Ares Express (36 page)

“Wait for me!” he yelled, ran, leaped, caught the dangling end of a severed chain and was whisked skyway just as the highest-reaching fingers missed his foot. His last glimpse of Solid Gone was of a circle of three thousand upturned faces filled with intolerable sorrow, then the airship climbed, turned, closed its hatches on them and their misfortune and sped away.

O
ne thousand storeys. Five metres per storey. Five thousand metres. Acceleration due to gravity, three metres per second squared. Terminal velocity in the thick, sweet air under Grand Valley's glass roof: twenty-two metres per second. Or eighty kilometres per hour. Time until Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th hit ground zero: four hundred seconds. Or six and two-thirds minutes. You can get a lot of screaming into that.

The first “www” was not off her lips when the hand seized the scruff of her track jacket. Woofff. The world went red under her eyes, and suddenly, faster than any attempt to analyse it, she was not falling. Something dark had darted out from the cantilevering that supported the terraces of Demesne Urching-Sembely; on a rope, on wings, on a wire, on a carnival rocket. Whatever. All she knew was, it had a hold of her and she was not falling. Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity had saved the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine. She looked down between her feet. Dark threads rippled across the corduroy terraces of Canton Semb; clans of pickers at the harvest. Sweetness laughed to see them at their task, never suspecting what hung by a fistful of rip-stop nylon five kilometres above their bended backs. She wiggled her toes, delighted that the universe had let her live.

“When you're done,” a strained voice said. “Only I don't know what's goin' to go first; my arm or the zip on your jacket.”

Only then did she think to look up rather than down.

And boggled.

“Returning the favour,” said the brown-eyed, urchin-fringed, suspicious-cute face that Sweetness Asiim Engineer had last seen looking up into hers from a precarious fingerhold on the side of ore car eleven. “You know, how is it every time we meet, I get a sore hand?”

Pharaoh the ex-railrat hung like a Missal Anagnosta from the
Guthru Gram Kanteklion
in a webbing harness. His left arm steadied himself on the rope fastened to the buttress ten metres overhead, his right was clenched in a generous fistful of her faithful track jacket. Sweetness could see his thin muscles knotting, his slender fingers going pale.

“When you're done staring, you wouldn't like to grab hold of this and haul yourself up?” He dropped her a length of line with two foot stirrups looped on the end. Sweetness, hands still bound, kicked her feet into the loops. Pharaoh threw two more loops around her body and slowly hauled her up to his level.

“Hold still,” he said, flicking a knife. Sweetness flinched, Pharaoh repeated the order. “I don't want to cut the wrong thing.” His blade was true; a snick, the cable tie fluttered yellowly down to the fertile terraces below. Sweetness watched it, gravely, as the hanging ensemble pirouetted gently, a Foucault pendulum ballasted with two lives.

“Hold on tight now, I'm going to put a bit of a swing on this thing,” Pharaoh warned and shifted his weight. Sweetness wrapped her legs around his, buried her fists in his scabby brown leather jacket and combated the positive body odour and escalating motion sickness as the pendulum built up by marvelling how stories did what you expected, and then some more; that little extra neat twist. She could hear the wind rushing past her ears. Or—the defensive, pedantic incongruity of one hanging from a slim line over a five-kilometre drop—was it her ears rushing past the wind?

Soon, very soon, she thought, the shaking's going to start.

“I should thank you, cause I kind of think you saved my life,” she whispered to Kid Pharaoh as they whooshed through ever-increasing arcs. His target seemed to be a clutch of heat vents and gas-exchange stacks tucked like parasitic moulds under the mushroom fan of the terrace tiers.

“Then we're even now,” he said as they hurtled upward toward the impaling geometry of the Demesne's service zone. He reached…He grabbed…He held. Pharaoh hauled himself and Sweetness up on to the spar. He tugged on the line and the smart-plastic snap-release shackle gave way. The sustaining rope fell, Pharaoh carefully coiled it in. Sweetness clung to the girder, suddenly very very cold.

The shaking started. Soon after it came the black thing.

After the incident with the Kaspidi Sisters that had cost him his Vagrant Entertainer's licence (as good as a shroud to an Old Skool Funnyman like him) and a warning never ever ever to set foot across the border of Christadelphia in this life or any other, Seskinore knew he deserved eternal banishment to the dark and humourless land that is the lot of Old Comics Who Do it With Wrong-Side-of-Barely-Legal Girls. It was meet and right that he would never hear the band count in
two
,
three
,
four
and in to “East St. Louis Boogaloo”; never again cross those boards to the spot under the footlights where the applause sounded sweetest. They tore up his joke books. They ripped the petals from his lapel carnation. Even when the government had given him the only kind of job available to an old comic aside from soft-shoe shuffling on the Great Concourse of Belladonna Main, cap in hand, his rep had preceded him. He copped it nobly—dignity, always dignity—but sometimes he wished that these young slubberdegullions showed a little more respect for his professionalism. Yea, he had sinned, and mightily, but it had been a
professional
sin. And from what moral pinnacle did they regard him; the burned-out smart-ass stand-up; the arty-farty
sensitive
girl who wouldn't know a funny line if it stuck it all the way up her right to her ovaries; the hand-standing fire-juggling dyke; the chicken-shit anarchist? Amateurs. Even Dearest Dimmy and Mr. Superb would have disdained them; bottom-rung acts they might have been, but at least they had been professional. They understood timing. They understood experience, and the knowledge of what works on an audience that only comes through dying the death a hundred, a thousand nights. They understood practice, practice, practice. They understood dignity. Always dignity. Disgraced he might be, but Seskinore had been professional unto the last. Seskinore could admit that he may never have been funny, but he had been
professionally
not funny.

“Enough, enough!” he shouted with just the right tone of camp exasperation. Bladnoch and Mishcondereya peeped sheepishly over the control panel of the dream machine. Skerry frowned at him upside down from a silver trapeze. Weill just scowled. “No no no no no!” He clapped his hands. “The Great Destaine would never have stood for this, never. Switch it off, go on, off. Right now.”

Bladnoch and Mishcondereya looked at each other, then Mishcondereya pouted and threw the power. The Ranks and Orders; the Rider on the Many Headed-Beast (each head that of a prominent politician, a satirical touch by Weill); the Circus of Heaven with its tightrope walkers balancing on superstrings, its jugglers cascading the planets of the solar system, its snarling, chained Tygers of Wrath and its high-prancing Horses of Instruction, its frilled, white-faced, terrifying Chaos Clowns; the down-sweeping Hammer and Sickle of God; all evaporated in an instant into the artificial clouds that had turned the Comedy Cave into a sweatlodge.

“What?” Skerry demanded, pulling herself upright and sliding off the trapeze on to the rehearsal platform. Seskinore half-averted his gaze from the gluteal zone of her cheek-cleaving green leotard.

“The timing's up the left. Between the Grand Parade of the High and Lordly Ones and the Opening of the Cornucopia of All Fruits, you're wide open for twenty, twenty-five seconds. And the coordination, God's bones, woman!” This to Mishcondereya. “The bloody things are running through each other! It's supposed to be the Ancient of Days thundering down in righteous wrath, not a charabanc of bloody village spooks!”

“It's a rushed job,” Mishcondereya pleaded.

“It's always a rushed job,” Seskinore said. “Now, we try it again. From the top. And this time, we will try to remember that the fate of the world is riding on us acting like professionals and not some half-arsed troupe of bloody sophomore-year drama students. First positions! Projector ready?”

Mishcondereya pouted again and reset the power buffers.

“Ready,” she said sullenly.

“Right boys and girl, from the top, and this time, let's try and get it bloody right, shall we? Dear God; amateurs!”

Clouds swirled, found shifting, transitory forms in the tropical heat. Skerry towelled dry and tripped back to her position on the silver trapeze. As the hoists lifted her, apocalypse unfolded as a backdrop. Seskinore watched the little woman move into position and recalled what it was about her tight little ass that stirred such provocation in him. Nothing physiological—few women, or gentlemen for that matter, raised the Jolly Roger these sad days. Nor her personality, such as it was, narrow and deep-rooted in her own
physicality. It was that he could order and stamp and throw funks and rehearse rehearse rehearse until they dropped, but come the day and the hour, it would be her out there on the high trapeze, and him back here, fretting over the monitors. Her; all of them. Never him. That was the price of his sensitive crimes with the Kaspidi Sisters. But once, by the gods of the backstage…When better to pick up the cane, tilt the hat, paint rouge circles on the death-white cheeks and stride boldly into the glare of the soda-light with the band striking up
your tune
behind you, than the end of the world?

The niggle with talent, Mishcondereya had always understood, was that it was blind to true genius. She had no doubt that her fellow artistes were indeed skilled at their crafts—in Bladnoch's case, a genuine
forte
—but all of them were so mired in the admiration of their own abilities that they could not recognise the only pukkah prodigy in the gang: Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana. The lot of her privileged life. Always fated to be a lower bloom among the early flowerings of her four older sisters; the painter, the writer, the harpist and the sen-so-rama sculptress. The performance artist? Just another genius. Children brought up in the airy, light-drenched Grand Valley pueblo of Etzwane Eksendrarana and Afton Benninger (he a Living Treasure crafter of ritual mint-tea-infusers, she the lauded architect of India's Chursky Prospekt and the sheer crystal dome of Wisdom's new Grand Trunk Terminus) could not fail to develop into world-wide movers and shapers, but even the most indulgent of parents' attention starts to thin with the fourth gifted child. The fifth? A blossom that blooms unseen, wasting its perfume on the desert air. The o'erlooked rose. The unregarded bud. Mishcondereya often thought of herself (and she thought of herself very often) in terms of a flower, growing wild, nobody's child. Unregarded among her colleagues as she had been among her sisters. But it is the unregarded rose that is the sweetest, the pebble half-buried in the dune face on which you stub your toe and give no more than a glance that is the raw diamond.

Mishcondereya was firmamentally convinced of four things.

That she was an utter genius.

That she was a sex goddess.

That everyone either wanted to be like her or was helplessly in love with her.

That therefore everyone was jealous of her.

The polythene elevator took Mishcondereya up from the R&D dungeon through tiers of holy battle. She sneered at the photonic ghosts. She was in no awe of the angelic forces swooping and trumpeting outside. Vanity had always been the Defiant One's strongest weapon.

How did they ever imagine this would convince Devastation Harx? A man who founds his own church has an intimate knowledge of the phoney. He'd bust his nuts laughing, if he'd hadn't already bust them in some kind of ritual-humiliation holy wooden vice thing. Or was that some other mail-order outfit? Research had never been Mishcondereya's trump suit.

Not for the first time she thought about handing in her resignation.
Take it, I quit, I walk, I'm up and out, comperes, do the memory-wipe thing, it's not as if I'd be losing much, or even taking much with me. Surprise! Planetary security run by a pack of jokers.

No. Not this time. There was yet pleasure to be savoured from saving their collective asses once again.

The device was still chill from the assembler vat; she tossed it from palm to palm. Cold that burns. Seskinore—
Fat Fart
, her private name for him—would be up there blubbering and mincing and farting like an old Show Boat duchess and of course it would all be heading floorward like a Belladonna dowager's butt and being
act-ors
(she always consciously spaced the syllables) they reckoned that if they looked deep enough inside their souls for Honesty in Comedy or stood in a circle and workshopped it out like sweating off a really bad wodka hangover or clenched and unclenched their fists and screwed up enough Team Force it would all come right just like that. Of course it wouldn't. Never would, not on its own. She'd told them that, lodged her token formal complaint, but they just kept stubbornly heading on with the wrong thing while the Armageddon clock ticked down to zero. No surprise they hadn't listened; she wasn't an
act-or
and therefore understood nothing of the creative process and the agonies of performance. Their loss. It didn't insult her any more. The ignorant can't insult you. So Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana did what she always did, excused herself from their group huddle and primal yodelling and took her own idea off to make it into something.