Bill meant the ones splashed across the front of most of the papers, the shots the new Italian government had released without first alerting Washington. Agent Wharton knew more than he wanted to about them.

"He looked more like Jake in those. Kind of battered and sunburnt but the sneer was right and the way he stood, one foot forward and his arms folded. Maybe you had to know him to recognize it."

"Yeah," said the man with the suit. "And you did, didn't you? You spend a week with this man in Paris and the next thing that happens is he takes a crack at the President... What?" Agent Wharton demanded, glaring at the door as if he could see straight through it and kill whoever knocked on the other side with a single glance.

"You need to turn on your cell phone."

"What?"

The Sergeant who peered round the door looked the suit up and down, too battle-scarred and too old to give a damn for anyone who wasn't her boss or an immediate colleague. "That's what the message said, turn on your mobile."

She shut the door with a bang.

"Agent Wharton," said the suit into his phone. "What? You're shitting me..." Michael Wharton never swore and certainly not in front of uniforms from the NYPD. So he stared the Hispanic out for a few brief seconds, as if daring him to smirk, and went back to his call.

"Where?"

"Both of them?"

"Me?"

"Yeah."

Snapping shut his cell phone, Agent Wharton took a look at the printouts, the photographs and the mess of papers and prepared to walk away from the lot. "Wrap him up," he told the older of the two officers. "He's off to see the President."

CHAPTER 31

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

The Emperor flinched at the sound of a lash, then flinched again and again until daylight pulled open his eyes and he woke to find himself in the Pavilion of Celestial Dreams, the smell of a distant city on his skin and ruined flesh burned into his memory.

He was exhausted by the effort of holding the dreams in his head.

"Saw two shooting stars last night."

Zaq looked around him for the source of the words. And miles above the Forbidden City particulate matter fell softly through the upper atmosphere. All that remained from a Casimir coil dumped by a racing yacht which had been stolen once to order and once again on something stronger than a whim.

All Tomorrow's Parties shed the first coil because that was what it always did at the halfway point of any race, once the vector was in sight and pit craft were waiting to cocoon it back into health. It took the decision on its own, based on precedent and extrapolation of all available data, which was rather less than it would have liked. The second coil it dumped because Tris told it to and she was holding a gun to its memory.

Where every emperor since the original Chuang Tzu had slept on a bed of solid oak, his head resting on a wooden pillow, Zaq bedded down in a corner of his room, wrapped in an old blanket and nightmares. He did this because it annoyed the Library and he had no need to tell the Library about the nightmares because it already knew.

They were the price Zaq paid for refusing to be Chuang Tzu. At least Zaq imagined they were. The war between Zaq and the Library was quiet and understated, but they both knew it was moving into a new and dangerous phase.

These days the darkness signed itself Rapture Library, the rapture bit being an old and bad joke at the expense of Holy Ghost Guides Us, a converted freighter fleeing from the world of the first Chuang Tzu, which stumbled through space and into the still-forming 2023 worlds.

Landing in the hills behind the embryo city, its crew imagined the world in which they found themselves to be deserted and it was only when a breakaway sect of fundamental polygamists began cutting down mulberry trees to the north of the Forbidden City that the Library disabused them.

The Boy Emperor had been forced to hide in his palace as thunder crashed hard enough to crack glass and lightning destroyed the tents of the polygamists with improbable accuracy.

Of course, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was not really a boy, whatever the legends said, although all of those who followed after had been children, almost all adapting happily to their new name and lives. The fact the Library had begun to refer to Zaq by his pre-manifestation name was worrying because it seemed to suggest that what Zaq feared was true.

And the Emperor knew how problematic a thought that was, how wrapped around with doubt, and this worried Zaq also... The Chuang Tzu was required to be solid in his certainty, representative of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. He was, to quote the Librarian, the spiritual health of the 2023 worlds made manifest.

It seemed doubtful to Zaq that the Library had ever intended this to be the lesson learnt from its banishment of the polygamists. A short and rather frightening conversation between Zaq and the Librarian revealed that it had been the destruction of the mulberry gardens which angered it.

"Although anger's probably the wrong word... It is, isn't it?"

Assent came from inside Zaq's own skull. A place both suffocatingly close and infinite in its distance.

Applying human emotions to an entity already ancient before amino acids tripped into life half a galaxy away was not helpful. Although this didn't stop the amino acid's descendant from so doing. And it seemed, from a throwaway afterthought, that what really troubled the Library was not the physical destruction of the mulberry bushes or the threat this implied to the silkworms which gave the orchard its reason for existing.

The Library had been scared that the orchard's destruction might upset the fragile happiness of the young Chinese navigator, who was only just coming to terms with his own progression from ice to Emperor.

There were a few among the cold immortals who felt that the navigator and every emperor who came after were no more than pets for the Library. Zaq knew different. The Library had been created not to command but to serve and without someone to serve its existence had no meaning.

This alone was the reason it clung to its role as tutor to each new Chuang Tzu with all the ruthlessness of a court eunuch in the real Forbidden City.

"Bath," Zaq shouted.

As orders went this was entirely redundant. A bath would have been run by servitors the moment Zaq dropped out of deep sleep and into his half-waking haze of dusty alleys and hurt children. In the event that Zaq remained there, another bath would be run and then another and another.

Zaq never saw this happen. He just rolled out of his huddle, walked through a single door and found a steaming pool awaiting him. All of this Zaq knew in the instant he realized that he didn't, facts simply appearing in his head.

The only place where the Librarian kept its peace was in the walled Butterfly Garden, which was within a larger walled garden to the north of the three private pavilions. And Zaq knew this was only because the butterflies were in themselves manifestations of the Librarian, who was, of course, merely one manifestation of the Library, which was merely...

Boxes within boxes.

"Your bath." Tuan-Yu.

Orthodox and Heaven Blessed.

His title went unsaid. Although Zaq was willing to bet that the servitor in the crimson changfu with the silver embroidery had muttered it under her breath. Some mornings, particularly in the first month after he'd given the order that no one was to use any of his titles, Zaq had actually seen the girl's lips move as she swallowed her words. Only Zaq's further announcement that this would be regarded as the height of rudeness brought her mumbling to an end.

He was too old to be this childish, Zaq knew that.