Red Dust Part 19

301.heights, but they might as well have been on another world.Lee wanted, needed, yearned, to escape, to reach Tiger Mountain and climb to its top. Part of it came from the viruses, and from Miriam's partial personality, but at least half of it came from himself. He had made the promise to himself back in Ichun. But he wouldn't kill to keep that promise; too many people had died already.Most of the Free Yankees were forward of the nest, crowding like a gang of apes in the dense thickets of bamboo. The largest bamboo stems were as thick as Lee's waist, and black sails had been raised high on them, straining in the brisk breeze. Masked children swung through the ratlines, shrieking with laughter.Lee had to step around and duck under a web of guy ropes and lines. Blown dust sifted over his torn s.h.i.+rt and jeans; dust acc.u.mulated in the finest creases of his skin and worked into the seals of his filter mask. Hanging on a leaning bamboo stem, he peered around a dense tangle of wire-weed at the prow of the shoal. A dark lane ran across the red dust, wider than the shoal. It was the track of the dust ray.One of the Free Yankees, a tall thin man in crinkling semiopaque coveralls made from dust ray intestine lining, came up to Lee, clapped him on the shoulder. A tattooed eagle spread its wings around the back of his skull, under the straps of his mask. He unlocked Lee's shackles and handed him a wadded intestine suit. His voice was m.u.f.fled by the bristly nightmare of his mask. He said, "You'll help your master. Put this on and come with me!"A group of men and women were hauling something like the upturned sh.e.l.l of a giant tortoise. Redd was amongst them. A young woman, with muscular arms and a V-shaped torso that made her intestine suit tight across her small flat b.r.e.a.s.t.s, grabbed a rope and heaved. The sh.e.l.l shot forward and most of the others fell on their behinds.By the time they had scrambled up, the boat--that was what the sh.e.l.l was--was riding high on the dust, under the tangle of tough polished roots which fringed the shoal. The 302.

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muscular woman grabbed a sheaf of harpoons and jumped down. The others followed, and the tall man made to shove Lee forward.

Lee dodged the man's advance, and jumped. For a clean instant he thought he'd made a mistake; the small round boat was crowded with a dozen people (who had lines attaching them to the boat's rail), and if he landed in the wrong place he'd tip it over. But his virus reflexes took over.

He felt as if he fluttered down as slow as a leaf and landed with one foot in the well of the boat, the other on the raised bow. He turned and raised a hand in salute to the man who'd tried to push him. It occurred to him that he must look like a captain making farewell on a difficult voyage, and he laughed inside his mask.

The harpoonist signed for him to sit down, her hands as eloquent in expression as her face might be behind her monstrous mask--she'd stuck fangs all the way around it, so it looked like the business end of a leech or a lamprey.

Redd clambered into the boat down a knotted rope, his feet skidding on ends of roots polished to the consistency of smooth iron by blowing dust. Hands reached up and helped him teeter into his seat, and then the mast was lowered into the boat and set in its step. A bird shape was nailed to the top of the mast, wide narrow wings spread. It was an ironwood carving of a cliff eagle, which spent almost all its life on the wing, sailing the thermals of Tiger Mountain's cliffs.

It was the symbol of the Free Yankees, for both touched land only when necessary; cliff eagles to incubate their eggs and raise their young, the Free Yankees to render dust rays.

A big triangular sail was hauled up. It filled with wind and in an instant the little boat leaped forward, its flat frictionless hull hissing and banging as it skimmed the crests of the dust waves. The shoal dwindled from a ragged island to a speck, was lost in the vastness of the red sea. Lee paid attention to the business of handling the boat. A scoop like the V-shaped plough of a bulldozer acted as rudder, its long tiller hauled by two people. The boat was tacking into the wind, following the broad dark wake of the dust ray. At every RED DUST.

303.other leg of each tack, abrasive dust fumed across the boat.

Despite his coveralls, Lee's whole body was soon alive with incendiary itches as the fine stuff worked through seals and into every crease and fold of his skin. He had to keep wiping away powder that clung to his goggles.

He was given the task of pumping up silvery floats with a set of foot-operated bellows. Around him, the others were measuring out lengths of cable into neat loops. The harpoonist was checking out her weapons and showing Redd what to do.

Each long harpoon was tipped with a hollow, triangular barbed head; a cap that screwed into the hollow head held an explosive charge. Redd handed one to Lee, who hefted it, found a grip at its point of balance. Redd shouted to the harpoonist that it didn't seem possible to throw it any distance, and she shrugged and waggled her hands either side of her masked head: body laughter. Then she clamped something to the shaft of the harpoon, just behind the grip. It was a cl.u.s.ter of powder rockets. The harpoon was a low-tech rocket-a.s.sisted missile.

By now, the shoal had vanished. Lee found he kept looking to starboard, at the s.h.i.+eld-wall cliffs rearing up from the shadows at their tumbled bases. So it was that he missed the first sighting, but, alerted by the m.u.f.fled shouts of the Free Yankees, he saw the plume of the dust ray when it rose again: a sudden double sheet of darker dust which shot high into the air and ruffled out in long billows on the breeze.

The plume was dust, taken in as the ray sieved the sea for plankton, that had been ejected from the ray's fine barbed combs by a kind of convulsive cough.

Redd, his masked face next to Lee, said that it was a big son of a b.i.t.c.h. Lee had to agree. Up in the prow, the muscular harpoonist was arming her weapons, banging the explosive charges into sockets at their points with cheerful gusto. Everyone else ducked as the boat heeled to starboard and the sail swung across. The harpoonist handed Redd a harpoon, and at the same time Lee saw the ray.

Its wide carbon whisker wings stretched a hundred meters 304.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.either side of its long flat armor-plated body. The wings were as black as a vacuum shadow. (Miriam was suddenly with Lee, standing just behind him, it seemed, and it was difficult for him not to turn to her.) They ceaselessly rippled over the bronze surface of the dust as the ray moved forward with dreamy slowness amidst a fine haze. Its combs rose like signal arms against the pink sky, fantastic fringed sculptures a dozen meters across, swept down and out across the dust, collapsed into its mouth. A double sheet of dust shot up, and the filter combs swept out again.The little round sailboat tacked away from the wake of darker dust churned by the ray's pa.s.sage. For a moment it ran parallel to the rippling edge of the creature's port wing: then it tacked inward. Its hull shudderingly vibrated as it dragged across the tough tissue-thin wing. Lee ducked the sail's swinging boom, saw the harpoonist rise as the boat turned parallel to the ray's body.The ray was as long as a locomotive, as flattened as a bedbug. Its tiny eye, like a bottle end set in its blunt armored head, was red as a stoplight. Breathing spiracles densely fringed with hairs pulsed arhythmically down the midline of its long flat body.The harpoonist beckoned to Redd, had him brace one footon the blunt raised prow, and handed him the harpoon. It was, symbolically, not attached to a line; nor was it armed.

She moved his right arm and harpoon back, told him to throw when she did, it didn't matter where. Then shereached across and lit the rocket fuses."Throw!"The cowboy threw as hard as he could. Sparks from thefuses sprayed his shoulder; the harpoon tipped head up as the rockets ignited, made a wobbling arc and struck the ray's body behind the armoured head, clattered down scales with the rockets still fizzing, and came to rest at the flexing junction between wing and body.The majestic rhythm of the ray's feeding didn't miss abeat.The Free Yankees raised a m.u.f.fled cheer, and the har- RED DUST.

305.poonist thumped Redd between the shoulder blades with such enthusiasm that he couldn't breathe for a full minute afterwards.Meanwhile the harpoonist took up her own weapon, this one fully primed. She raised it in her right hand to her shoulder, held her left hand across her chest, a glowing wick between finger and thumb. She spun the harpoon's shaft and the wick dragged across the fuses of the rockets.Then she leaned right back, flung her weapon forward.

For a moment it seemed to hang in the air, sparks flying from the furiously burning fuses. Then the rockets lit and it arched away in a flare of blue flame. It struck just behind the ray's tiny red eye, skittered sideways down its body. Then the charge blew. Dust rolled out from the explosion's brief red flower, leaving a ragged wound at the creased junction between the ray's body and its wing.There was a convulsive shudder under the boat. Everyone except Lee and the harpoonist fell on to the coils of cables in the well. The ray's filter combs collapsed into its mouth and sheets of dust blew sideways, but the combs didn't shake themselves out again.The muscular woman grabbed another harpoon, but as she braced herself something heaved under the boat and it rose until its prow pointed straight at zenith. The harpoonist flew backwards and hit the mast, and slid down it until she was sitting. The boat fell back and as the harpoonist struggled to her feet something plummeted from the top of the mast. It was the painted ironwood eagle. It hit the harpoon-ist's head with a heavy thud and fell into her lap as she slid back down again, this time quite unconscious.Veils of dust were rising all around the edge of the ray's vast wingspan. The boat rocked as wave after wave pa.s.sed over the wing on which it rested. People were hauling on the sail. One turned to Lee, jerked his thumb across his throat, pointed down, made a whirling motion.Lee understood. The ray was about to sound. When it did, the boat would go with it, sucked under in a maelstrom of displaced dust. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a harpoon.

306.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Virus reflexes made it easy to brace himself, exactly as the harpoonist had done. Redd saw what Lee was going to do, left off tending to the harpoonist and grabbed a slow match.

He kicked away someone who made a grab at the harpoon and lit the fuses of its rocket cl.u.s.ter. Dust clouds shaken up by the ray's flexing wings made a dense smog, like fire-lit smoke. Its body was no longer visible by ordinary light, but Lee could see it clearly by infra-red, saw a hot spot just behind its bottle-end eye, a patch of blood-rich skin where the lapping armor plates had drawn apart. There was no time for thought. He aimed and threw.

The rockets exploded in mid-flight, blindingly bright through swirling dust. Lee balanced like winged victory. The rocket's red glare vanished--then a dull explosion blew out thick gouts of blood and pulped flesh which spattered everyone on the little boat and drummed like hail on the sail.

There was a moment of silence, and then the Free Yankees yelled and began throwing cl.u.s.ters of recurved hooks attached to the long thin lines. When enough of them had snagged, the Free Yankees started hauling them in, dragging the boat across the now still wing and jumping on to the ray's body like so many pirates boarding their prize, armed with silvery bladders which they promptly began attaching at the dust line.

Lee followed Redd. The armored scales were like a tiled roof; beneath them, through his boots, Lee felt a complicated tremor, the failing of the ray's nervous system.

The harpoon's charge had made a big fleshy crater. Blood, thick and black as crude oil, was drooling from it, and the dust seethed as blood sank into it: plankton feeding on the life fluid of the creature which had fed on myriads of their cousins. As dust slowly cleared Lee saw that the ray's wings had sunk below the surface, and that the taut bladders were mostly buried; attached by hooks, they were all that were keeping the ray afloat.

Masked men and women were capering and stomping up and down the ray's long flat body. The harpoonist had recovered, and was alternately rubbing her sore head and sem RED DUST 307.

aphoring her arms up and down as if she was trying to take off.Redd grabbed her, whirled her in a brief waltz. Someone knelt, hands cupping flame. When he stepped back a rocket shot up at an angle over the dust sea, burst in a golden falling flower, bright against the soft pink of the sky. After a minute another flower bloomed, small with distance. Lee backtracked its trajectory, saw a speck at the horizon line.

It was the shoal, black sails crowding every tree as it bore down on the dust ray.

Sixty-five.

I.

I took the rest of the day to drag the dead dust ray to the sh.o.r.e. There was a narrow bay under toppling cliffs, its sh.o.r.e a fantastic conglomeration of b.u.t.tresses and broken arches, hollows and bowls and humped boulders. It was like the ruins of a city, ancient black lava polished smooth as gla.s.s by the ceaseless whisper of dust. Cliffs soared above, sculpted with balconies and terraces and caves.

The shoal was drag-anch.o.r.ed at the seaward point of the bay by sinking a weighted sail at its stern, and the Free Yankees swarmed ash.o.r.e in a flotilla of tiny boats, hauling the dust ray's corpse with them.

It was late afternoon when they beached it. The bay filled with the light of the setting sun, which poured through the high cliffs that bracketed its narrow entrance. Light was made solid by swarming dust. Gold: the light was gold. The Free Yankees moved like figures in a frieze of beaten gold, their shadows palpable, three-dimensional, extending like complex tunnels through the solid golden light. The long flat armored body of the ray glowed in the light as if it was being smelted.

Before the sun had set, the Free Yankees had peeled away the hard plates that s.h.i.+ngled the ray's body, flensed the hectares of carbon whisker wings and cut them into strips with diamond knives. Black strips hung from ledges and across boulders like the backdrop to an opera. The kinks and coils of the ray's intestines had been read for portents, then emptied of half-digested plankton (a prized delicacy) and hung on308.

RED DUST.

309.poles to wind dry. Flesh was cooked on trays over a slow fire fuelled by oil drained from the ray's vast liver. Soon, only the ray's flexible cartilage skeleton was left, gleaming like the cha.s.sis of a fantastic aircraft.The setting sun fell beyond the mouth of the bay and its swathe of light narrowed, less gold, more bronze. As it dwindled it seemed to run back into itself, until it hung like a blade at the entrance of the bay. Quickly, the blade shrank to a point that for a moment seemed to sway at the eclipsing edge of the cliff like a flower at the end of its stalk. Then the flower folded into itself, and slipped away.There was still light from the sky, hard and pinkish, but now everything seemed flatter, mundane. In the fading sky light, the strips of wings seemed to sink into the darkness of the boulders and ridges on which they were hung. Torches were lit, a slowly growing constellation of smudgy red flames scattered around the hub of the smouldering fire.A young child came up and set two torches in a crack in the smooth ledge where Lee and Redd and Chen Yao sat with Chancellor and other members of the senate of the Free Yankee Nation. These were the old men and women who had examined them, still wrapped in their fur-trimmed cloaks. Lee tried to make conversation, for the old know most and are unafraid of the truth, but at best the old men and women only nodded and smiled. Their finery was an honor earned not by wisdom but by survival of the perils of the Free Yankees' lives.The torches were shafts of ironwood whose tips were wound with cloth soaked in dust ray oil. They burned reluctantly, hissing and crackling with dancing golden motes as dust blew through their flames. Heavy smoke rolled into the shadowy air, spread in a low haze amongst the ma.s.sive boulders.

It smelt dryly sweet.Some of the Free Yankees had brought drums and tambourines and bells ash.o.r.e, and as dish after dish of food was served, sweet following savoury following sharply sour, a ragged percussive syncopation slowly settled into a steady throbbing groove. Lines of children excited by the carnival danced 310.

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in and out and around the big boulders which were scattered along the sh.o.r.eline.Redd picked sc.r.a.ps of meat from his teeth with the point of his knife. "These guys know how to have a good time," he said.Lee smiled, filled with muzzy beneficence. He was drunk with fierce brandy and with exhaustion. His virus-altered metabolism could have swiftly denatured the alcohol, but for once he wanted to feel it. He had walked to the edge of death for no good reason but the superst.i.tions of those around him, and he had come back. He was rebelling against the idea of himself that the Free Yankees had created, the idea in which he had acted when he had killed the dust ray. He didn't want to feel like a G.o.d. He wanted to feel human.His own music was broken and scratchy. Iron in the dust broke it to a ravelling secret whisper. He switched it off, lifted his mask and drank more brandy. Every sip of liquor, every mouthful of food, had the bitter taste of dust in it.Chen Yao said with disgusted despair, "You're both fools,"

and ran away down the rocky slope and pushed through the revels, which closed around her as the sea closes around a flung stone.Lee started after her, but lqedd caught his shoulder and he sat down heavily, off-balance. "Aw, let the kid be by herself,"

the cowboy said. "She doesn't understand we risked our lives today.""I think that's what she meant," Lee said."Tomorrow," Redd said. He took a long swallow of brandy.

"Tomorrow. That's what I told her. Man's gotta rest, after killing leviathan. Hey, just listen to that."The drumming grew louder; half the Free Yankees were beating something, most of the rest were dancing. Torches glowed in cauls of smoke and dust, obscuring by lapping shadows more than they revealed by light: but to Lee the people greenly burned by the light of their own heat, like animated candle flames flickering in smog.One of the Free Yankees clambered up to where Lee sat and bowed to the oldsters, who chuckled and nodded. It was the harpoonist. Her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s were bare, sprinkled with sweat RED DUST.

311.turning to mud. The swirling tattoos on her arms and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s burned with cold phosph.o.r.escence. Her mask grinned its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree grin at Lee. She grasped his hand in hers, and he followed her down towards the dance.Halfway there, she stopped and pushed up her mask. Her long-nosed face was tattooed with barbed polychrome swirls, so that her round bright blue eyes seemed to look at Lee through a c.h.i.n.k in a flowering hedge. Although she was a step below him on the uneven slope, she had to bend to kiss him."My name is Vette," she said, her mouth a centimeter from his own. "I owe you my life, and I never thought I would say that of any man. Are you really the one who will lead us back to the sh.o.r.e?""You're already here. The dust ray brought you, not I."

"They said you would deny it." Her smile glittered in the hedge of her face: like most of the Free Yankees, her teeth were capped with metal. Grit in their diet soon wore teeth to hollow stubs."Who told you that?""It was written in our charter, generations and generations ago.""I'm not a G.o.d. I'm just a man. A man!""It doesn't matter who you are. It's what you do."

"No! It's what you want of me."Vette laughed. "All I want you to do is come and join the dance!" She tugged Lee downward: he let her.Time dissolved in the steady pounding of the drums. Lee knew that the beat allowed the clockless crocodile of his back brain to dominate the quantum-decision trees of his mind, but he didn't care. That was the point of dancing, to dilute or submerge the heavy burden of selfhood. To let the many become one. Redd was dancing too, waving his hat above his head and whooping and kicking his heels. At one point someone rubbed oil on to the back of Lee's neck. Perhaps it contained a contact hallucinogen, because soon afterwards Lee kept glimpsing things that weren't quite there. Or which were in one place one moment, somewhere else th next.

312.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.

There was a species of hummingbird which lived in the cold high equatorial deserts. It lived in a close relations.h.i.+p with the giant yuccas which perpetually flowered in summer.

Only its long beak could reach the nectaries at the base of the yucca's long flowers, and in taking that exclusive food it carried pollen from one plant to another. In winter it dug a burrow and like so many creatures of the desert let its body freeze right through, but in summer it was the spirit of the high deserts of Mars, darting here and there or suddenly immobile on a blur of beating wings, then gone, so that you had to look around to find it again.So with the strange figure. Perhaps the dance had thawed it; perhaps the drug. Lee could only glimpse it in peripheral vision amongst the dancers, as if it lived in the blind spot of the eye. Whenever he tried to look at it directly it was gone, leaving only an impression of something human-shaped within a shadow that might have been a cloak, of a face masked like the faces of the dancers, except that it seemed that the mask was the face, or that behind the mask there was nothing at all. It was like the auditors that came and went in the other world of public information s.p.a.ce.

Perhaps they had always been in the real world, too, and only now could Lee glimpse one of them.The other dancers did not see the figure. Lee was in the middle of a chanting snake of dancers, grasping the waist of the woman in front of him, his waist grasped by Vette. His filter mask was pushed back on his head. The heavy smoke, rolling out across the bay, seemed to damp down the dust, and it was possible to breathe without choking. Which was just as well, because it was impossible, given the exertion of the dance, to breathe through a mask for more than five minutes.

His neck burned where the oil had been rubbed into it. A flask was pa.s.sed down the line, hand to mouth to hand to mouth to hand without missing a beat. Lee took it and tipped it to his mouth and pa.s.sed it on before swallowing--it was a fiery brandy that numbed the tongue and burned the throat.

Something stood in the shadows of a carved arch, watching as he was drawn past. It did not go away when he looked at it.

RED DUST.

313.

Lee stepped out of the dance. Vette followed, and the line closed up and moved on, an organism not without a mind or with many minds, but with one mind made of many. As Lee stepped towards the arch the drumbeats began to separate into distinct moments.The figure's robe covered its head and fell past its feet; it seemed to stand on the air above the dust-polished lava. The material of the robe was not a single weave but a four-color bit map composed of tiny irregular shapes, none bordered by another the same color, that merged in a polychrome s.h.i.+mmer.

Although the figure was no taller than Lee, it seemed to look down upon him from a distance, its gaze burning through a mask which seethed with characters and figures, like the ceaseless fall of a virus-riddled data base. When Lee reached the arch, the figure raised a hand and beckoned.Vette clutched Lee's shoulder, hard enough to bruise.

He said, "Do you see it?""Is it a soldier of your people?" Vette's soft hoa.r.s.e voice could be retrieved from the s.p.a.ces between the drumbeats.

Lee's viruses did it without his noticing."No. At least, I don't think it is a soldier in the way that you mean.""A few of those things would overwhelm an army," Vette said with awe.Lee realized in that moment that she would not leave him, and that she was braver than he.He said, "Perhaps, but not in this world. There's a world behind the world we know. Your people have never beenthere, but it is home to many of mine."

"Our dead are reborn. Aren't yours?"

"I don't mean the dead," Lee said.The figure extended its arm, and the hem of its swirling patchwork robe fell back to reveal its crooked little finger.

Not a human finger, but a curved claw that suddenly grew and grew. Its sharp tip touched Lee's right temple--the end point of the triple-burner acupuncture line.Everything tumbled away, and suddenly Lee was somewhere else.

Sixty-six.

A.

spot of heat pulsed at Lee's temple, where the figure's c!aw had p.r.i.c.ked him. He stood at the bank of a vast .nwer or sea of mist that poured past him up into the sky, rising and curving over as it rose so that it formed a circle, sky and sea eternally one with no beginning or end.

Intricate braids of golden light lived in the vaporous swirls, patterns switching restlessly and sparkling with trains of fugitive motes. They merged into a general glimmer where five dark shapes swam.

--The Isles of the Blest.

The voice was right inside his head. It was Miriam's voice, clear yet distant, as if transmitted down a fibre-optic cable from some far star.

--The Isles of the Blest are five in number. They are named Tai Yu, Yuan Chiao, Fang Hu, Ying Chou, and Penglai.

Once they drifted throughout the universe, but then they were fixed, each resting on the heads of three great Atlas turtles. There dwell those who have won immortality, or who will be reborn again, or who will pa.s.s on to a higher state. They are the white men and women who dwell in palaces of gold and of silver, and eat li chih, the fungus of immortality, and drink jade water.

Lee shouted into the mist, calling for the librarian, but he knew that he was not in any part of known information s.p.a.ce; he was beyond the barriers, where dwelt the dead. He was in Heaven.314.

RED DUST.

315.A star dawned high overhead as if in answer to his call, and rapidly grew brighter as it dropped through roiling vapors.

It was human-shaped, and glowed like a gla.s.s vessel in which a great lamp was trapped. Then its light flared and when Lee could see again, Miriam Makepeace Mbele stood before him.She wore black many-pocketed coveralls. Her dark face crinkled in a grin. Her shaven pate was unscarred. "Sorry about that," she said."Am I in my head?"She laughed. "You always were, Wei Lee. You haven't gone beyond that stage, not yet.""I mean, that's where I thought you were.""So I am still, or at least, the virus-transmitted partial of my own self is. But I'm here, Wei Lee, beyond life and death.

The old computer in the lamasery had connections every-where--this is where I went when you destroyed it."Lee stepped backwards. His fear must have shown on his face, because Miriam laughed. "I'm on the side of the angels,"

she said. "More or less. I'll be your librarian, if you'll let me. Come on. There is much to show you, and there isn't enough time."She took his hand (Lee remembered Vette, then) and mist and stuttering gold patterns streamed around them both.

They were flying through the mist at a furious pace, although they seemed only to be strolling. In a few heartbeats, before Lee could frame another question, the triple peaks of the nearest island swelled into clarity. Two other islands could be dimly seen, and shapes that had to be the world-bearing turtles swam in the mist below them.Miriam squeezed his hand. They stood in mist, high above the island, a way off from its sh.o.r.e."There were once five: now there are three. Tai Yu and Yuan Chiao were cast adrift when a giant waded into the sea and hooked the turtles with a drift line. When she had caught six she threw them over her back and waded away: in three strides she was gone. Without their turtles to bear them up, Tai Yu and Yuan Chiao were taken by the current 316.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.and drifted into the ice. Imagine, Lee, the isolation of the poor souls of those islands, stranded in featureless frozen whiteness.""Who are they, these inhabitants, these souls?" But he knew. They were the dead. "This is all a metaphor, isn't it?""Everything is itself, and the shadow it casts upon the world, and the shadows cast upon it by the world. Here the three are one."Lee trembled. He felt as if he had been stripped naked and cast into a furnace, with only his belief to save him. Yet he could not simply accept what he was told: he could not serve blindly, without question. "Forgive me for saying so, but you don't sound like Miriam.""The Miriam you knew was of the world. She was a mercenary a.s.sa.s.sin. I am your librarian, your guide. I came here, and it changed me. I can't leave unless you wake the dead dreamers from their icy sleep.""Again, forgive me. But I am still not certain.., what will happen when they wake?""We do not know. But to begin with, the barriers will be destroyed. The barrier that divides the information s.p.a.ce of Mars from that of the rest of humanity, the barrier that closes the sky, and the barrier which binds the dead of the Earth. We will help all who want help."Lee reflected that all his life he had been given that kind of help. All his life his destiny had been shaped by the actions of others."You have come far, Lee," Miriam Makepeace Mbele said.

"Tiger Mountain is riddled with ducts and cableways and pa.s.sages and caverns and nodes, drilled and laid by millions of von Neumann machines and big, slow viruses. A few parts still belong to those who built it. The ancestors of the Free Yankee Nation carefully chose the places they come ash.o.r.e, and their descendants return out of tradition, which after all is simply unquestioned memory. Here, I can speak to you by induction, but even here, that calls attention to myself.

These islands are secure, but I cannot yet land you upon them. That kind of direct interference has already lost two RED DUST.

317.

islands to Gaia. The final way is in the real world. That way is yours, yours alone to choose as you will--although we have arranged an ally for you. If you reach the top of the mountain, you will understand."Lee looked down upon the Blessed Isle. Its name was Peng-lai. On the flanks of its triple peaks, that rose sheer from the ground of data mist, were forests of trees whose fruit were pearls, data nodes that expanded upon contemplation.

And at the peak of the highest mountain were three intertwined trees whose branches reached through the circling sky, dividing ever finer, a billion billion connections each bearing a billion billion junctions, infinite connectivity...Lee had accessed all this in an instant, by instinct. His viruses drove around and through barriers. Amidst expanding blocks of data, Lee heard Miriam's cry, shrank back into himself."Not yet!" Miriam said. "Oh, you fool!"The island shrank away. They were standing on the sh.o.r.e again. The islands were vague shapes through the streaming data-dense mist. Miriam was a shadow before him, like a flickering figure on a badly tuned receiver."You fool," she said, more softly. "Poor fool. Go now, before the agents of Gaia close the way. You can do so much, and you know so little, and now you are on your own. It is too dangerous for me to stay here. Go, and don't look back!"She began to recede from him, along a direction that was at right angles to everything else. In a moment she had gone, but that direction remained, and it seemed to Lee that it was filled with the essence of her, the breath of her soul.

When something vast and dark leaned towards him, a shadow sucking up light, Lee fled after her.And fell back into his own self.

Sixty-seven.

H e staggered, caught himself against a shelf of dust polished lava. He retained the impression of a monstrous thing falling towards him, a lion-headed shark at least a kilometer long.

A woman turned his head and looked anxiously into his eyes. He could feel her body warmth; her smell of sweat and woodsmoke, tinged with a hint of rancid b.u.t.ter, rose from her skin. Her small bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed his side. Vette, her name was Vette.

"I thought you were going to have a fit," she said.

Lee replayed the moments before and after, and from the stutter of the rolling percussion figured he'd been gone less than a second in real time. He said, "I'm all right." It was true. He wasn't even drunk any more. He turned and saw Chen Yao toiling up the slope, Redd staggering behind her.

Chen Yao was breathless and angry. "Wei Lee! It won't work here! I told you it wouldn't. We have to go to the top, I keep telling you that, and you don't listen. Where would you be without me? While you've been dancing and dreaming and getting pig-drunk, I've fixed the gig."

"She's right," Redd said. He put his hat on his head and folded his arms and tried to look dignified, but his eyes kept crossing.

"At least," Chen Yao said to Lee, "you're not as bad as the cowboy."318.

RED DUST.

319.

Lee told Vette, "You hear my friends. I have to go. I mustfind the way to the top of Tiger Mountain."

"Then I'll go with you," Vette said.

"Just what we need.""Hush, Chen Yao. Vette, it is dangerous. More than dangerous.

I don't expect to return.""I know," Vette said, her eyes s.h.i.+ning behind her mask.