Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Sweetness saw a light in the traveller’s eyes, a prickling of his whiskers, an edge in the voice that warned her, Nice manners or not, you’re here with this man, and there’s no one else around and you don’t even know for sure what universe you’re in.

But the traveller was in flow and vent now. “This…soothsayer, this story-maker,” he sprayed, “This green man of whom you speak so lightly; he guided me to this place, teased and taunted and tantalised me across that desert, to this high red rock, where he abandoned me; he, if anyone, is the founder of the town that sometimes exists out there, sometimes not; he is the reason for every single one of those symbols on the wall, he is the reason I continue to travel across time, up and down and side to side; him. Read your beads? Say your seeds? Tell your bones? Of course! Of course he can tell the future, he is the future! Time is a part of him, as much as the air you breathe, the food you eat is part of you! This green man, you met him! Ah! I’ve been a billion years forward and a billion years back, I’ve seen the sun swollen like the burning belly of a pregnant martyr, this world of ours a ball of bubbling slag; I’ve seen the very first spring, a billion years ago in the youth of the world—there were things living then, girl, that you would not even reckon alive. I’ve travelled across the frozen years, I’ve seen them erect the diamond pillars of Grand Valley. And I’ve travelled from side to side: I’ve visited strange great civilisations, bizarre and inhuman; I’ve watched the fleets of Motherworld and this world set the heavens on fire with their weapons; I’ve seen this world in all its colours, red, green, blue, white, yellow; I’ve stood beneath titanic pyramids and mountains carved into alien faces. And all across these billions of years, landscapes of time, I see the footprints of this green man, mentor and tormentor, and always I am a moment too late, a day too early, a street or two wide: and you, traingirl, you tell me you meet him at some…some…trackside bawdy-burg! I tell you this, girl; yours must be a mighty story indeed for him to step out of time to say your sooths. I think I need to know much about you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. Tell me what brought you from there to here. Omit nothing.”

So she did. There was purple along the morning edge of the world by the time it was all told. The traveller interrupted often with questions she could not answer. At each of her half-responses, his face grew more grave. He started to roll his mustachios, an unconscious tic of concern.

“So here I am,” Sweetness concluded and the glass room was suddenly lit theatrical red as the edge of the world tipped beneath the upper limb of the sun.

“This is serious indeed,” the traveller said. “Glossing over that the Blessed Lady of Tharsis seems to have chosen to manifest herself as your late twin sister—the ways of deities, by definition, are beyond our consideration—if this Devastation Harx has control of her, he has access not just to the ROTECH command structure, which is bad enough for continued life on this world, but the vinculum processors that helped build the world; and that is bad news for reality, everywhere.”

“This is a problem? You go back in time and stop him.”

“Not so easy.”

“You whizzed this place up out of some other history somewhere, and you can’t kick Devastation Harx?”

“It’s a locality problem. I can strongly affect time-dependent events here, at the centre so to speak, but as I move away, the probability drops off. More than a hundred kilometres in any direction, it’s back to base-line reality. Think of me as a kind of human wave function.”

“So you’re telling me you can’t kick Devastation Harx.”

“I’m telling you that, yes. And anyway, even if I could, it’s not for me to do. You understand why?”

“I think so,” Sweetness said. In the night of words, as the people and events were drawn out her, the act of telling revealed an order, an organic structure in her experiences. She did not impose story on her tale. Story was within, quivering and sinewy in every action, like a speed-dog waiting its turn on the track. Nothing merely happened , every event was connected, one to another, with a unity and clarity. She thought of the green man’s fortune-telling stick, and its implied extension, out of the past, into the future. “It’s the story, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” the traveller said. When he smiled, as he was doing now, Sweetness was reminded of Uncle Neon, before. And, she thought again, in some ways, after.

“In this story, Sweetness Octave goes across the desert and has lots of big adventures before she tracks down Devastation Harx and his Church boys, rescues Our Lady of Tharsis, saves the world, and hopefully, somewhere in all that, gives Serpio a kicking.”

“That sounds like it.”

“A wee Engineer girl who’s not even allowed to drive a train takes on this guy who can balls about with what’s real and what’s not, and wins?”

“That’s the story. And if I know anything about them, things will get worse before they get better.”

“Only one problem.”

“Which is?”

“How do I get out of the desert?”

“That, I think, is my chapter in your story. Now, you catch a couple of hours’ sleep, and I’ll see what I can engineer.”

Sweetness slept in a brocade-canopied bed in a room with a high, small window looking south on to the great erg. She was shaken from the flocking hallucinations you get just before you drop off by a distinct feeling of other lives rushing through her. Then she gave a twitch and fell headlong into a dream that she was a girl sleeping in a canopied bed with desert wind blowing through her window who dreamed that, in a dream, without any polite warning, the universe abruptly changed. She woke up, and it had.

She lay in a wide pale bed in a high pale room draped with floating swags of pale muslin. The light through the unglazed window told her it was afternoon. The wind no longer smelled of desert, but vegetables fertilised with night soil. Peering through the gauzy layers of muslin, Sweetness thought she saw a ghostly figure by the foot of the bed.

“Hello?”

“Madam?”

Sweetness fought her way out of the fog of fabric. No ghost, but substance, a short, dumpy woman in her early teens, dressed in the ubiquitous pale cheesecloth, with an odd, conical hat that tilted forward.

“Who are you?”

“I am Bennis. I am here to help the madam dress and prepare herself for her journey.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Following the teacher by serving the madam.”

“The teacher? Never mind.”

“Madam.” Bennis lifted Sweetness’s clothes and held them out. They looked very clean and smelled of lavender.

“Are you an acolyte?” Sweetness asked suspiciously.

“I have the honour to be so, yes,” the girl said.

“I’ll dress myself, thanks.”

The traveller was waiting for her down at the tracks. A handful of acolytes, all alike in pale habits and conical hats formed a respectful circle around him. They parted to let Sweetness through.

“Good afternoon good afternoon good afternoon!” the traveller boomed. “I trust we are refreshed and restored? Good good good. Now, is this not a fine device?”

It was indeed; a thing of brass and wood and engraved steel. It stood four square on twin bogies, but Sweetness could not make out any driving wheels, or anything that looked like an engine.

“How?” she asked. The traveller pointed to the sky. Twelve big boxkites flew in three-by-four formation. Sweetness strained to make out bridle lines and tethers, they seemed to hover, unattached by anything but charisma. She did notice a shimmering around the head of carved Lorarch that was the rail-yacht’s figurehead, a halo, like spider silk in the wind. She went for a closer look.