Happy happy happy
Happy happy happy all the day
Harx has saved us
Harx has made us
Happy happy happy all the day, the fresh-faced choristers sang.
Does God ever tire of hearing his praises sung? Harx thought, embarrassed today by the adulation wafting himwards, Does he feel insulted by the infantile twaddle peddled in the name of worship? So he would not have to listen, he surveyed instead the damage Cadmon and Euphrasie had wrought on his floating basilica. It looked to the faithful like contemplation of higher things. For a homosexual anarchist artist—late and reluctant recruits to the war—his brother had made a good aerial bomber. A few more sticks, a little faster on the turns, he might have seriously discommoded the great strategy, if not forced a season’s defeat on him. His diversionary strike on heaven might have gained him ground in the lower orbitals and swept away a third of the angelic forces that opposed him, but the ways of machines were subtle, and from the humiliation at the Molesworth Festhall, he did not doubt that other energies were being mobilised against him.
Had they finished yet?
Gleeful gleeful gleeful all the day.
How many, if any, suspected the scale of crusade in which they were spiritual infantry? Few out on parade, few on this whole world, in this universe. Not the machines. They knew too well that this little red ball was their final redoubt, and that one installation artist turned religious shyster was to be their nemesis.
Strange, and passing inevitable, the path that leads from fine art to jihad.
Strange, the things you find in mirrors.
God, they were still at it. Did they never tire of singing? I’m trying to make a universe for humans to live in, and the best you can do with it is chant doggerel. Excessive aubergine and happy-clappiness were the prices you paid for owning your own church. Inventing a religion was still the best and easiest way to raise the astronomical amounts of cash a war with the angels required.
Sianne Dandeever, poker-erect, face rapt, hands firmly gripping balcony rail, suddenly flinched as if unseen wings had flapped in her face. She flicked something away with her hand, scowled, devotion broken.
Harx stared, then cocked his head a degree to catch a tiny sound. A hum, an insect drone.
Insects. Up here? On this glass desert? Ridiculous.
More than ridiculous. Sinister.
A black mote danced in his face. Harx lunged, snatched, felt frantic movement buzz in his palm. He closed his fist, felt a soft crunch, opened his palm and peered closely at it. One less skilled in the wiles of machines might have taken it for a true insect, but he could see that the thing whirring spastically in his hand was a tiny, glass-bellied helicopter. He held it closer; as he did, the belly-bead popped. Vapour wisped, Harx hurled the thing away from him but not before a greenish wisp had curled up his nostrils. He saw vinegar, tasted blue minims; a symphony for cabbage and pram played a loud chord in his frontal lobes. The smell of triangles…
“Battle stations!” he roared out over the assembled faithful. Every head turned. Sianne Dandeever stared, half numb, half thrilled that this might be the call for which Harx had invested so much of her body and will.
“Battle stations!” Harx repeated as the squares and drills broke up into frantic motion. “To arms, our church is under attack!”
He nodded for Sianne to take command as a cloud of robot insects, black as smoke, poured from the spire-top airco funnels. He did not like to be seen by the faithful to be abandoning Armageddon, but there were tactics that only he could employ, and those in private. The true battle would not be fought under the glass plains, with gun turrets and Gatling bunkers, but among the shifting dimensions of his mirror maze. Devastation Harx swirled from the balcony. Sianne Dandeever cracked her knuckles and stood tall. Thank you God. At last. At long long last.
“This is it, boys!” she guldered at the top of her ample lungs to the running acolytes. “This is war!”
It wears off, they’d warned Lutra Blaine when she ticked the box in the job centre next to “Space Service.” And quicker than you think, too. Cartwheeling off the action end of the Skywheel space elevator (no, it’s not me going arse-over-heels, it’s the stars carouselling around me; the innocent solipsism of the work-placement cosmonaut) she had yippeed in her soul of souls as the red-green-occasional-blue mottle of her world rolled up in a great disc before her like a test for colour-blindness in the eye of the Divine. So tell me Ms. Blaine, what can you read down there? Nothing but a door out of three rooms and twelve bodies Level Twenty-Seven Deep St. Berisha Project NewMarket Down, Belladonna, Greatest of the Cities of the Valley. The doctors had warned her of possible agoraphobia. It would still not have grounded her. No one got turned down for space service. Not a problem, she said. Outer space was no bigger or blacker than inner space. The tunnels of the littler moon were no less pumicey and constricting. Space, like bedrock, was just another darkness into which you cannot go.
You do know you’ve more chance of winning the Fat Lotto every week for a year than seeing some, you know, action, the sheddle steward had said as he turned her the right way up and sent her and her canvas grip-bag sailing through the lock into the foam-padded reception bay.
That’s okay, she had thought as she swam through the thick, fart-whiffy air, wondering who the stocky, shock-headed smiler was down at the end of the cylinder, hand held out to welcome her to Planetary Defence System Terror. Just as long as the cheques keep coming.
The view was the one thing that had not tired. The constant vague nanogee nausea; the bloated, rodent face in the morning mirror; the unflagging, eroding energy with which Taroudant—the tousled grinner—tried to get his hand into the waistband of her draw-string Space Service baggies—most of all, this last—those she’d tired of by the end of her first shift. But her world, her home, the soil of her birth, her shelter and prison; spinning slowly like the hands of a great clock behind the watch-glass of the observation blister, she would wake from near-trance to find hours had vanished, witched out of her by the huge, slow-turning world beneath her. Twelve and a half years she had lived and crawled beneath the surface without ever once looking at its face.
Truth be told, Taroudant notwithstanding—he occupied an ecological niche all his own—the creaky old battle station was full of creeps. Unaccountable breezes eddied in the gritty pumice tunnels. Light panels would flicker as she swam past, or switch themselves off, or, more spookily still, on, illuminating vast, irregular, lung-like hollows she was quite sure did not appear on any of the moon maps. Machines loved to click and groan theatrically; spirals of dust would spin and sparkle in the hub-chambers where tunnel systems met, and what was that lingering smell of perfume, like ashes of roses? Taroudant would have been the obvious suspect, by the unfeasible logic that if he scared her enough she’d suck him off, except that she knew he sensed them too and, more primarily, he lacked the imagination for even that rudimentary ploy. And he never smelled of anything approaching ashes, let alone of roses.
No, ghosts there were in the old, hollow moon. That was the very idea of the place. An army of ghosts, to be resurrected from the crusty regolith in the hour of its primary’s need and thrown into final battle. She’d glimpsed the ranked processors behind their diamond viewing panes, waiting in supercool quantum chill to spin soldiers out of stone, like ice goblins in faerytales. The cold got into her bones, never really got out again, in the long, empty spaces of Planetary Defence System Terror. She floated warily past the empty templates mounted on the walls, breast-plated and beaked like insect warrior armour. Too many eyes, too many toes, too many arms that ended in too many blades, like ever-opening penknives. Slashers stabbers impalers gutters beheaders. All our warfares in the end come down to hand-to-hand. Stick a piece of sharp metal through your enemy. Simple and reliable. Like Taroudant. He came down to the hand-to-hand, in the end. Impale with a pointed weapon. Knob knob knob knob knob. Simple and reliable.