Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“You hungry?” she had asked, thinking scraps and shavings among the party detritus; then Serpio had poked her in the third rib and said with voice forty-sixty longing and pride, Look, see?

Now the carriages had almost completed their evolutions: panels fixed and locked, joints and couplings met and mated. The machine outheld boom arms above wide metal skirts, above both rose a command torso of pumping engines and grinding conveyor trains. In a high glass cupola, the oldest and most experienced Waymenders steered the juggernaut over the grass past the procession of stalled trains. It made a tremendous noise. Dawn-grazing plainsbeasts skittered from its path, Surveyors rode them down on their terrain bikes, scooping up dust-hares and striped piglings. The machine inscribed sixteen parallel wheel tracks deep in the earth. It found the sheared track ends and settled over them like a venerable dowager of many skirts taking a piss. The booms dipped to the ground. Bucketwheel fingers threw up red dust. Conveyors spun their wheels.

“What are they doing?” Sweetness asked.

“Come and look.”

Serpio took her hand. Sweetness found she did not mind that. His was soft, with rather long nails. A nonworking hand. No handlebar or lever for it, the eye that guided it was as blinded by seeing too much as by too little. She felt sorry for that hand, as they sneaked around the side of the big machine, dodging flying clods, and so she squeezed it.

To make talk, she asked, “What do you think happened to the orph? I never saw one before, I thought they were all gone long ago.”

“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “Don’t care. Well shut of it. Well shut of them all. Poxy things were always going wrong; they weren’t very well made.”

This was mild blasphemy to an Asiim Engineer. The prickle of reflex impiety surprised Sweetness. She had thought herself young and free-thinking. She asked, carefully, “Is this because of your…you know?”

“Eye?”

“Aye.”

“You mean, because my angel-sight means I can’t work on the track?”

“Aye.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” He sounded as if the insight had genuinely tripped him up, like a diamond in a midden. “But I think it’s mainly because I don’t think they should be here. We don’t need them. So, they say they built the world, and they keep it running, and so we call them angels and say prayers but they’re machines and even if one machine makes another machine makes another machine, at the bottom of it all, there’s a person, not a machine. A human who designed the machine, and programmed it, and gave it a mission and a name and a purpose. They’re the ones built the world. They’re the ones we should be remembering, not bits of metal and plastic. Those orphs, they’re stupid. Big cow-machines. Cows got more sense’n an orph. I tell you, when you’ve seen as many as I have go ga-ga.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got a job, see? I don’t do nothing, no one does nothing on Iron Lion . I got a job. I guide the train. I stand up there on the fo’c’s’le and I look down the track and I see angels boiling off the horizon like dust-devils. Angels? Balls. Tired, bad, mad machines.”

“St. Catherine…”

“Woman. Like you.” Serpio looked at Sweetness askance from the eaves of his thatch of glossy black hair. “Nah. Not like you. St. Catherine, she was tired, mad, bad too. But she was a woman.”

“Who tells you all this?” An itch of irritation in the voice. She’d only known this boy one party and a night and he was niggling her already.

“Harx,” Serpio said and no more. While Sweetness was still deliberating if the monosyllable was a cough, a name or a Waymender curse, Serpio ducked down to peer through the dust-bunnies billowing up from the big machine’s hem. “Down here.”

Sweetness hunkered down on her hams beside the dark-haired boy. Through the soil and shredded grass, she glimpsed alchemy. The big machine ate soil and shat steel. Two gleaming parallel lines of steel, new forged, shimmering with heat-haze, married together by smoking obsidian sleepers.

“It’s making it straight out of the ground,” Sweetness said, amazed. Serpio nodded the nod of workaday magic, but Sweetness knew her delight had pleased him. Squatting side by side, they watched the steel rails creep across the gap of raw earth. Centimetre by centimetre , Sweetness thought. Measuring the time until the rails are joined. Shortening the gap between me and Narob and his stainless steel kitchen. A joining, and a joining. Grain by grain. Centimetre by centimetre.

Too dismal a thought by far for a crisp cold clear Deuteronomy morning. Serpio read the sudden gloom in her muscles.

“I’m hungry now. Come on. Let’s eat. They’ll be barbieing up by now.”

Under the ribs of a lone umbrella tree the Surveyors had dug firepits and slung spits. The flee-kills were being gutted, skinned, skewered. Cracks and flares of burning fat sent spirals of aromatic black smoke through the leaves of the shade tree. There were three barbecue pits under the tree. At one the Waymender bike girls were gathered, roasting bustards. They greeted Serpio with a toss of the chin, Sweetness with a suspicious glance over their goggles. Sweetness admired and envied their bike gear, the amount of dusty muscle it showed, the casual toughness with which they wore it.

“Anything going?”

The girl with the biggest muscles spoke. “Might be. Who’s that you’re with?”

“Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The leader tried the name out on her tongue, twice.

“So. Nice hair. You with Squint?”

“I’ve been talking to him.”

“Well, I suppose someone needs to. There’s rail-rabbit if you want some.”

They took the charred haunch wrapped in old survey charts to the trunk. It tasted to Sweetness like hamadryad thigh. A bike wireless burbled New School Deuteronomy flute-and-tabla and Sweetness thought, In this place, at this moment, I am perfectly happy. It could not last. The ending was exactly as Sweetness had seen in too many incarriage Range-rider movies. The cool touch of shadow, the boots foursquare on the earth, the silhouette blocking out the sun. Three of them, in classic vee-formation. Each could have taken Serpio like a haunch of rabbit in two hands and bitten him in half. And they wanted to. The bike girls’ gruffness had fronted a sororal affection. These Waymender boys hated him.

“You don’t eat that, Squint.”

A heavy-soled boot kicked the meat from Serpio’s grip. As he reached for it, a lieutenant pushed him over on his side down into the dust and twisted his spine until he was looking up at his chief tormentor.

“Breakfast, boy.”

The leader carried meat: a roasted pigling penis, smoking hot. Serpio struggled and spat but the two lieutenants had him held firm.

“This is what you eat, Squint.”

They pried his mouth open with sharp fingers pressed hard into the angle of the jaw. Serpio kicked and thrashed against the big boy’s attempt to shove the pig’s penis into his mouth.

“Hold him still.”

They did and it went in. Serpio choked and spat.

“Eat it up now.”

The lieutenants moved his jaw, mocking mastication.

I know why you are doing this, Sweetness thought. You see him with someone, doing a thing your rules for him do not allow, you see him doing a thing for himself and not asking it from you, and you hate that. She wanted to speak out. She wanted to kick them hard in the balls, go for their eyes. She wanted to stop them doing the thing to Serpio that was for her benefit. But she was off-territory, out-clan. Amongst aliens.

“Salp, let him be.”

The leader twisted his mouth in a moue of disappointment but the girls had spoken. They were not impressed. It was over. The boys left without a word. Serpio flung the foul pig-thing away from him, spat and spat and spat again. Sweetness went to him but she was afraid to touch him. She did not know the decorum of the Waymender Domiety. To offer a hand in comfort might be a worse insult than that done to him by the bike boys.