Ares Express (28 page)

She decided she liked fruitboy anarchist artists. She tugged Euphrasie's quilted sleeve.

“Where are we going?”

“Depends,” he shouted into the slipstream.

“On what?”

“On where you want to go.”

“Me?”

“Our work is done.”

“You've blown them all up?”

“Unto the last.”

“Even the big shoe?”

“The aglets flew three hundred metres in opposite directions.”

Aglets sounded to Sweetness Engineer like juvenile birds of prey, so three hundred metres might or might not be an impressive flight, but she understood and appreciated the pride in a good job well done in Euphrasie's voice. It's not an easy thing to do an explosion really well. Likewise, she understood and delighted in the thrilling velocity with which she skimmed across the desert, low enough for the sand sprayed up by the bow field to sting her ankles, up and over the dune crests with a leap and a yip and the bottom of her stomach falling out. These butty-boys had class. She liked them.

Sweetness hammered on Euphrasie's back.

“Molesworth!” she yelled when she had his attention. Euphrasie did not ask where or why. He nodded briskly, finger-talked with one hand to his
partner out at point. Cadmon and Euphrasie leaned into their sails. The banking boards cut crescents in the red sand as they curved due south.

“Wooooeeee!” fanfared Sweetness Asiim Engineer, throwing her head back and letting her greasy bonny black hair reel out behind her like a banner of anarchy. She could still smell it. She could still smell herself, lick her brown forearm and taste minerals. She had little enough water in her blood and less provender in her belly. She was still wandering in sterile places, cannoning off people places events like the legendary Rael Mandella Jr.'s cue ball. Her childhood companion was still incarcerated in a trans-dimensional mirror rolled up in a canopic jar. Her enemy roamed the airways by pedal power, cautiously testing his command of the very angels that had built the world. She had no weapons, no power, no plan, not even a cunning scheme. But she still knew, with a traingirl's sense, that that electric buzz in the air is a big express coming; with the high-plain herder's understanding that that flaring of the nostrils running through the herd is a sure sign of rains; with the deep core miner's certainty as she burrows through the obsidian flux tubes of primal shield volcanoes that the next grike will glitter with diamonds; that though nothing was changed, everything was different. Before, those people places events had pushed her around. Now, somehow, she was pusher, not pushee. From here on, it would be an Adventure.

When the heat went out of the sky, they camped in the lee of the upended boards. The anarchists made fire and heated small, neat foil sachets of trail food in a bubbling billy. It was not sufficient and tasted badly enough of additives to catch the back of Sweetness's throat but she skewered the tiny cubes of synthetic meat in their clinging sauce with her plastic pitchfork and gobbled them down with gratitude. To while away the cooling hours while the edge of the world rose over the face of the sun in streaks of red gold and purple, like a Pontifical progress, Cadmon and Euphrasie played a game with Sweetness. It was We've-Got-To-Guess-Why-You're-Going-To-Molesworth-But-You're-Only-Allowed-To-Give-One-Word-Monosyllabic-Answers.

“Why?” Sweetness immediately asked.

“Because,” tall Cadmon answered. “And the way we play it, we've only got ten questions.”

“Okay.”

Euphrasie raised a warning finger, then another. He shook them in Sweetness's face.

“Right.”

He nodded.

“Wherefore, Molesworth?” Cadmon asked. Euphrasie sat close beside him, and nodded sagely.

Sweetness opened her mouth, then caught herself. She counted syllables on her fingers, grimaced.

“Folk.”

“First, second or third generation?”

“Third,” Sweetness said confidently. Cadmon and Euphrasie inclined their heads together. They seemed to speak, though Sweetness heard no words in the cool cool cool of the evening.

“So, what do you flee?”

“Ring.” Sweetness twisted an imaginary third-finger-left-hand-gold-band. “But…”

Euphrasie furiously finger-wagged her.

“Clearly, this thing you seek in Molesworth is not a nuptial reconciliation,” Cadmon mused. Euphrasie whispered in his partner's ear. Cadmon nodded. “It's a grandparent, in my experience the most trustworthy of family members. So, not a reconciliation, but an alliance. You seek something together, do you not?”

“Twin,” Sweetness said. She mimed her second self, the quick knife of division. Cadmon and Euphrasie looked very slowly at each other.

“You need the assistance of your grandparent to seek the sundered self?”

Sweetness nodded, then added, “Ghost.” Without realising, she was caught up in the artists' ludicrous after-dinner sport. Her tongue was bound; she could no more iterate two words, or more than one syllable, than she could have recited all Five Hundred Five-Hundred-Letter Tallabasserite names of God.

“This—half sister?—is
dead
? Is this some manner of seance, some necromancy or other?” Cadmon asked, his little spectacles catching spook-fire in their round lenses.

“Free.”

“Someone has stolen the ghost of your dead twin sister?”

“Yes.”

“Damnation! That was a rhetorical question. They don't count.”

Sweetness held up her two hands, where she had been counting off the quota of questions with finger and thumbs, to show beyond any argument that in her game, rhetoric counted. Cadmon took a breath and tried again.

“Given that ours is a low-scale mercantile culture and folk will sell anything to anyone, it's still valid to ask, why would anyone want to steal a ghost?”

Again Sweetness nodded. “Saint.” She pointed to where the brightest lights of the moonring clung to the horizon, drew her finger in an all-creating arc across the sky. When she looked back, both Cadmon and Euphrasie's mouths were open.

“You mean to tell us that the ghost of your twin sister is not in fact your twin sister, but an angel? A saint?”

“
The
,” Sweetness said emphatically. Their mouths were two tunnels through to deep night now. Their last question was inevitable. So, by a hundred tiny cues, clues and flutings of the desert wind that had incrementally impinged on Sweetness's senses, was her answer.

“You are telling us that St. Catherine of Tharsis, masquerading as your natally-deceased twin sister, has been ghost-napped, and that you and your grandparent are on a quest to get her back,” Cadmon said. Not a question. For the first time, Sweetness heard in his voice a tremor of
not cool
. “But who would do a thing like that?”

“Him!” Sweetness yelled, pointing straight up as the dark fringe of the flying cathedral swept across the first glimmerings of the moonring, occulting them. Sworn enemy he might be; dumper of nubile girls into deadly deserts he most certainly was; Vastator, Godmörder and Destroyer of Worlds he aspired to become; but one thing she had to give this Devastation Harx. He had great timing.

Whispers in the wind had warned her. Her traingirl's sense for large moving objects under the close horizon had hinted. She had caught glimpses in the ebbing red at the edge of the world, something the size of a fallen moon, belly tabby-striped with cloud bands. The fine hair in her ears had
caught a whisper of gears and big-bladed fans. The laws of probability had ruled in it being what her sense suspected: he'd want to hover around, survey the results of his skeet-shooting. So the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family putting the full stop on her ten questions was no big surprise. Cadmon and Euphrasie's reactions were as the great shadow fell over them. In an instant they were on their feet, Cadmon shaking a fist at the slowly drifting constellations of warning lights.

“Harx! Only you, man! Only you! Still we are trapped in this same gyre! No more, I say! Probability has brought us together again. This time, we will have it out!”

“Even so, Cadmon, even so!” Euphrasie chorused.

“You
know
this guy?” Sweetness asked, incredulous.

“Once upon a time, there were three little anarchist artists went to the Collegium of
Belles Lettres
,” Euphrasie began.

“Euphrasie! To the boards! The boards!” With a good ten-metres-from-the-edge-of-the-box, Cadmon kicked sand over the fire, extinguishing it immediately. In the same movement, he scooped up his equipage and uprooted the gravboard. It skittered away from him on nervy magnetogravitic fingers. Cadmon reeled it in by the tether, raised sail and skipped aboard as the skimmer picked up speed.

“One thought: art is fine and anarchism is dandy, but to make a million, invent a religion,” Euphrasie tossed to Sweetness as he stuffed shut his pack and jammed his sail in its binnacle.

“This is a disagreement about art?” Sweetness said, ignored in the frenzy of mad activity as lights and vanes and little windows passed slowly over her head.

“He betrayed every principle he ever evinced for mail-order lucre and young ass,” Euphrasie declared.

“If only every war were fought for reasons as noble as art,” Cadmon said, reining his fretting board in like a war-palfrey. “And, if I played our game correctly, then this vile man is a positive menace to reality. Anarchists we may be, but we are not nihilists. Now, even as I debate these issues with you, we lose initiative and tempo. We will return for you, never fear. Now, we must to honourable battle. Stand back: this is not your fight.”

“Yes it is!” Sweetness yelled. “It's my goddam sister in there!”

“Prime your charges, Euphrasie!” Cadmon commanded, bringing his board round in a sail-cracking luff. Euphrasie loaded his vest of pockets with sticks of explosive, tossed some to Cadmon who caught them nimbly, let loose the sail and took the gravboard up in one heart-thrilling, vertiginous swoop toward the ponderous roof of lights. Euphrasie made a running mount on his board and followed his buddy up up and away.

“Don't you leave me, you…you…uphill gardeners, you dryland rowers, you, you brown dirt cowboys!” Sweetness shouted at the bright triangles of sailcloth dwindling into the twilit baroque underbelly of the flying cathedral. She cupped her hands. “Stay under him! He's got partacs, and he's not afraid to use them! Get above him and he'll shoot you out of the sky!”

Already she was emerging from the penumbra of the blimp church.

Sweetness slip-scrambled up a dune face, threw herself along the knife-edged, soft ridges, seeking higher ground. Gnats against a buffalo they might be, but Devastation Harx was aware of these bright little mosquitos and was marshalling defences. As Sweetness watched, gun-ports irised open, the multibarrelled muzzles of rotary cannon slid into position and locked.

“Oh my God, look out, look out!” Sweetness shouted, fingers clenched in her hair in helpless frustration as the air beneath the dirigible became a cage woven from white tracer. But the two gaudy triangles of the anarchist gravboards slipped through them as if they were so much confetti, a dodge here, a veer there, a sharp tack to port, a terrifying death dive there to pull out centimetres short of being shredded by eleven hundred rounds a minute into a steeply banked turn.

“Ahhh!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, skull assaulted by the heavy hammer of the Gatlings.

Devastation Harx seemed to be trying to bring his vessel about: sets of vanes stopped turning, others cranked up a gear, while little manoeuvring nacelles swivelled hither and yon, fans a blur. Sweetness imagined teams of grim-faced pedallists, fit thighs pumping double, treble time, sweat running down the backs of their purple cycle shorts. The cathedral turned like a weather system, trying to bring its big belly guns to bear on the attackers, but Cadmon and Euphrasie had the measure of their enemy now. They ran in close and fast, hugging the cathedral's chaotic architecture, mast-tips pulled
low to scrape below pods and vents and turrets, out of weapon arc. The guns dare not fire for fear of tearing apart the fragile skin of the big blimp.

“Go go go go!” Sweetness shouted, punching the air and leaping up and down on the hot, slipping sand as Cadmon and Euphrasie shot out from underneath the cathedral into clear air. They looped outward, upward. The guns spat tracer at them but they were already over the rim and cutting across the upper shell toward the glass nipple of the contemplatorium. Devastation Harx had clearly never expected vengeance to fall from the sky, his upper hemisphere was undefended. No turrets, no redoubts, not even a simple marksman with a fowling piece, sent precariously on to shell to snipe. And too close to risk the orbital weaponry. One decimal out and anarchists, Harx, purple people and all would go up in a rave of hyperaccelerated ions. Peering from beneath shading hands, Sweetness saw Euphrasie—his paisley sail identified him—raise an arm. A trail of smoke arced away from it. It struck just beyond the glass roof. There was a surprisingly large white flash. Seconds later, the boom shook Sweetness Asiim Engineer as she danced, jubilant, on her dune top. A ragged scarf of blimp fabric flapped in the wind. Smoke poured satisfyingly from the wound. The airship wheeled, trying to deny the attackers targets, but Cadmon and Euphrasie separated, banked hard and came screeching back on convergent courses toward the glass sanctorum. Two sticks this time. Double blast. One direct on the dome—shards of translucent plastic glittered in the magic hour light as they rained down, sharp knives, on the delicate upper skin. The other, longer-fused, rolled and went off a third the way down the canopy. Here the underlying structures lay closer to the surface: a gas cell ruptured with a gusher of shredded strut and packing tow that made the whole artifact wobble like an ill-set circumcision-day jello.

“Yay!” Sweetness cheered as the debris rained down over the red desert.

Devastation Harx's cathedral had a pronounced list. Still it spun, trying to get purchase on its tormentors. Gunners fired wildly in the hope of hitting something. Sweetness dived for cover as a spray of tracer blew the top of her dune to spray. She heard two, three, four more explosions. When she poked her head up over the top, she saw the cathedral canted at an angle of twenty degrees. Its dipping port side was pocked with craters and blast-holes. An
entire section of lower skin swung from the substructure like a partly ripped-off scab. Spars and struts showed through the ruptured canopy, a compound fracture of the flight organs. A steady rain of debris emptied from its portholes or slid off the canopy, pod struts bent and snapped under strange new strains. Sweetness could just make out frantic movement within, like spiders hatching, as the pedallo crews abandoned their positions. The anarchist airfleet worried the big church like pit dogs a buffalo. Explosions peppered the acned skin of the airship. Another cell blew; second by second, the big ship went down by the port side toward the hard ground. Unbelievably, two peripatetic artists with penchants for Big Domestic and explosives had the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the ropes. Their finest work, true anarchy in art, a hymn to chaos, with only a runaway traingirl to witness it. Too adrenalised on the spectacle to worry about Gatling fire, Sweetness danced and hollered on her dune top, cheering on the great capsize. In one of those brief instants when her booted feet were in contact with the sand, she felt it. She knew the feeling. Every trainkid learned it from the teat; the subtle vibration of the big thing coming. Impossible, insane, but soles and bones told her, train a-coming, deep down in the sand.