Red Dust Part 22

347.spongy gray cladonias stretched along the floors of little valleys, punctuated by stands of stunted fir and larch, aspen and juniper. Big air lichens raised their brain-like convolutions amongst frost-rimed basalt boulders. There was bilberry and dwarf birch, snow gra.s.s and saxifrage. Rust-pelted hares ran in straight lines from the bulldozer's pa.s.sage, and big black crows, with beaks white as bone, rode updrafts with lazy flicks of their meter-wide wings. Once Lee glimpsed a wild yak clattering away across a distant scree slope.Onwards, upwards. Behind them the horizon tipped towards the tiny sun. They stopped at dusk in a draw where an ice-cold stream ran between banks cushioned with mounds of moss. On the boulder-strewn slopes above the stream stands of junipers raised twisted branches like arthritic fingers; cl.u.s.ters of needles were like vivid green flames against papery bark. There was a kind of small bird that ran in pairs over the slimy flat stones in the stream, stopping to stab at the black gravel shoals. Something made a high piping sound amongst the junipers. It was a wild, clean, spare, lonesome place, the last outpost of life.Climbing the mountain, Lee told the others, was like recapitulating the world's changes."In more ways than one," Li Pe said. Cross-legged, black clothes loose around his bony frame, black hood cast over his leathery face. Hunched by the rushing stream in twilight, he said, "There's no one living up here. Not even the wild ones. And then a desert of stone, without enough air to breathe. A place where only the machines can live. We travel into the future, and it is no place for us.""That's what we're trying to stop," Redd said. "If we win, the rains will come again."Li Qing squeezed her brother's hand. "We've lived all our lives in the town and its forests," she said. "This is a wild and strange place, but it is different, nothing more."Li Pe said, "In the future, there will be no people. The world will be like this, a wilderness without memory or history."

348.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

"You say wrong words," Vette said. "I see tracks of men, and signs they leave each other. It is cold soon. Come on, Lee, we go, we get firewood."In the half-darkness amongst the junipers, on the other side of the stream, Lee said, "What don't you want them to hear?"Vette was piling up dead branches that had been bleached silver by frosty weather. She said flatly, "Want to know who follows.""You can speak Yankee with me, Vette. You've seen someone?""I thought you knew.""Well, I'm not infallible.""He's very fast, but not clever at hiding himself," Vette said. Her blunt, honest face wore a serious expression behind the mask of her tattoos. "He was keeping a long way back, and I never could see quite what he looked like. If we climbto the top of the ridge, we may be able to see him.""I don't like leaving our pa.s.sengers.""They survived those children. They're tougher than you think. Let the cowboy look after them, and that little brat.""She can't help the way she behaves. She's had a strange life... Besides, I need her. She knows things. But I don't know what to do with the brother and sister, Vette. Or with you and Redd. It is dangerous, where I am going. Well-guarded, I am sure. I have certain.., attributes that can help me survive. But Li Pe and Li Qing...""They're only human. So am I. But I was talking to them while you were finding the machines. They know the secrets of the mountain. Their people tended the forests, and knew other people who made the mountain into a sacred place.

The mountain rises out of the air. Can you live without breath? They say that there are places higher up, camps where the workers lived in the summer. There may be strong sciences left there.""The old know the world.""Of course." Vette dropped her load of firewood and RED DUST.

349.dusted her hands. "I'm going to climb the ridge. Will you come with me, and use your magical sight?""When there's time, I must explain about viruses."

Vette laughed. "I don't want to steal your science!" she said, and ran off through the trees, leaping from boulder to boulder.Lee followed, at first allowing her to stay a little way ahead, then having trouble in matching her pace. They left the stunted birches behind, leapingly climbed a steep smooth slope where lichens spread brittle orange and brown and green patches everywhere underfoot.The air was too thin. Every breath was deeper than the last, yet Lee's heart knocked louder and louder, a drum banging inside his head. He reached the top gasping and stumbling, had to sit on a k.n.o.b of lava while he groped inside himself, found how to flood oxygen-carrying viruses through his blood. The drumbeat slowed, and the world grew clearer.He walked across the lava pavement to where Vette stood on a craggy lava chunk that jutted over a steep cliff. Her pale hair flew back in the freezing wind. Lee joined her, and she put her arm around his shoulders.They had climbed the back side of a bluff that rose a kilometer above the slope. The mountain was spread beneath them. They could see the remnants of a vast weathered crater that pocked the slope, something Lee hadn't noticed on the way up. He remembered the earthmover zig-zagging up a terraced slope, and now saw that it was part of the crater's wall. They could see all the way down to the belts of forest.

They could see around half the mountain's curve to the western flanks where vast ice rivers sluggishly flowed, calving over the edge of the cliff escarpment and tumbling six kilometers into the seething dust sea. A dangerous place where monsters lived and heroes went to slay them, Vette claimed. She was grinning. No one in the Free Yankee Nation had ever thought to win a hero's story by travelling up the mountain, not until now."You can see the whole world," Vette said.

350.

PAUL J. MCAULEY."No, not really..."

They were so high that they could see the curve of the world's horizon. A distant white line floating across the red-dust sea were clouds riding the edge of a low-pressure cell far below them. Winds deflected by the slope of Tiger Mountain spun north and south, and rising air dumped moisture on the west flank, feeding the glaciers. To the southwest, beyond a narrow channel of the red, achingly flat Dust Seas, the Three Sisters, huge volcanoes dwarfed only by Tiger Mountain itself, rose above the escarpments and mesas of the Dragon's Back, a vast plateau raised half as high as Tiger Mountain itself. The setting sun threw their shadows outward, towards the notched horizon where the Great Valley began. How big the world was, how difficult to change! Even if Lee failed, its slow dying would last ten thousand years.

He was so lost to it that Vette had to shout in his ear to bring him back. "We have company!"

Chen Yao and Redd were hiking up the slope. Redd waved cheerily, quite out of breath. The hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder; his poisoned hand was strapped up against his chest. Chen Yao said to Vette, "This place is far more dangerous than you think."

"I don't need your protection."

Lee said, "What about the old people?"

"Oh," Redd said, "the earthmover is looking after them.

In fact, it's gossiping with them about the good old days. I thought I might get something for the pot on the way."

Vette said, "The reason I brought Lee up here is because someone is following us."

"I saw nothing," Chen Yao said, as if that settled the matter."Perhaps you weren't looking."

Lee said, "We will see what we can see, Yao," and did his trick, zooming in close, scanning the valley below. Virus-built structures processed the information for traces of movement, and images flashed by like a falling sheaf of photographs.

Birds rising on winds, a running deer so furry it was like a floating puffball. Then a flash of silver: a silver RED DUST.

351.figure hatched by slanting birch boles: a flat blue face: gone.

Chen Yao said, "You saw something. Where is it? What was it?"

Lee replayed his glimpse, and told the others what he'd seen.

The face was a television screen, an image, perhaps a human face, floating in watery blue. The rest was all tubes and angles, four arms, long stilt legs, a humped back painted with yellow and black chevrons. It was moving into the woods at the mouth of the valley.

Lee remembered the wake Yang Go had left in information s.p.a.ce, the sense of watchers rising towards it. Perhaps something had settled in one of the forestry robots...

or perhaps Yang Go had decided to follow them.

"I can't see a thing," Redd said. He was standing on an out-thrust shelf of rock, shading his eyes with his good hand.

"It's there," Lee said. "Two and a half kilometers away.

Vette was right."

"I saw no machine," Vette said. "I saw a man. I am sure.

A red man."

Lee laughed. "Monkey! Or at least, one of his brothers and sisters. A lucky coincidence... I'll tell you about Monkey another time, Vette, but now I think we should go back."

But when they reached the stream and the earthmover parked by its mossy bank, Li Pe and Li Qing were gone. The earthmover said the two old people had gone for a walk, but Vette found a note in neat firm calligraphy, every character well shaped and with the quick, precise shading of thick and thin strokes made possible only by the off-handed confidence of a master.

We trouble you no more.

Seventy-three.L.ee found it easy to track Li Pe and Li Qing. Footprints in moss near the stream, broken stalks of dry gra.s.s, 'scuffed sandy soil. If he lost the path he simply cast to the right and left until he found another trace. The others had agreed to wait by the earthmover, and he went quickly, confident that he would soon catch up with the two old people. There had not been enough time for them to have gone very far.The tracks went down the gully, staying beside the stream for the most part, pa.s.sed through a scanty birch wood, and then turned south, following the line of the slope across a lichen pavement, big splodges of red and brown and grey and yellow with distinct black lines at the borders of the differently colored species. Just by the far edge of the birches, Lee found a different kind of print, and remembered the high arched feet of the forestry robots. He couldn't tell which set of tracks crossed which, and couldn't see any sign of the two old people either.There was a movement in the shadows amongst the slender silvery trunks of the birches. Lee said, "You needn't skulk around, Chen Yao."As she came across the lichen pavement towards him, he said, "You're determined not to let me be on my own."

"We go on now, Wei Lee. Leave the others, and go onup.""First of all we have to find Li Pe and Li Qing."

352.

RED DUST.

353."I should think they are dead. And it's getting dark. We can climb the shoulder of the valley and camp at the top."

"We brought them here. We killed them."

"You must not feel bad, Wei Lee. They were old, and besides, the wild children would have killed them sooner or later."

"Even so," Lee said, and turned and set off across the lichen pavement. After a minute, he heard Chen Yao run to catch up with him.

They went on, losing time because it was difficult to follow the track across the particolored lichens. Night was sweeping down the mountainside; at last, Lee had to admit that he had lost the track entirely.

Although the rim of the mountain had risen above the sun, light still walked on the Plain of the Garden of Eternal Bliss a dozen kilometers below, and a red glow muted the colors of the lichen patches and accentuated the dark boundaries between them. It was as if Lee and Chen Yao were trekking across a vast tilted chessboard. They were about to turn back towards the gully when far around the curve of the slope a brilliant light flashed and faded.

Chen Yao said, "I suppose you're going to investigate. It is probably a trick."

"Even so," Lee said. "Go back, if you want."

"Oh no. You need my help, Wei Lee."

Lee led the way cautiously, thinking of the silvery robot, of the traces of habitation Vette claimed to have seen. The King of the Cats was playing a selection of lonesome Delta Blues, eerie in the emptiness of the high slopes of Tiger Mountain. It reminded Lee that ghosts always seek empty places to haunt, and he grew more and more nervous as he and Chen Yao approached the source of the light.

What had appeared from a distance to be a pile of rocks turned out to be the ruins of a small town. Its foursquare buildings were built of lava blocks. Narrow windows, their shutters long ago fallen away, looked out from beneath the jutting eaves of tiled roofs. Lava chips paved the streets, which formed a cross centered on a big square. Tree stumps 354.

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still remained in the middle of the square, like rotted teeth.

Chen Yao wondered how they had missed this place when they had looked down from the bluff.

Lee said, "You didn't see it either?"

"It's a bad omen."

"Well, we weren't looking for it, so perhaps we missed seeing it. Besides, we're a long way around the slope."

"I think it was looking for us, Wei Lee. We should go."

"Hush. Let me look, at least."

Lee went all the way round the square, every sense stripped bare. In the middle of the clump of half-fossilized tree stumps there was a stone cistern in which he supposed the town had once stored its water. He dropped a stone into it, and after a moment there was a dry echoing rattle.

As he turned away, he saw a spark above one of the houses. It flashed and failed, and then a small red glow shook there. Someone had lit a fire, and hope turned his heart over.

A brief search revealed stone stairs at one corner of the building. Lee told Chen Yao to keep watch and went up, cautiously peeped over the edge of the roof. Big loose tiles, each ridged in the middle, made a gentle slope. Two people lay beside the fire near the crest of the roof. Li Pe and Li Qing, faces peaceful, age rubbed away by the gentle glow of the fire. They did not stir as Lee made his way to them, not even when a the slipped beneath his feet and clattered over the edge to smash in the street below.

They were dead. No marks on them, skin cold, yet joints still supple. Li Pe's mouth was drawn back in a grimace. Li Qing's eyes were open, but blind once more. Lee gently closed them.

Someone called out, across cold night air. It was not Chen Yao. "Sister, you sure took your sweet time getting here."

Lee turned so quickly he almost fell off the roof. As he danced on loose tiles, white light flared across the square, a pillar of light bright as burning magnesium, shedding great sparks. A figure was silhouetted against its glare, legs apart, RED DUST.

355.fists on hips. Lee did not need to enhance his sight to knowwho it was and shouted to Chen Yao."Run?The figure laughed. "The little G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 coc.o.o.n. Lee knocked it from its plinth, swept aside the loose, dry bones inside. A pinlight winked red at him; there was still power. Everything was still connected to everything else: the system would ensure that, even after the world died.Lee jammed on the headset, felt his body collapse even as 356.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.he plunged away from it. He did not fall far, but went at an angle to everything else, down the way he'd glimpsed before.

Suddenly all the connections became clear. He saw the projectors that Mary Makepeace Gaia had set up, and the traps she had laid at the perimeter. She had wanted to talk with him, or with her sister, and then she had wanted him to run so that she could hunt him down and kill him.Well, run he would, but first he turned everything off andset up a beacon. And then he followed an extended branch in the ghostly quantum path he'd made during his previous incursion into Tiger Mountain's information s.p.a.ce, and had a brief intense conversation with the earthmover.And came back, because Mary Makepeace Gaia had rippedthe headset from him. She grasped his chin and pulled hishead back, held a knife at his throat.The room was in darkness, but at the edge of his visionLee 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 killedme at any time after you found me, but you never did. You always set others to that task." He kept himself still, despite his fear: the sharp knife blade had nicked his throat, and he could feel blood trickling down his neck, soaking his collar.

Beats of silence. He said, "Besides, your employers are coming.''The knife rang when it hit the far wall: Mary MakepeaceGaia laughed. "You think they'll save you? Sister, you'll wish you died at my hands. Go on, run if you want. I swear I'll kill you cleanly.""Too late," Lee said. "They're already here."His beacon had been answered. A whistling roar was descending on the town: a rising scream that couldn't blot out Mary Makepeace Gaia's laughter.

Seventy-four.T.here was a little town of shining silver towers. Like a circle of spears, it rose in the shadows beneath the fluted walls of the northern end of the stepped and nested craters of Tiger Mountain's deep, wide caldera. Each spear tip was ringed or vaned, rising to different heights from the glare of a field of lights. There were domes too, and looping silver roads, and a long long launch track that ran out and up across the eighty-kilometer-wide caldera, angled towards stars that shone bright and clear in the near-vacuum.Inside the steel can of its cabin, Lee felt the rocket ship turn beneath him. Torque pulled his face from the thick gla.s.s port hole; the restraint harness of his seat cut into his shoulders and chest. Everything tilted outside the port hole, and then there were only stars as the rocket ship settled on a tail of flame. There was a long roaring, then a shudder, then silence.Lee was suddenly surrounded by the cadres who had taken him from Mary Makepeace Gaia in the dead mountain town.

They were dressed in simple white one-piece uniforms. Black visors masked half their faces. Their heads were shaven, like monks or civil servants. They were all younger than Lee, more boys than men, and did not have names but numbers.

As soon as they had surrounded Lee they began to shout at each other in clipped tech-speak with a kind of suppressed hysteria. It was as if they were furious at everything, even 357.

358.

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themselves. Several held pistols on Lee as others unbuckled the complex harness that had strapped him down in the padded seat. He could hear Chen Yao's m.u.f.fled protests as she was lifted from her own seat. Across the circular metal cabin, Mary Makepeace Gaia watched mockingly. It was already clear that the cadres feared her more than Lee.A transparent tunnel linked the rocket ship with a high tower. They all rode an elevator down, Lee pressed in one corner by the now-silent cadres, Chen Yao in another. A moving walkway carried them along a long tunnel and then there was another elevator ride, to the top of another tower.It was the tallest tower in the cl.u.s.ter, and its top was aclear dome supported by thin metal pillars. It looked out across the sharp shining tops of towers and swooping roadways towards the starry sky and the far horizon of the southern end of the caldera. A cadre turned from this view, made a gesture. The guards drew to attention, stepped smartly back so that Lee and Chen Yao and Mary Makepeace Gaia were isolated in front of their rank.The cadre studied them, long fingers pressed together athis chest. His face was not masked. It was high-boned and bloodless, eyes hooded, thin lips pressed together. He looked like a scholar presented with an interesting but trivial problem, something requiring a moment's attention to unlock its worth before it could be filed away.He said, "Are they who you expected, Master?"Two people stepped from the shadows beneath one of the dome's filigreed metal pillars. One was the missionary from Earth, Dr. Damon Lovelace. The other was Guoquiang. He was in cadre uniform, and his head was shaven and seamed with raw red scars. He had been converted.Mary Makepeace Gaia bowed stiffly to Dr. Damon Love-lace. "Come," he said, "you must also honor our allies.""Of course," Mary Makepeace Gaia said sweetly, and bowed to the cadre."I am the Number Two Cadre," the cadre said stiffly. "The Number One Cadre is... unavailable. But you may speak to me as if to him."

RED DUST.

359.The mercenary said, "I don't want to talk to anyone in this place, but to those who give you your orders."The cadre said, "We have our duty. Orders are not necessary.

Orders require interpretation. As truth is not absolute, interpretation can lead to bad actions. You will tell me how you contacted us.""Not me. It was his idea."Lee said, "The usual way." He couldn't stop looking at Guoquiang, who stared straight ahead.The cadre said, "You lie. That way is forbidden.""I wouldn't know about that. I just did it."Chen Yao said, "He's dangerous. Let me go, I'll tell you just how dangerous he is, and why, and what you can do about it.""Bravo," Dr. Damon Lovelace said, but the cadre ignored her outburst. Lee was sure, in fact, that he hadn't heard it.

The cadre said, "Confession is the highest good."Lee knew all about the kind of mottoes the cadre used.

He had learned about them when he had tried to find out about his parents on his own, before Xiao Bing had made the librarian for him, before he had left the capital for the first time. He had read through the transcripts of hundreds of struggle sessions in the House of the Names of the Populace, where each reader had an aspect at his or her shoulder, like an angel, or a conscience. In every transcript, the human, agonised pleas of the accused had been answered with the kind of tags that the cadre used now.Lee countered with mottoes of his own. "Who is able to contact you, but those who are allowed? Who is allowed, but those who have authorization?""No one has authorization when sterility is to be maintained.

We are free of contamination here, because the highest duty requires it.""Those who know only correct actions needn't fear contamination.''"That's true," the cadre admitted."Very good," Dr. Damon Lovelace said.

360.

P^vL J. McAuLELee 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.