Red Dust

Book 5: Gateway Essentials

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Mars, 600 years in the future, is dying. Five hundred years after the Chinese conquered the Red Planet, the great work of terraforming is failing. The human-machine Consensus of Earth had persuaded the AI Emperor to follow the Golden Path into a vast virtual reality universe, leaving behind an ungoverned planet swept by hunger riots and the beginnings of civil war. Enter Wei Lee, a lowly itinerant agricultural technician: rock 'n' roll fan, dupe, holy fool - and unlikely Messiah. After stumbling on an anarchist pilot hiding near the wreckage of her spacecraft, he's drawn into a revolutionary plot that has been spinning for decades. With the help of a ghost, the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, a Yankee yak herder, and a little Girl God, Lee travels across the badlands, swampy waterways and vast dust seas to a showdown at the summit of the biggest volcano in the Solar System. Not even the God-like Consensus can predict the outcome of his struggle to define his own destiny . . . Epic in scope, Red Dust's spectacular, fast-paced story brilliantly brings to life the planet that has captured our imagination like no other.

Release date: December 30, 2010

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 318

Sample

Mars was dying.

Year after year, the summer rains failed and the hard pink skies were stitched only with dry lightning. Each year, the winter
dust storms raged more fiercely, and spring arrived later than the year before.


In the second year of the Silence of the Emperor, the first day of calm spring weather did not arrive until the forty-sixth
of April. The thousand or so people in the Bitter Waters danwei suddenly discovered that they were weary of their long winter confinement, their enthusiasms for fighting crickets, heroic
opera, and handcrafting fur-trimmed oddments for fun and profit. Despite a seventy per cent chance of a late dust storm, Contract
Agronomist Technician Wei Lee had no trouble in rounding up half a dozen volunteer citizens to clear the clogged filters of
Number Eight Field Dome.


It was filthy work, requiring full face masks and sealed suits. Edging along metre-wide frame elements. Climbing hand over
hand up lines of rung staples to find the air vents which studded one in every hundred of the field dome’s big hexagonal panes.
Sticking in the blower’s nozzle and becoming enveloped in a personal storm of red dust. When Wei Lee cleared the last vent
at the top of the dome, he blew his face plate clear, hooked his line to the vent’s grid and leaned out to take in the view.


The King of the Cats was playing some down-home rock’n’roll in Lee’s earpiece; apart from that he was more alone than he’d
been all winter. This was his first year at the Bitter Waters danwei, his second as an itinerant agronomist technician. Already he was chafing to move on through the emptying landscapes of Mars;
if he could he’d never stop moving until he found his parents or, at least, found the truth behind his great-grandfather’s
honeyed evasions. The librarian program Xiao Bing had built was all very well, but it searched the other world of the common information space, not the real world, the world all around him.


The dome curved away on either side of Lee, facets glittering against the shocking-pink sky. A dozen identical domes stood
in a grid of drainage canals and tracks. Beyond were the sours, green-brown patches showing through the thin mantling of red
dust, slashed by the lightning bolt of the dry riverbed, spreading north towards the lowlands of the Plain of Gold. Dust hazed
the line between land and sky; westward, the notch of the Great Valley was hardly visible. Perhaps he’d travel down it, come
summer, to the Paved Mountain and the strange ecosystem of the Dust Seas, hitch a ride on a dust skimmer and climb Tiger Mountain
…


Shouts floated up, no louder than the King’s music. Directly below, the others were semaphoring at Lee. Their shadows made
small black oblique strokes against the red ground. He abseiled all the way down, kicking off lightly once, twice against
structural struts. He just missed the trestle which carried the water line into the dome and landed sprawling on his back
in a bank of soft dust.


‘Make speed, Technician,’ one of the men shouted as Lee picked himself up. ‘Lin Yi is drowning!’

Field Dome Number Eight grew rice. The canal which carried away the overflow from its flooded fields had been choked by winter
dust storms, forming a slough of deep mud covered by a thin dry crust on to which Citizen Lin Yi had ventured and broken through.
Now he floundered up to his chest in algae-tinted gloop while the others laughed and shouted advice.


‘Do you think you’re a fish, Lin Yi?’

‘Fish swim in water, not mud. Maybe he’s a hog!’

‘You’re taking conchie recapitulation too far!’

‘Recapitulation? If he’s a hog, then he’s evolved!’

They were waiting for Lin Yi to call for help, none of them willing to break ranks and lose face; and Lin Yi wouldn’t ask
for help because he would lose face too. He made a kind of sobbing grunt and tried to lunge forward, but succeeded only in
sinking deeper. His hands splashed uselessly in dark green slime; his head was tipped back, his mouth wide open.


Lee tossed an end of his safety line to Lin Yi, missed and dragged it back, threw it again. ‘You might be enjoying your swim,’ he shouted, ‘but we’ll need your help to clear up this mess, Lin
Yi!’


Lin Yi threw himself at the line, his head going under the slop even as he grabbed hold with both hands. The line snapped
taut and Lee fell flat on his ass. Some of the watchers laughed. Lin Yi came back up, eyes rolling white in his mud-caked
face, and started to claw along the line in panic. For every metre he gained, Wei Lee was pulled a metre closer to the mud.
The watchers hooted and stamped their feet as Lee was dragged feet first towards the canal while at the other end of the line
Lin Yi pulled himself out hand over hand, as neat a demonstration of Newton’s third law of motion as anyone could wish. By
the time Lin Yi made dry land, gasping like a future-shocked amphibian and streaked from head to foot with slimy clods and
viridescent strands of algae, Lee was lying waist deep in mud beside him.


Lin Yi held out a hand. ‘Help me up, Technician,’ he said. After all, he was a shareholding citizen, and Lee was just an itinerant
worker. He had rights; Lee had a contract. The fact that Lee had just saved his life meant that Lin Yi had to regain face
by asserting his position.


Knowing that didn’t cool Lee’s temper. He clambered to his feet, smarting in a dozen different places. He pulled off his face
mask, swept his black, greased hair back into its DA, and mopped his face with the red kerchief he’d knotted around his neck,
the way the King wore one in Charro to hide his branded wound.


‘Help me up,’ Lin Yi said impatiently, and Lee said he’d do better than that, and stalked over to the big raised water line
that served the dome’s hydroponic fields. He had already attached a hose to a spur valve and hooked it over one of the struts
which supported the water line as a kind of makeshift shower to wash dust from the protective suits. Now he shook it free.


Lin Yi had climbed to his feet, and the first high-pressure burst sent him sprawling. He sputtered and spat and swore and
tried to get up again, and a second burst knocked him on to his back. He began to laugh, paddling upside down in mud and water
like an overturned turtle, trying to splash his fellows.


‘If you can’t swim,’ Lee said, ‘you should stay out of the water!’ And he lifted the jet so that it rose towards the pink
sky in a trembling fountain, glittering in cold sunlight and torn by wind and falling in fat droplets that darkened the red dust. The
men danced beneath it, faces raised to the precious rain, hands cupped to catch it, laughing at each other; and Lee laughed
too and sent the fountain shooting to new heights.


A voice said loudly, ‘This is a noble way to waste a morning, Wei Lee!’

Lee turned, sending water spraying in a flat fan. The men ran from it, screeching in mock alarm.

Guoquiang reached up and shut off the valve; the hose quivered and fell slack in Lee’s hands. ‘A little early for a rain dance,’
he remarked.


‘We wash ourselves of dust, after our labours.’

Beside Guoquiang, Xiao Bing held on to the harness of a draught bact. Face pale as powdered chalk; white hair; silver caps
over pink irises. With his free hand he thumbed a vial into the waist pocket of his long jacket and said, ‘You are an inspiration
to us all, with your selfless dedication. How is my librarian?’


‘Still searching. You’re going hunting?’

Guoquiang grinned. He was as tall and burly as a Yankee, with a shock of bristly hair, a craggy face with heavy brows. Like
Xiao Bing he was dressed in rust-coloured field clothes. A rifle was slung at one shoulder, and a pistol was buttoned into
a holster at his hip. ‘We aren’t here to shovel shit. The low-pressure cell shifted. The probability that the storm will hit
us has dropped to twenty per cent. It’s spring, Wei Lee! All kinds of furry critters are stirring in their burrows! Here,
put these on.’ He tossed Lee a bundle of clothes: padded cotton trousers; a long many-pocketed jacket; a zippered shirt; knee-high
hiking boots. ‘A good idea to get out, but we’ve a better one. And we’re good enough to share it with you.’


‘Besides,’ Xiao Bing said, ‘someone has to lead this bact, Contract Agronomist Technician Wei Lee, and it isn’t going to be
me.’


The terraced cliffs of the Red Valley rose step by step to a scalloped rim that stood out sharply against the hard pink sky.
As the three cadres marched through the sours, a straggling V of geese flew out over the cliffs, honking each to each as they
headed north to their breeding grounds in the polar sinks.


Spring!

Wei Lee shaded his eyes to watch the birds, and out of casual spitefulness, an attribute some gene cutter had forgotten to
edit out of the camel-derived genome of its kind, the draught bact took advantage of the slack harness rope to try and snatch
at his hair. Lee felt the rope swing out and ducked the bact’s swipe, then whacked it on its muzzle.


‘Ho! Ho there! Don’t you know I’m cleverer than you!’

He mopped his face with his kerchief and whacked the bact again, to get it moving.

‘Ho! Understand who is the master!’

Guoquiang and Xiao Bing had heard Lee shout, and now they shouted at him, asking how he knew he was smarter, asking who was
leading who. Xiao Bing said, ‘We’d be better off if the bact set the traps and Wei Lee carried the gear!’


Lee laughed, and said, ‘I think maybe you should carry the gear. This bact is not so dumb he could mistake heroic opera for
art, and I can lay out traps in my sleep.’


Guoquiang said, ‘Thank you for enlightenment! Now I know that only bacts and contract workers are dumb enough to pay attention
to the King of the Cats and his old-fashioned anarchist propaganda.’


‘Oh! You know very well I like the historical King, not some machine floating in Jupiter who thinks it’s the King, reborn all over again. No, I like the real one, the one who was born in a stable and became a planet-wide
media star, who was exiled to the Moon and returned a hero after leading a revolution against the tyranny of Colonel Parker,
who was crucified upon a burning cross, and returned as a thousand acolytes who surgically altered themselves to look exactly
like him.’


‘And who could raise the dead, and turn water into wine,’ Xiao Bing said.

‘I can turn wine into water,’ Guoquiang said. ‘The trick is finding the wine.’

‘I may be dumb,’ Lee insisted, ‘but I wouldn’t mistake historical reality for the construct who jockeys the show.’

‘But you listen to it, all the same,’ Guoquiang said. ‘A contradiction there, Wei Lee.’

‘Not at all! I just like the songs he plays. I’m smart enough to know they mean something. Nothing in those operas could ever
happen in the real world.’


‘That’s the point,’ Guoquiang said amiably.

‘And if you’re so smart,’ Xiao Bing said, ‘why are you slogging through this stuff with us?’

‘Oh! I don’t mind this.’

For most of the afternoon the three had been picking a path through the marshy saltpans of the sours. Low black willows and
tenacious soldier grasses grew along the ragged cuts of sand-clogged irrigation ditches; slimes and moulds threw up wrinkled
stinking banks that slumped into sands crusted with leached iron salts. Every footstep threw up a rotten salty stench, and
the three cadres walked with their kerchiefs drawn over nose and mouth. Only the bact seemed unaffected; its black lips drawn
back in a perpetual sneer as it padded behind Lee.


But while the others grumbled about the stink of the sours, Lee saw it for what it was: a co-operative ecological structure
which had once forced the Martian desert slowly to yield to wetland ecology. The roots of black willows reached deep down
into the frozen regolith; and special strands in their bark cambium conducted heat to melt and mine the permafrost. Soldier
grasses wove a net of stolons through the dusty soil, holding it together. Fungi broke the chemical bonds of the thin surface
crust of iron oxides, binding the iron to more stable forms, releasing the oxygen. Rainbow slicks on the black mud in the
clogged ditches were a sign that bacteria were multiplying in the anaerobic mud, slowly turning it into soil that would grow
crops.


A slow tide of life feeding on the Martian regolith, feeding on itself, processing red dust into oxygen and water and life-filled
muck. And the whole system crippled by the imbalance which was locking three grams of water in the polar icecaps for every two produced.
The battle fading. Crumbs of water spilled into thirsty sand. The front line where once unreclaimed Martian desert had grudgingly
given way to pioneer vegetation was now a festering wound circling the danwei’s fifty-kilometre perimeter.


As the three men moved farther from the danwei, the black willows grew smaller. Thickly clumped stands thinned out. Tussocks of soldier grass had tails of red sand, each
miniature sand dune pointing in the same direction, away from the danwei and the winds that blew off the Plain of Gold. The men’s boots kept breaking through a duricrust of hydrated minerals, making
a soft creaking sound with each step.


But there was life there, too. Succulent green spears were pushing through the crusted soil, tipped with transparent cells
which focused light down to deeply buried corms. The bact flared its nostrils hungrily, and Lee had to keep jerking at its
bridle to remind it that it wasn’t there to look for lunch. A few bees were out, commuting between widespread patches of yellow-flowered
rock vetch. A patch of frosty soil had gathered in the lee of two weather-split boulders, and a lupin had rooted there, its
spread of half a dozen leaves no bigger than Lee’s hand but already sending up a spike laden with purse-shaped flowers, white
and yellow against blood-red rock.


Life. It was delicate and tenacious, mocking the propaganda of the conchies, the triumph of the inorganic. Mars was dying,
yet still spring stirred the little lives.


‘Time to take a break,’ Guoquiang said.

Lee and Guoquiang sprawled on a tilted slab of sun-warmed rock and munched dried fish. The bact nibbled at foliose lichens,
tearing them from overhangs with its mobile lips. Xiao Bing ranged to and fro, too excited to keep still. He kept taking delicate
snorts from his little tube, jolts of memory enhancer that would let him fix every detail. He had taken the pledge to die
out of this world into the next, and was remembering details for the niche he was creating in Heaven, the part of information
space that belonged to the elective dead. Lee had experienced his design: a desert garden full of reflecting pools and strange
half-melted machinery under a starry sky where five moons swung by.


‘Look here, a periwinkle! And here is moss campion, a very big cushion. But this, I do not know what this is. Wei Lee!’

Lee asked what it looked like, and Xiao Bing said, ‘Black glossy leaves in a big rosette, a fat flower spike covered with,
I don’t know, what looks like silver dusting. The spike shines so bright, and there’s a patch of wet soil around the rosette,
crusted with blue-green algae. It’s beautiful, like a machine. Come and see, Wei Lee!’


‘I don’t need to. It’s ice sunflower, one of Cho Jinfeng’s species. It helped melt the polar caps back when. Very common above
three kilometres, I suppose what you have there is a remnant from the early days.’


Guoquiang yawned. ‘Perhaps it is coming back down from the mountains. The winters are colder than they once were.’

‘Perhaps. Don’t you ever sit down, Bing?’

‘I’ve been sitting down all winter. Look at that! There, there, there it goes!’

Lee saw it at once, an ice mouse jinking into the shadow of an undercut boulder, tufted tail held up like an aerial. Spring,
and the animals which had hibernated through the long winter or which like the ice mouse had lain neither dead nor alive,
blood vessels and body cavity filled with ice crystals minutely shaped by antifreeze peptides, were now all alive alive-o.
Running and feeding and breeding all unawares of the humans who had brought them here. Mice and men: men and the Ten Thousand
Years.


The Ten Thousand Years and the conchies.

Perhaps the conchie propaganda was right, perhaps the Golden Path was the only way, the inevitable next step in the evolution
of intelligence. Many, like Xiao Bing, were eager to embrace it, pledging early deaths in exchange for the privilege of designing
their own private niche in the Golden Isles of Heaven, that lay beyond the barrier in information space. But Lee did not understand
the conchie ideology which insisted that Mars must return to its original state, that after all these years the terraforming
project should be allowed to fail. If the Earth’s consensus was as powerful an ally as the Ten Thousand Years claimed it to
be, why was it afraid of the living? For why else would it want to gather all that lived into information space?


Guoquiang had fallen asleep while Lee had been thinking on this. Xiao Bing came over and rummaged through his pockets and at last came up with a pair of goggles. ‘It’s your last chance to
check on the librarian,’ he said. ‘When we get over the rim the reception will go.’


Lee took the goggles. ‘I checked this morning.’

‘It’s a good program. It’ll find your parents.’

‘Thank you, Xiao Bing.’

Xiao Bing bowed. ‘It was fun to make. But like all intelligence-mimicking programmes, it needs positive reinforcement. It
needs encouragement. I’m going to remember some more desert before we start up off again,’ he added, and wandered away.


Lee watched Xiao Bing ramble about for a while. Then he snapped on the goggles, and information space scrolled up even as
he adjusted earpiece and patch microphone. The librarian turned to him, a massive book clasped across his chest.


He was a tall thin man in a dark silk robe, its hood cast over his sharp, high-cheekboned face. It was a mirror-image of Lee’s
own face, a whim Lee now regretted but was unable to ask Xiao Bing to edit out; that Bing had written the librarian was favour
enough.


The librarian said, ‘I have found nothing new since we last spoke, Master, but I have accessed a promising new level. Every
day I feel I am getting closer to your parents.’


Behind the librarian, tiers of chained leather-bound volumes stepped up into darkness. A shaft of light from a high narrow
window slashed across their ranks, fell to a patch of richly patterned carpet no bigger than a hand.


Lee, who had never mastered the knack of subvocalising, mumbled, ‘You are here without compromise?’ The librarian had been
working for two weeks now, had moved a long way from the common data-access areas into undefined regions. So far, by some
miracle, its integrity had not been tested.


The librarian said, ‘I had to kill a guardian, but I believe it was not noticed.’

With goggles and earpiece as the only sensory inputs, Lee was aware of the faint warmth of the soft dust on which he sat,
the touch of cold air on his face. The librarian was only a fictive interface; still, Lee felt a dry catch of fear when he
said, ‘Isn’t that illegal? Show me.’


The librarian put his hands together, fingertip steepled against fingertip.

And suddenly a worm raced at Lee down an infinite corridor between stacks of books. Although it moved at tremendous speed
it also seemed to writhe about a single fixed point, now showing the red serrated plates along its back, now its pale belly.
Its golden eyes were huge under arched brows; its mouth gaped amongst bristles and kept on gaping, a vast yawning cave ringed
by wet razor-sharp ridges. Lee saw his hands tear a page from the book he carried, wad it and toss it into the worm’s maw:
there was a soundless flash and the worm vanished.


‘That was ten days ago,’ the librarian said. ‘I travelled on until I reached this place, and now I will try and penetrate
the data files. They are very old, as you see.’


‘Ten days?’ Lee had accessed the librarian only that morning.

‘Time is not the same for us,’ the librarian said. ‘Master, you have given me a difficult task, and I have travelled long
and hard roads to try and fulfil it. I wonder if I might ask one question of you?’


‘I would be honoured.’

‘Master, what will you do when I find out what happened to your parents?’

‘Once you have found out where they are, I will go to them, of course! My great-grandfather knows about them but would never
tell me and so I swore that I would find them for myself. He said it was to protect me from the taint of my parents’ Sky Roader
sympathies …’


‘Perhaps, Master, he had other reasons. But if you defy your great-grandfather, who is a powerful man, surely you would become
an outcast. What then? I ask only because it is often the case that the child’s personality is a reflection of its parents.
By knowing you better, I may hasten in my task.’


Lee’s patience had worn thin. ‘My great-grandfather is one of the Ten Thousand Years, it’s true, but I am only an agro-tech.
What have I to lose? You find them! That’s all I ask! After that, you won’t have to worry about me. Who can say what the future
holds?’


‘Who indeed, Master?’ The librarian bowed again, and added, ‘Someone wishes to speak with you.’

When Lee stripped off the goggles Guoquiang said, ‘You woke me up with your shouting. What were you doing? It’s no time to
be visiting dream girls at Ma Zizhen’s.’


‘That wouldn’t be much use with only sound and vision,’ Lee said.

‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with looking. Or talking, for that matter. I do it all the time. It’s healthy.’ Guoquiang grinned.
‘Now you’ve had a winter here you’ll know why.’


Xiao Bing said, ‘Wei Lee doesn’t need goggles and a clenched fist. He’s had more luck in one winter than you’ve had since
your first hard-on.’


Guoquiang said, ‘Exogamy is a strong drive. Wei Lee shouldn’t exploit it. I rely on my natural charms, not greased hair and
zither playing.’


‘It’s a guitar.’

‘Of course it is,’ Guoquiang said. ‘First you rock and then you roll. And then you and Li Mei start paying child tax.’

Lee blushed, and Guoquiang laughed. ‘There are no secrets amongst citizens – at least, not in winter. Come on, we’ve a way
to go.’


In two minutes they were packed and on the move again, climbing a slope of loose stones and frosty dust that rose up to the
horizon line, where a square boulder big and black as a locomotive jutted against the pink sky.


They were climbing a collapsed cliff towards the first terrace of the ancient river valley. Three billion years ago a vast
flood had carved the Red Valley, cutting a channel a kilometre deep and three kilometres wide at the point where it entered
the lowlands of the Plain of Gold. In the past few centuries the warming of the world had restarted the release of water from
aquifers in the badlands, but only enough to create a sluggish trickle, white with salts, that dried out completely in winter.
Now it was spring, but the alkaline river which had given the Bitter Waters danwei its name had not yet started to run. A bad omen.


Halfway up the slope, the cadres turned as one and saw the settlement framed by the red walls of the valley, small and far.
Domes glittered in the brilliant sunlight. Stepped cliffs rose on the other side of the braided river channel to the cratered
high plain.


The three grinned at each other, and then they were running. Lee hauled at the bact’s halter until it broke into a sullen
knock-kneed trot. Freedom, they suddenly all felt it. Their feet kicked dry dust high into the still air, and when they all reached the top and turned they saw far downhill a drifting red sheet that twisted
into three ropes pointing to the ridge where they stood, gasping for breath.


Lee started to babble as soon as he got his breath back, asking his friends to imagine the terraces cloaked in pine forest,
dark green rhododendrons. Grass pastures either side of a wide clear river, a waterfall plunging into a foaming pool. Water,
that was all that was needed: the water locked in the poles and in the vast buried permafrost reservoirs untapped by the world’s
failed warming. It could still happen. It was not too late.


‘Wei Lee’s genotype is expressing itself again.’ Xiao Bing said, when Lee paused for breath, and Guoquiang laughed. They’d
both heard all this Sky Roader propaganda many times; Lee had told them about his education and keep, the obligation to his
great-grandfather he could not forget. Xiao Bing, even though he had written the librarian for Lee, thought his flight from
privilege was romantic; Guoquiang was more scornful, but his scorn was tempered with deference to Lee’s upbringing. Once a
relation of one of the Ten Thousand Years, always a relation. Despite the danwei’s ethos of democratic capitalism, its shareholders retained a respect for lineage.


Lee sighed. He said, ‘I was brought up to believe that the task will be completed, but that does not mean that it will come
true.’ He had almost forgotten the angry uncertainty that the librarian’s questions had tapped. How little his own fate mattered,
compared to the fate of the world!


Guoquiang said seriously, ‘It is Sky Roader talk, Wei Lee. You know that. After what happened to your parents you must know
that. Your great-grandfather can believe what he wants. That is the privilege of the Ten Thousand Years. But you …’


‘I can talk with you fellows, at least.’

‘Better not to talk about it,’ Guoquiang said. ‘In a hundred years perhaps we will all be Sky Roaders singing the songs of
the King of the Cats day and night. But it is not likely. You know what happened to the last board of directors, ten years
ago. Thanks to Yi Shihung we’re all committed to the Golden Path. And so must you be, even as an employee.’


Lee said, ‘Perhaps. But I can still speak of these matters amongst friends, eh?’

Guoquiang said, ‘Mars is for the Martians. I don’t care for the conchies, but I have no special interest in the anarchists
either. Keep them all out, I say.’


Xiao Bing, who was always anxious to stop arguments developing, said, ‘Some people insist the King is an alien. We listen
to him, and he studies us.’


Lee said, ‘We made the world what it is. We should finish the making. Mars for the Martians, Guoquiang. So perhaps we agree
after all.’


Guoquiang said, ‘That’s over. We live as we must. At least Earth helps us defend ourselves from anarchists who would turn
this world into an ecological laboratory, if they could. Why should we aid them by trying to correct old mistakes?’


‘To prove that we can do it, of course.’

‘But of course,’ Guoquiang said, smiling, ‘we do not need to prove what we can do. Only what we cannot.’

Xiao Bing laughed. Silver-capped eyes flashed in his thin white face. ‘Cheer up, Wei Lee,’ he said. ‘Maybe it will rain every
day, and we will become frogs. I prefer the desert! I will always remember it this way.’ He took a dramatic sniff of enhancer.
‘I’ll remember all of us this way! Dusty and sweaty and happy! We don’t need this world: the Emperor rules a better one on
the far side of death.’


Lee and Guoquiang exchanged looks. It was bad taste to remind others of one’s elective death. Guoquiang briskly consulted
his mechanical watch. ‘There’s still three hours of daylight