The spreading of sweet water began each morning when the first shaft of gray light touched the chin of the Sage of the Clear Source.
The statue stood sixty arm-lengths high in the center of Entry hall 102, carved from a single mass of green-veined green-wave marble. Its hands were cupped before its chest in an eternal gesture of offering. Overnight, as the cold marine fog drifted down from the high window row vents, moisture condensed along the carved folds of its sleeves, trickling into the cupped palms before overflowing through a punched holes in lip into a stone catch-basin below. The water was pure, cold, and carried a faint stone sweetness from the limestone through which it had seeped.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the catch-basin, his knees bare where his trousers were rolled against the cold splash. He held a measuring rod of seasoned boxwood, marked in inches and tenths with burned notches. With steady, unrushed strokes of a soapstone pencil, he recorded the depth of the morning yield upon a damp slate tablet. His bare feet gripped the raised marble coping of the pool, feeling the slow pulse of the underground drain tube far below.
