For a second or two Ben knelt there in front of him threateningly, his whole body tensed as if to act. Then he moved back.
"You'll be quiet, understand? And you'll say nothing of this. Nothing! Or I'll switch you off and drop you over the side. Understand me, Teacher Peng?"
For a moment the android was perfectly still, then it gave the slightest nod.
"Good," said Ben, moving back and taking up the oars again. "Then we'll proceed."
AS BEN TURNED the boat into the tiny, boxlike harbor the two sailors looked up from where they sat on the steps mending their nets and smiled. They were both old men, in their late sixties, with broad, healthy, salt-tanned faces. Ben hailed them, then concentrated on maneuvering between the moored fishing boats. There was a strong breeze now from the mouth of the river and the metallic sound of the lines flapping against the masts filled the air, contesting with the cry of gulls overhead. Ben turned the boat's prow with practiced ease and let the craft glide between a big, high-sided fishing boat and the harbor wall, using one of the oars to push away, first one side, then the other. Meg, at the stern, held the rope in her hand, ready to jump ashore and tie up.
Secured, Ben jumped ashore, then looked back into the boat. Pen Yu-wei had stood up, ready to disembark.
"You'll stay," Ben said commandingly.
For a moment Peng Yu-wei hesitated, his duty to chaperone the children conflicting with the explicit command of the young master. Water slopped noisily between the side of the boat and the steps. Only paces away the two old sailors had stopped their mending, watching.
Slowly, with great dignity, the teacher sat, planting his staff before him. "I'll do as you say, young master," he said, looking up at the young boy on the quayside, "but I must tell your father about this."
Ben turned away, taking Meg's hand. "Do what you must, tin man," he muttered under his breath.
The quayside was cluttered with coils of rope, lobster pots, netting, and piles of empty wooden crates—old, frail-looking things that awaited loads of fish that never came. The harbor was filled with fishing boats, but no one ever fished. The town beyond was full of busy-seeming people, but no one lived there. It was all false: all part of the great illusion Ben's great-great-great-grandfather had created here.
Once this had been a thriving town, prospering on fishing and tourism and the naval college. Now it was dead. A shell of its former self, peopled by replicants.
Meg looked about her, delighted, as she always was by this. Couples strolled in the afternoon sunshine, the ladies in crinolines, the men in stiff three-piece suits. Pretty little girls with curled blond hair tied with pink ribbons ran here and there, while boys in sailor suits crouched, playing five-stones.
"It's so real here!" Meg said enthusiastically. "So alive!"
Ben looked down at her and smiled. "Yes," he said. "It is, isn't it?" He had seen pictures of the City. It seemed such an ugly, hideous place by comparison. A place of walls and cells and corridors—a vast, unending prison of a place. He turned his face to the breeze and drew in great lungfuls of the fresh salt air, then looked back at Meg. "What shall we do?"
She looked past the strolling holidaymakers at the gaily painted shops along the front, then looked up at the hillside and, beyond it, the Wall, towering over all.
"I don't know. . . ." She squeezed his hand. "Let's just go where we want, Ben. Look wherever we fancy looking, eh?"
"Okay. Then we'll start over there, at the Chandler's."
For the next few hours they went among the high-street shops, first searching through the shelves of Joseph Toms, Toys and Fancy Goods, for novelties, then looking among the tiny cupboards of Charles Weaver, Apothecary, sampling the sweet-tasting, harmless powders on their fingers and mixing the brightly colored liquids in beakers. But Ben soon tired of such .games and merely watched as Meg went from shop to shop,
unchallenged by the android shopkeepers. In Nash's Coffee House they had their lunch, the food real but somehow unsatisfying, as if reconstituted.
"There's a whole world here, Meg. Preserved. Frozen in time. Sometimes I look at it and think it's such a waste. It should be used somehow."
Meg sipped at her iced drink, then looked up at him. "You think we should let others come here into the Domain?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "No. Not that. But. . ."
Meg watched him curiously. It was unusual to see Ben so indecisive.
"You've an idea," she said.
"No. Not an idea. Not as such."
Again that uncertainty, that same slight shrugging of his shoulders. She watched him look away, his eyes tracing the row of signs above the shopfronts: David Wishart, Tobacconist; Arthur Redmayne, Couturier; Thomas Lipton, Vintner; Jack Del-croix, Dentist & Bleeder, Stagg & Mantle, Ironmongers; Verry's Restaurant; Jackson & Graham, Cabinet Makers; The Lambe Brothers, Linen-Drapers; and there, on the corner, facing Goode's Hostelry, Pugh's Mourning House.
Seeing Pugh's brought back a past visit. It was months ago and Ben had insisted on going into Pugh's, though they had always avoided the shop before. She had watched him go among the caskets, then lift one of the lids, peering inside. The corpse looked realistic enough, but Ben had turned to her and laughed. "Dead long before it was dead." Somehow that had made him talk about things here. Why they were as they were, and what kind of man her great-great-great-grandfather had been to create a place like this. He had not skimped on anything. One looked in drawers or behind doors and there, as in real life, one found small, inconsequential things. Buttons and pins and photographs. A hatstand with an old, well-worn top hat on one peg, a scarf on another, as if left there only an hour past. Since then she had searched and searched, her curiosity unflagging, trying to catch him out—to find some small part of this world he had made that wasn't finished. To find some blank, uncreated part behind the superficial details.
Would she have thought to do this without Ben? Would she have searched so ardently to find that patch of dull revealing blankness? No. In truth she would never have known. But he had shown her how this, the most real place she knew, was in other ways quite hollow. Was all a marvelous sham. A gaudy, imaginative fake.
"If this is fake, why is it so marvelous, Ben?" she had asked, and he had shaken his head in wonder at her question.
"Why? Because it's godlike! Look at it, Meg! It's so presumptuous! Such consummate mimicry! Such shameless artifice!"
Now, watching him, she knew he had a scheme. Some way of using this.
"Never mind," she said. "Let's move on. I'd like to try on some of Lloyd's hats."
Ben smiled at her. "Okay. And then we'll start back."
THEY WERE UPSTAIRS in Edgar Lloyd, Hatters, when Ben heard voices down below. Meg was busy trying on hats at the far side of the room, the android assistant standing beside her at the mirror, a stack of round, candy-striped boxes in her arms.
Ben went to the window and looked down. There were soldiers in the passageway below. Real soldiers. And not just any soldiers. He knew the men at once.
Meg turned to him, a wide-brimmed creation of pale cream lace balanced precariously on top of her dark curls. "What do you think, Ben? Do you—"
He hushed her urgently.
"What is it?" she mouthed.
"Soldiers," he mouthed back.
She set the hat down and came across to him.
"Keep down out of sight," he whispered. "They're our guards, and they shouldn't be here. They're supposed to be confined to barracks."
She looked up at him, wide eyed, then knelt down, so that her head was below the sill. "Tell me what's happening," she said quietly.
He watched. There were ten of them down there, their voices urgent, excited. For a moment Ben couldn't understand what was going on, then one of them turned and he saw it was the captain, a man called Rosten. Rosten pointed down the passageway toward the open ground in front of the old inn and muttered something Ben couldn't quite make out.