Red Dust Part 18

"Later," Lee said. "Now, I must think."

There was a tiny toilet. Lee emptied and cleaned the suit's 280.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.relief facilities and sponged off the worst of living inside it for two days. Then for a long time he did nothing but sprawl naked on the live hide couch at the stern of the little gig.

Sunlight sank through the canopy and through his skin to his bones. He watched waves of dust march in long parallel rows towards the horizon, their shadows running ahead of them now. The gig was moving just faster than the waves, dipping and rising smoothly as it ploughed through soft dense swells.Shards of what had happened were jumbled in his mind.

He was reluctant to put them together. He kept thinking of certain details. Wu Lin sprawled helpless on the ground beneath the triumphant mercenary, a h.e.l.lish tableau lit by the flames that roared across the surface of the burning ca.n.a.l.

He'd only known his sister for a day, but he knew that he would mourn her for the rest of his life. He remembered her grip on his arm and her exultant cry before she had sprung into battle, armed only with courage and the half-formed gifts of the anarchist viruses.And he remembered the way The Black Dragon had shuddered like a living thing when the culver had blown free the elevator cradle. He remembered the end of a chain flinging arcs of molten droplets as it fell past, loop after loop of a chain half a kilometer long falling towards the red dust sea.

A sailor's broad-brimmed straw hat sailing off, rising up on some current of air, the man's lined brown face turning to his, mouth open around an unspoken question. The sickening smooth slide, faster and faster. He remembered the flas.h.i.+ng glimpse of the counterweight of the empty dust-ballasted elevator shooting up the cliff face as the cradle carrying TheBlack Dragon plunged down, brake blocks screaming and showering great drooping arcs of sparks.Then there was nothing but pictures shuffled one after the other, bright and sharp in every detail but with no emo tional content. Lee suspected that Miriam had taken over then.He let the barrier down. He wanted to see what had happened when Miriam's virus-encoded personality had forced RED DUST.

281.control of his own body. He saw that he alone had escaped, clambering across the wildly tilting deck to the gig, strapping himself into a crash cradle and shooting the st.u.r.dy little vessel away from The Black Dragon moments before impact, taking off across the dust sea under cover of the plume of dust raised by the skimmer's final keel-breaking impact.He had looked back once. Had seen a vast dust cloud spread out at the base of the high cliffs. Had seen, atop a sheer kilometer of cliff face, the smoke of Ichun rising against the pink sky.The images were mercilessly sharp and clear and bright.

The viruses forgot nothing. Lee watched what they showed him with tears leaking from his clamped lids, running back towards his ears.Much later, the computer said, "Our destination is visible, if you care to look five degrees port of my bow."Sternward, the horizon had risen to touch the tarnished coin of the sun. Light lay across the tops of the waves, lines of red light broadening as the waves marched west, melting into a general glow. Lee turned and looked ahead, saw a star burning at the wide, level, dark eastern horizon. It was the tip of Tiger Mountain, the biggest volcano in the solar system, so huge that its peak rose above the horizon. Rose, in fact, through the atmosphere of the world, its flat-topped caldera s.h.i.+ning in near-vacuum twenty-seven kilometers above the surface of the Dust Seas.

Fifty-seven.T.he ecosystem of the Dust Seas were Cho Jinfeng's greatest triumph. Originally, they had been low-lying boulder-strewn cratered plains, a thin crust lying over dust and rubble bound by ice into permafrost as hard as iron and a kilometer deep. But the ice of the deep permafrost had begun to melt when Mars had been slowly warmed, by sky mirrors and by the greenhouse effect as out-ga.s.sing and sublimation of the south polar cap raised the carbon dioxide partial pressure. The plains had become unstable, and for the first time in an aeon Mars had been racked by quakes.Boulders (and half a dozen ancient s.p.a.ce probes) had sunk into quaggy unbound dust. Currents had started to circulate.

Great convection cells had carried heat deeper, liberating more and more permafrost water, freeing more and more dust. For three decades, muddy rain had fallen over most of the world in summer, and dust storms had shrouded most of it in winter. The Tibetan colonists had endured the climatic overturn in underground citadels; many of the Yankees had been wiped out, their fragile, technologically dependent settlements overwhelmed by weather. When it had finished, much of the dust had been redistributed, but treacherous bowls of semi-marshy dust had remained in certain places, hundreds of meters deep, and useless.Until Cho Jinfeng had found an ecological role for them.

She had developed strains of phytoplankton which could flourish in the dust. Gene-melded from diatoms and fora- 282.

RED DUST.

283.

miniferan amoebae, the microscopic plants had dense silicon valves permeated by threads of water-hungry cytoplasm which extended along long spines into the dust. They scavenged every molecule of water they encountered, even that chemically bound to the surface of the dust grains. The marshes had liquefied: the liquid not water but free dust, divided so fine the grains lacked even crystalline structure.

In the early stages of terraforming, vast amounts of oxygen had been released by the phytoplankton, which had been protected from lethal ultraviolet by the microclimate haze at the surface of the Dust Seas. The Dust Seas had reached stability. Water released by convective melting of permafrost at the bottom of the Seas was bound into the biosphere by phytoplankton. Sh.e.l.led zooplankton devoured the phytoplankton, and in turn the vast swarms of these tiny animals were devoured by armored dust rays which glided across the surface of the dust on huge tough membranes spun of carbon: carbon fibres. And dying phytoplankton, zooplankton and rays sank into the deep dust to replenish the great cycle.

Humans had established trade routes across the great dry seas, plied by wind- and static-powered dust skimmers.

And now, under the deep canopy of stars, a single small gig moved on the face of the dry red sea of the Plain of Heaven towards the reefs of Tiger Mountain.

Fifty-eight.

T.

he computer woke Lee at dawn. "We have a problem, Master," it said. When Lee asked what it meant, it showed him a sternward view, zooming in on a silvery speck s.h.i.+ning at the horizon of the red-dust sea. It was another gig, its sail catching the first light of the sun.

"Who are they?"

"The transponder identifies it as being a gig out of the skimmer The Lady Of The Golden Isle. We won't be able to outrun it. It's a smaller craft, with a bigger sail area."

"Why should we want to run away? Can I talk to it? I mean, to its crew."

"Its pa.s.sengers," the computer said.

"Whatever. Just try."

Minutes pa.s.sed. Lee watched the other gig grow imperceptibly larger.

The computer said, "No one answers. I can tell you something, though."

"Go ahead."

"There are two people aboard."

"I suppose I should ask how you know."

"Because I asked the computer. It's not as smart as me."

"Smugness is not a virtue."

"It's the simple truth. I've found the alarm subroutines.

Want me to use them? There's an impressive siren."

"Why not?"

"I suppose I can take that as an affirmative. Ah. Now I284.

RED DUST.

285.know that they are awake, because someone has switched off the siren. I'm getting voice, no visuals. I'll let you deal with it, Master. I don't understand some of the words."A voice sounded out of the middle of the air. It was Redd.

"Who the f.u.c.k turned on all the bells and whistles?"

And Chert Yao said, "Wei Lee? Did you do that?"

Fifty-nine.T.he gig carrying Chen Yao and Redd caught up with Lee's gig by noon, and they clambered across to meet him. Redd was grinning like a madman under his filter mask; Chen Yao looked around coolly and said, "We will be more comfortable here.""I'll make sure of it," the computer said, and closed up the canopy. The other gig had already fallen behind. Its sail flapped idly for a moment, then caught the wind and bellied full as it tacked away, turning back towards Ichun.Chen Yao and Redd had stolen the gig to follow Lee. It had been Chen Yao's idea; Redd claimed that he had come along to look after her. They had ridden the last elevator cradle down, away from the razing of lchun and the retreat of its surviving citizens. Most of the garrison had died fighting their own comrades, but many of the citizens had managed to escape across the ca.n.a.l."The captain of The Black Dragon organized the retreat,"

Chen Yao said. "He had the bridge blown.""Television crews turned up," Redd said. "From three of the commercial channels. That stopped the soldiers following, and stopped the culvers attacking the retreat. I guess everyone on Mars will have seen what the Army of the People's Mouths did." In a softer tone of voice, he added, "The woman that killed your sister got away. I'm sorry, Lee. I tried to chase her, but she vanished."Lee said, "I think we'll see her again."

286.

RED DUST.

287."I'll be ready next time," Redd said.Lee said, "I'm glad to see you both, but you must realize you're in more danger here than you ever were in Ichun.

It's a difficult road I'm following. It is clear that war is not the answer. I'm no leader, nor can I countenance the idea of people dying for what they think is my cause."Redd said, "Seems to me there's an undeclared war being fought. You can't blame yourself for what happened at Ichun.""Innocent people died. They didn't even know what they were really fighting for.""Freedom," Redd said. "It's what we all want, right?"Chen Yao said, "Wei Lee, I bet you haven't even asked the computer what your path is.""Well, it told me we're going to Tiger Mountain, but I already knew that. Is anything else expected of me?"The computer said, "The woman told me that once you reached Tiger Mountain you would find your own path, Master.''Chen Yao said, with mounting distress, "Is that all? That can't be all she said! She was supposed to know how to disable the defenses. That's why she came here!""I don't think the transfer was very accurate," Lee said.

He tried to call up memory of the time before he'd woken, when the fragmented memories of Miriam Makepeace Mbele had had control of his body, but he still had little control over the menu of his eidetic facilities. Specifics lay just out of reach, like an unspoken word lodged on the back of his tongue.Chen Yao was saying something. Lee opened his eyes. No, they were already open. It was just that he hadn't been using them.Chen Yao said, "Don't ever do that again!"Behind her, Redd said, "You were out a long time, Billy Lee. We were getting kind of worried."Lee blinked. The sun had moved. He had cramp in his right leg, where it was doubled up under his left. Even as he felt the pain, it began to fade. The computer told him he 288.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

had been in a trance for more than three hours, and Lee began to realize just how dangerous his virus-built powers were. He could vanish inside them, and never reappear.Redd said, "I was keeping watch while you were.., out.

I think we're getting nearer that mountain.""You let me worry about navigation," the computer said.

"The top of Tiger Mountain may well be above the horizon, but we have a long way to go. We have almost crossed the Plain of Heaven, but we still have to sail the Plain of the Garden of Eternal Bliss."

Sixty.W.ind rose as the gig sailed the narrow strait between the two dust seas. Driven by temperature differences, dust-laden gales howled like all the lost souls of Mars's dead between high red cliffs, drove high, heavy waves and the gig before it.After the strait, for a night and a day and another night the gig moved southeast, aslant clas.h.i.+ng combers of dust in a hazy spume that blotted out the sun and sky, that turned the King of the Cat's broadcasts to crackling mush. Redd, seasick, grumbled that he'd finally found a mode of transportation worse than a horse.Then there was a dawn that filled half the sky with filigrees of lacework like glowing iron. The dry, powdery waves were low and broad and lazy. The gig left a triple wake behind as it powered towards Tiger Mountain.Lee and Redd and Chen Yao put on their filter masks and had the computer lower the canopy, which had been scored and scratched with millions of minute pits and lines by the force of the storm. The air was fresh and cold. Lee kicked off his boots and walked to the high sharp prow. His muscles responded automatically to the sway of the gig's motion.He faced into the sun and bowed, then went through the moves Soldier had taught him. He felt his blood fizz and his muscles slidingly loosen, like silky steel cords under his skin. Chen Yao exclaimed fussily whenever he got too close 289.

290.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.to the edge of the gig's decking; Redd, lounging in the stern, applauded.

"You both come here," Lee said, and for two hours they went through t'ai chi exercises, flowing from one position to the next in a slow dance that somehow grew into more than a simple exercise, was an affirmation of the bonds that joined them, each to each.

The Plain of the Garden of Eternal Bliss was richer in life than the Plain of Heaven, for its water was supplemented by run-off from the high glaciers of Tiger Mountain. As the great cliffs of Tiger Mountain's western s.h.i.+eld wall rose ahead (their eroding feet, against which heavy dust combers ceaselessly broke, still many kilometers below the horizon), and the peaks of Tiger Mountain's three lesser sisters appeared as stars to the south, more and more shoals rode the heavy dust waves.

These floating islands were stromalithic accretions of filamentous blue-green algae and bacteria which formed stable platforms for densely woven stands of bamboo and creepers and gra.s.ses. Every species of plant had narrow silicon-impregnated leaves to resist the dust's ceaseless erosion, and as the gig spun past them the shoals glittered in the sunlight like heaped diamonds.

At night, faint luminescence was visible within the shoals, as if each were a galaxy receding so fast its light could hardly escape, and there was a greenish cast to the restless surface of the dust itself, the bioluminescent glow of swarming zooplankton that were feeding on dense blooms of phytoplankton.

The gig was a shadow moving across this glowing landscape, and the shoals made drifting constellations which mocked the rigid patterns of stars that bestrode the sky, as if the reflection of every star had become a wanderer, a planet. Lee and Chen Yao and Redd sailed the great void between like the anarchist families forever falling free.

And it was on one such still starry night that the Free Yankee Nation captured them.

Sixty-one.L.ee was sleeping when the computer sounded the alarm.

He woke at once. The computer told him that the gig was heading east by southeast, and that something was moving in on it, ahead and to starboard. A smeared trace showed on radar, very close.Redd pressed his face to the dark gla.s.s of the canopy andsaid sleepily, "It's just one of those floating islands."Lee said, "It is moving against the current.""Pirates," Chen Yao said, trying hard not to let her fear show.Lee activated every running light, started to broadcast a warning. The shoal was a ragged shadow silhouetted against the starry sky; then it was towering over the gig.There was the sound of breaking branches. The gig yawed, and all three pa.s.sengers were flung from one side of its c.o.c.kpit to the other.Lee came up on hands and toes just as there was a crackle of blue sheet lightning either side of the gig's canopy: something had discharged the dispersers. The gig dropped. Its keel slammed into the dust. Lee was thrown down again, and this time he bit his tongue.The computer was shrieking hysterically, alternating between incoherent rage and strings of fault codes. Lee spat a mouthful of blood and told it to be quiet."But we're sabotaged! We're under attack! We..."

291.

292.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

"Quiet!" His command was softened by a bubble of spit and blood, but the computer shut up.The gig groaned and rocked, slewed sideways with a soft dragging sound. Redd was sitting on the c.o.c.kpit's decking, legs splayed, back braced against the couch. He had his pistol c.o.c.ked and ready. Something rattled against the canopy, and Lee went into hypermode without a thought. By infrared he glimpsed blurred green human shapes outside, and then there was a point of intense light and the overpressured air of the c.o.c.kpit whistled out through the hole the light had made. Something dropped through and broke on the decking of the c.o.c.kpit. There was a sickeningly sweet smell, like decaying violets.Chen Yao pitched to the decking. Redd slumped forward and dropped his pistol. Lee was halfway into his filter mask when the stuff overpowered him.

Sixty-two.L.ee was woken by the sound of chanting. He had a foul taste in his mouth and a blinding headache. He was strapped to a post by a broad leather band that bound his arms to his sides. Chen Yao was strapped to another post on his right, Redd on his left. Redd's head lolled loosely.

Chen Yao said fiercely, "Do something, Wei Lee!"They were in a vaulted chamber. Its high ceiling was supported by what looked like the hooped cartilaginous ribs of some great beast. Narrow apertures admitted wedges of dim red light. People crowded tiered ledges on either side. They were all naked, and all had the faces of monstrous beasts.

Their bodies were covered in swirling patterns that glowed sickly yellow-green.When they saw that Lee was awake they shouted a single Yankee word."Cla.s.sification?A dozen old men and women shuffled forward. They wore bristling masks and strange square flat-capped hats, and were wrapped in tattered cloaks trimmed with the furry skins of ice mice: dozens of tiny heads hung down from collars and sleeves, eyes replaced by jet beads that glittered in the torchlight as if called back to life. The old people wielded bone calipers with which they pinched the heads ofthe three prisoners from ear to ear and chin to pate.

"Sterilization? the people roared.An old man slashed the tip of Lee's right thumb, wiped a 293.

294.

PAUL J. McAukEpiece of cloth over the b.l.o.o.d.y gash and threw it into a bowl of fuming liquid. Another old man stuck a blunt syringe into Lee's shoulder and injected what felt like a litre of salty bilge under his skin. From Chen Yao's indignant shouts Leeguessed that the same had been done to her."Mutation?'An old woman tottered forward. She was robed in layersof filmy black stuff from neck to ankles, and a tall conical hat was tipped on her scrofulous scalp. She grinned toothlessly at Lee and shoved something small and hard and bristly into his mouth. It was a computer chip. Its edges cut Lee's lips, and he spat it out with a mouthful of blood.The crone retrieved the chip and tried to get Chen Yao to swallow it, but the little girl managed to spit it right into her face. The crone picked it up again, and shuffled to Redd.

The cowboy was still groggy from the gas, and he swallowed the chip as if it were a pill.The watchers roared with approval. Two old men undidthe leather band which bound Redd to his post, and he fellto his knees.Chen Yao shouted with outrage. "Free us too! We're G.o.ds!

G.o.ds!"The people roared again."Electrification?Half a dozen jumped down and swarmed over Chen Yao.They undid her bonds and carried her screaming and kicking towards an apparatus which others had lowered from the shadows under the high ceiling. They lifted her on to its wooden platform, strapped her hands to a blown gla.s.s bowl over her head. Two men on either side wildly cranked handles and a leather belt spun, pa.s.sing up into the bowl, down below Chen Yao's platform. Chen Yao's hair bristled, then stood out from her skull in every direction.Electrification.t ElectrificationOne of the old men used a pole to prod Chen Yao, andthe little girl screamed each time a fat blue spark crackled between her skin and the pole's tip. Lee writhed against the RED DUST.

295.leather strap which held him tight, tried to speed up into hypermode. But the effort was too much. The effects of the gas hadn't completely worn off. Everything flickered blackly, as fast as a hummingbird's wings, and he fainted.

Sixty-three.

Wco hen Lee woke again, he was lying in a small fetid hamber lit by slanting light. Redd was kneeling ver him. "Well, at least you're not dead," the cowboy said.

"Chen Yao?"

"Still out cold, but I guess she'll be OK." He laughed.

"They were trying to cure her with static electricity."

"Who are they?"

Redd grinned. "I guess you could call them my countrymen."The shoal which had intercepted and captured the gig was the home of the descendants of the staff of a Yankee research station long ago sunk in the dust sea. Now they were the Free Yankee Nation. They sailed the restless face of the Plain of the Garden of Eternal Bliss, following plankton swarms because that was where the dust rays would be found, and the dust rays were mostly what the Free Yankees lived upon.

They used the rays' carbon whisker wings to construct multilayered dust-proof shelters in which they lived like worms in a rotten onion. They dried the intestines of the rays and beat them thin and sewed suits from them, made filter masks from the bristly palps by which the rays separated plankton from dust. They ate the rays' tough swimming muscles raw or pickled or dried, and rendered the rest of the flesh for oil which they smeared on their bodies and hair.296.

RED DUST.

297.

They had no lamps, and no fires. Fire was the shoal's greatest enemy.They had preserved the remains of their ancestors' crude twenty-first-century technology, although it had mostly degenerated into ritual and superst.i.tion. Different cultures of primitive viruses--big as amoebae, and about as versatile--were jealously maintained by different families, but the circuitry which the viruses printed were used as folk medicines, or worn as jewellery. Redd had been accepted as one of them because he had swallowed a virus-grown circuit chip.Lee learned all this from Redd and a Free Yankee who called himself Safety Officer. Safety Officer was a tall, scrawny old man with muscles tight as wires under loose skin. Lee could not see his face, or the face of any of the Free Yankees. They wore filter masks all the time. Speaker's was a bristling affair with tiny smoked gla.s.s eyepieces, like the snout of a subterranean insect. The Free Yankees were all experts in body language, and wore extensive tattoos to proclaim their family allegiances; they went naked inside their layered nest. They went in for swirling recursive designs, mostly in red and black, underlain by a secondary system of patterns created by injecting luminescent bacteria under the skin. In the gloom of the fetid s.p.a.ce where he crouched with Lee, Safety Officer was lined with swirling patterns that glowed with the glaucous hue of the flesh of rotting fish.Safety Officer was arbiter of quarrels between the dozen families. The Free Yankees had taken Redd to be the captain of the gig, and Lee and Chen Yao his property. While Redd was bathed and oiled and feasted, Lee and Chen Yao were shackled and told that they were lab rats."We decide to make you scholars maybe we give you names. Right now you don't need them," Safety Officer told his two prisoners.Lee bowed politely. The long chain that linked the manacles on his wrists c.h.i.n.ked.Safety Officer cuffed Lee around his freshly shaven head in an off-hand manner. "None of the kow-towing Hah s.h.i.+t,"

he said, almost kindly. "You're amongst proper folk now.

298.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

We're the Free Yankee Nation. We do things logically, scientifically.''Lee apologized as best he could. He still wasn't used to his virus translation program, which had taken over control of his larynx and tongue and lips, working independently but not quite at the speed of thought. Most of his sentences started with a muted choking sound, like a throat clearing.

But it kept him alive. The Free Yankees were intrigued by a Han who spoke Yankee.Chen Yao said, "He is a G.o.d. So am I. You let us go."

Safety Officer told Lee, "Your daughter is mad, but that's all right. You have seen our scientific way of curing insanity.

When she's strong enough we'll try it again. The scientific way is the only true way. You Han are falling apart in your soft settlements. Pretty soon we will rise up and take theworld from you. What do you think about that?""You have every chance.""It is our destiny. Democracy will always triumph.""Of course," Lee said, wondering just what Safety Officer meant by democracy. The Free Yankees were organized along the lines of a cla.s.sic oligarchy, with power vested not in the individual but in archaic rituals and the persons a.s.sociated with them. Safety Officer was powerful because of his name and his position, not because of who he was. No one was elected according to a test of ability.Safety Officer cuffed Lee again. It was his characteristic gesture of bonhomie. "If you survive deprogramming, boy, why maybe you just might make student after all.""I will learn," Lee said. "I will enhance the glory of the shoal.""Don't give yourself airs. You'll do what you're told, that'sall. Leave glory for the tenured.""Yes, sir."Safety Officer cuffed Lee again. "That's better. Now you two lab rats get your a.s.ses over to the kitchens. There's s.h.i.+t to be shovelled."It was a sign of the Free Yankees' confidence that Lee and Chen Yao could squirm through the narrow tunnels of theRED DUST.

299.

nest without an escort. It was obvious that the Free Yankee Nation was much smaller than it had once been. Despite their fetish for privacy, which meant that every citizen, even the children, had two or three tiny rooms no one else could enter without invitation, there were many s.p.a.ces in the shoal which were unused.In the kitchens, under the watchful gaze of the fat domestic bursar, Lee and Chen Yao were put to sorting edible zooplankton from inedible phytoplankton, and stripping the tiny creatures of their silicon-impregnated sh.e.l.ls. Later, as they spread nightsoil amongst the roots of stunted tomato plants and cuc.u.mbers in the moist warm greenhouse tunnels, they were able to s.n.a.t.c.h a whispered conversation."You've got to get us free," Chen Yao insisted over and over again, until Lee was fed up with pointing out that he wasn't going to kill everyone aboard the shoal, and in any event, he didn't know how to sail it.He had talked to the computer through his virus-built transceiver. The senior tutor and chief technician of the Free Yankees had unsuccessfully tried to access the computer, and it boasted to Lee about the ease with which it had subverted their primitive Trojan Horse programs. But they had manually severed its control cables, so it had no control over any part of the gig, which had been hauled on to the shoal and concealed within thickets of th.o.r.n.y creepers."Even if I killed everyone, I'm not sure if I could fix the gig," Lee said. "And besides, I don't want to kill anyone.""They're savages," Chen Yao said. "They don't count, not against a whole world. Just go into hypermode, Wei Lee.

Show them that they can't treat G.o.ds like slaves!""They'll make land, sooner or later. Then we'll escape, I promise."Chen Yao decapitated a dozen tomato plants with a sweep of her hoe. She rattled the long chain which swung between the shackles around her wrists. "It'll be too late!"And then they had to stop talking, because the domestic bursar had seen what Chen Yao had done and was hurrying forward to scold her.

Sixty-four.

The shoal was skirting the edge of a plankton bloom that grew where deep currents. .h.i.t the edge of the s.h.i.+eld of Tiger Mountain and rose to the surface, bringing moisture from the underlying permafrost. Dust rays, slow monsters with rippling wings fifty meters across, moved through shoals of plankton with their bristly palps swinging to and fro, leaving wide wakes of darker dust.A dust ray trail was sighted the day after the Free Yankees captured Redd and Lee and Chen Yao. Soon after, a lookout tied to the top of the tallest tree of the shoal spotted the feeding plumes of the ray itself, and the entire population poured out of the nest and clambered up trees and bamboo stands to try and catch a glimpse of the beast for themselves.

They regarded it as a propitious sign: Redd would be given the ritual chance to kill it, and so gain tenure.It was the middle of the afternoon. The clear pink sky glowed like neon and both moons were aloft: Fear a tipped crescent just above the western horizon; Panic a chip of light falling eastward. A kind of haze hung over the dust sea, and its heavy surface was the color of molten copper. Sluggish waves rolled towards Tiger Mountain. Its lower flanks were hazed, but its flat peak was sharp and clear and seemed to rear higher than the two moons. The cliffs of its vast lava s.h.i.+eld, six kilometers high, were so close that Lee could see house-sized boulders that piled up along their base, and the weathered folds and convolutions that vertically fretted their 3OO.RED DUST.