Grandmother Taal sat, legs stretched straight out, and rejoiced in breathing for a full minute before remembering to retract the pont. Then she turned to face the lock and drew the pin from her hair like a long-coated Rapari his sabre.
Where Harx was, Sweetness would be, that much was clear. All this piss and smoke about saints and mirrors; she could make none of that, except that anything that involved powers not safely meat and bone was bad. Typical of her granddaughter to underestimate the danger and overestimate her resourcefulness. Absconding is one thing, adventuring another, but Armageddon is entirely something again. Clown-time is over. This required the full resources of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes. Now, if she could just pick this little lock, walk up that long sloping tunnel to the surface and persuade some Engineer to break the snubbing and let her make a Red Call…
Long orders. Tall hikes. So. She was sturdy. Grandmother Taal worked the clever pick deeper into the lock. Something was resisting her. A shove, a twist. She felt metal give. She worked the device free. As she feared. Irredeemably bent.
This was not the end, though Grandmother Taal felt soul and body sag, all their gambled-away years returning in a moment of sheer dispirit. The semicircles of the hasp mocked her assurance and abilities. Fallen at the first. And a subtle pressure shift on the back of her neck warned her The End of the World Show was rolling up. She had sat through enough fatuous rehearsals to know she had less than a minute before the clouds recondensed into the vapour generators and she was exposed, a wicked black spider clinging to a metal door.
Help me, saints and ancestors! Aid an old and ridiculous woman, St. Catherine, since you clearly seem to exist and have some power in this world.
And it came. Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness. Suddenly Grandmother Taal knew exactly what she must do. She found the little paper-wrapped packet in the fifteenth fold of her bag. She unwrapped the block of Etzvan Canton Black Loess Child’a’grace had given her as a helpmeet. It smelled sweet and low and smoky. She had no need of its pharmacological virtues. The thing was that, in the white floodlight of the Comedy Cavern, it was deeply, gloriously, intrinsically brown. Quickly and decorously, Grandmother Taal fluffed her many skirts, squatted and urinated on the block of prime hash. With the briefest grimace of distaste, she mixed the hash and piss into a thick paste. With the bent blade of the lock-pick she crammed as much of the brown sludge into the lock mechanism as she could. Even when she thought she had enough, she kept obdurately plastering. It was a mighty thing to ask even of Etzvan Canton Black Loess. She packed and packed until it was dribbling out of the keyhole. Then, choosing a clean blade from the lock-pick, she pulled up a sleeve and swiftly carved the word OPEN on the ghost-pallid skin on the inside of her elbow.
Grandmother Taal cried aloud in pain. The winds that patrolled the great cave lifted it, turned it into just another shriek among the stalactites. The years, the prize years, were leaking out of her. The power was burning them, focusing their hope and energy on the intricacies of interlocked steel. Blood ran down her mutilated arm and dripped on to the marble concourse. Grandmother Taal clenched her fist, gritted her teeth. Fire gnawed her bones. Palsies wracked her. She shook to a spasm. The lock quivered. Again, she convulsed; two years, five years burned. The lock jerked. The ashes of years piled up in her cells; she was old, she was old. Seven years. Ten years. Please, leave me something! she begged of the lock. A third time the lock quaked. Quaked again, then, with a detonation of rending metal, it burst apart. A pool of brown sludge joined the pool of blood on the stone. The tunnel doors began to slide apart. No time to lose. Grandmother Taal snatched her bag, hitched up her skirts, slipped through the gap and highfooted it up the long, black tunnel.
The purple, Devastation Harx thought as the Acolytes of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family filed from the flying cathedral’s outlocks on to the morning-glinty plateau of the repair dock, had not been one of his better ideas. Not the colour; purple was a sacerdotal hue, and cheap. Fetching, in the right light. The uniformity. Suddenly he saw ranked and serried badness. All little faces and hands in little squads and files, all dressed in ticky-tacky, all together, all the same. Robots, not people. Not individuals. The ubiquitous machines. Getting closer now. Getting into his beloveds.
Why join? The thought came as a sudden desire to shout down from the brass-railinged balcony from which he took the salute of the faithful. An act of free will to joyfully become a drone? The words were a tight urging in his throat, then he heard in the hollow of his skull how they would sound going out across the high glass, and was afraid. The doubts of a middle-aged twenty-something who has woken all creak-jointy this morning. You owe them better, as they line up to praise you for the freedom you have given their souls. Tell them that they take free grace freely given and throw it away with both hands and the ones who could still think would stare, while those who could not would only worship all the harder.
It’s not easy, running a religion. They have a habit of running away on you.
The Rank Presbyters and Exercisers Temporal had mustered their sections into squares and quadrilles of episcopal purple. Faces gleamed in the morning light. They looked to Harx expectant of blessing. He raised a hand, hesitated, suddenly nauseated by their need, suddenly heedful of the Störting-Kobiyashi shift workers trekking from the big express elevators along the grapple arms and access cranes to start work, and the way they could not quite bring themselves to look at all these faithful people, and smiled, and shook their heads sadly.
Yes, it is, Devastation Harx thought. And, to his gathered faithful, Have you understood so little? I gave you the secrets of unbarring the cells of your minds, of mask-and-caping the superhuman beneath each of your mundane humanities, of nurturing each of your uniquenesses so that a thousand flowers might bloom and a thousand schools of thought pervade, and what did you do? Dressed all in purple and got great thighs pedalling a bicycle-powered cathedral.
Great thighs, he admitted, were something.
But to make yourselves machines to war against the tyranny of the mechanical?
His hand returned to the balcony rail, unwilling to bless.
“Grace,” whispered Sianne Dandeever, first of the faithful and devoted über-mater and who, Devastation Harx knew sadly from his visits to the cycle-housings, had an ass the Panarch herself would commit sin to own and who, if he ever said the word, would devotedly let him chew it. Devotedly, but not joyfully. “They’re waiting…”
You become trapped by the needs of faith.
He raised his hand. The Rank Presbyters smiled, relieved; among them that odd, too-hungry trackboy who had stolen for him that dreadful tyke of train-trash girl. Of all incarnations and emanations for that Haan woman to have been entangled with…The ways of the multiverse were strange, and the boy had done a fine job, deserving of more reward than a two-tier promotion in the church civil service. Harx watched the boy nod to the Vicars Choral. They raised their staves, brought them down.
Happy happy happy