by Ian McDonald
“They’re talking pins and ribbon,” Little Pretty One said. “Dowries and percentages. They’re saying, why wait for corroboree? We’re here, you’re here, they’re coming and we’ve got the money here, now, in our hands…”
“No!” Sweetness moaned. Revellers turned, startled by the noise from beneath the train. Another grumble from the divine battle distracted them. “Some invisible friend you are. This is the worst day of my life. What am I going to do?”
“There’s another train back there. Just pulled up.”
“So? Can’t move for trains.”
“That one’s still a-coming, but this one’s here.”
“What are you talking about? Why don’t you just do something useful for once rather than hand out stupid proverbs like they’re wise or something?”
“Okay,” Little Pretty One said. “Okay. You want me to do something. Watch this. You won’t see this again in a hurry.”
On cue, the earth shook again. Not a shiver, nor a side-of-beef-toppling quiver, but a sustained quake that made Sweetness glance up, suddenly alarmed by the thousands of tons of metal over her head. Out at the party, people reached for anchorholds, failing those, each other. Sweetness remembered some School of the Air bone-slug piece about how, unlike Mother-world, this world was cold-hearted and had not stirred since the fires that built Olympus a billion years ago. She was about to protest the geophysical impossibility until Little Pretty One nudged her and said, “Look.”
The light play between heaven and earth had become a battle. Rapiers of lilac and blue from above clashed with sabres of slashing scarlet stabbing upward and were parried. Blades and guillotines of light struck and shattered; ball lightnings arced fizzing through the air; pyrotechnics met and mutually annihilated in cascades of sparks. It would have been pure fiesta but for the vibration. Sweetness could feel the earth groan in her teeth. Bishop of Alves’s every bolt and rivet rattled. Rust flakes snowed down on her hair. Dust was sprung from the grass and spun away into scampering devils. Sweetness put out a hand to steady herself and yipped. Her second electric shock that day. The steelwork hummed with static.
“I couldn’t really recommend staying here,” Little Pretty One said. In illustration, a fat blue spark dropped from axle housing to wheel. Little Pretty One and Sweetness skipped out from her hole like a rabbit. Bishop of Alves came alive with lightning.
Party was over. The son et lumière had been entertaining, but everyone was afraid now. Here were forces beyond their reckoning. Engineers’ hair stood out from their heads; their clothes ballooned away from their bodies. The battle in the jungle was now a blinding cylinder of light, earthy crimsons and heavenly lilacs swirled together like a cosmic fool pudding. Trainfolk watched, eyes shaded by hands. Sweetness and Little Pretty One stood gobemouche. For the lilac was winning. The crimson was turned back on itself, confused and confounded and pressed down until it formed a boiling line of scarlet interrupted by the silhouettes of the fantastic jungle plants. End game. The whirling cylinder of light stretched to a column, to a single sunbright beam. The earth spasmed. People staggered. Spits tipped, a beer fermentory split, spilling its heady cargo around spectators’ feet. The party was ruined. No one noticed. Again, the earth shook, throwing up cataracts of dirt which were sucked into the vortex of light. Electricity cracked continuously between the apex of the hurricane and the insulating plastic forest. Derricks fell in showers of sparks, windmills detonated, crazy sails spinning as they blazed, severed creeper-pipes thrashed like beheaded snakes, spraying jets of vapour. It was most spectacular. A third time the earth heaved, hard enough to imagine the end of the world. Sweetness and Little Pretty One clutched each other. There was a cry, long and wailing and terrible, a voice, but none any present had ever dreamed of. The cry was in their heads and it went on and on and on and on and the earth danced like a poison-maddened mongoose and everyone decided they really wanted it ended now before things went wrong that could not be put right again, even by divine energies, and just as they were certain, absolutely certain that it never would and it was all over for everyone, it did.
The earth erupted in a stupendous gout of soil and plastic chaff like a hard-pulled tooth. The unseen battler flew clear. The trainpeople saw a soft-edged cube, blue and orange tiger-striped, hang in the shaft of light. The bulk of the hovering ROTECH device played tricks with its dimensions; the newcomer was the size of a Class 15 freight hauler. A fall of red dust and coloured confetti spattered the onlookers. Sweetness’s hair was a party of rust flakes, plastic spangles and red ochre. The quaking settled and ceased. The cube started to spin, faster, faster until it was a blur. And it seemed to be shrinking, as if the intense violet exerted an irresistible pressure inward.
It all ended suddenly and spectacularly. With an echoing boom of inrushing air, the cube imploded into a black dot and vanished. The beam of killing light exploded outward, engulfing the spectators in momentary blindness. In the same instant they heard a rushing mighty wind and a voice spoke in every head: This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.
An orph, Sweetness breathed to herself in the eye-blinking, carpet-patterned after-dazzle. Every child knew the hagiography of the machines that built the world before their fourth birthdays: most of the orphs had returned to heaven after the manforming, but some had refused the summons of St. Catherine and remained, buried deep in the ground, pumping out humus and microbacteria and going ever so slowly insane.
This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.
As she repeated the doom, her vision returned. Heaven-machine, orph, plastic other-world place, tracks, Oxus plains, all were gone. The twin queues of trains faced each other across two kilometres of bare earth.
“Wow,” Sweetness said. “That was a blast.”
What did I tell you? Little Pretty One skull-whispered as she slipped back inside her host.
Unsure of exactly what they had witnessed, the people stood staring at the stripped earth. All, but one. The unmistakable prickle of alien eyes on back of neck alerted Sweetness. She turned to see who was impudent enough to seek her out with eyes, and give him a gobful of her best disdain if it was Romereaux. The victim was a short skinny Waymender boy, easy to recognise by his flat, inbred nose. One eye was a milky film, the other stared shamelessly at her hip.
Sweetness put her hands on her hips and leaned back, as she had seen the heroine do in Feisty Grrrl comic.
“Like it, then?”
The kid frowned.
“What’s that hanging off your hip?”
10
His name was Serpio and Sweetness saw in the dawn with him, tailbones chilled and alert against the cold iron of a number five driving wheel. With the dawn the tracksters went out. Hours of talk had left Sweetness post-conversational, ravenous and slightly high; a nudge in the ribs poked her back into reality.
“Look. See?”
It was a sight too splendid to be kept only for the unpopulated dawn hours. The big Waymender train was a caterpillar of windowless service cars, yellow and green, bearing the red globe-and-rails clan colophon. At the touch of sun the cars opened like yawns. Ramps crept forward, tested the temperature of the ground, settled. In the shadows, motors trembled, big machinery woke. With a gleeful shout, the survey buggies leaped into the high plain tallgrass. Their riders were keen-faced, clench-teethed teens. They wore goggles and mouth-scarves. They arrowed out across the pampas drawing tails of rising dust. Ranging lasers flickered mensurations, theodolite mirrors heliographed responses. Next, unfolding like thermophilic insects, the levellers stepped from their cocoons. Clawed feet shook the morning dew from the grass blades. Piggy-backed jockeys pulled levers. Long orang-arms, shovel-handed, scooped and shifted soil. Wheel-heeled graders ponderously descended their ramps, stomped the soil into submission. Surveyors darted around the heavy shanks of the big earth-movers. Watching them, Sweetness wished more than any wish that at that moment she was a badmaash Waymender and not an exalted Asiim Engineer. She wanted scuffed
work boots and cut-off T-shirts and heavy gauntlets. She wanted dusty goggles and headscarves that waved their tassels in the dawn wind. She wanted to twist handles and pull levers and have machinery—any machinery—do her bidding. She wanted not to have Narob Stuard approaching over the close horizon in his wedding shirt and hat and vest with the dollar bills pinned all over it.
Almost, she blurted all the things in her heart to Serpio but they stalled on her tongue like a back-country air-fair barnstormer. The grand finale to the show was gearing itself together out of the back three carriages. Roof sections tilted and lifted, bogies swung out and back, gear trains and conveyor racks unfolded. The foremost carriage mounted the centre one like a Swavyn Ecstasy priest his catamite. The rear car completed the unlikely steel troilism by ducking underneath the central car and, by a complex series of extrusions, unfolding itself into tractor treads and bucketwheel booms. So much metal was performing so many unnatural acts that Sweetness’s head reeled with the dynamism of it all, but Serpio’s pride in his people’s work was warm beside her. It meant much to him, and thus to her.
She had learned early—after the wee-est ones had been sent to bed and before the trysters started trysting—that they were fellow oddballs. Outcasts. Bizarres, berefts.
“Like, all the time?”
“When it’s open.”
He didn’t mind her looking into his cataract. It was of a plasticy translucence. You could tap it. It made a kind of fingernailly click, and no pain. He didn’t mind her doing that either.
“Ghosts?”
“And angels. Anything sort of spiritual.”
“That thing.” Sweetness’s chin had jerked in the direction of the extracted orph. “Could you see that? What did it look like?”
“It’s kind of hard to describe what it sees, it’s like things extend out beyond themselves, into other kinds of worlds.”
“Like, tentacles?” Imagining things from two-year-old dreams, which are the big ones that scare you all your life, the dreams of loss and horror and the death of your parents by things with cable wrists and hooks for hands. And red light-bulb eyes. Imagining tendrils coiling out through puckered holes in the universe into mystery.
“No, it’s like I see you and you’re high and wide and deep…” She smiled inside at the warm glow of his eyes measuring her physicality. “But there’s other kinds of like, dimensions, beside those. You go out a long long way. That orph, when I looked at it, it had wings. I mean, they opened like wings, and I think there was some other kind of dimension it lived in some of the time where it could fly with them. They held it up in the air, if you know what I mean.”
She didn’t but the way his lower lip drooped when he was earnest pleased her so much she nodded and asked, slowly, “And when you look at me?”
“Which of you?”
His vision was both exciting and shaming; a striptease of the spirit. He looked at her and saw through his milky film a thing that had been private to Sweetness so long she had almost come to disbelieve in its objective existence. Baring, prying and enviable; Serpio needed no mirror. He looked at the world and his cataract reflected its flipside. But to see it everywhere, for everything you looked at to be populated with angels and ghosts. Too much. Too bright. You would go blind if you had to look at that too long. She could see it in Serpio. There was Trickster beneath that spiky thatch of gelled black hair. She liked it. She wanted to lick it. But she did not trust it. Only a fool or a trackside mark trusts his centavos to Trickster. She did not trust that it was Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th he liked, and not a Little Pretty One she could not see as he saw. She might have brighter eyes. She might have nicer hair. She might have better tits. Maybe he was turned on by whatever junction it was that joined them, meat to spirit.
Maybe it was both of them, together.
Bad thought. She’d only just met him, and he was nice—even if he’d had his Astral House changed by deed poll because of an uncertainty over which side of the Diurnal Line his carriage had been on when his mother heaved and squeezed him into the world. Uncertain house, strange boy, Grandmother Taal had warned.
Later: after the trysters had departed on their missions and before the drinkers achieved horizontal, she asked him, “Were you born with it?”
“No, I got it,” he answered and there was a worm of bitter in it. “There was this old hooker in Plazaville. They said she was a shapechanger—if you wanted to do it with a dog, or a big cat, or like a grazebeast, she’d turn into it for a pile of money. She worked out of this sprayed concrete dome home on the edge of the Rimbauds.” All railway children had heard of Plazaville’s Rimbauds, that iridescent, uncertain industrial district where used tokamak hotcores were stored. At the centre, the energy levels reached such intensity that reality broke down into a blur of many-coloured alternatives, the stories told, but you could never reach there. The power that flowed through the streets would turn you astray, and all the time the radiation was gently basting you. “All the kids used to rip the shit out of her, call her things, do the burning bag trick, throw ball bearings on the roof so they’d run down, you know? It was this real cheap house: there was this one tiny window, like a slit, and we were daring each other to go up and take a jeek in, maybe see her doing someone, or turning into something. So I pulled the card and even though I was scared, in case she was something out of the Rimbauds, I got a crate and went up and stood on it and jeeked in. It was a real tiny window, I could only get one eye.”
“And? Was she an animal or a machine or what?”
“I jeeked in, and there was a fat guy with a hood on hanging from this crossbar by his hands and feet and the hooker, she had her back to me, but she had this thing in her hand that looked like a claw, you know?” Serpio spasmed fingers into a Hand of Glory. “Well, you see something like that, you just have to keep looking, especially when the hooker, she started raking the fat guy’s ass with this claw thing and leaving all these red scrapes. And he was thrashing around up there but there was nowhere he could go and in like no time, his ass just all red, and there was blood dripping from it on the floor. And I’m still up there on the crate, staring. Then, it was like when you know someone’s looking at you but you can’t see them, like a warm feeling that there’re eyes on you? The hooker, she suddenly stands up straight, and I should’ve got out then, I should’ve jumped off and run like a champion, but I couldn’t you know? It’s like I knew something awful was going to happen, but I had to stand there and see what it was.”
“And was it? Something awful?” This, asked in the semi-wheedling tell-me voice of childhood ghost stories. And the answer, in that same intimate, mutual-conspiracy-of-let’s-be-scared voice: “She turned round and she looked right at me and all I can remember is her face. Where her face should have been, was silver. All silver. Not a mask. Like molten metal. I could feel the heat off it. I could feel it on my eye, I could feel it sucking all the moisture out of it, I could feel it shrivel up and go dry and hard and blind. That’s what I thought, it was blind, then when the eye-patch came off, I realised that I was still seeing the silver I’d seen in her face, but the silver was the like the colour of the light in another world where all the things from all the legends live.”
The linger after the end of the tale of the cataract seemed to request a response but Sweetness did not know how to best fill it. So she said nothing but edged a little closer to strange Serpio.
“So,” he said. “What about you?”
The question felt like a warm, intrusive probing between Sweetness’s thighs. She gave a little gasp at the violation of her selfhood, then yielded herself to it. Things she had not even told Uncle Neon she told Serpio Waymender. The drawing out of them felt like she imagined sex to feel, mutual and releasing, yet very very private. All night Serpio teased her out with questions until, with the first dip of the horizon beneath the sun, the story ended and Sweetness Asiim Engineer found herself tired and yawning and gritty-eyed and needing a wash but stra
ngely exhilarated on the cold trackside.
“You hungry?” she had asked, thinking scraps and shavings among the party detritus; then Serpio had poked her in the third rib and said with voice forty-sixty longing and pride, Look, see?
Now the carriages had almost completed their evolutions: panels fixed and locked, joints and couplings met and mated. The machine outheld boom arms above wide metal skirts, above both rose a command torso of pumping engines and grinding conveyor trains. In a high glass cupola, the oldest and most experienced Waymenders steered the juggernaut over the grass past the procession of stalled trains. It made a tremendous noise. Dawn-grazing plainsbeasts skittered from its path, Surveyors rode them down on their terrain bikes, scooping up dust-hares and striped piglings. The machine inscribed sixteen parallel wheel tracks deep in the earth. It found the sheared track ends and settled over them like a venerable dowager of many skirts taking a piss. The booms dipped to the ground. Bucketwheel fingers threw up red dust. Conveyors spun their wheels.
“What are they doing?” Sweetness asked.
“Come and look.”
Serpio took her hand. Sweetness found she did not mind that. His was soft, with rather long nails. A nonworking hand. No handlebar or lever for it, the eye that guided it was as blinded by seeing too much as by too little. She felt sorry for that hand, as they sneaked around the side of the big machine, dodging flying clods, and so she squeezed it.
To make talk, she asked, “What do you think happened to the orph? I never saw one before, I thought they were all gone long ago.”
“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “Don’t care. Well shut of it. Well shut of them all. Poxy things were always going wrong; they weren’t very well made.”
This was mild blasphemy to an Asiim Engineer. The prickle of reflex impiety surprised Sweetness. She had thought herself young and free-thinking. She asked, carefully, “Is this because of your…you know?”