And with the word, the news bell tolled again from its iron campanile and the people of Solid Gone assembled in the great zocalo, their brief respite of colour and scandal and eventfulness drained by the death of hope. Again, the pistils and stamens of Sanyap Bedassie’s projector shot dream-seed into the heart of dreamlessness and the clouds parted to reveal Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap with their Serious Heads on.
“Chaos at the Gubernatorial Inauguration in Molesworth’s Rathaus,” Sanka Déhau said, looking straight into camera.
“Public humiliation for recently elected Cossivo Beldene in girl-in-cake stunt,” Ashkander Beshrap chipped in his authoritative telegraphic style. The Eye on the World opened on the great hail with its chandeliers so mighty that each harboured a different species of bat, the Fest Table, carved from a single massive hunk of onyx, the gilded Missal Pulpit, festooned with the red-black-green swags of the Unity Rising campaign. Baroque mirrors returned the glare of camera lights and the stray glints from the diamonds of the favoured. Behind spangled frontals, the Glenn Miller Orchestra kicked in under the King of Swing’s left hand, while the great musician threw beaming glances out over the crowded tables. Bubbling cru cascaded down the ziggurats of glasses; servitors in breeches and frock coats offered warm scented toweliettes for their guests’ Personal Cleansing. All was merriness and conspicuous consumption and decadent cleavages, over which Ashkander Beshrap sternly pronounced, “In an elaborate practical joke, as the Glenn Miller Orchestra performed a specially commissioned composition, Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene’s rumoured mistress, was switched for a cake-dancer and leaped out to sing an alternative, explicit set of lyrics listing the new Gubernator’s sexual peccadilloes.”
Not one sound-bite of this lodged in Sweetness’s head; not even the cheering and hooting of the massed Solid Goners for she was staring at the freeze-frame of the vengeful woman, half-uncaked in spangled bikini and hoolie-hoolie feathers, arms spread ta-dah!, grinning triumphantly into her throat mike: Cossivo Beldene behind her in the Champion’s Seat, caught eternally gobemouche, beside him, one peripatetic minister of dubious religion and major contributor to election funds, Devastation Harx, slight apprehension on his distinguished features, as if he had already calculated the upshots and mentally jettisoned Cossivo Beldene and the Unity Rising Party.
But it was not even him Sweetness was staring at. At extreme left of shot, seated at a circular table with a stocky woman, a beautifully black-skinned man, a languidly bored girl with too many pierces, a grey-haired, anonymous looking middle-aged man and a weasely teen with dreadful teeth who seemed strangely unmoved by the unfolding tableau, was an old woman, small and bird-like and unobtrusive in sober blacks. The kind of woman you would not even notice, were she not your grandmother.
“Taal!” Sweetness shouted. The folk of Solid Gone moved around her, unheeding of anything but the delight on the screen in the sky. “Taal, it’s me!” Of course she could not hear. Of course it was an image of an image of an image taken hours ago, fixed in the heart of a cloud. Futile as exhorting a photograph. But here the weird walked, here were strange times. Here magic worked. “Taal!” The boom of the cloud figures and the derision of the townsfolk smothered her cries. “Bedassie!” she shouted at the hanging van. She rattled chips of cobble off the drive train. The cineaste’s tousled head peeped out like a desert animal from its scrape.
“Your projector!” Sweetness yelled as the happy smiling people, many holding hands, streamed past her back to their homes. “Can you make it work the other way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of taking a dream and making it into a picture, can it take a picture and send it as a dream?”
Sanyap Bedassie cocked his head to one side, intrigued.
“Pray why?”
“I need you to send a message.”
Already the clouds were closing again, curtains of rainless grey.
“To whom, exactly?”
Sensing another necessary recapitulation of her story, Sweetness sighed and shook her curls in exasperation.
“My grandmother. I’ll explain.”
By the time she did, the deeper penumbra that was night in Solid Gone had filled up the zocalo. As the story told itself, Bedassie had busied himself swagging dismounted vehicle lights around the base of the campervan. Now he flicked them on. Sweetness was pin-spotted in a wash of white heads, white tails and yellow indicators.
“Well, I can see the urgency now,” Sanyap Bedassie said, feet swinging over the zocalo. “And I think it should be theoretically possible to do what you ask. There is one minor, niggling cavil, though.”
“Which is?”
“You would rather need to get up here.”
Sweetness put her hands on her hips, sucked in her lower lip. She had fought battles in mirror mazes. She had fallen from flying cathedrals. She had crossed burning deserts. She had swung across time to strange other presents and been bounced back into the paths of express trains. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th was not to be defeated by a few metres of altitude and a few whacks of chain. She studied the zocalo. The stonework facades of the anchor buildings were big rock climbing-frames. Not even a work-out for a girl who’d grown up clambering all over the heavy, steaming metal of a Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler. The support chains were a simple hand-over-hand. Traingirls have good upper body strength. But a cannier soul had beaded a large glass globe on each chain, a few links down from the highest point. No way round over under through those babies.
Solid Gone was jealous of its news vendor.
“Okay,” Sweetness declared. “I can’t get up. So I’ll get you down.”
“I really don’t think…” Sanyap Bedassie began, eyes widening with apprehension beneath his wild hair. But Sweetness was away, loping back through the silent streets. Past the lamp-lit porches. Past the glowing yellow windows. Past the muttering voices behind them, already losing the threads of conversation, laughs tailing off into dust, quips falling and lying, dreams bleaching and desiccating. Out from under the cloud of dreamlessness, to the track. Her home, her line through life. The permanent way, forward, back: out. Free of the psychic anticyclone of the cloud, she could feel the lure of the line, a tug on the valves of the heart. So easy to step on to it and keep walking. Walk away from this town and its dis-ease. Walk right out of this desert. Walk all the way to Molesworth and her grandmother.
“After,” she said. A deal was a deal. And story was story.
Though the night was dark and groping—even the bright angel-machines of the moonring seemed intimidated by the cloud of numbness—her flashlight found the box of detonators first time, right where she had expected it, under the signal tower. She stuffed her pack and pockets with the red cylinders. One backward glance at the steel way, then Sweetness set her jaw—which she had always thought was one of her more determining features—and loped back into Solid Gone.
“…this is a good idea,” Sanyap Bedassie warned as Sweetness scaled the face of the old Ganj Bourse. “I mean, there’s a lot of delicate equipment in here. And I’m only holding it in trust, really.”