Ares Express

18

There was a dome called home by the side of the Trans-Oxiana upline. It was a primeval pressure bubble from the days before the man-forming, orange and breast-like, with a firm heat-exchange nipple erect on the summit. It had stood here for eight hundred years. Anywhere else it would have had preservation orders slapped all over it, been the focus of a heritage park or folk museum. Here in undervisited Great Oxus, atmosphere panels had been torn out, gas-exchange ducts ripped away, the pristine skin of the dome rudely punched into gabled windows and high dormers. Berya and Laventine Prestaine were the inheritors of this vandalism. They and their five-times-removed forebears abided here amongst brown-paper parcels. The Prestaines were a race of postage and parcels operatives for a swathe of terrain a day’s walk from middle to centre, a further day’s walk to the far side. Mantis-like gantries, the design of a second generation Prestaine, dangled their digits over the main line, primed, by a series of heliographs and clockwork devices, to nimbly whisk mail from fast-moving trains and deposit it safely in a lacrosse net. Clothes, mail-order seeds, bicycles, ploughshares, machine parts, dirty books, sports equipment, festival hampers, manuals and guides, wallpapers and paints; all were snatched from the parcel turrets of the big transcontinentals and whisked high. A spring-loaded telpherage shot those on the wrong side of the tracks spryly to the right side, then up the cable and through the dormer into the sun-lit sorting room. It was thin, blurred speed-and-wires work. There Berya and Laventine, now in their twenties, childless for the good of the genepool, sorted and filed in their matching yellow postal aprons. The uppermost chord of the dome was lined with baked-clay pigeonholes, many of them occupied by dusty brown-paper parcels, addresses faded to sepia by the moving trapezium of sun through the dormer. These were the widows and orphans, the unloved uncollected by the twice-weekly power-trike delivery girls.

A woman in black was walking toward the dome this morning. She moved too spryly for her dowdy dowager’s weeds. She kicked at stones, gave the occasional skip, tightrope-walked the slim rail, arms held out at her side. A wink of high sun blinded her; a lens looking down from the observation nipple. Behind the eyepiece of the opticon, Berya Prestaine hooted.

“Lavvy! Lavvy! Pedestrian! Pedestrian!”

His sister peered up from her wicker parcel trolley.

“Pedestrian?”

“Afoot!”

“Let me see.”

She scurried along the ramp that spiralled up the inside of the dome, past the hundreds of labelled pigeonholes, sort codes and alphabeticals, yellowed adhesive tape sun-dried and peeling.

“A woman!” Berya declared. “Afoot!”

The leather eyecup of the opticon confirmed this to wheezing Laventine.

“Afoot or not, we must service her,” the elder sister declared. “We shall open the counter.”

“The counter!” useless Berya cooed, daft as a pigeon.

They were standing behind it, side by side, as Grandmother Taal arrived under the cool striped awning. Their stamps were updated, their record books open, their pencils sharpened, their dockets ready for peel, their scales calibrated, their receipt book triple-larded with carbon paper, their moist pads warm and wet, their rubber thumbs dimpling amiably. All was ready for any conceivable postal transaction.

“Deposit or receipt?” they asked simultaneously.

“I beg your pardon?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“Are you in receipt of a collectable, in which instance we will require your name, address and a form of photographic identification, or have you come to consign an item, in which case the next collection will be the twenty-three fifteen Night Sleeping Service.” Laventine Prestaine stared cock-headed at Grandmother Taal, like a constipated owl. A small worm of drool was crawling from the left corner of Berya’s mouth.

“Twenty-three fifteen?” Grandmother Taal said.

“That is correct, madam.”

“I had hoped to connect with the fourteen oh three Local.”

“The fourteen oh three?” Laventine turned to look aghast at Berya.

“Fourteen oh three?” Berya echoed, staring at his sibling.

“Long gone, madam.”

“Gone gone gone long long long,” Berya fluted.

“But my compendium…” Grandmother Taal took out her vade-mecum, shook it as if she suspected broken clockwork, loose power cells.

“Mergers. All the thing on this line. Leveraged buy-outs. Snapping the tiddlers up, snip snap snip,” Laventine said, smugly. “First thing is shiny new corporate badges. Next is service cancellations.”

“Then when can I get a train? It is imperative that I catch a train.”

“Madam!” Laventine chided. “Where do you think you are? This is not Meridian Main. This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot. Our passengers are inanimate—usually—and wrapped in brown paper. In short, packages, madam. Packages.”

“I have to get a train, my granddaughter—my only granddaughter…She is in great peril…”

Grandmother Taal’s plea hit a layer of institutionalised incest annealed to the backs of the siblings’ eyes and bounced, like moonring-gleam from a starstruck cat. She laid the photograph of Sweetness on the counter. Berya’s hand seized the stamp like a striking snake, lifted it to blast. Laventine barely wrestled him back to the ink pad.

“This is my granddaughter.”

The two biddies clucked and fluffed over the photograph, then shook their heads.

“Never seen her.”

“Never seen, never been, never heard…”

“She would have been in the company of a wall-eyed boy.”

“Wall-eyed?”

Grandmother Taal pulled down a lower lid, rolled her eyeball up. The postal twins reeled back.

“Black hair, like a dust crow. Scruffy. Low caste.”

The twins checked to make sure each other was shaking his or her head.

“Name of Serpio. Waymender. A trainboy.”

“Waymender?” Berya twitched, as if association were a painful tic. He looked at Laventine. “Lavvy Lavvy Lavvy! Waymender! Trainboy!” He poked his finger in his cheek and rolled his left eye.

“My brother seems to have some positive recollection,” Laventine said.

“Your…brother…seems positively imbecilic,” Grandmother Taal said mildly.

“I shall consult the register,” Laventine Prestaine said carefully. Great soft yellow ledger pages curled, breaking waves surfed by spidery copperplate. Forefinger prodded names and deliveries. “Ah hah. Yes. The gentleman in question has indeed received a number of consignments from us. In fact…” She looked over her shoulder, furrowed her brow, unfolded a complex pair of spectacles from her apron pocket and squinted through them at the dusty, sun-shafted interior of the dome. “I knew it, I knew it! There is a collectable for the gentleman in Imminent Returns.”

“Might I see it?”

Laventine Prestaine cocked her head to the other side.

“It is rather irregular.”

“My granddaughter…”

Laventine showed Grandmother Taal how many ways she could purse her lips, then said, “Very well. Berya!” She tore a foil from the receipt book, stuck it to the back of Berya’s hand with tape and squared him up with the door. “Imminent Returns!”

While he wound his way up the spiral and down again, Grandmother Taal tested her new, sharper eyesight on the strict perspectives of the mainline. Not a wisp of steam, not a speck of black steel in the heat-haze, it reported faithfully. Berya Prestaine set the parcel on the counter. It was wrapped in brown paper and bound, neatly, with white string. It was book-shaped and book-sized and, when Grandmother Taal picked it up, book-weighty.

“Might I?”

The Prestaines reacted as if she had suggested an unexpected fisting.

“Open it, open it, open it?” Berya squeaked, hopping from foot to foot like a manic mynah.

“This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot,” Laventine boomed, drawing herself up to her full height. “Prestaines have been postal people since the days of the Rocket Mail. We hold our commission from St. Catherine Herself! Our obligations are sacrosanct. Sacrosanct!” She held a lofty silence, then added, “You may, however, feel it.”

Grandmother Taal ran her fingers over the packet’s contours. It was the size of a book, the shape of a book, the weight of a book, and, absolutely, the feel of a book.

“Is this the return address?”

Laventine peered at the adhesive label on the back.

“It is indeed, and you may count yourself lucky it had not already winged its way back to there.”

“Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.”

“You would be surprised how much mail-order religion we handle.”

“Has he had other deliveries from these folk?”

Laventine pursed her lips, another sour rebuttal armed, then shook her head testily and thumbed through the ledger.

“Yes, here, here, here and here.” Grandmother Taal could make nothing of the black, chitinous scrawl, but the spacing of the entries told her these were regular occurrences. “Here, here; here also, and here…”

“Yes, thank you. Are they all mailed from Molesworth?”

Laventine bent low over the adhesive receipt stickers next to the signatures.

“It would seem so.”

“Molesworth.”

“In Chimeria.”

“My good woman.” Grandmother Taal stiffened, flared her nostrils. “I am an Engineer. I am well aware it is a considerable journey.” Age, once accustomed to its due respect, does not gladly relinquish it.

“By rail,” Berya chirped.

“How else?” Grandmother Taal said sharply, but her mental vade-mecum was mapping routes and matching timetables and flagging halts with an increasing sense of losing the race between steam-powered grandmother and granddaughter on the back of a terrain bike.

“Lookee lookee lookee!” Berya exclaimed, running into the dome and waving his hands gleefully.

“My brother may not be the sharpest chisel in the set, but I defy anyone to better his innate sense for post,” Laventine stated proudly.

He returned wielding a heat-sealed plastic envelope emblazoned with prioritaire and expressissimo stickers. To be opened solely by addressee, warned red corner flashes.

“Ah, yes!” Laventine scanned the address. “I had almost forgotten about this one. We got a message on the radio about it, didn’t we, Berya?” He nodded. “Most important. They’re to pick it up today. Personal issue. Hand to hand.”

She passed the envelope to Grandmother Taal.

“The Glenn Miller Orchestra,” Grandmother Taal read out.

“We’re not unaccustomed to celebrity in our little dome. But the address, woman—read the address!”

“Director of Music, en route, Molesworth, Chimeria/Solstice Landing.”

Laventine and Berya Prestaine stood behind their leather-topped counter as if they had magicked up the whole shebang out of steel, sand and brown paper.

So it was that by midnight, Grandmother Taal was wedged between the trombones and the first clarinets, oppressed by cigarillo smoke and her coccyx bruised by eight hours bouncing over every rock and ant pile on the Solstice Landing trampas. Trainpeople and musicians, though brothers of the soul and historically mutually dependent, have never truly trusted each other. Grandmother Taal herself had too many memories of trashed dining cars and sexual shenanigans among the couchettes. They had a way about them at once overeasy and frighteningly professional; they salted their idle conversation with technical terms that computer scientists or geophysicists, with similar sacred vocabularies, would not have dared intrude into casual conversation. They talked of whole notes and eight bars, they had pappy-os and mammy-os and baby-blues. They spoke sentences where you beat time with a pursed thumb and forefinger and said pah-pah-pah-pah, pah-pah-pah-pah, pahpahpah. They jived over wah-wahs and mutes and leaned together to try out whispered rhythms, dat-da-dah no, try dat-duh-didit-duh, coming in sharp on the first beat and then going two three four five six seven and in and one hand beat five against eight and the other foot did eleven over four. Nothing was ever referred to by its correct name. Horns were bitches; clarinets fags; drums were skins, basses were broads, guitars were axes, saxophones were saxes. Sex sex sex sex sex. The musicians were as publicly intimate with their slang mistresses as teenagers in a city park, blowing into orifices, sticking tongues into slits, running fingers up and down brass nipples, stuffing balled hands into smooth flarings. Their professional hygiene techniques involved copious quantities of saliva and rags. They smoked colossal amounts of bhang. The interior of the big black boogie bus was a tube of blue funk. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain the driver was in control of the big eighteen-wheeler articulated land-train. The begoggled girl behind the wheel could be deliberately steering for the hummocks and mounds. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain she much cared whether she was or not. She leaned to yell at the tall, bespectacled man on the bench seat beside the grim-faced driver.

“How much longer?”

The man in glasses, the legend himself, yelled something to the driver, who yelled back, never once taking her eyes off the darkening trampas.

“She says it’ll take as long as it takes,” the musician reported.

“My granddaughter…”

The band leader bent toward Grandmother Taal.

“Show me again.”

She fished the photograph out of the depths of the universal handbag. It was growing foxed at the edges, the celluloid finish cracking and fanning into soft white petticoats of layered paper. Glenn Miller showed it to the driver. She pushed up her dust-goggles, gave it a look over, then bawled at the King of Swing. He nodded.

“We don’t have to be there until five for the get in, but she’ll try to make it tonight, if everything holds.”

Everything holds.

Grandmother Taal had not been long waiting at the Winged Messenger depot, which was as well, for the Prestaines were not accustomed to hospitality, and a guest of theirs might starve, or die of thirst or sunstroke before they thought to offer shade swig shelter. A stirring of dust on the far side had turned into a black wink of a vehicle, which had turned into a highly unlikely contraption, a long, black tube of a thing, studded with aerials and swivel spotlights, portholes down the sides, a mirror-glass windshield wrapped around its nose, like a snake in shades. It ran on three sets of huge, soft-tired dustwheels, and was articulated in three places, which gave a sly shimmy to its motion. A bus trying to pretend it’s a train, Grandmother Taal thought disdainfully as the device clambered disrespectfully over the tracks and came to a rest beside the Prestaines’ dome.

THE GLENN MILLER ORCHESTRA ON TOUR! declared metre-high white letters along the side of the bus. The Legendary Kings of Swing! the smaller print mentioned as an afterthought. The doors opened, a cloud of aromatic smoke plumed out, followed by a tide of coughing Kings of Swing. Last off was the Man Himself, Glenn Miller, trombone under arm. He stood at the top of the steps, frowning through his thick glasses at this forsaken place in which he found himself. Like most trainfolk, Grandmother Taal was no respecter of celebrity or legend. Gods and men alike paid their tickets. She had been prepared to treat this man, this musician, this band-leader record-maker radio-star jukebox angel, this marquis of mood and earl of easy and duke of jive, this legend that every night set the dark half of the planet jumpin’ and jittin’, as just another passenger. But seeing him there on the top step, the afternoon light glinting off the bell of his trombone, his glasses filmed with dust, she could not. Everything about him said, yes, all that, but that doesn’t matter, for whether it comes or whether it goes, I am now and always have been and always will be, genuine article. A crawl of bona fide awe had licked up Grandmother Taal’s spine.

Never too old for it, Engineer-Amma.

And nice manners too, because when it came to ask him could he, would he, was it possible, an old woman, alone, looking for a lost granddaughter, he had brushed it all away with a lift of his hand and said certainly and gave her his hand to guide her up on to the bus and his handkerchief to tie around her face in case the dust finally defeated the air-conditioning system. Such a nice manner that Grandmother Taal put aside her mistrust of a vehicle that could go anywhere its driver desired and climbed aboard.

With the Prestaine Dome beneath the horizon and the big black bus cutting south by southeast across the arid plains, she had watched Glenn Miller rip open his priority package. She had seen the frown as his eyes danced over the page, his lips shaping unfamiliar syllables.

“Is the tune bad?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“Not bad,” the band leader said. “Strange. The lyrics are challenging.”

Grandmother Taal wanted to inquire deeper, but manners prevented her. Her curiosity—a strong trait among Engineer females—had been intrigued after the great leader told her his ensemble was on a mission of some musical urgency, but a Gubernatorial Pleasance hardly seemed to justify prioritairing a song score into the very arse-end of Great Oxus. Though Chimeria had always been an odd place, and, since the recent elections, grown stranger. Cossivo Beldene, the water and bingo magnate, had swept to power on a populist gusher of regional pride and xenophobia. Grandmother Taal had paid as little and as much attention to the news as any trainperson; insofar as the doings of Passengers impinged on sacrosanct timetables and local contract tariffs. As a child of a long long lineage, she could understand what warmed the people of Chimeria and Solstice Landing in his orations of ancient traditions submerged by candy-coloured kultur and regional identity broken into bite-sized lumps by the hammer of social diversity and dusted with multicultural frosting. As a member of a brown-eyed, coffee-skinned, black-haired mongrel race, boisterous and fecund and fizzing with hybrid vigour, she found this talk of separation and racial purity eugenically unhealthy. She had seen the results of inbreeding laid in dozens of unmarked trackside scrapes. Engineers were a marrying-out people.

That thought took her both backward and forward. Back to her last sight of her granddaughter, standing with one foot cocked back against the drive wheel at the big steaming, chapatti in one hand, plastic glass of beer in the other and that sullen, sullen look in her eye Grandmother Taal admired so much, for properly used it would earn her anything she wanted in this world. Forward to Molesworth, where the Glenn Miller Orchestra would play at Cossivo Beldene’s Inaugural Pleasance, and where, in the intestinally convoluted footways of the old crater port, she might find the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, and glimpse that wanting, dark look in a passing eye.

The photograph caught that look right, Grandmother Taal thought, as it was passed from hand to hand around the bus. Dark, demanding, promising. Men found that look irresistible. But you are just learning that, Grandmother Taal mused. She noted the expressions on the bandsmen’s faces, the dilation of the pupils, the quiet, lewd comments as they looked at the girl. You should hear this, she thought at her granddaughter. You are being paid your due homage. You should know you are admired. Then you will begin to have a sense of your gifts.

The muted sax crept into Grandmother Taal’s sleep with such stealth that she was awake and listening for several bars before she knew it. Glenn Miller was perched on the back of the seat, conducting the soloists. Every lurch threatened to spill him into the first clarinets. The band was practising the new piece. Sheets of music were pin-lit by ceiling spots. The musicians frowned over peculiar passages; the singer, a small, fox-faced woman in clothes with too many fringes, hesitated over the words. They were indeed lyrically challenging. It seemed to have to do with oral sex, and to directly refer to the new Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Grandmother Taal wondered about their appropriateness for a state function. They seemed calculated to provoke political scandal, even law suits. She thought again about the express parcel plastered in priority seals. The timing had been too delicate for a pair of inbred rail-side postal workers. She tried to recall what she knew of Cossivo Beldene. He stood for…What had that slogan been, as oily on the ears, as easily in-and-out as any other? A human world for human beings. No gods, no saints, no angels, just our own hands. Owe nothing to no thing. Our hands, our lands. All manner of whispering money behind those slogans. Big people with big ideas, enough for everyone. Grandmother Taal was a citizen of a subtle and ubiquitous anarchy, with a distrust of dogmas and slogans eight hundred years deep. On principle, she would not vote for anyone who wanted to be elected. This new thing in the old heartlands alarmed her; more so, for the enthusiasm with which citizens, no more and no less political than her, had placed it in their hearts. She could understand how the subtle who ran the unsystem might wish Cossivo Beldene’s governorship terminated in infancy. She looked at the King of Swing, steadying himself with his feet on the bench seat, freeing his hands to count in the instruments. The most powerful government is the one that keeps anarchy in place. But a big band leader? Lulled by the narcotic scent of conspiracy, she dozed off again.

Cold woke her, and voices. The door was open, beams of light were shining up through the windows, darting around the ceiling. The voices had midlands accents and the grate of authority heavy weapons lend.

“Nothing for you here,” she heard Glenn Miller say.

“We’ll be the judges of that,” a man’s voice replied. A torch beam swung over the faces of the drowsing musicians, hugging their instruments. He clambered aboard. He was a big fat farmer, arrogant in his light-scatter armour. He held his General Issue field-inducer wand like an inseminating rod. Outside, his colleagues poked and scraped and thumped at the superstructure. Big Farmer fisted his wrist-light in the face of Second Trombone.

“What you got there?”

“Trombone. Aincha ever listened to the radio?”

“Just the stock prices. Some ID.”

“You what?”

“Something that says you are who you say you are.”

“And who the hell do you think I might be, with this piece of tin under my arm?”

“You could be a subversive.”

“I’m a jazz musician. I’m supposed to be subversive.”

“Show me something with your face on it.”

Second Trombone tetchily handed over his Musician’s Union card. As Big Farmer scrutinised it, a familiar instinct for sedition made Grandmother Taal pop open her carry-all bag, slip out her hand and quietly slide inside the scurrilous song score.

“Eh. You.”

“Are you speaking to me, young man?”

“Did you put something in your bag?”

Big Farmer shot his beam in Grandmother Taal’s face.

“What kind of manners have they got in this place, waking good women up and shining bright lights in their faces?”

“This is Chimeria, old woman, and we’ve Chimerian manners enough for Chimerian people. Your bag.”

Grandmother Taal presented it to him sure in the knowledge that, being a man, he could never master the trick of its nested dimensions. His cow-inseminator’s fingers hooked out trinkets, coin-purses, lip balm, pain-killers, pens, nail scissors. They did not find the sheet music, seven and a half dimensions away. Big Farmer snapped the clips, returned the bag with poor grace, moved to the next.

“How did you do that?” Glenn Miller whispered when Big Farmer had worked his way down to the end of the tour bus.

“Old women’s stuff,” Grandmother Taal replied.

“I owe you,” the band leader said.

Satisfied that there was no subversion on this vehicle, Big Farmer clumped off and waved the orchestra on.

“Who are those men?” Grandmother Taal asked Glenn Miller as she returned his big production number to him. She counted twenty sets of lights, back there in the miles-from-anywhere.

“Call themselves the Chimerian Yeomanry,” the band leader replied. “Keeping their country a good place for law-abiding folk.”

“That was a border, then, that we passed.”

“Seems so.”

Grandmother Taal shuddered. Men with weapons, like borders, and that some people and things could be subversive, in her world-view were unthinkables almost as great as that the sun might fail to rise, or the moons really were a hare and a desert mouse. Though there were no other unscheduled stops that night, the Chimerian Yeomanry had trailed a dust of misgiving through the bus. Welcome was no longer universal or automatic. There were unseen lines of behaviour in the soil. This side of the hill could admit you, the other turn you away. That blade of grass trusted you were who you claimed, but that tree suspected all manner of crimes. This stone would sleep blindly as you drove over it, that one call out men with field-inducers to blast you to nothing. Grandmother Taal eventually found sleep in the subdued bus, but it was grey and broken.

Dawn found the Glenn Miller Orchestra On Tour steering through the staggering landscapes of industrial dereliction of Central Solstice Landing. The craters had been left raw and un-manformed, their crenellated rims studded with guidance radars and command and control bunkers. Once-proud launch towers were spillikins of rusted steel, trellises for creepers and clematis. The grasslands were starred with the glassy scars of tailbursts, healing for a thousand years and still only half-scabbed over. This was a land recovering from a long divorce with the sky. Here feet first walked on the world, in the so-long-ago that it had passed from history into legend. For a thousand and some years ships had come and gone from this cratered plain. Its ruler-straight runways and eroded laser-pits and the fallen arches of EM launch cradles were a chronicle of manned spaceflight. For half an hour the orchestra tracked along the side of the gentle slope of a ground-to-orbit sling-ramp. On the horizon a second could be seen, curving skyward. Ten more of the behemoth constructions, visible even from orbit, were arrayed around Solstice Landing like numbers on a clock. Grassed-over supercore cables finger-ridged the ground; the big bus laboured over them like a caterpillar over a saint’s sandal. Blast walls and baffle plates formed a convoluted cheval de frise; the big band lumbered through the shadow geometry of ship gantries and construction cranes. Whole industries had been abandoned to rust and rot, but no scavengers picked over the postindustrial corpses. No shortage of raw materials on this world of red iron deserts. The rib cages of dead ships rose from the lush grass, the bus’s big wheels clanked over a shed skin of hullplates. The sun rose high over the nose cones of loadlifters forever stogged shin-deep in the loess; corporate pennons from orbital haulage firms long since liquidated rattled raggedly in the edge-of-day breeze.

All would be let fall to rust if Cossivo Beldene and his fiscal masters turned their backs to the stars and closed the skyports. Sealed planet.

And the band played on. Cenotaphs to a space-age rose painfully on every side and the bus boogied its way toward the crater-gates of Molesworth to a medley of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Jackson River Stomp,” “Six-oh-seven-four-five-two,” “String of Pearls,” “Oysters’n’Ale,” “My Summer Love,” “In the Mood,” “After the Love Is Gone,” “South of the Border,” “Silver Star” and “Red Rose Rag.” And that brought the Glenn Miller Orchestra out of the sodium-lit entry tunnel, on to the in-bound arterial and into the warren of towers, tenements and old space-terminus architecture of Old Molesworth.

Grandmother Taal of course had visited this ancient city many thousands of times, but these narrow, canyon streets, through which the bus squeezed as if it were being born, were an alien world to her. Molesworth’s main station, like much of the city’s primal infrastructure, was underground, buffered from the fusion blasts of immigrant ships by good thick stone. Molesworth, ancient port and first capital of the world, with a reputation for no-nonsense dourness and graft, was celebrating in the same spirit. The streets had been slung with celebratory bunting in Cossivo Beldene’s Unity Rising Party’s red, black and green; racks of fireworks were fixed to every balcony rail to ejaculate electoral triumph into the sky; bloated piñadas in the shape of the Gubernator swayed from the streetlights, to be split open at the perfect moment and shower the upturned faces with gifts from their distended bellies. The Glenn Miller Orchestra advanced through the jubilee. Its reputation had gone before it: kids crammed the tiered tenement balconies to danger-point, teenagers wearing favourite album covers on their heads like mitres paced the slow, lumbering bus. Shoppers in the arcades waved, startled that a piece of real legend was fighting its way through their quotidian streets. Coffee sellers and nimki vendors angrily pushed their carts out of the big band’s path, then read the name on the side and heard the jive coming from within and knew a little glow of pride that their Gubernator could command the biggest and the bestest. As it negotiated the lanes, the boogie bus’s whip aerials set wash-day blues swinging from ’tween-verandah lines, mud-flaps spilled barrows of oranges and sent daily scandal sheets flapping on the eccentric winds that inhabited the labyrinth. Goondahs and urchins jeered and pelted the windows with street-dung. The bus driver, grinning manically beneath her goggles, hooted furiously at them. Glenn Miller, with a musician’s fine disregard for niceties, signed for his brass section to blow all the harder. Grandmother Taal was handjiving with the rest (Mother’a’mercy, it didn’t hurt!) when the driver pulled on the brake and the band jolted to a halt under the tradesperson’s entrance of Molesworth’s venerable High Rathaus. It was an expansive, rambling building, like a fat old great-grandparent who cannot quite control his limbs on the sofa and sprawls all over his neighbours, built on many levels over and under and through the surrounding buildings. Civic Guilders in velvet knee breeches led the band members through a labyrinth of corridors, staircases, halls and lobbies to the main festhall. Leaving Grandmother Taal standing by the bus clutching her bag, looking up at the overhanging galleries and orioles of the Rathaus and the black doorway that had swallowed an entire big band.

Glenn Miller beckoned to her.

“Come on.”

“I have a granddaughter to find.”

“That you surely do, but I don’t think you even have an idea where to begin.”

“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family has a mail-order department here.”

“The Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family will be at the Pleasance,” Glenn Miller said. “Devastation Harx was a major contributor to Beldene’s election fund.”

“How do you know this?” Grandmother Taal said warily.

“I’ve got my own bag of secrets.” This last with a glitter behind the pebble glasses. “Come on. If nothing else, you need to eat. And anyway, I owe you, remember?”

A big band setting up is of marginal interest to non-musicians so after her mint tea and morning rolls Grandmother Taal asked a velveteen usher to show her the way to the street and she spent the morning wandering affably confusing alleys looking for anything church-like, ever-circling, or spiritually familial. She found nothing fitting those criteria, and the one mail-order warehouse she came across shipped hand-made fetishwear, but she did catch a curious climate in Molesworth’s decked laneways. A city’s mood is a subtle thing, divided among many people and activities, but it showed itself in glances, habits, touches; details of life. Heaped in the middle of a street Grandmother Taal found a dead machine, some indeterminate civic servitor, now terminated. Molesworthians skirted around it without regard or respect. No one had shown even the small grace to close its gaping ports and sockets. Grandmother Taal could not rid herself of the suspicion that it had been murdered. And the parasols! On a grey day of overcast. Silk white parasols, citizens huddling from the sky. All along the Marche shop awnings were pulled out in a continuous swoop of striped canvas, on Long Drag and Steel Market the sunny central strips of the streets were deserted, the morning shoppers clinging to the shade of the arcades. Over morning tea in a dusty plaza encircled by top-heavy tenements she tuned between conversations with the practised discrimination of the elderly. Grazestock prices could be better. Aye, and a bad turn of the weather. In next week for the hip job, and couldn’t I do without it? Keep calling at the door and I’ve told them he hasn’t lived there in a halfyear but will they believe me? Tea’s not what it used to be; they scorch the leaves. Waited half an hour, half an hour, then three came at once and there were bloody kids rampaging all over them. Well, I for one won’t be out waving my little flag, waste of the taxpayer’s dollars, if you ask me. Strangers in town, and foreigners too. Nothing in the news these days: wireless soaps and pelota-players’ wives.

Trivial in themselves, these gripes and scraps betrayed the deeper climate of moaning that Grandmother Taal had sensed in Molesworth’s streets. These were uneasy people. This was an uneasy grandmother, sipping her mint tea and decorously breaking her almond madeleines. A perpetual foreigner in every town she visited, this was the first time she felt like a stranger. As the waiter counted the change from his pouch, she asked him if he knew of a Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.

“No madam, but I do know now that they have a mail-order depot over in Sunny Mallusk. The brother works there.”

“And where might that be?”

He drew a map on the back of the receipt in silver pencil. It was a few hundred metres but many turns away. Grandmother Taal had to check with locals that she had taken the correct number of rights and lefts. Sunny Mallusk was a dour, yellow-brick huddle of tall, steep-gabled, small-windowed warehouses around a square in which litter rattled, stirred by a stable system of microtornadoes. Two Malluskers had never heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family but a third had and directed her to a buff-coloured door with a hatch at eye level. Her knock was greeted by an eye at the hatch.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for my granddaughter.”

“Who is?”

“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Grandmother Taal said in one breath.

“Nah,” said the eye. “No one here by that name.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d be sure.”

The tip of Grandmother Taal’s stick stopped the hatch from snapping shut.

“I don’t suppose a Mr. Devastation Harx is on the premises today?”

“You suppose correct.”

“But he is in town?”

“He’s up for the bash.”

“The Inaugural Pleasance.”

“Aye. That.”

“Will he be calling here?”

The eye hatch shot open again. A sigh came from beneath the eye, which was a very dark blue, and showed much sclera.

“Look lady, I just run the depot. If he comes, he comes, if he don’t, he don’t. He’s holy; that’s what holy people do, or don’t do. If you’re that desperate to see him, bluff your way into the bash, whatever. Me, I’ve got orders to fill.”

The eye vanished from behind the hatch. For an instant Grandmother Taal had a powerful perspective view of a corridor of shelves, racked a hundred high, dwindling to a vanishing point that she suspected lay beyond the physical bounds of the building. Tiny figures suspended from rope harnesses floated up and down the mile-long-aisle, filling baskets slung from their waists with religious wares. Then the buff metal slide slammed shut and, by reversing the order of the directions on the waiter’s bill, Grandmother Taal found her way back to Molesworth’s thronged Viking-Lander Plaza.

A clanging tram wormed through the intestinal streets to drop Grandmother Taal at the Rathaus. Down by the stage door an altercation was taking place. It involved the following elements: an eclectic group of four fronted by a stocky young woman with spiky hair—clearly furious—a girl in a spangled bikini with silver boots and hoolie-hoolie feathers in her hair—clearly impatient—and a flatbed truck with the legend “Let ’Em Eat Cake!” printed on a side-tarpaulin and a cylindrical, ziggurat structure on its back. The issue seemed to be this object, which Grandmother Taal concluded must be a cake, of the kind from which girls in spangled bikinis and hoolie-hoolie feathers leap at appropriate moments.

“Let me have a look,” the stocky girl demanded and climbed on to the back of the flat bed. Let ’Em Eat Cakers in formal Patissiers’ Guild bibs stood aside, awed by the biceps swelling from her sleeveless vest. She hugged the uppermost cylinder of the surprise cake and wrestled it until the cords of her throat stood out like guy ropes. Panting, she harangued the master bakers.

“It’s supposed to come off. It doesn’t come off. Why is this? It won’t work if it doesn’t come off. We paid you a lot of money for it to come off.”

Master Baker gave a gesture at once shrug and bow.

“It could have albumenised in the ovening.”

The woman stared at him at if he had suggested public fellatio.

“Albumenised? What is this?”

“Albumen molecules could undergo a lacto-gluten reaction to form a polymer mass,” the baker said. The woman stared at him.

“Over-egged the pudding,” his Prentice explained.

The woman swore and went to her colleagues. The five talked among themselves, with many hand motions and furious glances from the little muscley woman. Sensing as-yet unspecified opportunity, Grandmother Taal moved close. From the frequency with which the word was used, the strong, fierce woman seemed to be called Skerry. A tall, wire-thin man, soft spoken, with skin so black it swallowed light, was her chief supporter in her arguments with a pale, languorous girl with jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it and an air that communicated studied artiness even to a trainperson. She was lieutenanted by an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville. The fifth member, a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth, took no side but neither missed a chance to slide in a sarcasm.

Grandmother Taal took an innocent sidle nearer. Between Skerry’s dogged fury and the luvvie-girl’s—Mishcondereya’s—sighings and soft competence-assassinations, Grandmother Taal deduced that it was of regional, perhaps even planetary importance that silver-boots girlie leap out of the cake just as the Glenn Miller Orchestra struck up the intro to the song they had collected at the Prestaines’ Parcel Depot. Due to albumenisation, or some other error in contemporary baking, this was not going to happen, there now wasn’t time to bake another cake, and this was a Very Bad Thing.

Very Bad Things promised Very Interesting Consequences. Grandmother Taal drew near.

“Excuse me,” she ventured. “If I might interrupt; I may be able to assist.”

Animosities were forgotten. Five faces turned on her. Grandmother Taal forestalled the barrage of comment.

“I just have to know one thing. Is the cake chocolate?”

“Finest forty percent mocha first-melt high-bean mix,” the Master Baker sang out.

“Good!” Grandmother Taal said. “Give me that.”

Dreadful Teeth boy carried a knife in his boot-top. In one motion she scooped it out, unclasped it and before any hand could stop her, carved the word open on the back of her hand. She held the bleeding fist up to the cake. The ziggurat quivered. Molesworth Patissiers stepped back. The great cake heaved. The cake quaked. Bakers abandoned truck. In a spray of crumb, butter-cream and carob frosting, the top of the cake sprang open like the hatch of an overheated boiler. While every head was turned and every mouth open, Grandmother Taal flung the knife square between its owner’s boots. The boy bent to retrieve it, squinted small respect out from under his greasy fringe.

“Impressive, for an ould doll.”

He folded the knife and slid it into the smooth leather with a polished snick. While the bikini maid wriggled into the cake Grandmother Taal made bold to introduce herself.

“You trainies have good names,” he said, with his way of looking toward-but-not-at the person to whom he was speaking that made Grandmother Taal wonder if he were homosexual. “I’m just Weill.” Unused to the pronunciation, Grandmother Taal at first thought it was a self-description. “Neat power. What is it, some kind of family heirloom?”

“Things that are brown only.”

“Hey, that has a kind of…cloacal…potential.” He sucked in his top lip and nodded his head and studied the toe of his left boot. He shifted his feet in sudden decision, fished in his pockets for a card on which he scrawled in handwriting no less dreadful than his teeth. He presented it to Grandmother Taal. It was thick, creamy vellum, scalloped and gold-edged, an invitation to the Inaugural Pleasance of Cossivo Beldene as newly Elected Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Table twenty-five, nine minutes of nine, dress formal.

“Or as formal as you can get,” the ratty Weill said. “Personal guest of Weill, of United Artists.”

A dozen questions sprang to Grandmother Taal’s lips but Weill was already walking away to rejoin his compadres in manoeuvring the cake through the stage door. He turned only to call back to the once-old woman standing in the alley: “It’s all right, it’s official. They won’t bounce you. The others won’t like it but I’m the anarchist one, and I think you should see what you actually put a hand in. It’ll be funny.”

With that the great cake sailed through the double doors into the darkness of the kitchen and Grandmother Taal, gilt-edged invitation in hand, was left standing among Patissiers, doubting the sanity of every soul on the streets of Molesworth.