Ares Express

12

The rain was gruelling now. Sweetness loathed getting her hair wet, but stuck her head out from under the shelter of the seat. She thought she had heard it again.

“It’s nothing.” Serpio coaxed a small fire of grass stalks and wood splinters. It sent a wan spiral of smoke up to haunt the ribs and buttresses of the underside of the chair seat.

“It’s not nothing if it’s thunder.” She scanned the sky that had slowly curdled from the west until now it was a moiling blanket of grey on grey.

“You don’t get thunder from that kind of cloud.” Serpio was trying to rig a trivet of stones over the now-glowing fire.

“Well, I hope you’re sure, because in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re sitting right under a twenty-metre wooden chair, and not only is it wood, and the tallest thing in fifty kays, it’s also right on top of what passes for the major hill in this neighbourhood.”

“I’m sure.”

“How do you know?”

“I seen plenty of weather.”

“So’ve I.”

I’ve got an uncle fused into the regional signalling grid by plenty of weather, and a relative hit by lightning gives everyone a nose for thunder, she wanted to say but Serpio’s forehead was furrowed and his tongue peeking pinkly from the corner of his mouth as he stacked his stones. “I’m soaked,” Sweetness said instead. “Let me near that.” Wet hair momentarily blinded her. Her foot brushed the tripod of stones. It promptly collapsed. Serpio swiftly plucked the rocks from the fire before they crushed out its last breath. Then with the Zen patience of card-house builders, he set about rebalancing his rocks. Sweetness squatted on her heels and showed her hands to the three flickers of heat and thought about how quickly it had all gone like the weather.

For the first handful of hours the novelty of travel at right angles had thrilled her. Off the track. Beyond the lines. Turn those handlebars and you can go in any direction you like. The track doesn’t take you. You take the track. Maps among the trainfolk are grids, networks, interconnections of coloured lines with black circles. All this two-dimensionality was wooeeeee! stuff. This flat, almost treeless rangeland was full throttle terrain. Glancing behind her—comb black curls out of her eyes—Sweetness exulted at the plume of dust rising up behind her. One part of her soul warned her she was advertising her egress for a hundred kilometres around. Another did not give one fig. Outliers of a great herd of grazebeasts cantered, roll-eyed with fear, from the speeding bikers. Encouraged, Serpio aimed his machine at the heart of the dark wall of the main herd. It parted before him. The terrain bike drove a dust-coloured wedge through the mass of bovine bodies, splitting it in two like an amoeba.

“Woo-hoo!” he hollered.

Sweetness thumped Serpio on the back. When he stopped the bike, she took the little wireless and wedged it between the handlebars. Thereafter, Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces and Cool Cat Jazzy Jee rode with them over the outwash hills of Lesser Oxus into West Deuteronomy. Like hormone-troubled adolescence, the smooth face of the land was breaking into bumps and ridges. Straggles of wire tried to entrap the trampas. Dusty meanders in the grass became tracks, became double-rutted roads. By unspoken agreement, they stayed clear of these, and the fields that had appeared in between the long, low ridges, the farms and the stockyards and the pens. Occasional gangs of stockmen in dusters and cartwheel hats nodded to them. Their long-legged destriers minced nervously, offended by engine whine. Fence-crews working on the wire from the backs of huge eight-wheel yutes raised a hand in passing greeting. A taciturn folk, the Deuteronomians, given to their land and their past and the arcane formulae of their society.

In a wooded crotch where three valleys met stood St. Mariensborough. Five streets, seven shrines, five bars, three good cantinas all next to each other, one Universal Store, a manufactory, a doctor/lawyer/vet, an auction house and a folding cinema. Here they stopped for fuel. Serpio filled the tank from the alcohol distillery. Sweetness reclined in a pose she thought coquettish and dangerous. She tapped her foot to the radio—“Tuxedo Junction”—and surveyed her fellow fuel customers. A country bus, dust-battered and dented, shrieking with schoolkids. A big yute, high as a house, emblazoned with improving versos from the Guthru Gram Kanteklion. A truck train unashamedly carrying the sperm-and-ova symbol of the National AI Service. Two low-loaders, parked suspiciously close to each other. While they guzzled alcohol, two men passed a pile of cardboard boxes marked with “fragile” symbols from one flatback to the other. Bet you’ve no idea who we are, what we’re doing, where we’re going, Sweetness teased them.

A niggle whispered, And you do?

“Any cash?”

A different niggle as she rooted in her bag for bills. Vague resentment. St. Mariensborough was where it started to turn sour. Beyond St. Mariensborough, it changed. The outwash hills, remnants of a continental-scale deluge billennia before the cometary rain of the early decades of the manforming, ran into each other, formed ridges and escarpments. The land developed a trend, westward and upward, fingers to a palm. Roads roamed the long valleys, seeking ways on to the table lands above. Over this high land a hard rain intended; grey clouds running in from the west were wedged against a front and piled into a massive frown. The wind rose. The horizon vanished into twilight vagueness. An hour beyond the nub-end of the last metalled road they passed the last farm. Dour and Deuteronomian: a tower of planed wood and little windows, bare and defiant of the big flatness. A wind-pump rattled its vanes in the rising wind, its mechanism unlocked in anticipation of big wind coming. Dead ravens hung, claws up, beaks down, from a crucifixion board. Their fleasy feathers stirred. Take warning. Stern people here.

An hour past the last farm the first drop hit Sweetness between the eyes and slid down her nose. The second was not slow following. Somewhere between the three and four thousandth, she decided she was Not Having Fun. It wasn’t Want To Go Back—not yet, but it was getting there. The rain punished the tiny creeping vehicle, an offence against the elemental purity of land and weatherscape. Serpio steered through the arrowing rain into the dark heart of the storm.

“Where are we going?” Sweetness yelled. Each time the wind took her words away. The universal grey—earth, air and water—abolished any notion of time, but Sweetness’s innate Engineer sense of timetabling advised her it was nearing night. In confirmation, the horizon flared briefly: sun through a crack in the storm front as the edge of the world rose over it. In that instant of orange, Sweetness glimpsed a fellow intruder in the desolation. A silhouette: so simple and absolute there could be no mistaking its identity, however incongruous that might seem. A chair. Yes, a chair. And, she reckoned, a big chair. A big chair, all alone and untenanted on a ridge top.

She banged Serpio on the shoulder. He nodded—already seen and noted. He turned the handlebars toward the big chair.

A very big chair. And a very long way off. Sweetness clung to Serpio and pressed her face against his back while the headlamp felt out the darkness for the chair. She tried not to think about running out of ol, or how deliciously drowsy this whipping rain was making her feel, how soft the wire-tough grass looked. Half-hypnotised by the weaving spot of the headlight beam and half-stupid with cold, to her great astonishment, Sweetness suddenly found herself out of the rain. While Serpio tried to make wet wood burn with a splash of ol, Sweetness tried to take in the edifice sheltering her. It was a very very big chair. The legs were twenty metres high, she thought. Three orphanages of foundlings could have played handball on its ample seat. The carved finials of the back tugged at the low hurtling clouds. She thought it strange to find it not at all strange to be sheltering under a chair on which the Panarch might have rested, in the nowherelands of Deuteronomy West.

Serpio finally abandoned his attempts to erect a cooking trivet and used the stones instead to ring-fence the fire. Sweetness ate stale duck sandwiches, picking out the pickled cucumber which she didn’t like and flicking it into the dark. She looked into the fire and asked the glowing things to help her believe where she was, what she had done. Flakes of wood ash hold no oracle. Without a word she unrolled her sleeping bag across the fire from Serpio and slipped inside in her still damp clothes.

“You stay your side.”

He did. And he was still there in the morning, when Sweetness woke with a start to find that she was indeed where she feared she might be. The storm had marched on the east in the night. Behind it came an immense blue morning. The indigo edge of the world sparkled with the riding lights of interworld ships. The big chair was a throne of marvels, an invitation to sit and contemplate a moment as gods. From this height on which the chair stood golden light flowed down into the hollows and shallow valleys, filling up all the land so that every blade of grass stood distinct. On such a morning even curled-up duck sandwiches have the taste of glory. Sweetness woke cold and stiff and aching but as she shuffled around the camp, trying to poke life into extinct ashes, the morning worked its way into her soul and lit her up. She looked out at the land—her land now—and wondered with pleasure where it would take her today.

They were packed and on the bike in half an hour. Little grasslands things—a rustle, a dart—fled from their path. Behind they left three neat, parallel tire tracks. Trainfolk. Never get away from the track. Within half an hour the land was turning higher and drier. Scrub, sagey herbs, red sand between the roots of clinging grasses. At a waterstop, Sweetness stood up on the pillion seat to scan the horizon. Heat shimmer. They were crossing the dry fringe-country of the great northeastern desert. Between her and the haze, an unknown object bulked large. At this range Sweetness could not make anything out of it, except that it was big. Not a chair, but big. It kept its identity as they approached it across the dry hardpan, at first one thing, then another, then nothing known at all. It was only as they came up out of a seasonal stream bed, flowing with flowers in the brief rush-off after the rains, to find it squat in front of them that Sweetness realised what it was. An enormous shoe. The guttee of God.

It was the size of a rail-car, made of leather, rather sagged and rotted by the occasional rain seasons, and chewed at the edges by ravenous desert animals. Sweetness and Serpio ate a meagre lunch leaning against its welt. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The journey had taken them swiftly to that place in a relationship where you can be comfortable with silence. Out of curiosity Sweetness scrambled up the shoe—a left, she noted—then scaled to the cuff by means of the laces, each the size of bridge cables. She peered inside. The high sun illuminated a waste of bird bones. She felt vaguely disappointed, though she could not say what she might have expected that would have satisfied her.

In the afternoon the bike passed at some distance another Promethean domestic artifact; an ironing board on which entire stratocumuli could have been pressed and creased. A spindly mesa, it occupied the western horizon for many tens of kilometres. The tail of its huge shadow marked the beginning of the desert proper.

“Into that?”

Sweetness was doing her far-seeing-balance-on-the-seat feat again. Serpio refilled the canteens from a sandy little spring that meandered a way among black tar-thorn and shrub casanthus until it tired of its own energy and the red sand drank it down. The scent of deep rock water was rich in the air.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Sweetness’s left hand stopped him stoppering the flasks. Her right dropped in two purifying tablets.

“Are you questioning my direction?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because for the past two days I’ve been staring at the middle of your back and trusting implicitly that you’ve got some idea where you’re going, and now I really, really got to be sure. I just want to be sure, that’s all.”

“We’re going out there, yes.”

“Okay. Now, why?”

“There’s someone I want to meet, out there.”

“Out there?”

“People live in deserts.”

“People die in deserts.”

“Harx lives out there.”

“Harx who?”

Serpio was swinging back on to the saddle. He kicked at the starter. The ol motor cleared its throat; dry and dusty in the tubes.

“You coming?”

You’re rushing me, Sweetness thought as she shook up the canteens. You don’t want me to ask about this. You’re taking me to meet someone/thing but you don’t want to talk about him/it. Anywhere else, that would have been that to you and your terrain bike, matey. But when the last other person you have seen was a dour Deuteronomian Peripatete and he had discreetly shooed you away because he had taken a Vow of Seclusion, you get up behind the saddle.

“So, this Harx.”

“What about him?”

“I heard you mention him before.”

He did not reply but the muscles beneath his sweat-stiff workclothes said, Oh? What? Shit, secrets to keep to Sweetness’s fingers.

“Back then, where they did that thing. You know. With the…meat.”

A pause of half a kilometre. Sorry sorry sorry, Sweetness thought. It was bad and I shouldn’t remind you of it but I have to know.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You mentioned this Harx guy. So who is he?”

“He’s holy.”

“That explains it then.”

“Explains what?”

“People who live in deserts are either mad, bad, sad or holy.”

He said nothing for the next twenty kilometres, or so it seemed to Sweetness, hovering on the numb edge of sensory deprivation between the encircling haze and the dank man-odour of Serpio’s shirt. When he did talk, it was in a voice so soft and alien to him that it was as if the sand had spoken.

“He’s not mad or sad or bad, but he is holy.”

It was a major effort of will for Sweetness to pull her soul back from the horizon, to which it had been reeled out by the flat red land and spread into a thin, encircling line.

“Unk?”

“He’s good to me. He helps me. He respects me. I’ve got something that’s useful to him, he needs me. The others; they’ll all see, when he comes. They’ll look up and their mouths, they’ll just fall open like fishes in a bucket, and then they’ll see.”

“I’m a bit unclear about this…”

“Have you ever heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“You will. Everyone will…”

“Could we maybe do a little less of the big doomy when it all comes down stuff, and just start at the beginning?”

A pause, in which a skittering lizard hoicked itself up on its rear limbs and hot-legged it away over the burning sands.

“You ever listen to the radio real late at night?”

“Of course. Everyone does that.” On the trains it was how you reminded yourself you were young and cute and a kid like hundreds of millions of others out there in the non-moving world. The voices in the dark of your room, close to you in your bed, a dozen different tongues in your ear a night.

“You ever listen to the religious stations?”

Sweetness’s fingers had twirled the dial over the thousands of shouting pleading hectoring lecturing wheedling whining canoodling seducing scolding trumpeting voices jammed one on top of the other in the low medium wave. Her world bred religions like a dog fleas, and they all could afford air-time.

“I’m more a music person, me.” Pertinent to which, Sweetness realised that for an indefinite but long time now the handlebar wireless had played nothing but airglow. Scary biscuits. A place where the radio wasn’t. On the far shore of the airwaves.

“Yeah, well. Anyway, that’s where he found me, in the Godband.”

“You found him, you mean.” A random twiddle of the knobs.

“No. He found me. He was talking right at me.”

“Yah. Right.”

“No. Really. He called me, by name. He said, ‘And this is going out for Serpio Six Tuesday-Duodecember-Twelfth-Raining Sebendary Waymender.’”

“Nah. Someone set you up. One of those…other ones, back there.”

“No. Listen, will you? He saw me, same way as I see your friend there.”

“He had this, spirit-sight? Angel-vision? What the hell do you call it anyway?”

“The sight.”

“This ‘sight,’ so does it have a limit like normal sight, like perspective, or does it just not bother with things like that?”

“It does, but you can train it, and then it’s naturally more highly developed in some than others.”

“Higher spiritual beings. Of course.”

“Look, if you’re going to be cynical…”

“Sorry. I’m an Engineer.”

They passed a tangle of bones and Sweetness thought hard about cynicism in big deserts.

“Go on.”

“He saw me, he knew I had the sight, and he told me the Ever-Circling Family needed the sight to help them in the fight.”

“The sight, and the fight.”

“You can say what you like, but it’s a battle. This whole world’s a battle, it’s been a battle since before it was invented.”

The pause invited the question: “Who’s fighting?”

“Men and angels.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. Believe me. You think this world was made for us? We’re just human shields. They can’t wipe the angels out now because they keep the manforming systems running. Like the magnetic field. This place doesn’t have one, naturally, so there are these huge superconducting magnets up there in orbit. You’ve heard of vanas?”

Sweetness had always thought of the orbital mirrors as too lowly even to be proper angels, until the night in Inatra a spotlight from heaven lit her way home.

“They keep the weather working. This place isn’t like the Motherworld, it doesn’t have that feedback system so the whole thing always stays right for life. Well, not yet. The climate here is simple, like not complex. You wouldn’t know what that means, but basically, if left to its own devices, it would get stuck in a loop and you’d get the same weather over and over and over again. The vanas, they heat the atmosphere up so you get these pockets of randomness, so the climate doesn’t get stuck. That’s just two. There’s thousands, but the point is they keep the whole world alive, and they know it. They don’t need any of that stuff, they’d be as happy if this place was rock and ice, like it was, before, but then they wouldn’t be safe. We make them safe, and that’s why they let us come here.”

“Wait wait wait. What are all these theys and thems?”

“The angels, of course. Though Harx says you shouldn’t call them that; they’re machines, and machines have souls but no spirits. They can’t be of God, see?”

“Wait wait wait wait. If the angels are machines…”

“Not if.”

“Okay.” No contention: everyone head-knew that what they called angels were, for the most part, leftover manforming machinery, but the conceit persisted because for the most part they lived in heaven—they formed a visible ring around the world—and they carried out unguessable missions on the part of unseen powers for the betterment of humans. “And they’ve no spirits, so what do you and this Harx boy actually see with your sight?”

He sighed the sigh guys sigh when their thoughts are too much for wee females. Sport, sex, steam or steel, it never failed to kindle the devil in Sweetness.

“It’s theoretical.”

“Go on.”

“How much vinculum theory have you got?”

“The universe is a big brown package all tied up with string.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“I know that. That’s the bollocks you get off the School of the Air. All matter, energy, space and time are different harmonics in eleven dimensional strings, most of which are rolled up smaller than Planck space so all we get are the four we live in rather than lots we wouldn’t know what to do with.” She had always found visualising seven extra dimensions, each containing the ones beneath it, mind-wringing. Then one of her wiser Stabile Tutors, who held seminars in reality, had let her into the secret that everyone else did as well. Good thing. The order of the universe should be mind-wringing. She added, “I’m named after it.”

“What?”

“Octave. Harmonics. String music, all that.”

“What do you know about filament computing?”

Sweetness let go Serpio’s jacket and hunted for other hookholds underneath the bag rack. She made sure he appreciated that she was leaning back, away from him.

“Suppose you just give me the lecture, then?”

After a few miffed moments he said, “All the ROTECH machines use vinculum processing architecture.”

“Spell it,” Sweetness challenged. He did, and continued, “Calculations get done not in two states, like the old quantum machines we got on the trains, but in eleven uncollapsed states. You know…”

“Two impossible things at the same time. Or in this case, eleven.”

“Yeah. But what it really is, deep down, is using the structure of the universe as a computer. So in a sense…”

“The whole universe is a computer.” Or God, she thought of adding, but she was unsure of the small print of Serpio’s theology. If it involved blind hejiras into the Big Red, the devil in the details could be sharp.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“The whole universe has the potential to be in any number of uncollapsed states.”

“This is the ‘Many-worlds’ theory, isn’t it?”

“It is, but this is how it actually works day to day. Most of the time the calculations are very small and neat and they stay down there in the string-level of the universe.”

“Like those little knots in thread you sometimes get if you’re sewing, that don’t stop the needle going through the cloth.”

“Sort of, I suppose. But sometimes if you have to make a lot of calculations, like something really complicated like making a model of an ocean, or an ecosystem, you get what they call coherence. That’s when a whole lot of string potentials are entangled together and all collapse into the same state. Then you can get whole chunks of the big universe switching from one world to another. Like magic.”

“Like knots so big they pull the shape of the cloth into something else.”

“Like sewing a big sheet of fabric into a jacket or a shirt or a wedding waistcoat. That orph…”

The precise perimeter of the circular crazy-zone was sharp in Sweetness’s memory. Like stepping from one world into another, she had thought. Right and wrong. It was another way of being this world. And what of that other place Uncle Neon took her? Was she taken to other-world, or was other-world erected around her, and the set struck when she left?

“Its little string-machines all agreed to go mad and decided that reality was something else.”

“They switched on an alternative reality.”

A new image now, of the cloud-sized heaven machine decreeing its doom on the defective earth-builder and restoring the world to normality. But who decreed what was normal? Who minted the consensus? Normal ordained that girls don’t drive trains. Consensus said, the only daughters of illustrious Engineer Domieties marry Stuards with stainless steel kitchens and good prospects.

“We’ve got a consensus reality now, so any breaches have to get cleared up right quick, but in the earliest days of the manforming they used the technique all the time to speed things up. They’d run a model of an alternative world where, say the atmosphere was working better, or there were bacteria, or soil, or even plants, and when the model got complex enough, the model would become reality. Otherwise it would’ve taken thousand of years and we’d be up to our asses in ice, if we could even breathe at all.”

Sweetness’s mind was wringing with that same painful twist she recalled from Pastor Jhingh and his eleven-dimensional visualisations. If the machines could think like that, could see all those dimensions unfolding out of each other, then maybe it was right to call them angels.

“So, what is it you actually see?”

“Most people don’t know this, but humans can see on the quantum level no problem at all. We could do it out here. It’s good and clear at night. I’d drive about twenty kays away and light a match, and you could see it. That would be like one single photon reaching your eye, and one photon is seeing quantum.”

Please don’t feel you have to demonstrate, Sweetness thought.

“You know a lot about this.”

“It’s good to study the things that make us different.”

“So,” Sweetness said. “You see things not on the quantum level, but on the vinculum scale?”

“That’s the way I was born. That’s why I can see what you people call the angels, because I can see them thinking. All those tiny tiny little vinculum calculations. I can see their minds glowing.”

“And this Harx boy.”

“To be able to see on the vinculum level involves vinculum processes. He can see me, seeing them. But he can see better. He can see anywhere in the universe, because it’s all entangled.”

“Okay,” Sweetness said carefully. “I can get this. I think. But tell me, how come you see Little Pretty One? I’m telling you, she is not a machine. She is my sister, and she lives in mirrors, and she gives me good advice, most of the time, when she can be bothered talking.”

“And she’s sitting right behind you looking over your shoulder and smiling at me.”

“You know something,” Sweetness said, truly savouring the sudden rush of emotion. “I really hate it when you talk about her like that.”

“Sorry.”

“She talks to me. All you do is see her.”

Nothing was said for several kilometres of rocky red desert.

“She’s not a machine,” Sweetness reminded Serpio.

“I know.”

A minute or so further on, Sweetness pressed her sharp little chin on Serpio’s shoulder and said into his ear, “So how does she fit into all your big theory, then?”

“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “That’s why I want to ask Harx.”

“So that’s where we’re going.”

“Yeah.”

“To this guru preacher boy.”

“Devastation Harx, yes.”

“Ah,” said Sweetness on the back of a stolen bike with at least a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert around her in any direction. “Ah. Yes. I get it now. So I’ve walked out on my family and my home and my impending marriage and come out here with just the stuff on my back into the ass-end of nowhere and the only one you’re really bothered about is something I can’t even see that’s hanging off my ribcage. Can I ask you one question?”

“Whatever.”

“Did you ever really fancy me at all?”

Serpio stopped the bike. Dead square stopped. Middle of nowhere.

Oh Mother’a’grace, Sweetness thought. I’ve gone and done it, haven’t I? Why why why why do I have to go that one question too deep?

Serpio got off the bike. Shaking life into saddle-sore limbs, he walked away. Clinging to the superstructure, Sweetness watched him go.

“Serpio!”

No answer.

“Where are you going?”

No answer.

“What’re you doing?”

Back turned to her, he looked out upon a vista of sweeping dunes.

“I’m sorry!”

Dunes are dunes are dunes. What are you looking at, what are you seeing? Nothing, I bet, except not me.

“I said, I’m sorry!”

Unmoved, like the dark blue sky.

“I said!” Top of her lungs. “I’m sorry!”

She yelled so loud the desert heard her. Sand shifted on the sloping face of a big dune, ringed by minions. Shift triggered slide, triggered chain slippages that cascaded up into micro-avalanches into dust rivulets into flowing deltas into sheet-floods of sand. The dune face was shedding away before the power of her voice, disintegrating into scabs and floes. The dune was moving. It was stirring in its bed and rising up.

It had heard her. It was coming to get her, loud-mouthed little tyke who dared disturb the monumental solitude of the deep desert. It would fill her mouth and voice box and lungs with silencing sand.

No. Impossible. Dunes don’t walk. They crawl, over whole seasons. If a dune moves, it is because a buried something beneath it is moving. The slipping curtains of sand flashed tantalises of bright metal, curved plastic, knobbled ridges. The something was very big. It was not buried in the dune. It was the dune. It had lain here and gone to sleep and woken up caked in sand. Something like a lost city was rising out of the Big Red. It lifted clear of the other, lesser dunes. It left a circular crater a good ore train in diameter. Higher it rose. The flying city was the shape of a great, flat, upturned saucer, crazy with racing sand. Through veils of dust raining off its rim like monsoon from an umbrella, Sweetness glimpsed complex forms beneath the dome, like the folds and ruches of fungi that hide under the sobriety of their caps. She shaded her eyes with her hand as the thing reached the zenith and eclipsed the sun.

“Oh my God!” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th exclaimed as the flying thing passed over her head. It moved to the south, hovered over a flat expanse of rocky grit, settled slowly. The sun was full on it, and it was a magnificent creature, carapaced like a beetle with iridescent greens and electric blues, underneath busy with bulbous, insect-eyelike excrescences, manipulator arms and whirring rotors. Claw feet unfolded, tested the terrain, found it faithful. The flying object settled on its legs. The fans were stilled. An intimidating set of polished black mandibles that could have devoured houses by the district opened; an alabaster pont reached out and touched ground.

Sweetness stood mumchance.

Serpio was already running for the pont. He turned, extended a hand to Sweetness.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”