A woman was seated on a boudoir stool. She saw the apparition in the mirror stumbling in from the direction from which no apparition should stumble. She froze in the brushing of her long brown hair, half scooped back behind her left ear. She turned.
Pharaoh could see nothing but the bud-like ear, pierced for a single stone, and the mahogany hair tucked behind it. It seemed to open before him like a maw. He was falling into his own ear.
“My ear,” he mumbled. “Give me back my ear…”
He lunged at the woman, whose name was Tallysker Merie Thrinton. She leaped spryly away, swiping at Pharaoh with the hairbrush.
“Kidnapper!” she yelled. “Sky-pirate, abseiling hijacker! I’ve heard of people like you, come in on airships all quiet and steal people. Well, my husband has no money, it’s all in bonds, he can’t get it out. I’m as worthless alive as dead…”
“My ear,” Pharaoh said soggily and dived for it, fingers hooked to claw it from the misappropriator’s head. The hairbrush caught him underneath the jaw. He spun round once and was cold before he hit the fur pile.
Pharaoh regained consciousness with two dominant impressions. The first: he was as cold wet shivery filled with pain and hungry as ever. The second: two granite pairs of hands held him in a stern grip, supine, like a battering ram. Like that battering ram, his head was being aimed toward a small hatch in a riveted metal bulwark.
“Help!” he bleated.
“Oh ho,” said one pair of granite hands. By twisting his head, Pharaoh could follow the leather-clad arms up to the padded shoulders and helmet-covered head of Paradise View Apartment Services: 17. “Trash.”
“You know what we do with trash,” the other pair of hands, connected by identical sleeves to identical shoulders and a helmet that differed only in that it read Paradise View Apartment Services: 24.
Then Pharaoh saw the wording on the steel hatch: Refuse Disposal Chute.
“Bastards!” he started to shout as the two security men broke into a charge. His head clanged painfully against the hatch. Pharaoh was looking down a short, sharp metal slide into a bottomless pit. Plastic shopping bags, sanitary towel cover sheets and pieces of tissue paper flocked on the thermals that spiralled up from the dark depths of the titanic rubbish shaft. As he was held there, head down toward disposal, he heard a clank from above and a collection of individual cereal packets tumbled past him into the darkness of the abyss. He let himself slide. His fingers scrabbled for a firm grip but his shoulders were wedged in the hatch, he could get no purchase. By slow degrees, he was being tilted down the chute.
“Allez oop,” he heard Number 17 say, then a scuffle of feet and two muffled retorts. Pharaoh slid a centimetre, two, five. Like this? he thought. Born trash and died trash. Then an unknown, higher-pitched voice shouted, “Get a hold of him,” and he felt his ankles seized by numerous pairs of hands. A lurch and his shoulders came free.
Another and he shot from the hatch like a silver trout from an apprentice tickler’s fingers to lie gasping and shivering on the mesh flooring. Teenage faces appeared over him, none older, most younger than his own. They were daubed with stripes and smears of blue and yellow warpaint and hair gel was obviously their chief expenditure. Blinking certain death out of his eyes, Pharaoh scanned down his saviours as he had scanned up his executioners. They favoured sleeveless T-shirts and leather vests and pants with too many pockets tucked into boots with too much metal. Their wrists were bound in gizmotry, they carried beanie guns in over-elaborate holsters and from complex packs on their backs barely visible diamond-fibre lines ran up in to the dazzle of ceiling lights.
“Safe to lift?” said the one with the yellow under each eye, who seemed to be the head one, though his voice was hardly broken. A teen warrior with green streaks in his hair and henna tattoos on his well-developed biceps knelt to poke at Pharaoh.
“Eh!”
“Safe enough.”
“Then let’s get vertical!”
Before question or protest, more hands seized Pharaoh. Motors churned a second, then captors, captive and all were whisked straight up into the darkness.
“The Vertical Boys, that’s what they call themselves,” Pharaoh said. “Los Verticales.”
“There’s lots like that, up here,” Sweetness said. “I seen them up on the glass; kids’ nations, all that stuff. Runaways, thinking like they’re kings. They aren’t as flash as they think they are.”
Again, the thought of the fall of the Seven-Ups Girl Nation. Thought, and immediately unthought. Would it have been worth being a chandelier not to feel guilty about surviving? Stupid. Almost as stupid as diving over a thousandth-level balcony because all you could do was trust that you were still a story.
“They just want a place of their own, that’s all,” Pharaoh said. “Bastards won’t let you live, up here. There’s enough room for a million Vertical Boys, but even if they don’t use it they’re not going to let you have it. Their umpteen-times grandfather cleaned glass for this, you know. They earned it; and what have we done to deserve it? You got to fight. You got to squat on it and say hey, it means so much to you, you take it off me. That’s all these people understand.”
Sweetness rolled on to her side, tucked the blankets around her in a way she hoped was kitteny and cute. An idea was forming.
“So how many of them are there?”
“Two, three hundred.”
It must be cosy and reeky in those little plastic bladders. Sweetness’s estimate, from her queasy survey of the Vertical squatter-town, had been considerably lower. Two hundred was good. Three hundred, excellent.
“With beanie guns,” she said. “You going to stun them to death?”
“Hey, those beanie guns saved my ass, so I could save your ass from those furniture folk.”
“Okay okay, so that’s us even on the I-owe-you-my-life stakes. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but sometimes an outside viewpoint can give a whole new perspective on things—but you’ve got like one razor between the lot of youse and these window-cleaning aristos, one click of the fingers and there are two divisions of mercenaries sticking their laser-sights up your hole. Right now, you’re just a mild irritation. Moment you ever start to look like a threat, you’re all either down the chute or you’re in the black suit with your balls sticking out like two eggs in a handkerchief. Now, if you had weapons, and I mean real weapons, you could take these people by surprise. Blow them clean out in one go.”
She gave Pharaoh a teasing glance, loosened her shirt under the blankets and let her mantle slip a little. How long since you glimpsed the sweet and unaffordable flesh of a fine woman, railrat?
“What do you know about weapons?”
“I know there’s Gatlings and lasers and hunter-droids, man, not a day’s sail from here.”
“Tell me more.”
“Oh, I will, but first, I have to tell you a little story. It’s about St. Catherine, and mirrors, and a flying cathedral…”
27
Foolish folk will tell you that trains are intrinsically happy things. They are bright, speedwell creatures of pomp and steam, like well-fed cheerful uncles. They take people on journeys and life, such folk believe, is journey. A train is a thousand stories, each carriage, each compartment, each seat row crammed more full with motive and emotion and drama than any book. If, as the Masters of Narratology maintain, all story is journey; the converse is also true; there is no journey that does not have a story in its ticket price. Trains bringing lovers together. Trains carrying hopeful families to new lives. Trains taking bright young people to brilliant success in the cities. Trains taking the old to meet the new generations of their people. Engines of change, garlanded with flowers. Happy things.