Ares Express

27

Foolish folk will tell you that trains are intrinsically happy things. They are bright, speedwell creatures of pomp and steam, like well-fed cheerful uncles. They take people on journeys and life, such folk believe, is journey. A train is a thousand stories, each carriage, each compartment, each seat row crammed more full with motive and emotion and drama than any book. If, as the Masters of Narratology maintain, all story is journey; the converse is also true; there is no journey that does not have a story in its ticket price. Trains bringing lovers together. Trains carrying hopeful families to new lives. Trains taking bright young people to brilliant success in the cities. Trains taking the old to meet the new generations of their people. Engines of change, garlanded with flowers. Happy things.

People wiser in the ways of trains know that for every happy train there is a train of sorrow. For every holiday special there is a packed commuter, for every young hopeful there is a freeloader clinging to the bogies and for every reunion there is a final parting. Trains of farewell. Trains of fatalism, and passivity. Trains of exile. Trains of extermination. Death trains, on which we all must ride, carried at ever higher speeds by forces over which we have no control, directed by rails we did not set, into the tunnel that never ends. And the communication cord is snapped.

The wisest in the ways of trains count a third category; trains of no emotional content. Freight trains. Bulk carriers. Vast, slow-moving ore trains, big enough to be visible from orbit. Trains made up of grain silos, cement wagons, chemical tankers, lumber racks, agricultural machinery flatbeds, grazer cars, hydrocarbon processors, container pallets, paper mills; trains of oils and minerals and big red rocks. Trains of silk and straw and exotic fruit. Trains of glass and tin; tea and spices. Trains with no cargo of human feeling. These, such people say, are the truest trains, for they expose the soft anthropomorphism of those who must project feelings all around them. A train is nothing but a big chunk of inter-related metal parts wrapped around a hydrogen fusion/superheat steam boiler combo. Classically structured, a piece of pure operating logic. Any emotional freight is the property of its passengers and crew.

As example, they will say, here is a train. It’s coming on down the line. Let’s start at the front and see if there is anything about it that could teach us about happiness and sorrow.

We start with a pair of nipples, silver, quite erect. From them we move back over the areolas, the proud, firm and outsized breasts to the curved-back torso of a woman, chin proudly aloft, hair streaming out behind her. We note that the silver woman has wings for arms, and that they are folded back around the boiler cap. Back along the swelling curve of the boiler to the cyclops eye of the headlamp, over the tiers of outlook galleries and catwalks to the gold-plated anti-glare glazing of the driving bridge where the Engineer stands, hand on the thrust bar, eye on the quartersphere ball, thence by the black and silver livery of Bethlehem Ares Railroads to the streamlined wedge of the main stack. A moment’s pause to peep down the steam flues in the raving heart of the machine. On, over the fluid humps of the reheat coil and the Deep-Fusion homesteads, to the ornately filigreed hydro-helium tanks and the water tender with their turrets and watch-houses, the last outpost of the Engineer Domiety before we pass from driver to driven: the train proper. We enter here the territory of the Stuards; from single sleek, slim-line executive express cars to ten kilometres of ore trucks, from pilgrims clacking their beads to polymer processors, all are their responsibility, all are tended with equal attention. Today this service is hauling an organic chemical processor: the first fifteen cars we fly over are stacked with logs from the great polar taigas of Treeves and Raskolnikov. A beltway feeds them one by one to the chipping plant in car sixteen and from there into the bacterial fermentories, reactor plants and cracking towers of the middle section of the train. We glide over cylinders and chimneys and cooling ducts, rivers of pipework and power conduits, separator grids, pumps, distillation columns, wash-backs and vents jetting waste gasses. Brute industry. No emotion here. Now we follow the loops of colour-coded piping to the storage section of the factory-train where each separated fraction is channelled into the appropriate receiving tank. Some bear large and flagrant warning symbols, others are wreathed in mist from cooling tubes, others still carry prominent pressure release valves and little vent-flaps that flutter and chirp as the whole ensemble makes its ponderous way across the unhedged grainlands of central Axidy.

Happy, sad?

This train is not done yet. There is the auxiliary power van, and the raised cupola of Shipment Control, from which the Stuards can look out over the whole length of the train and ascertain in an instant if something is wrong with their charge. After aux and con we pass swiftly over Ballasted Brake vans 1 and 2, the abode of the abject Bassareenis, to the final car, the caboose. Passing over its gilded lion-head crest, we come to a long glass blister. We glimpse greenery. It seems to be some sort of conservatory. Onward. We fly out over the Stuards’ verandah a little way down the track that strikes undeviating across the plain. Turn, look back at the foreshortened length of the great train driving across the geometric farmland. There it is. The great train, Catherine of Tharsis. Happy? Sad? Can’t tell, can you? It’s magnificent, but it’s metal. Meaningless.

But let’s turn round, go back to that blister of glass and greenery. Hover a moment. Stoop lower. Look carefully. It is indeed a caboose-top roof garden, accessed by a wrought-iron spiral staircase, protected from the three-hundred kilometre-per-hour winds of express speed by a slender geodesic. Within is a lush little jungle of foliage plants; some flowers; a small water feature; wind-chimes; darting ornamental humming birds, like flying jewellery; a little lawn as smooth as snooker baize and a tiled patio area with casual cast-aluminium seating. A young man is sitting on one of the chairs. He is slightly built, with the pallor of the Deep-Fusion Domiety, a childhood encased in metal, close to perilous energies. A worm of goatee shadows his chin. He looks ten, eleven of this world’s double-years. On an occasional table beside him is a peeled apple, a pocket knife, and a red telephone. He cuts a slice from the apple, eats it, tries to pay attention to the yellow paperback in his hand.

Romereaux Deep-Fusion finds he has been spending more time in Marya Stuard’s conservatorium recently, reading yellow novels, mostly being away from other people. Friends and relatives now crowd him. There is not enough room, there is always someone around, someone wanting to talk to you, someone pushing past you, someone there. No space for yourself, except up here. And the books are yellow and stupid, but no more so than anything else. His job, his life-role, bores him. Tuning tokamaks, configuring containment fields, controlling plasma flows, manipulating ignition lasers; ten generations of Deep-Fusioneers may have nurtured the fire in the beast, but why the eleventh? Romereaux has discovered that he resents that he was never given a choice about it. You are born to tend tokamaks, that’s fact, son. It’s not just him. There’s a discontent going up and down the corridors, through the carriage couplings and along the gosport tubes. The contracts are signed, the loads hauled, the engines fused up and the brasses polished, but there’s no spirit in it. Haul, heave, haul again. The rails go on forever. You will never get anywhere on them, just round and round the round round world. Tempers are short, patience shorter. Good reason to stay away from your brothers and colleagues when a bump in a companionway can lead to a fist fight. Romereaux can’t remember the last time he heard Madre Mercedes strike up with her asbestos gloves on the calliope. Not since things started going bad. That is what he says; but what he means is since Sweetness went away.

In engineering terms, he thinks of her as a very small bolt, in a difficult place, unobtrusive, easy to miss. But that bolt is made of gold, and it’s the one that holds the whole thing together. Lose it, and…She rode away that morning and lit up a whole other world of places to go and lives to lead. All of a sudden, everyone had choices. You don’t have to go where the rails take you. You can move in at least two dimensions. You can get off the train. First Sweetness, then Grandmother Taal: if the lofty Engineers are so rotten within one girl can topple them, why do we cling so tenaciously to our traditions and laws? Will they save us, and what from? Are they worthy of saving?

Pull that bolt, and the whole damn thing starts to come apart.

He spears another segment of apple on the pen-knife blade. It’s halfway to his mouth (it is a terrible, yellower-than-yellow novel) when the telephone rings. The red telephone.

Because it is the red telephone, he stares at it for ten, twenty, thirty rings.

The red telephone. The hot-as-Hades emergency line. For use only in absolute extremis. War pillage flood firefall a line invasion end of the world. The red telephone. It is still ringing.

Romereaux looks around, finds no one who can advise or he can delegate to. He picks up the receiver, suddenly fearful the caller might have run off in disgust. He dislodges a thick fall of dust.

“Hello?” He listens to the voice at the other end. The message is short. “Yes, I understand,” he says and reverently sets down the handset. Then it is as if he has had a cattle-prod inserted anally: he is out of his chair and across the conservatorium in one galvanic bound. He snatches up the gosport, uncaps it and bellows up to the bridge.

“Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s Grandmother Taal!”

Sweetness clung like a tick to the underside of the grapple arm. Around her, Vertical Boys with improbable face paint hung from the metalwork like festival piñadas. It was five minutes since the punky little scout with the spiky hair had reported the last of the acolytes scampering in an all-fired-hurry back into the cathedral. Oddly quiet up on the working platforms. Had Störting-Kobiyashi’s industrial trolls downed tools again? Sweetness’s own ears hinted at strange energies brewing inside the flying machine. Something was about to happen, but Sweetness held her forces back. Better to be safe than sorry. This is war.

Every story needs a good mass action scene.

Sweetness checked her beanie gun. She checked her emergency parafoil. She didn’t trust herself with either of them.

Point and pull. Simple. A soft thud and they go down. Guaranteed non-lethal. Lies. A feather pillow can be lethal in the wrong hands. One false shot could knock someone right over the edge, or what if they had a heart condition, or brittle bones? She had sworn her way across the Great Desert on the lives of those she’d love to kill and the ways in which she would enjoy doing it. Now the very real possibility stood before her and asked, Can you do it? Can you do it? Even that Serpio. It’s you, him and a big drop. One shot. Will you put him over? And if you do, will you fire from cover, an unseen assassin, or do you want him to see you, do you want him to know? Do you want your face to be the last, the very last thing he will ever see? What if he goes for you? What if it’s you and him? Bean the bastard. No questions asked. There. Justified. Sort of.

The parafoil was simpler still. Fall and pull. She had done the fall already and that had not been so hard when it came to it, but it seemed saner to trust in the power of story than this rustley wad of cut-and-glue nylon sheeting. How many goes did it take to get the design right?

Everything does come out right in the mass action scene, doesn’t it?

Pharaoh was looking to her for instruction. He had two parallel stripes of blue under each eye and they made him look fierce in a soft, cute sort of way…Aw, no. Have you no self-control, girl? Get a grip of yourself. It’s the going into battle thing. A whiff of danger, a reek of death and the DNA says, pass me on, pass me on, make babies, make babies.

“Okay, let’s go to work.” She had heard someone say that in one of Sle’s action movies. Pharaoh heliographed to squads two and three on the far grapple and underneath the service yard. Mirrors flickered compliance, the Vertical Boys unhooked their safety lines and began to advance along the girders and ducts.

It had been a hard march, filing up the narrow flanges of one roof-spar, swinging perilously in webbing harness across the huge annular bolt plates where spars joined the huge glass hexagons, then another long shuffle down the next rib to the next pier. One hundred metres out along the first spar Sweetness had discovered the first, and unspoken, rule of a Vertical Boy: Don’t let go of what you’ve got until you have a firm grip on something else. The second rule she knew already. Don’t look down. Shuffle. Swing. Shuffle. Scramble. She watched the nonchalant ease with which the Vertical Boys swung over terrifying gaps, hung one-handed over appalling chasms. It’s easy for them, Sweetness thought. They have no eggs, just lots of cheap and messy seed they can fire where and when they like, all over the place. Be careless with it. Nature is profligate with guys’ life-stuff. Death means nothing to boys that age. Gangs, guns and glory. They imagine themselves gazing down on their own heroic memorials, all their friends and the ones who scorned them and secretly fancied them gathering round and being amazed or sorry or distraught or manly-but-gutted. They hear staunch eulogies, they stand by weeping mothers and girls who could have been girlfriends, in a guy’s way, right? and look at their broken bodies and feel really really good. They can’t understand that death is death, end, terminated, finito: game over. No nothing.

Sweetness thanked the hormones of pubescent boys, that let her play the Fab but Unattainable Warrior Queen with great hair and them her berserkers.

They roosted around her on spars and struts at the end of the grapple arm. Clamps held the cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family a short spit away. It filled half the world, an orange moon cratered with scars and punctures. Sweetness had reconnoitred her access points from the vantage of an adjacent roof-spar. You could march whole armies through the holes Cadmon and Euphrasie had blown in the skin. She flexed her aching muscles and gave her pre-invasion team talk.

“Okay, on my word, we go up and in. What we’re looking for is a jar thing, about this size, dirty greenish. It’s got a lid like a helmet with wings, right? It’s probably up at the very top; there’s a kind of glassed-over dome thing that seems to be Harx’s special place, I reckon he’s got it there if he’s got it anywhere. Work your way up, the place is all circles, so it’s easy to get about in but you can end up going round and round if you’re not smart. That jar is what we’re here for. Nothing else matters. Not even getting people, get that? Avoid unnecessary combat. That’s an order,” she insisted, seeing the looks of disappointment on some of the boys’ faces. “Don’t stop for anything. We want to get in and out, quick smart.”

“This fog is great cover,” green tiger-striped Vertical Boy said.

“What fog?”

The boy nodded down. Against the rules, Sweetness looked down between her feet. A raft of cloud boiled up toward her. As she watched, it swirled over her feet, up her legs, swallowed her whole. Sweetness and her strike force were suspended in grey murk.

“Something freaky here,” she said. Then the world lurched. “What the hell is going on?”

“We seem to be moving,” Pharaoh said calmly. Dripping blue arcs, power lines disconnected from the cathedral, swung free and began to retract. Water conduits unplugged, access scaffolds slid backward on their greased bearings. One by one the grapple fingers were releasing their grip. The sounds from inside the airship took on a deeper, more urgent tone. “Harx is casting free.”

“He’s what? He can’t do that. Signal the others.”

“In this?”

The arm lurched again. Sweetness looked wildly around. Her platoon awaited her command.

“Go go go!” she yelled and, before any of them could move, was diving recklessly out along the gantry, hand over hand, scrambling to beat the relentless release of the claspers. Three. Two. One steel finger now restrained Devastation Harx. Sweetness swung herself on to it as it let go the orange hull. The airship floated free. Sweetness hurled herself across the widening gap, dived through the jagged hole in the skin, rolled and came up looking out at her boy army swinging helplessly away into the grey. Grapple guns popped, fell into the void. One grapnel was firmly hooked into the lip of the wound. Sweetness heard winch motors whine. A hand grasped the ragged edge, another. Fingers strained. Pharaoh’s head appeared. Sweetness helped him haul himself into the corridor.

“Well, general,” he said, looking up and down the circular corridor.

“Nothing’s changed,” Sweetness said. “We got a job to do. Let’s move it on out.” She had heard that too in one of Sle’s movies, and always wanted a chance to say it. They moved it on out.

As usual, Devastation Harx’s reflection kept him waiting. Being a man with little tolerance of boredom, Devastation Harx amused himself by trying to catch sight of that other, mirror universe his reflection inhabited, into which it went to pass his reports and receive its instructions. As usual, the glass returned the infinite regress of his mirror maze, devoid of its creator.

Why, he thought, is it this Harx that must wait? The fountainhead and inspiration of an entire religion does not stand around tapping his foot for a mere dog soldier, even if that soldier is one of countless billion alternatives enlisted in the multiversal war against the machines.

Harx glanced at his hand to reassure himself of his own solidity. Truth, illusion and selfhood become dubious when you trap mirrors with mirrors. Mirrors could reflect time as easily as images and possibilities. Many a time he had found a new configuration of the maze, brought into temporary alignment by the movements of the mirrors, where he had seen back two and half decades ago to the Collegium of All Arts alternative poised on an overhang of sculpted rock over the deepest part of the canyon of Lyx like a school for apprentice sorcerers. Magic indeed had been worked there. Quantum magic, the only one the universe permits. The deepest, blackest and most baffling of all.

Somewhere in the mirror maze there must be the reflection of that moment when a three-year-old boy from a good, staid grain family of Valturapa picked a face mirror from his mother’s dressing table, turned it to the vanity mirror, peeped in to see what reflections of reflections of reflections looked like. There also must be time-reflection of the sudden explosion of a smack on the back of that boy’s head, the lace-gloved fingers snatching away the hand-mirror, his crow-face of grandmother bending down, the onion smell of her breath as she told him never never never to look into two mirrors reflecting each other. A boy’s soul could be sucked out of him and lost forever in the maze of reflections. Too late, Amma. His soul was already lost in the infinite regress.

He had certainly seen many times the mirror maze he built as his graduation piece, the culmination of four years’ esoteric research in draughty libraries. Fine art and quantum theory. Mirrors could be turned face to face to reflect not infinite regress, but infinite alternative universes, all the possibilities that bubble off from every wave function collapse. Polymers could be doped with the same string-processors that built the neural architectures of ROTECH’s reality-reshaping manforming machines and cast into mirrors. Such mirrors could show the dual, uncollapsed state of every photon that impinged on them; a man looking into the infinite regress would see not just himself, but all other possible selves. No two who looked would see the same. Every man his own work of art.

He built the first, ten-mirror quantumoculum in a mad dry season with the hot tlantoon wind blowing in from the high desert, alone, as he had spent most of his study years; a man apart from his fellow students. On a sleepless night with the summer lightning raving around the college’s spires, he stepped into the circle of mirrors, lit a paschal candle and looked. At first it eluded him, a shimmering, scampering thing that flitted from mirror to mirror, gone as soon as he tried to fix it in his vision; then he learned the trick of seeing by not-looking, like willing the floaters in the eyeball to be still, and he first encountered this other Harx, this soldier in the panversal war against the artificial intelligences. From him he learned his true name and nature, and the meaning of his existence in this universe.

Devastation Harx coughed dryly. In the next universe over, Harx II heard the signal of stretching patience and poked his head around the edge of the mirror.

“Oh. There you are. Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Have you been waiting long?”

Harx I stepped into full shot to face Harx II. They were, of course, physically identical, being mere quantum fluctuations of each other: middling height, trim, the grey hair that hue that is known as Distinguished Silver; the refined, slightly feminine features; lips slightly cruel. In manner of dress and disposition they differed radically. Harx I, as ever, was immaculate, expensive, restrained and carried his black swagger-stick with a casual ease that hinted at casual power casually wielded. Harx II seemed slumped, as if drawn in by an inner hollowness, skin waxy and blotched; weary to the very bones. He wore a high-collared uniform with badly pressed pants with a red stripe down the side. The whole looked as if slept in regularly. Harx I often thought of telling his alternate that he looked more like a bell-hop in a Belladonna bidouche than a reality warrior.

“The diversionary tactic was completely successful. Already the lunar assembly lines are dropping the first waves of military units across the equatorial zones. We should have secured local government, constabulary, communication and transport systems within seventy-two hours. We will maintain public order in the transition period.”

“That’s good, that’s good, that’s good.” Harx II’s voice was distracted, wandering. Harx I often suspected that he was taking orders from a clerk in the pay division. “What about the subterranean defence units?”

“They’re only accessible through privileged Synodical codes. Once we secure the compliance of the Anarchs, they’ll cease to pose a threat.”

“And until then, half the planet’s got a ring-side seat on robot wars.” Harx II paused, hacked up a phlegm ball and decorously ejected it. “There’s not going to be much left of your pretty little terraformed world by the time they end. Your people are going to have to rebuild it all, ground up.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is the notion.”

Harx I did thoroughly despise his quantum counterpart. Multiversal war was no excuse for bad dressing.

On that night of heat lightning, Harx had walked into a maze of quantum mirrors and discovered that his world, its peoples, its history, its Five Hundred Founders were all images, distant reflections of a greater, more terrible reality. In the long manforming, ROTECH’s angels had shuffled many realities. In one and one only was there any probability of a habitable world they could share with the humans, a redoubt of diversity and toleration. In all others, there was war. War between the meat and metal, without let or quarter. Total war. War fought across the million realities opened up by the computing power of vinculum theory processors. A war that, in all those other realities, the machines were losing. Across countless universes, the AIs had been exterminated, in many others, driven back, in the rest fighting for their survival as a sentient species. In one and one only they survived, hidden in a fold of improbability from the multiversal Questors of the Human League. This little greened world with its pretty moonring was their final stand. Their red Masada. And, on a hot summer night, an art student had opened a door into the multiverse, called out and received not a welcoming hello to a greater fellowship of all humanity, but the sound of bugles.

“Fight? For you? In a war? What for?” he had asked his scruffy emanation on their third meeting, a night with the insane tlantoon howling about the pinnacles and stacks of Lyx canyon.

“Bucketloads of money,” Harx II hinted.

“I am an artist,” young Harx had said, bristling at the enormity of the insult. “And anyway, physical transfer between universes violates conservation of mass and energy.”

“Information doesn’t,” Harx II said. “We’ve got ideas.”

Two weeks later he was back.

“I’ll take the bucketloads of money,” Harx I said. “Give me your ideas.”

Show time. The external examiners had decorously hitched their gowns of office to step over the threshold into the quantumoculum. Half an hour later they emerged. Two days after that, they delivered their judgement. This was not art. This was a risible fairground side-show, reeking of the fairground midway and the barker’s shout. A third-class degree. The lowest possible award. In all but name, a failure, for in these days of fiscally sound education and league tables of performance, a failed student meant a slashed budget and a faculty reprimand.

“Okay,” Harx II had said. “You want to make money, stuff art. Found a religion. Here’s one we prepared earlier…”

That day Harx I took the name and nature of devastation.

Back in the contemporary corner of the mirror maze, Harx II chewed at his lower lip in that way Harx I loathed so copiously.

“One wee thing, those two artists. They did a lot of a damage. A lot of damage. We can’t afford any more setbacks like that.”

Ironic, that the angels should have recruited his own brother and that brother’s lover as assassins. That they had been sent to destroy him, Harx I had no doubt. Had it been a desert revelation, the angels boiling out of the heat haze to take them up and show them the name and natures of the multiverse, then tell them exactly who they wanted killed, and how to do it? Bloody A-students. Bones in the dust. He’d seen to that. Never underestimate the longevity of professional jealousy.

“Everything is under control.”

Patently untrue, but Harx I had few qualms now about lying to his counterpart. Let the enemy love-bomb him, let them send who or whatever. He had control of the orbital weaponry, his metal soldiers were burning through the upper atmosphere like autumn meteors and, behind this gaudy diversion, he had accomplished his strategic goal: he had stripped the holy codes for the superstring processors out of the St. Catherine entity. Devastation Harx commanded the reality shapers themselves. Nothing could stop him now.

The sound of muffled shouting from the corridor outside gave immediate lie to Harx I’s claim. He whirled. Unregarded, Harx II vanished back into his reality. Last to fade was a puckered frown. His parting words echoed in the mirror maze.

“Just make sure it is.”

More shouting, louder now, and sounds of strife. Voices: Dandeever, calling orders. They were quick, his enemies, but he was ready for them. Mirrors pivoted away from Harx as he hastened from the mirror maze to take command against the attack. Parallel Harxes swung away from him and vanished into the multiverse. One misreflection caught him in midflight. He checked himself, took a cautious step back, seized the edge of the mirror to hold the image. Caught in the silvered glass was a girl, green eyes, brown skin, black curly hair in need of a wash. She wore tattered pants, a sleeveless shirt, an orange track vest. A new addition was the complex pack on her back, and the peculiar gun in her fist.

“You,” Devastation Harx breathed. “Again.”

It was not until Skerry was standing in the open hatch of the United Artists speed dirigible, bungee cords around her ankles, that the thought struck her. What exactly did the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis look like?

Two minutes to curtain up on The End of the World Show. Somewhere out in the thickening fog, Bladnoch lurked in UA2, the big heavy lifter, dream projector warmed up and ready to transmogrify all this mistiness into saints. In the tower-top penthouse that United Artists had requisitioned as command centre for a truly profane fee, Weill received confirmation of funding from Wisdom and immediately generated a credit transfer to Grand Valley Regional Weather’s account. It had been touch and go with the weather workers. Orbital climate systems had brusquely brushed his request for a hundred percent peasouper off to planetside weather control, but Weill could not rid himself of the feeling that they wanted rid of him quickly, that there were things going on up there not for the eyes of the earthbound. Grand Valley Regional Weather had whined about compensation payments to tower-toppers who paid high premiums for sunny skies and unbroken vistas from their panoramic windows and named a figure. Weill laughed. Grand Valley Regional Weather did not.

“Okay, I’ll get you your filthy money,” Weill growled, then spent five minutes he could not afford trying to track down Synodical Security’s Head of Finance through the labyrinth of Wisdom bureaucracy and the planetary communications network only to catch him on an approach shot to the thirteenth at Great Estramadura.

“How much?”

Weill repeated the fee. He heard the sigh.

“It’s yours. It’s transferring now. Now, if you’d be so kind, I’m about to dormy this hole.”

But Weill’s request had put Synodical Security’s Head of Finance off his stroke. He sliced his approach, bunkered, took five to get on to the green and threw away the match. The five-million-dollar five iron.

Mishcondereya’s plague of nano-flies had liberally dosed the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family with hallucinogens, there was a clear window of fifteen minutes to get Skerry in and out before the dosages wore off: she crept in on muffled fans, positioning the speed dirigible over what the satellite images had shown was a shattered glass vault at the apex of the cathedral.

In the command tower, Weill relinquished the command chair for Seskinore, fresh from the ritual ablutions which climaxed his preperformance superstitions which included inside out underwear, never wearing anything blue, singing two bars from “The Five O’Clock Whistle” and allowing no one to use the word bishop. Weill considered it a professional challenge to work in as many natural and logical uses of that last, taboo word as possible when he First ADed to Seskinore. The old ham took two puffs of minty breath freshener, sat ponderously down in the Director’s chair, cracked his walnut-knuckled fingers and donned his virtuality headset.

“And how are we, boys and girls?”

“Boys and girls are ready to rock-’n’-roll.”

The props were all in place, lighting and SFX up to speed, the actors cued and ready, and now Skerry had seen the gaping hole right through the belly of it all. Precious minutes could be lost sorting through racks of religious paraphernalia. She might have to take a hostage, anathema to Skerry. Threaten nastiness. It was a distinct possibility she might not be able to find the saint at all. Skerry thumbed the cabincom and explained her predicament to Mishcondereya.

“Merde,” Mishcondereya said, crackly over the corn lines. A pause, then, “I’ll call Control.” Mishcondereya called Seskinore. Seskinore called Bladnoch out in UA2, who called Weill to call the cave because the old train-witch might have got something about that in that sending. While Weill called the Comedy Cave, Skerry listened to the static on the interphone and tried to make faces out of the swirling patterns. It was a distraction from the stage fright. The fright was a secret she had successfully kept all her professional life: Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm was martyr to that disease of performers. The fear. The shakings; the pacings; the compulsive bouncings of balls on walls; the huddlings in the corner, arms wrapped around knees, rocking and moaning in terror; the discreet throwings up. She recited cantos from the Evyn Psalmody. She performed a Damantine stretch routine, jogged on the spot, chanted tongue-twisters. Anything to push down the dread. On this gig, stage fright could kill you.

“Sker.”

“The old train-witch doesn’t know.”

“The old train-witch has hightailed it.”

Skerry was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.

“She’s what?”

“Gone. Scarpered. Skedaddled. Flown the coop. Split the joint. Sker.”

“What?”

“There’s something else.”

Skerry’s stomach spasmed.

“What kind of something else?”

“He’s moving.”

“He’s not supposed to move.”

“I’m getting readings; he’s cast off from the dock and is under acceleration.”

Skerry swore. The calculations were all based on a stationary target. The margins were tight, hideously tight. Maimingly tight.

“Are we tracking him?”

“I’m setting up a radar lock now. That’s us. We’re locked on, provided he doesn’t make any sudden course changes. And, ah, Sker…”

“What now?”

“You know I said there was something else?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s another something else after that one.”

“Tell me.”

“Ground-to-orbit tracking at Molesworth has picked up a number of objects de-orbiting into atmospheric entry configurations.”

“A number, what number?”

“A big number.”

“How big a number?”

“Five thousand, in the first wave.”

“First wave? How many waves are there?”

“Four that Molesworth knows of.”

“Twenty thousand, that’s a big number. Does Molesworth know what they are?”

“Nothing on sensors, but, um, how should I put his? That other moon we used to have…”

“Oh, Mother of all Grace…”

“I don’t know how he’s done it, but he’s got into the planetary defence systems. He’s dropping soldiers all over the day side of the planet.”

Now Weill spoke in her ear.

“Thirty seconds. First positions.”

Skerry felt the dirigible shift altitude as Mishcondereya steered by radar through the cloud of unknowing. The fans swivelled into braking configuration, whirred, slowed to a safe-distancing thrum. Mishcondereya was parked directly over the Cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family, matching its ponderous progress through the fog that would soon boil into angels and demons. Skerry tried to send her circus sense out into the churning mist, feeling for her unseen target, asking clues, hints, graces. Give me a sign, what does it look like? Give me a break, one little break.

“Ready, Bladnoch?” Weill said.

“Ready.”

“Ready, Mishcon?”

“Ready.”

“Ready, Skerry?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

She buckled the bungees together around her ankles, strapped the isokinetic punch around her left wrist. The charge light glowed. She would blow a pure and perfect circle out of the hull, dive head first through, blow free the bungee couplings, roll and come up slugging. Simple. Pity there wouldn’t be anyone there to see her greatest stunt.

The show goes on.

“Cue Armageddon,” Seskinore said. The green jump light went on. And, as it did every time, though she doubted it, every time, the fear went. Vanished. She was filled with a clear, cold certainty. It was easy. It was all so easy.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard!” Skerry yelled, and dived head first out of the airship into the fog.

“Never!” Naon Sextus Solstice-Rising Asiim Engineer 11th thundered. His fist met the gleaming mahogany of the conference table. Tea glasses jumped, startled off their thick bottoms. “Never never never!” A double pound, doubly emphatic.

The gathered heads, without-portfolios and diverse uninviteds of the Domieties of Catherine of Tharsis turned their attention to the other end of the table where Child’a’grace sat, hands folded meekly in her lap, the natural leader of the rebel alliance.

She said, mildly, “But husband, it is your own mother.”

Naon Sextus’s mouth worked. For a terrible moment everyone thought all propriety would be undone and he would address his wife directly. He caught his words, turned to Marya Stuard, his lieutenant and interpreter.

“Inform my wife that she is correct, it is my mother, and Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th is an Engineer of Engineers, and were she here, she would tell you no different from what I am telling you: we have never, never, never failed to deliver a contract. She would say, leave me there.”

The assembly pondered the self-orbiting logic. The Confab Chamber was steadily filling; word had passed up and down the train that the thing that had simmered four long years between Naon Engineer and his wife was at last coming to a head. Ringside seats at a full-blown domestic! Spectators packed the railed off Gentles and Relatives areas at each end of the carriage. The Bassareenis had turned out en famille. They were particularly keen to watch the snooty Engineers publicly disgrace themselves.

“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.

Child’a’grace filled the stunned vacuum with action.

“With me, now!” she cried, leaped up from the conference table and was out through the carriage door. In a thought, Romereaux was after her, then, in order of fleetness, Thwayte Engineer, his sister Anhinga, Psalli, Ricardo and Miriamme Traction and Mercedes Deep-Fusion of the asbestos gloves and the impudent calliope.

“Quick quick quick,” Romereaux shouted, beckoning them through as Naon Engineer rose from his stupor with the terrible cry of “Mutiny!” on his lips and Sle and Rother’am at the head of the mob leaped for the hatch like hunting dogs. Romereaux slammed and dogged it in their faces. It would buy seconds, that was all. Seconds were all he needed. Tante Mercedes’s steatopygous rear was vanishing up the water tender companionway, already Sle and Rother’am were cranking away at the manual override and one of the six dogs was free. Romereaux punched his personal code into the emergency carriage release mechanism. The Engineer brothers saw what he intended and redoubled their efforts. Naon joined them, face pressed sideways into the porthole. Over the clacket of the wheels, Romereaux heard the repeated cry of “Mutiny, mutiny.” Two dogs were free, three dogs. The keypad spat out Romereaux’s authorisation with a curt “code not recognised.” Romereaux cursed exotically and reentered the code, willing his fingers to be slow, steady, patient. Four dogs free, five. So slow. The sixth and final dog was beginning to unwind. Was halfway unthreaded. Was three-quarters unthreaded.

“Code accepted,” the key pad reported. A square yellow button lit up. Romereaux hit it as the sixth and final dog hit the deck, the door scissored open, Rother’am and Sle dived and the explosive bolts in the carriage couplings blew. For an instant Rother’am and Sle hung suspended. Then it was as if they were being drawn slowly back while still in midleap as clear blue sky appeared between the carriages and the rear section of the train began to slow under its gargantuan weight.

Romereaux wiggled his fingers at the receding loyalists as Catherine of Tharsis, unencumbered, found unheard-of speeds. A last cry of “Mutiny!” penetrated the shriek of wind and steam and was gone.

Romereaux arrived on a crowded bridge. Catherine of Tharsis pounded at four hundred and twenty down the beautiful straight steel line.

“Excuse me,” he asked, “but who’s driving the train?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Thwayte, caught up in the drama of it all and now beginning to wonder just what he had done. “I’m just a kid.”

“Don’t look at me,” said his older-by-two years sister Anhinga. “Girls don’t drive trains.”

“Don’t look at us,” said the three Traction folk. “We’re Traction.”

“So who the hell is?” Romereaux asked again, nervously observing the numbers clicking up on the tacho.

A noise, like something rusted jarring free, like years of phlegm from aggregation of the bases being gullied up in one bucket-filling gob, like relief after constipation, like the screech the prematurely buried would make when the rescuers opened the coffin lid. In a shadowy corner of the bridge, an object moved. Motors whined. Grandfather Bedzo rolled out from his alcove, caked with drool and shaking with palsies. But his cyberhat glowed with puissance. He grinned toothlessly, a terrible sight, and with a thought, threw the points at Abbermeyer Switchover and took Catherine of Tharsis on to the Grand Valley mainline.

“Tante Miriamme,” Romereaux said. “Have you got your gloves?”

“I have indeed, nevvy.” She waved them over her head.

“Then put them on and get you up there and play like buggery and let Sweetness know her family’s coming for her.”