by Ian McDonald
“I’m an Engineer,” Sweetness said quietly.
“Yeah, and like I said, you were going to knock me clean off. Anyway, I wait there and one two three trains go by, and then you come along and you’re the biggest by a way and I reckon, bigger the train, better to hide, and then one of youse spies me and I have to hide down over the edge, so.”
Sweetness gave him her full regard a moment. She rocked back on her heels.
“So, where’s this all going to end?”
“Grand Valley, I’d hoped.” No hesitation. “I’m not comfortable ’cept there’s a roof on the sky.”
The brakes were squealing now, biting down hard on raw steel. Within their familiarity, Sweetness was able to make out another sound, a Bassareeni voice, calling over the car tops.
“Quick,” Sweetness ordered. “There.” She pushed Pharaoh toward the gap, mimed with her hands for him to crawl face flat and hushed.
“Down there?” he whispered, peering down the ladder into grinding darkness.
“Down there,” Sweetness hissed. “And be quiet about it.” Railrat Pharaoh slid over the top rung. His upturned face caught the moonslight.
“Hello? Who dat dere?” Chagdi Bassareeni called from too damn close.
“Listen up,” Sweetness hissed down into the dark abyss. “We’re pulling up for Juniper. Don’t wait for the train to stop, there’s always someone looking out when we pull up. Wait until we’re dead slow, dead dead slow, then do what I told you back there, drop down between the carriages on to the track. There’s plenty of room if you lie flat, on your back, not your face. Wait until you can’t see the taillights any more, then you’re safe. Juniper’s a merde-hole, but the Xipotle Slow Stopper’s through in a couple a days and they’ve no dignity. You can ride the roof for two centavos. When it gets to Xipotle, it splits; front half goes on to become the Grand Trunk Rapido. Take you right to Grand Valley.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Fat-thighed Chagdi was standing at the far end of the truck, sending his torch beam swinging around like a jive-dancer.
“Got to go. Luck.”
“Thank you. I owe you.”
“You do, but I don’t mean to collect, so I’ll write it off.”
“Sweetness Octave, why did you do this?”
Heavy feet on steel roof.
“I don’t know, I haven’t time.”
“I want to know.”
“Okay, okay. I don’t like seeing people getting trapped in things they can’t get out of. Especially by other people.”
“That’ll do.”
“That’s all you’re getting.”
The face was swallowed by the grating black. This is the last time I will ever see you, Pharaoh, Sweetness thought. Quick and desperate and unprepared. But all partings should be sudden. Sweetness stood up. Chagdi’s beam dazzled her.
“Watch it with that thing.”
“It is you.”
Light-blinded, then night-blinded. Phosphenes flocked like bats across Sweetness’s retinas.
“You find anything?”
A soft, gritty thud, then the brakes reached a crescendo. Can’t see a smile in the dark.
“Hey, what happened to your djubba-stick?”
“Bastard caught hold of it. Took it with him.”
“You djubba him?”
“Right off.” A whistle and a downward curve of the hand.
“And is he?”
“Couldn’t see. Don’t think so.”
Plump Chagdi’s face resolved out of the dazzle. He looked piqued. He had a reputation for capturing and tormenting caboose vermin and probably resented that his had not been the thumb on the djubba-stick trigger.
“Pity you lost the stick, but.”
“Yeah.” Sweetness sized up the dark gulf she must leap to get back home. “Pity.”
7
Forty-two long years on the iron road buys a woman a measure of dignity. When Grandmother Taal made one of her increasingly rare progresses down Catherine of Tharsis, she stopped, and the train moved for her.
“Honoured Grandmother,” Tante Miriamme cooed from her cubby by the crew companionway. Grandmother Taal grunted acknowledgement and shuffled down another painful step. God smite these shoes.
“Fine morning, Amma Taal,” called Finvar Traction, penduluming across the feed pipes and plasma buffers in his abseil harness. No one believed that all this swinging and dangling was necessary to his routine repairs but he clearly enjoyed it and he was one of the sights of the railroad.
“Umph.” Too damn hot in layered skirts and tight-laced bodice on a day like this. Electric blue sky. The hottest colour.
“Regards to thee and thine!” hailed cheery Silva Deep-Fusion, eternally white to the elbows in flour.
Grandmother Taal nodded and grabbed for the handrail as the train jolted over points. Son and heir he might be, but Naon was no part of the Engineer his father had been, in his day. But neither was he cyberhatted into the autonomic systems, the drooling autopilot on the long, boring straights. Grandmother Taal waited for the last creak of brake and huff of steam before stepping down to the ground. A tip of the finger to Prevell Watchman Junior in his shunting turret.
“Grandmo’r!” he yelled in warning. She was already pulling on her track vest. Not so old, nor yet so incontinent, as to forget the laws of the universe. Catherine of Tharsis dragged her long load past Grandmother Taal. She fished in her waist purse for her needle case. Her thick thumb opened the leather wallet, felt out the smooth shaft of the delicate obsidian needles, anticipating power and pain. Had they no respect for a woman in her forties, that they make her stand under hot sun and stitch coloured silk through the pallid skin of her forearms? But her magic had never been respected. It was too useful, despite its limitations. Her clients found creative ways of bringing their woes into its peculiar bailiwick. Had there been someone she could have thanked and cursed, she would have, copiously, but her power was not a gift. It had just happened, the day of her womaning. The best she could work it out was that the power had gone out of her into the brown smear in her pants, then from there to every other brown thing in the world.
The ore-trucks clunked past. The tail of the beast appeared around the slow bend. Henden Stuard was waiting at the foot of the galley stairs, hat of office outheld in salutation. He whispered into the gosport. Three hundred cars forward, Naon Engineer applied the brakes. The companionway came to a halt with such precision that Grandmother Taal need only step up.
“What is your need?” she asked.
“He is constipated,” suave Henden said.
Junior Stuard kitchen hands and vegetable peelers bowed out of Grandmother Taal’s way as she moved through the galley car to the Pursery. There Brellen Stuard greeted her gravely.
“He is constipated.”
Shafto Stuard sat enthroned among golden cushions in the observation box. Light stained by painted glass dappled his strained features.
“It is eight days now,” Brellen whispered.
“You have tried dried fruit?” Grandmother Taal said.
“And marmalade,” Shafto said, uncomfortably.
A slight lurch told Grandmother Taal Catherine of Tharsis was under way again. She watched the track unfold from under the bay of the observation box and wondered how it might flavour a family’s soul, to be always looking at where you have come from and never where you are going.
“I suggested a hemp bandage, soaked in oil of paraffin,” Brellen said. “But he could not swallow more than a finger of it.”
“Nor I,” said Grandmother Taal.
“Please help me,” Shafto pleaded.
Grandmother Taal contemplated a moment. It was good for the mystique.
“It is doable.”
“Is there anything you require?” Brellen asked, head bowed. Mint tea would have been good but Grandmother Taal remembered that once Brellen’s Aunt Mae had offered her tea in a smeared glass. Her opinion of the Stuards as a Domiety had never recovered.
&n
bsp; “Nothing, thank you.” She took out her needle case. “Children are advised not to watch.” She squinted in the stained-glass light to thread the right silk through the proper needle. The track outside, she noted, was now a blur of sleepers. She felt more secure in her power with fast steel beneath her. Immobility troubled Grandmother Taal. She uncapped her fountain pen and bared her forearm.
“Try to be concise, but poignant. It should express all your feeling.”
Shafto Stuard looked the old woman in the eyes, then took the pen and wrote STRAIN in bad lettering on the veined pale skin.
“Very well.” Grandmother Taal picked up the purple thread and commenced the humming. It had no significance and little tune—a medley of toe-tappers off that All-Swing Radio the young ones listened to—but it kept her voice busy while she embroidered the word strain on to her forearm.
It still hurt.
She tried something more closely related to the pain, reading the memories of past magics in the white scarifications of her arms. Those arcs and loops, buried under successive woundings like the surface of a cratered moon, had been that time she moved the big earth-making machine off the line when it had upped and died inconveniently. Easier done, alive and dead. At least the teams slopping brown paint over its orange and blue mottled hide had been spared the moaning and hectoring about fine points of contractural detail endemic among earth-makers. That time the magic had been strong enough, and the paint sufficient to hold it, to flip the cussed thing half a kilometre into an old impact crater. Odd, that the power was not a scalar thing. It had been so much more difficult and painful to change Levant Traction’s brown eyes blue for one night of passion with a track surveyor for Lombarghini. Her wrist bore the memory of his few, sweaty hours; the white scar of the word pretty.
She glanced down. On the “A.” Blood welled from the stitches, soaked the silk, stiffened. Bad to put in, worse to take out. Brellen looked politely revolted.
“How are we?” Grandmother Taal asked her client.
“I can feel something,” Shafto said with a curious light in his eyes. “Moving.”
“Deep within?” Brellen asked. Shafto nodded. Grandmother Taal kept stitching.
“Oh,” cried Shafto.
“Ah,” murmured Grandmother Taal. Almost there. The downward slash of the “N,” then the blissful ascent to the finish. Done.
“Ohh,” moaned Shafto Stuard. Brellen mopped his brow with a paper coaster.
“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, letting the needle fall and swing on the end of its silk. Blood paraded in thick drips down the thread.
“Oooh,” Shafto said, eyes opening in wonder. “Oohhh.”
“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, feeling behind her for a chair.
Eeeeeee, said an entirely new voice. Eeee. Eeee. Eeeeeeee. For an instant, puzzlement on every face. Then realisation: Catherine of Tharsis herself was crying out, the top-C shriek Grandmother Taal had last heard the night Marya Stuard had driven off the Starke gang.
The emergency whistle.
All hands rushed for their duty stations, never to reach them. A tremendous wrench threw everyone from their places. Shafto was flung hard against the stained-glass bay and went down in a heap. Brellen floundered among golden cushions. Grandmother Taal found herself toppling eyes-first toward her neatly arranged needles. She grabbed at a cupboard handle and twisted herself aside. Cutlery and crockery sprung from racks, a full samovar of tea flung itself from the spirit-burner to spill boiling liquid across the floor. Chairs tumbled, tables capsized, antimacassars flew. Grandmother Taal was rolled toward the spreading stain of scalding tea. Somewhere she was conscious there was a sharp pain in her hip. She would bother with that later; if any of them survived this thing. She kicked her legs and swung herself away from the deadly tea on the hinged door.
What was happening? A wreck? A derailment? Yet more dacoits? God forfend, a head-on, a containment breach? No, not that, the failsafes would blow the tail of the train free and send the locomotive shrieking on ahead to its final thermonuclear immolation.
And it ended. Like that. With as little warning or manners as it had begun. Everyone lay where they had fallen, stunned motionless. The silence was eerily oppressive. Not even the familiar creaks and clicks and hisses of track life. Catherine of Tharsis stood on the mainline, inexplicably halted.
8
The dead stop jerked the bone slug out of Sweetness’s ear. Before it had even hit the decking, she was out of the cabinette door on to the sidewalk. The little gristly device muttered surds and improper fractions to whoever had ear to attend. Education abandoned, Sweetness swung around the stanchion on to the port observation deck. What she saw stopped her as surely in her tracks as it had stopped Catherine of Tharsis in hers.
They have a saying for it in the patois of Old Belladonna, whispered from the perfumed balconies, tier upon tier upon tier lining the great cavern walls, growled in the dripping, fetid runways under the deepest of underdeeps: gobemouche. Mouth catching flies. Flygobbed. Sweetness stared at the precise circle of alien landscape dropped foursquare across the Trans Oxiana mainline.
What she saw first was colour. Oranges, yellows, deep blues blobbed like a drip-painting on to the burned beige of the highlands. Once a Flying Optometrist had tested her for colour-blindness with patterned discs that reminded her of this; dots, swirls, crazily eddied colour. Try and make out a pattern. This was what she saw next; shape. More difficult by far than an Optometrist’s numbers and letters; these shapes were completely other, so entangled she did not at first know what she was looking for. Then she caught edges, curves, lines. Those tall, ribbed things were three-sided derricks, those low, curved things that caught the light as they flapped in the wind, some kind of kite-aerofoil. Here there seemed to be knots of thorny vine-pipe, there, that bright blur might be some kind of rotor. This was a whip-tipped aerial-thing, tall as a house, that was a translucent bladder that swelled and ebbed, swelled and ebbed like the throat pouches of painfully unpleasant frogs.
Shape gave substance. The little rigs that supported the whizzing rotors looked as if they were made from purple bone; the sheets of the kites had the gloss of pure nylon, the guys that tethered them grew gas bladders like seawrack. The orange-green ground cover had the nap of a handwoven carpet, the cups of the big flowerheads looked like nothing more than satellite dishes spun from styrene foam. Plastic, a polymer jungle, a Bakelite rain forest.
From substance to purpose. What was this? Did it have a name? A nature? Laws, ethics? Business? Predictabilities: was this all there was of it, would it expand, would more of it appear, like chicken pox? Would it disappear as abruptly as it, apparently, had arrived? Was it friendly to people and their trains? Did big terrible things hunt in its heart? Was God to be found there, navel-deep in a pool of crystalline water? How had it come here? Dropped out of the sky? Just growed? Miraculously verbed into being by the angels of the Panarch? Domestic magic? Had some herder kid been mucking with the Stones of Saying, despite all the Prebendaries’ sermons to the stern contrary?
What was it, where had it come from, how had it got here, how were they going to get rid of it?
All of which, clamorous in Sweetness Octave’s head expressed itself in one soft, awestruck, “Wow.”
Others had joined her on the balcony. Miriamme Traction had forsaken her scullery. Marya Stuard stood agape. Naon Sextus had even relinquished the drive rods to stand and stare. A whirr, Grandfather Bedzo had unhooked himself from the cyberhat and was haltingly negotiating the ramps and sharp corners in his power-chair. Onlookers moved aside to give him a place at the rail. His bleary eyes rolled over the circle of otherness that lay square across the track. His words spoke for everyone.
“What the sweet suffering frig is that?”
The young were organised into scouting teams while the Domiety elders gathered in confab. Things were hideously amiss for North West Regional Track not to have issued a warning. Somehow—impossibly—it had slipped in under every s
ingle one of the thousands of watching eyes up in the moonring.
“Bugger hows,” Uncle Tahram Septus Engineer boomed over the great table. “Give me whens.” He was contracts clerk, but spoke for everyone’s fear of missed connections, rescheduled haulage deals, cancelled contracts and Wisdom’s bankers in their ground-scraping beige coats and little round purple data-specs. Customary inter-Domiety bickering was forgotten. Clan heads drew up schemes and hurried to their various stations to expedite it.
Equipped for the alien with track vests, notebooks, walkie-talkies and djubba-sticks, Sweetness and Romereaux eyed the intruder with mistrust.
“I don’t know,” Sweetness said. She stood between the rails, a few steps from where they disappeared into the other. “What if it smells bad, or something?”
Romereaux leaned forward, took a generous sniff.
“Smells okay to me. Sort of like when we haul a forest-fermenter.”
“It might be poisonous.”
“I don’t think so.”
Sweetness took a hesitant step toward the borderline. The rails were not smothered in other-growth. They stopped. Terminated, clean as a laser cut. Likewise, where the plastic factory-jungle abutted the everyday world the plant-machines were sliced though with surgical precision. A parasol-like leaf was sectioned along a chord, a windmill gantry was exposed down one side. Stems and vines were neatly truncated, oozing ichor the colour of long-dead batteries.
“I mean,” Sweetness said, “if we go in there and…”
“One way to find out.” Romereaux unholstered his djubba-stick. He positioned himself en-garde to the line of division, shuffled an uncomfortable moment or two, aimed the weapon. “Right then.” He pressed the trigger. The club-head shot out, clacked off a gantry upright well beyond the line of division. The shaft remained whole, unparted. He retracted the device.