Ian McDonald - Ares Express

She banged Serpio on the shoulder. He nodded—already seen and noted. He turned the handlebars toward the big chair.

A very big chair. And a very long way off. Sweetness clung to Serpio and pressed her face against his back while the headlamp felt out the darkness for the chair. She tried not to think about running out of ol, or how deliciously drowsy this whipping rain was making her feel, how soft the wire-tough grass looked. Half-hypnotised by the weaving spot of the headlight beam and half-stupid with cold, to her great astonishment, Sweetness suddenly found herself out of the rain. While Serpio tried to make wet wood burn with a splash of ol, Sweetness tried to take in the edifice sheltering her. It was a very very big chair. The legs were twenty metres high, she thought. Three orphanages of foundlings could have played handball on its ample seat. The carved finials of the back tugged at the low hurtling clouds. She thought it strange to find it not at all strange to be sheltering under a chair on which the Panarch might have rested, in the nowherelands of Deuteronomy West.

Serpio finally abandoned his attempts to erect a cooking trivet and used the stones instead to ring-fence the fire. Sweetness ate stale duck sandwiches, picking out the pickled cucumber which she didn’t like and flicking it into the dark. She looked into the fire and asked the glowing things to help her believe where she was, what she had done. Flakes of wood ash hold no oracle. Without a word she unrolled her sleeping bag across the fire from Serpio and slipped inside in her still damp clothes.

“You stay your side.”

He did. And he was still there in the morning, when Sweetness woke with a start to find that she was indeed where she feared she might be. The storm had marched on the east in the night. Behind it came an immense blue morning. The indigo edge of the world sparkled with the riding lights of interworld ships. The big chair was a throne of marvels, an invitation to sit and contemplate a moment as gods. From this height on which the chair stood golden light flowed down into the hollows and shallow valleys, filling up all the land so that every blade of grass stood distinct. On such a morning even curled-up duck sandwiches have the taste of glory. Sweetness woke cold and stiff and aching but as she shuffled around the camp, trying to poke life into extinct ashes, the morning worked its way into her soul and lit her up. She looked out at the land—her land now—and wondered with pleasure where it would take her today.

They were packed and on the bike in half an hour. Little grasslands things—a rustle, a dart—fled from their path. Behind they left three neat, parallel tire tracks. Trainfolk. Never get away from the track. Within half an hour the land was turning higher and drier. Scrub, sagey herbs, red sand between the roots of clinging grasses. At a waterstop, Sweetness stood up on the pillion seat to scan the horizon. Heat shimmer. They were crossing the dry fringe-country of the great northeastern desert. Between her and the haze, an unknown object bulked large. At this range Sweetness could not make anything out of it, except that it was big. Not a chair, but big. It kept its identity as they approached it across the dry hardpan, at first one thing, then another, then nothing known at all. It was only as they came up out of a seasonal stream bed, flowing with flowers in the brief rush-off after the rains, to find it squat in front of them that Sweetness realised what it was. An enormous shoe. The guttee of God.

It was the size of a rail-car, made of leather, rather sagged and rotted by the occasional rain seasons, and chewed at the edges by ravenous desert animals. Sweetness and Serpio ate a meagre lunch leaning against its welt. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. The journey had taken them swiftly to that place in a relationship where you can be comfortable with silence. Out of curiosity Sweetness scrambled up the shoe—a left, she noted—then scaled to the cuff by means of the laces, each the size of bridge cables. She peered inside. The high sun illuminated a waste of bird bones. She felt vaguely disappointed, though she could not say what she might have expected that would have satisfied her.

In the afternoon the bike passed at some distance another Promethean domestic artifact; an ironing board on which entire stratocumuli could have been pressed and creased. A spindly mesa, it occupied the western horizon for many tens of kilometres. The tail of its huge shadow marked the beginning of the desert proper.

“Into that?”

Sweetness was doing her far-seeing-balance-on-the-seat feat again. Serpio refilled the canteens from a sandy little spring that meandered a way among black tar-thorn and shrub casanthus until it tired of its own energy and the red sand drank it down. The scent of deep rock water was rich in the air.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Sweetness’s left hand stopped him stoppering the flasks. Her right dropped in two purifying tablets.

“Are you questioning my direction?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because for the past two days I’ve been staring at the middle of your back and trusting implicitly that you’ve got some idea where you’re going, and now I really, really got to be sure. I just want to be sure, that’s all.”

“We’re going out there, yes.”

“Okay. Now, why?”

“There’s someone I want to meet, out there.”

“Out there?”

“People live in deserts.”

“People die in deserts.”

“Harx lives out there.”

“Harx who?”

Serpio was swinging back on to the saddle. He kicked at the starter. The ol motor cleared its throat; dry and dusty in the tubes.

“You coming?”

You’re rushing me , Sweetness thought as she shook up the canteens. You don’t want me to ask about this. You’re taking me to meet someone/thing but you don’t want to talk about him/it. Anywhere else, that would have been that to you and your terrain bike, matey. But when the last other person you have seen was a dour Deuteronomian Peripatete and he had discreetly shooed you away because he had taken a Vow of Seclusion, you get up behind the saddle.

“So, this Harx.”

“What about him?”

“I heard you mention him before.”

He did not reply but the muscles beneath his sweat-stiff workclothes said, Oh? What? Shit, secrets to keep to Sweetness’s fingers.

“Back then, where they did that thing. You know. With the…meat.”

A pause of half a kilometre. Sorry sorry sorry , Sweetness thought. It was bad and I shouldn’t remind you of it but I have to know.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You mentioned this Harx guy. So who is he?”

“He’s holy.”

“That explains it then.”

“Explains what?”

“People who live in deserts are either mad, bad, sad or holy.”

He said nothing for the next twenty kilometres, or so it seemed to Sweetness, hovering on the numb edge of sensory deprivation between the encircling haze and the dank man-odour of Serpio’s shirt. When he did talk, it was in a voice so soft and alien to him that it was as if the sand had spoken.

“He’s not mad or sad or bad, but he is holy.”

It was a major effort of will for Sweetness to pull her soul back from the horizon, to which it had been reeled out by the flat red land and spread into a thin, encircling line.

“Unk?”

“He’s good to me. He helps me. He respects me. I’ve got something that’s useful to him, he needs me. The others; they’ll all see, when he comes. They’ll look up and their mouths, they’ll just fall open like fishes in a bucket, and then they’ll see.”

“I’m a bit unclear about this…”

“Have you ever heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family?”