by Ian McDonald
They were looking concerned—and rightly—as she strode toward them across the rehearsal space. Once again, the spooks and spiritual entities were dissolving back into their constituent clouds with looks on their faces that might be read as worry, had they been anything more tangible than holographic dream-projections.
“Did you?” Fat Fart.
“Of course I did. Everybody did.”
“We have to go, now.” Leotard Girl.
So, why are you looking at me? Because it's up to Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana to save your tight little butts again.
“No problem for the welders,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said and blew the little fritillary off her open hand into Weill's face. Pig-turd Boy reeled back, lashed at the buzzy thing and it popped in front of his eyes into an expanding cloud of green gas. In shock, he took a deep breath.
His eyes glazed over.
“Woh,” he said. “Wohhhhhh.” A shit-eating grin spread across his peasant face. Realisation, both neurochemical as the hallucinogens kicked in and, with the shreds they left of his intelligence, intellectual. “I mean, really, woh.”
“Yah,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said lazily. “He'll believe it now.”
The hat-pin snapped with a loud tink. The broken spike rolled across the platform, under the guard chains and over the edge. It speared through a cloud-hologram of the Lorarch ROHEL shrieking between the stalactites and stalagmites of the Comedy Cavern, barbed swords in all four hands. The big pin clinked audibly off some outcrop or other.
“Cock piss bugger bum balls,” Grandmother Taal swore. She should have gone straight for the lock-pick. Oh no, go for the easy option rather than invest ten minutes trying to remember where you left the wretched thing. Ten minutes squandered. That foo-feraw out there would only exercise their attentions so long. It was, of course, ludicrous. Even they could see that, and when the cloud-projector went off, she was bare bum naked up here on the platform.
A good God, a just God, would, at the end of your life, refund you all the time you had spent looking for little lost things. Like lock-picks. And granddaughters. Grandmother Taal plunged her arm elbow deep into her black bag and began to rummage through pocket universes.
The Bedassie boy had been easy to coerce. The polythene bauble perched on the sheer stalagmite might hold one so unadventurous as to prefer existence as a captive of a captive audience to wild wild life with a fit and nubile Engineer girl, but not a trainperson, and certainly not Engineer Amma. The boy had been polite, if a little malodorous from his long captivity and it was immediately evident to Grandmother Taal that he had been deeply touched by his exposure to Sweetness. She suspected that her granddaughter was one of those cursed to be fatally attractive to a certain type of man. Please God, the attraction did not seem to be reciprocal. Stainless steel kitchenettes were undeniably an excuse to up and leave, but for Sweetness to have boom-shakaed with this…Grandmother Taal shuddered at the thought.
Deep down in the dimensional folds of her bag, her fingers found a little pocket dedicated to souvenirs of Sweetness. A baby tooth. A bronzed raggie-doll. A scrolled-up drawing of a train, with a tree by the track and a yellow sun overhead and smiley Mama and Da waving palm-frond hands from the driving cab. The silk belly cord she had given up when she ceased to be a child and became fully human, an Engineer. The smeared panties of her womaning, preserved in a resin paperweight.
The fingers lingered a moment. The memories they felt out were a spur to hurry on. Soon, very soon, they're going to unleash Armageddon and your granddaughter has put herself right in the middle of it. The part of her that Uncle Billied rides across whole hemispheres, that recklessly bet years of her life on a turn of cards, that hitched with big band leaders and schemed with state-sponsored practical jokers, that tried to pick locks on railway tunnel exit doors, was slyly proud of that.
Three dimensions down, she found the lock-pick.
Let's see you try this, Marya Stuard, Grandmother Taal thought with an inner grin as she unfolded the prongs and set to work on the latch that sealed the two half doors. You may only need a lock-pick once, and maybe never, but when you do, you really do. Such was the logic of the collection she had stashed away over the decades in the black magic bag.
As she felt her way into the subtle mechanism, Grandmother Taal reflected that Sweetness's very gift probably sentenced her to a life of heartbreaks. The curse of unworthy men. Cute but chicken. When it had come to it, that one, back there, had chosen life as a captive of a captive audience to heading off with Sweetness into adventure, high or low. Small wonder that train life so appealed to men; full steam and high speed, but only in the direction permitted by the track. Bedassie had shown her the trick of the door—the comedians seemed to have forgotten that a cloud cineaste would have a way with electronic things—but he had turned down even an old wizened woman's offer of escape. The bridge that extruded itself from the stalactite to the railway station was narrow, railless, unsupported, and the drop through the warring tribes of holy ones terrifying, but Grandmother Taal had tightened up her courage and stepped out on to the swaying arch. Again, she thanked whatever Luck Gods had let her win precious years from Cyrene Ankhatiel Ree. In her old, fragile former self, the winds that gusted through the cave would have picked her up, puffed out her skirts like a festival balloon and dropped her on to the serrated obsidian daggers of the cavern floor. She looked back: Bedassie was clinging to the pod door.
“Come, take my hand.”
“Leave all this?” Nodding at the raving deities boiling up on either side of the slender pont.
“They're ghosts, clouds. Nothing. They can't hurt you.”
“It's all I have.”
“Young man, do you think they will let us go, seeing and knowing what we have? The best we can hope for is mnemonic erasure. The worst…Let us say, I deeply suspect some of these people's senses of humour. Come. Now. They won't give you your device back.”
For an instant he was tempted, then shook his head.
“I believe I can do a deal, be useful to them.”
“Young man, if you believe that any government ever offers, let alone honours, a deal like that, you deserve all that you get. Last offer. Time is ticking away. My granddaughter is in great peril.”
He smiled sadly and Grandmother Taal suspected that Sweetness had seen that look of amiable resignation too.
“I'm sorry.”
“So am I.”
Even with fifteen spare years, it had been a precarious crossing, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, breath coming in little tight flutters, looking ahead, dead ahead, always ahead, never down, never to one side or the other, never at the deities that loomed and ballooned at her like spooks in a Canton Fair House of Horrendo. Muttering it like a mantra, ahead, ahead, always ahead, down, down, never look down. The far side hove into view. A brass section of minor Cheraphs swooped at her, blowing sweet rock ’n’ roll, breezed nonchalantly through Grandmother Taal as if she wasn't there. The old matriarch gave a little eek, teetered. Her hands flailed. She looked down. Volcanic teeth yawned for her. She staggered, dashed forward, came off the end of the bridge in a stumbling roll.
Grandmother Taal sat, legs stretched straight out, and rejoiced in breathing for a full minute before remembering to retract the pont. Then she turned to face the lock and drew the pin from her hair like a long-coated Rapari his sabre.
Where Harx was, Sweetness would be, that much was clear. All this piss and smoke about saints and mirrors; she could make none of that, except that anything that involved powers not safely meat and bone was bad. Typical of her granddaughter to underestimate the danger and overestimate her resourcefulness. Absconding is one thing, adventuring another, but Armageddon is entirely something again. Clown-time is over. This required the full resources of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes. Now, if she could just pick this little lock, walk up that long sloping tunnel to the surface and persuade some Engineer to break the sn
ubbing and let her make a Red Call…
Long orders. Tall hikes. So. She was sturdy. Grandmother Taal worked the clever pick deeper into the lock. Something was resisting her. A shove, a twist. She felt metal give. She worked the device free. As she feared. Irredeemably bent.
This was not the end, though Grandmother Taal felt soul and body sag, all their gambled-away years returning in a moment of sheer dispirit. The semicircles of the hasp mocked her assurance and abilities. Fallen at the first. And a subtle pressure shift on the back of her neck warned her The End of the World Show was rolling up. She had sat through enough fatuous rehearsals to know she had less than a minute before the clouds recondensed into the vapour generators and she was exposed, a wicked black spider clinging to a metal door.
Help me, saints and ancestors! Aid an old and ridiculous woman, St. Catherine, since you clearly seem to exist and have some power in this world.
And it came. Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness. Suddenly Grandmother Taal knew exactly what she must do. She found the little paper-wrapped packet in the fifteenth fold of her bag. She unwrapped the block of Etzvan Canton Black Loess Child'a'grace had given her as a helpmeet. It smelled sweet and low and smoky. She had no need of its pharmacological virtues. The thing was that, in the white floodlight of the Comedy Cavern, it was deeply, gloriously, intrinsically brown. Quickly and decorously, Grandmother Taal fluffed her many skirts, squatted and urinated on the block of prime hash. With the briefest grimace of distaste, she mixed the hash and piss into a thick paste. With the bent blade of the lock-pick she crammed as much of the brown sludge into the lock mechanism as she could. Even when she thought she had enough, she kept obdurately plastering. It was a mighty thing to ask even of Etzvan Canton Black Loess. She packed and packed until it was dribbling out of the keyhole. Then, choosing a clean blade from the lock-pick, she pulled up a sleeve and swiftly carved the word OPEN on the ghost-pallid skin on the inside of her elbow.
Grandmother Taal cried aloud in pain. The winds that patrolled the great cave lifted it, turned it into just another shriek among the stalactites. The years, the prize years, were leaking out of her. The power was burning them, focusing their hope and energy on the intricacies of interlocked steel. Blood ran down her mutilated arm and dripped on to the marble concourse. Grandmother Taal clenched her fist, gritted her teeth. Fire gnawed her bones. Palsies wracked her. She shook to a spasm. The lock quivered. Again, she convulsed; two years, five years burned. The lock jerked. The ashes of years piled up in her cells; she was old, she was old. Seven years. Ten years. Please, leave me something! she begged of the lock. A third time the lock quaked. Quaked again, then, with a detonation of rending metal, it burst apart. A pool of brown sludge joined the pool of blood on the stone. The tunnel doors began to slide apart. No time to lose. Grandmother Taal snatched her bag, hitched up her skirts, slipped through the gap and highfooted it up the long, black tunnel.
The purple, Devastation Harx thought as the Acolytes of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family filed from the flying cathedral's outlocks on to the morning-glinty plateau of the repair dock, had not been one of his better ideas. Not the colour; purple was a sacerdotal hue, and cheap. Fetching, in the right light. The uniformity. Suddenly he saw ranked and serried badness. All little faces and hands in little squads and files, all dressed in ticky-tacky, all together, all the same. Robots, not people. Not individuals. The ubiquitous machines. Getting closer now. Getting into his beloveds.
Why join? The thought came as a sudden desire to shout down from the brass-railinged balcony from which he took the salute of the faithful. An act of free will to joyfully become a drone? The words were a tight urging in his throat, then he heard in the hollow of his skull how they would sound going out across the high glass, and was afraid. The doubts of a middle-aged twenty-something who has woken all creak-jointy this morning. You owe them better, as they line up to praise you for the freedom you have given their souls. Tell them that they take free grace freely given and throw it away with both hands and the ones who could still think would stare, while those who could not would only worship all the harder.
It's not easy, running a religion. They have a habit of running away on you.
The Rank Presbyters and Exercisers Temporal had mustered their sections into squares and quadrilles of episcopal purple. Faces gleamed in the morning light. They looked to Harx expectant of blessing. He raised a hand, hesitated, suddenly nauseated by their need, suddenly heedful of the Störting-Kobiyashi shift workers trekking from the big express elevators along the grapple arms and access cranes to start work, and the way they could not quite bring themselves to look at all these faithful people, and smiled, and shook their heads sadly.
Yes, it is, Devastation Harx thought. And, to his gathered faithful, Have you understood so little? I gave you the secrets of unbarring the cells of your minds, of mask-and-caping the superhuman beneath each of your mundane humanities, of nurturing each of your uniquenesses so that a thousand flowers might bloom and a thousand schools of thought pervade, and what did you do? Dressed all in purple and got great thighs pedalling a bicycle-powered cathedral.
Great thighs, he admitted, were something.
But to make yourselves machines to war against the tyranny of the mechanical?
His hand returned to the balcony rail, unwilling to bless.
“Grace,” whispered Sianne Dandeever, first of the faithful and devoted über-mater and who, Devastation Harx knew sadly from his visits to the cycle-housings, had an ass the Panarch herself would commit sin to own and who, if he ever said the word, would devotedly let him chew it. Devotedly, but not joyfully. “They're waiting…”
You become trapped by the needs of faith.
He raised his hand. The Rank Presbyters smiled, relieved; among them that odd, too-hungry trackboy who had stolen for him that dreadful tyke of train-trash girl. Of all incarnations and emanations for that Haan woman to have been entangled with…The ways of the multiverse were strange, and the boy had done a fine job, deserving of more reward than a two-tier promotion in the church civil service. Harx watched the boy nod to the Vicars Choral. They raised their staves, brought them down.
Happy happy happy
Happy happy happy
Happy happy happy all the day
Harx has saved us
Harx has made us
Happy happy happy all the day, the fresh-faced choristers sang.
Does God ever tire of hearing his praises sung? Harx thought, embarrassed today by the adulation wafting himwards, Does he feel insulted by the infantile twaddle peddled in the name of worship? So he would not have to listen, he surveyed instead the damage Cadmon and Euphrasie had wrought on his floating basilica. It looked to the faithful like contemplation of higher things. For a homosexual anarchist artist—late and reluctant recruits to the war—his brother had made a good aerial bomber. A few more sticks, a little faster on the turns, he might have seriously discommoded the great strategy, if not forced a season's defeat on him. His diversionary strike on heaven might have gained him ground in the lower orbitals and swept away a third of the angelic forces that opposed him, but the ways of machines were subtle, and from the humiliation at the Molesworth Festhall, he did not doubt that other energies were being mobilised against him.
Had they finished yet?
Gleeful gleeful gleeful all the day.
How many, if any, suspected the scale of crusade in which they were spiritual infantry? Few out on parade, few on this whole world, in this universe. Not the machines. They knew too well that this little red ball was their final redoubt, and that one installation artist turned religious shyster was to be their nemesis.
Strange, and passing inevitable, the path that leads from fine art to jihad.
Strange, the things you find in mirrors.
God, they were still at it. Did they never tire of singing? I'm trying to make a universe for humans to live in, and the best you can do with it is chant doggerel. Excessive
aubergine and happy-clappiness were the prices you paid for owning your own church. Inventing a religion was still the best and easiest way to raise the astronomical amounts of cash a war with the angels required.
Sianne Dandeever, poker-erect, face rapt, hands firmly gripping balcony rail, suddenly flinched as if unseen wings had flapped in her face. She flicked something away with her hand, scowled, devotion broken.
Harx stared, then cocked his head a degree to catch a tiny sound. A hum, an insect drone.
Insects. Up here? On this glass desert? Ridiculous.
More than ridiculous. Sinister.
A black mote danced in his face. Harx lunged, snatched, felt frantic movement buzz in his palm. He closed his fist, felt a soft crunch, opened his palm and peered closely at it. One less skilled in the wiles of machines might have taken it for a true insect, but he could see that the thing whirring spastically in his hand was a tiny, glass-bellied helicopter. He held it closer; as he did, the belly-bead popped. Vapour wisped, Harx hurled the thing away from him but not before a greenish wisp had curled up his nostrils. He saw vinegar, tasted blue minims; a symphony for cabbage and pram played a loud chord in his frontal lobes. The smell of triangles…
“Battle stations!” he roared out over the assembled faithful. Every head turned. Sianne Dandeever stared, half numb, half thrilled that this might be the call for which Harx had invested so much of her body and will.
“Battle stations!” Harx repeated as the squares and drills broke up into frantic motion. “To arms, our church is under attack!”
He nodded for Sianne to take command as a cloud of robot insects, black as smoke, poured from the spire-top airco funnels. He did not like to be seen by the faithful to be abandoning Armageddon, but there were tactics that only he could employ, and those in private. The true battle would not be fought under the glass plains, with gun turrets and Gatling bunkers, but among the shifting dimensions of his mirror maze. Devastation Harx swirled from the balcony. Sianne Dandeever cracked her knuckles and stood tall. Thank you God. At last. At long long last.