Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Serpio took the terrain bike easily.

“What kept you?”

“Things.” Sweetness slung herself up behind him. The engine trembled between her legs. She pressed her belly and thighs against his work gear.

“Is she comfortable?” he asked.

“Who comfortable?”

“Her. Your friend. She doesn’t look comfortable. Half her’s dragging on the ground.”

Sweetness rolled her eyes and mimed heaving some mass on her right side.

“Can we just go now?”

“Certainly.”

He twisted the handle and they went. Like that. Sweetness whooped and Serpio gunned the little alcohol engine and it was fast and dusty and sexy and in a direction she had never travelled before, which was perpendicular, and in all the speed and excitement she quite forgot to worry about the effect of Serpio’s angel-eye on his driving.

The rain was gruelling now. Sweetness loathed getting her hair wet, but stuck her head out from under the shelter of the seat. She thought she had heard it again.

“It’s nothing.” Serpio coaxed a small fire of grass stalks and wood splinters. It sent a wan spiral of smoke up to haunt the ribs and buttresses of the underside of the chair seat.

“It’s not nothing if it’s thunder.” She scanned the sky that had slowly curdled from the west until now it was a moiling blanket of grey on grey.

“You don’t get thunder from that kind of cloud.” Serpio was trying to rig a trivet of stones over the now-glowing fire.

“Well, I hope you’re sure, because in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re sitting right under a twenty-metre wooden chair, and not only is it wood, and the tallest thing in fifty kays, it’s also right on top of what passes for the major hill in this neighbourhood.”

“I’m sure.”

“How do you know?”

“I seen plenty of weather.”

“So’ve I.”

I’ve got an uncle fused into the regional signalling grid by plenty of weather, and a relative hit by lightning gives everyone a nose for thunder , she wanted to say but Serpio’s forehead was furrowed and his tongue peeking pinkly from the corner of his mouth as he stacked his stones. “I’m soaked,” Sweetness said instead. “Let me near that.” Wet hair momentarily blinded her. Her foot brushed the tripod of stones. It promptly collapsed. Serpio swiftly plucked the rocks from the fire before they crushed out its last breath. Then with the Zen patience of card-house builders, he set about rebalancing his rocks. Sweetness squatted on her heels and showed her hands to the three flickers of heat and thought about how quickly it had all gone like the weather.

For the first handful of hours the novelty of travel at right angles had thrilled her. Off the track. Beyond the lines. Turn those handlebars and you can go in any direction you like. The track doesn’t take you. You take the track. Maps among the trainfolk are grids, networks, interconnections of coloured lines with black circles. All this two-dimensionality was wooeeeee! stuff. This flat, almost treeless rangeland was full throttle terrain. Glancing behind her—comb black curls out of her eyes—Sweetness exulted at the plume of dust rising up behind her. One part of her soul warned her she was advertising her egress for a hundred kilometres around. Another did not give one fig. Outliers of a great herd of grazebeasts cantered, roll-eyed with fear, from the speeding bikers. Encouraged, Serpio aimed his machine at the heart of the dark wall of the main herd. It parted before him. The terrain bike drove a dust-coloured wedge through the mass of bovine bodies, splitting it in two like an amoeba.

“Woo-hoo!” he hollered.

Sweetness thumped Serpio on the back. When he stopped the bike, she took the little wireless and wedged it between the handlebars. Thereafter, Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces and Cool Cat Jazzy Jee rode with them over the outwash hills of Lesser Oxus into West Deuteronomy. Like hormone-troubled adolescence, the smooth face of the land was breaking into bumps and ridges. Straggles of wire tried to entrap the trampas. Dusty meanders in the grass became tracks, became double-rutted roads. By unspoken agreement, they stayed clear of these, and the fields that had appeared in between the long, low ridges, the farms and the stockyards and the pens. Occasional gangs of stockmen in dusters and cartwheel hats nodded to them. Their long-legged destriers minced nervously, offended by engine whine. Fence-crews working on the wire from the backs of huge eight-wheel yutes raised a hand in passing greeting. A taciturn folk, the Deuteronomians, given to their land and their past and the arcane formulae of their society.

In a wooded crotch where three valleys met stood St. Mariensborough. Five streets, seven shrines, five bars, three good cantinas all next to each other, one Universal Store, a manufactory, a doctor/lawyer/vet, an auction house and a folding cinema. Here they stopped for fuel. Serpio filled the tank from the alcohol distillery. Sweetness reclined in a pose she thought coquettish and dangerous. She tapped her foot to the radio—“Tuxedo Junction”—and surveyed her fellow fuel customers. A country bus, dust-battered and dented, shrieking with schoolkids. A big yute, high as a house, emblazoned with improving versos from the Guthru Gram Kanteklion . A truck train unashamedly carrying the sperm-and-ova symbol of the National AI Service. Two low-loaders, parked suspiciously close to each other. While they guzzled alcohol, two men passed a pile of cardboard boxes marked with “fragile” symbols from one flatback to the other. Bet you’ve no idea who we are, what we’re doing, where we’re going , Sweetness teased them.

A niggle whispered, And you do?

“Any cash?”

A different niggle as she rooted in her bag for bills. Vague resentment. St. Mariensborough was where it started to turn sour. Beyond St. Mariensborough, it changed. The outwash hills, remnants of a continental-scale deluge billennia before the cometary rain of the early decades of the manforming, ran into each other, formed ridges and escarpments. The land developed a trend, westward and upward, fingers to a palm. Roads roamed the long valleys, seeking ways on to the table lands above. Over this high land a hard rain intended; grey clouds running in from the west were wedged against a front and piled into a massive frown. The wind rose. The horizon vanished into twilight vagueness. An hour beyond the nub-end of the last metalled road they passed the last farm. Dour and Deuteronomian: a tower of planed wood and little windows, bare and defiant of the big flatness. A wind-pump rattled its vanes in the rising wind, its mechanism unlocked in anticipation of big wind coming. Dead ravens hung, claws up, beaks down, from a crucifixion board. Their fleasy feathers stirred. Take warning. Stern people here.

An hour past the last farm the first drop hit Sweetness between the eyes and slid down her nose. The second was not slow following. Somewhere between the three and four thousandth, she decided she was Not Having Fun. It wasn’t Want To Go Back—not yet, but it was getting there. The rain punished the tiny creeping vehicle, an offence against the elemental purity of land and weatherscape. Serpio steered through the arrowing rain into the dark heart of the storm.

“Where are we going?” Sweetness yelled. Each time the wind took her words away. The universal grey—earth, air and water—abolished any notion of time, but Sweetness’s innate Engineer sense of timetabling advised her it was nearing night. In confirmation, the horizon flared briefly: sun through a crack in the storm front as the edge of the world rose over it. In that instant of orange, Sweetness glimpsed a fellow intruder in the desolation. A silhouette: so simple and absolute there could be no mistaking its identity, however incongruous that might seem. A chair. Yes, a chair. And, she reckoned, a big chair. A big chair, all alone and untenanted on a ridge top.