Ares Express Read online

  Those ten items suddenly made it heavy enough to root her to the spot.

  The bright certainty was fading. One moment more of this greasy, scored wall panelling, that ingrained sweat of hot fat and onions, those smeary framed photographs of Great Trains passing over Photogenic Terrain, that phlegmy rattle of the neon wireless on the window-sill, those cheery plastic condiment bottles in the shapes of smiling vegetables with their crusted necklaces of dried drips, and she would be trapped forever. Pickled like a festal egg.

  “Sweet?”

  Too slow. You lost it.

  Cock piss bugger bum balls. It had to be Romereaux, standing in the doorway with his mouth open in a way that told her without words he had worked it all out in one glimpse.

  “Don't.” She held up a warning finger.

  “Sweet, where are you…”

  “Don't say another word.”

  She backed away from him.

  “Don't try and stop me, don't try and talk me out of it. I'm not marrying Stainless Steel Kitchen. I've got a life waiting for me.”

  “Sweet, I just wanted…”

  “Shut.”

  “Wanted to say…”

  “Up. Shut up.”

  “To say, good luck.”

  It was so wrong a thing for him to say that she was halfway to the door before the double-take hit. She turned.

  “What?”

  “Good luck.”

  “You're supposed to try to stop me. You're supposed to have arguments about how hurt everyone will be, and the honour of the family, and the disgrace I'll bring on everyone and they'll all have to go round with their hair uncut for three years. When that doesn't work, you're supposed to ask me if I know what I'm doing and do I know where I'm going and that it's a big wild world out there and I'll get very hurt very fast, and I'll come crawling back like that. And when I say I've got it all sorted, you're supposed to go all soft and say you'll miss me and that you've always really loved me, and that you had this brilliant plan to buy out the contract and we'd have our own train and go off in a cloud of steam into the sunset and we'll found our own Domiety and one day they'll name a station after us and that'll stop me for ten, maybe twenty seconds—if you've played it right—and I'll say something like, well, I always loved you too, like for years, since you were this size and I was that size and all those years, we never knew it, and now it's too late because I've got to go, I've got a life waiting for me, and I turn around and walk right out of here and that's it.”

  “Um, no.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “Like, no.”

  “I mean, you did love me, and you could never tell anyone about it, right?”

  He sighed from his cheeks.

  “Well, that time, by the pool?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I wanted to…”

  “So did I.”

  “But I didn't really…love you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wanted you. But that was just…wanting.”

  “I see.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, I suppose I'll go then.”

  “Yes. Go on. Go on then. Get out of here. Get wherever you're going, and don't come back. There's too much of you for this place, always going somewhere but ending up nowhere. You're too good for Stainless Steel Kitchen. You should have maharajahs and riverboat gamblers and Belladonna assassins and interplanetary ambassadors. You should have canal barges and silk-lined airships and gold-plated Praesidium Sailships and big low cars with bars in the back seat. There's stuff out there that's worthy of you, and if you don't go you'll never find it. So get out of here.”

  She turned in the corridor. She told herself it was because she wanted to ask a final favour, but they both knew it was for a final meeting of eyes.

  “Romi.”

  “Go on. What is it?”

  “Can you cover for me?”

  “I think I can do that.”

  She told herself she must not look back again, but she did it anyway because she knew she was perverse. Romereaux was gone.

  Having exhausted all other possibilities, the searchers were returning home for the fingertip scrutiny of crannies and hidey-holes. Sweetness slipped past the denim-clad arses of Sle and Rother'am cooeeing up an airco duct, but Tante Marya patrolling the undercarriage stopped her dead. One glimpse at her face promised a punishment worse than marriage to the Stainless Steel Kitchen. She was head of the Domiety. She had made the match. The shame would be excoriating.

  Sweetness ducked down under the porthole as she heard feet clang on the metal steps. She pressed herself hard against the sun-warmed wood. Marya Stuard's face deformed itself against the glass as she tried to squint out every possible line of sight. Clang clang clang. Away again. But she was out there, between herself and the things Sweetness deserved.

  The ripe fanfare of the calliope almost tricked a yelp of surprise from Sweetness. Bite it off, bite it off. Again, the steam organ tootled a riff.

  “There she goes, there! Look!”

  Romereaux.

  “Look, there, going east! Somebody stop her, she'll be away!”

  Feet clattered in the corridor. The opposite door slammed open, the same feet rattled down steps.

  “Where where where?”

  Again, the calliope parped the alarum. Sweetness dared a peek. Tante Marya was ducking under the carriage—a heinous sin, which every child was warned off on pain of gravest censure. She flung open the door, was down the steps and running. Now one look back. And there was Romereaux, a tiny silhouette standing on the saddle of the big steam calliope, asbestos-gloved hand pointing in exactly the wrong direction.

  Serpio took the terrain bike easily.

  “What kept you?”

  “Things.” Sweetness slung herself up behind him. The engine trembled between her legs. She pressed her belly and thighs against his work gear.

  “Is she comfortable?” he asked.

  “Who comfortable?”

  “Her. Your friend. She doesn't look comfortable. Half her's dragging on the ground.”

  Sweetness rolled her eyes and mimed heaving some mass on her right side.

  “Can we just go now?”

  “Certainly.”

  He twisted the handle and they went. Like that. Sweetness whooped and Serpio gunned the little alcohol engine and it was fast and dusty and sexy and in a direction she had never travelled before, which was perpendicular, and in all the speed and excitement she quite forgot to worry about the effect of Serpio's angel-eye on his driving.

  The rain was gruelling now. Sweetness loathed getting her hair wet, but stuck her head out from under the shelter of the seat. She thought she had heard it again.

  “It's nothing.” Serpio coaxed a small fire of grass stalks and wood splinters. It sent a wan spiral of smoke up to haunt the ribs and buttresses of the underside of the chair seat.

  “It's not nothing if it's thunder.” She scanned the sky that had slowly curdled from the west until now it was a moiling blanket of grey on grey.

  “You don't get thunder from that kind of cloud.” Serpio was trying to rig a trivet of stones over the now-glowing fire.

  “Well, I hope you're sure, because in case you hadn't noticed, we're sitting right under a twenty-metre wooden chair, and not only is it wood, and the tallest thing in fifty kays, it's also right on top of what passes for the major hill in this neighbourhood.”

  “I'm sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I seen plenty of weather.”

  “So've I.”

  I've got an uncle fused into the regional signalling grid by plenty of weather, and a relative hit by lightning gives everyone a nose for thunder, she wanted to say but Serpio's forehead was furrowed and his tongue peeking pinkly from the corner of his mouth as he stacked his stones. “I'm soaked,” Sweetness said instead. “Let me near that.” Wet hair momentarily blinded her. Her foot brushed the tripod of stones. It promptly collapsed. Serpio swif
tly plucked the rocks from the fire before they crushed out its last breath. Then with the Zen patience of card-house builders, he set about rebalancing his rocks. Sweetness squatted on her heels and showed her hands to the three flickers of heat and thought about how quickly it had all gone like the weather.

  For the first handful of hours the novelty of travel at right angles had thrilled her. Off the track. Beyond the lines. Turn those handlebars and you can go in any direction you like. The track doesn't take you. You take the track. Maps among the trainfolk are grids, networks, interconnections of coloured lines with black circles. All this two-dimensionality was wooeeeee! stuff. This flat, almost treeless rangeland was full throttle terrain. Glancing behind her—comb black curls out of her eyes—Sweetness exulted at the plume of dust rising up behind her. One part of her soul warned her she was advertising her egress for a hundred kilometres around. Another did not give one fig. Outliers of a great herd of grazebeasts cantered, roll-eyed with fear, from the speeding bikers. Encouraged, Serpio aimed his machine at the heart of the dark wall of the main herd. It parted before him. The terrain bike drove a dust-coloured wedge through the mass of bovine bodies, splitting it in two like an amoeba.

  “Woo-hoo!” he hollered.

  Sweetness thumped Serpio on the back. When he stopped the bike, she took the little wireless and wedged it between the handlebars. Thereafter, Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces and Cool Cat Jazzy Jee rode with them over the outwash hills of Lesser Oxus into West Deuteronomy. Like hormone-troubled adolescence, the smooth face of the land was breaking into bumps and ridges. Straggles of wire tried to entrap the trampas. Dusty meanders in the grass became tracks, became double-rutted roads. By unspoken agreement, they stayed clear of these, and the fields that had appeared in between the long, low ridges, the farms and the stockyards and the pens. Occasional gangs of stockmen in dusters and cartwheel hats nodded to them. Their long-legged destriers minced nervously, offended by engine whine. Fence-crews working on the wire from the backs of huge eight-wheel yutes raised a hand in passing greeting. A taciturn folk, the Deuteronomians, given to their land and their past and the arcane formulae of their society.

  In a wooded crotch where three valleys met stood St. Mariensborough. Five streets, seven shrines, five bars, three good cantinas all next to each other, one Universal Store, a manufactory, a doctor/lawyer/vet, an auction house and a folding cinema. Here they stopped for fuel. Serpio filled the tank from the alcohol distillery. Sweetness reclined in a pose she thought coquettish and dangerous. She tapped her foot to the radio—“Tuxedo Junction”—and surveyed her fellow fuel customers. A country bus, dust-battered and dented, shrieking with schoolkids. A big yute, high as a house, emblazoned with improving versos from the Guthru Gram Kanteklion. A truck train unashamedly carrying the sperm-and-ova symbol of the National AI Service. Two low-loaders, parked suspiciously close to each other. While they guzzled alcohol, two men passed a pile of cardboard boxes marked with “fragile” symbols from one flatback to the other. Bet you've no idea who we are, what we're doing, where we're going, Sweetness teased them.

  A niggle whispered, And you do?

  “Any cash?”

  A different niggle as she rooted in her bag for bills. Vague resentment. St. Mariensborough was where it started to turn sour. Beyond St. Mariensborough, it changed. The outwash hills, remnants of a continental-scale deluge billennia before the cometary rain of the early decades of the manforming, ran into each other, formed ridges and escarpments. The land developed a trend, westward and upward, fingers to a palm. Roads roamed the long valleys, seeking ways on to the table lands above. Over this high land a hard rain intended; grey clouds running in from the west were wedged against a front and piled into a massive frown. The wind rose. The horizon vanished into twilight vagueness. An hour beyond the nub-end of the last metalled road they passed the last farm. Dour and Deuteronomian: a tower of planed wood and little windows, bare and defiant of the big flatness. A wind-pump rattled its vanes in the rising wind, its mechanism unlocked in anticipation of big wind coming. Dead ravens hung, claws up, beaks down, from a crucifixion board. Their fleasy feathers stirred. Take warning. Stern people here.

  An hour past the last farm the first drop hit Sweetness between the eyes and slid down her nose. The second was not slow following. Somewhere between the three and four thousandth, she decided she was Not Having Fun. It wasn't Want To Go Back—not yet, but it was getting there. The rain punished the tiny creeping vehicle, an offence against the elemental purity of land and weatherscape. Serpio steered through the arrowing rain into the dark heart of the storm.

  “Where are we going?” Sweetness yelled. Each time the wind took her words away. The universal grey—earth, air and water—abolished any notion of time, but Sweetness's innate Engineer sense of timetabling advised her it was nearing night. In confirmation, the horizon flared briefly: sun through a crack in the storm front as the edge of the world rose over it. In that instant of orange, Sweetness glimpsed a fellow intruder in the desolation. A silhouette: so simple and absolute there could be no mistaking its identity, however incongruous that might seem. A chair. Yes, a chair. And, she reckoned, a big chair. A big chair, all alone and untenanted on a ridge top.

  She banged Serpio on the shoulder. He nodded—already seen and noted. He turned the handlebars toward the big chair.

  A very big chair. And a very long way off. Sweetness clung to Serpio and pressed her face against his back while the headlamp felt out the darkness for the chair. She tried not to think about running out of ol, or how deliciously drowsy this whipping rain was making her feel, how soft the wire-tough grass looked. Half-hypnotised by the weaving spot of the headlight beam and half-stupid with cold, to her great astonishment, Sweetness suddenly found herself out of the rain. While Serpio tried to make wet wood burn with a splash of ol, Sweetness tried to take in the edifice sheltering her. It was a very very big chair. The legs were twenty metres high, she thought. Three orphanages of foundlings could have played handball on its ample seat. The carved finials of the back tugged at the low hurtling clouds. She thought it strange to find it not at all strange to be sheltering under a chair on which the Panarch might have rested, in the nowherelands of Deuteronomy West.

  Serpio finally abandoned his attempts to erect a cooking trivet and used the stones instead to ring-fence the fire. Sweetness ate stale duck sandwiches, picking out the pickled cucumber which she didn't like and flicking it into the dark. She looked into the fire and asked the glowing things to help her believe where she was, what she had done. Flakes of wood ash hold no oracle. Without a word she unrolled her sleeping bag across the fire from Serpio and slipped inside in her still damp clothes.

  “You stay your side.”

  He did. And he was still there in the morning, when Sweetness woke with a start to find that she was indeed where she feared she might be. The storm had marched on the east in the night. Behind it came an immense blue morning. The indigo edge of the world sparkled with the riding lights of interworld ships. The big chair was a throne of marvels, an invitation to sit and contemplate a moment as gods. From this height on which the chair stood golden light flowed down into the hollows and shallow valleys, filling up all the land so that every blade of grass stood distinct. On such a morning even curled-up duck sandwiches have the taste of glory. Sweetness woke cold and stiff and aching but as she shuffled around the camp, trying to poke life into extinct ashes, the morning worked its way into her soul and lit her up. She looked out at the land—her land now—and wondered with pleasure where it would take her today.

  They were packed and on the bike in half an hour. Little grasslands things—a rustle, a dart—fled from their path. Behind they left three neat, parallel tire tracks. Trainfolk. Never get away from the track. Within half an hour the land was turning higher and drier. Scrub, sagey herbs, red sand between the roots of clinging grasses. At a waterstop, Sweetness stood up on the pillion seat to scan the horizon. Heat shimmer. They were crossing the d
ry fringe-country of the great northeastern desert. Between her and the haze, an unknown object bulked large. At this range Sweetness could not make anything out of it, except that it was big. Not a chair, but big. It kept its identity as they approached it across the dry hardpan, at first one thing, then another, then nothing known at all. It was only as they came up out of a seasonal stream bed, flowing with flowers in the brief rush-off after the rains, to find it squat in front of them that Sweetness realised what it was. An enormous shoe. The guttee of God.

  It was the size of a rail-car, made of leather, rather sagged and rotted by the occasional rain seasons, and chewed at the edges by ravenous desert animals. Sweetness and Serpio ate a meagre lunch leaning against its welt. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. The journey had taken them swiftly to that place in a relationship where you can be comfortable with silence. Out of curiosity Sweetness scrambled up the shoe—a left, she noted—then scaled to the cuff by means of the laces, each the size of bridge cables. She peered inside. The high sun illuminated a waste of bird bones. She felt vaguely disappointed, though she could not say what she might have expected that would have satisfied her.

  In the afternoon the bike passed at some distance another Promethean domestic artifact; an ironing board on which entire stratocumuli could have been pressed and creased. A spindly mesa, it occupied the western horizon for many tens of kilometres. The tail of its huge shadow marked the beginning of the desert proper.

  “Into that?”

  Sweetness was doing her far-seeing-balance-on-the-seat feat again. Serpio refilled the canteens from a sandy little spring that meandered a way among black tar-thorn and shrub casanthus until it tired of its own energy and the red sand drank it down. The scent of deep rock water was rich in the air.