Ares Express

17

Toward evening she came to the dead town on the bluffs. The heat-haze had teased her on every foot, luring her through exhaustion and dehydration and the angry sun. Then, within three steps, it evaporated and the houses were tumbled walls and the aerials were ragged whips of wire and the lozenges of solar panels empty skeletons hanging in the warm wind. Dust had choked this town years before. Dust was its legacy and population, drifted in elegant swathes on the leeward sides of crumbled walls; clogging the irrigation channels of the bone-dry fields, soft and treacherous as water; stogging the shattered stumps of wind-pumps and ground-water siphons thigh deep in powder that smelled of time and electricity. A nameboard greeted Sweetness from beneath a shroud of dust. Summer storms had scoured the welcome to an epitaph. Eso ion ad. Lation, vation. One step short.

Water, food, a place out of the sun should have been Sweetness’s direct concerns but the gravitas of the buried town worked its way into her, drew her along the twisting, dust-choked alleys between the disintegrating adobe walls, peering through dead doorways into roofless rooms. In one she disinterred pieces of an old wooden handloom, with a scrap of cloth, beautifully patterned, that fell apart beneath her fingers into a spray of colour. In another, she found a set of ancient brass beer-pumps, patinaed green. She walked through orchards of dead solar trees to the sentinel upthrust of red rock. An open door invited entry. Look, it said: immediately within, a thread of wall-writing, time-faded and esoteric, wound into the shadowy interior. Can you resist? Not Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She followed it in and out of dry and fusty rooms, up spiral stone staircases. Rivulets and tributaries of arcane mathematics joined the main flow, feeding it into a torrent of gabbling symbols, tumbling over each other in their rush to the top of the house. Here they gushed out to cover wall and floor of an open ledge under the pinnacle of the rock. A fine room, some kind of observatory, had stood here in former times. Fingers of metal, sand-blasted shiny, hinted at a glass geodesic. The wind sang in the aerials. Sweetness spent a time taking in the prospects of the desert from the high viewpoint. To the south the bluffs fell away in a long line, like a weir in the redness, to an uninterrupted dunefield, awesome in its unbrokenness. West, along the twin lines of wind-polished silver, and she could just make out a faint darkening in the horizon that was the tokamak crater. East, rumours of mountains at the further edge of the world. North, five metres of symbol-inscribed sandstone. She went to it, pressed her fingers to the rock face, tried to trace out meanings and insights in the scrawlings but was only drawn into a subtle spiral of equations, in and in and round and round, ending in a single equals sign at the centre of the gyre of mathematics.

No revelation here, then. Beyond Comprehension, certainly, but not much Help.

Down then, and out. Out in the solar orchard, the sun mugged her. She was very tired and very hungry and very thirsty, this town was very dead and she was not one step nearer sanctuary. As her energy evaporated, Sweetness caught a scent, immediate and animal. The primal scent: water. Near, here. Instinct drew her to a small circular wall in the centre of a rectangle of rock that must once have been a garden. Dust lay banked around the foot of the wall but it did not seem to have spilled over the curb stones. Pray that it is not too deep. That would be cruel. Cruel would be typical. Water smelled sweet and deep. Sweetness rolled over the retaining wall and looked down into the well. Her own dark reflection, haloed by blue sky, looked up at her. It was not so deep. Sweetness scrabbled as far over the retaining wall as she dared, stretched down with her empty backsac to scoop a bagful of water.

Azimuth on a triple letter, double word, a voice said behind her, clear as water. Sweetness whirled, just remembering to hook one finger through the straps of her backsac. An old woman had spoken. What old woman? the dead town said. Search me. Sweetness did, with her eyes, left and right, foreground to middle distance. No old woman. See?

She bent over to dip another bagful of water.

Fighting Machine Squad Charlie, go go go! a radio-crackle voice yelled. Sweetness swung her bag out of the well in an arc of precious water, stood up, challenging the ruined houses. Water trickled from her backsac seams.

And where do you think I’m hiding a Fighting Machine Squad Charlie? the fallen walls and stump wind-pumps said.

“Okay!” Sweetness Asiim shouted. “What’s going on?”

If a dead town could have spread its hand in a shrug, Huh?, this one would have.

“I said, what’s going on?”

No answer, of course. But the dust stroked her cheek, toyed with her hair. A rattle of wires: the aerials on the high rock were restless, twitching. A moan from the skeletons of the wind gantries. Dust rose around the soles of her desert boots. A prickle of pure superstition on the nape of Sweetness’s neck said, Turn around, traingirl. Out there, beyond the edge of the dead town, beneath the fall of the bluffs, a wind-devil was moving across the face of the Great Red. Unlike the scatty whirlwinds of the High Plains and the polar deserts, this did not wander willy-wally, wind-driven whither-whether. It cut straight through the crests of the dune fields in soft detonations of sand. Its course was straight and determined; aimed right at the dead town on the bluffs: No, Sweetness knew, at me. And by the same intuition she knew it was futile to run—if there had been anywhere she could have run in this terrible land—for the devil in the wind would hunt her wherever she tried to hide. The wind rose, whipping the dust drifted around the well rim into long, stinging streamers. Sweetness chased her scattered things, struggled the saturated backsac shut and wrapped one of her torn shirt sleeves around her head. The dust-devil was at the foot of the bluffs. It was a scream of wind and sand, shot through with flickers of lightning. In one bound it leaped the bluffs. Dust blew up around Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She battled through it to take shelter in the lee of the well. Sand scoured her seared shoulders and arms. She fought to keep her mouth and nostrils covered. She had heard of these desert gyrestorms, that could pounce on a herd of grazers and in mere mouthfuls reduce them to bloody bones. The twister dived on her. Sweetness threw up her hands to cover her head and was buried in faces. Old wrinkle-faced matriarchs; heaven-eyed teenagers; scampish, grinning goondahs; harried-looking men in veterinary’s scrubs; women in pilot’s helmets; youths in cylindrical supplicant’s hats, judges, engineers, men in ROTECH uniforms, shysters and roustabouts, faces of angels and faces of demons and faces in between. Faces, and voices. Voices praying, pleading, demanding, declaiming; voices of prophecy and obsession, voices of children and aged aged men, voices of radio and wrath, voices whirled away before their words grew solid meanings. Voices, and histories. Images of children laughing and leaping in the rain, of bright, dart-like aeroplanes stitching across the sky, of steel-shod behemoths marching through corn fields, of wide-hatted men in long coats cradling needle guns, of choirs of angels hovering over a stark desert pillar, of babies in bell jars and balls on a green baize tabletop. And at the centre of it all, a figure, perhaps a man, perhaps not, drifting in and out of focus, as if near and far at the same time, shifting between probabilities. The figure congealed: a man, wrapped for the desert, in a long coat, with a heavy pack on his back surmounted by what looked like a sewing machine. One last flicker and he became actual. At the same instant the whirlwind dispersed in a mighty rush of faces and whispers and memories. The figure staggered, righted itself.

“God!” it cried. “Here again!” Then, noticing Sweetness staring over the rim of the well, it pulled a device like a collapsible umbrella from a holster at its waist and brandished it at her. “What in the name of all sanity are you?”

“I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Sweetness ventured, then, finding the umbrella-thing aimed at her absolutely the last straw in a line of kidnappings, hoodwinkings, maroonings, meanderings and burnings, she declared, fiercely, “And just who the hell are you?”

The figure goggled owlishly at her. But if he were any bird, it was a desert hawk, something keen and pinched and fidgeting; a bit leathery. The feather in his battered hat lent to the avian image, and the dark little eyes that gave no hint of where they were looking. The long, elegantly curving mustachios suggested another kind of beast, some watchful, quizzical desert gopher, a chewer of taproots and cactus, burrowing and twitch-whiskered. Altogether he was a strange bestiary of a creature, Sweetness decided. Still fixing her with his eye, the man said, “I am a traveller.”

“Me too,” Sweetness said. “Where from?”

“Here,” the man answered.

“You haven’t exactly gone far,” Sweetness said. The man tilted his head from side to side, as if attempting to triangulate her soul.

“I’ve just got back,” the man said after a good pause. “I was away a long time.”

Sweetness realised that noun-play in a dead town with mysterious travellers who crossed the great desert in dust-devils of faces stood a good chance of killing her, and that all she had eaten for the past three days was paperback romantic fiction.

“Have you anything to eat?” she asked. The traveller heard the plaint in her voice. He shrugged off his heavy pack, which Sweetness now saw was much more complex and arcane than at first impression. There were whip aerials and coils of cable and arrays of flashing lights and copper dials and bellows that went in and out and the definite taint—to the train-born—of fusion power. The traveller rummaged through his pockets. His coat was generously endowed with them. He hooked out a clutch of claw-shaped green fruit too large for the pocket that had produced it, but Sweetness was inured to the dimensionally transcendental.

“These are good.”

Sweetness frowned at them.

“They’re going to be big, a few million years from here.”

She took the bunch, peeled one of the hooked things. Cautious sniff: coffee and vanilla and a sweet/ sour tang, like guavas, but a little to the left. She took a bite. It was so good to a belly fed with mass market paperback that she devoured the whole bunch in six mouthfuls. She wiped her sticky fingers on her backsac. Since entering the big desert she seemed to have eaten nothing but fruit and paper. She remembered her promise of a fish on the mud-terraces at Therme.

“Million years?” she asked.

“I get around,” the traveller said. He spread his coat tails and sat beside her on the well wall. “Up to the end, and back again.” He held out his forefingers, crossed his hands. “Both ways.”

“I got an uncle like that,” Sweetness said.

“Have you now?” said the stranger. He explored deep in a pocket, hauled out a greaseproof-paper package. “These were fresh yesterday.” Inside were pale flaky rolls, forefinger sized.

“Thanks.” They were stuffed with a sweet, beany paste. “Only he’s more like beyond the end, if you know what I mean.” This, through a spray of pastry flakes.

“Your uncle?”

“More like elsewhere.”

“Ah yes. I am familiar with that. Most when is elsewhere, when you come down to it. It’s all probabilities; at first I thought you went forward and back, what I now realise is that you go sideways as well. Every movement forward, or back, is into an alternative created by your own apparent motion. I go diagonally through time.”

“The sky’s red there,” Sweetness said. “There’s frost on the ground, and a lot of stones. No one around, no clouds, no plants neither. Any more of those roll things?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said the traveller. His hand went elbow deep into his right pocket. “That’s the problem with diagonal, probabilistic motion. You get something good, you can’t go back to it again. All you can go to is a close alternative. Sometimes it’s better. Usually it’s worse. This do?”

He offered a foil-wrapped savoury. Sweetness’s desert-wise nose picked up a whiff of off but it was sustenance. For the first time the traveller seemed to notice the where and what of his location. While Sweetness licked animal grease off her fingers, he surveyed the dead town.

“When is this?” he asked.

Sweetness gave him the year and month.

“Long way to go yet,” he said. “I suppose I should warn them all, for the good it’ll do.”

“Warn who?”

“The people who live here. Lived here.”

Drawn by the desolation, he picked up his humming pack and went through the desiccated streets, running a finger along the sandy tops of the fallen walls, peering into the slack mouths of the doorways at the choked rooms. Sweetness followed him, half-intrigued, half-hoping for more provender from the deep deep pockets.

“The people who lived here, I could tell you their names, the names of their children,” the man said. “I could tell you the names of their thousand-times children’s children, but the problem is, would it be true? So many alternatives, and you can never trust that you travel back to the one, the true. It might have been someone else entirely, in this history.” He walked through the sterile fields toward the red rock-house. “I wonder what happened? It’s easy to lose the small change down the lining.”

Sweetness glanced at the sky—evening coming on.

“You travel in time, right?” she said to the journeyman.

“Right, child.”

“So you could go back and find out what happened.” Temporal paradox had suggested opportunity to Sweetness. “In fact, you could go back and leave me some food, and some water. That would be nice. Somewhere comfy to sleep, you could do that too, and a bath. I’d really really like it if you could do me a bath, and a lot of shampoo.”

“Shampoo.”

“Shampoo.”

The traveller smiled. His face crinkled like a well-used old leather wallet.

“See that rock?”

“I see it.”

“I used to live there. That’s my home.”

“Those are your numbers, going all the way up?”

“You’ve been in?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Well, this time you come as guest, not trespasser.” The odd man bowed her through the door, indicated that she should follow the spiral of temporal mathematics all the way to its conclusion. From the ruined weather-room the sun was a cracked red yolk dripping light-juice over the horizon, the shards of twisted glazing bars desperate fingers trying to hold back the sol-stuff.

“Stay there. Don’t move.” The strange little man clicked his pack shut around him. He twiddled dials on his coat sleeve.

“Where would I go?” Sweetness began to ask, then a wind out of nowhere flayed her sunburn and whipped her hair in her eyes. “Hey!” Faces rushed in from the world’s four quarters, voices, images, and were gone. As was the man.

“Hey…” sweetness started to say again but while the word was still on her tongue, hot wind blew in her face, dust buffeted her, faces loomed at her, yawned as if to swallow her, then vanished to their haunts beyond the edge of the world. The man was back. With him, total transformation. The high room was a web of triangular glass panes linked into a geodesic bubble. Some of the lights were stained with Ekaterinist angels. The setting sun kindled them to divinity.

Then Sweetness saw the thing in the middle of the mosaic floor.

“Oh,” she said. “Oooh. Ooh.”

The bath was long and iron and elegantly curved, with lion’s paw feet, a gold faucet, and full to within ten centimetres of the brim with gently aromatic steaming water.

“And shampoo.” The man lifted up a silver ewer, poured a semeny gobbet into the bathwater. “And afterward…” A hammered brass Llangonedd table was set with covered thalis. Chapattis were stacked in a soft dinner-cloth. A folded napkin and bowl of rose-water invited finger-feeding. The man lifted a bottle out of a cooler and studied the label. “This is good. I never knew I had such taste.”

“What the, how the?”

“Pick one, choose one, engineer one. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” the man said, with a wizardly twirl of the mustachios. He surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. “It was never this good when I had it. Wonder what happened to that other Alimantando?”

“That your name?” Sweetness asked.

“It’s been one.”

“The writing’s still on the wall,” she said.

“So it is,” the traveller said. He walked to within squinting-distance of the equals sign, then began to follow the equations outward. Sweetness thought that the writing looked fresher, bluer, cleaner. But the water was deep and hot, and she could smell her hair again…

“Er.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” the man said, led out of the high room by numbers. As she wriggled out of her sweat-stiff gear, Sweetness glanced over her shoulder for spectators: reflex born of a life lived in close proximity to others. Beyond the stained glass there was no town, no walls, no ruination. A red rock stood on a bluff, and a steel rail ran by it. That was all. Trying not to screw her head round with the paradoxes of time-travel, Sweetness slid into the hot water, grimacing as it grazed her sun-sting. It was good and enfolding and long and she sang old burlesque songs as she scrubbed the shampoo into her curls. No drier, but she shook her hair out like a dog, then studied herself in the floor-standing mirror to check if she was still as cute as she remembered. She poked gingerly at the scabby burn on her cheek, turned profiles to see if her little breasts had lost anything she could not afford to desert privations. Still fabulous, she concluded, wrapped herself in a silk robe worked with more mathematical symbols. The night was high, the moonring a twinkling arch over the glass dome. Sweetness sat herself in a wicker chair by the glass and watched the hasty moon twins race each other up the sky.

Here’s a man can make anything by re-engineering history, she thought, so what else can he do for me?

The man himself looked through the stair door. He was dressed in velveteen knee-britches and frogged jacket. His mustachios were perkily waxed to lethal weapons.

“You’re, ah?”

“Done? Yah.”

“Good. Then let’s consume.”

He bowed in the Deuteronomian manner to guide Sweetness to her place, pulled out her chair, unfolded her napkin with a flourish.

“Thank you,” she said, charmed. Only proper man I’ve met in…oh my gods! Years!

“You’re exceedingly welcome,” the traveller said. “I have few enough chances to entertain, these days.”

Whatever they are, Sweetness thought. She said, “I got one question. What happened to the town?”

“It never happened, not in this time-line. I seem to have been something of a bon-viveur, though.” The man indicated his attire, the table furnishings. He offered a platter of wind-dried meats. Sweetness heaped her plate. “It’ll give you the shits, too much of that on an empty stomach.”

“I been eating stories,” Sweetness said.

“Really? How extraordinary. Poor fare, I don’t doubt. Little sustenance in most stories. A lot of people think their lives are stories, but they delude themselves. No structure, no narrative tack, no sense of dramaturgy. Just chains of events.”

“Not me,” Sweetness said. “I met this guy once told me I was a story, well, for a time.”

“That’s the most story any of us are, for a time.”

“He was weird. I think he was green.”

The dapper traveller choked as if poisoned.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He had this tiny wee yurt thing by the side of the track, ’cept of course when you looked back it wasn’t there, but he said, ‘Sees all hears all knows all.’”

“‘Past present future,’” the traveller cut in. “‘Uncurtain the windows of time…’ Have you any idea, young woman, any idea at all how long I’ve been searching for this…trackside mountebank, this scryer of fortunes and futures?”

Sweetness saw a light in the traveller’s eyes, a prickling of his whiskers, an edge in the voice that warned her, Nice manners or not, you’re here with this man, and there’s no one else around and you don’t even know for sure what universe you’re in.

But the traveller was in flow and vent now. “This…soothsayer, this story-maker,” he sprayed, “This green man of whom you speak so lightly; he guided me to this place, teased and taunted and tantalised me across that desert, to this high red rock, where he abandoned me; he, if anyone, is the founder of the town that sometimes exists out there, sometimes not; he is the reason for every single one of those symbols on the wall, he is the reason I continue to travel across time, up and down and side to side; him. Read your beads? Say your seeds? Tell your bones? Of course! Of course he can tell the future, he is the future! Time is a part of him, as much as the air you breathe, the food you eat is part of you! This green man, you met him! Ah! I’ve been a billion years forward and a billion years back, I’ve seen the sun swollen like the burning belly of a pregnant martyr, this world of ours a ball of bubbling slag; I’ve seen the very first spring, a billion years ago in the youth of the world—there were things living then, girl, that you would not even reckon alive. I’ve travelled across the frozen years, I’ve seen them erect the diamond pillars of Grand Valley. And I’ve travelled from side to side: I’ve visited strange great civilisations, bizarre and inhuman; I’ve watched the fleets of Motherworld and this world set the heavens on fire with their weapons; I’ve seen this world in all its colours, red, green, blue, white, yellow; I’ve stood beneath titanic pyramids and mountains carved into alien faces. And all across these billions of years, landscapes of time, I see the footprints of this green man, mentor and tormentor, and always I am a moment too late, a day too early, a street or two wide: and you, traingirl, you tell me you meet him at some…some…trackside bawdy-burg! I tell you this, girl; yours must be a mighty story indeed for him to step out of time to say your sooths. I think I need to know much about you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. Tell me what brought you from there to here. Omit nothing.”

So she did. There was purple along the morning edge of the world by the time it was all told. The traveller interrupted often with questions she could not answer. At each of her half-responses, his face grew more grave. He started to roll his mustachios, an unconscious tic of concern.

“So here I am,” Sweetness concluded and the glass room was suddenly lit theatrical red as the edge of the world tipped beneath the upper limb of the sun.

“This is serious indeed,” the traveller said. “Glossing over that the Blessed Lady of Tharsis seems to have chosen to manifest herself as your late twin sister—the ways of deities, by definition, are beyond our consideration—if this Devastation Harx has control of her, he has access not just to the ROTECH command structure, which is bad enough for continued life on this world, but the vinculum processors that helped build the world; and that is bad news for reality, everywhere.”

“This is a problem? You go back in time and stop him.”

“Not so easy.”

“You whizzed this place up out of some other history somewhere, and you can’t kick Devastation Harx?”

“It’s a locality problem. I can strongly affect time-dependent events here, at the centre so to speak, but as I move away, the probability drops off. More than a hundred kilometres in any direction, it’s back to base-line reality. Think of me as a kind of human wave function.”

“So you’re telling me you can’t kick Devastation Harx.”

“I’m telling you that, yes. And anyway, even if I could, it’s not for me to do. You understand why?”

“I think so,” Sweetness said. In the night of words, as the people and events were drawn out her, the act of telling revealed an order, an organic structure in her experiences. She did not impose story on her tale. Story was within, quivering and sinewy in every action, like a speed-dog waiting its turn on the track. Nothing merely happened, every event was connected, one to another, with a unity and clarity. She thought of the green man’s fortune-telling stick, and its implied extension, out of the past, into the future. “It’s the story, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” the traveller said. When he smiled, as he was doing now, Sweetness was reminded of Uncle Neon, before. And, she thought again, in some ways, after.

“In this story, Sweetness Octave goes across the desert and has lots of big adventures before she tracks down Devastation Harx and his Church boys, rescues Our Lady of Tharsis, saves the world, and hopefully, somewhere in all that, gives Serpio a kicking.”

“That sounds like it.”

“A wee Engineer girl who’s not even allowed to drive a train takes on this guy who can balls about with what’s real and what’s not, and wins?”

“That’s the story. And if I know anything about them, things will get worse before they get better.”

“Only one problem.”

“Which is?”

“How do I get out of the desert?”

“That, I think, is my chapter in your story. Now, you catch a couple of hours’ sleep, and I’ll see what I can engineer.”

Sweetness slept in a brocade-canopied bed in a room with a high, small window looking south on to the great erg. She was shaken from the flocking hallucinations you get just before you drop off by a distinct feeling of other lives rushing through her. Then she gave a twitch and fell headlong into a dream that she was a girl sleeping in a canopied bed with desert wind blowing through her window who dreamed that, in a dream, without any polite warning, the universe abruptly changed. She woke up, and it had.

She lay in a wide pale bed in a high pale room draped with floating swags of pale muslin. The light through the unglazed window told her it was afternoon. The wind no longer smelled of desert, but vegetables fertilised with night soil. Peering through the gauzy layers of muslin, Sweetness thought she saw a ghostly figure by the foot of the bed.

“Hello?”

“Madam?”

Sweetness fought her way out of the fog of fabric. No ghost, but substance, a short, dumpy woman in her early teens, dressed in the ubiquitous pale cheesecloth, with an odd, conical hat that tilted forward.

“Who are you?”

“I am Bennis. I am here to help the madam dress and prepare herself for her journey.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Following the teacher by serving the madam.”

“The teacher? Never mind.”

“Madam.” Bennis lifted Sweetness’s clothes and held them out. They looked very clean and smelled of lavender.

“Are you an acolyte?” Sweetness asked suspiciously.

“I have the honour to be so, yes,” the girl said.

“I’ll dress myself, thanks.”

The traveller was waiting for her down at the tracks. A handful of acolytes, all alike in pale habits and conical hats formed a respectful circle around him. They parted to let Sweetness through.

“Good afternoon good afternoon good afternoon!” the traveller boomed. “I trust we are refreshed and restored? Good good good. Now, is this not a fine device?”

It was indeed; a thing of brass and wood and engraved steel. It stood four square on twin bogies, but Sweetness could not make out any driving wheels, or anything that looked like an engine.

“How?” she asked. The traveller pointed to the sky. Twelve big boxkites flew in three-by-four formation. Sweetness strained to make out bridle lines and tethers, they seemed to hover, unattached by anything but charisma. She did notice a shimmering around the head of carved Lorarch that was the rail-yacht’s figurehead, a halo, like spider silk in the wind. She went for a closer look.

“Don’t get too close,” the traveller warned. “Diamond filament. Take your fingers right off quick smart.”

“Where did it come from?” Sweetness explored the safety of the burnished brass—already hot under the desert sun—and the intricate filigree metal work.

“I invented it, of course,” the man said. “These people tell me I arrived on it five years ago out of a dust storm that had been blowing for an entire season, thus ending the storm and saving their community. In this history, they beat me here by a good decade.”

“Yeah, I meant to ask, just who are these people?”

“Some manner of stylite order, originally. A Cathrinist sect; they’re a pretty peaceable crew. They seem to regard me as a great teacher.”

“The Teacher is a Skandava,” one of the acolytes spoke up, a skinny, hollow-cheeked man.

“A dweller between realities, that is,” a chunky woman beside him clarified.

“There you have it,” the traveller said. “Well, throw up your stuff then.” He stowed Sweetness’s bag in a cubby, then swung himself up on to the running board. He addressed the faithful, jaunty hat in one hand. “So, my good people, I, your great and distinctive teacher, bid you farewell—I have business between dimensions. I cannot say how long I will be engaged on it and when I will be able to return to you, but rest assured, I shall. Look for me in winter storms and summer lightning, in out-of-season whirlwinds and strange dreams. Now, it’s high time we were away.” To Sweetness he added, “Well, are you coming then?”

She bounced over the brass railing. The traveller was seated in one of two buttoned leather armchairs under an awning on the raised poop. Forward was a gurney-wheel, a binnacle and wind-rose and a set of brass levers. Old ambition, pressed down and almost forgotten, suddenly bubbled in her heart.

“Can I ask something?”

“Ask away,” the traveller said, unfolding a pair of smoked-glass pebble sun-spectacles from one of his many coat pockets.

“Can I drive?”

“The helm is yours,” the traveller said with an expansive gesture.

Sweetness took the footplate. She touched the hot, gleaming brasswork levers, the spokes of the braking wheel. The compass read west, the wind-rose reported a firm thirty-knotter up at two hundred metres, sou’ by sou’-west. Shading her eyes with her hand, she squinted up at the kites. They bobbed and strained, eager and restless. Not exactly a fusion tokamak and superheat boiler. And this wasn’t a drive rod in her hand. No calliope, no triple steam horns, but there was a brass bell. And the track ran straight before her and she could feel the rail-yacht quivering on its bogies for the off and it said, Drive me, take me off down that long line, make me run, Engineer girl. Point me wherever you want me to go.

Sweetness waved her hands at the Cathrinists. They humbly parted. She took the brake lever in her two hands and eased it back. The wheels creaked, the wind hummed in the invisible diamond thread. At first slowly, so slowly even Sweetness, used to the subtleties of great trains, could not be sure they were turning, the bogies began to roll. She gave a yip of glee. Furiously clanging the big brass bell, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th drove the rail-yacht through lines of politely applauding stylites and out across the Big Red.