Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Sweetness did not listen beyond the fifth word from the sky. Danger, reality breaches, so? ROTECH was here, stooped down from heaven to touch the earth. The people who made the world had come.

There was a steaming that night, hosted by the Stuards of Bishop of Alves . Spits were set up, great joints of grazebeast slung on spears and hoisted on to brackets. Women and juniors repaired to a safe distance to prepare salads and flat bread and barrel-up beer while the Deep-Fusion men, in silver heat-refraction suits, orchestrated the superheated steam blasts from the overheat valves, dextrously turning the dripping beeves.

All were invited and by now all was many. Stacked behind Catherine of Tharsis were Count Tassaday , Three Great Shepherds , Doughty Endeavour hauling a dangerously overreacting pulp processor and Lords of the Iron Way with forty carriages of express service passengers now as steaming hot as the cooking roasts. Passengers , of course, could not possibly be invited to a track jamboree. Down the track from Bishop of Alves were the famous Indomitable , then a nameless, low-caste ballast unit from Suvebray—its Domities huddled apart at the steaming and, as Psalli noted, all bearing the sunken chin, bug eyes and bulging, translucent forehead that advertised incest . Most available and despicable of track crimes. Behind the Ballasteros stood the venerable Mountain of Great Peace and a recently refitted JahSpeed! , her pipework and tubes the envy of every Deep-Eff. Bringing up the rear was Freight 128 , an ill-omened workhorse, stained with rumours of radiation leaks, bad fortune and piracy on the mainline which only persisted the harder her grim Engineers denied them.

Over all hung the ROTECH machine. Tulsa Engineer, inheritor of Tahram’s contractual mantle and smitten with an inappropriate love of all things airborne, had checked it up in his Big Book of Aircraft and Angel Recognition but it fitted no known format. By day it had been an oppressive presence, like the legendary flying city of Hooverville, torn from its bedrock and sentenced to roam the jet streams as punishment for cheating an angel of the Panarch in a frame of snooker. An obscuration. A total eclipse. A crushing satellite, a steel cloud. By night it was a deeper darkness on the black Oxus sky, a hiatus in the moonring where the belly-lights made up new, geometrically regular constellations. It would have been almost forgettable, but for its activities at the heart of the plastic jungle. This was a tug of war by light; vivid cerises, lilacs and turquoises from on high strove with flashes of vermilion, white and poisonous green from where the surveyors had mapped the mirror pool to be. Occasionally there would be a particularly dazzling exchange and the ground would tremble. It cast a fine, party illumination over the entertainments.

Beef-stuffed chapatti in one hand, mug of small beer in the other, Sweetness was not having a fine time. Small beer, small fun. Romereaux cast a ROTECH-machine-sized shadow over her pleasure. She queued up for her food, he was there, mug in hand by the beer fermentory, not noticing her. On to the musicians’ awning to watch the fingers fly over the keys and strings and the women entice the men to dance; tapping her foot, but Romereaux was talking with Domiety brothers from the other trains with a set to his shoulders that insisted, No dance, never dance . To the beer pavilion for her mug fresh from the teat, and now all his attention was given to shoving a fat chapatti, dripping grease and garlic sauce, sideways into his mouth while the lads laughed and cheered, Go on go on go on you boy! Eventually she turned her back on him but he did not notice that either.

The ground shook, the strongest tremor yet. Venerable matriarchs shrieked and tottered, flagons of petty beer slopped. Great trains swayed on their bearings, a spit of meat capsized in a hurricane of steam. Silver-suited Deep-Fusioners dashed through the billows to right it. Under cover of confusion Sweetness ducked between Bishop of Alves ’s drive wheels and crouched in the oily dark, avoiding everyone. A twitch in her side told her that the oil pool between her feet was now inhabited.

“Nice party,” Little Pretty One said. Sweetness offered her the remains of her chapatti. Little Pretty One devoured it decorously with her fine white teeth. “This ain’t bad, this. Any idea how long it is since I last ate anything?”

“Take it all,” Sweetness said. “There’s beer too. You dried out?”

“Some.” Little Pretty One took the pot, sniffed it. “Thanks.” She drained it in one.

“Tell me this, and tell me no more, why do they do it?”

“Who do what?”

“Men. One moment, they’re all over you, next…”

“Oh, that. Whole different world.”

“What, us and men?”

“Well, that too. Holiday romance.”

“Change of scenery…”

“Change of climate…”

“Everything commonplace becomes special…”

“Then you come home…”

“And they never write or phone.”

“Bummers.”

“That’s the way they are. The thing about males, my corporeal friend, is that what they really really want isn’t sex, or power, or money, it’s a quiet life. Everything easy. One-night stands included.”

“It wasn’t even a one-night stand.”

“Tell me.” Little Pretty One burped. It seemed to take her by surprise. “But it’s not going to be a problem.”

“I live on the same train as him, I see him every day, hell, five times a day, every day.”

“Not a problem. Train’s a-coming.”

“Trains is always coming. And going,” Sweetness said.

“This one’s special.”

“So? How?”

“This one’s a Great Southern. Ninth Avata .”

In a life without many surprises, Sweetness thought of sudden shock as numb thing , a sensation right behind her nose between freezing and wet mud turning to cracked clay under summer sun. Numb, dumb, paralysed, incapable of action. Shot through the will.

“ Ninth Avata . Good catering facilities,” Little Pretty One continued. “Stainless steel galley, and everything. This wasn’t timetabled. You were supposed to have zapped past each other three hundred kays south of here. But now, they’re thinking, well…Look.” Little Pretty One squatted beside Sweetness, pointed out between the spokes. There they were, all the traitors, Marya Stuard in her best epaulettes and braid, Naon Engineer flanked by Sleevel and Rother’am, Child’a’grace looking little and happy, even Grandmother Taal by the beer fermentory, talking animatedly with a group of similar-faced women in many skirts and petticoats.

“They’re talking pins and ribbon,” Little Pretty One said. “Dowries and percentages. They’re saying, why wait for corroboree? We’re here, you’re here, they’re coming and we’ve got the money here, now, in our hands…”

“No!” Sweetness moaned. Revellers turned, startled by the noise from beneath the train. Another grumble from the divine battle distracted them. “Some invisible friend you are. This is the worst day of my life. What am I going to do?”

“There’s another train back there. Just pulled up.”

“So? Can’t move for trains.”

“That one’s still a-coming, but this one’s here.”

“What are you talking about? Why don’t you just do something useful for once rather than hand out stupid proverbs like they’re wise or something?”