Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Fine words, from a nearly-nine on her knees in an inspection pit, buried under a kilometre of duststorm. It was then she noticed the steady rivulets of dust pouring over the corners of the dug-out, forming spreading spill-cones across the concrete floor, slowly burying the pieces of discarded train-innards with the granular tick of the hour-glass. Already it was piling up around her fingers, a sensation at once sexy and enclosing. She could feel it trickling into her shoes.

“Aw, come on ,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn’t the end.

As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness’s ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm’s passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.

Next round would go to the canvas.

Sweetness heaved herself out of the hole, suspiciously sniffed the air. It was clean and good and wonderfully clear, like clothes beaten by a dhobi boy. With her new clarity of vision, Sweetness now saw an object far on the western horizon, previously obscured by dust and heat haze. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Had she not seen such things before—indeed, spent a night with that man under one—she would have disbelieved her eyes. They told her true. The thing looked like—and therefore was—nothing more than a domestic, fireside companion set—poker, brush, shovel, tongs—big enough to keep hell tended.

An afternoon’s walk brought her to the prodigy. The central column and cap rose like the dome of a great, airy temple. Sweetness walked under it, wondering at the artifacts hanging from its rim. The poker was a sheer steel shaft, thirty metres long, slowly penduluming in the rising evening breeze. The brush bristles had been sadly abraded by the duststorm, lopsided and graded like a Belladonna goondah’s asymmetrical buzz-cut. The shovel could have scooped up hosts of the sinful for the tongs to hold in the white heart of purgatory’s forges. Sweetness steered away from the hungry, pronged jaws. All were polished metal, scoured clean by the dust, brilliant in the evening sun.

Sweetness started as she rounded the corner of the base to find two figures huddled against the plinth. Figures, she presumed, though they were man-shaped bundles of ochre-stained fabric. Dust-mummies , she thought, at which they both moved, shedding clouds of dust. Sweetness took a step back. Out here, jokes and superstitions and impossibilities turned up behind every rock, real and able and eager to do stuff to you. The mummies shuffled to their feet. They beat their wrappings free of dust with their bandaged hands. Sweetness saw then that they wore long duster coats and baggy trader’s pants with thick-wound puttees. The hands then rose to the bulbous brown heads, fiddled for a loose end and streeled off more metres of cloth than Sweetness ever imagined you could wear around your head without suffocating. Obsidian eyeballs glittered; Sweetness relaxed when a few turns more revealed them to be little, round-eye sunspectacles. Faces emerged, one tall and square, the other round and purse-lipped. Both wore identical hairstyles, shaved at the sides, teased up into a flat-topped mesa. They looked dedicated and zealous as they kicked away their discarded binding bands. Sweetness might have been stone to them for all their regard.

“A storm that was,” the square-faced, taller one said, taking a theatrical upright pose.

“Storm indeed, Cadmon,” the other agreed, copying him.

“Unseasonable.” The square one made a slow sweep of the horizon.

“Unseasonable indeed, Cadmon.” The squat one followed suit.

“One might almost think…”

“One might; one does, Cadmon.”

Sweetness watched their act for a few moments before clearing her throat. The two men turned as one; black round eyes regarded her, heads cocked to precisely the same degree.

“What is this? A fellow traveller in strange terrains?” The heads cocked the reverse angle.

“Would seem so, Cadmon.”

“A girl, I would hasten.”

“Hasten so, Cadmon.”

“Look, I don’t mean to butt in here if you’re doing something, but have you got any food or water?”

The two men looked at each other.

“Water and provender, for our guest?” the tall one, obviously Cadmon, asked.

“Exactly so, Cadmon,” the still nameless one answered and took a small bulb from one of the many pockets of the utility vest he wore beneath his duster. A soft squeeze. Sweetness waited for something to happen, then noticed a small stirring in the dust. Buried things unearthing themselves. Dust boiled and shed. Two gravboards with bulging leather side-panniers bobbed to the surface and came to rest at a level metre.

“Cool,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer.

Water there was, and provender, in square-faced Cadmon’s carefully weighed usage. Sweetness ate smally and carefully, sipped her water and used two handfuls to wipe the caked dirt off her face. Then she asked, “So, what are you guys doing out here then?”

“That question, I rather think, is better asked of you, madam,” Cadmon said. The short one nodded.

“I’m a story,” Sweetness said, then regretted her enthusiasm, for now she had committed herself to telling it yet again.

“No no no,” Cadmon interjected with a raised finger, mimicked by his partner. “Names, then stories.”

“Okay,” Sweetness said. “I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The two men bowed slightly.

“I am Cadmon, and this is Euphrasie,” Cadmon said, with a sweep of the hand which the shorter man could not refrain from distantly echoing. “We are the Brothers Dust.”

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “But you’re not brothers.”

“Brothers of the soul,” Cadmon said.

“Soul, indeed,” Euphrasie chimed in. “Brothers aesthetic, atheistic, anarchic.”

“We are anarchist artists,” Cadmon said. “Behold, our work.”

As one, the Brothers Dust thrust out their hands to the enormous fireside companion set, in the lengthening shade of which this exchange had taken place.

“Do you do a lot of household stuff?” Sweetness asked.

“You are familiar with our work?” Cadmon asked loftily.

“I’ve slept under some of it.”

“Which, pray?” Euphrasie responded, quick as a pocket-picking.

“The big chair,” Sweetness said. She added, “I’ve seen the ironing board from a distance. And the big shoe.”

“The big shoe!” Cadmon and Euphrasie chorused in one voice.

Sweetness thought a moment, then said, “So, correct me if I’m wrong here, but how is it anarchy to do big ironing boards and shoes?”

“The anarchy of incongruity,” Cadmon proclaimed.

“And the domestic,” Euphrasie added. “Domesticating the desert.”

“And desertifying the domestic,” Cadmon insisted. “Thus we confound two static absolutes: the desert without and the desert within.”