“Lovely, Edward! I will show you the ocean, and you shall watch the new breed of clipper ships sailing the China Seas!”
He clutched her and she did not draw away. “That will be marvellous. First, I have to talk to a Minister in Peking, a man called Li Kwang See. It is important to get his approval of the PM unofficially.”
She gave a little squeak in the region of his right shoulder and buried her face in his chest.
“Do you know the minister’s name?” he asked.
Felicity covered her mouth and nose with a narrow hand, shaking her head. “Go on,” she said indistinctly. “Why do you need Chinese approval?”
“We must secure Earth markets for full expansion. The World State will be in operation soon. Everything is getting very Chinese these days . . .”
“Only American things! Meanwhile, Chinese things are getting westernized.”
Her voice was strained; he attributed it to the fantastic view before them.
“Even my little old lin is Chinese in origin.”
“I know—the very name Lin is Mandarin, meaning a fabulous creature like a unicorn, whose voice coincides with all the notes of music—melodious, you’d say!”
“My lin isn’t much like a unicorn.”
“Maybe not. But it is symmetrical and beautifully proportioned, and it only appears when benevolent kings are on the throne. And those are legendary characteristics of our unicorns.”
“Aha! Then I like my lin a great deal, and will never part with it.”
They crowded into the ferry when it came, together with a flock of other passengers, happy that theirs was not a longer wait—unlike the zeepees, Roche’s Limit worked by the twenty-four-hour terrestrial clock, and there were only four ferries a terrestrial day to and from Earth.
The nightmare of sinking down to the planetary surface. The choking moment of landing. The nausea of full gravity. The rank smell of natural atmosphere, full of millions of years of impurities. The horror of finding that they had arrived during that antiquated and inconvenient hiatus, night. The boredom of getting through Check Out, with its interminable examinations. The contempt at the antique forms of transport. The excitement of being together in this irrational, random world . . .
XVII
A week in Cleveland, Ohio, was like a cycle of Cathay. They left after only five days. It was true that Edward’s old uncle was kind to them, and took them pedal-boating on the Cayahoga River. “You’d never believe that this waterway was once notorious,” he told them. “It was the first body of water ever to be insured as a fire-hazard. Now you catch big fish in it, and the duck-shooting’s great, in season.”
But Cleveland itself was a relic when it was not entirely a slum. Its industries had died for lack of nourishment. Like most of the great industrial cities of the West, its inhabitants were villagers again, painfully feeling their way back to a rooted way of life.
There was no private transport. They caught an infrequent coach to the West Coast, waiting in San Francisco until they could get a passage to one of the distant Chinese ports. Eventually, they boarded a steam-assisted schooner, The Caliph, bound for Hangchow.
Edward Maine was anxious. A veil had come between him and Felicity. He did not understand, and feared that he had somehow offended her, so maladroit was he with women.
They had a fair-sized cabin opening on the promenade deck. After long arguments with their steward, Maine managed to get both the PM and the lin brought up from the hold and installed in the cabin. The familiar objects brought with them a sense of security.
“That makes it more like home,” he said. “Lin, can you tell us a cheerful story?”
“America is disappearing,” said the lin, which was perfectly true. Already land was a mere blue line on the horizon. “I have a story called ‘Deserted Dunes’.”
“Would you like to hear it, Felicity?”
“I suppose so.”
“Leopards burned atrabiliously among the magnesium fountains. Musical girls walked among sand dunes because heavy increases in taxation were demanded. One old man said, ‘The ocean will return next year.’ Spring brought rain. Stone decayed. And again bells sounded along the deserted temples.”
She forced a laugh. “Very cheering. ‘The ocean will return next year . . .’ I wonder what exactly that means!” She looked a little green, as if the pitching of the schooner was having its effect.
With an effort, he went over to her and took her in his arms. “I know Cleveland wasn’t too successful. This is the first time we have been alone together since Fragrance. The world distracts us . . . What the lin says means nothing—and nothing will return unless we seize it now. Oh, dear Felicity, I don’t know what you really think of me—I know you really only came along for the ride—you really want to be with your father and never go back to Fragrance, isn’t that it?—but I care greatly for you, and I want to know what you feel about me. Please, please, speak out to me!”
She gave him a look of—he took it for despair and something more. Then she broke from him and ran from the cabin. He followed, watching her run along the deck, her coat flapping in the breeze, a vivid figure against the tumbled drama of ocean. Then he went back into the cabin and shut the door.
For a long while, he sat on the edge of his bunk. Then with
an effort, he rose again, beginning to unpack the parts of the PM and assemble them. The Caliph had its own wind-assisted generators, and passenger electricity was on at this hour of day. When the machine was assembled, he plugged it in at the power point and switched on.
The PM was not programmed with supplementary terrestrial data as yet. Edward realized more clearly than ever how far ahead lay the first generation of portable PMs. Nevertheless, the prototype should still be reliable as far as his and Felicity’s personal situation was concerned. He was determined that they must disentangle that situation as soon as possible; the sudden lapse in their easy relationship was more than he could bear.
As the machine began to read him, he became aware of a queasiness in the stomach, a light film of perspiration on his forehead, the symptoms of incipient mal de mer. He tried to relax as the PM absorbed the levels of his physiological functions.
He set the machine to print out for the next twelve hours only. It began to deliver, its print finger moving with an irascible, jerky action common to machines and tyrannosauri.
Persist in your mission
Anxiety precipitates crisis
76
Fragrance faces imminent destruction
99
Shock endangers love
47
Maintain contact with girl
Further study of chance laws needed
99.5
Summary: multiple crisis in attractive company
Edward switched the machine off, pulled the plug from the power socket, and began to dismantle the machine, making a long face as he did so.
The PM was programmed for the confined world of Fragrance II. It had been fed no routine data since leaving the zeepee. Its prediction of catastrophe was a phantom, based purely on his current physiological state which, on Fragrance, would indeed have presaged some phenomenal disaster: here it presaged only possible sea-sickness.
“Maintain contact with the girl” was another plain nonsense, since on shipboard it was impossible to do anything else.
Unless—the thought came like a shot—Felicity fell overboard.
But it was a miserable little read-out, with crazy probabilities. And the “Further study of chance laws needed” was irrelevant, since he had stressed such needs at every stage of research. The PM could not be expected to work in transposed environments without elaborate preparation.
He ought to dismiss the read-out, knowing how out-oftouch with reality it was. He was listening to a blind oracle, he told himself. Then he remembered that oracles were traditionally blind.
Searching the ship for Felicity in a state of anxiety, he found her eventually in the stern, leaning against a cover
ed winch, staring at the horizon below which the last of America had disappeared.
“Don’t stand here, my dear Felicity. It’s too cold. Come into the cabin.”
The sails drummed above them. He put an arm tightly round her waist, taken again by her beauty, for all her present pallor.
She gave him a tortured look, then followed meekly. He kept one hand on her arm and the other on the rail. Noise was all about them, in sails and boat and sea, while his lungs rejoiced in the wild air. He was not going to be sea sick. There were minor victories of which no one knew . . .
Even in the cabin, with the door closed, they could still hear the gallant sound of sails and rigging. Felicity stood looking so helpless that he became angry.
“You’ve fooled me, haven’t you? You came with me simply to get to Earth. I was mad to expect anything else. You don’t want anything further to do with me, do you?” He ran his hands through his wild hair.
“Don’t try to drive me away, Edward. What you say is not true.”
“Then tell me, for god’s sake. Something’s the matter. What is it?” He was shaking her angrily.
“All right, all right, you bastard! I’m not afraid of telling you—I’m afraid of your being unable to understand . . . You are going to visit Li Kwang See, is that so?” Her face was set. She scowled at him.
“I told you it was so.”
“Edward, Li Kwang See is my respected father.”
“Your father?” They stared at each other meaninglessly. “Your father?” He did not know what to say. He went and gazed out of the small window at the hammering waves until he regained his voice.
“The minister is your father? Are you a member of the Chinese secret police, the Khang?” He turned to examine her. “You were put on to me when my holiday on Earth was first on the cards. Your agents probably heard about it before I did. I was tricked into choosing you.”
“Edward, no, please don’t think that. I’m nothing to do with the Khang, of course I’m not!”
“No? Wait—I know. It was that sneering thing Stein-Presteign said, moving me subtly towards you. This was all engineered by Callibrastics, so that someone would come along with me and see how I performed. Typical of them! You’re paid by Callibrastics, aren’t you?”
“No, Edward. I don’t know anyone connected with your firm. It’s just coincidence, nothing more. When you mentioned my father’s name on the ferry to Earth, I could have died with astonishment. Literally, I could have died!”
“Yes? Then why didn’t you say something then?” The tears in her eyes only made him more savage.
“I was just so amazed . . . I couldn’t speak. I had to have time to think it over. But it really is just a coincidence. I cannot come to terms with it myself.”
He shook his head. “You ask me to believe that? How many Chinese are there? Eight hundred million? And I pick on you by accident? I’d be mad ever to believe that.”
“You must believe it. I have to believe it. Or else I have to believe that you sought me out just because you thought I would help you speak to my father and win his favour.”
“Nonsense, I hired you by accident, through the Intern Agency! I didn’t even ask for a Chinese girl.”
“Well, then, and you came to seek me out by devious means at FFFFA. I didn’t seekjow out. The advantage is with you, not me, and for me it’s just as much of a coincidence as for you.”
“An eight hundred million to one coincidence? It’s a trick.” Another thought struck him. “You’re lying, aren’t you? Li Kwang See can’t be your father.”
“He is, he is! Why are you so horrid? Your little scientific world’s turned upside down.”
They continued to argue. They ate no meal that evening. Finally they fell into their separate bunks exhausted, and slept. The morning made no difference. Still they argued.
For a whole sea-week they argued. Sea-sickness never touched them, so busy were they with the problem.
“This is ridiculous,” Edward said at last. “After all, I know a great deal more about the laws of probability than you do, Felicity. I cannot believe that this is a coincidence; the odds are just too long against it. It runs counter to everything in my theory of non-randomness—I’d be mad to believe it.”
“I’m fed up with your stupid little mathematical arguments,’ she said wearily. She was pale and fatigued, huddled in the cabin’s only armchair. “You’re mad to let a coincidence, however big, get in the way of our love.”
So exhausted were they that for a moment neither of them seemed to realize what she said. Then he looked at her again.
He began to smile. A great burden fell from him. She smiled back, concealing her nose and mouth with one small hand.
“Felicity, Zenith . . .” he said. He took her into his embrace, feeling her arms move about his neck as he kissed her, feeling her lips open and her slender body press against his.
“Oh, Felicity . . .” he whispered. They scrambled into the lower bunk, weeping and laughing and kissing.
XVIII
Edward never accepted the coincidence. By the end of the voyage, when they were adepts at love, he had come to live with it. But his mind still rejected it whenever the thought of it arose. It was as if he opened a familiar door and found that it led, not into the kitchen, but to the summit of Everest. It would always be there. He could not assimilate it.
Felicity adjusted more easily. As she explained, her view of life was in any case more random than Edward’s. She positively skipped on to the Chinese shore at Hangchow.
The stinks and perfumes of the place amazed Edward, as well as its bustling life—private lives lived much more publicly than he was used to. He viewed it all with fascination and a little dread, realizing again how much of his urge to create a working PM stemmed from his own timidity, his suspicion of the new, the exotic. But with Felicity for guide, he felt entirely safe.
They spent that night in a small hotel overlooking the Grand Canal and next morning boarded a train for Peking. The train was pulled by an enormous steam engine and was spotlessly clean. As they waited in Hangchow station, little old ladies with faces wrinkled like contour maps of the Pyrenees sprang out of the ground and rubbed down windows and brass-work until everything gleamed. Then the express set off again through the great tamed tawny countryside.
To Edward Maine’s eyes, Peking looked formidable, grim, and bleak, even in the fresh spring sunshine. At first it seemed like one more big monolithic capital, with its enormous squares, factories, and barracklike buildings. As they crossed Chang-an Square in a blue trolley-car, the wide spaces made him feel dizzy; but Felicity effected a partial cure by showing him slogans set in coloured tiles into the series of grey paving stones. She translated for him, squeezing his hand.
“You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you. Mao Tse-Tung.”
He liked the sentiment. It was still only nine-thirty, he thought.
The trolley-car took them past one of the great grey old watchtowers which had overlooked the city for a thousand years, to an older part of the town.
Felicity guided them to a small hotel in a side street where tourists rarely went, where the human scale was more to their taste.
“Oh, you will grow to love Peking, Edward. You see it was never a motor-car city, like the big cities of America and even Europe; so now that the motor car has gone, the city remains as it always was, without malformations. Wait till you get used to it!”
“I don’t want to get used to it. I like it all as it is now—novel in every stone.”
It proved difficult to visit Li Kwang See officially. The Ministry for External Trade and Exotic Invisible Earnings was a gaunt grey building near the Tou Na Ting Park, its flanks patched by large-letter posters. It was eight storeys high and lacked elevators. Edward, clutching his letter of introduction from Stein-Presteign of Smics Callibrastics, took a whole
day to work through junior officials on the ground floor up to senior officials on the top floor. The officials, dressed in grey or blue, were always smiling. One of them, greatly courteous—this was on the fifth floor, when Edward showed signs of impatience—said, “Naturally, we realize that Smics Callibrastics is very important, both to you and to the planetoid Fragrance II. Unfortunately, in our ignorance, we fail to have heard of the company, and so must remedy that error by applying to a better-informed department. You must try to excuse the delay.”
He smiled back. The whole exercise, he thought, was beautifully designed to make him see matters in perspective. A Chinese perspective. He admired it, admired both the courtesy and the slight mystery—just as he admired those qualities in Felicity.
During his second day in the waiting-rooms and staircases of the Ministry of External Trade, it was revealed to him that the Minister himself was at present negotiating a trading agreement elsewhere, and that consequently the Ministry was unable to help him this week. They hoped that he would enjoy the simple pleasures of Peking, and that they might be able to assist him on another occasion. They presented him with a free ticket to a concert in the Park of Workers, Farmers and Soldiers.
“Oh, my father is so elusive!” Felicity exclaimed, when all this was reported to her. To relieve her feelings, she tore up the free ticket and scattered the pieces equably about the room. “All these bureaucrats are the same. While you were languishing in that horrible building, I was speaking to some relations who live near here. They will try to trace my father. Meanwhile, tonight they invite us both to a feast.”
The feast was a glory in itself and successful as a social occasion. Among the multitudinous courses, many a toast was drunk to matters of mutual esteem, such as good health, longevity, wisdom, freedom from indigestion, prosperity, and the success of trading enterprises. Edward blundered home afterwards, holding Felicity’s hand down narrow lanes, sharing his new knowledge of China with her.
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