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By Root 1127 0

past the Temple of Heaven. The dark summer streets bustled with life. Where puny street lamps cast wan patches of light, people gathered in loose, friendly groups to escape the heat. Almost all were men, in old-fashioned undershirts. They squatted to gossip or play cards. The few cars rode with parking lights only, wary of the swirling stream of hard-to-see bicyclists, who used no lights at all. A young couple conducted public courtship on the stone steps of a government office building. From one alleyway, Stratton heard the muffled click of mah-jongg tiles, and from a window, the beat of Western rock music from a cheap tape deck. Like headlights, mah-jongg and rock music were forbidden in Peking that summer; the headlights so that bicyclists would not be blinded, the ancient game and the music because they were decadent. It pleased Stratton to realize that people still pursued their own muses on summer nights, and to hell with the Party and its rules.

The aim of Stratton’s walk was a downtown park built on an artificial hill. The park itself was nothing special, but the circumstances of its construction were testimony to the siege mentality of Chinese communism. Perhaps forty feet high and a quarter mile around, the hill had been built entirely by hand, one bucket at a time, by volunteer workers who had scooped it from underneath the foundations of the city. In every shop, every factory, every school, Stratton had read, a well-oiled door led down to a network of tunnels. It was the most elaborate bomb shelter in the world, and it had taken more than thirty years to finish.

Bombshelter Park, as Stratton had silently dubbed it, was closed. As he strolled back toward the hotel, he thought of David Wang.

He owed much to the old professor. Wang had sensed the disillusion, no, the despair, that Stratton had brought with him to the tiny college in rural Ohio. Stratton had been running from Asia when he arrived at St. Edward’s for graduate studies. Despite Wang’s considerable reputation, Stratton had avoided his courses. Still, he had found himself attracted to the gentle and patient teacher. They had become friends, then confidants, and on the bright morning when a changed Stratton had strode forward to receive his Ph.D., no one could have missed the fatherly gleam in David Wang’s eyes.

They had drifted apart, more by circumstance than design. With Stratton teaching in New England, rural Ohio had seemed increasingly remote. It had been two years since they had seen one another. Until Peking. Stratton, avoiding his brethren art historians for the first time and feeling particularly exultant at being alone, had stood, back arched, head up, to study the magnificent lakeside arcade of the Summer Palace.

The voice had come from behind him.

“They say she was a fool—profligate—the empress dowager, squandering national riches on a marble boat when she should have spent the money to build a modern navy.”

Stratton would have known the voice anywhere, and the professorial restatement of conventional wisdom that was meant to be challenged. He had replied without turning around.

“Perhaps she knew more than most people give her credit for.”

“How so?” asked the voice.

“She may have understood that, even with modernization, the Imperial Navy would have been no match for the barbarian fleets. She foresaw the end of dynastic China and, instead of sending more young men needlessly to their deaths, decided to create that which would give her pleasure in the realization that the end was coming for her kind.” It was, Stratton thought, an inspired improvisation.

“Mmmm, an interesting theory,” the voice had conceded, “but in the end, I would think history correct in judging her a foolish spendthrift.”

“Me, too,” said Stratton, turning around to embrace David Wang.

Together, they had strolled the lake, finding amid the crush of Chinese visitors a seat aboard the ludicrous and beautiful boat the Empress Ci Xi had ordered built a century before.

Wang seemed immune to time, Stratton thought. He had looked fit and every bit the elegant, prosperous