Wang-mu looked at her in wonder. “Why would you do this, when the gods have already told you how I bribed the foreman to let me be on your crew and not to interrupt us while I talked to you?”
The gods had told her no such thing, of course, but Qing-jao only smiled. “Why doesn't it occur to you that maybe the gods want us to be friends?”
Abashed, Wang-mu clasped her hands together and laughed nervously; Qing-jao took the girl's hands in hers and found that Wang-mu was trembling. So she wasn't as bold as she seemed.
Wang-mu looked down at their hands, and Qing-jao followed her gaze. They were covered with dirt and muck, dried on now because they had been standing so long, their hands out of the water. “We're so dirty,” said Wang-mu.
Qing-jao had long since learned to disregard the dirtiness of righteous labor, for which no penance was required. “My hands have been much filthier than this,” said Qing-jao. “Come with me when our righteous labor is finished. I will tell our plan to my father, and he will decide if you can be my secret maid.”
Wang-mu's expression soured. Qing-jao was glad that her face was so easy to read. “What's wrong?” said Qing-jao.
“Fathers always decide everything,” said Wang-mu.
Qing-jao nodded, wondering why Wang-mu would bother to say something so obvious. “That's the beginning of wisdom,” said Qing-jao. “Besides, my mother is dead.”
Righteous labor always ended early in the afternoon. Officially this was to give people who lived far from the fields time to return to their homes. Actually, though, it was in recognition of the custom of making a party at the end of righteous labor. Because they had worked right through the afternoon nap, many people felt giddy after righteous labor, as if they had stayed up all night. Others felt sluggish and surly. Either one was an excuse for drinking and dining with friends and then collapsing into bed hours early to make up for the lost sleep and the hard labor of the day.
Qing-jao was of the kind who felt out of sorts; Wang-mu was obviously of the giddy kind. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that the Lusitania Fleet weighed heavily on Qing-jao's mind, while Wang-mu had just been accepted as secret maid by a godspoken girl. Qing-jao led Wang-mu through the process of applying for employment with the House of Han– washing, fingerprinting, the security check– until she finally despaired of listening to Wang-mu's bubbling voice another moment and withdrew.
As she walked up the stairs to her room, Qing-jao could hear Wang-mu asking fearfully, “Have I made my new mistress angry?” And Ju Kung-mei, the guardian of the house, answered, “The godspoken answer to other voices than yours, little one.” It was a kind answer. Qing-jao often admired the gentleness and wisdom of those her father had hired into his house. She wondered if she had chosen as wisely in her first hiring.
No sooner did she think of this worry than she knew she had been wicked to make such a decision so quickly, and without consulting with her father beforehand. Wang-mu would be found to be hopelessly unsuitable, and Father would rebuke her for having acted foolishly.
Imagining Father's rebuke was enough to bring the immediate reproof of the gods. Qing-jao felt unclean. She rushed to her room and closed the door. It was bitterly ironic that she could think over and over again how hateful it was to perform the rituals the gods demanded, how empty their worship was– but let her think a disloyal thought about Father or Starways Congress, and she had to do penance at once.
Usually she would spend a half hour, an hour, perhaps longer, resisting the need for penance, enduring her own filthiness. Today, though, she hungered for the ritual of purification. In its own way, the ritual made sense, it had a structure, a beginning and end, rules to follow. Not at all like the problem of the Lusitania Fleet.
On her knees, she deliberately chose the narrowest, faintest grain in the palest board she could see. This would be a hard penance; perhaps then the gods would judge her clean enough that they could show her the solution to the problem Father had set for her. It took her half an hour to make her way across the room, for she kept losing the grain and had to start over each time.
At the end, exhausted from righteous labor and eyesore from line-tracing, she wanted desperately to sleep; instead, she sat on the floor before her terminal and called up the summary of her work so far. After examining and eliminating all the useless absurdities that had cropped up during the investigation, Qing-jao had come up with three broad categories of possibility. First, that the disappearance was caused by some natural event that, at lightspeed, had simply not become visible yet to the watching astronomers. Second, that the loss of ansible communications was the result of either sabotage or a command decision in the fleet. Third, that the loss of ansible communications was caused by some planetside conspiracy. The first category was virtually eliminated by the way the fleet was traveling. The starships were simply not close enough together for any known natural phenomenon to destroy them all at once. The fleet had not rendezvoused before setting out– the ansible made such things a waste of time. Instead, all the ships were moving toward Lusitania from wherever they happened to be when they were assigned to the fleet. Even now, with only a year or so of travel left before all were in orbit around Lusitania's star, they were so far apart that no conceivable natural event could possibly have affected them all at once.
The second category was made almost as unlikely by the fact that the entire fleet had disappeared, without exception. Could any human plan possibly work with such perfect efficiency– and without leaving any evidence of advance planning in any of the databases or personality profiles or communications logs that were maintained in planetside computers? Nor was there the slightest evidence that anyone had altered or hidden any data, or masked any communications to avoid leaving behind a trail of evidence. If it was a fleetside plan, there was neither evidence nor concealment nor error.
The same lack of evidence made the idea of a planetside conspiracy even more unlikely. And making all these possibilities still less possible was the sheer simultaneity of it. As near as anyone could determine, every single ship had broken off ansible communications at almost exactly the same time. There might have been a time lag of seconds, perhaps even minutes– but never as long as five minutes, never a gap long enough for someone on one ship to remark about the disappearance of another.
The summary was elegant in its simplicity. There was nothing left. The evidence was as complete as it would ever be, and it made every conceivable explanation inconceivable.
Why would Father do this to me? she wondered, not for the first time.
Immediately– as usual– she felt unclean even for asking such a question, for doubting her father's perfect correctness in all his decisions. She needed to wash, just a little, to take away the impurity of her doubt.
But she didn't wash. Instead she let the voice of the gods swell inside her, let their command grow more urgent. This time she wasn't resisting out of a righteous desire to grow more disciplined. This time she was deliberately trying to attract as much attention as possible from the gods. Only when she was panting with the need to cleanse herself, only when she shuddered at the most casual touch of her own flesh– a hand brushing a knee– only then did she voice her question.
“You did it, didn't you?” she said to the gods. “What no human being could have done, you must have done. You reached out and cut off the Lusitania Fleet.”
The answer came, not in words, but in the ever-increasing need for purification.
“But Congress and the admiralty are not of the Way. They can't imagine the golden door into the City of the Jade Mountain in the West. If Father says to them, 'The gods stole your fleet to punish you for wickedness,' they'll only despise him. If they despise him, our greatest living statesman, they'll despise us as well. And if Path is shamed because of Father, it will destroy him. Is that why you did this thing?”
She began to weep. “I won't let you destroy my father. I'll find another way. I'll find an answer that will satisfy them. I defy you!”
No sooner had she said the words than the gods sent her the most overpowering sense of her own abominable filthiness she had ever felt. It was so strong it took her breath away, and she fell forward, clutching at her terminal. She tried to speak, to plead for forgiveness, but she gagged instead, swallowed hard to keep from retching. She felt as though her hands were spreading slime on everything she touched; as she struggled to her feet, her gown clung across her flesh as if it were covered with thick black grease.
But she did not wash. Nor did she fall to the ground and trace lines in the wood. Instead she staggered to the door, meaning to go downstairs to her father's room.
The doorway caught her, though. Not physically– the door swung open easily as ever– but still she could not pass. She had heard of such things, how the gods captured their disobedient servants in doorways, but it had never happened to her before. She couldn't understand how she was being held. Her body was free to move. There was no barrier. But she felt such a sickening dread at the thought of walking through that she knew she couldn't do it, knew that the gods required some sort of penance, some sort of purification or they'd never let her leave the room. Not woodgrain-tracing, not handwashing. What did the gods require?
Then, all at once, she knew why the gods wouldn't let her pass through the door. It was the oath that Father had required of her for her mother's sake. The oath that she would always serve the gods, no matter what. And here she had been on the verge of defiance. Mother, forgive me! I will not defy the gods. But still I must go to Father and explain to him the terrible predicament in which the gods have placed us. Mother, help me pass through this door!
As if in answer to her plea, it came to her how she might pass through the door. All she needed to do was fix her gaze on a point in the air just outside the upper-right corner of the door, and while never letting her gaze move from that spot, step backward through the door with her right foot, place her left hand through, then pivot leftward, bringing her left leg backward through the doorway, then her right arm forward. It was complicated and difficult, like a dance, but by moving very slowly and carefully, she did it.
The door released her. And though she still felt the pressure of her own filthiness, some of the intensity had faded. It was bearable. She could breathe without gasping, speak without gagging.
She went downstairs and rang the little bell outside her father's door.
“Is it my daughter, my Gloriously Bright?” asked Father.
“Yes, noble one,” said Qing-jao.
“I'm ready to receive you.”
She opened Father's door and stepped through– no ritual was needed this time. She strode at once to where he sat on a chair before his terminal and knelt before him on the floor.
“I have examined your Si Wang-mu,” said Father, “and I believe your first hiring has been a worthy one.”
It took a moment for Father's words to make sense. Si Wang-mu? Why did Father speak to her of an ancient god? She looked up in surprise, then looked where Father was looking– at a serving girl in a clean gray gown, kneeling demurely, looking at the floor. It took a moment to remember the girl from the rice paddy, to remeber that she was to be Qing-jao's secret maid. How could she have forgotten? It was only a few hours ago that Qingjao left her. Yet in that time Qing-jao had battled with the gods, and if she hadn't won, at least she had not yet lost. What was the hiring of a servant compared to a struggle with the gods?
“Wang-mu is impertinent and ambitious,” said Father, “but she is also honest and far more intelligent than I would have expected. I assume from her bright mind and sharp ambition that you both intend for her to be your student as well as your secret maid.”
Wang-mu gasped, and when Qing-jao glanced over at her, she saw how horrified the girl looked. Oh, yes– she must think that I think that she told Father of our secret plan. “Don't worry, Wang-mu,” said Qing-jao. “Father almost always guesses secrets. I know you didn't tell.”
“I wish more secrets were as easy as this one,” said Father. “My daughter, I commend you for your worthy generosity. The gods will honor you for it, as I do also.”
The words of praise came like unguent to a stinging wound. Perhaps this was why her rebelliousness had not destroyed her, why some god had taken mercy on her and shown her how to get through the door of her room just now. Because she had judged Wang-mu with mercy and wisdom, forgiving the girl's impertinence, Qing-jao herself was being forgiven, at least a little, for her own outrageous daring.
Wang-mu does not repent of her ambition, thought Qing-jao. Neither will I repent of my decision. I must not let Father be destroyed because I can't find– or invent– a non-divine explanation for the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet. And yet, how can I defy the purposes of the gods? They have hidden or destroyed the fleet. And the works of the gods must be recognized by their obedient servants, even if they must remain hidden from unbelievers on other worlds.
“Father,” said Qing-jao, “I must speak to you about my task.”
Father misunderstood her hesitation. “We can speak in front of Wang-mu. She's been hired now as your secret maid. The hiring bonus has been sent to her father, the first barriers of secrecy have been suggested to her mind. We can trust her to hear us and never tell.”
“Yes, Father,” said Qing-jao. In truth she had again forgotten that Wang-mu was even there. “Father, I know who has hidden the Lusitania Fleet. But you must promise me that you will never tell it to Starways Congress.”
Father, who was usually placid, looked mildly distressed. "I can't promise such a thing," he said. "It would be unworthy of me to be such a disloyal servant. "
What could she do, then? How could she speak? And yet how could she keep from speaking? “Who is your master?” she cried. “Congress or the gods?”
“First the gods,” said Father. “They are always first.”
“Then I must tell you that I have discovered that the gods are the ones who have hidden the fleet from us, Father. But if you tell this to the Congress, they'll mock you and you'll be ruined.” Then another thought occurred to her. “If it was the gods who stopped the fleet, Father, then the fleet must have been against the will of the gods after all. And if Starways Congress sent the fleet against the will of–”
Father held up his hand for her to be silent. She immediately stopped speaking and bowed her head. She waited.
“Of course it's the gods,” said Father.
His words came as both a relief and a humiliation. Of course, he had said. Had he known this all along?
“The gods do all things that are done in the universe. But don't assume that you know why. You say they must have stopped the fleet because they oppose its mission. But I say that Congress couldn't have sent the fleet in the first place if the gods hadn't willed it. So why couldn't it be that the gods stopped the fleet because its mission was so great and noble that humanity was not worthy of it? Or what if they hid the fleet because it would provide a difficult test for you? One thing is certain: The gods have permitted Starways Congress to hold sway over most of humanity. As long as they have the mandate of heaven, we of Path will follow their edicts without opposition.”
“I didn't mean to oppose …” She could not finish such an obvious falsehood.
Father understood perfectly, of course. “I hear how your voice fades and your words trail off into nothing. This is because you know your words are not true. You meant to oppose Starways Congress, in spite of all I have taught you.” Then his voice grew gentler. “For my sake you meant to do it.”
“You're my ancestor. I owe you a higher duty than I owe them.”
“I'm your father. I won't become your ancestor until I'm dead.”
“For Mother's sake, then. If they ever lose the mandate of heaven, then I will be their most terrible enemy, for I will serve the gods.” Yet even as she said this, she knew her words were a dangerous half-truth. Until only a few moments ago– until she had been caught in the door– hadn't she been pe
rfectly willing to defy even the gods for her father's sake? I am the most unworthy, terrible daughter, she thought.
“I tell you now, my Gloriously Bright daughter, that opposing Congress will never be for my good. Or yours either. But I forgive you for loving me to excess. It is the gentlest and kindest of vices.”
He smiled. It calmed her agitation, to see him smile, though she knew that she didn't deserve his approbation. Qing-jao was able to think again, to return to the puzzle. “You knew that the gods did this, and yet you made me search for the answer.”
“But were you asking the right question?” said Father. “The question we need answered is: How did the gods do it?”
“How can I know?” answered Qing-jao. “They might have destroyed e fleet or hidden it, or carried it away to some secret place in the West–”
“Qing-jao! Look at me. Hear me well.”
She looked. His stern command helped calm her, give her focus.
“This is something I have tried to teach you all your life, but now you must learn it, Qing-jao. The gods are the cause of everything that happens, but they never act except in disguise. Do you hear me?”
She nodded. She'd heard those words a hundred times.
“You hear and yet you don't understand me, even now,” said Father. “The gods have chosen the people of Path, Qing-jao. Only we are privileged to hear their voice. Only we are allowed to see that they are the cause of all that is and was and will be. To all other people their works remain hidden, a mystery. Your task is not to discover the true cause of the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet– all of Path would know at once that the true cause is that the gods wished it to happen. Your task is to discover the disguise that the gods have created for this event.”
Qing-jao felt light-headed, dizzy. She had been so certain that she had the answer, that she had fulfilled her task. Now it was slipping away. The answer was still true, but her task was different now.
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