by Ian McDonald
“Who the hell else do you think I’d be?”
“Don’t know. Seen a lotta weird stuff recently, so now I ask everyone. I’m Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
The man Bedassie looked thoughtful.
“That’s a good mouth-filling name. That ought to keep you safe.”
“What? My name?”
“It’s got strength in it. The weak things go first.”
“What’re you talking about? What you doing up there anyway? You the town paedophile or something?”
“It’s the plague.”
“Plague? I’m out of here if there’s plague.”
“Yes. You should. Go on. Go now.”
“That’s why you’re up there. You’re the plague…If you’ve given me something…”
“I’m not the cause. I’m the cure.”
Sweetness looked up at the face looking down at her between the Preeds guttees, at the bondage-bus hanging in its chains, at the hovering cloud like a cup of sour ash soup, at the pillared plaza for something that would offer an explanation of what she was seeing.
“This is all mad,” she challenged the visible world. An acid grumble in Sweetness’s stomach reminded her of physiological reality. Place your bets: plague, or starvation in the desert. “You got anything to eat? Can’t rightly say how long since I last ate.”
“Not much,” the man in the bus said. “They only feed me twice a day.”
“Anything’ll do.”
“Hang on a wee moment, then.” He rolled over into the dark on the van, reappeared a moment later lying on his belly, right arm aiming a torpedo-shaped bread-roll down at Sweetness.
“I don’t eat the bread, I’ve got gluten allergy. Don’t know why I held on to this, usually I chuck them out for the hawks. Must’ve had a premonition.”
He speared it down, Sweetness took it in cupped hands, tore it apart, crammed it into her mouth. It was stale; each mouthful was like soil, but it was food, it filled bellies. When she had finished, she looked around the elegant arcades.
“How do they get it up to you?”
“Pulley and a basket.”
Sweetness pondered this a moment, then jumped to the inevitable next question.
“So what about, you know?”
“Let’s say, I wouldn’t go round the other side of the van.”
“Fair enough,” Sweetness said. “So just what did you do, then?”
“Nothing. My job. Entertained the people. Showed them humours and horrors, gods and monsters, all human life. And for that, they pay me with industrial grade chains and bread-rolls in a bucket.”
“Have you some problem with straight answers?”
The man laughed. He looked as if the laugh had surprised him, like an ex-smoker hacking in the morning. Stuff still down there.
“No. No, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. I have absolutely no problem with straight answers. This is as straight as they can come in this place.”
Sweetness huffed in frustration and instead tried to scry some truth from the fluorescent curvery on the side of the truck.
“So, what does a cloud-cineaste do, anyroad?”
At which a bell began to clang, leaden and mean as a miser’s funeral.
“You’re about to find out,” Sanyap Bedassie said, glancing up. Sweetness looked where he looked. Down each of the avenues that radiated out from the zocalo’s cardinal points, Solid Gone’s citizenry was advancing. Young and old, male and female, sick and halt, a slow, spreading wave of brown and drab, like a terminus honey-wagon unburdening itself of a cargo of nightsoil. They lurched in time with the tolling of the iron bell. Hup! hayfoot, hup, strawfoot. Another metaphor came to Sweetness’s mind: the nasties that Sle and Rother’am liked to watch in Sle’s cubby when they thought no one else was about, munching nimki, faces bathed blue in the zombie-light, snickering at the dismemberments. No: these trans-dead had a purpose, a lust, a blood-hunger. These people just came, and came, and came, closing their doors neatly behind them, safely pocketing their keys, falling into step, spreading sludgily across the cobbles, filling all available space. They nudged against Sweetness as if she was not there. Soft jostles. They did not even smell of anything. Ghosts have no scent.
“What’s going on?” she called up at the hoisted van but Sanyap Bedassie had slipped inside. The last citizen took up his place in the square. Every face was upturned to the cloud of gloom. The power generators hummed; electricity arced blue as burning Belladonna brandy around the porcelain insulators. The sense of something-about-to-happen was palpable as a summer sandstorm. The satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing on the roof unfolded like a night-blooming flower. Aerials ran up, dishes spun out like petals, cooling vanes fanned forth. A soft oooh ran through the people as a translucent pink erectile thing slid priapically out of the centre of the blossom of dishes and aimed itself at the coiled heart of the hot grey cloud.
Sweetness was entranced. Even if it did nothing more, the sheer drama of the unfolding bizarre technology would have been worth standing in this square with a cricked neck. But it did not do nothing more. It did a definite something. Power peaked to a sharp, ozoney, bone-buzzing crescendo: a pink beam stabbed the soft underbelly of the cloud.
Later, Sweetness would swear that the cloud flinched.
The grey folds and pleats of cloud billowed downward, threatening the cornices and photon-towers of Solid Gone. Sweetness lifted her arms in front of her face: she could feel the heat from the unnatural cloud, then the curds rolled back and, as they did, she saw them change shape. No, not change shape. Take shape. The cloud mass was folding into figures, a man and woman, god-sized, seated behind a curving desk. Behind them, a complicated kind of a wall, with a window in it, which seemed to look out on a still-indistinct but altogether other scene. The base of the cloud was shaped into massive, three-dimensional images, hanging over the burghers of Solid Gone. As the cloud gained shape, it also gained colour. Rivulets of hue, like prismatic lighting, ran from the place where the beam pinkly penetrated the cloud, stained the mist-figures, intermingled, formed new colours, gave movement and character to the grey icons.
“Oh my Mother’a’grace,” Sweetness Asiim Engineer exclaimed. “It’s the seven o’clock news.”
Huge as hills, Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap, DFLP Belladonna’s Little Miss Bright’n’Breezy and Mr. Big Truth, smiled down on the adoring faces of Solid Gone. Behind them, their famous Eye on the World opened a window into greater depths of the enchanted cloud, showing an image of sleek black Corvettes rolling up at an imposing flight of steps, disgorging waving people in formal dress and being valet-parked.
“Wow,” said Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.
The cloud convulsed again, throbbed like distant hill-thunder, then spoke.
“Regional leaders have arrived in Molesworth for the inauguration of the new Gubernator, Cossivo Beldene, whose Unity Rising Party won a landslide victory. However, the Anarchs of Deuteronomy and Grand Valley declined the invitation, citing undeclared funding by the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family and rumoured links to the Human League anti-machinist terror group,” Ashkander Beshrap said in his famous if-you-can’t-trust-me-who-can-you-trust? newsreader’s voice that shook the rooks from the roof-tiles.
The people watched “The Early Evening News” without comment but Sweetness could see them, one by one, standing taller, straightening up; noticed the corners of expression on their faces, creases in the eyes, tiny smile-seeds around the lips. By some unseen process, the colour seemed to drip from the cloud into their clothes. They watched the regional sports results and the market reports. By the time Sanka Déhau came to her solo Chitter-Chatter-Chit Celebrity Snippet, there were spontaneous outbreaks of delight in the zocalo. The news of Chaste Thercy, the Duenna of the Belladonna Opera’s adultery and pending divorce was greeted with applause and cheers. A favourable review of Blain Bethryn in a
new comedy by the Stapledon Regional Comedy Theatre was greeted with whistling and stamping of feet. The rumour of a new studio album by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces caused near-hysteria. They whooped the local weather forecast and laughed in the streets when Anjea Ankersonn told them it would be another high of thirty-two, humidity twelve percent, chance of significant precipitation…
“Zero!” the crowd yelled in concert, and, laughing, holding their sides with delight, tears streaming down their faces they broke up into chattering, hand-shaking, back-slapping groups and made their way out of the zocalo into the side streets, into their homes and houses.
Sweetness stood alone in the plaza.
The voice from the sky fell silent. The pink ray ceased. Instantly, the colour ebbed from the clouds, the grey figures boiled and broke up into exercises in fractal geometry. The heat pressed down like a sweaty hand on the plaza. The rooks returned to their roosts, demoralised dusters of ragged feathers.
Sanyap Bedassie’s tousled head poked out of the door of the campervan.
“That answer you?” he asked Sweetness, then cupped his hands and called out at the windowless bourse-halls, “You all be back for the nine o’clock bulletin! Tears and laughter, drama and gravitas. Births, marriages and deaths. Agony and ecstasy. Corn and passion. Dust and monstrous crimes. Nights in the roof gardens of Hy Brazyl. Volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, plagues of devouring star-bees. God parting the dust clouds; old women gossiping. Love and death and the whole damn thing. Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars.”
“But,” Sweetness interjected, “it’s the evening news.”
“Correct!” Sanyap Bedassie said. “If I were you, I’d lie down, because this takes a bit of explaining, and you’ll do your neck, craning up like that.”
“What? Here?”
“It’s just dust. And you look no stranger to dust.”
Sweetness sat down. She felt the grain of the sand between the rounded cobbles. No stranger indeed. But she was reluctant to stretch out belly up on the surface of the zocalo. She did not like to be so open and exposed to this suspended cineaste.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” Bedassie lay prostrate in the campervan, looking down into Sweetness’s face.
“I’m not sitting, and I’m definitely not comfortable.”
“It’s a formula.” His hair hung around down his face. “Then, I’ll begin.”
For two years now the plague of dreamlessness had ravaged Solid Gone. For years longer—whole of the world’s long decades—it had stalked the lonesome townships of the desert fringe like a dust-devil. Many a sand-scoured tumble of red adobe attested to its power to devastate communities. Theories abounded about its nature and origin—the most scientific among those who took it as more than a legend from the Big Red was that it was some kind of infectious meme borne on the magnetic anomalies stirred up by the frequent rust-storms. The manner of its coming was always the same. After a period of sapping heat and high pressure, of thick heads and infuriating, set-slapping wireless interference, the citizens of the infected township would wake amazed by the vividness, clarity and sheer bizarreness of their dreams. They would sit around on their porches, under their tea-shop awnings, in the shadow of their house walls, slapping their thighs and shaking their heads as friends and families narrated the weird stuff inside their heads. This was the period of incubation. For a week the dreams would batter the subconsciouses of their victims, until the people were dazed colourless by the intensity of their night-life. Then one night, everyone dreamed the same dream. This was that dream. A sky of boiling black milk, shot through with lightnings, hung over an endless desert of silver sand. An edible dog—pure white, with one black ear—stood on the sand, by the self-contradictory logic of dreams, at once minute and sky-scaringly vast. It would shake its head, then look the dreamer in the soul’s eye. It would bark three times. Strangely huge, those barks. Paralysing, night-terrorising. “The sky shook,” the people would say next day when they sat down together to recount their dreams. “Like a stone nail through the heart.” Then the white dog would turn, glance back once over its shoulder, and with its perky ring prominent, trot off into the heat-haze. What the dreamers never realised—or if they did realise, were helpless to prevent—was that that one look back summoned their dreams, and that when the dog trotted away into the deep desert, their dreams scampered behind it, sniffing its heat.
That was the last dream anyone dreamed.
At first it seemed a blessing. Clear heads, bright eyes, no morning mouth. Good day to you, citizen; and to you, sir. Sleep well? Ah! Pull back of the shoulders, stretch, smile. Sleep of the righteous, comrade. Like the very dead. Days, weeks, a month; deep and dreamless. No one noticed that there was less and less to talk about under the tea-shop awnings, leaning against the trackside signal lights waiting for the slow morning mail, or that sleep was no longer as righteous as it had once been, that it pressed down heavy as lead sheets all the hot night, impossible to throw off next morning. There was never a time when the people noticed that the light of that morning was not as bright as the one before, that the tea was pale and insipid, that the music on the breakfast show was just irritating. That the colour was draining out of life. That they sat up hour after hour, with the million lights of the moonring tumbling over their roof tiles, later than late, afraid to tell their friends lovers others that they did not want to go to bed for dread of that planetary, crushing sleep. That when next they woke, the light could be a mere lightening of night, that the tea could be warm water, that the wireless could sing in static, that all colours had run into one. That they no longer cared that it was so.
No one cared. No one laughed. No one cried. No one went out. No one made a joke. No one read a book. No one wrote a love letter, or fell in or out of love. No one loved. No one looked up at the tumbling jewels of the moonring with an ooh in the heart. No one woke in the night to the plaint of the night-train whistles and begged them, Take me where you are going. No one sang. No one danced. No one dandled a child upon the knee, much less thought to conceive one. No one bought a good frock or a new shirt or fine fine shoes. No one ached, no one hoped, no one longed, no one aspired, no one imagined, no one dreamed.
It was about that time that the grey cloud, sign and seal of the plague of dreamlessness, known and shunned by those more desert-wise than Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th, fixed itself over Solid Gone.
Many a town had died this way, withered by its own grey apathy. Nothing lives long when its dreams have died. But for a naive young cloud-cineaste, inheritor of a truck-load of marvels and inspiration from a mad, visionary great-aunt, Solid Gone would have ended swallowed by the dust.
“I mean, you get to expect people not turning out to greet you, out here,” Sanyap Bedassie said to by-now entranced Sweetness. “It’s kind of old-fashioned, folk’s grandparents’ll talk about the Cloudchanger and wasn’t it great and sure that was how I met your grandmother and all that, but most of the young ones, all they want to know about is this dance stuff. Even so, when I got right in here and there was absolutely no one around, I was beginning to think, even for the edgelands, this is odd. But free parking’s free parking and, hey, no kids coming poking at things, asking, hey mister, what’s that do?
“So, I hang out the flags. Not a soul. This happens. I unfold the aerial, set the thing up. Still nothing. If I hadn’t seen them, sitting on their verandahs, just staring, I’d’ve sworn I’d stumbled into one of those edgeland ghost towns you hear about. Anyway, I power up the dream-projector—I mean, half the reason for coming to this place is because they’ve got a perfect cloud hanging right over their heads!”
“I was going to ask you about that,” Sweetness said. “Like, a cloud cinny-hoojahflip, in a desert? Your great-aunt was mad, and you inherited it.”
“That’s what they say about all artists.”
“All artists aren’t stuck in a campervan ten metres up in the middle of a town square. And if you ask me, artist or no
t, it’s a pretty dumb thing to get trapped because of a perfect cloud.” When she saw how he shrugged; that that shrug was mostly a flinch, Sweetness wished she had not said the thing about being trapped. “Sorry,” she whispered. “So, how come?”
“So, I set the thing up—you know how it works?” He did not wait for the answer she did not give. “Well, it’s not your simple cinema. To work properly, you have to allow it to get into your head, pull out all your dreams and hopes and ambitions and fears. Everyone’s got cinema inside them. There’s clever machinery in there, takes your dreams, gives them plot and character and structure and all that, animates them, stick them up in the clouds.”
“But if there’re no dreams…”
“You get brain-static.”
“So, the evening news?”
“I was running it as a test programme. And they just started coming. It was like the stones had started walking. All those grey faces. I thought—well, you know my trade, you can imagine the kind of thing I was thinking.”
Yes, thought Sweetness, mind lit by the garish blue glare of her brother’s masher-movies.
“They came walking in, like you saw just there. Every last one of them. I didn’t think they were going to stop. I thought they were just going to walk right over me, trample me into the cobbles—next morning, there’d be like an oval of flat metal in the middle of the square. But I couldn’t get out. I was surrounded. And they stopped, and they stood there and every man jack of them looked up and no one said a word. Not one word. And they watched the news, right the way through to the end. I turned the thing off, and waited. I didn’t know what was going to happen. For all I knew, they’d pick up a cobble each and wade in. And then, one woman smiled. She was this plump, plain, middle-aged woman—nothing special about her, but that smile stood out in this square like a beacon. I saw it run out from her, like roots going out from a plant, I saw that smile go running around the square like some kid picking pockets, and they were all smiling, and then they were all laughing and crying and cheering and clapping and just sitting there with these big tears of ecstasy running down their cheeks. I tell you something, I never had an audience reaction like that. Never.”