Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Happy, sad?

This train is not done yet. There is the auxiliary power van, and the raised cupola of Shipment Control, from which the Stuards can look out over the whole length of the train and ascertain in an instant if something is wrong with their charge. After aux and con we pass swiftly over Ballasted Brake vans 1 and 2, the abode of the abject Bassareenis, to the final car, the caboose. Passing over its gilded lion-head crest, we come to a long glass blister. We glimpse greenery. It seems to be some sort of conservatory. Onward. We fly out over the Stuards’ verandah a little way down the track that strikes undeviating across the plain. Turn, look back at the foreshortened length of the great train driving across the geometric farmland. There it is. The great train, Catherine of Tharsis . Happy? Sad? Can’t tell, can you? It’s magnificent, but it’s metal. Meaningless.

But let’s turn round, go back to that blister of glass and greenery. Hover a moment. Stoop lower. Look carefully. It is indeed a caboose-top roof garden, accessed by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, protected from the three-hundred kilometre-per-hour winds of express speed by a slender geodesic. Within is a lush little jungle of foliage plants; some flowers; a small water feature; wind-chimes; darting ornamental humming birds, like flying jewellery; a little lawn as smooth as snooker baize and a tiled patio area with casual cast-aluminium seating. A young man is sitting on one of the chairs. He is slightly built, with the pallor of the Deep-Fusion Domiety, a childhood encased in metal, close to perilous energies. A worm of goatee shadows his chin. He looks ten, eleven of this world’s double-years. On an occasional table beside him is a peeled apple, a pocket knife, and a red telephone. He cuts a slice from the apple, eats it, tries to pay attention to the yellow paperback in his hand.

Romereaux Deep-Fusion finds he has been spending more time in Marya Stuard’s conservatorium recently, reading yellow novels, mostly being away from other people. Friends and relatives now crowd him. There is not enough room, there is always someone around, someone wanting to talk to you, someone pushing past you, someone there . No space for yourself, except up here. And the books are yellow and stupid, but no more so than anything else. His job, his life-role, bores him. Tuning tokamaks, configuring containment fields, controlling plasma flows, manipulating ignition lasers; ten generations of Deep-Fusioneers may have nurtured the fire in the beast, but why the eleventh? Romereaux has discovered that he resents that he was never given a choice about it. You are born to tend tokamaks, that’s fact, son. It’s not just him. There’s a discontent going up and down the corridors, through the carriage couplings and along the gosport tubes. The contracts are signed, the loads hauled, the engines fused up and the brasses polished, but there’s no spirit in it. Haul, heave, haul again. The rails go on forever. You will never get anywhere on them, just round and round the round round world. Tempers are short, patience shorter. Good reason to stay away from your brothers and colleagues when a bump in a companionway can lead to a fist fight. Romereaux can’t remember the last time he heard Madre Mercedes strike up with her asbestos gloves on the calliope. Not since things started going bad . That is what he says; but what he means is since Sweetness went away .

In engineering terms, he thinks of her as a very small bolt, in a difficult place, unobtrusive, easy to miss. But that bolt is made of gold, and it’s the one that holds the whole thing together. Lose it, and…She rode away that morning and lit up a whole other world of places to go and lives to lead. All of a sudden, everyone had choices. You don’t have to go where the rails take you. You can move in at least two dimensions. You can get off the train. First Sweetness, then Grandmother Taal: if the lofty Engineers are so rotten within one girl can topple them, why do we cling so tenaciously to our traditions and laws? Will they save us, and what from? Are they worthy of saving?

Pull that bolt, and the whole damn thing starts to come apart.

He spears another segment of apple on the pen-knife blade. It’s halfway to his mouth (it is a terrible, yellower-than-yellow novel) when the telephone rings. The red telephone.

Because it is the red telephone, he stares at it for ten, twenty, thirty rings.

The red telephone. The hot-as-Hades emergency line. For use only in absolute extremis . War pillage flood firefall a line invasion end of the world. The red telephone. It is still ringing.

Romereaux looks around, finds no one who can advise or he can delegate to. He picks up the receiver, suddenly fearful the caller might have run off in disgust. He dislodges a thick fall of dust.

“Hello?” He listens to the voice at the other end. The message is short. “Yes, I understand,” he says and reverently sets down the handset. Then it is as if he has had a cattle-prod inserted anally: he is out of his chair and across the conservatorium in one galvanic bound. He snatches up the gosport, uncaps it and bellows up to the bridge.

“Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s Grandmother Taal!”

Sweetness clung like a tick to the underside of the grapple arm. Around her, Vertical Boys with improbable face paint hung from the metalwork like festival piñadas. It was five minutes since the punky little scout with the spiky hair had reported the last of the acolytes scampering in an all-fired-hurry back into the cathedral. Oddly quiet up on the working platforms. Had Störting-Kobiyashi’s industrial trolls downed tools again? Sweetness’s own ears hinted at strange energies brewing inside the flying machine. Something was about to happen, but Sweetness held her forces back. Better to be safe than sorry. This is war.

Every story needs a good mass action scene.

Sweetness checked her beanie gun. She checked her emergency parafoil. She didn’t trust herself with either of them.

Point and pull. Simple. A soft thud and they go down. Guaranteed non-lethal. Lies. A feather pillow can be lethal in the wrong hands. One false shot could knock someone right over the edge, or what if they had a heart condition, or brittle bones? She had sworn her way across the Great Desert on the lives of those she’d love to kill and the ways in which she would enjoy doing it. Now the very real possibility stood before her and asked, Can you do it? Can you do it? Even that Serpio. It’s you, him and a big drop. One shot. Will you put him over? And if you do, will you fire from cover, an unseen assassin, or do you want him to see you, do you want him to know? Do you want your face to be the last, the very last thing he will ever see? What if he goes for you? What if it’s you and him? Bean the bastard. No questions asked. There. Justified. Sort of.

The parafoil was simpler still. Fall and pull. She had done the fall already and that had not been so hard when it came to it, but it seemed saner to trust in the power of story than this rustley wad of cut-and-glue nylon sheeting. How many goes did it take to get the design right?

Everything does come out right in the mass action scene, doesn’t it?

Pharaoh was looking to her for instruction. He had two parallel stripes of blue under each eye and they made him look fierce in a soft, cute sort of way…Aw, no. Have you no self-control, girl? Get a grip of yourself. It’s the going into battle thing. A whiff of danger, a reek of death and the DNA says, pass me on, pass me on, make babies, make babies.

“Okay, let’s go to work.” She had heard someone say that in one of Sle’s action movies. Pharaoh heliographed to squads two and three on the far grapple and underneath the service yard. Mirrors flickered compliance, the Vertical Boys unhooked their safety lines and began to advance along the girders and ducts.