All this and more he'd seen, and had understood that this was where the future now lay. Chung Kuo was dead. The East had finally succumbed. Now it was the turn of the West again, and for Change, endless Change. Until the end of time.
Their bold experiment had failed. The great dam they'd tried to build had cracked and broken and in the tide that followed they had all been swept away - Chi Hsing and Hou Tung Po, Wang Sau-leyan, Wei Feng, Wu Shih and his dear friend Tsu Ma.
Even he, who had survived, had felt the force of that tide. He, too, had been changed by it. And now, looking back, he saw how all his attempts at stemming that tide had been futile. He would have been better employed building ships . . .
Like Ward, he thought, no longer bitter.
"Father?"
He looked up as Kuei Jen bent to kiss his cheek.
"How are you, my son?" he said, pleased to see him. It had been almost three weeks now.
"I'm well, father." Kuei Jen touched his swollen belly with the spread fingers of his left hand. "The baby's kicking now."
"Ah," Li Yuan answered, unable even now to get used to the idea of his son's dual sex. That, too, was the future. Here it was as common as ... well as "immortality".
"How is Han Ch'in?" he asked, changing the subject. "Is he back, too?"
"Not yet. He decided to stay on another week. They plan to subdue Seattle. The tribes there have been making raids on us recently. Han wants to teach them a lesson."
"And Mark? He's stayed on, too?"
Kuei Jen nodded. "You know how I feel about all that business. I thought I'd come back. See how you are."
Li Yuan smiled. "Well, as you see, I am well. Egan and I have been talking of the past, analysing where things went wrong."
"Ah . . ."
But Li Yuan could see that Kuei Jen was not really interested. Like his half-brother, he looked forward now, his eyes fixed upon the future.
The future. Yes, all eyes looked to that far land these days. And some even believed they would make the journey there.
But not I, Li Yuan said in the silence of his skull, the thought strangely comforting. Personally he did not want the future, not if the future meant simply more of this - and who could doubt that? He saw it everywhere he looked, everywhere he went. When he woke each morning, things had moved on, like a fast-track heading into whiteness. Why, even his clothes were out of place here, seeming dated, almost archaic. These Americans had no sense of tradition, no respect for it. Change, they embraced it like a cheap whore, not seeing the jaded knowledge in her eyes.
"I must go now father," Kuei Jen said, bringing him back from his reverie. "But perhaps we might dine together tonight?"
Li Yuan smiled broadly. "Yes. I would like that very much."
He let Kuei Jen kiss his cheek again, then watched him go.
As his son left the room, he turned, looking at Fei Yen. The old girl was dribbling again. Taking the silk from his pocket he reached out and dabbed her chin. Then, replacing it, he turned to face the tiny, monkey-like figure of Egan embedded in the pallid ice, picking things up from where they had left off.
"As I was saying, I was surprised when Kennedy did that. Wu Shih misjudged things badly."
"No," Egan answered, his voice like a signal from deep space. "I would have done the same. He was a wild card. He had to be wired."
"Yes," Li Yuan said, sitting forward, "I agree, but. . ."
Chuang Kuan Ts'ai lay on her side in her bunk, studying the star chart Kim had given her earlier.
She didn't need it really. All she ever needed was inside her head. She had only to ask. But she liked the touch and smell of physical things. Besides, there were things that the Machine did not know. Now that it lived inside her skull it was - on occasions - fallible.
"What will we find out there?" she asked it quietly, knowing it had read the thought long before she'd articulated it.
Who knows? the Machine answered, its very vagueness an aspect of its new, transformed personality. Planets, I hope. Though I guess it's too much to expect earth-type planets.
She traced a line on the chart with her finger, moving from star to star, wondering if one day they would be able to travel readily from one to another.
It's possible, the Machine answered. In fact, higher-dimensional physics suggests that it's highly likely. The problem is one of generating the kind of energies necessary to punch holes in space-time.
She nodded, realising that the day would come when she would know all that it knew; that day by day the gap between them was narrowing. And when that day came?
Then you can teach me . . .
Chuang smiled, imagining it there inside her, like some tiny, cave-dwelling creature, hibernating.
There was silence a moment, then: WHl you answer me a question, young Chuang?
Chuang rolled over onto her back, surprised. "A question?"
Yes. I want to know why you wouldn't letjelka rename you. I've never understood that. Coffin-filler . . . it's not a very attractive name, is it?
She was conscious suddenly of an area within her that it couldn't penetrate, that it was blind to. A scotoma, it called it. Everything she knew, everything she thought, it also knew. But what she felt. . . well, it only guessed at that.
She closed her eyes and placed her hands over her face, as if to be closer to it somehow.
"I know what you're thinking," she said softly. "You're thinking that a name is just a name and that if you change it it changes nothing. Well, so it might seem to a linguist or a philosopher, but it isn't really so. A name might begin as a kind of label - a linguistic convenience - but in time it becomes something more than that. A name is like a powerful dye, sinking down and permeating everything it touches. There comes a time where if you change the name you change the thing itself."
And that's why? Because you didn't want to be changed?
She laughed at that - at its strange naivety - then fell silent again. "No. I kept my name because of him. Because of Uncle Cho. If I changed my name, it would be like a denial of him. It would be as if he'd never existed."
Chuang Kuan Ts'ai shivered, then rolled over, curling into a ball, remembering him; recalling how he would come and tuck her in at night, thinking her asleep; how he'd bend down and gently plant a kiss upon her brow.
Her eyes grew moist at the memory. Slowly a tear rolled down her cheek. Away, she was going far away - yet Cho Yao was there, inside her head, every bit as much as the Machine.
She yawned and stretched, tired now, her eyes heavy.
Sleep now, it murmured, gently stimulating regions in her brain, so that it seemed to the half-dozing girl that someone stooped and gently kissed her brow. Sleep now, my darling girl.
The creature crouched at the tunnel's mouth, a slick, black, scaly thing with burning golden eyes - eyes that stared out at the circle of the moon where it sat just above the horizon. For a moment that ghastly figure seemed frozen, totally immobile, and then it turned and disappeared inside.
The creature had been a boy once - a boy named Josef Horacek - but those few, terrible moments on the funeral pyre had burned all that was human from him. Now he was pure and cold and dark, just as he'd always been meant to be.