by Ian McDonald
On clearer days Sanyap Bedassie wondered if this resignation was not the first symptom of the plague. He had always assumed that, by dint of his profession, he was immune to it. Maybe he was only last to succumb. Maybe he had already gone down, and only dreamed that he dreamed. So be it. It was the world he must live in, therefore, he would live.
The tolling of the iron bell. The faithful drew near. Their feet rasped on sandy setts. Again, he brought the capacitors on-line, unfolded the array from the rear of the crippled campervan, took aim on the underbelly of the cloud. The gathered oohed as they always oohed, always surprised by the sudden stab of the pink lance into the groin of the cloud. Again, the darkness parted like foetal cells dividing: Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap's faces gestated out of the cloud-mass. To stunningly explode in wisps and vapours as a daring silver airship plunged out of the heart of the cloud. The crowd gasped, faces frozen, upturned, unsure if this was part of the plot. The plucky little dirigible pulled out of its death-dive centimetres above the Grand Bourse's crenellations. Belly-spots swivelled and focused on Bedassie and his little van, drowning the pink dream-beam in garish white. He shielded his eyes with his hand, thought he saw the belly of the fish-shaped craft open and a steel grapple-claw descend. No imagination: metal fingers closed around the van, shaking it from side to side like a terrier a rat as they clenched firmly beneath its subframe. A jolt: the van lifted a metre into the air. The people of Solid Gone swayed back, rumble-grumbled, then lurched a step forward. Sanyap Bedassie watched the airship reel his van up toward its belly. Again the crowd rumbled, took another step forward, and another. Startling reality was penetrating their sullen gloom. Someone was taking the last of their dreams away. The realisation struck Sanyap Bedassie the instant before the mob broke into a lead-footed run.
“Wait for me!” he yelled, ran, leaped, caught the dangling end of a severed chain and was whisked skyway just as the highest-reaching fingers missed his foot. His last glimpse of Solid Gone was of a circle of three thousand upturned faces filled with intolerable sorrow, then the airship climbed, turned, closed its hatches on them and their misfortune and sped away.
One thousand storeys. Five metres per storey. Five thousand metres. Acceleration due to gravity, three metres per second squared. Terminal velocity in the thick, sweet air under Grand Valley's glass roof: twenty-two metres per second. Or eighty kilometres per hour. Time until Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th hit ground zero: four hundred seconds. Or six and two-thirds minutes. You can get a lot of screaming into that.
The first “www” was not off her lips when the hand seized the scruff of her track jacket. Woofff. The world went red under her eyes, and suddenly, faster than any attempt to analyse it, she was not falling. Something dark had darted out from the cantilevering that supported the terraces of Demesne Urching-Sembely; on a rope, on wings, on a wire, on a carnival rocket. Whatever. All she knew was, it had a hold of her and she was not falling. Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity had saved the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine. She looked down between her feet. Dark threads rippled across the corduroy terraces of Canton Semb; clans of pickers at the harvest. Sweetness laughed to see them at their task, never suspecting what hung by a fistful of rip-stop nylon five kilometres above their bended backs. She wiggled her toes, delighted that the universe had let her live.
“When you're done,” a strained voice said. “Only I don't know what's goin’ to go first; my arm or the zip on your jacket.”
Only then did she think to look up rather than down.
And boggled.
“Returning the favour,” said the brown-eyed, urchin-fringed, suspicious-cute face that Sweetness Asiim Engineer had last seen looking up into hers from a precarious fingerhold on the side of ore car eleven. “You know, how is it every time we meet, I get a sore hand?”
Pharaoh the ex-railrat hung like a Missal Anagnosta from the Guthru Gram Kanteklion in a webbing harness. His left arm steadied himself on the rope fastened to the buttress ten metres overhead, his right was clenched in a generous fistful of her faithful track jacket. Sweetness could see his thin muscles knotting, his slender fingers going pale.
“When you're done staring, you wouldn't like to grab hold of this and haul yourself up?” He dropped her a length of line with two foot stirrups looped on the end. Sweetness, hands still bound, kicked her feet into the loops. Pharaoh threw two more loops around her body and slowly hauled her up to his level.
“Hold still,” he said, flicking a knife. Sweetness flinched, Pharaoh repeated the order. “I don't want to cut the wrong thing.” His blade was true; a snick, the cable tie fluttered yellowly down to the fertile terraces below. Sweetness watched it, gravely, as the hanging ensemble pirouetted gently, a Foucault pendulum ballasted with two lives.
“Hold on tight now, I'm going to put a bit of a swing on this thing,” Pharaoh warned and shifted his weight. Sweetness wrapped her legs around his, buried her fists in his scabby brown leather jacket and combated the positive body odour and escalating motion sickness as the pendulum built up by marvelling how stories did what you expected, and then some more; that little extra neat twist. She could hear the wind rushing past her ears. Or—the defensive, pedantic incongruity of one hanging from a slim line over a five-kilometre drop—was it her ears rushing past the wind?
Soon, very soon, she thought, the shaking's going to start.
“I should thank you, cause I kind of think you saved my life,” she whispered to Kid Pharaoh as they whooshed through ever-increasing arcs. His target seemed to be a clutch of heat vents and gas-exchange stacks tucked like parasitic moulds under the mushroom fan of the terrace tiers.
“Then we're even now,” he said as they hurtled upward toward the impaling geometry of the Demesne's service zone. He reached…He grabbed…He held. Pharaoh hauled himself and Sweetness up on to the spar. He tugged on the line and the smart-plastic snap-release shackle gave way. The sustaining rope fell, Pharaoh carefully coiled it in. Sweetness clung to the girder, suddenly very very cold.
The shaking started. Soon after it came the black thing.
After the incident with the Kaspidi Sisters that had cost him his Vagrant Entertainer's licence (as good as a shroud to an Old Skool Funnyman like him) and a warning never ever ever to set foot across the border of Christadelphia in this life or any other, Seskinore knew he deserved eternal banishment to the dark and humourless land that is the lot of Old Comics Who Do it With Wrong-Side-of-Barely-Legal Girls. It was meet and right that he would never hear the band count in two, three, four and in to “East St. Louis Boogaloo”; never again cross those boards to the spot under the footlights where the applause sounded sweetest. They tore up his joke books. They ripped the petals from his lapel carnation. Even when the government had given him the only kind of job available to an old comic aside from soft-shoe shuffling on the Great Concourse of Belladonna Main, cap in hand, his rep had preceded him. He copped it nobly—dignity, always dignity—but sometimes he wished that these young slubberdegullions showed a little more respect for his professionalism. Yea, he had sinned, and mightily, but it had been a professional sin. And from what moral pinnacle did they regard him; the burned-out smart-ass stand-up; the arty-farty sensitive girl who wouldn't know a funny line if it stuck it all the way up her right to her ovaries; the hand-standing fire-juggling dyke; the chicken-shit anarchist? Amateurs. Even Dearest Dimmy and Mr. Superb would have disdained them; bottom-rung acts they might have been, but at least they had been professional. They understood timing. They understood experience, and the knowledge of what works on an audience that only comes through dying the death a hundred, a thousand nights. They understood practice, practice, practice. They understood dignity. Always dignity. Disgraced he might be, but Seskinore had been professional unto the last. Seskinore could admit that he may never have been funny, but he had been professionally not funny.
“Enough, enough!” he shouted with just the right tone of camp exasperat
ion. Bladnoch and Mishcondereya peeped sheepishly over the control panel of the dream machine. Skerry frowned at him upside down from a silver trapeze. Weill just scowled. “No no no no no!” He clapped his hands. “The Great Destaine would never have stood for this, never. Switch it off, go on, off. Right now.”
Bladnoch and Mishcondereya looked at each other, then Mishcondereya pouted and threw the power. The Ranks and Orders; the Rider on the Many Headed-Beast (each head that of a prominent politician, a satirical touch by Weill); the Circus of Heaven with its tightrope walkers balancing on superstrings, its jugglers cascading the planets of the solar system, its snarling, chained Tygers of Wrath and its high-prancing Horses of Instruction, its frilled, white-faced, terrifying Chaos Clowns; the down-sweeping Hammer and Sickle of God; all evaporated in an instant into the artificial clouds that had turned the Comedy Cave into a sweatlodge.
“What?” Skerry demanded, pulling herself upright and sliding off the trapeze on to the rehearsal platform. Seskinore half-averted his gaze from the gluteal zone of her cheek-cleaving green leotard.
“The timing's up the left. Between the Grand Parade of the High and Lordly Ones and the Opening of the Cornucopia of All Fruits, you're wide open for twenty, twenty-five seconds. And the coordination, God's bones, woman!” This to Mishcondereya. “The bloody things are running through each other! It's supposed to be the Ancient of Days thundering down in righteous wrath, not a charabanc of bloody village spooks!”
“It's a rushed job,” Mishcondereya pleaded.
“It's always a rushed job,” Seskinore said. “Now, we try it again. From the top. And this time, we will try to remember that the fate of the world is riding on us acting like professionals and not some half-arsed troupe of bloody sophomore-year drama students. First positions! Projector ready?”
Mishcondereya pouted again and reset the power buffers.
“Ready,” she said sullenly.
“Right boys and girl, from the top, and this time, let's try and get it bloody right, shall we? Dear God; amateurs!”
Clouds swirled, found shifting, transitory forms in the tropical heat. Skerry towelled dry and tripped back to her position on the silver trapeze. As the hoists lifted her, apocalypse unfolded as a backdrop. Seskinore watched the little woman move into position and recalled what it was about her tight little ass that stirred such provocation in him. Nothing physiological—few women, or gentlemen for that matter, raised the Jolly Roger these sad days. Nor her personality, such as it was, narrow and deep-rooted in her own physicality. It was that he could order and stamp and throw funks and rehearse rehearse rehearse until they dropped, but come the day and the hour, it would be her out there on the high trapeze, and him back here, fretting over the monitors. Her; all of them. Never him. That was the price of his sensitive crimes with the Kaspidi Sisters. But once, by the gods of the backstage…When better to pick up the cane, tilt the hat, paint rouge circles on the death-white cheeks and stride boldly into the glare of the soda-light with the band striking up your tune behind you, than the end of the world?
The niggle with talent, Mishcondereya had always understood, was that it was blind to true genius. She had no doubt that her fellow artistes were indeed skilled at their crafts—in Bladnoch's case, a genuine forte—but all of them were so mired in the admiration of their own abilities that they could not recognise the only pukkah prodigy in the gang: Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana. The lot of her privileged life. Always fated to be a lower bloom among the early flowerings of her four older sisters; the painter, the writer, the harpist and the sen-so-rama sculptress. The performance artist? Just another genius. Children brought up in the airy, light-drenched Grand Valley pueblo of Etzwane Eksendrarana and Afton Benninger (he a Living Treasure crafter of ritual mint-tea-infusers, she the lauded architect of India's Chursky Prospekt and the sheer crystal dome of Wisdom's new Grand Trunk Terminus) could not fail to develop into world-wide movers and shapers, but even the most indulgent of parents’ attention starts to thin with the fourth gifted child. The fifth? A blossom that blooms unseen, wasting its perfume on the desert air. The o'erlooked rose. The unregarded bud. Mishcondereya often thought of herself (and she thought of herself very often) in terms of a flower, growing wild, nobody's child. Unregarded among her colleagues as she had been among her sisters. But it is the unregarded rose that is the sweetest, the pebble half-buried in the dune face on which you stub your toe and give no more than a glance that is the raw diamond.
Mishcondereya was firmamentally convinced of four things.
That she was an utter genius.
That she was a sex goddess.
That everyone either wanted to be like her or was helplessly in love with her.
That therefore everyone was jealous of her.
The polythene elevator took Mishcondereya up from the R&D dungeon through tiers of holy battle. She sneered at the photonic ghosts. She was in no awe of the angelic forces swooping and trumpeting outside. Vanity had always been the Defiant One's strongest weapon.
How did they ever imagine this would convince Devastation Harx? A man who founds his own church has an intimate knowledge of the phoney. He'd bust his nuts laughing, if he'd hadn't already bust them in some kind of ritual-humiliation holy wooden vice thing. Or was that some other mail-order outfit? Research had never been Mishcondereya's trump suit.
Not for the first time she thought about handing in her resignation. Take it, I quit, I walk, I'm up and out, comperes, do the memory-wipe thing, it's not as if I'd be losing much, or even taking much with me. Surprise! Planetary security run by a pack of jokers.
No. Not this time. There was yet pleasure to be savoured from saving their collective asses once again.
The device was still chill from the assembler vat; she tossed it from palm to palm. Cold that burns. Seskinore—Fat Fart, her private name for him—would be up there blubbering and mincing and farting like an old Show Boat duchess and of course it would all be heading floorward like a Belladonna dowager's butt and being act-ors (she always consciously spaced the syllables) they reckoned that if they looked deep enough inside their souls for Honesty in Comedy or stood in a circle and workshopped it out like sweating off a really bad wodka hangover or clenched and unclenched their fists and screwed up enough Team Force it would all come right just like that. Of course it wouldn't. Never would, not on its own. She'd told them that, lodged her token formal complaint, but they just kept stubbornly heading on with the wrong thing while the Armageddon clock ticked down to zero. No surprise they hadn't listened; she wasn't an act-or and therefore understood nothing of the creative process and the agonies of performance. Their loss. It didn't insult her any more. The ignorant can't insult you. So Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana did what she always did, excused herself from their group huddle and primal yodelling and took her own idea off to make it into something.
Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana was proud that she'd been expelled from the only other team that had recruited her—St. Xaviou's Community College Ladies’ touch-rugger—because she'd been more interested in spectator reaction to her tight'n'shiny shorts and over-the-knee socks than playing defensive wing. Even then she had not been ashamed to own that she was not a team player.
The trogs in nanofacturing were creepy and a little smelly and she didn't doubt that every man—and woman—jack of them fancied the teats off her, but at least they had respect for a good idea. Struell Llewyn, trog King, with too many pairs of glasses slung around his neck (can't he afford to get the oculars lasered or what?) had peered at the sketch, nodded at her general description of the effects she wanted (at least they didn't expect her to be a pharmacist) and called a conclave of nano and pharmaceutical advisers. No group hugs. No free-form improvisation. No word-associational brainstorming. Nothing that involved throwing soft balls to each other, abdominal breathing or striking Damantine Discipline thranas. Quiet talk, a bit of scribbling on thinkpads and after twenty minutes, the frog King had pushed up his reading lenses
and declared, “No problem for the welders.”
“When can I have it?”
“Forty minutes.”
And it had been, as it always was.
“Careful, now,” the trog King had advised as Mishcondereya juggled the frosted fluttering little thing up to her eye-level. “The trigger mechanism's delicate.” Compound globules of nano-carbon met jellied spheres of protein. Gossamer wings whirred micro-breezes chilled with the memory of 3K nanoassembler chambers in her face. She peered into the churning greenness in its glass belly.
“Nice one.”
As ever, he had given that lopsided bow/smirk that was all the thanks he would acknowledge. The pride of the artisan classes. When she was well gone, that was when he would gather the trog nation in their canteen and tell them what a great job they had done. Our humble bit in Saving the World! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! Good people, if limited. In her many idle moments Mishcondereya wondered just with what they filled their frequent downtimes, what—who—they fantasised about when they went back to their clean-living little pottery villages.
As the plastic elevator passed through the fish-scale train of Ananuturanta Deva, Lord of the Changing Ways, she ignored Struell Llewyn's admonition and tossed the little nano-bug high to catch it on the flat of her palm. And in that instant, without warning, she was embedded in stone. Darkness, pressure, absolute, not even space for a scream. Her lungs were rigid with solid rock. And then she was back in air and light and movement and the little flibbertigibbet floated down into her hand but she knew, for an instant, she had been dead, buried kilometres deep in the volcanic core of China Mountain in an alternative world where different laws of volcanology had refused to allow this chamber to form. She staggered against the flimsy side of the bubble car, almost dropped the frail flitter. She caught herself: dignity, always dignity. The Fat Fart was right in that one. But every one of her atoms remembered that they had been penetrated by cold hard gneiss.