Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Her toe-tips brushed the top of the tender, an eddy lifted her into the vapour trail. Moment’s blindness. She fought for control, stabilised, came in again. Almost almost almost…She tugged on the guy lines simultaneously, spilling lift, and touched down at a run in the middle of the tender. Immediately, figures—people! trainpeople! her people!—came surging off the access ladder, seized her, stripped off her flying harness and carried her down.

Sweetness babbled, recognising the faces of her bearers, trying to touch them, remember them.

“Psalli, Romereaux, Anhinga, it’s you. Thwayte, what are you doing here?”

She was borne along a sidewalk up a companionway through a shunting turret. She could feel the train was picking up speed again. Sweetness glanced backward. The cathedral eclipsed half the sky, the little air-yacht almost crushed between the two heavyweights of earth and air. On the driving bridge the people she loved were waiting for her. Her bearers set her down and immediately Child’a’grace hugged her.

“Your hair is needing washing, child,” she remonstrated.

Sweetness plucked at a greasy coil, then all the tension excitement fear confusion horror exhaustion dread wonder puzzlement loneliness hunger sleeplessness vertigo love loss and death of the days since she had ridden away from the grand steaming ruptured. She burst into tears. Her family, Domiety and non-Domiety rushed in to comfort her. Thus only Ricardo Traction noticed the shadow fall over the windows.

“Um, I hate to disturb you, but we seem to have a cathedral on the roof.”

Everyone looked up, the world went red, and they were somewhere else entirely.

Red. Red heaven, red earth. Red hills, red soil, red stones. Red sky, red sun, red lines of thin cloud at the close horizon. Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler Catherine of Tharsis , pride of the fleet, stood in a half-kilometre length of neatly severed track in the middle of endless, featureless red.

Numb silence. Utter dislocation. Then young Thwayte Engineer cried out in sudden pain, clapped hands to ears. In the same instant, everyone became aware of a hissing scream, like steam escaping from a fractured pipe. Scattered papers flew up, across the room like carrion birds and packed themselves against the bottom of the starboard catwalk door.

“We’re under vacuum!” Romereaux shouted, however impossible that seemed, and rushed to open an ancient, paint-sealed red box on the bulkhead with a fire-axe. Catherine of Tharsis was an old-school hauler, a veteran from the days of the manforming when the air was still thin and dead and Big Stuff needed shifting, and fusion-powered steam locomotives had been a useful way of getting water vapour into the primitive atmosphere. Her inner corridors and habitations had been designed to be pressure tight, however those seals might have perished with time and travel, and she still carried tubes of puncture goop in the Emergency DeePee boxes. Two blows hacked the casing off; Romereaux and Ricardo Traction wove streams of fast-drying foam goop over the bottom of the door, layer upon layer upon acetic-smelling layer until the piercing whistle dwindled to a whisper to nothing.

“Where the hell are we?” Romereaux asked.

A shriek aborted any offers of an answer. Mercedes Deep-Fusion stood pointing a quivery finger at Grandfather Bedzo. The aged aged man was slumped in his seat. His hands swung at his sides, bloated with pooled blood. His eyes were half-open. A thick rope of glossy drool hung from his protruding tongue to his chest. He did not seem to be breathing.

“Is he, is he, is he?” Mercedes stammered.

He looked anyone’s definition of dead as dead could be.

Anhinga Engineer, who had trained as a Knight of the Healing Joans, knelt by the old man, felt for pulses, tested for breath.

“He’s still alive, just about.”

“Get him to sick bay!” Romereaux ordered.

“We left sick bay back in Axidy, remember?” Anhinga said. Everyone slowly turned round to look at the alien world outside the windows.

“Really, where the hell are we?” Romereaux said sombrely.

Sweetness spoke up.

“Okay, you’re not going to like this.”

“We don’t like it anyway,” Thwayte Engineer said.

“Well, I think we’re in exactly the same place we were. We haven’t moved at all. Well, not forward or backward. I think what’s happened is, we’ve moved sideways. Across universes, if you like. Parallel worlds, all a little bit different. Harx sent us further than most. That’s why poor ould Bedzo’s in the state he’s in. The shock of transition. We all blacked out for a moment; he was plugged into the cyberhat, what must it’ve been like for the whole system to go down when we made the jump?”

“So, he’s not driving us out of here,” Ricardo Traction said.

“Looks like no one’s driving us out of this one,” Romereaux commented unhelpfully. “There isn’t even any air.”

“Harx did this?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“He had these mirrors could look into other universes,” Sweetness went on, aware of how frenetic this would sound in any other circumstance. “It’s where he got his power from: he wanted St. Catherine so he could get more of that power by getting hold of the angels that built the world by shuffling through the multiverse until they found the best of all possible worlds.”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa,” Romereaux interrupted. “This goondah has sent us across the multiverse into an alternative of our world?”

“That’s what I think.”

“We’re buggered.”

“Do you want to know how buggered?” Sweetness said.

“Can it get any worse?”

“I think this is an alternative world where the manforming never happened. That means, no air. Meaning, all the air we have, is in here. Eventually, we’ll run out. We’ve already lost a lot.”

“So, have we a plan for getting back?” the pragmatic Ricardo Traction asked. Diving through that carriage door into mutiny had been the only spontaneous thing he had ever done. Now look where it had landed him. That’s what you got for allowing yourself to be whirled up in the mood of the moment.

He led the inquiring expressions at Sweetness.

“Hey, I’m not a vinculum physicist,” she said. Sarcasms and recriminations burned more air. “There’s something I want to try, but I need to go to my cubby, right?”

Devastation Harx tried to restrain his delight. The symbols on his uplinker were dropping back out of the imaginary plane into the concrete world of integers. Incursion into the multiverse complete. He snapped the plastic lid shut.

“You know, I wasn’t entirely sure that would work,” he said to an awed Sianne Dandeever. All chances of worker’s playtime banished forever there. Gods don’t shag the believers, and with his demonstration of multiversal engineering, he surely qualified for that league.

“We don’t need her any more, then,” the faithful lieutenant said, nodding to the place Catherine of Tharsis had been.

“Ah, no,” said Devastation Harx.

The Cathedral of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family hovered over a precision-cut half-kilometre circle of other world. The Grand Valley mainline led in, the mainline ran out, in the middle, dead red grit and rocks. The airship still rocked gently from the inrush of air as near vacuum was displaced into atmosphere.

Devastation Harx looked around from the vantage of his high glass pulpit.

“Now,” he said, dusting off his hands, “who else has irritated me today?”

How sweet, Sweetness thought. They had kept her cubby unchanged since the day she left. Then again, she thought as she unscrewed the cap of the pyx, it wasn’t as if she had wandered away for years uncountable, and, with most of her stash of precious things in her backsac, there wasn’t much to identify a process of change. But it was nice to think they had kept it as a shrine to her.