Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Shape gave substance . The little rigs that supported the whizzing rotors looked as if they were made from purple bone; the sheets of the kites had the gloss of pure nylon, the guys that tethered them grew gas bladders like seawrack. The orange-green ground cover had the nap of a handwoven carpet, the cups of the big flowerheads looked like nothing more than satellite dishes spun from styrene foam. Plastic, a polymer jungle, a Bakelite rain forest.

From substance to purpose . What was this? Did it have a name? A nature? Laws, ethics? Business? Predictabilities: was this all there was of it, would it expand, would more of it appear, like chicken pox? Would it disappear as abruptly as it, apparently, had arrived? Was it friendly to people and their trains? Did big terrible things hunt in its heart? Was God to be found there, navel-deep in a pool of crystalline water? How had it come here? Dropped out of the sky? Just growed? Miraculously verbed into being by the angels of the Panarch? Domestic magic? Had some herder kid been mucking with the Stones of Saying, despite all the Prebendaries’ sermons to the stern contrary?

What was it, where had it come from, how had it got here, how were they going to get rid of it?

All of which, clamorous in Sweetness Octave’s head expressed itself in one soft, awestruck, “Wow.”

Others had joined her on the balcony. Miriamme Traction had forsaken her scullery. Marya Stuard stood agape. Naon Sextus had even relinquished the drive rods to stand and stare. A whirr, Grandfather Bedzo had unhooked himself from the cyberhat and was haltingly negotiating the ramps and sharp corners in his power-chair. Onlookers moved aside to give him a place at the rail. His bleary eyes rolled over the circle of otherness that lay square across the track. His words spoke for everyone.

“What the sweet suffering frig is that?”

The young were organised into scouting teams while the Domiety elders gathered in confab. Things were hideously amiss for North West Regional Track not to have issued a warning. Somehow—impossibly—it had slipped in under every single one of the thousands of watching eyes up in the moonring.

“Bugger hows ,” Uncle Tahram Septus Engineer boomed over the great table. “Give me whens .” He was contracts clerk, but spoke for everyone’s fear of missed connections, rescheduled haulage deals, cancelled contracts and Wisdom’s bankers in their ground-scraping beige coats and little round purple data-specs. Customary inter-Domiety bickering was forgotten. Clan heads drew up schemes and hurried to their various stations to expedite it.

Equipped for the alien with track vests, notebooks, walkie-talkies and djubba-sticks, Sweetness and Romereaux eyed the intruder with mistrust.

“I don’t know,” Sweetness said. She stood between the rails, a few steps from where they disappeared into the other. “What if it smells bad, or something?”

Romereaux leaned forward, took a generous sniff.

“Smells okay to me. Sort of like when we haul a forest-fermenter.”

“It might be poisonous.”

“I don’t think so.”

Sweetness took a hesitant step toward the borderline. The rails were not smothered in other-growth. They stopped. Terminated, clean as a laser cut. Likewise, where the plastic factory-jungle abutted the everyday world the plant-machines were sliced though with surgical precision. A parasol-like leaf was sectioned along a chord, a windmill gantry was exposed down one side. Stems and vines were neatly truncated, oozing ichor the colour of long-dead batteries.

“I mean,” Sweetness said, “if we go in there and…”

“One way to find out.” Romereaux unholstered his djubba-stick. He positioned himself en-garde to the line of division, shuffled an uncomfortable moment or two, aimed the weapon. “Right then.” He pressed the trigger. The club-head shot out, clacked off a gantry upright well beyond the line of division. The shaft remained whole, unparted. He retracted the device.

“So.”

“So.”

But Sweetness still tippy-toed across the boundary, like an old seabather testing the water. Then something darted at her, feathery and diaphanous and whirring, and darted away as she swiped at it. She glimpsed helicopter rotors, a fragile crystalline body, great blinking eyes framed, incongruously, with long eyelashes. It was no larger than her hand. The autogyro-bug blinked at her, emitted a soft purr and released a stream of phosphorescent spores from its belly. The spores settled on Sweetness’s skin like thistledown. They sparkled in the sun. She heard faint far tintinnabulations, smelled summer and palm wine and spent fireworks, felt delicious weals of cold stitch across her flesh.

“Oh,” she said. And, “Ah.”

The thing blinked again, dipped on its rotors and spun away. Without understanding the impulse, Sweetness followed. The will-o’-the-wisp led her into wonder. In groves of derrick trees five, six times her height she ducked under swooping sails. Gentle breezes scented with syrup and electricity fanned her face. Through copses of translucent orange bottle-plants, wide bellied, tight lipped, corked with plugs of matted fibre. Within, coiling things somersaulted in thick liquid. Luminous midges swarmed in her face, shifting patterns of light and density. As she moved inward, Sweetness heard the potplants uncork like deeply resonant belches. Looking back, she saw them ejaculate hundreds of long silver streamers. On, and in, over a carpet of glistening blue pebbles that, when she stepped on them, grew legs and fled from her. She padded through a parting sea of iridescent beetles. She stopped to pick one up, yelped, dropped it. The thing had hit her with an electric shock. It lay on its back, thrashing its cilia legs until one by one they locked and froze.

Onward; parting webs of thick, pulsating vines to be sure she was on the track of the fluttering lure. Bulbs and nodules burst between her fingers, staining them with coloured juices that smelled of stale beer, cinnamon, fresh buttery plastic, window polish, Grandmother Taal’s herb tisanes . One smelled so powerfully of ginger sorbet she remembered from a trip to Devenney on the Syrtic Sea she almost sucked her long fingers. Almost.

Onward: through curtains of transparent lace; along narrow twisting alleys confined between towering crimson tube walls, like the neatly coiled intestines of an eviscerated giant; crawling under umbrella-canopies of ground-kissing mushrooms; through flocks of creatures like tiny silver flies suspended from gossamer balloons that wheeled and darted with surprising agility from the touch of her shadow.

At some point Sweetness remembered that Romereaux was not with her, had never been with her. At another point, she realised she had been walking much much longer than she should have been able to. At yet another, she saw that the edge of the world was a good deal closer than she had expected. Another still, and she discovered she had no idea where she was. Further yet, she realised she did not care.

Pushing through swags of knitted moss, she failed to see the glitter of water and almost fell headlong into the pool. Sweetness grabbed fistfuls of moss, they tore like widow’s curtains. She fell to her hands and knees in shallow, metallic-smelling water. Water. She remembered who what where she was. She looked around. The flying tantaliser was gone, of course. She looked up at the sky. It was a shade or two darker than the norm. Verging indigo. She thought of that other strange sky, in the place where Uncle Neon dwelled alone in his steel pole. Was this like that, another other? Was what had fallen on to the Trans Oxiana mainline a circular door, an infinite number of ways in, so that when you were on the other side, you found that it was bigger on the inside than the outside? The twenty-seven heavens of the Panarch were stacked like that, each inside the one below it, each larger than the level that contained it. She had walked a long way; the sun—if that was the sun she knew—was close to the edge of the world.