Ares Express

10

His name was Serpio and Sweetness saw in the dawn with him, tailbones chilled and alert against the cold iron of a number five driving wheel. With the dawn the tracksters went out. Hours of talk had left Sweetness post-conversational, ravenous and slightly high; a nudge in the ribs poked her back into reality.

“Look. See?”

It was a sight too splendid to be kept only for the unpopulated dawn hours. The big Waymender train was a caterpillar of windowless service cars, yellow and green, bearing the red globe-and-rails clan colophon. At the touch of sun the cars opened like yawns. Ramps crept forward, tested the temperature of the ground, settled. In the shadows, motors trembled, big machinery woke. With a gleeful shout, the survey buggies leaped into the high plain tallgrass. Their riders were keen-faced, clench-teethed teens. They wore goggles and mouth-scarves. They arrowed out across the pampas drawing tails of rising dust. Ranging lasers flickered mensurations, theodolite mirrors heliographed responses. Next, unfolding like thermophilic insects, the levellers stepped from their cocoons. Clawed feet shook the morning dew from the grass blades. Piggy-backed jockeys pulled levers. Long orang-arms, shovel-handed, scooped and shifted soil. Wheel-heeled graders ponderously descended their ramps, stomped the soil into submission. Surveyors darted around the heavy shanks of the big earth-movers. Watching them, Sweetness wished more than any wish that at that moment she was a badmaash Waymender and not an exalted Asiim Engineer. She wanted scuffed work boots and cut-off T-shirts and heavy gauntlets. She wanted dusty goggles and headscarves that waved their tassels in the dawn wind. She wanted to twist handles and pull levers and have machinery—any machinery—do her bidding. She wanted not to have Narob Stuard approaching over the close horizon in his wedding shirt and hat and vest with the dollar bills pinned all over it.

Almost, she blurted all the things in her heart to Serpio but they stalled on her tongue like a back-country air-fair barnstormer. The grand finale to the show was gearing itself together out of the back three carriages. Roof sections tilted and lifted, bogies swung out and back, gear trains and conveyor racks unfolded. The foremost carriage mounted the centre one like a Swavyn Ecstasy priest his catamite. The rear car completed the unlikely steel troilism by ducking underneath the central car and, by a complex series of extrusions, unfolding itself into tractor treads and bucketwheel booms. So much metal was performing so many unnatural acts that Sweetness’s head reeled with the dynamism of it all, but Serpio’s pride in his people’s work was warm beside her. It meant much to him, and thus to her.

She had learned early—after the wee-est ones had been sent to bed and before the trysters started trysting—that they were fellow oddballs. Outcasts. Bizarres, berefts.

“Like, all the time?”

“When it’s open.”

He didn’t mind her looking into his cataract. It was of a plasticy translucence. You could tap it. It made a kind of fingernailly click, and no pain. He didn’t mind her doing that either.

“Ghosts?”

“And angels. Anything sort of spiritual.”

“That thing.” Sweetness’s chin had jerked in the direction of the extracted orph. “Could you see that? What did it look like?”

“It’s kind of hard to describe what it sees, it’s like things extend out beyond themselves, into other kinds of worlds.”

“Like, tentacles?” Imagining things from two-year-old dreams, which are the big ones that scare you all your life, the dreams of loss and horror and the death of your parents by things with cable wrists and hooks for hands. And red light-bulb eyes. Imagining tendrils coiling out through puckered holes in the universe into mystery.

“No, it’s like I see you and you’re high and wide and deep…” She smiled inside at the warm glow of his eyes measuring her physicality. “But there’s other kinds of like, dimensions, beside those. You go out a long long way. That orph, when I looked at it, it had wings. I mean, they opened like wings, and I think there was some other kind of dimension it lived in some of the time where it could fly with them. They held it up in the air, if you know what I mean.”

She didn’t but the way his lower lip drooped when he was earnest pleased her so much she nodded and asked, slowly, “And when you look at me?”

“Which of you?”

His vision was both exciting and shaming; a striptease of the spirit. He looked at her and saw through his milky film a thing that had been private to Sweetness so long she had almost come to disbelieve in its objective existence. Baring, prying and enviable; Serpio needed no mirror. He looked at the world and his cataract reflected its flipside. But to see it everywhere, for everything you looked at to be populated with angels and ghosts. Too much. Too bright. You would go blind if you had to look at that too long. She could see it in Serpio. There was Trickster beneath that spiky thatch of gelled black hair. She liked it. She wanted to lick it. But she did not trust it. Only a fool or a trackside mark trusts his centavos to Trickster. She did not trust that it was Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th he liked, and not a Little Pretty One she could not see as he saw. She might have brighter eyes. She might have nicer hair. She might have better tits. Maybe he was turned on by whatever junction it was that joined them, meat to spirit.

Maybe it was both of them, together.

Bad thought. She’d only just met him, and he was nice—even if he’d had his Astral House changed by deed poll because of an uncertainty over which side of the Diurnal Line his carriage had been on when his mother heaved and squeezed him into the world. Uncertain house, strange boy, Grandmother Taal had warned.

Later: after the trysters had departed on their missions and before the drinkers achieved horizontal, she asked him, “Were you born with it?”

“No, I got it,” he answered and there was a worm of bitter in it. “There was this old hooker in Plazaville. They said she was a shapechanger—if you wanted to do it with a dog, or a big cat, or like a grazebeast, she’d turn into it for a pile of money. She worked out of this sprayed concrete dome home on the edge of the Rimbauds.” All railway children had heard of Plazaville’s Rimbauds, that iridescent, uncertain industrial district where used tokamak hotcores were stored. At the centre, the energy levels reached such intensity that reality broke down into a blur of many-coloured alternatives, the stories told, but you could never reach there. The power that flowed through the streets would turn you astray, and all the time the radiation was gently basting you. “All the kids used to rip the shit out of her, call her things, do the burning bag trick, throw ball bearings on the roof so they’d run down, you know? It was this real cheap house: there was this one tiny window, like a slit, and we were daring each other to go up and take a jeek in, maybe see her doing someone, or turning into something. So I pulled the card and even though I was scared, in case she was something out of the Rimbauds, I got a crate and went up and stood on it and jeeked in. It was a real tiny window, I could only get one eye.”

“And? Was she an animal or a machine or what?”

“I jeeked in, and there was a fat guy with a hood on hanging from this crossbar by his hands and feet and the hooker, she had her back to me, but she had this thing in her hand that looked like a claw, you know?” Serpio spasmed fingers into a Hand of Glory. “Well, you see something like that, you just have to keep looking, especially when the hooker, she started raking the fat guy’s ass with this claw thing and leaving all these red scrapes. And he was thrashing around up there but there was nowhere he could go and in like no time, his ass just all red, and there was blood dripping from it on the floor. And I’m still up there on the crate, staring. Then, it was like when you know someone’s looking at you but you can’t see them, like a warm feeling that there’re eyes on you? The hooker, she suddenly stands up straight, and I should’ve got out then, I should’ve jumped off and run like a champion, but I couldn’t you know? It’s like I knew something awful was going to happen, but I had to stand there and see what it was.”

“And was it? Something awful?” This, asked in the semi-wheedling tell-me voice of childhood ghost stories. And the answer, in that same intimate, mutual-conspiracy-of-let’s-be-scared voice: “She turned round and she looked right at me and all I can remember is her face. Where her face should have been, was silver. All silver. Not a mask. Like molten metal. I could feel the heat off it. I could feel it on my eye, I could feel it sucking all the moisture out of it, I could feel it shrivel up and go dry and hard and blind. That’s what I thought, it was blind, then when the eye-patch came off, I realised that I was still seeing the silver I’d seen in her face, but the silver was the like the colour of the light in another world where all the things from all the legends live.”

The linger after the end of the tale of the cataract seemed to request a response but Sweetness did not know how to best fill it. So she said nothing but edged a little closer to strange Serpio.

“So,” he said. “What about you?”

The question felt like a warm, intrusive probing between Sweetness’s thighs. She gave a little gasp at the violation of her selfhood, then yielded herself to it. Things she had not even told Uncle Neon she told Serpio Waymender. The drawing out of them felt like she imagined sex to feel, mutual and releasing, yet very very private. All night Serpio teased her out with questions until, with the first dip of the horizon beneath the sun, the story ended and Sweetness Asiim Engineer found herself tired and yawning and gritty-eyed and needing a wash but strangely exhilarated on the cold trackside.

“You hungry?” she had asked, thinking scraps and shavings among the party detritus; then Serpio had poked her in the third rib and said with voice forty-sixty longing and pride, Look, see?

Now the carriages had almost completed their evolutions: panels fixed and locked, joints and couplings met and mated. The machine outheld boom arms above wide metal skirts, above both rose a command torso of pumping engines and grinding conveyor trains. In a high glass cupola, the oldest and most experienced Waymenders steered the juggernaut over the grass past the procession of stalled trains. It made a tremendous noise. Dawn-grazing plainsbeasts skittered from its path, Surveyors rode them down on their terrain bikes, scooping up dust-hares and striped piglings. The machine inscribed sixteen parallel wheel tracks deep in the earth. It found the sheared track ends and settled over them like a venerable dowager of many skirts taking a piss. The booms dipped to the ground. Bucketwheel fingers threw up red dust. Conveyors spun their wheels.

“What are they doing?” Sweetness asked.

“Come and look.”

Serpio took her hand. Sweetness found she did not mind that. His was soft, with rather long nails. A nonworking hand. No handlebar or lever for it, the eye that guided it was as blinded by seeing too much as by too little. She felt sorry for that hand, as they sneaked around the side of the big machine, dodging flying clods, and so she squeezed it.

To make talk, she asked, “What do you think happened to the orph? I never saw one before, I thought they were all gone long ago.”

“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “Don’t care. Well shut of it. Well shut of them all. Poxy things were always going wrong; they weren’t very well made.”

This was mild blasphemy to an Asiim Engineer. The prickle of reflex impiety surprised Sweetness. She had thought herself young and free-thinking. She asked, carefully, “Is this because of your…you know?”

“Eye?”

“Aye.”

“You mean, because my angel-sight means I can’t work on the track?”

“Aye.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” He sounded as if the insight had genuinely tripped him up, like a diamond in a midden. “But I think it’s mainly because I don’t think they should be here. We don’t need them. So, they say they built the world, and they keep it running, and so we call them angels and say prayers but they’re machines and even if one machine makes another machine makes another machine, at the bottom of it all, there’s a person, not a machine. A human who designed the machine, and programmed it, and gave it a mission and a name and a purpose. They’re the ones built the world. They’re the ones we should be remembering, not bits of metal and plastic. Those orphs, they’re stupid. Big cow-machines. Cows got more sense’n an orph. I tell you, when you’ve seen as many as I have go ga-ga.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got a job, see? I don’t do nothing, no one does nothing on Iron Lion. I got a job. I guide the train. I stand up there on the fo’c’s’le and I look down the track and I see angels boiling off the horizon like dust-devils. Angels? Balls. Tired, bad, mad machines.”

“St. Catherine…”

“Woman. Like you.” Serpio looked at Sweetness askance from the eaves of his thatch of glossy black hair. “Nah. Not like you. St. Catherine, she was tired, mad, bad too. But she was a woman.”

“Who tells you all this?” An itch of irritation in the voice. She’d only known this boy one party and a night and he was niggling her already.

“Harx,” Serpio said and no more. While Sweetness was still deliberating if the monosyllable was a cough, a name or a Waymender curse, Serpio ducked down to peer through the dust-bunnies billowing up from the big machine’s hem. “Down here.”

Sweetness hunkered down on her hams beside the dark-haired boy. Through the soil and shredded grass, she glimpsed alchemy. The big machine ate soil and shat steel. Two gleaming parallel lines of steel, new forged, shimmering with heat-haze, married together by smoking obsidian sleepers.

“It’s making it straight out of the ground,” Sweetness said, amazed. Serpio nodded the nod of workaday magic, but Sweetness knew her delight had pleased him. Squatting side by side, they watched the steel rails creep across the gap of raw earth. Centimetre by centimetre, Sweetness thought. Measuring the time until the rails are joined. Shortening the gap between me and Narob and his stainless steel kitchen. A joining, and a joining. Grain by grain. Centimetre by centimetre.

Too dismal a thought by far for a crisp cold clear Deuteronomy morning. Serpio read the sudden gloom in her muscles.

“I’m hungry now. Come on. Let’s eat. They’ll be barbieing up by now.”

Under the ribs of a lone umbrella tree the Surveyors had dug firepits and slung spits. The flee-kills were being gutted, skinned, skewered. Cracks and flares of burning fat sent spirals of aromatic black smoke through the leaves of the shade tree. There were three barbecue pits under the tree. At one the Waymender bike girls were gathered, roasting bustards. They greeted Serpio with a toss of the chin, Sweetness with a suspicious glance over their goggles. Sweetness admired and envied their bike gear, the amount of dusty muscle it showed, the casual toughness with which they wore it.

“Anything going?”

The girl with the biggest muscles spoke. “Might be. Who’s that you’re with?”

“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The leader tried the name out on her tongue, twice.

“So. Nice hair. You with Squint?”

“I’ve been talking to him.”

“Well, I suppose someone needs to. There’s rail-rabbit if you want some.”

They took the charred haunch wrapped in old survey charts to the trunk. It tasted to Sweetness like hamadryad thigh. A bike wireless burbled New School Deuteronomy flute-and-tabla and Sweetness thought, In this place, at this moment, I am perfectly happy. It could not last. The ending was exactly as Sweetness had seen in too many incarriage Range-rider movies. The cool touch of shadow, the boots foursquare on the earth, the silhouette blocking out the sun. Three of them, in classic vee-formation. Each could have taken Serpio like a haunch of rabbit in two hands and bitten him in half. And they wanted to. The bike girls’ gruffness had fronted a sororal affection. These Waymender boys hated him.

“You don’t eat that, Squint.”

A heavy-soled boot kicked the meat from Serpio’s grip. As he reached for it, a lieutenant pushed him over on his side down into the dust and twisted his spine until he was looking up at his chief tormentor.

“Breakfast, boy.”

The leader carried meat: a roasted pigling penis, smoking hot. Serpio struggled and spat but the two lieutenants had him held firm.

“This is what you eat, Squint.”

They pried his mouth open with sharp fingers pressed hard into the angle of the jaw. Serpio kicked and thrashed against the big boy’s attempt to shove the pig’s penis into his mouth.

“Hold him still.”

They did and it went in. Serpio choked and spat.

“Eat it up now.”

The lieutenants moved his jaw, mocking mastication.

I know why you are doing this, Sweetness thought. You see him with someone, doing a thing your rules for him do not allow, you see him doing a thing for himself and not asking it from you, and you hate that. She wanted to speak out. She wanted to kick them hard in the balls, go for their eyes. She wanted to stop them doing the thing to Serpio that was for her benefit. But she was off-territory, out-clan. Amongst aliens.

“Salp, let him be.”

The leader twisted his mouth in a moue of disappointment but the girls had spoken. They were not impressed. It was over. The boys left without a word. Serpio flung the foul pig-thing away from him, spat and spat and spat again. Sweetness went to him but she was afraid to touch him. She did not know the decorum of the Waymender Domiety. To offer a hand in comfort might be a worse insult than that done to him by the bike boys.

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling how lame the words were on her lips.

“Sorry?” Serpio struggled to his feet. “What are you sorry about? What have you done?”

“Sorry,” she said again, no better than before.

Serpio flung soil, kicked grass, dry-spat after his persecutors.

“Bastards! Bastards! You think you’re something, Salpinge, well, you’re nothing! You are nothing!”

He settled into a damaged, trembling sulk. His world-eye glowed dark.

“It’s over. They’re gone.” Sweetness knelt, carefully putting herself between Serpio and his bullies.

“Harx,” Serpio whispered, so quiet and venomous Sweetness almost mistook it for a natural phenomenon.

“What?”

“He’ll show you,” Serpio muttered. “He’ll show everyone. You’ll all see!”

“What is, who is, Harx?” Sweetness asked but he did not hear and she knew the words were not for her. She saw a reflection in Serpio’s angel-eye where the sun was not; a glint of silver.

Serpio stood up. He balled his fists and roared at his tormentors, a howl of energy that drew years of shame and rage and alienation like a vacuum in the soul. Sweetness was not sure she liked boys who howled. Serpio gasped into a hunch of humiliation, but the howl roared on, changing shape and tone, becoming something other, a note, a whistle, a train whistle, coming up the track. She knew that song. She knew the song of every train on the Southern Grand Trunk. An ear within had been listening for it since Little Pretty One told her in the night the name and nature of her intended. The song of the Class 44 single-tokamak fusion hauler Ninth Avata.