“Okay, right, so,” he said, turning away from the panorama of his ruined career, clapping his hands chivvyingly. “Come on come on, what’s God going to be wearing?”
Elsewhere, Mishcondereya’s weather radar sketched out the cloud of dreamlessness pressing darkly down on Solid Gone like a saucerful of alien invaders.
“It’s just sitting there,” she said, pouting with bafflement, the same expression with which she met every novel event. “This cross-wind, it shouldn’t last two minutes, but it’s just sitting there.” Skerry bent over the radar, face furrowed green by scanner-light. Those two minutes later the cloud hove into view, at once stifling and chilling. It grew perceptibly twilighty on the bridge of the sardine-ship. The streets, avenues and bourses of the stone town beneath it looked like a tourist map of hell. Mishcondereya cut thrust and steered the ship on to the central zocalo. The penumbra cast shadows and doubts, but there seemed to be a large crowd of people down there.
“What is that thing?” Mishcondereya asked with audible distaste.
“I know,” Grandmother Taal said with a chill in her voice that made both women turn from their instruments. “I saw this once before, long long time ago, way down deep South Borealis, some terrible rural place. Two streets and sun farm; Redemption they called it, but the only Redemption was the train-track out of it. I remember it well, we only stopped because we had to water. That cloud should have warned us, and the girl.”
“Girl?” Mishcondereya said in the off-hand way of a woman only half-listening to a story because she is checking the grapple gear in the belly hold.
“Aye. Chained to a steel luncheonette, she was, and there she would remain until she had written down and bottled in whiskey enough dreams from passing strangers for all her townsfolk to have a swallow. That was their disease—no one dreamed, and without dreams, nothing lives long. The girl dreamed too much, dreamed of getting out of a place like Redemption, and that was her curse, you see. Something had to come and take it all away from her: that cloud. Hence her doom.”
“What happened to her?” Skerry asked, crossing both pairs of fingers in the pocket of her short-shorts in the old Ocyrian deflection of evil auras.
“For all we know, she’s there still, but it would seem not, judging by that.”
Skerry imagined she could feel baleful heat from the cloud even through the gold-tinted reflective windows of the racing-blimp. Mishcondereya was looking at her one way. The old trainwoman was looking at her another. A decision was necessary, even a wrong one.
“Take us in,” she ordered.
In the short time since that troubling girl Sweetness Engineer had walked away, the cloud-cineaste who called himself Sanyap Bedassie, last of his mystery, had discovered the consolation of resignation. You need no ambitions, you need not risk pain and failure and disappointment. Here is food, here is water, here is a daily purpose and appreciation. We are your friends. We will always treasure you. Your world may be small, but whose is not, and it is blunt-edged. Your life may be circumscribed as tightly as an eremite’s, but who has not considered the attractions of the confined, contemplative life, and it is not sour. Eight times a day, at the top of the hour, his purpose was affirmed. He changed lives, for a little while.
On clearer days Sanyap Bedassie wondered if this resignation was not the first symptom of the plague. He had always assumed that, by dint of his profession, he was immune to it. Maybe he was only last to succumb. Maybe he had already gone down, and only dreamed that he dreamed. So be it. It was the world he must live in, therefore, he would live.
The tolling of the iron bell. The faithful drew near. Their feet rasped on sandy setts. Again, he brought the capacitors on-line, unfolded the array from the rear of the crippled campervan, took aim on the underbelly of the cloud. The gathered oohed as they always oohed, always surprised by the sudden stab of the pink lance into the groin of the cloud. Again, the darkness parted like foetal cells dividing: Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap’s faces gestated out of the cloud-mass. To stunningly explode in wisps and vapours as a daring silver airship plunged out of the heart of the cloud. The crowd gasped, faces frozen, upturned, unsure if this was part of the plot. The plucky little dirigible pulled out of its death-dive centimetres above the Grand Bourse’s crenellations. Belly-spots swivelled and focused on Bedassie and his little van, drowning the pink dream-beam in garish white. He shielded his eyes with his hand, thought he saw the belly of the fish-shaped craft open and a steel grapple-claw descend. No imagination: metal fingers closed around the van, shaking it from side to side like a terrier a rat as they clenched firmly beneath its subframe. A jolt: the van lifted a metre into the air. The people of Solid Gone swayed back, rumble-grumbled, then lurched a step forward. Sanyap Bedassie watched the airship reel his van up toward its belly. Again the crowd rumbled, took another step forward, and another. Startling reality was penetrating their sullen gloom. Someone was taking the last of their dreams away. The realisation struck Sanyap Bedassie the instant before the mob broke into a lead-footed run.
“Wait for me!” he yelled, ran, leaped, caught the dangling end of a severed chain and was whisked skyway just as the highest-reaching fingers missed his foot. His last glimpse of Solid Gone was of a circle of three thousand upturned faces filled with intolerable sorrow, then the airship climbed, turned, closed its hatches on them and their misfortune and sped away.
25
One thousand storeys. Five metres per storey. Five thousand metres. Acceleration due to gravity, three metres per second squared. Terminal velocity in the thick, sweet air under Grand Valley’s glass roof: twenty-two metres per second. Or eighty kilometres per hour. Time until Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th hit ground zero: four hundred seconds. Or six and two-thirds minutes. You can get a lot of screaming into that.