Red Dust Part 3

"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 pa.s.ses into Heaven I will not even have that. Not even his shareholding--he has changed his will." He laughed, a nervous bark. He was ashamed, Lee saw, ashamed and scared. "This is a place of the dead. The living exist only to serve those who have elected to die."

"The whole world is dying," Xiao Bing said.

"All the more reason to see it," Guoquiang said. "To see it before it all dies."

"Plenty of opportunities in the capital," iao Bing said.

Lee said sharply, "Who told you that? The soldiers? I will be going in the other direction." Travelling away from his great-grandfather, even though he knew he could never escape the weight of his obligations. Travel far enough around the world, and you return to where you began.

"Perhaps we can persuade you otherwise," Guoquiang said. "I have money. We should share it."

"You are a good friend, Guoquiang. I do not deserve you." "I am a better friend than you think. My father is an influential man in the whole province, not just in Bitter Waters.

You will have to travel very far to find a danwei that will employ you. He was greatly amused by the idea of you travelling empty-handed across the province, and doors clos- 38.PAUL J. McAuLEY ing in your face. If you travel west, you will have to travel a thousand kilometers to escape his influence. I see him for what he is, Wei Lee. I do not wish to become like him. It is a pivotal moment in my life. I have you to thank for it."

Lee saw that Guoquiang was very drunk--perhaps he had been drinking all day. He said, "What will you do in the capital? Rent your brain for information collation? Join up?

Those are the two most popular options for young people fresh from the country."

Guoquiang said, "We will seize the moment, when it comes. Perhaps it will be necessary to join the defense forces. Our pilot may be the first of an invasion force."

Xiao Bing said, "We can catch a lift with the Army of the People's Mouths when it takes the anarchist away. A surprisingly small bribe goes a long way with the ordinary soldiers.''

Lee started to comb his quiff, using the black water of the pool for a mirror. His hair kept losing its carefully sculpted shape because settling dust absorbed the grease. He said, "Your plans are so well made, I'm flattered you wish to include me. I was the source of your trouble in the first place."

"I hope that we are still friends," Guoquiang said.

"Friends will help each other, eh? Think on what I've said, Wei Lee. I'm sure you'll see the sense of it. Have some more brandy. Drink up! Drink to our future!"

Seven.T.hat night Lee lay awake long past midnight, muzzy with brandy fumes, mind spinning over and around without purpose, unable to riddle his way out of the face trap Guoquiang had so cunningly prepared. He listened to the King's broadcast for a while, but could hear only one word in ten, then called up one of the King's movies on his portable player, sat watching with the sound turned down (he knew all the dialogue and all the songs) and with his home-made solid-body electric guitar in his lap. The power was out, but Lee strummed along to each of the songs anyway, bending close to hear the chords singing in the wires.The movie was Fun in Acapulco. The chained heave of the sea fascinated Lee as much as the King, and he always liked the way in which it was obvious the King never appeared in any exterior shots. A double ambled down a street in his place, only seen from the back but still unconvincing, or was seen in long shot lounging on the beach with Ursula Andress while the King appeared with her in close-up under studio lights. The King by then so famous that women would tear him apart if he ever appeared in public, as they had torn apart his corpse after his execution, singing his songs as they carried his head away (and in legend his head sang too, but that was legend--in reality his head was preserved in the Shrine of the Land of Grace, and then lost or stolen).The movies of the King of the Cats were more than simple entertainment to Lee. They were sublime visions of the way 39.

40.PAUL J. McAULEY a hero moved through the world. The King was the center of a storm of portents and signs, yet while things fell into place around him, he had to find within himself the way to heal his secret wound--here, his vertigo, which was also his fear of death, for it sprang from involvement in the accident which had crippled his friend. Once he had redeemed his courage through love, he could heal himself by plunging into the sea from on high, and live for ever. Watching the movie, Lee could begin to believe that the world was simpler than it seemed. Perhaps he could learn how to riddle the world of the mystery of his parents' disappearance, unlock the secret of his past and free his future.

Half the movie was missing, half the rest was patched and washed with sweeps of static snow--Lee preferred the originals to enhanced recreations, real discontinuities to fake subst.i.tute footage--and towards the end the display flickered and began to lose definition as the player's batteries drained. Lee still could not sleep. Restlessly, he slipped on his goggles and tried to find the librarian, who had gone missing after Lee's sentencing at the special committee.

Cancelled by the same flat, perhaps, although the metaphoric interface he had bound around himself remained.

Dusty books towering into darkness, rotting carpets underfoot.

A window framed by books, looking on a starry void filled with wind. One of the stars swung towards Lee, bloomed into a burning bird with a woman's face.

He jerked awake. He had fallen asleep and the goggles had slipped from his face.

Caught between Guoquiang's face trap and the revenge of Guoquiang's father, Lee lay awake the rest of the night, wondering whether to travel on or return to the great and terrible capital of Mars, and the thrall of his great-grandfather. But the next day his fate caught up with him, and he was swept away, dust on history's wind.

Eight.T.he graveyard shift had their own table in the crowded dining hall used by the danwei's maintenance workers.

But even the tenders of the half-lifers avoided talking to Wei Lee. Disgrace was easy to catch. Alone at one end of the long table, Lee ate quickly, scooping up greasy noodles and vegetable pancake with his head ducked low to his bowl.

Conversation chattered all around, mostly about the half-lifer which, that shift, had died before pa.s.sing fully into Heaven. Lee had seen it happen, the pale emaciated body suddenly jerking slantwise on its couch like a dropped puppet while around it a hundred others continued to move their wired limbs under the guidance of the exercise programme.

A bad omen, was the eventual opinion, and one or two tenders made warding signs at Lee, as if he were to blame.Lee didn't notice. The King of the Cats cracklingly whispered in his ear, putting him at one remove from everyone in the dining hall. He'd been listening all day. The radio was not really allowed on shift, but no one dared raise a voice to forbid it, because that would bring them inside the circle of the black light of Lee's sin.The King never slept. He was always there, rapping a sermon or rummaging through mid-twentieth-century American pop culture. Lee was sc.r.a.ping his tray into the bin to the rocking beat of Carl Perkins's "Dixie Fried" when something odd happened. A soldier b.u.mped up against him in 41.

42.PAUL J. MCAULEY.the crowd around the recycling bins, and he felt something thrust into his hand.

It was a sc.r.a.p of paper. It burned in Lee's hand all the way back to the brightly lit solitude of his room, where at last he dared look at it. A terse message, telling him to be at the transport-pool stables at twenty hundred. It was ten minutes to, and he was supposed to meet Guoquiang at the same time. Lee made his choice and ran for the door. After all, it was just the sort of impulsive thing the King would have done.The stables were slaved to Mars's diurnal cycle. Their highracks of lights were turned to yellow twilight as with quicken ing nervousness Lee walked past steel-barred stalls in whichpalfreys, genets and alboraks stood in contemplation of losthorizons or munched at their feeding troughs.In one stall there was a fierce, steel-shod warhorse, moregreat cat than horse. It paced round and round its stall withcontained fury, mailed withers glittering. It was the mountof one of the officers of the Army of the People's Mouths.Lee stopped to look at it, remembering a long ridethrough 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 therush of wind, the liquid pull of muscles beneath Lee's grip ping thighs. He'd been no more than five, but he still re membered commands and the positions of sensitive nervecl.u.s.ters. He spoke a word, and the warhorse stopped its pac ing and stared at him with a narrow yellow eye. Then ityawned, 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 towardsLee, and he paused to scratch the coa.r.s.e hair between herflicking ears. When he turned from her, a man stood in theshadows 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 shortman who held himself stiffly in tailored rust red tunic and RED DUST.

43.

trousers. The only signs of his rank were the three bra.s.s stars of a Colonel on his green shoulder flash, and his immaculately polished boots. He said, "You are nervous, Citizen Wei Lee. But have no fear, for I work for your esteemed ancestor. Allow me to demonstrate."The Colonel blew on a short silver tube, and Great-grandfather Wei smiled and said, "The time has come, myson."

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

And in turning it was as if Lee had stepped from one room to another, except that this was a room of the Great House, the one with wooden panels fretted with scenes of the mountains of old Earth, and the floor of black tiles.The genet thrust her head through an open window, and sunlight splashed her flanks, the same sunlight vivid in the green garden beyond. Lee looked for the Colonel, but he had 44.RED DUST.

45.vanished; or perhaps he had become the stone lion that stood beside the wide door, with round eyes and curly beard and fanged mouth.

"How fortunate I am, Wei Lee, that you are my son. I could wish for no better."

The eidolon was a tall, austere man, younger than Wei Lee remembered. But Lee had aged, and the eidolon had not. He might have just now put on the black silk suit and the high-collared white shirt, but Lee remembered that those were the clothes the eidolon had always worn. Perhaps the Great House was great indeed, its rooms and corridors extending through time as well as s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.r.s.e 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. McAvIso 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 ident.i.ty.

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 cla.s.sics, then. And are you perhaps a follower of the films of Jerry Lee Lewis?"

"He's good, but not as good as the King."

"Ah yes, the King of the Cats! When I was young I listened all the time to the broadcasts of the King of the Cats. That is where I learned of Jerry Lee Lewis. I particularly admire his performance in The Nutty Professor. It had something of the King of the Cats in it, did it not? Wei Lee, you understand what you have to do?"

Lee said that he did, but the Colonel repeated all that Lee's great-grandfather had said and asked again if Lee understood.

"Of course. When do we do this?"

"You will be at the service entrance of these sheds at sunrise tomorrow. We will watch over you, Wei Lee, in case you fall into danger. You are important to us. I know that you are ready to serve."

Lee didn't know about that. He did know that he had been given a chance to clear his way through the tangle of obligations and to rescue the fallen Sky Roader anarchist. He said, "If my esteemed great-grandfather wants me to take the anarchist away from the danwei, I'll do all I can."

After all, honor was only a form to be satisfied.

Tell T.he encounter had taken less than an hour. Guoquiang and Xiao Bing were still waiting for Lee at the caf in Number One Recreation Hall, amidst the dusty cherry trees and crowds and opera music. Lee explained what had just happened (although he did not mention the precise task his great-grandfather wished him to perform), and what he needed."You are crazy!" Guoquiang said, then looked at the people crowding the tables around their own and repeated, this time in a whisper, "You're crazy."Xiao Bing said, "It's not as if it's an ordinary mount." He was whispering too."Let's walk," Lee said. As they ambled amongst the other strollers, music echoing from the high, iron-ribbed roof, he explained that if the Army of the People's Mouths had taken an interest in him, it was certain that he was being watched.Guoquiang said, "If you must run from this, can't you just take an ordinary mount, Wei Lee?"Lee grinned, told the two cadres to drink up. He had decided to get rid of the scrip he had acc.u.mulated. His salary credits could be forwarded (if Guoquiang's father didn't stop it), but Bitter Waters's scrip was useless everywhere but here. He bought more rice beer and cones of fried shrimp at one of the barrows scattered about the arena of shabby gra.s.s. He had already drunk three or four draughts with the two cadres as he explained his predicament and felt a fine 48.RED DUST.

49.floating cheerfulness. Tomorrow and yesterday no longer mattered.

As they walked on, Lee explained to Guoquiang and Xiao Bing that it was easier than they thought, told them how to go about it, told them about the idea that had sprung fully formed as he'd walked between the steel-barred stalls with his great-grandfather's agent, the Colonel of the Army of the People's Mouths. People glanced at him as they went past, quick stabs of distaste. As he talked, Lee smiled back at the pa.s.sers-by, even bowed once or twice, until Guoquiang told him to stop being a fool in front of half the danwei.

Even this late in the evening the place was crowded. With power off in the accommodation modules, it seemed that most of the living population of the danwei was out and about. They walked in pairs or family groups beneath the cherry trees, over threadbare lawns. Hedges and arbors conspired with holographic projections to suggest continued vistas running out under a blue, sunlit sky.

Fighting-cricket fanciers crowded around breeders and their enamel pots, each with a cricket inside and the price on top of the lid. As well as crickets, the breeders sold bamboo cricket-ticklers, cricket-lore data bases, feeding straws.

In a transparent steep-sided fighting pot, two Five-star General crickets shrilled at each other, black wings spread. Their genomes had been extensively spliced and diced, and the jaws in their ma.s.sive heads were so big that they could only eat pap from a straw; their muscular hind legs were sheathed in p.r.i.c.kly armour and terminated in hooked claws. Bets were noisily laid amongst the fanciers who crowded round the big pot. The owners tickled their crickets' antennae until they locked in combat with a blur of legs and wings, watched by intent fanciers until one was pumping ichor from a half-severed head. Its owner picked it out of the pot in disgust and ground it under his sandal while around him bets were paid off in a flurry of scrip.

Beyond the fighting-cricket crowd, a wall was showing the action of the heroic opera whose music was playing over the public address system. Close-ups of white faces under lac 50 PAUL J. McAULEY quered hairstyles intercut with panoramas of the half-dozen princ.i.p.als scattered across a wide black stage with the chorus in the background. It was an opera about the last days of the Middle Kingdom on Earth: a model entrepreneurial family was trying to regain their daughter from the socialist warlord who had recruited her into service with the intention of corrupting and seducing her. In a comic subplot, the dimwit younger brother gambled futures in the family's microchip growing tanks to buy arms for the libertarian mercenaries led by the girl with whom he had fallen in love. Every ten minutes the music was interrupted by commercials for products or services not available in the danwei: this was a tape bought in a cheap lot from some backstreet operation, and no one had bothered to edit it.

The action on the screen carried on regardless of whether music or commercials were playing, which lent a surreal air to the proceedings, rather like one of the King's salvaged movies.Neither the opera nor the murmur of the people in the park was louder than the whine of the storm. A fine haze silted the air: it stung the nose and left a taste of iron, of blood, in the mouth. As he talked, Lee took mouthful after mouthful of thick yeasty beer to wash the taste of dust away.

Dust enough where he was going."I still say you're crazy," Guoquiang said when Lee had finished.Lee said, "Does that mean you will not help me?""Of course I will help you."Lee suppressed his smile. Poor Guoquiang. It was his turn to be caught in a face trap. He had promised to stand by Wei Lee, and now he had been asked this favor he had no choice.Xiao Bing said, "What will you do, Wei Lee? Turn leu li?"

"They'll hunt you down," Guoquiang said. "Better to drink your Bitter Waters's bitter water, Lee. The storm will die, and we can go before the Army of the People's Mouths come for you.""They come for me sooner than the end of the storm. And RED DUST.

51.

it's better to drink Bitter Waters's beer than Bitter Waters's bitter water. I will buy us all another.""You should tell me what they need of you, that you risk your life.""They swore me to secrecy." Lee rapped a scrip token on the tiled surface of the barrow, and asked the girl for more beer.The girl said, "Have you not had enough, citizen shareholders?"She was six or seven, hair braided back in a thick pigtail from her round face. She was addressing Guoquiang and Xiao Bing, averting her face from Lee."They can drink with me," Lee said, made bold by beer.

The girl blushed, hurried to fill the cups from her pitcher.

Foam ran down the sides of the cups and puddled the tiles.

She more or less s.n.a.t.c.hed 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, youjust 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 wallscreenthat was so successful that both Lee and Xiao Bing laughed.

"Trust me," Guoquiang said."Trust us," Xiao Bing said. "We'll miss you, Wei Lee."

"I seem to have spent all day saying goodbye," Lee said.

He really did feel cheerful. On the run in a storm with a ransomed heroine: better than this dusty fake park and its tawdry secondhand opera tapes. He shook his friends' hands and made his farewells. He had told them about the army officer, but not about the plan to free the anarchist pilot.

There was no need to go into every detail, after all. Better for his friends if they knew only what they needed to know.

It was not his fault if they jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Eleven.T.hat night, the librarian came to Lee in his dreams.

"You are in danger, Master," the librarian said. As ever, he was calm and imperturbable, the hood of his black silk robe cast over the face that was a mirror of Lee's own."What are you doing here?" Lee was naked, and was aware he was dreaming with the floating detachment that dreams bring. "I can't find you, and all the time you've been hiding in my dreams. Is that it?""To me, all of your world is a dream. So why should yoube surprised to find me in one part of it, but not another?"

"I looked for you, and you weren't there.""The soldiers commandeered much of the spare capacity in the danwei's net. It made time slow for me; I could no longer steal what I needed. Still, it meant that I shared what they were doing. That is why I know that you are in danger, Master.""I don't need a figment of my subconscious to tell me this.""The anarchist pilot is dangerous, Master. She has placed the whole danwei in danger.""That's why the soldiers have her in that womb thing."

"The danwei's information net interfaces with the isolation womb, and somehow parts of the anarchist have penetrated the net. I have seen her here," the librarian said.

"She was reading a book three corridors away. I came upon 53.