Ares Express

4

Two hundred kilometres up, the orbital mirror caught sunlight from beneath the edge of the world and winked it into Naon Engineer’s eye. Momentarily blinded, he dropped the thread of his argument to the floor of the Confab Chamber.

“Erm…”

“The marriage portion,” svelte, dangerous Marya Stuard hinted.

Blithe and holy, the five-kilometre disk of silverskin wheeled down the orbital marches after the setting sun.

“Oh yes. Of course. What had I suggested?”

“Five thousand dollars in the chest.”

“Ah, yes.”

A glance at Grandfather Bedzo, drooling in the Remote Steering Cubby under the copper curls of the cyberhat. Tanking up should be straightforward enough a process to entrust to the decrepit old Engineer, but Naon 11th did not like the way the old man’s wall eye was rolling.

“Plus…”

“What?”

“Two percent on the next five years.”

A beat of fist on the live wood conference table. Grandfather Bedzo started in his decades-deep senescence. He remembered the hard edge of his wife’s hand.

“Never!” Grandmother Taal declared. She was a little, pickled kernel of a woman, packed with meat and life and potential. At forty-two she still shunted the weightiest of bargains when the locodores in their red flannel tailcoats came loping in their sedan chairs into the sidings to call the day’s contracts. Her eyes were sharp little black flies. “One percent, over three years.”

Naon Engineer 11th glanced again at his sire. He was banging his foot against a riveted bulkhead in time to the swash of water through the reservoir pipes. Naon prayed the Lords of the Iron Way that Bedzo would resist an incontinence attack. It would make the marriage bargaining so very much harder.

“One and three quarter percent and four years.”

Engineer and Stuard matriarchs locked eyes over the bargaining table. On this oval of wood, reputedly an Original Branch from the Tree of World’s Beginning, the Articles of Operation had been signed twelve generations and a billion kilometres back by Engineer and Stuard the First.

“Were he of your lineage, Tante Marya, I might concur,” Grandmother Taal said. “But this…”

“Narob,” piped Salam Serene Stuard, youngest of the Domiety, first time at the big table and blessedly ignorant of the social games the formidable old ladies loved to play. His great-aunt glared at him.

“…is a lad of prospects.” Meaning, and your granddaughter is just a daughter. A womb, a ladder to history. “He is Chef du Chemin. He has his own galley.”

“In stainless steel,” Youngest Salam said, with some envy. He had only just been promoted to Linen and Tray Service. Grandmother Taal scooped up his unwise attempt to recover coup like a hot nimki from a station tray-hawker.

“On the Ninth Avata!” she said.

“Yes!” Naon exclaimed, feeling as if he had missed a couple of turns in the game. “One and a quarter percent, and three and a half years!”

“Naon!” Mother-to-son voice. “You are without doubt the finest throttleman in this quartersphere, but that is exactly the reason men drive and women bargain. Now…” She turned to her adversary. “She is Engineer born in the bone. She has steam in her soul and oil in her heart and iron in her thighs and fusion fire in her eyes, she has left a million used-up kilometres behind her, she is true granddaughter of this grandmother and know this, she will carve up your Chef du Chemin Narob with his own fine knives, in his own stainless steel galley and serve him with a little salt and chilli to his clients and that is why she will go to Ninth Avata for nothing less than one and half percent for three years and twenty-four months. Stick. Stop…”

But before Grandmother Taal could call stay and seal the deal, Marya Stuard worked her thumbs behind the gold-embroidered lapels of her tunic and called out, “Yes, Engineer, but what is she doing now?”

It was an evil blow that ricocheted across the table from open mouth to raised eyebrow, deflected off Naon Engineer’s dismayed brow, through the porthole, two hundred kilometres up into the evening sky to bounce off the reflecting dish of the big vana, as it slid over the terminator into night, back down to earth two and half kilometres north to the Inatra Fillage Number Six Water Storage Cistern in which Sweetness Engineer joyfully swam. She felt it as a prickle of gooseflesh on her bare back as she stroked toward the concrete lip where Psalli sat, toes teasing the water. Sweetness glanced up; the knuckled rim of the escarpment had risen above the sun. That would explain the sudden shiver. Magic hour. The triskelions of the wind-pumps were lazy silhouettes on the deep blue.

“You going to be much longer?” Psalli called as Sweetness tumble-turned into another length. She was a solid, sullen-faced creature, a true Traction. At eight-and-not-a-day more she was Sweetness’s closest female contemporary, thus friend, though Sweetness wondered would she have been had their lives been less mobile. She could be a whining cow.

“You go on back if you’re cold,” Sweetness said, elbows hooked over the further ledge of the tank.

“Nah,” Psalli grunted.

“Don’t let me stop you, now.”

The girl shrugged her meaty shoulders. Sweetness kicked off from the far end of the cistern. Two strokes brought her sliding in front of Psalli.

“Why not?”

Psalli glanced beyond the stepped terraces of water tanks to the truck gardens.

“They won’t bother you,” Sweetness said.

“They keep looking and waving.”

“So? Okay. Then we’ll give them something to look and wave at.” A heave brought Sweetness out of the water in a cascade of fat drops. Balanced like a gymnast on the narrow lip, she drew herself up to her full one point seven five bare-ass metres. Honey-skin dewed with billion-year-old fossil water. She scraped her hair behind her ears, put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. It pierced the indigo cool of Inatra like a stiletto. All the dark doll figures that had been clinging to the tall foliage at the edge of the irrigation canals turned as one.

“Hey! Boys! See this?” Sweetness wiggled her hips. “Well, you can never, ever have this.” She turned a slow cartwheel on the edge of the pool. The watching boys of Inatra were each and every one struck through the eyes so that ever after they could not love right because tattooed on their retinas was a vision of unattainable youth and loss with arcs of old, cold water flicking from its heels. Sweetness bounced upright. “Just thought you should know, right?” The figures slunk away into the greenery.

Hands on hips, she surveyed her conquest. Inatra was a spring-line town, a place of wells and shafts and pumps, of water shivering silkily down mossy runnels from cistern to cistern, of gurgling irrigation canals and sagely nodding yawnagers, of aloof water-towers and lithe brown children who pranced in the rainbow spray from the leaking fill-hoses. Here the gradual tilt of the great Tanagyre plain cracked like a broken paschal biscuit into the kilometre uplift of the Praesoline Escarpment. Here the big fusion locos paused for a long drink of water before the toil up the ramps and switchovers of the Inatra Ascent. Here, while the trains drank, train people played in water.

“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, you have no shame,” Psalli said.

“Great, isn’t it?”

By now her piercing, two-finger whistle had penetrated Catherine of Tharsis’s Domiety Chamber and, though weak, it still had enough strength to climb into Marya Stuard’s ear. She smiled. Everyone around the table had as good a guess as her as to its source. She laid her hand palm upright on the polished wood.

“Three thousand, one point seven percent and three years thirty months. Stick stop stay.”

She held Grandmother Taal’s look. The old Engineer woman shrugged.

“Tinguoise.”

“Major’s Gate.”

“Ethan Soul.”

The formula was complete. No one living or undead knew its source, neither could they unsay anything it sealed.

“I’ll contact the Ninth Avata people and have the contract drawn up.”

Marya Stuard rose from the table with her delegation. As she swept out, Child’a’grace muttered, “Too cheap.”

Her husband roared.

“Tell that woman…” he commanded Grandmother Taal but she had departed in a rustle of many-layered skirts, so he signed, She is only a daughter! His fingers added, Half a daughter.

Child’a’grace rose in a blossom of sudden fury.

“Never…”

Sorry sorry my mistake, Naon Engineer signed. He had committed a cardinal sin. He knew that he had handled the negotiations badly. His hands might be on the throttles but he was afraid of Marya Stuard. Afeared, and indebted: no one in any of Catherine of Tharsis’s Domieties was let forget that she had single-handedly faced down the notorious Starke gang as they fleeced a carriage of Lewite Pelerines. Her defiance had cost her a needle in the hip that troubled her when it was political for it to do so, but her example had woken the demons in the milk-mannered pilgrims. As one they had risen, seized the dacoits and ejected them at the next mail drop. Marya Stuard herself had been so incensed at the needle in her side that she had laid out old, dreaded Selwyn Starke with a silver salver flung frisbee-style.

“Some day, and, please God, soon, that woman’s account will be overdrawn,” Naon Engineer mumbled as he went to clean Grandfather Bedzo’s tubes and change his bags.