Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“She gets the kidney.” Naon Engineer pointed. “And she gets the ovary.”

“Okie dokie,” the Flying Midwife said, and called up the surgeon she worked with in Belladonna. He was on a marriage-repair weekend on the canals of New Merionedd, so the locum slipped his hand into the waldoglove and put on the cyberhat. In his windowless office on the fifth underdeep of Belladonna he waggled his fingers. In an Alt Colorado impact crater, scalpel blades danced over the infants. The robot arms wove, the fingers flashed and at the end of it the one with the kidney lived and the one with the ovary died and in truth there was a shallow grave, by the side of the branchline, unmarked but much spattered by the soft, bloody faeces of condors.

Child’a’grace, half-joyful, half-despairing, hung a mobile of mirrored birds over the survivor’s cot and that night, Little Pretty One came into them and watched over her sibling, though the eyes of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th had yet to learn to focus.

That was the story as told by Little Pretty One.

“I just hope you like the smell of hot fat,” the twin ghost said in her bedroom mirror.

Sweetness surged out of her bunk with as great a surge as her tiny couchette would allow.

“Grandmother Taal…”

“She’s got powers but she’s not omnipotent. She got as good a deal as she could…”

The night, the dust, the gentle rock of the rails beneath her, the warm presence of constant velocity, the background bass hum of the tokamaks, the cool of the ancient waters of Inatra, the reek of dungfires, the verdant perfume of the green man’s booth; all drowned out by the rattle of pans and plates and the blatting of orders down the gosport. Sold. To a Stuard.

“ Ninth Avata ?”

“Who told you?”

“My uncle.”

Little Pretty One pouted, put out. She disliked having an oracular rival in the family.

“Did your uncle tell you his name?”

“Tell me.”

“Narob Chi-Ora of the Southern Circle Stuards.”

“Is he?”

“Cute enough. Black hair. Nice ass. Nice eyes too. He’d be kind. He’s got ambitions. Catering director for the entire North West Quartersphere. He could get it too.”

After eight years, Sweetness knew that Little Pretty One’s coulds usually meant will . Somewhere in the Panarch’s ninety-seven nested heavens, she suspected her ex-Siamese twin had met others .

“When?” Heavy question.

“Next corroboree.” Heavier answer. Twice a long year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the Trainpeople gathered on the great sidings of Woolongong flats, ten trains to a track, five hundred tracks. Five thousand noble locomotives, tenders and cabooses decked with bunting and flower garlands and hard-won iron rosettes for speed and endurance and bravery and heavy hauling. Here the Domiety heads boogied and the daughters were traded away. Economies of money and honour were exchanged out on the shimmering flats and, often as not, were that same day lost over card and snooker tables. Commodius vicus of recirculation of the commodifiable. Sweetness had seen the young women in their mothers’ dresses, bags in hands, nuptial kerchiefs on their heads. Seen, pitied, resolved never to join.

“Oh God!”

The big ore-load was bound for the foundries of Steel River. Three days deadhead from there up to Shelby to pick up a forest fermenter—raw trees at Shelby, fifteen kinds of liquiplastic and hydrocarbon fuel by the time it decoupled at Wisdom. There, an immediate shunt on to a pilgrim charter to the Murmuring Mountain at Chernowa, then a fast run to Belladonna for a month heading up the pride of Bethlehem Ares Railroads itself, the Ares Express. And after that the sun would stand vertical over the equator and divide the world into equal day and night and she would get to live in a strange man’s galley and her black curls would smell forever after of hot fat. So little time, so few kilometres.

“You can’t let this happen!”

In the mirror, Little Pretty One spread her hands in the way ghosts do when they tell the living, I’m a ghost, remember .

Sweetness did remember. Something else.

“The green man!”

For the first time Sweetness saw Little Pretty One taken aback.

“The what?”

“The green man. He said…”

“You met a green man? Where? I didn’t see that. This changes everything.”

He said, I don’t see a marriage yet , was what Sweetness would have said but for the smart rap on the cabin door, followed by the swift, fierce itch that was Little Pretty One exiting the mirror and entering the long scar up her side.

Brother Sle opened the porthole and bellowed.

“Uncle Billy!”

The formula was ancient, irrevocable and universally respected. Not even the Domiety historians agreed who Uncle Billy had been, if he had been any more than legendary, but he had saved generations of Engineers from peril, crime, police, debt, rivals, badmaashes, wanderlust and misjudged relationships. He had warned of threats gross and subtle, shysters, dunners, weighbridgemen, bindlestiffs and freeloaders.

“Whereaway?” Sweetness called.

“Railrat,” Sle answered.

A roofrider. A freeloader. A faredodger. Pausing only to scratch her haunted wound, Sweetness threw on shorts, shoes, shirt. Sle was waiting in the corridor with the flashlight and djubba-stick.

“You be careful with that,” he scolded as Sweetness reacquainted herself with the short, chubby railfolk’s weapon.

“What, like this, brother?” She aimed the blunt club-head at Sle. He danced back; the compressed gas charge could shoot out the djubba-stick with force enough to dislodge the most tenacious roof rider.

“Don’t waste the gas,” he said sourly. Sweetness gave his retreating back a thumb of disgrace as he exited the port sidewalk. She popped the overhead iris hatch with a gasp of steam and shinned up on to the roofwalk. Up on the roof had always been the place Sweetness had gone to think and feel and be alone, a savoury delicacy on crowded, bustling Catherine of Tharsis . Here, on the brilliant nights when the moonring was a diamond prizefighter’s belt, Child’a’grace had always known she could find her daughter out of all of a big train’s hundreds of hiding places. Sweetness unclasped her hair and shook it out in Catherine of Tharsis ’s eternal slipstream. With the innate grace of the trainborn, she poised herself against the slow rock of the engine. She breathed in the night air. Steam wreathed around her. Several times since sprouting hair she could sit on, she had come up to take her clothes off and let the white vapour and the night caress her. At first she had felt perverse and sinful. Midnight nudist and aspirant engine drier. Then one night, buttoning up her blouse, she had spied Nugent Traction not merely take his gear off, but enjoy a slow, nocturnal wank, launching his effort in an elegant arc over the side of the water tender.

Tonight, an Uncle Billy. Sweetness instinctively checked her tunnel warning beacon, though there was no tunnel within two hundred kays, hitched the djubba-stick to her belt and set off down the gently swaying roofwalk toward the tender.

A sound.

She froze on the top rung of the tender companionway. Her inquisitive torch beam swung hither and yon. Romereaux’s grin greeted her from the lee of the main water inflow.

“Don’t do that man, I could’ve djubba-ed you.”

“Sorry, did I spook you?”

“Nah. Course not.”

She saw Romereaux’s face change and knew what he was going to say. She did not want to hear it. He did anyway.

“About…”

Sweetness flared.

“How come everyone hears about this before me?”