of Elysium it was minus 76 degrees and falling. Great swaths of shadow lay to the north, beneath the slopes of Chaos, stretching slowly, inexorably toward the great dome of Kang Kua City. Earth lay on the horizon, a circle of pure whiteness, back-lit by the sun. The evening star, they called it here. Chung Kuo. The place from which they had come, centuries before.
DeVore stood at the window of the tower, looking out across the great dome of Kang Kua toward the northern desert and the setting sun. The messenger had come an hour earlier, bringing news from Earth. He smiled. And so it had ended, his group surrounded, his pieces taken from the board. Even so, he was pleased with the way his play had gone. It was not often that one gained so much for so small a sacrifice.
He turned, looking back into the room. The morph sat at the table, its tautly muscled skin glistening in the dull *ed light. It was hunched forward, its hands placed on either side of the board, as if considering its next play. So patient it was; filled with an inhuman watchfulness, an inexhaustible capacity for waiting.
He went to the table and sat, facing the faceless creature. This was the latest of his creations; the closest yet to the human. Closest and yet furthest, for few could match it intellectually or physically.
He took a white stone from the bowl and leaned forward, placing it in shang, the south, cutting the line of black stones that extended from the comer.
"Your move," he said, sitting back.
Each stone he placed activated a circuit beneath the board, registering in the creature's mind. Even so, the illusion that the morph had actually seen him place the stone was strong. Its shoulders tensed as it leaned closer, seeming to study the board; then it nodded and looked up, as if meeting his eyes.
Again it was only the copy—the counterfeit—of a gesture, for the smooth curve of its head was unmarked, like unmolded clay or a shell waiting to be formed.
So, too, its personality.
He looked away, a faint smile on his lips. Even in those few moments it had grown much darker. The lights of the great dome, barely evident before, now glowed warmly, filling the cold and barren darkness.
"Did you toast my death, Li Yuan?" he asked the darkness softly. "Did you think it finally done between us?"
But it wasn't done. It was far from being done.
He thought back, remembering the day when he had sent the "copy" out, two weeks after the assassination squad. It had never known; never for a moment considered itself anything but real. DeVore, it had called itself, fancying that that was what it had always been. And so, in a sense, it had. Was it not his genetic material, after all, that had gone into the being's making? Were they not his thoughts, his attitudes, that had gone to shape its mind? Well then, perhaps, in a very real sense, it was himself. An imperfect copy, perhaps, but good enough to fool all those it had had to face; even, when it turned to face the mirror, itself.
He watched the morph play its stone, his own one line out while at the same time protecting the connection between its groups. He smiled, pleased. It was the move he himself would have made.
Shadowing ... it was an important part of the game. As important, perhaps, as any of the final skirmishes. One had to sketch out one's territory well in advance, while plotting to break up one's opponent's future schemes: the one need balanced finely against the other.
DeVore leaned across the table and took a stone from the bowl, holding it for a moment between his fingers, finding its cool, polished weight strangely satisfying; then set it down in £>mg, the east, beginning a new play.
He stood and went to the window again, looking out across the lambent hemisphere of the dome to the darkness beyond.
He had never returned from Mars. What had landed at Nanking ten years ago had been a copy—a thing so real that to call it artificial questioned definition— while he had remained here, perfecting his plays, watching—from this cold and distant world—how the thing he had made fared in his place.
It was impressive. Indeed, it had exceeded all expectations. Whatever doubts he had harbored about its ability had quickly vanished. By all reports it had inherited his cunning along with many other of his traits. But in the end its resources had proved insufficient. It was but a single man, fragile in all the ways a single man is fragile. Karr's rifle butt had split its skull and ended all its schemes. And so it was if one were single. But to amend the forgotten poet Whitman's words, he would contain multitudes: would be like the dragon's teeth, which, when planted from the dragon's severed head, would sprout, producing a harvest of dragons, each fiercer, finer than its progenitor.
He breathed deeply, then turned to look at the morph again. Soon it would be time. They would take this unformed creature and mold it, mind and body, creating a being superior to those it would face back on Chung Kuo. A quicker, more cunning beast, unfettered by pity or love or obligation. A new model, better than the last.
But this time it would have another's face.
He went across, placing his hand on the creature's shoulder. Its flesh was warm, but the warmth was of the kind that communicated itself to the senses only after a moment or two: at first it had seemed cold, dead almost. Well, so it was, and yet, when they had finished with it, it would think itself alive; would defy God himself had He said, "I made you."
But whose face would he put to this one? Whose personality would furnish the empty chambers of its mind? He leaned across the creature to play another stone, furthering his line in ping, extending out toward tsu, the north. A T'ang? A General? Or something subtler—something much more unexpected?
DeVore smiled and straightened up, squeezing the creature's arm familiarly before he moved away. It would be interesting to see what they made of this one, for it was different in kind from the last. It was what his own imperfect copy had dreamed of. An inheritor. The first of a new species. A cleaner, purer being.
A dragon's tooth. A seed of destruction, floated across the vacuum of space. The first stone in a new, more terrifying game. He laughed, sensing the creature move behind him in the semidarkness, responding to the noise. Yes, the first. . . but not the last.
The White Mountain
Chi K'ang Tzu asked Confucius about government, saying, "What would you think if, in order to move closer to those who possess the Way, I were to kill those who do not follow the Way?"
Confucius answered, "In administering your government, what need is there for you to kill? Just desire the good in yourself and the common people will be good. The virtue of the gentleman is like wind; the virtue of the small man is like grass. Let the wind blow over the grass and it is sure to bend."
—confucius, The Analects, Book XII
"All warfare is based on deception."
—SUN tzu, The Art of War, Book I, Estimates