He turned sharply, fearful, his lopsided face grimacing fiercely, then saw her. The grimace became a smile. He took a step toward her, then stopped, looking down, the smile vanishing. Both his hands were bandaged. In one he loosely held a scrap of paper.

"Lin!" she said breathlessly, coming up to him and gripping his upper arms. "Lin! What happened to your hands?"

He shook his head, refusing to look at her.

"Lin! What is it?"

Slowly he held out the paper. She took it and unfolded it. On it was a picture of her face. She recognized it at once. It was one of the handbills Michael had been distributing throughout the levels before the War.

She stared at it a moment, then, looking back at him, held it out.

"Lin Shang . . . look at me."

Slowly, fearfully, he raised his eyes.

She tore the paper, then tore it once again and let it fall. Then, reaching down, she picked up his pack and, placing her arm about his shoulders, began to lead him away.

"Come, Lin," she said gently. "There's mending to be done."

BENEATH THE camera's solemn gaze the funeral cortege crossed the bridge then climbed the great steps, pausing beneath the gate of Bremen fortress for those senior officers who had survived to remove their caps and bow respectfully before the Marshal's body.

Tolonen was dead. Now he lay in the great coffin, his face made up to. resemble life, his corpse padded out to fill his Marshal's uniform. Ten stout cadets carried the great casket, while behind it the Marshal's daughter, Jelka, walked slowly, dressed from head to toe in white, her son one side of her, her diminutive husband the other. Beyond her, bareheaded and dressed in sackcloth, honoring his father's General, walked Li Yuan, and behind him his court.

Karr was next, his old lieutenant Chen beside him.

Last came Ebert and the Osu, their eight black faces exposed to the watching eyes of those millions who had survived to witness this final act.

Li Yuan, looking up at the casket, sighed. Ice, flood, and fire, they had survived it all. And now, it seemed, they were to place the old world in the earth: for Tolonen had been the keystone of the arch, and, as his father had so often said, without the keystone, the arch must surely fall.

He had had a plot cleared at the center of the fortress, at ground level. There he would bury the old man, and around his grave he would begin the task of rebuilding his world, of fulfilling his promise to Ebert and the Osu. The promise he'd renewed to Karr.

They had been given a chance-a breathing space in which to bring about a change. Change such as his father would never have dreamed of.You must not fail, he told himself, stepping beneath arch into the sepulchral darkness of the great atrium.

That morning, against habit, he had called his wife's Wu and had the old man cast the oracle.

Wei chi, it had been . . . Before completion.

He smiled, recalling the old man's words.

"Before completion. Success.

But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, Gets his tail in the water, There is nothing that would further."

He understood. Ahead of him lay his greatest task, that of leading his world from disorder into order; of shaping it into a newer, healthier form; of giving the world he had inherited true balance. But in so doing he must be like an old fox walking over ice. He must be the unifying force behind it all, stopping often to listen for the cracking of the ice where it was thinnest.

Yes, and he must keep his tail out of the icy water!

AFTER THE CEREMONY, Li Yuan went across to Ebert, who was standing with the Osu between the huge pillars of the Hall.

As the Osu stepped back, Ebert turned his blind eyes on the young T'ang and bowed low. "Li Yuan."

"There is some final business between us," Yuan said, turning to take the two documents from Nan Ho.

"Promises I made you."

Ebert smiled. "You gave your word. That is enough for me."

"Perhaps . . . but maybe I have less faith in myself than you, Hans Ebert. These"-he handed them across-"these are as a sign to all men. The one returns your name to you and absolves you of all blame for your father's death, the other is a statement of my government's policy from henceforth."

"Then you will tear it down?"

"I shall. Beginning here, at Bremen."

"And in its place?"

Li Yuan shrugged. "Who knows? The oracle bids me be like an old fox on the ice. It will doubtless be many years before the crossing's made."

"But beginning is something, neh?"

Li Yuan smiled and nodded. "And you, Hans Ebert? Will you stay and see those changes come about?"

Ebert bowed his head slightly. "Forgive me, Li Yuan, but I have other plans. I have a son I do not know, and a people who must find a proper home. Now that DeVore has gone, they have an itch to return from whence they came so long ago."

"I see.""Make sure you do," Ebert said, laughing softly. Then, with a bow, he turned and went to join the Osu.

IT WAS SILENT where he sat between the worlds. Silent and dark. Outside the stars shimmered redly, elongated toward him as his craft sped out toward the System's edge.

He had begun a new game; had placed the first stone on the board. Now he stared at it fixedly, conscious that he must learn it all again.

"What do you want, old man?" he asked, looking up at the shadowy figure seated across from him.

"To travel with you," the other answered, leaning closer as he placed an answering stone. "And to enlighten you."

DeVore laughed. "Enlighten me?"

The old man stared back at him, his dark eyes narrowed. "You think yourself beyond enlightenment?"

"No. No . . . it's just . . ." Again he laughed, amused by the whole thing.

"You lost," the old man said, sitting back.

"You cheated," DeVore answered, placing a second stone. "I don't know how, but that's the only way you could have beaten me."

"The only way?" It was the old man's turn to laugh. "You stare into the dark and think the dark is all."

"In the beginning there was nothing. And in the end . . ." DeVore shrugged. "Nothing."

"And yet we live in-between, neh?" The old man slapped down another stone-carelessly, it seemed.

DeVore stared at it, then shook his head. "It's all such a mess, don't you think? All so ... confused."

"That is one way of looking at things. But there are others, surely? As Chuang Tzu said, the human form has ten thousand changes that never come to an end. In consequence one's joys, like one's sorrows, must be uncountable. Life . . . life cannot be reduced. It cannot be tidied up, the way you wish to. It simply is."

DeVore snorted. "Nonsense! Life's there to be shaped, to be changed into other, better forms. Why give us knowledge if we are not to act upon it? Why give us power if we cannot use that power?"

"To teach restraint?" The old man waved a hand across the board. "It is like the game. It must not be mistaken for life."

DeVore stared at him, then picked up the board and threw it at him. It passed through the old man, landing on the floor, the stones scattering.

The old man was gone.

"Light and air," he said contemptuously. "That's all you ever were, old man. Starlight and nothingness!"

He stood, stretching, looking about himself at the tiny cabin.

The room was dark. He was alone now. He had always been alone. Outside the stars shimmered redly.

Restraint, he thought and laughed, just wait. I'll teach you cunts restraint!

END OF BOOK SIX White Moon, Red Dragon concludes the second phase of the great "War of the Two Directions," but the history of Chung Kuo-of the struggle for balance-enters a new and final phase in Book Seven, Days of Bitter Strength, as Li Yuan begins to build his new world order.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

THE TRANSCRIPTION OF standard Mandarin into European alphabetical form was first achieved in the seventeenth century by the Italian Matteo Ricci, who founded and ran the first Jesuit Mission in China from 1583 until his death in 1610. Since then several dozen attempts have been made to reduce the original Chinese sounds, represented by some tens of thousands of separate pictograms, into readily understandable phonetics for Western use. For a long time, however, three systems dominated- those used by the three major Western powers vying for influence in the corrupt and crumbling Chinese Empire of the nineteenth century: Great Britain, France, and Germany. These systems were the Wade-Giles (Great Britain and America-sometimes known as the Wade system), the Ecole Fran^aise de L'Extreme-Orient (France), and the Lessing (Germany).

Since 1958, however, the Chinese themselves have sought to create one single phonetic form, based on the German system, which they termed the hanyu pinyin fang'an (Scheme for a Chinese Phonetic Alphabet), known more commonly as pinyin, and in all foreign language books published in China since January 1, 1979, pinyin has been used, as well as now being taught in schools along with the standard Chinese characters. For this work, however, I have chosen to use the older and to my mind far more elegant transcription system, the Wade-Giles (in modified form). For those now used to the harder forms of pinyin, the following (courtesy of Edgar Snow's The Other Side of the River, Gol-lancz, 1961) may serve as a rough guide to pronunciation.

Chi is pronounced as "Gee," but Ch'i sounds like "Chee." Ch'in is exactly our "chin." Chu is roughly like "Jew," as in Chu Teh (Jew Duhr), but Ch'u equals "chew."

Tsung is "dzung"; ts'ung with the ts as in "Patsy." Tai is our word sound "die"; T'ai-"tie." Pai is "buy"

and P'ai is "pie."

Kung is like "Gung" (a Din); K'ung with the k as in "kind." J is the equivalent of r but slur it as "rrrun." H before an s, as in hsi, is the equivalent of an aspirate but is often dropped, as in Sian for Hsian.

Vowels in Chinese are generally short or medium, not long and flat. Thus Tang sounds like "dong," never like our "tang." T'ang is "tong."

a as in father e-run eh-hen i-see ih-her o-look ou-gou-soon The effect of using the Wade-Giles system is, I hope, to render the softer, more poetic side of the original Mandarin, ill served, I feel, by modern pinyin.

This usage, incidentally, accords with many of the major reference sources available in the West: the (planned) sixteen volumes of Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe's The Cambridge History of China; Joseph Needham's mammoth multivolumed Science and Civilisation in China; John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer's China, Tradition and Transformation; Charles Hucker's China's Imperial Past; Jacques Gernet's A History of Chinese Civilization; C. P. Fitzgerald's China: A Short Cultural History; Laurence Sickman and Alexander Soper's The Art and Architecture of China; William Hinton's classic social studies, Fanshen and Shenfan; and Derk Bodde's Essays on Chinese Civilization.

The version of the I Ching or Book of Changes quoted from throughout is the Richard Wilhelm translation, rendered into English by Gary F. Baynes and published by Routledge &. Kegan Paul, London, 1951, and all quotations from that text are with their permission.

The Chinese sage Chuang Tzu is quoted and referred to several times in the text, and a collection of his "Basic Writings" (title Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings) can be obtained from the Columbia University Press, translated by Burton Watson (1964). I strongly recommend this to anyone with more than a passing interest in Taoism, for its delightful wit and charm. The quotations are used here with the kind permission of the publishers.

The quotations from Kalevala: The Land of the Heroes is from the edition translated by W. F. Kirby and first published by J. M. Dent in 1907.

The quotations from the "Magic Flute" are from Act Two, from Sarastro's "Air" and translate as follows: Within these sacred halls, vengeance is unknown; if a man should fall, love leads him back to duty.

He is guided by a friendly hand, happy and contented, to the better land.

and, for the final two lines: He whom such teaching does not delight is not worthy to be a man.

The lines Ben and Meg quote of T. S. Eliot are from "The Wasteland" and are used by kind permission of the publishers, Faber & Faber.

The translation of Ch'u Yuan's "The Greater Master of Fate" is by David Hawkes from The Songs of the South, An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems, published by Penguin Books, London, 1985, and used with their kind permission.The translation of Li Ho's "Song of the Bronze Statue" is by Yang Xiangyi and Gladys Yang and is taken from Poetry and Prose of the Tang and Song, published by Panda Books, Beijing, in 1984- The game of wei chi mentioned throughout this volume is, incidentally, more commonly known by its Japanese name of Go, and is not merely the world's oldest game but its most elegant.

David Wingrove, March 1994

Acknowledgments.

Major thanks this time to Brian Griffin, who, as ever, put in long hours trying to work out-for my benefit-just what I was up to in the text. Thanks, too, to my editors, Carolyn, Jeanne, and Alyssa, and to good friends, Robert Carter, Andy Muir, Mike Cobley, John Hindes, Andy Sawyer, Vikki and Steve, my brother Ian, and to Edinburgh-based band Tranceport, whose Chung Kuo music has kept me going through many a long night-to Stewart, Robert, and Alan-a huge thanks.

And, of course, to my girls, Susan, Jessica, Amy, and Georgia, without whom none of this would be worth doing.

Glossary of Mandarin Terms aiya!------common exclamation of surprise or dismay.

ch'a------tea.

Ch'eng Hsiang------"Chancellor," a post first established in the Ch'in court more than two thousand years ago.

ch'i------a Chinese foot; approximately 14-4 inches.

chiao tzu------a traditional North Chinese meal of meat-filled dumplings eaten with a hot spicy sauce.

Chieh Hsia------term meaning "Your Majesty" derived from the expression "Below the Steps." It was the formal way of addressing the Emperor, through his Ministers, who stood "below the steps."

ching------literally "mirror"; here used also to denote a perfect GenSyn copy of a man. Under the Edict of Technological Control, these are limited to copies of the ruling T'ang. However, mirrors were also popularly believed to have certain strange properties, one of which was to make spirits visible. Buddhist priests used special "magic mirrors" to show believers the form into which they would be reborn.

Moreover, if a man looks into one of these mirrors and fails to recognize his own face, it is a sign that his death is not far off.

chung------a porcelain ch'a bowl, usually with a lid.

ch'un tzu------an ancient Chinese term from the Warring States period, describing a certain class of noblemen, controlled by a code of chivalry and morality known as the li or rites. Here the term is roughly, and sometimes ironically, translated as "gentlemen." The ch'un tzu is as much an ideal state of behavior-as specified by Confucius in his Analects-as an actual class in Chung Kuo, though a degree of financial independence and a high standard of education are assumed a prerequisite.

Hei------literally "black"; the Chinese pictogram for this represents a man wearing warpaint and tattoos.

Here it refers to the genetically manufactured (GenSyn) half-men used as riot police to quell uprisings in the lower levels.hsiao jen------"little man/men." In the Analects, Book XIV, Confucius writes: "The gentlemen gets through to what is up above; the small man gets through to what is down below." This distinction between "gentlemen" (ch'un tzu) and "little men" (hsiao jen), false even in Confucius's time, is no less a matter of social perspective in Chung Kuo.

Hsien------historically an administrative district of variable size. Here the term is used to denote a very specific administrative area: one of ten stacks-each stack composed of thirty decks. Each deck is a hexagonal living unit of ten levels, two li, or approximately one kilometer in diameter. A stack can be imagined as one honeycomb in the great hive of the City.

him------the "higher soul" or spirit soul which, the Han believe, ascends to Heaven at death, joins Shang Ti, the Supreme Ancestor, and lives in his court for ever more. The him is believed to come into being at the moment of conception (see also p'o).