Ian McDonald - Ares Express

A bit of help indeed.

The whirlwind rushed up to the side of the train, mounted the boarding ramp, spun along the walkways and stairways until it came to the pressure outlock. Then everyone on the bridge heard a hammering on the lock door.

“Open, in the name of Beelzebub!”

T he pressure-lock door closed behind the strange little man. He had long white hair tied back at his shoulders with a gold ring and long mustachios which he kept sharply waxed. His eyes were deep and darkly bright. He wore a long desert duster coat and a big-brimmed hat with a ludicrously jaunty feather in its band. On his back was a complex pack of many devices and power cables, including a handy-looking field-inducer tucked into the pocket of his coat and a whirring object that looked like a small sewing machine. He carried around him a translucent bubble of force that seemed to hold his own atmosphere. He twisted a setting ring on the field inducer. The bubble popped audibly. The oxygen-starved people of Catherine of Tharsis smelled purple heathers and autumn seaside. To them, the little man looked a little blurred at the edge, slightly out of focus, like a television picture on the edge of a transmission footprint. They thought it was their foggy minds. Sweetness knew better. The traveller was on the extreme edge of his probability locus. He took a step forward out of the lock, removed his gloves, banged them together, kicked the dust off his battered desert boots, sniffed, grimaced.

“It mings a bit in here.”

He sought Sweetness, doffed his hat and bowed in the formal Old Deuteronomy way to her.

“My dear, Dr. Alimantando, multiversal engineer and transtemporal tourist at your service. I have been expressly purposed by Our Lady of Tharsis herself with the task of taking you anywhere in the multiverse you wish to go.”

“Home would be good,” Sweetness said. “Home would be very good.”

“Tokamaks ready?” asked Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

“Ready,” came Romereaux’s voice from the gosport.

“Traction engaged?”

“Traction set,” Ricardo called up from the transmission tunnel.

“Timewinder ready?”

“Ready, aye ready,” came the voice of the doctor from the arcane bowels of systems engineering. “Hooked up and running sweet as a child’s top.”

“Then let’s go home,” Sweetness Engineer said, and moved her hand to the great brass drive bar. Her fingers opened to grasp it. And froze. Suddenly, sitting there in the Engineer’s chair, navigation sphere under her left hand like an orb, the sceptre of the drive control waiting for the touch of her right, she could not do it. It was everything. Everything. The years, the days, the nights, the dreams, the anger, the frustration, the investment of hope and joy, the aspired to, the wished for, the painfully desired, the loved thing, the completing thing, and now it lay under her palm and she could not do it. Should not do it.

Girls don’t drive.

She licked her lips, looked to her mother on her right side.

“Go on, my child.”

What if she did it and, after all, it was nothing? The train moves, the train stops. The train moves again, stops again. What if that was all there was to it, what if that was the secret the Engineer men kept from their women? That’s all there is. Nothing special.

She looked at Grandmother Taal on her left.

“I’ll give you such a slap,” she said tetchily.

Sweetness grinned, seized the bar and pushed it forward. And it was precisely as special as she wanted it to be. And that, she understood, was all the secret of the Engineers. Tokamaks flared, water flashed to agonised steam, thundered down pipes, turned cranks, turned wheels within wheels about wheels that drove a belt looped around the spindle of the machine that looked like a small sewing machine. Inside, vincular dimensions spun. The doctor rubbed his hands with glee and watched his fiendish little device, nested among the brute force heavy metal engineering.

Wheels spun. The big train inched forward. Laughing, Sweetness pushed the drive rod up, up. Catherine of Tharsis began to roll, not along the snatch of track, through alternative universes. White light seemed to break around the cab window, they were in the middle of a cavalry charge of six-legged monsters ridden by four-armed green creatures with fangs and swords. Flash. Now a dry and delicate desert place, in the distance, a city of crystal windows and fragile towers. A swarm of silver locusts parted around the speeding train.

Sweetness pushed the handle up, up. Flash. Tall metal tripods stalked a landscape of green canals and hive cities. Flash flash. A parade ground in a great spire-capped city, filled with creatures like mushrooms. Flash. A howling red desert, a lone spaceship standing on its tail, an object like an animate ice-yacht sailing away, a human infant cradled at its heart. Flash. More cavalry, grim-faced riders on outsize ferrets leaping a barbed-wire barricade. A sterile red desert, an archaeologist in a transparent spacesuit, and in the sky, a malevolent red moon. A landscape littered with massive terraforming machinery. A single red crater with a smiley face drawn on it. Flash flash flash. Sweetness drove the timewinder up, up, up. A forest of clattering plastic windmills. A big rocket with a big red star on its tail. The universes were coming so fast now she was afforded no more than a glimpse before bursting through into the next. But a trend was apparent, they were moving from uninhabited, inhospitable worlds to her own little green world.

Green hills, an endless glass roof, an orange air-borne cathedral.

Sweetness jerked back the drive bar, overshot by a few dimensions into a smoking battlefield swarming with killing machines, reversed up universe by universe.

“We’re back!”

She pulled out the gosport, whistled down to systems.

“Doctor!” No answer. “Doctor!” Still no answer. A third time: “Doctor!” As she had expected, the probability of his existence in this space of this time in this universe had dropped to zero.

Sweetness slumped back in the Engineer’s chair. Doors were opened, windows thrown wide. Grand Valley’s air smelled sweet as Isidy wine. Sweetness drank it down, touched a playful finger to the drive bar, shivered in private delight as the trainpeople came up from their stations and section to celebrate their return. Romereaux offered a hand to Sweetness, come on, you’ve earned it . She shook her head, looked at the navigation ball under her left hand. A world in her palm. Anywhere you like.

“I hate to disturb things,” came Ricardo Traction’s maithering voice, “but we’ve still got a cathedral on the roof.”

“And there’s an awful lot of robots headed our way,” Thwayte added.

The party froze.

“Oh my God!” Sweetness moaned. “Is there no end to this story?”

As she gave the curse, she knew where she was in the universal narrative—the Unexpected Resurgence of the Villain—and what she must do to resolve it and bring her story to a conclusion. By her right hand was the evacuation alarm. She punched the bright red toadstool, hard. Yellow flashing lights leaped to life, sirens yammered.

“Are you deaf?” Sweetness shouted at the startled, pale faces. “Get out! This is an evacuation, get off the train, go on, everybody off, get back to the tender!”

“My daughter…” Child’a’grace began.

“Don’t argue, I know what I’m doing. Get back to the tender, I’m going to sort this thing with Harx once and for all.”