Red Dust Part 21

Her bad manners shocked Lee--the old man, too, who took a step backwards and immediately went out of focus.

He said feebly, "It is not as easy as that, although I wish it were. I really must talk with my..."

Redd said, "Listen, when you're between a rock and a hard place, you kick the rock. You understand what I'm saying?"

The old man smiled, shook his head.

Vette uns.h.i.+pped her harpoon and stabbed it at the old man, who instantly faded away. No, wherever he really was, he'd simply stepped back, outside the focal point of the pro 336 PAUL J. MCAULEY.

jector. Lee said to Vette, "You really aren't helping."She said in furious Yankee, "I'm not standing around likefood on a platter while you swap compliments with a dab of light! Look at those things, they've seen us, they're coming right for us. Come on," she said, and grabbed Lee's arm again.Chen Yao said, "We are G.o.ds. They will grant us charity."

"You so sure of that?" Redd said.

"It is our right."Lee said, "As Chen Yao is so fond of pointing out, we haveno other way to go but up."They scrambled up the twisting path to the sheer blackwalls that enclosed the house. The lava blocks were polished like gla.s.s, and the joints between them were so fine a piece of paper couldn't have been inserted.There was a gate, armored with corroded steel plates.Vette banged on it so it rang like a gong. Lee turned to watch the ragged line of creatures move through the boulder field beyond the town, black shadows against dull gray rocks.

The sounds they made came faintly in the cold thin air.Lee said to Chen Yao, "I suppose that I could fight themin hypermode, if it came to it. Perhaps I could kill enough to make the rest run." He knew he could not kill them all before they killed him.Redd said, "If it comes to a fight I'm willing to stand ground while you run, Billy Lee. You're the main attractionof this little expedition, no sense you dying and us living."

"Exactly," Chen Yao said.Lee told Redd, "I thank you for your offer. It is made froma large heart. I am changed, it is true, but I am still human.I couldn't leave you.""Oh, Wei Lee! The needs of the many outweigh all else.Your loyalty is to the whole world!""I wish they were all standing beside me, Chen Yao." Suddenly, the old man stood before the gate. His image was sharper in the shadow cast by the high wall. "There is no need to make so much noise," he said.Lee bowed to him. "Your defenses are very strong."

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"We are happy with them.""Obviously, the.., wild ones can find no way in. You are to be congratulated. But I see one flaw--suppose someone were to pile rocks up against the gate? There are many rocks, enough to build a rough stairway. You are lucky the wild ones have not thought of it.""They do not have your education," the old man said.Lee bowed again. "I have travelled far, and learned a little of these practical matters."Vette said, "I pile rocks. Maybe those things understand."

"No need," the old man said. "We have not had visitors for such a long time that we will make poor hosts, I fear.

But you are welcome to our hospitality, such as it is."Behind his image, the rusted gate creaked open a handful of degrees. Redd put his shoulder to the corroded steel and widened it a handful more and Chen Yao slipped past him.

The line of creatures made a kind of inchoate yell and started to run as Vette and Lee squeezed through the narrow gap.

Redd followed, and they all leaned against the gate, and it slammed shut.

Seventy.

N.

ow the night was nearly over, but stones still bounced and clattered from the tiled roof. In one of the alcoves off the main room of the Last House, Li Pe stepped up to the projection plate. A cone of light fell around him, and Lee knew his image was walking in the night amongst the besiegers. But the stones did not cease to fall.

"There are more of them than I can count," Li Pe said.

"And a few are starting to pile stones against the southern wall. Their cunning needed a critical ma.s.s to become intelligence, it seems."

"Perhaps they've started to breed," Yang Go said. "Always said when that happened we were doomed."

Lee went out again, vaulted to the top of the southern wall, saw figures scatter from a heap that leaned against it.

Stones started to fly at him out of the pre-dawn darkness, and he jumped back down and went to tell the others what he had seen.

"It will take them a long time," Li Pe said. He was holding his sister's hands. "Perhaps they will be gone when day breaks."

"Perhaps those who brought them will do something,"

Yang Go said. "We were safe before they came."

Vette raised her harpoon. "All here together," she said.

Lee remembered then what Miriam had said about Tiger Mountain when he had met her in Heaven. He asked, "Who338.

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owned this house? Was this equipment in place when you came to live here?"

"Of course," Li Pe said.

"It was his idea to use it," Yang Go said. "Now look what has happened."

"For a long time it kept them away," Li Qing said softly.

Her arthritic hands clutched the arms of her chair every time a stone hit the roof, but that was the only sign of fear she showed. She turned her face approximately towards Lee, frost-capped eyes wide open, and explained, "When there were more of us we could look after the sleepers and keep them away. But we grew older, and some took escape in dreams. They all died, when at last we had to leave our homes. This was once the house of the district governor, young man. Forgive me, but you are young, are you not?"

"Too young, grandmother. Tell me, did the district governor walk amongst you?"

"The devices were mainly used for spying," Yang Go said.

He had been a strong man, once. He still had the truculent, blunt determination of the strong, which Lee did not mistake for rudeness.

"We feared him," Li Pe said, "and now it is too late I realize that he feared us. If people knew how much cadres fear them, they would have been overturned long ago, but because they know that they hide the fear behind force. We had to fight and defeat the keepers of this house to gain entry, twenty years after its owner had fled. That's how much he feared us."

"Luckily the machines were made feeble by age," Yang Go said. "But they still killed one of us, and I have the burn scars of their weapons down my back."

"Maybe I can fix them," Redd said.

"They were destroyed," Yang Go said. "Don't you think we would have used them ourselves?"

Lee said, "But you did not destroy the control systems, only the mechanisms. There will be other mechanisms hidden elsewhere, I am sure. This was the central seat of governance, was it not?"

Seventy-one.

I.

'I was easier than he had supposed. The antique control system was still in place; in fact, the projection facility .was a small part of it. The couch was filmed with dust.

Chen Yao helped Lee put on a dusty helmet and control gloves, their plastic sheaths cracked but still flexible. He took a breath, and activated the system.

And dropped through darkness into a place where luminous lines dwindled away in every direction, sketching vast matrices. His body was that of a glowing, winged man, a standard template the previous user hadn't bothered to customize-or more likely there had been many users, and this was the system default.

The matrices around Lee were empty of anything but their codes, connected to nothing now that the half-lifers had moved beyond known information s.p.a.ce, into Heaven. Faint webs interconnected them, ghostly quantum traces left by once active paths. Many dwindled towards islands of light that shone in the far distance, as if lit by shafts of sunlight.

Lee had the sense of a vastness lurking at right angles to everything else. He was careful not to let his attention go anywhere near the quantum traces, or focus on any of the active islands. He made himself as small as possible, a bird, a moth, a bee. He let himself slidingly fall through information s.p.a.ce.

As he fell, a cl.u.s.ter of insets started to flicker around him: one bloomed into a map of Tiger Mountain, gridded and340.

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hatched with coordinates, riven with a dendritic communications net. Lee completed a search in a flicker of time and flew right to the node he wanted.It was a kennel, although he perceived it not as a s.p.a.ce enclosing machines, but as machine presences defining their enclosure. Some were very nearly dead, no more than vestigial traces that stirred fitfully as Lee briefly possessed them before pa.s.sing on. But more than a dozen were still usable, and for a dizzy moment he found himself split amongst them: virus reflex completing in a moment what he alone would have taken hours to do.Microscopic pinches of tritium shot into the magnetic bottles of fusion pods. Motors spun into life. Machines neatly reversed around each other, vibrant with infrared and ultrasound and proximity radar. The kennel doors were jammed shut by decades of overgrowth, but the largest of the machines used its blade to ram through them, pus.h.i.+ng away soil and uprooting volunteer saplings. Piston limbs flexing and tilting, the other machines followed, navigating through the ranks of the trees they had planted and tended so long ago.Forest gave way to open land. The machines found the road and made speed, drove quickly through the abandoned fields. Several of the smaller machines clambered on to the big earthmover, clinging with pruning hooks and spray attachments.

Lee opened up the full sensory arrays of the machines as they rumbled up the single street of the town, through the square with its dripping air still. Shapes moved and postured up the rocky slope, burning in infrared.The small machines scrambled down from the earth-mover, waving every appendage, revving bandsaws and drills.

Floodlights came on, catching the wild ones in a variety of postures.In the moment before they fled, Lee saw the wild ones for what they really were: children grown feral and strange, cast adrift from history, without culture, without language. Being an invulnerable viewpoint helped him forget the gnawed bones, the fear of the three old people in the Last House.

342.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Lee let the little machines charge about and scatter the besiegers, and drove the big earthmover right up to the gate, its airhorn blaring and every light on its rack blazing, its blade raised high above its platform in triumph.

Suddenly someone was beside him. Lee partly withdrew and found himself held in the palm of a muscular vigorous man-shape sketched in crammed silvery hoops. A filament connected Lee's compacted bee-shaped body with the man-shape, linking senses. Yang Go said, "We looked for these years ago."

"They were carefully hidden. Fortunately, enough work."

"I will not ask you how you found them. Clearly, you have the powers for such a task."

"I'm glad you came. I was wondering how to keep off the wild ones. Before we can ride the big machine, I must board it to set it to manual."

"I can supervise the machines; it was once my work."

Lee understood that Yang Bo's sense of face had driven him to follow. He said, "They know what to do, but they need to be watched. Scare the children, but don't hurt them."

"It is a long time since I thought of the wild ones as children."

"It's all they are."

"You have not lost your family to them. They are more dangerous than animals. But I will respect your wish. As for the machines, we are old friends, they and I. We planted the forests together. Go quickly. The wild ones will not stay scared for long."

Yang Bo's silver figure lifted its hand, and Lee flew from its palm. His own faint path was overlaid by the cord of disturbed coordinates that Yang Go had made, like a man blundering through a jungle. It was a trail visible to anyone in the system, but Lee felt that he had no time to knit it up. He flew right into his own body, sat up and shucked mask and gloves. Yang Go, masked and gloved, lay quietly beside him.

The others were outside. Vette and Redd stood on top of RED DUST.

343.the wall either side of the gate's arch, outlined against the earthmover's lights. Li Qing leaned on her brother's arm, and asked Lee what he would have them do.

"We can open the gates now. There is a big machine we can ride."

Chen Yao said, "We can't take them all the way to the top, Wei Lee!"

"We'll do the best we can, Yao."

"We have food," Li Pe said, and held up a bundle wrapped in cloth knotted at four corners. "It has come to this. Running away in the night."

"It is morning, not night," Li Qing said. "It is a new chance."

Vette jumped down lightly and crushed Lee in her arms and extravagantly claimed him to be master of all monsters.

A bloodstained bandage bushed her blonde hair; she'd been hit by a rock while trying to scare off the besiegers.

She and Redd helped Lee haul the heavy gates open, and Li Pe and Li Qing followed them into glare and noise. Chen Yao came last, scornful and angry.

The smaller machines were scattered across the slope between the town and the Last House, running with staggering stilted gaits this way and that on long many-jointed legs, like robot ants that were trying to learn to become bipedal.

Even as Lee watched, one of the machines went sprawling after something bounced off its sensor cl.u.s.ter with a distinct clang. Shadowy figures leaped upon it, danced back howling from its thras.h.i.+ng limbs, started to pelt it with rocks.

other machine charged to the rescue of its sibling, slicing wildly with pruning attachments and a buzz saw. Two children were hacked down; the rest fled. One was holding his own severed arm.

Lee clambered on to the earthmover's rusty platform and found its control node. The featureless silver hooped head of Yang Bo's system-form floated inside a tiny, flat TV screen. "Come back now," Lee told Yang Go, as Chen Yao nimbly swung up beside him. Vette was helping Li Qing climb the ladder.

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PAUL J. MCAULEY.

"I'm staying. I'm staying to kill them all. You run if youlike, young fool."Lee jumped down from the earthmover and ran towardsthe gate. A skeletal machine whirled up, lights blazing, and slammed him to the ground. He went into hypermode, but it wasn't fast enough to dodge the machine. It spread its four arms wide, blades clattering and whirling. A chain flail made a kinetic pattern in the glare of the racked lights above its plate-like sensor platform. Lee feinted left, went right, had to jump back from a swinging blow. The machine stepped stiffly backwards through the arch, slammed the heavy gates shut."Let's go, Billy Lee!" Redd sang out.Naked long-haired children were scampering towards the lights of the bulldozer. Lee made a run for it, reached the ladder just before they did. Redd hauled on his arm as small hands grabbed his ankles. He kicked upwards and gained the platform, while Vette jabbed her harpoon at the children.

They screamed at her with wordless defiance. Vette yelled right back, her tattoos horribly vivid.The face was gone from the TV screen, which now showedonly a rolling interference pattern. Lee told the earthmover where to go and it growled, "Right, boss," and fed power to its tracks. The children fell behind, throwing rocks that bounced from its hopper.Fights ranged up and down the slope. The earthmover pa.s.sed a posse of small children who had somehow overturned a turtlelike machine; its two-dozen stumpy legs wagged helplessly as they pounded it with rocks. But for the most part the machines had the best of the fight. One strode towards the town with its battery of lights strobing, two arms raised high, a severed head dangling from each. Half a dozen smaller, man-sized machines were running down a desperately fleeing flock of children. Lee looked away just asthe machines caught them: but he heard the screams.

"Wicked," Redd breathed.

"Evil," Vette said."This is the beginning of the end," Li Pe said. "The young RED DUST.

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will eat their parents, and then they'll eat each other. Poor Yang Go doesn't understand that this is historical inevitability.

We all fell asleep, and the dream died. It will all go down in darkness."

Li Qing stood up, shaky on the shaking platform of the lumbering earthmover. Li Pe took his sister's arm, tried to make her sit down and be still, but she shrugged him off. She raised an arm, pointed ahead. "Look," she said wonderingly.

Her eyes were wide. Their caps of frost had melted, and tears streamed down her round, wrinkled cheeks.

"Look..."

Far ahead, far above, dawn had reached the peak of Tiger Mountain. It was a flat-topped crown floating on darkness, a crown of iron burning at red heat. But that was not what Li Qing meant. Above the circlet of Tiger Mountain's vast caldera, folds of light shook and s.h.i.+mmered, gold against red dawn. They danced there for an hour, were burning still as the earthmover drove over the crest of the valley and turned in the only direction left to go.

Up.

Seventy-two.T.he earthmover made good time, pulling up the regular slope at a steady ten kph. The slope curved evenly away on either side and rose up like a gentle wave towards the flat horizon of Tiger Mountain's peak two-hundred-odd kilometers straight ahead, although there was no straight way. Ravines and blunt valleys dug into the slope. Shallow craters pocked it and worn lava nubs pushed up from the black, stony ground. There were stands of convoluted lichen, and close-knit mats of wire gorse and golden-leaved dwarf birch. The earthmover steered around these obstacles with no prompting. It knew the way to the top, it said. It had helped build the city there.Every two or three hours Lee asked the earthmover to stop, and they all sipped water from the big bag Li Pe had brought, jumped or climbed down to stretch their legs or duck behind a boulder or into a stand of trees to relieve themselves.As the day wore on it grew colder and colder, the sky darker, the sunlight sharper. Splintered ultraviolet-rich light made everyone but Lee squint and rub their eyes. The earth-mover raised a hemicircular canopy over its platform. Blowers pumped warm pressurized air. Polarization of the canopy filtered the dazzling sunlight.They had not yet climbed beyond life. This was the zone where in the brief fall of the northern hemisphere clouds soaked the ground. Lichens grew in abundance. Meadows of 346.

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