Ares Express

9

There was a steaming that night, hosted by the Stuards of Bishop of Alves. Spits were set up, great joints of grazebeast slung on spears and hoisted on to brackets. Women and juniors repaired to a safe distance to prepare salads and flat bread and barrel-up beer while the Deep-Fusion men, in silver heat-refraction suits, orchestrated the superheated steam blasts from the overheat valves, dextrously turning the dripping beeves.

All were invited and by now all was many. Stacked behind Catherine of Tharsis were Count Tassaday, Three Great Shepherds, Doughty Endeavour hauling a dangerously overreacting pulp processor and Lords of the Iron Way with forty carriages of express service passengers now as steaming hot as the cooking roasts. Passengers, of course, could not possibly be invited to a track jamboree. Down the track from Bishop of Alves were the famous Indomitable, then a nameless, low-caste ballast unit from Suvebray—its Domities huddled apart at the steaming and, as Psalli noted, all bearing the sunken chin, bug eyes and bulging, translucent forehead that advertised incest. Most available and despicable of track crimes. Behind the Ballasteros stood the venerable Mountain of Great Peace and a recently refitted JahSpeed!, her pipework and tubes the envy of every Deep-Eff. Bringing up the rear was Freight 128, an ill-omened workhorse, stained with rumours of radiation leaks, bad fortune and piracy on the mainline which only persisted the harder her grim Engineers denied them.

Over all hung the ROTECH machine. Tulsa Engineer, inheritor of Tahram’s contractual mantle and smitten with an inappropriate love of all things airborne, had checked it up in his Big Book of Aircraft and Angel Recognition but it fitted no known format. By day it had been an oppressive presence, like the legendary flying city of Hooverville, torn from its bedrock and sentenced to roam the jet streams as punishment for cheating an angel of the Panarch in a frame of snooker. An obscuration. A total eclipse. A crushing satellite, a steel cloud. By night it was a deeper darkness on the black Oxus sky, a hiatus in the moonring where the belly-lights made up new, geometrically regular constellations. It would have been almost forgettable, but for its activities at the heart of the plastic jungle. This was a tug of war by light; vivid cerises, lilacs and turquoises from on high strove with flashes of vermilion, white and poisonous green from where the surveyors had mapped the mirror pool to be. Occasionally there would be a particularly dazzling exchange and the ground would tremble. It cast a fine, party illumination over the entertainments.

Beef-stuffed chapatti in one hand, mug of small beer in the other, Sweetness was not having a fine time. Small beer, small fun. Romereaux cast a ROTECH-machine-sized shadow over her pleasure. She queued up for her food, he was there, mug in hand by the beer fermentory, not noticing her. On to the musicians’ awning to watch the fingers fly over the keys and strings and the women entice the men to dance; tapping her foot, but Romereaux was talking with Domiety brothers from the other trains with a set to his shoulders that insisted, No dance, never dance. To the beer pavilion for her mug fresh from the teat, and now all his attention was given to shoving a fat chapatti, dripping grease and garlic sauce, sideways into his mouth while the lads laughed and cheered, Go on go on go on you boy! Eventually she turned her back on him but he did not notice that either.

The ground shook, the strongest tremor yet. Venerable matriarchs shrieked and tottered, flagons of petty beer slopped. Great trains swayed on their bearings, a spit of meat capsized in a hurricane of steam. Silver-suited Deep-Fusioners dashed through the billows to right it. Under cover of confusion Sweetness ducked between Bishop of Alves’s drive wheels and crouched in the oily dark, avoiding everyone. A twitch in her side told her that the oil pool between her feet was now inhabited.

“Nice party,” Little Pretty One said. Sweetness offered her the remains of her chapatti. Little Pretty One devoured it decorously with her fine white teeth. “This ain’t bad, this. Any idea how long it is since I last ate anything?”

“Take it all,” Sweetness said. “There’s beer too. You dried out?”

“Some.” Little Pretty One took the pot, sniffed it. “Thanks.” She drained it in one.

“Tell me this, and tell me no more, why do they do it?”

“Who do what?”

“Men. One moment, they’re all over you, next…”

“Oh, that. Whole different world.”

“What, us and men?”

“Well, that too. Holiday romance.”

“Change of scenery…”

“Change of climate…”

“Everything commonplace becomes special…”

“Then you come home…”

“And they never write or phone.”

“Bummers.”

“That’s the way they are. The thing about males, my corporeal friend, is that what they really really want isn’t sex, or power, or money, it’s a quiet life. Everything easy. One-night stands included.”

“It wasn’t even a one-night stand.”

“Tell me.” Little Pretty One burped. It seemed to take her by surprise. “But it’s not going to be a problem.”

“I live on the same train as him, I see him every day, hell, five times a day, every day.”

“Not a problem. Train’s a-coming.”

“Trains is always coming. And going,” Sweetness said.

“This one’s special.”

“So? How?”

“This one’s a Great Southern. Ninth Avata.”

In a life without many surprises, Sweetness thought of sudden shock as numb thing, a sensation right behind her nose between freezing and wet mud turning to cracked clay under summer sun. Numb, dumb, paralysed, incapable of action. Shot through the will.

“Ninth Avata. Good catering facilities,” Little Pretty One continued. “Stainless steel galley, and everything. This wasn’t timetabled. You were supposed to have zapped past each other three hundred kays south of here. But now, they’re thinking, well…Look.” Little Pretty One squatted beside Sweetness, pointed out between the spokes. There they were, all the traitors, Marya Stuard in her best epaulettes and braid, Naon Engineer flanked by Sleevel and Rother’am, Child’a’grace looking little and happy, even Grandmother Taal by the beer fermentory, talking animatedly with a group of similar-faced women in many skirts and petticoats.

“They’re talking pins and ribbon,” Little Pretty One said. “Dowries and percentages. They’re saying, why wait for corroboree? We’re here, you’re here, they’re coming and we’ve got the money here, now, in our hands…”

“No!” Sweetness moaned. Revellers turned, startled by the noise from beneath the train. Another grumble from the divine battle distracted them. “Some invisible friend you are. This is the worst day of my life. What am I going to do?”

“There’s another train back there. Just pulled up.”

“So? Can’t move for trains.”

“That one’s still a-coming, but this one’s here.”

“What are you talking about? Why don’t you just do something useful for once rather than hand out stupid proverbs like they’re wise or something?”

“Okay,” Little Pretty One said. “Okay. You want me to do something. Watch this. You won’t see this again in a hurry.”

On cue, the earth shook again. Not a shiver, nor a side-of-beef-toppling quiver, but a sustained quake that made Sweetness glance up, suddenly alarmed by the thousands of tons of metal over her head. Out at the party, people reached for anchorholds, failing those, each other. Sweetness remembered some School of the Air bone-slug piece about how, unlike Mother-world, this world was cold-hearted and had not stirred since the fires that built Olympus a billion years ago. She was about to protest the geophysical impossibility until Little Pretty One nudged her and said, “Look.”

The light play between heaven and earth had become a battle. Rapiers of lilac and blue from above clashed with sabres of slashing scarlet stabbing upward and were parried. Blades and guillotines of light struck and shattered; ball lightnings arced fizzing through the air; pyrotechnics met and mutually annihilated in cascades of sparks. It would have been pure fiesta but for the vibration. Sweetness could feel the earth groan in her teeth. Bishop of Alves’s every bolt and rivet rattled. Rust flakes snowed down on her hair. Dust was sprung from the grass and spun away into scampering devils. Sweetness put out a hand to steady herself and yipped. Her second electric shock that day. The steelwork hummed with static.

“I couldn’t really recommend staying here,” Little Pretty One said. In illustration, a fat blue spark dropped from axle housing to wheel. Little Pretty One and Sweetness skipped out from her hole like a rabbit. Bishop of Alves came alive with lightning.

Party was over. The son et lumière had been entertaining, but everyone was afraid now. Here were forces beyond their reckoning. Engineers’ hair stood out from their heads; their clothes ballooned away from their bodies. The battle in the jungle was now a blinding cylinder of light, earthy crimsons and heavenly lilacs swirled together like a cosmic fool pudding. Trainfolk watched, eyes shaded by hands. Sweetness and Little Pretty One stood gobemouche. For the lilac was winning. The crimson was turned back on itself, confused and confounded and pressed down until it formed a boiling line of scarlet interrupted by the silhouettes of the fantastic jungle plants. End game. The whirling cylinder of light stretched to a column, to a single sunbright beam. The earth spasmed. People staggered. Spits tipped, a beer fermentory split, spilling its heady cargo around spectators’ feet. The party was ruined. No one noticed. Again, the earth shook, throwing up cataracts of dirt which were sucked into the vortex of light. Electricity cracked continuously between the apex of the hurricane and the insulating plastic forest. Derricks fell in showers of sparks, windmills detonated, crazy sails spinning as they blazed, severed creeper-pipes thrashed like beheaded snakes, spraying jets of vapour. It was most spectacular. A third time the earth heaved, hard enough to imagine the end of the world. Sweetness and Little Pretty One clutched each other. There was a cry, long and wailing and terrible, a voice, but none any present had ever dreamed of. The cry was in their heads and it went on and on and on and on and the earth danced like a poison-maddened mongoose and everyone decided they really wanted it ended now before things went wrong that could not be put right again, even by divine energies, and just as they were certain, absolutely certain that it never would and it was all over for everyone, it did.

The earth erupted in a stupendous gout of soil and plastic chaff like a hard-pulled tooth. The unseen battler flew clear. The trainpeople saw a soft-edged cube, blue and orange tiger-striped, hang in the shaft of light. The bulk of the hovering ROTECH device played tricks with its dimensions; the newcomer was the size of a Class 15 freight hauler. A fall of red dust and coloured confetti spattered the onlookers. Sweetness’s hair was a party of rust flakes, plastic spangles and red ochre. The quaking settled and ceased. The cube started to spin, faster, faster until it was a blur. And it seemed to be shrinking, as if the intense violet exerted an irresistible pressure inward.

It all ended suddenly and spectacularly. With an echoing boom of inrushing air, the cube imploded into a black dot and vanished. The beam of killing light exploded outward, engulfing the spectators in momentary blindness. In the same instant they heard a rushing mighty wind and a voice spoke in every head: This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.

An orph, Sweetness breathed to herself in the eye-blinking, carpet-patterned after-dazzle. Every child knew the hagiography of the machines that built the world before their fourth birthdays: most of the orphs had returned to heaven after the manforming, but some had refused the summons of St. Catherine and remained, buried deep in the ground, pumping out humus and microbacteria and going ever so slowly insane.

This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.

As she repeated the doom, her vision returned. Heaven-machine, orph, plastic other-world place, tracks, Oxus plains, all were gone. The twin queues of trains faced each other across two kilometres of bare earth.

“Wow,” Sweetness said. “That was a blast.”

What did I tell you? Little Pretty One skull-whispered as she slipped back inside her host.

Unsure of exactly what they had witnessed, the people stood staring at the stripped earth. All, but one. The unmistakable prickle of alien eyes on back of neck alerted Sweetness. She turned to see who was impudent enough to seek her out with eyes, and give him a gobful of her best disdain if it was Romereaux. The victim was a short skinny Waymender boy, easy to recognise by his flat, inbred nose. One eye was a milky film, the other stared shamelessly at her hip.

Sweetness put her hands on her hips and leaned back, as she had seen the heroine do in Feisty Grrrl comic.

“Like it, then?”

The kid frowned.

“What’s that hanging off your hip?”