by Ian McDonald
“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 single 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.
“So.”
“So.”
But Sweetness still tippy-toed across the boundary, like an old seabather testing the water. Then something darted at her, feathery and diaphanous and whirring, and darted away as she swiped at it. She glimpsed helicopter rotors, a fragile crystalline body, great blinking eyes framed, incongruously, with long eyelashes. It was no larger than her hand. The autogyro-bug blinked at her, emitted a soft purr and released a stream of phosphorescent spores from its belly. The spores settled on Sweetness's skin like thistledown. They sparkled in the sun. She heard faint far tintinnabulations, smelled summer and palm wine and spent fireworks, felt delicious weals of cold stitch across her flesh.
“Oh,” she said. And, “Ah.”
The thing blinked again, dipped on its rotors and spun away. Without understanding the impulse, Sweetness followed. The will-o’-the-wisp led her into wonder. In groves of derrick trees five, six times her height she ducked under swooping sails. Gentle breezes scented with syrup and electricity fanned her face. Through copses of translucent orange bottle-plants, wide bellied, tight lipped, corked with plugs of matted fibre. Within, coiling things somersaulted in thick liquid. Luminous midges swarmed in her face, shifting patterns of light and density. As she moved inward, Sweetness heard the potplants uncork like deeply resonant belches. Looking back, she saw them ejaculate hundreds of long silver streamers. On, and in, over a carpet of glistening blue pebbles that, when she stepped on them, grew legs and fled from her. She padded through a parting sea of iridescent beetles. She stopped to pick one up, yelped, dropped it. The thing had hit her with an electric shock. It lay on its back, thrashing its cilia legs until one by one they locked and froze.
Onward; parting webs of thick, pulsating vines to be sure she was on the track of the fluttering lure. Bulbs and nodules burst between her fingers, staining them with coloured juices that smelled of stale beer, cinnamon, fresh buttery plastic, window polish, Grandmother Taal's herb tisanes. One smelled so powerfully of ginger sorbet she remembered from a trip to Devenney on the Syrtic Sea she almost sucked her long fingers. Almost.
Onward: through curtains of transparent lace; along narrow twisting alleys confined between towering crimson tube walls, like the neatly coiled intestines of an eviscerated giant; crawling under umbrella-canopies of ground-kissing mushrooms; through flocks of creatures like tiny silver flies suspended from gossamer balloons that wheeled and darted with surprising agility from the touch of her shadow.
At some point Sweetness remembered that Romereaux was not with her, had never been with her. At another point, she realised she had been walking much much longer than she should have been able to. At yet another, she saw that the edge of the world was a good deal closer than she had expected. Another still, and she discovered she had no idea where she was. Further yet, she realised she did not care.
Pushing through swags of knitted moss, she failed to see the glitter of water and almost fell headlong into the pool. Sweetness grabbed fistfuls of moss, they tore like widow's curtains. She fell to her hands and knees in shallow, metallic-smelling water. Water. She remembered who what where she was. She looked around. The flying tantaliser was gone, of course. She looked up at the sky. It was a shade or two darker than the norm. Verging indigo. She thought of that other strange sky, in the place where Uncle Neon dwelled alone in his steel pole. Was this like that, another other? Was what had fallen on to the Trans Oxiana mainline a circular door, an infinite number of ways in, so that when you were on the other side, you found that it was bigger on the inside than the outside? The twenty-seven heavens of the Panarch were stacked like that, each inside the one below it, each larger than the level that contained it. She had walked a long way; the sun—if that was the sun she knew—was close to the edge of the world.
A panicky thought. Some doors open only one way. Once through this door, could she get back? Could she even get back to where she could get back from?
Something moved in the water. A face, pale, framed by writhing black snakes. St. Catherine preserve us, the Lamia of the Pool. The snakes were black curls. The face was her own. But it was not a reflection. Little Pretty One lay under the shallow water, rising slowly through the rippled surface. A hand thrust out of the water. Sweetness seized it, pulled her psychic twin out of the pond. Little Pretty One was dressed in the work shorts, tie-waist T and big boots Sweetness had worn the day she refused to djubba Kid Pharaoh off the side of the ore-car. Little Pretty One gobbed and hawked out a mouthful of water.
“What were you doing in there?” Sweetness asked.
“Drowning, tit-breath,” Little Pretty One spat. “Sweet Mother of sewage…”
“No, I mean, how did you get here?”
“You're asking particularly inane questions today,” Little Pretty One said, wringing out the hems of her shorts. She and Sweetness stood facing each other ankle-deep in the strange water. “Same way I always get anywhere.”
“Where are we?”
Little Pretty One squatted, dripping, on a gnarled fist of translucent, spark-speckled polymer. Sweetness found a perch on a swag of liana.
“Now, what would have been a much better question is ‘when’ are we rather than ‘where’?”
“Well, when then?” For a psychic twin, Little Pretty One was damn irritating.
“That's tricky.” Little Pretty One stretched her fingers out and examined them. “God! Bloody prunes!” She held up wrinkled pads for Sweetness's perusal. “I mean, if you think of time as a railway line, you have a problem. There isn't anywhere but forward or back. Think of it more like a shunting yard…”
“But one with many thousands of tracks…Done this one before.”
“Where? When? You didn't tell me.”
“My uncle.”
“Oh. Him. And where is your uncle, exactly?” Little Pretty One looked theatrically around her.
“So, did he tell you it's a probability thing?”
“He didn't tell me anything. I thought it up myself. When I was there.” Conversations concerning invisible relatives tended to the surreal of the metaphysical, Sweetness had found.
“Well, my little mathematician, if you can imagine that the tracks closest to the mainline are more likely than the ones on the outside. Like a train to get on to a track has to roll three dice. So, to get on to the outside tracks you need a three, or an eighteen; it's going to be much easier to get on to the ones where you need a twelve. Except, the odds are way way longer than that. Like rolling a hundred Eagle-Eye-Jacques in a row. Maybe less likely, but the thing is, it can happen, and you'd be on that track way way out there. It can happen first time, even. Space-like time. Time-like space, but that's something else.”
Railway children grew up natural relativists, where time and distance were freely interchangeable as they moved at speed across whole landscapes.
“So, where does this when come from?” Sweetness asked. A cellophane rustle. Little Pretty One looked up. Her eyes opened. In a trice she dived back inside Sweetness. She left a damp stain on Sweetness's shirt and track jeans.
Pink plastic fronds parted. Fingers pushed through. A face followed. Romereaux's. Sweetness saw him, frond-freckled. Romereaux saw her, waterdappled. And it went crack between them, the thing that had been here every moment in every breath and word and look between them, that they had never dared talk about, that the ways of the Domieties and the customs of the trainfolk and the Forma had denied, but here, in a place outside the Forma, outside the world of laws and formas, they could play. Crack like Uncle Neon in the middle of routine signal maintenance, flashed into somewhere else. Like that Sweetness found her fingers untying the draw strings of his pants. Loosening the elasticated waistband from the crinkled skin. Like that she found her track vest floating in the water, found fingers working up and under her T, found Romereaux's attempted goatee prickling her chin. Then tongue. Then tongue back and the pants dropped around his ankle like a vanquished battle flag and the discovery that he, too, flouted Domiety prescriptions on underwear.
“Ooh, you filthy bugger,” Sweetness giggled as it kicked hard in her hand like a pet lizard and he just smiled.
“In there.” He nodded at the pool.
“In the water?”
“The water.”
“So, you've always wanted to…”
“In water. Ah hah.”
“You are a filthy bugger.”
She unbuttoned her shirt. It fell in surrender like Romereaux's many-pocketed pants. Sweetness took a step backward. Cool alien water sucked at her heels.
“Hello?”
She turned to stone. Romereaux was paralysed. The windmills wound and the whirligigs whirled and fritillaries frilled while they stood, two statues, too stunned even to pull their clothes on.
“Hello? There's someone there, isn't there?”
The little pet house lizard had gone down, limp and sad.
“There is someone there. I'm sure of it. Hello?”
The trance was broken.
“Cock piss bugger bum balls!” Sweetness scooped up her shirt and fled into the pink frond forest while Romereaux struggled, one legged like a stoned stork, to pull on his sodden pants. They were both sliding into their track vests as the figures emerged from the finger-forest on the further shore of the pool.
“Hi there!” Romereaux waved with one hand. The other scraped back his tousled hair.
“Hi yourselves!” called the leader of the other party, a cheery-faced, chubby man in his early tens. With him was a spookily thin girl who squatted on pinched thighs and looked resentful, and a dumb-looking seven-year-old boy whose face said I'm hugely confused here. Track vests and djubba-sticks marked them as track. “Where are you from?”
“Catherine of Tharsis,” Romereaux shouted.
“Back there,” Sweetness added.
“Ah!” cheery-face called. “Bishop of Alves!”
Sweetness knew the train, a good, tough little Class 14 freight hauler. Well-maintained and proud, but definitely second class.
“Where's yours?” Sweetness asked.
“Back there.” The Bishoper pointed back through the finger-forest. “You walked long?”
“Seems like it. Couldn't say.”
The Bishoper nodded.
“We must've been walking for a couple of hours. This place seems to get bigger the further in you go.”
“I think this is the middle, though,” Sweetness said.
“Thank God,” the chubby man called. “My name is Esquival Nonette D'Habitude Dharati Engineer 5th. Do you mind if we come round?”
“We'll meet you halfway,” Romereaux said. But neither party took a single step, for with a rushing like the wings of all the angels in the Ekaterina Angelography beating at once, the sun was eclipsed.
Everyone looked up. An edge of something huge and dark, and curved almost as gently as the world, moved over the trainfolk. Projections, protuberances, masts, aerials, unobvious sticking-out bits: then they were in deep shadow. Not darkness: the belly of the great machine was starred with lights. A clutch of those lights unfolded, swept fingers of light across the canopy of the plastic jungle before capturing each of the trainfolk explorers in a personal spotlight.
Sweetness shaded her eyes with her fingers and peered up into the beam. As she had half expected, a voice spoke out of it. As she had also expected, it was big and booming.
“Caution humans,” it said, not in the air, but inside Sweetness's skull. “This is ROTECH Real-systems Repair Monitor eleven thirty-eight. You are in peril. There has been a reality dysfunction in this sector. You are advised to leave forthwith. Further slippages may result in your being marooned when the breach is repaired. Please follow the moving lights. They will guide you to the exits.”
Sweetness did not listen beyond the fifth word from the sky. Danger, reality breaches, so? ROTECH was here, stooped down from heaven to touch the earth. The people who made the world had come.
There was a steaming that night, hosted by the Stuards of Bishop of Alves. Spits were set up, great joints of grazebeast slung on spears and hoisted on to brackets. Women and juniors repaired to a safe distance to prepare salads and flat bread and barrel-up beer while the Deep-Fusion men, in silver heat-refraction suits, orchestrated the superheated steam blasts from the overheat valves, dextrously turning the dripping beeves.
All were invited and by now all was many. Stacked behind Catherine of Tharsis were Count Tassaday, Three Great Shepherds, Doughty Endeavour hauling a dangerously overreacting pulp processor and Lords of the Iron Way with forty carriages of express service passengers now as steaming hot as the cooking roasts. Passengers, of course, could not possibly be invited to a track jamboree. Down the track from Bishop of Alves were the famous Indomitable, then a nameless, low-caste ballast unit from Suvebray—its Domities huddled apart at the steaming and, as Psalli noted, all bearing the sunken chin, bug eyes and bulging, translucent forehead that advertised incest. Most available and despicable of track crimes. Behind the Ballasteros stood the venerable Mountain of Great Peace and a recently refitted JahSpeed!, her pipework and tubes the envy of every Deep-Eff. Bringing up the rear was Freight 128, an ill-omened workhorse, stained with rumours of radiation leaks, bad fortune and piracy on the mainline which only persisted the harder her grim Engineers denied them.
Over all hung the ROTECH machine. Tulsa Engineer, inheritor of Tahram's contractual mantle and smitten with an inappropriate love of all things airborne, had checked it up in his Big Book of Aircraft and Angel Recognition but it fitted no known format. By day it had been an oppressive presence, like the legendary flying city of Hooverville, torn from its bedrock and sentenced to roam the jet streams as punishment for cheating an angel of the Panarch in a frame of snooker. An obscuration. A total eclipse. A crushing satellite, a steel cloud. By night it was a deeper darkness on the black Oxus sky, a hiatus in the moonring where
the belly-lights made up new, geometrically regular constellations. It would have been almost forgettable, but for its activities at the heart of the plastic jungle. This was a tug of war by light; vivid cerises, lilacs and turquoises from on high strove with flashes of vermilion, white and poisonous green from where the surveyors had mapped the mirror pool to be. Occasionally there would be a particularly dazzling exchange and the ground would tremble. It cast a fine, party illumination over the entertainments.
Beef-stuffed chapatti in one hand, mug of small beer in the other, Sweetness was not having a fine time. Small beer, small fun. Romereaux cast a ROTECH-machine-sized shadow over her pleasure. She queued up for her food, he was there, mug in hand by the beer fermentory, not noticing her. On to the musicians’ awning to watch the fingers fly over the keys and strings and the women entice the men to dance; tapping her foot, but Romereaux was talking with Domiety brothers from the other trains with a set to his shoulders that insisted, No dance, never dance. To the beer pavilion for her mug fresh from the teat, and now all his attention was given to shoving a fat chapatti, dripping grease and garlic sauce, sideways into his mouth while the lads laughed and cheered, Go on go on go on you boy! Eventually she turned her back on him but he did not notice that either.
The ground shook, the strongest tremor yet. Venerable matriarchs shrieked and tottered, flagons of petty beer slopped. Great trains swayed on their bearings, a spit of meat capsized in a hurricane of steam. Silver-suited Deep-Fusioners dashed through the billows to right it. Under cover of confusion Sweetness ducked between Bishop of Alves's drive wheels and crouched in the oily dark, avoiding everyone. A twitch in her side told her that the oil pool between her feet was now inhabited.
“Nice party,” Little Pretty One said. Sweetness offered her the remains of her chapatti. Little Pretty One devoured it decorously with her fine white teeth. “This ain't bad, this. Any idea how long it is since I last ate anything?”