Ian McDonald - Ares Express

If a dead town could have spread its hand in a shrug, Huh? , this one would have.

“I said, what’s going on?”

No answer, of course. But the dust stroked her cheek, toyed with her hair. A rattle of wires: the aerials on the high rock were restless, twitching. A moan from the skeletons of the wind gantries. Dust rose around the soles of her desert boots. A prickle of pure superstition on the nape of Sweetness’s neck said, Turn around, traingirl . Out there, beyond the edge of the dead town, beneath the fall of the bluffs, a wind-devil was moving across the face of the Great Red. Unlike the scatty whirlwinds of the High Plains and the polar deserts, this did not wander willy-wally, wind-driven whither-whether. It cut straight through the crests of the dune fields in soft detonations of sand. Its course was straight and determined; aimed right at the dead town on the bluffs: No , Sweetness knew, at me . And by the same intuition she knew it was futile to run—if there had been anywhere she could have run in this terrible land—for the devil in the wind would hunt her wherever she tried to hide. The wind rose, whipping the dust drifted around the well rim into long, stinging streamers. Sweetness chased her scattered things, struggled the saturated backsac shut and wrapped one of her torn shirt sleeves around her head. The dust-devil was at the foot of the bluffs. It was a scream of wind and sand, shot through with flickers of lightning. In one bound it leaped the bluffs. Dust blew up around Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She battled through it to take shelter in the lee of the well. Sand scoured her seared shoulders and arms. She fought to keep her mouth and nostrils covered. She had heard of these desert gyrestorms, that could pounce on a herd of grazers and in mere mouthfuls reduce them to bloody bones. The twister dived on her. Sweetness threw up her hands to cover her head and was buried in faces. Old wrinkle-faced matriarchs; heaven-eyed teenagers; scampish, grinning goondahs; harried-looking men in veterinary’s scrubs; women in pilot’s helmets; youths in cylindrical supplicant’s hats, judges, engineers, men in ROTECH uniforms, shysters and roustabouts, faces of angels and faces of demons and faces in between. Faces, and voices. Voices praying, pleading, demanding, declaiming; voices of prophecy and obsession, voices of children and aged aged men, voices of radio and wrath, voices whirled away before their words grew solid meanings. Voices, and histories. Images of children laughing and leaping in the rain, of bright, dart-like aeroplanes stitching across the sky, of steel-shod behemoths marching through corn fields, of wide-hatted men in long coats cradling needle guns, of choirs of angels hovering over a stark desert pillar, of babies in bell jars and balls on a green baize tabletop. And at the centre of it all, a figure, perhaps a man, perhaps not, drifting in and out of focus, as if near and far at the same time, shifting between probabilities. The figure congealed: a man, wrapped for the desert, in a long coat, with a heavy pack on his back surmounted by what looked like a sewing machine. One last flicker and he became actual. At the same instant the whirlwind dispersed in a mighty rush of faces and whispers and memories. The figure staggered, righted itself.

“God!” it cried. “Here again!” Then, noticing Sweetness staring over the rim of the well, it pulled a device like a collapsible umbrella from a holster at its waist and brandished it at her. “What in the name of all sanity are you?”

“I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Sweetness ventured, then, finding the umbrella-thing aimed at her absolutely the last straw in a line of kidnappings, hoodwinkings, maroonings, meanderings and burnings, she declared, fiercely, “And just who the hell are you?”

The figure goggled owlishly at her. But if he were any bird, it was a desert hawk, something keen and pinched and fidgeting; a bit leathery. The feather in his battered hat lent to the avian image, and the dark little eyes that gave no hint of where they were looking. The long, elegantly curving mustachios suggested another kind of beast, some watchful, quizzical desert gopher, a chewer of taproots and cactus, burrowing and twitch-whiskered. Altogether he was a strange bestiary of a creature, Sweetness decided. Still fixing her with his eye, the man said, “I am a traveller.”

“Me too,” Sweetness said. “Where from?”

“Here,” the man answered.

“You haven’t exactly gone far,” Sweetness said. The man tilted his head from side to side, as if attempting to triangulate her soul.

“I’ve just got back,” the man said after a good pause. “I was away a long time.”

Sweetness realised that noun-play in a dead town with mysterious travellers who crossed the great desert in dust-devils of faces stood a good chance of killing her, and that all she had eaten for the past three days was paperback romantic fiction.

“Have you anything to eat?” she asked. The traveller heard the plaint in her voice. He shrugged off his heavy pack, which Sweetness now saw was much more complex and arcane than at first impression. There were whip aerials and coils of cable and arrays of flashing lights and copper dials and bellows that went in and out and the definite taint—to the train-born—of fusion power. The traveller rummaged through his pockets. His coat was generously endowed with them. He hooked out a clutch of claw-shaped green fruit too large for the pocket that had produced it, but Sweetness was inured to the dimensionally transcendental.

“These are good.”

Sweetness frowned at them.

“They’re going to be big, a few million years from here.”

She took the bunch, peeled one of the hooked things. Cautious sniff: coffee and vanilla and a sweet/ sour tang, like guavas, but a little to the left. She took a bite. It was so good to a belly fed with mass market paperback that she devoured the whole bunch in six mouthfuls. She wiped her sticky fingers on her backsac. Since entering the big desert she seemed to have eaten nothing but fruit and paper. She remembered her promise of a fish on the mud-terraces at Therme.

“Million years?” she asked.

“I get around,” the traveller said. He spread his coat tails and sat beside her on the well wall. “Up to the end, and back again.” He held out his forefingers, crossed his hands. “Both ways.”

“I got an uncle like that,” Sweetness said.

“Have you now?” said the stranger. He explored deep in a pocket, hauled out a greaseproof-paper package. “These were fresh yesterday.” Inside were pale flaky rolls, forefinger sized.

“Thanks.” They were stuffed with a sweet, beany paste. “Only he’s more like beyond the end, if you know what I mean.” This, through a spray of pastry flakes.

“Your uncle?”

“More like elsewhere.”

“Ah yes. I am familiar with that. Most when is elsewhere, when you come down to it. It’s all probabilities; at first I thought you went forward and back, what I now realise is that you go sideways as well. Every movement forward, or back, is into an alternative created by your own apparent motion. I go diagonally through time.”

“The sky’s red there,” Sweetness said. “There’s frost on the ground, and a lot of stones. No one around, no clouds, no plants neither. Any more of those roll things?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said the traveller. His hand went elbow deep into his right pocket. “That’s the problem with diagonal, probabilistic motion. You get something good, you can’t go back to it again. All you can go to is a close alternative. Sometimes it’s better. Usually it’s worse. This do?”

He offered a foil-wrapped savoury. Sweetness’s desert-wise nose picked up a whiff of off but it was sustenance. For the first time the traveller seemed to notice the where and what of his location. While Sweetness licked animal grease off her fingers, he surveyed the dead town.