Ian McDonald - Ares Express

He stepped away from Sweetness.

“Go!” he shouted.

Sudden tears almost paralysed Sweetness. The story that was hers before this new one had rewritten every line had been subtly played out here. In this version, the hero chose his trap over the wild world. To him it was not a trap. Never had been a trap, only a kind of mitigated freedom. All the dreams in the world. Sweetness swallowed the emotion. You have to let some things go, Glorious Honey-Bun. You aren’t responsible for every ill and blessing in the world. People make their own minds up and you abide by their decisions. The grey people, the infected, were spilling slowly out into the zocalo. Go, now, if you’re ever going to go. She ran between closing walls of the news-hungry toward the black slit of the alley. There she turned, sought for Sanyap Bedassie between the moving bodies. She saw him as a flash of colour through the thicket of limbs. She watched the circle of hands close in around him, and his reach out to shake them.

“Go figure,” she said, and turned again, and ran away from Solid Gone.

“ All right then, I’ll walk!” Sweetness shouted up at the iron cliff of the Class 22.

“Damn right you will, for you’ll have no ride with me, nor anyone else on this railroad,” Engineer Joan Cleave Summer-Raining Tissera 8th declared from his brass shunting oriole. With which he climbed the stairs to the bridge, slammed and dogged the port behind him and began the power-up sequence. Misused tokamak fields set Sweetness’s fillings ringing; bleed valves bullied her with steam. She jumped back as the drive rods cranked and the wheels spun, then gripped. The train moved off. Sweetness jogged beside the wheels, flinging trainfolk curses, which curse very hard. The rolling bogies of the tank cars soon outpaced her. She shied track ballast at the receding stained-glass lights of the caboose in the hope of pettily breaking one and annoying a Stuard.

The big chemical train curved out of sight between red dunes. The anger drained out of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She sat dejectedly on the rail. She was outcast, named, pariah. She was the Little Girl Who Would Not Marry Whom She Was Told. No one would Uncle Billy for her. What would be scary-biscuits was if the ban had spread trackside. If she could not scrounge a mandazi from a platform goondah or a pan of water from a tanking tower, her story might come to a premature end. Story, she thought. People in stories were not supposed to be permanently thirsty, or hungry enough to eat the beard of a Sumache sacerdotal. Or smell their own bodies.

“I wouldn’t have written it like this,” Sweetness told the desert.

Creak , answered a desert rook on a signal pylon. Black bird of ill omen. Outcast, named, pariah. Sweetness buzzed a rock at it. It flew away in a rattle of oily feathers.

Who had dirtied on her? Dirtied she certainly had been. Dawn had seen her marching along the westbound upline, Solid Gone’s grey cloud stuck like a styptic plaster to the horizon, light filling up the land, her own long shadow returning to her after being all over all night, when she felt through the soles of her boots the thrum of a train coming. Peering from the shade of her hand into the low sun, she had recognised the characteristic three tall steam-stacks of a Class 22 medium freightliner. She stood resolutely in the middle of the track, flagging down the chemical train with her shirt. It had come to a halt before her, Eastern Star , steaming slightly. The Engineer had descended into his oriole, but even before she could invoke the formula, he had demanded, “Is your name Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th?”

“It is, and I’m told it’s a very fine name.”

“I’m told different,” he said. Then she learned that her name had passed up the line with the speed and enthusiasm of a venereal disease, shunted and switched and sided until every part of the global web of rails knew to shun it.

Who told you? she had wanted to shout at the receding train. And who told them? Who did the dirt? The Ninth Avata people, fair enough: I did the dirt on them. Child’a’grace, my own Catherine of Tharsis ? My own train. Marya Stuard—she’d be up to it, she’s never got on with us—she’s always thought we thought we were better than her—and she’s got this reputation for mean to protect. She can take out the Starke dacoits, she can put my name about quick as a knife. But that’d be like a direct attack on the Engineers. It’d be one end of the train against the other. Not even she’d be mean enough to start a civil war. But someone certainly did, so who? Oh no. They couldn’t. Could they? They could: if Da’s proud enough not to talk to Ma because of a card game four years ago, he could dirt me. Sle’s petty enough but he’s too lazy even to start a rumour. If it’s my own people, I’m really shafted. I really can’t go back again. But what’s to go back to? They’ll just work up another contract and it’ll be me with the paper money all over my dress all over again, only this Joe won’t even have a stainless steel kitchen. Mother’a’plenty, they might even fix me with a Bassareeni, just to punish me. I’ll never get my hands on the throttles. So what’s to go back for? Make a life out here, off the track. Lots of people do. Most people do. Hell, I’m a weird ethnic minority, most people can’t even imagine how we live the way we do. It’s probably a darn sight easier, maybe even better. Friends would be easier to keep. You wouldn’t have your friends and family and work-mates all the same people. You wouldn’t work with your family. You wouldn’t have them around all the time. That would be good. You could get away. But imagine waking up and it’s the same place every day. You’d be stuck with the seasons. And you’d really never ever ever get to drive. Their way, maybe. Not likely, but it’s a possibility. This way, nada . And you wouldn’t be track. You’d be a passenger. Every time you got on a train, you’d know there’d be someone up there at the front with their hand on the drive bar, taking you where you’re going to. You’d just be going along for the ride. Hell, I’m an Engineer! I’m not driven, I drive. I drive .

So: here’s this story, and this is where it’s left me. It sure can’t mean for everything to end like this. Whatever happened to happy ever after? No, think, hey, doesn’t every story have a time like this, when everything’s been burned down and levelled and things are as bad as they can get for our heroine?

So, in this time of levelling, what does a heroine do?

She gets up. She picks up her pack and slings it on her back. She turns to face the place she is going. She says, If everything is ashes and flat, on this I can build. This is the lowest of the low. Every way now is up. So go. Nothing here for you. You’ll get where you’re going.

She got up. She slung her pack on her back. She turned to face up the line. She felt no stronger, no surer, no more determined, no less hungry/ thirsty/grubby/tired but she could not remain another minute by that trackside. She walked out of that flat field of ashes.

By noon she had still neither eaten nor drunk, but a wind rose behind her that cooled her and carried her forward, and early in the afternoon there was the space battle.

At least, Sweetness presumed it was a space battle, in that part of it clearly did come from space, though the action was low to middle atmospheric. It was all rather confusing and done so quick that if you had not been looking you would have missed it, and even if you were, you could still not be sure what had happened. Trudging along the upline toward the beckoning skeleton of a water tower, Sweetness had become aware of a distant low howl behind her. She spun in the instant it took that howl to become a devouring roar as three World Defence ionospheric interceptors streaked out from behind the far rim rocks and thundered over her head.