Ares Express dru-2

by Ian McDonald

  “Can I ask something?”

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

  “Can I drive?”

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

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

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

  18

  There was a dome called home by the side of the Trans-Oxiana upline. It was a primeval pressure bubble from the days before the man-forming, orange and breast-like, with a firm heat-exchange nipple erect on the summit. It had stood here for eight hundred years. Anywhere else it would have had preservation orders slapped all over it, been the focus of a heritage park or folk museum. Here in undervisited Great Oxus, atmosphere panels had been torn out, gas-exchange ducts ripped away, the pristine skin of the dome rudely punched into gabled windows and high dormers. Berya and Laventine Prestaine were the inheritors of this vandalism. They and their five-times-removed forebears abided here amongst brown-paper parcels. The Prestaines were a race of postage and parcels operatives for a swathe of terrain a day’s walk from middle to centre, a further day’s walk to the far side. Mantis-like gantries, the design of a second generation Prestaine, dangled their digits over the main line, primed, by a series of heliographs and clockwork devices, to nimbly whisk mail from fast-moving trains and deposit it safely in a lacrosse net. Clothes, mail-order seeds, bicycles, ploughshares, machine parts, dirty books, sports equipment, festival hampers, manuals and guides, wallpapers and paints; all were snatched from the parcel turrets of the big transcontinentals and whisked high. A spring-loaded telpherage shot those on the wrong side of the tracks spryly to the right side, then up the cable and through the dormer into the sun-lit sorting room. It was thin, blurred speed-and-wires work. There Berya and Laventine, now in their twenties, childless for the good of the genepool, sorted and filed in their matching yellow postal aprons. The uppermost chord of the dome was lined with baked-clay pigeonholes, many of them occupied by dusty brown-paper parcels, addresses faded to sepia by the moving trapezium of sun through the dormer. These were the widows and orphans, the unloved uncollected by the twice-weekly power-trike delivery girls.

  A woman in black was walking toward the dome this morning. She moved too spryly for her dowdy dowager’s weeds. She kicked at stones, gave the occasional skip, tightrope-walked the slim rail, arms held out at her side. A wink of high sun blinded her; a lens looking down from the observation nipple. Behind the eyepiece of the opticon, Berya Prestaine hooted.

  “Lavvy! Lavvy! Pedestrian! Pedestrian!”

  His sister peered up from her wicker parcel trolley.

  “Pedestrian?”

  “Afoot!”

  “Let me see.”

  She scurried along the ramp that spiralled up the inside of the dome, past the hundreds of labelled pigeonholes, sort codes and alphabeticals, yellowed adhesive tape sun-dried and peeling.

  “A woman!” Berya declared. “Afoot!”

  The leather eyecup of the opticon confirmed this to wheezing Laventine.

  “Afoot or not, we must service her,” the elder sister declared. “We shall open the counter.”

  “The counter!” useless Berya cooed, daft as a pigeon.

  They were standing behind it, side by side, as Grandmother Taal arrived under the cool striped awning. Their stamps were updated, their record books open, their pencils sharpened, their dockets ready for peel, their scales calibrated, their receipt book triple-larded with carbon paper, their moist pads warm and wet, their rubber thumbs dimpling amiably. All was ready for any conceivable postal transaction.

  “Deposit or receipt?” they asked simultaneously.

  “I beg your pardon?” Grandmother Taal asked.

  “Are you in receipt of a collectable, in which instance we will require your name, address and a form of photographic identification, or have you come to consign an item, in which case the next collection will be the twenty-three fifteen Night Sleeping Service.” Laventine Prestaine stared cock-headed at Grandmother Taal, like a constipated owl. A small worm of drool was crawling from the left corner of Berya’s mouth.

  “Twenty-three fifteen?” Grandmother Taal said.

  “That is correct, madam.”

  “I had hoped to connect with the fourteen oh three Local.”

  “The fourteen oh three?” Laventine turned to look aghast at Berya.

  “Fourteen oh three?” Berya echoed, staring at his sibling.

  “Long gone, madam.”

  “Gone gone gone long long long,” Berya fluted.

  “But my compendium…” Grandmother Taal took out her vade-mecum, shook it as if she suspected broken clockwork, loose power cells.

  “Mergers. All the thing on this line. Leveraged buy-outs. Snapping the tiddlers up, snip snap snip,” Laventine said, smugly. “First thing is shiny new corporate badges. Next is service cancellations.”

  “Then when can I get a train? It is imperative that I catch a train.”

  “Madam!” Laventine chided. “Where do you think you are? This is not Meridian Main. This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot. Our passengers are inanimate—usually—and wrapped in brown paper. In short, packages, madam. Packages.”

  “I have to get a train, my granddaughter—my only granddaughter…She is in great peril…”

  Grandmother Taal’s plea hit a layer of institutionalised incest annealed to the backs of the siblings’ eyes and bounced, like moonring-gleam from a starstruck cat. She laid the photograph of Sweetness on the counter. Berya’s hand seized the stamp like a striking snake, lifted it to blast. Laventine barely wrestled him back to the ink pad.

  “This is my granddaughter.”

  The two biddies clucked and fluffed over the photograph, then shook their heads.

  “Never seen her.”

  “Never seen, never been, never heard…”

  “She would have been in the company of a wall-eyed boy.”

  “Wall-eyed?”

  Grandmother Taal pulled down a lower lid, rolled her eyeball up. The postal twins reeled back.

  “Black hair, like a dust crow. Scruffy. Low caste.”

  The twins checked to make sure each other was shaking his or her head.

  “Name of Serpio. Waymender. A trainboy.”

  “Waymender?” Berya twitched, as if association were a painful tic. He looked at Laventine. “Lavvy Lavvy Lavvy! Waymender! Trainboy!” He poked his finger in his cheek and rolled his left eye.

  “My brother seems to have some positive recollection,” Laventine said.

  “Your…brother…seems positively imbecilic,” Grandmother Taal said mildly.

  “I shall consult the register,” Laventine Prestaine said carefully. Great soft yellow ledger pages curled, breaking waves surfed by spidery copperplate. Forefinger prodded names and deliveries. “Ah hah. Yes. The gentleman in
question has indeed received a number of consignments from us. In fact…” She looked over her shoulder, furrowed her brow, unfolded a complex pair of spectacles from her apron pocket and squinted through them at the dusty, sun-shafted interior of the dome. “I knew it, I knew it! There is a collectable for the gentleman in Imminent Returns.”

  “Might I see it?”

  Laventine Prestaine cocked her head to the other side.

  “It is rather irregular.”

  “My granddaughter…”

  Laventine showed Grandmother Taal how many ways she could purse her lips, then said, “Very well. Berya!” She tore a foil from the receipt book, stuck it to the back of Berya’s hand with tape and squared him up with the door. “Imminent Returns!”

  While he wound his way up the spiral and down again, Grandmother Taal tested her new, sharper eyesight on the strict perspectives of the mainline. Not a wisp of steam, not a speck of black steel in the heat-haze, it reported faithfully. Berya Prestaine set the parcel on the counter. It was wrapped in brown paper and bound, neatly, with white string. It was book-shaped and book-sized and, when Grandmother Taal picked it up, book-weighty.

  “Might I?”

  The Prestaines reacted as if she had suggested an unexpected fisting.

  “Open it, open it, open it?” Berya squeaked, hopping from foot to foot like a manic mynah.

  “This is a Winged Messenger Postal Depot,” Laventine boomed, drawing herself up to her full height. “Prestaines have been postal people since the days of the Rocket Mail. We hold our commission from St. Catherine Herself! Our obligations are sacrosanct. Sacrosanct!” She held a lofty silence, then added, “You may, however, feel it.”

  Grandmother Taal ran her fingers over the packet’s contours. It was the size of a book, the shape of a book, the weight of a book, and, absolutely, the feel of a book.

  “Is this the return address?”

  Laventine peered at the adhesive label on the back.

  “It is indeed, and you may count yourself lucky it had not already winged its way back to there.”

  “Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family.”

  “You would be surprised how much mail-order religion we handle.”

  “Has he had other deliveries from these folk?”

  Laventine pursed her lips, another sour rebuttal armed, then shook her head testily and thumbed through the ledger.

  “Yes, here, here, here and here.” Grandmother Taal could make nothing of the black, chitinous scrawl, but the spacing of the entries told her these were regular occurrences. “Here, here; here also, and here…”

  “Yes, thank you. Are they all mailed from Molesworth?”

  Laventine bent low over the adhesive receipt stickers next to the signatures.

  “It would seem so.”

  “Molesworth.”

  “In Chimeria.”

  “My good woman.” Grandmother Taal stiffened, flared her nostrils. “I am an Engineer. I am well aware it is a considerable journey.” Age, once accustomed to its due respect, does not gladly relinquish it.

  “By rail,” Berya chirped.

  “How else?” Grandmother Taal said sharply, but her mental vade-mecum was mapping routes and matching timetables and flagging halts with an increasing sense of losing the race between steam-powered grandmother and granddaughter on the back of a terrain bike.

  “Lookee lookee lookee!” Berya exclaimed, running into the dome and waving his hands gleefully.

  “My brother may not be the sharpest chisel in the set, but I defy anyone to better his innate sense for post,” Laventine stated proudly.

  He returned wielding a heat-sealed plastic envelope emblazoned with prioritaire and expressissimo stickers. To be opened solely by addressee, warned red corner flashes.

  “Ah, yes!” Laventine scanned the address. “I had almost forgotten about this one. We got a message on the radio about it, didn’t we, Berya?” He nodded. “Most important. They’re to pick it up today. Personal issue. Hand to hand.”

  She passed the envelope to Grandmother Taal.

  “The Glenn Miller Orchestra,” Grandmother Taal read out.

  “We’re not unaccustomed to celebrity in our little dome. But the address, woman—read the address!”

  “Director of Music, en route, Molesworth, Chimeria/Solstice Landing.”

  Laventine and Berya Prestaine stood behind their leather-topped counter as if they had magicked up the whole shebang out of steel, sand and brown paper.

  So it was that by midnight, Grandmother Taal was wedged between the trombones and the first clarinets, oppressed by cigarillo smoke and her coccyx bruised by eight hours bouncing over every rock and ant pile on the Solstice Landing trampas. Trainpeople and musicians, though brothers of the soul and historically mutually dependent, have never truly trusted each other. Grandmother Taal herself had too many memories of trashed dining cars and sexual shenanigans among the couchettes. They had a way about them at once overeasy and frighteningly professional; they salted their idle conversation with technical terms that computer scientists or geophysicists, with similar sacred vocabularies, would not have dared intrude into casual conversation. They talked of whole notes and eight bars, they had pappy-os and mammy-os and baby-blues. They spoke sentences where you beat time with a pursed thumb and forefinger and said pah-pah-pah-pah, pah-pah-pah-pah, pahpahpah. They jived over wah-wahs and mutes and leaned together to try out whispered rhythms, dat-da-dah no, try dat-duh-didit-duh, coming in sharp on the first beat and then going two three four five six seven and in and one hand beat five against eight and the other foot did eleven over four. Nothing was ever referred to by its correct name. Horns were bitches; clarinets fags; drums were skins, basses were broads, guitars were axes, saxophones were saxes. Sex sex sex sex sex. The musicians were as publicly intimate with their slang mistresses as teenagers in a city park, blowing into orifices, sticking tongues into slits, running fingers up and down brass nipples, stuffing balled hands into smooth flarings. Their professional hygiene techniques involved copious quantities of saliva and rags. They smoked colossal amounts of bhang. The interior of the big black boogie bus was a tube of blue funk. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain the driver was in control of the big eighteen-wheeler articulated land-train. The begoggled girl behind the wheel could be deliberately steering for the hummocks and mounds. Grandmother Taal was no longer certain she much cared whether she was or not. She leaned to yell at the tall, bespectacled man on the bench seat beside the grim-faced driver.

  “How much longer?”

  The man in glasses, the legend himself, yelled something to the driver, who yelled back, never once taking her eyes off the darkening trampas.

  “She says it’ll take as long as it takes,” the musician reported.

  “My granddaughter…”

  The band leader bent toward Grandmother Taal.

  “Show me again.”

  She fished the photograph out of the depths of the universal handbag. It was growing foxed at the edges, the celluloid finish cracking and fanning into soft white petticoats of layered paper. Glenn Miller showed it to the driver. She pushed up her dust-goggles, gave it a look over, then bawled at the King of Swing. He nodded.

  “We don’t have to be there until five for the get in, but she’ll try to make it tonight, if everything holds.”

  Everything holds.

  Grandmother Taal had not been long waiting at the Winged Messenger depot, which was as well, for the Prestaines were not accustomed to hospitality, and a guest of theirs might starve, or die of thirst or sunstroke before they thought to offer shade swig shelter. A stirring of dust on the far side had turned into a black wink of a vehicle, which had turned into a highly unlikely contraption, a long, black tube of a thing, studded with aerials and swivel spotlights, portholes down the sides, a mirror-glass windshield wrapped around its nose, like a snake in shades. It ran on three sets of huge, soft-tired dustwheels, and was articulated in three places, which gave a sly shimmy to
its motion. A bus trying to pretend it’s a train, Grandmother Taal thought disdainfully as the device clambered disrespectfully over the tracks and came to a rest beside the Prestaines’ dome.

  THE GLENN MILLER ORCHESTRA ON TOUR! declared metre-high white letters along the side of the bus. The Legendary Kings of Swing! the smaller print mentioned as an afterthought. The doors opened, a cloud of aromatic smoke plumed out, followed by a tide of coughing Kings of Swing. Last off was the Man Himself, Glenn Miller, trombone under arm. He stood at the top of the steps, frowning through his thick glasses at this forsaken place in which he found himself. Like most trainfolk, Grandmother Taal was no respecter of celebrity or legend. Gods and men alike paid their tickets. She had been prepared to treat this man, this musician, this band-leader record-maker radio-star jukebox angel, this marquis of mood and earl of easy and duke of jive, this legend that every night set the dark half of the planet jumpin’ and jittin’, as just another passenger. But seeing him there on the top step, the afternoon light glinting off the bell of his trombone, his glasses filmed with dust, she could not. Everything about him said, yes, all that, but that doesn’t matter, for whether it comes or whether it goes, I am now and always have been and always will be, genuine article. A crawl of bona fide awe had licked up Grandmother Taal’s spine.

  Never too old for it, Engineer-Amma.

  And nice manners too, because when it came to ask him could he, would he, was it possible, an old woman, alone, looking for a lost granddaughter, he had brushed it all away with a lift of his hand and said certainly and gave her his hand to guide her up on to the bus and his handkerchief to tie around her face in case the dust finally defeated the air-conditioning system. Such a nice manner that Grandmother Taal put aside her mistrust of a vehicle that could go anywhere its driver desired and climbed aboard.

  With the Prestaine Dome beneath the horizon and the big black bus cutting south by southeast across the arid plains, she had watched Glenn Miller rip open his priority package. She had seen the frown as his eyes danced over the page, his lips shaping unfamiliar syllables.