Professor Yao arrived punctually at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was a hotel that, despite the proliferation of intelligent buildings with elaborate ecosystems over the last few decades, had mao g to its ageing Art Deco charm. The Waldorf Astoria was a landmark historical building, kept that way by a ittee of iial members of the establishment to protect the rapidly disappearing remnants of the old New York city. The digerati, osti, financiers, politicos, academics, teocrats and the wealthy had desded on this archaic patch to attend the World Teology Forum, the biggest meeting of fame, money and minds in the modern world.
It was raining heavily outside and the clouds had turo heavy gray molasses shifting slowly across a featureless sky. Now safely ihe ostentatious hotel, the diminutive professor found himself weaving his way between the sharp Saville Row suits and iional designer outfits of high society. He felt like a carp out of water, trying to free itself from a tangle of weeds. He looked a out of place. He was a small balding man in a cheap gray Guangdong-manufactured polyester-mix suit who still couldn』t get over the excitement of what had just happened in his native a.
Outside, a large se of Park Avenue and its adjoining streets had been cordoned off, droplets of rain casg off the shial barricades and the plastic ribbons. There were armed NYPD cops, carrying an assortment of state-of-the-art crowd-dispersion onry, for as far as the eye could see. Some of the ons had muzzles large enough for a full grown man to climb into. A small cluster of demonstrators stood way back from the barriers and the cops, waving banners and ting slogans and generally not looking too fident about being able to get their messages across. If they』d had any hopes of disrupting the forum, those hopes had been quickly put in check. The demonstrators eyed the cops suspiciously.
The professor』s taxi, a hulking black vehicle of the like he had never seen before, had dropped him off two blocks down the road. He had been forced to walk the rest of the way, rain water coalesg on his suit. He had had some trouble explaining to a couple of NYPD officers on bulky e and fiberglass electric motorbikes that he was an invited guest to the forum. They had scrutinized his smartcard, eying his suit suspiciously. One of the cops had swiped the smartcard on a wireless reader on his wrist and waited for the system to query a remote database and e back with a result. They had looked like they didn』t expect him to be authenticated.
Professor Yao had started to sweat in his polyester suit, or was it the rain slowly oozing through the syic weave, and his round fad intelligent eyes had began to show some . Mentally, he could trace the database query snaking through the system and knew every step the puters where taking to verify his identity, down to the last memory routihe rain was a dark omen, reminding him of the dog that had spent all night howling outside his Beijing hutong two nights earlier.
Then he』d seen his photo flicker on the officer』s wrist and waited patiently as the cops satisfied themselves that he was ihe authenticated entity. He disliked the probing and the body searg but was relieved when the black poli said to the oriental-looking ohat he was . Of course he was , who the hell did they think they where questioning his personal hygiene? And the oriental-looking one could have shown some respect by addressing him in ese, but