Red Dust Part 24

That's why my champion must erase you; otherwise I would have swallowed you whole and thought nothing of it. No more talking, now. It's too late."

He pointed, and Lee saw Mary Makepeace Gala running up the gardened slope towards him. She ran as if in a wind, flames streaming back from the burning sword she whirled around her head as she plunged through formal flowerbeds, leaped low hedges.

Lee felt the wind, too: it was rus.h.i.+ng from him. Something pa.s.sed through every cell in his body, like a hand pa.s.sing through a rainbow. Suddenly a host of beasts were leaping downhill towards Mary Makepeace Gaia. Tigers and RED DUST.

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panthers, monkeys twice as big as men, a bear bigger still that turned to Lee before lumbering after the other creatures.

Behind its sharp-muzzled mask was a human gaze; one Lee had not thought to see again.

The Emperor laughed again. "You multiply her aspect, but it won't help you."

Mary Makepeace Gaia whirled her flaming sword, cutting down the great cats that bounded at her, or setting on fire their striped or sable coats so that they raced away screaming.

The blade moved so quickly that its path blurred into a knot of blossoming flames. The giant monkeys howled and chattered at its edge, their coa.r.s.e coats smouldering as they dug up boulders and trees with frantic haste and hurled them at the a.s.sa.s.sin.

But boulders burst asunder when they struck the flame, and tree-spears shrivelled in mid-flight. The bear reared up, huger than it had first seemed. Its five-clawed paw raked the sky and there was a thunderclap and a fierce local deluge of rain.

The coc.o.o.n of flames died instantly. But where Mary Makepeace Gaia had been standing was a red dragon. It opened its beaked mouth and screamed, and with a brazen clash of wings leaped into the sky.

The bear lunged after it, turning in an instant into a black dragon that whirled away after its red twin. The two twisted in combat, now over the roofs of the Forbidden City, now over the crest of Coal Hill Park. They engaged as swiftly as striking snakes, flew apart, and struck at each other again.

At each encounter new thunderclouds billowed up. Slowly, the storm obscured the gray sky light of the flexing data streams. Rain dashed itself to earth amongst strobing strokes of lightning.

The Emperor yelled to Lee, "First your champion dies!

Then you!"

Lee wiped water from his face, yelled back, "I can't see how the battle is going! Are you more informed than I?"

For inconstant lightning was the only illumination now, and thunder drowned out the clash of the dragons. The Em 374 PAUL J. MCAULEY.

peror laughed, his face gleaming like metal. "Watch!" he said. His voice was louder than thunder.Air pulled apart between the Emperor and Lee, became a window. Suddenly Lee was looking over the shoulder of Dr.

Damon Lovelace, the envoy from Earth. He was in the control center, the dome atop the tallest tower of the city of s.h.i.+ning towers, watching a fanned sheaf of screens which displayed the earthmover from a dozen different viewpoints, in a dozen different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wave radio through visible light to gamma.The earthmover was roaring up a long slope towards the lip of Tiger Mountain's caldera, trailing a long comet tail of black dust. Lee caught his breath: one inset showed Redd alone in the bubble of its canopy, face slick with sweat, poisoned hand strapped up, one-handedly wrestling with the manual override stick.No one should have been aboard. The earthmover had a.s.sured him of that before he had set it its task.Gamma light showed the earthmover's bulky fusion pod.

At its heart the magnetic pinch fluttered bright as the sun.

Tritium fuel was pouring into it, and dozens of strange elements smeared its once pure spectrum. It was approaching criticality.By radio light, Redd's voice swooped and soared across a hundred wavebands. He was singing something about the land, this land, our land. Then he broke off and whooped and cried out, voice bright as the fusion pinch."I'm coming! I'm coming, Billy Lee! They went and killed you, but in the name of the people I'll finish it off!""Foolish man," the Emperor said. "I am disappointed in you, Wei Lee, if this is your diversion. Even if it does get close enough, which it won't, any explosion that little fusion plant is capable of won't hurt my defenses."Dr. Damon Lovelace turned, and the window turned with him to show cadres at work around the perimeter of the domed room. They were mobilizing some of the self-reproducing one-shot laser satellites that swarmed in orbit, turning them inward, marshalling them to produce a syn- RED DUST.

375.chronized beam that would vaporise the earthmover.Then the door of the elevator opened, and Guoquiang stepped out. He dragged a welding laser behind him, and pointed its wand straight up even as other cadres ran at him.

The apex of the dome shone white, and then the room filled with water vapor as the laser holed through. Lee imagined the supersonic whistle of air jetting into the near-vacuum outside.The swirling fog cleared, dwindling into a pillar that narrowed from its base, poured through the hole, gone. Most of the cadres were slumped at their stations; the few that had survived held air masks to their faces. Guoquiang was sprawled by the welding laser, blood bubbling from a chest wound.The view turned to show the sheaf of screens. The earth-mover was very near the top of the slope now. Redd was still singing.The Emperor screamed: far down the hill lightning flew up from every tower and rooftop of the Forbidden City, branching across the whole sky. Wei Lee and Number Eighty-Four were knocked down by the concussion.Lee saw the earthmover ride straight out over the lip of the caldera. For a long moment it seemed to defy gravity as its tracks churned the vanis.h.i.+ngly thin air. And then it tumbled end over end. The window flared with unbearable brightness. Lee threw his hands in front of his face and his viruses stepped down his vision: he saw the bones of his hands against the light: then it was gone.A terrific peal of thunder rolled overhead; blue sheet lightning shot across half the sky. The park was in ruins. The giant monkeys had fled. The Emperor's face, glimpsed by lightning, was pinched and drawn; his finery was ruined by the unrelenting drenching downpour."The explosion itself wasn't important," Lee said breathlessly, "but the magnetic pulse caused by the explosion opened your defenses to the sky. Even hardened machinery was blind for an instant, and an instant was all the anarchists needed."

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The Emperor said, "This will pa.s.s. I rule here. My champion will prevail, and you will both die. The boy first."He spread his arms and the boy, Number Eighty-Four, rose into the air. He screamed and reached for Wei Lee, but something caught him and hurled him into the Emperor.

For a moment, Lee saw the boy dwindling inside the Emperor's shadowy metrical frame. Then he was gone, and only the Emperor stood before him."And now you, little human," the Emperor said.Lee said, "I'm already dead. And so are you.""I was never alive, foolish Wei Lee! You can't hurt me.

You're a ghost in the realm of ghosts, and I'm the one who holds up the sky.""Oh, but I've already seen to that. You ate the boy, and he was infected with virus." Lee laughed, and reached for the Emperor.It batted ineffectually at his hands as Lee grasped the fine chain round its neck and pulled it hard, snapping its links.

He opened the pouch and took out the machine-code chip.The eidolon, Emperor no more, wailed, "You're dead!

You're a ghost!"Lee laughed again, closed his eyes and swallowed the chip.

Seventy-eight.H.'e had not known what to expect. At first it was as if someone was standing at his back, shouting furi- ously. But, slowly, the sense of the eidolon faded. It was like a drop of blood dissolving in a sparkling sea: Lee was that sea.And yet he was also himself. He was still the same young agronomist technician who with his two friends had walked out so eagerly into that spring morning; he always would be.He opened his eyes. The storm had pa.s.sed. The last rain slanted from the sky, silver spears falling softly to earth as thunderheads dissolved. In the grey light of the data streams Lee saw that the high battlement walls around the Forbidden City had dissolved too. All around the far, far horizon was an annular tsunami of ghosts. They were rus.h.i.+ng inward, but the distance was so great that they seemed not to move at all, an eternal ever-toppling wave.Closer at hand, a little way down the slope of the ruined park, a woman stood over her dead twin. It was Miriam Makepeace Mbele. She was breathing hard, and blood streamed from a wound on her scalp, soaking her close-cropped hair and soaking into the collar of her black one-piece bodysuit. She leaned on the pommel of a smoking sword that was planted in the ground. After a moment she left the weapon where it was and walked back up the hill towards Lee."It's over," she said. "I can feel it!"377.

378.

PAUL J. MCAULEY."It's just beginning," Lee said.Miriam Makepeace Mbele turned beside him, and saw the standing wave on the horizon. "You fool!""The lost islands have been opened. Now there is no wall.

No division between what should be, and what will be. Just as Mars will belong to everyone, so will information s.p.a.ce.

Nothing secret. Nothing hidden. I've torn down Heaven's wall."He watched Miriam consider transforming again, consider attempting to violate his integrity, consider activating a component of his viral system. She could have killed him in a dozen ways, but he knew that she would not.Instead she smiled. "At least you'll never have children.

You're a dynasty of one, Wei Lee. Enjoy your short life while you can, dear little brother.""I'd already figured that out. I'm you, but with something more.""You're me, half crippled.""Great-grandfather Wei bought an ovum from the Nexus and doubled its chromosome number and cloned it. Most were allowed to grow to term with only minimal changes to allow them to pa.s.s for Han. I met one of my sisters in Ichun; for a moment I thought it was you, come back from the dead. As for me, Great-grandfather Wei took one of the cloned ova and chipped one of the X chromosomes into a Y. My mother was a surrogate. My father was an employee of my great-grandfather. He..."Miriam said, "The man you call your father was the gene engineer who dealt with the Nexus. Instead of following your great-grandfather's orders, he inserted a Y chromosome given him by the Nexus. It wasn't editing, but deletion and subst.i.tution. He betrayed your great-grandfather to save humanity from the Earth's Consensus, and that's why he died.

As will we, when those ghosts reach us. But we'll die for nothing, Wei Lee."The seething wave of the freed dead was halfway across the darkling plain."I don't think so," Lee said. "Look!"

RED DUST.

379.A star suddenly shone high in the east. It grew from a point to a whirling torus streaked by amorphous pastel shapes within. Turn the torus inside out and you'd have the world, Lee thought. He said, "My great-grandfather's eidolon was subverted by the Emperor after the Emperor was seduced by the Earth. After that, my great-grandfather and most of the Ten Thousand Years were forced to deal with the Earth's Consensus.

They helped let in the Earth. For their betrayal, they gained immortality, and condemned the world to die."Miriam said, "In the beginning, your great-grandfather sought to unite Mars and the anarchists. You shouldn't blame him because he failed. His eidolon knew all about his plans, and of course so did the Emperor once it swallowed the eidolons of all the Ten Thousand Years. Only the oldest of the Ten Thousand Years, The Little Bird, had a mechanical eidolon; he bided his time and then rebelled. The Emperor did not know about his plans, and it did not know about ours. It didn't know how special you were, Wei Lee, or it would have killed you when you were a baby. Instead, it kept you as a stalking horse for the likes of me. It didn't know you were a double agent, and you didn't even know you were an agent at all."The torus whirled downward and kissed the side of Coal Hill. Light blazed up, and something swept through it.It was a long, four-wheeled ground vehicle, styled like an old-fas.h.i.+oned s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. It was painted a gleaming pink, with great streaks of chrome the length of its streamlined body. Lee recognized the emblem on top of its square radiator grille from a dozen doc.u.mentary clips.In the driver's seat was a man in chauffeur's uniform, with a face mild as milk and a wispy brown beard and a disc of light tilted above his head. When he raised his hands from the wheel, Lee saw that the palms of his white kid gloves were stained with blood."Jesus Christ," Miriam Makepeace Mbele breathed.And on the wide black leather seat behind the chauffeur was the King of the Cats. He wore a blue satin jacket, its collar turned up around the slicked combed-back cowl of his 380.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.hair. His arm was stretched along the back of the seat, and he kicked open the door with a negligent flip of a snakeskin boot. His lopsided grin broadened. "Hop on in, both of you.

Time to get out of here."

"I'm staying," Lee said.

The King said, "Don't be a fool, kid. You've done your bit, far better than we'd hoped. It's time to move on now. Time to come home."

Lee said, "You set me up. My whole life was set up from the beginning."

"From way before the beginning," the King said. "I can get you back across, but we'll have to move fast. They're angry, all those people you freed. There'll be trouble soon enough, and I don't aim to stick around to see it." Miriam had already climbed in; the King of the Cats put his arm around her. There was a crate of iced Thunderbird wine at his feet. Now he wore a check jacket, pink s.h.i.+rt, black jeans and blue suede shoes, and was ten years younger. "Yeah,"

he drawled, "I know I'm kind of unstable. The lousy codes in this s.p.a.ce don't translate too well. I had a h.e.l.l of a time pa.s.sing over." He uns.h.i.+pped a bottle, spun off the cap with a negligent flip of his thumb. In his other hand he held a bouquet of gla.s.ses. "Just a little bit further on down the road. There's nothing left for you to do here, kid."

Lee could feel the chip he had swallowed. It glowed in his chest like a neon heart. It was easy to pluck it out. He shook off blood and water and broke it in half and had two identical chips, whole in each hand. He broke them again, and had four.

The King of the Cats said, "Way too late for conjuring tricks, kid."

Lee had eight chips, sixteen, thirty-two. They made glowing stacks in his hands.

"Now hold on," the King said. "This really isn't part of the deal. You can't expect to give everyone..."

Lee said, "I didn't ask to be Emperor, but now I've backed on to the Jade Throne by mistake it's mine to dispose of as I will. You can't maintain a stable shape here because you RED DUST.

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can only approximate its codes: but I incorporate those codes. I'm going to use them to empower the living and the dead. Nothing will be hidden from anyone: the knowledge stacks will be transparent. My sister already waits in the Blessed Isles for the dead; they're free to go there or stay here. All I'm doing is giving them the knowledge to make the right choice. All my life !'ve loved listening to your talk and your music, without knowing that that love was coded in my Y chromosome. All my life has been shaped by others.

All my life I've been kept from the truth of my life. Call it revenge, if you like, but I want people to have truth in theirs."

"Kid," the King of the Cats said, "you can't throw up a utopia overnight."

Jesus said, "No, he's right. Wei Lee, the power to choose is all that we can ever give you humans. On your own perhaps you'll fail and fall, but the alternatives are worse. If we raise you up you'll be worse than slaves, and we'll be tainted by owners.h.i.+p. If we destroy you, then your potential will be lost for ever, and our guilt will haunt us until the end of time. Because the universe was not made for you, you have the potential to become something far greater than us. For that, we will always love you."

"You keep quiet now," the King of the Cats said. "You're just here to drive."

Jesus's toothy smile shone in the light of his halo. "I dislike metaphors, but truly I am in the driving seat. You are the interface, but you are only one of many. You know the consensus, and know you must be bound by it."

The King adjusted his big square-lensed dark gla.s.ses. He was a lot older and a lot fatter, in a jumpsuit glittering with rhinestones that was slashed open to his navel. He said, "I just don't like to see it end like this, in confusion. It isn't neat."

"It's not an ending," Jesus said. "It's a beginning."

The King of the Cats said, "So you let me do this job my own way until I reach the end of my string. Then you start jerking me around. Why should I put up with this?"

382.

PAJI J. McAuI "Because you're part of a democracy, and none of us are empowered by noise alone."

The King thought about that. "Noise is my life," he said, and handed br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses of Thunderbird wine to Miriam Makepeace Mbele, leaned across and gave one to Lee, toasted him with a third. "I guess we'll have to trust you,"

he said. "Take care, you hear?"

Lee said to Miriam, "You can stay here, if you want to."

She drank off the wine in one swallow, threw the gla.s.s over her shoulder: it vanished before it hit the ground.

"There's still work for me," she said. "I have to report to the anarchists, for one thing. I might be back, if they can find me a body."

The King of the Cats said, "That's another burden for you, Emperor Wei Lee. The anarchists are energy poor, their gene pool contaminated and reduced below safe limits, and their consensus is unravelling. They're a few generations from barbarism, maybe ten from extinction. That's why the Nexus agreed to let us work through them; it was their last chance.

You do right by them, you hear?"

'I'll always listen to you."

"Glad to hear it." The King tapped his chauffeur on the shoulder. "We're out of here, my man."

Jesus stepped on the gas, and the pink Cadillac blurred into a line of light that stretched and vanished.

The wine had turned to water. Lee drank it anyway, and went on down the hill, towards his people.

Seventy-nine.

'I took Vette three days to reach the top of the mountain.

The night the old people disappeared, and Wei Lee and .the little girl lab rat went chasing after them, the big machine had started up by itself. Vette had gone behind a boulder to pee, and she'd come out to see Redd chasing the machine down the gully. She ran after them through the clouds of black dust churned up by the machine, saw Redd grab hold of the ladder and pull himself up. She ran on until she could run no further, standing in the track the machine had smashed through the trees at the mouth of the draw and sobbing for breath as she watched the machine's lights dwindle into the starlit darkness.

Vette did not give up. She knew that heroes never gave up--sometimes they continued their quests beyond death.

For the rest of the night and through the day that followed she followed the tracks of the machine up the long, lichen-encrusted slope, jogging at a steady pace, her harpoon slung at her shoulder. It was like climbing an endless wave of rock.

As she climbed her breath grew labored and her sight fluttered red with the pounding of her pulse. She climbed until stars began to s.h.i.+ne through the day sky, and the air was so thin that every effort seemed immense and remote, as if she had grown to a giant without a giant's strength.

She was lying in a stupor when the limber four-legged robot with the woman's face floating within its screen found her. It was carrying a pressure suit, and Vette, who thought383.

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PAUL J. MCAULE.that this was a dream, did not resist when she was fastened into it. She was beyond surprise or fear.

The suit fed Vette thin sweet gruel from a nipple and sopped up her wastes and recycled her rebreathed air. Its black skin absorbed the light of the sun and turned her steps into leaps and bounds. Still, it took her and the robot all night and most of the day to climb to the top of Tiger Mountain.

She waited through dawn when the mountain trembled beneath her and vast sheets of light pulsed out above. Mter the lights were gone, the sky was full of falling stars. To the southwest a great light climbed the sky, and as it faded the mountain began to tremble again. Vette saw the world below the naked mountain slopes vanish under slate-grey rain-clouds.

The flood had come at last. Lee had won, but she had to find out if he and Redd and the little lab rat were still alive.

So she and the robot climbed for the rest of the day, until they reached the lip of the caldera and the ruined city directly below. Although the world below Tiger Mountain's slopes was shrouded with clouds, here above the atmosphere the sun still walked. The towers were broken or fallen amongst craters lined with s.h.i.+ny gla.s.s. Silvery loops of road slumped in s.h.i.+ny tangles. Domes had melted down to their rims.

Vette followed the robot down the steep cliffs. Darkness overtook them before they reached the bottom of the caldera, and Vette spent the night sleeping fitfully on a narrow ledge, watched over by the robot. The next day the sun was vertical by the time they reached the floor of the caldera.

They toiled across a fantastic landscape of collapsed lava tubes and stubs and snags towards the broken towers. Vette allowed the robot to lead her through the blasted ruins, the glow of its face-plate screen and the beam of her suit's helmet mingling and separating. One tower still held atmospheric pressure, and once inside Vette took off her helmet, grateful to feel the random brush of free air touching her face.

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The robot stalked silently and surely along curving corridors, and skittered down a turning stair that at last debouched into a room far beneath the surface of the caldera.

The room was hot, lit by the many colors of flowers.Three bodies lay in the kaleidoscope light. One had been dead for years, tangled in wires where it had half fallen from a couch. Another was of a slim muscular woman with dark skin and an eyepatch, dried blood streaked from her nose and ears and one eye.The third was Wei Lee's. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. He lay in a sea of dried blood.Vette cried out, but the robot caught her shoulder, turned her to show her two children curled in a corner, thumbs in their mouths, breathing gently and slowly in a deep sleep.

One was a young boy of no more than six or seven, his head shaven like a Free Yankee's. The other was the lab rat. When the robot touched her with the delicate metal fingers of a forelimb, she stirred and woke, blinked at the woman's benign floating image and said, "Wei Lee?"Beside her, the boy opened his eyes, but his gaze was as innocent of self as a newborn baby's.

Eighty.

Tg hey returned to the abandoned town at t,he margin of the forest belt that ringed Tiger Mountain s slo es T ate of the Last House had been broke,- n ?

7gL heuUltVII, lnere was no sign of Yang Go, or the robots he had commanded, or of the wild ones, except the remains of their dead. Bones were strewn across the slope beneath the wails of the Last House; it was clear that a/though Yang Go had killed most of the wild ones he had lost the battle. But although the surviving wild ones had ripped fabrics and overturned furniture, p.i.s.sed and shat on the floors and left doors open so that rain had blown in, the Last House was mostly intact.

Vette and Chert Yao and the boy made their home there. Vette and Chen Yao improvised rainproof garments from plastic sheeting, and foraged in fields where crops sprouted from long dormant seeds in a muddle of tomatoes and maize and peppers and sugar bamboo and greenleaf. They laid snares, smeared sticks with birdlime and set them around bait of sc.r.a.ps of fat. They gathered up the bones of the wild children and burned them on a pyre of aromatic juniper wood.

A year pa.s.sed.