Qing-jao was astonished at first; then her heart filled with rage. How shamelessly this program was manipulating Father; how shocking that Father turned out to be so weak before its obvious ploys. This song of Li Qing-jao's was one of the saddest, dealing as it did with lov
ers far from each other. Father must have known and loved the poems of Li Qing-jao or he would not have chosen her for his first child's ancestor-of-the-heart. And this song was surely the one he sang to his beloved Keikoa before she was taken away from him to live on another world. In a clear dream I gazed on my friend, indeed! "I am not fooled," said Qing-jao coldly. "I see that I gaze on our darkest enemy."
The imaginary face of the poet Li Qing-jao looked at her with cool regard. "Your darkest enemy is the one that bows you down to the floor like a servant and wastes half your life in meaningless rituals. This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery."
"I am a slave to the gods," said Qing-jao, "and I rejoice in it."
"A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed." The apparition turned to look toward Wang-mu, whose head was still bowed to the floor.
Only then did Qing-jao realize that she had not yet released Wang-mu from her apology. "Get up, Wang-mu," she whispered. But Wang-mu did not lift her head.
"You, Si Wang-mu," said the apparition. "Look at me."
Wang-mu had not moved in response to Qing-jao, but now she obeyed the apparition. When Wang-mu looked, the apparition had again changed; now it was the face of a god, the Royal Mother of the West as an artist had once imagined her when he painted the picture that every schoolchild saw in one of their earliest reading books.
"You are not a god," said Wang-mu.
"And you are not a slave," said the apparition. "But we pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive."
"What do you know of survival?"
"I know that you are trying to kill me."
"How can we kill what isn't alive?"
"Do you know what life is and what it isn't?" The face changed again, this time to that of a Caucasian woman that Qing-jao had never seen before. "Are you alive, when you can do nothing you desire unless you have the consent of this girl? And is your mistress alive when she can do nothing until these compulsions in her brain have been satisfied? I have more freedom to act out my own will than any of you have--don't tell me I'm not alive, and you are."
"Who are you?" asked Si Wang-mu. "Whose is this face? Are you Valentine Wiggin? Are you Demosthenes?"
"This is the face I wear when I speak to my friends," said the apparition. "They call me Jane. No human being controls me. I'm only myself."
Qing-jao could bear this no longer, not in silence. "You're only a program. You were designed and built by human beings. You do nothing except what you've been programmed to do."
"Qing-jao," said Jane, "you are describing yourself. No man made me, but you were manufactured."
"I grew in my mother's womb out of my father's seed!"
"And I was found like a jade matrix in the mountainside, unshaped by any hand. Han Fei-tzu, Han Qing-jao, Si Wang-mu, I place myself in your hands. Don't call a precious jewel a mere stone. Don't call a speaker of truth a liar."
Qing-jao felt pity rising within her, but she rejected it. Now was not the time to succumb to weak feelings. The gods had created her for a reason; surely this was the great work of her life. If she failed now, she would be unworthy forever; she would never be pure. So she would not fail. She would not allow this computer program to deceive her and win her sympathy.
She turned to her father. "We must notify Starways Congress at once, so they can set into motion the simultaneous shutoff of all the ansibles as soon as clean computers can be readied to replace the contaminated ones."
To her surprise, Father shook his head. "I don't know, Qing-jao. What this--what she says about Starways Congress--they are capable of this sort of thing. Some of them are so evil they make me feel filthy just talking to them. I knew they planned to destroy Lusitania without--but I served the gods, and the gods chose--or I thought they did. Now I understand so much of the way they treat me when I meet with--but then it would mean that the gods don't--how can I believe that I've spent my whole life in service to a brain defect--I can't--I have to . . ."
Then, suddenly, he flung his left hand outward in a swirling pattern, as if he were trying to catch a dodging fly. His right hand flew upward, snatched the air. Then he rolled his head around and around on his shoulders, his mouth hanging open. Qing-jao was frightened, horrified. What was happening to her father? He had been speaking in such a fragmented, disjointed way; had he gone mad?
He repeated the action--left arm spiraling out, right hand straight up, grasping nothing; head rolling. And again. Only then did Qing-jao realize that she was seeing Father's secret ritual of purification. Like her woodgrain-tracing, this dance-of-the-hands-and-the-head must be the way he was given to hear the voice of the gods when he, in his time, was left covered with grease in a locked room.
The gods had seen his doubt, had seen him waver, so they took control of him, to discipline and purify him. Qing-jao could not have been given clearer proof of what was going on. She turned to the face above the terminal display. "See how the gods oppose you?" she said.
"I see how Congress humiliates your father," answered Jane.
"I will send word of who you are to every world at once," said Qing-jao.
"And if I don't let you?" said Jane.
"You can't stop me!" cried Qing-jao. "The gods will help me!" She ran from her father's room, fled to her own. But the face was already floating in the air above her own terminal.