Soon after that final session, and a big party, Zhu Isao returned to Beijing, and Bao never saw him again.

They worked hard in the years after Zhu's visit to enact programmes that helped to frame some answers to his final questions. Just as the geologists had been greatly helped in their labours by the construction of a framework of understanding based on the movement of the broken eggshell plates of the crust, so the bureaucrats and technocrats and scientists and diplomats at the League of All Peoples were helped in their endeavours by Zhu's theoretical considerations. It helps to have a plan! as Zhu had often remarked.

And so Bao criss crossed the world, meeting and talking to people, helping to put certain strands into place, thickening the warp and weft of treaties and agreements by which all the peoples on the planet were tied together. He worked variously on land tenure reform, forest management, animal protection, water resources, panchayat support and divestiture of accumulated wealth, chipping away at the obdurate blocks of privilege left in the wake of the Long War and all that had happened in the centuries before it. Everything went very slowly, and progress was always in small increments, but what Bao noticed from time to time was that improvements in one part of the world situation often helped elsewhere, so that, for instance, the institution of panchayat governments at the local level in China and the Islamic states led to increased power for more and more people, especially where they adopted the Travancori law of requiring at least two of every five panchayat members to be women; and this in turn mitigated many land problems. Indeed, as many of the world's problems stemmed from too many people competing for too few resources, using too crude technologies, another happy result of the panchayat empowerment of localities and of women was that birthrates dropped rapidly and dramatically. The replacement rate for a population was 2.I births per woman, and before the Long War the world rate had been more like five; in the poorest countries, more like seven or eight. Now, in every country where women exerted the full range of rights advocated by the League of All Peoples, the replacement rate had fallen to less than three, and often less than two; this, combined with improvements in agriculture and other technologies, boded well for the future. it was the ultimately hopeful expression of the warp and the weft, of the principle of late emergent properties. It seemed, though everything went very slowly, that they might be able to concoct some kind of dharmic history after all. Perhaps; it was not yet clear; but some work got done.

So when Bao read of Zhu Isao's death, some years later, he groaned and threw the paper to the floor. He spent the day out on his balcony, feeling unaccountably bereft. Really there was nothing to mourn, everything to celebrate: the great one had lived over a hundred years, had helped to change China and then all the world; late in life he had appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself, going around and listening by talking. He had given the impression of someone who knew his place in the world.

But Bao did not know his place. Contemplating the immense city below him, looking up the great watery canyons, he realized that he had been living in this place for over ten years, and he still didn't know a thing about it. He was always leaving or coming back, always looking down on things from a balcony, eating in the same little hole in the wall, talking to colleagues from the League offices, spending most of his mornings and evenings reading. He was almost sixty now, and he didn't know what he was doing or how he was supposed to live. The huge city was like a machine, or a ship half sunk in the shallows. It was no help to him. He had worked every day trying to extend Kung and Zhu's work, to understand history and work on it in the moment of change, also to explain it to others, reading and writing, reading and writing, thinking that if he could only explain it then it wouldn't oppress him quite so much. It did not seem to have worked. He had the persistent feeling that everyone who ever meant anything to him had already died.

When he went back inside his apartment, he found a message on the screen of his lectern from his daughter Anzi, the first he had received from her in a long time. She had given birth to a daughter of her own, and wondered if Bao wanted to visit and meet his new grandchild. He typed an affirmative reply and packed his bag.

Anzi and her husband Deng lived above Shark Point, in one of the crowded hilly neighbourhoods on the bay side of Fangzhang. Their baby girl was named Fengyun, and Bao enjoyed very much taking her out on the tram and walking her in a stroller around the park at the south end of town, overlooking the Gold Gate. There was something about her look that reminded him very strongly of Pan Xichun – a curve of the cheek, a stubborn look in her eye. These traits we pass on. He watched ber sleep, and the fog roll in through the Gate, under and over the sweep of the new bridge, listening to a feng shui guru lecture a small class sitting at his feet, 'you can see that this is the most physically beautiful setting of any city on Earth', which seemed true enough to Bao; even Pyinkayaing had no prospect compared to this, the glories of the Burmese capital were all artefactual, and without those it was just like any other delta mouth; unlike this sublime place he had loved so in a previous existence, 'oh no, I don't think so, only geomantic imbeciles would have located the city on the other side of the strait, apart from practical considerations of street plaiting, there is the intrinsic qi of place, its dragon arteries are too exposed to the wind and fog, it is best to leave it as a park'. Certainly the opposing peninsula made a beautiful park, green and hilly across the water, sunlight streaming down on it through cloud, the whole scene so vibrant and gorgeous that Bao lifted the babe up out of her stroller to show it all to her; he pointed her in the four directions; and the scene blurred before his eyes as if he too were a babe. Everything became a flow of shapes, cloudy masses of brilliant colour swimming about, vivid and glowing, stripped of their meanings as known things, blue and white above, yellow below… He shivered, feeling very strange. It was as if he had been looking through the babe's eyes; and the child seemed fretful. So he took her back home, and Anzi reproached him for letting her get cold. 'And her nappy needs changing!'

'I know that! I'll do it.'

'No I'll do it, you don't know how.'

'I most certainly do too, I changed your nappies often enough in my time.'

She sniffed disapprovingly, as if he had been rude to do so, invading her privacy perhaps. He grabbed up the book he was reading and went out for a walk, upset. Somehow things were still awkward between them.

The great city hummed, the islands in the bay with their skyscrapers looking like the vertical mountains of south China, the slopes of Mount Tamalpi equally crowded with huge buildings; but the bulk of the city hugged its hills tightly, most of it still human scale, buildings two and three storeys tall, with upturned corners on all the roofs in the oldfashioned way, like a city of pagodas. This was the city he had loved, the city he had lived in during the years of his marriage.

And so he was a preta here. Like any other hungry ghost, he walked over the hill to the ocean side, and soon he found himself in the neighbourhood where they had lived when Pan was alive. He walked through the streets without even thinking about navigating his way, and there he was: the old home.

He stood before the building, an ordinary apartment block, now painted a pale yellow. They had lived in an apartment upstairs, always in the wind, just as it was now. He stared at the building. He felt nothing. He tested it, he tried to feel something: no. The main thing he felt was wonder that he could feel so little; a rather pale and unsatisfactory feeling to have at such a momentous confrontation with his past, but there it was. The children each had had a bedroom to themselves up there, and Bao and Pan had slept on an unrolled futon in the living room, the stove of the kitchenette right at their feet; it had been a cricket box of a place, really, but there they had lived, and for a time it had seemed it would always be just like that, husband, wife, son, daughter, clothed in a tiny apartment in Fangzhang, and every day the same, every week the same, in a round that would last for ever. Thus the power of thoughtlessness, the power people had to forget what time was always doing.