Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“But don’t we live in an anarchy?” Sweetness asked, sweetly.

“Habitual anarchy is no anarchy at all,” Cadmon said.

“The revolution must be continual if it is to be the true revolution.”

“True anarchy is archy.”

“I must invent a non-system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

Sweetness looked at the two desert-clad men, cocked her head in that way.

“Are you butty-boys?” she asked.

Cadmon maintained high disdain, but Sweetness caught Euphrasie turning away and lifting his hand to his mouth to suppress a chuckle.

“We are living art,” Cadmon said. Okay , Sweetness thought.

“And art consists as much in the unmaking as the making,” Euphrasie said.

“Look, I don’t do art, so you’ll have to explain this,” Sweetness said.

“Explain? Very well. This project is complete. True art is momentary; the false strives for immortality. We make and we unmake. Now is the time of unmaking.”

Sweetness looked to Euphrasie for elucidation. He merely swivelled his eyes upward to the mushroom-cap of the companion set. For the first time Sweetness noticed the clustered white cylinders fastened to the shaft and around the rim of the cap, the gaily coloured wires, the radio transponders.

“You’re not…”

Euphrasie nodded and produced another bulb device from his vest of pockets.

“You have something in the region of thirty seconds to decide whether you come with us, or bet on how fast you can run,” Cadmon said, gathering up his discarded wrappings and stuffing them into a carry-all bag, which he slung on to the back of the nearer of the two fretting gravboards.

“Me? On one of those?”

“Twenty seconds…” Euphrasie had already mounted his gravboard and was erecting the boom.

“All right, I’m not betting, I’m not betting!” Sweetness scooped up her bag and dived for Euphrasie’s board. The mercurial machine rocked under her, she fought for balance, grabbed at Euphrasie, who by seizing her shirt-front prevented them both from capsizing. Wind cracked Cadmon’s pink and purple fractal patterned sail. The board pitched, then the rising evening breeze lifted it and whipped it away. Within instants, he was a lost toy in the great redness.

“Hold tight!” Euphrasie called to Sweetness, pressed cheek to scapular.

“Tell me,” Sweetness muttered into his back, but all the same the sudden dip and surge of the board almost upset her as Euphrasie tilted the boom into the wind and the board took flight.

“Whoo!” exclaimed Sweetness Asiim Engineer as the rippled dust blurred beneath her. The second board tacked sharply, caught a stronger air current and slid up alongside big, vain Cadmon.

“Zero!” he shouted to Euphrasie over the flutter of sail and the shout of wind. The smaller man held out the bulb-teat. Cadmon nodded for Sweetness to look back, which she did, dizzyingly, and so missed Euphrasie depressing the nipple. The effects were impressive. The big companion set stood tall and black and domestic on the horizon. As she watched, white blossoms of flame exploded briefly underneath the rim, indeed like some vast desert mushroom sporing explosively. The fall was slow and tremendous. Had the Skywheel itself snapped and fallen flailing to earth, it could not have been more thunderous and aristocratic. Explosions around the edge of the cap first freed the poker, which fell straight to earth and embedded itself a third-deep in the sand. The brush fell to earth in a comet’s tail of blazing bristles: fireballs and sparks rebounded high as it smashed into the ground. Multiple detonations disintegrated the tongs into flying, clawed shards. Only the shovel remained. Unbalanced by its weight, the cap tilted, then the shaft blew apart beneath it in an orgy of detonations. The falling shovel threw a spadeful of hot desert twenty metres into the air. Like a bell falling from God’s campanile, the cap struck the ground. The chime shivered Sweetness’s ovaries in her belly. Fractions of a second later, the shockwave ruffled her hair and tugged her clothes, sent the gravboard yawing.

The second pillar of smoke in Sweetness’s day went up from the wreckage of art.

“You’re mad, you are!” Sweetness exclaimed as Euphrasie sent the board sweeping round on a great sand-scoring arc. She liked the way he smiled, pleased and self-deprecating at once. Almost that smile. Remember, butty-boy, she advised herself. And if you go on falling for every male who smiles that smile, and they probably all do, this story is going to end with you tripping over the end of the next chapter. But, she decided as the gravboard scored away from the smouldering wreckage across the Big Red and she felt man body beneath her fingers and smelled man smells whipped back in the wind of her velocity that was streaming her hair straight back from her good cheekbones: this is what stories are all about. “Wooo!” she yelled, for the second time that day.

She decided she liked fruitboy anarchist artists. She tugged Euphrasie’s quilted sleeve.

“Where are we going?”

“Depends,” he shouted into the slipstream.

“On what?”

“On where you want to go.”

“Me?”

“Our work is done.”

“You’ve blown them all up?”

“Unto the last.”

“Even the big shoe?”

“The aglets flew three hundred metres in opposite directions.”

Aglets sounded to Sweetness Engineer like juvenile birds of prey, so three hundred metres might or might not be an impressive flight, but she understood and appreciated the pride in a good job well done in Euphrasie’s voice. It’s not an easy thing to do an explosion really well. Likewise, she understood and delighted in the thrilling velocity with which she skimmed across the desert, low enough for the sand sprayed up by the bow field to sting her ankles, up and over the dune crests with a leap and a yip and the bottom of her stomach falling out. These butty-boys had class. She liked them.

Sweetness hammered on Euphrasie’s back.

“Molesworth!” she yelled when she had his attention. Euphrasie did not ask where or why. He nodded briskly, finger-talked with one hand to his partner out at point. Cadmon and Euphrasie leaned into their sails. The banking boards cut crescents in the red sand as they curved due south.

“Wooooeeee!” fanfared Sweetness Asiim Engineer, throwing her head back and letting her greasy bonny black hair reel out behind her like a banner of anarchy. She could still smell it. She could still smell herself, lick her brown forearm and taste minerals. She had little enough water in her blood and less provender in her belly. She was still wandering in sterile places, cannoning off people places events like the legendary Rael Mandella Jr.’s cue ball. Her childhood companion was still incarcerated in a trans-dimensional mirror rolled up in a canopic jar. Her enemy roamed the airways by pedal power, cautiously testing his command of the very angels that had built the world. She had no weapons, no power, no plan, not even a cunning scheme. But she still knew, with a traingirl’s sense, that that electric buzz in the air is a big express coming; with the high-plain herder’s understanding that that flaring of the nostrils running through the herd is a sure sign of rains; with the deep core miner’s certainty as she burrows through the obsidian flux tubes of primal shield volcanoes that the next grike will glitter with diamonds; that though nothing was changed, everything was different. Before, those people places events had pushed her around. Now, somehow, she was pusher, not pushee. From here on, it would be an Adventure.

When the heat went out of the sky, they camped in the lee of the upended boards. The anarchists made fire and heated small, neat foil sachets of trail food in a bubbling billy. It was not sufficient and tasted badly enough of additives to catch the back of Sweetness’s throat but she skewered the tiny cubes of synthetic meat in their clinging sauce with her plastic pitchfork and gobbled them down with gratitude. To while away the cooling hours while the edge of the world rose over the face of the sun in streaks of red gold and purple, like a Pontifical progress, Cadmon and Euphrasie played a game with Sweetness. It was We’ve-Got-To-Guess-Why-You’re-Going-To-Molesworth-But-You’re-Only-Allowed-To-Give-One-Word-Monosyllabic-Answers.