Black Star Rising

I

TSOONG DELILAH not only astonished herself but displeased herself very much. It was degrading to the dignity of an inspector of Renmin police to allow herself to be sexually attracted to a man younger than her own son! And a Yankee at that!

Even in her self-criticism, the term she was careful to use to herself was "sexually attracted." Not even in those morning periods of reproach, while she squatted over the toilet and balefully gazed into her own hostile eyes in the mirror on the bathroom door, did she admit the term "love." Such a word was simply out of the question.

Delilah, she reminded herself, was a woman with a fine career and considerable power. They were what her life was organized around, not "love." If Castor ever interfered with either (she told herself) she would discard him instantly. More than that. Kill him, if necessary. She knew that that was true; and, therefore, the word "love" was wholly inapplicable. All she cared about, really, was his strong, lean, lanky body that covered hers from toes to temples and made the entire inside of her torso tingle and convulse when he entered her. Sexual power, of course. Love? Not in the least!

So when, next morning, Castor dared to ask her, grinning, "Is that why you had me bring the ashes up here? So we could get it on, even though your son's home now?"—Delilah responded, quietly and firmly,

"My son's presence is an inconvenience, yes. So I preferred that we meet here, yes. Do not attach any special importance to those facts."

"Oh, very well," he said, still grinning. The words were satisfactory if the grin was not, so Delilah elected only to notice the words. He went on: "I suppose I'd better get the bike back to Heavenly Grain—"

"The peasants can pick it up themselves, Castor."

"Well, I suppose so, but then I've got to get the bus back to New Orleans, and it doesn't stop here."

"Bus!" she scoffed. "How foolish it would be for you to take the bus when I must drive the same route today! Almost the same route," she qualified. "I must stop at the observatory to pick up some material—but you won't mind that?"

"Oh, no," Castor said, obviously pleased; and that annoyed Delilah. Why was she trying to please this boy? Why ask him what he minded? Why, for that matter, offer him the car ride when the bus was available? "Get in the car," she ordered and was silent until she turned off on the sea road that passed the observatory. The thoughts she was thinking were dark. It was true that one tried to be considerate to one's lovers, but all the same—

All the same, simple "sexual attraction" was running thin as an explanation. At the observatory she braked peremptorily. "You will wait here, Castor. It will be best to stay in the car. If I need you to help carry anything I will call you."

"Right, Delilah," he said cheerfully, looking around the parking lot. It was the first time he had been inside the observatory's perimeter fence, Delilah knew. That no doubt accounted for his happiness, but what accounted for the light way he addressed her? "Delilah," forsooth! It was all very well to call her so in bed, where one could not reasonably demand "Renmin Inspector Tsoong," but here the guards were watching and listening. No. It was impudence, or very nearly. As she presented her ID to the guards, Delilah thought that the boy needed a lesson.

"You may enter, Inspector Tsoong," said the NCO of the guards. She nodded and passed through the heavy doors. She sat in an anteroom and waited for the director of the observatory to bring her what she had come all this way to receive. That cassette would be very important. But in her thoughts it was taking second place.

Delilah was thinking about her lovers. In the eight years since her elderly husband had gone Home to die, she had had—how many? One a week?—several hundred bed companions, at least. They had been of varying ages, and all available ethnicities. They had each one been different from the others, too. Some had been nasty or inept or— worst of all—seeking mastery over her. Quickly gone, all of those! Not one had ever taken her as lightly as Pettyman Castor. That was annoying. It could not be overlooked, because it might cause a scandal. It was also unworthy of her position and, of course, wholly inappropriate to the gravity of her errand here at the observatory.

The boy was going too far, she decided sternly. He should be corrected, she thought, and wondered if the sun was going to be too hot for him out there in the car.

Then she found out what it was that the director of the observatory was bringing her.

Castor did not mind being left to loaf in the sun. After all, he was inside the grounds of the observatory, where for so long he had so longed to be. Where he had, almost, a right to be, he thought with a sudden thrill of joyful realization and pulled out his university student ID. He showed it to the guards and wheedled nicely in the high tongue. "As I am a student of space science," he pleaded, "I have a natural right to be received at space installations."

The guards looked at each other, then the NCO grinned. "Not inside the building, Yankee student," he instructed. "However, you may walk around the parking lot if you wish."

"That's fine," cried Castor, beaming. He construed "parking lot" to mean the planted area that surrounded it—everything up to the chain link fence that cut off the nearest of the great pale radio-telescope dishes. Altogether well over a hectare. Plenty to explore! He made a beeline for the marching line of RT dishes, almost pressing his nose against the fence. How huge and handsome the telescope was! He could see the parabolic shell that caught the radio waves, the little helium-cooled nut in the middle that trapped them and converted them into signals that could be read. It was magnificent!

Then he returned to the observatory building itself, skulking along its walls, peering into windows. Most were disappointing because blocked—instruments, drapes, stored cartons, whatever. But now and then a glimpse of a shadowy room, even of a couple of Han observatory workers running up data on a bank of screens. Some day, he promised himself, he would be in one of those rooms! They would have to let him in if he completed the university courses—into the observatory, at least. Into the actual space program—if ever there really was an actual space program again—well, not so likely. It was true that the all-China space authorities seemed to be picking up a little speed under the spur of the unknown spacecraft, but if ever there were manned crews again, the Sinonauts would not be Yankee Americans. They would be Sino...

"Castor! Pettyman Castor!"

The voice was Delilah's, but the tone was one he had never heard from her before. Castor turned quickly. He was astonished that Delilah had come back out so soon. Not only soon, but rapidly; she was hurrying, almost trotting, to the car. Not only hurrying, but carrying a flat black metal box. And, in spite of what she had said, she did not let Castor carry it. When the boy reached for it she jerked it furiously out of his hand. "In the car, Pettyman," she snapped. "Move! We must get back to New Orleans at once!"

At once meant at once—not merely quickly, but as near to instantaneously as the car could be made to move. Speed was her only concern. Safety did not seem to matter at all. All the way down the coastal highway she drove at top speed, the blinking Renmin lights atop the car ordering people out of the way, the wheet-wheep of the siren commanding compliance.

All the way back, Delilah did not speak a word.

When they got into the heart of the old city Delilah slowed. Not much. Just enough to let civilians scurry out of her path. She spoke briefly into the car radio, and in a minute two other Renmin police vehicles appeared, leading the way for their inspector. But the way was not to her own apartment building. Castor was astonished to see her take the turnings that would bring her to Many-face's home and even more astonished when they reached the block the house was on. It was filled with cars. The curbs were crammed with limousines with official license plates—and with other vehicles so big and new that they didn't need to display official plates to show that they belonged to people of power. Half the power of New Orleans seemed to have parked its cars outside Many-face's home that night. Police. Renmin officials. University leaders.

"What is going on?" he demanded, staring around.

"It should not tax your intelligence, student, to deduce that for yourself," Delilah said as she pulled in to park. But though the words were her hard-edged standard, the tone was not. Castor was astonished to see that she looked upset. No, it had not taxed his intelligence to figure out that something worrisome had come in that box from the observatory; nor to realize, from the assemblage of cars, that the high party official Fung Bohsien was entertaining a leadership and cadre group summoned to discuss it. All that had been quite obvious all along. But to see that Delilah's face was drawn and her Up was being nibbled by her teeth—Tsoong Delilah, the tough-minded police inspector!—that was a surprise!

And she went on surprising him. Castor started to get out of the car. Before he had his feet on the ground he heard the door on her side slam. Before he had closed his door behind him, she was already up the steps of the walk, thumping impatiently on the knocker of Manyface's door. The box was clutched firmly under an arm, and as Castor hurried to catch up with her she gave him a frosty glare. "You will go to your room," she ordered. "There is to be a private meeting, which you may not attend. Do you understand?"

He said, "Yes, Delilah, I understand quite well. Delilah? As I am not inside to answer the door and Manyface never does, there is no use standing here. Push it open and we'll go inside."

It was a petty victory. There was no joy in it, either, because Delilah had not responded with that faint pulse of indignation that greeted most of his jokes at her expense. She was past that point, Castor realized. Which meant that whatever it was that had upset her, it was not likely to be trivial.

Castor followed instructions at least up to a point. He did go to his room. There he turned on his screen, hunted for news of something from space, found none. When he interrogated the data files they informed him only that electromagnetic emissions had been detected. What the emissions were was not stated—they could have been radar, they could have been automatic IFF pulses, or leakage from some telemetering systems—or a message. The news channels said no more. Even the interactive ones, where it was possible to search for key terms in the headlines and then to summon up uncut reports on any aspect of the story—even they had nothing to say that clarified Castor's mind. He left the screen set to continue the search, sat on the edge of his bed, gazed out the window at the chimney-pot skyline of the French Quarter, and pondered.

The Han Chinese did not bother to keep secrets, as a general rule.

If there was a secret, it had to be in some way political.

What could be political about a spacecraft in orbit?

Castor stepped to the door of his room and opened it. Manyface's house was nearly two hundred years old, built on the lavish scale of Louisiana gentry at the beginning of the twentieth century; the corridors were wide, the stairway broad, the ceilings high. Unfortunately the doors were also solid. Castor could hear a confusion of voices from the drawing room where Manyface and his guests were discussing—whatever it was they were discussing. But to pick out any individual words at this distance was hopeless. He drew back into his room as a pair of grim-faced young men, later arrivals to the meeting, pushed in the front door and entered the sitting room.

If he was to go down the stairs and listen at the door, he realized, some other latecomer might catch him at it.

Well, why not? What harm could that do? He lived in the house; it was his right to move about it!

Having convinced himself, he slipped silently down the stairs and pressed close to the regrettably thick door. It wasn't soundproof, quite. Voices came through. They were all talking in the high tongue, which was not a problem; the problem was that they seemed all to be talking at once. Most of the voices were strangers to him, but he recognized Manyface's treble and Delilah's deferential, but agitated, contralto.

He could not make out a single word of what they said. He pressed his ear to the crack—and heard, a moment too late, the opening of the unlocked front door. He straightened up quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid criticism. "Yankee!" shrilled a female voice—it belonged to a wrinkled old woman in Home blue. "What are you doing there? Go away at once!"

Castor gave her a sulky look. He tarried long enough to show her that, if he was going, it was because he had decided to go, not because he was ordered. All the same, he did as he was ordered. He complied with the letter of the order. He went away; but not to his own room.

His curiosity had become too great an itch to remain unscratched. He glanced back at the closed door, then stole into Manyface's private study.

What Manyface had that Castor did not was a hundred-channel receptor. Even slaved to it, Castor's satellite screen did not have the range of options that of Manyface possessed. He closed the door of the study behind him and made a systematic search for further news.

There was none. Not on the local channels. Not on the ethnics for the few Amerindians or Mexicans. Not on the ionosphere-relay channels from Home. Not anywhere on any of the scores of stations that Han China broadcast on, for any purpose.

Of course, he told himself irritably, that only meant that it was more interesting! If the news of whatever it was that the highest officials in New Orleans were huddling over was kept from the public, then it must be tremendous news indeed. Frowning, Castor reached to turn the screen off—

Then he thought of something. Han China could control every one of its broadcasts absolutely; but there were parts of the Earth where China's writ did not run.

Even on Manyface's hundred-channel screen, getting one of the Indian channels was hard. Their satellites were weakly powered and their antennae often savagely out of line. When the image came in it was grainy, and the indexing capricious—Castor had to try more than a dozen times to get the story he wanted.

But the story was there.

When at last the index retrieved the proper clip, Castor saw an Indian youth, pomaded hair and dhobi, wearing the sneery kind of smirk that the Indian propagandists always wore when they thought they had something discreditable to say about China. Behind the speaker was a patched-in space shot. Although it was breaking up in the poor transmission from the Indian satellite, Castor recognized the scene. It was the unidentified spaceship. The image was poor, indicating that the picture had been either taken through inferior Indian telescopes or stolen by one of their spies from Chinese sources.

It was what the man was saying that riveted Castor. "The People's Republic of China," he sneered, large lips wrapping themselves around each word before they spat it out, "is once again concealing the truth from its people." Since the satellite was time-locked to the western hemisphere, the announcer was speaking in English—almost accent-free, Castor noticed. "That a message has been received by the Chinese is undeniable, though they have made no announcement of it. We now present you the text of this message—in English, just as you hear it now."

There was a pause, while the sneery face pursed its lips to listen. Then came a recorded voice. "Attention!" it said, tone deep, hoarse, whispery.

There was a pause. The pause filled itself with pictures on the backdrop—a woman in what seemed to be military uniform; another woman, nearly naked, with what looked like a kind of stuffed animal doll on her shoulder, standing next to a sort of great bat or small dragon; a great city, glassy towers all the colors of light, with some of the same creatures wheeling above it.

Then the voice again: "We have a demonstration to offer you, since you doubt our powers."

The sneery face of the Indian announcer nodded and pursed its lips to listen.

"Choose an island," said the other voice. "We will show you our capabilities by annihilating all life on it. Then you will understand that we are serious and that the Chinese invaders must return to their own country. But we will discuss this with only one person, the president of the United States."

The pictures faded. The voice stopped. The Indian announcer was smiling disdainfully. "The 'president of the United States,"' he repeated. "As though there were any such person! No wonder the Chinese warlords have concealed this message! It will be fascinating to watch them wriggle as they attempt to deal with this challenge to their evil hegemony!"

An hour later Castor heard the sounds of the meeting below breaking up. He raced downstairs in time to catch Manyface in sober conversation with Tsoong Delilah. The other great leaders had gone. Castor dared demand, "Is it true, what the Indian satellite broadcast says?"

Tsoong Delilah gave him a look of compassion and fatigue. "It is, Castor."

"And there is a spacecraft that wants the Chinese to leave America?"

"So it seems," she said heavily.

"And they have the power to destroy life on Earth somehow?"

She did not answer. Neither did Manyface. And for Castor that was answer enough.

II

Once the news had been broadcast on the Indian satellite stations, there was no longer any use trying to keep it secret. It was electrifying news. The surge of its power flashed all over the Renmin. Sparks flew in command posts along the Indian border, haloes flickered over the Central Committee, arcs flared about the great Space Center on the island of Hainan. First the high councils knew. Then the middle-level civilians with access to Indian TV.

Then everyone.

The outpost centers in New Orleans and Sydney and Acapulco and everywhere else were sizzling with the electricity of the message from space, and so were all the anthill cities of Han China itself.

When Indian satellite TV broke the story, the leadership was already in session in the Great Hall of the People off Tienanmen Square, though it was nearly four in the morning in Beijing. They received the word at once. "Hindu pigs!" snarled the commissioner for culture, fox-faced and long-haired, descendant of a hundred generations of Kwangsi peasants—and five generations of high party cadres. No one listened to him. What did culture have to do with a threat from space?

Threat it was. Dire. Dangerous. Wholly unexpected and unprovided for, for who could have guessed that that comic and extinct monster the "United States of America" might have spacefaring allies after all these years?—and armed and belligerent ones! Dangerous, unexpected, and sickeningly unfair, too, for what "invasion" had China committed? China had never attacked the U.S.A.! The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. had committed a messy and mutual suicide, and China had simply spilled over into the hole they left.

The meetings of the high leadership were formal— ritualistic, in fact, as elaborate as a consistory of cardinals. Each cadre had his own page, secretary, and bodyguard, and the debate was usually stately.

But then the debates had always had time to be stately, calculated to the long time spans of ancient China itself. Now there was no time. There was an ultimatum: "Do they mean it?" "Of course, they mean it, pig's dung!" "But can they do it?" "Who can tell?—" There were fears: "If they take America, what next?" "If there is a next, then maybe China itself?—" There were greedy notions born of fear: "But if they are so powerful, and if we can make terms with them, then vis-^-vis the Indians we can wipe them out! If we wish, of course."

So the Highest Councils met and tried to plan and told each other it was unfair... and decided at last what every such nation and person must decide, which was that fairness had nothing to do with it. They didn't decide that easily. They needed help. The mule moves along when you tell him to, but you first have to lay the club across his nose to get his attention; what got their attention was the missile that streaked in out of space across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean and Indochina and the Philippines, and exploded fifteen hundred meters over a Western Pacific Island named Shihiki, just north of Truk. It wasn't a very big island. It wasn't even inhabited, really—not by Han Chinese, at least. But everything on the island died at once.

And after that the Highest Councils were unanimous in their resolve. The trouble was that they couldn't find anything very promising to resolve to do.

When Tsoong Delilah deigned to visit Renmin Police Headquarters these days, even the commissioners leaped to open the doors in her way. She didn't do it often; she had too much to do to waste time with routine police matters, and everyone in the Renmin administration knew it. Promotion? She could have had any promotion in the commissioners' power by the snap of her fingers; she was above promotion, she was an insider in the Highest Circles.

That was all an accident, pretty much. Because Delilah had been the one whom chance (and a little help from her glands) directed to bring to New Orleans the tapes that were too secret to transmit, she was present at that first emergency meeting of the New Orleans Renmin. Because she was there then, she was the logical choice to be assigned to the committee permanently. Why should the committee need a permanent policeone? Because anything might happen! Nearly eight million Yanks were still alive in what used to be called the Lower Forty-Eight, and who knew what craziness some of them might get into? Even serious and dangerous craziness, if they were not watched. They seemed placid, true. Placid people, all the same, sometimes blew up for no good reason at all— look at the Cultural Revolution. Quiet subject races went insane with religion or patriotism or tribal loyalties—look at old Iran or Ireland or South Africa. The most prosperous and peaceful state could be ruined by riots and bloodshed—look at everywhere. No. The police had to be ready at an instant's need. A police liaison had to be there always.

So Delilah sat silent at the back of the New Orleans People's Hall, listening to the debates and diatribes.

It was as bad, almost, as the first meetings of the Highest Councils in Beijing—in fact, there were a lot of Beijing all-highests there in New Orleans, for the leadership had split off a chunk from itself to send to America. They could not conduct secret meetings by satellite—the alien spacecraft would be listening. And New Orleans was where the action was; it was the United States that was the problem, and the United States was the best place to look for an answer.

No one had any idea what that answer might be, of course.

Castor was allowed into the meetings, too, as the page of the high party member Manyface; from her seat at the back of the room Delilah could see him, sitting at Many-face's knee, his eyes turning from speaker to speaker. Half the remarks were addressed to her: "Increase surveillance!" "Certainly, Cadre Hsu; I will notify Renmin headquarters at once." "Arrest known 'patriots' like that Feng Miranda." "With all respect, Comrade Fiscal Director, I advise against it. It suggests we are afraid the masses will follow them. At need we can conduct many arrests very quickly. We know who they all are." She was extraordinarily busy, Delilah was, and formidably competent; but all the same those qualities did not, when she caught sight of Castor on his low stool, prevent her knees from moving an inch or two apart. They moved wider than that, of course, when she could find an hour or two to be alone with him. What a pity that he wanted to spend so many of their scarce hours together talking! And what mad ideas he had of what constituted pillow talk! "Will the spaceship really attack China?" he would breathe in her ear, just as her ear was softening for some sweeter breath; and she would push herself erect and tell him not to be a fool. No one would dare attack Han China! And a precious quarter of an hour would be lost while they settled that question and went back to what was important.

To what was important, at least, to her.

What was important to Pettyman Castor was not at all the same. Oh, certainly he enjoyed the use of her body! But certainly he had other things on his mind as well. For a time Delilah had the worrisome suspicion that Castor was secretly praying for a great victory for the alien spaceship—real freedom for "America," laughable as that notion was. But that fear dwindled and disappeared. Castor was not political at all. The idea of a rescue mission to liberate America from the Han struck him as bizarre enough to be fascinating, but he did not take sides—go it husband, go it bear; the quarrel was interesting to him to contemplate, but he was not interested in who won.

What interested him—no, what excited him far more than freedom for America or the soft, sweet recesses of Delilah's body—was space. The idea of actual human beings in orbit excited him. The possibility that something important might happen in space excited him. The vagrant, hopeless hope that somehow, some day, he himself might have a chance to climb out there into the void beyond the air excited him most of all.

And they all, Delilah reflected, stung, excited him much more than she did.

He did not in the least appreciate that the hours she spent in his bed carried a heavy price tag for her. She had to steal that time. She had a son at home now, and a son who did not in the least approve of liaisons with arrogant Yankee peasants who did not know their place. When at last Delilah got to her own home each night, young Tsoong Arnold was always waiting up for her, almost sniffing at her for the stink of sex that would confirm what he already was sure she had been doing with Pettyman Castor. He was his father's son, was Tsoong Arnold. The old man had also been puritanical and righteous, though Delilah had given him no cause for jealousy—well, not much, anyway, and not very often.

What was most annoying to Delilah was that the boy did not ever charge her with what, in fact, she was doing. He only engaged her in conversation—at midnight and later, when what she desperately wanted was sleep.

Sometimes the conversations were of some importance, for indeed there were questions to settle. Questions, for instance, of Arnold's future. He had been discharged from his compulsory service in the Militia only a week before coming home. It was not the best time to be discharged, he told her, because for the first time there might be a reason to prolong his service. He was fidgeting around with the notion of reenlisting—quickly—while he could still keep his rank and assignments. So, "What do you think, Delilah?" he would demand. "Will there be trouble with the Yankees?"

"Not a chance, son"—wishing he would go to sleep— or reenlist—or miraculously drop sixteen years off his age so she could pack him off to nursery school again.

"But there might be! There might be pacification missions. There might be fighting! Chasing aboriginals into their mountain fastnesses, capturing their leaders, bringing criminal outlaws to justice—"

"There are no mountains to speak of in Louisiana province," his mother reminded him, yawning longingly.

He set his jaw. His fingers were working, as though curling around the butt of a gun. "What is the Council going to do about the ultimatum?"

"They will send the American president to meet them in space, of course," his mother said with a flash of humor as she slipped out of her polished boots.

Her son had no sense of humor. "President? What president? There is no American president," he said, and his mother said,

"Then we will have to invent one. Go to bed." She did, too. But she remained upright on the edge of the bed, staring into space, for some time.

There was one good thing to ease the scary tension, and that was the law of orbital ballistics. The alien ship had first been spotted on the far side of the Sun, many millions of miles away. It took time for it to approach the Earth. Between the first messages and the ultimatum it actually passed behind the Sun. When the ultimatum was delivered, it was spiraling in. It continued to transmit, but it did not, could not, expect the "conquerors" to deliver the actual, physical body of the president of the United States until it came much, much, closer.

So there was time. Time to think and plan.

So Delilah sat at the back of the Council chamber and listened to the debates and went out to implement them when police action was needed—prophylactic only, of course. The masses were interested, but a long way from uprising. She got her son attached to the security forces at the administrative section so he could be near her— and had a word to see that he was put on night duty so he would be far. And she watched.

They were cowards, the high party cadres, she thought judiciously. They were afraid for almighty China, when all the ship was known to be able to do was boil off one tiny island. China had survived the all-out Soviet-American exchange. It would surely survive any hit one ship could deliver from space. What damage could be delivered to the ground Delilah knew quite well. In her youth, doing her national service, she piloted aircraft that sprayed five-year sterility drugs on African villages. That was in the airborne MPs; that was what decided her to continue police work when she was discharged, though no longer in an airplane. The sterility drugs killed no one, of course, but the job made her want to know more, and so she had read and studied: Airborne warfare could annihilate, yes, and it could damage and kill, certainly. But it could never win.

Manyface knew that. Of all the comrades in the green-and-gilt room, he was the only one who consistently said, "This is not a cause for fear alone, it is also an opportunity if we know how to seize it." The old man was recovering from his last implant—the spur of urgency no doubt helped his recovery along. Manyface was a committee—thought of himself as a committee—but in times of crisis the committee spoke with a single voice.

Manyface was, for instance, a great deal more sensible than Tchai Howard, the director of Taxation and Enforcement, a tiny man with a mean disposition whose favorite refrain was: "Prevent local trouble! Disarm the Yanks. Open camps."

"And who," asked Manyface, "will feed us then, if we put them all in camps? They are in camps, Tchai; they live in camps in their communes."

"But Comrade Tchai is right," the district commandant squeaked, moving restlessly in her silk-brocade chair. And so the wrangling went on. Delilah watched Castor's face turning from one to another and wondered what he was making of it.

And then Manyface said, "All we need is a president, comrades. A president whom we can trust, who has demonstrated his loyalty to the Han Chinese, who knows enough about space to talk sensibly to the aliens. Whom we can control."

And Tsoong Delilah glanced at Castor, slipped silently around the rows of armchairs, bent down to Manyface's great, bulging head, and whispered in his ear.

Manyface looked startled. For a moment the icy control wavered, and others of his voices tried to speak, then he got back his chairmanship. "Pettyman Castor," he called, "go back to my home and get my briefcase. The red one. Do it now."

That afternoon a message went out to every village, collective, farm, and factory in what had once been the United States. It said,

It is necessary to elect a president of the United States to deal with the bandit spacecraft. Poll your people. Report immediately the total of the voting in three categories, as follows:

a. Total voters in your community.

b. Total of votes for the candidate.

c. Total number of voters who failed to understand instructions.

Categories b and c should equal a.

While it was on its way Castor hurried back to Many-face's house, found the briefcase, started to return—and was interrupted by a message: "Don't bother to come back. The Council is recessing." A few hours later Many-face returned, uncommunicative, retiring to his room with instructions not to be bothered; and Delilah followed not long after. She was communicative enough, but only on the level of biology. "We will eat, my young friend," she announced jovially, "and then we will have a few drinks. My son? He is on duty tonight. All night. He will be kept on duty until the Council resumes, and so I will remain here with you tonight."

Castor would have preferred to talk, but he could not talk with his mouth full of food, or full of wine, or later full of Delilah. He fell asleep with all his curiosity unsatisfied—intellectual curiosity, at least.

At 6:00 a.m. the phone rang in his room.

He reached for it, but Delilah scrambled over him to take it. She identified herself, listened, hung up, then turned to Castor, grinning. "Mr. President," she said, "good morning."

III

When the Council resumed its deliberations later that morning there was no stool at Manyface's feet for Castor. A high-backed gilt chair occupied the middle of the room with all the brocaded armchairs surrounding it; and Tsoong Delilah managed not to smile as she conducted Castor to his new place. Back at the wall of the room she saw with amusement how ill-at-ease the boy was. It was a place of honor, but not a comfortable one; he could see only the upper portion of the Council and craned his neck uncomfortably now and then to peer at what was going on behind him.

But it was the front of the room that had taken over. The chairman was Wa Fohtsi, head of the delegation from Home, the power figure in the room. He peered nearsightedly at Castor and said:

"Do not worry, Mr. President. No one will hurt you." Castor stared at him—almost impudently. Delilah thought: Please, don't let the boy get himself into trouble now! But Wa went on ponderously: "As president of the United States, there will be only some very simple things for you to do. Your main job, if not your only one, will be to communicate with these bandits and persuade them of the realities of the situation."

"What—" Castor began eagerly, and the old Buddha raised his hand.

"What those realities are," he said, "will be explained to you before you begin communicating. There will be no 'conversation,' Pettyman Castor. You will have a prepared script to tape for transmission to them. Basically, you will convince them that we Han have done no evil thing. That we are, indeed, America's benefactors, if the situation is understood properly. Your ultimate objective will be not only to cause them to withdraw any threat against China, but indeed to lend support in convincing the Indians that they must abandon certain outrageous and damaging practices, such as transmitting propaganda broadcasts to Han areas. However, all that will be explained to you. Meanwhile there will be some delay until the bandit spacecraft is in position to communicate again. There will be plenty of time for your reeducation."

"I see," Castor said, dampened.

Then his spirits rose again as Wa said, "Inspector Tsoong will remain with you to aid in your reeducation, and you will give her an official title." ("I, Castor? Give Tsoong Delilah a title?") "You will be provided with suitable quarters and staff." ("Quarters? Staff?") "It will be useful as well for you to put together some sort of mock government apparatus," Wa went on thoughtfully. "At least a cabinet. In that way, when we prepare your transmission to the outlaw ship we can have you appear with your cabinet around you to show that it is official."

"Of course," Castor cried and then, "What's a cabinet?"

Wa glanced humorously at Delilah, who frowned, though her heart was suddenly melting. The poor, innocent, uninformed kid! "A cabinet, Citizen Pettyman," she said severely, "is a group of high officials. The most important one at this time is what is called secretary of state, and Comrade Wa has been generous enough to propose that I assume that post."

"Ah, not generous, Inspector Tsoong," the old man protested modestly. "It is what is required by the logic of the situation." He closed his eyes for a moment to try to think if he had forgotten anything and decided he hadn't. He opened them and extended a hand, Western-style. "That will be all, Mr. President," he said, his eyes twinkling. As Castor left with Tsoong Delilah he heard the old Buddha chuckling.

In her car, en route back to her apartment building, Delilah indulgently let Castor chatter. The silly boy was almost believing all this was real! Not real, exactly—of course it was real, or as real as the presidency of a nearly imaginary country could hope to be. But he thought it was substantive!

In certain senses it almost was substantive. As Delilah took Castor up the elevator to the floor of her apartment she greatly enjoyed showing him one of those senses. She led him past her door, to the door of the even larger corner one just beyond, pulled the key to the new apartment out of her bag and handed it to him. "Mr. President," she said grandly, "with the presidency comes a presidential mansion, and Castor, here's yours."

How pop-eyed Yankees got sometimes! The expression on his face would have forced her into hysterical laughter if it hadn't forced her into tenderness instead. The face was sweaty with joy and confusion as he unlocked his very own door and looked in on his very own apartment. He didn't walk in. He trotted in. He didn't wait for Delilah. She followed, smiling at his glee, as he peered into the kitchen—"It's bigger than yours!"— and the master bedroom—"A water bed?"—and the view from the window, and the little toy fountain that plinked into the rock pool built into a corner of the sun porch. Delilah was not at all surprised that he loved the apartment. It was a very good one, better than her own, and the previous tenants had been very surly about leaving it.

At the bed he clutched her to him and fell back with her, the cold water underneath rippling back and forth and jouncing them. Crossly, Delilah tried to pull herself free, but he was too strong. Laughing, he pressed his face into her neck and then pulled it free to stare into her eyes. "Madame Secretary of State," he chortled, "what a hell of a fine cabinet meeting we can have right here!"

She jerked free, squatting on the hard edge of the bed, stern with him: "Have a care, Castor! It is all right to make jokes because in a way this whole situation is no more than a joke. But it is also in some ways very serious, and if you joke it must only be with me. Not with the high cadres. Certainly not when you talk to the spaceship people!"

"Aw, hell, Delilah," he grumbled. "I wouldn't do anything like that. Please, do I get to keep this when it's over?"

"Something of it at least, perhaps," she said, softening.

"How much?" he begged. "No, don't tell me. I will enjoy it while I have it and earn it as best I can."

She looked hard at him, but the look on his face was without guile—inside his heart, perhaps, something entirely different. She got up, slapping back her wandering hair, and sat more decorously on a gilt bench before a makeup table. "Now. There are practical matters. The cadres have caused research to be done into the old American cabinet, and it seems that there are twelve major posts. Most of them will of course have no function, even as a joke—there is certainly no need for a secretary of labor. But we will fill all the posts anyway."

"Of course," he said earnestly, so earnestly that she looked at him warningly.

"For instance," she went on, "we will use some of them for political purposes. To the post of secretary of the interior you will appoint Feng Miranda."

That one, she saw with pleasure, jolted the prepared expressions off his face. "But—But—"

"But she is a revolutionary, yes. I know that, of course."

She patted his head, relaxing, and sat down to take off her boots. What a good student this Castor was, after all! Unruly. Vain. Inclined to be impudent. But educable— more than willing to learn, quick and eager to learn. He was watching her with complete attention as she lectured, "To deal with a revolutionary group, the first thing of importance is to keep the channels open. If you stop them saying what they wish they will say other things you do not hear; trouble begins that way. What does the girl want, after all? Freedom for 'America'? But there is no America. The expulsion of us Han Chinese? How silly, since she is purebred genetic Han herself. So we will give her a title and the illusion of a national government to satisfy her illusion of a nation. Also," she added, smiling as she reached to undo the buttons of his shirt, "it is really quite amusing, and a joke is always worth having. Come try out your new bed."

It was not up to Tsoong Delilah to select a cabinet for Castor to appoint, but she was permitted to make recommendations and to be in on the discussions—which was more than Castor was. They could not find twelve that were worth the naming, but Delilah assured them the people from space would not notice a few shortages.

When the list was complete Delilah returned to her own apartment to think it over. It was not her responsibility in any formal sense to do that; nothing she had done had been done without the approval of higher authorities than she. But Tsoong Delilah did not need to be given responsibility. She was responsible. If things went wrong in any project with which she was concerned, it was never because Renmin Police Inspector Tsoong Delilah had failed to try to anticipate problems and try to avoid them. Delilah knew that of herself. It gave her pride. In that respect she was irreproachable—not counting the occasional reproach or fleeting thought that she might deserve a reproach over the way she had let Pettyman Castor occupy a measurable part of her concerns...

She dismissed that thought peremptorily. It wasn't hard. She'd been practicing it for months.

Tsoong Delilah dropped a chip into her home screen and studied the list of high officials in the American government. (Or American "government"? Or "American" government?)

They were:

President: Pettyman Castor, age twenty-two, nonpolitical, docile (not counting youthful impudence). A satisfactory choice, with watching.

Attorney General: Sebastio Carlos, poli-sci professor at the university ; Yankee whose family had been in Chinese government for two generations—very loyal. Very loyal in the ways that could be counted on, because the Han Chinese could give him more than anyone else. An excellent choice for attorney general, Delilah thought sardonically. If this "government" should ever succumb to the wild impulse to pass any laws, Sebastio would make sure they didn't matter.

Secretary of Defense: Tchai Howard, small man with a mean disposition—but a former comrade commander in the Air Defense Corps and well able to plan military actions. Killing did not frighten Tchai Howard. Like Tsoong Delilah herself, he was American-born; also like Delilah, he was in no sense an "American."

Secretary of the Interior: Feng Miranda. There was nothing Delilah needed to think over about Feng Miranda, for she had thought it all already. The possible gains outweighed the losses. It was only necessary to be watchful so that the losses did not occur.

Secretary of Agriculture: Danbury Eustace—nonentity—regional director for rapeseed and oil grains for all of the New Orleans area. That didn't matter. What mattered was that when Delilah called up pictures of American statesmen, the most statesmanlike of them were middle-aged, iron-gray-haired, wide-eyed, strong-jawed— exactly like Danbury Eustace. No problem. Didn't even have to be watched, because it would never occur to him to do anything at all not ordered in a party directive.

Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare: Many-face. An obvious choice. A comic one, too, because what experience had Manyface had, these last twenty years, of health?

Vice-president: Delilah frowned. How had they forgotten to name a vice-president? Should she call Wa and mention it to him? Did it matter? She could not decide that and resolved to think it over more carefully later on. Perhaps, she thought, unable to leave the subject, it was too late for that, for wasn't the vice-president what they called elected, like Castor? Another election would be easy enough to arrange, of course—No. Let it go. She went on to the last post:

Secretary of State: Tsoong Delilah. That completed the roster, and that one, at least, she thought, smiling to herself, would never ever, under any circumstances at all, do anything harmful to the People's Republic of China, by accident or design. It was a good list.

It only remained to get them all together and rehearse them in their roles.

The rehearsals—which Wa, grinning sardonically, instructed her to call cabinet meetings—were in fact political reeducation sessions. Wa himself sat in on some of them, Buddha-grin, absolute certainty of control over them all. For him it was voluntary. For the others it was compulsory—for almost all the others, at any rate. Sebastio was never at the cabinet meetings because he didn't need reeducation; his work was elsewhere, anyway. Delilah certainly didn't need it, either, but the meetings needed her—she was the one who kept one eye on Feng Miranda to see that she didn't get any troublesome ideas and the other on Castor to see that he took the matter seriously. That was not easy. Castor could stand about five quotations from Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung in one morning, she found. After that he began to scowl and whisper sardonic remarks into the ear of Feng Miranda. At the end of the second session she took him firmly by an arm. "You must be more serious," she scolded as soon as they were out of the chamber.

"For what?" he demanded angrily. "Shit, Delilah, I don't care about all this stuff. It's costing me time at the university—I'll never catch up with the classes!"

"The president of the United States," she said firmly, "does not need to attend a class. You can have tutors. You can become a research fellow. You can order your own degree and it will be given you—all this, providing you do the task the Party has assigned you, will be yours."

And the funny thing was, she realized she meant it. Whatever else happened, Pettyman Castor could never go back to being a peasant on the Heavenly Grain Collective.

What the implications of that were, Delilah could not decide, but a queer burning feeling in her belly told her that they were going to be important to her.

When finally they were all sufficiently indoctrinated to be trusted, a taping session was set up. Castor read his lines handsomely:

"My friends from space," he said, gazing benignly into the camera, "I am afraid there has been a mistake. The Chinese are not our conquerors. They are our friends. Let us both put down our weapons and meet in peace and friendship, and—"

Peace and friendship. Put down our weapons! While the president was delivering his canned message, his secretary of state was doing her very best to keep a dignified expression. The idea of America having any weapons to put down was ludicrous.

The idea, or more accurately the fact, that even Han China had no weapons that might prevail against the spacecraft was not funny at all.

The taping was successful; the technicians all checked in, one by one, with their assurances that sound was good, color was good, no one had a bad shadow to hide his face, all the cabinet had managed to look sufficiently cabinetly; but Delilah was quiet as she and Castor started back. It was only when they were nearing home that she began to grin. The grin came when Castor asked, "Say, Delilah— there was scaffolding around the building when I left this morning. Do you know what they're doing?"

"I know," said Delilah smugly, "very well." But would not answer him. Would not tell him how all the other tenants in the building had been persuaded to move out, how all the "Americn cabinet" had been provided with suitable quarters; would not speak at all on the subject until they rounded the corner and saw what had happened to the building. The pastel lime green was gone under two coats of quick-drying paint the color of rice flour. The workmen were just removing the last of the spidery struts and platforms they had worked from. Castor turn to her in puzzlement, and Delilah snickered. "Mr. President," she said, "behold your White House!"

Living in the same house with Tchai Howard and Feng Miranda and Danbury Eustace and Tsoong Delilah and Tsoong Delilah's son—especially with Miranda and Delilah and the boy—was not a relaxing existence for Castor. For a lousy secretary, Tchai was pretty peremptory with his president. Delilah was peremptory enough, too, with her bed demands—which, it was true, Castor greatly enjoyed meeting. (But why did it always have to be her idea?) Miranda was the most troublesome, for what she saw in Castor was hard to figure out (certainly she treated him as a silly delinquent), but that there was something was clearly demonstrated by the way she hung around.

Life had been a lot less confusing back on the collective.

What it had been back on the collective was boring, and even now there were boring parts. Most boring of all were the "cabinet meetings," where nothing ever seemed to be discussed except why it was dialectically essential to maintain proper political and economic attitudes and what those ordained attitudes had to be. It was so often explained to Castor that the Chinese were not aggressors in America that Castor, who had always assumed that was true anyway, began to doubt it. Miranda fed that doubt. Miranda had no doubts. When one day the meeting was abruptly terminated without explanation and Delilah and Manyface went hurriedly off in her car the same way, Miranda clutched Castor's arm. "We'll walk home," she informed him. "I've got a lot to say to you."

Inside, Castor groaned; he knew what that lot was. After half an hour or so he was groaning audibly, because the lot was just what he expected. "You're a traitor to your country," she lectured. "You make a fool of yourself with that old Han policeone! You have the title, and the title gives you the power—have the courage to use them!"

Reeducation had not worked well on Feng Miranda. Argument did no better: "What 'country'? What is the harm in making love with someone I enjoy? Use the title for what?—and what good is the title when it can be taken away in a minute?"

"You're a silly child," spat Feng Miranda, and the argument could have gone on forever. It lasted more than an hour. Could have lasted for three, but just as they were crossing Canal Street a Renmin police car made a violent U-turn, its siren suddenly ascream, and pulled up beside them. "Are you Citizen Pettyman? Citizen Feng? Get in at once—you are needed!" And no questions answered as they screamed through the streets to the mock-White House, where Delilah was tapping her foot at the door.

"Where have you been?" she demanded; and, without waiting for an answer, "They finished the secure link and transmitted the tape. The answer has just come in."

"Answer?" said Castor, not quite able to follow. "What kind of answer?"

Delilah's face was like thunder. "They won't talk to you by radio. They want you to meet them in space."

IV

Castor had never been in an airplane before. When the takeoff thrust jammed him hard against the seat back he swallowed and grinned weakly and wondered if airsickness disqualified a person for spaceflight. Feng Miranda had never been in the air before, either, and hissed resentment into Castor's ear: "These airplanes should have been ours!" Tsoong Delilah had been in aircraft a thousand times—all types of aircraft, all over the world—and mostly she was watching Miranda and Castor in the seat ahead with cold eyes. It was of course certain that she was not jealous of the way this Overseas-Chinese vixen had set her sights for Castor, since Castor was merely a machine she used to produce good sensations inside her body. There was no question of "love." Therefore there could be no question of "jealousy." When she disciplined Feng, as she intended to do very soon, it would be for none but the most correct political reasons: the woman could not jeopardize this most vital of missions.

What she would do to, or with, Castor was less clear in her mind.

Still, she thought indulgently, the boy was so very thrilled by it all! It was flight and adventure that made Castor's eyes sparkle so, not the presence of a skinny girl child with crazy and destructive notions.

So thinking, Delilah let herself drift off to sleep. All the same, hours later, when they were in the limousine to take them to their housing, she made sure that it was she who sat beside Castor.

In truth, Delilah was nearly as excited as Castor, for everything was almost as new to her as to him. The island of Hainan hung from the southernmost tip of Han China, out of the way, not very interesting except for its climate (but Hawaii's was just as good) and for its Space Center. That was very interesting, of course, but generally speaking that interest was discouraged by the high party officials. Delilah had been Home a dozen times, the last time to escort her aged and ailing husband to his dying place (when would the old man do it?). Hainan Dao she had never seen.

From the air there had been tiny and unsatisfying glimpses of coast, palms, rivers, villas; even, a minute or two, everybody craning to get a corner of one of the tiny aircraft windows as they approached the landing over the Space Center itself, a giant man-rated ship towering over its own gantry, with the meteorological and communications and sky-eyes rockets dotted across the rest of the field pencil-thin and wheatstalk-high by comparison. Everyone on the plane shouted when they saw the ships. Even Delilah.

And everyone, even Delilah, stared excitedly out of the limousines as they purred toward their quarters. Hainan Dao was rather like a combination of the old Waikiki and Palm Springs, with Midwest car racetracks and stately California mansions thrown in. Castor's eyes popped as they passed groves of ornamental trees and swimming pools tucked into the formal gardens of homes. There were joggers along the road and children playing games in meadows; there were old people taking the sun between holes on the golf courses and lovers holding hands. And all the cars! Hainan Dao was a rich place. Except for the Han Chinese, none of the "American cabinet" had ever seen a rich countryside before, and when they pulled into a long, pine-lined drive, Feng Miranda began to swear bitterly to herself. Delilah grinned. She knew what the silly child was thinking.

"What is that?" Castor demanded in her ear, and Delilah peered to see what he meant. They were approaching an immense house with balconies and pillars and a fountain playing in the center of its circled driveway, and just before the fountain was a pole. The pole bore a flag: white stripes and red stripes, blue field and white stars.

Delilah could not help herself, though others might have seen. As she leaned toward the window she touched her lips to his cheek in pleasure at his openmouthed stare. "Have you never seen it before, Mr. President? It is the flag of your United States of America."

Exhausted though they were and spacey with jet lag, the first thing they did was have a meeting. To Delilah's surprise it was Manyface's face Dien Kaichung that took charge. "You, Tsoong Delilah," he snapped, "you will study pilotage."

"I already know pilotage," said Delilah, and heard with surprise the tone of her voice. It was not a good tone to take with a high party member. But in fact it was not really the high party member Fung Bohsien who was speaking, but only the implant Dien Kaichung, or the implant that had once been the human being Dien Kaichung before he became an implant, and thus only one member of the committee that was Manyface. Delilah found herself confused, not only by jet lag. Yet one thing was clear to her: it was not only politically unprofitable to take that tone, it was also likely to make problems. In fact it did. The face of Manyface twisted in a grimace that was almost pain. For a moment it was the eye of the real Fung Bohsien that stared accusingly at her out of the face they held in common. "I'm sorry," she said, as graciously as she could. "I am tired, and careless. I will of course do as you instruct, Comrade Dien, since you are our director of training."

He frowned at her, moving his lips as though holding an internal conversation—no doubt he is, thought Delilah. She looked away from him to minimize the confrontation and fell into another. Feng Miranda! Saucy little Overseas-Chinese slut, she was sitting far too close to Castor and whispering far too intimately into his ear. And— oh, what unfairness!—it was not the slut who got reprimanded, it was Delilah herself. "Do pay attention, Comrade Tsoong," Manyface snapped. "We have much to cover, and little time to do it. Now! You will of course all be required to take extra-atmospheric training. There will be centrifuges and bouncing chambers, spinning rooms to test for space-sickness, underwater maneuvering to simulate zero-G. These courses are of the utmost importance for those who will be part of the mission! If anyone fails any of these tests," he added severely, "he will of course be disqualified from the mission at once, so do not take them lightly—oh, what is it now?" he demanded irritably as Feng Miranda raised her hand.

Her expression was innocent enough, but her tone was not. "I only wanted to ask, what if it is President Pettyman who should fail the tests?" she said sweetly.

That nasty little man Tchai Howard interrupted then. "Shut up, Feng," he ordered roughly. "Let the briefing proceed." Delilah could have kissed him... almost.

In fact the rest of the briefing was more interesting than the assignment of tasks, for the Space Center teams had produced computer simulations of the alien vessel's orbit and projected deltas; there would be eighteen days at most before it would be in position to meet the launched president of the United States in orbit. "That is at most," Manyface warned. "It may be as little as fourteen. So there must be no delay in training! Is that understood?"

The party all nodded, and Manyface allowed himself a grin. "In that case," he declared—and this time the voice was Fung Bohsien's own—"I will tell you what has been decided. Three of you will be aboard the rocket when it is launched for the rendezvous—always assuming you pass the tests," he added, looking meaningfully at Delilah. "I will now give you their names. Pettyman Castor. Tsoong Delilah. And Tchai Howard."

Castor looked thunderstruck, then ablaze with joy. The mean little face of Tchai Howard froze, then split in a predatory grin. Delilah herself felt nothing at all—nothing but a sort of subliminal sting of fear, then a rush of pride at having been selected...

And then, as she caught a glimpse of the jealousy and rage on the face of Feng Miranda, an exultation of triumph.

The house they stayed in had twenty-nine rooms. Castor counted them and reported the result to Delilah with awe. No one else had counted, because it was not the kind of house that announced its status with numbers. It was far too grand for that. It was a manor, almost a palace ; in the queer, archaic terms of its butler (for it had, among many other unprecedented luxuries, a butler) it was "the Residence." Whatever it was called, it was impressively huge. It had the Master Suite and the Green Jade Suite and the Mao Wing, with six handsome bed-sitters, each complete with bath and tiny sitting room and hot tub. It had a library and a drawing room—actually two drawing rooms, if you counted the one that completed the Master Suite. It had a dining gallery and a billiard room; it had porches and conversation chambers and a huge green lawn.

It also had, as noted, servants. What servants! Delilah had never seen their like. These were not peasants hired out of the pig slop. The butler was Singapore-born and Shanghai-bred, but his genes were pure English countryside six generations back and so were his accent and his manners. Not to mention his warm, pale blue eyes and his curly blond hair. All eight of the maids were from New Zealand, mixed Anglo and Maori ancestry. The kitchen help, which had been hired away from the rich suburbs around Benares, were every one French by ancestry and training. All these people contributed all they could to the material well-being of the party from America—such food! Such wonderful, warm, soft, perfumed beds! But they were not what the party was there for; that was training.

And training they got.

First there was pilotage. That was not hard for Delilah, with six thousand flight hours on her log, and not too hard for Castor, with all his lonely hours in front of the teaching screens. For Tchai Howard it was hard, because he had to start from scratch. There were scuba lessons—because scuba diving was the closest easy thing to zero-G—a breeze for Castor, not too hard for Delilah, again a starting-over for Tchai. Martial arts was quite the opposite. Tchai not only didn't need that, he was their instructor—as he was in hand weapons and the concealment thereof, a course that they got whether they needed it or not. Tchai didn't need it, clearly, but he put himself through the same loading and firing and marksmanship and stripping and cleaning drills as the other two.

Almost all of that part of the training was on the Space Center grounds itself, half an hour from home. A smell of petroleum products hung over everything—not from the rockets, but from the crackers that made the liquid hydrogen fuel; by and by no one noticed it anymore. The rest of the cabinet was not required to take any part of the training. Most of them hung around anyhow—especially envious Miranda, who complained endlessly that she was excluded. Even to so unsympathetic an ear as Delilah's: "I deserve to go into space. I want to!"

Rough good humor from Delilah: "No chance, Yankee. You couldn't stand the centrifuge."

"I'll bet I could," Miranda said. It wasn't just her tone that was resentful. Her whole body was tense and angry, thumbnails digging into the nails of her forefingers.

Delilah felt a flash of anger. "No chance anyway! You are disloyal, Feng. What fool would trust you in space? Earn trust, then you may have some chances—possibly!" And flounced off to try her space suit with Castor and Tchai Howard while Miranda glared after her.

The rocket that would carry Delilah, Castor, and Tchai into space was still the tallest object on the field, but as they came out of the space suit workshop Delilah frowned at a second gantry. What were workmen doing there? And then she saw that preparations were being made to install a second rocket, not one of the lesser utility craft but a big one. "What's going on?" she demanded of Tchai Howard, who shrugged.

"Backup," he said.

"Backup for what?"

He looked at her, and then at Castor a few steps away earnestly listening to the complaints of Feng Miranda.

"None of your business," he said and left Delilah to wonder.

Since training was arduous, there was not much time for Delilah to worry about Castor, who shared her bed every night anyway. There was even less time to think about the rest of the world until, waiting for Castor to come out of the shower one night, Delilah absently thumbed on a newscast.

The rest of the world was not idle.

When Castor came back to bed Delilah was sitting upright, glaring at the screen. "Look!" she cried. "The wogs are making trouble!"

"Trouble" was the word for it. It wasn't crisis, wasn't a threat, exactly—certainly wasn't a danger of warfare or anything like that. Well, not immediately, Delilah thought savagely; but perhaps the Indians needed to be taught a lesson! The newscasts were showing "spontaneous" demonstrations against China, not only in Delhi and Calcutta but in the rebuilt cities of Rome and Moscow and a dozen other places. It was hard to piece together, from the voice-overs and statements of public figures, just what was going on; but the outlines became clear.

India had got suspicious. They suspected what was quite true, that the Chinese were in secret contact with the spacecraft. They could not know exactly what the contact meant, but they were worried—hence the "spontaneous" demonstrations to denounce China's "attempt" to "revive" the imperialist United States.

The night went badly for Delilah.

In the morning she demanded admittance to the daily Steering Committee meeting. That was not her right; she was not high enough to have such rights. It was not her duty, either, because her time was taken up with training; but the morning was free, as part of the carefully prepared recreation schedule, and anyway her blazing eyes would have let her in regardless. "I hope," said Tchai frostily, "that you have a good reason for this!"

"The best!" declared Delilah, seating herself on one of the half-dozen chairs in the study—there were only three people present, Tchai and Manyface and the Space Center chief, Mu Dailen. "Why have you not instructed us on the Indian situation?"

"There is no Indian situation," said Tchai frostily. "It is only a nuisance, not important. What is important is your mission."

"You think you can get the spaceship to help you against India, is that it?"

"It is our intention to explore that possibility, yes," said Manyface, smiling at her. "Please, Delilah. Your training is your first priority. We had no wish to disturb it with outside factors."

Tchai was having none of the smiles or pleases. "Enough," he barked. "We are in the middle of important decisions. Tsoong must go."

But Manyface smiled at him, too. "She can stay, Howard. We may want her advice."

What they could possibly want her advice on, Delilah could not guess, since what they were discussing had to do with Tchai's specialty and no one's else. Weaponry! Delilah sat seething as they displayed holograms over the bamboo fireplace. Explore a possibility! An unimportant nuisance! And what was important to them? Was it these weapons that they were hiding inside the spacecraft? Delilah looked at them with disdain. So this was how high party members conducted themselves! Why, they were no more than foolish children! Even the tai chi class of seven-year-olds she could hear faintly beyond the pine grove would not imagine that these peashooters could prevail against a spaceship that had the power to annihilate an island—that claimed that it could annihilate a continent as easily, or a planet! Delilah believed that claim. No. There would be only one useful weapon on that ship, and that would be herself. Castor, a silly figurehead boy. Tchai, a sillier, older one. Their carefully camouflaged guns were as idiotic as the fireplace of bamboo, in a room that never needed a fire, that would burn the house down at the first touch of flame. "I am not useful to you here after all," she said frostily, "so I will go supervise the others."

"Of course," said Manyface, this time managing not to smile, and Delilah managed not to slam the door. It was, of course, not true that she needed to supervise the others; there was nothing to supervise on a free morning. It was unquestionably true, on the other hand, that she had not seen Castor since he disappeared into the shower that morning. Where could he have gone?

He was not in the gun room, though he liked the old one-over-one shotguns the Chinese craftsmen had made and the mean little Uzis that could cut a man in half. He was not in the library—no surprise there, Delilah thought darkly. She walked through them, and the breakfast room, and the halls, as though absentminded in thought. Her eyes were focused, though, and they saw nothing she was looking for.

Where was the boy?

She stepped out onto the eastern sun deck as though for a breath of air—who would want that? Steamy, sultry, it stung her nose. There was no one there, no one on the long, green lawn, no one visible in the piney grove or around the water-lily pool. "Sawyer," she called harshly over her shoulder. The butler appeared at once. "Sawyer, have you seen Pettyman Castor this morning?"

"Yes, modom. In the conservatory. With Comrade Feng Miranda, modom," he said, and Delilah whirled and glared at the tone of faint amusement in his voice. How terrible if even the servants thought she was jealous of the boy! Delilah was in no good mood as she stormed through the rooms toward the conservatory.

Before she saw them she heard the voices, Castor's good-humored growl, Miranda's angry soprano. It was not only Miranda's voice that annoyed Delilah, the voice that had always grated on her nerves—pitiful bird-chirp, how could a sensible man like Castor stand hearing it? The words were far worse. She was denouncing Castor: "You're a honey-ball! Rice-flour white on the outside, Han yellow inside—you're a traitor to your country!"

And Castor's placatory "Aw, sweet, you're as Han as Delilah is. What are you carrying on about?"

If only he had not said her name, thought Delilah as she stormed into the doorway, glaring at them with frost and flame. "You have no country, you fool," she shouted at Miranda. "You had a desert, and we Chinese came and brought it back to life for you!" She blasted them while she froze them. They stood petrified, Castor with a foolish grin on his face, hand still uplifted in mock-defense against Miranda's attack; the girl with her mouth still open to deliver it. And what a nasty little mouth she had, lip-sticked to make it worse!

Whatever Miranda was, she was no coward. "We hate you for it!" she cried belligerently.

And that was fine! How stupid of the girl to let it become a debate, Delilah thought, for at debate she was confident of winning. She advanced into the room, the fire and ice controlled. "I see," she said, seating herself between them. "You and those other madmen the Russians, you did your best to destroy the world, did you not?"

"We did not! We were simply defending ourselves—a network of antimissile satellites that could not possibly be used to attack—"

"Ah, yes," nodded Delilah. "You erected your nuclear laser defenses, yes, so that the Russians could thereafter do nothing to hurt you. But you could hurt them. And you were terribly surprised when it all failed."

"They attacked us without warning!"

"Yes," sighed Delilah. "The naked warrior saw his opponent putting on armor, so he attacked while he thought there was still a chance to win, is that not right?" The girl was angrily silent. "But let us consider this question of hate, Comrade Feng. You hate us because we brought you law and order. You hate us for helping to get your farms clean again. You hate us because you insanely destroyed what used to be your country and your people were unable to put it together again. I understand that. It is natural to resent help. The wounded dog snaps at the master who tries to bind its wounds."

"Tsoong," Miranda said, "the British brought law and medicine to India long ago. Did that make the Indians love them? Or want them in their country?"

Delilah shook her head indulgently, though the frost and fire were still in her voice. "The cases are entirely different. There it was a few thousand Englishmen running the affairs of a hundred million Indians. Now there are almost as many Han Chinese in North America as aborigin—as persons of North American extraction."

"Do you think that makes it better?"

"It makes what you say unfair!"

Miranda said doggedly, "You're Han, Tsoong. You don't understand."

"You're Han, too!"

Miranda shook her head. "I'm an American, Tsoong. So is Castor if only he knew it. And," she added, rising and moving toward the door, "this conversation is at an end."

The Indian unrest grew. The alien ship was moving into position. The training went on. The man-rated ship was tested and fueled and stocked.

And armed.

Only Delilah and Tchai Howard, of the crew, knew about the armament. Castor was kept away from the ship while the weaponry was installed and so, of course, were the other "Americans." Castor objected only out of annoyance, because the ship was so fascinating to him; Feng Miranda objected out of the reasons she always had for objecting to anything the Han Chinese did. "You stole our space program from us," she shouted at Delilah, and Delilah snapped back, "You have no space program. There is no 'you'! In any event, you have neither the training nor the aptitudes to be of any use."

"You said I couldn't stand the centrifuge, either, but I did! I won twenty yuan from Tchai Howard because I took more Gs than he could!"

"Tchai Howard will be spoken to," snapped Delilah. "Go about your business!"

But at last the great day dawned.

To Tsoong Delilah's astonishment, she found she was frightened. Going into space was not, after all, like getting into an airplane. Going into space was like entering an immense, hostile, and unknown place where human beings—even Renmin police inspectors—came at their peril; and the burden of the responsibility (and the fear) of meeting whoever was in the alien spacecraft was terrifying. She let her dressers put her space suit on her and attach the vulgar and uncomfortable little pipes and slip the mating collar around her neck, and she was in a daze.

It all went so fast! Out of her dressing room, into the White Room, up the elevator with Tchai and Castor in their own suits next to her, as silent as she. She glanced into their faces and saw only what they saw in her, the opaque light-shutter faceplates and no humanity behind them; they didn't talk; the technicians and helpers talked, kept on talking, talked endlessly, but it was only orders: "Through the door, please!" "Sit down in your seat, please!" "Move your arm so I can see if it's free—"

And then the great belly-busting thrust from below and the queerest moment of sick terror and wild jubilance Tsoong Delilah had ever felt.

And they were in space. Forty kilometers up in six hundred seconds, dropping the boosters and the tanks, and Delilah was too busy to think and Castor too drunk with delight to stop talking. They were in space! Naked hairless apes, spurning the planet that had borne them! What a clod you are, Tchai Howard, Delilah exulted as she matched her board for the lifting thrust—not a word out of you in this great moment...

The words did come from Tchai then, but not from the space-masked figure still beside her. They came from the space control radio, and they said,

"Tsoong! Pettyman! Arrest her at once! She must be shot! She knocked me out and took my suit!"

Delilah and Castor turned to stare at the figure between them.

"I told you I could get into space," said the shrill, vindictive voice of Feng Miranda.

V

It was impossible to turn back, of course.

It was ridiculous to "arrest" Feng Miranda, though of course Delilah did so. But what did "arrest" mean when there was nowhere to go?

It was inevitable, though, that rage and frustration exploded on the girl, and her nose was still bleeding from the back of Delilah's fist when they sighted the alien spacecraft. If Castor had not got in the way, there would have been more than a nosebleed, but he took Delilah's karate chop harmlessly on his forearm and managed to squirm out of the way of Miranda's retaliatory kick. "Don't kill each other, damn it!" he shouted. "How'll I get rid of the bodies?"

Delilah breathed hard for a moment. A moment was all she had; the spaceship needed to be piloted or they were all dead and the mission wasted. "I will deal with you later," she said through gritted teeth, and devoted her attention to the board.

"Later" was indefinitely deferred, to Delilah's serious regret. There simply was no time. There was less time than anyone could have calculated a need for, because when Miranda stole Tchai's space suit she stole from the spacecraft a large fraction of its utility. Tchai was the gunner. The hidden weaponry tucked into the spaceship was no longer a counter in the game unless Delilah herself could operate it, and how could she do that? and pilot at the same time? and keep an eye on the vicious little bitch's machinations and for that matter on Castor, and—hardest of all—simultaneously think and plan and be ready for what terrible and unexpected things the alien ship might produce? Delilah's mind fluttered like a limed bird with the trapper closing in; and then there was no time, no time at all, because the alien ship appeared on their radar, and a moment later Castor squawked in excitement as he picked up the faint dot of it through the starboard glass.

The radar said nothing useful about the alien: the readouts along the edge of the screen gave mass (three hundred metric tons, close enough) and dimensions (easily forty meters long) and shape—shape more like a can of fruit than anything else, with bits of odd metallic shapes stuck onto it. The visual to the naked eye was not even as useful as that, except that there was color to the naked eye, purply, violety color that did not seem material. Delilah snatched the twelve-centimeter glasses out of their felt-lined pocket and stared through them at the stranger. Behind her Castor and Miranda were demanding and pleading and exchanging quick words of explanation of how Miranda had got there; behind her Tchai Howard's radio voice was still screaming demands and questions. Delilah blotted them out. She had enough attention available to keep her own board dressed and her ship on course; all of the rest of it went to what was in the glasses.

The ship was metallic, but not shiny-chrome metallic. Thirty years at relativistic speeds through the diffuse dusts and gases of interstellar space had dulled the shine and pitted the surface. It looked mean. It looked like a storage tank for some unpleasant liquid waste or like one of the first primitive nuclear weapons. It was barrel-shaped rather than truly cylindrical, with here and there a scarred fin or incongruously bright (because long retracted from the buffing of dust) paraboloid dish. The whole thing was longer than the radar had displayed because of its angle of approach, perhaps as much as a hundred meters long.

"What's that purple?" Castor screeched in her ear.

The purple. Good question! The squat cylinder wore at one end a ring of faint violet light. Faint? That was not the right word. The glow hurt the eyes. Plenty of photons were coming out of whatever it was, but perhaps only a small spillover into the visible band. Puzzled, scared, Delilah let the bitch Miranda snatch the glasses away from her and reached to thumb on the ship-to-ship radio. "Unknown spacecraft," she said, "this is the ship of the president of the United States. He is aboard and ready to meet with you."

She released the thumb button and waited for acknowledgment to speak again.

There was no acknowledgment. There was no answer at all. "Call them again, damn you," Miranda shrilled, struggling with Castor for the glasses, and without will of her own Delilah repeated the call.

No answer, and the two spacecraft were moving volitionlessly toward each other, hindquarter to forequarter, not as though they were planning it, but as though some large Caliban were stirring minnows together in a pool. "Back away," whispered Castor, his nerve failing.

Delilah's nerve was also failing, but her finger would not tell the keyboard to take them away. Her duty was assigned. It was not to flee because she was scared or because the aliens were impolite about replying; it was to make contact.

Anyway, she thought, there was still plenty of distance between them, and if they tried anything funny the secret panel to Tchai's weaponry lay within the reach of her right hand, just under the bulge of Miranda's shoulder as she squirmed to stare out the window.

There was not still plenty of distance, though. All of a sudden there was no distance at all. The two ships did not accelerate toward each other; it was something unexpected and worse.

The violet ring slipped free of the alien ship.

It spun around on its axis twice, like a coin on a tabletop. Then it rushed toward them.

Tsoong Delilah slapped quick fingers on the board, and their spaceship bucked and tried to turn away. Thrust forward, she reached out despairingly toward the weaponry board. Miranda was on top of it in her hard and unmoving suit; she wouldn't get out of the way and got a backhanded slap again for her trouble—would have got worse if there had been time—did get worse, verbally at least, with Delilah screaming fury, promising punishment for leaving them without a gunner... There was no time for punishment. There was no time to solve the riddles of the arming and aiming and launching of Tchai's missiles, either.

The ring was on them.

The ring swallowed them. It slipped past the plunging stern quarter of their ship like a hoop over a stake. Delilah had not permitted herself to vomit in years, nor did she feel ill; but for the tenth part of a second something in her stomach lunged toward her throat.

Then it was over.

The ring sailed away from them. They were floating in space. The star-sprinkled black of the sky was all around them.

But the stars were different stars.

Instinctively Delilah cut the thrusters and switched on all sensors: Were they in orbit? was it stable? was there a terrible crash threatening at any second? While the ship's autosystems were reaching for data and trying for solutions, she had a moment to see that they were not alone in space—quite—for behind them and below was a planet, blue-white and huge.

It was not the Earth. Beyond it, its sun was redder and larger and nearer, and under the planet's white blobs of cloud the continent at its sunlit edge was none she had ever seen before.

Doubly they were not alone, for radar squawked the word that a ship-sized object was near. It was on the side of Delilah's spacecraft away from the ruby sun, therefore brightly lit. It, too, was nothing they had seen before. A spaceship? Well, certainly it was a spaceship; that followed from the fact that it was a ship and in space. All the same it was queer that the vessel was lined for air. It was wingless, yes, but its bedbug-shaped contours were those of a lifting body; and it had control surfaces that meant nothing in a vacuum.

Not only bug-shaped. It had a bedbug's claws. Tiny blue-white jets flared on the ship. It turned, till opposing jets halted it in a posture aimed directly at them. Behind it a swell of golden flame showed main-thrust engines, hurling it toward them, and the claws opened.

Delilah could have escaped the claws. This bedbug was a mere rocket, not some mad and inescapable wheel of violet light. There was plenty of time for Delilah to run. There was plenty of time, too, to go through the steps of the weaponry board. Arm, and the ready lights on the lid of the secret board blinked green. Aim, and the sighting reticle flashed a solution.

Launch—

But she did not launch the missile.

Delilah didn't have a chance to launch the missile, actually. Miranda saw what she was doing and swarmed all over her, pinning her arms, wrestling her away from the board—Castor trying clumsily to help one or the other, or to decide which one to help—yelling and shouting of Let go, bitch and Don't be a fool, Tsoong and I'll kill you and You'll kill us all! in hisses and grunts. It was almost impossible to tell which one was shouting which... but then it was all moot. The alien shuttle was too close. The grapples closed. And at once they all went flying in a sudden surge of acceleration as the alien towed them away.

Reentry was no faster than on Earth; all of a sudden they had plenty of time. There was time, thought Delilah, to power-up the main engines, blow every drop of fuel, break free from this steel-clawed bedbug—

But where would they go?

There was time, at least, to try to make sense of where they were and what was happening, although it did not seem that all the time in the world would suffice for that. The sensors read out data on the planet they were spiraling in on. It was a fatter and flimsier planet than the Earth, with a surprisingly dense atmosphere—thus the lifting body instead of wings on the shuttle. It was warm where the continent lay, Hainan temperatures or better, and hardly cold enough to matter even at the poles.

It was inhabited.

Well, of course it was inhabited! Delilah snapped at herself—where else would the shuttle come from? But all the same it was a startlement to see the crystalline lights on the dark side and the glitter of what could only have been cities on the bright. What cities! Beijing was a mud-hut village by comparison.

And the other way they knew it was inhabited was that the planet reached out and told them so.

"Look at this!" squawked Castor, playing with his communications equipment, and it was something indeed to look at.

Pictures were coming in, and sounds.

None of them were clear, of course, and none of them lasted. The photons in a slice of electromagnetic radiation are the same on the Earth and out past the farthest quasar. But the way technologists count and measure and decode them depends on chance and the accident of somebody's handy piece of equipment when the first vacuum tube is built. The aliens did not use the same bandwidths or screenline parameters or even the basic choices out of the electromagnetic spectrum that were doctrinal on Earth. The comm equipment in Delilah's ship was marvelously resourceful. It could seek patterned transmission anywhere and then puzzle over the patterns until it congealed them into data. But it could not do it easily, and sometimes its solutions failed.

So what they got were snatches and glimpses and glitches. Some were patterns of meaningless color; most were not even patterns. But now and then, for a moment at a time—

Pictures. What pictures!

There was a city—maybe the city, or one of the cities, that popped into glittering life below them as they spun around the planet. Bright green and shockingly brilliant pink, all colors, all intense.

There was a machine that pumped out thick, syrupy goo—why and how and for what they could not guess.

There was a cluster of creatures—buglike? molelike? there were no real standards to judge by—tumbling over each other and pausing to move their lips; but the sound channel did not go with the picture, and what sounds they made were lost.

There was another creature—a statue of a creature, perhaps?—in a sort of niche of glowing gold, more like an ostrich than anything else, but with arms instead of wings.

There was their own ship, blipped onto the screen, flashed away.

There was a planet, and the planet was Earth.

There were a thousand other things; and there were sounds on the audio frequency—chatters of facsimile and code and telemetry; whispers of, almost, voices, but whose and saying what they could not tell.

The sounds were as bad as the pictures, in fact. Every now and then there was a sound that seemed almost to make a sort of sense, a whisper of an English phrase ("—rescue you"—was that one?) or a name: Was "A-Belinka" a name? And Castor would capture all those fleeting bits and pour them back through the secondary screens and speakers so that Delilah and Miranda could puzzle over them while he hunted for more...

And all the time, all the time, they were swirling down to whatever was kidnapping them.

All the time in the world would not have been enough to try to understand, or to feel terror, or to scheme what steps they might take against whatever might befall. That didn't matter. They didn't have all the time in the world. Suddenly reentry began, and there was no time at all.

Reentry was no gentler than on Earth, either. Fortunately they'd managed to strap their battered bodies in again. Whether that would be enough to save them, Delilah could only guess; there was a lot of danger here. The claws on the alien shuttle had grasped their ship any which way. The ablative surfaces were no longer where they could do any good.

But their captors had thought of that. The thermal shock was minimal. The bug-tug blasted, blasted continuous retrofire. There was no time for their ship's skin to soften and burn away before they were down to a crawl— Mach 4 or less—and then it was a long, gentle glide to the surface.

They bounced—but not hard, and surprisingly slowly— and stopped.

When they realized they were down and safe—momentarily safe—they scrambled out of belts and harnesses. Castor was quickest. Before she could stop him— before she had quite realized that it might be a fatal act— he was at the door, opening it to their new world. All their reflexes were like molasses. The pull of gravity was distinctly less, and their heads unhinged. Delilah had only time to scream, "Be careful!"

The air did not kill them.

It smelled—strange all right, but good. A little like distant frying mushrooms. A little like the sea. It was raining, slow fat drops like peppermint jelly, and the breeze was gentle and quite hot. The astronauts clustered around the port, staring out at a maroon paved plain. The port, unfortunately, was facing away from the city they had seen, but out at its farther edge were lesser buildings, a cluster like crystals grown in a saturated sea, green and blue prisms, golden needles, ruby columns.

And it sounded as though they were being met.

"Put it away," snarled Miranda, and Delilah realized her hand had reached inside the waistband of her suit for the weapon Tchai had given her.

"Yes, please, Delilah," said Castor nervously. "Let's not start a fight."

She didn't answer. She put the gun back, and that was answer enough. She jumped down bravely from the port to the maroon paving—how strangely slowly one fell here!—and began to shuck out of her suit. They would look less threatening out of the suits, she reasoned. Besides, she was sweating terribly inside it.

The sounds of Someone Coming got louder. By the time Delilah had struggled out of her bottoms and stepped out of her jonny-drawers the sounds were just around the other side of the rocket, and then they were whirling around toward the three half-naked people.

There was a hoverplatform. It slipped and skidded in its turn, and more slowly came toward them—two or three others were following after, and the whine and screech of their air pumps was deafening.

They all carried passengers. What passengers! Alien passengers, as alien as you could ever wish! with their buggy, feelered faces and the ridge of glossy spines along their backs. Monsters from space! Deadly creatures that made childhood nightmares seem tame!

But Delilah had expected monsters, and besides, these monsters were no bigger than cats. Some of them wore clothing and ornaments of one kind or another—fabric ruffs around the places where their necks should have been, cloaks, jewelry, as well as what Delilah thought might be the equivalents of wristwatches, communications pendants, and so on. Most didn't. The naked ones were the ones who seemed to be hanging onto the floats any way they could and sometimes falling—children, perhaps?

Some one of them did something, and as the three hovervans dropped to their knees around the Earth spaceship, a great glowing hologram sprang into the sky—on one edge one of those ostrich-things; on the other what Delilah recognized as a bird clutching lightnings and leaves; in the middle a globe that might well have been meant to be the planet Earth.

All these shocks registered only peripherally in her eyes, because the thing she saw most clearly was a woman. A bare-busted, bulgingly pregnant, saber-wavingly grinning and huge woman who stood triumphant among the aliens as though they belonged to her—or she to them— and bawled at the three undressed visitors, "Welcome! Be brave! We'll save you yet!"

"Oh, my God," whispered Miranda from beside her, and Delilah could not guess what she meant to say. None of them knew what to say. They were in shock.

It was only a little less startling, and not reassuring at all, when the aliens on the second platform twitched themselves into a sort of regular cluster and raised objects before them. Some they blew into or rubbed against; the most common were things like horizontally held xylophones, and they struck them.

It was music that came out. Approximately music, anyway.

Delilah had no way of recognizing it, but beside her Miranda caught her breath and sobbed, "Oh, Castor! They remembered! It's 'Hail to the Chief!'"