Red Dust Part 5

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face of the young soldier who hung out of the hatch in a sling.Miriam had the torch again. She grounded the b.u.t.t in the red dirt. Lee goggled at the slit-lens; then Miriam twitched the torch a fraction and fired.For an instant, an intense thread of light burned through whirling dust. The tail of the culver broke off and flew away in one direction while the main body somersaulted in the other. A flexing wing smashed into the muddy river, threw the broken cabin against a sandstone ridge beyond.Lee tried to cover Miriam with his own body as debris whirred through the air. The whole surface of the river pocked and rippled. A section of hull went end over end over the water and smashed into a gravel bank. Something caught fire in the wreckage of the cabin. Lee started to get to his feet and a ball of fire enveloped the wreckage; he fell on his face as flame bloomed out across the water. Heat washed his skin."d.a.m.n you," Miriam said. There was something funny about her voice. "I didn't want to kill anyone...""Except yourself," Lee said. There was something stuck in the back of his throat. Then, astonis.h.i.+ngly, he was crying.The culver was still burning. Its frame glowed in a jelly of heat and flame. Thick black smoke unpacked itself into the pink sky.Miriam said in her weak, pinched voice, "You had better shape up, kid. I'm going to need help. I think you broke something all over again." She turned her head and spat blood into the red dust.

Sixteen.

They followed the tracks of the warhorse. There was little hope of catching it--it was probably halfway to the capital by now but when its trail turned away from the river Lee and Miriam turned too.

There was a scramble over a high lip of stone, through a narrow pa.s.sage between sandstone bluffs that met overhead like two heads touching, then the start of a long climb up a steep defile, the fossil bed of a tributary gashed into the cliffs millennia ago, when Mars had been in full flood and dinosaurs had ruled Earth.

The ancient stream had been partly revived by terraforming--the sides of the defile were littered with dead, fallen trees--but now the stream bed was clogged with dry red dust. The defile widened into a little sloping valley. Lee, carrying Miriam pickaback, kept stumbling on water-smoothed stones. Here and there pools of water stood, their still surfaces mantled with dust. Farther up, seepage was was.h.i.+ng red mud down tussocky slopes. Dwarf juniper spread fragrant dark green needle-fans above scree and sere clumps of gra.s.s; Himalayan pines, dwarfed and twisted, clung to boulders with gnarled roots longer than their knotted trunks.

Stands of immature lichens raised shoulder-high lobes. Lee saw desert chats, rose finches, robin accentors, once spotted a Sikkim deer turning away through the scrubby forest.

Amongst the dwarf trees and sandstone boulders were sloping s.p.a.ces thatched with gra.s.s and herbs. Pale yellow 76.RED DUST.

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flowers rose through a mantle of fine red dust. Whenever they reached one of these tiny meadows, Lee set Miriam down and sprawled beside her to rest for a few minutes.

Miriam was very weak now. Her breath was hoa.r.s.e and ragged. She had long ago given up telling Lee to leave her.

It was almost night, and growing bitterly cold. Finally, when it was clear that they could go no further, Lee lay Miriam on a narrow ledge of thin, sandy turf no bigger than a tabletop.

Lee held Miriam, and she held him. They were both s.h.i.+vering.

"Now I suppose we both die," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "You are such a fool, Wei Lee. I've given you all you need, you just don't realize it. Awhole world, in your hands..."

'I'll try and light a fire, in a little while." He had seen some gorse; there would be dry wood in the dead hearts of the stands, and he could make a friction bow to spark punk alight.

Miriam didn't reply. She had fallen asleep, or had pa.s.sed out. Lee held her. Above and behind them, the dwarf forest climbed the narrow valley towards a dusk sky already rich with stars. And all around were the sounds of the inhabitants of the valley going about their lives: furtive rustlings and faint squeaks or chitterings; once, the c of an owl, a soft thump as it plummeted on its prey a few metres from Lee, the whir of its wings as it rose.

Martians.

Beneath the sounds of the tiny lives lay the ancient silence of the planet, vast and empty as an ocean. The silence of the rocks; the silence from before the beginning of history; the dreamy silence that inhabited the centre of every thought, that filled the mind with an inexpressible sweet longing.

The silence that the conchie preachers wanted to spread across the face of Mars, a dry end to history and life.

Lee left Miriam sleeping, and collected the materials he needed to make his fire. The stars gave enough light to see in grainy black and white, and as Lee picked his way back to the clearing, arms laden with p.r.i.c.kly dry heather, the top 78.PAUL J. McAuLrof the valley fell to reveal Jupiter, and it was flooded with his cold yellow light. At the same moment, stars floated down, moving towards Lee swiftly and silently. He scarcely had time to register them before they were upon him.

Strong arms grasped his, knocked away the kindling. He shouted a warning to Miriam and something smashed him to his knees. Stars swooped giddily; Lee fell upwards into the night.

Seventeen.A.Pantheon of red and gold figures marched upon Lee.

He was lying on a pallet amongst a level field of stars which swam in the veil of their own heat. Above him, a gigantic gold-skinned man draped in green and red sat cross-legged on a throne of beaten gold. His gaze was level and serene, his eyes so wide that white showed all around his pupils. Flowers were strewn at his feet.

(Voices murmured, each to each.This is the young Han, Master.He is no soldier. And the other? Will she live or die?

We do not know, Master.We will pray for them both.) Lee tried to say Miriam's name. He couldn't move, yet still the field of stars tipped and receded. A b.e.s.t.i.a.l mask leered down at him; behind it, brown human eyes gazed into his. With a shock of reversal, Lee saw that it was no mask, but a face half ape, half human. The creature grinned, showing yellow fangs with a red tongue lolling between them, and Lee cried out.

79.EighteenL.

ee woke on a hard mattress in a narrow niche carved into the sandstone wall of a little cell. A primitive lamp shed a warm light and filled the dank air with the reek of rancid b.u.t.ter. A shaven-headed old man, dressed in loose orange robes belted with a yellow sash, sat cross-legged on the floor. He was knitting a skein of undyed yarn into a kind of cap. He peered at his tangling and untangling knitting needles through a pair of b.u.t.terfly gla.s.ses that perched on the sharp peak of his nose. Fine lines radiated around his eyes, but otherwise his face was as smooth and plump as a baby's.

When he saw that Lee was awake he set his knitting aside, hopped nimbly to the door and rang a silver bell. Then he helped Lee dress, loose black trousers, an orange robe, san-dais.

The old man said that his name was Pemba, that he was one of the monks of the Kailas lamasery. Lee had never heard of the place. He knew of the underground Tibetan lamaseries, but most were in ruins and none were within a thousand kilometers of the Bitter Waters danwei. The warhorse had been swift, but even it could not have ridden so far in the middle of a storm. When Lee asked. d just where Kailas was, Pemba answered cheerfully that he could not say.

"It belongs to the time before the Han. It belongs to the original people."

Lee wanted to ask if the old monk was ku//; but it was 8O.

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the one question he could not safely ask and, besides, he was fairly certain that he knew the answer. Instead, he asked about Miriam Makepeace Mbele. "The Yankee woman I was with.""Perhaps she was a Yankee, a long time ago. Dorje and Nangpa are attending to her. I will take you there, and find you something to eat too. Is she your friend?"Lee followed the old monk down a narrow corridor. Like the cell, it was carved from naked sandstone. Lee could feel the weight of rock above his head, a stress in the dim air like a word waiting to be spoken. b.u.t.ter lamps burned in niches, a line of smoky stars. Lee said, after a long silence which suggested he ought to say something, "I saved her life.""And so of course you feel an obligation to her, just as the G.o.ds are obliged to help us, for they have saved us again and again. And will, until time ends. We are all eager to hear your story. She is not human, you know."Lee would have asked Pemba what he meant, but at that moment someone swung down from an opening in the corridor's ceiling. It was the ape-man Lee had glimpsed in his dream which he knew now had been no dream at all.Pemba swatted the creature on its hairy flank and it cringed away from him. Pemba Said, "Don't mind Monkey.

He is mostly harmless, but he enjoys trying to startle me.

It is a streak of mischief I have not managed to beat out of him. But I need him, you see, because we are not yet certain about you."Monkey was perhaps two and a half meters tall--it was difficult to be precise because he walked with a stooped bowlegged gait, hands swinging by outthrust knees. He wore only a kind of waistcoat with many bulging pockets, and he was covered with coa.r.s.e reddish hair. His brown eyes peered at Lee from beneath a heavy brow that sloped straight back to the crested top of his skull; wide flat nostrils snuffled and thin lips skinned back from fangs the color of old ivory.

His feet were huge, with opposable big toes. They made a 82.PAUL J. MCAULEY.

flat, slapping sound as he followed Lee and Pemba along the corridor.Lee said, "I don't know if I'm afraid of your friend, because I don't know anything about him. I have certainly never seen anything like him in my life.""Monkey is our servant, but I do believe that some of his kind live wild, in the mountains. I remember that when I was a boy I saw footprints in the snow just like his. The people of the mountains, my people, made up stories about the creatures that made such tracks, but as usual the truth is less interesting than the stories. Probably, the tracks were left by a servant on its way from one lamasery to another.

This way, now."Pemba and Monkey led Lee through a dark room. Echoing footsteps suggested it was huge, high-ceilinged, and empty.

On the far side, light defined a small doorway. Lee had to duck to pa.s.s through it, and found himself in a long hall alive with color.Pillars carved with red and gold figures cavorting amidst swirling patterns receded towards a huge statue of the Buddha sitting in the lotus position. Lee remembered that serene yet quizzical golden face, its flexed eyebrows and wide eyes, its slightly parted red mouth. The Buddha's headdress was encrusted with jewels; a red scarf folded around his neck was tucked under a heavy jewelled torc. Small statues of lesser bodhisattvas cluttered the steps leading up to his throne, and before the steps a myriad tiny flames floated in two wide shallow bowls: yak-b.u.t.ter candle oceans whose hot pungent smell filled the hall. To one side of the throne, golden statues of wrathful deities and protectors stood in wall niches; to the other was a shrine, with a three-cornered high roof like a little house, which sheltered a tank in which a shrunken homunculus floated. The shrine stood on a cube of s.h.i.+ny black stuff in which sparks seemed to drift and slide.Monkey knelt. Palms flat, he bowed down so that his heavy brow touched the flagstone floor. He bowed not to the Buddha but to the shrine.Pemba took Lee's arm and led him down the central aisle, RED DUST.

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between the yak-b.u.t.ter candle oceans. Beneath the statue-peopled steps that led up to the Buddha's throne was a table where two robed figures bent over a p.r.o.ne figure."Your friend," Pemba said. "Dorje and Nangpa try to save her, but I fear we may not have the facilities."One of the monks said, "Perhaps no one could save her."The other added, "It depends what you mean by save, of course. The body is not important, Dorje.""In my present incarnate state, my body is important to me, Nangpa."The two orange-robed monks were both older than Pemba. The first, Dorje, was tall and gaunt, a bent stork of a man with heavy bones and skin so dark and wrinkled it might have been smokecured. Nangpa was like a wraith conjured from parchment; the sutures of his skull and a map of blue veins were visible beneath his pallid skin. His ears were huge and translucent, their lobes stretched by pegs of gold so that they touched his shoulders."Until we draw her machines her body is also important,"

Dorje said. "The body is the vessel, true, but it is important as long as it is full and cannot be emptied.""This one is full, to be sure. Far too full."Miriam was naked. A kind of mask lay over her face, sprouting wires which wove into a web of cables and looped up into darkness. Pemba put his hand flat on Lee's chest; until then, Lee had not realised that he had started forward.

"No, young Hah," Pemba said gently. "She is no longer yours."Dorje touched a silver wand to the ring finger of Miriam's right hand, to her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder, the side of her neck, her temple. He said, "We try to activate the triple-burner route, but still have much to do before she isfully exorcised. Where is she from, young Han?"Lee said, "The sky."Nangpa said to his tall companion, in a mild voice, "Shetold our master the truth. Unless the boy also lies.""He doesn't," Pemba said.The tall monk said, "It does not matter where she is from, 84.PAUL J. McAuLEbut who she is. It does not matter who she is, but what she does."

Nangpa said, "It would help if we knew who made the machines that infest her."

Dorje touched the side of Miriam's neck with his silver wand. "Needles there, quickly, before the infernal things disperse again."

Pemba said to Lee, "It has been so long since they have had to do this. Master Norbhu pa.s.sed away, why, it must have been fifty years ago, and besides, he had no machines in his blood."

"Not until we put them in," Nangpa said. "And it was sixty-three years, not fifty, young Pemba."

"It was sixty-five," Dorje said. "But only Pemba would care how long ago it was. He was not born here."

Pemba bowed and said humbly, "Masters, I know that the years are of no account to anyone below, and until yesterday I had not been above for a very long time." Dorje and Nangpa took no notice. Pemba told Lee, "I had to help Monkey.

Two of us were needed because there were two of you.

There is only ever one Monkey. Band-width limitations prevent Master Norbhu from controlling more than one at a time. But when I had to carry you back, young man, I began to see an argument for two, trouble enough though one is.

We could have left you to die, but that is not our way."

Lee said, "I don't understand what they are doing to Miriam.

Who is your master? How can he ask her questions if she is asleep and he is dead?"

"All the better if she is asleep," Pemba said. "The truth is in dreams. And he really is dead, but he has not yet pa.s.sed into transcendence. Perhaps you do not remember his interview with you."

"I remember his voice, I think. But corpses do not speak."

The half-lifers, pale puppets in their coc.o.o.ns, dreaming their way into Heaven's information s.p.a.ce as they died out of this one. It was possible that they spoke to each other, but they never spoke to the living.

"Only the body is dead," Nangpa said as he drew out nee RED DUST 85.dies he had pushed into Miriam's neck. A fat bead of blood clung to the end of each, and he carefully dropped them into a bra.s.s jar whose throat smoked with white vapor."The body lives, in part," Dorje said testily. "It keeps the brain alive, or else the soul would be released into a new cycle. If the house is burned, the inhabitants do not die, but they must live somewhere else. And so here. The machines help the body, in its half-life. So our dear Master Norbhu guides and enlightens us still.""He is right," Pemba said, guiding Lee around the bowls which held the smoky constellations of the yak-b.u.t.ter candle oceans to the shrine. "See, young Han. Master Norbhu lives, in his own way."Light came on beneath the peaked roof of the shrine. It shone on the homunculus which hung inside its fluid-filled jar like a huge, ancient embryo. Bubbles rose from sutures where tubes entered its ribcage, fanned around its bowed chin, caressed its sunken cheeks. Fine wires trailed from the corners of the homunculus's eyes, which were sealed by bluish membranes, and from its ears and the base of its skull, looping over its shoulder and winding once around its waist before running into the base of the vessel and the black cube on which the shrine stood.This was not like the half-lifers, Lee thought. This was a corpse, wired and preserved.But then the homunculus stirred. It moved slowly and jerkily. There was a cage of fine silvery filaments wrapped closely around its limbs. It raised its head, swung to face Lee. A hand came out, pressed against the gla.s.s of the vessel.

The nails were curled h.o.r.n.y blades long as knives.Lee heard the faint scratching they made against the gla.s.s, and stepped backwards. For the first time he felt afraid. The monks were old men, wise perhaps, but not strong enough to hold him against his will. Monkey was some kind of gene-tailored animal, and there were always words of control for such creatures, perhaps the same words which had controlled the warhorse. But the homunculus was neither living nor dead. It was a ghost, a demon.

86.PAUL J. McAuLg The homunculus's mouth did not move, but there was a voice. Lee could not tell where it came from. It was not a human voice. It filled his skull, deep and wise and patient and remote.--MONKEY'S LINEAGE IS NOT OF ANIMALS TURNED INTO MEN, it said. HE IS OF MEN WHO HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE ATTRIBUTES OF ANIMALS. YOUR GREAT SCIENTIST DESIGNED HIS ANCESTORS AS.

SLAVES, BUT THEY WERE NOT A SUCCESS. LIKE OUR OWN DEAR.

PEOPLE, THEY ARE TOO INDEPENDENT. YOU WILL UNLEARN THE.

FALSE WICKED HABITS OF INDEPENDENCE HERE, YOUNG HAN. IT.

HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE GAINED A NEW RECRUIT.Lee said to Pemba, "Your master can see into my mind.

He must see that I do not belong here."--EVEN THOUGH THE MOUNTAIN BECOMES THE SEA, WORDS.

CANNOT OPEN ANOTHER'S MIND."The master quotes Mumon," Pemba said. "There is a teaching behind all things, but it is not of the mind, it isnot Buddha, it is not things. That is what we learn here."

"Perhaps that kind of learning is too hard for me.""The Way is always hard," Pemba said. "When it is not,we know we are not on the Way.""Miriam...""Your friend will serve too. She has much to offer, once we have tamed her machines.""If it is possible," Dorje said from the flickering shadows beneath the throne."It is possible," Nangpa said. "But although it is possible, she may not outlast our ministrations. So we must hurry, Dorje, as I have told you.""We work as we will," Dorje said.Lee said, "And if she will not serve?" His voice echoed from the painted vaults of the chamber's ceiling: he hadn't meant to speak so loudly.Pemba told him, "There is only one Way."Lee ran. He dodged Pemba's feeble swipe and ran straight for the low door at the far end of the hall. Monkey leaped up. Lee shouted words of power, but Monkey only beat his chest and hooted and chattered. RED DUST 87.Lee wrenched free a pole which held one corner of a dusty canopy pitched above a statue of many-armed Yamantanka the Terrible. Monkey dodged Lee's wild swing and grabbed the splintered b.u.t.t of the pole. When Monkey pulled, Lee slammed his shoulder hard against his flat frog-face. Monkey lost all his breath. Lee wrestled the pole from his grip and whacked him in the stomach.Monkey fell on his knees, and Lee turned and raised the pole above his head, shouted to the monks that they must free Miriam or some bones would be broken.The tall, thin monk, Dorje, stood between the two bowls of candle flames. He pointed his silver wand at Lee, who laughed. These foolish old monks and their half-animal servant were feeble enemies.And then lightning flashed along the wand and Lee was flung backwards, every string in his body loosened.

Nineteen.

T.

he blow from Dorje's wand did not quite knock Lee out, but for a long time he could hold no thought in his head for more than a second. Slippery moments fell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering beyond his reach.

When time knitted up again, he was back in the little cell, in the niche hollowed into sandstone. Pemba gave him food, a purple broth with fibrous chunks, a bowl of tea with b.u.t.ter swirled into it.

Pemba explained that the food was woven from plant stuff grown in vats, using light piped down from the surface. The lamasery was as old as the Tibetan occupation of Mars, from the time when the air had been partly thickened but had not yet been made breathable, when vast storms racked the world from pole to pole. The Tibetans had tended the remaking of Mars, and the Han, who had exiled them, had then stolen their work: but the lamasery had survived. One day its time would come again.

Lee had heard this sort of thing before, from the cowboys he'd met on his travels from one danwei to another across the vast plains. He knew better than to say that his ancestors had been exiled too, in a vast exodus of hastily built gimcrack s.h.i.+ps of which perhaps only a tenth had finished the voyage. That his own mother and father had disappeared because of their political beliefs. That he was no more than a p.a.w.n in a scheme of his great-grandfather.

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Pemba, knitting slowly by the flickering light of the b.u.t.ter lamp in its niche, b.u.t.terfly gla.s.ses perched on his nose, told Lee that he had once lived free, on the surface. The lamasery had been forgotten, or if it had been remembered it was as a place abandoned and in ruins. Pemba had been a cowboy before he had been recruited into the lamasery, before he had been given a new name and a new purpose. So too had been Dorje and Nangpa, and perhaps even Master Norbhu.

It had been a very long time since anyone else had stumbled into the hidden valley, Pemba said, and it dawned on Lee that he was meant never to leave here. That he was meant to live out his life in saffron contemplation, cleaning the statues of the great hall and knitting scarves for them, playing conch or drums or cymbals to the slow rhythms of chants, tending the master in his wired jar.

Pemba said that it had taken him a long time to see the light, but now it was with him to the end of his days. And so it would be with Lee.

"I don't think so," Lee said.

"It was a very long time ago, but I remember my first days very clearly. And what you say to me is just what I said to Dorje." Pemba held up his knitting needles, and Lee cringed from them.

Pemba chortled. "The wand does that to you. After only one application, you fear even its image. It is a beginning, young Han. You'll see."

Twenty.L.ee was still weak and feverish. After a while he slept, and it seemed to him that the librarian came into the cell and stooped over him, whispered in his ear that his parents had been found. Lee woke with a start. Pemba was asleep, breathing slowly and regularly with a faint whistle.

His knitting had fallen in his lap.What had woken Lee was the voice of the King of the Cats, faintly whispering in his head, fading in and out of audibility. Lee sat up. His fever had gone. As he swun his legs over the side of the sleeping niche, the King started to play "Blue Suede Shoes"--not his version, but Carl Perkins's.Pemba said, without opening his eyes, "You're awake.

That is good."Carl Perkins began to fade in mid-song. But the voice that spoke over the fade wasn't that of the King.--He's gonna tell you I'm dead, Miriam Makepeace Mbele said.Pemba said, "Your friend is dead, but only in body. Herspirit lives on..."--More or less."...and like you, she will serve the lamasery well. Come with me, young Han."--There's this computer, Miriam said in Lee's ear as hewas led along narrow corridors and up winding stairs by RED DUST.

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Pemba. They were going to the surface. There was a ceremony to be performed.--It not as old as I am, but it's close. It thought it could seal me off, use me to fill in gaps in its functions. I think someone tried to physically reprogram it once upon a time, and nearly destroyed it. It still working, but only because it's using the higher brain functions of this old monk it hardwired into its systems. It wants my skills to open up its physical plant again. Already I'm making connections all over the planet. Say something, Wei Lee. Subvocalize."What did you do to me?" Lee whispered. "What has happened to me?"--I turned you on.When she had kissed him, Miriam said, totipotent fuller-ene viruses in her saliva had swarmed into Lee. They had been multiplying inside him ever since, using gene therapy to rewrite the DNA of muscle and epidermal cells to turn them into little transceivers, spinning molecular networks through his body and brain to form a parallel nervous system.Although the narrow corridors were lit only by infrequent b.u.t.ter lamps, Lee could see quite clearly, in bright, slightly fuzzy shades of green. Arrays of optical sensors had been inserted into his retinas; an image-processing network had been constructed parallel to his own. Occasionally, ideograms ghosted across his sight: command strings for activating a whole range of functions that were being hardwired into his optical chiasma.Lee accepted these changes without alarm. Perhaps the viruses had conditioned him to accept their work--he would never know.He mumbled, "You seem so calm."--I've been dead before. It doesn't matter if I'm the real Miriam or not, I've gotten used to that philosophical problem over the centuries. There isn't time to explain the turns I've taken, but watch out for any of my sisters. There at least one down here, and she isn't on my side.

92.PAUL J. MCAULEY."Who is she working for?"--I'm a licensed soldier of fortune. The Nexus owns copyright on me, but anyone can buy an ovum and the training program. You're near the surface, now. They're all there, except the master, and he hardly counts. I doubt if the computer left anything of him except perhaps his limbic functions.

Ever see the Wizard of Oz? I guess not. Well, the master's not the danger. It's the little guys hiding behind the curtain. Those two old guys, Dorje and Nangpa."I think you're wrong," Lee mumbled. "This whole place is like a trap. The monks don't run it."--You're coming up to a big chamber. Then the surface.

I'm up there, in a way. I'm going to help you escape.Ahead of Lee, Pemba was silhouetted against a brilliant glare that abruptly stepped down as the sensors built into Lee's eyes compensated for the increase in light. The corridor opened into a vast domed chamber a hundred meters across, rising to fifty meters at its apex. It was lit by sunlight falling through square apertures cut into the domed roof.

The walls were naked rock, with niches crammed with statues of demons. There were demons with rolling eyes and fierce fang-filled grins, bat-eared demons and elephant-nosed demons and demons with human ears whose lobes hung down to their pot bellies, pop-eyed demons and snake-eyed demons and demons who had rolled their eyes back into their skulls, demons with the beaks of crows or of parrots.

Forever frozen, hundreds of them, thousands, they grinned and grimaced and ground their teeth, capered and chortled and contorted their pot-bellied bodies into impossible and obscene postures. Appliqu tangas hung from ceiling to floor down the demon-filled walls, tongues of dusty cloth whose brilliant colors had long faded. Drifts of red dust saddled away across the floor, and wind blew through the chamber, turning hundreds of prayer wheels that were scattered everywhere. They made a dry roaring rattling, hollow drums with printed prayers pasted inside them revolving around and around in the constant wind, each revolution a prayer blown RED DUST.

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out into the world. For every working wheel, there were two that had fallen over or simply jammed.--This place has seen better days, Miriam commented.

You're very near the surface now, Lee. The others have taken my body there.Footprints already st.i.tched a diagonal path across the vast prayer-haunted wind chamber. Lee followed Pemba through an oval arch set in the rock and up a winding stair. Narrow windows pierced the sandstone wall at every revolution of the helical stair. Lee glimpsed a narrow valley falling away, the steep slopes of wind-carved rock that enclosed it and chaotic terrain beyond, slumped hills pitched every which way.Pemba had to stop at intervals to gain his breath. He clutched a fold of his fluttering orange robe over his shaven head. At last the stair opened into the back of a shallow cave.

Outside was a wide s.p.a.ce littered with rocks; each rock had a tail of sand pointing east. Something crackled under Lee's boots. It was a fragment of dry bleached bone.There was an altar in the center of the garden of rocks and bones, and from each corner of the altar thin pillars of blue aromatic smoke rose straight up in the still air. The small sun shone high overhead, a coin of platinum fire stamped into the neon pink sky. A body lay on the altar. The two old monks, Dorje and Nangpa, were working on it with hatchets.They wore only breechclouts, and their skinny chests and arms were spotted and streaked with vivid red blood. Monkey sat to one side, softly tapping a small drum he held between his big feet. A flock of ravens hopped and s.h.i.+fted on white-stained boulders heaped at the far side of the arena.--I've had all kinds of funerals, but I guess this has to be the most ecologically sound.Lee didn't want to get any closer to the butchery, but Pemba took his arm. "You must help with the sky burial,"

Pemba said. "You must see how inhuman your friend was."--I'm a good deal more human than their High Lama.

Even Monkey more human than that.

94.PAUL J. MCAULEY.

"Go on, young man!" Pemba brandished a knitting needle.