Ares Express (38 page)

Grandmother Taal cried aloud in pain. The winds that patrolled the great cave lifted it, turned it into just another shriek among the stalactites. The years, the prize years, were leaking out of her. The power was burning them, focusing their hope and energy on the intricacies of interlocked steel. Blood ran down her mutilated arm and dripped on to the marble concourse. Grandmother Taal clenched her fist, gritted her teeth. Fire gnawed her bones. Palsies wracked her. She shook to a spasm. The lock quivered. Again, she convulsed; two years, five years burned. The lock jerked. The ashes of years piled up in her cells; she was old, she was
old
. Seven years. Ten years.
Please, leave me something!
she begged of the lock. A third time the lock quaked. Quaked again, then, with a detonation of rending metal, it burst apart. A pool of brown sludge joined the pool of blood on the stone. The tunnel doors began to slide apart. No time to lose. Grandmother Taal snatched her bag, hitched up her skirts, slipped through the gap and highfooted it up the long, black tunnel.

The purple, Devastation Harx thought as the Acolytes of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family filed from the flying cathedral's outlocks on to the morning-glinty plateau of the repair dock, had not been one of his better ideas. Not the colour; purple was a sacerdotal hue, and cheap. Fetching, in the right light. The uniformity. Suddenly he saw ranked and serried badness. All little faces and hands in little squads and files, all dressed in ticky-tacky, all together, all the same. Robots, not people. Not individuals. The ubiquitous machines. Getting closer now. Getting into his beloveds.

Why join?
The thought came as a sudden desire to shout down from the brass-railinged balcony from which he took the salute of the faithful.
An act of free will to joyfully become a drone?
The words were a tight urging in his throat, then he heard in the hollow of his skull how they would sound going out across the high glass, and was afraid. The doubts of a middle-aged twenty-something who has woken all creak-jointy this morning. You owe
them better, as they line up to praise you for the freedom you have given their souls. Tell them that they take free grace freely given and throw it away with both hands and the ones who could still think would stare, while those who could not would only worship all the harder.

It's not easy, running a religion. They have a habit of running away on you.

The Rank Presbyters and Exercisers Temporal had mustered their sections into squares and quadrilles of episcopal purple. Faces gleamed in the morning light. They looked to Harx expectant of blessing. He raised a hand, hesitated, suddenly nauseated by their need, suddenly heedful of the Störting-Kobiyashi shift workers trekking from the big express elevators along the grapple arms and access cranes to start work, and the way they could not quite bring themselves to look at all these faithful people, and smiled, and shook their heads sadly.

Yes, it is
, Devastation Harx thought. And, to his gathered faithful,
Have you understood so little? I gave you the secrets of unbarring the cells of your minds, of mask-and-caping the superhuman beneath each of your mundane humanities, of nurturing each of your uniquenesses so that a thousand flowers might bloom and a thousand schools of thought pervade, and what did you do? Dressed all in purple and got great thighs pedalling a bicycle-powered cathedral.

Great thighs, he admitted, were something.

But to make yourselves machines to war against the tyranny of the mechanical?

His hand returned to the balcony rail, unwilling to bless.

“Grace,” whispered Sianne Dandeever, first of the faithful and devoted über-mater and who, Devastation Harx knew sadly from his visits to the cycle-housings, had an ass the Panarch herself would commit sin to own and who, if he ever said the word, would devotedly let him chew it. Devotedly, but not joyfully. “They're waiting…”

You become trapped by the needs of faith.

He raised his hand. The Rank Presbyters smiled, relieved; among them that odd, too-hungry trackboy who had stolen for him that dreadful tyke of train-trash girl. Of all incarnations and emanations for that Haan woman to have been entangled with…The ways of the multiverse were strange, and the boy had done a fine job, deserving of more reward than a two-tier
promotion in the church civil service. Harx watched the boy nod to the Vicars Choral. They raised their staves, brought them down.

Happy happy happy

Happy happy happy

Happy happy happy all the day

Harx has saved us

Harx has made us

Happy happy happy all the day
, the fresh-faced choristers sang.

Does God ever tire of hearing his praises sung?
Harx thought, embarrassed today by the adulation wafting himwards,
Does he feel insulted by the infantile twaddle peddled in the name of worship?
So he would not have to listen, he surveyed instead the damage Cadmon and Euphrasie had wrought on his floating basilica. It looked to the faithful like contemplation of higher things. For a homosexual anarchist artist—late and reluctant recruits to the war—his brother had made a good aerial bomber. A few more sticks, a little faster on the turns, he might have seriously discommoded the great strategy, if not forced a season's defeat on him. His diversionary strike on heaven might have gained him ground in the lower orbitals and swept away a third of the angelic forces that opposed him, but the ways of machines were subtle, and from the humiliation at the Molesworth Festhall, he did not doubt that other energies were being mobilised against him.

Had they finished yet?

Gleeful gleeful gleeful all the day.

How many, if any, suspected the scale of crusade in which they were spiritual infantry? Few out on parade, few on this whole world, in this universe. Not the machines. They knew too well that this little red ball was their final redoubt, and that one installation artist turned religious shyster was to be their nemesis.

Strange, and passing inevitable, the path that leads from fine art to jihad.

Strange, the things you find in mirrors.

God, they were still at it. Did they never tire of singing? I'm trying to make a universe for humans to live in, and the best you can do with it is chant doggerel. Excessive aubergine and happy-clappiness were the prices you paid for owning your own church. Inventing a religion was still the best and
easiest way to raise the astronomical amounts of cash a war with the angels required.

Sianne Dandeever, poker-erect, face rapt, hands firmly gripping balcony rail, suddenly flinched as if unseen wings had flapped in her face. She flicked something away with her hand, scowled, devotion broken.

Harx stared, then cocked his head a degree to catch a tiny sound. A hum, an insect drone.

Insects. Up here? On this glass desert? Ridiculous.

More than ridiculous. Sinister.

A black mote danced in his face. Harx lunged, snatched, felt frantic movement buzz in his palm. He closed his fist, felt a soft crunch, opened his palm and peered closely at it. One less skilled in the wiles of machines might have taken it for a true insect, but he could see that the thing whirring spastically in his hand was a tiny, glass-bellied helicopter. He held it closer; as he did, the belly-bead popped. Vapour wisped, Harx hurled the thing away from him but not before a greenish wisp had curled up his nostrils. He saw vinegar, tasted blue minims; a symphony for cabbage and pram played a loud chord in his frontal lobes. The smell of triangles…

“Battle stations!” he roared out over the assembled faithful. Every head turned. Sianne Dandeever stared, half numb, half thrilled that this might be the call for which Harx had invested so much of her body and will.

“Battle stations!” Harx repeated as the squares and drills broke up into frantic motion. “To arms, our church is under attack!”

He nodded for Sianne to take command as a cloud of robot insects, black as smoke, poured from the spire-top airco funnels. He did not like to be seen by the faithful to be abandoning Armageddon, but there were tactics that only he could employ, and those in private. The true battle would not be fought under the glass plains, with gun turrets and Gatling bunkers, but among the shifting dimensions of his mirror maze. Devastation Harx swirled from the balcony. Sianne Dandeever cracked her knuckles and stood tall. Thank you God. At last. At long long last.

“This is it, boys!” she guldered at the top of her ample lungs to the running acolytes. “This is war!”

It wears off
, they'd warned Lutra Blaine when she ticked the box in the job centre next to “Space Service.”
And quicker than you think, too.
Cartwheeling off the action end of the Skywheel space elevator (
no, it's not me going arse-over-heels, it's the stars carouselling around me
; the innocent solipsism of the work-placement cosmonaut) she had yippeed in her soul of souls as the red-green-occasional-blue mottle of her world rolled up in a great disc before her like a test for colour-blindness in the eye of the Divine.
So tell me Ms. Blaine, what can you read down there?
Nothing but a door out of three rooms and twelve bodies Level Twenty-Seven Deep St. Berisha Project NewMarket Down, Belladonna, Greatest of the Cities of the Valley. The doctors had warned her of possible agoraphobia. It would still not have grounded her. No one got turned down for space service. Not a problem, she said. Outer space was no bigger or blacker than inner space. The tunnels of the littler moon were no less pumicey and constricting. Space, like bedrock, was just another darkness into which you cannot go.

You do know you've more chance of winning the Fat Lotto every week for a year than seeing some, you know, action
, the sheddle steward had said as he turned her the right way up and sent her and her canvas grip-bag sailing through the lock into the foam-padded reception bay.

That's okay
, she had thought as she swam through the thick, fart-whiffy air, wondering who the stocky, shock-headed smiler was down at the end of the cylinder, hand held out to welcome her to Planetary Defence System Terror.
Just as long as the cheques keep coming.

The view was the one thing that had not tired. The constant vague nanogee nausea; the bloated, rodent face in the morning mirror; the unflagging, eroding energy with which Taroudant—the tousled grinner—tried to get his hand into the waistband of her draw-string Space Service baggies—most of all, this last—those she'd tired of by the end of her first shift. But her world, her home, the soil of her birth, her shelter and prison; spinning slowly like the hands of a great clock behind the watch-glass of the observation blister, she would wake from near-trance to find hours had vanished, witched out of her by the huge, slow-turning world beneath her. Twelve and a half years she had lived and crawled beneath the surface without ever once looking at its face.

Truth be told, Taroudant notwithstanding—he occupied an ecological niche all his own—the creaky old battle station was full of creeps. Unaccountable breezes eddied in the gritty pumice tunnels. Light panels would flicker as she swam past, or switch themselves off, or, more spookily still, on, illuminating vast, irregular, lung-like hollows she was quite sure did not appear on any of the moon maps. Machines loved to click and groan theatrically; spirals of dust would spin and sparkle in the hub-chambers where tunnel systems met, and what was that lingering smell of perfume, like ashes of roses? Taroudant would have been the obvious suspect, by the unfeasible logic that if he scared her enough she'd suck him off, except that she knew he sensed them too and, more primarily, he lacked the imagination for even that rudimentary ploy. And he never smelled of anything approaching ashes, let alone of roses.

No, ghosts there were in the old, hollow moon. That was the very idea of the place. An army of ghosts, to be resurrected from the crusty regolith in the hour of its primary's need and thrown into final battle. She'd glimpsed the ranked processors behind their diamond viewing panes, waiting in supercool quantum chill to spin soldiers out of stone, like ice goblins in faerytales. The cold got into her bones, never really got out again, in the long, empty spaces of Planetary Defence System Terror. She floated warily past the empty templates mounted on the walls, breast-plated and beaked like insect warrior armour. Too many eyes, too many toes, too many arms that ended in too many blades, like ever-opening penknives. Slashers stabbers impalers gutters beheaders. All our warfares in the end come down to hand-to-hand. Stick a piece of sharp metal through your enemy. Simple and reliable. Like Taroudant. He came down to the hand-to-hand, in the end. Impale with a pointed weapon. Knob knob knob knob knob. Simple and reliable.

Two people; man, woman, trying to avoid each other in a worm-eaten potato of a moonlet, two billion humans' final defence against interplanetary attack. Oh. Forgetting of course, SERAPAMOUN, Cheraph, exalted one, genius loci, seeded so thoroughly and minutely through Terror that the whole planetoid could be said to be one great orbiting brain. The real trigger finger, silent as only the angels can be silent, patiently waiting for a word certain never to be spoken, that would transform moon-stuff into machine
warriors and send them falling out of the evening sky like diamond rain in their spin-carbon reentry shells.