Ares Express (21 page)

And the band played on. Cenotaphs to a space-age rose painfully on every side and the bus boogied its way toward the crater-gates of Molesworth to a medley of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Jackson River Stomp,” “Six-oh-seven-four-five-two,” “String of Pearls,” “Oysters'n'Ale,” “My Summer Love,” “In the Mood,” “After the Love Is Gone,” “South of the Border,” “Silver Star” and “Red Rose Rag.” And that brought the Glenn Miller Orchestra out of the sodium-lit entry tunnel, on to the in-bound arterial and into the warren of towers, tenements and old space-terminus architecture of Old Molesworth.

Grandmother Taal of course had visited this ancient city many thousands of times, but these narrow, canyon streets, through which the bus squeezed as if it were being born, were an alien world to her. Molesworth's main station, like much of the city's primal infrastructure, was underground, buffered from the fusion blasts of immigrant ships by good thick stone. Molesworth,
ancient port and first capital of the world, with a reputation for no-nonsense dourness and graft, was celebrating in the same spirit. The streets had been slung with celebratory bunting in Cossivo Beldene's Unity Rising Party's red, black and green; racks of fireworks were fixed to every balcony rail to ejaculate electoral triumph into the sky; bloated
piñadas
in the shape of the Gubernator swayed from the streetlights, to be split open at the perfect moment and shower the upturned faces with gifts from their distended bellies. The Glenn Miller Orchestra advanced through the jubilee. Its reputation had gone before it: kids crammed the tiered tenement balconies to danger-point, teenagers wearing favourite album covers on their heads like mitres paced the slow, lumbering bus. Shoppers in the arcades waved, startled that a piece of real legend was fighting its way through their quotidian streets. Coffee sellers and
nimki
vendors angrily pushed their carts out of the big band's path, then read the name on the side and heard the jive coming from within and knew a little glow of pride that their Gubernator could command the biggest and the bestest. As it negotiated the lanes, the boogie bus's whip aerials set wash-day blues swinging from 'tween-verandah lines, mud-flaps spilled barrows of oranges and sent daily scandal sheets flapping on the eccentric winds that inhabited the labyrinth. Goondahs and urchins jeered and pelted the windows with street-dung. The bus driver, grinning manically beneath her goggles, hooted furiously at them. Glenn Miller, with a musician's fine disregard for niceties, signed for his brass section to blow all the harder. Grandmother Taal was handjiving with the rest (Mother'a'mercy, it
didn't hurt
!) when the driver pulled on the brake and the band jolted to a halt under the tradesperson's entrance of Molesworth's venerable High
Rathaus
. It was an expansive, rambling building, like a fat old great-grandparent who cannot quite control his limbs on the sofa and sprawls all over his neighbours, built on many levels over and under and through the surrounding buildings. Civic Guilders in velvet knee breeches led the band members through a labyrinth of corridors, staircases, halls and lobbies to the main festhall. Leaving Grandmother Taal standing by the bus clutching her bag, looking up at the overhanging galleries and orioles of the
Rathaus
and the black doorway that had swallowed an entire big band.

Glenn Miller beckoned to her.

“Come on.”

“I have a granddaughter to find.”

“That you surely do, but I don't think you even have an idea where to begin.”

“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family has a mail-order department here.”

“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family will be at the Pleasance,” Glenn Miller said. “Devastation Harx was a major contributor to Beldene's election fund.”

“How do you know this?” Grandmother Taal said warily.

“I've got my own bag of secrets.” This last with a glitter behind the pebble glasses. “Come on. If nothing else, you need to eat. And anyway, I owe you, remember?”

A big band setting up is of marginal interest to non-musicians so after her mint tea and morning rolls Grandmother Taal asked a velveteen usher to show her the way to the street and she spent the morning wandering affably confusing alleys looking for anything church-like, ever-circling, or spiritually familial. She found nothing fitting those criteria, and the one mail-order warehouse she came across shipped hand-made fetishwear, but she did catch a curious climate in Molesworth's decked laneways. A city's mood is a subtle thing, divided among many people and activities, but it showed itself in glances, habits, touches; details of life. Heaped in the middle of a street Grandmother Taal found a dead machine, some indeterminate civic servitor, now terminated. Molesworthians skirted around it without regard or respect. No one had shown even the small grace to close its gaping ports and sockets. Grandmother Taal could not rid herself of the suspicion that it had been murdered. And the parasols! On a grey day of overcast. Silk white parasols, citizens huddling from the sky. All along the Marche shop awnings were pulled out in a continuous swoop of striped canvas, on Long Drag and Steel Market the sunny central strips of the streets were deserted, the morning shoppers clinging to the shade of the arcades. Over morning tea in a dusty plaza encircled by top-heavy tenements she tuned between conversations with the practised discrimination of the elderly. Grazestock prices could be better. Aye, and a bad turn of the weather. In next week for the hip job, and couldn't I do
without it? Keep calling at the door and I've told them he hasn't lived there in a halfyear but will they believe me? Tea's not what it used to be; they scorch the leaves. Waited half an hour,
half an hour
, then three came at once and there were bloody kids rampaging all over them. Well, I for one won't be out waving my little flag, waste of the taxpayer's dollars, if you ask me. Strangers in town, and foreigners too. Nothing in the news these days: wireless soaps and pelota-players' wives.

Trivial in themselves, these gripes and scraps betrayed the deeper climate of moaning that Grandmother Taal had sensed in Molesworth's streets. These were uneasy people. This was an uneasy grandmother, sipping her mint tea and decorously breaking her almond madeleines. A perpetual foreigner in every town she visited, this was the first time she felt like a stranger. As the waiter counted the change from his pouch, she asked him if he knew of a Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.

“No madam, but I do know now that they have a mail-order depot over in Sunny Mallusk. The brother works there.”

“And where might that be?”

He drew a map on the back of the receipt in silver pencil. It was a few hundred metres but many turns away. Grandmother Taal had to check with locals that she had taken the correct number of rights and lefts. Sunny Mallusk was a dour, yellow-brick huddle of tall, steep-gabled, small-windowed warehouses around a square in which litter rattled, stirred by a stable system of microtornadoes. Two Malluskers had never heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family but a third had and directed her to a buff-coloured door with a hatch at eye level. Her knock was greeted by an eye at the hatch.

“Yes?”

“I'm looking for my granddaughter.”

“Who is?”

“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Grandmother Taal said in one breath.

“Nah,” said the eye. “No one here by that name.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'd be sure.”

The tip of Grandmother Taal's stick stopped the hatch from snapping shut.

“I don't suppose a Mr. Devastation Harx is on the premises today?”

“You suppose correct.”

“But he is in town?”

“He's up for the bash.”

“The Inaugural Pleasance.”

“Aye. That.”

“Will he be calling here?”

The eye hatch shot open again. A sigh came from beneath the eye, which was a very dark blue, and showed much sclera.

“Look lady, I just run the depot. If he comes, he comes, if he don't, he don't. He's holy; that's what holy people do, or don't do. If you're that desperate to see him, bluff your way into the bash, whatever. Me, I've got orders to fill.”

The eye vanished from behind the hatch. For an instant Grandmother Taal had a powerful perspective view of a corridor of shelves, racked a hundred high, dwindling to a vanishing point that she suspected lay beyond the physical bounds of the building. Tiny figures suspended from rope harnesses floated up and down the mile-long-aisle, filling baskets slung from their waists with religious wares. Then the buff metal slide slammed shut and, by reversing the order of the directions on the waiter's bill, Grandmother Taal found her way back to Molesworth's thronged Viking-Lander Plaza.

A clanging tram wormed through the intestinal streets to drop Grandmother Taal at the
Rathaus
. Down by the stage door an altercation was taking place. It involved the following elements: an eclectic group of four fronted by a stocky young woman with spiky hair—clearly furious—a girl in a spangled bikini with silver boots and hoolie-hoolie feathers in her hair—clearly impatient—and a flatbed truck with the legend “Let 'Em Eat Cake!” printed on a side-tarpaulin and a cylindrical, ziggurat structure on its back. The issue seemed to be this object, which Grandmother Taal concluded must be a cake, of the kind from which girls in spangled bikinis and hoolie-hoolie feathers leap at appropriate moments.

“Let me have a look,” the stocky girl demanded and climbed on to the back of the flat bed. Let 'Em Eat Cakers in formal Patissiers' Guild bibs stood aside, awed by the biceps swelling from her sleeveless vest. She hugged the uppermost
cylinder of the surprise cake and wrestled it until the cords of her throat stood out like guy ropes. Panting, she harangued the master bakers.

“It's supposed to come off. It doesn't come off. Why is this? It won't work if it doesn't come off. We paid you a lot of money for it to come off.”

Master Baker gave a gesture at once shrug and bow.

“It could have albumenised in the ovening.”

The woman stared at him at if he had suggested public fellatio.

“Albumenised? What is this?”

“Albumen molecules could undergo a lacto-gluten reaction to form a polymer mass,” the baker said. The woman stared at him.

“Over-egged the pudding,” his Prentice explained.

The woman swore and went to her colleagues. The five talked among themselves, with many hand motions and furious glances from the little muscley woman. Sensing as-yet unspecified opportunity, Grandmother Taal moved close. From the frequency with which the word was used, the strong, fierce woman seemed to be called Skerry. A tall, wire-thin man, soft spoken, with skin so black it swallowed light, was her chief supporter in her arguments with a pale, languorous girl with jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it and an air that communicated studied artiness even to a trainperson. She was lieutenanted by an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville. The fifth member, a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth, took no side but neither missed a chance to slide in a sarcasm.

Grandmother Taal took an innocent sidle nearer. Between Skerry's dogged fury and the luvvie-girl's—Mishcondereya's—sighings and soft competence-assassinations, Grandmother Taal deduced that it was of regional, perhaps even planetary importance that silver-boots girlie leap out of the cake just as the Glenn Miller Orchestra struck up the intro to the song they had collected at the Prestaines' Parcel Depot. Due to albumenisation, or some other error in contemporary baking, this was not going to happen, there now wasn't time to bake another cake, and this was a Very Bad Thing.

Very Bad Things promised Very Interesting Consequences. Grandmother Taal drew near.

“Excuse me,” she ventured. “If I might interrupt; I may be able to assist.”

Animosities were forgotten. Five faces turned on her. Grandmother Taal forestalled the barrage of comment.

“I just have to know one thing. Is the cake chocolate?”

“Finest forty percent mocha first-melt high-bean mix,” the Master Baker sang out.

“Good!” Grandmother Taal said. “Give me that.”

Dreadful Teeth boy carried a knife in his boot-top. In one motion she scooped it out, unclasped it and before any hand could stop her, carved the word
open
on the back of her hand. She held the bleeding fist up to the cake. The ziggurat quivered. Molesworth Patissiers stepped back. The great cake heaved. The cake quaked. Bakers abandoned truck. In a spray of crumb, butter-cream and carob frosting, the top of the cake sprang open like the hatch of an overheated boiler. While every head was turned and every mouth open, Grandmother Taal flung the knife square between its owner's boots. The boy bent to retrieve it, squinted small respect out from under his greasy fringe.

“Impressive, for an ould doll.”

He folded the knife and slid it into the smooth leather with a polished snick. While the bikini maid wriggled into the cake Grandmother Taal made bold to introduce herself.

“You trainies have good names,” he said, with his way of looking toward-but-not-at the person to whom he was speaking that made Grandmother Taal wonder if he were homosexual. “I'm just Weill.” Unused to the pronunciation, Grandmother Taal at first thought it was a self-description. “Neat power. What is it, some kind of family heirloom?”

“Things that are brown only.”

“Hey, that has a kind of…cloacal…potential.” He sucked in his top lip and nodded his head and studied the toe of his left boot. He shifted his feet in sudden decision, fished in his pockets for a card on which he scrawled in handwriting no less dreadful than his teeth. He presented it to Grandmother Taal. It was thick, creamy vellum, scalloped and gold-edged, an invitation to the Inaugural Pleasance of Cossivo Beldene as newly Elected Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Table twenty-five, nine minutes of nine, dress formal.