Wait. Your radio. That Deuteronomy station, it had been all fluttery and wowy and phasey, because they’ve only got low power transmitters and the mountains over to the east there interfere with the signal. No mountains to the south: so, pick up a Tempe Station—preferably one in a big place like Therme—and turn around until you get a clear signal. You’re on beam. She’ll lead you right into the Watering Rooms of the Great Bath itself.
As the last stolen light ebbed from the rim-rocks, Sweetness pulled Radio Pleasant out of the atmosphere. It twitched and chittered like a family of bats. Beneath the wheeling stars, Sweetness turned, listening to the airwaves. There. Honesto’s Used Yute Mart. Treat Ye Better’n Ye Treat Yerself. For a great deal on pre-cared Dorts and Stavingers, call…She opened her eyes. The stars seemed to line up above her into a hunting arrow. This way, traingirl.
“Right, then,” she decided. “South.”
She shouldered her bag and began to walk. The Bakelite cat and the used spell she left as offerings to the Big Red.
The Big Red, in the big dark, was extremely boring. Those things that give character to deserts; heat, space, desolation, grandeur, an atomising sense of isolation in a vast terrain, are erased by night. Dark made it a dimensionless expanse of tough trekking. Sweetness pressed on at a steady speed, fast enough to give a sense of purpose, slow enough not to flag too soon and leave her demoralised. To conserve the solar batteries, she listened in to Radio Pleasant only long enough to get a fix on due south. She sang songs from the shows. She recited chunks of the Evyn Psalmody. She counted from one to one thousand, then from two thousand back to one thousand. She took a sip of water and used it to explore as many aspects and crannies of her mouth as she could. She did seven times tables, eight times tables, all the way up to fifteen times tables. She engaged in convoluted games of word association, she formed great trains of thought, longer than any thousand-car-er out of Iron Mountain, then tried to trace back every step of the cognitive process to the originating engine. She wondered, when’s this Aid Beyond Comprehension going to arrive? She took another furtive grab at the airwaves, adjusted her course, walked on. It was still astonishingly tedious. It was much later than she thought when the “Radio Pleasant Pre-Breakfast Show” timechecks started. She slithered down dune faces, slogged along heavy, sucking sifs and thought about people in Therme’s tall tenements rolling over in their quilts for another five or sitting up and scratching or staring at their faces in the bathroom mirror or grumbling to their lovers over the morning bread and tea. Have you any idea, Mr. Deejay, what this one of your listeners is doing? When the edge of the world dipped beneath the sun, she unrolled her bag, found a sheltered place where the sand would not blow into her nostrils and remembered to set out the solar radio to recharge. Then she read a few pages of her unimproving book and was asleep before her powers of aesthetic discrimination could tell her they were excrement.
Sweat woke her. Sweetness licked the salt off her forearms and tried to find a sweet spot in the curve of soft sand that now seemed concrete. The next time she woke was with a searing headache from sunlight leaking through her permeable eyelids. Her face felt raw and sunburned. Sweetness wrapped a torn-off shirt-sleeve around her head and rolled over again, half stifled. The third time she woke, it was the hunger. She willed it down but it would not be so easily beaten. Sweetness tried eating pages of her unimproving book, washed down with sips of water. They stayed the belly gnaw. The last time she woke the sun was two fingers above the western rim rocks. Time to get up, get up, get on, get out.
Dizzy with hunger and headache, Sweetness took a bearing on Radio Pleasant. She had come a hair off true, a shift to the left brought her on to the way south. This place she had spent the day looked so similar to the one she had left yesterday—the sand so rippled, the rocks so crumbled and red, the sky so piercingly blue—she might not have moved at all. Have not moved at all, whispered a small, black, despairing demon. It took a major effort of will to lift one foot and place it ahead of the other, but she managed it. Belly full of yellow press, she had to. To listen to the demon was death.
That second night, death seemed a fine thing. Much of the time she was crazy, staggering and weaving under the hurtling scraps of moon, crawling up slip-sliding dune-faces, clutching at the sand running away between her fingers, rolling downslope, at some point recovering sense enough to reckon she had wandered far off course and checking her position against the cool midnight grooves of Radio Pleasant’s “Wind-down with Willem.” The ridiculous notion that down there people were toasting each other with wine and throwing money to band leaders and sending compliment slips to chefs and fumbling with each other’s underwear in cars gave her the idea. Things I will do when I get to Therme.
Top of the list. Wash my hair. She could smell it. Worse, she could not get away from it. Bad bad bad bad bad when you can smell your own hair. Worse when it sticks to you. Aghhh. Hair wash. No questions, numero uno. And a bath. Maybe together. No problem in Therme. It’s a spa town. So, hydrotherapy then. Deep bath, with all those healing oils and minerals from the volcanic vents. Like for several hours. And a glass of wine as light and clear as water, so cold the condensation runs down the outside, across the foot, then down your arm and you lick it off. Oh yes. Licking things off. Some boy with nice muscles and cute eye make-up to run a hose up and down you. How does that feel, Miss Engineer? Oh ah, oohhh, ahhh. She’d scandalise him. But not before he’d shampooed her hair, with a good, deep, finger motion, right down to the roots, twice and conditioner, and a warm blow dry—not a hot one, she’d had enough hot air blowing in her face for any lifetime. Yes, a bath, with oils and minerals and a hose down and a body scrub and when you’ve got every molecule of rust and silicon out of you, a table on a verandah with a view over the mud gardens, and you wearing nothing but a shortie silkie robe, and someone bringing you fish. Yes, fish, fresh caught, cooked in a steam vent.