Ebert nodded. "We must call a gathering. Tonight."
"It is done."
"Ah." Ebert smiled. "And my intentions? You know those too?" Tuan Ti Fo's laughter was light, infectious. "You mistake me, Tsou Tsai Hei. The woman, Hama, spoke to me."
He stared at the old sage, surprised. "You speak with her?"
"Sometimes."
"Is there anything you do not know, Master Tuan?"
Tuan's eyes, normally so calm, so clear, for once looked away, troubled. "Many things. But only one that bothers me. I do not know what that man wants."
"DeVore, you mean?"
Tuan Ti Fo nodded. "This world—this reality—it is like a game to him. He plays his stone and then awaits an answer. Why, the King of Hell is but an apprentice beside him. He has made malice into an art. Some days I think the man is old. Older than the frame of flesh he wears."
"Older than you, Master Tuan?"
Tuan laughed. "Don't mock my gray beard, Worthless One. Time will find you too."
"Of course. But tell me, Master Tuan, what do you mean?" "Only this. That I come to think the true nature of the man has been masked from us. DeVore . . . what is he? Is he a mortal man? An orphan, raised to high office in the T'ang's Security forces? Or was that, too, merely a guise? A mask of flesh put on to fool mere human eyes? Copies . . . Think of it, Hans. Why does the man love copies so? He duplicates himself and sends his copies out to do his bidding. Now, is that self-love or some far deeper game?" . ••., ..... -;.-.,-.•.-,..
Hans considered a moment, then shrugged. "Why did the Machine not destroy his craft while it was here?"
"Destroy it? How? How can one destroy what is not there?"
He laughed. "Something was there. I sensed it. With my eyes closed I could see it."
"Maybe. But what I said still goes. It was not there. It was . . . folded in somehow: a negative twist of nothingness. The Machine has a theory about it. It thinks the craft exists within a probability space quite near to our own, the atoms of which have been . . . vibrated, like a plucked string."
"There but not there."
"Like your dream."
Hans stared at the old man, startled. "I told Hama nothing of the dream."
"I was there but not there."
"And you?" Ebert asked, passing his hand slowly through the old man's chest as his silk-cloaked figure shimmered into nothingness again. "Are you here, or are you 'folded in'?"
THEY GATHERED AT the long day's end, as the last light of the sun bled from the horizon and the red became black. Hans Ebert, once heir to the great GenSyn Corporation of Chung Kuo, traitor to his T'ang and patricide, known also as Efulefu, "the Worthless One" and Tsou Tsai Hei, "The Walker in the Darkness," climbed up onto the table rock and turned to face the thousands who had come.
He looked about him, noting who was there. Just below him were the ndichie, the elders of the Osu, their white curls hidden within the tall domes of their helmets. Beyond them, standing in loose family groups, were members of all the northern tribes, sons and daughters of Mother Sky. To his right, forming a tight knot beside the escarpment, were two or three hundred of the new settlers. They looked on suspiciously, clearly ill at ease, disturbed to see so many of the tribes gathered there. Hans wondered what arguments Old Tuan had used to bring them out so late and so far from their settlement.
He raised a hand, then spoke, his voice carrying from his lip mike to the helmets of everyone there.
"Brothers, sisters, friends, respected elders, I thank you all for coming. You have been patient, very patient, with me. Twice Mars has circled the sun and still I brought no answer. But finally 1 see what must be done."
"Speak, Efulefu," one of the ndichie called, speaking for them all.
"Tell us what you see."
"I see a time when the supply ships no longer come. When Chung Kuo no longer looks to Mars with caring eyes." "What of it?" someone called.
"We do not need their food, their medicines," another, deeper voice shouted from farther back. "Let the ships stop. It makes no difference!" "That's right!" another yelled. "We want nothing from them!" "No?" Ebert shrugged. "When a father forgets his son . . . when he casts him off, is that nothing? When a mother casts her unwanted child into a stream, to sink or swim, is that nothing? When a great thread is cut, is that nothing?"
He moved forward until he stood on the very edge of the great rock, then leaned toward them. "The poet Kang Jiang was right. This planet isn't home, it's exile. There is no life for us here, only the certainty of eventual extinction. Not now, perhaps, not for a thousand years, but one day. One day no human eye will wake to see this world. One day only our dust will blow about the circle of this place." "It is fate."
Ebert looked down at the elder who had spoken. "Fate, Jaga?"
The old man lifted his hands in a gesture of emptiness. "What can we do, Efulefu? There is nowhere else for us. We were cast off two centuries ago. To be Osu . . . why, it is to live in exile."
"Maybe that was so," Ebert answered, more gently than before. "But now that must end. We must build a ship."
"A ship!" The surprised words echoed back from all sides. Ebert nodded. "That is so. Oh, not a huge thing. Nothing that is beyond our means."
There was a furious murmuring. Ebert waited, then raised his hand again. Slowly the noise subsided.
"We must go back ... a few of us . . . and claim a place."
"They would kill us!" someone yelled.
"They will kill you," the elder, Jaga, said, pointing a gloved hand at his chest.
"Maybe. Yet we must try. A ship. First off we need a ship. And then men. Eight volunteers. Eight men of honor . . . eight black-faced heroes to offer to Li Yuan."
He laughed, seeing it clearly now, recalling the day twelve years before when the two gifts of stones had been given to the young prince on his betrothal day.
"It has been foreseen. One has gone on before us. And we must follow. For if we fail, all fails."
He stepped back, hearing the great murmur of debate begin, his own part in it done.
Yes, and it was true what he had said: DeVore had gone on before them to place a great white stone upon the board. But he would follow hard upon his heels—he and his eight black stones.
The game . . . The game had begun again.
He looked down, flexing his ring finger within the glove, remembering the moment in the dream. It was time to be rejoined. Time to play his proper role in things. He knew it now. Knew it with a clarity that filled him. His exile was coming to an end. It was time to return. Time to emerge into the light again.
PART 1 SPRING 2216
Song of the Bronze Statue
Gone that emperor of Maoling,
Rider through the autumn wind,
Whose horse neighs at night
And has passed without trace by dawn.
The fragrance of autumn lingers still
On those cassia trees by painted galleries,
But on every palace hall the green moss grows.
As Wei's envoy sets out to drive a thousand li
The keen wind at the East Gate stings the statue's eyes. . . .
From the ruined palace he brings nothing forth
But the moonshaped disc of Han,
True to his lord, he sheds leaden tears,
And withered orchids by the Xianyang Road
See the traveler on his way.
Ah, if Heaven had a feeling heart, it, too, must grow old!
He bears the disc off alone
By the light of a desolate moon,
The town far behind him, muted its lapping waves.
—Li he, "Song of the Bronze Statue," ninth century A.D.
CHAPTER ONE
In Heaven's Sight
COLONEL KARR crouched in the tunnel behind his lieutenant, the light from the flatscreen on the man's back casting a pale glow over his face and chest. His helmet hung loosely about his neck, his gun—a heavy automatic with twin clips—rested against the wall. Beyond him, squatting to either side of the unlit tunnel, a thousand men waited.