Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling how lame the words were on her lips.

“Sorry?” Serpio struggled to his feet. “What are you sorry about? What have you done?”

“Sorry,” she said again, no better than before.

Serpio flung soil, kicked grass, dry-spat after his persecutors.

“Bastards! Bastards! You think you’re something, Salpinge, well, you’re nothing! You are nothing!”

He settled into a damaged, trembling sulk. His world-eye glowed dark.

“It’s over. They’re gone.” Sweetness knelt, carefully putting herself between Serpio and his bullies.

“Harx,” Serpio whispered, so quiet and venomous Sweetness almost mistook it for a natural phenomenon.

“What?”

“He’ll show you,” Serpio muttered. “He’ll show everyone. You’ll all see!”

“What is, who is, Harx?” Sweetness asked but he did not hear and she knew the words were not for her. She saw a reflection in Serpio’s angel-eye where the sun was not; a glint of silver.

Serpio stood up. He balled his fists and roared at his tormentors, a howl of energy that drew years of shame and rage and alienation like a vacuum in the soul. Sweetness was not sure she liked boys who howled. Serpio gasped into a hunch of humiliation, but the howl roared on, changing shape and tone, becoming something other, a note, a whistle, a train whistle, coming up the track. She knew that song. She knew the song of every train on the Southern Grand Trunk. An ear within had been listening for it since Little Pretty One told her in the night the name and nature of her intended. The song of the Class 44 single-tokamak fusion hauler Ninth Avata.

Funny, she was to think kilometres later, how simply these things are decided. In all this piece of the Great Oxus there was one upswelling—a shallow, egg-shaped mound a spit or two long and less high, a flaw in the world-making like a bull’s-eye in cheap glass—and Sweetness and Serpio were hiding behind it. They lay side by side, belly-flat on the grass, passing a stolen pair of Surveyor’s glasses between them.

“What are they doing now?” Sweetness demanded. She was a poor passive listener. She was eye that looked, not ear that heard. Thus, from childhood she had had a fear of going blind, perhaps in whimsical divine punishment.

“They’re processing,” Serpio said.

Too much. She snatched the binoculars from his grasp, almost throttling Serpio with the thong. The hillock lay a kay and a half west of the mainline—so the ranging equipment on the glasses told her. Good little glasses, light, clever: they focused automatically. She turned them on the twin ant-trains mutually approaching against a backdrop of colossal engineering. Asiim Engineers to the right, Stuards to the left. They leaped into resolution: first Naon Engineer, sweating but superb in the robe, hat and gloves of his mystery. A pace behind him: Child’a’grace, heartbreakingly elegant in her Susquavanna marriage gown, unfaded, unshrunken and unpatched. Like her. So precise were the survey-glasses that Sweetness could even make out her smirk of small pride at her husband’s splendour—knowing full he would never see it. Then came brother Sle, sulky still, with the casket that held the bank draft for three thousand dollars; Rother’am, sulkier still. Behind him came a Hire-priest—a spotty adolescent in rented regalia. Sweetness watched his lips move as he rehearsed the sentences and responses. His inexperience would have been inaudible over the sound of the Catherine of Tharsis Inter-Domiety band immediately following. Sweetness could hear them parping and cracking notes all the way from her grassy knoll. Non-wedding party, non-musicians straggled after, minor Domiety members and important Septs, the curious, those who liked a bit of a cry, those who wanted any distraction from the mundane nomadism of life on the line. The sides of the waiting trains were hung with religious banners, good-luck ribbons and the faces of those who loved a good wedding. Sweetness swung the glasses widdershins.

Narob Stuard strode well ahead of his people. It showed nuptial eagerness. He held his chin up, and kept his eyes steely-slitted. The wind rustled the banknotes stapled to his waistcoat and tousled the tassels of his wedding shirt. Every few paces he touched his hand to his wedding hat to steady it against the rising high-plains wind. It seemed to irritate him. He is good-looking, Sweetness thought. But then many men look good walking into the wind, and that’s no reason to marry them.

They hadn’t missed her yet. The affiance. On the first meeting between the partners, the bride-soon-to-be was supposed to feign a demure reluctance. But soon they would wonder what was taking her so long with her clips, or her veil, or her garland, and the unmarried girls would be sent to look. They would be sent to look, and a kilometre and a half away on a grassy knoll she realised she had not thought what to do when they did not find her. It was a big thing to realise. It lay in her stomach like morning hunger, or the sway when a train hits a set of points you aren’t expecting, or magic hour moments when the edge of the world is just over the sun and the sandstone fingers of the Big Vermilion country are still glowing with the heat of it—you can feel it on your face—and the sky is so blue it aches.

Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, the feeling said, at this moment, you are free to do one of two things. You can get up from this bank and go to your cabin and put on your clips and your veil and your garland and go out there to meet your husband-to-be. You can get up from this bank and go to that terrain bike over there and take that bike and this boy and go wherever you want in the world. That’s it. That’s your two choices. Sorry there ain’t no more. That’s your lot.

Sweetness put down the glasses, but it wasn’t readjustment to new perspectives that made the world swim around her. It was those two and two-only choices, and the certainty that in this moment, she had to decide. The world went white. Certainty blinded her.

Sweetness suddenly found words inside her. She did not want to have to think too much about them, because that might have killed them, so she opened her mouth and let them come out. They tasted like something she was spitting up, strong and biley, something she had to get out of her.

“Hey Serpio.”

“What?” He had been reaching for the glasses, but Sweetness rolled on to her back and looked at the sky.

“You hate it.”

“What?”

“Here. This. You hate it. I hate it. So let’s go.”

“You mean?”

“Let’s go. Now. Why not?” Thinking: Hurry up, get on with it, say yes, don’t keep asking stupid questions because each one eats a bit of that blinding white certainty and I don’t want to have to go back there, I don’t want to be married and have a stainless steel kitchen and no, I don’t know what’s going to be out there with you, but I do know that it’s none of that back there. And this is a very very very long moment indeed.

She saw his lips open. It was like a replay on the pelota, but with a tiny rope of saliva between tooth and top lip that caught the sun.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

And so they ran away.

But it wasn’t that quick, or clean. You don’t just run away. People who do that on the Deuteronomy trampas end up raven-picked and windpolished. Even an Engineer girl knew this.

Timetabling made the raid easier. Engineers and Stuards were hither and thither, up-track and down, but North East Quartersphere regional control had stuff backed up all the way to Grand Valley and a railroad to run, God damn it, so all the running around was against a backdrop of track-mending gear folding itself neatly into its manifolds and tokamaks firing up in impressive gouts of steam and crews swinging themselves perilously on to companionways as cranks turned and wheels ground. Marshals with red flags and whistles backed trains up to the sidings and engaged in impressive feats of impromptu shunting as intercities nudged past slow freighters and priority diplomatic transports slipped in ahead of big chemical processors. In the confusion of steam and costumes, Sweetness could slip up the Number Twelve access ladder, over the top of the water tender, wriggle down the relief pipe that no one over the age of ten could ever make it down, along the midway and through the open porthole of her cabin unseen.