Ares Express (32 page)

Dark night returned, darker for having been broken by unnatural light. Even to non-astronomical Sweetness Engineer, the moonring looked tattered, moth-eaten. The constellations would never be the same again. Now someone
would have to think up new names for them. The man in the flying cathedral had been beaten, at permanent cost to the night sky. This time. The next war would be fought on another battlefield entirely: the shifting interplay of alternative quantum universes. Next time, reality would be the casualty.

“Oh, man!” Sweetness said, suddenly cold and small and very high up, far from her close little cubby, and alone. She drew her knees up against her chest, hugged them to her, bound them close with cable and wished for something more to look at than lights in darkness.

A third time, that dislocation of having fallen asleep without knowing. Sweetness came to herself with a gasp and shudder. No nod, no doze, this; she woke with the light of early morning full in her face. Huddled over in her web of cables, she had slept away entire cantons and quarterspheres. The sun was a spreading scab of blood on the western horizon, clotted between the continental upthrusts of the Great Volcanoes, the only hint of the terrible war that had been fought in the dark. The air was miraculously clear and bright; light flooded across the land, driving early ribbons of cloud before it like a Purging Priest a poolful of swingers. Sweetness painfully lifted her arm to shade her eyes, tried to blink the morning gold out of it. Blinded. Then the sun lifted clear from the hollow between the mountains and one of the great vistas of her solar system unveiled itself to Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th.

This little red world was never the nearest, but had always been dearest to the hearts and bones of Motherworld. Since before words, in the great songtime of the dry plain, the ancestors of humans had looked up to this the speck of blood where the needle of imagination pricked the sky and invested it with power. An angry star, the eye of a martial god, masculine, stomping and sanguine, armoured in rust. It rose and set on a million lootings, burnings, invadings and besiegings. When the gods died, the warlike aspect was transferred and made concrete in the planet itself. It hung by night, watching, while minds immeasurably superior to man's drew up plans. The world itself was our red enemy. Even its puny, pumicey moons were demonised. Fear! Terror! Our true enemy is always our neighbour. Naked to our lenses, human imagination had engineered its surface. Whether watered by slow canals, galloped across by green or red barbarians; contemplated by a wistful, autumn people; the little world next one out, unlike the other
globes in the system, rocky or smothered with steam, had always possessed a geography. It had regions, landscapes, places. Names were written on its skin. To name a thing has always been to claim possession of it.

It was only when the first space vehicles went out from Motherworld that its humanity realised the long injustice they had committed. This was no war-lord, no red destroyer. Beneath the thin, cold unbreathable atmosphere—no life here, another myth dashed—and the veils of dust was the face of a woman, graceful, refined, strong and mysterious. It had good bones, the little red world.

Here, in the early space days, the ancient and persistent lie of “Motherworld” was exposed. The genders had always bent the other way. A woman must be possessed. A gentle wooing by go-betweens, then the men were sent out from the aggressive bigger blue dot to lay claim to the world next door. They drove round in their machines, put their feet on it, stuck their flags in it, made it theirs. A forced marriage of worlds. After wedding, impregnation. The barren must be made to carry life. The arrogance was monumental, the vision more than its equal. It was a big universe out there, and hostile to clever carbon. But even the technologically extended lives of the golden who controlled the home planet's immense resources were too short to measure the scale of transforming one world into another. Water gushing down the dried-up riverbeds, spring green blooming across the high plateaulands, waves breaking on the red shores of shallow blue seas: these were visions no amount of their wealth could buy them. Their engineering advisers gave them a quick, flashy, hideously pricey fix: see that great rift valley? Four and a half thousand kilometres long, five kilometres deep? Stick a glass roof over it. Turn it into one mother of a greenhouse. Better still, make it to last. Build it out of diamond. Diamond as big as the Ritz? Phah! Diamond as big as a continent. Good, hard science. Technical and manly.

Fleets of vast, visually chaotic engineering ships were sent into slow transfer orbits to the wife-world. Surface workers surveying the sites watched the thirty-kilometre units move into low orbit and disassemble themselves from their drive-spines. They dropped automated construction modules on Grand Valley day and night for seven weeks.

Pressure-dome hoovervilles mushroomed up the length of the valley
floor; as the easterlies clocked off, the westerlies clocked on, new dawn on their hard helmet faceplates. Construction plants drew in megatons of carbon dioxide—all the better for the atmospheric manforming—and by the alchemy of molecular processing, spun it into engineering-grade carbon nanofibre. Diamond trees began to rise from great Mariner rift. Day by day they grew as the assemblers wove carbon; through blinding CO
₂
fogs, through the hurricane seasons, through the blanketing dust storms when engineers went blind even by their helmet lights and navigated by heavy sonar. Carbon on carbon, molecules locking together. One kilometre, two kilometres they rose. One and a half long years after the engineer-towns, which would one day be the great and civilised cities of the valley, struck their taproots into the cold, dead mantle, two million trunks topped the highest of the canyon mesas and budded into four branches. A forest of diamond grew in the great valley. Out on the high blasted plains, a thousand vitrification plants moved over their immaculately surveyed and levelled sites, fusing silicon sand to trace-doped glass hexagons five hundred metres across. Flotillas of robot aerobodies cautiously shifted the panes into position; even in lower gravity, one warp could have thrown the tensile integrity of an entire canton. They settled on to their bolt-posts; one by one the nuts were tightened while scuttling groutbots filled the gaps with light-permeable expansion mastic. By scabs and scars, like some archaic children's game of territory and capture, a tessellation of hexagons spread across the canyonlands of Grand Valley. Twenty long-years after the first gaffers had surveyed their sites and threw up their Carbonbergs, the last constructor units disassembled, reconfigured into maintenance mode and buried themselves in the regolith.

As one pundit put it, Grand Valley now ran to thirty trillion carats.

Even as the last roofplates were being bolted into place, a new and noble guild was receiving its letters patent; a nation as individual and caste-ridden as the trainfolk: the Ancient and Pristine Order of Windowcleaners. Only when the glass was
spotless
, utterly transparent to every spectrum of light, could the ecological engineers be moved in. Nothing Pristine about this order. A grubby crew, these, soily-handed, humusy, stained and muddied. Dirty knees on their pressure suits. It is a work of years to make a soil, yet more to weave an atmosphere, decades longer for a mix of gases to become a
self-perpetuating, self-regulating and adjusting homoeostatic system that some people think of as a planetary organism and call Gaia, except that here it was Gaia-in-a-bottle, and needed a different name altogether.

The grunt engineering had been the easy bit. The golden rich fretted long decades—twice as unendurable as those of their homeworld—for the day when the first of the ecoengineers undogged her helmet, lifted it off, took a long, deep breath and found it very good. Few remained of that impatient generation; the last twenty lived out their days in canyonside adobes hunting in pristine parklands under diamond skies. A great oasis, sheltered from the scoring winds and terrifying energies of ROTECH's larger scale manforming, green on red like a colour blindness test for an entire planet. A strip development that reached round one third of a world. When sunrising and sunsetting flashed from the roof glass tiles, they heliographed across interplanetary space. Watchers on nightside Motherworld would wink and blink the novadazzle out of their eyes. Within their roofed-in world, the ancient rich, spry in the low gravity, observed their night sky fill up with stars: the vanguard of the new generation of planetary engineers seeding themselves across the parking orbits. A scary people, this; less patient even than the greenhouse gardeners, their angel-machines would engineer realities wholesale.

Selah. So be it. Around here, this history began to abut into another Sweetness had recently heard and little more need be said of it, save that beneath the great glass roof, the last of the golden died and their sculpted mesa-chateaux became the cores of the elegant and diverse cities of Grand Valley, a patchwork of four hundred cantonettes and city-states and the densest and most diverse cultural region in the solar system. And that it was the dawn glory of Worldroof that so amazed Sweetness Asiim Engineer, left hanging in her precarious web.

With a wan, early mist clinging to the roof panels, Sweetness first thought of ice mornings on the winter transpolar runs, when the temperatures high high north dropped so low the carbon dioxide smoked out of the atmosphere into a thin rime. Then, as the sun gained in strength and the mist burned off, she imagined that she was flying over the board of a titanic children's game, a thing she had once hallucinated when she went down with one of those necessary childhood diseases and her temperature hit the high
thirties. Vast playing pieces should be moving from hexagon to hexagon, manoeuvring and threatening. Shading her eyes, she could discern distant dark shapes standing out above the fields of hexes, stalky and angular: mooring towers for Skywheel ground-to-orbit shuttles, communications masts, but her imagination made them Peons and Palisers and Prelates investing and humiliating Princes and Palaces. She reminded herself she had had very little sleep last night, and she had witnessed a fragment of Armageddon, so powers and dominions were lodged in her head. The light was still low and glancing enough to render the glass opaque, a golden highway over which the flying cathedral drifted. Half a degree of altitude, and on an instant, the ground beneath her feet went transparent. She thought of clouds lifting or some inky solution in a School of the Air chemistry demonstration clearing with a drop of reagent. Sweetness's was not a seafaring family—she had never set foot on a water-borne craft—but her childhood bedtimes had been filled with stories from the shallow oceans, of pirates and shipwrecks and drowned cities of the wicked, down there, where the people still went about their business in the watery streets and on clear, fearful nights, their bells could be heard, tolling from the submerged campaniles. The small, manicured farms, the geometric roads, the tightly packed villages and towns beneath her feet were the stuff of such stories. The cathedral passed over the support branch of one of the roof-trees. At its tip, it split into finer and finer branchings, suggesting a new image to Sweetness; blood vessels, capillaries: a city beneath the skin, if such a thing could be. Peering down between her feet, she saw that the upper levels of pier were encrusted with orioles and turrets and perilous balconies. Grand Valley was as familiar to her as any other piece of the planet's terrain; the vertical cities that clung to the bottom couple of kilometres of the roof-trees held no wonder for her any more, but the view from above revealed details previously hidden by perspective. On one of the very highest terraces, tiny figures celebrated some dawn party: as the airship's shadow fell over them, Sweetness thought they looked up, and that one waved. She waved back. Now she crossed the junction of two roofplates; a perfect black fault line across the outer burbs of one of the valley cities, like a knife cut in reality. A couple of minutes onward, dark scurrying machines worked doggedly at a hole punched through the
tough glass: some bolide snuck through while the anti-meteor defences had been otherwise occupied in the night. They fused over the cracks, wove silica from their mandibles like spiders walling themselves up in egg-cocoons of silk. Sweetness noticed that they were working on both sides of the wound; the ones beneath clung nonchalantly with suckered feet.

A loop of river identified the city unreeling below as Melucene, an elegant, university town of high-gabled gritstone colleges strung along the river bluffs of the muddy Meluce. Castle Melucene, the venerable seat of the Provosts, hove into view, a fantastical confection of towers and spires and buttresses carved from a primeval ventolith mesa by orbital construction lasers. Sweetness had never liked Melucene: she detested the boyish, mannered jinks of the students on the term runs when they flocked back to their dormitories. She hated their high, affected, nasal singing, and determinedly kept herself on the working side of the tender. It took the Stuards a week to sluice out the beer and vomit. As she watched the steeply pitched roofs of the colleges slip beneath her feet, a niggling feeling came over her that perhaps they were a little
closer
to her boot soles than they had been. That the fields looked a little larger, that the details of the college badges worked out in coloured roof-tiles were more sharply focused. That the labouring airship was losing height.

In confirmation, the cathedral lurched and dropped. Sweetness grabbed for something solid to hold on to. The glass hexagons were coming up hard and fast beneath her. Ahead, an entire roofpanel was slowly tilting open. Squinting through the glare, Sweetness could make out the silhouettes of gantry work rising above the surface, beneath, the indistinct but massive torpedoes of lighter-than-aircraft nuzzled at roof-branches like great fish feeding from coral. Some repair facility, but Harx was coming in too fast, too low…What was the pilot doing? Ballast gushed from vents, shedding across the roofplates in a flash flood but the basilica was still losing height. Air gusted warm in Sweetness's face and she had her answer. As the sun warmed the morning air, the airship lost in the battle of competing densities. Sweetness tried to clamber away from the closing ground. Nowhere to go, remember? This is as far as you got. She had to do something. At this speed, with this mass, if Harx hit, his little freeloader would be spread like cashewbutter. The access panel was fully open now, but the bottom rungs of the rope ladder, her
salvation, were brushing the glass. Coming in, too low! Too low! Sweetness wrestled in her cocoon, untangling legs and arms. She freed three metres of cable, screwed up her courage, screwed it tighter. She grasped hold of the cable, wrapped it firmly around her wrists and with a cry, swung herself free. Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th dangled beneath the dome of the cathedral. The airframe lurched again. She let out a little shriek. Don't look down.