Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Before him, Grand Valley; its gently greened hills, its rangelands and ranches, ancient and noble haciendas folded at their hearts; the woodlands and lakes of the Pay Parks; the sister pillars rising at regular geometrical intervals: true primeval world-trees. Here Grand Valley was at its widest; even through a coin-operated opticon, Pharaoh could not see the valley walls to north and south. The hexagon-patterned glass of Worldroof arched over all, curving down to the visual horizon in every direction. Pharaoh looked down. Beneath him the boroughs and manufacturing districts of Pier 11738 swept down to the earth. They went much further than he had imagined. He trained his opticon on the place where the naked carbon of a root buttress entered the ground. Turf and bedrock were heaved up around it, like plucked skin, or a scar. Pharaoh stroked his lost ear, the ear that was guiding him upward, and turned around to look up at his final destination. It seemed to lean over him like a bullying deity, or a new Concourse and Franchise Manager. He leaned back. Railrat and tower regarded each other. The way up is not so simple now, the tower said.

Cunning could find sneaky ascents in the vertical country above St. Dominic’s Preview. A sneaky ride on top of a tourist elevator lifted Pharaoh fifty whole levels. Up in the land of the communications systems: great, crackling dishes and relays, the neurons of Grand Valley’s communication system were crawling with access ladders and, when those gave out, offered plenty of handholds.

Upward, guided still by the echo in his deaf inner ear. Birds swooped at Pharaoh; householders and pier security hurled threats and harder objects; keek and filth discarded from yet higher levels threatened to dislodge and knock him spinning into space. Tucked in a crevice between the pipes of a water recycling system, he chewed a refrito chapatti stolen from Aisle of Plenty Mall and surveyed his kingdom. A half-hour overhead was the great baffle of St. Lutetia’s Preview, midpoint of the pier. Two and a half kilometres. Pharaoh’s lunch perch opened new panoramas to him; lines of shadow to north and south were the rim walls, higher even than this high seat. The land beneath had lost its geography and become a carpet, a tapestry of green on greener, arbitrary and thus lovely. He could trace the progress of rivers and the movements of trains. He had to make it to five now, to see how more different his world looked from the very top. He could not stop now. Halfway? Like the immigrants off the Sailships who made it six streets away from the sheddle port and no further. Enough energy for six streets. Upward, to the owner of his ear.

The second Preview was difficult. Understatement. It was only after his traverse of the canopy ribbing (“Look, look Rafe, is that a boy ? How theatrical!”) to the guy stays, soaked through, fingers numb with cold from a sudden squall, that he understood how close he had come to the long scream. For Pharaoh, that was the only way back now. Above the Preview was a quarter-kay of expensive residential apartments. No access to the interior service shafts was apparent, so Pharaoh made his way up via the obligingly railinged balconies. He struck out strong and zealous to dry out his clinging clothes and put a little fire into his fibres but the cold was sinking its claws into his core. Every hand-haul was that little more difficult than the one before. Every grasp and pull weaker. Sometime, if he did not find a way in to heat, his fingers would grasp falsely, slip and he would fall.

It was beginning to look more attractive than the recriminations of What have you got yourself into now, boy?

Open drapes. A sliding door ajar. Pharaoh heaved himself over the railing, stumbled across the balcony, into ankle-hugging fur carpet, rose damask and the overwhelming reek of Nightshade by Arvonne.

A woman was seated on a boudoir stool. She saw the apparition in the mirror stumbling in from the direction from which no apparition should stumble. She froze in the brushing of her long brown hair, half scooped back behind her left ear. She turned.

Pharaoh could see nothing but the bud-like ear, pierced for a single stone, and the mahogany hair tucked behind it. It seemed to open before him like a maw. He was falling into his own ear.

“My ear,” he mumbled. “Give me back my ear…”

He lunged at the woman, whose name was Tallysker Merie Thrinton. She leaped spryly away, swiping at Pharaoh with the hairbrush.

“Kidnapper!” she yelled. “Sky-pirate, abseiling hijacker! I’ve heard of people like you, come in on airships all quiet and steal people. Well, my husband has no money, it’s all in bonds, he can’t get it out. I’m as worthless alive as dead…”

“My ear,” Pharaoh said soggily and dived for it, fingers hooked to claw it from the misappropriator’s head. The hairbrush caught him underneath the jaw. He spun round once and was cold before he hit the fur pile.

Pharaoh regained consciousness with two dominant impressions. The first: he was as cold wet shivery filled with pain and hungry as ever. The second: two granite pairs of hands held him in a stern grip, supine, like a battering ram. Like that battering ram, his head was being aimed toward a small hatch in a riveted metal bulwark.

“Help!” he bleated.

“Oh ho,” said one pair of granite hands. By twisting his head, Pharaoh could follow the leather-clad arms up to the padded shoulders and helmet-covered head of Paradise View Apartment Services: 17. “Trash.”

“You know what we do with trash,” the other pair of hands, connected by identical sleeves to identical shoulders and a helmet that differed only in that it read Paradise View Apartment Services: 24.

Then Pharaoh saw the wording on the steel hatch: Refuse Disposal Chute.

“Bastards!” he started to shout as the two security men broke into a charge. His head clanged painfully against the hatch. Pharaoh was looking down a short, sharp metal slide into a bottomless pit. Plastic shopping bags, sanitary towel cover sheets and pieces of tissue paper flocked on the thermals that spiralled up from the dark depths of the titanic rubbish shaft. As he was held there, head down toward disposal, he heard a clank from above and a collection of individual cereal packets tumbled past him into the darkness of the abyss. He let himself slide. His fingers scrabbled for a firm grip but his shoulders were wedged in the hatch, he could get no purchase. By slow degrees, he was being tilted down the chute.

“Allez oop ,” he heard Number 17 say, then a scuffle of feet and two muffled retorts. Pharaoh slid a centimetre, two, five. Like this? he thought. Born trash and died trash. Then an unknown, higher-pitched voice shouted, “Get a hold of him,” and he felt his ankles seized by numerous pairs of hands. A lurch and his shoulders came free.

Another and he shot from the hatch like a silver trout from an apprentice tickler’s fingers to lie gasping and shivering on the mesh flooring. Teenage faces appeared over him, none older, most younger than his own. They were daubed with stripes and smears of blue and yellow warpaint and hair gel was obviously their chief expenditure. Blinking certain death out of his eyes, Pharaoh scanned down his saviours as he had scanned up his executioners. They favoured sleeveless T-shirts and leather vests and pants with too many pockets tucked into boots with too much metal. Their wrists were bound in gizmotry, they carried beanie guns in over-elaborate holsters and from complex packs on their backs barely visible diamond-fibre lines ran up in to the dazzle of ceiling lights.

“Safe to lift?” said the one with the yellow under each eye, who seemed to be the head one, though his voice was hardly broken. A teen warrior with green streaks in his hair and henna tattoos on his well-developed biceps knelt to poke at Pharaoh.