The boy sleepwalked through it, never speaking and showingno sign of comprehension when spoken to. Most of the time he slept at the hearth of the house, but sometimes Vette and Chen Yao would return to find him at the mended gates, clinging to one of the posts and staring up the mountain's long slope at the cloud cap which hid its summit.386.

RED DUST.

387.

He was infected with a copy of Wei Lee's memories, Chen Yao said, but not with his essence. Perhaps Wei Lee planned to return from information s.p.a.ce when his task of enlightening the living and the dead was done, but she did not think so.

Once a month she used one of the couches to plunge into information s.p.a.ce. She tried to explain the changes to Vette, the growing transparency of the architecture of the medium.

You could go anywhere, even Heaven. Vette wasn't interested: she believed that the spirit world was only a ma.s.s delusion. All that mattered was that Wei Lee had brought the rains.

Chen Yao used the couch to speak with people all over the world, and with the aspects of the other G.o.ds in Xin Beijing. They told her that rain was general over both hemispheres of the planet; that snow was falling over the Great Northern Desert. About ten per cent of the anarchists' ice bolides had not disintegrated during their skimming pa.s.ses through the atmosphere, but had fallen in one piece. A string of explosive impacts had smashed an irregular chain of new craters around the equator, and a multiple strike near the slopes of the Paved Mountain had released the vast fossil aquifer underlying the Dragon's Back. Water had poured into the Dust Seas at rates of over a billion litres an hour.

The Dust Seas had turned to swamp, and then to shallow brine seas. Their artificial ecosystem--the glittering swarms of phytoplankton and zooplankton, and the slow monstrous dust rays--was destroyed for ever, and water was still pouring from the aquifer. And the fullerene viruses released from the other ice bolides were multiplying at an exponential rate.

They had already formed vast cl.u.s.ters in the deep permafrost, and outga.s.sing geysers and sumps were developing all over the high plains, while thin stratospheric layers of chlorofluorocarbons were beginning to spread out from the poles.

It was the chaotic spring of a new climatic era.

The fall of the Emperor had brought chaos, too. The Ten Thousand Years had been overthrown. The Little Bird had 388.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.been strung upside down from a transmission relay tower by his former troops when the Army of the People's Mouths had started to retake the capital in a brief fierce war that the rains had ended. The Gang of Six had each committed ritual suicide at the same moment in their separate houses.

The body of Lee's great-grandfather had been killed by the boy-thing into which his personality had been partially written.

Many others had simply vanished.And Wei Lee had appeared to everyone who used information s.p.a.ce. Everyone who talked with Chen Yao told her that Wei Lee had given them the gift of mastering the structures which held the knowledge of the world. Nothing was hidden any more.But Wei Lee did not come to Chen Yao herself until a year after his apotheosis, on a rare sunny day in early summer.

When she masked herself and lay down on the couch not the usual perception grid but a person appeared to her, tall and robed in black, with a hood cast over his face. He took her hand and then she was standing before the great throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.The figure cast off the hood, and Chen Yao laughed aloud when she saw Wei Lee's face. He laughed too, and sat on the steps beneath the throne so that his face was level with hers. He told her that he was nearly finished with the living, that he wanted to go on to the Isles of the Blessed to join his sister and the myriads of the dead.Chen Yao wanted to know whether Wei Lee would return to the real world, where his memories slept safe in the curve of the boy's skull.Wei Lee said that he had changed too much to be able to return. But although poor Number Eighty-Four had only been infected with partials of Lee's memory, another carried partials of Lee's own self. It was her choice to let him be reborn, and meanwhile clades of viruses would keep Number Eighty-Four forever young."Until," Wei Lee said, "the time comes for me to be banished.

I did not seek to become Emperor, Chen Yao, but that is what I am. I wish to diminish amongst the dead, but it RED DUST.seems that the living are not done with me. They want an Emperor, and their will grows stronger every day. The changes I have made to information s.p.a.ce mean that I cannot hide from them. Nothing can be hidden.""You don't need anyone to tell you what to do, and you don't have to listen to anyone, either. I know you never listened to me.""I'm not what I was. I have.., multiplied. This aspect is perhaps the nearest to my human self, but I am thousands, now. I fear that I'll become what the Thing in Jupiter feared it would become: a surrogate G.o.d, ruler of humanity for all time. I hope that someone will take that bitter cup from me." He looked at his hands, clasping hers. "You've grown, Chert Yao. You'll have young men chasing after you soonu h"eno g As for young men, there"None of us are what we were. are none that I know of. Vette and me, and Number Eighty-Four, we live alon ."As for that, remember that nothing stays the same for ever." Wei Lee smiled, and told Chen Yao that he had a gift for her, and laid a p.r.i.c.kly chip in her mouth. AS it dissolved into her, the throne room dissolved around her (although now she knew where she could find it, now and forever more) and she was aware of the couch beneath her, the mask over her eyes and the gloves on her hands, bird-song thrilling through the open window and Vette rattling pots somewhere in the house.That was the day the robot vanished, it had remained with them for that whole year, but as spring had worn into summer they had seen less of it each day. After Wei Lee spoke to Chert Yao, they never saw it again.The next day, Chen Yao came running in from the fields.

It was raining. She had seen a band of people toiling up out of the forest towards the town. Vette ran to the gate and recognized a banner raised soddenly above the heads of the approaching people and began to wave and shout. Someone, the boy, caught her hand. He had lost his clothes again, and stood naked in the soft cold rain.

390 P^vL J. McAvLE"It's all right," Vette said. "These are my people! These are the Free Yankee Nation They've come to find me at last!" 'The boy stared at them, mouth working around his socketed thumb. He had not spoken in all this time, and stared with silent incomprehension as nearly naked people, masked and tattooed, ran up the path to the Last House, laughing and cheering, and shouting questions at Vette.His time had not yet come.

Eighty-one.B.ut come it would. One day, five long years after the rains had begun, a woman would ride a barque down the Grand Ca.n.a.l to a coastal town where rusty but still serviceable elevators plunged from the top of a high cliff to the weltering unchained sea. She was the dear daughter of the House of Kong, the eldest of the one hundred and tenth generation of descendants of the Great Sage, and the essence of the Saviour of the World was coded in fullerene viruses that had settled in certain implanted circuits in her nervous system.A Yankee ghost had brought her a message from another place. The ghost had come at night, her image burning blue, and had shown the woman the young boy whose head held nothing but another's coded memories. The ghost had explained that it was time that these memories were quickened, and had told the dear daughter of the House of Kong what she must do.And so, in the morning, she had told her husband that the time to repay her obligation had come at last. She had packed a small bag, kissed each of her five children in turn, and set off on her journey.Mars had changed, but the people of Mars had changed less than might be imagined. They loved and laughed and watched heroic operas and wagered on fighting crickets and cheated and hustled and lied--and sometimes even killed--as they always had. No dictator, no matter how universal or 391.

392.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.benign, could stop people being people. But the lies were only little lies, personal lies. Big public lies were no longer possible because the only system by which they could be disseminated was now too transparent for lies to slip by undetected.Nothing important was hidden or could be hidden, or not for long. In theory everyone could express an opinion on every decision of the Emperor. Most didn't. The last time the world had united was when it had decided to send aid to the anarchists, and that had been a year after the beginning of the rains. For most it was enough that they could get on with their lives, enough that they could find the job they wanted, that there was enough food, a good place to live, a future for their children.Still, some knew and cared about the dear daughter of the House of Kong. A pod of fin escorted her barque on its voyage down the Grand Ca.n.a.l, their bulging foreheads pregnant with knowledge, and a few people gathered at the elevator heads to cheer her as she set out on the last part of her journey.Now she stood before the mast of the little barque and watched the sea's horizon for the first sight of her destination.

The wet salt wind cracked and filled the bellying sail above her head. It stood fair out of the eye of the south, driving the little ship across the bitter, muddy seas of Mars towards the island of Tiger Mountain, where she would find the lost boy and quicken in him Wei Lee's new beginning and last end in a way traditional to the conclusion of tales such as this, with a kiss.