Evenings after dinner were usually for being together. Foster parents and children talked, played games, sat quietly reading. Sometimes they watched the single television set, but only by mutual consent, subject to adult overrule. A person who wished to be alone could withdraw to his or her room with a book or pursue a hobby in the little workshop. Thus the hour was late when Tu Shan and Asagao walked out. They ranged widely and were gone long. Nevertheless they spoke in Chinese. To be sure, their dialect of it still came most easily to them of the tongues they had mutually mastered in their centuries.
Night lay cool and still. Land reached shadowy, treetops loomed darkling beneath the extravagant stars of the high West. Once an owl hooted, repeatedly, before ghosting past.
“They could so well be our kind.” Asagao’s tone shivered. “Something built up slowly, over generations, yet centered on one or two individuals, who talk about being mother and child but remain mysterious and work in the same style. We two were chiefs, under one title or another, of different villages; our businesses in the cities were incidental. Hanno made his businesses into his power, protection, and disguise. Here may be a third way. Down among the poor, the rootless, the disinherited. Give them leadership, counsel, purpose, hope. In return they will provide you your little kingdom, or queendom; and there you can Uve safe, hidden, for mortal lifetimes.”
“It may be,” Tu Shan replied in the slow fashion that was his when he thought hard. “Or perhaps not. We will write to Hanno. He will investigate.”
“Or should we do that?”
“What?” He checked his stride, startled. “He knows how. We are countryfolk, you and I.”
“Will he not keep these immortals underground, as he has kept Wanderer and us, as he would keep that Turk did the man not stay aside on his own account?”
“Well, he has explained why.”
“How sure are we that he is right?” Asagao demanded. “You know how I have studied. I have talked with that learned man, Giannotti, whenever he examined us again. Do we truly need to go on beneath our masks? It was not always necessary for us in Asia. It never was for Wanderer among his wild Indians. Is it in America today? Times have changed. If we made ourselves known, it could well mean immortality for everyone within a few years.”
“Maybe it would not. And what then would people do to us?”
“I know. I know. And yet—r Why must we take it for granted that Hanno is right? Why shouldn’t we decide for ourselves whether he is the wisest because he is the oldest, or else has grown set in his ways and now is making a horrible mistake, out of needless fear and … utter selfishness?”
“M-m-m—”
“At worst we die.” Asagao lifted her head against the stars. “We die like everybody else, except that we have had so many, many years. I am not afraid to. Are you?”
“No.” Tu Shan laughed a bit. “I dislike the thought, yes, I admit that.” Sobering: “We do have to tell him about this Unity thing. He has the means, the knowledge, to find out. We don’t.”
Asagao nodded. “True.” After a moment: “But once we nave learned whether or not these are like us—”
“We owe Hanno much.” Entry to this nation, through Tomek’s influence over a certain Congressman. Help in getting acquainted with it. Establishment here, once they realized that American cities would never be for them.
“We do. We also owe humanity much, I think. And ourselves. Freedom to choose is our right too.”
“Let us see what happens,” Tu Shan proposed.
They walked on a while in silence. A bright rapid star rose in the west and crossed the lower constellations. “Look,” Tu Shan said. “A satellite. This is an age of marvels.”
“I believe that is Mir,” she answered slowly.
“What? … Oh, yes. The Russian one.”
“The space station. The only space station. And the United States, since Challenger—“ Asagao had no further need to speak. As long as they had lived together, they could each often follow what was in the other’s mind. Dynasties flourish and fall. Empires do, nations, peoples, destinies.