Yes. But how did the hidden comset fit in with all of that? Unless Ebert had been keeping something back from him. Unless he was still working for DeVore in some other role than factory sweeper. Ikuro stood, wondering, not for the first time, whether he shouldn’t just go; whether Bates and his friends really were out there waiting for him, or whether that, too, had been made up.
He huffed, angry with himself, disturbed by the uncertainty he felt. Why should Ebert lie? Why should he expose himself so thoroughly if his motives were not honorable? Besides which, even if he had not revealed to Ikuro why he had the comset, he had made no attempt to conceal the fact of its existence. Any fool would have realized it was there in the apartment somewhere.
So what was the truth? Just what was Hans Ebert doing on Mars? He stopped, the title on the spine of one of Ebert’s books catching his eye. Taking it from the shelf he sat again, letting his thoughts grow still. It was a slim, soft-covered edition of Kan Jiang’s Poems, printed on flimsy onion-paper. Opening a page at random he began to read. On Patrolling the Course of the Proposed Western Pipeline A broken chain Lies shattered in the dry bed of an ancient stream. Our Corps Commander makes his slow way down, Weightless, it seems, in the pale earthlight.
The long shadows of his limbs
Dance like puppets on the red earth.
He crouches and the power-torch flares green, Cupped like a cat’s eye in his white-gloved hands.
Sparks scatter like fireflies,
As the iron glows red.
Ten thousand years our fathers labored,
Tilling the black earth of our home.
Flood, famine, and disease they suffered,
And survived, the chain unbroken,
Knowing the day would come,
The harvest time,
That single day of sun and ease.
The workday ends.
Back in my bunk I cast the yarrow stalks
And read the sage’s words.
Six in the fifth place.
“Work on what has been spoiled.
Afterward there is order.”
Work, it urges, yet what tool exists
To weld us to our past?
The bridge between the worlds is down.
Here, in this dry land,
I am my father and my own dear son,
Born out of nothing.
I am the broken chain.
In this land without ghosts,
Who will sweep the graves
And light the paper offerings?
Ikuro shivered, moved deeply by the words. So it was. For himself, Ishida Ikuro, just as much as for the noble Kan Jiang. And Ebert? Yes. In fact, for him, perhaps, more than for any of them, because for Ebert there was no home, was no returning.
Ikuro set the book down, his decision made. He would wait here until Ebert returned from his shift. Then, when Ebert was back, he would ask him what the comset meant, and if the answer satisfied he would tell Ebert about himself, exchanging one confidence for another. Trusting Ebert just as Ebert had trusted him.
And then? Ikuro shook his head. Who knew what would happen then? Only the gods. Yet he was certain of one thing now: the gods had sent him here for a purpose, and whatever that purpose was—whatever it entailed—he would see it through. For the honor of his family.
And because he was Ikuro, grandson of Miyamoto, the youngest son of Nagahara, who had run away and had adventures and returned to tell the tale and add a new branch to the family.
Smiling, he picked up the book again and opened it at the beginning, then settled back in the chair, starting to read.
ebert stood on the narrow balcony, looking out across the vastness of the workfloor. It was between shifts and the rows between the vats were empty, the machines still, the hangar echoing silent. A cool blue light made the workfloor seem like a giant pool from which, ob-elisklike, the vats thrust up, huge and square, the glistening life-forms lying inert in their sterilized troughs like huge grubs, the opaque walls lit from below. He raised his eyes. Overhead a grid of enclosed walkways crisscrossed the hangar roof. Beneath them one-man observation pods moved slowly back and forth, gliding smoothly on electric tracks. Below and to the far left of the workfloor, beside a brightly lit opening, a gang of supervisors in bright green pressure suits talked quietly among themselves while close at hand a larger group in red waited silently. Ebert scratched at his neck beneath the mask, then turned and made his way toward the steps. His skin tingled beneath the body-hugging suit and his eyes smarted from the disinfectants in the shower, but that was normal at the start of a shift. The suit was1 disposable and would be burned once the shift was over. One of the men had once quipped that Culver would have had them all burned, too, if it made economic sense, and had been sacked on the spot for saying it. But the point was well made. HoloGen went to extraordinary lengths to prevent infection on the workfloor. In fact anything that threatened HoloGen’s “babies” was not merely frowned on but actively discouraged.
At the bottom of the steps he turned right, making his way toward his workpoint. From this level you got a sense of the scale of the workfloor. The obelisks in which the vats rested were twice the height of a man, and their shadowed flanks—which from above seemed featureless—were covered in controls and screens which monitored and regulated the troughs. He walked unhurriedly along the narrow, slatted walkway, the polished double runners of the broad maintenance track to his left, the blank wall of the hangar to his right. Every twenty paces or so he would see, to his left, the great rows of vats, stretching away, it seemed, into infinity, their size and the regularity of their spacing making it seem more like a tomb—a vast mausoleum—than a place where living things were made. He paused briefly, staring along the row. As he did, a cloud of disinfectant sprayed over his booted feet, as a busy little cleaning machine went by beneath the slats.
He had wondered at first why DeVore bothered employing men to do the cleaning at the plant, when it could all have been done so much more easily—so much more efficiently—by machines. But now he understood. It was all political. By employing men in such menial positions he not only enhanced his position as a great Martian benefactor, but also kept the guilds quiet.
Guilds. He still found the idea strange. Back on Chung Kuo there had been no guilds. Organizations of workingmen had been banned and anyone who had tried to organize had been dealt with severely. But here, while they were still illegal—for the laws of Chung Kuo applied as much here as they did on the home planet—they did exist. It was another of those hangovers from Mars’s early history. The first settlers had formed guilds to preserve basic skills among the new colonists, and even after the two Colonial Wars those guilds, though driven underground, had survived. He walked on. It was almost half a li from one end of the hangar to the other, but he preferred to walk than to ride the shuttle, crammed in with a hundred other men. It had been hard, adjusting to this life. Harder still to fit in with the mindless chatter of his fellow workers. From early on he had got the reputation of being a loner, and he had embraced that, welcoming the space, the distance, it gave him from it all. As ever, he found himself thinking back, recalling, as if from a dream, those memories he had of visiting his father’s plants. Never once, in all those times, had he stepped down onto the workfloor. Never once had he stopped to speak to one of those faceless millions his father had employed throughout Chung Kuo. GenSyn . . .
GenSyn had been a hundred times bigger than HoloGen, a thousand times more powerful, and it had all been his. He had only had to wait. But he had been greedy. Greedy and impatient. Like a child he had squandered his gift. Had let it fall through his fingers like dust. The thought made him smile beneath the mask. And what would he have done with it that he hadn’t done already? No, only by losing it had he come to recognize its value. If he had kept it he would never have seen its worth, nor would he have walked these narrow pathways, his eyes opened to the world. But was that always so? Did a man need to have lost all he loved before he could see what it was really worth to him? Or was it only he, Hans Ebert, who had needed to be taught that lesson?