“I suppose that the woman who started this did not do it out of malice,” he said. “Its purpose must be to show us, whether or not we want to see it, our weaknesses, vanities, pettinesses, meannesses, selfishnesses, stupid thinking, prejudices, you name it, everything undesirable in us. With, I suppose, an end in mind, a goal. That we should be able to change ourselves for the better. Ethical advancement.”
“That’s probably true,” Nur said. “But … why the secrecy on her part? Why did she kill Loga?”
“That’s something we’ll have to find out,” Burton said. “If we can.”
The woman who had ordered the merciless recordings had had some compassion, however. At 8:00 p.m. the screens’ displays faded out, and they did not reappear until 8:00 a.m. There would be some respite.
Burton left early that evening for his apartment. However, a sufferer from insomnia all his life, he was unable to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, his mind filled with scenes from the past-displays, he rose, dressed and left the apartment. For three hours, he rode his chair through many corridors and into many rooms and up and down many shafts. His wanderings were aimless until he decided to organize his explorations. Why not get a diagram from the Computer and start from the top and work every level thoroughly down to the bottom? He had no goal in mind, no thought that he’d find something new. He was restless, he wanted to keep moving, and, perhaps, he might come across something novel or useful or both.
On the way up to the hangar, his starting point, he changed his mind again. The twelve vast rooms that had been the private worlds of the Council of Twelve beckoned him. They, at least, would offer a variety, something different from the monotonous sameness of corridor and rooms. His tour lasted four hours. When finished with all of them, he knew that he would tell the others that they, too, should explore these fascinating worlds.
Burton visited the hangar again and found it, as far as he could see, unchanged. He counted the craft to make sure that none were missing. That did not mean that the woman Agent had not used one since his last visit.
He returned to his apartment at four in the morning and slept from 4:30 to 7:30. After showering, he decided to go for breakfast at Li Po’s. First, he called him to make sure that the Chinese would be his host for today. The handsome, somewhat Mephistophelian face was smiling.
“Yes, I am eager to have you as my guest. I have a surprise for you.”
He turned his head and said something in Chinese.
Another face appeared by his. Burton was startled. It was a stranger’s, a beautiful Chinese woman’s.
13
Some men and women seem to be steam locomotives chug-chugging steadily on their tracks, slowing down uphill but working steadily and running freely downhill. Others are like internal combustion automobiles that take different roads but now and then run out of gas and wait to be refueled.
Li Po seemed to be a rocket with inexhaustible fuel. He was always exploding, propelled here and there, noisy, sometimes obnoxious, but always letting you know that he was not to be ignored. His face, expressions, and gesticulations reminded Burton of the final stanza in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Li Po, also known as Li T’ai-Po and Tai-Peng, had been born in a.d. 701 in the oasis town of Yarkand. At the time he was born, the vast desert territory did not belong to any Chinese kingdom. Yarkand was on the trade route between Persia and China, and Li Po’s great-great-grandfather had come there from China. According to family tradition, he had been banned for some political reason. He brought his wife and children with him, and his oldest son married a Turkic-speaking woman, a Uigur. Their eldest son had married a Chinese woman; the second son of this marriage had taken for wife an Afghani-Uigur woman.