I$


Other AvoNova Books by

Paul J. McAuley


A
      ETERNAL LIGHT


Y

C
PAUL J. )4cAUL[Y


An AvoNova Book


William Morrow and Company, Inc.

New York
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1993 by Paul J. McAuley
Published by arrangement with the author
ISBN: 0688137938

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in
any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For
information address
Avon Books.

First Morrow/AvoNova Printing: November 1994

AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA
REGISTRADA,
HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

ARC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
Veteran revolutionaries only end up
as monsters and ghosts.

DENG XIAOPING
One


M

ars was dying.
Year after y,
,hard pink ski
ning. Each year, the
and spring arrived lab

In the second year
day of calm spring w
sixth of April. The tho
danwei suddenly disc.
long winter confinen
crickets, heroic opera
ments for fun and pre
of a late dust storm,
Lee had no trouble ir
citizens to clear the
Dome.

It was filthy work,
suits. Edging along r
hand over hand up lit
which studded one in
hexagonal panes. Sticl
ing enveloped in a p,
Lee cleared the last w
face plate clear, hook
out to take in the vie

The King of the
ear, the summer rains failed and the
.'s were stitched only with dry light,inter
dust storms raged more fiercely,
er than the year before.
of the Silence of the Emperor, the first
eather did not arrive until the forty-asand
or so people in the Bitter Waters
overed that they were weary of their
aent, their enthusiasms for fighting
, and handcrafting fur-trimmed odd>fit.
Despite a seventy per cent chance
Contract Agronomist Technician Wei
rounding up half a dozen volunteer
:logged filters of Number Eight Field

requiring full face masks and sealed
netre-wide frame elements. Climbing
les of rung staples to find the air vents
every hundred of the field dome's big
king in the blower's nozzle and becomersonal
storm of red dust. When Wei
.'nt at the top of the dome, he blew his
.d his line to the vent's grid and leaned
W,
Cats was playing some down-home I
      2
      PAUL J. McAuLE¥


rock'n'roll in Lee's earpiece; apart from that he was more
alone than he'd been all winter. This was his first year at
the Bitter Waters danwei, his second as an itinerant agronomist
technician. Already he was chafing to move on
through the emptying landscapes of Mars; if he could he'd
never stop moving until he found his parents or, at least,
found the truth behind his great-grandfather's honeyed evasions.
The librarian program Xiao Bing had built was all very
well, but it searched the other world of the common information
space, not the real world, the world all around him.

The dome curved away on either side of Lee, facets glittering
against the shocking-pink sky. A dozen identical
domes stood in a grid of drainage canals and tracks. Beyond
were the sours, green-brown patches showing through the
thin mantling of red dust, riven by the lightning bolt of the
dry riverbed and spreading north towards the lowlands of
the Plain of Gold. Dust hazed the line between land and sky;
westward, the notch of the Great Valley was hardly visible.
Perhaps he'd travel down it, come summer, to the Paved
Mountain and the strange ecosystem of the Dust Seas, hitch
a ride on a dust skimmer and climb Tiger Mountain...

Shouts floated up,' no louder than the King's music. Directly
below, the others were semaphoring at Lee. Their
shadows made small black oblique strokes against the red
ground. He abseiled all the way down, kicking off lightly
once, twice against structural struts. He just missed the trestle
which carried the water line into the dome and landed
sprawling on his back in a bank of soft dust.

"Make speed, Technician," one of the men shouted as Lee
picked himself up. "Lin Yi is drowning!"

Field Dome Number Eight grew rice. The canal which
carried away the overflow from its flooded fields had been
choked by winter dust storms, forming a slough of deep mud
covered by a thin dry crust on to which Citizen Lin Yi had
ventured and broken through. Now he floundered up to his
chest in algae-tinted gloop while the others laughed and
shouted advice.

"Do you think you're a fish, Lin Yi?"
      RED DUST
      3

"Fish swim in water, not mud. Maybe he's a hog!"
"You're taking conchie recapitulation too far!"
"Recapitulation? If he's a hog, then he's evolved!"

They were waiting for Lin Yi to call for help, none of them
willing to break ranks and lose face; and Lin Yi wouldn't ask
for help because he would lose face too. He made a kind of
sobbing grunt and tried to lunge forward, but succeeded
only in sinking deeper. His hands plashed uselessly in dark
green slime; his head was tipped back, his mouth wide open.

Lee tossed an end of his safety line to Lin Yi, missed and
dragged it back, threw it again. "You might be enjoying your
swim," he shouted, "but we'll need your help to clear up
this mess, Lin Yi!"

Lin Yi threw himself at the line, his head going under the
slop even as he grabbed hold with both hands. The line
snapped taut and Lee fell flat on his ass. Some of the watchers
laughed. Lin Yi came back up, eyes rolling white in his
mud-caked face, and started to claw along the line in panic.
For every meter he gained, Wei Lee was pulled a meter
closer to the mud. The watchers hooted and stamped their
feet as Lee was dragged feet first towards the canal while at
the other end of the line Lin Yi pulled himself out hand over
hand, as neat a demonstration of Newton's third law of motion
as anyone could wish. By the time Lin Yi made dry land,
gasping like a future-shocked amphibian and streaked from
head to foot with slimy clods and viridescent strands of algae,
Lee was lying waist deep in mud beside him.

Lin Yi held out a hand. "Help me up, Technician," he
said. After all, he was a shareholding citizen, and Lee was
just an itinerant worker. He had rights; Lee had a contract.
The fact that Lee had just saved his life meant that Lin Yi
had to regain face by asserting his position.

Knowing that didn't cool Lee's temper. He clambered to
his feet, smarting in a dozen different places. He pulled off
his face mask, swept his black, greased hair back into its DA,
and mopped his face with the red kerchief he'd knotted
around his neck, the way the King wore one in Charro to
hide his branded wound.
      4
      P^vi. J. McAw¥

"Help me up," Lin Yi said impatiently, and Lee said he'd
do better than that, and stalked over to the big raised water
line that served the dome's hydroponic fields. He had already
attached a hose to a spur valve and hooked it over one of
the struts which supported the water line as a kind of makeshift
shower to wash dust from the protective suits. Now he
shook it free.

Lin Yi had climbed to his feet, and the first high-pressure
burst sent him sprawling. He sputtered and spat and swore
and tried to get up again, and a second burst knocked him
on to his back. He began to laugh, paddling upside down in
mud and water like an overturned turtle, trying to splash
his fellows.

"If you can't swim," Lee said, "you should stay out of the
water!" And he lifted the jet so that it rose towards the pink
sky in a trembling fountain, glittering in cold sunlight and
torn by wind and falling in fat droplets that darkened the
red dust. The men danced beneath it, faces raised to the
precious rain, hands cupped to catch it, laughing at each
other; and Lee laughed too and sent the fountain shooting
to new heights.

A voice said loudly, "This is a noble way to waste a morning,
Wei Lee!"

Lee turned, sending water spraying in a flat fan. The men
ran from it, screeching in mock alarm.

Guoquiang reached up and shut off the valve; the hose
quivered and fell slack in Lee's hands. "A little early for a
rain dance," he remarked.

"We wash ourselves of dust, after our labours."

Beside Guoquiang, Xiao Bing held on to the harness of a
draught bact. Face pale as powdered chalk; white hair; silver
caps over pink irises. With his free hand he thumbed a vial
into the waist pocket of his long jacket and said, "You are
an inspiration to us all, with your selfless dedication. How
is my librarian?"

"Still searching. You're going hunting?"

Guoquiang grinned. He was as tall and burly as a Yankee,
with a shock of bristly hair, a craggy face with heavy brows.
      RED DUST
      5

Like Xiao Bing he was dressed in rust-coloured field clothes.
A rifle was slung at one shoulder, and a pistol was buttoned
into a holster at his hip. "We're not here to shovel shit. The
low-pressure cell shifted. The probability that the storm will
hit us has dropped to twenty per cent. It's spring, Wei Lee!
All kinds of furry critters are stirring in their burrows! Here,
put these on." He tossed Lee a bundle of clothes: padded
cotton trousers; a long many-pocketed jacket; a zippered
shirt; knee-high hiking boots. "A good idea to get out, but
we've a better one. And we're good enough to share it with
you."

"Besides," Xiao Bing said, "someone has to lead this bact,
Contract Agronomist Technician Wei Lee, and it isn't going
to be me."
Two


T

he terraced cliffs of the Red Valley rose step by step to
a scalloped rim that stood out sharply against the hard
pink sky. As the three cadres marched through the
sours, a straggling V of geese flew out over the cliffs, honking
each to each as they headed north to their breeding

grounds in the polar sinks.

Spring!

Wei Lee shaded his eyes to watch the birds, and out of
casual spitefulness, an attribute some gene cutter had forgotten
to edit out of the camel-derived genome of its kind,
the draft bact took advantage of the slack harness rope to
try and snatch at his hair. Lee felt the rope swing out and
ducked the bact's swipe, then whacked it on its muzzle.

"Ho! Ho there! Don't you know I'm cleverer than you!"

He mopped his face with his kerchief and whacked the
bact again, to get it moving.

"Ho! Understand who is the master!"

Guoquiang and Xiao Bing had heard Lee shout, and now
they shouted at him, asking how he knew he was smarter,
asking who was leading who. Xiao Bing said, "We'd be better
off if the bact set the traps and Wei Lee carried the gear!"

Lee laughed, and said, "I think maybe you should carry
the gear. This bact is not so dumb he could mistake heroic
opera for art, and I can lay out traps in my sleep."

Guoquiang said, "Thank you for enlightenment! Now I
know that only bacts and contract workers are dumb enough


6
      RED DUST
      7

to pay attention to the King of the Cats and his old-fashioned
anarchist propaganda."
"Oh! You know very well I like the historical King, not
some machine floating in Jupiter who thinks it's the King,
reborn all over again. No, I like the real one, the one who
was born in a stable and became a planet-wide media star,
who was exiled to the Moon and returned a hero after leading
a revolution against the tyranny of Colonel Parker, who
was crucified upon a burning cross, and returned as a thousand
acolytes who surgically altered themselves to look exactly
like him."
"And who could raise the dead, and turn water into wine,"
Xiao Bing said.
"I can turn wine into water," Guoquiang said. "The trick
is finding the wine."
"I may be dumb," Lee insisted, "but I wouldn't mistake
historical reality for the construct who jockeys the show."
"But you listen to it, all the same," Guoquiang said. "A
contradiction there, Wei Lee."
"Not at all! I just like the songs he plays. I'm smart
enough to know they mean something. Nothing in those
operas could ever happen in the real world."
"That's the point," Guoquiang said amiably.
"And if you're so smart," Xiao Bing said, "why are you
slogging through this stuff with us?"
"Oh! I don't mind this."
For most of the afternoon the three had been picking a
path through the marshy saltpans of the sours. Low black
willows and tenacious soldier grasses grew along the ragged
cuts of sandclogged irrigation ditches; slimes and moulds
threw up wrinkled stinking banks that slumped into sands
crusted with leached iron salts. Every footstep threw up a
rotten salty stench, and the three cadres walked with their
kerchiefs drawn over nose and mouth. Only the bact seemed
unaffected; its black lips drawn back in a perpetual sneer as
it padded behind Lee.
But while the others grumbled about the stink of the
sours, Lee saw it for what it was: a co-operative ecological
      8
      PAUL J. MCAULE¥


structure which had once forced the Martian desert slowly
to yield to wetland ecology. The roots of black willows
reached deep down into the frozen regolith; and special
strands in their bark cambium conducted heat to melt and
mine the permafrost. Soldier grasses wove a net of stolons
through the dusty soil, holding it together. Fungi broke the
chemical bonds of the thin surface crust of iron oxides, bindg
the iron to more stable forms, releasing the oxygen.
Rainbow slicks on the black mud in the clogged ditches were
a sign that bacteria were multiplying in the anaerobic muck,
slowly turning it into soil that would grow crops.

A slow tide of life feeding on the Martian regolith, feeding
on itself, processing red dust into oxygen and water and life-filled
muck. And the whole system crippled by the imbalance
which was locking three grams of water in the polar icecaps
for every two produced. The battle fading. Crumbs of water
spilled into thirsty sand. The front line where once unre-claimed
Martian desert had grudgingly given way to pioneer
vegetation was now a festering wound circling the danwei's
fifty-kilometre perimeter.

As the three men moved farther from the danwei, the black
willows grew smaller. Thickly clumped stands thinned out.
Tussocks of soldier grass had tails of red sand, each miniature
sand dune pointing in the same direction, away from the dan-wei
and the winds that blew off the Plain of Gold. The men's
boots kept breaking through a duricrust of hydrated minerals,
making a soft creaking sound with each step.

But there was life there, too. Succulent green spears were
pushing through the crusted soil, tipped with transparent
cells which focused light down to deeply buried corms. The
bact flared its nostrils hungrily, and Lee had to keep jerking
at its bridle to remind it that it wasn't there to look for
lunch. A few bees were out, commuting between widespread
patches of yellow-flowered rock vetch. A patch of frosty soil
had gathered in the lee of two weather-split boulders, and a
lupin had rooted there, its spread of half a dozen leaves no
bigger than Lee's hand but already sending up a spike laden
      RED DUST
      9

with purse-shaped flowers, white and yellow against blood-red
rock.

Life. It was delicate and tenacious, mocking the propaganda
of the conchies, the triumph of the inorganic. Mars

was dying, yet still spring stirred the little lives.

"Time to take a break," Guoquiang said.

Lee and Guoquiang sprawled on a tilted slab of sun-warmed
rock and munched dried fish. The bact nibbled at
foliose lichens, tearing them from overhangs with its mobile
lips. Xiao Bing ranged to and fro, too excited to keep still.
He kept taking delicate snorts from his little tube, jolts of
memory enhancer that would let him fix every detail. He
had taken the pledge to die out of this world into the next,
and was remembering details for the niche he was creating
in Heaven, the part of information space that belonged to
the elective dead. Lee had experienced his design: a desert
garden full of reflecting pools and strange half-melted machinery
under a starry sky where five moons swung by.

"Look here, a periwinkle! And here is moss campion, a
very big cushion. But this, I do not know what this is. Wei
Lee!"

Lee asked what it looked like, and Xiao Bing said, "Black
glossy leaves in a big rosette, a fat flower spike covered with,
I don't know, what looks like silver dusting. The spike shines
so bright, and there's a patch of wet soil around the rosette,
crusted with blue-green algae. It's beautiful, like a machine.
Come and see, Wei Lee!"

"I don't need to. It's ice sunflower, one of Cho Jinfeng's
species. It helped melt the polar caps back when. Very common
above three kilometers, I suppose what you have there
is a remnant from the early days."

Guoquiang yawned. "Perhaps it is coming back down
from the mountains. The winters are colder than they once
were."

"Perhaps. Don't you ever sit down, Bing?"

"I've been sitting down all winter. Look at that! There,
there, there it goes!"

Lee saw it at once, an ice mouse jinking into the shadow
      10
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

of an undercut boulder, tufted tail held up like an aerial.
Spring, and the animals which had hibernated through the
long winter or which like the ice mouse had lain neither
dead nor alive, blood vessels and body cavity filled with ice
crystals minutely shaped by antifreeze peptides, were now
all alive alive-o. Running and feeding and breeding all unawares
of the humans who had brought them here. Mice
and men: men and the Ten Thousand Years.
The Ten Thousand Years and the conchies.
Perhaps the conchie propaganda was right, perhaps the
Golden Path was the only way, the inevitable next step in
the evolution of intelligence. Many, like Xiao Bing, were eager
to embrace it, pledging early deaths in exchange for the
privilege of designing their own private niche in the Golden
Isles of Heaven that lay beyond the barrier in information
space. But Lee did not understand the conchie ideology
which insisted that Mars must return to its original state,
that after all these years the terraforming project should be
allowed to fail. If the Earth's consensus was as powerful an
ally as the Ten Thousand Years claimed it to be, why was it afraid of the
living? For why else would it want to gather all
that lived into information space?
Guoquiang had fallen asleep while Lee had been thinking
on this. Xiao Bing came over and rummaged through his
pockets and at last came up with a pair of goggles. "It's your
last chance to check on the librarian," he said. "When we
get over the rim the reception will go."
Lee took the goggles. "I checked this morning." "It's a good program. It'll
find your parents."
"Thank you, Xiao Bing."
Xiao Bing bowed. "It was fun to make. But like all intelligence-mimicking
programs, it needs positive reinforcement.
It needs encouragement. I'm going to remember
some more desert before we start up off again," he added,
and wandered away.
Lee watched Xiao Bing ramble about for a while. Then he
snapped on the goggles, and information space scrolled up
even as he adjusted earpiece and patch microphone. The
      RED DUST
      11

librarian turned to him, a massive book clasped across his
chest.

He was a tall thin man in a dark silk robe, its hood cast
over his sharp, high-cheekboned face. It was a mirror-image
of Lee's own face, a whim Lee now regretted but was unable
to ask Xiao Bing to edit out; that Bing had written the librarian
was favor enough.

The librarian said, "I have found nothing new since we
last spoke, Master, but I have accessed a promising new
level. Every day I feel I am getting closer to your parents."

Behind the librarian, tiers of chained leather-bound volumes
stepped up into darkness. A shaft of light from a high
narrow window slashed across their ranks, fell to a patch of
richly patterned carpet no bigger than a hand.

Lee, who   had never mastered the knack of subvocalising,
mumbled,   "You are here without compromise?" The librarian
had been   working for two weeks now, had moved a long
way from   the common data-access areas into undefined
regions.   So far, by some miracle, its integrity had not been
tested.

The librarian said, "I had to kill a guardian, but I believe
it was not noticed."

With goggles and earpiece as the only sensory inputs, Lee
was aware of the faint warmth of the soft dust on which he
sat, the touch of cold air on his face. The librarian was only
a fictive interface; still, Lee felt a dry catch of fear when he
said, "Isn't that illegal? Show me."

The librarian put his hands together, fingertip steepled
against fingertip.

And suddenly a worm raced at Lee down an infinite corridor
between stacks of books. Although it moved at tremendous
speed it also seemed to writhe about a single fixed
point, now showing the red serrated plates along its back,
now its pale belly. Its golden eyes were huge under arched
brows; its mouth gaped amongst bristles and kept on gaping,
a vast yawning cave ringed by wet razor-sharp ridges. Lee
saw his hands tear a page from the book he carried, wad it
      12
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
and toss it into the worm's maw: there was a soundless flash
and the worm vanished.
"That was ten days ago," the librarian said. "I travelled
on until I reached this place, and now I will try and penetrate
the data files. They are very old, as you see."
"Ten days?" Lee had accessed the librarian only that
morning.
"Time is not the same for us," the librarian said. "Master,
you have given me a difficult task, and I have travelled long
and hard roads to try and fulfil it. I wonder if I might ask
one question of you?"
"I would be honored."
"Master, what will you do when I find out what happened
to your parents?"
"Once you have found out where they are, I will go to
them, of course! My great-grandfather knows about them
but would never tell me and so I swore that I would find
them for myself. He said it was to protect me from taint of
my parents' Sky Roader sympathies..."
"Perhaps, Master, he had other reasons. But if you defy
your great-grandfather, who is a powerful man, surely you
would become an outcast. What then? I ask only because it
is often the case that the child's personality is a reflection
of its parents. By knowing you better, I may hasten in my
task."
Lee's patience had worn thin. "My great-grandfather is
one of the Ten Thousand Years, it's true, but I am only an
agro-tech. What have I to lose? You find them! That's all I
ask! After that, you won't have to worry about me. Who can
say what the future holds?"
"Who indeed, Master?" The librarian bowed again, and
added, "Someone wishes to speak with you."
When Lee stripped off the goggles Guoquiang said, "You
woke me up with your shouting. What were you doing? It's
no time to be visiting dream girls at Ma Zizhen's."
"That wouldn't be much use with only sound and vision,"
Lee said.
"Oh, there's nothing wrong with looking. Or talking, for
      RED DUST
      13

that matter. I do it all the time. It's healthy." Guoquiang
grinned. "Now you've had a winter here you'll know why."

Xiao Bing said, "Wei Lee doesn't need goggles and a
clenched fist. He's had more luck in one winter than you've
had since your first hard-on."

Guoquiang said, "Exogamy is a strong drive. Wei Lee
shouldn't exploit it. I rely on my natural charms, not greased

hair and zither playing."

"It's a guitar."

"Of course it is," Guoquiang said. "First you rock and
then you roll. And then you and Li Mei start paying child
tax."

Lee blushed, and Guoquiang laughed. "There are no secrets
amongst citizens, at least, not in winter. Come on,
we've a way to go."

In two minutes they were packed and on the move again,
climbing a slope of loose stones and frosty dust that rose up
to the horizon line, where a square boulder big and black
as a locomotive jutted against the pink sky.

They were climbing a collapsed cliff towards the first terrace
of the ancient river valley. Three billion years ago a vast
flood had carved the Red Valley, cutting a channel a kilometer
deep and three kilometers wide at the point where it
entered the lowlands of the Plain of Gold. In the past few
centuries the warming of the world had restarted the release
of water from aquifers in the badlands, but only enough to
create a sluggish trickle, white with salts, that dried out
completely in winter. Now it was spring, but the alkaline
river which had given the Bitter Waters danwei its name
had not yet started to run. A bad omen.

Halfway up the slope, the cadres turned as one and saw
the settlement framed by the red walls of the valley, small
and far. Domes glittered in the brilliant sunlight. Stepped
cliffs rose on the other side of the braided river channel to
the cratered high plain.

The three grinned at each other, and then they were running.
Lee hauled at the bact's halter until it broke into a
sullen knock-kneed trot. Freedom, they suddenly all felt it.
      14
      PAUL J. McAULEY

Their feet kicked dry dust high into the still air, and when
they all reached the top and turned they saw far downhill a
drifting red sheet that twisted into three ropes pointing to
the ridge where they stood, gasping for breath.

Lee started to babble as soon as he got his breath back,
asking his friends to imagine the terraces cloaked in pine
forest, dark green rhododendrons. Grass pastures either side
of a wide clear river, a waterfall plunging into a foaming
pool. Water, that was all that was needed: the water locked
in the poles and in the vast buried permafrost reservoirs
untapped by the world's failed warming. It could still happen.
It was not too late.

"Wei Lee's genotype is expressing itself again," Xiao Bing
said, when Lee paused for breath, and Guoquiang laughed.
They'd both heard all this Sky Roader propaganda many
times; Lee had told them about his education and keep, the
obligation to his great-grandfather he could not forget. Xiao
Bing, even though he had written the librarian for Lee,
thought his flight from privilege was romantic; Guoquiang
was more scornful, but his scorn was tempered with deference
to Lee's upbringing. Once a relation of one of the Ten
Thousand Years, always a relation. Despite the danwei's
ethos of democratic capitalism, its shareholders retained a
respect for lineage.

Lee sighed. He said, "I was brought up to believe that the
task will be completed, but that does not mean that it will
come true." He had almost forgotten the angry uncertainty
that the librarian's questions had tapped. How little his own
fate mattered, compared to the fate of the world!

Guoquiang said seriously, "It is Sky Roader talk, Wei Lee.
You know that. After what happened to your parents you
must know that. Your great-grandfather can believe what he
wants. That is the privilege of the Ten Thousand Years. But
you...

"I can talk with you fellows, at least."

"Better not to talk about it," Guoquiang said. "In a hundred
years perhaps we will all be Sky Roaders singing the
songs of the King of the Cats day and night. But it is not
      RED DUST
      15
likely. You know what happened to the last board of directors,
ten years ago. Thanks to Yi Shihung we're all committed
to the Golden Path. And so must you be, even as an
employee."
Lee said, "Perhaps. But I can still speak of these matters
amongst friends, eh?"
Guoquiang said, "Mars is for the Martians. I don't care for
the conchies, but I have no special interest in the anarchists
either. Keep them all out, I say."
Xiao Bing, who was always anxious to stop arguments
developing, said, "Some people insist the King is an alien.
We listen to him, and he studies us."
Lee said, "We made the world what it is. We should finish
the making. Mars for the Martians, Guoquiang. So perhaps
we agree after all."
Guoquiang said, "That's over. We live as we must. At least
Earth helps us defend ourselves from anarchists who would
turn this world into an ecological laboratory, if they could.
Why should we aid them by trying to correct old mistakes?"
"To prove that we can do it, of course."
"But of course," Guoquiang said, smiling, "we do not
need to prove what we can do. Only what we cannot."
Xiao Bing laughed. Silver-capped eyes flashed in his thin
white face. "Cheer up, Wei Lee," he said. "Maybe it will rain
every day, and we will become frogs. I prefer the desert! I
will always remember it this way." He took a dramatic sniff
of enhancer. "I'll remember all of us this way! Dusty and
sweaty and happy! We don't need this world: the Emperor
rules a better one on the far side of death."
Lee and Guoquiang exchanged looks. It was bad taste to
remind others of one's elective death. Guoquiang briskly
consulted his mechanical watch. "There's still three hours
of daylight left. We'll try and make the rim today, at least."
By the time Lee had managed to pull the bact away from
a clump of luscious prickly pear, and beaten its flanks and
dodged a sullen kick, the two cadres were almost out of
sight. Lee followed, wishing that he could keep his mouth
shut, not argue the King's undoubted greatness, not deni
      16
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

grate the Thousand Year Plan of the Golden Path. His
thoughts were like water stored in the porous regolith; raise
the temperature and they flooded out under an irresistible
pressure, causing chaos and collapse.
But he couldn't stay unhappy for long, not when he was
out in the world again. Leading the contrary bact, he sang
in his high, cracked tenor songs from his all-time number-one
favorite movie--the immortal Spinout--and listened for
the echoes from the rosy cliff that rose ahead, where Guoquiang
and Xiao Bing were toiling up the narrow path that
clung to its sheer face.
By the time Lee had hauled the bact to the top, the others
had already started to make camp in the remains.of an ancient
crater, a weathered arc of upturned strata fretted with
horizontal crevices. It was a site traditionally used by hunting
expeditions from Bitter Waters. Guoquiang was sweeping
out the largest crevice, which was no more than a couple of
meters high; right in front of it, Xiao Bing was excavating
from the dust of the winter's storms a blackened slab of rock
that had served as campfire hearth for at least a century.
As Lee hammered in the bact's tether Guoquiang emerged
in a haze of red, rubbing his hair, spitting and spluttering. "I thought I
would cook tonight," he said to Lee, and Lee
smiled and helped him rummage through the packages for
the iron pot and the supplies.
Guoquiang cooked what he always cooked, a sort of soup
of mushrooms thickened with rice flour and sharpened with
spring onions and chili pods, and little pancakes with which
to eat it. The three ate in companionable silence as Mars
turned his face from the sun. Westward, the level land ran
away towards the horizon. A few twisted Joshua trees made
arthritic silhouettes against red dust that glowed like heated
iron in the level light. As the horizon climbed above the
sun's pinpoint disc there was a brief flash of blue, a thin
ring that ran around half the horizon. Xiao Bing stood and
saluted the double star of Earth and its Moon, now suddenly
visible. A moment later they too had set.
Three

L
ee and Xiao Bing were dozing near the dying fire when
Guoquiang came back. He'd gone off to scatter pheromone-baited
traps for kit fox and red mongoose; now
he slithered down the craggy slope of the crater rim with
an urgent clatter.
"Ku li," he whispered fiercely, one hand on Lee's shoulder,
the other on Xiao Bing's. Firelight struck his face under
his chin, making his eyes crescents of shadow. "I have seen
tracks, half a kilometer southwest. Of horses, I think."
"You're sure?"
"How do you know they are ku li?"
Lee and Xiao Bing had spoken at the same time.
"The fire," Guoquiang said, and kicked dust into it. Sparks
whirled high and Guoquiang groaned with frustration and
kicked harder: more sparks flew.
"If there are ku li," Lee said, "now they will surely know
where we are. Wait, don't..."
But Guoquiang snatched the big water bag from Lee's
grasp, upended it over the fire's scattered embers. There was
a hiss and a smell of hot mud: then they were in darkness.
"That," Xiao Bing remarked, "was most of the water we
have."
Guoquiang said from out of the darkness, "Ku li, I swear
it. Tracks of three different horses."
Lee said, "Cowboys, then. I've often seen them; never one
of the legendary ku li."

17
      18
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
"Don't talk so loudly!"
"It's you who are talking..."
"Quiet!"
Their voices echoed out into the immense starry stillness
of the desert night.
"I thought they had been beaten back to the polar
marshes at the beginning of winter," Xiao Bing whispered.
But there was a tremor in his voice: he was the cleverest of
the three, and perhaps he was imagining the kind of atrocities
the ku li insurgents were rumoured to perform on their
prisoners being performed on him.
"Even I do not believe all the boasts of the loyal and
strong Army of the People's Mouths," Guoquiang said in a
hoarse whisper. "Listen! What was that?"
Lee heard the rustle, and smiled into the darkness. He
could just make out the shapes of the other two by starlight.
He said, "A mouse, come to finish your mushroom stew,
Guoquiang. If the ku li have horses, we would hear them
easily."
There was a silence, and then Xiao Bing whispered, "They
muffle the hoofs with rags."
Four


L

ee took first watch. He perched on a sheaf of frost-shattered
rock at the crater's rim, a quilted blanket
wrapped around his shoulders, motion sensor and infrared
scope and pistol to hand, radio plugged into his ear. He was
too far from Bitter Waters to access the librarian. His mother
and his father, out there somewhere. He would not believe that
they were dead. Exiled, yes. In penal labor gangs almost certainly.
One of his childhood fantasies had been that they had
joined the ku li, that one day they would return and scale the
high walls of Master Qing's Academy of Mental Cultivation and
take him away...

Instead, he had left to look for them.

He did not believe for a moment that the ku li would have
penetrated this far south. No doubt Guoquiang had seen
tracks, but they could have been made any time since the
last storm. And most likely they had been made by cowboys
searching for their winter-scattered herds: this was the edge
of the vast ranges where half-wild yak and dzo grazed.

So he made the best of it, enjoying the solitude of the
huge, quiet night. It was good to be alone and outside the
danwei, without having to think of other people, without
having to listen to the exhortations and advertisements continually
broadcast through the loudspeakers that were everywhere,
in Number One Recreation Hall, in the labs, even
out amongst the fields and fishponds. "Mars is Red" at dawn
and dusk, and in between commercials, games shows, heroic


19
      20
      PAUL J. McAULEV

opera, noise made to fill the space made by the Emperor's
silence. Out here there was only the sound of wind whining
amongst the rocks, stirring the cold sand: the wind, and the
voice of the King of the Cats whispering in his skull.

The lazy lallygagging voice, smooth and strong like iron
slowly sinking in velvet folds of pitch black oil...

"Coming down to y'all from way way way on high, I'm
gonna lay some righteous country soul on you for a few
hours now. That's right, I'm gonna feed you some rich
Memphis stew. Here we go with the Mar-Keys and 'Last
Night'..."

No long sermons tonight. Lee lay back luxuriously, sweet
ancient harmony in his ears, looking up at the ancient light
of the stars. An act of rebellion in itself, for anywhere beyond
the atmosphere was the territory of the enemy. The stars
were everywhere, hard and bright and many coloured. The
faint haze of the asteroid belt was diagonally bisected by the
Milky Way's river of light. There was Panic's mottled fleck,
falling backwards across the sky; Fear wouldn't rise for another
hour. Jupiter, a double handspan above the horizon,
shone so brightly that it cast Lee's shadow across the slope.
He could just see the pinpoints of two of its moons to one
side. The tiny repeater satellites which relayed the King's
twenty-four-and-a-half-hour-a-day rock'n'roll station were
invisibly closer to hand, reproducing faster than they could
be shot down from their tangled orbits, a braid of music
girdling the world...

("And here we go with some guys working out of Chips
Moman's American studios, back when there was an America.
Anyone out there remember the old US of A? One day
I'm gonna lay the real history down on you, correct some
serious misconceptions. But right now I'm talkin' about
James and Bobby Purify and this is their big hit, sort of
poppy but I love it anyway, 'Shake a Tail Feather'... ")

Music in his ears, Lee watched the sky for a long time, so
long that he couldn't quite tell when he realised that the
occasional streaks of light that slashed the starscape weren't
meteorites.
      RED DUST
      21
They were coming out of the east, radiating from a single
point halfway to zenith, flashing at regular intervals spaced
about a hundred heartbeats apart. Most scratched a long line
of light high above Lee's head, white fading towards red
followed after a space of silence by a faint drawn-out rumble.
But more and more frequently the streaks terminated prematurely
and silently, inflating into blurred hazes and then
slowly fading.
Craft of the anarchists, attempting to penetrate the defences.
The first wave falling fast enough to reach the atmosphere
before they were targeted by the X-ray laser
cannon satellites controlled by the loyal cadres of the Tiger
Mountain defense systems. Later arrivals would be vaporised
further out, before they hit atmosphere. He was watching a
battle in sub-orbital space.
Points of light were moving counter to the general direction,
slowly drifting west to east. A violet line rose from
below the horizon, from the land where the sun now walked.
It climbed so slowly that it could not be light alone. Presently,
Lee felt a soft shaking through the soles of his boots.
Then the light went out, and there were only the stars.
"Those bastards got what they deserved," Guoquiang said,
right behind Lee.
Lee wondered how long his friend had been standing
there. He said, "So many of them."
"Robots," said Guoquiang, who took a keen interest in
such matters. "Radar-dense frames with single-shot thrusters,
probably from some little nickel-iron asteroid made over
by fullerene viruses. The X-ray defenses destroy the anarchists
before they have more than grazed the atmosphere.
They are more alert than you, Wei Lee. Take that radio out
of your ear! If I was a leu li bandit I could have cut your
throat."
"How fortunate that you are only Guoquiang."
"Perhaps we should build machines to take us out to the
lair of the degenerate anarchists," Guoquiang said. His face
was a white smear by Jupiter light. Barefoot, he wore only
a shirt and loose trousers, didn't seem to notice the freezing
      22
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

wind that tugged at the blanket Lee clutched around his
shoulders. "They breed out there like sandflies To destroy
a weed you must pull it up by the roots."

"Are the anarchists insects then, or plants?"

"The Great Reassessment was ten years ago, Wei Lee. It
will not be taking the Sky Road to build machines with attack
capability and destroy the anarchist running dogs who
infest the asteroids."

"Perhaps you have a point." Lee was made uneasy by the
reference to the revolution which had been the downfall of
his parents.

Guoquiang looked up at the starry sky. "Of course," he
said, "many of the Ten Thousand Years are against that idea.
They know only the safety of the past, of custom. Each year
we grow closer to the past, Wei Lee."

"Our persistence is our strength," Lee said.

Guoquiang laughed, then remembered the imagined
threat of the ku li, and whispered, "That sounds as convincing
as a commercial for an industrial adhesive. You needn't
mouth tags with me, Lee. Is it really true that you were
born up there?"

"I was conceived, as I believe I've told you, when my parents
were on a diplomatic mission. We were trading with
the anarchists, then." The librarian, patiently working in the
data stacks. Even now, it could have found his parents. Or
been destroyed by a guardian.

"Some of them still try and trade with us, of course. And
certainly they trade with the ku li. The tracks I saw could

have been made by ku'li moving towards a landing site." "I should imagine the
ku li have little to offer."

"They promise the future, yours and mine and the whole
world's. It is not theirs to promise, of course, but I suppose
that's beside the point."

Lee said, "Instead the Ten Thousand Years trade it with
the Earth's Consensus. I wonder who is right?"

"The Ten Thousand Years of course. Because they rule in the name of the
Emperor, as they always will."

"The anarchists change, and the Earth does not, and the
RED DUST 23

Emperor has been silent for more than a year. Does the
future belong to the past, or to the future?"

Guoquiang didn't rise to the bait. Instead he shouted,
"Look!"

Something fell across the sky towards them on a long
track. It glowed white-hot, and tongues of flame cascaded in
its wake. Lee and Guoquiang threw themselves to the
ground as the thing burned overhead. Then silence. By Jupiter's
light, Lee saw Xiao Bing clambering towards them
along the eroded ridge of the crater rim.

Guoquiang stood and beat dust from his clothes. "Did you
see where it fell? It may still be intact!"

Lee said, "I don't think it can be far away. It was right
over our heads. Those things glide, they don't really fly. So
the lower it is the closer it is to landing."

"Or to crashing," Xiao Bing said. "I wonder if the cargo
survived!"

In their excitement, they had forgotten both their argument
and the threat of the ku li.

Xiao Bing built up the fire, and the three cadres sat
around it, speculating about what the thing could have been.
A robot craft of the anarchists, no doubt about it, but what
would it be carrying? To find such a prize would bring great
honor to the Bitter Waters danweL Guoquiang concluded,
and Lee sensed beneath his sentiment the unspoken wish
they all shared, that it would bring greater honor on their
own selves.
Five


T

hey set out at dawn, heading south. The purple sky
was crossed from horizon to horizon with ropes of livid
orange, flaws in the jetstream that heralded a late
storm. Two days off, Guoquiang said, but Lee was not so
confident.

Icy gusts whipped knee-high flurries of dust slantwise
across the sloping land. Now and then above the wind whine
came the distant but distinct thud thud thud of culvers. Lee,
Guoquiang and Xiao Bing were not the only ones searching
for the crashed spacecraft, but the intermittent noise of the
flying machines had faded northwards by the time the three
friends found the first aluminum streamers.

Knotted bunches of shiny tassels were caught amongst
slabs of red rock or spiky clumps of cactus. Their glittering
ribbons blew high in the windy air. It was chaff, designed to
confuse the sensors which directed the X-ray laser cannon.
The further south the cadres travelled, the more streamers
there were. It was like a trail from one of the old tales, Xiao
Bing said.

"The old tales belong in the old world," Guoquiang said.
"We made this world, and we must make new stories for it.
Think of it, citizens! We may be making a new story even
as we ride. No one has ever captured an intact anarchist
drone, not in all the years since the Great Reassessment!"

The land descended. It was hatched with narrow crevasses
and slopes of red shale, punctuated with stands of broom

24
      RED DUST
      25

and dry sawgrass and clumps of prickly pear. The wind had
picked up, a constant howl that whirled dust around the
three men and the bact.

Lee slipped on goggles and tied his red kerchief over nose
and mouth. Overhead the sun had blurred to a grainy glare
in the blowing dust, dim as evening. Dust filtered through
the slipseals of Lee's boots and clothing, and mixed with his
sweat to form a gritty slime that uncomfortably lubricated
armpits and crotch. Xiao Bing lurched past, his shape half
erased by red haze, muttering, "I'm not remembering this.
I'm not remembering this."

It was not the main storm, only a minor vortex that
skipped before its leading edge just as a child will outrun its
parent. Still, it was getting so bad that the three might have
abandoned the search if they had not found the parachute.

Guoquiang saw it first; Lee and Xiao Bing were walking
bent over by the wind, heads tucked down. Their leader let
out a whoop and when they looked up he pointed dramatically
to where a white shape rose and fell some way ahead
in the murk.

It was the braking parachute of the anarchist craft, caught
around a spire of stone: a banner of fine white seamless stuff
thinner than high-grade silk but so tough nothing they had
would cut it, not even Guoquiang's broad-bladed knife. Xiao
Bing took a sniff from his tube and walked round and round
it. It could easily have covered the largest breeder pond in
the shit-cycling sheds, but when it had been folded up
(which was not easy to do in the wind), it packed smaller
than a bedroll.

They set off again, moving quickly now. Guoquiang had
drawn his pistol and given Xiao Bing his hunting rifle. Lee
supposed that he would have to use rocks as weapons against
the ku li, or set the bact on them. Fear was a fine tremor
he couldn't quite suppress, mixed with growing excitement,
the thrill of the chase that even the bact seemed to catch--it
galumphed along behind Lee in an undignified trot as he
and the others leaped and ran through blowing curtains of
      26
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

red dust and bounded up a steep rise that was notched at
its crest by a blackened scar.
A raw, deep grove stretched away down the gentle reverse
slope, fading into the red haze. Shapes moved slowly and
ponderously in the murk down there, like carp at the bottom
of a breeder pond.
Guoquiang forced the others to lie down. The shapes were
the horses of the ku li, he said, and then he swore that he
saw a man moving amongst them. Lee saw no such thing,
but Guoquiang was up on one knee. He aimed his pistol
down the slope and fired: the narrow beam was diffused by
the dust into a violent glare that momentarily filled the little
valley from edge to edge.
Something screamed, high and inhuman. Guoquiang fired
again. He was on his feet now. Lee jumped up, planning to
pull him down, but then Guoquiang was running, charging
downslope with Xiao Bing right behind him. Lee ran too;
he had seen that the shadows in the dust had vanished, and
was suddenly scared that he would be ridden down by ku li bandits if he stayed
on the ridge.
Lee lost the other two in swirling dust, then saw shadows
running back towards him. He had a moment to realise that
the shadows were too big to be human, and then the animals
were upon him, bellowing with fear as they scrambled up
the slope.
Lee dodged a black-tipped horn, its span wide as his outstretched
arms, and something struck him from behind. He
tumbled through dust and flying rocks, landed hard and covered
his head with his hands, curled into a ball. He couldn't
make himself small enough. A hoof slammed down centimeters
from iis face; he felt rather than saw one of the huge
beasts gather itself and leap over him.
Then there was only wind and dust. Lee uncurled and
picked himself up, tested one leg and then the other. Down-slope,
Guoquiang and Xiao Bing were standing over a
slumped shape. It wasn't a man, or even a horse, but a long-horned
shaggy-coated yak.
Guoquiang's shot had burned away half its belly. Its mat
      RED DUST
      27

ted coat smouldered around the wound. It rolled a brown-veined
eye at Lee as he took Guoquiang's broad-bladed knife
and slit its throat: the gush of hot blood splashed his boots.

"You're bleeding," Xiao Bing said. He cupped Lee's face
with one hand, lifted a corner of Lee's kerchief and dabbed
at his wounds. Lee saw his face reflected in the silver caps
over Xiao Bing's pupils; there was a long shallow gash on
his forehead, a couple of nicks on the ridge of his cheekbones.
He'd be remembered this way for ever.

"We still must find the anarchists' craft," Guoquiang said
impatiently.

Lee said, "Please don't mistake it for a yak, Guoquiang. I
could not survive the excitement."

They did not have far to search. The gouged track led
them right to the place where the spacecraft was half buried
at the end of the scar it had torn into the ground, crumpled
against a rocky outcrop as big as Number Eight Field Dome.
The spacecraft was far smaller than Lee had imagined, a
sculpted aerodynamic wedge that, even crumpled against adamantine
slabs of red rock, looked as if the wind could at
any moment send it skimming into the dust-filled sky.

The reflections of the three cadres swam up in the mirror-smooth
silver skin, distorted by the flare of its curves. A
section had flipped off to reveal a cockpit, snug as a holster.
Dry foam shrunken on the contoured couch was already
silted with dust. A little panel of controls winked and blinked
with indicator lights, labelled not with neat ideograms but
marks like clusters of skulls and bones.

Not a virus-built robot drone after all. It had carried a
passenger.

It was Xiao Bing who found the bloody handprint smeared
on the spacecraft's mirrored hull. But any footprints had
been smothered by dust or trampled by panicked yaks or
blown away on the wind. The three cast around for almost
an hour, spiraling away from the wrecked craft across the
floor of the ancient crater, and found nothing.

Lee made his way back through whirling dust to the outcrop
and the wrecked craft, wondering where the anarchist
      28
      PAUL J. McAULEY
could have run to. If he hadn't been picked up by Guoquiang's ku li horsemen--
but then they would have blown
up the spacecraft, destroyed the evidence. He hunkered
down near the spacecraft with his back against a boulder at
the foot of the outcrop, out of the worst of the blowing dust.
Better shelter inside, of course, but he didn't dare set a foot
in the cockpit.
Think like an anarchist.
You are wounded, fallen in enemy territory. You must
hide, but you can't go too far because your friends might,
come for you.
It came to him in the sudden way that sideways logic
always does, and he was so sure that he was right that he
almost went to look for the pilot there and then. But he had
long ago learned the virtues of patience, and he hunkered
down and waited for the others to return.
At last Xiao Bing stumbled through blowing curtains of
dust and flopped down beside Lee. "We had no luck either,"
he said.
Guoquiang arrived a few minutes later. He pulled his kerchief
away from his face and spat an oyster of rusty phlegm.
He said: "At least we looked. I see your dedication is consistent,
Wei Lee."
"But, Guoquiang, I don't need to search. I know where
the pilot is hiding." Lee pointed, and Guoquiang looked at
the tumbled boulders which formed a rough stair up the
side of the outcrop. And then he laughed.
The top of the outcrop sloped like a pitched roof, riddled
with eroded sinkholes and split down the middle by a deep
narrow crevice. Wind howled around the three as they quartered
this maze; dust slithered around them like whipped
snakes.
It was Xiao Bing who found the anarchist. She lay in the
crooked shelter of the crevice, her slim figure curled in a
foetal ball and cased within a wedge of clear paste. Her entire
body was covered with a silvery film, with a transparent strip
across her round and startlingly blue eyes. She stared up
      RED DUST
      29

through paste at the three cadres and Lee had a flash of
what she saw: three inscrutable masked faces, peering over
a lip of rock.

Guoquiang kneeled and reached down to touch the paste.
It had a kind of skin which dimpled under his fingers, then
gave as he pushed harder. He started to scoop up handfuls
of the stuff, and Xiao Bing joined him. The pilot stirred. Her
mouth seemed to be working under the silvery film.

Lee was struck with sudden foreboding. He said, "I don't
think we should do this."

Guoquiang took no notice. He scraped paste from the pilot's
silver-filmed face, then drew his pistol and told Xiao
Bing to pull the film off.

"Maybe it's better if we get help," Xiao Bing said uncertainly.

"He's right," Wei Lee said.

"Think anyone will find us in this storm? Already radio
will be knocked out. Just do it, Bing."

Xiao Bing did it. The pilot gasped, then began to choke.
Guoquiang jumped into the crevice behind her, knee deep
in paste, pulled her into a sitting position, put his two fists
in the V below her ribcage, jerked.

The pilot coughed out about a litre of white fluid, drew a
shuddering breath. Her face was shiny black, with a bubble
of red blood blown from one nostril. She did not have teeth,
but seamless ridges of white plastic.

Lee thought that he'd seen her before, but he couldn't
remember where. She looked back at Lee, and when she
spoke it was so unbelievable that Lee didn't at first register
its meaning. For she had spoken in the Common Language,
a weak unravelling whisper almost lost to the howl of the
wind.

"So you've found me."

Lee dropped to his knees at the edge of the crevice and
bent close to her, but she suddenly slumped back against
Guoquiang, who shouted triumphantly, "You see, Wei Lee,
it is my story after all!"

"Our story, I hope," Xiao Bing said.
      30
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
"Of course! We must get her down. The bact will carry
her."
"It really might be better if we sent for help," Lee said.
"She's hurt. That paste was some kind of cocoon, perhaps.
Look, there is a cylinder under her hip--I guess it generated
the paste."
Guoquiang sneered. "Of course, Wei Lee, you are an
expert in the ways of the Sky Road."
Lee said, "She didn't come up here to die. She's expecting
help."
Xiao Bing said, "The ku li. I can't die, Guoquiang, not
yet."
"Then we'd better hurry," Guoquiang said. He handed
Xiao Bing his pistol and got his hands under the pilot's
shoulders, but when he tried to pull her to her feet, she
shuddered and squirmed like a landed fish.
Lee said, "Leave her alone, you fool." Xiao Bing clutched
at his arm. The pilot said something, a hoarse whisper. Guoquiang
bent to catch her words.
The pilot smiled, and spat blood into his face.
Guoquiang swore and kicked at her, and Lee threw an
armlock around his neck and heaved. He had wrestled him
halfway out of the crevice before Guoquiang managed to jam
a hard elbow under his ribcage. Lee sat down hard. A moment
later Guoquiang was straddling his chest and yelling
in his face, calling him a filthy communistic Sky Roader
traitor, while Xiao Bing hopped around in an agony of nerves
and pleaded for them both to stop.
And above everything was a growing roar, louder than the
roaring in Lee's head. Dust suddenly blew in every direction
at once; a shadow crossed the sun. Guoquiang looked up; so
did Lee. The black belly of a culver was falling towards them.
The Army of the People's Mouths had found the crashed
spacecraft at last.
Six


A

n area of low pressure had swung in from the north-est.
It displaced the constant winds from the Great
alley that usually dominated weather systems in the
region, and funnelled freezing air from the dry northern
plains, settling in for what the people of the Bitter Waters
danwei called a Ten Day Blow.

The culvers of the Army of the People's Mouths were
grounded by dust. The troops were stabled in the danwei's
half-derelict Number Three Recreation Hall; the anarchist
pilot was incarcerated in the gaol's only cell, where she was
undergoing treatment for her injuries. No one in the danwei
or the army's search party was of sufficient rank to interrogate
her, so she had to be kept alive until the storm blew
itself out and she could be flown to the capital.

Meanwhile, wind drove billowing sheets of dust across the
wide fields of rugged dwarf wheat and around the domes
over the rice fields. Dust silted the irrigation canals, turned
day to perpetual glowering twilight. The solar power station,
a faceted pagoda of black glass at the centre of the danwei,
was shut down. The electricity supply to dormitories and
accommodation modules was rationed to three hours in the
evening.

And wind dashed itself against the linked structures of the
danwei itself, howling and rattling and spraying dust
through every crevice. Red dust swirled in shafts of light,
coated every surface with a gritty patina, worked between


31
      32
      PAUL J. McAULEY


sheets, ground between the teeth with every mouthful of
food. Every touch of metal drew a sting of static electricity;
dry, ionized air cracked lips, wore tempers to razor edges.

The iron-rich dust blanketed radio reception too. The
voice of the King of the Cats sounded faint and far behind
a swirling squall of static. The King was preaching, something
about the power of rock'n'roll burning through the
universe at the speed of light or of life. What with the static
and Xiao Bing's nervous prattle, Wei Lee could only make
out snatches of the King's sermon.

The two cadres were walking along one of the runnels
that connected the danwei's modules. It was night. Beyond
the tunnel's transparent plastic walls dust ceaselessly poured
and whirled past, dim masses vaguely visible in the feeble
strip lighting either side of the walkway. It gave Wei Lee a
strange detached feeling to be safe inside a sleeve of warm
stale air while the storm's rage was held in check by a centimeter
width of plastic.

Change is coming at forty-five revolutions a minute, the
King said in Lee's ear. Or perhaps it was evolutions; static
rattled across the King's words, and at the same moment
Xiao Bing said everything was changed now, that Guoquiang
had settled himself to change.

"He doesn't have to change a thing," Lee said. "In a year,
this will be just another story in the danwei's history." As
would he: he had already been dismissed, for bringing disgrace
to the danwei. Guoquiang's father, a major shareholder,
had been chairman of the special session of the
council. It had been over in five minutes. Lee's humiliation
would linger as long as the storm and then he would be
gone, just as he'd dreamed two days ago on top of Number
Eight Field Dome. Beware of wishes, he thought, you may
get what you want.

"You're bitter, but you've every right after Li Mci denounced
you in public."

"Her parents put her up to it. I don't really blame her."
Lee couldn't admit to Xiao Bing how much Li Mei's behav-
      RED DUST
      33
for had hurt him. He said, "The scandal will die down and
everything will be as it was. You'll see."
"But everything is changed," Xiao Bing said. The caps
over his pupils were pewter in the dull light, his white hair
and pale skin bruise-colored.
"You make this a mystery."
"Guoquiang wants to talk to you about it. I'll let him."
"You're a loyal friend, Xiao Bing. None of us deserve your
loyalty."
"I've known Guoquiang all my life. He stopped the other
kids beating me up. He liked me because I was smarter than
he was, an unselfishness I appreciate more as I grow older.
He is a leader, always has been. He didn't have to take it
upon himself to look out for a special, and he's always had
to look out for me, because the other kids tried to get at
him by getting at me. A small place like this... I hear that
in the capital no one takes any notice of specials."
Lee thought of the child beggars in the Yankee Quarter;
not all the deformities had been deliberately inflicted by
their parents. He said, "You wouldn't be called a special in
the capital, it's true. But surely your contract... The danwei has taken money
for your..." he couldn't say death "... your sleep."
"Oh, once I have finished designing my little piece of
Heaven, once I have remembered enough to make it real, I
can die out of this world at any time. Here, or in the capital,
it makes no difference. But right now, Guoquiang needs
me."
"Perhaps it's as well, now I know how Bitter Waters treats
its half-lifers."
"When you begin your translation into Heaven," Xiao
Bing said serenely, "it only matters that your body is kept
alive for as long as the transfer takes. How it is kept alive
doesn't matter. It is just an emptying vessel. The conchies
want us all dead, Wei Lee, one way or another. They'll wait
for me."
Lee said, as they pushed through heavy strips at the runnel's
end, "I wasn't thinking of the conchies. I was thinking
      34
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
of the danwei, which will lose the bounty for your..."
"My death? That's what it is. I don't mind it."
The strips fell away. Warm moist air folded around Lee
and Xiao Bing like a heavy cloak. Bright light struck through
greenery, burned in water falling from shelf to shelf in the
azolla cascades that zig-zagged around pools dense with water
hyacinth. The sound of the storm and of the King's voice
hushed at the same moment.
The rich smell of growing things and the sound of falling
water struck a chord of unease deep inside Lee. There had
been a bad time in a garden a long time ago. He had been
no more than one or two. He was sure it had been something
to do with his parents' disappearance, but could remember
only his terror and the smell of cut grass.
"Over there," Xiao Bing said. "Come on, Wei Lee, you're
dreaming again?
Guoquiang was tipping cakes of boiled leaf into the livestock
pens. That was his punishment: work the shit-cycling
sheds until the Army of the People's Mouths left the danwei. He didn't seem to
mind. He was whistling to the dogs, scolding
them for not eating. The fat white hairless dogs padded
up and down nervously, spooked by the storm.
Guoquiang emptied the woven basket with a sweeping
toss, sniffed the air and said, "Is a waste line leaking?"
Lee took the radio from his ear. He said, "The domestic
electricity supply is cut off before my shift ends. There is no
water to wash. The others steal water from the half-lifers; I
can't bring myself to do that. I'd have changed my clothes
at least, but ×iao Bing was waiting for me."
Guoquiang, to his credit, was immediately contrite. "I am
sorry, Wei Lee."
"It's all right. I've been around it so long that I can't smell
it."
"I mean that my father is a proud man. He sees loss of
face by the collective as a great blow to himself. So we are
all punished. I am sorry that you have the worst of it."
Lee said, "How's your eye?"
"Sore," Guoquiang admitted. It was the left eye that Lee
      RED DUST
      35
had managed to hit with his elbow; the swollen flesh around
it was fading from dark purple to green and yellow. Guoquiang
added, "How are your ribs?"
"A]so sore."
Guoquiang laughed. "We were both very foolish."
Lee didn't have the heart to point out that if Guoquiang
hadn't been so stubborn they would all be heroes, instead
of being in disgrace for having deviated from the danwei's ideals of
democratic collectivization, for having committed
the mortal sin of self-aggrandizement. For having lost face
in front of the soldiers of the Army of the People's Mouths.
He said, "I suppose we both made a mistake."
His own was to have tried to save the injured anarchist
pilot from Guoquiang's impulsive misplaced sense of duty.
Two days afterwards, Lee couldn't understand why she mattered
so much to him. Why she still did. Even thinking
about her gave him a cloying sense of claustrophobia, as if
he was with her in the isolation womb, masked and cathetered
and IVed, surrounded by hostile aliens on an alien
world, floating in a bubble of fluorocarbons...
The danwei had pried access from the Army of the People's
Mouths, and a loop of the anarchist pilot (a long shot
of her being hustled by two soldiers down a narrow brightly
lit corridor; medium shots of her standing against a tiled
wall, supported by the same two nervous men; a circling
close-up of her inside the isolation womb, face masked, nakedness
washed out in glare reflected from the womb's
plastic skin) was continuously running on one of the public
access channels. The danwei had sold it to the capital's media
nets too, and it turned up on every news channel every
hour on the hour.
Lee had watched it over and over, each time with the same
fresh sense of fascinated horror. It was like watching a rape.
Guoquiang said, "My father insists that you formally recant
your transgression before your contract is terminated.
I said if that was the case, so would I."
"He also volunteered me," Xiao Bing said. His eyes threw
back flashing reflections when he smiled.
      36
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
"My father didn't think anything of the idea, unfortunately.
But all the same, we will stand beside you for the
struggle session. It is not your disgrace. It is ours."
Guoquiang looked so humble that Lee laughed. "Oh, I'll
find another job, somewhere or other. And as for disgrace,
it passes sooner than you'd imagine. I'll move on, and forget
about it. As a matter of fact, this isn't my first struggle session.''
"You know the world," Guoquiang said.
"Some of it."
"Teach me," Guoquiang said, with a fierceness that surprised
Lee. His big hands crushed the basket to his chest.
"Teach me stuff. I need to learn. I want to make a difference.''
"I know very little."
"You have walked the world. I would be honored," Guoquiang
said formally, "if you would share what you learned."
In that way their quarrel began to heal. They sat together
at the gravel edge of a hyacinth pool, in the murmurous
roar of recirculating pumps and aerator cascades. The cruel
brilliance of the growth lights, tinted purple with near-UV,
gave their skins a corpsedike cast. Guoquiang put on a pair
of dark glasses, oval lenses not much bigger than his eyes.
Xiao Bing produced a stone bottle and three translucent porcelain
thimbles which he filled to the brim.
Lee took one. The clear meniscus of brandy reflected an
upside-down image of the grids of electric lights when he
lifted it to his lips. It took a moment for the alcohol to burn
through the sweetness; then he and Guoquiang and Xiao
Bing were coughing and spluttering and clapping each other
on the back.
After the second shot of brandy, Guoquiang was relaxed
enough to ask about the story behind Lee's first struggle
session. Lee told him that and more, and when his story was
done the bottle was more than half empty and all three felt
a warm glow of rekindled comradeship.
"I want to see the world," Guoquiang said, grandly and
drunkenly. "I want to be out in it, I want to go where the
      RED DUST
      37
living outnumber the half-lifers. You know there are more
than twice as many half-lifers than living here?"
"He looks after them," Xiao Bing said.
"Of course. Excuse me. My father gives me the dogs to
tend, and you the dead."
"And I'm below consideration," Xiao Bing said, "because
I'm already numbered amongst the half-lifers. There is some
advantage in low station after all. You can't fall from it. Have
some more brandy."
They toasted each other and drank.
Lee said, "Think carefully, my friends, before you leave
the comfort of your danwei. The capital fills with refugees,
and it's a hard place for strangers to find a living. There are
more advantages to communal capitalism than you believe."
Guoquiang said, "I cannot stay here. My father has destroyed
my standing. I will have no authority but that which
he doles out. And when he passes into Heaven I will not
even have that. Not even his shareholding--he has changed
his will." He laughed, a nervous bark. He was ashamed, Lee
saw, ashamed and scared. "This is a place of the dead. The
living exist only to serve those who have elected to die."
"The whole world is dying," Xiao Bing said.
"All the more reason to see it," Guoquiang said. "To see
it before it all dies."
"Plenty of opportunities in the capital," ×iao Bing said.
Lee said sharply, "Who told you that? The soldiers? I will
be going in the other direction." Travelling away from his
great-grandfather, even though he knew he could never escape
the weight of his obligations. Travel far enough around
the world, and you return to where you began.
"Perhaps we can persuade you otherwise," Guoquiang
said. "I have money. We should share it."
"You are a good friend, Guoquiang. I do not deserve you." "I am a better
friend than you think. My father is an influential
man in the whole province, not just in Bitter Waters.
You will have to travel very far to find a danwei that
will employ you. He was greatly amused by the idea of you
travelling empty-handed across the province, and doors clos-
      38
      PAUL J. McAuLEY
ing in your face. If you travel west, you will have to travel
a thousand kilometers to escape his influence. I see him for
what he is, Wei Lee. I do not wish to become like him. It is
a pivotal moment in my life. I have you to thank for it."
Lee saw that Guoquiang was very drunk--perhaps he had
been drinking all day. He said, "What will you do in the
capital? Rent your brain for information collation? Join up?
Those are the two most popular options for young people
fresh from the country."
Guoquiang said, "We will seize the moment, when it
comes. Perhaps it will be necessary to join the defense
forces. Our pilot may be the first of an invasion force."
Xiao Bing said, "We can catch a lift with the Army of the
People's Mouths when it takes the anarchist away. A surprisingly
small bribe goes a long way with the ordinary soldiers.''
Lee started to comb his quiff, using the black water of the
pool for a mirror. His hair kept losing its carefully sculpted
shape because settling dust absorbed the grease. He said,
"Your plans are so well made, I'm flattered you wish to include
me. I was the source of your trouble in the first place."
"I hope that we are still friends," Guoquiang said.
"Friends will help each other, eh? Think on what I've said,
Wei Lee. I'm sure you'll see the sense of it. Have some more
brandy. Drink up! Drink to our future!"
Seven


T

hat night Lee lay awake long past midnight, muzzy
with brandy fumes, mind spinning over and around
without purpose, unable to riddle his way out of the
face trap Guoquiang had so cunningly prepared. He listened
to the King's broadcast for a while, but could hear only one
word in ten, then called up one of the King's movies on his
portable player, sat watching with the sound turned down
(he knew all the dialogue and all the songs) and with his
home-made solid-body electric guitar in his lap. The power
was out, but Lee strummed along to each of the songs anyway,
bending close to hear the chords singing in the wires.

The movie was Fun in Acapulco. The chained heave of the
sea fascinated Lee as much as the King, and he always liked
the way in which it was obvious the King never appeared in
any exterior shots. A double ambled down a street in his
place, only seen from the back but still unconvincing, or
was seen in long shot lounging on the beach with Ursula
Andress while the King appeared with her in close-up under
studio lights. The King by then so famous that women would
tear him apart if he ever appeared in public, as they had torn
apart his corpse after his execution, singing his songs as they
carried his head away (and in legend his head sang too, but
that was legend--in reality his head was preserved in the
Shrine of the Land of Grace, and then lost or stolen).

The movies of the King of the Cats were more than simple
entertainment to Lee. They were sublime visions of the way


39
      40
      PAUL J. McAULEY
a hero moved through the world. The King was the center
of a storm of portents and signs, yet while things fell into
place around him, he had to find within himself the way to
heal his secret wound--here, his vertigo, which was also his
fear of death, for it sprang from involvement in the accident
which had crippled his friend. Once he had redeemed his
courage through love, he could heal himself by plunging
into the sea from on high, and live for ever. Watching the
movie, Lee could begin to believe that the world was simpler
than it seemed. Perhaps he could learn how to riddle the world of the mystery
of his parents' disappearance, unlock
the secret of his past and free his future.
Half the movie was missing, half the rest was patched and
washed with sweeps of static snow--Lee preferred the originals
to enhanced recreations, real discontinuities to fake
substitute footage--and towards the end the display flickered
and began to lose definition as the player's batteries
drained. Lee still could not sleep. Restlessly, he slipped on
his goggles and tried to find the librarian, who had gone
missing after Lee's sentencing at the special committee.
Cancelled by the same flat, perhaps, although the metaphoric
interface he had bound around himself remained.
Dusty books towering into darkness, rotting carpets underfoot.
A window framed by books, looking on a starry void
filled with wind. One of the stars swung towards Lee,
bloomed into a burning bird with a woman's face.
He jerked awake. He had fallen asleep and the goggles had
slipped from his face.
Caught between Guoquiang's face trap and the revenge of
Guoquiang's father, Lee lay awake the rest of the night, wondering
whether to travel on or return to the great and terrible
capital of Mars, and the thrall of his great-grandfather. But the
next day his fate caught up with him, and he was swept away,
dust on history's wind.
Eight


T

he graveyard shift had their own table in the crowded
dining hall used by the danwei's maintenance workers.
But even the tenders of the half-lifers avoided talking
to Wei Lee. Disgrace was easy to catch. Alone at one end of
the long table, Lee ate quickly, scooping up greasy noodles
and vegetable pancake with his head ducked low to his bowl.
Conversation chattered all around, mostly about the half-lifer
which, that shift, had died before passing fully into
Heaven. Lee had seen it happen, the pale emaciated body
suddenly jerking slantwise on its couch like a dropped puppet
while around it a hundred others continued to move
their wired limbs under the guidance of the exercise programme.
A bad omen, was the eventual opinion, and one or
two tenders made warding signs at Lee, as if he were to
blame.

Lee didn't notice. The King of the Cats cracklingly whispered
in his ear, putting him at one remove from everyone
in the dining hall. He'd been listening all day. The radio was
not really allowed on shift, but no one dared raise a voice
to forbid it, because that would bring them inside the circle
of the black light of Lee's sin.

The King never slept. He was always there, rapping a sermon
or rummaging through mid-twentieth-century American
pop culture. Lee was scraping his tray into the bin to
the rocking beat of Carl Perkins's "Dixie Fried" when something
odd happened. A soldier bumped up against him in


41
      42
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

the crowd around the recycling bins, and he felt something
thrust into his hand.
It was a scrap of paper. It burned in Lee's hand all the
way back to the brightly lit solitude of his room, where at
last he dared look at it. A terse message, telling him to be
at the transport-pool stables at twenty hundred. It was ten
minutes to, and he was supposed to meet Guoquiang at the
same time. Lee made his choice and ran for the door. After
all, it was just the sort of impulsive thing the King would
have done.

      The stables were slaved to Mars's diurnal cycle. Their high

      racks of lights were turned to yellow twilight as with quicken
      ing nervousness Lee walked past steel-barred stalls in which

      palfreys, genets and alboraks stood in contemplation of lost

      horizons or munched at their feeding troughs.

      In one stall there was a fierce, steel-shod warhorse, more

      great cat than horse. It paced round and round its stall with

      contained fury, mailed withers glittering. It was the mount

      of one of the officers of the Army of the People's Mouths.

      Lee stopped to look at it, remembering a long ride

      through spring desert on one of the decommissioned war
      horses owned by Master Qing's Academy of Mental Cultiva
      tion. Flowers everywhere, a flowing carpet spindled on the

      rush of wind, the liquid pull of muscles beneath Lee's grip
      ping thighs. He'd been no more than five, but he still re
      membered commands and the positions of sensitive nerve

      clusters. He spoke a word, and the warhorse stopped its pac
      ing and stared at him with a narrow yellow eye. Then it

      yawned, showing a rough tongue lolling amongst fangs each
            :'

      as long as the span of Lee's fingers, and started pacing again.

      Further down, a mild genet thrust her long face towards

      Lee, and he paused to scratch the coarse hair between her

      flicking ears. When he turned from her, a man stood in the

      shadows at the end of the long row of pens.
Lee waited, and the man stepped forward into the light.

He was an officer of the Army of the People's Mouths, a short

man who held himself stiffly in tailored rust red tunic and
        RED DUST
        43

trousers. The only signs of his rank were the three brass
stars of a Colonel on his green shoulder flash, and his immaculately
polished boots. He said, "You are nervous, Citizen
Wei Lee. But have no fear, for I work for your esteemed
ancestor. Allow me to demonstrate."

The Colonel blew on a short silver tube, and Great-grandfather
Wei smiled and said, "The time has come, my

son."
Nine


A

fter Wei Lee's parents had disappeared and he had been
given the protection of Great-grandfather Wei, he had
been taken from Master Qing's Academy of Mental
Cultivation to the Great House to be interviewed on the first
day of each month. Lee's great-grandfather had never appeared
in the flesh--only his doctors and attendants saw
him. Rather, he had visited through an eidolon, although to
maintain the fiction that image was reality, Lee had always
followed instructions to wait at a certain place in the gardens
of the Great House, or in a certain room, and after a span
of waiting, his ancestor would greet him, and Lee would
turn and see him, and the interview would begin. Sometimes
it lasted only a minute, and sometimes the shadows turned
and lengthened across the hedged lawn, or the little room
with the painted walls, as they marked out the hours while
Lee waited.

So Lee turned now, and saw the eidolon of Great-grandfather
Wei standing beside the stall of the genet, who
thrust her long mild face at the bars just as she had for Lee.
And in turning it was as if Lee had stepped from one room
to another, except that this was a room of the Great House,
the one with wooden panels fretted with scenes of the mountains
of old Earth, and the floor of black tiles.

The genet thrust her head through an open window, and
sunlight splashed her flanks, the same sunlight vivid in the
green garden beyond. Lee looked for the Colonel, but he had


44
      RED DUST
      45
vanished; or perhaps he had become the stone lion that
stood beside the wide door, with round eyes and curly beard
and fanged mouth.
"How fortunate I am, Wei Lee, that you are my son. I could wish for no
better."
The eidolon was a tall, austere man, younger than Wei
Lee remembered. But Lee had aged, and the eidolon had
not. He might have just now put on the black silk suit and
the high-collared white shirt, but Lee remembered that
those were the clothes the eidolon had always worn. Perhaps
the Great House was great indeed, its rooms and corridors
extending through time as well as space, so that if Lee
walked out of this room he might find himself returned to
his childhood. And then he had the strange idea that if he
walked out into the garden he would find his parents, and
for some reason that filled him with terror.
"My house has many rooms," the eidolon said. "No, Wei
Lee, I cannot read your thoughts, but I do understand your
muscles. Each is a sentence, and so I parse the text of your
posture for meaning."
Lee's mouth was dry. He rubbed his tongue against his
upper teeth to stimulate the flow of saliva, and said, "All my
life I have been serving you, great-grandfather."
It was only a polite formula, but it struck Lee that it was
true, although usually such formulas are not.
The eidolon's smile was genuine, like that of a woman,
not the rearrangement of those small muscles around the
mouth that most men use in the belief that they are smiling. "I had always
hoped you would retain the flexibility of intelligence,
Wei Lee. I am delighted that it is so."
"I serve you now as always."
"How I do hope so. You have wandered far, but at last I
have a task for you, Wei Lee. Yes, it does concern the anarchist
pilot."
Lee sighed. All of his adult life he had waited for the debt
to his great-grandfather to be called in. He'd known it would
come one day, but he had not expected it to take place in
      46
      PAU, J. McAvI¥

so mundane a place as the stable of a small danwei in a far-flung
province. He said, "What must I do?"

"It is all arranged for you. It is not a hard task for someone
who has lived in one or another desert danwei these
past two years. You will take the Sky Roader anarchist and
hide her beyond the perimeter, and then rendezvous with a
culver as soon as the storm subsides. You can take the main
road out. No one will watch it in this storm, and it is well
marked. There is a cache of supplies hidden two kilometers
southeast of the main gate. My man will give you a homing
beacon. Wait there, and he will come for you when the
search has ended. Do not fail us. It is extremely important
that the pilot is not interrogated, and yet we also need her
alive."

Lee said, "I am honored that you think so highly of me,
great-grandfather, but I am merely a contract agronomist
technician. You would trust me to keep the pilot alive in the
storm?"

"You are my beloved son, whom I have taught so carefully.
You will find a way. You will disappear from this dan-wei,
and they will say you committed suicide because of loss
of face. When we pick you up, you will be given a new identity.
Your life will be your own. Of course, you may have to
change your hairstyle. That piled-up greasy style is too...
flamboyant."

The stone lion, which all this time had guarded the fireplace
with the implacable patience of its kind, now yawned,
showing a rough red tongue as long as a snake's. It stretched
its forepaws: claws like hooked stalagmites raked the black
tiles. Lee took a step backwards. Beyond the window at
which the genet placidly stood a cloud covered the sun, and
then it was as if the ceiling of the room had lifted away to
show stars shining down.

They were the lights of the stables, dimmed by a hazing
of storm-blown dust. The Colonel thrust something into
Lee's hand and said, "Your great-grandfather is most esteemed,
Wei Lee. I am honored to be a servant of his faction.''
      RED DUST
      47
it was a small, sleek pistol. Its barrel flared into a horizontal
slit. A red ruby twinkled in its white bone grip.
"You have handled weapons before," the Colonel said.
"You know how this works?"
"I think so."
The Colonel plucked the weapon from Lee's grasp, pocketed
it with a flourish. "Pray that you will not need to use
it," he said.
Lee followed him down the aisle between the barred stalls,
and was suddenly struck by a possibility. Oh yes, much more
than a possibility! He jammed his hands in the pockets of
his coveralls and dug his fingernails into the meat of his
palms to keep from smiling.
"I noticed your hairstyle myself," the officer said. "You
are a scholar of the classics, then. And are you perhaps a
follower of the films of Jerry Lee Lewis?"
"He's good, but not as good as the King."
"Ah yes, the King of the Cats! When I was young I listened
all the time to the broadcasts of the King of the Cats. That
is where I learned of Jerry Lee Lewis. I particularly admire
his performance in The Nutty Professor. It had something
of the King of the Cats in it, did it not? Wei Lee, you understand
what you have to do?"
Lee said that he did, but the Colonel repeated all that
Lee's great-grandfather had said and asked again if Lee understood.
"Of course. When do we do this?"
"You will be at the service entrance of these sheds at sunrise
tomorrow. We will watch over you, Wei Lee, in case you
fall into danger. You are important to us. I know that you
are ready to serve."
Lee didn't know about that. He did know that he had been
given a chance to clear his way through the tangle of obligations and to
rescue the fallen Sky Roader anarchist. He
said, "If my esteemed great-grandfather wants me to take
the anarchist away from the danwei, I'll do all I can."
After all, honor was only a form to be satisfied.
Tell


T

he encounter had taken less than an hour. Guoquiang
and Xiao Bing were still waiting for Lee at the caf in
Number One Recreation Hall, amidst the dusty cherry
trees and crowds and opera music. Lee explained what had
just happened (although he did not mention the precise task
his great-grandfather wished him to perform), and what he
needed.

"You are crazy!" Guoquiang said, then looked at the people
crowding the tables around their own and repeated, this
time in a whisper, "You're crazy."

Xiao Bing said, "It's not as if it's an ordinary mount." He
was whispering too.

"Let's walk," Lee said. As they ambled amongst the other
strollers, music echoing from the high, iron-ribbed roof, he
explained that if the Army of the People's Mouths had taken
an interest in him, it was certain that he was being watched.

Guoquiang said, "If you must run from this, can't you
just take an ordinary mount, Wei Lee?"

Lee grinned, told the two cadres to drink up. He had decided
to get rid of the scrip he had accumulated. His salary
credits could be forwarded (if Guoquiang's father didn't stop
it), but Bitter Waters's scrip was useless everywhere but
here. He bought more rice beer and cones of fried shrimp
at one of the barrows scattered about the arena of shabby
grass. He had already drunk three or four draughts with the
two cadres as he explained his predicament and felt a fine


48
      RED DUST
      49
floating cheerfulness. Tomorrow and yesterday no longer
mattered.
As they walked on, Lee explained to Guoquiang and Xiao
Bing that it was easier than they thought, told them how to
go about it, told them about the idea that had sprung fully
formed as he'd walked between the steel-barred stalls with
his great-grandfather's agent, the Colonel of the Army of the
People's Mouths. People glanced at him as they went past,
quick stabs of distaste. As he talked, Lee smiled back at the
passers-by, even bowed once or twice, until Guoquiang told
him to stop being a fool in front of half the danwei.
Even this late in the evening the place was crowded. With
power off in the accommodation modules, it seemed that
most of the living population of the danwei was out and
about. They walked in pairs or family groups beneath the
cherry trees, over threadbare lawns. Hedges and arbors conspired
with holographic projections to suggest continued
vistas running out under a blue, sunlit sky.
Fighting-cricket fanciers crowded around breeders and
their enamel pots, each with a cricket inside and the price
on top of the lid. As well as crickets, the breeders sold bamboo
cricket-ticklers, cricket-lore data bases, feeding straws.
In a transparent steep-sided fighting pot, two Five-star General
crickets shrilled at each other, black wings spread. Their
genomes had been extensively spliced and diced, and the
jaws in their massive heads were so big that they could only
eat pap from a straw; their muscular hind legs were sheathed
in prickly armour and terminated in hooked claws. Bets
were noisily laid amongst the fanciers who crowded round
the big pot. The owners tickled their crickets' antennae until
they locked in combat with a blur of legs and wings, watched
by intent fanciers until one was pumping ichor from a half-severed
head. Its owner picked it out of the pot in disgust
and ground it under his sandal while around him bets were
paid off in a flurry of scrip.
Beyond the fighting-cricket crowd, a wall was showing the
action of the heroic opera whose music was playing over the
public address system. Close-ups of white faces under lac
      50
      PAUL J. McAULEY


quered hairstyles intercut with panoramas of the half-dozen
principals scattered across a wide black stage with the
chorus in the background. It was an opera about the last
days of the Middle Kingdom on Earth: a model entrepreneurial
family was trying to regain their daughter from the
socialist warlord who had recruited her into service with the
intention of corrupting and seducing her. In a comic subplot,
the dimwit younger brother gambled futures in the
family's microchip growing tanks to buy arms for the libertarian
mercenaries led by the girl with whom he had fallen
in love. Every ten minutes the music was interrupted by
commercials for products or services not available in the
danwei: this was a tape bought in a cheap lot from some
backstreet operation, and no one had bothered to edit it.
The action on the screen carried on regardless of whether
music or commercials were playing, which lent a surreal air
to the proceedings, rather like one of the King's salvaged
movies.

Neither the opera nor the murmur of the people in the
park was louder than the whine of the storm. A fine haze
silted the air: it stung the nose and left a taste of iron, of
blood, in the mouth. As he talked, Lee took mouthful after
mouthful of thick yeasty beer to wash the taste of dust away.
Dust enough where he was going.

"I still say you're crazy," Guoquiang said when Lee had
finished.

Lee said, "Does that mean you will not help me?"

"Of course I will help you."

Lee suppressed his smile. Poor Guoquiang. It was his turn
to be caught in a face trap. He had promised to stand by
Wei Lee, and now he had been asked this favor he had no
choice.

Xiao Bing said, "What will you do, Wei Lee? Turn leu li?"
"They'll hunt you down," Guoquiang said. "Better to
drink your Bitter Waters's bitter water, Lee. The storm will
die, and we can go before the Army of the People's Mouths
come for you."

"They come for me sooner than the end of the storm. And
      RED DUST
      51

it's better to drink Bitter Waters's beer than Bitter Waters's
bitter water. I will buy us all another."

"You should tell me what they need of you, that you risk
your life."

"They swore me to secrecy." Lee rapped a scrip token on
the tiled surface of the barrow, and asked the girl for more
beer.

The girl said, "Have you not had enough, citizen shareholders?"

She was six or seven, hair braided back in a thick pigtail
from her round face. She was addressing Guoquiang and
Xiao Bing, averting her face from Lee.

"They can drink with me," Lee said, made bold by beer.
The girl blushed, hurried to fill the cups from her pitcher.
Foam ran down the sides of the cups and puddled the tiles.
She more or less snatched at the token Lee offered, and he
laughed and twitched it out of her reach before tossing it
on the wet tiles. He could use the shame of his disgrace like
a weapon, as a mirror reflects laser light. It was interesting.

As the three walked on, Lee said to Guoquiang, "Your
father wants an example of me. And the Army of the People's
Mouths will use me before then. This way is better, I think.
Do not worry. I will head for the capital, somehow or other.
We will meet there. The storm will stop anyone following
me on a lesser mount."

"You'll be a criminal," Xiao Bing said. But he was smiling.
"The capital is not like this danwei. Five million people
live there. More arrive every day." Lee smiled: he knew that
his two friends could not imagine the anonymity of the capital.
He said, "You don't have to wait for me, just hobble it
and leave it with the supplies."

"If it doesn't bite off our arms."

"Or our heads."

"I told you about the way to calm it. When it's calm, you

just slip on the muzzle, and it will follow you anywhere."
"I hope you listened carefully, Xiao Bing."
"As carefully as you, Guoquiang."
"Did I tell you about the supplies?"
      52
      PAUL J. McAULEY

"Twice. It will be difficult."

"But not impossible for cadres as resourceful as you two."
Guoquiang narrowed his eyes and shrugged, an imitation
of the gangster villain of the opera playing on the wallscreen

that was so successful that both Lee and Xiao Bing laughed.
"Trust me," Guoquiang said.

"Trust us," Xiao Bing said. "We'll miss you, Wei Lee."
"I seem to have spent all day saying goodbye," Lee said.
He really did feel cheerful. On the run in a storm with a
ransomed heroine: better than this dusty fake park and its
tawdry secondhand opera tapes. He shook his friends' hands
and made his farewells. He had told them about the army
officer, but not about the plan to free the anarchist pilot.
There was no need to go into every detail, after all. Better
for his friends if they knew only what they needed to know.
It was not his fault if they jumped to the wrong conclusions.
Eleven


T

hat night, the librarian came to Lee in his dreams.
"You are in danger, Master," the librarian said. As
ever, he was calm and imperturbable, the hood of his
black silk robe cast over the face that was a mirror of Lee's
own.

"What are you doing here?" Lee was naked, and was aware
he was dreaming with the floating detachment that dreams
bring. "I can't find you, and all the time you've been hiding
in my dreams. Is that it?"

"To me, all of your world is a dream. So why should you

be surprised to find me in one part of it, but not another?"
"I looked for you, and you weren't there."

"The soldiers commandeered much of the spare capacity
in the danwei's net. It made time slow for me; I could no
longer steal what I needed. Still, it meant that I shared what
they were doing. That is why I know that you are in danger,
Master."

"I don't need a figment of my subconscious to tell me
this."

"The anarchist pilot is dangerous, Master. She has placed
the whole danwei in danger."

"That's why the soldiers have her in that womb thing."
"The danwei's information net interfaces with the isolation
womb, and somehow parts of the anarchist have penetrated
the net. I have seen her here," the librarian said.
"She was reading a book three corridors away. I came upon


53
      54
      PAV J. McAv¥
her and she put the book back on its shelf and vanished.
She had opened the book, but I could not. I fear I have made
little progress since last you saw me, Master. Too many
books remain closed to me."
"At present I have more important things to think of than
my parents. When I go, will you still be with me?"
"The information net of the danwei is my home. Specifically,
the licensed, edited copy of the House of the Names
of the Populace that the net contains. But there are places
where I can step into the original. Those doorways are shifting
and transient, and difficult to use, but I will follow you
as best I can. Master, the soldiers are right to fear the anarchist.
She has infected this place."
"You really think she was here?"
"Look," the librarian said, and drew aside a tall dusty curtain
that Lee had not noticed. Perhaps it had not been there
until the librarian had put its hand upon it. There was an
arched window filled with flickering light. Stars, thickly
clustered in spacey night. Lee clasped the cold stone ledge,
suddenly dizzy with djO vu. One of the stars grew brighter;
no, it was moving towards him, shedding feathers of flame
like a great comet. He had seen it before. It was a burning
bird with a woman's head.
"You see. You see, Master." The librarian's hand was on
Lee's shoulder, burning cold. Its long nails pricked Lee's
bare skin. "Don't wake up, Master. Not yet. There is more
to tell!"
"He's awake," someone said, and stripped the goggles
from Lee's face.
Twelve


L

ee squinted in sudden light. His little room was
crowded. Three men, two ordinary soldiers and the
Colonel, looked down at him. The soldiers grabbed
Lee's arms and sat him up. In the confusion, someone
knocked the solid-body guitar from the peg on which it
hung. Lee started to protest, and the Colonel told him that
it was as well he was his great-grandfather's son before jabbing
something into his arm.

The benign fog of sleep and beer vanished instantly; but
although Lee's head was clear, he kept stumbling as he was
marched down the corridor. He was still naked, but no one
seemed to be about to witness his shame. He asked questions,
but the Colonel only ordered him to move faster.

A medical technician was waiting for him at a service entrance.
Lee was fitted with loose coveralls that sealed at neck
and wrists and ankles, high flexible boots, and a filter mask
with bulbous goggles so he wouldn't choke in the dust-filled
gales. The technician explained that his charge--he meant the
anarchist pilot--would need minimal maintenance. She was
anaesthetised. All Lee would have to do was check her intravenous
dripfeeds and change the filter on her oxygenator every
twelve hours.

"You have worked with half-lifers," the technician said.
"This is the same."

Lee nodded. All he could think about was Guoquiang and
Xiao Bing. About whether they had had enough time. About


55
      56
      PAUL J. McAULEY


whether the Army of the People's Mouths knew about his
little plot.

The Colonel had pulled on coveralls and a filter mask. He
led Lee through the sand-trap door--pushing through hundreds
of flexible but heavy interleaved plastic strips--into
howling night lit by lamps whose light was bloodily blurred
by whirling dust. Dawn made a bloody thumbprint above
the huddled domes and tubes and sheds of the danwei.

Wind buffeted and snatched at Lee, roared past and
screamed up the curve of the dome behind him. The Colonel
caught his arm and hauled him a dozen paces to where a
draft bact stood amidst the whirling dust, eyes sealed by
thickly lashed lids. It was yoked to a trailer which carried a
pod of milky plastic. The trailer's two mesh wheels were as
high as Lee's shoulder. Lee could dimly make out a curled
shape suspended by tubes and wires in bubbling amniotic
fluid inside the pod.

The Colonel shoved the bact's harness reins into one of
Lee's gloved hands, a torch into the other, yelled, "Supplies
in the saddlebags! Take the south road!" and slapped the
bact's hairy flank. The beast stirred and strained forward,
the trailer dragged through sand, and Lee was pulled along
into the storm's dark whirl.


One thing Lee wasn't going to do was go south, but it took
a few minutes to convince the bact to change direction. By
the time they were headed towards the field domes, Lee was
sweating inside his suit. Anxiety and the anti-alcohol shot
had dried his mouth, and he could feel his blood pounding
in his head. His chest hurt with the effort of straining air
through the mask's filters. This was like birth, he thought.
Painful, and with no time for preparation.

The lights of the danwei faded into the storm. All Lee had
to guide him were bioluminescent markers planted on one
side of the dust-buried road, a line of tall green-glowing
poles rising out of whirling darkness. By their spectral light
he could see the shapes the wind whipped out of the dust,
a secret life writhing and tumbling, tormented by the gale
       RED DUST
       57


that blew slantwise over Lee and the bact as they plodded

Orl.

The trailer kept digging into dust drifts and each time Lee
had to run back and heave it out. The fourth or fifth time
it happened he thought he saw the anarchist pilot moving
inside the pod. He wiped at dust clinging to the tough plastic,
shone his torch beam through murky liquid.

The anarchist raised her arms, pressing against the plastic
so that it deformed upwards. It didn't break but stretched
with her as she rose in a crouch. Blood swirled from torn
IV ligatures at the crooks of her elbows and the base of her
spine. Bubbles rose around her face as the mask which fed
her air was pulled askew. Her mouth was open: she was
drowning in amniotic fluid.

Lee's heart lurched. He scrabbled at dusty plastic: it deformed
but would not tear. Wind and dust shrieked around
him. He leaned over the drowning anarchist, his hands for
a moment pressing against hers, her blue eyes staring up at
him. He ran around the trailer, was blown to his knees by
the wind, scrambled up and grabbed the saddlebag that hung
at the bact's withers. But it was empty. Of course it was
empty. Wind howled mockingly.

No, he couldn't let his great-grandfather win so easily. He
ran to one of the marker poles, leaped and swung on it until
it fell over, then snapped it across his knee. Its green light
went out, but he had what he needed.

The pod's plastic parted beneath the jagged end of this
crude spear. Thick amniotic fluid spurted, crusting with flying
dust and blowing away in tatters. The anarchist's hand
grabbed a torn edge; Lee grabbed another. Together, they
widened the split, and suddenly the anarchist tumbled forward,
her naked body coated in dust. She was lighter than
he'd expected, light as a bird. He could feel her heart fluttering,
the hard edge of her air mask against his chin.

She reached up and raised the mask, pressed her lips to
his ear.

"You're walking into a trap. They want me dead." The
mask went back. She drew a shuddering breath, took it away
      58
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


again and yelled, "You too! Wherever they said you're to

go the other way!"

Half a dozen questions framed themselves in Lee's head
tripping over each other. Wind blew his astonishment into
the howling darkness. He helped the anarchist into the flapping
remains of the pod, tried to settle torn plastic around
her.

"We're not going where my great-grandfather wants us to

go!" Lee yelled, but the anarchist gave no sign that she had
heard him. Plastic flapped around her; she grasped at it feebly
with one hand, pressed her air mask to her face with the
other.

Lee whipped the bact with its halter and it stumbled forward,
the trailer slewing behind it. They missed the first
waymark, and for five tense minutes Lee believed all was
lost. But then a shadow loomed beyond the dashed luminous
line of the marker poles and his heart lifted.

He had to tell the anarchist what he wanted three times

over before she understood. She let him pull her to her feet,
and Lee wrapped plastic around her like a tattered cape. Its
wings lifted on the dusty wind as they stumbled towards the
dome's big revolving door.

Calm darkness, a pocket of sheltered order in the storm's

rage. They were on a wide earthen bank above the flooded
fields where the spring rice grew. Lee waved his torch all
around and nearly jumped out of his skin when Xiao Bing's
voice cried, "Over here, Wei Lee? And Guoquiang: "Who is
that with you?"

A beam of light pinpointed the anarchist. She stared into

it, naked except for tattered plastic and the caked dust that
clung to her dark skin. She said, "I hope these are your
friends."

Guoquiang was so shocked that for once he couldn't say

a word. Lee told him that it was all right, that the Army of
the People's Mouths wanted her to escape. Xiao Bing
grinned. The silver caps over his eyes were sparks in the
torchlit gloom. He couldn't stop staring at the naked anar-
RED DUST 59
chist. He said, "We should get her some clothes, do you
think?"
"Thank you," the anarchist said calmly.
She was serenely regal in her filthy plastic cape. More self-possessed
than anyone else, most especially Lee, who told
Guoquiang, "All you had to do was leave it here, hobble it
and leave it." Panic was beating inside him. He said, "Don't
tell me you didn't bring it!"
"It's here," Guoquiang said, "although it nearly bit off
Bing's head two or three times." He put his hands on Lee's
shoulders. "We're going with you, Wei Lee! To the capital,
right now! We couldn't stay, we'd be the first suspects when
you went missing. We have helped you, and now you will
help us."
The anarchist sealed the seam of a khaki shirt. She'd had
to roll up the cuffs of the trousers, and their waistband
bunched over the cord she'd tied as a crude belt. She said,
"You must all listen to me. Although your soldiers did their
best to keep me sedated, I was able to counter their efforts. I saw what
happened to the guards when the others came
for me. An officer shot them, then dropped the pistol
amongst the smoking pieces of their bodies. He was wearing
gloves..."
Lee remembered the pistol the Colonel had thrust into
his hand. Fingerprints. He felt as if he was falling through
darkness, right there where he stood on soft earth.
"This officer wants me dead," the anarchist said. "If he
works for who I believe he works for, he is afraid I will tell
the truth. I imagine Wei Lee is the sacrificial pawn. This will
be blamed on him, and he will be killed trying to escape. So
will I. They want me to escape, oh yes, but it is an excuse
to kill me. There is a certain neatness to it, I suppose."
Guoquiang said to Lee, "If they wanted her dead, why did
they heal her first?"
The anarchist said, "Only a disloyal faction of your soldiers
wants me dead. The others carry out orders to bring
me to the capital. Besides, my viruses did most of the healing.
Believe me!"
      60
      P^uL J. McAtLr¥
Xiao Bing smiled. "Didn't we always tell you that taking
the Sky Road was dangerous, Wei Lee?"
But Gu°quiang wasn't convinced. He said, "How do we
know this anarchist is telling the truth?"
That was when the dome blew in.
Lee saw it happen in slow motion. The ragged white
flower of the explosion: shards of plastic riding a ball of
flame. Then he was on his belly on muddy ground, dust and
burning fragments of plastic flew around him.
"Come on!" Someone dragged him to his feet.
There were lights outside, brilliant and unfocused. Wind
roared and roared through a great hole in the dome, filling
it with whirling dust.
"Come on," Guoquiang said again, less insistent but no
less urgent.
He started to drag Lee towards the warhorse. It pulled
against its tether and struck at the two cadres with the sinuous
ferocity of a snake.
Guoquiang fell over. Lee dodged forward, clouted the
smooth skin behind the beast's ear where nerves clustered,
shouted the word of command and vaulted into the high
narrow saddle.
Xiao Bing threw up a canvas pack. Lee grabbed it one-handed
and fastened it to the saddle. Xiao Bing shouted
something lost in an explosion which struck the base of the
dome, spraying dust and rubble. The whole structure
groaned, and Lee heard panes splashing into the flooded
fields.
Xiao Bing raised his hand in salute, then cut the warhorse's
tether.
The warhorse would have bolted, but Lee pulled hard on
the reins and forced its head to the ground. Then he barked
a word of command and gave it slack and it sprang forward.
The anarchist stood amidst whirling dust and smoke and
crossing beams of light. Lee stooped and grabbed her waist
and lifted her into the saddle in front of him as the warhorse
leaped the dome's ragged edge into the full force of the storm.
Thirteen


T

he warhorse raced into the howling dark using senses
other than sight. In moments, it carried Lee and the
anarchist pilot through the circle of the ambush and
plunged into the sours. In an hour the sours were a long
way behind and the warhorse was galloping down the Red
Valley in thick blowing dust and dawn light dirty as burned
sulphur.

Lee and the anarchist rode the rest of the day and cast
themselves into the vestigial shelter of an overhang at nightfall,
too exhausted to do more than exchange a few words
and bolt down paste rations before falling asleep.

The wind blew through Lee's dreams, erasing the past. It
was still blowing hard when he woke, half buried in dust,
with ochre storm light filtering beyond the lip of the overhang.
The anarchist pilot--her name, she'd told him, was
Miriam Makepeace Mbele--was propped on one elbow,
watching him. He could hardly see her face behind the filter

mask, and she had to shout to be heard over the wind.
"Time to go!"

"I want to know..."

"Later! If we survive! Otherwise it doesn't matter!"

They travelled through the howling storm for three days,
stopping only to sleep. The warhorse cantered at a fluid
thirty or forty kilometers an hour, and Lee let it pick its own
way. He was spaced out by blowing curtains of dust that
continually parted and swirled with the same flowing pseu-


61
      62
      PAUL J. McAULEY

docomplexity that in fire allows the unfocused eye to generate
pictures or salamanders. Lee saw ghosts of his past,
vague shapes that might be presentiments of his future. The
dust made a fluid, lithe hiss as it scoured past, and it worked
its way into every fold of skin until he was alive with incendiary
itches.

The anarchist pilot clung to Lee with a fierce silence. She
was injured and ill. Every so often she would lean out, lift
her filter mask and vomit blood into the dusty gale. She
endured this stoically.

Lee learned only a little more about her; the storm wore
away any attempt at conversation. They spent the second
night wedged in a deep low cave, scarcely more than a crevice
in the undercut base of the cliffs; the third with no shelter
but a sheet of plastic weighed down with stones--and in
the middle of the night they woke amidst screaming wind
and dust, the plastic sheet gone. They groped their way to
the warhorse, and huddled against its flank. They got no
more sleep that night, but the storm kept them from speaking,
and it rose in pitch the next day. The warhorse slowed
from a canter to a walk, and then to a creeping pace as it
leaned into roaring sheets of dust. When Lee saw the lichen
stand sometime near noon--a noon no lighter than dawn--he
turned the warhorse straight for it. They had gone as far
as they could until the storm blew itself out.
Fourteen


The giant lichens were a design of Cho Jinfeng. Lee had
sheltered in them before, but he had never before had
better reason to be grateful to the legendary gene cutter.
He and the anarchist pilot, Miriam Makepeace Mbele,
lay wedged head to foot in a narrow crevice within an inflated
lobe, warmed by their own trapped body heat. The
wails and floors and angled ceiling of the crevice were striated
like muscle. The striations were bundles of hyphae.
Here and there, hyphal strands swelled into clusters of moist
globules that tasted of musty, peppery meat, of sweetly acid
fruit, or of nothing at all. Long hairy strands loosely packed the narrow
corkscrew entrance. Spurs and veins of green
bioluminescence made weird constellations brighter than
the yellow storm light that leaked through the entrance.

By night these constellations seemed to blaze, and that was
when the anarchist pilot woke, in the way that sick people turn
their diurnal rhythms end for end. She crawled deep into the
lichen's crevice, down towards the cobweb hyphae designed to
absorb body wastes, and Lee heard her throwing up. When she
came back she was pale and shaky, but she was ready to talk.

Miriam Makepeace Mbele was six hundred and twenty-eight
Greenwich years old, born in the United States of
America on Earth in the sixth decade of the twentieth century.
Or she was eighteen, brought to term in a bottle after
the genome of the ancestor of her mercenary clone line had
been transplanted into an enucleated ovum, and raised and


63
      64
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

trained by her owners, the Mbele-Somerville family, who
also owned the Information Nexus of the Belt. And she was
dying.

She explained it quite matter of factly. She had a way of
saying things directly that was both exciting and unnerving.
The crash landing had crushed a lung, destroyed her spleen
and torn up her liver. The fullerene viruses that swarmed
through her bloodstream had constructed clades to bootstrap
her metabolism, had turned off the pain of her internal
injuries and patched up as much of the damage as they
could, but her liver function was reduced almost to zero.
Blood was backing up and bursting through the weakest
point, the web of veins and capillaries in her throat. She
needed two things unavailable in a howling storm in the
badlands of the Red Valley: rest to allow the damage to heal;
and transfusions to replace lost blood.

Lee would not believe that he had rescued her only to lose
her. He said that as soon as the storm had blown itself out
he would find a medical technician at the nearest settlement,
but she only smiled and thanked him, and said it was impossible.

"Oh, there are white people, you didn't know that? Yankees.
Beggars and thieves and vagabonds."

Miriam Makepeace Mbele (it took Lee a while to get used
to the idea of her back-to-front name) said, "How fallen are
the mighty. But that's not what is important. Right now,
you are what is important, Wei Lee."

She wanted Lee to understand why she was here. She said
that she had been sent to trade with Lee's great-grandfather.
She carried a cargo of totipotent viruses which could generate
clades of specialised subgroups according to need, just
as immune-system T-cells generated a near-infinite variety
of antibodies. The totipotent viruses Miriam carried generated
a whole variety which dealt with the diseases of old age,
which Lee's great-grandfather had planned to dole out
amongst the Ten Thousand to win back support for the Sky
Road. He thought that he hadn't needed Miriam alive after
her capture; especially after the Bitter Waters danwei had
      RED DUST
      65

sold news of her capture to the commercial news channels.
He'd had some of her blood drawn while she was being
treated by the medical technicians. Butchers, she added;
she'd be dead before her viruses could undo, cell by cell, the
damage the medics' clumsy macroscopic work had done. After
her cargo had been sampled, she was a liability alive, and
so the fake escape attempt had been staged.

Lee said, "Where you fell. You mean it's no coincidence..."

"It's no coincidence that the landing coordinates were so
close to your home..."

"It's no coincidence that you crashed here..."

"... because your great-grandfather needed someone on
hand to blame if things went wrong. Which they did. It was
coincidence you and your friends stumbled on

me..."

"We were looking for you. For the cargo of the spacecraft.
And we found you..."

"...and it was lucky for me, because I guess maybe your
army would have killed me right off. You guys there as witnesses,
they couldn't. So that little charade was staged..."

"But if I was to be killed helping you escape, surely it
would lead straight back to my great-grandfather..."

"You can't believe that your ancestor would have you killed,
Wei Lee, but it is true. I was too dangerous to be allowed to live
after I was captured. Your great-grandfather can't let it be
known that he is trading with the anarchists, but he maintained
connections with us after the Great Reassessment, and
he knows that we are desperate, that we are losing the war with
the Earth's Consensus. He knew we'd agree to almost any

terms. Of course, he doesn't know everything..."

"I am sorry that your plan did not work."

"Who says it's not going to work, kid?" Miriam's somatic
age was roughly the same as Lee's, but she treated him like
a slightly retarded child. She did it with a kind of rough
familiar humor, and Lee discovered he didn't mind. "Your
great-grandfather thinks that because he has some of my
blood, he has my totipotent viruses. He doesn't."
      66
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"I am honored by your trust," Lee said.

"I'm not telling you everything. Not yet. Maybe if I turn

you on... but maybe not even then."

Lee said recklessly, "Well, if you can't tell me everything
about yourself, perhaps you can tell me about the Belt."

The Belt, Miriam said, was dying. Once there had been
innumerable continually shifting alliances and hundreds of
different political ideologies vying for supremacy, driving a
Golden Age of art and science and philosophy. On Earth,
politics (before the Earth's Consensus had put an end to
politics) had been shaped by geography; in the Belt, orbital
mechanics were just as prescriptive. Asteroids did not follow
tidy orbits. Macrotrade and migration between two asteroids
that might be economical one week would suddenly become
impossible the next when their different orbits moved them
too far from each other and delta V differences jumped a
quantum level. No family nation was ever out of contact with
the information net controlled by the Nexus, unless it chose
to go gray ghost ("That's when we know they're there, but
they aren't talking. There are more and more of them each
year."), but ideological alliances required more cement than
exchange of information. Complex concatenations of political
groupings and trade alliances were continually shifting
in the main belt, and then there were those asteroids which
pursued eccentric orbits that isolated them from human discourse
except for short, irregular intervals. This ever-changing
diversity was what had saved the Belt from direct
conquest by the Earth's Consensus, but it also meant that
the Belt had never united against their common enemy. After
a long war of attrition, only remnants of the Belt's multiplex
civilization survived, huddled in slowly dying
arcologies. The Nexus was their last best hope.

It took Miriam a long time to explain this to Lee. Most of
the terms she used couldn't be translated directly into Common
Language. Still, Lee was fascinated. It was a world--worlds
he'd hardly suspected to have existed, a great territory
of possibilities. The sky that seemed so empty, save for
a few rock-bound barbarians, was buzzing and blooming
      RED DUST
      67

with trade and information. What he wanted to know was
how Miriam's trading would help the people of Mars.

Miriam made a small movement that might have been a
weary shrug. She was sitting with her shoulders cushioned
by a soft bank of hyphae. Sweat beaded her face, was sprinkled
on the V of skin between her small breasts, exposed by
the open fastener of her shirt. Lee couldn't help staring,
even though he knew that she knew he was doing it.

She said, "Your great-grandfather is like the rest of the
Ten Thousand Years. They all want power, and they all want

to live for ever. Your own Consensus--"

"The Emperor."

"Whatever it calls itself. It's become isolated. We know for
a fact parts of it are as old as the original terraforming program.
We suspect the same thing happened to it as happened
to the Earth. It has become inward looking. It is using too
many dreamers inside its systems. Agents of the Earth's
Consensus--the conchies--are here to encourage that."

Lee thought of the half-lifers of Bitter Waters. Rows and
rows of cocoons in the blood-warm infra-red-lit halls holding
wirestrung intubated bodies. He said, "Mars is dying.
People escape from death into the perfect illusion of
Heaven."

"Yeah, but there's this world, too. It's at least as real as

the consensual dreams in information space."

"I believe that too."

"So do your Ten Thousand Years."

They smiled at each other in the cold green light of the
lichen's chamber.

Miriam said, "Dung, you and me are going to get on fine,

I can see that."

"Dung?"

"Is that wrong? My translation program didn't teach me
swear words."

So Lee did, to pass the long night and to distract him
from Miriam's body, her closeness. She might be twice as
old as his moribund great-grandfather, but her body was
lithe and lovely, and his own body responded to its closeness.
      68
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


She noticed, and told him to go ahead and masturbate if he
needed to, she didn't mind. "One time I could have helped
you out, but I can't trust my reflexes right now. I've nerve
damage, too."

Lee blushed, smiling furiously in embarrassment, and she
said, "I am sorry. It is culture shock, perhaps."

So much for romance. But a bond had grown between
them, Lee thought. He was beginning to think of a way to
save her: he had saved her life once, she had admitted as
much, and now he could not let her die.

Later, while Miriam Makepeace Mbele slept, Lee measured
the strength of the storm by listening to the King of the
Cats. At times the King came in so sweet and strong that
Lee thought the storm was surely failing, but then static
would rise and the King and his.music would recede to a
great distance, borne away on the wings of the storm.

Miriam woke and asked him what he was listening to, and
when he told her she said, "Of course you are. It's good that

you like him, Wei Lee. They said you would."

"Who told you? My great-grandfather?"

"You'll see, if it all works out. I saw the King once, you
know. I'd forgotten it for six hundred years, but things have

all been shaken up and now I remember. Isn't that strange?"
Lee said, "You can remember your ancestor's life?"
"Parts of it. We all do--we're all our own ancestor after
all, and besides, it's part of the personality fix we get. My
parents took me to Las Vegas when I was sixteen. It was a
place where you went to gamble. Do I have to explain that?"

"Oh, I know about gambling, of course. As for the place,
I saw it in Viva Las Vegas."

Miriam smiled. "You must have a strange view of Ancient
Old-time America. But there were other entertainments in
Vegas, sideshows for the main event, which was to lose as
much money as possible and use as much electricity as you
could while doing it. The King was one of the sideshows.
My parents were big fans so they took me along, although
all I wanted to do was hang out at the slots and eye the
guys. Oh, this is so strange, remembering! The King was
      RED DUST
      69

sort of gross, we all thought, people my age back then, he'd
sold out, dressing in white leather and rhinestones, mopping
his sweat with white scarves and throwing them into the
audience, singing these awful ballads with these terrible
pseudo long-haired musicians grunging along behind. This
was the early seventies, when I was about thirteen. I was
into the Doors, Cream, Edgar Winter's White Trash. All I
really remember from the show was 'American Trilogy.' You
know that song?"
Various things had been going through Lee's mind. But
all he said was, "Of course. I have recordings of his concert;
it is all that remains of Elvis on Tour. I mean, I had." It was
still there, back in his little room in the Bitter Waters dan-wei, along with
all his recordings, and his solid-body guitar.
He hoped that Guoquiang had them now, or Xiao Bing. If
they were still alive.
Miriam wanted to listen to the King, and Lee gave her the
radio. She listened a moment and shrugged and handed it
back. "It's not the real King," she said, "but I guess you
know that. For one thing, the real King of the Cats didn't
speak Common Language. Or it's news to me he did. And
there never were any blues in Common Language, I guarantee
that."
Lee smiled, nervous again. "The King of the Cats became
a god long ago. He can do as he wishes. Even when he was
alive he could not walk amongst the people for fear that in
the frenzy of their love they would tear him apart. That is
why in all his later films he has to use a double for scenes
set outside, and why he could never travel abroad."
Miriam laughed. "That's because his manager was an illegal
alien and couldn't leave the US himself. And when I
saw him the King wasn't even that famous any more. He
only became famous again after he died." She laughed. "It
turns out they were right all along, he didn't really die, he
really was kidnapped by aliens. We have dealings, you know,
with the Thing in Jupiter. Or aspects of it. The King of the
Cats is just one aspect of the Thing, but I've never understood
what he's about. We get his broadcasts in American.
      70
      PAUL J. McAuLE¥


The Thing moves in mysterious ways, that's all there is to

it. We're lucky it's on our side, more or less."

"You mean your danwei?"

"My family? Oh, that, of course. But I mean all of us.
Humans. Or at least, the Thing in Jupiter doesn't mean us
harm. It doesn't have religion, the way the Earth's Consensus
does."

Lee thought of his great-grandfather, of the Sky Road and
of the alliance that the Emperor had made with the Earth
before it had fallen silent, of the Ten Thousand Years struggling
against each other to fill the vacuum of the Emperor's
silence. There was no center. It was as if everything he had
known had suddenly been cut free, and for a while he
couldn't even think of a question to ask. When he did, Miriam
had fallen asleep.
Fifteen

A
I some time during the night, unnoticed, the unmodulated
howl of the storm faded. Lee woke to the lonesome
growl of Tony Joe White's "Linesman of the
County" small and clear in his head. Miriam Makepeace
Mbele was sleeping, her mouth open, a fine sheen of sweat
on her pale face.
Lee pushed through the lichen's matted hyphal curtain
and scrambled over the drift of dusty sand that half choked
the entrance. The air was clear, although the sky was still
full of dust: the sun was a vast technicolor smear of red and
orange in a pink sky. Wind whipped scarves of sand from
the sharp crests of new drifts, but it was only a whisper now.
The warhorse was kneeling half buried downhill from the
lichen stand. Lee cleared its eyes and muzzle from the caul
it had spun around itself, and blew into its nostrils until it
shuddered and woke. It turned its head and snapped at him
in a half-hearted way.
Lee went off to set running wire traps at ice mice burrows;
food would help the warhorse revive. When he and Miriam
had stumbled upon the stand of lichens in howling dust-filled
darkness, they had already lost their bearings. Now Lee
saw that the lichen stand ramified along the top of a flood
gravelbed that bent around a loop of the dust-choked river.
Above, striated sandstone cliffs rose towards the red sky,
their top smashed in by an ancient crater; on the other side
of the river, sandstone ridges, marked by fossil scour marks

71
      72
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

like the thumbprints of the creator, saddled away towards
cliffs a kilometer away, hazed by dust that still hung in the
air.
Lee caught a dozen ice mice and desert rats inside an
hour, but when he got back the warhorse was grazing on a
stand of prickly pear, excavating the spiny paddles from dust
drifts with a forelimb. It nosed Lee's gift and tossed its head
in disdain, then stepped back, its ribbed ears unfolding and
twitching this way and that.
After a moment Lee heard what had made the warhorse
quicken. It was the fluttering thud of a culver.

Miriam was awake inside the dank and smelly crevice in the
lichen stand. When Lee told her about the culver she said
at once, "So we did not run far enough. You have only one
choice. Kill me, and stay alive."
Lee opened his mouth, smiling in incomprehension.
"I'm dying. I'd rather go quickly and painlessly than have
my body torn apart under questioning. I've spent all my life
getting it into shape, I don't want to see it mutilated."
She was quite serious. Lee said, "You aren't serious."
She held out the big torch. "This will do it. I've focused
the laser and shorted the safety on the power supply. You've
only one shot, but it will be enough. Stick it against the top
of my head and it'll fry my brain. I'll probably not even see
the flash."
She thrust the torch at him, and he had to take it or drop
it. Then she leaned into him and fastened her lips on his.
Her warm wet tongue prised open his lips, squirmed deep
into his mouth. Astonished, Lee started to return the kiss,
but Miriam pulled away.
"It's done," she said, "for better or worse. Wei Lee, we
haven't known each other very long, and this is a fucking--did I get that
right?--big favor to ask even a close friend,
but it's the only favor I'm ever going to ask. See, I can't
do myself. I've been blocked, to stop the goods damaging
itself."
      RED DUST
      73

"Oh. Is that why you did not kill yourself when you were
captured?"

"I wouldn't talk," Miriam said. "It doesn't matter what
they do to me, I'd never talk. And that's nothing to do with
a block. It's professional pride. But, I don't want to go
through it, you understand?"

"I understand," Lee said, and raised the torch. Perhaps
she saw at the last moment what he intended, because her
hands started to come up, too late, as he smashed the heavy
torch across the top of her head.

She was as light as a bird, as if all her bones were hollow.
Although Lee had trouble dragging her through the crevice's
kinked, hyphae-packed entrance, it was not too difficult to
carry her downhill to the warhorse. After Lee spoke to it,
the warhorse allowed him to sling Miriam's body over its
withers, in front of the narrow saddle. Then Lee swung up
into the saddle and the warhorse leaped forward, flying over
gravel alongside the dustchoked river at an easy gallop.

The sound of the culver was gone, swallowed by the aching
silence of Mars. Yet as Lee rode south, the Bitter Waters
River and its wide valley unravelling at a steady seventy kph,
he felt a weight centred between his shoulder blades. He had
not escaped, not yet.

He knew that it was very unlikely that he could carry the
wounded pilot to one of the secret camps of the ku li rebels,
even if he could track them down. But in his mind the Red
Valley fell behind and somehow they were there, under a
huge spreading tree on some swampy spit of land, with a
campfire sending a thin tendril of smoke into dense leaves
overhead, ku li rebels in ragged but clean tunics and trousers
and heavy boots going about their business amongst
stacks of supplies and stands of rifles, while Lee rocked Miriam
in a linen hammock suspended from one great limb of
the all-sheltering tree and half listened to a lecturer off in
some clearing explaining the power of the people to his
cross-legged audience...

Lee almost fell from the narrow saddle. The clean vertiginous
shock woke him at once. The warhorse had slowed to
        74
        PAUL J. MCAULEY


a walking pace and was snatching at thorny vegetation that
grew in the dry mudflats flanking the river channel. The
sound of the culver fluttered somewhere in the empty sky.

Lee snatched the reins with the intention of bringing the
warhorse under control, but he forgot to speak the word of
command and the beast struck at his leg. Lee pulled back
hard and shouted. The warhorse pranced sideways. Miriam
started to slide and Lee grabbed at her: the warhorse bucked
and they both fell.

They rolled down a crusty slope of dry mud, enveloped in
clouds of dust. The warhorse screamed and shot away like
an arrow from a bow. In less than a minute it was out of
sight. The rope of dust left in its wake rose and twisted in
the still air.

The fall partly brought Miriam to her senses. Lee helped
her sit up, and she punched him square in the chest. As he
sprawled backwards, she slid the torch from his belt loop.
Her eyes were starry with tears. She said, "Do me! Do me

nOW["

"I don't..."

"Kill me!"

Lee grabbed for the torch but Miriam threw herself flat,

swift as a striking snake. Something roared and roared overhead.
Lee lunged again, but she managed to drive a sharp
elbow into his ribs and tried to roll away from him. He
grabbed her ankle and was dragged through crusty mud, a
roaring in his ears, his heart pounding. Miriam turned to
club at his hand and he pulled; off-balance, she fell.

In a moment, Lee was on her; in the next, he had snatched

the torch from her grasp. She butted his chin with the top
of her head; his teeth clicked on his tongue tip and pain
spiked the roof of his skull. She got an elbow in his stomach
and he sobbed for breath that suddenly wouldn't come. The
roaring was louder, and streamers of dust were flying away
from them in every direction.

Lee looked up, saw the black wasp-shape of the culver
tilted a dozen meters above, so close that he could see the
      RED DUST
      75

face of the young soldier who hung out of the hatch in a
sling.

Miriam had the torch again. She grounded the butt in the
red dirt. Lee goggled at the slit-lens; then Miriam twitched
the torch a fraction and fired.

For an instant, an intense thread of light burned through
whirling dust. The tail of the culver broke off and flew away
in one direction while the main body somersaulted in the
other. A flexing wing smashed into the muddy river, threw
the broken cabin against a sandstone ridge beyond.

Lee tried to cover Miriam with his own body as debris
whirred through the air. The whole surface of the river
pocked and rippled. A section of hull went end over end over
the water and smashed into a gravel bank. Something
caught fire in the wreckage of the cabin. Lee started to get
to his feet and a ball of fire enveloped the wreckage; he fell
on his face as flame bloomed out across the water. Heat
washed his skin.

"Damn you," Miriam said. There was something funny
about her voice. "I didn't want to kill anyone..."

"Except yourself," Lee said. There was something stuck
in the back of his throat. Then, astonishingly, he was crying.

The culver was still burning. Its frame glowed in a jelly
of heat and flame. Thick black smoke unpacked itself into
the pink sky.

Miriam said in her   weak, pinched voice, "You had better
shape up, kid. I'm   going to need help. I think you broke
something all over   again." She turned her head and spat
blood into the red   dust.
Sixteen

They followed the tracks of the warhorse. There was little
hope of catching it--it was probably halfway to the
capital by now but when its trail turned away from the
river Lee and Miriam turned too.
There was a scramble over a high lip of stone, through a
narrow passage between sandstone bluffs that met overhead
like two heads touching, then the start of a long climb up
a steep defile, the fossil bed of a tributary gashed into the
cliffs millennia ago, when Mars had been in full flood and
dinosaurs had ruled Earth.
The ancient stream had been partly revived by terraforming--the
sides of the defile were littered with dead, fallen
trees--but now the stream bed was clogged with dry red
dust. The defile widened into a little sloping valley. Lee, carrying
Miriam pickaback, kept stumbling on water-smoothed
stones. Here and there pools of water stood, their still
surfaces mantled with dust. Farther up, seepage was washing
red mud down tussocky slopes. Dwarf juniper spread fragrant
dark green needle-fans above scree and sere clumps of
grass; Himalayan pines, dwarfed and twisted, clung to boulders
with gnarled roots longer than their knotted trunks.
Stands of immature lichens raised shoulder-high lobes. Lee
saw desert chats, rose finches, robin accentors, once spotted
a Sikkim deer turning away through the scrubby forest.
Amongst the dwarf trees and sandstone boulders were
sloping spaces thatched with grass and herbs. Pale yellow

76
      RED DUST
      77

flowers rose through a mantle of fine red dust. Whenever
they reached one of these tiny meadows, Lee set Miriam
down and sprawled beside her to rest for a few minutes.
Miriam was very weak now. Her breath was hoarse and
ragged. She had long ago given up telling Lee to leave her.
It was almost night, and growing bitterly cold. Finally, when
it was clear that they could go no further, Lee lay Miriam
on a narrow ledge of thin, sandy turf no bigger than a tabletop.
Lee held Miriam, and she held him. They were both shivering.
"Now I suppose we both die," she whispered hoarsely. "You
are such a fool, Wei Lee. I've given you all you need, you just
don't realize it. Awhole world, in your hands..."
'I'll try and light a fire, in a little while." He had seen
some gorse; there would be dry wood in the dead hearts of
the stands, and he could make a friction bow to spark punk
alight.
Miriam didn't reply. She had fallen asleep, or had passed
out. Lee held her. Above and behind them, the dwarf forest
climbed the narrow valley towards a dusk sky already rich
with stars. And all around were the sounds of the inhabitants
of the valley going about their lives: furtive rustlings and
faint squeaks or chitterings; once, the c of an owl, a soft
thump as it plummeted on its prey a few metres from Lee,
the whir of its wings as it rose.
Martians.
Beneath the sounds of the tiny lives lay the ancient silence
of the planet, vast and empty as an ocean. The silence of the
rocks; the silence from before the beginning of history; the
dreamy silence that inhabited the centre of every thought,
that filled the mind with an inexpressible sweet longing.
The silence that the conchie preachers wanted to spread
across the face of Mars, a dry end to history and life.
Lee left Miriam sleeping, and collected the materials he
needed to make his fire. The stars gave enough light to see
in grainy black and white, and as Lee picked his way back
to the clearing, arms laden with prickly dry heather, the top
      78
      PAUL J. McAuLr¥

of the valley fell to reveal Jupiter, and it was flooded with
his cold yellow light. At the same moment, stars floated
down, moving towards Lee swiftly and silently. He scarcely
had time to register them before they were upon him.
Strong arms grasped his, knocked away the kindling. He
shouted a warning to Miriam and something smashed him
to his knees. Stars swooped giddily; Lee fell upwards into
the night.
Seventeen


A

Pantheon of red and gold figures marched upon Lee.
He was lying on a pallet amongst a level field of stars
which swam in the veil of their own heat. Above him,
a gigantic gold-skinned man draped in green and red sat
cross-legged on a throne of beaten gold. His gaze was level
and serene, his eyes so wide that white showed all around
his pupils. Flowers were strewn at his feet.


(Voices murmured, each to each.

This is the young Han, Master.

He is no soldier. And the other? Will she live or die?
We do not know, Master.

We will pray for them both.)


Lee tried to say Miriam's name. He couldn't move, yet
still the field of stars tipped and receded. A bestial mask
leered down at him; behind it, brown human eyes gazed into
his. With a shock of reversal, Lee saw that it was no mask,
but a face half ape, half human. The creature grinned, showing
yellow fangs with a red tongue lolling between them,
and Lee cried out.


79
Eighteen

L
ee woke on a hard mattress in a narrow niche carved
into the sandstone wall of a little cell. A primitive lamp
shed a warm light and filled the dank air with the reek
of rancid butter. A shaven-headed old man, dressed in loose
orange robes belted with a yellow sash, sat cross-legged on
the floor. He was knitting a skein of undyed yarn into a kind
of cap. He peered at his tangling and untangling knitting
needles through a pair of butterfly glasses that perched on
the sharp peak of his nose. Fine lines radiated around his
eyes, but otherwise his face was as smooth and plump as a
baby's.
When he saw that Lee was awake he set his knitting aside,
hopped nimbly to the door and rang a silver bell. Then he
helped Lee dress, loose black trousers, an orange robe, san-dais.
The old man said that his name was Pemba, that he was
one of the monks of the Kailas lamasery. Lee had never
heard of the place. He knew of the underground Tibetan
lamaseries, but most were in ruins and none were within a
thousand kilometers of the Bitter Waters danwei. The warhorse
had been swift, but even it could not have ridden so
far in the middle of a storm. When Lee asked. d just where
Kailas was, Pemba answered cheerfully that he could not say.
"It belongs to the time before the Han. It belongs to the
original people."
Lee wanted to ask if the old monk was ku//; but it was
8O
      RED DUST
      81

the one question he could not safely ask and, besides, he
was fairly certain that he knew the answer. Instead, he asked
about Miriam Makepeace Mbele. "The Yankee woman I was
with."

"Perhaps she was a Yankee, a long time ago. Dorje and
Nangpa are attending to her. I will take you there, and find
you something to eat too. Is she your friend?"

Lee followed the old monk down a narrow corridor. Like
the cell, it was carved from naked sandstone. Lee could feel
the weight of rock above his head, a stress in the dim air
like a word waiting to be spoken. Butter lamps burned in
niches, a line of smoky stars. Lee said, after a long silence
which suggested he ought to say something, "I saved her
life."

"And so of course you feel an obligation to her, just as
the gods are obliged to help us, for they have saved us again
and again. And will, until time ends. We are all eager to hear
your story. She is not human, you know."

Lee would have asked Pemba what he meant, but at that moment
someone swung down from an opening in the corridor's
ceiling. It was the ape-man Lee had glimpsed in his dream
which he knew now had been no dream at all.

Pemba swatted the creature on its hairy flank and it
cringed away from him. Pemba Said, "Don't mind Monkey.
He is mostly harmless, but he enjoys trying to startle me.
It is a streak of mischief I have not managed to beat out of
him. But I need him, you see, because we are not yet certain
about you."

Monkey was perhaps two and a half meters tall--it was
difficult to be precise because he walked with a stooped bowlegged
gait, hands swinging by outthrust knees. He wore
only a kind of waistcoat with many bulging pockets, and he
was covered with coarse reddish hair. His brown eyes peered
at Lee from beneath a heavy brow that sloped straight back
to the crested top of his skull; wide flat nostrils snuffled and
thin lips skinned back from fangs the color of old ivory.
His feet were huge, with opposable big toes. They made a
      82
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


flat, slapping sound as he followed Lee and Pemba along the
corridor.

Lee said, "I don't know if I'm afraid of your friend, because
I don't know anything about him. I have certainly never seen
anything like him in my life."

"Monkey is our servant, but I do believe that some of his
kind live wild, in the mountains. I remember that when I
was a boy I saw footprints in the snow just like his. The
people of the mountains, my people, made up stories about
the creatures that made such tracks, but as usual the truth
is less interesting than the stories. Probably, the tracks were
left by a servant on its way from one lamasery to another.
This way, now."

Pemba and Monkey led Lee through a dark room. Echoing
footsteps suggested it was huge, high-ceilinged, and empty.
On the far side, light defined a small doorway. Lee had to
duck to pass through it, and found himself in a long hall
alive with color.

Pillars carved with red and gold figures cavorting amidst
swirling patterns receded towards a huge statue of the Buddha
sitting in the lotus position. Lee remembered that serene
yet quizzical golden face, its flexed eyebrows and wide
eyes, its slightly parted red mouth. The Buddha's headdress
was encrusted with jewels; a red scarf folded around his neck
was tucked under a heavy jewelled torc. Small statues of
lesser bodhisattvas cluttered the steps leading up to his
throne, and before the steps a myriad tiny flames floated in
two wide shallow bowls: yak-butter candle oceans whose hot
pungent smell filled the hall. To one side of the throne,
golden statues of wrathful deities and protectors stood in
wall niches; to the other was a shrine, with a three-cornered
high roof like a little house, which sheltered a tank in which
a shrunken homunculus floated. The shrine stood on a cube
of shiny black stuff in which sparks seemed to drift and slide.

Monkey knelt. Palms flat, he bowed down so that his
heavy brow touched the flagstone floor. He bowed not to the
Buddha but to the shrine.

Pemba took Lee's arm and led him down the central aisle,
      RED DUST
      83

between the yak-butter candle oceans. Beneath the statue-peopled
steps that led up to the Buddha's throne was a table
where two robed figures bent over a prone figure.

"Your friend," Pemba said. "Dorje and Nangpa try to save
her, but I fear we may not have the facilities."

One of the monks said, "Perhaps no one could save her."

The other added, "It depends what you mean by save, of
course. The body is not important, Dorje."

"In my present incarnate state, my body is important to
me, Nangpa."

The two orange-robed monks were both older than
Pemba. The first, Dorje, was tall and gaunt, a bent stork of
a man with heavy bones and skin so dark and wrinkled it
might have been smokecured. Nangpa was like a wraith conjured
from parchment; the sutures of his skull and a map
of blue veins were visible beneath his pallid skin. His ears
were huge and translucent, their lobes stretched by pegs of
gold so that they touched his shoulders.

"Until we draw her machines her body is also important,"
Dorje said. "The body is the vessel, true, but it is important
as long as it is full and cannot be emptied."

"This one is full, to be sure. Far too full."

Miriam was naked. A kind of mask lay over her face,
sprouting wires which wove into a web of cables and looped
up into darkness. Pemba put his hand flat on Lee's chest;
until then, Lee had not realised that he had started forward.
"No, young Hah," Pemba said gently. "She is no longer
yours."

Dorje touched a silver wand to the ring finger of Miriam's
right hand, to her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder, the side
of her neck, her temple. He said, "We try to activate the
triple-burner route, but still have much to do before she is

fully exorcised. Where is she from, young Han?"

Lee said, "The sky."

Nangpa said to his tall companion, in a mild voice, "She

told our master the truth. Unless the boy also lies."

"He doesn't," Pemba said.

The tall monk said, "It does not matter where she is from,
      84
      PAUL J. McAuLE¥

but who she is. It does not matter who she is, but what she
does."
Nangpa said, "It would help if we knew who made the
machines that infest her."
Dorje touched the side of Miriam's neck with his silver
wand. "Needles there, quickly, before the infernal things disperse
again."
Pemba said to Lee, "It has been so long since they have
had to do this. Master Norbhu passed away, why, it must
have been fifty years ago, and besides, he had no machines
in his blood."
"Not until we put them in," Nangpa said. "And it was
sixty-three years, not fifty, young Pemba."
"It was sixty-five," Dorje said. "But only Pemba would
care how long ago it was. He was not born here."
Pemba bowed and said humbly, "Masters, I know that the
years are of no account to anyone below, and until yesterday
I had not been above for a very long time." Dorje and
Nangpa took no notice. Pemba told Lee, "I had to help Monkey.
Two of us were needed because there were two of you.
There is only ever one Monkey. Band-width limitations prevent
Master Norbhu from controlling more than one at a
time. But when I had to carry you back, young man, I began
to see an argument for two, trouble enough though one is.
We could have left you to die, but that is not our way."
Lee said, "I don't understand what they are doing to Miriam.
Who is your master? How can he ask her questions if
she is asleep and he is dead?"
"All the better if she is asleep," Pemba said. "The truth is
in dreams. And he really is dead, but he has not yet passed
into transcendence. Perhaps you do not remember his interview
with you."
"I remember his voice, I think. But corpses do not speak."
The half-lifers, pale puppets in their cocoons, dreaming
their way into Heaven's information space as they died out
of this one. It was possible that they spoke to each other, but they never
spoke to the living.
"Only the body is dead," Nangpa said as he drew out nee
      RED DUST
      85


dies he had pushed into Miriam's neck. A fat bead of blood
clung to the end of each, and he carefully dropped them
into a brass jar whose throat smoked with white vapor.

"The body lives, in part," Dorje said testily. "It keeps the
brain alive, or else the soul would be released into a new
cycle. If the house is burned, the inhabitants do not die, but
they must live somewhere else. And so here. The machines
help the body, in its half-life. So our dear Master Norbhu
guides and enlightens us still."

"He is right," Pemba said, guiding Lee around the bowls
which held the smoky constellations of the yak-butter candle
oceans to the shrine. "See, young Han. Master Norbhu lives,
in his own way."

Light came on beneath the peaked roof of the shrine. It
shone on the homunculus which hung inside its fluid-filled
jar like a huge, ancient embryo. Bubbles rose from sutures
where tubes entered its ribcage, fanned around its bowed
chin, caressed its sunken cheeks. Fine wires trailed from the
corners of the homunculus's eyes, which were sealed by bluish
membranes, and from its ears and the base of its skull,
looping over its shoulder and winding once around its waist
before running into the base of the vessel and the black cube
on which the shrine stood.

This was not like the half-lifers, Lee thought. This was a
corpse, wired and preserved.

But then the homunculus stirred. It moved slowly and
jerkily. There was a cage of fine silvery filaments wrapped
closely around its limbs. It raised its head, swung to face
Lee. A hand came out, pressed against the glass of the vessel.
The nails were curled horny blades long as knives.

Lee heard the faint scratching they made against the glass,
and stepped backwards. For the first time he felt afraid. The
monks were old men, wise perhaps, but not strong enough
to hold him against his will. Monkey was some kind of gene-tailored
animal, and there were always words of control for
such creatures, perhaps the same words which had controlled
the warhorse. But the homunculus was neither living
nor dead. It was a ghost, a demon.
      86
      PAUL J. McAuLg¥


The homunculus's mouth did not move, but there was a
voice. Lee could not tell where it came from. It was not a
human voice. It filled his skull, deep and wise and patient
and remote.

--MONKEY'S LINEAGE IS NOT OF ANIMALS TURNED INTO MEN, it
said. HE IS OF MEN WHO HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE ATTRIBUTES OF
ANIMALS. YOUR GREAT SCIENTIST DESIGNED HIS ANCESTORS AS
SLAVES, BUT THEY WERE NOT A SUCCESS. LIKE OUR OWN DEAR
PEOPLE, THEY ARE TOO INDEPENDENT. YOU WILL UNLEARN THE
FALSE WICKED HABITS OF INDEPENDENCE HERE, YOUNG HAN. IT
HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE GAINED A NEW RECRUIT.

Lee said to Pemba, "Your master can see into my mind.
He must see that I do not belong here."

--EVEN THOUGH THE MOUNTAIN BECOMES THE SEA, WORDS
CANNOT OPEN ANOTHER'S MIND.

"The master quotes Mumon," Pemba said. "There is a
teaching behind all things, but it is not of the mind, it is

not Buddha, it is not things. That is what we learn here."
"Perhaps that kind of learning is too hard for me."

"The Way is always hard," Pemba said. "When it is not,

we know we are not on the Way."

"Miriam..."

"Your friend will serve too. She has much to offer, once
we have tamed her machines."

"If it is possible," Dorje said from the flickering shadows
beneath the throne.

"It is possible," Nangpa said. "But although it is possible,
she may not outlast our ministrations. So we must hurry,
Dorje, as I have told you."

"We work as we will," Dorje said.

Lee said, "And if she will not serve?" His voice echoed
from the painted vaults of the chamber's ceiling: he hadn't
meant to speak so loudly.

Pemba told him, "There is only one Way."

Lee ran. He dodged Pemba's feeble swipe and ran straight
for the low door at the far end of the hall. Monkey leaped
up. Lee shouted words of power, but Monkey only beat his
chest and hooted and chattered.
      RED DUST
      87


Lee wrenched free a pole which held one corner of a dusty
canopy pitched above a statue of many-armed Yamantanka
the Terrible. Monkey dodged Lee's wild swing and grabbed
the splintered butt of the pole. When Monkey pulled, Lee
slammed his shoulder hard against his flat frog-face. Monkey
lost all his breath. Lee wrestled the pole from his grip and
whacked him in the stomach.

Monkey fell on his knees, and Lee turned and raised the
pole above his head, shouted to the monks that they must
free Miriam or some bones would be broken.

The tall, thin monk, Dorje, stood between the two bowls
of candle flames. He pointed his silver wand at Lee, who
laughed. These foolish old monks and their half-animal servant
were feeble enemies.

And then lightning flashed along the wand and Lee was
flung backwards, every string in his body loosened.
Nineteen

T
he blow from Dorje's wand did not quite knock Lee
out, but for a long time he could hold no thought in
his head for more than a second. Slippery moments
fell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering beyond his
reach.
When time knitted up again, he was back in the little cell,
in the niche hollowed into sandstone. Pemba gave him food,
a purple broth with fibrous chunks, a bowl of tea with butter
swirled into it.
Pemba explained that the food was woven from plant stuff
grown in vats, using light piped down from the surface. The
lamasery was as old as the Tibetan occupation of Mars, from
the time when the air had been partly thickened but had
not yet been made breathable, when vast storms racked the
world from pole to pole. The Tibetans had tended the remaking
of Mars, and the Han, who had exiled them, had
then stolen their work: but the lamasery had survived. One
day its time would come again.
Lee had heard this sort of thing before, from the cowboys
he'd met on his travels from one danwei to another across
the vast plains. He knew better than to say that his ancestors
had been exiled too, in a vast exodus of hastily built gimcrack
ships of which perhaps only a tenth had finished the
voyage. That his own mother and father had disappeared
because of their political beliefs. That he was no more than
a pawn in a scheme of his great-grandfather.

88
      RED DUST
      89

Pemba, knitting slowly by the flickering light of the butter
lamp in its niche, butterfly glasses perched on his nose, told
Lee that he had once lived free, on the surface. The lamasery
had been forgotten, or if it had been remembered it was as
a place abandoned and in ruins. Pemba had been a cowboy
before he had been recruited into the lamasery, before he
had been given a new name and a new purpose. So too had
been Dorje and Nangpa, and perhaps even Master Norbhu.
It had been a very long time since anyone else had stumbled
into the hidden valley, Pemba said, and it dawned on Lee
that he was meant never to leave here. That he was meant
to live out his life in saffron contemplation, cleaning the
statues of the great hall and knitting scarves for them, playing
conch or drums or cymbals to the slow rhythms of
chants, tending the master in his wired jar.
Pemba said that it had taken him a long time to see the
light, but now it was with him to the end of his days. And
so it would be with Lee.
"I don't think so," Lee said.
"It was a very long time ago, but I remember my first
days very clearly. And what you say to me is just what I said
to Dorje." Pemba held up his knitting needles, and Lee
cringed from them.
Pemba chortled. "The wand does that to you. After only
one application, you fear even its image. It is a beginning,
young Han. You'll see."
Twenty


L

ee was still weak and feverish. After a while he slept,
and it seemed to him that the librarian came into the
cell and stooped over him, whispered in his ear that
his parents had been found. Lee woke with a start. Pemba
was asleep, breathing slowly and regularly with a faint whistle.
His knitting had fallen in his lap.

What had woken Lee was the voice of the King of the
Cats, faintly whispering in his head, fading in and out of
audibility. Lee sat up. His fever had gone. As he swun his
legs over the side of the sleeping niche, the King started to
play "Blue Suede Shoes"--not his version, but Carl Perkins's.

Pemba said, without opening his eyes, "You're awake.
That is good."

Carl Perkins began to fade in mid-song. But the voice that
spoke over the fade wasn't that of the King.

--He's gonna tell you I'm dead, Miriam Makepeace Mbele
said.

Pemba said, "Your friend is dead, but only in body. Her

spirit lives on..."

--More or less.

"...and like you, she will serve the lamasery well. Come
with me, young Han."

--There's this computer, Miriam said in Lee's ear as he

was led along narrow corridors and up winding stairs by
      RED DUST
      91

Pemba. They were going to the surface. There was a ceremony
to be performed.

--It not as old as I am, but it's close. It thought it could
seal me off, use me to fill in gaps in its functions. I think
someone tried to physically reprogram it once upon a time,
and nearly destroyed it. It still working, but only because
it's using the higher brain functions of this old monk it
hardwired into its systems. It wants my skills to open up
its physical plant again. Already I'm making connections
all over the planet. Say something, Wei Lee. Subvocalize.

"What did you do to me?" Lee whispered. "What has happened
to me?"

--I turned you on.

When she had kissed him, Miriam said, totipotent fuller-ene
viruses in her saliva had swarmed into Lee. They had
been multiplying inside him ever since, using gene therapy
to rewrite the DNA of muscle and epidermal cells to turn
them into little transceivers, spinning molecular networks
through his body and brain to form a parallel nervous system.

Although the narrow corridors were lit only by infrequent
butter lamps, Lee could see quite clearly, in bright, slightly
fuzzy shades of green. Arrays of optical sensors had been
inserted into his retinas; an image-processing network had
been constructed parallel to his own. Occasionally, ideograms
ghosted across his sight: command strings for activating
a whole range of functions that were being hardwired
into his optical chiasma.

Lee accepted these changes without alarm. Perhaps the
viruses had conditioned him to accept their work--he would
never know.

He mumbled, "You seem so calm."

--I've been dead before. It doesn't matter if I'm the real
Miriam or not, I've gotten used to that philosophical problem
over the centuries. There isn't time to explain the turns
I've taken, but watch out for any of my sisters. There at
least one down here, and she isn't on my side.
      92
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"Who is she working for?"

--I'm a licensed soldier of fortune. The Nexus owns copyright
on me, but anyone can buy an ovum and the training
program. You're near the surface, now. They're all there,
except the master, and he hardly counts. I doubt if the computer
left anything of him except perhaps his limbic functions.
Ever see the Wizard of Oz? I guess not. Well, the
master's not the danger. It's the little guys hiding behind
the curtain. Those two old guys, Dorje and Nangpa.

"I think you're wrong," Lee mumbled. "This whole place
is like a trap. The monks don't run it."

--You're coming up to a big chamber. Then the surface.
I'm up there, in a way. I'm going to help you escape.

Ahead of Lee, Pemba was silhouetted against a brilliant
glare that abruptly stepped down as the sensors built into
Lee's eyes compensated for the increase in light. The corridor
opened into a vast domed chamber a hundred meters
across, rising to fifty meters at its apex. It was lit by sunlight
falling through square apertures cut into the domed roof.
The walls were naked rock, with niches crammed with statues
of demons. There were demons with rolling eyes and
fierce fang-filled grins, bat-eared demons and elephant-nosed
demons and demons with human ears whose lobes
hung down to their pot bellies, pop-eyed demons and snake-eyed
demons and demons who had rolled their eyes back
into their skulls, demons with the beaks of crows or of parrots.
Forever frozen, hundreds of them, thousands, they
grinned and grimaced and ground their teeth, capered and
chortled and contorted their pot-bellied bodies into impossible
and obscene postures. Appliqu tangas hung from ceiling to
floor down the demon-filled walls, tongues of dusty cloth
whose brilliant colors had long faded. Drifts of red dust saddled
away across the floor, and wind blew through the chamber,
turning hundreds of prayer wheels that were scattered
everywhere. They made a dry roaring rattling, hollow drums
with printed prayers pasted inside them revolving around and
around in the constant wind, each revolution a prayer blown
      RED DUST
      93

out into the world. For every working wheel, there were two
that had fallen over or simply jammed.

--This place has seen better days, Miriam commented.
You're very near the surface now, Lee. The others have
taken my body there.

Footprints already stitched a diagonal path across the vast
prayer-haunted wind chamber. Lee followed Pemba through
an oval arch set in the rock and up a winding stair. Narrow
windows pierced the sandstone wall at every revolution of
the helical stair. Lee glimpsed a narrow valley falling away,
the steep slopes of wind-carved rock that enclosed it and
chaotic terrain beyond, slumped hills pitched every which
way.

Pemba had to stop at intervals to gain his breath. He
clutched a fold of his fluttering orange robe over his shaven
head. At last the stair opened into the back of a shallow cave.
Outside was a wide space littered with rocks; each rock had
a tail of sand pointing east. Something crackled under Lee's
boots. It was a fragment of dry bleached bone.

There was an altar in the center of the garden of rocks
and bones, and from each corner of the altar thin pillars of
blue aromatic smoke rose straight up in the still air. The
small sun shone high overhead, a coin of platinum fire
stamped into the neon pink sky. A body lay on the altar. The
two old monks, Dorje and Nangpa, were working on it with
hatchets.

They wore only breechclouts, and their skinny chests and
arms were spotted and streaked with vivid red blood. Monkey
sat to one side, softly tapping a small drum he held between
his big feet. A flock of ravens hopped and shifted on white-stained
boulders heaped at the far side of the arena.

--I've had all kinds of funerals, but I guess this has to
be the most ecologically sound.

Lee didn't want to get any closer to the butchery, but
Pemba took his arm. "You must help with the sky burial,"
Pemba said. "You must see how inhuman your friend was."

--I'm a good deal more human than their High Lama.
Even Monkey more human than that.
      94
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"Go on, young man!" Pemba brandished a knitting needle.
Lee laughed. The trick wouldn't work twice.

Pemba frowned, stuck the knitting needle inside the
sleeve of his robes, pulled out Dorje's silver wand. He
pointed it at Lee, who felt an icy worm squirm in the pit of
his stomach.

--One thing I can't stand, Miriam remarked, is fighting
at my own funeral. Unless I'm the one doing the fighting.

Monkey's drumming suddenly shifted tempo, from a slow
soft tapping to a more insistent rhythm. He uttered a series
of soft yelps, then a humming noise. It was a tune the King
of the Cats sometimes played: "Sympathy for the Devil."

Suddenly, everything seemed to go into slow motion. The
viruses had built lines of communication to Lee's muscles
and to his senses that worked at the speed of light, not
sound: now he was using them. He plucked the silver wand
from Pemba's hand and threw it away, and ran full tilt at
the altar.

The two old monks turned, bloody hatchets raised. Lee
easily dodged Dorje's graceful slow swipe and slammed the
heel of his palm into the monk's nose, smashing it flat and
driving bone fragments into his brain. Nangpa's hatchet
came down as Lee swung Dorje's body around: the hatchet
clopped into its back. Monkey's drum bounced off Nangpa's
head with a hollow thud. The monk staggered and dropped
the hatchet into the ruin of Miriam's dismembered corpse.

Lee hesitated, and Nangpa grabbed the hatchet in a wild
swing that nearly eviscerated Lee. Things were back to normal
speed again. Monkey was shaking his shaggy head, poking
a long forefinger in his ear.

A burning pain pierced Lee's shoulder: he yelled when
Pemba pulled out the knitting needle. Black shadows flapped
overhead as Pemba stabbed at Lee again. Lee managed to
kick Pemba in the knee and the monk fell down.

Strong wings beat about Lee; there were ravens everywhere,
settling on the altar, on Miriam's corpse, on Dorje's
sprawled body. Nangpa was crawling over the rocky ground
      RED DUST
      95

towards the cave, a raven flapping at his neck and pecking
at his shaven scalp.

--Kill them! Kill them all! Quickly! Quickly, Lee! Something's
going wrong...

Lee pulled up a flat rock and staggered across to Nangpa.
The monk's pale shrivelled face turned to look at Lee, who
felt a spasm of physical revulsion. He dropped the rock to
the ground instead of on to Nangpa's head, pushed the old
monk over with the toe of his boot. Nangpa fell slowly, in

stages, curling up like a shrivelled spider.

--Do it Lee! Do it now!

"I'm not what you want me to be!"

The cry came from somewhere deep inside Lee. It had
been building all his life, all the time he had been indebted
to his great-grandfather. It was the store of all the shame
and loss of face, its fragile membrane of deference, self-

effacement, a misguided sense of duty, finally broken.
"I'm not what you want..."

--BUT YOU ARE, YOUNG HAN.

The voice came from the same place inside his head as
had Miriam's.

--YOUR FRIEND WAS SUBTLE, BUT NOT SUBTLE ENOUGH.

Monkey shuddered and stiffened on the other side of the
altar. His face was locked in a rictus snarl. Something was
looking through his eyes, looking at Lee. Something that
spoke to Lee inside his head.

--HOW INTERESTING THIS NEW TECHNOLOGY IS. YOU WILL
MAKE A FINE SERVANT, EVEN BETTER THAN THE HOMINID SERIES.
PERHAPS THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR ALL THESE
YEARS, ALL THESE CENTURIES.

Lee ran.

He made the stairs at the back of the cave, fell around a
whole turn, picked himself up and heard Monkey's feet slapping
above him and ran on down, banging from side to side.
He was halfway across the dusty hall when he dared look
back, saw Monkey loping after him and ran on, pushing
prayer wheels out of his way, raising clouds of red dust. His
breath burned in his throat.
      96
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

--YES, YOUNG HAN. YES. COME TO ME. COME TO ME.
A dozen low doors led off the far end of the chamber. Lee
chose one and turned right and left at random as he ran
down the narrow branching corridor. Or so he thought. For
the corridor ended in a darkened room and Lee ran straight
through it into the Great Hall.
--WELCOME, said the voice in Lee's head.
The canopy had been reset above the statue of Yamantanka
the Terrible. Lee snatched a pole from it again as he
ran down the aisle.
Monkey loped out from shadows to one side of the great
golden Buddha. He pressed his palms together, then hurled
himself at Lee. Before Lee could raise his weapon he was
crushed and lifted up, his face pressed into the coarse pelt
that covered Monkey's barrel chest. Lee got a hand under
Monkey's chin and pushed. They fell backwards against one
of the yak-butter candle oceans. The bowl tipped, splashing
molten butter and flaming wicks. Monkey sprang up,
screaming and chattering, brushing at the little flames that
clung to his pelt.
Drenched in hot butter, his clothes smouldering, Lee saw
his chance. He only had a moment, and knew he must not
make a mistake.
--YOU CANNOT HURT ME WITH THAT SILLY LITTLE WEAPON,
YOUNG HAN.
Lee swung the pole.
The ancient wood was as hard as iron. It rang against the
cylinder which housed the undead corpse of Master Norbhu.
Glass starred and the shock shivered the pole to flinders.
Lee stepped back, raised his foot, and kicked at the starred
glass. It broke.
Fluid spurted and the corpse sagged in its net of fine
wires. Connections broke in brief constellations of snapping
sparks. Overhead, all the electric lights went out. Perhaps
only a chance current or a final spasm raised the corpse's
chicken-claw hand, but Lee thought it was something more.
Like everything in the lamasery, the corpse had been a slave
to the true master, the ancient computer which Miriam had
      RED DUST
      97

tried to subvert. Miriam had been wrong to suggest that the
old master of the lamasery had lost all but his limbic functions.
Something had remained: he had scratched at the
glass, begged to be set free. And Lee had freed him, and now
Miriam was truly dead.

Monkey lay on the floor, red pelt pulled into slick points
by clotting butter, singed to the hide in half a dozen patches.
Lee helped him to his feet, and the simian servant came up
with docile grace. Lee found a butter lamp and had Monkey
lead him to the dead, dark kitchens. He took what he
needed, then found his way back up to the surface.
Twenty-one


p

emba was waiting in the shadows in the cave at the
head of the stairwell, but ,Lee had half expected that.
He grabbed the old monk s arm and twisted it until
the hatchet clattered to the rocks. He let it lie there; he'd
had enough of weapons.

Pemba sat down heavily. He was bleeding from nose and
ears, and two bloody tears streaked his cheeks. Monkey had
to help him walk. Nangpa was dead. He had been under the
thrall of the computer longer than Pemba, and the shock of
the broken connection had been too great. His body lay near
that of Dorje; ravens had already pecked out their eyes and
tongues.

Lee did not entirely trust Pemba, but he could not leave
him for the ravens. He and Monkey took turns helping the
half-comatose monk along, but progress was slow. They
were only halfway down the narrow green valley that
dropped away from the tabletop plateau when night fell.

Lee lit a fire, as he had been about to do when the monks
had come upon him. Monkey vanished, came back with half
a dozen ice mice and a russet-pelted rock hare, and a handful
of dark, odorous wild garlic bulbs. He lay the corpses and
the garlic on a flat stone and shuffled backwards, sat in a
half-squat at the edge of the dancing firelight. Two pinpricks
of reflected fire shone beneath his heavy brow; his flat wide
nostrils snuffled as he watched Lee skin and clean the hare.
The hare's carcass took a long time to roast and came out


98
      RED DUST
      99


half-raw, half-burnt. But, taking alternate bites of meat and
pungent garlic bulbs, Lee could have eaten ten times his
share.

Monkey tried to feed Pemba, but the monk wouldn't eat.
His eyes were filmed with white. His cheeks had sunken and
the lines around his eyes had deepened, like cracks in drying
mud. The skin of his hand, when Lee took it to feel his pulse,
was dry and cold, loose over brittle bones. His pulse was a
rapid feeble flutter.

The computer had done more than rewire his brain, Lee
thought. It had kept all the monks alive long past their natural
span. He wondered just how old Pemba really was. He
had talked of snow, but except at the poles, where no one
lived, snow had not fallen on Mars for at least two centuries.
And how old had Dorje and Nangpa been?

"I'm sorry, young Master," Pemba said, startling Lee, who
told him to rest. But Pemba wanted to tell his story. "I left
the mountains because I killed a man, and I became a roving
cowboy and killed another. I sought to become a monk to
cleanse myself of blood-debt before the wheel of my life
turned, but the gods saw to my punishment. I was on my
way to the capital when I rested in this little valley, and was
taken by Dorje and Nangpa. Master Norbhu had just died.
Long before then the Kailas lamasery had been abandoned
by all but its computer, and what had once served the community
of the lamasery now gathered a community to itself,
at first to save the lamasery, but later to save itself. It became
the master, but without heart, without Buddhism. It was a
spider, brooding in its web, its poison working in its bound
victims to keep them neither dead nor alive. Our hearts
darkened, our eyes were its eyes, our minds its mind. When
my people came, young Master, Mars was a wilderness of
rock and dust, without breath or heart. My people made it
breathe; my people gave it life. Every rock and stone is holy,
for they have been changed by the quickening of the world.
The heart of my people, their soul and their lifeblood, is
Buddhism. It sustained them through the hard years when
Mars turned green, and only one child in ten lived. But when
      100
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


the deserts flowered and the Han came to take what they
claimed to be theirs, my people lost heart, and the monks
of many lamaseries lost discipline, and abandoned their
places. Still, they said that one day the Lord of Light, the
Buddha of the Future, the Maitreya Buddha, would step out
on to the face of Mars. I had forgotten that, until now."

It took Pemba a long time to say this, and when he had
finished he did not speak again, but turned his face to the
shadows beyond the ring of firelight.

Monkey left a charred haunch by Pemba, like an offering,
and swallowed the ice mice one by one, skins and all, like
furry grapes. Lee shook out the cloth he had taken, a gorgeous
brocade which had been the cloak of a snake-haired
demon, wrapped himself in it, pulled down the hood of his
chuba, and fell asleep.

It was very easy to sleep, and there were no dreams.
Twenty-two


H

e woke at first light. A faint frost mantled the brocade
cloak and frost tipped every blade of grass in the little
. meadow. The sound that had woken him was Monkey
slapping earth with his big bare feet, making a keening
sound as he rocked Pemba.

The old monk was dead. His dry, shrunken corpse could
have been dead a hundred years. As Lee gently took the body
from Monkey, the shoulder of the valley fell away from the
face of the sun and the air was filled with light.

Lee helped Monkey cover the body with rocks, and covered
the rocks with sandy soil and strips of turf. Jackals
would dig it out before long, but the gesture was entirely
human. Monkey stamped down the turves and made obeisance
to his dead master, and then he and Lee set off down
the valley.


101
Twenty-three


M

onkey loped ahead of Lee in ever widening circles
that day. They climbed the domed hill that blocked
.the entrance of the hidden valley, and headed north
into the chaotic terrain beyond.

This was the land which had fed the huge river which had
carved the Red Valley in lost ages before man had come to
Mars. Confined aquifers, sealed above by thick, permanent
ice, sealed below by self-compaction, had built up high pressures
which had at last burst forth in head zones. As meltwater
discharged in vast torrents, the land above the aquifers
had slumped and collapsed, a self-perpetuating process that
had ended only when the hydraulic gradient had been reduced.
If Mars was to live, the floods must come again.

Lee and Monkey trekked through a maze of long dry valleys
that lay between low hills which ran in irregular shoals
in every compass direction. Dry scrub grew on the flanks of
the hills. Creosote bush and scrub oak; twisted desert pine
with papery bark and a salting of live leaf buds like vivid
green sparks; tarweed, chaparral pea, jumping cactus, cheat
grass. The valleys were jumbled mazes of huge boulders, or
parched tongues of alkaline salt flats broken only by tufts of
soldier grass.

A thin cold wind knifed across the valleys. Monkey did not
seem to notice it, but Lee was glad of the chuba he had
taken, a gown with wide sleeves made of heavy brown wool.


102
      RED DUST
      103

He wrapped the hood close around his head, for all the world
like the dead monks he had left behind.

The silences of the desert landscape of Mars, hardly
touched by the skim of life, helped cleanse him of guilt. He
was learning to control his rewired nervous system, and the
King of the Cats and his music was clear and close as he
walked.

That night, Lee took shelter in the weathered skull of an
archiosaur. One of Cho Jinfeng's failed experiments had been
the creation of animals that under Mars's low gravity had
grown bigger than any creature that had ever lived on the
Earth. But the archiosaurs had not been able to adapt to the
changing climate of Mars. Ice mice and other small mammals
had feasted on their eggs, and within a century they
had died out.

The skull was half sunken in sand, tilted sideways like a
bony galleon beached on a dry seabed. It had been etched
by sandstorms and stained by iron oxides. Grasses made a
mohican crest along the top of the cranium. Lee camped in
the half-buried circle of an eye socket. He piled a bed of dry
grasses in the channel which had held the optic nerve and
built a fire of juniper wood so dry and old it was almost
fossilized, built it so high that sparks flew into the starry
sky like birthing galaxies.

Monkey sat at the edge of the fire's flickering shadows;
that night he brought no food. Once or twice when Lee
looked up Monkey was gone, but the next time Lee looked
he was there again as if he had never been away.

But in the morning Monkey was gone for good. Lee performed
t'ai chi exercises to rid himself of the frosty stiffness
of the night, trampling the warm ashes of his fire as he made
the slow, flowing forms.

As he walked that day he kept glimpsing Monkey's rufous
body at the edge of his vision, far off and moving fast. But
when he looked it was nothing but a kit fox, or a tuft of
frost-burned soldier grass, or the flash of sunlight against
some far chiselled cliff face.

All that day, Lee walked with a diminishing sense of Mon-
      104
      PAUL J. McAULEY


key's company, and when he made camp that night he knew
he was alone at last. Except for the sound of the King, and
the myriad viruses that coursed through his blood, each a
word waiting to be spoken.
Twenty-four


T

he yak had fallen down a scree slope into a deep little
crevasse. As Lee watched, it scrambled halfway up the
slope, hoofs striking sparks, until it could climb no
more. It stood shivering as its legs slid apart on loose stones,
and then it rolled back down and bounced to its feet. It
trotted up and down at the bottom of the gully, then tried
the slope again, and again stopped halfway up and rolled
back down to the bottom.

It was close to sunset, that time when the flying moons
were brighter than the sun, and the temperature was falling
fast. Lee glimpsed a shape lurking amongst boulders on the
other side of the gully, took a stone and lofted it, saw a dire-wolf
slink away from the clatter. Come nightfall, the yak
would have its throat torn out; by morning, nothing would
be left but bloody bones.

The yak tossed its head and looked at Lee with mournful
eyes, as if fully aware of its fate. It had a shaggy coat of black
hair down to its knees, wide forward-curving horns, a long
face with a white stripe down the muzzle. There was a big
brass ring through its nose, and red ribbons plaited into the
bush of its long tail.

Lee eased off his pack, untied the length of rope that
belted his chuba, and crabbed his way down the scree slope.

When he reached the bottom of the slope the yak cantered
forward and tried to knock him over so it could gore him
with its sharp-tipped horns. But after he slipped the rope


105
      106
      PAUL J. McAJLE¥


through its nose ring it became docile, and he was able to
lead it straight up the scree slope, pulling hard whenever it
stopped.

Lee stumbled over the edge out of breath, and as he
turned to haul the yak the last few meters, something
launched itself from shadows beneath a tumble of boulders.
The yak bellowed in terror and made a run for it, tail in the
air. Lee was dragged on his belly over hard stones until he
remembered to let go of the rope. He got to his feet with
blood in his eyes from a cut on the bridge of his nose. The
dire-wolf growled a dozen meters away, a ruff of coarse hair
raised around its humped shoulders, its ears flat on its long
skull. It must have sneaked around while Lee had been rescuing
the yak, and must be desperate, too, to even think of
attacking a man.

Lee backed away, step by step. The dire-wolf followed,
flowing like water. It favored its left front leg, which had
probably been broken and healed badly. Lee threw a handful
of stones, but the dire-wolf dodged each one and turned back
towards Lee, its eyes like yellow lamps. It was between Lee
and his pack, which was where he'd set the big broad-bladed
kitchen knife when he'd unbelted his chuba.

Then something cracked past his ear, and the dire-wolf's

head exploded.

Lee turned so quickly he fell over. Atop a crater ridge a
kilometer away, a pony and rider were silhouetted against
the red sun. The pony reared on two legs, and then it was
galloping down the ridge. Lee barely had time to find his
knife before pony and rider were upon him in a cloud of red
dust

"How you doing?" said the cowboy.

He leaned on the front grip of the high, square saddle of

his bay pony. A short-barrelled rifle rested in the crook of
his arm. With his free hand he pushed up the brim of his
black felt hat: a lean dark weathered face, with bright blue
eyes and a white smile, a week's growth of blond beard, long
red-blond hair tied back with a leather thong. Despite the
sunset chill, his leather vest was open down his hairy chest.
      RED DUST
      107
Lee carefully set down the knife and bowed, and started
to express his thanks.
"No need for that," the cowboy said. "I'd hope you'd do
the same for me." He was called Redd--it was not his real
name, of course, but most who rode the dusty ranges had
one reason or another to lose or forget their real names. He
was helping ride a herd to the capital.
Lee introduced himself. "I also have business at the capital.''
"You want to try and ride that yak back along with me?
Maybe we can get you a real mount at the camp."
"Pardon me?"
"The yak you rescued," Redd said, with exaggerated patience.
"I do not think that would be very suitable. It is not my
place to make a suggestion, but I notice that your saddle is
very capacious..."
"Gee, do you Han always have to be so damned formal?"
Lee felt his face heat. He had been talking to Redd as a
master talks to a servant, for Redd was a Yankee, and that
was how he had been taught to treat Yankees. He said, "I'm sorry. It is not my
place. But I admit your rifle makes me
nervous."
"This little thing?" Redd raised the weapon over his head,
spun it twice, and plunged it into the sheath that hung at
his mount's withers. All this before Lee could draw a breath.
"Don't mind me," Redd said. "I've been out on the range so
long I've forgotten any manners I might have had. You're
heading for the capital, you say? Well, we're shorthanded
since old Stinkfoot was trampled a week ago. There was this
dust storm?"
Like every Yankee Lee had met, Redd had a habit of ending
everything he said with a rising inflection, as if constantly
unsure that his perception of the world was shared
by anyone else. Well, it had been taken from them after all,
and their failure turned into a victory, however temporary.
Lee said, "You offer me a job?"
"Take it or leave it. If you take it you can lead the yak
      108
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


back or ride it, it's all the same to me. You want to walk it's
north by northwest, about three klicks or so?" Redd pointed,
aslant the setting sun. "You do want to walk, I won't wait
on you, but the yak'll know the way. Unless it falls into
another gully. It's kind of dumb, even as yaks go."

Lee didn't stop to consider how much choice he had. For
you earned your keep in the high plains or you died, and
although he could live off the land for a few weeks, he knew
that he would grow weaker by the day, and that it would
take more than a few weeks to walk to the capital.

The yak hadn't run far, and was grazing on a patch of
moss it had scrabbled up from the sandy soil. It let Lee get
close enough to grab the rope which hung from its nose
ring, and then it was easy. Lee put two fingers in the yak's
sensitive nostrils and twisted hard, his shoulders against the
beast's flank. It went down on its knees, and Lee jumped
astride it, clinging behind the hump of muscle over its
shoulders. The yak got up, puffing like an indignant dowager.

"Not bad," Redd said, and spat a squirt of brown saliva.
"Now let's see how you ride."
Twenty-five


T

hey followed the trail left by the herd: tufts of soldier
grass munched to the ground; dried pats spotting the
trampled sand, big fierce black beetles already at work
on them, scurrying this way and that with their loads of
dung.

Lee told Redd a little of his story, glossing over Miriam's
part. He didn't want everyone to know that he was carrying
a cargo of valuable fullerene viruses. Besides, he hadn't
enough breath to tell even half of what had happened to
him. The yak bounced him around even over level ground,
of which there was not much, and his testicles were rhythmically
hammered between the yak's ridged back and his
own pelvis.

Redd heard Lee out, then said, "I'd keep quiet, if I were
you. Especially about the bit with the monks. Even if it's
true..."

"I don't need to lie!"

"So you found a lamasery hidden since Mars was changed,
with the original monks..."

"They were all really old, but I don't think any of them
were original."

"These guys, centuries old. They kill your friend, feed her
mind into their computer, dismember her body. You kill two
monks and the half-lifer and escape with the help of an ape-man.
The other monk disintegrates before your eyes as soon
as you get out of the place."


109
      110
      PAUL J. McAuLr.¥

"It wasn't exactly like that," Lee said.
Redd shrugged. "I'll be quiet."
"Good. Some of the guys are kind of religious."
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Even if he was a
Yankee, Redd was like the cowboys Lee had seen in the markets
of small danweis: compact, muscular, taciturn men who
wouldn't haggle over the prices of the trinkets they sold.
You heard that they fought duels to the death, that they
hunted runaways from the danweis for sport, that they were
the scum of Mars.
Night fell, hard and sudden, but there was enough starlight
for Lee's enhanced vision to show him a patchy infrared
landscape of green light and deep shadows.
Clades of viruses, spinning through his blood, climbing
his nerves. Turning him into something else. Into what Miriam
had been, perhaps; and perhaps they'd make him as
long-lived as his great-grandfather and the other Ten
Thousand Years, although that was little comfort when he
didn't know where his next meal was coming from.
At last Lee saw the glow of the cowboys' fire, small and
fierce as a star fallen to the wide, wide surface of the world.
Yaks, their long faces like burning skulls in Lee's enhanced
sight, were tethered by their nose rings to chains staked
amongst heather and trampled grass. They snorted and
stirred restlessly as Lee and Redd rode towards the fire at
the centre of their concentric circles.
"This is it," Redd said.
Boxes and baskets of woven grass were scattered over the
ground. There were a few rough shelters of tarpaulin or
blankets draped over wicker frames. A black dog barked at
Lee's mount; it was tied to a stake and wore a ruff of red
wool.
As for the cowboys, there were a round dozen of them,
all men, mostly wearing chubas over denim shirts and trousers.
They were all smaller than Lee, but he didn't doubt
that any one of them could pull him limb from limb in a
moment. Firelight showed faces seamed and tanned as hard
      RED DUST
      111
as saddle leather, coarse black hair greased back into braids
tied with tags and coloured ribbons--the tags were chips of
silicon circuitry.
Their leader was an old Tibetan who called himself Hawk.
While Redd told him how he had found Lee, Hawk took Lee's
face in his horny, cracked hands and held Lee's gaze with
eyes like black bright currants sunk in the creased baked
dough of his face. He had a big belly, and long white hair
that straggled halfway down his back. After a long minute,
he speared a pair of glasses from a breast pocket and strung
them over his ears and nose. The lenses were little round
mirrors, and they distortingly reflected Lee's face as Hawk
peered at him.
Half the cowboys crowded up behind Hawk; the rest
hadn't bothered to leave their places around the fire. One of
the onlookers said, "You think we need this yellow-faced boy
scout?"
"You be quiet, White Eye," Hawk said. "I'm thinking it
over."
"They smell funny and Spock the critters," White Eye said.
He smiled at Lee. Half his teeth were missing; the rest were
blackened stumps. His right eye was capped with the frost
of a cataract--a common complaint amongst cowboys, who
spent most of their lives out in the ultraviolet-drenched sunlight.
"Nothing personal you understand," he added.
"Steal too," someone else said.
"He'll ride with us," Hawk said, and put away his mirrored
spectacles.
"Aw, Hawk..."
Hawk put an arm around Lee's shoulders. "He interests
me. And we need a replacement for Stinkfoot, and you all
know what they say about the Hah. We can trust him, you
think, Redd?"
Redd shrugged.
Hawk told Lee, "You'll get a daily wage, let's call it twenty
yuan. No share in profits, but you can hardly expect that."
Twenty yuan a day was about a tenth of what Lee had
earned at Bitter Waters. But money wasn't the point. The
        112
        PAUL J. MCAULEY


point was that Lee's great-grandfather wouldn't expect him
to ride into the capital amongst a herd of yaks. He said, "It's
a deal."

"Someone give him tea," Hawk said.

Lee sat a little way off from the roaring fire. A tin mug
of tea with a lump of rancid butter dissolving in it warmed
his cramped hands. The cowboys talked quietly amongst
themselves, passing around a long-stemmed pipe of marijuana
and telling tall tales. After a while, Redd brought Lee
a rough blanket. It reeked of horse sweat, but Lee took it
gratefully: it was piercingly cold out under the stars.

"Sleep," Redd said. "Long ride tomorrow, and you'll need

to get up before everyone else."

"Oh?"

"I guess I did forget to tell you. Stinkfoot was our cook."
Twenty-six

L
ee woke to a frail thread of song. It was the grey hour
before dawn. Jupiter was a blurred diamond low on the
horizon. The fire was down to glowing ashes. The
singer was a long way off, out amongst the circles of tethered
yaks. His voice was high and plaintive, rising at the end
of each line in a weird ululation. He was singing in the
Country and Western mode that the King of the Cats had
sometimes affected (although of course as with everything
else the King had stamped it with his own persona). Hear the lonesome
whippoorwill...
By the time Lee had revived the fire and set a pot of water
to boil, the rest of the cowboys were up and about and the
horizon was just falling below the rim of the sun. Redd
showed Lee where the supplies were kept, helped him brew
tea dark as beetroot juice, and fry cakes of oatmeal and butter
on a sheet of metal set directly on the fire. Cowboys
drifted up, took food and tea without comment, drifted away.
"We always sing to our herds," Redd told Lee, and explained
that the yaks, used to ranging free in small groups,
grew nervous and contrary when herded together. At night,
almost anything could Spock them, kit foxes or a dire-wolf, a
change in wind direction, a meteor. Song calmed them.
Lee thought about the pop arias and commercials that
had constantly echoed around and about the Bitter Waters danwei, and said he
knew what Redd meant. He added, "I
113
      114
      PAUL J. McAuLE¥
know plenty of good songs. Maybe you'll let me sing to your
animals."
As Redd showed Lee how to saddle up, they fell into a
friendly discussion about whether the King of the Cats had
transcended Country and Western as he had transcended so
much else. Or at least, Lee did most of the talking and Redd
smiled a lot, and when Lee had more or less run through
praising the King of the Cats, Redd commented that the
King sounded like an outgrowth of Country and Western,
no more special than that. Lee laughed, and said when they
made camp he'd teach Redd some of the King's style and
then see what he said.
"Let's get to camp first," Redd said, and swung himself
up into the saddle of his skittish bay pony. "The longer it
takes to get the yaks to market the thinner they are and the
less they're worth. Hawk said I should let you know that!"
Then he kicked his pony into a trot, and left Lee standing.
The cowboys made speed that day. Their ambling herd
moved surprisingly quickly over the red stony plain. Impacted
sand, rocks, shale, spattered with the broken circles
of ancient craters. They were paralleling hills that rose, wave
after wave, to the north.
Riding dead Stinkfoot's old, barrel-bellied pony, which
was laden before and behind its high saddle with bundled
cooking implements and sacks of barley meal, Lee followed
as best he could. The pony's lurching sway-backed amble
was making him distinctly motion sick, but he was happy.
Just to be moving was enough. Everything that had happened
to him or that cast a shadow into his future--the
flight from Bitter Waters, Miriam's death, the viruses, his
great-grandfather's plots--dissolved in the eternal moment.
Lee was very young.
Far ahead, the cowboys were strung in a loose V behind
the herd of yaks, moving in a gritty rolling cloud of red dust
and clatter of wooden bells. The men called to each other
in high yodels, now one and now another racing forward to
cut a stray back into the herd. Only rare clumps of air lichen
punctuated the cold desert, and those were stunted, frost
      RED DUST
      115

blasted specimens, yet these plains were where the yaks
spent most of their lives. A kind of saxifrage moss grew just
beneath the surface of the sandy soil, and yaks scraped it up
and gulped it down, grit and all. The cowboys had to ride
back and forth to keep the herd moving whenever it passed
over an especially rich patch.

It was hard, dirty, difficult, dangerous work. Yaks were
temperamental beasts, bad-tempered and unreliable, switching
from sullen stubbornness to high nervousness and back
at the twitch of a tufted tail. Because they had to fend for
themselves in winter, their long sharp horns were untrimmed.
Orange spittle streaked their muzzles. When a yak was
nervous, it yawned to show strings of dirty orange mucus
inside a black mouth; when it was getting ready to run it
shook its head and spit went everywhere. Their coats of long
hair hid long legs: a yak looked bulkier than a cow, but could
be as skittish as an antelope. And they could run for ever if
they wanted. Half their bodies were packed with lungs; they
were just about the only animal species that hadn't had to
be spliced and diced to adapt it to Mars's thin cold atmosphere.

Lee picked up from Redd what was needed more by imitation
than instruction; herding left little time for conversation.
They rode trailing point behind the left flank of the
herd, eyes open for any yak that decided it had had enough
of the company of its peers. Escape bids were discouraged
by cutting in on the stray and physically blocking its path.
Not as easy as Redd made it seem, Lee discovered the first
time he tried it. Yaks were as nimble as the cowboys' ponies,
and knew how to use their long sharp horns. Whips were
used as a last resort; it could make the yak panic and charge
off at an unstoppable lick, tail held high. If you were really
unlucky, nearby yaks caught the same panic.

The cowboys were heading towards the round-up camps
outside the capital, but they had other business that was
taking them in a wide arc to the west. Lee guessed that it
was something to do with the anarchists, for where else
would the cowboys have gotten their silicon jewellery, their
      116
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


penchant for Hank Williams, Roy Rogers and Roy Acuff?.

Constant wind sent drifts of red dust skimming across the
plain. Towards noon, a pod of sky seeders rode the wind out
from the foothills: big ragged blue-green blimps with rudimentary
nerve nets, each moving inside a distinct haze of
extruded cyanobacteria, remnants from the time when the
newly outgassed atmosphere of Mars, rich in carbon dioxide
and little else, had been made breathable. Cho Jinfeng had
spliced them from sponge and coral genes. Cyanobacteria
constantly multiplied within them, producing oxygen and
fixing atmospheric nitrogen--hydrogen produced as a byproduct
of nitrogen fixation filled membranous pockets and
gave the things lift. Excess blue-green filaments were extruded
and fertilized the land over which the sky seeders
drifted.

Lee had only seen sky seeders once before, and dropped
behind the herd as they traversed directly overhead. Even as
he watched, a cluster of black darts zoomed out of the west.
They were conchie killer drones. The other cowboys had
seen them too, and rose on their stirrups, calling to each
other.

The drones hurtled through the pod of sky seeders before
the plant-animals had time to react, smashing great holes
in their inflated bodies and setting fire to their hydrogen
sacs. Half the sky seeders started to sink, trailing smoke and
blue flames. The drones somersaulted and made another
pass. Wounded sky seeders blew apart with sharp explosions
that shivered echoes from the foothills. The rest were shedding
ballast--vast green clouds of cyanobacteria--as they
tried to rise into higher, faster winds. But the drones cut
through them again, once, twice. A mother sky seeder tried to
place its bulk between the drones and its two pups--a drone
smashed her in half and dispersed lightnings that blew up the
pups in balls of blue flame.

The drones swooped low over the cowboys and the herd,
and then they were dwindling westward, even as the burning
remnants of the sky seeders tumbled to the plain. Globs of
cyanobacteria were raining down everywhere, and the yaks
      RED DUST
      117

had scattered and were greedily grazing on this unexpected
manna; it took a long time to get them moving again.

"Bastards," Redd said to Lee, when they briefly worked
alongside each other, chivvying a yak away from a singed

slab of sky seeder.

"The drones?"

"Their masters. They won't rest until they've destroyed
the world, and it isn't theirs to destroy."

Lee, amazed by the cowboy's bold opinions, said, "The
Emperor has decreed otherwise." In the past year Lee hadn't
dared to express his own Sky Roader sympathies to anyone
but Guoquiang and Xiao Bing, and then only well away from
the rest of the danwei.

Redd managed to loop a rope through the yak's nose ring.
The other end was tied to his saddle. The yak bellowed but
reluctantly left the feast. He shouted, "The world isn't the
Emperor's. It's ours. And no one asked us what we want."
Then he kicked his pony into a trot, dragging the yak after
him. Lee would have ridden after him to ask what he meant,
but Hawk yelled for him to give a hand, and he had to turn
away.
Twenty-seven

T
he herd covered less than twenty kilometers that day.
When the cowboys finally made camp, at a place little
different from where they had started, Lee felt as if
most of the territory coated his whole skin, all the way inside
him to his stomach. Patches had rubbed raw on the insides
of his sweat-slippery thighs where they'd gripped the high
saddle.
Redd handed Lee a pair of chaps with supple leather
patches on the thighs, and Lee thanked him.
Redd said, "Are you ready to sing, Comrade Lee?"
"After cooking, I should think I'd have trouble lifting the
guitar."
"Plenty of time to practice before we reach the roundup.
Then you will sing. I told the others, and they're eager to
hear new songs. We'll be pleased if your King of the Cats
charms the yaks half as well as Hank Williams."
"He is more your King than mine. One of your ancestors,
after all."
"I'm a Martian," Redd said. "All cowboys are Martians.
That's why so few of them are Han. You might be a Martian,
Wei Lee, I don't know yet. As for the King of the Cats, he's
just a dead guy from another world. Maybe I'll think something
of him if you can out-sing the rest of us."
Ordinarily, Lee would have sprung to passionate defence
of the King. But now.., he was simply too exhausted. He
found it hard enough to stay awake to cook the cowboys'

118
      RED DUST
      119
supper: smashed barley grains, dehydrated vegetables and
fatty salt meat boiled up in a big black kettle, yak bones
charred on the embers until their marrows bubbled and ran.
"Good food," Hawk pronounced. His beard shone with
grease. "I told you," he said to the cowboys, "that they make
the best cooks. You come with me, young Han, and I'll show
you how to make tea strong enough to sink such good food
and lay the dust."
As he shaved tea from a black brick into the kettle which
had held the stew, Hawk said quietly, "What do you think
of young Redd?"
"He has been good to me. After all, he saved my life."
"I've seen you talking with him. And I've been wondering
just why you're out here."
"I was travelling to the capital."
"Do tell." Hawk licked the blade of his knife, folded it up
and put it away. His long white hair made a kind of cowl
around his lined face. "You put water in the kettle until it's
half full, bring it to the boil, then put in the butter." When
he had set the kettle in the middle of the cooking fire he
said, "Young Redd's a firebrand. A couple of herd bosses have
already fired him from their crews. I find him.., entertaining.
He reminds me of myself when I was young, when the
Emperor and the Ten Thousand Years began to deal with
the Earth. The conchies sent missionaries amongst us, and
we lynched most of them, but there were always more, all
looking almost exactly alike. There were riots, I remember,
and the Army of the People's Mouths was sent against us. I
was amongst those who called for the strike to hold, and it
did. We took away half the capital's meat supply, and pretty
soon the Ten Thousand Years gave in--no more missionaries.
But the conchies won in the end. They only had to
wait. These days even cowboys give up their lives to dream
their way into Heaven, for all Redd's fine sentiments. The
difference between him and my younger self is that I was
one of many, but he's one of a vanishing breed."
Lee, wondering what Hawk was trying to tell him, said
nothing.
      120
      PAUL J. McAuLrY


"What I'm telling you, young Hah, is that Redd's an outspoken
loner."

"Yet you are sympathetic to his ... ideas."

"I like him, but I don't trust him. I get the idea that you're
sympathetic to his ideas too, and I saw the way you looked
at the conchie drones today. No need to be alarmed. We
none of us out here like what's happening to the world, it's
just that unlike Redd, most of us know there isn't much we
can do about it. Now, go get a block of butter; tea's near to
boiling."

Lee fell asleep as soon as he had wrapped himself in his
brocade cloak, and the librarian was waiting for him in his
dreams.

"You should have told them about what was done to you,"

the librarian said. "It's important. It will give you face. You'll

need that, in the days to come."

They stood in warm white sunlight by a stone wall at the

top of a cliff. The librarian was a shadow in the sunlight, his
face hidden by a fold of his black silk robe. There were intricate
lines embroidered in the silk, like circuit diagrams.
Lee hadn't noticed them before. He leaned on sun-warmed
stone and said, "This is better than your mus books."

Beneath them spread a wide bay that bent around a city

built on seven hills. A glass pyramid reflected the blue sky
in the midst of a host of tall buildings bigger than anything
Lee had ever known. The blue water was flecked with the
sails of many small craft. Nearer, overshadowing Lee and the
librarian, a vast rust-red bridge soared across the strait
which was the mouth of the bay. Vehicles hummed across
it, small as beetles in the distance. Beyond the bridge...
fog, a bank of fog rolling in from gray ocean water. Something
made a deep mournful sound out there.

The librarian pushed back the robe's hood, and shook out

her long black hair. Miriam (but when had she had long hair?
and why was she so young, younger even than Lee?) said, "It's
on Earth, or it was. I suppose the ruins of the city might still be
there, but it's been so long since I thought to look, and the
Earth's a green wilderness now... Listen, Lee, the people
      RED DUST
      121

you're with worship their ancestors. That you have a ghost in
your head is very impressive to them. It's why they let you live."

She laughed. "They think you can raise the dead."

Lee laughed too. "Why would they kill me?"

"Why not? You're Han. You raped their country centuries
ago on the Earth, and the survivors were sent to provide the
labor for terraforming Mars. Most died. Those that didn't
became Martians. They believe the world is theirs, and why
not?"

"The Great Leap Forward will not take a century, but a
thousand years. That is its glory."

"You sound like a recruiting poster."

Lee had been quoting   a slogan he had come across in an
old history file. He   blushed and smiled and apologized. "I
don't believe it. It   should take only a century to be finished.
I'm like my parents,   a Sky Roader."

"There's no progress, that's the point. Your Emperor has
lost its way, and the Ten Thousand Years have traded progress
for immortality. They've traded on the lives of everyone
on Mars."

"Like leaders everywhere."

"Wow, Lee, how did someone so young get to be so cynical?''
Her smile was still the same, sudden and bright.

"I started early, under my great-grandfather's guidance.
Whose side is he on?"

"His own, like all of the Ten Thousand Years. Their needs
roughly map into each other, but that's all. You're a biologist,
Lee. You know what will happen to the ecosphere of
Mars if something isn't done to stop all the liberated water

from being locked up again. Something dramatic."

"This isn't a dream, is it?"

"It used to be thought that dreams were a way of assimilating
new information. That's what you're doing."

"The librarian said something like that, a while back. In
another dream that wasn't a dream. This is because of the
machines you put in my blood, isn't it? The viruses."

Miriam's black hair lifted around her shoulders in the wind
which blew up from the cliffs. The mournful horn was still
      122
      P^uI J. McAuk:¥
sounding from inside the fog bank, which had now swallowed
the bridge. The sunlight was edged with cold. She said, "The
cowboys might be able to help us, Lee. The viruses tried to encrypt
part of my memories, but it didn't take too well. Not surprising,
really, the machines were never designed to read out
into another nervous system. But they found that other viruses
had already been at work inside you. They found the librarian."
"No. He's an archive program a friend wrote for me. He
was worming through the common data banks, looking for
information..." For information on his parents. Lee said,
"My great-grandfather."
"Someone had a RAM chip mapped into your visual cortex.
It was triggered by the specific information bandwidth
of virtual-reality goggles, and recorded anything you experienced.
My viruses took it over, rewrote me into what was
there. But it wasn't enough. I can't remember everything I
was supposed to tell you."
"You didn't just come to trade with my great-grandfather,
did you?"
"You must go to the capital, Wei Lee."
"That's where the cowboys are going. Where my great-grandfather
is. I thought I could make a deal with him..."
Miriam clutched her ears. "I can't think! No, wait! Water.
They live near water. That's all I remember. I need something
to straighten me out, Lee. If not..."
The fog was swirling around them. Cold droplets beaded
Lee's skin. Miriam was a shadow in the whiteness, leaning
towards him. Another shadow stood behind her. Lee thought
it was the librarian, but it was taller and thinner, and there
was a bonewhite glint in the hood cast over its face.
Miriam said, "Otherwise I'll die again, Lee. Otherwise bad
sectors might spread to your memories. Now you must wake
up. Redd wants to show you something."
Redd was leaning over Lee, a shadow against a sky so
choked with brilliant stars it dazzled the eyes. He had been
shaking Lee's shoulder, and sat back when Lee groaned and
pushed up on one elbow. Every muscle in his body was stiff
and sore.
      RED DUST
      123

"It's time," Redd said, and with a grand gesture pointed
at the starry sky.

Lee looked up.

A burning thread hung between heaven and Mars.
Twenty-eight


T

he thread was already fading by the time the search

party was ready to leave camp.

More than half the cowboys were going, leaving just
enough to watch over the herd. Lee could put a name to
most of them now. White Eye, Dog Breath, Dead Finger.
The Gray Fox, Angel Eyes, Lonesome Dove.

When White Eye saw Lee amongst them he complained
loudly to Hawk. "You want the little chink comin' along?"

"Of course," Hawk said calmly. "Do you think he wouldn't

find out about our little sideline if we left him in camp? We
have to bring the stuff back, after all, and he's a smart chink.
Or at least, not as dumb as you."

White Eye said, "So maybe we should deal with him, like

I was sayin' all along."

One or two of the others agreed.

"Listen," Hawk told them all. "He's a chink, but he's no
conchie. Some of you are smart enough to have noticed that.
He listens to that dead music broadcaster up in Father Jupiter.
He has ghosts in his head..." chills ran down Lee's
spine".., and he's as much reason as any to stay away from
the Army of the People's Mouths, or any of the militias of
the Ten Thousand Years. So quit being so prejudiced. I swear
I'm getting ashamed of you all."

"He listens to the King of the Cats, he should prove it,"
someone called.

"Yeah," White Eye said. "Sing us a song, boy."


124
      RED DUST
      125
"Sing out!"
Lee waited until they'd stopped. Then he stepped forward
and said, "I'm not much of a singer, and I don't have my
guitar. But if you are willing to listen, I'll try."
"Go ahead," Redd said, after a moment's silence.
Lee took three breaths to steady himself. What he had
meant to sing was one of the trivial country songs, but under
Redd's stare they all fell away from his mind. He sang
what was left: he sang "Promised Land."
And afterwards he stood alone in silence while the cowboys
drifted away to their ponies. Only one came up to him.
Lee hadn't noticed him before. Half-Yankee, half-Tibetan, he
had long frizzy hair layered either side of a central parting,
small black eyes set close together over a hooked nose. He
was younger than Lee, eight or nine at the most.
"You understand," he said to Lee, "there's nothin' romantic
about being' a cowboy. About being' out on the land.
It's just a job of work. Lot of people do it because they can't
do nothin' else. Some of them are on the run, maybe. But
there's no romance to it."
"So why are you out here?"
"That's a good question," the kid said, and sort of faded
back into the darkness.
Lee rode beside Redd. He asked, "Who was the kid?"
"Calls himself Alias. Talk is he's killed a dozen men and
doesn't give a damn about any of them. But we all talk a lot
out here, and most of the stories don't have much truth to
them."
They were riding across the bare, cold plain towards the
point where the burning thread had touched the face of
Mars. Redd was being very coy about exactly what was going
on, and Lee was too tired to press him. So tired, in fact, that
despite the pony's awkward rolling gait a fugitive dream
fragment took him back to the wall beneath the soaring fog-shrouded
bridge. The bay and the city beyond were lost in
fog, too. Everything was. From the fog's still center, Miriam said,--It's a
punch-out operation, Lee. Straight down from
      126
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Clarke orbit through a hole in the defenses. Friction heats
up the monofilament, that's why you see it.

"This is like a spaceship?"

More like an elevator. The capsule comes straight
down, like a spider on its thread. Do you have spiders on
Mars?

"Don't be silly."

--I don't know why I should assume that you do. The
Nexus's habitat doesn't.

"Mars has a highly diverse ecological system," Lee said.
"Who sent down this capsule?"

--There are two possibilities, Miriam said, and then the
pony stumbled and Lee was jolted awake just in time to rein

it in at the lip of a sudden drop.

They were there.

It was a small, deep, relatively young crater, its rim wall
still sharply terraced. Some of the cowboys rode straight on
down, whooping and waving their woollen hats amidst rising
clouds of dust. The more cautious took a meandering path
amongst boulders and across overturned strata down to the
dusty floor where a dwarf forest of cacti grew, raising spiny
paddles as high as the ponies' bellies.

Lee didn't need enhanced vision to see the thing in the
center of the crater. It stood poised on three prongs, bullet-shaped
and twice as tall as a man, glittering in the fierce
starlight. The first cowboys had already reached it and were
riding round and round, calling to each other in high, excited
voices. Lee looked up into the starry sky but could no
longer see the thread down which the thing had fallen from
the sky.

As they rode down the terraced crater wall, he said to
Redd, "I can think of two possibilities. Which is it?"

The old Tibetan cowboy riding alongside them, the Gray
Fox, chuckled and said, "Two possibilities, eh? Ain't he sharp
as a needle," then stood in his saddle and lashed his pony's
withers with ends of his reins and galloped ahead.

Redd said, "Maybe it won't help you to know that this
isn't for the Ten Thousand. They get contraband by free-fall
      RED DUST
      127

craft. Our drops are more subtle. Look there."

Lee saw that a swathe had been cut through the stands
of cacti that covered the crater's floor. Something had
lopped the plants neatly at ground level so that they had all
fallen in one direction.

"It comes down after the drop, kilometers of it, dragging
this end with it. It'll still be falling, drifting westward, for at
least a day. We'd spool it up and spray fixative on it, but you
can't cut it, and it cuts anything clean through. Dangerous
stuff. Like most gifts from the sky you have to know how to
handle it."

Lee said, "I've travelled all over, but I've never seen any
of this dangerous stuff of yours."

"Without fixation, it falls apart in air," Redd said. "Most
doesn't even reach the ground." They reined in their ponies
and joined those cowboys, Hawk amongst them, who had
dismounted. A few were still circling the capsule. One
started taking pot shots that rang against the capsule's metal
and whined away. Hawk bellowed irritably, "Damn you,
White Eye, don't you go damaging the merchandise!"

Redd told Lee, "What we do is now wait. Sometimes it
takes a day before it gives us what it's brought down."

That was when a hatch in the side of the capsule's nose
cone blew off in a cloud of rolling smoke, green stuff lit
from within by a brief sullen glare. There was a hideous
amplified cackle that rolled and echoed around the crater's
steep sides.

Cowboys were fighting to rein in their prancing mounts.
Above them a human head, four or five times normal size,
bobbed on the end of a long coiled spring, its white face,
red lips, bloodshot round eyes and green bush of hair lit by
some internal light source.

"Greetings, Martians, it said, its voice booming out into
the night. Its lips curled back from even teeth in a sneering
grin. "Whatever you do, don't take me to your leaders!"

Lee stepped back, because for a moment the bobbing head
seemed to look directly at him, its eyes knowing and filled
      128
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


with deadly mischief. Redd caught his elbow. "It's only a
hologram. It'll tell us what it has."

The head said, "They tried to ban us when we were born,
then we made it big just in time to be forgotten for a century
or two. But what's a few hundred years between friends?
We're back, as bad and as dangerous as ever. Just give us to
your children and stand well back. Why, they don't even
need to read. They can just look at the pictures. Like I always
say, a picture is worse than a thousand words."

Miriam was suddenly beside Lee. Though the head's luminous
white skin threw grisly light over the cowboys, she
was a shadow without form. When Lee tried to look at her
directly, she vanished inside a prickly blur of dark light.

She said in a ravelling whisper, "I might have known. The
Pranksters."

Lee whispered back, "That's the name of this thing?" He
was only half certain he was not dreaming all this, would
wake rolled inside his blanket beside the camp fire.

Miriam said, "Listen. This costs me to speak. Costs you,
too. The Pranksters are a religious group. They inhabit half
a dozen rocks, all on eccentric orbits. They are dedicated to
destabilizing systems. They say that it's an evolutionary tool,
and it makes them dangerous. I'd guess that this is funded
by the Earth; there's no way something like this could have
fallen through the defenses by itself."

'fit doesn't matter who gives them to us," Hawk said unexpectedly.
He had put on his funny round mirror glasses.

Miriam looked at him and said, "I suppose they sent down
the technology for direct sensory access, too." She added, to
Lee, "Call it a kind of pseudo psi. He's tapping into the RAM
chip in your visual cortex to see me."

"There's not much to see," Hawk said. "You are in a very
bad way, even for a ghost. The system you've parasitised isn't
much of a home, is it? And I believe I see someone standing
at your back."

Miriam whispered, "Even if they haven't been subverted
by the Earth, the Pranksters won't be any help."
"Ah, but their gifts are sometimes useful," Hawk said, and
      RED DUST
      129
raised his arm. His hand was wrapped inside the freeform
stock of a huge reaction pistol. He fired, and the head vanished
in mid-sentence.
The capsule whirred and shook. Its top suddenly began to
spin, faster and faster. Steam shot from the widening joint
with a scream. Then the whole nose cone shot off on a wobbling
trajectory, and an explosion inside the capsule blew a
storm of paper over the cowboys.
Lee plucked at pages that fluttered around him. Leaflets,
picture novels printed in garish colors. They were a little
like instruction manuals, but in the dying glow from the
capsule he could see that the panels were dense with violence,
costumed muscle-bulging freaks, flames and explosions
amongst tall buildings built of glass, all kinds of
strange things.
Redd said, "We get good money for this, and in the old
days we'd have stuck a finger up the noses of the Emperor's
state censors, too. But now there's so much propaganda that
this is just another dust grain in the storm."
"Oh," Lee said. He was beginning to realize where all the
rock'n'roll artifacts came from. His posters of the King of
the Cats, the data needles of his music, the fragments of his
films. Who, then, was the King working for?
He helped the others pull back the flimsy panels of the
burnt-out capsule, unload bundles of leaflets and reload them
on to the ponies. Paper had blown all over the crater, and the
cowboys started their ride back to camp amidst cacti festooned
with leaflets that, impaled on spines, fluttered and flapped like
a million crucified birds.
Twenty-nine

T
he drive to the capital took a dozen more days. It left
the vast, cratered plains and crossed the Ridge of Gold
at Shaylin Pass. The guy cables of a skeletal relay tower
had been strung with scarves printed with prayers and with
flags of pure white and blue and red and yellow, all unravelling
in the thin constant wind. The older cowboys stopped
to set more flags and prayers fluttering, or to place stones
on the huge cairn of red rocks.
The same cowboys would stop to pay their respects at
wayside shrines. It was only when they passed the third or
fourth in as many hours, a low mani wall with a pair of
flexed eyes painted in fading red and blue and white over
the ubiquitous sacred mantra From Mani Padme Hum, that
Lee realized they were on a road, or at any rate a trail. Redd
pointed to lines of stones either side of the wide rutted
road--cleared by hand two centuries ago, he said.
Lee remembered what Pemba had told him: that every
stone was holy, for every stone had been touched by change.
One night the herders camped at the edge of a tiny village
that had grown up around a heat-engine well head. Half a
dozen low flat-roofed houses slumped against each other as
if for mutual support. Built out of pink sandstone, they
blended right into the landscape. All the villagers were
draped in shapeless enveloping garments and black gauze
veils, so that you couldn't tell which were men and which
women. Perhaps that was the point. They sold the cowboys

130
      RED DUST
      131

potatoes fried to crispy char on the outside and with a cold
wet knot in the center, but otherwise kept away.
The well head dominated the slumped village, a huge
flower with battered silvery petals that focused sunlight on
black panels thick with piping. Sunlight warmed the panels
through which water flowed; the heated water was driven
underground by its own expansion, to melt permafrost
which was used to irrigate the village's stony potato fields.
It tasted of iron and bitter salts, this fossil water. The day
after drinking it, Lee had a bad case of the shits, which
caused the cowboys no end of amusement.
Most of the cowboys had some secret locked away, some
reason why they'd taken to riding the range. As he rode with
them, Lee heard something of their stories. Hawk had been
indentured to a danwei work gang when he was six, had
escaped a year later and worked his way up from cowboy to
range boss. He owned the yaks they were driving from the
winter ranges. Skinny White Eye had poisoned a dozen
women in his neighborhood, then escaped the transport
train taking him to the polar labor camp. Old Dead Finger
had been a monk, and his head was still clean shaven. Lonesome
Dove was a deserter from the Army of the People's
Mouths. And so on.
Only Redd's reasons for riding the range were unclear.
Lee heard half a dozen contradictory stories: he was supposed
to have betrayed his best friend to the secret police;
or to have shot him in the back; or to have actually been in
the secret police, and gone on the run after letting his childhood
friend, a leader of the ku li, escape an ambush; or he
had been a leader of the ku li who had renounced violent
action... Redd wouldn't confirm or deny any one of them.
He wasn't much older than Lee, but Lee was learning from
him just how little he knew about the desert and about herding
yaks, and how little he knew about the lives of men who
lived in the vast empty landscapes of Mars, outside the cities
and the huddled danweis.
"You gotta have a new name," Redd declared. "Can't have
you walkin' around Lowell"-- like all the cowboys, Redd in
      132
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

sisted on calling the capital by its old Yankee name --"where
your great-grandfather can pick you out of the crowd in a moment
if you use your real name." He looked asquint at Lee, blue
eyes glinting under the brim of his black hat. "Billy, that's the
name for you."

"You are very certain."

"It's 'cause you're a kid. Billy Lee. See, we turn you into
a Yankee half-breed. I reckon you got some white man in
you, there ain't anyone on the planet who ain't got some
Martian in them, Yankee or Tibetan or both. Cowboys just
generally have more Martian than most, which is why they

usually kill any wandering Han they come across."

"You saved my life."

"I was wondering if you remembered that."

"I won't forget it. But why did you take me back to camp,
if you knew I was likely to be killed?"

"Oh, I was ready to argue for you, Billy Lee. Turned out
I didn't need to, so I was right about my hunch all along.
Know why you were spared? Hawk saw the ghost on your
back. He's curious about it, 'cause cowboys owe the anarchists
part of their living. But cowboys aren't for the Sky
Road, for all that. They're just for themselves."

Lee had seen Miriam only once in his dreams since the
night the anarchist capsule had come down. Perhaps she was
already fading, like an imperfectly fixed photographic image.
She had not spoken to him in the dream; perhaps it had
been nothing but an ordinary dream after all. It had been
in the ancient Earth city of Las Vegas, by daylight. Lee recognized
the elaborate cliffs of the casino frontages from the
film fragments of Viva Las Vegas.t, but they seemed small,
faded and tawdry without their cloaks of electric light. Miriam
had been walking way in front of him, but when he
tried to catch up with her a pink automobile as big as her
spacecraft glided out of nowhere and she jumped into it.
And as the automobile swept her away, Lee saw that the
driver was the King of the Cats.

Lee asked Redd, who was in as loquacious a mood as Lee
had ever known, "Is that what you're for, just yourself?." He
      RED DUST
      133

was thinking of Redd's moments of quiet prayer, atonement
for his mysterious past.

Redd pulled the brim of his black hat over his eyes. His
gloves were caked with red dust; there was a time of dust
on the woollen blanket he wore as a cape. "I reckon no one
can afford not to be for themselves," he said. "Otherwise
they just get used by other people. How about you, Billy
Lee? You like the cowboy life enough to stay?"

"I have to talk to my great-grandfather, if I can. Otherwise,
perhaps..."

Redd laughed, and said, "Yeah, that's how it goes, until
one day you're as old as the Gray Fox or Lonesome Dove,
and you wonder where your life went." And he spurred his
pony after a yak that was trotting eagerly at right angles
from the trail, after who knew what, or why.

So it went, moving in a blowing cloud of red dust by day,
chivvying yaks that were forever stopping to scrape saxifrage
moss from crusted ground, making camp after the sudden
sunset, the nights achingly cold and glorious with stars, and
always the lonesome songs of the watch riders floating out
into the desert, and awesome sunrises, frost vanishing into
the air with a sound like a million tiny bells and yaks making
clouds around themselves with their own breath, groaning
and flinging strings of orange spittle as they started moving
again. Until at last the cowboys and their herd crossed a
single-track railway line that ran from east to west across
the flat land. The herd turned to parallel the high dust bank
that had been cleared from the line after the winter storms,
and the next day reached Xin Beijing, the capital of Mars.
Thirty

X
in Beijing sprawled in a wide pass that cut through a
ragged circle of mountains, the eroded rim wall of a
vast ancient crater more than a hundred kilometers
across. Within the crater a perfectly circular lake, ringed
round with white salt deposits, reflected the pink sky and
the pine-clad mountains that rose steeply around it.
Xin Beijing had once been the site of the Yankee Martian
colony, long before the air had been thickened, but the old
domed Yankee Quarter was lost now in a sprawl of wide
dusty streets, lined by giant ginkgoes, where bicycles
swarmed amongst clanging trolley cars. Streets radiated
away from the industrial sector and the railway junction and
the silent citadel where ten thousand ministers, secretaries,
programmers, engineers and interpreters interceded between
the world and the Emperor. Between these three mingling
fans of streets were wedge-shaped parks and big
government buildings and the sterile white compounds
where half-lifers dreamed themselves into Heaven.
Lee had left Xin Beijing two years before, as a passenger
on the Central Desert Express. The railway station had been
a small city in itself, an entire social ecology with separate
castes which made their living by selling food or trinkets to
travellers, or by recycling nightsoil from the trains' lavatories,
or which subsisted on waste food thrown from restaurant
cars. Most of the traffic had been one way. Every train
brought in hundreds more refugees from dust-buried farm134
      RED DUST
      135


lands along the Grand Canal; leaving the city, Lee had had
an entire carriage to himself.

Lee had vowed never to return, and in a way he had not.
Riding into the stockyards amongst a gaggle of cowboys
channelling a thousand head of yak into their holding pasture
was to ride into a city he did not know. He remembered
the pink, circular lake, the second largest body of free water
on Mars, so wide that not even the tallest peaks of the mountains
on its far side showed above the flat line of its horizon.
He recognized the pine-forested snaggle-toothed rim-wall
mountains that rose either side of the city, saw with a pang
the distant, flat-topped peak where the house of his great-grandfather
stood. But otherwise he might be riding into a
city on another planet.

The stockyards were to the south of Xin Beijing, stretching
from the shore of the lake towards the stony desert.
Brawling herds of yak were being driven this way and that,
in clouds of red dust that glowed like red-hot iron in the
level afternoon sun, across a flat landscape where trails made
a complex network amongst fields of bare red earth fenced
with stone. Small electric locomotives shunted cattle cars
or feed wagons along spur lines. Tented camps were pitched
along the lake shore, where in the shallows floating pontoons
corralled hectares of algae and azolla for fodder.

Lee soon saw why Hawk had hired one of the denim-clad
men who hung around the trail head, most of them laconic
round-eyed Yankees, to guide the herd through the stockyards'
shifting labyrinths. He had thought that the journey
would be over once they reached the stockyards, but it took
from noon to sunset to negotiate their way to the feed lot
set aside for the herd.

Like the railway station, the stockyards were a culture in
miniature. As well as field guides, there were slaughterers
and assayers and veterinarians and auctioneers, stockmen
and wranglers and field hands, sod busters and wet workers
and feed-lot pitchers. They served all the high equatorial
plains, and even on a world as small and barren as Mars that
was a considerable territory. Lee had once read that the
      136
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
plains were the range of ten million head of domesticated
yak and dzo, and uncounted numbers of yak reverted to the
wild. Only now was the statistic gaining some reality.
Most of the herd had been brought here not to be slaughtered,
but for the cow yaks to calve or to be tupped, and for
the calves to be sorted. The males would almost all be gelded
and feed-lot fattened and butchered without ever setting
hoof on the red ranges. The females would be tagged and
returned with their mothers and newly impregnated aunts.
The yaks in the herd, every one of which the cowboys invariably
called "he," were all female.
The real work began when the feed-lot pasturage was
reached. The chip implanted in each yak was scanned by an
assayer for a readout on the animal's physiological history.
To do this the confused and irritable animals had to be wrangled
one by one into a narrow chute until one thousand and
twenty-eight had passed through into the big bare field beyond.
The yaks were fed a slobber of azolla and ripe silage. The
cowboys drank tea in a circle around a campsite fire while
Hawk came around and paid them off. He pressed a little
roll of ten yuan notes into Lee's bleeding hands and told
him to find his town house the next day, at the Square of
Two Thousand Martyrs. He said, in a gravelly confiding undertone,
"You're a good worker. I decided you're due something
from the sale of our sky booty, but don't tell the others
in case of bad feeling. And another thing. Take care with
Redd. He might not be so good a friend as you think. Keep
our little rendezvous from him."
Most of the cowboys were headed towards the strip of
smoke houses and pleasure palaces along the lake shore beyond
the fodder-processing plants. Redd explained to Lee
that they'd spend most of their pay and then sign up with
some other herd boss. "You come along with me, Billy Lee,
and get a bath. That's what I aim to do."
Lee agreed. He was too tired to worry about Hawk's whispered
warning, in truth too tired and scared to do much
thinking of his own. He had returned to challenge his great
      RED DUST
      137


grandfather, either by finding the people Miriam's ghost had
said were waiting for him somewhere in the city, or by trying
to sell him the totipotent viruses, and either way he did
not think he had long to live.

They walked the short distance to a tram stop. When Lee
asked about Redd's pony, the cowboy said, "I don't even own
the saddle. What's so special about a horse? Temperamental
critters with a nasty bite and brains about as big as a sun-dried
grape. Backbroken way of moving so your balls are
hammered between your saddle and your arse with every
step, fall sick when you least need it, have to be watched
every second in case they get some damnfool notion of independence
in their heads. And another thing, you ever
eaten horse? They don't even taste good. What I'd like is to
do it all from air in a culver, but that's not allowed so it's
not worth thinking about."

It took three changes of tram to get them to the old Yankee
Quarter. The city seemed emptier than Lee remembered.
Whole blocks of apartment houses lay dark and silent in the
twilight. Others had been colonized by refugees. Dzo and
goats were tethered in the remains of parks. Bonfires blazed
on roofs. Walls had been painted and repainted with slogans;
Lee saw a little robot, perched on delicate telescopic legs,
overpainting a vast idealized portrait of one of the Ten Thousand
with ideograms a dozen meters high, denouncing the
Committee of Six, the group of Ten Thousand Years who
had taken it upon themselves to speak for the Emperor and
who were now the only voices of authority in the deserts of
its silence.

Lee had watched the news broadcasts along with everyone
else in Bitter Waters, but like everyone else he hadn't believed
half the stories told by the blithe newscasters. It was
well known that the commercial channels hyped and exaggerated
everything because that was how they survived. If
they didn't do it, someone else would: so they all did it.

Everyone in Bitter Waters had preferred the government
channel. It spoke comfortingly of small gatherings quickly
dispersed rather than riots, of disagreements between polit-
      138
      PAUL J. MCAULE¥

ical factions rather than civil war. Lee had only half believed
this anodyne line, but like most people it was what he
wanted to believe. Governments were all obsessed with secrecy,
and the best and the worst gave the same excuses for
playing with the truth: that it is for the good of the people;
that undiluted truth is harmful; that it must be filtered and
massaged before the population can accept it. Tyrannies
ruthlessly imposed this filtration, this selectivity; democracies,
no matter how high their ideals, sooner or later slid
into the same behavior by default. It didn't matter. It didn't
matter because all the different kinds of governments were
right: people didn't want to hear the truth. Left to themselves
in democracies, bullied into faking interest by tyrannies,
people really didn't care what the truth was as long as
it didn't hurt them, which was why, except in times of crisis,
power divided amongst the people was too fragmented to be
of any use. The stronger always won out because the weaker
let them: Guoquiang's father, Great-grandfather Wei, the
computer in the lamasery. If people were given power, they
usually gave it away as quickly as they could because it was
uncomfortable to hold. Only those who should never have
been given power in the first place actively sought it.

The tram rattled past murals and wrecked buildings and
refugee camps, past wreckage left by riots and buildings
whose walls bore murals pocked and cratered by shell and
shot. The tram's bell tingled dutifully at every junction, as
if it was trying to conjure the old order back into being. It
rattled past the sepulchres of the half-lifers, layered white
buildings that seemed to float in islands of light. Those dying
out of this world were more important than those still living
in it, it seemed.

There was little traffic, and most of it consisted of squads
of militia zooming by in swift electric trucks. Once, the tram
had to stop at a barricade while militia in black blouses and
black baggy trousers, the red bands tied around their foreheads
marked with the seal of The Little Bird, climbed
aboard and looked at each passenger in turn. They were
armed with pistols and laser prods. Redd stared right back
      RED DUST
      139
at them, and once the tram had passed through the barricade
he said to Lee, "Things are bad. The Emperor has become
so quiet that the Ten Thousand Years fight amongst
themselves to see who will be its successor."
"Warlords," Lee said.
"It hasn't come to that. Not yet. Let's hope it won't. But
their factions run the streets now, dividing the city amongst
themselves. There were fire fights just about every night
when I left here. Things look to have gotten worse."
But at least the Yankee Quarter was just as Lee remembered
it. The field-sized panes of glass of its dome, opaquely
sandblasted by centuries of storms, shone in the gathering
night like a hovering pearl as the tram rocked towards it
down a long tree-lined avenue.
Beneath the dome was a maze of narrow streets and even
narrower hutongs, a warren that had grown up and around
and over the original buildings until almost no trace was
left of the Yankee settlement the dome had once protected.
The atmospheric recycling units had long ago overloaded
and a greasy drizzle of condensation continually drifted
down on to the layers of flat roofs and the interlayered blades
of heat-exchange engines. Apartment blocks and arcades and
factories grew into each other like corals. Vegetables were
cultivated in courtyards full of purplish light cast by racks
of fluorescent tubing. Ganglia of cables and pipes and optical
fibres and telephone wiring ran everywhere. Light fell into
the narrow hutongs from grilles, past swatches of sagging
wires or plumes of steam, past balconies, past the barred
windows of thousands of tiny shops (it was said that if you
could buy anything on Mars, you could buy it in the Yankee
Quarter). In many hutongs light never fell at all, for the
buildings on either side had grown together overhead.
Main Street more or less divided the Quarter into two.
Crowds seethed up and down its length, half of them Yankee,
the rest more or less evenly distributed between Tibetan and
Han. Many wore hats pulled down over their faces and capes
of slick waterproof material in bright primary colors over
ordinary tunics and trousers. There were few militia here,
      140
      PAUt, J. McAu[:¥

but many soldiers of the Army of the People's Mouths, young
shaven-headed recruits with the scars of their brain surgery
still raw, most walking in pairs, hand in hand, the way citizens
did when in a strange place. Lee saw a pilot carried
along above the crowds on his stalking, insectile litter,
breastplate and bubble helmet shining. A pair of conchie
missionaries from Earth, alike as twins, walked side by side
in their dark suits and hardly anyone took any notice, although
everyone stepped out of their way. Trams drifted
through the crowds of bicycles that clogged the roadways.
Electric signs rose dozens of meters into the air, neon tubing
sizzling in the drizzle. Holograms floated here and there,
message clouds tugged by impalpable breezes. Most of the
signs were in wormy backwards Yankee script; Common
Language ideograms were rare. Every so often there was the
sound of firecrackers; it was the beginning of the festival of
the little gods of the lake fisherfolk, and this reminded Lee

of what Miriam's ghost had said.

--They live near water.

Redd kept a hand on Lee's shoulder, steering him into a
crowded shopping street that curved away from Main Street.
Cyclists wove amongst the pedestrians, banging on tinny
horns. The street was lit by fluorescent tubes stapled to a
concrete ceiling, and by the signs and windows of the shops,
all of which sold electronic components.

"This way," Redd said, and plunged into a narrow, tunnel-like
hutong. There were no lights, yet bicycles careered
along it regardless, continually sounding their horns as if
steering by sonar, like bats. A stairway off the hutong twisted
down to a dim, crowded, noisy cave of a bar. A steel counter
ran around three sides. Men, almost all of them Yankees,
stood shoulder to shoulder, drinking steadily and watching
a Yankee woman taking her clothes off inside a raised cage.
Lee gaped at her and Redd pulled him by his elbow all the
way across the bar and through an arch curtained with strips
of plastic into another room, smaller and quieter, floor, walls
and ceiling of white-painted concrete lit by bare fluorescent
tubes. In one corner was a tea counter where a few old men
      RED DUST
      141

sat around chessboards on iron tables. In another, Redd paid
attendants with small coins, and a bald gnome of a man got
up from a chair of faded blue plush and took Lee to a cubicle.

Lee exchanged his dusty sweat-stiffened clothes for a huge
towel and allowed himself to be led through the rituals of
showering and soaking, massaging and steaming. Finally, he
stood side by side with Redd in a huge pool of salty, faintly
sulphurous water that buoyed up their scrubbed bodies.
They leaned at the pool's edge and sipped earthy jasmine tea
and munched on cold shrimp noodles and sweet rice balls.

Lee felt a trembling lassitude that was not at all unpleasant.
Hairy Yankees and smooth-skinned Han mingled with
democratic ease in this vaulted cavern. Fluorescent tubes
hung from a ceiling of naked rock. Their light slithered on
the surface of the slop of water, slipped and twinkled on
slimy tiles which were each embossed with a curled dragon.
It was a very old bathhouse, Redd said, five hundred years
old at least--which Lee thought impossible before he remembered
that Yankees still counted years by Earth's short
seasons.

"So how do you like riding the range, young Billy Lee?
Like it well enough to sign up again? What are your plans?"

"They are not   changed. I must find.., my friends. Perhaps
I can get the   help of my great-grandfather, but it will
be difficult.   He is a powerful man, but we have had a misunderstanding
that needs to   be corrected."

"You Chinks are all so reverent towards your old men."
:'You try to shock me? I have been around."

"It's a hard world. You haven't seen much of that. Han
don't."

Long silvery scars seamed Redd's chest, three lines that
ran from beneath his left nipple to the bottom of his ribcage.
The ball of his right shoulder looked as if someone had once
chewed on it, long ago.

Redd caught Lee staring. "Leopard cult," he said. "Back
when I was as young and foolish as you."

"I'm not so young."
      142
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"Maybe there's only a year or two difference. I'm not talking
age."

"You've lived life, and I haven't." Lee had been thinking, on
the long tram ride, about how little he really knew the city in
which he had grown up. He knew that part of the quiet tree-filled
suburb of the Fragrant Hills around Master Qing's Academy
of Mental Cultivation, the Great House of
Great-grandfather Wei, the mountain lodge where Master
Qing's Academy of Mental Cultivation had convened in summer
to escape the city's dusty heat, high in the mountains on
the far side of the lake. The rest of the city had been forbidden
to him, known only through brief expeditions planned with as
much daring and long thought as military raids upon hostile
territory.

Redd smiled, signalled to a tray-carrying attendant. "You
catch on fast. That's one good thing about you. Or is it the
ghost you carry?"

"She has fallen asleep, I think. That is also something I
must attend to. My great-grandfather..."

"If you go to your great-grandfather, he'll ream her out
of you and throw away your carcass. Wise up, kid." Redd
took a thin black cigar from the attendant, who lighted it
for him. Redd drew until the cigar tip glowed cherry red,
exhaled a riffle of smoke.

Lee watched this piece of business patiently. He was in no
hurry. He had enough money to last him a week if he was
careful, and Hawk had promised him more. There was no
point looking for Miriam's friends while he was still aching
from the trail drive, and he couldn't walk up to Great-grandfather
Wei's gates and bang on them for admittance.
He needed time to think. There had been no time for that
while helping herd a thousand yaks. Besides, Redd was a
good enough fellow, and he was ideal company in the Yankee
Quarter.

Redd regarded the end of his cigar with pleasure. "What
I'm offering you is advice, Billy Lee. More than advice, if you
want it. And whether or not you want it, you need it."

"I see," Lee said, although he didn't.
      RED DUST
      143

"You're carrying something valuable. You haven't told me
what it is, and that's fine, that's up to you. But I know that
your great-grandfather wants it, and I bet so does the rest
of the Ten Thousand Years. Now they know you escaped with
the anarchist, and by now they might have figured you
might still be alive. Even if you're not, they'll be keeping a
watch out for you. They might even have spotted you. And
the nearer that you get to your great-grandfather, the closer
to being spotted you get. Ever think of what would happen
to you when that happens? I reckon I do. I used to work for
one of the Ten Thousand Years, in a small way." Redd looked
sideways to gauge Lee's reaction, and what he saw evidently
amused him. "Don't you worry, Billy Lee, if I wanted to turn
you in, I'd have done it long ago."
"It just reminded me of something Hawk said."
"Some of those campfire stories get a little near the
truth," Redd said softly.
Lee waited, as he used to wait for his great-grandfather's
eidolon. Redd said, "I learned one thing, back then. It was
that the Ten Thousand Years aren't human. If you want to
talk with your great-grandfather, you can't just go walking
up to his front door. I saved your life, Billy Lee. One thing
you need to keep fixed in your head. You owe me one, and
I'm not asking anything but what would help you further."
Lee laughed, because Redd's crude attempt at constructing
a face trap had only served to free him. He had an obligation
to Redd only because Redd had an obligation to him:
Redd had saved Lee's life, and so was obliged to protect him,
just as Lee had protected, or tried to protect, Miriam Make-peace
Mbele. But Redd had admitted that the obligation was
at an end, and now Lee knew just how much he had changed
since the morning he had set out with Guoquiang and Xiao
Bing on the first calm day of spring. There was a new hardness
in him, something like the cold selfishness of the Yankees,
who were all islands, entire unto themselves.
Lee said carefully, "I will never forget any of your kindnesses,
Citizen Redd, and most especially your advice."
Redd ground the butt of his cigar on wet the and heaved
      144
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

himself out of the water. "There's a little misunderstanding
here," he said. "It's what you're going to do. It's time to
meet some people I know. If you've something you want to
sell to your great-grandfather or any of the Ten Thousand
Years, these people will want it just as bad. I'll help you sell
it to them--for a commission, of course."

"It is good of you to offer, Citizen Redd, but I do not need
help."

"Again, it isn't an offer." Redd's fingers met around Lee's
forearm. "Come on, now. Let's you and me get dressed. And
don't worry. This might be business, but I still like you."

Redd held on to Lee's arm as they crossed the quiet antechamber
and pushed through the hanging plastic strips
into the noisy, smoky bar. Halfway across, Redd's grip tightened
and he said, "I reckon we're in trouble."

A man moved away from the shadows by the stairway and
made his way towards them amongst the crowded tables. It
was White Eye. He smiled crookedly and said, "You're so
predictable, friend Redd," and laid a hand on Lee's shoulder.

Two men who had been lounging by the stairway started
across the bar. They both had brush-cut hair, and both wore
white short-sleeved shirts, baggy trousers with camouflage
red and gray blotches, heavy combat boots.

"You fucker!" Redd shouted, and pushed White Eye aside.
Then the two militia were running, tipping tables and
spilling drinks into the laps of cardplayers. White Eye swung
at Redd, a knife suddenly in his hand. Redd danced back,
kicked White Eye's knee, his hip. White Eye flew backwards
and landed across a table, scattering glasses and bottles.
When he tried to stand, burly drinkers grabbed his shoulders
and spun him away: men stepped aside and he crashed into
the steel-topped bar.

One of the militia was caught in the middle of a brawl;
the other dodged when someone swung a chair at him, and
laid out the chair wielder with a single punch. The fight was
spreading to every corner of the bar; White Eye had disappeared
in a male of swinging fists and furniture, volleys of
bottles and glasses.
      RED DUST
      145


"Run!" Redd yelled at Lee, and the nearest of the militia
shouted something, too. Waving a gun, he pushed through
the riot like a swimmer in a heavy sea. He was so close that
when the gun went off Lee felt the heat of its beam wash
across his face. The bolt smashed the cables and pipes that
wove across the ceiling; fans of sparks rained down on the
heads of the fighters.

"Run!" Redd yelled again.

And something seized Lee and bore him away.
Thirty-one


L

ee was walking through noisy crowds and neon-lit drizzle.
He was on Main Street, and didn't remember how
he'd reached it. He could feel the thing that had seized
him float away on the tides of his blood. He let it go. He
could feel his pulse, just behind his ears. His legs and back
ached sweetly, hollowly. He felt calm and exhausted. He had
been running, running very fast...

The rich slow voice of the King of the Cats was rapping
from speakers in an information arcade. Lee remembered
that the librarian had promised to try and follow him to the
capital, and went inside. He had no other ally, now, except
Miriam's silent ghost.

After he'd paid the old woman who ran the arcade, Lee
chose one of the half-dozen couches at random. It folded
around him like a predatory flower, thrust electrodes at the
nape of his neck and the backs of his hands, masked his
sight and clamped speakers to his ears.

The menu burned briefly before him, but before he could
make a selection it blew past like a curtain on an electronic
wind and he was in a familiar booklined corridor. Tall in his
black robes, his face hidden by shadows through which silver
motes endlessly fell, the librarian lifted down a leather-bound
octavo book and said, "Master. You have come not a
moment too soon. I have found your parents."

"At last," Lee said, but he felt a pang of dread. This was
the hinge of his life.


146
      RED DUST
      147
The librarian said, "You are afraid, Master. I understand.
You have dedicated your life to this, after all."
"I think I know what happened to them," Lee said. "I'm not afraid of the
future, librarian, but of the past."
"The past is always as it has been, as I will show you,"
the librarian said, and opened the book to show the vivid
greens of a summer garden.
"No," Lee said, "wait..."
But he was already there, in that part of the garden of
Great-grandfather Wei's Great House where water fell over
shelves of red rock and tinkled into dark rush-lined pools.
Lee was small, fizzing with impatience, tugging against the
big firm hands which held each of his. There was the sharp
scent of newly cut grass.
His mother and father leaned over him, their faces dark
against brilliant sunlight. Hush, hush. He'll be here soon. And another voice:
I'm already here. And then thunder and
lightning fell from the sky, and Lee's parents flew away from
him. He looked up in utter confusion, frightened beyond
tears, and the man standing high above, on top of the wet
red rocks. A young man, all in black, holding a smoking
machine pistol. He laughed out loud and said, "Catch you
later, kid," and spat down into the pool where Lee's mother
floated, her face still and white in the center of her spreading
black hair.
"Time's up! Hey, come on! Time's up ten minutes ago!"
It was the grandmother Yankee who ran the arcade. She
had opened up the couch. "You want, you can pay for more
time, but you gotta do it now. Hey. Hey, you OK?"
Lee saw her through a blur of tears. She was at least forty,
wore a towering bright red wig, a centimeter of white powder
like icing laid across her creviced face, bright red lipstick,
greasy blue stuff around her eyes. Her breasts pushed
up in her voluminous red velvet dress like a shelf. She smelt
intensely of geraniums.
She said, "You look like shit, citizen."
"Something I saw..."
"Hey, now listen, all my equipment is exorcised on a reg
      148
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


ular basis. This is a clean place, there are no line demons
here, not unless you went and brought one down on yourself.
You've been peeking in forbidden areas? We don't allow
that kind of stuff here. It's a public place, I got my public
to think of."

"I am sorry, grandmother. It was looking for me."

Lee pushed past her to the door, but as he stumbled into
the crowds outside the arcade she shouted after him. "You
get the hell out of here with your demon. This is a clean
place!"
Thirty-two


T

en minutes later, Lee knew that he was being followed.
The man was a burly Han with the pale look of a civil
servant, dressed in a business suit under a transparent
plastic slicker. He sauntered along on the far side of the busy
street, and if there had not been so many Yankees about,
Lee might never have noticed him. But his bland moon face
seemed always turned to Lee, flashing again and again in
the crowd between the gaps in the trams. Lee took turnings
at random, always keeping to the wider streets--he didn't
dare to dodge into the maze of hutongs--but every time he
looked back, his tail was still there, moving at the same
steady pace through the crowds on the far side of the street.

Perhaps he was a friend of Redd's--but how would he have
found Lee so quickly? Or perhaps Great-grandfather Wei had
found Lee after he had used the information terminal.

The thought doubled the weight of the knowledge of his parents'
deaths. He had known all along, but until now he hadn't
understood. That they were dead. That they had been killed by
an assassin who had been employed by Great-grandfather Wei.
For the man could not have entered the garden of the Great
House without the co-operation of the Great House's security
system; and besides, Lee knew who he was. Years afterwards he
was still employed by Great-grandfather Wei.

Lee's random route had led him to a big octagonal space
where tram lines tangled around a plinth on which Cho


149
      150
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


Jinfeng stood above the traffic and the crowds, looking up
at a test tube she held high as a torch. There was spidery
Yankee graffiti down the back of her open laboratory coat,
one wing of which was slightly lifted as if blown back by an
unfelt breeze.

Lee circled the statue, was walking past the rank of pedicabs
for the second time when the idea came. He jumped into the
first pedicab in the queue. The driver was a muscular Yankee in
tight green leggings and a neon pink undershirt with the arms
torn offat the shoulders. There was a kind of bubble of crinkly
plastic over his mane of blond hair; a filter mask hung under
his chin. He said, "Where to go, my man?"

Lee shoved a ten yuan note in the driver's face. "Anywhere
fast... I'm trying to lose someone."

The driver plucked the note from Lee's fingers, held it to
his ear and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. Then it
was gone. "Radical," he said. "Anyone I know?"

Lee saw the beefy black-suited Han pushing through people
less than a dozen meters away. He shoved another note
at the driver and said, "Let's just go!"

The driver magicked away the note, hooked his mask over
his nose and mouth and stood on his pedals. He wheeled all
the way around a slow-moving tram and then shot through
a stream of cyclists who split right and left in a clatter of
horns. There was an intersection with a traffic cop right in
its center, his blue uniform loaded with gold braid, his
white-gloved hands held up, palms out. But the pedicab
driver didn't pause. Lee saw the cop's expression change
from authority to astonishment just before he leaped aside.
A moment later the pedicab was spinning past crowds and
brightly lit shopfronts, teahouses and massage parlors.

Lee leaned out around the pedicab's awning to look back
and the driver glanced over his shoulder and said, "Be cool,
man. You'll tip us over." A cluster of mirrors rose from the
left handlebar like a bouquet of steel and glass flowers; Lee
saw the driver's masked face variously reflected in flat and
convex and concave surfaces.

"I think your friend, he hasn't given up. Sort of a chunky
      RED DUST
      151
Chink? In black?" The driver spoke in machine-pistol bursts
between the sips of breath he took to top up his lungs. "Oh. That's him."
"He's in this pedicab. Maybe a hundred meters back? Mad-dog
Maguire doing his best to catch me. No contest, if you're
ready for it. My grafts are the best. The best you can get.
Maddog built his up. Built his up the hard way."
Lee thrust another ten yuan note at the driver, who
snatched it without turning his head and stood on his pedals
again, sounding an ear-splitting air horn as he veered hard
into a hutong. Lee clung to the narrow armrests as the pedicab
slewed from side to side down the dark narrow alley.
The hubs of the big rear wheels struck sparks from the stone
walls. Then light again, pedestrians scattering and suddenly
gone as the pedicab plunged into another hutong, braking
sharply at its end and turning on to a wide avenue, threading
in between two trams. There was dark sky overhead. They
had left the Yankee Quarter behind.
The driver yelled happily. Lee leaned forward and gave
him another note, asked how he knew the hutong would be
empty.
"I didn't! Just luck, man. Oh shit, but it looks like Maddog
got lucky, too."
Apartment buildings made random patterns of lights under
the night sky. No more crowds, only a few passersby
who turned to watch the two pedicabs race past.
They were suddenly level with each other. Maddog Ma-guire
was a tall Yankee with a head completely shaven except
for a vertical crest that stood up in spikes. The spikes were
dyed luminescent red and green. His face gleamed with
sweat. He yelled something at Lee's blond driver, who jabbed
a finger at the sky and put on a spurt of speed that for a
moment left Maddog's pedicab behind. But then it drew level
again and its burly black-clad passenger was leaning forward,
shouting something lost in the whir and hiss of wheels and
wind. He was shaking his fist--no, there was something in
it, and Lee ducked just before a flare of light blew away the
pedicab's awning. In the same instant, Maddog twitched his
      152
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

steering bar and the two pedicabs collided, wheels tangling
before they shot apart again.

Then there was a tremendous blast of sound.

Lee had a confused glimpse of a truck bearing down,
headlamps glaring. Then it spun away and there was a terrific
wrench and Lee shot forward, rolling over and over
through leaves and stiff twigs.
Thirty-three


T

he pedicab had ploughed through a hedge into a little
park. Lee lay amid the dusty smell of carnations, foolishly
looking up at black sky. He rolled over, saw the
driver trying to get his pedicab upright. Beyond a scrim of
bushes, the other pedicab was upended in the middle of the
road, one wheel still lazily revolving. The brawny man was
being pulled out of the wreckage by spike-haired Maddog
Maguire.

Lee sprang up and ran. He plunged straight through flow-erbeds
and cleared the hedge on the other side of the park
in a single bound. Then he was running along a wide street
divided down the middle by tram lines. Factory buildings
made a low humming on either side. Occasional lights shed
a sickly orange radiance. Up ahead there was the sound of
music, and once, twice, fireworks burst above the flat roofs
of the factories, brief constellations already fading by the
time the faint sound of their detonation reached Lee.

He ran until he was quite out of breath and then he
walked, gasping, until he heard the rattle of a pedicab and
looked back. He hoped it was simply his own driver, chasing
him for payment, but then a flash of light burst in the air
in front and to the left of him, so close he felt the wash of
heat.

For a moment the flight reaction threatened to take him
again. But he knew how it worked now: he knew how to


153
      154
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
access the parallel nerve net spun by the viruses. He speeded
up. He blurred.
Maddog Maguire's pedicab was soon left far behind as Lee
dodged down ever narrowing streets. He ran sweetly and
easily, taking rapid sips of air. Paved road suddenly gave way
to a mud track with a stinking sewer channel overflowing
its center. Washing strung from house to house made ghost
shapes above him; dogs barked from porches as Lee sped
past. The fireworks and the music seemed closer, and then
Lee turned a corner and was in the middle of a festival
crowd.
He stopped, muscles loose as sacks of water. People
wound all up and down the waterfront. There were monks
in red robes, and fishermen and women in black cotton
smocks or hooded jackets of undyed wool, red yarn wound
through their hair and red or yellow kerchiefs at their
throats. Children ran everywhere. Vendors cried their wares:
beer, sweet rice, dumplings, fried dough. Everybody seemed
to be whirling a prayer wheel or carrying a boat-shaped butter
lamp or a smoking stick of incense, or banging a little
drum or shaking a tambourine. Every so often someone
would touch off a firework, just for the fun of it, and fiery
flowers would bloom out across the dark lake. Jetties ran
out into faintly luminous darkness and boats were tied up a
long way down them, paper lanterns glowing like stars at
the points of their high sterns.
It was the festival of the houses of the gods, the time when
the myriad fragmented gods of the fisherfolk left the people
they had been riding for a year and settled in new hosts.
Here and there chanting circles danced around a man or a
woman who swayed as if drunk--drunk on the immanence
of godhead. Lee was twice drawn into one of these circles,
and after he freed himself the second time he was brought
up short by a man with staring eyes and tears running down
his cheeks. He held Lee by his shoulders and looked unblinkingly
into his face and said, "Welcome, sister," and
spun away.
A firework went off prematurely, cracking a shower of
      RED DUST
      155
golden rain directly overhead. Everyone around Lee looked up,
everyone except a man who was looking right and left as he
pushed through the crowd.
It was the man in black.
He saw Lee in the same moment that Lee saw him,
shouted a single word that was lost in the chants and
screams and laughter of the festival.
Lee dodged around the smoking cart of a dough fryer,
threaded his way through ambling knots and chanting circles
of people. A solemn little girl caught at the hem of his
chuba; Lee pulled free and darted between two shaven-headed
monks in orange robes who capered and beat little
drums tucked under their arms in wild syncopation.
Lee was standing at the beginning of a long stone jetty.
The man in black pushed between the dancing monks, and
Lee ran on, ran a long, long way until he almost ran off the
end of the jetty. The tops of the masts of the little fishing
boats rose waist high on either side. Black water slopped far
below him. He turned.
The man in black raised his hands to show they were
empty. He was only a few meters away. The lanterns and
dancing lights of the festival made a ribbon on the darkness
behind him.
"Wei Lee," he said. "Don't be scared. I am here to help
you."
Lee said, "I need no help." A fire burned beneath his
breastbone.
"I think you do. You can trust me. Look."
The man started to bring something out of his jacket and
Lee blurred into motion and ran straight at the man and
caught his wrist. For a moment they wrestled at the lip of
the jetty: Lee desperately quick; the man ponderous and
strong. And then they fell.
Thirty-four


T

he impact of the water drove all breath from Lee's
body. He plunged in a whirl of bubbles down into cold
darkness. Pressure drove twin spikes into his eardrums.
Like almost every Martian, he had never learned to
swim. Galvanized by a lightning tree of fear, he thrashed
and kicked against the heavy dark water with no idea of up
or down.

Every muscle ached for air, but he retained enough sense
to clamp his teeth against the impulse to breathe that was
tightening within his chest like a vice, threatening to spring
his ribs.

Then something thumped into the small of his back. He
was rushed through cold black water which suddenly broke
over his face. He opened his mouth and it filled with a gush
of air, pure as life, before water closed over his head again.
He kicked out, felt something graze his legs, his hands. He
grasped a smooth hard streamlined body, and it lifted him
into air again, pushed him towards the shore with strong
supple movements.

Lee's legs grazed silt and a tangle of waterweed; then he
was sprawled on salt-caked mud with scarcely enough
strength to raise his head as he spewed cold water. He fell
down and rolled over, breathing as hard and painfully as a
new-born baby.

He had been brought round the curve of the shore, beyond
the jetties and noise and light the festival made along

156
      RED DUST
      157

the waterfront. A little way off, something with a grinning
beaked mouth full of tiny needle-sharp teeth breached the
surface. It made a high-pitched chattering, and cocked a
bright eye at him before sliding back into black water. Lee
realized that it was the creature that had saved him.

"It's a fin," a small voice said out of the darkness behind
him.

Lee remembered to use the enhanced vision the viruses
had given him, and saw the solemn little girl who had
clutched at the hem of his chuba in the midst of the festival's
whirl. She wore a black shift over a red shirt with baggy
sleeves and kneehigh felt boots. Her black hair was done up
in oiled pigtails pinned above her ears.

She said, "Fin help us fish. Now one catches a god!"
Lee managed to get to his feet. He was shivering with
more than cold, although his clothes were heavy with icy
water and he was chilled to the marrow by the breeze off
the lake. He said, "I wish I could thank him."

"You need a machine to talk fin. Much is too high and
fast, even for me." She said, in a completely different tone
of voice, "I carry a god. That is how I know you are more
than one."

A chattering squeal came from out in the water.

The little girl said, "The fin says you are legion. He says
you come to save the lake. He says you must do what you

must. I know that, too. That is why we have come for you."
"We?" Lee said stupidly.

"All the gods. We've been waiting for you for such a long
time."

The little girl's name was Chen Yao. She was four years
old, the youngest daughter of a fishing family. The god that
had settled in her that night was a star god whose secret
name could not be revealed. Chen Yao said that he claimed
to be the father of the Emperor Yu, who had first controlled
the flooding of the Yellow River; his familiar was a fox with

nine tails. That was why she had known to help Lee.
"Because I have nine tails?"

"Perhaps you have nine lives." Chen Yao tipped her head,
      158
      PAUL J. McAuLEv


listening intently to something only she could hear. "No,
because you hold the keys to the heavenly river, that will
one day wash the shores of the friendly lands."

Lee thought that she meant the Milky Way, and asked no
more. Chen Yao led him up the long sweep of the salt flats
and then through the crowds and the lights and scents and
noise of the festival. She held his thumb in her hot small
fist and chattered away in the manner of any four-year-old.

It seemed that the fin which had saved him was a descendant
of dolphins made more intelligent by Cho Jinfeng. That
at least had been real enough. So had the man in black, who
Lee fervently hoped was at the bottom of the lake. But the
talk of gods ... even if Chen Yao did somehow know about
Miriam, Miriam was no god. She was not even alive, was no
more than the sum of data coded by her viruses on to the
spy device in his visual cortex...

Lee realized that somehow he and little Chen Yao had
become the head of a procession. Men and women and children
followed them in solemn single file through the
crowds, all with wide eyes and tear-stained cheeks. He asked
the little girl where they were going, and she pointed and
said, "Why, to our house, of course."

On a spit of land at the far end of the waterfront, past the
houses and long steep jetties, lit by lanterns strung everywhere
across its white-washed walls and steep red-tiled
roofs, was a temple.
Thirty-five

T
he gods bathed Lee and brought him clean clothes, and
fed him fried aubergines and maize porridge flecked
with bits of charcoaled potato. This was in one of the
chapels of the temple, an octagonal high-ceilinged room
bright with murals and banners, and with lamps in a hundred
niches making flickering constellations. Lee learned
how good food tastes after your life has been saved, and the
gods smiled indulgently at his relish.
After Lee had eaten, the gods left him to sleep. He
sprawled on loose cushions in a big ornate chair, the brocade
gown given to him by the gods scratchy against his clean
skin. He was pleasantly drowsy, and clean and comfortable,
after the terrors of the night, the chase and his near-drowning.
The revelation of the double murder of his parents hurt
less than he thought it should. The young boy who had
witnessed it was no relation to him except that they were
the same person, and he was beginning to realize that he
had been more obsessed with the search to find them than
its outcome. What hurt most was that Great-grandfather Wei
had betrayed him not once but twice, using the same cat'spaw
with a casual arrogance that implied volumes about
what he thought about his great-grandson.
And so all Lee's vaguely formed plans were overthrown.
Tomorrow he would have to begin again, but now he could
sleep...

159
      160
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


The gods watched him solemnly from the doorway of the
chapel, asking nothing of him. The little girl, Chert Yao,
slept curled at the foot of Lee's throne, and Lee soon fell
asleep too.
Thirty-six


H

e was in the chapel, alone. Light streamed through
the door, brighter than the butter lamps. Two people
stood in the light.

One was Miriam Makepeace Mbele. She was wearing tight
blue-denim jeans crusted with sewn-on badges, and a sleeveless
undershirt with sunburst patterns of purple and orange
that interlocked in a way that made them seem to rotate
over her unbound breasts. Her hair was long and bleached,
tied back with a sparkly headband.

The other person, in a white leather suit sparkling with
rhinestones, its front V-ed open down to his navel, was the
King of the Cats. Around his shoulders was a white cape
lined with cloth of gold, its flared collar faced with scarlet.
His wide golden belt bore the legend "The World Champion
Entertainer." He flashed his crooked grin and beckoned to
Lee. His fingers glittered with gold rings set with diamonds
and rubies and emeralds.

With no sense of awe or surprise, Lee got up and followed
Miriam and the King of the Cats into the light.

They were in a transparent bubble hung in starry space
from a siding of pitted rock. Like ghosts, they floated in cool
pine-scented air.

Miriam said, "It's still too early to have regrets, but I
know that this is one place I'll miss." Her long blond hair
fanned out around her face. Like her hair, her skin was
bleached.

161
      162
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Lee said, "This is where you lived?" He couldn't stop
looking at the King, who grinned and winked back at
him.

"This is just one room. I'd come here to turn on, tune in,
drop out. Most of the Nexus are agoraphobes. They like tunnels
and little chambers, warmth and red light. They like to
huddle."

"Poor little anarchists!" the King said. "They fear the
seething silence of the void!" His gleaming black hair was
slicked back just like Lee's. Or was it the other way
around? He plucked a white silk scarf from the air and
draped it around his neck. "Listen closely," he said, "and
you can hear the echo of the word God spoke to light the
Universe."

Lee wondered which god he meant.

"There are many gods," Miriam said. "Yes, of course I can
read your mind, Wei Lee. Are we not in it?"

"Speak for yourself," the King said. A corner of his
full-lipped mouth lifted into precisely the expression Lee
had spent so much time practicing. "I'm just visiting.
And incidentally, in this present incarnation I'm too
young for this science-fictiony suit. But, hey, don't bother
ageing me. Corporeality is relative."

Lee said, "You know each other?"

The King shrugged. "I've known one or another of Miriam's
incarnations down the years. She's a popular agent
with both sides. A regular pistol. A Colt pistol, if you get my
drift."

"As in Frankie and Johnnie? The one with the real bullet
when it was supposed to be blank?"

The King drawled, "Now, I always preferred Flaming
Star."

"Lee, I told you that my gene tine was owned," Miriam
said, casting an exasperated look at the King of the Cats.
"Miriam is my own given name, Makepeace is the trade
name of my clone line, Mbele is the name of the family
      RED DUST
      163
which owns the Nexus and owns me. It isn't as if it's slavery,
because after all I'm legally dead. I have no rights, or else
the dead would own everything."
"They do, on Earth," the King said.
"No one owns anything there. That's the point."
"No one owns life, but anyone who owns a frying pan
owns death. The dead own Earth, all right."
Lee said, "I thought everyone on Earth worshipped the
Mother Goddess of the World." He felt quite calm, as if he
was floating about a centimeter above his own skull. A viewpoint.
An observer.
The King said, "No one's left alive on Earth except res-urrectees
kind of like Miriam here. Old genotypes in new
bodies. You know them as the conchies. They do the work
of the Earth's Consensus, and the Earth's Consensus
serves the Mother Goddess of the World. Which is the
world, dig? Earth was dying, strangling in the wastes of
human civilization, heat pollution, carbon dioxide. The
Earth's Consensus had two choices, move Earth's orbit out
from the Sun, or remove the source of the problem. The
first solution wasn't technically feasible, so it applied the
second."
"Oh, it was technically feasible," Miriam said.
"Not without losing the Moon, and messing up the orbits
of Venus and Mars. And the Earth's Consensus has plans for
Mars, of course. And is applying them, as it did on Earth.
That's why we're all here. Mars is a dying world, from the
human viewpoint. It's being allowed to die. The Earth's Consensus
sees that as a rebirth. An erasure of human presence,
a triumph of the inorganic."
"Sometimes I think you side with the Earth's Consensus,
even without realizing it."
"Aw heck, I'm way older than it is. I'm even older than
you, Miriam, or at least most of the derivations of my mindsets
are. I never was a conservationist, nor could be. I'm too
early a model. In a way, I guess you could say the Earth's
Consensus is my child. Without me..."
      164
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"You were the first," Miriam said.

"Oh yeah, you bet! The first and best. I gave birth to
myselves, don't ever forget that. It gives me an edge the
monads that make up the Earth's Consensus can never
have. The# were created, once I had shown that it was
possible.

"For most of history, humans believed that gods lived in

the sky beyond the Earth. Even after the dawn of science a
vestige of that belief persisted. My original lived through a
time when cults thought that benign advanced aliens would
descend from the skies to rescue the Earth from Atomic
Armageddon. But instead humans created intelligences superior
to themselves." The King winked. "Such as yours
truly, and the monads of the Earth's Consensus. Perhaps
they've never forgiven you humans that. Or perhaps they
regard you in the way your Cro-Magnon ancestors regarded
the Neanderthalers. Either way, they destroyed most of humanity
in the name of preserving the Earth, and now they
want to transcend their origins completely, they want to
become gods. For all their talk of the Mother Goddess of the
World they look inward, away from the real, into worlds
created from information alone. Maybe they'll carry what's
left of humanity with them as worshippers. Now, I was at
the center of a religion once, and I can tell you it's the last
thing you should want. My children, my child. I'm fond of
it, but this whole green machine thing scares the shit out
of me."

Miriam said, "That was the army in Vietnam."

"Yeah, I was hinting at Vietnam. A scorched earth policy,
except the conchies scorched only the population. Vietnam,
Vietnam, hot damn, did I ever tell you about my tour of duty
in 'nam?"

.... 'You never were there. Not even to entertain the troops."

"Naw, they had Bob Hope and a half-dozen Playmates in

cute white panties to do that. I had the Colonel, telling me

I couldn't go abroad for some kind of business reasons, I

et precisely why.
      RED DUST
      165

"You were in the army," Lee said. "In Germany."
"That's 'cause I got caught in the draft. Those old GI
Blues. We all got married and had kids, that was the
blues. You're a fan? Here, I haven't done this in a long
time."

The King unslung his silk scarf, wiped his suddenly sweaty
brow and flung the scarf at Lee. It flew straight as an arrow,
but went limp when Lee plucked it from the air. "Think
nothing of it, kid," the King said, and plucked another scarf
from the air and knotted it around his neck.

Lee smiled and copied the King of the Cats.

Miriam said, "We're wasting time. It's not even as if this
is one of your strongest partials. And you should know better,
Wei Lee. I think I told you about the way he's twisted
his history to suit himself. He thinks he's a combination of
Christ, Orpheus, and Osiris."

The King said, "Heck, who are you to say? Listen, why do
you think the kid's a fan. He'll believe me more than Mao
or some other long-gone politician. Lighten up, Miriam. Be
like me, have some fun. I'll tell the kid what he needs to
know, but let me do it my way."

"Water," Miriam said, "is what it's all about."

"My, do you have a one-track mind!" said the King.
"That's one of my genome's selling points. Mars is dying,
Lee. You know that. The terraforming is reversing itself, water
locking back up under the crust because not enough was
ever melted to achieve a balance where liquid water dominates.
On the Earth, if all water was frozen at the poles, it
would soon melt under its own weight and fill the oceans
again. Here on Mars there's not enough water. The balance
has to be tipped. The original terraforming was on the right
track, but it didn't push the balance far enough. We will, if
we can."

"It's a hard rain that's gonna fall," the King crooned. He
added, "First ice, then fire."

"Fire, and then rain. A seeding, and a harvest. Forty days
and forty nights, Lee. The first installment of a flood that
      166
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

will fill the dry seabeds for ever. Thousands may die, so that
unborn billions will live. Otherwise all will die, now and for
ever, and Mars will be what it once was."
"This is the Sky Roader path," Lee said. "But the balance
requires an average depth of five hundred meters in the seas.
No one can move that amount of water, and even if they
could it would kill everyone on Mars when it fell from the
sky. Even the Ten Thousand Years didn't try to drop water
on Mars, but melt what was already there. Mars needs heat,
not water..."
The King said, "You're good, kid. They did a good job on
you. Now we're done talking, let's just show you."
"First of all he has to understand..."
The King smiled and snapped his fingers. Miriam made a frustrated sound and
spun away from him. Outside the blister,
the stars were dimming as if behind a rising mist. Then
Lee understood that another scene was bleeding through the
starscape: a segment of Jupiter's banded globe, frozen bands
of salmon and yellow and white feathering off into complex
scrolls.
It hung there for a moment before rising up with terrific
speed, although Lee felt no hint of acceleration in
the weightless volume of the strange room. They were
falling through clouds twenty kilometers deep. Opalescent
light streaked all around. It was like being inside a pearl.
Then cloud vanished, and they were floating above a vast
brick-red plain--a cloud deck from which great thunderheads
boiled up to form improbable mountain ranges of
inverted fiat-topped wedges. They formed rough parallel
lines that dwindled to the horizon, three thousand kilometers
away.
Something small glittered at the same height as the
viewing blister, brilliant in the pinkish twilight. The blister
swept towards it, and Lee saw that it was like a tinsel
pine tree, its size impossible to estimate. In the clear atmosphere
it could have been ten meters high and right
      RED DUST
      167
next to the blister, or a kilometer tall and a hundred kilometers
away.
The King of the Cats saluted the thing's slow rotations.
Miriam said, "You're such a show off."
The King put on a pair of dark glasses with chunky metal
frames. The earpieces had square cutouts in them. "A showman
is just exactly what I am," he said, cocking a hip and
doing a kind of slow swivel about its axis. "I thought the
kid should know where I'm coming from."
Lee said, "That's where you live?"
The King said, "Kind of."
"There are thousands of them," Miriam said.
"The mean optimal value is twenty-five thousand two
hundred fifty-three. 'Course, it varies by about eight per
cent. This is a dangerous environment. Accidents happen all
the time..."
Miriam told Lee, "This is one of the descendants of a self-replicating
probe the Europeans dropped six hundred years
ago to map Jupiter. It replicated all right, and at some time
it achieved consciousness. Its owners downloaded a suite of
simulated personalities to stabilize it, let it tap into a data
bank. He's one of the results. A partial, one part of a consensual
hive-mind holographically stored in twenty-five
thousand parallel processors."
"It isn't quite like that," the King said, with a self-satisfied
smirk. "We're more like a continually reiterated Cantor Set.
You're not even in our dust, Miriam."
Lee turned in mid-air to watch the tinselly construct
dwindle against the mountainous clouds. The blister was
picking up speed; all of a sudden, the construct vanished to
a speck, winked out. Luminous arcs radiated away from the
blister, shock waves in the dense atmosphere. Dark red
mountain ranges fell away. The blister arrowed through a
swirl of vaporous islands, shot into a vast canyon in the
upper clouds. Then clouds dropped away, turned into a
smog-colored river mixing in great swirls with rivers on either
side. The sky was black, and then stars came out. And
bisecting the starry sky was a faint interrupted line, flecks
      168
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


of curdled light tracing a narrow band that grew less distinct
as it grew nearer.

"That," the King said, "is the beginning of your new world
sea, all packaged for delivery."

It was Jupiter's ring.
Thirty-seven


T

he blister matched orbits with the ring's jostling lanes:
millions of dirty ice nuggets, massing from the size of
a dust speck to a small mountain, shepherded by the
inner moons into a series of arcs that forever poured around
Jupiter's equator.

Fullerene viruses had been at work on every nugget of ice
more than a tonne in mass. Each had been fitted with a one-shot
smart booster that would take it out of orbit and send
it falling towards Mars. Lazy skimming passes through the
atmosphere would fragment and melt the bolides; their water
would rain down, seeded with viruses. Viruses that would
soak up sunlight and burrow into the permafrost and melt
it with billions of pinchfusion processes. Viruses that would
float into the high reaches of the atmosphere to manufacture
a cocktail of chlorofluorocarbons that would absorb
across the thermal infra-red spectrum and warm the world.
But before they reached Mars, the bolides would have to
evade the laser defenses of the Army of the People's Mouths.
These too had multiplied, and there were more than enough
of them to deflect the long slow orbits of the bolides.

"Someone will have to disable the defense controls," Miriam
said. "There are too many weapons to be destroyed, but
there is only a single command system."

"Problem is," the King added, "you can't just drop a big
rock on it. We tried that, but y'all know the defenses can
deal with rocks. It works on dust, too. We tried to dust Mars

169
      170
      PAUL J. McAULEY

with viruses fifty years ago, but your Emperor was ahead of
us. The defenses saturate space around Mars with low-power
low-frequency broadcasts that destroy unshielded viruses by
inductive heating."
Miriam told Lee, "The defenses work too well. The con-
chics persuaded your Emperor to design and build them,
and he still controls them."
All of a sudden, the King held a pistol grip which flicked
out a rod of crackling white light. "Star Wars," he said.
"Only their light sabres have an effective range of fifty thousand
kilometers."
There was only one way to disable the defenses, and that
was to destroy the command center, which the Army of the
People's Mouths had built on the highest point of Mars, in
the vast caldera of Tiger Mountain. Lee had come all the
way to Xin Beijing, and now he was supposed to turn back
and set out eastward. If he and Miriam had not been captured
by the monks of the lost lamasery, they might already
have completed their mission.
"Or perhaps not," the King said cheerfully. "Now you have
the help of what's left of our other agents. At last they become
useful."
Miriam had floated across to the bubble's curved transparent
wall, clinging with splayed fingertips and watching
the braided river of water-ice boulders eternally fall through
its orbit. She said, "I'm not the first agent sent down by the
anarchists, but perhaps I will be the last. Many others failed;
a few survive in a fragmentary way, as virus infections in
the descendants of their contacts. As I survive in you."
"They've become gods," the King said.
"No," Miriam said, "or else that's what I've become. And
I'm so much less than what I once was ..."
"Who's to say, babe," the King said. "After all, you walk
in the kid the way the gods walk in their avatars. Oh, I've
boosted you up for this, but don't underestimate yourself."
He turned his twisted smile on Lee. "You know what you
have to do, kid?"
      RED DUST
      171
"I know what you want me to do. I don't know how.
Please, can you tell me how I must do it?"
"That's the hard part," the King said. "It's hard because
it's down to you, kid. You gotta understand that the Earth's
Consensus can simulate me. It can foresee any strategy I can
devise. I could randomise the choice..." he spun a thick
silver coin through the air, which vanished in the same direction
the light sabre had taken "... but I couldn't know
if the conchies haven't devised contingencies for everything.
It is possible. But you're an unknown variable, kid. That's
why we chose you."
"And your parents," Miriam said.
"He doesn't need to know that," Elvis said.
Lee looked at the King, at Miriam. He felt a vast deep
urgent sadness. He said, "My great-grandfather had my parents
killed. Why did he do that? What does he want from
me?"
Miriam said, "You still think that it was a coincidence that
I landed where I did? It was because you were there, Lee.
You're a link between us and your great-grandfather, part of
a long-standing deal, but you're also something else. Something
your great-grandfather doesn't know about. Your
mother..."
"He killed my mother! My mother and my father! He shot
them down..." Lee couldn't see clearly any more. He was
crying. In microgravity, his tears formed fat blebs that clung
to his eyelashes.
The King told Miriam, "Hush now. You'll destroy the random
variables if he knows too much."
Miriam said in a small voice, "Then let me die."
"No," the King said. "Listen to me, Wei Lee. You'll take
that little girl. Chen Yao? You take her with you, now. She
is the avatar of something whose powers you'll need. You'll
wake up now, but you'll remember. Remember all this."
"Wait!" Miriam said. "If I can't die I need to wake up with
him. What I have is worse than death. I need more than
flashes, fragments..."
      172
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"It'll get better," the King of the Cats said. "Now wake
up, Lee."

"No! Wait! Tell me why my parents were killed! Tell me
what happened to them when they were ambassadors to the
anarchists. Tell me..."

"Time past! Wake up!"
Thirty-eight


L

ee woke with a start, and almost fell out of the nest of
pillows he had made on the throne-like chair. He found
'that he was wearing goggles, and stripped them off.
Weak morning light streamed through the narrow windows
of the chapels, dimming the multitude of flickering butter-lamp
flames.

The vision was settling inside him, every detail vividly accessible.
He was not at the periphery of some plot of his
great-grandfather's after all: he was at the center of
something so vast that despite Miriam's long and tangled
explanations he felt he had only glimpsed its edges.

Lee clutched the heavy material of the brocade gown with
both fists. He felt as if he was poised over a great black pit.
Because, despite the goggles that the gods had put on him
while he slept, it could all be some terrible delusional system
he had worked up, trying to rationalize what had happened
to him. His loss of face at the Bitter Waters danwei, his
fugitive life, the sudden desperate sad weight of the memory
of the murder of his parents ...

He had always loved the King of the Cats, had always
hated the slow dying of Mars. And he had dreamed that the
King had recruited him to save Mars... that crazy story
about Jupiter's ring, about viruses that would melt water,
fill the outer skies with microscopic greenhouse gas factories...

He remembered everything so clearly! But now that he


173
      174
      PAUL J. McAuL¥
was awake Miriam had slipped away from him. More than
ever Lee wanted her to appear to him: even her previous
manifestations could have been nothing more than hallucinations.
Suppose the viruses hadn't transferred her partial
personality after all, but had simply damaged his brain?
"I'm not mad," he whispered into the cushion under his
cheek. "I won't be mad..."
The little girl, Chen Yao, was curled at the feet of the
chair. Only two other gods remained: an old woman with
white hair pulled back in a thick braid, and a stout young
fellow in clean but worn work clothes. They both came forward
and bowed to Lee, who jumped down at once, embarrassed
beyond all measure.
Chen Yao stretched, and said, "What's all this noise? Have
you finished talking with your friends?"
Lee said slowly, "I was dreaming. Such a strange dream.
I remember it very clearly."
"Of course you do. You were supposed to remember it."
"You know what I dreamed?"
Chen Yao stretched again, and yawned with the quick unselfconscious
reflex of a cat. She looked like any sleepy four-year-old,
eyes puffy, hair scuffed up on one side in a
roostertail. "I shared your vision," she said. "That is my
attribute. I speak with those you carry, with the woman, and
with the godhead."
Lee laughed. If Chen Yao knew, then perhaps it was all
true after all! Or perhaps she was as crazy as he believed he
might be. A poor crazy little girl worshipped by the fisherfolk
as a god.
Chen Yao said, "Don't be silly. We contain fragments, but
you are the avatar of the entire godhead. You are our saviour,
Benefit of the People Lee."
"No," Lee said. "No, I don't know that I am."
The young fisherman bowed again, and said, "The child
tells the truth, Master."
"Please! I'm no one's master! I'm not even master of my
own life!"
The old woman said, "At seven, I set my heart on learning.
      RED DUST
      175
At fifteen, I was firmly established. At twenty, I had no more
doubts. At twenty-five, I knew the will of heaven. At thirty, I was ready to
listen to it. At thirty-five, I could follow my
heart's desire without transgressing what was right."
"Lao," Lee said, bowing to the old woman. "I am still
young enough to have many doubts."
"But you know the will of heaven," Chen Yao said.
"I do?"
"Silly man," Chen Yao said. "Your vision explained everything,
of course."
Lee thought that it explained everything or nothing. It
was as complete and as fragile as a bubble.
Chen Yao clapped her hands with a curious mixture of
childish excitement and hauteur. "Now come on," she said, "we must start our
journey! We must go to join our friends!"
Thirty-nine


hegods returned Lee's chuba, shirt and black jeans.
TThey had been washed and dried and pressed. Lee

. found that his money was gone from the button-down
pocket of his shirt, but he did not think that the gods had
taken it. Perhaps it had been lost when the pedicab had
crashed (so perhaps the driver had got his fare--and more),
or perhaps when he had fallen into the lake.

But on the waterfront, at least, lack of money wasn't a
problem. Chen Yao simply went up to a street vendor, and
the man smiled and handed them bananas sliced and fried
in paper-thin envelopes of dough.

Munching his breakfast, Lee allowed Chen Yao to lead him
along the dockside. Things happened, one after the other,
whether he willed them or not. So let them happen, this
bright spring morning!

Grainy white salt flats sloped away into gauzes of mist
that lay low on the black water of the lake. Down at the ends
of the kilometer-long jetties, fishermen were preparing their
boats for the day's work. Their songs drifted small and clear
in the bitter morning air. Oyster farms and kelp racks made
rectangular patterns beyond the jetties. The sun still lay behind
the worn rimwall mountains, but his light glowed the
sky and rouged the mists. Fear was overhead, a tiny
smudged crescent riding swiftly to greet the dawning sun.

Lee stopped when he saw something break the water out
beyond the longest jetty. His attention switched something


176
      RED DUST
      177
in his rebuilt eyes, and everything else flowed away from the
suddenly magnified patch of water.
Lee clapped his hands over his face and fell to his knees.
After a few moments he cautiously opened his fingers. Chen
Yao was looking at him. Her face was exactly level with his
own. She said, "What did you see?"
"I thought I had something in my eye. It's gone now."
He allowed his eyes to do their zoom trick again, and saw
the bulging heads of fins break the surface far out in the
black lake: two, four, six of them. One rose chest deep in
the water, beaked head bobb. ing. Perhaps it was the one
which had saved his life. Lee got to his feet and raised his
hand in salute.
"The lake shrinks year by year," Chen Yao said. Fried banana
was smeared around her mouth. "Once it was twice as
big, and where we walk was under water. These are the new
docks."
"I know," Lee said, but Chen Yao wasn't paying attention
to him. She was watching the sweep of water beyond the
dry salt flats and the ends of the jetties.
She said, "The fin grow fewer and fewer, for there are
fewer and fewer fish for them to eat. Soon there will not be
enough for the fishermen and the fin, and there will be war.
The fin know that, and that is why they saved your life, and
allowed the other to drown."
Lee discovered that the closer he looked at something,
the smaller his field of view became. He looked right into
the texture of the netting that a fisherman was folding
at the end of the long jetty, at the scars on the man's flexing
knuckles. Just an extra step, that was all. He had it under
control now.
He said, "These fin, they drowned the fellow that was following
me?"
"They did not save him. It was action through inaction,
for the greater good. Their viruses prevent them from killing
men, which is why they fear war so much. But through
inaction they can allow death if it is for the greater good."
      178
      P^v J. McAtn.:¥
"Do you know who he was? The man who tried to... kill
me."
Chen Yao said seriously, "We think he was a demon. The
Ten Thousand Years grow them. Many there are in the Army
of the People's Mouths. An army within an army. They kill
on order. He would want the viruses that have raised the
godhead in you."
Lee said, "The viruses are real. I mean, they really are
rewiring my nervous system."
"It's all real. You must accept it."
Lee asked, "How did you know I was coming here? I
mean, you were expecting me."
"The gods drew you here. The way does not matter, as
long as it is the right way." How serious she was, for one
so young.., yet of course she was more than a young girl.
Like all the fisherfolk, she carried viruses which allowed partial
personalities to be expressed in her, just as Lee carried
fragments of Miriam. Lee remembered what Miriam had told
him about her gene line, mercenaries licensed to kill for
anarchist families whose members could not bear to leave
the binding closures of their habitats. Was she a demon or
an angel?
He realized it did not matter. He felt a strange calm lucidity.
Even if Miriam's fullerene viruses had rewired him to
feel that way, even if they had snuffed his panic the way he
might pinch out a candle flame, it still felt right. The con-chie
missionaries claimed that the world was only an illusion:
who was to say whether one thing was more real than
another, whether light was stronger than darkness?
Lee felt Chen Yao's small hand in his. It was warm, and
greasy with fried banana. The little crazy girl god said,
"Whether she's a demon or an angel depends on who she
serves, of course. She fell from Heaven, so I suppose she
must be an angel."
"Earth is in Heaven too."
"Miriam says you have a lot to learn."
"Can you really speak to her?"
"Of course." Chen Yao was calmly matter of fact. "Viruses
      RED DUST
      179
are everywhere here, because of the fin. They were infected
with strains by Cho Jinfeng herself, and she gave us a translator
strain so that we could speak to our helpmates. The
viruses have changed since, and so we fisherfolk can become
avatars for the fragments of godhead that have fallen
amongst us. But they are incomplete, and you are not."
Lee remembered Miriam's claim that there had been
many agents before her, that some survived as fragmentary
infections in the descendants of their original contacts. He
thought he knew what had caused the mutations in the
translator viruses of the fisherfolk.
He said, "Where are you taking me, Chen Yao? You overestimate
my powers if you believe that I can walk halfway
around the world."
"There are people who will help us. They have been waiting
a long time for people like you. The Sky Road was never
completely destroyed."
"Miriam said that the ku li would help me. Is that who
your friends are?"
"You ask too many questions," Chen Yao said. "Come on,
it's this way."
"I have my own idea," Lee said. "You can come with me
if you want, but I'm going there with or without you. It
won't take too long to get what I'm owed."
"We don't need money."
"Of course we do. We're going out into the real world.
Trust me." He struck off down the narrow street down
which he had run last night, and after a moment heard Chen
Yao running to catch up with him.
"You'll be sorry," she said. Then, "Where are we going?"
"To the one man who can help me."
"Your great-grandfather is no friend!"
"I'm not thinking of him," Lee said.
So it was that Lee walked through the waking city two
paces ahead of a cross young girl who carried a god stitched
into translator viruses inside her own genome. It was as if
he walked at the head of a procession.
They walked down wide streets shaded by the two
      180
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
hundred-meter-high canopies of dusty ginkgoes. Trams
glided amongst flocks of bicycling commuters, but Lee and
Chert Yao had no money for trams, not even the least coin
for a mouthful of freshly squeezed orange or mango juice
that vendors dipped from plastic canisters with steel cups
which they meticulously wiped after each customer.
Chert Yao said, "You really are going the wrong way."
Lee told Chen Yao that she could not rely on the charity
of her worshippers.
"They are not worshippers," Chen Yao said. "I wonder if
you understand anything you've been told, Wei Lee."
"Perhaps you are right. But Tiger Mountain is five thousand
kilometers away and there is a man in the city who
owes me money."
"We do not need it!"
They stared at each other, while passers-by moved around
them. Lee said, "Tell me everything, Chen Yao."
Chen Yao turned her face sideways to his. "I told you
before that you ask too many questions."
"You haven't been told very much. It's all right. I don't
know much either. We're two of a kind."
Chen Yao pouted, entirely her age now.
"We'll visit this man, and then we'll find your friends."
"You don't know anything," Chen Yao said again. "I know this city, a little.
It won't take long."
Maps of the city came down inside his head, settling
through each other. One was written by the viruses, the
other patched from his own memories. He was walking
down North Avenue, with apartment houses on one side and
the long low white houses of the half-lifers set in a narrow
parkland on the other. North Avenue led all the way to the
First House of the Emperor, but soon he would be able to
cut across the Park of the Central Sea and find Hawk's
house. He didn't need viruses to tell him that.
But as they walked on Lee rediscovered what he had long
ago forgotten, that walking in a city is far more wearying
than walking the untamed landscape. There was no way to
establish the rhythm of long strides which ate up territory,
        RED DUST
        181
                   for every few meters there was a fresh distraction: a fat
shirt
                   less man standing in a doorway, smoking a cheroot with

                   such an air of beneficent satisfaction that Lee could
believe

                   that he was the real owner of the city, enjoying watching it

                   wake around him; a policeman with white gloves directing

                   traffic at an intersection, blowing furiously on his silver

                   whistle at swarms of oblivious cyclists; beggars sitting in
a

                   row under a flowering hedge, displaying various mutilations

                   and disfigurements; a man laboriously pedalling along at

                   snail's pace, towing a trailer which carried a square crate
as

                   tall as Lee; a tram so laden with passengers--hanging from

                   its windows, along its running boards, crowded on to its
roof

                   and even clinging to the wedge of its crash-catcher--that it

                   looked like a heap of people skimming along with no visible

                   means of support.

                   The tram went slowly because there were so many people

                   spilling from the wide sidewalks into the road. Something

                   began to knot itself in Lee's chest. He knew that this was

                   no ordinary rush-hour crowd even before he reached the

                   border of the Park of the Central Sea, and saw the soldiers.

                   Some were lined along the park's edge. Many more

                   roamed the dusty grass and the perimeter of the big lake,

                   the third biggest body of open water on Mars. Vehicles were

                   parked everywhere. A culver flapped up from Jade Island, in

                   the center of the lake. All around Lee and Chen Yao, people

                   hooted and jeered.
      '
      The soldiers watched impassively. Despite the density of

      !1
      the crowd, no one used the sidewalk that ran along the bor
                  der of the park because the soldiers stood on the other side

            I
      of it. They were dressed in black leather, carried transparent

                  plastic shields as tall as themselves. Their faces were
masked;
.
      the
masks had bulbous goggles, and complex fairings that
swept back and grew into the soldiers' skulls. Things flew
out of the crowd at the soldiers--bottles, stones, even the
occasional shoe--but the soldiers moved only to deflect missiles
with their shields. The crowd roared when red paint
splashed across one soldier's shield.
Chen Yao tugged at Lee's hand. "You see! You see!"
      182
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


She was close to tears, and that, more than the soldiers
or the mob they faced, was what scared Lee.

"You should have followed me!" Chert Yao wailed.
"Let's get off the street," Lee said, and took her hand.
But when he tried to zig-zag through the crowd to the
far side of the avenue he was caught in a swirling current
of people that carried him in one direction and Chert Yao in
another. Lee fought free and had to dodge a crowded tram
that continuously rang its bell as it crept through in the
middle of the crowd which swept Lee past the park and
spilled out into the wide space of the Square of Heavenly
Peace.

It seemed that half the population of the city was already
there. People streamed across the wide space towards the
high white walls of the First House of the Emperor. They
clustered thickly around the Front Gate, which in normal
times would be open to allow entry of petitioners to the
Halls of Requite Interface. But the gate was closed; it had
been closed ever since the Emperor had fallen silent, and
now its black and white mandala and its twenty-meter-high
arch was spattered with red paint. People spilled past it on
either side, under the overhang of the wall, which arched
above them like a wave frozen in the moment of breaking.
Posters and painted slogans covered the lower third of the
wall. Holographs projected luminous ladders of characters
above the heads of the crowd, a hundred different variations
on the call for truth. Vendors were out and about, crying
their wares, and a cluster of makeshift tents was pitched at
one corner of the square.

Lee caught the arm of a man, excused   himself and asked
what had happened. The man smiled in   confusion and
pointed to the sky and hurried away.   An old woman shouted
at Lee, "The Emperor, young man! The   sky radio says that
the Emperor is dead!"

Lee remembered to switch on the radio which the viruses
had built inside his head but there was only a dizzy swoop
of static. At the same moment Lee heard someone call out
his name.
      RED DUST
      183

"Wei Lee! Wei Lee!"

Xiao Bing ran towards him, silver eyes flashing in his
white face. Elsewhere, a ragged shout went up from people
still crowding into the square.

"The soldiers! The soldiers are coming! The soldiers!"
Fort


R

ank after rank of soldiers marched into the Square of
Heavenly Peace, fanning out either side of the avenue
to form an arrowhead that pointed across the crowded
square to the Front Gate. An officer in a black silver-belted
bodysuit rose into the air, feet pointed like an angel in those
early Yankee paintings before the rules of perspective were
formulated. His black bubble helmet flared in the morning
light which flooded above the heads of the crowd and burned
salt-white on the blank walls of the government buildings
behind the soldiers' formation.

Lee gasped at this miracle. Xiao Bing shrugged and said,
"There are superconducting coils woven in his suit. He'll be
hovering over a honeycomb magnet--sort of like a flying
carpet in reverse, the carpet stays on the ground, you fly. If
we could induce flux in that guy we'd degauss his coils and
see how he flew without them."

"You haven't changed," Lee said. "Always some pragmatic

explanation for something no one else can understand."
Xiao Bing said, "It's only been three weeks, Lee."
"Has it? That's amazing."

The officer's amplified voice clattered across the Square
of Heavenly Peace, rebounding from the buildings on three
of its sides, the upswept wall on its fourth.

"It is time to leave the square," the officer said. "All citizens
should leave the square so that the Army of the People's
Mouths can implement their tasks."

184
      RED DUST
      185

A kind of formless murmur went up from the crowds as
the echoes of the officer's voice died away. "Now we'll see,"
Xiao Bing said with grim satisfaction. He took Lee's arm and
began to steer him through the crush.

"I'm glad to see you," Lee said. He vividly remembered
the bombardment of the agricultural dome, the explosions
and the sudden rush of the storm. He had thought his two
friends dead. "I'm glad to see you escaped the soldiers. And
Guoquiang? He is here?"

"He could be with the troops surrounding us, for all I
know. He joined up, Wei Lee!"

"All that talk about the glory of serving the Emperor in
the Orbital Defense Corps... so Guoquiang was a true idealist.''

"As for escaping the soldiers, we jumped in the rice paddies
and when the shooting stopped we stayed there. We had
on our masks because of the dust storm, and so we could
lie completely underwater and quench our infra-red signatures.
Besides, the soldiers weren't looking for us, but for
you and the anarchist pilot. When night came we stole two
horses and slipped away and they didn't even know we'd
been there. We rode as far as Dragon Spring Junction and
then we caught a train. Guoquiang had just enough money
for the trip, and as soon as we reached the city he joined
up. He wanted me to join too, but that was never my idea
of a life. Besides, could you see a silver-eyed white-haired
pale-skinned albino in that black leather uniform?"

"It would be rather elegant." Lee had to lean in close to
Xiao Bing; half the crowd were chanting for the Emperor,
the rest were shouting "Down with the Gang of Six!" over
and over and over. Lee said, "And you're still here. Still in
the world. You're not yet one of the half-lifers."

"Oh, Heaven can wait. I fell in with some interesting people.
You see the Big Character posters on the walls? They are the
fifty-six calls for the devolution of power to the individual. We
put up most of them in the night, when the King of the Cats
started talking about the death of the Emperor. I help keep the
projectors working to put our slogans in the air."
      186
      PAUL J. McAut,r¥
"How did you find the ku li?"
Xiao Bing laughed--it was lost in the crowd's roar. He
leaned close and said, "They aren't the ku li. They're far
more radical than that, you'll see. And they found me, Lee.
They find those who can help them, and in turn they help
us. There's a soup kitchen down near the railway station. I
got talking to one of the comrades, and he took me to one
of the meetings. Now I come here every day to help to educate
the petitioners who come to speak with the Emperor."
"But surely the Emperor speaks with no one."
"That's true, but there are always those who for some
reason or another believe that only the Emperor can help
them. Some have been here ever since the Emperor fell si-lent--I'm
sure you have seen the tents in the west corner
of the square. We come here to educate those who still think
the Emperor can help them. In a way, I suppose we--my
friends and I--are also petitioning the Emperor. I'd like you
to meet my friends, Wei Lee."
"I think that would be interesting."
"By the way, what happened to the pilot?"
"She... died. She died, Xiao Bing. A long way from here."
"How strange! She fell from the sky and touched all our
lives, and now she is gone and we are changed."
"That's truer than you think."
The crowd was densest by the wall. Xiao Bing used his
sharp elbows to push through the people who were reading
the posters and slogans. The officer of the Army of the People's
Mouths had floated higher, bobbing in the morning
breeze like a tethered balloon. When his amplified voice repeated
the warning, it was half drowned by the shouts and
jeers of the crowd.
"This is our day!" Xiao Bing said happily, and pulled Lee
on, all the way across the square to steps which swept up
to the high narrow doors of the House of the Names of the
Populace. Somewhere in there, Lee thought, the librarian
Xiao Bing had written for him was still haunting the dim,
booklined corridors of the data base. But what would the
      RED DUST
      187
librarian search for now, now that the truth of his parents'
assassination had been found?
A dozen young men had commandeered the sheltered alcove
at the top of the steps in front of the closed stainless
steel doors. Half were Yankees, and all were dressed in loose,
mostly black clothes. Some were distributing printed leaflets
to passers-by; others were unpacking all kinds of electronic
equipment from canvas carry-ails, stuff which had the raw
edges of homemade experimental units.
Xiao Bing introduced Lee to a plump young man named
Lao San. He had a shining round face and hair slickly swept
back and an excitable aggressive air. He said, "What have
you brought us, Xiao Bing?"
"Wei Lee worked in my danwei," Xiao Bing said.
Lao San said impatiently, "Doesn't matter where he comes
from. Is he hip to technology?"
Lee said, "I am only an agronomist technician. All this is
very intimidating to me."
Lao San jabbed a forefinger in Lee's chest, such an astonishing
lapse of manners that it paralyzed Lee. "Forget that
humble self-effacing shit! A new order is rising, and the old
ways have had their day! From the Darwinian point of view,
they're useful as a kind of social lubricant regulating the
behavior of the population, but there will be no need of that
once everybody's position in society is self-determined. If
you're going to help the PSLM you'd better be straight about
what you can do."
"But I don't even know what you're trying to do," Lee
said.
"We're here to change reality," Lao San said grandly. He
snapped a thin glass tube, stuck one half under his own
nose, the other under Lee's. Lee recoiled from the sharp
whiff of solvent, and Lao San laughed. "You've got to change
yourself before you can change the future."
"What was that stuff?."
"It'll free up your mind," Lao San said, and leered into
Lee's face in such a way that he seemed deranged. Then he
stalked off to harangue one of the black-clad young men. He
      188
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
kicked the projector the young man was tending and out
above the heads of the crowd a slogan written in rippling
red light unfolded in the air.
Xiao Bing said with undisguised admiration, "He's a pretty
intense fellow."
"What was that, memory enhancer? I don't need to free
my mind." Lee was wondering if the drug would affect the
viruses that swarmed in his bloodstream, but all he could
feel was a prickling in his palms that might be nothing more
than adrenalin.
"Oh no! Even I don't do that, now that I've put off dying
into my little piece of Heaven. We have many different kinds
of drugs to help us. That one is supposed to increase your
intelligence by allowing synapses to fire faster."
Xiao Bing explained that Lao San was leader of this cell
of the People's Scientific Liberation Movement. They believed
that the establishment of a technocracy would save
Mars, for only a technocracy could complete the terraforming
program. Their ideology was that of social Darwinism,
in which individuals were free units subject not to the constraints
of society, which in any case was a fiction maintained
only by collective delusion, but to the forces of the
market place. Government would be dismantled. Individuals
and danweis and privately owned industries would compete
to serve the population, and each person would pay only for
services they required. Competition would favor those most
fit to survive, those who were technologically literate.
"Just think of it, Lee, a truly scientific society!" "It seems, well,
incredible."
"Just so," Xiao Bing said, grinning.
Lee understood that Xiao Bing had lost Guoquiang but
had found someone else to follow. And with a floating careless
rapture he also understood that the drug had allowed
him this insight. He said, "It sounds fine, although I do not
quite understand how these competing danweis could band
together to complete the terraforming of Mars. Who will pay
for it?"
"Oh, there would be an air tax," Xiao Bing said, "or a
      RED DUST
      189

water tax. Or perhaps both. Details are not important at this
stage."
"You would have people pay simply to live?"
"Life is not a right, but a privilege. Read our Big Character
posters, and you will understand. Not here and now, of
course. We'll soon be done here anyhow; there's a seventy
per cent chance that the soldiers will clear the square in the
next hour. We will be gone by then."
"You don't support the people?"
"Lao San says there's no such thing as the people. Only
a stochastic mass of individuals."
Lee smiled. "Perhaps so. But at the moment it seems they
all want the same thing."
Lao San turned from the little machine he'd been fiddling
with and jabbed a finger into Lee's chest. "Listen! The Emperor
is nothing more than an outmoded attempt at centralizing
control. No such control is needed, of course, but
it cannot be removed by banging on its gates. You want to
know why we're here? It should be obvious this is a wonderful
propaganda exercise. Look at our slogans, our Big
Character posters!"
It was true, there were a dozen or more columns of ideograms
floating in the morning air. But most of the people
in the crowd were looking towards the soldiers, not the sky.
Lee said, "Oh, I understand that. I do want the same thing
as you. I want Mars to live again!" And he did, so strongly
that he started to cry, for he clearly saw the high cold deserts
spreading, the forests withering, the lake shrinking in its
salt basin.
"Sure you do," Lao San said.
Lee, embarrassed, started to apologize. Lao San said, "It is hard to force the
evolution of your mind. But it is necessary.
You help Xiao Bing try and get a projector on that
officer. Let's make him interesting."
Xiao Bing was fitting a little machine with a dozen glass-ringed
snouts to a kind of harness. Lee sniffed and said,
"You're going to degauss the officer?"
"Oh no. Just superimpose an image on him. A little ani
      190
      PAUL J. McAULE¥


mated program that will turn him into a demon. I wrote it
myself." Xiao Bing attached the little machine's harness to
a limp mylar balloon. "Hand me that gas cylinder."

As Xiao Bing inflated the balloon with helium, the officer's

voice boomed out again, and Lao San shouted that they
would have to hurry. From the elevation of the steps, Lee
could see across the heads of the crowd to the phalanx of
the troops on the far side of the square. The soldiers were
beating their shock sticks against their transparent shields
in an ominous rhythm. Slowly, their line advanced towards
the edge of the crowd, like the ruffling edge of an amoeba.
Lee saw little knots of struggle break out as snatch squads
of soldiers ran forward and grabbed hapless individuals and
dragged them away. The crowd, which had seemed like some
supra-organism united by a collective will, was fragmenting.
Ragged singing was lost in screams as the first gas bombs
went off. Blossoms of orange smoke began to spread at the
boundary between the troops and the crowd. Soldiers aimed
wide-bore rifles, and people at the edge of the crowd were
knocked down by glycerine rounds. Tanglewire suddenly expanded
in a mad dance, trapping dozens along its jittery
perimeter. Somewhere, there was the fluttering beat of hovering
culvers.

Then Lee was busy holding down the transparent balloon,

now as big around as the spread of his arms, while Xiao
Bing checked the projector hanging beneath it. "Let it go!"
Bing shouted, and Lee stood back as the balloon floated free.
Spurts of gas from little nozzles in the harness steered the
contraption out into the morning sunlight as its navigation
circuit fixed on the distant figure of the officer, who floated
high above the spreading clouds of gas and the running bat-tie
that was advancing inexorably towards the Front Gate.

Xiao Bing watched the balloon go with a blissful smile.
"You see the power of technology, Wei Lee."

"I wish it could be used to help the people understand."
Xiao Bing smiled. "Ideas, Wei Lee. That's the thing. We
explain to the population what they need until they embrace
the ideas as their own."
      RED DUST
      191

"It seems to me everyone wants to tell the people what
to do, but no one asks them what they want."
Lao San was suddenly in Lee's face again. "They won't
know they need it," he said, "until it is explained to them."
He spun Lee around. "Look at your brave masses, running
for their lives!"
It was true. The troops had occupied about half the
square. Their line had broken into dozens of units that
roamed back and forth under a pall of orange smoke while
thousands of people tried to escape down the avenue on the
far side. Dust clouds hung above the seething press, reddening
the morning sunlight. With a roar of wings, a culver
rose over the flat roof of the Ministry of Information and
swept towards the panicking people like a sparrowhawk harrying
ice mice from long grass.
Lao San laughed at Lee's dismay. "You stay with us, and
you'll understand. You're a bright fellow, even if you're wet
behind the ears." He turned and shouted at the others to
start packing up; it was time to go, and the other members
of the PSLM started to jam their bits and pieces of equipment
into canvas bags.
Lee saw threads of light stab down from the culver, raking
the crowd. People caught aflame like ants under a lens. He
and Xiao Bing shrank back when a laser pulse touched the
lower steps and heat-stressed stone flew in every direction.
A woman ran through the crowd, her hair on fire. A second
culver lazily settled over the Front Gate, the wind from its
wings sending posters flying like autumn leaves. Orange gas
squirted from the culver's belly, was dashed across the
square by its down draft.
People ran from the wave front of gas. Some tried to climb
the steps, but Lao San's young men fought them back with
bare hands or by swinging canvas bags weighted with their
equipment. Lao San wielded a telescopic pole; he punched
an old woman in her chest and she fell down, tripping the
people behind her.
Lee caught a whiff of gas that burned all the way down
his lungs. His eyes spilled burning tears. The drug had
      192
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
ripped his perceptions open. He was a screen, a nervous
surface. He grabbed Xiao Bing. "Can your machines project
a picture of a real person?"
"Sure. We have cameras as well as a recorder."
Lee saw his reflection doubled in the silver caps over Xiao
Bing's pupils. He saw that his own eyes seemed to be nothing
but pupil. He said, "Xiao Bing, you've always been a good
friend. Please set it up for me. For Guoquiang."
"You won't have more than a minute," Xiao Bing said,
and told Lee to step back. Overlapping cones of light sprang
around him, projected from little cameras fixed by adhesive
pads to the marble walls on either side of the stainless-steel
door. Lee slicked back his hair as Xiao Bing stuck a foam
microphone dot to his throat. "Stay in the light," Xiao Bing
said.
And then Lee saw his projected image hung hugely above
the square. It was as tall as a building. Lee spread his arms,
and his image's left hand passed through the culver that
hovered over the Front Gate. The drug fizzed in his forebrain.
He felt that he could reach into the heads of everyone
in the square, even the soldiers. His own voice echoed back
at him: the words came without thought.
"The King of the Cats told you the Emperor is dead! Believe
in the King! I have walked with him in Father Jupiter.
He has a message that is so strong it took a whole civilization
to forget it, yet it takes only a moment to remember it.
Remember that he forgave those who exiled him, and those
who betrayed him. Remember that he died for our sins!"
Lee paused for breath, and the crowd shouted and waved
their hands at his projected figure. "The King lives! The
King has returned!"
One of the culvers sprayed Lee's image with laser fire, and
Lee gave them his imitation of the King's smile. He swivelled
on his cocked hip and flicked his fingers at the floating officer,
who shot higher into the air in alarm. The crowd
laughed and cheered. Lee's voice was almost lost in their
noise. "The rains will come! All you have to do is open the
sky, and the rains will come! Take the Sky Road!"
      RED DUST
      193


And then he could no longer hear his voice as the crowd
surged forward. He saw that Lao San was staring at him
beyond the cones of camera light, hands clenched up around
his ears. Lee smiled and waved at Xiao Bing (his projected
figure out across the square seemed to gesture towards the
line of troops) and the light around him went off; out above
the surging crowds, so did his projected figure.

Lao San's voice was choked with anger and fear. "Who--
who are you?"

Xiao Bing laughed. "He's the King of the Cats' number
one fan!"

One of Lao San's underlings said, "We did a patch and
got it on to Channel Five, boss. The whole city'll have seen
it."

Lao San said furiously, "Who told you to do that? They'll
hang a trace?

The man, a horse-faced young Yankee, snorted with
laughter. "So it's time we left. Great propaganda, though."

Someone else said, "The government channel just went
off the air, but all the commercial channels are going crazy!"

Lao San spat. "The King of the Cats is dead, and I don't
believe in ghosts."

Lee grinned happily. "If you want to move the people,
you've got to give them what they want."

"What you've given them is a riot," Lao San sneered.

It was true. The crowd was surging forward, swirling
around knots of soldiers like the sea around rocks. Culvers
swooped low overhead, but they couldn't fire without hitting
their own troops. Trucks with armored prows welded over
airbags swept into the square from the avenue--but they
were driven by civilians, and civilians crowded their load-beds.
They ploughed through the lines of troops and people
jumped down from the loadbeds and ran into the crowd, ran
into outstretched arms. Everyone seemed to be embracing
everyone else.

"That's it," said the man who had been monitoring the
government channel. "The Gang of Six have been arrested.
There's a woman with a machine pistol in the studio advis-
      194
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


ing everyone that the city is under martial rule, by the order
of The Little Bird." He pointed at Lee. "And there's a price
on your head, fellow."

A little girl pushed out of the dispersing crowd and ran
up the steps, dodging the PSLM man who tried to catch her.
It was Chen Yao.

She grabbed Lee's hand. "You've caUSed big trouble," she
shouted. "Come on, now!"
Forty-one


T

he avenues around the Square of Heavenly Peace were
full of people hurrying away from it. Little electric
trucks cruised amongst them, flying red and black flags
and packed with armed men. They were the vigilante cadres
of Xiao Yan, The Little Bird, the Ten Thousand Years who
had seized the moment and captured the media networks.
A column of dense black smoke rose into the pink sky, close
by the dome over the Yankee Quarter.

"You follow me now," Chen Yao kept saying to Lee. She
held on to his hand. "All this craziness is your fault, Wei
Lee."

Lee was dazed by the comedown of Lao SaWs drug. His
head felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool, and there
was a trembling, not unpleasant lassitude in his limbs. He
hardly noticed when the gunfire started.

One moment he was being tugged through the dispersing
crowds by Chen Yao, the next he was wedged into a corner
of the doorway of an apartment building with people screaming
and shoving and shuddering all around him. Trucks
swerved around each other in the street, and there was the
orange stutter of muzzle flashes. Then someone made the
doors open and Lee and Chen Yao were swept into the lobby
with a hundred others.

Nobody had been directly hit, but many had been
wounded by shrapnel and flying glass. Those who lived in
the building brought sheets for bandages, and then blankets


195
      196
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

and bowls of soup or tea. The doors were closed and barricaded
and guarded by volunteers.

The old man found Chen Yao and Wei Lee tending a stoic
woman whose hand had been struck by a tumbling ricochet.
He waited while Lee washed away the blood and bound a
crude splint to the woman's broken fingers, and then put a
hand on his shoulder and said, "I know you, Master. It would
be an honor to my family if you took tea."

"At another time I would be honored by your hospitality."

The old man said, "One more pair of hands makes no
difference now."

It was true. For every person wounded there were two
others to bandage wounds or mop up blood or fetch tea.
People had brought out televisions. The tall lobby was filled
with the chatter of conversation. All this by consensus, without
leaders, without orders.

"I know you, Master," the old man said again. "My family
has known you for a long time. I'd like to talk with you
about it."

Chen Yao said, "It is kind of you, but we must go."
"The streets are dangerous. The Little Bird makes war
with the soldiers who were in the Square of Heavenly
Peace."

"An hour's delay won't hurt," Lee said. He was curious.
The old man, Kong Tiangang, lived in a three-room railroad
apartment with his wife and their two sons and their
wives and children--a baby, and twin brothers not much
older than Chen Yao--and their only daughter. This young
woman suffered from progressive atrophy of her central
nervous system, one of the genetic disorders common in a
population whose ancestors had been packed like sardines
in unshielded rockets. Stick-thin, she lay twitching and jerking
on a pallet in the main room of the two-room apartment,
staring up at the dingy ceiling, occasionally slobbering a
kind of gasping speech only her mother could understand.

The Kong family were poor, honest people who had committed
the crime of having too many children. After the
Great Reassessment, the Sky Roader trials and the alliance
      RED DUST
      197
with the Earth, punitive sanctions had been introduced to
reverse population growth; chief among them was that children
were taxed on an asymptotic sliding scale.
"We have dwindled," Kong Tiangang said. "Master Kong,
the Sage of Antiquity, whose name was known throughout
Old Earth, was our ancestor, but that was three thousand
years ago. I am of the one hundred and ninth generation.
Many more stayed on Earth, but they will not be alive now.
Once we were the first family under heaven. We ruled a
province, and lived in a mansion that was the largest, most
sumptuous mansion in the whole of the Middle Kingdom.
That is no more, except for a few treasures, and the library.
And that, which once filled a thousand thousand books in
the Great Pavilion of the Constellation of Literature, is now
stored in a data chip no bigger than my thumb. Master, will
you take more tea?"
Lee and Chen Yao thanked him. It was bitter green tea,
served in porcelain cups as thin and translucent as paper.
Apart from the palsied daughter, the whole Kong family sat
behind them, and neighbors crowded in the doorway and on
the landing and the stairs, whispering comments and speculation. Chen Yao
seemed to take no notice, but it took all
of Lee's will not to turn around.
Kong Tiangang smiled and said, "No doubt you have been
wondering how I knew of you, young Master."
"I had supposed that you saw me on television. But it is
more than that, isn't it?"
"We brought with us one treasure in particular. It was
made for our family in the Tang Dynasty by two famous
fortune tellers, Yuan Tiangang, for whom I am named, and
Li Chunfeng. Here, my son has it."
It was a thick bundle of ancient fibrous paper sheets,
stitched together. When it was unfolded it took up half the
floor space of the small room. It was covered with thousands
of symbols. The Sun, and Earth's Moon in all its phases,
stars and mountains, trees and plants, birds and beasts and
all manner of household articles, all jumbled together.
"We call it the back-to-back diagram," Kong Tiangang
      198
      PAUl. J. McAut,:¥

said. "The symbols represent the fate of each generation."

Chen Yao said, "It seems to me that Yuan Tiangang and
Li Chunfeng were indeed very clever prognosticators, for
there are so many different symbols that each generation
cannot fail to find something that reflects the meaning of
their lives."

Kong Tiangang said, "That may be true, young miss. If it
is, then what I show your master will do him no harm, and

at least you will have enjoyed my family's hospitality."
"Please," Lee said. "I'd like to see what it is."

"We found a symbol which we believe represented the one
hundred and tenth generation, here, a monkey in an aspen
tree. Our dear, unfortunate daughter was born in the year
of the monkey, and you have seen how her limbs stir and
quake, like the branches of an aspen in a wind. Yet you see
that the monkey in the branches of the aspen holds the
crescent of a bloody moon in its paw, and that the aspen
stands on the side of a mountain whose base is patrolled by
a tiger. I think that you are the monkey, Master, come to
cure our daughter, and to save the red planet."

"Please," Kong Tiangang's wife said. "We paid to have
machines put in her blood that would build circuits in her
nervous system. But that did not cure her."

"She no longer has fits," Kong Tiangang said. "But still
she trembles, as I have said, like the branches of an aspen
tree. Please, Master."

Chen Yao said, "This isn't what your gifts are for, Wei
Lee!"

Lee said, "You understand, Master Kong, that I promise
nothing."

Kong Tiangang bowed.

Lee knelt beside the palsied young woman, laid a hand on
her brow. She juddered, tried to focus cross-eyed on his face.
Her tongue labored in her mouth like the tongue of an animal.
Lee's mouth suddenly flooded with saliva and he bent and
kissed her deeply, then sat back, strangely moved. There was a
long silence in the crowded room. Then the young woman's
eyes uncrossed. She stared into Lee's eyes and sighed and fell
      RED DUST
      199
asleep, her twitching limbs relaxing, her clawed hands uncurling.
Her mother gave a cry as high and piercing as a bird, and
Lee stood up as the woman rushed to her daughter's side.
In a moment, the room was full of people exclaiming over
this miracle. The palsied young woman slept peacefully in
their midst.
Chen Yao took Lee's hand and pulled him against the flow
of people, out of the apartment and down the stairs. People
patted his face, sought his free hand. An old woman presented
Lee with a cloth-wrapped parcel of rice cakes and
dried fruit. Lee took it, and the woman bowed to him, but
it was Chen Yao who thanked her, and pushed Lee down the
stairs, ordered the self-appointed guards to open the barricaded
doors in the lobby. Two men volunteered to go with
them, and when Chen Yao refused their help the oldest told
them to keep away from the main streets, where The Little
Bird's vigilantes made their patrols.
Outside, Chen Yao led Wei Lee as fast as she could walk
down a tangle of residential streets. "You must be careful,"
she said. "Viruses are everywhere here, because of the fin.
It was Cho Jinfeng herself who gave a translator strain to
the fisherfolk. The viruses have changed since, and so we
avatars came into being. But none of us can do what you
did. News will spread quickly."
"I felt pity for her." Lee was munching on the sticky sweet
rice cakes. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, and now it was
past noon.
"That's bad. Pity weakens. It is too much like contempt."
Chen Yao was suddenly angry, and let go of his hand. "In
future, keep your pity to yourself, Wei Lee."
"Do you believe what the old man said?"
"My godhead tells me that it is superstition. No one can
know the future, for the fabric of the universes blurs into a
myriad possibilities from moment to moment. Yet it is true
that we are going to Tiger Mountain. I want to believe that
you cured the woman, that you will save the world. I want
to believe that the deed will be so great that it echoes up
      200
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

and down the corridors of time. If those ancient prognosticators
caught those echoes, then we have already won."

"The monkey held the world," Lee said, "yet the tree held
the monkey. I wonder what it means?"

"The point of those symbols is that they mean many
things. Too many things, perhaps. Why have you stopped?"

The street had opened on to   a big square with white three-or
four-story houses around it   and a central fountain, its
basin dry as a bone. It was   the Square of Two Thousand
Martyrs, and Lee recognized   Hawk's house straight away,
because a pair of yak horns   was mounted over its gate.
Forty-two


T

he wrought-iron gate was twice as high as Lee, with
scenes of herding life cunningly woven into its bars.
At his touch, the lock clicked and the gate swung back.
Lee, followed by Chen Yao, walked through the archway into
a courtyard where a small fountain played, a bubbling pulse
of water that rose and trickled down a cone of shingled tiles.
Lee bathed his gas-burned face. The water stung like liquid
fire before it soothed him.

"I don't think this is a good idea," Chen Yao said nervously,
looking around at the courtyard.

Geraniums grew thickly in large earthenware pots. Their
bright red blooms seemed to float in the gloom, and filled
the courtyard with their dusty scent. Balconies rose up four
storeys to a glass ceiling; banners hung down from their
balustrades like tongues.

"He owes me money," Lee said. "We'll need it."

"We need to get out of the city. First we cure the sick,
and then we become beggars. At this rate I'll be an old

woman by the time we reach Tiger Mountain."

"Hush. Listen."

A woman was singing somewhere, a song in a language
Lee had never heard before. She was singing her heart out,
drowning in waves of orchestration. It wasn't rock'n'roll, yet
it pulled at Lee's heart all the same.

Light shone from an open door on the far side of the
courtyard.


201
      202
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
That was where the music came from.
The room beyond the door was high-ceilinged, wood-panelled.
Thick carpets lapped the floor, muffled Lee's footsteps.
The light came from a big lamp behind a couch where
Hawk lay, propped by cushions as he sipped smoke from a
water pipe. The room smelt of a voluptuous combination of
sweet hash smoke and crme de menthe.
"Come in, Lee," Hawk said. He seemed not at all surprised,
and not at all drugged. "Sit down. I'm pleased to see
you."
He made a languid gesture. Narrow cones of light dropped
from high above, spotlighting two stools. The music faded
to a whisper.
Lee said boldly, "I came to get the money I was owed."
"Oh, all in good time," Hawk said.
"My friend and I, we're setting off on a journey."
"I know. That's why I asked you to sit, because I want to
talk to you about it. That was quite a show you put on."
"Oh. You know about that."
"Every commercial channel was showing looped tapes of
it before they were pulled off the air by The Little Bird's
vigilantes." Hawk laughed. "Wei Lee, I shall tell you why the
government troops didn't fight back after your.., performance.
They were all wired up, and The Little Bird pulled their
plugs. He hit the command center. Only the officers were
left. How does it feel, to have started a revolution?"
"Perhaps I've ended one."
"Perhaps... but The Little Bird is neither a Sky Roader
nor a conservationist. No, he's an isolationist: Mars for the
Martians. He has no power base amongst the Ten Thousand
Years, only popular support, and soon enough he'll be destroyed
by the conchies, just as they destroyed the Sky Road-ers.
You know, I met The Little Bird many years ago. His
eidolon, of course, not him personally, but the eidolon was
real enough, not those projections favored by the rest of the
Ten Thousand Years. A great shambling thing, steel and
chrome and black rubber roughly in the shape of a man's
skeleton, with The Little Bird's face bobbing in a television
      RED DUST
      203

set up where its head should be. They say the eidolon has
ripped apart a hundred or more people, enemies of The Little
Bird and those servants who failed him. He is a first-generation
Martian, the last. They say his body is a garden
of cancers, shrivelled like a bad apple, the result of radiation
exposure from the Long Crossing. But you are still standing.
Please sit. You are my guests, after all. I'll be thought a bad
host."

Lee sat, but Chen Yao stood behind him. Her head was
exactly level with his.

Hawk looked at her. "I don't know your young friend.
From a fishing family, by those clothes."

Lee started to explain, but Hawk held up a hand. "I know
about the wretches that fisherfolk call avatars of the godhead,
when it's nothing but a rash of viruses caught from
their fishy helpmates. Viruses that babble away inside them
mindlessly. It is not true insight."

Chen Yao said with contempt, "You only think you know."
"Child, I've forgotten more than you will ever learn. Wei
Lee, the city is a place full of traps for the unwary. But at
least you seem to have lost Redd. A good herder, but an
untrustworthy man."

Lee said humbly, "I owe him my life."

It seemed he owed his life to many people. To Great-grandfather
Wei and to Guoquiang, and to Miriam, and the
fin, and little Chen Yao. When had it ever been his?

Hawk laughed. "The Yankees don't understand face debts,
Wei Lee. Do you know the music I was listening to when
you came in?"

Lee confessed that he didn't.

"It was written by an Italian, a kind of proto-Yankee. An
addiction of mine, Capitalist Western opera. It is even older
than your King of the Cats and his rock'n'roll. One of my
trail bosses introduced it to me when I was still as wet behind
the ears as you--in the old days cowboys sang arias to
the yaks, not Hank Williams. This particular opera was written
by the perfect master of the form, Giacomo Puccini. It
tells of the cruelty of a princess of the Imperial city of Old
      204
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
Beijing, who will marry any man of royal blood who can
answer three riddles set by her. But although she has had
many suitors, all have failed and have been beheaded, for
the Princess believes that to take the life of any man who
desires her is to avenge the dishonor suffered by an ancestress
ravished and killed by barbarous Tartars centuries before.
But it is a prince of the Tartars who solves the riddles
and who convinces her, through love, to end her revenge. A
silly little tale, eh, Wei Lee, although of course it is beautifully
told. It says almost nothing about the human condition,
but volumes about Yankee misunderstanding of the
Han."
"Does it tell you anything about how we misunderstand
the Yankees?"
"They are a violent, romantic people. They have no concept
of history, yet seek personal eternity in all they do. That
is why they failed so gloriously to conquer our world, for
they never can unite, never can quench their reckless individuality.''
"And yet we failed, too."
"Everything fails. Against the great cycle of the universe,
even the fundamental units of matter fail. All herders know
that Mars is dying. Year after year, the ranges shrink, the
herds grow smaller. I'm an old man, Wei Lee. I've seen it myself I know that
we have had our season."
"The ku li would say that it is only spring, perhaps. The
dry season before the rains of summer."
"The ku li are a paper tiger, a convenient illusion which
provides an excuse to subject the population to the rigours
and restrictions of a permanent war economy. There is no
revolution, except in the minds of a few misguided Martians.
We herders live half the year on the high ranges, and yet we
see none of the fabled army of the ku li. The anarchists drop
subversive literature, but only we profit."
Chen Yao said, "Ask him how he profits, Wei Lee."
Hawk's smile was like a small animal awakening within
his neatly combed, silky white beard. He said, "I am many
things, Wei Lee. I am Hawk, herd master. And I am also
      RED DUST
      205


Yamyang Norbu, a citizen and householder who must support
a wife and eight children and fifteen grandchildren, not
to mention platoons of lazy in-laws and their relatives. Many
people are more than one thing, or even two. It is the way
of people. You of all people must know this."

"He hides something from you," Chert Yao said.

"The wharfs breed liars faster than they breed rats," Hawk
said sharply. "Be quiet, little girl."

One of Lee's virus gifts was the ability to see in the far
red end of the spectrum. It happened unconsciously. He saw
Hawk's face bleed into a green mask, with bright patches
pulsing on cheeks and forehead. Then he realised that Chen
Yao was holding his hand. She said, "Blood always betrays."

There was a sound outside. Lee's hearing suddenly selectively
intensified. It filtered noise in Hawk's study, the
breathing of the three people, their heartbeats. Hawk said
something but Lee didn't hear it. He was listening to the
electric purr of a motor, voices, the rattle as the gate swung
open to admit two people.

Something seized Lee from inside. He whirled and
smashed a glass-fronted cabinet with his elbow, with finger
and thumb plucked a long spike from the shards. He
knocked Hawk back as the old man started to rise, pinned
his arms and shoved the makeshift glass dagger into the
folds of skin under his white beard. Lee's hearing was back
to normal. Hawk started to speak, and Lee let the glass slice

his throat a little, so blood ran into his raw silk undershirt.
"Don't kill him, Miriam," Chen Yao said.

Lee knew what possessed him, then. Chert Yao had woken
her. She was all around him, yet at no point did she touch
him. She was there, but he couldn't speak to her.

Chen Yao closed the door and turned, quite self-possessed.
She said, "Who did you sell us to, old man?"

Lee eased the knife-edged glass from Hawk's throat. He
had cut his own palm slightly. His blood mingled with
Hawk's and ran down his arm inside his shirtsleeve.

"I apologize, Wei Lee," Hawk said, "but business is business.
When I first saw you, I thought you might be important, which
      206
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


is why I invited you here. When I saw you on television, I knew
how important you were. Not just some waif possessed by fragments,
but something else..."

Lee said into Hawk's ear, "You always meant to sell me,
but you couldn't do it with Redd around. You got rid of him,
and waited for me to come to you."

Chen Yao said, "Tell us how to leave safely, old man."
Hawk said calmly, "You could try the servants' quarters.
Through the panelled door behind me, down the corridor to
the end. There is no one in the house but me; I sent everyone
to the mountains at the turn of the year, when the
fighting in the city began. You are very quick, Lee, but if I
chose to fight I do not think you could best me."

"Then I am glad you choose not to fight," Lee said. He
released the pressure on Hawk's arms and dropped the glass
dagger.

At that moment the door behind Chen Yao burst open.
Two people sprang into the room. Both were armed with
stubby laser rifles. Both were dressed in shiny black one-piece
impact suits. One was the Colonel who had sent Lee
out into the storm with Miriam, back at the Bitter Waters
danwei. The other, impossibly, was Miriam herself.
Forty-three


A

sleek car waited outside the gate of Hawk's house, its
tear-drop body shaped from a single sheet of polarized
glass. From the outside, it was a dense reflective black;
from the inside, perfectly transparent. As the car sped to the
station, scattering bicyclists and weaving around slow-moving
trams, its half-dozen swivel chairs seemed to float
above the rushing roadway with no visible means of support.

The Colonel and the woman who looked exactly like Miriam
Makepeace Mbele sat opposite Chen Yao and Wei Lee
with their laser rifles not exactly pointed at them but with
attitudes that suggested that it was just as well they didn't
have to be.

"She's not really Miriam," Chen Yao whispered.
"I know," Lee whispered back.
"Quiet," the Colonel said.

It was the first thing he had said since ordering the vehicle
to move off. The woman hadn't spoken a word so far.
Her shiny black suit was moulded to her slim body with
embarrassing closeness. Her eyes were hidden behind tinted
glasses that every so often filmed over: video-shades. Her
face was Miriam's, and like Miriam her hair was cut close to
her shapely skull, but her skin was not as richly black as
Miriam's, more the color of a tea brick. An old, crescent-shaped
scar seamed her left temple. Lee remembered that
Miriam had told him that she had many sisters, all drawn
from the same gene line, mercenaries who were bought and


2O7
      208
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
sold before birth, who took the name of their owners.
He said to the Colonel, amazed that he could keep his
voice level, "What is your friend's name?"
"The resemblance is astonishing, isn't it? She's Mary
Makepeace Doe. A freelance. Please, Mr Wei, no more questions.
I don't have the authority to answer them."
"Who does? My great-grandfather?"
The Colonel, Great-grandfather Wei's cat's-paw, shrugged.
He looked embarrassed.
Lee couldn't stop himself. He said, "Him or some other
Ten Thousand Years. I know you killed my parents, you bastard.
I don't even know your name."
"I have worked for your great-grandfather for a long
time," the Colonel said calmly.
Anger burned through Lee's blood. Not because the Colonel
had admitted guilt by not denying Lee's accusation, but
because it didn't seem to matter to him.
Mary Makepeace Doe hardly seemed to move, but suddenly
her rifle was pointed at Lee's left eye. He jerked back
and the rifle followed, although the mercenary wasn't even
looking at him.
The Colonel said, "I don't know anything about your parents,
Wei Lee. I've done many things for your great-grandfather."
"You've killed for him."
"You are still angry at me for what happened last time we
met. I understand. But look at it this way: if I hadn't...
helped you, you wouldn't be where you are now."
"Oh. Then I must thank you for making me a refugee as
well as an orphan."
The Colonel said in a quiet voice, "You are an important .
person, Wei Lee. What you carry is worth a great deal...
tell me, have you been troubled with strange dreams lately?"
"Only about your death."
The Colonel smiled. "You don't have to lie to me, Miriam.
Or perhaps it has not yet taken properly. No matter. Soon
it will all be clear to you."
Lee looked away, although it was obvious that they knew
      RED DUST
      209

what had happened to him. After all, he had more or less
told Hawk the whole story, in innocence.
The car weaved through dense traffic. Suddenly, Lee saw
the high roof of the train station, curved like a white hill.
The car slowed, nosing through a crowd packed around a
barrier of tanglewire loops stretched across the road.
The people were trying to flee the city. They carried parcels
bundled in sheets, televisions, caged chickens, baskets
of vegetables or fruit, bicycles, small industrial motors, bubblepacks
of biochips, umbrellas, even furniture. Four men
supported a double bed, one at each corner. Militia were
letting people through one by one or pushing them aside,
seemingly at random. The air was dense with noise that
struck through the car's one-way glass: women screaming
at their children; children wailing with fright; men shouting
at militia and militia shouting right back, shoving rifles in
faces, slapping backs to push some through, chests to push
others back. An old woman pleaded with a boy soldier with
an assault rifle, crying and yelling and clinging to his arm,
not even letting go when he struck her in the face.
The car slid to a halt in the middle of the crowd and its
hatch snapped back: the noise doubled, trebled. The stink of
sweat and fear was intense. Mary Makepeace Doe seized Lee's
elbow with paralyzing force; he had to follow her through
the hatch or lose his arm. He glanced back and saw the
Colonel trying to lift Chert Yao out, saw the little girl kick
him in the crotch.
And then Mary Makepeace Doe tugged and whirled Lee
around, shoved him through the crowd to the gate, sweeping
her stubby rifle back and forth to clear the way. The
militia waved them through with hardly a glance, and then
they were on the concourse.
It was scarcely less crowded or noisy than the road outside.
Mary Makepeace Doe grabbed a handful of Lee's hair,
turned his head and said in his ear, "You wouldn't believe
how much it cost to guarantee safe passage out of the city.
Don't even think about trying to escape," and pushed him
towards one of the trains before he could say anything.
      210
      PAUI J. McAtny. v

People were climbing into dusty carriages through windows
as well as doors, climbing up on to the roofs. Pedlars
were hawking food, and passengers' hands reached starfish-wise
through windows to exchange notes for dumplings or
glutinous rice cakes. The pedlars' cries sang out above the
crowd's roar; beneath it was the stentorian exhalations of
the huge black fission-powered steam locomotives. Their exhaust
plumes rose straight up into the girdered space of the
high roof like so many pillars.
Mary Makepeace Doe shouldered her way between two
pedlars, used the stock of her rifle to dislodge a man who
was using the door rail to climb to the roof, and dragged
Lee up into the carriage. The corridor was packed with people
squatting on the floor amongst their possessions and the
compartments were filled with smug bourgeois. The mercenary
picked a compartment at random, pulled back the
concertina plastic partition, and told the startled bourgeois
family inside to move on, she was commandeering the compartment.
Her voice: that was just like Miriam's. But her Common
Language was flawless.
Lee wondered what it must have looked like to the bourgeois,
this tall muscular video-shaded woman in skintight
black dragging her bloody-handed captive. But they were
responding to her tone of command, were all getting up,
pulling their possessions together. Only one started to protest,
a plump smooth-skinned man in an expensive jacket
with a dozen little machines hanging from loops. The mercenary
put her rifle in the man's face and told him it was a
matter of security. He backed away with an amazingly broad
smile and disappeared into the goggle-eyed peasants
crowded outside.
Lee sat on a dusty plush seat. The mercenary pulled the
door shut and slammed down the blinds against onlookers,
then leaned at the window and shouted to the pedlars
through the sliding strip at its top, throwing a handful of
notes in exchange for beakers of tea and wafers of crispy
fried bean paste.
      RED DUST
      211
"Eat," she said to Lee, like Buddha to the grasshopper.
Lee sipped hot tea, munched on the wafers. His throat
was very dry. The mercenary told him that if he cooperated,
everything would be fine, something Lee hardly believed for
a moment.
He finished his tea, licked grease from his fingers. The
fear that any moment he would be killed had not abated,
but he was getting used to it. Every sense sang to him with
incredible clarity: he was aware of the nap of the plush seats
under his thighs, sweat on his skin under the denim shirt
and heavy chuba, dust motes swimming in the light that fell
through the smeared window, the electric musk of the mercenary.
She watched him watching her, her gaze made enigmatic
by the purple-gold lenses of her video-shades. Every now and
then they filmed over as she accessed or received a transmission.
She said abruptly, "She's still alive. After the transfer.''
"I don't think she calls it life."
"Name?"
"Miriam. Miriam Makepeace Mbele. Did you know her?" "I don't think so. The
family, of course. The Nexus is one
of the last holdouts, but they'll fall. They'll fall. She was on
the wrong side."
"She looked just like you."
"Of course. In a guerrilla war, it is always better if the
insurgents use the same weapons as the government they're
fighting. Anything else creates logistical problems. The
Nexus was allowed to acquire my genome centuries ago--we
can always predict when they'll try and use it, and how
it will behave. Besides, I understand that all off-worlders
look the same to the Han."
"I wouldn't know. I've only ever met two off-worlders.
You, and Miriam. You look different from Yankees." For
some reason he thought of Redd.
"The gene line was originally Caucasian. But it has been...
somewhat adapted."
Lee remembered Miriam in the dream. Pale-faced, straw
      212
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
haired, in crudely daubed clothes. "Miriam took the name
of the family who owned her. But you are a free agent?"
Saying Miriam's name gave him a pang of hope, as if it
was a charm to ward off death.
"She was a fool to declare her allegiance. As for me, you
will find out if you are meant to find out."
"You are concerned about secrecy, yet you behave in such
a way that all the station must know what happened here."
"That's the point. You think only I and that army fool
work together to bring you here?"
"Someone chased me, last night."
The mercenary shrugged. "Perhaps he was one of ours,
perhaps not. What happened to him?"
"He disappeared. I think he drowned."
Again, the mercenary shrugged.
A silence fell. Lee tried to evoke Miriam, but she was out
of reach. He needed Chen Yao, who could speak directly with
virus-encoded personalities.
The train shuddered and jerked and started to move forward,
and at the same moment a dumpy woman in a gray
quilted jacket pulled back the door. She had a clipboard
under her arm, and a peaked cap pushed back on her head.
She said, "Pardon me, citizens, but do you have reservations
for this compartment? There has been a complaint."
Lee saw his chance. He jumped to his feet and bowed and
quickly said he was very sorry, he had made a mistake. The
mercenary lunged for him and he bolted into the press in
the corridor, stumbling over packages and baskets and
sprawling people. The train was shuddering and lurching as
it picked up speed over buckled tracks. Lee risked a glance
over his shoulder and saw the mercenary halfway out the
compartment, trying to shake off the guard who was doggedly
clinging to one of her arms.
Lee lurched through a knot of people, gained the angle of the
door. Passengers clinging to grab rails outside the carriage
goggled at him as he leaned out into gritty wind. The locomotive's
whistle shrieked far along the train's smooth snake. It
was coming up to the swampy border of the city's reclaimed
      RED DUST
      213

land. Shacks crumbling in abandoned fields, a wrecked meltwater
plant standing in a wide basin of dried mud, low tangles
of black trees and ochre stretches of bare, rocky ground.
Shouts behind him, and the mercenary's hoarse voice
raised above them.
Lee made a desperate calculation, and jumped.
Hands reached to grab him: passengers trying to save him
from himself. The thunder of the train filling his ears, Lee
fell through air and hit the gritty embankment. He rolled
and tumbled, breath knocked out of him, and fetched up in
a tangle of briars. It seemed to take a long time to ease
himself out of the clutches of the thorny canes. The train
had disappeared, but at the top of the embankment the rail
still sang with its passing.
Lee spat a mouthful of grit. The right side of his body was
scraped and raw under torn cloth, and he had banged his
left knee badly. But he was free, free to choose to walk into
the city or head into the desert. It wasn't much of a choice,
but he knew where he had to go.
He limped up the steep slope of sliding dry stones to the top
of the embankment. Parched marshlands stretched on either
side under a haze in the cold afternoon. Beyond was the prospect
of dry red plains.
"Look all you want," someone said behind him.
Lee almost jumped out of his skin, then something
grabbed him from inside and he whirled in a fighter's
crouch. The mercenary's rifle was right in his face.
She said, "I'd love you to try it on. But I have orders."
Her smile was an edge of steel under her video-shades. There
were scuffs on the knees of her tight leather outfit, but otherwise
she was quite unruffled. She must have jumped out
of the train at almost the same moment as Lee, and circled
back to ambush him.
Lee put his hands together before his chest and bowed in
bitter submission. And Mary Makepeace Doe hit him across
the head with the stock of her weapon.
Forty-four

Wi
i Lee and the mercenary walked the line atop the
mbankment for most of the chill equatorial after-oon.
Rather, Lee limped, the side of his head swollen
with hot pain. His quiff, matted with dust, kept falling
across his eyes. The embankment dwindled away in front of
him, crossing the marshes towards the beginning of a cratered
plain at the horizon.
Crisp bright sunlight and bone-dry air sucked moisture
from him as he limped along. After a couple of hours, he
would have killed to roll down the embankment's stony
slope into one of the marsh's scummy seeps, more muddy
sand than water but wet at least, damp, dank, moist. Last
night he had nearly drowned, and now he was dying of
thirst. It was as if a lifetime's worth of the world's torments
had been compressed into a few hours. He couldn't even
tune into the King's broadcast; that was still being jammed.
The mercenary wouldn't allow him to slow his pace. Apparently
the plan had been for the train to slow to a crawl so that she
and Lee could step off, but Lee had pre-empted that by a dozen
kilometers. They had a lot of distance to make up. The only times
they left the embankment were when the rails sang warning of a
passing train, and Mary Makepeace Doe didn't let Lee stray from
her side. It happened three times, and after the last she said,
"There'll be no more."
Lee asked how she knew.

214
      RED DUST
      215


"Because that's the agreement with The Little Bird. Our

people out in exchange for a ceasefire."

"So you lost."

"A temporary setback. It's not important. The Little Bird
thinks that he can outsmart the conservationists, but he'll
pay the price for it. Move faster, damn you!"

If she felt the effects of sun and dry air she showed no
sign of it, except that she had smeared a translucent cream
on her lips. When they finally reached the rendezvous, she
looked as strong and implacable as ever.

A caravan, a fat segmented silver tube like an industrial-designed
insect grub, was parked at the bottom of the embankment,
near the edge of the sour marshes. The radiator
fins of its power plant bled a shimmer of heat into the still
afternoon air. Around it, scrubby thorn bushes threw spidery
black shapes amongst craggy boulders that glowed like
heated iron in the afternoon sunlight.

"Go on down," the mercenary said, and prodded Lee in
the small of his back, hard enough to hurt.

Lee's injured knee unhinged halfway down the embankment.
He slithered all the way down on his backside, once
again ending up in a tangle of thorny canes. Obviously, the
bushes had been designed to break the fall of travellers and
then suck their blood. It was almost good to relax in their
piercing grip.

A shadow eclipsed the hard pink sky and its feathering of
high clouds. Mary Makepeace Doe dragged Lee to his feet,
and the pain of losing gobbets of flesh to clutching thorns
brought him awake.

He was able to stumble ahead of the mercenary towards
the segmented silvery caravan, but, just as he reached its
shadow, his feet twisted under him and the side of the world
slammed into him with every unforgiving gram of its mass.
Forty-five


L

ee was in a humming space of bright metal and white
light. A translucent sac taped to his elbow was slowly
wrinkling as it pumped saline into a vein. A soaked
sponge was put to his cracked lips and he greedily sucked
moisture from it. Two attendants, small neat sharp-featured
men who might have been brothers, might have been any
age from ten to twenty, stripped off his dusty clothes, stuck
needles in his joints to counter pain, bandaged his raw skin.
Then they plucked off the by-now empty saline sac and
helped him into soft clean trousers of unbleached linen, a
raw silk shirt. They even greased his hair back into an approximation
of its original quiff.

As they worked, the attendants talked to each other in a
language Lee had never heard before. They used gestures
and prods to make him understand what they wanted of him,
just as one would treat a docile but stupid animal.

They pushed and prodded him to his feet and tugged him
through a low narrow hatch into an airy room filled with
color.

The room was a tent, pitched up against the curved silvery
side of the caravan. Five people turned to look at him as he
came through. There was the mercenary, her leathers still
dusty, a man dressed in white just like Lee, a very young
boy. But Lee hardly noticed them, because he saw that Chen
Yao was there, too.

She sat unsmiling in a big square chair in a corner of the


216
      RED DUST
      217


tented space, her feet kicking above the carpets that lapped
the ground. The Colonel stood behind the chair, a hand resting
on its back just above Chen Yao's head. Neat and dapper
in his uniform, he inclined his head in formal acknowledgement
of Lee's stare. Lee willed him to die right then and
there, but psychic powers were not part of the viruses' gifts.

Someone stepped in front of Lee. It was the man in white.
He was very tall and thin, and his skin was so pale he might
have been bloodless. He polished a red apple on his silk shirt,
bit into it with relish. Chewing, he said, "So glad you're here
at last, Wei Lee. And Miriam too, if you are listening." He
took another bite of the apple. "She tried to kill me once,
you know. That's war. Or the kind of war we're fighting. You
never know who's going to turn up, and where."

Lee pointed at Mary Makepeace Doe, who leaned against
the silver side of the caravan and said, "Are you sure it
wasn't her?"

"This is a very strange war, Wei Lee. Only a few people are directly
involved, and so each of their moves are magnified. I
wave my hand..." the half-eaten apple had vanished somehow:
Lee blinked, forced himself to pay attention "... and
thousands die. Or millions. You wield the same power, although
perhaps you are only just realizing that."

Lee remembered the riots. And before that, the monks of
the lost lamasery.

"You see," the man said with a smile, "you do understand.
Like it or not, you are one of the players now. So is everyone
in this tent, and perhaps a score more people in the rest of
the Solar System. I know them all, and I have been playing
the game a long time.

"So," he said, suddenly bright, "here we are. Once upon
a time your friend Miriam tried to kill me. She wasn't a
player, then. But her failure pushed her into a position
where she had to become one, or die. And now she has fallen
inside you, and the same thing has happened to you. Interesting,
don't you think? There's a pattern."

The little boy spoke up in a piping treble. "He will not be
a player much longer, if he ever was one."
      218
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Lee hadn't taken much notice of the boy before, but now
he saw that a thick braided cable was looped over his arm.
It ran up into the inverted bowl of his black hair, ran back
into a corner of the tent curtained with filmy white. It was
just possible to make out a high double bed flanked by monitoring
equipment back there, a shadowy glimpse that triggered
vague uneasy memories in Lee, a troubling, deep
unease he couldn't quite define. And the boy reminded him
of someone, too. The lineaments of a familiar face lay under
the plump cheeks, the cupid bow mouth, the wide flat nose.

The boy said, "We have been neglecting our introductions,
Wei Lee, although I think you are beginning to suspect who
I am. The Colonel you already know, and of course you have
just enjoyed a stroll through the countryside with Mary
Makepeace Doe."

The mercenary looked up, a scowl twisting her mouth
under the video-shades. The boy bowed to her, and Lee
glimpsed the junction at the base of his skull where the
cable broke into filaments that fanned out and burrowed
under his scalp like tree roots clutching a boulder.

"We forgive you," the boy said to the mercenary, "because
you are necessary to us."

The man in white said, "She is a player, too. Her name
of course is not really Doe, but Gaia. Mary Makepeace Gaia.
The kind of people she was working with made it necessary
that she work under cover."

The boy piped up, cross at having been interrupted, "I
must introduce you to the most important person last of all.
The head of the conservationist missionary expedition from
Gaia. Doctor Lovelace Damon."

The man in white bowed from the waist. "Damon Love-lace,
in the fashion of Gaia."

The boy reddened. His black almond-shaped eyes glistened
and his mouth worked as if he was about to burst into tears,
but then his face froze and he stiffly bowed an apology.

"Control will come as the interface knits up," Dr. Damon
Lovelace said. "Besides, there's nothing to apologize for.
Names aren't important to us. We are one."
      RED DUST
      219

Suddenly Lee knew who the boy was, and what was lying
in the bed behind the gauzy curtain. He had seen the equip-ment-laden
double bed once before. He had been so very
young, and near to collapse from exhaustion, still suffering
from smoke inhalation and flash-burns from his parents' assassination.
He remembered being marched into a clean
white room, and shown for the first and last time the reality
of his great-grandfather.
A high, wide bed, sheets like snow under bright lights.
Two bodies in it, separated by a bolster. Both male. One
young and pinkly hairless, its eyes bandaged, tubes running
into its nose, into a ligature in its throat. The other little
more than a skeleton clad in leathery skin, head hidden by
a complicated helmet, withered arms drawn up on the ladder
of ribs of the chest, hands gloved in rigid black polymer.
Wires ran back from helmet and hands and tangled into
cables that went into the wall behind the bed.
Two bodies, linked by transparent tubes through which
rich red blood pulsed: one the mummified near-corpse of
Lee's great-grandfather; the other the decerebrated Yankee
which kept his ancient body alive.
The little boy watched Lee's expression change. He
smirked, twisted one foot against the other. His face was a
young, plump version of Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon.
"That's right, son," he said. He was shining with proud
enthusiasm. "At last I will be free of the dead weight of my
body. I'll be free to move in the world again. I am being
transferred piece by piece into the brain of this living eidolon,
which was grown from a single cell taken from the
epithelial lining of my bowel. I will live for ever, not merely
for ten thousand years!"
And he skipped a gleeful little dance, right there on the
luxurious carpet. The cable which linked him to his ancient
body swung in long arcs behind him.
Lee thought that the eidolon had been a true representation
of his great-grandfather after all. A picture, out of
time. He had puzzled over it every time he had visited the
Great House, and now he knew, and it didn't matter.
      220
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Dr. Damon Lovelace watched indulgently, for all the
worlds like a proud parent. Which he was, in a way. He told
Lee that it was Gaia (which was what conchies called both
the Earth and the Earth's Consensus) which had made this
possible. The transference of mind into a new body was routine:
it was how people were born, on Gaia. He himself had
been born that way.

"Although of course there was the added complication of
reading my genome from storage into a quickened artificial
ovum. It is whole and true transference, not at all like what
happened between you and Miriam, Wei Lee. We are very far
ahead of the anarchists' technology, on Gaia."

The little boy laughed. "Except for fullerene virus
design.., unfortunately for you, my dear son. You see, Miriam's
infection will not save you. Quite the reverse. We cannot
study it without destroying you."

Lee held out an arm. "Just take my blood." It was what
he had been travelling towards the capital to offer, the discharge
of his life's debt. His nerves sang with expectation.
"Please," he said, when no one moved.

"If only it was that simple," Dr. Damon Lovelace said.
"Only the simpler kinds of viruses live in your blood, Wei
Lee. We know all about those. Clades of the common kinds
of self-replicating sub-microscopic machines, constructed of
varieties of metal-doped carbon-lattice spheres, which routinely
perform the housekeeping tasks which increase life-span.
Cancer stalkers, plaque busters and the like. But the
special viruses that Miriam Makepeace Mbele carried have
woven themselves into your nervous system. Think of the
weave of this carpet. You could tease out the individual
threads, but you would destroy the patterns they make. So
with the viruses that have rebuilt your nervous system from
the inside. To retrieve them we must destroy the pattern."

Lee realized then that they only knew a little about Miriam's
viruses. They did not know, for instance, that the infection
could be transferred by something as simple as a kiss.

"We must kill you, my son," the little boy piped up, grinning
mischievously.
      RED DUST
      221

Boy-thing, Lee thought, his skin crawling.

"And of course we will likewise dissect your girlfriend,"
Dr. Damon Lovelace said, smiling cheerfully. "She has also
been infected with viruses that built themselves into her
nervous system. It makes her a translator, able to access
virus systems at all levels. An interesting coincidence, don't
you think, Wei Lee? That the viral machinery which allows
fishermen to talk to augmented dolphins also allows communication
with the clades of viral machines used by the
anarchists. I have the greatest respect for the achievements
of your great scientist, Cho Jinfeng."

"Silly little man," Chen Yao said. She jumped down from
the couch, dodging the Colonel's restraining hand. "Yes,
silly and foolish and puny and vain. You see only what you
wish to see, and so you are blind."

"Now just be quiet? the Colonel said, trying to catch hold
of the little girl.

"Oh no," Damon Lovelace said. "Let her speak. It's traditional,
after all. And besides, we may learn something. Afterwards,
we will offer her a cigarette."

"I'll speak because I want to," Chen Yao said. She was
very calm, Lee saw, very calm and very self-possessed. Her
aspect was upon her. She pressed her hands in front of her,
fingertip to fingertip, and bowed to the boy-thing.

"I respect you for your age, great-grandfather," she said.
She spoke with deliberation and icy calm. Each word was a
stone, flung with force. "Age and experience you have in
abundance, and those I respect. But I cannot respect you for
your wisdom. You and your kind have sold our world for
your own profit, and that cannot be forgiven. And it will not
be forgiven. You have lived so long that you want nothing
more than to live for ever. You grasp at life with the unforgiving
greed of a parasite, not caring that your very existence
condemns millions to death. I tell you this: your act of piracy

will not be allowed to be completed."

She bowed again.

And then she stepped forward and spat in the boy-thing's
face.
      222
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
The boy-thing flushed with anger. He hissed like a snake
and tried to kick and punch Chen Yao, but she skipped out
of reach and when he charged blindly after her he was
brought up short by his cable and fell on his back. He wailed
and sputtered with outrage, kicking his legs in the air and
screaming that she'd die, she'd die right now, for what she'd
done.
"Kill the little bitch! Mary Makepeace Gaia! I order you! I
order you to kill her! Take her out, Colonel! Shoot her! Blow
her fucking brains out!"
Tears ran in snail tracks from the corners of his eyes to
his ears, and snot and spit bubbled from nostrils and mouth.
Dr. Damon Lovelace stooped and picked him up, hugged
him and said tenderly, "I know it's hard. Young glands on
a hair trigger, the fret of a new nervous system, all that. But
you'll learn control. We all have to learn to control our unruly
flesh when born again to the wheel, and so will you.
Hush, now. Hush. She'll die soon enough, and her death
will be far far worse than a bullet in the head."
The boy-thing sniffed deeply, hiccuped. "I want to watch,"
he said. "And then I want to go home. I hate the wilderness.
I've brought you the anarchist's Trojan Horse, and now you
must bring me The Little Bird. I want to have his own eidolon
flay his rotten cancerous body centimeter by centimeter.
That's what we agreed." He glared over Lovelace's
shoulder at Lee. "And you, you never were any son of mine.
Your parents were employees, not blood relations. You never
were anything but a pawn, Wei Lee, and you have advanced
to your final square."
"How I hate clich(," Chen Yao said. She was still wearing
her aspect. "Always it blurs meaning. But to extend it for a
moment, you forget pawns can move diagonally if they take
something. Wei Lee has moved aslant you all, and carries
the seeds of greatness inside him. He has started a revolution.
He has far to go. And his next move will destroy you."
Dr. Damon Lovelace put down the boy-thing. "He triggered
an inevitable rebellion, little girl. He upset our plans,
but not by much, for we had always planned to neutralize
      RED DUST
      223


The Little Bird. But now people kill each other, and that is
very regrettable, very immature. We have no way to read
dead brains, and so with every minute of rebellion the data
base of potential overseers grows smaller."

"As on the Earth, so in Heaven," Chen Yao said. "But I
don't think so."

The Colonel had been holding himself quiet and still all
through this. Now he could no longer hold in his outrage.
He said, "Sir! I am ready to deal with this brat on your
orders."

"In good time," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "She's harmless,
after all. Harmless, and sadly out of date. Metaphors
are useful, Chen Yao. Good metaphors shine a light through
complex ideas, and simplify their shape."

Chen Yao said disdainfully, "I'd rather things shone with
their own light."

Lee could no longer hold in his own outburst. He was
gripped by the vertigo of erased history. He felt that he was
standing at the edge of a pit, where a moment ago there had
been firm ground. The pit was the gap in what he thought
he had known, his own story erased by a petulant outburst.

He said to the boy-thing, "Who was my father if he was
not the first-born child of your own son! Who was my
mother!"

What he meant was, who am I?

The boy-thing shrugged. He was calm again. "Loyal employees
at the middle level. Nothing more. You were born
as bait to hook bigger fish, with the fiction that I was a kind
of rebel, out of sympathy with my fellows. An old trick, but
successful even so. But do not think yourself special, Wei
Lee. There are others like you. You just happen to be the
bait which was swallowed at the right time."

"Then I don't owe you anything! I don't owe you anything
at all? Lee could have danced on the carpet with joy. Only
Chen Yao's serious gaze stopped him.

The boy-thing draped his cable over his arm with an imperious
gesture. "Your life is mine. After all, you have nothing
else to give me."
      224
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


Chert Yao said, "You cannot talk to them, Lee. They do
not hear, nor do they think. Their heads are full of straw. It
is time for us to go."

Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "I don't think so, little lady. We
have not begun with you. Your death will be a beginning,
but only that."

Chen Yao said, "You're   as stupid as the old man. What
time do you come from,   to be born in this time and pretend
to rule us? Keep Earth   and the wilderness you've made of
it, if you want. We'll   take the rest of the universe."

"Ah," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "The hubris of the young.
To go boldly where no man has gone before--I remember
that tag from my first incarnation. But you must forgive
these memories. Nostalgia is a luxury afforded only by the
incurably romantic. Silly little girl, the universe isn't a blank
map for your kind to scribble over. It is its own thing, and
it is no place for intelligence. That lies inward, not outward.
Your allies are the tattered remnants of the old order, not
the harbingers of a New Age. Gaia is that Age, and we are
its guardians. You're history. And you too, Wei Lee. A pity,
because I understand you were a biologist. I wish we had

time to talk, but there you are."

He clapped his hands, twice.

The twin attendants appeared at the tent's entrance. Lee's
heart raced in sudden anticipation.

But before Dr. Damon Lovelace could give his order, the
attendants were knocked aside by a soldier covered in red
dust. She fell to her knees on the carpeted ground and
bowed to the boy-thing, to Dr. Damon Lovelace. She was
shaking with fear or exhaustion, her holster was empty, and
there was a bloody tear across the shoulders of her black
uniform.

"Speak," the boy-thing said in as nastily petulant a tone
as Lee had ever heard.

The soldier raised the mirrored visor of her helmet. She was
very young, Lee saw. She said, "A thousand pardons, ancestor.
A thousand pardons, Master. A terrible thing..."

Dr. Damon Lovelace grasped the soldier's neck, pulled her
      RED DUST
      225

up without any visible effort. Her feet kicked out, the toes
of her cleated boots barely brushing the carpet. "In one word," Lovelace said.
"A-ambush!"
Dr. Damon Lovelace threw the soldier against the side of
the caravan. Her helmet rang like a bell and she fell down
beside Mary Makepeace Gaia.
The mercenary raised an eyebrow, and then she was gone. "It won't do any
good," Chen Yao said. "You hide out here
because you do not dare face the mobs in the city, and so
you deliver yourselves into our hands. Your perimeter defenses
are no longer active. They haven't been since I was
walked through them. Viruses subverted the machinery, and
half a dozen desert fighters captured your troops. That one
was allowed to escape, ahead of the storm."
The mercenary was back, as suddenly as she had left. "It's
true," she said calmly. "The ring alarms have not been triggered
and the motion sensors appear to be functioning, but
no one answers at any of the guard posts."
Dr. Damon Lovelace shrugged. "We'll fall back and regroup.
Disable the prisoners."
"Sir?" the Colonel said.
"Break their spines. Between the third and fourth cervical
vertebrae will do the trick. We'll process them later. Do I
have to tell you everything?"
Chen Yao did something astonishing: a back flip that sent
her flying feet first into the boy-thing. He went down with
a startled yelp and she pulled him to his feet. Her hand was
at his throat, and there was a metal spike in her hand.
The Colonel and the mercenary both drew their pistols,
but Chert Yao pulled the boy-thing backwards step by step
until they were up against the high double bed. Gauzy curtains
billowed around them.
Chen Yao shouted shrilly, "I'll cut his carotid arteries!
Brain death in two minutes!"
The mercenary let the hand holding her pistol fall to her
side. The Colonel looked at Dr. Damon Lovelace.
The boy-thing squirmed, then squealed when Chert Yao
      226
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

nicked the soft skin of his throat. Bright red blood blossomed
at the neck of his tunic. The boy-thing shrieked in
fear.

And there was another sound, a soft thrashing from the
curtained bed behind Chen Yao and her prisoner.

Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "You hold the wrong body, foolish
girl."

Chen Yao said, "He is in neither one place nor the other.
Like those in the process of dying into your famous new
world, he still needs his old body. Another mistake, to think
of me as a little girl. I'm not. I'm a god. Over here, Wei Lee.
They won't hurt you."

Lee stepped past the Colonel, and Chen Yao's free hand
grasped his. Instantly, everything seemed to slow around
him. His sight was overlaid with gridded symbols, and he
felt a sudden rush of dizzy strength, as if he'd been plunged
head first into a bubble of pure oxygen. Chen Yao had
switched on the modifications woven in his nervous system,
all at once.

And now he could hear a distant rumble, a long way beyond
the encampment, but growing louder at a steady rate.

Dr. Damon Lovelace's voice was a bass drawl. "Give it up
and I promise a quick death. You must know that you cannot
run. You have the wrong hostage for that."

"I don't need to run. But you do. Ask your soldier."
Mary Makepeace Gaia held out her hand, let her pistol fall
to the carpet. Then she whirled on the slumped soldier, did
something that made the woman scream.

"Speak," the mercenary said softly. To Lee it was like
thunder.

"We, we must run. There's a stampede on the way. Yaks!
Thousands and thousands..."

The Colonel's attention wavered, and Lee stepped up and
plucked the man's pistol from his hand as easily as taking a
toy from a sleeping child.

Mary Makepeace Gaia dived to the floor and rolled, so
quickly she would have been a blur in normal time. She
      RED DUST
      227

rolled again, came up behind the partial cover of a flowering
yucca in a big earthenware pot. She had her pistol in her
hand.

Lee moved too, without thinking. He spun the Colonel
round just as the mercenary fired. The Colonel yelled (a
basso profundo rumbling) and his hand slowly moved to
clasp his wounded arm. The sleeve of his tunic was on fire.
So was the material of the tent behind him.

The mercenary's pistol tracked in quick jerks, and Lee
stepped back and forth, buffeting the hapless Colonel this
way and that. Lee was pumped up with adrenalin. Everything
except the mercenary's hand, the needle hole in the center
of the pistol's fat barrel, was a disregarded blur.

The mercenary shot again. The beam glancingly struck
the Colonel's head. He shuddered and slumped, so much
dead weight. His hair had caught fire. Jerk, and suddenly
the needle hole was pointed right at Lee's face.

Lee let go of the Colonel's body and closed his eyes. He
couldn't help it. He couldn't separate the pounding of his
heart from the pounding of the stampede. Both shook him
equally.

The mercenary yelped, a soft, half-gulped sound. Lee
opened his eyes. The mercenary had dropped her pistol. Her
hand was cupped beneath the cracked right lens of her
video-shades. Flickering with random colors, glass splintered
around the end of the metal spike dead center of the
lens.

The mercenary's cupped hand filled with blood; blood
spilled down her wrist.

Chen Yao yelled into Lee's face that it was time to go. She
had to yell it twice: the stampede was almost upon them.
Lee let the Colonel's body drop to the floor. The tent was
filled with the stench of charred flesh and the sharp smell
of burnt hair. The boy-thing was curled up on his side,
clutching his bloody throat. Dr. Damon Lovelace was running
in slow motion towards the shelter of the caravan.

Lee raised the Colonel's pistol. The side of the tent blew
      228
      PAUl. J. McAu.E¥


away in a flare of hot light. Red dust whirled in, smothering
Lee and Chen Yao. Dark shapes moved in the murk beyond.
The whole ground vibrated. Lee lifted Chen Yao into his
arms and ran into the stampede.
Forty-six


D

espite his jazzed-up nerves and turbo-charged muscles,
Wei Lee was nearly run down twice by charging
yaks before he managed to carry Chen Yao to the relative
shelter of a clump of thorn bushes that grew in the
angle of a tipped-up shelf of red rock.

He set down Chen Yao, flopped beside her, and coughed
and coughed and coughed. He could taste dust all the way
down to the bottom of his lungs. What he spat was red as
blood. Fifty per cent of the air seemed to be fine silt thrown
up by the pounding hoofs of the stampeding yaks.

A yak swerved around the rocks as neatly as a dancer. One
of its hoofs almost stamped on Lee's foot, but his speeded
reactions gave him plenty of time to tuck his leg out of the
way, mark the animal's rolling red-rimmed eyes under the
jut of its horns and every pin-prick spatter of moisture on
his face from the orange froth shaken from its muzzle. He
shared its bewildered rage and shouted into the dust.

"All the time I searched for my parents I thought I knew
who they were! Now I've found them, but I don't know them
at all!"

Another yak went by, stately and slow amidst rolling red
dust. And another. And another. They made the world over
into dust and thunder.

Lee pressed into the bushes, scarcely noticing the cat's-claw
thorns that scored his flesh, or the bone-deep ache in
his skull where the mercenary had hit him. The last few


229
      230
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

moments in the tent kept flashing past, especially the instant
of the Colonel's death. Lee could still feel the final shudder
of the Colonel's body; the stink of burnt flesh and hair
seemed to be permanently bonded in his nostrils, deeper
than dust could reach. Although he had not actually killed
the man, Lee felt responsible for his death, and knew, now
that the Colonel was dead, that although he had murdered
his parents he had not deserved to die. No one born into
life deserves death.

Chen Yao huddled closer against Lee, shivering with nervous
exhaustion. She was no longer wearing the aspect of a
god; she was just a little girl. Lee put his arm around her
and after a moment she touched his wrist...


·
      .. and everything around him speeded up.

No. He had slowed down, back to normal speed.

Chen Yao said in a distracted monotone, as if reciting
something she had learned by rote, "It is dangerous to use
your enhancements for too long. Noradrenalin overload will
burn out the interface synapses."

Their stampede seemed to have mostly passed, although
clouds of dust obliterated almost everything. Lazy billows
rose to blot out even the sun, which was now only a few
spans from the laboring horizon. The caravan was gone, escaped
or obliterated. Yaks were blurry ghosts in grainy
clouds lit by low-level light. A calf in a coat of hair down to
the ground ran close by, bawling, its hindquarters streaked
with shit. A yak crashed against the shelf of rock that sheltered
Lee and Chen Yao and tried to scramble over it, sharp
hoofs lashing the thorn bushes. Then it rolled off, bounced
to its feet, and was gone.

Lee shouted into Chen Yao's ear. "How many yaks does

it take to make a stampede?"

"As many as you can get!"

Lee pulled himself from thorns and risked standing up.
There were only a few yaks now, half trotting, half walking,
with the studied insouciant air of those who don't want to
be associated with the herd, but at the same time don't want
to be left behind.
      RED DUST
      231


Lee bent to Chen Yao, pulled her to her feet. "I think we
can make a run for it."

Chen Yao said, "Don't be silly," but Lee, hardly hearing
her, yanked on her arm and dragged her at a run out into
the tail end of the stampede. It was perfectly safe, after all.
By infra-red he could see any stragglers through the blowing
dust long before they could see him. Chen Yao tried to drag
him to a halt, but he pulled hard and she yelped and stumbled
after him, out of breath and coughing on dust so that
he couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him.

Nor did he really care: he was riding a sudden wind of
adrenalin. He was free, free, free! Free of his captors. Free
of the fear of death, for now he knew how banal the threat
was. And most of all, free of the obligation that had shaped
his life. He was as free as a butterfly that had struggled out
of its cocoon after three hundred days of winter sleep and
taken flight from the dull time of growth.

Free of everything, even of a plan really, except some
vague idea of finding the railway line, of skipping along the
tracks all the way back to the city. Of going home.

He had forgotten that he had no home; had forgotten,
too, all about the dream-revealed destiny he had fallen into.

And he had also forgotten where the railway line was. He'd
been dragging Chen Yao at a trot through swirling dust
along a more or less straight route, zigging this way to avoid
a stray yak, zagging that way to get around an outcrop of
eroded boulders or a clump of thorn bushes. He remembered
that the caravan had been within easy reach of the
railway line, but they had walked two or three times that
distance now and there was still no sight of it.

Lee stopped, out of breath and dizzily exhilarated. It was
time to get his bearings. Chen Yao jerked her hand away
from his, and at the same time he heard a nagging whine,
rising and falling in the distance.

It was an electric engine screaming under duress.

Chen Yao kicked Lee in the shin. He jumped back, surprised.
She kicked again, catching him under his kneecap,
and his legs folded under him and he sat down in a mess of
      232
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

yak flop. Chen Yao grabbed his ears and shouted into his
face.

"You won't listen! You just won't listen!"

Lee blinked up at her, smiling with astonishment. Chen
Yao was trembling with anger. Tears made muddy tracks in
the red dust that coated her face. "We were safe where we
were. There is a pick-up looking for us! How can it find us
when we are stumbling around!"

Lee tried to get up, put his hand in more yak shit, and
fell over again, besmearing himself with even more of the
stinking green slime.

"Listen," Chen Yao said.

Lee didn't need his hyper-keen senses to hear the nagging
mosquito whine. It grew faint and then loud, and then faint
again, circling away and circling back in an unpredictable
pattern.

Chen Yao said, "You hear? You hear that?" She was looking
around, peering this way and that into billowing dust.
At last she said, "This way. Hurry, before she catches up!"

She ran before Lee could get to his feet, but it was the
knock-kneed run of a little girl, and he easily caught up with
her.

"Where are we going?"

"We're running away. From her, from the sister. The sister
of, of your friend. Of Miriam." Chen Yao was already out
of breath. Her words came out in angry little spasms. Her
expression was one Lee had never before seen on someone
so young. "I should have killed her. Should have. But it
would be bad karma. Oh please! Come on!"

That was when Lee heard the nagging whine crossing
from right to left far behind them, growing louder, closer.

Chen Yao was running fast now; Lee could hardly keep

up with her. She shouted, "Dust helps hide us, but she's
random tracking. And not on foot."

Then she disappeared from view, and Lee stepped on to
thin air and fell with a sickening slide down a steep slope.
He came to a stop a few meters from the corpse of a yak; a
small avalanche of stones bounced off his back.
      RED DUST
      233
Chen Yao grabbed his arm, pulled him down. Something
had half eviscerated the yak--perhaps only the fall--and Lee
was soaked in blood as he huddled with Chen Yao inside the
coarse reeking pelt. A tangle of slippery intestines bulged
against his back, hot as his skin. The rich fetid smell of
fermented vegetation rose from the corpse's spilled bowels.
"Quiet," Chen Yao said. "She's wired just like you."
Lee understood. At the same moment he heard the mosquito
whine above him and held his breath, willing himself
to become one with the corpse's infra-red signature.
Time passed. Lee and Chen Yao huddled under bloody yak
hair like mice in a grain store with a cat prowling somewhere.
Lee felt someone's attention pass over him like a
searchlight: it raised the hair on his head.
The whine grew louder for a moment before fading into
the distance.
Chen Yao counted dolphins under her breath, just like a
child playing Emperor of the Hill, and when she reached a
hundred she said it was safe. They staggered out of their
grisly shelter into blowing dust which stuck to and stiffened
their bloody clothes.
Lee saw now that the dead yak lay in the bottom of a
narrow crevasse. Through the thick haze of dust were the
ghost-shapes of clumps of dry vegetation standing amongst
flat water-worn stones--in the brief rainy season of late
summer this would be the bed of a raging river.
Chen Yao scrambled up the slope and Lee followed. She
now stood at the top, head turning this way and that.
"There," she said at last, and set off at a slant.
"I think the railway is back there," Lee said politely.
Chen Yao shook her head. "That's why we must go the
other way. Oh please, please Wei Lee, you must follow me."
And she stumbled on the level ground as if she had tried to
climb a step that wasn't there, and began to cry.
Lee gathered her up in his arms and staggered forward
through blowing dust. Chen Yao whispered directions, and
because Lee had to bend close to hear her he didn't see the
pony materialize out of the dust. When its rider shouted to
      234
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

him, Lee almost dropped Chen Yao in amazement.

The man on the pony wore a mask against the dust, but
Lee recognized him at once.

"Good goddamn Billy Lee," Redd said loudly, "you give
me that girl and get your scrawny ass on my saddle right
now." Chen Yao roused enough to scramble into the saddle
in front of Redd; the cowboy leaned down to give Lee his
arm, and said, "If I had time, I'd buy you another bath."

He was smiling behind the mask. Lee smiled back and
swung up on Redd's strong arm and settled behind the cowboy
in the high-backed wooden saddle.

That was when the bike roared out of swirling dust.

It was two-wheeled and all chrome. Mary Makepeace Gala
leaned back in its narrow saddle, her arms raised to grip a
steering bar which had the same upswept curve as a yak's
horns. There was a patch over her left eye, and a red bandanna
around her shaven head. Under the saddle, between
her legs, was a teardrop pod with the yellow and black trefoil
warning of radiation hazard.

The mercenary brought her fission-powered bike to a halt
so abruptly it reared up like a stallion, the whine of its motor
rising to a scream.

Redd held Chen Yao, and Lee clutched   the coarse blanket
Redd wore like a cloak, as the horse   shied under the three
of them. The mercenary's bike spiked   a stand into the dirt
and Mary Makepeace Gaia was suddenly   standing with a pistol
in each hand. Sparkling dust defined   two needles of laser
light as she shot at the sky.

Redd raised his hands, palms upwards. Lee thought he
saw something glitter away from them, blown towards the
mercenary on the dusty wind.

Mary Makepeace Gaia triggered another burst of laser
light and the beams crossed just above Redd's head. Lee
heard dust grains exploding in the intense energy like peppercorns
bursting in a wok. The mercenary holstered one of
the pistols and pushed up the filter which had covered her
mouth and nose.
      RED DUST
      235


She said, "I get a bonus for live meat, so I'll ask you all
to climb down."

"I don't think so," Redd said.

The mercenary shrugged. "You I don't need anyway," she
said, and pointed her pistols right at Redd's face.

Nothing happened. The whine of the fission-powered bike
died away, and there was only the soft sound of dust blowing
on the wind. A yak bellowed, far off in the distance.

Redd drew something from his belt: a heavy wheel pistol
with grips of cross-hatched white bone. Its hammer clicked
back. It was aimed at Mary Makepeace Gaia.

"Never depend on electricity," Redd said. "I infected you
with circuit busters. Gift of the anarchists."

The mercenary stared right back at him. Her voice was
cold. "People who talk about it never do it."

"I'm a kind of exceptional guy," Redd said.

But at the moment he pulled the trigger Lee pulled on
his arm so the shot went straight up in the air. The pony
jinked and Redd grabbed the reins and yelled, "What the
fuck you thinking of!"

Lee started to stammer out that he'd seen enough killing.
Chen Yao said calmly, "If he has done it, let it be so. He
knows more than he thinks he knows."

"Kill me," the mercenary said. Her teeth were gritted together.
Veins stood out on her forehead. Horribly, blood
gathered at the lower rim of her eyepatch, and a red tear
sluggishly ran down her cheek. "Kill me," she said again,
"or I swear I'll find you, wherever you run. I'll find you all,
and kill you all."

Redd didn't put the pistol away, but he eased the hammer
down with his thumb. "Get away from your bike, lay down
in the dirt."

"Fuck you, asshole," the mercenary said, and folded her
arms.

Redd whispered, "You sure you want this? I mean, there's
no harm in giving her what she wants."

"It is done," Chen Yao said. "Besides, for her failure is
worse than death."
      236
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


Mary Makepeace Gaia said, "Next time I will not fail."
"I can't wait," Redd told her.

The mercenary smiled. It was exactly the same smile as
her sister, but four hundred degrees cooler. "Good," she
said, and ran at the pony.

Redd reined the pony around and spurred its belly. Lee
held on tight as it flew into a gallop. The assassin screamed
something after them, but already she was left far behind.
Forty-seven


R

edd rode as if all the demons in creation were after
him, through settling veils of dust and out at last into
.the light of the sun. Its red light was melting into the
red sky, where wisps of high cirrus glowed like beaten
bronze, as the horizon began to climb up its disc.

Clinging behind the cowboy, Lee knew enough to relax
into the spine-jarring ride. Despite his nervous exhaustion
he found the hell-for-leather ride exhilarating. He squinted
over Redd's shoulder into wind and sunset light, saw a dark
line at the horizon of the stony plain, running from west to
east.

It was the Grand Canal. They rode straight for it, across
wide dry fields, over dry irrigation dikes, past toppled wind
pumps. Then they were in deep shadow, clattering down a
narrow street between ruined flat-roofed mud-brick houses,
one of the abandoned villages which dotted the length of the
Grand Canal from the capital to the Dust Seas. They burst
into the last light of the sun, crashed through a belt of seedling
mangroves.

A skimmer was moored at the end of a stone jetty that
ran a little way into the kilometer-wide canal. Its black dispersers
were raised high on their recurved booms, and its
slack silvery monofilament sail ripplingly mirrored the red
sky.

Redd reined the pony, vaulted off and lifted Chen Yao from
the saddle. When Lee jumped down Redd swatted the pony's


237
      238
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


rump with his hat. It turned its head to regard him reproachfully
with a large brown eye, and Redd yelled, "You
get going, you stupid lump of dogmeat!" and swatted it
again. The pony pranced away, and with its reins trailing
trotted off along the trail it had smashed through the seedling
mangroves.

Redd set his hat on his head. "I swear I'm gonna get me
one of those bikes next time. You two come on, now."

He led Lee and Chen Yao down the jetty and on to the
skimmer. Even as they set foot on the white-wood decking
the gangway retracted and lines took up slack, the sail filled
with evening breeze, and the skimmer slipped its mooring.
Forty-eight


T

he Grand Canal was a vast irrigation project, the largest
body of water on Mars. It was fed by thousands of
reactor well heads that were sunk so deeply into the
permafrost that the conchies couldn't reach them. But no
new wells had been drilled since the Great Reassessment,
and one by one the reactors were failing. In a hundred years
the Grand Canal would be as dry as any of Mars's fossil
watercourses. Already most of the villages along its banks
had been abandoned. Banyans, soldier bamboo and freshwater
mangroves, unchecked, were turning the edges of the
canal into swamp where herds of the last surviving species
of archiosaur grazed, man-sized semi-aquatic bipeds with
vividly crested duck-billed heads. Water hyacinths choked
irrigation outlets, and the rich agricultural strips alongside
the canal were dying back into desert.

The skimmer ran the eastward lane of the wide waterway,
following a string of buoys that winked green in the gathering
dusk. Other skimmers moved slowly on the clogged
waterway. They cut through floating islands of water hyacinth,
rafts of azolla and mats of cyanobacteria with razor-sharp
prows.

Lee sat at the stern rail of the skimmer, sipping jasmine
tea from a bowl big enough to wash his face in. He had
taken off his boots, for everyone went barefoot on the whitewood
decking, even Redd, who stood talking to the captain
at the high waist of the skimmer, under the bridge awning.


239
      240
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
Both men were underlit by the blue light of the console.
The skimmer's captain, a weatherbeaten Tibetan, had already
greeted Lee and Chen Yao with brief but punctilious ceremony,
but it was clear he had more urgent considerations
than the comfort of his passengers. He had to blend into the
local and long-distance traffic, make his way past satellite
surveillance into the wide wastes of the Dust Seas.
With nothing to do but watch the green and red lights of
the shipping lanes and the running lights of other skimmers
drift past, Lee soon fell asleep. He awoke to a lurid sunrise from a dream
where Mary Makepeace Gaia stalked him
through a maze of red canyons clogged with dust, her eyes
mirrors, her hands white flames. He had a headache and a
dry mouth. Someone had wrapped a heavy yak hide around
him as he slept: every long hair of the hide was tipped with
a ruby of hoarfrost. Near by, Chen Yao slept under another
hide; only her cap of glossy black hair showed.
The skimmer was still sailing east. Dawn light dimmed
the lights of the shipping lanes, made silhouettes of the scattering
of skimmers on the canal. It threw Lee's shadow a
long way across the white wood of the decking as, wrapped
in his yak-hide blanket, he stalked to the bridge.
Captain Jigme Tsatar was at his console. A short, stolid,
rotund man with an air of invincible competence, he wore
an intricately braided jacket and loose cotton trousers. A
broad-brimmed black felt hat was pulled low over his brow,
so that his small, close-set eyes and shapeless blob of a nose
were in shadow. He told Lee that they had an eighty per
cent chance of making the Ichun elevator at the end of the
canal. Things were bad in the capital and The Little Bird's
revolution was taking most of the attention of the Army of
the People's Mouths; more importantly it had scattered the
forces working against Lee.
"I am grateful that Redd found such friends as you," Lee
said. Flattery never hurt, even if the captain surely knew the
worth of what he had done.
But Captain Tsatar waved that away. "The Yankee wants
payment for delivery of you and the little girl god. We've
      RED DUST
      241


told him he can have it when we reach Ichun. A herd boss
called Hawk was supposed to take you to the fisherfolk, but
things worked out in the end. It is not your fault that Hawk
had been turned."

"Perhaps I trusted the wrong people."

Captain Tsatar's face gave nothing away. So different from
Redd, whose face was a constant storm of half-concealed
emotions whose meanings Lee could often only guess at.
The captain said, "And yet here you are after all. No one
could be expected to have done better. If the wind holds we
have a day to educate you. And if it doesn't, well then we
have even longer--if our enemies don't find us."
Forty-nine


L

ee's education began after breakfast of doupi, fried bean
curd pancakes stuffed with minced vegetables. His
teacher was a thin ascetic Yankee called Soldier. Soldier
had iron-gray hair, a thin face which showed all the
bones beneath it, steel teeth, and an inexhaustible supply of
invective. For twelve hours, from dawn to dusk, he taught
Lee the rudiments of half a dozen fighting techniques--Tae
Kwon Do, the Five Animal Styles of the Shaolin Temple (an
especial favorite of Soldier's), Karate, Choy Li-Fut, use of
knife and quarterstaff. They didn't even stop when the skimmer
put into shore, sheltering under the many-arched canopy
of a giant banyan from a culver that patrolled the wide
canal for an hour before turning back towards the capital.

Lee found that he could store away every move of a fighting
sequence, and when challenged replay it without thinking.
Soon it was Soldier rather than himself whose back or
shoulder or hip was hitting the thin cotton matting which
had been laid on the white-wood deck.

At last Soldier pronounced himself satisfied. "It'll have to
do," he said. They bowed to each other and rolled up the
matting, just as the last sliver of the sun flashed blue light
around half the horizon and vanished below it.

Chen Yao had been restored to her role as avatar on the
skimmer. While Lee had been given his workout, she had sat
beneath an awning, nibbling sweet rice balls and sipping sour
milk, watching ruined villages and mangrove swamp go by to


242
      RED DUST
      243

starboard, watching other skimmers slowly pass to port.

That afternoon, a pod of fin had surfaced near the skimmer.
They had ridden the bow wave and then slipped back
to chatter to Chen Yao. Lee could almost understand what
they were saying; or at least, he could play it back, slowed
down, and filter words from the chatter. Only Chen Yao
could make sense of it.

What the fin had brought was news. Chen Yao translated
it. Most of the city was under martial law. Roving gangs had
looted much of the Yankee Quarter and there were frequent
fire fights at night. Refugees crowded the feed lots; the Army
of the People's Mouths was preventing them from moving
further.

Everyone on the skimmer listened to Chen Yao recount
this, and it was passed to other skimmers via blinking signal
lamps.

If Chen Yao was worried about her family, her people, she
gave no sign. The aspect of her godhead gave her the calm
acceptance of the world of a true bodhisattva. The crew of
the skimmer brought her water-hyacinth flowers, which she
wove into her hair. By starlight and the colored points of
the skimmer's running lights, the wilting blooms made a
glimmering constellation above her face as, serious and
quiet, she taught Lee how to call up the functions of his
rewired nervous system, to move in and out of hypermode,
tune his hearing and visual acuity at will, control the autonomic
functions of his body.

Meanwhile, although the broadcasts of the King of the
Cats were no longer being jammed he was doing nothing
but play music, and Miriam slept like a mangrove seed in
the muddy darkness at the base of Lee's brain.

The end of the long hard day had left Lee with a sense of
lassitudinous well-being. He was tired, but not exhausted.
By heat sight he could enjoy the trim lines of the skimmer
as it ran before the night wind. Its sail rippled as breezes
rose and fell and computer-controlled winches differentially
flexed the semi-intelligent material to gain every dyne.

The skimmer had the beauty of form perfectly mirroring
      244
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


function. It was a hundred years old. It was called The Black
Dra#on.

Redd was ill at ease a-sail, and he was still trying to convince
himself that he was on the right side. "So long as it's
against owners, that would be OK," he said. "Never did like
owners. People like Hawk, thinking they own the ranges...
no one ever really owns the land. It's really the land owns
you." Redd hummed a few bars of "Don't Fence Me In"; it
made a strange counterpoint to Oscar Toney's "Precious
Love," which courtesy of his revamped nervous system was
playing in cleaned-up stereo right inside Lee's head.

He and Redd were sitting at the fantail of the skimmer.
Along in the bow, the crew were talking around a little brass
brazier. It was near midnight with frost sharp in the air, and
no one on the skimmer could sleep. At any moment the
culvers of Lee's great-grandfather, or of the Army of the
People's Mouths, could swoop on them like owls.

The skimmer's wake streamed out across the dark water.
Stars and the diamond haze of the asteroid belt burned brilliantly
across the sky. Venus and the double star of Earth
and Moon were setting: Jupiter wouldn't rise for an hour
yet. The red and green double stars of other skimmers' running
lights moved in the distance against the vast black silence
of the land.

After a while, Redd said, "Know why I'm still here?"
"You are waiting to be paid."

"I guess I deserve that. But I brought you here, didn't I?
And for less money than I'd have gotten from the conchies,
and not for cash on the barrel-head, either."

"That's true. Please, I would like to hear why you are
here."

"It goes way back to when I was a young kid. Barely had
hair on my balls when I had that operation they advertise.
Maybe you don't know about it. Aimed at Tibetans and Yankees
to keep our populations down. Took the money like an
idiot, spent it in a week. So I'll never have kids, but I figure
maybe I want something to live on and this is my shot at
it. If we win, they'll make statues of us all."
      RED DUST
      245

"Or make songs," Lee said. He imagined the King of the
Cats singing of his exploits in his slow bluesy voice, and felt
an illicit thrill. Part of the King was inside him, he always
felt, after that dream. In a different way that part of Miriam
Makepeace Mbele was, but there all the same.

In his head, the voice of the King of the Cats came in on
the fade. Lee had found he could separate the broadcasts
and the real world, and attend to them simultaneously. The
King was all fired up the way he had been when he'd triggered
The Little Bird's revolution. Lee took notice of that
kind of thing now. He knew that the King's moods weren't
random. He was talking directly to his audience down here
in the world.


"Awww-right! Rock aaaaand
      Redd said, very serious, "All

rooooll. Yessir, we're
      that hand-waving and

cooking right now, good
      yelling, that Chop-Suckey

golly we really are. Light
      stuff you've been taught,

crawls up and light crawls
      that won't do you no good

down, but I can spy with
      at all against someone with

my real big eye what's
      a gun. This pistol of mine

happening with you folks,
      might be crude and out of

Let me tell you I'll be
      date, but its advantage is,

bringing you the news only
      it's mechanical. Pure brute

a few minutes out of synch,
      force, nothing that circuit-

and the news right now is
      buster viruses can touch.

there's an army column
      Here, now, hold it. It's OK,
moving on Xin Beiing.
      it won't go off. See that

That's coming to you north
      little pip there? The action

by northeast, and at
      won't work unless you slide

present speed it should be
      it forward. And it's not

reaching the railway pass
      loaded. Yeah, that, the

local time oh nine hundred
      trigger, that fires it. Three-

or thereabouts tomorrow,
      gram pull, that's all, double

Looks like a division for
      action, first click cocks the

those of you interested. Any
      hammer there, second

soldiers listening, I say I
      drops it. Real sweet, real

can count your heads,
      balanced. There's this old
    246
    PAVI J. McAvI:¥

    baaay-beees.t You wave your
    guy back in Yankee Town

    hands in the air if you
    that makes these by hand,

    don't care. I can count you
    takes him a month on one

    all the way from up here,
    piece. He numbers each

    why I can even tell if
    one, right above the wheel

    you've trimmed your nails
    there, see? Yankee

    or not. I have eyes, believe
    numbering, illegal or not,

    me, I have eyes everywhere
    that's how he does it. Now

    In a minute, in just a
    here's the speed-loader, see

    minute, we're going to get
    how the shot slides right

'
    back down to some music,
    into each hole there?

    after this public service
    Wicked stuff. There's the

    announcement. That's a
    flat copper tip here, and

    special message for all you
    behind that is number

    people way way up on the
    twelve shot suspended in

    Tiger Mountain defense
    liquid polymer. It'll put a

    system: keep watching the
    hole in a man big as both

    skies. You know what's
    your fists together. Hit him
      coming down. So mellow
      anywhere and it'll stop him

      out to the music, and get
      dead, one shot, every time.

      ready. We're fast and loud
      It'll do a yak serious harm,

      and proud, you shouldn't
      main reason I have it.

      listen to what those no-
      You're on the ground, a yak

      growth eco-freaks tell you.
      coming at you, you need an

      Up here we know all about
      option. This is it. So here I

      ecosystems, it how we
      have a gun, and you have

      stay alive. Think about it
      your arm-waving, and what

      while I lay this on you: "If
      are you going to do?"

      the World Don't End

      Tomorrow I'm Coming

      After You" by the Fairlanes.

      You know it."

Redd held the gun on Lee's head and smiled. Lee went
into hypermode, reached out and took it from Redd's grip.
Redd started to react as Lee slowed back down, and then he
was working his empty hand, staring at the gun which dangled
by its trigger guard from Lee's forefinger.
      RED DUST
      247

After a moment, Redd said, "Yeah, well, that's some trick.
I'll give you that."

Lee saw that he had offended the Yankee. He handed the
gun back. "You are right, it is a trick. But it is what I have."

Redd thought for a moment. He said, "You ever stop to
think that mercenary has the same wiring as you? She
comes after you, you aren't going to take her gun away."

Lee had to admit that Redd was right. And he was certain
that Mary Makepeace Gaia would not rest until she found
him: a certainty he suspected he owed to the buried fragments
of her dead sister, who perhaps was simply silent, and
not sleeping at all.

Redd said, "So let me at least show you how to use a gun."
The song ended, and the King of the Cats came back. He
was needling the sky defense systems again. The place where
Lee was headed. It couldn't be coincidence.

Lee said, "Do you know why they've stopped jamming the
broadcasts of the King of the Cats? I have just thought of
it. He dangles bait before the enemy; they need him just as
much as we do, because they suspect he might give something
away."

"He also broadcasts with enough power to burn a hole
through the planet, it was concentrated on one spot. Jamming
him after the trouble in the city must have screwed
up communications across half the planet. You listening to

that guy? Never had time myself."

"But it is your heritage, Redd."

"It's the past, another world and long gone, too. I know
how much you Han hold to the past, but we're different."

"Ah. Then I see that you are not following the traditions
of your ancestors when you ride the range. Forgive me for
being so foolish."

"Well, I guess you got me there. But, see, it's not exactly
following any tradition. It's re-using it in a different way, in
a different place for a different purpose. You put any cowpoke
from the nineteenth century out on the range, he
wouldn't last a day." Redd spat a jet of saliva over the rail,
      248
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

into the water. "There's maybe one tradition I like to keep,
though. Lucky for you, as it turns out."

"I would very much like to learn to shoot."

"There you go. Knew you'd come round. I guess if I'm
going to give you shooting lessons we should ask permission
of the captain."

Captain Tsatar was a gun buff himself, it turned out, and
showed Redd the hand-made sniper rifle he kept just in case
he needed to surprise river bandits who haunted the abandoned
villages along the Grand Canal and (in fact its only
real use) to pot waterfowl or small game in the border
swamps. It had an octagonal barrel two meters long with a
telescopic sight that ran its whole length, and a bore as big
as Lee's thumb.

"Accurate over two kilometers," Captain Tsatar said. "I

shot a horse from beneath a bandit at that distance once.

He was most surprised."

He spoke quietly; they all did. Apart from the sound of
water moving past the skimmer's hull the night held an
immense stillness. Cold, the sky clear, stars so bright Lee
thought he could have reached out and plucked one, like
fruit from a tree. The bridge controls made a small comforting
glow, like a hearth fire dimming to ashes. Tomorrow
they would reach Ichun, the danwei at the end of the canal.

"It's a nice gun," Redd said. "There's this guy back in
Yankee town you should talk to some time."

Lee was surprised to see how quickly Captain Tsatar and
Redd formed a bond, for Tibetans and Yankees were traditionally
enemies: there had been much bad blood during the
resettlement, when a million Tibetan pioneers had fallen
from the sky and taken the planet from the failing Yankee
colony. But perhaps that was the point. Redd and Captain
Tsatar shared the same history, and both their races were
oppressed by the Han--although in true stubborn Yankee
fashion Redd would never admit this. Both knew more about
that history than Lee, too. Lee had for most of his life been
as unaware of it as a fish is of water, or the child of a rich
man of money. It was a medium, taken for granted. But now
      RED DUST
      249

he was caught up in its strong current, and his life was as
unwillingly changed by it as the lives of those without power
have always been changed.

He was beginning to understand why Redd had stayed
after bringing him here.

He was beginning to understand the forces in delicate
balance all around him, even if he was still unsure just who
was trying to move them.

"We are the first people," Captain Tsatar said when Lee
asked if the ku li really existed. "We've never needed a name,
until now. If the name strikes fear into our enemies, then
it is to our advantage."

"Ku li," Soldier said, "is as good a name as any. We are
not as numerous as the Ten Thousand Years would have the
populace believe, but we will unite the people and move
forward with them."

Lee said, "Do you mean you will impose your ideas on
them?"

Captain Tsatar said, "We learn from the people, and then
teach them what we have learned. The people will take control
from the Emperor and the Ten Thousand Years and
centralize all means of transforming the world so it can be
done as quickly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this
will mean inroads on the rights of the individual, But political
power wielded in the name of the Emperor is merely
the instrument by which the Ten Thousand Years oppresses
the people."

Soldier said, suddenly and unexpectedly passionate, "In
our hands it will change the world for ever. And for the
benefit of everyone."

Redd said, "People know they must co-operate to get on.
But they need leading, too. Not much different from running
a herd."

Soldier said, "When the people take power and make
themselves the ruling class, then they will have swept away
the structure which oppresses them. They cannot oppress
themselves."

Captain Tsatar said, "In place of a hierarchical society we
      250
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

will have an association in which the free development of

each is the condition for free development of all."

"Every man an Emperor," Redd said.

Soldier shook his head. "No one will rule but the will of

the people. Every man true to his own self."

"We don't have time to teach you everything," Captain

Tsatar said, and smiled.

Lee looked from one to the other. "I'm learning all the

time," he said.

Captain Tsatar said, "We are few. I admit that. But drag
ons hatch from the smallest of eggs. We will finish the trans
formation of this poor world even if it means swapping The

Black Dragon for a three-masted sailing barque, oceans of

water for seas of dust."

Lee said, "It sails on water now."

"It sails tame water. It has such a shallow draft that on

open sea the slightest swell would, overturn it. You will soon

see how different dust is from water, young master."

Lee thought about that. After a while Captain Tsatar

touched his shoulder, lightly, gently. It was then that Lee

realized how afraid the man was, how afraid all the crew

were of himself and of Chen Yao. Even Soldier was afraid.

"Look up," Captain Tsatar said.

A faint web rose from the eastern horizon. It lay across that

quarter of the sky as if the invisible lines with which the sages

had linked stars into constellations had come adrift and tan
gled there. Without his conscious control, Lee's vision mag
nified the view. Stars became bright blurred points. He felt a

diffuse sense of expansion, as if he were falling into the sky.
Redd and Soldier and Captain Tsatar were talking excitedly,

but he heard only their voices, not their words.

The lines were discontinuous, each composed of a myriad
      :----
twinkling shards. The web effect was caused by the fact that
the lines radiated away from dozens of different points .
spaced across the sky, most yet to be revealed by the hori-

      -..

zon's slow sinking.
Then blooms of light began to appear all over the web. They
were as bright as the brightest stars, and Lee's sight stepped
      RED DUST
      251

down to compensate. Something in his rewired brain plotted
every line. He remembered the technician explaining about
cluster probes designed to test Mars's defenses. Each an icy
moonlet infected with fullerene viruses which carved it into a
hundred fluffy micro-comets and manufactured the viruses
which would melt the permafrost during the long fall from
Jupiter's orbit to that of Mars. The man was hugely fat, naked
and completely hairless, with a nervous habit of looking into
Lee's eyes at the end of each sentence and then looking away
again. No, not Lee's eyes: this was Miriam remembering part of
her mission briefing.

The blossoms hung across the sky were the comet heads
(each no bigger than Lee's own head) burst by the orbital
defense lasers controlled by Tiger Mountain, beyond the
eastern horizon. The lines of the web were burning water
droplets, exploding in ionisation trails. Rain, falling faintly
through the stratosphere, evaporating kilometers above the
surface, the viruses suspended in the droplets already destroyed
by induction hundreds of thousands of kilometers
before they reached the Martian atmosphere.

This was not war, not yet. The display showed that the
defenses were still too strong for frontal assault. But it was
the beginning of the end of the time before war.
Fifty


T

he road to Ichun was paved with yellow and red bricks
set in sinuous curves, like the patterns on the back of
a petrified snake. As he walked down the road, with
Redd and Chen Yao on either side of them, Lee saw two
things.

Columns of smoke, five, six, seven of them, rose from
various places amongst Ichun's low flat-roofed buildings.

And people were running out of the city gate and down
the road, so many that they spilled into the rocky desert
scrub either side of it. They ran towards Lee and Chen Yao
and Redd. They were shouting and waving palm branches,
and they were dressed and masked in carnival attire. In a
moment they had surrounded the astonished travellers.
Dragons and griffins hoisted Lee on to their shoulders; two
snout-nosed carp lifted Chen Yao, who laughed with tremendous
glee.

Redd pressed up against the masked men who supported
Lee, crushing his hat to his head with one hand. He was
shouting something that was lost in the noise of the crowd.
"The sky!" the people chanted. "The sky! The sky!"

The fin had spread word of Lee and of the riots in Xin
Beijing up and down the network of canals, supplementing
the censored television shots of the one news channel The
Little Bird allowed to operate. Skimmers had picked up the
story, too. News that Lee was heading towards Ichun, and


252
      RED DUST
      253

the portents in the sky that night, had combined to cause a
popular revolt.

The company of soldiers garrisoned in the town had surrendered
after their compound had been set on fire. The
governor and his family had fled into the Dust Seas as soon
as the revolt had started, riding the last skimmer carried
down on the elevators. The post office had been liberated
from its nightwatchman, who was now sleeping off a massive
drunk after all the rice beer to which he'd been treated.
Posters of the Gang of Six had been defaced and slogans
picked up from the Xin Beijing uprising covered most of the
white walls of Ichun's buildings. Lee recognized some of the
PSCM's jargon mixed with quotations from the movie fragments
of the King of the Cats. The civic loudspeakers no
longer broadcast a bland diet of pop arias, advertisements
and anti-expansionist propaganda, but the King's round-the-clock
rock'n'roll show.

And the massive elevators which carried skimmers up and
down between the Grand Canal and the Dust Seas were
stalled. The family which owned and operated them had
joined the revolution. Queues of skimmers were already
backed up half a kilometer, and growing every hour. Among
them was The Black Dragon, which Lee and Chen Yao and
Redd had left at dawn.

Arriving at lchun by road had seemed sensibly inconspicuous
at the time: by now Mary Makepeace Gaia must have
worked out how they had escaped. As it turned out, they
might as well have carried huge banners broadcasting their
presence. In fact, as Lee was carried by the celebrating crowd
down the main avenue of Ichun towards the Governor's residence,
he saw that a banner with his name had been
stretched between two of the big ginkgoes which lined the
thoroughfare.

Chen Yao, her hands on the scaly heads of the two carp
who carried her, shouted, "This is your hour, Wei Lee! Now
your journey really begins!"

"Remember what happened in Xin Beijing," Lee said.
      254
      PAUI J. McAu[E¥


Chen Yao laughed. "I don't see any army!"

"Not yet?'

Then the crowd swept between them, and Lee was carried
through the gates of the Governor's house.
Fifty-one


T

he Governor's house was perched at the edge of
kilometer-high cliffs that dropped straight down to the
vast red flatness of the Plain of Heaven. The delicate
tiers of the house and its lush green gardens, sheltered by
curved windshields that raked the sky like thirty-meter talons,
had been turned into the headquarters of Ichun's popular
revolt. Manicured lawns, which had been watered every
day and cut by a dozen women with hand scythes, were
slowly being trampled to mud by the victory party. Cooking
pits had been dug into the precious turf; there were tables
loaded with sour vegetables, pickled yak brains, mapo dofu
with fiery sauces, stuffed roast intestines, pig-face soup,
sugar jaffles and other delicacies.

One of the self-appointed revolutionary committee explained
to Lee that the whole feast had all been looted from
the Governor's cold stores. He was a tall nervous student
not much older than Lee, handsome in a cadaverous way,
his Adam's apple protruding above the knot in his yellow
scarf. A yellow scarf and lack of a mask were the badges of
authority, it seemed. The committee knew only too well if
the town was retaken that no masks could save them from
informers, so went bare faced amongst timorous townsfolk
who preferred to carry out the revolution anonymously.

"You see the riches stolen from the populace," another
committee member said.


255
      256
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"The Ten Thousand Years cling to the backs of the Hundred
Families," said another.
Lee said, "I see celebration seems more important to you
than victory."
"As to that," the tall student said, "the Captain of the
garrison awaits your convenience. We have secured all weapons
and all communications."
Lee did not hold back his anger. "I suppose you mean you
have locked up the soldiers. And what will you do when the
Army of the People's Mouths arrives at your gates?"
The tall student blinked, taken aback.
Behind him, a young woman stared right at Lee. For a
moment Lee thought that another of Miriam's sisters had
found him. But the young woman had straight black hair
cut to frame a face the color of buttermilk. Her almond-shaped
eyes were as black as Lee's. She coolly met his stare
and said, "You must not think that we have not thought of
these things."
"Let him talk," someone else said.
Lee said, "I'll not have you on my conscience, so I must
speak plainly. I can offer you two choices. You may stand
and fight, or run away. Both are dangerous, but you must
have realized that when you acted. No? Too bad. Unless you
choose, you will all be dead in a very short time. The Army
of the People's Mouths would have begun to move on you
as soon as communications were cut, and certainly once the
elevators stopped working. The skimmers have radio sets,
after all. Did you confiscate those?"
"The skimmer crews are on our side," the tall student
said.
"So any skimmer captain would say, when faced with a
mob. Where are the soldiers of the garrison? Not the officers,
but the ordinary soldiers. I'll need to speak with them."
Fortunately, at least one of the revolutionaries had re
tained some sense. The ordinary soldiers had been locked
up in a warehouse, but they had not been mistreated. There
were sixty of them. They stood at parade rest in the middle
of the main avenue in front of the gate of the Governor's
      RED DUST
      257

house, looking ill at ease and watched with intense curiosity
by twice their number of townspeople in carnival motley.

Lee explained to the soldiers that they had a choice. They
would be set free and turned out of the town, or they could
stay and fight. They had ten minutes to think about it.

It took only five. Their spokesperson, a squat, powerfully
built corporal, was thrust forward. "We'll fight," he said.

Lee allowed himself a moment to enjoy the surprise of
the committee. He bowed to the corporal, thanked him for
his helpfulness, and suggested that he go with a squad of
his men to the Governor's house and take what food and
drink they needed. By that time their weapons would have
been returned to them.

When the corporal had departed, the tall student said,
"Very fine sentiments. But when we return their weapons
they will shoot us."

"Not at all. The corporal is smarter than you. He knows
that if he tried to rejoin the Army of the People's Mouths
he would be shot as a deserter, as would all his men. No
one in the Army of the People's Mouths could allow them
to live, because that would be to admit that they had surrendered
Ichun without a fight. So the corporal and his men
will fight on your side, for there is a slim chance of victory.
When he comes back, I want you to accompany us around
the town. He will know all the defensive positions."

It was late afternoon before the corporal had finished
showing Lee how to defend Ichun. Meanwhile, the committee
had been set to work rounding up those citizens who
remained sober enough to dig ditches and lay tanglewire at
the edge of the town. In Lee's opinion, such defenses were
only good until attackers found a way around them, but at
least it gave the townspeople something to do.

The corporal agreed with Lee. He was wryly resigned to
his fate. Like all in the garrison, he had not been born within
a thousand kilometers of Ichun, and was not planning to be
buried in it. "But only the lucky or rich choose where to
die, and only the Lords of Ten Thousand Years when."

"That may no longer be true."
      258
      PAUL J. McAuLEv

"We hear rumors," the corporal said. He was smiling.
"You really started those riots?"
"In a way. But the rioting came after the Army of the
People's Mouths attacked lawful petitioners in the Square of
Heavenly Peace. Their masters sent lite troops against unarmed
citizens."
"War is not an embroidery exercise," the corporal said
grimly. "I'd guess they'll send warhorses against us, once
we've been softened up by culvers. Those defenses won't do
much good against a charge, but we can fall back to the
main square. The buildings there are two-storied, and have
thick walls. We can put a sniper in every window, and keep
open a passage for retreat to the elevators." The corporal
scratched his close-shaven pate. He was a sturdy weather-beaten
man with old laser burns down one side of his shrewd
face. "It would be best if you started sending out the old
men and women and children now. Order skimmers to turn
back. There are plenty of half-lifers, too, stacked in an old
warehouse."
"They'll have to stay."
"I'd like to blow up a few buildings. It'll give us proper
fire lanes to cover any approach on the square."
"Of course."
"They won't like it," the corporal said.
"I will tell them, if you like."
The corporal smiled. "It's just that I'm no good when it
comes to ordering civilians about. It's what stopped me becoming
an officer."
Most of the revolutionary committee were waiting in the
square, dusty and dishevelled from their labors. Lee gave
them the broad outline of his plans, and sat off to one side
while the corporal explained the details. The woman who
had confronted Lee at the Governor's house came up to him.
She had brought a covered bowl: boiled rice and fried shreds
of pork and beancurd. Lee took it gratefully. He hadn't eaten
since leaving The Black Dragon.
The woman sat beside Lee while he ate. Her name was
Wu Lin. She had been born in the capital. Her parents were
      RED DUST
      259


distant relatives of one of the Ten Thousand Years, and had
died in an accident soon after her birth. She had been
brought up in the Great House of her great-grandfather, and
a year ago she had been sent to Ichun to work as an agronomist
technician. Her black hair was cut in a wing that
brushed her eyes; her nails were broken and crested with
dirt. She said, "My comrades have worked hard for you. A
kind word would help."

"I'm not sure that's true. They believe in their own importance,
not in reality."

"Are the stories about you true?"

"I'm sure they are true to those who tell them. I'm sure,
too, that those who tell the stories think they know more
about me than they do." Lee scraped the last grains of rice
into his mouth. The food made a solid shape in his stomach.

Wu Lin said, "I'll find you a place to rest. We'll have a
night at least before the army comes."

Lee took her left hand in both of his. He looked at her
nails, then pulled her to her feet. They were exactly the same
height. He said, "I know about you. I know more than you

think. I know who your great-grandfather is."

She tried to pull away.

Lee said, "I've killed a man, and soon I may have to kill
a woman. I'm not scared of anything on this world except
myself. And that's all you have to be scared of, too."
Fifty-two

W
u Lin's room, in a cadre dormito a few blocks
outh of the Governor's house, was as small and as
parely furnished as Lee's room in the Bitter Waters danw¢i--and as in his
room, one whole wall of Wu Lin's
was covered in still pictures of the King of the Cats, printed
from the surviving fragments of his movies.
Lee tapped the largest, which in stark technicolor showed
the King strumming his guitar and singing to Anne Helm
on some lost beach of Old Earth, with his thumb. "I may
be mistaken, but is this from Follow That Dream?"
Wu Lin was busy making tea on the room's small hotplate.
"I knew by your hair that you are a follower of the King of
the Cats."
"Do you hope I can defeat the Army of the People's
Mouths as the King defeated the gamblers' gangsters?"
"You are already a kind of sheriff, it seems. Please, you
must explain how you know about me, Wei Lee. We might
never see each other again."
Lee took the bowl of tea she held out to him. They sat
side by side on the edge of her small hard bed. He said, "I think we may.
Because we're the same." '
She didn't understand. Lee put his left hand over hers.
He said, "When I was a child, I often visited the Great House
where you lived. It was in the mountains, above Xin Beijing. 'It
was far bigger than either of us thought. I knew only a
few courtyards, a few of the buildings."

260
      RED DUST
      261
Wu Lin met his gaze. "Once, I climbed on to the roof of
the Southern Flowery Hall. That was where my bedroom
was. I climbed a vine that grew past my window. My ayah
had to send for the gardeners to bring me down. But I saw
the walls, far in the distance. I thought then they were the
walls of the city. I didn't see the city until I was ten, when
I was sent here."
"I have a trick fingernail," Lee said. "On my forefinger. It
always splits in two places when it grows past the quick.
That's what I saw about you. That's when I knew. He
changed sex and face, and perhaps he changed fingerprints
and retinal patterns too, but he did not change the small
things, the unimportant single-gene products."
Wu Lin said, "I always thought I was the only one. I didn't
understand why I had been sent here. I thought I'd done
wrong..."
Her grip was strong. Lee returned it. "I had the same
thoughts. There are others, I am sure of it. Bait, Great-grandfather
Wei said, but he didn't understand the nature
of our conception. I still don't entirely understand it myself"
"Tell me what you know," Wu Lin said with a sudden
fierceness that surprised Lee. When he had finished telling
her what Miriam Makepeace Mbele had told him, she said,
"It could have happened to me. Not you, but to me!"
Lee said, "Instead, you organized the freeing of Ichun.
Perhaps you will be luckier than I, in the long run. We must
defend your prize before we can begin to learn that." He
hesitated, and then said, "There is a way in which you can
share my fate," and explained about the totipotent fullerene
viruses, and what they had done to him.
"And you can infect me, just as the anarchist infected
you?"
"Yes. But it is a hard burden, Wu Lin."
"But it's ours, isn't it? It's what we were born for."
So Lee kissed her deeply, and it was done.
Fifty-three

T
he corporal came for Lee just after dawn. He was a
polite man, and knocked on the door and softly called
Lee's name until Lee replied. Lee had slept on Wu Lin s
floor matting; as he worked the stiffness from his limbs it
occurred to him that he had not slept in a bed since leaving
Bitter Waters. As he combed his hair, Wu Lin stirred on her
bed, then suddenly sat upright, her hands clasped tightly
across her eyes.
"There are grids and numbers wherever I look!"
"The viruses have begun their work," Lee said, and explained
what she should expect. "I don't know if it will help
us save Ichun, but it gives me hope."
"All we have ever had is hope," Wu Lin said. "Go on now,
go to your friends. I will go to mine. Together, my brother,
we shall see what we can do."
Chen Yao, Redd, and Captain Tsatar were waiting outside
the dormitory with the corporal, in a cold wind that blew
thin dust in from the desert.
Chen Yao looked at Lee and said, "You are a god, Wei Lee.
There are no rules."
"If I'm a god, what is Wu Lin?"
"A potential."
"We all are that. Or I hope so."
Redd said, "Maybe some day you'll explain all of what's
going down." He wore a black and red checked scarf over
his mouth and long nose against the dusty wind. The captain

262
      RED DUST
      263


of The Black Dragon was there, too. His hunting rifle was
slung over his shoulder; its octagonal barrel stuck straight
up a meter above his black felt hat.

"I'm happy to see you," Lee said, "but if I'm not mistaken
shouldn't you be with your ship?"

"She's standing ready by the elevator cradle," Captain Tsa-tar
said. "Our back door, if we need it."

"When we need it," Redd said, "and that's soon. Soldier
is organizing some of the skimmer crews." He laughed.
"Mostly lecturing them about their moral duty."

"The people must understand the nature of the revolution,''
Captain Tsatar said. "Once they understand, they will
join it gladly and fully."

"Let's hope so," Redd said.

"We maintained a deep radar watch all night," the corporal
said. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he was unshaven.
"Just before I came to wake you two blips lit up, three hundred
klicks out and closing fast. We're moving everyone into
position, and the elevators have been started up." He gave
a fierce grin. "It's always nice to think there's a back door,
but I doubt we'll have time to use this one."

They started off towards the main square. Redd told Lee
what had happened in the night. Less than half of Ichun's
citizens had stayed to defend their homes. The rest, and the
children and old men and women, had been transported
down to the Plain of Heaven aboard commandeered skimmers.

"There was a deal of trouble over that," Redd said, "and
Soldier had to break a few heads. You'd think the crews
would be grateful to be allowed on their way."

Captain Tsatar said mildly, "You understand little about
sailors' pride."

Redd laughed. "Soldier said it was what? The reaction of
the Little Owners to loss of their only means of oppressing
the people."

"Soldier's a good man," Captain Tsatar said, "but sometimes
he tends to favor theory over practice."
      264
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Redd whispered to Lee, "I wanted Chen Yao to go too.
She wouldn't, of course."

Chen Yao said, "My place is with Wei Lee. And although
his place is not here, he seems to have made up his mind
to stay."

"I can't run away from this, Yao."

Chen Yao was more angry and more scared than she
wanted anyone to know. Perhaps only Lee saw the effort she
put into controlling her voice when she said coldly, "You
can't save the world a town at a time, either."

The corporal said, "Had to put a couple of armed people
aboard each skimmer, to make sure refugees weren't thrown
overboard at the first opportunity."

"That's good," Lee said. He hadn't thought of that, and it
suddenly seemed to him that there was so much he hadn't
thought of. He was the center of a thousand unravelling
threads. It was an exciting, scary thought, and kicked in
adrenalin as they came out into the big square.

Ichun's main avenue ran straight across the middle,
blocked where it entered the square by a sagging web of
tanglewire strung between the buildings on either side. Or
between their remaining walls, for the buildings had been
gutted, holes blown completely through them, flat roofs
caved in. That side of the square faced east, and early sunlight
poured down the fire lanes, burning on the red banners
which flew from every available point. Every scrap of red
cloth in Ichun must have been commandeered; even the big
ginkgoes were decked in red.

Trucks had been parked in a semicircle bowed away from
the main avenue's entrance into the square. Fifty or sixty
people lounged behind this makeshift barricade. Most were
civilians, and many still wore masks, which lent them a gay
carnival air at odds with the grim expressions of the few
soldiers amongst them.

The corporal explained to Lee that most of his men were
on the perimeter roofs, and Captain Tsatar made his excuses
and left for his own sniper's position. He was halfway across
the square when two culvers burst out of the air low above
      RED DUST
      265


the buildings, shadows against the bright morning sun.
Their wings made a thunderous pulse; Lee saw their belly
guns winking but didn't hear them fire. Lines of dust walked
across the square. A ginkgo flew into splinters and then a
truck blew apart, scattering bodies and parts of bodies
amongst flame and terrific noise.

There was a ragged fusillade from the survivors, but the
culvers had already passed out of range. Captain Tsatar had
dropped to the ground. Now he picked himself up, dusted
his loose trousers, and trotted across the square into the
shadowy arcade of a building on the far side. The corporal
put on a padded helmet and spoke urgently into its microphone,
holding the foam pad against his throat with a finger.

Chen Yao was looking up at the sky. "Here they come
again," she said.

Two black specks in the pink sky: their bulbous bodies
and flexing circular wings jumping into clear focus as Lee's
sight reflexively amplified. Dawn light burned off their canopies.
They rushed forward faster than the thunder of their
wings. Neither Redd nor the corporal made a move to cover,
and so Lee stood his ground, too. Redd put an arm around
Chen Yao, but she pulled away from him without taking her
gaze from the swooping culvers. It came to Lee that most
acts of heroism simply spring from embarrassment.

As the culvers skimmed towards the tops of the trees
around the Governor's house, a brilliant light shot up from
the roof of one of the buildings that bordered the square.
For an instant, Lee thought it was a strike from the culvers'
weapons, but then the right-hand culver blew apart, and Lee
realized that the light had been a one-shot laser. Disintegrating
parts, most on fire, fell in slow trajectories as the
other culver stood on its nose in midair, clapped its wings
above its canopy, and dropped below the cliff.

"Well," the corporal said with gloomy satisfaction, "now
they know we defected." He paused, his head cocked. He was
listening to the speaker in his helmet. He said, "Oh, they
know, all right. Come on."

Redd and Lee trotted alongside him, and little Chen Yao
      266
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
had to run to match their pace. She said, "I hear a distant
thunder."
"Cavalry," the corporal said. "This way."
They entered the shade of one of the arcades that lined
the square, and cantered up a winding stair lit by sunlight
at every other turn from narrow glazed windows. The glass
had been milkily pitted by centuries of winter sandstorms.
A reflexed groove was worn into the middle of each stone
step. Lee couldn't stop noticing details all of a sudden. Every
moment was suddenly significant.
The stair ended in an open trapdoor. Lee stepped on to
the flat roof, where the morning breeze seemed colder and
stronger than in the square, the sunlight rawer. Raw gold
pouring from the sun's tiny disc, gleaming on the solar panels
which, like flowers, had turned towards it, silhouetting
soldiers who squatted behind the low parapet bordering the
roof.
The corporal offered Lee a pair of fieldglasses, but Lee
shook his head and asked, "Where?"
The corporal pointed.
Virus-enhanced sight brought into sudden focus a line of
mounted soldiers stretched across the barren red landscape.
The sun was at their backs as their lithe mounts moved
forward at--an inset in Lee's sight blinked a figure formed
of black bacilli-like rods--at a steady forty kph.
"Like machines," Chen Yao said.
Lee said, "But they're still people."
"No," the corporal said, "the young lady is correct. This
is a crack cavalry unit, and all the soldiers and their mounts
will be hardwired for maximum coordination."
Soldiers on the roof and on the roofs either side were
firing deliberate single shots.
Little puffs of dust were fountaining up here and there
before and behind the line. A warhorse reared up, toppling
its rider as it snapped with fanged jaws at a red rose smashed
into its scaly flank. A rider slumped sideways, shattered head
pumping blood across his mount's withers, and it charged
forward wildly, the corpse of its rider flopping like a badly
      RED DUST
      267


used puppet. But the line continued to move steadily forward.

"They'll charge any moment," the corporal said. Lee
looked around, but the corporal was speaking into his microphone.
"Keep the fire rate steady when they do. It's a
tactic to panic us. Don't let them."

Lee found that he was holding his breath. Someone used
a one-shot laser and two cavalry soldiers and their mounts
vanished in a flare of burning sand. The rest of the line came
on inexorably. The corporal said something urgently in his
microphone, but Lee didn't hear it: in that moment the
charge started.

Warhorses leaped forward as one, leaving behind a rising
line of dust. Lee's motion sensor read-out blurred, stabilized
around two hundred kph. In three breaths the cavalry halved
the distance between their line and the edge of Ichun; in
the next they started to fire, knocking huge chunks of masonry
from outlying buildings. Lee saw several riders stand
in their saddles, whirling slings which loosed hornet swarms
of micromissiles. Something discharged a swathe of coherent
light which burned a roof clean of soldiers three buildings
to the left. There was a rising haze of dust and smoke;
the riders vanished into it.

Lee and the soldiers ran to the other side of the roof just
in time to see the last of the cavalry clear the tanglewire
barricades with a meter to spare. Warhorses scattered across
the square as they charged after fleeing civilians. One
grabbed a woman directly below Lee's vantage point, worried
her and tossed her aside, a bloody bundle. The corporal was
shouting wildly, his microphone hanging from his throat. A
last rider cleared the barricades; a shaven-headed woman
dressed in seamless black leather.

Lee recognized her at the same moment her face turned
to him. She wore sunglasses that masked half her face, but
Lee knew that she had seen him, and he ran for the stairs,
instantly kicking into hypermode.
Fifty-four

·
     'I' ee's body moved faster than his thoughts. Reflex took

:
     L him to the top of the stairs before he remembered what


     Redd had said on The Black Dragon. He swerved and

     leaped between two soldiers straight over the parapet,

     snatching a rifle from one of them as he went.

     He landed on the clay tiles which roofed the arcade that


     ran the length of the building and let himself roll over the

     edge. The ground came up so slowly he could turn in mid
!
     air and like a cat land crouching on feet and hands. He did

     a backflip into the arcade's shadow, and an instant later the

     paving where he'd landed exploded in stone chips.

     Lee ran for cover, storing upside-down glimpses of the

     square: warhorses circling left and right around burning

     trucks; a tree hit by a stream of gunfire and shuddering into

     flinders of wood and leaves; a legless man crawling across the

     wide avenue, leaving a trail of blood. He reached the shelter of

     a stone pillar, looked left, right. Warhorses moving slow as mo
     lasses. Each leaf and splinter distinct as it fell. The dying man

     slumping by degrees.

     A riderless warhorse trotting across the square had to be

     hers. Lee's sight went momentarily infrared as he gathered

     himself, a snapshot in luminous greens that he stored as he

     ran the length of the arcade and drew gunfire; he reversed,

     and quick tiny things sang viciously where he would have

     been.

     Lee made himself as small as possible behind another pil-
268
      RED DUST
      269

lar. Every muscle trembled. His skin was on fire as it radiated
spent energy. His grip had dented the aluminum stock
of the stub-barrelled rifle. But his heart pumped smooth and
slow; he wasn't even out of breath. The viruses had rebuilt
his muscles to take care of oxygen debt.

It took a microsecond to match the infra-red glimpse of
the square with triangulation of the gunfire aimed at him:
there she was, burning bright on the far side of the square,
firing from the hip as she ran for the trucks burning in the
center of the square. She was wired for speed, too.

Lee gathered himself and ran out into smoky morning
light. He dodged and weaved amongst the cavalry with
dreamlike ease. He caught the slow-moving arm of a rider
as she started to raise her sling, pulled her down and left
her behind. Saw dust spurts tracking towards a civilian
woman who lay clasping her bleeding leg, and knocked her
out of the way. All the time turning his head, snapping in
and out of infra-red, short rifle flicking back and forth.

But the heat of the burning trucks hid the mercenary's
bright trace.

Half the cavalry had broken from circling the square and
were moving towards the broad avenue that led to the Governor's
house. Lee took a breath and ran after them, winding
in and out of their hurtling bodies.

He had time to see everything clearly: the lather of foam
flying from their red, fanged mouths; their rolling yellow
eyes aflame like lamps; the motion of muscles under their
spotted hides; the intent expressions of their crouching riders.
A warhorse snapped at Lee, but he easily dodged the
lazy snatch of its jaws and vaulted up behind its rider and
ripped out the cables which connected his headpiece to the
skin-tight fighting suit. The rider went into tetanic spasm
and Lee reached down, gripped the man's right leg, and
tipped him out of the narrow saddle. The warhorse bucked
violently; Lee sang calming words to it. A dozen strides later,
just as the riders around him were beginning to react to
what had happened, he jumped down, safe on the far side
of the square.
      270
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

He looked right and left, infra-red sight piercing rolling
dust clouds. A riderless warhorse charged at him, and Lee
swerved aside.

Then he was smashed to the ground.

Mary Makepeace Gaia, hanging from the warhorse's harness
on his blind side, had dropped in passing and then
leaped. Lee reacted by reflex. The viruses took over. His body
made the pass of the Startled Locust and he was two meters
away. The mercenary was climbing to her feet and fire was
burning his shoulder where she'd cut him.

She had lost her sunglasses; a ball of black metal moved
in her stitched eyesocket. Lee's rifle lay on the ground at
her feet. She kicked it aside, raised her knife.

Lee assumed the posture of the Angry Crane, left foot
tucked behind right knee, arms half raised, elbows out like
wings.

The mercenary laughed and threw away her knife. Then
she was upon him.

They whirled and kicked amongst warhorses rearing in
slow-motion panic. Lee vaulted clear across one to escape
Mary Makepeace Gaia's attack and landed in a weaving
crouch, the sharp pain of splintered ribs dying away as viruses
damped nerves. The edge of his right hand stung
where he'd caught the side of her head.

She came at him again, but this time Lee ran forward to
meet her. They flew past each other, legs scissoring out in
a complex ballet. His right foot caught her under her armpit,
but she grasped his ankle and twisted. He fell sprawling in
dust, rolled from the slow-motion plunging of a warhorse
and felt a wind and rolled again so that the mercenary's kick
merely bruised his hip instead of breaking his spine.

Lee jumped up in a half-squat, right ankle rubbery and
feeling as if it had been dipped in ice, ice wrapping his ribs,
his hip, a line of ice down his back from the cut, his shirt
stuck to him with blood and dust.

The mercenary came at him again. Lee dodged amongst
the stamping legs of two warhorses as she whirled through
the Springing Tiger, the Striking Snake, the Striking Mantis,
     RED DUST
     271

     the Striking Spider. Lee's body countered in a whirl of arms

     and legs; striking attitudes at blinding speed, they whirled

     through the dust and smoke and carnage in the square, leap
·.
     ing burning trucks, dodging wreckage each flung at the

     other, dodging bullets. Both sides were firing on them--

     fortunately, no one thought to wave a laser across the

     square. Twice Lee grabbed weapons from the hapless cavalry,

     and twice the mercenary knocked them from his hands. He

     was slowly being forced back towards the tanglewire barri
     cade at the far end of the square.

     The mercenary feinted left then right as he tried to break

     away. And then she paused. Lee watched her, back in the

     posture of the Angry Crane but with right foot tucked up

     behind left knee. Sweat was just breaking out across his

     fevered skin.

     "Not bad for a beginner," the mercenary said. And then

     he was on his back, looking up at her with the pink sky

     beyond. The iron taste of dust parched his throat.

     "Now you're mine," she said.

     That was when Chen Yao jumped on her back.

     Lee rolled away, smashed down a soldier and took his rifle.

     Mary Makepeace Gaia laughed. She held Chen Yao out in

     front of her by an arm and a leg. She shouted a single word.

     It rolled and rattled around the square.

     "Yield!"

     The rifle hummed and shifted in Lee's hands as it tracked

     the mercenary. He said, "So you need me alive."

     "Yield! I'll spare the little girl."
    Lee dropped the rifle and spread his hands. The next mo
    ment he was on his back again. Mary Makepeace Gaia grinned

    down at him and punched him three times, and he couldn't

=
    breath, couldn't move, and everything dropped back to normal

=
    speed.


    "I only need a little piece of you alive," the mercenary

'
    said.

    "Spare the girl. You promised." The words were squeezed

    from the vise of his chest.

    "I lied. You get to watch her die. Then I do you."
      272
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

And then the mercenary was knocked sprawling. She
sprang to her feet and was knocked down again, her right
arm shattered. The third shot struck the ground by her head
and spun away end for end. Lee glimpsed the captain of The
Black Dragon standing at the edge of the arcade's roof, his
long rifle poised. The mercenary saw him too, and blurred
into hypermode.

Lee scooped up Chen Yao and ran for his life.
Fifty-five

             T he Governor's house was aflame from end to end. Cav
                   alry charged around the ruined garden, shooting into

                   the flames. One rode straight at Lee and he went into

     ''
     hypermode again. With Chen Yao in his arms, he ran down

             a street lined with gutted shops. At the far end a barricade

     '
     of crates, furniture and doors had been wedged together. Wu

             Lin vaulted its top and sped down the street, meeting Lee

             just as he slowed down.

             The surviving leaders of the uprising were making their


     last stand beyond the barricade, around the elevators down

             to the Plain of Heaven. Lee watched as a dragon in chains

             gaped its jaws wide to swallow The Black Dragon herself,

             upraised dispersers and masts and all. Links rattled by, each

             as thick as Lee's thigh. The sound of draining water mixed

             with distant gunfire and the shrill shriek of steam as the

             cradle closed around The Black Dragon.

             Redd took Chen Yao from Lee's arms. She was uncon
             scious, with bruises beginning to show on her forehead and

             neck. The cowboy was streaked with soot, and one side of

             his face was scorched as red as dust.

     =
     Different parts of Lee's body began to shudder at different

             speeds as he started to come down from the extended period

             of hypermode. Time passed in shuddering jerks. He was ly-

     ---
     ing on the ground, a sac fixed to his arm, pulsing glucose-

             saline into his bloodstream. Someone spoke to him, went

             away. Lee replayed it: Redd leaning over him, saying, Hold
273
      274
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

on in there Billy Lee, we're gonna get you out of here soon
as we can. His muscles clenched and relaxed, rotating each
joint of his legs and arms in turn. His fingers tapped staccato
codes.

Redd came back. Lee sat up, and almost fainted.

"Easy partner. Nothing to do now but run away. You
might as well lie back."

Lee peeled the drained sac from his arm, wiped the spot

of venous blood that appeared when its proboscis pulled free.
"How bad is it?"

Redd fanned himself with his hat. There was a singed hole

in its crown. He said, "They cut us in half. The garrison
troops are holding their rooftop positions, but they're surrounded.
Whole town's on fire, and all we have are the elevators.''

"The best we could hope," Lee said. He listened to the
sound of explosions, coming closer like giant's footsteps.

"You were the last to get through," Redd said. "Chen Yao

will be OK. Hard-headed little girl. Soldier's dead--went to
meet the cavalry charge head on. We..."

That was when the water in the channel leading to the
elevator caught fire.

It went up all at once, flapping sheets of fire rising higher
than the big cable drums atop the elevator head. Redd and
Lee turned just in time to see Mary Makepeace Gaia leap
through the flames. Lee jumped to his feet and almost fell
down again. Someone grabbed his arm and said, "Let me

use your gift, brother."

It was Wu Lin.

Before Lee could say anything she kissed him and ran
towards the mercenary, silhouetted against flapping flames.
She ran faster and faster, blurring into hypermode: the viruses
had already adjusted her musculature and nervous system.

The mercenary's right arm was strapped up, but when

she went into hypermode it hardly seemed to matter. She

and Wu Lin whirled around each other, but while Wu
      RED DUST
      275

Lin could match the mercenary's superhuman speed, she
had only courage to wield against the other's honed technique.

It wasn't enough. The mercenary broke Wu Lin's right
arm, kicked her legs from under her, planted a boot on her
throat. "Come to me!" the mercenary shouted. "Come to
me, Wei Lee, and I swear I'll spare this one!"

Lee screamed and started forward, but Redd hauled him
around and Lee found that he was too weak to resist. He
didn't see the mercenary's killing blow, but he felt it all
the same, and shuddered and cried out as Redd lifted him
up and tipped him over the elevator's railing on to the
white-wood deck of The Black Dragon. Girders arched
above the skimmer. Lee took a step forward and almost
fell on his face. Redd helped him sit up, then unholstered
his pistol.

"Let's see the bitch bite on one of these," he said.
"Give me a minute..."

"No time, Billy Lee! Chen Yao said you have to go on. I
believe her. Think of us."

And then he was gone, and the cradle which held The
Black Dragon swung out over the edge. Elevator tracks
scored parallel lines down the cliff face, dwindling down to
the smooth surface of the Plain of Heaven. Water which
spilled the joint of the big lock gates made a distinct falling
noise amongst the noise of steam and clank of steam-driven
machinery. Lee had trouble keeping things at right angles.
It was as if the world was trying to turn itself out. The air
seemed packed with forms, huge and vague.

Everything lurched as the elevator started down with ponderous
smoothness. Girder work dropped away; huge chains
made a rushing sound as they moved up.

For a long minute The Black Dragon dropped down towards
the dust sea.

Then the culver appeared beyond the bow of the cradled
skimmer, matching its fall.

Lee dragged himself to his feet, clutching at the rail, saw
the pilot sitting in the bubble of its Cyclopean eye. Sailors
      276
      PAUI J. McAuIE¥


ran for weapons, but the culver shrugged its wings and shot
upwards and something exploded far overhead. The Black
Dragon lurched in its cradle and then everything was falling
free.
Fifty-six


T

he first time Lee woke, it was night.

He was. on his back. His face was masked, and he
was peering through little round lenses, looking
straight up at the stars. Overlays came and went--sighting
lines, vectors, navigational algorithms. Certain stars were
bracketed, with figures clustered next to them. Presently he
saw that these were moving counter to the great wheeling
motion the world made as it continually sank eastward.

In all that time he didn't think to move. At last the overlays
blinked off and he faded into the vast starry night.

The second time he woke, it was like a monitor warming

up.

Sound first. The dreamy hiss of dust slipping past a hull,
the crackle and hum of dispersers like the white noise of an
old-fashioned radio tuned between stations. The creak of rigging,
and the metallic crinkling of the sail.

A mask was clamped over his face, feeding him air with
a rattling hiss. Lee opened his eyes, peered through the
mask's round lenses.

It was day, crisply warm with the sun a shade off vertical.
He lay in the craft's padded cockpit, sheltered by the narrow
wedge of shadow cast by the perspective-narrowed triangle
of the silvery sail. With three pairs of dispersers slung out
on either side--red dust dipping around their black pods,
which crackled and spat with induced static--the little craft
looked something like a water-skating insect. A water-skater


277
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      PAUL J. MCAULEY

with a sail on its back and a stabilizing fin in its belly, and
a lost lonely homunculus riding it.
Lee sat up. A voice said, "Well, it's about time, Master. Do
we feel at all like talking?"
A stalk rose from a control housing. It terminated in a
cluster of sensors, like a machined orchid.
"Or perhaps we're just the strong and silent type," the
computer said. Its voice, neither male nor female, was informed
by a querulous inflection.
Lee said, "Where are we?" His voice sounded strangely
intimate inside the mask.
All around, from close horizon to close horizon, stretched
a sea of red dust. The little craft--it was a skimmer's gig--was
running with the wind. Gently swelling waves marched
across the surface of the dust, each precisely the same shape
and height as the next, defined by a narrow line of shadow
at its near side. Even as Lee watched, dazed and confused,
logy with the weight of consciousness, the sun reached
noon. Shadow lines vanished across the bowl of the dust
sea. Wave tops were oscillating streaks of slightly brighter
red across the glowing red surface, making dizzying moire
patterns. A faint spume fumed into the air from each wave
crest. Although a transparent shield curved around the padded
cockpit where he sat, he could feel wind-blown dust
stinging his hands.
The computer gave universal grid coordinates. Lee supposed
that his rewiring could translate that into an aereo-graphical
position, but he didn't want to call on any of his
new talents right now. Virus-stored memory was a pregnant
weight in his head, and he didn't think he could stand instantaneous
apprehension of the terrible moments after the
culver had stooped upon The Black Dragon in its descending
elevator cradle
He said to the computer, "Make sense of that for me." "We are sailing east by
northeast, towards the strait which
links the Plain of Heaven with the Plain of the Garden of
Eternal Bliss. We've been sailing two days four hours, and
estimated time of arrival is in eight days, fifteen hours."
      RED DUST
      279
"Where are we heading?"
"I'd prefer one question at a time. My processing ware
isn't all I would like."
Lee said, "I'm sorry," and felt foolish. This was only a
machine, after all. He said, "It doesn't matter. I know where
we're going."
"Am I speaking to the woman now?"
"You're speaking to me. There is someone else aboard?"
"Well, in a manner of speaking," the computer said, and
then Lee remembered Miriam Makepeace Mbele.
The computer said, in a crabby pedantic tone, "I think
that it really would be better if I explained..."
"You are taking me to Tiger Mountain."
"Lucky guess."
"Not at all. Is there a way of closing up this cockpit?"
"Fresh air is good for you."
"If that means that you can do it, then please do it." The
mask was irritatingly hot and close against his face, but if
he took it off he'd choke in the dust-filled air.
The transparent canopy slid up around him like the calyx
of a flower. There was a rush of air, and he started to fumble
with the straps of his mask.
"Please be patient," the computer said. "It is necessary to
change and filter the air."
Lee waited.
"It is safe now, but please don't do this too often," the
computer said. "My resources are finite."
Once he had taken off the mask, Lee vigorously scratched
the weals left by its seals under his chin, around the line of
his jaw, at his hairline. The computer said, "I can fix something
to eat. My cookery sub-routines are very adept. Pigeon
in plum sauce, perhaps, or..."
"Please be quiet. I want to think."
"You've been living on unrefined pap for the last two
days," the computer said. "I was only thinking of your
health." It sounded offended.
"Later," Lee said. "Now, I must think."
There was a tiny toilet. Lee emptied and cleaned the suit's
      280
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

relief facilities and sponged off the worst of living inside it
for two days. Then for a long time he did nothing but sprawl
naked on the live hide couch at the stern of the little gig.
Sunlight sank through the canopy and through his skin to
his bones. He watched waves of dust march in long parallel
rows towards the horizon, their shadows running ahead of
them now. The gig was moving just faster than the waves,
dipping and rising smoothly as it ploughed through soft
dense swells.

Shards of what had happened were jumbled in his mind.
He was reluctant to put them together. He kept thinking of
certain details. Wu Lin sprawled helpless on the ground beneath
the triumphant mercenary, a hellish tableau lit by the
flames that roared across the surface of the burning canal.
He'd only known his sister for a day, but he knew that he
would mourn her for the rest of his life. He remembered
her grip on his arm and her exultant cry before she had
sprung into battle, armed only with courage and the half-formed
gifts of the anarchist viruses.

And he remembered the way The Black Dragon had shuddered
like a living thing when the culver had blown free the
elevator cradle. He remembered the end of a chain flinging
arcs of molten droplets as it fell past, loop after loop of a
chain half a kilometer long falling towards the red dust sea.
A sailor's broad-brimmed straw hat sailing off, rising up on
some current of air, the man's lined brown face turning to
his, mouth open around an unspoken question. The sickening
smooth slide, faster and faster. He remembered the flashing
glimpse of the counterweight of the empty dust-ballasted elevator
shooting up the cliff face as the cradle carrying TheBlack
Dragon plunged down, brake blocks screaming and showering
great drooping arcs of sparks.

Then there was nothing but pictures shuffled one after
the other, bright and sharp in every detail but with no emo
tional content. Lee suspected that Miriam had taken over
then.

He let the barrier down. He wanted to see what had happened
when Miriam's virus-encoded personality had forced
      RED DUST
      281

control of his own body. He saw that he alone had escaped,
clambering across the wildly tilting deck to the gig, strapping
himself into a crash cradle and shooting the sturdy
little vessel away from The Black Dragon moments before
impact, taking off across the dust sea under cover of the
plume of dust raised by the skimmer's final keel-breaking
impact.

He had looked back once. Had seen a vast dust cloud
spread out at the base of the high cliffs. Had seen, atop a
sheer kilometer of cliff face, the smoke of Ichun rising
against the pink sky.

The images were mercilessly sharp and clear and bright.
The viruses forgot nothing. Lee watched what they showed
him with tears leaking from his clamped lids, running back
towards his ears.

Much later, the computer said, "Our destination is visible,
if you care to look five degrees port of my bow."

Sternward, the horizon had risen to touch the tarnished
coin of the sun. Light lay across the tops of the waves, lines
of red light broadening as the waves marched west, melting
into a general glow. Lee turned and looked ahead, saw a star
burning at the wide, level, dark eastern horizon. It was the
tip of Tiger Mountain, the biggest volcano in the solar system,
so huge that its peak rose above the horizon. Rose, in
fact, through the atmosphere of the world, its flat-topped
caldera shining in near-vacuum twenty-seven kilometers
above the surface of the Dust Seas.
Fifty-seven


T

he ecosystem of the Dust Seas were Cho Jinfeng's
greatest triumph. Originally, they had been low-lying
boulder-strewn cratered plains, a thin crust lying over
dust and rubble bound by ice into permafrost as hard as iron
and a kilometer deep. But the ice of the deep permafrost had
begun to melt when Mars had been slowly warmed, by sky
mirrors and by the greenhouse effect as out-gassing and sublimation
of the south polar cap raised the carbon dioxide
partial pressure. The plains had become unstable, and for
the first time in an aeon Mars had been racked by quakes.

Boulders (and half a dozen ancient space probes) had sunk
into quaggy unbound dust. Currents had started to circulate.
Great convection cells had carried heat deeper, liberating
more and more permafrost water, freeing more and more
dust. For three decades, muddy rain had fallen over most of
the world in summer, and dust storms had shrouded most
of it in winter. The Tibetan colonists had endured the climatic
overturn in underground citadels; many of the Yankees
had been wiped out, their fragile, technologically
dependent settlements overwhelmed by weather. When it
had finished, much of the dust had been redistributed, but
treacherous bowls of semi-marshy dust had remained in certain
places, hundreds of meters deep, and useless.

Until Cho Jinfeng had found an ecological role for them.
She had developed strains of phytoplankton which could
flourish in the dust. Gene-melded from diatoms and fora-


282
      RED DUST
      283
miniferan amoebae, the microscopic plants had dense silicon
valves permeated by threads of water-hungry cytoplasm
which extended along long spines into the dust. They scavenged
every molecule of water they encountered, even that
chemically bound to the surface of the dust grains. The
marshes had liquefied: the liquid not water but free dust,
divided so fine the grains lacked even crystalline structure.
In the early stages of terraforming, vast amounts of oxygen
had been released by the phytoplankton, which had been
protected from lethal ultraviolet by the microclimate haze
at the surface of the Dust Seas. The Dust Seas had reached
stability. Water released by convective melting of permafrost
at the bottom of the Seas was bound into the biosphere by
phytoplankton. Shelled zooplankton devoured the phytoplankton,
and in turn the vast swarms of these tiny animals
were devoured by armored dust rays which glided across the
surface of the dust on huge tough membranes spun of carbon:
carbon fibres. And dying phytoplankton, zooplankton
and rays sank into the deep dust to replenish the great cycle.
Humans had established trade routes across the great dry
seas, plied by wind- and static-powered dust skimmers.
And now, under the deep canopy of stars, a single small
gig moved on the face of the dry red sea of the Plain of
Heaven towards the reefs of Tiger Mountain.
Fifty-eight

T
he computer woke Lee at dawn. "We have a problem,
Master," it said. When Lee asked what it meant, it
showed him a sternward view, zooming in on a silvery
speck shining at the horizon of the red-dust sea. It was another
gig, its sail catching the first light of the sun.
"Who are they?"
"The transponder identifies it as being a gig out of the
skimmer The Lady Of The Golden Isle. We won't be able to
outrun it. It's a smaller craft, with a bigger sail area."
"Why should we want to run away? Can I talk to it? I
mean, to its crew."
"Its passengers," the computer said.
"Whatever. Just try."
Minutes passed. Lee watched the other gig grow imperceptibly
larger.
The computer said, "No one answers. I can tell you something,
though."
"Go ahead."
"There are two people aboard."
"I suppose I should ask how you know."
"Because I asked the computer. It's not as smart as me."
"Smugness is not a virtue."
"It's the simple truth. I've found the alarm subroutines.
Want me to use them? There's an impressive siren."
"Why not?"
"I suppose I can take that as an affirmative. Ah. Now I

284
      RED DUST
      285

know that they are awake, because someone has switched
off the siren. I'm getting voice, no visuals. I'll let you deal
with it, Master. I don't understand some of the words."

A voice sounded out of the middle of the air. It was Redd.
"Who the fuck turned on all the bells and whistles?"
And Chert Yao said, "Wei Lee? Did you do that?"
Fifty-nine


T

he gig carrying Chen Yao and Redd caught up with
Lee's gig by noon, and they clambered across to meet
him. Redd was grinning like a madman under his filter
mask; Chen Yao looked around coolly and said, "We will be
more comfortable here."

"I'll make sure of it," the computer said, and closed up
the canopy. The other gig had already fallen behind. Its sail
flapped idly for a moment, then caught the wind and bellied
full as it tacked away, turning back towards Ichun.

Chen Yao and Redd had stolen the gig to follow Lee. It
had been Chen Yao's idea; Redd claimed that he had come
along to look after her. They had ridden the last elevator
cradle down, away from the razing of lchun and the retreat
of its surviving citizens. Most of the garrison had died fighting
their own comrades, but many of the citizens had managed
to escape across the canal.

"The captain of The Black Dragon organized the retreat,"
Chen Yao said. "He had the bridge blown."

"Television crews turned up," Redd said. "From three of
the commercial channels. That stopped the soldiers following,
and stopped the culvers attacking the retreat. I guess
everyone on Mars will have seen what the Army of the People's
Mouths did." In a softer tone of voice, he added, "The
woman that killed your sister got away. I'm sorry, Lee. I
tried to chase her, but she vanished."

Lee said, "I think we'll see her again."


286
      RED DUST
      287

"I'll be ready next time," Redd said.

Lee said, "I'm glad to see you both, but you must realize
you're in more danger here than you ever were in Ichun.
It's a difficult road I'm following. It is clear that war is not
the answer. I'm no leader, nor can I countenance the idea
of people dying for what they think is my cause."

Redd said, "Seems to me there's an undeclared war being
fought. You can't blame yourself for what happened at
Ichun."

"Innocent people died. They didn't even know what they
were really fighting for."

"Freedom," Redd said. "It's what we all want, right?"

Chen Yao said, "Wei Lee, I bet you haven't even asked the
computer what your path is."

"Well, it told me we're going to Tiger Mountain, but I
already knew that. Is anything else expected of me?"

The computer said, "The woman told me that once you
reached Tiger Mountain you would find your own path, Master.''

Chen Yao said, with mounting distress, "Is that all? That
can't be all she said! She was supposed to know how to
disable the defenses. That's why she came here!"

"I don't think the transfer was very accurate," Lee said.
He tried to call up memory of the time before he'd woken,
when the fragmented memories of Miriam Makepeace Mbele
had had control of his body, but he still had little control
over the menu of his eidetic facilities. Specifics lay just out
of reach, like an unspoken word lodged on the back of his
tongue.

Chen Yao was saying something. Lee opened his eyes. No,
they were already open. It was just that he hadn't been using
them.

Chen Yao said, "Don't ever do that again!"

Behind her, Redd said, "You were out a long time, Billy
Lee. We were getting kind of worried."

Lee blinked. The sun had moved. He had cramp in his
right leg, where it was doubled up under his left. Even as
he felt the pain, it began to fade. The computer told him he
      288
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


had been in a trance for more than three hours, and Lee
began to realize just how dangerous his virus-built powers
were. He could vanish inside them, and never reappear.

Redd said, "I was keeping watch while you were.., out.
I think we're getting nearer that mountain."

"You let me worry about navigation," the computer said.
"The top of Tiger Mountain may well be above the horizon,
but we have a long way to go. We have almost crossed the
Plain of Heaven, but we still have to sail the Plain of the
Garden of Eternal Bliss."
Sixty


W

ind rose as the gig sailed the narrow strait between
the two dust seas. Driven by temperature differences,
dust-laden gales howled like all the lost souls
of Mars's dead between high red cliffs, drove high, heavy
waves and the gig before it.

After the strait, for a night and a day and another   night
the gig moved southeast, aslant clashing combers of   dust in
a hazy spume that blotted out the sun and sky, that   turned
the King of the Cat's broadcasts to crackling mush.   Redd,
seasick, grumbled that he'd finally found a mode of   transportation
worse than a horse.

Then there was a dawn that filled half the sky with filigrees
of lacework like glowing iron. The dry, powdery waves
were low and broad and lazy. The gig left a triple wake behind
as it powered towards Tiger Mountain.

Lee and Redd and Chen Yao put on their filter masks and
had the computer lower the canopy, which had been scored
and scratched with millions of minute pits and lines by the
force of the storm. The air was fresh and cold. Lee kicked
off his boots and walked to the high sharp prow. His muscles
responded automatically to the sway of the gig's motion.

He faced into the sun and bowed, then went through the
moves Soldier had taught him. He felt his blood fizz and his
muscles slidingly loosen, like silky steel cords under his
skin. Chen Yao exclaimed fussily whenever he got too close


289
      290
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

to the edge of the gig's decking; Redd, lounging in the stern,
applauded.
"You both come here," Lee said, and for two hours they
went through t'ai chi exercises, flowing from one position
to the next in a slow dance that somehow grew into more
than a simple exercise, was an affirmation of the bonds that
joined them, each to each.
The Plain of the Garden of Eternal Bliss was richer in life
than the Plain of Heaven, for its water was supplemented by
run-off from the high glaciers of Tiger Mountain. As the
great cliffs of Tiger Mountain's western shield wall rose
ahead (their eroding feet, against which heavy dust combers
ceaselessly broke, still many kilometers below the horizon),
and the peaks of Tiger Mountain's three lesser sisters appeared
as stars to the south, more and more shoals rode the
heavy dust waves.
These floating islands were stromalithic accretions of filamentous
blue-green algae and bacteria which formed stable
platforms for densely woven stands of bamboo and creepers
and grasses. Every species of plant had narrow silicon-impregnated
leaves to resist the dust's ceaseless erosion, and
as the gig spun past them the shoals glittered in the sunlight
like heaped diamonds.
At night, faint luminescence was visible within the shoals,
as if each were a galaxy receding so fast its light could hardly
escape, and there was a greenish cast to the restless surface
of the dust itself, the bioluminescent glow of swarming zooplankton
that were feeding on dense blooms of phytoplankton.
The gig was a shadow moving across this glowing landscape,
and the shoals made drifting constellations which
mocked the rigid patterns of stars that bestrode the sky, as
if the reflection of every star had become a wanderer, a
planet. Lee and Chen Yao and Redd sailed the great void
between like the anarchist families forever falling free.
And it was on one such still starry night that the Free
Yankee Nation captured them.
Sixty-one


L

ee was sleeping when the computer sounded the alarm.
He woke at once. The computer told him that the gig
was heading east by southeast, and that something was
moving in on it, ahead and to starboard. A smeared trace
showed on radar, very close.

Redd pressed his face to the dark glass of the canopy and

said sleepily, "It's just one of those floating islands."

Lee said, "It is moving against the current."

"Pirates," Chen Yao said, trying hard not to let her fear
show.

Lee activated every running light, started to broadcast a
warning. The shoal was a ragged shadow silhouetted against
the starry sky; then it was towering over the gig.

There was the sound of breaking branches. The gig yawed,
and all three passengers were flung from one side of its
cockpit to the other.

Lee came up on hands and toes just as there was a crackle
of blue sheet lightning either side of the gig's canopy: something
had discharged the dispersers. The gig dropped. Its
keel slammed into the dust. Lee was thrown down again,
and this time he bit his tongue.

The computer was shrieking hysterically, alternating between
incoherent rage and strings of fault codes. Lee spat a
mouthful of blood and told it to be quiet.

"But we're sabotaged! We're under attack! We..."


291
      292
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"Quiet!" His command was softened by a bubble of spit
and blood, but the computer shut up.

The gig groaned and rocked, slewed sideways with a soft
dragging sound. Redd was sitting on the cockpit's decking,
legs splayed, back braced against the couch. He had his pistol
cocked and ready. Something rattled against the canopy,
and Lee went into hypermode without a thought. By infrared
he glimpsed blurred green human shapes outside, and then
there was a point of intense light and the overpressured air
of the cockpit whistled out through the hole the light had
made. Something dropped through and broke on the decking
of the cockpit. There was a sickeningly sweet smell, like
decaying violets.

Chen Yao pitched to the decking. Redd slumped forward
and dropped his pistol. Lee was halfway into his filter mask
when the stuff overpowered him.
Sixty-two


L

ee was woken by the sound of chanting. He had a foul
taste in his mouth and a blinding headache. He was
strapped to a post by a broad leather band that bound
his arms to his sides. Chen Yao was strapped to another post
on his right, Redd on his left. Redd's head lolled loosely.
Chen Yao said fiercely, "Do something, Wei Lee!"

They were in a vaulted chamber. Its high ceiling was supported
by what looked like the hooped cartilaginous ribs of
some great beast. Narrow apertures admitted wedges of dim
red light. People crowded tiered ledges on either side. They
were all naked, and all had the faces of monstrous beasts.
Their bodies were covered in swirling patterns that glowed
sickly yellow-green.

When they saw that Lee was awake they shouted a single
Yankee word.

"Classification?

A dozen old men and women shuffled forward. They wore
bristling masks and strange square flat-capped hats, and
were wrapped in tattered cloaks trimmed with the furry
skins of ice mice: dozens of tiny heads hung down from
collars and sleeves, eyes replaced by jet beads that glittered
in the torchlight as if called back to life. The old people
wielded bone calipers with which they pinched the heads of

the three prisoners from ear to ear and chin to pate.
"Sterilization? the people roared.

An old man slashed the tip of Lee's right thumb, wiped a


293
      294
      PAUL J. McAukE¥

piece of cloth over the bloody gash and threw it into a bowl
of fuming liquid. Another old man stuck a blunt syringe into
Lee's shoulder and injected what felt like a litre of salty bilge
under his skin. From Chen Yao's indignant shouts Lee

guessed that the same had been done to her.

"Mutation?'

An old woman tottered forward. She was robed in layers

of filmy black stuff from neck to ankles, and a tall conical
hat was tipped on her scrofulous scalp. She grinned toothlessly
at Lee and shoved something small and hard and bristly
into his mouth. It was a computer chip. Its edges cut
Lee's lips, and he spat it out with a mouthful of blood.

The crone retrieved the chip and tried to get Chen Yao to
swallow it, but the little girl managed to spit it right into
her face. The crone picked it up again, and shuffled to Redd.
The cowboy was still groggy from the gas, and he swallowed
the chip as if it were a pill.

The watchers roared with approval. Two old men undid

the leather band which bound Redd to his post, and he fell

to his knees.

Chen Yao shouted with outrage. "Free us too! We're gods!
Gods!"

The people roared again.

"Electrification?

Half a dozen jumped down and swarmed over Chen Yao.

They undid her bonds and carried her screaming and kicking
towards an apparatus which others had lowered from
the shadows under the high ceiling. They lifted her on to
its wooden platform, strapped her hands to a blown glass
bowl over her head. Two men on either side wildly cranked
handles and a leather belt spun, passing up into the bowl,
down below Chen Yao's platform. Chen Yao's hair bristled,
then stood out from her skull in every direction.

Electrification.t Electrification£

One of the old men used a pole to prod Chen Yao, and

the little girl screamed each time a fat blue spark crackled
between her skin and the pole's tip. Lee writhed against the
      RED DUST
      295

leather strap which held him tight, tried to speed up into
hypermode. But the effort was too much. The effects of the
gas hadn't completely worn off. Everything flickered blackly,
as fast as a hummingbird's wings, and he fainted.
Sixty-three

Wco
hen Lee woke again, he was lying in a small fetid
hamber lit by slanting light. Redd was kneeling
ver him. "Well, at least you're not dead," the cowboy
said.
"Chen Yao?"
"Still out cold, but I guess she'll be OK." He laughed.
"They were trying to cure her with static electricity."
"Who are they?"
Redd grinned. "I guess you could call them my countrymen."

The shoal which had intercepted and captured the gig was
the home of the descendants of the staff of a Yankee research
station long ago sunk in the dust sea. Now they were the
Free Yankee Nation. They sailed the restless face of the Plain
of the Garden of Eternal Bliss, following plankton swarms
because that was where the dust rays would be found, and
the dust rays were mostly what the Free Yankees lived upon.
They used the rays' carbon whisker wings to construct multilayered
dust-proof shelters in which they lived like worms
in a rotten onion. They dried the intestines of the rays and
beat them thin and sewed suits from them, made filter
masks from the bristly palps by which the rays separated
plankton from dust. They ate the rays' tough swimming
muscles raw or pickled or dried, and rendered the rest of
the flesh for oil which they smeared on their bodies and
hair.

296
      RED DUST
      297


They had no lamps, and no fires. Fire was the shoal's
greatest enemy.

They had preserved the remains of their ancestors' crude
twenty-first-century technology, although it had mostly degenerated
into ritual and superstition. Different cultures of
primitive viruses--big as amoebae, and about as versatile--were
jealously maintained by different families, but the circuitry
which the viruses printed were used as folk medicines,
or worn as jewellery. Redd had been accepted as one of them
because he had swallowed a virus-grown circuit chip.

Lee learned all this from Redd and a Free Yankee who called
himself Safety Officer. Safety Officer was a tall, scrawny old
man with muscles tight as wires under loose skin. Lee could
not see his face, or the face of any of the Free Yankees. They
wore filter masks all the time. Speaker's was a bristling affair
with tiny smoked glass eyepieces, like the snout of a subterranean
insect. The Free Yankees were all experts in body language,
and wore extensive tattoos to proclaim their family
allegiances; they went naked inside their layered nest. They
went in for swirling recursive designs, mostly in red and black,
underlain by a secondary system of patterns created by injecting
luminescent bacteria under the skin. In the gloom of the
fetid space where he crouched with Lee, Safety Officer was
lined with swirling patterns that glowed with the glaucous hue
of the flesh of rotting fish.

Safety Officer was arbiter of quarrels between the dozen
families. The Free Yankees had taken Redd to be the captain
of the gig, and Lee and Chen Yao his property. While Redd
was bathed and oiled and feasted, Lee and Chen Yao were
shackled and told that they were lab rats.

"We decide to make you scholars maybe we give you
names. Right now you don't need them," Safety Officer told
his two prisoners.

Lee bowed politely. The long chain that linked the manacles
on his wrists chinked.

Safety Officer cuffed Lee around his freshly shaven head
in an off-hand manner. "None of the kow-towing Hah shit,"
he said, almost kindly. "You're amongst proper folk now.
      298
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


We're the Free Yankee Nation. We do things logically, scientifically.''

Lee apologized as best he could. He still wasn't used to
his virus translation program, which had taken over control
of his larynx and tongue and lips, working independently
but not quite at the speed of thought. Most of his sentences
started with a muted choking sound, like a throat clearing.
But it kept him alive. The Free Yankees were intrigued by a
Han who spoke Yankee.

Chen Yao said, "He is a god. So am I. You let us go."
Safety Officer told Lee, "Your daughter is mad, but that's
all right. You have seen our scientific way of curing insanity.
When she's strong enough we'll try it again. The scientific
way is the only true way. You Han are falling apart in your
soft settlements. Pretty soon we will rise up and take the

world from you. What do you think about that?"

"You have every chance."

"It is our destiny. Democracy will always triumph."

"Of course," Lee said, wondering just what Safety Officer
meant by democracy. The Free Yankees were organized
along the lines of a classic oligarchy, with power vested not
in the individual but in archaic rituals and the persons associated
with them. Safety Officer was powerful because of
his name and his position, not because of who he was. No
one was elected according to a test of ability.

Safety Officer cuffed Lee again. It was his characteristic
gesture of bonhomie. "If you survive deprogramming, boy,
why maybe you just might make student after all."

"I will learn," Lee said. "I will enhance the glory of the
shoal."

"Don't give yourself airs. You'll do what you're told, that's

all. Leave glory for the tenured."

"Yes, sir."

Safety Officer cuffed Lee again. "That's better. Now you
two lab rats get your asses over to the kitchens. There's shit
to be shovelled."

It was a sign of the Free Yankees' confidence that Lee and
Chen Yao could squirm through the narrow tunnels of the
      RED DUST
      299


nest without an escort. It was obvious that the Free Yankee
Nation was much smaller than it had once been. Despite
their fetish for privacy, which meant that every citizen, even
the children, had two or three tiny rooms no one else could
enter without invitation, there were many spaces in the
shoal which were unused.

In the kitchens, under the watchful gaze of the fat domestic
bursar, Lee and Chen Yao were put to sorting edible zooplankton
from inedible phytoplankton, and stripping the tiny creatures
of their silicon-impregnated shells. Later, as they spread
nightsoil amongst the roots of stunted tomato plants and cucumbers
in the moist warm greenhouse tunnels, they were
able to snatch a whispered conversation.

"You've got to get us free," Chen Yao insisted over and
over again, until Lee was fed up with pointing out that he
wasn't going to kill everyone aboard the shoal, and in any
event, he didn't know how to sail it.

He had talked to the computer through his virus-built
transceiver. The senior tutor and chief technician of the Free
Yankees had unsuccessfully tried to access the computer,
and it boasted to Lee about the ease with which it had subverted
their primitive Trojan Horse programs. But they had
manually severed its control cables, so it had no control over
any part of the gig, which had been hauled on to the shoal
and concealed within thickets of thorny creepers.

"Even if I killed everyone, I'm not sure if I could fix the
gig," Lee said. "And besides, I don't want to kill anyone."

"They're savages," Chen Yao said. "They don't count, not
against a whole world. Just go into hypermode, Wei Lee.
Show them that they can't treat gods like slaves!"

"They'll make land, sooner or later. Then we'll escape, I
promise."

Chen Yao decapitated a dozen tomato plants with a sweep
of her hoe. She rattled the long chain which swung between
the shackles around her wrists. "It'll be too late!"

And then they had to stop talking, because the domestic
bursar had seen what Chen Yao had done and was hurrying
forward to scold her.
Sixty-four


The shoal was skirting the edge of a plankton bloom
that grew where deep currents hit the edge of the
shield of Tiger Mountain and rose to the surface, bringing
moisture from the underlying permafrost. Dust rays,
slow monsters with rippling wings fifty meters across,
moved through shoals of plankton with their bristly palps
swinging to and fro, leaving wide wakes of darker dust.

A dust ray trail was sighted the day after the Free Yankees
captured Redd and Lee and Chen Yao. Soon after, a lookout
tied to the top of the tallest tree of the shoal spotted the
feeding plumes of the ray itself, and the entire population
poured out of the nest and clambered up trees and bamboo
stands to try and catch a glimpse of the beast for themselves.
They regarded it as a propitious sign: Redd would be given
the ritual chance to kill it, and so gain tenure.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The clear pink sky
glowed like neon and both moons were aloft: Fear a tipped
crescent just above the western horizon; Panic a chip of light
falling eastward. A kind of haze hung over the dust sea, and
its heavy surface was the color of molten copper. Sluggish
waves rolled towards Tiger Mountain. Its lower flanks were
hazed, but its flat peak was sharp and clear and seemed to
rear higher than the two moons. The cliffs of its vast lava
shield, six kilometers high, were so close that Lee could see
house-sized boulders that piled up along their base, and the
weathered folds and convolutions that vertically fretted their


3OO
      RED DUST
      301

heights, but they might as well have been on another world.

Lee wanted, needed, yearned, to escape, to reach Tiger
Mountain and climb to its top. Part of it came from the
viruses, and from Miriam's partial personality, but at least
half of it came from himself. He had made the promise to
himself back in Ichun. But he wouldn't kill to keep that
promise; too many people had died already.

Most of the Free Yankees were forward of the nest, crowding
like a gang of apes in the dense thickets of bamboo. The
largest bamboo stems were as thick as Lee's waist, and black
sails had been raised high on them, straining in the brisk
breeze. Masked children swung through the ratlines, shrieking
with laughter.

Lee had to step around and duck under a web of guy ropes
and lines. Blown dust sifted over his torn shirt and jeans;
dust accumulated in the finest creases of his skin and
worked into the seals of his filter mask. Hanging on a leaning
bamboo stem, he peered around a dense tangle of wire-weed
at the prow of the shoal. A dark lane ran across the
red dust, wider than the shoal. It was the track of the dust
ray.

One of the Free Yankees, a tall thin man in crinkling
semiopaque coveralls made from dust ray intestine lining,
came up to Lee, clapped him on the shoulder. A tattooed
eagle spread its wings around the back of his skull, under
the straps of his mask. He unlocked Lee's shackles and
handed him a wadded intestine suit. His voice was muffled
by the bristly nightmare of his mask. He said, "You'll help
your master. Put this on and come with me!"

A group of men and women were hauling something like
the upturned shell of a giant tortoise. Redd was amongst
them. A young woman, with muscular arms and a V-shaped
torso that made her intestine suit tight across her small flat
breasts, grabbed a rope and heaved. The shell shot forward
and most of the others fell on their behinds.

By the time they had scrambled up, the boat--that was
what the shell was--was riding high on the dust, under the
tangle of tough polished roots which fringed the shoal. The
      302
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
muscular woman grabbed a sheaf of harpoons and jumped
down. The others followed, and the tall man made to shove
Lee forward.
Lee dodged the man's advance, and jumped. For a clean
instant he thought he'd made a mistake; the small round
boat was crowded with a dozen people (who had lines attaching
them to the boat's rail), and if he landed in the
wrong place he'd tip it over. But his virus reflexes took over.
He felt as if he fluttered down as slow as a leaf and landed
with one foot in the well of the boat, the other on the raised
bow. He turned and raised a hand in salute to the man who'd
tried to push him. It occurred to him that he must look like
a captain making farewell on a difficult voyage, and he
laughed inside his mask.
The harpoonist signed for him to sit down, her hands as
eloquent in expression as her face might be behind her monstrous
mask--she'd stuck fangs all the way around it, so it
looked like the business end of a leech or a lamprey.
Redd clambered into the boat down a knotted rope, his
feet skidding on ends of roots polished to the consistency of
smooth iron by blowing dust. Hands reached up and helped
him teeter into his seat, and then the mast was lowered into
the boat and set in its step. A bird shape was nailed to the
top of the mast, wide narrow wings spread. It was an ironwood
carving of a cliff eagle, which spent almost all its life
on the wing, sailing the thermals of Tiger Mountain's cliffs.
It was the symbol of the Free Yankees, for both touched land
only when necessary; cliff eagles to incubate their eggs and
raise their young, the Free Yankees to render dust rays.
A big triangular sail was hauled up. It filled with wind and
in an instant the little boat leaped forward, its flat frictionless
hull hissing and banging as it skimmed the crests of
the dust waves. The shoal dwindled from a ragged island to
a speck, was lost in the vastness of the red sea. Lee paid
attention to the business of handling the boat. A scoop like
the V-shaped plough of a bulldozer acted as rudder, its long
tiller hauled by two people. The boat was tacking into the
wind, following the broad dark wake of the dust ray. At every
      RED DUST
      303

other leg of each tack, abrasive dust fumed across the boat.
Despite his coveralls, Lee's whole body was soon alive with
incendiary itches as the fine stuff worked through seals and
into every crease and fold of his skin. He had to keep wiping
away powder that clung to his goggles.
He was given the task of pumping up silvery floats with
a set of foot-operated bellows. Around him, the others were
measuring out lengths of cable into neat loops. The harpoonist
was checking out her weapons and showing Redd
what to do.
Each long harpoon was tipped with a hollow, triangular
barbed head; a cap that screwed into the hollow head held
an explosive charge. Redd handed one to Lee, who hefted it,
found a grip at its point of balance. Redd shouted to the
harpoonist that it didn't seem possible to throw it any distance,
and she shrugged and waggled her hands either side
of her masked head: body laughter. Then she clamped something
to the shaft of the harpoon, just behind the grip. It
was a cluster of powder rockets. The harpoon was a low-tech
rocket-assisted missile.
By now, the shoal had vanished. Lee found he kept looking
to starboard, at the shield-wall cliffs rearing up from the
shadows at their tumbled bases. So it was that he missed
the first sighting, but, alerted by the muffled shouts of the
Free Yankees, he saw the plume of the dust ray when it rose
again: a sudden double sheet of darker dust which shot high
into the air and ruffled out in long billows on the breeze.
The plume was dust, taken in as the ray sieved the sea for
plankton, that had been ejected from the ray's fine barbed
combs by a kind of convulsive cough.
Redd, his masked face next to Lee, said that it was a big
son of a bitch. Lee had to agree. Up in the prow, the muscular
harpoonist was arming her weapons, banging the explosive
charges into sockets at their points with cheerful
gusto. Everyone else ducked as the boat heeled to starboard
and the sail swung across. The harpoonist handed Redd a
harpoon, and at the same time Lee saw the ray.
Its wide carbon whisker wings stretched a hundred meters
        304
        PAUL J. MCAULEY

either side of its long flat armor-plated body. The wings were
as black as a vacuum shadow. (Miriam was suddenly with
Lee, standing just behind him, it seemed, and it was difficult
for him not to turn to her.) They ceaselessly rippled over
the bronze surface of the dust as the ray moved forward with
dreamy slowness amidst a fine haze. Its combs rose like signal
arms against the pink sky, fantastic fringed sculptures a
dozen meters across, swept down and out across the dust,
collapsed into its mouth. A double sheet of dust shot up,
and the filter combs swept out again.

The little round sailboat tacked away from the wake of
darker dust churned by the ray's passage. For a moment it ran
parallel to the rippling edge of the creature's port wing: then it
tacked inward. Its hull shudderingly vibrated as it dragged
across the tough tissue-thin wing. Lee ducked the sail's swinging
boom, saw the harpoonist rise as the boat turned parallel to
the ray's body.

The ray was as long as a locomotive, as flattened as a bed

bug. Its tiny eye, like a bottle end set in its blunt armored
head, was red as a stoplight. Breathing spiracles densely
fringed with hairs pulsed arhythmically down the midline of
its long flat body.

The harpoonist beckoned to Redd, had him brace one foot

on the blunt raised prow, and handed him the harpoon. It
was, symbolically, not attached to a line; nor was it armed.
She moved his right arm and harpoon back, told him to
throw when she did, it didn't matter where. Then she

reached across and lit the rocket fuses.

"Throw!"

The cowboy threw as hard as he could. Sparks from the

fuses sprayed his shoulder; the harpoon tipped head up as
the rockets ignited, made a wobbling arc and struck the ray's
body behind the armoured head, clattered down scales with
the rockets still fizzing, and came to rest at the flexing junction
between wing and body.

The majestic rhythm of the ray's feeding didn't miss a

beat.

The Free Yankees raised a muffled cheer, and the har-
      RED DUST
      305

poonist thumped Redd between the shoulder blades with
such enthusiasm that he couldn't breathe for a full minute
afterwards.

Meanwhile the harpoonist took up her own weapon, this
one fully primed. She raised it in her right hand to her
shoulder, held her left hand across her chest, a glowing wick
between finger and thumb. She spun the harpoon's shaft and
the wick dragged across the fuses of the rockets.

Then she leaned right back, flung her weapon forward.
For a moment it seemed to hang in the air, sparks flying
from the furiously burning fuses. Then the rockets lit and
it arched away in a flare of blue flame. It struck just behind
the ray's tiny red eye, skittered sideways down its body. Then
the charge blew. Dust rolled out from the explosion's brief
red flower, leaving a ragged wound at the creased junction
between the ray's body and its wing.

There was a convulsive shudder under the boat. Everyone
except Lee and the harpoonist fell on to the coils of cables
in the well. The ray's filter combs collapsed into its mouth
and sheets of dust blew sideways, but the combs didn't shake
themselves out again.

The muscular woman grabbed another harpoon, but as
she braced herself something heaved under the boat and it
rose until its prow pointed straight at zenith. The harpoonist
flew backwards and hit the mast, and slid down it until she
was sitting. The boat fell back and as the harpoonist struggled
to her feet something plummeted from the top of the
mast. It was the painted ironwood eagle. It hit the harpoon-ist's
head with a heavy thud and fell into her lap as she slid
back down again, this time quite unconscious.

Veils of dust were rising all around the edge of the ray's
vast wingspan. The boat rocked as wave after wave passed
over the wing on which it rested. People were hauling on
the sail. One turned to Lee, jerked his thumb across his
throat, pointed down, made a whirling motion.

Lee understood. The ray was about to sound. When it did,
the boat would go with it, sucked under in a maelstrom of
displaced dust. He snatched up a harpoon.
      306
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Virus reflexes made it easy to brace himself, exactly as the
harpoonist had done. Redd saw what Lee was going to do,
left off tending to the harpoonist and grabbed a slow match.
He kicked away someone who made a grab at the harpoon
and lit the fuses of its rocket cluster. Dust clouds shaken up
by the ray's flexing wings made a dense smog, like fire-lit
smoke. Its body was no longer visible by ordinary light, but
Lee could see it clearly by infra-red, saw a hot spot just
behind its bottle-end eye, a patch of blood-rich skin where
the lapping armor plates had drawn apart. There was no time
for thought. He aimed and threw.
The rockets exploded in mid-flight, blindingly bright
through swirling dust. Lee balanced like winged victory. The
rocket's red glare vanished--then a dull explosion blew out
thick gouts of blood and pulped flesh which spattered everyone
on the little boat and drummed like hail on the sail.
There was a moment of silence, and then the Free Yankees
yelled and began throwing clusters of recurved hooks attached
to the long thin lines. When enough of them had
snagged, the Free Yankees started hauling them in, dragging
the boat across the now still wing and jumping on to the
ray's body like so many pirates boarding their prize, armed
with silvery bladders which they promptly began attaching
at the dust line.
Lee followed Redd. The armored scales were like a tiled
roof; beneath them, through his boots, Lee felt a complicated
tremor, the failing of the ray's nervous system.
The harpoon's charge had made a big fleshy crater. Blood,
thick and black as crude oil, was drooling from it, and the
dust seethed as blood sank into it: plankton feeding on the
life fluid of the creature which had fed on myriads of their
cousins. As dust slowly cleared Lee saw that the ray's wings
had sunk below the surface, and that the taut bladders were
mostly buried; attached by hooks, they were all that were
keeping the ray afloat.
Masked men and women were capering and stomping up
and down the ray's long flat body. The harpoonist had recovered,
and was alternately rubbing her sore head and sem
      RED DUST
      307


aphoring her arms up and down as if she was trying to take
off.

Redd grabbed her, whirled her in a brief waltz. Someone
knelt, hands cupping flame. When he stepped back a rocket
shot up at an angle over the dust sea, burst in a golden
falling flower, bright against the soft pink of the sky. After
a minute another flower bloomed, small with distance. Lee
backtracked its trajectory, saw a speck at the horizon line.
It was the shoal, black sails crowding every tree as it bore
down on the dust ray.
Sixty-five

I
I took the rest of the day to drag the dead dust ray to
the shore. There was a narrow bay under toppling cliffs,
its shore a fantastic conglomeration of buttresses and
broken arches, hollows and bowls and humped boulders. It
was like the ruins of a city, ancient black lava polished
smooth as glass by the ceaseless whisper of dust. Cliffs
soared above, sculpted with balconies and terraces and caves.
The shoal was drag-anchored at the seaward point of the
bay by sinking a weighted sail at its stern, and the Free
Yankees swarmed ashore in a flotilla of tiny boats, hauling
the dust ray's corpse with them.
It was late afternoon when they beached it. The bay filled
with the light of the setting sun, which poured through the
high cliffs that bracketed its narrow entrance. Light was made
solid by swarming dust. Gold: the light was gold. The Free Yankees
moved like figures in a frieze of beaten gold, their shadows
palpable, three-dimensional, extending like complex tunnels
through the solid golden light. The long flat armored body of
the ray glowed in the light as if it was being smelted.
Before the sun had set, the Free Yankees had peeled away
the hard plates that shingled the ray's body, flensed the hectares
of carbon whisker wings and cut them into strips with
diamond knives. Black strips hung from ledges and across
boulders like the backdrop to an opera. The kinks and coils of
the ray's intestines had been read for portents, then emptied
of half-digested plankton (a prized delicacy) and hung on

308
      RED DUST
      309

poles to wind dry. Flesh was cooked on trays over a slow fire
fuelled by oil drained from the ray's vast liver. Soon, only the
ray's flexible cartilage skeleton was left, gleaming like the
chassis of a fantastic aircraft.

The setting sun fell beyond the mouth of the bay and its
swathe of light narrowed, less gold, more bronze. As it dwindled
it seemed to run back into itself, until it hung like a blade
at the entrance of the bay. Quickly, the blade shrank to a point
that for a moment seemed to sway at the eclipsing edge of the
cliff like a flower at the end of its stalk. Then the flower folded
into itself, and slipped away.

There was still light from the sky, hard and pinkish, but
now everything seemed flatter, mundane. In the fading sky
light, the strips of wings seemed to sink into the darkness of
the boulders and ridges on which they were hung. Torches
were lit, a slowly growing constellation of smudgy red flames
scattered around the hub of the smouldering fire.

A young child came up and set two torches in a crack in the
smooth ledge where Lee and Redd and Chen Yao sat with
Chancellor and other members of the senate of the Free Yankee
Nation. These were the old men and women who had examined
them, still wrapped in their fur-trimmed cloaks. Lee
tried to make conversation, for the old know most and are unafraid
of the truth, but at best the old men and women only
nodded and smiled. Their finery was an honor earned not by
wisdom but by survival of the perils of the Free Yankees' lives.

The torches were shafts of ironwood whose tips were
wound with cloth soaked in dust ray oil. They burned reluctantly,
hissing and crackling with dancing golden motes as
dust blew through their flames. Heavy smoke rolled into the
shadowy air, spread in a low haze amongst the massive boulders.
It smelt dryly sweet.

Some of the Free Yankees had brought drums and tambourines
and bells ashore, and as dish after dish of food was
served, sweet following savoury following sharply sour, a ragged
percussive syncopation slowly settled into a steady throbbing
groove. Lines of children excited by the carnival danced
      310
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


in and out and around the big boulders which were scattered
along the shoreline.

Redd picked scraps of meat from his teeth with the point of
his knife. "These guys know how to have a good time," he said.

Lee smiled, filled with muzzy beneficence. He was drunk
with fierce brandy and with exhaustion. His virus-altered
metabolism could have swiftly denatured the alcohol, but for
once he wanted to feel it. He had walked to the edge of death
for no good reason but the superstitions of those around
him, and he had come back. He was rebelling against the
idea of himself that the Free Yankees had created, the idea
in which he had acted when he had killed the dust ray. He
didn't want to feel like a god. He wanted to feel human.

His own music was broken and scratchy. Iron in the dust
broke it to a ravelling secret whisper. He switched it off,
lifted his mask and drank more brandy. Every sip of liquor,
every mouthful of food, had the bitter taste of dust in it.

Chen Yao said with disgusted despair, "You're both fools,"
and ran away down the rocky slope and pushed through the
revels, which closed around her as the sea closes around a
flung stone.

Lee started after her, but lqedd caught his shoulder and
he sat down heavily, off-balance. "Aw, let the kid be by herself,"
the cowboy said. "She doesn't understand we risked
our lives today."

"I think that's what she meant," Lee said.

"Tomorrow," Redd said. He took a long swallow of brandy.
"Tomorrow. That's what I told her. Man's gotta rest, after
killing leviathan. Hey, just listen to that."

The drumming grew louder; half the Free Yankees were
beating something, most of the rest were dancing. Torches
glowed in cauls of smoke and dust, obscuring by lapping shadows
more than they revealed by light: but to Lee the people
greenly burned by the light of their own heat, like animated
candle flames flickering in smog.

One of the Free Yankees clambered up to where Lee sat and
bowed to the oldsters, who chuckled and nodded. It was the
harpoonist. Her small breasts were bare, sprinkled with sweat
      RED DUST
      311

turning to mud. The swirling tattoos on her arms and between
her breasts burned with cold phosphorescence. Her mask
grinned its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree grin at Lee. She
grasped his hand in hers, and he followed her down towards the
dance.

Halfway there, she stopped and pushed up her mask. Her
long-nosed face was tattooed with barbed polychrome swirls,
so that her round bright blue eyes seemed to look at Lee
through a chink in a flowering hedge. Although she was a step
below him on the uneven slope, she had to bend to kiss him.

"My name is Vette," she said, her mouth a centimeter
from his own. "I owe you my life, and I never thought I
would say that of any man. Are you really the one who will
lead us back to the shore?"

"You're already here. The dust ray brought you, not I."
"They said you would deny it." Her smile glittered in the
hedge of her face: like most of the Free Yankees, her teeth
were capped with metal. Grit in their diet soon wore teeth
to hollow stubs.

"Who told you that?"

"It was written in our charter, generations and generations
ago."

"I'm not a god. I'm just a man. A man!"

"It doesn't matter who you are. It's what you do."
"No! It's what you want of me."

Vette laughed. "All I want you to do is come and join the
dance!" She tugged Lee downward: he let her.

Time dissolved in the steady pounding of the drums. Lee
knew that the beat allowed the clockless crocodile of his back
brain to dominate the quantum-decision trees of his mind,
but he didn't care. That was the point of dancing, to dilute or
submerge the heavy burden of selfhood. To let the many become
one. Redd was dancing too, waving his hat above his
head and whooping and kicking his heels. At one point someone
rubbed oil on to the back of Lee's neck. Perhaps it contained
a contact hallucinogen, because soon afterwards Lee
kept glimpsing things that weren't quite there. Or which were
in one place one moment, somewhere else th next.
      312
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


There was a species of hummingbird which lived in the
cold high equatorial deserts. It lived in a close relationship
with the giant yuccas which perpetually flowered in summer.
Only its long beak could reach the nectaries at the base
of the yucca's long flowers, and in taking that exclusive food
it carried pollen from one plant to another. In winter it dug
a burrow and like so many creatures of the desert let its
body freeze right through, but in summer it was the spirit
of the high deserts of Mars, darting here and there or suddenly
immobile on a blur of beating wings, then gone, so
that you had to look around to find it again.

So with the strange figure. Perhaps the dance had thawed
it; perhaps the drug. Lee could only glimpse it in peripheral
vision amongst the dancers, as if it lived in the blind spot
of the eye. Whenever he tried to look at it directly it was
gone, leaving only an impression of something human-shaped
within a shadow that might have been a cloak, of a
face masked like the faces of the dancers, except that it
seemed that the mask was the face, or that behind the mask
there was nothing at all. It was like the auditors that came
and went in the other world of public information space.
Perhaps they had always been in the real world, too, and
only now could Lee glimpse one of them.

The other dancers did not see the figure. Lee was in the
middle of a chanting snake of dancers, grasping the waist of
the woman in front of him, his waist grasped by Vette. His filter
mask was pushed back on his head. The heavy smoke, rolling
out across the bay, seemed to damp down the dust, and it
was possible to breathe without choking. Which was just as
well, because it was impossible, given the exertion of the
dance, to breathe through a mask for more than five minutes.
His neck burned where the oil had been rubbed into it. A flask
was passed down the line, hand to mouth to hand to mouth to
hand without missing a beat. Lee took it and tipped it to his
mouth and passed it on before swallowing--it was a fiery
brandy that numbed the tongue and burned the throat.
Something stood in the shadows of a carved arch, watching as
he was drawn past. It did not go away when he looked at it.
      RED DUST
      313


Lee stepped out of the dance. Vette followed, and the line
closed up and moved on, an organism not without a mind
or with many minds, but with one mind made of many. As
Lee stepped towards the arch the drumbeats began to separate
into distinct moments.

The figure's robe covered its head and fell past its feet; it
seemed to stand on the air above the dust-polished lava. The
material of the robe was not a single weave but a four-color
bit map composed of tiny irregular shapes, none bordered by
another the same color, that merged in a polychrome shimmer.
Although the figure was no taller than Lee, it seemed to
look down upon him from a distance, its gaze burning
through a mask which seethed with characters and figures,
like the ceaseless fall of a virus-riddled data base. When Lee
reached the arch, the figure raised a hand and beckoned.

Vette clutched Lee's shoulder, hard enough to bruise.
He said, "Do you see it?"

"Is it a soldier of your people?" Vette's soft hoarse voice
could be retrieved from the spaces between the drumbeats.
Lee's viruses did it without his noticing.

"No. At least, I don't think it is a soldier in the way that
you mean."

"A few of those things would overwhelm an army," Vette
said with awe.

Lee realized in that moment that she would not leave him,
and that she was braver than he.

He said, "Perhaps, but not in this world. There's a world
behind the world we know. Your people have never been

there, but it is home to many of mine."
"Our dead are reborn. Aren't yours?"
"I don't mean the dead," Lee said.

The figure extended its arm, and the hem of its swirling
patchwork robe fell back to reveal its crooked little finger.
Not a human finger, but a curved claw that suddenly grew
and grew. Its sharp tip touched Lee's right temple--the end
point of the triple-burner acupuncture line.

Everything tumbled away, and suddenly Lee was somewhere
else.
Sixty-six

A
spot of heat pulsed at Lee's temple, where the figure's
c!aw had pricked him. He stood at the bank of a vast
.nwer or sea of mist that poured past him up into the
sky, rising and curving over as it rose so that it formed a
circle, sky and sea eternally one with no beginning or end.
Intricate braids of golden light lived in the vaporous swirls,
patterns switching restlessly and sparkling with trains of fugitive
motes. They merged into a general glimmer where
five dark shapes swam.
--The Isles of the Blest.
The voice was right inside his head. It was Miriam's voice,
clear yet distant, as if transmitted down a fibre-optic cable
from some far star.
--The Isles of the Blest are five in number. They are
named Tai Yu, Yuan Chiao, Fang Hu, Ying Chou, and Penglai.
Once they drifted throughout the universe, but then
they were fixed, each resting on the heads of three great
Atlas turtles. There dwell those who have won immortality,
or who will be reborn again, or who will pass on to a higher
state. They are the white men and women who dwell in palaces of gold and of
silver, and eat li chih, the fungus of
immortality, and drink jade water.
Lee shouted into the mist, calling for the librarian, but
he knew that he was not in any part of known information
space; he was beyond the barriers, where dwelt the dead. He
was in Heaven.

314
      RED DUST
      315

A star dawned high overhead as if in answer to his call,
and rapidly grew brighter as it dropped through roiling vapors.
It was human-shaped, and glowed like a glass vessel
in which a great lamp was trapped. Then its light flared and
when Lee could see again, Miriam Makepeace Mbele stood
before him.

She wore black many-pocketed coveralls. Her dark face
crinkled in a grin. Her shaven pate was unscarred. "Sorry
about that," she said.

"Am I in my head?"

She laughed. "You always were, Wei Lee. You haven't
gone beyond that stage, not yet."

"I mean, that's where I thought you were."

"So I am still, or at least, the virus-transmitted partial of
my own self is. But I'm here, Wei Lee, beyond life and death.
The old computer in the lamasery had connections every-where--this
is where I went when you destroyed it."

Lee stepped backwards. His fear must have shown on his
face, because Miriam laughed. "I'm on the side of the angels,"
she said. "More or less. I'll be your librarian, if you'll
let me. Come on. There is much to show you, and there
isn't enough time."

She took his hand (Lee remembered Vette, then) and mist
and stuttering gold patterns streamed around them both.
They were flying through the mist at a furious pace, although
they seemed only to be strolling. In a few heartbeats,
before Lee could frame another question, the triple peaks of
the nearest island swelled into clarity. Two other islands
could be dimly seen, and shapes that had to be the world-bearing
turtles swam in the mist below them.

Miriam squeezed his hand. They stood in mist, high above
the island, a way off from its shore.

"There were once five: now there are three. Tai Yu and
Yuan Chiao were cast adrift when a giant waded into the sea
and hooked the turtles with a drift line. When she had
caught six she threw them over her back and waded away:
in three strides she was gone. Without their turtles to bear
them up, Tai Yu and Yuan Chiao were taken by the current
      316
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

and drifted into the ice. Imagine, Lee, the isolation of the
poor souls of those islands, stranded in featureless frozen
whiteness."

"Who are they, these inhabitants, these souls?" But he
knew. They were the dead. "This is all a metaphor, isn't it?"

"Everything is itself, and the shadow it casts upon the
world, and the shadows cast upon it by the world. Here the
three are one."

Lee trembled. He felt as if he had been stripped naked and
cast into a furnace, with only his belief to save him. Yet he
could not simply accept what he was told: he could not serve
blindly, without question. "Forgive me for saying so, but you
don't sound like Miriam."

"The Miriam you knew was of the world. She was a mercenary
assassin. I am your librarian, your guide. I came here,
and it changed me. I can't leave unless you wake the dead
dreamers from their icy sleep."

"Again, forgive me. But I am still not certain.., what will
happen when they wake?"

"We do not know. But to begin with, the barriers will be
destroyed. The barrier that divides the information space of
Mars from that of the rest of humanity, the barrier that
closes the sky, and the barrier which binds the dead of the
Earth. We will help all who want help."

Lee reflected that all his life he had been given that kind
of help. All his life his destiny had been shaped by the actions
of others.

"You have come far, Lee," Miriam Makepeace Mbele said.
"Tiger Mountain is riddled with ducts and cableways and
passages and caverns and nodes, drilled and laid by millions
of von Neumann machines and big, slow viruses. A few parts
still belong to those who built it. The ancestors of the Free
Yankee Nation carefully chose the places they come ashore,
and their descendants return out of tradition, which after
all is simply unquestioned memory. Here, I can speak to you
by induction, but even here, that calls attention to myself.
These islands are secure, but I cannot yet land you upon
them. That kind of direct interference has already lost two
      RED DUST
      317


islands to Gaia. The final way is in the real world. That way
is yours, yours alone to choose as you will--although we
have arranged an ally for you. If you reach the top of the
mountain, you will understand."

Lee looked down upon the Blessed Isle. Its name was
Peng-lai. On the flanks of its triple peaks, that rose sheer
from the ground of data mist, were forests of trees whose
fruit were pearls, data nodes that expanded upon contemplation.
And at the peak of the highest mountain were three
intertwined trees whose branches reached through the
circling sky, dividing ever finer, a billion billion connections
each bearing a billion billion junctions, infinite connectivity...

Lee had accessed all this in an instant, by instinct. His
viruses drove around and through barriers. Amidst expanding
blocks of data, Lee heard Miriam's cry, shrank back into
himself.

"Not yet!" Miriam said. "Oh, you fool!"

The island   shrank away. They were standing on the shore
again. The   islands were vague shapes through the streaming
data-dense   mist. Miriam was a shadow before him, like a
flickering   figure on a badly tuned receiver.

"You fool," she said, more softly. "Poor fool. Go now, before
the agents of Gaia close the way. You can do so much,
and you know so little, and now you are on your own. It is
too dangerous for me to stay here. Go, and don't look back!"

She began to recede from him, along a direction that was
at right angles to everything else. In a moment she had
gone, but that direction remained, and it seemed to Lee that
it was filled with the essence of her, the breath of her soul.
When something vast and dark leaned towards him, a
shadow sucking up light, Lee fled after her.

And fell back into his own self.
Sixty-seven

H e staggered, caught himself against a shelf of dust
polished lava. He retained the impression of a monstrous
thing falling towards him, a lion-headed shark
at least a kilometer long.
A woman turned his head and looked anxiously into his
eyes. He could feel her body warmth; her smell of sweat and
woodsmoke, tinged with a hint of rancid butter, rose from
her skin. Her small bare breasts pressed his side. Vette, her
name was Vette.
"I thought you were going to have a fit," she said.
Lee replayed the moments before and after, and from the
stutter of the rolling percussion figured he'd been gone less
than a second in real time. He said, "I'm all right." It was
true. He wasn't even drunk any more. He turned and saw
Chen Yao toiling up the slope, Redd staggering behind her.
Chen Yao was breathless and angry. "Wei Lee! It won't
work here! I told you it wouldn't. We have to go to the top,
I keep telling you that, and you don't listen. Where would
you be without me? While you've been dancing and dreaming
and getting pig-drunk, I've fixed the gig."
"She's right," Redd said. He put his hat on his head and
folded his arms and tried to look dignified, but his eyes kept
crossing.
"At least," Chen Yao said to Lee, "you're not as bad as the
cowboy."

318
      RED DUST
      319


Lee told Vette, "You hear my friends. I have to go. I must

find the way to the top of Tiger Mountain."
"Then I'll go with you," Vette said.
"Just what we need."

"Hush, Chen Yao. Vette, it is dangerous. More than dangerous.
I don't expect to return."

"I know," Vette said, her eyes shining behind her mask.
"But I also know I must go with you, to help save my
people."

Chen Yao, from deep within her aspect, said, "Save them?
Perhaps, but not as they are. They cannot survive without
change, and change will destroy what they are. But that's
true for all of us."
Sixty-eight

'he old man, Li Pe, peered through a chink in the corroded iron plating of the
barred and chained gate of
.. the Last House. "They are coming again," he said. The
torch he held in his right hand sputtered and sparks whirled
up past the keystone of the arch into the night sky.
Behind the old man, Lee said, "How many are out there?"
and Vette shifted her grip on her harpoon while Redd eased
the mechanism of the hunting rifle he'd spent the last few
hours cleaning and refurbishing. Across the little courtyard,
Li Pe's blind sister fretted in the darkness just inside the
house's door. The other survivor of the mountain town,
Yang Go, told her not to worry, it wasn't different from any
other night. "But it is," the blind woman said.
"I see three coming straight up the road," Li Pe said.
Redd said, "I guess there were at least fifty following us."
"Counted a hundred then gave up," Vette said in her
pidgin Common Language. Her face was pale but set; Lee
knew that she was as frightened as he was, but also that she
was better at hiding her fear. He had learned that and more
about her in the days of sailing the dust seas in the lee of
Tiger Mountain's high flanks.
From atop the wall, Chen Yao called, "There are many
more than that out there now. They are circling around on
either side."
Li Pe said, "The little god has good eyesight, but you
should ask her to come down. They may not know how to

32O
      RED DUST
      321

climb walls, but they do know how to throw stones."
Lee said, "She likes to be doing something. I am sorry
that we brought so many unwelcome guests to your door."
Li Pe said, "It would have happened, sooner or later. They
run in little packs, but now and then the packs unite. Perhaps
if I try the light show again... "Then he stepped back
smartly. A moment later the gate rang from a heavy blow.
Shards of rust shivered to the ground. There was a sharp
high gibbering outside, and Li Pe's sister gave a muffled
scream.
Yang Go came up behind Lee, shouldering a pole with a knife
blade lashed to its end by wire. He held up a torch whose flame
shook above his polished pate. "It wasn't so bad last year," he
said. "Now they come every night. By day, too. Before that they
mostly stayed away. There were more of us, then, even if more
were sleeping than alive, and they only came at night; Li Pe
could scare them off..."
"I'm afraid they've become used to my conjurations," Li
Pe said.
Chert Yao called down, "But not to Wei Lee's. You'll see."
Yang Go said, "Is that so, little god! Then I was wrong:
instead of hiding here with us, you pay us a social call."
"We rush them," Vette said. She shifted her harpoon from
her right hand to her left, then back again. "Isn't as if they're
animals. We can fright them."
Redd rubbed his bandaged hand and said, "I wouldn't be
so sure."
"They are more dangerous than animals," Li Pe said. He
stooped and set his torch in a socket by the gate. For a
moment his wrinkled face was illuminated from below; then
he stepped back and was in darkness again.
The gate clanged again; for Lee, the way the echoes spread
defined what was outside. Three, as Li Pe had said, standing
some way off. Lee remembered that Li Pe had said they had
learned how to throw stones--and, as if to mock his
thoughts, there was a sudden smack and rattle on the tiled
roof of the house.
      322
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Chert Yao was suddenly standing beside him. "They've
come right up to the walls," she said.
Stones made an irregular percussion on the tiles; some
fell short and smashed on the courtyard flagstones. Everyone
took refuge in the doorway of the house. Li Pe's sister, Li
Qing, plaintively asked what was happening.
"It's all right, grandmother," Lee said. "There may be
more of them, but they are still the same. They will not
know how to climb the gate."
"We hope," Redd said.
The old woman's hand fumbled out, and Lee grasped it,
surprised at its warmth. He crouched to let her fingers spider
over his face.
"You have travelled far," Li Qing said.
"And I have farther to go, grandmother." He touched her
face in turn, carefully kissed the half-closed lids over her
milky eyes. Immediately, her eyes filled with tears. Li Pe
bent to comfort his sister, although she seemed calm
enough. "The young man will take care of us, brother. He
is a good man. His friends are good people."
Vette said to Lee, "You do something."
Redd said, "Maybe you could pull that go-faster stunt."
"There are too many," Chen Yao said. "In the morning
they will go away, perhaps. We are not here to fight them." "I could try this
gun. Shoot over their heads."
"You should shoot them," Li Pe said.
Redd said, "I'm not about to start shooting little..."
"You won't have to." Lee had been listening to rocks rattling
on the tiled roof, and now he had an idea. "Stay there,"
he told them, and took Yang Bo's torch and ran across the
courtyard and swarmed one-handed up one of the twisted
pillars of the gate.
The Last House stood on a slope above the ruined town.
By starlight, Lee's enhanced sight showed tiled rooftops
stepping down either side of a road that twisted like a broken-backed
snake. Many of the roofs sagged from storm
damage; at the far end of the town some of the houses were
already little more than shells standing amongst the weedy
      RED DUST
      323

remains of their gardens. The townsfolk had retreated   uphill,
as if from a slow inexorable flood, until the last of   them had
been stranded here, unwilling to run because this was   their
home, and then unable to run because of what lived in   the
stony wilderness of Tiger Mountain's slopes.

Infrared clearly revealed the small swift creatures that flitted
this way and that in the starlight. Lee's torch flame drew
them like moths, as he had intended. They were frightened
of fire, yet they were also fascinated by it. Perhaps Li Pe's
projections had brought them here as much as the unwitting
passage through their territory of Lee, Chen Yao, Vette,
and Redd.

Lee counted a hundred staring up at him from varying
distances, and more were coming nearer, scampering over
rocks, hooting and whistling to each other. He listened,
wondering if his translation viruses could sift a pattern from
their noise.

Then the first stones started to sail out of the darkness.
Lee shifted to and fro atop the wall, using virus-enhanced
reflexes to dodge the missiles. Only a few came near him.
These he plucked from the air and threw back, always hitting
his intended target. After ten minutes of this, the besiegers
retreated out of range, two of them badly hurt, most of the
rest with smarting bruises.

Vette stood below, and Lee tossed her the torch before
jumping down. "We'll have it quiet for an hour or so," he
said.

Redd said, "But they'll come again."

"Truth," Vette said. "We make run for it?"

Lee said, "We have to do something for these people,
Vette. We brought it upon them."

Vette whispered, "They are already doomed. Can't save
everyone in the world, Lee." Then she smiled. "But you try,
I know. I learn much from you."
Sixty-nine

A
fter they had escaped the Free Yankee Nation, they had
taken ten days to find a place to land, fighting currents
.and wind. The gig complained that the Free Yankees
had taken them in the wrong direction. It followed a twisting
path through the shoals and reefs which were outriders of
the talus shore, always hugging close to the foot of the cliffs
of the lava shield of Tiger Mountain. It bounced and swayed
and spun over the dust swells through the hot days and cold
clear nights, making its way north and east. Always, the
sculpted talus shore stood off to starboard, so polished by
dust that the boulders, some as big as hills, sparkled like
gems: a necklace at the feet of cliffs that rose almost vertically
six kilometers above them, cutting off half the sky.
Something was looking for them: culvers beat the air
around the mountain. Scarcely a day went past without
sighting at least one, but usually they were so far off that
by unaided sight they were mere dots in the pink sky. But
twice culvers came so close that the gig had to put into
shore to hide. The first time it anchored in the shadow of a
towering arch polished smooth as a gold ring, the second,
inside a perfectly spherical cave of black rock half filled with
the restless heave of the red-dust sea.
One night they glimpsed lights beyond the edge of the
soaring cliffs, cold auroras that played and flickered until
dawn. If the display was a response to an attack by the Sky
Roader anarchists, there was no sign of it. Lee felt a brood324
      RED DUST
      325

ing hush that seemed to be centered above his head. The
war was waiting for him.

In the long reaches of the night, while Redd and Vette
slept, Lee kept watch with Chen Yao. Like her, he slept for
only two or three hours each night: the viruses had edited
out the need, or relegated it to some part of his brain not
occupied by consciousness. Lee ran and reran his memories
of his intrusion into the dreamscape on the other side of
the barrier. He talked them over with Chen Yao, but her
aspect knew less than he did about information space, and
nothing at all about Heaven.

Miriam Makepeace Mbele had not told him who the
Blessed Isles were intended for, but Lee thought that his
guess was right. They were for the people who had dreamed
their way into death. But where were they? And if that was
the paradise promised by the conchies, why was it on the
far side of the barrier?

Chen Yao didn't know, and the replicated residue of Miriam
Makepeace Mbele was silent in his head.

One thing was certain: Lee was changed. He was not who
he had once been. That was true of everyone who has ever
lived, of course, but in them change was a process of growth.
People grow layers of self, like the layers of an onion. Lee
knew that he had been changed in a different way. As if his
layers had grown into each other, and mixed with layers of
others, Miriam and a host of minor partial personae sinking
and intermingling with his own self, as paint mixes in the
water an artist uses to clean her brush.

He tried to talk about this with Vette as a way of trying
to get to know her, but she didn't understand, or pretended
not to. She said it was magic, and she didn't need to know
how magic worked as long as she could rely on it.

In the long hours while the gig tacked against the wind,
they all four talked of their different histories, of their own
lives, of their peoples, or Lee or Redd or both together sang
song after song--the old old songs Lee had learned from
the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, the plaintive songs
with which the cowboys calmed their herds, even snatches
      326
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

of commercials, which Vette enjoyed more than all the others.
She worked hard at improving her rudimentary Common
Language; Redd spent hours patiently teaching her
tones and stresses.

They came at last to landfall on a bright cloudless day.
Sunlight played through dust that whipped off the crests of
soft slow waves, so that the air seemed full of fragmented
rainbows. Far out to sea, the symmetrical peaks of the Three
Sisters rose above a glittering haze that blended imperceptibly
into the shocking-pink sky. Beyond them was the Great
Valley, and beyond that the dry rivers and chaotic terrain of
the high deserts.

If you followed those dry rivers north, Lee thought, as he
had followed them south, you found that they wove together,
running out towards the Plain of Gold. On the way you
would pass through a small settlement, sheltered in a bend
of a muddy, shrunken river. The Bitter Waters danwei. He
had travelled three-quarters of the way around the world.

And now he would travel upward. There was a vast
slumped gash in the high cliffs that ringed the raised lava
shield of Tiger Mountain. A cold wind blew out of it. The
gig tacked across choppy dust towards landfall, into the cold
shadow of the cliffs. When they had all clambered ashore,
the gig promised to wait for them, and then sailed off to
find an anchorage amongst the reefs beyond the mouth of
this steep embayment.

They all watched it until its sail flashed full of light as it
passed out of the shadow of the cliffs: a silver spark dwindling
into the restless sea of red dust.

"Never thought I'd miss the little fucker," Redd said, his
voice muffled by his filter mask.

Vette shouldered her harpoon. They had little else to
carry: packets of dried food and the few decilitres of water
which the gig had decanted from its still. She said, with
studied carelessness, "We explore."

But Lee knew, even though her face was hidden by her
hideous mask, that she was as apprehensive as Redd.
The ruins of a little port town ran along one side of the
      RED DUST
      327

embayment, most no more than frontages built across the
mouths of natural caves, sheltered by a huge ledge that undercut
the cliffs. It was as if a town had struggled to rise
from the native rocks but had only half succeeded, and was
now slumping back into dissolution.

The town had been abandoned for at least a century. Drifts
of fine dust had accumulated inside the buildings, waist deep
in places. All the glass had been broken from the windows,
and shards left in the frames had been polished to a milky
smoothness by storms. Redd found the remains of a huge
monomolecular screen which must have slid like a soap-bubble
membrane across the face of the biggest cave; something
had torn the almost indestructible stuff to shreds and
tatters, and all that was left of the simple machinery which
had manipulated the screen were the outlines of its tracks.
Nothing grew there, not even lichens, and there was no trace
of the former inhabitants, no bones, not a stick of furniture
or a shard of circuitry.

"Up," Chen Yao said impatiently. "It's the only way."

It was the middle of the morning when they set off along
the wide smooth road that threw a hundred luxurious
switchbacks as it climbed the tongue of ancient lava that
had smashed the windy, windy pass into the cliffs. Six kilometers
of height translated into a hike of more than a hundred
kilometers. It was three days before, hungry and
exhausted, they reached the top.

It was dusk, and they made camp by one of the fast-flowing
streams which had carved deep channels in a layer
of soft gray-brown tuff. The water was very cold and had a
chemical taste, but they had nothing else to fill their bellies.
There were stands of tough bamboo and low, wind-sculpted
spruce, and outcrops of black basalt were splashed with the
bright round thalli of wild lichens, but there was nothing
edible. Lee set some traps of looped wire anyway: something,
probably ice mice, had been nibbling the lichen crusts.

Later that night Vette came to him. He was huddled in a
smooth narrow hollow beneath the side of the road, and she
slithered down to him, wrapped him with arms and legs. All
        328
        PAUL J. MCAULEY


around, wind hooted and whined without cessation as cold
air poured down through the pass from the higher slopes of
the mountain. Afterwards, she whispered in Yankee, "I've
been waiting for this ever since you saved my life. Do you
mind?"

"If I did save your life, then my life is yours." Lee could
feel sweat cooling on his flanks. They hadn't undressed: it
was too cold for that.

She laughed. "Funny. We have it the other way around."
"I'm not even sure if I did save your life."
"You did, and that of everyone on the boat. If you hadn't
killed the ray it would have sounded and sucked us under.
That's the sign of a hero. To do a brave deed by instinct and
not even realize it."

"I'm no hero, Vette. The opposite, if anything. I've been
given gifts, that's all, and too often I show them off. I'm
beginning to learn that they are not mine to use as I will.
If anything, they're using me."

He knew that the totipotent viruses had infected his salivary
glands; Mary Makepeace Mbele had changed him with
a kiss. But he had withheld that burden from Vette. Fortunately,
the Free Yankees, who habitually went masked, had
lost the art of kissing.

"In the stories, a hero always has gifts, and a quest, and
a band of friends to help him."

Lee   asked her about the stories, and she told him a few,
and   then they made love again and she slept. Lee chipped
his   viruses and found a place where he could rest his consciousness,
and   slept, too.

And woke in cold, bright starlight. He was kneeling, hands
on his knees, head bent forward, listening. He was at the
top of the stream bank beside the road. Its broad white
swathe ribboned away, eerily luminous in the starlight,
empty. He called down infrared, saw, in green on green,
shapes moving amongst the rocks on the far side. Something
small was poised in the shadows between two big
rocks. He could hear the little noises as those behind it
urged it forward.
      RED DUST
      329

Redd and Chen Yao crawled up the slope to where Lee

squatted. Redd whispered, "They must be scared of us."
"What are they?" Chen Yao said.

While Redd explained, Lee stood and advanced to the middle
of the road. The shapes on the other side of the road
froze for a moment. Then with faint scrabbling sounds their
heat signatures faded away, ducking behind outcrops and
boulders.

Lee called after them and something sailed through the
air towards him. A meter wide of its mark, the stone
bounced once with a hard sound and splashed into the
stream. Chattering from the watchers on the far side: then
more stones.

Lee retreated. Vette, lying beside Redd and Chen Yao on
the slope beneath the road, wanted to know what was happening.

Lee said,   "They are testing us. I think they might be as
hungry as   we are. There are at least two handfuls. Probably
more." He   thought of the youngest, being urged to cross
the road.   An initiation dare or a sacrifice, or simply a matter

of rank? Suddenly that seemed quite important.

"They're in four or five places," Redd said.

"Six," Lee said. His optical systems had tracked the trajectory
of every stone.

Redd said, "We could rush them."

"You take the right," Vette said, and stood up, brandishing
her harpoon. She stepped to one side and the other as stones
sailed out of shadow. They were quite visible against the

luminous road. Then she bounded away, and Redd followed.
Chen Yao said, "We should go on."
"We'll wait for our friends."

"It's not necessary. They'll catch up."

"We can wait, Yao."

"I really think you would risk the whole world for the
sake of one person."

"It wouldn't be worth saving if I had to do it any other
way."

"I heard you. With the woman."
      330
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"Are you jealous, Chen Yao?"

"Don't be silly. Listen."

Vette and Redd came back in a hurry, dodging a hail of
stones. "I caught one," Redd said, "but the little fucker bit
me. Hurts like hell. Do you think they could have poisoned
bites?"

Stones clattered and bounced off the road. Lee could see
the heat shapes of the throwers on the far side. It looked as
if they were dancing.

"Up," Chen Yao said.

But the stone throwers kept pace with them. A group
would rush forward, throw stones and fall back when Vette
brandished her harpoon at them. At first she made threatening
noises, rolling her eyes outrageously and capering like
an enraged ape. But she soon tired of this, and her gestures
became stylized, token threats. Redd suggested that she put
on her mask, but Vette, who didn't understand that it was
frightening to others, said, "No dust here."

After several hours of this Chen Yao said that perhaps they
were being herded towards something, a trap or ambush.

"Would already happen," Vette said. Both she and Redd
were tired now. Lee's viruses cleaned fatigue poisons from
his muscles and set the rhythm of walking: so did Chen
Yao's aspect. But Redd and Vette were only human.

The land rose up ahead of them. It was the beginning of
the long five-degree slope that climbed twenty-one kilometers
out of the atmosphere, all the way to the lip of Tiger
Mountain's vast caldera. By bright starlight Lee could see
the road winding away to a line, a point. If there was a trap,
surely he would see it... but the slope was broken by draws
and bluffs, and crossed by belts of juniper and Himalayan
pine. Whenever the road passed through one of these dense
forest belts, their followers would dart off the road, and they
all quickened their pace until they reached open ground
again.

Dawn had touched the very top of the mountain, so that
it seemed like a fiery rock floating kilometers above, when
they entered the widest belt of trees. It took an hour to pass
      RED DUST
      331

through it. The trees were stunted, but they grew so closely
together on either side of the road that it was impossible to
see ahead. Lee's eyes and ears, turned up as far as they would
go, ached from the bombardment of light and sound. There
was no sign of their followers.

Chen Yao agreed. "Animals," she said. "They don't think
or plan."

The far edge of the forest belt was as abrupt as a knife
blade. Lee's heightened senses collapsed in on themselves so
suddenly that he thought he'd gone deaf and blind. Vette
and Chen Yao helped him to a little stream that sang in its
bed of black rock beside the road. He splashed icy water over
his head and drank what seemed like his own body weight.
Vette stood on a slab of upthrust rock, shading her eyes as
she looked back the way they had come.

Dawn was an hour away, but already there was enough
light from the higher slopes of the mountain for Lee to be
able to distinguish colors quite easily even with normal
sight. The black and gray of the rocks; the blue-black of the
fanned branches of the gnarled close-knit junipers; the yellow
of Vette's baggy trousers and the different, lighter shade
of her hair that fell unbound down the back of her black
hide jacket. Scarlet tassels hung from the barbed head of
her harpoon, vivid against her pale hair.

When Lee joined her he saw that what he had thought,
back on the other side of the forest belt, to have been just
another field of boulders was in fact a small town clustered
below one of the promontories left after partial collapse of
the slope. It was at least twenty kilometers up the long curve
of the mountain's slope, but every one of the straggling
houses was sharp and clear in the clean air.

Chen Yao said, "It'll be easy to avoid it. We just follow the
road."

"They could help us," Lee said.

"We can't trust anyone on this mountain."

Vette said slowly, "Heroes of my people search adventure
here, but none ever come back. Now I know why."

They watched the little town for a long time, while they
      332
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
waited to see if their followers were still with them. The
dawn line crept down as the horizon fell below the gaze of
the sun. At last Redd came back up the trail and reported
that he couldn't see any sign of the little fuckers. He held
his bitten hand close to his belly; it was swollen and flushed,
and dead white around the crescent wound.
"That settles the matter," Lee said. "There must be medical
help up there, so that's where we're going."
Chen Yao sighed theatrically. "You don't know your own
powers, Wei Lee. But I won't argue with you."
They toiled through most of the rest of the day to reach
the town, following the little stream rather than the white
road, which threw a loop away from it. At last they crossed
what had once been a patchwork of cultivated fields divided
by stone walls. The elaborate irrigation system had long broken
and run dry, and there was nothing left but bleached
stalks of corn that crackled into dust under their feet.
The houses of the little town ran uphill alongside its only
street. They were low and small, built of whitewashed blocks
of hewn tuff under tiled roofs. There was no sound from the
shuttered houses of the town, no trace of smoke or hum of
machinery. Those nearest the fields had fallen into ruin.
Most of those beyond had their doorways and windows
sealed with crudely mortared stones. Still, Lee and Vette and
Redd walked up the street, shouting themselves hoarse, before
Chen Yao suggested that they break into one. Lee had
left his traps behind, and they were all hungry: and food
would keep a long time in the dry cold mountain air.
They were near the top of the town, where houses clustered
around a flagstone square. An air still dripped water
from its few unbroken vanes into a half-empty pool green
with slime.
"Spiro!" Vette said, and went down on her knees at the
pool's edge and scooped a dripping double handful of blue-green
gunk into her mouth. She chewed noisily and said,
"Good. You try it. Our winter rations." She licked clinging
strands from her fingers. "Ancestors eat it, on shoals that
      RED DUST
      333

bring them here. Really, is good. High protein, most scientific.''

It wasn't exactly good, Lee discovered, and Redd suggested
that on a gastronomic level it rated slightly higher than
eating Yak cud. But they were all hungry enough to eat their
fill of the bitter, slippery strands, even fastidious Chen Yao.

Afterwards, Lee put his shoulder to the door of one of the
houses, and was surprised when it gave easily. Chen Yao
slipped past him, pointed out the many footprints in the dust
drifted over rotting rugs, put her finger to her lips. Two
square rooms, lit by blades of light that pried through closed
shutters. Furniture pulled over and smashed. A half-lifer cocoon
in the middle of the second, bones inside, bones scattered
on the floor: broken, gnawed. Lee saw the marks of
teeth and showed them to Chen Yao, and her look of horror
mirrored his.

They fled into clean level sunlight and told Redd and Vette
what they'd seen, and they all ran from the haunted place
down the town's winding street.

And at the end of the street saw what was coming towards
them, far away down the gentle slope, already halfway between
the line of the forest's edge and the beginning of the town's
abandoned fields and growing nearer, small as flies, fifty,
eighty, a hundred of them, stretched in a long line as they
climbed towards the ruined town.

Chen Yao wanted to run, but Lee argued against it.
"They'll wear us down, and besides, this is their territory."

"Well, we can't fight that many. And anyway, the only way
is up."

Redd said, "I don't even know if I could kill one. They're
only..."

Chen Yao said, "They are less than that. They are only
intelligent animals, with no society beyond that of the pack."

"Drove us here," Vette said. "I kill, if need." She was leaning
on her harpoon, its butt grounded in stony dust. One
hand shaded her eyes as she stared downhill.

"Yeah," Redd said, "but there are so many of them..."

The ragged line moved steadily upwards. Lee could zoom
      334
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

in on individuals. Many had daubed their naked bodies with
ochre mud; some had filed their teeth to points. He said, "I
don't think they are planners."

Chen Yao said, "Whatever we do, we can't stand here and
wait for them. Let's go higher."

They turned and quickly climbed back up the street, past
the pool and the violated tomb of the house. High crags
reared above, stark against the slope of the mountain that
rose into the dark sky. Night was coming on: the shadow of
the mountaintop was sweeping down its slopes.

There was one last house, its high-peaked tiled roof floating
behind walls of polished lava blocks. They turned towards
it, and climbed a narrow path that ran crookedly up
a rubble-strewn slope. They kept turning to look back at the
town and the line climbing towards it, and so they almost
walked through the giant that popped into existence and
barred their way with a gesture that conjured a wall of roaring
flame.

The huge figure was three or four times as tall as Lee, an
old man whose lips moved, slightly out of synch with his
amplified voice, within a thin silky beard that dropped to his
waist.

"Go back, go back! Go back, demons from hell!"

His words shook from rock to rock. Flames roared higher,
casting brilliant light but no heat. Sinuous black shapes
seemed to writhe within the furnace light.

Vette dropped to her knees, arms wrapped around her
head. Chen Yao looked this way and that, squinting into the
light of the flames; behind her, Redd had unsheathed his
knife. Lee helped Vette to stand, and she clung to him while
he explained that it was a simple hologram, the first stage
in a defense system. "A trick of light, that's all! Scientific!"
He had to shout, over the amplified roar of flames. "A recording!"

"It certainly isn't," the old man said. Echoes knocked
clouds of dust from the slopes. His voice was that loud. Lee
clapped his hands over his ears. "Who are you, young man?
Who are your friends? From her harpoon, I would say that
      RED DUST
      335

your friend is one of the Yankee barbarians from the Dust
Seas, but you are certainly not from these parts. Nor is the
little girl, or the dangerous-looking cowboy. Oh, I'm sorry,
let me turn this down." He disappeared for a moment, came
back at normal size, dwarfed by his curtain of hell fire. He
said, in a normal conversational voice, "Is that better?"
Lee said, "Your flames are impressive, but like your voice
they overwhelm us."
"Oh yes, how careless." The roaring light vanished. "I'm
sorry," the old man said, "but it has been so long since we've
had visitors. Apart from the wild ones, that is."
"I'm Lee. This is Vette. Over there, Chen Yao, and Redd.
Redd is the cowboy."
Vette squinted sideways at the old man's image with deep
suspicion. "Bad conjuring trick," she said at last. "I see
through him."
Redd said, "It kind of had you going though, didn't it?"
"It is more effective at night," the old man said. "The
trouble is that the wild ones are no longer fooled by it."
Lee looked up at the walled house, saw a point of light
twinkle there: the projector. He said, "We were seeking a
place to shelter."
"That's something my companions and I would have to
consider, of course. These are difficult times."
"I understand. But it is rather urgent."
Vette gripped Lee's arm. "They come up through the
town!" she said, and turned to the projection of the old man.
"You hide behind walls! You let us in!"
Her bad manners shocked Lee--the old man, too, who
took a step backwards and immediately went out of focus.
He said feebly, "It is not as easy as that, although I wish it
were. I really must talk with my..."
Redd said, "Listen, when you're between a rock and a hard
place, you kick the rock. You understand what I'm saying?"
The old man smiled, shook his head.
Vette unshipped her harpoon and stabbed it at the old
man, who instantly faded away. No, wherever he really was,
he'd simply stepped back, outside the focal point of the pro
      336
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


jector. Lee said to Vette, "You really aren't helping."

She said in furious Yankee, "I'm not standing around like

food on a platter while you swap compliments with a dab of
light! Look at those things, they've seen us, they're coming
right for us. Come on," she said, and grabbed Lee's arm
again.

Chen Yao said, "We are gods. They will grant us charity."
"You so sure of that?" Redd said.
"It is our right."

Lee said, "As Chen Yao is so fond of pointing out, we have

no other way to go but up."

They scrambled up the twisting path to the sheer black

walls that enclosed the house. The lava blocks were polished
like glass, and the joints between them were so fine a piece
of paper couldn't have been inserted.

There was a gate, armored with corroded steel plates.

Vette banged on it so it rang like a gong. Lee turned to
watch the ragged line of creatures move through the boulder
field beyond the town, black shadows against dull gray rocks.
The sounds they made came faintly in the cold thin air.

Lee said to Chen Yao, "I suppose that I could fight them

in hypermode, if it came to it. Perhaps I could kill enough
to make the rest run." He knew he could not kill them all
before they killed him.

Redd said, "If it comes to a fight I'm willing to stand
ground while you run, Billy Lee. You're the main attraction

of this little expedition, no sense you dying and us living."
"Exactly," Chen Yao said.

Lee told Redd, "I thank you for your offer. It is made from

a large heart. I am changed, it is true, but I am still human.

I couldn't leave you."

"Oh, Wei Lee! The needs of the many outweigh all else.

Your loyalty is to the whole world!"

"I wish they were all standing beside me, Chen Yao."
Suddenly, the old man stood before the gate. His image
was sharper in the shadow cast by the high wall. "There is
no need to make so much noise," he said.

Lee bowed to him. "Your defenses are very strong."
      RED DUST
      337


"We are happy with them."

"Obviously, the.., wild ones can find no way in. You are
to be congratulated. But I see one flaw--suppose someone
were to pile rocks up against the gate? There are many
rocks, enough to build a rough stairway. You are lucky the
wild ones have not thought of it."

"They do not have your education," the old man said.

Lee bowed again. "I have travelled far, and learned a little
of these practical matters."

Vette said, "I pile rocks. Maybe those things understand."
"No need," the old man said. "We have not had visitors
for such a long time that we will make poor hosts, I fear.
But you are welcome to our hospitality, such as it is."

Behind his image, the rusted gate creaked open a handful
of degrees. Redd put his shoulder to the corroded steel and
widened it a handful more and Chen Yao slipped past him.
The line of creatures made a kind of inchoate yell and started
to run as Vette and Lee squeezed through the narrow gap.
Redd followed, and they all leaned against the gate, and it
slammed shut.
Seventy

N
ow the night was nearly over, but stones still bounced
and clattered from the tiled roof. In one of the alcoves
off the main room of the Last House, Li Pe stepped
up to the projection plate. A cone of light fell around him,
and Lee knew his image was walking in the night amongst
the besiegers. But the stones did not cease to fall.
"There are more of them than I can count," Li Pe said.
"And a few are starting to pile stones against the southern
wall. Their cunning needed a critical mass to become intelligence,
it seems."
"Perhaps they've started to breed," Yang Go said. "Always
said when that happened we were doomed."
Lee went out again, vaulted to the top of the southern
wall, saw figures scatter from a heap that leaned against it.
Stones started to fly at him out of the pre-dawn darkness,
and he jumped back down and went to tell the others what
he had seen.
"It will take them a long time," Li Pe said. He was holding
his sister's hands. "Perhaps they will be gone when day
breaks."
"Perhaps those who brought them will do something,"
Yang Go said. "We were safe before they came."
Vette raised her harpoon. "All here together," she said.
Lee remembered then what Miriam had said about Tiger
Mountain when he had met her in Heaven. He asked, "Who

338
      RED DUST
      339
owned this house? Was this equipment in place when you
came to live here?"
"Of course," Li Pe said.
"It was his idea to use it," Yang Go said. "Now look what
has happened."
"For a long time it kept them away," Li Qing said softly.
Her arthritic hands clutched the arms of her chair every
time a stone hit the roof, but that was the only sign of fear
she showed. She turned her face approximately towards Lee,
frost-capped eyes wide open, and explained, "When there
were more of us we could look after the sleepers and keep them away. But we
grew older, and some took escape in
dreams. They all died, when at last we had to leave our
homes. This was once the house of the district governor,
young man. Forgive me, but you are young, are you not?"
"Too young, grandmother. Tell me, did the district governor
walk amongst you?"
"The devices were mainly used for spying," Yang Go said.
He had been a strong man, once. He still had the truculent,
blunt determination of the strong, which Lee did not mistake
for rudeness.
"We feared him," Li Pe said, "and now it is too late I
realize that he feared us. If people knew how much cadres
fear them, they would have been overturned long ago, but
because they know that they hide the fear behind force. We
had to fight and defeat the keepers of this house to gain
entry, twenty years after its owner had fled. That's how
much he feared us."
"Luckily the machines were made feeble by age," Yang Go
said. "But they still killed one of us, and I have the burn
scars of their weapons down my back."
"Maybe I can fix them," Redd said.
"They were destroyed," Yang Go said. "Don't you think
we would have used them ourselves?"
Lee said, "But you did not destroy the control systems,
only the mechanisms. There will be other mechanisms hidden
elsewhere, I am sure. This was the central seat of governance,
was it not?"
Seventy-one

I
'I was easier than he had supposed. The antique control
system was still in place; in fact, the projection facility
.was a small part of it. The couch was filmed with dust.
Chen Yao helped Lee put on a dusty helmet and control
gloves, their plastic sheaths cracked but still flexible. He
took a breath, and activated the system.
And dropped through darkness into a place where luminous
lines dwindled away in every direction, sketching vast
matrices. His body was that of a glowing, winged man, a
standard template the previous user hadn't bothered to customize-or
more likely there had been many users, and this
was the system default.
The matrices around Lee were empty of anything but their
codes, connected to nothing now that the half-lifers had moved
beyond known information space, into Heaven. Faint webs interconnected
them, ghostly quantum traces left by once active
paths. Many dwindled towards islands of light that shone in the
far distance, as if lit by shafts of sunlight.
Lee had the sense of a vastness lurking at right angles to
everything else. He was careful not to let his attention go
anywhere near the quantum traces, or focus on any of the
active islands. He made himself as small as possible, a bird,
a moth, a bee. He let himself slidingly fall through information
space.
As he fell, a cluster of insets started to flicker around him:
one bloomed into a map of Tiger Mountain, gridded and

340
      RED DUST
      341


hatched with coordinates, riven with a dendritic communications
net. Lee completed a search in a flicker of time and
flew right to the node he wanted.

It was a kennel, although he perceived it not as a space
enclosing machines, but as machine presences defining their
enclosure. Some were very nearly dead, no more than vestigial
traces that stirred fitfully as Lee briefly possessed them
before passing on. But more than a dozen were still usable,
and for a dizzy moment he found himself split amongst
them: virus reflex completing in a moment what he alone
would have taken hours to do.

Microscopic pinches of tritium shot into the magnetic
bottles of fusion pods. Motors spun into life. Machines neatly
reversed around each other, vibrant with infrared and ultrasound
and proximity radar. The kennel doors were jammed
shut by decades of overgrowth, but the largest of the machines
used its blade to ram through them, pushing away
soil and uprooting volunteer saplings. Piston limbs flexing
and tilting, the other machines followed, navigating through
the ranks of the trees they had planted and tended so long
ago.

Forest gave way to open land. The machines found the
road and made speed, drove quickly through the abandoned
fields. Several of the smaller machines clambered on to the
big earthmover, clinging with pruning hooks and spray attachments.
Lee opened up the full sensory arrays of the machines
as they rumbled up the single street of the town,
through the square with its dripping air still. Shapes moved
and postured up the rocky slope, burning in infrared.

The small machines scrambled down from the earth-mover,
waving every appendage, revving bandsaws and drills.
Floodlights came on, catching the wild ones in a variety of
postures.

In the moment before they fled, Lee saw the wild ones for
what they really were: children grown feral and strange, cast
adrift from history, without culture, without language. Being
an invulnerable viewpoint helped him forget the gnawed
bones, the fear of the three old people in the Last House.
      342
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

Lee let the little machines charge about and scatter the besiegers,
and drove the big earthmover right up to the gate,
its airhorn blaring and every light on its rack blazing, its
blade raised high above its platform in triumph.
Suddenly someone was beside him. Lee partly withdrew
and found himself held in the palm of a muscular vigorous
man-shape sketched in crammed silvery hoops. A filament
connected Lee's compacted bee-shaped body with the man-shape,
linking senses. Yang Go said, "We looked for these
years ago."
"They were carefully hidden. Fortunately, enough work."
"I will not ask you how you found them. Clearly, you have
the powers for such a task."
"I'm glad you came. I was wondering how to keep off the
wild ones. Before we can ride the big machine, I must board
it to set it to manual."
"I can supervise the machines; it was once my work."
Lee understood that Yang Bo's sense of face had driven
him to follow. He said, "They know what to do, but they
need to be watched. Scare the children, but don't hurt
them."
"It is a long time since I thought of the wild ones as
children."
"It's all they are."
"You have not lost your family to them. They are more
dangerous than animals. But I will respect your wish. As for
the machines, we are old friends, they and I. We planted the
forests together. Go quickly. The wild ones will not stay
scared for long."
Yang Bo's silver figure lifted its hand, and Lee flew from
its palm. His own faint path was overlaid by the cord of
disturbed coordinates that Yang Go had made, like a man
blundering through a jungle. It was a trail visible to anyone
in the system, but Lee felt that he had no time to knit it
up. He flew right into his own body, sat up and shucked
mask and gloves. Yang Go, masked and gloved, lay quietly
beside him.
The others were outside. Vette and Redd stood on top of
      RED DUST
      343

the wall either side of the gate's arch, outlined against the
earthmover's lights. Li Qing leaned on her brother's arm,
and asked Lee what he would have them do.
"We can open the gates now. There is a big machine we
can ride."
Chen Yao said, "We can't take them all the way to the
top, Wei Lee!"
"We'll do the best we can, Yao."
"We have food," Li Pe said, and held up a bundle wrapped
in cloth knotted at four corners. "It has come to this. Running
away in the night."
"It is morning, not night," Li Qing said. "It is a new
chance."
Vette jumped down lightly and crushed Lee in her arms
and extravagantly claimed him to be master of all monsters.
A bloodstained bandage bushed her blonde hair; she'd been
hit by a rock while trying to scare off the besiegers.
She and Redd helped Lee haul the heavy gates open, and
Li Pe and Li Qing followed them into glare and noise. Chen
Yao came last, scornful and angry.
The smaller machines were scattered across the slope between
the town and the Last House, running with staggering
stilted gaits this way and that on long many-jointed legs,
like robot ants that were trying to learn to become bipedal.
Even as Lee watched, one of the machines went sprawling
after something bounced off its sensor cluster with a distinct
clang. Shadowy figures leaped upon it, danced back howling
from its thrashing limbs, started to pelt it with rocks.
other machine charged to the rescue of its sibling, slicing
wildly with pruning attachments and a buzz saw. Two children
were hacked down; the rest fled. One was holding his
own severed arm.
Lee clambered on to the earthmover's rusty platform and
found its control node. The featureless silver hooped head
of Yang Bo's system-form floated inside a tiny, flat TV
screen. "Come back now," Lee told Yang Go, as Chen Yao
nimbly swung up beside him. Vette was helping Li Qing
climb the ladder.
      344
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"I'm staying. I'm staying to kill them all. You run if you

like, young fool."

Lee jumped down from the earthmover and ran towards

the gate. A skeletal machine whirled up, lights blazing, and
slammed him to the ground. He went into hypermode, but
it wasn't fast enough to dodge the machine. It spread its
four arms wide, blades clattering and whirling. A chain flail
made a kinetic pattern in the glare of the racked lights above
its plate-like sensor platform. Lee feinted left, went right,
had to jump back from a swinging blow. The machine
stepped stiffly backwards through the arch, slammed the
heavy gates shut.

"Let's go, Billy Lee!" Redd sang out.

Naked long-haired children were scampering towards the
lights of the bulldozer. Lee made a run for it, reached the
ladder just before they did. Redd hauled on his arm as small
hands grabbed his ankles. He kicked upwards and gained the
platform, while Vette jabbed her harpoon at the children.
They screamed at her with wordless defiance. Vette yelled
right back, her tattoos horribly vivid.

The face was gone from the TV screen, which now showed

only a rolling interference pattern. Lee told the earthmover
where to go and it growled, "Right, boss," and fed power to
its tracks. The children fell behind, throwing rocks that
bounced from its hopper.

Fights ranged up and down the slope. The earthmover
passed a posse of small children who had somehow overturned
a turtlelike machine; its two-dozen stumpy legs
wagged helplessly as they pounded it with rocks. But for the
most part the machines had the best of the fight. One strode
towards the town with its battery of lights strobing, two
arms raised high, a severed head dangling from each. Half
a dozen smaller, man-sized machines were running down a
desperately fleeing flock of children. Lee looked away just as

the machines caught them: but he heard the screams.
"Wicked," Redd breathed.
"Evil," Vette said.

"This is the beginning of the end," Li Pe said. "The young
      RED DUST
      345
will eat their parents, and then they'll eat each other. Poor
Yang Go doesn't understand that this is historical inevitability.
We all fell asleep, and the dream died. It will all go
down in darkness."
Li Qing stood up, shaky on the shaking platform of the
lumbering earthmover. Li Pe took his sister's arm, tried
to make her sit down and be still, but she shrugged him
off. She raised an arm, pointed ahead. "Look," she said wonderingly.
Her eyes were wide. Their caps of frost had melted,
and tears streamed down her round, wrinkled cheeks.
"Look..."
Far ahead, far above, dawn had reached the peak of Tiger
Mountain. It was a flat-topped crown floating on darkness,
a crown of iron burning at red heat. But that was not what
Li Qing meant. Above the circlet of Tiger Mountain's vast
caldera, folds of light shook and shimmered, gold against
red dawn. They danced there for an hour, were burning still
as the earthmover drove over the crest of the valley and
turned in the only direction left to go.
Up.
Seventy-two


T

he earthmover made good time, pulling up the regular
slope at a steady ten kph. The slope curved evenly away
on either side and rose up like a gentle wave towards
the flat horizon of Tiger Mountain's peak two-hundred-odd
kilometers straight ahead, although there was no straight
way. Ravines and blunt valleys dug into the slope. Shallow
craters pocked it and worn lava nubs pushed up from the
black, stony ground. There were stands of convoluted lichen,
and close-knit mats of wire gorse and golden-leaved dwarf
birch. The earthmover steered around these obstacles with
no prompting. It knew the way to the top, it said. It had
helped build the city there.

Every two or three hours Lee asked the earthmover to
stop, and they all sipped water from the big bag Li Pe had
brought, jumped or climbed down to stretch their legs or
duck behind a boulder or into a stand of trees to relieve
themselves.

As the day wore on it grew colder and colder, the sky
darker, the sunlight sharper. Splintered ultraviolet-rich light
made everyone but Lee squint and rub their eyes. The earth-mover
raised a hemicircular canopy over its platform. Blowers
pumped warm pressurized air. Polarization of the canopy
filtered the dazzling sunlight.

They had not yet climbed beyond life. This was the zone
where in the brief fall of the northern hemisphere clouds
soaked the ground. Lichens grew in abundance. Meadows of


346
      RED DUST
      347

spongy gray cladonias stretched along the floors of little valleys,
punctuated by stands of stunted fir and larch, aspen
and juniper. Big air lichens raised their brain-like convolutions
amongst frost-rimed basalt boulders. There was bilberry
and dwarf birch, snow grass and saxifrage. Rust-pelted
hares ran in straight lines from the bulldozer's passage, and
big black crows, with beaks white as bone, rode updrafts
with lazy flicks of their meter-wide wings. Once Lee
glimpsed a wild yak clattering away across a distant scree
slope.

Onwards, upwards. Behind them the horizon tipped towards
the tiny sun. They stopped at dusk in a draw where
an ice-cold stream ran between banks cushioned with
mounds of moss. On the boulder-strewn slopes above the
stream stands of junipers raised twisted branches like arthritic
fingers; clusters of needles were like vivid green
flames against papery bark. There was a kind of small bird
that ran in pairs over the slimy flat stones in the stream,
stopping to stab at the black gravel shoals. Something made
a high piping sound amongst the junipers. It was a wild,
clean, spare, lonesome place, the last outpost of life.

Climbing the mountain, Lee told the others, was like recapitulating
the world's changes.

"In more ways than one," Li Pe said. Cross-legged, black
clothes loose around his bony frame, black hood cast over
his leathery face. Hunched by the rushing stream in twilight,
he said, "There's no one living up here. Not even the wild
ones. And then a desert of stone, without enough air to
breathe. A place where only the machines can live. We travel
into the future, and it is no place for us."

"That's what we're trying to stop," Redd said. "If we win,
the rains will come again."

Li Qing squeezed her brother's hand. "We've lived all our
lives in the town and its forests," she said. "This is a wild
and strange place, but it is different, nothing more."

Li Pe said, "In the future, there will be no people. The
world will be like this, a wilderness without memory or history."
      348
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


"You say wrong words," Vette said. "I see tracks of men,
and signs they leave each other. It is cold soon. Come on,
Lee, we go, we get firewood."

In the half-darkness amongst the junipers, on the other
side of the stream, Lee said, "What don't you want them to
hear?"

Vette was piling up dead branches that had been bleached
silver by frosty weather. She said flatly, "Want to know who
follows."

"You can speak Yankee with me, Vette. You've seen someone?"

"I thought you knew."

"Well, I'm not infallible."

"He's very fast, but not clever at hiding himself," Vette
said. Her blunt, honest face wore a serious expression behind
the mask of her tattoos. "He was keeping a long way back,
and I never could see quite what he looked like. If we climb

to the top of the ridge, we may be able to see him."

"I don't like leaving our passengers."

"They survived those children. They're tougher than you
think. Let the cowboy look after them, and that little brat."

"She can't help the way she behaves. She's had a strange
life... Besides, I need her. She knows things. But I don't
know what to do with the brother and sister, Vette. Or with
you and Redd. It is dangerous, where I am going. Well-guarded,
I am sure. I have certain.., attributes that can
help me survive. But Li Pe and Li Qing..."

"They're only human. So am I. But I was talking to them
while you were finding the machines. They know the secrets
of the mountain. Their people tended the forests, and knew
other people who made the mountain into a sacred place.
The mountain rises out of the air. Can you live without
breath? They say that there are places higher up, camps
where the workers lived in the summer. There may be
strong sciences left there."

"The old know the world."

"Of course." Vette dropped her load of firewood and
      RED DUST
      349

dusted her hands. "I'm going to climb the ridge. Will you
come with me, and use your magical sight?"

"When there's time, I must explain about viruses."
Vette laughed. "I don't want to steal your science!" she
said, and ran off through the trees, leaping from boulder to
boulder.

Lee followed, at first allowing her to stay a little way
ahead, then having trouble in matching her pace. They left
the stunted birches behind, leapingly climbed a steep
smooth slope where lichens spread brittle orange and brown
and green patches everywhere underfoot.

The air was too thin. Every breath was deeper than the
last, yet Lee's heart knocked louder and louder, a drum
banging inside his head. He reached the top gasping and
stumbling, had to sit on a knob of lava while he groped
inside himself, found how to flood oxygen-carrying viruses
through his blood. The drumbeat slowed, and the world
grew clearer.

He walked across the lava pavement to where Vette stood
on a craggy lava chunk that jutted over a steep cliff. Her
pale hair flew back in the freezing wind. Lee joined her, and
she put her arm around his shoulders.

They had climbed the back side of a bluff that rose a kilometer
above the slope. The mountain was spread beneath
them. They could see the remnants of a vast weathered crater
that pocked the slope, something Lee hadn't noticed on
the way up. He remembered the earthmover zig-zagging up
a terraced slope, and now saw that it was part of the crater's
wall. They could see all the way down to the belts of forest.
They could see around half the mountain's curve to the
western flanks where vast ice rivers sluggishly flowed, calving
over the edge of the cliff escarpment and tumbling six
kilometers into the seething dust sea. A dangerous place
where monsters lived and heroes went to slay them, Vette
claimed. She was grinning. No one in the Free Yankee Nation
had ever thought to win a hero's story by travelling up
the mountain, not until now.

"You can see the whole world," Vette said.
      350
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"No, not really..."
They were so high that they could see the curve of the
world's horizon. A distant white line floating across the red-dust
sea were clouds riding the edge of a low-pressure cell
far below them. Winds deflected by the slope of Tiger Mountain
spun north and south, and rising air dumped moisture
on the west flank, feeding the glaciers. To the southwest,
beyond a narrow channel of the red, achingly flat Dust Seas,
the Three Sisters, huge volcanoes dwarfed only by Tiger
Mountain itself, rose above the escarpments and mesas of
the Dragon's Back, a vast plateau raised half as high as Tiger
Mountain itself. The setting sun threw their shadows outward,
towards the notched horizon where the Great Valley
began. How big the world was, how difficult to change! Even
if Lee failed, its slow dying would last ten thousand years.
He was so lost to it that Vette had to shout in his ear to
bring him back. "We have company!"
Chen Yao and Redd were hiking up the slope. Redd waved
cheerily, quite out of breath. The hunting rifle was slung
over his shoulder; his poisoned hand was strapped up against
his chest. Chen Yao said to Vette, "This place is far more
dangerous than you think."
"I don't need your protection."
Lee said, "What about the old people?"
"Oh," Redd said, "the earthmover is looking after them.
In fact, it's gossiping with them about the good old days. I
thought I might get something for the pot on the way."
Vette said, "The reason I brought Lee up here is because
someone is following us."
"I saw nothing," Chen Yao said, as if that settled the matter.

"Perhaps you weren't looking."
Lee said, "We will see what we can see, Yao," and did his
trick, zooming in close, scanning the valley below. Virus-built
structures processed the information for traces of
movement, and images flashed by like a falling sheaf of photographs.
Birds rising on winds, a running deer so furry it
was like a floating puffball. Then a flash of silver: a silver
      RED DUST
      351

figure hatched by slanting birch boles: a flat blue face: gone.
Chen Yao said, "You saw something. Where is it? What
was it?"
Lee replayed his glimpse, and told the others what he'd
seen.
The face was a television screen, an image, perhaps a human
face, floating in watery blue. The rest was all tubes and
angles, four arms, long stilt legs, a humped back painted
with yellow and black chevrons. It was moving into the
woods at the mouth of the valley.
Lee remembered the wake Yang Go had left in information
space, the sense of watchers rising towards it. Perhaps something
had settled in one of the forestry robots...
or perhaps Yang Go had decided to follow them.
"I can't see a thing," Redd said. He was standing on an
out-thrust shelf of rock, shading his eyes with his good
hand.
"It's there," Lee said. "Two and a half kilometers away.
Vette was right."
"I saw no machine," Vette said. "I saw a man. I am sure.
A red man."
Lee laughed. "Monkey! Or at least, one of his brothers
and sisters. A lucky coincidence... I'll tell you about Monkey
another time, Vette, but now I think we should go back."
But when they reached the stream and the earthmover
parked by its mossy bank, Li Pe and Li Qing were gone. The
earthmover said the two old people had gone for a walk, but
Vette found a note in neat firm calligraphy, every character
well shaped and with the quick, precise shading of thick and
thin strokes made possible only by the off-handed confidence
of a master.
We trouble you no more.
Seventy-three


L

ee found it easy to track Li Pe and Li Qing. Footprints
in moss near the stream, broken stalks of dry grass,
'scuffed sandy soil. If he lost the path he simply cast to
the right and left until he found another trace. The others
had agreed to wait by the earthmover, and he went quickly,
confident that he would soon catch up with the two old
people. There had not been enough time for them to have
gone very far.

The tracks went down the gully, staying beside the stream
for the most part, passed through a scanty birch wood, and
then turned south, following the line of the slope across a
lichen pavement, big splodges of red and brown and grey
and yellow with distinct black lines at the borders of the
differently colored species. Just by the far edge of the
birches, Lee found a different kind of print, and remembered
the high arched feet of the forestry robots. He couldn't tell
which set of tracks crossed which, and couldn't see any sign
of the two old people either.

There was a movement in the shadows amongst the slender
silvery trunks of the birches. Lee said, "You needn't
skulk around, Chen Yao."

As she came across the lichen pavement towards him, he
said, "You're determined not to let me be on my own."
"We go on now, Wei Lee. Leave the others, and go on

up."

"First of all we have to find Li Pe and Li Qing."


352
      RED DUST
      353

"I should think they are dead. And it's getting dark. We
can climb the shoulder of the valley and camp at the top."
"We brought them here. We killed them."
"You must not feel bad, Wei Lee. They were old, and besides,
the wild children would have killed them sooner or
later."
"Even so," Lee said, and turned and set off across the
lichen pavement. After a minute, he heard Chen Yao run to
catch up with him.
They went on, losing time because it was difficult to follow
the track across the particolored lichens. Night was sweeping down the
mountainside; at last, Lee had to admit that
he had lost the track entirely.
Although the rim of the mountain had risen above the
sun, light still walked on the Plain of the Garden of Eternal
Bliss a dozen kilometers below, and a red glow muted the
colors of the lichen patches and accentuated the dark boundaries
between them. It was as if Lee and Chen Yao were
trekking across a vast tilted chessboard. They were about to
turn back towards the gully when far around the curve of
the slope a brilliant light flashed and faded.
Chen Yao said, "I suppose you're going to investigate. It
is probably a trick."
"Even so," Lee said. "Go back, if you want."
"Oh no. You need my help, Wei Lee."
Lee led the way cautiously, thinking of the silvery robot,
of the traces of habitation Vette claimed to have seen. The
King of the Cats was playing a selection of lonesome Delta
Blues, eerie in the emptiness of the high slopes of Tiger
Mountain. It reminded Lee that ghosts always seek empty
places to haunt, and he grew more and more nervous as he
and Chen Yao approached the source of the light.
What had appeared from a distance to be a pile of rocks
turned out to be the ruins of a small town. Its foursquare
buildings were built of lava blocks. Narrow windows, their
shutters long ago fallen away, looked out from beneath the
jutting eaves of tiled roofs. Lava chips paved the streets,
which formed a cross centered on a big square. Tree stumps
      354
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
still remained in the middle of the square, like rotted teeth.
Chen Yao wondered how they had missed this place when
they had looked down from the bluff.
Lee said, "You didn't see it either?"
"It's a bad omen."
"Well, we weren't looking for it, so perhaps we missed
seeing it. Besides, we're a long way around the slope."
"I think it was looking for us, Wei Lee. We should go."
"Hush. Let me look, at least."
Lee went all the way round the square, every sense
stripped bare. In the middle of the clump of half-fossilized
tree stumps there was a stone cistern in which he supposed
the town had once stored its water. He dropped a stone into
it, and after a moment there was a dry echoing rattle.
As he turned away, he saw a spark above one of the
houses. It flashed and failed, and then a small red glow
shook there. Someone had lit a fire, and hope turned his
heart over.
A brief search revealed stone stairs at one corner of the
building. Lee told Chen Yao to keep watch and went up,
cautiously peeped over the edge of the roof. Big loose tiles,
each ridged in the middle, made a gentle slope. Two people
lay beside the fire near the crest of the roof. Li Pe and Li
Qing, faces peaceful, age rubbed away by the gentle glow of
the fire. They did not stir as Lee made his way to them, not
even when a the slipped beneath his feet and clattered over
the edge to smash in the street below.
They were dead. No marks on them, skin cold, yet joints
still supple. Li Pe's mouth was drawn back in a grimace. Li
Qing's eyes were open, but blind once more. Lee gently
closed them.
Someone called out, across cold night air. It was not Chen
Yao. "Sister, you sure took your sweet time getting here."
Lee turned so quickly he almost fell off the roof. As he
danced on loose tiles, white light flared across the square, a
pillar of light bright as burning magnesium, shedding great
sparks. A figure was silhouetted against its glare, legs apart,
        RED DUST
        355

fists on hips. Lee did not need to enhance his sight to know

who it was and shouted to Chen Yao.

"Run?

The figure laughed. "The little god is with me."

Lee called back, "Did you do this?"

Mary Makepeace Gaia moved against the brilliant light.
"I've been following you for a while. But it's time to end it."

"You set the children upon us, didn't you? That was why
there were so many of them."

"You're not the one I want. Talk to me, sister. I know
you're there."

"She's part of me, and I'm part of her. You can talk to
me."

Lee understood that he had walked into a trap, and that
he had taken Chen Yao with him. The village had been invisible
because it had been made so, and he had seen it only
when it had been made visible for him. There was no way
the two old people could have walked all this way so quickly.
Mary Makepeace Gaia had killed them and brought them
here, knowing he would come looking for them. No doubt
she controlled the forestry robot; she would have been monitoring
information space, waiting for him to show himself
there. He said, "Are you still serving your employer? Or is
this something more personal?"

Mary Makepeace Gaia screamed. The light behind her
flared and went out. Lee slid down the roof in an avalanche
of loose tiles, kicked off and did a tuck and roll, landing with
knees bent to absorb the impact. Falling tiles smashed
around him: he could measure the space between each impact
as he ran in a zig-zag across the square, kicked in a
door and dived through it.

This was the living room and kitchen, and in the bedroom
beyond was a half-lifer cocoon. Lee knocked it from its
plinth, swept aside the loose, dry bones inside. A pinlight
winked red at him; there was still power. Everything was
still connected to everything else: the system would ensure
that, even after the world died.

Lee jammed on the headset, felt his body collapse even as
      356
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

he plunged away from it. He did not fall far, but went at an
angle to everything else, down the way he'd glimpsed before.
Suddenly all the connections became clear. He saw the projectors
that Mary Makepeace Gaia had set up, and the traps
she had laid at the perimeter. She had wanted to talk with
him, or with her sister, and then she had wanted him to
run so that she could hunt him down and kill him.

Well, run he would, but first he turned everything off and

set up a beacon. And then he followed an extended branch
in the ghostly quantum path he'd made during his previous
incursion into Tiger Mountain's information space, and had
a brief intense conversation with the earthmover.

And came back, because Mary Makepeace Gaia had ripped

the headset from him. She grasped his chin and pulled his

head back, held a knife at his throat.

The room was in darkness, but at the edge of his vision

Lee could see her expression in the warm mask of her face.

She said, "There are so many ways to die."

"But not by your hand. Not directly. You could have killed

me at any time after you found me, but you never did. You
always set others to that task." He kept himself still, despite
his fear: the sharp knife blade had nicked his throat, and he
could feel blood trickling down his neck, soaking his collar.
Beats of silence. He said, "Besides, your employers are coming.''

The knife rang when it hit the far wall: Mary Makepeace

Gaia laughed. "You think they'll save you? Sister, you'll wish
you died at my hands. Go on, run if you want. I swear I'll
kill you cleanly."

"Too late," Lee said. "They're already here."

His beacon had been answered. A whistling roar was descending
on the town: a rising scream that couldn't blot out
Mary Makepeace Gaia's laughter.
Seventy-four


T

here was a little town of shining silver towers. Like a
circle of spears, it rose in the shadows beneath the
fluted walls of the northern end of the stepped and
nested craters of Tiger Mountain's deep, wide caldera. Each
spear tip was ringed or vaned, rising to different heights
from the glare of a field of lights. There were domes too,
and looping silver roads, and a long long launch track that
ran out and up across the eighty-kilometer-wide caldera, angled
towards stars that shone bright and clear in the near-vacuum.

Inside the steel can of its cabin, Lee felt the rocket ship
turn beneath him. Torque pulled his face from the thick
glass port hole; the restraint harness of his seat cut into his
shoulders and chest. Everything tilted outside the port hole,
and then there were only stars as the rocket ship settled on
a tail of flame. There was a long roaring, then a shudder,
then silence.

Lee was suddenly surrounded by the cadres who had taken
him from Mary Makepeace Gaia in the dead mountain town.
They were dressed in simple white one-piece uniforms. Black
visors masked half their faces. Their heads were shaven, like
monks or civil servants. They were all younger than Lee,
more boys than men, and did not have names but numbers.
As soon as they had surrounded Lee they began to shout at
each other in clipped tech-speak with a kind of suppressed
hysteria. It was as if they were furious at everything, even


357
      358
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


themselves. Several held pistols on Lee as others unbuckled
the complex harness that had strapped him down in the
padded seat. He could hear Chen Yao's muffled protests as
she was lifted from her own seat. Across the circular metal
cabin, Mary Makepeace Gaia watched mockingly. It was already
clear that the cadres feared her more than Lee.

A transparent tunnel linked the rocket ship with a high
tower. They all rode an elevator down, Lee pressed in one
corner by the now-silent cadres, Chen Yao in another. A
moving walkway carried them along a long tunnel and then
there was another elevator ride, to the top of another tower.

It was the tallest tower in the cluster, and its top was a

clear dome supported by thin metal pillars. It looked out
across the sharp shining tops of towers and swooping roadways
towards the starry sky and the far horizon of the southern
end of the caldera. A cadre turned from this view, made
a gesture. The guards drew to attention, stepped smartly
back so that Lee and Chen Yao and Mary Makepeace Gaia
were isolated in front of their rank.

The cadre studied them, long fingers pressed together at

his chest. His face was not masked. It was high-boned and
bloodless, eyes hooded, thin lips pressed together. He looked
like a scholar presented with an interesting but trivial problem,
something requiring a moment's attention to unlock
its worth before it could be filed away.

He said, "Are they who you expected, Master?"

Two people stepped from the shadows beneath one of the
dome's filigreed metal pillars. One was the missionary from
Earth, Dr. Damon Lovelace. The other was Guoquiang. He
was in cadre uniform, and his head was shaven and seamed
with raw red scars. He had been converted.

Mary Makepeace Gaia bowed stiffly to Dr. Damon Love-

lace. "Come," he said, "you must also honor our allies."

"Of course," Mary Makepeace Gaia said sweetly, and
bowed to the cadre.

"I am the Number Two Cadre," the cadre said stiffly. "The
Number One Cadre is... unavailable. But you may speak to
me as if to him."
      RED DUST
      359

The mercenary said, "I don't want to talk to anyone in
this place, but to those who give you your orders."

The cadre said, "We have our duty. Orders are not necessary.
Orders require interpretation. As truth is not absolute,
interpretation can lead to bad actions. You will tell me
how you contacted us."

"Not me. It was his idea."

Lee said, "The usual way." He couldn't stop looking at
Guoquiang, who stared straight ahead.

The cadre said, "You lie. That way is forbidden."

"I wouldn't know about that. I just did it."

Chen Yao said, "He's dangerous. Let me go, I'll tell you
just how dangerous he is, and why, and what you can do
about it."

"Bravo," Dr. Damon Lovelace said, but the cadre ignored
her outburst. Lee was sure, in fact, that he hadn't heard it.
The cadre said, "Confession is the highest good."

Lee knew all about the kind of mottoes the cadre used.
He had learned about them when he had tried to find out
about his parents on his own, before Xiao Bing had made
the librarian for him, before he had left the capital for the
first time. He had read through the transcripts of hundreds
of struggle sessions in the House of the Names of the Populace,
where each reader had an aspect at his or her shoulder,
like an angel, or a conscience. In every transcript, the
human, agonised pleas of the accused had been answered
with the kind of tags that the cadre used now.

Lee countered with mottoes of his own. "Who is able to
contact you, but those who are allowed? Who is allowed, but
those who have authorization?"

"No one has authorization when sterility is to be maintained.
We are free of contamination here, because the highest
duty requires it."

"Those who know only correct actions needn't fear contamination.''

"That's true," the cadre admitted.

"Very good," Dr. Damon Lovelace said.
      360
      P^vL J. McAuLE¥

Lee said to the Earthman, "How can you bear to take so
much away from people?"
"Oh, it was the Ten Thousand Years that did this," Dr.
Damon Lovelace said lightly. "We leased them the technology;
they put it to use in their own way. We would have
used machines, not brain-cored humans, and we wouldn't have put the control
center in this vulnerable position.
There is still much about your psychology that astounds us."
He put his hand on Guoquiang's shoulder. "This cadre has
a question for you, Wei Lee. We think we know who you
are, but we want to make sure. There are more than one of
you, you see. Just as there are more than one of me."
"I understand."
Dr. Damon Lovelace said to Guoquiang, "Ask your question.''
Guoquiang stepped forward as if he was on parade. He
stopped two paces from Lee. Sweat stood out on his forehead. "I..." he said.
"Who... I..."
Dr. Damon Lovelace's hand crushed Guoquiang's shoulder.
"Ask it!"
"Who? Who fell? Who fell in dust that was not dust? Who
saved him and washed him clean?"
Lee remembered. It had been the beginning of everything,
and he hadn't realized it until now. He remembered how
they had all danced under the wavering fountain in the cold
spring air outside Number Eight Field Dome of the Bitter
Waters danwei. He looked straight into Guoquiang's eyes
and said, "Lin Yi fell, and almost drowned me too, when I
saved him."
"There," Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "that wasn't so hard.
All right, cadre. You're dismissed."
Lee lunged forward, and kissed Guoquiang full on the lips.
"I forgive you," he said.
Mary Makepeace Gaia laughed, and then softly applauded.
Guoquiang wheeled away without even wiping Lee's saliva
from his mouth.
"Well," Lee said, "now that you know who I am, what do
you want of me?"
      RED DUST
      361


Dr. Damon Lovelace turned and paced to the window,
hands clasped at his back. He looked out across the tops of
the shining towers for a full minute before speaking. "I regret
that there's no more time for talk. Your allies are causing
some small nuisance in the skies, and that must be dealt
with before we can send you where you're wanted. But before
my masters come for you I hope I will have time to talk
with you again."

The interview was at an end.
Seventy-five


L

ee and Chen Yao were able to exchange a few words
during the elevator ride down. "I'm scared, Wei Lee,"
Chen Yao said. "It wasn't supposed to happen like
this."

"It's all right to be scared, Chen Yao. I'm scared, too. It's
only human, and that's all that we are, really."

"I know. That's why I'm scared. I never was much of a
god, was I? These people scare me. They're no longer human;
they have no need of gods."

"They talk in tags because they don't need to know anything
else," Lee said. "That's not scary, it's sad."

As the elevator slowed, one of the guards spoke unexpectedly.
"If the people do not control their defenses, then
how does the nation defend itself?."

"If a nation must defend itself against its own people, it

is not a nation," Lee said.

The guard didn't reply.

Chen Yao and Lee were led off in opposite directions down

a white corridor. The cadres left Lee in a big, mostly empty
room. Hopefully, he asked the door to let him out, but it
could only apologize. "I wish I could, Master, but it is best
for you to stay here." It had a dry small voice: Lee imagined
an old, simple monk, head bowed.

The floor was as wide and as shinily empty as that of a
ballroom. There was a clutter of hard-edged furniture
stacked in one corner, and when the young boy came in Lee


362
      RED DUST
      363
was perched on top of a stack of chairs, prying unsuccessfully
at the smooth joint between ceiling and wall.
Lee blurred from one side of the room to the other and
took the tray from the boy's hands. "Stay while I eat," Lee
said. "I'd like to talk with you."
The boy was six or seven, and masked like the rest. He
said, "I do not know if it is permitted."
"It is not forbidden, then. Everything that is not forbidden
is permitted."
"There are guards on my other side," the door said.
"Thank you for telling me," Lee said, and told the boy,
"You can wait while I eat, and then you will not need to
come in again to take away my tray."
He lifted the covers of the stainless-steel bowls one after
the other. Steamed rice, fried crackers, yellow bean paste,
water. The unsalted food tasted of almost nothing; the water
was distilled, warm and insipid. The boy stood with his back
to the door and watched Lee eat.
"What's your name?"
"I am Number Eighty-Four."
"I mean before that. Before you came here."
The boy's mouth twisted, but he said nothing.
"You don't remember? You can't have been here very
long. Door, are you listening to this?"
"Yes, Master."
"You will not record it, and you won't transmit it to the
guards on the other side, or anywhere else."
"Yes, Master."
Lee told the boy, "I suppose that you are used to having
machines eavesdrop on you, Eighty-Four, but it makes me
uncomfortable. Here, I've finished now."
When the boy bent to take the tray, Lee grasped his wrists
in one hand, flicked up the visor of his mask with the other.
The boy's pale face squirmed, like something disturbed by
the turning of a rock. Lee touched his eyes and his mouth
with fingertips wet with saliva, and he suddenly relaxed.
"Tell me the first thing you remember," Lee said.
The boy spoke dreamily. "We were travelling on a train.
      364
      PAV J. McAvk¥
There were many of us, more than two hundred. We were
new units, from different danweis. I was travelling with
thirty-eight others from my own danwei. We were travelling
to the capital, to receive the blessing of the Emperor." (The
door said, "Are you all right, Number Eighty-Four?" Lee told
it to be quiet.) "We had been selected because we had purged
our teachers. They had been advocating the Sky Road, and
we forced them to purge their carrels, to recant their crimes
and to march around the perimeter of the danwei with placards
describing their crimes around their necks. It was winter,
and dust was blowing from the Plain of Gold. The
teachers were barefoot, and without masks, and in their
nightclothes. We had beaten them, and made them kneel on
glass. I remember one young woman helping an old man;
both were choking in the dusty air, and their clothes flapped
and billowed with the wind. Very few survived their recantations.
"The leader of our unit was a girl, Yu Shihuang. She was
a bad crazy person, but her anger gave her strength of will.
All feared her. I remember an old woman, on the train that
took us to the city. She was in the carriage in which we
rode. We were in high spirits, and she told us not to make
so much noise. Yu Shihuang turned on the old woman, and
started to hit her. Others joined in. The old woman curled
up like a spider. Blood ran from her ears and her eyes and
her nose. She was unconscious and some urged Yu Shihuang
to stop, but Yu Shihuang declared that the Great
Reassessment was not an embroidery lesson. It was winter,
as I have said, and the carriage windows were curtained with
heavy material. She took down a curtain pole and beat the
old woman to death. Her face was like a piece of rotten fruit.
Then Yu Shihuang had her thrown from the carriage. I remember
that was how we came to the capital. I remember
little more. It is an effect of the processing."
The boy had spoken in a slow halting monotone, but as
his tale progressed tears began to run down his soft plump
cheeks. They dripped on to his coveralls, beading the slick
white material.
      RED DUST
      365

Lee said, although he already knew the boy's story, "What
was the name of your danwei?"

"It was the Bitter Waters danwei."

It had happened ten years ago, during the planet-wide
purges after the Emperor had made its final pact with the
Earth's Consensus, and declared the sky off-limits. The boy
had been frozen at that age ever since. Everyone in the shining
city had been frozen. It was a glimpse of the future, of
brain-cored children serving machines, becoming machines.
Without new memory, without new experience, without
change.

Lee said, "I must speak with your leader, Number Eighty-Four.
Will the door open when you ask it?"

"Of course I will," the door said, surprising Lee.

"Take the tray and leave with the guards. As soon as you

can, come back. Can you do that?"

The boy nodded.

"Be brave. Remember what you are. Everything else is a
dream, and you're waking from it now."

Lee paced up and down once the boy had gone, suddenly
nervous. He had no way of knowing if the viruses could
overcome ten years' conditioning, ten years of being but not
becoming. Miriam Makepeace Mbele had once teased him
about being able to bring the dead back to life: now he would
see if it was true or not. If he could save the boy, then
perhaps he had saved Guoquiang. Perhaps he had saved
them all.

His internal clock had counted off more than a hundred
minutes when the door opened. The boy stood there, and
Lee ran to him. "Goodbye, Master," the door said.

"Goodbye," Lee said, astonished, and took the boy's hand,
and allowed himself to be led away.
Seventy-six

T
he door to Chen Yao's room said nothing, but simply
opened at the boy's command. Chen Yao had dismantled
a wall screen, and was trying to pull away the
panels behind it. "I would have gotten out by myself," she
said. "Eventually."
"I don't doubt it."
After a while, Chen Yao said, "Where is this boy taking
us?" The blank white corridors made her nervous; she was
geared for signals and signs that were not there.
"To see the Number One Cadre."
Chen Yao said, "A dead man won't be much help."
"He isn't dead," the boy said. He still had not remembered
his name. Lee feared that little of his original personality
remained, that he was not a resurrectee but a construction,
as a new building might be built on the stone foundations
of an old one.
Lee said, "There are different deaths. If I've learned one
thing, it's that."
The towers reached down into the congealed lava floor of
the caldera as well as into the sky. The boy led them to an
elevator that fell for a full minute and swooped to a stop
that briefly tripled gravity. It opened not on another bright,
white corridor but warm semidarkness.
Orchids as big as human heads and as complicated as
sexual parts glowed behind faceted glass set in the floor and
walls. Other panels pulsed with color, sent chips of light

366
      RED DUST
      367


swarming over the room like blood corpuscles coursing
through the muscular chambers of the heart. Cables looped
down from the ceiling and gathered together in a thick braid
that plugged into the back of the couch where the Number
One Cadre lay.

He was dead, withered and black, part mummy, part crystal.
He looked as if he would shatter at a touch. Projection
helmets dangled above his couch like a bouquet of flowers.

"This is a crazy place," Chen Yao said, and stepped towards
the couch, a shadow in the swarming colors.

From the corner of his eye, Lee saw the elevator shimmer
and flow, bleeding away into the pressed flower walls. When
the boy's hand crept into his, Lee told him, "Nothing can
hurt you here."

That was when the Number One Cadre's corpse sat up. It
moved stiffly but swiftly, jerking its legs over the edge of the
couch, dashing leads from its head with a sweep of its hand.
Its eyes glittered redly, like cut cacholongs. Its mouth
worked and a long silver tongue licked out. It was forked,
made of rings of metal. It dashed over the corpse's face, then
lashed out at Chen Yao.

The little girl danced away from the tongue, which
whipped after her, meters long and lithe as a snake. Lee went
into hypermode and plucked a helmet from the bouquet
above the corpse's couch, and set it on his head.

And was elsewhere.
Seventy-seven

W
'ei Lee stood on a darkling plain under a chain-mail
sky that flexed and warped with its cargo of hurtling
data streams. It stretched away towards a wall dark
red as dried blood and studded with defensive towers. The
wall's mass loomed like a thunderstorm, more felt than seen.
Signals crackled from tower to tower like heat lightning.
Beyond the wall and its towers floated a huddle of tall peaked
roofs lapped with glazed ochre tiles. It was the Forbidden
City.
The air beside Lee twisted and shimmered as if heated by
an invisible fire. It made a crouching human shape, and then
the boy was beside him.
"Number Eighty-Four! What are you doing here?" But Lee
was not really angry, for the boy's presence meant that he
would not go into this terrible place alone.
"You left," Number Eighty-Four said accusingly. "You left
me. I only wanted to see where you had gone."
"!t is the Forbidden City. We are going to see the Emperor.
Take my hand."
Number Eighty-Four flinched from Lee. "But no one sees
Him! He is immortal and invisible and everywhere at once!"
Lightning flared from top to top of the distant towers;
massive peals of thunder rolled across the plain on which
they stood.
"Don't be afraid," Lee said. He took the boy's hand and
they moved forward.

368
      RED DUST
      369


Each step translated them across space like chess pieces.
There was a high gate in the blood-red walls. Wumen, the Meridian
Gate, the place of execution. It opened for them but they
were already inside the walls, standing in a courtyard cut by the
recurved Tartar bow of the Golden Water Stream. Five dazzlingly
white marble bridges arched over the glittering stream,
leading to the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Beyond this gate was
another courtyard, and at the far end of the courtyard rose the
marble terraces on which stood the three great halls.

Lee and Number Eighty-Four stood directly in front of
the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Its doors were flanked by
bronze incense burners, and from each burner rose a pillar
of aromatic smoke. The smoke pillars twisted into braids and
merged with the flexing sky. Directly in front of the doors
was a bronze turtle, symbol of longevity and stability. A fire
had been lit in its hollow belly, and smoke billowed from its
hooked mouth.

There were guards on either side of the bronze turtle, but
when Lee and Number Eighty-Four found themselves standing
beside it, the guards had vanished. Above the turtle's
armor-plated shell was a ghostly globe: the turning world,
battered dusty red, polar caps of white water ice small as
thumbprints: Mars.

Complex spindles of light hung over the shrunken icecaps.
Lee wafted a hand through them, top and bottom; they engaged
his viral systems for only a second.

The discharge was like pure sex. It propelled Lee and
Number Eighty-Four through the entrance in a fast edit,
into a vast richly decorated space filled with the clash of
battered gongs, thick billows of incense, and blurred ghosts.
Lee could hardly distinguish individuals in the insubstantial
crowd, but the repetitive motions of its ever-changing constituents
made it possible to see what was going on.

Bowing nine times over by throwing themselves full
length on the floor and hitting the tiles with their foreheads,
interlocutors advanced towards the high throne which stood
before the carved Xumi Mountain, the Mountain of Paradise.
Only then was each interlocutor allowed to stand and wait
      370
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
to be escorted, by an aspect in long skirt coat and trousers,
its machine code in a locked pouch hung by a chain from
its belt, into the ever-changing throng that hid all but the
throne's high canopy.
"Come on," Lee said to Number Eighty-Four, but when
he tried to push through the crowd of interlocutors who
were waiting their turn to be escorted to the throne he was
buffeted and shoved and turned so that his path became a
drunkard's walk that led right back to its starting place.
"I told you!" Number Eighty-Four wailed. "We are not
meant to be here. We don't have the codes!"
Lee gripped the boy's hand and plunged into the crowd
again. They were pushed this way and that, and suddenly
Lee was standing in front of someone he knew. He was looking
into his own face.
"You have come far, Master," the librarian said.
"I have been fortunate, thanks to the help of my friends,"
Lee said. "I regret that I still have some way to go, and now
there is no one to help me."
"If you will allow it, perhaps I can serve you one last time.
After that, your path is your own."
"For the first time," Lee said, and suddenly, despite his
fear, he felt a calm joy fill him. Here, in this hall of ghosts,
he was finally no one but himself. Win or fail, it would be
on his own terms.
"Use your freedom wisely, Master," the librarian said, and
took Lee's hand in a freezing grip. He pulled Lee and Number
Eighty-Four through the crowd of interlocutors and aspects,
which now made no more resistance than the scented
smoke, and Lee saw at last who sat on the throne.
He was dressed in the high-collared, yellow silk brocade
robes of tradition, his face stern and patient beneath a
square cornered hat. He rested his elbows on his knees and
his chin in his hands, not turning his attention from any of
the interlocutors, yet addressing dozens at once. At the instant
of address the ghosts took on the aspect of their client-all
of them either men in uniform or richly dressed
servants of one or another of the Gang of Six or more or
      RED DUST
      371

less interchangeable drably dressed conchies--and faded and
blew away like smoke.

"I have done all I can, Master," the librarian said. "Free
me. Free me now."

It held up the pouch hung round its neck and Lee took
out the control chip. It was a no-color lozenge bristly with
machine code, squirming in his palm like an overturned
beetle. The librarian snatched it and bowed and ran down a
corridor Lee hadn't noticed, its black cloak flapping like a
tattered flame, growing smaller and smaller and then vanishing
around a corner and taking the corridor with it.

An aspect grasped Lee's elbow and tried to hustle him
away. Lee laughed and lifted the aspect's locked pouch,
opened it, and held out the control chip. The aspect grabbed
the chip and greedily stuffed it into its mouth: it glowed
through skin translucent as parchment as it went down. For
an instant, an old man stood before Lee, barefoot and bareheaded
in a faded fisherman's smock with both sleeves out
at the elbows. It was the human template of the aspect, the
dead personality hijacked and bound to this function. Wonderingly,
the old fisherman raised his hands before his
face--and then he was gone, free to address himself
anywhere in information space.

Lee stepped forward, suddenly alone before the ruler of
the living and the dead.

The Emperor dismissed the aspects with a smooth gesture
and stood, and Lee recognized him even before he took off
his hat and his long moustache. "You're too late, Wei Lee,"
Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon said, and put the false
moustache into the hat, and tossed the hat over his shoulder
into paradise. A painted buddha grabbed it and cheerfully
slapped it on to his shaven long-eared head. The Emperor
stepped down from the throne.

"I have many aspects," the Emperor said. "Now that The
Little Bird is dead, every one of the Ten Thousand Years
belongs to me. Come with me, Wei Lee. You can bring your
little friend, too, or what's left of him."

There was a gap. Lee had a false memory of passing through
      372
      PAUL J. MCAULEY
the Gate of Heavenly Purity behind the Three Great Halls; of
skirting the three Palaces where power had always resided, behind
the formal mask, at the back door; of moving through
small, human-scale courtyards in which fountains played or
carp swam in pools; past the unpretentious one-storey buildings
in which (if this had been the real Forbidden City) emperors
and their consorts had once lived in eras long past.
Through all this, Lee did not let go of Number Eighty-Four's
hand.
And then there was an editing cut and they were standing
elsewhere, high on Coal Hill Park to the north of the walls,
with pavilions behind them and terraced gardens dropping
away before them and the peaks of the roofs of the Forbidden
City spread beyond.
The Emperor shot a sleeve of his yellow silk robe. "Far
too late, little Lee. Already, my champion has killed your
true body. And now she will come here and kill you. As for
the boy, I'll eat him. There's not much left of him anyhow."
Number Eighty-Four said, "Wei Lee is the champion of
the people." His hand made a fist inside Lee's grasp: he
dared to scowl at the Emperor.
"That means more to me than you could know, Number
Eighty-Four," Lee said. "But I'm no champion, only a messenger. I came here to
give our Emperor a gift from the
people, if he'll take it."
The Emperor laughed. "I know about your silly little viruses.
That's why my champion must erase you; otherwise
I would have swallowed you whole and thought nothing of
it. No more talking, now. It's too late."
He pointed, and Lee saw Mary Makepeace Gala running
up the gardened slope towards him. She ran as if in a wind,
flames streaming back from the burning sword she whirled
around her head as she plunged through formal flowerbeds,
leaped low hedges.
Lee felt the wind, too: it was rushing from him. Something
passed through every cell in his body, like a hand
passing through a rainbow. Suddenly a host of beasts were
leaping downhill towards Mary Makepeace Gaia. Tigers and
      RED DUST
      373
panthers, monkeys twice as big as men, a bear bigger still
that turned to Lee before lumbering after the other creatures.
Behind its sharp-muzzled mask was a human gaze;
one Lee had not thought to see again.
The Emperor laughed again. "You multiply her aspect,
but it won't help you."
Mary Makepeace Gaia whirled her flaming sword, cutting
down the great cats that bounded at her, or setting on fire
their striped or sable coats so that they raced away screaming.
The blade moved so quickly that its path blurred into
a knot of blossoming flames. The giant monkeys howled and
chattered at its edge, their coarse coats smouldering as they
dug up boulders and trees with frantic haste and hurled
them at the assassin.
But boulders burst asunder when they struck the flame,
and tree-spears shrivelled in mid-flight. The bear reared up,
huger than it had first seemed. Its five-clawed paw raked the
sky and there was a thunderclap and a fierce local deluge of
rain.
The cocoon of flames died instantly. But where Mary Makepeace
Gaia had been standing was a red dragon. It opened
its beaked mouth and screamed, and with a brazen clash of
wings leaped into the sky.
The bear lunged after it, turning in an instant into a black
dragon that whirled away after its red twin. The two twisted
in combat, now over the roofs of the Forbidden City, now
over the crest of Coal Hill Park. They engaged as swiftly as
striking snakes, flew apart, and struck at each other again.
At each encounter new thunderclouds billowed up. Slowly,
the storm obscured the gray sky light of the flexing data
streams. Rain dashed itself to earth amongst strobing
strokes of lightning.
The Emperor yelled to Lee, "First your champion dies!
Then you!"
Lee wiped water from his face, yelled back, "I can't see
how the battle is going! Are you more informed than I?"
For inconstant lightning was the only illumination now,
and thunder drowned out the clash of the dragons. The Em
      374
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


peror laughed, his face gleaming like metal. "Watch!" he
said. His voice was louder than thunder.

Air pulled apart between the Emperor and Lee, became a
window. Suddenly Lee was looking over the shoulder of Dr.
Damon Lovelace, the envoy from Earth. He was in the control
center, the dome atop the tallest tower of the city of
shining towers, watching a fanned sheaf of screens which
displayed the earthmover from a dozen different viewpoints,
in a dozen different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,
from long-wave radio through visible light to gamma.

The earthmover was roaring up a long slope towards the
lip of Tiger Mountain's caldera, trailing a long comet tail of
black dust. Lee caught his breath: one inset showed Redd
alone in the bubble of its canopy, face slick with sweat, poisoned
hand strapped up, one-handedly wrestling with the
manual override stick.

No one should have been aboard. The earthmover had
assured him of that before he had set it its task.

Gamma light showed the earthmover's bulky fusion pod.
At its heart the magnetic pinch fluttered bright as the sun.
Tritium fuel was pouring into it, and dozens of strange elements
smeared its once pure spectrum. It was approaching
criticality.

By radio light, Redd's voice swooped and soared across a
hundred wavebands. He was singing something about the
land, this land, our land. Then he broke off and whooped
and cried out, voice bright as the fusion pinch.

"I'm coming! I'm coming, Billy Lee! They went and killed
you, but in the name of the people I'll finish it off!"

"Foolish man," the Emperor said. "I am disappointed in
you, Wei Lee, if this is your diversion. Even if it does get
close enough, which it won't, any explosion that little fusion
plant is capable of won't hurt my defenses."

Dr. Damon Lovelace turned, and the window turned with
him to show cadres at work around the perimeter of the
domed room. They were mobilizing some of the self-reproducing
one-shot laser satellites that swarmed in orbit,
turning them inward, marshalling them to produce a syn-
      RED DUST
      375

chronized beam that would vaporise the earthmover.

Then the door of the elevator opened, and Guoquiang
stepped out. He dragged a welding laser behind him, and
pointed its wand straight up even as other cadres ran at him.
The apex of the dome shone white, and then the room filled
with water vapor as the laser holed through. Lee imagined
the supersonic whistle of air jetting into the near-vacuum
outside.

The swirling fog cleared, dwindling into a pillar that narrowed
from its base, poured through the hole, gone. Most
of the cadres were slumped at their stations; the few that
had survived held air masks to their faces. Guoquiang was
sprawled by the welding laser, blood bubbling from a chest
wound.

The view turned to show the sheaf of screens. The earth-mover
was very near the top of the slope now. Redd was still
singing.

The Emperor screamed: far down the hill lightning flew
up from every tower and rooftop of the Forbidden City,
branching across the whole sky. Wei Lee and Number
Eighty-Four were knocked down by the concussion.

Lee saw the earthmover ride straight out over the lip of
the caldera. For a long moment it seemed to defy gravity as
its tracks churned the vanishingly thin air. And then it tumbled
end over end. The window flared with unbearable
brightness. Lee threw his hands in front of his face and his
viruses stepped down his vision: he saw the bones of his
hands against the light: then it was gone.

A terrific peal of thunder rolled overhead; blue sheet lightning
shot across half the sky. The park was in ruins. The
giant monkeys had fled. The Emperor's face, glimpsed by
lightning, was pinched and drawn; his finery was ruined by
the unrelenting drenching downpour.

"The explosion itself wasn't important," Lee said breathlessly,
"but the magnetic pulse caused by the explosion
opened your defenses to the sky. Even hardened machinery
was blind for an instant, and an instant was all the anarchists
needed."
      376
      PAUL J. MCAULEY


The Emperor said, "This will pass. I rule here. My champion
will prevail, and you will both die. The boy first."

He spread his arms and the boy, Number Eighty-Four,
rose into the air. He screamed and reached for Wei Lee, but
something caught him and hurled him into the Emperor.
For a moment, Lee saw the boy dwindling inside the Emperor's
shadowy metrical frame. Then he was gone, and only
the Emperor stood before him.

"And now you, little human," the Emperor said.

Lee said, "I'm already dead. And so are you."

"I was never alive, foolish Wei Lee! You can't hurt me.
You're a ghost in the realm of ghosts, and I'm the one who
holds up the sky."

"Oh, but I've already seen to that. You ate the boy, and
he was infected with virus." Lee laughed, and reached for
the Emperor.

It batted ineffectually at his hands as Lee grasped the fine
chain round its neck and pulled it hard, snapping its links.
He opened the pouch and took out the machine-code chip.

The eidolon, Emperor no more, wailed, "You're dead!
You're a ghost!"

Lee laughed again, closed his eyes and swallowed the chip.
Seventy-eight


H

'e had not known what to expect. At first it was as if
someone was standing at his back, shouting furi-
· ously. But, slowly, the sense of the eidolon faded. It
was like a drop of blood dissolving in a sparkling sea: Lee
was that sea.

And yet he was also himself. He was still the same young
agronomist technician who with his two friends had walked
out so eagerly into that spring morning; he always would be.

He opened his eyes. The storm had passed. The last rain
slanted from the sky, silver spears falling softly to earth as
thunderheads dissolved. In the grey light of the data streams
Lee saw that the high battlement walls around the Forbidden
City had dissolved too. All around the far, far horizon
was an annular tsunami of ghosts. They were rushing inward,
but the distance was so great that they seemed not to
move at all, an eternal ever-toppling wave.

Closer at hand, a little way down the slope of the ruined
park, a woman stood over her dead twin. It was Miriam
Makepeace Mbele. She was breathing hard, and blood
streamed from a wound on her scalp, soaking her close-cropped
hair and soaking into the collar of her black one-piece
bodysuit. She leaned on the pommel of a smoking
sword that was planted in the ground. After a moment she
left the weapon where it was and walked back up the hill
towards Lee.

"It's over," she said. "I can feel it!"

377
      378
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

"It's just beginning," Lee said.

Miriam Makepeace Mbele turned beside him, and saw the
standing wave on the horizon. "You fool!"

"The lost islands have been opened. Now there is no wall.
No division between what should be, and what will be. Just
as Mars will belong to everyone, so will information space.
Nothing secret. Nothing hidden. I've torn down Heaven's
wall."

He watched Miriam consider transforming again, consider
attempting to violate his integrity, consider activating a
component of his viral system. She could have killed him in
a dozen ways, but he knew that she would not.

Instead she smiled. "At least you'll never have children.
You're a dynasty of one, Wei Lee. Enjoy your short life while
you can, dear little brother."

"I'd already figured that out. I'm you, but with something
more."

"You're me, half crippled."

"Great-grandfather Wei bought an ovum from the Nexus
and doubled its chromosome number and cloned it. Most
were allowed to grow to term with only minimal changes to
allow them to pass for Han. I met one of my sisters in Ichun;
for a moment I thought it was you, come back from the
dead. As for me, Great-grandfather Wei took one of the
cloned ova and chipped one of the X chromosomes into a
Y. My mother was a surrogate. My father was an employee
of my great-grandfather. He..."

Miriam said, "The man you call your father was the gene
engineer who dealt with the Nexus. Instead of following your
great-grandfather's orders, he inserted a Y chromosome
given him by the Nexus. It wasn't editing, but deletion and
substitution. He betrayed your great-grandfather to save humanity
from the Earth's Consensus, and that's why he died.
As will we, when those ghosts reach us. But we'll die for
nothing, Wei Lee."

The seething wave of the freed dead was halfway across
the darkling plain.

"I don't think so," Lee said. "Look!"
      RED DUST
      379

A star suddenly shone high in the east. It grew from a point
to a whirling torus streaked by amorphous pastel shapes
within. Turn the torus inside out and you'd have the world, Lee
thought. He said, "My great-grandfather's eidolon was subverted
by the Emperor after the Emperor was seduced by the
Earth. After that, my great-grandfather and most of the Ten
Thousand Years were forced to deal with the Earth's Consensus.
They helped let in the Earth. For their betrayal, they
gained immortality, and condemned the world to die."

Miriam said, "In the beginning, your great-grandfather
sought to unite Mars and the anarchists. You shouldn't
blame him because he failed. His eidolon knew all about his
plans, and of course so did the Emperor once it swallowed
the eidolons of all the Ten Thousand Years. Only the oldest
of the Ten Thousand Years, The Little Bird, had a mechanical
eidolon; he bided his time and then rebelled. The Emperor
did not know about his plans, and it did not know
about ours. It didn't know how special you were, Wei Lee,
or it would have killed you when you were a baby. Instead,
it kept you as a stalking horse for the likes of me. It didn't
know you were a double agent, and you didn't even know
you were an agent at all."

The torus whirled downward and kissed the side of Coal
Hill. Light blazed up, and something swept through it.

It was a long, four-wheeled ground vehicle, styled like an
old-fashioned spaceship. It was painted a gleaming pink,
with great streaks of chrome the length of its streamlined
body. Lee recognized the emblem on top of its square radiator
grille from a dozen documentary clips.

In the driver's seat was a man in chauffeur's uniform, with
a face mild as milk and a wispy brown beard and a disc of
light tilted above his head. When he raised his hands from
the wheel, Lee saw that the palms of his white kid gloves
were stained with blood.

"Jesus Christ," Miriam Makepeace Mbele breathed.

And on the wide black leather seat behind the chauffeur
was the King of the Cats. He wore a blue satin jacket, its
collar turned up around the slicked combed-back cowl of his
      380
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

hair. His arm was stretched along the back of the seat, and
he kicked open the door with a negligent flip of a snakeskin
boot. His lopsided grin broadened. "Hop on in, both of you.
Time to get out of here."
"I'm staying," Lee said.
The King said, "Don't be a fool, kid. You've done your bit,
far better than we'd hoped. It's time to move on now. Time
to come home."
Lee said, "You set me up. My whole life was set up from
the beginning."
"From way before the beginning," the King said. "I can
get you back across, but we'll have to move fast. They're
angry, all those people you freed. There'll be trouble soon
enough, and I don't aim to stick around to see it." Miriam
had already climbed in; the King of the Cats put his arm
around her. There was a crate of iced Thunderbird wine at
his feet. Now he wore a check jacket, pink shirt, black jeans
and blue suede shoes, and was ten years younger. "Yeah,"
he drawled, "I know I'm kind of unstable. The lousy codes
in this space don't translate too well. I had a hell of a time
passing over." He unshipped a bottle, spun off the cap with
a negligent flip of his thumb. In his other hand he held a
bouquet of glasses. "Just a little bit further on down the
road. There's nothing left for you to do here, kid."
Lee could feel the chip he had swallowed. It glowed in his
chest like a neon heart. It was easy to pluck it out. He shook
off blood and water and broke it in half and had two identical
chips, whole in each hand. He broke them again, and had
four.
The King of the Cats said, "Way too late for conjuring
tricks, kid."
Lee had eight chips, sixteen, thirty-two. They made glowing
stacks in his hands.
"Now hold on," the King said. "This really isn't part of
the deal. You can't expect to give everyone..."
Lee said, "I didn't ask to be Emperor, but now I've backed
on to the Jade Throne by mistake it's mine to dispose of as I will. You can't
maintain a stable shape here because you
      RED DUST
      381
can only approximate its codes: but I incorporate those
codes. I'm going to use them to empower the living and the
dead. Nothing will be hidden from anyone: the knowledge
stacks will be transparent. My sister already waits in the
Blessed Isles for the dead; they're free to go there or stay
here. All I'm doing is giving them the knowledge to make
the right choice. All my life !'ve loved listening to your talk
and your music, without knowing that that love was coded
in my Y chromosome. All my life has been shaped by others.
All my life I've been kept from the truth of my life. Call it
revenge, if you like, but I want people to have truth in
theirs."
"Kid," the King of the Cats said, "you can't throw up a
utopia overnight."
Jesus said, "No, he's right. Wei Lee, the power to choose
is all that we can ever give you humans. On your own perhaps
you'll fail and fall, but the alternatives are worse. If we
raise you up you'll be worse than slaves, and we'll be tainted
by ownership. If we destroy you, then your potential will be
lost for ever, and our guilt will haunt us until the end of
time. Because the universe was not made for you, you have
the potential to become something far greater than us. For
that, we will always love you."
"You keep quiet now," the King of the Cats said. "You're
just here to drive."
Jesus's toothy smile shone in the light of his halo. "I dislike
metaphors, but truly I am in the driving seat. You are
the interface, but you are only one of many. You know the
consensus, and know you must be bound by it."
The King adjusted his big square-lensed dark glasses. He
was a lot older and a lot fatter, in a jumpsuit glittering with
rhinestones that was slashed open to his navel. He said, "I
just don't like to see it end like this, in confusion. It isn't
neat."
"It's not an ending," Jesus said. "It's a beginning."
The King of the Cats said, "So you let me do this job my
own way until I reach the end of my string. Then you start
jerking me around. Why should I put up with this?"
      382
      PAJI J. McAuI¥
"Because you're part of a democracy, and none of us are
empowered by noise alone."
The King thought about that. "Noise is my life," he said,
and handed brimming glasses of Thunderbird wine to Miriam
Makepeace Mbele, leaned across and gave one to Lee,
toasted him with a third. "I guess we'll have to trust you,"
he said. "Take care, you hear?"
Lee said to Miriam, "You can stay here, if you want to."
She drank off the wine in one swallow, threw the glass
over her shoulder: it vanished before it hit the ground.
"There's still work for me," she said. "I have to report to
the anarchists, for one thing. I might be back, if they can
find me a body."
The King of the Cats said, "That's another burden for you,
Emperor Wei Lee. The anarchists are energy poor, their gene
pool contaminated and reduced below safe limits, and their
consensus is unravelling. They're a few generations from
barbarism, maybe ten from extinction. That's why the Nexus
agreed to let us work through them; it was their last chance.
You do right by them, you hear?"
'I'll always listen to you."
"Glad to hear it." The King tapped his chauffeur on the
shoulder. "We're out of here, my man."
Jesus stepped on the gas, and the pink Cadillac blurred
into a line of light that stretched and vanished.
The wine had turned to water. Lee drank it anyway, and
went on down the hill, towards his people.
Seventy-nine

'I took Vette three days to reach the top of the mountain.
The night the old people disappeared, and Wei Lee and
.the little girl lab rat went chasing after them, the big
machine had started up by itself. Vette had gone behind a
boulder to pee, and she'd come out to see Redd chasing the
machine down the gully. She ran after them through the
clouds of black dust churned up by the machine, saw Redd
grab hold of the ladder and pull himself up. She ran on until
she could run no further, standing in the track the machine
had smashed through the trees at the mouth of the draw
and sobbing for breath as she watched the machine's lights
dwindle into the starlit darkness.
Vette did not give up. She knew that heroes never gave
up--sometimes they continued their quests beyond death.
For the rest of the night and through the day that followed
she followed the tracks of the machine up the long, lichen-encrusted
slope, jogging at a steady pace, her harpoon slung
at her shoulder. It was like climbing an endless wave of rock.
As she climbed her breath grew labored and her sight
fluttered red with the pounding of her pulse. She climbed
until stars began to shine through the day sky, and the air
was so thin that every effort seemed immense and remote,
as if she had grown to a giant without a giant's strength.
She was lying in a stupor when the limber four-legged
robot with the woman's face floating within its screen found
her. It was carrying a pressure suit, and Vette, who thought

383
      384
      PAUL J. MCAULE¥

that this was a dream, did not resist when she was fastened
into it. She was beyond surprise or fear.
The suit fed Vette thin sweet gruel from a nipple and
sopped up her wastes and recycled her rebreathed air. Its
black skin absorbed the light of the sun and turned her steps
into leaps and bounds. Still, it took her and the robot all
night and most of the day to climb to the top of Tiger Mountain.
She waited through dawn when the mountain trembled
beneath her and vast sheets of light pulsed out above. Mter
the lights were gone, the sky was full of falling stars. To the
southwest a great light climbed the sky, and as it faded the
mountain began to tremble again. Vette saw the world below
the naked mountain slopes vanish under slate-grey rain-clouds.
The flood had come at last. Lee had won, but she
had to find out if he and Redd and the little lab rat were
still alive.
So she and the robot climbed for the rest of the day, until
they reached the lip of the caldera and the ruined city directly
below. Although the world below Tiger Mountain's
slopes was shrouded with clouds, here above the atmosphere
the sun still walked. The towers were broken or fallen
amongst craters lined with shiny glass. Silvery loops of road
slumped in shiny tangles. Domes had melted down to their
rims.
Vette followed the robot down the steep cliffs. Darkness
overtook them before they reached the bottom of the caldera,
and Vette spent the night sleeping fitfully on a narrow
ledge, watched over by the robot. The next day the sun was
vertical by the time they reached the floor of the caldera.
They toiled across a fantastic landscape of collapsed lava
tubes and stubs and snags towards the broken towers. Vette
allowed the robot to lead her through the blasted ruins, the
glow of its face-plate screen and the beam of her suit's helmet
mingling and separating. One tower still held atmospheric
pressure, and once inside Vette took off her helmet,
grateful to feel the random brush of free air touching her
face.
      RED DUST
      385


The robot stalked silently and surely along curving corridors,
and skittered down a turning stair that at last debouched
into a room far beneath the surface of the caldera.
The room was hot, lit by the many colors of flowers.

Three bodies lay in the kaleidoscope light. One had been
dead for years, tangled in wires where it had half fallen from
a couch. Another was of a slim muscular woman with dark
skin and an eyepatch, dried blood streaked from her nose
and ears and one eye.

The third was Wei Lee's. His throat had been cut from ear
to ear. He lay in a sea of dried blood.

Vette cried out, but the robot caught her shoulder, turned
her to show her two children curled in a corner, thumbs in
their mouths, breathing gently and slowly in a deep sleep.
One was a young boy of no more than six or seven, his head
shaven like a Free Yankee's. The other was the lab rat. When
the robot touched her with the delicate metal fingers of a
forelimb, she stirred and woke, blinked at the woman's benign
floating image and said, "Wei Lee?"

Beside her, the boy opened his eyes, but his gaze was as
innocent of self as a newborn baby's.
Eighty

      Tg hey returned to the abandoned town at t,he margin of
      the forest belt that ringed Tiger Mountain s slo es T
      ate of the Last House had been broke,- n ?
7gL he

uUltVII, lnere
was
no sign of Yang Go, or the robots he had commanded, or
of the wild ones, except the remains of their dead. Bones were
strewn across the slope beneath the wails of the Last House;
it was clear that a/though Yang Go had killed most of
the wild ones he had lost the battle. But although the surviving
wild ones had ripped fabrics and overturned furniture,
pissed and shat on the floors and left doors open so that
rain had blown in, the Last House was mostly intact.
Vette
and Chert Yao and the boy made their home there. Vette
and Chen Yao improvised rainproof garments from plastic
sheeting, and foraged in fields where crops sprouted from
long dormant seeds in a muddle of tomatoes and maize and
peppers and sugar bamboo and greenleaf. They laid snares,
smeared sticks with birdlime and set them around bait
of scraps of fat. They gathered up the bones of the wild children
and burned them on a pyre of aromatic juniper wood.
A year passed.
      The
boy sleepwalked through it, never speaking and showing

no sign of comprehension when spoken to. Most of the time
he slept at the hearth of the house, but sometimes Vette
and Chen Yao would return to find him at the mended gates,
clinging to one of the posts and staring up the mountain's
long slope at the cloud cap which hid its summit.

386
      RED DUST
      387
He was infected with a copy of Wei Lee's memories, Chen
Yao said, but not with his essence. Perhaps Wei Lee planned
to return from information space when his task of enlightening
the living and the dead was done, but she did not
think so.
Once a month she used one of the couches to plunge into
information space. She tried to explain the changes to Vette,
the growing transparency of the architecture of the medium.
You could go anywhere, even Heaven. Vette wasn't interested:
she believed that the spirit world was only a mass
delusion. All that mattered was that Wei Lee had brought
the rains.
Chen Yao used the couch to speak with people all over
the world, and with the aspects of the other gods in Xin
Beijing. They told her that rain was general over both hemispheres
of the planet; that snow was falling over the Great
Northern Desert. About ten per cent of the anarchists' ice
bolides had not disintegrated during their skimming passes
through the atmosphere, but had fallen in one piece. A
string of explosive impacts had smashed an irregular chain
of new craters around the equator, and a multiple strike near
the slopes of the Paved Mountain had released the vast fossil
aquifer underlying the Dragon's Back. Water had poured
into the Dust Seas at rates of over a billion litres an hour.
The Dust Seas had turned to swamp, and then to shallow
brine seas. Their artificial ecosystem--the glittering swarms
of phytoplankton and zooplankton, and the slow monstrous
dust rays--was destroyed for ever, and water was still pouring
from the aquifer. And the fullerene viruses released from
the other ice bolides were multiplying at an exponential rate.
They had already formed vast clusters in the deep permafrost,
and outgassing geysers and sumps were developing all
over the high plains, while thin stratospheric layers of chlorofluorocarbons
were beginning to spread out from the
poles.
It was the chaotic spring of a new climatic era.
The fall of the Emperor had brought chaos, too. The Ten
Thousand Years had been overthrown. The Little Bird had
      388
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

been strung upside down from a transmission relay tower
by his former troops when the Army of the People's Mouths
had started to retake the capital in a brief fierce war that
the rains had ended. The Gang of Six had each committed
ritual suicide at the same moment in their separate houses.
The body of Lee's great-grandfather had been killed by the
boy-thing into which his personality had been partially written.
Many others had simply vanished.

And Wei Lee had appeared to everyone who used information
space. Everyone who talked with Chen Yao told her
that Wei Lee had given them the gift of mastering the structures
which held the knowledge of the world. Nothing was
hidden any more.

But Wei Lee did not come to Chen Yao herself until a year
after his apotheosis, on a rare sunny day in early summer.
When she masked herself and lay down on the couch not
the usual perception grid but a person appeared to her, tall
and robed in black, with a hood cast over his face. He took
her hand and then she was standing before the great throne
in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.

The figure cast off the hood, and Chen Yao laughed aloud
when she saw Wei Lee's face. He laughed too, and sat on
the steps beneath the throne so that his face was level with
hers. He told her that he was nearly finished with the living,
that he wanted to go on to the Isles of the Blessed to join
his sister and the myriads of the dead.

Chen Yao wanted to know whether Wei Lee would return
to the real world, where his memories slept safe in the curve
of the boy's skull.

Wei Lee said that he had changed too much to be able to
return. But although poor Number Eighty-Four had only
been infected with partials of Lee's memory, another carried
partials of Lee's own self. It was her choice to let him be
reborn, and meanwhile clades of viruses would keep Number
Eighty-Four forever young.

"Until," Wei Lee said, "the time comes for me to be banished.
I did not seek to become Emperor, Chen Yao, but that
is what I am. I wish to diminish amongst the dead, but it
RED DUST

seems that the living are not done with me. They want an
Emperor, and their will grows stronger every day. The
changes I have made to information space mean that I cannot
hide from them. Nothing can be hidden."

"You don't need anyone to tell you what to do, and you
don't have to listen to anyone, either. I know you never
listened to me."

"I'm not what I was. I have.., multiplied. This aspect is
perhaps the nearest to my human self, but I am thousands,
now. I fear that I'll become what the Thing in Jupiter feared
it would become: a surrogate god, ruler of humanity for all
time. I hope that someone will take that bitter cup from
me." He looked at his hands, clasping hers. "You've grown,
Chert Yao. You'll have young men chasing after you soon

      u h"

      eno g ·
      As for young men, there

      "None of us are what we were. ··

are none that I know of. Vette and me, and Number Eighty-Four,
we live alon .

"As for that, remember that nothing stays the same for
ever." Wei Lee smiled, and told Chen Yao that he had a gift
for her, and laid a prickly chip in her mouth. AS it dissolved
into her, the throne room dissolved around her (although
now she knew where she could find it, now and forever
more) and she was aware of the couch beneath her, the mask
over her eyes and the gloves on her hands, bird-song thrilling
through the open window and Vette rattling pots somewhere
in the house.

That was   the day the robot vanished, it had remained with
them for   that whole year, but as spring had worn into summer
they had   seen less of it each day. After Wei Lee spoke
to Chert   Yao, they never saw it again.

The next day, Chen Yao came running in from the fields.
It was raining. She had seen a band of people toiling up out
of the forest towards the town. Vette ran to the gate and
recognized a banner raised soddenly above the heads of the
approaching people and began to wave and shout. Someone,
the boy, caught her hand. He had lost his clothes again, and
stood naked in the soft cold rain.
390 P^vL J. McAvLE¥

"It's all right," Vette said. "These are my people! These
are the Free Yankee Nation They've come to find me at
last!" '

The boy stared at them, mouth working around his socketed
thumb. He had not spoken in all this time, and stared
with silent incomprehension as nearly naked people, masked
and tattooed, ran up the path to the Last House, laughing
and cheering, and shouting questions at Vette.

His time had not yet come.
Eighty-one


B

ut come it would. One day, five long years after the
rains had begun, a woman would ride a barque down
the Grand Canal to a coastal town where rusty but
still serviceable elevators plunged from the top of a high cliff
to the weltering unchained sea. She was the dear daughter
of the House of Kong, the eldest of the one hundred and
tenth generation of descendants of the Great Sage, and the
essence of the Saviour of the World was coded in fullerene
viruses that had settled in certain implanted circuits in her
nervous system.

A Yankee ghost had brought her a message from another
place. The ghost had come at night, her image burning blue,
and had shown the woman the young boy whose head held
nothing but another's coded memories. The ghost had explained
that it was time that these memories were quickened,
and had told the dear daughter of the House of Kong
what she must do.

And so, in the morning, she had told her husband that
the time to repay her obligation had come at last. She had
packed a small bag, kissed each of her five children in turn,
and set off on her journey.

Mars had changed, but the people of Mars had changed
less than might be imagined. They loved and laughed and
watched heroic operas and wagered on fighting crickets and
cheated and hustled and lied--and sometimes even killed--as
they always had. No dictator, no matter how universal or


391
      392
      PAUL J. MCAULEY

benign, could stop people being people. But the lies were
only little lies, personal lies. Big public lies were no longer
possible because the only system by which they could be
disseminated was now too transparent for lies to slip by undetected.

Nothing important was hidden or could be hidden, or not
for long. In theory everyone could express an opinion on
every decision of the Emperor. Most didn't. The last time
the world had united was when it had decided to send aid
to the anarchists, and that had been a year after the beginning
of the rains. For most it was enough that they could
get on with their lives, enough that they could find the job
they wanted, that there was enough food, a good place to
live, a future for their children.

Still, some knew and cared about the dear daughter of the
House of Kong. A pod of fin escorted her barque on its voyage
down the Grand Canal, their bulging foreheads pregnant
with knowledge, and a few people gathered at the elevator
heads to cheer her as she set out on the last part of her
journey.

Now she stood before the mast of the little barque and
watched the sea's horizon for the first sight of her destination.
The wet salt wind cracked and filled the bellying sail
above her head. It stood fair out of the eye of the south,
driving the little ship across the bitter, muddy seas of Mars
towards the island of Tiger Mountain, where she would find
the lost boy and quicken in him Wei Lee's new beginning
and last end in a way traditional to the conclusion of tales
such as this, with a kiss.