Red Dust Part 7

Twenty yuan a day was about a tenth of what Lee had earned at Bitter Waters. But money wasn't the point. The 112.

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point was that Lee's great-grandfather wouldn't expect him to ride into the capital amongst a herd of yaks. He said, "It's a deal.""Someone give him tea," Hawk said.Lee sat a little way off from the roaring fire. A tin mug of tea with a lump of rancid b.u.t.ter dissolving in it warmed his cramped hands. The cowboys talked quietly amongst themselves, pa.s.sing around a long-stemmed pipe of marijuana and telling tall tales. After a while, Redd brought Lee a rough blanket. It reeked of horse sweat, but Lee took it gratefully: it was piercingly cold out under the stars."Sleep," Redd said. "Long ride tomorrow, and you'll needto get up before everyone else.""Oh?""I guess I did forget to tell you. Stinkfoot was our cook."

Twenty-six.

L.

ee woke to a frail thread of song. It was the grey hour before dawn. Jupiter was a blurred diamond low on the horizon. The fire was down to glowing ashes. The singer was a long way off, out amongst the circles of tethered yaks. His voice was high and plaintive, rising at the end of each line in a weird ululation. He was singing in the Country and Western mode that the King of the Cats had sometimes affected (although of course as with everything else the King had stamped it with his own persona). Hear the lonesome whippoorwill...

By the time Lee had revived the fire and set a pot of water to boil, the rest of the cowboys were up and about and the horizon was just falling below the rim of the sun. Redd showed Lee where the supplies were kept, helped him brew tea dark as beetroot juice, and fry cakes of oatmeal and b.u.t.ter on a sheet of metal set directly on the fire. Cowboys drifted up, took food and tea without comment, drifted away.

"We always sing to our herds," Redd told Lee, and explained that the yaks, used to ranging free in small groups, grew nervous and contrary when herded together. At night, almost anything could Spock them, kit foxes or a dire-wolf, a change in wind direction, a meteor. Song calmed them.

Lee thought about the pop arias and commercials that had constantly echoed around and about the Bitter Waters danwei, and said he knew what Redd meant. He added, "I 113.

114.

PAUL J. McAuLE know plenty of good songs. Maybe you'll let me sing to your animals."

As Redd showed Lee how to saddle up, they fell into a friendly discussion about whether the King of the Cats had transcended Country and Western as he had transcended so much else. Or at least, Lee did most of the talking and Redd smiled a lot, and when Lee had more or less run through praising the King of the Cats, Redd commented that the King sounded like an outgrowth of Country and Western, no more special than that. Lee laughed, and said when they made camp he'd teach Redd some of the King's style and then see what he said.

"Let's get to camp first," Redd said, and swung himself up into the saddle of his skittish bay pony. "The longer it takes to get the yaks to market the thinner they are and the less they're worth. Hawk said I should let you know that!"

Then he kicked his pony into a trot, and left Lee standing.

The cowboys made speed that day. Their ambling herd moved surprisingly quickly over the red stony plain. Impacted sand, rocks, shale, spattered with the broken circles of ancient craters. They were paralleling hills that rose, wave after wave, to the north.

Riding dead Stinkfoot's old, barrel-bellied pony, which was laden before and behind its high saddle with bundled cooking implements and sacks of barley meal, Lee followed as best he could. The pony's lurching sway-backed amble was making him distinctly motion sick, but he was happy.

Just to be moving was enough. Everything that had happened to him or that cast a shadow into his future--the flight from Bitter Waters, Miriam's death, the viruses, his great-grandfather's plots--dissolved in the eternal moment.

Lee was very young.

Far ahead, the cowboys were strung in a loose V behind the herd of yaks, moving in a gritty rolling cloud of red dust and clatter of wooden bells. The men called to each other in high yodels, now one and now another racing forward to cut a stray back into the herd. Only rare clumps of air lichen punctuated the cold desert, and those were stunted, frost RED DUST 115.blasted specimens, yet these plains were where the yaks spent most of their lives. A kind of saxifrage moss grew just beneath the surface of the sandy soil, and yaks sc.r.a.ped it up and gulped it down, grit and all. The cowboys had to ride back and forth to keep the herd moving whenever it pa.s.sed over an especially rich patch.It was hard, dirty, difficult, dangerous work. Yaks were temperamental beasts, bad-tempered and unreliable, switching from sullen stubbornness to high nervousness and back at the twitch of a tufted tail. Because they had to fend for themselves in winter, their long sharp horns were untrimmed.

Orange spittle streaked their muzzles. When a yak was nervous, it yawned to show strings of dirty orange mucus inside a black mouth; when it was getting ready to run it shook its head and spit went everywhere. Their coats of long hair hid long legs: a yak looked bulkier than a cow, but could be as skittish as an antelope. And they could run for ever if they wanted. Half their bodies were packed with lungs; they were just about the only animal species that hadn't had to be spliced and diced to adapt it to Mars's thin cold atmosphere.Lee picked up from Redd what was needed more by imitation than instruction; herding left little time for conversation.

They rode trailing point behind the left flank of the herd, eyes open for any yak that decided it had had enough of the company of its peers. Escape bids were discouraged by cutting in on the stray and physically blocking its path.

Not as easy as Redd made it seem, Lee discovered the first time he tried it. Yaks were as nimble as the cowboys' ponies, and knew how to use their long sharp horns. Whips were used as a last resort; it could make the yak panic and charge off at an unstoppable lick, tail held high. If you were really unlucky, nearby yaks caught the same panic.The cowboys were heading towards the round-up camps outside the capital, but they had other business that was taking them in a wide arc to the west. Lee guessed that it was something to do with the anarchists, for where else would the cowboys have gotten their silicon jewellery, their 116.

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penchant for Hank Williams, Roy Rogers and Roy Acuff?.Constant wind sent drifts of red dust skimming across the plain. Towards noon, a pod of sky seeders rode the wind out from the foothills: big ragged blue-green blimps with rudimentary nerve nets, each moving inside a distinct haze of extruded cyan.o.bacteria, remnants from the time when the newly outga.s.sed atmosphere of Mars, rich in carbon dioxide and little else, had been made breathable. Cho Jinfeng had spliced them from sponge and coral genes. Cyan.o.bacteria constantly multiplied within them, producing oxygen and fixing atmospheric nitrogen--hydrogen produced as a byproduct of nitrogen fixation filled membranous pockets and gave the things lift. Excess blue-green filaments were extruded and fertilized the land over which the sky seeders drifted.Lee had only seen sky seeders once before, and dropped behind the herd as they traversed directly overhead. Even as he watched, a cl.u.s.ter of black darts zoomed out of the west.

They were conchie killer drones. The other cowboys had seen them too, and rose on their stirrups, calling to each other.The drones hurtled through the pod of sky seeders before the plant-animals had time to react, smas.h.i.+ng great holes in their inflated bodies and setting fire to their hydrogen sacs. Half the sky seeders started to sink, trailing smoke and blue flames. The drones somersaulted and made another pa.s.s. Wounded sky seeders blew apart with sharp explosions that s.h.i.+vered echoes from the foothills. The rest were shedding ballast--vast green clouds of cyan.o.bacteria--as they tried to rise into higher, faster winds. But the drones cut through them again, once, twice. A mother sky seeder tried to place its bulk between the drones and its two pups--a drone smashed her in half and dispersed lightnings that blew up the pups in b.a.l.l.s of blue flame.The drones swooped low over the cowboys and the herd, and then they were dwindling westward, even as the burning remnants of the sky seeders tumbled to the plain. Globs of cyan.o.bacteria were raining down everywhere, and the yaks RED DUST.

117.had scattered and were greedily grazing on this unexpected manna; it took a long time to get them moving again."b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Redd said to Lee, when they briefly worked alongside each other, chivvying a yak away from a singedslab of sky seeder."The drones?""Their masters. They won't rest until they've destroyed the world, and it isn't theirs to destroy."Lee, amazed by the cowboy's bold opinions, said, "The Emperor has decreed otherwise." In the past year Lee hadn't dared to express his own Sky Roader sympathies to anyone but Guoquiang and Xiao Bing, and then only well away from the rest of the danwei.Redd managed to loop a rope through the yak's nose ring.

The other end was tied to his saddle. The yak bellowed but reluctantly left the feast. He shouted, "The world isn't the Emperor's. It's ours. And no one asked us what we want."

Then he kicked his pony into a trot, dragging the yak after him. Lee would have ridden after him to ask what he meant, but Hawk yelled for him to give a hand, and he had to turn away.

Twenty-seven.

T.

he herd covered less than twenty kilometers that day.

When the cowboys finally made camp, at a place little different from where they had started, Lee felt as if most of the territory coated his whole skin, all the way inside him to his stomach. Patches had rubbed raw on the insides of his sweat-slippery thighs where they'd gripped the high saddle.

Redd handed Lee a pair of chaps with supple leather patches on the thighs, and Lee thanked him.

Redd said, "Are you ready to sing, Comrade Lee?"

"After cooking, I should think I'd have trouble lifting the guitar."

"Plenty of time to practice before we reach the roundup.

Then you will sing. I told the others, and they're eager to hear new songs. We'll be pleased if your King of the Cats charms the yaks half as well as Hank Williams."

"He is more your King than mine. One of your ancestors, after all."

"I'm a Martian," Redd said. "All cowboys are Martians.

That's why so few of them are Han. You might be a Martian, Wei Lee, I don't know yet. As for the King of the Cats, he's just a dead guy from another world. Maybe I'll think something of him if you can out-sing the rest of us."

Ordinarily, Lee would have sprung to pa.s.sionate defence of the King. But now.., he was simply too exhausted. He found it hard enough to stay awake to cook the cowboys'118.

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supper: smashed barley grains, dehydrated vegetables and fatty salt meat boiled up in a big black kettle, yak bones charred on the embers until their marrows bubbled and ran.

"Good food," Hawk p.r.o.nounced. His beard shone with grease. "I told you," he said to the cowboys, "that they make the best cooks. You come with me, young Han, and I'll show you how to make tea strong enough to sink such good food and lay the dust."

As he shaved tea from a black brick into the kettle which had held the stew, Hawk said quietly, "What do you think of young Redd?"

"He has been good to me. After all, he saved my life."

"I've seen you talking with him. And I've been wondering just why you're out here."

"I was travelling to the capital."

"Do tell." Hawk licked the blade of his knife, folded it up and put it away. His long white hair made a kind of cowl around his lined face. "You put water in the kettle until it's half full, bring it to the boil, then put in the b.u.t.ter." When he had set the kettle in the middle of the cooking fire he said, "Young Redd's a firebrand. A couple of herd bosses have already fired him from their crews. I find him.., entertaining.

He reminds me of myself when I was young, when the Emperor and the Ten Thousand Years began to deal with the Earth. The conchies sent missionaries amongst us, and we lynched most of them, but there were always more, all looking almost exactly alike. There were riots, I remember, and the Army of the People's Mouths was sent against us. I was amongst those who called for the strike to hold, and it did. We took away half the capital's meat supply, and pretty soon the Ten Thousand Years gave in--no more missionaries.

But the conchies won in the end. They only had to wait. These days even cowboys give up their lives to dream their way into Heaven, for all Redd's fine sentiments. The difference between him and my younger self is that I was one of many, but he's one of a vanis.h.i.+ng breed."

Lee, wondering what Hawk was trying to tell him, said nothing.

120.

PAUL J. McAuLrY "What I'm telling you, young Hah, is that Redd's an outspoken loner.""Yet you are sympathetic to his ... ideas.""I like him, but I don't trust him. I get the idea that you're sympathetic to his ideas too, and I saw the way you looked at the conchie drones today. No need to be alarmed. We none of us out here like what's happening to the world, it's just that unlike Redd, most of us know there isn't much we can do about it. Now, go get a block of b.u.t.ter; tea's near to boiling."Lee fell asleep as soon as he had wrapped himself in his brocade cloak, and the librarian was waiting for him in his dreams."You should have told them about what was done to you,"the librarian said. "It's important. It will give you face. You'llneed that, in the days to come."They stood in warm white sunlight by a stone wall at thetop of a cliff. The librarian was a shadow in the sunlight, his face hidden by a fold of his black silk robe. There were intricate lines embroidered in the silk, like circuit diagrams.

Lee hadn't noticed them before. He leaned on sun-warmed stone and said, "This is better than your mus books."Beneath them spread a wide bay that bent around a citybuilt on seven hills. A gla.s.s pyramid reflected the blue sky in the midst of a host of tall buildings bigger than anything Lee had ever known. The blue water was flecked with the sails of many small craft. Nearer, overshadowing Lee and the librarian, a vast rust-red bridge soared across the strait which was the mouth of the bay. Vehicles hummed across it, small as beetles in the distance. Beyond the bridge...

fog, a bank of fog rolling in from gray ocean water. Something made a deep mournful sound out there.The librarian pushed back the robe's hood, and shook outher long black hair. Miriam (but when had she had long hair?

and why was she so young, younger even than Lee?) said, "It's on Earth, or it was. I suppose the ruins of the city might still be there, but it's been so long since I thought to look, and the Earth's a green wilderness now... Listen, Lee, the people RED DUST.

121.you're with wors.h.i.+p their ancestors. That you have a ghost in your head is very impressive to them. It's why they let you live."She laughed. "They think you can raise the dead."Lee laughed too. "Why would they kill me?""Why not? You're Han. You raped their country centuries ago on the Earth, and the survivors were sent to provide the labor for terraforming Mars. Most died. Those that didn't became Martians. They believe the world is theirs, and why not?""The Great Leap Forward will not take a century, but a thousand years. That is its glory.""You sound like a recruiting poster."Lee had been quoting a slogan he had come across in an old history file. He blushed and smiled and apologized. "I don't believe it. It should take only a century to be finished.

I'm like my parents, a Sky Roader.""There's no progress, that's the point. Your Emperor has lost its way, and the Ten Thousand Years have traded progress for immortality. They've traded on the lives of everyone on Mars.""Like leaders everywhere.""Wow, Lee, how did someone so young get to be so cynical?''

Her smile was still the same, sudden and bright."I started early, under my great-grandfather's guidance.

Whose side is he on?""His own, like all of the Ten Thousand Years. Their needs roughly map into each other, but that's all. You're a biologist, Lee. You know what will happen to the ecosphere of Mars if something isn't done to stop all the liberated waterfrom being locked up again. Something dramatic.""This isn't a dream, is it?""It used to be thought that dreams were a way of a.s.similating new information. That's what you're doing.""The librarian said something like that, a while back. In another dream that wasn't a dream. This is because of the machines you put in my blood, isn't it? The viruses."Miriam's black hair lifted around her shoulders in the wind which blew up from the cliffs. The mournful horn was still 122 P^uI J. McAuk: sounding from inside the fog bank, which had now swallowed the bridge. The sunlight was edged with cold. She said, "The cowboys might be able to help us, Lee. The viruses tried to encrypt part of my memories, but it didn't take too well. Not surprising, really, the machines were never designed to read out into another nervous system. But they found that other viruses had already been at work inside you. They found the librarian."

"No. He's an archive program a friend wrote for me. He was worming through the common data banks, looking for information..." For information on his parents. Lee said, "My great-grandfather."

"Someone had a RAM chip mapped into your visual cortex.

It was triggered by the specific information bandwidth of virtual-reality goggles, and recorded anything you experienced.

My viruses took it over, rewrote me into what was there. But it wasn't enough. I can't remember everything I was supposed to tell you."

"You didn't just come to trade with my great-grandfather, did you?"

"You must go to the capital, Wei Lee."

"That's where the cowboys are going. Where my great-grandfather is. I thought I could make a deal with him..."

Miriam clutched her ears. "I can't think! No, wait! Water.

They live near water. That's all I remember. I need something to straighten me out, Lee. If not..."

The fog was swirling around them. Cold droplets beaded Lee's skin. Miriam was a shadow in the whiteness, leaning towards him. Another shadow stood behind her. Lee thought it was the librarian, but it was taller and thinner, and there was a bonewhite glint in the hood cast over its face.

Miriam said, "Otherwise I'll die again, Lee. Otherwise bad sectors might spread to your memories. Now you must wake up. Redd wants to show you something."

Redd was leaning over Lee, a shadow against a sky so choked with brilliant stars it dazzled the eyes. He had been shaking Lee's shoulder, and sat back when Lee groaned and pushed up on one elbow. Every muscle in his body was stiff and sore.

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123."It's time," Redd said, and with a grand gesture pointed at the starry sky.Lee looked up.A burning thread hung between heaven and Mars.

Twenty-eight.T.he thread was already fading by the time the searchparty was ready to leave camp.More than half the cowboys were going, leaving just enough to watch over the herd. Lee could put a name to most of them now. White Eye, Dog Breath, Dead Finger.

The Gray Fox, Angel Eyes, Lonesome Dove.When White Eye saw Lee amongst them he complained loudly to Hawk. "You want the little c.h.i.n.k comin' along?""Of course," Hawk said calmly. "Do you think he wouldn'tfind out about our little sideline if we left him in camp? We have to bring the stuff back, after all, and he's a smart c.h.i.n.k.

Or at least, not as dumb as you."White Eye said, "So maybe we should deal with him, likeI was sayin' all along."One or two of the others agreed."Listen," Hawk told them all. "He's a c.h.i.n.k, but he's no conchie. Some of you are smart enough to have noticed that.

He listens to that dead music broadcaster up in Father Jupiter.

He has ghosts in his head..." chills ran down Lee's spine".., and he's as much reason as any to stay away from the Army of the People's Mouths, or any of the militias of the Ten Thousand Years. So quit being so prejudiced. I swear I'm getting ashamed of you all.""He listens to the King of the Cats, he should prove it,"

someone called."Yeah," White Eye said. "Sing us a song, boy."

124.

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"Sing out!"

Lee waited until they'd stopped. Then he stepped forward and said, "I'm not much of a singer, and I don't have my guitar. But if you are willing to listen, I'll try."

"Go ahead," Redd said, after a moment's silence.

Lee took three breaths to steady himself. What he had meant to sing was one of the trivial country songs, but under Redd's stare they all fell away from his mind. He sang what was left: he sang "Promised Land."

And afterwards he stood alone in silence while the cowboys drifted away to their ponies. Only one came up to him.

Lee hadn't noticed him before. Half-Yankee, half-Tibetan, he had long frizzy hair layered either side of a central parting, small black eyes set close together over a hooked nose. He was younger than Lee, eight or nine at the most.

"You understand," he said to Lee, "there's nothin' romantic about being' a cowboy. About being' out on the land.

It's just a job of work. Lot of people do it because they can't do nothin' else. Some of them are on the run, maybe. But there's no romance to it."

"So why are you out here?"

"That's a good question," the kid said, and sort of faded back into the darkness.

Lee rode beside Redd. He asked, "Who was the kid?"

"Calls himself Alias. Talk is he's killed a dozen men and doesn't give a d.a.m.n about any of them. But we all talk a lot out here, and most of the stories don't have much truth to them."

They were riding across the bare, cold plain towards the point where the burning thread had touched the face of Mars. Redd was being very coy about exactly what was going on, and Lee was too tired to press him. So tired, in fact, that despite the pony's awkward rolling gait a fugitive dream fragment took him back to the wall beneath the soaring fog-shrouded bridge. The bay and the city beyond were lost in fog, too. Everything was. From the fog's still center, Miriam said,--It's a punch-out operation, Lee. Straight down from 126.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Clarke orbit through a hole in the defenses. Friction heats up the monofilament, that's why you see it."This is like a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p?"More like an elevator. The capsule comes straight down, like a spider on its thread. Do you have spiders on Mars?"Don't be silly."--I don't know why I should a.s.sume that you do. The Nexus's habitat doesn't."Mars has a highly diverse ecological system," Lee said.

"Who sent down this capsule?"--There are two possibilities, Miriam said, and then the pony stumbled and Lee was jolted awake just in time to reinit in at the lip of a sudden drop.They were there.It was a small, deep, relatively young crater, its rim wall still sharply terraced. Some of the cowboys rode straight on down, whooping and waving their woollen hats amidst rising clouds of dust. The more cautious took a meandering path amongst boulders and across overturned strata down to the dusty floor where a dwarf forest of cacti grew, raising spiny paddles as high as the ponies' bellies.Lee didn't need enhanced vision to see the thing in the center of the crater. It stood poised on three p.r.o.ngs, bullet-shaped and twice as tall as a man, glittering in the fierce starlight. The first cowboys had already reached it and were riding round and round, calling to each other in high, excited voices. Lee looked up into the starry sky but could no longer see the thread down which the thing had fallen from the sky.As they rode down the terraced crater wall, he said to Redd, "I can think of two possibilities. Which is it?"The old Tibetan cowboy riding alongside them, the Gray Fox, chuckled and said, "Two possibilities, eh? Ain't he sharp as a needle," then stood in his saddle and lashed his pony's withers with ends of his reins and galloped ahead.Redd said, "Maybe it won't help you to know that this isn't for the Ten Thousand. They get contraband by free-fall RED DUST.