It was strange, in a way, because they had explained it to him in the first place; had told him how intricately connected the finances and thus the computer systems of Chung Kuo were. It was they who had explained about "discrete systems" cut off from all the rest; islands of tight-packed information, walled round with defenses. And it was they who had told him that the Project's system was "discrete."
He had discovered none of that himself. All he had discovered was that the Project's files wese not alone within the walled island of their computer system. There was another file inside the system—an old, long-forgotten file that had been there a century or more, dormant, undisturbed, until Kim had found it. And not just any file. This was a library. No. More than that. It was a world. A world too rich to have been invented, too consistent—even in its errors—to have been anything less than real.
So why had the Seven hidden it? What reason could they have had for burying the past?
Freed from the burden of his secret, he had spent the last two nights considering just this. He had looked at it from every side, trying to see what purpose they had had in mind. And finally he had understood. It was to put an end to change. They had lied to end the Western dream of progress. To bring about a timeless age where nothing changed. A golden age.
But that left him with the problem of himself, for what was he if not Change personified? What if not a bacillus of that selfsame virus they had striven so long and hard to eradicate?
Kim opened his eyes and rolled over onto his front, then kicked out for the deeper water.
He saw it clearly now. What he was made him dangerous to them—made him a threat to the Seven and their ways. Yet he was also valuable. He knew, despite their efforts to hide it from him, what SimFic had paid for his contract. But why had they paid so vast a sum? What did they think to use him for?
Change. He was almost certain of it. But how could he be sure?
Push deeper in, he told himself. Be curious. Is SimFic just a faceless force? A mechanism for making profits? Or does it have a personality?
And if so, whose?
The name came instantly. He had heard it often enough of late in the news. Soren Berdichev.
Yes, but who is he? A businessman. Yes. A Dispersionist. That too. But beyond that, what? What kind of man is he? Where does he come from? What does he want? And—most important of all—what does he want of me?
Kim ducked his head beneath the surface then came up again, shaking the water from his hair, the tiredness washed suddenly from his mind. He felt a familiar excitement in his blood and laughed. Yes, that was it! That would be his new task. To find out all he could about the man.
And when he'd found it out?
He drifted, letting the thread fall slack. Best not anticipate so far. Best find out what he could and then decide.
SOREN BERDICHEV sat in the shadowed silence of his study, the two files laid out on the desk in front of him. The Wu had just gone, though the sweet, sickly scent of his perfume lingered in the air. The message of the yarrow stalks was written on the slip of paper Berdichev had screwed into a ball and thrown to the far side of the room. Yet he could see it clearly even so.
The light has sunk into the earth:
The image of darkening of the light.
Thus does the superior man live with the great mass:
He veils his light, yet still he shines.
He banged the desk angrily. This threw all of his deliberations out. He had decided on his course of action and called upon the Wu merely to confirm what he had planned. But the Wu had contradicted him. And now he must decide again.
He could hear the Wu's scratchy voice even now as the old man looked up from the stalks; could remember how his watery eyes had widened; how his wispy gray beard had stuck out stiffly from his chin.
"K'un, the Earth, in the above, Li, the Fire, down below. It is Ming I, the darkening of the light."
It had meant the boy. He was certain of it. The fire from the earth. He veils Jus light, yet still he shines.
"Is this a warning?" he had asked, surprising the old man, for he had never before interrupted him in all the years he had been casting the I C/iing for him.
"A warning, S/iih Berdichev?" The Wu had laughed. "The Book of Changes does not warn. Yoif mistake its purpose. Yet the hexagram portends harm . . . injury."
Berdichev had nodded and fallen silent. But he had known it for what it was. A warning. The signs were too strong to ignore. So now he must decide again.
He laid his glasses on the desk and picked up the newest of the files containing the genotype reports he had had done.
He spread the two charts on the desk before him, beside each other, then touched the pad, underlighting the desk's surface.
There was no doubt about it. Even without the expert's report on the matter, it could be seen at once. The similarities were striking. He traced the mirrored symbols on the spiraling trees of the two double helices and nodded to himself.
"So you are Edmund Wyatt's son, Kim Ward. I wonder what Edmund would have made of that?"
He laughed sadly, realizing for the first time how much he missed his dead friend's quiet strengths, then sat back, rubbing his eyes.
The genotyping and the Aristotle file, they were each reason enough in themselves to have Kim terminated. The first meant he was the son of the traitor, Wyatt, the second breached the special Edict which concealed Chung Kuo's true past. Both made Kim's life forfeit under the law, and that made the boy a threat to him. And so, despite the cost—despite the huge potential profit to be made from him—he had decided to play safe and terminate the boy, at the same time erasing all trace of those who had prepared the genotype report for him. But then the Wu had come.
The sun in the earth. Yes, it was the boy. There was no doubt about it. And, as he had that first time he had used the services of the Wu, he felt the reading could not be ignored. He had to act on it.
A small shiver ran through him, remembering that first time, almost nine years ago now. He had been skeptical and the Wu had angered him by laughing at his doubt. But only moments later the Wu had shocked him into silence with his reading.
The wind drives over the water:
The image of dispersion.
Thus the kings of old sacrificed to the Lord And built temples.
It had been the evening before his dinner with Edmund Wyatt and Pietr Lehmann—a meeting at which he was to decide whether or not he should join their new Dispersion faction. And there it was. The fifty-ninth hexagram—/iuan. He remembered how he had listened, absorbed by the Wu's explanation, convinced by his talk of high goals and the coming of spring after the hardness of winter. It was too close to what they had been talking of to be simple chance or coincidence. Why, even the title of the ancient book seemed suddenly apt, serendipitous—The Book of Changes. He had laughed and bowed and paid the Wu handsomely before contacting Edmund at once to tell him yes.
And so it had begun, all those years ago. Nor could he ever think of it without seeing in his mind the movement of the wind upon the water, the budding of leaves upon the branches. So how could he argue with it now—now that he had come to this new beginning?
He switched off the underlighting, slipped the charts back into the folder, then picked up his glasses and stood, folding them and placing them in the pocket of his pau.
The sun in the earth. . . . Yes, he would leave the boy for now. But in the morning he would contact his man in the Midlevels and have him bomb the laboratory where they had prepared the genotypes.