by Ian McDonald
She tugged. He was unmoved.
“Child’a’grace, man!”
Bedassie looked around at the pale faces ranked down the strict perspectives of Solid Gone. He shook his head, let slip Sweetness’s hand.
“You cannot do this,” Sweetness begged him.
“I never had an audience like this. Do you understand that? Every night, I put the pictures up in that cloud, and they smile, and they laugh, and they feel something, and they go home for an hour, two hours, they dream their dreams. Don’t you understand? That’s how it should be. It’s not there to take dreams out of people’s heads and make them into pictures. You were right, with your wondering if it could work in reverse. It was meant to work in reverse. That’s what all cinema has ever been, taking the pictures out of the clouds, off that screen and making them dreams in people’s heads. They need that. They need me. Here, movies make people’s lives. I make a difference. I don’t entertain, I shape their worlds. And they’re just people, who had the bad luck to have lost their dreams. They deserve them back. I can give them to them, as long as it takes. This cloud won’t last forever. This plague will move on someday. Until then, I’ll give them the news of the worlds, eight times a day. I’m not trapped. I’m not a prisoner. You can’t be a prisoner, if you remain of your own free will. I’m staying here. You go. You’ve got your story. I’ve got the pictures.”
He stepped away from Sweetness.
“Go!” he shouted.
Sudden tears almost paralysed Sweetness. The story that was hers before this new one had rewritten every line had been subtly played out here. In this version, the hero chose his trap over the wild world. To him it was not a trap. Never had been a trap, only a kind of mitigated freedom. All the dreams in the world. Sweetness swallowed the emotion. You have to let some things go, Glorious Honey-Bun. You aren’t responsible for every ill and blessing in the world. People make their own minds up and you abide by their decisions. The grey people, the infected, were spilling slowly out into the zocalo. Go, now, if you’re ever going to go. She ran between closing walls of the news-hungry toward the black slit of the alley. There she turned, sought for Sanyap Bedassie between the moving bodies. She saw him as a flash of colour through the thicket of limbs. She watched the circle of hands close in around him, and his reach out to shake them.
“Go figure,” she said, and turned again, and ran away from Solid Gone.
21
“ All right then, I’ll walk!” Sweetness shouted up at the iron cliff of the Class 22.
“Damn right you will, for you’ll have no ride with me, nor anyone else on this railroad,” Engineer Joan Cleave Summer-Raining Tissera 8th declared from his brass shunting oriole. With which he climbed the stairs to the bridge, slammed and dogged the port behind him and began the power-up sequence. Misused tokamak fields set Sweetness’s fillings ringing; bleed valves bullied her with steam. She jumped back as the drive rods cranked and the wheels spun, then gripped. The train moved off. Sweetness jogged beside the wheels, flinging trainfolk curses, which curse very hard. The rolling bogies of the tank cars soon outpaced her. She shied track ballast at the receding stained-glass lights of the caboose in the hope of pettily breaking one and annoying a Stuard.
The big chemical train curved out of sight between red dunes. The anger drained out of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. She sat dejectedly on the rail. She was outcast, named, pariah. She was the Little Girl Who Would Not Marry Whom She Was Told. No one would Uncle Billy for her. What would be scary-biscuits was if the ban had spread trackside. If she could not scrounge a mandazi from a platform goondah or a pan of water from a tanking tower, her story might come to a premature end. Story, she thought. People in stories were not supposed to be permanently thirsty, or hungry enough to eat the beard of a Sumache sacerdotal. Or smell their own bodies.
“I wouldn’t have written it like this,” Sweetness told the desert.
Creak, answered a desert rook on a signal pylon. Black bird of ill omen. Outcast, named, pariah. Sweetness buzzed a rock at it. It flew away in a rattle of oily feathers.
Who had dirtied on her? Dirtied she certainly had been. Dawn had seen her marching along the westbound upline, Solid Gone’s grey cloud stuck like a styptic plaster to the horizon, light filling up the land, her own long shadow returning to her after being all over all night, when she felt through the soles of her boots the thrum of a train coming. Peering from the shade of her hand into the low sun, she had recognised the characteristic three tall steam-stacks of a Class 22 medium freightliner. She stood resolutely in the middle of the track, flagging down the chemical train with her shirt. It had come to a halt before her, Eastern Star, steaming slightly. The Engineer had descended into his oriole, but even before she could invoke the formula, he had demanded, “Is your name Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th?”
“It is, and I’m told it’s a very fine name.”
“I’m told different,” he said. Then she learned that her name had passed up the line with the speed and enthusiasm of a venereal disease, shunted and switched and sided until every part of the global web of rails knew to shun it.
Who told you? she had wanted to shout at the receding train. And who told them? Who did the dirt? The Ninth Avata people, fair enough: I did the dirt on them. Child’a’grace, my own Catherine of Tharsis? My own train. Marya Stuard—she’d be up to it, she’s never got on with us—she’s always thought we thought we were better than her—and she’s got this reputation for mean to protect. She can take out the Starke dacoits, she can put my name about quick as a knife. But that’d be like a direct attack on the Engineers. It’d be one end of the train against the other. Not even she’d be mean enough to start a civil war. But someone certainly did, so who? Oh no. They couldn’t. Could they? They could: if Da’s proud enough not to talk to Ma because of a card game four years ago, he could dirt me. Sle’s petty enough but he’s too lazy even to start a rumour. If it’s my own people, I’m really shafted. I really can’t go back again. But what’s to go back to? They’ll just work up another contract and it’ll be me with the paper money all over my dress all over again, only this Joe won’t even have a stainless steel kitchen. Mother’a’plenty, they might even fix me with a Bassareeni, just to punish me. I’ll never get my hands on the throttles. So what’s to go back for? Make a life out here, off the track. Lots of people do. Most people do. Hell, I’m a weird ethnic minority, most people can’t even imagine how we live the way we do. It’s probably a darn sight easier, maybe even better. Friends would be easier to keep. You wouldn’t have your friends and family and work-mates all the same people. You wouldn’t work with your family. You wouldn’t have them around all the time. That would be good. You could get away. But imagine waking up and it’s the same place every day. You’d be stuck with the seasons. And you’d really never ever ever get to drive. Their way, maybe. Not likely, but it’s a possibility. This way, nada. And you wouldn’t be track. You’d be a passenger. Every time you got on a train, you’d know there’d be someone up there at the front with their hand on the drive bar, taking you where you’re going to. You’d just be going along for the ride. Hell, I’m an Engineer! I’m not driven, I drive. I drive.
So: here’s this story, and this is where it’s left me. It sure can’t mean for everything to end like this. Whatever happened to happy ever after? No, think, hey, doesn’t every story have a time like this, when everything’s been burned down and levelled and things are as bad as they can get for our heroine?
So, in this time of levelling, what does a heroine do?
She gets up. She picks up her pack and slings it on her back. She turns to face the place she is going. She says, If everything is ashes and flat, on this I can build. This is the lowest of the low. Every way now is up. So go. Nothing here for you. You’ll get where you’re going.
She got up. She slung her pack on her back. She turned to face up the line. She felt no stronger, no surer, no more determined, no less hungry/ thirsty/grubby
/tired but she could not remain another minute by that trackside. She walked out of that flat field of ashes.
By noon she had still neither eaten nor drunk, but a wind rose behind her that cooled her and carried her forward, and early in the afternoon there was the space battle.
At least, Sweetness presumed it was a space battle, in that part of it clearly did come from space, though the action was low to middle atmospheric. It was all rather confusing and done so quick that if you had not been looking you would have missed it, and even if you were, you could still not be sure what had happened. Trudging along the upline toward the beckoning skeleton of a water tower, Sweetness had become aware of a distant low howl behind her. She spun in the instant it took that howl to become a devouring roar as three World Defence ionospheric interceptors streaked out from behind the far rim rocks and thundered over her head.
“Wooo!” she yelled into the shatter of engines, and whirled to see the interceptors rise on their parallel white contrails into a sky-scourging loop. They were magnificently evolved devices, utterly of their native element, arrogant of gravity in their spindly, insectoid asymmetry. They spun as one on their long axes as they reached the top of the loop, then rolled on to their backs for a hair-raising tumble through fifty kilometres of airspace. When the zenith blazed with crackling lilac beams, the point interceptor exploded immediately in a white fireball. Numbstruck, Sweetness watched the flaming fragments draw streamers of smoke down to impact beyond the southern horizon. She could not register what she had seen. It was all lights and smokes and mystery, as beautiful and remote as sacred theatre. She found the remaining two aerospacecraft against the blue. They had shaken off their vain aerobatics and were screaming down on divergent courses, hoping to bemuse the targeting computers among the dunes and rocks. Lilac sky-beams flickered again; Sweetness saw a searing arc slash across the southern stone plains, strike the fleeing fighter amidships, cut it cleanly, thoughtlessly, in two. Severed halves went tumbling over each other, bounding high, disintegrating into chunks of burning scrap. A sheet of flame went up from the line of impact as the jumble of high technology struck sand. The third interceptor came scorching round on a tight turn from the west, headed back to whatever base had launched it. It bore down on Sweetness, jumped the mainline with a hypersonic boom that beat her inner organs like a drum and headed north. High in heaven, lilac beams criss-crossed like a master carver steeling his blade. A single lilac scimitar cut down. Presciently warned, the interceptor had veered on an erratic manoeuvre, otherwise it would have been cleanly vaporised. Not enough: the partac beam clipped a stabiliser vane. Too low, too fast. The pilot fought for stability but gravity fought harder. The interceptor jerked, heaved, veered, flipped on to its side and ploughed into the slip-slope of a sif dune in a kilometres-long plume of sand. A titanic pillar of fire went up from the northern dunefields. Seconds later, the blast front buffeted Sweetness. Heat washed her face, she reeled, regained balance.
Oily black smoke spiralled up into the sky.
“Woof,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th. “That was freaky.”
A few footsteps along, the chill hit her out of the desert heat: she had seen flash machines, swift technology, war by special effects budget. Under all that chrome there had been crew, people really dying bad, arbitrary and meaningless deaths out there with no other witness but herself and God. She had watched their final struggles, their skills and talents strive and fail. Real death, not story death. No trainperson is a stranger to death: Sweetness did not doubt that the majority of those freeloaders she had djubba-ed from the top of the train had either perished immediately or slowly as a result of her action. This was grand death with no connection to her. This would have spread itself across an entire terrain whether she had been there or not.
A chiller chill struck her, one that shivered ice through her marrow. Grand death on a planetary stage, but intimately connected to her. The sky weapons did not fire arbitrarily, least of all at planetary defence aerospace fighters. Unless the angels were mad and ROTECH insane, another had gained control of the orbital partacs. Other being a soft-voiced, grey-haired man in a light-swallowing suit with a cane in one hand and the soul of St. Catherine in a stasis jar in the other.
She had been sole human witness of the opening shots of the war between Harx and the angels. He was testing his powers, and they were sure and strong.
In confirmation, after the space battle came the duststorm.
A curvet of wind had tugged Sweetness’s cheek as she trudged the upline, burdened with her own thoughts and responsibilities. It had to tweak twice to get her attention. She looked up and saw, like the mother of slow trains a’coming, the boiling wall of ochre dust rolling toward her down the line, shot through with steel lightnings.
For a moment she stared. The thing bearing down on her was as fabulous as a herbragriff or stalking aspanda. They were the creatures of childhood story, the feral duststorms that would blanket entire quarterspheres for weeks, that would carry away whole towns and rearrange landscapes and change the course of rivers and turn lakes into plains. No such monster had visited the world in her or her parents’ generation, not since ROTECH created a suborder of angels to keep the climate sweet. Grandmother Taal had known these creatures, and now Sweetness recalled her lurid descriptions of tracks, trains, crews and passengers buried beneath dunes in a single night, of thrice-painted metal whetted to a naked steel blade, of grazebeasts stripped to polished bone flutes, of trainspersons drowning in dust even as they ran for the presumed safety of their cabs.
“Mother’a’mercy,” Sweetness said, the lone vertical obstacle in the path of the beast as it bore down on her. “He’s got into the weather!” Dust brushed her cheek. The next kiss would be rougher. She had maybe seconds to find cover out here in the middle of all this hugeness. She glanced around her. As she had hoped: the concrete grave of an inspection pit. Cover, of a kind. Of the only kind, she told herself. It would mean running into the face of the storm. So be it.
“Yaaaaaah!” she yelled, and charged the bulwark of dust. She flung herself through the orange wall. The wind threatened to hurl her back for her presumptuousness. Rust-lightning crackled around her as she dived down between the sleepers into the inspection pit. The concrete floor was littered with swarf and scrap train and sun-dried shit from the honey-vents, and hit exceeding hard.
“Oof!” Sweetness gasped, present enough to roll belly down and curl her back against the storm. Instants later, it struck with a shriek like every soul in the Benekasherite purgatory enduring genital torture at once. Darkness. Terrible noise. Dust. Sweetness struggled a handkerchief over her face, knotted it behind her head but the dust had already found its way up her nose, prickling and electrical and scented with dead, dried summers. Red dust caked in the corners of her eyes and behind her ears as she huddled, face down, not looking at the gorgon-face of the storm. She could feel it in her hair, heavy and matting. She’d be an adobe-head for days after this. The almost solid plane of dust drew a sympathetic plaint from the steel rails. Storm-claws plucked at her shirt: Come, fly with me.
“What are you doing, man?” she shouted at her enemy. “Don’t you know it’s going to make everything come apart? Is that what you want? They’re not going to let you, you know.” But, if Harx could access the planetary defences and the climate control system, even God the Panarchic was hog-tied. What was Harx doing to St. Catherine, with what cybernetic torments was he threatening her, what weird stuff makes saints and angels shudder? Planetary patroness she might be, a psychic twin of false pretences, but the reflection of a soul sealed in Devastation Harx’s memory jar was also Little Pretty One, half of Sweetness’s life to date. He was torturing the crippling disappointment of her third birthday party when she did not get the toy Engineer’s outfit; it was her first no-tongue bruise-lipped snog-ette with Axle Deep-Eff at the corroboree steaming. It was the economics exam she had failed spectacularly and cavalierly—there had been a handball match the night befo
re against Darker Star—and the longwave humiliation she had endured before her School of the Air tutor and a continent of fellow pupils. It was the night of the Boletohatchie lay-over she had crept from her cabin up along the star-lit companionways over the dark, simmering hulk of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes, and had stolen in to the command bridge to lay her hand for one, electric second, on the brass drive bar. It was the foolish confessed hopes and dreams and unachievable ambitions; the infatuations and infuriations and warm-between-the-thighs moments; the naked lusts and the hopeless rages and the whispered hours of giggle and smut. Out of sheer adolescent embarrassment alone, she had to get her other half back. “I’m not going to let you!” she shouted, arms wrapped around her head.
Fine words, from a nearly-nine on her knees in an inspection pit, buried under a kilometre of duststorm. It was then she noticed the steady rivulets of dust pouring over the corners of the dug-out, forming spreading spill-cones across the concrete floor, slowly burying the pieces of discarded train-innards with the granular tick of the hour-glass. Already it was piling up around her fingers, a sensation at once sexy and enclosing. She could feel it trickling into her shoes.
“Aw, come on,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn’t the end.
As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness’s ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm’s passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.