Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“When is this?” he asked.

Sweetness gave him the year and month.

“Long way to go yet,” he said. “I suppose I should warn them all, for the good it’ll do.”

“Warn who?”

“The people who live here. Lived here.”

Drawn by the desolation, he picked up his humming pack and went through the desiccated streets, running a finger along the sandy tops of the fallen walls, peering into the slack mouths of the doorways at the choked rooms. Sweetness followed him, half-intrigued, half-hoping for more provender from the deep deep pockets.

“The people who lived here, I could tell you their names, the names of their children,” the man said. “I could tell you the names of their thousand-times children’s children, but the problem is, would it be true? So many alternatives, and you can never trust that you travel back to the one, the true. It might have been someone else entirely, in this history.” He walked through the sterile fields toward the red rock-house. “I wonder what happened? It’s easy to lose the small change down the lining.”

Sweetness glanced at the sky—evening coming on.

“You travel in time, right?” she said to the journeyman.

“Right, child.”

“So you could go back and find out what happened.” Temporal paradox had suggested opportunity to Sweetness. “In fact, you could go back and leave me some food, and some water. That would be nice. Somewhere comfy to sleep, you could do that too, and a bath. I’d really really like it if you could do me a bath, and a lot of shampoo.”

“Shampoo.”

“Shampoo.”

The traveller smiled. His face crinkled like a well-used old leather wallet.

“See that rock?”

“I see it.”

“I used to live there. That’s my home.”

“Those are your numbers, going all the way up?”

“You’ve been in?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Well, this time you come as guest, not trespasser.” The odd man bowed her through the door, indicated that she should follow the spiral of temporal mathematics all the way to its conclusion. From the ruined weather-room the sun was a cracked red yolk dripping light-juice over the horizon, the shards of twisted glazing bars desperate fingers trying to hold back the sol-stuff.

“Stay there. Don’t move.” The strange little man clicked his pack shut around him. He twiddled dials on his coat sleeve.

“Where would I go?” Sweetness began to ask, then a wind out of nowhere flayed her sunburn and whipped her hair in her eyes. “Hey!” Faces rushed in from the world’s four quarters, voices, images, and were gone. As was the man.

“Hey…” sweetness started to say again but while the word was still on her tongue, hot wind blew in her face, dust buffeted her, faces loomed at her, yawned as if to swallow her, then vanished to their haunts beyond the edge of the world. The man was back. With him, total transformation. The high room was a web of triangular glass panes linked into a geodesic bubble. Some of the lights were stained with Ekaterinist angels. The setting sun kindled them to divinity.

Then Sweetness saw the thing in the middle of the mosaic floor.

“Oh,” she said. “Oooh. Ooh.”

The bath was long and iron and elegantly curved, with lion’s paw feet, a gold faucet, and full to within ten centimetres of the brim with gently aromatic steaming water.

“And shampoo.” The man lifted up a silver ewer, poured a semeny gobbet into the bathwater. “And afterward…” A hammered brass Llangonedd table was set with covered thalis . Chapattis were stacked in a soft dinner-cloth. A folded napkin and bowl of rose-water invited finger-feeding. The man lifted a bottle out of a cooler and studied the label. “This is good. I never knew I had such taste.”

“What the, how the?”

“Pick one, choose one, engineer one. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” the man said, with a wizardly twirl of the mustachios. He surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. “It was never this good when I had it. Wonder what happened to that other Alimantando?”

“That your name?” Sweetness asked.

“It’s been one.”

“The writing’s still on the wall,” she said.

“So it is,” the traveller said. He walked to within squinting-distance of the equals sign, then began to follow the equations outward. Sweetness thought that the writing looked fresher, bluer, cleaner. But the water was deep and hot, and she could smell her hair again…

“Er.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” the man said, led out of the high room by numbers. As she wriggled out of her sweat-stiff gear, Sweetness glanced over her shoulder for spectators: reflex born of a life lived in close proximity to others. Beyond the stained glass there was no town, no walls, no ruination. A red rock stood on a bluff, and a steel rail ran by it. That was all. Trying not to screw her head round with the paradoxes of time-travel, Sweetness slid into the hot water, grimacing as it grazed her sun-sting. It was good and enfolding and long and she sang old burlesque songs as she scrubbed the shampoo into her curls. No drier, but she shook her hair out like a dog, then studied herself in the floor-standing mirror to check if she was still as cute as she remembered. She poked gingerly at the scabby burn on her cheek, turned profiles to see if her little breasts had lost anything she could not afford to desert privations. Still fabulous , she concluded, wrapped herself in a silk robe worked with more mathematical symbols. The night was high, the moonring a twinkling arch over the glass dome. Sweetness sat herself in a wicker chair by the glass and watched the hasty moon twins race each other up the sky.

Here’s a man can make anything by re-engineering history, she thought, so what else can he do for me?

The man himself looked through the stair door. He was dressed in velveteen knee-britches and frogged jacket. His mustachios were perkily waxed to lethal weapons.

“You’re, ah?”

“Done? Yah.”

“Good. Then let’s consume.”

He bowed in the Deuteronomian manner to guide Sweetness to her place, pulled out her chair, unfolded her napkin with a flourish.

“Thank you,” she said, charmed. Only proper man I’ve met in…oh my gods! Years!

“You’re exceedingly welcome,” the traveller said. “I have few enough chances to entertain, these days.”

Whatever they are , Sweetness thought. She said, “I got one question. What happened to the town?”

“It never happened, not in this time-line. I seem to have been something of a bon-viveur, though.” The man indicated his attire, the table furnishings. He offered a platter of wind-dried meats. Sweetness heaped her plate. “It’ll give you the shits, too much of that on an empty stomach.”

“I been eating stories,” Sweetness said.

“Really? How extraordinary. Poor fare, I don’t doubt. Little sustenance in most stories. A lot of people think their lives are stories, but they delude themselves. No structure, no narrative tack, no sense of dramaturgy. Just chains of events.”

“Not me,” Sweetness said. “I met this guy once told me I was a story, well, for a time.”

“That’s the most story any of us are, for a time.”

“He was weird. I think he was green.”

The dapper traveller choked as if poisoned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He had this tiny wee yurt thing by the side of the track, ’cept of course when you looked back it wasn’t there, but he said, ‘Sees all hears all knows all.’”

“‘Past present future,’” the traveller cut in. “‘Uncurtain the windows of time…’ Have you any idea, young woman, any idea at all how long I’ve been searching for this…trackside mountebank, this scryer of fortunes and futures?”