Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Mishcondereya was firmamentally convinced of four things.

That she was an utter genius.

That she was a sex goddess.

That everyone either wanted to be like her or was helplessly in love with her.

That therefore everyone was jealous of her.

The polythene elevator took Mishcondereya up from the R&D dungeon through tiers of holy battle. She sneered at the photonic ghosts. She was in no awe of the angelic forces swooping and trumpeting outside. Vanity had always been the Defiant One’s strongest weapon.

How did they ever imagine this would convince Devastation Harx? A man who founds his own church has an intimate knowledge of the phoney. He’d bust his nuts laughing, if he’d hadn’t already bust them in some kind of ritual-humiliation holy wooden vice thing. Or was that some other mail-order outfit? Research had never been Mishcondereya’s trump suit.

Not for the first time she thought about handing in her resignation. Take it, I quit, I walk, I’m up and out, comperes, do the memory-wipe thing, it’s not as if I’d be losing much, or even taking much with me. Surprise! Planetary security run by a pack of jokers.

No. Not this time. There was yet pleasure to be savoured from saving their collective asses once again.

The device was still chill from the assembler vat; she tossed it from palm to palm. Cold that burns. Seskinore— Fat Fart , her private name for him—would be up there blubbering and mincing and farting like an old Show Boat duchess and of course it would all be heading floorward like a Belladonna dowager’s butt and being act-ors (she always consciously spaced the syllables) they reckoned that if they looked deep enough inside their souls for Honesty in Comedy or stood in a circle and workshopped it out like sweating off a really bad wodka hangover or clenched and unclenched their fists and screwed up enough Team Force it would all come right just like that. Of course it wouldn’t. Never would, not on its own. She’d told them that, lodged her token formal complaint, but they just kept stubbornly heading on with the wrong thing while the Armageddon clock ticked down to zero. No surprise they hadn’t listened; she wasn’t an act-or and therefore understood nothing of the creative process and the agonies of performance. Their loss. It didn’t insult her any more. The ignorant can’t insult you. So Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana did what she always did, excused herself from their group huddle and primal yodelling and took her own idea off to make it into something.

Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana was proud that she’d been expelled from the only other team that had recruited her—St. Xaviou’s Community College Ladies’ touch-rugger—because she’d been more interested in spectator reaction to her tight’n’shiny shorts and over-the-knee socks than playing defensive wing. Even then she had not been ashamed to own that she was not a team player.

The trogs in nanofacturing were creepy and a little smelly and she didn’t doubt that every man—and woman—jack of them fancied the teats off her, but at least they had respect for a good idea. Struell Llewyn, trog King, with too many pairs of glasses slung around his neck (can’t he afford to get the oculars lasered or what?) had peered at the sketch, nodded at her general description of the effects she wanted (at least they didn’t expect her to be a pharmacist) and called a conclave of nano and pharmaceutical advisers. No group hugs. No free-form improvisation. No word-associational brainstorming. Nothing that involved throwing soft balls to each other, abdominal breathing or striking Damantine Discipline thranas . Quiet talk, a bit of scribbling on thinkpads and after twenty minutes, the frog King had pushed up his reading lenses and declared, “No problem for the welders.”

“When can I have it?”

“Forty minutes.”

And it had been, as it always was.

“Careful, now,” the trog King had advised as Mishcondereya juggled the frosted fluttering little thing up to her eye-level. “The trigger mechanism’s delicate.” Compound globules of nano-carbon met jellied spheres of protein. Gossamer wings whirred micro-breezes chilled with the memory of 3K nanoassembler chambers in her face. She peered into the churning greenness in its glass belly.

“Nice one.”

As ever, he had given that lopsided bow/smirk that was all the thanks he would acknowledge. The pride of the artisan classes. When she was well gone, that was when he would gather the trog nation in their canteen and tell them what a great job they had done. Our humble bit in Saving the World! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! Good people, if limited. In her many idle moments Mishcondereya wondered just with what they filled their frequent downtimes, what—who—they fantasised about when they went back to their clean-living little pottery villages.

As the plastic elevator passed through the fish-scale train of Ananuturanta Deva, Lord of the Changing Ways, she ignored Struell Llewyn’s admonition and tossed the little nano-bug high to catch it on the flat of her palm. And in that instant, without warning, she was embedded in stone. Darkness, pressure, absolute, not even space for a scream. Her lungs were rigid with solid rock. And then she was back in air and light and movement and the little flibbertigibbet floated down into her hand but she knew, for an instant, she had been dead, buried kilometres deep in the volcanic core of China Mountain in an alternative world where different laws of volcanology had refused to allow this chamber to form. She staggered against the flimsy side of the bubble car, almost dropped the frail flitter. She caught herself: dignity, always dignity. The Fat Fart was right in that one. But every one of her atoms remembered that they had been penetrated by cold hard gneiss.

They were looking concerned—and rightly—as she strode toward them across the rehearsal space. Once again, the spooks and spiritual entities were dissolving back into their constituent clouds with looks on their faces that might be read as worry, had they been anything more tangible than holographic dream-projections.

“Did you?” Fat Fart.

“Of course I did. Everybody did.”

“We have to go, now.” Leotard Girl.

So, why are you looking at me? Because it’s up to Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana to save your tight little butts again.

“No problem for the welders,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said and blew the little fritillary off her open hand into Weill’s face. Pig-turd Boy reeled back, lashed at the buzzy thing and it popped in front of his eyes into an expanding cloud of green gas. In shock, he took a deep breath.

His eyes glazed over.

“Woh,” he said. “Wohhhhhh.” A shit-eating grin spread across his peasant face. Realisation, both neurochemical as the hallucinogens kicked in and, with the shreds they left of his intelligence, intellectual. “I mean, really, woh.”

“Yah,” Mishcondereya Benninger Eksendrarana said lazily. “He’ll believe it now.”

The hat-pin snapped with a loud tink. The broken spike rolled across the platform, under the guard chains and over the edge. It speared through a cloud-hologram of the Lorarch ROHEL shrieking between the stalactites and stalagmites of the Comedy Cavern, barbed swords in all four hands. The big pin clinked audibly off some outcrop or other.

“Cock piss bugger bum balls,” Grandmother Taal swore. She should have gone straight for the lock-pick. Oh no, go for the easy option rather than invest ten minutes trying to remember where you left the wretched thing. Ten minutes squandered. That foo-feraw out there would only exercise their attentions so long. It was, of course, ludicrous. Even they could see that, and when the cloud-projector went off, she was bare bum naked up here on the platform.