Ian McDonald - Ares Express

After a timeless time in the dark, he became aware of a growing light ahead, a golden glow not from any device of Hep Badda ’s, but from the tunnel itself. With a pressure gradient that wrenched the drum of his surviving ear, the rapido burst from its narrow tube into a wide subterranean boulevard. Houses and tenements carved from raw stone leaned over the tracks so steeply and closely that they met overhead in knurled concrete bosses and casement-studded fan vaultings. These were the barryvilles of Belladonna, the first diggings of the manformers when the world had no air and the radiation would roast your gear in your pants like a station vendor’s spiced nuts. Idiosyncrasies with cutting lasers had, over the centuries, deepened it into a chaotically baroque architecture, and the old vehicle out-lock had widened into the main thoroughfare into Belladonna.

The big train brushed terrifyingly close to overhanging orioles and stone balconies: Pharaoh saw, quite clearly, a woman in a simple white shift standing reading a letter in a glassed bubble. Her face was joyful. Then she was whisked into the past. Residents bustled along the arcades that hugged the faces of the red stone buildings like a ballet dancer’s tights his piece; made their way up broad, foot-worn staircases to the hanging markets on their precarious stone platforms. Elegant stone footbridges arched over the tracks. Pharaoh glimpsed children’s faces grinning down. He waved, they were gone. He had no notion how deep he was, but many tracks came together here under the vaulted ceiling: Hep Badda sprinted past a crowded local, a goggle-eyed, nocturnal creature that spent its entire life in the tunnels ways within Belladonna. The express gained on a big tanker train, drew level, prow to prow. Pharaoh glanced across, met another pair of eyes returning the regard. The two freeloaders strapped to their respective cow-catchers stared, then Hep Badda pulled away. Somewhere ahead must lie the terminus, Belladonna’s legendary Main, but squint as he might, Pharaoh could see no end to the great street, just the warm golden glow haze of ten thousand windows.

But end it must, and did, the Barryville terminating in a sheer face of cliff pierced by a dozen tunnels. Hep Badda selected its destination, slid over the points and into constricting darkness. The lights showed nothing but curving track, but Pharaoh’s kinesic sense told him his was headed upward. Then the Grand Trunk Rapido ground around a tight turn in the tunnel, a circle of painful white opened in front of Pharaoh’s pained eyes and in a fanfare of steam and whistles he was thrust into the Minus One and second-highest level of Belladonna Main.

Hep Badda glided in to the marble platform like an oil-drop on steel. Numb with wonder, Pharaoh gazed up, immune to the stares of the station staff. Belladonna Main filled a shaft a kilometre deep. The same constructional diamond technology that propped up Grand Valley’s roof here built the cantilevers and cables that supported the ten levels of platforms, tracks, concourses and ticketing halls that criss-crossed each other like outspread fingers in a children’s game of who-gets-to-go-first. What entranced Pharaoh was that, up there beyond the spans and spars of Level Nought, he could see dawn light glitter on the glass dome that capped the shaft-station, and through that, beyond that, the building-crusted shaft of a support pier leading his vision high, higher, highest, through the morning cumulus to the diamond glint of Worldroof.

The squeal of brakes broke his dream. The buffers were approaching. Porters and pedicab wallahs were already closing on the train like warrior ants tackling a snake. With stiff fingers, he worked loose the bindings, returned his belt to its more socially acceptable use of keeping his pants from obeying gravity. He stood up, balanced himself and stepped off the cow-catcher on to the platform at a gentle walking pace.

Belladonna.

He had made it. He had arrived.

He clenched his fists in private triumph, let a slow, sly “yes” slip across his lips.

Instantly he felt fingers at his pocket. He turned: gone. Faces. The Grand Trunk Rapido was disembarking, a flood of faces. Pharaoh shrugged. So. Everything he valued, he carried inside his clothes, and up there, the sun was shining.

Belladonna.

Made it.

“Long way between down there and up here,” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th observed as she tugged the blankets tighter around her and tried to ignore the swaying of the little webbing nest.

The shaking had soon passed, eased with cups of a herbal brew that left twiggy bits in the gaps of her teeth. Picking at them too vigorously, Sweetness noticed that she was setting this little globular nest of plastic, webbing and soft fabrics in which she had found herself swaying. Before Pharaoh could stop her, she had stuck her head out through the entrance slit and found herself looking down through five kilometres at the sinuous terraces of Canton Czystoya.

“Oh whoa,” Sweetness had said, queasily, and crept back into the draughty comfort of Pharaoh’s nest.

“More tea?”

“I think I could, yeah.”

Because it was all story, it was necessary not just that she be rescued from the Point of Worst Personal Threat by a daring swoop out of the big blue, but that the daring swooper be a character she had last encountered before she properly understood what it was to be a story and have improbable things happen around you. Ironic too; the saviour saved. Now she understood what the Teacher of the Air had been going on about in all those lessons about story and structure and narrative. All you had to do was throw yourself off the thousandth-level balcony of a pier-top manor. Irony on irony; the meat Lotto winner from the pits under Meridian should end up some kind of vertical goondah in a squatter town of pods and cocoons hanging like grapefruit from the heat-exchange vanes of Pier 11738.

Some folk just got the hooverville in the genes, Sweetness supposed. Never get away from it. Like some people got trains. At least the view’s better, and you get to crap on the people below.

“It’s easy to get trapped, so,” Pharaoh said in his soft, hesitating way, his head half turned so she would not have to look at one price he had paid to make it all the way up here.

Yeah , Sweetness thought and remembered those other men she had met who, one way or another, had trapped themselves. Uncle Neon, literally so, fused into the global signalling network, his soul blasted into some alternative world less friendly than this. The doctor, free to go as far into the futures and pasts as he liked, but only within the confines of the town he had invented. Bedassie with his dream cinema playing every night to an audience of zombies because any applause was better than the sound of your own feet walking off stage. Cadmon and Euphrasie: weird butty-boys. Building things and blowing them up again and not caring if anyone ever saw or knew. Bones in the sand now, with no one caring or knowing, because they’d let head stuff—politics, art, aesthetic outrage—drive them to war with Harx. He was at art school with them? So what was this Church of the Ever-Circling things then? Big big art—so they got jealous, or sell-out? Trapped. Leading of course to him . Serpio. Trapped like the rest of them. Terrible, the things mail order can lead to. Now this Pharaoh guy, again . You give some folk the key to the box, they walk out, take a look, decide it’s not for them, then they turn around and walk right in again. When station rats look at heaven, they see just a bigger station, with better retailing.

You need to cultivate a different flavour of males, Engineer.

So? What’s so different about you, cutie? All this is working, all these adventures are happening, all this story stuff you tell yourself, because one evening you walked into a trackside booth and you’ve never really walked out again. You’re still in there with the falling beans, balancing on those skinny sticks.