As published in The Giggling Busterìan, Gurgel, Gigglebusterìa, 28th Fnerb 1206.

At least the Gestapo knocked (oh, were that an original line). Alex had dragged him by the hair — the only one he had left.
Ahead now, presumably due to an unusually turbid confluence of random circumstances, rather than matters Jungian, a lone clump of purple verbena (here actually entheogenic maveluthra, its flower cinque-foiled and quincunx-patterned) sprang out beneath the glassy sun — in the shadow, for an instant, of Alex’s zipperless red boot. She led Clay in a tight amble toward the cliff’s edge. She believed in a General Progeny Strike until the Ruling Few met all demands. (Fuck Lysistrata. She had no ambition.)
All the world is waiting for the sunrise … drifted in from a dance-hall beyond the glass menagerie of stars above. Cynically, she imagined that the universal arse pointed in their direction. Time to deploy the Valerie Thomas 3D Illusion Transmitter, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. They were a dialectical pair in these days of Interplanetary Free Enterprise. (‘Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery’ was its gummy motto.) He was the opposite of human as far as she was concerned, the first teenager to circumnavigate the Earth by ekranoplane. He constantly got wrong notes with his voice, typical of his incompetence, the twat. She sniffed, a mine of knowledge (she was a glogger back home, into blackmail and had even read Ludwig Von Mises). Verona Rupes it was not. How much one thought while talking to oneself, she said to herself, thinking on her feet.
He hung back a little, slow as continental drift, red-faced as a mid-twentieth century English postbox, chewing on the last of the fake-soy hamburgers. (He knew that the troubles and the separation wall in Belfast were due to the fact that if Catholics and Protestants were to interbreed they would produce Poets, and that people would even convert to Protestant or Catholic Christianity in order to achieve this utopian outcome, thus producing a world composed of Poets in which the ruling class would be economically compelled to pay Poets, which would spell the death of Free Enterprise. Oh to stand and fart resonantly from the highest point in Darien! ) An alien sat at the end of the rainbow, staring from a glistening dittany bush, pallid as an unvarnished mandolin. This was a place where you didn’t expect to find a gold coin or bottletop beneath a grassblade, no matter how much finger-slicing silica contained. Nor an horizon like a razor edge. Like all foreign worlds, it was fungible as coinage.
Here was a planet, beyond Pluto and Charon, just at the tail end of the solar system, where the interstellar gas and solar wind became truly flatulent; a planet warmed by a tiny gilt star, invisible from earth or anywhere else, 13 billion kilometres from the sun, and very close indeed. Oh my pork chop God what a fanny …
Such were Clay’s disjointed thoughts. Time to complain to Guy Fawkes, M.P. He was nervous, a (slovenly but empirical) poet at heart, an early product of transhuman experimentation (they’d come a long way since false teeth), and — despite his bionic arse — happy to be sidetracked. (At home he was the sole member of his line not in prison, as almost the whole family had had their names put down for imprisonment — though not public school, thank God — long before his grandparents were born.) Each suspended prismatic droplet, as he moved his glistering bald head, became the illusory pupil of a mantis’s compound eye. He tore his gaze away, saying “Careful, there’s the updraft — ” as they stared out at the dancing puff of dust.
The sands of time scream in the eyeball grindstone of the universe … he whispered to a light-headed butterfly, no surrealist (though born a designer-baby in Papeete). God is not dead, She just left in disgust, delivering boutades left right and centre. Ah, the merry hum of the chainsaw on an April morning when you have no certificate. Ah, the false jollity of contemporary philosophy! Ah, the moral panic!
Illantyn — pronounced ‘iliantin’ — had that effect on people.
“The ‘spaceship’ was here?” she called back, incredulous. Her favourite poet was Emily Dickinson (her lesser-known performance pieces).
“I didn’t report it!” he squeaked and growled. “Supposedly — out there.”
She nodded. The droplet of meaty tomato sauce in the corner of her mouth he found erotic. He hoped she never brushed it away.
“Don’t get too close!”
“I’m fine with heights.” Her cropped, white-dyed hair flickered in the wind.
They could see the whole Earth Liberation Front school from up here, wreathed in little curls of yellow smoke and mist. They were missing rooftop marijuana classes again. Oh, well. It was dangerous up there anyway. Crawling with future-oriented Anarchists spouting from Father Proudhon and Son Bakunin and Louise Michels and Flora Tristan and Emma Goldman … she preferred Marx (Eleanor). The adobe buildings clinging to the amphitheatre-like hillsides of the valley channeled water down their u-shaped radial rooves into a deep well in the centre. The township looked to be an environmentalist’s dream, yet was an E.L.F. military garrison. Or, perhaps, a mirage.
The United States of the Solar System (often known disrespectfully as a ‘cistern’ on the grounds that it was regularly washing its citizenry down the toilet) was these days funded entirely by phishing scams and social security fraud, and generally in debt up to its optics from here to Jupiter.
“What’s that?”
“A giant stick-insect.” muttered Clay, not twigging. Maybe a cyborg one. (What sort of stick he cared less. He felt like a blind man about to be snapped up by his own guide-dog.)
“Eh? No, out there, you janky dork.”
The standing-wave of dust had moved away from the clifftop, big and bizarre against the distant Jindyworobak mountains (upon which ranged vast nictitating advertising signs reading ‘Save Money! Save Energy!’). An inviting knitted rope-bridge of sandy air stretched out to meet it.
Clay grasped her slender, steely arm.
“I won’t succumb.” she reassured him, through gritted teeth. He was about as attractive as pilonidal disease, or a handle on a flowerpot. In fact, she felt like making a speech not unlike the following, mutatis mutandis:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money; is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? is there one vice you do not possess? ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do; I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place; go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

(Nation-states don’t have allies, they have varying degrees of enemy. Oh for an Umma. )
“It’s, um, some sort of banner-cloud effect.” he swallowed loudly, farting unintentionally, his teeth and underpants vibrating, Darien L. Dorado notwithstanding.
She made a lemon-sucking face. (It was hard for her to make any other kind.) Today he was a filthy vanguardist Spart. Last week he was an anarcho-primitivist who ceaselessly pursued the perfect ‘rewilding’. He ceaselessly converted to millions of minuscule revolutionary sects. Nothing to float your boat like a rising tide of political filth. Extermination was the answer.
The queer ball of dust had darkened. It began to look solid as the well-panned sand-canal that stretched off to the mountains below.
“Who did report it?” snapped Alex, fingernails flashing like brooch-pins.
“Eh? Oh — some, er, foreigner, er, Labriola.”
A novice. A false sighting. They needed more discipline.
“This isn’t what I expected.” said Clay, glancing sidelong like Yoko Meshi.
“It isn’t a craft. What is it? Just dust, arbitrary dust, word-dust, the Dust Bowl bloom of a trillion disastrous butterflies.” There was a revival of the ancient art of postal modernism. One of those break-ins from the past that sometimes took such horrific forms. The market was art gone mad; the dollar (maniacal laugh coming up) represented everything.
The mantis raised its head like an emaciated penis and smiled, post festum.
“Or, er, book-ashes, eh. Straight out of Georges Bataille’s anus… Let’s get back.” He began to tug at her arm.
“Not yet. It’s only arbitrary silica dust — but what a pattern. Jesus, Clay. We are Sandwashers. You’ve got to have more guts than that.” She didn’t feel as confident as she sounded. She felt more confident. Clay had been rotted by politics. The dark ball swirled like a great sucked gobstopper. It turned white as her hair for a second, then orange. It began to glow. She glogged it. It did not fall.
The snaking trail they’d followed up the mountain was easy enough to climb, but treacherous in the dark. The dummy subject intervened. It was not yet noon, but the clouds round the shrunken shickered horizon were closing in at eye-level. (The daily solar eclipse was due too.) Clay heard a snarl of thunder. His tight blue regulation jumpsuit was damp with mist. Alex shimmered in front of him, trim, taut, twelve (she was Martian) … The white sphere was bright as a sparkler-head now. The school roof, like an upturned barge, was all but invisible. He felt giddy. His cutthroat-shaven pate was sizzling. She pulled away and padded balletically to the edge.
Alex — her real name the unpronounceable Alxlxx — could sense an intelligence in the tiny starlet that was lacking in her student. (The young marketistic, speech-impedimented, reverse-mortgaged Earthling — notorious for selling his hard-sponged dollars for used teapots, or sometimes peepots — had once bought a ‘bush block’ in Antarctica. She knew because she’d sold it to him. ) Like two eyes drawing her in, knowing her to be from the more advanced Outer Planets League. They seemed to smile. The long pointed toes of her red squidge-boots teetered over the drop. Clay Pidgeon could make a circumbendibus to hell, or indeed back to his Capital-influenced ‘Whore on Terra’. All she had to do was step onto the golden path to the Galactic Centre (crispy nougat, in factoid), she with the DNA of the original Ceresian ocean in her cells, she who understood the real connection between words and things , mental labour-power, as that between smoky concave mirrors and Zoroastrian fires and gems and dunghills …
She heard footsteps behind. Growing softer. The seamy little earthbrain, she assumed, running zanily down into the mist and, hopefully, out of her life forever. He had abandoned her, abandoned the adventure, the pattern they had found — one so unlike earth’s insect-like human accretions, which she had once googlishly seen from a descending spaceliner. Labriola, that thing of the past, had done well. She would make sure he got a latrine.
She tested the path with her boot. Spongy as a peat bog full of manure but firm enough. The cosmic eyes calmed her. She placed her weight on that studiedly cute Martian foot. She did not fall. Now the future would be hers to write. She would be kind to herself. The mantis rose up.
A shadow fell on the glowing craft, a decolourised fright wig of a shadow. She half-turned (Martians did). Quickly, the creature draped its giant, spiny forelegs about her slim shoulders and spoke of Prussian State Socialism. She sighed. Then a whoosh, as a length of wood split its pumpkin-wedge head in two.
“Who? Mzzdrkfxxxrtrxx !”
Clay grabbed her, both of them stinking and green and slimy, and dragged her back to what he considered safety.
“Had — to run back for this, Missx.” He panted, dropping the heavy gnarled stick. Above, the sun was half-shuttered. Things went from chiaroscuro to film noir.
The mountains jangled for an instant. The dead briefly woke. Slowly, the ball shrank to a raisin, dry as an old tear, then turned dung-brown, and blew not up but away.
“He — he was standing there, against the light, huge, horrible, black and white — I had no breath — ” It wasn’t the height.
His once-blue jumpsuit was torn, dishevelled and de-zippered. She felt like telling him to put his hands back in his pockets.
They both flopped exhausted onto the verbena plant as the mist lifted. After a while she forced out into the returning sunlight, “Well, thanks Clay. But you’ve gone and murdered Novice Labriola.”
“Goddamned pastlings. Serves him right. The asshole lured us up here — obviously to devour us. I hate their fucking planet. We oughta bomb it.”
“Sure. How — contradictory.” She managed a grin, wishing he’d stick to syrupy verse about the end of the universe.

(E.g.,
Throw the candy to the children
Watch ’em as they gather round
Then you take yer laser rifle
An’ mow the little fuckers down.)

Aliens disgusted her too. Worse than the underexploited pulse-munching masses. Give them a bath and they’d put gin in it.
Clay picked at a puma-scratched zircon thread on his clothing. Thunder growled again as at the end of an ancient film. “But now we’re safe … Alex.” He tried to plant a kiss on full on her meat-specked roseleaf mouth, but she belted him in the kisser with her little finger.
“Ow! You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“I — guess — not. You did save my life. Or at least my virginity.”
“I sure did, Ma’am.” A virgin at her age?
“O.k., then. Nothing else can go wrong now, can it?”
The Jindyworobaks had settled down. God returned to Her heaven. The school below were tucking into a repast made with the sweat of their brow (no wonder it had such an interesting flavour). But not for long.
His dander was up. “No way José!” He really kissed her then, and before you could say ‘condom’ they were at it like jack-and-jill-rabbits, so much so that the sun went in again out of embarrassment. The alien school and indeed the whole shrunken planet seemed (perhaps sadly) a long, long way away. Karl Marx went out for an evening walk. Words and things began to hum in harmony, rather like a volcano, and the world was theirs.

Then the maveluthra ate them up.