Ares Express

13

In the privacy of command, striding alone on his big brass bridge, Naon Engineer decided that the only way out of the situation was to die of shame. There were numerous precedents for this action. No matter that most of them had been performed by ascetics and monastics in order to stymie wars, blight cities or summon monsoons. They had not had their wheels pissed on by Stuards.

Out, quick. Yell “power-up” down the gosport, throw full steam and throttles wide open. Put as many sleepers as possible between you and the bad thing. Old Engineer advice, father to son to son to son. As soon as there was free track, he had bellowed the Deep-Fusion folk to frenzy and spun the wheels. But the Ninth Avata Stuards were ready for him. Two rows, either side of the track. A firing squad. The men had unzipped and unfurled. The women had hoisted their many skirts and aimed. As the looming superstructure of Catherine of Tharsis passed over their heads, they had gushingly anointed the drive wheels.

The track-level cameras spared none of the humiliation.

“Full power!” Naon Engineer thundered at the sweating Deep-Fusioners in their windowless reactor hive. His cheeks were red. Blood seethed in his brainpan. There was a high whining whistle in his inner ears. It blocked out the imagined jeering of the Stuards. “Full power, you slugs snails tortoises infernal turtles!” But heavy trains are slow. It seemed a damned eternity for Catherine of Tharsis to pull away from those two ranks of jeering cooks and waiters.

The imagined tang of urine filled his nostrils. It would never wash away. Never. Speed. The wind of high velocity might at least blow it somewhere he would not have to smell it. Naon Engineer pushed the lever forward to its uttermost notch. The big fusion engines responded with a howl of power. Catherine of Tharsis was a smoke-fletched arrow shot across the plains of Old Deuteronomy. She ran Mendocello Bank at such a lick that it jumped Marya Stuard’s formal goblets from their racks. Scampering junior sommeliers bumped into each other as they rolled away from grasping fingers. Brimful of the righteous wrath that had defeated the Starke badmaashes, Marya Stuard stormed forward.

“He’s locked himself in,” Child’a’grace said. Marya Stuard was no respecter of sanctums. She beat the door with her fists.

“What d’you think you’re doing, man?”

The twin horns blew.

“I demand to be let in!”

She swayed as the train took a switchover at two hundred and fifty.

“I’m a bloody laughing stock, Engineer! A laughing stock! And people do not laugh at Marya Stuard. Remember who bounced Selwyn Starke and his dacoits!”

“There’s no talking to him,” Child’a’grace said mildly. Marya Stuard stood glaring at the door, as if heat of will could melt a hole in it. It remained obdurately unmelted and unopened. For once defeated, she gave a huff of exasperation and turned on her heel.

“He’ll talk to me, eventually,” she declared. Child’a’grace sighed, still waiting after four years.

Naon Engineer finally ran out of steam on the down-grade to the Muchanga Water Tower. Hands off the throttles. Catherine of Tharsis ghosted to a creaking, heavy halt under the blessing fingers of the water-charger. By now the decision was firm in his mind, and he could face the council of his peers.

“I am destroyed,” he declared to the assembled council of the Domieties. He had had plenty of time to practise the tone of pained humiliation, and he thought he did it really rather well. “The money is forfeit. So be it. A price must be paid, though three thousand dollars, and a lien on our contracts is a heavy burden. But what is heavier still, what is intolerable, is the shame. I cannot bear the disgrace. Cannot bear it, I tell you!” Every eye was on him. “There is only one choice available to me. The stain that besmirches the great name of Engineer can only be expunged by blood. Yes, blood!” A corner-of-eye glance to make sure Marya Stuard was watching, and impressed. Too hard to tell with that fierce little woman. Very well then. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not considerable. “I have studied the family archives, and there is a way that shame may be bought out. Shame for shame, life for life. I declare to you now, for the shame brought on this name by that child, for the urine stains rusting the pure steel of my driving wheels, yes, I will die from shame! A terrible price, yes, but one I bear gladly. Thirteen generations of the name Asiim demand it!” He held aloft his hand in a rhetorical gesture he had once seen in an itinerant tent theatre performance of The Melodrama of the Twelve Just Trappers. It had been a notoriously hammy gig, but trainpeople had never been renowned as critics. He held the pose, flared his nostrils.

Someone farted. It was soft and eructating and rippling. Before anyone could crack a chortle, Naon Engineer whirled.

“Who was that?” His finger was a claw of accusation. “Who emitted that…noise? Whose nether trumpet sounded?”

“Husband,” Child’a’grace said.

“I mean it,” he said, remembering just in time to sign to his wife, “I shall…”

“Naon…”

“Sle shall succeed. He shall inherit the starter rod.” But he was failing. His pride was tobogganing toward a fatal precipice. Damn them. Damn his always reasonable wife, damn that underwearless tramp of a daughter, damn that loose-sphinctered hellion of a Bassareeni, he suspected.

“Naon, enough,” Child’a’grace said gently, and he was utterly defeated.

“Just get us out of this with our dignity intact,” Marya Stuard sighed. At the far end of the long table, Grandmother Taal ruffled her skirts and shawls like a prize chanticleer at a canton fair.

“We have forgotten someone here,” she said. Her voice was small and soft, like a desert bird, but the air made room for every word. “We are all full of our shame and our disgrace and the stains on our wheels and our name, and even our money…” She stood up, fumbled open her black old-woman’s bag, which had infinite dimensions folded up inside it. She flung a green something down the table. It slid to a halt in front of Naon Engineer: a wad of Bank of Tharsis bills. “Are you satisfied, son?”

Naon Engineer meanly flicked through the wad.

“It all seems to be here.”

Grandmother Taal remained standing.

“Yes, we are all full of shame and disgrace but I say humiliation is a family that happily gives up a daughter to save its name. I say shame is a family that thinks of social betterment over a child’s happiness. I say disgrace is a nearly-nine-year-old girl most probably at this very moment standing in the cold by the trackside back in Deuteronomy, looking for a train that wouldn’t wait for her because its Chief Engineer—her own father—thinks too much of his own good name to even look for her. Let alone disrupt his timetables to wait to see if she might come back. That is shame. That is disgrace. That is what makes a Domiety’s name small along the tracksides. If you are to die from anything, die for shame of that, father Naon Engineer 11th!”

In a flurry of black that seemed to go out from the old lady into other states and dimensions, Grandmother Taal whirled out of the council room.

In the wee hours, Child’a’grace came tippy-tapping at Grandmother Taal’s cabin door. As she had expected, the matriarch was awake. The old sleep little but their dreams are mighty.

“Grandmother.”

As she entered, she saw Grandmother Taal hastily tug down the hem of her black nightrobe. Drops of crimson on the floor. Child’a’grace looked for needles and thread: they were on the dressing table next to a patch of tabletop polished to mirror-sheen.

“Taal.”

“It didn’t work anyway.”

“Could you not get a high enough gloss?”

Child’a’grace traced a finger across the wooden scrying-mirror as she sat down on the dressing stool. Grandmother Taal shook her head.

“Something is fogging me.”

“Out of range?”

“It has no range. Something is muddying the scry-lines.”

“What did you write?”

Grandmother Taal sat on the side of the bed. Her feet did not touch the ground. Blood was a crusty red rivulet in the contours of her ankle. She pulled up her skirt. SWEETNESS, her thin calf said.

“He’s not a bad man,” Child’a’grace said.

“He tries hard,” Grandmother Taal said. “And you are defending him? How long since he last spoke to you?”

“Four years, sixteen months, twenty-seven days.”

“If he does this over a folly of cards, you expect any less for a daughter who runs out on her own betrothal?”

“Ach, you are too right.”

“Yes. So, do you think he will go ahead and shame himself to death?”

“He is embarrassed enough.”

“Embarrassment is good for the soul. Especially his soul. Ah, if his father…I tell you, one good thing, if he did go and die of shame, at least it would give that girl the chance to do what she’s always wanted.”

There was no reasonable reply to this. Child’a’grace pursed her lips, then said, “I hope she has enough clean underwear.” She looked at the circle of sheened wood, tried to catch her own reflection in the dressing tabletop. “Did you see anything?”

“It was muddy.”

“But did you see anything?”

“I saw mirrors. Muddy mirrors. I saw the girl, reflected in many many mirrors. She was looking for something. She was looking very hard.”

“Was it real? Or was it a sign?”

“How should I know?” Grandmother Taal said, testily. “I’m only a domestic magician. But I know one thing, she did not look happy. She looked scared.”

Child’a’grace glanced away to hide the sudden emotion swelling in the corners of her eyes.

“I should…”

“No. They need you. Someone must keep the train on track, and the men are useless.”

Child’a’grace nodded. From her bag she produced a thin, rectangular, oil-paper-wrapped packet. She presented it to Grandmother Taal. The old woman sniffed the yellow, greasy, thick paper carefully. Her eyes widened a sliver.

“This is most fine stuff.”

“It is Etzvan Canton Black Loess.”

In that ancient division of Deuteronomy, Grandmother Taal recalled, the soil was so dark and rich a teaspoon was stirred into the local hot chocolate to promote long life and fertility.

“It was in my dowry,” Child’a’grace said simply. “I never really got the taste for it.”

Grandmother Taal sniffed the packet again.

“Yes, I can smell bottom-drawer cottons and mothballs,” she said.

“It’s for your journey,” Child’a’grace added hastily, “not your own use.”

“I gathered that.” The crow-corners of Grandmother Taal’s eyes wrinkled.

“If I’d had any money…”

“Etzvan Canton Black Loess is better than money, especially a bar of this fine a vintage.” Grandmother Taal slid the neat little wad into one of her many skirt pockets. “So, how did you know I was going?”

Again, Child’a’grace stroked fingertips against the wooden mirror.

“I’ve got my own domestic magic.”

“Yes,” Grandmother Taal said. “All women do.”

“Keep safe,” Child’a’grace said, kissing the old woman the three-fold kiss of farewell; forehead, wrist, wrist. “You’ve got a photograph…”

“A grandmother does not have a photograph of her granddaughter?”

“Of course. Well, let us know…”

“Immediately.”

Ten minutes later, a figure a little more black than the Muchanga night climbed slowly down the passenger steps to the ground. The air smelled of sage and cold, stone-chilled water. The stars were sharp and threatening as an arrow storm. The moonring seemed suspended in flight, an arch of frost. Grandmother Taal took two nostrilfuls of the big night. She took three steps away from the track. This was the furthest she had been from Catherine of Tharsis in a half-decade. The novelty was worth that brief a consideration, no more. She found a place of concealment among the trackside equipment. Ladies of her venerability did not hide. Skittering night things fled from her. Good. There were almost certainly things out there that she would flee from. The big train swigged its fill of fossil water. The feeder arms swung loose. Voices called up and down the track. Steam vented from valves. The big horns sang once, twice, thrice. The pistons thrashed, the wheels spun. Freighted with lights and lives, Catherine of Tharsis glided slowly past her.

Grandmother Taal watched the red taillights curve out of sight around the bend in the track. She stepped out of concealment. By the light of the moonring, she took a reading from her pocket vade-mecum. The timetable function told her the 22:50 Triskander-Grand Valley Limited Night Service would be on the upline in eighty minutes. Time enough. She began to walk. She laid the first detonator on the upline switchover. Vertebrae protested as she straightened up. The night was working into her marrow. She found a pair of fingerless gloves and pulled them on. Warm hands fool a cold body. She laid the second detonator a twenty-minute walk upline by the vade-mecum clock. The service lights of Muchanga Water Station had receded into the great dark, a dirty, low constellation. She thought a bit about the flee-worthy things in the dark. Onward.

She heard an explosion behind her. She turned. Too soon, too close…Grandmother Taal fumbled in her infinity bag. Keys, sweets, small ladylike weapons, items of food, coins, charms, vials of scented waters, comfits, hair pins and old-fashioned jewellery, hard edges of very large machines. Where was it? Damn infundibular folding dimensions.

The second detonator went off. She saw its brief sharp flare close to the ground, eclipsed by wheels. She began to walk very quickly, counting one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand…There. Her fingers curled around the shaft of the thermite flare. Fifteen thousand sixteen thousand…So dark, so damned dark, no light from all those stupid, wasted stars, and so cold; one frosty sleeper, one unseated trackbed, one loose tie, she could fall, and that would be…Twenty-two thousand twenty-three thousand twenty-four thousand…Boom.

The last detonator. He was coming fast, too fast. There must have been delays down the line in Margaret Land, he was making up time on the empty Oxus section.

She turned, held the flare at arm’s length, pulled the ripcord. The metal cap flipped off. The thermite mixture coughed, spat sparks. A low flare guttered, teetered on the edge of extinction in the wind, then caught. A blade of searing white flame leaped from the casing. Grandmother Taal faced down the night train to Grand Valley with a sword of light. She could see the headlamp, cutting a curve through the night. The wheels beat, the horns declared their impatience with all that might impede them. Grandmother Taal held her sword firm before her face. See it. They must see it. But she could not hear brakes. She could not hear the chunter of an Engineer throwing the drive into reverse, the shriek of the emergency steam release. She tried to remember how much fire there was in the standard Bethlehem Ares Railroads signal flare. The light expanded before, swallowing her like the hypnotising eyes of a speedsnake bewitching a Syrtis hare. The world around her was white, the horns bellowed, “This is the Triskander-Grand Valley Limited, out of my way.” He wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t stopping. Brakes. She heard brakes. Sparks cascaded from the agonised steel. Geysers of steam jetted from the piston valves. The horns yelled at her, then fell silent. The engine stood motionless before her. She could have reached out and touched the cow-catcher.

The flame guttered out in dismal sparks. Grandmother Taal flung the empty casing away from her. She looked defiantly up into the great white light.

“I am Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th, of Catherine of Tharsis!” she declared. “In the name of all Engineers, I claim Uncle Billy!”

A distant voice shouted down.

“How about you, Cousin Taal Engineer! Welcome to Five Great Stones. Come aboard.”

Dark figures were already weaving through the seething white spotlight to her assistance.