Red Dust Part 14

He finished his tea, licked grease from his fingers. The fear that any moment he would be killed had not abated, but he was getting used to it. Every sense sang to him with incredible clarity: he was aware of the nap of the plush seats under his thighs, sweat on his skin under the denim s.h.i.+rt and heavy chuba, dust motes swimming in the light that fell through the smeared window, the electric musk of the mercenary.

She watched him watching her, her gaze made enigmatic by the purple-gold lenses of her video-shades. Every now and then they filmed over as she accessed or received a transmission.

She said abruptly, "She's still alive. After the transfer.''

"I don't think she calls it life."

"Name?"

"Miriam. Miriam Makepeace Mbele. Did you know her?" "I don't think so. The family, of course. The Nexus is one of the last holdouts, but they'll fall. They'll fall. She was on the wrong side."

"She looked just like you."

"Of course. In a guerrilla war, it is always better if the insurgents use the same weapons as the government they're fighting. Anything else creates logistical problems. The Nexus was allowed to acquire my genome centuries ago--we can always predict when they'll try and use it, and how it will behave. Besides, I understand that all off-worlders look the same to the Han."

"I wouldn't know. I've only ever met two off-worlders.

You, and Miriam. You look different from Yankees." For some reason he thought of Redd.

"The gene line was originally Caucasian. But it has been...

somewhat adapted."

Lee remembered Miriam in the dream. Pale-faced, straw 212 PAUL J. MCAULEY.

haired, in crudely daubed clothes. "Miriam took the name of the family who owned her. But you are a free agent?"

Saying Miriam's name gave him a pang of hope, as if it was a charm to ward off death.

"She was a fool to declare her allegiance. As for me, you will find out if you are meant to find out."

"You are concerned about secrecy, yet you behave in such a way that all the station must know what happened here."

"That's the point. You think only I and that army fool work together to bring you here?"

"Someone chased me, last night."

The mercenary shrugged. "Perhaps he was one of ours, perhaps not. What happened to him?"

"He disappeared. I think he drowned."

Again, the mercenary shrugged.

A silence fell. Lee tried to evoke Miriam, but she was out of reach. He needed Chen Yao, who could speak directly with virus-encoded personalities.

The train shuddered and jerked and started to move forward, and at the same moment a dumpy woman in a gray quilted jacket pulled back the door. She had a clipboard under her arm, and a peaked cap pushed back on her head.

She said, "Pardon me, citizens, but do you have reservations for this compartment? There has been a complaint."

Lee saw his chance. He jumped to his feet and bowed and quickly said he was very sorry, he had made a mistake. The mercenary lunged for him and he bolted into the press in the corridor, stumbling over packages and baskets and sprawling people. The train was shuddering and lurching as it picked up speed over buckled tracks. Lee risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the mercenary halfway out the compartment, trying to shake off the guard who was doggedly clinging to one of her arms.

Lee lurched through a knot of people, gained the angle of the door. Pa.s.sengers clinging to grab rails outside the carriage goggled at him as he leaned out into gritty wind. The locomotive's whistle shrieked far along the train's smooth snake. It was coming up to the swampy border of the city's reclaimed RED DUST.

213.land. Shacks crumbling in abandoned fields, a wrecked melt.w.a.ter plant standing in a wide basin of dried mud, low tangles of black trees and ochre stretches of bare, rocky ground.

Shouts behind him, and the mercenary's hoa.r.s.e voice raised above them.

Lee made a desperate calculation, and jumped.

Hands reached to grab him: pa.s.sengers trying to save him from himself. The thunder of the train filling his ears, Lee fell through air and hit the gritty embankment. He rolled and tumbled, breath knocked out of him, and fetched up in a tangle of briars. It seemed to take a long time to ease himself out of the clutches of the th.o.r.n.y canes. The train had disappeared, but at the top of the embankment the rail still sang with its pa.s.sing.

Lee spat a mouthful of grit. The right side of his body was sc.r.a.ped and raw under torn cloth, and he had banged his left knee badly. But he was free, free to choose to walk into the city or head into the desert. It wasn't much of a choice, but he knew where he had to go.

He limped up the steep slope of sliding dry stones to the top of the embankment. Parched marshlands stretched on either side under a haze in the cold afternoon. Beyond was the prospect of dry red plains.

"Look all you want," someone said behind him.

Lee almost jumped out of his skin, then something grabbed him from inside and he whirled in a fighter's crouch. The mercenary's rifle was right in his face.

She said, "I'd love you to try it on. But I have orders."

Her smile was an edge of steel under her video-shades. There were scuffs on the knees of her tight leather outfit, but otherwise she was quite unruffled. She must have jumped out of the train at almost the same moment as Lee, and circled back to ambush him.

Lee put his hands together before his chest and bowed in bitter submission. And Mary Makepeace Doe hit him across the head with the stock of her weapon.

Forty-four.

Wi i Lee and the mercenary walked the line atop the mbankment for most of the chill equatorial after-oon.

Rather, Lee limped, the side of his head swollen with hot pain. His quiff, matted with dust, kept falling across his eyes. The embankment dwindled away in front of him, crossing the marshes towards the beginning of a cratered plain at the horizon.

Crisp bright sunlight and bone-dry air sucked moisture from him as he limped along. After a couple of hours, he would have killed to roll down the embankment's stony slope into one of the marsh's sc.u.mmy seeps, more muddy sand than water but wet at least, damp, dank, moist. Last night he had nearly drowned, and now he was dying of thirst. It was as if a lifetime's worth of the world's torments had been compressed into a few hours. He couldn't even tune into the King's broadcast; that was still being jammed.

The mercenary wouldn't allow him to slow his pace. Apparently the plan had been for the train to slow to a crawl so that she and Lee could step off, but Lee had pre-empted that by a dozen kilometers. They had a lot of distance to make up. The only times they left the embankment were when the rails sang warning of a pa.s.sing train, and Mary Makepeace Doe didn't let Lee stray from her side. It happened three times, and after the last she said, "There'll be no more."

Lee asked how she knew.214.

RED DUST.

215.

"Because that's the agreement with The Little Bird. Ourpeople out in exchange for a ceasefire.""So you lost.""A temporary setback. It's not important. The Little Bird thinks that he can outsmart the conservationists, but he'll pay the price for it. Move faster, d.a.m.n you!"If she felt the effects of sun and dry air she showed no sign of it, except that she had smeared a translucent cream on her lips. When they finally reached the rendezvous, she looked as strong and implacable as ever.A caravan, a fat segmented silver tube like an industrial-designed insect grub, was parked at the bottom of the embankment, near the edge of the sour marshes. The radiator fins of its power plant bled a s.h.i.+mmer of heat into the still afternoon air. Around it, scrubby thorn bushes threw spidery black shapes amongst craggy boulders that glowed like heated iron in the afternoon sunlight."Go on down," the mercenary said, and prodded Lee in the small of his back, hard enough to hurt.Lee's injured knee unhinged halfway down the embankment.

He slithered all the way down on his backside, once again ending up in a tangle of th.o.r.n.y canes. Obviously, the bushes had been designed to break the fall of travellers and then suck their blood. It was almost good to relax in their piercing grip.A shadow eclipsed the hard pink sky and its feathering of high clouds. Mary Makepeace Doe dragged Lee to his feet, and the pain of losing gobbets of flesh to clutching thorns brought him awake.He was able to stumble ahead of the mercenary towards the segmented silvery caravan, but, just as he reached its shadow, his feet twisted under him and the side of the world slammed into him with every unforgiving gram of its ma.s.s.

Forty-five.L.ee was in a humming s.p.a.ce of bright metal and white light. A translucent sac taped to his elbow was slowly wrinkling as it pumped saline into a vein. A soaked sponge was put to his cracked lips and he greedily sucked moisture from it. Two attendants, small neat sharp-featured men who might have been brothers, might have been any age from ten to twenty, stripped off his dusty clothes, stuck needles in his joints to counter pain, bandaged his raw skin.

Then they plucked off the by-now empty saline sac and helped him into soft clean trousers of unbleached linen, a raw silk s.h.i.+rt. They even greased his hair back into an approximation of its original quiff.As they worked, the attendants talked to each other in a language Lee had never heard before. They used gestures and prods to make him understand what they wanted of him, just as one would treat a docile but stupid animal.They pushed and prodded him to his feet and tugged him through a low narrow hatch into an airy room filled with color.The room was a tent, pitched up against the curved silvery side of the caravan. Five people turned to look at him as he came through. There was the mercenary, her leathers still dusty, a man dressed in white just like Lee, a very young boy. But Lee hardly noticed them, because he saw that Chen Yao was there, too.She sat unsmiling in a big square chair in a corner of the 216.

RED DUST.

217.

tented s.p.a.ce, her feet kicking above the carpets that lapped the ground. The Colonel stood behind the chair, a hand resting on its back just above Chen Yao's head. Neat and dapper in his uniform, he inclined his head in formal acknowledgement of Lee's stare. Lee willed him to die right then and there, but psychic powers were not part of the viruses' gifts.Someone stepped in front of Lee. It was the man in white.

He was very tall and thin, and his skin was so pale he might have been bloodless. He polished a red apple on his silk s.h.i.+rt, bit into it with relish. Chewing, he said, "So glad you're here at last, Wei Lee. And Miriam too, if you are listening." He took another bite of the apple. "She tried to kill me once, you know. That's war. Or the kind of war we're fighting. You never know who's going to turn up, and where."Lee pointed at Mary Makepeace Doe, who leaned against the silver side of the caravan and said, "Are you sure it wasn't her?""This is a very strange war, Wei Lee. Only a few people are directly involved, and so each of their moves are magnified. I wave my hand..." the half-eaten apple had vanished somehow: Lee blinked, forced himself to pay attention "... and thousands die. Or millions. You wield the same power, although perhaps you are only just realizing that."Lee remembered the riots. And before that, the monks of the lost lamasery."You see," the man said with a smile, "you do understand.

Like it or not, you are one of the players now. So is everyone in this tent, and perhaps a score more people in the rest of the Solar System. I know them all, and I have been playing the game a long time."So," he said, suddenly bright, "here we are. Once upon a time your friend Miriam tried to kill me. She wasn't a player, then. But her failure pushed her into a position where she had to become one, or die. And now she has fallen inside you, and the same thing has happened to you. Interesting, don't you think? There's a pattern."The little boy spoke up in a piping treble. "He will not be a player much longer, if he ever was one."

218.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Lee hadn't taken much notice of the boy before, but now he saw that a thick braided cable was looped over his arm.

It ran up into the inverted bowl of his black hair, ran back into a corner of the tent curtained with filmy white. It was just possible to make out a high double bed flanked by monitoring equipment back there, a shadowy glimpse that triggered vague uneasy memories in Lee, a troubling, deep unease he couldn't quite define. And the boy reminded him of someone, too. The lineaments of a familiar face lay under the plump cheeks, the cupid bow mouth, the wide flat nose.The boy said, "We have been neglecting our introductions, Wei Lee, although I think you are beginning to suspect who I am. The Colonel you already know, and of course you have just enjoyed a stroll through the countryside with Mary Makepeace Doe."The mercenary looked up, a scowl twisting her mouth under the video-shades. The boy bowed to her, and Lee glimpsed the junction at the base of his skull where the cable broke into filaments that fanned out and burrowed under his scalp like tree roots clutching a boulder."We forgive you," the boy said to the mercenary, "because you are necessary to us."The man in white said, "She is a player, too. Her name of course is not really Doe, but Gaia. Mary Makepeace Gaia.

The kind of people she was working with made it necessary that she work under cover."The boy piped up, cross at having been interrupted, "I must introduce you to the most important person last of all.

The head of the conservationist missionary expedition from Gaia. Doctor Lovelace Damon."The man in white bowed from the waist. "Damon Love-lace, in the fas.h.i.+on of Gaia."The boy reddened. His black almond-shaped eyes glistened and his mouth worked as if he was about to burst into tears, but then his face froze and he stiffly bowed an apology."Control will come as the interface knits up," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "Besides, there's nothing to apologize for.

Names aren't important to us. We are one."

RED DUST.

219.Suddenly Lee knew who the boy was, and what was lying in the bed behind the gauzy curtain. He had seen the equip-ment-laden double bed once before. He had been so very young, and near to collapse from exhaustion, still suffering from smoke inhalation and flash-burns from his parents' a.s.sa.s.sination.

He remembered being marched into a clean white room, and shown for the first and last time the reality of his great-grandfather.

A high, wide bed, sheets like snow under bright lights.

Two bodies in it, separated by a bolster. Both male. One young and pinkly hairless, its eyes bandaged, tubes running into its nose, into a ligature in its throat. The other little more than a skeleton clad in leathery skin, head hidden by a complicated helmet, withered arms drawn up on the ladder of ribs of the chest, hands gloved in rigid black polymer.

Wires ran back from helmet and hands and tangled into cables that went into the wall behind the bed.

Two bodies, linked by transparent tubes through which rich red blood pulsed: one the mummified near-corpse of Lee's great-grandfather; the other the decerebrated Yankee which kept his ancient body alive.

The little boy watched Lee's expression change. He smirked, twisted one foot against the other. His face was a young, plump version of Great-grandfather Wei's eidolon.

"That's right, son," he said. He was s.h.i.+ning with proud enthusiasm. "At last I will be free of the dead weight of my body. I'll be free to move in the world again. I am being transferred piece by piece into the brain of this living eidolon, which was grown from a single cell taken from the epithelial lining of my bowel. I will live for ever, not merely for ten thousand years!"

And he skipped a gleeful little dance, right there on the luxurious carpet. The cable which linked him to his ancient body swung in long arcs behind him.

Lee thought that the eidolon had been a true representation of his great-grandfather after all. A picture, out of time. He had puzzled over it every time he had visited the Great House, and now he knew, and it didn't matter.

220.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Dr. Damon Lovelace watched indulgently, for all the worlds like a proud parent. Which he was, in a way. He told Lee that it was Gaia (which was what conchies called both the Earth and the Earth's Consensus) which had made this possible. The transference of mind into a new body was routine: it was how people were born, on Gaia. He himself had been born that way."Although of course there was the added complication of reading my genome from storage into a quickened artificial ovum. It is whole and true transference, not at all like what happened between you and Miriam, Wei Lee. We are very far ahead of the anarchists' technology, on Gaia."The little boy laughed. "Except for fullerene virus design.., unfortunately for you, my dear son. You see, Miriam's infection will not save you. Quite the reverse. We cannot study it without destroying you."Lee held out an arm. "Just take my blood." It was what he had been travelling towards the capital to offer, the discharge of his life's debt. His nerves sang with expectation.

"Please," he said, when no one moved."If only it was that simple," Dr. Damon Lovelace said.

"Only the simpler kinds of viruses live in your blood, Wei Lee. We know all about those. Clades of the common kinds of self-replicating sub-microscopic machines, constructed of varieties of metal-doped carbon-lattice spheres, which routinely perform the housekeeping tasks which increase life-span.

Cancer stalkers, plaque busters and the like. But the special viruses that Miriam Makepeace Mbele carried have woven themselves into your nervous system. Think of the weave of this carpet. You could tease out the individual threads, but you would destroy the patterns they make. So with the viruses that have rebuilt your nervous system from the inside. To retrieve them we must destroy the pattern."Lee realized then that they only knew a little about Miriam's viruses. They did not know, for instance, that the infection could be transferred by something as simple as a kiss."We must kill you, my son," the little boy piped up, grinning mischievously.

RED DUST.

221.Boy-thing, Lee thought, his skin crawling."And of course we will likewise dissect your girlfriend,"

Dr. Damon Lovelace said, smiling cheerfully. "She has also been infected with viruses that built themselves into her nervous system. It makes her a translator, able to access virus systems at all levels. An interesting coincidence, don't you think, Wei Lee? That the viral machinery which allows fishermen to talk to augmented dolphins also allows communication with the clades of viral machines used by the anarchists. I have the greatest respect for the achievements of your great scientist, Cho Jinfeng.""Silly little man," Chen Yao said. She jumped down from the couch, dodging the Colonel's restraining hand. "Yes, silly and foolish and puny and vain. You see only what you wish to see, and so you are blind.""Now just be quiet? the Colonel said, trying to catch hold of the little girl."Oh no," Damon Lovelace said. "Let her speak. It's traditional, after all. And besides, we may learn something. Afterwards, we will offer her a cigarette.""I'll speak because I want to," Chen Yao said. She was very calm, Lee saw, very calm and very self-possessed. Her aspect was upon her. She pressed her hands in front of her, fingertip to fingertip, and bowed to the boy-thing."I respect you for your age, great-grandfather," she said.

She spoke with deliberation and icy calm. Each word was a stone, flung with force. "Age and experience you have in abundance, and those I respect. But I cannot respect you for your wisdom. You and your kind have sold our world for your own profit, and that cannot be forgiven. And it will not be forgiven. You have lived so long that you want nothing more than to live for ever. You grasp at life with the unforgiving greed of a parasite, not caring that your very existence condemns millions to death. I tell you this: your act of piracywill not be allowed to be completed."She bowed again.And then she stepped forward and spat in the boy-thing's face.

222.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

The boy-thing flushed with anger. He hissed like a snake and tried to kick and punch Chen Yao, but she skipped out of reach and when he charged blindly after her he was brought up short by his cable and fell on his back. He wailed and sputtered with outrage, kicking his legs in the air and screaming that she'd die, she'd die right now, for what she'd done.

"Kill the little b.i.t.c.h! Mary Makepeace Gaia! I order you! I order you to kill her! Take her out, Colonel! Shoot her! Blow her f.u.c.king brains out!"

Tears ran in snail tracks from the corners of his eyes to his ears, and snot and spit bubbled from nostrils and mouth.

Dr. Damon Lovelace stooped and picked him up, hugged him and said tenderly, "I know it's hard. Young glands on a hair trigger, the fret of a new nervous system, all that. But you'll learn control. We all have to learn to control our unruly flesh when born again to the wheel, and so will you.

Hush, now. Hush. She'll die soon enough, and her death will be far far worse than a bullet in the head."

The boy-thing sniffed deeply, hiccuped. "I want to watch,"

he said. "And then I want to go home. I hate the wilderness.

I've brought you the anarchist's Trojan Horse, and now you must bring me The Little Bird. I want to have his own eidolon flay his rotten cancerous body centimeter by centimeter.

That's what we agreed." He glared over Lovelace's shoulder at Lee. "And you, you never were any son of mine.

Your parents were employees, not blood relations. You never were anything but a p.a.w.n, Wei Lee, and you have advanced to your final square."

"How I hate clich(," Chen Yao said. She was still wearing her aspect. "Always it blurs meaning. But to extend it for a moment, you forget p.a.w.ns can move diagonally if they take something. Wei Lee has moved aslant you all, and carries the seeds of greatness inside him. He has started a revolution.

He has far to go. And his next move will destroy you."

Dr. Damon Lovelace put down the boy-thing. "He triggered an inevitable rebellion, little girl. He upset our plans, but not by much, for we had always planned to neutralize RED DUST.

223.

The Little Bird. But now people kill each other, and that is very regrettable, very immature. We have no way to read dead brains, and so with every minute of rebellion the data base of potential overseers grows smaller.""As on the Earth, so in Heaven," Chen Yao said. "But I don't think so."The Colonel had been holding himself quiet and still all through this. Now he could no longer hold in his outrage.

He said, "Sir! I am ready to deal with this brat on your orders.""In good time," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "She's harmless, after all. Harmless, and sadly out of date. Metaphors are useful, Chen Yao. Good metaphors s.h.i.+ne a light through complex ideas, and simplify their shape."Chen Yao said disdainfully, "I'd rather things shone with their own light."Lee could no longer hold in his own outburst. He was gripped by the vertigo of erased history. He felt that he was standing at the edge of a pit, where a moment ago there had been firm ground. The pit was the gap in what he thought he had known, his own story erased by a petulant outburst.He said to the boy-thing, "Who was my father if he was not the first-born child of your own son! Who was my mother!"What he meant was, who am I?The boy-thing shrugged. He was calm again. "Loyal employees at the middle level. Nothing more. You were born as bait to hook bigger fish, with the fiction that I was a kind of rebel, out of sympathy with my fellows. An old trick, but successful even so. But do not think yourself special, Wei Lee. There are others like you. You just happen to be the bait which was swallowed at the right time.""Then I don't owe you anything! I don't owe you anything at all? Lee could have danced on the carpet with joy. Only Chen Yao's serious gaze stopped him.The boy-thing draped his cable over his arm with an imperious gesture. "Your life is mine. After all, you have nothing else to give me."

224.