Beneath the Tree of Heaven

CHAPTER FIVE

Mother Sky it was night. Ahead, across the silent dunes, the Martian capital of Rang Kua was still ablaze, its great dome cracked and open to the sky. Beyond it the crater wall loomed vast and dark.

From a ledge of rock two li to the south, a dozen men looked on, the darkness of their face plates lit by the flickering flames. They had heard the screams of the dying carried on the thin and frigid air. Through the broad, curving face of the dome they had witnessed the devastation, the slow, suffocating death of Mars’s greatest City. Now the dome was dark, fire blackened, and the trickle of refugees through the main air lock had ceased. There would be no more survivors. Ebert looked about him at the silent, watching figures, then turned back, studying the scene, fixing it in mind. In less than thirty hours two centuries of patient enterprise had been undone. Mars had ripped itself apart in a series of tormented convulsions, like the death throes of an animal driven mad by inner sickness.

As the flames died, they turned away, making their way back to their power sleds. Returning across the darkness of the dunes, they lapsed into a brooding silence. It was only when they were back inside the settlement, seated about the benches in the meeting room, that they began to talk of what they had seen.

“It is the women and children I feel sorry for,” one of them said, his eyes pained. “I can’t help thinking how I’d feel if they were mine.” There were nods all around. What they had seen had sobered them. There had been excited talk beforehand, real joy at the prospect of being free finally from the yoke of the Han. But now they understood the price of that freedom—the cost in deaths and human suffering. One of the younger men looked up, his dark face shining in the lamplight. “It was awful. I felt so helpless. I wanted to stop it, but what could I do? What could any of us do?”

“We can remember,” one of the eldest, his hair gray, answered him. “And we can make sure our children remember.”

On the journey north to Kang Kua, Ebert had heard from his companion just how badly the Osu had suffered; how they had been hunted and persecuted, year after year, until their anger had turned to bitterness, their bitterness to resignation. Mother Sky deliver us, they had prayed. But now things would be different. There would be new tales to tell the unborn children of the Osu when their time came beneath Mother Sky. They had fallen into silence. Their heads were lowered, their eyes downcast. Then, as if drawing it up from some well of sadness deep within him, the old man began to sing.

For a moment the old man sang alone, then, slowly, one after another of them joined their voices, until the room resounded to the haunting sadness of the refrain. The men were weeping now, singing and weeping, their faces lifted up, as if they sang for Mother Sky herself. Ebert, watching, shivered violently, then clenched his fists against the sudden, overwhelming sense of loss he felt, against the vast and echoing emptiness inside him. And yet his grief, his personal suffering, was as nothing beside that of the Osu.

Long ago, so Echewa had told him, the Osu had lived in Africa. For ten thousand years their lives had been peaceful, orderly. They had been as one with the earth and the sky. And then the Hung Mao—the White Man—had come, raiding their coastlines and taking them away in great ships, a thousand at a time—men, women, and children, chained like animals and kept in dreadful, insanitary conditions. They had been taken to a new land—America—and forced to work the land as slaves. Centuries later, in the time of the tyrant Tsao Ch’un, their kind had been eradicated from Chung Kuo. Yet some had survived, here on Mars. They had come here as free men, along with others—white men and yellow men, men of all creeds and many nations—who had first settled this harsh planet. But when Tsao Ch’un’s soldiers came there was no place for them in the Cities, and so they came out here, into the wild, beneath the great blackness. Mother Sky, they called it, seeing in its face the dark reflection of their own. Mother Sky...

He looked from face to face, surprised by the tears that streaked each one, astonished to find no masks, no walls or barriers to these men. You could see what they were at a glance. And with that realization came a strange and urgent need to be connected—to be bonded somehow—to these Osu. To be like them seemed suddenly not merely desirable but essential. He saw how they looked to each other, like brothers, the connections between them welded tight by adversity, and shuddered inwardly. He had been alone. All his life he had been alone. But now he was awake, alive—maybe for the first time in his life free of all masks, all encumbrances of birth—and what was he to do with that?

As the song faded he looked down, trembling, afraid almost to look at them in case, by the slightest word or gesture, they might reject him. For to be cast out by these Osu—these outcasts—would indeed be hell. “Hans Ebert ...”

He looked up. Aluko Echewa was standing there in the doorway across from him, one hand out, summoning him. Ebert looked about him, seeing how they were watching him, curious to see how he would act. “What is it?” he asked quietly.

“The ships have gone,” Echewa answered, his face expressionless. “The pipelines are smashed, the Cities all burned or broken. Their dreams of Mars are dead, my friend. It is time for our dream to begin.” Ebert hesitated, then stood and went across, conscious of their eyes upon him. As Echewa turned away, he followed, down a long, sloping corridor, uncertain what was to befall him. To his right small galley kitchens and storerooms had been cut into the unfaced rock. Farther down he passed family dormitories where black-faced women sat silently on their bunks, their children surrounding them, watching as he passed. At the bottom the corridor turned abruptly to the right. A suited guard waited there, the inner door to the air lock held open.

He went inside, standing beside Echewa as he closed the door and spun the wheel. Once before he had stood thus, not knowing what awaited him. Then it had been a race of blacks and a woman he had loved and lost. And now? He met Echewa’s eyes, surprised to find the black man watching him.

“You must not expect too much,” Echewa said. Too much? He wondered what he meant by that, then caught his breath as the door swung back and he saw what lay beyond. He stepped out into a circular hollow in the rock, thirty paces in circumference. The hollow was surrounded by pale, irregular white stone to a height of ten or twelve ch’i. Beneath his feet lay a fine red dust. But his eyes were drawn upward, up toward the great dark circle of the sky. Above him the stars burned down, Chung Kuo a brilliant point of whiteness in their midst, a Cyclops’s eye, staring him out. He turned and looked about him, astonished. It was a dome, a miniature dome. “This is the place,” Echewa said. “Wait and he will come.”

Ebert turned, looking back at him. “Wait?” But Echewa simply backed away, pulling the door closed behind him, leaving Ebert to the silence and the burning sky. Ebert took two steps toward the center of the hollow and then stopped, the hairs rising along his spine and at the back of his neck. Across from him, no more than ten ch’i from where he stood, an old man—a gray-bearded Han—was sitting on a rock, watching him. He was partly in shadow, his robes loose about him. What looked like a flat black case lay in his lap. And yet the hoHow had been empty. . . .

“Welcome, Hans Ebert. Are you more at peace with yourself now?”

Ebert moved closer, until he stood only a body’s length from the old man. For a moment he had suspected that it was a hologram of some kind, projected from above, but from close up it was clear that the man was real. The old man’s eyes were lucid, his expression calm. There was an air of great serenity about him.

“Who are you?”

The old man smiled, showing a perfect set of yellowed teeth. “I am Master Tuan. A friend, let us say. Now please, be seated. It is hard to talk to another man when you must crane your neck to see his face, neh?” “Forgive me. . . .” Hans sat, folding his legs beneath him. The old Han watched, satisfied, then leaned slightly toward him. “Did it cost you much to give away that which you wanted most?”

Ebert narrowed his eyes. “The girl, you mean?”

“Is that what I mean?”

Ebert considered a moment, then nodded. What else was there? All else—all worldly things—meant nothing to him now, only Jelka’s good opinion. That and the friendship of the Osu.

“Was it hard?”

Ebert looked down. “Yes,” he admitted. “Harder than I’d ever imagined. There was a moment—the briefest moment—when I thought of keeping her, but”—he looked up, meeting the old Han’s gaze—“I could not have lived with myself. You understand?”

The old Han’s face did not change. There was the vaguest hint of a smile—of irony? of understanding?—on his lips, and the eyes, staring back into his own, seemed deep and warm and wise beyond all years. “I have been watching you for a long time now, Hans Ebert. I have seen the path you have taken. To some it might seem that you have fallen far, and yet these eyes have seen you climb from out of the darkness. Then again, some might say that you have come a long way, Tsou Tsai Hei, but the Way is long and you have taken but the first step on that road.” Ebert leaned forward. “Forgive me, Master Tuan, but why did you call me that?”

“Tsou Tsai Hei?” The old Han laughed. “Forgive me, my young friend, but I thought you knew your Mandarin. Is it so hard to grasp?” Tsou Tsai Hei. The walker in the darkness. “No,” Ebert answered, then hesitated, uncertain. He understood the words, but their meaning?

Master Tuan lifted a hand. “No matter. As Hsu Yu said, name is only the guest of reality. It is what lies behind the name that matters, neh? I mean, where is the darkness? Where is it to be found? In the hearts of men? In the pupil of the eye? In shadows and the sunless depths of night? We say of a man that his heart is dark, and yet without the darkness, where is the light? Without evil, where the good? You have understanding, Tsou Tsai Hei. You have been there. All your young life you have been a man of action. Now, as your middle years begin, you must adopt a different course. You must embrace wuwei, inaction. You must seek the te, the true virtue, that the Way provides.”

He leaned forward slightly. “You are strong. Strong enough, I note, to kill a man with your bare hands. And yet what is true strength? Is it manifested in the exercise of power over others? Is that true strength? Or is true strength the exercise of some inner restraint? Is it a working against desire? This you must learn, Tsou Tsai Hei. This and much more.” “And the Osu? What is their role in this?” The Old Han laughed. “Am I to tell you everything? No, Tsou Tsai Hei, that is for you to learn. Study them. Be as they. The truth will follow. You are to stay here, to finish the work that time has begun in you. To wait here, among these hidden works of darkness. Until the call comes.” “The call?”

The old man smiled. “Be patient. Work hard. The Way is difficult, wherever one is. Yet here you might find yourself. And that is the first step, neh? No more masks, Hans Ebert. No more masks.” The old Han looked down, then lifted the case, offering it to Ebert. “It will take a while, but you will learn patience. This will help you in that task.”

“What is it?”

“Words. Images. A friend when you need a friend. An eye where you need an eye.”

Ebert leaned in, wanting to query what he meant, but the old man raised his hand once more.

“I am afraid our conversation is over. You must go now. Look, your people are awaiting you.”

Ebert turned. The air lock was open. In the opening stood two of the Osu, Echewa and the old man who had begun the song. He turned back, meaning to say one final thing, but Master Tuan was gone. He whirled about, expecting some trick, but there was no sign of the old man within the dome, and there was no way out, unless a man could walk through walls. That thought made him turn and look back at Echewa, recalling what he had said that time, about walking through solid rock. “Was that real, Aluko?”

Echewa pointed to the case. “He gave you that?”

Ebert nodded.

“Then it was real.”

Ebert looked up, conscious suddenly of the vastness of the sky above him. Dark it was, and endless. Dark beyond the possibility of any human eye penetrating it. And yet what was that darkness? In what way were he and it related? Ebert shuddered. Thus far he had lived his life in the glare of artificial light, with walls on all sides, a floor below, and a ceiling overhead. Now he must learn to live differently— to live outside, beneath that vast and overwhelming darkness.

Ebert paused, feeling a stillness settle deep within as he recalled Echewa’s words.

The night is our mother She comforts us. She tells us who we are. Mother sky is all We live, we die, beneath her. She sees all. Even the darkness deep within us.

So it was. So it would be from henceforth. Yes. It was time to refashion himself, to be the walker in the darkness. No more masks, he thought, echoing the old Han’s words. Then, with a small bow to the space where Master Tuan had sat, he turned and went across. It was time to be.

PART 2 I SPRING 2212