Li Sikai, Commander of the China Rescue Team, had come to Xiji Town along with Shen Cong. This was a formal conference. The meeting place was the Party Committee building, and the Provisional Government's top two men were already waiting at its doors.

Waiting with them were a great many of the Provisional Government's senior people.

The reception was on a considerable scale.

Li Sikai rode in another iron person's armored vehicle, which carried an old-style radio that could talk to the Vajra Fortress directly.

Shen Cong was going carefully over the crowds on both sides of the road with the Third Eye Radar, looking for anything out of place, anything dangerous hidden in them. Then Li Sikai's voice came over the radio, musing. "My spirit roams the old country; you should laugh at me for so much feeling, my hair gone white before its time."

With the Superbrain to help, Shen Cong had long been able to do two things at once. He answered absently. "What's that?"

"What?" Li Sikai was thrown for a moment, then explained. "Remembering Red Cliff, the Su Shi lyric (TL Note: an eleventh-century poem every Chinese schoolchild learns; Red Cliff is the site of a famous ancient battle). It seemed to fit. The old country, the old country."

"I think I studied it."

Shen Cong thought about it. He seemed to have studied the lyric once, in a Chinese textbook. But it had been a long time and he did not remember much of it. Classical poetry did not interest him and he had never thought of taking it up. Films and novels were more entertaining.

Still, he pressed. "What does it mean?"

"It's an inverted line. In ordinary word order it would run: my spirit roams the old country, and you should laugh at me for so much feeling, my hair gone white before its time. What Su Shi is saying is that if he ever had the chance to travel in spirit to the old state of Wu and meet Zhou Yu, that man would surely laugh at him for all that…