Ares Express (34 page)

“Prepare to stop!” Meadowbank shouted and her skinny girls jumped to their posts. Dagger-boards were thrust down through the keel; hundreds of scavenged nail and construction bolt-teeth bit glass in a cascade of powder. Sails furled, helm brought the boat about, nose in to the hard dock. With a shriek and a shudder, Seven-Ups Girl Nation came to a rest. A hatch undogged in the spire, the communications men stepped out, blinking in the morning light. They looked old and big and dirty and bearlike with their shaggy hair and beards and crusty coveralls. The Seven-Ups formed a line on deck.

Sweetness watched the face-off warily, suspecting sordid sexual trading
of that kind that is so ubiquitous in the less public and more hungry parts of the world.

“Ladies,” the leader of the radio men said, “have you any idea how long it's been? We've been dying up here. Can you do us? Can you give us what we need?”

“It'll cost.”

“The usual.”

“Plus ten. Extra mouth.”

The leader ran his hand across his mouth, shook his head.

“I've got to have a bit of trim. Okay, extra ten. Deal?”

“Deal.”

With a war-cry, the girls of Seven-Ups Nations pulled hard steel and brandished it over their heads. The brilliant light caught twin blades: scissors. As one, the cutting crew went over the side twirling their plastic haircapes, and set to work on the heads of the relieved workers. Over the next hour, they dispensed bowl-cuts, flat-tops, numbers six down to nought, page boys, duck's arses, quiffs, back-combs, centre partings, side-partings left, side-partings right, shaved patterns names religious mottoes sports team logos on the backs of skulls. The scissors snip-snap-snipped, long greasy hair fell in bangs to the ground and blew away on the eternal winds. Then the capes were swirled away and the stray hair dusted from the nape of the neck, the scissors tucked away and the bay-rum frictioned into shorn scalps.

Throughout the mass hair-doing, Sweetness had noticed the leader of the communications men, now sporting a set of ear-length dreads, keep squinting at the upper levels of the telecom mast. A non-hairfarer, Sweetness could observe unobtrusively from her recliner, but in the jumble of technology it was impossible to tell what was kosher and what was not. Now, as Meadowbank laboured over making up the bill, Sweetness saw something move up there. Very slowly, very subtly, like large spiders creeping up on their prey, black objects were making their way down through the relays and microwave transmitters. Not machines, Sweetness suspected, though she could not assign any shape to them; they moved like living things. God the Panarchic alone knew what lived up here, up above the world so high, and what it liked to eat.

Meadowbank and the chief of communications were still haggling. Sweetness thought that he seemed to be delaying her. She looked up again. The objects had stopped moving. She scrutinised the gantry work; patterns appeared, images resolved into limbs, torsos, heads.

“Up there, look!” Sweetness shouted, pointing. Meadowbank Trumbden looked up, and the figures leaped. Twelve of them, changing colour as they fell feet first, black to white to translucent glass, falling slower than gravity should allow. Sweetness's fillings throbbed in her molars: impeller fields, as well as light-scatter toadsuits.

“Run!” Meadowbank Trumbden yelled. “It's the furniture folk!” The Seven-Ups Girl Nation scattered. Too slow. The hunters pulled big black pieces from their shoulder holsters and took aim. Expecting massacre, Sweetness ducked. Glue-guns, net-chuckers, neural bolloxers: state-of-art non-lethal weaponry immobilised, trawled, dazed and confused the hairdressers. Three comtechs ran to assist their foreman as he wrestled with a kicking, blaspheming Meadowbank. The hunters touched lightly down, moved to secure their prisoners and round up what few had escaped.

Sweetness leaped up but a wave of persons in black surged over the gunwale, seized the edge of her mattress and, with a swift tug, turned it over and wrapped her up in it before she could utter one trainfolk curse. For the second time that day, everything went black.

Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely held her monthly furniture auctions on the thousandth-level balcony of her pier-top manor. Though hers was a refined and specialised interest, and the higher up the pier the more refined and specialised the interests came, they were attended by many outside her hobby group for the catering was excellent, the wine list superb, despite being decanted at altitude, and the chitter-chatter-chat unexcelled. The lots were arranged in order of disposal along the skyward side of the vertiginous ledge, where the afternoon light would show them off to their best advantage. Acquisitive parties inspected the pieces, assessed their size and durability. For those who were seeking matched sets or to complete a tableau, some had already been suited and positioned.

All morning the spider-machine had negotiated cautious passage along
the jungle of roof-tree branches, daring and vertiginous scurries from sucker-pad feet across the intervening spans of bare roof glass. In her barred cage, hanging with the other captured Seven-Upers from the belly of the transporter like mites, Sweetness had watched the track of the sun arc across the transparent ceiling. For the first time, she noticed the scratches and scorings and scars in the glass. The sun told her that at least she was heading in the right direction, Harx-ward. Otherwise, her lot seemed dire indeed. Many child-takers hunted the glass plains, but the hirelings of the very rich and very specialist and very bored who used humans for furniture were especially feared.

“They've got these suits,” Meadowbank Trumbden whispered in the next cage, quiet, watching, for the child-takers enforced their disciplines with cattle prods. “Can't see, can't hear, can't talk. I heard they even feed you and take away all your crap stuff. Once you got them on, they don't come off. And they like, move you, and then they lock and you can't move either.”

Another trip into black, Sweetness thought. Only this one you don't come out of. She tried to tell herself that this was all part of adventure and that stories didn't end with the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine as a tea table. She was still trying to convince herself of this as the roof-crawler descended the main spur toward the hundred slim spires of Demesne Urtching-Sembely, its burden of flesh swaying beneath it like heavy dugs.

Now with her hands lashed behind her with cable grip, Sweetness stood last in line—but not in desirability, she told herself; even human furniture auctions leave best to last—on the balcony sweating in the afternoon torpor close under Worldroof. Next to her, Urtching-Sembely hirelings cut Meadowbank Trumbden out of her plastic rags while a third forced her into the form-kissing black suit. Prie, Scabies and the crewgirl who had given Sweetness sweet water had already been knocked down as a matched table set, forced down into a kneel, then leaned backward by the nano-motors seeded through the clinging fabric until their wrists were locked to their ankles. The buyer, a stalky, angular man in a brocade coat and slightly unfashionable footwear, spent considerable time measuring the angles and making sure the breasts were large enough to support the great glass circle at which he proposed to entertain like-minded guests. After much measuring and fine control with the suit motors, he seemed satisfied.

The enforcers finally wrestled the hood over Meadowbank's head, tucked in stray wisps of urchin cut, made sure the gag and earplugs were seated right and sealed it up. The auction attendants stepped back. Meadowbank struggled a moment, then the suit locked, immobilising her.

“So, what's collectable with you?” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely asked the purchaser, a man of such astonishing nondescriptness that he had to own some secret and unpleasant vice otherwise he would have faded out of the world completely.

“Lamps,” the buyer said. “Flambeaux bearers. I'm going through a household illumination phase at the moment.”

“How delightful!” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely clapped her hands in pleasant anticipation. She was an unjustifiably beautiful woman, tall, elegant, with brown brown eyes and brown brown hair and the loveliest hands. She was dressed in a floor-skimming formal robe of lace and white brocade, corseted to enhance her generous
embonpoint
. It was all so unfair, Sweetness thought. No Don Urtching-Sembely. Probably eaten him, or got him as a chair for special occasions, in a very private room. The gracious Ladonna took a control bulb from her wrist purse. Her manicured fingers touched studs. Meadowbank's legs were drawn together to attention; against her will, her arms raised vertically over her head. The suit locked. One of the buyer's servants brought a self-powering electric flambeau and set it into the upraised, rigid hands. A step back, and the plastic flame glowed white.

“Perfect,” the astonishingly nondescript man said.

“I'll have it delivered today,” the Ladonna said and one of her hunters slapped a red sale circle on the black figure's small right breast. “Now, on to our last item today, lot twelve. An older piece, more solidly constructed, but still capable of a lifetime of service.”

“Meaty,” commented an old woman with a white edible dog under her arm. A tall, epicene man in breeches and knee boots looked more appraisingly through a quizzing glass.

“Possibilities. A chandelier, I think. Yes.” He tapped lorgnettes against his palm thoughtfully. “This one would look fine hanging from my ceiling.”

“May I take that as a bid?” purred the Ladonna.

“You may. Three thousand.”

“Done, sir.”

The gentleman bowed, the Ladonna nodded to her servitors. Two closed on Sweetness with knives to cut her out of her clothes, the third brought the black suit.

It can't end like this.

Oh can't it?

And that was it decided. If all this wasn't story, it would end here with her spending several decades swinging from a ceiling with candles in her hands and feet. If it was, then the rules of narrative governed everything that happened. Therefore, this was the Point of Worst Personal Threat, when all the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine's efforts to attain her Dramatic Goal hang by a thread, and Something Big Happens that rolls it over into the End Game. Here narrative creatures like Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity were all the FR(BCWI) Heroine could trust to save her.

The black furniture suit wove in front of her, drawing her gaze in like a collapsed star. Now.

“I'll give you meaty!” she yelled and planted the toe of her left boot into the suit bearer's testicles. She heard things crunch. The man let out a near-hypersonic shriek. His eyes rolled up in his head. He went down like a felled redwood. In the moment's confusion, Sweetness danced out from under the knife-men's blades. Hands bound, she plunged toward the edge of the balcony.

“No!” roared the Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely.

Five kilometres of Canton Semb late afternoon gaped as Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th went over the rail head first toward the tailored vine terraces one thousand storeys below.

“I
t will be the End of the World as We Know It,” Weill pronounced with a grin that showed too many of his evil teeth.

There were seconds of silence in the vast cavern under the primeval ROTECH redoubt of China Mountain for the words to reach their proper depth and explode, like anti-submarine charges. Skerry was the first to react.

“Impossible. Can't do it.”

Scenting an opportunity to snide Weill, Mishcondereya drew herself up to her full height, looked down her aristocratic snub nose and declared, “Lies. It's your last best hope for a bit of trim. The sky's falling, here come the saints, hows about it, bay-bee? Don't mind the smell, it's going to get a lot worse than this.”

Seskinore's chest rose and fell beneath the two-buttons-too-tight jacket of his taper-legged suit.

“I must say, if that's the best you can offer us.”

“It has merit, you know,” Bladnoch said from his aluminium chair which, as usual in strategy meetings, he tipped back alarmingly close to the sheer steel drop over the side of the balcony. “It's what Mr. Harx is expecting. So give him what he wants, in Cash. He wants angel legions, he wants saints coming out of the sky like rain, he wants the clouds to open and God the Panarchic to ride out at the head of the entire Circus of Heaven, he wants it to rain blood and toads, he wants shitstorms and brimstone, he can have it, courtesy of United Artists. It's a hell of a decoy.”

Weill held his hands up and applauded.

“Am I the only one of you jokers with any vision?”

Seskinore stroked his chin where once, when King of the Circuit, he had sported a small distinguished silver goatee, like a metallic sheep's tongue.

“It has a certain…theatrical…merit. Yes, I can say, it would be our crowning achievement. I'd be proud to put that on my
curriculum vitae
.”

“The End of the World,” Mishcondereya said, arms folded, now with a small see-you sneer that had long ago failed to provoke anything more in Weill than a vague some-time-when-I've-absolutely-nothing-better-to-do-I-wouldn't-mind-seeing-
you
-without-your-clothes-on glow.

Weill nodded enthusiastically.

“Go for the big one.”

“You're suggesting that United Artists fakes an Armageddon?” Skerry said incredulously.

“Either we do it, or he does it for us. Only his ain't fake.”

“Our friend has a good point,” Bladnoch said. “But I think Skerry remains to be convinced, and she will be the one going in under all this divine comedy. Skerry?”

“I don't know.” She turned her back on her comrade jesters, put one grip-soled boot up on the railing, looked out over the echoing chambers of the Comedy Cave. “Keep it simple. That's always been how we've done it. Comedy is simple. I'd trust it more if it were less complicated, less risky, less…outrageous.”

“All these years, and now she wants a safety net,” Weill said. Skerry rounded on him.

“You can say that, dirt-bird, the day you do this.” With which the tight little woman flipped into a single handstand on the top rail, axled one hundred and eighty degrees on to her free arm and in this way hand-walked thirty steps along the edge of the drop before dismounting in a double somersault close enough to Weill for him to flinch. She stared up at him, staring him down. Little love lost between the United Artists. Though many of the best double acts are born from mutual detestation, the five practical jokers knew that, in comedy as in everything else, the Synod could only afford second-best. The greats were out there on the circuit, wowing them in Belladonna's Chitter-chatter-chat Club, topping the Top of the Town in Llangonedd, hovercrafted between the pleasure barges that sailed the Syrtic Sea. Venues where you handed the band leader your own theme music and he would bow and wink and raise the baton. Gigs where the very first word of a catch-phrase could bring a house down. Clubs where people positively welcomed the old jokes; savouring the coming punchline with the pre-orgasmic surge of semen rising through the pipes.

Skerry and Weill broke. The little woman went glowering back to the rail to stare bluely out over the cluttered expanses of the Comedy Cavern. Two billion years ago the stupendous volcanoes that built this hemisphere had emptied their sacks and died, leaving mammoth lava chambers to cool and crack under the hardening lava shields. Delving under China Mountain to build redoubts strong enough to withstand the comet bombardment by which ROTECH imported most of the world's air and water, deep drill teams had broken through the cap rock into a hall of obsidian mirrors. Helidrones, navigating like plastic bats by squeaks of sonar, had mapped the chaotic interior of the two-kilometre long bubble: “Grand Valley, with another one upside down on top of it,” was how one of the areologists described it. Suspended between the roof-pillars in stress-webs like spiders in a rainstorm, ROTECH Hydro-Cycle Control headquarters had jiggled to the multiple comet impacts, but not a cup was cracked. For a time, after the humans and machines emerged and the pillars started to go up along Grand Valley, the China Mountain Bubble became a hatchery for the millions of orphs who tunnelled out of their birth cells up through the rock and into the regolith, bellies full of bacteria, spinning stone into soil. As industrial parks decay when the factories move out, so the China Mountain Bubble had fallen to dereliction as ROTECH spread its precision bioformed villages and microcities down the slopes of its capital mountain. And, as low-rent artists and performers move into those decayed factories and make them workshops and studios, so United Artists had descended by a glass elevator unused for three hundred years to go, collectively,
wow
as the floodlights clanged on. Now the pristine, volcanic glass spears were hung with the trophies and banners of past routines, like piked heads: the inflatable, dirigible demons from the JJT scam; the enormous feathered headdresses and outrageous gauze and sequin plumages of Paulus Twining's involuntary outing carnival; the one thousandth-scale fake Sailship from the Gartan Roscoe Affair (even one-to-one-thousand, it filled an entire subcavern like a cancer an alveolus in a hashisheen's lung).

Skerry always found grit and assurance in the hanging testimonials. The Synod had chosen the leader cannily: riven by doubts and a nagging sense of unbelonging. She was circus skills, the action girl, the one dangling from the
silver trapeze. She wasn't supposed to be funny, but a day never passed that she did not wish she had the power to make mirth. She longed to conceive giant pratfalls, send cosmic springy snakes bounding out of jack-in-the-boxes, place whoopee cushions beneath the posterior of the Panarch. She wished she had a sense of humour. For she had none. There was no gene for it in her reserved, Ocyrian gentry stock. They glumly masqueraded a tribal inferiority complex as modesty and trusted that would steer them through a messy, spontaneous and impolite world. From the moment the doors of Ghalgorm Manor had closed behind her as she set off for the Royal Circus of the Sun on its shaved-off Grand Valley mesa, she knew she had irrevocably offended the family doctrine of comfortable mediocrity. Four years and a good, steady civil service job under her, she had largely settled herself to snooty exile, but when she looked out at those gently waving banners, those grinning demon heads, she wanted to call out to that crenellated termite-heap in the flat fields of Ocyrus, “Hey, Mum! Look at me! I brought down the government!”

By swinging from ropes, turning somersaults, diving through hoops, putting your leg behind your neck and juggling fire? She could hear the high, thin voice echoing from Ghalgorm's painted rafters. To her mother, the putdown had been as divine an art as icon painting. It was not sarcasm. It was maintaining a universal and holy order.

Yes! Skerry wanted to shout. All that, and in ridiculous and frequently immodest costumes. But practising what you've only ever preached. Humbling the arrogant, ridiculing the vain, bringing down the proud, mocking the mighty. By showing off, by making a spectacle of myself, I'm fulfilling all your family values. But,
with no bloody net!

They were arguing again, details, trivia; the exact numbers of each species in the Divine Menageries, whether the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast rode astride or sidesaddle, did God go to the toilet? and the colours of angels' wings. At such times, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm thanked her lack of a sense of humour. Somebody had to have perspective. Somebody had to get a grip on this rabble.

“Enough. These helicopters with saints hanging under them, these ball-lightning generators, these luminous blimps: tell me, how long
exactly
have we got?”

The looks of schoolchild contrition at these moments when she brought her comrades up hard against the buffers of the real world was almost compensation for her nagging suspicion that she was a caste less funny than the rest of the team. Seskinore raised his Distinguished Silver eyebrows. Mishcondereya did Magnificent Sullen. Weill twisted and scratched himself. He had caught a wicked little fungal infection of the armpits, and they itched furiously. Bladnoch whipped out his
vade-mecum
. Cybernetic angels flocked through the planetary nervous system, prying and sniffing, and returned with an answer.

“Störting-Kobiyashi have a repair tender in for the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, estimated, three days.” He glanced again at his read-out, raised one precisely shaved eyebrow, which Seskinore had always envied, as well as the dark comedian's Dog Chow and Why Windchimes? routines. “Mostly skin punctures, minor mainframe, a couple of gas cells down. Interestingly, the Engineer's report hints at blast damage. Who's been having a crack at Devastation Harx?”

He snapped shut the
vade-mecum
; a device so far in advance of Grandmother Taal's companion of the same name that it scarcely deserved to be included in the same species. Observational comedy needs observations. There was wisdom somewhere in the secretive recesses of the Synod that they gave pocket-size omniscience to Bladnoch and not Seskinore, Skerry thought. Or, saints forfend, Weill. She said, “Well, I think we have a problem then.”

They did another look then, the our-one-and-only-idea-has-gone-down-the-shitpit one. Skerry folded her arms. Bladnoch was dryly rustling his fingers and looking at the floor. He would think of something. She trusted him. Three years working within sniffing distance, an attempted seduction at a wrap party after they bust the Bethlehem Ares Board Salaries Scam, a consequent (or maybe,
despite it
) closeness and she still had no angles on the tall, skinny man; whether there were depths beyond the apparent depths, or if it was all one continuous, highly polished surface. Since being headhunted from the All New! Terence Payne Carnival of Horrors, where she had prestidigitated in a rubber suit with high-voltage electric cables, Skerry had maintained a stern celibacy, but Bladnoch was the loophole in her resolve.

“The old woman,” he said, clicking his fingers in that don't-derail-my-train-of-thought
way of his she found so cute. “That dream, some kind of sending, she said, right?” His co-performers knew better than to answer. “Where did it come from?”

“Why?” Skerry asked.

“Just a suspicion.”

The United Artists Special, routed by customised signalling, had swept past sidelined transcontinentals and
prioritaires
, even the proud Argyre Express and its prouder sept of Malevant-Engineers, as it climbed the gentle slopes of China Mountain. Above it, the sky had kindled, angels fallen and Grandmother Taal feared for her granddaughter out in a world turned upside down. She felt older and frailer than ever she had over the cards with Cyrene Ree the year-vampire. The future of her family and world were in the hands of squabbling youths. Then the little leatherette express swayed over a set of points on to a siding Grandmother Taal knew in her boots she had never ridden before, then the sky and the offences being committed on it were extinguished as Kharam Malevant-Engineer 8th plunged his machine into a long dark tunnel. Grandmother Taal knew the rattle and roll of every tunnel and cutting in four quarterspheres and her ears told her she had never been this way before, and that she was being taken deep, way deep, way long. After a time verging on the unendurable, the isolated lamps on the tunnel walls slowed in their rhythm and the train slid into golden light on a half-tunnel open on the right side to a stupendous void of glittering, reflecting obsidian. Beyond the platform, cable cars bobbed: this undervault was big enough to have its own microclimate. Weill escorted Grandmother Taal, who had one glimpse of what lay beyond that frail insult of a handrail at the edge of the platform and kept her eyes firmly shut and her bottomless bag firmly clasped to her until the wretched cable car stopped its swaying and she felt good steel under her feet.

“Make yourself at home here,” Weill said, with unconscious fatuity, but Grandmother Taal did so, filling the shelves and niches with gew-gaws from the personal dimension of her black bag. It might be a bobbing bauble of construction plastic and aluminium slung from alarmingly flimsy guying but it was more like her rocking, rolling cabin high on
Catherine of Tharsis
's hump than anywhere else in these—how many now?—days since climbing off at Muchanga Water Station. It had a soothing sense of motion, even if it
was three dimensional, and disturbing to the inner ears of old ladies who have lived much of their lives in one-dimensional transit. The view she could not take, so she drank her mint tea—much of it, but cheaply machine manufactured—in an interior room without windows. Therefore her first inkling that the cable-car was coming was a growing vibration throughout the suspended building—familiar and almost as comfortable as the bass tremble of fusion tokamaks. Grandmother Taal bustled to make the guest-unit ready. Defended on all sides by two hundred metres straight down to obsidian razors, “guest unit” was interchangeable with “prison,” but visitors were visitors. The bauble swayed as the car hard-docked. Her hosts/captors filed out into the receiving room.