Ares Express

20

At some point in its recent history, Solid Gone, population 2125, elevation 2124, had offended the weather. World was rising in brilliant reds and ochres, skeined through with imperial purples and mood indigos, around Sweetness as she turned off the mainline on to the two-rut track down which the finger-board pointed. Thither Solid Gone. But over Solid Gone a small, shapely cloud hovered, so firm and exact Sweetness felt a shudder of association with Devastation Harx’s airmobile cathedral. Evening air brushed the nape of her neck; the cloud hung in defiance of all winds, seemingly moored over the small desert town. Not one drop of rain had it ever cast. The earth beneath it was dry as a Poor Quadrentine’s crack, penumbral, deathly. Sweetness rested her bag a moment on the wooden nameboard, studied the grey array of dead solar trees, languid wind-pumps and adobes clumped around the taller cylindrical buildings of the civic centre, then hitched her bag and marched down the slight slope across the terminator. A blind woman could have told the moment she stepped under the cloud. A stifling, draining heat sucked sweat from Sweetness’s pits and the pluck from her pith. She stopped, shook her head, suddenly reluctant to walk on, to turn and go back, to do anything intentional at all. As a kid, she had told and told and told her parents that she couldn’t take antihistamines to combat the zone-allergies she had suffered from—it’s always pollen season somewhere in the world, for trainpeople. They made her woozy, they stuffed her head with socks and lint, made her eyes red and her limbs heavy as if she had been dropped down Motherworld’s gravity hole. Child’a’grace and Naon Engineer had made her take them anyway, and it was all exactly as she had described it to them. But Solid Gone was twenty times that.

Solid Gone was a town-shaped case of myalgic encephalopathy.

There were people here. They sat on their wooden verandahs, dressed in drab, turd-like colours. They were of a variety of ages, but all seemed old. Their bodies had no bearing, they slumped and sagged, slack sack-folk. They half-listened to wirelesses set up on beer crates; or semi-attended to the ornate bong-pipes carved from desert gypsum which had been Solid Gone’s name and fame, once; or spent moments studying crossword puzzles and Star-prize Wordsearch magazines before deciding it was too much effort and lolling back in their deckchairs. Even more than a flick of attention to the passing colourful stranger was too much effort. A tip of the chin, a slight declination of the head, were all the welcomes Sweetness received to Solid Gone.

The intricately terraced and irrigated weedfields had turned to dust and blown away years before. The wirelesses were all tuned off station, playing a sinister, whispering amalgam of livestock prices, rural politicians, failed comedians, phone-ins about infidelity. Talk talk talk. A chatter of spectres. Not a minim of music. The heat and drone sat on Sweetness’s shoulders like grey luggage. Drear. Heat. Weight. With every step she imagined the colour draining from her clothes; a thread here, a button there, a seam, a panel, whoops! a whole sleeve, gone dirt.

“Hey!”

She felt she must make some sound, test her voice on the thick air to be sure it was still working. A barefoot kid lolling on a slatted wooden recliner lifted the brim of his hat.

“How do I get to the town centre?”

The kid lifted a thumb, jerked it left.

In the days of civic pride, before this communal affliction of the spirit, Solid Gone had built a small but elegant bourse around a cobbled central plaza. Here the weekly weed markets and meerschaum exchange had met in the colonnaded arcades, sheltered from the dehydrating sun and blow-in, vagrant sand. Sellers in smocks and veils had uncovered their piles of sweet-scented leaf, dealers in cartwheel hats and duster coats bent over the fragrant carpets, sniffing, crumbling fronds between their fingers, heating the powder up in small solar-lens censers, wafting the fumes to their faces. Hands had been struck, oil-paper packets of dollars slapped down into palms; vests of pockets stuffed with bales of pressed leaf. Once. Now plaza and bourse had been reserved for a single, new tenant.

Numb, almost dumb, Sweetness Asiim Engineer stopped in her tracks to stare. The camperbus was suspended ten metres above the cambered cobbles. A thick metal chain fastened each corner to massive staples on the cornices of the adjacent exchange buildings. The bus’s wheels sagged on their leaf springs. There were little gritty oil-pools on the cobbles. Amazed by this wonder in the heart of lethargy, Sweetness circled round for a better view. There was a device on the truck’s roof; some kind of satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing, aimed at the churning grey centre of the stationary cloud. On the back was a complex transformer unit, clumsily mounted on the luggage rack. The power-pack crackled and dripped fat sparks to the cobbles, where they skittered back and forth before running inevitably down to earth. Ninety degrees more, and the far side of the bus was a swirl of spray-paint graphics that challenged the creeping drab of Solid Gone. Sweetness studied the clouds of angels and jazz musicians and puce and lilac curving things that looked like visual representations of the result of Solid Gone’s former trade for several minutes before she untangled the words: Sanyap Bedassie, Cloud-Cineaste. In the middle of this gaudiness was the black rectangle of an open door. In the middle of the open door sat a young man, dark hair, ratty goatee of the type grown from necessity not fashion. He wore black pants that tapered at the cuffs. Foreshortening made his feet look the size of grain trucks. They were shod in loafers—Preeds of (scuff) read the labels on the soles: no socks. His ankles were painfully big-boned, and skinny. His feet swung in counterpoint.

He looked down and noticed Sweetness.

“Hey! You! Get out of here!”

Sweetness gaminely cocked her head to one side to study him.

“Didn’t you hear me?” The young man waved a weak-looking fist. “Get out, go on! You still got some colour about you.”

“You Sanyap Bedassie?” Sweetness squinted up in a way she knew made her look cute whether she liked it or not.

“Who the hell else do you think I’d be?”

“Don’t know. Seen a lotta weird stuff recently, so now I ask everyone. I’m Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The man Bedassie looked thoughtful.

“That’s a good mouth-filling name. That ought to keep you safe.”

“What? My name?”

“It’s got strength in it. The weak things go first.”

“What’re you talking about? What you doing up there anyway? You the town paedophile or something?”

“It’s the plague.”

“Plague? I’m out of here if there’s plague.”

“Yes. You should. Go on. Go now.”

“That’s why you’re up there. You’re the plague…If you’ve given me something…”

“I’m not the cause. I’m the cure.”

Sweetness looked up at the face looking down at her between the Preeds guttees, at the bondage-bus hanging in its chains, at the hovering cloud like a cup of sour ash soup, at the pillared plaza for something that would offer an explanation of what she was seeing.

“This is all mad,” she challenged the visible world. An acid grumble in Sweetness’s stomach reminded her of physiological reality. Place your bets: plague, or starvation in the desert. “You got anything to eat? Can’t rightly say how long since I last ate.”

“Not much,” the man in the bus said. “They only feed me twice a day.”

“Anything’ll do.”

“Hang on a wee moment, then.” He rolled over into the dark on the van, reappeared a moment later lying on his belly, right arm aiming a torpedo-shaped bread-roll down at Sweetness.

“I don’t eat the bread, I’ve got gluten allergy. Don’t know why I held on to this, usually I chuck them out for the hawks. Must’ve had a premonition.”

He speared it down, Sweetness took it in cupped hands, tore it apart, crammed it into her mouth. It was stale; each mouthful was like soil, but it was food, it filled bellies. When she had finished, she looked around the elegant arcades.

“How do they get it up to you?”

“Pulley and a basket.”

Sweetness pondered this a moment, then jumped to the inevitable next question.

“So what about, you know?”

“Let’s say, I wouldn’t go round the other side of the van.”

“Fair enough,” Sweetness said. “So just what did you do, then?”

“Nothing. My job. Entertained the people. Showed them humours and horrors, gods and monsters, all human life. And for that, they pay me with industrial grade chains and bread-rolls in a bucket.”

“Have you some problem with straight answers?”

The man laughed. He looked as if the laugh had surprised him, like an ex-smoker hacking in the morning. Stuff still down there.

“No. No, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. I have absolutely no problem with straight answers. This is as straight as they can come in this place.”

Sweetness huffed in frustration and instead tried to scry some truth from the fluorescent curvery on the side of the truck.

“So, what does a cloud-cineaste do, anyroad?”

At which a bell began to clang, leaden and mean as a miser’s funeral.

“You’re about to find out,” Sanyap Bedassie said, glancing up. Sweetness looked where he looked. Down each of the avenues that radiated out from the zocalo’s cardinal points, Solid Gone’s citizenry was advancing. Young and old, male and female, sick and halt, a slow, spreading wave of brown and drab, like a terminus honey-wagon unburdening itself of a cargo of nightsoil. They lurched in time with the tolling of the iron bell. Hup! hayfoot, hup, strawfoot. Another metaphor came to Sweetness’s mind: the nasties that Sle and Rother’am liked to watch in Sle’s cubby when they thought no one else was about, munching nimki, faces bathed blue in the zombie-light, snickering at the dismemberments. No: these trans-dead had a purpose, a lust, a blood-hunger. These people just came, and came, and came, closing their doors neatly behind them, safely pocketing their keys, falling into step, spreading sludgily across the cobbles, filling all available space. They nudged against Sweetness as if she was not there. Soft jostles. They did not even smell of anything. Ghosts have no scent.

“What’s going on?” she called up at the hoisted van but Sanyap Bedassie had slipped inside. The last citizen took up his place in the square. Every face was upturned to the cloud of gloom. The power generators hummed; electricity arced blue as burning Belladonna brandy around the porcelain insulators. The sense of something-about-to-happen was palpable as a summer sandstorm. The satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing on the roof unfolded like a night-blooming flower. Aerials ran up, dishes spun out like petals, cooling vanes fanned forth. A soft oooh ran through the people as a translucent pink erectile thing slid priapically out of the centre of the blossom of dishes and aimed itself at the coiled heart of the hot grey cloud.

Sweetness was entranced. Even if it did nothing more, the sheer drama of the unfolding bizarre technology would have been worth standing in this square with a cricked neck. But it did not do nothing more. It did a definite something. Power peaked to a sharp, ozoney, bone-buzzing crescendo: a pink beam stabbed the soft underbelly of the cloud.

Later, Sweetness would swear that the cloud flinched.

The grey folds and pleats of cloud billowed downward, threatening the cornices and photon-towers of Solid Gone. Sweetness lifted her arms in front of her face: she could feel the heat from the unnatural cloud, then the curds rolled back and, as they did, she saw them change shape. No, not change shape. Take shape. The cloud mass was folding into figures, a man and woman, god-sized, seated behind a curving desk. Behind them, a complicated kind of a wall, with a window in it, which seemed to look out on a still-indistinct but altogether other scene. The base of the cloud was shaped into massive, three-dimensional images, hanging over the burghers of Solid Gone. As the cloud gained shape, it also gained colour. Rivulets of hue, like prismatic lighting, ran from the place where the beam pinkly penetrated the cloud, stained the mist-figures, intermingled, formed new colours, gave movement and character to the grey icons.

“Oh my Mother’a’grace,” Sweetness Asiim Engineer exclaimed. “It’s the seven o’clock news.”

Huge as hills, Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap, DFLP Belladonna’s Little Miss Bright’n’Breezy and Mr. Big Truth, smiled down on the adoring faces of Solid Gone. Behind them, their famous Eye on the World opened a window into greater depths of the enchanted cloud, showing an image of sleek black Corvettes rolling up at an imposing flight of steps, disgorging waving people in formal dress and being valet-parked.

“Wow,” said Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

The cloud convulsed again, throbbed like distant hill-thunder, then spoke.

“Regional leaders have arrived in Molesworth for the inauguration of the new Gubernator, Cossivo Beldene, whose Unity Rising Party won a landslide victory. However, the Anarchs of Deuteronomy and Grand Valley declined the invitation, citing undeclared funding by the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family and rumoured links to the Human League anti-machinist terror group,” Ashkander Beshrap said in his famous if-you-can’t-trust-me-who-can-you-trust? newsreader’s voice that shook the rooks from the roof-tiles.

The people watched “The Early Evening News” without comment but Sweetness could see them, one by one, standing taller, straightening up; noticed the corners of expression on their faces, creases in the eyes, tiny smile-seeds around the lips. By some unseen process, the colour seemed to drip from the cloud into their clothes. They watched the regional sports results and the market reports. By the time Sanka Déhau came to her solo Chitter-Chatter-Chit Celebrity Snippet, there were spontaneous outbreaks of delight in the zocalo. The news of Chaste Thercy, the Duenna of the Belladonna Opera’s adultery and pending divorce was greeted with applause and cheers. A favourable review of Blain Bethryn in a new comedy by the Stapledon Regional Comedy Theatre was greeted with whistling and stamping of feet. The rumour of a new studio album by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces caused near-hysteria. They whooped the local weather forecast and laughed in the streets when Anjea Ankersonn told them it would be another high of thirty-two, humidity twelve percent, chance of significant precipitation…

“Zero!” the crowd yelled in concert, and, laughing, holding their sides with delight, tears streaming down their faces they broke up into chattering, hand-shaking, back-slapping groups and made their way out of the zocalo into the side streets, into their homes and houses.

Sweetness stood alone in the plaza.

The voice from the sky fell silent. The pink ray ceased. Instantly, the colour ebbed from the clouds, the grey figures boiled and broke up into exercises in fractal geometry. The heat pressed down like a sweaty hand on the plaza. The rooks returned to their roosts, demoralised dusters of ragged feathers.

Sanyap Bedassie’s tousled head poked out of the door of the campervan.

“That answer you?” he asked Sweetness, then cupped his hands and called out at the windowless bourse-halls, “You all be back for the nine o’clock bulletin! Tears and laughter, drama and gravitas. Births, marriages and deaths. Agony and ecstasy. Corn and passion. Dust and monstrous crimes. Nights in the roof gardens of Hy Brazyl. Volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, plagues of devouring star-bees. God parting the dust clouds; old women gossiping. Love and death and the whole damn thing. Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars.”

“But,” Sweetness interjected, “it’s the evening news.”

“Correct!” Sanyap Bedassie said. “If I were you, I’d lie down, because this takes a bit of explaining, and you’ll do your neck, craning up like that.”

“What? Here?”

“It’s just dust. And you look no stranger to dust.”

Sweetness sat down. She felt the grain of the sand between the rounded cobbles. No stranger indeed. But she was reluctant to stretch out belly up on the surface of the zocalo. She did not like to be so open and exposed to this suspended cineaste.

“Are you sitting comfortably?” Bedassie lay prostrate in the campervan, looking down into Sweetness’s face.

“I’m not sitting, and I’m definitely not comfortable.”

“It’s a formula.” His hair hung around down his face. “Then, I’ll begin.”

For two years now the plague of dreamlessness had ravaged Solid Gone. For years longer—whole of the world’s long decades—it had stalked the lonesome townships of the desert fringe like a dust-devil. Many a sand-scoured tumble of red adobe attested to its power to devastate communities. Theories abounded about its nature and origin—the most scientific among those who took it as more than a legend from the Big Red was that it was some kind of infectious meme borne on the magnetic anomalies stirred up by the frequent rust-storms. The manner of its coming was always the same. After a period of sapping heat and high pressure, of thick heads and infuriating, set-slapping wireless interference, the citizens of the infected township would wake amazed by the vividness, clarity and sheer bizarreness of their dreams. They would sit around on their porches, under their tea-shop awnings, in the shadow of their house walls, slapping their thighs and shaking their heads as friends and families narrated the weird stuff inside their heads. This was the period of incubation. For a week the dreams would batter the subconsciouses of their victims, until the people were dazed colourless by the intensity of their night-life. Then one night, everyone dreamed the same dream. This was that dream. A sky of boiling black milk, shot through with lightnings, hung over an endless desert of silver sand. An edible dog—pure white, with one black ear—stood on the sand, by the self-contradictory logic of dreams, at once minute and sky-scaringly vast. It would shake its head, then look the dreamer in the soul’s eye. It would bark three times. Strangely huge, those barks. Paralysing, night-terrorising. “The sky shook,” the people would say next day when they sat down together to recount their dreams. “Like a stone nail through the heart.” Then the white dog would turn, glance back once over its shoulder, and with its perky ring prominent, trot off into the heat-haze. What the dreamers never realised—or if they did realise, were helpless to prevent—was that that one look back summoned their dreams, and that when the dog trotted away into the deep desert, their dreams scampered behind it, sniffing its heat.

That was the last dream anyone dreamed.

At first it seemed a blessing. Clear heads, bright eyes, no morning mouth. Good day to you, citizen; and to you, sir. Sleep well? Ah! Pull back of the shoulders, stretch, smile. Sleep of the righteous, comrade. Like the very dead. Days, weeks, a month; deep and dreamless. No one noticed that there was less and less to talk about under the tea-shop awnings, leaning against the trackside signal lights waiting for the slow morning mail, or that sleep was no longer as righteous as it had once been, that it pressed down heavy as lead sheets all the hot night, impossible to throw off next morning. There was never a time when the people noticed that the light of that morning was not as bright as the one before, that the tea was pale and insipid, that the music on the breakfast show was just irritating. That the colour was draining out of life. That they sat up hour after hour, with the million lights of the moonring tumbling over their roof tiles, later than late, afraid to tell their friends lovers others that they did not want to go to bed for dread of that planetary, crushing sleep. That when next they woke, the light could be a mere lightening of night, that the tea could be warm water, that the wireless could sing in static, that all colours had run into one. That they no longer cared that it was so.

No one cared. No one laughed. No one cried. No one went out. No one made a joke. No one read a book. No one wrote a love letter, or fell in or out of love. No one loved. No one looked up at the tumbling jewels of the moonring with an ooh in the heart. No one woke in the night to the plaint of the night-train whistles and begged them, Take me where you are going. No one sang. No one danced. No one dandled a child upon the knee, much less thought to conceive one. No one bought a good frock or a new shirt or fine fine shoes. No one ached, no one hoped, no one longed, no one aspired, no one imagined, no one dreamed.

It was about that time that the grey cloud, sign and seal of the plague of dreamlessness, known and shunned by those more desert-wise than Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th, fixed itself over Solid Gone.

Many a town had died this way, withered by its own grey apathy. Nothing lives long when its dreams have died. But for a naive young cloud-cineaste, inheritor of a truck-load of marvels and inspiration from a mad, visionary great-aunt, Solid Gone would have ended swallowed by the dust.

“I mean, you get to expect people not turning out to greet you, out here,” Sanyap Bedassie said to by-now entranced Sweetness. “It’s kind of old-fashioned, folk’s grandparents’ll talk about the Cloudchanger and wasn’t it great and sure that was how I met your grandmother and all that, but most of the young ones, all they want to know about is this dance stuff. Even so, when I got right in here and there was absolutely no one around, I was beginning to think, even for the edgelands, this is odd. But free parking’s free parking and, hey, no kids coming poking at things, asking, hey mister, what’s that do?

“So, I hang out the flags. Not a soul. This happens. I unfold the aerial, set the thing up. Still nothing. If I hadn’t seen them, sitting on their verandahs, just staring, I’d’ve sworn I’d stumbled into one of those edgeland ghost towns you hear about. Anyway, I power up the dream-projector—I mean, half the reason for coming to this place is because they’ve got a perfect cloud hanging right over their heads!”

“I was going to ask you about that,” Sweetness said. “Like, a cloud cinny-hoojahflip, in a desert? Your great-aunt was mad, and you inherited it.”

“That’s what they say about all artists.”

“All artists aren’t stuck in a campervan ten metres up in the middle of a town square. And if you ask me, artist or not, it’s a pretty dumb thing to get trapped because of a perfect cloud.” When she saw how he shrugged; that that shrug was mostly a flinch, Sweetness wished she had not said the thing about being trapped. “Sorry,” she whispered. “So, how come?”

“So, I set the thing up—you know how it works?” He did not wait for the answer she did not give. “Well, it’s not your simple cinema. To work properly, you have to allow it to get into your head, pull out all your dreams and hopes and ambitions and fears. Everyone’s got cinema inside them. There’s clever machinery in there, takes your dreams, gives them plot and character and structure and all that, animates them, stick them up in the clouds.”

“But if there’re no dreams…”

“You get brain-static.”

“So, the evening news?”

“I was running it as a test programme. And they just started coming. It was like the stones had started walking. All those grey faces. I thought—well, you know my trade, you can imagine the kind of thing I was thinking.”

Yes, thought Sweetness, mind lit by the garish blue glare of her brother’s masher-movies.

“They came walking in, like you saw just there. Every last one of them. I didn’t think they were going to stop. I thought they were just going to walk right over me, trample me into the cobbles—next morning, there’d be like an oval of flat metal in the middle of the square. But I couldn’t get out. I was surrounded. And they stopped, and they stood there and every man jack of them looked up and no one said a word. Not one word. And they watched the news, right the way through to the end. I turned the thing off, and waited. I didn’t know what was going to happen. For all I knew, they’d pick up a cobble each and wade in. And then, one woman smiled. She was this plump, plain, middle-aged woman—nothing special about her, but that smile stood out in this square like a beacon. I saw it run out from her, like roots going out from a plant, I saw that smile go running around the square like some kid picking pockets, and they were all smiling, and then they were all laughing and crying and cheering and clapping and just sitting there with these big tears of ecstasy running down their cheeks. I tell you something, I never had an audience reaction like that. Never.”

“Some thanks you got.”

“How could they let me go after that? To you and me, it’s the evening news. To them, it’s everything the plague took away. It’s all the mundane, trivial, petty, useless things that make up a life. It’s dirt and gossip and achievement and tragedy and horror and strife, and we love it. We gather it in and sow it out in every possible medium we can, as often as we can, as much as we can: we can’t get enough of it! It’s the best soap opera there is. News makes our lives. Tell me this, you’re sitting round having your dinner, what’s the talk at the table about? What’s on the news. Well, these people more than talk it. They live it, eight times a day at the top of the hour. Now, tell me, how could they let me go? Sticking me up here was the last creative thing they ever did.”

And with the word, the news bell tolled again from its iron campanile and the people of Solid Gone assembled in the great zocalo, their brief respite of colour and scandal and eventfulness drained by the death of hope. Again, the pistils and stamens of Sanyap Bedassie’s projector shot dream-seed into the heart of dreamlessness and the clouds parted to reveal Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap with their Serious Heads on.

“Chaos at the Gubernatorial Inauguration in Molesworth’s Rathaus,” Sanka Déhau said, looking straight into camera.

“Public humiliation for recently elected Cossivo Beldene in girl-in-cake stunt,” Ashkander Beshrap chipped in his authoritative telegraphic style. The Eye on the World opened on the great hail with its chandeliers so mighty that each harboured a different species of bat, the Fest Table, carved from a single massive hunk of onyx, the gilded Missal Pulpit, festooned with the red-black-green swags of the Unity Rising campaign. Baroque mirrors returned the glare of camera lights and the stray glints from the diamonds of the favoured. Behind spangled frontals, the Glenn Miller Orchestra kicked in under the King of Swing’s left hand, while the great musician threw beaming glances out over the crowded tables. Bubbling cru cascaded down the ziggurats of glasses; servitors in breeches and frock coats offered warm scented toweliettes for their guests’ Personal Cleansing. All was merriness and conspicuous consumption and decadent cleavages, over which Ashkander Beshrap sternly pronounced, “In an elaborate practical joke, as the Glenn Miller Orchestra performed a specially commissioned composition, Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene’s rumoured mistress, was switched for a cake-dancer and leaped out to sing an alternative, explicit set of lyrics listing the new Gubernator’s sexual peccadilloes.”

Not one sound-bite of this lodged in Sweetness’s head; not even the cheering and hooting of the massed Solid Goners for she was staring at the freeze-frame of the vengeful woman, half-uncaked in spangled bikini and hoolie-hoolie feathers, arms spread ta-dah!, grinning triumphantly into her throat mike: Cossivo Beldene behind her in the Champion’s Seat, caught eternally gobemouche, beside him, one peripatetic minister of dubious religion and major contributor to election funds, Devastation Harx, slight apprehension on his distinguished features, as if he had already calculated the upshots and mentally jettisoned Cossivo Beldene and the Unity Rising Party.

But it was not even him Sweetness was staring at. At extreme left of shot, seated at a circular table with a stocky woman, a beautifully black-skinned man, a languidly bored girl with too many pierces, a grey-haired, anonymous looking middle-aged man and a weasely teen with dreadful teeth who seemed strangely unmoved by the unfolding tableau, was an old woman, small and bird-like and unobtrusive in sober blacks. The kind of woman you would not even notice, were she not your grandmother.

“Taal!” Sweetness shouted. The folk of Solid Gone moved around her, unheeding of anything but the delight on the screen in the sky. “Taal, it’s me!” Of course she could not hear. Of course it was an image of an image of an image taken hours ago, fixed in the heart of a cloud. Futile as exhorting a photograph. But here the weird walked, here were strange times. Here magic worked. “Taal!” The boom of the cloud figures and the derision of the townsfolk smothered her cries. “Bedassie!” she shouted at the hanging van. She rattled chips of cobble off the drive train. The cineaste’s tousled head peeped out like a desert animal from its scrape.

“Your projector!” Sweetness yelled as the happy smiling people, many holding hands, streamed past her back to their homes. “Can you make it work the other way?”

“What do you mean?”

“Instead of taking a dream and making it into a picture, can it take a picture and send it as a dream?”

Sanyap Bedassie cocked his head to one side, intrigued.

“Pray why?”

“I need you to send a message.”

Already the clouds were closing again, curtains of rainless grey.

“To whom, exactly?”

Sensing another necessary recapitulation of her story, Sweetness sighed and shook her curls in exasperation.

“My grandmother. I’ll explain.”

By the time she did, the deeper penumbra that was night in Solid Gone had filled up the zocalo. As the story told itself, Bedassie had busied himself swagging dismounted vehicle lights around the base of the campervan. Now he flicked them on. Sweetness was pin-spotted in a wash of white heads, white tails and yellow indicators.

“Well, I can see the urgency now,” Sanyap Bedassie said, feet swinging over the zocalo. “And I think it should be theoretically possible to do what you ask. There is one minor, niggling cavil, though.”

“Which is?”

“You would rather need to get up here.”

Sweetness put her hands on her hips, sucked in her lower lip. She had fought battles in mirror mazes. She had fallen from flying cathedrals. She had crossed burning deserts. She had swung across time to strange other presents and been bounced back into the paths of express trains. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th was not to be defeated by a few metres of altitude and a few whacks of chain. She studied the zocalo. The stonework facades of the anchor buildings were big rock climbing-frames. Not even a work-out for a girl who’d grown up clambering all over the heavy, steaming metal of a Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler. The support chains were a simple hand-over-hand. Traingirls have good upper body strength. But a cannier soul had beaded a large glass globe on each chain, a few links down from the highest point. No way round over under through those babies.

Solid Gone was jealous of its news vendor.

“Okay,” Sweetness declared. “I can’t get up. So I’ll get you down.”

“I really don’t think…” Sanyap Bedassie began, eyes widening with apprehension beneath his wild hair. But Sweetness was away, loping back through the silent streets. Past the lamp-lit porches. Past the glowing yellow windows. Past the muttering voices behind them, already losing the threads of conversation, laughs tailing off into dust, quips falling and lying, dreams bleaching and desiccating. Out from under the cloud of dreamlessness, to the track. Her home, her line through life. The permanent way, forward, back: out. Free of the psychic anticyclone of the cloud, she could feel the lure of the line, a tug on the valves of the heart. So easy to step on to it and keep walking. Walk away from this town and its dis-ease. Walk right out of this desert. Walk all the way to Molesworth and her grandmother.

“After,” she said. A deal was a deal. And story was story.

Though the night was dark and groping—even the bright angel-machines of the moonring seemed intimidated by the cloud of numbness—her flashlight found the box of detonators first time, right where she had expected it, under the signal tower. She stuffed her pack and pockets with the red cylinders. One backward glance at the steel way, then Sweetness set her jaw—which she had always thought was one of her more determining features—and loped back into Solid Gone.

“…this is a good idea,” Sanyap Bedassie warned as Sweetness scaled the face of the old Ganj Bourse. “I mean, there’s a lot of delicate equipment in here. And I’m only holding it in trust, really.”

“You want to hang up there forever?” Sweetness asked as she carefully straddled the top end of the chain. “Then shut up and trust me. You got airbags on that thing?”

“I think they’re standard on this model.”

“You be fine, then. Machinery you can fix. You, you can’t.”

With strips ripped from her posh frock (in case was almost certain to be never, now, but each wrench tore, hard) she lashed the clustered detonators to the chain. Applicator threads pulled from tampons she wound into a common fuse, which she doused in glue—good, stinky stuff, the kind that really burns.

“I think you might need to blow two,” Bedassie suggested.

Sweetness enjoyed a moment’s novelty of a new perspective on his face, then said, “Nah. I reckon one’s enough. I’ve been working out the stresses. I know metal. Now, you strap in tight.”

Before she touched fire to the fuse, she gave a moment’s worry to whether her little boom might rouse the town.

“Sod it,” she said. The last collective act of arousal these people had committed had been putting up these same chains. A little bang in the night would scarcely flicker in the grey. She lit the thread and dropped down beneath the Ganj Bourse’s stone balcony.

The bang in the night was much bigger and closer than she had expected. Sweetness gave a little squeak of surprise as stone chips, rust, dust and shredded detonator cartridge rained down on her. She waited for her ears to clear, trying to make falling campervan sounds out of the ringing. She peeked up over the edge of the balcony. The blast had surgically severed the chain. It lay stretched dead on the cobbles. The glass no pasaran bead was a million pieces scattered across the zocalo. But the campervan hung dramatically suspended above the square in a hey-look-at-me-Mum-one-hand! spread-eagle.

“Bum,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

“Well, I’m still here,” came a voice from inside the van. “I thought you knew metal.”

“Do you want out or don’t you?” Sweetness said, eyeing the ascent to the next cable point. Not so easy, a tricksy little drain-pipe shin up to a Greek key frieze. From there, nasty overhanging balconies all the way to the anchor point. And only eight detonators left. That blast had used twelve. She would have to bet on the additional strain on the remaining rear cable. Sweetness jumped lightly off the lowest balcony, landed like a cat, darted across the zocalo, all the time listening out for soft padding zombie-feet. It was surely asking too much of even the deadened nervous systems of Solid Gone to have been deaf to such a blast. She wrestled her way up the side of the Meerschaum Exchange, hooked her legs around the steel staple and prepared her second charge. Nowhere handy to hide here. She’d need a long fuse. Up was safer than down. How much centimetrage left in her handi-pack of tampons? Have to do. Little less liberal with the glue. But you want it to burn. It has to burn. Mother’a’mercy, it has to burn and the charges have to blow and the bus has to go arse-first down to the ground and even then there has to be enough of the rear transmission to get the thing to move and if there’s a Panarch in heaven and eleven orders of angels in serried attendance, there’ll be enough juice in the tank to jam the thing into reverse and snap the remaining chains.

Lots of ifs, Glorious Honey-Bun.

For the first time, the realisation struck her—hard and chill—that maybe everything she had done since and including riding off into the wicked west with Serpio Waymender had in fact been absolutely the wrong thing to do, and she had got away with it only because she was protected by the exigencies of being, for a time, a story.

So? Whatever works. Light the blue touch paper and retire.

The blast caught her and flipped her with a squawk tail-first over the cornice on to the Exchange’s flat roof. Quick as a knife she was up and at the stone balustrade in time to see Sanyap Bedassie and his cinema of dreams hit the ground. They hit hard. They hit rough. Bits fell off. Things cracked. Liquids leaked. Wheels splayed at angles that convinced even a trainperson that driving was over for this little camper. Nevertheless, Sweetness punched a fist in the air.

“Yah!” she yelled. Her victory cry rebounded like a well-shot cue-ball around the stone cushions of the zocalo.

With a plaint of protesting metal, the driver-side door opened. After some seconds, Sanyap Bedassie clambered out. He looked a little rocky. He looked like a man who, with his love and livelihood, has been dropped ten metres on to a hard stone surface. He looked around him, at the ground, at the square, at the severed chains that had once held him, at the buildings and the radial avenues, at the new perspective on it all. At Sweetness on her rooftop.

“Well,” he said, dusting himself down, “now I’m down here, and you’re up there.”

She was not for long. Sanyap Bedassie was shorter on the horizontal than Sweetness had thought, and, from his long aerial captivity, had a personal odour at odds with his cute appearance. He was suspiciously checking the power units for the cloud projector.

“Well, you’ve managed to write off the truck,” he said, not looking at her.

“It was a write-off anyway,” Sweetness said brightly. “Anyway, you can always get someone to tow you out of here. What about the, uh, that?”

“The uh-that seems, by grace of God, to be fine and dandy,” Bedassie said, feeling the honours of his machinery with his subtle hands.

“So, you can make my call?”

“When I’ve finished recalibrating, certainly.”

Sweetness stood shifting from foot to foot, nervously glancing down the dark avenues. Surely surely surely…

“We’re done.”

“So what do I do?”

“You stand here.”

“What, here?” Being as nondescript a piece of Solid Gone zocalo as any other.

“Yes, here.” Nondescript banished as Sweetness was bathed in the pink, cloud-stabbing beam.

“Ooh,” she said. It hissed and tickled. “So, what do I say?”

“You say what you want her to dream. It would help if you could keep it down to five main points, and if you could, put it into classic three-act structure, you know; beginning, middle, end. Setup, confrontation, resolution.”

“What?”

“Just tell it however. But I’d be quick about it.”

“Why?” asked Sweetness, pinkly.

Bedassie raised a listen finger. Straining through the seethe of light, Sweetness could hear the patient plod of the news bell.

“All right all right all right,” she said, combing her hair out of her eyes. “Hi, Grandmother Taal, this is me, Sweetness—can she see me, or only hear me? Anyway, look, I haven’t got much time, but this is to say I’m all right—well, actually I’m not, but that’s because at the moment I’m a story, which seems to make interesting things happen. So, I reckon the only reason I’m seeing you—I’m not even going to ask how you got there, but I know you—is that you’ve decided to come and look for me. By the way, it was only a flash, like, but you’re looking good. You been taking vitamins or what? Okay, I shouldn’t’ve run off like that—but you know me. I couldn’t marry that guy. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in a galley, stainless steel or not; and, hey, as it turned out, it was all meant to happen anyway, because I’m a story.”

“Speaking of which,” Bedassie counselled, “now would be a good time to make your first plot point.”

Tramp, tramp, tramp came the marching feet.

“Okay, well, you probably can’t hear that, but there’s like an army of zombie villagers out there—except they aren’t really zombies, they’ve got this plague that means they can’t dream, but they’re all addicted to the evening news and that’s them coming for the eleven o’clock serving. Anyway: what’s happening is: I got to find this guy Devastation Harx. You saw him, up there. Well, I had this run in with him—he’s got this flying cathedral crewed by all these grade school rejects—and, well, you know I used to have this invisible friend? Little Pretty One? Well, it seems she wasn’t so invisible, actually she was Catherine of Tharsis hitching a ride off my other twin’s ghost, and Devastation Harx’s stolen her and he’s keeping her in a jar and I have to get her back otherwise he’ll use her to start this final war between humans and machines, and it looks like it’s up to me to stop the whole shebang.” She glanced at Sanyap Bedassie. The whole stone arena was now ringing to the steady slap of flat feet. “That do?”

“Succinct, if not classically structured,” the young man said, checking his dials and instruments. “Your grandmother is going to have some dream tonight.”

“Yeah, but will she believe it’s really me?”

“Oh, grandmothers generally believe what their dreams tell them. It might be nice to sign off?”

“Oh. Yeah. Forgot. Hi, Gran. Listen, tell the folks I’m all right. If that guy Harx was at Molesworth, then that’s a good place to look for him, so stay there and I’ll meet up with you. Hey, we could even be parts of the story together.”

“I think you already are,” Sanyap Bedassie said softly. He frowned at his indicators. “That’s you.” He threw a small brass lever. The pink light died around Sweetness.

“Ooh,” she said.

Down each of the radial avenues, a wedge of citizenry was marching, dull and intent on only one thing, their thrice nightly dose of the mundane. Surrounded by advancing grey. It was, Sweetness had to admit, pure monster movie. She grabbed Sanyap’s hand.

“Time to go.”

He pulled back.

“Where?”

“There.” Sweetness pointed down a narrow entry between buildings of the kind that only becomes apparent when you absolutely necessarily must have a neat egress. She seized his hand again. It was nice and soft and warm. A good non-labouring hand. “Come on.”

Again, he resisted.

“They’ll stick you up there again, and me too this time, and I don’t know about you, friend, but I got a story. You want that?”

“My machine…”

“It’s only a thing, man. If it troubles you that much, come back and get it later, like I said. Come back with a pile of people. But you can only do that if you get out now.”

She tugged. He was unmoved.

“Child’a’grace, man!”

Bedassie looked around at the pale faces ranked down the strict perspectives of Solid Gone. He shook his head, let slip Sweetness’s hand.

“You cannot do this,” Sweetness begged him.

“I never had an audience like this. Do you understand that? Every night, I put the pictures up in that cloud, and they smile, and they laugh, and they feel something, and they go home for an hour, two hours, they dream their dreams. Don’t you understand? That’s how it should be. It’s not there to take dreams out of people’s heads and make them into pictures. You were right, with your wondering if it could work in reverse. It was meant to work in reverse. That’s what all cinema has ever been, taking the pictures out of the clouds, off that screen and making them dreams in people’s heads. They need that. They need me. Here, movies make people’s lives. I make a difference. I don’t entertain, I shape their worlds. And they’re just people, who had the bad luck to have lost their dreams. They deserve them back. I can give them to them, as long as it takes. This cloud won’t last forever. This plague will move on someday. Until then, I’ll give them the news of the worlds, eight times a day. I’m not trapped. I’m not a prisoner. You can’t be a prisoner, if you remain of your own free will. I’m staying here. You go. You’ve got your story. I’ve got the pictures.”

He stepped away from Sweetness.

“Go!” he shouted.

Sudden tears almost paralysed Sweetness. The story that was hers before this new one had rewritten every line had been subtly played out here. In this version, the hero chose his trap over the wild world. To him it was not a trap. Never had been a trap, only a kind of mitigated freedom. All the dreams in the world. Sweetness swallowed the emotion. You have to let some things go, Glorious Honey-Bun. You aren’t responsible for every ill and blessing in the world. People make their own minds up and you abide by their decisions. The grey people, the infected, were spilling slowly out into the zocalo. Go, now, if you’re ever going to go. She ran between closing walls of the news-hungry toward the black slit of the alley. There she turned, sought for Sanyap Bedassie between the moving bodies. She saw him as a flash of colour through the thicket of limbs. She watched the circle of hands close in around him, and his reach out to shake them.

“Go figure,” she said, and turned again, and ran away from Solid Gone.