Red Dust Part 23

Mary Makepeace Gaia laughed, and then softly applauded.

Guoquiang wheeled away without even wiping Lee's saliva from his mouth.

"Well," Lee said, "now that you know who I am, what do you want of me?"

RED DUST.

361.

Dr. Damon Lovelace turned and paced to the window, hands clasped at his back. He looked out across the tops of the shining towers for a full minute before speaking. "I regret that there's no more time for talk. Your allies are causing some small nuisance in the skies, and that must be dealt with before we can send you where you're wanted. But before my masters come for you I hope I will have time to talk with you again."The interview was at an end.

Seventy-five.L.ee and Chen Yao were able to exchange a few words during the elevator ride down. "I'm scared, Wei Lee,"

Chen Yao said. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this.""It's all right to be scared, Chen Yao. I'm scared, too. It's only human, and that's all that we are, really.""I know. That's why I'm scared. I never was much of a G.o.d, was I? These people scare me. They're no longer human; they have no need of G.o.ds.""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, itis not a nation," Lee said.The guard didn't reply.Chen Yao and Lee were led off in opposite directions downa white corridor. The cadres left Lee in a big, mostly empty room. Hopefully, he asked the door to let him out, but it could only apologize. "I wish I could, Master, but it is best for you to stay here." It had a dry small voice: Lee imagined an old, simple monk, head bowed.The floor was as wide and as shinily empty as that of a ballroom. There was a clutter of hard-edged furniture stacked in one corner, and when the young boy came in Lee 362.

RED DUST.

363.

was perched on top of a stack of chairs, prying unsuccessfully at the smooth joint between ceiling and wall.

Lee blurred from one side of the room to the other and took the tray from the boy's hands. "Stay while I eat," Lee said. "I'd like to talk with you."

The boy was six or seven, and masked like the rest. He said, "I do not know if it is permitted."

"It is not forbidden, then. Everything that is not forbidden is permitted."

"There are guards on my other side," the door said.

"Thank you for telling me," Lee said, and told the boy, "You can wait while I eat, and then you will not need to come in again to take away my tray."

He lifted the covers of the stainless-steel bowls one after the other. Steamed rice, fried crackers, yellow bean paste, water. The unsalted food tasted of almost nothing; the water was distilled, warm and insipid. The boy stood with his back to the door and watched Lee eat.

"What's your name?"

"I am Number Eighty-Four."

"I mean before that. Before you came here."

The boy's mouth twisted, but he said nothing.

"You don't remember? You can't have been here very long. Door, are you listening to this?"

"Yes, Master."

"You will not record it, and you won't transmit it to the guards on the other side, or anywhere else."

"Yes, Master."

Lee told the boy, "I suppose that you are used to having machines eavesdrop on you, Eighty-Four, but it makes me uncomfortable. Here, I've finished now."

When the boy bent to take the tray, Lee grasped his wrists in one hand, flicked up the visor of his mask with the other.

The boy's pale face squirmed, like something disturbed by the turning of a rock. Lee touched his eyes and his mouth with fingertips wet with saliva, and he suddenly relaxed.

"Tell me the first thing you remember," Lee said.

The boy spoke dreamily. "We were travelling on a train.

364.

PAV J. McAvk There were many of us, more than two hundred. We were new units, from different danweis. I was travelling with thirty-eight others from my own danwei. We were travelling to the capital, to receive the blessing of the Emperor." (The door said, "Are you all right, Number Eighty-Four?" Lee told it to be quiet.) "We had been selected because we had purged our teachers. They had been advocating the Sky Road, and we forced them to purge their carrels, to recant their crimes and to march around the perimeter of the danwei with placards describing their crimes around their necks. It was winter, and dust was blowing from the Plain of Gold. The teachers were barefoot, and without masks, and in their nightclothes. We had beaten them, and made them kneel on gla.s.s. I remember one young woman helping an old man; both were choking in the dusty air, and their clothes flapped and billowed with the wind. Very few survived their recantations.

"The leader of our unit was a girl, Yu Shihuang. She was a bad crazy person, but her anger gave her strength of will.

All feared her. I remember an old woman, on the train that took us to the city. She was in the carriage in which we rode. We were in high spirits, and she told us not to make so much noise. Yu Shihuang turned on the old woman, and started to hit her. Others joined in. The old woman curled up like a spider. Blood ran from her ears and her eyes and her nose. She was unconscious and some urged Yu Shihuang to stop, but Yu Shihuang declared that the Great Rea.s.sessment was not an embroidery lesson. It was winter, as I have said, and the carriage windows were curtained with heavy material. She took down a curtain pole and beat the old woman to death. Her face was like a piece of rotten fruit.

Then Yu Shihuang had her thrown from the carriage. I remember that was how we came to the capital. I remember little more. It is an effect of the processing."

The boy had spoken in a slow halting monotone, but as his tale progressed tears began to run down his soft plump cheeks. They dripped on to his coveralls, beading the slick white material.

RED DUST.

365.Lee said, although he already knew the boy's story, "What was the name of your danwei?""It was the Bitter Waters danwei."It had happened ten years ago, during the planet-wide purges after the Emperor had made its final pact with the Earth's Consensus, and declared the sky off-limits. The boy had been frozen at that age ever since. Everyone in the shining city had been frozen. It was a glimpse of the future, of brain-cored children serving machines, becoming machines.

Without new memory, without new experience, without change.Lee said, "I must speak with your leader, Number Eighty-Four.

Will the door open when you ask it?""Of course I will," the door said, surprising Lee."Take the tray and leave with the guards. As soon as youcan, come back. Can you do that?"The boy nodded."Be brave. Remember what you are. Everything else is a dream, and you're waking from it now."Lee paced up and down once the boy had gone, suddenly nervous. He had no way of knowing if the viruses could overcome ten years' conditioning, ten years of being but not becoming. Miriam Makepeace Mbele had once teased him about being able to bring the dead back to life: now he would see if it was true or not. If he could save the boy, then perhaps he had saved Guoquiang. Perhaps he had saved them all.His internal clock had counted off more than a hundred minutes when the door opened. The boy stood there, and Lee ran to him. "Goodbye, Master," the door said."Goodbye," Lee said, astonished, and took the boy's hand, and allowed himself to be led away.

Seventy-six.

T.

he door to Chen Yao's room said nothing, but simply opened at the boy's command. Chen Yao had dismantled a wall screen, and was trying to pull away the panels behind it. "I would have gotten out by myself," she said. "Eventually."

"I don't doubt it."

After a while, Chen Yao said, "Where is this boy taking us?" The blank white corridors made her nervous; she was geared for signals and signs that were not there.

"To see the Number One Cadre."

Chen Yao said, "A dead man won't be much help."

"He isn't dead," the boy said. He still had not remembered his name. Lee feared that little of his original personality remained, that he was not a resurrectee but a construction, as a new building might be built on the stone foundations of an old one.

Lee said, "There are different deaths. If I've learned one thing, it's that."

The towers reached down into the congealed lava floor of the caldera as well as into the sky. The boy led them to an elevator that fell for a full minute and swooped to a stop that briefly tripled gravity. It opened not on another bright, white corridor but warm semidarkness.

Orchids as big as human heads and as complicated as s.e.xual parts glowed behind faceted gla.s.s set in the floor and walls. Other panels pulsed with color, sent chips of light366.

RED DUST.

367.

swarming over the room like blood corpuscles coursing through the muscular chambers of the heart. Cables looped down from the ceiling and gathered together in a thick braid that plugged into the back of the couch where the Number One Cadre lay.He was dead, withered and black, part mummy, part crystal.

He looked as if he would shatter at a touch. Projection helmets dangled above his couch like a bouquet of flowers."This is a crazy place," Chen Yao said, and stepped towards the couch, a shadow in the swarming colors.From the corner of his eye, Lee saw the elevator shimmer and flow, bleeding away into the pressed flower walls. When the boy's hand crept into his, Lee told him, "Nothing can hurt you here."That was when the Number One Cadre's corpse sat up. It moved stiffly but swiftly, jerking its legs over the edge of the couch, dashing leads from its head with a sweep of its hand.

Its eyes glittered redly, like cut cacholongs. Its mouth worked and a long silver tongue licked out. It was forked, made of rings of metal. It dashed over the corpse's face, then lashed out at Chen Yao.The little girl danced away from the tongue, which whipped after her, meters long and lithe as a snake. Lee went into hypermode and plucked a helmet from the bouquet above the corpse's couch, and set it on his head.And was elsewhere.

Seventy-seven.

W.

'ei Lee stood on a darkling plain under a chain-mail sky that flexed and warped with its cargo of hurtling data streams. It stretched away towards a wall dark red as dried blood and studded with defensive towers. The wall's ma.s.s loomed like a thunderstorm, more felt than seen.

Signals crackled from tower to tower like heat lightning.

Beyond the wall and its towers floated a huddle of tall peaked roofs lapped with glazed ochre tiles. It was the Forbidden City.

The air beside Lee twisted and shimmered as if heated by an invisible fire. It made a crouching human shape, and then the boy was beside him.

"Number Eighty-Four! What are you doing here?" But Lee was not really angry, for the boy's presence meant that he would not go into this terrible place alone.

"You left," Number Eighty-Four said accusingly. "You left me. I only wanted to see where you had gone."

"!t is the Forbidden City. We are going to see the Emperor.

Take my hand."

Number Eighty-Four flinched from Lee. "But no one sees Him! He is immortal and invisible and everywhere at once!"

Lightning flared from top to top of the distant towers; ma.s.sive peals of thunder rolled across the plain on which they stood.

"Don't be afraid," Lee said. He took the boy's hand and they moved forward.368.

RED DUST.

369.

Each step translated them across s.p.a.ce like chess pieces.

There was a high gate in the blood-red walls. Wumen, the Meridian Gate, the place of execution. It opened for them but they were already inside the walls, standing in a courtyard cut by the recurved Tartar bow of the Golden Water Stream. Five dazzlingly white marble bridges arched over the glittering stream, leading to the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Beyond this gate was another courtyard, and at the far end of the courtyard rose the marble terraces on which stood the three great halls.Lee and Number Eighty-Four stood directly in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Its doors were flanked by bronze incense burners, and from each burner rose a pillar of aromatic smoke. The smoke pillars twisted into braids and merged with the flexing sky. Directly in front of the doors was a bronze turtle, symbol of longevity and stability. A fire had been lit in its hollow belly, and smoke billowed from its hooked mouth.There were guards on either side of the bronze turtle, but when Lee and Number Eighty-Four found themselves standing beside it, the guards had vanished. Above the turtle's armor-plated sh.e.l.l was a ghostly globe: the turning world, battered dusty red, polar caps of white water ice small as thumbprints: Mars.Complex spindles of light hung over the shrunken icecaps.

Lee wafted a hand through them, top and bottom; they engaged his viral systems for only a second.The discharge was like pure s.e.x. It propelled Lee and Number Eighty-Four through the entrance in a fast edit, into a vast richly decorated s.p.a.ce filled with the clash of battered gongs, thick billows of incense, and blurred ghosts.

Lee could hardly distinguish individuals in the insubstantial crowd, but the repet.i.tive motions of its ever-changing const.i.tuents made it possible to see what was going on.Bowing nine times over by throwing themselves full length on the floor and hitting the tiles with their foreheads, interlocutors advanced towards the high throne which stood before the carved Xumi Mountain, the Mountain of Paradise.

Only then was each interlocutor allowed to stand and wait 370.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

to be escorted, by an aspect in long skirt coat and trousers, its machine code in a locked pouch hung by a chain from its belt, into the ever-changing throng that hid all but the throne's high canopy.

"Come on," Lee said to Number Eighty-Four, but when he tried to push through the crowd of interlocutors who were waiting their turn to be escorted to the throne he was buffeted and shoved and turned so that his path became a drunkard's walk that led right back to its starting place.

"I told you!" Number Eighty-Four wailed. "We are not meant to be here. We don't have the codes!"

Lee gripped the boy's hand and plunged into the crowd again. They were pushed this way and that, and suddenly Lee was standing in front of someone he knew. He was looking into his own face.

"You have come far, Master," the librarian said.

"I have been fortunate, thanks to the help of my friends,"

Lee said. "I regret that I still have some way to go, and now there is no one to help me."

"If you will allow it, perhaps I can serve you one last time.

After that, your path is your own."

"For the first time," Lee said, and suddenly, despite his fear, he felt a calm joy fill him. Here, in this hall of ghosts, he was finally no one but himself. Win or fail, it would be on his own terms.

"Use your freedom wisely, Master," the librarian said, and took Lee's hand in a freezing grip. He pulled Lee and Number Eighty-Four through the crowd of interlocutors and aspects, which now made no more resistance than the scented smoke, and Lee saw at last who sat on the throne.

He was dressed in the high-collared, yellow silk brocade robes of tradition, his face stern and patient beneath a square cornered hat. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, not turning his attention from any of the interlocutors, yet addressing dozens at once. At the instant of address the ghosts took on the aspect of their client-all of them either men in uniform or richly dressed servants of one or another of the Gang of Six or more or RED DUST.

371.less interchangeable drably dressed conchies--and faded and blew away like smoke."I have done all I can, Master," the librarian said. "Free me. Free me now."It held up the pouch hung round its neck and Lee took out the control chip. It was a no-color lozenge bristly with machine code, squirming in his palm like an overturned beetle. The librarian s.n.a.t.c.hed it and bowed and ran down a corridor Lee hadn't noticed, its black cloak flapping like a tattered flame, growing smaller and smaller and then vanishing around a corner and taking the corridor with it.An aspect grasped Lee's elbow and tried to hustle him away. Lee laughed and lifted the aspect's locked pouch, opened it, and held out the control chip. The aspect grabbed the chip and greedily stuffed it into its mouth: it glowed through skin translucent as parchment as it went down. For an instant, an old man stood before Lee, barefoot and bareheaded in a faded fisherman's smock with both sleeves out at the elbows. It was the human template of the aspect, the dead personality hijacked and bound to this function. Wonderingly, the old fisherman raised his hands before his face--and then he was gone, free to address himself anywhere in information s.p.a.ce.Lee stepped forward, suddenly alone before the ruler of the living and the dead.The Emperor dismissed the aspects with a smooth gesture and stood, and Lee recognized him even before he took off his hat and his long moustache. "You're too late, Wei Lee,"

Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon said, and put the false moustache into the hat, and tossed the hat over his shoulder into paradise. A painted buddha grabbed it and cheerfully slapped it on to his shaven long-eared head. The Emperor stepped down from the throne."I have many aspects," the Emperor said. "Now that The Little Bird is dead, every one of the Ten Thousand Years belongs to me. Come with me, Wei Lee. You can bring your little friend, too, or what's left of him."There was a gap. Lee had a false memory of pa.s.sing 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.