by Ian McDonald
“Then do it.”
“I’ll come back in a year, when they’ve grown stronger and the organs have settled.”
“No, do it now.”
Afterward Naon Engineer would always justify it by arguing that you could not have twin-trunked creatures obstructing Catherine of Tharsis’s narrow corridors and gangways. If there were a pressure leak, or, please God, a plasma breach, the creature would not only endanger itself but the lives of every other family member. Child’a’grace, still vertiginous from the birthing drugs, had understood that he feared others might suspect bad genes in the Engineer Domiety. Too close to the tokamaks. Uh huh. And there’s a shallow grave, just off the McAuleyburg branch. Oh yes. Well, of course there’s nothing left now, the condors get everything. But just you look at the collar bones, and count the vertebrae.
“So,” the Flying Midwife said as she printed out the consent forms and laid the little red squawling thing on the white table under the white lights, “who gets the kidney and who gets the ovary?”
“She gets the kidney.” Naon Engineer pointed. “And she gets the ovary.”
“Okie dokie,” the Flying Midwife said, and called up the surgeon she worked with in Belladonna. He was on a marriage-repair weekend on the canals of New Merionedd, so the locum slipped his hand into the waldoglove and put on the cyberhat. In his windowless office on the fifth underdeep of Belladonna he waggled his fingers. In an Alt Colorado impact crater, scalpel blades danced over the infants. The robot arms wove, the fingers flashed and at the end of it the one with the kidney lived and the one with the ovary died and in truth there was a shallow grave, by the side of the branchline, unmarked but much spattered by the soft, bloody faeces of condors.
Child’a’grace, half-joyful, half-despairing, hung a mobile of mirrored birds over the survivor’s cot and that night, Little Pretty One came into them and watched over her sibling, though the eyes of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th had yet to learn to focus.
That was the story as told by Little Pretty One.
“I just hope you like the smell of hot fat,” the twin ghost said in her bedroom mirror.
Sweetness surged out of her bunk with as great a surge as her tiny couchette would allow.
“Grandmother Taal…”
“She’s got powers but she’s not omnipotent. She got as good a deal as she could…”
The night, the dust, the gentle rock of the rails beneath her, the warm presence of constant velocity, the background bass hum of the tokamaks, the cool of the ancient waters of Inatra, the reek of dungfires, the verdant perfume of the green man’s booth; all drowned out by the rattle of pans and plates and the blatting of orders down the gosport. Sold. To a Stuard.
“Ninth Avata?”
“Who told you?”
“My uncle.”
Little Pretty One pouted, put out. She disliked having an oracular rival in the family.
“Did your uncle tell you his name?”
“Tell me.”
“Narob Chi-Ora of the Southern Circle Stuards.”
“Is he?”
“Cute enough. Black hair. Nice ass. Nice eyes too. He’d be kind. He’s got ambitions. Catering director for the entire North West Quartersphere. He could get it too.”
After eight years, Sweetness knew that Little Pretty One’s coulds usually meant will. Somewhere in the Panarch’s ninety-seven nested heavens, she suspected her ex-Siamese twin had met others.
“When?” Heavy question.
“Next corroboree.” Heavier answer. Twice a long year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the Trainpeople gathered on the great sidings of Woolongong flats, ten trains to a track, five hundred tracks. Five thousand noble locomotives, tenders and cabooses decked with bunting and flower garlands and hard-won iron rosettes for speed and endurance and bravery and heavy hauling. Here the Domiety heads boogied and the daughters were traded away. Economies of money and honour were exchanged out on the shimmering flats and, often as not, were that same day lost over card and snooker tables. Commodius vicus of recirculation of the commodifiable. Sweetness had seen the young women in their mothers’ dresses, bags in hands, nuptial kerchiefs on their heads. Seen, pitied, resolved never to join.
“Oh God!”
The big ore-load was bound for the foundries of Steel River. Three days deadhead from there up to Shelby to pick up a forest fermenter—raw trees at Shelby, fifteen kinds of liquiplastic and hydrocarbon fuel by the time it decoupled at Wisdom. There, an immediate shunt on to a pilgrim charter to the Murmuring Mountain at Chernowa, then a fast run to Belladonna for a month heading up the pride of Bethlehem Ares Railroads itself, the Ares Express. And after that the sun would stand vertical over the equator and divide the world into equal day and night and she would get to live in a strange man’s galley and her black curls would smell forever after of hot fat. So little time, so few kilometres.
“You can’t let this happen!”
In the mirror, Little Pretty One spread her hands in the way ghosts do when they tell the living, I’m a ghost, remember.
Sweetness did remember. Something else.
“The green man!”
For the first time Sweetness saw Little Pretty One taken aback.
“The what?”
“The green man. He said…”
“You met a green man? Where? I didn’t see that. This changes everything.”
He said, I don’t see a marriage yet, was what Sweetness would have said but for the smart rap on the cabin door, followed by the swift, fierce itch that was Little Pretty One exiting the mirror and entering the long scar up her side.
Brother Sle opened the porthole and bellowed.
“Uncle Billy!”
The formula was ancient, irrevocable and universally respected. Not even the Domiety historians agreed who Uncle Billy had been, if he had been any more than legendary, but he had saved generations of Engineers from peril, crime, police, debt, rivals, badmaashes, wanderlust and misjudged relationships. He had warned of threats gross and subtle, shysters, dunners, weighbridgemen, bindlestiffs and freeloaders.
“Whereaway?” Sweetness called.
“Railrat,” Sle answered.
A roofrider. A freeloader. A faredodger. Pausing only to scratch her haunted wound, Sweetness threw on shorts, shoes, shirt. Sle was waiting in the corridor with the flashlight and djubba-stick.
“You be careful with that,” he scolded as Sweetness reacquainted herself with the short, chubby railfolk’s weapon.
“What, like this, brother?” She aimed the blunt club-head at Sle. He danced back; the compressed gas charge could shoot out the djubba-stick with force enough to dislodge the most tenacious roof rider.
“Don’t waste the gas,” he said sourly. Sweetness gave his retreating back a thumb of disgrace as he exited the port sidewalk. She popped the overhead iris hatch with a gasp of steam and shinned up on to the roofwalk. Up on the roof had always been the place Sweetness had gone to think and feel and be alone, a savoury delicacy on crowded, bustling Catherine of Tharsis. Here, on the brilliant nights when the moonring was a diamond prizefighter’s belt, Child’a’grace had always known she could find her daughter out of all of a big train’s hundreds of hiding places. Sweetness unclasped her hair and shook it out in Catherine of Tharsis’s eternal slipstream. With the innate grace of the trainborn, she poised herself against the slow rock of the engine. She breathed in the night air. Steam wreathed around her. Several times since sprouting hair she could sit on, she had come up to take her clothes off and let the white vapour and the night caress her. At first she had felt perverse and sinful. Midnight nudist and aspirant engine drier. Then one night, buttoning up her blouse, she had spied Nugent Traction not merely take his gear off, but enjoy a slow, nocturnal wank, launching his effort in an elegant arc over the side of the water tender.
Tonight, an Uncle Billy. Sweetness instinctively checked her tunnel warning beacon, though there was no tunnel within two hundred kays, hitche
d the djubba-stick to her belt and set off down the gently swaying roofwalk toward the tender.
A sound.
She froze on the top rung of the tender companionway. Her inquisitive torch beam swung hither and yon. Romereaux’s grin greeted her from the lee of the main water inflow.
“Don’t do that man, I could’ve djubba-ed you.”
“Sorry, did I spook you?”
“Nah. Course not.”
She saw Romereaux’s face change and knew what he was going to say. She did not want to hear it. He did anyway.
“About…”
Sweetness flared.
“How come everyone hears about this before me?”
“I’m sorry…”
Well, Engineers can’t marry Deep-Fusion people anyway, so you’re scuppered there, she thought of saying but he really did not deserve words like that so she said, coolly, “Where’ve you checked?”
“Starboard side’s clear. Suleiman is still down port. Chagdi’s coming up from the caboose.”
“I’ll do the tops of the trucks.”
“Okay.” A pause. “Sweet…”
“Don’t talk. Okay?”
It was good and physical to leap over the dark chasms between the ore-cars and flash her torch down among the clanking couplings.
“Come out come out.”
She sent her beam dancing over the angled planes of the truck roof. Behind this one, three hundred more. More distant than she had imagined, another sway of light, Chagdi working his way up.
Father Naon had tried to impress the family horror of railrats on Sweetness but she had seen the indignity of old tramps impaled on signal stanchions and sad goondahs, shaken from the bogies, guillotined in half by the wheels, and the dreadful look in the eyes of the bums as they spat red dust from their mouths and banged red dust from their coats and then saw five hundred kilometres of it on every side of them. Freeloading was stealing but every time she was sent up on the roof Sweetness regretted that she must be part of the punishment. Were tales of the terrible fates of roofriders not told among the indigent orders that breed and were buried under the great termini? Or was whatever they were escaping worth any risk?
Escape.
A noise. Not family this time. The torch beam dodged left. Movement down on the sloping flank of ore-car eleven. Behind the vent stack. Sweetness hurdled the gaps between trucks, light fixed on the hexagonal mound of the vents. Steel mesh clanged beneath her feet. Yes. Yes. There. Fingers. She crouched by the handrail, sent her light this way, that. Her right hand unhooked the djubba-stick. Fingers, pale knuckled around the metal vent. Thin fingers, dust ingrained in the knuckles, black jam under the nails.
Sweetness considered the fingers for a long time. Then she laid the djubba-stick on the roofwalk and said, softly, “Hey. You’re taking a wild risk, you know.”
The fingers were silent.
“You get all kinds of stuff gassing up off the ore. A kind of relative of mine fell in once when they were unloading. Came out like a teacher’s handbag. True. If that thing valves, it’ll blow you clear off the car.”
The fingers twitched.
“You know, I wouldn’t pick that place at all. Hanging down the side? You want to get gravity working for you, not against you, see? I’d go right up the front, down on the cow-catcher. It’s right in front of everyone but it’s kind of like a blind spot, you can’t see it from the bridge. True. Really. But, well, you’re here, so what you need to do, when you fall off, is make sure you land right between the tracks. That way the train goes right over your head. Mind you, you have to get down kind of fast, you don’t want to get anything tangled up in the grit pipes. You could be dragged for like kilometres.”
The fingers twitched in her torch beam.
“So, how long’ve you been down there?”
Nothing. Then, a whisper almost lost in the wheel rumble, “Since Little Rapids.”
“Mother’a…Your fingers must be coming off.”
“Yes,” came the small reply that was full of knotted nerves and locked sinews and muscles numb to everything but dumb survival. Sweetness came to a decision.
“I’m going to send something down to you. Grab ahold of it.”
“No,” came the answer.
“You what? I’m trying to help you.”
“Don’t trust.”
Sweetness was sincerely perplexed at the rejection of her offer of rebellion.
“Why so?”
“Trick. Try to knock me off.”
“Listen, if you’ve been hanging on there since Little Rapids, you don’t need me to knock you off. Sooner rather than later, my friend.”
The train lurched over points. Fingers groaned. Fingers slipped a fraction. Sweetness ducked under the handrail, anchored her feet over the lip of the roofwalk and stretched down over the sloping truck side. One-handed, she aimed the djubba-stick as close as she dared to the fingers.
“This is going to come fast, so don’t shy away or anything stupid like that.”
A second lurch threw her aim. The club-head shot within a whisker of the pale soft hand. The fingers almost flinched. Almost.
“Grab hold!” Sweetness shouted. “It’ll hold you.”
“Yeah,” came the voice as the fingers felt for the telescopic shaft of the stick. “But can you?”
“I can hold any damn thing,” Sweetness said, affronted. One hand, then the other grasped the stick. The sudden tug almost tore her loose.
“Hang on,” she gritted, to herself. She fumbled for the retract key. And twist. The djubba-stick kicked like Nugent Traction’s organ as first the hands, then the arms, then between them, a hunger-sunken face beneath the mat of black hair were hauled up over the edge of the car.
He’s kind of young, Sweetness Asiim Engineer thought between the rip in her shoulders and the tear in her calves. What, just gone eight?
They were almost face to face, lip to lip. Sweetness felt the last of her strength go.
“Grab the rail!” she hissed. He seized it just as the djubba-stick fell from her fingers and clattered down the side of the ore-car into the dark. Sweetness rolled on to her back. The railrat knelt over her, head cocked to one side like an inquisitive songbird.
“Why are you doing this? You could have knocked me clean off.”
“Have,” Sweetness panted. “Plenty. So”—a swallow—“what ya called?”
He was desperately thin. The fall would have snapped his little chicken bones. He had big brown suspicious eyes that mistrusted everything in the universe from under his urchin fringe. He was desperately cute. Worth saving just to look at.
“You saved me, you tell first.”
Sweetness sat up.
“My name,” she said, “is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer. The twelfth.”
“You trainies have big names.”
“So, how big’s yours?”
“Pharaoh,” the boy said.
“Pharaoh something? Something Pharaoh?”
“Pharaoh nothing.”
“Just Pharaoh.”
“It’s enough, where I come from.”
“And where would that be, little-name?”
“Meridian.”
“That’s…”
“I know how far Meridian is.”
Half a planet.
“How?”
“I won the meat lotto.”
“What is this?”
A crossing bell clanged away into the past.
“Everyone puts up a steak. Then the Boss of the Roof draws the feathers.”
“Whoa whoa whoa. Everyone? Who is this?”
“The people. All of them. The underfolk.”
“Ah.” The deep dregs; the faces you glimpsed looking up at you from between the sleepers in Meridian Main; the hands that reached out from under the platform when you dropped a centavo and it rolled over the lip. Small loss to you, to the fingers down there in the access tunnels and bogieways, food and glam and power. “You lived there like for
always?”
“This life, the one before it, probably the one after it too.”
“Don’t get cute, railrat.”
“We got names for you people, underneath. Anyway, you dropped your punch-stick over the side, remember?”
“Yeah, well I can still pick you up and throw you off.” They knelt, challenging each other under the circling moonring. “So, how old are you?”
“I’m near ten.”
“Had you for younger.”
“How much younger?”
“Younger. So, what steak?”
Kid Pharaoh finger-combed back his lank hair. No left ear, instead, a puckered grin of deaf scar.
“An old woman bought it. She had cancer of the lobe.”
“Don’t get a lot of that, cancer of the lobe.”
“Sometimes, when the wind’s right, I can hear what she’s hearing, in here.” He tapped the earless curve of his skull. “That’s how I know who got it, after.”
“What did you win for that?”
“The ticket out. Anywhere. And the golden purse. A thousand dollars.”
A tangential thought demanded Sweetness voice it before it faded.
“So, how many times did you go in for the, ah?”
“Meat lotto? Second time lucky.”
“The first time?”
“A big toe. Don’t balance too good.”
“Who got the toe?”
“Don’t know. Not much sense in a toe.”
“I suppose there’re one’s’ve been up for it a lot of times?”
“Well, there’s a kind of natural limit…”
“I suppose so.” Up ahead in the night, Naon Engineer whistled. Three short blasts, one long. Coming up on Juniper. Sweetness felt the great train shudder beneath her, brakes gently gripping.
“So, what happened? I mean, if you had a thousand dollars…”
“Got stiffed.”
“Where?”
“Suniyapa. Three big girls. Must’ve heard that they give out the Golden Purse with the lotto. They were looking for poor kids riding rich. They had suits. Looked like regular coh-mute-ers. Big damn blakey-toe boots, but.”
“Sorry.”
“What for? You were going to knock me off your train, so? Any road, they throw me off at High Plains and then I hitch a ride on some shit deadheader across Chryse because Mr. Engineer he’s expecting to ride the whole rig with me hanging off his lizard and when I don’t he dumps me out. Walked three days to Little Rapids.”
