Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Why did she, you know, hook up with me? Be my sister?”

The traveller looked over his small spectacles at her in exactly the way the Head Magister of the School of the Air had when Sweetness had given him some particularly Sweetness-like answer over the picture link.

“She’s a saint. She does what she likes.”

“That’s a really weak answer.”

“Yes, but it’s also the only correct one,” the traveller said, and with that, he popped like a bubble. Doctor, spectacles, twinkle in eye, mustachios, buttoned chair and brass poop-rail. The wheel vanished under her hand, the brass brake lever evaporated. The steering binnacle faded into the red horizon. One trade became two. The bogie disappeared into quantum mist, but Sweetness’s momentum was real.

She threw her arms up to protect her head, curled instinctively into a foetal ball, but hit hard and fast. Sweetness rolled twelve times along the hard concrete sleepers. She cried out, feeling ribs bend, muscles tear, skin split. She came to on her back, panting painfully, staring at the sky. The kites were the last to become impossible, blowing away in the high air like wisps of cloud before the thermocline of a warm front.

Alive, then. And panting, and hurting—a lot. And horns. Horns horns horns. Train horns. Get out of my way horns. Big and loud and Oh Dear Mother’a’mercy, close .

She sat up.

The train was on top of her. If she tried to get up, if she tried to run, if she tried to roll to left or right, it would smash her like a bug, guillotine her on the rails. She threw herself flat on the trackbed as the sweep of the cow-catcher rushed over her. Tokamaks yelled, bogies thundered; the wind howled, Sweetness closed her eyes and yelled back. The din of heavy metal seemed to go on for longer than any train should be. She opened her eyes. Through the whirling grit and sand she saw wheel sets blur over her face. A blink: for an instant, another face looked down into hers: a freeloader, clinging spreadeagled to the understructure. She remembered another face, looking up at hers, out of the dark, clinging to the side of an ore-truck as she eased the safety back on her djubba-stick. Pharaoh. Memory and name came in instant, then this fellow hitcher was swept on to his own personal destination.

“Oh God!” Sweetness screamed at the hurtling steel. “Enough! Enough adventure, all right?”

The train heard her and swished its caboose over her head and left her, gasping and grit-blind, prone on the upline of the Big Red mainline. Sweetness Asiim Engineer counted ten, fifteen, twenty deep breaths before she sat up. A hundred sleepers down the track was her bag of essential things. Over her shoulder, the train curled around a long, slow right-hander toward the mountains that looked somehow lower and more weatherworn than the ones she remembered from moments ago. And the sky was paler, the clouds less pink, the desert grubbier, less pristine, scruffy with scrub planting. Most real, and insistent that she was back on the hard, mundane baseline, was the gnaw of hunger in her belly.

“I’m starving!” Sweetness shouted at the wilderness.

You can never grow fat on miracle food, or slaked by other-world’s water.

Her cheek smarted from the steel-burn where she had tumbled on to this same rail, a world away. Her arms ached pink with sun-sear.

“Mother’a’mercy, I am back,” she declared, then made sure she could heave herself to her feet—just—and hobbled down the track to reclaim her pack. As she checked the contents, she remembered Psalli’s spell for Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness.

Reality-manipulating time-travellers chasing the shade of a green man across alternate futures and pasts, fixing time just to suit you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

That worked as Aid Beyond Comprehension.

The spell had one shot left in it. The warm, unpredictable desert wind eddied around her and, sudden, strong as memory, Sweetness smelled water . Her nose guided her. She turned to face upline. There, at the very edge of the heat-haze, was that the shadow of a cloud dropping dark on the desert? Did the red turn green, like the colour blindness test her brother had failed, but would be an Engineer none the less? In that red-green were there flecks of black? Might they be buildings, houses, streets, a town?

Smell is the oldest, deepest and surest sense. Yes, it said, and trusting its instincts, Sweetness shouldered her pack and tramped steadfastly up the long line toward the cloud shadow.

At some point in its recent history, Solid Gone, population 2125, elevation 2124, had offended the weather. World was rising in brilliant reds and ochres, skeined through with imperial purples and mood indigos, around Sweetness as she turned off the mainline on to the two-rut track down which the finger-board pointed. Thither Solid Gone. But over Solid Gone a small, shapely cloud hovered, so firm and exact Sweetness felt a shudder of association with Devastation Harx’s airmobile cathedral. Evening air brushed the nape of her neck; the cloud hung in defiance of all winds, seemingly moored over the small desert town. Not one drop of rain had it ever cast. The earth beneath it was dry as a Poor Quadrentine’s crack, penumbral, deathly. Sweetness rested her bag a moment on the wooden nameboard, studied the grey array of dead solar trees, languid wind-pumps and adobes clumped around the taller cylindrical buildings of the civic centre, then hitched her bag and marched down the slight slope across the terminator. A blind woman could have told the moment she stepped under the cloud. A stifling, draining heat sucked sweat from Sweetness’s pits and the pluck from her pith. She stopped, shook her head, suddenly reluctant to walk on, to turn and go back, to do anything intentional at all. As a kid, she had told and told and told her parents that she couldn’t take antihistamines to combat the zone-allergies she had suffered from—it’s always pollen season somewhere in the world, for trainpeople. They made her woozy, they stuffed her head with socks and lint, made her eyes red and her limbs heavy as if she had been dropped down Motherworld’s gravity hole. Child’a’grace and Naon Engineer had made her take them anyway, and it was all exactly as she had described it to them. But Solid Gone was twenty times that.

Solid Gone was a town-shaped case of myalgic encephalopathy.

There were people here. They sat on their wooden verandahs, dressed in drab, turd-like colours. They were of a variety of ages, but all seemed old. Their bodies had no bearing, they slumped and sagged, slack sack-folk. They half-listened to wirelesses set up on beer crates; or semi-attended to the ornate bong-pipes carved from desert gypsum which had been Solid Gone’s name and fame, once; or spent moments studying crossword puzzles and Star-prize Wordsearch magazines before deciding it was too much effort and lolling back in their deckchairs. Even more than a flick of attention to the passing colourful stranger was too much effort. A tip of the chin, a slight declination of the head, were all the welcomes Sweetness received to Solid Gone.

The intricately terraced and irrigated weedfields had turned to dust and blown away years before. The wirelesses were all tuned off station, playing a sinister, whispering amalgam of livestock prices, rural politicians, failed comedians, phone-ins about infidelity. Talk talk talk. A chatter of spectres. Not a minim of music. The heat and drone sat on Sweetness’s shoulders like grey luggage. Drear. Heat. Weight. With every step she imagined the colour draining from her clothes; a thread here, a button there, a seam, a panel, whoops! a whole sleeve, gone dirt.