Ares Express

23

Arms and legs wrapped around cables, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th sailed beneath the brilliant stars of the moonring. Shortly after full night a thermal from off the Banninger Escarpment had lifted the flying cathedral into higher, chillier air. The thrill of the view had faded with the light; within minutes Sweetness was noticing her teeth chattering, her breath steaming, her limbs shivering. She could not feel the rope under her fingers. Soon, the cold numb would spread to fingers. Shortly after that, she would lose her grip and fall, like a flash-frozen bird caught in an updraft. Numb limbs dissenting, she hauled herself up, step by step, toward the canopy. She had noticed early that this was a ladder to nowhere, an emergency egress shaken loose by the Dust Brothers’ bombing. The escape hatch above it remained sternly dogged. But there might be another way in, a vent, a shelter among the heat-exchange vanes, some warm spot to which she could cling and curl for this night which she knew was going to be one of the longest in her life. There were inspection gantries over there, cables and pipeworks. If she could make her way along them to one of the blast holes, she could work her way inside. Industrial grade if. She already hurt like the devil’s nipple clamps. By morning? No option, you hurt, Glorious Honey-Bun. And she was tired and wet through and thirsty and those foil-packet trail dinners wouldn’t fill a hole in your tooth. Go on, then. Take that big scream. Or quit moaning and come on. You expect an adventure to be easy? Hand over hand over hand will do it. Hand over hand over hand.

Hand over hand over hand, she made it to the escape hatch. Teeth gritted with effort, she beat at it with a fist, pulled off a boot and whacked at the hatch dog.

“Let me in! Mother’a’mercy, there’s a girl out here!”

If she could scarcely hear herself over the whirr of propellers and the moan of the high wind in the cathedral’s gingerbread, what chance a passing purple person? Surely someone in the cycle pods must have noticed there was a girl hanging from a rope ladder? She hauled herself around on the ladder. The nearest pod hung like an overripe fig from a single strut, abandoned, its gear-trains and drive chains gnashes of oily teeth. The only other she could even glimpse was three quarters occluded by a rudder array, and that part she could see was awash with ballast water. Twenty metres to her starboard was a thermal dump stack. She could feel the warmth from the fans gently wash her face. Twenty metres. Twenty light-years. If she could just get to those u-bars. She started to swing the ladder. It let out a hitherto unsuspected ominous creak. She glanced. In her mad leap for rescue, she had failed to notice that one of the ropes had been cut half-through by shrapnel.

Real Big Adventure Stuff. Get that pendulum swinging…

Her first reach missed by a fingernail. She ignored the sound of stretching, snapping cord fibres and threw her whole weight into the next swing. She reached; her finger locked around the hand-hold. She let go the ladder. Her momentum almost tore her free.

Trust that trainfolk upper body strength…

Her right hand seized the next rung. Sweetness hung, crucified, a kilometre and gaining above the yellow-windowed manses of Banninger Canton’s geometric farms.

Easy. Peasy. Wee buns.

Thirty monkey-walks brought her to the heat-dump fans, amongst which she nestled, ripping loose communications cables and wrapping them around her waist, thighs and wrists. A survey of her situation told her this was as far as Sweetness Asiim Engineer was going under this air-borne basilica. She tightened her cocoon and tried to shake water out of her hair. Warmer now, warm enough to drive off the now wracking shivers and dry out her clothes, warm enough for her brain to be alerted to another peril.

The airship was ascending slowly but steadily, and without any indication of reaching its ceiling. Long before anoxia shrivelled her brain in her skull like a pickled pig testicle, it would have loosened her grip, blurred her sense, made her altitude drunk enough to make that big step look not just appealing, but necessary. Already she was feeling cosy-dozy, comforted by memories of hiding from parental wrath among warm, cranny-laden machinery. She slung extra loops of cable around her shoulder, knotted them and tried to keep herself awake.

Shock. Where what who? The sky…the stars…it hurts. Oh my God. Her slim snake hips had slipped through their cinch, the loop of cable had locked under her small but perfectly pert breasts. Her feet kicked at two kilometres of empty space. Thanks, tits. But as she wiggled the noose down over her pelvis, she became aware that here was a second way to die. Hanging would do it every bit as well as falling.

Stay awake! she berated herself. Look at the world: You ain’t ever seen it from this angle before.

She had to admit she had a grandstand seat on night across the earth. From this height she could appreciate the roundness of the world: a little last perfect blue clung to the eastern horizon; Sweetness calculated that the cathedral was headed southwest. Morningwards. The teeming cantons of Grand Valley lay that way, sunning themselves under the ancient lights of World-roof. The ship would need repair. The great vertical engineering cities that clung to the piers as Sweetness clung to heat had once assembled Sailships and starcrossers. A gas-filled bag of faith was little to them. That lay in the future. This gently sloping scarp country over which she flew was not without interest. Sweetness reckoned she could see two hundred kilometres in every direction: to the west and south towns and cities clung silvery on the horizon like patches of glowing moth-dust, flowing into each other with filigree tendrils of powder-soft lights. From a hundred kilometres out to immediately beneath Sweetness’s feet scattered dots of farmsteads clustered around the agglomerations of the rural towns which in turn gathered around the larger market centres. Sweetness tried to draw patterns on them, terrestrial constellations, and with a sudden revelation, saw it whole: hexagons upon hexagons upon hexagons, from steading to city. Her sudden insight into human geometry stunned her for whole minutes, then she caught two long glints of silver moonslight streaking straight across the dark land. A railroad. She leaned forward in her harness. There! Tiny and wan as a lonely firefly, a scattering of sparks tore across the night. A train!

Perhaps her train.

The unbidden thought was like a flash-freezing of the spleen.

My train. My people. I could wave and cheer and shout. I could send down flares, I could throw lightning, I could explode whole stars and they still wouldn’t know it was me. They wouldn’t even look up from the track and drive levers. Do they even think about me?

Taal did. Great Taal, mother of grandmothers. Taal would have heard her, noticed her, received her message. But Taal was in Molesworth and she was up here on the way to Grand Valley with no way of telling a soul living or astral.

Sweetness watched the train out of sight among the other scintilla of the scarp land, then settled back in her harness and did not look at the ground again.

This time, she caught herself just as she was dropping off with a convulsive judder.

Dropping off!

She decided she would look at the stars. There was nothing to make her feel track-sick in those original patterns of light in the darkness. On the long night runs she had learned the names of the major constellations from her mother, but most of the night sky was just lights to her, patternless and magical. Sweetness knew the Cup, and the Dogs, and the Hunting Cat, but the nomenclature seemed tenuous and arbitrary. The Cup could as easily be the Diaphragm; the Hunting Cat, the Bouquet of Oddly Shaped Lilies. Who had these men been, whose particular visions became imprinted on the night sky? Sweetness amused herself down toward midnight by drawing up new constellations and naming them. That wasp-waisted configuration could be the Hornet, or, if you extended it to those three bright stars up there, the Nasty Vase. Just beneath it lay the Angular Banjo, to the left of it, hovering on the dawnward horizon, the Banyan. That band of silver; fainter, softer, broader than the moonring, was the Great Southern Railroad, that tight collection of eleven stars the Sunshine Express. Just visible under the rim of the canopy, the Really Little Church, at eleven o’clock to it, Snortus the Hog. Rolling along the upper rim of the moonring, the Hoop and Stick, behind it, in zodiacal procession, the Typewriter, the Star-Goat, Zelda the Cheap Woman, the Yawning Man, the Open Newspaper; the Five Tickets, the Pram, the Safety Pin, the Letter B, the Big Slipper, the Wishbone.

As she was about to set to work naming the southern constellations, a star fell out of the Letter B, transforming it into a P. It burned brief and bright to the east, a streak of swift fading silver light. While it ebbed from her eyeballs, three more plummeted out of moonring in close formation. They kindled and burned on the southern horizon. Then all three legs of Marco the Three-Legged Pig came off and blazed across the night like a firework display.

While Sweetness gaped, half-wondering if the Powers and Dominions had taken offence at her renaming them, the moonring blazed lilac. The band around the world was a loom of lasers: beams flickered and duelled, parried, stabbed, cut. Sweetness cried out in astonishment as the sky burned, almost let slip her hold on the heat-exchanger. Stars burst, bright enough to light the land beneath like day. Others hurtled on mad trajectories across the orbital marches to die in searing light, slashed apart by scythes of lilac light. Fleets and squadrons moved in from the outer constellations toward the edge of the affray: crimson struck back at lilac. A hundred novas burned on Sweetness’s retinas. Stars fell from heaven by the legion, scoring the sky as if fingernails had left love-scratches in the bowl of night to the ur-light beyond. By the lights of any and every of her world’s plethora of religions, this was the big one. God the Panarchic, the Ekaterina Angelography, the Seven Sanctas, the Thrones and Dominions, the Orders Lofty and Lesser together with the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast had come out slugging. From the point of view of a runaway traingirl lashed to the bottom of a limping airship-basilica somewhere over central Canton Banninger, God looked on the ropes.

We’re in big trouble, Sweetness thought, face lit by the heat-death of falling angels. What’s happening, why, who’s doing it? The questions answered themselves the instant she shaped them. That man, up there, just a fistful of metres above your head. But was this the big one, the Angels and Devastation Harx, duking it out, mano a mano, or was he merely testing the limits of his powers?

Crimson strove against the lilac. Beam by beam, duel by duel, angel by angel, crimson was failing. Sweetness’s carefully constructed constellations were unravelling as reinforcements were de-mothballed from centuries of cyber-sleep, powered up their altitude jets and rolled into attack orbits. Waves of crimson and lilac crashed against each other, surged back and forth across the moonring like the rather cheap rippling sand tank sculpture Uncle Mort had got, together with a dose, from that maintenance woman in Llangonedd Junction, and was meant to be relaxing but made Sweetness feel bilious. Stars fell like sparks from a wheel foundry, scattered across the nightside of the planet. It was an oddly soothing sight, war in heaven, until Sweetness realised the only reason she was not free-floating atoms in a cloud of superheated helium was because of the very weapon Devastation Harx was using to gain access to the battle systems.

He cuts down angels like grass in the city park, and you’re going against him with nothing more than a stick of sunblock, the bottom of a tube of glue, two thirds of a posh frock and a half-eaten romantic novel?

He who fights the tiger has no eye for the mosquito on his neck, she reminded herself, which was like something Cadmon, or, for that matter, Uncle Neon, might have said.

Yeah, until the mosquito bites.

High in the planetary approaches, inconceivable forces marched and countermarched, outflanked and ambushed, attacked and were thrown back. The Banninger sky still burned with the corpses of angels, but the lilac assault had been halted. The western horizon was lit by hundreds of puff-ball novas, sparkling like corroboree whizz-bangs: Harx’s orbital partacs, Sweetness guessed. The picket of lilac beams faltered, then failed. Crimson rushed through in ten, twenty, fifty places, invading like cancer. The lilac rallied but Devastation Harx’s intervention was at an end. The lilac was forced back on itself, inward, like a black hole collapsing under its own weight. Like an imploding star, it was merely overture to explosion. A single starburst, brilliant as the sun, lit the night hemisphere. Sweetness blinked afterimages out of her eyes as the nova turned the sky white, then faded. Something big had gone up, up there. A stardock, a Skywheel transfer station; maybe an orhab. There were people on those big cylinders. No legs and four arms and way too long and snooty people because they disdained coming down to earth, but still people. They probably never even knew they were dying.

Dark night returned, darker for having been broken by unnatural light. Even to non-astronomical Sweetness Engineer, the moonring looked tattered, moth-eaten. The constellations would never be the same again. Now someone would have to think up new names for them. The man in the flying cathedral had been beaten, at permanent cost to the night sky. This time. The next war would be fought on another battlefield entirely: the shifting interplay of alternative quantum universes. Next time, reality would be the casualty.

“Oh, man!” Sweetness said, suddenly cold and small and very high up, far from her close little cubby, and alone. She drew her knees up against her chest, hugged them to her, bound them close with cable and wished for something more to look at than lights in darkness.

A third time, that dislocation of having fallen asleep without knowing. Sweetness came to herself with a gasp and shudder. No nod, no doze, this; she woke with the light of early morning full in her face. Huddled over in her web of cables, she had slept away entire cantons and quarterspheres. The sun was a spreading scab of blood on the western horizon, clotted between the continental upthrusts of the Great Volcanoes, the only hint of the terrible war that had been fought in the dark. The air was miraculously clear and bright; light flooded across the land, driving early ribbons of cloud before it like a Purging Priest a poolful of swingers. Sweetness painfully lifted her arm to shade her eyes, tried to blink the morning gold out of it. Blinded. Then the sun lifted clear from the hollow between the mountains and one of the great vistas of her solar system unveiled itself to Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th.

This little red world was never the nearest, but had always been dearest to the hearts and bones of Motherworld. Since before words, in the great songtime of the dry plain, the ancestors of humans had looked up to this the speck of blood where the needle of imagination pricked the sky and invested it with power. An angry star, the eye of a martial god, masculine, stomping and sanguine, armoured in rust. It rose and set on a million lootings, burnings, invadings and besiegings. When the gods died, the warlike aspect was transferred and made concrete in the planet itself. It hung by night, watching, while minds immeasurably superior to man’s drew up plans. The world itself was our red enemy. Even its puny, pumicey moons were demonised. Fear! Terror! Our true enemy is always our neighbour. Naked to our lenses, human imagination had engineered its surface. Whether watered by slow canals, galloped across by green or red barbarians; contemplated by a wistful, autumn people; the little world next one out, unlike the other globes in the system, rocky or smothered with steam, had always possessed a geography. It had regions, landscapes, places. Names were written on its skin. To name a thing has always been to claim possession of it.

It was only when the first space vehicles went out from Motherworld that its humanity realised the long injustice they had committed. This was no war-lord, no red destroyer. Beneath the thin, cold unbreathable atmosphere—no life here, another myth dashed—and the veils of dust was the face of a woman, graceful, refined, strong and mysterious. It had good bones, the little red world.

Here, in the early space days, the ancient and persistent lie of “Motherworld” was exposed. The genders had always bent the other way. A woman must be possessed. A gentle wooing by go-betweens, then the men were sent out from the aggressive bigger blue dot to lay claim to the world next door. They drove round in their machines, put their feet on it, stuck their flags in it, made it theirs. A forced marriage of worlds. After wedding, impregnation. The barren must be made to carry life. The arrogance was monumental, the vision more than its equal. It was a big universe out there, and hostile to clever carbon. But even the technologically extended lives of the golden who controlled the home planet’s immense resources were too short to measure the scale of transforming one world into another. Water gushing down the dried-up riverbeds, spring green blooming across the high plateaulands, waves breaking on the red shores of shallow blue seas: these were visions no amount of their wealth could buy them. Their engineering advisers gave them a quick, flashy, hideously pricey fix: see that great rift valley? Four and a half thousand kilometres long, five kilometres deep? Stick a glass roof over it. Turn it into one mother of a greenhouse. Better still, make it to last. Build it out of diamond. Diamond as big as the Ritz? Phah! Diamond as big as a continent. Good, hard science. Technical and manly.

Fleets of vast, visually chaotic engineering ships were sent into slow transfer orbits to the wife-world. Surface workers surveying the sites watched the thirty-kilometre units move into low orbit and disassemble themselves from their drive-spines. They dropped automated construction modules on Grand Valley day and night for seven weeks.

Pressure-dome hoovervilles mushroomed up the length of the valley floor; as the easterlies clocked off, the westerlies clocked on, new dawn on their hard helmet faceplates. Construction plants drew in megatons of carbon dioxide—all the better for the atmospheric manforming—and by the alchemy of molecular processing, spun it into engineering-grade carbon nanofibre. Diamond trees began to rise from great Mariner rift. Day by day they grew as the assemblers wove carbon; through blinding CO₂ fogs, through the hurricane seasons, through the blanketing dust storms when engineers went blind even by their helmet lights and navigated by heavy sonar. Carbon on carbon, molecules locking together. One kilometre, two kilometres they rose. One and a half long years after the engineer-towns, which would one day be the great and civilised cities of the valley, struck their taproots into the cold, dead mantle, two million trunks topped the highest of the canyon mesas and budded into four branches. A forest of diamond grew in the great valley. Out on the high blasted plains, a thousand vitrification plants moved over their immaculately surveyed and levelled sites, fusing silicon sand to trace-doped glass hexagons five hundred metres across. Flotillas of robot aerobodies cautiously shifted the panes into position; even in lower gravity, one warp could have thrown the tensile integrity of an entire canton. They settled on to their bolt-posts; one by one the nuts were tightened while scuttling groutbots filled the gaps with light-permeable expansion mastic. By scabs and scars, like some archaic children’s game of territory and capture, a tessellation of hexagons spread across the canyonlands of Grand Valley. Twenty long-years after the first gaffers had surveyed their sites and threw up their Carbonbergs, the last constructor units disassembled, reconfigured into maintenance mode and buried themselves in the regolith.

As one pundit put it, Grand Valley now ran to thirty trillion carats.

Even as the last roofplates were being bolted into place, a new and noble guild was receiving its letters patent; a nation as individual and caste-ridden as the trainfolk: the Ancient and Pristine Order of Windowcleaners. Only when the glass was spotless, utterly transparent to every spectrum of light, could the ecological engineers be moved in. Nothing Pristine about this order. A grubby crew, these, soily-handed, humusy, stained and muddied. Dirty knees on their pressure suits. It is a work of years to make a soil, yet more to weave an atmosphere, decades longer for a mix of gases to become a self-perpetuating, self-regulating and adjusting homoeostatic system that some people think of as a planetary organism and call Gaia, except that here it was Gaia-in-a-bottle, and needed a different name altogether.

The grunt engineering had been the easy bit. The golden rich fretted long decades—twice as unendurable as those of their homeworld—for the day when the first of the ecoengineers undogged her helmet, lifted it off, took a long, deep breath and found it very good. Few remained of that impatient generation; the last twenty lived out their days in canyonside adobes hunting in pristine parklands under diamond skies. A great oasis, sheltered from the scoring winds and terrifying energies of ROTECH’s larger scale manforming, green on red like a colour blindness test for an entire planet. A strip development that reached round one third of a world. When sunrising and sunsetting flashed from the roof glass tiles, they heliographed across interplanetary space. Watchers on nightside Motherworld would wink and blink the novadazzle out of their eyes. Within their roofed-in world, the ancient rich, spry in the low gravity, observed their night sky fill up with stars: the vanguard of the new generation of planetary engineers seeding themselves across the parking orbits. A scary people, this; less patient even than the greenhouse gardeners, their angel-machines would engineer realities wholesale.

Selah. So be it. Around here, this history began to abut into another Sweetness had recently heard and little more need be said of it, save that beneath the great glass roof, the last of the golden died and their sculpted mesa-chateaux became the cores of the elegant and diverse cities of Grand Valley, a patchwork of four hundred cantonettes and city-states and the densest and most diverse cultural region in the solar system. And that it was the dawn glory of Worldroof that so amazed Sweetness Asiim Engineer, left hanging in her precarious web.

With a wan, early mist clinging to the roof panels, Sweetness first thought of ice mornings on the winter transpolar runs, when the temperatures high high north dropped so low the carbon dioxide smoked out of the atmosphere into a thin rime. Then, as the sun gained in strength and the mist burned off, she imagined that she was flying over the board of a titanic children’s game, a thing she had once hallucinated when she went down with one of those necessary childhood diseases and her temperature hit the high thirties. Vast playing pieces should be moving from hexagon to hexagon, manoeuvring and threatening. Shading her eyes, she could discern distant dark shapes standing out above the fields of hexes, stalky and angular: mooring towers for Skywheel ground-to-orbit shuttles, communications masts, but her imagination made them Peons and Palisers and Prelates investing and humiliating Princes and Palaces. She reminded herself she had had very little sleep last night, and she had witnessed a fragment of Armageddon, so powers and dominions were lodged in her head. The light was still low and glancing enough to render the glass opaque, a golden highway over which the flying cathedral drifted. Half a degree of altitude, and on an instant, the ground beneath her feet went transparent. She thought of clouds lifting or some inky solution in a School of the Air chemistry demonstration clearing with a drop of reagent. Sweetness’s was not a seafaring family—she had never set foot on a water-borne craft—but her childhood bedtimes had been filled with stories from the shallow oceans, of pirates and shipwrecks and drowned cities of the wicked, down there, where the people still went about their business in the watery streets and on clear, fearful nights, their bells could be heard, tolling from the submerged campaniles. The small, manicured farms, the geometric roads, the tightly packed villages and towns beneath her feet were the stuff of such stories. The cathedral passed over the support branch of one of the roof-trees. At its tip, it split into finer and finer branchings, suggesting a new image to Sweetness; blood vessels, capillaries: a city beneath the skin, if such a thing could be. Peering down between her feet, she saw that the upper levels of pier were encrusted with orioles and turrets and perilous balconies. Grand Valley was as familiar to her as any other piece of the planet’s terrain; the vertical cities that clung to the bottom couple of kilometres of the roof-trees held no wonder for her any more, but the view from above revealed details previously hidden by perspective. On one of the very highest terraces, tiny figures celebrated some dawn party: as the airship’s shadow fell over them, Sweetness thought they looked up, and that one waved. She waved back. Now she crossed the junction of two roofplates; a perfect black fault line across the outer burbs of one of the valley cities, like a knife cut in reality. A couple of minutes onward, dark scurrying machines worked doggedly at a hole punched through the tough glass: some bolide snuck through while the anti-meteor defences had been otherwise occupied in the night. They fused over the cracks, wove silica from their mandibles like spiders walling themselves up in egg-cocoons of silk. Sweetness noticed that they were working on both sides of the wound; the ones beneath clung nonchalantly with suckered feet.

A loop of river identified the city unreeling below as Melucene, an elegant, university town of high-gabled gritstone colleges strung along the river bluffs of the muddy Meluce. Castle Melucene, the venerable seat of the Provosts, hove into view, a fantastical confection of towers and spires and buttresses carved from a primeval ventolith mesa by orbital construction lasers. Sweetness had never liked Melucene: she detested the boyish, mannered jinks of the students on the term runs when they flocked back to their dormitories. She hated their high, affected, nasal singing, and determinedly kept herself on the working side of the tender. It took the Stuards a week to sluice out the beer and vomit. As she watched the steeply pitched roofs of the colleges slip beneath her feet, a niggling feeling came over her that perhaps they were a little closer to her boot soles than they had been. That the fields looked a little larger, that the details of the college badges worked out in coloured roof-tiles were more sharply focused. That the labouring airship was losing height.

In confirmation, the cathedral lurched and dropped. Sweetness grabbed for something solid to hold on to. The glass hexagons were coming up hard and fast beneath her. Ahead, an entire roofpanel was slowly tilting open. Squinting through the glare, Sweetness could make out the silhouettes of gantry work rising above the surface, beneath, the indistinct but massive torpedoes of lighter-than-aircraft nuzzled at roof-branches like great fish feeding from coral. Some repair facility, but Harx was coming in too fast, too low…What was the pilot doing? Ballast gushed from vents, shedding across the roofplates in a flash flood but the basilica was still losing height. Air gusted warm in Sweetness’s face and she had her answer. As the sun warmed the morning air, the airship lost in the battle of competing densities. Sweetness tried to clamber away from the closing ground. Nowhere to go, remember? This is as far as you got. She had to do something. At this speed, with this mass, if Harx hit, his little freeloader would be spread like cashewbutter. The access panel was fully open now, but the bottom rungs of the rope ladder, her salvation, were brushing the glass. Coming in, too low! Too low! Sweetness wrestled in her cocoon, untangling legs and arms. She freed three metres of cable, screwed up her courage, screwed it tighter. She grasped hold of the cable, wrapped it firmly around her wrists and with a cry, swung herself free. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th dangled beneath the dome of the cathedral. The airframe lurched again. She let out a little shriek. Don’t look down.

You have to look down.

She looked down.

Five kilometres below her, a lazy river lost itself in meanders and braided sandbars while great coloured riverboats the size of small towns cruised the backwaters. Sweetness shifted focus. Closer—very much closer—the glass rushed up at her. The portal was close…The airship sagged lower. Aerials snapped, booms bent. Not close enough.

“Yaaah!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, and jumped.

Glass, she had forgotten, is smooth, slick and hard. Very hard. The impact knocked the wind from her: she rolled five times, the world a blur of airship canyons land sky, and into a slide. Flickering between sense and unconsciousness, she saw the cathedral hit the edge of the portal, bounce clear and drop through. That edge, toward which she was helplessly sliding…She tried to find an anchor for her fingers, something to kick against. Nothing, slick, smooth glass. With the last of her strength and will, Sweetness heaved herself into another roll. Ribs protested, she tried to pull her arms over her head. If she missed, if she got it wrong, best not to see the moment she shot over the edge on to five kilometres of clear morning air. Over and over and over, and to rest. She peeked out between her arms. She could have spat a gobber over the lip of the big drop. Sweetness laughed deeply, painfully and then everything went wonderfully black.

One eye opened, some time later. In front of it was a boy’s face, cocked at the angle of curiosity. Sweetness opened her other eye. The boy tilted his head the other way. Sweetness guessed him to be four, maybe five, and so incongruous was the sight that she forgot for a moment the grating pain down her left side. While she puzzled, another child’s face looked over the boy’s shoulder, a girl, a couple of years older.

“Mine,” the boy said.

“You think,” the girl laughed. “Way too old.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“How old are you?” the boy asked Sweetness.

“Nearly-nine,” Sweetness said. “Listen…” But the girl gave a bray of laughter, stood up, arms folded triumphantly.

“Mine, see?”

“Too old for you, too, Meadowbank.”

“Me or no one else, Townley. And hadn’t you noticed, but she’s a girl anyway. My jurisdiction. Go back to your boys.”

The boy scowled. The girl play-pushed him away and squatted down in front of Sweetness.

“You came out of that flying thing, didn’t you?” she said. “I expect you hurt a bit.”

“A bit.” To name it brought it back. Sweetness lay back on the glass ceiling, feeling like glass inside; broken, sharp-edged bones of glass. The girl’s face eclipsed the sun.

“I’m Meadowbank Trumbden, President Elect of the Seven-Ups Girl Nation. You’ll be all right with me. Townley’s just a kid anyway and he knows he’s got no jurisdiction over girls. He was just trying it on because he thought you might have something worth stealing. They’d probably have eaten you. They’re not civilised, like we are, and they’ve got no idea how to manage things. We’re always having to lend them water or fix their runner. They can’t sail, you know. No sense of direction.”

Sweetness studied the face that bent over hers. The girl was a pinch-faced, sun-beaten urchin with bad skin and surprisingly well-cropped hair. She was dressed in a hooded parka and pocket-busy pants stitched from plastic sacks. Some of them still retained their logos. I am being rescued by someone who actually looks worse than me, Sweetness thought, ungraciously. She said, “Meadowbank Trumbden, I’m not feeling too good right now.”

Concern came over the gamine face.

“Oh, sorry sorry sorry. There’s me banging on again.” She put her fingers in her mouth and gave one of those piercing whistles that Sweetness had always wanted to be able to do and envied in those who could. She struggled up on to her elbows. It did not hurt quite so badly in this position, which gave her worries for her back. A half-dozen similarly dressed, similarly aged and similar-looking girls were working methodically across the roof glass, siphoning up ballast water with clearly home-brewed elbow pumps and storing it in arrays of plastic litrejohns on their backs. At Meadowbank Trumbden’s whistle, they abandoned their sweep and came hurrying to help. They moved with an odd gait, half lope, half skate.

“Got to get water when we can,” Meadowbank Trumbden explained.

A hundred or so metres beyond the water-gatherers were three singular artifacts. Like everything else Sweetness had seen of this hallucinatory roofworld—not much, she had to admit, but a significant sample—they were constructed chiefly from junk plastic. Availability of resources and idiosyncrasies of design resulted in wildly varying details but the underlying structure was the same, a hull, a cabin, booms and sails, riding the high, sheer glass on sharp-toed runners.

The water-huntresses obscured the view. Sweetness was ringed by faces.

“Hold tight,” Meadowbank Trumbden said. “This might hurt a bit.”

On three, the girls lifted Sweetness. It hurt a lot. They carried her to the closest of the glass schooners. The boy Townley watched from the poop of the smallest and meanest of the flotilla. He sniffed gooily. On the third and largest ship, a ferrety-looking eight-year-old boy was rigging canvas on two angled side-sails. He called over.

“Pass her over here when you’re done.”

“Keep your hormones to yourself, Draelon,” Meadowbank Trumbden returned. The watergirls gently handled Sweetness over the side. That hurt more. Meadowbank Trumbden had her brought up to a canopied deck at the rear and laid on a palliasse stuffed with shredded plastic. A deckhand offered Sweetness water. She sipped, then her body remembered how long it had been since it last drank and she grabbed the flagon and gulped greedily. Water splashed over her face, down her neck.

“Prie, take her out,” Meadowbank ordered.

Windlasses lifted land-anchors of solid glass. Sails were raised, a muscular girl in a sleeveless vest of white plastic took the rudder, a sweep of wood with a steel hook buried in the tip. Sweetness felt the ship stir as the eternal winds of Worldroof bellied the plastic sails. With a sharp screak of steel runners, the little fleet set forth, President Meadowbank’s barque taking point. In their wake, the schooners left three sets of parallel scores on the glass.

The Seven-Ups Girl Nation, President Elect Meadowbank Trumbden, had a population of eight and national boundaries at once as wide as the whole Worldroof (here it was floor, not ceiling) and as tightly circumscribed as the hull of their glass-cruiser. Each of the junk schooners—many more roamed the vastnesses of the glass desert, scavenging—was a separate people and state, delimited by age, sex and the availability of scarce resources. Townley Cheane, currently Chief of the Five-boys, ran an order of four-and five-year-olds with a piratical disposition and a taste for the cheerful monster-movie ghoulishness peculiar to boys of those ages. Each nation set its own laws and mores and jealously guarded its jurisdiction. If you survived to outgrow your nation, you graduated up to the next. Soon chubby Townley would make the short but significant crossing from Five-boys to Slayer, the third ship in the little fleet, and, after painful and humiliating hazing rituals, pass under the rule of King Draelon (the Temporary) and his hormone-tormented pubescents. Out there were nations of lofty girls with budding breasts and interests in make-up; there were shiploads of aggressive, boisterous male nearly-nines; there was even the Great Crèche where the semi-legendary Mam Mammary rocked cots of cotton-swaddled infants as she steered her pinnace across the high glass. All on Worldroof shared a greater nationhood: this was the place where the lost children went; the bad little boys who would not keep hold of their nannies’ hands in the big shops; the naughty girls who stamped their feet and would not come when told; the schoolchildren who wandered off from organised trips; the sulky teenagers who spent too long staring blackly out of the window of the Skywheel shuttle lounge and turned back to find family and luggage gone; the toddlers who got up on their feet and ran as fast as they could away from their fathers until they outran the world and ended up in that place that every society has, the place where the lost things go. Think of it as a kind of postal sorting office, with little marked cages for the pens and the socks and the cable remotes and the cuff-links; the cats and the change and the cigarette lighters. Children here, subsorted into age and sex and transported by the agents of lostness to their allotted place. Pens to a planetoid just inside the orbit of Neptune, change to a vast, red-hot volcanic vault deep under the doloritic core of Mount Olympus; children to Worldroof.

Or so Meadowbank Trumbden believed. She was in her fifth nation now; a semi-memory held fragmentary images of standing on a high balcony with an elegant woman in white, sun shining through a glass roof on an upturned face, a tall man in a long dark coat shaking her awake in the night, moonslight on a glass roof. She no longer trusted these visions. Memories have half-lives. Scabies, a ratty little sheet-mender infected by her name, knew exactly where she came from: a grim industrial High-ville three kilometres down Pier 188276 where twelve generations had grown up atmosphere-plant workers and enthusiastic amateur incests. She had climbed away from all that, climbed and climbed and climbed through places that would not welcome her or welcomed her only to do things worse than where she had come from, until she popped a hatch and found she was on top of the world. No mystery there. But the babies, the wains and the toddlers; the only other explanation was deliberate abandonment and people didn’t do things like that.

The fact that Sweetness had come from the sky made her an object of some distinction. The roof-people connected her advent with the events of the previous night, which had been hotly, and fearfully, debated, and theories formulated. A night of a thousand shooting stars, of swords in heaven; battles in the moonring, concepts for which the roof-wonders had no language. Sweetness was not sure she had any herself. Then with dawn word of the meteor strike—an unheard of occurrence, a hole in the big floor!—had passed across the glass plain with the speed of the wind; now a girl, falling from a flying church.

“That’s why Townley claimed jurisdiction over you,” Meadowbank said, the Seven-Ups Girl Nation speeding west in three sprays of powdered glass and all the crew gathered around Sweetness’s bed. “Even Draelon wants to know; he’d’ve asked you, then got you to take all your clothes off.”

“What do you think it is?” Sweetness asked.

The Seven-up Girls looked to their President.

“I heard there’re other worlds out there, like this one.”

“There are, not too many like this one. There’s the one we came from…”

“No, not that one, that’s what Draelon thinks; he says there was this war of the worlds and that it got fought through hundreds and hundreds of different universes so we may not even be the one that started the war, but whatever, in our bit of the universes, we won and the ones back there, where we came from, they’ve never forgotten and certainly not forgiven. They’re going to have another go, and this time, they’re going to win.”

“There was a war like that,” Sweetness said, thinking, you sound so clever and it’s only days since you learned this yourself. “But it’s been over a long time. We’re at peace. So, what do you think it is?”

“I think it’s another world altogether, one way way out there, that mightn’t even have the same sun as us. Maybe the people don’t even look like us, maybe they look like collie dogs or bits of plastic or something you can’t even imagine, but they want our world. They’ve wanted it for a long time, like hundreds of years, and every so often they put a fleet together, like hundreds and hundreds of fighting machines and they send it to invade us, and we fight them off. That’s what those stars are up there, all the scraps and wrecks and junk from the battles. They’ve been doing it a long time, and you think they’d learn, but they know that we have to be lucky every time and they only have to be lucky once.”

“I’ve heard worse theories. Is that what you believe?”

“Maybe. Heard another story; the gate crew said it was on the wireless news this morning…”

“Gate crew?”

“The ones who open the hatch, you know? Your church went through? And close it again?”

“Merde’a’God!” Ribs and invalidity forgotten, Sweetness sat bolt upright. “Where are we!”

“About two kays west of Pier one six six six eight three seven. Up over Rhosymedre Canton.”

“It’s the wrong way. I have to get back there!”

“What is this?” President Meadowbank asked. Her electorate drew close around the bed, vote pool and state military.

“That stuff that happened last night, I’ll tell you exactly what’s happening. It’s a war between the angels. There are angels up there—machines like angels, millions of them, up in that ring of stars, and there’s a civil war going on because that guy in the cathedral, Devastation Harx, is taking control of them. And when they’re gone, you’re next.”

Meadowbank Trumbden stood with her arms folded and her face set. Her nation adopted the presidential posture.

“Now that is the dumbest story…” she said. “You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s true! He’s got hold of St. Catherine—she’s not really a saint at all…”

No point, Engineer girl. They don’t believe you. The truth of this world is too much for them. Reality is too unreal. Is there anyone out there knows what’s really going on, apart from you? And if Lost Girls won’t hold that truth who will? Right now, you are as far from achieving your goal as you are probably ever going to be in this story. But I fell from the flying cathedral! she wanted to say, again checked herself. Any and all words were wasted. Now, they tolerate you as a liar. Say a whisper more and they will hate you.

“Ahoy!”

The cry from the sole forward lookout was like the crack of a whip. Every head recoiled, then turned. The national skate-ship had separated from its companions in the flotilla—all such alliances in this environment were brief and serendipitous—and was fast approaching a communications spire, a black, baroque tangle of aerials, dishes and signal boosters protruding from the pristine glass like a single black hair on the face of a venerable dowager.

“Prepare to stop!” Meadowbank shouted and her skinny girls jumped to their posts. Dagger-boards were thrust down through the keel; hundreds of scavenged nail and construction bolt-teeth bit glass in a cascade of powder. Sails furled, helm brought the boat about, nose in to the hard dock. With a shriek and a shudder, Seven-Ups Girl Nation came to a rest. A hatch undogged in the spire, the communications men stepped out, blinking in the morning light. They looked old and big and dirty and bearlike with their shaggy hair and beards and crusty coveralls. The Seven-Ups formed a line on deck.

Sweetness watched the face-off warily, suspecting sordid sexual trading of that kind that is so ubiquitous in the less public and more hungry parts of the world.

“Ladies,” the leader of the radio men said, “have you any idea how long it’s been? We’ve been dying up here. Can you do us? Can you give us what we need?”

“It’ll cost.”

“The usual.”

“Plus ten. Extra mouth.”

The leader ran his hand across his mouth, shook his head.

“I’ve got to have a bit of trim. Okay, extra ten. Deal?”

“Deal.”

With a war-cry, the girls of Seven-Ups Nations pulled hard steel and brandished it over their heads. The brilliant light caught twin blades: scissors. As one, the cutting crew went over the side twirling their plastic haircapes, and set to work on the heads of the relieved workers. Over the next hour, they dispensed bowl-cuts, flat-tops, numbers six down to nought, page boys, duck’s arses, quiffs, back-combs, centre partings, side-partings left, side-partings right, shaved patterns names religious mottoes sports team logos on the backs of skulls. The scissors snip-snap-snipped, long greasy hair fell in bangs to the ground and blew away on the eternal winds. Then the capes were swirled away and the stray hair dusted from the nape of the neck, the scissors tucked away and the bay-rum frictioned into shorn scalps.

Throughout the mass hair-doing, Sweetness had noticed the leader of the communications men, now sporting a set of ear-length dreads, keep squinting at the upper levels of the telecom mast. A non-hairfarer, Sweetness could observe unobtrusively from her recliner, but in the jumble of technology it was impossible to tell what was kosher and what was not. Now, as Meadowbank laboured over making up the bill, Sweetness saw something move up there. Very slowly, very subtly, like large spiders creeping up on their prey, black objects were making their way down through the relays and microwave transmitters. Not machines, Sweetness suspected, though she could not assign any shape to them; they moved like living things. God the Panarchic alone knew what lived up here, up above the world so high, and what it liked to eat.

Meadowbank and the chief of communications were still haggling. Sweetness thought that he seemed to be delaying her. She looked up again. The objects had stopped moving. She scrutinised the gantry work; patterns appeared, images resolved into limbs, torsos, heads.

“Up there, look!” Sweetness shouted, pointing. Meadowbank Trumbden looked up, and the figures leaped. Twelve of them, changing colour as they fell feet first, black to white to translucent glass, falling slower than gravity should allow. Sweetness’s fillings throbbed in her molars: impeller fields, as well as light-scatter toadsuits.

“Run!” Meadowbank Trumbden yelled. “It’s the furniture folk!” The Seven-Ups Girl Nation scattered. Too slow. The hunters pulled big black pieces from their shoulder holsters and took aim. Expecting massacre, Sweetness ducked. Glue-guns, net-chuckers, neural bolloxers: state-of-art non-lethal weaponry immobilised, trawled, dazed and confused the hairdressers. Three comtechs ran to assist their foreman as he wrestled with a kicking, blaspheming Meadowbank. The hunters touched lightly down, moved to secure their prisoners and round up what few had escaped.

Sweetness leaped up but a wave of persons in black surged over the gunwale, seized the edge of her mattress and, with a swift tug, turned it over and wrapped her up in it before she could utter one trainfolk curse. For the second time that day, everything went black.

Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely held her monthly furniture auctions on the thousandth-level balcony of her pier-top manor. Though hers was a refined and specialised interest, and the higher up the pier the more refined and specialised the interests came, they were attended by many outside her hobby group for the catering was excellent, the wine list superb, despite being decanted at altitude, and the chitter-chatter-chat unexcelled. The lots were arranged in order of disposal along the skyward side of the vertiginous ledge, where the afternoon light would show them off to their best advantage. Acquisitive parties inspected the pieces, assessed their size and durability. For those who were seeking matched sets or to complete a tableau, some had already been suited and positioned.

All morning the spider-machine had negotiated cautious passage along the jungle of roof-tree branches, daring and vertiginous scurries from sucker-pad feet across the intervening spans of bare roof glass. In her barred cage, hanging with the other captured Seven-Upers from the belly of the transporter like mites, Sweetness had watched the track of the sun arc across the transparent ceiling. For the first time, she noticed the scratches and scorings and scars in the glass. The sun told her that at least she was heading in the right direction, Harx-ward. Otherwise, her lot seemed dire indeed. Many child-takers hunted the glass plains, but the hirelings of the very rich and very specialist and very bored who used humans for furniture were especially feared.

“They’ve got these suits,” Meadowbank Trumbden whispered in the next cage, quiet, watching, for the child-takers enforced their disciplines with cattle prods. “Can’t see, can’t hear, can’t talk. I heard they even feed you and take away all your crap stuff. Once you got them on, they don’t come off. And they like, move you, and then they lock and you can’t move either.”

Another trip into black, Sweetness thought. Only this one you don’t come out of. She tried to tell herself that this was all part of adventure and that stories didn’t end with the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine as a tea table. She was still trying to convince herself of this as the roof-crawler descended the main spur toward the hundred slim spires of Demesne Urtching-Sembely, its burden of flesh swaying beneath it like heavy dugs.

Now with her hands lashed behind her with cable grip, Sweetness stood last in line—but not in desirability, she told herself; even human furniture auctions leave best to last—on the balcony sweating in the afternoon torpor close under Worldroof. Next to her, Urtching-Sembely hirelings cut Meadowbank Trumbden out of her plastic rags while a third forced her into the form-kissing black suit. Prie, Scabies and the crewgirl who had given Sweetness sweet water had already been knocked down as a matched table set, forced down into a kneel, then leaned backward by the nano-motors seeded through the clinging fabric until their wrists were locked to their ankles. The buyer, a stalky, angular man in a brocade coat and slightly unfashionable footwear, spent considerable time measuring the angles and making sure the breasts were large enough to support the great glass circle at which he proposed to entertain like-minded guests. After much measuring and fine control with the suit motors, he seemed satisfied.

The enforcers finally wrestled the hood over Meadowbank’s head, tucked in stray wisps of urchin cut, made sure the gag and earplugs were seated right and sealed it up. The auction attendants stepped back. Meadowbank struggled a moment, then the suit locked, immobilising her.

“So, what’s collectable with you?” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely asked the purchaser, a man of such astonishing nondescriptness that he had to own some secret and unpleasant vice otherwise he would have faded out of the world completely.

“Lamps,” the buyer said. “Flambeaux bearers. I’m going through a household illumination phase at the moment.”

“How delightful!” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely clapped her hands in pleasant anticipation. She was an unjustifiably beautiful woman, tall, elegant, with brown brown eyes and brown brown hair and the loveliest hands. She was dressed in a floor-skimming formal robe of lace and white brocade, corseted to enhance her generous embonpoint. It was all so unfair, Sweetness thought. No Don Urtching-Sembely. Probably eaten him, or got him as a chair for special occasions, in a very private room. The gracious Ladonna took a control bulb from her wrist purse. Her manicured fingers touched studs. Meadowbank’s legs were drawn together to attention; against her will, her arms raised vertically over her head. The suit locked. One of the buyer’s servants brought a self-powering electric flambeau and set it into the upraised, rigid hands. A step back, and the plastic flame glowed white.

“Perfect,” the astonishingly nondescript man said.

“I’ll have it delivered today,” the Ladonna said and one of her hunters slapped a red sale circle on the black figure’s small right breast. “Now, on to our last item today, lot twelve. An older piece, more solidly constructed, but still capable of a lifetime of service.”

“Meaty,” commented an old woman with a white edible dog under her arm. A tall, epicene man in breeches and knee boots looked more appraisingly through a quizzing glass.

“Possibilities. A chandelier, I think. Yes.” He tapped lorgnettes against his palm thoughtfully. “This one would look fine hanging from my ceiling.”

“May I take that as a bid?” purred the Ladonna.

“You may. Three thousand.”

“Done, sir.”

The gentleman bowed, the Ladonna nodded to her servitors. Two closed on Sweetness with knives to cut her out of her clothes, the third brought the black suit.

It can’t end like this.

Oh can’t it?

And that was it decided. If all this wasn’t story, it would end here with her spending several decades swinging from a ceiling with candles in her hands and feet. If it was, then the rules of narrative governed everything that happened. Therefore, this was the Point of Worst Personal Threat, when all the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine’s efforts to attain her Dramatic Goal hang by a thread, and Something Big Happens that rolls it over into the End Game. Here narrative creatures like Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity were all the FR(BCWI) Heroine could trust to save her.

The black furniture suit wove in front of her, drawing her gaze in like a collapsed star. Now.

“I’ll give you meaty!” she yelled and planted the toe of her left boot into the suit bearer’s testicles. She heard things crunch. The man let out a near-hypersonic shriek. His eyes rolled up in his head. He went down like a felled redwood. In the moment’s confusion, Sweetness danced out from under the knife-men’s blades. Hands bound, she plunged toward the edge of the balcony.

“No!” roared the Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely.

Five kilometres of Canton Semb late afternoon gaped as Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th went over the rail head first toward the tailored vine terraces one thousand storeys below.