“In a minute,” Devastation Harx said. “Tour continues.”
The elevator touched bottom. Devastation Harx led his guests along a curving corridor.
“Post room,” he said, throwing open a door on to a room where people in purple milled around a long table piled with envelopes, labelling machines and plastic crates filled with brochures, tracts and three-fold flyers. All Swing Radio blared. “Heart of the Empire. As soon as we hit Molesworth we’ll do a mail-drop.”
“So you’re saying,” Sweetness went on as the door closed on King Jupe and his Mint Juleps, “That my sister isn’t my sister at all. That she’s some kind of angel that’s got attached to me.”
“Not any sort of angel…” Serpio began and promptly tripped over.
“Careful,” Devastation Harx admonished. He helped the trackboy up but Sweetness could have sworn she saw the tip of his swagger-stick flick out and tangle itself between Serpio’s ankles. “Must be turbulence. You get odd thermals coming up off the old terrain.” He flung open another door. “Central processing.”
A starkly rectangular room, sinisterly underlit by floor-lights, was filled rank upon rank with wooden prie-dieus. Each bore an acolyte devoutly bent over a wooden abacus. Fingers flicked, beads ricocheted. The air was filled with soft clicking, like a locust army mustering.
“Simple, efficient and good for eye-hand coordination.”
The bead-counters did not look up as their guru passed up an aisle. Some moved their lips silently, eyes reading the shifting digits.
“Data Storage is next door. You haven’t signed on for my ‘Be a Master of Memory’ course, have you?” That, to Serpio. To Sweetness: “People don’t realise half their potential. Entire human faculties atrophy and rot because we hand them over to machines. That, pretty much in a nutshell, is my philosophy. A human world for a human species.”
Sweetness looked around at the human calculus.
“Who feeds everyone?” she asked. “And who makes all the purple gear? And what do you do with the night-soil?”
Devastation Harx clapped his hands softly in delight.
“I so enjoy trainpeople. They’ve such a stubbornly pragmatic bent.”
“You’ve got trainpeople?”
A door at the far end of Central Processing took them back into the circulare corridor. It seemed to Sweetness that it took them back to exactly the point they had left. They processed on.
“I’ve got every kind of people. Our motto.” It was inlaid in marquetry in the wooden wall panelling, bird’s-eye maple and gnarled walnut on ash.
“‘We’re no angels.’ Hah.”
“Then again,” Devastation Harx said thoughtfully, “Trainpeople do live a little too close to their machines.”
“So, what is it with you and these angels, who you say aren’t really angels at all, then?”
“What it is, Ms. Engineer, is, I intend to fight a war against the angels.”
Sweetness stopped dead.
“You what?”
Devastation Harx turned to face her. He rested his hands on the ferule of his cane. Sweetness noticed that Serpio was now standing behind him. Airship, mad-lands, big desert, three kilometres straight down, she thought. How can I make these into an escape plan that doesn’t involve me falling to my death?
“I thought I’d made myself quite clear. I intend to engage these angels—who, as you observed, are nothing of the sort—in battle. And I intend to defeat them.”
Sweetness laughed. It was louder than she had intended, and nastier.
“Let me get this straight. There’s about two hundred and fifty thousand angels up there? Like so many they make a ring round the world? That’s not to mention all the ones that got left behind down here. They’ve got big sky mirrors and lasers and particle beams and superconducting magnets and probably loads of other stuff I can’t even think of. They keep the weather going. They keep the UV from frying us like nimki. They keep the air in. They throw comets around. They go Bedzo and the world disappears. And you go up against these people with an inflatable bouncy church, a mail-order department, a couple of hundred abacuses and a pile of dysfunctional cyclists in purple, and you win?”
“Yes,” Devastation Harx said in that tone of you-know-nothing-really-nothing adults know infuriates teenagers.
“I want a parachute, now.”
“Ms. Engineer…”
“No, you wait.” She turned to Serpio. “This was not part of the deal. The deal was we both run away from what we hate and we go and get a good life somewhere and maybe we end up together or maybe we don’t but whatever, it absolutely did not say I get hijacked by some mail-order messiah in a flying mushroom and end up crisped by partacs. You know something? I think I made a mistake with you, Serpio. I think…I think you arranged all this.” The realisation was marvellous and liberating. There is a strong joy, Sweetness discovered, in understanding your own utter gullibility. “You did! You bastard! You had this all planned. You took one look at me—at us—and it all fitted into some big master plan and you called up Harx-boy here and he said, bring her on. I cannot believe I ever even thought about sleeping with you. And I did. A bit. Not now. You’re not a good person. Go and put your purple on, freak-eye.”
While they were just thoughts, Sweetness had known her last two words were unforgivable. Two fingers poked clean and hard in the cataract. But she said them anyway, and whatever had begun at Great Oxus, they ended. From here on she was on her own. For a moment she thought Serpio might hit her. Devastation Harx, too, read the balled aggression in shoulders and neck and fists.
“I think it’d be better if you left us for a while,” he said. “We’ll meet up with you when Ms. Engineer is in sweeter humour.”
Face twisting as it does when you are hurt badly enough to cry but damned if you will in public, Serpio turned and walked with over-deliberate casualness down the curving corridor. He stopped once, to call back.
“So you thought about sleeping with me, then?”
“Like I said, it’s all one big chapter of bad mistakes.” They just kept coming out of her mouth, badder and badder and badder.
“Well, I didn’t. And I’ll tell you this, I wouldn’t if you were the last woman in the world.”
“You would say that!” Sweetness sent her final dart cannoning round the corridor walls after him. She did not see if it struck. Her and Harx now. That was always the way he intended to play it, she realised. Play it, and me. She said, feistily, “So, how do you achieve this prodigy?”
“With the help of your invisible friend,” Devastation Harx said. “Who, as you’ve probably guessed, is considerably more powerful than you thought, and definitely not your Siamese twin sister. I think it’s time you got to see what she’s really like. This way.”
A section of ash pivoted under his palm. Sweetness stepped through the wall after Devastation Harx, and into her selves. Dozens of Sweetnesses. A multiplicity of Sweetnesses. A plethora, a myriad, a host, a horde, an infinite regress of Sweetnesses.
“Woo,” she said, immersed in mirrors.
“I did say there was a great spirituality in reflections,” fifty Devastation Harxes said at once.
For the first few minutes Sweetness took the rare opportunity to study herself from every aspect. She frowned at her eyebrows. She tugged critically at her hair. She rolled her shoulders to try to make better of her boobs. She tightened, relaxed, tightened, relaxed her ass-cheeks and seemed pleased at the result. She looked down at her foreshortened self in the floor mirrors and grinned. She waved to her selves. She made faces. She struck attitudes. She led a dozen Sweetnesses in a step-perfect dance. Then she remembered she was supposed to be feeling angry about Serpio the Bastard, and asked, “Where’s the way out?”