“Succinct, if not classically structured,” the young man said, checking his dials and instruments. “Your grandmother is going to have some dream tonight.”
“Yeah, but will she believe it’s really me?”
“Oh, grandmothers generally believe what their dreams tell them. It might be nice to sign off?”
“Oh. Yeah. Forgot. Hi, Gran. Listen, tell the folks I’m all right. If that guy Harx was at Molesworth, then that’s a good place to look for him, so stay there and I’ll meet up with you. Hey, we could even be parts of the story together.”
“I think you already are,” Sanyap Bedassie said softly. He frowned at his indicators. “That’s you.” He threw a small brass lever. The pink light died around Sweetness.
“Ooh,” she said.
Down each of the radial avenues, a wedge of citizenry was marching, dull and intent on only one thing, their thrice nightly dose of the mundane. Surrounded by advancing grey. It was, Sweetness had to admit, pure monster movie. She grabbed Sanyap’s hand.
“Time to go.”
He pulled back.
“Where?”
“There.” Sweetness pointed down a narrow entry between buildings of the kind that only becomes apparent when you absolutely necessarily must have a neat egress. She seized his hand again. It was nice and soft and warm. A good non-labouring hand. “Come on.”
Again, he resisted.
“They’ll stick you up there again, and me too this time, and I don’t know about you, friend, but I got a story. You want that?”
“My machine…”
“It’s only a thing, man. If it troubles you that much, come back and get it later, like I said. Come back with a pile of people. But you can only do that if you get out now.”
She tugged. He was unmoved.
“Child’a’grace, man!”
Bedassie looked around at the pale faces ranked down the strict perspectives of Solid Gone. He shook his head, let slip Sweetness’s hand.
“You cannot do this,” Sweetness begged him.
“I never had an audience like this. Do you understand that? Every night, I put the pictures up in that cloud, and they smile, and they laugh, and they feel something, and they go home for an hour, two hours, they dream their dreams. Don’t you understand? That’s how it should be. It’s not there to take dreams out of people’s heads and make them into pictures. You were right, with your wondering if it could work in reverse. It was meant to work in reverse. That’s what all cinema has ever been, taking the pictures out of the clouds, off that screen and making them dreams in people’s heads. They need that. They need me. Here, movies make people’s lives. I make a difference. I don’t entertain, I shape their worlds. And they’re just people, who had the bad luck to have lost their dreams. They deserve them back. I can give them to them, as long as it takes. This cloud won’t last forever. This plague will move on someday. Until then, I’ll give them the news of the worlds, eight times a day. I’m not trapped. I’m not a prisoner. You can’t be a prisoner, if you remain of your own free will. I’m staying here. You go. You’ve got your story. I’ve got the pictures.”
He stepped away from Sweetness.
“Go!” he shouted.
Sudden tears almost paralysed Sweetness. The story that was hers before this new one had rewritten every line had been subtly played out here. In this version, the hero chose his trap over the wild world. To him it was not a trap. Never had been a trap, only a kind of mitigated freedom. All the dreams in the world. Sweetness swallowed the emotion. You have to let some things go, Glorious Honey-Bun. You aren’t responsible for every ill and blessing in the world. People make their own minds up and you abide by their decisions. The grey people, the infected, were spilling slowly out into the zocalo. Go, now, if you’re ever going to go. She ran between closing walls of the news-hungry toward the black slit of the alley. There she turned, sought for Sanyap Bedassie between the moving bodies. She saw him as a flash of colour through the thicket of limbs. She watched the circle of hands close in around him, and his reach out to shake them.
“Go figure,” she said, and turned again, and ran away from Solid Gone.
21
“All right then, I’ll walk!” Sweetness shouted up at the iron cliff of the Class 22.
“Damn right you will, for you’ll have no ride with me, nor anyone else on this railroad,” Engineer Joan Cleave Summer-Raining Tissera 8th declared from his brass shunting oriole. With which he climbed the stairs to the bridge, slammed and dogged the port behind him and began the power-up sequence. Misused tokamak fields set Sweetness’s fillings ringing; bleed valves bullied her with steam. She jumped back as the drive rods cranked and the wheels spun, then gripped. The train moved off. Sweetness jogged beside the wheels, flinging trainfolk curses, which curse very hard. The rolling bogies of the tank cars soon outpaced her. She shied track ballast at the receding stained-glass lights of the caboose in the hope of pettily breaking one and annoying a Stuard.
The big chemical train curved out of sight between red dunes. The anger drained out of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She sat dejectedly on the rail. She was outcast, named, pariah. She was the Little Girl Who Would Not Marry Whom She Was Told. No one would Uncle Billy for her. What would be scary-biscuits was if the ban had spread trackside. If she could not scrounge a mandazi from a platform goondah or a pan of water from a tanking tower, her story might come to a premature end. Story, she thought. People in stories were not supposed to be permanently thirsty, or hungry enough to eat the beard of a Sumache sacerdotal. Or smell their own bodies.
“I wouldn’t have written it like this,” Sweetness told the desert.
Creak, answered a desert rook on a signal pylon. Black bird of ill omen. Outcast, named, pariah. Sweetness buzzed a rock at it. It flew away in a rattle of oily feathers.
Who had dirtied on her? Dirtied she certainly had been. Dawn had seen her marching along the westbound upline, Solid Gone’s grey cloud stuck like a styptic plaster to the horizon, light filling up the land, her own long shadow returning to her after being all over all night, when she felt through the soles of her boots the thrum of a train coming. Peering from the shade of her hand into the low sun, she had recognised the characteristic three tall steam-stacks of a Class 22 medium freightliner. She stood resolutely in the middle of the track, flagging down the chemical train with her shirt. It had come to a halt before her, Eastern Star, steaming slightly. The Engineer had descended into his oriole, but even before she could invoke the formula, he had demanded, “Is your name Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th?”
“It is, and I’m told it’s a very fine name.”
“I’m told different,” he said. Then she learned that her name had passed up the line with the speed and enthusiasm of a venereal disease, shunted and switched and sided until every part of the global web of rails knew to shun it.