Ian McDonald - Ares Express

In the privacy of command, striding alone on his big brass bridge, Naon Engineer decided that the only way out of the situation was to die of shame. There were numerous precedents for this action. No matter that most of them had been performed by ascetics and monastics in order to stymie wars, blight cities or summon monsoons. They had not had their wheels pissed on by Stuards.

Out, quick. Yell “power-up” down the gosport, throw full steam and throttles wide open. Put as many sleepers as possible between you and the bad thing. Old Engineer advice, father to son to son to son. As soon as there was free track, he had bellowed the Deep-Fusion folk to frenzy and spun the wheels. But the Ninth Avata Stuards were ready for him. Two rows, either side of the track. A firing squad. The men had unzipped and unfurled. The women had hoisted their many skirts and aimed. As the looming superstructure of Catherine of Tharsis passed over their heads, they had gushingly anointed the drive wheels.

The track-level cameras spared none of the humiliation.

“Full power!” Naon Engineer thundered at the sweating Deep-Fusioners in their windowless reactor hive. His cheeks were red. Blood seethed in his brainpan. There was a high whining whistle in his inner ears. It blocked out the imagined jeering of the Stuards. “Full power, you slugs snails tortoises infernal turtles!” But heavy trains are slow. It seemed a damned eternity for Catherine of Tharsis to pull away from those two ranks of jeering cooks and waiters.

The imagined tang of urine filled his nostrils. It would never wash away. Never. Speed. The wind of high velocity might at least blow it somewhere he would not have to smell it. Naon Engineer pushed the lever forward to its uttermost notch. The big fusion engines responded with a howl of power. Catherine of Tharsis was a smoke-fletched arrow shot across the plains of Old Deuteronomy. She ran Mendocello Bank at such a lick that it jumped Marya Stuard’s formal goblets from their racks. Scampering junior sommeliers bumped into each other as they rolled away from grasping fingers. Brimful of the righteous wrath that had defeated the Starke badmaashes, Marya Stuard stormed forward.

“He’s locked himself in,” Child’a’grace said. Marya Stuard was no respecter of sanctums. She beat the door with her fists.

“What d’you think you’re doing, man?”

The twin horns blew.

“I demand to be let in!”

She swayed as the train took a switchover at two hundred and fifty.

“I’m a bloody laughing stock, Engineer! A laughing stock! And people do not laugh at Marya Stuard. Remember who bounced Selwyn Starke and his dacoits!”

“There’s no talking to him,” Child’a’grace said mildly. Marya Stuard stood glaring at the door, as if heat of will could melt a hole in it. It remained obdurately unmelted and unopened. For once defeated, she gave a huff of exasperation and turned on her heel.

“He’ll talk to me, eventually,” she declared. Child’a’grace sighed, still waiting after four years.

Naon Engineer finally ran out of steam on the down-grade to the Muchanga Water Tower. Hands off the throttles. Catherine of Tharsis ghosted to a creaking, heavy halt under the blessing fingers of the water-charger. By now the decision was firm in his mind, and he could face the council of his peers.

“I am destroyed,” he declared to the assembled council of the Domieties. He had had plenty of time to practise the tone of pained humiliation, and he thought he did it really rather well. “The money is forfeit. So be it. A price must be paid, though three thousand dollars, and a lien on our contracts is a heavy burden. But what is heavier still, what is intolerable, is the shame. I cannot bear the disgrace. Cannot bear it, I tell you!” Every eye was on him. “There is only one choice available to me. The stain that besmirches the great name of Engineer can only be expunged by blood. Yes, blood!” A corner-of-eye glance to make sure Marya Stuard was watching, and impressed. Too hard to tell with that fierce little woman. Very well then. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not considerable. “I have studied the family archives, and there is a way that shame may be bought out. Shame for shame, life for life. I declare to you now, for the shame brought on this name by that child, for the urine stains rusting the pure steel of my driving wheels, yes, I will die from shame! A terrible price, yes, but one I bear gladly. Thirteen generations of the name Asiim demand it!” He held aloft his hand in a rhetorical gesture he had once seen in an itinerant tent theatre performance of The Melodrama of the Twelve Just Trappers . It had been a notoriously hammy gig, but trainpeople had never been renowned as critics. He held the pose, flared his nostrils.

Someone farted. It was soft and eructating and rippling. Before anyone could crack a chortle, Naon Engineer whirled.

“Who was that?” His finger was a claw of accusation. “Who emitted that…noise? Whose nether trumpet sounded?”

“Husband,” Child’a’grace said.

“I mean it,” he said, remembering just in time to sign to his wife, “I shall…”

“Naon…”

“Sle shall succeed. He shall inherit the starter rod.” But he was failing. His pride was tobogganing toward a fatal precipice. Damn them. Damn his always reasonable wife, damn that underwearless tramp of a daughter, damn that loose-sphinctered hellion of a Bassareeni, he suspected.

“Naon, enough,” Child’a’grace said gently, and he was utterly defeated.

“Just get us out of this with our dignity intact,” Marya Stuard sighed. At the far end of the long table, Grandmother Taal ruffled her skirts and shawls like a prize chanticleer at a canton fair.

“We have forgotten someone here,” she said. Her voice was small and soft, like a desert bird, but the air made room for every word. “We are all full of our shame and our disgrace and the stains on our wheels and our name, and even our money…” She stood up, fumbled open her black old-woman’s bag, which had infinite dimensions folded up inside it. She flung a green something down the table. It slid to a halt in front of Naon Engineer: a wad of Bank of Tharsis bills. “Are you satisfied, son?”

Naon Engineer meanly flicked through the wad.

“It all seems to be here.”

Grandmother Taal remained standing.

“Yes, we are all full of shame and disgrace but I say humiliation is a family that happily gives up a daughter to save its name. I say shame is a family that thinks of social betterment over a child’s happiness. I say disgrace is a nearly-nine-year-old girl most probably at this very moment standing in the cold by the trackside back in Deuteronomy, looking for a train that wouldn’t wait for her because its Chief Engineer—her own father—thinks too much of his own good name to even look for her. Let alone disrupt his timetables to wait to see if she might come back. That is shame. That is disgrace. That is what makes a Domiety’s name small along the tracksides. If you are to die from anything, die for shame of that, father Naon Engineer 11th!”

In a flurry of black that seemed to go out from the old lady into other states and dimensions, Grandmother Taal whirled out of the council room.

In the wee hours, Child’a’grace came tippy-tapping at Grandmother Taal’s cabin door. As she had expected, the matriarch was awake. The old sleep little but their dreams are mighty.

“Grandmother.”

As she entered, she saw Grandmother Taal hastily tug down the hem of her black nightrobe. Drops of crimson on the floor. Child’a’grace looked for needles and thread: they were on the dressing table next to a patch of tabletop polished to mirror-sheen.