Ares Express (27 page)

“What are you doing, man?” she shouted at her enemy. “Don't you know it's going to make everything come apart? Is that what you want? They're not going to let you, you know.” But, if Harx could access the planetary defences and the climate control system, even God the Panarchic was hog-tied. What was Harx doing to St. Catherine, with what cybernetic torments was he threatening her, what weird stuff makes saints and angels shudder? Planetary
patroness she might be, a psychic twin of false pretences, but the reflection of a soul sealed in Devastation Harx's memory jar was also Little Pretty One, half of Sweetness's life to date. He was torturing the crippling disappointment of her third birthday party when she did not get the toy Engineer's outfit; it was her first no-tongue bruise-lipped snog-ette with Axle Deep-Eff at the corroboree steaming. It was the economics exam she had failed spectacularly and cavalierly—there had been a handball match the night before against
Darker Star
—and the longwave humiliation she had endured before her School of the Air tutor and a continent of fellow pupils. It was the night of the Boletohatchie lay-over she had crept from her cabin up along the star-lit companionways over the dark, simmering hulk of
Catherine of Tharsis
and her many tribes, and had stolen in to the command bridge to lay her hand for one, electric second, on the brass drive bar. It was the foolish confessed hopes and dreams and unachievable ambitions; the infatuations and infuriations and warm-between-the-thighs moments; the naked lusts and the hopeless rages and the whispered hours of giggle and smut. Out of sheer adolescent embarrassment alone, she had to get her other half back. “I'm not going to let you!” she shouted, arms wrapped around her head.

Fine words, from a nearly-nine on her knees in an inspection pit, buried under a kilometre of duststorm. It was then she noticed the steady rivulets of dust pouring over the corners of the dug-out, forming spreading spill-cones across the concrete floor, slowly burying the pieces of discarded train-innards with the granular tick of the hour-glass. Already it was piling up around her fingers, a sensation at once sexy and enclosing. She could feel it trickling into her shoes.

“Aw, come
on
,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn't the end.

As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness's ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers
was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm's passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.

Next round would go to the canvas.

Sweetness heaved herself out of the hole, suspiciously sniffed the air. It was clean and good and wonderfully clear, like clothes beaten by a dhobi boy. With her new clarity of vision, Sweetness now saw an object far on the western horizon, previously obscured by dust and heat haze. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Had she not seen such things before—indeed, spent a night with
that man
under one—she would have disbelieved her eyes. They told her true. The thing looked like—and therefore was—nothing more than a domestic, fireside companion set—poker, brush, shovel, tongs—big enough to keep hell tended.

An afternoon's walk brought her to the prodigy. The central column and cap rose like the dome of a great, airy temple. Sweetness walked under it, wondering at the artifacts hanging from its rim. The poker was a sheer steel shaft, thirty metres long, slowly penduluming in the rising evening breeze. The brush bristles had been sadly abraded by the duststorm, lopsided and graded like a Belladonna goondah's asymmetrical buzz-cut. The shovel could have scooped up hosts of the sinful for the tongs to hold in the white heart of purgatory's forges. Sweetness steered away from the hungry, pronged jaws. All were polished metal, scoured clean by the dust, brilliant in the evening sun.

Sweetness started as she rounded the corner of the base to find two figures huddled against the plinth. Figures, she presumed, though they were man-shaped bundles of ochre-stained fabric.
Dust-mummies
, she thought, at which they both moved, shedding clouds of dust. Sweetness took a step back. Out here, jokes and superstitions and impossibilities turned up behind every rock, real and able and eager to do stuff to you. The mummies shuffled to their feet. They beat their wrappings free of dust with their bandaged hands. Sweetness saw then that they wore long duster coats and baggy trader's pants with thick-wound puttees. The hands then rose to the bulbous brown heads,
fiddled for a loose end and streeled off more metres of cloth than Sweetness ever imagined you could wear around your head without suffocating. Obsidian eyeballs glittered; Sweetness relaxed when a few turns more revealed them to be little, round-eye sunspectacles. Faces emerged, one tall and square, the other round and purse-lipped. Both wore identical hairstyles, shaved at the sides, teased up into a flat-topped mesa. They looked dedicated and zealous as they kicked away their discarded binding bands. Sweetness might have been stone to them for all their regard.

“A storm that was,” the square-faced, taller one said, taking a theatrical upright pose.

“Storm indeed, Cadmon,” the other agreed, copying him.

“Unseasonable.” The square one made a slow sweep of the horizon.

“Unseasonable indeed, Cadmon.” The squat one followed suit.

“One might almost think…”

“One might; one does, Cadmon.”

Sweetness watched their act for a few moments before clearing her throat. The two men turned as one; black round eyes regarded her, heads cocked to precisely the same degree.

“What is this? A fellow traveller in strange terrains?” The heads cocked the reverse angle.

“Would seem so, Cadmon.”

“A girl, I would hasten.”

“Hasten so, Cadmon.”

“Look, I don't mean to butt in here if you're doing something, but have you got any food or water?”

The two men looked at each other.

“Water and provender, for our guest?” the tall one, obviously Cadmon, asked.

“Exactly so, Cadmon,” the still nameless one answered and took a small bulb from one of the many pockets of the utility vest he wore beneath his duster. A soft squeeze. Sweetness waited for something to happen, then noticed a small stirring in the dust. Buried things unearthing themselves. Dust boiled and shed. Two gravboards with bulging leather side-panniers bobbed to the surface and came to rest at a level metre.

“Cool,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

Water there was, and provender, in square-faced Cadmon's carefully weighed usage. Sweetness ate smally and carefully, sipped her water and used two handfuls to wipe the caked dirt off her face. Then she asked, “So, what are you guys doing out here then?”

“That question, I rather think, is better asked of you, madam,” Cadmon said. The short one nodded.

“I'm a story,” Sweetness said, then regretted her enthusiasm, for now she had committed herself to telling it yet again.

“No no no,” Cadmon interjected with a raised finger, mimicked by his partner. “Names, then stories.”

“Okay,” Sweetness said. “I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The two men bowed slightly.

“I am Cadmon, and this is Euphrasie,” Cadmon said, with a sweep of the hand which the shorter man could not refrain from distantly echoing. “We are the Brothers Dust.”

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “But you're not brothers.”

“Brothers of the soul,” Cadmon said.

“Soul, indeed,” Euphrasie chimed in. “Brothers aesthetic, atheistic, anarchic.”

“We are anarchist artists,” Cadmon said. “Behold, our work.”

As one, the Brothers Dust thrust out their hands to the enormous fireside companion set, in the lengthening shade of which this exchange had taken place.

“Do you do a lot of household stuff?” Sweetness asked.

“You are familiar with our work?” Cadmon asked loftily.

“I've slept under some of it.”

“Which, pray?” Euphrasie responded, quick as a pocket-picking.

“The big chair,” Sweetness said. She added, “I've seen the ironing board from a distance. And the big shoe.”

“The big shoe!” Cadmon and Euphrasie chorused in one voice.

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “So, correct me if I'm wrong here, but how is it anarchy to do big ironing boards and shoes?”

“The anarchy of incongruity,” Cadmon proclaimed.

“And the domestic,” Euphrasie added. “Domesticating the desert.”

“And desertifying the domestic,” Cadmon insisted. “Thus we confound two static absolutes: the desert without and the desert within.”

“But don't we live in an anarchy?” Sweetness asked, sweetly.

“Habitual anarchy is no anarchy at all,” Cadmon said.

“The revolution must be continual if it is to be the true revolution.”

“True anarchy is archy.”

“I must invent a non-system or be enslaved by another man's.”

Sweetness looked at the two desert-clad men, cocked her head in
that way.

“Are you butty-boys?” she asked.

Cadmon maintained high disdain, but Sweetness caught Euphrasie turning away and lifting his hand to his mouth to suppress a chuckle.

“We are living art,” Cadmon said.
Okay
, Sweetness thought.

“And art consists as much in the unmaking as the making,” Euphrasie said.

“Look, I don't do art, so you'll have to explain this,” Sweetness said.

“Explain? Very well. This project is complete. True art is momentary; the false strives for immortality. We make and we unmake. Now is the time of unmaking.”

Sweetness looked to Euphrasie for elucidation. He merely swivelled his eyes upward to the mushroom-cap of the companion set. For the first time Sweetness noticed the clustered white cylinders fastened to the shaft and around the rim of the cap, the gaily coloured wires, the radio transponders.

“You're not…”

Euphrasie nodded and produced another bulb device from his vest of pockets.

“You have something in the region of thirty seconds to decide whether you come with us, or bet on how fast you can run,” Cadmon said, gathering up his discarded wrappings and stuffing them into a carry-all bag, which he slung on to the back of the nearer of the two fretting gravboards.

“Me? On one of those?”

“Twenty seconds…” Euphrasie had already mounted his gravboard and was erecting the boom.

“All right, I'm not betting, I'm not betting!” Sweetness scooped up her bag and dived for Euphrasie's board. The mercurial machine rocked under her, she fought for balance, grabbed at Euphrasie, who by seizing her shirt-front prevented them both from capsizing. Wind cracked Cadmon's pink and purple fractal patterned sail. The board pitched, then the rising evening breeze lifted it and whipped it away. Within instants, he was a lost toy in the great redness.

“Hold tight!” Euphrasie called to Sweetness, pressed cheek to scapular.

“Tell me,” Sweetness muttered into his back, but all the same the sudden dip and surge of the board almost upset her as Euphrasie tilted the boom into the wind and the board took flight.

“Whoo!” exclaimed Sweetness Asiim Engineer as the rippled dust blurred beneath her. The second board tacked sharply, caught a stronger air current and slid up alongside big, vain Cadmon.

“Zero!” he shouted to Euphrasie over the flutter of sail and the shout of wind. The smaller man held out the bulb-teat. Cadmon nodded for Sweetness to look back, which she did, dizzyingly, and so missed Euphrasie depressing the nipple. The effects were impressive. The big companion set stood tall and black and domestic on the horizon. As she watched, white blossoms of flame exploded briefly underneath the rim, indeed like some vast desert mushroom sporing explosively. The fall was slow and tremendous. Had the Skywheel itself snapped and fallen flailing to earth, it could not have been more thunderous and aristocratic. Explosions around the edge of the cap first freed the poker, which fell straight to earth and embedded itself a third-deep in the sand. The brush fell to earth in a comet's tail of blazing bristles: fireballs and sparks rebounded high as it smashed into the ground. Multiple detonations disintegrated the tongs into flying, clawed shards. Only the shovel remained. Unbalanced by its weight, the cap tilted, then the shaft blew apart beneath it in an orgy of detonations. The falling shovel threw a spadeful of hot desert twenty metres into the air. Like a bell falling from God's campanile, the cap struck the ground. The chime shivered Sweetness's ovaries in her belly. Fractions of a second later, the shockwave ruffled her hair and tugged her clothes, sent the gravboard yawing.

The second pillar of smoke in Sweetness's day went up from the wreckage of art.

“You're mad, you are!” Sweetness exclaimed as Euphrasie sent the board sweeping round on a great sand-scoring arc. She liked the way he smiled, pleased and self-deprecating at once. Almost that smile. Remember, butty-boy, she advised herself. And if you go on falling for every male who smiles that smile, and they probably all do, this story is going to end with you tripping over the end of the
next chapter
. But, she decided as the gravboard scored away from the smouldering wreckage across the Big Red and she felt man body beneath her fingers and smelled man smells whipped back in the wind of her velocity that was streaming her hair straight back from her good cheekbones: this is what stories are all about. “Wooo!” she yelled, for the second time that day.