Rainbow Bridge by Gwyneth Jones

think I screwed it out of him.’
    ‘I think I said please don’t laugh at me , you bastard.’
    The splendours and miseries of Fiorinda’s teenage life were clinging to her—
    ‘You should exchange rings.’
    ‘Tha’s a good idea. But I’m holding out for Hawaii on the beach at sunset.’
    ‘Don’t be crass, Sage,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Just do it.’
    Sage was six inches taller in old money, and heavier in the bone. But the guitar-man had big hands, the exchanged rings fitted, which seemed a kind gesture on the part of fate. The men went outside, barefoot, to rinse their mouths and take a piss. They lay down together, without undressing much; Fiorinda in the middle, you notice she’s stopped complaining about that? ‘I keep thinking it’ll be nice when the fest is over,’ sighed Fiorinda. ‘It’s tiring me out. I want to get back our nice life of eating stolen chickens and picking slugs out of our hair.’ Body heat soon builds up, but never quite enough. Got to do something about the winter insulation in here.
    ‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Ax, resolutely optimistic. ‘Brace yourself. Something different and much better is going to happen instead.’

Winter Wind
    Winter Wind
     
I
    Coming Up Like Thunder
    Snow had been blown off the helipad, the blowers were still going. As he stepped down into white-out, white noise, Ax glimpsed through dancing powder the railway bridge over Richfield Avenue, at the western boundary of Rivermead. The windows in the rear section of the machine—captured from the English, no relation to those fantastic airships—had been blanked out. He wondered why he was being allowed to get his bearings now; then he saw the wall, rising from frosted winter pasture about a hundred metres away, pale and sheer, a bewildering affront to his senses. He had seen this development on tv, but the reality was something else. He was going to spend the day reading signs and gestures. Would they all be writ so large?
    ‘This way, please, Mr Preston,’ said the Australian sergeant. People’s Liberation Army insignia couldn’t always be trusted, but Ax didn’t feel he’d been given an honour escort. Not a visiting dignitary, not quite a prisoner, the soldiers marched him to a giant Chinatown arch (weirdly stripped of its natural, vibrant but scruffy inner city accoutrements): creamy pale, with a few courses of indigo, and dark red inscriptions. The wall was not so huge as it had seemed at the first shock, but it was three times Ax’s height and growing. He could see a constant stirring; just perceptible, very disturbing. Was the material alive? Maybe.

    The inscription on the lintel was the opening sentence of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms: In general, the world must unite when it has been long divided… They liked that quote, he’d seen it often. Profound vertigo went through him. I know you, you fantastic monster. I heard of your birth, long ago, in the Utopian chatrooms of Pan-Asia. I wasn’t afraid of you then, I’m not afraid now, this feeling isn’t fear; and he’d been looking at the characters too long, he didn’t want them to know he could read.
    Ceremonial guards, very smart in olive green with scarlet belts and shoulder boards, stood to attention on either side of a pair of huge doors, the same creamy, quivering material as the wall but shaped into hinges, studs and bars; an imitation, no, a reference to ancient bronze. The doors opened majestically, Ax and his escort passed into the gatehouse with no halt, no greeting, no perceptible security scan. They waited in a blank side room. The air was chill; the only furniture creamy, naked couches with scrolled ends, set against the walls. The soldiers stood face-front, chin up. The sergeant was a ginger-haired individual with a prominent nose, the private soldiers looked like Han Chinese. Ax wondered if he should try whistling “Waltzing Matilda” ? Start a conversation about cricket? No.
    No romancing the help.