Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“But it was the red telephone,” Romereaux said. The conference room had a simple polarity. Stop the Trainers! at one end, The Mail Must Get Throughers at the other, undecideds down each side and baying bloodsports fans behind the studded brass railings. Amongst the nonaligned, mostly Tractions, a couple of new generation Deep-Fusion folk and the oldest Bassareenis, heads nodded, agreements muttered. A red telephone, yes, the red phone, starkest emergencies, Aid from Beyond Comprehension, in a time of Extreme Direness, only direst direness, Taal Chordant, of course she knows, wouldn’t have unless, worse than worst.

“Red telephones can be ignored,” Naon Engineer countered. There was a collective intake of breath. Heresy. Ignore a red telephone? Foolish. Worse than foolish. Reckless. Perilous. A dangerous precedent could be set. Taal Engineer was no grazeherd crying, “Leopard leopard leopard.” The collected heads turned back to Child’a’grace. She waited with an icon-like grace and stillness for the room to match her serenity. The very way she held herself in her council chair made everyone check his or her posture and sit up a little straighter.

“Husband, your mother, saints be kind to her, is being well aware of the Formas, of years more so even than you,” Child’a’grace said. That’s right, the nodding heads agreed, Yezzir. “Not for nothing would she imperil the economic well-being of this train and those who live upon her. Not for nothing, say I again, but for one thing and one thing only, and that is family. Wherefore this red phone, unless she has found our child, your daughter, Sweetness Octave?”

A smattering of applause swelled into a small ovation. Many Tractions, Deep-Fusioneers and Bassareenis bore generations of low-grade resentment at being the driven, never the driver. Smelling mutiny, Marya Stuard rose from her green buttoned-leather seat. The room fell silent.

“Economic well-being. Shall we explore this idea for a few moments? The economic well-being of this train and all who live upon her. That, I believe, was your expression, Child’a’grace. I’m very glad you used it because it clarifies our thinking upon this subject. For, despite our many Domieties and mysteries, ultimately, this train is one nation, mobile, indivisible. We are all on the same track together, headed for the same destination, carrying a common cargo. What we are discussing here is not an Engineer affair. It is not even a Stuard and Deep Fusion affair. It is all of us, Tractions, Bassareeenis, all the people of Catherine of Tharsis . That is why it warms me to see representatives here from all our peoples and ages. Our economic well-being, my friends. And that cannot be the responsibility of just one family, or one individual out of one family.”

She looked around the captive faces.

“I agree with my friend, Child’a’grace, that Taal Chordant would only have used the emergency communication system on another’s behalf, and I feel the loss of young Sweetness Octave as deeply as any of you, but consider again those words ‘economic well-being.’ Sweetness Octave had a choice. She made it, she left the train. Such is her right. But her choice took away our choice. We live with the economic and social consequences of her exercise of freedom. I don’t need to regale you with the economic implications of marriage contracts—we all have our diverse nuptial customs—let alone the social. Suffice to say what you have all by now experienced: that the real damage was done to the name of Catherine of Tharsis , and that name is our economic well-being. We are Catherine of Tharsis , four centuries of history beneath her wheels, named after Our Blessed Lady herself. We should be heading up the Ares Express. There should be Prelates and Nabobs in our Excelsior class lounges, not half a forest and a festering factory full of bugs. But it is work—the only work we can get. Oh yes. I won’t bore you with how hard I and my family argued to get even this. So low has our stock sunk. So low. But it’s money. It pays the track fees and the water rates and the insurance and the mortgage and puts a little food in our mouths. It’s economic well-being. And now, you would throw every deadline and timetable and delivery date down the jakes for the person—mark this well—who got us into this state in the first place. Not enough for her to do it once. She would have you do it again. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Whatever you’re doing, I don’t care, stop it. Come and get me. I’ve had enough. I’m bored with life out there. I want to come back. Remember, she chose to leave us. She chose to walk away without a thought; without a thought for us, and now she wants to walk back again.”

Marya Stuard looked long at the sombre faces around the table. She had given them the back of her hand, the hard slapping of truth. Time now for the drop of honey. The table would be hers.

“I’m not saying, leave her,” Marya Stuard said, and could almost hear the tension go out of her audience’s muscles like a chemical sigh. She afforded a little smile. “What I am saying is just, not now. When we’ve delivered. When we’ve our next contract, then, and she’ll always be welcome back among us—we are one nation on a rail. But not now. Not now.”

She stood, feeding on the ringing applause.

“There, I think that has it sorted,” she asided to Naon Engineer. It did seem so. The mutineer running dogs were dismayed, Romereaux silently seething, but Child’a’grace sat preternaturally calm. Marya Stuard felt her scalp prickle, a wash of magnetism, a subtle charisma from the Engineer woman that slowly but surely suffused the room like incense and turned every head to her.

“You’re not a mother, are you?”

There was a collective gasp. It was an unspeakably low blow, it was the knife in the belly, the mallet to the testicles, the Sunday punch from which there is no coming back, the all-conquering Belly Spear which can never be used with honour. Because every sinning soul aboard Catherine of Tharsis knew it was true. Marya Stuard staggered, her assurance annihilated, the wind gone out of her, the fusion fires doused. She wavered. She paled. She passed her hand over her face.

She looked faint, confused, for the first time without a riposte ready to hand. Things no one in that council chamber had ever seen before and no one could rightly believe they were seeing now. She toppled, went down in her seat, fatally punctured, mouth opening and closing like a beached cod, but Child’a’grace was relentless. The long chapatti years were speaking. She turned on Naon Sextus Asiim Engineer 11th.

“And you, the flesh of your flesh and the blood of your blood, the seed of your seed and the dream of your dreams? You a father, not dry and seedless like this, this stick, this thorn, and you no different? Dollars and centavos. Dollars and centavos. The nation, the train, the nation, the train. Catherine of Tharsis is her people, her wealth is here, all of the people in this chamber, not what we haul behind us for others like sledge dogs. Our wealth is our people, all our people, and if one of us is missing, we are the poorer, we are impoverished, and for us to willingly sell of our own, for dollars and centavos, for security, we are lost. We are bankrupt. We deserve to steam no more. We deserve to go under the hammers at the Winter Solstice auction and take up hoes and desk jobs.”

Face like fusion reheat, Naon Sextus was on his feet. Every mouth was a round “O” of astonishment.

“Woman, you go too far! You drive me too far, too far. You are not track, not in the blood, you know nothing, nothing, you…you…Susquavanna, you Platform.”

The silence was absolute, the shock palpable. Not at what Naon had said, terrible though it was. It was what—who—he had said it to. To his wife. Directly. Passionately. Face to face.