By swinging from ropes, turning somersaults, diving through hoops, putting your leg behind your neck and juggling fire? She could hear the high, thin voice echoing from Ghalgorm’s painted rafters. To her mother, the putdown had been as divine an art as icon painting. It was not sarcasm. It was maintaining a universal and holy order.
Yes! Skerry wanted to shout. All that, and in ridiculous and frequently immodest costumes. But practising what you’ve only ever preached. Humbling the arrogant, ridiculing the vain, bringing down the proud, mocking the mighty. By showing off, by making a spectacle of myself, I’m fulfilling all your family values. But, with no bloody net!
They were arguing again, details, trivia; the exact numbers of each species in the Divine Menageries, whether the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast rode astride or sidesaddle, did God go to the toilet? and the colours of angels’ wings. At such times, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm thanked her lack of a sense of humour. Somebody had to have perspective. Somebody had to get a grip on this rabble.
“Enough. These helicopters with saints hanging under them, these ball-lightning generators, these luminous blimps: tell me, how long exactly have we got?”
The looks of schoolchild contrition at these moments when she brought her comrades up hard against the buffers of the real world was almost compensation for her nagging suspicion that she was a caste less funny than the rest of the team. Seskinore raised his Distinguished Silver eyebrows. Mishcondereya did Magnificent Sullen. Weill twisted and scratched himself. He had caught a wicked little fungal infection of the armpits, and they itched furiously. Bladnoch whipped out his vade-mecum. Cybernetic angels flocked through the planetary nervous system, prying and sniffing, and returned with an answer.
“Störting-Kobiyashi have a repair tender in for the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, estimated, three days.” He glanced again at his read-out, raised one precisely shaved eyebrow, which Seskinore had always envied, as well as the dark comedian’s Dog Chow and Why Windchimes? routines. “Mostly skin punctures, minor mainframe, a couple of gas cells down. Interestingly, the Engineer’s report hints at blast damage. Who’s been having a crack at Devastation Harx?”
He snapped shut the vade-mecum; a device so far in advance of Grandmother Taal’s companion of the same name that it scarcely deserved to be included in the same species. Observational comedy needs observations. There was wisdom somewhere in the secretive recesses of the Synod that they gave pocket-size omniscience to Bladnoch and not Seskinore, Skerry thought. Or, saints forfend, Weill. She said, “Well, I think we have a problem then.”
They did another look then, the our-one-and-only-idea-has-gone-down-the-shitpit one. Skerry folded her arms. Bladnoch was dryly rustling his fingers and looking at the floor. He would think of something. She trusted him. Three years working within sniffing distance, an attempted seduction at a wrap party after they bust the Bethlehem Ares Board Salaries Scam, a consequent (or maybe, despite it) closeness and she still had no angles on the tall, skinny man; whether there were depths beyond the apparent depths, or if it was all one continuous, highly polished surface. Since being headhunted from the All New! Terence Payne Carnival of Horrors, where she had prestidigitated in a rubber suit with high-voltage electric cables, Skerry had maintained a stern celibacy, but Bladnoch was the loophole in her resolve.
“The old woman,” he said, clicking his fingers in that don’t-derail-my-train-of-thought way of his she found so cute. “That dream, some kind of sending, she said, right?” His co-performers knew better than to answer. “Where did it come from?”
“Why?” Skerry asked.
“Just a suspicion.”
The United Artists Special, routed by customised signalling, had swept past sidelined transcontinentals and prioritaires, even the proud Argyre Express and its prouder sept of Malevant-Engineers, as it climbed the gentle slopes of China Mountain. Above it, the sky had kindled, angels fallen and Grandmother Taal feared for her granddaughter out in a world turned upside down. She felt older and frailer than ever she had over the cards with Cyrene Ree the year-vampire. The future of her family and world were in the hands of squabbling youths. Then the little leatherette express swayed over a set of points on to a siding Grandmother Taal knew in her boots she had never ridden before, then the sky and the offences being committed on it were extinguished as Kharam Malevant-Engineer 8th plunged his machine into a long dark tunnel. Grandmother Taal knew the rattle and roll of every tunnel and cutting in four quarterspheres and her ears told her she had never been this way before, and that she was being taken deep, way deep, way long. After a time verging on the unendurable, the isolated lamps on the tunnel walls slowed in their rhythm and the train slid into golden light on a half-tunnel open on the right side to a stupendous void of glittering, reflecting obsidian. Beyond the platform, cable cars bobbed: this undervault was big enough to have its own microclimate. Weill escorted Grandmother Taal, who had one glimpse of what lay beyond that frail insult of a handrail at the edge of the platform and kept her eyes firmly shut and her bottomless bag firmly clasped to her until the wretched cable car stopped its swaying and she felt good steel under her feet.
“Make yourself at home here,” Weill said, with unconscious fatuity, but Grandmother Taal did so, filling the shelves and niches with gew-gaws from the personal dimension of her black bag. It might be a bobbing bauble of construction plastic and aluminium slung from alarmingly flimsy guying but it was more like her rocking, rolling cabin high on Catherine of Tharsis’s hump than anywhere else in these—how many now?—days since climbing off at Muchanga Water Station. It had a soothing sense of motion, even if it was three dimensional, and disturbing to the inner ears of old ladies who have lived much of their lives in one-dimensional transit. The view she could not take, so she drank her mint tea—much of it, but cheaply machine manufactured—in an interior room without windows. Therefore her first inkling that the cable-car was coming was a growing vibration throughout the suspended building—familiar and almost as comfortable as the bass tremble of fusion tokamaks. Grandmother Taal bustled to make the guest-unit ready. Defended on all sides by two hundred metres straight down to obsidian razors, “guest unit” was interchangeable with “prison,” but visitors were visitors. The bauble swayed as the car hard-docked. Her hosts/captors filed out into the receiving room.