Ares Express dru-2

by Ian McDonald

  “Some thanks you got.”

  “How could they let me go after that? To you and me, it’s the evening news. To them, it’s everything the plague took away. It’s all the mundane, trivial, petty, useless things that make up a life. It’s dirt and gossip and achievement and tragedy and horror and strife, and we love it. We gather it in and sow it out in every possible medium we can, as often as we can, as much as we can: we can’t get enough of it! It’s the best soap opera there is. News makes our lives. Tell me this, you’re sitting round having your dinner, what’s the talk at the table about? What’s on the news. Well, these people more than talk it. They live it, eight times a day at the top of the hour. Now, tell me, how could they let me go? Sticking me up here was the last creative thing they ever did.”

  And with the word, the news bell tolled again from its iron campanile and the people of Solid Gone assembled in the great zocalo, their brief respite of colour and scandal and eventfulness drained by the death of hope. Again, the pistils and stamens of Sanyap Bedassie’s projector shot dream-seed into the heart of dreamlessness and the clouds parted to reveal Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap with their Serious Heads on.

  “Chaos at the Gubernatorial Inauguration in Molesworth’s Rathaus,” Sanka Déhau said, looking straight into camera.

  “Public humiliation for recently elected Cossivo Beldene in girl-in-cake stunt,” Ashkander Beshrap chipped in his authoritative telegraphic style. The Eye on the World opened on the great hail with its chandeliers so mighty that each harboured a different species of bat, the Fest Table, carved from a single massive hunk of onyx, the gilded Missal Pulpit, festooned with the red-black-green swags of the Unity Rising campaign. Baroque mirrors returned the glare of camera lights and the stray glints from the diamonds of the favoured. Behind spangled frontals, the Glenn Miller Orchestra kicked in under the King of Swing’s left hand, while the great musician threw beaming glances out over the crowded tables. Bubbling cru cascaded down the ziggurats of glasses; servitors in breeches and frock coats offered warm scented toweliettes for their guests’ Personal Cleansing. All was merriness and conspicuous consumption and decadent cleavages, over which Ashkander Beshrap sternly pronounced, “In an elaborate practical joke, as the Glenn Miller Orchestra performed a specially commissioned composition, Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene’s rumoured mistress, was switched for a cake-dancer and leaped out to sing an alternative, explicit set of lyrics listing the new Gubernator’s sexual peccadilloes.”

  Not one sound-bite of this lodged in Sweetness’s head; not even the cheering and hooting of the massed Solid Goners for she was staring at the freeze-frame of the vengeful woman, half-uncaked in spangled bikini and hoolie-hoolie feathers, arms spread ta-dah!, grinning triumphantly into her throat mike: Cossivo Beldene behind her in the Champion’s Seat, caught eternally gobemouche, beside him, one peripatetic minister of dubious religion and major contributor to election funds, Devastation Harx, slight apprehension on his distinguished features, as if he had already calculated the upshots and mentally jettisoned Cossivo Beldene and the Unity Rising Party.

  But it was not even him Sweetness was staring at. At extreme left of shot, seated at a circular table with a stocky woman, a beautifully black-skinned man, a languidly bored girl with too many pierces, a grey-haired, anonymous looking middle-aged man and a weasely teen with dreadful teeth who seemed strangely unmoved by the unfolding tableau, was an old woman, small and bird-like and unobtrusive in sober blacks. The kind of woman you would not even notice, were she not your grandmother.

  “Taal!” Sweetness shouted. The folk of Solid Gone moved around her, unheeding of anything but the delight on the screen in the sky. “Taal, it’s me!” Of course she could not hear. Of course it was an image of an image of an image taken hours ago, fixed in the heart of a cloud. Futile as exhorting a photograph. But here the weird walked, here were strange times. Here magic worked. “Taal!” The boom of the cloud figures and the derision of the townsfolk smothered her cries. “Bedassie!” she shouted at the hanging van. She rattled chips of cobble off the drive train. The cineaste’s tousled head peeped out like a desert animal from its scrape.

  “Your projector!” Sweetness yelled as the happy smiling people, many holding hands, streamed past her back to their homes. “Can you make it work the other way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Instead of taking a dream and making it into a picture, can it take a picture and send it as a dream?”

  Sanyap Bedassie cocked his head to one side, intrigued.

  “Pray why?”

  “I need you to send a message.”

  Already the clouds were closing again, curtains of rainless grey.

  “To whom, exactly?”

  Sensing another necessary recapitulation of her story, Sweetness sighed and shook her curls in exasperation.

  “My grandmother. I’ll explain.”

  By the time she did, the deeper penumbra that was night in Solid Gone had filled up the zocalo. As the story told itself, Bedassie had busied himself swagging dismounted vehicle lights around the base of the campervan. Now he flicked them on. Sweetness was pin-spotted in a wash of white heads, white tails and yellow indicators.

  “Well, I can see the urgency now,” Sanyap Bedassie said, feet swinging over the zocalo. “And I think it should be theoretically possible to do what you ask. There is one minor, niggling cavil, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “You would rather need to get up here.”

  Sweetness put her hands on her hips, sucked in her lower lip. She had fought battles in mirror mazes. She had fallen from flying cathedrals. She had crossed burning deserts. She had swung across time to strange other presents and been bounced back into the paths of express trains. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th was not to be defeated by a few metres of altitude and a few whacks of chain. She studied the zocalo. The stonework facades of the anchor buildings were big rock climbing-frames. Not even a work-out for a girl who’d grown up clambering all over the heavy, steaming metal of a Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler. The support chains were a simple hand-over-hand. Traingirls have good upper body strength. But a cannier soul had beaded a large glass globe on each chain, a few links down from the highest point. No way round over under through those babies.

  Solid Gone was jealous of its news vendor.

  “Okay,” Sweetness declared. “I can’t get up. So I’ll get you down.”

  “I really don’t think…” Sanyap Bedassie began, eyes widening with apprehension beneath his wild hair. But Sweetness was away, loping back through the silent streets. Past the lamp-lit porches. Past the glowing yellow windows. Past the muttering voices behind them, already losing the threads of conversation, laughs tailing off into dust, quips falling and lying, dreams bleaching and desiccating. Out from under the cloud of dreamlessness, to the track. Her home, her line through life. The permanent way, forward, back: out. Free of the psychic anticyclone of the cloud, she could feel the lure of the line, a tug on the valves of the heart. So easy to step on to it and keep walking. Walk away from this town and its dis-ease. Walk right out of this desert. Walk all the way to Molesworth and her grandmother.

  “After,” she said. A deal was a deal. And story was story.

  Though the night was dark and groping—even the bright angel-machines of the moonring seemed intimidated by the cloud of numbness—her flashlight found the box of detonators first time, right where she had expected it, under the signal tower. She stuffed her pack and pockets with the red cylinders. One backward glance at the steel way, then Sweetness set her jaw—which she had always thought was one of her more determining features—and loped back into Solid Gone.

  “…this is a good idea,” Sanyap Bedassie warned as Sweetness scaled the face of the old Ganj Bourse. “I mean, there’s a lot of delicate equipment in here. And I’m only holding it in trust, really.”

  “You want to hang up there forever?” Sweetness asked as she carefully
straddled the top end of the chain. “Then shut up and trust me. You got airbags on that thing?”

  “I think they’re standard on this model.”

  “You be fine, then. Machinery you can fix. You, you can’t.”

  With strips ripped from her posh frock (in case was almost certain to be never, now, but each wrench tore, hard) she lashed the clustered detonators to the chain. Applicator threads pulled from tampons she wound into a common fuse, which she doused in glue—good, stinky stuff, the kind that really burns.

  “I think you might need to blow two,” Bedassie suggested.

  Sweetness enjoyed a moment’s novelty of a new perspective on his face, then said, “Nah. I reckon one’s enough. I’ve been working out the stresses. I know metal. Now, you strap in tight.”

  Before she touched fire to the fuse, she gave a moment’s worry to whether her little boom might rouse the town.

  “Sod it,” she said. The last collective act of arousal these people had committed had been putting up these same chains. A little bang in the night would scarcely flicker in the grey. She lit the thread and dropped down beneath the Ganj Bourse’s stone balcony.

  The bang in the night was much bigger and closer than she had expected. Sweetness gave a little squeak of surprise as stone chips, rust, dust and shredded detonator cartridge rained down on her. She waited for her ears to clear, trying to make falling campervan sounds out of the ringing. She peeked up over the edge of the balcony. The blast had surgically severed the chain. It lay stretched dead on the cobbles. The glass no pasaran bead was a million pieces scattered across the zocalo. But the campervan hung dramatically suspended above the square in a hey-look-at-me-Mum-one-hand! spread-eagle.

  “Bum,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

  “Well, I’m still here,” came a voice from inside the van. “I thought you knew metal.”

  “Do you want out or don’t you?” Sweetness said, eyeing the ascent to the next cable point. Not so easy, a tricksy little drain-pipe shin up to a Greek key frieze. From there, nasty overhanging balconies all the way to the anchor point. And only eight detonators left. That blast had used twelve. She would have to bet on the additional strain on the remaining rear cable. Sweetness jumped lightly off the lowest balcony, landed like a cat, darted across the zocalo, all the time listening out for soft padding zombie-feet. It was surely asking too much of even the deadened nervous systems of Solid Gone to have been deaf to such a blast. She wrestled her way up the side of the Meerschaum Exchange, hooked her legs around the steel staple and prepared her second charge. Nowhere handy to hide here. She’d need a long fuse. Up was safer than down. How much centimetrage left in her handi-pack of tampons? Have to do. Little less liberal with the glue. But you want it to burn. It has to burn. Mother’a’mercy, it has to burn and the charges have to blow and the bus has to go arse-first down to the ground and even then there has to be enough of the rear transmission to get the thing to move and if there’s a Panarch in heaven and eleven orders of angels in serried attendance, there’ll be enough juice in the tank to jam the thing into reverse and snap the remaining chains.

  Lots of ifs, Glorious Honey-Bun.

  For the first time, the realisation struck her—hard and chill—that maybe everything she had done since and including riding off into the wicked west with Serpio Waymender had in fact been absolutely the wrong thing to do, and she had got away with it only because she was protected by the exigencies of being, for a time, a story.

  So? Whatever works. Light the blue touch paper and retire.

  The blast caught her and flipped her with a squawk tail-first over the cornice on to the Exchange’s flat roof. Quick as a knife she was up and at the stone balustrade in time to see Sanyap Bedassie and his cinema of dreams hit the ground. They hit hard. They hit rough. Bits fell off. Things cracked. Liquids leaked. Wheels splayed at angles that convinced even a trainperson that driving was over for this little camper. Nevertheless, Sweetness punched a fist in the air.

  “Yah!” she yelled. Her victory cry rebounded like a well-shot cue-ball around the stone cushions of the zocalo.

  With a plaint of protesting metal, the driver-side door opened. After some seconds, Sanyap Bedassie clambered out. He looked a little rocky. He looked like a man who, with his love and livelihood, has been dropped ten metres on to a hard stone surface. He looked around him, at the ground, at the square, at the severed chains that had once held him, at the buildings and the radial avenues, at the new perspective on it all. At Sweetness on her rooftop.

  “Well,” he said, dusting himself down, “now I’m down here, and you’re up there.”

  She was not for long. Sanyap Bedassie was shorter on the horizontal than Sweetness had thought, and, from his long aerial captivity, had a personal odour at odds with his cute appearance. He was suspiciously checking the power units for the cloud projector.

  “Well, you’ve managed to write off the truck,” he said, not looking at her.

  “It was a write-off anyway,” Sweetness said brightly. “Anyway, you can always get someone to tow you out of here. What about the, uh, that?”

  “The uh-that seems, by grace of God, to be fine and dandy,” Bedassie said, feeling the honours of his machinery with his subtle hands.

  “So, you can make my call?”

  “When I’ve finished recalibrating, certainly.”

  Sweetness stood shifting from foot to foot, nervously glancing down the dark avenues. Surely surely surely…

  “We’re done.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You stand here.”

  “What, here?” Being as nondescript a piece of Solid Gone zocalo as any other.

  “Yes, here.” Nondescript banished as Sweetness was bathed in the pink, cloud-stabbing beam.

  “Ooh,” she said. It hissed and tickled. “So, what do I say?”

  “You say what you want her to dream. It would help if you could keep it down to five main points, and if you could, put it into classic three-act structure, you know; beginning, middle, end. Setup, confrontation, resolution.”

  “What?”

  “Just tell it however. But I’d be quick about it.”

  “Why?” asked Sweetness, pinkly.

  Bedassie raised a listen finger. Straining through the seethe of light, Sweetness could hear the patient plod of the news bell.

  “All right all right all right,” she said, combing her hair out of her eyes. “Hi, Grandmother Taal, this is me, Sweetness—can she see me, or only hear me? Anyway, look, I haven’t got much time, but this is to say I’m all right—well, actually I’m not, but that’s because at the moment I’m a story, which seems to make interesting things happen. So, I reckon the only reason I’m seeing you—I’m not even going to ask how you got there, but I know you—is that you’ve decided to come and look for me. By the way, it was only a flash, like, but you’re looking good. You been taking vitamins or what? Okay, I shouldn’t’ve run off like that—but you know me. I couldn’t marry that guy. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in a galley, stainless steel or not; and, hey, as it turned out, it was all meant to happen anyway, because I’m a story.”

  “Speaking of which,” Bedassie counselled, “now would be a good time to make your first plot point.”

  Tramp, tramp, tramp came the marching feet.

  “Okay, well, you probably can’t hear that, but there’s like an army of zombie villagers out there—except they aren’t really zombies, they’ve got this plague that means they can’t dream, but they’re all addicted to the evening news and that’s them coming for the eleven o’clock serving. Anyway: what’s happening is: I got to find this guy Devastation Harx. You saw him, up there. Well, I had this run in with him—he’s got this flying cathedral crewed by all these grade school rejects—and, well, you know I used to have this invisible friend? Little Pretty One? Well, it seems she wasn’t so invisible, actually she was Catherine of Tharsis hitching a ride off my other twin’s ghost, and Devastation Harx’s stolen her
and he’s keeping her in a jar and I have to get her back otherwise he’ll use her to start this final war between humans and machines, and it looks like it’s up to me to stop the whole shebang.” She glanced at Sanyap Bedassie. The whole stone arena was now ringing to the steady slap of flat feet. “That do?”

  “Succinct, if not classically structured,” the young man said, checking his dials and instruments. “Your grandmother is going to have some dream tonight.”

  “Yeah, but will she believe it’s really me?”

  “Oh, grandmothers generally believe what their dreams tell them. It might be nice to sign off?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Forgot. Hi, Gran. Listen, tell the folks I’m all right. If that guy Harx was at Molesworth, then that’s a good place to look for him, so stay there and I’ll meet up with you. Hey, we could even be parts of the story together.”

  “I think you already are,” Sanyap Bedassie said softly. He frowned at his indicators. “That’s you.” He threw a small brass lever. The pink light died around Sweetness.

  “Ooh,” she said.

  Down each of the radial avenues, a wedge of citizenry was marching, dull and intent on only one thing, their thrice nightly dose of the mundane. Surrounded by advancing grey. It was, Sweetness had to admit, pure monster movie. She grabbed Sanyap’s hand.

  “Time to go.”

  He pulled back.

  “Where?”

  “There.” Sweetness pointed down a narrow entry between buildings of the kind that only becomes apparent when you absolutely necessarily must have a neat egress. She seized his hand again. It was nice and soft and warm. A good non-labouring hand. “Come on.”

  Again, he resisted.

  “They’ll stick you up there again, and me too this time, and I don’t know about you, friend, but I got a story. You want that?”

  “My machine…”

  “It’s only a thing, man. If it troubles you that much, come back and get it later, like I said. Come back with a pile of people. But you can only do that if you get out now.”