by Ian McDonald
“Where is it where is it where is it?”
Down on the south side of the sky, lasers kindled the horizon green; a Praesidium Sailship setting out on its long, slow loop back to Motherworld, a fair wind of coherent light behind it.
Sun woke her. Sun should not have, not this hot, not this high. The backs of her arms, her exposed ankles, were burning. Sweetness rolled on to her back.
Hot sand on scorched skin. She blinked up into the white atom of the sun. How what why where? The last thing she remembered…the last thing she remembered…Never mind what you do or don't remember! Get out of this murderous sun that's sucking the moisture right through your skin, that's burning you to a blister. She kicked out her sleeping bag, dived in, scraping sensitive skin against the zip and the sweat-crusty fabric. Sleep would not be commanded so she curled up inside the fetid heat of the bag and watched the hallucinations bubble out of her forebrain. From their colour and frenetic persistence, she knew she had only two days, a day left before the desert overcame her. Somewhere, she knew she should be very, very concerned at that. She slept fitfully, jerkily until the light through the skin of the bag darkened and she wormed out for her evening meal twenty-five pages of romantic tosh washed down with five mouthfuls of oxygenated water.
When she took her reading on Radio Pleasant, she discovered that in the night she had managed to turn herself around one hundred and eighty degrees. In that somewhere place, she knew she should be very, very afraid of that.
She never knew how she made it out that night, dragging her backsac from a tether around her wrist because its strapping raised wet blisters on her burned shoulders. She drove each foot in front of the next by swearing at it.
“Arsholing fuckbiscuit turdsucking fudge-punching fanny-dripping ring-licking pox-sucking titty-twisting nipple-cracking colon-fisting cucumber-jerking diseased chilli-burned flap-ringed ox-balled cockless arseless fannyfree cuntless one-leg-in-the-air-wanking bumbutton of a donkeyfucker's priest-buggering fuck-mother's piss-gargling venereally-seeping cousin-rimming pox-father cock-dripping green-cummed mother's sister's priest's cousin's shit-crusted ten-day-hung-shark-scented crack.”
She swore Engineer oaths, Deep-Eff oaths, Stuard and Traction and Bassareeni oaths, she swore pointsmen's oaths and shunt-jockey oaths, she swore service engineers’ elaborate and highly technical oaths, she swore shipping clerks’ hair-curling oaths. She swore Bethlehem Ares Railroads and Great Southern and Transpolaris Traction and Transborealis and Llangonned and North Eastern and Great Eastern and Grand Valley corporate oaths. She swore North West and South East and South West and North East Quarter-sphere oaths. She swore Deuteronomy and Axidy and Chryse and Great Oxus and Tharsis and Syrtia and Grand Valley and New Merionedd and Tempe (of course) and Big Red (most especially) regional oaths. For several kilometres she explored desert oaths, Big Red and Big Crimson and Big Vermilion oaths, Big Carmine and Big Ochre and Big Orange oaths, stone desert and sand desert and soda desert and ash desert and ice desert and acid desert and salt desert and rust desert and dust desert oaths. Finding fruit in the provincial, she worked through her repertoire of Belladonna oaths and Wisdom oaths, Meridian and Lyx and Solstice Landing oaths, Kershaw and New Cosmobad and Bleriot oaths, Touchdown and O and China Mountain oaths.
And the smaller moon was not halfway across the sky.
So she catalogued all her names for body parts, male and female, and swore every swear that could be sworn by them, then made up new names and new swearings for and by them, then by bodily fluids, solids and gases and joined unlikely adjectives to these. Then she remembered to tune in to Radio Pleasant and found to her dismay that Jonathon J. Jonas was just playing his last request on “The Jumpin’ Jive Show” and handing over to Fazie Obeke on “The Swing Shift.”
Sweetness Octave then swore by the deities. She started with God the Panarchic, and his Immanencies and Emanations, twelve of each. After some thought about whether it was private blasphemy, she then swore by Our Lady Catherine of Tharsis—she could have told her, in eight and bit years, she could have dropped some hint, Oh by the way, I made the world. She swore by the Lofty Angelic Orders, the Ranks Eotemporal; the Powers and Dominions, the Spiritual Menagerie, the Rider of the Many-Headed Beast, the Justices and Magisters; the Atmospheric Guides and the Octaval Guides and the Minor Kings of High Brazyl. She swore by the Lesser Orders, the Governances of Amshastrias and Reshpundees; the Five Ranks of Beings Spiritual and Actual: Archangelsks, Avatas, Lorarchs, Cheraphs and Anaels. She swore by the Least Orders, the Ranks Venal and Mechanical, vanas, partacs, magnetos, orphs, flaesers, fielders. She swore by writ and scripture, by the Tree of World's Beginning and the Original Cinder, by Seven Sanctas and the Guthru Gram, by the Evyn Psalmody and the Ekaterina Angelography, by the Cantus Septimus and the Mute Scribes who calligraphied beautiful prayers on the kite-sails of Lyx and Deuteronomy, by the three-centavo (refunded!) oracle of green men in stenchy booths in Inatra and by the cheap gramarye of budget witches in Belladonna Main who hawk spells for Help Beyond Comprehension. She swore by orders and denominations: by the Poor Pelerines and the Prebendarists and the Devotes of the Bryghte Chylde of Chernowa, by the Cathars and Cathrinists and Cathites, by the Swavyn Ecstasy-priests and the Damantine Ascetics and the Penitential Mendicants, by the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption and the Sisters-Sufferant of the Song of Clare and (long and hard and heartfelt) the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, its theology, its mail-order service, its floating basilica, its plummy acolytes, their head and leader, but most of all, that it had ever accepted for shriving the obsidian soul of Serpio Waymender.
And it was still only one fifteen in the morning. Mumbling blasphemies, Sweetness Asiim Engineer shuffled to the crest of a barchan. Her feet went from under her; with a whimper, she slid ass-first down the slip-face. She spat sand, tried to get to her feet. A nag, a niggle. Something something something. Just before she went weeeeee. What? Yes. Had she seen, dare she trust, a glint of sick light, out there? With the dregs of her energy and sanity, she clawed herself back to the top of the dune. Yes. Indeed. A tiny coin of poisonous green out there in the hissing dark.
You know what that is, don't you, Engineer girl?
Yes I do. The thing we fear, our dread and annihilation. A blast crater. Out there, somewhen, a tokamak blew. A train vaporised. A train, that ran on a long steel line. A line, going from somewhere, to somewhere.
In the end, it was only by swearing at herself, by herself, for herself, on herself, every part of her, every moment in her history, every thought in her head, every value and moral and ambition, every precious dream and vision, every sin and vice, every triviality and pettiness, every generosity and joy, that she was able to push those feet through the night to dawn. Whereupon they rushed so fast at the rail, the real rail, yes, really real, simmering in the heat haze, a black divisor across the world, that they caught themselves on the edge of the sleeper and face forward she fell, cheek to hot, steel, real rail.
She reeled up, leaving a stripe of cheek shrivelling on the hot metal. But we are not out of the woods yet, Glorious Honey-Bun. Not even close to getting into the woods. The rail ran out of heat-haze, under her feet, into heat-haze, straight and undeviating. One way was signals, passing loops, junction boxes, desert mail-drops, halts, stations, marshalling yards, a great glassy terminus. The other way was a glowing hemisphere in the desert a kilometre deep and a messy, seeping end by radiation poisoning. But which?
She unhooked the radio, tuned it away from Radio Pleasant's “Smoother Breakfast with Ned and Greazebop” to white noise. Kkksssshhh. The song of the Big Red. She turned to face one way down the track. The sound of frying sky grew louder, interspersed with pops like boils bursting. She did a one-eighty. Kkksssshhh. She did the test again, to be sure. Roar, and whisper.
That way, then. As if in confirmation, the haze rippled a moment and parted and Sweetness glimpsed bright lozenge-shaped winks of light, and above them, a dark finger of rock, feathery wit
h antennae. And those regularly-shaped objects beneath, dare she trust they were houses?
Why not? Everything was foolish out here, and equally wise. The veils of shimmer closed again, disclosing nothing. Sweetness Asiim Engineer breakfasted on five sips from her last bottle and a particularly choice fly-leaf she had been saving for a special occasion. Then she squared her pack, set the sun behind her right shoulder and strode into the east.
Toward evening she came to the dead town on the bluffs. The heat-haze had teased her on every foot, luring her through exhaustion and dehydration and the angry sun. Then, within three steps, it evaporated and the houses were tumbled walls and the aerials were ragged whips of wire and the lozenges of solar panels empty skeletons hanging in the warm wind. Dust had choked this town years before. Dust was its legacy and population, drifted in elegant swathes on the leeward sides of crumbled walls; clogging the irrigation channels of the bone-dry fields, soft and treacherous as water; stogging the shattered stumps of wind-pumps and ground-water siphons thigh deep in powder that smelled of time and electricity. A nameboard greeted Sweetness from beneath a shroud of dust. Summer storms had scoured the welcome to an epitaph. Eso ion ad. Lation, vation. One step short.
Water, food, a place out of the sun should have been Sweetness's direct concerns but the gravitas of the buried town worked its way into her, drew her along the twisting, dust-choked alleys between the disintegrating adobe walls, peering through dead doorways into roofless rooms. In one she disinterred pieces of an old wooden handloom, with a scrap of cloth, beautifully patterned, that fell apart beneath her fingers into a spray of colour. In another, she found a set of ancient brass beer-pumps, patinaed green. She walked through orchards of dead solar trees to the sentinel upthrust of red rock. An open door invited entry. Look, it said: immediately within, a thread of wall-writing, time-faded and esoteric, wound into the shadowy interior. Can you resist? Not Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She followed it in and out of dry and fusty rooms, up spiral stone staircases. Rivulets and tributaries of arcane mathematics joined the main flow, feeding it into a torrent of gabbling symbols, tumbling over each other in their rush to the top of the house. Here they gushed out to cover wall and floor of an open ledge under the pinnacle of the rock. A fine room, some kind of observatory, had stood here in former times. Fingers of metal, sand-blasted shiny, hinted at a glass geodesic. The wind sang in the aerials. Sweetness spent a time taking in the prospects of the desert from the high viewpoint. To the south the bluffs fell away in a long line, like a weir in the redness, to an uninterrupted dunefield, awesome in its unbrokenness. West, along the twin lines of wind-polished silver, and she could just make out a faint darkening in the horizon that was the tokamak crater. East, rumours of mountains at the further edge of the world. North, five metres of symbol-inscribed sandstone. She went to it, pressed her fingers to the rock face, tried to trace out meanings and insights in the scrawlings but was only drawn into a subtle spiral of equations, in and in and round and round, ending in a single equals sign at the centre of the gyre of mathematics.
No revelation here, then. Beyond Comprehension, certainly, but not much Help.
Down then, and out. Out in the solar orchard, the sun mugged her. She was very tired and very hungry and very thirsty, this town was very dead and she was not one step nearer sanctuary. As her energy evaporated, Sweetness caught a scent, immediate and animal. The primal scent: water. Near, here. Instinct drew her to a small circular wall in the centre of a rectangle of rock that must once have been a garden. Dust lay banked around the foot of the wall but it did not seem to have spilled over the curb stones. Pray that it is not too deep. That would be cruel. Cruel would be typical. Water smelled sweet and deep. Sweetness rolled over the retaining wall and looked down into the well. Her own dark reflection, haloed by blue sky, looked up at her. It was not so deep. Sweetness scrabbled as far over the retaining wall as she dared, stretched down with her empty backsac to scoop a bagful of water.
Azimuth on a triple letter, double word, a voice said behind her, clear as water. Sweetness whirled, just remembering to hook one finger through the straps of her backsac. An old woman had spoken. What old woman? the dead town said. Search me. Sweetness did, with her eyes, left and right, foreground to middle distance. No old woman. See?
She bent over to dip another bagful of water.
Fighting Machine Squad Charlie, go go go! a radio-crackle voice yelled. Sweetness swung her bag out of the well in an arc of precious water, stood up, challenging the ruined houses. Water trickled from her backsac seams.
And where do you think I'm hiding a Fighting Machine Squad Charlie? the fallen walls and stump wind-pumps said.
“Okay!” Sweetness Asiim shouted. “What's going on?”
If a dead town could have spread its hand in a shrug, Huh?, this one would have.
“I said, what's going on?”
No answer, of course. But the dust stroked her cheek, toyed with her hair. A rattle of wires: the aerials on the high rock were restless, twitching. A moan from the skeletons of the wind gantries. Dust rose around the soles of her desert boots. A prickle of pure superstition on the nape of Sweetness's neck said, Turn around, traingirl. Out there, beyond the edge of the dead town, beneath the fall of the bluffs, a wind-devil was moving across the face of the Great Red. Unlike the scatty whirlwinds of the High Plains and the polar deserts, this did not wander willy-wally, wind-driven whither-whether. It cut straight through the crests of the dune fields in soft detonations of sand. Its course was straight and determined; aimed right at the dead town on the bluffs: No, Sweetness knew, at me. And by the same intuition she knew it was futile to run—if there had been anywhere she could have run in this terrible land—for the devil in the wind would hunt her wherever she tried to hide. The wind rose, whipping the dust drifted around the well rim into long, stinging streamers. Sweetness chased her scattered things, struggled the saturated backsac shut and wrapped one of her torn shirt sleeves around her head. The dust-devil was at the foot of the bluffs. It was a scream of wind and sand, shot through with flickers of lightning. In one bound it leaped the bluffs. Dust blew up around Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She battled through it to take shelter in the lee of the well. Sand scoured her seared shoulders and arms. She fought to keep her mouth and nostrils covered. She had heard of these desert gyrestorms, that could pounce on a herd of grazers and in mere mouthfuls reduce them to bloody bones. The twister dived on her. Sweetness threw up her hands to cover her head and was buried in faces. Old wrinkle-faced matriarchs; heaven-eyed teenagers; scampish, grinning goondahs; harried-looking men in veterinary's scrubs; women in pilot's helmets; youths in cylindrical supplicant's hats, judges, engineers, men in ROTECH uniforms, shysters and roustabouts, faces of angels and faces of demons and faces in between. Faces, and voices. Voices praying, pleading, demanding, declaiming; voices of prophecy and obsession, voices of children and aged aged men, voices of radio and wrath, voices whirled away before their words grew solid meanings. Voices, and histories. Images of children laughing and leaping in the rain, of bright, dart-like aeroplanes stitching across the sky, of steel-shod behemoths marching through corn fields, of wide-hatted men in long coats cradling needle guns, of choirs of angels hovering over a stark desert pillar, of babies in bell jars and balls on a green baize tabletop. And at the centre of it all, a figure, perhaps a man, perhaps not, drifting in and out of focus, as if near and far at the same time, shifting between probabilities. The figure congealed: a man, wrapped for the desert, in a long coat, with a heavy pack on his back surmounted by what looked like a sewing machine. One last flicker and he became actual. At the same instant the whirlwind dispersed in a mighty rush of faces and whispers and memories. The figure staggered, righted itself.
“God!” it cried. “Here again!” Then, noticing Sweetness staring over the rim of the well, it pulled a device like a collapsible umbrella from a holster at its waist and brandished it at her. “What in the name of all sanity are you?”
“I
am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Sweetness ventured, then, finding the umbrella-thing aimed at her absolutely the last straw in a line of kidnappings, hoodwinkings, maroonings, meanderings and burnings, she declared, fiercely, “And just who the hell are you?”
The figure goggled owlishly at her. But if he were any bird, it was a desert hawk, something keen and pinched and fidgeting; a bit leathery. The feather in his battered hat lent to the avian image, and the dark little eyes that gave no hint of where they were looking. The long, elegantly curving mustachios suggested another kind of beast, some watchful, quizzical desert gopher, a chewer of taproots and cactus, burrowing and twitch-whiskered. Altogether he was a strange bestiary of a creature, Sweetness decided. Still fixing her with his eye, the man said, “I am a traveller.”
“Me too,” Sweetness said. “Where from?”
“Here,” the man answered.
“You haven't exactly gone far,” Sweetness said. The man tilted his head from side to side, as if attempting to triangulate her soul.
“I've just got back,” the man said after a good pause. “I was away a long time.”
Sweetness realised that noun-play in a dead town with mysterious travellers who crossed the great desert in dust-devils of faces stood a good chance of killing her, and that all she had eaten for the past three days was paperback romantic fiction.
“Have you anything to eat?” she asked. The traveller heard the plaint in her voice. He shrugged off his heavy pack, which Sweetness now saw was much more complex and arcane than at first impression. There were whip aerials and coils of cable and arrays of flashing lights and copper dials and bellows that went in and out and the definite taint—to the train-born—of fusion power. The traveller rummaged through his pockets. His coat was generously endowed with them. He hooked out a clutch of claw-shaped green fruit too large for the pocket that had produced it, but Sweetness was inured to the dimensionally transcendental.
