CHUNG KUO.

BY DAVID WINGROVE.

WHITE MOON, RED DRAGON.

PROLOGUE.

WINTER 2215.

Forgotten Words.

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.-CHUANO tzu, Writings, xxvi, II, sixth century b.c.

EBERT STOOD on the lip of the crater, looking across the ruined city toward the distant sun. It was early morning and a rime of frost covered the iron-red rocks, making them glisten. Below him, in the deep shadow, he could discern the twisted shapes of the struts that had once curved half a li into the air, supporting the dome of the greatest of Mars' nineteen cities.

He crouched, placing a gloved hand on a nearby rock, conscious of the sound of his own breathing inside the helmet. Behind him, five paces back, the woman and the boy waited silently.

It was here that the dream had ended, gone in a single night, burned up in a violent conflagration that had taken the lives of more than twenty million people. Dust they were. Dead, like the planet that had never been their home, only a prison, a resting place between two darknesses.

He shivered, understanding. The chain had been broken here, the links scattered. That was the message the great Kan Jiang had offered in his poems. Mars was not the future, Mars was a dead end, a cosmic cul-de-sac. If they tried for a million years Man would never make a home of this place. No, they had to go back, back to Earth-to Chung Kuo. Only then could they move on. Only then might there be a future.

And the Osu? Did they have a future?

He turned, looking back. The woman was watching him, her face behind the thick glass of the helmet like carved ebony. Beside her, resting in the crook of her arm, the boy looked into the distance, dreaming as usual, his eyes far off.

Ebert smiled. It was a year ago that he had first met her, in one of the northern settlements. In his desire to become a sage he had renounced the flesh, holding that darker part of himself in abeyance, yet, when she had come to him that night, his body had remembered. She had been with him ever since.

It was as Tuan Ti Fo had said-desire took many forms, and sometimes renunciation itself could be a kind of desire. Best then to be at peace with oneself; to have and not to want. He stood, putting out a hand to her.

"Come."

Then, turning back toward the setting sun, he began to make his way down into the darkness.

HE WOKE IN DARKNESS, the nightmare still close-so close, it seemed he might reach out and touch it.

Yes, he could sense it, there behind the night's dark skin, the pulse of it still warm, still real. For a moment longer it was there, and then he felt it slip from him, leaving him gasping on the cold, bare floor of the tent, emptied by the vision.

The woman lay beside him sleeping, her breathing soft, almost inaudible. From outside the muffled sound of the air vent's hiss was like the noise the wind makes in the southern deserts during the season of storms. Here, at the bottom of the crater, one of the old air-generators was still partly operational, spewing pure oxygen from a single vent.

He went out, sealing the tent flap after him. It was an hour until dawn and the darkness was intense. Fromwhere he stood the sky was a ragged circle framed by the black of the crater walls, seven stars, shaped like a scythe, blazing in the center.

He climbed, following the path through the twisted ruins from memory. On the lip he paused, turning to look back across the crater's mouth. The blackness beneath him was perfect. To the east, on the horizon, was the tiny blue-white circle of Chung Kuo.

He shivered, remembering the nightmare. He had had it before, many times, but this time it had seemed real.

He looked down at his right hand, flexing the fingers in the glove, surprised to find it whole. Two of them-his father's men-had held him while another splayed his fingers on the slab. He had struggled, but it was no use. There'd been a flash of silver, then he felt the thick-edged blade slice through the sinewy joint of the knuckle-his nerves singing pain, his hot blood pumping into the air. He had heard his own high scream and scuttled like a ghost from out his flesh. There, usually, it ended-there, thankfully, he had always woken-but this time it went on. He had felt his spirit turn, away from the tormented shrieks, following a servant who, bloody bowl in hand, made his way through flickering corridors of stone toward a bright-lit chamber.

There, at the operating bench, stood his father, cold mouthed, dead these eight years, his work apron tied neatly about his massive chest. His dead eyes watched as the servant brought the bowl. He took it, spilling its bloodied contents onto the scrubbed white surface.

The old man's mouth had opened like a cave, words tumbling forth like windblown autumn leaves, dust-brown and crumbling.

"The design was wrong. I must begin again. I must make my son anew."

There had been laughter, a cold, ironic laughter. He had turned to see his mother looking on, her ice-blue eyes dismissive.

"Zombies," she said, reaching past her dead husband to lift the severed finger from the bowl. "That's all you've ever made. Dead flesh. It's all dead flesh."

She let the finger fall, a chilling indifference in her face, then turned and left the room.

No warmth in her, he thought. The woman had no warmth. . . .

Setting the bowl aside, his father had taken the finger, stretching and molding it until the figure of a man lay on the bench before him.

Hans had stepped forward, looking down into the unformed face, willing it not to happen, but the dream was ineluctable. Slowly the features formed, like mountain ranges rising from the primal earth, until the mirror image of his face stared back at him . . . and sneered.

He jerked his head back, gasping.

"Efulefu . . ."

He swallowed back his fear, then answered the voice that had come up from the darkness. "What is it, Hama?"

Her figure threaded its way up through the shadows just below. "Are you all right, husband? I thought I heard you groan.""It is nothing, Hama, only tiredness."

She came to him, reaching out to take his hands. "The boy is sleeping still."

"Good." He smiled, enjoying the sight of her face in the starlight, the dream defeated by the reality of her.

"I was thinking, Hama. We must call a gathering."

"A gathering? Of the ndichie?"

He shook his head. "No, Hama. Of everyone. Of Elders, Tribes, and Settlers." He gazed past her at the distant earth, noting how small, how fragile, it seemed in all that emptiness. "It is time we decided what to do. Time we chose a path for all to follow."

THE MACHINE BLINKED, then looked again. One moment there had been nothing, and the next . . .

"Tuan Ti Fo? Do you see what I see?"

The air before the Machine shimmered and took form. Tuan Ti Fo sat cross-legged before the open console, bowing his gray-haired head in greeting. "What is it that you see?"

"I see"-the Machine strained, staring into the intense darkness, using all its powers to try to penetrate that single spot where it was blind-"I see ... nothing."

Tuan Ti Fo chuckled softly. "You see nothing? Then, surely, there is nothing."

"No. Something landed on the surface of the planet north of Kang Kua. I can sense it. It is there. Its very absence reveals it, and yet it conceals itself."

The old man tugged at his beard thoughtfully. "And your camera probes?"

"Cannot penetrate it. It's as if there is a shell surrounding it. A shell of-it hesitated, a hesitation that in a man might seem normal, yet in the great Machine revealed the existence of billions of rapid calculations-"something unknown," it concluded, a strange hesitancy in its normally toneless voice.

Tuan Ti Fo stared at the console a moment, then nodded. His mood was suddenly more sober. "I see."

The Machine fell silent. It was thinking. For more than five million years Mankind had striven upward out of the primal dark toward the light, and from that quest had come Itself, the ultimate flowering of mind: one single, all-encompassing intelligence.

Intelligent, yet incomplete. Within its mind it pictured the great swirl of things known and unknown, like a vast t'ai chi of light and dark, perfectly balanced. Within that half which was light was a tiny circle of blackness-a pinpoint of occlusion, which it knew to be Tuan Ti Fo. And now, within the darkness of those things unknown, lay a single point of light.

"If it's a craft," Tuan Ti Fo said, "then it must have come from somewhere."

"But there's no trace," the Machine began, then checked itself, realizing that, like the absence that revealed something, there was a line of occlusion through its memory; an area of tampering-a no-trace that paradoxically revealed the passage of the craft.

"It came in from the System's edge. From the tenth planet."

Yet even as it spoke, it questioned that."Something alien?" Tuan Ti Fo asked.

It considered the notion, surprised that for once it was dealing in uncertainties.

"No . . ."

"But you have a hunch?"

"A calculated guess."

"Then you had best send someone."

"Send someone?"

Tuan Tl Fo laughed, then stood, brushing down his silks. "Why, to look, of course." He turned, his figure shimmering, slowly vanishing into the air, his words echoing after he had gone. "Send the boy. He'll see.

Whatever it is."

"Nza?"

The voice came from the air. At its sound the boy turned sharply, his body crouched defensively, then he saw the tiny, glittering probe hovering like a silver insect in the air above his head.

"What is it?" he asked, keeping the fear from his voice.

"Where is Ebert?"

The ten-year-old turned, pointing back into the shadows. The probe moved past him, drifting into the darkness-a moment later it returned.

"Come," it said, hovering just above his head, no bigger than his fist, its surface smooth and rounded like a tiny shaven skull. Nza shivered and then obeyed.

THE machine W A T C H E D the boy approach the nullity; saw hkn Put out his hand, then withdraw it as if he'd been stung.

"Can you feel anything?" it asked, the sensation of curiosity almost overwhelming.

The boy nodded, then put out his hand, tracing what seemed like a smooth, curving slope in the air. But still it could see nothing, sense nothing.

It watched the boy move slowly around, testing the air with his hands, defining more accurately the area of nothingness the Machine's probes had sensed.

Nza turned, his eyes wide.

"What is it?" it asked. "Did you see anything?"

Nza shook his head. "Efulefu . . . Get Efulefu."

IT WAS LIGHT when Ebert got there. He crouched some fifty ch'i from the unseen presence, perfectly at rest, watching the shadows shorten as the sun climbed the sky. The wind blew fitfully, and when it did he noted the patterns the sand made around the nullity.

After two hours he stood and motioned to the boy. Nza went to him and stood there, looking up at himas he mouthed something through the glass of his helmet. It was cold, bitterly cold, and already two of the Machine's six probes had ceased functioning, but Ebert seemed unaware of it.

The cold. It would kill them all one day. Machine and men alike.

Nza stared a moment longer, then nodded and, with that curious loping run of his, scuttled across to the nearest of the probes.

"What is it?" the Machine asked, but the boy shook his head and pointed to his mouth. It watched, reading the boy's lips.

There's something there. He senses it. He thinks it watches us and listens. And something else.

It waited as the boy ordered his thoughts, recalling what Ebert had told him.

He says . . . when he closes his eyes ... he sees a face. An old, familiar face.

It knew, even before the boy's mouth stretched twice to form the word. So he was back. DeVore was back on Mars.

DEVORE STOOD AT the view window, looking out across the windblown surface toward the crouching figure, then turned to the monitor again. Ebert's face filled the screen, his eyes behind the helmet's glass a deep reposeful blue.

So you survived, old friend. And now you consort with those ugly sons of the night. Well, stranger things have been known.

He laughed softly, then clicked his fingers, summoning one of his guards.

"Find out how it's going. We've been here too long as it is. I want us gone by nightfall."

The soldier bowed low and backed away. DeVore turned back to the screen, pushing out his chin reflexively. Hans Ebert had been but a child when he'd first met him. A spoiled and willful child. But now, looking at him, studying him, he saw how much he had changed. It was there in his eyes, in the perfect stillness of the man.

Impressive, he thought. But also dangerous. Hans Ebert was no friend of his - he understood that now.

At any other time he'd stop to kill this exiled prince, but right now it was more important to get back to Chung Kuo as quickly - and as discreetly - as possible.

He cursed silently, angry that they had had to set down and determined that, once repairs were effected, he'd kill that bastard Hooper himself. As an example to the others.

He crossed the room and tapped into the craft's log. Things were getting slack. Already they had lost two days. As it was, even a week's delay wouldn't affect their cargo, but any longer . . .

He cleared the screen. That would be one advantage of getting back to Chung Kuo. For too long now he'd had to rely on the services of second-raters. Once back he could dispense with them and hire some better men.