At first it seemed everything had changed. Certainly the immediate vicinity outside the Gate had been razed, and new streets laid out, so that there was no way they could find their old haunts by the Gate, as they were gone. In their place stood a police station and a number of work unit compounds, lined up parallel to the old stretch of city wall that still existed for a short distance on each side of the Gate. Fairly big trees had been transplanted to the new street corners, protected by thick wrought iron fences with spikes on top: the greenery looked very fine. The work unit compounds had dorm windows looking outwards, another welcome new feature; in the old days they were always built with blank walls facing the outside world, and only in their inner courtyards were there any signs of life. Now the streets themselves were crowded with vendor carts and rolling bookstalls.

'It looks good,' Bao had to admit.

Kung grinned. 'I liked the old place better. Let's get going and see what we can find.'

Their appointment was in an old work unit, occupying several smaller buildings just to the south of the new quarter. Down there the alleys were as tight as ever, all brick and dust and muddy lanes, not a tree to be seen. They wandered freely here, wearing sunglasses and aviator's caps like half the other young men. No one paid them the slightest attention, and they were able to buy paper bowls of noodles and eat standing on a street corner among the crowds and traffic, observing the familiar scene, which did not seem to have changed a bit since their departure a few packed years before.

Bao said, 'I miss this place.'

Kung agreed. 'It won't be long before we can move back here if we want. Enjoy Beijing again, centre of the world.'

But first, a revolution to finish. They slipped into one of the shops of the work unit and met with a group of unit supervisors, most of them old women. They were not inclined to be impressed by any boy advocating enormous change, but by this time Kung was famous, and they listened carefully to him, and asked a lot of detailed questions, and when he had finished they nodded and patted him on the shoulder and sent him back out onto the street, telling him he was a good boy and that he should get out of the city before he got himself arrested, and that they would back him when the time came. That was the way it was with Kung: everyone felt the fire in him, and responded in the human way. If he could win over the old women of the Long War in a single meeting, then nothing was impossible. Many a village and work unit was staffed entirely by these women, as were the Buddhist hospitals and colleges. Kung knew all about them by now, 'the gangs of widows and grandmothers', he called them; 'very frightening minds, they are beyond the world but know every tael of it, so they can be very hard, very unsenti mental. Good scientists frequent among them. Politicians of great cunning. It's best not to cross them.' And he never did, but learned from them, and honoured them; Kung knew where the power lay in any given situation. 'If the old women and the young men ever get together, it will be all over!'

Kung also travelled to Yingkou to meet with Zhu Isao himself, and discuss with the old philosopher the campaign for China. Under Zhu's aegis he flew to Yingzhou, and spoke with the Japanese and Chinese representatives of the Yingzhou League, meeting also Travancoris and others in Fangzhang, and when he returned, he came with promises of support from all the progressive governments of the New World.

Soon after that, one of the great Hodenosaunee fleets arrived in Yingkou, and unloaded huge quantities of food and weapons, and similar fleets appeared off all the port cities not under revolutionary control already, blockading them in effect if not in word, and the New China forces were able over the next couple of years to win victories in Shanghai, Canton, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and inland all over China. The final assault on Beijing became more of a triumphal entry than anything else; the soldiers of the old army disappeared into the vast city, or out to their last stronghold in Gansu, and Kung was with Zhu in the first trucks of a giant motorcade that entered the capital uncontested, indeed hugely celebrated, on the spring equinox marking the Year 36, through the Big Red Gate.

It was later in that week that they opened up the Forbidden City to the people, who had been in there only a few times before, after the disappearance of the last emperor, when for a few years of the war it had been a public park and army barracks. For the past forty years it had been closed again to the people, and now they streamed in to hear Zhu and his inner circle speak to China and the world. Bao was in the crowd accompanying them, and as they passed under the Gate of Great Harmony he saw Kung look around, as if surprised. Kung shook his head, an odd expression on his face; and it was still there when he went up to the podium to stand by Zhu and speak to the ecstatic masses filling the square.

Zhu was still speaking when the shots rang out. Zhu fell, Kung fell; all was chaos. Bao fought his way through the screaming crowd and got to the ring of people around the wounded on the temporary wooden stage, and most of those people were men and women he knew, trying to establish order and get medical assistance and a route out of the palace grounds to a hospital. One who recognized him let Bao through, and he rushed and stumbled to Kung's side. The assassin had used the big soft tipped bullets that had been developed during the war, and there was blood all over the wood of the stage, shocking in its copious gleaming redness. Zhu had been struck in the arm and leg; Kung in the chest. There was a big hole in his back and his face was grey. He was dying. Bao knelt beside him and took up his splayed right hand, calling out his name. Kung looked through him; Bao couldn't be sure he was seeing anything; 'Kung Jianguo!' Bao cried, the words torn out of him like no others had ever been.

'Bao Xinhua,' Kung mouthed. 'Go on.'

Those were his last words. He died before they even got him off the stage.

2. This Square Fathom

All that happened when Bao was young.

After Kung's assassination he wasn't much good for a time. He attended the funeral and never shed a tear; he thought he was beyond such things, that he was a realist, that the cause was what mattered and that the cause would go on. He was numb to his grief, he felt he didn't really care. That seemed odd to him, but there it was. It wasn't all that real, it couldn't be. He had got over it.

He kept his nose in books, and read all the time. He attended the college in Beijing and read history and political science, and accepted diplomatic posts for the new government, first in Japan, then Yingzhou, then Nsara, then Burma. The New China programme progressed, but slowly, so slowly. Things were better but not in any rapid marked way. Different but in some ways the same. People still fought, corruption infected the new institutions, it was always a struggle. Everything took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and yet every few years everything was also somehow entirely different. The pulse of history's long duration was much slower than an individual's time.

One day, after some years had passed, he met a woman named Pan Xichun, a diplomat from Yingzhou, in Beijing on assignment to the embassy there. They were assigned together to work on the Dahai League, the association of states encircling the Great Ocean, and as part of that work they were both sent by their governments to a conference in Hawaii, in the middle of the Dahai. There on the beaches of the big island they spent a great deal of time together, and when they returned to Beijing they were a couple. Her ancestry was both Chinese and Japanese, and all her great grandparents had lived in Yingzhou, in Fangzhang and the valley behind it. When Pan Xichun's assignment in Beijing ended and she went back home, Bao made arrangements to join the Chinese embassy in Fangzhang, and flew across the Dahai to the dramatic green coastline and golden hills of Yingzhou.