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.