Horizons

EIGHT

IN THE MORNING, AHNI WENT BACK TO THE PARK WHERE she met Noah. Time to take him up on his invitation to play games in microG, where there would be witnesses if Xai or Li Zhen showed up. It was too early for the lunch crowd he sold to, but he was there, playing a thready melody on a small flute, his portable grill propped against a spreading oak tree. Too large for the space, Ahni thought and realized as her fingertips brushed the rough bark that the crown and branches were holo, that only the bottom part of the trunk was real. Birds even flitted among the branches and a fat gray squirrel chittered at her.

“Hey, you’re up early.” Noah scrambled to his feet, pocketing his flute. “Did you get some breakfast yet?

I’ve got half a melon. Real nice one.”

“Thanks,” she said, and took the thick orange slice he handed her. “Are you working, or can we sneak off?” She wiped juice from her chin. “I really want to try your ball game.”

“Let’s go.” He bounded to his feet. “People off this sixhour have had breakfast if they’re just getting up, or they’re done with dinner, and the park’ll be filling up. I was just about to head up there. Cleo — my girlfriend — she’ll already be up there, getting together a good pickup scrum. She’s an addict.” He chuckled as he leaned his pack up against the tree beside his grill and scrubbed his hands on his singlesuit. “I bet you’ll pick it up in a sec.”

“You just going to leave that there?” She nodded at the pack.

“Yeah.” He looked puzzled. “Why not?”

That said a lot right there. About this world up here in her sky. She smiled. “Why not.”

They took the elevator upward and when it beeped at them, she slipped into the padded straps as if she had done it every day of her life. This time, when the door slid open at the axle, she squinted automatically, but it wasn’t necessary. The air was bright, with a harsh brilliance that the ‘sunlight’ in the park and the light in the corridors didn’t have, but it was quite bearable. No green here, no planted tubes.

Instead, thick cables crisscrossed the space. Lots of room to fly and that’s what people were doing.

Off to her right, a woven lattice offered hand and toe holds along a string of kiosks selling squeezes of juice, tea, and water, skewered snacks, and bright nylon backpacks with small directional air jets for propulsion and steering. “For the tourists.” Noah’s lip curled.”You got cables all over the place.”

The brightly colored cables seemed to crisscross randomly at first sight, but Ahni noticed that they enclosed several large spherical patches of clear air. In the one just beyond the kiosks and elevator terminal, five skinny figures darted about like thrown spears. Fascinated, Ahni anchored herself with one hand and watched the game. Sure enough… they used a ball, although it had two grip loops attached.

A stiff mesh bag hung not too far from where she drifted. One of the players grabbed the ball by a loop, her foot twined around a cable, gave the ball a two handed jerk that whipped the man gripping the other loop head over heels. He lost his grip and she was off in a second, kicking off the stiff cable and soaring straight for the bag, the others angling in on trajectories to cross hers.

She snagged a bright blue cable as she sped by, whipped around it, and shot off at an angle, feet first, toes pointed, evading her closing pursuers neatly and earning a hoot of frustration from the clossest, who grabbed, missed, and spun out of control, grabbing for cables just out of his reach. The ball handler spun 180 degrees around another cable, but this one gave too much to her pull and sent her spiraling, close to out of control. The opposing players were on her now, yelling as they arrowed in, deflecting the ball handler’s teammates who hurtled in to run interference so that they went tumbling, grabbing for cables to kill their momentum, rebounding as they slammed into cables and one another. No helmets, Ahni noticed and winced as a player connected face first with a shoulder at full speed. Rough game.

With a whoop, Noah launched himself on a flat, shallow trajectory that would take him past the bag. The ball handler caught a caable, whipped around it, and used her momentum to shoot the ball on a perfect intersecting trajectory to Noah. He snagged it, somersaulted around another cable, spilling a lot of momentum, and spun himself feet first toward the bag.

Yelling, two of the other team hurtled toward him, certain to deflect him before he connected.

Ahni shrugged, grinned, and kicked off hard from the cable she’d anchored to. It was stiffer than she had guessed, with less give, and she rocketed forward, almost out of control but not quite. Her aim was good and the pair of interceptors weren’t watching for her. She tucked her head, hit the first one hard with her shoulder, heard his yelp as he spun, momentum transferring, caroming off her like a cue ball on a pool table. She’d imparted enough of her force that he hit his teammate. Not hard, but it deflected his trajectory and there was nothing for him to catch, to correct it. Yelling, he missed Noah by a handful of centimeters, writhing wildly as he tried to close that tiny gap.

With a howl of victory, Noah slammed the ball into the bag and rocked into a series of diminishing somersaults. The other players had spilled their momentum and rescued floundering teammates. They converged on Ahni now, radiating satisfied aggression, pleasure, and curiosity in equal amounts.

“Cheater, NO all! You weren’t playing!”

“Neither was she!”

“Would have been if you’d waited.” Noah grinned. “And Cleo was short, so I figure she’d pick me. I told you!” Noah reached Ahni first, arrowing back to spill most of his momentum on a nearby cable and kill the rest with a resounding slap on her back that sent her tumbling, out of control. “This is Ahni. A friend of mine. Not bad for a downsider, huh?”

Ahni sensed what was coming and tucked herself into a roll, just as a pair of hands connected and shoved.

She shot away from the push, felt another, less powerful connection that this time sent her spinning sideways. Initiation? She closed her eyes as blue and green cables spun around her and nausea spiked in her gut. Waiting to see if she panicked? Flailed? Another contact, this time from someone in motion, so that they shared the momentum and she spun off in a new direction. Her stomach protested and she squelched the sensation. How to win? She cracked her eyelids, focused on fleeting glimpses. A cable comming. If nobody hit her…

Fingertips brushed her, but the pusher had misjudged the trajectory. Now! She flung out her arms, back arching, her straightline path wavering, momentum faltering a hair. The cable slapped her palm and she clamped her fingers around it, readying herself for the jerk on her shoulder joint, her muscles flexing with it, taking up the shock. She whipped around, momentum spilling, and grinned. “Cool.” She laughed.

“You do this to all the new kids on the block?’”

The skinny rope-and-bone girl who had headed for the basket laughed with her, diamond inlays glinting in her teeth. “Next game, she’s on my team!”

“I brought her here, Cleo. She’s mine,” Noah drifted up beside her, grinning, totally pleased with himself.

“Okay, beer is on me. Tell Jacques at the stand.” He winked at Ahni, offered her a hand. “Nice save.

You sure you never saw scrum before?”

“Sure I have.” Ahni grinned and grabbed his wrist. “It’s called ‘pool’ downside. And we’re not the balls.”

Noah laughed, planted his foot against the cable, swung her into a sharp arc and launched her.

Ahni had the presence of mind to let go of his wrist and look ahead to see where she was going. Right toward the kiosks, with the rest of the scrum players in a loose scatter around her. She had a moment or two to watch a couple of them deftly grab cables, spinning around them to increase momentum, then arrowing off precisely toward the next cable, zig-zagging feet-first toward their goal. She tried it, did a sloppy launch on the first one, barely had enough momenntum to reach the next cable, did better there, and managed to reach the kiosk under her own power, if not as neatly or as quickly as the rest. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a couple of young kids playing tag… maybe ten years old.

They darted like fish and looked sort of like Koi.

“Your downside shows,” the diamond-toothed Cleo said when Ahni caught the guiding cables that fenced the kiosks. “But you do okay for all that.”

“Ah, she needs practice, is all.” A skinny man with a fuzz of bright red hair and freckles handed her a squeeze.

Ahni looked for the kids, but they had vanished. She stuck the spout of the squeeze in her mouth.

“Good,” she said, swallowing rich, bitter beer.

“Friend of ours makes it, sells it here.” The redheaded man poked his chin toward one of the kiosks.

“I’m Paul.” He gripped her wrist.

“Ahni.” One by one they introduced themselves, gripped her wrist. Cleo, Noah’s scrum-addict girlfriend, worked the Con, too, along with Illie, the other girl, a near albino with lavender eyes. Paul made and sold fruit wine locally, the other two players, Jose and Von, worked in Security, one in Customs and the other on patrol. They carried their beers to one of several loose hammocks of netting strung around the kiosks, perched there, one ankle woven through the mesh, orienting in the same direction.

“We’re here every day,” Cleo told Ahni. “Just hop on up. You gonna be here for awhile?”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be around.” Ahni grinned. “But I’ll be back. That was fun.”

“Good way to do some bump and bang, you know?” Illie spoke up, her voice a rich, jazz-singer alto that didn’t go with her snowwqueen color. “Get rid of it when you’re about ready to hit someone.”

“Some of these creeps heating up the Con oughta come up here more,” Von wiped sweat from his ebony face with the front of his singlesuit. “Energy level is getting hot, down at the skin.”

“That stuff’s not all for real.” Noah sucked the last drops from his squeeze. “Some of it’s ghosts. Whole bunch all of a sudden.” He shrugged. “Some wise ass dicking around.”

“Ghosts?” Ahni finished her own beer.

“People hacking a fake persona, pretending to be real in the Can. You can do it, but the system catches you eventually. Too hard to create really solid ghosts. Keyboard patterns, word use, syntax–they all give you away eventually, and your real name starts showing up. We’ve got a couple of real virtuosos playing hide and seek in there, though.”

“So who cares?” Cleo made a face, flashing her diamonds. “You know the type–got to prove they can get around the game–they got a bigger dick than you do. Kids and hormones. Doesn’t have anything to do with people getting ticked off skinside.”

“Well, we’re sure having a lot more trouble with the tourists.” Von stuffed his squeeze into a recycle slot on the side of the closest kiosk. “Everybody’s touchy and I don’t know how many complaints we got just this last week. From silly stuff to a couple of actual fights — like punches, right there in public space.

Heavies don’t have any manners.” Shaking his head, he waggled his fingers. “I’m off. On shift in a couple of hours. Stuff to do.” With a precise thrust of his foot against the webbing of the hammock, he arrowed away toward the elevator.

“I think you just got sort of a compliment.” Illie winked at Ahni. “He forgot you’re a downsider.”

“I figured.” Ahni made a face. “I’d better go, too.” She disposed of her own squeeze. “Thanks for the intro. Next game I’ll buy.” She pushed off and headed for the elevator, looking vainly for the kids she had seen earlier.

HER CORNROWED DOORMAN was on duty and watching for her. “A private courier from Dragon Home is waiting for you,” he told her. “Would you like me to inform him that you are back?”

“Urgent?” Ahni raised her eyebrows.

“Didn’t say so.” The man shook his head. “The hotel would have contacted you if it had been a bonded, urgent message.”

Probably not. Ahni hid her smile. Since she hadn’t eaten that very enticing chocolate on her pillow.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said, because she could smell herself after that brief stint of aerial soccer and she wasn’t about to greet a messenger from Dragon Home stinking of sweat. Hurrying now, she crossed the atrium to her room, the door opening to greet her. The faint film of scented powder — right where an intruder would be sure to step into it — was unmarred. The other articles she had left in precarious and strategic locations hadn’t been disturbed either. Good. She stripped out of her singleesuit, wincing at a host of small aches.

Rough sport. She stood under the multiple shower jets finding the beginnings of tomorrow’s bruises as she quickly washed. Great way to work off aggression in a closed little society like this one. Dry, she hesitated, then selected a long, elegant pant dress with a fitted bodice and a high collar, a handwoven silk brocade in a rich forest green with delicate gold thread embroidery. Very Chinese. Very imposing.

This was the time to look the part of The Huang’s daughter. “Send the courier,” she told the room.

He’s on his way, Miss Huang.

A handful of seconds later, the door flickered and seemed to vanish, revealing a small, compact man with a Cantonese face standing in front of the door. “Huang Ahni,” he said in English, “I am here to offer you an invitation from Li Zhen to join him for tea.” The Courier Union glyph glimmered on his right cheek, a bolt of scarlet lightning in a pearlescent circle that guaranteed safety.

“Open,” she said, and the image vanished as the door slid open. “I accept with pleasure.”

The Courier bowed again and ushered her to one of the small rental carts available for tourist use. He touched the screen to life, selected a destination, and climbed in beside her.

“I have a shuttle docked here,” he told her as the cart took off, threading the crowded corridor at a rapid pace, its sensors whipping it neatly around strolling tourists and hurrying service personnel. He wore a loose, full length jumpsuit, and she eyed it, searching for the cutting edge weaponry that each Courier was required to carry. It was well hidden. He guessed her interest and his internal smile glimmered like quicksilver for an instant. He had the skinny, ropy body and gravity-thick bones of a long-term resident born downside.

They entered a small docking facility that required a vitals pass and a retinal scan before an inner lock admitted them. He led her along a corridor to a numbered door, palmed it open to reveal a small craft stuffed into a closet sized space that barely fit it. It looked like an old fashioned bathtub with a top, Ahni thought. Ugly. The top folded up like wings, to reveal two recliners inside with space behind for minimal cargo. At the Courier’s nod she climbed down into the craft and pulled the webbing harness across her.

It tightened and lights glowed as the hatch winged closed. “I’d like to see out,” Ahni said mildly.

The Courier nodded. Instantly the upper hull vanished, leaving Ahni with the disquieting feeling that she was indeed sitting in a bathtub. At that moment, the dock port irised open and the little shuttle zoomed backward into the void.

Eerie to move and feel no wind, no rush of passage. Not to mention that they were floating in vacuum that would wring them to dry husks in an instant. Ahni drew a deep breath, damping the rush of adrenaline into her bloodstream, using a moment of Pause to control her reaction. Caught that quicksilver glimmer of a smile as the Courier whipped the little craft around and booted it away from the huge hulking curve of NYUp’s outer hull.

Damn, that thing was big. Acceleration pushed her into her seat with its invisible palm.

And then… Earth came into view. Huge. Blue and white. So close that she stiffened, prepared to fall down to it, clutched by its steel arms of gravity. Draw a slow breath. Another. Better. Aware of the Courier watching her, gauging her reaction. “What… did you do before you were a Courier?” She managed the voice of calm if not internal tranquility.

“I was an asteroid miner. Got tired of the belt. I have family on Dragon Home.”

“What’s it like out there?”

“The Belt? Alone.”

Alone, not lonely. Ahni nodded slowly. “Did you mine metals?”

“Ice.” The shuttle tilted and stars swung across Ahni’s field of vision, so that she had to swallow hard.

Damn her stomach anyway. “Look.” He gestured with his chin.

At first she couldn’t figure out what he was pointing out. Then she saw it, the matte black of a ship shape trailing a lacy veil that glittered as it caught the light.

“Solar flare due tomorrow… X class,” he said. “That’ll help keep your genes good for the next generation.”

”What is it?” She squinted, spied one… no, two more of the dark ships trailing lace.

“Ice crystals. Melt the ice, spray it out. Makes a curtain to shield the platform. For awhile.” His grin tinged his words. “Steady job, ice.”

Up ahead, another vast shape obscured the stars, began to eclipse the sun. Dragon Home.

Indistinguishable from NYUp, it rotated slowly, majestically, just fast enough to give skinside residents a good percentage of Earthnormal gravity without creating a problem for the fragile primate inner ear. Small craft zipped around it, glittering in the sun, vanishing into the darkness of its shadow. Silver balloons garlanded it.”What are those round things?” Ahni asked.

“Storage bladders. You fill ’em with ice or refined metal, drop em down the gravity well to your catcher out of Darkside. You stay up there and keep mining.”

She felt an echo of that alone in his voice.

“Saved my credit, wanted to bring my sister up here, and her daughter. She’s a professor and my niece could be one. There are no jobs down there and we could use her up here.” An edge of bitterness threaded his mild words. “Can’t do it. All those years I saved, they don’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Too many people. Dragon Home won’t take new resident families. Neither will Euro Two and NYUp.

We’ve hit the limit unnless we expand.”

”Why not expand?” Anhi flinched as they dove beneath the garrlanded balloons. They were big…

everything was bigger than it seemed. Perspective didn’t seem to function up here. “Why not just build a new platform if so many people want to live up here?”

“Money. Numbers.” The Courier shrugged. “We’re saturated with downside corporations. They don’t need more space up here. We can’t afford to lift downside material for expansion. Not for residential space. You need to drop big rocks down here if you want to have enough resources to build big.

Darkside doesn’t want us mining the lunar and they’re backed by the military. Earth’s not gonna let us drop rocks down. Just the refined stuff. We can’t refine enough out there to expand.”

Another piece to this puzzle, but she had no picture yet. Ahni stifled a gasp as they closed on Dragon Home. It loomed and her brain wanted that to be up, screamed at her that it was going to topple over on them, crush them. She closed her eyes, did Pause to still the chemical panic, breathed deeply. Opened her eyes just in time to see a lighted opening in front of them.

The shuttle dove into it, walls sliding past, making her realize just how fast they had to have been moving out there. The Courier halted in a narrow bay nearly identical to the one she had just left, only here, the miscellaneous labels, warnings, and instructions were in Chinese. The Courier touched his invisible controls and after perrhaps a minute, the winged hatch folded back and he leaped out, turning to offer her a hand.

She scrambled out, straightened her dress and ran a hand over her short crop. Stepped toward the door at the end of the little dock at the Courier’s gesture. It irised open as she approached.

The man standing on the other side was thirty-three, she knew. but Li Zhen looked no older than Xai.

Slender with high cheekkbones and a long, lanky northern build, only son of China’s current Chairman, he smiled at her, bowed slightly as she stepped out of her sandals. “Huang Ahni,” he said in upperclass Beijing Mandarin. “Welcome to Dragon Home.” He gave her another shallow bow — you are not my equal it said, but you are my guest — and ushered her through the doorway and into the room behind it.

Woven carpets in shades of gold and black accented with lacquer red covered the floor and several chairs of carved wood covered with embroidered cushions circled a low table. An antique square of silk, exquisitely embroidered, hung on the eggshell colored wall. A carved screen hid a refreshment wall. This must be his private dock, she realized. This would be where he greeted visitors, perhaps offered them tea if they were not important enough to deal with in his private rooms.

“So what is your impression of life above the sky?” he asked as he ushered her through an arched doorway. “Your father has never been interested in the orbitals.”

“M y father keeps his eyes on the ground,” Ahni agreed. Polite chit chat, tea, then real talk. They passed through a small garden with a cloudless sky above, all gravel paths and neatly pruned bonnsai, with a pool full of gold and silver fish. Koi. She glanced at them. “I find this world… fascinating,” she said slowly. “It is not Earth.”

“You are perceptive.”

He was curious. And wary. He would know that she was a Class Nine empath. He himself was a Class Five. Sensitive enough to benefit him as a leader, not sensitive enough to read people clearly. “Have you tried a few games in micro gravity?” He smiled but his eyes glinted with a razor hint of mockery.

“I have indeed.” She smiled. “I enjoy exercising the wings of flight. And I envy those born here with such talent to fly.” It was a pleasantry, so his spike of reaction surprised her.

She had touched a nerve with this casual comment. Why?

“I rarely have time for childish games,” he said crisply. “But then you are on vacation, are you not?” He stood aside to usher her into the room beyond the garden.

This was his private chamber. More rugs covered the floor and the furniture was of lacquer, inlaid with mother of pearl, antiques lifted from Earth. An intricately carved and inlaid screen decorated one corner and a small bamboo plant grew in a celadon pot. Sofa and chairs with heavily embroidered cushions grouped about a low table with an inlaid surface. A tray held a round, imperfect pot and two cups. Ahni seated herself on the sofa, realizing that this furniiture was genuinely old, certainly more than a thousand years. Her grandmother could have told her which dynasty had produced it, who the emperors were, and why it ultimately failed. And then she would have rapped Ahni on the knuckles with her fan for not knowing these things.

“Tea?” Li Zhen was already pouring and Ahni realized that the pot was very old, perhaps from the Qin dynasty, shaped on a primitive wheel. How had it survived? Buried in some noble’s tomb? Dug up by looters, perhaps used by some peasant-family who bought it cheap in the bazaar because it wasn’t perfect and had been in the ground with the dead? Ahni accepted the cup of golden liquid that Li Zhen handed her, murmured thanks. The tea was flowery and delicate, delicious. She sipped it, bowed her thanks. “Very nice. From Earth?”

Li Zhen nodded. “But we grow good tea here. In our internal garden. Much like the one in the North American Alliance platform that you visited. Have you an interest in micro gravity gardening?”

First thrust. “Not really,” she said. “I am more interested in those who garden.”

“I see.” He looked up as a teenaged boy bearing a lacquer tray entered the room. He set several small dishes of tiny dumplings on the table, placed a pair of chopsticks before each of them along with a small plate. Bowed and departed. He looked like Li Zhen.

“Your son?” Ahni asked.

“No.” That spike of reaction flared again. “My cousin’s son. Please.” He gestured at the table. “Help yourself.”

Ahni picked up her chopsticks, selected one of the plump dumplings. It burst in her mouth, the tender skin releasing a flood of delicate broth and a filling of chopped pork and green onion. “Excellent.” She smiled at him, wondering about those spikes. “Your cook is better than the best dumpling shop in Tai Pei.”

“He was a chef in Beijing.” Li Zhen took one, gestured at the dish. “These are filled with duck,” he said.

“Very good. How is your father these days?” He gave her a brief sharp look as he popped a dumpling neatly into his mouth.

“You are right.” She smiled. “The duck is very good. My father is… concerned about his son. As you perhaps know.”

Li Zhen laid aside his chopsticks, sipped his tea thoughtfully. “Friendship is a very complex thing,” he mused. “One may amass a certain amount of… obligation. And when the time comes to disscharge it, one does. It would be distressing to find that one’s friend had used that obligation to dishonor his own family.”

“Particularly his father.” Ahni selected another dumpling. “But it may be, that one is not aware of the use to which one’s assistance may be put.”

Ahni nibbled at the dumpling. “Very nice,” she said. “Is the spinach from your garden here?”

“Of course. I will give you a tour of our rice paddies if you wish.”

“I would like that, another time.” She made her tone apologetic. “Alas, I need to speak with my brother, and I must concentrate on finding him first. Do you know where I might contact him?”

Li Zhen deftly selected another dumpling and put it on her plate.”You must try this sweet one. It’s a specialty of my chef. I cannot tell you where your brother is.” His tone was apologetic.

He was lying, but Ahni made her face reflect resignation. “I am disappointed. I had hoped to… restore the situation. You’re right. That was excellent.” She laid her chopsticks crosswise on her plate. “Your chef is very skilled.”

Li Zhen bowed his head fractionally. “Please give your brother my regards when you speak to him,” he said. “I would be honored to entertain you both in Dragon Home. Since you have not visited the platforms before.”

“Perhaps we will do that.” She was tired of the polite circling. “The flowers you sent me were lovely. I enjoyed them.”

He acknowledged the point with the slightest hint of a smile.

“A gesture of apology,” he murmured. “For my inadvertent cooperation in less than honorable behavior.”

“I found the combination of scent to be… intriguing.”

“Ah, the richness of life is always tempered by the knowledge of the grave is it not?” He smiled gently at her.

“How true.” She picked up the teapot, poured tea into his cup, unasked. “A pair of assassins stalked me on Earth recently. The threat of the grave is always there, is it not?” She smiled at him. “We cannot spend our lives fearing it.”

Li Zhen got up abruptly, crossed to the wall beside the carved screen. At his approach it suddenly shimmered and seemed to beecome transparent, showing Ahni a layered landscape of corridors above, people, parks, busy manufacturing floors, and finally, the green and hot light of a garden, all overlaid like transparencies one atop the other. “What do you see?” he demanded.

Ahni feigned consideration. Not a test, no. Genuine question.

A tin can? Her father’s perspective, a floating outpost in a wasteland above the ground, of no real consequence. She looked with Dane’s eyes. She studied the corridors, the ant sized people, the man selling stems of fresh flowers, the woman applying a fiberlight tatttoo to a customer from a one-legged table that reminded her of Noah’s grill, the rich greens of the garden. “I see a world,” she said softly.

“Yes.” His eyes lighted as he looked at the bustle of life on the wall. Then he faced her, his eyes holding hers. “I am dismayed that your brother has caused trouble for your family. And I regret that I cannot tell you where he is. I have no argument with Huang Family. This world–as you so aptly named it–is my entire concern. I encourage you to remain here as my guest, for as long as you wish. This world up here… its future is worth contemplation, Huang Ahni.”

Genuine invitation and… something more? “What is the future of this world, Zhen Li?”

“It is our tomorrow.”

A tickle of cold made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. “My father does not share your vision of tomorrow,” she said softly. “Nor does my brother. I think he may have misled you.”

“This is a possibility, of course.” He lifted the empty teapot from the table. “Take this as my gift.” He held it out to her. “It’s from the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.” He smiled, his eyes enigmatic, his emotions mixed enough to be unreadable. “You will appreciate it.”

“I am honored.” She bowed as she took the pot, stunned at the gift, aware of the age of it against the skin of her palms. “I thank you for this treasure,” she murmured and meant it.

“I will be honored if you accept my invitation.” Zhen’s eyes were on her. She felt the gaze without needing to lift her eyes from the ancient porcelain in her hands.

“Thank you for inviting me,” she said. “I will… consider it.” The teenaged son of a cousin had appeared at the door, and her visit was obviously at an end. “And thank you for this gift. I will treasure it.” Which was truth and she let him hear it.

He didn’t answer, merely inclined his head. The son of a cousin led her back through the small reception chamber and her Courier was waiting for her. He didn’t say anything as she webbed in and the small dock opened. The hull was still transparent and she almost asked him to opaque it. But she didn’t, and on the trip back, cradled the pot in her lap. Qin Shi Huang. More than two thousand years ago he had unified the many warring states into one country, had given them a single currency and language and legal code. From his name, Qin, had come the name of China. He had died at age forty, leaving behind an army of pottery warriors to guard him that still stood watch. And China was whole, still.

Priceless, this pot. She touched it, wondering if that long ago emperor had ever touched it, picked it up with his own hands to pour tea for an honored guest. Beyond the seemingly transparent walls of this mobile bathtub, the blue-white ball of Earth shimmered, partially eclipsed by the dark mass of NYUp.

And she tried to feel the connection between this ancient piece of fire-hardened clay in her hands and that planet before her.

She could not, and that troubled her.