Belladonna.
He had made it. He had arrived.
He clenched his fists in private triumph, let a slow, sly “yes” slip across his lips.
Instantly he felt fingers at his pocket. He turned: gone. Faces. The Grand Trunk Rapido was disembarking, a flood of faces. Pharaoh shrugged. So. Everything he valued, he carried inside his clothes, and up there, the sun was shining.
Belladonna.
Made it.
“Long way between down there and up here,” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th observed as she tugged the blankets tighter around her and tried to ignore the swaying of the little webbing nest.
The shaking had soon passed, eased with cups of a herbal brew that left twiggy bits in the gaps of her teeth. Picking at them too vigorously, Sweetness noticed that she was setting this little globular nest of plastic, webbing and soft fabrics in which she had found herself swaying. Before Pharaoh could stop her, she had stuck her head out through the entrance slit and found herself looking down through five kilometres at the sinuous terraces of Canton Czystoya.
“Oh whoa,” Sweetness had said, queasily, and crept back into the draughty comfort of Pharaoh’s nest.
“More tea?”
“I think I could, yeah.”
Because it was all story, it was necessary not just that she be rescued from the Point of Worst Personal Threat by a daring swoop out of the big blue, but that the daring swooper be a character she had last encountered before she properly understood what it was to be a story and have improbable things happen around you. Ironic too; the saviour saved. Now she understood what the Teacher of the Air had been going on about in all those lessons about story and structure and narrative. All you had to do was throw yourself off the thousandth-level balcony of a pier-top manor. Irony on irony; the meat Lotto winner from the pits under Meridian should end up some kind of vertical goondah in a squatter town of pods and cocoons hanging like grapefruit from the heat-exchange vanes of Pier 11738.
Some folk just got the hooverville in the genes, Sweetness supposed. Never get away from it. Like some people got trains. At least the view’s better, and you get to crap on the people below.
“It’s easy to get trapped, so,” Pharaoh said in his soft, hesitating way, his head half turned so she would not have to look at one price he had paid to make it all the way up here.
Yeah, Sweetness thought and remembered those other men she had met who, one way or another, had trapped themselves. Uncle Neon, literally so, fused into the global signalling network, his soul blasted into some alternative world less friendly than this. The doctor, free to go as far into the futures and pasts as he liked, but only within the confines of the town he had invented. Bedassie with his dream cinema playing every night to an audience of zombies because any applause was better than the sound of your own feet walking off stage. Cadmon and Euphrasie: weird butty-boys. Building things and blowing them up again and not caring if anyone ever saw or knew. Bones in the sand now, with no one caring or knowing, because they’d let head stuff—politics, art, aesthetic outrage—drive them to war with Harx. He was at art school with them? So what was this Church of the Ever-Circling things then? Big big art—so they got jealous, or sell-out? Trapped. Leading of course to him. Serpio. Trapped like the rest of them. Terrible, the things mail order can lead to. Now this Pharaoh guy, again. You give some folk the key to the box, they walk out, take a look, decide it’s not for them, then they turn around and walk right in again. When station rats look at heaven, they see just a bigger station, with better retailing.
You need to cultivate a different flavour of males, Engineer.
So? What’s so different about you, cutie? All this is working, all these adventures are happening, all this story stuff you tell yourself, because one evening you walked into a trackside booth and you’ve never really walked out again. You’re still in there with the falling beans, balancing on those skinny sticks.
Trapped, like the rest of them.
She didn’t like the track this train of thought was taking, so she prompted, “So, what was it about Belladonna, then?”
The boy leaned back against the yielding skin of his bubble. Sweetness tried not to think of the terrible void outside.
“No kids.”
“Explain this.”
“Not the city—never got out into the city, not the city proper. The station. I walked down the platform on to the concourse and just stood there, looking around me, because I knew something wasn’t right, so, but I couldn’t smell what it was. I mean, there were travelling people and staff and people selling food and shining your shoes and reading your cards and selling you travel insurance and all that passenger stuff but there was something not right. Something missing, you know? So there I was, standing under the Diamond Clock with all these people rushing around past me and then it hit me. Where were the kids?”
Sweetness understood. Not passenger stuff. Not the grouchy four-year-olds dressed in their breeches and frocks for their Dedication at the shrine of their Celestial Patroness. Not the bouncy T-shirts and shorts kids off for their holidays at the seaside or in the mountains or some desert spa. Not the school parties roped together by the wrists off on an educational jolly to the chasmside colleges of Lyx. Not the commuting high-schoolers burning holes in the upholstery with their illicit cigarillos, stopping off at the shopping levels before traipsing on home. The track kids. The seen-but-unseen kids. The world’s mainline termini teemed with vermin children: water sellers, hotel touts, street performers, beggars, get-rich-quick pamphleteers, hawkers of burgled goods, apprentice pimps, rent-boys, sucky-sucky girls, shoe shines, con-artists, muggers, teen dacoits, cut-purses, luggage-slicers, street sleepers and trash. Those pinched ferret faces Sweetness had seen peering up between the sleepers. In her professional capacity, she accepted them as you accept fleas on a dog, had even come to relegate them to background noise, as trainpeople of necessity learn this skill, but any station, let alone Belladonna Main, with its five million transits every day and night, without kids was more than peculiar. It was improper. It was a full quarteryear since Catherine of Tharsis had last drawn in to a stand on the crystal cantilevers of Belladonna Main—a succession of dreary if lucrative heavy haulage contracts had kept the trainfolk out on the industrial circuit—but such a total pogrom of the vermin could only have come from radical changes in station hierarchy.
“Karen Kupelski,” Pharaoh said quietly. The high winds soughed in the support webbing. “Concourse and Franchise Management. Heard about her later. After, you know.”
“She cleared out all the tunnels and chased them off the concourse.”
“More’n that. She sold them. Made a lot of cash out of the deal. That was the idea; they were going to put out shares or something like that, I don’t know; anyway, they need a boost of quick cash, so Karen Kupelski, she’s three weeks in the job and says, I got an idea! Watch me kill two birds with one stone! In come the railway police with torches and hunting cheetahs and sonics and gas and all that. Rounded them all up, put them in containers, shipped them out as night freight. Result, happy shareholders and passenger complaints way down for the quarter. There’s a lot of people out there’ve got a use for a spare kid. Them ones I lifted you from…”
“The furniture folk.”
“Them, they’re not the worst by any means. Not by a long way, no.”
Children as resources. Feedstock. Sound economic sense to recycle your trash. Sweetness shivered: memories of being an almost-chandelier. She thought about the others, ever-ready for dinner, shedding light from a plastic flambeaux, then unthought, guiltily.