by Ian McDonald
“Raise two,” Cyrene said.
“Parvue,” Grandmother Taal snapped. Twenty-six, or forty-four. “Twist.” Her third ten, in Blades. “Vue.”
“What have you got?”
“Full house, tens and twos.” She spread them slowly.
“Ah,” said Cyrene the gambler. He turned up his hand. “Four eights.”
Nine years fell on Grandmother Taal. She gave a small cry as bones sagged, tendons tautened, muscles withered, senses coarsened, aches and complaints flocked in. Looking at Cyrene—with difficulty, a cataract now clouded her right eye—he was as she had first seen him; more so, she thought, with an added gleam in his one eye and a new wave in his sleek hair. He held up the deck.
The gambler's dilemma. To take the loss, or play for it back. Easy to walk away with a whistle and a resolution when it is only money. Years of your life—years you can afford less than dollars—that is another thing. The problem with playing to get it back is that that is not enough. You play for more. You play for it all. Especially when the stakes are higher than you can afford, and no other game will offer them. I am trapped, Grandmother Taal thought, reaching to cut the cards. Trapped and fooled. Forty-four years, two of them by your own foolishness, and still you have not learned the smell of hustler.
The cards spun across the table and from that game on, Grandmother Taal could not win another hand. Cyrene bet small and sly, a year here, a half-year there, forcing her to fold on potentially strong cards because with every hand, she became less and less able to afford an ante war. And when she did call vue he always had the perfect play, as if that smile that deepened around the corners of his mouth did so because it knew how the cards would turn. There was a further handicap, with every year added to her, she became less and less able to play. She squinted at the patterns as Wasps melted into Blades, Bosses into Duennas, red into black. The rules kept slipping from her grasp, a full house beat what, and was beaten by what? Her fingers trembled as she tried to grip the flighty, silky treacherous things. Walnut knuckles ached. Yet play she must, ask for her draw in a voice she no longer recognised, turn over the cards one by one, lose another year in the hope of winning one back.
She had now lost all sense of how old she was. Flickering motes flocked at the edges of her field of vision. The observation car became filled with a cloying smell like rotting maté and unwashed bodies. Grandmother Taal knew they were the smells and shapes of death. This was how this smiling youth, firm cheeked and full-lipped, intended it to end. This, she suspected, was how he made his way across the world, swallowing lives, a year-vampire feeding on the elderly who, because they could not afford his stakes, craved them all the more.
“No,” she mumbled, mouth filled with the yellow stumps of rotted teeth. “This is not how it ends.”
“I'm sorry, did you say something?” Cyrene shuffled the deck with his quick and nimble gloved fingers. He dealt another round. “I say, shall we play for the big one? Enough of this prettying around. A decade rich enough for you? No? How about two?”
As the gambler dealt the cards, Grandmother Taal's attention became fixed more and more closely on Cyrene's eye-patch. Her sense for brown itchily insisted it concealed more than empty socket. If he could see the turn of the cards before they fell, this, her magic said, was where his power was centred. But a crumbling old woman could not hope to wrestle with a man in a stolen prime. But there were other ways. Ways perilous to a crumbling old woman, but worse not to attempt. She wedged her cards into the claw of her hand. Three Hieros.
“Two,” she said. Cyrene smiled, and so did not observe Grandmother Taal slip the pin out of her hair. “Twist.”
Spice of Wasps. Cyrene twisted a Boss of Blades.
“Hm. The Strife Card,” he said, and so did not see Grandmother Taal begin to scratch the word eye into the back of her hand with the hairpin.
“Twist,” she gritted. Curse of the Panarch on her hand, stop shaking! Stop shaking. The Hieros of Hands slid across the Formica. Four of a kind. Keep going. Keep going.
“And for myself,” Cyrene said.
“Stop!” Grandmother Taal commanded. She held up her maimed hand. A bloody eye confronted the blind brown leather patch. Powers boiled between them. Grandmother Taal's hand shook. She could not hold it up any longer, it was heavy as pig iron, painful as rheumatism, her power was ended. Leather creaked. The eye-patch bulged. Cyrene's hands flew to keep it down but the strap snapped. The patch catapulted across the carriage. Cyrene let out a wail. Crouched in his eyesocket was a tiny metal homunculus, some machine-demon thing. It turned chromium mandibles on Grandmother Taal and made to leap to safety. Too slow. There was spirit yet in the ancient woman. Quick as thought, she rammed the silver maté straw into Cyrene's possessed eye-socket, straight through the belly of the demon-thing. Impaled, it crashed to the table, wailing like band-sawn tin. It staggered between the cards, clutching ineffectually at the impaling spear. It tripped over the stainless steel table trim and fell to the floor. Grandmother Taal's high-heeled boot lifted once and came down with a metallic crunch. She turned to face Cyrene, fumbling at his blind eye.
“You have blinded me!” he screeched. “You terrible old woman!”
“And you have cheated me,” Grandmother Taal said. She laid down her hand. “Four Hieros. Now, shall we see what you have?” She twisted the top card. A second Boss. Looking Cyrene in his single eye, she said, “Vue.”
She flicked over the face-down cards. They were blank. As she stared at them, Grandmother Taal saw the patterns of other cards flicker over them before settling into the six-eyed Boss of Wasps and the top-hatted Boss of Cash.
“You are a despicable creature,” Grandmother Taal said, feeling all her gambled years rush back into her. Infirmities slid from her like cast-off clothes. She felt herself growing, back beyond what she had been, five, ten, fifteen. She was Amma no longer, she was a vigorous, spry woman of twenty-seven. “And no gentleman!” Cyrene slumped back in his seat as the stolen years fell on him like a landslide. He withered. He aged. His body sagged, wrinkles grew up him like strangling vines. His hair greyed and vanished, his mustachios drooped impotently. The hand clutching the silver-tipped cane shrivelled into a claw. He dwindled inside his crushed velvet clothes.
He reached for his deck, his strength, his hope. Grandmother Taal scooped them out from under his grasp.
“No more!” she said. She stood up, opened the window and threw the cards out. They fluttered and spun in the slipstream; amshastrias and blankness.
“No!” Cyrene Ree cried and the cry became a thin, wheedling wail as, before Grandmother Taal's eyes, all the years that the gambler had stolen over his centuries of existence were returned. In a breath he crumbled, man to eyeless mummy to ragged skeleton to a pile of soil and humus. An empty suit of tailored clothes hung on the leatherette club chair. Brown dirt spilled from the sleeves, frilled collar and boot-tops. Grandmother Taal grimaced in distaste, rang the attendant bell to summon the impolite Stuard boy to tidy up the mess, moved to an empty seat and hunted a compact out of her bottomless bag to greet a face she had not seen in decades.
On the third day, between delirium and dehydration, Sweetness hit the steel rail. She tripped over a crumbled concrete sleeper and fell on it. It burned her right cheek. She reeled back and left a strip of skin fused to the metal. That was how she knew it was real. It was the first experience she had been certain of in two days.
When her feet had given her no answer to being dropped from a height of three metres over a sterile red desert by an air-borne cathedral waltzing away over the horizon in a gaudy of purple clouds, conned out of what she half understood was her greatest asset—the woman who created the world—Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th did an inventory.
Don't think bruised maybe cracked ribs. Don't think rim-rocks and rust. Don't think, nothing that even suggests something I recognise. Don't think which way? Don't think how much food and water? Don't think how soon the night, and
how long and cold? All the answers have to be in this little black sack, so start there.
The sandwiches were long since mummified crescents but there were four bottles of oxygenated water. Sweetness set them out on the sand in front of her. With her pencil and paper she sat down to work out how many sips, then realised it was pointless without an idea of how long she would be walking, which was pointless without knowing where she was. And among the petty treasures, she had forgotten a simple map and compass.
One useful thing. Psalli's emergency spell. Lost in a desert, no map, no compass, night coming on, four bottles of water between you and the condors; that's an emergency. Sweetness unrolled the little scroll of paper, fastened with a hair-tie.
For Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness, first light a beeswax candle…
What the hell kind of emergency spell is it that's picky about the kind of candle you light? Or even that you light a candle at all? Sweetness hauled out her all-weather lighter and a tampon. She lit the thread end. It burned enthusiastically, then sputtered at the wadded cotton.
“Then face the sun…” She did so. “Call three times, ‘Aid me in my succour, Green Saint,’ then blow out the candle and say, ‘May my wish be granted.’ Okay.” She performed the recitations, blew on her light. The tampon guttered and expired in a curl of red embers and smoke. “May my wish be granted.”
Sweetness sat down and waited for Aid Beyond Comprehension. To keep herself amused in a Time of Direness, she thought. You're lost in the middle of a desert without a map or a compass. You've got a radio. You're facing the sun, which is about two hands above the horizon. You're facing vaguely west, so most of the important stuff in the world is that way. Nine o'clock-ish. South. Walk and you'll hit something human sooner or later. If you roll over—cock piss bugger bum balls, it hurts!—and use the top of this pen as one sight and the top of that finger rock as another and hold real still, you can guess how quickly the sun's setting. Fast on the equator, slow up north. This season, hardly at all above the polar circle. Well, it's definitely moving, so I'm not that far north. About three minutes from top of pen to top of rock. That's up above the thirty degree line north. Where had that fly bastard Harx said they were going? Molesworth, for a mail run. That's Bequerelly, west-southwest from Therme. Now, your watch is still on Deuteronomy time. So, you tune the radio to a Deuteronomy station and listen for the Evening Angelus. Star of the Evening, pale blue mother of men…Then you find a place where you can see the horizon. It's okay to walk about a bit. The Help Beyond Comprehension isn't going to miss you out here. There's a gap in the shield-wall. Now count the time until the sun sets here. A few head-sums—how many degrees is it per minute? Three. And there it goes…Magic hour. Wooo, big blue. The rocks are so red, like they don't want to let the colour go. No, no, it's mine, not the black's. Eight minutes. So, you're mid Axidy, edge of Chryse. Not too many railway lines up here, which is arsebiscuits, but down south is Tempe and the thirty-degree orbital. That's a walk. You're going to sprout wings and fly? Getting night-wise. Best to walk in the night, sleep in the day. That sun'll cook you like a stripey penis on a Waymender barbecue. Let's not entertain that thought or those people. You're warm already on forehead and cheeks. Upper arms are stinging. Also, you'll drink less water. Snuggle up in your bag and sleep in the sun on the sand. So, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, best get booting. Wait wait wait. It's night. No sun. So, how will you know which way is south? Moonring's east–west, and south, but it goes all the way across the sky and a little error now can be days out. Can be leather and bones, Honey-Bun.
Wait. Your radio. That Deuteronomy station, it had been all fluttery and wowy and phasey, because they've only got low power transmitters and the mountains over to the east there interfere with the signal. No mountains to the south: so, pick up a Tempe Station—preferably one in a big place like Therme—and turn around until you get a clear signal. You're on beam. She'll lead you right into the Watering Rooms of the Great Bath itself.
As the last stolen light ebbed from the rim-rocks, Sweetness pulled Radio Pleasant out of the atmosphere. It twitched and chittered like a family of bats. Beneath the wheeling stars, Sweetness turned, listening to the airwaves. There. Honesto's Used Yute Mart. Treat Ye Better'n Ye Treat Yerself. For a great deal on pre-cared Dorts and Stavingers, call…She opened her eyes. The stars seemed to line up above her into a hunting arrow. This way, traingirl.
“Right, then,” she decided. “South.”
She shouldered her bag and began to walk. The Bakelite cat and the used spell she left as offerings to the Big Red.
The Big Red, in the big dark, was extremely boring. Those things that give character to deserts; heat, space, desolation, grandeur, an atomising sense of isolation in a vast terrain, are erased by night. Dark made it a dimensionless expanse of tough trekking. Sweetness pressed on at a steady speed, fast enough to give a sense of purpose, slow enough not to flag too soon and leave her demoralised. To conserve the solar batteries, she listened in to Radio Pleasant only long enough to get a fix on due south. She sang songs from the shows. She recited chunks of the Evyn Psalmody. She counted from one to one thousand, then from two thousand back to one thousand. She took a sip of water and used it to explore as many aspects and crannies of her mouth as she could. She did seven times tables, eight times tables, all the way up to fifteen times tables. She engaged in convoluted games of word association, she formed great trains of thought, longer than any thousand-car-er out of Iron Mountain, then tried to trace back every step of the cognitive process to the originating engine. She wondered, when's this Aid Beyond Comprehension going to arrive? She took another furtive grab at the airwaves, adjusted her course, walked on. It was still astonishingly tedious. It was much later than she thought when the “Radio Pleasant Pre-Breakfast Show” timechecks started. She slithered down dune faces, slogged along heavy, sucking sifs and thought about people in Therme's tall tenements rolling over in their quilts for another five or sitting up and scratching or staring at their faces in the bathroom mirror or grumbling to their lovers over the morning bread and tea. Have you any idea, Mr. Deejay, what this one of your listeners is doing? When the edge of the world dipped beneath the sun, she unrolled her bag, found a sheltered place where the sand would not blow into her nostrils and remembered to set out the solar radio to recharge. Then she read a few pages of her unimproving book and was asleep before her powers of aesthetic discrimination could tell her they were excrement.
Sweat woke her. Sweetness licked the salt off her forearms and tried to find a sweet spot in the curve of soft sand that now seemed concrete. The next time she woke was with a searing headache from sunlight leaking through her permeable eyelids. Her face felt raw and sunburned. Sweetness wrapped a torn-off shirt-sleeve around her head and rolled over again, half stifled. The third time she woke, it was the hunger. She willed it down but it would not be so easily beaten. Sweetness tried eating pages of her unimproving book, washed down with sips of water. They stayed the belly gnaw. The last time she woke the sun was two fingers above the western rim rocks. Time to get up, get up, get on, get out.
Dizzy with hunger and headache, Sweetness took a bearing on Radio Pleasant. She had come a hair off true, a shift to the left brought her on to the way south. This place she had spent the day looked so similar to the one she had left yesterday—the sand so rippled, the rocks so crumbled and red, the sky so piercingly blue—she might not have moved at all. Have not moved at all, whispered a small, black, despairing demon. It took a major effort of will to lift one foot and place it ahead of the other, but she managed it. Belly full of yellow press, she had to. To listen to the demon was death.
That second night, death seemed a fine thing. Much of the time she was crazy, staggering and weaving under the hurtling scraps of moon, crawling up slip-sliding dune-faces, clutching at the sand running away between her fingers, rolling downslope, at some point recovering sense enough to reckon she had wandered far off course and chec
king her position against the cool midnight grooves of Radio Pleasant's “Wind-down with Willem.” The ridiculous notion that down there people were toasting each other with wine and throwing money to band leaders and sending compliment slips to chefs and fumbling with each other's underwear in cars gave her the idea. Things I will do when I get to Therme.
Top of the list. Wash my hair. She could smell it. Worse, she could not get away from it. Bad bad bad bad bad when you can smell your own hair. Worse when it sticks to you. Aghhh. Hair wash. No questions, numero uno. And a bath. Maybe together. No problem in Therme. It's a spa town. So, hydrotherapy then. Deep bath, with all those healing oils and minerals from the volcanic vents. Like for several hours. And a glass of wine as light and clear as water, so cold the condensation runs down the outside, across the foot, then down your arm and you lick it off. Oh yes. Licking things off. Some boy with nice muscles and cute eye make-up to run a hose up and down you. How does that feel, Miss Engineer? Oh ah, oohhh, ahhh. She'd scandalise him. But not before he'd shampooed her hair, with a good, deep, finger motion, right down to the roots, twice and conditioner, and a warm blow dry—not a hot one, she'd had enough hot air blowing in her face for any lifetime. Yes, a bath, with oils and minerals and a hose down and a body scrub and when you've got every molecule of rust and silicon out of you, a table on a verandah with a view over the mud gardens, and you wearing nothing but a shortie silkie robe, and someone bringing you fish. Yes, fish, fresh caught, cooked in a steam vent.
Good game, the little black one said. Fine game, but what's the point? You're not going to get these things. They're not going to happen. You're going to kneel down and bend over and press your forehead to the sand and wait for a storm to cover you over.
She stopped in the middle of the black desert.
“Where is my Help Beyond Comprehension?” she roared at the sky.
