Ares Express

25

One thousand storeys. Five metres per storey. Five thousand metres. Acceleration due to gravity, three metres per second squared. Terminal velocity in the thick, sweet air under Grand Valley’s glass roof: twenty-two metres per second. Or eighty kilometres per hour. Time until Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th hit ground zero: four hundred seconds. Or six and two-thirds minutes. You can get a lot of screaming into that.

The first “www” was not off her lips when the hand seized the scruff of her track jacket. Woofff. The world went red under her eyes, and suddenly, faster than any attempt to analyse it, she was not falling. Something dark had darted out from the cantilevering that supported the terraces of Demesne Urching-Sembely; on a rope, on wings, on a wire, on a carnival rocket. Whatever. All she knew was, it had a hold of her and she was not falling. Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity had saved the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine. She looked down between her feet. Dark threads rippled across the corduroy terraces of Canton Semb; clans of pickers at the harvest. Sweetness laughed to see them at their task, never suspecting what hung by a fistful of rip-stop nylon five kilometres above their bended backs. She wiggled her toes, delighted that the universe had let her live.

“When you’re done,” a strained voice said. “Only I don’t know what’s goin’ to go first; my arm or the zip on your jacket.”

Only then did she think to look up rather than down.

And boggled.

“Returning the favour,” said the brown-eyed, urchin-fringed, suspicious-cute face that Sweetness Asiim Engineer had last seen looking up into hers from a precarious fingerhold on the side of ore car eleven. “You know, how is it every time we meet, I get a sore hand?”

Pharaoh the ex-railrat hung like a Missal Anagnosta from the Guthru Gram Kanteklion in a webbing harness. His left arm steadied himself on the rope fastened to the buttress ten metres overhead, his right was clenched in a generous fistful of her faithful track jacket. Sweetness could see his thin muscles knotting, his slender fingers going pale.

“When you’re done staring, you wouldn’t like to grab hold of this and haul yourself up?” He dropped her a length of line with two foot stirrups looped on the end. Sweetness, hands still bound, kicked her feet into the loops. Pharaoh threw two more loops around her body and slowly hauled her up to his level.

“Hold still,” he said, flicking a knife. Sweetness flinched, Pharaoh repeated the order. “I don’t want to cut the wrong thing.” His blade was true; a snick, the cable tie fluttered yellowly down to the fertile terraces below. Sweetness watched it, gravely, as the hanging ensemble pirouetted gently, a Foucault pendulum ballasted with two lives.

“Hold on tight now, I’m going to put a bit of a swing on this thing,” Pharaoh warned and shifted his weight. Sweetness wrapped her legs around his, buried her fists in his scabby brown leather jacket and combated the positive body odour and escalating motion sickness as the pendulum built up by marvelling how stories did what you expected, and then some more; that little extra neat twist. She could hear the wind rushing past her ears. Or—the defensive, pedantic incongruity of one hanging from a slim line over a five-kilometre drop—was it her ears rushing past the wind?

Soon, very soon, she thought, the shaking’s going to start.

“I should thank you, cause I kind of think you saved my life,” she whispered to Kid Pharaoh as they whooshed through ever-increasing arcs. His target seemed to be a clutch of heat vents and gas-exchange stacks tucked like parasitic moulds under the mushroom fan of the terrace tiers.

“Then we’re even now,” he said as they hurtled upward toward the impaling geometry of the Demesne’s service zone. He reached…He grabbed…He held. Pharaoh hauled himself and Sweetness up on to the spar. He tugged on the line and the smart-plastic snap-release shackle gave way. The sustaining rope fell, Pharaoh carefully coiled it in. Sweetness clung to the girder, suddenly very very cold.

The shaking started. Soon after it came the black thing.

After the incident with the Kaspidi Sisters that had cost him his Vagrant Entertainer’s licence (as good as a shroud to an Old Skool Funnyman like him) and a warning never ever ever to set foot across the border of Christadelphia in this life or any other, Seskinore knew he deserved eternal banishment to the dark and humourless land that is the lot of Old Comics Who Do it With Wrong-Side-of-Barely-Legal Girls. It was meet and right that he would never hear the band count in two, three, four and in to “East St. Louis Boogaloo”; never again cross those boards to the spot under the footlights where the applause sounded sweetest. They tore up his joke books. They ripped the petals from his lapel carnation. Even when the government had given him the only kind of job available to an old comic aside from soft-shoe shuffling on the Great Concourse of Belladonna Main, cap in hand, his rep had preceded him. He copped it nobly—dignity, always dignity—but sometimes he wished that these young slubberdegullions showed a little more respect for his professionalism. Yea, he had sinned, and mightily, but it had been a professional sin. And from what moral pinnacle did they regard him; the burned-out smart-ass stand-up; the arty-farty sensitive girl who wouldn’t know a funny line if it stuck it all the way up her right to her ovaries; the hand-standing fire-juggling dyke; the chicken-shit anarchist? Amateurs. Even Dearest Dimmy and Mr. Superb would have disdained them; bottom-rung acts they might have been, but at least they had been professional. They understood timing. They understood experience, and the knowledge of what works on an audience that only comes through dying the death a hundred, a thousand nights. They understood practice, practice, practice. They understood dignity. Always dignity. Disgraced he might be, but Seskinore had been professional unto the last. Seskinore could admit that he may never have been funny, but he had been professionally not funny.

“Enough, enough!” he shouted with just the right tone of camp exasperation. Bladnoch and Mishcondereya peeped sheepishly over the control panel of the dream machine. Skerry frowned at him upside down from a silver trapeze. Weill just scowled. “No no no no no!” He clapped his hands. “The Great Destaine would never have stood for this, never. Switch it off, go on, off. Right now.”

Bladnoch and Mishcondereya looked at each other, then Mishcondereya pouted and threw the power. The Ranks and Orders; the Rider on the Many Headed-Beast (each head that of a prominent politician, a satirical touch by Weill); the Circus of Heaven with its tightrope walkers balancing on superstrings, its jugglers cascading the planets of the solar system, its snarling, chained Tygers of Wrath and its high-prancing Horses of Instruction, its frilled, white-faced, terrifying Chaos Clowns; the down-sweeping Hammer and Sickle of God; all evaporated in an instant into the artificial clouds that had turned the Comedy Cave into a sweatlodge.

“What?” Skerry demanded, pulling herself upright and sliding off the trapeze on to the rehearsal platform. Seskinore half-averted his gaze from the gluteal zone of her cheek-cleaving green leotard.

“The timing’s up the left. Between the Grand Parade of the High and Lordly Ones and the Opening of the Cornucopia of All Fruits, you’re wide open for twenty, twenty-five seconds. And the coordination, God’s bones, woman!” This to Mishcondereya. “The bloody things are running through each other! It’s supposed to be the Ancient of Days thundering down in righteous wrath, not a charabanc of bloody village spooks!”

“It’s a rushed job,” Mishcondereya pleaded.

“It’s always a rushed job,” Seskinore said. “Now, we try it again. From the top. And this time, we will try to remember that the fate of the world is riding on us acting like professionals and not some half-arsed troupe of bloody sophomore-year drama students. First positions! Projector ready?”

Mishcondereya pouted again and reset the power buffers.

“Ready,” she said sullenly.

“Right boys and girl, from the top, and this time, let’s try and get it bloody right, shall we? Dear God; amateurs!”

Clouds swirled, found shifting, transitory forms in the tropical heat. Skerry towelled dry and tripped back to her position on the silver trapeze. As the hoists lifted her, apocalypse unfolded as a backdrop. Seskinore watched the little woman move into position and recalled what it was about her tight little ass that stirred such provocation in him. Nothing physiological—few women, or gentlemen for that matter, raised the Jolly Roger these sad days. Nor her personality, such as it was, narrow and deep-rooted in her own physicality. It was that he could order and stamp and throw funks and rehearse rehearse rehearse until they dropped, but come the day and the hour, it would be her out there on the high trapeze, and him back here, fretting over the monitors. Her; all of them. Never him. That was the price of his sensitive crimes with the Kaspidi Sisters. But once, by the gods of the backstage…When better to pick up the cane, tilt the hat, paint rouge circles on the death-white cheeks and stride boldly into the glare of the soda-light with the band striking up your tune behind you, than the end of the world?

The niggle with talent, Mishcondereya had always understood, was that it was blind to true genius. She had no doubt that her fellow artistes were indeed skilled at their crafts—in Bladnoch’s case, a genuine forte—but all of them were so mired in the admiration of their own abilities that they could not recognise the only pukkah prodigy in the gang: Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana. The lot of her privileged life. Always fated to be a lower bloom among the early flowerings of her four older sisters; the painter, the writer, the harpist and the sen-so-rama sculptress. The performance artist? Just another genius. Children brought up in the airy, light-drenched Grand Valley pueblo of Etzwane Eksendrarana and Afton Benninger (he a Living Treasure crafter of ritual mint-tea-infusers, she the lauded architect of India’s Chursky Prospekt and the sheer crystal dome of Wisdom’s new Grand Trunk Terminus) could not fail to develop into world-wide movers and shapers, but even the most indulgent of parents’ attention starts to thin with the fourth gifted child. The fifth? A blossom that blooms unseen, wasting its perfume on the desert air. The o’erlooked rose. The unregarded bud. Mishcondereya often thought of herself (and she thought of herself very often) in terms of a flower, growing wild, nobody’s child. Unregarded among her colleagues as she had been among her sisters. But it is the unregarded rose that is the sweetest, the pebble half-buried in the dune face on which you stub your toe and give no more than a glance that is the raw diamond.

Mishcondereya was firmamentally convinced of four things.

That she was an utter genius.

That she was a sex goddess.

That everyone either wanted to be like her or was helplessly in love with her.

That therefore everyone was jealous of her.

The polythene elevator took Mishcondereya up from the R&D dungeon through tiers of holy battle. She sneered at the photonic ghosts. She was in no awe of the angelic forces swooping and trumpeting outside. Vanity had always been the Defiant One’s strongest weapon.

How did they ever imagine this would convince Devastation Harx? A man who founds his own church has an intimate knowledge of the phoney. He’d bust his nuts laughing, if he’d hadn’t already bust them in some kind of ritual-humiliation holy wooden vice thing. Or was that some other mail-order outfit? Research had never been Mishcondereya’s trump suit.

Not for the first time she thought about handing in her resignation. Take it, I quit, I walk, I’m up and out, comperes, do the memory-wipe thing, it’s not as if I’d be losing much, or even taking much with me. Surprise! Planetary security run by a pack of jokers.

No. Not this time. There was yet pleasure to be savoured from saving their collective asses once again.

The device was still chill from the assembler vat; she tossed it from palm to palm. Cold that burns. Seskinore—Fat Fart, her private name for him—would be up there blubbering and mincing and farting like an old Show Boat duchess and of course it would all be heading floorward like a Belladonna dowager’s butt and being act-ors (she always consciously spaced the syllables) they reckoned that if they looked deep enough inside their souls for Honesty in Comedy or stood in a circle and workshopped it out like sweating off a really bad wodka hangover or clenched and unclenched their fists and screwed up enough Team Force it would all come right just like that. Of course it wouldn’t. Never would, not on its own. She’d told them that, lodged her token formal complaint, but they just kept stubbornly heading on with the wrong thing while the Armageddon clock ticked down to zero. No surprise they hadn’t listened; she wasn’t an act-or and therefore understood nothing of the creative process and the agonies of performance. Their loss. It didn’t insult her any more. The ignorant can’t insult you. So Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana did what she always did, excused herself from their group huddle and primal yodelling and took her own idea off to make it into something.

Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana was proud that she’d been expelled from the only other team that had recruited her—St. Xaviou’s Community College Ladies’ touch-rugger—because she’d been more interested in spectator reaction to her tight’n’shiny shorts and over-the-knee socks than playing defensive wing. Even then she had not been ashamed to own that she was not a team player.

The trogs in nanofacturing were creepy and a little smelly and she didn’t doubt that every man—and woman—jack of them fancied the teats off her, but at least they had respect for a good idea. Struell Llewyn, trog King, with too many pairs of glasses slung around his neck (can’t he afford to get the oculars lasered or what?) had peered at the sketch, nodded at her general description of the effects she wanted (at least they didn’t expect her to be a pharmacist) and called a conclave of nano and pharmaceutical advisers. No group hugs. No free-form improvisation. No word-associational brainstorming. Nothing that involved throwing soft balls to each other, abdominal breathing or striking Damantine Discipline thranas. Quiet talk, a bit of scribbling on thinkpads and after twenty minutes, the frog King had pushed up his reading lenses and declared, “No problem for the welders.”

“When can I have it?”

“Forty minutes.”

And it had been, as it always was.

“Careful, now,” the trog King had advised as Mishcondereya juggled the frosted fluttering little thing up to her eye-level. “The trigger mechanism’s delicate.” Compound globules of nano-carbon met jellied spheres of protein. Gossamer wings whirred micro-breezes chilled with the memory of 3K nanoassembler chambers in her face. She peered into the churning greenness in its glass belly.

“Nice one.”

As ever, he had given that lopsided bow/smirk that was all the thanks he would acknowledge. The pride of the artisan classes. When she was well gone, that was when he would gather the trog nation in their canteen and tell them what a great job they had done. Our humble bit in Saving the World! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! Good people, if limited. In her many idle moments Mishcondereya wondered just with what they filled their frequent downtimes, what—who—they fantasised about when they went back to their clean-living little pottery villages.

As the plastic elevator passed through the fish-scale train of Ananuturanta Deva, Lord of the Changing Ways, she ignored Struell Llewyn’s admonition and tossed the little nano-bug high to catch it on the flat of her palm. And in that instant, without warning, she was embedded in stone. Darkness, pressure, absolute, not even space for a scream. Her lungs were rigid with solid rock. And then she was back in air and light and movement and the little flibbertigibbet floated down into her hand but she knew, for an instant, she had been dead, buried kilometres deep in the volcanic core of China Mountain in an alternative world where different laws of volcanology had refused to allow this chamber to form. She staggered against the flimsy side of the bubble car, almost dropped the frail flitter. She caught herself: dignity, always dignity. The Fat Fart was right in that one. But every one of her atoms remembered that they had been penetrated by cold hard gneiss.

They were looking concerned—and rightly—as she strode toward them across the rehearsal space. Once again, the spooks and spiritual entities were dissolving back into their constituent clouds with looks on their faces that might be read as worry, had they been anything more tangible than holographic dream-projections.

“Did you?” Fat Fart.

“Of course I did. Everybody did.”

“We have to go, now.” Leotard Girl.

So, why are you looking at me? Because it’s up to Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana to save your tight little butts again.

“No problem for the welders,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said and blew the little fritillary off her open hand into Weill’s face. Pig-turd Boy reeled back, lashed at the buzzy thing and it popped in front of his eyes into an expanding cloud of green gas. In shock, he took a deep breath.

His eyes glazed over.

“Woh,” he said. “Wohhhhhh.” A shit-eating grin spread across his peasant face. Realisation, both neurochemical as the hallucinogens kicked in and, with the shreds they left of his intelligence, intellectual. “I mean, really, woh.”

“Yah,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said lazily. “He’ll believe it now.”

The hat-pin snapped with a loud tink. The broken spike rolled across the platform, under the guard chains and over the edge. It speared through a cloud-hologram of the Lorarch ROHEL shrieking between the stalactites and stalagmites of the Comedy Cavern, barbed swords in all four hands. The big pin clinked audibly off some outcrop or other.

“Cock piss bugger bum balls,” Grandmother Taal swore. She should have gone straight for the lock-pick. Oh no, go for the easy option rather than invest ten minutes trying to remember where you left the wretched thing. Ten minutes squandered. That foo-feraw out there would only exercise their attentions so long. It was, of course, ludicrous. Even they could see that, and when the cloud-projector went off, she was bare bum naked up here on the platform.

A good God, a just God, would, at the end of your life, refund you all the time you had spent looking for little lost things. Like lock-picks. And granddaughters. Grandmother Taal plunged her arm elbow deep into her black bag and began to rummage through pocket universes.

The Bedassie boy had been easy to coerce. The polythene bauble perched on the sheer stalagmite might hold one so unadventurous as to prefer existence as a captive of a captive audience to wild wild life with a fit and nubile Engineer girl, but not a trainperson, and certainly not Engineer Amma. The boy had been polite, if a little malodorous from his long captivity and it was immediately evident to Grandmother Taal that he had been deeply touched by his exposure to Sweetness. She suspected that her granddaughter was one of those cursed to be fatally attractive to a certain type of man. Please God, the attraction did not seem to be reciprocal. Stainless steel kitchenettes were undeniably an excuse to up and leave, but for Sweetness to have boom-shakaed with this…Grandmother Taal shuddered at the thought.

Deep down in the dimensional folds of her bag, her fingers found a little pocket dedicated to souvenirs of Sweetness. A baby tooth. A bronzed raggie-doll. A scrolled-up drawing of a train, with a tree by the track and a yellow sun overhead and smiley Mama and Da waving palm-frond hands from the driving cab. The silk belly cord she had given up when she ceased to be a child and became fully human, an Engineer. The smeared panties of her womaning, preserved in a resin paperweight.

The fingers lingered a moment. The memories they felt out were a spur to hurry on. Soon, very soon, they’re going to unleash Armageddon and your granddaughter has put herself right in the middle of it. The part of her that Uncle Billied rides across whole hemispheres, that recklessly bet years of her life on a turn of cards, that hitched with big band leaders and schemed with state-sponsored practical jokers, that tried to pick locks on railway tunnel exit doors, was slyly proud of that.

Three dimensions down, she found the lock-pick.

Let’s see you try this, Marya Stuard, Grandmother Taal thought with an inner grin as she unfolded the prongs and set to work on the latch that sealed the two half doors. You may only need a lock-pick once, and maybe never, but when you do, you really do. Such was the logic of the collection she had stashed away over the decades in the black magic bag.

As she felt her way into the subtle mechanism, Grandmother Taal reflected that Sweetness’s very gift probably sentenced her to a life of heartbreaks. The curse of unworthy men. Cute but chicken. When it had come to it, that one, back there, had chosen life as a captive of a captive audience to heading off with Sweetness into adventure, high or low. Small wonder that train life so appealed to men; full steam and high speed, but only in the direction permitted by the track. Bedassie had shown her the trick of the door—the comedians seemed to have forgotten that a cloud cineaste would have a way with electronic things—but he had turned down even an old wizened woman’s offer of escape. The bridge that extruded itself from the stalactite to the railway station was narrow, railless, unsupported, and the drop through the warring tribes of holy ones terrifying, but Grandmother Taal had tightened up her courage and stepped out on to the swaying arch. Again, she thanked whatever Luck Gods had let her win precious years from Cyrene Ankhatiel Ree. In her old, fragile former self, the winds that gusted through the cave would have picked her up, puffed out her skirts like a festival balloon and dropped her on to the serrated obsidian daggers of the cavern floor. She looked back: Bedassie was clinging to the pod door.

“Come, take my hand.”

“Leave all this?” Nodding at the raving deities boiling up on either side of the slender pont.

“They’re ghosts, clouds. Nothing. They can’t hurt you.”

“It’s all I have.”

“Young man, do you think they will let us go, seeing and knowing what we have? The best we can hope for is mnemonic erasure. The worst…Let us say, I deeply suspect some of these people’s senses of humour. Come. Now. They won’t give you your device back.”

For an instant he was tempted, then shook his head.

“I believe I can do a deal, be useful to them.”

“Young man, if you believe that any government ever offers, let alone honours, a deal like that, you deserve all that you get. Last offer. Time is ticking away. My granddaughter is in great peril.”

He smiled sadly and Grandmother Taal suspected that Sweetness had seen that look of amiable resignation too.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

Even with fifteen spare years, it had been a precarious crossing, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, breath coming in little tight flutters, looking ahead, dead ahead, always ahead, never down, never to one side or the other, never at the deities that loomed and ballooned at her like spooks in a Canton Fair House of Horrendo. Muttering it like a mantra, ahead, ahead, always ahead, down, down, never look down. The far side hove into view. A brass section of minor Cheraphs swooped at her, blowing sweet rock ’n’ roll, breezed nonchalantly through Grandmother Taal as if she wasn’t there. The old matriarch gave a little eek, teetered. Her hands flailed. She looked down. Volcanic teeth yawned for her. She staggered, dashed forward, came off the end of the bridge in a stumbling roll.

Grandmother Taal sat, legs stretched straight out, and rejoiced in breathing for a full minute before remembering to retract the pont. Then she turned to face the lock and drew the pin from her hair like a long-coated Rapari his sabre.

Where Harx was, Sweetness would be, that much was clear. All this piss and smoke about saints and mirrors; she could make none of that, except that anything that involved powers not safely meat and bone was bad. Typical of her granddaughter to underestimate the danger and overestimate her resourcefulness. Absconding is one thing, adventuring another, but Armageddon is entirely something again. Clown-time is over. This required the full resources of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes. Now, if she could just pick this little lock, walk up that long sloping tunnel to the surface and persuade some Engineer to break the snubbing and let her make a Red Call…

Long orders. Tall hikes. So. She was sturdy. Grandmother Taal worked the clever pick deeper into the lock. Something was resisting her. A shove, a twist. She felt metal give. She worked the device free. As she feared. Irredeemably bent.

This was not the end, though Grandmother Taal felt soul and body sag, all their gambled-away years returning in a moment of sheer dispirit. The semicircles of the hasp mocked her assurance and abilities. Fallen at the first. And a subtle pressure shift on the back of her neck warned her The End of the World Show was rolling up. She had sat through enough fatuous rehearsals to know she had less than a minute before the clouds recondensed into the vapour generators and she was exposed, a wicked black spider clinging to a metal door.

Help me, saints and ancestors! Aid an old and ridiculous woman, St. Catherine, since you clearly seem to exist and have some power in this world.

And it came. Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness. Suddenly Grandmother Taal knew exactly what she must do. She found the little paper-wrapped packet in the fifteenth fold of her bag. She unwrapped the block of Etzvan Canton Black Loess Child’a’grace had given her as a helpmeet. It smelled sweet and low and smoky. She had no need of its pharmacological virtues. The thing was that, in the white floodlight of the Comedy Cavern, it was deeply, gloriously, intrinsically brown. Quickly and decorously, Grandmother Taal fluffed her many skirts, squatted and urinated on the block of prime hash. With the briefest grimace of distaste, she mixed the hash and piss into a thick paste. With the bent blade of the lock-pick she crammed as much of the brown sludge into the lock mechanism as she could. Even when she thought she had enough, she kept obdurately plastering. It was a mighty thing to ask even of Etzvan Canton Black Loess. She packed and packed until it was dribbling out of the keyhole. Then, choosing a clean blade from the lock-pick, she pulled up a sleeve and swiftly carved the word OPEN on the ghost-pallid skin on the inside of her elbow.

Grandmother Taal cried aloud in pain. The winds that patrolled the great cave lifted it, turned it into just another shriek among the stalactites. The years, the prize years, were leaking out of her. The power was burning them, focusing their hope and energy on the intricacies of interlocked steel. Blood ran down her mutilated arm and dripped on to the marble concourse. Grandmother Taal clenched her fist, gritted her teeth. Fire gnawed her bones. Palsies wracked her. She shook to a spasm. The lock quivered. Again, she convulsed; two years, five years burned. The lock jerked. The ashes of years piled up in her cells; she was old, she was old. Seven years. Ten years. Please, leave me something! she begged of the lock. A third time the lock quaked. Quaked again, then, with a detonation of rending metal, it burst apart. A pool of brown sludge joined the pool of blood on the stone. The tunnel doors began to slide apart. No time to lose. Grandmother Taal snatched her bag, hitched up her skirts, slipped through the gap and highfooted it up the long, black tunnel.

The purple, Devastation Harx thought as the Acolytes of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family filed from the flying cathedral’s outlocks on to the morning-glinty plateau of the repair dock, had not been one of his better ideas. Not the colour; purple was a sacerdotal hue, and cheap. Fetching, in the right light. The uniformity. Suddenly he saw ranked and serried badness. All little faces and hands in little squads and files, all dressed in ticky-tacky, all together, all the same. Robots, not people. Not individuals. The ubiquitous machines. Getting closer now. Getting into his beloveds.

Why join? The thought came as a sudden desire to shout down from the brass-railinged balcony from which he took the salute of the faithful. An act of free will to joyfully become a drone? The words were a tight urging in his throat, then he heard in the hollow of his skull how they would sound going out across the high glass, and was afraid. The doubts of a middle-aged twenty-something who has woken all creak-jointy this morning. You owe them better, as they line up to praise you for the freedom you have given their souls. Tell them that they take free grace freely given and throw it away with both hands and the ones who could still think would stare, while those who could not would only worship all the harder.

It’s not easy, running a religion. They have a habit of running away on you.

The Rank Presbyters and Exercisers Temporal had mustered their sections into squares and quadrilles of episcopal purple. Faces gleamed in the morning light. They looked to Harx expectant of blessing. He raised a hand, hesitated, suddenly nauseated by their need, suddenly heedful of the Störting-Kobiyashi shift workers trekking from the big express elevators along the grapple arms and access cranes to start work, and the way they could not quite bring themselves to look at all these faithful people, and smiled, and shook their heads sadly.

Yes, it is, Devastation Harx thought. And, to his gathered faithful, Have you understood so little? I gave you the secrets of unbarring the cells of your minds, of mask-and-caping the superhuman beneath each of your mundane humanities, of nurturing each of your uniquenesses so that a thousand flowers might bloom and a thousand schools of thought pervade, and what did you do? Dressed all in purple and got great thighs pedalling a bicycle-powered cathedral.

Great thighs, he admitted, were something.

But to make yourselves machines to war against the tyranny of the mechanical?

His hand returned to the balcony rail, unwilling to bless.

“Grace,” whispered Sianne Dandeever, first of the faithful and devoted über-mater and who, Devastation Harx knew sadly from his visits to the cycle-housings, had an ass the Panarch herself would commit sin to own and who, if he ever said the word, would devotedly let him chew it. Devotedly, but not joyfully. “They’re waiting…”

You become trapped by the needs of faith.

He raised his hand. The Rank Presbyters smiled, relieved; among them that odd, too-hungry trackboy who had stolen for him that dreadful tyke of train-trash girl. Of all incarnations and emanations for that Haan woman to have been entangled with…The ways of the multiverse were strange, and the boy had done a fine job, deserving of more reward than a two-tier promotion in the church civil service. Harx watched the boy nod to the Vicars Choral. They raised their staves, brought them down.

Happy happy happy

Happy happy happy

Happy happy happy all the day

Harx has saved us

Harx has made us

Happy happy happy all the day, the fresh-faced choristers sang.

Does God ever tire of hearing his praises sung? Harx thought, embarrassed today by the adulation wafting himwards, Does he feel insulted by the infantile twaddle peddled in the name of worship? So he would not have to listen, he surveyed instead the damage Cadmon and Euphrasie had wrought on his floating basilica. It looked to the faithful like contemplation of higher things. For a homosexual anarchist artist—late and reluctant recruits to the war—his brother had made a good aerial bomber. A few more sticks, a little faster on the turns, he might have seriously discommoded the great strategy, if not forced a season’s defeat on him. His diversionary strike on heaven might have gained him ground in the lower orbitals and swept away a third of the angelic forces that opposed him, but the ways of machines were subtle, and from the humiliation at the Molesworth Festhall, he did not doubt that other energies were being mobilised against him.

Had they finished yet?

Gleeful gleeful gleeful all the day.

How many, if any, suspected the scale of crusade in which they were spiritual infantry? Few out on parade, few on this whole world, in this universe. Not the machines. They knew too well that this little red ball was their final redoubt, and that one installation artist turned religious shyster was to be their nemesis.

Strange, and passing inevitable, the path that leads from fine art to jihad.

Strange, the things you find in mirrors.

God, they were still at it. Did they never tire of singing? I’m trying to make a universe for humans to live in, and the best you can do with it is chant doggerel. Excessive aubergine and happy-clappiness were the prices you paid for owning your own church. Inventing a religion was still the best and easiest way to raise the astronomical amounts of cash a war with the angels required.

Sianne Dandeever, poker-erect, face rapt, hands firmly gripping balcony rail, suddenly flinched as if unseen wings had flapped in her face. She flicked something away with her hand, scowled, devotion broken.

Harx stared, then cocked his head a degree to catch a tiny sound. A hum, an insect drone.

Insects. Up here? On this glass desert? Ridiculous.

More than ridiculous. Sinister.

A black mote danced in his face. Harx lunged, snatched, felt frantic movement buzz in his palm. He closed his fist, felt a soft crunch, opened his palm and peered closely at it. One less skilled in the wiles of machines might have taken it for a true insect, but he could see that the thing whirring spastically in his hand was a tiny, glass-bellied helicopter. He held it closer; as he did, the belly-bead popped. Vapour wisped, Harx hurled the thing away from him but not before a greenish wisp had curled up his nostrils. He saw vinegar, tasted blue minims; a symphony for cabbage and pram played a loud chord in his frontal lobes. The smell of triangles…

“Battle stations!” he roared out over the assembled faithful. Every head turned. Sianne Dandeever stared, half numb, half thrilled that this might be the call for which Harx had invested so much of her body and will.

“Battle stations!” Harx repeated as the squares and drills broke up into frantic motion. “To arms, our church is under attack!”

He nodded for Sianne to take command as a cloud of robot insects, black as smoke, poured from the spire-top airco funnels. He did not like to be seen by the faithful to be abandoning Armageddon, but there were tactics that only he could employ, and those in private. The true battle would not be fought under the glass plains, with gun turrets and Gatling bunkers, but among the shifting dimensions of his mirror maze. Devastation Harx swirled from the balcony. Sianne Dandeever cracked her knuckles and stood tall. Thank you God. At last. At long long last.

“This is it, boys!” she guldered at the top of her ample lungs to the running acolytes. “This is war!”

It wears off, they’d warned Lutra Blaine when she ticked the box in the job centre next to “Space Service.” And quicker than you think, too. Cartwheeling off the action end of the Skywheel space elevator (no, it’s not me going arse-over-heels, it’s the stars carouselling around me; the innocent solipsism of the work-placement cosmonaut) she had yippeed in her soul of souls as the red-green-occasional-blue mottle of her world rolled up in a great disc before her like a test for colour-blindness in the eye of the Divine. So tell me Ms. Blaine, what can you read down there? Nothing but a door out of three rooms and twelve bodies Level Twenty-Seven Deep St. Berisha Project NewMarket Down, Belladonna, Greatest of the Cities of the Valley. The doctors had warned her of possible agoraphobia. It would still not have grounded her. No one got turned down for space service. Not a problem, she said. Outer space was no bigger or blacker than inner space. The tunnels of the littler moon were no less pumicey and constricting. Space, like bedrock, was just another darkness into which you cannot go.

You do know you’ve more chance of winning the Fat Lotto every week for a year than seeing some, you know, action, the sheddle steward had said as he turned her the right way up and sent her and her canvas grip-bag sailing through the lock into the foam-padded reception bay.

That’s okay, she had thought as she swam through the thick, fart-whiffy air, wondering who the stocky, shock-headed smiler was down at the end of the cylinder, hand held out to welcome her to Planetary Defence System Terror. Just as long as the cheques keep coming.

The view was the one thing that had not tired. The constant vague nanogee nausea; the bloated, rodent face in the morning mirror; the unflagging, eroding energy with which Taroudant—the tousled grinner—tried to get his hand into the waistband of her draw-string Space Service baggies—most of all, this last—those she’d tired of by the end of her first shift. But her world, her home, the soil of her birth, her shelter and prison; spinning slowly like the hands of a great clock behind the watch-glass of the observation blister, she would wake from near-trance to find hours had vanished, witched out of her by the huge, slow-turning world beneath her. Twelve and a half years she had lived and crawled beneath the surface without ever once looking at its face.

Truth be told, Taroudant notwithstanding—he occupied an ecological niche all his own—the creaky old battle station was full of creeps. Unaccountable breezes eddied in the gritty pumice tunnels. Light panels would flicker as she swam past, or switch themselves off, or, more spookily still, on, illuminating vast, irregular, lung-like hollows she was quite sure did not appear on any of the moon maps. Machines loved to click and groan theatrically; spirals of dust would spin and sparkle in the hub-chambers where tunnel systems met, and what was that lingering smell of perfume, like ashes of roses? Taroudant would have been the obvious suspect, by the unfeasible logic that if he scared her enough she’d suck him off, except that she knew he sensed them too and, more primarily, he lacked the imagination for even that rudimentary ploy. And he never smelled of anything approaching ashes, let alone of roses.

No, ghosts there were in the old, hollow moon. That was the very idea of the place. An army of ghosts, to be resurrected from the crusty regolith in the hour of its primary’s need and thrown into final battle. She’d glimpsed the ranked processors behind their diamond viewing panes, waiting in supercool quantum chill to spin soldiers out of stone, like ice goblins in faerytales. The cold got into her bones, never really got out again, in the long, empty spaces of Planetary Defence System Terror. She floated warily past the empty templates mounted on the walls, breast-plated and beaked like insect warrior armour. Too many eyes, too many toes, too many arms that ended in too many blades, like ever-opening penknives. Slashers stabbers impalers gutters beheaders. All our warfares in the end come down to hand-to-hand. Stick a piece of sharp metal through your enemy. Simple and reliable. Like Taroudant. He came down to the hand-to-hand, in the end. Impale with a pointed weapon. Knob knob knob knob knob. Simple and reliable.

Two people; man, woman, trying to avoid each other in a worm-eaten potato of a moonlet, two billion humans’ final defence against interplanetary attack. Oh. Forgetting of course, SERAPAMOUN, Cheraph, exalted one, genius loci, seeded so thoroughly and minutely through Terror that the whole planetoid could be said to be one great orbiting brain. The real trigger finger, silent as only the angels can be silent, patiently waiting for a word certain never to be spoken, that would transform moon-stuff into machine warriors and send them falling out of the evening sky like diamond rain in their spin-carbon reentry shells.

Sometimes, as she hovered above the great viewing eye, Lutra Blaine wished for even a rumour of war. A blip on the sensors that watched the edges of System. A sudden rip in reality, spewing dagger-edged starfighters from some alien empire, filling all circumambient space with lambent beams of coruscating force. Skyjack and piracy on one of the big, stately Sailships. Something to set the alarms ringing and the amber lights pulse-rotating and Lutra and Taroudant hand-over-handing at flank speed along the tunnelways.

Nah.

So there was always the world, and it was unfailingly wonderful. The amazement that geography was actually the same as drawn in the atlas. The miracle of clouds seen from above. The revelation that weather moved and you could watch the birth, life and death of a storm. That the seas had currents, that the mountains had snowcaps and that the green of spring visibly spread south day by day. A thought unfolded the opticon arm, through its eye Lutra could look past the clouds to see the wakes of ships on her world’s small, landlocked seas. She could squint through the dazzle of sunlight from Worldroof to map the towns and tight-packed city-states of Grand Valley’s floor. She could track the progress of the great trains across the quarterspheres by the white plumes of steam lashing out behind them. She loved the trains most, cranking up the magnification on the opticon until she could make out the spider-silk threads of the tracks themselves, their junctions and switchovers, trying to guess the route this freight would take, that passenger express. The train was freedom. The iron way out. Her hormone-haunted teenage sleep had been broken at least once a night by a whistle far away through the labyrinth of stone streets and downramps between St. Berisha and Belladonna Main. Train a’leavin’. Without you, Lutra Blaine.

“Child’a’grace, not again!” she grimaced.

The enchantment was dispelled by a red light pulsing in the bottom left corner of the opticon. That intermittent again. She thought up a diagnostic. Her world went out of focus.

As she suspected. The bloody thing had kicked into assembler preignition. Sixth time in as many days. Senile bunch of scrap. No way, of course, to think of an angel, a Cheraph, no less, whose physical body you inhabited more as parasite than guest. But no one could deny that after that night it had started to go quietly ga-ga. No one had explained what the hell was going on there, like no one had explained what the hell was going on that night, when all the stars started shooting at each other with lasers and all the viewing panels had sealed up tight and somewhere inside her a nasty little voice had said, there’s stuff going on here they don’t want you to see, stuff that might, just might get you killed, Lutra Blaine.

Machines. The way they should do it: either fix the stupid machine so you don’t need any people so they can shoot away to their hearts’ content, or you scrap SERAPAMOUN and make it all people. But three; one angel, one girl and one pervo, is sure-as-eggs-is-eggs grief.

Pain in the hole. When it kicked off you had to go down there and shut the bloody thing down manually before it went into full Generation One assembler breeding. It was only a one-touch panel, but it was picking that panel out of a grid twenty by twenty all the colours of the rainbow. First time she’d made it with 007 seconds to spare. Once the processor halls started filling with assemblers, all hungry for moonrock to turn into cybersoldier, it took three different codewords from three separate Anarchs to put the system back into Condition Mauve.

“Tarou, he’s kicking off again,” she said more in hope than confidence. The first three times he’d told her she had to do it because she needed to know what to do in an emergency, the fourth time she realised that he was saying that because he hadn’t Idea One about how anything in the battle station worked.

Sort it yourself.

She’d worked out a way of negotiating Terror’s warren of tunnels, push with the hands in a long, gentle incline toward a point on the opposite wall way down the tube, spin one eighty halfway down so that she met the oncoming rock hands and face forward, ready for another long shallow swallow-dive. As she zigzagged toward the main soul-sphere in the zero-gee hollow at the core of the satellite where the heart of SERAPAMOUN depended, the thought niggled her, as it had each time before when the intermittent kicked off, that she should probably tell someone about this.

Nah (as she jack-knifed from the Equatorial One into Six O’Clock Diagonal). They didn’t pay her enough for responsibility.

One swoop past the intersection, Taroudant had left one of his tokens of intent. Grimacing, Lutra squeezed herself past the slowly revolving glob of milky jizzum.

“This wasn’t in my job description, man!”

This time, not even a far distant snicker, reverberating through the tunnel system. The wads she could cope with, just. The lurkings, the stealth approaches, the sudden shock of a hand slipped into her pants, the clutch of a (small) breast: not even a job creation scheme cosmonaut should have to tolerate that. And she never saw him coming. He could move fast and silent as a shadow in those endless corridors.

Creep.

As her hands touched gritstone for the next fist-off, a peculiar tremor ran through her palms. She seized a rung, stayed her flight. Fingertips told her unprecedented things were stirring within the pumice. What; her one-hour prelaunch neuro-induction course had not covered. Had covered very little, except how not to depressurise the station, and if in doubt, refer upward. She changed course at the next node, upward rather than inward, following the tremble she could now feel in the air around her to the nearest processor hall. Her arms cleared a swathe through a flock of foam styrene food trays, still sticky with sambhar sauce and curry ketchup, the detritus of Taroudant’s solitary dinners; she came in for a landing on the crystal porthole of the Valhalla 3 hall. Squinting down between her feet she could see at once through the hypercold the wasp-striped feed hoppers raised from their rest positions, pressed against raw rock, guzzling greedily. Shadows in the frosted diamond casting chambers. She bent closer, squinted. Steel bones and beaks. As she watched, swarms of assembler drones wove wires and smart-carbon sinews around the naked skeletons.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” said Lutra Blaine. There was no avoiding having to tell someone now. She kicked off.

Something snagged the waistband of her pants.

“Leave it out, man!” she yelled at Taroudant. “This is serious, SERAPAMOUN’s lost it big time, the whole place is going monkeyshit.”

The fingers did not let go. The other hand seized a fistful of work shirt.

“Tarou…”

She slapped behind her, yelped. The back of her knuckles had connected with something harder by far than barely-post-adolescent flesh.

A third hand snagged her right ankle.

She began a scream. A fourth hand ended it, fingers clapped around her open mouth. Six fingers of articulated stone. Lutra Blaine kicked with her free leg, struck out with her hands. Stone arms thrust from the tunnel walls to seize and pin them. Held immobile, Lutra Blaine could only watch the opposite side of the corridor unfold like an insect’s maw into an arsenal of graspers, blades, buzz-saws. A swift, sure pass of the scalpel opened her up from pubis to sternum. Rectractors peeled back flesh and bone as the robot mandibles proceeded to patiently disembowel her.