Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“No!” roared the Ladonna Cloris Grace Avaunt Urtching-Sembely.

Five kilometres of Canton Semb late afternoon gaped as Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th went over the rail head first toward the tailored vine terraces one thousand storeys below.

“ It will be the End of the World as We Know It,” Weill pronounced with a grin that showed too many of his evil teeth.

There were seconds of silence in the vast cavern under the primeval ROTECH redoubt of China Mountain for the words to reach their proper depth and explode, like anti-submarine charges. Skerry was the first to react.

“Impossible. Can’t do it.”

Scenting an opportunity to snide Weill, Mishcondereya drew herself up to her full height, looked down her aristocratic snub nose and declared, “Lies. It’s your last best hope for a bit of trim. The sky’s falling, here come the saints, hows about it, bay-bee? Don’t mind the smell, it’s going to get a lot worse than this.”

Seskinore’s chest rose and fell beneath the two-buttons-too-tight jacket of his taper-legged suit.

“I must say, if that’s the best you can offer us.”

“It has merit, you know,” Bladnoch said from his aluminium chair which, as usual in strategy meetings, he tipped back alarmingly close to the sheer steel drop over the side of the balcony. “It’s what Mr. Harx is expecting. So give him what he wants, in Cash. He wants angel legions, he wants saints coming out of the sky like rain, he wants the clouds to open and God the Panarchic to ride out at the head of the entire Circus of Heaven, he wants it to rain blood and toads, he wants shitstorms and brimstone, he can have it, courtesy of United Artists. It’s a hell of a decoy.”

Weill held his hands up and applauded.

“Am I the only one of you jokers with any vision?”

Seskinore stroked his chin where once, when King of the Circuit, he had sported a small distinguished silver goatee, like a metallic sheep’s tongue.

“It has a certain…theatrical…merit. Yes, I can say, it would be our crowning achievement. I’d be proud to put that on my curriculum vitae .”

“The End of the World,” Mishcondereya said, arms folded, now with a small see-you sneer that had long ago failed to provoke anything more in Weill than a vague some-time-when-I’ve-absolutely-nothing-better-to-do-I-wouldn’t-mind-seeing- you -without-your-clothes-on glow.

Weill nodded enthusiastically.

“Go for the big one.”

“You’re suggesting that United Artists fakes an Armageddon?” Skerry said incredulously.

“Either we do it, or he does it for us. Only his ain’t fake.”

“Our friend has a good point,” Bladnoch said. “But I think Skerry remains to be convinced, and she will be the one going in under all this divine comedy. Skerry?”

“I don’t know.” She turned her back on her comrade jesters, put one grip-soled boot up on the railing, looked out over the echoing chambers of the Comedy Cave. “Keep it simple. That’s always been how we’ve done it. Comedy is simple. I’d trust it more if it were less complicated, less risky, less…outrageous.”

“All these years, and now she wants a safety net,” Weill said. Skerry rounded on him.

“You can say that, dirt-bird, the day you do this.” With which the tight little woman flipped into a single handstand on the top rail, axled one hundred and eighty degrees on to her free arm and in this way hand-walked thirty steps along the edge of the drop before dismounting in a double somersault close enough to Weill for him to flinch. She stared up at him, staring him down. Little love lost between the United Artists. Though many of the best double acts are born from mutual detestation, the five practical jokers knew that, in comedy as in everything else, the Synod could only afford second-best. The greats were out there on the circuit, wowing them in Belladonna’s Chitter-chatter-chat Club, topping the Top of the Town in Llangonedd, hovercrafted between the pleasure barges that sailed the Syrtic Sea. Venues where you handed the band leader your own theme music and he would bow and wink and raise the baton. Gigs where the very first word of a catch-phrase could bring a house down. Clubs where people positively welcomed the old jokes; savouring the coming punchline with the pre-orgasmic surge of semen rising through the pipes.

Skerry and Weill broke. The little woman went glowering back to the rail to stare bluely out over the cluttered expanses of the Comedy Cavern. Two billion years ago the stupendous volcanoes that built this hemisphere had emptied their sacks and died, leaving mammoth lava chambers to cool and crack under the hardening lava shields. Delving under China Mountain to build redoubts strong enough to withstand the comet bombardment by which ROTECH imported most of the world’s air and water, deep drill teams had broken through the cap rock into a hall of obsidian mirrors. Helidrones, navigating like plastic bats by squeaks of sonar, had mapped the chaotic interior of the two-kilometre long bubble: “Grand Valley, with another one upside down on top of it,” was how one of the areologists described it. Suspended between the roof-pillars in stress-webs like spiders in a rainstorm, ROTECH Hydro-Cycle Control headquarters had jiggled to the multiple comet impacts, but not a cup was cracked. For a time, after the humans and machines emerged and the pillars started to go up along Grand Valley, the China Mountain Bubble became a hatchery for the millions of orphs who tunnelled out of their birth cells up through the rock and into the regolith, bellies full of bacteria, spinning stone into soil. As industrial parks decay when the factories move out, so the China Mountain Bubble had fallen to dereliction as ROTECH spread its precision bioformed villages and microcities down the slopes of its capital mountain. And, as low-rent artists and performers move into those decayed factories and make them workshops and studios, so United Artists had descended by a glass elevator unused for three hundred years to go, collectively, wow as the floodlights clanged on. Now the pristine, volcanic glass spears were hung with the trophies and banners of past routines, like piked heads: the inflatable, dirigible demons from the JJT scam; the enormous feathered headdresses and outrageous gauze and sequin plumages of Paulus Twining’s involuntary outing carnival; the one thousandth-scale fake Sailship from the Gartan Roscoe Affair (even one-to-one-thousand, it filled an entire subcavern like a cancer an alveolus in a hashisheen’s lung).

Skerry always found grit and assurance in the hanging testimonials. The Synod had chosen the leader cannily: riven by doubts and a nagging sense of unbelonging. She was circus skills, the action girl, the one dangling from the silver trapeze. She wasn’t supposed to be funny, but a day never passed that she did not wish she had the power to make mirth. She longed to conceive giant pratfalls, send cosmic springy snakes bounding out of jack-in-the-boxes, place whoopee cushions beneath the posterior of the Panarch. She wished she had a sense of humour. For she had none. There was no gene for it in her reserved, Ocyrian gentry stock. They glumly masqueraded a tribal inferiority complex as modesty and trusted that would steer them through a messy, spontaneous and impolite world. From the moment the doors of Ghalgorm Manor had closed behind her as she set off for the Royal Circus of the Sun on its shaved-off Grand Valley mesa, she knew she had irrevocably offended the family doctrine of comfortable mediocrity. Four years and a good, steady civil service job under her, she had largely settled herself to snooty exile, but when she looked out at those gently waving banners, those grinning demon heads, she wanted to call out to that crenellated termite-heap in the flat fields of Ocyrus, “Hey, Mum! Look at me! I brought down the government!”