The prisoner ignored her.
"It's a corner turret from Beijing's Palace Museum," Katie Petrov told the Professor, who glanced up briefly but more or less did the same. "You know," insisted Katie, "part of the UN heritage site."
"No," said Prisoner Zero, "it's not." They were the first words he'd actually addressed directly to Dr. Petrov.
"Triple-roofed, gables on the two highest, carved acroteria on the corner of each, intricate screens..."
"It's not," Prisoner Zero insisted.
"China," Katie Petrov wrote in her notebook. "Beijing..." If nothing else, dropping hints about Beijing would tie up half the upper echelon of the NSA and keep them off Professor Mayer's back for a while.
Prisoner Zero's sketch progressed in shades of grey, the crosshatching made from numbers and words. The words were broken, the numbers near random and he would lose the drawing at the end of the day because, every evening before the overhead bulb went out in Prisoner Zero's cell, Sergeant Saez would come in to search his room.
The darkness thought it only kind to give him something to find.
Sergeant Saez's search was methodical. The mattress was overturned (Prisoner Zero had one of those too) and his new table and chair examined carefully. The laptop recently made available by Petra Mayer was confiscated for the night as was every single piece of paper on which Prisoner Zero had doodled during the course of that day.
Laptop, paper and pencils were returned again the next morning. To get them back Prisoner Zero had to eat at least half his breakfast. No one had explained this to him but empirical testing had confirmed that this was how it worked.
"I don't get it," Katie Petrov said.
"What's to get?" said the Professor. She was used to this. Katie's questions to Prisoner Zero went unanswered. Which meant that if Katie wanted to ask him something she had to ask the Professor, who would ask the prisoner. It was clumsy, arbitrary and time consuming. Petra Mayer assumed that was the point.
"Where does Beijing come into this?"
"So," said Professor Mayer, addressing the prisoner, "where does Beijing come into this?"
"It doesn't."
"That's not Beijing?"
"No," said Prisoner Zero. "That's where the darkness lives." And with that he returned to a small figure climbing the outside of a tower. He gave the figure a short sword in each hand and then scrawled out one of them, turning it into rope.
As a church clock in a distant village struck ten and day turned to night on Lampedusa without bothering to pass through dusk, Colonel Borgenicht arrived to suggest that now might be a good time for his men to be allowed to lock Prisoner Zero down. Petra Mayer could tell by the Colonel's manner that he knew all about the President's planned visit and didn't like the idea one little bit.
"In a minute," she said. "We just want to take him for a walk first... That was a joke," she added, seeing anxiety suddenly flood the Colonel's face.
Colonel Borgenicht nodded weakly.
"You know," Katie Petrov said, as she and the Professor were crunching across gravel on their way back to their quarters, "you probably shouldn't tease him so much."
Petra Mayer glanced round to where the Colonel stood staring after them. "I thought you loathed the man."
"Of course I do," said Katie Petrov hastily. "All the same..."
The Professor raised her eyebrows. "Stockholm Syndrome," she said. "You'll be feeling sorry for him next."
Katie Petrov blushed.
"Can I ask you something?" Katie Petrov had reached the door of her chalet, and was actually feeding her key card into the lock when she stopped and turned back to the older woman.
"Of course."
"What does the President really hope to gain by coming here?"
"He carries the Europeans with him on his refusal to sign the space accord with Beijing until the human rights issues are resolved. America is seen to be magnanimous to someone it could justifiably treat harshly. And Gene gets to prove he's not the previous incumbent."
"But that's not all, is it?"
Professor Mayer shook her head. "No," she said. "He sees Prisoner Zero as an asset for America and a personal challenge."
"And that's it?"
"Mostly," admitted Petra Mayer. "Although we shouldn't forget the photo shoot. Gene Newman and the world's lost genius... Brave move by US President... Newman meets would-be assassin..."
"So where does the challenge come in?"
"If you knew Gene the way I know Gene..." It sounded like the first line of a song and after a second Katie realized that was exactly how Petra Mayer intended it to sound. "You ever met anyone who just knows they can do things better than anyone else?"
"Sounds like my first husband," Katie said.
The Professor looked interested. "How many have you had?"
"Just the one," Katie said. "I learn quickly from my mistakes."
"And could he?"
"The man could barely change a light bulb without reading the manual."
"Gene can," said the Professor. "It's one of the more annoying things about him. He acts like Olivier, writes like a Don DeLillo, cooks like Anthony Bourdain. And I'm reliably informed--" Whatever Petra Mayer was about to reveal, she thought the better of it. "He looks good too," she ended lamely.
"What's all that got to do with him coming here?"
"Think about it," said the Professor, and she wasn't being rude. Just talking to her companion as she'd have talked to herself.
Watching stars break through a pitch-black sky, Katie Petrov worked it out. "Yeah, I get it," she said. Gene Newman was coming to Lampedusa to sort out the "Killing Einstein" problem for himself, and he was planning to do it in the full glare of the world's press.
CHAPTER 55
Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
"You have messages."
Zaq snorted. The record for messages was one point five billion in a day, or maybe that was per hour. An entire bureau, the Tung Wen Kuan, existed to answer these, which were always dealt with individually, usually by a short cerebral link that gave each recipient the impression that he, she or it had been in direct conversation with the Emperor.
Someone, supposedly the original Chuang Tzu (though Zaq suspected it was actually the Library), had decided that every answer should equal the message received. So random mental messages got simple cerebral replies, while actual gifts were met with tokens of equal worth, that worth calculated using a complex algorithm that took time/value into account but gave it less weight than rareness or originality.
"Answer them then," he told the voice in his head.
"It's not that simple."
Zaq was about to snort when he realized he'd done this already. So he made do with a scowl. "Why not?" His voice sounded petulant, even to himself.
"Because it's the Council of Ambassadors."
"The--" Zaq had rather forgotten about the Council. On good days, of course, only on really good days, he could even forget that he had an empire. Although he'd never, no matter how hard he tried, quite managed to forget the Library, but this was probably because the Library and he were threaded through each other.
"What do they want?"
"What they wanted last time."
"Which is...?" Zaq really didn't have time to remember this stuff.
"They demand that you back yourself up and insist that I make you. For the good of the 2023 worlds."
"And what's your opinion?" asked Zaq, his voice tight. The Librarian was meant to be his mentor but it was also a facet of the Library. Neither Zaq nor the Library had any doubt that they were now at war with each other. And Zaq still believed he was winning.