Ares Express

16

On the third day, between delirium and dehydration, Sweetness hit the steel rail. She tripped over a crumbled concrete sleeper and fell on it. It burned her right cheek. She reeled back and left a strip of skin fused to the metal. That was how she knew it was real. It was the first experience she had been certain of in two days.

When her feet had given her no answer to being dropped from a height of three metres over a sterile red desert by an air-borne cathedral waltzing away over the horizon in a gaudy of purple clouds, conned out of what she half understood was her greatest asset—the woman who created the world—Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th did an inventory.

Don’t think bruised maybe cracked ribs. Don’t think rim-rocks and rust. Don’t think, nothing that even suggests something I recognise. Don’t think which way? Don’t think how much food and water? Don’t think how soon the night, and how long and cold? All the answers have to be in this little black sack, so start there.

The sandwiches were long since mummified crescents but there were four bottles of oxygenated water. Sweetness set them out on the sand in front of her. With her pencil and paper she sat down to work out how many sips, then realised it was pointless without an idea of how long she would be walking, which was pointless without knowing where she was. And among the petty treasures, she had forgotten a simple map and compass.

One useful thing. Psalli’s emergency spell. Lost in a desert, no map, no compass, night coming on, four bottles of water between you and the condors; that’s an emergency. Sweetness unrolled the little scroll of paper, fastened with a hair-tie.

For Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness, first light a beeswax candle…

What the hell kind of emergency spell is it that’s picky about the kind of candle you light? Or even that you light a candle at all? Sweetness hauled out her all-weather lighter and a tampon. She lit the thread end. It burned enthusiastically, then sputtered at the wadded cotton.

“Then face the sun…” She did so. “Call three times, ‘Aid me in my succour, Green Saint,’ then blow out the candle and say, ‘May my wish be granted.’ Okay.” She performed the recitations, blew on her light. The tampon guttered and expired in a curl of red embers and smoke. “May my wish be granted.”

Sweetness sat down and waited for Aid Beyond Comprehension. To keep herself amused in a Time of Direness, she thought. You’re lost in the middle of a desert without a map or a compass. You’ve got a radio. You’re facing the sun, which is about two hands above the horizon. You’re facing vaguely west, so most of the important stuff in the world is that way. Nine o’clock-ish. South. Walk and you’ll hit something human sooner or later. If you roll over—cock piss bugger bum balls, it hurts!—and use the top of this pen as one sight and the top of that finger rock as another and hold real still, you can guess how quickly the sun’s setting. Fast on the equator, slow up north. This season, hardly at all above the polar circle. Well, it’s definitely moving, so I’m not that far north. About three minutes from top of pen to top of rock. That’s up above the thirty degree line north. Where had that fly bastard Harx said they were going? Molesworth, for a mail run. That’s Bequerelly, west-southwest from Therme. Now, your watch is still on Deuteronomy time. So, you tune the radio to a Deuteronomy station and listen for the Evening Angelus. Star of the Evening, pale blue mother of men…Then you find a place where you can see the horizon. It’s okay to walk about a bit. The Help Beyond Comprehension isn’t going to miss you out here. There’s a gap in the shield-wall. Now count the time until the sun sets here. A few head-sums—how many degrees is it per minute? Three. And there it goes…Magic hour. Wooo, big blue. The rocks are so red, like they don’t want to let the colour go. No, no, it’s mine, not the black’s. Eight minutes. So, you’re mid Axidy, edge of Chryse. Not too many railway lines up here, which is arsebiscuits, but down south is Tempe and the thirty-degree orbital. That’s a walk. You’re going to sprout wings and fly? Getting night-wise. Best to walk in the night, sleep in the day. That sun’ll cook you like a stripey penis on a Waymender barbecue. Let’s not entertain that thought or those people. You’re warm already on forehead and cheeks. Upper arms are stinging. Also, you’ll drink less water. Snuggle up in your bag and sleep in the sun on the sand. So, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, best get booting. Wait wait wait. It’s night. No sun. So, how will you know which way is south? Moonring’s east–west, and south, but it goes all the way across the sky and a little error now can be days out. Can be leather and bones, Honey-Bun.

Wait. Your radio. That Deuteronomy station, it had been all fluttery and wowy and phasey, because they’ve only got low power transmitters and the mountains over to the east there interfere with the signal. No mountains to the south: so, pick up a Tempe Station—preferably one in a big place like Therme—and turn around until you get a clear signal. You’re on beam. She’ll lead you right into the Watering Rooms of the Great Bath itself.

As the last stolen light ebbed from the rim-rocks, Sweetness pulled Radio Pleasant out of the atmosphere. It twitched and chittered like a family of bats. Beneath the wheeling stars, Sweetness turned, listening to the airwaves. There. Honesto’s Used Yute Mart. Treat Ye Better’n Ye Treat Yerself. For a great deal on pre-cared Dorts and Stavingers, call…She opened her eyes. The stars seemed to line up above her into a hunting arrow. This way, traingirl.

“Right, then,” she decided. “South.”

She shouldered her bag and began to walk. The Bakelite cat and the used spell she left as offerings to the Big Red.

The Big Red, in the big dark, was extremely boring. Those things that give character to deserts; heat, space, desolation, grandeur, an atomising sense of isolation in a vast terrain, are erased by night. Dark made it a dimensionless expanse of tough trekking. Sweetness pressed on at a steady speed, fast enough to give a sense of purpose, slow enough not to flag too soon and leave her demoralised. To conserve the solar batteries, she listened in to Radio Pleasant only long enough to get a fix on due south. She sang songs from the shows. She recited chunks of the Evyn Psalmody. She counted from one to one thousand, then from two thousand back to one thousand. She took a sip of water and used it to explore as many aspects and crannies of her mouth as she could. She did seven times tables, eight times tables, all the way up to fifteen times tables. She engaged in convoluted games of word association, she formed great trains of thought, longer than any thousand-car-er out of Iron Mountain, then tried to trace back every step of the cognitive process to the originating engine. She wondered, when’s this Aid Beyond Comprehension going to arrive? She took another furtive grab at the airwaves, adjusted her course, walked on. It was still astonishingly tedious. It was much later than she thought when the “Radio Pleasant Pre-Breakfast Show” timechecks started. She slithered down dune faces, slogged along heavy, sucking sifs and thought about people in Therme’s tall tenements rolling over in their quilts for another five or sitting up and scratching or staring at their faces in the bathroom mirror or grumbling to their lovers over the morning bread and tea. Have you any idea, Mr. Deejay, what this one of your listeners is doing? When the edge of the world dipped beneath the sun, she unrolled her bag, found a sheltered place where the sand would not blow into her nostrils and remembered to set out the solar radio to recharge. Then she read a few pages of her unimproving book and was asleep before her powers of aesthetic discrimination could tell her they were excrement.

Sweat woke her. Sweetness licked the salt off her forearms and tried to find a sweet spot in the curve of soft sand that now seemed concrete. The next time she woke was with a searing headache from sunlight leaking through her permeable eyelids. Her face felt raw and sunburned. Sweetness wrapped a torn-off shirt-sleeve around her head and rolled over again, half stifled. The third time she woke, it was the hunger. She willed it down but it would not be so easily beaten. Sweetness tried eating pages of her unimproving book, washed down with sips of water. They stayed the belly gnaw. The last time she woke the sun was two fingers above the western rim rocks. Time to get up, get up, get on, get out.

Dizzy with hunger and headache, Sweetness took a bearing on Radio Pleasant. She had come a hair off true, a shift to the left brought her on to the way south. This place she had spent the day looked so similar to the one she had left yesterday—the sand so rippled, the rocks so crumbled and red, the sky so piercingly blue—she might not have moved at all. Have not moved at all, whispered a small, black, despairing demon. It took a major effort of will to lift one foot and place it ahead of the other, but she managed it. Belly full of yellow press, she had to. To listen to the demon was death.

That second night, death seemed a fine thing. Much of the time she was crazy, staggering and weaving under the hurtling scraps of moon, crawling up slip-sliding dune-faces, clutching at the sand running away between her fingers, rolling downslope, at some point recovering sense enough to reckon she had wandered far off course and checking her position against the cool midnight grooves of Radio Pleasant’s “Wind-down with Willem.” The ridiculous notion that down there people were toasting each other with wine and throwing money to band leaders and sending compliment slips to chefs and fumbling with each other’s underwear in cars gave her the idea. Things I will do when I get to Therme.

Top of the list. Wash my hair. She could smell it. Worse, she could not get away from it. Bad bad bad bad bad when you can smell your own hair. Worse when it sticks to you. Aghhh. Hair wash. No questions, numero uno. And a bath. Maybe together. No problem in Therme. It’s a spa town. So, hydrotherapy then. Deep bath, with all those healing oils and minerals from the volcanic vents. Like for several hours. And a glass of wine as light and clear as water, so cold the condensation runs down the outside, across the foot, then down your arm and you lick it off. Oh yes. Licking things off. Some boy with nice muscles and cute eye make-up to run a hose up and down you. How does that feel, Miss Engineer? Oh ah, oohhh, ahhh. She’d scandalise him. But not before he’d shampooed her hair, with a good, deep, finger motion, right down to the roots, twice and conditioner, and a warm blow dry—not a hot one, she’d had enough hot air blowing in her face for any lifetime. Yes, a bath, with oils and minerals and a hose down and a body scrub and when you’ve got every molecule of rust and silicon out of you, a table on a verandah with a view over the mud gardens, and you wearing nothing but a shortie silkie robe, and someone bringing you fish. Yes, fish, fresh caught, cooked in a steam vent.

Good game, the little black one said. Fine game, but what’s the point? You’re not going to get these things. They’re not going to happen. You’re going to kneel down and bend over and press your forehead to the sand and wait for a storm to cover you over.

She stopped in the middle of the black desert.

“Where is my Help Beyond Comprehension?” she roared at the sky.

“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 with 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.