Ian McDonald - Ares Express

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

Sanyap Bedassie cocked his head to one side, intrigued.

“Pray why?”

“I need you to send a message.”

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

“To whom, exactly?”

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

“My grandmother. I’ll explain.”

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

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

“Which is?”

“You would rather need to get up here.”

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

Solid Gone was jealous of its news vendor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bum,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

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

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