“What’s going on?” she called up at the hoisted van but Sanyap Bedassie had slipped inside. The last citizen took up his place in the square. Every face was upturned to the cloud of gloom. The power generators hummed; electricity arced blue as burning Belladonna brandy around the porcelain insulators. The sense of something-about-to-happen was palpable as a summer sandstorm. The satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing on the roof unfolded like a night-blooming flower. Aerials ran up, dishes spun out like petals, cooling vanes fanned forth. A soft oooh ran through the people as a translucent pink erectile thing slid priapically out of the centre of the blossom of dishes and aimed itself at the coiled heart of the hot grey cloud.
Sweetness was entranced. Even if it did nothing more, the sheer drama of the unfolding bizarre technology would have been worth standing in this square with a cricked neck. But it did not do nothing more. It did a definite something. Power peaked to a sharp, ozoney, bone-buzzing crescendo: a pink beam stabbed the soft underbelly of the cloud.
Later, Sweetness would swear that the cloud flinched.
The grey folds and pleats of cloud billowed downward, threatening the cornices and photon-towers of Solid Gone. Sweetness lifted her arms in front of her face: she could feel the heat from the unnatural cloud, then the curds rolled back and, as they did, she saw them change shape. No, not change shape. Take shape. The cloud mass was folding into figures, a man and woman, god-sized, seated behind a curving desk. Behind them, a complicated kind of a wall, with a window in it, which seemed to look out on a still-indistinct but altogether other scene. The base of the cloud was shaped into massive, three-dimensional images, hanging over the burghers of Solid Gone. As the cloud gained shape, it also gained colour. Rivulets of hue, like prismatic lighting, ran from the place where the beam pinkly penetrated the cloud, stained the mist-figures, intermingled, formed new colours, gave movement and character to the grey icons.
“Oh my Mother’a’grace,” Sweetness Asiim Engineer exclaimed. “It’s the seven o’clock news.”
Huge as hills, Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap, DFLP Belladonna’s Little Miss Bright’n’Breezy and Mr. Big Truth, smiled down on the adoring faces of Solid Gone. Behind them, their famous Eye on the World opened a window into greater depths of the enchanted cloud, showing an image of sleek black Corvettes rolling up at an imposing flight of steps, disgorging waving people in formal dress and being valet-parked.
“Wow,” said Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.
The cloud convulsed again, throbbed like distant hill-thunder, then spoke.
“Regional leaders have arrived in Molesworth for the inauguration of the new Gubernator, Cossivo Beldene, whose Unity Rising Party won a landslide victory. However, the Anarchs of Deuteronomy and Grand Valley declined the invitation, citing undeclared funding by the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family and rumoured links to the Human League anti-machinist terror group,” Ashkander Beshrap said in his famous if-you-can’t-trust-me-who-can-you-trust? newsreader’s voice that shook the rooks from the roof-tiles.
The people watched “The Early Evening News” without comment but Sweetness could see them, one by one, standing taller, straightening up; noticed the corners of expression on their faces, creases in the eyes, tiny smile-seeds around the lips. By some unseen process, the colour seemed to drip from the cloud into their clothes. They watched the regional sports results and the market reports. By the time Sanka Déhau came to her solo Chitter-Chatter-Chit Celebrity Snippet, there were spontaneous outbreaks of delight in the zocalo. The news of Chaste Thercy, the Duenna of the Belladonna Opera’s adultery and pending divorce was greeted with applause and cheers. A favourable review of Blain Bethryn in a new comedy by the Stapledon Regional Comedy Theatre was greeted with whistling and stamping of feet. The rumour of a new studio album by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces caused near-hysteria. They whooped the local weather forecast and laughed in the streets when Anjea Ankersonn told them it would be another high of thirty-two, humidity twelve percent, chance of significant precipitation…
“Zero!” the crowd yelled in concert, and, laughing, holding their sides with delight, tears streaming down their faces they broke up into chattering, hand-shaking, back-slapping groups and made their way out of the zocalo into the side streets, into their homes and houses.
Sweetness stood alone in the plaza.
The voice from the sky fell silent. The pink ray ceased. Instantly, the colour ebbed from the clouds, the grey figures boiled and broke up into exercises in fractal geometry. The heat pressed down like a sweaty hand on the plaza. The rooks returned to their roosts, demoralised dusters of ragged feathers.
Sanyap Bedassie’s tousled head poked out of the door of the campervan.
“That answer you?” he asked Sweetness, then cupped his hands and called out at the windowless bourse-halls, “You all be back for the nine o’clock bulletin! Tears and laughter, drama and gravitas. Births, marriages and deaths. Agony and ecstasy. Corn and passion. Dust and monstrous crimes. Nights in the roof gardens of Hy Brazyl. Volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, plagues of devouring star-bees. God parting the dust clouds; old women gossiping. Love and death and the whole damn thing. Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars.”
“But,” Sweetness interjected, “it’s the evening news.”
“Correct!” Sanyap Bedassie said. “If I were you, I’d lie down, because this takes a bit of explaining, and you’ll do your neck, craning up like that.”
“What? Here?”
“It’s just dust. And you look no stranger to dust.”
Sweetness sat down. She felt the grain of the sand between the rounded cobbles. No stranger indeed. But she was reluctant to stretch out belly up on the surface of the zocalo. She did not like to be so open and exposed to this suspended cineaste.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” Bedassie lay prostrate in the campervan, looking down into Sweetness’s face.
“I’m not sitting, and I’m definitely not comfortable.”
“It’s a formula.” His hair hung around down his face. “Then, I’ll begin.”
For two years now the plague of dreamlessness had ravaged Solid Gone. For years longer—whole of the world’s long decades—it had stalked the lonesome townships of the desert fringe like a dust-devil. Many a sand-scoured tumble of red adobe attested to its power to devastate communities. Theories abounded about its nature and origin—the most scientific among those who took it as more than a legend from the Big Red was that it was some kind of infectious meme borne on the magnetic anomalies stirred up by the frequent rust-storms. The manner of its coming was always the same. After a period of sapping heat and high pressure, of thick heads and infuriating, set-slapping wireless interference, the citizens of the infected township would wake amazed by the vividness, clarity and sheer bizarreness of their dreams. They would sit around on their porches, under their tea-shop awnings, in the shadow of their house walls, slapping their thighs and shaking their heads as friends and families narrated the weird stuff inside their heads. This was the period of incubation. For a week the dreams would batter the subconsciouses of their victims, until the people were dazed colourless by the intensity of their night-life. Then one night, everyone dreamed the same dream. This was that dream. A sky of boiling black milk, shot through with lightnings, hung over an endless desert of silver sand. An edible dog—pure white, with one black ear—stood on the sand, by the self-contradictory logic of dreams, at once minute and sky-scaringly vast. It would shake its head, then look the dreamer in the soul’s eye. It would bark three times. Strangely huge, those barks. Paralysing, night-terrorising. “The sky shook,” the people would say next day when they sat down together to recount their dreams. “Like a stone nail through the heart.” Then the white dog would turn, glance back once over its shoulder, and with its perky ring prominent, trot off into the heat-haze. What the dreamers never realised—or if they did realise, were helpless to prevent—was that that one look back summoned their dreams, and that when the dog trotted away into the deep desert, their dreams scampered behind it, sniffing its heat.