Ares Express (2 page)

N
aon Sextus Solstice-Rising Engineer 11th always experienced a little death when he took his hands off the drive lever. Post coital. He coyly shrugged the thought away—exaggeration—but that first time when his own father Bedzo 10th had taken his hand and laid it on the drive bar, when he lifted it off again, had there not been a tiny damp spot on the fly of his pants?

Twenty years rodding and railing had made him acute to every whisper and vibration of his machine. The fusion fires ebbing in the magnetic pinchtorus was a languid decay, a sorrowful limpening. Flaccid. He was never truly himself while the fusion engines slumbered. He grew distracted and irritable. All his family had learned this decades ago and were wise.

He called up a track report from North West Regional Track at Suvebray. The mottled quartersphere resolved in the projector focus, the mainlines a web of throbbing vessels like the arteries of a womb. The fast Northern Lights Express was still twenty minutes down despite its Engineers rattling every valve up into the ochre on the long Axidy incline. Derailment at Perdition Junction, down to a single track. Damn locals, jammed with commuters and roof-riding goondahs, stopping at every hole in the hedge. Woolamagong! Serendip! Acacia Heights! Atomic Avenue! Naon Sextus was not a man who bore delays with grace. Every lost second felt pared from the exposed end of his life, like hard salt cheese. As a child he had read and memorised timetables. For fun. He snatched the monocular from its peg, peered impatiently down the branchline but even the vantage of the bridge of
Catherine of Tharsis
could not penetrate the haze.

“Tcha!”

Casting around for an object on which to flog his annoyance, he noticed through the grille of the catwalk overhead a pair of yellow desert-boot soles. He turned his lenses on them.

“Mother of plenty, has that child no shame?”

A woman's voice answered from behind him: Child'a'grace, Mrs. Asiim Engineer 11th, floury to the elbows, folding samosas in the domestic galley.

“What, dearest?”

Firmness was as much a part of Naon Sextus's character as good timekeeping. Many a time the unexpected voice of his wife had almost tricked him into speaking but he had never lapsed, not once, in four years. He tightened his lips, gave the nasty cough that was the sign for his wife to look at him. Naon Sextus turned from the control board, enough to glimpse Child'a'grace, but not so much that she might think he was looking at her.

No underwear!
his fingers said, shaking with indignation.

“It's a fine day,” Child'a'grace commented, deftly sealing a pastry triangle and flipping it into hot fat.

The shame!
Naon Engineer signed.

“Who's to see?”

Every staring soul on the thirteen twenty-seven Northern Lights Express!
For something was emerging from the liquid light dazzle.
Due in three and a half minutes!
As a coda, his thumbs added,
What will they think?

“They will think,” said Child'a'grace breezily, here fishing samosa from the fry-bath with a chicken-wire scoop, “That there is a fine young woman of nearly-nine with the body of an Avata and the impatience of a rat whom you and I both know, husband, should long since have been married.” She drained the golden oil back into the pan. “And if by some chance, the passing winds should blow that skirt up—which they might, for if I remember, it is quite short and floaty—and they see that she wears not underpants, then the more fortune to them and I hope their sleeps are tormented by wants for many a night.”

Before leaving her family at an unnamed water stop under the volcanoes, Child'a'grace had been Susquavanna, a catering people who for two long centuries had hawked hot savouries up and down the platforms of the northwest quartersphere. Pastry was in their genes, like steam in the blood of the Engineers, but she resolutely refused to observe the proprieties of caste, namely the eternal distinction between
track
and
platform
. This was deeply grievous to Naon Sextus, a son of his father and his line before him. Truly, the dowry had cleared up the matter of the remortgage, but he frequently wished that
Grandmother Taal had matched him with someone a little less
platform
. But after eleven years, the food was still exciting. The sex can go, the conversation will go, the respect may be trodden into a familiar track of predictability, but by the Mother of Mercies, cooking endures.

But the girl had no underwear, and one under-dignified marriage was enough. Women with no knickers ended married to Bassareenis and dropping their sprogs in the caboose. His fingers prepared to riposte this to Child'a'grace but the shapes were blown away by the sudden slam of the express train's passing.

T
here was a moment that Sweetness Asiim Engineer treasured above all other distinct moments. She had travelled long enough around the globe to admit it as almost sexual, but it was entirely her own. It began with a brief flutter, an intake of breath, a stirring of hair and clothes: the pressure shift. At this point you obtained best effect by closing the eyes and listening to the swelling thunder of wheels. Hold the dread: fight the instinct to look at the source of that unholy noise. Then, the second pressure point:
there
. Sweetness opened her eyes. The fast train reared like a cliff before her. The world was nothing but steel and steam and blasting, shattering sound. Sweetness unleashed the deep, dark fear:
You're on the wrong track, the points have failed, sixty thousand tons of train are about to meet head on at three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, and you're right between them!

It would be quick, and glorious.

The mountain aimed itself at her heart and, at the last instant, turned away.

The pressure wave punched her hard, blinded her with steam and dust. Then the slipstream yanked at her:
You, come.
Sweetness needed no invitation. She leaped after the blur of chrome and black. Along clattering catwalks. Down iron staircases. Across vertiginous gantries, over platforms, hurdling the sprawling legs of brother Sleevel, lolling idle with his best mate Rother'am watching the afternoon pelota on a handheld.

“Sle.”

“What? Uh. Just my sister.”

Sweetness raced the faces behind the tinted window glass but the faces were always going to win. The wind that dragged her was failing. It dropped her in a little iron-framed oriole high on the side of the starboard tender coupling. She leaned out over the brass railing, raised her hand in salute to the
glass observation car, the rattle in the express's tail. On the open rear balcony was a fine city lady in a sheer lace dress. Wake turbulence tugged her parasol from her fingers. It soared up and away, a bamboo and waxed-paper flying saucer. The city lady looked up, vexed, and in that moment her eyes met those of the black-haired girl in the orange track vest in the wrought-iron carbuncle on the flank of the big hauler.

Lady and train were a thin black snake winding across the red desert. Carried high on the winds, the parasol floated into invisibility. The haze swallowed all. Gone again.

“You're a fool to yourself,” the voice said after a decent interlude. The thunder of wheels had masked his approach, but Sweetness had deduced Romereaux's presence from his smell. All the Deep-Fusion people had a distinctive musk, like electricity and cool evenings after hot days, or concrete after rain. Sweetness imagined it was what atoms smelled like.

“You think.”

He was leaning against the turret door in the easy-pleasey way men can when it's not important for them to be looked at. Romereaux's people shared hair colour and quality with the Engineers—and body fluids, certain generations ago—but he was slight and pale, with a narrow shadow of attempted goatee. The sun did not get to the Deep-Effs in the heart of the big train.

“Two hundred years of Engineer tradition says I know what I'm talking about.”

He was a year and a half Sweetness's senior and, bad genes or not, next corroboree he would marry a Traction daughter off the Class 88
Four Ways
. She would miss him.

“There's a first time for everything.”

He saw the way she looked down the long straight track and wanted to lie, to promise unpromisable things, but he had never been able to lie to Sweetness in all their years growing up together on
Catherine of Tharsis
.

“Sle will be Engineer 12th. You know that.”

She did, she knew it like she knew the sun would rise tomorrow, but she still growled, “All Sle's interested in is pelota and grab ass. And he's not even any good at them.”

Romereaux smiled palely. She went on.

“There are other branches of the Domiety have women drivers. The Slipher Engineers. The Great Western folk. Down in New Merionedd every other Engineer is a woman. And couldn't you just pretend, eh? Couldn't you just for once tell me, yeah, sure, Sweetness, you'll drive, you'll be up there with your hand on the drive lever? Would that be so hard, for once?”

“Sweetness…”

“I know.”

He said, “Have you been to see your uncle yet?”

“Mother'a…I near forgot. How long've we got?”

“About five minutes.”

“I'll go now, then. You coming?”

“If you don't mind.”

Trainpeople
, Sweetness thought as she waited for Ricardo Traction to crank down the access ladder. We can go any place we like in the whole wide world but only as long as we stay on the rails.

“Regards to your uncle!”
Tante
Miriamme Traction called from the tiny window of her laundry room as Sweetness hopped down on to the red sand. Stay on the rails. Bad luck will come in the night and climb up through your nose and through your ears if you wander off the safe track. Superstitions, litanies, observations. Casual coincidences that have become baked over years into causes and effects. Believed truths. Like daughters don't drive. But she still glanced over her shoulder when she could no longer feel the psychic closeness of
Catherine of Tharsis
on the back of her neck. The big train stood like a black monolith fused out of rust sand.

Romereaux paid his respects first. A quick press of the palm to the sandscoured shaft of the signal light. Everyone—crew, that was,
passengers
never counted—on
Catherine of Tharsis
was related in some way, even the boisterous Bassareenis, but Romereaux's connection with Uncle Neon was tenuous and he had never really believed that a soul could exist in a railroad signal. That might have been why he had never felt anything but Bethlehem Ares galvanised steel, Sweetness thought. He bowed and stood back.

Sweetness clapped her hands twice. The sound was small and flat in the huge and flat desert. She uncapped the flask she had collected from
Madre
Marya Stuard and poured a libation of cold tea. It frothed and stained the red
sand like urine. Sweetness closed her eyes and boldly pressed her hand against the shaft. As ever, it began with sound-shadow, steel-slither, the hum-thrum of wind and wheels on rails, a memory of a life in rapid motion, twin ribbons of metal singing like the tines of a tuning fork. Her hearing opened like wings, was down at the bottom listening to the strum of the silicon and the songs the stones sing, then up through the wind-tumbled grains, listening to them building into harmonies of sand, a slow sea breaking grain by grain. Outward still, until she could hear everything contained within the girdling horizon. The rhythms and pulses of her own body joined with the chord of sand song. For a divine moment the great northern desert was a single quantum wave function, modelled in sand like a Shandastria scrying-garden. Sweetness stood at the locus of maximum probability.

She opened her eyes. As ever, she was somewhere else. In this place there were no rails and no train and where the desert met the far mountains the red bled up into the sky. Blood-red sky, a pink zenith. No clouds in that sky, neither hope nor memory of rain. The rocks around her feet were salted with frost. The sand on which she stood seethed with static electricity. In all the world there were only two things, her and the upright of the signal light, rooted obstinately in the alien earth.

Sweetness had always understood three things about this place. First, that neither of them should really be here at all. Second, that it should be as instantly lethal to her as if the soil were acid. Third, that this was their private place, her uncle and her, and that she could never tell anyone about it. Not even her family. It had been bad enough with Little Pretty One. They had talked Flying Therapist. This…

“Uncle.”

When he spoke, he sounded less like the practical, piratical man she remembered, and more like she imagined God the Panarchic. In a voice that seemed to come from a great distance, he asked, “What year is it?”

“Same as last time.”

“When was last time?”

“Duoseptember. The autumn equinox. The Cadmium Valley contract?”

“Oh, yes.” Like a sandstorm subsiding. “What year is that, exactly?” She told him. He said, “I lose the track, here.”

As she knew that these conversations with her uncle took place outside normal space, Sweetness also understood that they occupied a special time, neither past nor present nor future, but other, real-time inverted. Dream time.

“So,” Uncle Neon said. “Sle…”

“Still thinks he's going to be a big pelota star. 'Cept he's got two right feet and a fat gut and his head is fried from too much television and wanking.”

“He hasn't married that Cussite girl with the fifteen gold ear-rings, yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Has he…”

“Met her yet? Not that, either.”

“Ah. I see.” He did too, much and wide, but unfocused, like a distorting lens. Sweetness frequently tripped over Uncle Neon's nostalgias for futures that might never happen. And sometimes the branching future he picked in this mother of marshalling yards was the mainline ahead.

“They want you wed,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“To a Stuard. A
Ninth Avata
Stuard, on the Llangonedd run.”

“Mother'a'grace…”

“Don't worry yourself.”

“Don't worry myself? You've just told me I'm going to blow my wild years brewing samovars of mint tea for Cathar pilgrims.”

Uncle Neon had an appropriately scary laugh. It felt like sand scouring the inside of your skull. Sweetness winced.

“Sweetness, your wild years are far from blown,” he said, and sang an old nursery rhyme about a sailor who sailed across the sky and brought back his love a silver fig and a diamond rattle. He did not sing well, even in death, but Sweetness was patient with relatives. When he had finished she left a polite pause before asking, “Is that it?”

“That what?”

“I'm going to marry a Stuard and my wild years are far from over?”

In the pause that followed, Sweetness imagined the three-bulbed signal light cocked to one side, quizzically.

“Yes. That's it. Don't worry, though. Trust me. Now, tell me, how is she?”

By “she,” Sweetness understood
Catherine of Tharsis
and that she would see no more of her future. She huffed through her nose in exasperation at the unruly oracle.

“The aft containment field still isn't seating right.”

“Is it making a sound like this?”
This
being a twittering, hissing whistle.

“More like this.” Sweetness added a tweeting click, on a rising cadence.

Uncle Neon clicked his tongue.

“You want to get that seen to. What are those Deep-Fusion folk about? I don't know, since I died, she's gone to pieces. No one has any respect for good machinery any more.
He
certainly doesn't. His head's completely up his arse, and I don't just mean trains. Look at that poor sow he married—your sainted mother, I mean.” Uncle Neon's telepathic apology felt like two crossed fingers circling Sweetness's frontal lobe in blessing. She loved the feeling. It made her purr. “He's still not talking to her.”

“Not a whisper. He signs.”

Another neural tut.

“It should be you. I've always said that. You'd get that field generator set right
toute suite
.”

“I wouldn't have let it get into that state in the first place,” Sweetness said proudly. Too many dead-end tracks toppling into glossy green craters were the monuments to sloppy tokamak maintenance. The Tracksters laid fresh rail around them but the blast craters stayed hot for lifetimes, glowing sickly in the high plains night. Thinking of them, Sweetness flared, “But I'm going to marry a poncing Stuard on the God-shuttle and make tea and almond slices, amn't I?”

“You are?”

“You said you saw it.”

“I see a lot more than I say. That I can say.”

Says who?
Sweetness wanted to say but the words were sucked off her lips by the sudden dust wind whipping up around her, a dust she knew was not dust, or rust, but moments. Granulated time. She was being drawn back. The journey home was always quicker and more precipitous than the way out: a swooping giddiness, a rustling blackness, a sense of wings wide enough to wrap the world, and then
there
; the big big desert and the hot hot sun.

Romereaux was squatting on his heels by the rail, scooping up palmfuls of dust and trickling them through his fingers. Idling time away.

“How do you do that?” he said.

“Do what?” The other place took a moment to blink away, like grit in the eye.

“Whatever it is you do. Wherever it is you go.”

“Go?” Suspicious: what had he seen? “I don't go anywhere. I mean, you're there, but you're not there.”

“But where are you?”

“What's this about?”