Ares Express

21

“All right then, I’ll walk!” Sweetness shouted up at the iron cliff of the Class 22.

“Damn right you will, for you’ll have no ride with me, nor anyone else on this railroad,” Engineer Joan Cleave Summer-Raining Tissera 8th declared from his brass shunting oriole. With which he climbed the stairs to the bridge, slammed and dogged the port behind him and began the power-up sequence. Misused tokamak fields set Sweetness’s fillings ringing; bleed valves bullied her with steam. She jumped back as the drive rods cranked and the wheels spun, then gripped. The train moved off. Sweetness jogged beside the wheels, flinging trainfolk curses, which curse very hard. The rolling bogies of the tank cars soon outpaced her. She shied track ballast at the receding stained-glass lights of the caboose in the hope of pettily breaking one and annoying a Stuard.

The big chemical train curved out of sight between red dunes. The anger drained out of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She sat dejectedly on the rail. She was outcast, named, pariah. She was the Little Girl Who Would Not Marry Whom She Was Told. No one would Uncle Billy for her. What would be scary-biscuits was if the ban had spread trackside. If she could not scrounge a mandazi from a platform goondah or a pan of water from a tanking tower, her story might come to a premature end. Story, she thought. People in stories were not supposed to be permanently thirsty, or hungry enough to eat the beard of a Sumache sacerdotal. Or smell their own bodies.

“I wouldn’t have written it like this,” Sweetness told the desert.

Creak, answered a desert rook on a signal pylon. Black bird of ill omen. Outcast, named, pariah. Sweetness buzzed a rock at it. It flew away in a rattle of oily feathers.

Who had dirtied on her? Dirtied she certainly had been. Dawn had seen her marching along the westbound upline, Solid Gone’s grey cloud stuck like a styptic plaster to the horizon, light filling up the land, her own long shadow returning to her after being all over all night, when she felt through the soles of her boots the thrum of a train coming. Peering from the shade of her hand into the low sun, she had recognised the characteristic three tall steam-stacks of a Class 22 medium freightliner. She stood resolutely in the middle of the track, flagging down the chemical train with her shirt. It had come to a halt before her, Eastern Star, steaming slightly. The Engineer had descended into his oriole, but even before she could invoke the formula, he had demanded, “Is your name Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th?”

“It is, and I’m told it’s a very fine name.”

“I’m told different,” he said. Then she learned that her name had passed up the line with the speed and enthusiasm of a venereal disease, shunted and switched and sided until every part of the global web of rails knew to shun it.

Who told you? she had wanted to shout at the receding train. And who told them? Who did the dirt? The Ninth Avata people, fair enough: I did the dirt on them. Child’a’grace, my own Catherine of Tharsis? My own train. Marya Stuard—she’d be up to it, she’s never got on with us—she’s always thought we thought we were better than her—and she’s got this reputation for mean to protect. She can take out the Starke dacoits, she can put my name about quick as a knife. But that’d be like a direct attack on the Engineers. It’d be one end of the train against the other. Not even she’d be mean enough to start a civil war. But someone certainly did, so who? Oh no. They couldn’t. Could they? They could: if Da’s proud enough not to talk to Ma because of a card game four years ago, he could dirt me. Sle’s petty enough but he’s too lazy even to start a rumour. If it’s my own people, I’m really shafted. I really can’t go back again. But what’s to go back to? They’ll just work up another contract and it’ll be me with the paper money all over my dress all over again, only this Joe won’t even have a stainless steel kitchen. Mother’a’plenty, they might even fix me with a Bassareeni, just to punish me. I’ll never get my hands on the throttles. So what’s to go back for? Make a life out here, off the track. Lots of people do. Most people do. Hell, I’m a weird ethnic minority, most people can’t even imagine how we live the way we do. It’s probably a darn sight easier, maybe even better. Friends would be easier to keep. You wouldn’t have your friends and family and work-mates all the same people. You wouldn’t work with your family. You wouldn’t have them around all the time. That would be good. You could get away. But imagine waking up and it’s the same place every day. You’d be stuck with the seasons. And you’d really never ever ever get to drive. Their way, maybe. Not likely, but it’s a possibility. This way, nada. And you wouldn’t be track. You’d be a passenger. Every time you got on a train, you’d know there’d be someone up there at the front with their hand on the drive bar, taking you where you’re going to. You’d just be going along for the ride. Hell, I’m an Engineer! I’m not driven, I drive. I drive.

So: here’s this story, and this is where it’s left me. It sure can’t mean for everything to end like this. Whatever happened to happy ever after? No, think, hey, doesn’t every story have a time like this, when everything’s been burned down and levelled and things are as bad as they can get for our heroine?

So, in this time of levelling, what does a heroine do?

She gets up. She picks up her pack and slings it on her back. She turns to face the place she is going. She says, If everything is ashes and flat, on this I can build. This is the lowest of the low. Every way now is up. So go. Nothing here for you. You’ll get where you’re going.

She got up. She slung her pack on her back. She turned to face up the line. She felt no stronger, no surer, no more determined, no less hungry/ thirsty/grubby/tired but she could not remain another minute by that trackside. She walked out of that flat field of ashes.

By noon she had still neither eaten nor drunk, but a wind rose behind her that cooled her and carried her forward, and early in the afternoon there was the space battle.

At least, Sweetness presumed it was a space battle, in that part of it clearly did come from space, though the action was low to middle atmospheric. It was all rather confusing and done so quick that if you had not been looking you would have missed it, and even if you were, you could still not be sure what had happened. Trudging along the upline toward the beckoning skeleton of a water tower, Sweetness had become aware of a distant low howl behind her. She spun in the instant it took that howl to become a devouring roar as three World Defence ionospheric interceptors streaked out from behind the far rim rocks and thundered over her head.

“Wooo!” she yelled into the shatter of engines, and whirled to see the interceptors rise on their parallel white contrails into a sky-scourging loop. They were magnificently evolved devices, utterly of their native element, arrogant of gravity in their spindly, insectoid asymmetry. They spun as one on their long axes as they reached the top of the loop, then rolled on to their backs for a hair-raising tumble through fifty kilometres of airspace. When the zenith blazed with crackling lilac beams, the point interceptor exploded immediately in a white fireball. Numbstruck, Sweetness watched the flaming fragments draw streamers of smoke down to impact beyond the southern horizon. She could not register what she had seen. It was all lights and smokes and mystery, as beautiful and remote as sacred theatre. She found the remaining two aerospacecraft against the blue. They had shaken off their vain aerobatics and were screaming down on divergent courses, hoping to bemuse the targeting computers among the dunes and rocks. Lilac sky-beams flickered again; Sweetness saw a searing arc slash across the southern stone plains, strike the fleeing fighter amidships, cut it cleanly, thoughtlessly, in two. Severed halves went tumbling over each other, bounding high, disintegrating into chunks of burning scrap. A sheet of flame went up from the line of impact as the jumble of high technology struck sand. The third interceptor came scorching round on a tight turn from the west, headed back to whatever base had launched it. It bore down on Sweetness, jumped the mainline with a hypersonic boom that beat her inner organs like a drum and headed north. High in heaven, lilac beams criss-crossed like a master carver steeling his blade. A single lilac scimitar cut down. Presciently warned, the interceptor had veered on an erratic manoeuvre, otherwise it would have been cleanly vaporised. Not enough: the partac beam clipped a stabiliser vane. Too low, too fast. The pilot fought for stability but gravity fought harder. The interceptor jerked, heaved, veered, flipped on to its side and ploughed into the slip-slope of a sif dune in a kilometres-long plume of sand. A titanic pillar of fire went up from the northern dunefields. Seconds later, the blast front buffeted Sweetness. Heat washed her face, she reeled, regained balance.

Oily black smoke spiralled up into the sky.

“Woof,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th. “That was freaky.”

A few footsteps along, the chill hit her out of the desert heat: she had seen flash machines, swift technology, war by special effects budget. Under all that chrome there had been crew, people really dying bad, arbitrary and meaningless deaths out there with no other witness but herself and God. She had watched their final struggles, their skills and talents strive and fail. Real death, not story death. No trainperson is a stranger to death: Sweetness did not doubt that the majority of those freeloaders she had djubba-ed from the top of the train had either perished immediately or slowly as a result of her action. This was grand death with no connection to her. This would have spread itself across an entire terrain whether she had been there or not.

A chiller chill struck her, one that shivered ice through her marrow. Grand death on a planetary stage, but intimately connected to her. The sky weapons did not fire arbitrarily, least of all at planetary defence aerospace fighters. Unless the angels were mad and ROTECH insane, another had gained control of the orbital partacs. Other being a soft-voiced, grey-haired man in a light-swallowing suit with a cane in one hand and the soul of St. Catherine in a stasis jar in the other.

She had been sole human witness of the opening shots of the war between Harx and the angels. He was testing his powers, and they were sure and strong.

In confirmation, after the space battle came the duststorm.

A curvet of wind had tugged Sweetness’s cheek as she trudged the upline, burdened with her own thoughts and responsibilities. It had to tweak twice to get her attention. She looked up and saw, like the mother of slow trains a’coming, the boiling wall of ochre dust rolling toward her down the line, shot through with steel lightnings.

For a moment she stared. The thing bearing down on her was as fabulous as a herbragriff or stalking aspanda. They were the creatures of childhood story, the feral duststorms that would blanket entire quarterspheres for weeks, that would carry away whole towns and rearrange landscapes and change the course of rivers and turn lakes into plains. No such monster had visited the world in her or her parents’ generation, not since ROTECH created a suborder of angels to keep the climate sweet. Grandmother Taal had known these creatures, and now Sweetness recalled her lurid descriptions of tracks, trains, crews and passengers buried beneath dunes in a single night, of thrice-painted metal whetted to a naked steel blade, of grazebeasts stripped to polished bone flutes, of trainspersons drowning in dust even as they ran for the presumed safety of their cabs.

“Mother’a’mercy,” Sweetness said, the lone vertical obstacle in the path of the beast as it bore down on her. “He’s got into the weather!” Dust brushed her cheek. The next kiss would be rougher. She had maybe seconds to find cover out here in the middle of all this hugeness. She glanced around her. As she had hoped: the concrete grave of an inspection pit. Cover, of a kind. Of the only kind, she told herself. It would mean running into the face of the storm. So be it.

“Yaaaaaah!” she yelled, and charged the bulwark of dust. She flung herself through the orange wall. The wind threatened to hurl her back for her presumptuousness. Rust-lightning crackled around her as she dived down between the sleepers into the inspection pit. The concrete floor was littered with swarf and scrap train and sun-dried shit from the honey-vents, and hit exceeding hard.

“Oof!” Sweetness gasped, present enough to roll belly down and curl her back against the storm. Instants later, it struck with a shriek like every soul in the Benekasherite purgatory enduring genital torture at once. Darkness. Terrible noise. Dust. Sweetness struggled a handkerchief over her face, knotted it behind her head but the dust had already found its way up her nose, prickling and electrical and scented with dead, dried summers. Red dust caked in the corners of her eyes and behind her ears as she huddled, face down, not looking at the gorgon-face of the storm. She could feel it in her hair, heavy and matting. She’d be an adobe-head for days after this. The almost solid plane of dust drew a sympathetic plaint from the steel rails. Storm-claws plucked at her shirt: Come, fly with me.

“What are you doing, man?” she shouted at her enemy. “Don’t you know it’s going to make everything come apart? Is that what you want? They’re not going to let you, you know.” But, if Harx could access the planetary defences and the climate control system, even God the Panarchic was hog-tied. What was Harx doing to St. Catherine, with what cybernetic torments was he threatening her, what weird stuff makes saints and angels shudder? Planetary patroness she might be, a psychic twin of false pretences, but the reflection of a soul sealed in Devastation Harx’s memory jar was also Little Pretty One, half of Sweetness’s life to date. He was torturing the crippling disappointment of her third birthday party when she did not get the toy Engineer’s outfit; it was her first no-tongue bruise-lipped snog-ette with Axle Deep-Eff at the corroboree steaming. It was the economics exam she had failed spectacularly and cavalierly—there had been a handball match the night before against Darker Star—and the longwave humiliation she had endured before her School of the Air tutor and a continent of fellow pupils. It was the night of the Boletohatchie lay-over she had crept from her cabin up along the star-lit companionways over the dark, simmering hulk of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes, and had stolen in to the command bridge to lay her hand for one, electric second, on the brass drive bar. It was the foolish confessed hopes and dreams and unachievable ambitions; the infatuations and infuriations and warm-between-the-thighs moments; the naked lusts and the hopeless rages and the whispered hours of giggle and smut. Out of sheer adolescent embarrassment alone, she had to get her other half back. “I’m not going to let you!” she shouted, arms wrapped around her head.

Fine words, from a nearly-nine on her knees in an inspection pit, buried under a kilometre of duststorm. It was then she noticed the steady rivulets of dust pouring over the corners of the dug-out, forming spreading spill-cones across the concrete floor, slowly burying the pieces of discarded train-innards with the granular tick of the hour-glass. Already it was piling up around her fingers, a sensation at once sexy and enclosing. She could feel it trickling into her shoes.

“Aw, come on,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn’t the end.

As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness’s ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm’s passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.

Next round would go to the canvas.

Sweetness heaved herself out of the hole, suspiciously sniffed the air. It was clean and good and wonderfully clear, like clothes beaten by a dhobi boy. With her new clarity of vision, Sweetness now saw an object far on the western horizon, previously obscured by dust and heat haze. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Had she not seen such things before—indeed, spent a night with that man under one—she would have disbelieved her eyes. They told her true. The thing looked like—and therefore was—nothing more than a domestic, fireside companion set—poker, brush, shovel, tongs—big enough to keep hell tended.

An afternoon’s walk brought her to the prodigy. The central column and cap rose like the dome of a great, airy temple. Sweetness walked under it, wondering at the artifacts hanging from its rim. The poker was a sheer steel shaft, thirty metres long, slowly penduluming in the rising evening breeze. The brush bristles had been sadly abraded by the duststorm, lopsided and graded like a Belladonna goondah’s asymmetrical buzz-cut. The shovel could have scooped up hosts of the sinful for the tongs to hold in the white heart of purgatory’s forges. Sweetness steered away from the hungry, pronged jaws. All were polished metal, scoured clean by the dust, brilliant in the evening sun.

Sweetness started as she rounded the corner of the base to find two figures huddled against the plinth. Figures, she presumed, though they were man-shaped bundles of ochre-stained fabric. Dust-mummies, she thought, at which they both moved, shedding clouds of dust. Sweetness took a step back. Out here, jokes and superstitions and impossibilities turned up behind every rock, real and able and eager to do stuff to you. The mummies shuffled to their feet. They beat their wrappings free of dust with their bandaged hands. Sweetness saw then that they wore long duster coats and baggy trader’s pants with thick-wound puttees. The hands then rose to the bulbous brown heads, fiddled for a loose end and streeled off more metres of cloth than Sweetness ever imagined you could wear around your head without suffocating. Obsidian eyeballs glittered; Sweetness relaxed when a few turns more revealed them to be little, round-eye sunspectacles. Faces emerged, one tall and square, the other round and purse-lipped. Both wore identical hairstyles, shaved at the sides, teased up into a flat-topped mesa. They looked dedicated and zealous as they kicked away their discarded binding bands. Sweetness might have been stone to them for all their regard.

“A storm that was,” the square-faced, taller one said, taking a theatrical upright pose.

“Storm indeed, Cadmon,” the other agreed, copying him.

“Unseasonable.” The square one made a slow sweep of the horizon.

“Unseasonable indeed, Cadmon.” The squat one followed suit.

“One might almost think…”

“One might; one does, Cadmon.”

Sweetness watched their act for a few moments before clearing her throat. The two men turned as one; black round eyes regarded her, heads cocked to precisely the same degree.

“What is this? A fellow traveller in strange terrains?” The heads cocked the reverse angle.

“Would seem so, Cadmon.”

“A girl, I would hasten.”

“Hasten so, Cadmon.”

“Look, I don’t mean to butt in here if you’re doing something, but have you got any food or water?”

The two men looked at each other.

“Water and provender, for our guest?” the tall one, obviously Cadmon, asked.

“Exactly so, Cadmon,” the still nameless one answered and took a small bulb from one of the many pockets of the utility vest he wore beneath his duster. A soft squeeze. Sweetness waited for something to happen, then noticed a small stirring in the dust. Buried things unearthing themselves. Dust boiled and shed. Two gravboards with bulging leather side-panniers bobbed to the surface and came to rest at a level metre.

“Cool,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

Water there was, and provender, in square-faced Cadmon’s carefully weighed usage. Sweetness ate smally and carefully, sipped her water and used two handfuls to wipe the caked dirt off her face. Then she asked, “So, what are you guys doing out here then?”

“That question, I rather think, is better asked of you, madam,” Cadmon said. The short one nodded.

“I’m a story,” Sweetness said, then regretted her enthusiasm, for now she had committed herself to telling it yet again.

“No no no,” Cadmon interjected with a raised finger, mimicked by his partner. “Names, then stories.”

“Okay,” Sweetness said. “I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The two men bowed slightly.

“I am Cadmon, and this is Euphrasie,” Cadmon said, with a sweep of the hand which the shorter man could not refrain from distantly echoing. “We are the Brothers Dust.”

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “But you’re not brothers.”

“Brothers of the soul,” Cadmon said.

“Soul, indeed,” Euphrasie chimed in. “Brothers aesthetic, atheistic, anarchic.”

“We are anarchist artists,” Cadmon said. “Behold, our work.”

As one, the Brothers Dust thrust out their hands to the enormous fireside companion set, in the lengthening shade of which this exchange had taken place.

“Do you do a lot of household stuff?” Sweetness asked.

“You are familiar with our work?” Cadmon asked loftily.

“I’ve slept under some of it.”

“Which, pray?” Euphrasie responded, quick as a pocket-picking.

“The big chair,” Sweetness said. She added, “I’ve seen the ironing board from a distance. And the big shoe.”

“The big shoe!” Cadmon and Euphrasie chorused in one voice.

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “So, correct me if I’m wrong here, but how is it anarchy to do big ironing boards and shoes?”

“The anarchy of incongruity,” Cadmon proclaimed.

“And the domestic,” Euphrasie added. “Domesticating the desert.”

“And desertifying the domestic,” Cadmon insisted. “Thus we confound two static absolutes: the desert without and the desert within.”

“But don’t we live in an anarchy?” Sweetness asked, sweetly.

“Habitual anarchy is no anarchy at all,” Cadmon said.

“The revolution must be continual if it is to be the true revolution.”

“True anarchy is archy.”

“I must invent a non-system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

Sweetness looked at the two desert-clad men, cocked her head in that way.

“Are you butty-boys?” she asked.

Cadmon maintained high disdain, but Sweetness caught Euphrasie turning away and lifting his hand to his mouth to suppress a chuckle.

“We are living art,” Cadmon said. Okay, Sweetness thought.

“And art consists as much in the unmaking as the making,” Euphrasie said.

“Look, I don’t do art, so you’ll have to explain this,” Sweetness said.

“Explain? Very well. This project is complete. True art is momentary; the false strives for immortality. We make and we unmake. Now is the time of unmaking.”

Sweetness looked to Euphrasie for elucidation. He merely swivelled his eyes upward to the mushroom-cap of the companion set. For the first time Sweetness noticed the clustered white cylinders fastened to the shaft and around the rim of the cap, the gaily coloured wires, the radio transponders.

“You’re not…”

Euphrasie nodded and produced another bulb device from his vest of pockets.

“You have something in the region of thirty seconds to decide whether you come with us, or bet on how fast you can run,” Cadmon said, gathering up his discarded wrappings and stuffing them into a carry-all bag, which he slung on to the back of the nearer of the two fretting gravboards.

“Me? On one of those?”

“Twenty seconds…” Euphrasie had already mounted his gravboard and was erecting the boom.

“All right, I’m not betting, I’m not betting!” Sweetness scooped up her bag and dived for Euphrasie’s board. The mercurial machine rocked under her, she fought for balance, grabbed at Euphrasie, who by seizing her shirt-front prevented them both from capsizing. Wind cracked Cadmon’s pink and purple fractal patterned sail. The board pitched, then the rising evening breeze lifted it and whipped it away. Within instants, he was a lost toy in the great redness.

“Hold tight!” Euphrasie called to Sweetness, pressed cheek to scapular.

“Tell me,” Sweetness muttered into his back, but all the same the sudden dip and surge of the board almost upset her as Euphrasie tilted the boom into the wind and the board took flight.

“Whoo!” exclaimed Sweetness Asiim Engineer as the rippled dust blurred beneath her. The second board tacked sharply, caught a stronger air current and slid up alongside big, vain Cadmon.

“Zero!” he shouted to Euphrasie over the flutter of sail and the shout of wind. The smaller man held out the bulb-teat. Cadmon nodded for Sweetness to look back, which she did, dizzyingly, and so missed Euphrasie depressing the nipple. The effects were impressive. The big companion set stood tall and black and domestic on the horizon. As she watched, white blossoms of flame exploded briefly underneath the rim, indeed like some vast desert mushroom sporing explosively. The fall was slow and tremendous. Had the Skywheel itself snapped and fallen flailing to earth, it could not have been more thunderous and aristocratic. Explosions around the edge of the cap first freed the poker, which fell straight to earth and embedded itself a third-deep in the sand. The brush fell to earth in a comet’s tail of blazing bristles: fireballs and sparks rebounded high as it smashed into the ground. Multiple detonations disintegrated the tongs into flying, clawed shards. Only the shovel remained. Unbalanced by its weight, the cap tilted, then the shaft blew apart beneath it in an orgy of detonations. The falling shovel threw a spadeful of hot desert twenty metres into the air. Like a bell falling from God’s campanile, the cap struck the ground. The chime shivered Sweetness’s ovaries in her belly. Fractions of a second later, the shockwave ruffled her hair and tugged her clothes, sent the gravboard yawing.

The second pillar of smoke in Sweetness’s day went up from the wreckage of art.

“You’re mad, you are!” Sweetness exclaimed as Euphrasie sent the board sweeping round on a great sand-scoring arc. She liked the way he smiled, pleased and self-deprecating at once. Almost that smile. Remember, butty-boy, she advised herself. And if you go on falling for every male who smiles that smile, and they probably all do, this story is going to end with you tripping over the end of the next chapter. But, she decided as the gravboard scored away from the smouldering wreckage across the Big Red and she felt man body beneath her fingers and smelled man smells whipped back in the wind of her velocity that was streaming her hair straight back from her good cheekbones: this is what stories are all about. “Wooo!” she yelled, for the second time that day.

She decided she liked fruitboy anarchist artists. She tugged Euphrasie’s quilted sleeve.

“Where are we going?”

“Depends,” he shouted into the slipstream.

“On what?”

“On where you want to go.”

“Me?”

“Our work is done.”

“You’ve blown them all up?”

“Unto the last.”

“Even the big shoe?”

“The aglets flew three hundred metres in opposite directions.”

Aglets sounded to Sweetness Engineer like juvenile birds of prey, so three hundred metres might or might not be an impressive flight, but she understood and appreciated the pride in a good job well done in Euphrasie’s voice. It’s not an easy thing to do an explosion really well. Likewise, she understood and delighted in the thrilling velocity with which she skimmed across the desert, low enough for the sand sprayed up by the bow field to sting her ankles, up and over the dune crests with a leap and a yip and the bottom of her stomach falling out. These butty-boys had class. She liked them.

Sweetness hammered on Euphrasie’s back.

“Molesworth!” she yelled when she had his attention. Euphrasie did not ask where or why. He nodded briskly, finger-talked with one hand to his partner out at point. Cadmon and Euphrasie leaned into their sails. The banking boards cut crescents in the red sand as they curved due south.

“Wooooeeee!” fanfared Sweetness Asiim Engineer, throwing her head back and letting her greasy bonny black hair reel out behind her like a banner of anarchy. She could still smell it. She could still smell herself, lick her brown forearm and taste minerals. She had little enough water in her blood and less provender in her belly. She was still wandering in sterile places, cannoning off people places events like the legendary Rael Mandella Jr.’s cue ball. Her childhood companion was still incarcerated in a trans-dimensional mirror rolled up in a canopic jar. Her enemy roamed the airways by pedal power, cautiously testing his command of the very angels that had built the world. She had no weapons, no power, no plan, not even a cunning scheme. But she still knew, with a traingirl’s sense, that that electric buzz in the air is a big express coming; with the high-plain herder’s understanding that that flaring of the nostrils running through the herd is a sure sign of rains; with the deep core miner’s certainty as she burrows through the obsidian flux tubes of primal shield volcanoes that the next grike will glitter with diamonds; that though nothing was changed, everything was different. Before, those people places events had pushed her around. Now, somehow, she was pusher, not pushee. From here on, it would be an Adventure.

When the heat went out of the sky, they camped in the lee of the upended boards. The anarchists made fire and heated small, neat foil sachets of trail food in a bubbling billy. It was not sufficient and tasted badly enough of additives to catch the back of Sweetness’s throat but she skewered the tiny cubes of synthetic meat in their clinging sauce with her plastic pitchfork and gobbled them down with gratitude. To while away the cooling hours while the edge of the world rose over the face of the sun in streaks of red gold and purple, like a Pontifical progress, Cadmon and Euphrasie played a game with Sweetness. It was We’ve-Got-To-Guess-Why-You’re-Going-To-Molesworth-But-You’re-Only-Allowed-To-Give-One-Word-Monosyllabic-Answers.

“Why?” Sweetness immediately asked.

“Because,” tall Cadmon answered. “And the way we play it, we’ve only got ten questions.”

“Okay.”

Euphrasie raised a warning finger, then another. He shook them in Sweetness’s face.

“Right.”

He nodded.

“Wherefore, Molesworth?” Cadmon asked. Euphrasie sat close beside him, and nodded sagely.

Sweetness opened her mouth, then caught herself. She counted syllables on her fingers, grimaced.

“Folk.”

“First, second or third generation?”

“Third,” Sweetness said confidently. Cadmon and Euphrasie inclined their heads together. They seemed to speak, though Sweetness heard no words in the cool cool cool of the evening.

“So, what do you flee?”

“Ring.” Sweetness twisted an imaginary third-finger-left-hand-gold-band. “But…”

Euphrasie furiously finger-wagged her.

“Clearly, this thing you seek in Molesworth is not a nuptial reconciliation,” Cadmon mused. Euphrasie whispered in his partner’s ear. Cadmon nodded. “It’s a grandparent, in my experience the most trustworthy of family members. So, not a reconciliation, but an alliance. You seek something together, do you not?”

“Twin,” Sweetness said. She mimed her second self, the quick knife of division. Cadmon and Euphrasie looked very slowly at each other.

“You need the assistance of your grandparent to seek the sundered self?”

Sweetness nodded, then added, “Ghost.” Without realising, she was caught up in the artists’ ludicrous after-dinner sport. Her tongue was bound; she could no more iterate two words, or more than one syllable, than she could have recited all Five Hundred Five-Hundred-Letter Tallabasserite names of God.

“This—half sister?—is dead? Is this some manner of seance, some necromancy or other?” Cadmon asked, his little spectacles catching spook-fire in their round lenses.

“Free.”

“Someone has stolen the ghost of your dead twin sister?”

“Yes.”

“Damnation! That was a rhetorical question. They don’t count.”

Sweetness held up her two hands, where she had been counting off the quota of questions with finger and thumbs, to show beyond any argument that in her game, rhetoric counted. Cadmon took a breath and tried again.

“Given that ours is a low-scale mercantile culture and folk will sell anything to anyone, it’s still valid to ask, why would anyone want to steal a ghost?”

Again Sweetness nodded. “Saint.” She pointed to where the brightest lights of the moonring clung to the horizon, drew her finger in an all-creating arc across the sky. When she looked back, both Cadmon and Euphrasie’s mouths were open.

“You mean to tell us that the ghost of your twin sister is not in fact your twin sister, but an angel? A saint?”

“The,” Sweetness said emphatically. Their mouths were two tunnels through to deep night now. Their last question was inevitable. So, by a hundred tiny cues, clues and flutings of the desert wind that had incrementally impinged on Sweetness’s senses, was her answer.

“You are telling us that St. Catherine of Tharsis, masquerading as your natally-deceased twin sister, has been ghost-napped, and that you and your grandparent are on a quest to get her back,” Cadmon said. Not a question. For the first time, Sweetness heard in his voice a tremor of not cool. “But who would do a thing like that?”

“Him!” Sweetness yelled, pointing straight up as the dark fringe of the flying cathedral swept across the first glimmerings of the moonring, occulting them. Sworn enemy he might be; dumper of nubile girls into deadly deserts he most certainly was; Vastator, Godmörder and Destroyer of Worlds he aspired to become; but one thing she had to give this Devastation Harx. He had great timing.

Whispers in the wind had warned her. Her traingirl’s sense for large moving objects under the close horizon had hinted. She had caught glimpses in the ebbing red at the edge of the world, something the size of a fallen moon, belly tabby-striped with cloud bands. The fine hair in her ears had caught a whisper of gears and big-bladed fans. The laws of probability had ruled in it being what her sense suspected: he’d want to hover around, survey the results of his skeet-shooting. So the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family putting the full stop on her ten questions was no big surprise. Cadmon and Euphrasie’s reactions were as the great shadow fell over them. In an instant they were on their feet, Cadmon shaking a fist at the slowly drifting constellations of warning lights.

“Harx! Only you, man! Only you! Still we are trapped in this same gyre! No more, I say! Probability has brought us together again. This time, we will have it out!”

“Even so, Cadmon, even so!” Euphrasie chorused.

“You know this guy?” Sweetness asked, incredulous.

“Once upon a time, there were three little anarchist artists went to the Collegium of Belles Lettres,” Euphrasie began.

“Euphrasie! To the boards! The boards!” With a good ten-metres-from-the-edge-of-the-box, Cadmon kicked sand over the fire, extinguishing it immediately. In the same movement, he scooped up his equipage and uprooted the gravboard. It skittered away from him on nervy magnetogravitic fingers. Cadmon reeled it in by the tether, raised sail and skipped aboard as the skimmer picked up speed.

“One thought: art is fine and anarchism is dandy, but to make a million, invent a religion,” Euphrasie tossed to Sweetness as he stuffed shut his pack and jammed his sail in its binnacle.

“This is a disagreement about art?” Sweetness said, ignored in the frenzy of mad activity as lights and vanes and little windows passed slowly over her head.

“He betrayed every principle he ever evinced for mail-order lucre and young ass,” Euphrasie declared.

“If only every war were fought for reasons as noble as art,” Cadmon said, reining his fretting board in like a war-palfrey. “And, if I played our game correctly, then this vile man is a positive menace to reality. Anarchists we may be, but we are not nihilists. Now, even as I debate these issues with you, we lose initiative and tempo. We will return for you, never fear. Now, we must to honourable battle. Stand back: this is not your fight.”

“Yes it is!” Sweetness yelled. “It’s my goddam sister in there!”

“Prime your charges, Euphrasie!” Cadmon commanded, bringing his board round in a sail-cracking luff. Euphrasie loaded his vest of pockets with sticks of explosive, tossed some to Cadmon who caught them nimbly, let loose the sail and took the gravboard up in one heart-thrilling, vertiginous swoop toward the ponderous roof of lights. Euphrasie made a running mount on his board and followed his buddy up up and away.

“Don’t you leave me, you…you…uphill gardeners, you dryland rowers, you, you brown dirt cowboys!” Sweetness shouted at the bright triangles of sailcloth dwindling into the twilit baroque underbelly of the flying cathedral. She cupped her hands. “Stay under him! He’s got partacs, and he’s not afraid to use them! Get above him and he’ll shoot you out of the sky!”

Already she was emerging from the penumbra of the blimp church.

Sweetness slip-scrambled up a dune face, threw herself along the knife-edged, soft ridges, seeking higher ground. Gnats against a buffalo they might be, but Devastation Harx was aware of these bright little mosquitos and was marshalling defences. As Sweetness watched, gun-ports irised open, the multibarrelled muzzles of rotary cannon slid into position and locked.

“Oh my God, look out, look out!” Sweetness shouted, fingers clenched in her hair in helpless frustration as the air beneath the dirigible became a cage woven from white tracer. But the two gaudy triangles of the anarchist gravboards slipped through them as if they were so much confetti, a dodge here, a veer there, a sharp tack to port, a terrifying death dive there to pull out centimetres short of being shredded by eleven hundred rounds a minute into a steeply banked turn.

“Ahhh!” Sweetness Asiim Engineer shouted, skull assaulted by the heavy hammer of the Gatlings.

Devastation Harx seemed to be trying to bring his vessel about: sets of vanes stopped turning, others cranked up a gear, while little manoeuvring nacelles swivelled hither and yon, fans a blur. Sweetness imagined teams of grim-faced pedallists, fit thighs pumping double, treble time, sweat running down the backs of their purple cycle shorts. The cathedral turned like a weather system, trying to bring its big belly guns to bear on the attackers, but Cadmon and Euphrasie had the measure of their enemy now. They ran in close and fast, hugging the cathedral’s chaotic architecture, mast-tips pulled low to scrape below pods and vents and turrets, out of weapon arc. The guns dare not fire for fear of tearing apart the fragile skin of the big blimp.

“Go go go go!” Sweetness shouted, punching the air and leaping up and down on the hot, slipping sand as Cadmon and Euphrasie shot out from underneath the cathedral into clear air. They looped outward, upward. The guns spat tracer at them but they were already over the rim and cutting across the upper shell toward the glass nipple of the contemplatorium. Devastation Harx had clearly never expected vengeance to fall from the sky, his upper hemisphere was undefended. No turrets, no redoubts, not even a simple marksman with a fowling piece, sent precariously on to shell to snipe. And too close to risk the orbital weaponry. One decimal out and anarchists, Harx, purple people and all would go up in a rave of hyperaccelerated ions. Peering from beneath shading hands, Sweetness saw Euphrasie—his paisley sail identified him—raise an arm. A trail of smoke arced away from it. It struck just beyond the glass roof. There was a surprisingly large white flash. Seconds later, the boom shook Sweetness Asiim Engineer as she danced, jubilant, on her dune top. A ragged scarf of blimp fabric flapped in the wind. Smoke poured satisfyingly from the wound. The airship wheeled, trying to deny the attackers targets, but Cadmon and Euphrasie separated, banked hard and came screeching back on convergent courses toward the glass sanctorum. Two sticks this time. Double blast. One direct on the dome—shards of translucent plastic glittered in the magic hour light as they rained down, sharp knives, on the delicate upper skin. The other, longer-fused, rolled and went off a third the way down the canopy. Here the underlying structures lay closer to the surface: a gas cell ruptured with a gusher of shredded strut and packing tow that made the whole artifact wobble like an ill-set circumcision-day jello.

“Yay!” Sweetness cheered as the debris rained down over the red desert.

Devastation Harx’s cathedral had a pronounced list. Still it spun, trying to get purchase on its tormentors. Gunners fired wildly in the hope of hitting something. Sweetness dived for cover as a spray of tracer blew the top of her dune to spray. She heard two, three, four more explosions. When she poked her head up over the top, she saw the cathedral canted at an angle of twenty degrees. Its dipping port side was pocked with craters and blast-holes. An entire section of lower skin swung from the substructure like a partly ripped-off scab. Spars and struts showed through the ruptured canopy, a compound fracture of the flight organs. A steady rain of debris emptied from its portholes or slid off the canopy, pod struts bent and snapped under strange new strains. Sweetness could just make out frantic movement within, like spiders hatching, as the pedallo crews abandoned their positions. The anarchist airfleet worried the big church like pit dogs a buffalo. Explosions peppered the acned skin of the airship. Another cell blew; second by second, the big ship went down by the port side toward the hard ground. Unbelievably, two peripatetic artists with penchants for Big Domestic and explosives had the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the ropes. Their finest work, true anarchy in art, a hymn to chaos, with only a runaway traingirl to witness it. Too adrenalised on the spectacle to worry about Gatling fire, Sweetness danced and hollered on her dune top, cheering on the great capsize. In one of those brief instants when her booted feet were in contact with the sand, she felt it. She knew the feeling. Every trainkid learned it from the teat; the subtle vibration of the big thing coming. Impossible, insane, but soles and bones told her, train a-coming, deep down in the sand.

Devastation Harx had weapons other than partacs.

She turned to see two ripples in the sand racing toward her, like the bow-waves of some inverted or invisible ship that sailed a sea of sand.

Across the Big Red they arrowed, straight and true and perfectly parallel and terrifyingly fast. The tremble became a shudder became a quaking. The sand beneath Sweetness’s boots liquefied, she sank ankle, shin, knee deep. In instants the swift burrowers had crossed the open plain across which Sweetness had sailed that afternoon, and plunged into the dune on which she stood. Sweetness dived and rolled as the side of the dune exploded into twin geysers of sand. A glimpse was all she had. A glimpse was enough. Mantis beaked, twin-engined turbo-powered, all spikes, spines and sensor eyes. Hunting machines: fast and pointy. Very pointy: the drive canards carried twin impaling spines, glittering chromed steel in the blue of magic hour. The heads swivelled, the many eyes locked on. The twin hunters pulled a multigee turn into an ear-shattering climb.

Sweetness scraped sand out of her face, yelled the classic warning.

“Behind you! Look behind you!”

Euphrasie, balanced delicately on his board, turned, stick in hand. The lead hunter took him fast and clean on its port nacelle. The impact should have torn him in half. Layer upon layer of tough desert clothing saved him but he was pinned like a collector’s dust moth, the bloodsmeared spear run through him to two thirds its length. As if she too had been savagely impaled, a terrible, incoherent wail was driven out of Sweetness. She watched the hunter sweep Euphrasie high into the air. Captainless, the gravboard went spinning down to earth. Vertical now; and Sweetness understood the killing thing’s strategy. A backward roll at the apex of the climb and Euphrasie would slide down the spike, lubricated by his own blood, into a kilometre of airspace. But he still clung to the stick of explosive, and with a final, defiant snap at the hounds of God, he struck fire. Sweetness saw a thin wisp of smoke, then man and machine went up in a terminal blossom of white fire. Numb, dumb, she watched shattered scraps of meat and metal punch clean through the dirigible canopy in gaping, smoking holes to rain, smouldering, on the red sand.

Now Cadmon battled the second terminator. This was no swift, sharp victory. Seeing his enemy upon him, Cadmon thrust his boots deeply into the footstraps, seized the mast with all his main and went down over the edge of the canopy in a one-eighty vertical flip. The hunter pulled a high-gee horizontal roll, but those half-seconds were enough for Cadmon to lose it among the sensor booms and vent stacks and lattices of Devastation Harx’s soft underbelly. His sense for the wind enabled him to draw more speed from every flaw and fidget that fretted around the airship’s complex architecture. Sweetness’s cheering, amplified by the anarchic mathematics of chaos theory, spun breezes that breathed a few centimetres per second into his fractal-patterned sail. But he was man and nature against angel and machine. The hunter was forced to keep its speed down to avoid further damaging the ship canopy, but metre by metre, second by second, it was gaining.

“Right! Right!!” Sweetness shouted; then, as the terminator tore through a flapping curtain of blimp-cloth, leaving it in three shreds: “Left! Hard aport!” Cadmon obeyed, not because he heard her, but because the rim was nearing and, in open air, he was kebab. He pulled a one-eighty bank into the face of the hunter. Too fast: it managed a mere flick of the barbs, then they were past each other. The hunter tumbled end over end, reacquired its target, but Cadmon was ready. He had one-eightied again, and while the hunting angel was picking up speed, he jumped straight between the horns. He caught the edge of its shield, flipped up over the spikes and bosses to come behind the beaked head. It thrashed and gaped at him, trying to snip limbs with its vanadium mandibles, but Cadmon had struggled out of his desert duster and was wrapping the too-many-eyed head with it. The hunter jerked and tossed, flipped upside down, but Cadmon’s legs were locked around its chrome throat. The gravboard sailed on out from underneath the capsizing cathedral on a gently rising arc. Two gunners who had not yet abandoned their posts as the cathedral sank lower in the air found it in their firing arcs. Intersecting streams of white tracer shredded the board. But Cadmon the anarchist artist had his fist deep in the machine’s skull-wiring. He ripped up a fistful of cable. The hunter let out a scream that Sweetness could hear over the creaking and sobbing of the tormented dirigible. Riding it like a high-plains gaucho a canton rodeo llama, Cadmon tore out another bunch of wiring. Keening madly, the hunter spun like a carousel, trying to throw the anarchist free. His fingers clung like cargo hooks. Sapient enough to understand its end was close, and could only be meaningfully be bought at the price of its destroyer’s life, the machine dived blindly for earth. Belly gunners waved arcs of shells at it; Cadmon rode the hunter as he had ridden his board, heaving on the sensor head and rudder vanes to send the shrieking thing dodging between the bullets. Muscles straining like hawsers, he pulled the thing out of its death dive with centimetres to spare. The dune on which Sweetness stood loomed, soft sand as hard as rust. Sweetness saw a steel maw gape for her, then Cadmon pulled it up, up, up. At the last instant leaped from its back. He hit fast. He hit hard. He sent a great bow-wave of sand flying before him; all legs and arms and flapping coat tails, tumbling over and over and over. Blind, guidance wrecked, the hunter climbed on twin pillars of fire from its afterburner. It stabbed a terrible wound through the starboard quadrant of the flying cathedral. It burst from the upper canopy in a gout of engine parts and shredded gas cell. The maimed cathedral lurched lower. Fans beat uselessly at the air. She was going down by the side. Spinning like a fairground humjundrum, the outer sensor booms brushed the ground and snapped. Sweetness watched the thing wheel toward her, a crushing juggernaut. Ballast vents opened, Devastation Harx dumped tons of water on to the desert to try to keep airborne. The dying hunter-killer blazed starward. At the zenith of its climb, it faltered. Its engines choked, failed. Dead in the air, the hunting angel rolled on to its back. Spinning, it fell to earth, buried itself in the receiving sand, exploded in oily black flames. Sweetness ducked under the rim of the cathedral. It scraped her by a hairbreadth. The waterfall from the sky knocked her flat, drove the air from her lungs. Instantly saturated, bruised, she was swept down the dune side in a flash flood of water and sand.

She washed up against Cadmon. He lay flat, unmoving, wet beyond any decent notion of wetness in an arid desert. From his flatness, Sweetness guessed he was very broken inside.

“Oh man…”

Broken, maybe dead.

An eye opened.

“Get the hell out of here, girl!” Cadmon bellowed with all the strength of his lungs.

“You’re all right!”

“No, I am not all right. I’m bloody dying, is what I am. At least I’ll have some flowers around me. And you’ll be sharing them with me unless you take the only traffic out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ladder, girl! The ladder!”

He nodded with his chin. Sweetness followed the tilt of the day-old stubble up the slumped dune face to where the slowly rolling wheel of the stricken airship was dipping a paltry rope access ladder toward the ground.

“But…”

“Oh, spare me the indignity of a death scene. Just go.”

The ladder sagged to the ground, lowering itself rung by rung like a Belladonna veil dancer enticing a john.

“Why?”

“What? You’re still here?”

Two rungs, three rungs, four rungs. Five.

“Why do you hate him so much? I mean, I know why I do, he’s got my sister, except she’s not really my sister, but I treat her like she’s my sister, but what’ve you got against him? I mean, just because you fall out at art school, is that a reason to try and blow him out of the sky?”

Eight rungs, nine rungs. Very soon, the wheel would swing the other way. And the ballast shift was working. Very slowly, the dirigible was righting itself. The fans were picking up speed.

“Oh, for goodness sake. He is my brother.”

“This,” Sweetness said, “is a bit mad.”

“Cadmon Laventry Ophicleide Harx, dying before your very eyes, madam. Everyone has someone they have to kill, usually part of the family circle. Now go!”

The ladder was wheeling away from her, lifting up one rung, two rungs, three rungs, tantalising her. Still Sweetness hesitated.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Cadmon croaked. “Why can’t you just let it go as one of those things you’ll never understand? It’s the little mysteries that make life interesting. Leave me! Git!”

She got, but with one backward glance. The deep-buried, swift-sprouting desert flowers, woken by unseasonal rains, had already surrounded Cadmon in a nimbus of green. Wreath indeed. Hers also, if she didn’t get that dangling piece of rope. She remembered all those times she had had to sprint for the train, the last-second leap on to the bottom rung. No third whistle here.

“Aaah!” she yelled as she struggled over the wet, clogging sand toward the taunting ladder. Mother’a’grace, it was going to be close. One rung, no rungs. She leaped at the ladder as it lifted above her head, caught the bottom bar with one hand. She swung, kicking her legs, grimacing with strain as Devastation Harx’s cathedral gained altitude. A second hand on the ladder. A first hand up a level. Another, then, agonisingly, another. Rung by rung, Sweetness Asiim Engineer hauled herself up as the wounded airship turned ponderously on its fans and took her away into the magic hour.