by Ian McDonald
“Aw, come on,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn't the end.
As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness's ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm's passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.
Next round would go to the canvas.
Sweetness heaved herself out of the hole, suspiciously sniffed the air. It was clean and good and wonderfully clear, like clothes beaten by a dhobi boy. With her new clarity of vision, Sweetness now saw an object far on the western horizon, previously obscured by dust and heat haze. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Had she not seen such things before—indeed, spent a night with that man under one—she would have disbelieved her eyes. They told her true. The thing looked like—and therefore was—nothing more than a domestic, fireside companion set—poker, brush, shovel, tongs—big enough to keep hell tended.
An afternoon's walk brought her to the prodigy. The central column and cap rose like the dome of a great, airy temple. Sweetness walked under it, wondering at the artifacts hanging from its rim. The poker was a sheer steel shaft, thirty metres long, slowly penduluming in the rising evening breeze. The brush bristles had been sadly abraded by the duststorm, lopsided and graded like a Belladonna goondah's asymmetrical buzz-cut. The shovel could have scooped up hosts of the sinful for the tongs to hold in the white heart of purgatory's forges. Sweetness steered away from the hungry, pronged jaws. All were polished metal, scoured clean by the dust, brilliant in the evening sun.
Sweetness started as she rounded the corner of the base to find two figures huddled against the plinth. Figures, she presumed, though they were man-shaped bundles of ochre-stained fabric. Dust-mummies, she thought, at which they both moved, shedding clouds of dust. Sweetness took a step back. Out here, jokes and superstitions and impossibilities turned up behind every rock, real and able and eager to do stuff to you. The mummies shuffled to their feet. They beat their wrappings free of dust with their bandaged hands. Sweetness saw then that they wore long duster coats and baggy trader's pants with thick-wound puttees. The hands then rose to the bulbous brown heads, fiddled for a loose end and streeled off more metres of cloth than Sweetness ever imagined you could wear around your head without suffocating. Obsidian eyeballs glittered; Sweetness relaxed when a few turns more revealed them to be little, round-eye sunspectacles. Faces emerged, one tall and square, the other round and purse-lipped. Both wore identical hairstyles, shaved at the sides, teased up into a flat-topped mesa. They looked dedicated and zealous as they kicked away their discarded binding bands. Sweetness might have been stone to them for all their regard.
“A storm that was,” the square-faced, taller one said, taking a theatrical upright pose.
“Storm indeed, Cadmon,” the other agreed, copying him.
“Unseasonable.” The square one made a slow sweep of the horizon.
“Unseasonable indeed, Cadmon.” The squat one followed suit.
“One might almost think…”
“One might; one does, Cadmon.”
Sweetness watched their act for a few moments before clearing her throat. The two men turned as one; black round eyes regarded her, heads cocked to precisely the same degree.
“What is this? A fellow traveller in strange terrains?” The heads cocked the reverse angle.
“Would seem so, Cadmon.”
“A girl, I would hasten.”
“Hasten so, Cadmon.”
“Look, I don't mean to butt in here if you're doing something, but have you got any food or water?”
The two men looked at each other.
“Water and provender, for our guest?” the tall one, obviously Cadmon, asked.
“Exactly so, Cadmon,” the still nameless one answered and took a small bulb from one of the many pockets of the utility vest he wore beneath his duster. A soft squeeze. Sweetness waited for something to happen, then noticed a small stirring in the dust. Buried things unearthing themselves. Dust boiled and shed. Two gravboards with bulging leather side-panniers bobbed to the surface and came to rest at a level metre.
“Cool,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.
Water there was, and provender, in square-faced Cadmon's carefully weighed usage. Sweetness ate smally and carefully, sipped her water and used two handfuls to wipe the caked dirt off her face. Then she asked, “So, what are you guys doing out here then?”
“That question, I rather think, is better asked of you, madam,” Cadmon said. The short one nodded.
“I'm a story,” Sweetness said, then regretted her enthusiasm, for now she had committed herself to telling it yet again.
“No no no,” Cadmon interjected with a raised finger, mimicked by his partner. “Names, then stories.”
“Okay,” Sweetness said. “I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
The two men bowed slightly.
“I am Cadmon, and this is Euphrasie,” Cadmon said, with a sweep of the hand which the shorter man could not refrain from distantly echoing. “We are the Brothers Dust.”
Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “But you're not brothers.”
“Brothers of the soul,” Cadmon said.
“Soul, indeed,” Euphrasie chimed in. “Brothers aesthetic, atheistic, anarchic.”
“We are anarchist artists,” Cadmon said. “Behold, our work.”
As one, the Brothers Dust thrust out their hands to the enormous fireside companion set, in the lengthening shade of which this exchange had taken place.
“Do you do a lot of household stuff?” Sweetness asked.
“You are familiar with our work?” Cadmon asked loftily.
“I've slept under some of it.”
“Which, pray?” Euphrasie responded, quick as a pocket-picking.
“The big chair,” Sweetness said. She added, “I've seen the ironing board from a distance. And the big shoe.”
“The big shoe!” Cadmon and Euphrasie chorused in one voice.
Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but how is it anarchy to do big ironing boards and shoes?”
“The anarchy of incongruity,” Cadmon proclaimed.
“And the domestic,” Euphrasie added. “Domesticating the desert.”
“And desertifying the domestic,” Cadmon insisted. “Thus we confound two static absolutes: the desert without and the desert within.”
“But don't we live in an anarchy?” Sweetness asked, sweetly.
“Habitual anarchy is no anarchy at all,” Cadmon said.
“The revolution must be continual if it is to be the true revolution.”
“True anarchy is archy.”
“I must invent a non-system or be enslaved by another man's.”
Sweetness looked at the two desert-clad men, cocked her head in that way.
“Are you butty-boys?” she asked.
Cadmon maintained high disdain, but Sweetness caught Euphrasie turning away and lifting his hand to his mouth to suppress a chuckle.
“We are living art,” Cadmon said. Okay, Sweetness thought.
“And art consists as much in the unmaking as the making,” Euphrasie said.
“Look, I don't do art, so you'll have to
explain this,” Sweetness said.
“Explain? Very well. This project is complete. True art is momentary; the false strives for immortality. We make and we unmake. Now is the time of unmaking.”
Sweetness looked to Euphrasie for elucidation. He merely swivelled his eyes upward to the mushroom-cap of the companion set. For the first time Sweetness noticed the clustered white cylinders fastened to the shaft and around the rim of the cap, the gaily coloured wires, the radio transponders.
“You're not…”
Euphrasie nodded and produced another bulb device from his vest of pockets.
“You have something in the region of thirty seconds to decide whether you come with us, or bet on how fast you can run,” Cadmon said, gathering up his discarded wrappings and stuffing them into a carry-all bag, which he slung on to the back of the nearer of the two fretting gravboards.
“Me? On one of those?”
“Twenty seconds…” Euphrasie had already mounted his gravboard and was erecting the boom.
“All right, I'm not betting, I'm not betting!” Sweetness scooped up her bag and dived for Euphrasie's board. The mercurial machine rocked under her, she fought for balance, grabbed at Euphrasie, who by seizing her shirt-front prevented them both from capsizing. Wind cracked Cadmon's pink and purple fractal patterned sail. The board pitched, then the rising evening breeze lifted it and whipped it away. Within instants, he was a lost toy in the great redness.
“Hold tight!” Euphrasie called to Sweetness, pressed cheek to scapular.
“Tell me,” Sweetness muttered into his back, but all the same the sudden dip and surge of the board almost upset her as Euphrasie tilted the boom into the wind and the board took flight.
“Whoo!” exclaimed Sweetness Asiim Engineer as the rippled dust blurred beneath her. The second board tacked sharply, caught a stronger air current and slid up alongside big, vain Cadmon.
“Zero!” he shouted to Euphrasie over the flutter of sail and the shout of wind. The smaller man held out the bulb-teat. Cadmon nodded for Sweetness to look back, which she did, dizzyingly, and so missed Euphrasie depressing the nipple. The effects were impressive. The big companion set stood tall and black and domestic on the horizon. As she watched, white blossoms of flame exploded briefly underneath the rim, indeed like some vast desert mushroom sporing explosively. The fall was slow and tremendous. Had the Skywheel itself snapped and fallen flailing to earth, it could not have been more thunderous and aristocratic. Explosions around the edge of the cap first freed the poker, which fell straight to earth and embedded itself a third-deep in the sand. The brush fell to earth in a comet's tail of blazing bristles: fireballs and sparks rebounded high as it smashed into the ground. Multiple detonations disintegrated the tongs into flying, clawed shards. Only the shovel remained. Unbalanced by its weight, the cap tilted, then the shaft blew apart beneath it in an orgy of detonations. The falling shovel threw a spadeful of hot desert twenty metres into the air. Like a bell falling from God's campanile, the cap struck the ground. The chime shivered Sweetness's ovaries in her belly. Fractions of a second later, the shockwave ruffled her hair and tugged her clothes, sent the gravboard yawing.
The second pillar of smoke in Sweetness's day went up from the wreckage of art.
“You're mad, you are!” Sweetness exclaimed as Euphrasie sent the board sweeping round on a great sand-scoring arc. She liked the way he smiled, pleased and self-deprecating at once. Almost that smile. Remember, butty-boy, she advised herself. And if you go on falling for every male who smiles that smile, and they probably all do, this story is going to end with you tripping over the end of the next chapter. But, she decided as the gravboard scored away from the smouldering wreckage across the Big Red and she felt man body beneath her fingers and smelled man smells whipped back in the wind of her velocity that was streaming her hair straight back from her good cheekbones: this is what stories are all about. “Wooo!” she yelled, for the second time that day.
She decided she liked fruitboy anarchist artists. She tugged Euphrasie's quilted sleeve.
“Where are we going?”
“Depends,” he shouted into the slipstream.
“On what?”
“On where you want to go.”
“Me?”
“Our work is done.”
“You've blown them all up?”
“Unto the last.”
“Even the big shoe?”
“The aglets flew three hundred metres in opposite directions.”
Aglets sounded to Sweetness Engineer like juvenile birds of prey, so three hundred metres might or might not be an impressive flight, but she understood and appreciated the pride in a good job well done in Euphrasie's voice. It's not an easy thing to do an explosion really well. Likewise, she understood and delighted in the thrilling velocity with which she skimmed across the desert, low enough for the sand sprayed up by the bow field to sting her ankles, up and over the dune crests with a leap and a yip and the bottom of her stomach falling out. These butty-boys had class. She liked them.
Sweetness hammered on Euphrasie's back.
“Molesworth!” she yelled when she had his attention. Euphrasie did not ask where or why. He nodded briskly, finger-talked with one hand to his partner out at point. Cadmon and Euphrasie leaned into their sails. The banking boards cut crescents in the red sand as they curved due south.
“Wooooeeee!” fanfared Sweetness Asiim Engineer, throwing her head back and letting her greasy bonny black hair reel out behind her like a banner of anarchy. She could still smell it. She could still smell herself, lick her brown forearm and taste minerals. She had little enough water in her blood and less provender in her belly. She was still wandering in sterile places, cannoning off people places events like the legendary Rael Mandella Jr.’s cue ball. Her childhood companion was still incarcerated in a trans-dimensional mirror rolled up in a canopic jar. Her enemy roamed the airways by pedal power, cautiously testing his command of the very angels that had built the world. She had no weapons, no power, no plan, not even a cunning scheme. But she still knew, with a traingirl's sense, that that electric buzz in the air is a big express coming; with the high-plain herder's understanding that that flaring of the nostrils running through the herd is a sure sign of rains; with the deep core miner's certainty as she burrows through the obsidian flux tubes of primal shield volcanoes that the next grike will glitter with diamonds; that though nothing was changed, everything was different. Before, those people places events had pushed her around. Now, somehow, she was pusher, not pushee. From here on, it would be an Adventure.
When the heat went out of the sky, they camped in the lee of the upended boards. The anarchists made fire and heated small, neat foil sachets of trail food in a bubbling billy. It was not sufficient and tasted badly enough of additives to catch the back of Sweetness's throat but she skewered the tiny cubes of synthetic meat in their clinging sauce with her plastic pitchfork and gobbled them down with gratitude. To while away the cooling hours while the edge of the world rose over the face of the sun in streaks of red gold and purple, like a Pontifical progress, Cadmon and Euphrasie played a game with Sweetness. It was We've-Got-To-Guess-Why-You're-Going-To-Molesworth-But-You're-Only-Allowed-To-Give-One-Word-Monosyllabic-Answers.
“Why?” Sweetness immediately asked.
“Because,” tall Cadmon answered. “And the way we play it, we've only got ten questions.”
“Okay.”
Euphrasie raised a warning finger, then another. He shook them in Sweetness's face.
“Right.”
He nodded.
“Wherefore, Molesworth?” Cadmon asked. Euphrasie sat close beside him, and nodded sagely.
Sweetness opened her mouth, then caught herself. She counted syllables on her fingers, grimaced.
“Folk.”
“First, second or third generation?”
“Third,” Sweetness said confidently. Cadmon and Euphrasie inclined their heads together. They seemed to speak, though Sweetness
heard no words in the cool cool cool of the evening.
“So, what do you flee?”
“Ring.” Sweetness twisted an imaginary third-finger-left-hand-gold-band. “But…”
Euphrasie furiously finger-wagged her.
“Clearly, this thing you seek in Molesworth is not a nuptial reconciliation,” Cadmon mused. Euphrasie whispered in his partner's ear. Cadmon nodded. “It's a grandparent, in my experience the most trustworthy of family members. So, not a reconciliation, but an alliance. You seek something together, do you not?”
“Twin,” Sweetness said. She mimed her second self, the quick knife of division. Cadmon and Euphrasie looked very slowly at each other.
“You need the assistance of your grandparent to seek the sundered self?”
Sweetness nodded, then added, “Ghost.” Without realising, she was caught up in the artists’ ludicrous after-dinner sport. Her tongue was bound; she could no more iterate two words, or more than one syllable, than she could have recited all Five Hundred Five-Hundred-Letter Tallabasserite names of God.
“This—half sister?—is dead? Is this some manner of seance, some necromancy or other?” Cadmon asked, his little spectacles catching spook-fire in their round lenses.
“Free.”
“Someone has stolen the ghost of your dead twin sister?”
“Yes.”
“Damnation! That was a rhetorical question. They don't count.”
Sweetness held up her two hands, where she had been counting off the quota of questions with finger and thumbs, to show beyond any argument that in her game, rhetoric counted. Cadmon took a breath and tried again.
“Given that ours is a low-scale mercantile culture and folk will sell anything to anyone, it's still valid to ask, why would anyone want to steal a ghost?”
Again Sweetness nodded. “Saint.” She pointed to where the brightest lights of the moonring clung to the horizon, drew her finger in an all-creating arc across the sky. When she looked back, both Cadmon and Euphrasie's mouths were open.