Red Dust Part 15

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

Chert Yao said, "You cannot talk to them, Lee. They do not hear, nor do they think. Their heads are full of straw. It is time for us to go."Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "I don't think so, little lady. We have not begun with you. Your death will be a beginning, but only that."Chen Yao said, "You're as stupid as the old man. What time do you come from, to be born in this time and pretend to rule us? Keep Earth and the wilderness you've made of it, if you want. We'll take the rest of the universe.""Ah," Dr. Damon Lovelace said. "The hubris of the young.

To go boldly where no man has gone before--I remember that tag from my first incarnation. But you must forgive these memories. Nostalgia is a luxury afforded only by the incurably romantic. Silly little girl, the universe isn't a blank map for your kind to scribble over. It is its own thing, and it is no place for intelligence. That lies inward, not outward.

Your allies are the tattered remnants of the old order, not the harbingers of a New Age. Gaia is that Age, and we are its guardians. You're history. And you too, Wei Lee. A pity, because I understand you were a biologist. I wish we hadtime to talk, but there you are."He clapped his hands, twice.The twin attendants appeared at the tent's entrance. Lee's heart raced in sudden antic.i.p.ation.But before Dr. Damon Lovelace could give his order, the attendants were knocked aside by a soldier covered in red dust. She fell to her knees on the carpeted ground and bowed to the boy-thing, to Dr. Damon Lovelace. She was shaking with fear or exhaustion, her holster was empty, and there was a b.l.o.o.d.y tear across the shoulders of her black uniform."Speak," the boy-thing said in as nastily petulant a tone as Lee had ever heard.The soldier raised the mirrored visor of her helmet. She was very young, Lee saw. She said, "A thousand pardons, ancestor.

A thousand pardons, Master. A terrible thing..."Dr. Damon Lovelace grasped the soldier's neck, pulled her RED DUST.

225.up without any visible effort. Her feet kicked out, the toes of her cleated boots barely brus.h.i.+ng the carpet. "In one word," Lovelace said.

"A-ambus.h.!.+"

Dr. Damon Lovelace threw the soldier against the side of the caravan. Her helmet rang like a bell and she fell down beside Mary Makepeace Gaia.

The mercenary raised an eyebrow, and then she was gone. "It won't do any good," Chen Yao said. "You hide out here because you do not dare face the mobs in the city, and so you deliver yourselves into our hands. Your perimeter defenses are no longer active. They haven't been since I was walked through them. Viruses subverted the machinery, and half a dozen desert fighters captured your troops. That one was allowed to escape, ahead of the storm."

The mercenary was back, as suddenly as she had left. "It's true," she said calmly. "The ring alarms have not been triggered and the motion sensors appear to be functioning, but no one answers at any of the guard posts."

Dr. Damon Lovelace shrugged. "We'll fall back and regroup.

Disable the prisoners."

"Sir?" the Colonel said.

"Break their spines. Between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae will do the trick. We'll process them later. Do I have to tell you everything?"

Chen Yao did something astonis.h.i.+ng: a back flip that sent her flying feet first into the boy-thing. He went down with a startled yelp and she pulled him to his feet. Her hand was at his throat, and there was a metal spike in her hand.

The Colonel and the mercenary both drew their pistols, but Chert Yao pulled the boy-thing backwards step by step until they were up against the high double bed. Gauzy curtains billowed around them.

Chen Yao shouted shrilly, "I'll cut his carotid arteries!

Brain death in two minutes!"

The mercenary let the hand holding her pistol fall to her side. The Colonel looked at Dr. Damon Lovelace.

The boy-thing squirmed, then squealed when Chert Yao 226.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.nicked the soft skin of his throat. Bright red blood blossomed at the neck of his tunic. The boy-thing shrieked in fear.And there was another sound, a soft thras.h.i.+ng from the curtained bed behind Chen Yao and her prisoner.Dr. Damon Lovelace said, "You hold the wrong body, foolish girl."Chen Yao said, "He is in neither one place nor the other.

Like those in the process of dying into your famous new world, he still needs his old body. Another mistake, to think of me as a little girl. I'm not. I'm a G.o.d. Over here, Wei Lee.

They won't hurt you."Lee stepped past the Colonel, and Chen Yao's free hand grasped his. Instantly, everything seemed to slow around him. His sight was overlaid with gridded symbols, and he felt a sudden rush of dizzy strength, as if he'd been plunged head first into a bubble of pure oxygen. Chen Yao had switched on the modifications woven in his nervous system, all at once.And now he could hear a distant rumble, a long way beyond the encampment, but growing louder at a steady rate.Dr. Damon Lovelace's voice was a ba.s.s drawl. "Give it up and I promise a quick death. You must know that you cannot run. You have the wrong hostage for that.""I don't need to run. But you do. Ask your soldier."

Mary Makepeace Gaia held out her hand, let her pistol fall to the carpet. Then she whirled on the slumped soldier, did something that made the woman scream."Speak," the mercenary said softly. To Lee it was like thunder."We, we must run. There's a stampede on the way. Yaks!

Thousands and thousands..."The Colonel's attention wavered, and Lee stepped up and plucked the man's pistol from his hand as easily as taking a toy from a sleeping child.Mary Makepeace Gaia dived to the floor and rolled, so quickly she would have been a blur in normal time. She RED DUST.

227.rolled again, came up behind the partial cover of a flowering yucca in a big earthenware pot. She had her pistol in her hand.Lee moved too, without thinking. He spun the Colonel round just as the mercenary fired. The Colonel yelled (a ba.s.so profundo rumbling) and his hand slowly moved to clasp his wounded arm. The sleeve of his tunic was on fire.

So was the material of the tent behind him.The mercenary's pistol tracked in quick jerks, and Lee stepped back and forth, buffeting the hapless Colonel this way and that. Lee was pumped up with adrenalin. Everything except the mercenary's hand, the needle hole in the center of the pistol's fat barrel, was a disregarded blur.The mercenary shot again. The beam glancingly struck the Colonel's head. He shuddered and slumped, so much dead weight. His hair had caught fire. Jerk, and suddenly the needle hole was pointed right at Lee's face.Lee let go of the Colonel's body and closed his eyes. He couldn't help it. He couldn't separate the pounding of his heart from the pounding of the stampede. Both shook him equally.The mercenary yelped, a soft, half-gulped sound. Lee opened his eyes. The mercenary had dropped her pistol. Her hand was cupped beneath the cracked right lens of her video-shades. Flickering with random colors, gla.s.s splintered around the end of the metal spike dead center of the lens.The mercenary's cupped hand filled with blood; blood spilled down her wrist.Chen Yao yelled into Lee's face that it was time to go. She had to yell it twice: the stampede was almost upon them.

Lee let the Colonel's body drop to the floor. The tent was filled with the stench of charred flesh and the sharp smell of burnt hair. The boy-thing was curled up on his side, clutching his b.l.o.o.d.y throat. Dr. Damon Lovelace was running in slow motion towards the shelter of the caravan.Lee raised the Colonel's pistol. The side of the tent blew 228.

PAUl. J. McAu.E away in a flare of hot light. Red dust whirled in, smothering Lee and Chen Yao. Dark shapes moved in the murk beyond.

The whole ground vibrated. Lee lifted Chen Yao into his arms and ran into the stampede.

Forty-six.D.espite his jazzed-up nerves and turbo-charged muscles, Wei Lee was nearly run down twice by charging yaks before he managed to carry Chen Yao to the relative shelter of a clump of thorn bushes that grew in the angle of a tipped-up shelf of red rock.He set down Chen Yao, flopped beside her, and coughed and coughed and coughed. He could taste dust all the way down to the bottom of his lungs. What he spat was red as blood. Fifty per cent of the air seemed to be fine silt thrown up by the pounding hoofs of the stampeding yaks.A yak swerved around the rocks as neatly as a dancer. One of its hoofs almost stamped on Lee's foot, but his speeded reactions gave him plenty of time to tuck his leg out of the way, mark the animal's rolling red-rimmed eyes under the jut of its horns and every pin-p.r.i.c.k spatter of moisture on his face from the orange froth shaken from its muzzle. He shared its bewildered rage and shouted into the dust."All the time I searched for my parents I thought I knew who they were! Now I've found them, but I don't know them at all!"Another yak went by, stately and slow amidst rolling red dust. And another. And another. They made the world over into dust and thunder.Lee pressed into the bushes, scarcely noticing the cat's-claw thorns that scored his flesh, or the bone-deep ache in his skull where the mercenary had hit him. The last few 229.

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PAUL J. MCAULEY.moments in the tent kept flas.h.i.+ng past, especially the instant of the Colonel's death. Lee could still feel the final shudder of the Colonel's body; the stink of burnt flesh and hair seemed to be permanently bonded in his nostrils, deeper than dust could reach. Although he had not actually killed the man, Lee felt responsible for his death, and knew, now that the Colonel was dead, that although he had murdered his parents he had not deserved to die. No one born into life deserves death.Chen Yao huddled closer against Lee, s.h.i.+vering with nervous exhaustion. She was no longer wearing the aspect of a G.o.d; she was just a little girl. Lee put his arm around her and after a moment she touched his wrist...

.. and everything around him speeded up.No. He had slowed down, back to normal speed.Chen Yao said in a distracted monotone, as if reciting something she had learned by rote, "It is dangerous to use your enhancements for too long. Noradrenalin overload will burn out the interface synapses."Their stampede seemed to have mostly pa.s.sed, although clouds of dust obliterated almost everything. Lazy billows rose to blot out even the sun, which was now only a few spans from the laboring horizon. The caravan was gone, escaped or obliterated. Yaks were blurry ghosts in grainy clouds lit by low-level light. A calf in a coat of hair down to the ground ran close by, bawling, its hindquarters streaked with s.h.i.+t. A yak crashed against the shelf of rock that sheltered Lee and Chen Yao and tried to scramble over it, sharp hoofs las.h.i.+ng the thorn bushes. Then it rolled off, bounced to its feet, and was gone.Lee shouted into Chen Yao's ear. "How many yaks doesit take to make a stampede?""As many as you can get!"Lee pulled himself from thorns and risked standing up.

There were only a few yaks now, half trotting, half walking, with the studied insouciant air of those who don't want to be a.s.sociated with the herd, but at the same time don't want to be left behind.

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Lee bent to Chen Yao, pulled her to her feet. "I think we can make a run for it."Chen Yao said, "Don't be silly," but Lee, hardly hearing her, yanked on her arm and dragged her at a run out into the tail end of the stampede. It was perfectly safe, after all.

By infra-red he could see any stragglers through the blowing dust long before they could see him. Chen Yao tried to drag him to a halt, but he pulled hard and she yelped and stumbled after him, out of breath and coughing on dust so that he couldn't understand what she was trying to tell him.Nor did he really care: he was riding a sudden wind of adrenalin. He was free, free, free! Free of his captors. Free of the fear of death, for now he knew how ba.n.a.l the threat was. And most of all, free of the obligation that had shaped his life. He was as free as a b.u.t.terfly that had struggled out of its coc.o.o.n after three hundred days of winter sleep and taken flight from the dull time of growth.Free of everything, even of a plan really, except some vague idea of finding the railway line, of skipping along the tracks all the way back to the city. Of going home.He had forgotten that he had no home; had forgotten, too, all about the dream-revealed destiny he had fallen into.And he had also forgotten where the railway line was. He'd been dragging Chen Yao at a trot through swirling dust along a more or less straight route, zigging this way to avoid a stray yak, zagging that way to get around an outcrop of eroded boulders or a clump of thorn bushes. He remembered that the caravan had been within easy reach of the railway line, but they had walked two or three times that distance now and there was still no sight of it.Lee stopped, out of breath and dizzily exhilarated. It was time to get his bearings. Chen Yao jerked her hand away from his, and at the same time he heard a nagging whine, rising and falling in the distance.It was an electric engine screaming under duress.Chen Yao kicked Lee in the s.h.i.+n. He jumped back, surprised.

She kicked again, catching him under his kneecap, and his legs folded under him and he sat down in a mess of 232.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.yak flop. Chen Yao grabbed his ears and shouted into his face."You won't listen! You just won't listen!"Lee blinked up at her, smiling with astonishment. Chen Yao was trembling with anger. Tears made muddy tracks in the red dust that coated her face. "We were safe where we were. There is a pick-up looking for us! How can it find us when we are stumbling around!"Lee tried to get up, put his hand in more yak s.h.i.+t, and fell over again, besmearing himself with even more of the stinking green slime."Listen," Chen Yao said.Lee didn't need his hyper-keen senses to hear the nagging mosquito whine. It grew faint and then loud, and then faint again, circling away and circling back in an unpredictable pattern.Chen Yao said, "You hear? You hear that?" She was looking around, peering this way and that into billowing dust.

At last she said, "This way. Hurry, before she catches up!"She ran before Lee could get to his feet, but it was the knock-kneed run of a little girl, and he easily caught up with her."Where are we going?""We're running away. From her, from the sister. The sister of, of your friend. Of Miriam." Chen Yao was already out of breath. Her words came out in angry little spasms. Her expression was one Lee had never before seen on someone so young. "I should have killed her. Should have. But it would be bad karma. Oh please! Come on!"That was when Lee heard the nagging whine crossing from right to left far behind them, growing louder, closer.Chen Yao was running fast now; Lee could hardly keepup with her. She shouted, "Dust helps hide us, but she's random tracking. And not on foot."Then she disappeared from view, and Lee stepped on to thin air and fell with a sickening slide down a steep slope.

He came to a stop a few meters from the corpse of a yak; a small avalanche of stones bounced off his back.

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Chen Yao grabbed his arm, pulled him down. Something had half eviscerated the yak--perhaps only the fall--and Lee was soaked in blood as he huddled with Chen Yao inside the coa.r.s.e reeking pelt. A tangle of slippery intestines bulged against his back, hot as his skin. The rich fetid smell of fermented vegetation rose from the corpse's spilled bowels.

"Quiet," Chen Yao said. "She's wired just like you."

Lee understood. At the same moment he heard the mosquito whine above him and held his breath, willing himself to become one with the corpse's infra-red signature.

Time pa.s.sed. Lee and Chen Yao huddled under b.l.o.o.d.y yak hair like mice in a grain store with a cat prowling somewhere.

Lee felt someone's attention pa.s.s over him like a searchlight: it raised the hair on his head.

The whine grew louder for a moment before fading into the distance.

Chen Yao counted dolphins under her breath, just like a child playing Emperor of the Hill, and when she reached a hundred she said it was safe. They staggered out of their grisly shelter into blowing dust which stuck to and stiffened their b.l.o.o.d.y clothes.

Lee saw now that the dead yak lay in the bottom of a narrow creva.s.se. Through the thick haze of dust were the ghost-shapes of clumps of dry vegetation standing amongst flat water-worn stones--in the brief rainy season of late summer this would be the bed of a raging river.

Chen Yao scrambled up the slope and Lee followed. She now stood at the top, head turning this way and that.

"There," she said at last, and set off at a slant.

"I think the railway is back there," Lee said politely.

Chen Yao shook her head. "That's why we must go the other way. Oh please, please Wei Lee, you must follow me."

And she stumbled on the level ground as if she had tried to climb a step that wasn't there, and began to cry.

Lee gathered her up in his arms and staggered forward through blowing dust. Chen Yao whispered directions, and because Lee had to bend close to hear her he didn't see the pony materialize out of the dust. When its rider shouted to 234.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.him, Lee almost dropped Chen Yao in amazement.The man on the pony wore a mask against the dust, but Lee recognized him at once."Good G.o.dd.a.m.n Billy Lee," Redd said loudly, "you give me that girl and get your scrawny a.s.s on my saddle right now." Chen Yao roused enough to scramble into the saddle in front of Redd; the cowboy leaned down to give Lee his arm, and said, "If I had time, I'd buy you another bath."He was smiling behind the mask. Lee smiled back and swung up on Redd's strong arm and settled behind the cowboy in the high-backed wooden saddle.That was when the bike roared out of swirling dust.It was two-wheeled and all chrome. Mary Makepeace Gala leaned back in its narrow saddle, her arms raised to grip a steering bar which had the same upswept curve as a yak's horns. There was a patch over her left eye, and a red bandanna around her shaven head. Under the saddle, between her legs, was a teardrop pod with the yellow and black trefoil warning of radiation hazard.The mercenary brought her fission-powered bike to a halt so abruptly it reared up like a stallion, the whine of its motor rising to a scream.Redd held Chen Yao, and Lee clutched the coa.r.s.e blanket Redd wore like a cloak, as the horse s.h.i.+ed under the three of them. The mercenary's bike spiked a stand into the dirt and Mary Makepeace Gaia was suddenly standing with a pistol in each hand. Sparkling dust defined two needles of laser light as she shot at the sky.Redd raised his hands, palms upwards. Lee thought he saw something glitter away from them, blown towards the mercenary on the dusty wind.Mary Makepeace Gaia triggered another burst of laser light and the beams crossed just above Redd's head. Lee heard dust grains exploding in the intense energy like peppercorns bursting in a wok. The mercenary holstered one of the pistols and pushed up the filter which had covered her mouth and nose.

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She said, "I get a bonus for live meat, so I'll ask you all to climb down.""I don't think so," Redd said.The mercenary shrugged. "You I don't need anyway," she said, and pointed her pistols right at Redd's face.Nothing happened. The whine of the fission-powered bike died away, and there was only the soft sound of dust blowing on the wind. A yak bellowed, far off in the distance.Redd drew something from his belt: a heavy wheel pistol with grips of cross-hatched white bone. Its hammer clicked back. It was aimed at Mary Makepeace Gaia."Never depend on electricity," Redd said. "I infected you with circuit busters. Gift of the anarchists."The mercenary stared right back at him. Her voice was cold. "People who talk about it never do it.""I'm a kind of exceptional guy," Redd said.But at the moment he pulled the trigger Lee pulled on his arm so the shot went straight up in the air. The pony jinked and Redd grabbed the reins and yelled, "What the f.u.c.k you thinking of!"Lee started to stammer out that he'd seen enough killing.

Chen Yao said calmly, "If he has done it, let it be so. He knows more than he thinks he knows.""Kill me," the mercenary said. Her teeth were gritted together.

Veins stood out on her forehead. Horribly, blood gathered at the lower rim of her eyepatch, and a red tear sluggishly ran down her cheek. "Kill me," she said again, "or I swear I'll find you, wherever you run. I'll find you all, and kill you all."Redd didn't put the pistol away, but he eased the hammer down with his thumb. "Get away from your bike, lay down in the dirt.""f.u.c.k you, a.s.shole," the mercenary said, and folded her arms.Redd whispered, "You sure you want this? I mean, there's no harm in giving her what she wants.""It is done," Chen Yao said. "Besides, for her failure is worse than death."

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Mary Makepeace Gaia said, "Next time I will not fail."

"I can't wait," Redd told her.The mercenary smiled. It was exactly the same smile as her sister, but four hundred degrees cooler. "Good," she said, and ran at the pony.Redd reined the pony around and spurred its belly. Lee held on tight as it flew into a gallop. The a.s.sa.s.sin screamed something after them, but already she was left far behind.

Forty-seven.R.edd rode as if all the demons in creation were after him, through settling veils of dust and out at last into .the light of the sun. Its red light was melting into the red sky, where wisps of high cirrus glowed like beaten bronze, as the horizon began to climb up its disc.Clinging behind the cowboy, Lee knew enough to relax into the spine-jarring ride. Despite his nervous exhaustion he found the h.e.l.l-for-leather ride exhilarating. He squinted over Redd's shoulder into wind and sunset light, saw a dark line at the horizon of the stony plain, running from west to east.It was the Grand Ca.n.a.l. They rode straight for it, across wide dry fields, over dry irrigation dikes, past toppled wind pumps. Then they were in deep shadow, clattering down a narrow street between ruined flat-roofed mud-brick houses, one of the abandoned villages which dotted the length of the Grand Ca.n.a.l from the capital to the Dust Seas. They burst into the last light of the sun, crashed through a belt of seedling mangroves.A skimmer was moored at the end of a stone jetty that ran a little way into the kilometer-wide ca.n.a.l. Its black dispersers were raised high on their recurved booms, and its slack silvery monofilament sail ripplingly mirrored the red sky.Redd reined the pony, vaulted off and lifted Chen Yao from the saddle. When Lee jumped down Redd swatted the pony's 237.

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rump with his hat. It turned its head to regard him reproachfully with a large brown eye, and Redd yelled, "You get going, you stupid lump of dogmeat!" and swatted it again. The pony pranced away, and with its reins trailing trotted off along the trail it had smashed through the seedling mangroves.Redd set his hat on his head. "I swear I'm gonna get me one of those bikes next time. You two come on, now."He led Lee and Chen Yao down the jetty and on to the skimmer. Even as they set foot on the white-wood decking the gangway retracted and lines took up slack, the sail filled with evening breeze, and the skimmer slipped its mooring.

Forty-eight.T.he Grand Ca.n.a.l was a vast irrigation project, the largest body of water on Mars. It was fed by thousands of reactor well heads that were sunk so deeply into the permafrost that the conchies couldn't reach them. But no new wells had been drilled since the Great Rea.s.sessment, and one by one the reactors were failing. In a hundred years the Grand Ca.n.a.l would be as dry as any of Mars's fossil watercourses. Already most of the villages along its banks had been abandoned. Banyans, soldier bamboo and freshwater mangroves, unchecked, were turning the edges of the ca.n.a.l into swamp where herds of the last surviving species of archiosaur grazed, man-sized semi-aquatic bipeds with vividly crested duck-billed heads. Water hyacinths choked irrigation outlets, and the rich agricultural strips alongside the ca.n.a.l were dying back into desert.The skimmer ran the eastward lane of the wide waterway, following a string of buoys that winked green in the gathering dusk. Other skimmers moved slowly on the clogged waterway. They cut through floating islands of water hyacinth, rafts of azolla and mats of cyan.o.bacteria with razor-sharp prows.Lee sat at the stern rail of the skimmer, sipping jasmine tea from a bowl big enough to wash his face in. He had taken off his boots, for everyone went barefoot on the whitewood decking, even Redd, who stood talking to the captain at the high waist of the skimmer, under the bridge awning.

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Both men were underlit by the blue light of the console.

The skimmer's captain, a weatherbeaten Tibetan, had already greeted Lee and Chen Yao with brief but punctilious ceremony, but it was clear he had more urgent considerations than the comfort of his pa.s.sengers. He had to blend into the local and long-distance traffic, make his way past satellite surveillance into the wide wastes of the Dust Seas.

With nothing to do but watch the green and red lights of the s.h.i.+pping lanes and the running lights of other skimmers drift past, Lee soon fell asleep. He awoke to a lurid sunrise from a dream where Mary Makepeace Gaia stalked him through a maze of red canyons clogged with dust, her eyes mirrors, her hands white flames. He had a headache and a dry mouth. Someone had wrapped a heavy yak hide around him as he slept: every long hair of the hide was tipped with a ruby of h.o.a.rfrost. Near by, Chen Yao slept under another hide; only her cap of glossy black hair showed.

The skimmer was still sailing east. Dawn light dimmed the lights of the s.h.i.+pping lanes, made silhouettes of the scattering of skimmers on the ca.n.a.l. It threw Lee's shadow a long way across the white wood of the decking as, wrapped in his yak-hide blanket, he stalked to the bridge.

Captain Jigme Tsatar was at his console. A short, stolid, rotund man with an air of invincible competence, he wore an intricately braided jacket and loose cotton trousers. A broad-brimmed black felt hat was pulled low over his brow, so that his small, close-set eyes and shapeless blob of a nose were in shadow. He told Lee that they had an eighty per cent chance of making the Ichun elevator at the end of the ca.n.a.l. Things were bad in the capital and The Little Bird's revolution was taking most of the attention of the Army of the People's Mouths; more importantly it had scattered the forces working against Lee.

"I am grateful that Redd found such friends as you," Lee said. Flattery never hurt, even if the captain surely knew the worth of what he had done.

But Captain Tsatar waved that away. "The Yankee wants payment for delivery of you and the little girl G.o.d. We've RED DUST.

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told him he can have it when we reach Ichun. A herd boss called Hawk was supposed to take you to the fisherfolk, but things worked out in the end. It is not your fault that Hawk had been turned.""Perhaps I trusted the wrong people."Captain Tsatar's face gave nothing away. So different from Redd, whose face was a constant storm of half-concealed emotions whose meanings Lee could often only guess at.

The captain said, "And yet here you are after all. No one could be expected to have done better. If the wind holds we have a day to educate you. And if it doesn't, well then we have even longer--if our enemies don't find us."

Forty-nine.L.ee's education began after breakfast of doupi, fried bean curd pancakes stuffed with minced vegetables. His teacher was a thin ascetic Yankee called Soldier. Soldier had iron-gray hair, a thin face which showed all the bones beneath it, steel teeth, and an inexhaustible supply of invective. For twelve hours, from dawn to dusk, he taught Lee the rudiments of half a dozen fighting techniques--Tae Kwon Do, the Five Animal Styles of the Shaolin Temple (an especial favorite of Soldier's), Karate, Choy Li-Fut, use of knife and quarterstaff. They didn't even stop when the skimmer put into sh.o.r.e, sheltering under the many-arched canopy of a giant banyan from a culver that patrolled the wide ca.n.a.l for an hour before turning back towards the capital.Lee found that he could store away every move of a fighting sequence, and when challenged replay it without thinking.

Soon it was Soldier rather than himself whose back or shoulder or hip was. .h.i.tting the thin cotton matting which had been laid on the white-wood deck.At last Soldier p.r.o.nounced himself satisfied. "It'll have to do," he said. They bowed to each other and rolled up the matting, just as the last sliver of the sun flashed blue light around half the horizon and vanished below it.Chen Yao had been restored to her role as avatar on the skimmer. While Lee had been given his workout, she had sat beneath an awning, nibbling sweet rice b.a.l.l.s and sipping sour milk, watching ruined villages and mangrove swamp go by to 242.

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243.starboard, watching other skimmers slowly pa.s.s to port.That afternoon, a pod of fin had surfaced near the skimmer.

They had ridden the bow wave and then slipped back to chatter to Chen Yao. Lee could almost understand what they were saying; or at least, he could play it back, slowed down, and filter words from the chatter. Only Chen Yao could make sense of it.What the fin had brought was news. Chen Yao translated it. Most of the city was under martial law. Roving gangs had looted much of the Yankee Quarter and there were frequent fire fights at night. Refugees crowded the feed lots; the Army of the People's Mouths was preventing them from moving further.Everyone on the skimmer listened to Chen Yao recount this, and it was pa.s.sed to other skimmers via blinking signal lamps.If Chen Yao was worried about her family, her people, she gave no sign. The aspect of her G.o.dhead gave her the calm acceptance of the world of a true bodhisattva. The crew of the skimmer brought her water-hyacinth flowers, which she wove into her hair. By starlight and the colored points of the skimmer's running lights, the wilting blooms made a glimmering constellation above her face as, serious and quiet, she taught Lee how to call up the functions of his rewired nervous system, to move in and out of hypermode, tune his hearing and visual acuity at will, control the autonomic functions of his body.Meanwhile, although the broadcasts of the King of the Cats were no longer being jammed he was doing nothing but play music, and Miriam slept like a mangrove seed in the muddy darkness at the base of Lee's brain.The end of the long hard day had left Lee with a sense of la.s.situdinous well-being. He was tired, but not exhausted.

By heat sight he could enjoy the trim lines of the skimmer as it ran before the night wind. Its sail rippled as breezes rose and fell and computer-controlled winches differentially flexed the semi-intelligent material to gain every dyne.The skimmer had the beauty of form perfectly mirroring 244.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

function. It was a hundred years old. It was called The Black Dra#on.Redd was ill at ease a-sail, and he was still trying to convince himself that he was on the right side. "So long as it's against owners, that would be OK," he said. "Never did like owners. People like Hawk, thinking they own the ranges...

no one ever really owns the land. It's really the land owns you." Redd hummed a few bars of "Don't Fence Me In"; it made a strange counterpoint to Oscar Toney's "Precious Love," which courtesy of his revamped nervous system was playing in cleaned-up stereo right inside Lee's head.He and Redd were sitting at the fantail of the skimmer.

Along in the bow, the crew were talking around a little bra.s.s brazier. It was near midnight with frost sharp in the air, and no one on the skimmer could sleep. At any moment the culvers of Lee's great-grandfather, or of the Army of the People's Mouths, could swoop on them like owls.The skimmer's wake streamed out across the dark water.

Stars and the diamond haze of the asteroid belt burned brilliantly across the sky. Venus and the double star of Earth and Moon were setting: Jupiter wouldn't rise for an hour yet. The red and green double stars of other skimmers' running lights moved in the distance against the vast black silence of the land.After a while, Redd said, "Know why I'm still here?"

"You are waiting to be paid.""I guess I deserve that. But I brought you here, didn't I?