Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  It would be quick, and glorious.

  The mountain aimed itself at her heart and, at the last instant, turned away.

  The pressure wave punched her hard, blinded her with steam and dust. Then the slipstream yanked at her: You, come. Sweetness needed no invitation. She leaped after the blur of chrome and black. Along clattering catwalks. Down iron staircases. Across vertiginous gantries, over platforms, hurdling the sprawling legs of brother Sleevel, lolling idle with his best mate Rother'am watching the afternoon pelota on a handheld.

  “Sle.”

  “What? Uh. Just my sister.”

  Sweetness raced the faces behind the tinted window glass but the faces were always going to win. The wind that dragged her was failing. It dropped her in a little iron-framed oriole high on the side of the starboard tender coupling. She leaned out over the brass railing, raised her hand in salute to the glass observation car, the rattle in the express's tail. On the open rear balcony was a fine city lady in a sheer lace dress. Wake turbulence tugged her parasol from her fingers. It soared up and away, a bamboo and waxed-paper flying saucer. The city lady looked up, vexed, and in that moment her eyes met those of the black-haired girl in the orange track vest in the wrought-iron carbuncle on the flank of the big hauler.

  Lady and train were a thin black snake winding across the red desert. Carried high on the winds, the parasol floated into invisibility. The haze swallowed all. Gone again.

  “You're a fool to yourself,” the voice said after a decent interlude. The thunder of wheels had masked his approach, but Sweetness had deduced Romereaux's presence from his smell. All the Deep-Fusion people had a distinctive musk, like electricity and cool evenings after hot days, or concrete after rain. Sweetness imagined it was what atoms smelled like.

  “You think.”

  He was leaning against the turret door in the easy-pleasey way men can when it's not important for them to be looked at. Romereaux's people shared hair colour and quality with the Engineers—and body fluids, certain generations ago—but he was slight and pale, with a narrow shadow of attempted goatee. The sun did not get to the Deep-Effs in the heart of the big train.

  “Two hundred years of Engineer tradition says I know what I'm talking about.”

  He was a year and a half Sweetness's senior and, bad genes or not, next corroboree he would marry a Traction daughter off the Class 88 Four Ways. She would miss him.

  “There's a first time for everything.”

  He saw the way she looked down the long straight track and wanted to lie, to promise unpromisable things, but he had never been able to lie to Sweetness in all their years growing up together on Catherine of Tharsis.

  “Sle will be Engineer 12th. You know that.”

  She did, she knew it like she knew the sun would rise tomorrow, but she still growled, “All Sle's interested in is pelota and grab ass. And he's not even any good at them.”

  Romereaux smiled palely. She went on.

  “There are other branches of the Domiety have women drivers. The Slipher Engineers. The Great Western folk. Down in New Merionedd every other Engineer is a woman. And couldn't you just pretend, eh? Couldn't you just for once tell me, yeah, sure, Sweetness, you'll drive, you'll be up there with your hand on the drive lever? Would that be so hard, for once?”

  “Sweetness…”

  “I know.”

  He said, “Have you been to see your uncle yet?”

  “Mother'a…I near forgot. How long've we got?”

  “About five minutes.”

  “I'll go now, then. You coming?”

  “If you don't mind.”

  Trainpeople, Sweetness thought as she waited for Ricardo Traction to crank down the access ladder. We can go any place we like in the whole wide world but only as long as we stay on the rails.

  “Regards to your uncle!” Tante Miriamme Traction called from the tiny window of her laundry room as Sweetness hopped down on to the red sand. Stay on the rails. Bad luck will come in the night and climb up through your nose and through your ears if you wander off the safe track. Superstitions, litanies, observations. Casual coincidences that have become baked over years into causes and effects. Believed truths. Like daughters don't drive. But she still glanced over her shoulder when she could no longer feel the psychic closeness of Catherine of Tharsis on the back of her neck. The big train stood like a black monolith fused out of rust sand.

  Romereaux paid his respects first. A quick press of the palm to the sandscoured shaft of the signal light. Everyone—crew, that was, passengers never counted—on Catherine of Tharsis was related in some way, even the boisterous Bassareenis, but Romereaux's connection with Uncle Neon was tenuous and he had never really believed that a soul could exist in a railroad signal. That might have been why he had never felt anything but Bethlehem Ares galvanised steel, Sweetness thought. He bowed and stood back.

  Sweetness clapped her hands twice. The sound was small and flat in the huge and flat desert. She uncapped the flask she had collected from Madre Marya Stuard and poured a libation of cold tea. It frothed and stained the red sand like urine. Sweetness closed her eyes and boldly pressed her hand against the shaft. As ever, it began with sound-shadow, steel-slither, the hum-thrum of wind and wheels on rails, a memory of a life in rapid motion, twin ribbons of metal singing like the tines of a tuning fork. Her hearing opened like wings, was down at the bottom listening to the strum of the silicon and the songs the stones sing, then up through the wind-tumbled grains, listening to them building into harmonies of sand, a slow sea breaking grain by grain. Outward still, until she could hear everything contained within the girdling horizon. The rhythms and pulses of her own body joined with the chord of sand song. For a divine moment the great northern desert was a single quantum wave function, modelled in sand like a Shandastria scrying-garden. Sweetness stood at the locus of maximum probability.

  She opened her eyes. As ever, she was somewhere else. In this place there were no rails and no train and where the desert met the far mountains the red bled up into the sky. Blood-red sky, a pink zenith. No clouds in that sky, neither hope nor memory of rain. The rocks around her feet were salted with frost. The sand on which she stood seethed with static electricity. In all the world there were only two things, her and the upright of the signal light, rooted obstinately in the alien earth.

  Sweetness had always understood three things about this place. First, that neither of them should really be here at all. Second, that it should be as instantly lethal to her as if the soil were acid. Third, that this was their private place, her uncle and her, and that she could never tell anyone about it. Not even her family. It had been bad enough with Little Pretty One. They had talked Flying Therapist. This…

  “Uncle.”

  When he spoke, he sounded less like the practical, piratical man she remembered, and more like she imagined God the Panarchic. In a voice that seemed to come from a great distance, he asked, “What year is it?”

  “Same as last time.”

  “When was last time?”

  “Duoseptember. The autumn equinox. The Cadmium Valley contract?”

  “Oh, yes.” Like a sandstorm subsiding. “What year is that, exactly?” She told him. He said, “I lose the track, here.”

  As she knew that these conversations with her uncle took place outside normal space, Sweetness also understood that they occupied a special time, neither past nor present nor future, but other, real-time inverted. Dream time.

  “So,” Uncle Neon said. “Sle…”

  “Still thinks he's going to be a big pelota star. ’Cept he's got two right feet and a fat gut and his head is fried from too much television and wanking.”

  “He hasn't married that Cussite girl with the fifteen gold ear-rings, yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Has he…”

  “Met her yet? Not that, either.”

  “Ah. I see.” He did too, much and wide, but unfocused, like a distorting lens. Sweetness frequently tripped over Uncle Neo
n's nostalgias for futures that might never happen. And sometimes the branching future he picked in this mother of marshalling yards was the mainline ahead.

  “They want you wed,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “To a Stuard. A Ninth Avata Stuard, on the Llangonedd run.”

  “Mother'a'grace…”

  “Don't worry yourself.”

  “Don't worry myself? You've just told me I'm going to blow my wild years brewing samovars of mint tea for Cathar pilgrims.”

  Uncle Neon had an appropriately scary laugh. It felt like sand scouring the inside of your skull. Sweetness winced.

  “Sweetness, your wild years are far from blown,” he said, and sang an old nursery rhyme about a sailor who sailed across the sky and brought back his love a silver fig and a diamond rattle. He did not sing well, even in death, but Sweetness was patient with relatives. When he had finished she left a polite pause before asking, “Is that it?”

  “That what?”

  “I'm going to marry a Stuard and my wild years are far from over?”

  In the pause that followed, Sweetness imagined the three-bulbed signal light cocked to one side, quizzically.

  “Yes. That's it. Don't worry, though. Trust me. Now, tell me, how is she?”

  By “she,” Sweetness understood Catherine of Tharsis and that she would see no more of her future. She huffed through her nose in exasperation at the unruly oracle.

  “The aft containment field still isn't seating right.”

  “Is it making a sound like this?” This being a twittering, hissing whistle.

  “More like this.” Sweetness added a tweeting click, on a rising cadence.

  Uncle Neon clicked his tongue.

  “You want to get that seen to. What are those Deep-Fusion folk about? I don't know, since I died, she's gone to pieces. No one has any respect for good machinery any more. He certainly doesn't. His head's completely up his arse, and I don't just mean trains. Look at that poor sow he married—your sainted mother, I mean.” Uncle Neon's telepathic apology felt like two crossed fingers circling Sweetness's frontal lobe in blessing. She loved the feeling. It made her purr. “He's still not talking to her.”

  “Not a whisper. He signs.”

  Another neural tut.

  “It should be you. I've always said that. You'd get that field generator set right toute suite.”

  “I wouldn't have let it get into that state in the first place,” Sweetness said proudly. Too many dead-end tracks toppling into glossy green craters were the monuments to sloppy tokamak maintenance. The Tracksters laid fresh rail around them but the blast craters stayed hot for lifetimes, glowing sickly in the high plains night. Thinking of them, Sweetness flared, “But I'm going to marry a poncing Stuard on the God-shuttle and make tea and almond slices, amn't I?”

  “You are?”

  “You said you saw it.”

  “I see a lot more than I say. That I can say.”

  Says who? Sweetness wanted to say but the words were sucked off her lips by the sudden dust wind whipping up around her, a dust she knew was not dust, or rust, but moments. Granulated time. She was being drawn back. The journey home was always quicker and more precipitous than the way out: a swooping giddiness, a rustling blackness, a sense of wings wide enough to wrap the world, and then there; the big big desert and the hot hot sun.

  Romereaux was squatting on his heels by the rail, scooping up palmfuls of dust and trickling them through his fingers. Idling time away.

  “How do you do that?” he said.

  “Do what?” The other place took a moment to blink away, like grit in the eye.

  “Whatever it is you do. Wherever it is you go.”

  “Go?” Suspicious: what had he seen? “I don't go anywhere. I mean, you're there, but you're not there.”

  “But where are you?”

  “What's this about?”

  Romereaux shrugged, opened his hand, looked at the earth and small stones clutched there.

  “I'm just interested in what you do, where you go.”

  “Well don't be.”

  “You're very defensive.”

  “I've got to have something for myself.” On a train where five families live on top of each other in a tapestry of territories and societies. “Some place for me.”

  “So you do go somewhere.”

  “What's this to you?”

  “Nothing. They've whistled.”

  That brought her up.

  “What? How many times?”

  “Twice.”

  “Mother'a…”

  Three whistles and the train left. With or without you. Fare or family. We've got a railroad to run, don't you know? Timetables to keep. As Sweetness sprinted for Catherine of Tharsis, steam plumed up from the calliope mounted where the main boiler joined the tender. The impudent notes of “Liberty Lillian's Rag” swaggered across the desert as Madre Mercedes Deep-Fusion's asbestos-gloved fingers hopped across the seething keys. All aboard that's coming aboard! All a-ground that's staying behind. Skirt hitched around her thighs, Sweetness pounded down the track. Romereaux passed her effortlessly. Behind them, Uncle Neon closed his amber eye and opened his green eye. Catherine of Tharsis cleared her cylinders with a shout of steam. Cranks flailed, wheels spun. Like a crustal plate shifting, the behemoth began to move.

  Sweetness saw Romereaux snatch at the bottom rung of the companionway as it retracted. Then it was past her head and moving in utterly the opposite direction. Sweetness spun on her heel and raced after the receding ladder. House-high wheels churned beside her head. Romereaux crouched on the lowest step, hand outstretched. Mother'a'grace, it was going to be close.

  “Romereaux!”

  The reaching hand was pulling away. With the dregs of her strength, Sweetness leaped. Romereaux's hand was an iron manacle around her wrist. Sweetness slammed into the relief valve on the luff housing. Winded, she swung from Romereaux's grip. Drive shafts hammered beside her ear.

  “I can't…” Romereaux's face read; youthful strength overstretched by sharp reality. Sweetness swung, tried to kick herself toward the diamond tread of the rung. Nailtips grazed steel. The sleeper-ends beneath her were a blur of concrete. Fall now, and it would be worse than miss the train. She kicked again, reached.

  “Ahhh!”

  Fingers locked around metal rung. Romereaux pulled her up until both hands had a firm grip. He gathered a fistful of track jacket and floral-print summer frock and hauled Sweetness on to the companionway. Metal scraped bare shin, she paddled with her feet. Boot treads found stair treads.

  Home.

  “Close one,” Tante Miriamme called, sheets a-folding as Romereaux and Sweetness scurried past her window. “And Sweetness, in the desert? A true lady never forgets her underwear.”

  Two hundred kilometres up, the orbital mirror caught sunlight from beneath the edge of the world and winked it into Naon Engineer's eye. Momentarily blinded, he dropped the thread of his argument to the floor of the Confab Chamber.

  “Erm…”

  “The marriage portion,” svelte, dangerous Marya Stuard hinted.

  Blithe and holy, the five-kilometre disk of silverskin wheeled down the orbital marches after the setting sun.

  “Oh yes. Of course. What had I suggested?”

  “Five thousand dollars in the chest.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  A glance at Grandfather Bedzo, drooling in the Remote Steering Cubby under the copper curls of the cyberhat. Tanking up should be straightforward enough a process to entrust to the decrepit old Engineer, but Naon 11th did not like the way the old man's wall eye was rolling.

  “Plus…”

  “What?”

  “Two percent on the next five years.”

  A beat of fist on the live wood conference table. Grandfather Bedzo started in his decades-deep senescence. He remembered the hard edge of his wife's hand.

  “Never!” Grandmother Taal declared. She was a little, pickled kernel of a woman, packed with mea
t and life and potential. At forty-two she still shunted the weightiest of bargains when the locodores in their red flannel tailcoats came loping in their sedan chairs into the sidings to call the day's contracts. Her eyes were sharp little black flies. “One percent, over three years.”

  Naon Engineer 11th glanced again at his sire. He was banging his foot against a riveted bulkhead in time to the swash of water through the reservoir pipes. Naon prayed the Lords of the Iron Way that Bedzo would resist an incontinence attack. It would make the marriage bargaining so very much harder.

  “One and three quarter percent and four years.”

  Engineer and Stuard matriarchs locked eyes over the bargaining table. On this oval of wood, reputedly an Original Branch from the Tree of World's Beginning, the Articles of Operation had been signed twelve generations and a billion kilometres back by Engineer and Stuard the First.

  “Were he of your lineage, Tante Marya, I might concur,” Grandmother Taal said. “But this…”

  “Narob,” piped Salam Serene Stuard, youngest of the Domiety, first time at the big table and blessedly ignorant of the social games the formidable old ladies loved to play. His great-aunt glared at him.

  “…is a lad of prospects.” Meaning, and your granddaughter is just a daughter. A womb, a ladder to history. “He is Chef du Chemin. He has his own galley.”

  “In stainless steel,” Youngest Salam said, with some envy. He had only just been promoted to Linen and Tray Service. Grandmother Taal scooped up his unwise attempt to recover coup like a hot nimki from a station tray-hawker.

  “On the Ninth Avata!” she said.