“Fight? For you? In a war? What for?” he had asked his scruffy emanation on their third meeting, a night with the insane tlantoon howling about the pinnacles and stacks of Lyx canyon.
“Bucketloads of money,” Harx II hinted.
“I am an artist,” young Harx had said, bristling at the enormity of the insult. “And anyway, physical transfer between universes violates conservation of mass and energy.”
“Information doesn’t,” Harx II said. “We’ve got ideas.”
Two weeks later he was back.
“I’ll take the bucketloads of money,” Harx I said. “Give me your ideas.”
Show time. The external examiners had decorously hitched their gowns of office to step over the threshold into the quantumoculum. Half an hour later they emerged. Two days after that, they delivered their judgement. This was not art. This was a risible fairground side-show, reeking of the fairground midway and the barker’s shout. A third-class degree. The lowest possible award. In all but name, a failure, for in these days of fiscally sound education and league tables of performance, a failed student meant a slashed budget and a faculty reprimand.
“Okay,” Harx II had said. “You want to make money, stuff art. Found a religion. Here’s one we prepared earlier…”
That day Harx I took the name and nature of devastation.
Back in the contemporary corner of the mirror maze, Harx II chewed at his lower lip in that way Harx I loathed so copiously.
“One wee thing, those two artists. They did a lot of a damage. A lot of damage. We can’t afford any more setbacks like that.”
Ironic, that the angels should have recruited his own brother and that brother’s lover as assassins. That they had been sent to destroy him, Harx I had no doubt. Had it been a desert revelation, the angels boiling out of the heat haze to take them up and show them the name and natures of the multiverse, then tell them exactly who they wanted killed, and how to do it? Bloody A-students. Bones in the dust. He’d seen to that. Never underestimate the longevity of professional jealousy.
“Everything is under control.”
Patently untrue, but Harx I had few qualms now about lying to his counterpart. Let the enemy love-bomb him, let them send who or whatever. He had control of the orbital weaponry, his metal soldiers were burning through the upper atmosphere like autumn meteors and, behind this gaudy diversion, he had accomplished his strategic goaclass="underline" he had stripped the holy codes for the superstring processors out of the St. Catherine entity. Devastation Harx commanded the reality shapers themselves. Nothing could stop him now.
The sound of muffled shouting from the corridor outside gave immediate lie to Harx I’s claim. He whirled. Unregarded, Harx II vanished back into his reality. Last to fade was a puckered frown. His parting words echoed in the mirror maze.
“Just make sure it is.”
More shouting, louder now, and sounds of strife. Voices: Dandeever, calling orders. They were quick, his enemies, but he was ready for them. Mirrors pivoted away from Harx as he hastened from the mirror maze to take command against the attack. Parallel Harxes swung away from him and vanished into the multiverse. One misreflection caught him in midflight. He checked himself, took a cautious step back, seized the edge of the mirror to hold the image. Caught in the silvered glass was a girl, green eyes, brown skin, black curly hair in need of a wash. She wore tattered pants, a sleeveless shirt, an orange track vest. A new addition was the complex pack on her back, and the peculiar gun in her fist.
“You,” Devastation Harx breathed. “Again.”
It was not until Skerry was standing in the open hatch of the United Artists speed dirigible, bungee cords around her ankles, that the thought struck her. What exactly did the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis look like?
Two minutes to curtain up on The End of the World Show. Somewhere out in the thickening fog, Bladnoch lurked in UA2, the big heavy lifter, dream projector warmed up and ready to transmogrify all this mistiness into saints. In the tower-top penthouse that United Artists had requisitioned as command centre for a truly profane fee, Weill received confirmation of funding from Wisdom and immediately generated a credit transfer to Grand Valley Regional Weather’s account. It had been touch and go with the weather workers. Orbital climate systems had brusquely brushed his request for a hundred percent peasouper off to planetside weather control, but Weill could not rid himself of the feeling that they wanted rid of him quickly, that there were things going on up there not for the eyes of the earthbound. Grand Valley Regional Weather had whined about compensation payments to tower-toppers who paid high premiums for sunny skies and unbroken vistas from their panoramic windows and named a figure. Weill laughed. Grand Valley Regional Weather did not.
“Okay, I’ll get you your filthy money,” Weill growled, then spent five minutes he could not afford trying to track down Synodical Security’s Head of Finance through the labyrinth of Wisdom bureaucracy and the planetary communications network only to catch him on an approach shot to the thirteenth at Great Estramadura.
“How much?”
Weill repeated the fee. He heard the sigh.
“It’s yours. It’s transferring now. Now, if you’d be so kind, I’m about to dormy this hole.”
But Weill’s request had put Synodical Security’s Head of Finance off his stroke. He sliced his approach, bunkered, took five to get on to the green and threw away the match. The five-million-dollar five iron.
Mishcondereya’s plague of nano-flies had liberally dosed the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family with hallucinogens, there was a clear window of fifteen minutes to get Skerry in and out before the dosages wore off: she crept in on muffled fans, positioning the speed dirigible over what the satellite images had shown was a shattered glass vault at the apex of the cathedral.
In the command tower, Weill relinquished the command chair for Seskinore, fresh from the ritual ablutions which climaxed his preperformance superstitions which included inside out underwear, never wearing anything blue, singing two bars from “The Five O’Clock Whistle” and allowing no one to use the word bishop. Weill considered it a professional challenge to work in as many natural and logical uses of that last, taboo word as possible when he First ADed to Seskinore. The old ham took two puffs of minty breath freshener, sat ponderously down in the Director’s chair, cracked his walnut-knuckled fingers and donned his virtuality headset.
“And how are we, boys and girls?”
“Boys and girls are ready to rock-’n’-roll.”
The props were all in place, lighting and SFX up to speed, the actors cued and ready, and now Skerry had seen the gaping hole right through the belly of it all. Precious minutes could be lost sorting through racks of religious paraphernalia. She might have to take a hostage, anathema to Skerry. Threaten nastiness. It was a distinct possibility she might not be able to find the saint at all. Skerry thumbed the cabincom and explained her predicament to Mishcondereya.
“Merde,” Mishcondereya said, crackly over the corn lines. A pause, then, “I’ll call Control.” Mishcondereya called Seskinore. Seskinore called Bladnoch out in UA2, who called Weill to call the cave because the old train-witch might have got something about that in that sending. While Weill called the Comedy Cave, Skerry listened to the static on the interphone and tried to make faces out of the swirling patterns. It was a distraction from the stage fright. The fright was a secret she had successfully kept all her professional life: Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm was martyr to that disease of performers. The fear. The shakings; the pacings; the compulsive bouncings of balls on walls; the huddlings in the corner, arms wrapped around knees, rocking and moaning in terror; the discreet throwings up. She recited cantos from the Evyn Psalmody. She performed a Damantine stretch routine, jogged on the spot, chanted tongue-twisters. Anything to push down the dread. On this gig, stage fright could kill you.