"I know. There was talk on the news of a State of Emergency."

He nodded. "I may have to go back. Li Yuan has formed a special council. He's asked me if I want to be a part of it."

"And do you?"

His eyes sparkled. "It might be fun. To shape men's dreams and make them real."

"I thought that's what you did already?"

He smiled, then walked on, chuckling softly to himself.

LEHMANN STOOD AMONG his generals, watching through field glasses as his troops began a fresh attack on the Odessa garrison. In the last hour it had begun to rain, the black clouds billowing across the estuary from the sea to the southeast. Under its cover his assault cruisers swept in, firing salvo after salvo into the burning fortress.

Despite the rain, the smell of burning polymers was strong in the air and an acrid smoke mingled with the cloud, sending down a residue of flaky ash.

Lehmann pulled down his mask and looked about him. To his right the Overseer's House was on fire, its three tiers blazing like a giant tree. Beyond it his men were busy mining the bridges and setting booby traps in the bunkhouses. To his left a mobile command unit had been set up and a bank of monitors showed scenes from the struggle for Odessa. Supported by two phalanxes of armored vehicles, a body of five thousand men were trying to take the gatehouse, using flame-throwers and mobile rocket-launchers to prize their way in through the front door of the great fortress.

It had gone well. His feint to the north, at Kishinev, had drawn more than two thirds of the garrison's strength, while the massive air battle farther west had deprived Odessa of the critical air cover it needed to survive. He had only now to persevere and it was his-Li Yuan's "Pearl of the Black Sea," his prestige garrison.

Overhead the air was full of his cruisers, ferrying the wounded back to the base hospital in Galati. More than eighty thousand-killed in the first few hours of the assault-would never make that journey. They would be left where they'd fallen on the battlefield, for in this overpopulated world nothing was so cheaply spent as soldiers' lives.

He smiled, pleased with how things had gone. His forces had penetrated deep into the T'ang's territory, destroying more than one hundred and twenty separate plantations in the process-almost a third of the Eastern European growing area. And though news had come in the last half hour of Karr's counterattack, that barely mattered now, for they had served their purpose. He could lose all three armies and it would mean nothing, for what his enemies had taken to be a major attempt to take the Plantations had, in essence, been purely diversionary-a mighty, destructive cast of the dice, and all to win one single prize, Odessa.

Even so, he had been surprised by the resistance the T'ang's armies had put up.

That's Karr's doing, he thought, feeling a great respect for the man. Unlike that vapid apologist Rheinhardt, Karr was a born fighter. He knew that it was never enough to contain one's enemy, one had to hurt him too. And so he had, today, no matter that it would not change the long-term progress of thewar. Since Karr had been General things had changed a lot. Six months ago he might have swept the T'ang's forces back into the Baltic, but today his armies had been stalled and turned.

Unobserved, Lehmann smiled. I shall send him the painting he admired. Schiele's painting of the fighter.

"Fiihrer!"

Lehmann turned. His Communications Officer stood close by, his head bowed.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"It's Soucek, Fiihrer. He says he's got it back."

"Ah . . ." The copy! Soucek has got the copy! He thought a moment. "Tell him to take it to Milan. I'll meet him there. Oh, and Lieutenant?"

"Yes, Fuhrer?"

He looked past the lieutenant at his watching generals, seeing how they huddled together miserably in the falling rain, and knew which ones would live, which die, before the night was out.

"Give the order to send in the reserves. I want Odessa taken within the hour."

KARR STARED AT Surgeon Hu a moment, then roared with laughter.

"They what?" Then, more soberly. "Poor bastard. I hope he doesn't suffer too much when they find out."

"Oh, they'll find out. How, I don't know. But if they made that thing, they'll know the difference"

Karr nodded. So Lehmann tfiought he'd got his copy back. Well, maybe he'd find out the truth afid maybe he wouldn't. Maybe there was no difference-maybe these new^copies were that good. Or, as Hu had suggested, maybe they were clones of some kind, grown from genetic material somehow obtained from the originals. One thing was sure, though, and that was that Lehmann's forces were retreating. For the past hour they had been withdrawing from most of the territory they had taken. Only a small pocket of land surrounding the Odessa garrison now remained in Lehmann's hands.

What does he want? Karr asked himself. Why set such a host in motion and then withdraw with so little achieved? Was it just to test our strength? To weaken us?

If so, then it was certainly successful. Lehmann could throw three armies at them-lose almost a hundred thousand men-and it was nothing to him; against which the destruction of a third of the Plantations would have serious repercussipns over the coming months. If Lehmann were to attack again in that time, then the position could easily deteriorate to the point of untenability.

Karr sat, offering Hu a seat across from him, then drew the investigation file toward him, "You've heard what's happening?"

"He's here."

"Ward?" Karr looked up. "Why wasn't I told?"

"I believe he's gone to see the old Marshal.""Ah . . ." Karr pursed his lips, then opened the file. "You'll cooperate fully with him, Hu. Understand me?"

Hu smiled. "It doesn't worry me."

Karr looked at him questioningly.

"That he's Clayborn," Hu clarified. "I know a lot of people find that difficult, but I can't see what the problem is. I've read his papers. There's no one knows the field better."

"Good." Karr smiled tightly. "Then you won't mind if I sit in on your first session."

"Not at all," Hu said urbanely. "If you've the time."

KIM LEANED OVER the corpse and pointed to the exposed cranium, speaking through the surgical mask he wore.

"It's as I thought, the whole limbic system is generally far less developed than in a real human. It's like a human brain-much more than I imagined it would be-but it has the appearance of being damaged, dysfunctional."

He stood back slightly, looking to Hu, whose three assistants stood behind him, scrubbed up and masked as if for surgery.

"If I'm right, the pituitary gland will be undeveloped. Whoever built these wouldn't have cared whether they reproduced or not, so maybe they won't be able to produce those hormones that create sperm or eggs. Nor, I suspect, would they have bothered with creating a fully developed emotional system. The amygdala might be very rudimentary-maybe even absent altogether. From Lehmann's point of view it would be useful if these things felt no fear. Against which, I'd guess there might be increased dopamine activity. We might look for pin-tight pupils in the living copies."

Hu gave a thoughtful nod. "I'll get started, then."

"Good." Kim bowed to him, then came away.

Karr, who had been watching through the window, greeted Kim as he stepped into the anteroom.

"Shih Ward," he said, bowing his head and extending a hand.

Kim looked up at the giant. "General Karr . . . Why, you could put me in your pocket!"

Karr laughed. "Ah, but would you stay there?"

Kim smiled, then took Karr's hand, his own enveloped by it. "If that thing in there is a copy, then it's the best I've ever seen. I didn't think Lehmann was even interested in copies. I thought that was more your old friend DeVore's line."

Karr released his hand, indicated that Kim should take a seat, then sat across from him. He leaned in, speaking confidentially.

"From what we can ascertain, when Lehmann captured the southern City, he took great care not to damage or destroy any of GenSyn's installations there. Our spies report that he's got the main factory at Milan working at twice its former capacity, and a great many of Gen-Syn's former employees are now working for him there. Even so, this latest development surprised us. There's not been a sniff of anythinglike this."

Kim nodded. "I see. It would have helped to have had some idea of Lehmann's thinking, but I suppose we can make a few assumptions, neh? My own guess is that Lehmann has targeted a group of very normal-seeming, stable men and women. Unemotional types."

"Why's that?"

"Because it makes things simpler. A mind is the most complex of things to create. Anything that streamlines the process has to be a plus. Bearing that in mind, we can make two fairly safe assumptions: one, that he's not planning to breed a new race, and two, that, whatever his scheme is, it's short term rather than long."

Karr sat back slightly. "Why?"

"Because the longer you run a system the more invariables creep in and the more unstable and unpredictable it becomes. In this case, the more copies there are and the longer they remain in place, the greater grows the risk of discovery. As has been proved."

"So what do you mean by short term?"

"A year. Eighteen months at most."

"So what we need to know is how long this has been going on."

"Which we won't know until we discover further copies, if then."

"So what do we do?"

Kim laughed. "Keep looking. It's all we can do. Is there any news on the camera sweep?"

Karr shook his head. "Not yet. But we should know something by tonight."

"I see." Kim looked down, silent a moment, then, more quietly: "Just how bad are things?"

"Bad," Karr confessed. "If he'd wanted, he could have carved us apart. Kicked the legs out from under us and watched us fall. As it is, it looks like we've lost Odessa, and that's a major blow. That whole sector has been destabilized."

Kim nodded. "So why did he stop?"

"I don't know. Maybe he thinks we're stronger than we are. But I doubt that. His spy network has to be as good as ours."

"And yet something stopped him."

Karr met his eyes. His own were troubled.

"I didn't realize," Kim said after a moment. "I've been away too long. Things have changed."

There was an awkward silence between them, then Surgeon Hu came into the room, a broad smile on his unmasked face.

"It's just as you said!" he announced triumphantly, looking to Kim. "The pituitary's a fifth the size it ought to be and the amygdala is missing completely. And there are other differences too. Enough, perhaps, forus to identify one of these things with a simple brain scan."

"Excellent!" Karr said, grinning at Kim. "Then I'll leave you to it. Good day, Shih Ward. I hope we can talk again."

"General Karr?"

Karr, who had been turning away, turned back. "Yes, Shih Ward?"

"Surgeon Hu seems to be in control of things here, so I wondered . . . well, I wondered whether I might leave matters in his capable hands and come with you. I'd like to see how things are. You know, get a feel of the broader picture. It might help, especially as all of this seems to be linked."

Karr hesitated a moment, as if embarrassed by the request, then nodded. "All right. But there's one thing 1 must do first. If you'll wait here for half an hour, I'll send my equerry tor you. Maybe we'll have dinner, neh?"

Kim smiled and lowered his head respectfully.~"W like that, General Karr. I'd like that very much." *

MEG SHOULDERED the door open, then turned and made her way down the steps, carrying the tray across the half-lit living room.

"What's happening?" she asked as she set it down beside her brother.

Ben was sprawled out full length on the sofa, watching the wall screen.

"They're announcing a great victory-our enemies trounced and peace restored-which probably means we've scraped through by the skin of our teeth and the grace of Almighty God."

She took one of the earthenware bowls from the tray and offered it to him. He sat up, his eyes never leaving the screen.

"The truth is," he continued, taking the bowl, "we're fortunate there's such a delicate balance of power.

Lehmann is more powerful than any of the States surrounding him. Left alone, he could bring Li Yuan to his knees in a week. But his enemies-the African Mountain Lords and the West Asian Warlords-wouldn't let him. If they saw him go for Li Yuan's throat, they'd go for his. They're like jackals sitting in a tree, waiting for their prey to fall."

"And will we fall?"

Ben looked to her. "One day."

He sniffed at the soup, then, taking the spoon from the bowl, began to eat. It was a broth she'd made up from the remainders of the rabbit stew they'd had earlier. He grunted his satisfaction, then sat back, watching the screen again.

"The media can't tell the half of it. If they did there'd be panic in the levels. The Enclave would self-destruct. That's why they need what I do. Distractions." He laughed. "You know, that pompous puffball Tung Chung-shu was right for once. Distractions, that's precisely what I make. Artful distractions." He took a spoonful of the soup, then gave a thoughtful grunt. "Makers. It's all made, don't you think?"

"Model" She narrowed her eyes and stared at him."Mankind. Intelligence. The Universe. It all has the stamp of something made. I can't believe that Chance threw it all together, however long it had to do the job. Chance could take three eternities and not create a piece of coal, let alone a thinking being. But what made the thing that made it? And what made that?"

"Maybe Chance and a piece of coal were enough."

He laughed. "It's not even that I want a god behind it all. Not someone like Great Father Amos, anyway.

I want . . ." He sighed. "Well, to be honest with you, Meg, I don't know quite what I want, but I don't want a man with a white beard and a benign expression, nor even a woman with a white beard, come to that. I just want some kind of principle that explains it all. That makes sense of it without reducing it all back down to Chance."

"And a piece of coal."

He looked at her and smiled, mouthed another spoonful of soup, then carried on, the screen forgotten.

"That's why the darkness is so important. You know, some days I have the feeling that if I could just step through, into the darkness-if I could just tear that veil and penetrate it-then I might see and understand exactly how things are. As it is, it excludes me. It keeps itself from me."

She stared at him. Sometimes he frightened her with his talk of the dark. Darkness ... for him it was not merely the absence of light, but a quality in its own right-not a negative but a positive, a different state of being. And sometimes-just sometimes-she was convinced that what he described by the term dark was that same thing that others called "death," the ultimate darkness.

She looked past him at the half-open window. Outside it was dark, the valley echoing still. Night birds called beneath the moon. She shivered.

"Will you sleep with me tonight?"