Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“This Harx is an apocalypsist?” Grandmother Taal said, sitting primly on an uncomfortable banquette, boots buried up to the ankles in buff fluff.

“I think that’s what you’d call someone who advocates all-out war between humans and angels,” said Mishcondereya.

“So how did your misfortunate daughter become involved with such a disreputable villain?” Seskinore asked.

“My granddaughter did not take to an arranged marriage and ran away with a very common Waymender boy, who is also a member of this church,” Grandmother Taal said.

“I ran away and I did all right,” Weill said. “But then, I stayed well away from religions like any sane boy should. Especially ones you have to pay for.”

Mishcondereya flared her nostrils and gave a damp, disdainful flick of her still-wet hair.

“Not too bright, is she, your granddaughter?”

Before Grandmother Taal could riposte, Bladnoch’s sofa arm beeped. He bent close to the screen. Taal could make out neither the scratchy jerky images or the muttered words but something had come in on top of his sports channel, something that put furrows in his brow. Skerry was beside him. Grandmother Taal wondered if there might be something between the tall, thin man and the tough little woman.

“Trouble,” Skerry said. “Someone just took out three aerospacers on manoeuvres over Big Vermilion.”

“How?” Mishcondereya asked.

“Partacs,” Skerry said carefully.

“Oh,” said Seskinore. “So, either the angels have gone berserk up there…”

“Or Pastor Harx is cranking up his apocalypse machine,” Weill said.

Perked by the scent of action, Skerry leaped to her feet and pulled an anodised aluminium gosport horn down from the ceiling.

“Full speed ahead there!” she shouted to the engineers. On her word the Class 27 found power deep in its tokamaks and leaped forward, sending the United Artists reeling.

“Excuse me,” Grandmother Taal said, innately adjusting to the surge and sway, “but exactly full speed ahead where ?”

“To the Comedy Cave,” Skerry said without a flicker of irony.

“Please explain. I am an old lady and have experienced much of late.”

“We’re not all improvisers like Weill there,” Mishcondereya said. “You think we make this up as we go along? I tell you, it takes time and a lot of effort to put a good routine together, and a lot of resources. We’ve got FX teams, costume designers, script consultants, hundreds of extras, all on permanent standby.”

“And my granddaughter?”

“Find Harx, and we’ll find her, if I know runaway brides,” Skerry said.

“Oh people,” Bladnoch said, leaning over the arm of his sofa to look out the window, “weather warning.”

Even as he spoke, Grandmother Taal could feel the train slowing from its flat-out gallop. Everyone rushed to the window, faces and hands pressed to the gold-cooled glass. Solstice Landing’s magnificent dereliction had been left behind; the United Artists Special now arrowed across the high, unkempt and only-partially manformed high Plateau of Gwyst. Not a clint or a karst or a crater punctuated the monotonous black-sage scrub that gave this country its informal name; the Ashlands. You could see clear to the horizon in any direction. No missing a duststorm out there.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Bladnoch said, “but this isn’t supposed to be happening.”

“It’s big,” said Mishcondereya coolly. Skerry was on the gosport again, hollering at the driver.

“I see it!” he yelled back, voice thin and tinny on the metal tube. “Mother’a’grace, don’t you think I see it? No way I’m going through that, lady, timetables or no.”

The train had already slowed from its high cruise to a canter. Brakes squealing as the pads felt the first touch of the dust, the United Artists Special came to a halt in the heart of the Ashlands. Moments later, the storm closed around it like a fist. The carriages went blind. The windows were opaque dark brown panels. The train could have been sealed in terra cotta like a hedgepig for roasting.

Sweetness , Grandmother Taal thought. Where are you, what are you doing, are you safe? She tried to summon up some echo of the psychic resonance of the sending to will a message back to her granddaughter but the electrical properties of the duststorm muffled the will, baffled the higher sensitivities. United Artists sat in the close gloom while Seskinore recounted an interminable epic of his days as a stand-up on the circuit made all the more unendurable by the creepy feeling, there in the hissing twilight, that everyone was dead, killed in a crash when the train jumped points and derailed at four hundred and eighty, and this was the hell to which God the Panarchic consigned state-sanctioned practical jokers.

“Clearing,” Bladnoch said at last and by the time everyone got to the windows to peer through the sand-blasted glass, the last grains of dust had blown away and the sun stood high over Ashlands, ashen no more, for every leaf had been stripped from every black-sage bush.

“Took the paint right off,” Mishcondereya said, again coolly.

“Think what that could do to your beautiful skin,” Weill said.

“Never mind that,” Bladnoch said, craning round to follow the track of the departing storm, “Think what Harx can do if he’s got into the weather.”

The train moved on and was soon back to its customary pell-mell, down from the Gwyst into the Banninger. Bladnoch’s warning spurred United Artists from their perpetual bickering and sniping to some manner of actions. They formed a creative huddle in a glassed-off office section at the rear of the carriage and spent the remainder of the sun-lit hours in professional level sniping and bickering. Grandmother Taal saw much gesturing and stamping around, finger pointing and table punching and fist clenching. She ate a desultory prepackaged dinner in a plastic compartment tray dispensed from a slot and lip-read oaths that made even a trainfolk Matriarch blench. She squared the two contenders. In the green booth: a flying cathedral, untold catamites, a warehouse full of apparatchiks on ropes and the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis, with which he sought to Trojan Horse his way into the programmes of the angels themselves. In the red pavilion; a trapeze artist with a penchant for indecently short shorts, an alleged maestro who had urinated away his genius for afternoon sports channel tractor-pulls; a wispy performance artist (whatever that might be) with a pierce everywhere but through her ego; a paunchy joke-jockey too piss-poor even for the cruise trains; a ferrety self-proclaimed anarchist whose only chance of defeating the great enemy was through body-odour. Grandmother Taal mused for a time about what type of world it might be when Devastation Harx dethroned the angels. If any were left alive to inhabit it. The Engineers had never in all their genealogy produced a theologian, so Grandmother Taal’s conclusion, by the lights of her Domiety, was quite profound: if the Evil One defeats the Panarch, he, by defection, becomes God in all his absoluteness. When he takes the adamantine throne, the universe is remade in its entirety, beginning to end, and every memory with it. What we become, we will remember always having been. If there are trains in that world, they will still need Engineers. If not, then she would never know what she had been.

With full night outside, the huddle of heads broke up. The leather table and bulkhead wall were covered in fibre-pen scribblings but when the door flew open and United Artists stomped out, everyone went as far from his comrades as the carriage would allow and no one looked at anyone. Skerry paced tightly up and down in the one square metre by the bar, punching her fist into her hand. Bladnoch lay face down on his sofa and flicked on the evening sulky racing from Charnoch Park. Seskinore sat on a pouffe, palms on thighs, tilted his head upward and began to hum, quietly but nasally, hits from Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler . Mishcondereya huddled in a chair, knees pulled to her chest, to practise sulks and pouts and, when she thought someone was looking, let leak the odd hard-done-by tear. Weill picked ferociously at his teeth and, when done with that, slipped off his sandals and peeled white strips of athlete’s foot from between his toes.