Mu-pao looked aghast at the thought. “But it’s forbidden to interrupt when the gods are—”

  “Qing-jao will do a greater penance later. She will want to know her father is calling her.” It gave Wang-mu great satisfaction to put Mu-pao in her place. You may be ruler of the houseservants, Mu-pao, but I am the one who has the power to interrupt even the conversation between my godspoken mistress and the gods themselves.

  As Wang-mu expected, Qing-jao’s first reaction to being interrupted was bitter frustration, fury, weeping. But when Wang-mu bowed herself abjectly to the floor, Qing-jao immediately calmed. This is why I love her and why I can bear serving her, thought Wang-mu, because she does not love the power she has over me and because she has more compassion than any of the other godspoken I have heard of. Qing-jao listened to Wang-mu’s explanation of why she had interrupted, and then embraced her. “Ah, my friend Wang-mu, you are very wise. If my father has cried out in anguish and then called to me, the gods know that I must put off my purification and go to him.”

  Wang-mu followed her down the hallway, down the stairs, until they knelt together on the mat before Han Fei-tzu’s chair.

  Qing-jao waited for Father to speak, but he said nothing. Yet his hands trembled. She had never seen him so anxious.

  “Father,” said Qing-jao, “why did you call me?”

  He shook his head. “Something so terrible—and so wonderful—I don’t know whether to shout for joy or kill myself.” Father’s voice was husky and out of control. Not since Mother died—no, not since Father had held her after the test that proved she was godspoken—not since then had she heard him speak so emotionally.

  “Tell me, Father, and then I’ll tell you my news—I’ve found Demosthenes, and I may have found the key to the disappearance of the Lusitania Fleet.”

  Father’s eyes opened wider. “On this day of all days, you’ve solved the problem?”

  “If it is what I think it is, then the enemy of Congress can be destroyed. But it will be very hard. Tell me what you’ve discovered!”

  “No, you tell me first. This is strange—both happening on the same day. Tell me!”

  “It was Wang-mu who made me think of it. She was asking questions about—oh, about how computers work—and suddenly I realized that if there were in every ansible computer a hidden program, one so wise and powerful that it could move itself from place to place to stay hidden, then that secret program could be intercepting all the ansible communications. The fleet might still be there, might even be sending messages, but we’re not receiving them and don’t even know that they exist because of these programs.”

  “In every ansible computer? Working flawlessly all the time?” Father sounded skeptical, of course, because in her eagerness Qing-jao had told the story backward.

  “Yes, but let me tell you how such an impossible thing might be possible. You see, I found Demosthenes.”

  Father listened as Qing-jao told him all about Valentine Wiggin, and how she had been writing secretly as Demosthenes all these years. “She is clearly able to send secret ansible messages or her writings couldn’t be distributed from a ship in flight to all the different worlds. And if she can do it, if the program exists to allow her to do it, then that same program would clearly have the power to intercept the ansible messages from the fleet.”

  “If A, then B, yes—but how could this woman have planted a program in every ansible computer in the first place?”

  “Because she did it at the first! That’s how old she is. In fact, if Hegemon Locke was her brother, perhaps—no, of course—he did it! When the first colonization fleets went out, with their philotic double-triads aboard to be the heart of each colony’s first ansible, he could have sent that program with them.”

  Father understood at once, of course he did. “As Hegemon he had the power, and the reason as well—a secret program under his control, so that if there were a rebellion or a coup, he would still hold in his hands the threads that bind the worlds together.”

  “And when he died, Demosthenes—his sister—she was the only one who knew the secret! Isn’t it wonderful? We’ve found it. All we have to do is wipe all those programs out of memory!”

  “Only to have the programs instantly restored through the ansible by other copies of the program on other worlds,” said Father. “It must have happened a thousand times before over the centuries, a computer breaking down and the secret program restoring itself on the new one.”

  “Then we have to cut off all the ansibles at the same time,” said Qing-jao. “On every world, have a new computer ready that has never been contaminated by any contact with the secret program. Shut the ansibles down all at once, cut off the old computers, bring the new computers on-line, and wake up the ansibles. The secret program can’t restore itself because it isn’t on any of the computers. Then the power of Congress will have no rival to interfere!”

  “You can’t do it,” said Wang-mu.

  Qing-jao looked at her secret maid in shock. How could the girl be so ill-bred as to interrupt a conversation between two of the godspoken in order to contradict them?

  But Father was gracious—he was always gracious, even to people who had overstepped all the bounds of respect and decency. I must learn to be more like him, thought Qing-jao. I must allow servants to keep their dignity even when their actions have forfeited any such consideration.

  “Si Wang-mu,” said Father, “why can’t we do it?”

  “Because to have all the ansibles shut off at the same time, you would have to send messages by ansible.” said Wang-mu. “Why would the program allow you to send messages that would lead to its own destruction?”

  Qing-jao followed her father’s example by speaking patiently to Wang-mu. “It’s only a program—it doesn’t know the content of messages. Whoever rules the program told it to hide all the communications from the fleet, and to conceal the tracks of all the messages from Demosthenes. It certainly doesn’t read the messages and decide from their contents whether to send them.”

  “How do you know?” asked Wang-mu.

  “Because such a program would have to be—intelligent!”

  “But it would have to be intelligent anyway,” said Wang-mu. “It has to be able to hide from any other program that would find it. It has to be able to move itself around in memory to conceal itself. How would it be able to tell which programs it had to hide from, unless it could read them and interpret them? It might even be intelligent enough to rewrite other programs so they wouldn’t look in the places where this program was hiding.”

  Qing-jao immediately thought of several reasons why a program could be smart enough to read other programs but not intelligent enough to understand human languages. But because Father was there, it was his place to answer Wang-mu. Qing-jao waited.

  “If there is such a program,” said Father, “it might be very intelligent indeed.”

  Qing-jao was shocked. Father was taking Wang-mu seriously. As if Wang-mu’s ideas were not those of a naive child.

  “It might be so intelligent that it not only intercepts messages, but also sends them.” Then Father shook his head. “No, the message came from a friend. A true friend, and she spoke of things that no one else could know. It was a real message.”

  “What message did you receive, Father?”

  “It was from Keikoa Amaauka; I knew her face to face when we were young. She was the daughter of a scientist from Otaheiti who was here to study genetic drift of Earthborn species in their first two centuries on Path. They left—they were sent away quite abruptly . . . .” He paused, as if considering whether to say something. Then he decided, and said it: “If she had stayed she might have become your mother.”

  Qing-jao was both thrilled and frightened to have Father speak of such a thing to her. He never spoke of his past. And now to say that he once loved another woman besides his wife who gave birth to Qing-jao, this was so unexpected that Qing-jao didn’t know what to say.

  “She was sent somewhere very far away. It’s been thirty-five years. Most of my life has passed since she left. But she only just arrived, a year ago. And now she has sent me a message telling me why her father was sent away. To her, our parting was only a year ago. To her, I’m still—

  “Her lover,” said Wang-mu.

  The impertinence! thought Qing-jao. But Father only nodded. Then he turned to his terminal and paged through the display. “Her father had stumbled onto a genetic difference in the most important Earthborn species on Path.”

  “Rice?” asked Wang-mu.

  Qing-jao laughed. “No, Wang-mu. We are the most important Earthborn species on this world.”

  Wang-mu looked abashed. Qing-jao patted her shoulder. This was as it should be—Father had encouraged Wang-mu too much, had led her to think she understood things that were still far beyond her education. Wang-mu needed these gentle reminders now and then, so she did not get her hopes too high. The girl must not allow herself to dream of being the intellectual equal of one of the godspoken, or her life would be filled with disappointment instead of contentment.

  “He detected a consistent, inheritable genetic difference in some of the people of Path, but when he reported it, his transfer came almost immediately. He was told that human beings were not within the scope of his study.”

  “Didn’t she tell you this before she left?” asked Qing-jao.

  “Keikoa? She didn’t know. She was very young, of an age when most parents don’t burden their children with adult affairs. Your age.”

  The implications of this sent another thrill through Qing-jao. Her father had loved a woman who was the same age as Qing-jao; thus Qing-jao was, in her father’s eyes, the age when she might be given in marriage. You cannot send me away to another man’s house, she cried out inside; yet part of her also was eager to learn the mysteries between a man and a woman. Both feelings were beneath her, she would do her duty to her father, and no more.

  “But her father told her during the voyage, because he was very upset about the whole thing. As you can imagine—for his life to be disrupted like this. When they got to Ugarit a year ago, however, he plunged into his work and she into her education and tried not to think about it. Until a few days ago, her father ran across an old report about a medical team in the earliest days of Path, which had also been exiled suddenly. He began to put things together, and confided them to Keikoa, and against his advice she sent me the message I got today.”

  Father marked a block of text on the display, and Qing-jao read it. “That earlier team was studying OCD?” she said.

  “No, Qing-jao. They were studying behavior that looked like OCD, but couldn’t possibly have been OCD because the genetic tag for OCD was not present and the condition did not respond to OCD-specific drugs.”

  Qing-jao tried to remember what she knew about OCD. That it caused people to act inadvertently like the godspoken. She remembered that between the first discovery of her hand-washing and her testing, she had been given those drugs to see if the hand-washing went away. “They were studying the godspoken,” she said. “Trying to find a biological cause for our rites of purification.” The idea was so offensive she could hardly say the words.

  “Yes,” said Father. “And they were sent away.”

  “I should think they were lucky to get away with their lives. If the people heard of such sacrilege—”

  “This was early in our history, Qing-jao,” said Father. “The godspoken were not yet fully known to be—communing with the gods. And what about Keikoa’s father? He wasn’t investigating OCD. He was looking for genetic drift. And he found it. A very specific, inheritable alteration in the genes of certain people. It had to be present on the gene from one parent, and not overridden by a dominant gene from the other—when it came from both parents, it was very strong. He thinks now that the reason he was sent away was because every one of the people with this gene from both parents was godspoken, and not one of the godspoken he sampled was without at least one copy of the gene.”

  Qing-jao knew at once the only possible meaning of this, but she rejected it. “This is a lie,” she said. “This is to make us doubt the gods.”

  “Qing-jao, I know how you feel. When I first realized what Keikoa was telling me, I cried out from my heart. I thought I was crying out in despair. But then I realized that my cry was also a cry of liberation.”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said, terrified.

  “Yes you do,” said Father, “or you wouldn’t be afraid. Qing-jao, these people were sent away because someone didn’t want them discovering what they were about to discover. Therefore whoever sent them away must already have known what they would find out. Only Congress—someone with Congress, anyway—had the power to exile these scientists, and their families. What was it that had to stay hidden? That we, the godspoken, are not hearing gods at all. We have been altered genetically. We have been created as a separate kind of human being, and yet that truth is being kept from us. Qing-jao, Congress knows the gods speak to us—that is no secret from them, even though they pretend not to know. Someone in Congress knows about it, and allows us to continue doing these terrible, humiliating things—and the only reason I can think of is that it keeps us under control, keeps us weak. I think—Keikoa thinks so, too—that it’s no coincidence that the godspoken are the most intelligent people of Path. We were created as a new subspecies of humanity with a higher order of intelligence, but to stop such intelligent people from posing a threat to their control over us, they also spliced into us a new form of OCD and either planted the idea that it was the gods speaking to us or let us continue to believe it when we came up with that explanation ourselves. It’s a monstrous crime, because if we knew about this physical cause instead of believing it’s the gods, then we might turn our intelligence toward overcoming our variant form of OCD and liberate ourselves. We are the slaves here! Congress is our most terrible enemy, our masters, our deceivers, and now will I lift my hand to help Congress? I say that if Congress has an enemy so powerful that he—or she—controls our very use of the ansible then we should be glad! Let that enemy destroy Congress! Only then will we be free!”

  “No!” Qing-jao screamed the word. “It is the gods!”

  “It’s a genetic brain defect,” Father insisted. “Qing-jao, we are not godspoken, we’re hobbled geniuses. They’ve treated us like caged birds; they’ve pulled our primary wing feathers so we’ll sing for them but never fly away. “Father was weeping now, weeping in rage. “We can’t undo what they’ve done to us, but by all the gods we can stop rewarding them for it. I will not raise my hand to give the Lusitania fleet back to them. If this Demosthenes can break the power of Starways Congress, then the worlds will be better for it!”

  “Father, no, please, listen to me!” cried Qing-jao. She could hardly speak for the urgency, the terror at what her father was saying. “Don’t you see? This genetic difference in us—it’s the disguise the gods have given for their voices in our lives. So that people who are not of the Path will still be free to disbelieve. You told me this yourself, only a few months ago—the gods never act except in disguise.”

  Father stared at her, panting.

  “The gods do speak to us. And even if they have chosen to let other people think that they did this to us, they were only fulfilling the will of the gods to bring us into being.”

  Father closed his eyes, squeezing the last of his tears between his eyelids.

  “Congress has the mandate of heaven, Father,” said Qing-jao. “So why shouldn’t the gods cause them to create a group of human beings who have keener minds—and who also hear the voices of the gods? Father, how can you let your mind become so clouded that you don’t see the hand of the gods in this?”

  Father shook his head. “I don’t know. What you’re saying, it sounds like everything that I’ve believed all my life, but—”

  “But a woman you once loved many years ago has told you something else and you believe her because you remember your love for her but Father, she’s not one of us, she hasn’t heard the voice of the gods, she hasn’t—”

  Qing-jao could not go on speaking, because Father was embracing her. “You’re right,” he said, “you’re right, may the gods forgive me, I have to wash, I’m so unclean, I have to . . .”

  He staggered up from his chair, away from his weeping daughter. But without regard for propriety, for some mad reason known only to herself, Wang-mu thrust herself in front of him, blocked him. “No! Don’t go!”

  “How dare you stop a godspoken man who needs to be purified!” roared Father, and then, to Qing-jao’s surprise, he did what she had never seen him do—he struck another person, he struck Wang-mu, a helpless servant girl, and his blow had so much force that she flew backward against the wall and then dropped to the floor.

  Wang-mu shook her head, then pointed back at the computer display. “Look, please, Master, I beg you! Mistress, make him look!”

  Qing-jao looked, and so did her father. The words were gone from the computer display. In their place was the image of a man. An old man, with a beard, wearing the traditional headdress; Qing-jao recognized him at once, but couldn’t remember who he was.

  “Han Fei-tzu!” whispered father. “My ancestor of the heart!”

  Then Qing-jao remembered: This face showing above the display was the same as the common artist’s rendering of the ancient Han Fei-tzu for whom Father was named.

  “Child of my name,” said the face in the computer, “let me tell you the story of the Jade of Master Ho.”

  “I know the story,” said Father.

  “If you understood it, I wouldn’t have to tell it to you.”

  Qing-jao tried to make sense of what she was seeing. To run a visual program with such perfect detail as the head floating above the terminal would take most of the capacity of the house computer—and there was no such program in their library. There were two other sources she could think of. One was miraculous: The gods might have found another way to speak to them, by letting Father’s ancestor-of-the-heart appear to him. The other was hardly less awe-inspiring: Demosthenes’s secret program might be so powerful that it monitored their very speech in the same room as any terminal, and, having heard them reach a dangerous conclusion, took over the house computer and produced this apparition. In either case, however, Qing-jao knew that she must listen with one question in mind: What do the gods mean by this?