Black Star Rising

I

MANYFACE lay in his cocoon, watching the alien ship grow larger on the spaceship's screen. Manyface was not the only one in a cocoon. Every space traveler had a cocoon to cushion him against the shocks and drags of space travel, but Manyface's had to be more huge and more complex than most, since Manyface himself was. The part where his huge head rested, the part that cushioned the head against squeezing and the neck against snapping, was jelly-filled and twice the size of the others. It did not keep Manyface from seeing what was going on, although it reminded him that his survival was far more precarious than the rest of the crew.

But so was all of Manyface's life. Manyface had taken on himself the burden of ten other minds in his own. Those ten other samples of brain tissue tucked inside his own imposed restraints on everything he did. If Manyface, high Party member, chose to overrule the restraints, that was the privilege of his position. It was also the risk of his choosing, for the launch directors had warned him that the flight might cost him his life. Or, more accurately, his lives. Some of the eleven lives that made up the committee called Manyface had opposed the plan.

Manyface twisted slightly in the cocoon. His head ached fiercely, and not just with the acceleration he had endured. For any human being, the venture of space required cosseting and armoring and training. Space was a sea where the sharks were swimming. One did not venture into it bare. For as peculiar a person as himself, thought Many-face—thought one of the personas of Manyface, and the rest of the committee concurred—the armor had to be twice as strong and all precautions doubled.

Lying supine in his cocoon, twitching uncomfortably at every slight change of thrust, Manyface decided that there was one other noteworthy thing about space travel. It was boring. He had been warned of dangers. He hadn't been warned that there would be so many long hours with nothing to do but lie there while the ship painfully lifted itself away from the Earth. Nor had anyone mentioned that other unpleasantness of space travel, that you smelled all your companions in all of their animal aroma. Like all Han, Manyface intensely disliked body odors. In the spaceship, they were part of the air he breathed, inescapably.

He drowsed off, thinking about the last few days. When the traitorous peasant woman Feng Miranda stole aboard the first ship, when that ship disappeared, suddenly and terrifyingly, there had been upheavals on Hainan-ko. All precautions were doubled at once. Tchai Howard had seen to that. He had been made to look a fool, and rage as well as prudence made him recheck every precaution. No treacherous young female would steal into a dressing room and stun an astronaut again! Nor would there be as easy a hijacking of this second ship as there had been of the President's yacht.

So for intensive days and sleepless nights the ship itself was refitted with the ultimate in weapons, and the crew reshuffled to use them best. The second ship was bigger than the first. It had to be; it had more to carry. Besides the new rocket launchers and the white-noise radio projectors that, some hoped, might damage that strange purple glow that had swallowed the President's ship, it had a crew of ten rather than three. There was Manyface himself, adamant on going no matter what the doctors or the administrators said. There was Tchai Howard, of course, cheated out of his first chance, urgent to punish and revenge. And there was a strike force, seven hard-trained, tough assault guerrillas just back from a little pacification mission in Botswanaland, along with their commander. All ten of them, those last days, slept in one huge room, relieved themselves in open toilets, were never out of sight of each other for any minute, all through their training, right up to the moment when the dressers fitted them all into their suits and the technicians handed them into the ship.

All the same, when the ship was ready to blast off, Manyface was frightened.

Nothing was easy or simple for Manyface, not even fear. He wasn't all frightened. Angorak Aglat wasn't frightened. Angorak had once been a security marshal in the Mexican protectorates, when courage was an occupational requirement. Neither were Shum Hengdzhou or Tsai Mingwo, and Potter Alicia was too vague and cloudy in her perceptions to be really frightened. She spent her time asking to have the tape of her daughter's voice—a message they had coerced from Maria on promise of full citizenship and honors for her unborn child—played back to her. It didn't help when it was; she forgot it quickly again every time, for her connection with reality had always been tenuous. Those were the brave members of the committee. Corelli Anastasio, on the other hand, was scared blind. He had suffered all his life from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, and what space could be more open than space? Hsang Futsui and Dien Kaichung were edgy with the irritation of fear, and so the currents of emotion that flowed in the soupy sea that was the collective mind of Manyface were sour with tension. The orderly workings of the committee were troubled.

This was annoying to Manyface—to the original Fung Bohsien and to all his added selves—because, really, this couldn't have come at a worse time! Just when Dien Kaichung, the latest implant, was settling down! Just when the postoperative confusion and the psychic nausea had begun to pass, so that the committee could once again deliberate in orderly fashion and speak, most often, with a single voice!

So the takeoff was bad, really bad. The whole first battering thrust as the spacecraft pushed itself away from the surface of the Earth was tainted and sickened with the flood of panic from Corelli and Hsang and Dien; so was the recheck in low Earth orbit; so was the boost toward the alien ship. "Calm down! Calm down!" Many-face shouted inside his head. "We must keep control! Much depends on it!"

And as a matter of fact all the voices were saying much the same thing, and all equally loudly; so that it was a pity they didn't hear each other.

When the voices of Manyface met in executive session—which was always, since they had no escape from each other but death—there were eleven of them.

There was Angorak Aglat, mountaineer from the southern provinces of the Chinese nation, former peace marshal and artillery officer. As a person with a body of his own, he had been slightly deaf from the explosion of cannon next to his ears. For that reason he often shouted. As a scrap of remnant gray matter tucked into someone else's skull he still shouted. Angorak was never wrong. He knew this to be true, though sometimes other people did not seem to believe it. Angorak was sardonic and greedy; Angorak was smart, but not smart enough to know that he was not necessarily smarter than every other human being he would ever encounter, even within the limited space of Manyface's swollen skull.

Potter Alicia was the sweet one, the one who hated to see her skullmates at odds. Potter would soothe one and plead with another, urging them all toward peace. Potter would arbitrate unendingly, even well past the point where arbitration and patience seemed reasonable. Even past the point where the disputants had begun to dislike her more than they disliked each other. Potter would accept any slight or insult or outburst of anger from any of those other minds she lived with, just for the purpose of bringing peace to their councils. Potter had been an agronomist, mother of two, and she was always sweet, except sometimes when the issue was something that Potter herself wanted.

Su Wonmu had been a high Party member, though not 210 one who mattered much to the other high Party members. Su had been a soccer player. Su had always been thoroughly reliable in a political sense; he grasped new Party lines as soon as they were formed. He managed quickly and easily to live within them, to defend them, to explain them—even when they were hardly explicable. So when the high Party officials decided it was an investment worth making to humanize their image and looked around for a popular, safe candidate to join the Presidium, Su was an easy choice. Inside Manyface's skull he was still easy. He just was not of much use. He was the person in every committee who seconds motions other people make.

Corelli Anastasio—ah, he was a weird one. Pure indigene. Ancestors American for two centuries. He was the scientist. He was also a wimp. He was as politically reliable as Su Wonmu, which is to say he lacked any conviction of his own as wholly; this made him trustworthy. What made him weird was that he was glad to be dead. He had left behind him grown children and a bitter divorced wife. He didn't mind being in Manyface's skull. It was safer there.

The other one that mattered, really, was Shum Hengdzhou. In his life as an autonomous human being he had not been anything much. He had been the father of two middle-sized girls and a section leader in a steel mill when the ladle of molten metal splashed over his body. No political background. Unknown outside his mill and home. All that had given him salvation, or as much salvation as anyone could find in somebody else's head, was that he had been the first totally destroyed, biologically compatible human being available with a salvageable brain when Manyface proposed to continue the implants as an experiment. He was also rather a decent person. The other implants, vainglorious about their more illustrious past histories, tended to look down on him. Shum accepted that. He was second only to Potter Alicia in anxiety to smooth out stress and less likely than Potter to make demands of his own. For Shum had little of his own to demand and no right to demand it.

Of most of the others, not much trace remained of "personality," for their implants had been taken from far more fundamental regions of the brain. Yet every one of them contributed his own special flavor to the soup. To Manyface himself, as chairman of the board, each voice was uniquely distinctive. He could not have told how he recognized them. There was no sound to carry clues. A choice of words, an intensity of will, a tremor of self-doubt—those were the characteristics he could recognize.

And he could hear them all, all the time—and sometimes the voices were maddening.

Manyface was nearly stable within his own head when he got into the rocket. It had been long enough since the implant of Dien Kaichung for Dien to settle down. His terrified screams and convulsions at finding himself dead, trapped, imprisoned within the skull of Manyface had dwindled to an occasional sob—the soundless equivalent of a sob. The rest of the inhabitants of Manyface's now healed skull had moved around to accommodate him. ("But no more, please," said Corelli pettishly. "It's getting really crowded!")

But then there was the stress of the flight...

"Old fool, wake up!" It was Tchai Howard bellowing in his ear. "I was not asleep," Manyface said instinctively, in the honest lie that every drowser tells when caught. But he had been. Behind him the assault team was muttering among themselves while their captain methodically went through the checklist of his weaponry; on the screen before him was a confusing pattern of bright spots.

"What are they?" demanded Tchai, waving a free arm toward the screen.

Manyface could not answer. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them—a dozen solid blips at least, maybe a hundred if you counted the fainter ones. The radar could not reach far enough to see details. But his inner voices could see enough to scare some of them and anger the others. Said the voice of Angorak-the-warrior, glumly, "It looks like a fleet!"

"A fleet is impossible!" cried Tchai, glowering; Many-face realized that Angorak's voice had spoken aloud, through his lips. Well, a fleet was impossible. But the blips were real enough. Manyface peered at the radar, trying to make sense of what he saw, trying even harder to quiet the shouting within his brain. All the voices were talking at once. He could not make them stop. Worse, they couldn't stop themselves, so that all ten of them were yammering at once, and sometimes the words leaked through Fung's own lips. "Stop it!" roared Tchai, wriggling to thrust his face into the swollen face of Fung. "Old man, you endanger the mission if you cannot get a grip on yourself!"

Well, that was what Fung most desired! At least there was unanimity in that respect. All the concern and fear and anger of his implants found a new direction, and together, in half a dozen voices, they cursed Tchai Howard, so that the assault team lifted their heads from their rests to admire. When the committee's anger was spent, reason returned. A whisper from one of Manyface's implants, a consequence drawn from another; Manyface, speaking again with a single voice, said coldly, "They are not a fleet, Tchai. They are simply drones. A great many of them, but none is the alien ship itself. Study the ranging data! They are too small to be dangerous."

Tchai Howard glared at the old man, then turned his attention to the screen. "You are right," he said reluctantly. "But where is the big ship?"

Manyface said with disdain, "It is you who are supposed to be the pilot and navigator. Find it, Tchai!"

"And when I do?" Tchai demanded. "Will you be able to carry out your task?"

Manyface said cuttingly, "My task is to communicate with them. I cannot do that until you establish a communications link."

"The question is," Tchai snarled, "whether you can do it at all. Was it a mistake to bring you, after all? Is that freak's brain of yours really under control?"

"Oh, Tchai," said Manyface sorrowfully, "you speak of endangering the mission, but what else are you doing now?" It was taking all of his effort to keep the parts of his mind focused on the same task. Rage made them hard to control; rage was what Tchai Howard produced so easily.

For Manyface, even to answer a simple question was sometimes not simple at all. No question was simple when eleven complicated persons—or scraps of persons—each heard it and invested it with the overlay of attitudes and habits of thought that modify every received message in the mind of everyone. The committee gabbled back and forth, in the quick communication that was possible within a single skull. It took no time at all, really, for communication took the form of a kind of shorthand—sometimes, really, only a sort of feeling. In this present confrontation, for example, Potter, Shum, and Dien responded only with a general outpouring of consent and support. Sometimes, though, the communications were articulate, explicit, even furious: "Do it, damn it!" ordered Corelli in a rage. "I'll speak if you don't want to," offered Su. And, "Tell that ass Tchai that we, after all, are in charge of this vessel," commanded Angorak; and what came out of the single mouth held in joint tenancy by the fragmented minds of Manyface was "Shut up, Tchai. Of course I'll speak to the alien."

He loosened his retaining straps and glanced around the cabin. The assault team lay still, but their straps were loose, too. Tchai Howard had freed himself completely of his cocoon, all but a single belt to keep him from flying away; their vessel was without acceleration now, and therefore they were all without weight. Manyface leaned forward and turned on the communications mike to say, "Unidentified alien vessel, please respond. What have you done with the president of the United States?"

Then they waited for an answer.

It was a long wait, and out of the corner of his eye, Manyface saw Tchai Howard's fingers busy on the armaments board. "Stop that, Tchai!" he commanded. "First we must find out what has happened and what their intentions are—remember, we may want their help against the Indians!"

Tchai opened his mouth to reply, but the radio preempted him. A familiar voice: "This is the President. What do you want?"

Puzzlement. Consternation. Even the assault team lost discipline enough to mutter among itself. "How can that be the boy," demanded Tchai, "when his ship was destroyed by their energy weapon?" Manyface did not answer at once. He could not, because the dialogue in the ship was echoed by the debate in his own head. "We will ask," he said at last. And, to the microphone: "Where are you, Mr. President?"

Pause. Then the voice of the jumped-up houseboy: "I am safe, Manyface." Manyface! The voices inside Manyface's head gasped in shock and anger; no one dared call Manyface by that name in his hearing! Even the assault team giggled.

Then, "Keep them talking," ordered Tchai Howard, his hands busy on the armaments board again, and Many-face was angry enough, this time, not to order him to stop. And, all in all, the parley went well, thought Many-face in all eleven of his parts—

Until he heard Tchai Howard groan and a moment later gasps and cries from the assault team—

And until he felt, more than saw, a curtain of violet fire rush toward him, and envelop him, and pass beyond him—

And until he looked out the window before him and saw that the Sun that had been to the right of the window, striking fiery reflections off the sharp angles of the alien ship, had been replaced by a smaller, redder sun on the left—

And then the panic currents poured forth again, and Manyface, all eleven of Manyface, screamed at once in the certain knowledge that they had been overwhelmed by something they could neither comprehend nor control.

Manyface was not surprised that they were captured. He had warned against it in the first place. Had told the Generalissimo of Missilery and the Deputy Chief of the People's Militia, his equals in those last days of briefing before the takeoff from Hainan-ko, that these aliens were far better prepared than anyone in China could possibly be—had had fifty years to get ready and plan surprises. They could not catch up in a matter of months. He told Tchai Howard the same, and the assault team. It was true that in the excitement of the takeoff, he had forgotten his own warnings, but he had even told his own brainmates the same, when they were not telling him. "But don't hurt my son-in-law," said Potter Alicia, and Manyface sighed—all the other parts of Manyface sighed—and said,

"He is not your son-in-law. He has divorced your daughter. But anyway," he added, in that quick internal flash between tissues, "we are not likely to hurt anyone. The big problem is to keep anyone from hurting us, very badly." And when they were in fact captured, ripped out of this new orbit around this new planet and dragged by force down to its surface, even in the violent jerks and fears of the reentry Manyface shouted to Tchai Howard, "I told you this would happen! Now be still! Do nothing! Let me plan for all of us, and I will issue orders!"

Whether Tchai accepted the command was hard to tell. It did not matter, either, because as soon as their vessel had been irrevocably grounded they were surrounded by troops and weaponry. What troops! Even Tchai and the assault team were too stupefied to resist. Resistance would have meant little against the overwhelming odds, ten men against an entire planet, and in any case nothing had prepared them for Amazons with rifles and queer little floppy beetles that chirped and chattered and, to show that they were to be taken seriously, every now and then discharged some sort of projectile weapon in great bursts of explosive power into the air.

No, they could not resist. And the final blow was when a great, ungainly hovercraft machine came sliding toward them across the broad, barren spaceport. It bore one person, looking incongruously majestic. When it stopped the person hopped off and strutted toward them.

It was Pettyman Castor.

"I welcome you to World," he said gravely—as though he had a right to welcome them anywhere, as though anything he might say could be important to anyone! "Although you do not come in peace, we welcome you here to see our resolute purpose and our overwhelming might. The liberation of America is ready to begin!"

It was fortunate that the assault team had long been disarmed. The Amazon guards behind them saw them stir and tense and lifted their weapons warningly. Even Many-face could hardly believe what he heard. "What have we done?" moaned many of his voices, whispering together inside his head. "Is this amusing game we were playing suddenly going to be serious?"

II

What Manyface saw in space, what he saw on landing, what he saw in the queer, crystalline city that became his jail—they were all scary. The game had indeed become serious. Astonishingly serious. The "spaceway"— that terrifying, immaterial purple veil through which they passed from one space to another in the twinkling of an eye—that was serious, all right! That meant a technology no Han Chinese had ever dreamed existed. And it was not the only thing. Their ship had been captured by a shuttle and dragged down to the planet's surface just as some misbehaving weather satellite might have been brought home for repair by human beings in the great days of the space age. But that was only because the Chinese technology was so inept, so primitive, that primitive means had to be used against it. As they landed Manyface saw off toward the skyline a huge skeletal structure like a mad roller coaster and learned it was called a "launch loop"—a better, faster, cheaper, more deadly way of launching ships than anything on Hainan-ko. And it was launching them! New ships every day! Already dozens, maybe scores of ships were in orbit, waiting for the time to attack. It was an armada! And if one single ship had been able to destroy an island, what hope was there that the Han Chinese could resist scores or hundreds of them?

The Yanks were serious enough, all right. No, "serious" was not the word—"fanatic" was a better one, for they seemed to think of nothing but warfare and revenge against the Han Chinese. How Tchai Howard and the assault team felt about this Manyface could not know, for the party was broken up at once. Even the erks, queer little beasts though they were, were obviously able to deploy great force for whatever campaign they planned. They were not funny to him, after the first moments. They were real. The Yanks and "erks"—what strange names these strange creatures had!—had had half a century to make their plans. Han China would have no defense at all.

The future was hopelessly black, Manyface's internal committee concluded somberly. And yet—

And yet, the experience was interesting in itself. Many-face had started out as a scientist, was still a scientist in several of his parts, retained the curiosity and interest of a scientist in strange phenomena.

There were plenty of strange phenomena on World!

The erks themselves were fascinating. If they did not speak Chinese—none of them did—at least many spoke English, and one in particular became a guide, almost a friend—at least, a being with as much curiosity and interest as Manyface himself. His name, he said, was Jutch— "Jutch Vashng'nun," he explained, "since I have taken the name of your great first President!"

"He was not my President," said Manyface frostily, but then relented. "Haven't you got any heroes of your own to name yourself after?"

"Many, many," Jutch assured him, "but it is a courtesy to our allies to take some of their names. We have always done this so. Now," he said, dropping off the stool he had been perched on and scuttling through a doorway, "if you will follow me, we will have a nice dinner together and talk."

The talk was delightful, Manyface found. The erk had so much to tell, all of it so new and wonderful! There were some minor embarrassments, as when a naked erk climbed up on the table and began to feed itself from the platter that held their dinner, but Jutch shooed the little creature away. "It's a dumb erk," he apologized. "Please don't let it disturb you. They mean no harm."

Manyface laid down the two-pronged fork he was eating with. "Dumb erk?" he asked. "You mean, ah, of inferior intelligence, perhaps?"

"Oh, very inferior," agreed Jutch. "Let me see. Where shall I begin? Do you know anything about us erks? No, of course not. Well, to begin with, we were domestic animals..."

And Manyface listened, his eyes popping, as he heard how the erks had once been only pets; that they had somehow—it was not clear how—been caused to mutate so that they became quite intelligent; how the creatures who had been their masters had, somehow, destroyed themselves; how, as the ages passed, the artificial mutations had begun to backslide, as the genetic material reverted to type. The dumb erks were what all erks once had been...

The astonishing revelations went on forever, and Manyface was enjoying himself. From time to time he remembered to think of doomed China. It did not seem very real. Since Manyface, or at least a good deal of Manyface, was very old, he had learned some hard lessons. One was that there are events that cannot be controlled, and this, it seemed, was one such... And, meanwhile, how fascinating and strange it all was! How many questions to ask! How many thousand new questions each answered question created! Once he had begun to understand the erks themselves, there were all these other things to ask about—these long-legged, fish-looking creatures who did not exist anywhere alive, apparently, but whose effigies were all over—"Living Gods"? What were "Living Gods," then? And once that was explained, so many others that needed explaining: why the erks made a religion of warfare, how diligently they had sought places to wage it and issues to wage it on—

The questions did not end.

There was also the great question of what had happened to Castor, and Tsoong Delilah, and Feng Miranda, for none of them were quite as Manyface remembered them from just a few short weeks ago.

Apart from Potter Alicia's deluded love for the boy, the parts of Manyface could not see much good in Castor. It was true that he seemed more mature now. He was still quite arrogant and self-centered... and entirely too sure of himself with women. (So thought the man who had rarely had a woman love him since the first tumor was taken from his brain.)

And Delilah! How easy it was to destroy a valuable public official with calflove! Anyone could diagnose her failing from the way she spat jealousy at the Feng girl. Anyone could see that in the long run Castor would certainly choose the younger woman over her—or a dozen younger women before he was through, because the other thing that was evident was that there was hardly a sister on World who would not enjoy making love with the boy. Anyone could see that but Delilah.

As to Feng Miranda, Manyface had no opinions worth mentioning. She was too silly and childish to require much thought, he decided. That was rather a big mistake.

Miranda was no longer a prisoner. The conceptual bar that had kept the Yanks from understanding that a genetic Han Chinese could still be a patriotic U.S. American had dissolved in the war room. Yes, Miranda was clearly as loyal as Jupe himself or even the Governor.

Delilah was no longer a prisoner, either, though the reasons were not at all the same. It was not that she was trusted. It was simply that there was obviously nothing in her power to do that could do the Yanks any harm. She was not allowed near the war room or the Space Center, and if she had gone violently ragingly hostile in some nest or farm settlement, what difference would it have made?

Castor, of course, had never been a prisoner. That, thought Manyface, was perhaps an error on the part of the erks and the Yanks, for the boy simply was not mature enough to have solid political opinions. It pumped up his ego to be called President, of course. But it pumped up his ego almost as much to have the bitches in heat sniff after him, and he got very much of that every day—to Delilah's conspicuous disgust.

The really surprising thing (thought Manyface) was that he himself was not imprisoned. No one was. The assault team had been politely dispersed to five other cities for "debriefing and discussion"—not that those trigger-happy hit men had anything to discuss with anyone! Once there, they roamed as freely as any... and they, too, were having a truly fine time with World's sisters. Even Tchai Howard was not behind bars—though, as was the case with Manyface himself, he was followed everywhere by erks at least, often by sisters with multiple motives for curiosity.

But those erks and Yanks were not actually guards. Manyface was sure of that. They didn't consider Many-face an enemy. He knew what the smart erks thought of him: they thought him a truly fascinating laboratory preparation ... as indeed he had been on Earth, for that matter.

As on Earth, even more on World. The Living Gods had taken a great interest in biological matters—the development of the erks themselves proved that—but the concept of transplanting parts of one brain into another, it seemed, had never occurred to them.

It took some time for Manyface to understand what it meant to the erks to be in the presence of a kind of technology the Living Gods had never thought of. It almost made Manyface himself honorarily divine.

If the erks were fascinated by Manyface, Manyface was fascinated in turn by the erks...and their Living Gods... and their world... and their history ... and especially by their planetary houseguests, the Yankees. For a time the sheer intellectual joy of discovery was enough for Manyface. Was almost enough for Manyface. Learning was a special experience for Manyface, because what he learned he learned eleven times over. Each of his sub-brains had his own special interests and his own expertise. Potter-the-agronomist was fascinated by erk farm practices. Corelli-the-anthropologist delighted in erk and Yank social customs. Angorak-the-soldier thrilled to erk and Yank weaponry and drill. Dien-the-engineer thrilled to the marvelous Living God construction. And Hsang-the-psychologist—

Ah, Hsang-the-psychologist! For him the Yanks were not merely a puzzle. They were a threat to his most basic beliefs.

It happened that those beliefs were illicit, but that did not make them less strongly felt. As in most Socialist countries, the Han Chinese had early on repudiated the foul-smelling and antipeople ravings of that degenerate toady to the bosses, Sigmund Freud. The sexual interpretation of dreams was not merely heretical in China. It was punishable by law.

As in most Socialist countries, however, the psychologists of Han China found ways of making eclectic use of forbidden therapies. Now and then, into their behavior-modification therapy they managed to sneak a Freudian diagnosis. Did the patient have a fascination with eating bananas, carrots, and juicy red sausages? Ah, to be sure, Comrade, to your work and study regimen we will recommend adding some cold showers.

And when Hsang-the-psychologist saw how the Yankees lived, he saw, too, that—for the first time in two centuries—the work of Sigmund Freud was not merely heretical. It was irrelevant.

There were no vast, punitive father figures in the minds of the Yankees on World.

There were no fathers.

So Hsang babbled endlessly to his skullmates. What nonsense this made of Freud's theories!—no, not nonsense, they were known to be a bourgeois illusion. Still, on Earth they had—ah, that was, they had been thought to have—some limited, tenuous reality—The others shut him up, because they had their own babbling to do; but then Hsang burst forth again. He was more secure now, having reflected that there was, after all, no way the Han Chinese state could effectively discipline heterodox psychology under the very special circumstances now existing. The father was gone! He did not exist! The son need not wither under the larger shadow! And as to penis envy, why, with women outnumbering men by, what was it, some 180 to 1, there were not enough penises around to make a good fantasy-envy!

And then Su Wonmu, the nonspecialist, the humble soul—Su said gently, "It is interesting, Hsang, that you are interested in the shape of their psyches and interesting, Dien, that you admire their grasp of structural techniques ... but is it not time that we, all eleven of us, devote our collective minds to making a plan? A plan, let us say, to keep these erks and Yankees from wiping out everything we cherish in our beloved Home?"

III

"I vouch for this old man," said Pettyman Castor, President of the United States. He put his hand patronizingly on the sloped shoulder that supported Manyface's huge head. "He is peculiar," Castor conceded tolerantly, "but he can't do any real harm. You see, he's all mixed up inside himself."

Just beside him, seated on her Governor's chair, Big Polly pursed her lips. She gazed out over the Congress of the United States (in Exile), looking for signs of agreement or rejection, but all the Senators and Congressones were as noncommittal as herself. "So you want us to let him go anywhere he wants to go, Mr. President?" she asked. "I mean, just as if he were loyal?"

"Absolutely," Castor said grandly, giving Manyface's shoulder a friendly thump. "Like I say. He's harmless. Besides, he's a friend of mine, kind of."

Big Polly sighed. "It is so ordered," she said, gazing around for objections and finding, as she expected, none. "So now we might as well adjourn this special session, right? And get on with the war?"

Well, there were no objections to that, for sure, and Manyface allowed himself to shake Castor's hand. "That was nice of you," he said as they walked out together.

"Any time," said Castor carelessly, smiling at a couple of barely pubescent sisters waving amorously from the steps. "It's ail over, you know. Once these people get their fleet through the spaceway China's finished."

"So it seems," said Manyface. "Well. I see you've got friends waiting for you, Castor. Don't worry about me. I'll find my way wherever I want to go all right."

He walked away as briskly as an elderly man supporting an extra fifteen kilograms of head on a weary neck could do. It was a good thing the gravity of World was light, compared to Earth's. It was a bad thing that the climate was so muzzy-clammy-Ao/ because the old man tired quickly. That couldn't be helped, he decided—his internal committee decided, nearly unanimously; he had things to do, and no choice about doing them.

The first thing to do was to convince himself that what Castor said was true. That was easy. Manyface managed to catch a ride on a hoverplatform skittering across the field to what the erks proudly called Mission Control. Jutch was on duty there and had no objections at all to satisfying Manyface's curiosity. Yes, there were thirty-one vessels already in orbit, fully armed and ready to go. (He obligingly called up images of them on the index screen.) Yes, there were plenty more in reserve, still on the ground—not all of them operational, to be sure, but then any dozen of them would surely be adequate to the job of knocking out China's pitiful combat forces. Many-face stood on the open platform of Mission Control, with the soft, warm rain of World falling on him, and felt very cold. Off on the horizon the great open tracework of the launch loop was getting ready to throw another ship into orbit. On the ground erks were bustling around the tractor that would pull the next vessel to the loop.

Yes. World's forces were surely adequate.

He shivered in the slow, sloppy raindrops. The drops splashed over the instruments and controls on the roof, too, but they were built for it—everything on World was built, or evolved, to stand chronic wetness and warmth. Everything but Manyface, anyway. "I think I'll get out of the rain," he excused himself, and the smart erk reared himself up on his hind legs to touch vibrissae to fingers as a handshake in farewell.

It was just as Castor had said. The forces of Yanks and erks were unbeatable.

Manyface entered the city, toweling himself to get the rain off his body—not that that was much use, since a film of sweat sprang out at once to replace it. He gazed around benignly at smart erks and dumb, at the Yank sisters and occasional males who stared at him and whispered to each other. There was no sign on the little face in the front of the pumpkin of the great debate going on inside.

Not all of Manyface's committee was quite united. Corelli, Potter, Angorak, and Dien were, after all, not genetically Han Chinese. They did not have the same inbred devotion to Home as Fung himself or the rest of the implants. But all did have an aversion to racial suicide and even to unnecessary murders. All had seen what hap-paned to the island the erk ship had wiped sterile in a single pass. All agreed that something had to be done.

When the committee was in agreement it could act with great speed and precision. Manyface did not need to retire to ponder and regroup. He had eleven concurrent data processors going inside that pumpkin that so wearied the muscles of his neck. Each datum of information that came in went straight to the mind (or minds) that could make best use of it, and integrate it into knowledge already stored, and be ready to patch it into the general pattern when needed.

So Manyface did not change his ways. He continued to rubberneck and sightsee and question. The only difference was that now the questions were more pointed, and the points of interest on the tour more pointedly chosen.

The Yanks and the erks did not seem to notice.

The same gaggle of soft-skinned beetles followed him around in fascination. Most of them were dumb erks, tumbling over each other in excitement to see what this weirdest of biped creatures was up to. But smart erks were always somewhere around, too, equally curious. Even the Yankees—almost all of them female, of course— also took an interest—when they were not taking an interest in Castor, of course.

Manyface covered the erk city—no, he corrected himself (or Dien-the-engineer corrected all of them), it was not really an erk city, but a Living God city. It was not hopelessly wrong for human beings. But for erks it was grotesquely out of scale. The erks had made patchy attempts to adjust it to their tininess. Soft-surfaced ramps lay over staircases that would have been a trifle steep for even one of World's tall Yankees; the erks, smart and dumb alike, scuttled up and down them and did not seem even to wonder why they had not reprogrammed the Living Gods' machines to rebuild in their own scale. There was hardly a window in the city that an erk could look out of. The kitchens—they were more like chemical laboratories—were all two-tiered. An elevated platform had been built in to run along the sides of tables and stoves and benches of mixing devices. The erks who chose to create their own cuisine, instead of letting the automatics do it, climbed to the upper level for their work. The lower was not used at all—except by the exploring Manyface. It was the same in the public rooms and the libraries and even the living quarters, where erks had to hop up a bench to get into the tall, wide beds.

Manyface explored them all... especially the libraries.

It was too bad that the language the erks spoke among themselves, which was the language the Living Gods had spoken long ago, was not Chinese. Or even English. But the problem was not fatal, because much of the data in the library stores was pictorial, and there were English language summaries, prepared for the use of the Yankees, for the most important parts.

Corelli-the-anthropologist was busy there, learning what he could about the Yankees. He learned a great deal. He learned, for example, that when the original interstellar ship reached Alpha Eridani and was transported direct to World, the first thing the erks did was construct another transporter ship and send it back through the same portal to begin the long, slower-than-light trip to Earth. That trip had taken forty-two years. That was a very significant datum to Manyface; the Alpha Eridani outpost was the closest the erks had come to Earth. He learned, too, that the Yankee population amounted to just under 8,500, 8,450 of them female. He snickered to the rest of Manyface, "If they had just waited two more generations they could have outnumbered us!" And he learned a great deal more that did not as yet fit into a pattern.

The Yankee records themselves were wondrous. Not only were they in English (of course), but they were automatically kept current. The journal of the Yankees on World was updated every day. The most interesting files Corelli-the-anthropologist found were the files that covered the Earth visitors themselves.

Manyface had not realized those files existed. It was a surprise to him to deduce that among the erks and Yanks who flocked after them, there must have been some with cameras. And not just those who followed Manyface; and sometimes the camera must have been hidden in the walls—how else to account for the shot of Tsoong Delilah, naked as a skinned cat, furiously haranguing a naked and sullen Pettyman Castor over his attentions to the Feng girl? Or—this was a surprise—the zealot Tchai Howard observed in the act of vigorously seducing one of those huge, healthy Yank sisters?

Nothing was left out, it seemed. And nothing was hidden from the casual curiosity-seeker. The erks had never had any reason to mark any data "classified." What one erk knew, they could all know. The Yanks had never questioned the customs of the erks, and so it was all there.

All of it. Even the parts that made sweat pop out on the great forehead of Manyface and drove his component parts to panicky debate.

Even the parts that told how the erks had helped the cause of freedom all over the galaxy for thousands of years. The library was very productive for Manyface, and not only of risque entertainment.

"Those poor little pink things," sobbed Potter Alicia, and Angorak thundered, "To hell with those animals, Potter! What about our homeland?"

To that there was no easy answer. To that there was only silence in response, until Shum said diffidently, "Comrades? 1 think we have failed to understand the complexities of this situation."

"Indeed," said Angorak heavily. "Please enlighten us all, Comrade Shum!"

"Thank you, Comrade Angorak, I will. I propose that we consider the possibility that we have underestimated these erks. They are quite comic little creatures, to be sure. But they are not entirely ludicrous."

"Of course they're ludicrous, Shum," Potter said crossly. "They're not even human."

"I think that is an incorrect view, Comrade Alicia. They are all too human. Let me explain," he added hastily. "Are they silly clowns, so foolish and inept that no one can take them seriously? No. They are far too powerful for that. Are they so wicked that anyone would recoil from them? No. To speak of helping the oppressed become free is not wicked. Comrade Mao endorsed just that principle many times. No one would recoil from such a sentiment."

"Shum, you fool, are you taking their side?" Angorak's cry was more incredulous than angry.

"Not at all, Comrade Angorak, only pointing out that they are not so unlike human beings as one might suspect. The erks are very like certain world powers of a hundred years ago. They have elevated slogans to the point of dogma. In doing so, they have lost sight of the principles that made the slogans valid in the first place."

"Speak plainly, you fool!"

"I will, Comrade Angorak. Do we not see just such behavior in history? Was it not just so with the great powers that destroyed each other in nuclear war?—that they spoke, the one of 'freedom' and the other of 'equality,' so loudly that neither could hear the rightness in what the other said?"

"Our ancestors, Shum," thundered Angorak, "were well aware of these contradictions! It was for that reason that China decided to have nothing to do with either of those hegemonistic, imperialist, war-mongering, power-hungry tyrannies!"

"Our ancestors," sighed Shum, "had that choice, yes.

But we do not, do we? We can't decide to have nothing to do with the Yanks and the erks. We can only hope that we can find a way to prevent them from 'helping' our planet in the way they have helped so many others."

"Like those poor little pink things," sobbed Potter Alicia.

"And what is that way?" demanded Angorak. "I do not know," said Shum respectfully. "But we have the knowledge. The question is, how can we use it?"

No knowledge is of much value unless it is used. To use knowledge means to share it with someone; and who could Manyface share with?

His first thought was a right thought, saving the unfortunate fact that it was impossible. As a high Party official his first duty was to find Tchai Howard or the assault-team commander and tell them what the library held. The erks had made that out of the question. The erks were trusting, but not entirely crazy, and so Howard and the soldiers were well out of Manyface's reach.

What about Castor?

Yes, thought Manyface to himself (or, yes, concurred the committee within Manyface's skull by majority vote), Castor was a good choice. (A strong minority within the skull opposed the choice on the grounds that Castor might get hurt. The minority was only one, and anyway she was not being rational most of the time.) So Manyface acted. There was something in his possession that would lure Castor to him; it was time to use it. He composed a letter to Castor and found a smart erk who was willing to promise to deliver it.

The letter said:

Honored Mr. President:

I am glad to say that your wife, Maria, is alive and well in Saskatchewan. Before we left, she prepared a taped message to deliver to you. I have it. Would you like to meet me to view the tape?

Fung Bohsien

It was a simple and straightforward bait, right? So the committee viewed it. But Castor shook their confidence. He didn't take the bait. The smart erk toiled back to Manyface with the doleful report that the President said he couldn't care less about messages from ex-wives who had run out on him when he was poor and unknown and certainly shouldn't be given any special consideration now that he was the President of the United States.

Manyface swore at the erk. That did not help anything, except to entertain the erk. When Manyface stopped shouting and went back into executive session inside his head, the erk went disappointedly away and the minds of Manyface accepted the fact that it was not going to be so easy.

If Castor would not come to Manyface, then Manyface would have to go to Castor.

But where was the foolish boy? Manyface asked Tsoong Delilah, who replied only with a furious, "How should I know, you old fool?" He asked among the smart erks and got, in essence, the same answer, although more politely phrased. He retired that night without sleep coming easily, for the parts of his brain were snapping at each other. It was after sunrise that he woke with a start, for one of the voices inside him woke to cry, "The library!"

Of course, the library! Manyface should have figured that out at once. The erks didn't know where Castor was; but then, the one who had volunteered to be a messenger could not have known either. Manyface had simply asked them the wrong question: Not "Do you know where Castor is?" but "Where is Castor?" Obviously the erks had a way of finding out such things—so obvious that none of them thought to mention it.

So Manyface made his way through the sweaty morning to the library. The index screen disclosed Castor's current whereabouts at once—the city nest, in the sleeping quarters—and what it disclosed him doing made Manyface blush.

He had to hurry out of the city, over to the nest, up to the sleeping levels—it was bright morning now, in the short day of World, and most of its inhabitants were long since aroused from sleep. If Castor's main interest had been sleep he, too, would no doubt have been long gone; but he was in the nuptial chambers. Manyface had to wait for him to come out. When at last he appeared it was with a young sister on each arm, the women looking very contented, Castor himself looking mostly tired. "I don't care about the damn tape, Manyface," he said at once. Manyface shrugged.

"Then perhaps you will just take a walk with me?" he urged politely.

Castor looked at him with dignity. "For what? I'm not your houseboy anymore."

"No," agreed Manyface, "but my friend, I hope. I would like to take a friendly stroll, is all."

Castor gave him a puzzled look, for they both knew that that was a preposterous suggestion. Walking in the sultry air of World was work, even though they weighed less, with the air so hot and steamy. But only by walking, Manyface believed, could he even hope to avoid those all-watching lenses. They crossed the strip of purple-blue moss that the erks (or the Living Gods) had fancied in the way that human beings liked lawns. They walked in the opposite direction from the spacecraft tarmac, for fewer people were there. Of course, a gaggle of erks followed them, but Manyface looked them over carefully and decided they were all dumb erks. They wore no clothes; they did not speak intelligibly—above all, they seemed happy and carefree, and not even smart erks were those things all the time.

They reached an irrigation ditch. Manyface joyfully removed his sandals and rolled up his culottes. He stood in the ditch, squeezing the thick mud of World between his toes, and gazed up at Castor, watching and frowning from the bank. He said, "You know that these people will destroy China completely."

Castor shrugged.

"I understand," Manyface said. "China is not your homeland. It does not matter to you that the Great Wall will be lava and the Forbidden City a cinder, since you have never seen them. But tell me, Mr. President of the United States, do you think North America will escape the same destruction?"

Castor pushed a dumb erk off his lap as he sat on the bank. Wading in the mud was not interesting to him, since he had had enough of that at the Heavenly Grain Collective. He shook his head and said tenderly, "Foolish old man, these people are my allies. Why would they hurt my country?"

"Ah," said Manyface, nodding the giant head. "You don't know then, do you? You have not been in the library."

Castor's expression changed, now interested and a little resentful.

Manyface chuckled. "I know that your studies here have been mostly anatomical. I can't blame you for that.

If I were young and good-looking, I would certainly do the same. Still, Castor, I wonder."

"What do you wonder, old man?"

"I wonder what happened to the boy who spent all his time with the teaching screens and the young man who was so thrilled to be admitted to the university."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"I am talking about the acquisition of knowledge, Castor. The library has knowledge for you, and knowledge is the thing that makes the difference between you and that dumb erk who is trying to get something out of your pocket—do you have food there, Castor?" The President impatiently shoved the creature away. "I thought I saw in you a person who wished to know everything there was to know, Castor, a true scholar, a person who knows that knowledge gives guidance and is worth having for its own sake." And inside his head Potter Alicia was whispering, He does, he does, and Hsang-the-psychologist warned, You're laying it on too thick! But Manyface was in charge of the committee. He climbed regretfully out of the blood-warm water, wiping his feet on the mossy bank. As he slipped the sandals back on, one hand on Castor's shoulder for support, he said, "Knowledge is power, Castor."

"Oh," said Castor, lost in his thoughts, "I guess so."

They started back toward the crystalline and colorful city in silence. Even the dumb erks were almost silent as they followed.

As they reached the first outbuilding Castor said, "Where is this library?"

"Ask any erk, Castor," Manyface said cheerfully. "Ask them to show you the war records of the past eight thousand years."