Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“I’m sorry…”

Well, Engineers can’t marry Deep-Fusion people anyway, so you’re scuppered there , she thought of saying but he really did not deserve words like that so she said, coolly, “Where’ve you checked?”

“Starboard side’s clear. Suleiman is still down port. Chagdi’s coming up from the caboose.”

“I’ll do the tops of the trucks.”

“Okay.” A pause. “Sweet…”

“Don’t talk. Okay?”

It was good and physical to leap over the dark chasms between the ore-cars and flash her torch down among the clanking couplings.

“Come out come out.”

She sent her beam dancing over the angled planes of the truck roof. Behind this one, three hundred more. More distant than she had imagined, another sway of light, Chagdi working his way up.

Father Naon had tried to impress the family horror of railrats on Sweetness but she had seen the indignity of old tramps impaled on signal stanchions and sad goondahs, shaken from the bogies, guillotined in half by the wheels, and the dreadful look in the eyes of the bums as they spat red dust from their mouths and banged red dust from their coats and then saw five hundred kilometres of it on every side of them. Freeloading was stealing but every time she was sent up on the roof Sweetness regretted that she must be part of the punishment. Were tales of the terrible fates of roofriders not told among the indigent orders that breed and were buried under the great termini? Or was whatever they were escaping worth any risk?

Escape.

A noise. Not family this time. The torch beam dodged left. Movement down on the sloping flank of ore-car eleven. Behind the vent stack. Sweetness hurdled the gaps between trucks, light fixed on the hexagonal mound of the vents. Steel mesh clanged beneath her feet. Yes. Yes. There. Fingers . She crouched by the handrail, sent her light this way, that. Her right hand unhooked the djubba-stick. Fingers, pale knuckled around the metal vent. Thin fingers, dust ingrained in the knuckles, black jam under the nails.

Sweetness considered the fingers for a long time. Then she laid the djubba-stick on the roofwalk and said, softly, “Hey. You’re taking a wild risk, you know.”

The fingers were silent.

“You get all kinds of stuff gassing up off the ore. A kind of relative of mine fell in once when they were unloading. Came out like a teacher’s handbag. True. If that thing valves, it’ll blow you clear off the car.”

The fingers twitched.

“You know, I wouldn’t pick that place at all. Hanging down the side? You want to get gravity working for you, not against you, see? I’d go right up the front, down on the cow-catcher. It’s right in front of everyone but it’s kind of like a blind spot, you can’t see it from the bridge. True. Really. But, well, you’re here, so what you need to do, when you fall off, is make sure you land right between the tracks. That way the train goes right over your head. Mind you, you have to get down kind of fast, you don’t want to get anything tangled up in the grit pipes. You could be dragged for like kilometres.”

The fingers twitched in her torch beam.

“So, how long’ve you been down there?”

Nothing. Then, a whisper almost lost in the wheel rumble, “Since Little Rapids.”

“Mother’a…Your fingers must be coming off.”

“Yes,” came the small reply that was full of knotted nerves and locked sinews and muscles numb to everything but dumb survival. Sweetness came to a decision.

“I’m going to send something down to you. Grab ahold of it.”

“No,” came the answer.

“You what? I’m trying to help you.”

“Don’t trust.”

Sweetness was sincerely perplexed at the rejection of her offer of rebellion.

“Why so?”

“Trick. Try to knock me off.”

“Listen, if you’ve been hanging on there since Little Rapids, you don’t need me to knock you off. Sooner rather than later, my friend.”

The train lurched over points. Fingers groaned. Fingers slipped a fraction. Sweetness ducked under the handrail, anchored her feet over the lip of the roofwalk and stretched down over the sloping truck side. One-handed, she aimed the djubba-stick as close as she dared to the fingers.

“This is going to come fast, so don’t shy away or anything stupid like that.”

A second lurch threw her aim. The club-head shot within a whisker of the pale soft hand. The fingers almost flinched. Almost.

“Grab hold!” Sweetness shouted. “It’ll hold you.”

“Yeah,” came the voice as the fingers felt for the telescopic shaft of the stick. “But can you?”

“I can hold any damn thing,” Sweetness said, affronted. One hand, then the other grasped the stick. The sudden tug almost tore her loose.

“Hang on,” she gritted, to herself. She fumbled for the retract key. And twist . The djubba-stick kicked like Nugent Traction’s organ as first the hands, then the arms, then between them, a hunger-sunken face beneath the mat of black hair were hauled up over the edge of the car.

He’s kind of young , Sweetness Asiim Engineer thought between the rip in her shoulders and the tear in her calves. What, just gone eight?

They were almost face to face, lip to lip. Sweetness felt the last of her strength go.

“Grab the rail!” she hissed. He seized it just as the djubba-stick fell from her fingers and clattered down the side of the ore-car into the dark. Sweetness rolled on to her back. The railrat knelt over her, head cocked to one side like an inquisitive songbird.

“Why are you doing this? You could have knocked me clean off.”

“Have,” Sweetness panted. “Plenty. So”—a swallow—“what ya called?”

He was desperately thin. The fall would have snapped his little chicken bones. He had big brown suspicious eyes that mistrusted everything in the universe from under his urchin fringe. He was desperately cute. Worth saving just to look at.

“You saved me, you tell first.”

Sweetness sat up.

“My name,” she said, “is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer. The twelfth.”

“You trainies have big names.”

“So, how big’s yours?”

“Pharaoh,” the boy said.

“Pharaoh something? Something Pharaoh?”

“Pharaoh nothing.”

“Just Pharaoh.”

“It’s enough, where I come from.”

“And where would that be, little-name?”

“Meridian.”

“That’s…”

“I know how far Meridian is.”

Half a planet.

“How?”

“I won the meat lotto.”

“What is this?”

A crossing bell clanged away into the past.

“Everyone puts up a steak. Then the Boss of the Roof draws the feathers.”

“Whoa whoa whoa. Everyone? Who is this?”

“The people. All of them. The underfolk.”

“Ah.” The deep dregs; the faces you glimpsed looking up at you from between the sleepers in Meridian Main; the hands that reached out from under the platform when you dropped a centavo and it rolled over the lip. Small loss to you, to the fingers down there in the access tunnels and bogieways, food and glam and power. “You lived there like for always?”

“This life, the one before it, probably the one after it too.”

“Don’t get cute, railrat.”

“We got names for you people, underneath. Anyway, you dropped your punch-stick over the side, remember?”

“Yeah, well I can still pick you up and throw you off.” They knelt, challenging each other under the circling moonring. “So, how old are you?”

“I’m near ten.”

“Had you for younger.”

“How much younger?”

“Younger. So, what steak?”

Kid Pharaoh finger-combed back his lank hair. No left ear, instead, a puckered grin of deaf scar.