Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Long gone, madam.”

“Gone gone gone long long long,” Berya fluted.

“But my compendium…” Grandmother Taal took out her vade-mecum , shook it as if she suspected broken clockwork, loose power cells.

“Mergers. All the thing on this line. Leveraged buy-outs. Snapping the tiddlers up, snip snap snip,” Laventine said, smugly. “First thing is shiny new corporate badges. Next is service cancellations.”

“Then when can I get a train? It is imperative that I catch a train.”

“Madam!” Laventine chided. “Where do you think you are? This is not Meridian Main. This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot. Our passengers are inanimate—usually—and wrapped in brown paper. In short, packages, madam. Packages.”

“I have to get a train, my granddaughter—my only granddaughter…She is in great peril…”

Grandmother Taal’s plea hit a layer of institutionalised incest annealed to the backs of the siblings’ eyes and bounced, like moonring-gleam from a starstruck cat. She laid the photograph of Sweetness on the counter. Berya’s hand seized the stamp like a striking snake, lifted it to blast. Laventine barely wrestled him back to the ink pad.

“This is my granddaughter.”

The two biddies clucked and fluffed over the photograph, then shook their heads.

“Never seen her.”

“Never seen, never been, never heard…”

“She would have been in the company of a wall-eyed boy.”

“Wall-eyed?”

Grandmother Taal pulled down a lower lid, rolled her eyeball up. The postal twins reeled back.

“Black hair, like a dust crow. Scruffy. Low caste.”

The twins checked to make sure each other was shaking his or her head.

“Name of Serpio. Waymender. A trainboy.”

“Waymender?” Berya twitched, as if association were a painful tic. He looked at Laventine. “Lavvy Lavvy Lavvy! Waymender! Trainboy!” He poked his finger in his cheek and rolled his left eye.

“My brother seems to have some positive recollection,” Laventine said.

“Your…brother…seems positively imbecilic,” Grandmother Taal said mildly.

“I shall consult the register,” Laventine Prestaine said carefully. Great soft yellow ledger pages curled, breaking waves surfed by spidery copperplate. Forefinger prodded names and deliveries. “Ah hah. Yes. The gentleman in question has indeed received a number of consignments from us. In fact…” She looked over her shoulder, furrowed her brow, unfolded a complex pair of spectacles from her apron pocket and squinted through them at the dusty, sun-shafted interior of the dome. “I knew it, I knew it! There is a collectable for the gentleman in Imminent Returns.”

“Might I see it?”

Laventine Prestaine cocked her head to the other side.

“It is rather irregular.”

“My granddaughter…”

Laventine showed Grandmother Taal how many ways she could purse her lips, then said, “Very well. Berya!” She tore a foil from the receipt book, stuck it to the back of Berya’s hand with tape and squared him up with the door. “Imminent Returns!”

While he wound his way up the spiral and down again, Grandmother Taal tested her new, sharper eyesight on the strict perspectives of the mainline. Not a wisp of steam, not a speck of black steel in the heat-haze, it reported faithfully. Berya Prestaine set the parcel on the counter. It was wrapped in brown paper and bound, neatly, with white string. It was book-shaped and book-sized and, when Grandmother Taal picked it up, book-weighty.

“Might I?”

The Prestaines reacted as if she had suggested an unexpected fisting.

“Open it, open it, open it?” Berya squeaked, hopping from foot to foot like a manic mynah.

“This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot,” Laventine boomed, drawing herself up to her full height. “Prestaines have been postal people since the days of the Rocket Mail. We hold our commission from St. Catherine Herself! Our obligations are sacrosanct. Sacrosanct!” She held a lofty silence, then added, “You may, however, feel it.”

Grandmother Taal ran her fingers over the packet’s contours. It was the size of a book, the shape of a book, the weight of a book, and, absolutely, the feel of a book.

“Is this the return address?”

Laventine peered at the adhesive label on the back.

“It is indeed, and you may count yourself lucky it had not already winged its way back to there.”

“Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.”

“You would be surprised how much mail-order religion we handle.”

“Has he had other deliveries from these folk?”

Laventine pursed her lips, another sour rebuttal armed, then shook her head testily and thumbed through the ledger.

“Yes, here, here, here and here.” Grandmother Taal could make nothing of the black, chitinous scrawl, but the spacing of the entries told her these were regular occurrences. “Here, here; here also, and here…”

“Yes, thank you. Are they all mailed from Molesworth?”

Laventine bent low over the adhesive receipt stickers next to the signatures.

“It would seem so.”

“Molesworth.”

“In Chimeria.”

“My good woman.” Grandmother Taal stiffened, flared her nostrils. “I am an Engineer. I am well aware it is a considerable journey.” Age, once accustomed to its due respect, does not gladly relinquish it.

“By rail,” Berya chirped.

“How else?” Grandmother Taal said sharply, but her mental vade-mecum was mapping routes and matching timetables and flagging halts with an increasing sense of losing the race between steam-powered grandmother and granddaughter on the back of a terrain bike.

“Lookee lookee lookee!” Berya exclaimed, running into the dome and waving his hands gleefully.

“My brother may not be the sharpest chisel in the set, but I defy anyone to better his innate sense for post,” Laventine stated proudly.

He returned wielding a heat-sealed plastic envelope emblazoned with prioritaire and expressissimo stickers. To be opened solely by addressee , warned red corner flashes.

“Ah, yes!” Laventine scanned the address. “I had almost forgotten about this one. We got a message on the radio about it, didn’t we, Berya?” He nodded. “Most important. They’re to pick it up today. Personal issue. Hand to hand.”

She passed the envelope to Grandmother Taal.

“The Glenn Miller Orchestra,” Grandmother Taal read out.

“We’re not unaccustomed to celebrity in our little dome. But the address, woman—read the address!”

“Director of Music, en route , Molesworth, Chimeria/Solstice Landing.”

Laventine and Berya Prestaine stood behind their leather-topped counter as if they had magicked up the whole shebang out of steel, sand and brown paper.

So it was that by midnight, Grandmother Taal was wedged between the trombones and the first clarinets, oppressed by cigarillo smoke and her coccyx bruised by eight hours bouncing over every rock and ant pile on the Solstice Landing trampas. Trainpeople and musicians, though brothers of the soul and historically mutually dependent, have never truly trusted each other. Grandmother Taal herself had too many memories of trashed dining cars and sexual shenanigans among the couchettes . They had a way about them at once overeasy and frighteningly professional; they salted their idle conversation with technical terms that computer scientists or geophysicists, with similar sacred vocabularies, would not have dared intrude into casual conversation. They talked of whole notes and eight bars, they had pappy-os and mammy-os and baby-blues. They spoke sentences where you beat time with a pursed thumb and forefinger and said pah-pah-pah-pah, pah-pah-pah-pah, pahpahpah. They jived over wah-wahs and mutes and leaned together to try out whispered rhythms, dat-da-dah no, try dat-duh-didit-duh , coming in sharp on the first beat and then going two three four five six seven and in and one hand beat five against eight and the other foot did eleven over four. Nothing was ever referred to by its correct name. Horns were bitches; clarinets fags; drums were skins, basses were broads, guitars were axes, saxophones were saxes. Sex sex sex sex sex. The musicians were as publicly intimate with their slang mistresses as teenagers in a city park, blowing into orifices, sticking tongues into slits, running fingers up and down brass nipples, stuffing balled hands into smooth flarings. Their professional hygiene techniques involved copious quantities of saliva and rags. They smoked colossal amounts of bhang . The interior of the big black boogie bus was a tube of blue funk. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain the driver was in control of the big eighteen-wheeler articulated land-train. The begoggled girl behind the wheel could be deliberately steering for the hummocks and mounds. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain she much cared whether she was or not. She leaned to yell at the tall, bespectacled man on the bench seat beside the grim-faced driver.