Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  They were arguing again, details, trivia; the exact numbers of each species in the Divine Menageries, whether the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast rode astride or sidesaddle, did God go to the toilet? and the colours of angels’ wings. At such times, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm thanked her lack of a sense of humour. Somebody had to have perspective. Somebody had to get a grip on this rabble.

  “Enough. These helicopters with saints hanging under them, these ball-lightning generators, these luminous blimps: tell me, how long exactly have we got?”

  The looks of schoolchild contrition at these moments when she brought her comrades up hard against the buffers of the real world was almost compensation for her nagging suspicion that she was a caste less funny than the rest of the team. Seskinore raised his Distinguished Silver eyebrows. Mishcondereya did Magnificent Sullen. Weill twisted and scratched himself. He had caught a wicked little fungal infection of the armpits, and they itched furiously. Bladnoch whipped out his vade-mecum. Cybernetic angels flocked through the planetary nervous system, prying and sniffing, and returned with an answer.

  “Störting-Kobiyashi have a repair tender in for the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, estimated, three days.” He glanced again at his read-out, raised one precisely shaved eyebrow, which Seskinore had always envied, as well as the dark comedian's Dog Chow and Why Windchimes? routines. “Mostly skin punctures, minor mainframe, a couple of gas cells down. Interestingly, the Engineer's report hints at blast damage. Who's been having a crack at Devastation Harx?”

  He snapped shut the vade-mecum; a device so far in advance of Grandmother Taal's companion of the same name that it scarcely deserved to be included in the same species. Observational comedy needs observations. There was wisdom somewhere in the secretive recesses of the Synod that they gave pocket-size omniscience to Bladnoch and not Seskinore, Skerry thought. Or, saints forfend, Weill. She said, “Well, I think we have a problem then.”

  They did another look then, the our-one-and-only-idea-has-gone-down-the-shitpit one. Skerry folded her arms. Bladnoch was dryly rustling his fingers and looking at the floor. He would think of something. She trusted him. Three years working within sniffing distance, an attempted seduction at a wrap party after they bust the Bethlehem Ares Board Salaries Scam, a consequent (or maybe, despite it) closeness and she still had no angles on the tall, skinny man; whether there were depths beyond the apparent depths, or if it was all one continuous, highly polished surface. Since being headhunted from the All New! Terence Payne Carnival of Horrors, where she had prestidigitated in a rubber suit with high-voltage electric cables, Skerry had maintained a stern celibacy, but Bladnoch was the loophole in her resolve.

  “The old woman,” he said, clicking his fingers in that don't-derail-my-train-of-thought way of his she found so cute. “That dream, some kind of sending, she said, right?” His co-performers knew better than to answer. “Where did it come from?”

  “Why?” Skerry asked.

  “Just a suspicion.”

  The United Artists Special, routed by customised signalling, had swept past sidelined transcontinentals and prioritaires, even the proud Argyre Express and its prouder sept of Malevant-Engineers, as it climbed the gentle slopes of China Mountain. Above it, the sky had kindled, angels fallen and Grandmother Taal feared for her granddaughter out in a world turned upside down. She felt older and frailer than ever she had over the cards with Cyrene Ree the year-vampire. The future of her family and world were in the hands of squabbling youths. Then the little leatherette express swayed over a set of points on to a siding Grandmother Taal knew in her boots she had never ridden before, then the sky and the offences being committed on it were extinguished as Kharam Malevant-Engineer 8th plunged his machine into a long dark tunnel. Grandmother Taal knew the rattle and roll of every tunnel and cutting in four quarterspheres and her ears told her she had never been this way before, and that she was being taken deep, way deep, way long. After a time verging on the unendurable, the isolated lamps on the tunnel walls slowed in their rhythm and the train slid into golden light on a half-tunnel open on the right side to a stupendous void of glittering, reflecting obsidian. Beyond the platform, cable cars bobbed: this undervault was big enough to have its own microclimate. Weill escorted Grandmother Taal, who had one glimpse of what lay beyond that frail insult of a handrail at the edge of the platform and kept her eyes firmly shut and her bottomless bag firmly clasped to her until the wretched cable car stopped its swaying and she felt good steel under her feet.

  “Make yourself at home here,” Weill said, with unconscious fatuity, but Grandmother Taal did so, filling the shelves and niches with gew-gaws from the personal dimension of her black bag. It might be a bobbing bauble of construction plastic and aluminium slung from alarmingly flimsy guying but it was more like her rocking, rolling cabin high on Catherine of Tharsis's hump than anywhere else in these—how many now?—days since climbing off at Muchanga Water Station. It had a soothing sense of motion, even if it was three dimensional, and disturbing to the inner ears of old ladies who have lived much of their lives in one-dimensional transit. The view she could not take, so she drank her mint tea—much of it, but cheaply machine manufactured—in an interior room without windows. Therefore her first inkling that the cable-car was coming was a growing vibration throughout the suspended building—familiar and almost as comfortable as the bass tremble of fusion tokamaks. Grandmother Taal bustled to make the guest-unit ready. Defended on all sides by two hundred metres straight down to obsidian razors, “guest unit” was interchangeable with “prison,” but visitors were visitors. The bauble swayed as the car hard-docked. Her hosts/captors filed out into the receiving room.

  “Tea?” Grandmother Taal offered. Her guests shook their heads. They knew the synthesisers too intimately. “What news of Sweetness, then?”

  They were a sorry, scarecrow-crew, self-confident and at the same time coy, as if they were terrified that some day someone would suddenly realise what they had been doing all their lives and tell them to stop it at once and do something proper.

  “Nothing to report, sorry,” Weill, the boy who evidently came from a nice family, apologised.

  The tall, dark one, whom Grandmother Taal was sure was a repressed homosexual, wrung his hands gently, then asked, “Your granddaughter: when she spoke to you in this dream, how did you see her?”

  “She was standing in a stone square, quite ugly. There were tall buildings around her. This is what convinces me it was a dream: she was standing in a beam of pink light, but the ray was coming from some kind of recreational vehicle.”

  Bladnoch, head slightly bowed, finger to mouth, closed his eyes and nodded.

  “You see, it's exactly that which convinces me it was no dream,” he said. “I thought they were long gone, evidently not.”

  “What, gone?” Weill asked. But Seskinore was nodding too.

  “Ah, in my young days; why, the whole town would turn out! We'd throw streamers and paper prayers and run along beside the van—of course, it was dray-drawn then…The fun we had!”

  Mishcondereya pursed her lips in vexation. Grandmother Taal had yet to have it proved to her whether the girl performed another function in the team. Brats, jugglers and comedians. That Mishcondereya was no different from any of the others, all things considered. Old blood in now-young veins cried out the loud yawp that is as old as human creativity: I can do that! I can do that better! Why should these tatterdemalions be the ones who get to play with the toys; what audition had they passed to play saviours of the world? Grandmother Taal wanted more than a consultative role. Marya Stuard might have faced down the Starke Gang with their man-bone-handled needle pistols, but Taal Engineer, in her forty-second year was going up against the Anti-God himself, the destroyer of worlds, the Grand Vanitas; and that would be long sung up and down the narrow steel rails.

  “I am an old woman, and hugely confused,” Grandmother Taal said grand-maternally. “What exactly are you asking me?”

  �
�I'm asking, do you think this…sending…might have been from an oneiroscope?” asked Bladnoch, who, though he would not have lasted ten minutes trainboard, seemed the only one to have any more sense than a hen would hold in its shut fist. “A dream projector, if you're familiar with these devices?”

  “Young man,” Grandmother Taal said, fluffing her funereal black like a gamecock its dancing feathers, “in my young youth, we hauled the cars of Jonathon Darke himself, he of the Oneiric Circus and Grand Nebular ’Stravaganza. They would conjure whole stormfronts into melodramas.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Bladnoch, steepling his fingers and tapping the tips lightly together in an advertisement of mildly impatient blueskying. “I'm sure it was all most spectacular, but this…sending could you describe to me exactly what you saw? The geography, country, desert, town, city?”

  Grandmother Taal did so over passable mint tea. Bladnoch then consulted his unfolding vade-mecum and while it searched the civic databases and threw the dreary zocalos of a thousand rural dustburgs on to the screen, Grandmother Taal studied her hosts and wondered again at the wisdom of Wisdom in entrusting the safety of the world to third-division comedians. Every profession has its fear: the soldier pant-soiling cowardice; the actor paralysing stage-fright; the trainwoman unforeseen delays, cancelled contracts, bankruptcy. The comedian's fear, she had always heard, is the sound of his own two feet walking back to the dressing room. What if they went out there and did their routine and no one laughed? If these people died the death, the audience died with them.

  The United Artists were all gathered around Bladnoch's palm-sized screen. It lit his face spectral blue. His eyebrows climbed: a hit.

  “Solid Gone,” he declared, snapping the clever little machine shut.

  “Let's go get ’em,” Skerry declared and United Artists swept into action.

  “Excuse me,” Grandmother Taal ventured as the secret agents bustled around her. “Excuse me.” They were all entering codes on little thumb-pads. “Listen to me, please.” Mishcondereya and Weill were arguing over bright orange backpacks. “Will you listen to me?” She rapped her stick stoutly on the floor and everyone's attention was fixed on the little old woman in black. “I want to come with you.” Before they could shout her down, she said, “First, because I have seen this place more clearly than any of you and I know what to look for. Second, because my granddaughter may still be there, and, if not, the cineaste may know what has happened to her. Third, because it's going to be fun.”

  Thus it was that a circle of cloud forest on the lower slopes of Tassaday District flipped open and a small sardine-shaped racing blimp slipped out, unfolded its ducted fans and swiftly sought concealment in the cloud layer that clung decorously around the hips of China Mountain. Aboard were Mishcondereya (pilot), Skerry (action girl) and Grandmother Taal Asiim Engineer (ould woman). Bladnoch, Weill and Seskinore remained in the Comedy Cave, finessing the End of the World.

  The little airship was slim, nimble and quick, but Grandmother Taal could sense the two United Artists women's tension growing with every passing kilometre. Seskinore's meddling with the repair dock unions might buy a day or two, but even with an oneirojector and a shedload of fancy programming, even Grandmother Taal could see that the plan would be going in at the very last minute. If it went in at all. And given that it was deep deep down divinely ludicrous. Fake the apocalypse. What kind of person did they think would fall for that? Only someone who was confidently expecting the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast, the Circus of Heaven, the Seven Trumpets blowing sweet rock ’n’ roll, the Conclave of Amshastria, the Vials of Honeydew and the Vials of Bile, the Apotheosis of St. Catherine among the Eleven Orders, the Revelation of the Secret Names and Nails, and God the Panarchic playing Flying Fifty-Two with the twenty-seven heavens. The full McClatch.

  It was asking a lot even of the man who had challenged the angels. It was asking more of five music-hall entertainers and a clapped-out cloud projector.

  “What if there aren't any clouds that day?” Grandmother Taal asked, aware now of a little pregnant worm of excitement growing inside her as she came nearer to Action. Action! After forty-two years…

  “Clouds will be provided,” Skerry said, grimly. The duststorm they had battled through on the run to China Mountain had given warning not to trust the weather makers. The storm wardens might not obey her. They might already obey another. Thus she kept one eye on the orbital monitors, full in the knowledge that the first sign of untoward movement up there and they were all hot ions. The fast little airship drilled on.

  Beneath China Mountain, Bladnoch tried to marshal his team into a scripting session. While Weill and Seskinore did not verbally roughhouse as the little anarchist did with Mishcondereya (whom Bladnoch considered thoroughly useless, and probably not even a good poke), they did set each other back into their entrenched positions: street-snotty rebel-rebel; world-weary, comically-fused Mr. Let-me-Entertain-You. Bladnoch knew that his own irritation at his colleagues had been predicted and predicated: part of the Synod's social engineering. Keep your enemies close, but your agents closer, and eternally bickering. He cajoled them into a light brainstorming and came up with some good ideas for choruses of angels: Big Band, Deuteronomy Wedding Schremmel singers, irritating Mariachi, Elevator Panpipe Orchestra, which he zapped through to the design team up but he knew heart-of-hearts that he was carrying them. Had always carried them. Always would carry them. This was not vanity. This was comedic truth. His had been the only mandatory recruitment to United Artists, and that because if the constabulary had become involved, he would still be festering in Winstanley Canton Gaol. A people notorious for their stunted senses of humour, the Argyrians. Had it been only locals the night of the Corncrake Club, he would have gotten clean away with it. But Grantham Grornan had been a Chryseman and he got the little dagger-sharp one-liner. Got it. Yes, he got it. Indeed he got it. Started to laugh, and laugh and laugh until the veins stood out on his forehead and his neck muscles were like bridge cables and his eyes were like poorly poached eggs and his face was black with choking laughter. Laughed until he fell off his chair on to the floor of the Corncrake Club, stone dead. Bladnoch killed a man with a single joke. It was not the only thing died that night as he crept offstage to the sound of cardiac shock-plate powering up. The comedian's comedian died in the neon-lit dressing room. Laugh? I thought I'd die. That funny, but you could only ever be that funny once, if anyone who heard it died. And why be anything less funny than the killing joke? He considered suicide. He considered asceticism. He considered hermeticism, and drinking, and flagellant orders. He had found televised sport. Even now, he knew in his inner schedule that he was missing the playoffs in the Northwest Quartersphere kabadi league, and that was bad and idle—yea, sinful—because he'd been hired to save the world, not lie around watching tractor racing and freestyle windboarding. Like Skerry, Bladnoch came from a family with a lot of parcelled guilt. All comedians do. All the funny ones.

  “Okay, right, so,” he said, turning away from the panorama of his ruined career, clapping his hands chivvyingly. “Come on come on, what's God going to be wearing?”

  Elsewhere, Mishcondereya's weather radar sketched out the cloud of dreamlessness pressing darkly down on Solid Gone like a saucerful of alien invaders.

  “It's just sitting there,” she said, pouting with bafflement, the same expression with which she met every novel event. “This cross-wind, it shouldn't last two minutes, but it's just sitting there.” Skerry bent over the radar, face furrowed green by scanner-light. Those two minutes later the cloud hove into view, at once stifling and chilling. It grew perceptibly twilighty on the bridge of the sardine-ship. The streets, avenues and bourses of the stone town beneath it looked like a tourist map of hell. Mishcondereya cut thrust and steered the ship on to the central zocalo. The penumbra cast shadows and doubts, but there seemed to be a large crowd of people down there.

  “What is that thing?” Mishcondereya asked with audible distaste.


  “I know,” Grandmother Taal said with a chill in her voice that made both women turn from their instruments. “I saw this once before, long long time ago, way down deep South Borealis, some terrible rural place. Two streets and sun farm; Redemption they called it, but the only Redemption was the train-track out of it. I remember it well, we only stopped because we had to water. That cloud should have warned us, and the girl.”

  “Girl?” Mishcondereya said in the off-hand way of a woman only half-listening to a story because she is checking the grapple gear in the belly hold.

  “Aye. Chained to a steel luncheonette, she was, and there she would remain until she had written down and bottled in whiskey enough dreams from passing strangers for all her townsfolk to have a swallow. That was their disease—no one dreamed, and without dreams, nothing lives long. The girl dreamed too much, dreamed of getting out of a place like Redemption, and that was her curse, you see. Something had to come and take it all away from her: that cloud. Hence her doom.”

  “What happened to her?” Skerry asked, crossing both pairs of fingers in the pocket of her short-shorts in the old Ocyrian deflection of evil auras.

  “For all we know, she's there still, but it would seem not, judging by that.”

  Skerry imagined she could feel baleful heat from the cloud even through the gold-tinted reflective windows of the racing-blimp. Mishcondereya was looking at her one way. The old trainwoman was looking at her another. A decision was necessary, even a wrong one.

  “Take us in,” she ordered.

  In the short time since that troubling girl Sweetness Engineer had walked away, the cloud-cineaste who called himself Sanyap Bedassie, last of his mystery, had discovered the consolation of resignation. You need no ambitions, you need not risk pain and failure and disappointment. Here is food, here is water, here is a daily purpose and appreciation. We are your friends. We will always treasure you. Your world may be small, but whose is not, and it is blunt-edged. Your life may be circumscribed as tightly as an eremite's, but who has not considered the attractions of the confined, contemplative life, and it is not sour. Eight times a day, at the top of the hour, his purpose was affirmed. He changed lives, for a little while.