Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Why?” Sweetness immediately asked.

“Because,” tall Cadmon answered. “And the way we play it, we’ve only got ten questions.”

“Okay.”

Euphrasie raised a warning finger, then another. He shook them in Sweetness’s face.

“Right.”

He nodded.

“Wherefore, Molesworth?” Cadmon asked. Euphrasie sat close beside him, and nodded sagely.

Sweetness opened her mouth, then caught herself. She counted syllables on her fingers, grimaced.

“Folk.”

“First, second or third generation?”

“Third,” Sweetness said confidently. Cadmon and Euphrasie inclined their heads together. They seemed to speak, though Sweetness heard no words in the cool cool cool of the evening.

“So, what do you flee?”

“Ring.” Sweetness twisted an imaginary third-finger-left-hand-gold-band. “But…”

Euphrasie furiously finger-wagged her.

“Clearly, this thing you seek in Molesworth is not a nuptial reconciliation,” Cadmon mused. Euphrasie whispered in his partner’s ear. Cadmon nodded. “It’s a grandparent, in my experience the most trustworthy of family members. So, not a reconciliation, but an alliance. You seek something together, do you not?”

“Twin,” Sweetness said. She mimed her second self, the quick knife of division. Cadmon and Euphrasie looked very slowly at each other.

“You need the assistance of your grandparent to seek the sundered self?”

Sweetness nodded, then added, “Ghost.” Without realising, she was caught up in the artists’ ludicrous after-dinner sport. Her tongue was bound; she could no more iterate two words, or more than one syllable, than she could have recited all Five Hundred Five-Hundred-Letter Tallabasserite names of God.

“This—half sister?—is dead ? Is this some manner of seance, some necromancy or other?” Cadmon asked, his little spectacles catching spook-fire in their round lenses.

“Free.”

“Someone has stolen the ghost of your dead twin sister?”

“Yes.”

“Damnation! That was a rhetorical question. They don’t count.”

Sweetness held up her two hands, where she had been counting off the quota of questions with finger and thumbs, to show beyond any argument that in her game, rhetoric counted. Cadmon took a breath and tried again.

“Given that ours is a low-scale mercantile culture and folk will sell anything to anyone, it’s still valid to ask, why would anyone want to steal a ghost?”

Again Sweetness nodded. “Saint.” She pointed to where the brightest lights of the moonring clung to the horizon, drew her finger in an all-creating arc across the sky. When she looked back, both Cadmon and Euphrasie’s mouths were open.

“You mean to tell us that the ghost of your twin sister is not in fact your twin sister, but an angel? A saint?”

“ The ,” Sweetness said emphatically. Their mouths were two tunnels through to deep night now. Their last question was inevitable. So, by a hundred tiny cues, clues and flutings of the desert wind that had incrementally impinged on Sweetness’s senses, was her answer.

“You are telling us that St. Catherine of Tharsis, masquerading as your natally-deceased twin sister, has been ghost-napped, and that you and your grandparent are on a quest to get her back,” Cadmon said. Not a question. For the first time, Sweetness heard in his voice a tremor of not cool . “But who would do a thing like that?”

“Him!” Sweetness yelled, pointing straight up as the dark fringe of the flying cathedral swept across the first glimmerings of the moonring, occulting them. Sworn enemy he might be; dumper of nubile girls into deadly deserts he most certainly was; Vastator, Godmörder and Destroyer of Worlds he aspired to become; but one thing she had to give this Devastation Harx. He had great timing.

Whispers in the wind had warned her. Her traingirl’s sense for large moving objects under the close horizon had hinted. She had caught glimpses in the ebbing red at the edge of the world, something the size of a fallen moon, belly tabby-striped with cloud bands. The fine hair in her ears had caught a whisper of gears and big-bladed fans. The laws of probability had ruled in it being what her sense suspected: he’d want to hover around, survey the results of his skeet-shooting. So the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family putting the full stop on her ten questions was no big surprise. Cadmon and Euphrasie’s reactions were as the great shadow fell over them. In an instant they were on their feet, Cadmon shaking a fist at the slowly drifting constellations of warning lights.

“Harx! Only you, man! Only you! Still we are trapped in this same gyre! No more, I say! Probability has brought us together again. This time, we will have it out!”

“Even so, Cadmon, even so!” Euphrasie chorused.

“You know this guy?” Sweetness asked, incredulous.

“Once upon a time, there were three little anarchist artists went to the Collegium of Belles Lettres ,” Euphrasie began.

“Euphrasie! To the boards! The boards!” With a good ten-metres-from-the-edge-of-the-box, Cadmon kicked sand over the fire, extinguishing it immediately. In the same movement, he scooped up his equipage and uprooted the gravboard. It skittered away from him on nervy magnetogravitic fingers. Cadmon reeled it in by the tether, raised sail and skipped aboard as the skimmer picked up speed.

“One thought: art is fine and anarchism is dandy, but to make a million, invent a religion,” Euphrasie tossed to Sweetness as he stuffed shut his pack and jammed his sail in its binnacle.

“This is a disagreement about art?” Sweetness said, ignored in the frenzy of mad activity as lights and vanes and little windows passed slowly over her head.

“He betrayed every principle he ever evinced for mail-order lucre and young ass,” Euphrasie declared.

“If only every war were fought for reasons as noble as art,” Cadmon said, reining his fretting board in like a war-palfrey. “And, if I played our game correctly, then this vile man is a positive menace to reality. Anarchists we may be, but we are not nihilists. Now, even as I debate these issues with you, we lose initiative and tempo. We will return for you, never fear. Now, we must to honourable battle. Stand back: this is not your fight.”

“Yes it is!” Sweetness yelled. “It’s my goddam sister in there!”

“Prime your charges, Euphrasie!” Cadmon commanded, bringing his board round in a sail-cracking luff. Euphrasie loaded his vest of pockets with sticks of explosive, tossed some to Cadmon who caught them nimbly, let loose the sail and took the gravboard up in one heart-thrilling, vertiginous swoop toward the ponderous roof of lights. Euphrasie made a running mount on his board and followed his buddy up up and away.

“Don’t you leave me, you…you…uphill gardeners, you dryland rowers, you, you brown dirt cowboys!” Sweetness shouted at the bright triangles of sailcloth dwindling into the twilit baroque underbelly of the flying cathedral. She cupped her hands. “Stay under him! He’s got partacs, and he’s not afraid to use them! Get above him and he’ll shoot you out of the sky!”

Already she was emerging from the penumbra of the blimp church.

Sweetness slip-scrambled up a dune face, threw herself along the knife-edged, soft ridges, seeking higher ground. Gnats against a buffalo they might be, but Devastation Harx was aware of these bright little mosquitos and was marshalling defences. As Sweetness watched, gun-ports irised open, the multibarrelled muzzles of rotary cannon slid into position and locked.

“Oh my God, look out, look out!” Sweetness shouted, fingers clenched in her hair in helpless frustration as the air beneath the dirigible became a cage woven from white tracer. But the two gaudy triangles of the anarchist gravboards slipped through them as if they were so much confetti, a dodge here, a veer there, a sharp tack to port, a terrifying death dive there to pull out centimetres short of being shredded by eleven hundred rounds a minute into a steeply banked turn.