Ares Express (20 page)

“How much longer?”

The man in glasses, the legend himself, yelled something to the driver, who yelled back, never once taking her eyes off the darkening trampas.

“She says it'll take as long as it takes,” the musician reported.

“My granddaughter…”

The band leader bent toward Grandmother Taal.

“Show me again.”

She fished the photograph out of the depths of the universal handbag. It was growing foxed at the edges, the celluloid finish cracking and fanning into soft white petticoats of layered paper. Glenn Miller showed it to the driver. She pushed up her dust-goggles, gave it a look over, then bawled at the King of Swing. He nodded.

“We don't have to be there until five for the get in, but she'll try to make it tonight, if everything holds.”

Everything holds.

Grandmother Taal had not been long waiting at the Winged Messenger depot, which was as well, for the Prestaines were not accustomed to hospitality, and a guest of theirs might starve, or die of thirst or sunstroke before they thought to offer shade swig shelter. A stirring of dust on the far side had turned into a black wink of a vehicle, which had turned into a highly unlikely contraption, a long, black tube of a thing, studded with aerials and
swivel spotlights, portholes down the sides, a mirror-glass windshield wrapped around its nose, like a snake in shades. It ran on three sets of huge, soft-tired dustwheels, and was articulated in three places, which gave a sly shimmy to its motion. A bus trying to pretend it's a train, Grandmother Taal thought disdainfully as the device clambered disrespectfully over the tracks and came to a rest beside the Prestaines' dome.

THE GLENN MILLER ORCHESTRA ON TOUR! declared metre-high white letters along the side of the bus.
The Legendary Kings of Swing!
the smaller print mentioned as an afterthought. The doors opened, a cloud of aromatic smoke plumed out, followed by a tide of coughing Kings of Swing. Last off was the Man Himself, Glenn Miller, trombone under arm. He stood at the top of the steps, frowning through his thick glasses at this forsaken place in which he found himself. Like most trainfolk, Grandmother Taal was no respecter of celebrity or legend. Gods and men alike paid their tickets. She had been prepared to treat this man, this musician, this band-leader record-maker radio-star jukebox angel, this marquis of mood and earl of easy and duke of jive, this legend that every night set the dark half of the planet jumpin' and jittin', as just another passenger. But seeing him there on the top step, the afternoon light glinting off the bell of his trombone, his glasses filmed with dust, she could not. Everything about him said, yes, all that, but that doesn't matter, for whether it comes or whether it goes, I am now and always have been and always will be,
genuine article
. A crawl of
bona fide
awe had licked up Grandmother Taal's spine.

Never too old for it, Engineer-Amma.

And nice manners too, because when it came to ask him could he, would he, was it possible, an old woman, alone, looking for a lost granddaughter, he had brushed it all away with a lift of his hand and said
certainly
and gave her his hand to guide her up on to the bus and his handkerchief to tie around her face in case the dust finally defeated the air-conditioning system. Such a nice manner that Grandmother Taal put aside her mistrust of a vehicle that could go anywhere its driver desired and climbed aboard.

With the Prestaine Dome beneath the horizon and the big black bus cutting south by southeast across the arid plains, she had watched Glenn Miller rip open his priority package. She had seen the frown as his eyes danced over the page, his lips shaping unfamiliar syllables.

“Is the tune bad?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“Not bad,” the band leader said. “Strange. The lyrics are challenging.”

Grandmother Taal wanted to inquire deeper, but manners prevented her. Her curiosity—a strong trait among Engineer females—had been intrigued after the great leader told her his ensemble was on a mission of some musical urgency, but a Gubernatorial Pleasance hardly seemed to justify
prioritairing
a song score into the very arse-end of Great Oxus. Though Chimeria had always been an odd place, and, since the recent elections, grown stranger. Cossivo Beldene, the water and bingo magnate, had swept to power on a populist gusher of regional pride and xenophobia. Grandmother Taal had paid as little and as much attention to the news as any trainperson; insofar as the doings of Passengers impinged on sacrosanct timetables and local contract tariffs. As a child of a long long lineage, she could understand what warmed the people of Chimeria and Solstice Landing in his orations of ancient traditions submerged by candy-coloured kultur and regional identity broken into bite-sized lumps by the hammer of social diversity and dusted with multicultural frosting. As a member of a brown-eyed, coffee-skinned, black-haired mongrel race, boisterous and fecund and fizzing with hybrid vigour, she found this talk of separation and racial purity eugenically unhealthy. She had seen the results of inbreeding laid in dozens of unmarked trackside scrapes. Engineers were a marrying-out people.

That thought took her both backward and forward. Back to her last sight of her granddaughter, standing with one foot cocked back against the drive wheel at the big steaming, chapatti in one hand, plastic glass of beer in the other and that sullen, sullen look in her eye Grandmother Taal admired so much, for properly used it would earn her anything she wanted in this world. Forward to Molesworth, where the Glenn Miller Orchestra would play at Cossivo Beldene's Inaugural Pleasance, and where, in the intestinally convoluted footways of the old crater port, she might find the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, and glimpse that wanting, dark look in a passing eye.

The photograph caught that look right, Grandmother Taal thought, as it was passed from hand to hand around the bus. Dark, demanding, promising. Men found that look irresistible.
But you are just learning that
, Grandmother Taal mused. She noted the expressions on the bandsmen's faces, the dilation
of the pupils, the quiet, lewd comments as they looked at the girl. Y
ou should hear this
, she thought at her granddaughter.
You are being paid your due homage. You should know you are admired. Then you will begin to have a sense of your gifts.

The muted sax crept into Grandmother Taal's sleep with such stealth that she was awake and listening for several bars before she knew it. Glenn Miller was perched on the back of the seat, conducting the soloists. Every lurch threatened to spill him into the first clarinets. The band was practising the new piece. Sheets of music were pin-lit by ceiling spots. The musicians frowned over peculiar passages; the singer, a small, fox-faced woman in clothes with too many fringes, hesitated over the words. They were indeed lyrically challenging. It seemed to have to do with oral sex, and to directly refer to the new Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Grandmother Taal wondered about their appropriateness for a state function. They seemed calculated to provoke political scandal, even law suits. She thought again about the express parcel plastered in priority seals. The timing had been too delicate for a pair of inbred rail-side postal workers. She tried to recall what she knew of Cossivo Beldene. He stood for…What had that slogan been, as oily on the ears, as easily in-and-out as any other? A human world for human beings. No gods, no saints, no angels, just our own hands. Owe nothing to no
thing
. Our hands, our lands. All manner of whispering money behind those slogans. Big people with big ideas, enough for everyone. Grandmother Taal was a citizen of a subtle and ubiquitous anarchy, with a distrust of dogmas and slogans eight hundred years deep. On principle, she would not vote for anyone who wanted to be elected. This new thing in the old heartlands alarmed her; more so, for the enthusiasm with which citizens, no more and no less political than her, had placed it in their hearts. She could understand how the subtle who ran the unsystem might wish Cossivo Beldene's governorship terminated in infancy. She looked at the King of Swing, steadying himself with his feet on the bench seat, freeing his hands to count in the instruments. The most powerful government is the one that keeps anarchy in place. But a big band leader? Lulled by the narcotic scent of conspiracy, she dozed off again.

Cold woke her, and voices. The door was open, beams of light were shining up through the windows, darting around the ceiling. The voices had midlands accents and the grate of authority heavy weapons lend.

“Nothing for you here,” she heard Glenn Miller say.

“We'll be the judges of that,” a man's voice replied. A torch beam swung over the faces of the drowsing musicians, hugging their instruments. He clambered aboard. He was a big fat farmer, arrogant in his light-scatter armour. He held his General Issue field-inducer wand like an inseminating rod. Outside, his colleagues poked and scraped and thumped at the superstructure. Big Farmer fisted his wrist-light in the face of Second Trombone.

“What you got there?”

“Trombone. Aincha ever listened to the radio?”

“Just the stock prices. Some ID.”

“You what?”

“Something that says you are who you say you are.”

“And who the hell do you think I might be, with this piece of tin under my arm?”

“You could be a subversive.”

“I'm a jazz musician. I'm supposed to be subversive.”

“Show me something with your face on it.”

Second Trombone tetchily handed over his Musician's Union card. As Big Farmer scrutinised it, a familiar instinct for sedition made Grandmother Taal pop open her carry-all bag, slip out her hand and quietly slide inside the scurrilous song score.

“Eh. You.”

“Are you speaking to me, young man?”

“Did you put something in your bag?”

Big Farmer shot his beam in Grandmother Taal's face.

“What kind of manners have they got in this place, waking good women up and shining bright lights in their faces?”

“This is Chimeria, old woman, and we've Chimerian manners enough for Chimerian people. Your bag.”

Grandmother Taal presented it to him sure in the knowledge that, being a man, he could never master the trick of its nested dimensions. His cow-inseminator's fingers hooked out trinkets, coin-purses, lip balm, pain-killers, pens, nail scissors. They did not find the sheet music, seven and a half
dimensions away. Big Farmer snapped the clips, returned the bag with poor grace, moved to the next.

“How did you do that?” Glenn Miller whispered when Big Farmer had worked his way down to the end of the tour bus.

“Old women's stuff,” Grandmother Taal replied.

“I owe you,” the band leader said.

Satisfied that there was no subversion on this vehicle, Big Farmer clumped off and waved the orchestra on.

“Who are those men?” Grandmother Taal asked Glenn Miller as she returned his big production number to him. She counted twenty sets of lights, back there in the miles-from-anywhere.

“Call themselves the Chimerian Yeomanry,” the band leader replied. “Keeping their country a good place for law-abiding folk.”

“That was a border, then, that we passed.”

“Seems so.”

Grandmother Taal shuddered. Men with weapons, like borders, and that some people and things could be
subversive
, in her world-view were unthinkables almost as great as that the sun might fail to rise, or the moons really were a hare and a desert mouse. Though there were no other unscheduled stops that night, the Chimerian Yeomanry had trailed a dust of misgiving through the bus. Welcome was no longer universal or automatic. There were unseen lines of behaviour in the soil. This side of the hill could admit you, the other turn you away. That blade of grass trusted you were who you claimed, but that tree suspected all manner of crimes. This stone would sleep blindly as you drove over it, that one call out men with field-inducers to blast you to nothing. Grandmother Taal eventually found sleep in the subdued bus, but it was grey and broken.

Dawn found the Glenn Miller Orchestra On Tour steering through the staggering landscapes of industrial dereliction of Central Solstice Landing. The craters had been left raw and un-manformed, their crenellated rims studded with guidance radars and command and control bunkers. Once-proud launch towers were spillikins of rusted steel, trellises for creepers and clematis. The grasslands were starred with the glassy scars of tailbursts, healing for a thousand years and still only half-scabbed over. This was a land
recovering from a long divorce with the sky. Here feet first walked on the world, in the so-long-ago that it had passed from history into legend. For a thousand and some years ships had come and gone from this cratered plain. Its ruler-straight runways and eroded laser-pits and the fallen arches of EM launch cradles were a chronicle of manned spaceflight. For half an hour the orchestra tracked along the side of the gentle slope of a ground-to-orbit sling-ramp. On the horizon a second could be seen, curving skyward. Ten more of the behemoth constructions, visible even from orbit, were arrayed around Solstice Landing like numbers on a clock. Grassed-over supercore cables finger-ridged the ground; the big bus laboured over them like a caterpillar over a saint's sandal. Blast walls and baffle plates formed a convoluted
cheval de frise
; the big band lumbered through the shadow geometry of ship gantries and construction cranes. Whole industries had been abandoned to rust and rot, but no scavengers picked over the postindustrial corpses. No shortage of raw materials on this world of red iron deserts. The rib cages of dead ships rose from the lush grass, the bus's big wheels clanked over a shed skin of hullplates. The sun rose high over the nose cones of loadlifters forever stogged shin-deep in the loess; corporate pennons from orbital haulage firms long since liquidated rattled raggedly in the edge-of-day breeze.

All would be let fall to rust if Cossivo Beldene and his fiscal masters turned their backs to the stars and closed the skyports. Sealed planet.