“Not when I left her,” Ariel said. “I don’t think the forge means it’s worse, it just means the main workshop is hotter than Hell. I don’t know what she’s making, but since when did I ever? It didn’t seem to be anything serious. Just another bout of moody creativity,” she eyed Ash significantly. “I’m sure the timing is a complete coincidence.”
“Just as well you’re here to hold us both together,” Ash said with a grin to hide just how much she meant what she was saying. “It must be difficult to be the responsible one, when there are so many bikinis out there that need filling.”
“That reminds me,” Ariel grumbled, “I have to be back in the city for a shoot in,” she looked at her watch, “four hours. So unless you need me for anything else…” she sighed as Ash, still looking at her frankly over her shoulder and not breaking eye-contact, reached out and pushed her cigar butt into the passenger-side ashtray. “You’re welcome,” Ariel concluded resignedly.
“It’s an ashtray, sweetheart. This is literally what it’s designed to do.”
“Since most of what you just jammed in there was soggy tobacco-leaf and not, in fact, ashes, your use of ‘literally’ is inaccurate at best,” Ariel said firmly.
“‘Ashtray’ is short for ‘ashes-and-butts-tray’.”
“Sort of like ‘Ashley’ is short for ‘Ashes-and-butts-ley’?”
“Weak.”
“The past three hours of trying to talk your brooding face out of Angstville has pretty much tapped out my quip supply.”
Ash chuckled and pushed herself out of the car. Ariel sighed again, climbed out and rounded Thursday’s gleaming flank, bent at the passenger door and tugged out the little ashtray box. It was mostly filled with candy wrappers and parking permits, with the cigar mashed into the top. Closing the door, Ariel made her way to the garage.
Ash, it seemed, had also detoured that way rather than heading in through the front entrance. Ariel caught up with her just inside the wide roller door, where – sure enough – the heaped debris of Roon’s latest attack of creativity turned the brightly-lit space into an obstacle course. It would be difficult to walk through it, let alone bring a car through. Ash was examining the chaos with a discerning yet ultimately confused eye. There was a method to it, an underlying logic and an ultimate plan, but it was generally one only Roon could see. Right now, it just seemed to be random piles of engine parts, connected by lines of circuitry and components and cables of various thicknesses.
The door to the second garage-workshop – now the main workshop, Ariel thought – was standing open and the heat was little more than ambient warmth at this disconnect, quite welcome in the evening’s gathering chill. It was likely to be less pleasant inside the main workshop, but fortunately they didn’t need to go through there.
Roon’s forge, or refinery, or whatever you wanted to call it – it really depended on what she was using it for at the time, Ariel didn’t know the correct terminology and Roon herself seemed to write her own books in that regard – was a compact series of furnaces and smelters that, as usual, the whole family had pulled together to get built. Roon didn’t use the machinery often, but when she did it was usually because she needed to create an alloy, or cast metal to a certain purity level, unavailable even to the super-wealthy. That meant custom-crafting it.
Roon herself was sitting in a folding chair, tinkering with a heavy piece of well-oiled machinery that Ariel remembered buying about a dozen of at the expo that day. A card table next to her was arrayed with a series of screwdrivers, a soldering iron and a coffee cup, as well as the bulky bronze-coloured shape of something she had presumably cast in the main workshop, out of some obscenely rare hybrid metal she’d also made in the main workshop. It looked like a very small, round cannon cut in half, a gleaming metal trencher with a heat-blackened handle on either side. Its interior, as bright and clean as a bronze mirror, was intricately curved and segmented like the inside of a robot seashell. Ariel could see how a second half could be placed over the top of the first to create a squat, barrel-like … thingy … with a pair of handles and a slightly-flared snout, like a chubby vintage pygmy death ray.
And that was the problem, Ariel concluded helplessly, with Roon’s inventions. You inevitably ran into what she and Ash referred to as the Thingy Barrier, where all you could do was declare that your brilliant, broken sister had created a thingy, and then say what it sort of looked like.
Roon was wearing glasses, or more accurately a monocle. She didn’t need it for seeing better as far as Ariel knew, but she often donned the device when she was performing delicate work. Ash had told Ariel it was a receiving-recording device of some kind, and the way she’d gone thin-lipped when she said it made Ariel fairly sure it was some sort of classified military tech Ash hadn’t wanted Roon playing around with. But hadn’t stopped her for whatever reason.
Roon looked up at Ariel and smiled, her eyes bright and mismatched with the monocle in place. Then she went back to her work.
“Those,” Ash said softly to Ariel, pointing, “are aeroplane components. Did you buy another jet, or did you let her take your old one apart, or did you just get more pieces from somewhere?”
“None of the above,” Ariel murmured, “the jet’s still in Paris. Those, she’s just made out of car pieces.”
“You can’t make–” Ash shook her head, and pointed again. “The intakes, at least, they’re from that boat of yours.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Of course, jet boat and jet plane are completely different things, even with those pieces you’d need to strengthen the … is that a carbon fibre … oh man, I’m going to bed,” Ash started to pick her way through the maze of pieces, perfectly balanced and catlike in her coordination despite the drink. “Try to leave us at least one working vehicle,” she told her sister, “and don’t touch the munitions locker.”
Roon flicked off a casual salute with her screwdriver, plugged a cable into the oiled metal contraption in her hand and placed it delicately inside the bronze shell. The construction remained inert, but she produced a voltmeter from the breast pocket of her coverall and touched it to a couple of points, nodded to herself, then picked out the evidently-finished object and set it onto a clean rag spread on the floor by her feet. Roon glanced up at Ariel as their sister found her way to the door at the far end of the garage and vanished from sight.
“She’s okay,” Ariel said. “The usual.”
Roon’s eyebrow twitched.
“Nineteen, she says.”
Nod.
“It wasn’t a bad one. But you know how it is. It may be the most efficient way of disqualifying people from the human race, but no matter how little they deserve to be here, it’s still a hard thing to pull the trigger.”
Eyebrow.
“Or stick the knife.”
Tilt.
“Or do the cool twisty neck-snap thing that she swears people don’t do but you just know they do all the damn time because let’s face it, it’s cool as shit.”
Smile.
“I’m going to bed,” Ariel declared, “I have to be at work in a few hours,” she looked down at the ashtray in her hand, and Roon pointed with her screwdriver. Ariel followed the line to a rubbish bin, crossed to it and emptied the little box out. “Goodnight.”
Ariel followed the path Ash had found through the jumble, stopped at the door into the house, and looked back.
Roon had taken a fresh component and was sitting with it in her lap, watching Ariel with a little smile on her breathtakingly lovely face. Ariel was helpless to prevent herself smiling in response, Roon bent her head back to her work, and Ariel went to bed.
By seven thirty, she was back behind Thursday’s wheel.
THAT DAY
I
Ariel drove directly to ‘the office’.
On this occasion ‘the office’ happened to be a closed set in the middle of Timor Park, one of the few green zones remaining within walking distance of Perth’s central business district
. The team from Cosmeta magazine had set up a large pavilion in case of rain – there’d already been a pattering of it as Ariel pulled out of Tumblehedge’s driveway but it didn’t really start in earnest until midday – and to protect from the worst of the wind that swept up the valley and pummelled the hillside park brutally even on good days. Today, Ariel came to realise as the Doc47 boomed the pavilion like a drum and the two ideologically-opposed photographers argued over everything from lighting to motivation to espresso-drinking style, was not going to be a good one.
Indeed, as the afternoon wound on and the wind and rain arced up into a genuine old-time B&S ball of a storm, the whole team fled into the nearby visitors’ centre that they’d also had the foresight to rent for the occasion, and continued the shoot against computer-assisted backdrops while crew members risked life and limb to pack up ‘the office’ before it carried them all to Kalgoorlie. Ariel managed to pep-talk the two photographers into settling most of their disagreements amicably and compromising on the rest, or at least into uniting in their disgust at the idiotic concept director who had decided they could somehow combine their visions on this editorial and had thus insisted on forcing them all together when clearly their strengths lay in working alone.
She didn’t quite manage to make them shake hands on the espresso thing.
II
Ash slept until nine, then went immediately to the gym.
The gym was actually a converted stable, a ludicrous conceit even back when the place had been built – not a single horse had ever crossed the threshold of Tambleigh Heath, let alone the new incarnation that was Tumblehedge, and the spacious series of little connected-up buildings along the rear boundary of the property had been clean and empty since the days of Ash’s grandfather, whose own father had briefly attempted to use the stables as a combined family museum and whiskey distillery, but had ultimately given up on what turned out to be an endeavour that contained the seeds of its own demise.
Ash had repurposed them into a set of training rooms and almost every resident of Tumblehedge used them in their own ways. Even Aunt Agñasta occasionally enjoyed a sparring session in the fencing gear – with her formidable niece – and an even more occasional sauna – strictly by herself. Only Jarvis avoided the place, claiming it was unnatural.
Ash performed her own series of esoteric and self-devised exercises, geared more towards stretching muscle and tendon and burning off the last of the alcohol in her system than building up any one particular skill or strength. She spent forty-five minutes on the computer-guided reflex-honing program – what Ariel gleefully insisted on calling “that corny ol’ shoot-em-up game” – and another thirty on the sparring bars, before winding down on a sequence of other equipment, a lot of which she and Roon had built together.
Then she returned to the house, had breakfast, went for a run, sat on the verandah and smoked a cigar and watched the rain, had a brief but satisfying snark-off with Jarvis, then retired to her room with the tray of lunch he’d prepared for her, to edit and send off her official mission report for the unit. She invariably wrote the whole report right after returning home and before going out to drink, then took it out the next day and scrubbed it of all subtext, cynicism, veiled and not-so-veiled socio-political commentary and puns that had seemed darkly hilarious at the time but were, in the cold light of day, just ghoulish. Sometimes this left her with very little text to work with, but her supervisors weren’t big readers anyway.
Then she spent some time corresponding with various friends and colleagues who would be waiting for word, as well as the families of her teammates. They, of course, would already be aware of the situation – this time, blessedly, they’d all come home and she hadn’t needed to send any of those messages – but she liked to send a personal greeting and thank-you. There were different kinds of sacrifice, and the people who stayed behind often made the hardest ones of all.
III
Gabriel read the dossier on the Vandemar family one more time, just – he admitted to himself – to put off shaving.
He hated shaving. He didn’t do it very often, and had to concede that it was mostly his own warped self-consciousness that made him do it. People noticed him, or didn’t notice him, at about the same frequency whether he shaved or not. Yes, when he shaved there was a certain easing of the burden he needed to lay on observers to make them ignore him, but that was practically automatic and effortless these days anyway. No, it was more than that. When Gabriel shaved, he felt as though he was making himself more presentable.
Patently ridiculous, of course, and if any of the other Angels knew about his neuroses they would snigger behind their fluffy white wings … but there it was.
Of course, there wasn’t a driving need to shave everywhere, since clothes would cover most of it … and the way he looked, once shaved, tended to divert attention from any incidentally over-hairy bits that had been left unmolested. But in order to enjoy that small benefit, he had to shave at least his face and his neck, and he hated it.
And so he read the dossier, came to the same conclusion he’d come to the past three times he’d read it – that of cautious optimism tempered by dozens of crushing disappointments, but overall a certainty of a decidedly unscientific and baseless ninety-five percent, making it worth the trip by a solid but still unscientific twenty-percent margin – and then he shaved his face and neck and hands and as far up his wrists as he could bear to, and cropped the thick, lush fur of his forearms down to a heavy fuzz for good measure before dressing, packing up files and minimal belongings, and repairing to the church roof.
He followed the sun west, first chasing the sunset and then fleeing the dawn, from New York to California. He rested through the day in a little chapel on the edge of the ocean, then – after waiting for the fabled green flash as the sun dipped below the Pacific horizon and, approximately the eight hundred and three thousandth time in a row since the world went all ball on him, failing to see it – launched himself south-westwards once more.
IV
Sloane took a brisk walk, visiting the grocery store, pet shop and then the post office to retrieve the mail from his post box.
He returned home, read his mail, paid his bills, ate a brunch of rice cakes and veg-protein cheese, finished it off with a banana and a glass of milk, and then sat in comfortable silence for two hours and forty-seven minutes. Then he rose, stretched, and retrieved the little straw-padded box he’d brought from the pet store. He moved to his well-lit and plastic-covered card table, sat, opened the box carefully, and lifted the trembling hamster out.
Another one hour and fifty-three minutes later, he disposed of the remains in the kitchen sink’s compost grinder, showered, and cooked some pasta for dinner.
Sloane had issues. Sloane’s issues had issues.
V
Aunt Agñasta was out of the country, due to return home that very afternoon.
She was in Singapore, and consequently terrorising a check-in clerk who was not being paid anywhere near enough to be expected to tell Agñasta Mulqueen where her bags were, why the flight out of Paris had been delayed, why the two first-class seats she had booked for herself had been allocated with an aisle in between them instead of side by side, and who would answer for the inconvenience she had gone to considerable expense to avoid.
Aunt Agñasta was not a large woman – in fact, she was just on the upper edge of petite, escaping both ‘skinny and wizened’ and ‘tiny and furious’ by a margin as comfortable as her own in-built padding. She did, however, loathe sharing her personal space and even the relatively capacious first class seats were too close for comfort and almost inevitably resulted in her being forced to talk to somebody she did not want to talk to. And that never turned out well for anyone concerned, for as smart as she was she had yet to master – or even accept the value of mastering – the art of small talk or polite, non-devastating conversational dissuasion. She usually travelled by one of the Vandemar Trust or Vandemar Holdings private jets, or a plane be
longing to one or another of the vast multinational corporations the Vandemar family owned or controlled, or she would simply ‘borrow’ Ariel’s own jet and its pilot, Launchpad. His name wasn’t Launchpad, but Aunt Agñasta had a sense of humour that was strictly not of this century.
On this occasion there had been no recourse but to fall back on ‘public transportation’, and having paid the price for doing so Agñasta Mulqueen was determined that any further paying would be done exclusively by others.
VI
Jarvis was awake before Ariel – only about an hour after Ariel and Ash went to sleep, as a matter of fact – and was finished with the majority of his ‘housework’ well before lunchtime.
He left his usual impeccably-placed and completely-unnecessary notices, took one of the more humble cars into town, and did some grocery shopping. By the time he returned, it was raining heavily and Ash was sitting on the verandah, puffing moodily on one of the enormous military-chic cigars that he knew she favoured for the dual reasons of her late father smoking the same variety, and the way they made her look and feel like a tough special-forces-slash-generalissimo type. A classic coping mechanism that he had long since noted she used with greater frequency after returning from a mission, even if she tended to drink the worst of the poison out of her system within the first couple of nights of her return.
Well-aware of her other coping mechanisms, he fixed her a large lunch and left it on a tray near the stairs leading up to her room, where she wouldn’t fail to spot it as she strode away after – hypothetically, for example – soundly whipping him in a battle of verbal wits.
He joined her on the verandah, folded his hands and waited for her opening salvo.
VII
And Roon worked, and worked, and worked.
AACTUR (AN ATTEMPTED BUT
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