Black Star Rising

I

CASTOR was halfway across the paddy, part of the long line of farm workers, when he stepped on the dead man's head. He was not thinking about dead men. He wasn't really thinking about poking the rice seedlings into the muck, either, or about the warm rain dripping on his bent shoulders or about the ache in his back; he was thinking about Maria and her problem and about going for a swim and about whether it was possible that the people at the observatory would let him apply for a job there and mostly about what he and Maria would do in bed that night, and then all of a sudden there it was. He didn't know it was a dead man's head at first. He couldn't see it, though the water was only centimeters deep, because the sowers had stirred up the bottom mud. His foot told him it was solid, and heavy, and didn't belong there. "Tourists," he muttered to old Sarah, next to him in line. "They throw their garbage anywhere they like!"

He reached down into the muck. Tiny tilapia slipped between his fingers, angry as poked wasps at the disturbance. Castor felt that the thing was round and soggy, and then as he lifted it up he saw what it was. His scared, furious bellow brought the whole production team splashing and squashing over to him. Fat Rhoda came up scowling, because she'd had enough of Castor's foolishness, and old Franky was giggling and calling out jokey questions—"What is it then, Castor, you found another baby in the bullrushes?"—and almost all of them smiling, because nobody but Rhoda minded an excuse to pause for a moment from the endless stoop labor of transplanting the seedlings.

Then they saw what Castor was holding, and all smiles froze. They stood staring, sweating through the rain-glistened skin, while the tilapia played about their toes and no one knew what to do. "It's a murder!" quavered old Franky, leaning on his stick. "Don't say that!" ordered Fat Rhoda, but her voice was a lot more frightened than commanding. Then she reached for the talkie that hung, around her neck and said, "Commune, this is Production Team Three. We've just discovered a dead body. Part of a dead body, a head." She licked her lips and added, "Call the cops, and tell them it isn't one of us. It looks like a Han Chinese."

Although the Heavenly Grain Collective Farm was more than a hundred kilometers from Biloxi, the police helicopter was there in half an hour. It was a long half hour. The production team was ordered to do nothing but stay right where they were. Stay they did, all fourteen of them sitting on the dike, looking at the place where Castor in horror had dropped the head back out of sight and old Franky had jammed in his hobbling stick for a marker. "They'll drain the paddy," Franky predicted gloomily, "and everything to do all over again!"

Little Nan cried out with shock, "We'll lose the fish. Rhoda! Sixty kilos of tilapia fry, we just put them in!"

"I know," Rhoda said crossly, frowning. The ecology of rice farming was not just rice. First you prepared the paddy, then you flooded the paddy, then you seeded brine shrimp, then you seeded tilapia. The shrimp fed on bits of anything and on insect larvae. The tilapia fed on the insect larvae and on the shrimp; then, when they had grown, people fed on the meal made from the adult tilapia; it was "the commune's best and cheapest protein. Since both shrimp and tilapia were resolutely carnivorous, insect pests were destroyed and the rice seedlings were spared.

"Get traps," Franky suggested. "Maybe we can save the tilapia."

"I'm just going to get traps," Rhoda fretted and talked to the commune again on the little radio that hung around her neck; though what good the traps would do no one was sure, for the baby tilapia were so tiny that many of them might slip right through the mesh and be lost.

At least the rain had stopped, though the burning sun was no easier to take. The excitement had attracted a tour bus away from the village's souvenir shops. Forty Mainland tourists were snatching pictures of the paddy, the grumpy production team, and each other. Already two schoolgirls from the village had hurried out with bike-loads of sweet persimmons and golden limes from the private plots. The tourists bought eagerly. The production team looked wistfully at the fruit but didn't buy—not at tourist prices—not, especially, when the tourist renmin-dollars were pouring into the village's economy so easily. One tourist persimmon was worth more than a kilo of state-bought rice, and no taxes to pay.

The production team heard the sudden buzz of tourist cameras before they heard the flutter of the approaching choppers. They all stood up as three police helicopters settled on the truck hardstand. Three! What were they expecting, an armed gang of murderers waiting to shoot it out with the cops? But the six police from the first craft wore the green shoulder boards of traffic control and expeditiously shepherded the grumbling tourists back to their bus and away. The second chopper carried real police; armed and helmeted, along with a couple of unarmed, older police carrying cameras and black attach^ cases. The third seemed to hold only one person, a woman wearing the collar insignia of an inspector.

She stepped down and paused. She gazed at the rice paddy, at the departing tourist bus, at the clouds building again out over the Gulf of Mexico; and then she turned to the production team. In excellent English she asked, "Which one found the body?"

Grateful hands pushed Castor forward. "It wasn't a body, only a head," he said to set the record straight.

She confronted him staring up into his face. She was less than shoulder-high to him, but she did not seem to notice the difference in their heights. "Oh, only a head, then? I see. But that makes quite a difference, if it is only a head rather than a whole body! Still, in my experience I have learned that if a dead head turns up, then somewhere there is a dead body it has belonged to."

Castor's annoyance at her sarcasm exceeded his worry at being involved with the Renmin Police. In faultless Mandarin he answered her. "A high police officer will understand these things better than a peasant, I know."

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "I am in the presence of a scholar! But please, permit me to speak in your language, since some of your colleagues may not understand the high tongue. Tell me, then, scholar, how did you find this thing, whether it be body or merely inexplicably separate head?"

So Castor told her, and all the other members of the production team told her, and the police began their work. Some did indeed stamp and scuffle around the paddy, ordering the water level be lowered a little at a time. Others conducted separate interrogations of all fourteen witnesses; others still took pictures and bottled little samples of water and mud and other things. There was a flurry when the interrogating police found that some of the production team did not have their passport cards on their persons. Castor was one. He thought angrily of the criticism that would follow, perhaps even punishment duty. But the inspector would have none of that. "Forget that!" she ordered. "Of course these people don't carry cards on their own farm, that is foolishness. You can perfectly well verify their identities in the village." And she was equally short at Fat Rhoda's request to be allowed to trap as many of the tilapia as possible as the water was drained away. "No one wishes to waste valuable food! Certainly, catch your fish." And so half the production team was set to placing the traps and bailing out their squirming contents to be put in transport tanks, while the other half was put to walking the paddy with nets to capture as many as possible of those flapping away in the mud. That was Castor's job—the job of a ten-year-old, really! It was an indignity. He was always suffering indignities. Even being assigned to planting rice was an indignity. Stoop-labor gangs were picked from the shortest members of the commune—they didn't have so far to stoop—and Castor was nearly two meters tall. He felt the amused eyes of the People's Police inspector on him from time to time as he tripped 01 fell m the pursuit of the glittery, flopping little creatures; and all in all it was a bad day.

The good part of the bad day was that it was saved from getting worse. The People's Police didn't let Production Team Three go until it was nearly dark—questions and requestions, much time spent merely waiting while the water level in the paddy was lowered stage by stage and the police technicians sifted the mud and strained the water for clues. There were none. No weapon. No other part of the body. No convenient passport card carelessly dropped by the murderer—nothing. But the good result was that they were so late getting back that the evening educational meeting was canceled and the subject that Castor didn't want to discuss was postponed.

What there was instead was a quick meeting in the assistant director's office, all fourteen of the production team squeezed in anyhow and made to stand so as not to soil his good furniture with their muddy bodies. It was not a criticism meeting. It was only the assistant director's desire to hear for himself just what had happened; so all fourteen had to tell their stories one time more. It took time the production team would have been glad to use to clean up for the evening meal. Although it was not a criticism meeting, Castor found himself being scolded anyway. "Cousin Castor," said the assistant director coldly—they were both Pettymans, though that didn't make them close, since only seven families made up more than half the commune—"Cousin Castor, watch your tongue! Why were you impudent to the Renmin inspector?"

"I wasn't. She was making fun of us."

"Of us! Of you, you mean, and rightly so. You are a vain young man, Cousin Castor. A potentially troublesome element. I am really very dissatisfied, and not only with you. How are you going to make up this lost time, Cousin Rhoda?" And so the meeting ended only in the usual exhortations to meet production norms and take more seriously the education meetings, and Castor was allowed to escape to the showers.

Somewhat cleaner, he met his wife, Maria, in the dining hall. She was late, too. Her job was in the handicraft store, and they had been able to close the doors just minutes before. In fact, a couple of tourists were still standing around, photographing the villagers at the business of their daily lives, tossing the village's handmade Frisbees back and forth, greatly enjoying their day among the quaint peasants of the Bama Autonomous Republic. They kissed—he with pleasure tempered by concern, she with reluctance modified by duty. He was bursting to tell her how rotten his day had been, but she did not look as though she wanted to hear.

Maria was tall and fair—almost as tall as Castor, and far paler than anyone else in the village. Her parents had come to the B.A.R. as glum volunteers twenty years earlier. They had not lasted long. The mother was dead in a tractor accident a year after Maria's birth. The father was once again a "volunteer," but this time he actually did volunteer, all of his own volition. He went off to the calamitous deserts of western Iowa and never was heard from again. The infant was left behind. The village didn't protest greatly; the pressure to hold down the birthrate was not yet strong.

But of course that had not been forgotten, either. "Do you want to eat at home?" Castor asked. Maria shook her head, though it was often their custom for one of them to go to the hall with their own pots, fill them up, and bring the meal back to their own apartment to dine in privacy.

"We don't want to look as though we're hiding," she said. "Anyway, I'm not very hungry." She hesitated. "I'm going for my tests tomorrow."

"Oh," said Castor, there being not much more to say. But then he cheered up, because as they approached the counter, he saw that the meal was one of his favorites, a curry with plenty of meat and plenty of their own good rice.

Maria only picked at the food. Cattor braced himself for jokes from the other people at their table about Maria's lack of appetite, because the gossip had got around, but they were few. The hall was buzzing with excited talk about the other topic; the unscheduled pregnancy of one villager could not compete in interest with the discovery of the dead man's head. A dozen times Castor had to retell the story of finding it, for the people at the table, for table hoppers, for those next to him as he lined up for the curry, for the fruit, to refill his cup from the tea urns. News and rumors flew about the room—it was hard to tell which was which. The Renmin Police were scouring the neighborhood for the murderer. The People's Police had caught the murderer in the Biloxi airport. The Renmin Police suspected the murderer was one of the villagers— no, they suspected no one. The head had fallen from the sky as the result of a stratosphere jet explosion. But all the rumors were only rumors. At least the news-video panel at the back of the room had nothing informative to say about them. There was a shot of the paddy, and even one quick glimpse of Castor looking sullen as he pointed to the spot where he had stepped on the head, but the whole item came and went in twenty seconds. The only other thing of interest was a reminder that High Noon was going to be shown that evening. "Want to watch it?" Maria asked.

"I saw it when I was ten years old."

"No, no, this is a new production. They say it's really good."

So Castor said yes, and then he was reminded he was on cleanup duty that night, supervising the schoolchildren as they moved the chairs and tables and wiped up the dinner mess. He had counted on a little private time with Maria to make up for the day's aggravations, but he never got out of the dining hall. Which was also the senate hall for village meetings and the community theater and gymnasium and, once a month, dance floor. It was big enough for all, twenty meters across under a shallow dome of black plastic. Even before Castor had made the last teenager push a broom one more time over a sloppy corner of the floor, the villagers were coming back for the evening's entertainment.

The village had its own video dish, of course. From the geosynchronous satellite hanging over the trackless jungles of Bolivia twenty channels of television rained down on the Bama Autonomous Republic. Six of them were in English. As a formality the old director dragged herself to the front of the room for a vote, but there was no question about it; the villagers wanted to be entertained. Actually, the show sounded good to Castor, too, but he had an idea on how to make it better. When Maria came back to the hall, he was waiting for her. "Here or there?" he whispered, nuzzling the back of her neck. Since they had been together only six months and were still so actively in love, they usually took their entertainment as they did their meals, in the privacy of their apartment.

Their flat screen was tiny compared to the huge holo in the common hall; they offset that debit against the great gain of being able to watch in each other's arms—or to stop watching for other entertainment when they chose. But Maria pushed him away—gently, to be sure. "Here," she said firmly. "Let's not make it worse." And for the same reason, insisted on sitting apart from him when the show began.

Castor was neither a mean-hearted young man nor a stupid one, but he was a young one. He had not yet discovered that the world had its own interests and spent little time looking after his—not the whole world, not the village that was most of the world to him, not even his wife. So his mood was sulky. But it improved, as he got caught up in the grand old story of the Renmin marshal of a century earlier, fresh from Home, threatened by a gang of anti-Party elements. The marshal, whose part was sung by the famous Feng Wonfred, was all alone against six armed enemies, but aided by the schoolteacher and other cadres, he struggled against the anti-Party rightists and forced them to criticize themselves. It was a marvelous production, beautifully sung, stirring and tender in turns; the sets beautifully showed the America of the late twentieth century with its endless empty stretches of burned-out land and the few brave pioneers trying to make it liveable. Castor lost himself in the story.

At the end of the opera, the anti-Party gang handed over their weapons and boarded the bus that would take them to Pennsylvania for reeducation, while the Renmin marshal and the schoolteacher led the cadres in a victorious procession across the sagebrush landscape, banners flying. The audience applauded in delight, Castor included. As the images faded from the holo area and the hall lights went up he looked for Maria to share his pleasure, but she had gone. '

Castor found his wife in the screen room, rapt before one of the consoles. She was listening to the audio portion through earplugs and did not hear him enter; when she caught sight of him, she clicked the screen off. By the time he could see it, the screen was only winking in orange letters Waiting... Waiting... Waiting... in both Chinese and English.

There were twenty screens in the room, each with its own seat. Castor knew every one of them. This was where he had got most of his education after schooling stopped for him because his university application was turned down. His teacher had fought for him—and failed. Had coached him in the high tongue until he was almost accent-free—to no purpose. Had begged him to continue on his own with the teaching machines, because his mind was too good to waste on plowing rice paddies. And indeed he had done so, every chance he got, doggedly pursuing one course after another out of the limitless catalogue, until Maria had made him aware there were other things to do with his spare time than study.

She was still watching him politely, waiting for the interruption to be explained. He said awkwardly, "You're not finished yet, then?"

"Not really."

He nodded, looking around at the empty machines. "Well," he said, surrendering to the impulse, "listen, take your time. I'd like to, ah, check out a few things, too." And it was true. He had always liked that, every time he got a chance at the screens. He liked it now. So much so that as he punched in his codes and instructions, his wife's peculiar behavior slipped out of his mind.

What Castor had mostly studied was space. Everything about space, theory and practice. It was his dream. Because it was only a dream, it was also his curse. He had discovered bitterly early that only an ethnic Han Chinese had any real prospect of receiving space-going training. For that matter, there was hardly any space program to be trained for. The Chinese had a few Comsats, of course, and some meteorological and resource-spotting satellites. That was all—even for China. For America, of course, there was nothing at all.

No human being had gone into space, from any country, for nearly one hundred years. Oh, there were human beings up there even now, to be sure. Dead ones. Astronauts and cosmonauts caught in orbit by the outbreak of the war, unable ever to get back. In the data stores of the screens, there were fifty or sixty "identity uncertains" stored—some of them actual sightings, some only recorded trajectories.

What fascinated Castor was that there was a new one in the stores. "Identity uncertain" barely described this one. It was on the far side of the Sun, well over an A.U. away, far too small for any detail to be seen. So it could be anything, and Castor's imagination was unchecked. Spacelab gone adrift? One of those old Russian Soyuz things? A lost shuttle, an Ariane—anything!

He gazed longingly at the smudged dot that was all telescopy had been able to retrieve of the object. It was there all right, though what "it" was he could not say. Still, the orbital elements were clear enough. In a few months it would be close to Earth—then there would be plenty to see! Of course, it almost certainly was one of the sixty other "identity uncertains" perturbed, perhaps, by passing too close to the Sun...

But what if it were not?

Castor was smiling as he pulled the earphones off and turned to his wife. Surprisingly, she did not seem quite finished with what she was doing—whatever she was doing. She glanced up at him politely, still awaiting the explanatory key, her great blue eyes cool and hooded. He hesitated, trying to think of a conversational gambit that would turn this polite and distant woman back into his wife. He pulled out a packet of honey-dried fruit sticks and offered her one. She shook her head. He said, "But you didn't eat much dinner, either."

"I wasn't hungry," she explained.

Castor nodded as though that clarified the subject completely, chewing the edible paper off his own stick. He bit into the rich, delicious pear flavor. There was no use asking Maria any question she didn't want to answer, and no use asking questions at all when she'd been given every chance to volunteer. Still, he was curious. "What were you looking up?" he asked with a generous, wise, I-know-you've-got-some-little-secret grin.

"Oh, just some things," she said vaguely, and that settled that.

Castor shrugged. "I'm about ready to go to bed," he said, all subtlety put aside.

The blue eyes gazed at him coolly, then turned to the machine. She paused, then made a decision. Briskly she clicked the screen off and clicked off the cool, distant Maria at the same time. "So am I," she said, standing up and untangling the earplugs. When she put out her hand to his arm her touch was warm and intimate, and so was her voice. "Real ready," she added. "After all, what harm can it do now?"

II

If anyone had asked Castor if he loved his wife his answer would have been instant and loud. Of course he did! Even when she was withdrawn. Even when she insisted on taking chances with getting pregnant. He certainly did not blame her, he would have said at that point in any conversation (or perhaps was rehearsing in advance of the conversations that he knew were bound to come), for the problem they now confronted. She was very dear to him—

But strange, all the same, for after a night just like old times, in the morning she was cool and withdrawn again. She slipped away to catch her bus for Biloxi before breakfast was over. She didn't have to. She needn't have left till almost noon. She certainly needn't have left it to him to explain to the exercise leaders why she had skipped the group aerobic dance and tai chi. So Castor's day began sulkily again, and when Fat Rhoda called on all of Production Team Three to put in a voluntary day's work, in spite of the fact that this was officially a rest day for them, to make up for the time lost yesterday, Castor set his chin and refused. And, as he didn't want to hang idly around the village after that, he took out an electrobike and went to the beach. He stripped quickly on the sand, sniffed for methane—but the air was clean today—and slipped on backpack and face mask as he was already wading into the salt, warm waves.

As soon as he was underwater, safe in the amniotic sea, Castor felt soothed, alive, almost joyous again. It had been much too long since he had swum there last!

It had been since his marriage, in fact, for Maria was terrified of sharks. Castor decided he would have to teach her better or even go without her, because this pleasure was too great to give up. Ever since he was ten, barely old enough to be allowed to swim by himself, he had biked or trudged the long, quiet roads to the coast, between the cane fields or the marshes, skirting the edge of the giant radio-telescope installation, heading for the sea. And it never changed.

He had an hour's air in each tank, and so he let himself follow the gentle fall of the sea bottom, out half a kilometer and more. He knew where to find the trail buoys, but allowed himself to be diverted from the straight swim to poke into interesting-looking hummocks or bits of debris, chasing the fish—and sometimes being chased by them, too, because although he had no fear of the occasional stupid shark, he went away from its annoying presence. It was always cool under the water and so much cleaner than the land; the currents that fed the Gulf brought no muck, no industrial wastes, no city sewage—no reminders of the terrible wiped-out world of a century ago. Or not very many, anyway. There was always the death-glass. It was far out, but the closer patches of it not yet very deep; sometimes on a dark night you could see the pale blue fire in the water, even from the beach. The children were warned against them. Of course, that kept no child away.

It didn't keep grown-up Castor away, either, because he was convinced from his courses that the most dangerous radiation had had plenty of time to fade away. Besides, the deathglass was beautiful. Castor swam down through the fish and the kelps, circling and admiring the blobby glass objects that shimmered like jellies in the underwater light. There were tall, angled ones like prisms, bent-over ones that seemed to have been partly melted in the middle, and many, many that had softened themselves down into random roundnesses before they had hardened again. Castor knew that, really, they were garbage. They were vitrified radioactive wastes, hurriedly barged out to a disposal area in the middle of the Gulf in those frantic days of the war when everything went crazy at once. You could not blame the bargemen for strewing them over a hundred square kilometers in their haste. But he could not think of them as garbage, because they were too beautiful. He followed their trail to the sixty-meter depth and then, reluctantly, turned around and swam steadily back to the beach, still underwater. One tank was gone already; it was time to come out. He paid little attention to the fish or the sea on the homeward trip. He was thinking about the deathglass and how it had come to be there. He wondered what the world had been like, in those days just before the old United States and the old Soviet Union had thought about the unthinkable and reached the wrong conclusions. Suppose they hadn't? Suppose they had sometime said to each other, "Look here, there's no sense in stinging each other to death like scorpions in a bottle, let's toss these things away and think of something else to do with our hostilities." What would the world be like if the war had not happened and if the Han Chinese had not come? Would he have been allowed, then, to go to the university? To take some other job than working on the rice plantation? Would he have been spared such annoyances as that infuriatingly superior Renmin Police inspector, with her sarcasm and her authority?

He was still asking himself these questions when he emerged from the water and saw the inspector standing on the beach waiting for him.

The woman was standing with her back to him, smoking a little lacquered pipe and frowning at the distant lip of the radio-telescope. Castor was wearing no more than the face mask and the tanks—what was the use of swimming trunks when no one was there to see? He paused, uselessly knee-deep in the gentle waves, wondering whether to be embarrassed.

The policewoman had no such problem. When she turned, the frown gave way to a pleased grin. "Well, Pettyman Castor! You're looking very well today!"

He stood belligerently straight. "It's nice to see you again, Inspector Tsoong Delilah."

She laughed. "How did you know my name? No, never mind—the same way I knew yours, I suppose—by asking." She was walking toward the water and stopped with her glassy-bright boots in the wavelets, not a meter away. She bent to feel the temperature of the sea and rose slowly, her eyes studying every part of him on the way. "I almost think I ought to get out of my clothes and join you for a swim," she observed thoughtfully.

He pointed out, "I only have one set of gear."

She studied his expression, and this time her laugh was slightly soured. "Well, Scholar, you can get dressed then," she said, turning her back and marching to the bluff. She sat down, silhouetted against the huge arc of the telescope, refilling her pipe as she watched him pull up his shorts. "Have you ever been over there?" she asked suddenly, pointing at the radio-telescope. He shook his head. "Not even to visit?"

"No. They're almost all Han Chinese, and they come and go in their own aircraft. We never see them at the village, although—"

She filled in for him. "Although you would like to be assigned to work there, I understand?"

He was angry, but said nothing—if she had taken the trouble to study his records, of course she would know that.

She persisted. "But how can you hope to work in such a place without a degree?"

"It isn't my fault I don't have a degree! I was rejected. They said I was more useful growing rice."

"Quite right! Food is the foundation of socialism," she quoted approvingly. He didn't answer, not even a shrug, just stood swinging his scuba gear by the straps as he waited for her to get to whatever point had brought her here. She nodded as though satisfied, puffing on her pipe. The smoke was like heavy perfume. "We found your missing body, Scholar Pettyman Castor," she said suddenly. "At least, we found the bones. They were crushed along with hog bones at the slaughterhouse in the cattle collective, but not so crushed they couldn't be identified." She watched his face with sardonic amusement as she added, "We could not find any flesh, however. Apparently each part had been put through the mechanical deboner and all the meat taken off... tell me, did you enjoy your dinner last night?"

This time Tsoong Delilah's laugh was full-throated as Castor dropped his face mask in the sand and his mouth spasmed. "No, no, don't puke!" she chuckled. "I was only joking. This meat was fed to pigs, not people, we are quite sure."

"Thank you for telling me that," Castor said angrily, resolving not to eat pork for some time.

"Oh, you are quite welcome." She glanced again at the radio-telescope, then became businesslike. "I have enjoyed this conversation with you, Scholar, but my duties require attention elsewhere. This is for you."

"This" was a summons, red-sealed and Renmin-coded with magnetic inks. Castor took it dumbly in his hand. "It means you must come to testify at the inquest on this unfortunate person, young Pettyman Castor, since you made the mistake of finding the only part of the cadaver we can identify. You will be notified as to the time; meanwhile, you must not leave your village."

"Where would I go?" Castor growled.

She took no offense at either words or tone, but said cheerfully, "When you get to New Orleans you will report direct to me. Who knows? Perhaps I will then get diving gear for two and we can enjoy a nice, private swim."

Biking back, Castor went slowly to let the dust of the policewoman's car settle. But as he drove along the chain link fence that enclosed the area of the radio-telescope, two guards appeared and shouted at him for dawdling, so he speeded up again. That was curious; no one had ever been visible there before. When he had gone there himself to ask humbly if there was any chance of being taken on in some capacity, sweeper, student, anything at all, it had taken twenty minutes before anyone responded to the gate bell. And then he had only told Castor to go away and, all right, if he chose, submit a written application through channels. Out of sight he could hear the buzzing of several helicopters in the private landing field; if important officials were visiting, that might explain it, but what would explain what important officials were doing bothering with this out-of-the-way place?

By the time he was back in the village square his mind was full, mostly, of wanting to tell Maria about his curious conversation with the Renmin policewoman—to be sure, in a somewhat censored version. She would be interested, he was sure...

He was wrong. She was not interested at all. What she herself had to tell was far more important in her mind. When he found her in their apartment her expression told him what the words only confirmed: "Yes, Castor, it's definite. The ovum is lodged and dividing; I'm pregnant."

"Oh—" he began, but "hell" was the next word, and he changed it. "Oh, that's it, then." He took her hand tenderly, ready to be her sword and shield in this catastrophe; but the look on her face was confusing. Her eyes were not cool, not loving, either; they were serene. Then he thought. "Oh! Tonight's meeting! It's going to be pretty awful, unless—Well, maybe they won't have your records yet—"

"Don't be so silly," she flared, "of course they'll have the records. The diagnosis was ready this morning."

"I see." He thought that over until, looking around the room, he realized why he didn't see. "But it looks as though you just came in."

"I did. I was in the screen room," she said. "And other places. Come on, it's time for dinner."

The dinner might have been an ordeal, but there was a distraction. The director tottered up to the front of the room to announce that, obedient to a Renmin "request"— that was the word she used, "request," though there was no history anywhere of the village ever refusing one—all electrical machinery would be off for seventy-five minutes, reason not given. So the last half hour of the dinner was eaten by candlelight, and by candlelight the cleanup crews whisked away the scraps and lugged the tables and chairs to make the hall ready for the evening meeting. With the light poor there was plenty of opportunity for the idle and heedless to chatter, wasting time, so the work went slowly. The chatter was about the murder, about the thrilling discovery of most of the body in another commune (removing the worry, leaving the excitement of the crime), most of all about the terrible annoyance of having the power off. It was a rare event, and there were many guesses about the reason for the order; but as no one, really, had any facts to go on, they were quite wild.

What there was no gossip about at all was the impending problem of Castor and Maria, and that, thought Castor gloomily after the lights were on again and the meeting had come to order, was a very bad sign. They were saving themselves for the meeting.

For movies, the little stage at the end of the room held the holo projectors and mirrors. For meals, the projectors sank into their safe, covered wells, and buffet tables were lined up to serve the diners. For criticism the platform held a single chair, with all the others arranged in arcs before it and below.

Castor looked at the hot seat as a condemned felon might view the electric chair of old. To sit there was not an honor. To sit there was to be hopelessly and painfully alone. The man or woman sweating in the hot seat matched three hundred pairs of accusing eyes with his own abashed ones, heard three hundred condemning voices with his solitary pair of shamed ears, spoke in self-criticism or (foolishly, vainly) in defense in his own single, stammering voice—and then heard it roar back at him over the heads of the three hundred from the row of speaker-buttons along the walls. It was not a prominence anyone sought.

Since there was no point in trying to avert the storm anymore, Castor led his wife to the very first row and sat proudly, holding her hand. She did not resist. She was relaxed and calm, and for all one could tell from her face she might have thought this evening would pass without ever hearing her own name.

Indeed, at first she did not, for the first person in the hot seat at criticism meetings was almost always a team head. Production was what the village was all about, after all. Tonight it was Fat Rhoda, summoned by name by the wrathful voice of the assistant director from his desk at the side of the room. "You, Pettyman Rhoda!" he thundered. "You are two hectares behind plan. How is this possible, in view of the fact that food is the foundation of socialism?"

But he had no scared novice victim in Fat Rhoda. Wise in the skills of the hot seat, she hurried forward to the seat, beginning to criticize herself on the way. "I have been too lenient with the team," she confessed. "I have failed to give proper leadership in volunteer work to achieve the plan. I have allowed Pettyman Castor to withdraw from today's extra-duty work without clarifying for him the importance of political understanding—" She didn't stop there, but she might as well have as far as Castor was concerned. He was furious. Just like her, to start blaming him when she knew, must know, what was coming next!

So did everyone else, and the criticism of Rhoda was no more than perfunctory. When she had finished abasing herself she was let go with no more than a promise to work and study diligently.

Then the assistant director waved a hand, and a second chair was brought to the stage, and it began.

Ten minutes was the usual length of time in the hot seat. The vilest of criminals sometimes were there an hour—the hard cases whose deeds could be expiated only by expulsion from the village. Or worse. Yet an hour later Castor and Maria were still there and the crowd just seemingly getting warmed up. Every last member seemed to want to be heard—not just about the pregnancy, but about every misdeed anyone could remember—

"Why did you study Chinese and astrophysics instead of something useful to the village, like soil chemistry or accounting?"

"You showed vanity, Castor, and pride! You should learn your place!"

"You spoke impudently to a high state official, Castor. Why are you so arrogant?"

"Did you not think, Castor, of what may happen to the village if we exceed birth limits? Do you want us sprayed like the Africans?"

"If you were loyal to the village, why did you ask for a transfer?"

"Vanity, Castor! Pride, arrogance, vanity! You should be more humble."

—and always it was Castor this and Castor that, but what about Maria, who had got them into this trouble in the first place? Oh, not without complicity, Castor admitted to himself, his jaw grim and eyes fierce as he stared back at the accusing villagers. But it was Maria who had decided that if a child was to happen then it should happen, and he had merely agreed—who could blame him for that, six months married and still hungry every night? Should he answer back? Denounce her? Criticize them both and get off as Fat Rhoda had done? But he couldn't do that; pride—yes, he had pride; maybe arrogance, too, but whatever the reason he sat mute and glowering and let them say what they liked. He wished the two chairs were closer. He would have liked to reach out and hold Maria's hand to comfort her—or to comfort himself, more likely. But actually she seemed to have no need of comforting. She was sitting quietly with her hands folded calmly in her lap and that serene and untroubled gaze in her eyes.

At last the assistant director clapped his hands for the microphone, and as the automatic sound-seekers turned toward him he said, "Speak, Castor! Answer the people's just anger!"

Castor ground his teeth. Angrily he said, "I was wrong. I did not fulfill my obligations to the people."

"And?" demanded the assistant director. Castor did not speak; he could not make himself. "And what else?" the man went on remorselessly. "What of this pregnancy you have caused? What steps are you willing to take?"

Castor, raging, opened his mouth to answer, he had no idea what. But it never came out. Maria clapped for the mikes and said clearly, "Castor has nothing to say about it."

The assistant director's mouth opened. It hung that way until he recovered enough to croak, "What? What did you say?"

"I said it is not Castor's decision. I am divorcing him. I have applied for divorce through the screens, and it will be granted in twenty-four hours unless he protests."

"But I protest!" Castor croaked, managing at last to speak.

"No," she said, turning toward him calmly, "you will not, because I will not abort my child. I have done one other thing. I have volunteered for service in a prairie grain commune, where there are no birth limits, and I have been accepted."

She smiled at Castor and then at the villagers in the suddenly soundless hall. "So you see," she finished, "there is nothing more to say on this subject." And indeed there was not.

There was not, at least, until the next morning, when Castor finished the sleepless night's packing and weeping and arguing and pleading and put his wife on the bus for, ultimately, Saskatchewan. Maria had been sleepless, too, and Maria had done her own share of weeping at the last, but by the time the bus rumbled up she was smiling. "I am still very fond of you, Castor," she announced, "and I will send you pictures of our child."

"Oh, Maria!" he groaned. Then, suddenly despairing, "Wait, don't go today, wait until tomorrow. I'll go with you!"

She shook her head. "You can't," she pointed out. "You aren't allowed to leave the village while you're needed to testify." And then, standing on the step of the bus, bending down to kiss him good-bye, "You don't really want to, anyway, do you?"

III

It was six days before the court summons came. In that time Castor had made his mind up about Maria a hundred times—a hundred different ways. The result was he did nothing. He had lost Maria. He was terribly, terribly hurt, a broken man. But on the other hand, he thought, if she could leave him so easily over so small a thing as an unborn child, why, then, why not?

He was not much use to the village in those six days. The assistant director did not fail to tell him so—then, adding in more human tones, "Be careful of your money, Cousin Castor, don't stay too long, and oh yes, please, if you have a chance, do pick up for me some of those chocolate mints—what's the matter?"

"These," grumbled Castor, waving his tickets. Han Chinese, high officials, and persons on government business were authorized air transport, as everyone knew, but the assistant director only laughed at Castor's pretensions.

"Government business! You are a witness, not a high cadre! You'll go to New Orleans, you'll tell what you saw, you'll come home—with the mints, please. No. Your government business is here, Cousin Castor, and how am I to make up the work you will miss? You'll take the bus." So Castor's long trip, the first time in all his life he had been outside the Bama Autonomous Republic, crawled along the coastal roads, across rice paddies and mud flats and stock-grazing land, up the delta to the big city. For the first five hours of the trip, Castor saw nothing he had not seen before, or something just like. That was bad. That gave him time to think. The same subjects kept coming up in his mind. They were subjects he was tired of and had no joy in pursuing. Castor knew very well why volunteers for Saskatchewan did not have to worry about the birthrate. It was because of the death rate—from the terrible winters, from the scant harvests, from the lingering pockets of radiation—from being there, on the frontier of a continent that had almost annihilated itself and still had not completely healed. He should have kept her from going. He could not do that, but should have gone with her. He couldn't do that, either, not until the inquest was over, but certainly he could go after her, next week, or next month... And that was where the thinking reached dead end. That he could do.

But she had been right in what she said to him as she left: He didn't really want to, after all.

Then the bus entered the outskirts of New Orleans. Maria disappeared from his mind.

They were still in the newer eastern fringes of the old city, but it was wonderland. Electric trolleybuses whizzed along the streets, people in bright clothes meandered from shop to shop, gazing at the displays in the windows and pausing to buy stick ices, cones of sherbet and cream, paper cups of drinks. The buildings towered over the sidewalks, three stories high, five, sometimes ten or more— later, as they approached the muddy trickle that was still called the Mississippi River, incredible skyscrapers of forty stories and more. Castor's mouth hung open. He was an abandoned husband, very nearly a father, a full-fledged working member of his commune, with grave matters on his mind. But he was also twenty-two years old. He dissolved in wonder and joy as he beheld the marvels all around. It wasn't until they had crossed the river and entered a huge, noisy terminal that he began to worry. He shouldered his backpack, checked his money to see it was still safe, exited through great, treacherous revolving doors that nipped at his heels for being slow, and stood on the curb, wondering what to do next. His orders were to report to the Criminal Courts Building; very well. Of course. But how, exactly, did one do that?

A green-shouldered traffic policeman defended an island in the middle of the road. Ask him? Again—of course, but how? To gawk at the traffic from the safe shelter of the bus was one thing. To be so dangerously in the middle of it was quite another. The number of vehicles was frightening—trucks, trolleybuses, private cars, vans, taxis darting in and out—surely every human being in North America was in New Orleans that day, and every one driving madly past the bus terminal. He watched from the curb for a long time, trying to solve the riddle of the traffic lights. Then, at a break, he dodged bravely in front of a slow-moving farm truck to the island. The policeman gazed at him sternly. "The Criminal Courts Building," Castor gasped, "where is it?"

He got the information, along with the news that he had foolishly gone more than two kilometers past his destination and a free lecture on the obligations good citizenship imposed on those who would cross a busy street. He was glad to get away from there. But, once he gained skill enough to be relieved of the fear of imminent death by being run over, his spirits rose again.

It turned out to be a very long walk. Castor did not mind, for there was so much to see! Even better than from the bus window, for you could smell and feel and jostle as well; Biloxi was nothing like this! There were excursion buses full of Home-Han tourists—it was not only the farm communes they found quaint enough to photograph. There were sidewalk vendors with tomatoes and grapes and pale, long lettuce stalks from their private plots, in town for the day to sell their produce and see the sights. Artisans lined up or filled the alcoves with the tools of their trade, to repair a shoe or cut a head of hair. Nearly all the sidewalk merchants were Yankees. Nearly all the strolling pedestrians were Han Chinese, but no one seemed to notice Castor among them.

He discovered he was hungry and paused to study the mob in front of a frozen-sherbet stand. When he had absorbed the technique of sliding to the counter, he unbuttoned his money pocket and slipped a note off his small wad of bills. The vendor regarded the red-rimmed Bama money suspiciously when Castor at last got his attention, but shrugged and accepted it—without, however, returning any change. As Castor turned away, irritable because he had been cheated and hadn't protested, a grinning Han Chinese youth slapped him on the shoulder. In nearly incomprehensible English he demanded jovially, "You just up from downcountry, brother? Never fear! Catch on quick-quick, you see!"

Castor winced at the English but was grateful for the good will. He asked in the high tongue, "Am I going the right way for the Criminal Courts Building?" Yes, he was; but it took minutes for the new friend to decide that that was so and then to explain to Castor which turnings he must make and how he must cross on the pedestrian bridges at certain intersections—all of it accompanied by many pats on the shoulder and slaps on the back and friendly nudges. Castor was surprised that a Han Chinese, of a people who traditionally avoided touching another person as much as possible, should show so much physical intimacy, but he remained grateful. For nearly an hour.

Then Castor took thought. Not the least of the attractions of New Orleans were the shops, the department stores, the clothing establishments, the hardware emporia; it was not only the assistant director who yearned for the goodies of the big city, and Castor made up his mind to carry back as many luxury items as he could afford. When he thought to count his money to see just what he could manage to buy, he discovered he had none. The pocket was unbuttoned and empty.

Castor stopped feeling grateful to the jolly young Han.

When he got to the Criminal Courts Building they told him that he had been given peremptory orders to check in with Inspector Tsoong Delilah; when he had finished hoofing the extra kilometer to the police headquarters, she wasn't there; when at last her secretary reached her for instructions the word was for Castor to report to a transient hotel and show up in court in the morning—a kilometer and a half, that time, and the sun already down. The desk clerk told him the good news and the bad news when he checked in. The bad news was that the hour for serving dinner was over. The good news was that that didn't matter, because there were plenty of fast-food restaurants within a block's walk...

But, of course, only if you had the money.

Pettyman Castor's testimony amounted only to answering three questions, with none of the answers above one word, but it took some time to do it in spite of the fact that he was the first witness called. First there was a lot of whispered wrangling among the five judges and various functionaries, while Castor and everyone else sat restless (and, in Castor's case, gnawed by hunger) and waited for the show to get on the road.

Hunger was less important, though, than excitement. Castor used the time profitably to rubberneck. The courtroom was divided into three concentric quarter-circle shells like the floor plan of a concert hall. At the front, which was the "stage," were the benches for the judges, the people's law advisors, and the clerks. One remove away, the seats for the witnesses and specialists, where Castor sat—and where, ahead of him in the front row, he spotted the black-bobbed hair of Renmin Police Inspector Tsoong Delilah. Behind Castor was a transparent screen, to cut off the spectators' gallery and their noise from the court itself. There were seats for several hundred gawkers, but only sparsely occupied—mostly by the idle and the curious, he supposed. There did seem to be a number of Yankees watching the proceedings, and one or two of them looked vaguely familiar to Castor. Were they members of the cattle collective? That made sense, for certainly that village had an interest in the matter—but so did Castor's own, and none of his people had come to watch his performance. Some of the other spectators were more interesting, though. There was a busload of the omnipresent tourists from the Mainland and even a smaller party of Indians, saris and turbans and cameras. Some of the spectators seemed quite queer. There was a man with a very large head—or a very large hat, almost like a football helmet five sizes too big for his skull; Castor could not decide which. He was Han Chinese, but his face seemed to change at every look, and his behavior was odder than his face. He could not seem to make up his mind what he wanted to do. Stand up, start to leave— then clamber back along the seats to his place; stand up again for an instant; sit down with a crash of folding seat.

Castor was surprised the attendants didn't throw him out, but evidently the attendants considered him privileged.

Then, when the judges finally came out of their huddle and the proceedings began, there was a second delay.

The stern-faced clerk who approached Castor, squirming before all those eyes on the witness stand, addressed him in the high tongue: "Do you understand the penalties for perjury, and will you undertake to speak only truth and all truth here?" And when he started to answer, she looked shocked, made him wait while another clerk translated the question into English before she would let him reply. Castor resentfully understood that he was not considered capable of comprehending the high tongue. He allowed the charade to proceed, but it rankled. He glared back at the staring eyes, not least the queer old big-headed man in the visitors' gallery and most of all Inspector Tsoong herself. The sardonic half smile played about her lips as she studied him. At last came the three questions:

"Are you Pettyman Castor, citizen of the Bama Autonomous Republic, member of Production Team Three of the Heavenly Grain Village Collective?"

Pause for translation, then Castor was allowed to answer: "Yes."

"Hsieh-hsieh," reported the translator, and the attorney asked the next question.

"Did you one week ago, while engaged in your duties in the transplanting of rice seedlings, discover a human head?"

"Yes."

"Hsieh-hsieh."

And then the final question:

"Is this the head?"

And that question would have needed no translation for even the most exclusively Anglophone witness, because the woman thrust before him a picframe, life-size, of the head itself in all its ruin. The tilapia had eaten the soft parts out. The face was awful. Worse than the sight was the knowledge that he had touched that terrible thing. "Y—yes," he croaked, trying not to retch, and was dismissed.

The image of that once-human horror followed him back to his seat, and it was some minutes before he was able to take interest in the proceedings again.

But, really, it was interesting. It was almost like a detective opera. Methodically the state paraded its evidence, and how this piece fit in with that was an absorbing puzzle to work at. The second witness was a young boy from the River of Pearl Cattle Collective, where the corpse's bones had been ground to powder. The youth was frightened but enjoying his prominence as he said that yes, he and some other boys had sneaked away from tai chi to play baseball and yes, they had found part of a human arm. As the cattle-herding dogs had found it before they did, it was well chewed. Castor was glad he didn't have to look at that pic close up, but it didn't seem to bother the boy.

Then there was an elderly man, also from the cattle collective. He was obviously even more scared than the boy. He took it out in belligerence, delivering his answers as though spitting them in the face of the translator. Yes, he was in charge of the packinghouse. Yes, he was responsible for the use of it. Yes, he always kept it locked when not in use—children might hurt themselves there. No, he had no idea how anyone could have gained admittance to it to debone the parts of the corpse and grind its skeleton for spreading on the fields. When he was excused he tottered off to the end of the back row and sat with his head down, paying no attention to the next witness. That was a forensic surgeon, reporting that the fragments found in the bonemeal were human. Then it was Tsoong Delilah, who came back to sit down next to Castor when she had finished testifying how she had supervised the team that had interrogated the witnesses from the B.A.R. and located the various fragments of the deceased. "Scholar," she whispered in his ear, "you spoke very well." But as Castor could not tell how much of what she said was mockery he didn't reply.

To his surprise, there was only one more witness that morning—another police official, to add a few details to Tsoong's evidence—and then the judges conferred and announced that there would be a two-hour recess for lunch. After only an hour and a half or less! Oh, yes, these Han Chinese did themselves well. Fat Rhoda would have allowed no such slackness on her production team. As Tsoong Delilah started to get up she saw Castor still rooted to his seat and paused, "What's the matter, Scholar? Aren't you hungry?" she asked.

"I am nearly starved," Castor said bitterly, explaining how his pocket had been picked and how he had been wakened too late for breakfast in the transient hotel.

"What a fool you are!" the policewoman scolded. "Don't you know that witnesses are entitled to payment and reimbursement for expenses? Go downstairs to the accounts room. Simply identify yourself and draw your pay—or, no, better, come with me. We'll eat across the street, where the food is good, and I will find out just how naive you are, Scholar!"

An incident occurred before they reached the crowded street and the dazzling sun. As they left the courtroom, just at the crystal barrier, they saw a commotion in the spectators' gallery. The queer old man who didn't seem to know what he wanted to do had found a new way of making a disturbance. He was sprawled across two seats, while white-jacketed Health Service emergency corpsmen were administering oxygen to him. He waved his arms and tried to talk, his eyes glowering at Castor through the glass, but the oxygen mask made him mute. Castor laughed out loud. "What a nut," he remarked, and the policewoman frowned.

"You are speaking of Fung Bohsien," she reproved him, "a famous scientist and high party member! You must show more respect." Then, relenting, "But it's true, Manyface should stay in his laboratories. Every time he leaves there is trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" Castor began to ask, interestedly, but they were out of the building by then and had the street to cross. If anything it was worse than any before in his experience, because it was the height of the working day and all the vehicles were desperate to get where they were going before any other. What Castor wanted to do was hold the inspector's hand as they crossed. Pride did not allow that—even if she would have—and his heart was pounding by the time they reached the opposite curb.

The restaurant, however, soothed all hurts. The smells were marvelous! They found two seats at a great round table in a corner of the room, overlooking the busy street. All the other seats were occupied, but each party confined its attention to itself as waiters and waitresses brought steaming tureens and plates of sizzling-hot fried fish and crisp green vegetables and tall half-liter bottles of beer and orange soda. Tsoong Delilah, seeing that Castor was indeed starving, allowed him to feed his young metabolism without talking while she picked at her food. Finally, after his second helping of crisp chicken wings and third bowl of rice, he asked, "Who is this 'Manyface'?"

"You are not to call him that," she commanded. "To you he is Professor Fung Bohsien, as well as a number of other names—etcetera, as you would say in English."

'"Et cetera' isn't English," he pointed out, with his mouth full.

"Oh, what a scholar it is! In any case, Manyface is no concern of yours." Castor shrugged, eyeing the platters of fresh fruit that the waiters were just depositing on the revolving lazy Susan in the center of the table. To make conversation while he was helping himself to the dessert, he asked, "How did you know to go to the cattle collective?"

"Simply good police work," said Tsoong Delilah sternly, "and you must not discuss the case until the inquest is complete." Then she thought for a moment and added, "However, perhaps you can be of some help."

"It is a citizen's duty to assist the police in their work, Inspector," he said formally.

"Oh, Scholar! How sarcastic you are! Have you been treated so badly, then?"

"I was not admitted to the university," he said, as though that answered everything.

"Yes, I am aware of that. But I am aware, too, that you did in fact then proceed to educate yourself through the teaching machines, and in such curious subjects! Astronomy. Mathematics. History—and, of course, your admirable command of the high tongue; is being an autodidact so much worse than a college degree?"

He shrugged, impressed not only by her use of words like "autodidact"—he had never heard it spoken in a conversation before, though perhaps that was not surprising on a rice farm—but by her detailed knowledge of his studies. "I suppose," he conceded, "that I lost very little, really."

"And have you been mistreated here? Made to sleep with pigs?"

There was enough country bumpkin left in Castor to make his eyes sparkle. "I guess not," he admitted and, with a rush, "Actually, the hotel is grand! If only they'd fed me—But I have in my room my own toilet and shower! And a screen that gets fifty-one channels, including the Indian programs!"

"Han is not good enough for you?" she joked. Then, coming to the point, "So it is fair for me to ask you for your special knowledge, then. Tell me, have you had much contact with the cattle collective?"

"Not really. Oh, we see them, now and then. At dances and rallies, mostly, and my cousin Patrick's son married a girl from there—but I don't really know her, because they volunteered for reassignment in Texas. She didn't like our village, I guess."

"Tell me what you do know, at least," Tsoong Delilah commanded, and obediently Castor searched his memory while they dawdled over their tea. The River of Pearl Cattle Collective got its name from its origins. The first group of settlers had once been tourists, caught browsing the shops of Hong Kong when the war broke out. When it was over they had a real problem. They couldn't stay in China, because there was no way for China to feed even its own people, much less bourgeois jet-setters who had no real right to be there in the first place. The tourists couldn't go home, because most of them didn't have any homes left to go to. For three or four months they were tossed around from camp to camp, always hungry, as psychically shaken by the war as any and even more despairing than most. When at last they were offered transportation back to America on condition that they start a livestock farm in the least ruined parts of what had once been Alabama, they jumped at the chance. Not with pleasure; simply because all the alternatives were worse. As, mostly, retired English teachers and vacationing mutual-fund salesmen, they were not very good at slopping hogs and birthing calves. It didn't matter. Most of them did not survive the cruelly hard conditions very long, anyway. It was the handful of younger American tourists who had survived to build the collective, supplemented as the years went by with drafts of undesirables from the cities. Many of the new recruits were Overseas Chinese— third- and fourth-generation Chinese-Americans, who found the Han colonists who arrived to repopulate the devastated continent even harder to take than did their Anglo compatriots. So River of Pearl had more than its share of malcontents. Their neighbors had built up a tradition of leaving them alone.

When he saw the policewoman consulting her watch Castor realized he had told her as much as she wanted to know about the River of Pearl Collective. "What should I do now?" he asked. "Am I supposed to go back to the village?"

She looked astonished. "Now? Before the inquest is over? Certainly not. Any witness may be recalled; you'll be told when you may leave. And anyway," she said, grinning, as she waved to a waiter for the check, "this afternoon will be especially interesting for you, I think!"

There had been time to draw his witness fees and expenses after all. Castor turned the green-edged Renmin currency over in his fingers curiously as he waited for the afternoon session to begin. The spectators' gallery was fuller than before, though the queer old man called Manyface was not among them as far as Castor could see. Inspector Tsoong Delilah had not rejoined him. She was seated once more in the front row, along with three other police. All four of them seemed intently poised for something special.

The first witness had barely begun to testify when Castor lost interest in the other spectators and jammed his money back into his pocket. The witness was a police technician, a white-haired man whose ease and control suggested many hours in court. The questions and answers were quick and direct:

"Were you assigned the task of identifying the deceased?"

"I was. Through cell typing and analysis of the hair patterns at the base of the skull, the deceased was identified as Feng Avery, seventeen years old, citizen of the Bama Autonomous Republic, apprentice slaughterer at the River of Pearl Livestock Collective. Apprentice Feng was an Overseas Chinese, of pure strain for six generations."

"Have you examined the dossier of Apprentice Feng Avery?"

"I have. He was arrested twice while a university student. Both arrests were for counterrevolutionary activities. The first was for participating in a rightist meeting. The second was for defacing the people's property by spray-painting graffiti. He painted such slogans as 'America for Americans' and 'Chinese Go Home' on the walls of his dormitory. Apprentice Feng was expelled from the university after the second arrest and has since been the subject of observation."

By then Castor was riveted to his seat. He was almost afraid to look around for fear of drawing attention to himself. This was dangerous territory! It was not just a simple murder. It entailed a state crime! An act, perhaps even a series of acts, against the people! And what could have made this boy so criminally irresponsible? He had been given everything! The Yankee Chinese were even less likely to be allowed into universities than pure-bred Yanks like Castor himself. The boy must have been something special—and had been given special privileges; for such a person to have betrayed his trust was almost unbelievable!

The whole courtroom was tense now, with stirrings and whisperings. Castor could hear no sound from the penned spectators, but he could see them leaning toward each other in excitement; body language was not screened out by the glass. In the front of the room the head judge was peremptorily recalling the old slaughterhouse boss to the stand, and his body language, too, was clearer than words. Head down, face stricken, steps slow, he took his seat and waited for the blow to fall.

"Did you know that Apprentice Feng was missing from his post?"

The old man took a bitter breath and flared, "Of course I did! He was my grandson, how could I not know?" Two seats down from Castor, the baseball-playing boy began to cry.

"And you did not report his absence?"

"I didn't have to!" yelled the old man. "I knew! Always in trouble, never satisfied! He had stolen a gun; he was going to attack the radio-telescope. I followed him; I begged him not to—" And then as, at a signal from one of the judges, Tsoong Delilah and the other police rose to approach him, he bawled, "I didn't mean to do it, but he gave me no choice. He would have destroyed us all..."

So the day in court was over, the courtroom emptying. Castor sat waiting for someone to tell him what to do, glumly contemplating the long bus ride back to the village and the scolding of Fat Rhoda and the endless stoop labor of the rice paddies, when he heard his name called.

It was the policewoman. "Well, Scholar, what are your plans?" she asked, her face bright. Obviously she was pleased with herself over the easy solution of the case. He shrugged.

"Back to the village, I suppose."

"Back to the village, of course," she agreed, "but there is no reason to hurry. The buses run every day, and you might as well stay here tonight."

"Really?" He began to feel pleasure: the rest of the day in the city, some quick shopping in the morning, the pleasures of the transient hotel that night, this time with money in his pocket. "I can watch some Indian programs in my room," he said happily.

"Return to that slum? Certainly not!" she scoffed. "No, I insist. Dinner at my place, and we will find a bed for you there. No argument! It is decided."

IV

Tsoong Delilah's "place" didn't mean her place of residence—"My city apartment! No! That's not much better than your damned transient flophouse!"—but the "place" she kept for herself on the water, way down the Delta to the Gulf Coast. It took more than an hour to drive, even in Tsoong Delilah's zippy little sports car, while the afternoon darkened into full night.

Castor, sitting next to her in the two-seater, was alternately glowing with delight and sick with envy. How skillfully her gloved hands turned the wheel, dimmed the lights, operated the radio, sounded the horn; how briskly the little car slipped through gaps in the stream of trucks and taxis! The envy was just as powerful. Castor had never driven anything more exciting than one of the village trucks. What must it be like to have a machine like this for one's own? And under the excitement and the envy, another feeling, partly sexual, partly fearful, as he wondered what this woman had in mind for him that night.

When they were out of the city traffic she rummaged in her pocket and passed him her little lacquered pipe. "Fill it from the pouch in my bag," she ordered, not taking her eyes off the road to see that he did so. When he started to hand the filled pipe back to her she scoffed, "Oh, Scholar, what's the use of a pipe not lighted? The plug on the dash—use it!"

When Castor succeeded in figuring out how the plug lighted, he took a reckless deep puff. Mistake. He was sent coughing and strangling, head down, almost dropping the pipe. When he recovered, the policewoman was laughing. He passed it over, wondering what he had inhaled. Not tobacco, certainly, but if it was marijuana it was something orders of magnitude more potent than the homegrown from the private plots of the village.

Still, it certainly did make one feel good. Relaxing, he asked a question that had been on his mind: "What will happen to the old man?"

"The murderer? He will be convicted in the people's court, of course, and sentenced no doubt to many years of reeducation," said the policewoman righteously; and then, "But if I were the judge I would suspend the sentence."

"Because he is so old?"

"No. Because he did nothing malicious or evil. I almost admire him, Scholar. He saw something that threatened the people, and he took steps to stop it. He did not mean to kill Feng Avery. When he saw what had happened he grew frightened and careless. It's too bad you found the head; he would have got off clean otherwise."

She took a deep draft on the pipe and handed it back to him in silence. Then she exploded: "You Yanks! How many of you secretly hate us?"

"It is natural to hate one's conquerors," Castor said boldly, sucking at the pipe.

"But we are not conquerors! We came here to help, when you and the Russians had stung each other to death— and nearly killed the whole world, too! We brought you doctors and teachers! We helped you rebuild your land!" When Castor was silent, she turned her eyes from the road for a moment to look at him. "Don't you know that?" she demanded. "Don't you know that without us you might all have perished? We did right to come!"

The pipe was burned out now. Castor turned it over in his fingers thoughtfully. What the woman said was true enough, or almost true enough, except—

"Except that you are still here," he said at last.

The moon was setting, on the heels of the sun, as they pulled into a parking space overlooking the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Castor got out and waited while the policewoman rummaged in the trunk of the car, gazing about. There were four or five houses, most of them dark, in this little colony. They were on a bluff, and that was strange. There were no bluffs there. Mud from the old course of the Mississippi River had made all the land within a dozen kilometers or more, and mud does not heap itself into hills. It took Castor only a moment to realize this, and to realize that Police Inspector Tsoong's home was built on the heaped-up ruins of what had once been some sort of town. From the reek of petroleum in the air he realized another fact. No matter what Tsoong Delilah had jokingly promised, there would be no tandem skin diving for them this time. There had obviously been an oil surge from the rickety old wells a hundred kilometers out on the Gulf, and swimming would be no pleasure.

Still, it was a delightful place. The sliver of a moon did not obscure the stars. "There's Jupiter," he said suddenly. "And Vega and Altair—this would be a marvelous place for a telescope!" Tsoong Delilah looked at him curiously, but said only, "Here, take our dinner while I get my bag. The house is just up that path."

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?"

"Not what you can do. What you know." She swirled the ice cubes in her drink moodily. "I have a puzzle. It has nothing to do with a police case, because I would know that. It does not involve high party members or politics with India—I would know if either of those were so, too. But information is being kept secret, and I don't know why."

"Then what can I do?"

"You can lend me some of your wisdom, Scholar." She reached over to the table at the end of the couch and lifted one edge. It exposed a keyboard. The tabletop, erected, became a screen. "For instance," she said, punching in commands, "see here." A table of numbers wrote itself across the screen, faster than the eye could follow:

SELECTED POWER ANOMALIES

Bermuda Drain 0335-0349Q Standby 0350-0450Q

Arecibo Drain 0500-0514Q Standby 0515-0615Q

Gulfport Drain 0605-0619Q Standby 0620-0720Q

Goldstone Drain 0720-0734Q Standby 0735-0830Q

Mauna Kea Drain 0940-0954Q Standby 0955-1055Q

"This is from the energy collective," she said, "and it shows an extraordinary power consumption for about fifteen minutes and then a period of an hour when all major electrical machinery is silenced for quite a large area. It is only these areas that show this, and although this is for yesterday, the same thing has been going on all week. What does it tell you, Scholar?"

He said promptly, "Well, they are all radio-astronomy observatories. The times are Q times—World Standard Time, based on the Beijing meridian—"

"Scholar!" she warned.

He grinned, for almost the first time in their relationship confident. "I did not know how much you knew," he explained. "The times correspond to about the rotation period of the earth. Presumably all observing the same point in space."

"Excellent, Scholar."

He admitted, "I had help, Inspector. We've had these power blackouts every night in my village. I didn't know till now what they were for. I suppose the same thing is going on in the observatories in the rest of the world."

"Very likely," she agreed, "but the records for the energy collectives outside the North American grid are less conveniently accessible for me. What else can you tell me?"

He was getting enthusiastic now. "Well, hell! Obviously they're radaring something—the heavy power drain, then the waiting period for signal return. Since they require so much power, it must be pretty small. Also pretty distant—but not more than, let me see, about five A.U. Because of the round-trip time for the signal at light speed," he explained, answering her frown. "Say seven or eight hundred million kilometers. That would be way past the asteroid belt, almost to the orbit of Jupiter. If," he added with some bitterness, "we had probes in space, we wouldn't have to worry about surface radar observatories to see things like that."

Tsoong Delilah was scowling, but it didn't look like anger, only concentration. "If the People's Republics have no energy to waste on space travel, it is not their fault, Scholar," she reminded him. "What else?"

He said, keeping the reversal-of-role superiority out, or largely out, of his voice, "If I can use your screen, I think I can show you a picture of it."

The look she gave him was sardonic again, but she moved aside for him—and raised her pencil-thin eyebrow* a few minutes later when he looked up, blushing. "Well, Scholar? No picture?"

"It's your system," he said defensively. "I can't access SKYWATCH or the IAF net, or even the current-projects file for the Bama scope. I could probably get something through the Transient Phenomena Center in Mukden if you want to pay for an overseas line—"

"No. Not Mukden," she said sharply.

He spread his hands. Trying to make the position clear without being definitely disagreeable about it, he said, "Your system doesn't seem to have much science capability."

"Why should it? I'm a police inspector, not a professor. I can access anything I like through the police net—but that," she added swiftly, to forestall him, "I think I will not do in this case. There is some delicacy here. I don't know what is being such a mystery, but there must be a reason." She gazed thoughtfully into the fire for a moment, then snapped the screen down decisively. "It is just as well," she announced. "I have told you nothing that is not public record, so there can be no criticism."

She stood up, satisfied, and moved over to the bar. "Another drink, Scholar?" she called over her shoulder, but didn't wait for an answer. When she brought Castor's new drink back, her appearance had changed; she was neither police inspector nor puzzled citizen, and once again she looked much younger.

Castor found his face warming once more. Robbed of his position as lecturer in astronomy to a class of one, he was a rice-field Yankee in the private retreat of a seductive and worldly-wise woman. "But aren't you curious?" he asked.

She sank down next to him. "If I am curious tomorrow, I will have one of my sergeants access the IAF net or SKYWATCH or the Transient Phenomena Center in Mukden through the police net," she said, demonstrating how well she had learned her lesson. "But perhaps I will think it over for a day or two first. In any case, Castor, there are other things I am curious about. How did you come to make that woman pregnant?"

He almost choked on his drink. "You mean my wife."

"Wife, of course," she shrugged. "Did she not receive an implant at twelve?"

"Implants are not compulsory, Inspector," he reminded her and this time did not even get a shrug. He went on, with some embarrassment, "It's hard to explain, because it's a religious matter."

"Ah! Religion! Of course. But I did not think all Yankees were religious."

"Well, personally I'm not, but my wife is. Was. It has to do with, uh, what they call the sanctity of life giving. It means that before you have intercourse you're supposed to have to, well, pause for a while—that's when she puts the thing in—so she can reflect before deciding not to have a child. Only then she said she really wanted one."

Delilah sipped her drink, regarding him over the rim of her glass, while Castor tried to read her expression. Was she going to tell him how quaint these barbarous practices seemed? Or remind him of the duty to control population while the carrying capacity of the world's land was still so low? She did neither. She leaned forward suddenly to brush his cheek with her lips, then stood up. "What we do," she said, slipping loose the cord that held her pajamas, "is to receive an implant just before puberty. Then, if we want children, we have it removed. It is in the fatty part just where the buttocks join the thigh, so it really does not appear in most circumstances. I'll show you, Castor. And then you can show me if you are able to perform without such a preliminary pause to consider the sanctity of life giving."

At daybreak she woke him with her gently, sweetly stroking hand, and they had another bout—the fourth, perhaps, or maybe the fifth or sixth. She seemed inexhaustible. He was twenty-two years old; and besides, what happened in Tsoong Delilah's perfumed and gently resilient bed was light-years away from frantic grapplings at the edge of a rice paddy or even the marriage chamber. She was a marvelous lover, denied him nothing, demanded (it seemed) only his pleasure, and let that magnify hers.

Nothing that passed in that night led Castor to suspect that he was any more to Tsoong Delilah than a one-night stand, and he was wholly sure that he was only one of many. Still, he came out of the shower to find she had made breakfast for him. And when, in her turn, she finished her toilet and came out uniformed for the day, she sipped tea with him as he finished his rice and crab. "Well, Scholar," she said, puffing on the little pipe—it was tobacco this time—"you've had an interesting time, but now it's good-bye. Perhaps we'll meet again."

"I hope so," he said, surprising himself with the warmth he felt. Embarrassed, he added quickly, "Do I go back to the village now?"

She said indulgently, "You can if you want to, but maybe you'd like another day or two in the city. They will have kept your room at the transient hotel, and it's all paid for by the court."

"I'd like that!"

"Of course. Don't stretch it too long, Castor. There's a limit—ah." She frowned in annoyance as her screen beeped for attention. She clapped twice sharply; the satellite screen over the breakfast table blinked alive, and a face looked out at them.

It was the famous scientist and high party member Fung Bohsien, and the reason he was called Manyface was instantly apparent. His face was twitching convulsively, as though he could not make up his mind what expression he wanted to wear. Even less did he seem able to decide what he wanted to say, because his words were jumbled, interrupted, terribly confusing:

"I am looking for—no, I'm not—PLEASE!—for Bama Repub—shut up—the citizen, Pettyman Castor—aw, he's not there—PLEASE! LET HIM FIN—of Production Team—I want to watch the opera..."

"He's right here," Tsoong Delilah cut in, for the first time in Castor's experience showing consternation. She waved furiously to Castor to take her place before the screen. The old man looked at him, face working, his voices muttering to each other.

"Ah," he said. "Come to—no!—my office at—not today!—noon today because—" The voice faded to inaudible mutterings, while the expressions chased each other across the old face before, triumphantly, he finished in a rush: "My fourth part wants to see you!"

And he clicked off.

V

The university grounds sprawled over a dozen or more hectares. If Tsoong Delilah, silent and withdrawn, had not dropped him at the right building, Castor would have been lost beyond prayer. Even so, he had to ask directions twice before he found the correct wing of the Center for Neuroanatomy and Brain Studies. Then it was easy. Fairly easy.

All of the offices had nameplates on the door, CHEN Litsun or HONG Wuzhen or, rarely, BRADLEY Jonathan, but Castor recognized the one he was looking for instantly. It could have been no other, for the nameplate was three times regulation size and it said,

FUNG - HS ANG - DIEN - POTTER - SU - ANGORAK -SHUM - TSAI - CORELLI - HONG - GWAI Bohsien -Futsui - Kaichung - Alicia - Wonmu - Aglat - Hengdzhou -Mingwo - Anastasio - Ludzhen - Hunmong. Evidently Manyface had, at least, a sense of humor!

When Castor let himself in, he discovered that Many-face's secretary did too. She was an elderly Han, far past the age when most Chinese went Home to die, but not past a jocular glint in the eyes when Castor explained he had an appointment with Professor Fung. "Do you now?" she asked. "They didn't tell me, though that's no surprise. Hold on a minute while I see where he is." She punched keys for her desk screen, gazed a moment, and shook her head. "He isn't on campus. I'll try the professor's home to see if he's left yet."

"I don't want to disturb him at home," Castor ventured. The secretary laughed. It was a friendly laugh, and Castor decided that what was amusing was the concept of Professor Fung Bohsien's being any more "disturbed" than he usually was. Encouraged, Castor edged forward to peek at the keyboard as she switched to comm mode, and his mouth watered. What a keyboard! This put the inspector's puny Little rig in the shade, not to mention the rudimentary teaching screens at the Heavenly Grain Collective. There were hard-wired single-key functions for tasks that would have taken long and complicated programming instructions back at home. If they could have been done at all. He had seen setups as complicated as this on the village screens, and his heart had yearned for them. Here one was!

He could hear the wheep... wheep that indicated ringing on the other end of the line. It seemed to go on a long time. The secretary read his expression and said kindly, "He's probably there. It takes them a long time to get themselves together to answer when there's no servant, and they always have a hard time keeping them." She let it ring at least fifty times. Long past the point when Castor would have given up, she leaned forward abruptly and spoke into the phone. "Professor Fung, Pettyman Castor is here for his appointment with you."

Castor was only in the fringe of the directed sound from the screen, but he could catch what sounded like several voices babbling at once. It did not disconcert the secretary. She looked up at Castor. "He wants to speak to you himself. I'll put it on the wall screen." Castor turned toward the screen wall, and Manyface peered out at him. The old face creased and twitched and managed to spit out words:

"Welcome, Pettyman—hell if he is—Castor—WHO'S HE?—I'm sorry I am late—am not sorry!—but—ooh, it's him!—I'll be in at three—NO!—but I wanted to— PLEASE!—please wait, Castor—" There was more, but it got worse. Castor could understand almost nothing of it. What made it worse was the look—the looks—on the old man's face. It was not a handsome face to begin with. The huge football helmet was gone, but replaced by an equally huge turban of white toweling. When the screen clicked off Castor turned bemused to the secretary.

"What did he say?"

"He said to come back at three," she reported sympathetically. "Maybe he'll be here. Maybe not. I advise you to get something to eat while you're waiting. It might be a long time."

In spite of the secretary's directions it took Castor half an hour to find the student lunchroom in the Liu Piao Center. He made several false starts, got lost twice, wandered through the Astronomy & Astrophysics building with his heart hungry, took a shortcut through the Foreign History Institute lobby, with American Revolutionary War army uniforms in glass cases. He did not ask directions until the hunger gnawing at the pit of his stomach forced him to. But it was not only hunger that knotted his belly. It was envy, sick envy, and regret. If things had gone just a little differently, he might have been a student at this very university! He might long since have earned an honorable degree—might even have been allowed to go on to graduate school—to a doctorate—even to a professorship, right here, to teach new generations of the students he saw thronging the halls and walks. He pushed his tray along the steam-table line, caught between a giggling group of Han girls and a covey of Yankee ones, exchanging the same confidences in the high tongue and in English. He was pop-eyed at the wonder of being there. When he found a place at a table to eat his dumplings (two turbaned Indian exchange students sat across from him!), every mouthful tasted of what might have been. If his grades had been a little better in the village school— If his teacher had fought for him a little harder or been a trifle better connected— If he had been born Han Chinese instead of Bama Yank— If the Russians and the Americans hadn't blown each other away a century before and left the world to the surviving hundreds of millions of China and India—

If the world had been a different world, then he might have been here, not by an old freak's caprice and the chance of blundering onto a severed head, but by right. And then even Maria would have been impressed by her scholar husband!

It occurred to him that that was only the second time in forty-eight hours he had thought of Maria.

Anyway, he told himself truly, it was a wonder to be here at all. When he had finished his dumplings he watched the others to see what they did with their trays and where they went afterward. Moving after random knots of students, he prowled the student center, the snack bar, the screen rooms, the beer hall, the study lounges, the supply stores, the auditoriums. Pure heaven! What it must be like to have the right to use these facilities any time you liked...

And, after all, he thought suddenly, who was to stop him?

The screens for students were nearly as formidable as the secretary's, but Castor was thrilled to be able to practice on one. When he had got it into communications mode, the first thing he did was to call Professor Many-face's secretary to make sure the strange old creature had not decided to come in early. He hadn't. Reassured, Castor tinkered the screen into data-retrieval mode and punched up Directory—University. He found the entry for Fung Bohsien easily. The cursor poured out fifty characters a second, and in no time at all Castor had Many-face's vital statistics:

Fung Bohsien, b. Sinjiang Province 2019. BSc Sinjiang 2037. MSc Beijing 2039. MD Tokyo Prefecture 2042. PhD Stanford 2046. Fellow Academica Sinica—

Fast-feed. Castor humped the crawl ahead, past dozens of lines of honors given and positions held—then, with a growing puzzlement, past a much longer roll of major papers published. It was a perfectly ordinary, if unusually distinguished, academic vita. There was not one word to suggest what made him talk so funny or have such weird nicknames. The only unusual thing about the biographical entry was a postscript that said, "See also Hsang Futsui, Dien Kaichung, Potter Alicia, Su Wonmu, Angorak Aglat, Shum Hengdzhou, Tsai Mingwo, Corelli Anastasio, Hong Ludzhen, and Gwai Hunmong."

Castor frowned in frustration at the screen, then doggedly rolled it back to the beginning and reread every word. And in the list of papers for the year 2057 he hit pay dirt.

He looked around to get his bearings, then headed straight for the nearest screen room.

He looked around to get his bearings, then headed straight for the nearest screen room.

The title was "Personality Retention after Brain Tissue Transplant," and the authors were given as Fung, Shan, Tzuling, Gwui, and Gwui.

Fortunately the journal cited was in the university library memory. It was the answer. Not easily found, because Castor's autoeducation had not included much anatomy. He had to force his way through thickets of fornices and corpus callosa and tangles of epiphyses and hypophyses, but the story was there to read. At the age of only thirty-six, Dr. Fung had developed a brain tumor, and it was malignant. Worse, it involved areas with names like the "basis pedunculi" that involved the basic functioning of the body; to lose them was not merely to lose a few memories or the sense of smell, it was a loss incompatible with life. The only hope was a transplant. The operation was successful... except that, coming out of his druggy post-op doze, young Dr. Fung Bohsien responded to the surgeon's questions clearly and positively. Who was he? Why, he was Fung Bohsien, of course, and in the next breath identified himself equally certainly as Hsang Futsui, the young Han student killed under the wheels of a trolleybus who had donated the brain stem.

Castor stared at the golden characters on the screen, thrilled and revolted. Revolted to find that the famous scientist and high party member did not merely perform experiments but was the subject of one. Thrilled to be, at last, in the place where such wonders could happen. Revolted, and thrilled, and desperately, desperately sick with longing to stay there.

"No," the secretary said good-humoredly, "Professor Fung isn't here, and I have no idea where he is. He did call. He said he would be greatly pleased if you would remain in the city for a few days. All the necessary papers will be arranged."

Castor's heart throbbed joyfully. "In the transient hotel?" he asked hopefully. The secretary pursed her lips.

"If you wish that, I suppose it could be arranged, but Professor Fung suggested you stay with Police Inspector Tsoong. It is more convenient to the university. I promise the inspector will not object," the secretary grinned. "I have informed her already. So stay in the city, enjoy yourself—but first you should see the professor. He may come at any time."

Never since the feast days of childhood had Castor had so many wishes granted at once. "Can I wait in the student center?" he asked with stars in his eyes.

"No, why? Are you hungry still?"

"I would like to use the screens," he confessed.

"Do you know how? Well, then! Why use a public screen when you can use the professor's?"

And so for three hours and more Pettyman Castor lived in the very heart of heaven, seated at the huge keyboard belonging to a famous scientist and high party member, with what seemed nearly unrestricted access to all the world's scientific data. The keyboard, of course, was formidable. He studied it for ten minutes before he dared do anything more than turn it on. Then he repeated the searches he had conducted in the student center, adding a cross-lookup instruction to find later papers, and easier papers, to describe what Fung Bohsien was and had done. The screen was a marvel. It seemed to think for him, once instructed in what he wished. By the time the secretary came in with a cup of tea and word that the professor was still missing, he had learned more than he ever wished to know about Fung Bohsien. He had part or most of the brains of ten other human beings, all dead of things that wrecked their bodies but left their brains intact, installed within his own skull—well, not his own skull anymore, because one cranium could not hold so much tissue. Bone grafts and later noble-metal plates had expanded the cranial capacity. He seemed—now it was perhaps they seemed—to have no limit to his desire for added personalities; it was not lack of will that kept him from adding a dozen more but the difficulty of finding proper tissue matches. Most of the conventional series of antigen factors were no problem at all, because immune-reaction suppressants handled them well, but the brain was tricky stuff. Fewer than one cadaver in a hundred could live comfortably inside Manyface's pumpkin-sized skull.

Then, emboldened, Castor threw a wider net. Was there any progress in solving the mystery of Ursa QY since his last course in astronomy a year before? No. There was not; it was still an anomalous black hole. Had the Earth-based telescopes any new pictures of the massive eruptions on Callisto? Yes, they had—good ones, considering that astronomy was all back on the surface of the planet again, with the adventure into space a forgotten chapter a century old...

He might have gone on forever if the secretary had not appeared to say, "The professor is in his laboratory; go there. Out the door, down the stairs, room 3C44—don't worry, you won't have any trouble finding it!"

Castor had no trouble at all. The laboratory announced itself by its sounds and smells before he reached the open door. Sounds of chirping, cheeping, squeaking, yowling; smells of animal cages by the dozen. Most of the cages were full. A good half of their occupants were monsters. A capuchin monkey, intact and lively, chattered as it bounded from perch to floor in one cage; next door another monkey squatted sullenly in a nest of rags, its huge head braced by a leather collar, its eyes fierce. The dominant freakishness of the animals was the big head, but there were others—a snake with two bodies joined to a single skull, a steel band reinforcing the joint as the creature squirmed and twisted in its own coils; a piglet's head on a puppy's body; a guinea pig that seemed to have no proper head at all, just a nose and a mouth that seemed to come right from its shoulders and eyes that peeped pleadingly at Castor. He was shaken. When he saw the great football helmet of Manyface past a row of cages, he looked at the animals no more, but kept his gaze on the scientist as he approached.

Three or four normally formed human beings were with Manyface, a couple of them Yankee, Castor saw with surprise. They listened patiently to the internal debate that confused every statement that came from the mouth of Fung Bohsien; they seemed skilled at disregarding the minority voices and extracting the instructions and comments of the boss.

Castor did not have that skill. When Manyface's gaze fell on him he shrank back. Not only was Fung Bohsien a freak, he was old. The face was wrinkled; there were age spots on the hands; the voice (voices?) tremulous. There was a faint musty smell that managed to register itself even through the miasma of the animal pens. It was the smell of old age, Castor thought, wondering. Old Yankees were nothing new. Old Han Chinese, however, were exceedingly rare on North America. Why had this man not gone back to the Mainland to live out the last years of his life like everyone else? "Who?" demanded the scientist, and Castor licked his lips before he answered.

"I'm Pettyman Castor. You sent for me. You saw me at the hearing, I think."

And all the voices tried to respond at once: "What hearing? That hearing, damn it, the one Alicia dragged us—I didn't drag anybody, I simply wanted—Oh," said the least confused voice of Manyface, "I remember. You're from the Heavenly Grain Village—what village?—please— SHUT UP—and one of us has a special interest—wait." The massive head turned aside for a moment while the voices muttered to each other. When Manyface looked back at Castor the voice was different:

"I'm the one," it said. "Potter Alicia. Do you know the village well?"

"I've lived there all my life."

"Well, then—ah, let's go—SHUT UP!— well, then, do you know a little girl named Grootenbart Maria?"

"Maria? Certainly I know her, but she's not a little girl. She's my wife."

More confused internal argument among Manyface's personalities; it lasted for a half a minute, and then the twitching face settled into an expression half-joyful, half-pleading; and the voice said:

"Well, I'm her mother!"

VI

The city apartment of Renmin Police Inspector Tsoong Delilah was even grander than her beachfront place and a lot more lived-in. To begin with it had five rooms. What any single human being could do with five whole rooms Castor couldn't imagine, but the quiet Yankee maid who let him in assured him they were all for Tsoong Delilah—and, of course, for her "guests." No other guest was in sight this evening. Neither was Tsoong Delilah because, the maid explained, she was detained on duty but would be with him in time for dinner.

In fact, she was earlier than that. She came in behind Castor without warning while he was gazing at an extra bedroom, larger than the whole apartment he and Maria had shared, complete with closets and washstand and screen. "Like it?" she said to the back of his head. "You can have it—to keep your things in, anyway." When he turned she was smiling. If there was a touch of rue in her smile, at least she did not seem angry at having him thrust on her. He started to apologize, but she shook her head. "A request from Fung Bohsien is an honor for me—I think a pleasure, too," she added, looking at him boldly. "I must shower and change before dinner—make yourself at home. Although I see you have already done that."

Dinner was interrupted twice by faint beeps from the screen. Each time Tsoong Delilah got up to take the call in another room, and the second time she returned, frowning. "You don't have to worry about the old man from River of Pearl anymore," she reported. "He committed suicide in his cell."

"Oh," he said, startled. It had not occurred to him that even a convicted murderer might want to take his own life. "What a pity!"

"It is a pity, Castor. He was a good man," she said softly. He was silent for a moment, thinking about the old man and about why a police inspector should care about a felon's death, and then he forgot about the old man. What was much more interesting was what had happened to him that day—above all, what might yet happen! Tsoong Delilah let him do all the talking while she picked at her food. Then, when the maid had put the dishes in the washer and departed, they sat at opposite ends of a huge couch and the policewoman smoked her little pipe and let him go on talking. Castor did not object. There was so much to say!

"Manyface likes me," he boasted. "He even asked if I might be willing to work for him, what do you think of that? That could be a very good deal, although working for a freak like Manyface isn't my idea—what?"

Delilah was smiling, but only just. "Not 'Manyface,'" she corrected. "'Senior Party Cadre Fung Bohsien.' And not 'freak' under any circumstances."

"Oh, hell, Delilah," he said scornfully, "there's no need to be so formal." He observed the smile chill and changed his mind. "But you're right," he added quickly. "One has to respect authority, of course! He does like me, though. Or part of him does. Do you think I could stand working for him? I'm to see him again in the morning. Will you take me there?"

"Of course," said Delilah, watching him.

"But he's so hard to talk to! Not so much when he's quiet, but when he gets excited. Then they all try to speak at once—of course, he's excited a lot of the time..." He remembered, "And, oh yes, I punched up my own dossier. I'm qualified for the observatory! If Manyface will just put in a word for me—"

"Why the observatory?" the policewoman asked. "The telescope is only a tool. If you wanted to run your farm collective, would you assign yourself as a plow?"

He paused, blinking. "What do you mean?"

"If Fung Bohsien would help you get transferred to the observatory, he could just as easily get you admitted to the university."

Castor sat up straight, gasping. "The university?"

"Why not?"

"Can he do such a thing?"

She only laughed. Obviously he could. Perhaps he would! Perhaps that great sullen dream might come true after all, and all because he had had the dumb luck to kick a dead man's head one afternoon in the rice paddy!

He realized the policewoman was smiling at him indulgently, almost fondly, and he recollected himself. "I forgot!" he cried. "I brought you a present."

Tsoong Delilah actually looked startled. "A present?"

"They let me use their screen," he said, getting up to rummage in his backpack, "and—may I use yours?—I remembered what we were talking about last night." He sat before the small living-room screen, studied it a moment and then punched for display mode. "They can access anything! SKYWATCH didn't have what I wanted, and neither did the IAF, but the university's astronomy department had all the plates—all the way to the big Lhasa scope, and some Indian ones, too. So I took the best radar scans from each, corrected for rotation and tumbling and scale—it's coming toward us—and programmed a comparison mode to pick the best features of each—it was easy, really," he boasted, though that wasn't true, and pushed the button for display. On the screen an object took form, surrounded by blackness pierced with tiny dots of blinding white.

It was a spaceship.

Tsoong Delilah gazed at it wonderingly. "But we don't have any spacecraft out there," she said, her voice husky.

"Exactly! Isn't it wonderful?" Castor was thrilled.

VII

The morning sky was blue and fine; the odor of hydrocarbons from the Gulf was no more than a suspicion ; even the New Orleans traffic was no more than a challenge to the rapidly evolving Pettyman Castor, who became an order of magnitude more sophisticated every day. He did not even get lost on his way to Manyface's office. He made his way unerringly to the proper building, floor, and even room. The only thing that went wrong was that Manyface was not there, nor even expected.

The faithful secretary said so. She was picking desultorily at her screen with a cursor rod when Castor came in. She did not seem either surprised or particularly apologetic when it developed that Senior Party Cadre Fung Bohsien had forgotten to mention Castor's arrival. She was friendly enough, though. "You have to allow for him at times like this, Pettyman," she said absently, eyes on the screen. Craning his neck, Castor caught a glimpse of what was on the screen. The secretary was playing a game of Go with the computer. She made her move and then went on: "He's always this way when he gets a new implant."

"I didn't know he had a new one," said Castor.

"Oh, sure. Five weeks ago. Do you think he's always this way? Would I be working for him if he was?" She shook her head, glancing distastefully at the screen. Perhaps, Castor thought, the computer was beating her. Suddenly she threw the cursor rod down on her desk and asked, "Have you eaten?"

"What?"

"Eaten breakfast," she explained. "You know? In the mouth? Chew? Swallow? No? Then pull up a chair and we'll order some soup and rice from the faculty club."

Actually, the woman seemed to want to be friendly! She called in the order and, waiting for it to be delivered, put her feet up on the desk to regard Castor appraisingly. "So, young man. You think you would like to work for the professor?"

Castor nodded.

"But you don't know if you can stand his craziness, is that right? Yes, well, do not worry too much. Now his whole personality is out of balance. They all start fighting among themselves when a new one is added—it is terrible! But it ends." She looked up as the messenger from the faculty club came in and instructed him in where to lay out the dishes. "Eat," she ordered Castor. "You may ask questions of me while you eat, if you wish."

Castor was caught with chopsticks halfway to his mouth. He watched the woman nimbly alternating soup and rice while he formulated his questions. "Well—what is it like for him to have all those people in his head? Is it like split personality?"

"No, not at all. Split personality—or as Professor Fung's colleagues describe it, 'multiple personality disorder,' is a psychological thing. It is trauma, usually from early childhood damage, that in some way causes a retreat from reality. Manyface is very real. So are all of his voices."

Castor scooped rice into his mouth, dampened it with a porcelain spoonful of soup. He managed to say, "But how?"

"How do they operate within his head? Let me see. There was a psychologist named Hilary Roberts who published work many, many years ago—when there really was an America, even. I will give you his example, by asking you a question. What are we doing now?"

"Why—" Castor swallowed, to be able to say, "Talking?"

"Exactly. Now, young Pettyman, how did you know that was what we were doing?"

"Why—" Castor swallowed again. This time it was not to clear his throat of food, but to assist in thought. "I guess I thought about it?" he offered.

"Right. So, while we were 'talking,' you were also 'thinking' of 'talking.' You are now probably 'thinking' of 'thinking' of talking. That second thinking is what Roberts (and I) call 'meta-thinking.' But, look at this, Petty-man! Now we are 'thinking' about 'meta-thinking'! What does that mean we are doing?"

"Wow! Meta-meta-thinking?"

"Precisely." The secretary grinned, crushing the empty disposable cups that had once held her rice and soup. She tossed them neatly into a disposal basket. "You can go on doing that forever, Pettyman. You can do it through infinity."

"Wow!"

"More than that! You cannot tell which thinking is the 'ultimate' thinking, because there is none, it being infinite. You cannot even tell which kind of thinking is at the bottom—is the 'real' thinking—because infinity is a closed loop."

Castor was frowning, trying to find a way of applying this airy-fairy metaphysics—this meta-thinking!—to the reality of his life. "Do you mean that Manyface is infinite?" he demanded.

"Not infinite, no. But a closed loop, Pettyman. There isn't any 'real' Manyface any more. They are all real."

Following her example, Castor picked up his own empty containers and disposed of them. He reached for the remains of the rice, but the secretary was ahead of him, scooping out the last little bit to eat. "How do you know so much about it?" he asked.

She gave him a disliking look. "Because I am a secretary, you mean? Even a secretary has a brain, Pettyman. Also, how do you think I got this job? I was Professor Fung's research assistant before I was his secretary. Then, for a time, it was proposed that I be his wife. Then he found companionship inside his skull and no longer needed a wife... but I remained his secretary." She balled up the last of the containers and pitched it after the others. "Well, Pettyman, how would you like to amuse yourself till the professor comes? With his screen? To follow these spacecraft that fascinate you so?"

"Don't they you?"

She shrugged. "Outer space is less interesting to me than inner space, but yes, it is interesting, I admit, that there is talk of radio signals that have not been decoded."

"Radio signals!" And mystery ones at that! Castor felt the sudden pull of the screen, but the secretary smiled.

"A great mystery, yes," she conceded. "But perhaps not a very interesting one, since most likely it is only that the decoding algorithms have been forgotten."

By the time Castor established, regretfully, that the secretary had been right, it was mid-afternoon. The first he knew of the arrival of Fung Bohsien was a gabble of voices from the outer office. Manyface was talking in tongues again—at least four of his personalities contributing their share to the dialogue. He was also being followed by a group of citizens, some young, some old; some students, one or two obviously senior executives of one kind or another. What they had in common, Castor realized, was that every one of them seemed to want something from Manyface. Manyface was not merely a curious physiological preparation. He was indeed a high party cadre. And thus, Castor perceived, able to grant boons or withhold them.

Castor moved out of the way as the whole procession entered Fung Bohsien's office. He was studying the old man, for in addition to checking out the disappointing news from space, he had spent his waiting time at Many-face's screen in looking up the physiology of Manyface.

The brain is in some ways the most delicate of the body's organs and in some ways the sturdiest. What anatomists call "the blood-brain barrier" is a mighty shield against the outlaw cells and organisms that circulate through the rest of the body. Cancer of the brain rarely metastasizes to the torso. Cancer of any other part rarely invades the brain. Immunologically speaking, the brain is exempted from most of the body's threats. Of all the secret corners of the human frame, it may be the very least likely to reject an implant.

And yet what a wonder it was that Manyface's huge buff-watermelon head should hold eleven minds! It became obvious to Castor that each of the occupants of Manyface's head had his own personal identity—or hers; that sometimes one did the speaking, sometimes another, depending on the subject on which they were addressed. Or depending on the consensual will of the majority within Fung's head. Or depending on which shouted loudest.

When the clients and hangers-on had been sent away, Manyface sat down at his desk and, for a moment, examined Castor silently. Castor prepared himself for the babble of competing voices that he had heard before. Surprisingly, when Manyface spoke it was with only one voice—the one Castor supposed to be his own. "So, Pettyman Castor," he said, "do you want the job?"

"To be your houseboy? Cook your meals, clean your house? I do not know if I can do that well. I have no training in these skills, apart from my compulsory help-out duties as a teen-ager."

Manyface's mouth spoke, but this time with a different accent. "He means yes," it said. "Get it over with. Let's get out of here."

"We will get out of here," Manyface told himself solemnly, "when we have finished. Pettyman Castor! Do you want to enter the university?"

"Oh, do I!"

"That means yes, too," said the second voice disagreeably, and Manyface's own overrode it again:

"Do you know what courses you want to take?"

"Not really," Castor confessed. "I mean, after all, the semester has been running for weeks now. I'm not sure which ones will still admit me—"

Manyface looked surprised with all his faces. "Admit you?" he said uncertainly, as though testing whether the words had any meaning in that context. "Of course they'll admit you!" He gestured at the screen. "Display the curriculum lists," he ordered. "Pick what you want, and I will put my chop on your application—no, no more discussion, boy! Do it. Then go to my house and make dinner. It has been too long since I have had a home-cooked meal! And I want something special tonight—let me see, I think some fried fish—no, not fish, too much oil in the water—STEAK, PLEASE—no, shrimp—no, damn it, remember the oil—Oh, hell," shouted Manyface furiously, over the noise of his own skullmates, "cook anything you can! But do it well and serve it hot! Now get on with it!"

So Castor prepared for himself a dream menu of all the hands-on and advanced courses his village screens had been unable to supply. He munched his way through the various classes with delight—astrogation, solar ballistics, space medicine—everywhere he was welcome, and the instructors unfailingly made sure he caught up quickly with the classes. Castor was awed. To him the concept of "high party official" had been one of those abstractions that you knew people thought about. But he had never before seen the power one such (or, in Many-face's case, perhaps several such) could display.

And Manyface's status was very high indeed. He was a powerful figure even at Home, when he chose to visit the old Han cities of Beijing or Guangzhou. In the Chinese society of North America, where Home was only an ideal, he was at least first among equals.

After the first day of school, Castor was addicted. He decided that no price was too high to pay for these joys! After his first full day as Manyface's houseboy, however, he began to think that some prices were at least extravagant. For one thing, he had not expected that he would be required to sleep at Manyface's house. That was not bad. The room given him was large, comfortable, even luxurious. All it lacked was the presence of Tsoong Delilah. Castor had rapidly become accustomed to that most appreciative of bedmates, was jolted to find his sleeping arrangements had been altered without consulting him, was startled to learn (from Manyface's secretary) that the change was at Inspector Tsoong Delilah's own request. It had to be some sort of feminine tact, he decided. No doubt she was giving him the opportunity to find some younger woman to relate to among the female students at the university. No matter. That he would straighten out when the time was ripe—when the question arose—when his glands recovered from their exercise in her busy bed.

There was also the question of Manyface himself. Or themself.

It was not that any one portion of Manyface's collective personality was unduly abrasive—well, not intolerably so, anyway. It was just that they were eleven individuals. With eleven different sets of habits and preferences and interests and dislikes. Usually it was Professor Fung who did the talking, as "chairman" of the committee that lived inside his skull. But that was only custom when there was no serious competition; what Manyface's secretary had told Castor was true. There was no "real" Manyface. When one of the others had some special interest in talking to Castor—when, one might say, the chair of some subcommittee needed to discuss a matter of particular interest—the other voices gave it freedom to speak. Sometimes for minutes on end. "It's quite difficult, yes," said Potter Alicia, through lips of the old man. "But we rub along somehow together. We have no choice, after all. Hsang is always complaining that we never play golf. Shum gives us the most trouble, I think—I do not!—oh, be still, Shum. I'm not criticizing you, I'm only saying that you have very strong sexual drives. There's not much we can do for either Hsang or Shum, actually. Shum least of all—not counting that the idea of physical intimacy with a woman quite disgusts me—" A warning grimace of the lips as Shum gathered himself to rebut made her change the subject—"anyway, we do the best we can to humor each other. It makes for peace inside the skull. Tell me, are you going to see my daughter soon?"

Castor cleared his throat. "I'm really very busy here," he temporized. He had said, or as much as said, that he and her daughter were divorced. If his putative mother-in-law had trouble remembering that, it was certainly not his business to remind her. It was a good time to change the subject. "As to dinner," he said, "I think we're all agreed on chicken, is that right? And with it rice?"

"Rice with onions, correct—no, plain—WHAT RICE? PILAF!—plain rice—I think," said Potter Alicia's thoughtful, ladylike voice, "that you should cook what you like, dear Castor, and we'll eat it anyway."

It was all a dream for Castor. Acceptance to the university! No need ever to go back to rot in the damned rice paddies! A skilled new mistress—temporarily unavailable, yes, but sure to be restored to him before long. It even occurred to him now and then to miss his wife. (But she had left him, after all. There was no need to feel guilt, and thus no obligation to miss her.)

And most delightful of all was the chance to look out into space through his new classes—not as a stubborn student at the end of a computer tie line on a collective farm, but as a regular member, indeed a privileged member, of the academic community.

And there was news. His astrogation class was full of it. First, the Party had ordered a speedup in the desultory space program. The instructor was as thrilled as Castor to be able to tell the class the news. He displayed the dozen or so rockets that had been designed long since, some of them even built; but there had been no muscle behind the program. Now the tempo was picking up. Why? asked the class, and the instructor gave them an opaque look. "It is the wisdom of the Party cadres that must answer such questions," he said. "At certain times it is necessary to wait and regroup, at others to move ahead."

And now was a time to move ahead.

Castor said boldly, "Has this anything to do with the new spaceship that has been discovered?"

The instructor hesitated, looked around the class for support, finally dared a "Perhaps."

"And have any of the messages from the spaceship been translated?"

To that not even a perhaps; the instructor took refuge in indignation. "Pettyman Castor! If such information were available, do you not know that the high Party officials would let us know at once? Think rightly, Pettyman Castor!"

But he had not said the message had not been translated. Nor did he pretend that the spacecraft was some burned-out hulk left over from either the Russians or the Americans.

That night in his room at Manyface's house he slaved the screen in his room to Manyface's own and systematically searched the files for further information on the spacecraft. There was none. So there was a secret, that was clear; but he was not going to find out what that secret was. And that, too, was clear.

As, bored, he snapped the screen off it suddenly blinked into his attention signal: Someone was calling him. When he opened the circuit he discovered it was Manyface's secretary. Her expression was frosty. "Orders," she said. "You are to report to her apartment for duty."

Though Castor knew it was not decorous, he couldn't help himself. He laughed out loud. "Duty, she said? Oh, to be sure! I know that duty well."

But the secretary was not sharing the joke. "You would be well advised," she said seriously, "to take an order from a Renmin police inspector seriously."

"I will," he promised, suppressing the smile. Then, as he thought things over, he wondered just why the Renmin police inspector passed on her orders in just that way. Puzzlement became irritation. He waited until he was sure she would be home. Then, when Manyface was well asleep, Castor stole out of the house, hailed a taxi, and in ten minutes was in front of the building that contained Tsoong Delilah's apartment. He was smiling as he entered the elevator. He had calculated that the light traffic of late night would make the trip trivially brief. So it had. Ten minutes cab ride each way. Say sixty minutes in bed— no, better allow ninety—why, he could be back in time for a good five hours' sleep before getting up to start the rice steaming for Professor Fung's breakfast.

But when he knocked on the door the errand was not what he expected, and in fact it was not Delilah who answered the door. It opened no more than halfway, to show a tall Han Chinese youth, Castor's age or nearly. The young man gave him a hard-eyed look. "You are the peasant Pettyman Castor?" he demanded.

Castor didn't pay him the compliment of admitting it. "And who are you, then?" he demanded cuttingly.

"I am the son of your lover," said the youth. "I have orders for you. This urn here by the door contains the ashes of the murderer Feng. These are to be returned to his collective. It is my mother's order that you take them there tomorrow morning."

VIII

When the bus stopped at the Heavenly Grain Village Collective, Castor got off grandly. The conqueror of the city returns to the humble place of his childhood. Only the humble place did not seem to care. Though Castor was ready to smile and to grasp the hands of his old neighbors just as warmly as though he were still no better than they, no old neighbors were there. No adults at all were in sight. The only person around was little Pettyman Benjy, the five-year-old son of Castor's cousin Pettyman Pendrake. The boy was sucking his thumb in the doorway of the village school—thrown out again for wetting his pants in class, no doubt.

Castor had no time to seek more of an audience. "Citizen!" remonstrated the bus driver. "I have a schedule to keep. Which bag is yours?"

The injury to his vanity was only grazing. Castor shrugged, picked up the boxed urn, dangled his overnight shoulderbag from the other hand, and went into the assistant director's office. There his reception committee was waiting for him: Fat Rhoda, with more than the usual bundle of complaints to deliver, starting with, "Your bus was late!"

But at least it turned out that Fat Rhoda had really missed him. Well, that was not quite true. She had not missed Castor in particular, but she certainly was deeply aggrieved that her production team had been left a worker short. When she had finished reproaching him for the fact that their plan had, therefore, not been more than 83 percent completed in the past week, she gazed down at the screen on her desk and punched out orders for the plot of available housing. "What a nuisance," she grumbled, eyeing the plot on the screen. "I suppose you want a bed? And a meal tonight, no doubt? Although, since you're not on the ration strength anymore, everyone will suffer?"

Well, that was nonsense. To serve one more meal out of three hundred would certainly cause no suffering for anyone. At most, it would mean only a little less scraped into the cans to feed the tilapia. Castor did not dignify the statement with a reply, nor the next proposal—which was that he share a bed with one of the children that night. "Your own apartment—your former apartment—" she said with pleasure, "is of course being repainted for the next tenant."

"Of course," said Castor, wondering how she could lie so. Fat Rhoda had never charged a can of paint against her team's profit and loss in her life. "Keep your food," he said cuttingly. "Keep your pissed-in bed, too. Let me only charge out a bike, and I will go to River of Pearl and stay there tonight."

Fat Rhoda stared at him resentfully. "There's no need to take that tone," she said. "Still—well, yes, I suppose there's a bike in the transportation pool..."

There was also at least one human face glad to see Castor again and happy to talk over the small talk of the commune since he left. No, said Pettyman Jim, nothing had been heard of Maria. Yes, they still had the blackouts. Something to do with the radio-telescope, wasn't it? No, there wasn't any reason he couldn't take any bike he liked—only, see, Castor, he said apologetically, since Castor wasn't on the ration strength anymore, he'd have to pay tourist rates for the rental...

Castor had not expected the hole left by his departure from the commune would heal so seamlessly and fast.

It was dark when he reached the River of Pearl. Bawling cattle and snorting, snuffling pigs filled his ears— nose, too. Since he had phoned ahead, at least this time someone was waiting for him.

The waiting person was a girl, slim, dark, short. She wore blouse and shorts, but fashion was not a motive. The blouse was khaki and stained—with, Castor supposed, pig slop. The shorts were no better. As she moved into the light to greet him he saw her face and realized he had seen it before.

It was the face he had seen in photo exhibits at the inquest. It was the same face on the same head—though a more gracile version of it—that he had kicked against in the rice paddy, to start all his troubles. And triumphs. "I'm Feng Miranda," said the face, unsmiling, even unwelcoming. "Thank you for bringing Grandfather's ashes home. No, no. Don't hand them to me now. A memorial service has been arranged and the people are waiting, so come along."

As they walked into the lighted catwalk to the community center, Castor found that Feng Miranda had every reason to look like the murdered youth. She was his sister. Twin sister, and she shared more than genes. "He died a hero," she said matter-of-factly. "Who, my grandfather? Of course not! My brother was as dedicated to freeing America from the yoke of the oppressor as I. A martyr to America." Gee! Castor moved half a step farther away from her and let her guide him into the hall.

The point of not taking the old man's ashes from him at the bus, Castor discovered, was that they were to be handed over at a ceremonial, when appropriate remarks would be delivered. Why not? It would be interesting to see how these peasants conducted funerals; Tsoong Delilah would be amused, perhaps. But the ceremony was a surprise. It was a one-woman performance, and what she said in the hall was worse than she had said outside. She stood there before the gathering of forty or fifty villagers, mostly elderly, and let Castor hand the unboxed urn to her. She did not treat it reverently. She glanced casually at the nameplate to see no impostor was receiving her grandfather's funeral oration, then put the ashes down on a table—a kitchen table, Castor saw, though at least someone had troubled to cover it with a red cloth that drooped to the floor on both sides. She kissed the urn absentmindedly, as though she were brushing itching lips against some handy surface while her hands were full, and turned to the audience:

"This old man, Feng Hsumu, was my grandfather, who killed my brother. Feng Hsumu was a good father to our father and I mourn him for that, but he was a murderer to my brother—only because my brother wanted the Han Chinese to leave America and let it be free again."

Castor sidled off the platform, shocked a little, more sorry for the girl. She did not seem to have a good grasp of reality. Although the Chinese had preserved the forms of the old People's Republic, they were most of all just Chinese. America's lack of "freedom" interested them very little. The Han Chinese didn't look on themselves as occupiers of America (or of Eastern Siberia or Japan or Indochina or Australia, or all the other non-Chinese places they dominated). China—"Home"—was the China of the emperors. It included most of Indochina, part of Korea, and part of Siberia; that was their China, and they simply did not think of arguing the point. The rest of the areas under their control were foreign lands.

She was still speaking, and Castor glanced around the room. Surprisingly, no one seemed to take offense. No one seemed to agree, either; even the young faces seemed placid as the cattle they tended.

She was reciting ancient history now. Much of it was true. When the nuclear war was over there were a couple of hundred million Chinese still alive, and a couple of hundred million Indians. They inherited the world. There wasn't anybody else still around big enough to challenge them. So they chopped up the world—Western Europe and the Near East for India, most of the rest for China. Nobody was in any position to challenge them effectively. Nobody even tried. The big power centers didn't have anything left to try with, not even much population.

But what this woman didn't seem to realize, Castor thought, was that the Chinese weren't conquerors. Han China never tried to conquer anything outside of Han China. Han China didn't want to add non-Han races to its empire. Han China was willing to own whatever was valuable in the demolished lands—but they didn't want the people in those areas to be Chinese; and the Chinese born and raised in those areas certainly didn't regard themselves as natives, either.

Except for the oddballs like Feng Miranda.

It did not do one good to be too close to oddballs, and so while Miranda was still speaking, Castor edged, slowly and as though abstracted, to the back of the room, where the River of Pearl director was standing, as impassive as the rest. "Sir?" whispered Castor, meaning to ask if the man saw anything strange in the funeral oration. But when the director's eyes met his, Castor changed his question. "Sir," he said, "have you found me a bed for the night?"

The director's expression remained placid. "Of course, Pettyman Castor. I think the Renmin policewoman intends to have you share hers." He nodded toward the side of the hall—and there, in a seat in the last row, inconspicuous apart from her sardonic expression, was Tsoong Delilah.

He did not ask her what she was doing in the cattle collective. She did not volunteer, only took him by the hand and led him firmly toward the guesthouse. He suspected that he knew the answer anyway. He suspected that the Renmin police kept hotbeds of insanity like this under surveillance—that was logic—and maybe that Delilah had arranged for her to do that and for him to be ordered to bring up the old man's ashes, for obvious purposes. Perhaps because she did not want to invite him to her own bed while her son was there. (That was vanity, but at least that part was right enough.)

When they reached the guesthouse and the door on the crude, small room was closed, he stammered, "Will you arrest her?"

She laughed. "Don't be foolish," she said, hanging up her civilian trousers and pulling a nightgown out of her bag. "We watch these silly kids, but we don't make any arrests—unless some wiser person murders one of them. Come to bed."