If Castor had thought the transient hotel splendid, Tsoong Delilah's country retreat was simply awesome. A private kitchen! A fireplace! A bedroom that contained neither working desk nor dining table, but only those things that went with the bed—and such a bed, big enough for six!
She also had a bar, and the first thing she did was to make him a drink. She took her own into the kitchen, leaving him to sit in a deeply enveloping soft chair and gaze out over the Gulf while she put their dinner into the slow cooker, then disappeared again, into the bedroom, coming out in black silk pajamas, her feet bare. Not for the first time, Castor wondered just how old Renmin Police Inspector Tsoong Delilah was. Uniformed and interrogating him at the rice paddy, she had looked middle-aged, maybe even old, say as much as forty or more. At lunch that afternoon, a handsome woman in perhaps her late twenties. Now, curled up on the rug before the fireplace (so great a waste of fuel in this balmy air!—but so cheerfully relaxing, too), she seemed no older than Castor himself. Certainly she did not seem as old as his recent twenty-year-old wife, Maria, who had always had an inclination to seem more mature than her years... Maria! It was the first time that day Castor had thought of her!
"What's the matter, Scholar?" the policewoman demanded. "Did someone just walk over your grave?"
He shook his head without answering. He didn't want to think about Maria just then, much less talk about her with this woman. What he wanted to think about was why Tsoong Delilah had brought him here. For his body? Oh, yes, very likely, and that might prove very interesting. But he could not help feeling that there was something else. He could not begin to imagine what a Renmin police inspector could possibly want from a peasant. It was difficult to think of such subjects in this place, with this pleasant-smelling woman close to him and his bloodstream full of cannabis and alcohol. He didn't speak; and the woman misinterpreted his silence.
"I think," she said, "you are mulling over what I said in the car. Well, I, too, have been thinking. Do you know what China was like in the old days? We were conquered by one invader after another, over and over, through thousands of years. When we ran out of nomads from the west we had the Americans and the British, and then the Japanese. They stayed too long, too, Scholar, but at least in our parks there are no signs saying: 'No dogs or Yankees permitted'! Now," she said, rising, "I think our dinner is nearly ready, if you will help me set the table."
Castor had never dined by candlelight before except when there was a power cutoff. The dinner was delicious—it was a mixture of Yankee and Han Chinese, a stew of pork and beans and a salad. And wine. They sat facing the dark Gulf, and with the room lights dimmed Castor's eyes began to pick out a pale flicker on the horizon. He knew what it was. Oil spills were usually controlled in a day or two, but the old natural gas wells cracked and leaked everywhere, and when there was a steady bubbling up of gas from the bottom over a period of time, sooner or later something set it off and the sea blazed for a few weeks. The gulls were dining by candlelight, too, feeding at night because there were so many dead or stunned fish, choked by the hydrocarbons in the water, helpless at the surface. He could see the birds diving and soaring, silhouetted against the distant glow. "Do you blame us for that, too?" the policewoman asked, and Castor shook his head.
"I don't blame you at all," he said. It was true. Nearly true. He didn't blame the Han Chinese for what had happened to the Gulf. Everyone knew that it was a couple of H-missiles that had wrecked the American fuel supply, the hydraulic hammer of their blast snapping off the pipes and pylons of the oil rigs. The Han Chinese had capped the worst of them almost at once and were still working on the hopeless myriad of others. He did, perhaps, blame them for other things, not excluding the desertion of his wife.
Tsoong Delilah did not pursue the subject. She tapped her wineglass with a long fingernail to signal Castor to refill it and began to tell him the story of her life. It was an interesting enough story. She had been born in San Francisco, grown up in a mixed neighborhood, Han Chinese and Yankee, mostly prosperous, mostly professionals. Her father, an economist specializing in trade matters, had sent her to a preparatory school in Guangzhou; then her two years of national service, as an MP in Africa and later in such romantic places as London and Marseilles and Zurich, serving the Han Chinese embassies in what were, after all, basically Indian protectorates. Then back to college, this time in Beijing. "I liked being a military police," she said as they cleared off the table, "so I majored in criminology and police procedures—and here I am."
Castor stepped back to observe how she fitted the dishes into the automatic cleaning machine—another marvel! "You never married?" he asked.
She looked up at him quizzically. "Who said I never married? Do you think you are the only one who has ever been divorced, Scholar? I married my professor, and when he retired he decided to spend the rest of his life at Home. So we divorced. Now," she said, turning on the machine and leading the way back to the living room, "let us have another drink while we hear your story. You are an interesting young man, autodidact. You took courses in physics, three years of that. And in physical chemistry; and in mathematics, also three years, all the way up to calculus and even a survey course in matrix mechanics which, however, you did not complete. I do not mention astronomy, navigation, astrogation, a survey of space medicine, planetology and orbital ballistics." While she talked she was seating him at one end of a deep couch and freshening their drinks; when he accepted his glass he said, "Your investigation left out a couple. Chinese and English literature, history—"
"I left out all the ones which appeared to be only compulsory courses required for a degree, which you did not, after all, apply for. Why?"
"I just wanted an education," he said sulkily.
"You wanted a special kind of education," she corrected. "Space. All of your courses point to space. Is that it, Scholar? Are you longing for the old days, when you and the Russians dominated space, and everything else?"
"I want to go there," he mumbled, his tongue loosened by the wine and the dope. "My great-great-great-grandfather—"
"Yes? What about this honorable ancestor?"
"He was honorable, damn it! He was an astronaut!"
"An astronaut," she said, but for a wonder her tone was not mocking.
"That's right. My grandmother told me— Well, he was killed, I think. Probably in the war. But he was in the space program, that is definite."
She nodded slowly. "It is not shameful to want to match the brave deeds of your ancestors," she said, and her tone was almost kind. He shrugged. "And is that what you want to do, Scholar?"
"What chance do I have?" he demanded.
She thought it over. "Very little, I admit. You Westerners cost the world a great deal with your wars. There has not been much left over for a space program."
"And what little there is, do they take Yankees?" he asked bitterly.
"Perhaps not," she conceded, but as though she had lost interest in the discussion. She looked into the fire for a minute. Then she turned to him, and she was neither sexually alluring nor police-arrogant. She said, "I was not truthful with you at lunch, Castor. There is something you can do for me, and it has nothing to do with the River of Pearl Livestock Collective." It was the first time she had called him by name.
Castor sat up. His head was woozy, but he knew a point when he came to it. "What can I do that you can't do for yourself?"