Ian McDonald - Ares Express

And it was still only one fifteen in the morning. Mumbling blasphemies, Sweetness Asiim Engineer shuffled to the crest of a barchan. Her feet went from under her; with a whimper, she slid ass-first down the slip-face. She spat sand, tried to get to her feet. A nag, a niggle. Something something something. Just before she went weeeeee. What? Yes. Had she seen, dare she trust, a glint of sick light, out there? With the dregs of her energy and sanity, she clawed herself back to the top of the dune. Yes. Indeed. A tiny coin of poisonous green out there in the hissing dark.

You know what that is, don’t you, Engineer girl?

Yes I do. The thing we fear, our dread and annihilation. A blast crater. Out there, somewhen, a tokamak blew. A train vaporised. A train, that ran on a long steel line. A line, going from somewhere, to somewhere.

In the end, it was only by swearing at herself, by herself, for herself, on herself, every part of her, every moment in her history, every thought in her head, every value and moral and ambition, every precious dream and vision, every sin and vice, every triviality and pettiness, every generosity and joy, that she was able to push those feet through the night to dawn. Whereupon they rushed so fast at the rail, the real rail, yes, really real, simmering in the heat haze, a black divisor across the world, that they caught themselves on the edge of the sleeper and face forward she fell, cheek to hot, steel, real rail.

She reeled up, leaving a stripe of cheek shrivelling on the hot metal. But we are not out of the woods yet, Glorious Honey-Bun. Not even close to getting into the woods. The rail ran out of heat-haze, under her feet, into heat-haze, straight and undeviating. One way was signals, passing loops, junction boxes, desert mail-drops, halts, stations, marshalling yards, a great glassy terminus. The other way was a glowing hemisphere in the desert a kilometre deep and a messy, seeping end by radiation poisoning. But which?

She unhooked the radio, tuned it away from Radio Pleasant’s “Smoother Breakfast with Ned and Greazebop” to white noise. Kkksssshhh. The song of the Big Red. She turned to face one way down the track. The sound of frying sky grew louder, interspersed with pops like boils bursting. She did a one-eighty. Kkksssshhh. She did the test again, to be sure. Roar, and whisper.

That way, then. As if in confirmation, the haze rippled a moment and parted and Sweetness glimpsed bright lozenge-shaped winks of light, and above them, a dark finger of rock, feathery with antennae. And those regularly-shaped objects beneath, dare she trust they were houses ?

Why not? Everything was foolish out here, and equally wise. The veils of shimmer closed again, disclosing nothing. Sweetness Asiim Engineer breakfasted on five sips from her last bottle and a particularly choice fly-leaf she had been saving for a special occasion. Then she squared her pack, set the sun behind her right shoulder and strode into the east.

Toward evening she came to the dead town on the bluffs. The heat-haze had teased her on every foot, luring her through exhaustion and dehydration and the angry sun. Then, within three steps, it evaporated and the houses were tumbled walls and the aerials were ragged whips of wire and the lozenges of solar panels empty skeletons hanging in the warm wind. Dust had choked this town years before. Dust was its legacy and population, drifted in elegant swathes on the leeward sides of crumbled walls; clogging the irrigation channels of the bone-dry fields, soft and treacherous as water; stogging the shattered stumps of wind-pumps and ground-water siphons thigh deep in powder that smelled of time and electricity. A nameboard greeted Sweetness from beneath a shroud of dust. Summer storms had scoured the welcome to an epitaph. Eso ion ad. Lation, vation. One step short.

Water, food, a place out of the sun should have been Sweetness’s direct concerns but the gravitas of the buried town worked its way into her, drew her along the twisting, dust-choked alleys between the disintegrating adobe walls, peering through dead doorways into roofless rooms. In one she disinterred pieces of an old wooden handloom, with a scrap of cloth, beautifully patterned, that fell apart beneath her fingers into a spray of colour. In another, she found a set of ancient brass beer-pumps, patinaed green. She walked through orchards of dead solar trees to the sentinel upthrust of red rock. An open door invited entry. Look , it said: immediately within, a thread of wall-writing, time-faded and esoteric, wound into the shadowy interior. Can you resist? Not Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She followed it in and out of dry and fusty rooms, up spiral stone staircases. Rivulets and tributaries of arcane mathematics joined the main flow, feeding it into a torrent of gabbling symbols, tumbling over each other in their rush to the top of the house. Here they gushed out to cover wall and floor of an open ledge under the pinnacle of the rock. A fine room, some kind of observatory, had stood here in former times. Fingers of metal, sand-blasted shiny, hinted at a glass geodesic. The wind sang in the aerials. Sweetness spent a time taking in the prospects of the desert from the high viewpoint. To the south the bluffs fell away in a long line, like a weir in the redness, to an uninterrupted dunefield, awesome in its unbrokenness. West, along the twin lines of wind-polished silver, and she could just make out a faint darkening in the horizon that was the tokamak crater. East, rumours of mountains at the further edge of the world. North, five metres of symbol-inscribed sandstone. She went to it, pressed her fingers to the rock face, tried to trace out meanings and insights in the scrawlings but was only drawn into a subtle spiral of equations, in and in and round and round, ending in a single equals sign at the centre of the gyre of mathematics.

No revelation here, then. Beyond Comprehension, certainly, but not much Help.

Down then, and out. Out in the solar orchard, the sun mugged her. She was very tired and very hungry and very thirsty, this town was very dead and she was not one step nearer sanctuary. As her energy evaporated, Sweetness caught a scent, immediate and animal. The primal scent: water. Near, here. Instinct drew her to a small circular wall in the centre of a rectangle of rock that must once have been a garden. Dust lay banked around the foot of the wall but it did not seem to have spilled over the curb stones. Pray that it is not too deep. That would be cruel. Cruel would be typical. Water smelled sweet and deep. Sweetness rolled over the retaining wall and looked down into the well. Her own dark reflection, haloed by blue sky, looked up at her. It was not so deep. Sweetness scrabbled as far over the retaining wall as she dared, stretched down with her empty backsac to scoop a bagful of water.

Azimuth on a triple letter, double word , a voice said behind her, clear as water. Sweetness whirled, just remembering to hook one finger through the straps of her backsac. An old woman had spoken. What old woman? the dead town said. Search me. Sweetness did, with her eyes, left and right, foreground to middle distance. No old woman. See?

She bent over to dip another bagful of water.

Fighting Machine Squad Charlie, go go go! a radio-crackle voice yelled. Sweetness swung her bag out of the well in an arc of precious water, stood up, challenging the ruined houses. Water trickled from her backsac seams.

And where do you think I’m hiding a Fighting Machine Squad Charlie? the fallen walls and stump wind-pumps said.

“Okay!” Sweetness Asiim shouted. “What’s going on?”