Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  So you tell the old man, this is where it all happened and he smiles that secret smile again and says, “Yes, this is where it all happened all those years ago, long before you were even thought of; it was here the Lady worked a miracle and saved five hundred lives, yes, we’ll be there soon, and look, even the weather is deciding to improve, look.”

  Out across the hills the sky is clearing from the North West. Light is pouring through the dirty clouds and the rain has blown away leaving the air jewel-bright and clear. Catharine of Tharsis explodes out into the sunlight, a shout of black and gold and the plains about her steam gently in the afternoon sun.

  Lights flash on the control desk. Even though you do not understand what they mean, they look important. You direct Taam Engineer’s attention to them, but he just nods and then ignores them. He even sits back and lights a cheroot. You thought he had given up those dirty things years ago, but when you ask him if there is anything wrong, he says,

  “Nothing, boy, nothing,” and tells you she’s only doing what her high station expects of her, but you haven’t time to think about that because the train is slowing down. Definitely, unmistakably. Her speed is now well under 100. You look to Taam Engineer, but he grins roguishly and does not even touch the keypad to demand more speed. He just sits there, arms folded, puffing on his cheroot as the speed drops and drops and it becomes obvious that the train is not just slowing, but stopping.

  The nonstop Rejoice-to-Llangonnedd Aries Express grinds past a stationary chemical train down-bound from the sulphur beds of Pavo. The engines whine as they deliver power to the squealing brakes and the 700-ton train comes to a stand right out there in the middle of the pampas with not even a station or even a signal pylon to mark it as special and worthy of the attention of Catharine of Tharsis.

  A hiss of steam startles you, it is that quiet. Cooling metal clicks. Even the hum of the engines is gone, the fusion generators are shut right down. The rust-red chemical train looks almost sinister in its stillness.

  “What now?” you whisper, painfully aware of how loud your voice sounds. Grandfather Taam nods at the door.

  “We get out.”

  The door hisses open and he jumps out, then lifts you down to the ground. You can see the staring faces pressed to the windows all the way down the train.

  “Come on,” says Grandfather Taam and he takes you by the hand and leads over the slow down-line (you glance nervously at the waiting chemical train, half expecting the automated locomotive to suddenly blare into life), down the low embankment and into the tall grass. He grinds his filthy cheroot out on the ground, says, “It should be around here somewhere,” and starts thrashing about, whish whish swush, in the wet grass. You can hear him muttering.

  “Aha! Got it! A bit overgrown, but that just goes to show how long it is since a human engineer ran this line. I tell you, in my day we kept the weeds down and polished the silverwork so bright you could see it shining from ten kilometers down the track. Come and look at this, son … .”

  He has cleared the grass away from a small stone pedestal. Inlaid in tarnished metal is the nine-spiked wheel-symbol of Saint Catharine. You can feel the devotion as your grandfather bends to rub the dirt of the years from the small memorial. When it is clean and silver-bright again he bids you sit with him on the damp crushed grass and listen as he tells you his tale.

  I have told Patrick what I am going to do. I used the simplest words, the most restrained gestures, the shortest sentences, for I know how incoherent I become when I am excited. I did my best to explain, but all I did was scare him. Seeing me transformed, my body clean, my face pretty, again the Kathy Haan he had once loved, and then to hear me tell him of how I am going to cast this world away and live forever on Mars is too great a shock for him. He does not have to tell me. I know he thinks I am mad. More than just “mad.” Insane. My explanations will do no good, he can’t understand and I’m not going to force him to.

  “One favor, Patrick. You know people who can get these things, could you get me two lengths of twistlock monofiber?”

  “What for?”

  “I need it.”

  “ … for your mad ‘escape,’ don’t tell me. Forget it. No, Kathy.”

  “But listen, Patrick …”

  “No, no, no, I’ve listened enough to you already. You’re a persistent bitch; if I listen to your voice long enough I’ll find myself agreeing with whatever insane notion you suggest.”

  “But it’s not insanity. It’s survival, it’s the only way for me to go.”

  “Oh, yes, the only way you can be pure, the only way you can achieve spirituality … . What is it that’s driven you to this, Kathy? It’s suicide, that’s exactly what it is!”

  “The Crazy Angel, Patrick. At some time or another the Crazy Angel touches us all and we just have to go with the flow.”

  But he doesn’t see the joke: If there is no God, how can there be any angel at all, Crazy or otherwise, unless it is me?

  “Are we not enough? There was a time when it was enough for us to have each other. What more do you want, what more is there?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that, Patrick?” I give him one of my fascinating half-smiles that used to excite him so much. Now it only angers him.

  “Then what does Mars offer that I don’t?”

  Same question. This time I choose to answer it.

  “Sanity.”

  “Sanity! Hah! You talk to me about sanity? That’s rich, Kathy Haan, that is rich.”

  I remain patient. I will not allow Patrick to disturb me. I will not lose my head or shout at him. To do so would only be to play the game according to his rules, and his sick society’s rules.

  “Sanity,” I say, “in a world where words like hunger and fear and disease and war and decadence and degeneration don’t have any meaning, in a world that one day will be so much more than your Earth could ever be. Freedom from a world that registers its terrorists, Patrick Byrne, and lets them kill who they will for their high and lofty registered ideals!”

  That stings him, but I am relentless, I am the voice of final authority: the angel is speaking through me and won’t be silent.

  “And you will let me go, Patrick, you will get me those lengths of monofiber from your Corps friends, because either I go or your sick, sick society will have me off the top of a building in a week, and that is a promise, Patrick Byrne, a Kathy Haan promise: either way I go; either way you lose.”

  “Bitch!” he roars and spins round, hand raised to strike, but no one may lay hands on the Crazy Angel and live, and the look in my eyes stops him cold. Serenity.

  “Bitch. God, maybe you are an angel after all, maybe you are a saint.”

  “Not a saint, Patrick, never a saint. A saint who doesn’t believe in God? Not Saint Kathy, just a woman out of time who wanted something more than her world had to offer. Now, will you get me those bits of twistlock fiber?”

  “All right. I can’t fight the Crazy Angel. How long?”

  I hold my hands about half a meter apart. “Two of them, with grips at both ends and a trigger-release twistlock set to fifth-second decay so they won’t ever find out how I did it.”

  “I’ll get them. It’ll take some time.”

  “I can wait.”

  Expressions flow as words across his face. Then he turns away from me.

  “Kathy, this is suicide!”

  “So what? It’s legal, like everything else from political murder to public buggery.”

  “It’s suicide.”

  “No. Not this. To stay behind, to try and live one more year on this rotting world, that’s suicide. More than that, it’s the end of everything, because then I’ll have even thrown all my hope away.”

  It is a story old and stale with telling and retelling, but here, sitting on the damp grass under the enormous sky, it feels as if it is happening to you for the first time. Taam Engineer’s eyes are vacant, gazing into years ago; he does not even notice how his stained fingers trace the s
tarburst shape of the Catharine Wheel on the pedestal.

  “I tell you, I thought we were done then. I’d given up all hope when that pump blew, with us so far out into the wilderness, and it was wilderness then, this was years back before ROTECH had completed manforming the Grand Valley … we were so far out that no help could ever reach us in time, not even if they sent the fastest flyer down from their skystations, and there were five hundred souls aboard, man, woman and child … .

  “So I ordered them to evacuate the train, even though I knew right well that they could never get far enough away to outrun the blast when the fusion engines exploded … . But I had them run all the same, run to those hills over there … you know, to this day I don’t know if they have a name, those hills … but I thought that if they could reach the far side then they might be safe, knowing full well that they never would … .

  “All the time I was counting off the seconds until the pressure vessel would crack and all that superheated steam would blow my beauty to glory and us with her. I can remember that I had one thought in my head that kept running round and round and round: ‘God, save the train, please, save the train God … .’ That was when the miracle happened.”

  An afterbreath of wind stirs the grass around you. It feels deliciously creepy.

  “I don’t know if it was my calling or the train’s agony that brought her, and I don’t think it matters much; but on the horizon I saw a black dot, way out there … .” He points out across the waving grass and if you squint along the line of his finger into the sun you too can see that black dot rushing towards you. “An aveopter, black as sin and big as a barn, bigger even; circling over the line, and I tell you, it was looking for me, for the one who called it … .” Taam Engineer’s hands fly like aveopters, but he is too busy watching the great black metal hawk coming lower and lower and lower to notice them. “And I swear she took the loco in her claws, boy, in her metal claws, and every bit of bright-work on her ran with blue fire. Then I heard it. The most terrible sound in the world, the scream of the steam-release valve overloading and I knew that was it and I scrambled down this bank as fast as I could and threw myself onto the ground because death was only a second behind me, and do you know what I saw?”

  Though you have heard the story a hundred tellings before, this time it takes your breath away. So you shake your head, because for once you do not know.

  “I tell you, every one of those five hundred souls, just standing there in the long grass and staring for all they were worth. Not one of them trying to run, I say, so I turned myself belly-up and stared too, and I tell you, it was a thing so worth the staring that I couldn’t have run, though my life depended on it.

  “They’d stripped her down and laid her bare and unplugged the fusion generators and, by the Mother-of-Us-All, they were fusing up the cracks in the containment vessel and running the pumps from zero up to red and down again, and those pumps, those God-blind-’em pumps, they were singing so sweetly that day it was like the Larks of the Argyres themselves.”

  “Who, Grandfather?” you say, swept away by the story. “Who were they?”

  “The Angels of Saint Catharine herself, I tell you. They had the look of great metal insects, like the crickets you keep in a cage at home, but as big as lurchers and silver all over. They came out of the belly of the aveopter and a-swarmed all over my locomotive.”

  He slaps his thighs.

  “Well, I knew she was saved then, and I was whooping and cheering for all I was worth and so was every man-jack of those five hundred souls by the time those silver crickets had finished their work and put her back together again. Then they all just packed back into the belly of that big black aveopter and she flew off over the horizon and we never saw her again, none of us.

  “So, I got up into the cab and everything was all quiet and everything smelt right and every readout was normal and every light green, and I put the power on as gentle as gentle and those engines just roared up and sang, and those pumps, those pumps that so near killed us all, they were humming and trilling like they were fresh from the shop. Then I knew I’d seen a miracle happen, that the Blessed Lady, Saint Catharine herself, had intervened and saved us all. And I tell you this, I would still never have believed it had it not been for those five hundred souls who witnessed every little thing she did and some of them even had it recorded and you can see those pictures to this day.”

  Up on the track the chemical train fires up. The shocking explosion of sound makes you both jump. Then you laugh and up on the embankment the robot train moves off: cunk, cunk, cunk, cunk. Taam Engineer rises to watch it. When it is gone he pats the small stone pedestal.

  “So of course we named the engine after her and put this here to commemorate the miracle. I tell you, all the engineers (in the days when we used to have human engineers) on the Grand Valley run would sound their horns when they went by as a mark of respect, and also in the hope that if they gave the Lady her due, one day she might pull them out of trouble. You see, we know that the Lady’s on our side.”

  He offers you a hand and drags you up damp-assed from the ground. As you climb the embankment you see all the faces at the windows and the hands waving ikons and charms and medallions and holy things. It makes you look at Catharine of Tharsis again, as something not quite believable, half locomotive and half miracle.

  Grandfather Taam lifts you up the cab steps. Suddenly a question demands to be asked.

  “Grandfather, then why do the trains stop now if they only used to whistle?”

  He reaches for the flask of tea and pours you a scalding cup. Behind you the djinn rumbles into life again.

  “I’ll tell you for why. Because she is not a saint of people, but a saint of machines. Remember that, because the day came when the last engineer was paid off this line and they turned it over to the machines and then they felt that they could honor their Lady as best they knew.”

  Lights blink red white green yellow blue all over the cab. The light glints off the holy medals and ikons but somehow it is not as pretty as it once was.

  As if it were aware of my imminent escape into spirituality, the ugliness is drawing closer to me. Yesterday in the train I saw a licensed beggar kicked to death by three masked men. No one raised voice nor hand in protest. For one of the masks held out a Political Activist Registry card for us all to see while the other two beat the old man to death in accordance with their political ideals. Everyone looked out of the windows or at the floor or at the advertisements for sunny holidays and personal credit extensions. Anywhere but at the beggar or at each other.

  I am ashamed. I too looked away and did nothing.

  We left him on the floor of the car for others to take care of when we stepped off at our stop. A smart man I vaguely know with a highcaste tekmark glanced at me and whispered, “We certainly must remember to respect people’s right to political expression; goodness knows what terrible things might happen if we don’t.”

  Oh, Patrick, how many beggars have you killed in the name of political expression? Damn you, Patrick Byrne, for all the love I’ve wasted on a man who a hundred years ago would have been hunted down and torn apart for the common murderer he was. Dear God, though I know you aren’t there, what sort of a people are we when we call terrorists “heroes” and murder “political expression”? What sort of a person is it who would dare to say she loved one? A Kathy Haan, that’s what. But I will be rid of him.

  Escape is two lengths of twistlocked monofiber wrapped up in my pouch, but have I the courage to use it? Cowardice is a virtue now, everyone has their Political Activist card to wave as justification for their fear. Be brave, Kathy.

  I like to think of myself as the first Martian at these times.

  It’s not the loneliness that scares me. I have been alone for twenty-four years now and there is no lonelier place than the inside of your skull. What terrifies me is the fear of gods.

  Deiophobia.

  “Maybe you are an angel after all, maybe you are a
saint,” Patrick had said. What I fear most is that I may become more than just a saint, that the ultimate blasphemy to all that the sacrifice of Kathy Haan stood for will be for me to become the Creator God of the world I am building: the Earth Mother, the Blessed Virgin Kathy, the Cherished and Adored Womb of the humanity I despise.

  I do not want to be God, I don’t even particularly want to be human. I only want to be free from the wheel.

  Smiles and leers greet me from friend and satyr alike. “Morning, Kathy (thighs, Kathy), ’day, Kathy (breasts Kathy) …” I take my chair, still warm from the flesh of its previous occupant whom I have never known and probably never will, now. Warm-up drill: codes, ciphers, and calibrations. The sensor helmet meshes with my neural implants and nobody sees me slip the coils of monofiber from my pouch and throw a couple of loops around the armrests.

  Lightspeed will be the death of me. The monofiber is merely the charm I chose to invoke it.

  “Okay, Kathy, taphead monitoring on …”

  Needles slip into my brain and I slip my wrists through the loops, concealing the twistlock control studs in my palms. I had not thought death would be so easy.

  Brainscans worm across the ceiling.

  Listen: I have not much time to tell you this, so listen well. It takes six minutes for the oxygen level in the brain to fall to the critical point after which damage is irreversible. It is easy to do this. Damage to two major arteries will do very nicely, provided there is no rapid medical attention.

  But: it takes four minutes for the coded tadon pulse containing the soul of Kathy Haan to reach Mars. You can add. You know that if you add another four minutes return time from ROTECH to Earth that leaves you with a brain so like shredded cabbage that there’s no way they’ll ever be able to pour poor Kathy back into it again. I shall be free and I shall live forever as a creature of pure spirit.

  I have invented a totally new sin. Is it fitting then that I should become a saint?