Red Dust Part 4

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 cl.u.s.tered in s.p.a.cey 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 p.r.i.c.ked Lee's bare skin. "Don't wake up, Master. Not yet. There is more to tell!"

"He's awake," someone said, and stripped the goggles from Lee's face.

Twelve.L.ee squinted in sudden light. His little room was crowded. Three men, two ordinary soldiers and the Colonel, looked down at him. The soldiers grabbed Lee's arms and sat him up. In the confusion, someone knocked the solid-body guitar from the peg on which it hung. Lee started to protest, and the Colonel told him that it was as well he was his great-grandfather's son before jabbing something into his arm.The benign fog of sleep and beer vanished instantly; but although Lee's head was clear, he kept stumbling as he was marched down the corridor. He was still naked, but no one seemed to be about to witness his shame. He asked questions, but the Colonel only ordered him to move faster.A medical technician was waiting for him at a service entrance.

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

"This is the same."Lee nodded. All he could think about was Guoquiang and Xiao Bing. About whether they had had enough time. About 55.

56.PAUL J. McAULEY whether the Army of the People's Mouths knew about his little plot.The Colonel had pulled on coveralls and a filter mask. He led Lee through the sand-trap door--pushing through hundreds of flexible but heavy interleaved plastic strips--into howling night lit by lamps whose light was bloodily blurred by whirling dust. Dawn made a b.l.o.o.d.y thumbprint above the huddled domes and tubes and sheds of the danwei.Wind buffeted and s.n.a.t.c.hed at Lee, roared past and screamed up the curve of the dome behind him. The Colonel caught his arm and hauled him a dozen paces to where a draft bact stood amidst the whirling dust, eyes sealed by thickly lashed lids. It was yoked to a trailer which carried a pod of milky plastic. The trailer's two mesh wheels were as high as Lee's shoulder. Lee could dimly make out a curled shape suspended by tubes and wires in bubbling amniotic fluid inside the pod.The Colonel shoved the bact's harness reins into one of Lee's gloved hands, a torch into the other, yelled, "Supplies in the saddlebags! Take the south road!" and slapped the bact's hairy flank. The beast stirred and strained forward, the trailer dragged through sand, and Lee was pulled along into the storm's dark whirl.

One thing Lee wasn't going to do was go south, but it took a few minutes to convince the bact to change direction. By the time they were headed towards the field domes, Lee was sweating inside his suit. Anxiety and the anti-alcohol shot had dried his mouth, and he could feel his blood pounding in his head. His chest hurt with the effort of straining air through the mask's filters. This was like birth, he thought.

Painful, and with no time for preparation.The lights of the danwei faded into the storm. All Lee had to guide him were bioluminescent markers planted on one side of the dust-buried road, a line of tall green-glowing poles rising out of whirling darkness. By their spectral light he could see the shapes the wind whipped out of the dust, a secret life writhing and tumbling, tormented by the gale RED DUST.

57.that blew slantwise over Lee and the bact as they ploddedOrl.The trailer kept digging into dust drifts and each time Lee had to run back and heave it out. The fourth or fifth time it happened he thought he saw the anarchist pilot moving inside the pod. He wiped at dust clinging to the tough plastic, shone his torch beam through murky liquid.The anarchist raised her arms, pressing against the plastic so that it deformed upwards. It didn't break but stretched with her as she rose in a crouch. Blood swirled from torn IV ligatures at the crooks of her elbows and the base of her spine. Bubbles rose around her face as the mask which fed her air was pulled askew. Her mouth was open: she was drowning in amniotic fluid.Lee's heart lurched. He scrabbled at dusty plastic: it deformed but would not tear. Wind and dust shrieked around him. He leaned over the drowning anarchist, his hands for a moment pressing against hers, her blue eyes staring up at him. He ran around the trailer, was blown to his knees by the wind, scrambled up and grabbed the saddlebag that hung at the bact's withers. But it was empty. Of course it was empty. Wind howled mockingly.No, he couldn't let his great-grandfather win so easily. He ran to one of the marker poles, leaped and swung on it until it fell over, then snapped it across his knee. Its green light went out, but he had what he needed.The pod's plastic parted beneath the jagged end of this crude spear. Thick amniotic fluid spurted, crusting with flying dust and blowing away in tatters. The anarchist's hand grabbed a torn edge; Lee grabbed another. Together, they widened the split, and suddenly the anarchist tumbled forward, her naked body coated in dust. She was lighter than he'd expected, light as a bird. He could feel her heart fluttering, the hard edge of her air mask against his chin.She reached up and raised the mask, pressed her lips to his ear."You're walking into a trap. They want me dead." The mask went back. She drew a shuddering breath, took it away 58.PAUL J. MCAULEY.

again and yelled, "You too! Wherever they said you're togo the other way!"Half a dozen questions framed themselves in Lee's head tripping over each other. Wind blew his astonishment into the howling darkness. He helped the anarchist into the flapping remains of the pod, tried to settle torn plastic around her."We're not going where my great-grandfather wants us togo!" Lee yelled, but the anarchist gave no sign that she had heard him. Plastic flapped around her; she grasped at it feebly with one hand, pressed her air mask to her face with the other.Lee whipped the bact with its halter and it stumbled forward, the trailer slewing behind it. They missed the first waymark, and for five tense minutes Lee believed all was lost. But then a shadow loomed beyond the dashed luminous line of the marker poles and his heart lifted.He had to tell the anarchist what he wanted three timesover before she understood. She let him pull her to her feet, and Lee wrapped plastic around her like a tattered cape. Its wings lifted on the dusty wind as they stumbled towards the dome's big revolving door.Calm darkness, a pocket of sheltered order in the storm'srage. They were on a wide earthen bank above the flooded fields where the spring rice grew. Lee waved his torch all around and nearly jumped out of his skin when Xiao Bing's voice cried, "Over here, Wei Lee? And Guoquiang: "Who is that with you?"A beam of light pinpointed the anarchist. She stared intoit, naked except for tattered plastic and the caked dust that clung to her dark skin. She said, "I hope these are your friends."Guoquiang was so shocked that for once he couldn't saya word. Lee told him that it was all right, that the Army of the People's Mouths wanted her to escape. Xiao Bing grinned. The silver caps over his eyes were sparks in the torchlit gloom. He couldn't stop staring at the naked anar- RED DUST 59.

chist. He said, "We should get her some clothes, do you think?"

"Thank you," the anarchist said calmly.

She was serenely regal in her filthy plastic cape. More self-possessed than anyone else, most especially Lee, who told Guoquiang, "All you had to do was leave it here, hobble it and leave it." Panic was beating inside him. He said, "Don't tell me you didn't bring it!"

"It's here," Guoquiang said, "although it nearly bit off Bing's head two or three times." He put his hands on Lee's shoulders. "We're going with you, Wei Lee! To the capital, right now! We couldn't stay, we'd be the first suspects when you went missing. We have helped you, and now you will help us."

The anarchist sealed the seam of a khaki shirt. She'd had to roll up the cuffs of the trousers, and their waistband bunched over the cord she'd tied as a crude belt. She said, "You must all listen to me. Although your soldiers did their best to keep me sedated, I was able to counter their efforts. I saw what happened to the guards when the others came for me. An officer shot them, then dropped the pistol amongst the smoking pieces of their bodies. He was wearing gloves..."

Lee remembered the pistol the Colonel had thrust into his hand. Fingerprints. He felt as if he was falling through darkness, right there where he stood on soft earth.

"This officer wants me dead," the anarchist said. "If he works for who I believe he works for, he is afraid I will tell the truth. I imagine Wei Lee is the sacrificial p.a.w.n. This will be blamed on him, and he will be killed trying to escape. So will I. They want me to escape, oh yes, but it is an excuse to kill me. There is a certain neatness to it, I suppose."

Guoquiang said to Lee, "If they wanted her dead, why did they heal her first?"

The anarchist said, "Only a disloyal faction of your soldiers wants me dead. The others carry out orders to bring me to the capital. Besides, my viruses did most of the healing.

Believe me!"

60.P^uL J. McAtLr Xiao Bing smiled. "Didn't we always tell you that taking the Sky Road was dangerous, Wei Lee?"

But Guquiang 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 cl.u.s.tered, 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 filtermask, 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 s.p.a.ced out by blowing curtains of dust that continually parted and swirled with the same flowing pseu- 61.

62.PAUL J. McAULEYdocomplexity that in fire allows the unfocused eye to generate pictures or salamanders. Lee saw ghosts of his past, vague shapes that might be presentiments of his future. The dust made a fluid, lithe hiss as it scoured past, and it worked its way into every fold of skin until he was alive with incendiary itches.The anarchist pilot clung to Lee with a fierce silence. She was injured and ill. Every so often she would lean out, lift her filter mask and vomit blood into the dusty gale. She endured this stoically.Lee learned only a little more about her; the storm wore away any attempt at conversation. They spent the second night wedged in a deep low cave, scarcely more than a crevice in the undercut base of the cliffs; the third with no shelter but a sheet of plastic weighed down with stones--and in the middle of the night they woke amidst screaming wind and dust, the plastic sheet gone. They groped their way to the warhorse, and huddled against its flank. They got no more sleep that night, but the storm kept them from speaking, and it rose in pitch the next day. The warhorse slowed from a canter to a walk, and then to a creeping pace as it leaned into roaring sheets of dust. When Lee saw the lichen stand sometime near noon--a noon no lighter than dawn--he turned the warhorse straight for it. They had gone as far as they could until the storm blew itself out.

Fourteen.The giant lichens were a design of Cho Jinfeng. Lee had sheltered in them before, but he had never before had better reason to be grateful to the legendary gene cutter.

He and the anarchist pilot, Miriam Makepeace Mbele, lay wedged head to foot in a narrow crevice within an inflated lobe, warmed by their own trapped body heat. The wails and floors and angled ceiling of the crevice were striated like muscle. The striations were bundles of hyphae.

Here and there, hyphal strands swelled into cl.u.s.ters of moist globules that tasted of musty, peppery meat, of sweetly acid fruit, or of nothing at all. Long hairy strands loosely packed the narrow corkscrew entrance. Spurs and veins of green bioluminescence made weird constellations brighter than the yellow storm light that leaked through the entrance.By night these constellations seemed to blaze, and that was when the anarchist pilot woke, in the way that sick people turn their diurnal rhythms end for end. She crawled deep into the lichen's crevice, down towards the cobweb hyphae designed to absorb body wastes, and Lee heard her throwing up. When she came back she was pale and shaky, but she was ready to talk.Miriam Makepeace Mbele was six hundred and twenty-eight Greenwich years old, born in the United States of America on Earth in the sixth decade of the twentieth century.

Or she was eighteen, brought to term in a bottle after the genome of the ancestor of her mercenary clone line had been transplanted into an enucleated ovum, and raised and 63.

64.PAUL J. MCAULEY.trained by her owners, the Mbele-Somerville family, who also owned the Information Nexus of the Belt. And she was dying.She explained it quite matter of factly. She had a way of saying things directly that was both exciting and unnerving.

The crash landing had crushed a lung, destroyed her spleen and torn up her liver. The fullerene viruses that swarmed through her bloodstream had constructed clades to bootstrap her metabolism, had turned off the pain of her internal injuries and patched up as much of the damage as they could, but her liver function was reduced almost to zero.

Blood was backing up and bursting through the weakest point, the web of veins and capillaries in her throat. She needed two things unavailable in a howling storm in the badlands of the Red Valley: rest to allow the damage to heal; and transfusions to replace lost blood.Lee would not believe that he had rescued her only to lose her. He said that as soon as the storm had blown itself out he would find a medical technician at the nearest settlement, but she only smiled and thanked him, and said it was impossible."Oh, there are white people, you didn't know that? Yankees.

Beggars and thieves and vagabonds."Miriam Makepeace Mbele (it took Lee a while to get used to the idea of her back-to-front name) said, "How fallen are the mighty. But that's not what is important. Right now, you are what is important, Wei Lee."She wanted Lee to understand why she was here. She said that she had been sent to trade with Lee's great-grandfather.

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

65.

sold news of her capture to the commercial news channels.

He'd had some of her blood drawn while she was being treated by the medical technicians. Butchers, she added; she'd be dead before her viruses could undo, cell by cell, the damage the medics' clumsy macroscopic work had done. After her cargo had been sampled, she was a liability alive, and so the fake escape attempt had been staged.Lee said, "Where you fell. You mean it's no coincidence...""It's no coincidence that the landing coordinates were so close to your home...""It's no coincidence that you crashed here...""... because your great-grandfather needed someone on hand to blame if things went wrong. Which they did. It was coincidence you and your friends stumbled onme...""We were looking for you. For the cargo of the s.p.a.cecraft.

And we found you...""...and it was lucky for me, because I guess maybe your army would have killed me right off. You guys there as witnesses, they couldn't. So that little charade was staged...""But if I was to be killed helping you escape, surely it would lead straight back to my great-grandfather...""You can't believe that your ancestor would have you killed, Wei Lee, but it is true. I was too dangerous to be allowed to live after I was captured. Your great-grandfather can't let it be known that he is trading with the anarchists, but he maintained connections with us after the Great Rea.s.sessment, and he knows that we are desperate, that we are losing the war with the Earth's Consensus. He knew we'd agree to almost anyterms. Of course, he doesn't know everything...""I am sorry that your plan did not work.""Who says it's not going to work, kid?" Miriam's somatic age was roughly the same as Lee's, but she treated him like a slightly r.e.t.a.r.ded child. She did it with a kind of rough familiar humor, and Lee discovered he didn't mind. "Your great-grandfather thinks that because he has some of my blood, he has my totipotent viruses. He doesn't."

66.PAUL J. MCAULEY.

"I am honored by your trust," Lee said."I'm not telling you everything. Not yet. Maybe if I turnyou on... but maybe not even then."Lee said recklessly, "Well, if you can't tell me everything about yourself, perhaps you can tell me about the Belt."The Belt, Miriam said, was dying. Once there had been innumerable continually shifting alliances and hundreds of different political ideologies vying for supremacy, driving a Golden Age of art and science and philosophy. On Earth, politics (before the Earth's Consensus had put an end to politics) had been shaped by geography; in the Belt, orbital mechanics were just as prescriptive. Asteroids did not follow tidy orbits. Macrotrade and migration between two asteroids that might be economical one week would suddenly become impossible the next when their different orbits moved them too far from each other and delta V differences jumped a quantum level. No family nation was ever out of contact with the information net controlled by the Nexus, unless it chose to go gray ghost ("That's when we know they're there, but they aren't talking. There are more and more of them each year."), but ideological alliances required more cement than exchange of information. Complex concatenations of political groupings and trade alliances were continually shifting in the main belt, and then there were those asteroids which pursued eccentric orbits that isolated them from human discourse except for short, irregular intervals. This ever-changing diversity was what had saved the Belt from direct conquest by the Earth's Consensus, but it also meant that the Belt had never united against their common enemy. After a long war of attrition, only remnants of the Belt's multiplex civilization survived, huddled in slowly dying arcologies. The Nexus was their last best hope.It took Miriam a long time to explain this to Lee. Most of the terms she used couldn't be translated directly into Common Language. Still, Lee was fascinated. It was a world--worlds he'd hardly suspected to have existed, a great territory of possibilities. The sky that seemed so empty, save for a few rock-bound barbarians, was buzzing and blooming RED DUST.

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with trade and information. What he wanted to know was how Miriam's trading would help the people of Mars.Miriam made a small movement that might have been a weary shrug. She was sitting with her shoulders cushioned by a soft bank of hyphae. Sweat beaded her face, was sprinkled on the V of skin between her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s, exposed by the open fastener of her shirt. Lee couldn't help staring, even though he knew that she knew he was doing it.She said, "Your great-grandfather is like the rest of the Ten Thousand Years. They all want power, and they all wantto live for ever. Your own Consensus--""The Emperor.""Whatever it calls itself. It's become isolated. We know for a fact parts of it are as old as the original terraforming program.

We suspect the same thing happened to it as happened to the Earth. It has become inward looking. It is using too many dreamers inside its systems. Agents of the Earth's Consensus--the conchies--are here to encourage that."Lee thought of the half-lifers of Bitter Waters. Rows and rows of coc.o.o.ns in the blood-warm infra-red-lit halls holding wirestrung intubated bodies. He said, "Mars is dying.

People escape from death into the perfect illusion of Heaven.""Yeah, but there's this world, too. It's at least as real asthe consensual dreams in information s.p.a.ce.""I believe that too.""So do your Ten Thousand Years."They smiled at each other in the cold green light of the lichen's chamber.Miriam said, "Dung, you and me are going to get on fine,I can see that.""Dung?""Is that wrong? My translation program didn't teach me swear words."So Lee did, to pa.s.s the long night and to distract him from Miriam's body, her closeness. She might be twice as old as his moribund great-grandfather, but her body was lithe and lovely, and his own body responded to its closeness. 68 PAUL J. MCAULEY.

She noticed, and told him to go ahead and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 thatyou 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 haveall 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.

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sort of gross, we all thought, people my age back then, he'd sold out, dressing in white leather and rhinestones, mopping his sweat with white scarves and throwing them into the audience, singing these awful ballads with these terrible pseudo long-haired musicians grunging along behind. This was the early seventies, when I was about thirteen. I was into the Doors, Cream, Edgar Winter's White Trash. All I really remember from the show was 'American Trilogy.' You know that song?"

Various things had been going through Lee's mind. But all he said was, "Of course. I have recordings of his concert; it is all that remains of Elvis on Tour. I mean, I had." It was still there, back in his little room in the Bitter Waters dan-wei, along with all his recordings, and his solid-body guitar.

He hoped that Guoquiang had them now, or Xiao Bing. If they were still alive.

Miriam wanted to listen to the King, and Lee gave her the radio. She listened a moment and shrugged and handed it back. "It's not the real King," she said, "but I guess you know that. For one thing, the real King of the Cats didn't speak Common Language. Or it's news to me he did. And there never were any blues in Common Language, I guarantee that."

Lee smiled, nervous again. "The King of the Cats became a G.o.d long ago. He can do as he wishes. Even when he was alive he could not walk amongst the people for fear that in the frenzy of their love they would tear him apart. That is why in all his later films he has to use a double for scenes set outside, and why he could never travel abroad."

Miriam laughed. "That's because his manager was an illegal alien and couldn't leave the US himself. And when I saw him the King wasn't even that famous any more. He only became famous again after he died." She laughed. "It turns out they were right all along, he didn't really die, he really was kidnapped by aliens. We have dealings, you know, with the Thing in Jupiter. Or aspects of it. The King of the Cats is just one aspect of the Thing, but I've never understood what he's about. We get his broadcasts in American.

70.PAUL J. McAuLE The Thing moves in mysterious ways, that's all there is toit. We're lucky it's on our side, more or less.""You mean your danwei?""My family? Oh, that, of course. But I mean all of us.

Humans. Or at least, the Thing in Jupiter doesn't mean us harm. It doesn't have religion, the way the Earth's Consensus does."Lee thought of his great-grandfather, of the Sky Road and of the alliance that the Emperor had made with the Earth before it had fallen silent, of the Ten Thousand Years struggling against each other to fill the vacuum of the Emperor's silence. There was no center. It was as if everything he had known had suddenly been cut free, and for a while he couldn't even think of a question to ask. When he did, Miriam had fallen asleep.

Fifteen.

A.

I some time during the night, unnoticed, the unmodulated howl of the storm faded. Lee woke to the lonesome growl of Tony Joe White's "Linesman of the County" small and clear in his head. Miriam Makepeace Mbele was sleeping, her mouth open, a fine sheen of sweat on her pale face.

Lee pushed through the lichen's matted hyphal curtain and scrambled over the drift of dusty sand that half choked the entrance. The air was clear, although the sky was still full of dust: the sun was a vast technicolor smear of red and orange in a pink sky. Wind whipped scarves of sand from the sharp crests of new drifts, but it was only a whisper now.

The warhorse was kneeling half buried downhill from the lichen stand. Lee cleared its eyes and muzzle from the caul it had spun around itself, and blew into its nostrils until it shuddered and woke. It turned its head and snapped at him in a half-hearted way.

Lee went off to set running wire traps at ice mice burrows; food would help the warhorse revive. When he and Miriam had stumbled upon the stand of lichens in howling dust-filled darkness, they had already lost their bearings. Now Lee saw that the lichen stand ramified along the top of a flood gravelbed that bent around a loop of the dust-choked river.

Above, striated sandstone cliffs rose towards the red sky, their top smashed in by an ancient crater; on the other side of the river, sandstone ridges, marked by fossil scour marks 71.

72.PAUL J. MCAULEY.like the thumbprints of the creator, saddled away towards cliffs a kilometer away, hazed by dust that still hung in the air.

Lee caught a dozen ice mice and desert rats inside an hour, but when he got back the warhorse was grazing on a stand of p.r.i.c.kly pear, excavating the spiny paddles from dust drifts with a forelimb. It nosed Lee's gift and tossed its head in disdain, then stepped back, its ribbed ears unfolding and twitching this way and that.

After a moment Lee heard what had made the warhorse quicken. It was the fluttering thud of a culver.Miriam was awake inside the dank and smelly crevice in the lichen stand. When Lee told her about the culver she said at once, "So we did not run far enough. You have only one choice. Kill me, and stay alive."

Lee opened his mouth, smiling in incomprehension.

"I'm dying. I'd rather go quickly and painlessly than have my body torn apart under questioning. I've spent all my life getting it into shape, I don't want to see it mutilated."

She was quite serious. Lee said, "You aren't serious."

She held out the big torch. "This will do it. I've focused the laser and shorted the safety on the power supply. You've only one shot, but it will be enough. Stick it against the top of my head and it'll fry my brain. I'll probably not even see the flash."

She thrust the torch at him, and he had to take it or drop it. Then she leaned into him and fastened her lips on his.

Her warm wet tongue prised open his lips, squirmed deep into his mouth. Astonished, Lee started to return the kiss, but Miriam pulled away.

"It's done," she said, "for better or worse. Wei Lee, we haven't known each other very long, and this is a f.u.c.king--did I get that right?--big favor to ask even a close friend, but it's the only favor I'm ever going to ask. See, I can't do myself. I've been blocked, to stop the goods damaging itself."

RED DUST.

73.

"Oh. Is that why you did not kill yourself when you were captured?""I wouldn't talk," Miriam said. "It doesn't matter what they do to me, I'd never talk. And that's nothing to do with a block. It's professional pride. But, I don't want to go through it, you understand?""I understand," Lee said, and raised the torch. Perhaps she saw at the last moment what he intended, because her hands started to come up, too late, as he smashed the heavy torch across the top of her head.She was as light as a bird, as if all her bones were hollow.

Although Lee had trouble dragging her through the crevice's kinked, hyphae-packed entrance, it was not too difficult to carry her downhill to the warhorse. After Lee spoke to it, the warhorse allowed him to sling Miriam's body over its withers, in front of the narrow saddle. Then Lee swung up into the saddle and the warhorse leaped forward, flying over gravel alongside the dustchoked river at an easy gallop.The sound of the culver was gone, swallowed by the aching silence of Mars. Yet as Lee rode south, the Bitter Waters River and its wide valley unravelling at a steady seventy kph, he felt a weight centred between his shoulder blades. He had not escaped, not yet.He knew that it was very unlikely that he could carry the wounded pilot to one of the secret camps of the ku li rebels, even if he could track them down. But in his mind the Red Valley fell behind and somehow they were there, under a huge spreading tree on some swampy spit of land, with a campfire sending a thin tendril of smoke into dense leaves overhead, ku li rebels in ragged but clean tunics and trousers and heavy boots going about their business amongst stacks of supplies and stands of rifles, while Lee rocked Miriam in a linen hammock suspended from one great limb of the all-sheltering tree and half listened to a lecturer off in some clearing explaining the power of the people to his cross-legged audience...Lee almost fell from the narrow saddle. The clean vertiginous shock woke him at once. The warhorse had slowed to 74.PAUL J. MCAULEY.

a walking pace and was s.n.a.t.c.hing at th.o.r.n.y vegetation that grew in the dry mudflats flanking the river channel. The sound of the culver fluttered somewhere in the empty sky.Lee s.n.a.t.c.hed the reins with the intention of bringing the warhorse under control, but he forgot to speak the word of command and the beast struck at his leg. Lee pulled back hard and shouted. The warhorse pranced sideways. Miriam started to slide and Lee grabbed at her: the warhorse bucked and they both fell.They rolled down a crusty slope of dry mud, enveloped in clouds of dust. The warhorse screamed and shot away like an arrow from a bow. In less than a minute it was out of sight. The rope of dust left in its wake rose and twisted in the still air.The fall partly brought Miriam to her senses. Lee helped her sit up, and she punched him square in the chest. As he sprawled backwards, she slid the torch from his belt loop.

Her eyes were starry with tears. She said, "Do me! Do menOW[""I don't...""Kill me!"Lee grabbed for the torch but Miriam threw herself flat,swift as a striking snake. Something roared and roared overhead.

Lee lunged again, but she managed to drive a sharp elbow into his ribs and tried to roll away from him. He grabbed her ankle and was dragged through crusty mud, a roaring in his ears, his heart pounding. Miriam turned to club at his hand and he pulled; off-balance, she fell.In a moment, Lee was on her; in the next, he had s.n.a.t.c.hedthe torch from her grasp. She b.u.t.ted his chin with the top of her head; his teeth clicked on his tongue tip and pain spiked the roof of his skull. She got an elbow in his stomach and he sobbed for breath that suddenly wouldn't come. The roaring was louder, and streamers of dust were flying away from them in every direction.Lee looked up, saw the black wasp-shape of the culver tilted a dozen meters above, so close that he could see the RED DUST.