Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Up there, look!” Sweetness shouted, pointing. Meadowbank Trumbden looked up, and the figures leaped. Twelve of them, changing colour as they fell feet first, black to white to translucent glass, falling slower than gravity should allow. Sweetness’s fillings throbbed in her molars: impeller fields, as well as light-scatter toadsuits.

“Run!” Meadowbank Trumbden yelled. “It’s the furniture folk!” The Seven-Ups Girl Nation scattered. Too slow. The hunters pulled big black pieces from their shoulder holsters and took aim. Expecting massacre, Sweetness ducked. Glue-guns, net-chuckers, neural bolloxers: state-of-art non-lethal weaponry immobilised, trawled, dazed and confused the hairdressers. Three comtechs ran to assist their foreman as he wrestled with a kicking, blaspheming Meadowbank. The hunters touched lightly down, moved to secure their prisoners and round up what few had escaped.

Sweetness leaped up but a wave of persons in black surged over the gunwale, seized the edge of her mattress and, with a swift tug, turned it over and wrapped her up in it before she could utter one trainfolk curse. For the second time that day, everything went black.

Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely held her monthly furniture auctions on the thousandth-level balcony of her pier-top manor. Though hers was a refined and specialised interest, and the higher up the pier the more refined and specialised the interests came, they were attended by many outside her hobby group for the catering was excellent, the wine list superb, despite being decanted at altitude, and the chitter-chatter-chat unexcelled. The lots were arranged in order of disposal along the skyward side of the vertiginous ledge, where the afternoon light would show them off to their best advantage. Acquisitive parties inspected the pieces, assessed their size and durability. For those who were seeking matched sets or to complete a tableau, some had already been suited and positioned.

All morning the spider-machine had negotiated cautious passage along the jungle of roof-tree branches, daring and vertiginous scurries from sucker-pad feet across the intervening spans of bare roof glass. In her barred cage, hanging with the other captured Seven-Upers from the belly of the transporter like mites, Sweetness had watched the track of the sun arc across the transparent ceiling. For the first time, she noticed the scratches and scorings and scars in the glass. The sun told her that at least she was heading in the right direction, Harx-ward. Otherwise, her lot seemed dire indeed. Many child-takers hunted the glass plains, but the hirelings of the very rich and very specialist and very bored who used humans for furniture were especially feared.

“They’ve got these suits,” Meadowbank Trumbden whispered in the next cage, quiet, watching, for the child-takers enforced their disciplines with cattle prods. “Can’t see, can’t hear, can’t talk. I heard they even feed you and take away all your crap stuff. Once you got them on, they don’t come off. And they like, move you, and then they lock and you can’t move either.”

Another trip into black, Sweetness thought. Only this one you don’t come out of. She tried to tell herself that this was all part of adventure and that stories didn’t end with the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine as a tea table. She was still trying to convince herself of this as the roof-crawler descended the main spur toward the hundred slim spires of Demesne Urtching-Sembely, its burden of flesh swaying beneath it like heavy dugs.

Now with her hands lashed behind her with cable grip, Sweetness stood last in line—but not in desirability, she told herself; even human furniture auctions leave best to last—on the balcony sweating in the afternoon torpor close under Worldroof. Next to her, Urtching-Sembely hirelings cut Meadowbank Trumbden out of her plastic rags while a third forced her into the form-kissing black suit. Prie, Scabies and the crewgirl who had given Sweetness sweet water had already been knocked down as a matched table set, forced down into a kneel, then leaned backward by the nano-motors seeded through the clinging fabric until their wrists were locked to their ankles. The buyer, a stalky, angular man in a brocade coat and slightly unfashionable footwear, spent considerable time measuring the angles and making sure the breasts were large enough to support the great glass circle at which he proposed to entertain like-minded guests. After much measuring and fine control with the suit motors, he seemed satisfied.

The enforcers finally wrestled the hood over Meadowbank’s head, tucked in stray wisps of urchin cut, made sure the gag and earplugs were seated right and sealed it up. The auction attendants stepped back. Meadowbank struggled a moment, then the suit locked, immobilising her.

“So, what’s collectable with you?” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely asked the purchaser, a man of such astonishing nondescriptness that he had to own some secret and unpleasant vice otherwise he would have faded out of the world completely.

“Lamps,” the buyer said. “Flambeaux bearers. I’m going through a household illumination phase at the moment.”

“How delightful!” Ladonna Urtching-Sembely clapped her hands in pleasant anticipation. She was an unjustifiably beautiful woman, tall, elegant, with brown brown eyes and brown brown hair and the loveliest hands. She was dressed in a floor-skimming formal robe of lace and white brocade, corseted to enhance her generous embonpoint . It was all so unfair, Sweetness thought. No Don Urtching-Sembely. Probably eaten him, or got him as a chair for special occasions, in a very private room. The gracious Ladonna took a control bulb from her wrist purse. Her manicured fingers touched studs. Meadowbank’s legs were drawn together to attention; against her will, her arms raised vertically over her head. The suit locked. One of the buyer’s servants brought a self-powering electric flambeau and set it into the upraised, rigid hands. A step back, and the plastic flame glowed white.

“Perfect,” the astonishingly nondescript man said.

“I’ll have it delivered today,” the Ladonna said and one of her hunters slapped a red sale circle on the black figure’s small right breast. “Now, on to our last item today, lot twelve. An older piece, more solidly constructed, but still capable of a lifetime of service.”

“Meaty,” commented an old woman with a white edible dog under her arm. A tall, epicene man in breeches and knee boots looked more appraisingly through a quizzing glass.

“Possibilities. A chandelier, I think. Yes.” He tapped lorgnettes against his palm thoughtfully. “This one would look fine hanging from my ceiling.”

“May I take that as a bid?” purred the Ladonna.

“You may. Three thousand.”

“Done, sir.”

The gentleman bowed, the Ladonna nodded to her servitors. Two closed on Sweetness with knives to cut her out of her clothes, the third brought the black suit.

It can’t end like this.

Oh can’t it?

And that was it decided. If all this wasn’t story, it would end here with her spending several decades swinging from a ceiling with candles in her hands and feet. If it was, then the rules of narrative governed everything that happened. Therefore, this was the Point of Worst Personal Threat, when all the Feisty and Resourceful (But Cute With It) Heroine’s efforts to attain her Dramatic Goal hang by a thread, and Something Big Happens that rolls it over into the End Game. Here narrative creatures like Coincidence, Chance and Serendipity were all the FR(BCWI) Heroine could trust to save her.

The black furniture suit wove in front of her, drawing her gaze in like a collapsed star. Now.

“I’ll give you meaty!” she yelled and planted the toe of her left boot into the suit bearer’s testicles. She heard things crunch. The man let out a near-hypersonic shriek. His eyes rolled up in his head. He went down like a felled redwood. In the moment’s confusion, Sweetness danced out from under the knife-men’s blades. Hands bound, she plunged toward the edge of the balcony.