Ares Express

31

The 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.”

Such talk clears bridges. Ricardo and Thwayte pulled Bedzo plug-free from the cyberhat and wheeled the comatose old gent to the escape hatch. Child’a’grace and Miriamme Traction scooped up Grandmother Taal, who was for staying with her wayward granddaughter. Romereaux was last to clear the battle zone. He looked back, as he knew he must, as Sweetness hoped he would.

“What about you?”

“I’ll be all right,” Sweetness said. The door sealed. She glanced up at the thumb-nail monitors. She saw Romereaux close the hatch to the tender. The rest of Catherine of Tharsis was empty. The exterior eyes told her the metal men were getting uncomfortably close. Looking up, the roof cameras told her what she hoped; the sudden return to this universe had jammed parts of the complex undersurface of Harx’s flying cathedral against Catherine of Tharsis’s corporate gingerbread.

“Gotcha,” Sweetness hissed as she hit the buttons for the preignition sequence. “Let’s go play trains.” She punched the red tokamak overheat plate, gently eased the drive bar forward. Train and parasitic cathedral began to roll.

The sudden lurch sent Devastation Harx reeling against Sianne Dandeever. He pushed her away, flipped open his uplinker. The screen spat random numbers at him. Heaven was rebelling. That damn train with that bloody girl was back. Devastation Harx had a ball-shrivelling suspicion that something else had paved the way for her. Something else harrowing his heaven. Harx snapped the treacherous machine shut—should never have trusted it—tried to think what to do. Don’t get flustered. Gods may be capricious, but they’re never flustered.

His whole world lurched again, began ponderously to move.

“Get everybody off,” he ordered Sianne Dandeever. This was the end game now. Poor reward for the faithfulness of his faithful to risk them all on a final play of death or glory. “Abandon ship.”

“Sir.”

“Sound the alarms.”

They were picking up speed. Soon it would be too late for all of them.

Sianne broke open the sealed box and pulled down the lever. As the bells rang and Harx felt his airship tremble to hundreds of pairs of running feet, Sianne said, “Sir, with respect, I’m not leaving you. Whatever happens, I will be true.”

Which was as profound a profession of love as Devastation Harx had ever heard.

“Would you look at those purple boys go,” said Weill, watching the evacuation of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family on the opticon from UA2’s stand-off position twenty kilometres east. “Here, Bladdy, take us in for a closer look, you don’t see this every day.”

“What about the reality-shaping weapon?” Seskinore warned, wringing his red, veiny hands.

“You think he’d be abandoning ship if he still had it?”

“If he were about to use it, he would,” Seskinore countered, but Bladnoch was already pushing the stick. On Weill’s monitor, purple-clad bodies tumbled down chutes, scrambled down wire ladders, slid down ropes, dropped in inflatable escape spheres, jumped, fell, ran through the advancing soldiery as the tottering, creaking lighter-than-air cathedral was dragged along by the slowly accelerating train.

“Wo, that is premier league chaos. Train-cathedral steel cage match, with fighting robots. Get the finger out, Blad, I don’t want to miss any of this.”

Instead of the mildly stimulating vibration of slightly unsynched engines, Weill’s groin felt instead the sensation of the fans powering down.

“Blad, I said get it on, what the hell is up?”

“That,” Bladnoch said, pointing up the western approaches of the valley where a disc of light, bright as the sun, was swooping toward them through the air.

One eye on the tacho. One eye on the tokamak monitors. A third eye…No third eye. Just trust. Sweetness edged the power bar forward. Too much acceleration and the wedged cathedral might tear loose. Too little and those steel flatfoots might catch up. Four legs, four arms. Nightmares. Thirty, forty. Keep it going. Fifty. Fifty-five. That’s a crawl. A crawl. You’ve got to get them a safe distance. Sixty. Seventy. That’s enough.

“Sorry folks,” she said to her friends and family and pulled the lever that blew the bolts coupling tender to train. The rearviews showed them falling behind. The wave of galloping soldiers broke around it, reformed. It was her now. On her own, with just the water and hydrogen in the tanks.

She prayed the Train Gods she had worked it out right.

A drilling, banging on the roof. Sweetness cringed, another deafening rattle. She flicked up the ceiling-eyes, found herself looking up the multiple barrels of a Gatling, with Devastation Harx behind the triggers. He loosed off another stream of bullets. The camera went blind.

“Right,” she said, teeth gritted, and pushed the drive bar forward. And went blind too. Light. Primal light, pure white, seared the cab. Sweetness cried out in pain, blinked away the after-images. There was something divine going on in the rearview cameras. The swathe of light scythed across the cavalry charge. Wherever it touched, it paralysed. Cybersoldiers froze in mid-step, arms uplifted, locked rigid. Ten passes, and the battlefield was a sculpture garden. The light flashed over Sweetness again, hovered for a moment. She squinted up through the glare at the flying disc of light. A vana, a skymirror, stooped down from the moonring to earth. Through the painful white, Sweetness thought she saw an image in the great mirror. A woman, with long dark hair. Her image.

She understood. She waved. The light went out, the vana twisted away and up on its long loop through Grand Valley.

The tattoo on the roof continued. Old Catherine could take it. The founding engineers of Bethlehem Ares built well. One hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty. Nice smooth power curve. Enough reserves to make it up to two hundred and eighty, if they didn’t hit any upgrades. Decision point was two hundred. Tokamak pressure was peaking high orange. Sweetness began the priming sequence. Deep-Fusion? Who needed them. All you had to do was watch and learn. This little button shut down power to the containment field. This little button overrode the overrides. And this little button got her fine ass right out of here.

One ninety. One ninety-five. Two hundred.

“This is Point of No Return,” Sweetness said. “This is for everyone.” She hit the Emergency Escape button. The lights went to red. Shutters sealed over the windows. Drive rod and navigation ball folded away into the floor. Safety bars enfolded her like overaffectionate aunts. The camera eyes went black. The read-outs blanked. Alone in the red dark, Sweetness heard the serial bangs of the explosive bolts, heavier and harder than Harx’s now-sporadic Gatling fire. Then she felt the grapple arms lift the driving cab free of the locomotive. Yellow digits counted down to primary ignition.

Here was the gamble. Here was the place where it could all go so so wrong. A misalignment of the escape rockets, and she wouldn’t be thrown clear to the side and back. She’d go straight up and be tangled in Harx’s cathedral.

The cab stirred under her. She was moving, but where. Where? Then the rockets kicked in and Sweetness momentarily blacked out under three gees. Burn burn burn burn burn. She was still moving, She was free. Then the rockets burned out and she was falling free. And in that instant, there was a light, brighter even than the light of the Little Pretty One vana, a light that penetrated even the meshed fingers of the blast shutters, the light of a Class 88 hauler containment field collapsing and a hydrogen fusion tokamak exploding. Then something like a steel fist punched the falling cab as hard as it could, sent it tumbling and Sweetness, strapped in her chair, screaming, crashing down to earth. Then the sudden whump of parachutes unfurling snatched her away from death.

The cab lay on its flank, buried waist-deep in the loam. The parachute, discarded on impact, bowled on the winds of the after-blast like a demon-driven thing across the grazing lands, screaming toward the rim mountains. The internal lights had failed: Sweetness scrabbled, trying to locate the green phosphorescence of the emergency door release. She hurt. She hurt bad. Things bent in there, chipped. But alive. Sort them later. But you could be radiated. The shields have no other purpose than to defend from fusion core detonations, but you were close to the epicentre when the tokamaks blew. Some could have eaten through. It could be burrowing into your bone marrow like maggots. It could be gnawing your genes. Three-headed Engineer children. Siamese twins. The Big C, she thought, completing the downward spiral of sobering possibilities. Hey, it’s an occupational hazard of trainfolk. You’re alive alive-oh. They can do things with that, these days. It costs but, don’t they owe you? You saved the world. You can name your price. A gene-scrub, then that week getting oiled and sunkissed at the spas in Therme.

The back-up power seemed to have failed as well. Swearing, Sweetness Asiim Engineer grubbed around until she found the manual door crank. Every turn dug it into her ribs and brought a fresh oath as she winched the iris slowly open. Indigo sky. Distant bluffs. Green hills. A shower of dust. Sweetness pulled herself up and out, stood on the hull to survey the damage she had dealt. To the west the lower levels of the mushroom cloud were disintegrating but the thunder-head still boiled furiously upward through the hole it had blown in Worldroof, challenging heaven, setting weather patterns fleeing in consternation. Shading her eyes with her hand, she thought she could just make out the lip of the characteristic, fatal blast crater. This world liked craters, Sweetness decided. It could afford another one. Around were embedded mammoth shards of shattered roof-glass, thrust dagger-deep into the hill-country. She made a complete circuit of the horizon. Scattered across the southern panorama were the tangled, ungainly corpses of the machine army, twisted like burned matches where the sudden cease from St. Catherine had frozen them in the path of the fusion blast. With the seasons the soils would blow over and the green grass grow up and bury the forgotten army. A kilometre or so to the west she found the dazzling silver thread of the mainline. She thanked all her saints; the blast-wind could have carried her any distance, any direction into the wilderness. Sweetness slid down the cab hull on to the grass, headed over meadow flowers and sweet turf to the track. She looked back at all that remained of Catherine of Tharsis.

Best to see it as another piece of discarded metal in this junkyard of improbabilities, soon to be covered and forgotten like all the other casualties.

Her home…Her people. What had she done to them?

What only she could do.

Would they believe her when she pleaded story?

She could not look at the silver gingerbread that prettied up the blast shutters, the roaring lion crest, charred, battered. No more Ares Express. The Saint is dead. You killed her, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

Head full of the singing, ringing sound of pushed-down tears, she walked through the robot cemetery to the line. This time, she had a clear indication what direction not to go. Think of it as another re-route job for the Waymenders and a few minutes down-time on the Grand Valley runs. She turned east, to warmth and hope.

Sweetness had walked but a few minutes when she became aware of a bee-drone and moving mote in the eye of the sun. She squinted, peered. An object was driving through the air toward her, a larger object than its direct frontal approach hinted. United Artists’ trim little airship emerged to eclipse the light and dropped to a relaxed hover over Sweetness Asiim. A hatch opened, the woman in the green leotard hailed her.

“You want a lift? We owe you.”

“A lift? Where?”

Skerry indicated the whole wide world.

“Wherever you want.”

Sweetness thought about the gift of leaving all the mess for someone else to clear up, climbing up that ramp and dissolving into the anonymous. Then she saw Grandmother Taal, and Child’a’grace, Psalli and Romereaux, still standing there, seeing what she had done, waiting, and still she did not come. Did not ever come. Ran away with the circus. Sometimes even an Engineer cannot ride. Sometimes you have to walk to face it.

“I think I’ll walk this one, thank you. But hey!” she shouted as the fans swivelled into lift configuration and the little blimp began to turn. “Tell them I’m all right, will you?”

The taut little woman saluted.

“We will. By the way, in case you were wondering, we did win.”

“That’s all right then,” Sweetness called up as the door irised shut, the fans threw dust around her and the airship lifted, turned, dipped its nose to the east and sailed away.

Five hundred paces later, she found the bean. It was balanced on the starboard rail. No natural force could have balanced it there, the fusion wind from Harx’s devastation would have carried it away had it been there for any time. Sweetness bent down, studied the dull, white little eating bean. She frowned at the incongruity, then remembered where she had seen such a pulse before. She pocketed it and hiked on up the line, knowing what she would find next.

The skinny wooden spill was stabbed like a vodun charm into the dirt between the sleepers. Sweetness knelt, slowly pulled it out by its green tip. It was, she remembered, meant to be pulled slowly, gingerly, with forethought.

“Boy of Two Dusts,” she read. Glancing up, she saw the next stick thrust into the dirt three sleepers up. “Golden Thumb-ring.” She kept it in her hand with Boy of Two Dusts. Within a minute’s walk she had a fistful of slim sticks. Half a kilometre upline was a signal relay from which came an unseasonable smell of spring verdure. Suspecting what she would find there, Sweetness walked resolutely up to it.

“I thought it might be you.”

The greenperson sat back on the relay, knees pulled up to chest, forearms resting lightly on them. A loose canvas jellaba covered its body and hid its face within a deep cowl but the slim-fingered, pale green hands confirmed what the smell of growing suggested. Sweetness dropped the bundle of fate sticks at its scaley feet.

“Story over, then.”

“It is. You are no longer afforded the protection of the universal narrative conventions. You are not the darling of the universe any more.”

Funny way the universe had of showing it, Sweetness thought. She said, “Not even a little after bit? A coda?”

The green person shrugged.

“It reminds me of someone when you do that,” Sweetness said.

“Nice denouement, I must say,” the greenperson said, ignoring her bait. “End with a bang. Always good.”

“Cost Catherine of Tharsis. My family’s one and only asset, and I blew it up.”

The green person cocked its head to one side, a darting, reptilian motion Sweetness could not read.

“I think you’ll find that, despite the mess you’ve managed to spread across this and neighbouring universes, what passes for the government in this one is not ungrateful,” it said. It looked up from the folds of its cowl, shot a hand from the long, loose sleeve. The face was slit-eyed, scaled. Sweetness thought she saw a forked tongue flicker. The long fingers had stretched into hooks, the knuckles swollen to painful knobs, the nails drawn into tight black claws. Sweetness took the hand. It felt like napped velvet.

“Well, that’ll be goodbye then,” the green person said. “I’ll not get up if you don’t mind, I’m finding standing increasingly uncomfortable as I change. We’ll not meet again in this lifetime. Goodbye, it was a good story, I enjoyed you: see you in the next one.”

They shook hands briefly. Then the lizard-hands scooped up the bundle of fortune-telling sticks and snapped it smartly in half.

“You’re free now. I give you your fate back. What happens from now on is entirely in your own hands. Your story has ended, your tale has just begun.”

“Thank God for that,” Sweetness Engineer 12th said, and began to walk. Like flies in the heat-haze, she thought she could see objects far down the track, swimming in the treacherous silver. Resolution and certainty increased with every step she took closer. People, trainpeople, and behind them, that rippling square of black must be the jettisoned tender. But what was that in the deeper haze beyond? A thing like a city, all spires and towers and campaniles. Mirage. Illusion. It could all be lies and magnifications. Should have taken that ride, traingirl. Story’s over, if your pride gets you into trouble now, you’ve only yourself to get you out of it. No different from everyone else then. That should be sufficient. Sweetness jogged forward, trying to penetrate the shimmering. A city, yes, but a narrow one. A linear city? She stopped, laughed out loud, beat her hands off her thighs in realisation. Not a city at all; a factory train. A big smelly minging dirty factory. Now she could see the tell-tale parallel plumes of steam from the separators. They had all come for her. They were all here. All her people. She glanced back, as everyone must. Of course there was no figure squatting by the signal relay, but did she see a scurry of green dart to cover behind a sleeper?

Free to be mundane again.

Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th smiled, shouldered her pack and ran along the line through the green hills of Mars, into the silver shimmer where her people were waiting.