Ares Express (35 page)

“Tea?” Grandmother Taal offered. Her guests shook their heads. They knew the synthesisers too intimately. “What news of Sweetness, then?”

They were a sorry, scarecrow-crew, self-confident and at the same time coy, as if they were terrified that some day someone would suddenly realise what they had been doing all their lives and tell them to stop it at once and do something proper.

“Nothing to report, sorry,” Weill, the boy who evidently came from a nice family, apologised.

The tall, dark one, whom Grandmother Taal was sure was a repressed homosexual, wrung his hands gently, then asked, “Your granddaughter: when she spoke to you in this dream, how did you see her?”

“She was standing in a stone square, quite ugly. There were tall buildings around her. This is what convinces me it was a dream: she was standing in a beam of pink light, but the ray was coming from some kind of recreational vehicle.”

Bladnoch, head slightly bowed, finger to mouth, closed his eyes and nodded.

“You see, it's exactly that which convinces me it was no dream,” he said. “I thought they were long gone, evidently not.”

“What, gone?” Weill asked. But Seskinore was nodding too.

“Ah, in my young days; why, the whole town would turn out! We'd throw streamers and paper prayers and run along beside the van—of course, it was dray-drawn then…The fun we had!”

Mishcondereya pursed her lips in vexation. Grandmother Taal had yet to have it proved to her whether the girl performed another function in the team. Brats, jugglers and comedians. That Mishcondereya was no different from any of the others, all things considered. Old blood in now-young veins cried out the loud yawp that is as old as human creativity:
I can do that! I can do that better!
Why should these tatterdemalions be the ones who get to play with the toys; what audition had they passed to play saviours of the world? Grandmother Taal wanted more than a consultative role. Marya Stuard might have faced down the Starke Gang with their man-bone-handled needle pistols, but Taal Engineer, in her forty-second year was going up against the Anti-God himself, the destroyer of worlds, the Grand Vanitas; and that would be long sung up and down the narrow steel rails.

“I am an old woman, and hugely confused,” Grandmother Taal said grand-maternally. “What exactly are you asking me?”

“I'm asking, do you think this…sending…might have been from an oneiroscope?” asked Bladnoch, who, though he would not have lasted ten minutes trainboard, seemed the only one to have any more sense than a hen would hold in its shut fist. “A dream projector, if you're familiar with these devices?”

“Young man,” Grandmother Taal said, fluffing her funereal black like a gamecock its dancing feathers, “in my young youth, we hauled the cars of Jonathon Darke himself, he of the Oneiric Circus and Grand Nebular 'Stravaganza. They would conjure whole stormfronts into melodramas.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Bladnoch, steepling his fingers and tapping the tips lightly together in an advertisement of mildly impatient blueskying. “I'm sure it was all most spectacular, but this…sending could you describe to me exactly what you saw? The geography, country, desert, town, city?”

Grandmother Taal did so over passable mint tea. Bladnoch then consulted his unfolding
vade-mecum
and while it searched the civic databases and threw the dreary zocalos of a thousand rural dustburgs on to the screen, Grandmother Taal studied her hosts and wondered again at the wisdom of Wisdom in entrusting the safety of the world to third-division comedians. Every profession has its fear: the soldier pant-soiling cowardice; the actor paralysing stage-fright; the trainwoman unforeseen delays, cancelled
contracts, bankruptcy. The comedian's fear, she had always heard, is the sound of his own two feet walking back to the dressing room. What if they went out there and did their routine and no one laughed? If these people died the death, the audience died with them.

The United Artists were all gathered around Bladnoch's palm-sized screen. It lit his face spectral blue. His eyebrows climbed: a hit.

“Solid Gone,” he declared, snapping the clever little machine shut.

“Let's go get 'em,” Skerry declared and United Artists swept into action.

“Excuse me,” Grandmother Taal ventured as the secret agents bustled around her. “Excuse me.” They were all entering codes on little thumb-pads. “Listen to me, please.” Mishcondereya and Weill were arguing over bright orange backpacks. “Will you listen to me?” She rapped her stick stoutly on the floor and everyone's attention was fixed on the little old woman in black. “I want to come with you.” Before they could shout her down, she said, “First, because I have seen this place more clearly than any of you and I know what to look for. Second, because my granddaughter may still be there, and, if not, the cineaste may know what has happened to her. Third, because it's going to be fun.”

Thus it was that a circle of cloud forest on the lower slopes of Tassaday District flipped open and a small sardine-shaped racing blimp slipped out, unfolded its ducted fans and swiftly sought concealment in the cloud layer that clung decorously around the hips of China Mountain. Aboard were Mishcondereya (pilot), Skerry (action girl) and Grandmother Taal Asiim Engineer (ould woman). Bladnoch, Weill and Seskinore remained in the Comedy Cave, finessing the End of the World.

The little airship was slim, nimble and quick, but Grandmother Taal could sense the two United Artists women's tension growing with every passing kilometre. Seskinore's meddling with the repair dock unions might buy a day or two, but even with an oneirojector and a shedload of fancy programming, even Grandmother Taal could see that the plan would be going in at the very last minute. If it went in at all. And given that it was deep deep down divinely ludicrous. Fake the apocalypse. What kind of person did they think would fall for that? Only someone who was confidently expecting the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast, the Circus of Heaven, the Seven Trumpets
blowing sweet rock 'n' roll, the Conclave of Amshastria, the Vials of Honeydew and the Vials of Bile, the Apotheosis of St. Catherine among the Eleven Orders, the Revelation of the Secret Names and Nails, and God the Panarchic playing Flying Fifty-Two with the twenty-seven heavens. The full McClatch.

It was asking a lot even of the man who had challenged the angels. It was asking more of five music-hall entertainers and a clapped-out cloud projector.

“What if there aren't any clouds that day?” Grandmother Taal asked, aware now of a little pregnant worm of excitement growing inside her as she came nearer to Action. Action! After forty-two years…

“Clouds will be provided,” Skerry said, grimly. The duststorm they had battled through on the run to China Mountain had given warning not to trust the weather makers. The storm wardens might not obey her. They might already obey another. Thus she kept one eye on the orbital monitors, full in the knowledge that the first sign of untoward movement up there and they were all hot ions. The fast little airship drilled on.

Beneath China Mountain, Bladnoch tried to marshal his team into a scripting session. While Weill and Seskinore did not verbally roughhouse as the little anarchist did with Mishcondereya (whom Bladnoch considered thoroughly useless, and probably not even a good poke), they did set each other back into their entrenched positions: street-snotty rebel-rebel; world-weary, comically-fused Mr. Let-me-Entertain-You. Bladnoch knew that his own irritation at his colleagues had been predicted and predicated: part of the Synod's social engineering. Keep your enemies close, but your agents closer, and eternally bickering. He cajoled them into a light brainstorming and came up with some good ideas for choruses of angels: Big Band, Deuteronomy Wedding
Schremmel
singers, irritating Mariachi, Elevator Panpipe Orchestra, which he zapped through to the design team up but he knew heart-of-hearts that he was carrying them. Had always carried them. Always would carry them. This was not vanity. This was comedic truth. His had been the only mandatory recruitment to United Artists, and that because if the constabulary had become involved, he would still be festering in Winstanley Canton Gaol. A people notorious for their stunted senses of humour, the Argyrians. Had it been only locals the night of the Corncrake Club, he would
have gotten clean away with it. But Grantham Grornan had been a Chryseman and he got the little dagger-sharp one-liner. Got it. Yes, he got it. Indeed he got it. Started to laugh, and laugh and laugh until the veins stood out on his forehead and his neck muscles were like bridge cables and his eyes were like poorly poached eggs and his face was black with choking laughter. Laughed until he fell off his chair on to the floor of the Corncrake Club, stone dead. Bladnoch killed a man with a single joke. It was not the only thing died that night as he crept offstage to the sound of cardiac shock-plate powering up. The comedian's comedian died in the neon-lit dressing room. Laugh? I thought I'd die. That funny, but you could only ever be that funny once, if anyone who heard it died. And why be anything less funny than the killing joke? He considered suicide. He considered asceticism. He considered hermeticism, and drinking, and flagellant orders. He had found televised sport. Even now, he knew in his inner schedule that he was missing the playoffs in the Northwest Quartersphere
kabadi
league, and that was bad and idle—yea, sinful—because he'd been hired to save the world, not lie around watching tractor racing and freestyle windboarding. Like Skerry, Bladnoch came from a family with a lot of parcelled guilt. All comedians do. All the funny ones.

“Okay, right, so,” he said, turning away from the panorama of his ruined career, clapping his hands chivvyingly. “Come on come on, what's God going to be wearing?”

Elsewhere, Mishcondereya's weather radar sketched out the cloud of dreamlessness pressing darkly down on Solid Gone like a saucerful of alien invaders.

“It's just sitting there,” she said, pouting with bafflement, the same expression with which she met every novel event. “This cross-wind, it shouldn't last two minutes, but it's just sitting there.” Skerry bent over the radar, face furrowed green by scanner-light. Those two minutes later the cloud hove into view, at once stifling and chilling. It grew perceptibly twilighty on the bridge of the sardine-ship. The streets, avenues and bourses of the stone town beneath it looked like a tourist map of hell. Mishcondereya cut thrust and steered the ship on to the central zocalo. The penumbra cast shadows and doubts, but there seemed to be a large crowd of people down there.

“What is that thing?” Mishcondereya asked with audible distaste.

“I know,” Grandmother Taal said with a chill in her voice that made both women turn from their instruments. “I saw this once before, long long time ago, way down deep South Borealis, some terrible rural place. Two streets and sun farm; Redemption they called it, but the only Redemption was the train-track out of it. I remember it well, we only stopped because we had to water. That cloud should have warned us, and the girl.”

“Girl?” Mishcondereya said in the off-hand way of a woman only half-listening to a story because she is checking the grapple gear in the belly hold.

“Aye. Chained to a steel luncheonette, she was, and there she would remain until she had written down and bottled in whiskey enough dreams from passing strangers for all her townsfolk to have a swallow. That was their disease—no one dreamed, and without dreams, nothing lives long. The girl dreamed too much, dreamed of getting out of a place like Redemption, and that was her curse, you see. Something had to come and take it all away from her: that cloud. Hence her doom.”

“What happened to her?” Skerry asked, crossing both pairs of fingers in the pocket of her short-shorts in the old Ocyrian deflection of evil auras.

“For all we know, she's there still, but it would seem not, judging by that.”

Skerry imagined she could feel baleful heat from the cloud even through the gold-tinted reflective windows of the racing-blimp. Mishcondereya was looking at her one way. The old trainwoman was looking at her another. A decision was necessary, even a wrong one.

“Take us in,” she ordered.

In the short time since that troubling girl Sweetness Engineer had walked away, the cloud-cineaste who called himself Sanyap Bedassie, last of his mystery, had discovered the consolation of resignation. You need no ambitions, you need not risk pain and failure and disappointment. Here is food, here is water, here is a daily purpose and appreciation. We are your friends. We will always treasure you. Your world may be small, but whose is not, and it is blunt-edged. Your life may be circumscribed as tightly as an eremite's, but who has not considered the attractions of the confined, contemplative life,
and it is not sour. Eight times a day, at the top of the hour, his purpose was affirmed. He changed lives, for a little while.

On clearer days Sanyap Bedassie wondered if this resignation was not the first symptom of the plague. He had always assumed that, by dint of his profession, he was immune to it. Maybe he was only last to succumb. Maybe he had already gone down, and only dreamed that he dreamed. So be it. It was the world he must live in, therefore, he would live.

The tolling of the iron bell. The faithful drew near. Their feet rasped on sandy setts. Again, he brought the capacitors on-line, unfolded the array from the rear of the crippled campervan, took aim on the underbelly of the cloud. The gathered oohed as they always oohed, always surprised by the sudden stab of the pink lance into the groin of the cloud. Again, the darkness parted like foetal cells dividing: Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap's faces gestated out of the cloud-mass. To stunningly explode in wisps and vapours as a daring silver airship plunged out of the heart of the cloud. The crowd gasped, faces frozen, upturned, unsure if this was part of the plot. The plucky little dirigible pulled out of its death-dive centimetres above the Grand Bourse's crenellations. Belly-spots swivelled and focused on Bedassie and his little van, drowning the pink dream-beam in garish white. He shielded his eyes with his hand, thought he saw the belly of the fish-shaped craft open and a steel grapple-claw descend. No imagination: metal fingers closed around the van, shaking it from side to side like a terrier a rat as they clenched firmly beneath its subframe. A jolt: the van lifted a metre into the air. The people of Solid Gone swayed back, rumble-grumbled, then lurched a step forward. Sanyap Bedassie watched the airship reel his van up toward its belly. Again the crowd rumbled, took another step forward, and another. Startling reality was penetrating their sullen gloom. Someone was taking the last of their dreams away. The realisation struck Sanyap Bedassie the instant before the mob broke into a lead-footed run.