“A storm that was,” the square-faced, taller one said, taking a theatrical upright pose.
“Storm indeed, Cadmon,” the other agreed, copying him.
“Unseasonable.” The square one made a slow sweep of the horizon.
“Unseasonable indeed, Cadmon.” The squat one followed suit.
“One might almost think…”
“One might; one does, Cadmon.”
Sweetness watched their act for a few moments before clearing her throat. The two men turned as one; black round eyes regarded her, heads cocked to precisely the same degree.
“What is this? A fellow traveller in strange terrains?” The heads cocked the reverse angle.
“Would seem so, Cadmon.”
“A girl, I would hasten.”
“Hasten so, Cadmon.”
“Look, I don’t mean to butt in here if you’re doing something, but have you got any food or water?”
The two men looked at each other.
“Water and provender, for our guest?” the tall one, obviously Cadmon, asked.
“Exactly so, Cadmon,” the still nameless one answered and took a small bulb from one of the many pockets of the utility vest he wore beneath his duster. A soft squeeze. Sweetness waited for something to happen, then noticed a small stirring in the dust. Buried things unearthing themselves. Dust boiled and shed. Two gravboards with bulging leather side-panniers bobbed to the surface and came to rest at a level metre.
“Cool,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.
Water there was, and provender, in square-faced Cadmon’s carefully weighed usage. Sweetness ate smally and carefully, sipped her water and used two handfuls to wipe the caked dirt off her face. Then she asked, “So, what are you guys doing out here then?”
“That question, I rather think, is better asked of you, madam,” Cadmon said. The short one nodded.
“I’m a story,” Sweetness said, then regretted her enthusiasm, for now she had committed herself to telling it yet again.
“No no no,” Cadmon interjected with a raised finger, mimicked by his partner. “Names, then stories.”
“Okay,” Sweetness said. “I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
The two men bowed slightly.
“I am Cadmon, and this is Euphrasie,” Cadmon said, with a sweep of the hand which the shorter man could not refrain from distantly echoing. “We are the Brothers Dust.”
Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “But you’re not brothers.”
“Brothers of the soul,” Cadmon said.
“Soul, indeed,” Euphrasie chimed in. “Brothers aesthetic, atheistic, anarchic.”
“We are anarchist artists,” Cadmon said. “Behold, our work.”
As one, the Brothers Dust thrust out their hands to the enormous fireside companion set, in the lengthening shade of which this exchange had taken place.
“Do you do a lot of household stuff?” Sweetness asked.
“You are familiar with our work?” Cadmon asked loftily.
“I’ve slept under some of it.”
“Which, pray?” Euphrasie responded, quick as a pocket-picking.
“The big chair,” Sweetness said. She added, “I’ve seen the ironing board from a distance. And the big shoe.”
“The big shoe!” Cadmon and Euphrasie chorused in one voice.
Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “So, correct me if I’m wrong here, but how is it anarchy to do big ironing boards and shoes?”
“The anarchy of incongruity,” Cadmon proclaimed.
“And the domestic,” Euphrasie added. “Domesticating the desert.”
“And desertifying the domestic,” Cadmon insisted. “Thus we confound two static absolutes: the desert without and the desert within.”
“But don’t we live in an anarchy?” Sweetness asked, sweetly.
“Habitual anarchy is no anarchy at all,” Cadmon said.
“The revolution must be continual if it is to be the true revolution.”
“True anarchy is archy.”
“I must invent a non-system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
Sweetness looked at the two desert-clad men, cocked her head in that way.
“Are you butty-boys?” she asked.
Cadmon maintained high disdain, but Sweetness caught Euphrasie turning away and lifting his hand to his mouth to suppress a chuckle.
“We are living art,” Cadmon said. Okay, Sweetness thought.
“And art consists as much in the unmaking as the making,” Euphrasie said.
“Look, I don’t do art, so you’ll have to explain this,” Sweetness said.
“Explain? Very well. This project is complete. True art is momentary; the false strives for immortality. We make and we unmake. Now is the time of unmaking.”
Sweetness looked to Euphrasie for elucidation. He merely swivelled his eyes upward to the mushroom-cap of the companion set. For the first time Sweetness noticed the clustered white cylinders fastened to the shaft and around the rim of the cap, the gaily coloured wires, the radio transponders.
“You’re not…”
Euphrasie nodded and produced another bulb device from his vest of pockets.
“You have something in the region of thirty seconds to decide whether you come with us, or bet on how fast you can run,” Cadmon said, gathering up his discarded wrappings and stuffing them into a carry-all bag, which he slung on to the back of the nearer of the two fretting gravboards.
“Me? On one of those?”
“Twenty seconds…” Euphrasie had already mounted his gravboard and was erecting the boom.
“All right, I’m not betting, I’m not betting!” Sweetness scooped up her bag and dived for Euphrasie’s board. The mercurial machine rocked under her, she fought for balance, grabbed at Euphrasie, who by seizing her shirt-front prevented them both from capsizing. Wind cracked Cadmon’s pink and purple fractal patterned sail. The board pitched, then the rising evening breeze lifted it and whipped it away. Within instants, he was a lost toy in the great redness.
“Hold tight!” Euphrasie called to Sweetness, pressed cheek to scapular.
“Tell me,” Sweetness muttered into his back, but all the same the sudden dip and surge of the board almost upset her as Euphrasie tilted the boom into the wind and the board took flight.
“Whoo!” exclaimed Sweetness Asiim Engineer as the rippled dust blurred beneath her. The second board tacked sharply, caught a stronger air current and slid up alongside big, vain Cadmon.
“Zero!” he shouted to Euphrasie over the flutter of sail and the shout of wind. The smaller man held out the bulb-teat. Cadmon nodded for Sweetness to look back, which she did, dizzyingly, and so missed Euphrasie depressing the nipple. The effects were impressive. The big companion set stood tall and black and domestic on the horizon. As she watched, white blossoms of flame exploded briefly underneath the rim, indeed like some vast desert mushroom sporing explosively. The fall was slow and tremendous. Had the Skywheel itself snapped and fallen flailing to earth, it could not have been more thunderous and aristocratic. Explosions around the edge of the cap first freed the poker, which fell straight to earth and embedded itself a third-deep in the sand. The brush fell to earth in a comet’s tail of blazing bristles: fireballs and sparks rebounded high as it smashed into the ground. Multiple detonations disintegrated the tongs into flying, clawed shards. Only the shovel remained. Unbalanced by its weight, the cap tilted, then the shaft blew apart beneath it in an orgy of detonations. The falling shovel threw a spadeful of hot desert twenty metres into the air. Like a bell falling from God’s campanile, the cap struck the ground. The chime shivered Sweetness’s ovaries in her belly. Fractions of a second later, the shockwave ruffled her hair and tugged her clothes, sent the gravboard yawing.