"Have these villages been here long?" Alice asked Dr. Kong as they rattled through one.

"Not long," he answered.

"Like... a few generations?" she pushed.

He shifted in his seat, adjusting his cell phone on his belt, looking away. "The people you see out here were resettled. East China and South China are very crowded. Here, the population is small. So people moved here."

She heard the careful diction of Chinese evasion and glanced imprudently at Lin. He darkened his eyes in the universal signal: Don't ask about this. She turned, mind racing, and fixed an innocent look out the window. So! These villagers must have been inmates of the laogai, laogai, released from the camps but not allowed to leave the area. Of course. She could see they were poor people with hardscrabble lives, hanging washing over rocks and pulling carts down dirt tracks. They had all been prisoners, and now were doomed to a lifetime in this yellow dust. Was Lin's wife one? released from the camps but not allowed to leave the area. Of course. She could see they were poor people with hardscrabble lives, hanging washing over rocks and pulling carts down dirt tracks. They had all been prisoners, and now were doomed to a lifetime in this yellow dust. Was Lin's wife one?

It was almost noon when they finally topped a rise and headed down a long slope to the Shuidonggou site. At the bottom of the little dirt valley lay a winding, glittering creek lined with rustling acacia trees. Behind the creek rose a canyon wall, and along the top of the canyon limped what was left of the Great Wall.

In the center of the canyon face, halfway up, a huge box-like hole had been excavated.

"This is it," Kong whispered. He jumped out of the jeep and scrambled eagerly up the yellow-earth wall.

They all followed. "This is one of the few archaeological sites in China that's really been excavated," Adam told Alice. "Like Zhoukoudian."

Lin pried a tiny piece of stone out of the dirt wall. "See? This type of rock is native to this area. It could have occurred here naturally. But this one"-he worked another one loose- "had to have been brought here by someone. That's how we can tell humans lived here. And look." He brushed off the bits of dirt. "See these sc.r.a.pe marks and chips? It was worked by someone's hands."

"Incredible," Alice breathed. "What kind of culture lived here?"

"This is a Late Paleolithic site," Dr. Lin said. "So, of course, I do not know as much as Dr. Kong." He glanced at the other Chinese professor, on his knees, excitedly picking bits of rock from the dirt wall. "But I know a little. We should find microliths everywhere. You see, stonework was quite advanced here, and they trimmed pieces like this into sc.r.a.pers and blades. Hunting was crucial-until about eight thousand years ago, when they started domesticating steppe animals and growing crops. Then their tool making changed." He smiled down at her. "Do you find it interesting?"

"Interesting!" She examined the stone he had handed her. "It's almost beyond words. How old do you think this is?"

He peered at it. "Maybe ten, twelve thousand years."

"I've never held anything so old," she breathed.

"Look!" Spencer cried suddenly.

He had picked up a tiny circle of something white, and laid it on his palm; it had a perfect hole drilled through its middle. A bead. "See?" Spencer said. "Only a human with a tool could have made this. It's ostrich sh.e.l.l. That makes it easy to date-ostriches have been extinct here since the end of the Pleistocene. Beautiful, isn't it?"

Alice translated, skipping over the words ostrich ostrich and and Pleistocene, Pleistocene,and saying instead, "a big bird that has been extinct here for a long time." She stared awestruck at the tiny thing. Someone made that at least ten thousand years ago, she thought. Ten thousand years - the time unit of commitment in the Chinese mind. I will love you for ten thousand years. May you live for ten thousand years. Wansui. Wansui.

"What?" said Dr. Kong, looking up from the spot where he was working.

Spencer held out the bead.

"Let me see," said Kong, reaching for it, and somehow in the fumble the thing dropped to their feet, glanced off someone's shoe, and bounced out of the cutaway toward the valley floor below.

Alice saw Lin's face, stricken, follow the tiny, threading arc the bead made for a split second against the air. White, almost the same color as the earth below, it would be h.e.l.l to find.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," Adam mumbled. "Sorry."

"The fault is mine." Kong sighed.

"No, really. G.o.d."

"It doesn't matter," Kong said. He turned to the wall and returned to prizing out chips and rock bits. "There is more here to find."

"No"-Lin shook his head-"it was perfect. I'm going to look for it." He turned and climbed back down the handholds in the wall.

Adam sighed. "I feel terrible."

"It's okay," she said, knowing it wasn't, not really.

"Listen, Alice. Let's start looking for the Mongol family. They're the thing we should concentrate on."

She closed her eyes and visualized the empty rock-and-earth expanse of this little valley the way they had seen it, driving in. There had been no signs of habitation. None. "Did you see anything from the jeep?"

"No, I didn't. But let's just start walking."

She explained to Dr. Kong, and they followed Lin back down the wall. Kong was absorbed in the microliths embedded in the loess walls, Lin in pacing back and forth by the stream, head down, scanning the soft earth. Alice and Adam left them and hiked upstream.

"Teilhard never says exactly where they lived."

"What if they're gone?" she asked.

"They might be."

"What if even their house is gone?"

"That's unlikely. The climate here preserves things, which is why Teilhard found so much at Shuidonggou in the first place. We'll find them. We just have to cover the whole area."

So they walked, in the pulsating yellow sun, through the silty dirt. The crumbling canyon walls rose around them. Ravines and washes tumbled down from the crest above, where the ridgeline was still topped with the eroded backbone of the Great Wall.

Spencer said they should explore each ravine in turn. So they climbed as high in each one as they could, struggling up the grade, slipping in the quick, fine earth. Sometimes they got close enough to catch a glimpse of the worn-down Wall above them, sometimes they hit a jumble of rocks or an impossibly narrow cleft or some other formation that told them no house could possibly have been built any higher up. Then they would turn around. They stopped talking. There was no sound except their sand-sucking footsteps, the drone of wind, and the scratching of Adam's pen in his notebook as he mapped the system of canyons.

"Keep going," Spencer insisted when her disappointment started to show. She did. Even three hours later, when his shirt was sweat blotched and his nose starting to show pink, he kept saying it. "Let's do the next one."

"The house could be anywhere. In any direction."

"We'll find it," he said stubbornly.

It was like this, dragging, empty handed, that Dr. Lin Shiyang spotted them moving around the lip of a wash, at the turn of the canyon a mile or so up. "Tamen zai ner," "Tamen zai ner," he said with relief, and pointed them out to Kong with his chin. A small movement, economical. He was hot and tired too. he said with relief, and pointed them out to Kong with his chin. A small movement, economical. He was hot and tired too.

''Na hao. Women zou-ba. " Kong sighed, and walked away to collect the driver from his patch of shade. " Kong sighed, and walked away to collect the driver from his patch of shade.

When the Americans walked up Lin could see they'd found nothing. Their eyes sagged with failure.

"It should have been right here," Spencer said, the rust-headed woman putting his words into melodious Chinese. "Right by the site. But it's okay. Tomorrow, we'll keep looking."

He nodded and looked down at the woman. "Zenmoyang?" "Zenmoyang?" he asked her-How did it go? he asked her-How did it go?

She shook her head. Nothing.

"Tai zao-le, " he said sympathetically. " he said sympathetically.

Alice sighed in acknowledgment. All she wanted at this moment was to get back to Yinchuan and have a bath. She was coated with dust and grit. Her mouth was dry and aching with thirst, but she had finished off her water bottle as they hiked back down the last canyon.

Lin saw her glance at her bottle, empty, saw the flush in her freckled cheeks. He held out his own, still a third full. "Gei, "Gei, " he said quietly. " he said quietly.

"Oh, no," she said. "Na zenmo xing." "Na zenmo xing."

"Gei, " he said again.

She took it, drank gratefully, and handed it back to him. "Thank you."

He nodded and reattached it to his belt.

"What did you get?" Spencer was saying in English to Dr. Kong, nodding his head at Kong's sack bulging with microliths.

Kong smiled broadly and opened the bag for Spencer, who inspected the contents and gave him a thumbs-up. "Good work."

The driver, who stood next to Lin, cleared his throat and glanced pointedly at the sun's angle above their heads. The light had grown long and yellow, the shimmering heat almost unbearable.

"Yes," Lin said. "We should go."

"Dr. Spencer," she said, taking a few steps toward him, "the driver says we should hit the road."

"Oh? Okay. Hey, congratulations, Dr. Kong. Great stuff." He twirled the bag closed and handed it back to the Chinese, smiled tiredly at her. "Let's go."

"G.o.d, Adam," she said in English, "look at your neck! Don't you feel it? It's bright red!"

"It is?" He reached back and touched it, winced.

"You have to be more careful. Sunburn is no joke." As she spoke she reached out and unfolded his shirt collar, positioning it gently so it covered his neck. She smoothed out the denim. "Really. Be careful."

Lin felt his stomach drop, watching them. Don't stare, he ordered himself. Turn away. The way she touched the American man! So familiar, so intimate. So there was something between them. When he and Kong had been briefed it had been made clear that these two foreigners did not know each other until a week ago, when the man hired the woman as his interpreter. Both, they'd been informed, were unmarried. He'd heard stories about Americans, just as all Chinese had. Their restlessness, their high s.e.xual interest. These two had worked together only one week. Could they already be qing ren? qing ren?

"You ready, Dr. Lin?" Now her face was turned to him, those khaki eyes wide open, pleasant, expectant.

"Eh," he said. "Ready." Remarkable.

"Zou-ba, " she said, watching Lin climb into the rear seat. " she said, watching Lin climb into the rear seat.

She stepped into the back and sat next to Lin. He showed her a millisecond of mild surprise, and then faced front again. She adjusted in her seat for Spencer, who climbed in the back on her other side. Kong got in front with the driver.

They bounced up the dirt road, twisting and turning through the long series of canyons. It would take an hour and a half to get to the ferry crossing. She let the first hour go by without a word.

As they pa.s.sed through the resettled villages, she saw that Lin scanned out the window constantly.

He thinks his wife might still be out there, Alice realized. He thinks he might actually see her.

So she waited until they came almost to the river before she spoke to him. By then, she knew, they were out of the laogai laogai zone and the only people they would see would be the Mongols, and the Muslims, driving their camels and their sheep and their two-wheeled carts. zone and the only people they would see would be the Mongols, and the Muslims, driving their camels and their sheep and their two-wheeled carts.

"Dr. Lin," she ventured. "Find anything today?"

He turned to her with his mouth bent in the smallest smile. Instead of speaking, he opened his clenched palm and extended it.

There, all but invisible in the brown landscape of hollows and calluses, gleamed the tiny ostrich-sh.e.l.l bead.

Sun Gong, third a.s.sistant Party vice manager for Ningxia Province, was back in his office after a week's leave, glancing through a sheaf of faxes on his desk. One from Beijing caught his eye. It was his prudent habit to always look carefully at faxes from Beijing.

Vice Manager Sun squinted at the letterhead: Inst.i.tute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. Curious. The IVPP was the national research inst.i.tute handling anthropology and archaeology. They gave out excavation permits and oversaw Ningxia's provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics. What was odd was that they were communicating with the Party ofnce-with him, Sun Gong. Normally their directives went straight to the Bureau of Cultural Relics.

He scanned through the fax. Alerting him to the presence of an American archaeologist and his female a.s.sistant... attempting to recover Peking Man, the single most important batch of fossils lost by China during the world war ... calls placed to highest-level U.S. Government offices.... Peking Man! Sun's eyebrows went up. One of China's great lost treasures. He read on: Two Chinese scientists accompanying, from Huabei University... permits granted to cross Xi Xia Missile Range... please coordinate with regional PLA command. They are providing security. Cordially. Vice Director Han.

Security! Sun's fingers trembled as he pulled a crumpled pack of Flying Horse cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one loose, and lit it. The words seemed clear enough, but what lay behind them? Did Vice Director Han imply that if they found the precious Peking Man remains-though surely that was impossible, for the j.a.panese had spirited the bones away fifty years before-the Americans might try to smuggle the fossils out of the country? The very idea made Sun Gong bridle in righteous fury.

Or was it possible-could it be-did they suspect espionage?

Yes, he thought, pulling hard on the strong cigarette and feeling his heart race, yes, it was possible. Anything was possible. The archaeologists were going to cross a missile range, after all. Highly sensitive. State secrets.

For years, Sun Gong had been looking for a way to prove himself to the bosses above his head. It was not easy, out here in the provinces, where nothing ever happened.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone and jabbed out a number. Miles away, at the PLA command post, he heard the insistent ring.

"Wei?"

"Give me Lieutenant Shan."

"Lieutenant Shan! Who's calling?"

He raised his face and blew a perfect smoke ring, which floated lazily toward the ceiling. "His cousin," he answered, satisfied, for a moment, with his lot in life. "Ningxia Province Party Vice Manager Sun Gong."

Back at the Number One, she stopped at the front desk after dinner. "Phone call to Beijing." She took a form and filled it out.

The fuwuyuan fuwuyuan took the slip, bored. took the slip, bored. "Hao-de, "Hao-de, " she said. " she said. "Deng "Deng yixia. " yixia. "

On her way back to her room Alice thought through what to say. Mother Meng, I'm sorry for the scene I caused, showing up like that with Jian and his wife there, at your apartment. Next time before I visit you I'll call first - The phone in her room was jangling. Next to it she saw the clipping, the yellowed newsprint, the obituary of Lucile Swan. She s.n.a.t.c.hed at the receiver. "Wei!" "Wei!"

"Beijing dianhua!" the operator screamed. the operator screamed.

Suddenly there was a male voice on the other end. "Wei! "Wei! Wei!" Wei!"

A male voice? But this was Meng Shaowen's apartment.

"Wei, " she said tentatively, " she said tentatively, "Duibuqi." "Duibuqi." Sorry. "I must have punched wrong. I'm seeking the home of Meng Shaowen." Sorry. "I must have punched wrong. I'm seeking the home of Meng Shaowen."

"Who is this?" The voice tensed.

"Jian?" she whispered. Of all the bad luck- "Mo Ai-li," he said flatly, recognizing her.

"Jian, please. Is she there? I need to talk to her."

"You can't."