Ian McDonald - Ares Express

A good God, a just God, would, at the end of your life, refund you all the time you had spent looking for little lost things. Like lock-picks. And granddaughters. Grandmother Taal plunged her arm elbow deep into her black bag and began to rummage through pocket universes.

The Bedassie boy had been easy to coerce. The polythene bauble perched on the sheer stalagmite might hold one so unadventurous as to prefer existence as a captive of a captive audience to wild wild life with a fit and nubile Engineer girl, but not a trainperson, and certainly not Engineer Amma . The boy had been polite, if a little malodorous from his long captivity and it was immediately evident to Grandmother Taal that he had been deeply touched by his exposure to Sweetness. She suspected that her granddaughter was one of those cursed to be fatally attractive to a certain type of man. Please God, the attraction did not seem to be reciprocal. Stainless steel kitchenettes were undeniably an excuse to up and leave, but for Sweetness to have boom-shakaed with this …Grandmother Taal shuddered at the thought.

Deep down in the dimensional folds of her bag, her fingers found a little pocket dedicated to souvenirs of Sweetness. A baby tooth. A bronzed raggie-doll. A scrolled-up drawing of a train, with a tree by the track and a yellow sun overhead and smiley Mama and Da waving palm-frond hands from the driving cab. The silk belly cord she had given up when she ceased to be a child and became fully human, an Engineer. The smeared panties of her womaning, preserved in a resin paperweight.

The fingers lingered a moment. The memories they felt out were a spur to hurry on. Soon, very soon, they’re going to unleash Armageddon and your granddaughter has put herself right in the middle of it. The part of her that Uncle Billied rides across whole hemispheres, that recklessly bet years of her life on a turn of cards, that hitched with big band leaders and schemed with state-sponsored practical jokers, that tried to pick locks on railway tunnel exit doors, was slyly proud of that.

Three dimensions down, she found the lock-pick.

Let’s see you try this, Marya Stuard, Grandmother Taal thought with an inner grin as she unfolded the prongs and set to work on the latch that sealed the two half doors. You may only need a lock-pick once, and maybe never, but when you do, you really do. Such was the logic of the collection she had stashed away over the decades in the black magic bag.

As she felt her way into the subtle mechanism, Grandmother Taal reflected that Sweetness’s very gift probably sentenced her to a life of heartbreaks. The curse of unworthy men. Cute but chicken. When it had come to it, that one, back there, had chosen life as a captive of a captive audience to heading off with Sweetness into adventure, high or low. Small wonder that train life so appealed to men; full steam and high speed, but only in the direction permitted by the track. Bedassie had shown her the trick of the door—the comedians seemed to have forgotten that a cloud cineaste would have a way with electronic things—but he had turned down even an old wizened woman’s offer of escape. The bridge that extruded itself from the stalactite to the railway station was narrow, railless, unsupported, and the drop through the warring tribes of holy ones terrifying, but Grandmother Taal had tightened up her courage and stepped out on to the swaying arch. Again, she thanked whatever Luck Gods had let her win precious years from Cyrene Ankhatiel Ree. In her old, fragile former self, the winds that gusted through the cave would have picked her up, puffed out her skirts like a festival balloon and dropped her on to the serrated obsidian daggers of the cavern floor. She looked back: Bedassie was clinging to the pod door.

“Come, take my hand.”

“Leave all this?” Nodding at the raving deities boiling up on either side of the slender pont.

“They’re ghosts, clouds. Nothing. They can’t hurt you.”

“It’s all I have.”

“Young man, do you think they will let us go, seeing and knowing what we have? The best we can hope for is mnemonic erasure. The worst…Let us say, I deeply suspect some of these people’s senses of humour. Come. Now. They won’t give you your device back.”

For an instant he was tempted, then shook his head.

“I believe I can do a deal, be useful to them.”

“Young man, if you believe that any government ever offers, let alone honours, a deal like that, you deserve all that you get. Last offer. Time is ticking away. My granddaughter is in great peril.”

He smiled sadly and Grandmother Taal suspected that Sweetness had seen that look of amiable resignation too.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

Even with fifteen spare years, it had been a precarious crossing, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, breath coming in little tight flutters, looking ahead, dead ahead, always ahead, never down, never to one side or the other, never at the deities that loomed and ballooned at her like spooks in a Canton Fair House of Horrendo. Muttering it like a mantra, ahead, ahead, always ahead, down, down, never look down. The far side hove into view. A brass section of minor Cheraphs swooped at her, blowing sweet rock ’n’ roll, breezed nonchalantly through Grandmother Taal as if she wasn’t there. The old matriarch gave a little eek, teetered. Her hands flailed. She looked down. Volcanic teeth yawned for her. She staggered, dashed forward, came off the end of the bridge in a stumbling roll.

Grandmother Taal sat, legs stretched straight out, and rejoiced in breathing for a full minute before remembering to retract the pont. Then she turned to face the lock and drew the pin from her hair like a long-coated Rapari his sabre.

Where Harx was, Sweetness would be, that much was clear. All this piss and smoke about saints and mirrors; she could make none of that, except that anything that involved powers not safely meat and bone was bad. Typical of her granddaughter to underestimate the danger and overestimate her resourcefulness. Absconding is one thing, adventuring another, but Armageddon is entirely something again. Clown-time is over. This required the full resources of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes. Now, if she could just pick this little lock, walk up that long sloping tunnel to the surface and persuade some Engineer to break the snubbing and let her make a Red Call…

Long orders. Tall hikes. So. She was sturdy. Grandmother Taal worked the clever pick deeper into the lock. Something was resisting her. A shove, a twist. She felt metal give. She worked the device free. As she feared. Irredeemably bent.

This was not the end, though Grandmother Taal felt soul and body sag, all their gambled-away years returning in a moment of sheer dispirit. The semicircles of the hasp mocked her assurance and abilities. Fallen at the first. And a subtle pressure shift on the back of her neck warned her The End of the World Show was rolling up. She had sat through enough fatuous rehearsals to know she had less than a minute before the clouds recondensed into the vapour generators and she was exposed, a wicked black spider clinging to a metal door.

Help me, saints and ancestors! Aid an old and ridiculous woman, St. Catherine, since you clearly seem to exist and have some power in this world.

And it came. Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness. Suddenly Grandmother Taal knew exactly what she must do. She found the little paper-wrapped packet in the fifteenth fold of her bag. She unwrapped the block of Etzvan Canton Black Loess Child’a’grace had given her as a helpmeet. It smelled sweet and low and smoky. She had no need of its pharmacological virtues. The thing was that, in the white floodlight of the Comedy Cavern, it was deeply, gloriously, intrinsically brown . Quickly and decorously, Grandmother Taal fluffed her many skirts, squatted and urinated on the block of prime hash. With the briefest grimace of distaste, she mixed the hash and piss into a thick paste. With the bent blade of the lock-pick she crammed as much of the brown sludge into the lock mechanism as she could. Even when she thought she had enough, she kept obdurately plastering. It was a mighty thing to ask even of Etzvan Canton Black Loess. She packed and packed until it was dribbling out of the keyhole. Then, choosing a clean blade from the lock-pick, she pulled up a sleeve and swiftly carved the word OPEN on the ghost-pallid skin on the inside of her elbow.