Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Grandmother Taal took an innocent sidle nearer. Between Skerry’s dogged fury and the luvvie-girl’s—Mishcondereya’s—sighings and soft competence-assassinations, Grandmother Taal deduced that it was of regional, perhaps even planetary importance that silver-boots girlie leap out of the cake just as the Glenn Miller Orchestra struck up the intro to the song they had collected at the Prestaines’ Parcel Depot. Due to albumenisation, or some other error in contemporary baking, this was not going to happen, there now wasn’t time to bake another cake, and this was a Very Bad Thing.

Very Bad Things promised Very Interesting Consequences. Grandmother Taal drew near.

“Excuse me,” she ventured. “If I might interrupt; I may be able to assist.”

Animosities were forgotten. Five faces turned on her. Grandmother Taal forestalled the barrage of comment.

“I just have to know one thing. Is the cake chocolate?”

“Finest forty percent mocha first-melt high-bean mix,” the Master Baker sang out.

“Good!” Grandmother Taal said. “Give me that.”

Dreadful Teeth boy carried a knife in his boot-top. In one motion she scooped it out, unclasped it and before any hand could stop her, carved the word open on the back of her hand. She held the bleeding fist up to the cake. The ziggurat quivered. Molesworth Patissiers stepped back. The great cake heaved. The cake quaked. Bakers abandoned truck. In a spray of crumb, butter-cream and carob frosting, the top of the cake sprang open like the hatch of an overheated boiler. While every head was turned and every mouth open, Grandmother Taal flung the knife square between its owner’s boots. The boy bent to retrieve it, squinted small respect out from under his greasy fringe.

“Impressive, for an ould doll.”

He folded the knife and slid it into the smooth leather with a polished snick. While the bikini maid wriggled into the cake Grandmother Taal made bold to introduce herself.

“You trainies have good names,” he said, with his way of looking toward-but-not-at the person to whom he was speaking that made Grandmother Taal wonder if he were homosexual. “I’m just Weill.” Unused to the pronunciation, Grandmother Taal at first thought it was a self-description. “Neat power. What is it, some kind of family heirloom?”

“Things that are brown only.”

“Hey, that has a kind of…cloacal…potential.” He sucked in his top lip and nodded his head and studied the toe of his left boot. He shifted his feet in sudden decision, fished in his pockets for a card on which he scrawled in handwriting no less dreadful than his teeth. He presented it to Grandmother Taal. It was thick, creamy vellum, scalloped and gold-edged, an invitation to the Inaugural Pleasance of Cossivo Beldene as newly Elected Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Table twenty-five, nine minutes of nine, dress formal.

“Or as formal as you can get,” the ratty Weill said. “Personal guest of Weill, of United Artists.”

A dozen questions sprang to Grandmother Taal’s lips but Weill was already walking away to rejoin his compadres in manoeuvring the cake through the stage door. He turned only to call back to the once-old woman standing in the alley: “It’s all right, it’s official. They won’t bounce you. The others won’t like it but I’m the anarchist one, and I think you should see what you actually put a hand in. It’ll be funny.”

With that the great cake sailed through the double doors into the darkness of the kitchen and Grandmother Taal, gilt-edged invitation in hand, was left standing among Patissiers, doubting the sanity of every soul on the streets of Molesworth.

“ In the beginning,” the traveller said, his boots up on the brass pooprail of the track-yacht, “was the word. Or rather, words. A lot of words. A language, but not a human language. A machine language.”

Sweetness Asiim Engineer shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up the invisible bridle lines to the kites, beating bravely through the dark blue sky. The molecule-thin, diamond-string filaments cut the air like razors and the air keened. They moved through a dimension of sound. The bogie sang down the steel rail; the track joints clicked in syncopation under the thrumming wheels; the westerly current cracked and strummed the boxkites. The old man’s mantra-like litany was a counterpoint to the creaking of the axles; the squeal of the brake as Sweetness gently lifted the brass lever to let the bogie take a long, slow right-hander added a descant to the hymn of forward motion.

“Wozzat?”

“Computers, girl. Devices of memory, logic and language. Thinking machines, brains in boxes. Quasimentos. Like unto the shape of a mind. What you people ignorantly call angels. Have you no interest in the history of this erstwhile psychic twin of yours?”

Twenty kilometres downtrack, the sun was glinting off the curved steel rail. Ranged along the horizon like an encamped fantasy army, ancient red mountains defended the edge of the world. Dunes broke on either side of her, surfing away into desert shimmer. The sky was a bowl of indigo porcelain, the electric wind streamed her curls back from her cheekbones and Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th understood for the first time that adult thing called ecstasy, and that is brief and incredibly precious and not to be tarnished by talk of history and machines.

“Be thankful that you live in an adolescent civilisation,” the doctor went on, blithely indifferent to Sweetness’s bliss. “We do not balk at miracles and wonders, we have an innate bull-at-a-gate can-doism. And we do take it for granted that we live in a wholly artificial environment. Therefore, we find it hard to identify with the mind-sets of those Five Hundred Founders who looked up at our world in their night sky and conceived the plan of turning it into a second home for humanity. The scale of the task, the boldness of the conception, the sheer marshalling of resources, not to mention the task of wrestling every bit of it out of that terrible gravity-well of theirs—we can’t comprehend it. We think of Motherworld as old, tired, a little decadent. Geriatric. Motherworlders—though I will bet you, Sweetness Engineer, that in all your millions of kilometres you have never met one—are effete, spindly, inbred and epicene. I tell you, child, these were giants among men. And women. Colossi. They had the ambitions and energies of gods. They built worlds. They threw stars down from heaven. In the end, they played with the laws of reality itself. They were mighty folk, the Five Hundred Founders.

“Catherine of Tharsis was not one of these.”

Startled from her desert reveries, Sweetness glanced round in time to see doctor, chair, poop-rail, bogie, track, desert, world suddenly turn translucent. She felt the deck beneath her boot soles soften, the reality beneath her feet give like mud. She grabbed for the wheel: her fingers sank into it like a wrung sponge.

“H…”

The cry for help got no further than the initial aspirate when all flicked back to colour and solidity.

“What?”

“I hadn’t thought that would happen quite so soon,” the traveller said. “But now it has, I should warn you that it will, with increasing frequency and duration, until eventually it won’t come back at all. The further I get from the source, the less the probability of my existence becomes until it is so close to zero that all this disappears and baseline reality reasserts itself. Quite solidly and probably painfully. Which all just helps to illustrate the point I am trying to make in my little homily.”

“This isn’t real?” Sweetness asked, with a glance at the bobbing kites and the singing rail.