Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Dizzy with hunger and headache, Sweetness took a bearing on Radio Pleasant. She had come a hair off true, a shift to the left brought her on to the way south. This place she had spent the day looked so similar to the one she had left yesterday—the sand so rippled, the rocks so crumbled and red, the sky so piercingly blue—she might not have moved at all. Have not moved at all , whispered a small, black, despairing demon. It took a major effort of will to lift one foot and place it ahead of the other, but she managed it. Belly full of yellow press, she had to. To listen to the demon was death.

That second night, death seemed a fine thing. Much of the time she was crazy, staggering and weaving under the hurtling scraps of moon, crawling up slip-sliding dune-faces, clutching at the sand running away between her fingers, rolling downslope, at some point recovering sense enough to reckon she had wandered far off course and checking her position against the cool midnight grooves of Radio Pleasant’s “Wind-down with Willem.” The ridiculous notion that down there people were toasting each other with wine and throwing money to band leaders and sending compliment slips to chefs and fumbling with each other’s underwear in cars gave her the idea. Things I will do when I get to Therme.

Top of the list. Wash my hair. She could smell it. Worse, she could not get away from it. Bad bad bad bad bad when you can smell your own hair. Worse when it sticks to you. Aghhh. Hair wash. No questions, numero uno . And a bath. Maybe together. No problem in Therme. It’s a spa town. So, hydrotherapy then. Deep bath, with all those healing oils and minerals from the volcanic vents. Like for several hours. And a glass of wine as light and clear as water, so cold the condensation runs down the outside, across the foot, then down your arm and you lick it off. Oh yes. Licking things off. Some boy with nice muscles and cute eye make-up to run a hose up and down you. How does that feel, Miss Engineer? Oh ah, oohhh, ahhh. She’d scandalise him. But not before he’d shampooed her hair, with a good, deep, finger motion, right down to the roots, twice and conditioner, and a warm blow dry—not a hot one, she’d had enough hot air blowing in her face for any lifetime. Yes, a bath, with oils and minerals and a hose down and a body scrub and when you’ve got every molecule of rust and silicon out of you, a table on a verandah with a view over the mud gardens, and you wearing nothing but a shortie silkie robe, and someone bringing you fish. Yes, fish, fresh caught, cooked in a steam vent.

Good game, the little black one said. Fine game, but what’s the point? You’re not going to get these things. They’re not going to happen. You’re going to kneel down and bend over and press your forehead to the sand and wait for a storm to cover you over.

She stopped in the middle of the black desert.

“Where is my Help Beyond Comprehension?” she roared at the sky.

“Where is it where is it where is it?”

Down on the south side of the sky, lasers kindled the horizon green; a Praesidium Sailship setting out on its long, slow loop back to Motherworld, a fair wind of coherent light behind it.

Sun woke her. Sun should not have, not this hot, not this high. The backs of her arms, her exposed ankles, were burning. Sweetness rolled on to her back.

Hot sand on scorched skin. She blinked up into the white atom of the sun. How what why where? The last thing she remembered…the last thing she remembered…Never mind what you do or don’t remember! Get out of this murderous sun that’s sucking the moisture right through your skin, that’s burning you to a blister. She kicked out her sleeping bag, dived in, scraping sensitive skin against the zip and the sweat-crusty fabric. Sleep would not be commanded so she curled up inside the fetid heat of the bag and watched the hallucinations bubble out of her forebrain. From their colour and frenetic persistence, she knew she had only two days, a day left before the desert overcame her. Somewhere, she knew she should be very, very concerned at that. She slept fitfully, jerkily until the light through the skin of the bag darkened and she wormed out for her evening meal twenty-five pages of romantic tosh washed down with five mouthfuls of oxygenated water.

When she took her reading on Radio Pleasant, she discovered that in the night she had managed to turn herself around one hundred and eighty degrees. In that somewhere place, she knew she should be very, very afraid of that.

She never knew how she made it out that night, dragging her backsac from a tether around her wrist because its strapping raised wet blisters on her burned shoulders. She drove each foot in front of the next by swearing at it.

“Arsholing fuckbiscuit turdsucking fudge-punching fanny-dripping ring-licking pox-sucking titty-twisting nipple-cracking colon-fisting cucumber-jerking diseased chilli-burned flap-ringed ox-balled cockless arseless fannyfree cuntless one-leg-in-the-air-wanking bumbutton of a donkeyfucker’s priest-buggering fuck-mother’s piss-gargling venereally-seeping cousin-rimming pox-father cock-dripping green-cummed mother’s sister’s priest’s cousin’s shit-crusted ten-day-hung-shark-scented crack.”

She swore Engineer oaths, Deep-Eff oaths, Stuard and Traction and Bassareeni oaths, she swore pointsmen’s oaths and shunt-jockey oaths, she swore service engineers’ elaborate and highly technical oaths, she swore shipping clerks’ hair-curling oaths. She swore Bethlehem Ares Railroads and Great Southern and Transpolaris Traction and Transborealis and Llangonned and North Eastern and Great Eastern and Grand Valley corporate oaths. She swore North West and South East and South West and North East Quarter-sphere oaths. She swore Deuteronomy and Axidy and Chryse and Great Oxus and Tharsis and Syrtia and Grand Valley and New Merionedd and Tempe (of course) and Big Red (most especially) regional oaths. For several kilometres she explored desert oaths, Big Red and Big Crimson and Big Vermilion oaths, Big Carmine and Big Ochre and Big Orange oaths, stone desert and sand desert and soda desert and ash desert and ice desert and acid desert and salt desert and rust desert and dust desert oaths. Finding fruit in the provincial, she worked through her repertoire of Belladonna oaths and Wisdom oaths, Meridian and Lyx and Solstice Landing oaths, Kershaw and New Cosmobad and Bleriot oaths, Touchdown and O and China Mountain oaths.

And the smaller moon was not halfway across the sky.

So she catalogued all her names for body parts, male and female, and swore every swear that could be sworn by them, then made up new names and new swearings for and by them, then by bodily fluids, solids and gases and joined unlikely adjectives to these. Then she remembered to tune in to Radio Pleasant and found to her dismay that Jonathon J. Jonas was just playing his last request on “The Jumpin’ Jive Show” and handing over to Fazie Obeke on “The Swing Shift.”

Sweetness Octave then swore by the deities. She started with God the Panarchic, and his Immanencies and Emanations, twelve of each. After some thought about whether it was private blasphemy, she then swore by Our Lady Catherine of Tharsis—she could have told her, in eight and bit years, she could have dropped some hint, Oh by the way, I made the world. She swore by the Lofty Angelic Orders, the Ranks Eotemporal; the Powers and Dominions, the Spiritual Menagerie, the Rider of the Many-Headed Beast, the Justices and Magisters; the Atmospheric Guides and the Octaval Guides and the Minor Kings of High Brazyl. She swore by the Lesser Orders, the Governances of Amshastrias and Reshpundees; the Five Ranks of Beings Spiritual and Actual: Archangelsks, Avatas, Lorarchs, Cheraphs and Anaels. She swore by the Least Orders, the Ranks Venal and Mechanical, vanas, partacs, magnetos, orphs, flaesers, fielders. She swore by writ and scripture, by the Tree of World’s Beginning and the Original Cinder, by Seven Sanctas and the Guthru Gram , by the Evyn Psalmody and the Ekaterina Angelography, by the Cantus Septimus and the Mute Scribes who calligraphied beautiful prayers on the kite-sails of Lyx and Deuteronomy, by the three-centavo (refunded!) oracle of green men in stenchy booths in Inatra and by the cheap gramarye of budget witches in Belladonna Main who hawk spells for Help Beyond Comprehension. She swore by orders and denominations: by the Poor Pelerines and the Prebendarists and the Devotes of the Bryghte Chylde of Chernowa, by the Cathars and Cathrinists and Cathites, by the Swavyn Ecstasy-priests and the Damantine Ascetics and the Penitential Mendicants, by the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption and the Sisters-Sufferant of the Song of Clare and (long and hard and heartfelt) the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, its theology, its mail-order service, its floating basilica, its plummy acolytes, their head and leader, but most of all, that it had ever accepted for shriving the obsidian soul of Serpio Waymender.