Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“When you’re done staring, you wouldn’t like to grab hold of this and haul yourself up?” He dropped her a length of line with two foot stirrups looped on the end. Sweetness, hands still bound, kicked her feet into the loops. Pharaoh threw two more loops around her body and slowly hauled her up to his level.

“Hold still,” he said, flicking a knife. Sweetness flinched, Pharaoh repeated the order. “I don’t want to cut the wrong thing.” His blade was true; a snick, the cable tie fluttered yellowly down to the fertile terraces below. Sweetness watched it, gravely, as the hanging ensemble pirouetted gently, a Foucault pendulum ballasted with two lives.

“Hold on tight now, I’m going to put a bit of a swing on this thing,” Pharaoh warned and shifted his weight. Sweetness wrapped her legs around his, buried her fists in his scabby brown leather jacket and combated the positive body odour and escalating motion sickness as the pendulum built up by marvelling how stories did what you expected, and then some more; that little extra neat twist. She could hear the wind rushing past her ears. Or—the defensive, pedantic incongruity of one hanging from a slim line over a five-kilometre drop—was it her ears rushing past the wind?

Soon, very soon, she thought, the shaking’s going to start.

“I should thank you, cause I kind of think you saved my life,” she whispered to Kid Pharaoh as they whooshed through ever-increasing arcs. His target seemed to be a clutch of heat vents and gas-exchange stacks tucked like parasitic moulds under the mushroom fan of the terrace tiers.

“Then we’re even now,” he said as they hurtled upward toward the impaling geometry of the Demesne’s service zone. He reached…He grabbed…He held. Pharaoh hauled himself and Sweetness up on to the spar. He tugged on the line and the smart-plastic snap-release shackle gave way. The sustaining rope fell, Pharaoh carefully coiled it in. Sweetness clung to the girder, suddenly very very cold.

The shaking started. Soon after it came the black thing.

After the incident with the Kaspidi Sisters that had cost him his Vagrant Entertainer’s licence (as good as a shroud to an Old Skool Funnyman like him) and a warning never ever ever to set foot across the border of Christadelphia in this life or any other, Seskinore knew he deserved eternal banishment to the dark and humourless land that is the lot of Old Comics Who Do it With Wrong-Side-of-Barely-Legal Girls. It was meet and right that he would never hear the band count in two , three , four and in to “East St. Louis Boogaloo”; never again cross those boards to the spot under the footlights where the applause sounded sweetest. They tore up his joke books. They ripped the petals from his lapel carnation. Even when the government had given him the only kind of job available to an old comic aside from soft-shoe shuffling on the Great Concourse of Belladonna Main, cap in hand, his rep had preceded him. He copped it nobly—dignity, always dignity—but sometimes he wished that these young slubberdegullions showed a little more respect for his professionalism. Yea, he had sinned, and mightily, but it had been a professional sin. And from what moral pinnacle did they regard him; the burned-out smart-ass stand-up; the arty-farty sensitive girl who wouldn’t know a funny line if it stuck it all the way up her right to her ovaries; the hand-standing fire-juggling dyke; the chicken-shit anarchist? Amateurs. Even Dearest Dimmy and Mr. Superb would have disdained them; bottom-rung acts they might have been, but at least they had been professional. They understood timing. They understood experience, and the knowledge of what works on an audience that only comes through dying the death a hundred, a thousand nights. They understood practice, practice, practice. They understood dignity. Always dignity. Disgraced he might be, but Seskinore had been professional unto the last. Seskinore could admit that he may never have been funny, but he had been professionally not funny.

“Enough, enough!” he shouted with just the right tone of camp exasperation. Bladnoch and Mishcondereya peeped sheepishly over the control panel of the dream machine. Skerry frowned at him upside down from a silver trapeze. Weill just scowled. “No no no no no!” He clapped his hands. “The Great Destaine would never have stood for this, never. Switch it off, go on, off. Right now.”

Bladnoch and Mishcondereya looked at each other, then Mishcondereya pouted and threw the power. The Ranks and Orders; the Rider on the Many Headed-Beast (each head that of a prominent politician, a satirical touch by Weill); the Circus of Heaven with its tightrope walkers balancing on superstrings, its jugglers cascading the planets of the solar system, its snarling, chained Tygers of Wrath and its high-prancing Horses of Instruction, its frilled, white-faced, terrifying Chaos Clowns; the down-sweeping Hammer and Sickle of God; all evaporated in an instant into the artificial clouds that had turned the Comedy Cave into a sweatlodge.

“What?” Skerry demanded, pulling herself upright and sliding off the trapeze on to the rehearsal platform. Seskinore half-averted his gaze from the gluteal zone of her cheek-cleaving green leotard.

“The timing’s up the left. Between the Grand Parade of the High and Lordly Ones and the Opening of the Cornucopia of All Fruits, you’re wide open for twenty, twenty-five seconds. And the coordination, God’s bones, woman!” This to Mishcondereya. “The bloody things are running through each other! It’s supposed to be the Ancient of Days thundering down in righteous wrath, not a charabanc of bloody village spooks!”

“It’s a rushed job,” Mishcondereya pleaded.

“It’s always a rushed job,” Seskinore said. “Now, we try it again. From the top. And this time, we will try to remember that the fate of the world is riding on us acting like professionals and not some half-arsed troupe of bloody sophomore-year drama students. First positions! Projector ready?”

Mishcondereya pouted again and reset the power buffers.

“Ready,” she said sullenly.

“Right boys and girl, from the top, and this time, let’s try and get it bloody right, shall we? Dear God; amateurs!”

Clouds swirled, found shifting, transitory forms in the tropical heat. Skerry towelled dry and tripped back to her position on the silver trapeze. As the hoists lifted her, apocalypse unfolded as a backdrop. Seskinore watched the little woman move into position and recalled what it was about her tight little ass that stirred such provocation in him. Nothing physiological—few women, or gentlemen for that matter, raised the Jolly Roger these sad days. Nor her personality, such as it was, narrow and deep-rooted in her own physicality. It was that he could order and stamp and throw funks and rehearse rehearse rehearse until they dropped, but come the day and the hour, it would be her out there on the high trapeze, and him back here, fretting over the monitors. Her; all of them. Never him. That was the price of his sensitive crimes with the Kaspidi Sisters. But once, by the gods of the backstage…When better to pick up the cane, tilt the hat, paint rouge circles on the death-white cheeks and stride boldly into the glare of the soda-light with the band striking up your tune behind you, than the end of the world?

The niggle with talent, Mishcondereya had always understood, was that it was blind to true genius. She had no doubt that her fellow artistes were indeed skilled at their crafts—in Bladnoch’s case, a genuine forte —but all of them were so mired in the admiration of their own abilities that they could not recognise the only pukkah prodigy in the gang: Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana. The lot of her privileged life. Always fated to be a lower bloom among the early flowerings of her four older sisters; the painter, the writer, the harpist and the sen-so-rama sculptress. The performance artist? Just another genius. Children brought up in the airy, light-drenched Grand Valley pueblo of Etzwane Eksendrarana and Afton Benninger (he a Living Treasure crafter of ritual mint-tea-infusers, she the lauded architect of India’s Chursky Prospekt and the sheer crystal dome of Wisdom’s new Grand Trunk Terminus) could not fail to develop into world-wide movers and shapers, but even the most indulgent of parents’ attention starts to thin with the fourth gifted child. The fifth? A blossom that blooms unseen, wasting its perfume on the desert air. The o’erlooked rose. The unregarded bud. Mishcondereya often thought of herself (and she thought of herself very often) in terms of a flower, growing wild, nobody’s child. Unregarded among her colleagues as she had been among her sisters. But it is the unregarded rose that is the sweetest, the pebble half-buried in the dune face on which you stub your toe and give no more than a glance that is the raw diamond.