In the afternoon the bike passed at some distance another Promethean domestic artifact; an ironing board on which entire stratocumuli could have been pressed and creased. A spindly mesa, it occupied the western horizon for many tens of kilometres. The tail of its huge shadow marked the beginning of the desert proper.
“Into that?”
Sweetness was doing her far-seeing-balance-on-the-seat feat again. Serpio refilled the canteens from a sandy little spring that meandered a way among black tar-thorn and shrub casanthus until it tired of its own energy and the red sand drank it down. The scent of deep rock water was rich in the air.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Sweetness’s left hand stopped him stoppering the flasks. Her right dropped in two purifying tablets.
“Are you questioning my direction?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because for the past two days I’ve been staring at the middle of your back and trusting implicitly that you’ve got some idea where you’re going, and now I really, really got to be sure. I just want to be sure, that’s all.”
“We’re going out there, yes.”
“Okay. Now, why?”
“There’s someone I want to meet, out there.”
“Out there?”
“People live in deserts.”
“People die in deserts.”
“Harx lives out there.”
“Harx who?”
Serpio was swinging back on to the saddle. He kicked at the starter. The ol motor cleared its throat; dry and dusty in the tubes.
“You coming?”
You’re rushing me, Sweetness thought as she shook up the canteens. You don’t want me to ask about this. You’re taking me to meet someone/thing but you don’t want to talk about him/it. Anywhere else, that would have been that to you and your terrain bike, matey. But when the last other person you have seen was a dour Deuteronomian Peripatete and he had discreetly shooed you away because he had taken a Vow of Seclusion, you get up behind the saddle.
“So, this Harx.”
“What about him?”
“I heard you mention him before.”
He did not reply but the muscles beneath his sweat-stiff workclothes said, Oh? What? Shit, secrets to keep to Sweetness’s fingers.
“Back then, where they did that thing. You know. With the…meat.”
A pause of half a kilometre. Sorry sorry sorry, Sweetness thought. It was bad and I shouldn’t remind you of it but I have to know.
“Oh, yeah.”
“You mentioned this Harx guy. So who is he?”
“He’s holy.”
“That explains it then.”
“Explains what?”
“People who live in deserts are either mad, bad, sad or holy.”
He said nothing for the next twenty kilometres, or so it seemed to Sweetness, hovering on the numb edge of sensory deprivation between the encircling haze and the dank man-odour of Serpio’s shirt. When he did talk, it was in a voice so soft and alien to him that it was as if the sand had spoken.
“He’s not mad or sad or bad, but he is holy.”
It was a major effort of will for Sweetness to pull her soul back from the horizon, to which it had been reeled out by the flat red land and spread into a thin, encircling line.
“Unk?”
“He’s good to me. He helps me. He respects me. I’ve got something that’s useful to him, he needs me. The others; they’ll all see, when he comes. They’ll look up and their mouths, they’ll just fall open like fishes in a bucket, and then they’ll see.”
“I’m a bit unclear about this…”
“Have you ever heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“You will. Everyone will…”
“Could we maybe do a little less of the big doomy when it all comes down stuff, and just start at the beginning?”
A pause, in which a skittering lizard hoicked itself up on its rear limbs and hot-legged it away over the burning sands.
“You ever listen to the radio real late at night?”
“Of course. Everyone does that.” On the trains it was how you reminded yourself you were young and cute and a kid like hundreds of millions of others out there in the non-moving world. The voices in the dark of your room, close to you in your bed, a dozen different tongues in your ear a night.
“You ever listen to the religious stations?”
Sweetness’s fingers had twirled the dial over the thousands of shouting pleading hectoring lecturing wheedling whining canoodling seducing scolding trumpeting voices jammed one on top of the other in the low medium wave. Her world bred religions like a dog fleas, and they all could afford air-time.
“I’m more a music person, me.” Pertinent to which, Sweetness realised that for an indefinite but long time now the handlebar wireless had played nothing but airglow. Scary biscuits. A place where the radio wasn’t. On the far shore of the airwaves.
“Yeah, well. Anyway, that’s where he found me, in the Godband.”
“You found him, you mean.” A random twiddle of the knobs.
“No. He found me. He was talking right at me.”
“Yah. Right.”
“No. Really. He called me, by name. He said, ‘And this is going out for Serpio Six Tuesday-Duodecember-Twelfth-Raining Sebendary Waymender.’”
“Nah. Someone set you up. One of those…other ones, back there.”
“No. Listen, will you? He saw me, same way as I see your friend there.”
“He had this, spirit-sight? Angel-vision? What the hell do you call it anyway?”
“The sight.”
“This ‘sight,’ so does it have a limit like normal sight, like perspective, or does it just not bother with things like that?”
“It does, but you can train it, and then it’s naturally more highly developed in some than others.”
“Higher spiritual beings. Of course.”
“Look, if you’re going to be cynical…”
“Sorry. I’m an Engineer.”
They passed a tangle of bones and Sweetness thought hard about cynicism in big deserts.
“Go on.”
“He saw me, he knew I had the sight, and he told me the Ever-Circling Family needed the sight to help them in the fight.”
“The sight, and the fight.”
“You can say what you like, but it’s a battle. This whole world’s a battle, it’s been a battle since before it was invented.”
The pause invited the question: “Who’s fighting?”
“Men and angels.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. Believe me. You think this world was made for us? We’re just human shields. They can’t wipe the angels out now because they keep the manforming systems running. Like the magnetic field. This place doesn’t have one, naturally, so there are these huge superconducting magnets up there in orbit. You’ve heard of vanas?”
Sweetness had always thought of the orbital mirrors as too lowly even to be proper angels, until the night in Inatra a spotlight from heaven lit her way home.
“They keep the weather working. This place isn’t like the Motherworld, it doesn’t have that feedback system so the whole thing always stays right for life. Well, not yet. The climate here is simple, like not complex. You wouldn’t know what that means, but basically, if left to its own devices, it would get stuck in a loop and you’d get the same weather over and over and over again. The vanas, they heat the atmosphere up so you get these pockets of randomness, so the climate doesn’t get stuck. That’s just two. There’s thousands, but the point is they keep the whole world alive, and they know it. They don’t need any of that stuff, they’d be as happy if this place was rock and ice, like it was, before, but then they wouldn’t be safe. We make them safe, and that’s why they let us come here.”