The Dark Design

Now Tai-Peng was closer, and his speech could be heard clear­ly.

"I eat like a tiger! I crap like an elephant! I can drink three hundred cups of wine at a sitting! I have married three wives, made love to a thousand women! I outplay anyone on the lute and the flute! I write immortal poems by the thousands, but I throw them into the stream as soon as they're finished and watch the water, the wind, and the spirits carry them off to destruction!

"Water and flowers! Water and flowers! These I love the most! "Change and impermanence! These wound, pain, torture me!

"Yet it is change and ephemerality that make for beauty! Without dy ng and death can there be beauty? Can there be perfection? "Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish! "Or is it?

"I, Tai-Peng, once thought of myself as flowing water, as a blooming flower! As a dragon!

"Rowers and dragons! Dragons are flowers of the flesh! They live in beauty while generations of flowers bloom and die! Bloom and become dust! Yet even dragons die; they bloom and become dust! A white man, pale as a ghost, blue-eyed as a demon, once told me that dragons lived for eons! Eons, I say! For ages that make the mind turn upside down to think of them! Yet... they all perished millions of years ago, long before Nukua created men and women from yellow mud!

"In all their pride and beauty, they died!

"Water! Flowers! Dragons!"

Tai-Peng's voice became less loud as he went down the hill. But the man in the hut heard one especially clarion passage.

"What evil person brought us back to life and now wishes us to die forever again?.''

The man in the hut said, "Hah!"

Though Tai-Peng's poems spoke much of the shortness of life of men and women and of flowers, they never mentioned death. Nor had he ever before referred to death in his conversation. Yet now he was speaking boldly of it, raging at it.

Until now he had seemed to be as happy as a man could be. He'd lived for six years in this little state and apparently had no desire to leave it.

Was he ready now?

A man like Tai-Peng would be a good companion for the voyage up-River. He was aggressive, quick wined, and a great swordsman. If he could be subtly urged to resume the course he had forsaken... What was likely to happen in the decades to come? All he could predict-for now he too was one of the webs in the dark design, no longer a weaver-all he could predict was that some would get to Virolando and some would not.

The more astute would discover a message there. Some of these would surely decipher it. Among these would be both recruits and agents.

Who would get to the tower first?

He must be the one who did.

And he must survive the perils of the journey. Probably the greatest of these would be the inevitable battle between the two great boats. Clemens was determined to catch up with King John and kill or capture him. It was possible, highly possible, that both vessels and their crews would be destroyed.

Savagery! The idiocy of the tiger!

All because of this frenzied desire for vengeance which had seized Clemens. Clemens, who was otherwise the most pacifistic of men.

Could Clemens be talked out of this childish passion for revenge ?

Sometimes he agreed with what the Operator, in a depressed mood, had once said.

"Humankind sticks in the throat of God."

But. .. Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

And the Master of Dark Truth was riding on unpredictable Change.

"What...?"

The glowing lines and symbols had disappeared.

For a few seconds he stared, his mouth open. Then he uttered a string of code phrases. But the surface of the grail remained grey.

He clenched his fists and his teeth.

So ... what he had feared had at last happened.

Some element in the complex of the satellite had suddenly quit working. No wonder. After over a thousand years the circuits were due for a checking, but no one had been able to inspect them on schedule.

From now on, he would no longer know exactly where the other men and women were. Now he too was in the house of night, bounded by fog. The passing of the lights on the grail had left a deeper gloom behind. He felt like a tired and companionless pilgrim on a lonely shore, a shadow among shades.

What would go amiss next? What could? For one thing, no, surely not... But if it did, then he might not have all the time needed.

He stood up and straightened his shoulders. Time to go.

A shadow among the shades and ru