Ian McDonald - Ares Express

The ore-trucks clunked past. The tail of the beast appeared around the slow bend. Henden Stuard was waiting at the foot of the galley stairs, hat of office outheld in salutation. He whispered into the gosport. Three hundred cars forward, Naon Engineer applied the brakes. The companionway came to a halt with such precision that Grandmother Taal need only step up.

“What is your need?” she asked.

“He is constipated,” suave Henden said.

Junior Stuard kitchen hands and vegetable peelers bowed out of Grandmother Taal’s way as she moved through the galley car to the Pursery. There Brellen Stuard greeted her gravely.

“He is constipated.”

Shafto Stuard sat enthroned among golden cushions in the observation box. Light stained by painted glass dappled his strained features.

“It is eight days now,” Brellen whispered.

“You have tried dried fruit?” Grandmother Taal said.

“And marmalade,” Shafto said, uncomfortably.

A slight lurch told Grandmother Taal Catherine of Tharsis was under way again. She watched the track unfold from under the bay of the observation box and wondered how it might flavour a family’s soul, to be always looking at where you have come from and never where you are going.

“I suggested a hemp bandage, soaked in oil of paraffin,” Brellen said. “But he could not swallow more than a finger of it.”

“Nor I,” said Grandmother Taal.

“Please help me,” Shafto pleaded.

Grandmother Taal contemplated a moment. It was good for the mystique.

“It is doable.”

“Is there anything you require?” Brellen asked, head bowed. Mint tea would have been good but Grandmother Taal remembered that once Brellen’s Aunt Mae had offered her tea in a smeared glass. Her opinion of the Stuards as a Domiety had never recovered.

“Nothing, thank you.” She took out her needle case. “Children are advised not to watch.” She squinted in the stained-glass light to thread the right silk through the proper needle. The track outside, she noted, was now a blur of sleepers. She felt more secure in her power with fast steel beneath her. Immobility troubled Grandmother Taal. She uncapped her fountain pen and bared her forearm.

“Try to be concise, but poignant. It should express all your feeling.”

Shafto Stuard looked the old woman in the eyes, then took the pen and wrote STRAIN in bad lettering on the veined pale skin.

“Very well.” Grandmother Taal picked up the purple thread and commenced the humming. It had no significance and little tune—a medley of toe-tappers off that All-Swing Radio the young ones listened to—but it kept her voice busy while she embroidered the word strain on to her forearm.

It still hurt.

She tried something more closely related to the pain, reading the memories of past magics in the white scarifications of her arms. Those arcs and loops, buried under successive woundings like the surface of a cratered moon, had been that time she moved the big earth-making machine off the line when it had upped and died inconveniently. Easier done, alive and dead. At least the teams slopping brown paint over its orange and blue mottled hide had been spared the moaning and hectoring about fine points of contractural detail endemic among earth-makers. That time the magic had been strong enough, and the paint sufficient to hold it, to flip the cussed thing half a kilometre into an old impact crater. Odd, that the power was not a scalar thing. It had been so much more difficult and painful to change Levant Traction’s brown eyes blue for one night of passion with a track surveyor for Lombarghini. Her wrist bore the memory of his few, sweaty hours; the white scar of the word pretty .

She glanced down. On the “A.” Blood welled from the stitches, soaked the silk, stiffened. Bad to put in, worse to take out. Brellen looked politely revolted.

“How are we?” Grandmother Taal asked her client.

“I can feel something,” Shafto said with a curious light in his eyes. “Moving.”

“Deep within?” Brellen asked. Shafto nodded. Grandmother Taal kept stitching.

“Oh,” cried Shafto.

“Ah,” murmured Grandmother Taal. Almost there. The downward slash of the “N,” then the blissful ascent to the finish. Done.

“Ohh,” moaned Shafto Stuard. Brellen mopped his brow with a paper coaster.

“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, letting the needle fall and swing on the end of its silk. Blood paraded in thick drips down the thread.

“Oooh,” Shafto said, eyes opening in wonder. “Oohhh.”

“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, feeling behind her for a chair.

Eeeeeee , said an entirely new voice. Eeee. Eeee. Eeeeeeee. For an instant, puzzlement on every face. Then realisation: Catherine of Tharsis herself was crying out, the top-C shriek Grandmother Taal had last heard the night Marya Stuard had driven off the Starke gang.

The emergency whistle.

All hands rushed for their duty stations, never to reach them. A tremendous wrench threw everyone from their places. Shafto was flung hard against the stained-glass bay and went down in a heap. Brellen floundered among golden cushions. Grandmother Taal found herself toppling eyes-first toward her neatly arranged needles. She grabbed at a cupboard handle and twisted herself aside. Cutlery and crockery sprung from racks, a full samovar of tea flung itself from the spirit-burner to spill boiling liquid across the floor. Chairs tumbled, tables capsized, antimacassars flew. Grandmother Taal was rolled toward the spreading stain of scalding tea. Somewhere she was conscious there was a sharp pain in her hip. She would bother with that later; if any of them survived this thing. She kicked her legs and swung herself away from the deadly tea on the hinged door.

What was happening? A wreck? A derailment? Yet more dacoits? God forfend, a head-on, a containment breach? No, not that, the failsafes would blow the tail of the train free and send the locomotive shrieking on ahead to its final thermonuclear immolation.

And it ended. Like that. With as little warning or manners as it had begun. Everyone lay where they had fallen, stunned motionless. The silence was eerily oppressive. Not even the familiar creaks and clicks and hisses of track life. Catherine of Tharsis stood on the mainline, inexplicably halted.

The dead stop jerked the bone slug out of Sweetness’s ear. Before it had even hit the decking, she was out of the cabinette door on to the sidewalk. The little gristly device muttered surds and improper fractions to whoever had ear to attend. Education abandoned, Sweetness swung around the stanchion on to the port observation deck. What she saw stopped her as surely in her tracks as it had stopped Catherine of Tharsis in hers.

They have a saying for it in the patois of Old Belladonna, whispered from the perfumed balconies, tier upon tier upon tier lining the great cavern walls, growled in the dripping, fetid runways under the deepest of underdeeps: gobemouche . Mouth catching flies. Flygobbed. Sweetness stared at the precise circle of alien landscape dropped foursquare across the Trans Oxiana mainline.

What she saw first was colour . Oranges, yellows, deep blues blobbed like a drip-painting on to the burned beige of the highlands. Once a Flying Optometrist had tested her for colour-blindness with patterned discs that reminded her of this; dots, swirls, crazily eddied colour. Try and make out a pattern. This was what she saw next; shape . More difficult by far than an Optometrist’s numbers and letters; these shapes were completely other, so entangled she did not at first know what she was looking for. Then she caught edges, curves, lines. Those tall, ribbed things were three-sided derricks, those low, curved things that caught the light as they flapped in the wind, some kind of kite-aerofoil. Here there seemed to be knots of thorny vine-pipe, there , that bright blur might be some kind of rotor. This was a whip-tipped aerial-thing, tall as a house, that was a translucent bladder that swelled and ebbed, swelled and ebbed like the throat pouches of painfully unpleasant frogs.