Red Dust Part 8

127.craft. Our drops are more subtle. Look there."Lee saw that a swathe had been cut through the stands of cacti that covered the crater's floor. Something had lopped the plants neatly at ground level so that they had all fallen in one direction."It comes down after the drop, kilometers of it, dragging this end with it. It'll still be falling, drifting westward, for at least a day. We'd spool it up and spray fixative on it, but you can't cut it, and it cuts anything clean through. Dangerous stuff. Like most gifts from the sky you have to know how to handle it."Lee said, "I've travelled all over, but I've never seen any of this dangerous stuff of yours.""Without fixation, it falls apart in air," Redd said. "Most doesn't even reach the ground." They reined in their ponies and joined those cowboys, Hawk amongst them, who had dismounted. A few were still circling the capsule. One started taking pot shots that rang against the capsule's metal and whined away. Hawk bellowed irritably, "d.a.m.n you, White Eye, don't you go damaging the merchandise!"Redd told Lee, "What we do is now wait. Sometimes it takes a day before it gives us what it's brought down."That was when a hatch in the side of the capsule's nose cone blew off in a cloud of rolling smoke, green stuff lit from within by a brief sullen glare. There was a hideous amplified cackle that rolled and echoed around the crater's steep sides.Cowboys were fighting to rein in their prancing mounts.

Above them a human head, four or five times normal size, bobbed on the end of a long coiled spring, its white face, red lips, bloodshot round eyes and green bush of hair lit by some internal light source."Greetings, Martians, it said, its voice booming out into the night. Its lips curled back from even teeth in a sneering grin. "Whatever you do, don't take me to your leaders!"Lee stepped back, because for a moment the bobbing head seemed to look directly at him, its eyes knowing and filled 128.

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with deadly mischief. Redd caught his elbow. "It's only a hologram. It'll tell us what it has."The head said, "They tried to ban us when we were born, then we made it big just in time to be forgotten for a century or two. But what's a few hundred years between friends?

We're back, as bad and as dangerous as ever. Just give us to your children and stand well back. Why, they don't even need to read. They can just look at the pictures. Like I always say, a picture is worse than a thousand words."Miriam was suddenly beside Lee. Though the head's luminous white skin threw grisly light over the cowboys, she was a shadow without form. When Lee tried to look at her directly, she vanished inside a p.r.i.c.kly blur of dark light.She said in a ravelling whisper, "I might have known. The Pranksters."Lee whispered back, "That's the name of this thing?" He was only half certain he was not dreaming all this, would wake rolled inside his blanket beside the camp fire.Miriam said, "Listen. This costs me to speak. Costs you, too. The Pranksters are a religious group. They inhabit half a dozen rocks, all on eccentric orbits. They are dedicated to destabilizing systems. They say that it's an evolutionary tool, and it makes them dangerous. I'd guess that this is funded by the Earth; there's no way something like this could have fallen through the defenses by itself."'fit doesn't matter who gives them to us," Hawk said unexpectedly.

He had put on his funny round mirror gla.s.ses.Miriam looked at him and said, "I suppose they sent down the technology for direct sensory access, too." She added, to Lee, "Call it a kind of pseudo psi. He's tapping into the RAM chip in your visual cortex to see me.""There's not much to see," Hawk said. "You are in a very bad way, even for a ghost. The system you've parasitised isn't much of a home, is it? And I believe I see someone standing at your back."Miriam whispered, "Even if they haven't been subverted by the Earth, the Pranksters won't be any help."

"Ah, but their gifts are sometimes useful," Hawk said, and RED DUST.

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raised his arm. His hand was wrapped inside the freeform stock of a huge reaction pistol. He fired, and the head vanished in mid-sentence.

The capsule whirred and shook. Its top suddenly began to spin, faster and faster. Steam shot from the widening joint with a scream. Then the whole nose cone shot off on a wobbling trajectory, and an explosion inside the capsule blew a storm of paper over the cowboys.

Lee plucked at pages that fluttered around him. Leaflets, picture novels printed in garish colors. They were a little like instruction manuals, but in the dying glow from the capsule he could see that the panels were dense with violence, costumed muscle-bulging freaks, flames and explosions amongst tall buildings built of gla.s.s, all kinds of strange things.

Redd said, "We get good money for this, and in the old days we'd have stuck a finger up the noses of the Emperor's state censors, too. But now there's so much propaganda that this is just another dust grain in the storm."

"Oh," Lee said. He was beginning to realize where all the rock'n'roll artifacts came from. His posters of the King of the Cats, the data needles of his music, the fragments of his films. Who, then, was the King working for?

He helped the others pull back the flimsy panels of the burnt-out capsule, unload bundles of leaflets and reload them on to the ponies. Paper had blown all over the crater, and the cowboys started their ride back to camp amidst cacti festooned with leaflets that, impaled on spines, fluttered and flapped like a million crucified birds.

Twenty-nine.

T.

he drive to the capital took a dozen more days. It left the vast, cratered plains and crossed the Ridge of Gold at Shaylin Pa.s.s. The guy cables of a skeletal relay tower had been strung with scarves printed with prayers and with flags of pure white and blue and red and yellow, all unravelling in the thin constant wind. The older cowboys stopped to set more flags and prayers fluttering, or to place stones on the huge cairn of red rocks.

The same cowboys would stop to pay their respects at wayside shrines. It was only when they pa.s.sed the third or fourth in as many hours, a low mani wall with a pair of flexed eyes painted in fading red and blue and white over the ubiquitous sacred mantra From Mani Padme Hum, that Lee realized they were on a road, or at any rate a trail. Redd pointed to lines of stones either side of the wide rutted road--cleared by hand two centuries ago, he said.

Lee remembered what Pemba had told him: that every stone was holy, for every stone had been touched by change.

One night the herders camped at the edge of a tiny village that had grown up around a heat-engine well head. Half a dozen low flat-roofed houses slumped against each other as if for mutual support. Built out of pink sandstone, they blended right into the landscape. All the villagers were draped in shapeless enveloping garments and black gauze veils, so that you couldn't tell which were men and which women. Perhaps that was the point. They sold the cowboys130.

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131.potatoes fried to crispy char on the outside and with a cold wet knot in the center, but otherwise kept away.

The well head dominated the slumped village, a huge flower with battered silvery petals that focused sunlight on black panels thick with piping. Sunlight warmed the panels through which water flowed; the heated water was driven underground by its own expansion, to melt permafrost which was used to irrigate the village's stony potato fields.

It tasted of iron and bitter salts, this fossil water. The day after drinking it, Lee had a bad case of the s.h.i.+ts, which caused the cowboys no end of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Most of the cowboys had some secret locked away, some reason why they'd taken to riding the range. As he rode with them, Lee heard something of their stories. Hawk had been indentured to a danwei work gang when he was six, had escaped a year later and worked his way up from cowboy to range boss. He owned the yaks they were driving from the winter ranges. Skinny White Eye had poisoned a dozen women in his neighborhood, then escaped the transport train taking him to the polar labor camp. Old Dead Finger had been a monk, and his head was still clean shaven. Lonesome Dove was a deserter from the Army of the People's Mouths. And so on.

Only Redd's reasons for riding the range were unclear.

Lee heard half a dozen contradictory stories: he was supposed to have betrayed his best friend to the secret police; or to have shot him in the back; or to have actually been in the secret police, and gone on the run after letting his childhood friend, a leader of the ku li, escape an ambush; or he had been a leader of the ku li who had renounced violent action... Redd wouldn't confirm or deny any one of them.

He wasn't much older than Lee, but Lee was learning from him just how little he knew about the desert and about herding yaks, and how little he knew about the lives of men who lived in the vast empty landscapes of Mars, outside the cities and the huddled danweis.

"You gotta have a new name," Redd declared. "Can't have you walkin' around Lowell"-- like all the cowboys, Redd in 132 PAUL J. MCAULEY.sisted on calling the capital by its old Yankee name --"where your great-grandfather can pick you out of the crowd in a moment if you use your real name." He looked asquint at Lee, blue eyes glinting under the brim of his black hat. "Billy, that's the name for you.""You are very certain.""It's 'cause you're a kid. Billy Lee. See, we turn you into a Yankee half-breed. I reckon you got some white man in you, there ain't anyone on the planet who ain't got some Martian in them, Yankee or Tibetan or both. Cowboys just generally have more Martian than most, which is why theyusually kill any wandering Han they come across.""You saved my life.""I was wondering if you remembered that.""I won't forget it. But why did you take me back to camp, if you knew I was likely to be killed?""Oh, I was ready to argue for you, Billy Lee. Turned out I didn't need to, so I was right about my hunch all along.

Know why you were spared? Hawk saw the ghost on your back. He's curious about it, 'cause cowboys owe the anarchists part of their living. But cowboys aren't for the Sky Road, for all that. They're just for themselves."Lee had seen Miriam only once in his dreams since the night the anarchist capsule had come down. Perhaps she was already fading, like an imperfectly fixed photographic image.

She had not spoken to him in the dream; perhaps it had been nothing but an ordinary dream after all. It had been in the ancient Earth city of Las Vegas, by daylight. Lee recognized the elaborate cliffs of the casino frontages from the film fragments of Viva Las Vegas.t, but they seemed small, faded and tawdry without their cloaks of electric light. Miriam had been walking way in front of him, but when he tried to catch up with her a pink automobile as big as her s.p.a.cecraft glided out of nowhere and she jumped into it.

And as the automobile swept her away, Lee saw that the driver was the King of the Cats.Lee asked Redd, who was in as loquacious a mood as Lee had ever known, "Is that what you're for, just yourself?." He RED DUST.

133.was thinking of Redd's moments of quiet prayer, atonement for his mysterious past.Redd pulled the brim of his black hat over his eyes. His gloves were caked with red dust; there was a time of dust on the woollen blanket he wore as a cape. "I reckon no one can afford not to be for themselves," he said. "Otherwise they just get used by other people. How about you, Billy Lee? You like the cowboy life enough to stay?""I have to talk to my great-grandfather, if I can. Otherwise, perhaps..."Redd laughed, and said, "Yeah, that's how it goes, until one day you're as old as the Gray Fox or Lonesome Dove, and you wonder where your life went." And he spurred his pony after a yak that was trotting eagerly at right angles from the trail, after who knew what, or why.So it went, moving in a blowing cloud of red dust by day, chivvying yaks that were forever stopping to sc.r.a.pe saxifrage moss from crusted ground, making camp after the sudden sunset, the nights achingly cold and glorious with stars, and always the lonesome songs of the watch riders floating out into the desert, and awesome sunrises, frost vanis.h.i.+ng into the air with a sound like a million tiny bells and yaks making clouds around themselves with their own breath, groaning and flinging strings of orange spittle as they started moving again. Until at last the cowboys and their herd crossed a single-track railway line that ran from east to west across the flat land. The herd turned to parallel the high dust bank that had been cleared from the line after the winter storms, and the next day reached Xin Beijing, the capital of Mars.

Thirty.

X.

in Beijing sprawled in a wide pa.s.s that cut through a ragged circle of mountains, the eroded rim wall of a vast ancient crater more than a hundred kilometers across. Within the crater a perfectly circular lake, ringed round with white salt deposits, reflected the pink sky and the pine-clad mountains that rose steeply around it.

Xin Beijing had once been the site of the Yankee Martian colony, long before the air had been thickened, but the old domed Yankee Quarter was lost now in a sprawl of wide dusty streets, lined by giant ginkgoes, where bicycles swarmed amongst clanging trolley cars. Streets radiated away from the industrial sector and the railway junction and the silent citadel where ten thousand ministers, secretaries, programmers, engineers and interpreters interceded between the world and the Emperor. Between these three mingling fans of streets were wedge-shaped parks and big government buildings and the sterile white compounds where half-lifers dreamed themselves into Heaven.

Lee had left Xin Beijing two years before, as a pa.s.senger on the Central Desert Express. The railway station had been a small city in itself, an entire social ecology with separate castes which made their living by selling food or trinkets to travellers, or by recycling nightsoil from the trains' lavatories, or which subsisted on waste food thrown from restaurant cars. Most of the traffic had been one way. Every train brought in hundreds more refugees from dust-buried farm134RED DUST.

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lands along the Grand Ca.n.a.l; leaving the city, Lee had had an entire carriage to himself.Lee had vowed never to return, and in a way he had not.

Riding into the stockyards amongst a gaggle of cowboys channelling a thousand head of yak into their holding pasture was to ride into a city he did not know. He remembered the pink, circular lake, the second largest body of free water on Mars, so wide that not even the tallest peaks of the mountains on its far side showed above the flat line of its horizon.

He recognized the pine-forested snaggle-toothed rim-wall mountains that rose either side of the city, saw with a pang the distant, flat-topped peak where the house of his great-grandfather stood. But otherwise he might be riding into a city on another planet.The stockyards were to the south of Xin Beijing, stretching from the sh.o.r.e of the lake towards the stony desert.

Brawling herds of yak were being driven this way and that, in clouds of red dust that glowed like red-hot iron in the level afternoon sun, across a flat landscape where trails made a complex network amongst fields of bare red earth fenced with stone. Small electric locomotives shunted cattle cars or feed wagons along spur lines. Tented camps were pitched along the lake sh.o.r.e, where in the shallows floating pontoons corralled hectares of algae and azolla for fodder.Lee soon saw why Hawk had hired one of the denim-clad men who hung around the trail head, most of them laconic round-eyed Yankees, to guide the herd through the stockyards'

s.h.i.+fting labyrinths. He had thought that the journey would be over once they reached the stockyards, but it took from noon to sunset to negotiate their way to the feed lot set aside for the herd.Like the railway station, the stockyards were a culture in miniature. As well as field guides, there were slaughterers and a.s.sayers and veterinarians and auctioneers, stockmen and wranglers and field hands, sod busters and wet workers and feed-lot pitchers. They served all the high equatorial plains, and even on a world as small and barren as Mars that was a considerable territory. Lee had once read that the 136.

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plains were the range of ten million head of domesticated yak and dzo, and uncounted numbers of yak reverted to the wild. Only now was the statistic gaining some reality.

Most of the herd had been brought here not to be slaughtered, but for the cow yaks to calve or to be tupped, and for the calves to be sorted. The males would almost all be gelded and feed-lot fattened and butchered without ever setting hoof on the red ranges. The females would be tagged and returned with their mothers and newly impregnated aunts.

The yaks in the herd, every one of which the cowboys invariably called "he," were all female.

The real work began when the feed-lot pasturage was reached. The chip implanted in each yak was scanned by an a.s.sayer for a readout on the animal's physiological history.

To do this the confused and irritable animals had to be wrangled one by one into a narrow chute until one thousand and twenty-eight had pa.s.sed through into the big bare field beyond.

The yaks were fed a s...o...b..r of azolla and ripe silage. The cowboys drank tea in a circle around a campsite fire while Hawk came around and paid them off. He pressed a little roll of ten yuan notes into Lee's bleeding hands and told him to find his town house the next day, at the Square of Two Thousand Martyrs. He said, in a gravelly confiding undertone, "You're a good worker. I decided you're due something from the sale of our sky booty, but don't tell the others in case of bad feeling. And another thing. Take care with Redd. He might not be so good a friend as you think. Keep our little rendezvous from him."

Most of the cowboys were headed towards the strip of smoke houses and pleasure palaces along the lake sh.o.r.e beyond the fodder-processing plants. Redd explained to Lee that they'd spend most of their pay and then sign up with some other herd boss. "You come along with me, Billy Lee, and get a bath. That's what I aim to do."

Lee agreed. He was too tired to worry about Hawk's whispered warning, in truth too tired and scared to do much thinking of his own. He had returned to challenge his great RED DUST 137.

grandfather, either by finding the people Miriam's ghost had said were waiting for him somewhere in the city, or by trying to sell him the totipotent viruses, and either way he did not think he had long to live.They walked the short distance to a tram stop. When Lee asked about Redd's pony, the cowboy said, "I don't even own the saddle. What's so special about a horse? Temperamental critters with a nasty bite and brains about as big as a sun-dried grape. Backbroken way of moving so your b.a.l.l.s are hammered between your saddle and your a.r.s.e with every step, fall sick when you least need it, have to be watched every second in case they get some d.a.m.nfool notion of independence in their heads. And another thing, you ever eaten horse? They don't even taste good. What I'd like is to do it all from air in a culver, but that's not allowed so it's not worth thinking about."It took three changes of tram to get them to the old Yankee Quarter. The city seemed emptier than Lee remembered.

Whole blocks of apartment houses lay dark and silent in the twilight. Others had been colonized by refugees. Dzo and goats were tethered in the remains of parks. Bonfires blazed on roofs. Walls had been painted and repainted with slogans; Lee saw a little robot, perched on delicate telescopic legs, overpainting a vast idealized portrait of one of the Ten Thousand with ideograms a dozen meters high, denouncing the Committee of Six, the group of Ten Thousand Years who had taken it upon themselves to speak for the Emperor and who were now the only voices of authority in the deserts of its silence.Lee had watched the news broadcasts along with everyone else in Bitter Waters, but like everyone else he hadn't believed half the stories told by the blithe newscasters. It was well known that the commercial channels hyped and exaggerated everything because that was how they survived. If they didn't do it, someone else would: so they all did it.Everyone in Bitter Waters had preferred the government channel. It spoke comfortingly of small gatherings quickly dispersed rather than riots, of disagreements between polit- 138.

PAUL J. MCAULE.ical factions rather than civil war. Lee had only half believed this anodyne line, but like most people it was what he wanted to believe. Governments were all obsessed with secrecy, and the best and the worst gave the same excuses for playing with the truth: that it is for the good of the people; that undiluted truth is harmful; that it must be filtered and ma.s.saged before the population can accept it. Tyrannies ruthlessly imposed this filtration, this selectivity; democracies, no matter how high their ideals, sooner or later slid into the same behavior by default. It didn't matter. It didn't matter because all the different kinds of governments were right: people didn't want to hear the truth. Left to themselves in democracies, bullied into faking interest by tyrannies, people really didn't care what the truth was as long as it didn't hurt them, which was why, except in times of crisis, power divided amongst the people was too fragmented to be of any use. The stronger always won out because the weaker let them: Guoquiang's father, Great-grandfather Wei, the computer in the lamasery. If people were given power, they usually gave it away as quickly as they could because it was uncomfortable to hold. Only those who should never have been given power in the first place actively sought it.The tram rattled past murals and wrecked buildings and refugee camps, past wreckage left by riots and buildings whose walls bore murals pocked and cratered by sh.e.l.l and shot. The tram's bell tingled dutifully at every junction, as if it was trying to conjure the old order back into being. It rattled past the sepulchres of the half-lifers, layered white buildings that seemed to float in islands of light. Those dying out of this world were more important than those still living in it, it seemed.There was little traffic, and most of it consisted of squads of militia zooming by in swift electric trucks. Once, the tram had to stop at a barricade while militia in black blouses and black baggy trousers, the red bands tied around their foreheads marked with the seal of The Little Bird, climbed aboard and looked at each pa.s.senger in turn. They were armed with pistols and laser prods. Redd stared right back RED DUST.

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at them, and once the tram had pa.s.sed through the barricade he said to Lee, "Things are bad. The Emperor has become so quiet that the Ten Thousand Years fight amongst themselves to see who will be its successor."

"Warlords," Lee said.

"It hasn't come to that. Not yet. Let's hope it won't. But their factions run the streets now, dividing the city amongst themselves. There were fire fights just about every night when I left here. Things look to have gotten worse."

But at least the Yankee Quarter was just as Lee remembered it. The field-sized panes of gla.s.s of its dome, opaquely sandblasted by centuries of storms, shone in the gathering night like a hovering pearl as the tram rocked towards it down a long tree-lined avenue.

Beneath the dome was a maze of narrow streets and even narrower hutongs, a warren that had grown up and around and over the original buildings until almost no trace was left of the Yankee settlement the dome had once protected.

The atmospheric recycling units had long ago overloaded and a greasy drizzle of condensation continually drifted down on to the layers of flat roofs and the interlayered blades of heat-exchange engines. Apartment blocks and arcades and factories grew into each other like corals. Vegetables were cultivated in courtyards full of purplish light cast by racks of fluorescent tubing. Ganglia of cables and pipes and optical fibres and telephone wiring ran everywhere. Light fell into the narrow hutongs from grilles, past swatches of sagging wires or plumes of steam, past balconies, past the barred windows of thousands of tiny shops (it was said that if you could buy anything on Mars, you could buy it in the Yankee Quarter). In many hutongs light never fell at all, for the buildings on either side had grown together overhead.

Main Street more or less divided the Quarter into two.

Crowds seethed up and down its length, half of them Yankee, the rest more or less evenly distributed between Tibetan and Han. Many wore hats pulled down over their faces and capes of slick waterproof material in bright primary colors over ordinary tunics and trousers. There were few militia here, 140.

PAUt, J. McAu[:but many soldiers of the Army of the People's Mouths, young shaven-headed recruits with the scars of their brain surgery still raw, most walking in pairs, hand in hand, the way citizens did when in a strange place. Lee saw a pilot carried along above the crowds on his stalking, insectile litter, breastplate and bubble helmet s.h.i.+ning. A pair of conchie missionaries from Earth, alike as twins, walked side by side in their dark suits and hardly anyone took any notice, although everyone stepped out of their way. Trams drifted through the crowds of bicycles that clogged the roadways.

Electric signs rose dozens of meters into the air, neon tubing sizzling in the drizzle. Holograms floated here and there, message clouds tugged by impalpable breezes. Most of the signs were in wormy backwards Yankee script; Common Language ideograms were rare. Every so often there was the sound of firecrackers; it was the beginning of the festival of the little G.o.ds of the lake fisherfolk, and this reminded Leeof what Miriam's ghost had said.--They live near water.Redd kept a hand on Lee's shoulder, steering him into a crowded shopping street that curved away from Main Street.

Cyclists wove amongst the pedestrians, banging on tinny horns. The street was lit by fluorescent tubes stapled to a concrete ceiling, and by the signs and windows of the shops, all of which sold electronic components."This way," Redd said, and plunged into a narrow, tunnel-like hutong. There were no lights, yet bicycles careered along it regardless, continually sounding their horns as if steering by sonar, like bats. A stairway off the hutong twisted down to a dim, crowded, noisy cave of a bar. A steel counter ran around three sides. Men, almost all of them Yankees, stood shoulder to shoulder, drinking steadily and watching a Yankee woman taking her clothes off inside a raised cage.

Lee gaped at her and Redd pulled him by his elbow all the way across the bar and through an arch curtained with strips of plastic into another room, smaller and quieter, floor, walls and ceiling of white-painted concrete lit by bare fluorescent tubes. In one corner was a tea counter where a few old men RED DUST.

141.sat around chessboards on iron tables. In another, Redd paid attendants with small coins, and a bald gnome of a man got up from a chair of faded blue plush and took Lee to a cubicle.Lee exchanged his dusty sweat-stiffened clothes for a huge towel and allowed himself to be led through the rituals of showering and soaking, ma.s.saging and steaming. Finally, he stood side by side with Redd in a huge pool of salty, faintly sulphurous water that buoyed up their scrubbed bodies.

They leaned at the pool's edge and sipped earthy jasmine tea and munched on cold shrimp noodles and sweet rice b.a.l.l.s.Lee felt a trembling la.s.situde that was not at all unpleasant.

Hairy Yankees and smooth-skinned Han mingled with democratic ease in this vaulted cavern. Fluorescent tubes hung from a ceiling of naked rock. Their light slithered on the surface of the slop of water, slipped and twinkled on slimy tiles which were each embossed with a curled dragon.

It was a very old bathhouse, Redd said, five hundred years old at least--which Lee thought impossible before he remembered that Yankees still counted years by Earth's short seasons."So how do you like riding the range, young Billy Lee?

Like it well enough to sign up again? What are your plans?""They are not changed. I must find.., my friends. Perhaps I can get the help of my great-grandfather, but it will be difficult. He is a powerful man, but we have had a misunderstanding that needs to be corrected.""You c.h.i.n.ks are all so reverent towards your old men."

:'You try to shock me? I have been around.""It's a hard world. You haven't seen much of that. Han don't."Long silvery scars seamed Redd's chest, three lines that ran from beneath his left nipple to the bottom of his ribcage.

The ball of his right shoulder looked as if someone had once chewed on it, long ago.Redd caught Lee staring. "Leopard cult," he said. "Back when I was as young and foolish as you.""I'm not so young."

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PAUL J. MCAULEY."Maybe there's only a year or two difference. I'm not talking age.""You've lived life, and I haven't." Lee had been thinking, on the long tram ride, about how little he really knew the city in which he had grown up. He knew that part of the quiet tree-filled suburb of the Fragrant Hills around Master Qing's Academy of Mental Cultivation, the Great House of Great-grandfather Wei, the mountain lodge where Master Qing's Academy of Mental Cultivation had convened in summer to escape the city's dusty heat, high in the mountains on the far side of the lake. The rest of the city had been forbidden to him, known only through brief expeditions planned with as much daring and long thought as military raids upon hostile territory.Redd smiled, signalled to a tray-carrying attendant. "You catch on fast. That's one good thing about you. Or is it the ghost you carry?""She has fallen asleep, I think. That is also something I must attend to. My great-grandfather...""If you go to your great-grandfather, he'll ream her out of you and throw away your carca.s.s. Wise up, kid." Redd took a thin black cigar from the attendant, who lighted it for him. Redd drew until the cigar tip glowed cherry red, exhaled a riffle of smoke.Lee watched this piece of business patiently. He was in no hurry. He had enough money to last him a week if he was careful, and Hawk had promised him more. There was no point looking for Miriam's friends while he was still aching from the trail drive, and he couldn't walk up to Great-grandfather Wei's gates and bang on them for admittance.

He needed time to think. There had been no time for that while helping herd a thousand yaks. Besides, Redd was a good enough fellow, and he was ideal company in the Yankee Quarter.Redd regarded the end of his cigar with pleasure. "What I'm offering you is advice, Billy Lee. More than advice, if you want it. And whether or not you want it, you need it.""I see," Lee said, although he didn't.

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143."You're carrying something valuable. You haven't told me what it is, and that's fine, that's up to you. But I know that your great-grandfather wants it, and I bet so does the rest of the Ten Thousand Years. Now they know you escaped with the anarchist, and by now they might have figured you might still be alive. Even if you're not, they'll be keeping a watch out for you. They might even have spotted you. And the nearer that you get to your great-grandfather, the closer to being spotted you get. Ever think of what would happen to you when that happens? I reckon I do. I used to work for one of the Ten Thousand Years, in a small way." Redd looked sideways to gauge Lee's reaction, and what he saw evidently amused him. "Don't you worry, Billy Lee, if I wanted to turn you in, I'd have done it long ago."

"It just reminded me of something Hawk said."

"Some of those campfire stories get a little near the truth," Redd said softly.

Lee waited, as he used to wait for his great-grandfather's eidolon. Redd said, "I learned one thing, back then. It was that the Ten Thousand Years aren't human. If you want to talk with your great-grandfather, you can't just go walking up to his front door. I saved your life, Billy Lee. One thing you need to keep fixed in your head. You owe me one, and I'm not asking anything but what would help you further."

Lee laughed, because Redd's crude attempt at constructing a face trap had only served to free him. He had an obligation to Redd only because Redd had an obligation to him: Redd had saved Lee's life, and so was obliged to protect him, just as Lee had protected, or tried to protect, Miriam Make-peace Mbele. But Redd had admitted that the obligation was at an end, and now Lee knew just how much he had changed since the morning he had set out with Guoquiang and Xiao Bing on the first calm day of spring. There was a new hardness in him, something like the cold selfishness of the Yankees, who were all islands, entire unto themselves.

Lee said carefully, "I will never forget any of your kindnesses, Citizen Redd, and most especially your advice."

Redd ground the b.u.t.t of his cigar on wet the and heaved 144.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.himself out of the water. "There's a little misunderstanding here," he said. "It's what you're going to do. It's time to meet some people I know. If you've something you want to sell to your great-grandfather or any of the Ten Thousand Years, these people will want it just as bad. I'll help you sell it to them--for a commission, of course.""It is good of you to offer, Citizen Redd, but I do not need help.""Again, it isn't an offer." Redd's fingers met around Lee's forearm. "Come on, now. Let's you and me get dressed. And don't worry. This might be business, but I still like you."Redd held on to Lee's arm as they crossed the quiet antechamber and pushed through the hanging plastic strips into the noisy, smoky bar. Halfway across, Redd's grip tightened and he said, "I reckon we're in trouble."A man moved away from the shadows by the stairway and made his way towards them amongst the crowded tables. It was White Eye. He smiled crookedly and said, "You're so predictable, friend Redd," and laid a hand on Lee's shoulder.Two men who had been lounging by the stairway started across the bar. They both had brush-cut hair, and both wore white short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts, baggy trousers with camouflage red and gray blotches, heavy combat boots."You f.u.c.ker!" Redd shouted, and pushed White Eye aside.

Then the two militia were running, tipping tables and spilling drinks into the laps of cardplayers. White Eye swung at Redd, a knife suddenly in his hand. Redd danced back, kicked White Eye's knee, his hip. White Eye flew backwards and landed across a table, scattering gla.s.ses and bottles.

When he tried to stand, burly drinkers grabbed his shoulders and spun him away: men stepped aside and he crashed into the steel-topped bar.One of the militia was caught in the middle of a brawl; the other dodged when someone swung a chair at him, and laid out the chair wielder with a single punch. The fight was spreading to every corner of the bar; White Eye had disappeared in a male of swinging fists and furniture, volleys of bottles and gla.s.ses.

RED DUST.

145.

"Run!" Redd yelled at Lee, and the nearest of the militia shouted something, too. Waving a gun, he pushed through the riot like a swimmer in a heavy sea. He was so close that when the gun went off Lee felt the heat of its beam wash across his face. The bolt smashed the cables and pipes that wove across the ceiling; fans of sparks rained down on the heads of the fighters."Run!" Redd yelled again.And something seized Lee and bore him away.

Thirty-one.L.ee was walking through noisy crowds and neon-lit drizzle.

He was on Main Street, and didn't remember how he'd reached it. He could feel the thing that had seized him float away on the tides of his blood. He let it go. He could feel his pulse, just behind his ears. His legs and back ached sweetly, hollowly. He felt calm and exhausted. He had been running, running very fast...The rich slow voice of the King of the Cats was rapping from speakers in an information arcade. Lee remembered that the librarian had promised to try and follow him to the capital, and went inside. He had no other ally, now, except Miriam's silent ghost.After he'd paid the old woman who ran the arcade, Lee chose one of the half-dozen couches at random. It folded around him like a predatory flower, thrust electrodes at the nape of his neck and the backs of his hands, masked his sight and clamped speakers to his ears.The menu burned briefly before him, but before he could make a selection it blew past like a curtain on an electronic wind and he was in a familiar booklined corridor. Tall in his black robes, his face hidden by shadows through which silver motes endlessly fell, the librarian lifted down a leather-bound octavo book and said, "Master. You have come not a moment too soon. I have found your parents.""At last," Lee said, but he felt a pang of dread. This was the hinge of his life.

146.

RED DUST.

147.

The librarian said, "You are afraid, Master. I understand.

You have dedicated your life to this, after all."