Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  “Allez oop,” he heard Number 17 say, then a scuffle of feet and two muffled retorts. Pharaoh slid a centimetre, two, five. Like this? he thought. Born trash and died trash. Then an unknown, higher-pitched voice shouted, “Get a hold of him,” and he felt his ankles seized by numerous pairs of hands. A lurch and his shoulders came free.

  Another and he shot from the hatch like a silver trout from an apprentice tickler's fingers to lie gasping and shivering on the mesh flooring. Teenage faces appeared over him, none older, most younger than his own. They were daubed with stripes and smears of blue and yellow warpaint and hair gel was obviously their chief expenditure. Blinking certain death out of his eyes, Pharaoh scanned down his saviours as he had scanned up his executioners. They favoured sleeveless T-shirts and leather vests and pants with too many pockets tucked into boots with too much metal. Their wrists were bound in gizmotry, they carried beanie guns in over-elaborate holsters and from complex packs on their backs barely visible diamond-fibre lines ran up in to the dazzle of ceiling lights.

  “Safe to lift?” said the one with the yellow under each eye, who seemed to be the head one, though his voice was hardly broken. A teen warrior with green streaks in his hair and henna tattoos on his well-developed biceps knelt to poke at Pharaoh.

  “Eh!”

  “Safe enough.”

  “Then let's get vertical!”

  Before question or protest, more hands seized Pharaoh. Motors churned a second, then captors, captive and all were whisked straight up into the darkness.

  “The Vertical Boys, that's what they call themselves,” Pharaoh said. “Los Verticales.”

  “There's lots like that, up here,” Sweetness said. “I seen them up on the glass; kids’ nations, all that stuff. Runaways, thinking like they're kings. They aren't as flash as they think they are.”

  Again, the thought of the fall of the Seven-Ups Girl Nation. Thought, and immediately unthought. Would it have been worth being a chandelier not to feel guilty about surviving? Stupid. Almost as stupid as diving over a thousandth-level balcony because all you could do was trust that you were still a story.

  “They just want a place of their own, that's all,” Pharaoh said. “Bastards won't let you live, up here. There's enough room for a million Vertical Boys, but even if they don't use it they're not going to let you have it. Their umpteen-times grandfather cleaned glass for this, you know. They earned it; and what have we done to deserve it? You got to fight. You got to squat on it and say hey, it means so much to you, you take it off me. That's all these people understand.”

  Sweetness rolled on to her side, tucked the blankets around her in a way she hoped was kitteny and cute. An idea was forming.

  “So how many of them are there?”

  “Two, three hundred.”

  It must be cosy and reeky in those little plastic bladders. Sweetness's estimate, from her queasy survey of the Vertical squatter-town, had been considerably lower. Two hundred was good. Three hundred, excellent.

  “With beanie guns,” she said. “You going to stun them to death?”

  “Hey, those beanie guns saved my ass, so I could save your ass from those furniture folk.”

  “Okay okay, so that's us even on the I-owe-you-my-life stakes. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but sometimes an outside viewpoint can give a whole new perspective on things—but you've got like one razor between the lot of youse and these window-cleaning aristos, one click of the fingers and there are two divisions of mercenaries sticking their laser-sights up your hole. Right now, you're just a mild irritation. Moment you ever start to look like a threat, you're all either down the chute or you're in the black suit with your balls sticking out like two eggs in a handkerchief. Now, if you had weapons, and I mean real weapons, you could take these people by surprise. Blow them clean out in one go.”

  She gave Pharaoh a teasing glance, loosened her shirt under the blankets and let her mantle slip a little. How long since you glimpsed the sweet and unaffordable flesh of a fine woman, railrat?

  “What do you know about weapons?”

  “I know there's Gatlings and lasers and hunter-droids, man, not a day's sail from here.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Oh, I will, but first, I have to tell you a little story. It's about St. Catherine, and mirrors, and a flying cathedral…”

  Foolish folk will tell you that trains are intrinsically happy things. They are bright, speedwell creatures of pomp and steam, like well-fed cheerful uncles. They take people on journeys and life, such folk believe, is journey. A train is a thousand stories, each carriage, each compartment, each seat row crammed more full with motive and emotion and drama than any book. If, as the Masters of Narratology maintain, all story is journey; the converse is also true; there is no journey that does not have a story in its ticket price. Trains bringing lovers together. Trains carrying hopeful families to new lives. Trains taking bright young people to brilliant success in the cities. Trains taking the old to meet the new generations of their people. Engines of change, garlanded with flowers. Happy things.

  People wiser in the ways of trains know that for every happy train there is a train of sorrow. For every holiday special there is a packed commuter, for every young hopeful there is a freeloader clinging to the bogies and for every reunion there is a final parting. Trains of farewell. Trains of fatalism, and passivity. Trains of exile. Trains of extermination. Death trains, on which we all must ride, carried at ever higher speeds by forces over which we have no control, directed by rails we did not set, into the tunnel that never ends. And the communication cord is snapped.

  The wisest in the ways of trains count a third category; trains of no emotional content. Freight trains. Bulk carriers. Vast, slow-moving ore trains, big enough to be visible from orbit. Trains made up of grain silos, cement wagons, chemical tankers, lumber racks, agricultural machinery flatbeds, grazer cars, hydrocarbon processors, container pallets, paper mills; trains of oils and minerals and big red rocks. Trains of silk and straw and exotic fruit. Trains of glass and tin; tea and spices. Trains with no cargo of human feeling. These, such people say, are the truest trains, for they expose the soft anthropomorphism of those who must project feelings all around them. A train is nothing but a big chunk of inter-related metal parts wrapped around a hydrogen fusion/superheat steam boiler combo. Classically structured, a piece of pure operating logic. Any emotional freight is the property of its passengers and crew.

  As example, they will say, here is a train. It's coming on down the line. Let's start at the front and see if there is anything about it that could teach us about happiness and sorrow.

  We start with a pair of nipples, silver, quite erect. From them we move back over the areolas, the proud, firm and outsized breasts to the curved-back torso of a woman, chin proudly aloft, hair streaming out behind her. We note that the silver woman has wings for arms, and that they are folded back around the boiler cap. Back along the swelling curve of the boiler to the cyclops eye of the headlamp, over the tiers of outlook galleries and catwalks to the gold-plated anti-glare glazing of the driving bridge where the Engineer stands, hand on the thrust bar, eye on the quartersphere ball, thence by the black and silver livery of Bethlehem Ares Railroads to the streamlined wedge of the main stack. A moment's pause to peep down the steam flues in the raving heart of the machine. On, over the fluid humps of the reheat coil and the Deep-Fusion homesteads, to the ornately filigreed hydro-helium tanks and the water tender with their turrets and watch-houses, the last outpost of the Engineer Domiety before we pass from driver to driven: the train proper. We enter here the territory of the Stuards; from single sleek, slim-line executive express cars to ten kilometres of ore trucks, from pilgrims clacking their beads to polymer processors, all are their responsibility, all are tended with equal attention. Today this service is hauling an organic chemical processor: the first fifteen cars we fly over are stacked with logs from the great polar taigas of Treeves and Raskolnikov. A beltway feeds them one by one to the ch
ipping plant in car sixteen and from there into the bacterial fermentories, reactor plants and cracking towers of the middle section of the train. We glide over cylinders and chimneys and cooling ducts, rivers of pipework and power conduits, separator grids, pumps, distillation columns, wash-backs and vents jetting waste gasses. Brute industry. No emotion here. Now we follow the loops of colour-coded piping to the storage section of the factory-train where each separated fraction is channelled into the appropriate receiving tank. Some bear large and flagrant warning symbols, others are wreathed in mist from cooling tubes, others still carry prominent pressure release valves and little vent-flaps that flutter and chirp as the whole ensemble makes its ponderous way across the unhedged grainlands of central Axidy.

  Happy, sad?

  This train is not done yet. There is the auxiliary power van, and the raised cupola of Shipment Control, from which the Stuards can look out over the whole length of the train and ascertain in an instant if something is wrong with their charge. After aux and con we pass swiftly over Ballasted Brake vans 1 and 2, the abode of the abject Bassareenis, to the final car, the caboose. Passing over its gilded lion-head crest, we come to a long glass blister. We glimpse greenery. It seems to be some sort of conservatory. Onward. We fly out over the Stuards’ verandah a little way down the track that strikes undeviating across the plain. Turn, look back at the foreshortened length of the great train driving across the geometric farmland. There it is. The great train, Catherine of Tharsis. Happy? Sad? Can't tell, can you? It's magnificent, but it's metal. Meaningless.

  But let's turn round, go back to that blister of glass and greenery. Hover a moment. Stoop lower. Look carefully. It is indeed a caboose-top roof garden, accessed by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, protected from the three-hundred kilometre-per-hour winds of express speed by a slender geodesic. Within is a lush little jungle of foliage plants; some flowers; a small water feature; wind-chimes; darting ornamental humming birds, like flying jewellery; a little lawn as smooth as snooker baize and a tiled patio area with casual cast-aluminium seating. A young man is sitting on one of the chairs. He is slightly built, with the pallor of the Deep-Fusion Domiety, a childhood encased in metal, close to perilous energies. A worm of goatee shadows his chin. He looks ten, eleven of this world's double-years. On an occasional table beside him is a peeled apple, a pocket knife, and a red telephone. He cuts a slice from the apple, eats it, tries to pay attention to the yellow paperback in his hand.

  Romereaux Deep-Fusion finds he has been spending more time in Marya Stuard's conservatorium recently, reading yellow novels, mostly being away from other people. Friends and relatives now crowd him. There is not enough room, there is always someone around, someone wanting to talk to you, someone pushing past you, someone there. No space for yourself, except up here. And the books are yellow and stupid, but no more so than anything else. His job, his life-role, bores him. Tuning tokamaks, configuring containment fields, controlling plasma flows, manipulating ignition lasers; ten generations of Deep-Fusioneers may have nurtured the fire in the beast, but why the eleventh? Romereaux has discovered that he resents that he was never given a choice about it. You are born to tend tokamaks, that's fact, son. It's not just him. There's a discontent going up and down the corridors, through the carriage couplings and along the gosport tubes. The contracts are signed, the loads hauled, the engines fused up and the brasses polished, but there's no spirit in it. Haul, heave, haul again. The rails go on forever. You will never get anywhere on them, just round and round the round round world. Tempers are short, patience shorter. Good reason to stay away from your brothers and colleagues when a bump in a companionway can lead to a fist fight. Romereaux can't remember the last time he heard Madre Mercedes strike up with her asbestos gloves on the calliope. Not since things started going bad. That is what he says; but what he means is since Sweetness went away.

  In engineering terms, he thinks of her as a very small bolt, in a difficult place, unobtrusive, easy to miss. But that bolt is made of gold, and it's the one that holds the whole thing together. Lose it, and…She rode away that morning and lit up a whole other world of places to go and lives to lead. All of a sudden, everyone had choices. You don't have to go where the rails take you. You can move in at least two dimensions. You can get off the train. First Sweetness, then Grandmother Taal: if the lofty Engineers are so rotten within one girl can topple them, why do we cling so tenaciously to our traditions and laws? Will they save us, and what from? Are they worthy of saving?

  Pull that bolt, and the whole damn thing starts to come apart.

  He spears another segment of apple on the pen-knife blade. It's halfway to his mouth (it is a terrible, yellower-than-yellow novel) when the telephone rings. The red telephone.

  Because it is the red telephone, he stares at it for ten, twenty, thirty rings.

  The red telephone. The hot-as-Hades emergency line. For use only in absolute extremis. War pillage flood firefall a line invasion end of the world. The red telephone. It is still ringing.

  Romereaux looks around, finds no one who can advise or he can delegate to. He picks up the receiver, suddenly fearful the caller might have run off in disgust. He dislodges a thick fall of dust.

  “Hello?” He listens to the voice at the other end. The message is short. “Yes, I understand,” he says and reverently sets down the handset. Then it is as if he has had a cattle-prod inserted anally: he is out of his chair and across the conservatorium in one galvanic bound. He snatches up the gosport, uncaps it and bellows up to the bridge.

  “Stop the train! Stop the train! It's Grandmother Taal!”

  Sweetness clung like a tick to the underside of the grapple arm. Around her, Vertical Boys with improbable face paint hung from the metalwork like festival piñadas. It was five minutes since the punky little scout with the spiky hair had reported the last of the acolytes scampering in an all-fired-hurry back into the cathedral. Oddly quiet up on the working platforms. Had Störting-Kobiyashi's industrial trolls downed tools again? Sweetness's own ears hinted at strange energies brewing inside the flying machine. Something was about to happen, but Sweetness held her forces back. Better to be safe than sorry. This is war.

  Every story needs a good mass action scene.

  Sweetness checked her beanie gun. She checked her emergency parafoil. She didn't trust herself with either of them.

  Point and pull. Simple. A soft thud and they go down. Guaranteed non-lethal. Lies. A feather pillow can be lethal in the wrong hands. One false shot could knock someone right over the edge, or what if they had a heart condition, or brittle bones? She had sworn her way across the Great Desert on the lives of those she'd love to kill and the ways in which she would enjoy doing it. Now the very real possibility stood before her and asked, Can you do it? Can you do it? Even that Serpio. It's you, him and a big drop. One shot. Will you put him over? And if you do, will you fire from cover, an unseen assassin, or do you want him to see you, do you want him to know? Do you want your face to be the last, the very last thing he will ever see? What if he goes for you? What if it's you and him? Bean the bastard. No questions asked. There. Justified. Sort of.

  The parafoil was simpler still. Fall and pull. She had done the fall already and that had not been so hard when it came to it, but it seemed saner to trust in the power of story than this rustley wad of cut-and-glue nylon sheeting. How many goes did it take to get the design right?

  Everything does come out right in the mass action scene, doesn't it?

  Pharaoh was looking to her for instruction. He had two parallel stripes of blue under each eye and they made him look fierce in a soft, cute sort of way…Aw, no. Have you no self-control, girl? Get a grip of yourself. It's the going into battle thing. A whiff of danger, a reek of death and the DNA says, pass me on, pass me on, make babies, make babies.

  “Okay, let's go to work.” She had heard someone say that in one of Sle's action movies. Pharaoh heliographed to squads two and three on the far grapple and underneath the service ya
rd. Mirrors flickered compliance, the Vertical Boys unhooked their safety lines and began to advance along the girders and ducts.

  It had been a hard march, filing up the narrow flanges of one roof-spar, swinging perilously in webbing harness across the huge annular bolt plates where spars joined the huge glass hexagons, then another long shuffle down the next rib to the next pier. One hundred metres out along the first spar Sweetness had discovered the first, and unspoken, rule of a Vertical Boy: Don't let go of what you've got until you have a firm grip on something else. The second rule she knew already. Don't look down. Shuffle. Swing. Shuffle. Scramble. She watched the nonchalant ease with which the Vertical Boys swung over terrifying gaps, hung one-handed over appalling chasms. It's easy for them, Sweetness thought. They have no eggs, just lots of cheap and messy seed they can fire where and when they like, all over the place. Be careless with it. Nature is profligate with guys’ life-stuff. Death means nothing to boys that age. Gangs, guns and glory. They imagine themselves gazing down on their own heroic memorials, all their friends and the ones who scorned them and secretly fancied them gathering round and being amazed or sorry or distraught or manly-but-gutted. They hear staunch eulogies, they stand by weeping mothers and girls who could have been girlfriends, in a guy's way, right? and look at their broken bodies and feel really really good. They can't understand that death is death, end, terminated, finito: game over. No nothing.