Ian McDonald - Ares Express

The fact that Sweetness had come from the sky made her an object of some distinction. The roof-people connected her advent with the events of the previous night, which had been hotly, and fearfully, debated, and theories formulated. A night of a thousand shooting stars, of swords in heaven; battles in the moonring, concepts for which the roof-wonders had no language. Sweetness was not sure she had any herself. Then with dawn word of the meteor strike—an unheard of occurrence, a hole in the big floor!—had passed across the glass plain with the speed of the wind; now a girl, falling from a flying church.

“That’s why Townley claimed jurisdiction over you,” Meadowbank said, the Seven-Ups Girl Nation speeding west in three sprays of powdered glass and all the crew gathered around Sweetness’s bed. “Even Draelon wants to know; he’d’ve asked you, then got you to take all your clothes off.”

“What do you think it is?” Sweetness asked.

The Seven-up Girls looked to their President.

“I heard there’re other worlds out there, like this one.”

“There are, not too many like this one. There’s the one we came from…”

“No, not that one, that’s what Draelon thinks; he says there was this war of the worlds and that it got fought through hundreds and hundreds of different universes so we may not even be the one that started the war, but whatever, in our bit of the universes, we won and the ones back there, where we came from, they’ve never forgotten and certainly not forgiven. They’re going to have another go, and this time, they’re going to win.”

“There was a war like that,” Sweetness said, thinking, you sound so clever and it’s only days since you learned this yourself. “But it’s been over a long time. We’re at peace. So, what do you think it is?”

“I think it’s another world altogether, one way way out there, that mightn’t even have the same sun as us. Maybe the people don’t even look like us, maybe they look like collie dogs or bits of plastic or something you can’t even imagine, but they want our world. They’ve wanted it for a long time, like hundreds of years, and every so often they put a fleet together, like hundreds and hundreds of fighting machines and they send it to invade us, and we fight them off. That’s what those stars are up there, all the scraps and wrecks and junk from the battles. They’ve been doing it a long time, and you think they’d learn, but they know that we have to be lucky every time and they only have to be lucky once.”

“I’ve heard worse theories. Is that what you believe?”

“Maybe. Heard another story; the gate crew said it was on the wireless news this morning…”

“Gate crew?”

“The ones who open the hatch, you know? Your church went through? And close it again?”

“Merde’a’God!” Ribs and invalidity forgotten, Sweetness sat bolt upright. “Where are we!”

“About two kays west of Pier one six six six eight three seven. Up over Rhosymedre Canton.”

“It’s the wrong way. I have to get back there!”

“What is this?” President Meadowbank asked. Her electorate drew close around the bed, vote pool and state military.

“That stuff that happened last night, I’ll tell you exactly what’s happening. It’s a war between the angels. There are angels up there—machines like angels, millions of them, up in that ring of stars, and there’s a civil war going on because that guy in the cathedral, Devastation Harx, is taking control of them. And when they’re gone, you’re next.”

Meadowbank Trumbden stood with her arms folded and her face set. Her nation adopted the presidential posture.

“Now that is the dumbest story…” she said. “You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s true! He’s got hold of St. Catherine—she’s not really a saint at all…”

No point, Engineer girl. They don’t believe you. The truth of this world is too much for them. Reality is too unreal. Is there anyone out there knows what’s really going on, apart from you? And if Lost Girls won’t hold that truth who will? Right now, you are as far from achieving your goal as you are probably ever going to be in this story. But I fell from the flying cathedral! she wanted to say, again checked herself. Any and all words were wasted. Now, they tolerate you as a liar. Say a whisper more and they will hate you.

“Ahoy!”

The cry from the sole forward lookout was like the crack of a whip. Every head recoiled, then turned. The national skate-ship had separated from its companions in the flotilla—all such alliances in this environment were brief and serendipitous—and was fast approaching a communications spire, a black, baroque tangle of aerials, dishes and signal boosters protruding from the pristine glass like a single black hair on the face of a venerable dowager.

“Prepare to stop!” Meadowbank shouted and her skinny girls jumped to their posts. Dagger-boards were thrust down through the keel; hundreds of scavenged nail and construction bolt-teeth bit glass in a cascade of powder. Sails furled, helm brought the boat about, nose in to the hard dock. With a shriek and a shudder, Seven-Ups Girl Nation came to a rest. A hatch undogged in the spire, the communications men stepped out, blinking in the morning light. They looked old and big and dirty and bearlike with their shaggy hair and beards and crusty coveralls. The Seven-Ups formed a line on deck.

Sweetness watched the face-off warily, suspecting sordid sexual trading of that kind that is so ubiquitous in the less public and more hungry parts of the world.

“Ladies,” the leader of the radio men said, “have you any idea how long it’s been? We’ve been dying up here. Can you do us? Can you give us what we need?”

“It’ll cost.”

“The usual.”

“Plus ten. Extra mouth.”

The leader ran his hand across his mouth, shook his head.

“I’ve got to have a bit of trim. Okay, extra ten. Deal?”

“Deal.”

With a war-cry, the girls of Seven-Ups Nations pulled hard steel and brandished it over their heads. The brilliant light caught twin blades: scissors. As one, the cutting crew went over the side twirling their plastic haircapes, and set to work on the heads of the relieved workers. Over the next hour, they dispensed bowl-cuts, flat-tops, numbers six down to nought, page boys, duck’s arses, quiffs, back-combs, centre partings, side-partings left, side-partings right, shaved patterns names religious mottoes sports team logos on the backs of skulls. The scissors snip-snap-snipped, long greasy hair fell in bangs to the ground and blew away on the eternal winds. Then the capes were swirled away and the stray hair dusted from the nape of the neck, the scissors tucked away and the bay-rum frictioned into shorn scalps.

Throughout the mass hair-doing, Sweetness had noticed the leader of the communications men, now sporting a set of ear-length dreads, keep squinting at the upper levels of the telecom mast. A non-hairfarer, Sweetness could observe unobtrusively from her recliner, but in the jumble of technology it was impossible to tell what was kosher and what was not. Now, as Meadowbank laboured over making up the bill, Sweetness saw something move up there. Very slowly, very subtly, like large spiders creeping up on their prey, black objects were making their way down through the relays and microwave transmitters. Not machines, Sweetness suspected, though she could not assign any shape to them; they moved like living things. God the Panarchic alone knew what lived up here, up above the world so high, and what it liked to eat.

Meadowbank and the chief of communications were still haggling. Sweetness thought that he seemed to be delaying her. She looked up again. The objects had stopped moving. She scrutinised the gantry work; patterns appeared, images resolved into limbs, torsos, heads.