Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Don’t get too close,” the traveller warned. “Diamond filament. Take your fingers right off quick smart.”

“Where did it come from?” Sweetness explored the safety of the burnished brass—already hot under the desert sun—and the intricate filigree metal work.

“I invented it, of course,” the man said. “These people tell me I arrived on it five years ago out of a dust storm that had been blowing for an entire season, thus ending the storm and saving their community. In this history, they beat me here by a good decade.”

“Yeah, I meant to ask, just who are these people?”

“Some manner of stylite order, originally. A Cathrinist sect; they’re a pretty peaceable crew. They seem to regard me as a great teacher.”

“The Teacher is a Skandava,” one of the acolytes spoke up, a skinny, hollow-cheeked man.

“A dweller between realities, that is,” a chunky woman beside him clarified.

“There you have it,” the traveller said. “Well, throw up your stuff then.” He stowed Sweetness’s bag in a cubby, then swung himself up on to the running board. He addressed the faithful, jaunty hat in one hand. “So, my good people, I, your great and distinctive teacher, bid you farewell—I have business between dimensions. I cannot say how long I will be engaged on it and when I will be able to return to you, but rest assured, I shall. Look for me in winter storms and summer lightning, in out-of-season whirlwinds and strange dreams. Now, it’s high time we were away.” To Sweetness he added, “Well, are you coming then?”

She bounced over the brass railing. The traveller was seated in one of two buttoned leather armchairs under an awning on the raised poop. Forward was a gurney-wheel, a binnacle and wind-rose and a set of brass levers. Old ambition, pressed down and almost forgotten, suddenly bubbled in her heart.

“Can I ask something?”

“Ask away,” the traveller said, unfolding a pair of smoked-glass pebble sun-spectacles from one of his many coat pockets.

“Can I drive?”

“The helm is yours,” the traveller said with an expansive gesture.

Sweetness took the footplate. She touched the hot, gleaming brasswork levers, the spokes of the braking wheel. The compass read west, the wind-rose reported a firm thirty-knotter up at two hundred metres, sou’ by sou’-west. Shading her eyes with her hand, she squinted up at the kites. They bobbed and strained, eager and restless. Not exactly a fusion tokamak and superheat boiler. And this wasn’t a drive rod in her hand. No calliope, no triple steam horns, but there was a brass bell. And the track ran straight before her and she could feel the rail-yacht quivering on its bogies for the off and it said, Drive me, take me off down that long line, make me run, Engineer girl. Point me wherever you want me to go.

Sweetness waved her hands at the Cathrinists. They humbly parted. She took the brake lever in her two hands and eased it back. The wheels creaked, the wind hummed in the invisible diamond thread. At first slowly, so slowly even Sweetness, used to the subtleties of great trains, could not be sure they were turning, the bogies began to roll. She gave a yip of glee. Furiously clanging the big brass bell, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th drove the rail-yacht through lines of politely applauding stylites and out across the Big Red.

There was a dome called home by the side of the Trans-Oxiana upline. It was a primeval pressure bubble from the days before the man-forming, orange and breast-like, with a firm heat-exchange nipple erect on the summit. It had stood here for eight hundred years. Anywhere else it would have had preservation orders slapped all over it, been the focus of a heritage park or folk museum. Here in undervisited Great Oxus, atmosphere panels had been torn out, gas-exchange ducts ripped away, the pristine skin of the dome rudely punched into gabled windows and high dormers. Berya and Laventine Prestaine were the inheritors of this vandalism. They and their five-times-removed forebears abided here amongst brown-paper parcels. The Prestaines were a race of postage and parcels operatives for a swathe of terrain a day’s walk from middle to centre, a further day’s walk to the far side. Mantis-like gantries, the design of a second generation Prestaine, dangled their digits over the main line, primed, by a series of heliographs and clockwork devices, to nimbly whisk mail from fast-moving trains and deposit it safely in a lacrosse net. Clothes, mail-order seeds, bicycles, ploughshares, machine parts, dirty books, sports equipment, festival hampers, manuals and guides, wallpapers and paints; all were snatched from the parcel turrets of the big transcontinentals and whisked high. A spring-loaded telpherage shot those on the wrong side of the tracks spryly to the right side, then up the cable and through the dormer into the sun-lit sorting room. It was thin, blurred speed-and-wires work. There Berya and Laventine, now in their twenties, childless for the good of the genepool, sorted and filed in their matching yellow postal aprons. The uppermost chord of the dome was lined with baked-clay pigeonholes, many of them occupied by dusty brown-paper parcels, addresses faded to sepia by the moving trapezium of sun through the dormer. These were the widows and orphans, the unloved uncollected by the twice-weekly power-trike delivery girls.

A woman in black was walking toward the dome this morning. She moved too spryly for her dowdy dowager’s weeds. She kicked at stones, gave the occasional skip, tightrope-walked the slim rail, arms held out at her side. A wink of high sun blinded her; a lens looking down from the observation nipple. Behind the eyepiece of the opticon, Berya Prestaine hooted.

“Lavvy! Lavvy! Pedestrian! Pedestrian!”

His sister peered up from her wicker parcel trolley.

“Pedestrian?”

“Afoot!”

“Let me see.”

She scurried along the ramp that spiralled up the inside of the dome, past the hundreds of labelled pigeonholes, sort codes and alphabeticals, yellowed adhesive tape sun-dried and peeling.

“A woman!” Berya declared. “Afoot!”

The leather eyecup of the opticon confirmed this to wheezing Laventine.

“Afoot or not, we must service her,” the elder sister declared. “We shall open the counter.”

“The counter!” useless Berya cooed, daft as a pigeon.

They were standing behind it, side by side, as Grandmother Taal arrived under the cool striped awning. Their stamps were updated, their record books open, their pencils sharpened, their dockets ready for peel, their scales calibrated, their receipt book triple-larded with carbon paper, their moist pads warm and wet, their rubber thumbs dimpling amiably. All was ready for any conceivable postal transaction.

“Deposit or receipt?” they asked simultaneously.

“I beg your pardon?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“Are you in receipt of a collectable, in which instance we will require your name, address and a form of photographic identification, or have you come to consign an item, in which case the next collection will be the twenty-three fifteen Night Sleeping Service.” Laventine Prestaine stared cock-headed at Grandmother Taal, like a constipated owl. A small worm of drool was crawling from the left corner of Berya’s mouth.

“Twenty-three fifteen?” Grandmother Taal said.

“That is correct, madam.”

“I had hoped to connect with the fourteen oh three Local.”

“The fourteen oh three?” Laventine turned to look aghast at Berya.

“Fourteen oh three?” Berya echoed, staring at his sibling.