Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  A loop of river identified the city unreeling below as Melucene, an elegant, university town of high-gabled gritstone colleges strung along the river bluffs of the muddy Meluce. Castle Melucene, the venerable seat of the Provosts, hove into view, a fantastical confection of towers and spires and buttresses carved from a primeval ventolith mesa by orbital construction lasers. Sweetness had never liked Melucene: she detested the boyish, mannered jinks of the students on the term runs when they flocked back to their dormitories. She hated their high, affected, nasal singing, and determinedly kept herself on the working side of the tender. It took the Stuards a week to sluice out the beer and vomit. As she watched the steeply pitched roofs of the colleges slip beneath her feet, a niggling feeling came over her that perhaps they were a little closer to her boot soles than they had been. That the fields looked a little larger, that the details of the college badges worked out in coloured roof-tiles were more sharply focused. That the labouring airship was losing height.

  In confirmation, the cathedral lurched and dropped. Sweetness grabbed for something solid to hold on to. The glass hexagons were coming up hard and fast beneath her. Ahead, an entire roofpanel was slowly tilting open. Squinting through the glare, Sweetness could make out the silhouettes of gantry work rising above the surface, beneath, the indistinct but massive torpedoes of lighter-than-aircraft nuzzled at roof-branches like great fish feeding from coral. Some repair facility, but Harx was coming in too fast, too low…What was the pilot doing? Ballast gushed from vents, shedding across the roofplates in a flash flood but the basilica was still losing height. Air gusted warm in Sweetness's face and she had her answer. As the sun warmed the morning air, the airship lost in the battle of competing densities. Sweetness tried to clamber away from the closing ground. Nowhere to go, remember? This is as far as you got. She had to do something. At this speed, with this mass, if Harx hit, his little freeloader would be spread like cashewbutter. The access panel was fully open now, but the bottom rungs of the rope ladder, her salvation, were brushing the glass. Coming in, too low! Too low! Sweetness wrestled in her cocoon, untangling legs and arms. She freed three metres of cable, screwed up her courage, screwed it tighter. She grasped hold of the cable, wrapped it firmly around her wrists and with a cry, swung herself free. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th dangled beneath the dome of the cathedral. The airframe lurched again. She let out a little shriek. Don't look down.

  You have to look down.

  She looked down.

  Five kilometres below her, a lazy river lost itself in meanders and braided sandbars while great coloured riverboats the size of small towns cruised the backwaters. Sweetness shifted focus. Closer—very much closer—the glass rushed up at her. The portal was close…The airship sagged lower. Aerials snapped, booms bent. Not close enough.

  “Yaaah!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, and jumped.

  Glass, she had forgotten, is smooth, slick and hard. Very hard. The impact knocked the wind from her: she rolled five times, the world a blur of airship canyons land sky, and into a slide. Flickering between sense and unconsciousness, she saw the cathedral hit the edge of the portal, bounce clear and drop through. That edge, toward which she was helplessly sliding…She tried to find an anchor for her fingers, something to kick against. Nothing, slick, smooth glass. With the last of her strength and will, Sweetness heaved herself into another roll. Ribs protested, she tried to pull her arms over her head. If she missed, if she got it wrong, best not to see the moment she shot over the edge on to five kilometres of clear morning air. Over and over and over, and to rest. She peeked out between her arms. She could have spat a gobber over the lip of the big drop. Sweetness laughed deeply, painfully and then everything went wonderfully black.

  One eye opened, some time later. In front of it was a boy's face, cocked at the angle of curiosity. Sweetness opened her other eye. The boy tilted his head the other way. Sweetness guessed him to be four, maybe five, and so incongruous was the sight that she forgot for a moment the grating pain down her left side. While she puzzled, another child's face looked over the boy's shoulder, a girl, a couple of years older.

  “Mine,” the boy said.

  “You think,” the girl laughed. “Way too old.”

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “How old are you?” the boy asked Sweetness.

  “Nearly-nine,” Sweetness said. “Listen…” But the girl gave a bray of laughter, stood up, arms folded triumphantly.

  “Mine, see?”

  “Too old for you, too, Meadowbank.”

  “Me or no one else, Townley. And hadn't you noticed, but she's a girl anyway. My jurisdiction. Go back to your boys.”

  The boy scowled. The girl play-pushed him away and squatted down in front of Sweetness.

  “You came out of that flying thing, didn't you?” she said. “I expect you hurt a bit.”

  “A bit.” To name it brought it back. Sweetness lay back on the glass ceiling, feeling like glass inside; broken, sharp-edged bones of glass. The girl's face eclipsed the sun.

  “I'm Meadowbank Trumbden, President Elect of the Seven-Ups Girl Nation. You'll be all right with me. Townley's just a kid anyway and he knows he's got no jurisdiction over girls. He was just trying it on because he thought you might have something worth stealing. They'd probably have eaten you. They're not civilised, like we are, and they've got no idea how to manage things. We're always having to lend them water or fix their runner. They can't sail, you know. No sense of direction.”

  Sweetness studied the face that bent over hers. The girl was a pinch-faced, sun-beaten urchin with bad skin and surprisingly well-cropped hair. She was dressed in a hooded parka and pocket-busy pants stitched from plastic sacks. Some of them still retained their logos. I am being rescued by someone who actually looks worse than me, Sweetness thought, ungraciously. She said, “Meadowbank Trumbden, I'm not feeling too good right now.”

  Concern came over the gamine face.

  “Oh, sorry sorry sorry. There's me banging on again.” She put her fingers in her mouth and gave one of those piercing whistles that Sweetness had always wanted to be able to do and envied in those who could. She struggled up on to her elbows. It did not hurt quite so badly in this position, which gave her worries for her back. A half-dozen similarly dressed, similarly aged and similar-looking girls were working methodically across the roof glass, siphoning up ballast water with clearly home-brewed elbow pumps and storing it in arrays of plastic litrejohns on their backs. At Meadowbank Trumbden's whistle, they abandoned their sweep and came hurrying to help. They moved with an odd gait, half lope, half skate.

  “Got to get water when we can,” Meadowbank Trumbden explained.

  A hundred or so metres beyond the water-gatherers were three singular artifacts. Like everything else Sweetness had seen of this hallucinatory roofworld—not much, she had to admit, but a significant sample—they were constructed chiefly from junk plastic. Availability of resources and idiosyncrasies of design resulted in wildly varying details but the underlying structure was the same, a hull, a cabin, booms and sails, riding the high, sheer glass on sharp-toed runners.

  The water-huntresses obscured the view. Sweetness was ringed by faces.

  “Hold tight,” Meadowbank Trumbden said. “This might hurt a bit.”

  On three, the girls lifted Sweetness. It hurt a lot. They carried her to the closest of the glass schooners. The boy Townley watched from the poop of the smallest and meanest of the flotilla. He sniffed gooily. On the third and largest ship, a ferrety-looking eight-year-old boy was rigging canvas on two angled side-sails. He called over.

  “Pass her over here when you're done.”

  “Keep your hormones to yourself, Draelon,” Meadowbank Trumbden returned. The watergirls gently handled Sweetness over the side. That hurt more. Meadowbank Trumbden had her brought up to a canopied deck at the rear and laid on a palliasse stuffed with shredded plastic. A deckhand offered Sweetness water. She sippe
d, then her body remembered how long it had been since it last drank and she grabbed the flagon and gulped greedily. Water splashed over her face, down her neck.

  “Prie, take her out,” Meadowbank ordered.

  Windlasses lifted land-anchors of solid glass. Sails were raised, a muscular girl in a sleeveless vest of white plastic took the rudder, a sweep of wood with a steel hook buried in the tip. Sweetness felt the ship stir as the eternal winds of Worldroof bellied the plastic sails. With a sharp screak of steel runners, the little fleet set forth, President Meadowbank's barque taking point. In their wake, the schooners left three sets of parallel scores on the glass.

  The Seven-Ups Girl Nation, President Elect Meadowbank Trumbden, had a population of eight and national boundaries at once as wide as the whole Worldroof (here it was floor, not ceiling) and as tightly circumscribed as the hull of their glass-cruiser. Each of the junk schooners—many more roamed the vastnesses of the glass desert, scavenging—was a separate people and state, delimited by age, sex and the availability of scarce resources. Townley Cheane, currently Chief of the Five-boys, ran an order of four-and five-year-olds with a piratical disposition and a taste for the cheerful monster-movie ghoulishness peculiar to boys of those ages. Each nation set its own laws and mores and jealously guarded its jurisdiction. If you survived to outgrow your nation, you graduated up to the next. Soon chubby Townley would make the short but significant crossing from Five-boys to Slayer, the third ship in the little fleet, and, after painful and humiliating hazing rituals, pass under the rule of King Draelon (the Temporary) and his hormone-tormented pubescents. Out there were nations of lofty girls with budding breasts and interests in make-up; there were shiploads of aggressive, boisterous male nearly-nines; there was even the Great Crèche where the semi-legendary Mam Mammary rocked cots of cotton-swaddled infants as she steered her pinnace across the high glass. All on Worldroof shared a greater nationhood: this was the place where the lost children went; the bad little boys who would not keep hold of their nannies’ hands in the big shops; the naughty girls who stamped their feet and would not come when told; the schoolchildren who wandered off from organised trips; the sulky teenagers who spent too long staring blackly out of the window of the Skywheel shuttle lounge and turned back to find family and luggage gone; the toddlers who got up on their feet and ran as fast as they could away from their fathers until they outran the world and ended up in that place that every society has, the place where the lost things go. Think of it as a kind of postal sorting office, with little marked cages for the pens and the socks and the cable remotes and the cuff-links; the cats and the change and the cigarette lighters. Children here, subsorted into age and sex and transported by the agents of lostness to their allotted place. Pens to a planetoid just inside the orbit of Neptune, change to a vast, red-hot volcanic vault deep under the doloritic core of Mount Olympus; children to Worldroof.

  Or so Meadowbank Trumbden believed. She was in her fifth nation now; a semi-memory held fragmentary images of standing on a high balcony with an elegant woman in white, sun shining through a glass roof on an upturned face, a tall man in a long dark coat shaking her awake in the night, moonslight on a glass roof. She no longer trusted these visions. Memories have half-lives. Scabies, a ratty little sheet-mender infected by her name, knew exactly where she came from: a grim industrial High-ville three kilometres down Pier 188276 where twelve generations had grown up atmosphere-plant workers and enthusiastic amateur incests. She had climbed away from all that, climbed and climbed and climbed through places that would not welcome her or welcomed her only to do things worse than where she had come from, until she popped a hatch and found she was on top of the world. No mystery there. But the babies, the wains and the toddlers; the only other explanation was deliberate abandonment and people didn't do things like that.

  The fact that Sweetness had come from the sky made her an object of some distinction. The roof-people connected her advent with the events of the previous night, which had been hotly, and fearfully, debated, and theories formulated. A night of a thousand shooting stars, of swords in heaven; battles in the moonring, concepts for which the roof-wonders had no language. Sweetness was not sure she had any herself. Then with dawn word of the meteor strike—an unheard of occurrence, a hole in the big floor!—had passed across the glass plain with the speed of the wind; now a girl, falling from a flying church.

  “That's why Townley claimed jurisdiction over you,” Meadowbank said, the Seven-Ups Girl Nation speeding west in three sprays of powdered glass and all the crew gathered around Sweetness's bed. “Even Draelon wants to know; he'd've asked you, then got you to take all your clothes off.”

  “What do you think it is?” Sweetness asked.

  The Seven-up Girls looked to their President.

  “I heard there're other worlds out there, like this one.”

  “There are, not too many like this one. There's the one we came from…”

  “No, not that one, that's what Draelon thinks; he says there was this war of the worlds and that it got fought through hundreds and hundreds of different universes so we may not even be the one that started the war, but whatever, in our bit of the universes, we won and the ones back there, where we came from, they've never forgotten and certainly not forgiven. They're going to have another go, and this time, they're going to win.”

  “There was a war like that,” Sweetness said, thinking, you sound so clever and it's only days since you learned this yourself. “But it's been over a long time. We're at peace. So, what do you think it is?”

  “I think it's another world altogether, one way way out there, that mightn't even have the same sun as us. Maybe the people don't even look like us, maybe they look like collie dogs or bits of plastic or something you can't even imagine, but they want our world. They've wanted it for a long time, like hundreds of years, and every so often they put a fleet together, like hundreds and hundreds of fighting machines and they send it to invade us, and we fight them off. That's what those stars are up there, all the scraps and wrecks and junk from the battles. They've been doing it a long time, and you think they'd learn, but they know that we have to be lucky every time and they only have to be lucky once.”

  “I've heard worse theories. Is that what you believe?”

  “Maybe. Heard another story; the gate crew said it was on the wireless news this morning…”

  “Gate crew?”

  “The ones who open the hatch, you know? Your church went through? And close it again?”

  “Merde'a'God!” Ribs and invalidity forgotten, Sweetness sat bolt upright. “Where are we!”

  “About two kays west of Pier one six six six eight three seven. Up over Rhosymedre Canton.”

  “It's the wrong way. I have to get back there!”

  “What is this?” President Meadowbank asked. Her electorate drew close around the bed, vote pool and state military.

  “That stuff that happened last night, I'll tell you exactly what's happening. It's a war between the angels. There are angels up there—machines like angels, millions of them, up in that ring of stars, and there's a civil war going on because that guy in the cathedral, Devastation Harx, is taking control of them. And when they're gone, you're next.”

  Meadowbank Trumbden stood with her arms folded and her face set. Her nation adopted the presidential posture.

  “Now that is the dumbest story…” she said. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It's true! He's got hold of St. Catherine—she's not really a saint at all…”

  No point, Engineer girl. They don't believe you. The truth of this world is too much for them. Reality is too unreal. Is there anyone out there knows what's really going on, apart from you? And if Lost Girls won't hold that truth who will? Right now, you are as far from achieving your goal as you are probably ever going to be in this story. But I fell from the flying cathedral! she wanted to say, again checked herself. Any and all words were wasted. Now, they tolerate you as a liar. Say a whisper mor
e and they will hate you.

  “Ahoy!”

  The cry from the sole forward lookout was like the crack of a whip. Every head recoiled, then turned. The national skate-ship had separated from its companions in the flotilla—all such alliances in this environment were brief and serendipitous—and was fast approaching a communications spire, a black, baroque tangle of aerials, dishes and signal boosters protruding from the pristine glass like a single black hair on the face of a venerable dowager.

  “Prepare to stop!” Meadowbank shouted and her skinny girls jumped to their posts. Dagger-boards were thrust down through the keel; hundreds of scavenged nail and construction bolt-teeth bit glass in a cascade of powder. Sails furled, helm brought the boat about, nose in to the hard dock. With a shriek and a shudder, Seven-Ups Girl Nation came to a rest. A hatch undogged in the spire, the communications men stepped out, blinking in the morning light. They looked old and big and dirty and bearlike with their shaggy hair and beards and crusty coveralls. The Seven-Ups formed a line on deck.

  Sweetness watched the face-off warily, suspecting sordid sexual trading of that kind that is so ubiquitous in the less public and more hungry parts of the world.

  “Ladies,” the leader of the radio men said, “have you any idea how long it's been? We've been dying up here. Can you do us? Can you give us what we need?”