Ian McDonald - Ares Express

She washed up against Cadmon. He lay flat, unmoving, wet beyond any decent notion of wetness in an arid desert. From his flatness, Sweetness guessed he was very broken inside.

“Oh man…”

Broken, maybe dead.

An eye opened.

“Get the hell out of here, girl!” Cadmon bellowed with all the strength of his lungs.

“You’re all right!”

“No, I am not all right. I’m bloody dying, is what I am. At least I’ll have some flowers around me. And you’ll be sharing them with me unless you take the only traffic out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ladder, girl! The ladder!”

He nodded with his chin. Sweetness followed the tilt of the day-old stubble up the slumped dune face to where the slowly rolling wheel of the stricken airship was dipping a paltry rope access ladder toward the ground.

“But…”

“Oh, spare me the indignity of a death scene. Just go.”

The ladder sagged to the ground, lowering itself rung by rung like a Belladonna veil dancer enticing a john.

“Why?”

“What? You’re still here?”

Two rungs, three rungs, four rungs. Five.

“Why do you hate him so much? I mean, I know why I do, he’s got my sister, except she’s not really my sister, but I treat her like she’s my sister, but what’ve you got against him? I mean, just because you fall out at art school, is that a reason to try and blow him out of the sky?”

Eight rungs, nine rungs. Very soon, the wheel would swing the other way. And the ballast shift was working. Very slowly, the dirigible was righting itself. The fans were picking up speed.

“Oh, for goodness sake. He is my brother.”

“This,” Sweetness said, “is a bit mad.”

“Cadmon Laventry Ophicleide Harx, dying before your very eyes, madam. Everyone has someone they have to kill, usually part of the family circle. Now go!”

The ladder was wheeling away from her, lifting up one rung, two rungs, three rungs, tantalising her. Still Sweetness hesitated.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Cadmon croaked. “Why can’t you just let it go as one of those things you’ll never understand? It’s the little mysteries that make life interesting. Leave me! Git!”

She got, but with one backward glance. The deep-buried, swift-sprouting desert flowers, woken by unseasonal rains, had already surrounded Cadmon in a nimbus of green. Wreath indeed. Hers also, if she didn’t get that dangling piece of rope. She remembered all those times she had had to sprint for the train, the last-second leap on to the bottom rung. No third whistle here.

“Aaah!” she yelled as she struggled over the wet, clogging sand toward the taunting ladder. Mother’a’grace, it was going to be close. One rung, no rungs. She leaped at the ladder as it lifted above her head, caught the bottom bar with one hand. She swung, kicking her legs, grimacing with strain as Devastation Harx’s cathedral gained altitude. A second hand on the ladder. A first hand up a level. Another, then, agonisingly, another. Rung by rung, Sweetness Asiim Engineer hauled herself up as the wounded airship turned ponderously on its fans and took her away into the magic hour.

Panic on the streets of Molesworth.

All night the rival political gangs, incensed by what they respectively interpreted as humiliation or jubilation, chased each other through the stone boulevards, party banners flying, flinging partisan abuse and bottles, bombarding each other with ripped-up paving setts and cafe chairs. Windows were smashed, those merchants incautious enough, or just too cheap, not to have bought security shutters were gleefully looted. Fires burned, Molotov cocktails showered down from balconies. Blouses and chemises set to dry now blazed merrily, lowest festoons catching from the fires in the streets and igniting those above. Burning tramcars, driverless but not powerless, careered along their tracks; vans and delivery drays were commandeered and swivelled into hasty barricades into and over which the respective party colours were set. Civic guards were mobilised, militias summoned from their beds and hastily armed. Military units at Gesserem and Shrelby were put on full alert; deep in their titanium-lined caverns under Chryse’s laval shield, robot divisions opened their beady red eyes from eight hundred years of cybernetic slumber and lifted their heads. This was a big riot. Molesworthians took their politics seriously.

A combination of water cannon and wide-spectrum force-fields cleared most of the rioters and their barricades from the streets. Here and there, short shield squads baton-charged the mobs and fell enthusiastically to hand-to-hand. By morning most of the fires had been extinguished or had burned themselves out; the street was the province of ashes, charred shells of trams and trucks, those sweeping up broken glass and the occasional carload of young turks driving at mad speed along the splintered boulevards whooping and hooting and waving party flags from their windows and sunroofs.

Molesworth was a wreck, but the immediate crisis was over. The robot legions lowered their heads and closed their eyes.

In Rembrandt Platz the plane trees had all burned down but the early morning news vendors were sweeping away the broken glass and cinders and setting up their booths. Agency three-wheelers came scooting through the wreckage; newsboys in folded paper tricorns sporting the morning’s headline sent bundles of daily news bounding across the debris before whizzing on to their next delivery. The gossip must get through.

Early starters picked their way cautiously past hissing, sparking tram cables brought down in the night, marvelling at the completeness of the destruction. Only one set of windows had escaped the crystal night, and those belonged to Torsten Toskvig’s Salon Du Thé, the most venerable in Molesworth. The proprietor attributed this reputation to the excellence of his mint, picked by hand with the dew fresh on it from the family fields at Tullaswaygo, and he held that it was this, and this alone, that had protected his tea-house from the mob when Cossivo Beldene fell.

Here, on this morning, five people sat, taking their morning tea and reading the early editions. They were, left to right; a stocky young woman with spiky hair; a tall, wire-thin man with skin so black it swallowed light; a pale, languorous girl with the air of studied artiness and jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it; an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville and a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth. Skerry, Bladnoch, Mishcondereya, Seskinore and Weill. Together they called themselves United Artists. Same order as above, their arts were circus skills, observational comedy, performance artist in interactive micro-drama, dundered-in stand-up and anarchist. Their trick with the cake and the specially written song, hastened to the Glenn Miller Orchestra by express courier, had precipitated all the destruction which lay around their feet as they sipped their mint teas in the tea garden. Exactly as planned. This was no stunt. This was a precise act of political sabotage. These five people were secret agents, under commission from the Synod of Anarchs of Wisdom to seek out threats to their genial non-government and humiliate it with massive practical jokes.

Accrington LeCerf, phoney faith healer and abstracter of wealth from pensioners, had received his comeuppance when a curtain at one of his healing meetings had dropped, revealing the supposedly “healed” sitting backstage smoking and chatting, actors one and all. A mob of incensed old ladies had beaten him severely with his own collection bowl. He had been hospitalised for three months. United Artists arranged for that curtain to drop.