Grandmother Taal fumed inwardly at this sullen brattishness. If they had been trainpeople, little Engineers, even good-for-nothing Bassareenis, she would have had their very lugs…Not even her dear, wayward granddaughter, whom she permitted liberties allowed to no others aboard Catherine of Tharsis, would have behaved like that in the face of adversity. She found she was clenching her fists, sucking in her lower lip and chewing it, frowning hard enough to spark a tic of headache from her pineal gland. Too much. Like a superheated boiler venting, her patience blew in a great calliope whistle.
“United Artists, you call yourselves? I’ve seen more unity in a truckload of Cathrinist pelerines. Professionals: I will tell you professional; professional is, even when your son has not spoken to his wife for four years, the lading bills are made up, the contracts are docketed and sealed, the trucks end in the right yards and always, always, the train leaves on time. Three whistles, and you are left behind. You would all be walking, if you were trainfolk. You think you are so clever, so funny, that you are the hope of the world. My granddaughter is funnier than you when she is not even trying, and I have more hope in her than I have in you. Heroes! Bah. I break wind at you. If you are all that stands between my daughter and rescue, if you are our last best hope for bringing down Devastation Harx and his machinations, then dress me in purple and call me catamite. I squat and ease on you all.”
After a long, cool pause, Weill drawled, “Hey, lady, dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Bladnoch, who of all had seemed most ashamed at Taal’s frustrated outburst, suddenly propped himself up on his forearm, squinted through the near-opaque window glass into the darkness.
“Many a true word, Weill,” he said, and no one could mishear the tone of fear in his low, soft voice. “Lights, down.”
The golden glow ebbed from the leatherette carriage.
“What is it?” Skerry demanded, rushing to the window.
“I rather think we’re going to have to wing this one,” Bladnoch said, as the dark Banninger night was shockingly lit by beams of lilac light.
23
Arms and legs wrapped around cables, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th sailed beneath the brilliant stars of the moonring. Shortly after full night a thermal from off the Banninger Escarpment had lifted the flying cathedral into higher, chillier air. The thrill of the view had faded with the light; within minutes Sweetness was noticing her teeth chattering, her breath steaming, her limbs shivering. She could not feel the rope under her fingers. Soon, the cold numb would spread to fingers. Shortly after that, she would lose her grip and fall, like a flash-frozen bird caught in an updraft. Numb limbs dissenting, she hauled herself up, step by step, toward the canopy. She had noticed early that this was a ladder to nowhere, an emergency egress shaken loose by the Dust Brothers’ bombing. The escape hatch above it remained sternly dogged. But there might be another way in, a vent, a shelter among the heat-exchange vanes, some warm spot to which she could cling and curl for this night which she knew was going to be one of the longest in her life. There were inspection gantries over there, cables and pipeworks. If she could make her way along them to one of the blast holes, she could work her way inside. Industrial grade if. She already hurt like the devil’s nipple clamps. By morning? No option, you hurt, Glorious Honey-Bun. And she was tired and wet through and thirsty and those foil-packet trail dinners wouldn’t fill a hole in your tooth. Go on, then. Take that big scream. Or quit moaning and come on. You expect an adventure to be easy? Hand over hand over hand will do it. Hand over hand over hand.
Hand over hand over hand, she made it to the escape hatch. Teeth gritted with effort, she beat at it with a fist, pulled off a boot and whacked at the hatch dog.
“Let me in! Mother’a’mercy, there’s a girl out here!”
If she could scarcely hear herself over the whirr of propellers and the moan of the high wind in the cathedral’s gingerbread, what chance a passing purple person? Surely someone in the cycle pods must have noticed there was a girl hanging from a rope ladder? She hauled herself around on the ladder. The nearest pod hung like an overripe fig from a single strut, abandoned, its gear-trains and drive chains gnashes of oily teeth. The only other she could even glimpse was three quarters occluded by a rudder array, and that part she could see was awash with ballast water. Twenty metres to her starboard was a thermal dump stack. She could feel the warmth from the fans gently wash her face. Twenty metres. Twenty light-years. If she could just get to those u-bars. She started to swing the ladder. It let out a hitherto unsuspected ominous creak. She glanced. In her mad leap for rescue, she had failed to notice that one of the ropes had been cut half-through by shrapnel.
Real Big Adventure Stuff. Get that pendulum swinging…
Her first reach missed by a fingernail. She ignored the sound of stretching, snapping cord fibres and threw her whole weight into the next swing. She reached; her finger locked around the hand-hold. She let go the ladder. Her momentum almost tore her free.
Trust that trainfolk upper body strength…
Her right hand seized the next rung. Sweetness hung, crucified, a kilometre and gaining above the yellow-windowed manses of Banninger Canton’s geometric farms.
Easy. Peasy. Wee buns.
Thirty monkey-walks brought her to the heat-dump fans, amongst which she nestled, ripping loose communications cables and wrapping them around her waist, thighs and wrists. A survey of her situation told her this was as far as Sweetness Asiim Engineer was going under this air-borne basilica. She tightened her cocoon and tried to shake water out of her hair. Warmer now, warm enough to drive off the now wracking shivers and dry out her clothes, warm enough for her brain to be alerted to another peril.
The airship was ascending slowly but steadily, and without any indication of reaching its ceiling. Long before anoxia shrivelled her brain in her skull like a pickled pig testicle, it would have loosened her grip, blurred her sense, made her altitude drunk enough to make that big step look not just appealing, but necessary. Already she was feeling cosy-dozy, comforted by memories of hiding from parental wrath among warm, cranny-laden machinery. She slung extra loops of cable around her shoulder, knotted them and tried to keep herself awake.
Shock. Where what who? The sky…the stars…it hurts. Oh my God. Her slim snake hips had slipped through their cinch, the loop of cable had locked under her small but perfectly pert breasts. Her feet kicked at two kilometres of empty space. Thanks, tits. But as she wiggled the noose down over her pelvis, she became aware that here was a second way to die. Hanging would do it every bit as well as falling.
Stay awake! she berated herself. Look at the world: You ain’t ever seen it from this angle before.
She had to admit she had a grandstand seat on night across the earth. From this height she could appreciate the roundness of the world: a little last perfect blue clung to the eastern horizon; Sweetness calculated that the cathedral was headed southwest. Morningwards. The teeming cantons of Grand Valley lay that way, sunning themselves under the ancient lights of World-roof. The ship would need repair. The great vertical engineering cities that clung to the piers as Sweetness clung to heat had once assembled Sailships and starcrossers. A gas-filled bag of faith was little to them. That lay in the future. This gently sloping scarp country over which she flew was not without interest. Sweetness reckoned she could see two hundred kilometres in every direction: to the west and south towns and cities clung silvery on the horizon like patches of glowing moth-dust, flowing into each other with filigree tendrils of powder-soft lights. From a hundred kilometres out to immediately beneath Sweetness’s feet scattered dots of farmsteads clustered around the agglomerations of the rural towns which in turn gathered around the larger market centres. Sweetness tried to draw patterns on them, terrestrial constellations, and with a sudden revelation, saw it whole: hexagons upon hexagons upon hexagons, from steading to city. Her sudden insight into human geometry stunned her for whole minutes, then she caught two long glints of silver moonslight streaking straight across the dark land. A railroad. She leaned forward in her harness. There! Tiny and wan as a lonely firefly, a scattering of sparks tore across the night. A train!