Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

“Yes!” Naon exclaimed, feeling as if he had missed a couple of turns in the game. “One and a quarter percent, and three and a half years!”

  “Naon!” Mother-to-son voice. “You are without doubt the finest throttleman in this quartersphere, but that is exactly the reason men drive and women bargain. Now…” She turned to her adversary. “She is Engineer born in the bone. She has steam in her soul and oil in her heart and iron in her thighs and fusion fire in her eyes, she has left a million used-up kilometres behind her, she is true granddaughter of this grandmother and know this, she will carve up your Chef du Chemin Narob with his own fine knives, in his own stainless steel galley and serve him with a little salt and chilli to his clients and that is why she will go to Ninth Avata for nothing less than one and half percent for three years and twenty-four months. Stick. Stop…”

  But before Grandmother Taal could call stay and seal the deal, Marya Stuard worked her thumbs behind the gold-embroidered lapels of her tunic and called out, “Yes, Engineer, but what is she doing now?”

  It was an evil blow that ricocheted across the table from open mouth to raised eyebrow, deflected off Naon Engineer's dismayed brow, through the porthole, two hundred kilometres up into the evening sky to bounce off the reflecting dish of the big vana, as it slid over the terminator into night, back down to earth two and half kilometres north to the Inatra Fillage Number Six Water Storage Cistern in which Sweetness Engineer joyfully swam. She felt it as a prickle of gooseflesh on her bare back as she stroked toward the concrete lip where Psalli sat, toes teasing the water. Sweetness glanced up; the knuckled rim of the escarpment had risen above the sun. That would explain the sudden shiver. Magic hour. The triskelions of the wind-pumps were lazy silhouettes on the deep blue.

  “You going to be much longer?” Psalli called as Sweetness tumble-turned into another length. She was a solid, sullen-faced creature, a true Traction. At eight-and-not-a-day more she was Sweetness's closest female contemporary, thus friend, though Sweetness wondered would she have been had their lives been less mobile. She could be a whining cow.

  “You go on back if you're cold,” Sweetness said, elbows hooked over the further ledge of the tank.

  “Nah,” Psalli grunted.

  “Don't let me stop you, now.”

  The girl shrugged her meaty shoulders. Sweetness kicked off from the far end of the cistern. Two strokes brought her sliding in front of Psalli.

  “Why not?”

  Psalli glanced beyond the stepped terraces of water tanks to the truck gardens.

  “They won't bother you,” Sweetness said.

  “They keep looking and waving.”

  “So? Okay. Then we'll give them something to look and wave at.” A heave brought Sweetness out of the water in a cascade of fat drops. Balanced like a gymnast on the narrow lip, she drew herself up to her full one point seven five bare-ass metres. Honey-skin dewed with billion-year-old fossil water. She scraped her hair behind her ears, put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. It pierced the indigo cool of Inatra like a stiletto. All the dark doll figures that had been clinging to the tall foliage at the edge of the irrigation canals turned as one.

  “Hey! Boys! See this?” Sweetness wiggled her hips. “Well, you can never, ever have this.” She turned a slow cartwheel on the edge of the pool. The watching boys of Inatra were each and every one struck through the eyes so that ever after they could not love right because tattooed on their retinas was a vision of unattainable youth and loss with arcs of old, cold water flicking from its heels. Sweetness bounced upright. “Just thought you should know, right?” The figures slunk away into the greenery.

  Hands on hips, she surveyed her conquest. Inatra was a spring-line town, a place of wells and shafts and pumps, of water shivering silkily down mossy runnels from cistern to cistern, of gurgling irrigation canals and sagely nodding yawnagers, of aloof water-towers and lithe brown children who pranced in the rainbow spray from the leaking fill-hoses. Here the gradual tilt of the great Tanagyre plain cracked like a broken paschal biscuit into the kilometre uplift of the Praesoline Escarpment. Here the big fusion locos paused for a long drink of water before the toil up the ramps and switchovers of the Inatra Ascent. Here, while the trains drank, train people played in water.

  “Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, you have no shame,” Psalli said.

  “Great, isn't it?”

  By now her piercing, two-finger whistle had penetrated Catherine of Tharsis's Domiety Chamber and, though weak, it still had enough strength to climb into Marya Stuard's ear. She smiled. Everyone around the table had as good a guess as her as to its source. She laid her hand palm upright on the polished wood.

  “Three thousand, one point seven percent and three years thirty months. Stick stop stay.”

  She held Grandmother Taal's look. The old Engineer woman shrugged.

  “Tinguoise.”

  “Major's Gate.”

  “Ethan Soul.”

  The formula was complete. No one living or undead knew its source, neither could they unsay anything it sealed.

  “I'll contact the Ninth Avata people and have the contract drawn up.”

  Marya Stuard rose from the table with her delegation. As she swept out, Child'a'grace muttered, “Too cheap.”

  Her husband roared.

  “Tell that woman…” he commanded Grandmother Taal but she had departed in a rustle of many-layered skirts, so he signed, She is only a daughter! His fingers added, Half a daughter.

  Child'a'grace rose in a blossom of sudden fury.

  “Never…”

  Sorry sorry my mistake, Naon Engineer signed. He had committed a cardinal sin. He knew that he had handled the negotiations badly. His hands might be on the throttles but he was afraid of Marya Stuard. Afeared, and indebted: no one in any of Catherine of Tharsis's Domieties was let forget that she had single-handedly faced down the notorious Starke gang as they fleeced a carriage of Lewite Pelerines. Her defiance had cost her a needle in the hip that troubled her when it was political for it to do so, but her example had woken the demons in the milk-mannered pilgrims. As one they had risen, seized the dacoits and ejected them at the next mail drop. Marya Stuard herself had been so incensed at the needle in her side that she had laid out old, dreaded Selwyn Starke with a silver salver flung frisbee-style.

  “Some day, and, please God, soon, that woman's account will be overdrawn,” Naon Engineer mumbled as he went to clean Grandfather Bedzo's tubes and change his bags.

  It was full dark now over Inatra. Under the first glimmerings of the moonring, that tumble of orbital engineering that sustained the world's fragile habitability, Sweetness walked home alone along the tracks. Psalli had made the most of the space caused by Sweetness's display and slipped off to her cabin before the rude boys drummed up a scrap of courage between them. She walked between the sleeper-ends and the shanties. Sweetmeat and patty vendors roused themselves from their scavenged human-dung smudgefires, then settled back into repose at the sight of an Engineer orange track vest. Androgynously thin boygirls, ungendered by hunger, shook fistfuls of copper charm bangles at her. Good luck, good luck girlie, a prayer on every strand. Sweetness shook her head. The wire was filched from switchgear relays. Aside from the occasional electrocuted bangle-wallah, a prayer on every strand often meant a derailed front end.

  Catherine of Tharsis rose from the night, as monolithic as the scarp she was preparing to climb. Riding lights twinkled, windows beckoned. But a whisper turned Sweetness aside at the last booth before home.

  “Sees all hears all knows all. Past present future. Uncurtain the windows of time, lady.”

  The voice was a reptilian whisper, but strangely attractive for that; a reptile with a gorgeous jewelled skin, an ornate crest, a coiling blue tongue. An unsuspected seduceability in Sweetness responded. She heard herself say, “Oh, all right then. How much is it?”

  “Very little,” lizard-tongue replied. The booth was a sagging leopard spotted yurt. As she ducked inside,
the door flaps brushed Sweetness's nape. They felt like skin.

  “It's kind of little in here.”

  Littler than the exterior hinted. She could hardly make out the lizard-lips man across the octagonal table. He seemed small and hairless, his skin oddly dark even among a dark-skinned people. She could have sworn it was green in the dull glow from everywhere and nowhere.

  “Shouldn't you be asking me to cross your palm with centavos?” Sweetness asked. The yurt smelled ripely of green and growing, mould and leaf, pistils and fresh-spaded soil.

  “If you like,” the fortune-teller said. While she fiddled in her hip bag for silver, he placed a device like an overweight egg-timer on the table. Its upper hemisphere was filled with small white beans. Their progress to the lower hemisphere was prevented by a cheval de frise of spills inserted through a mesh.

  “This do?”

  The fortune-teller scooped the trickle of centavos up to his mouth and swallowed them.

  “Should you…?”

  The huckster leaned toward her. He was green and the source of the smell of verdure. He flared his nostrils.

  “You've been swimming.”

  “My hair's wet, o great detective.”

  “You smell of water. Here.” Quick as a striking rat-snake, he whipped a spine out of the hour-glass. It had a blue tip. Burned on with a hot needle were the words “Fulfillingness First Finale” and “One for free.” The little green man studied the motto. “Worse places to start.” He laid the spill on the table. “Now, you play. Remove any stick you like, and the aim of the game is not to win, because you can't win a game like this, but to delay the fall of the beans as long as possible. Then we shall begin our reading.”

  “No problem.” Sweetness reached for a stick.

  “One rule. Whatever you touch, you must draw.”

  “I get ya.” She confidently drew the stick at which she had aimed her finger. The first five moves were simple, even mindless; then, as the beans rattled and sagged, it became a true game, with demands of thought and foresight. She sucked her lower lip in concentration and hovered between two spills that crossed deep in the heart of the bean heap.

  “So, how does this work anyway?”

  “You pull the sticks. Gravity supplies the rest.”

  “I mean, how does it tell the future?”

  “How should I know?” the green man said. “All I know is it does.”

  Her fingers seesawed, decided, decided again, locked firmly around the spill that stuck out at thirty degrees. She could feel the beans grind over the wood as she withdrew the stick. A lurch. A solitary bean hit the bottom of the future-machine. She found she had been holding her breath, and released it in a relieved sigh.

  “Some beans will always fall,” the green man said, taking the stick. “Hm. Queen's Canton.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “It is, that's all.” He laid it next to the others in an orderly row.

  “I've got an uncle can see the future,” Sweetness said matter-of-factly. She squatted low, hands on the table, eyes level with the web of spills.

  “Indeed?” said the green man.

  “Though he'd tell you it's not so much seeing the future, it's more like having a wider now.”

  “An interesting perspective.”

  “That's what he says. But then, he is a signal light.”

  “That would give…novel…insights.”

  “He was working on the pylon when he got hit by lightning.” Sweetness drew a stick like a Belladonna rapieree drawing a swordstick. “There!”

  “Bravo,” said the green man.

  Three sticks later there was a click and a sag and all the beans hit the bottom of the jar like goondah-flung pebbles on a widow's window.

  “Oh,” said Sweetness. The green man was now crouching, studying the pattern of the remaining sticks. He turned the future-ometer over in his hands. Sweetness noticed that he was frowning. She thought of ploughing.

  “Bone Sandals in parallel with Boy of Two Dusts, crossing Innocent Excesses obliquely. But Boy of Two Dusts overruns Scent of Lavender, then exits hole eight eight, upper right quadrant; the Deserted Quarter.”

  “Meaning?”

  The green man raised a finger to his lips. He held the hour-glass up to the light that came from everywhere.

  “See? Golden Thumb-ring is quite, quite horizontal, and in an isolated quadrant; notice that the only stick that approaches it is Eternal Assistance. Your family wants you wed.”

  His eyes—which Sweetness noticed had yellow irises—challenged her to be amazed.

  “That's not hard. A trackgirl, my age? You're going to have to do better than that.”

  “I don't see a marriage, though.”

  “That's more like it. You mean, ever?”

  The green man held the future-ometer out to Sweetness.

  “Not within the frame of the story.”

  “What story would that be?”

  “The one you're in. The one we're all in. This.” The green man's hands cupped the wasp-waisted glass torso. “Stories are made up of lives but not all of life is a story. Only parts have the narrative construction, the dramatic energy, the confluence of incident, desire and coincidence that are the elements of story. Within here”—he again caressed the glass—“is the story of your life. Here and here”—he touched either green-tipped end of a scrying-stick—“are where you fade out of the once-upon-a-time and into the happy-ever-after. The rods, of course, go on forever.” His fingers described extensions in the air. An instant of other-sight: Sweetness saw them stretching out beyond his reach, through him, through her, through the soft walls of the yurt and the softer walls of night and time. “You think that everything that has happened to you in your life thus far has been chance? To be so blessed! Everything you have been leads to this place, this story-jar, this confluence of forces. Of course, you can look at it the other way.” His chartreuse hands turned the oracle one hundred and eighty degrees. A different phalanx of quills menaced Sweetness. “If the universal laws are as reversible as the sages insist, then it is also true that the what-you-will-become influences your decision of what-you-are-now.”

  “And these beans, are they like God's shit, going to fall on me if I do this or don't do that?”

  The green man pursed his lips.

  “If you consider that, to me, shit is an excellent fertiliser, and to these people, how they warm their lives, maybe. Then again, you could consider them the weight of undecided events that must be shed for the bones of your story to emerge.”

  Sweetness cocked her head and folded her arms and looked a challenge from under her fringe of dark curls.

  “Do I get to drive a train or not?”

  “You do a lot of driving.”

  “Driver, or driven?”

  The green man rotated a spill between thumb and forefinger.

  “Grey Lady's Visit, crossing Trumpet of Alves, acute. Both, my dear. Words of advice. Hold on tight to fast-moving objects. Don't trust too much to appearances; then again, first impressions are lasting impressions. When climbing, look at the hands, not the feet. Be aware that the marvellous is always around you. Don't discount family. Don't drop litter. Always expect unexpected assistance. Take a toothbrush and at least one change of underwear. Small change is bulky and too easily rolled out of pockets. Keep notes in your sock. Angels exist, if you know how to use them. Read a little every day. The desert teaches drought, the city bathing. Your body odour is usually worse than you think. Some day, soon, you will cost the world a moon. Your grandmother loves you very much. Easy on the throttle until the cylinders expand. The world is very much more than it seems. When you see green, trust it, for it's all one with me and I will be there in some form or another. Never pay good money to trackside hucksters.”

  The green man pulled the remaining sticks and set them beside the others on the octagonal table. The future was spoken.

  “That's it?” Sweetness asked, in case it wasn't.

&n
bsp; “Yes, that's it,” the green man said with the same considering look, as if Sweetness's every syllable was loaded with wise ore.

  “Keep your eyes open and bring a change of underwear? Anyone could tell you that. What happens to me, where do I go, what do I do, who do I meet?”

  “You want me to give the story away?” the green man said.

  “This is balls,” Sweetness Asiim Engineer declared. “I want my money back.”

  “Have beans instead,” the green man said and threw a fistful of legumes at Sweetness's face. The beans flew apart into dust. Sweetness reeled back from the blinding beige fog that, as it settled, became common Inatra road dust. The soft skin yurt and its resident were, of course, both gone.

  “Hey!”

  In the dust at her feet Sweetness saw three gleams of silver. Her coins. A hissing: she looked up: wisps of steam were leaking from Catherine of Tharsis's shaft couplings. The Ascent beckoned. A flicker in her peripheral vision distracted her; a wink of light, minute as a five centavo piece, floated over the top of the escarpment. Quick as silver it slithered between the wind-pumps, leaped over the zigzags of the Ascent, glimmered across the tank terraces. Every moment it grew in size: over the trucks, gardens, the water-towers and hose gantries, aimed true and proper at Sweetness. Fear and wonder transfixed her. The spotlight from heaven dashed across the sidings, over the cardboard roofs of the poor, swept over Sweetness. And stopped. She was embedded in light. The air about her seemed to sing. Dust rose from the ground. The night smelled electric. Sweetness held out her hand. The three centavos in her palm shone like burning platinum. But she was not afraid. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up the beam to the orbital mirror at its source. The light squeezed tears from her eyes.

  “Thanks, but I got to go now!”

  She stepped out of the enchanted circle. The spotlight followed her.

  Sweetness giggled nervously.

  Be aware that the marvellous is always around you.

  She stowed the three centavos in her hip-bag and walked home shrouded in light.