Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Perhaps her train.

The unbidden thought was like a flash-freezing of the spleen.

My train. My people. I could wave and cheer and shout. I could send down flares, I could throw lightning, I could explode whole stars and they still wouldn’t know it was me. They wouldn’t even look up from the track and drive levers. Do they even think about me?

Taal did. Great Taal, mother of grandmothers. Taal would have heard her, noticed her, received her message. But Taal was in Molesworth and she was up here on the way to Grand Valley with no way of telling a soul living or astral.

Sweetness watched the train out of sight among the other scintilla of the scarp land, then settled back in her harness and did not look at the ground again.

This time, she caught herself just as she was dropping off with a convulsive judder.

Dropping off!

She decided she would look at the stars. There was nothing to make her feel track-sick in those original patterns of light in the darkness. On the long night runs she had learned the names of the major constellations from her mother, but most of the night sky was just lights to her, patternless and magical. Sweetness knew the Cup, and the Dogs, and the Hunting Cat, but the nomenclature seemed tenuous and arbitrary. The Cup could as easily be the Diaphragm; the Hunting Cat, the Bouquet of Oddly Shaped Lilies. Who had these men been, whose particular visions became imprinted on the night sky? Sweetness amused herself down toward midnight by drawing up new constellations and naming them. That wasp-waisted configuration could be the Hornet, or, if you extended it to those three bright stars up there, the Nasty Vase. Just beneath it lay the Angular Banjo, to the left of it, hovering on the dawnward horizon, the Banyan. That band of silver; fainter, softer, broader than the moonring, was the Great Southern Railroad, that tight collection of eleven stars the Sunshine Express. Just visible under the rim of the canopy, the Really Little Church, at eleven o’clock to it, Snortus the Hog. Rolling along the upper rim of the moonring, the Hoop and Stick, behind it, in zodiacal procession, the Typewriter, the Star-Goat, Zelda the Cheap Woman, the Yawning Man, the Open Newspaper; the Five Tickets, the Pram, the Safety Pin, the Letter B, the Big Slipper, the Wishbone.

As she was about to set to work naming the southern constellations, a star fell out of the Letter B, transforming it into a P. It burned brief and bright to the east, a streak of swift fading silver light. While it ebbed from her eyeballs, three more plummeted out of moonring in close formation. They kindled and burned on the southern horizon. Then all three legs of Marco the Three-Legged Pig came off and blazed across the night like a firework display.

While Sweetness gaped, half-wondering if the Powers and Dominions had taken offence at her renaming them, the moonring blazed lilac. The band around the world was a loom of lasers: beams flickered and duelled, parried, stabbed, cut. Sweetness cried out in astonishment as the sky burned, almost let slip her hold on the heat-exchanger. Stars burst, bright enough to light the land beneath like day. Others hurtled on mad trajectories across the orbital marches to die in searing light, slashed apart by scythes of lilac light. Fleets and squadrons moved in from the outer constellations toward the edge of the affray: crimson struck back at lilac. A hundred novas burned on Sweetness’s retinas. Stars fell from heaven by the legion, scoring the sky as if fingernails had left love-scratches in the bowl of night to the ur -light beyond. By the lights of any and every of her world’s plethora of religions, this was the big one. God the Panarchic, the Ekaterina Angelography, the Seven Sanctas, the Thrones and Dominions, the Orders Lofty and Lesser together with the Rider on the Many-Headed Beast had come out slugging. From the point of view of a runaway traingirl lashed to the bottom of a limping airship-basilica somewhere over central Canton Banninger, God looked on the ropes.

We’re in big trouble , Sweetness thought, face lit by the heat-death of falling angels. What’s happening, why, who’s doing it? The questions answered themselves the instant she shaped them. That man, up there, just a fistful of metres above your head . But was this the big one, the Angels and Devastation Harx, duking it out, mano a mano , or was he merely testing the limits of his powers?

Crimson strove against the lilac. Beam by beam, duel by duel, angel by angel, crimson was failing. Sweetness’s carefully constructed constellations were unravelling as reinforcements were de-mothballed from centuries of cyber-sleep, powered up their altitude jets and rolled into attack orbits. Waves of crimson and lilac crashed against each other, surged back and forth across the moonring like the rather cheap rippling sand tank sculpture Uncle Mort had got, together with a dose, from that maintenance woman in Llangonedd Junction, and was meant to be relaxing but made Sweetness feel bilious. Stars fell like sparks from a wheel foundry, scattered across the nightside of the planet. It was an oddly soothing sight, war in heaven, until Sweetness realised the only reason she was not free-floating atoms in a cloud of superheated helium was because of the very weapon Devastation Harx was using to gain access to the battle systems.

He cuts down angels like grass in the city park, and you’re going against him with nothing more than a stick of sunblock, the bottom of a tube of glue, two thirds of a posh frock and a half-eaten romantic novel?

He who fights the tiger has no eye for the mosquito on his neck, she reminded herself, which was like something Cadmon, or, for that matter, Uncle Neon, might have said.

Yeah, until the mosquito bites.

High in the planetary approaches, inconceivable forces marched and countermarched, outflanked and ambushed, attacked and were thrown back. The Banninger sky still burned with the corpses of angels, but the lilac assault had been halted. The western horizon was lit by hundreds of puff-ball novas, sparkling like corroboree whizz-bangs: Harx’s orbital partacs, Sweetness guessed. The picket of lilac beams faltered, then failed. Crimson rushed through in ten, twenty, fifty places, invading like cancer. The lilac rallied but Devastation Harx’s intervention was at an end. The lilac was forced back on itself, inward, like a black hole collapsing under its own weight. Like an imploding star, it was merely overture to explosion. A single starburst, brilliant as the sun, lit the night hemisphere. Sweetness blinked afterimages out of her eyes as the nova turned the sky white, then faded. Something big had gone up, up there. A stardock, a Skywheel transfer station; maybe an orhab. There were people on those big cylinders. No legs and four arms and way too long and snooty people because they disdained coming down to earth, but still people. They probably never even knew they were dying.

Dark night returned, darker for having been broken by unnatural light. Even to non-astronomical Sweetness Engineer, the moonring looked tattered, moth-eaten. The constellations would never be the same again. Now someone would have to think up new names for them. The man in the flying cathedral had been beaten, at permanent cost to the night sky. This time. The next war would be fought on another battlefield entirely: the shifting interplay of alternative quantum universes. Next time, reality would be the casualty.

“Oh, man!” Sweetness said, suddenly cold and small and very high up, far from her close little cubby, and alone. She drew her knees up against her chest, hugged them to her, bound them close with cable and wished for something more to look at than lights in darkness.

A third time, that dislocation of having fallen asleep without knowing. Sweetness came to herself with a gasp and shudder. No nod, no doze, this; she woke with the light of early morning full in her face. Huddled over in her web of cables, she had slept away entire cantons and quarterspheres. The sun was a spreading scab of blood on the western horizon, clotted between the continental upthrusts of the Great Volcanoes, the only hint of the terrible war that had been fought in the dark. The air was miraculously clear and bright; light flooded across the land, driving early ribbons of cloud before it like a Purging Priest a poolful of swingers. Sweetness painfully lifted her arm to shade her eyes, tried to blink the morning gold out of it. Blinded. Then the sun lifted clear from the hollow between the mountains and one of the great vistas of her solar system unveiled itself to Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th.