Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  “Aaah!” she yelled as she struggled over the wet, clogging sand toward the taunting ladder. Mother'a'grace, it was going to be close. One rung, no rungs. She leaped at the ladder as it lifted above her head, caught the bottom bar with one hand. She swung, kicking her legs, grimacing with strain as Devastation Harx's cathedral gained altitude. A second hand on the ladder. A first hand up a level. Another, then, agonisingly, another. Rung by rung, Sweetness Asiim Engineer hauled herself up as the wounded airship turned ponderously on its fans and took her away into the magic hour.

  Panic on the streets of Molesworth.

  All night the rival political gangs, incensed by what they respectively interpreted as humiliation or jubilation, chased each other through the stone boulevards, party banners flying, flinging partisan abuse and bottles, bombarding each other with ripped-up paving setts and cafe chairs. Windows were smashed, those merchants incautious enough, or just too cheap, not to have bought security shutters were gleefully looted. Fires burned, Molotov cocktails showered down from balconies. Blouses and chemises set to dry now blazed merrily, lowest festoons catching from the fires in the streets and igniting those above. Burning tramcars, driverless but not powerless, careered along their tracks; vans and delivery drays were commandeered and swivelled into hasty barricades into and over which the respective party colours were set. Civic guards were mobilised, militias summoned from their beds and hastily armed. Military units at Gesserem and Shrelby were put on full alert; deep in their titanium-lined caverns under Chryse's laval shield, robot divisions opened their beady red eyes from eight hundred years of cybernetic slumber and lifted their heads. This was a big riot. Molesworthians took their politics seriously.

  A combination of water cannon and wide-spectrum force-fields cleared most of the rioters and their barricades from the streets. Here and there, short shield squads baton-charged the mobs and fell enthusiastically to hand-to-hand. By morning most of the fires had been extinguished or had burned themselves out; the street was the province of ashes, charred shells of trams and trucks, those sweeping up broken glass and the occasional carload of young turks driving at mad speed along the splintered boulevards whooping and hooting and waving party flags from their windows and sunroofs.

  Molesworth was a wreck, but the immediate crisis was over. The robot legions lowered their heads and closed their eyes.

  In Rembrandt Platz the plane trees had all burned down but the early morning news vendors were sweeping away the broken glass and cinders and setting up their booths. Agency three-wheelers came scooting through the wreckage; newsboys in folded paper tricorns sporting the morning's headline sent bundles of daily news bounding across the debris before whizzing on to their next delivery. The gossip must get through.

  Early starters picked their way cautiously past hissing, sparking tram cables brought down in the night, marvelling at the completeness of the destruction. Only one set of windows had escaped the crystal night, and those belonged to Torsten Toskvig's Salon Du Thé, the most venerable in Molesworth. The proprietor attributed this reputation to the excellence of his mint, picked by hand with the dew fresh on it from the family fields at Tullaswaygo, and he held that it was this, and this alone, that had protected his tea-house from the mob when Cossivo Beldene fell.

  Here, on this morning, five people sat, taking their morning tea and reading the early editions. They were, left to right; a stocky young woman with spiky hair; a tall, wire-thin man with skin so black it swallowed light; a pale, languorous girl with the air of studied artiness and jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it; an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville and a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth. Skerry, Bladnoch, Mishcondereya, Seskinore and Weill. Together they called themselves United Artists. Same order as above, their arts were circus skills, observational comedy, performance artist in interactive micro-drama, dundered-in stand-up and anarchist. Their trick with the cake and the specially written song, hastened to the Glenn Miller Orchestra by express courier, had precipitated all the destruction which lay around their feet as they sipped their mint teas in the tea garden. Exactly as planned. This was no stunt. This was a precise act of political sabotage. These five people were secret agents, under commission from the Synod of Anarchs of Wisdom to seek out threats to their genial non-government and humiliate it with massive practical jokes.

  Accrington LeCerf, phoney faith healer and abstracter of wealth from pensioners, had received his comeuppance when a curtain at one of his healing meetings had dropped, revealing the supposedly “healed” sitting backstage smoking and chatting, actors one and all. A mob of incensed old ladies had beaten him severely with his own collection bowl. He had been hospitalised for three months. United Artists arranged for that curtain to drop.

  United Artists had set it up so that Ramon Drube, the corrupt Indian politician and the heart of the Cash-for-Sugar row, took a timely pratfall into a keg of eels when he bestrode his next electoral platform.

  Gyorgy Krinz, a powerful lawyer with contacts among the Exalted Families, was also a notorious seducer of young boys in public conveniences, until United Artists, in a complex sting operation, converted an innocent WC into an all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza featuring the Cottage Boys in gold lamé and urinals fountaining flames like coloured roman candles. It was broadcast live on three networks. Viewing figures went through the roof. Gyorgy Krinz went off the roof. Convictions against the Exalted Families became more regular.

  Mavda Quinsana, daughter of the more famous mother, ran a small but effective money-laundering empire from a few artificial atolls in the Syrtic Sea. Conventional justice failed, until United Artists slipped her a mickey in a margarita and convinced her, through clever suggestion and set design, that she had died and gone to hell, whereupon she fessed up all her known crimes and a wodge more nobody had even suspected. The walls of the fake hell opened, the shirrifry marched in, the real hell began.

  Shareholder meetings of several big companies with pie-flavoured fingers were spectacularly disrupted by Amanda the Corporate Crime-busting Armadillo, frequently provoking shareholder riots when the extent of board-member remunerations were made public. United Artists, again.

  Last night, United Artists had arranged for a very large chocolate cake to be delivered to the Gubernatorial Pleasance in Molesworth. Ooohs, ahhs. As the new Gubernator leaned forward with his cutting knife, the top had blown off and out leaped Seetra Annulka, Cossivo Beldene's former mistress, dressed in a spangled bikini, silver bootees and hoolie-hoolie feathers. As painstakingly rehearsed, she strutted up and down the stage to the whoops and cheers of the guests, singing a specially commissioned song. The whoops and cheers had grown louder as the audience became aware of the lyrics which had to do with nipple clips and glue, poultry, hooks in the ceiling, orphan girls in pristine white panties and stuffing the state jewels of Canton Chimeria into orifices not designed to show them off to their fullest glory. By the third verse there was not a whisper in the great Festhall.

  To a riot of laughter and outrage in equal measures, Cossivo Beldene, his entourage and his guests were off stage before the final chorus. Shortly after the first chair was thrown and the fight broke out that was to spread from the Rathaus to the entire city.

  Now, in the early light, with the smoke of burning washing still on the air, United Artists were reading their reviews.

  “Gobbling Gubernator Feast-Farce,” Skerry read, fresh and tight after her morning run, which she did for ten kilometres every day, riot or no riot. Whatever, wherever, whoever, she always showed a lot of healthy, glowing skin.

  “A bit overdone on the alliteration,” the solemn black man, Bladnoch, said in his soft, low voice. The best comedians seldom laugh. He had been the comedian's comedian; so funny he backed into being not funny at all. “Ball-clamp Beldene in hiding,” he read, from his copy of The C
himerian, then flipped the paper over to the sports section.

  “As in, hiding out, or a good hiding?” the languid, over-pierced woman said. She was Mishcondereya, bad daughter of a very good family, and even drinking morning tea she radiated a hunting-cheetah grace and lethargy that was at once attractive and extremely irritating. She was natural-born aristocrat. Of course, she had the quality daily, Landing Times: “Anarchy Rules Molesworth: Mobs Run Riot as Beldene Falls. That should please you, Weill.”

  The little skinny anarchist merely picked pieces of mint off his teeth. The over-tall, over-loud, over-coiffed and over-corseted middle-aged man in his trademark too-small silver suit commented from behind his Impartial Reporter, “I thought better of the Times's editorial than to let an oxymoron like that on to the front page. You know, I remember when I was on the riverboats, I once met a newspaper copy-editor. Or was it a typesetter?” Seskinore's reminiscence was submerged by a chorus of derision from his fellow artistes. He added, lamely, “They're trying to get Glenn Miller to release it as a single with vocals by Seetra Annulka. We could be in for royalties.”

  “I'd buy it,” Weill the anarchist said.

  “Steal it, more like,” Mishcondereya sniped. “Did you pay for that Harbinger?”

  “Of course not.” In twelve months training and thirty-six as roving agents of the Synod of Anarchs, Mishcondereya had not yet learned that Weill took her blunt little sarcasms as compliments. “No one buys when Babylon burns. This capitalist rag gives us a decent write-up.”

  “Is it top of the hour news yet?” Skerry asked.

  “Seven bells,” Weill said, nodding across the ruined plaza at the municipal clock on the tram-halt. Every piece of glass had been reduced to sugar cubes, but the naked hands told the time, slowly, steadily, for Molesworth. “Looks like it. Is there a wireless in this place? Well, look who it is.”

  A lady in widow's black was crossing the plaza, stepping resourcefully over the wiry piles of charred tires, ignoring the paperlads’ entreaties. She held her hands folded decorously and did not look in the least out of place in the aftermath of Mob.

  Seskinore folded down his paper, raised his eyebrows.

  “Ah, our interestingly pedigreed trainlady.”

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Skerry demanded, sliding on a pair of dark glasses. “You know, Weill, sometimes you piss me right off. In fact, most of the time. Okay, she did us a favour, the little old dear's got some kind of weird shit trainpeople magic thing—enough inbreeding, you can do anything—but you shouldn't have invited her to the show. Least of all, our own table. I worry about your sense of security, comrade.”

  “At least I have a sense of decency,” Weill said. “I don't know about you Tharsians, but in Grand Valley, even us anarchists treat our grandparents with due respect.”

  By now Grandmother Taal had arrived at the tea party on the verandah. The past ten hours had been a whirring daze of some notion or other. Forty-something years, and life can still knock you silly. The strange doings with that cake in the back alley, the unexpected invitation to the Pleasance, the very fine food and wine as she sat with these odd people—the last one would imagine on the guest-list for such a lofty event: then everything being thrown up in the air to hang a fearful minute while the girl in the silver spangles sang the satirical song, only to come crashing down in a rush of reporters, a lightning storm of camera flashes and a broadside of chairs flung toward the stage. She had followed United Artists as they fled, skulking along the lines of tables as the fighting broke out overhead, thanking her newly young knee and back bones. Her first thought had been to go with the band, but all she saw of the King of Swing was his tour bus driving away at speed, chased by a pelt of bottles and hurled imprecations that the Glenn Miller Orchestra would never sell another record in this town again, buddy. The fighting had by now transferred to the streets; she was alone in the great Rathaus. Plenty of places to sleep. It would not be the first time, Grandmother Taal thought as she swept broken glass from the plush sofa, wrapped herself up in table cloths and bedded herself down for the night. Nor, she sensed with grandmotherly insight, would it be the last. Outrage, riot, confusion, and then the dream.

  She had woken with a shock, convinced that she was back in her mahogany cubby on the train, that Sweetness was a three-year-old again, banging on her door when her mother and father were sullenly arguing again. Her eyes told her no, you are on a bench in the Members Bar in Molesworth Rathaus; her ears told her, through the distant shouting and sirens and gobble of burning, there is a riot outside. The dream had been so vivid, so insistent; the dark cloud and her granddaughter standing under it in a deserted stone square; with none of the skewed logic or narrative absurdities of dreamspeak. Meaning was not veiled in metaphor or subconscious sexual imagery. No trains entering tunnels, no umbrellas or daggers or pointy airships. This was classically structured, with a clear and precise message, if packed overdensely with important points and presented in Sweetness's characteristic all-in-one-breath delivery. This was no dream. This was a sending. Grandparents believe in such things. She wrote down the gist of it on a napkin, studied it for a time while listening to the ebb and flow of riot outside, then slept again without further dream or sending.

  “Sit ye down,” Weill invited, gesturing to a chair. “Well, I told you it would be funny.”

  Grandmother Taal did not sit. She surveyed the ruined plaza. It was comment enough on Weill's sense of humour. Then she said, quite formally, “I do not know who you are, but I know what you are capable of. I am asking you, please help me find my granddaughter. I fear she has become enmeshed in great danger, for herself, and for us all.”

  She spread the napkin on the table. The newspapers all folded shut at once.

  “I had a sending,” Grandmother Taal said.

  Bladnoch read the napkin. Seskinore sat back with a faraway look in his eye, then pointed at Grandmother Taal and asked, “Last night, didn't you say you were a Chordant Asiim Engineer? Is that any relation of the Chordants of Vermeulen? Maybe not, they weren't actually trainfolk, but I am acquainted with many people from the trains. Do you know I used to work the South Rim Scenic Recreational?”

  Bladnoch raised an eyebrow, passed the napkin to Skerry, whose pupils dilated after the first line.

  “Marvellous people, marvellous. It was more of a cruise than a train trip: the very best you know, food and wine, and standards of service! And clientele too; the very cream, you had to be to be able to afford the South Rim Scenic; and though I say so myself, the entertainment, top of the line. And the views down over Grand Valley in the evening, quite wonderful.”

  Skerry now passed the napkin to Mishcondereya, whose look of mounting impatience at Seskinore's enthusiasm for bounding into showbiz reminiscence at any opportunity turned on an instant to concern.

  “Wonderful little train; very select, you see. Wonderful bill: there was Jimmy and Alice, and Mr. Superb—whatever happened to him?—and Dimmy darling. Dear Dimmy—dead these three years, alas—but I suppose you wouldn't know them; Engineer people don't get back to the passengers too often, do they? Or maybe your branch of the family's freight? That would be unfortunate, think what you've missed. Anyway, I got to know some of the Stuards; fine folk, if a little standoffish at first. That's a thing you learn in my line, how to read people, then how to bring them round. If you can't bring an audience round, you're dead as a comic, dear, dead.”

  “Seskinore,” Mishcondereya said, “as a comic, you were never alive.” She passed him the napkin. His mouth opened. His eyebrows steepled. He passed it to Weill, whose only response was a small smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

  “I think we can help you in this,” Skerry said, solemnly.

  Half an hour later, Grandmother Taal was punching across Solstice Landing's industrial scablands on a fast, executive express.

  It was a low, fast, two-car unit with automated tilt mechanism designed to lean into the bends as the sleek, supercharged Great So
uthern Class 27 hauled it at speeds of up to five hundred kilometres per hour. Too small to have a resident Domiety, the engine was crewed by a newly wed team Grandmother Taal remembered from the lavishness of their wedding a few corroborees back. No kids yet. Nor likely to be; these priority service specials played fast and loose with the radiation shielding. Their privilege, their choice, but when she hailed them under the stone vault of Molesworth Main, they snubbed her. Bad word passed fast along the lines. The Asiim Engineers would be an age healing this social wound. For a moment Grandmother Taal contemplated invoking her full matronly authority; thought better. Molesworth and punk engineers did not deserve it. They whistled up and moved out on to the fast line.

  The carriages were a symphony in cream leather, streamlined and smooth as infants’ buttocks. Clever machinery was concealed behind the curvaceous banks of hide; the leather was clever, too; a touch, a word and controls or information screens would appear like tattoos on the surface. The carpet was toe-deep fur pile, the raked windows tinted gold. All very sophisticated, high-tech, minimal yet with a whiff of decadence, utterly last century. This age favoured heavy wood and heavier metal: big brass clunking stuff. The Synod in Wisdom, which had little experience of and less budget for running a counterinsurgency force, had bought it cut price off a Lyxian broker who had bankrupted five generations of family fortune on speculation in mink futures. Now it ferried United Artists at speed and in fin du siècle luxury around the planet on missions of political practical joking.

  “An old trainmother tells you something from a dream, and you believe the end of the world is nigh?” Grandmother Taal asked as the train took points at three hundred and eighty on to the westbound fast and powered up.