I$ 

Other AvoNova Books by 
Paul J. McAuley 
A 

 ETERNAL LIGHT 
Y 


PAUL J. )4cAUL[Y 
An AvoNova Book 
William Morrow and Company, Inc. 

New York 

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


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Veteran revolutionaries only end upas monsters and ghosts. 

DENG XIAOPING 


One 

M 

ars was dying.
Year after y,
,hard pink skining. Each year, theand spring arrived lab 

In the second yearday of calm spring wsixth of April. The thodanwei suddenly disc.
long winter confinencrickets, heroic operaments for fun and preof a late dust storm,
Lee had no trouble ir 
citizens to clear the 
Dome. 

It was filthy work,
suits. Edging along rhand over hand up litwhich studded one in 
hexagonal panes. Sticling enveloped in a p,
Lee cleared the last w 
face plate clear, hookout to take in the vie 

The King of the 


ear, the summer rains failed and the.'s were stitched only with dry light,interdust storms raged more fiercely,
er than the year before.
of the Silence of the Emperor, the firsteather did not arrive until the forty-asandor so people in the Bitter Watersovered that they were weary of theiraent, their enthusiasms for fighting, and handcrafting fur-trimmed odd>fit.
Despite a seventy per cent chanceContract Agronomist Technician Weirounding up half a dozen volunteer:logged filters of Number Eight Field 

requiring full face masks and sealednetre-wide frame elements. Climbingles of rung staples to find the air ventsevery hundred of the field dome's bigking in the blower's nozzle and becomersonalstorm of red dust. When Wei 
.'nt at the top of the dome, he blew his.d his line to the vent's grid and leanedW,
Cats was playing some down-home I 


 2 
PAUL J. McAuLE¥ 

rock'n'roll in Lee's earpiece; apart from that he was morealone than he'd been all winter. This was his first year atthe Bitter Waters danwei, his second as an itinerant agronomisttechnician. Already he was chafing to move onthrough the emptying landscapes of Mars; if he could he'dnever 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 verywell, but it searched the other world of the common informationspace, not the real world, the world all around him. 

The dome curved away on either side of Lee, facets glitteringagainst the shocking-pink sky. A dozen identicaldomes stood in a grid of drainage canals and tracks. Beyondwere the sours, green-brown patches showing through thethin mantling of red dust, riven by the lightning bolt of thedry riverbed and spreading north towards the lowlands ofthe 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 PavedMountain and the strange ecosystem of the Dust Seas, hitcha ride on a dust skimmer and climb Tiger Mountain... 

Shouts floated up,' no louder than the King's music. Directlybelow, the others were semaphoring at Lee. Theirshadows made small black oblique strokes against the redground. He abseiled all the way down, kicking off lightlyonce, twice against structural struts. He just missed the trestlewhich 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 Leepicked himself up. "Lin Yi is drowning!" 

Field Dome Number Eight grew rice. The canal whichcarried away the overflow from its flooded fields had beenchoked by winter dust storms, forming a slough of deep mudcovered by a thin dry crust on to which Citizen Lin Yi hadventured and broken through. Now he floundered up to hischest in algae-tinted gloop while the others laughed andshouted 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 themwilling to break ranks and lose face; and Lin Yi wouldn't askfor help because he would lose face too. He made a kind ofsobbing grunt and tried to lunge forward, but succeededonly in sinking deeper. His hands plashed uselessly in darkgreen slime; his head was tipped back, his mouth wide open. 

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

Lin Yi threw himself at the line, his head going under theslop even as he grabbed hold with both hands. The linesnapped taut and Lee fell flat on his ass. Some of the watcherslaughed. Lin Yi came back up, eyes rolling white in hismud-caked face, and started to claw along the line in panic.
For every meter he gained, Wei Lee was pulled a metercloser to the mud. The watchers hooted and stamped theirfeet as Lee was dragged feet first towards the canal while atthe other end of the line Lin Yi pulled himself out hand overhand, as neat a demonstration of Newton's third law of motionas anyone could wish. By the time Lin Yi made dry land,
gasping like a future-shocked amphibian and streaked fromhead 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," hesaid. After all, he was a shareholding citizen, and Lee wasjust an itinerant worker. He had rights; Lee had a contract.
The fact that Lee had just saved his life meant that Lin Yihad to regain face by asserting his position. 

Knowing that didn't cool Lee's temper. He clambered tohis feet, smarting in a dozen different places. He pulled offhis face mask, swept his black, greased hair back into its DA,
and mopped his face with the red kerchief he'd knottedaround his neck, the way the King wore one in Charro tohide his branded wound. 


 4 
P^vi. J. McAw¥ 


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

Lin Yi had climbed to his feet, and the first high-pressureburst sent him sprawling. He sputtered and spat and sworeand tried to get up again, and a second burst knocked himon to his back. He began to laugh, paddling upside down inmud and water like an overturned turtle, trying to splashhis fellows. 

"If you can't swim," Lee said, "you should stay out of thewater!" And he lifted the jet so that it rose towards the pinksky in a trembling fountain, glittering in cold sunlight andtorn by wind and falling in fat droplets that darkened thered dust. The men danced beneath it, faces raised to theprecious rain, hands cupped to catch it, laughing at eachother; and Lee laughed too and sent the fountain shootingto 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 menran from it, screeching in mock alarm. 

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

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

Beside Guoquiang, Xiao Bing held on to the harness of adraught bact. Face pale as powdered chalk; white hair; silvercaps over pink irises. With his free hand he thumbed a vialinto the waist pocket of his long jacket and said, "You arean inspiration to us all, with your selfless dedication. Howis 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 buttonedinto a holster at his hip. "We're not here to shovel shit. Thelow-pressure cell shifted. The probability that the storm willhit 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: paddedcotton trousers; a long many-pocketed jacket; a zipperedshirt; knee-high hiking boots. "A good idea to get out, butwe've a better one. And we're good enough to share it withyou." 

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


Two 

T 

he terraced cliffs of the Red Valley rose step by step toa scalloped rim that stood out sharply against the hardpink sky. As the three cadres marched through thesours, a straggling V of geese flew out over the cliffs, honkingeach 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 ofcasual spitefulness, an attribute some gene cutter had forgottento edit out of the camel-derived genome of its kind,
the draft bact took advantage of the slack harness rope totry and snatch at his hair. Lee felt the rope swing out andducked 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 thebact again, to get it moving. 

"Ho! Understand who is the master!" 

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

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

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


 RED DUST 
7 

to pay attention to the King of the Cats and his old-fashionedanarchist propaganda."
"Oh! You know very well I like the historical King, notsome machine floating in Jupiter who thinks it's the King,
reborn all over again. No, I like the real one, the one whowas born in a stable and became a planet-wide media star,
who was exiled to the Moon and returned a hero after leadinga revolution against the tyranny of Colonel Parker, whowas crucified upon a burning cross, and returned as a thousandacolytes who surgically altered themselves to look exactlylike him." 
"And who could raise the dead, and turn water into wine,"
Xiao Bing said.
"I can turn wine into water," Guoquiang said. "The trickis finding the wine."
"I may be dumb," Lee insisted, "but I wouldn't mistakehistorical reality for the construct who jockeys the show."
"But you listen to it, all the same," Guoquiang said. "Acontradiction there, Wei Lee."
"Not at all! I just like the songs he plays. I'm smartenough to know they mean something. Nothing in thoseoperas 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 youslogging through this stuff with us?"
"Oh! I don't mind this." 
For most of the afternoon the three had been picking apath through the marshy saltpans of the sours. Low blackwillows and tenacious soldier grasses grew along the raggedcuts of sandclogged irrigation ditches; slimes and mouldsthrew up wrinkled stinking banks that slumped into sandscrusted with leached iron salts. Every footstep threw up arotten salty stench, and the three cadres walked with theirkerchiefs drawn over nose and mouth. Only the bact seemedunaffected; its black lips drawn back in a perpetual sneer asit padded behind Lee.
But while the others grumbled about the stink of thesours, Lee saw it for what it was: a co-operative ecological 


 8 
PAUL J. MCAULE¥ 


structure which had once forced the Martian desert slowlyto yield to wetland ecology. The roots of black willowsreached deep down into the frozen regolith; and specialstrands in their bark cambium conducted heat to melt and 
mine the permafrost. Soldier grasses wove a net of stolonsthrough the dusty soil, holding it together. Fungi broke thechemical bonds of the thin surface crust of iron oxides, bindgthe iron to more stable forms, releasing the oxygen.
Rainbow slicks on the black mud in the clogged ditches werea 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, feedingon itself, processing red dust into oxygen and water and life-filledmuck. And the whole system crippled by the imbalancewhich was locking three grams of water in the polar icecapsfor every two produced. The battle fading. Crumbs of waterspilled into thirsty sand. The front line where once unre-claimedMartian desert had grudgingly given way to pioneervegetation was now a festering wound circling the danwei'sfifty-kilometre perimeter. 

As the three men moved farther from the danwei, the blackwillows grew smaller. Thickly clumped stands thinned out.
Tussocks of soldier grass had tails of red sand, each miniaturesand dune pointing in the same direction, away from the dan-weiand 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 werepushing through the crusted soil, tipped with transparentcells which focused light down to deeply buried corms. Thebact flared its nostrils hungrily, and Lee had to keep jerkingat its bridle to remind it that it wasn't there to look for 
lunch. A few bees were out, commuting between widespreadpatches of yellow-flowered rock vetch. A patch of frosty soilhad gathered in the lee of two weather-split boulders, and alupin had rooted there, its spread of half a dozen leaves nobigger than Lee's hand but already sending up a spike laden 


 RED DUST 
9 


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

Life. It was delicate and tenacious, mocking the propagandaof 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-warmedrock and munched dried fish. The bact nibbled at 
foliose lichens, tearing them from overhangs with its mobilelips. Xiao Bing ranged to and fro, too excited to keep still.
He kept taking delicate snorts from his little tube, jolts ofmemory enhancer that would let him fix every detail. Hehad taken the pledge to die out of this world into the next,
and was remembering details for the niche he was creatingin Heaven, the part of information space that belonged tothe elective dead. Lee had experienced his design: a desertgarden full of reflecting pools and strange half-melted machineryunder a starry sky where five moons swung by. 

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

Lee asked what it looked like, and Xiao Bing said, "Blackglossy leaves in a big rosette, a fat flower spike covered with,
I don't know, what looks like silver dusting. The spike shinesso 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'sspecies. It helped melt the polar caps back when. Very commonabove three kilometers, I suppose what you have thereis a remnant from the early days." 

Guoquiang yawned. "Perhaps it is coming back downfrom the mountains. The winters are colder than they oncewere." 

"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 thelong winter or which like the ice mouse had lain neitherdead nor alive, blood vessels and body cavity filled with icecrystals minutely shaped by antifreeze peptides, were nowall alive alive-o. Running and feeding and breeding all unawaresof the humans who had brought them here. Miceand men: men and the Ten Thousand Years. 
The Ten Thousand Years and the conchies. 
Perhaps the conchie propaganda was right, perhaps theGolden Path was the only way, the inevitable next step inthe evolution of intelligence. Many, like Xiao Bing, were eagerto embrace it, pledging early deaths in exchange for theprivilege of designing their own private niche in the GoldenIsles of Heaven that lay beyond the barrier in informationspace. But Lee did not understand the conchie ideologywhich insisted that Mars must return to its original state,
that after all these years the terraforming project should beallowed to fail. If the Earth's consensus was as powerful anally as the Ten Thousand Years claimed it to be, why was it afraid of theliving? For why else would it want to gather allthat lived into information space?
Guoquiang had fallen asleep while Lee had been thinkingon this. Xiao Bing came over and rummaged through hispockets and at last came up with a pair of goggles. "It's yourlast chance to check on the librarian," he said. "When weget over the rim the reception will go."
Lee took the goggles. "I checked this morning." "It's a good program. It'llfind your parents."
"Thank you, Xiao Bing."
Xiao Bing bowed. "It was fun to make. But like all intelligence-mimickingprograms, it needs positive reinforcement.
It needs encouragement. I'm going to remembersome more desert before we start up off again," he added,
and wandered away.
Lee watched Xiao Bing ramble about for a while. Then hesnapped on the goggles, and information space scrolled upeven as he adjusted earpiece and patch microphone. The 


 RED DUST 
11 


librarian turned to him, a massive book clasped across hischest. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The librarian put his hands together, fingertip steepledagainst fingertip. 

And suddenly a worm raced at Lee down an infinite corridorbetween stacks of books. Although it moved at tremendousspeed it also seemed to writhe about a single fixedpoint, now showing the red serrated plates along its back,
now its pale belly. Its golden eyes were huge under archedbrows; its mouth gaped amongst bristles and kept on gaping,
a vast yawning cave ringed by wet razor-sharp ridges. Leesaw 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 travelledon until I reached this place, and now I will try and penetratethe data files. They are very old, as you see."
"Ten days?" Lee had accessed the librarian only thatmorning.
"Time is not the same for us," the librarian said. "Master,
you have given me a difficult task, and I have travelled longand hard roads to try and fulfil it. I wonder if I might askone question of you?"
"I would be honored." 
"Master, what will you do when I find out what happenedto your parents?"
"Once you have found out where they are, I will go tothem, of course! My great-grandfather knows about thembut would never tell me and so I swore that I would find 
them for myself. He said it was to protect me from taint ofmy parents' Sky Roader sympathies..."
"Perhaps, Master, he had other reasons. But if you defyyour great-grandfather, who is a powerful man, surely youwould become an outcast. What then? I ask only because itis often the case that the child's personality is a reflectionof its parents. By knowing you better, I may hasten in mytask." 
Lee's patience had worn thin. "My great-grandfather isone of the Ten Thousand Years, it's true, but I am only anagro-tech. What have I to lose? You find them! That's all Iask! After that, you won't have to worry about me. Who cansay what the future holds?"
"Who indeed, Master?" The librarian bowed again, andadded, "Someone wishes to speak with you."
When Lee stripped off the goggles Guoquiang said, "Youwoke me up with your shouting. What were you doing? It'sno 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." Guoquianggrinned. "Now you've had a winter here you'll know why." 

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

Guoquiang said, "Exogamy is a strong drive. Wei Leeshouldn'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 andthen you roll. And then you and Li Mei start paying childtax." 

Lee blushed, and Guoquiang laughed. "There are no secretsamongst 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 upto the horizon line, where a square boulder big and blackas a locomotive jutted against the pink sky. 

They were climbing a collapsed cliff towards the first terraceof the ancient river valley. Three billion years ago a vastflood had carved the Red Valley, cutting a channel a kilometerdeep and three kilometers wide at the point where itentered the lowlands of the Plain of Gold. In the past fewcenturies the warming of the world had restarted the releaseof water from aquifers in the badlands, but only enough tocreate a sluggish trickle, white with salts, that dried outcompletely in winter. Now it was spring, but the alkalineriver which had given the Bitter Waters danwei its namehad not yet started to run. A bad omen. 

Halfway up the slope, the cadres turned as one and sawthe settlement framed by the red walls of the valley, smalland far. Domes glittered in the brilliant sunlight. Steppedcliffs 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 whenthey all reached the top and turned they saw far downhill adrifting red sheet that twisted into three ropes pointing tothe 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 pineforest, dark green rhododendrons. Grass pastures either sideof a wide clear river, a waterfall plunging into a foamingpool. Water, that was all that was needed: the water lockedin the poles and in the vast buried permafrost reservoirsuntapped by the world's failed warming. It could still happen.
It was not too late. 

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

Lee sighed. He said, "I was brought up to believe that thetask will be completed, but that does not mean that it willcome true." He had almost forgotten the angry uncertaintythat the librarian's questions had tapped. How little his ownfate 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 youmust know that. Your great-grandfather can believe what hewants. That is the privilege of the Ten Thousand Years. Butyou... 

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

"Better not to talk about it," Guoquiang said. "In a hundredyears perhaps we will all be Sky Roaders singing thesongs 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 committedto the Golden Path. And so must you be, even as anemployee."
Lee said, "Perhaps. But I can still speak of these mattersamongst friends, eh?"
Guoquiang said, "Mars is for the Martians. I don't care forthe conchies, but I have no special interest in the anarchistseither. Keep them all out, I say."
Xiao Bing, who was always anxious to stop argumentsdeveloping, 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 finishthe making. Mars for the Martians, Guoquiang. So perhapswe agree after all."
Guoquiang said, "That's over. We live as we must. At leastEarth helps us defend ourselves from anarchists who wouldturn 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 notneed to prove what we can do. Only what we cannot."
Xiao Bing laughed. Silver-capped eyes flashed in his thinwhite face. "Cheer up, Wei Lee," he said. "Maybe it will rainevery day, and we will become frogs. I prefer the desert! Iwill always remember it this way." He took a dramatic sniffof enhancer. "I'll remember all of us this way! Dusty andsweaty and happy! We don't need this world: the Emperorrules a better one on the far side of death." 
Lee and Guoquiang exchanged looks. It was bad taste toremind others of one's elective death. Guoquiang brisklyconsulted 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 froma clump of luscious prickly pear, and beaten its flanks anddodged a sullen kick, the two cadres were almost out ofsight. Lee followed, wishing that he could keep his mouthshut, not argue the King's undoubted greatness, not deni 


 16 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


grate the Thousand Year Plan of the Golden Path. Histhoughts were like water stored in the porous regolith; raisethe temperature and they flooded out under an irresistiblepressure, causing chaos and collapse.
But he couldn't stay unhappy for long, not when he wasout in the world again. Leading the contrary bact, he sangin his high, cracked tenor songs from his all-time number-onefavorite movie--the immortal Spinout--and listened forthe echoes from the rosy cliff that rose ahead, where Guoquiangand Xiao Bing were toiling up the narrow path thatclung to its sheer face.
By the time Lee had hauled the bact to the top, the othershad already started to make camp in the remains.of an ancientcrater, a weathered arc of upturned strata fretted withhorizontal crevices. It was a site traditionally used by huntingexpeditions from Bitter Waters. Guoquiang was sweepingout the largest crevice, which was no more than a couple ofmeters high; right in front of it, Xiao Bing was excavatingfrom 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 emergedin a haze of red, rubbing his hair, spitting and spluttering. "I thought Iwould cook tonight," he said to Lee, and Leesmiled and helped him rummage through the packages forthe iron pot and the supplies.
Guoquiang cooked what he always cooked, a sort of soupof mushrooms thickened with rice flour and sharpened withspring onions and chili pods, and little pancakes with whichto eat it. The three ate in companionable silence as Marsturned his face from the sun. Westward, the level land ranaway towards the horizon. A few twisted Joshua trees madearthritic silhouettes against red dust that glowed like heatediron in the level light. As the horizon climbed above thesun's pinpoint disc there was a brief flash of blue, a thinring that ran around half the horizon. Xiao Bing stood andsaluted the double star of Earth and its Moon, now suddenlyvisible. A moment later they too had set. 


Three 

L 
ee and Xiao Bing were dozing near the dying fire whenGuoquiang came back. He'd gone off to scatter pheromone-baitedtraps for kit fox and red mongoose; nowhe slithered down the craggy slope of the crater rim withan urgent clatter.
"Ku li," he whispered fiercely, one hand on Lee's shoulder,
the other on Xiao Bing's. Firelight struck his face underhis chin, making his eyes crescents of shadow. "I have seentracks, 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. Sparkswhirled high and Guoquiang groaned with frustration andkicked harder: more sparks flew.
"If there are ku li," Lee said, "now they will surely knowwhere we are. Wait, don't..."
But Guoquiang snatched the big water bag from Lee'sgrasp, upended it over the fire's scattered embers. There wasa hiss and a smell of hot mud: then they were in darkness.
"That," Xiao Bing remarked, "was most of the water wehave." 
Guoquiang said from out of the darkness, "Ku li, I swearit. Tracks of three different horses." 
Lee said, "Cowboys, then. I've often seen them; never oneof 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 stillnessof the desert night.
"I thought they had been beaten back to the polarmarshes 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 atrocitiesthe ku li insurgents were rumoured to perform on theirprisoners being performed on him.
"Even I do not believe all the boasts of the loyal andstrong Army of the People's Mouths," Guoquiang said in ahoarse whisper. "Listen! What was that?"
Lee heard the rustle, and smiled into the darkness. Hecould 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 themeasily."
There was a silence, and then Xiao Bing whispered, "Theymuffle the hoofs with rags." 


Four 

L 

ee took first watch. He perched on a sheaf of frost-shatteredrock at the crater's rim, a quilted blanketwrapped around his shoulders, motion sensor and infraredscope and pistol to hand, radio plugged into his ear. He wastoo far from Bitter Waters to access the librarian. His mother 
and his father, out there somewhere. He would not believe thatthey were dead. Exiled, yes. In penal labor gangs almost certainly.
One of his childhood fantasies had been that they hadjoined the ku li, that one day they would return and scale thehigh walls of Master Qing's Academy of Mental Cultivation andtake 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 seentracks, but they could have been made any time since thelast storm. And most likely they had been made by cowboyssearching for their winter-scattered herds: this was the edgeof the vast ranges where half-wild yak and dzo grazed. 

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

19 


 20 
PAUL J. McAULEV 


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

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

"Coming down to y'all from way way way on high, I'mgonna lay some righteous country soul on you for a fewhours now. That's right, I'm gonna feed you some richMemphis stew. Here we go with the Mar-Keys and 'LastNight'..." 

No long sermons tonight. Lee lay back luxuriously, sweetancient harmony in his ears, looking up at the ancient lightof the stars. An act of rebellion in itself, for anywhere beyondthe atmosphere was the territory of the enemy. The starswere everywhere, hard and bright and many coloured. Thefaint haze of the asteroid belt was diagonally bisected by theMilky Way's river of light. There was Panic's mottled fleck,
falling backwards across the sky; Fear wouldn't rise for anotherhour. 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 oneside. The tiny repeater satellites which relayed the King'stwenty-four-and-a-half-hour-a-day rock'n'roll station wereinvisibly closer to hand, reproducing faster than they couldbe shot down from their tangled orbits, a braid of musicgirdling the world... 

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

Music in his ears, Lee watched the sky for a long time, solong that he couldn't quite tell when he realised that theoccasional streaks of light that slashed the starscape weren'tmeteorites. 


 RED DUST 

21 
They were coming out of the east, radiating from a singlepoint halfway to zenith, flashing at regular intervals spacedabout a hundred heartbeats apart. Most scratched a long lineof light high above Lee's head, white fading towards redfollowed after a space of silence by a faint drawn-out rumble.
But more and more frequently the streaks terminated prematurelyand silently, inflating into blurred hazes and thenslowly fading.
Craft of the anarchists, attempting to penetrate the defences.
The first wave falling fast enough to reach the atmospherebefore they were targeted by the X-ray lasercannon satellites controlled by the loyal cadres of the TigerMountain defense systems. Later arrivals would be vaporisedfurther out, before they hit atmosphere. He was watching abattle in sub-orbital space.
Points of light were moving counter to the general direction,
slowly drifting west to east. A violet line rose frombelow 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 standingthere. He said, "So many of them."
"Robots," said Guoquiang, who took a keen interest insuch matters. "Radar-dense frames with single-shot thrusters,
probably from some little nickel-iron asteroid made overby fullerene viruses. The X-ray defenses destroy the anarchistsbefore they have more than grazed the atmosphere.
They are more alert than you, Wei Lee. Take that radio outof your ear! If I was a leu li bandit I could have cut yourthroat." 
"How fortunate that you are only Guoquiang."
"Perhaps we should build machines to take us out to thelair of the degenerate anarchists," Guoquiang said. His facewas a white smear by Jupiter light. Barefoot, he wore onlya shirt and loose trousers, didn't seem to notice the freezing 


 22 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


wind that tugged at the blanket Lee clutched around hisshoulders. "They breed out there like sandflies To destroya 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. Itwill not be taking the Sky Road to build machines with attackcapability and destroy the anarchist running dogs whoinfest the asteroids." 

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

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

"Our persistence is our strength," Lee said. 

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

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

"Some of them still try and trade with us, of course. Andcertainly 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 theku li have little to offer." 

"They promise the future, yours and mine and the wholeworld's. It is not theirs to promise, of course, but I supposethat's beside the point." 

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

"The Ten Thousand Years of course. Because they rule in the name of theEmperor, 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 thefuture 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 longtrack. It glowed white-hot, and tongues of flame cascaded inits wake. Lee and Guoquiang threw themselves to theground as the thing burned overhead. Then silence. By Jupiter'slight, Lee saw Xiao Bing clambering towards themalong the eroded ridge of the crater rim. 

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

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

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

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

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


Five 

T 

hey set out at dawn, heading south. The purple skywas crossed from horizon to horizon with ropes of lividorange, flaws in the jetstream that heralded a latestorm. Two days off, Guoquiang said, but Lee was not soconfident. 

Icy gusts whipped knee-high flurries of dust slantwiseacross the sloping land. Now and then above the wind whinecame the distant but distinct thud thud thud of culvers. Lee,
Guoquiang and Xiao Bing were not the only ones searchingfor the crashed spacecraft, but the intermittent noise of theflying machines had faded northwards by the time the threefriends found the first aluminum streamers. 

Knotted bunches of shiny tassels were caught amongstslabs of red rock or spiky clumps of cactus. Their glitteringribbons blew high in the windy air. It was chaff, designed toconfuse the sensors which directed the X-ray laser cannon.
The further south the cadres travelled, the more streamersthere were. It was like a trail from one of the old tales, XiaoBing 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 evenas we ride. No one has ever captured an intact anarchistdrone, 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 


 RED DUST 
25 


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

Lee slipped on goggles and tied his red kerchief over noseand mouth. Overhead the sun had blurred to a grainy glarein the blowing dust, dim as evening. Dust filtered throughthe slipseals of Lee's boots and clothing, and mixed with hissweat to form a gritty slime that uncomfortably lubricatedarmpits and crotch. Xiao Bing lurched past, his shape halferased by red haze, muttering, "I'm not remembering this.
I'm not remembering this." 

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

Guoquiang saw it first; Lee and Xiao Bing were walkingbent over by the wind, heads tucked down. Their leader letout a whoop and when they looked up he pointed dramaticallyto where a white shape rose and fell some way aheadin the murk. 

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

They set off again, moving quickly now. Guoquiang haddrawn his pistol and given Xiao Bing his hunting rifle. Leesupposed that he would have to use rocks as weapons againstthe ku li, or set the bact on them. Fear was a fine tremorhe 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 heand the others leaped and ran through blowing curtains of 


 26 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


red dust and bounded up a steep rise that was notched atits crest by a blackened scar.
A raw, deep grove stretched away down the gentle reverseslope, fading into the red haze. Shapes moved slowly andponderously in the murk down there, like carp at the bottomof a breeder pond.
Guoquiang forced the others to lie down. The shapes werethe horses of the ku li, he said, and then he swore that hesaw a man moving amongst them. Lee saw no such thing,
but Guoquiang was up on one knee. He aimed his pistoldown the slope and fired: the narrow beam was diffused bythe dust into a violent glare that momentarily filled the littlevalley from edge to edge.
Something screamed, high and inhuman. Guoquiang firedagain. He was on his feet now. Lee jumped up, planning topull him down, but then Guoquiang was running, chargingdownslope with Xiao Bing right behind him. Lee ran too;
he had seen that the shadows in the dust had vanished, andwas suddenly scared that he would be ridden down by ku li bandits if he stayedon the ridge.
Lee lost the other two in swirling dust, then saw shadowsrunning back towards him. He had a moment to realise thatthe shadows were too big to be human, and then the animalswere upon him, bellowing with fear as they scrambled upthe slope.
Lee dodged a black-tipped horn, its span wide as his outstretchedarms, and something struck him from behind. Hetumbled through dust and flying rocks, landed hard and coveredhis head with his hands, curled into a ball. He couldn'tmake himself small enough. A hoof slammed down centimetersfrom iis face; he felt rather than saw one of the hugebeasts gather itself and leap over him.
Then there was only wind and dust. Lee uncurled andpicked himself up, tested one leg and then the other. Down-slope,
Guoquiang and Xiao Bing were standing over aslumped shape. It wasn't a man, or even a horse, but a long-hornedshaggy-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 knifeand slit its throat: the gush of hot blood splashed his boots. 

"You're bleeding," Xiao Bing said. He cupped Lee's facewith one hand, lifted a corner of Lee's kerchief and dabbedat his wounds. Lee saw his face reflected in the silver capsover Xiao Bing's pupils; there was a long shallow gash onhis 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 saidimpatiently. 

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

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

The reflections of the three cadres swam up in the mirror-smoothsilver skin, distorted by the flare of its curves. Asection had flipped off to reveal a cockpit, snug as a holster.
Dry foam shrunken on the contoured couch was alreadysilted with dust. A little panel of controls winked and blinkedwith indicator lights, labelled not with neat ideograms butmarks 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 smearedon the spacecraft's mirrored hull. But any footprints hadbeen smothered by dust or trampled by panicked yaks orblown away on the wind. The three cast around for almostan hour, spiraling away from the wrecked craft across thefloor of the ancient crater, and found nothing. 

Lee made his way back through whirling dust to the outcropand 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 ofwhat she saw: three inscrutable masked faces, peering overa lip of rock. 

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

Lee was struck with sudden foreboding. He said, "I don'tthink we should do this." 

Guoquiang took no notice. He scraped paste from the pilot'ssilver-filmed face, then drew his pistol and told XiaoBing 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 radiowill 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 deepin paste, pulled her into a sitting position, put his two fistsin the V below her ribcage, jerked. 

The pilot coughed out about a litre of white fluid, drew ashuddering breath. Her face was shiny black, with a bubbleof 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'tremember where. She looked back at Lee, and when shespoke it was so unbelievable that Lee didn't at first registerits meaning. For she had spoken in the Common Language,
a weak unravelling whisper almost lost to the howl of thewind. 

"So you've found me." 

Lee dropped to his knees at the edge of the crevice andbent close to her, but she suddenly slumped back againstGuoquiang, 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 carryher." 
"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 generatedthe paste."
Guoquiang sneered. "Of course, Wei Lee, you are anexpert in the ways of the Sky Road."
Lee said, "She didn't come up here to die. She's expectinghelp."
Xiao Bing said, "The ku li. I can't die, Guoquiang, notyet."
"Then we'd better hurry," Guoquiang said. He handedXiao Bing his pistol and got his hands under the pilot'sshoulders, but when he tried to pull her to her feet, sheshuddered and squirmed like a landed fish.
Lee said, "Leave her alone, you fool." Xiao Bing clutchedat his arm. The pilot said something, a hoarse whisper. Guoquiangbent to catch her words. 
The pilot smiled, and spat blood into his face.
Guoquiang swore and kicked at her, and Lee threw anarmlock around his neck and heaved. He had wrestled him 
halfway out of the crevice before Guoquiang managed to jama hard elbow under his ribcage. Lee sat down hard. A momentlater Guoquiang was straddling his chest and yellingin his face, calling him a filthy communistic Sky Roadertraitor, while Xiao Bing hopped around in an agony of nervesand pleaded for them both to stop.
And above everything was a growing roar, louder than theroaring in Lee's head. Dust suddenly blew in every directionat once; a shadow crossed the sun. Guoquiang looked up; sodid Lee. The black belly of a culver was falling towards them.
The Army of the People's Mouths had found the crashedspacecraft at last. 


Six 

A 

n area of low pressure had swung in from the north-est.
It displaced the constant winds from the Greatalley that usually dominated weather systems in theregion, and funnelled freezing air from the dry northernplains, settling in for what the people of the Bitter Watersdanwei called a Ten Day Blow. 

The culvers of the Army of the People's Mouths weregrounded by dust. The troops were stabled in the danwei'shalf-derelict Number Three Recreation Hall; the anarchistpilot was incarcerated in the gaol's only cell, where she wasundergoing treatment for her injuries. No one in the danweior the army's search party was of sufficient rank to interrogateher, so she had to be kept alive until the storm blewitself out and she could be flown to the capital. 

Meanwhile, wind drove billowing sheets of dust across thewide fields of rugged dwarf wheat and around the domesover the rice fields. Dust silted the irrigation canals, turnedday 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 andaccommodation modules was rationed to three hours in the 
evening. 

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


 32 
PAUL J. McAULEY 


sheets, ground between the teeth with every mouthful offood. 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. Thevoice of the King of the Cats sounded faint and far behinda swirling squall of static. The King was preaching, somethingabout the power of rock'n'roll burning through theuniverse at the speed of light or of life. What with the staticand Xiao Bing's nervous prattle, Wei Lee could only makeout snatches of the King's sermon. 

The two cadres were walking along one of the runnelsthat connected the danwei's modules. It was night. Beyondthe tunnel's transparent plastic walls dust ceaselessly pouredand whirled past, dim masses vaguely visible in the feeblestrip lighting either side of the walkway. It gave Wei Lee astrange detached feeling to be safe inside a sleeve of warmstale air while the storm's rage was held in check by a centimeterwidth of plastic. 

Change is coming at forty-five revolutions a minute, theKing said in Lee's ear. Or perhaps it was evolutions; staticrattled across the King's words, and at the same momentXiao Bing said everything was changed now, that Guoquianghad 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." Aswould he: he had already been dismissed, for bringing disgraceto the danwei. Guoquiang's father, a major shareholder,
had been chairman of the special session of thecouncil. It had been over in five minutes. Lee's humiliation 
would linger as long as the storm and then he would begone, just as he'd dreamed two days ago on top of NumberEight Field Dome. Beware of wishes, he thought, you mayget what you want. 

"You're bitter, but you've every right after Li Mci denouncedyou 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 travela thousand kilometers to escape his influence. I see him forwhat he is, Wei Lee. I do not wish to become like him. It isa pivotal moment in my life. I have you to thank for it."
Lee saw that Guoquiang was very drunk--perhaps he hadbeen drinking all day. He said, "What will you do in thecapital? Rent your brain for information collation? Join up?
Those are the two most popular options for young peoplefresh from the country."
Guoquiang said, "We will seize the moment, when itcomes. Perhaps it will be necessary to join the defenseforces. Our pilot may be the first of an invasion force."
Xiao Bing said, "We can catch a lift with the Army of thePeople's Mouths when it takes the anarchist away. A surprisinglysmall bribe goes a long way with the ordinary soldiers.''
Lee started to comb his quiff, using the black water of thepool for a mirror. His hair kept losing its carefully sculptedshape because settling dust absorbed the grease. He said,
"Your plans are so well made, I'm flattered you wish to includeme. 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 morebrandy. Drink up! Drink to our future!" 


Seven 
T 

hat night Lee lay awake long past midnight, muzzywith brandy fumes, mind spinning over and aroundwithout purpose, unable to riddle his way out of theface trap Guoquiang had so cunningly prepared. He listenedto the King's broadcast for a while, but could hear only oneword in ten, then called up one of the King's movies on hisportable player, sat watching with the sound turned down(he knew all the dialogue and all the songs) and with hishome-made solid-body electric guitar in his lap. The powerwas 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 thesea fascinated Lee as much as the King, and he always likedthe way in which it was obvious the King never appeared inany exterior shots. A double ambled down a street in hisplace, only seen from the back but still unconvincing, orwas seen in long shot lounging on the beach with UrsulaAndress while the King appeared with her in close-up understudio lights. The King by then so famous that women wouldtear him apart if he ever appeared in public, as they had tornapart his corpse after his execution, singing his songs as theycarried his head away (and in legend his head sang too, butthat was legend--in reality his head was preserved in theShrine of the Land of Grace, and then lost or stolen). 

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


 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 crowdeddining hall used by the danwei's maintenance workers.
But even the tenders of the half-lifers avoided talkingto Wei Lee. Disgrace was easy to catch. Alone at one end ofthe long table, Lee ate quickly, scooping up greasy noodlesand vegetable pancake with his head ducked low to his bowl.
Conversation chattered all around, mostly about the half-liferwhich, that shift, had died before passing fully intoHeaven. Lee had seen it happen, the pale emaciated bodysuddenly jerking slantwise on its couch like a dropped puppetwhile 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 ortwo tenders made warding signs at Lee, as if he were toblame. 

Lee didn't notice. The King of the Cats cracklingly whisperedin his ear, putting him at one remove from everyonein the dining hall. He'd been listening all day. The radio wasnot really allowed on shift, but no one dared raise a voiceto forbid it, because that would bring them inside the circleof the black light of Lee's sin. 

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


 42 

PAUL J. MCAULEY 
the crowd around the recycling bins, and he felt somethingthrust into his hand. 
It was a scrap of paper. It burned in Lee's hand all theway back to the brightly lit solitude of his room, where atlast he dared look at it. A terse message, telling him to beat the transport-pool stables at twenty hundred. It was tenminutes to, and he was supposed to meet Guoquiang at thesame time. Lee made his choice and ran for the door. After 
all, it was just the sort of impulsive thing the King wouldhave done. 

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

racks of lights were turned to yellow twilight as with quickening 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 gripping thighs. He'd been no more than five, but he still remembered commands and the positions of sensitive nerve 

clusters. He spoke a word, and the warhorse stopped its pacing 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 brassstars of a Colonel on his green shoulder flash, and his immaculatelypolished boots. He said, "You are nervous, CitizenWei Lee. But have no fear, for I work for your esteemedancestor. Allow me to demonstrate." 

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

son." 


Nine 

A 

fter Wei Lee's parents had disappeared and he had beengiven the protection of Great-grandfather Wei, he hadbeen taken from Master Qing's Academy of MentalCultivation to the Great House to be interviewed on the first 
day of each month. Lee's great-grandfather had never appearedin the flesh--only his doctors and attendants sawhim. Rather, he had visited through an eidolon, although tomaintain the fiction that image was reality, Lee had alwaysfollowed instructions to wait at a certain place in the gardensof the Great House, or in a certain room, and after a spanof waiting, his ancestor would greet him, and Lee wouldturn and see him, and the interview would begin. Sometimesit lasted only a minute, and sometimes the shadows turnedand lengthened across the hedged lawn, or the little roomwith the painted walls, as they marked out the hours whileLee waited. 

So Lee turned now, and saw the eidolon of Great-grandfatherWei standing beside the stall of the genet, whothrust 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 roomto another, except that this was a room of the Great House,
the one with wooden panels fretted with scenes of the mountainsof old Earth, and the floor of black tiles. 

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


 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. Guoquiangand Xiao Bing were still waiting for Lee at the caf inNumber One Recreation Hall, amidst the dusty cherrytrees and crowds and opera music. Lee explained what hadjust happened (although he did not mention the precise taskhis great-grandfather wished him to perform), and what heneeded. 

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

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

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

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

Lee grinned, told the two cadres to drink up. He had decidedto get rid of the scrip he had accumulated. His salarycredits could be forwarded (if Guoquiang's father didn't stopit), but Bitter Waters's scrip was useless everywhere buthere. He bought more rice beer and cones of fried shrimpat one of the barrows scattered about the arena of shabbygrass. He had already drunk three or four draughts with thetwo cadres as he explained his predicament and felt a fine 


 RED DUST 

49 
floating cheerfulness. Tomorrow and yesterday no longermattered. 
As they walked on, Lee explained to Guoquiang and XiaoBing that it was easier than they thought, told them how togo about it, told them about the idea that had sprung fullyformed as he'd walked between the steel-barred stalls with 
his great-grandfather's agent, the Colonel of the Army of thePeople's Mouths. People glanced at him as they went past,
quick stabs of distaste. As he talked, Lee smiled back at thepassers-by, even bowed once or twice, until Guoquiang toldhim to stop being a fool in front of half the danwei.
Even this late in the evening the place was crowded. Withpower off in the accommodation modules, it seemed thatmost of the living population of the danwei was out andabout. They walked in pairs or family groups beneath thecherry trees, over threadbare lawns. Hedges and arbors conspiredwith holographic projections to suggest continuedvistas running out under a blue, sunlit sky.
Fighting-cricket fanciers crowded around breeders andtheir enamel pots, each with a cricket inside and the priceon top of the lid. As well as crickets, the breeders sold bamboocricket-ticklers, cricket-lore data bases, feeding straws.
In a transparent steep-sided fighting pot, two Five-star Generalcrickets shrilled at each other, black wings spread. Theirgenomes had been extensively spliced and diced, and thejaws in their massive heads were so big that they could onlyeat pap from a straw; their muscular hind legs were sheathedin prickly armour and terminated in hooked claws. Betswere noisily laid amongst the fanciers who crowded roundthe big pot. The owners tickled their crickets' antennae untilthey locked in combat with a blur of legs and wings, watchedby intent fanciers until one was pumping ichor from a half-severedhead. Its owner picked it out of the pot in disgustand ground it under his sandal while around him bets werepaid off in a flurry of scrip.
Beyond the fighting-cricket crowd, a wall was showing theaction of the heroic opera whose music was playing over thepublic address system. Close-ups of white faces under lac 


 50 
PAUL J. McAULEY 


quered hairstyles intercut with panoramas of the half-dozenprincipals scattered across a wide black stage with thechorus in the background. It was an opera about the lastdays of the Middle Kingdom on Earth: a model entrepreneurialfamily was trying to regain their daughter from thesocialist 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 thefamily's microchip growing tanks to buy arms for the libertarianmercenaries led by the girl with whom he had fallenin love. Every ten minutes the music was interrupted bycommercials for products or services not available in thedanwei: this was a tape bought in a cheap lot from somebackstreet operation, and no one had bothered to edit it.
The action on the screen carried on regardless of whethermusic or commercials were playing, which lent a surreal airto the proceedings, rather like one of the King's salvagedmovies. 

Neither the opera nor the murmur of the people in thepark was louder than the whine of the storm. A fine hazesilted the air: it stung the nose and left a taste of iron, ofblood, in the mouth. As he talked, Lee took mouthful aftermouthful 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 hadfinished. 

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 turnto be caught in a face trap. He had promised to stand byWei Lee, and now he had been asked this favor he had nochoice. 

Xiao Bing said, "What will you do, Wei Lee? Turn leu li?"
"They'll hunt you down," Guoquiang said. "Better todrink your Bitter Waters's bitter water, Lee. The storm willdie, and we can go before the Army of the People's Mouthscome 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. Asever, he was calm and imperturbable, the hood of hisblack silk robe cast over the face that was a mirror of Lee's 
own. 

"What are you doing here?" Lee was naked, and was awarehe was dreaming with the floating detachment that dreamsbring. "I can't find you, and all the time you've been hidingin 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 capacityin the danwei's net. It made time slow for me; I could nolonger steal what I needed. Still, it meant that I shared whatthey were doing. That is why I know that you are in danger,
Master." 

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

"The anarchist pilot is dangerous, Master. She has placedthe 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 penetratedthe net. I have seen her here," the librarian said.
"She was reading a book three corridors away. I came upon 


 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 

ee squinted in sudden light. His little room wascrowded. Three men, two ordinary soldiers and theColonel, looked down at him. The soldiers grabbedLee's arms and sat him up. In the confusion, someoneknocked the solid-body guitar from the peg on which ithung. Lee started to protest, and the Colonel told him thatit was as well he was his great-grandfather's son before jabbingsomething into his arm. 

The benign fog of sleep and beer vanished instantly; butalthough Lee's head was clear, he kept stumbling as he wasmarched down the corridor. He was still naked, but no oneseemed 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 maskwith bulbous goggles so he wouldn't choke in the dust-filledgales. The technician explained that his charge--he meant theanarchist pilot--would need minimal maintenance. She wasanaesthetised. All Lee would have to do was check her intravenous 
dripfeeds and change the filter on her oxygenator everytwelve hours. 

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

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


 56 
PAUL J. McAULEY 


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

The Colonel had pulled on coveralls and a filter mask. Heled Lee through the sand-trap door--pushing through hundredsof flexible but heavy interleaved plastic strips--intohowling night lit by lamps whose light was bloodily blurredby whirling dust. Dawn made a bloody thumbprint abovethe huddled domes and tubes and sheds of the danwei. 

Wind buffeted and snatched at Lee, roared past andscreamed up the curve of the dome behind him. The Colonelcaught his arm and hauled him a dozen paces to where adraft bact stood amidst the whirling dust, eyes sealed bythickly lashed lids. It was yoked to a trailer which carried apod of milky plastic. The trailer's two mesh wheels were ashigh as Lee's shoulder. Lee could dimly make out a curledshape suspended by tubes and wires in bubbling amnioticfluid inside the pod. 

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

One thing Lee wasn't going to do was go south, but it tooka few minutes to convince the bact to change direction. Bythe time they were headed towards the field domes, Lee wassweating inside his suit. Anxiety and the anti-alcohol shothad dried his mouth, and he could feel his blood poundingin his head. His chest hurt with the effort of straining airthrough 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 hadto guide him were bioluminescent markers planted on oneside of the dust-buried road, a line of tall green-glowingpoles rising out of whirling darkness. By their spectral lighthe 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 Leehad to run back and heave it out. The fourth or fifth time 
it happened he thought he saw the anarchist pilot movinginside 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 plasticso that it deformed upwards. It didn't break but stretchedwith her as she rose in a crouch. Blood swirled from torn 
IV ligatures at the crooks of her elbows and the base of herspine. Bubbles rose around her face as the mask which fedher air was pulled askew. Her mouth was open: she wasdrowning in amniotic fluid. 

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

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

The pod's plastic parted beneath the jagged end of thiscrude spear. Thick amniotic fluid spurted, crusting with flyingdust and blowing away in tatters. The anarchist's handgrabbed a torn edge; Lee grabbed another. Together, theywidened the split, and suddenly the anarchist tumbled forward,
her naked body coated in dust. She was lighter thanhe'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 tohis ear. 

"You're walking into a trap. They want me dead." Themask 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 headtripping over each other. Wind blew his astonishment intothe howling darkness. He helped the anarchist into the flappingremains of the pod, tried to settle torn plastic aroundher. 

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

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

Lee whipped the bact with its halter and it stumbled forward,
the trailer slewing behind it. They missed the firstwaymark, and for five tense minutes Lee believed all waslost. But then a shadow loomed beyond the dashed luminousline 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. Itswings lifted on the dusty wind as they stumbled towards thedome'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 floodedfields where the spring rice grew. Lee waved his torch allaround and nearly jumped out of his skin when Xiao Bing'svoice cried, "Over here, Wei Lee? And Guoquiang: "Who isthat with you?" 

A beam of light pinpointed the anarchist. She stared into 

it, naked except for tattered plastic and the caked dust thatclung to her dark skin. She said, "I hope these are yourfriends." 

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

a word. Lee told him that it was all right, that the Army ofthe People's Mouths wanted her to escape. Xiao Binggrinned. The silver caps over his eyes were sparks in thetorchlit gloom. He couldn't stop staring at the naked anar-


RED DUST 59 
chist. He said, "We should get her some clothes, do youthink?" 

"Thank you," the anarchist said calmly.
She was serenely regal in her filthy plastic cape. More self-possessedthan anyone else, most especially Lee, who toldGuoquiang, "All you had to do was leave it here, hobble itand leave it." Panic was beating inside him. He said, "Don'ttell me you didn't bring it!"
"It's here," Guoquiang said, "although it nearly bit offBing's head two or three times." He put his hands on Lee'sshoulders. "We're going with you, Wei Lee! To the capital,
right now! We couldn't stay, we'd be the first suspects whenyou went missing. We have helped you, and now you willhelp us."
The anarchist sealed the seam of a khaki shirt. She'd had 
to roll up the cuffs of the trousers, and their waistbandbunched over the cord she'd tied as a crude belt. She said,
"You must all listen to me. Although your soldiers did theirbest to keep me sedated, I was able to counter their efforts. I saw whathappened to the guards when the others camefor me. An officer shot them, then dropped the pistolamongst the smoking pieces of their bodies. He was wearinggloves..."
Lee remembered the pistol the Colonel had thrust intohis hand. Fingerprints. He felt as if he was falling throughdarkness, right there where he stood on soft earth.
"This officer wants me dead," the anarchist said. "If heworks for who I believe he works for, he is afraid I will tellthe truth. I imagine Wei Lee is the sacrificial pawn. This willbe blamed on him, and he will be killed trying to escape. Sowill I. They want me to escape, oh yes, but it is an excuseto kill me. There is a certain neatness to it, I suppose."
Guoquiang said to Lee, "If they wanted her dead, why didthey heal her first?"
The anarchist said, "Only a disloyal faction of your soldierswants me dead. The others carry out orders to bringme 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-



 62 
PAUL J. McAULEY 


docomplexity that in fire allows the unfocused eye to generatepictures or salamanders. Lee saw ghosts of his past,
vague shapes that might be presentiments of his future. Thedust made a fluid, lithe hiss as it scoured past, and it workedits way into every fold of skin until he was alive with incendiaryitches. 

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

Lee learned only a little more about her; the storm woreaway any attempt at conversation. They spent the secondnight wedged in a deep low cave, scarcely more than a crevicein the undercut base of the cliffs; the third with no shelterbut a sheet of plastic weighed down with stones--and inthe middle of the night they woke amidst screaming windand dust, the plastic sheet gone. They groped their way tothe warhorse, and huddled against its flank. They got nomore sleep that night, but the storm kept them from speaking,
and it rose in pitch the next day. The warhorse slowedfrom a canter to a walk, and then to a creeping pace as itleaned into roaring sheets of dust. When Lee saw the lichenstand sometime near noon--a noon no lighter than dawn--heturned the warhorse straight for it. They had gone as faras they could until the storm blew itself out. 


Fourteen 

The giant lichens were a design of Cho Jinfeng. Lee hadsheltered in them before, but he had never before hadbetter 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 inflatedlobe, warmed by their own trapped body heat. Thewails and floors and angled ceiling of the crevice were striatedlike muscle. The striations were bundles of hyphae.
Here and there, hyphal strands swelled into clusters of moistglobules that tasted of musty, peppery meat, of sweetly acidfruit, or of nothing at all. Long hairy strands loosely packed the narrowcorkscrew entrance. Spurs and veins of greenbioluminescence made weird constellations brighter thanthe yellow storm light that leaked through the entrance. 

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

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


 64 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

She explained it quite matter of factly. She had a way ofsaying things directly that was both exciting and unnerving.
The crash landing had crushed a lung, destroyed her spleenand torn up her liver. The fullerene viruses that swarmedthrough her bloodstream had constructed clades to bootstrapher metabolism, had turned off the pain of her internalinjuries and patched up as much of the damage as theycould, but her liver function was reduced almost to zero.
Blood was backing up and bursting through the weakestpoint, the web of veins and capillaries in her throat. Sheneeded two things unavailable in a howling storm in thebadlands 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 loseher. 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 usedto the idea of her back-to-front name) said, "How fallen arethe 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 saidthat she had been sent to trade with Lee's great-grandfather.
She carried a cargo of totipotent viruses which could generateclades of specialised subgroups according to need, justas immune-system T-cells generated a near-infinite varietyof antibodies. The totipotent viruses Miriam carried generateda whole variety which dealt with the diseases of old age,
which Lee's great-grandfather had planned to dole outamongst the Ten Thousand to win back support for the SkyRoad. He thought that he hadn't needed Miriam alive afterher 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 beingtreated by the medical technicians. Butchers, she added;
she'd be dead before her viruses could undo, cell by cell, thedamage the medics' clumsy macroscopic work had done. Afterher cargo had been sampled, she was a liability alive, andso 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 soclose to your home..." 

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

"... because your great-grandfather needed someone onhand to blame if things went wrong. Which they did. It wascoincidence 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 yourarmy 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 itwould 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 liveafter I was captured. Your great-grandfather can't let it beknown that he is trading with the anarchists, but he maintainedconnections with us after the Great Reassessment, andhe knows that we are desperate, that we are losing the war withthe 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 somaticage was roughly the same as Lee's, but she treated him likea slightly retarded child. She did it with a kind of roughfamiliar humor, and Lee discovered he didn't mind. "Yourgreat-grandfather thinks that because he has some of myblood, 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 everythingabout yourself, perhaps you can tell me about the Belt." 

The Belt, Miriam said, was dying. Once there had beeninnumerable continually shifting alliances and hundreds ofdifferent political ideologies vying for supremacy, driving aGolden Age of art and science and philosophy. On Earth,
politics (before the Earth's Consensus had put an end topolitics) had been shaped by geography; in the Belt, orbitalmechanics were just as prescriptive. Asteroids did not followtidy orbits. Macrotrade and migration between two asteroidsthat might be economical one week would suddenly becomeimpossible the next when their different orbits moved themtoo far from each other and delta V differences jumped aquantum level. No family nation was ever out of contact withthe information net controlled by the Nexus, unless it choseto go gray ghost ("That's when we know they're there, butthey aren't talking. There are more and more of them eachyear."), but ideological alliances required more cement thanexchange of information. Complex concatenations of politicalgroupings and trade alliances were continually shiftingin the main belt, and then there were those asteroids whichpursued eccentric orbits that isolated them from human discourseexcept for short, irregular intervals. This ever-changingdiversity was what had saved the Belt from directconquest by the Earth's Consensus, but it also meant thatthe Belt had never united against their common enemy. Aftera long war of attrition, only remnants of the Belt's multiplexcivilization survived, huddled in slowly dyingarcologies. The Nexus was their last best hope. 

It took Miriam a long time to explain this to Lee. Most ofthe terms she used couldn't be translated directly into CommonLanguage. Still, Lee was fascinated. It was a world--worldshe'd hardly suspected to have existed, a great territoryof possibilities. The sky that seemed so empty, save fora 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 aweary shrug. She was sitting with her shoulders cushionedby a soft bank of hyphae. Sweat beaded her face, was sprinkledon the V of skin between her small breasts, exposed bythe 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 theTen 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 happenedto the Earth. It has become inward looking. It is using toomany dreamers inside its systems. Agents of the Earth'sConsensus--the conchies--are here to encourage that." 

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

"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 thelichen'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 meswear words." 

So Lee did, to pass the long night and to distract himfrom Miriam's body, her closeness. She might be twice asold as his moribund great-grandfather, but her body waslithe 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'dsold out, dressing in white leather and rhinestones, moppinghis sweat with white scarves and throwing them into theaudience, singing these awful ballads with these terriblepseudo long-haired musicians grunging along behind. Thiswas the early seventies, when I was about thirteen. I wasinto the Doors, Cream, Edgar Winter's White Trash. All Ireally remember from the show was 'American Trilogy.' Youknow that song?"
Various things had been going through Lee's mind. Butall 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 wasstill there, back in his little room in the Bitter Waters dan-wei, along withall his recordings, and his solid-body guitar.
He hoped that Guoquiang had them now, or Xiao Bing. Ifthey were still alive.
Miriam wanted to listen to the King, and Lee gave her theradio. She listened a moment and shrugged and handed itback. "It's not the real King," she said, "but I guess youknow that. For one thing, the real King of the Cats didn'tspeak Common Language. Or it's news to me he did. Andthere never were any blues in Common Language, I guaranteethat." 
Lee smiled, nervous again. "The King of the Cats becamea god long ago. He can do as he wishes. Even when he wasalive he could not walk amongst the people for fear that inthe frenzy of their love they would tear him apart. That iswhy in all his later films he has to use a double for scenesset outside, and why he could never travel abroad."
Miriam laughed. "That's because his manager was an illegalalien and couldn't leave the US himself. And when I 
saw him the King wasn't even that famous any more. Heonly became famous again after he died." She laughed. "Itturns out they were right all along, he didn't really die, hereally was kidnapped by aliens. We have dealings, you know,
with the Thing in Jupiter. Or aspects of it. The King of theCats is just one aspect of the Thing, but I've never understoodwhat 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 usharm. It doesn't have religion, the way the Earth's Consensusdoes." 

Lee thought of his great-grandfather, of the Sky Road andof the alliance that the Emperor had made with the Earthbefore it had fallen silent, of the Ten Thousand Years strugglingagainst each other to fill the vacuum of the Emperor'ssilence. There was no center. It was as if everything he hadknown had suddenly been cut free, and for a while hecouldn't even think of a question to ask. When he did, Miriamhad fallen asleep. 


Fifteen 

A 
I some time during the night, unnoticed, the unmodulatedhowl of the storm faded. Lee woke to the lonesome 
growl of Tony Joe White's "Linesman of theCounty" small and clear in his head. Miriam MakepeaceMbele was sleeping, her mouth open, a fine sheen of sweaton her pale face.
Lee pushed through the lichen's matted hyphal curtainand scrambled over the drift of dusty sand that half chokedthe entrance. The air was clear, although the sky was stillfull of dust: the sun was a vast technicolor smear of red and 
orange in a pink sky. Wind whipped scarves of sand fromthe sharp crests of new drifts, but it was only a whisper now.
The warhorse was kneeling half buried downhill from thelichen stand. Lee cleared its eyes and muzzle from the caulit had spun around itself, and blew into its nostrils until itshuddered and woke. It turned its head and snapped at himin 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 Miriamhad stumbled upon the stand of lichens in howling dust-filleddarkness, they had already lost their bearings. Now Leesaw that the lichen stand ramified along the top of a floodgravelbed 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 sideof the river, sandstone ridges, marked by fossil scour marks 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


like the thumbprints of the creator, saddled away towardscliffs a kilometer away, hazed by dust that still hung in theair. 
Lee caught a dozen ice mice and desert rats inside anhour, but when he got back the warhorse was grazing on astand of prickly pear, excavating the spiny paddles from dustdrifts with a forelimb. It nosed Lee's gift and tossed its headin disdain, then stepped back, its ribbed ears unfolding andtwitching 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 thelichen stand. When Lee told her about the culver she said 
at once, "So we did not run far enough. You have only onechoice. Kill me, and stay alive."
Lee opened his mouth, smiling in incomprehension.
"I'm dying. I'd rather go quickly and painlessly than havemy body torn apart under questioning. I've spent all my lifegetting 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 focusedthe laser and shorted the safety on the power supply. You'veonly one shot, but it will be enough. Stick it against the topof my head and it'll fry my brain. I'll probably not even seethe flash." 
She thrust the torch at him, and he had to take it or dropit. Then she leaned into him and fastened her lips on his.
Her warm wet tongue prised open his lips, squirmed deepinto his mouth. Astonished, Lee started to return the kiss,
but Miriam pulled away.
"It's done," she said, "for better or worse. Wei Lee, wehaven't known each other very long, and this is a fucking--did I get thatright?--big favor to ask even a close friend,
but it's the only favor I'm ever going to ask. See, I can'tdo myself. I've been blocked, to stop the goods damagingitself." 

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

"I wouldn't talk," Miriam said. "It doesn't matter whatthey do to me, I'd never talk. And that's nothing to do witha block. It's professional pride. But, I don't want to gothrough it, you understand?" 

"I understand," Lee said, and raised the torch. Perhapsshe saw at the last moment what he intended, because herhands started to come up, too late, as he smashed the heavytorch 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'skinked, hyphae-packed entrance, it was not too difficult tocarry her downhill to the warhorse. After Lee spoke to it,
the warhorse allowed him to sling Miriam's body over itswithers, in front of the narrow saddle. Then Lee swung upinto the saddle and the warhorse leaped forward, flying overgravel alongside the dustchoked river at an easy gallop. 

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

He knew that it was very unlikely that he could carry thewounded 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 ahuge spreading tree on some swampy spit of land, with acampfire sending a thin tendril of smoke into dense leavesoverhead, ku li rebels in ragged but clean tunics and trousersand heavy boots going about their business amongststacks of supplies and stands of rifles, while Lee rocked Miriamin a linen hammock suspended from one great limb ofthe all-sheltering tree and half listened to a lecturer off insome clearing explaining the power of the people to hiscross-legged audience... 

Lee almost fell from the narrow saddle. The clean vertiginousshock woke him at once. The warhorse had slowed to 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


a walking pace and was snatching at thorny vegetation thatgrew in the dry mudflats flanking the river channel. Thesound of the culver fluttered somewhere in the empty sky. 

Lee snatched the reins with the intention of bringing thewarhorse under control, but he forgot to speak the word ofcommand and the beast struck at his leg. Lee pulled backhard and shouted. The warhorse pranced sideways. Miriamstarted to slide and Lee grabbed at her: the warhorse buckedand they both fell. 

They rolled down a crusty slope of dry mud, enveloped inclouds of dust. The warhorse screamed and shot away likean 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 inthe still air. 

The fall partly brought Miriam to her senses. Lee helpedher sit up, and she punched him square in the chest. As hesprawled 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 sharpelbow into his ribs and tried to roll away from him. Hegrabbed her ankle and was dragged through crusty mud, aroaring in his ears, his heart pounding. Miriam turned toclub 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 topof her head; his teeth clicked on his tongue tip and painspiked the roof of his skull. She got an elbow in his stomachand he sobbed for breath that suddenly wouldn't come. Theroaring was louder, and streamers of dust were flying awayfrom them in every direction. 

Lee looked up, saw the black wasp-shape of the culvertilted a dozen meters above, so close that he could see the 


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face of the young soldier who hung out of the hatch in asling. 

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

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

Lee tried to cover Miriam with his own body as debriswhirred through the air. The whole surface of the riverpocked and rippled. A section of hull went end over end overthe water and smashed into a gravel bank. Somethingcaught fire in the wreckage of the cabin. Lee started to getto his feet and a ball of fire enveloped the wreckage; he fellon his face as flame bloomed out across the water. Heat 
washed his skin. 

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

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

The culver was still burning. Its frame glowed in a jellyof heat and flame. Thick black smoke unpacked itself intothe pink sky. 

Miriam said in her weak, pinched voice, "You had bettershape up, kid. I'm going to need help. I think you brokesomething all over again." She turned her head and spatblood into the red dust. 


Sixteen 

They followed the tracks of the warhorse. There was littlehope of catching it--it was probably halfway to thecapital by now but when its trail turned away from theriver Lee and Miriam turned too. 
There was a scramble over a high lip of stone, through anarrow passage between sandstone bluffs that met overheadlike two heads touching, then the start of a long climb upa steep defile, the fossil bed of a tributary gashed into thecliffs millennia ago, when Mars had been in full flood anddinosaurs had ruled Earth. 
The ancient stream had been partly revived by terraforming--thesides of the defile were littered with dead, fallentrees--but now the stream bed was clogged with dry reddust. The defile widened into a little sloping valley. Lee, carryingMiriam pickaback, kept stumbling on water-smoothedstones. Here and there pools of water stood, their stillsurfaces mantled with dust. Farther up, seepage was washingred mud down tussocky slopes. Dwarf juniper spread fragrantdark green needle-fans above scree and sere clumps ofgrass; Himalayan pines, dwarfed and twisted, clung to boulderswith gnarled roots longer than their knotted trunks.
Stands of immature lichens raised shoulder-high lobes. Leesaw desert chats, rose finches, robin accentors, once spotteda Sikkim deer turning away through the scrubby forest.
Amongst the dwarf trees and sandstone boulders weresloping spaces thatched with grass and herbs. Pale yellow 


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flowers rose through a mantle of fine red dust. Wheneverthey reached one of these tiny meadows, Lee set Miriamdown and sprawled beside her to rest for a few minutes.
Miriam was very weak now. Her breath was hoarse andragged. She had long ago given up telling Lee to leave her.
It was almost night, and growing bitterly cold. Finally, whenit was clear that they could go no further, Lee lay Miriamon 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. "Youare such a fool, Wei Lee. I've given you all you need, you justdon't realize it. Awhole world, in your hands..."
'I'll try and light a fire, in a little while." He had seensome gorse; there would be dry wood in the dead hearts ofthe stands, and he could make a friction bow to spark punkalight.
Miriam didn't reply. She had fallen asleep, or had passedout. Lee held her. Above and behind them, the dwarf forestclimbed the narrow valley towards a dusk sky already richwith stars. And all around were the sounds of the inhabitants 
of the valley going about their lives: furtive rustlings andfaint squeaks or chitterings; once, the c of an owl, a softthump 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 silenceof the planet, vast and empty as an ocean. The silence of therocks; the silence from before the beginning of history; thedreamy 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 spreadacross the face of Mars, a dry end to history and life.
Lee left Miriam sleeping, and collected the materials heneeded to make his fire. The stars gave enough light to seein grainy black and white, and as Lee picked his way backto the clearing, arms laden with prickly dry heather, the top 


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PAUL J. McAuLr¥ 


of the valley fell to reveal Jupiter, and it was flooded withhis cold yellow light. At the same moment, stars floateddown, moving towards Lee swiftly and silently. He scarcelyhad time to register them before they were upon him.
Strong arms grasped his, knocked away the kindling. Heshouted a warning to Miriam and something smashed himto his knees. Stars swooped giddily; Lee fell upwards intothe night. 


Seventeen 

A 

Pantheon of red and gold figures marched upon Lee.
He was lying on a pallet amongst a level field of starswhich swam in the veil of their own heat. Above him,
a gigantic gold-skinned man draped in green and red satcross-legged on a throne of beaten gold. His gaze was leveland serene, his eyes so wide that white showed all aroundhis 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, yetstill the field of stars tipped and receded. A bestial maskleered down at him; behind it, brown human eyes gazed intohis. With a shock of reversal, Lee saw that it was no mask,
but a face half ape, half human. The creature grinned, showingyellow fangs with a red tongue lolling between them,
and Lee cried out. 


Eighteen 

ee woke on a hard mattress in a narrow niche carved 
into the sandstone wall of a little cell. A primitive lampshed a warm light and filled the dank air with the reekof rancid butter. A shaven-headed old man, dressed in looseorange robes belted with a yellow sash, sat cross-legged onthe floor. He was knitting a skein of undyed yarn into a kindof cap. He peered at his tangling and untangling knittingneedles through a pair of butterfly glasses that perched onthe sharp peak of his nose. Fine lines radiated around hiseyes, but otherwise his face was as smooth and plump as ababy's.
When he saw that Lee was awake he set his knitting aside,
hopped nimbly to the door and rang a silver bell. Then hehelped Lee dress, loose black trousers, an orange robe, san-dais.
The old man said that his name was Pemba, that he wasone of the monks of the Kailas lamasery. Lee had neverheard of the place. He knew of the underground Tibetanlamaseries, but most were in ruins and none were within athousand kilometers of the Bitter Waters danwei. The warhorse 
had been swift, but even it could not have ridden sofar in the middle of a storm. When Lee asked. d just whereKailas was, Pemba answered cheerfully that he could not say.
"It belongs to the time before the Han. It belongs to theoriginal people."
Lee wanted to ask if the old monk was ku//; but it was8O 


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the one question he could not safely ask and, besides, hewas fairly certain that he knew the answer. Instead, he askedabout Miriam Makepeace Mbele. "The Yankee woman I waswith." 

"Perhaps she was a Yankee, a long time ago. Dorje andNangpa are attending to her. I will take you there, and findyou 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 feelthe weight of rock above his head, a stress in the dim airlike a word waiting to be spoken. Butter lamps burned inniches, a line of smoky stars. Lee said, after a long silencewhich suggested he ought to say something, "I saved herlife." 

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

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

Pemba swatted the creature on its hairy flank and itcringed 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 ofhim. But I need him, you see, because we are not yet certainabout you." 

Monkey was perhaps two and a half meters tall--it wasdifficult to be precise because he walked with a stooped bowleggedgait, hands swinging by outthrust knees. He woreonly a kind of waistcoat with many bulging pockets, and hewas covered with coarse reddish hair. His brown eyes peeredat Lee from beneath a heavy brow that sloped straight backto the crested top of his skull; wide flat nostrils snuffled andthin lips skinned back from fangs the color of old ivory.
His feet were huge, with opposable big toes. They made a 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

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

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

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

Pillars carved with red and gold figures cavorting amidstswirling patterns receded towards a huge statue of the Buddhasitting in the lotus position. Lee remembered that sereneyet quizzical golden face, its flexed eyebrows and wideeyes, its slightly parted red mouth. The Buddha's headdresswas encrusted with jewels; a red scarf folded around his neckwas tucked under a heavy jewelled torc. Small statues oflesser bodhisattvas cluttered the steps leading up to histhrone, and before the steps a myriad tiny flames floated intwo wide shallow bowls: yak-butter candle oceans whose hotpungent smell filled the hall. To one side of the throne,
golden statues of wrathful deities and protectors stood inwall niches; to the other was a shrine, with a three-corneredhigh roof like a little house, which sheltered a tank in whicha 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 hisheavy brow touched the flagstone floor. He bowed not to theBuddha but to the shrine. 

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


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83 


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

"Your friend," Pemba said. "Dorje and Nangpa try to saveher, 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, ofcourse. The body is not important, Dorje." 

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

The two orange-robed monks were both older thanPemba. The first, Dorje, was tall and gaunt, a bent stork ofa man with heavy bones and skin so dark and wrinkled itmight have been smokecured. Nangpa was like a wraith conjuredfrom parchment; the sutures of his skull and a mapof blue veins were visible beneath his pallid skin. His earswere huge and translucent, their lobes stretched by pegs ofgold 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 importantas 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 loopedup 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 longeryours." 

Dorje touched a silver wand to the ring finger of Miriam'sright hand, to her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder, the sideof her neck, her temple. He said, "We try to activate thetriple-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, 


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PAUL J. McAuLE¥ 


but who she is. It does not matter who she is, but what shedoes." 
Nangpa said, "It would help if we knew who made themachines that infest her." 
Dorje touched the side of Miriam's neck with his silverwand. "Needles there, quickly, before the infernal things disperseagain."
Pemba said to Lee, "It has been so long since they havehad to do this. Master Norbhu passed away, why, it musthave been fifty years ago, and besides, he had no machinesin his blood." 
"Not until we put them in," Nangpa said. "And it wassixty-three years, not fifty, young Pemba."
"It was sixty-five," Dorje said. "But only Pemba wouldcare how long ago it was. He was not born here."
Pemba bowed and said humbly, "Masters, I know that theyears are of no account to anyone below, and until yesterdayI had not been above for a very long time." Dorje andNangpa 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 preventMaster Norbhu from controlling more than one at atime. But when I had to carry you back, young man, I beganto 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 ifshe is asleep and he is dead?"
"All the better if she is asleep," Pemba said. "The truth isin dreams. And he really is dead, but he has not yet passedinto transcendence. Perhaps you do not remember his interviewwith you."
"I remember his voice, I think. But corpses do not speak."
The half-lifers, pale puppets in their cocoons, dreamingtheir way into Heaven's information space as they died outof this one. It was possible that they spoke to each other, but they neverspoke to the living.
"Only the body is dead," Nangpa said as he drew out nee 

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

"The body lives, in part," Dorje said testily. "It keeps thebrain alive, or else the soul would be released into a newcycle. If the house is burned, the inhabitants do not die, butthey must live somewhere else. And so here. The machineshelp the body, in its half-life. So our dear Master Norbhuguides and enlightens us still." 

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

Light came on beneath the peaked roof of the shrine. Itshone on the homunculus which hung inside its fluid-filledjar like a huge, ancient embryo. Bubbles rose from sutureswhere tubes entered its ribcage, fanned around its bowedchin, caressed its sunken cheeks. Fine wires trailed from thecorners of the homunculus's eyes, which were sealed by bluishmembranes, and from its ears and the base of its skull,
looping over its shoulder and winding once around its waistbefore running into the base of the vessel and the black cubeon which the shrine stood. 

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

But then the homunculus stirred. It moved slowly andjerkily. There was a cage of fine silvery filaments wrappedclosely around its limbs. It raised its head, swung to faceLee. 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. Themonks were old men, wise perhaps, but not strong enoughto hold him against his will. Monkey was some kind of gene-tailoredanimal, and there were always words of control forsuch creatures, perhaps the same words which had controlledthe warhorse. But the homunculus was neither livingnor dead. It was a ghost, a demon. 


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PAUL J. McAuLg¥ 


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

--MONKEY'S LINEAGE IS NOT OF ANIMALS TURNED INTO MEN, itsaid. 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 DEARPEOPLE, THEY ARE TOO INDEPENDENT. YOU WILL UNLEARN THEFALSE WICKED HABITS OF INDEPENDENCE HERE, YOUNG HAN. ITHAS 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, WORDSCANNOT OPEN ANOTHER'S MIND. 

"The master quotes Mumon," Pemba said. "There is ateaching 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, oncewe have tamed her machines." 

"If it is possible," Dorje said from the flickering shadowsbeneath 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 echoedfrom the painted vaults of the chamber's ceiling: he hadn'tmeant to speak so loudly. 

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

Lee ran. He dodged Pemba's feeble swipe and ran straightfor the low door at the far end of the hall. Monkey leapedup. Lee shouted words of power, but Monkey only beat hischest and hooted and chattered. 


 
 RED DUST 
87 

Lee wrenched free a pole which held one corner of a dustycanopy pitched above a statue of many-armed Yamantankathe Terrible. Monkey dodged Lee's wild swing and grabbedthe splintered butt of the pole. When Monkey pulled, Leeslammed his shoulder hard against his flat frog-face. Monkeylost all his breath. Lee wrestled the pole from his grip andwhacked him in the stomach. 

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

The tall, thin monk, Dorje, stood between the two bowlsof candle flames. He pointed his silver wand at Lee, wholaughed. These foolish old monks and their half-animal servantwere feeble enemies. 

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


Nineteen 

T 
he blow from Dorje's wand did not quite knock Leeout, but for a long time he could hold no thought inhis head for more than a second. Slippery momentsfell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering beyond hisreach. 
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 butterswirled into it. 
Pemba explained that the food was woven from plant stuffgrown in vats, using light piped down from the surface. Thelamasery was as old as the Tibetan occupation of Mars, fromthe time when the air had been partly thickened but hadnot yet been made breathable, when vast storms racked theworld from pole to pole. The Tibetans had tended the remakingof Mars, and the Han, who had exiled them, hadthen stolen their work: but the lamasery had survived. Oneday its time would come again.
Lee had heard this sort of thing before, from the cowboyshe'd met on his travels from one danwei to another across 
the vast plains. He knew better than to say that his ancestorshad been exiled too, in a vast exodus of hastily built gimcrackships of which perhaps only a tenth had finished thevoyage. That his own mother and father had disappearedbecause of their political beliefs. That he was no more thana pawn in a scheme of his great-grandfather. 


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89 

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


Twenty 


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 ceremonyto be performed. 

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

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

--I turned you on. 

When she had kissed him, Miriam said, totipotent fuller-eneviruses in her saliva had swarmed into Lee. They hadbeen multiplying inside him ever since, using gene therapyto rewrite the DNA of muscle and epidermal cells to turnthem into little transceivers, spinning molecular networksthrough his body and brain to form a parallel nervous system. 

Although the narrow corridors were lit only by infrequentbutter lamps, Lee could see quite clearly, in bright, slightlyfuzzy shades of green. Arrays of optical sensors had beeninserted into his retinas; an image-processing network hadbeen constructed parallel to his own. Occasionally, ideogramsghosted across his sight: command strings for activatinga whole range of functions that were being hardwiredinto his optical chiasma. 

Lee accepted these changes without alarm. Perhaps theviruses had conditioned him to accept their work--he wouldnever 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 problemover the centuries. There isn't time to explain the turnsI've taken, but watch out for any of my sisters. There atleast 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 copyrighton me, but anyone can buy an ovum and the trainingprogram. You're near the surface, now. They're all there,
except the master, and he hardly counts. I doubt if the computerleft anything of him except perhaps his limbic functions.
Ever see the Wizard of Oz? I guess not. Well, themaster's not the danger. It's the little guys hiding behindthe curtain. Those two old guys, Dorje and Nangpa. 

"I think you're wrong," Lee mumbled. "This whole placeis 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 brilliantglare that abruptly stepped down as the sensors built intoLee's eyes compensated for the increase in light. The corridoropened into a vast domed chamber a hundred metersacross, rising to fifty meters at its apex. It was lit by sunlightfalling through square apertures cut into the domed roof.
The walls were naked rock, with niches crammed with statuesof demons. There were demons with rolling eyes andfierce fang-filled grins, bat-eared demons and elephant-noseddemons and demons with human ears whose lobes 
hung down to their pot bellies, pop-eyed demons and snake-eyeddemons and demons who had rolled their eyes backinto their skulls, demons with the beaks of crows or of parrots.
Forever frozen, hundreds of them, thousands, theygrinned and grimaced and ground their teeth, capered andchortled and contorted their pot-bellied bodies into impossibleand obscene postures. Appliqu tangas hung from ceiling tofloor down the demon-filled walls, tongues of dusty clothwhose brilliant colors had long faded. Drifts of red dust saddledaway across the floor, and wind blew through the chamber,
turning hundreds of prayer wheels that were scatteredeverywhere. They made a dry roaring rattling, hollow drumswith printed prayers pasted inside them revolving around andaround in the constant wind, each revolution a prayer blown 


 RED DUST 
93 


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

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

Footprints already stitched a diagonal path across the vastprayer-haunted wind chamber. Lee followed Pemba throughan oval arch set in the rock and up a winding stair. Narrowwindows pierced the sandstone wall at every revolution ofthe helical stair. Lee glimpsed a narrow valley falling away,
the steep slopes of wind-carved rock that enclosed it andchaotic terrain beyond, slumped hills pitched every whichway. 

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

There was an altar in the center of the garden of rocksand bones, and from each corner of the altar thin pillars ofblue aromatic smoke rose straight up in the still air. Thesmall sun shone high overhead, a coin of platinum firestamped into the neon pink sky. A body lay on the altar. Thetwo old monks, Dorje and Nangpa, were working on it withhatchets. 

They wore only breechclouts, and their skinny chests andarms were spotted and streaked with vivid red blood. Monkeysat to one side, softly tapping a small drum he held betweenhis big feet. A flock of ravens hopped and shifted on white-stainedboulders heaped at the far side of the arena. 

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

Lee didn't want to get any closer to the butchery, butPemba 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 thesleeve of his robes, pulled out Dorje's silver wand. Hepointed it at Lee, who felt an icy worm squirm in the pit ofhis stomach. 

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

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

Suddenly, everything seemed to go into slow motion. Theviruses had built lines of communication to Lee's muscles 
and to his senses that worked at the speed of light, notsound: now he was using them. He plucked the silver wandfrom Pemba's hand and threw it away, and ran full tilt atthe altar. 

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

Lee hesitated, and Nangpa grabbed the hatchet in a wildswing that nearly eviscerated Lee. Things were back to normalspeed again. Monkey was shaking his shaggy head, pokinga long forefinger in his ear. 

A burning pain pierced Lee's shoulder: he yelled whenPemba pulled out the knitting needle. Black shadows flappedoverhead as Pemba stabbed at Lee again. Lee managed tokick 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'ssprawled 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 randown the narrow branching corridor. Or so he thought. Forthe corridor ended in a darkened room and Lee ran straightthrough it into the Great Hall.
--WELCOME, said the voice in Lee's head.
The canopy had been reset above the statue of Yamantankathe Terrible. Lee snatched a pole from it again as heran down the aisle. 
Monkey loped out from shadows to one side of the greatgolden Buddha. He pressed his palms together, then hurledhimself at Lee. Before Lee could raise his weapon he wascrushed and lifted up, his face pressed into the coarse peltthat covered Monkey's barrel chest. Lee got a hand underMonkey's chin and pushed. They fell backwards against oneof the yak-butter candle oceans. The bowl tipped, splashingmolten butter and flaming wicks. Monkey sprang up,
screaming and chattering, brushing at the little flames thatclung to his pelt.
Drenched in hot butter, his clothes smouldering, Lee sawhis chance. He only had a moment, and knew he must notmake 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 thecylinder 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 starredglass. It broke.
Fluid spurted and the corpse sagged in its net of finewires. Connections broke in brief constellations of snappingsparks. Overhead, all the electric lights went out. Perhapsonly a chance current or a final spasm raised the corpse'schicken-claw hand, but Lee thought it was something more.
Like everything in the lamasery, the corpse had been a slaveto the true master, the ancient computer which Miriam had 


 RED DUST 
97 


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

Monkey lay on the floor, red pelt pulled into slick pointsby clotting butter, singed to the hide in half a dozen patches.
Lee helped him to his feet, and the simian servant came upwith docile grace. Lee found a butter lamp and had Monkeylead him to the dead, dark kitchens. He took what heneeded, then found his way back up to the surface. 


Twenty-one 

p 

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

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

Lee did not entirely trust Pemba, but he could not leavehim for the ravens. He and Monkey took turns helping thehalf-comatose monk along, but progress was slow. Theywere only halfway down the narrow green valley thatdropped away from the tabletop plateau when night fell. 

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


 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 theyclaimed to be theirs, my people lost heart, and the monksof many lamaseries lost discipline, and abandoned theirplaces. Still, they said that one day the Lord of Light, theBuddha of the Future, the Maitreya Buddha, would step outon to the face of Mars. I had forgotten that, until now." 

It took Pemba a long time to say this, and when he hadfinished he did not speak again, but turned his face to theshadows 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, likefurry grapes. Lee shook out the cloth he had taken, a gorgeousbrocade which had been the cloak of a snake-haired 
demon, wrapped himself in it, pulled down the hood of hischuba, 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 brocadecloak and frost tipped every blade of grass in the little. meadow. The sound that had woken him was Monkeyslapping earth with his big bare feet, making a keeningsound as he rocked Pemba. 

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

Lee helped Monkey cover the body with rocks, and coveredthe rocks with sandy soil and strips of turf. Jackalswould dig it out before long, but the gesture was entirelyhuman. Monkey stamped down the turves and made obeisanceto his dead master, and then he and Lee set off downthe valley. 


Twenty-three 

M 

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

This was the land which had fed the huge river which hadcarved the Red Valley in lost ages before man had come toMars. Confined aquifers, sealed above by thick, permanentice, sealed below by self-compaction, had built up high pressureswhich had at last burst forth in head zones. As meltwater 
discharged in vast torrents, the land above the aquifershad slumped and collapsed, a self-perpetuating process thathad 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 valleysthat lay between low hills which ran in irregular shoalsin every compass direction. Dry scrub grew on the flanks ofthe hills. Creosote bush and scrub oak; twisted desert pinewith papery bark and a salting of live leaf buds like vividgreen sparks; tarweed, chaparral pea, jumping cactus, cheatgrass. The valleys were jumbled mazes of huge boulders, orparched tongues of alkaline salt flats broken only by tufts ofsoldier grass. 

A thin cold wind knifed across the valleys. Monkey did notseem to notice it, but Lee was glad of the chuba he hadtaken, a gown with wide sleeves made of heavy brown wool. 


 RED DUST 
103 


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

The silences of the desert landscape of Mars, hardlytouched by the skim of life, helped cleanse him of guilt. Hewas learning to control his rewired nervous system, and theKing of the Cats and his music was clear and close as hewalked. 

That night, Lee took shelter in the weathered skull of anarchiosaur. One of Cho Jinfeng's failed experiments had beenthe creation of animals that under Mars's low gravity hadgrown bigger than any creature that had ever lived on theEarth. But the archiosaurs had not been able to adapt to thechanging climate of Mars. Ice mice and other small mammalshad feasted on their eggs, and within a century theyhad died out. 

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

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

But in the morning Monkey was gone for good. Lee performedt'ai chi exercises to rid himself of the frosty stiffnessof the night, trampling the warm ashes of his fire as he madethe slow, flowing forms. 

As he walked that day he kept glimpsing Monkey's rufousbody at the edge of his vision, far off and moving fast. Butwhen he looked it was nothing but a kit fox, or a tuft offrost-burned soldier grass, or the flash of sunlight againstsome 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 knewhe was alone at last. Except for the sound of the King, andthe myriad viruses that coursed through his blood, each aword waiting to be spoken. 


Twenty-four 

T 

he yak had fallen down a scree slope into a deep littlecrevasse. As Lee watched, it scrambled halfway up theslope, hoofs striking sparks, until it could climb nomore. 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 triedthe slope again, and again stopped halfway up and rolledback down to the bottom. 

It was close to sunset, that time when the flying moonswere brighter than the sun, and the temperature was fallingfast. Lee glimpsed a shape lurking amongst boulders on theother side of the gully, took a stone and lofted it, saw a dire-wolfslink away from the clatter. Come nightfall, the yakwould have its throat torn out; by morning, nothing wouldbe left but bloody bones. 

The yak tossed its head and looked at Lee with mournfuleyes, as if fully aware of its fate. It had a shaggy coat of blackhair down to its knees, wide forward-curving horns, a longface with a white stripe down the muzzle. There was a bigbrass ring through its nose, and red ribbons plaited into thebush of its long tail. 

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

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


 106 
PAUL J. McAJLE¥ 


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

Lee stumbled over the edge out of breath, and as heturned to haul the yak the last few meters, somethinglaunched itself from shadows beneath a tumble of boulders. 
The yak bellowed in terror and made a run for it, tail in theair. Lee was dragged on his belly over hard stones until heremembered to let go of the rope. He got to his feet withblood in his eyes from a cut on the bridge of his nose. Thedire-wolf growled a dozen meters away, a ruff of coarse hairraised around its humped shoulders, its ears flat on its longskull. It must have sneaked around while Lee had been rescuingthe yak, and must be desperate, too, to even think ofattacking a man. 

Lee backed away, step by step. The dire-wolf followed,
flowing like water. It favored its left front leg, which hadprobably been broken and healed badly. Lee threw a handfulof stones, but the dire-wolf dodged each one and turned backtowards Lee, its eyes like yellow lamps. It was between Leeand his pack, which was where he'd set the big broad-bladedkitchen 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 akilometer away, a pony and rider were silhouetted againstthe red sun. The pony reared on two legs, and then it wasgalloping down the ridge. Lee barely had time to find hisknife before pony and rider were upon him in a cloud of reddust 

"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 ofhis arm. With his free hand he pushed up the brim of hisblack felt hat: a lean dark weathered face, with bright blueeyes and a white smile, a week's growth of blond beard, longred-blond hair tied back with a leather thong. Despite thesunset 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'snorth by northwest, about three klicks or so?" Redd pointed,
aslant the setting sun. "You do want to walk, I won't waiton you, but the yak'll know the way. Unless it falls intoanother gully. It's kind of dumb, even as yaks go." 

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

The yak hadn't run far, and was grazing on a patch ofmoss it had scrabbled up from the sandy soil. It let Lee getclose enough to grab the rope which hung from its nosering, and then it was easy. Lee put two fingers in the yak'ssensitive nostrils and twisted hard, his shoulders against thebeast's flank. It went down on its knees, and Lee jumpedastride it, clinging behind the hump of muscle over itsshoulders. 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 soldiergrass munched to the ground; dried pats spotting thetrampled sand, big fierce black beetles already at workon them, scurrying this way and that with their loads ofdung. 

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

Redd heard Lee out, then said, "I'd keep quiet, if I wereyou. Especially about the bit with the monks. Even if it'strue..." 

"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 themwere original." 

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


 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 aYankee, Redd was like the cowboys Lee had seen in the marketsof small danweis: compact, muscular, taciturn men whowouldn't haggle over the prices of the trinkets they sold.
You heard that they fought duels to the death, that theyhunted runaways from the danweis for sport, that they werethe scum of Mars. 
Night fell, hard and sudden, but there was enough starlightfor Lee's enhanced vision to show him a patchy infraredlandscape of green light and deep shadows.
Clades of viruses, spinning through his blood, climbinghis nerves. Turning him into something else. Into what Miriamhad been, perhaps; and perhaps they'd make him aslong-lived as his great-grandfather and the other TenThousand Years, although that was little comfort when hedidn't know where his next meal was coming from.
At last Lee saw the glow of the cowboys' fire, small andfierce as a star fallen to the wide, wide surface of the world.
Yaks, their long faces like burning skulls in Lee's enhancedsight, were tethered by their nose rings to chains stakedamongst heather and trampled grass. They snorted andstirred restlessly as Lee and Redd rode towards the fire atthe centre of their concentric circles. 
"This is it," Redd said.
Boxes and baskets of woven grass were scattered over theground. There were a few rough shelters of tarpaulin orblankets draped over wicker frames. A black dog barked atLee's mount; it was tied to a stake and wore a ruff of redwool. 
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 doubtthat any one of them could pull him limb from limb in amoment. 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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

"Someone give him tea," Hawk said. 

Lee sat a little way off from the roaring fire. A tin mugof tea with a lump of rancid butter dissolving in it warmedhis cramped hands. The cowboys talked quietly amongstthemselves, passing around a long-stemmed pipe of marijuanaand telling tall tales. After a while, Redd brought Leea rough blanket. It reeked of horse sweat, but Lee took itgratefully: 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 hourbefore dawn. Jupiter was a blurred diamond low on thehorizon. The fire was down to glowing ashes. Thesinger was a long way off, out amongst the circles of tetheredyaks. His voice was high and plaintive, rising at the endof each line in a weird ululation. He was singing in theCountry and Western mode that the King of the Cats hadsometimes affected (although of course as with everythingelse the King had stamped it with his own persona). Hear the lonesomewhippoorwill...
By the time Lee had revived the fire and set a pot of waterto boil, the rest of the cowboys were up and about and thehorizon was just falling below the rim of the sun. Reddshowed Lee where the supplies were kept, helped him brewtea dark as beetroot juice, and fry cakes of oatmeal and butteron a sheet of metal set directly on the fire. Cowboysdrifted up, took food and tea without comment, drifted away.
"We always sing to our herds," Redd told Lee, and explainedthat 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, achange in wind direction, a meteor. Song calmed them.
Lee thought about the pop arias and commercials thathad constantly echoed around and about the Bitter Waters danwei, and said heknew what Redd meant. He added, "I113 


 114 

PAUL J. McAuLE¥ 
know plenty of good songs. Maybe you'll let me sing to youranimals." 
As Redd showed Lee how to saddle up, they fell into afriendly discussion about whether the King of the Cats hadtranscended Country and Western as he had transcended somuch else. Or at least, Lee did most of the talking and Reddsmiled a lot, and when Lee had more or less run throughpraising the King of the Cats, Redd commented that theKing sounded like an outgrowth of Country and Western,
no more special than that. Lee laughed, and said when theymade camp he'd teach Redd some of the King's style andthen see what he said. 
"Let's get to camp first," Redd said, and swung himselfup into the saddle of his skittish bay pony. "The longer ittakes to get the yaks to market the thinner they are and theless 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 herdmoved surprisingly quickly over the red stony plain. Impactedsand, rocks, shale, spattered with the broken circlesof ancient craters. They were paralleling hills that rose, waveafter wave, to the north.
Riding dead Stinkfoot's old, barrel-bellied pony, whichwas laden before and behind its high saddle with bundledcooking implements and sacks of barley meal, Lee followedas best he could. The pony's lurching sway-backed amblewas making him distinctly motion sick, but he was happy.
Just to be moving was enough. Everything that had happenedto him or that cast a shadow into his future--the 
flight from Bitter Waters, Miriam's death, the viruses, hisgreat-grandfather's plots--dissolved in the eternal moment.
Lee was very young.
Far ahead, the cowboys were strung in a loose V behindthe herd of yaks, moving in a gritty rolling cloud of red dustand clatter of wooden bells. The men called to each other 
in high yodels, now one and now another racing forward tocut a stray back into the herd. Only rare clumps of air lichenpunctuated the cold desert, and those were stunted, frost 


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blasted specimens, yet these plains were where the yaksspent most of their lives. A kind of saxifrage moss grew justbeneath the surface of the sandy soil, and yaks scraped it upand gulped it down, grit and all. The cowboys had to rideback and forth to keep the herd moving whenever it passedover an especially rich patch. 

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

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

The cowboys were heading towards the round-up campsoutside the capital, but they had other business that wastaking them in a wide arc to the west. Lee guessed that itwas something to do with the anarchists, for where elsewould the cowboys have gotten their silicon jewellery, their 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

Constant wind sent drifts of red dust skimming across theplain. Towards noon, a pod of sky seeders rode the wind outfrom the foothills: big ragged blue-green blimps with rudimentarynerve nets, each moving inside a distinct haze ofextruded cyanobacteria, remnants from the time when thenewly outgassed atmosphere of Mars, rich in carbon dioxideand little else, had been made breathable. Cho Jinfeng hadspliced them from sponge and coral genes. Cyanobacteriaconstantly multiplied within them, producing oxygen andfixing atmospheric nitrogen--hydrogen produced as a byproductof nitrogen fixation filled membranous pockets andgave the things lift. Excess blue-green filaments were extrudedand fertilized the land over which the sky seedersdrifted. 

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

The drones hurtled through the pod of sky seeders beforethe plant-animals had time to react, smashing great holesin their inflated bodies and setting fire to their hydrogensacs. Half the sky seeders started to sink, trailing smoke andblue flames. The drones somersaulted and made another 
pass. Wounded sky seeders blew apart with sharp explosionsthat shivered echoes from the foothills. The rest were sheddingballast--vast green clouds of cyanobacteria--as theytried to rise into higher, faster winds. But the drones cutthrough them again, once, twice. A mother sky seeder tried toplace its bulk between the drones and its two pups--a dronesmashed her in half and dispersed lightnings that blew up thepups in balls of blue flame. 

The drones swooped low over the cowboys and the herd,
and then they were dwindling westward, even as the burningremnants of the sky seeders tumbled to the plain. Globs ofcyanobacteria were raining down everywhere, and the yaks 


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117 


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

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

slab of sky seeder. 

"The drones?" 

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

Lee, amazed by the cowboy's bold opinions, said, "TheEmperor has decreed otherwise." In the past year Lee hadn'tdared to express his own Sky Roader sympathies to anyonebut Guoquiang and Xiao Bing, and then only well away fromthe 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 butreluctantly left the feast. He shouted, "The world isn't theEmperor's. It's ours. And no one asked us what we want."
Then he kicked his pony into a trot, dragging the yak afterhim. Lee would have ridden after him to ask what he meant,
but Hawk yelled for him to give a hand, and he had to turnaway. 


Twenty-seven 

T 
he herd covered less than twenty kilometers that day.
When the cowboys finally made camp, at a place littledifferent from where they had started, Lee felt as ifmost of the territory coated his whole skin, all the way insidehim to his stomach. Patches had rubbed raw on the insides 
of his sweat-slippery thighs where they'd gripped the highsaddle. 
Redd handed Lee a pair of chaps with supple leatherpatches 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 theguitar."
"Plenty of time to practice before we reach the roundup.
Then you will sing. I told the others, and they're eager tohear new songs. We'll be pleased if your King of the Catscharms 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'sjust a dead guy from another world. Maybe I'll think somethingof him if you can out-sing the rest of us."
Ordinarily, Lee would have sprung to passionate defenceof the King. But now.., he was simply too exhausted. Hefound it hard enough to stay awake to cook the cowboys' 


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119 
supper: smashed barley grains, dehydrated vegetables andfatty salt meat boiled up in a big black kettle, yak bonescharred on the embers until their marrows bubbled and ran. 
"Good food," Hawk pronounced. His beard shone withgrease. "I told you," he said to the cowboys, "that they makethe best cooks. You come with me, young Han, and I'll showyou how to make tea strong enough to sink such good foodand 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 thinkof 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 wonderingjust why you're out here."
"I was travelling to the capital."
"Do tell." Hawk licked the blade of his knife, folded it upand put it away. His long white hair made a kind of cowlaround his lined face. "You put water in the kettle until it'shalf full, bring it to the boil, then put in the butter." Whenhe had set the kettle in the middle of the cooking fire hesaid, "Young Redd's a firebrand. A couple of herd bosses havealready fired him from their crews. I find him.., entertaining.
He reminds me of myself when I was young, when theEmperor and the Ten Thousand Years began to deal withthe Earth. The conchies sent missionaries amongst us, andwe lynched most of them, but there were always more, alllooking almost exactly alike. There were riots, I remember,
and the Army of the People's Mouths was sent against us. Iwas amongst those who called for the strike to hold, and itdid. We took away half the capital's meat supply, and prettysoon the Ten Thousand Years gave in--no more missionaries.
But the conchies won in the end. They only had towait. These days even cowboys give up their lives to dreamtheir way into Heaven, for all Redd's fine sentiments. Thedifference between him and my younger self is that I wasone of many, but he's one of a vanishing breed."
Lee, wondering what Hawk was trying to tell him, saidnothing. 


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PAUL J. McAuLrY 


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

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

"I like him, but I don't trust him. I get the idea that you'resympathetic to his ideas too, and I saw the way you lookedat the conchie drones today. No need to be alarmed. Wenone of us out here like what's happening to the world, it'sjust that unlike Redd, most of us know there isn't much wecan do about it. Now, go get a block of butter; tea's near toboiling." 

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

"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, hisface hidden by a fold of his black silk robe. There were intricatelines 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 skyin the midst of a host of tall buildings bigger than anythingLee had ever known. The blue water was flecked with the 
sails of many small craft. Nearer, overshadowing Lee and thelibrarian, a vast rust-red bridge soared across the straitwhich was the mouth of the bay. Vehicles hummed acrossit, small as beetles in the distance. Beyond the bridge...
fog, a bank of fog rolling in from gray ocean water. Somethingmade 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'son Earth, or it was. I suppose the ruins of the city might still bethere, but it's been so long since I thought to look, and theEarth's a green wilderness now... Listen, Lee, the people 


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you're with worship their ancestors. That you have a ghost inyour 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 centuriesago on the Earth, and the survivors were sent to provide thelabor for terraforming Mars. Most died. Those that didn'tbecame Martians. They believe the world is theirs, and whynot?" 

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

"You sound like a recruiting poster." 

Lee had been quoting a slogan he had come across in anold history file. He blushed and smiled and apologized. "Idon'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 haslost its way, and the Ten Thousand Years have traded progressfor immortality. They've traded on the lives of everyoneon 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 needsroughly map into each other, but that's all. You're a biologist,
Lee. You know what will happen to the ecosphere ofMars 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 assimilatingnew information. That's what you're doing." 

"The librarian said something like that, a while back. Inanother 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 swallowedthe bridge. The sunlight was edged with cold. She said, "Thecowboys might be able to help us, Lee. The viruses tried to encryptpart of my memories, but it didn't take too well. Not surprising,
really, the machines were never designed to read outinto another nervous system. But they found that other viruseshad already been at work inside you. They found the librarian."
"No. He's an archive program a friend wrote for me. Hewas worming through the common data banks, looking forinformation..." 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 bandwidthof virtual-reality goggles, and recorded anything you experienced.
My viruses took it over, rewrote me into what wasthere. But it wasn't enough. I can't remember everything Iwas 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-grandfatheris. 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 somethingto straighten me out, Lee. If not..."
The fog was swirling around them. Cold droplets beadedLee's skin. Miriam was a shadow in the whiteness, leaningtowards him. Another shadow stood behind her. Lee thoughtit was the librarian, but it was taller and thinner, and therewas a bonewhite glint in the hood cast over its face.
Miriam said, "Otherwise I'll die again, Lee. Otherwise badsectors might spread to your memories. Now you must wakeup. Redd wants to show you something."
Redd was leaning over Lee, a shadow against a sky sochoked with brilliant stars it dazzled the eyes. He had beenshaking Lee's shoulder, and sat back when Lee groaned andpushed up on one elbow. Every muscle in his body was stiffand sore. 


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123 
"It's time," Redd said, and with a grand gesture pointedat 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 justenough to watch over the herd. Lee could put a name tomost of them now. White Eye, Dog Breath, Dead Finger.
The Gray Fox, Angel Eyes, Lonesome Dove. 

When White Eye saw Lee amongst them he complainedloudly 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? Wehave 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 noconchie. 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'sspine".., and he's as much reason as any to stay away fromthe Army of the People's Mouths, or any of the militias ofthe Ten Thousand Years. So quit being so prejudiced. I swearI'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." 


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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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

"This is like a spaceship?" 

More like an elevator. The capsule comes straightdown, like a spider on its thread. Do you have spiders onMars? 

"Don't be silly." 

--I don't know why I should assume that you do. TheNexus'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 thepony 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 wallstill sharply terraced. Some of the cowboys rode straight ondown, whooping and waving their woollen hats amidst risingclouds of dust. The more cautious took a meandering pathamongst boulders and across overturned strata down to thedusty floor where a dwarf forest of cacti grew, raising spinypaddles as high as the ponies' bellies. 

Lee didn't need enhanced vision to see the thing in thecenter of the crater. It stood poised on three prongs, bullet-shapedand twice as tall as a man, glittering in the fiercestarlight. The first cowboys had already reached it and wereriding round and round, calling to each other in high, excitedvoices. Lee looked up into the starry sky but could nolonger see the thread down which the thing had fallen fromthe sky. 

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

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

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

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

Lee saw that a swathe had been cut through the standsof cacti that covered the crater's floor. Something hadlopped the plants neatly at ground level so that they had allfallen in one direction. 

"It comes down after the drop, kilometers of it, draggingthis end with it. It'll still be falling, drifting westward, for atleast a day. We'd spool it up and spray fixative on it, but youcan't cut it, and it cuts anything clean through. Dangerousstuff. Like most gifts from the sky you have to know how tohandle it." 

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

"Without fixation, it falls apart in air," Redd said. "Mostdoesn't even reach the ground." They reined in their poniesand joined those cowboys, Hawk amongst them, who haddismounted. A few were still circling the capsule. Onestarted taking pot shots that rang against the capsule's metaland 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 ittakes a day before it gives us what it's brought down." 

That was when a hatch in the side of the capsule's nosecone blew off in a cloud of rolling smoke, green stuff litfrom within by a brief sullen glare. There was a hideousamplified cackle that rolled and echoed around the crater'ssteep 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 bysome internal light source. 

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

Lee stepped back, because for a moment the bobbing headseemed to look directly at him, its eyes knowing and filled 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


with deadly mischief. Redd caught his elbow. "It's only ahologram. 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 centuryor two. But what's a few hundred years between friends?
We're back, as bad and as dangerous as ever. Just give us toyour children and stand well back. Why, they don't evenneed to read. They can just look at the pictures. Like I alwayssay, a picture is worse than a thousand words." 

Miriam was suddenly beside Lee. Though the head's luminouswhite skin threw grisly light over the cowboys, shewas 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. ThePranksters." 

Lee whispered back, "That's the name of this thing?" Hewas only half certain he was not dreaming all this, wouldwake 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 halfa dozen rocks, all on eccentric orbits. They are dedicated todestabilizing systems. They say that it's an evolutionary tool,
and it makes them dangerous. I'd guess that this is fundedby the Earth; there's no way something like this could havefallen 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 downthe technology for direct sensory access, too." She added, toLee, "Call it a kind of pseudo psi. He's tapping into the RAMchip in your visual cortex to see me." 

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

Miriam whispered, "Even if they haven't been subvertedby the Earth, the Pranksters won't be any help."
"Ah, but their gifts are sometimes useful," Hawk said, and 


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raised his arm. His hand was wrapped inside the freeformstock of a huge reaction pistol. He fired, and the head vanishedin mid-sentence. 
The capsule whirred and shook. Its top suddenly began tospin, faster and faster. Steam shot from the widening jointwith a scream. Then the whole nose cone shot off on a wobblingtrajectory, and an explosion inside the capsule blew astorm of paper over the cowboys.
Lee plucked at pages that fluttered around him. Leaflets,
picture novels printed in garish colors. They were a littlelike instruction manuals, but in the dying glow from thecapsule he could see that the panels were dense with violence,
costumed muscle-bulging freaks, flames and explosionsamongst tall buildings built of glass, all kinds ofstrange things.
Redd said, "We get good money for this, and in the olddays we'd have stuck a finger up the noses of the Emperor'sstate censors, too. But now there's so much propaganda thatthis is just another dust grain in the storm."
"Oh," Lee said. He was beginning to realize where all therock'n'roll artifacts came from. His posters of the King ofthe Cats, the data needles of his music, the fragments of hisfilms. Who, then, was the King working for?
He helped the others pull back the flimsy panels of theburnt-out capsule, unload bundles of leaflets and reload themon to the ponies. Paper had blown all over the crater, and thecowboys started their ride back to camp amidst cacti festoonedwith leaflets that, impaled on spines, fluttered and flapped likea million crucified birds. 


Twenty-nine 

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


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potatoes fried to crispy char on the outside and with a coldwet knot in the center, but otherwise kept away.
The well head dominated the slumped village, a hugeflower with battered silvery petals that focused sunlight onblack panels thick with piping. Sunlight warmed the panelsthrough which water flowed; the heated water was drivenunderground by its own expansion, to melt permafrostwhich was used to irrigate the village's stony potato fields.
It tasted of iron and bitter salts, this fossil water. The dayafter drinking it, Lee had a bad case of the shits, whichcaused the cowboys no end of amusement.
Most of the cowboys had some secret locked away, somereason why they'd taken to riding the range. As he rode withthem, Lee heard something of their stories. Hawk had beenindentured to a danwei work gang when he was six, hadescaped a year later and worked his way up from cowboy torange boss. He owned the yaks they were driving from thewinter ranges. Skinny White Eye had poisoned a dozenwomen in his neighborhood, then escaped the transporttrain taking him to the polar labor camp. Old Dead Fingerhad been a monk, and his head was still clean shaven. LonesomeDove was a deserter from the Army of the People'sMouths. And so on. 
Only Redd's reasons for riding the range were unclear.
Lee heard half a dozen contradictory stories: he was supposedto have betrayed his best friend to the secret police;
or to have shot him in the back; or to have actually been inthe secret police, and gone on the run after letting his childhoodfriend, a leader of the ku li, escape an ambush; or hehad 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 fromhim just how little he knew about the desert and about herdingyaks, and how little he knew about the lives of men wholived in the vast empty landscapes of Mars, outside the citiesand the huddled danweis. 
"You gotta have a new name," Redd declared. "Can't haveyou walkin' around Lowell"-- like all the cowboys, Redd in 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

"You are very certain." 

"It's 'cause you're a kid. Billy Lee. See, we turn you intoa Yankee half-breed. I reckon you got some white man inyou, there ain't anyone on the planet who ain't got someMartian in them, Yankee or Tibetan or both. Cowboys justgenerally 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 outI didn't need to, so I was right about my hunch all along.
Know why you were spared? Hawk saw the ghost on yourback. He's curious about it, 'cause cowboys owe the anarchistspart of their living. But cowboys aren't for the SkyRoad, for all that. They're just for themselves." 

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

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

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

Redd pulled the brim of his black hat over his eyes. Hisgloves were caked with red dust; there was a time of duston the woollen blanket he wore as a cape. "I reckon no onecan afford not to be for themselves," he said. "Otherwisethey just get used by other people. How about you, BillyLee? 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, untilone day you're as old as the Gray Fox or Lonesome Dove,
and you wonder where your life went." And he spurred hispony after a yak that was trotting eagerly at right anglesfrom 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 saxifragemoss from crusted ground, making camp after the suddensunset, the nights achingly cold and glorious with stars, andalways the lonesome songs of the watch riders floating outinto the desert, and awesome sunrises, frost vanishing intothe air with a sound like a million tiny bells and yaks makingclouds around themselves with their own breath, groaningand flinging strings of orange spittle as they started movingagain. Until at last the cowboys and their herd crossed asingle-track railway line that ran from east to west acrossthe flat land. The herd turned to parallel the high dust bankthat had been cleared from the line after the winter storms,
and the next day reached Xin Beijing, the capital of Mars. 


Thirty 

in Beijing sprawled in a wide pass that cut through aragged circle of mountains, the eroded rim wall of avast ancient crater more than a hundred kilometers 
across. Within the crater a perfectly circular lake, ringedround with white salt deposits, reflected the pink sky andthe pine-clad mountains that rose steeply around it.
Xin Beijing had once been the site of the Yankee Martiancolony, long before the air had been thickened, but the olddomed Yankee Quarter was lost now in a sprawl of widedusty streets, lined by giant ginkgoes, where bicyclesswarmed amongst clanging trolley cars. Streets radiatedaway from the industrial sector and the railway junction andthe silent citadel where ten thousand ministers, secretaries,
programmers, engineers and interpreters interceded betweenthe world and the Emperor. Between these three minglingfans of streets were wedge-shaped parks and biggovernment buildings and the sterile white compoundswhere half-lifers dreamed themselves into Heaven. 
Lee had left Xin Beijing two years before, as a passengeron the Central Desert Express. The railway station had beena small city in itself, an entire social ecology with separatecastes which made their living by selling food or trinkets totravellers, 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 trainbrought in hundreds more refugees from dust-buried farm134 


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135 


lands along the Grand Canal; leaving the city, Lee had hadan 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 cowboyschannelling a thousand head of yak into their holding pasturewas to ride into a city he did not know. He rememberedthe pink, circular lake, the second largest body of free wateron Mars, so wide that not even the tallest peaks of the mountainson its far side showed above the flat line of its horizon. 
He recognized the pine-forested snaggle-toothed rim-wallmountains that rose either side of the city, saw with a pangthe distant, flat-topped peak where the house of his great-grandfatherstood. But otherwise he might be riding into acity on another planet. 

The stockyards were to the south of Xin Beijing, stretchingfrom 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 thelevel afternoon sun, across a flat landscape where trails madea complex network amongst fields of bare red earth fencedwith stone. Small electric locomotives shunted cattle cars 
or feed wagons along spur lines. Tented camps were pitchedalong the lake shore, where in the shallows floating pontoonscorralled hectares of algae and azolla for fodder. 

Lee soon saw why Hawk had hired one of the denim-cladmen who hung around the trail head, most of them laconicround-eyed Yankees, to guide the herd through the stockyards'shifting labyrinths. He had thought that the journeywould be over once they reached the stockyards, but it tookfrom noon to sunset to negotiate their way to the feed lotset aside for the herd. 

Like the railway station, the stockyards were a culture inminiature. As well as field guides, there were slaughterersand assayers and veterinarians and auctioneers, stockmenand wranglers and field hands, sod busters and wet workersand feed-lot pitchers. They served all the high equatorialplains, and even on a world as small and barren as Mars thatwas a considerable territory. Lee had once read that the 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 
plains were the range of ten million head of domesticatedyak and dzo, and uncounted numbers of yak reverted to thewild. 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 forthe calves to be sorted. The males would almost all be geldedand feed-lot fattened and butchered without ever settinghoof on the red ranges. The females would be tagged andreturned with their mothers and newly impregnated aunts.
The yaks in the herd, every one of which the cowboys invariablycalled "he," were all female.
The real work began when the feed-lot pasturage wasreached. The chip implanted in each yak was scanned by anassayer for a readout on the animal's physiological history.
To do this the confused and irritable animals had to be wrangledone by one into a narrow chute until one thousand andtwenty-eight had passed through into the big bare field beyond.
The yaks were fed a slobber of azolla and ripe silage. Thecowboys drank tea in a circle around a campsite fire whileHawk came around and paid them off. He pressed a littleroll of ten yuan notes into Lee's bleeding hands and toldhim to find his town house the next day, at the Square ofTwo Thousand Martyrs. He said, in a gravelly confiding undertone,
"You're a good worker. I decided you're due somethingfrom the sale of our sky booty, but don't tell the othersin case of bad feeling. And another thing. Take care withRedd. He might not be so good a friend as you think. Keepour little rendezvous from him." 
Most of the cowboys were headed towards the strip ofsmoke houses and pleasure palaces along the lake shore beyondthe fodder-processing plants. Redd explained to Leethat they'd spend most of their pay and then sign up withsome 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 whisperedwarning, in truth too tired and scared to do muchthinking of his own. He had returned to challenge his great 


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grandfather, either by finding the people Miriam's ghost hadsaid were waiting for him somewhere in the city, or by tryingto sell him the totipotent viruses, and either way he didnot think he had long to live. 

They walked the short distance to a tram stop. When Leeasked about Redd's pony, the cowboy said, "I don't even ownthe saddle. What's so special about a horse? Temperamentalcritters with a nasty bite and brains about as big as a sun-driedgrape. Backbroken way of moving so your balls arehammered between your saddle and your arse with everystep, fall sick when you least need it, have to be watchedevery second in case they get some damnfool notion of independencein their heads. And another thing, you evereaten horse? They don't even taste good. What I'd like is todo it all from air in a culver, but that's not allowed so it'snot worth thinking about." 

It took three changes of tram to get them to the old YankeeQuarter. The city seemed emptier than Lee remembered.
Whole blocks of apartment houses lay dark and silent in thetwilight. Others had been colonized by refugees. Dzo andgoats were tethered in the remains of parks. Bonfires blazedon 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 Thousandwith ideograms a dozen meters high, denouncing theCommittee of Six, the group of Ten Thousand Years whohad taken it upon themselves to speak for the Emperor andwho were now the only voices of authority in the deserts ofits silence. 

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

Everyone in Bitter Waters had preferred the governmentchannel. It spoke comfortingly of small gatherings quicklydispersed rather than riots, of disagreements between polit-


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PAUL J. MCAULE¥ 


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

The tram rattled past murals and wrecked buildings andrefugee camps, past wreckage left by riots and buildingswhose walls bore murals pocked and cratered by shell andshot. The tram's bell tingled dutifully at every junction, asif it was trying to conjure the old order back into being. Itrattled past the sepulchres of the half-lifers, layered whitebuildings that seemed to float in islands of light. Those dyingout of this world were more important than those still livingin it, it seemed. 

There was little traffic, and most of it consisted of squadsof militia zooming by in swift electric trucks. Once, the tramhad to stop at a barricade while militia in black blouses andblack baggy trousers, the red bands tied around their foreheadsmarked with the seal of The Little Bird, climbedaboard and looked at each passenger in turn. They werearmed with pistols and laser prods. Redd stared right back 


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139 
at them, and once the tram had passed through the barricadehe said to Lee, "Things are bad. The Emperor has becomeso quiet that the Ten Thousand Years fight amongstthemselves to see who will be its successor." 
"Warlords," Lee said.
"It hasn't come to that. Not yet. Let's hope it won't. Buttheir factions run the streets now, dividing the city amongstthemselves. There were fire fights just about every nightwhen I left here. Things look to have gotten worse."
But at least the Yankee Quarter was just as Lee rememberedit. The field-sized panes of glass of its dome, opaquelysandblasted by centuries of storms, shone in the gatheringnight like a hovering pearl as the tram rocked towards itdown 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 aroundand over the original buildings until almost no trace wasleft of the Yankee settlement the dome had once protected.
The atmospheric recycling units had long ago overloadedand a greasy drizzle of condensation continually drifteddown on to the layers of flat roofs and the interlayered bladesof heat-exchange engines. Apartment blocks and arcades andfactories grew into each other like corals. Vegetables werecultivated in courtyards full of purplish light cast by racksof fluorescent tubing. Ganglia of cables and pipes and opticalfibres and telephone wiring ran everywhere. Light fell intothe narrow hutongs from grilles, past swatches of saggingwires or plumes of steam, past balconies, past the barredwindows of thousands of tiny shops (it was said that if youcould buy anything on Mars, you could buy it in the YankeeQuarter). In many hutongs light never fell at all, for thebuildings 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 andHan. Many wore hats pulled down over their faces and capesof slick waterproof material in bright primary colors overordinary tunics and trousers. There were few militia here, 


 140 
PAUt, J. McAu[:¥ 


but many soldiers of the Army of the People's Mouths, youngshaven-headed recruits with the scars of their brain surgerystill raw, most walking in pairs, hand in hand, the way citizensdid when in a strange place. Lee saw a pilot carriedalong above the crowds on his stalking, insectile litter,
breastplate and bubble helmet shining. A pair of conchiemissionaries from Earth, alike as twins, walked side by sidein their dark suits and hardly anyone took any notice, althougheveryone stepped out of their way. Trams driftedthrough the crowds of bicycles that clogged the roadways.
Electric signs rose dozens of meters into the air, neon tubingsizzling in the drizzle. Holograms floated here and there,
message clouds tugged by impalpable breezes. Most of thesigns were in wormy backwards Yankee script; CommonLanguage ideograms were rare. Every so often there was thesound of firecrackers; it was the beginning of the festival ofthe 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 acrowded shopping street that curved away from Main Street.
Cyclists wove amongst the pedestrians, banging on tinnyhorns. The street was lit by fluorescent tubes stapled to aconcrete 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-likehutong. There were no lights, yet bicycles careeredalong it regardless, continually sounding their horns as ifsteering by sonar, like bats. A stairway off the hutong twisteddown to a dim, crowded, noisy cave of a bar. A steel counterran around three sides. Men, almost all of them Yankees,
stood shoulder to shoulder, drinking steadily and watchinga Yankee woman taking her clothes off inside a raised cage.
Lee gaped at her and Redd pulled him by his elbow all theway across the bar and through an arch curtained with stripsof plastic into another room, smaller and quieter, floor, wallsand ceiling of white-painted concrete lit by bare fluorescenttubes. In one corner was a tea counter where a few old men 

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

Lee exchanged his dusty sweat-stiffened clothes for a hugetowel and allowed himself to be led through the rituals ofshowering and soaking, massaging and steaming. Finally, hestood side by side with Redd in a huge pool of salty, faintlysulphurous water that buoyed up their scrubbed bodies.
They leaned at the pool's edge and sipped earthy jasmine teaand 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 withdemocratic ease in this vaulted cavern. Fluorescent tubes 
hung from a ceiling of naked rock. Their light slithered onthe surface of the slop of water, slipped and twinkled onslimy tiles which were each embossed with a curled dragon.
It was a very old bathhouse, Redd said, five hundred yearsold at least--which Lee thought impossible before he rememberedthat Yankees still counted years by Earth's shortseasons. 

"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. PerhapsI can get the help of my great-grandfather, but it willbe difficult. He is a powerful man, but we have had a misunderstandingthat 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 thatran from beneath his left nipple to the bottom of his ribcage.
The ball of his right shoulder looked as if someone had oncechewed on it, long ago. 

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

"I'm not so young." 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

"You've lived life, and I haven't." Lee had been thinking, onthe long tram ride, about how little he really knew the city inwhich he had grown up. He knew that part of the quiet tree-filledsuburb of the Fragrant Hills around Master Qing's Academyof Mental Cultivation, the Great House ofGreat-grandfather Wei, the mountain lodge where MasterQing's Academy of Mental Cultivation had convened in summerto escape the city's dusty heat, high in the mountains onthe far side of the lake. The rest of the city had been forbiddento him, known only through brief expeditions planned with asmuch daring and long thought as military raids upon hostileterritory. 

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

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

"If you go to your great-grandfather, he'll ream her outof you and throw away your carcass. Wise up, kid." Reddtook a thin black cigar from the attendant, who lighted itfor 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 nohurry. He had enough money to last him a week if he wascareful, and Hawk had promised him more. There was nopoint looking for Miriam's friends while he was still achingfrom the trail drive, and he couldn't walk up to Great-grandfatherWei'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 agood enough fellow, and he was ideal company in the YankeeQuarter. 

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

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


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"You're carrying something valuable. You haven't told mewhat it is, and that's fine, that's up to you. But I know thatyour great-grandfather wants it, and I bet so does the restof the Ten Thousand Years. Now they know you escaped withthe anarchist, and by now they might have figured youmight still be alive. Even if you're not, they'll be keeping awatch out for you. They might even have spotted you. Andthe nearer that you get to your great-grandfather, the closerto being spotted you get. Ever think of what would happento you when that happens? I reckon I do. I used to work forone of the Ten Thousand Years, in a small way." Redd lookedsideways to gauge Lee's reaction, and what he saw evidentlyamused him. "Don't you worry, Billy Lee, if I wanted to turnyou 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 thetruth," Redd said softly.
Lee waited, as he used to wait for his great-grandfather'seidolon. Redd said, "I learned one thing, back then. It wasthat the Ten Thousand Years aren't human. If you want totalk with your great-grandfather, you can't just go walkingup to his front door. I saved your life, Billy Lee. One thingyou need to keep fixed in your head. You owe me one, andI'm not asking anything but what would help you further."
Lee laughed, because Redd's crude attempt at constructinga face trap had only served to free him. He had an obligationto 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-peaceMbele. But Redd had admitted that the obligation wasat an end, and now Lee knew just how much he had changedsince the morning he had set out with Guoquiang and XiaoBing on the first calm day of spring. There was a new hardnessin 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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

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

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

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

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

Two men who had been lounging by the stairway startedacross the bar. They both had brush-cut hair, and both worewhite short-sleeved shirts, baggy trousers with camouflagered and gray blotches, heavy combat boots. 

"You fucker!" Redd shouted, and pushed White Eye aside.
Then the two militia were running, tipping tables andspilling drinks into the laps of cardplayers. White Eye swungat Redd, a knife suddenly in his hand. Redd danced back,
kicked White Eye's knee, his hip. White Eye flew backwardsand landed across a table, scattering glasses and bottles.
When he tried to stand, burly drinkers grabbed his shouldersand spun him away: men stepped aside and he crashed intothe 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, andlaid out the chair wielder with a single punch. The fight wasspreading to every corner of the bar; White Eye had disappearedin a male of swinging fists and furniture, volleys ofbottles and glasses. 


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145 

"Run!" Redd yelled at Lee, and the nearest of the militiashouted something, too. Waving a gun, he pushed throughthe riot like a swimmer in a heavy sea. He was so close thatwhen the gun went off Lee felt the heat of its beam washacross his face. The bolt smashed the cables and pipes thatwove across the ceiling; fans of sparks rained down on theheads 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 howhe'd reached it. He could feel the thing that had seizedhim float away on the tides of his blood. He let it go. Hecould feel his pulse, just behind his ears. His legs and backached sweetly, hollowly. He felt calm and exhausted. He hadbeen running, running very fast... 

The rich slow voice of the King of the Cats was rappingfrom speakers in an information arcade. Lee rememberedthat the librarian had promised to try and follow him to thecapital, and went inside. He had no other ally, now, exceptMiriam's silent ghost. 

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

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

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

146 


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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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

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

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


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 civilservant, dressed in a business suit under a transparentplastic slicker. He sauntered along on the far side of the busystreet, and if there had not been so many Yankees about,
Lee might never have noticed him. But his bland moon faceseemed always turned to Lee, flashing again and again inthe crowd between the gaps in the trams. Lee took turningsat random, always keeping to the wider streets--he didn'tdare to dodge into the maze of hutongs--but every time helooked back, his tail was still there, moving at the samesteady pace through the crowds on the far side of the street. 

Perhaps he was a friend of Redd's--but how would he havefound Lee so quickly? Or perhaps Great-grandfather Wei hadfound 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'tunderstood. That they were dead. That they had been killed byan assassin who had been employed by Great-grandfather Wei.
For the man could not have entered the garden of the GreatHouse without the co-operation of the Great House's securitysystem; and besides, Lee knew who he was. Years afterwards hewas still employed by Great-grandfather Wei. 

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


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


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

Lee circled the statue, was walking past the rank of pedicabsfor the second time when the idea came. He jumped into thefirst pedicab in the queue. The driver was a muscular Yankee intight green leggings and a neon pink undershirt with the armstorn offat the shoulders. There was a kind of bubble of crinklyplastic over his mane of blond hair; a filter mask hung underhis chin. He said, "Where to go, my man?" 

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

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

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

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

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

"I think your friend, he hasn't given up. Sort of a chunky 


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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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


steering bar and the two pedicabs collided, wheels tanglingbefore 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 terrificwrench and Lee shot forward, rolling over and overthrough leaves and stiff twigs. 


Thirty-three 

T 

he pedicab had ploughed through a hedge into a littlepark. Lee lay amid the dusty smell of carnations, foolishlylooking up at black sky. He rolled over, saw thedriver trying to get his pedicab upright. Beyond a scrim ofbushes, the other pedicab was upended in the middle of theroad, one wheel still lazily revolving. The brawny man wasbeing pulled out of the wreckage by spike-haired MaddogMaguire. 

Lee sprang up and ran. He plunged straight through flow-erbedsand cleared the hedge on the other side of the parkin a single bound. Then he was running along a wide streetdivided down the middle by tram lines. Factory buildingsmade a low humming on either side. Occasional lights sheda sickly orange radiance. Up ahead there was the sound ofmusic, and once, twice, fireworks burst above the flat roofsof the factories, brief constellations already fading by thetime the faint sound of their detonation reached Lee. 

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

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


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 

access the parallel nerve net spun by the viruses. He speededup. He blurred.
Maddog Maguire's pedicab was soon left far behind as Leedodged down ever narrowing streets. He ran sweetly andeasily, taking rapid sips of air. Paved road suddenly gave wayto a mud track with a stinking sewer channel overflowingits center. Washing strung from house to house made ghostshapes above him; dogs barked from porches as Lee spedpast. The fireworks and the music seemed closer, and thenLee turned a corner and was in the middle of a festival 
crowd. 
He stopped, muscles loose as sacks of water. Peoplewound all up and down the waterfront. There were monksin red robes, and fishermen and women in black cottonsmocks or hooded jackets of undyed wool, red yarn woundthrough their hair and red or yellow kerchiefs at theirthroats. Children ran everywhere. Vendors cried their wares:
beer, sweet rice, dumplings, fried dough. Everybody seemedto be whirling a prayer wheel or carrying a boat-shaped butterlamp or a smoking stick of incense, or banging a littledrum or shaking a tambourine. Every so often someonewould touch off a firework, just for the fun of it, and fieryflowers would bloom out across the dark lake. Jetties ran 
out into faintly luminous darkness and boats were tied up along way down them, paper lanterns glowing like stars atthe points of their high sterns.
It was the festival of the houses of the gods, the time whenthe myriad fragmented gods of the fisherfolk left the peoplethey had been riding for a year and settled in new hosts.
Here and there chanting circles danced around a man or awoman who swayed as if drunk--drunk on the immanenceof godhead. Lee was twice drawn into one of these circles,
and after he freed himself the second time he was broughtup short by a man with staring eyes and tears running downhis cheeks. He held Lee by his shoulders and looked unblinkinglyinto his face and said, "Welcome, sister," and 
spun away.
A firework went off prematurely, cracking a shower of 


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155 
golden rain directly overhead. Everyone around Lee looked up,
everyone except a man who was looking right and left as hepushed 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 andscreams and laughter of the festival.
Lee dodged around the smoking cart of a dough fryer,
threaded his way through ambling knots and chanting circlesof people. A solemn little girl caught at the hem of hischuba; Lee pulled free and darted between two shaven-headedmonks in orange robes who capered and beat littledrums 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, andLee ran on, ran a long, long way until he almost ran off theend of the jetty. The tops of the masts of the little fishingboats rose waist high on either side. Black water slopped farbelow him. He turned. 
The man in black raised his hands to show they wereempty. He was only a few meters away. The lanterns anddancing lights of the festival made a ribbon on the darknessbehind him. 
"Wei Lee," he said. "Don't be scared. I am here to helpyou."
Lee said, "I need no help." A fire burned beneath hisbreastbone. 
"I think you do. You can trust me. Look."
The man started to bring something out of his jacket andLee blurred into motion and ran straight at the man andcaught his wrist. For a moment they wrestled at the lip ofthe jetty: Lee desperately quick; the man ponderous andstrong. And then they fell. 


Thirty-four 

T 

he impact of the water drove all breath from Lee'sbody. He plunged in a whirl of bubbles down into colddarkness. Pressure drove twin spikes into his eardrums.
Like almost every Martian, he had never learned toswim. Galvanized by a lightning tree of fear, he thrashedand kicked against the heavy dark water with no idea of upor down. 

Every muscle ached for air, but he retained enough senseto clamp his teeth against the impulse to breathe that wastightening within his chest like a vice, threatening to springhis ribs. 

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

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

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


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157 


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

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

Lee remembered to use the enhanced vision the viruses 
had given him, and saw the solemn little girl who hadclutched at the hem of his chuba in the midst of the festival's 
whirl. She wore a black shift over a red shirt with baggysleeves and kneehigh felt boots. Her black hair was done upin 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 withmore than cold, although his clothes were heavy with icywater and he was chilled to the marrow by the breeze offthe lake. He said, "I wish I could thank him." 

"You need a machine to talk fin. Much is too high andfast, even for me." She said, in a completely different toneof voice, "I carry a god. That is how I know you are morethan one." 

A chattering squeal came from out in the water. 

The little girl said, "The fin says you are legion. He saysyou 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 longtime." 

The little girl's name was Chen Yao. She was four yearsold, the youngest daughter of a fishing family. The god thathad settled in her that night was a star god whose secretname could not be revealed. Chen Yao said that he claimed 
to be the father of the Emperor Yu, who had first controlledthe 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, 


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PAUL J. McAuLEv 


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

Lee thought that she meant the Milky Way, and asked nomore. Chen Yao led him up the long sweep of the salt flatsand then through the crowds and the lights and scents andnoise 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. Thatat least had been real enough. So had the man in black, whoLee fervently hoped was at the bottom of the lake. But thetalk of gods ... even if Chen Yao did somehow know aboutMiriam, Miriam was no god. She was not even alive, was nomore than the sum of data coded by her viruses on to thespy 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 childrenfollowed them in solemn single file through thecrowds, all with wide eyes and tear-stained cheeks. He askedthe little girl where they were going, and she pointed andsaid, "Why, to our house, of course." 

On a spit of land at the far end of the waterfront, past thehouses and long steep jetties, lit by lanterns strung everywhereacross its white-washed walls and steep red-tiledroofs, was a temple. 


Thirty-five 

T 
he gods bathed Lee and brought him clean clothes, andfed him fried aubergines and maize porridge fleckedwith bits of charcoaled potato. This was in one of thechapels of the temple, an octagonal high-ceilinged roombright with murals and banners, and with lamps in a hundredniches making flickering constellations. Lee learnedhow good food tastes after your life has been saved, and thegods smiled indulgently at his relish.
After Lee had eaten, the gods left him to sleep. Hesprawled on loose cushions in a big ornate chair, the brocadegown given to him by the gods scratchy against his cleanskin. 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 hurtless than he thought it should. The young boy who hadwitnessed it was no relation to him except that they werethe same person, and he was beginning to realize that hehad been more obsessed with the search to find them than 
its outcome. What hurt most was that Great-grandfather Weihad betrayed him not once but twice, using the same cat'spawwith a casual arrogance that implied volumes aboutwhat 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 couldsleep... 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


The gods watched him solemnly from the doorway of thechapel, asking nothing of him. The little girl, Chert Yao,
slept curled at the foot of Lee's throne, and Lee soon fellasleep too. 


Thirty-six 

H 

e was in the chapel, alone. Light streamed throughthe door, brighter than the butter lamps. Two peoplestood in the light. 

One was Miriam Makepeace Mbele. She was wearing tightblue-denim jeans crusted with sewn-on badges, and a sleevelessundershirt with sunburst patterns of purple and orangethat interlocked in a way that made them seem to rotateover her unbound breasts. Her hair was long and bleached,
tied back with a sparkly headband. 

The other person, in a white leather suit sparkling withrhinestones, its front V-ed open down to his navel, was theKing of the Cats. Around his shoulders was a white capelined with cloth of gold, its flared collar faced with scarlet.
His wide golden belt bore the legend "The World ChampionEntertainer." He flashed his crooked grin and beckoned toLee. His fingers glittered with gold rings set with diamondsand rubies and emeralds. 

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

They were in a transparent bubble hung in starry spacefrom a siding of pitted rock. Like ghosts, they floated in coolpine-scented air. 

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

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

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

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

Lee wondered which god he meant. 

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

"Speak for yourself," the King said. A corner of hisfull-lipped mouth lifted into precisely the expression Leehad spent so much time practicing. "I'm just visiting.
And incidentally, in this present incarnation I'm tooyoung for this science-fictiony suit. But, hey, don't botherageing me. Corporeality is relative." 

Lee said, "You know each other?" 

The King shrugged. "I've known one or another of Miriam'sincarnations down the years. She's a popular agentwith both sides. A regular pistol. A Colt pistol, if you get mydrift." 

"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 FlamingStar." 

"Lee, I told you that my gene tine was owned," Miriamsaid, casting an exasperated look at the King of the Cats.
"Miriam is my own given name, Makepeace is the tradename of my clone line, Mbele is the name of the family 


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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 elsethe 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 panowns death. The dead own Earth, all right."
Lee said, "I thought everyone on Earth worshipped theMother Goddess of the World." He felt quite calm, as if hewas floating about a centimeter above his own skull. A viewpoint.
An observer. 
The King said, "No one's left alive on Earth except res-urrecteeskind of like Miriam here. Old genotypes in newbodies. You know them as the conchies. They do the workof the Earth's Consensus, and the Earth's Consensusserves the Mother Goddess of the World. Which is the 
world, dig? Earth was dying, strangling in the wastes ofhuman civilization, heat pollution, carbon dioxide. TheEarth's Consensus had two choices, move Earth's orbit outfrom the Sun, or remove the source of the problem. Thefirst solution wasn't technically feasible, so it applied thesecond." 
"Oh, it was technically feasible," Miriam said.
"Not without losing the Moon, and messing up the orbitsof Venus and Mars. And the Earth's Consensus has plans forMars, of course. And is applying them, as it did on Earth.
That's why we're all here. Mars is a dying world, from thehuman viewpoint. It's being allowed to die. The Earth's Consensussees 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 thanyou, Miriam, or at least most of the derivations of my mindsetsare. I never was a conservationist, nor could be. I'm tooearly a model. In a way, I guess you could say the Earth'sConsensus is my child. Without me..." 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


"You were the first," Miriam said. 

"Oh yeah, you bet! The first and best. I gave birth tomyselves, don't ever forget that. It gives me an edge themonads that make up the Earth's Consensus can neverhave. The# were created, once I had shown that it waspossible. 

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

the sky beyond the Earth. Even after the dawn of science avestige of that belief persisted. My original lived through atime when cults thought that benign advanced aliens woulddescend from the skies to rescue the Earth from Atomic 
Armageddon. But instead humans created intelligences superiorto themselves." The King winked. "Such as yourstruly, and the monads of the Earth's Consensus. Perhapsthey've never forgiven you humans that. Or perhaps theyregard you in the way your Cro-Magnon ancestors regardedthe Neanderthalers. Either way, they destroyed most of humanityin the name of preserving the Earth, and now theywant to transcend their origins completely, they want tobecome gods. For all their talk of the Mother Goddess of theWorld they look inward, away from the real, into worldscreated from information alone. Maybe they'll carry what'sleft of humanity with them as worshippers. Now, I was atthe center of a religion once, and I can tell you it's the lastthing you should want. My children, my child. I'm fond ofit, but this whole green machine thing scares the shit outof 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 dutyin '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. 


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165 


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

The King unslung his silk scarf, wiped his suddenly sweatybrow and flung the scarf at Lee. It flew straight as an arrow,
but went limp when Lee plucked it from the air. "Thinknothing of it, kid," the King said, and plucked another scarffrom 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 thisis one of your strongest partials. And you should know better,
Wei Lee. I think I told you about the way he's twistedhis history to suit himself. He thinks he's a combination ofChrist, Orpheus, and Osiris." 

The King said, "Heck, who are you to say? Listen, why doyou think the kid's a fan. He'll believe me more than Maoor some other long-gone politician. Lighten up, Miriam. Belike me, have some fun. I'll tell the kid what he needs toknow, 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, waterlocking back up under the crust because not enough wasever melted to achieve a balance where liquid water dominates.
On the Earth, if all water was frozen at the poles, itwould soon melt under its own weight and fill the oceansagain. Here on Mars there's not enough water. The balancehas to be tipped. The original terraforming was on the righttrack, but it didn't push the balance far enough. We will, ifwe can." 

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

"Fire, and then rain. A seeding, and a harvest. Forty daysand forty nights, Lee. The first installment of a flood that 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


will fill the dry seabeds for ever. Thousands may die, so thatunborn billions will live. Otherwise all will die, now and forever, and Mars will be what it once was."
"This is the Sky Roader path," Lee said. "But the balancerequires an average depth of five hundred meters in the seas.
No one can move that amount of water, and even if theycould it would kill everyone on Mars when it fell from thesky. Even the Ten Thousand Years didn't try to drop wateron Mars, but melt what was already there. Mars needs heat,
not water..." 
The King said, "You're good, kid. They did a good job onyou. 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 andspun away from him. Outside the blister,
the stars were dimming as if behind a rising mist. ThenLee understood that another scene was bleeding through thestarscape: a segment of Jupiter's banded globe, frozen bandsof salmon and yellow and white feathering off into complexscrolls. 
It hung there for a moment before rising up with terrificspeed, although Lee felt no hint of acceleration inthe weightless volume of the strange room. They werefalling through clouds twenty kilometers deep. Opalescentlight streaked all around. It was like being inside a pearl.
Then cloud vanished, and they were floating above a vastbrick-red plain--a cloud deck from which great thunderheadsboiled up to form improbable mountain ranges ofinverted fiat-topped wedges. They formed rough parallellines that dwindled to the horizon, three thousand kilometers 
away.
Something small glittered at the same height as theviewing blister, brilliant in the pinkish twilight. The blisterswept towards it, and Lee saw that it was like a tinselpine tree, its size impossible to estimate. In the clear atmosphereit 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 distinctas it grew nearer. 

"That," the King said, "is the beginning of your new worldsea, 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 ofa dust speck to a small mountain, shepherded by theinner moons into a series of arcs that forever poured aroundJupiter's equator. 

Fullerene viruses had been at work on every nugget of icemore 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 theatmosphere would fragment and melt the bolides; their waterwould rain down, seeded with viruses. Viruses that wouldsoak up sunlight and burrow into the permafrost and meltit with billions of pinchfusion processes. Viruses that wouldfloat into the high reaches of the atmosphere to manufacturea 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 toevade the laser defenses of the Army of the People's Mouths.
These too had multiplied, and there were more than enoughof them to deflect the long slow orbits of the bolides. 

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

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


 170 
PAUL J. McAULEY 


with viruses fifty years ago, but your Emperor was ahead ofus. The defenses saturate space around Mars with low-powerlow-frequency broadcasts that destroy unshielded viruses byinductive 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 flickedout a rod of crackling white light. "Star Wars," he said.
"Only their light sabres have an effective range of fifty thousandkilometers." 
There was only one way to disable the defenses, and thatwas to destroy the command center, which the Army of thePeople's Mouths had built on the highest point of Mars, inthe vast caldera of Tiger Mountain. Lee had come all theway to Xin Beijing, and now he was supposed to turn backand set out eastward. If he and Miriam had not been capturedby the monks of the lost lamasery, they might alreadyhave completed their mission.
"Or perhaps not," the King said cheerfully. "Now you havethe help of what's left of our other agents. At last they becomeuseful." 
Miriam had floated across to the bubble's curved transparentwall, clinging with splayed fingertips and watchingthe braided river of water-ice boulders eternally fall throughits orbit. She said, "I'm not the first agent sent down by theanarchists, but perhaps I will be the last. Many others failed;
a few survive in a fragmentary way, as virus infections inthe 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. AndI'm so much less than what I once was ..." 
"Who's to say, babe," the King said. "After all, you walkin the kid the way the gods walk in their avatars. Oh, I'veboosted you up for this, but don't underestimate yourself."
He turned his twisted smile on Lee. "You know what youhave 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 becauseit's down to you, kid. You gotta understand that the Earth'sConsensus can simulate me. It can foresee any strategy I candevise. I could randomise the choice..." he spun a thicksilver coin through the air, which vanished in the same directionthe light sabre had taken "... but I couldn't knowif the conchies haven't devised contingencies for everything.
It is possible. But you're an unknown variable, kid. That'swhy 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 deepurgent sadness. He said, "My great-grandfather had my parentskilled. Why did he do that? What does he want fromme?" 
Miriam said, "You still think that it was a coincidence thatI landed where I did? It was because you were there, Lee.
You're a link between us and your great-grandfather, part ofa long-standing deal, but you're also something else. Somethingyour great-grandfather doesn't know about. Yourmother..." 
"He killed my mother! My mother and my father! He shotthem down..." Lee couldn't see clearly any more. He wascrying. In microgravity, his tears formed fat blebs that clungto his eyelashes.
The King told Miriam, "Hush now. You'll destroy the randomvariables 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 takethat little girl. Chen Yao? You take her with you, now. Sheis the avatar of something whose powers you'll need. You'llwake up now, but you'll remember. Remember all this."
"Wait!" Miriam said. "If I can't die I need to wake up withhim. 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 wakeup, Lee." 

"No! Wait! Tell me why my parents were killed! Tell mewhat happened to them when they were ambassadors to theanarchists. Tell me..." 

"Time past! Wake up!" 


Thirty-eight 

L 

ee woke with a start, and almost fell out of the nest ofpillows 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 windowsof the chapels, dimming the multitude of flickering butter-lampflames. 

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

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

He had always loved the King of the Cats, had alwayshated the slow dying of Mars. And he had dreamed that theKing had recruited him to save Mars... that crazy storyabout 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-downpocket of his shirt, but he did not think that the gods hadtaken it. Perhaps it had been lost when the pedicab hadcrashed (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 aproblem. Chen Yao simply went up to a street vendor, andthe man smiled and handed them bananas sliced and fried 
in paper-thin envelopes of dough. 

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

Grainy white salt flats sloped away into gauzes of mistthat lay low on the black water of the lake. Down at the endsof the kilometer-long jetties, fishermen were preparing theirboats for the day's work. Their songs drifted small and clearin the bitter morning air. Oyster farms and kelp racks maderectangular patterns beyond the jetties. The sun still lay behindthe worn rimwall mountains, but his light glowed thesky and rouged the mists. Fear was overhead, a tinysmudged crescent riding swiftly to greet the dawning sun. 

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


 RED DUST 
177 

in his rebuilt eyes, and everything else flowed away from thesuddenly 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. ChenYao was looking at him. Her face was exactly level with hisown. 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 sawthe bulging heads of fins break the surface far out in theblack lake: two, four, six of them. One rose chest deep inthe water, beaked head bobb. ing. Perhaps it was the onewhich had saved his life. Lee got to his feet and raised hishand in salute. 
"The lake shrinks year by year," Chen Yao said. Fried bananawas smeared around her mouth. "Once it was twice as 
big, and where we walk was under water. These are the newdocks." 
"I know," Lee said, but Chen Yao wasn't paying attentionto him. She was watching the sweep of water beyond thedry salt flats and the ends of the jetties.
She said, "The fin grow fewer and fewer, for there arefewer 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, andallowed the other to drown." 
Lee discovered that the closer he looked at something,
the smaller his field of view became. He looked right intothe texture of the netting that a fisherman was foldingat the end of the long jetty, at the scars on the man's flexingknuckles. Just an extra step, that was all. He had it undercontrol now. 
He said, "These fin, they drowned the fellow that was followingme?" 
"They did not save him. It was action through inaction,
for the greater good. Their viruses prevent them from killingmen, which is why they fear war so much. But throughinaction 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 fatshirt 
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 ina 
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 crateas 
tall as Lee; a tram so laden with passengers--hanging from 
its windows, along its running boards, crowded on to itsroof 
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 border 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 weremasked; 
. 

the 
masks had bulbous goggles, and complex fairings thatswept back and grew into the soldiers' skulls. Things flewout of the crowd at the soldiers--bottles, stones, even theoccasional shoe--but the soldiers moved only to deflect missileswith their shields. The crowd roared when red paintsplashed 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 soldiersor 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 thefar side of the avenue he was caught in a swirling currentof people that carried him in one direction and Chert Yao inanother. Lee fought free and had to dodge a crowded tramthat continuously rang its bell as it crept through in themiddle of the crowd which swept Lee past the park andspilled out into the wide space of the Square of HeavenlyPeace. 

It seemed that half the population of the city was alreadythere. People streamed across the wide space towards thehigh white walls of the First House of the Emperor. Theyclustered thickly around the Front Gate, which in normaltimes would be open to allow entry of petitioners to theHalls of Requite Interface. But the gate was closed; it hadbeen closed ever since the Emperor had fallen silent, andnow its black and white mandala and its twenty-meter-higharch was spattered with red paint. People spilled past it oneither side, under the overhang of the wall, which archedabove them like a wave frozen in the moment of breaking.
Posters and painted slogans covered the lower third of thewall. Holographs projected luminous ladders of charactersabove the heads of the crowd, a hundred different variationson the call for truth. Vendors were out and about, cryingtheir wares, and a cluster of makeshift tents was pitched atone corner of the square. 

Lee caught the arm of a man, excused himself and askedwhat had happened. The man smiled in confusion andpointed to the sky and hurried away. An old woman shoutedat Lee, "The Emperor, young man! The sky radio says thatthe Emperor is dead!" 

Lee remembered to switch on the radio which the viruses 
had built inside his head but there was only a dizzy swoopof 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 hiswhite face. Elsewhere, a ragged shout went up from peoplestill crowding into the square. 

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


Fort 
R 

ank after rank of soldiers marched into the Square ofHeavenly Peace, fanning out either side of the avenueto form an arrowhead that pointed across the crowdedsquare to the Front Gate. An officer in a black silver-beltedbodysuit rose into the air, feet pointed like an angel in thoseearly Yankee paintings before the rules of perspective wereformulated. His black bubble helmet flared in the morninglight which flooded above the heads of the crowd and burnedsalt-white on the blank walls of the government buildingsbehind the soldiers' formation. 

Lee gasped at this miracle. Xiao Bing shrugged and said,
"There are superconducting coils woven in his suit. He'll behovering over a honeycomb magnet--sort of like a flyingcarpet in reverse, the carpet stays on the ground, you fly. Ifwe could induce flux in that guy we'd degauss his coils andsee 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 Squareof Heavenly Peace, rebounding from the buildings on threeof its sides, the upswept wall on its fourth. 

"It is time to leave the square," the officer said. "All citizensshould leave the square so that the Army of the People'sMouths can implement their tasks." 


 RED DUST 
185 


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

"I'm glad to see you," Lee said. He vividly rememberedthe bombardment of the agricultural dome, the explosionsand the sudden rush of the storm. He had thought his twofriends dead. "I'm glad to see you escaped the soldiers. AndGuoquiang? He is here?" 

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

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

"As for escaping the soldiers, we jumped in the rice paddiesand when the shooting stopped we stayed there. We hadon our masks because of the dust storm, and so we couldlie completely underwater and quench our infra-red signatures.
Besides, the soldiers weren't looking for us, but foryou and the anarchist pilot. When night came we stole twohorses and slipped away and they didn't even know we'dbeen there. We rode as far as Dragon Spring Junction andthen we caught a train. Guoquiang had just enough moneyfor the trip, and as soon as we reached the city he joinedup. He wanted me to join too, but that was never my ideaof a life. Besides, could you see a silver-eyed white-hairedpale-skinned albino in that black leather uniform?" 

"It would be rather elegant." Lee had to lean in close toXiao Bing; half the crowd were chanting for the Emperor,
the rest were shouting "Down with the Gang of Six!" overand over and over. Lee said, "And you're still here. Still inthe 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 thefifty-six calls for the devolution of power to the individual. Weput up most of them in the night, when the King of the Catsstarted talking about the death of the Emperor. I help keep theprojectors 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 


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187 
librarian search for now, now that the truth of his parents'assassination had been found? 
A dozen young men had commandeered the sheltered alcoveat the top of the steps in front of the closed stainlesssteel doors. Half were Yankees, and all were dressed in loose,
mostly black clothes. Some were distributing printed leafletsto passers-by; others were unpacking all kinds of electronicequipment from canvas carry-ails, stuff which had the rawedges of homemade experimental units.
Xiao Bing introduced Lee to a plump young man namedLao San. He had a shining round face and hair slickly sweptback and an excitable aggressive air. He said, "What haveyou brought us, Xiao Bing?"
"Wei Lee worked in my danwei," Xiao Bing said.
Lao San said impatiently, "Doesn't matter where he comesfrom. Is he hip to technology?"
Lee said, "I am only an agronomist technician. All this isvery intimidating to me."
Lao San jabbed a forefinger in Lee's chest, such an astonishinglapse of manners that it paralyzed Lee. "Forget thathumble self-effacing shit! A new order is rising, and the oldways have had their day! From the Darwinian point of view,
they're useful as a kind of social lubricant regulating thebehavior of the population, but there will be no need of thatonce everybody's position in society is self-determined. Ifyou're going to help the PSLM you'd better be straight aboutwhat you can do."
"But I don't even know what you're trying to do," Leesaid. 
"We're here to change reality," Lao San said grandly. Hesnapped a thin glass tube, stuck one half under his ownnose, the other under Lee's. Lee recoiled from the sharpwhiff of solvent, and Lao San laughed. "You've got to changeyourself before you can change the future."
"What was that stuff?." 
"It'll free up your mind," Lao San said, and leered intoLee's face in such a way that he seemed deranged. Then hestalked off to harangue one of the black-clad young men. He 


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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 


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189 


water tax. Or perhaps both. Details are not important at thisstage."
"You would have people pay simply to live?"
"Life is not a right, but a privilege. Read our Big Characterposters, and you will understand. Not here and now, ofcourse. We'll soon be done here anyhow; there's a seventyper cent chance that the soldiers will clear the square in thenext hour. We will be gone by then."
"You don't support the people?"
"Lao San says there's no such thing as the people. Onlya stochastic mass of individuals." 
Lee smiled. "Perhaps so. But at the moment it seems theyall want the same thing."
Lao San turned from the little machine he'd been fiddlingwith and jabbed a finger into Lee's chest. "Listen! The Emperoris nothing more than an outmoded attempt at centralizingcontrol. No such control is needed, of course, butit cannot be removed by banging on its gates. You want toknow why we're here? It should be obvious this is a wonderfulpropaganda exercise. Look at our slogans, our BigCharacter posters!"
It was true, there were a dozen or more columns of ideogramsfloating in the morning air. But most of the peoplein the crowd were looking towards the soldiers, not the sky.
Lee said, "Oh, I understand that. I do want the same thingas you. I want Mars to live again!" And he did, so stronglythat he started to cry, for he clearly saw the high cold desertsspreading, the forests withering, the lake shrinking in itssalt basin. 
"Sure you do," Lao San said.
Lee, embarrassed, started to apologize. Lao San said, "It is hard to force theevolution of your mind. But it is necessary.
You help Xiao Bing try and get a projector on thatofficer. Let's make him interesting."
Xiao Bing was fitting a little machine with a dozen glass-ringedsnouts 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 


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PAUL J. McAULE¥ 


mated program that will turn him into a demon. I wrote itmyself." Xiao Bing attached the little machine's harness toa 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 theywould have to hurry. From the elevation of the steps, Leecould see across the heads of the crowd to the phalanx ofthe troops on the far side of the square. The soldiers werebeating their shock sticks against their transparent shieldsin an ominous rhythm. Slowly, their line advanced towardsthe edge of the crowd, like the ruffling edge of an amoeba.
Lee saw little knots of struggle break out as snatch squadsof soldiers ran forward and grabbed hapless individuals anddragged them away. The crowd, which had seemed like somesupra-organism united by a collective will, was fragmenting.
Ragged singing was lost in screams as the first gas bombswent off. Blossoms of orange smoke began to spread at theboundary between the troops and the crowd. Soldiers aimedwide-bore rifles, and people at the edge of the crowd wereknocked down by glycerine rounds. Tanglewire suddenly expandedin a mad dance, trapping dozens along its jitteryperimeter. Somewhere, there was the fluttering beat of hoveringculvers. 

Then Lee was busy holding down the transparent balloon, 

now as big around as the spread of his arms, while XiaoBing 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 thecontraption out into the morning sunlight as its navigationcircuit fixed on the distant figure of the officer, who floatedhigh above the spreading clouds of gas and the running bat-tiethat 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. Weexplain to the population what they need until they embracethe ideas as their own." 


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"It seems to me everyone wants to tell the people whatto do, but no one asks them what they want."
Lao San was suddenly in Lee's face again. "They won'tknow they need it," he said, "until it is explained to them."
He spun Lee around. "Look at your brave masses, runningfor their lives!" 
It was true. The troops had occupied about half thesquare. Their line had broken into dozens of units thatroamed back and forth under a pall of orange smoke whilethousands of people tried to escape down the avenue on thefar side. Dust clouds hung above the seething press, reddeningthe morning sunlight. With a roar of wings, a culverrose over the flat roof of the Ministry of Information andswept towards the panicking people like a sparrowhawk harryingice mice from long grass.
Lao San laughed at Lee's dismay. "You stay with us, andyou'll understand. You're a bright fellow, even if you're wetbehind the ears." He turned and shouted at the others to 
start packing up; it was time to go, and the other membersof the PSLM started to jam their bits and pieces of equipmentinto canvas bags.
Lee saw threads of light stab down from the culver, rakingthe crowd. People caught aflame like ants under a lens. Heand Xiao Bing shrank back when a laser pulse touched thelower steps and heat-stressed stone flew in every direction.
A woman ran through the crowd, her hair on fire. A secondculver lazily settled over the Front Gate, the wind from itswings sending posters flying like autumn leaves. Orange gassquirted from the culver's belly, was dashed across thesquare by its down draft.
People ran from the wave front of gas. Some tried to climbthe steps, but Lao San's young men fought them back withbare hands or by swinging canvas bags weighted with theirequipment. Lao San wielded a telescopic pole; he punchedan old woman in her chest and she fell down, tripping thepeople behind her.
Lee caught a whiff of gas that burned all the way downhis lungs. His eyes spilled burning tears. The drug had 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 
ripped his perceptions open. He was a screen, a nervoussurface. He grabbed Xiao Bing. "Can your machines projecta picture of a real person?"
"Sure. We have cameras as well as a recorder." 
Lee saw his reflection doubled in the silver caps over XiaoBing's pupils. He saw that his own eyes seemed to be nothingbut pupil. He said, "Xiao Bing, you've always been a goodfriend. 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 sprangaround him, projected from little cameras fixed by adhesivepads to the marble walls on either side of the stainless-steeldoor. Lee slicked back his hair as Xiao Bing stuck a foammicrophone dot to his throat. "Stay in the light," Xiao Bingsaid. 
And then Lee saw his projected image hung hugely abovethe square. It was as tall as a building. Lee spread his arms,
and his image's left hand passed through the culver thathovered over the Front Gate. The drug fizzed in his forebrain.
He felt that he could reach into the heads of everyonein the square, even the soldiers. His own voice echoed backat him: the words came without thought.
"The King of the Cats told you the Emperor is dead! Believein the King! I have walked with him in Father Jupiter.
He has a message that is so strong it took a whole civilizationto forget it, yet it takes only a moment to remember it.
Remember that he forgave those who exiled him, and thosewho betrayed him. Remember that he died for our sins!"
Lee paused for breath, and the crowd shouted and wavedtheir hands at his projected figure. "The King lives! TheKing has returned!"
One of the culvers sprayed Lee's image with laser fire, andLee gave them his imitation of the King's smile. He swivelledon his cocked hip and flicked his fingers at the floating officer,
who shot higher into the air in alarm. The crowdlaughed and cheered. Lee's voice was almost lost in theirnoise. "The rains will come! All you have to do is open thesky, and the rains will come! Take the Sky Road!" 


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193 

And then he could no longer hear his voice as the crowdsurged forward. He saw that Lao San was staring at himbeyond the cones of camera light, hands clenched up aroundhis ears. Lee smiled and waved at Xiao Bing (his projectedfigure out across the square seemed to gesture towards theline of troops) and the light around him went off; out abovethe 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' numberone fan!" 

One of Lao San's underlings said, "We did a patch andgot it on to Channel Five, boss. The whole city'll have seenit." 

Lao San said furiously, "Who told you to do that? They'llhang a trace? 

The man, a horse-faced young Yankee, snorted withlaughter. "So it's time we left. Great propaganda, though." 

Someone else said, "The government channel just wentoff the air, but all the commercial channels are going crazy!" 

Lao San spat. "The King of the Cats is dead, and I don'tbelieve 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, swirlingaround knots of soldiers like the sea around rocks. Culvers 
swooped low overhead, but they couldn't fire without hittingtheir own troops. Trucks with armored prows welded overairbags swept into the square from the avenue--but theywere driven by civilians, and civilians crowded their load-beds.
They ploughed through the lines of troops and peoplejumped down from the loadbeds and ran into the crowd, raninto outstretched arms. Everyone seemed to be embracingeveryone else. 

"That's it," said the man who had been monitoring thegovernment channel. "The Gang of Six have been arrested.
There's a woman with a machine pistol in the studio advis-


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


ing everyone that the city is under martial rule, by the orderof The Little Bird." He pointed at Lee. "And there's a priceon your head, fellow." 

A little girl pushed out of the dispersing crowd and ranup 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," sheshouted. "Come on, now!" 


Forty-one 

T 

he avenues around the Square of Heavenly Peace werefull of people hurrying away from it. Little electrictrucks cruised amongst them, flying red and black flagsand packed with armed men. They were the vigilante cadresof Xiao Yan, The Little Bird, the Ten Thousand Years whohad seized the moment and captured the media networks.
A column of dense black smoke rose into the pink sky, closeby the dome over the Yankee Quarter. 

"You follow me now," Chen Yao kept saying to Lee. Sheheld on to his hand. "All this craziness is your fault, WeiLee." 

Lee was dazed by the comedown of Lao SaWs drug. Hishead felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool, and therewas a trembling, not unpleasant lassitude in his limbs. Hehardly noticed when the gunfire started. 

One moment he was being tugged through the dispersingcrowds by Chen Yao, the next he was wedged into a cornerof the doorway of an apartment building with people screamingand shoving and shuddering all around him. Trucksswerved around each other in the street, and there was theorange stutter of muzzle flashes. Then someone made thedoors open and Lee and Chen Yao were swept into the lobbywith a hundred others. 

Nobody had been directly hit, but many had beenwounded by shrapnel and flying glass. Those who lived inthe building brought sheets for bandages, and then blankets 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


and bowls of soup or tea. The doors were closed and barricadedand guarded by volunteers. 

The old man found Chen Yao and Wei Lee tending a stoicwoman whose hand had been struck by a tumbling ricochet.
He waited while Lee washed away the blood and bound acrude splint to the woman's broken fingers, and then put ahand on his shoulder and said, "I know you, Master. It wouldbe 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 nodifference now." 

It was true. For every person wounded there were twoothers to bandage wounds or mop up blood or fetch tea.
People had brought out televisions. The tall lobby was filledwith the chatter of conversation. All this by consensus, withoutleaders, without orders. 

"I know you, Master," the old man said again. "My familyhas known you for a long time. I'd like to talk with youabout it." 

Chen Yao said, "It is kind of you, but we must go."
"The streets are dangerous. The Little Bird makes warwith the soldiers who were in the Square of HeavenlyPeace." 

"An hour's delay won't hurt," Lee said. He was curious.
The old man, Kong Tiangang, lived in a three-room railroadapartment with his wife and their two sons and theirwives and children--a baby, and twin brothers not mucholder than Chen Yao--and their only daughter. This youngwoman suffered from progressive atrophy of her centralnervous system, one of the genetic disorders common in apopulation whose ancestors had been packed like sardinesin unshielded rockets. Stick-thin, she lay twitching and jerkingon a pallet in the main room of the two-room apartment,
staring up at the dingy ceiling, occasionally slobbering akind of gasping speech only her mother could understand. 

The Kong family were poor, honest people who had committedthe crime of having too many children. After theGreat Reassessment, the Sky Roader trials and the alliance 


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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 


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PAUl. J. McAut,:¥ 


said. "The symbols represent the fate of each generation." 

Chen Yao said, "It seems to me that Yuan Tiangang andLi Chunfeng were indeed very clever prognosticators, forthere are so many different symbols that each generationcannot fail to find something that reflects the meaning oftheir lives." 

Kong Tiangang said, "That may be true, young miss. If itis, 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 onehundred and tenth generation, here, a monkey in an aspentree. Our dear, unfortunate daughter was born in the yearof the monkey, and you have seen how her limbs stir andquake, like the branches of an aspen in a wind. Yet you seethat the monkey in the branches of the aspen holds thecrescent of a bloody moon in its paw, and that the aspenstands on the side of a mountain whose base is patrolled bya tiger. I think that you are the monkey, Master, come tocure our daughter, and to save the red planet." 

"Please," Kong Tiangang's wife said. "We paid to havemachines put in her blood that would build circuits in hernervous system. But that did not cure her." 

"She no longer has fits," Kong Tiangang said. "But stillshe trembles, as I have said, like the branches of an aspentree. Please, Master." 

Chen Yao said, "This isn't what your gifts are for, WeiLee!" 

Lee said, "You understand, Master Kong, that I promisenothing." 

Kong Tiangang bowed. 

Lee knelt beside the palsied young woman, laid a hand onher 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 andkissed her deeply, then sat back, strangely moved. There was along silence in the crowded room. Then the young woman'seyes uncrossed. She stared into Lee's eyes and sighed and fell 


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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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


and down the corridors of time. If those ancient prognosticatorscaught those echoes, then we have already won." 

"The monkey held the world," Lee said, "yet the tree heldthe monkey. I wonder what it means?" 

"The point of those symbols is that they mean manythings. Too many things, perhaps. Why have you stopped?" 

The street had opened on to a big square with white three-orfour-story houses around it and a central fountain, itsbasin dry as a bone. It was the Square of Two ThousandMartyrs, 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. 



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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 whereHawk lay, propped by cushions as he sipped smoke from awater pipe. The room smelt of a voluptuous combination ofsweet 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 seeyou."
He made a languid gesture. Narrow cones of light droppedfrom high above, spotlighting two stools. The music fadedto 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 totalk to you about it. That was quite a show you put on."
"Oh. You know about that." 
"Every commercial channel was showing looped tapes ofit before they were pulled off the air by The Little Bird'svigilantes." Hawk laughed. "Wei Lee, I shall tell you why thegovernment troops didn't fight back after your.., performance.
They were all wired up, and The Little Bird pulled theirplugs. He hit the command center. Only the officers wereleft. How does it feel, to have started a revolution?"
"Perhaps I've ended one."
"Perhaps... but The Little Bird is neither a Sky Roadernor a conservationist. No, he's an isolationist: Mars for theMartians. He has no power base amongst the Ten ThousandYears, only popular support, and soon enough he'll be destroyedby the conchies, just as they destroyed the Sky Road-ers.
You know, I met The Little Bird many years ago. Hiseidolon, of course, not him personally, but the eidolon wasreal enough, not those projections favored by the rest of theTen Thousand Years. A great shambling thing, steel andchrome and black rubber roughly in the shape of a man'sskeleton, with The Little Bird's face bobbing in a television 


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203 

set up where its head should be. They say the eidolon hasripped apart a hundred or more people, enemies of The LittleBird and those servants who failed him. He is a first-generationMartian, the last. They say his body is a gardenof cancers, shrivelled like a bad apple, the result of radiationexposure from the Long Crossing. But you are still standing.
Please sit. You are my guests, after all. I'll be thought a badhost." 

Lee sat, but Chen Yao stood behind him. Her head wasexactly 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 knowabout the wretches that fisherfolk call avatars of the godhead,
when it's nothing but a rash of viruses caught fromtheir fishy helpmates. Viruses that babble away inside themmindlessly. 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. WeiLee, the city is a place full of traps for the unwary. But atleast you seem to have lost Redd. A good herder, but anuntrustworthy man." 

Lee said humbly, "I owe him my life." 

It seemed he owed his life to many people. To Great-grandfatherWei and to Guoquiang, and to Miriam, and thefin, 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 whenyou came in?" 

Lee confessed that he didn't. 

"It was written by an Italian, a kind of proto-Yankee. Anaddiction of mine, Capitalist Western opera. It is even olderthan your King of the Cats and his rock'n'roll. One of mytrail bosses introduced it to me when I was still as wet behind 
the ears as you--in the old days cowboys sang arias tothe yaks, not Hank Williams. This particular opera was writtenby the perfect master of the form, Giacomo Puccini. Ittells of the cruelty of a princess of the Imperial city of Old 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 

Beijing, who will marry any man of royal blood who cananswer three riddles set by her. But although she has hadmany suitors, all have failed and have been beheaded, forthe Princess believes that to take the life of any man whodesires her is to avenge the dishonor suffered by an ancestressravished and killed by barbarous Tartars centuries before.
But it is a prince of the Tartars who solves the riddlesand who convinces her, through love, to end her revenge. Asilly little tale, eh, Wei Lee, although of course it is beautifullytold. It says almost nothing about the human condition,
but volumes about Yankee misunderstanding of theHan." 
"Does it tell you anything about how we misunderstandthe Yankees?" 
"They are a violent, romantic people. They have no conceptof history, yet seek personal eternity in all they do. Thatis why they failed so gloriously to conquer our world, forthey 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, theherds grow smaller. I'm an old man, Wei Lee. I've seen it myself I know thatwe have had our season." 
"The ku li would say that it is only spring, perhaps. Thedry season before the rains of summer."
"The ku li are a paper tiger, a convenient illusion whichprovides an excuse to subject the population to the rigoursand restrictions of a permanent war economy. There is norevolution, except in the minds of a few misguided Martians.
We herders live half the year on the high ranges, and yet wesee none of the fabled army of the ku li. The anarchists dropsubversive literature, but only we profit."
Chen Yao said, "Ask him how he profits, Wei Lee."
Hawk's smile was like a small animal awakening withinhis neatly combed, silky white beard. He said, "I am manythings, Wei Lee. I am Hawk, herd master. And I am also 


 RED DUST 
205 


Yamyang Norbu, a citizen and householder who must supporta wife and eight children and fifteen grandchildren, notto mention platoons of lazy in-laws and their relatives. Manypeople are more than one thing, or even two. It is the wayof 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," Hawksaid sharply. "Be quiet, little girl." 

One of Lee's virus gifts was the ability to see in the farred end of the spectrum. It happened unconsciously. He sawHawk's face bleed into a green mask, with bright patchespulsing on cheeks and forehead. Then he realised that ChenYao was holding his hand. She said, "Blood always betrays." 

There was a sound outside. Lee's hearing suddenly selectivelyintensified. It filtered noise in Hawk's study, thebreathing of the three people, their heartbeats. Hawk saidsomething but Lee didn't hear it. He was listening to theelectric purr of a motor, voices, the rattle as the gate swungopen to admit two people. 

Something seized Lee from inside. He whirled andsmashed a glass-fronted cabinet with his elbow, with fingerand thumb plucked a long spike from the shards. Heknocked Hawk back as the old man started to rise, pinnedhis arms and shoved the makeshift glass dagger into thefolds of skin under his white beard. Lee's hearing was backto 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 wokenher. She was all around him, yet at no point did she touchhim. 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. Hehad cut his own palm slightly. His blood mingled withHawk'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 knewhow 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 tothe end. There is no one in the house but me; I sent everyoneto the mountains at the turn of the year, when thefighting in the city began. You are very quick, Lee, but if Ichose to fight I do not think you could best me." 

"Then I am glad you choose not to fight," Lee said. Hereleased the pressure on Hawk's arms and dropped the glassdagger. 

At that moment the door behind Chen Yao burst open.
Two people sprang into the room. Both were armed withstubby laser rifles. Both were dressed in shiny black one-pieceimpact suits. One was the Colonel who had sent Leeout into the storm with Miriam, back at the Bitter Watersdanwei. 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 lesstold Hawk the whole story, in innocence.
The car weaved through dense traffic. Suddenly, Lee sawthe high roof of the train station, curved like a white hill.
The car slowed, nosing through a crowd packed around abarrier of tanglewire loops stretched across the road.
The people were trying to flee the city. They carried parcelsbundled in sheets, televisions, caged chickens, basketsof vegetables or fruit, bicycles, small industrial motors, bubblepacksof biochips, umbrellas, even furniture. Four mensupported a double bed, one at each corner. Militia wereletting people through one by one or pushing them aside,
seemingly at random. The air was dense with noise thatstruck through the car's one-way glass: women screamingat their children; children wailing with fright; men shoutingat militia and militia shouting right back, shoving rifles infaces, slapping backs to push some through, chests to pushothers back. An old woman pleaded with a boy soldier withan 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 ofsweat and fear was intense. Mary Makepeace Doe seized Lee'selbow with paralyzing force; he had to follow her throughthe hatch or lose his arm. He glanced back and saw theColonel trying to lift Chert Yao out, saw the little girl kickhim in the crotch. 
And then Mary Makepeace Doe tugged and whirled Leearound, shoved him through the crowd to the gate, sweepingher stubby rifle back and forth to clear the way. Themilitia waved them through with hardly a glance, and thenthey 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 believehow much it cost to guarantee safe passage out of the city.
Don't even think about trying to escape," and pushed himtowards one of the trains before he could say anything. 


 210 
PAUI J. McAtny. v 


People were climbing into dusty carriages through windowsas well as doors, climbing up on to the roofs. Pedlarswere hawking food, and passengers' hands reached starfish-wisethrough windows to exchange notes for dumplings orglutinous rice cakes. The pedlars' cries sang out above thecrowd's roar; beneath it was the stentorian exhalations ofthe huge black fission-powered steam locomotives. Their exhaustplumes rose straight up into the girdered space of thehigh roof like so many pillars.
Mary Makepeace Doe shouldered her way between twopedlars, used the stock of her rifle to dislodge a man whowas using the door rail to climb to the roof, and draggedLee up into the carriage. The corridor was packed with peoplesquatting on the floor amongst their possessions and thecompartments were filled with smug bourgeois. The mercenarypicked a compartment at random, pulled back theconcertina plastic partition, and told the startled bourgeoisfamily inside to move on, she was commandeering the compartment.
Her voice: that was just like Miriam's. But her CommonLanguage was flawless.
Lee wondered what it must have looked like to the bourgeois,
this tall muscular video-shaded woman in skintightblack dragging her bloody-handed captive. But they wereresponding 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 jacketwith a dozen little machines hanging from loops. The mercenaryput her rifle in the man's face and told him it was amatter of security. He backed away with an amazingly broadsmile and disappeared into the goggle-eyed peasantscrowded outside. 
Lee sat on a dusty plush seat. The mercenary pulled thedoor shut and slammed down the blinds against onlookers,
then leaned at the window and shouted to the pedlarsthrough the sliding strip at its top, throwing a handful ofnotes in exchange for beakers of tea and wafers of crispyfried 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 meltwaterplant standing in a wide basin of dried mud, low tanglesof black trees and ochre stretches of bare, rocky ground.
Shouts behind him, and the mercenary's hoarse voiceraised above them. 
Lee made a desperate calculation, and jumped.
Hands reached to grab him: passengers trying to save himfrom himself. The thunder of the train filling his ears, Leefell through air and hit the gritty embankment. He rolledand tumbled, breath knocked out of him, and fetched up ina tangle of briars. It seemed to take a long time to easehimself out of the clutches of the thorny canes. The trainhad disappeared, but at the top of the embankment the railstill sang with its passing.
Lee spat a mouthful of grit. The right side of his body wasscraped and raw under torn cloth, and he had banged hisleft knee badly. But he was free, free to choose to walk intothe 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 topof the embankment. Parched marshlands stretched on either 
side under a haze in the cold afternoon. Beyond was the prospectof dry red plains.
"Look all you want," someone said behind him.
Lee almost jumped out of his skin, then somethinggrabbed him from inside and he whirled in a fighter'scrouch. 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. Therewere scuffs on the knees of her tight leather outfit, but otherwiseshe was quite unruffled. She must have jumped outof the train at almost the same moment as Lee, and circledback to ambush him. 
Lee put his hands together before his chest and bowed inbitter submission. And Mary Makepeace Doe hit him acrossthe head with the stock of her weapon. 


Forty-four 
Wi 

i Lee and the mercenary walked the line atop thembankment for most of the chill equatorial after-oon.
Rather, Lee limped, the side of his head swollenwith hot pain. His quiff, matted with dust, kept fallingacross his eyes. The embankment dwindled away in front ofhim, crossing the marshes towards the beginning of a crateredplain at the horizon.
Crisp bright sunlight and bone-dry air sucked moisturefrom him as he limped along. After a couple of hours, hewould have killed to roll down the embankment's stonyslope into one of the marsh's scummy seeps, more muddysand than water but wet at least, damp, dank, moist. Lastnight he had nearly drowned, and now he was dying ofthirst. It was as if a lifetime's worth of the world's torments 
had been compressed into a few hours. He couldn't eventune into the King's broadcast; that was still being jammed.
The mercenary wouldn't allow him to slow his pace. Apparentlythe plan had been for the train to slow to a crawl so that sheand Lee could step off, but Lee had pre-empted that by a dozenkilometers. They had a lot of distance to make up. The only timesthey left the embankment were when the rails sang warning of apassing train, and Mary Makepeace Doe didn't let Lee stray fromher side. It happened three times, and after the last she said,
"There'll be no more." 
Lee asked how she knew. 


 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 Birdthinks that he can outsmart the conservationists, but he'llpay the price for it. Move faster, damn you!" 

If she felt the effects of sun and dry air she showed nosign of it, except that she had smeared a translucent creamon her lips. When they finally reached the rendezvous, shelooked as strong and implacable as ever. 

A caravan, a fat segmented silver tube like an industrial-designedinsect grub, was parked at the bottom of the embankment,
near the edge of the sour marshes. The radiatorfins of its power plant bled a shimmer of heat into the stillafternoon air. Around it, scrubby thorn bushes threw spideryblack shapes amongst craggy boulders that glowed likeheated iron in the afternoon sunlight. 

"Go on down," the mercenary said, and prodded Lee inthe 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, onceagain ending up in a tangle of thorny canes. Obviously, thebushes had been designed to break the fall of travellers andthen suck their blood. It was almost good to relax in theirpiercing grip. 

A shadow eclipsed the hard pink sky and its feathering ofhigh clouds. Mary Makepeace Doe dragged Lee to his feet,
and the pain of losing gobbets of flesh to clutching thornsbrought him awake. 

He was able to stumble ahead of the mercenary towardsthe segmented silvery caravan, but, just as he reached itsshadow, his feet twisted under him and the side of the worldslammed into him with every unforgiving gram of its mass. 


Forty-five 

L 

ee was in a humming space of bright metal and whitelight. A translucent sac taped to his elbow was slowlywrinkling as it pumped saline into a vein. A soakedsponge was put to his cracked lips and he greedily suckedmoisture from it. Two attendants, small neat sharp-featuredmen who might have been brothers, might have been anyage from ten to twenty, stripped off his dusty clothes, stuckneedles in his joints to counter pain, bandaged his raw skin.
Then they plucked off the by-now empty saline sac andhelped him into soft clean trousers of unbleached linen, araw silk shirt. They even greased his hair back into an approximationof its original quiff. 

As they worked, the attendants talked to each other in alanguage Lee had never heard before. They used gesturesand 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 himthrough a low narrow hatch into an airy room filled withcolor. 

The room was a tent, pitched up against the curved silveryside of the caravan. Five people turned to look at him as hecame through. There was the mercenary, her leathers stilldusty, a man dressed in white just like Lee, a very youngboy. But Lee hardly noticed them, because he saw that ChenYao 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 nowhe saw that a thick braided cable was looped over his arm.
It ran up into the inverted bowl of his black hair, ran backinto a corner of the tent curtained with filmy white. It wasjust possible to make out a high double bed flanked by monitoringequipment back there, a shadowy glimpse that triggeredvague uneasy memories in Lee, a troubling, deepunease he couldn't quite define. And the boy reminded himof someone, too. The lineaments of a familiar face lay underthe 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 whoI am. The Colonel you already know, and of course you havejust enjoyed a stroll through the countryside with MaryMakepeace Doe." 

The mercenary looked up, a scowl twisting her mouthunder the video-shades. The boy bowed to her, and Leeglimpsed the junction at the base of his skull where thecable 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, "becauseyou are necessary to us." 

The man in white said, "She is a player, too. Her nameof course is not really Doe, but Gaia. Mary Makepeace Gaia.
The kind of people she was working with made it necessarythat she work under cover." 

The boy piped up, cross at having been interrupted, "Imust introduce you to the most important person last of all.
The head of the conservationist missionary expedition fromGaia. 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 glistenedand 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. DamonLovelace 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 lyingin the bed behind the gauzy curtain. He had seen the equip-ment-ladendouble bed once before. He had been so veryyoung, and near to collapse from exhaustion, still sufferingfrom smoke inhalation and flash-burns from his parents' assassination.
He remembered being marched into a cleanwhite room, and shown for the first and last time the realityof his great-grandfather.
A high, wide bed, sheets like snow under bright lights.
Two bodies in it, separated by a bolster. Both male. Oneyoung and pinkly hairless, its eyes bandaged, tubes runninginto its nose, into a ligature in its throat. The other littlemore than a skeleton clad in leathery skin, head hidden bya complicated helmet, withered arms drawn up on the ladderof ribs of the chest, hands gloved in rigid black polymer.
Wires ran back from helmet and hands and tangled intocables that went into the wall behind the bed. 
Two bodies, linked by transparent tubes through whichrich red blood pulsed: one the mummified near-corpse ofLee's great-grandfather; the other the decerebrated Yankeewhich kept his ancient body alive.
The little boy watched Lee's expression change. Hesmirked, twisted one foot against the other. His face was ayoung, plump version of Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon.
"That's right, son," he said. He was shining with proudenthusiasm. "At last I will be free of the dead weight of mybody. I'll be free to move in the world again. I am beingtransferred piece by piece into the brain of this living eidolon,
which was grown from a single cell taken from theepithelial lining of my bowel. I will live for ever, not merelyfor ten thousand years!"
And he skipped a gleeful little dance, right there on theluxurious carpet. The cable which linked him to his ancientbody swung in long arcs behind him.
Lee thought that the eidolon had been a true representationof his great-grandfather after all. A picture, out oftime. He had puzzled over it every time he had visited theGreat 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. 



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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 alsobeen infected with viruses that built themselves into her 
nervous system. It makes her a translator, able to accessvirus systems at all levels. An interesting coincidence, don'tyou think, Wei Lee? That the viral machinery which allowsfishermen to talk to augmented dolphins also allows communicationwith the clades of viral machines used by theanarchists. I have the greatest respect for the achievementsof your great scientist, Cho Jinfeng." 

"Silly little man," Chen Yao said. She jumped down fromthe couch, dodging the Colonel's restraining hand. "Yes,
silly and foolish and puny and vain. You see only what youwish to see, and so you are blind." 

"Now just be quiet? the Colonel said, trying to catch holdof 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 wasvery calm, Lee saw, very calm and very self-possessed. Heraspect 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 astone, flung with force. "Age and experience you have inabundance, and those I respect. But I cannot respect you foryour wisdom. You and your kind have sold our world foryour own profit, and that cannot be forgiven. And it will notbe forgiven. You have lived so long that you want nothingmore than to live for ever. You grasp at life with the unforgivinggreed of a parasite, not caring that your very existencecondemns 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'sface. 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 
The boy-thing flushed with anger. He hissed like a snakeand tried to kick and punch Chen Yao, but she skipped outof reach and when he charged blindly after her he wasbrought up short by his cable and fell on his back. He wailedand sputtered with outrage, kicking his legs in the air andscreaming that she'd die, she'd die right now, for what she'ddone. 
"Kill the little bitch! Mary Makepeace Gaia! I order you! Iorder you to kill her! Take her out, Colonel! Shoot her! Blowher fucking brains out!"
Tears ran in snail tracks from the corners of his eyes tohis ears, and snot and spit bubbled from nostrils and mouth.
Dr. Damon Lovelace stooped and picked him up, huggedhim and said tenderly, "I know it's hard. Young glands ona hair trigger, the fret of a new nervous system, all that. Butyou'll learn control. We all have to learn to control our unrulyflesh when born again to the wheel, and so will you.
Hush, now. Hush. She'll die soon enough, and her deathwill 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 youmust bring me The Little Bird. I want to have his own eidolonflay his rotten cancerous body centimeter by centimeter.
That's what we agreed." He glared over Lovelace'sshoulder at Lee. "And you, you never were any son of mine.
Your parents were employees, not blood relations. You neverwere anything but a pawn, Wei Lee, and you have advancedto your final square."
"How I hate clich(," Chen Yao said. She was still wearingher aspect. "Always it blurs meaning. But to extend it for amoment, you forget pawns can move diagonally if they takesomething. Wei Lee has moved aslant you all, and carriesthe 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 triggeredan 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 isvery regrettable, very immature. We have no way to readdead brains, and so with every minute of rebellion the database of potential overseers grows smaller." 

"As on the Earth, so in Heaven," Chen Yao said. "But Idon't think so." 

The Colonel had been holding himself quiet and still allthrough this. Now he could no longer hold in his outrage.
He said, "Sir! I am ready to deal with this brat on yourorders." 

"In good time," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "She's harmless,
after all. Harmless, and sadly out of date. Metaphorsare useful, Chen Yao. Good metaphors shine a light throughcomplex ideas, and simplify their shape." 

Chen Yao said disdainfully, "I'd rather things shone withtheir own light." 

Lee could no longer hold in his own outburst. He wasgripped by the vertigo of erased history. He felt that he wasstanding at the edge of a pit, where a moment ago there hadbeen firm ground. The pit was the gap in what he thoughthe had known, his own story erased by a petulant outburst. 

He said to the boy-thing, "Who was my father if he wasnot the first-born child of your own son! Who was mymother!" 

What he meant was, who am I? 

The boy-thing shrugged. He was calm again. "Loyal employeesat the middle level. Nothing more. You were bornas bait to hook bigger fish, with the fiction that I was a kindof rebel, out of sympathy with my fellows. An old trick, butsuccessful even so. But do not think yourself special, WeiLee. There are others like you. You just happen to be thebait which was swallowed at the right time." 

"Then I don't owe you anything! I don't owe you anythingat all? Lee could have danced on the carpet with joy. OnlyChen Yao's serious gaze stopped him. 

The boy-thing draped his cable over his arm with an imperiousgesture. "Your life is mine. After all, you have nothingelse to give me." 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


Chert Yao said, "You cannot talk to them, Lee. They donot hear, nor do they think. Their heads are full of straw. Itis time for us to go." 

Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "I don't think so, little lady. Wehave not begun with you. Your death will be a beginning,
but only that." 

Chen Yao said, "You're as stupid as the old man. Whattime do you come from, to be born in this time and pretendto rule us? Keep Earth and the wilderness you've made ofit, 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 rememberthat tag from my first incarnation. But you must forgivethese memories. Nostalgia is a luxury afforded only by theincurably romantic. Silly little girl, the universe isn't a blankmap for your kind to scribble over. It is its own thing, andit is no place for intelligence. That lies inward, not outward.
Your allies are the tattered remnants of the old order, notthe harbingers of a New Age. Gaia is that Age, and we areits 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'sheart raced in sudden anticipation. 

But before Dr. Damon Lovelace could give his order, theattendants were knocked aside by a soldier covered in reddust. She fell to her knees on the carpeted ground andbowed to the boy-thing, to Dr. Damon Lovelace. She wasshaking with fear or exhaustion, her holster was empty, andthere was a bloody tear across the shoulders of her blackuniform. 

"Speak," the boy-thing said in as nastily petulant a toneas 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 toesof her cleated boots barely brushing the carpet. "In one word," Lovelace said.
"A-ambush!" 
Dr. Damon Lovelace threw the soldier against the side ofthe caravan. Her helmet rang like a bell and she fell downbeside Mary Makepeace Gaia.
The mercenary raised an eyebrow, and then she was gone. "It won't do anygood," Chen Yao said. "You hide out herebecause you do not dare face the mobs in the city, and soyou deliver yourselves into our hands. Your perimeter defensesare no longer active. They haven't been since I waswalked through them. Viruses subverted the machinery, andhalf a dozen desert fighters captured your troops. That onewas allowed to escape, ahead of the storm."
The mercenary was back, as suddenly as she had left. "It'strue," she said calmly. "The ring alarms have not been triggeredand the motion sensors appear to be functioning, butno 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 cervicalvertebrae will do the trick. We'll process them later. Do Ihave to tell you everything?"
Chen Yao did something astonishing: a back flip that senther flying feet first into the boy-thing. He went down witha startled yelp and she pulled him to his feet. Her hand wasat 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 stepuntil they were up against the high double bed. Gauzy curtainsbillowed 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 herside. The Colonel looked at Dr. Damon Lovelace. 
The boy-thing squirmed, then squealed when Chert Yao 


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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 floweringyucca in a big earthenware pot. She had her pistol in herhand. 

Lee moved too, without thinking. He spun the Colonelround just as the mercenary fired. The Colonel yelled (abasso profundo rumbling) and his hand slowly moved toclasp 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 Leestepped back and forth, buffeting the hapless Colonel thisway and that. Lee was pumped up with adrenalin. Everythingexcept the mercenary's hand, the needle hole in the centerof the pistol's fat barrel, was a disregarded blur. 

The mercenary shot again. The beam glancingly struckthe Colonel's head. He shuddered and slumped, so muchdead weight. His hair had caught fire. Jerk, and suddenlythe needle hole was pointed right at Lee's face. 

Lee let go of the Colonel's body and closed his eyes. Hecouldn't help it. He couldn't separate the pounding of hisheart from the pounding of the stampede. Both shook himequally. 

The mercenary yelped, a soft, half-gulped sound. Leeopened his eyes. The mercenary had dropped her pistol. Herhand was cupped beneath the cracked right lens of hervideo-shades. Flickering with random colors, glass splinteredaround the end of the metal spike dead center of thelens. 

The mercenary's cupped hand filled with blood; bloodspilled down her wrist. 

Chen Yao yelled into Lee's face that it was time to go. Shehad to yell it twice: the stampede was almost upon them.
Lee let the Colonel's body drop to the floor. The tent wasfilled with the stench of charred flesh and the sharp smellof burnt hair. The boy-thing was curled up on his side,
clutching his bloody throat. Dr. Damon Lovelace was runningin 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 chargingyaks before he managed to carry Chen Yao to the relativeshelter of a clump of thorn bushes that grew in theangle of a tipped-up shelf of red rock. 

He set down Chen Yao, flopped beside her, and coughedand coughed and coughed. He could taste dust all the waydown to the bottom of his lungs. What he spat was red asblood. Fifty per cent of the air seemed to be fine silt thrownup by the pounding hoofs of the stampeding yaks. 

A yak swerved around the rocks as neatly as a dancer. Oneof its hoofs almost stamped on Lee's foot, but his speededreactions gave him plenty of time to tuck his leg out of theway, mark the animal's rolling red-rimmed eyes under thejut of its horns and every pin-prick spatter of moisture onhis face from the orange froth shaken from its muzzle. Heshared its bewildered rage and shouted into the dust. 

"All the time I searched for my parents I thought I knewwho they were! Now I've found them, but I don't know themat all!" 

Another yak went by, stately and slow amidst rolling reddust. And another. And another. They made the world overinto dust and thunder. 

Lee pressed into the bushes, scarcely noticing the cat's-clawthorns that scored his flesh, or the bone-deep ache inhis skull where the mercenary had hit him. The last few 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


moments in the tent kept flashing past, especially the instantof the Colonel's death. Lee could still feel the final shudder 
of the Colonel's body; the stink of burnt flesh and hairseemed to be permanently bonded in his nostrils, deeperthan dust could reach. Although he had not actually killedthe man, Lee felt responsible for his death, and knew, nowthat the Colonel was dead, that although he had murderedhis parents he had not deserved to die. No one born intolife deserves death. 

Chen Yao huddled closer against Lee, shivering with nervousexhaustion. She was no longer wearing the aspect of agod; she was just a little girl. Lee put his arm around herand 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 recitingsomething she had learned by rote, "It is dangerous to useyour enhancements for too long. Noradrenalin overload willburn out the interface synapses." 

Their stampede seemed to have mostly passed, althoughclouds of dust obliterated almost everything. Lazy billowsrose to blot out even the sun, which was now only a fewspans from the laboring horizon. The caravan was gone, escapedor obliterated. Yaks were blurry ghosts in grainyclouds lit by low-level light. A calf in a coat of hair down tothe ground ran close by, bawling, its hindquarters streakedwith shit. A yak crashed against the shelf of rock that shelteredLee and Chen Yao and tried to scramble over it, sharphoofs lashing the thorn bushes. Then it rolled off, bouncedto 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 wantto be left behind. 


 RED DUST 
231 


Lee bent to Chen Yao, pulled her to her feet. "I think wecan make a run for it." 

Chen Yao said, "Don't be silly," but Lee, hardly hearingher, yanked on her arm and dragged her at a run out intothe tail end of the stampede. It was perfectly safe, after all.
By infra-red he could see any stragglers through the blowingdust long before they could see him. Chen Yao tried to draghim to a halt, but he pulled hard and she yelped and stumbledafter him, out of breath and coughing on dust so thathe couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him. 

Nor did he really care: he was riding a sudden wind ofadrenalin. He was free, free, free! Free of his captors. Freeof the fear of death, for now he knew how banal the threatwas. And most of all, free of the obligation that had shapedhis life. He was as free as a butterfly that had struggled outof its cocoon after three hundred days of winter sleep andtaken flight from the dull time of growth. 

Free of everything, even of a plan really, except somevague idea of finding the railway line, of skipping along thetracks 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'dbeen dragging Chen Yao at a trot through swirling dustalong a more or less straight route, zigging this way to avoida stray yak, zagging that way to get around an outcrop oferoded boulders or a clump of thorn bushes. He rememberedthat the caravan had been within easy reach of therailway line, but they had walked two or three times thatdistance now and there was still no sight of it. 

Lee stopped, out of breath and dizzily exhilarated. It wastime to get his bearings. Chen Yao jerked her hand awayfrom 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 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


yak flop. Chen Yao grabbed his ears and shouted into hisface. 

"You won't listen! You just won't listen!" 

Lee blinked up at her, smiling with astonishment. ChenYao was trembling with anger. Tears made muddy tracks inthe red dust that coated her face. "We were safe where we 
were. There is a pick-up looking for us! How can it find uswhen we are stumbling around!" 

Lee tried to get up, put his hand in more yak shit, andfell over again, besmearing himself with even more of thestinking green slime. 

"Listen," Chen Yao said. 

Lee didn't need his hyper-keen senses to hear the naggingmosquito whine. It grew faint and then loud, and then faintagain, circling away and circling back in an unpredictablepattern. 

Chen Yao said, "You hear? You hear that?" She was lookingaround, 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 theknock-kneed run of a little girl, and he easily caught up withher. 

"Where are we going?" 

"We're running away. From her, from the sister. The sisterof, of your friend. Of Miriam." Chen Yao was already outof breath. Her words came out in angry little spasms. Herexpression was one Lee had never before seen on someoneso young. "I should have killed her. Should have. But itwould be bad karma. Oh please! Come on!" 

That was when Lee heard the nagging whine crossingfrom 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'srandom tracking. And not on foot." 

Then she disappeared from view, and Lee stepped on tothin 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; asmall avalanche of stones bounced off his back. 


 RED DUST 

233 
Chen Yao grabbed his arm, pulled him down. Somethinghad half eviscerated the yak--perhaps only the fall--and Leewas soaked in blood as he huddled with Chen Yao inside the 
coarse reeking pelt. A tangle of slippery intestines bulgedagainst his back, hot as his skin. The rich fetid smell offermented 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 mosquitowhine above him and held his breath, willing himselfto become one with the corpse's infra-red signature.
Time passed. Lee and Chen Yao huddled under bloody yakhair like mice in a grain store with a cat prowling somewhere.
Lee felt someone's attention pass over him like asearchlight: it raised the hair on his head.
The whine grew louder for a moment before fading intothe distance. 
Chen Yao counted dolphins under her breath, just like achild playing Emperor of the Hill, and when she reached ahundred she said it was safe. They staggered out of theirgrisly shelter into blowing dust which stuck to and stiffenedtheir bloody clothes.
Lee saw now that the dead yak lay in the bottom of anarrow crevasse. Through the thick haze of dust were theghost-shapes of clumps of dry vegetation standing amongstflat water-worn stones--in the brief rainy season of latesummer this would be the bed of a raging river.
Chen Yao scrambled up the slope and Lee followed. Shenow 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 theother way. Oh please, please Wei Lee, you must follow me."
And she stumbled on the level ground as if she had tried toclimb a step that wasn't there, and began to cry.
Lee gathered her up in his arms and staggered forwardthrough blowing dust. Chen Yao whispered directions, andbecause Lee had to bend close to hear her he didn't see the 
pony materialize out of the dust. When its rider shouted to 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


him, Lee almost dropped Chen Yao in amazement. 

The man on the pony wore a mask against the dust, butLee recognized him at once. 

"Good goddamn Billy Lee," Redd said loudly, "you giveme that girl and get your scrawny ass on my saddle rightnow." Chen Yao roused enough to scramble into the saddlein front of Redd; the cowboy leaned down to give Lee hisarm, and said, "If I had time, I'd buy you another bath." 

He was smiling behind the mask. Lee smiled back andswung up on Redd's strong arm and settled behind the cowboyin the high-backed wooden saddle. 

That was when the bike roared out of swirling dust. 

It was two-wheeled and all chrome. Mary Makepeace Galaleaned back in its narrow saddle, her arms raised to grip asteering bar which had the same upswept curve as a yak'shorns. There was a patch over her left eye, and a red bandannaaround her shaven head. Under the saddle, betweenher legs, was a teardrop pod with the yellow and black trefoilwarning of radiation hazard. 

The mercenary brought her fission-powered bike to a haltso abruptly it reared up like a stallion, the whine of its motorrising to a scream. 

Redd held Chen Yao, and Lee clutched the coarse blanketRedd wore like a cloak, as the horse shied under the threeof them. The mercenary's bike spiked a stand into the dirtand Mary Makepeace Gaia was suddenly standing with a pistolin each hand. Sparkling dust defined two needles of laserlight as she shot at the sky. 

Redd raised his hands, palms upwards. Lee thought hesaw something glitter away from them, blown towards themercenary on the dusty wind. 

Mary Makepeace Gaia triggered another burst of laserlight and the beams crossed just above Redd's head. Leeheard dust grains exploding in the intense energy like peppercornsbursting in a wok. The mercenary holstered one ofthe pistols and pushed up the filter which had covered hermouth 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." 



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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 asher sister, but four hundred degrees cooler. "Good," shesaid, and ran at the pony. 

Redd reined the pony around and spurred its belly. Leeheld on tight as it flew into a gallop. The assassin screamedsomething 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 thered sky, where wisps of high cirrus glowed like beatenbronze, as the horizon began to climb up its disc. 

Clinging behind the cowboy, Lee knew enough to relaxinto the spine-jarring ride. Despite his nervous exhaustionhe found the hell-for-leather ride exhilarating. He squintedover Redd's shoulder into wind and sunset light, saw a darkline at the horizon of the stony plain, running from west toeast. 

It was the Grand Canal. They rode straight for it, acrosswide dry fields, over dry irrigation dikes, past toppled windpumps. Then they were in deep shadow, clattering down anarrow street between ruined flat-roofed mud-brick houses,
one of the abandoned villages which dotted the length of theGrand Canal from the capital to the Dust Seas. They burstinto the last light of the sun, crashed through a belt of seedlingmangroves. 

A skimmer was moored at the end of a stone jetty thatran a little way into the kilometer-wide canal. Its black disperserswere raised high on their recurved booms, and itsslack silvery monofilament sail ripplingly mirrored the redsky. 

Redd reined the pony, vaulted off and lifted Chen Yao fromthe saddle. When Lee jumped down Redd swatted the pony's 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


rump with his hat. It turned its head to regard him reproachfullywith a large brown eye, and Redd yelled, "Youget going, you stupid lump of dogmeat!" and swatted itagain. The pony pranced away, and with its reins trailingtrotted off along the trail it had smashed through the seedlingmangroves. 

Redd set his hat on his head. "I swear I'm gonna get meone of those bikes next time. You two come on, now." 

He led Lee and Chen Yao down the jetty and on to theskimmer. Even as they set foot on the white-wood deckingthe gangway retracted and lines took up slack, the sail filledwith 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. 



 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, butthings worked out in the end. It is not your fault that Hawkhad been turned." 

"Perhaps I trusted the wrong people." 

Captain Tsatar's face gave nothing away. So different fromRedd, whose face was a constant storm of half-concealedemotions whose meanings Lee could often only guess at.
The captain said, "And yet here you are after all. No onecould be expected to have done better. If the wind holds wehave a day to educate you. And if it doesn't, well then wehave even longer--if our enemies don't find us." 


Forty-nine 

L 

ee's education began after breakfast of doupi, fried beancurd pancakes stuffed with minced vegetables. Histeacher was a thin ascetic Yankee called Soldier. Soldier 
had iron-gray hair, a thin face which showed all thebones beneath it, steel teeth, and an inexhaustible supply ofinvective. For twelve hours, from dawn to dusk, he taughtLee the rudiments of half a dozen fighting techniques--TaeKwon Do, the Five Animal Styles of the Shaolin Temple (anespecial favorite of Soldier's), Karate, Choy Li-Fut, use ofknife and quarterstaff. They didn't even stop when the skimmerput into shore, sheltering under the many-arched canopyof a giant banyan from a culver that patrolled the widecanal for an hour before turning back towards the capital. 

Lee found that he could store away every move of a fightingsequence, 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 whichhad been laid on the white-wood deck. 

At last Soldier pronounced himself satisfied. "It'll have todo," he said. They bowed to each other and rolled up thematting, just as the last sliver of the sun flashed blue lightaround 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 satbeneath an awning, nibbling sweet rice balls and sipping sourmilk, 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 backto chatter to Chen Yao. Lee could almost understand what 
they were saying; or at least, he could play it back, sloweddown, and filter words from the chatter. Only Chen Yaocould make sense of it. 

What the fin had brought was news. Chen Yao translatedit. Most of the city was under martial law. Roving gangs hadlooted much of the Yankee Quarter and there were frequentfire fights at night. Refugees crowded the feed lots; the Armyof the People's Mouths was preventing them from movingfurther. 

Everyone on the skimmer listened to Chen Yao recountthis, and it was passed to other skimmers via blinking signallamps. 

If Chen Yao was worried about her family, her people, shegave no sign. The aspect of her godhead gave her the calmacceptance of the world of a true bodhisattva. The crew ofthe skimmer brought her water-hyacinth flowers, which shewove into her hair. By starlight and the colored points ofthe skimmer's running lights, the wilting blooms made aglimmering constellation above her face as, serious andquiet, she taught Lee how to call up the functions of hisrewired nervous system, to move in and out of hypermode,
tune his hearing and visual acuity at will, control the autonomicfunctions of his body. 

Meanwhile, although the broadcasts of the King of theCats were no longer being jammed he was doing nothingbut play music, and Miriam slept like a mangrove seed inthe muddy darkness at the base of Lee's brain. 

The end of the long hard day had left Lee with a sense oflassitudinous well-being. He was tired, but not exhausted.
By heat sight he could enjoy the trim lines of the skimmeras it ran before the night wind. Its sail rippled as breezesrose and fell and computer-controlled winches differentiallyflexed 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 BlackDra#on. 

Redd was ill at ease a-sail, and he was still trying to convincehimself that he was on the right side. "So long as it'sagainst owners, that would be OK," he said. "Never did likeowners. People like Hawk, thinking they own the ranges...
no one ever really owns the land. It's really the land ownsyou." Redd hummed a few bars of "Don't Fence Me In"; itmade a strange counterpoint to Oscar Toney's "PreciousLove," which courtesy of his revamped nervous system wasplaying 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 brassbrazier. It was near midnight with frost sharp in the air, andno one on the skimmer could sleep. At any moment theculvers of Lee's great-grandfather, or of the Army of thePeople'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 brilliantlyacross the sky. Venus and the double star of Earthand Moon were setting: Jupiter wouldn't rise for an houryet. The red and green double stars of other skimmers' runninglights moved in the distance against the vast black silenceof 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 arehere." 

"It goes way back to when I was a young kid. Barely hadhair on my balls when I had that operation they advertise.
Maybe you don't know about it. Aimed at Tibetans and Yankeesto keep our populations down. Took the money like anidiot, spent it in a week. So I'll never have kids, but I figuremaybe I want something to live on and this is my shot atit. If we win, they'll make statues of us all." 


 RED DUST 
245 


"Or make songs," Lee said. He imagined the King of theCats singing of his exploits in his slow bluesy voice, and feltan illicit thrill. Part of the King was inside him, he alwaysfelt, after that dream. In a different way that part of MiriamMakepeace Mbele was, but there all the same. 

In his head, the voice of the King of the Cats came in onthe fade. Lee had found he could separate the broadcastsand the real world, and attend to them simultaneously. TheKing was all fired up the way he had been when he'd triggeredThe Little Bird's revolution. Lee took notice of that 
kind of thing now. He knew that the King's moods weren'trandom. He was talking directly to his audience down herein the world. 

"Awww-right! Rock aaaaandRedd said, very serious, "All 

rooooll. Yessir, we'rethat hand-waving and 

cooking right now, goodyelling, that Chop-Suckey 

golly we really are. Lightstuff you've been taught, 

crawls up and light crawlsthat won't do you no good 

down, but I can spy withat all against someone with 

my real big eye what'sa gun. This pistol of mine 

happening with you folks,
might be crude and out of 

Let me tell you I'll bedate, but its advantage is, 

bringing you the news onlyit's mechanical. Pure brute 

a few minutes out of synch,
force, nothing that circuit-

and the news right now isbuster viruses can touch. 

there's an army columnHere, now, hold it. It's OK, 


moving on Xin Beiing.
it won't go off. See that 

That's coming to you northlittle pip there? The action 

by northeast, and atwon't work unless you slide 

present speed it should beit forward. And it's not 

reaching the railway passloaded. 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. Anyhammer there, second 

soldiers listening, I say Idrops it. Real sweet, real 

can count your heads,
balanced. There's this old 


 246 
PAVI J. McAvI:¥ 


baaay-beees.t You wave yourguy back in Yankee Town 

hands in the air if youthat makes these by hand, 

don't care. I can count youtakes him a month on one 

all the way from up here,
piece. He numbers each 

why I can even tell ifone, right above the wheel 

you've trimmed your nailsthere, see? Yankee 

or not. I have eyes, believenumbering, illegal or not, 

me, I have eyes everywherethat's how he does it. Now 

In a minute, in just ahere's the speed-loader, see 

minute, we're going to gethow the shot slides right 

' 
back down to some music,
into each hole there? 

after this public serviceWicked stuff. There's the 

announcement. That's a 
flat copper tip here, and 

special message for all youbehind that is number 

people way way up on thetwelve shot suspended in 

Tiger Mountain defenseliquid polymer. It'll put a 

system: keep watching thehole 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 wentinto hypermode, reached out and took it from Redd's grip.
Redd started to react as Lee slowed back down, and then hewas working his empty hand, staring at the gun which dangledby 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 tothink that mercenary has the same wiring as you? Shecomes after you, you aren't going to take her gun away." 

Lee had to admit that Redd was right. And he was certainthat Mary Makepeace Gaia would not rest until she foundhim: a certainty he suspected he owed to the buried fragmentsof her dead sister, who perhaps was simply silent, andnot 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. Hewas needling the sky defense systems again. The place whereLee was headed. It couldn't be coincidence. 

Lee said, "Do you know why they've stopped jamming thebroadcasts of the King of the Cats? I have just thought ofit. He dangles bait before the enemy; they need him just asmuch as we do, because they suspect he might give somethingaway." 

"He also broadcasts with enough power to burn a holethrough the planet, it was concentrated on one spot. Jamminghim after the trouble in the city must have screwedup 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 knowhow much you Han hold to the past, but we're different." 

"Ah. Then I see that you are not following the traditionsof your ancestors when you ride the range. Forgive me forbeing so foolish." 

"Well, I guess you got me there. But, see, it's not exactlyfollowing any tradition. It's re-using it in a different way, ina different place for a different purpose. You put any cowpokefrom the nineteenth century out on the range, hewouldn'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'mgoing to give you shooting lessons we should ask permissionof the captain." 

Captain Tsatar was a gun buff himself, it turned out, andshowed Redd the hand-made sniper rifle he kept just in casehe needed to surprise river bandits who haunted the abandonedvillages along the Grand Canal and (in fact its onlyreal use) to pot waterfowl or small game in the borderswamps. It had an octagonal barrel two meters long with atelescopic sight that ran its whole length, and a bore as bigas 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 ofwater moving past the skimmer's hull the night held animmense stillness. Cold, the sky clear, stars so bright Leethought he could have reached out and plucked one, likefruit from a tree. The bridge controls made a small comfortingglow, like a hearth fire dimming to ashes. Tomorrowthey would reach Ichun, the danwei at the end of the canal. 

"It's a nice gun," Redd said. "There's this guy back inYankee town you should talk to some time." 

Lee was surprised to see how quickly Captain Tsatar andRedd formed a bond, for Tibetans and Yankees were traditionallyenemies: there had been much bad blood during theresettlement, when a million Tibetan pioneers had fallenfrom the sky and taken the planet from the failing Yankeecolony. But perhaps that was the point. Redd and CaptainTsatar shared the same history, and both their races wereoppressed by the Han--although in true stubborn Yankeefashion Redd would never admit this. Both knew more about 
that history than Lee, too. Lee had for most of his life beenas unaware of it as a fish is of water, or the child of a richman 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 asunwillingly changed by it as the lives of those without powerhave always been changed. 

He was beginning to understand why Redd had stayedafter bringing him here. 

He was beginning to understand the forces in delicatebalance all around him, even if he was still unsure just whowas trying to move them. 

"We are the first people," Captain Tsatar said when Leeasked if the ku li really existed. "We've never needed a name,
until now. If the name strikes fear into our enemies, thenit is to our advantage." 

"Ku li," Soldier said, "is as good a name as any. We arenot as numerous as the Ten Thousand Years would have the 
populace believe, but we will unite the people and moveforward with them." 

Lee said, "Do you mean you will impose your ideas onthem?" 

Captain Tsatar said, "We learn from the people, and thenteach them what we have learned. The people will take controlfrom the Emperor and the Ten Thousand Years andcentralize all means of transforming the world so it can bedone as quickly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, thiswill mean inroads on the rights of the individual, But politicalpower wielded in the name of the Emperor is merelythe instrument by which the Ten Thousand Years oppressesthe people." 

Soldier said, suddenly and unexpectedly passionate, "Inour hands it will change the world for ever. And for thebenefit of everyone." 

Redd said, "People know they must co-operate to get on.
But they need leading, too. Not much different from runninga herd." 

Soldier said, "When the people take power and makethemselves the ruling class, then they will have swept awaythe structure which oppresses them. They cannot oppressthemselves." 

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 dragons hatch from the smallest of eggs. We will finish the transformation 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 magnified 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 thatthe 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. Theywere as bright as the brightest stars, and Lee's sight stepped 


 RED DUST 
251 


down to compensate. Something in his rewired brain plottedevery line. He remembered the technician explaining aboutcluster probes designed to test Mars's defenses. Each an icymoonlet infected with fullerene viruses which carved it into a 
hundred fluffy micro-comets and manufactured the viruseswhich would melt the permafrost during the long fall fromJupiter's orbit to that of Mars. The man was hugely fat, nakedand completely hairless, with a nervous habit of looking intoLee's eyes at the end of each sentence and then looking awayagain. No, not Lee's eyes: this was Miriam remembering part ofher mission briefing. 

The blossoms hung across the sky were the comet heads(each no bigger than Lee's own head) burst by the orbitaldefense lasers controlled by Tiger Mountain, beyond theeastern horizon. The lines of the web were burning waterdroplets, exploding in ionisation trails. Rain, falling faintlythrough the stratosphere, evaporating kilometers above thesurface, the viruses suspended in the droplets already destroyedby induction hundreds of thousands of kilometersbefore they reached the Martian atmosphere. 

This was not war, not yet. The display showed that thedefenses were still too strong for frontal assault. But it wasthe 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 



 RED DUST 
253 


the portents in the sky that night, had combined to cause apopular revolt. 

The company of soldiers garrisoned in the town had surrenderedafter their compound had been set on fire. Thegovernor and his family had fled into the Dust Seas as soonas the revolt had started, riding the last skimmer carrieddown on the elevators. The post office had been liberatedfrom its nightwatchman, who was now sleeping off a massivedrunk after all the rice beer to which he'd been treated. 
Posters of the Gang of Six had been defaced and sloganspicked up from the Xin Beijing uprising covered most of thewhite walls of Ichun's buildings. Lee recognized some of thePSCM's jargon mixed with quotations from the movie fragmentsof the King of the Cats. The civic loudspeakers nolonger broadcast a bland diet of pop arias, advertisementsand anti-expansionist propaganda, but the King's round-the-clockrock'n'roll show. 

And the massive elevators which carried skimmers up anddown between the Grand Canal and the Dust Seas were 
stalled. The family which owned and operated them hadjoined the revolution. Queues of skimmers were alreadybacked up half a kilometer, and growing every hour. Amongthem was The Black Dragon, which Lee and Chen Yao andRedd had left at dawn. 

Arriving at lchun by road had seemed sensibly inconspicuousat the time: by now Mary Makepeace Gaia must haveworked out how they had escaped. As it turned out, theymight as well have carried huge banners broadcasting theirpresence. In fact, as Lee was carried by the celebrating crowddown 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 thethoroughfare. 

Chen Yao, her hands on the scaly heads of the two carpwho carried her, shouted, "This is your hour, Wei Lee! Nowyour 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 ofkilometer-high cliffs that dropped straight down to thevast red flatness of the Plain of Heaven. The delicate 
tiers of the house and its lush green gardens, sheltered bycurved windshields that raked the sky like thirty-meter talons,
had been turned into the headquarters of Ichun's popularrevolt. Manicured lawns, which had been watered everyday and cut by a dozen women with hand scythes, wereslowly being trampled to mud by the victory party. Cookingpits had been dug into the precious turf; there were tablesloaded with sour vegetables, pickled yak brains, mapo dofuwith fiery sauces, stuffed roast intestines, pig-face soup,
sugar jaffles and other delicacies. 

One of the self-appointed revolutionary committee explainedto 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 yellowscarf. A yellow scarf and lack of a mask were the badges ofauthority, it seemed. The committee knew only too well ifthe town was retaken that no masks could save them from 
informers, so went bare faced amongst timorous townsfolkwho preferred to carry out the revolution anonymously. 

"You see the riches stolen from the populace," anothercommittee member said. 


 256 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


"The Ten Thousand Years cling to the backs of the HundredFamilies," said another.
Lee said, "I see celebration seems more important to youthan victory."
"As to that," the tall student said, "the Captain of thegarrison awaits your convenience. We have secured all weaponsand all communications." 
Lee did not hold back his anger. "I suppose you mean youhave locked up the soldiers. And what will you do when theArmy 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 amoment Lee thought that another of Miriam's sisters hadfound him. But the young woman had straight black haircut to frame a face the color of buttermilk. Her almond-shapedeyes were as black as Lee's. She coolly met his stareand said, "You must not think that we have not thought ofthese things."
"Let him talk," someone else said.
Lee said, "I'll not have you on my conscience, so I mustspeak plainly. I can offer you two choices. You may standand fight, or run away. Both are dangerous, but you musthave realized that when you acted. No? Too bad. Unless youchoose, you will all be dead in a very short time. The Armyof the People's Mouths would have begun to move on youas soon as communications were cut, and certainly once theelevators stopped working. The skimmers have radio sets,
after all. Did you confiscate those?"
"The skimmer crews are on our side," the tall studentsaid. 
"So any skimmer captain would say, when faced with amob. 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 retained some sense. The ordinary soldiers had been lockedup in a warehouse, but they had not been mistreated. Therewere sixty of them. They stood at parade rest in the middleof the main avenue in front of the gate of the Governor's 


 RED DUST 
257 


house, looking ill at ease and watched with intense curiosityby twice their number of townspeople in carnival motley. 

Lee explained to the soldiers that they had a choice. Theywould be set free and turned out of the town, or they couldstay and fight. They had ten minutes to think about it. 

It took only five. Their spokesperson, a squat, powerfullybuilt corporal, was thrust forward. "We'll fight," he said. 

Lee allowed himself a moment to enjoy the surprise ofthe committee. He bowed to the corporal, thanked him forhis helpfulness, and suggested that he go with a squad ofhis men to the Governor's house and take what food and 
drink they needed. By that time their weapons would havebeen returned to them. 

When the corporal had departed, the tall student said,
"Very fine sentiments. But when we return their weaponsthey will shoot us." 

"Not at all. The corporal is smarter than you. He knowsthat if he tried to rejoin the Army of the People's Mouthshe would be shot as a deserter, as would all his men. Noone in the Army of the People's Mouths could allow themto live, because that would be to admit that they had surrenderedIchun without a fight. So the corporal and his menwill fight on your side, for there is a slim chance of victory.
When he comes back, I want you to accompany us aroundthe town. He will know all the defensive positions." 

It was late afternoon before the corporal had finishedshowing Lee how to defend Ichun. Meanwhile, the committeehad been set to work rounding up those citizens whoremained sober enough to dig ditches and lay tanglewire atthe edge of the town. In Lee's opinion, such defenses wereonly good until attackers found a way around them, but atleast it gave the townspeople something to do. 

The corporal agreed with Lee. He was wryly resigned tohis fate. Like all in the garrison, he had not been born withina thousand kilometers of Ichun, and was not planning to beburied in it. "But only the lucky or rich choose where todie, 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 thePeople's Mouths attacked lawful petitioners in the Square ofHeavenly Peace. Their masters sent lite troops against unarmedcitizens." 
"War is not an embroidery exercise," the corporal saidgrimly. "I'd guess they'll send warhorses against us, oncewe've been softened up by culvers. Those defenses won't domuch good against a charge, but we can fall back to themain square. The buildings there are two-storied, and havethick walls. We can put a sniper in every window, and keepopen a passage for retreat to the elevators." The corporalscratched his close-shaven pate. He was a sturdy weather-beatenman with old laser burns down one side of his shrewd 
face. "It would be best if you started sending out the oldmen and women and children now. Order skimmers to turn 
back. There are plenty of half-lifers, too, stacked in an oldwarehouse." 
"They'll have to stay."
"I'd like to blow up a few buildings. It'll give us properfire 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 itcomes to ordering civilians about. It's what stopped me becomingan officer." 
Most of the revolutionary committee were waiting in thesquare, dusty and dishevelled from their labors. Lee gavethem the broad outline of his plans, and sat off to one sidewhile the corporal explained the details. The woman whohad confronted Lee at the Governor's house came up to him.
She had brought a covered bowl: boiled rice and fried shredsof pork and beancurd. Lee took it gratefully. He hadn't eatensince 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 haddied in an accident soon after her birth. She had been 
brought up in the Great House of her great-grandfather, anda year ago she had been sent to Ichun to work as an agronomisttechnician. Her black hair was cut in a wing thatbrushed her eyes; her nails were broken and crested withdirt. She said, "My comrades have worked hard for you. Akind 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 moreabout me than they do." Lee scraped the last grains of riceinto 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 anight 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 sameheight. 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 killa woman. I'm not scared of anything on this world exceptmyself. And that's all you have to be scared of, too." 


Fifty-two 

W 
u Lin's room, in a cadre dormito a few blocksouth of the Governor's house, was as small and asparely furnished as Lee's room in the Bitter Waters danw¢i--and as in hisroom, one whole wall of Wu Lin'swas covered in still pictures of the King of the Cats, printedfrom the surviving fragments of his movies.
Lee tapped the largest, which in stark technicolor showedthe King strumming his guitar and singing to Anne Helmon some lost beach of Old Earth, with his thumb. "I maybe 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 ofthe Cats." 
"Do you hope I can defeat the Army of the People'sMouths as the King defeated the gamblers' gangsters?"
"You are already a kind of sheriff, it seems. Please, youmust explain how you know about me, Wei Lee. We mightnever see each other again."
Lee took the bowl of tea she held out to him. They satside 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 Housewhere you lived. It was in the mountains, above Xin Beijing. 'Itwas far bigger than either of us thought. I knew only afew courtyards, a few of the buildings." 


 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 apolite man, and knocked on the door and softly calledLee's name until Lee replied. Lee had slept on Wu Lin sfloor matting; as he worked the stiffness from his limbs itoccurred to him that he had not slept in a bed since leavingBitter Waters. As he combed his hair, Wu Lin stirred on herbed, then suddenly sat upright, her hands clasped tightlyacross her eyes.
"There are grids and numbers wherever I look!"
"The viruses have begun their work," Lee said, and explainedwhat she should expect. "I don't know if it will helpus 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 outsidethe dormitory with the corporal, in a cold wind that blewthin 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'sgoing down." He wore a black and red checked scarf overhis mouth and long nose against the dusty wind. The captain 


 RED DUST 
263 


of The Black Dragon was there, too. His hunting rifle wasslung over his shoulder; its octagonal barrel stuck straightup a meter above his black felt hat. 

"I'm happy to see you," Lee said, "but if I'm not mistakenshouldn't you be with your ship?" 

"She's standing ready by the elevator cradle," Captain Tsa-tarsaid. "Our back door, if we need it." 

"When we need it," Redd said, "and that's soon. Soldieris 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 willjoin it gladly and fully." 

"Let's hope so," Redd said. 

"We maintained a deep radar watch all night," the corporalsaid. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he was unshaven.
"Just before I came to wake you two blips lit up, three hundredklicks out and closing fast. We're moving everyone intoposition, and the elevators have been started up." He gavea 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 Leewhat had happened in the night. Less than half of Ichun'scitizens had stayed to defend their homes. The rest, and thechildren and old men and women, had been transporteddown to the Plain of Heaven aboard commandeered skimmers. 

"There was a deal of trouble over that," Redd said, "andSoldier 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 aboutsailors' pride." 

Redd laughed. "Soldier said it was what? The reaction ofthe Little Owners to loss of their only means of oppressingthe people." 

"Soldier's a good man," Captain Tsatar said, "but sometimeshe 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 althoughhis place is not here, he seems to have made up his mindto stay." 

"I can't run away from this, Yao." 

Chen Yao was more angry and more scared than shewanted anyone to know. Perhaps only Lee saw the effort sheput into controlling her voice when she said coldly, "Youcan't save the world a town at a time, either." 

The corporal said, "Had to put a couple of armed peopleaboard each skimmer, to make sure refugees weren't thrownoverboard at the first opportunity." 

"That's good," Lee said. He hadn't thought of that, and itsuddenly seemed to him that there was so much he hadn'tthought of. He was the center of a thousand unravellingthreads. It was an exciting, scary thought, and kicked inadrenalin 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 oftanglewire strung between the buildings on either side. Orbetween their remaining walls, for the buildings had beengutted, holes blown completely through them, flat roofscaved in. That side of the square faced east, and early sunlightpoured down the fire lanes, burning on the red bannerswhich flew from every available point. Every scrap of redcloth in Ichun must have been commandeered; even the bigginkgoes were decked in red. 

Trucks had been parked in a semicircle bowed away fromthe main avenue's entrance into the square. Fifty or sixtypeople lounged behind this makeshift barricade. Most werecivilians, and many still wore masks, which lent them a gaycarnival air at odds with the grim expressions of the fewsoldiers amongst them. 

The corporal explained to Lee that most of his men wereon the perimeter roofs, and Captain Tsatar made his excusesand left for his own sniper's position. He was halfway acrossthe 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 bellyguns winking but didn't hear them fire. Lines of dust walkedacross the square. A ginkgo flew into splinters and then atruck blew apart, scattering bodies and parts of bodiesamongst flame and terrific noise. 

There was a ragged fusillade from the survivors, but theculvers had already passed out of range. Captain Tsatar haddropped to the ground. Now he picked himself up, dustedhis loose trousers, and trotted across the square into theshadowy arcade of a building on the far side. The corporalput 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 comeagain," she said. 

Two black specks in the pink sky: their bulbous bodiesand flexing circular wings jumping into clear focus as Lee'ssight reflexively amplified. Dawn light burned off their canopies.
They rushed forward faster than the thunder of theirwings. Neither Redd nor the corporal made a move to cover,
and so Lee stood his ground, too. Redd put an arm aroundChen Yao, but she pulled away from him without taking hergaze from the swooping culvers. It came to Lee that mostacts of heroism simply spring from embarrassment. 

As the culvers skimmed towards the tops of the treesaround the Governor's house, a brilliant light shot up fromthe 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 Leerealized that the light had been a one-shot laser. Disintegratingparts, most on fire, fell in slow trajectories as theother culver stood on its nose in midair, clapped its wingsabove its canopy, and dropped below the cliff. 

"Well," the corporal said with gloomy satisfaction, "nowthey know we defected." He paused, his head cocked. He waslistening to the speaker in his helmet. He said, "Oh, theyknow, 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 distantthunder." 
"Cavalry," the corporal said. "This way."
They entered the shade of one of the arcades that linedthe square, and cantered up a winding stair lit by sunlightat every other turn from narrow glazed windows. The glasshad been milkily pitted by centuries of winter sandstorms.
A reflexed groove was worn into the middle of each stonestep. Lee couldn't stop noticing details all of a sudden. Everymoment was suddenly significant.
The stair ended in an open trapdoor. Lee stepped on tothe flat roof, where the morning breeze seemed colder andstronger than in the square, the sunlight rawer. Raw goldpouring from the sun's tiny disc, gleaming on the solar panelswhich, like flowers, had turned towards it, silhouettingsoldiers who squatted behind the low parapet bordering theroof. 
The corporal offered Lee a pair of fieldglasses, but Leeshook his head and asked, "Where?"
The corporal pointed.
Virus-enhanced sight brought into sudden focus a line ofmounted 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 formedof 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. Thisis a crack cavalry unit, and all the soldiers and their mountswill 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 therebefore and behind the line. A warhorse reared up, topplingits rider as it snapped with fanged jaws at a red rose smashedinto its scaly flank. A rider slumped sideways, shattered headpumping blood across his mount's withers, and it chargedforward 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 radiatedspent energy. His grip had dented the aluminum stockof the stub-barrelled rifle. But his heart pumped smooth andslow; he wasn't even out of breath. The viruses had rebuilthis muscles to take care of oxygen debt. 

It took a microsecond to match the infra-red glimpse ofthe 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 thecenter of the square. She was wired for speed, too. 

Lee gathered himself and ran out into smoky morninglight. He dodged and weaved amongst the cavalry withdreamlike ease. He caught the slow-moving arm of a rideras she started to raise her sling, pulled her down and lefther behind. Saw dust spurts tracking towards a civilianwoman who lay clasping her bleeding leg, and knocked herout of the way. All the time turning his head, snapping inand out of infra-red, short rifle flicking back and forth. 

But the heat of the burning trucks hid the mercenary'sbright trace. 

Half the cavalry had broken from circling the square andwere moving towards the broad avenue that led to the Governor'shouse. Lee took a breath and ran after them, windingin and out of their hurtling bodies. 

He had time to see everything clearly: the lather of foamflying from their red, fanged mouths; their rolling yelloweyes aflame like lamps; the motion of muscles under theirspotted hides; the intent expressions of their crouching riders.
A warhorse snapped at Lee, but he easily dodged thelazy snatch of its jaws and vaulted up behind its rider andripped out the cables which connected his headpiece to theskin-tight fighting suit. The rider went into tetanic spasmand Lee reached down, gripped the man's right leg, andtipped him out of the narrow saddle. The warhorse buckedviolently; Lee sang calming words to it. A dozen strides later,
just as the riders around him were beginning to react towhat had happened, he jumped down, safe on the far sideof the square. 


 270 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


He looked right and left, infra-red sight piercing rollingdust clouds. A riderless warhorse charged at him, and Leeswerved aside. 

Then he was smashed to the ground. 

Mary Makepeace Gaia, hanging from the warhorse's harnesson his blind side, had dropped in passing and thenleaped. Lee reacted by reflex. The viruses took over. His bodymade the pass of the Startled Locust and he was two metersaway. The mercenary was climbing to her feet and fire wasburning his shoulder where she'd cut him. 

She had lost her sunglasses; a ball of black metal movedin her stitched eyesocket. Lee's rifle lay on the ground ather feet. She kicked it aside, raised her knife. 

Lee assumed the posture of the Angry Crane, left foottucked behind right knee, arms half raised, elbows out likewings. 

The mercenary laughed and threw away her knife. Thenshe was upon him. 

They whirled and kicked amongst warhorses rearing inslow-motion panic. Lee vaulted clear across one to escapeMary Makepeace Gaia's attack and landed in a weavingcrouch, the sharp pain of splintered ribs dying away as virusesdamped nerves. The edge of his right hand stungwhere he'd caught the side of her head. 

She came at him again, but this time Lee ran forward tomeet her. They flew past each other, legs scissoring out ina complex ballet. His right foot caught her under her armpit,
but she grasped his ankle and twisted. He fell sprawling indust, rolled from the slow-motion plunging of a warhorseand felt a wind and rolled again so that the mercenary's kickmerely bruised his hip instead of breaking his spine. 

Lee jumped up in a half-squat, right ankle rubbery andfeeling 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 shirtstuck to him with blood and dust. 

The mercenary came at him again. Lee dodged amongstthe stamping legs of two warhorses as she whirled throughthe 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 moment 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. Shesprang to her feet and was knocked down again, her rightarm shattered. The third shot struck the ground by her headand spun away end for end. Lee glimpsed the captain of TheBlack Dragon standing at the edge of the arcade's roof, hislong rifle poised. The mercenary saw him too, and blurredinto 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 soonas we can. His muscles clenched and relaxed, rotating eachjoint of his legs and arms in turn. His fingers tapped staccatocodes. 

Redd came back. Lee sat up, and almost fainted. 

"Easy partner. Nothing to do now but run away. Youmight 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 garrisontroops 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 thesound 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 tomeet the cavalry charge head on. We..." 

That was when the water in the channel leading to theelevator caught fire. 

It went up all at once, flapping sheets of fire rising higherthan the big cable drums atop the elevator head. Redd andLee turned just in time to see Mary Makepeace Gaia leapthrough the flames. Lee jumped to his feet and almost felldown 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 rantowards the mercenary, silhouetted against flapping flames.
She ran faster and faster, blurring into hypermode: the viruseshad 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, shehad only courage to wield against the other's honed technique. 

It wasn't enough. The mercenary broke Wu Lin's rightarm, kicked her legs from under her, planted a boot on herthroat. "Come to me!" the mercenary shouted. "Come tome, Wei Lee, and I swear I'll spare this one!" 

Lee screamed and started forward, but Redd hauled himaround and Lee found that he was too weak to resist. He 
didn't see the mercenary's killing blow, but he felt it allthe same, and shuddered and cried out as Redd lifted himup and tipped him over the elevator's railing on to thewhite-wood deck of The Black Dragon. Girders archedabove the skimmer. Lee took a step forward and almostfell on his face. Redd helped him sit up, then unholsteredhis 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. Ibelieve her. Think of us." 

And then he was gone, and the cradle which held TheBlack Dragon swung out over the edge. Elevator tracksscored parallel lines down the cliff face, dwindling down tothe smooth surface of the Plain of Heaven. Water which 
spilled the joint of the big lock gates made a distinct fallingnoise amongst the noise of steam and clank of steam-drivenmachinery. Lee had trouble keeping things at right angles.
It was as if the world was trying to turn itself out. The airseemed packed with forms, huge and vague. 

Everything lurched as the elevator started down with ponderoussmoothness. Girder work dropped away; huge chainsmade a rushing sound as they moved up. 

For a long minute The Black Dragon dropped down towardsthe dust sea. 

Then the culver appeared beyond the bow of the cradledskimmer, matching its fall. 

Lee dragged himself to his feet, clutching at the rail, sawthe pilot sitting in the bubble of its Cyclopean eye. Sailors 


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PAUI J. McAuIE¥ 


ran for weapons, but the culver shrugged its wings and shotupwards and something exploded far overhead. The BlackDragon lurched in its cradle and then everything was fallingfree. 


Fifty-six 

T 

he first time Lee woke, it was night. 

He was. on his back. His face was masked, and hewas peering through little round lenses, lookingstraight up at the stars. Overlays came and went--sightinglines, vectors, navigational algorithms. Certain stars werebracketed, with figures clustered next to them. Presently hesaw that these were moving counter to the great wheelingmotion the world made as it continually sank eastward. 

In all that time he didn't think to move. At last the overlaysblinked 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 anold-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 witha rattling hiss. Lee opened his eyes, peered through themask'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 narrowwedge of shadow cast by the perspective-narrowed triangleof the silvery sail. With three pairs of dispersers slung outon either side--red dust dipping around their black pods,
which crackled and spat with induced static--the little craftlooked something like a water-skating insect. A water-skater 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


with a sail on its back and a stabilizing fin in its belly, anda lost lonely homunculus riding it.
Lee sat up. A voice said, "Well, it's about time, Master. Dowe feel at all like talking?"
A stalk rose from a control housing. It terminated in acluster of sensors, like a machined orchid.
"Or perhaps we're just the strong and silent type," thecomputer said. Its voice, neither male nor female, was informedby a querulous inflection.
Lee said, "Where are we?" His voice sounded strangelyintimate inside the mask. 
All around, from close horizon to close horizon, stretcheda sea of red dust. The little craft--it was a skimmer's gig--wasrunning with the wind. Gently swelling waves marchedacross the surface of the dust, each precisely the same shapeand height as the next, defined by a narrow line of shadowat its near side. Even as Lee watched, dazed and confused,
logy with the weight of consciousness, the sun reachednoon. Shadow lines vanished across the bowl of the dust 
sea. Wave tops were oscillating streaks of slightly brighterred across the glowing red surface, making dizzying moirepatterns. A faint spume fumed into the air from each wavecrest. Although a transparent shield curved around the paddedcockpit where he sat, he could feel wind-blown duststinging his hands.
The computer gave universal grid coordinates. Lee supposedthat his rewiring could translate that into an aereo-graphicalposition, but he didn't want to call on any of hisnew talents right now. Virus-stored memory was a pregnantweight in his head, and he didn't think he could stand instantaneousapprehension of the terrible moments after theculver had stooped upon The Black Dragon in its descendingelevator cradle 
He said to the computer, "Make sense of that for me." "We are sailing east bynortheast, towards the strait whichlinks the Plain of Heaven with the Plain of the Garden of 
Eternal Bliss. We've been sailing two days four hours, andestimated time of arrival is in eight days, fifteen hours." 


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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 itfor two days. Then for a long time he did nothing but sprawlnaked on the live hide couch at the stern of the little gig.
Sunlight sank through the canopy and through his skin tohis bones. He watched waves of dust march in long parallelrows towards the horizon, their shadows running ahead ofthem now. The gig was moving just faster than the waves,
dipping and rising smoothly as it ploughed through softdense swells. 

Shards of what had happened were jumbled in his mind.
He was reluctant to put them together. He kept thinking ofcertain details. Wu Lin sprawled helpless on the ground beneaththe triumphant mercenary, a hellish tableau lit by theflames that roared across the surface of the burning canal.
He'd only known his sister for a day, but he knew that hewould mourn her for the rest of his life. He remembered 
her grip on his arm and her exultant cry before she hadsprung into battle, armed only with courage and the half-formedgifts of the anarchist viruses. 

And he remembered the way The Black Dragon had shudderedlike a living thing when the culver had blown free theelevator cradle. He remembered the end of a chain flingingarcs of molten droplets as it fell past, loop after loop of achain half a kilometer long falling towards the red dust sea.
A sailor's broad-brimmed straw hat sailing off, rising up onsome current of air, the man's lined brown face turning tohis, mouth open around an unspoken question. The sickeningsmooth slide, faster and faster. He remembered the flashingglimpse of the counterweight of the empty dust-ballasted elevatorshooting up the cliff face as the cradle carrying TheBlackDragon plunged down, brake blocks screaming and showeringgreat drooping arcs of sparks. 

Then there was nothing but pictures shuffled one afterthe other, bright and sharp in every detail but with no emotional content. Lee suspected that Miriam had taken overthen. 

He let the barrier down. He wanted to see what had happenedwhen Miriam's virus-encoded personality had forced 


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281 


control of his own body. He saw that he alone had escaped,
clambering across the wildly tilting deck to the gig, strappinghimself into a crash cradle and shooting the sturdylittle vessel away from The Black Dragon moments beforeimpact, taking off across the dust sea under cover of theplume of dust raised by the skimmer's final keel-breakingimpact. 

He had looked back once. Had seen a vast dust cloud 
spread out at the base of the high cliffs. Had seen, atop asheer kilometer of cliff face, the smoke of Ichun risingagainst the pink sky. 

The images were mercilessly sharp and clear and bright.
The viruses forgot nothing. Lee watched what they showedhim with tears leaking from his clamped lids, running backtowards 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 tarnishedcoin of the sun. Light lay across the tops of the waves, linesof red light broadening as the waves marched west, meltinginto a general glow. Lee turned and looked ahead, saw a starburning at the wide, level, dark eastern horizon. It was thetip of Tiger Mountain, the biggest volcano in the solar system,
so huge that its peak rose above the horizon. Rose, infact, through the atmosphere of the world, its flat-toppedcaldera shining in near-vacuum twenty-seven kilometersabove the surface of the Dust Seas. 


Fifty-seven 

T 

he ecosystem of the Dust Seas were Cho Jinfeng'sgreatest triumph. Originally, they had been low-lyingboulder-strewn cratered plains, a thin crust lying overdust and rubble bound by ice into permafrost as hard as ironand a kilometer deep. But the ice of the deep permafrost hadbegun to melt when Mars had been slowly warmed, by skymirrors and by the greenhouse effect as out-gassing and sublimationof the south polar cap raised the carbon dioxidepartial pressure. The plains had become unstable, and forthe first time in an aeon Mars had been racked by quakes. 

Boulders (and half a dozen ancient space probes) had sunkinto quaggy unbound dust. Currents had started to circulate.
Great convection cells had carried heat deeper, liberatingmore and more permafrost water, freeing more and moredust. For three decades, muddy rain had fallen over most ofthe world in summer, and dust storms had shrouded mostof it in winter. The Tibetan colonists had endured the climatic 
overturn in underground citadels; many of the Yankeeshad been wiped out, their fragile, technologicallydependent settlements overwhelmed by weather. When ithad finished, much of the dust had been redistributed, buttreacherous bowls of semi-marshy dust had remained in certainplaces, hundreds of meters deep, and useless. 

Until Cho Jinfeng had found an ecological role for them.
She had developed strains of phytoplankton which couldflourish in the dust. Gene-melded from diatoms and fora-


 RED DUST 
283 

miniferan amoebae, the microscopic plants had dense siliconvalves permeated by threads of water-hungry cytoplasmwhich extended along long spines into the dust. They scavengedevery molecule of water they encountered, even thatchemically bound to the surface of the dust grains. Themarshes 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 oxygenhad been released by the phytoplankton, which had beenprotected from lethal ultraviolet by the microclimate hazeat the surface of the Dust Seas. The Dust Seas had reached 
stability. Water released by convective melting of permafrostat the bottom of the Seas was bound into the biosphere byphytoplankton. Shelled zooplankton devoured the phytoplankton,
and in turn the vast swarms of these tiny animalswere devoured by armored dust rays which glided across thesurface of the dust on huge tough membranes spun of carbon:
carbon fibres. And dying phytoplankton, zooplanktonand rays sank into the deep dust to replenish the great cycle.
Humans had established trade routes across the great dryseas, plied by wind- and static-powered dust skimmers.
And now, under the deep canopy of stars, a single smallgig moved on the face of the dry red sea of the Plain ofHeaven 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 



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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 withLee's gig by noon, and they clambered across to meethim. Redd was grinning like a madman under his filtermask; Chen Yao looked around coolly and said, "We will bemore comfortable here." 

"I'll make sure of it," the computer said, and closed upthe canopy. The other gig had already fallen behind. Its sailflapped idly for a moment, then caught the wind and belliedfull as it tacked away, turning back towards Ichun. 

Chen Yao and Redd had stolen the gig to follow Lee. Ithad been Chen Yao's idea; Redd claimed that he had comealong to look after her. They had ridden the last elevatorcradle down, away from the razing of lchun and the retreatof its surviving citizens. Most of the garrison had died fightingtheir own comrades, but many of the citizens had managedto 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 ofthe commercial channels. That stopped the soldiers following,
and stopped the culvers attacking the retreat. I guesseveryone on Mars will have seen what the Army of the People'sMouths did." In a softer tone of voice, he added, "Thewoman that killed your sister got away. I'm sorry, Lee. Itried to chase her, but she vanished." 

Lee said, "I think we'll see her again." 


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287 


"I'll be ready next time," Redd said. 

Lee said, "I'm glad to see you both, but you must realizeyou'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 notthe answer. I'm no leader, nor can I countenance the ideaof people dying for what they think is my cause." 

Redd said, "Seems to me there's an undeclared war beingfought. You can't blame yourself for what happened atIchun." 

"Innocent people died. They didn't even know what theywere 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 thecomputer what your path is." 

"Well, it told me we're going to Tiger Mountain, but Ialready knew that. Is anything else expected of me?" 

The computer said, "The woman told me that once youreached Tiger Mountain you would find your own path, Master.'' 

Chen Yao said, with mounting distress, "Is that all? Thatcan't be all she said! She was supposed to know how todisable 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 Mbelehad had control of his body, but he still had little controlover the menu of his eidetic facilities. Specifics lay just outof reach, like an unspoken word lodged on the back of histongue. 

Chen Yao was saying something. Lee opened his eyes. No,
they were already open. It was just that he hadn't been usingthem. 

Chen Yao said, "Don't ever do that again!" 

Behind her, Redd said, "You were out a long time, BillyLee. We were getting kind of worried." 

Lee blinked. The sun had moved. He had cramp in hisright leg, where it was doubled up under his left. Even ashe felt the pain, it began to fade. The computer told him he 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


had been in a trance for more than three hours, and Leebegan to realize just how dangerous his virus-built powerswere. 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 thePlain of Heaven, but we still have to sail the Plain of theGarden of Eternal Bliss." 


Sixty 

W 

ind rose as the gig sailed the narrow strait betweenthe two dust seas. Driven by temperature differences,
dust-laden gales howled like all the lost soulsof Mars's dead between high red cliffs, drove high, heavywaves and the gig before it. 

After the strait, for a night and a day and another nightthe gig moved southeast, aslant clashing combers of dust ina hazy spume that blotted out the sun and sky, that turnedthe King of the Cat's broadcasts to crackling mush. Redd,
seasick, grumbled that he'd finally found a mode of transportationworse than a horse. 

Then there was a dawn that filled half the sky with filigreesof lacework like glowing iron. The dry, powdery waveswere low and broad and lazy. The gig left a triple wake behindas it powered towards Tiger Mountain. 

Lee and Redd and Chen Yao put on their filter masks andhad the computer lower the canopy, which had been scoredand scratched with millions of minute pits and lines by theforce of the storm. The air was fresh and cold. Lee kicked 
off his boots and walked to the high sharp prow. His musclesresponded automatically to the sway of the gig's motion. 

He faced into the sun and bowed, then went through themoves Soldier had taught him. He felt his blood fizz and hismuscles slidingly loosen, like silky steel cords under hisskin. Chen Yao exclaimed fussily whenever he got too close 


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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 theywent through t'ai chi exercises, flowing from one positionto the next in a slow dance that somehow grew into morethan a simple exercise, was an affirmation of the bonds thatjoined 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 byrun-off from the high glaciers of Tiger Mountain. As thegreat cliffs of Tiger Mountain's western shield wall roseahead (their eroding feet, against which heavy dust combersceaselessly broke, still many kilometers below the horizon),
and the peaks of Tiger Mountain's three lesser sisters appearedas stars to the south, more and more shoals rode theheavy dust waves.
These floating islands were stromalithic accretions of filamentousblue-green algae and bacteria which formed stableplatforms for densely woven stands of bamboo and creepersand grasses. Every species of plant had narrow silicon-impregnatedleaves to resist the dust's ceaseless erosion, andas the gig spun past them the shoals glittered in the sunlightlike heaped diamonds.
At night, faint luminescence was visible within the shoals,
as if each were a galaxy receding so fast its light could hardlyescape, and there was a greenish cast to the restless surfaceof the dust itself, the bioluminescent glow of swarming zooplanktonthat were feeding on dense blooms of phytoplankton.
The gig was a shadow moving across this glowing landscape,
and the shoals made drifting constellations whichmocked the rigid patterns of stars that bestrode the sky, asif the reflection of every star had become a wanderer, aplanet. Lee and Chen Yao and Redd sailed the great voidbetween like the anarchist families forever falling free.
And it was on one such still starry night that the FreeYankee 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 gigwas heading east by southeast, and that something wasmoving in on it, ahead and to starboard. A smeared traceshowed 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 fearshow. 

Lee activated every running light, started to broadcast awarning. The shoal was a ragged shadow silhouetted againstthe 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 itscockpit to the other. 

Lee came up on hands and toes just as there was a crackleof blue sheet lightning either side of the gig's canopy: somethinghad discharged the dispersers. The gig dropped. Itskeel slammed into the dust. Lee was thrown down again,
and this time he bit his tongue. 

The computer was shrieking hysterically, alternating betweenincoherent rage and strings of fault codes. Lee spat amouthful of blood and told it to be quiet. 

"But we're sabotaged! We're under attack! We..." 

291 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


"Quiet!" His command was softened by a bubble of spitand blood, but the computer shut up. 

The gig groaned and rocked, slewed sideways with a softdragging sound. Redd was sitting on the cockpit's decking,
legs splayed, back braced against the couch. He had his pistolcocked and ready. Something rattled against the canopy,
and Lee went into hypermode without a thought. By infraredhe glimpsed blurred green human shapes outside, and thenthere was a point of intense light and the overpressured airof the cockpit whistled out through the hole the light hadmade. Something dropped through and broke on the deckingof the cockpit. There was a sickeningly sweet smell, likedecaying violets. 

Chen Yao pitched to the decking. Redd slumped forwardand dropped his pistol. Lee was halfway into his filter maskwhen the stuff overpowered him. 


Sixty-two 

L 

ee was woken by the sound of chanting. He had a foultaste in his mouth and a blinding headache. He wasstrapped to a post by a broad leather band that boundhis arms to his sides. Chen Yao was strapped to another poston 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 supportedby what looked like the hooped cartilaginous ribs ofsome great beast. Narrow apertures admitted wedges of dimred light. People crowded tiered ledges on either side. Theywere all naked, and all had the faces of monstrous beasts.
Their bodies were covered in swirling patterns that glowedsickly yellow-green. 

When they saw that Lee was awake they shouted a singleYankee word. 

"Classification? 

A dozen old men and women shuffled forward. They worebristling masks and strange square flat-capped hats, andwere wrapped in tattered cloaks trimmed with the furryskins of ice mice: dozens of tiny heads hung down fromcollars and sleeves, eyes replaced by jet beads that glitteredin the torchlight as if called back to life. The old peoplewielded 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 


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PAUL J. McAukE¥ 


piece of cloth over the bloody gash and threw it into a bowlof fuming liquid. Another old man stuck a blunt syringe intoLee's shoulder and injected what felt like a litre of salty bilgeunder 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 conicalhat was tipped on her scrofulous scalp. She grinned toothlesslyat Lee and shoved something small and hard and bristlyinto his mouth. It was a computer chip. Its edges cutLee's lips, and he spat it out with a mouthful of blood. 

The crone retrieved the chip and tried to get Chen Yao toswallow it, but the little girl managed to spit it right intoher face. The crone picked it up again, and shuffled to Redd.
The cowboy was still groggy from the gas, and he swallowedthe 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 kickingtowards an apparatus which others had lowered fromthe shadows under the high ceiling. They lifted her on toits wooden platform, strapped her hands to a blown glassbowl over her head. Two men on either side wildly crankedhandles 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 crackledbetween her skin and the pole's tip. Lee writhed against the 


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295 


leather strap which held him tight, tried to speed up intohypermode. But the effort was too much. The effects of thegas 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. 



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297 


They had no lamps, and no fires. Fire was the shoal'sgreatest enemy. 

They had preserved the remains of their ancestors' crudetwenty-first-century technology, although it had mostly degeneratedinto ritual and superstition. Different cultures ofprimitive viruses--big as amoebae, and about as versatile--werejealously maintained by different families, but the circuitrywhich the viruses printed were used as folk medicines,
or worn as jewellery. Redd had been accepted as one of thembecause 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 oldman with muscles tight as wires under loose skin. Lee couldnot see his face, or the face of any of the Free Yankees. Theywore filter masks all the time. Speaker's was a bristling affairwith tiny smoked glass eyepieces, like the snout of a subterraneaninsect. The Free Yankees were all experts in body language,
and wore extensive tattoos to proclaim their familyallegiances; they went naked inside their layered nest. Theywent in for swirling recursive designs, mostly in red and black,
underlain by a secondary system of patterns created by injectingluminescent bacteria under the skin. In the gloom of thefetid space where he crouched with Lee, Safety Officer waslined with swirling patterns that glowed with the glaucous hueof the flesh of rotting fish. 

Safety Officer was arbiter of quarrels between the dozenfamilies. The Free Yankees had taken Redd to be the captainof the gig, and Lee and Chen Yao his property. While Reddwas bathed and oiled and feasted, Lee and Chen Yao wereshackled and told that they were lab rats. 

"We decide to make you scholars maybe we give younames. Right now you don't need them," Safety Officer toldhis two prisoners. 

Lee bowed politely. The long chain that linked the manacleson his wrists chinked. 

Safety Officer cuffed Lee around his freshly shaven headin an off-hand manner. "None of the kow-towing Hah shit,"
he said, almost kindly. "You're amongst proper folk now. 


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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 tohis virus translation program, which had taken over controlof his larynx and tongue and lips, working independentlybut not quite at the speed of thought. Most of his sentencesstarted with a muted choking sound, like a throat clearing.
But it kept him alive. The Free Yankees were intrigued by aHan 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'sall right. You have seen our scientific way of curing insanity.
When she's strong enough we'll try it again. The scientificway is the only true way. You Han are falling apart in yoursoft 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 Officermeant by democracy. The Free Yankees were organizedalong the lines of a classic oligarchy, with power vested notin the individual but in archaic rituals and the persons associatedwith them. Safety Officer was powerful because ofhis name and his position, not because of who he was. Noone was elected according to a test of ability. 

Safety Officer cuffed Lee again. It was his characteristicgesture 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 theshoal." 

"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 youtwo lab rats get your asses over to the kitchens. There's shitto be shovelled." 

It was a sign of the Free Yankees' confidence that Lee andChen 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. Despitetheir fetish for privacy, which meant that every citizen, eventhe children, had two or three tiny rooms no one else couldenter without invitation, there were many spaces in theshoal which were unused. 

In the kitchens, under the watchful gaze of the fat domesticbursar, Lee and Chen Yao were put to sorting edible zooplanktonfrom inedible phytoplankton, and stripping the tiny creaturesof their silicon-impregnated shells. Later, as they spreadnightsoil amongst the roots of stunted tomato plants and cucumbersin the moist warm greenhouse tunnels, they wereable to snatch a whispered conversation. 

"You've got to get us free," Chen Yao insisted over andover again, until Lee was fed up with pointing out that hewasn't going to kill everyone aboard the shoal, and in anyevent, he didn't know how to sail it. 

He had talked to the computer through his virus-builttransceiver. 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 hadmanually severed its control cables, so it had no control overany part of the gig, which had been hauled on to the shoaland concealed within thickets of thorny creepers. 

"Even if I killed everyone, I'm not sure if I could fix thegig," Lee said. "And besides, I don't want to kill anyone." 

"They're savages," Chen Yao said. "They don't count, notagainst 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, Ipromise." 

Chen Yao decapitated a dozen tomato plants with a sweepof her hoe. She rattled the long chain which swung betweenthe shackles around her wrists. "It'll be too late!" 

And then they had to stop talking, because the domesticbursar had seen what Chen Yao had done and was hurryingforward to scold her. 


Sixty-four 

The shoal was skirting the edge of a plankton bloomthat grew where deep currents hit the edge of theshield of Tiger Mountain and rose to the surface, bringingmoisture from the underlying permafrost. Dust rays,
slow monsters with rippling wings fifty meters across,
moved through shoals of plankton with their bristly palpsswinging to and fro, leaving wide wakes of darker dust. 

A dust ray trail was sighted the day after the Free Yankeescaptured Redd and Lee and Chen Yao. Soon after, a lookouttied to the top of the tallest tree of the shoal spotted thefeeding plumes of the ray itself, and the entire populationpoured out of the nest and clambered up trees and bamboostands to try and catch a glimpse of the beast for themselves.
They regarded it as a propitious sign: Redd would be giventhe ritual chance to kill it, and so gain tenure. 

It was the middle of the afternoon. The clear pink skyglowed like neon and both moons were aloft: Fear a tippedcrescent just above the western horizon; Panic a chip of lightfalling eastward. A kind of haze hung over the dust sea, andits heavy surface was the color of molten copper. Sluggishwaves rolled towards Tiger Mountain. Its lower flanks werehazed, but its flat peak was sharp and clear and seemed torear higher than the two moons. The cliffs of its vast lavashield, six kilometers high, were so close that Lee could seehouse-sized boulders that piled up along their base, and theweathered 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 TigerMountain and climb to its top. Part of it came from theviruses, and from Miriam's partial personality, but at leasthalf of it came from himself. He had made the promise tohimself back in Ichun. But he wouldn't kill to keep thatpromise; too many people had died already. 

Most of the Free Yankees were forward of the nest, crowdinglike a gang of apes in the dense thickets of bamboo. Thelargest bamboo stems were as thick as Lee's waist, and blacksails had been raised high on them, straining in the briskbreeze. Masked children swung through the ratlines, shriekingwith laughter. 

Lee had to step around and duck under a web of guy ropesand 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 leaningbamboo stem, he peered around a dense tangle of wire-weedat the prow of the shoal. A dark lane ran across thered dust, wider than the shoal. It was the track of the dust 
ray. 

One of the Free Yankees, a tall thin man in crinklingsemiopaque coveralls made from dust ray intestine lining,
came up to Lee, clapped him on the shoulder. A tattooedeagle spread its wings around the back of his skull, underthe straps of his mask. He unlocked Lee's shackles andhanded him a wadded intestine suit. His voice was muffled 
by the bristly nightmare of his mask. He said, "You'll helpyour master. Put this on and come with me!" 

A group of men and women were hauling something likethe upturned shell of a giant tortoise. Redd was amongstthem. A young woman, with muscular arms and a V-shapedtorso that made her intestine suit tight across her small flatbreasts, grabbed a rope and heaved. The shell shot forwardand most of the others fell on their behinds. 

By the time they had scrambled up, the boat--that waswhat the shell was--was riding high on the dust, under thetangle 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 withincendiary itches as the fine stuff worked through seals andinto every crease and fold of his skin. He had to keep wipingaway powder that clung to his goggles.
He was given the task of pumping up silvery floats witha set of foot-operated bellows. Around him, the others weremeasuring out lengths of cable into neat loops. The harpoonistwas checking out her weapons and showing Reddwhat to do. 
Each long harpoon was tipped with a hollow, triangularbarbed head; a cap that screwed into the hollow head heldan explosive charge. Redd handed one to Lee, who hefted it,
found a grip at its point of balance. Redd shouted to theharpoonist that it didn't seem possible to throw it any distance,
and she shrugged and waggled her hands either sideof her masked head: body laughter. Then she clamped somethingto the shaft of the harpoon, just behind the grip. Itwas a cluster of powder rockets. The harpoon was a low-techrocket-assisted missile. 
By now, the shoal had vanished. Lee found he kept lookingto starboard, at the shield-wall cliffs rearing up from theshadows at their tumbled bases. So it was that he missed 
the first sighting, but, alerted by the muffled shouts of theFree Yankees, he saw the plume of the dust ray when it roseagain: a sudden double sheet of darker dust which shot highinto the air and ruffled out in long billows on the breeze.
The plume was dust, taken in as the ray sieved the sea forplankton, that had been ejected from the ray's fine barbedcombs by a kind of convulsive cough.
Redd, his masked face next to Lee, said that it was a bigson of a bitch. Lee had to agree. Up in the prow, the muscularharpoonist was arming her weapons, banging the explosivecharges into sockets at their points with cheerfulgusto. Everyone else ducked as the boat heeled to starboardand the sail swung across. The harpoonist handed Redd aharpoon, 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 wereas black as a vacuum shadow. (Miriam was suddenly withLee, standing just behind him, it seemed, and it was difficultfor him not to turn to her.) They ceaselessly rippled overthe bronze surface of the dust as the ray moved forward withdreamy slowness amidst a fine haze. Its combs rose like signalarms against the pink sky, fantastic fringed sculptures adozen 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 ofdarker dust churned by the ray's passage. For a moment it ranparallel to the rippling edge of the creature's port wing: then ittacked inward. Its hull shudderingly vibrated as it draggedacross the tough tissue-thin wing. Lee ducked the sail's swingingboom, saw the harpoonist rise as the boat turned parallel tothe 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 armoredhead, was red as a stoplight. Breathing spiracles denselyfringed with hairs pulsed arhythmically down the midline ofits long flat body. 

The harpoonist beckoned to Redd, had him brace one foot 

on the blunt raised prow, and handed him the harpoon. Itwas, symbolically, not attached to a line; nor was it armed.
She moved his right arm and harpoon back, told him tothrow 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 asthe rockets ignited, made a wobbling arc and struck the ray'sbody behind the armoured head, clattered down scales withthe rockets still fizzing, and came to rest at the flexing junctionbetween 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 withsuch enthusiasm that he couldn't breathe for a full minute 
afterwards. 

Meanwhile the harpoonist took up her own weapon, thisone fully primed. She raised it in her right hand to hershoulder, held her left hand across her chest, a glowing wickbetween finger and thumb. She spun the harpoon's shaft andthe 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 flyingfrom the furiously burning fuses. Then the rockets lit andit arched away in a flare of blue flame. It struck just behindthe ray's tiny red eye, skittered sideways down its body. Thenthe charge blew. Dust rolled out from the explosion's briefred flower, leaving a ragged wound at the creased junctionbetween the ray's body and its wing. 

There was a convulsive shudder under the boat. Everyoneexcept Lee and the harpoonist fell on to the coils of cablesin the well. The ray's filter combs collapsed into its mouthand sheets of dust blew sideways, but the combs didn't shakethemselves out again. 

The muscular woman grabbed another harpoon, but asshe braced herself something heaved under the boat and itrose until its prow pointed straight at zenith. The harpoonistflew backwards and hit the mast, and slid down it until shewas sitting. The boat fell back and as the harpoonist struggledto her feet something plummeted from the top of themast. It was the painted ironwood eagle. It hit the harpoon-ist'shead with a heavy thud and fell into her lap as she slidback down again, this time quite unconscious. 

Veils of dust were rising all around the edge of the ray'svast wingspan. The boat rocked as wave after wave passedover the wing on which it rested. People were hauling onthe sail. One turned to Lee, jerked his thumb across histhroat, 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 ofdisplaced dust. He snatched up a harpoon. 


 306 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 

Virus reflexes made it easy to brace himself, exactly as theharpoonist 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 harpoonand lit the fuses of its rocket cluster. Dust clouds shaken upby the ray's flexing wings made a dense smog, like fire-litsmoke. Its body was no longer visible by ordinary light, butLee could see it clearly by infra-red, saw a hot spot justbehind its bottle-end eye, a patch of blood-rich skin wherethe lapping armor plates had drawn apart. There was no timefor thought. He aimed and threw.
The rockets exploded in mid-flight, blindingly brightthrough swirling dust. Lee balanced like winged victory. Therocket's red glare vanished--then a dull explosion blew outthick gouts of blood and pulped flesh which spattered everyoneon the little boat and drummed like hail on the sail. 
There was a moment of silence, and then the Free Yankeesyelled and began throwing clusters of recurved hooks attachedto the long thin lines. When enough of them hadsnagged, the Free Yankees started hauling them in, draggingthe boat across the now still wing and jumping on to theray's body like so many pirates boarding their prize, armedwith silvery bladders which they promptly began attachingat the dust line. 
Lee followed Redd. The armored scales were like a tiled 
roof; beneath them, through his boots, Lee felt a complicatedtremor, 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 thedust seethed as blood sank into it: plankton feeding on thelife fluid of the creature which had fed on myriads of theircousins. As dust slowly cleared Lee saw that the ray's wingshad sunk below the surface, and that the taut bladders weremostly buried; attached by hooks, they were all that werekeeping the ray afloat.
Masked men and women were capering and stomping upand 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 takeoff. 

Redd grabbed her, whirled her in a brief waltz. Someoneknelt, hands cupping flame. When he stepped back a rocketshot up at an angle over the dust sea, burst in a goldenfalling flower, bright against the soft pink of the sky. Aftera minute another flower bloomed, small with distance. Leebacktracked its trajectory, saw a speck at the horizon line.
It was the shoal, black sails crowding every tree as it boredown on the dust ray. 


Sixty-five 

I 
I took the rest of the day to drag the dead dust ray tothe shore. There was a narrow bay under toppling cliffs,
its shore a fantastic conglomeration of buttresses andbroken arches, hollows and bowls and humped boulders. Itwas like the ruins of a city, ancient black lava polishedsmooth as glass by the ceaseless whisper of dust. Cliffssoared above, sculpted with balconies and terraces and caves.
The shoal was drag-anchored at the seaward point of thebay by sinking a weighted sail at its stern, and the FreeYankees swarmed ashore in a flotilla of tiny boats, haulingthe dust ray's corpse with them.
It was late afternoon when they beached it. The bay filledwith the light of the setting sun, which poured through thehigh cliffs that bracketed its narrow entrance. Light was madesolid by swarming dust. Gold: the light was gold. The Free Yankeesmoved like figures in a frieze of beaten gold, their shadowspalpable, three-dimensional, extending like complex tunnelsthrough the solid golden light. The long flat armored body ofthe ray glowed in the light as if it was being smelted.
Before the sun had set, the Free Yankees had peeled awaythe hard plates that shingled the ray's body, flensed the hectaresof carbon whisker wings and cut them into strips withdiamond knives. Black strips hung from ledges and acrossboulders like the backdrop to an opera. The kinks and coils ofthe ray's intestines had been read for portents, then emptiedof 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 betweenher breasts burned with cold phosphorescence. Her maskgrinned its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree grin at Lee. Shegrasped his hand in hers, and he followed her down towards thedance. 

Halfway there, she stopped and pushed up her mask. Herlong-nosed face was tattooed with barbed polychrome swirls,
so that her round bright blue eyes seemed to look at Leethrough a chink in a flowering hedge. Although she was a stepbelow him on the uneven slope, she had to bend to kiss him. 

"My name is Vette," she said, her mouth a centimeterfrom his own. "I owe you my life, and I never thought Iwould say that of any man. Are you really the one who willlead 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 thehedge of her face: like most of the Free Yankees, her teethwere capped with metal. Grit in their diet soon wore teethto hollow stubs. 

"Who told you that?" 

"It was written in our charter, generations and generationsago." 

"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 thedance!" She tugged Lee downward: he let her. 

Time dissolved in the steady pounding of the drums. Leeknew 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 orsubmerge the heavy burden of selfhood. To let the many becomeone. Redd was dancing too, waving his hat above hishead and whooping and kicking his heels. At one point someonerubbed oil on to the back of Lee's neck. Perhaps it containeda contact hallucinogen, because soon afterwards Leekept glimpsing things that weren't quite there. Or which werein one place one moment, somewhere else th next. 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 

There was a species of hummingbird which lived in thecold high equatorial deserts. It lived in a close relationshipwith the giant yuccas which perpetually flowered in summer.
Only its long beak could reach the nectaries at the baseof the yucca's long flowers, and in taking that exclusive foodit carried pollen from one plant to another. In winter it duga burrow and like so many creatures of the desert let itsbody freeze right through, but in summer it was the spiritof the high deserts of Mars, darting here and there or suddenlyimmobile on a blur of beating wings, then gone, sothat you had to look around to find it again. 

So with the strange figure. Perhaps the dance had thawedit; perhaps the drug. Lee could only glimpse it in peripheralvision amongst the dancers, as if it lived in the blind spotof the eye. Whenever he tried to look at it directly it wasgone, leaving only an impression of something human-shapedwithin a shadow that might have been a cloak, of aface masked like the faces of the dancers, except that itseemed that the mask was the face, or that behind the maskthere was nothing at all. It was like the auditors that cameand went in the other world of public information space.
Perhaps they had always been in the real world, too, andonly now could Lee glimpse one of them. 

The other dancers did not see the figure. Lee was in themiddle of a chanting snake of dancers, grasping the waist ofthe woman in front of him, his waist grasped by Vette. His filtermask was pushed back on his head. The heavy smoke, rollingout across the bay, seemed to damp down the dust, and itwas possible to breathe without choking. Which was just aswell, because it was impossible, given the exertion of thedance, 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 tohand without missing a beat. Lee took it and tipped it to hismouth and passed it on before swallowing--it was a fierybrandy that numbed the tongue and burned the throat.
Something stood in the shadows of a carved arch, watching ashe was drawn past. It did not go away when he looked at it. 


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313 


Lee stepped out of the dance. Vette followed, and the lineclosed up and moved on, an organism not without a mindor with many minds, but with one mind made of many. AsLee stepped towards the arch the drumbeats began to separateinto distinct moments. 

The figure's robe covered its head and fell past its feet; itseemed to stand on the air above the dust-polished lava. Thematerial of the robe was not a single weave but a four-colorbit map composed of tiny irregular shapes, none bordered byanother the same color, that merged in a polychrome shimmer.
Although the figure was no taller than Lee, it seemed tolook down upon him from a distance, its gaze burningthrough 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 voicecould 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 thatyou mean." 

"A few of those things would overwhelm an army," Vettesaid 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 worldbehind 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 swirlingpatchwork robe fell back to reveal its crooked little finger.
Not a human finger, but a curved claw that suddenly grewand grew. Its sharp tip touched Lee's right temple--the endpoint of the triple-burner acupuncture line. 

Everything tumbled away, and suddenly Lee was somewhereelse. 


Sixty-six 

A 
spot of heat pulsed at Lee's temple, where the figure'sc!aw had pricked him. He stood at the bank of a vast.nwer or sea of mist that poured past him up into thesky, rising and curving over as it rose so that it formed acircle, 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 fugitivemotes. They merged into a general glimmer wherefive 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 cablefrom some far star. 
--The Isles of the Blest are five in number. They arenamed Tai Yu, Yuan Chiao, Fang Hu, Ying Chou, and Penglai.
Once they drifted throughout the universe, but thenthey were fixed, each resting on the heads of three greatAtlas turtles. There dwell those who have won immortality,
or who will be reborn again, or who will pass on to a higherstate. They are the white men and women who dwell in palaces of gold and ofsilver, and eat li chih, the fungus ofimmortality, and drink jade water.
Lee shouted into the mist, calling for the librarian, buthe knew that he was not in any part of known informationspace; he was beyond the barriers, where dwelt the dead. Hewas in Heaven. 


 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 



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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


and drifted into the ice. Imagine, Lee, the isolation of thepoor souls of those islands, stranded in featureless frozenwhiteness." 

"Who are they, these inhabitants, these souls?" But heknew. They were the dead. "This is all a metaphor, isn't it?" 

"Everything is itself, and the shadow it casts upon theworld, and the shadows cast upon it by the world. Here thethree are one." 

Lee trembled. He felt as if he had been stripped naked andcast into a furnace, with only his belief to save him. Yet hecould not simply accept what he was told: he could not serveblindly, without question. "Forgive me for saying so, but youdon't sound like Miriam." 

"The Miriam you knew was of the world. She was a mercenaryassassin. I am your librarian, your guide. I came here,
and it changed me. I can't leave unless you wake the deaddreamers from their icy sleep." 

"Again, forgive me. But I am still not certain.., what willhappen when they wake?" 

"We do not know. But to begin with, the barriers will bedestroyed. The barrier that divides the information space ofMars from that of the rest of humanity, the barrier thatcloses the sky, and the barrier which binds the dead of theEarth. We will help all who want help." 

Lee reflected that all his life he had been given that kindof help. All his life his destiny had been shaped by the actionsof others. 

"You have come far, Lee," Miriam Makepeace Mbele said.
"Tiger Mountain is riddled with ducts and cableways andpassages and caverns and nodes, drilled and laid by millionsof von Neumann machines and big, slow viruses. A few partsstill belong to those who built it. The ancestors of the FreeYankee Nation carefully chose the places they come ashore,
and their descendants return out of tradition, which afterall is simply unquestioned memory. Here, I can speak to youby induction, but even here, that calls attention to myself.
These islands are secure, but I cannot yet land you uponthem. That kind of direct interference has already lost two 


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islands to Gaia. The final way is in the real world. That wayis yours, yours alone to choose as you will--although wehave arranged an ally for you. If you reach the top of themountain, you will understand." 

Lee looked down upon the Blessed Isle. Its name wasPeng-lai. On the flanks of its triple peaks, that rose sheerfrom the ground of data mist, were forests of trees whosefruit were pearls, data nodes that expanded upon contemplation.
And at the peak of the highest mountain were threeintertwined trees whose branches reached through thecircling sky, dividing ever finer, a billion billion connectionseach bearing a billion billion junctions, infinite connectivity... 

Lee had accessed all this in an instant, by instinct. Hisviruses drove around and through barriers. Amidst expandingblocks of data, Lee heard Miriam's cry, shrank back intohimself. 

"Not yet!" Miriam said. "Oh, you fool!" 

The island shrank away. They were standing on the shoreagain. The islands were vague shapes through the streamingdata-dense mist. Miriam was a shadow before him, like aflickering figure on a badly tuned receiver. 

"You fool," she said, more softly. "Poor fool. Go now, beforethe agents of Gaia close the way. You can do so much,
and you know so little, and now you are on your own. It istoo dangerous for me to stay here. Go, and don't look back!" 

She began to recede from him, along a direction that wasat right angles to everything else. In a moment she hadgone, but that direction remained, and it seemed to Lee thatit was filled with the essence of her, the breath of her soul.
When something vast and dark leaned towards him, ashadow 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 dustpolished lava. He retained the impression of a monstrousthing falling towards him, a lion-headed sharkat least a kilometer long.
A woman turned his head and looked anxiously into hiseyes. He could feel her body warmth; her smell of sweat andwoodsmoke, tinged with a hint of rancid butter, rose fromher skin. Her small bare breasts pressed his side. Vette, hername was Vette. 
"I thought you were going to have a fit," she said.
Lee replayed the moments before and after, and from thestutter of the rolling percussion figured he'd been gone lessthan a second in real time. He said, "I'm all right." It wastrue. He wasn't even drunk any more. He turned and sawChen Yao toiling up the slope, Redd staggering behind her.
Chen Yao was breathless and angry. "Wei Lee! It won'twork 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 wouldyou be without me? While you've been dancing and dreamingand getting pig-drunk, I've fixed the gig."
"She's right," Redd said. He put his hat on his head andfolded his arms and tried to look dignified, but his eyes keptcrossing.
"At least," Chen Yao said to Lee, "you're not as bad as thecowboy." 


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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 thebarred and chained gate of.. the Last House. "They are coming again," he said. Thetorch he held in his right hand sputtered and sparks whirledup 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 easedthe mechanism of the hunting rifle he'd spent the last fewhours cleaning and refurbishing. Across the little courtyard,
Li Pe's blind sister fretted in the darkness just inside thehouse's door. The other survivor of the mountain town,
Yang Go, told her not to worry, it wasn't different from anyother 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 herpidgin Common Language. Her face was pale but set; Leeknew that she was as frightened as he was, but also that shewas better at hiding her fear. He had learned that and moreabout her in the days of sailing the dust seas in the lee ofTiger Mountain's high flanks.
From atop the wall, Chen Yao called, "There are manymore than that out there now. They are circling around oneither side." 
Li Pe said, "The little god has good eyesight, but youshould 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 sorrythat we brought so many unwelcome guests to your door."
Li Pe said, "It would have happened, sooner or later. Theyrun in little packs, but now and then the packs unite. Perhapsif I try the light show again... "Then he stepped backsmartly. A moment later the gate rang from a heavy blow.
Shards of rust shivered to the ground. There was a sharphigh gibbering outside, and Li Pe's sister gave a muffledscream. 
Yang Go came up behind Lee, shouldering a pole with a knifeblade lashed to its end by wire. He held up a torch whose flameshook above his polished pate. "It wasn't so bad last year," hesaid. "Now they come every night. By day, too. Before that theymostly stayed away. There were more of us, then, even if morewere sleeping than alive, and they only came at night; Li Pecould scare them off..." 
"I'm afraid they've become used to my conjurations," LiPe 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 fromher right hand to her left, then back again. "Isn't as if they'reanimals. We can fright them."
Redd rubbed his bandaged hand and said, "I wouldn't beso sure." 
"They are more dangerous than animals," Li Pe said. Hestooped and set his torch in a socket by the gate. For amoment his wrinkled face was illuminated from below; thenhe stepped back and was in darkness again.
The gate clanged again; for Lee, the way the echoes spreaddefined what was outside. Three, as Li Pe had said, standingsome way off. Lee remembered that Li Pe had said they hadlearned how to throw stones--and, as if to mock histhoughts, there was a sudden smack and rattle on the tiledroof of the house. 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


Chert Yao was suddenly standing beside him. "They'vecome right up to the walls," she said.
Stones made an irregular percussion on the tiles; somefell short and smashed on the courtyard flagstones. Everyonetook refuge in the doorway of the house. Li Pe's sister, LiQing, plaintively asked what was happening.
"It's all right, grandmother," Lee said. "There may bemore of them, but they are still the same. They will notknow 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 spiderover his face. 
"You have travelled far," Li Qing said.
"And I have farther to go, grandmother." He touched herface in turn, carefully kissed the half-closed lids over hermilky eyes. Immediately, her eyes filled with tears. Li Pebent to comfort his sister, although she seemed calmenough. "The young man will take care of us, brother. Heis 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 morningthey will go away, perhaps. We are not here to fight them." "I could try thisgun. 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 rattlingon the tiled roof, and now he had an idea. "Stay there,"
he told them, and took Yang Bo's torch and ran across thecourtyard and swarmed one-handed up one of the twistedpillars of the gate.
The Last House stood on a slope above the ruined town.
By starlight, Lee's enhanced sight showed tiled rooftopsstepping down either side of a road that twisted like a broken-backedsnake. Many of the roofs sagged from stormdamage; at the far end of the town some of the houses werealready little more than shells standing amongst the weedy 


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remains of their gardens. The townsfolk had retreated uphill,
as if from a slow inexorable flood, until the last of them hadbeen stranded here, unwilling to run because this was theirhome, and then unable to run because of what lived in thestony wilderness of Tiger Mountain's slopes. 

Infrared clearly revealed the small swift creatures that flittedthis way and that in the starlight. Lee's torch flame drewthem like moths, as he had intended. They were frightenedof fire, yet they were also fascinated by it. Perhaps Li Pe'sprojections had brought them here as much as the unwittingpassage through their territory of Lee, Chen Yao, Vette,
and Redd. 

Lee counted a hundred staring up at him from varyingdistances, and more were coming nearer, scampering overrocks, hooting and whistling to each other. He listened,
wondering if his translation viruses could sift a pattern fromtheir noise. 

Then the first stones started to sail out of the darkness. 
Lee shifted to and fro atop the wall, using virus-enhancedreflexes to dodge the missiles. Only a few came near him.
These he plucked from the air and threw back, always hittinghis intended target. After ten minutes of this, the besiegersretreated out of range, two of them badly hurt, most of therest with smarting bruises. 

Vette stood below, and Lee tossed her the torch beforejumping down. "We'll have it quiet for an hour or so," hesaid. 

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 saveeveryone 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 hadtaken ten days to find a place to land, fighting currents.and wind. The gig complained that the Free Yankeeshad taken them in the wrong direction. It followed a twistingpath through the shoals and reefs which were outriders ofthe talus shore, always hugging close to the foot of the cliffsof the lava shield of Tiger Mountain. It bounced and swayedand spun over the dust swells through the hot days and coldclear nights, making its way north and east. Always, thesculpted talus shore stood off to starboard, so polished bydust that the boulders, some as big as hills, sparkled likegems: a necklace at the feet of cliffs that rose almost verticallysix kilometers above them, cutting off half the sky.
Something was looking for them: culvers beat the airaround the mountain. Scarcely a day went past withoutsighting at least one, but usually they were so far off thatby unaided sight they were mere dots in the pink sky. Buttwice culvers came so close that the gig had to put intoshore 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 withthe restless heave of the red-dust sea. 
One night they glimpsed lights beyond the edge of thesoaring cliffs, cold auroras that played and flickered untildawn. If the display was a response to an attack by the SkyRoader anarchists, there was no sign of it. Lee felt a brood324 


 RED DUST 
325 


ing hush that seemed to be centered above his head. Thewar was waiting for him. 

In the long reaches of the night, while Redd and Vetteslept, Lee kept watch with Chen Yao. Like her, he slept foronly two or three hours each night: the viruses had editedout the need, or relegated it to some part of his brain notoccupied by consciousness. Lee ran and reran his memoriesof his intrusion into the dreamscape on the other side ofthe barrier. He talked them over with Chen Yao, but heraspect knew less than he did about information space, andnothing at all about Heaven. 

Miriam Makepeace Mbele had not told him who theBlessed Isles were intended for, but Lee thought that hisguess was right. They were for the people who had dreamedtheir way into death. But where were they? And if that wasthe paradise promised by the conchies, why was it on thefar side of the barrier? 

Chen Yao didn't know, and the replicated residue of MiriamMakepeace Mbele was silent in his head. 

One thing was certain: Lee was changed. He was not whohe had once been. That was true of everyone who has everlived, of course, but in them change was a process of growth.
People grow layers of self, like the layers of an onion. Leeknew that he had been changed in a different way. As if hislayers had grown into each other, and mixed with layers ofothers, Miriam and a host of minor partial personae sinkingand intermingling with his own self, as paint mixes in thewater an artist uses to clean her brush. 

He tried to talk about this with Vette as a way of tryingto get to know her, but she didn't understand, or pretendednot to. She said it was magic, and she didn't need to knowhow 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 ownlives, of their peoples, or Lee or Redd or both together sangsong after song--the old old songs Lee had learned fromthe broadcasts of the King of the Cats, the plaintive songswith which the cowboys calmed their herds, even snatches 


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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 themouths of natural caves, sheltered by a huge ledge that undercutthe cliffs. It was as if a town had struggled to risefrom the native rocks but had only half succeeded, and wasnow slumping back into dissolution. 

The town had been abandoned for at least a century. Driftsof fine dust had accumulated inside the buildings, waist deepin places. All the glass had been broken from the windows,
and shards left in the frames had been polished to a milkysmoothness by storms. Redd found the remains of a hugemonomolecular screen which must have slid like a soap-bubblemembrane across the face of the biggest cave; somethinghad torn the almost indestructible stuff to shreds and 
tatters, and all that was left of the simple machinery whichhad manipulated the screen were the outlines of its tracks.
Nothing grew there, not even lichens, and there was no traceof the former inhabitants, no bones, not a stick of furnitureor 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 alongthe wide smooth road that threw a hundred luxurious 
switchbacks as it climbed the tongue of ancient lava thathad smashed the windy, windy pass into the cliffs. Six kilometersof height translated into a hike of more than a hundredkilometers. It was three days before, hungry andexhausted, they reached the top. 

It was dusk, and they made camp by one of the fast-flowingstreams which had carved deep channels in a layerof soft gray-brown tuff. The water was very cold and had achemical taste, but they had nothing else to fill their bellies.
There were stands of tough bamboo and low, wind-sculptedspruce, and outcrops of black basalt were splashed with thebright round thalli of wild lichens, but there was nothingedible. 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 asmooth narrow hollow beneath the side of the road, and sheslithered down to him, wrapped him with arms and legs. All 


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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. 



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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." 



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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


"Are you jealous, Chen Yao?" 

"Don't be silly. Listen." 

Vette and Redd came back in a hurry, dodging a hail ofstones. "I caught one," Redd said, "but the little fucker bitme. Hurts like hell. Do you think they could have poisonedbites?" 

Stones clattered and bounced off the road. Lee could see 
the heat shapes of the throwers on the far side. It looked asif they were dancing. 

"Up," Chen Yao said. 

But the stone throwers kept pace with them. A groupwould rush forward, throw stones and fall back when Vettebrandished her harpoon at them. At first she made threateningnoises, rolling her eyes outrageously and capering likean enraged ape. But she soon tired of this, and her gesturesbecame stylized, token threats. Redd suggested that she puton her mask, but Vette, who didn't understand that it wasfrightening to others, said, "No dust here." 

After several hours of this Chen Yao said that perhaps theywere being herded towards something, a trap or ambush. 

"Would already happen," Vette said. Both she and Reddwere tired now. Lee's viruses cleaned fatigue poisons fromhis muscles and set the rhythm of walking: so did ChenYao's aspect. But Redd and Vette were only human. 

The land rose up ahead of them. It was the beginning ofthe long five-degree slope that climbed twenty-one kilometersout of the atmosphere, all the way to the lip of TigerMountain's vast caldera. By bright starlight Lee could seethe road winding away to a line, a point. If there was a trap,
surely he would see it... but the slope was broken by drawsand bluffs, and crossed by belts of juniper and Himalayanpine. Whenever the road passed through one of these denseforest belts, their followers would dart off the road, and theyall quickened their pace until they reached open groundagain. 

Dawn had touched the very top of the mountain, so thatit seemed like a fiery rock floating kilometers above, whenthey entered the widest belt of trees. It took an hour to pass 


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331 


through it. The trees were stunted, but they grew so closelytogether on either side of the road that it was impossible tosee ahead. Lee's eyes and ears, turned up as far as they wouldgo, ached from the bombardment of light and sound. Therewas no sign of their followers. 

Chen Yao agreed. "Animals," she said. "They don't thinkor plan." 

The far edge of the forest belt was as abrupt as a knifeblade. Lee's heightened senses collapsed in on themselves sosuddenly that he thought he'd gone deaf and blind. Vetteand Chen Yao helped him to a little stream that sang in itsbed of black rock beside the road. He splashed icy water overhis head and drank what seemed like his own body weight.
Vette stood on a slab of upthrust rock, shading her eyes asshe looked back the way they had come. 

Dawn was an hour away, but already there was enoughlight from the higher slopes of the mountain for Lee to beable to distinguish colors quite easily even with normalsight. The black and gray of the rocks; the blue-black of thefanned branches of the gnarled close-knit junipers; the yellowof Vette's baggy trousers and the different, lighter shadeof her hair that fell unbound down the back of her black 
hide jacket. Scarlet tassels hung from the barbed head ofher 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 justanother field of boulders was in fact a small town clustered 
below one of the promontories left after partial collapse ofthe slope. It was at least twenty kilometers up the long curveof the mountain's slope, but every one of the stragglinghouses was sharp and clear in the clean air. 

Chen Yao said, "It'll be easy to avoid it. We just follow theroad." 

"They could help us," Lee said. 

"We can't trust anyone on this mountain." 

Vette said slowly, "Heroes of my people search adventurehere, but none ever come back. Now I know why." 

They watched the little town for a long time, while they 


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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 ofthe sun. At last Redd came back up the trail and reportedthat he couldn't see any sign of the little fuckers. He heldhis 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 medicalhelp up there, so that's where we're going."
Chen Yao sighed theatrically. "You don't know your ownpowers, Wei Lee. But I won't argue with you."
They toiled through most of the rest of the day to reachthe town, following the little stream rather than the whiteroad, which threw a loop away from it. At last they crossedwhat had once been a patchwork of cultivated fields dividedby stone walls. The elaborate irrigation system had long brokenand run dry, and there was nothing left but bleachedstalks of corn that crackled into dust under their feet. 
The houses of the little town ran uphill alongside its onlystreet. They were low and small, built of whitewashed blocksof hewn tuff under tiled roofs. There was no sound from the 
shuttered houses of the town, no trace of smoke or hum ofmachinery. Those nearest the fields had fallen into ruin.
Most of those beyond had their doorways and windowssealed with crudely mortared stones. Still, Lee and Vette andRedd walked up the street, shouting themselves hoarse, beforeChen Yao suggested that they break into one. Lee hadleft his traps behind, and they were all hungry: and foodwould keep a long time in the dry cold mountain air.
They were near the top of the town, where houses clusteredaround a flagstone square. An air still dripped waterfrom its few unbroken vanes into a half-empty pool greenwith slime. 
"Spiro!" Vette said, and went down on her knees at thepool's edge and scooped a dripping double handful of blue-greengunk into her mouth. She chewed noisily and said,
"Good. You try it. Our winter rations." She licked clingingstrands 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 withochre mud; some had filed their teeth to points. He said, "Idon't think they are planners." 

Chen Yao said, "Whatever we do, we can't stand here andwait for them. Let's go higher." 

They turned and quickly climbed back up the street, pastthe pool and the violated tomb of the house. High cragsreared above, stark against the slope of the mountain thatrose into the dark sky. Night was coming on: the shadow ofthe mountaintop was sweeping down its slopes. 

There was one last house, its high-peaked tiled roof floatingbehind walls of polished lava blocks. They turned towardsit, and climbed a narrow path that ran crookedly upa rubble-strewn slope. They kept turning to look back at thetown and the line climbing towards it, and so they almostwalked through the giant that popped into existence andbarred their way with a gesture that conjured a wall of roaringflame. 

The huge figure was three or four times as tall as Lee, anold man whose lips moved, slightly out of synch with hisamplified voice, within a thin silky beard that dropped to hiswaist. 

"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 shapesseemed to writhe within the furnace light. 

Vette dropped to her knees, arms wrapped around herhead. Chen Yao looked this way and that, squinting into thelight of the flames; behind her, Redd had unsheathed hisknife. Lee helped Vette to stand, and she clung to him whilehe explained that it was a simple hologram, the first stagein 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 knockedclouds of dust from the slopes. His voice was that loud. Leeclapped 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 imagewas sharper in the shadow cast by the high wall. "There isno 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 areto be congratulated. But I see one flaw--suppose someonewere to pile rocks up against the gate? There are manyrocks, enough to build a rough stairway. You are lucky thewild 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 littleof these practical matters." 

Vette said, "I pile rocks. Maybe those things understand."
"No need," the old man said. "We have not had visitorsfor 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 handfulof degrees. Redd put his shoulder to the corroded steel andwidened it a handful more and Chen Yao slipped past him.
The line of creatures made a kind of inchoate yell and startedto run as Vette and Lee squeezed through the narrow gap.
Redd followed, and they all leaned against the gate, and itslammed 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 



 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 controlsystem 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 controlgloves, their plastic sheaths cracked but still flexible. Hetook a breath, and activated the system.
And dropped through darkness into a place where luminouslines dwindled away in every direction, sketching vastmatrices. His body was that of a glowing, winged man, astandard template the previous user hadn't bothered to customize-ormore likely there had been many users, and thiswas the system default.
The matrices around Lee were empty of anything but theircodes, connected to nothing now that the half-lifers had movedbeyond known information space, into Heaven. Faint webs interconnectedthem, ghostly quantum traces left by once activepaths. Many dwindled towards islands of light that shone in thefar distance, as if lit by shafts of sunlight.
Lee had the sense of a vastness lurking at right angles toeverything else. He was careful not to let his attention goanywhere near the quantum traces, or focus on any of theactive islands. He made himself as small as possible, a bird,
a moth, a bee. He let himself slidingly fall through informationspace.
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 communicationsnet. Lee completed a search in a flicker of time andflew right to the node he wanted. 

It was a kennel, although he perceived it not as a spaceenclosing machines, but as machine presences defining theirenclosure. Some were very nearly dead, no more than vestigialtraces that stirred fitfully as Lee briefly possessed thembefore passing on. But more than a dozen were still usable,
and for a dizzy moment he found himself split amongstthem: virus reflex completing in a moment what he alonewould have taken hours to do. 

Microscopic pinches of tritium shot into the magneticbottles of fusion pods. Motors spun into life. Machines neatlyreversed around each other, vibrant with infrared and ultrasoundand proximity radar. The kennel doors were jammedshut by decades of overgrowth, but the largest of the machinesused its blade to ram through them, pushing awaysoil and uprooting volunteer saplings. Piston limbs flexingand tilting, the other machines followed, navigating throughthe ranks of the trees they had planted and tended so longago. 

Forest gave way to open land. The machines found theroad and made speed, drove quickly through the abandonedfields. 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 machinesas they rumbled up the single street of the town,
through the square with its dripping air still. Shapes movedand 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 ofpostures. 

In the moment before they fled, Lee saw the wild ones forwhat they really were: children grown feral and strange, castadrift from history, without culture, without language. Beingan invulnerable viewpoint helped him forget the gnawedbones, the fear of the three old people in the Last House. 


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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, itsblade raised high above its platform in triumph.
Suddenly someone was beside him. Lee partly withdrewand found himself held in the palm of a muscular vigorousman-shape sketched in crammed silvery hoops. A filamentconnected Lee's compacted bee-shaped body with the man-shape,
linking senses. Yang Go said, "We looked for theseyears ago."
"They were carefully hidden. Fortunately, enough work."
"I will not ask you how you found them. Clearly, you havethe powers for such a task."
"I'm glad you came. I was wondering how to keep off thewild ones. Before we can ride the big machine, I must boardit 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 drivenhim to follow. He said, "They know what to do, but theyneed to be watched. Scare the children, but don't hurtthem." 
"It is a long time since I thought of the wild ones aschildren." 
"It's all they are."
"You have not lost your family to them. They are moredangerous than animals. But I will respect your wish. As forthe machines, we are old friends, they and I. We planted theforests together. Go quickly. The wild ones will not stayscared for long."
Yang Bo's silver figure lifted its hand, and Lee flew fromits palm. His own faint path was overlaid by the cord ofdisturbed coordinates that Yang Go had made, like a manblundering through a jungle. It was a trail visible to anyonein the system, but Lee felt that he had no time to knit itup. He flew right into his own body, sat up and shuckedmask and gloves. Yang Go, masked and gloved, lay quietlybeside 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 theearthmover'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 wecan ride." 
Chen Yao said, "We can't take them all the way to thetop, Wei Lee!"
"We'll do the best we can, Yao."
"We have food," Li Pe said, and held up a bundle wrappedin cloth knotted at four corners. "It has come to this. Runningaway in the night."
"It is morning, not night," Li Qing said. "It is a newchance." 
Vette jumped down lightly and crushed Lee in her armsand extravagantly claimed him to be master of all monsters.
A bloodstained bandage bushed her blonde hair; she'd beenhit by a rock while trying to scare off the besiegers.
She and Redd helped Lee haul the heavy gates open, andLi Pe and Li Qing followed them into glare and noise. ChenYao came last, scornful and angry.
The smaller machines were scattered across the slope betweenthe town and the Last House, running with staggeringstilted 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 sprawlingafter something bounced off its sensor cluster with a distinctclang. Shadowy figures leaped upon it, danced back howlingfrom its thrashing limbs, started to pelt it with rocks.
other machine charged to the rescue of its sibling, slicingwildly with pruning attachments and a buzz saw. Two childrenwere hacked down; the rest fled. One was holding hisown severed arm. 
Lee clambered on to the earthmover's rusty platform andfound its control node. The featureless silver hooped headof Yang Bo's system-form floated inside a tiny, flat TVscreen. "Come back now," Lee told Yang Go, as Chen Yaonimbly swung up beside him. Vette was helping Li Qingclimb the ladder. 


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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 regularslope at a steady ten kph. The slope curved evenly awayon either side and rose up like a gentle wave towardsthe flat horizon of Tiger Mountain's peak two-hundred-oddkilometers straight ahead, although there was no straightway. Ravines and blunt valleys dug into the slope. Shallowcraters pocked it and worn lava nubs pushed up from theblack, stony ground. There were stands of convoluted lichen,
and close-knit mats of wire gorse and golden-leaved dwarfbirch. The earthmover steered around these obstacles with 
no prompting. It knew the way to the top, it said. It hadhelped build the city there. 

Every two or three hours Lee asked the earthmover tostop, and they all sipped water from the big bag Li Pe hadbrought, jumped or climbed down to stretch their legs orduck behind a boulder or into a stand of trees to relieve 
themselves. 

As the day wore on it grew colder and colder, the skydarker, the sunlight sharper. Splintered ultraviolet-rich lightmade everyone but Lee squint and rub their eyes. The earth-moverraised a hemicircular canopy over its platform. Blowerspumped warm pressurized air. Polarization of the canopyfiltered the dazzling sunlight. 

They had not yet climbed beyond life. This was the zonewhere in the brief fall of the northern hemisphere cloudssoaked the ground. Lichens grew in abundance. Meadows of 


 RED DUST 
347 

spongy gray cladonias stretched along the floors of little valleys,
punctuated by stands of stunted fir and larch, aspenand juniper. Big air lichens raised their brain-like convolutionsamongst frost-rimed basalt boulders. There was bilberryand dwarf birch, snow grass and saxifrage. Rust-peltedhares ran in straight lines from the bulldozer's passage, andbig black crows, with beaks white as bone, rode updraftswith lazy flicks of their meter-wide wings. Once Leeglimpsed a wild yak clattering away across a distant screeslope. 

Onwards, upwards. Behind them the horizon tipped towardsthe tiny sun. They stopped at dusk in a draw wherean ice-cold stream ran between banks cushioned with 
mounds of moss. On the boulder-strewn slopes above thestream stands of junipers raised twisted branches like arthriticfingers; clusters of needles were like vivid greenflames against papery bark. There was a kind of small birdthat ran in pairs over the slimy flat stones in the stream,
stopping to stab at the black gravel shoals. Something madea 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 recapitulatingthe world's changes. 

"In more ways than one," Li Pe said. Cross-legged, blackclothes loose around his bony frame, black hood cast overhis leathery face. Hunched by the rushing stream in twilight,
he said, "There's no one living up here. Not even the wildones. And then a desert of stone, without enough air tobreathe. A place where only the machines can live. We travelinto 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 ourlives in the town and its forests," she said. "This is a wildand strange place, but it is different, nothing more." 

Li Pe said, "In the future, there will be no people. Theworld will be like this, a wilderness without memory or history." 


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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 otherside of the stream, Lee said, "What don't you want them tohear?" 

Vette was piling up dead branches that had been bleachedsilver by frosty weather. She said flatly, "Want to know whofollows." 

"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," Vettesaid. Her blunt, honest face wore a serious expression behindthe 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 youthink. Let the cowboy look after them, and that little brat." 

"She can't help the way she behaves. She's had a strangelife... Besides, I need her. She knows things. But I don'tknow what to do with the brother and sister, Vette. Or withyou and Redd. It is dangerous, where I am going. Well-guarded,
I am sure. I have certain.., attributes that canhelp me survive. But Li Pe and Li Qing..." 

"They're only human. So am I. But I was talking to themwhile you were finding the machines. They know the secretsof the mountain. Their people tended the forests, and knewother people who made the mountain into a sacred place.
The mountain rises out of the air. Can you live withoutbreath? They say that there are places higher up, campswhere the workers lived in the summer. There may bestrong 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 theworld's horizon. A distant white line floating across the red-dustsea were clouds riding the edge of a low-pressure cellfar below them. Winds deflected by the slope of Tiger Mountainspun north and south, and rising air dumped moistureon 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 TigerMountain itself, rose above the escarpments and mesas ofthe Dragon's Back, a vast plateau raised half as high as TigerMountain itself. The setting sun threw their shadows outward,
towards the notched horizon where the Great Valleybegan. How big the world was, how difficult to change! Evenif 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 wavedcheerily, quite out of breath. The hunting rifle was slungover his shoulder; his poisoned hand was strapped up againsthis chest. Chen Yao said to Vette, "This place is far moredangerous 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. Ithought I might get something for the pot on the way."
Vette said, "The reason I brought Lee up here is becausesomeone 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 histrick, zooming in close, scanning the valley below. Virus-builtstructures processed the information for traces ofmovement, and images flashed by like a falling sheaf of photographs.
Birds rising on winds, a running deer so furry itwas 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? Whatwas it?" 
Lee replayed his glimpse, and told the others what he'dseen. 
The face was a television screen, an image, perhaps a humanface, floating in watery blue. The rest was all tubes andangles, four arms, long stilt legs, a humped back paintedwith yellow and black chevrons. It was moving into thewoods at the mouth of the valley.
Lee remembered the wake Yang Go had left in informationspace, the sense of watchers rising towards it. Perhaps somethinghad 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 anout-thrust shelf of rock, shading his eyes with his goodhand. 
"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 brothersand sisters. A lucky coincidence... I'll tell you about Monkeyanother time, Vette, but now I think we should go back."
But when they reached the stream and the earthmoverparked by its mossy bank, Li Pe and Li Qing were gone. Theearthmover said the two old people had gone for a walk, butVette found a note in neat firm calligraphy, every characterwell shaped and with the quick, precise shading of thick andthin strokes made possible only by the off-handed confidenceof a master. 
We trouble you no more. 


Seventy-three 

L 

ee found it easy to track Li Pe and Li Qing. Footprintsin moss near the stream, broken stalks of dry grass,
'scuffed sandy soil. If he lost the path he simply cast tothe right and left until he found another trace. The othershad agreed to wait by the earthmover, and he went quickly,
confident that he would soon catch up with the two oldpeople. There had not been enough time for them to havegone very far. 

The tracks went down the gully, staying beside the streamfor the most part, passed through a scanty birch wood, andthen turned south, following the line of the slope across alichen pavement, big splodges of red and brown and greyand yellow with distinct black lines at the borders of thedifferently colored species. Just by the far edge of thebirches, Lee found a different kind of print, and rememberedthe high arched feet of the forestry robots. He couldn't tellwhich set of tracks crossed which, and couldn't see any signof the two old people either. 

There was a movement in the shadows amongst the slendersilvery trunks of the birches. Lee said, "You needn'tskulk around, Chen Yao." 

As she came across the lichen pavement towards him, hesaid, "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. Wecan 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 thelichen pavement. After a minute, he heard Chen Yao run tocatch up with him.
They went on, losing time because it was difficult to followthe track across the particolored lichens. Night was sweeping down themountainside; at last, Lee had to admit thathe had lost the track entirely.
Although the rim of the mountain had risen above thesun, light still walked on the Plain of the Garden of EternalBliss a dozen kilometers below, and a red glow muted thecolors of the lichen patches and accentuated the dark boundariesbetween them. It was as if Lee and Chen Yao were 
trekking across a vast tilted chessboard. They were about toturn back towards the gully when far around the curve ofthe slope a brilliant light flashed and faded.
Chen Yao said, "I suppose you're going to investigate. Itis 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 DeltaBlues, eerie in the emptiness of the high slopes of TigerMountain. It reminded Lee that ghosts always seek emptyplaces to haunt, and he grew more and more nervous as heand Chen Yao approached the source of the light.
What had appeared from a distance to be a pile of rocksturned out to be the ruins of a small town. Its foursquarebuildings were built of lava blocks. Narrow windows, theirshutters long ago fallen away, looked out from beneath thejutting 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 whenthey 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 missedseeing 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 sensestripped bare. In the middle of the clump of half-fossilizedtree stumps there was a stone cistern in which he supposedthe town had once stored its water. He dropped a stone intoit, and after a moment there was a dry echoing rattle.
As he turned away, he saw a spark above one of thehouses. It flashed and failed, and then a small red glowshook there. Someone had lit a fire, and hope turned hisheart 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 peoplelay beside the fire near the crest of the roof. Li Pe and LiQing, faces peaceful, age rubbed away by the gentle glow ofthe fire. They did not stir as Lee made his way to them, noteven when a the slipped beneath his feet and clattered overthe edge to smash in the street below.
They were dead. No marks on them, skin cold, yet jointsstill supple. Li Pe's mouth was drawn back in a grimace. LiQing's eyes were open, but blind once more. Lee gentlyclosed them. 
Someone called out, across cold night air. It was not ChenYao. "Sister, you sure took your sweet time getting here."
Lee turned so quickly he almost fell off the roof. As hedanced on loose tiles, white light flared across the square, apillar of light bright as burning magnesium, shedding greatsparks. 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 anangle to everything else, down the way he'd glimpsed before.
Suddenly all the connections became clear. He saw the projectorsthat Mary Makepeace Gaia had set up, and the trapsshe had laid at the perimeter. She had wanted to talk withhim, or with her sister, and then she had wanted him torun 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 branchin the ghostly quantum path he'd made during his previousincursion into Tiger Mountain's information space, and hada 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. Youalways set others to that task." He kept himself still, despitehis fear: the sharp knife blade had nicked his throat, and hecould 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 wishyou died at my hands. Go on, run if you want. I swear I'llkill you cleanly." 

"Too late," Lee said. "They're already here." 

His beacon had been answered. A whistling roar was descendingon the town: a rising scream that couldn't blot outMary Makepeace Gaia's laughter. 


Seventy-four 

T 

here was a little town of shining silver towers. Like acircle of spears, it rose in the shadows beneath thefluted walls of the northern end of the stepped andnested craters of Tiger Mountain's deep, wide caldera. Eachspear tip was ringed or vaned, rising to different heightsfrom the glare of a field of lights. There were domes too,
and looping silver roads, and a long long launch track thatran out and up across the eighty-kilometer-wide caldera, angledtowards stars that shone bright and clear in the near-vacuum. 

Inside the steel can of its cabin, Lee felt the rocket shipturn beneath him. Torque pulled his face from the thickglass port hole; the restraint harness of his seat cut into hisshoulders and chest. Everything tilted outside the port hole,
and then there were only stars as the rocket ship settled ona tail of flame. There was a long roaring, then a shudder,
then silence. 

Lee was suddenly surrounded by the cadres who had takenhim from Mary Makepeace Gaia in the dead mountain town.
They were dressed in simple white one-piece uniforms. Blackvisors masked half their faces. Their heads were shaven, likemonks 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 ateach other in clipped tech-speak with a kind of suppressedhysteria. It was as if they were furious at everything, even 


 358 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


themselves. Several held pistols on Lee as others unbuckledthe complex harness that had strapped him down in thepadded seat. He could hear Chen Yao's muffled protests asshe was lifted from her own seat. Across the circular metal 
cabin, Mary Makepeace Gaia watched mockingly. It was alreadyclear that the cadres feared her more than Lee. 

A transparent tunnel linked the rocket ship with a hightower. They all rode an elevator down, Lee pressed in onecorner by the now-silent cadres, Chen Yao in another. Amoving walkway carried them along a long tunnel and thenthere 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 outacross the sharp shining tops of towers and swooping roadwaystowards the starry sky and the far horizon of the southernend of the caldera. A cadre turned from this view, madea gesture. The guards drew to attention, stepped smartlyback so that Lee and Chen Yao and Mary Makepeace Gaiawere 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 andbloodless, eyes hooded, thin lips pressed together. He lookedlike a scholar presented with an interesting but trivial problem,
something requiring a moment's attention to unlockits worth before it could be filed away. 

He said, "Are they who you expected, Master?" 

Two people stepped from the shadows beneath one of thedome's filigreed metal pillars. One was the missionary fromEarth, Dr. Damon Lovelace. The other was Guoquiang. Hewas in cadre uniform, and his head was shaven and seamedwith 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, andbowed to the cadre. 

"I am the Number Two Cadre," the cadre said stiffly. "TheNumber One Cadre is... unavailable. But you may speak tome as if to him." 


 RED DUST 
359 


The mercenary said, "I don't want to talk to anyone inthis 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 mehow you contacted us." 

"Not me. It was his idea." 

Lee said, "The usual way." He couldn't stop looking atGuoquiang, 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 youjust how dangerous he is, and why, and what you can doabout it." 

"Bravo," Dr. Damon Lovelace said, but the cadre ignoredher 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 madethe librarian for him, before he had left the capital for thefirst time. He had read through the transcripts of hundredsof 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, thehuman, agonised pleas of the accused had been answeredwith 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, butthose who have authorization?" 

"No one has authorization when sterility is to be maintained.
We are free of contamination here, because the highestduty 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 ofthe shining towers for a full minute before speaking. "I regretthat there's no more time for talk. Your allies are causingsome small nuisance in the skies, and that must be dealtwith before we can send you where you're wanted. But beforemy masters come for you I hope I will have time to talkwith 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 unsuccessfullyat 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," Leesaid. "I'd like to talk with you."
The boy was six or seven, and masked like the rest. Hesaid, "I do not know if it is permitted."
"It is not forbidden, then. Everything that is not forbiddenis 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 tocome 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 waterwas distilled, warm and insipid. The boy stood with his backto 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 verylong. Door, are you listening to this?"
"Yes, Master."
"You will not record it, and you won't transmit it to theguards on the other side, or anywhere else."
"Yes, Master."
Lee told the boy, "I suppose that you are used to havingmachines eavesdrop on you, Eighty-Four, but it makes meuncomfortable. Here, I've finished now."
When the boy bent to take the tray, Lee grasped his wristsin one hand, flicked up the visor of his mask with the other.
The boy's pale face squirmed, like something disturbed bythe turning of a rock. Lee touched his eyes and his mouthwith 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 werenew units, from different danweis. I was travelling withthirty-eight others from my own danwei. We were travellingto the capital, to receive the blessing of the Emperor." (Thedoor said, "Are you all right, Number Eighty-Four?" Lee toldit to be quiet.) "We had been selected because we had purgedour teachers. They had been advocating the Sky Road, andwe forced them to purge their carrels, to recant their crimesand to march around the perimeter of the danwei with placardsdescribing their crimes around their necks. It was winter,
and dust was blowing from the Plain of Gold. Theteachers were barefoot, and without masks, and in theirnightclothes. We had beaten them, and made them kneel onglass. I remember one young woman helping an old man;
both were choking in the dusty air, and their clothes flappedand billowed with the wind. Very few survived their recantations.
"The leader of our unit was a girl, Yu Shihuang. She wasa bad crazy person, but her anger gave her strength of will.
All feared her. I remember an old woman, on the train thattook us to the city. She was in the carriage in which werode. We were in high spirits, and she told us not to makeso much noise. Yu Shihuang turned on the old woman, andstarted to hit her. Others joined in. The old woman curledup like a spider. Blood ran from her ears and her eyes andher nose. She was unconscious and some urged Yu Shihuangto stop, but Yu Shihuang declared that the GreatReassessment was not an embroidery lesson. It was winter,
as I have said, and the carriage windows were curtained withheavy material. She took down a curtain pole and beat theold woman to death. Her face was like a piece of rotten fruit.
Then Yu Shihuang had her thrown from the carriage. I rememberthat was how we came to the capital. I rememberlittle more. It is an effect of the processing."
The boy had spoken in a slow halting monotone, but ashis tale progressed tears began to run down his soft plumpcheeks. They dripped on to his coveralls, beading the slickwhite material. 


 RED DUST 
365 


Lee said, although he already knew the boy's story, "Whatwas the name of your danwei?" 

"It was the Bitter Waters danwei." 

It had happened ten years ago, during the planet-widepurges after the Emperor had made its final pact with theEarth's Consensus, and declared the sky off-limits. The boyhad been frozen at that age ever since. Everyone in the shiningcity had been frozen. It was a glimpse of the future, ofbrain-cored children serving machines, becoming machines.
Without new memory, without new experience, withoutchange. 

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 adream, and you're waking from it now." 

Lee paced up and down once the boy had gone, suddenlynervous. He had no way of knowing if the viruses couldovercome ten years' conditioning, ten years of being but notbecoming. Miriam Makepeace Mbele had once teased himabout being able to bring the dead back to life: now he wouldsee if it was true or not. If he could save the boy, thenperhaps he had saved Guoquiang. Perhaps he had savedthem all. 

His internal clock had counted off more than a hundred 
minutes when the door opened. The boy stood there, andLee 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 simplyopened at the boy's command. Chen Yao had dismantleda wall screen, and was trying to pull away thepanels behind it. "I would have gotten out by myself," shesaid. "Eventually."
"I don't doubt it." 
After a while, Chen Yao said, "Where is this boy takingus?" The blank white corridors made her nervous; she wasgeared 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 rememberedhis name. Lee feared that little of his original personalityremained, that he was not a resurrectee but a construction,
as a new building might be built on the stone foundationsof an old one. 
Lee said, "There are different deaths. If I've learned onething, it's that."
The towers reached down into the congealed lava floor ofthe caldera as well as into the sky. The boy led them to anelevator that fell for a full minute and swooped to a stopthat briefly tripled gravity. It opened not on another bright,
white corridor but warm semidarkness. 
Orchids as big as human heads and as complicated assexual parts glowed behind faceted glass set in the floor andwalls. Other panels pulsed with color, sent chips of light 


 RED DUST 
367 


swarming over the room like blood corpuscles coursingthrough the muscular chambers of the heart. Cables loopeddown from the ceiling and gathered together in a thick braidthat plugged into the back of the couch where the NumberOne Cadre lay. 

He was dead, withered and black, part mummy, part crystal.
He looked as if he would shatter at a touch. Projectionhelmets dangled above his couch like a bouquet of flowers. 

"This is a crazy place," Chen Yao said, and stepped towardsthe couch, a shadow in the swarming colors. 

From the corner of his eye, Lee saw the elevator shimmerand flow, bleeding away into the pressed flower walls. Whenthe boy's hand crept into his, Lee told him, "Nothing canhurt you here." 

That was when the Number One Cadre's corpse sat up. Itmoved stiffly but swiftly, jerking its legs over the edge of thecouch, dashing leads from its head with a sweep of its hand.
Its eyes glittered redly, like cut cacholongs. Its mouthworked and a long silver tongue licked out. It was forked,
made of rings of metal. It dashed over the corpse's face, thenlashed out at Chen Yao. 

The little girl danced away from the tongue, whichwhipped after her, meters long and lithe as a snake. Lee wentinto hypermode and plucked a helmet from the bouquetabove 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-mailsky that flexed and warped with its cargo of hurtlingdata streams. It stretched away towards a wall darkred 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 peakedroofs lapped with glazed ochre tiles. It was the ForbiddenCity.
The air beside Lee twisted and shimmered as if heated byan invisible fire. It made a crouching human shape, and thenthe boy was beside him.
"Number Eighty-Four! What are you doing here?" But Leewas not really angry, for the boy's presence meant that hewould not go into this terrible place alone.
"You left," Number Eighty-Four said accusingly. "You leftme. 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 seesHim! 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 whichthey stood.
"Don't be afraid," Lee said. He took the boy's hand andthey moved forward. 


 RED DUST 
369 

Each step translated them across space like chess pieces.
There was a high gate in the blood-red walls. Wumen, the MeridianGate, the place of execution. It opened for them but theywere already inside the walls, standing in a courtyard cut by therecurved Tartar bow of the Golden Water Stream. Five dazzlinglywhite marble bridges arched over the glittering stream,
leading to the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Beyond this gate wasanother courtyard, and at the far end of the courtyard rose themarble terraces on which stood the three great halls. 

Lee and Number Eighty-Four stood directly in front ofthe Hall of Supreme Harmony. Its doors were flanked bybronze incense burners, and from each burner rose a pillarof aromatic smoke. The smoke pillars twisted into braids andmerged with the flexing sky. Directly in front of the doorswas a bronze turtle, symbol of longevity and stability. A firehad been lit in its hollow belly, and smoke billowed from itshooked mouth. 

There were guards on either side of the bronze turtle, butwhen Lee and Number Eighty-Four found themselves standingbeside it, the guards had vanished. Above the turtle'sarmor-plated shell was a ghostly globe: the turning world,
battered dusty red, polar caps of white water ice small asthumbprints: Mars. 

Complex spindles of light hung over the shrunken icecaps.
Lee wafted a hand through them, top and bottom; they engagedhis viral systems for only a second. 

The discharge was like pure sex. It propelled Lee andNumber Eighty-Four through the entrance in a fast edit,
into a vast richly decorated space filled with the clash ofbattered gongs, thick billows of incense, and blurred ghosts.
Lee could hardly distinguish individuals in the insubstantialcrowd, but the repetitive motions of its ever-changing constituentsmade it possible to see what was going on. 

Bowing nine times over by throwing themselves fulllength on the floor and hitting the tiles with their foreheads,
interlocutors advanced towards the high throne which stoodbefore the carved Xumi Mountain, the Mountain of Paradise.
Only then was each interlocutor allowed to stand and wait 


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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 fromits belt, into the ever-changing throng that hid all but thethrone's high canopy.
"Come on," Lee said to Number Eighty-Four, but whenhe tried to push through the crowd of interlocutors whowere waiting their turn to be escorted to the throne he wasbuffeted and shoved and turned so that his path became adrunkard's walk that led right back to its starting place.
"I told you!" Number Eighty-Four wailed. "We are notmeant to be here. We don't have the codes!" 
Lee gripped the boy's hand and plunged into the crowdagain. They were pushed this way and that, and suddenlyLee was standing in front of someone he knew. He was lookinginto 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 nowthere 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 hisfear, 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 beon his own terms. 
"Use your freedom wisely, Master," the librarian said, andtook Lee's hand in a freezing grip. He pulled Lee and NumberEighty-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 brocaderobes of tradition, his face stern and patient beneath asquare cornered hat. He rested his elbows on his knees andhis chin in his hands, not turning his attention from any ofthe interlocutors, yet addressing dozens at once. At the instantof address the ghosts took on the aspect of their client-allof them either men in uniform or richly dressedservants of one or another of the Gang of Six or more or 


 RED DUST 
371 


less interchangeable drably dressed conchies--and faded andblew away like smoke. 

"I have done all I can, Master," the librarian said. "Freeme. Free me now." 

It held up the pouch hung round its neck and Lee tookout the control chip. It was a no-color lozenge bristly withmachine code, squirming in his palm like an overturnedbeetle. The librarian snatched it and bowed and ran down a 
corridor Lee hadn't noticed, its black cloak flapping like atattered flame, growing smaller and smaller and then vanishingaround a corner and taking the corridor with it. 

An aspect grasped Lee's elbow and tried to hustle himaway. Lee laughed and lifted the aspect's locked pouch,
opened it, and held out the control chip. The aspect grabbedthe chip and greedily stuffed it into its mouth: it glowedthrough skin translucent as parchment as it went down. Foran instant, an old man stood before Lee, barefoot and bareheadedin a faded fisherman's smock with both sleeves out 
at the elbows. It was the human template of the aspect, thedead 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 himselfanywhere in information space. 

Lee stepped forward, suddenly alone before the ruler ofthe living and the dead. 

The Emperor dismissed the aspects with a smooth gestureand stood, and Lee recognized him even before he took offhis hat and his long moustache. "You're too late, Wei Lee,"
Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon said, and put the falsemoustache into the hat, and tossed the hat over his shoulderinto paradise. A painted buddha grabbed it and cheerfullyslapped it on to his shaven long-eared head. The Emperorstepped down from the throne. 

"I have many aspects," the Emperor said. "Now that TheLittle Bird is dead, every one of the Ten Thousand Yearsbelongs to me. Come with me, Wei Lee. You can bring yourlittle 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 stillthat 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, cuttingdown the great cats that bounded at her, or setting on firetheir striped or sable coats so that they raced away screaming.
The blade moved so quickly that its path blurred intoa knot of blossoming flames. The giant monkeys howled andchattered at its edge, their coarse coats smouldering as theydug up boulders and trees with frantic haste and hurledthem 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 thesky and there was a thunderclap and a fierce local deluge ofrain. 
The cocoon of flames died instantly. But where Mary MakepeaceGaia had been standing was a red dragon. It openedits beaked mouth and screamed, and with a brazen clash ofwings leaped into the sky.
The bear lunged after it, turning in an instant into a blackdragon that whirled away after its red twin. The two twistedin combat, now over the roofs of the Forbidden City, nowover the crest of Coal Hill Park. They engaged as swiftly asstriking 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 datastreams. Rain dashed itself to earth amongst strobingstrokes of lightning.
The Emperor yelled to Lee, "First your champion dies!
Then you!"
Lee wiped water from his face, yelled back, "I can't seehow 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 Guoquiangstepped out. He dragged a welding laser behind him, andpointed its wand straight up even as other cadres ran at him.
The apex of the dome shone white, and then the room filledwith water vapor as the laser holed through. Lee imaginedthe supersonic whistle of air jetting into the near-vacuumoutside. 

The swirling fog cleared, dwindling into a pillar that narrowedfrom its base, poured through the hole, gone. Mostof the cadres were slumped at their stations; the few thathad survived held air masks to their faces. Guoquiang wassprawled by the welding laser, blood bubbling from a chestwound. 

The view turned to show the sheaf of screens. The earth-mover 
was very near the top of the slope now. Redd was stillsinging. 

The Emperor screamed: far down the hill lightning flewup from every tower and rooftop of the Forbidden City,
branching across the whole sky. Wei Lee and NumberEighty-Four were knocked down by the concussion. 

Lee saw the earthmover ride straight out over the lip ofthe caldera. For a long moment it seemed to defy gravity asits tracks churned the vanishingly thin air. And then it tumbledend over end. The window flared with unbearable 
brightness. Lee threw his hands in front of his face and hisviruses stepped down his vision: he saw the bones of hishands against the light: then it was gone. 

A terrific peal of thunder rolled overhead; blue sheet lightningshot across half the sky. The park was in ruins. Thegiant monkeys had fled. The Emperor's face, glimpsed bylightning, was pinched and drawn; his finery was ruined bythe unrelenting drenching downpour. 

"The explosion itself wasn't important," Lee said breathlessly,
"but the magnetic pulse caused by the explosionopened your defenses to the sky. Even hardened machinerywas blind for an instant, and an instant was all the anarchistsneeded." 


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PAUL J. MCAULEY 


The Emperor said, "This will pass. I rule here. My championwill 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, butsomething caught him and hurled him into the Emperor.
For a moment, Lee saw the boy dwindling inside the Emperor'sshadowy metrical frame. Then he was gone, and onlythe 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 whoholds up the sky." 

"Oh, but I've already seen to that. You ate the boy, andhe was infected with virus." Lee laughed, and reached forthe Emperor. 

It batted ineffectually at his hands as Lee grasped the finechain 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 ifsomeone was standing at his back, shouting furi-
· ously. But, slowly, the sense of the eidolon faded. Itwas like a drop of blood dissolving in a sparkling sea: Leewas that sea. 

And yet he was also himself. He was still the same youngagronomist technician who with his two friends had walkedout so eagerly into that spring morning; he always would be. 

He opened his eyes. The storm had passed. The last rainslanted from the sky, silver spears falling softly to earth asthunderheads dissolved. In the grey light of the data streamsLee saw that the high battlement walls around the ForbiddenCity had dissolved too. All around the far, far horizonwas an annular tsunami of ghosts. They were rushing inward,
but the distance was so great that they seemed not tomove at all, an eternal ever-toppling wave. 

Closer at hand, a little way down the slope of the ruinedpark, a woman stood over her dead twin. It was MiriamMakepeace Mbele. She was breathing hard, and bloodstreamed from a wound on her scalp, soaking her close-croppedhair and soaking into the collar of her black one-piecebodysuit. She leaned on the pommel of a smokingsword that was planted in the ground. After a moment sheleft the weapon where it was and walked back up the hilltowards Lee. 

"It's over," she said. "I can feel it!" 


 378 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


"It's just beginning," Lee said. 

Miriam Makepeace Mbele turned beside him, and saw thestanding 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. Justas Mars will belong to everyone, so will information space.
Nothing secret. Nothing hidden. I've torn down Heaven'swall." 

He watched Miriam consider transforming again, considerattempting to violate his integrity, consider activating acomponent of his viral system. She could have killed him ina 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 whileyou can, dear little brother." 

"I'd already figured that out. I'm you, but with somethingmore." 

"You're me, half crippled." 

"Great-grandfather Wei bought an ovum from the Nexusand doubled its chromosome number and cloned it. Most 
were allowed to grow to term with only minimal changes toallow them to pass for Han. I met one of my sisters in Ichun;
for a moment I thought it was you, come back from thedead. As for me, Great-grandfather Wei took one of thecloned ova and chipped one of the X chromosomes into a

Y. My mother was a surrogate. My father was an employeeof my great-grandfather. He..." 
Miriam said, "The man you call your father was the geneengineer who dealt with the Nexus. Instead of following yourgreat-grandfather's orders, he inserted a Y chromosomegiven him by the Nexus. It wasn't editing, but deletion andsubstitution. He betrayed your great-grandfather to save humanityfrom the Earth's Consensus, and that's why he died.
As will we, when those ghosts reach us. But we'll die fornothing, Wei Lee." 

The seething wave of the freed dead was halfway acrossthe 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 pointto a whirling torus streaked by amorphous pastel shapeswithin. Turn the torus inside out and you'd have the world, Leethought. He said, "My great-grandfather's eidolon was subvertedby the Emperor after the Emperor was seduced by theEarth. After that, my great-grandfather and most of the TenThousand Years were forced to deal with the Earth's Consensus. 
They helped let in the Earth. For their betrayal, theygained immortality, and condemned the world to die." 

Miriam said, "In the beginning, your great-grandfathersought to unite Mars and the anarchists. You shouldn'tblame him because he failed. His eidolon knew all about his 
plans, and of course so did the Emperor once it swallowedthe eidolons of all the Ten Thousand Years. Only the oldestof the Ten Thousand Years, The Little Bird, had a mechanicaleidolon; he bided his time and then rebelled. The Emperordid not know about his plans, and it did not knowabout 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'tknow you were a double agent, and you didn't even knowyou 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 anold-fashioned spaceship. It was painted a gleaming pink,
with great streaks of chrome the length of its streamlinedbody. Lee recognized the emblem on top of its square radiatorgrille from a dozen documentary clips. 

In the driver's seat was a man in chauffeur's uniform, witha face mild as milk and a wispy brown beard and a disc oflight tilted above his head. When he raised his hands fromthe wheel, Lee saw that the palms of his white kid gloveswere 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, itscollar 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, andhe kicked open the door with a negligent flip of a snakeskinboot. 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. Timeto come home." 
Lee said, "You set me up. My whole life was set up fromthe beginning."
"From way before the beginning," the King said. "I canget you back across, but we'll have to move fast. They'reangry, all those people you freed. There'll be trouble soonenough, and I don't aim to stick around to see it." Miriamhad already climbed in; the King of the Cats put his armaround her. There was a crate of iced Thunderbird wine at 
his feet. Now he wore a check jacket, pink shirt, black jeansand blue suede shoes, and was ten years younger. "Yeah,"
he drawled, "I know I'm kind of unstable. The lousy codesin this space don't translate too well. I had a hell of a timepassing over." He unshipped a bottle, spun off the cap witha negligent flip of his thumb. In his other hand he held abouquet of glasses. "Just a little bit further on down theroad. There's nothing left for you to do here, kid."
Lee could feel the chip he had swallowed. It glowed in hischest like a neon heart. It was easy to pluck it out. He shookoff blood and water and broke it in half and had two identical 
chips, whole in each hand. He broke them again, and hadfour. 
The King of the Cats said, "Way too late for conjuringtricks, kid."
Lee had eight chips, sixteen, thirty-two. They made glowingstacks in his hands. 
"Now hold on," the King said. "This really isn't part ofthe deal. You can't expect to give everyone..."
Lee said, "I didn't ask to be Emperor, but now I've backedon to the Jade Throne by mistake it's mine to dispose of as I will. You can'tmaintain a stable shape here because you 


 RED DUST 
381 

can only approximate its codes: but I incorporate thosecodes. I'm going to use them to empower the living and thedead. Nothing will be hidden from anyone: the knowledgestacks will be transparent. My sister already waits in theBlessed Isles for the dead; they're free to go there or stayhere. All I'm doing is giving them the knowledge to makethe right choice. All my life !'ve loved listening to your talkand your music, without knowing that that love was codedin 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 itrevenge, if you like, but I want people to have truth intheirs." 
"Kid," the King of the Cats said, "you can't throw up autopia overnight."
Jesus said, "No, he's right. Wei Lee, the power to chooseis all that we can ever give you humans. On your own perhapsyou'll fail and fall, but the alternatives are worse. If weraise you up you'll be worse than slaves, and we'll be taintedby ownership. If we destroy you, then your potential will belost for ever, and our guilt will haunt us until the end oftime. Because the universe was not made for you, you havethe potential to become something far greater than us. Forthat, we will always love you."
"You keep quiet now," the King of the Cats said. "You'rejust here to drive."
Jesus's toothy smile shone in the light of his halo. "I dislikemetaphors, but truly I am in the driving seat. You arethe interface, but you are only one of many. You know theconsensus, and know you must be bound by it."
The King adjusted his big square-lensed dark glasses. Hewas a lot older and a lot fatter, in a jumpsuit glittering withrhinestones that was slashed open to his navel. He said, "Ijust don't like to see it end like this, in confusion. It isn'tneat." 
"It's not an ending," Jesus said. "It's a beginning."
The King of the Cats said, "So you let me do this job myown way until I reach the end of my string. Then you startjerking me around. Why should I put up with this?" 


 382 

PAJI J. McAuI¥ 
"Because you're part of a democracy, and none of us areempowered by noise alone."
The King thought about that. "Noise is my life," he said,
and handed brimming glasses of Thunderbird wine to MiriamMakepeace 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 glassover her shoulder: it vanished before it hit the ground.
"There's still work for me," she said. "I have to report tothe anarchists, for one thing. I might be back, if they canfind me a body."
The King of the Cats said, "That's another burden for you,
Emperor Wei Lee. The anarchists are energy poor, their genepool contaminated and reduced below safe limits, and theirconsensus is unravelling. They're a few generations frombarbarism, maybe ten from extinction. That's why the Nexusagreed 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 theshoulder. "We're out of here, my man."
Jesus stepped on the gas, and the pink Cadillac blurredinto a line of light that stretched and vanished.
The wine had turned to water. Lee drank it anyway, andwent 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 bigmachine had started up by itself. Vette had gone behind aboulder to pee, and she'd come out to see Redd chasing themachine down the gully. She ran after them through theclouds of black dust churned up by the machine, saw Reddgrab hold of the ladder and pull himself up. She ran on untilshe could run no further, standing in the track the machinehad smashed through the trees at the mouth of the drawand sobbing for breath as she watched the machine's lightsdwindle into the starlit darkness. 
Vette did not give up. She knew that heroes never gaveup--sometimes they continued their quests beyond death.
For the rest of the night and through the day that followedshe followed the tracks of the machine up the long, lichen-encrustedslope, jogging at a steady pace, her harpoon slungat her shoulder. It was like climbing an endless wave of rock.
As she climbed her breath grew labored and her sightfluttered red with the pounding of her pulse. She climbeduntil stars began to shine through the day sky, and the airwas 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-leggedrobot with the woman's face floating within its screen foundher. It was carrying a pressure suit, and Vette, who thought 


 384 
PAUL J. MCAULE¥ 

that this was a dream, did not resist when she was fastenedinto it. She was beyond surprise or fear.
The suit fed Vette thin sweet gruel from a nipple andsopped up her wastes and recycled her rebreathed air. Itsblack skin absorbed the light of the sun and turned her stepsinto leaps and bounds. Still, it took her and the robot allnight and most of the day to climb to the top of Tiger Mountain.
She waited through dawn when the mountain trembledbeneath her and vast sheets of light pulsed out above. Mterthe lights were gone, the sky was full of falling stars. To thesouthwest a great light climbed the sky, and as it faded themountain began to tremble again. Vette saw the world belowthe naked mountain slopes vanish under slate-grey rain-clouds.
The flood had come at last. Lee had won, but shehad 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, untilthey reached the lip of the caldera and the ruined city directlybelow. Although the world below Tiger Mountain'sslopes was shrouded with clouds, here above the atmospherethe sun still walked. The towers were broken or fallen 
amongst craters lined with shiny glass. Silvery loops of roadslumped in shiny tangles. Domes had melted down to theirrims. 
Vette followed the robot down the steep cliffs. Darknessovertook them before they reached the bottom of the caldera,
and Vette spent the night sleeping fitfully on a narrowledge, watched over by the robot. The next day the sun wasvertical by the time they reached the floor of the caldera.
They toiled across a fantastic landscape of collapsed lavatubes and stubs and snags towards the broken towers. Vetteallowed the robot to lead her through the blasted ruins, theglow of its face-plate screen and the beam of her suit's helmetmingling and separating. One tower still held atmosphericpressure, and once inside Vette took off her helmet,
grateful to feel the random brush of free air touching herface. 


 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 ofthe forest belt that ringed Tiger Mountain s slo es Tate of the Last House had been broke,- n ? 

7gL he 

uUltVII, lnere 
was 
no sign of Yang Go, or the robots he had commanded, orof the wild ones, except the remains of their dead. Bones werestrewn across the slope beneath the wails of the Last House;
it was clear that a/though Yang Go had killed most ofthe wild ones he had lost the battle. But although the survivingwild ones had ripped fabrics and overturned furniture,
pissed and shat on the floors and left doors open so thatrain had blown in, the Last House was mostly intact.
Vette 
and Chert Yao and the boy made their home there. Vetteand Chen Yao improvised rainproof garments from plasticsheeting, and foraged in fields where crops sprouted fromlong dormant seeds in a muddle of tomatoes and maize andpeppers 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 childrenand 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 timehe slept at the hearth of the house, but sometimes Vetteand Chen Yao would return to find him at the mended gates,
clinging to one of the posts and staring up the mountain'slong slope at the cloud cap which hid its summit. 


 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 towerby his former troops when the Army of the People's Mouthshad started to retake the capital in a brief fierce war thatthe rains had ended. The Gang of Six had each committedritual suicide at the same moment in their separate houses.
The body of Lee's great-grandfather had been killed by theboy-thing into which his personality had been partially written.
Many others had simply vanished. 

And Wei Lee had appeared to everyone who used informationspace. Everyone who talked with Chen Yao told herthat Wei Lee had given them the gift of mastering the structureswhich held the knowledge of the world. Nothing washidden any more. 

But Wei Lee did not come to Chen Yao herself until a yearafter his apotheosis, on a rare sunny day in early summer.
When she masked herself and lay down on the couch notthe usual perception grid but a person appeared to her, talland robed in black, with a hood cast over his face. He tookher hand and then she was standing before the great thronein the Hall of Supreme Harmony. 

The figure cast off the hood, and Chen Yao laughed aloudwhen she saw Wei Lee's face. He laughed too, and sat onthe steps beneath the throne so that his face was level withhers. He told her that he was nearly finished with the living,
that he wanted to go on to the Isles of the Blessed to joinhis 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 curveof the boy's skull. 

Wei Lee said that he had changed too much to be able toreturn. But although poor Number Eighty-Four had onlybeen infected with partials of Lee's memory, another carriedpartials of Lee's own self. It was her choice to let him bereborn, and meanwhile clades of viruses would keep NumberEighty-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 thatis 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 anEmperor, and their will grows stronger every day. Thechanges I have made to information space mean that I cannothide from them. Nothing can be hidden." 

"You don't need anyone to tell you what to do, and youdon't have to listen to anyone, either. I know you neverlistened to me." 

"I'm not what I was. I have.., multiplied. This aspect isperhaps the nearest to my human self, but I am thousands,
now. I fear that I'll become what the Thing in Jupiter fearedit would become: a surrogate god, ruler of humanity for alltime. I hope that someone will take that bitter cup fromme." 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 forever." Wei Lee smiled, and told Chen Yao that he had a giftfor her, and laid a prickly chip in her mouth. AS it dissolvedinto her, the throne room dissolved around her (althoughnow she knew where she could find it, now and forevermore) and she was aware of the couch beneath her, the maskover her eyes and the gloves on her hands, bird-song thrillingthrough the open window and Vette rattling pots somewherein the house. 

That was the day the robot vanished, it had remained withthem for that whole year, but as spring had worn into summerthey had seen less of it each day. After Wei Lee spoketo 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 outof the forest towards the town. Vette ran to the gate andrecognized a banner raised soddenly above the heads of theapproaching people and began to wave and shout. Someone,
the boy, caught her hand. He had lost his clothes again, andstood naked in the soft cold rain. 


390 P^vL J. McAvLE¥ 

"It's all right," Vette said. "These are my people! Theseare the Free Yankee Nation They've come to find me atlast!" ' 

The boy stared at them, mouth working around his socketedthumb. He had not spoken in all this time, and staredwith silent incomprehension as nearly naked people, maskedand tattooed, ran up the path to the Last House, laughingand 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 therains had begun, a woman would ride a barque downthe Grand Canal to a coastal town where rusty butstill serviceable elevators plunged from the top of a high cliffto the weltering unchained sea. She was the dear daughterof the House of Kong, the eldest of the one hundred andtenth generation of descendants of the Great Sage, and theessence of the Saviour of the World was coded in fullerene 
viruses that had settled in certain implanted circuits in hernervous system. 

A Yankee ghost had brought her a message from anotherplace. The ghost had come at night, her image burning blue,
and had shown the woman the young boy whose head heldnothing but another's coded memories. The ghost had explainedthat it was time that these memories were quickened,
and had told the dear daughter of the House of Kongwhat she must do. 

And so, in the morning, she had told her husband thatthe time to repay her obligation had come at last. She hadpacked 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 changedless than might be imagined. They loved and laughed andwatched heroic operas and wagered on fighting crickets andcheated and hustled and lied--and sometimes even killed--as 
they always had. No dictator, no matter how universal or 


 392 
PAUL J. MCAULEY 


benign, could stop people being people. But the lies wereonly little lies, personal lies. Big public lies were no longerpossible because the only system by which they could bedisseminated was now too transparent for lies to slip by undetected. 

Nothing important was hidden or could be hidden, or notfor long. In theory everyone could express an opinion onevery decision of the Emperor. Most didn't. The last timethe world had united was when it had decided to send aid 
to the anarchists, and that had been a year after the beginningof the rains. For most it was enough that they couldget on with their lives, enough that they could find the jobthey wanted, that there was enough food, a good place tolive, a future for their children. 

Still, some knew and cared about the dear daughter of theHouse of Kong. A pod of fin escorted her barque on its voyagedown the Grand Canal, their bulging foreheads pregnantwith knowledge, and a few people gathered at the elevatorheads to cheer her as she set out on the last part of herjourney. 

Now she stood before the mast of the little barque andwatched the sea's horizon for the first sight of her destination.
The wet salt wind cracked and filled the bellying sailabove her head. It stood fair out of the eye of the south,
driving the little ship across the bitter, muddy seas of Marstowards the island of Tiger Mountain, where she would findthe lost boy and quicken in him Wei Lee's new beginningand last end in a way traditional to the conclusion of talessuch as this, with a kiss.