Ares Express (30 page)

“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 Southern 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.

“We're supposed to work eclectically,” Skerry said, fidgeting on a curving leather sofa. She was never comfortable sitting down for long. Weill had told Grandmother Taal she could put both legs behind her neck.
I wish I could do that
, thought Grandmother Taal, then realised she had a better chance now than for a long time. Bladnoch, curled at the other end of the couch, was the opposite; never happier than when horizontal. He surreptitiously watched the afternoon pelota on a televisual patch of armrest. Backstage in the comedy clubs, the whisper was,
Bladnoch, he could have been the greatest, 'cept for that addiction to televised sport
.

“She means, we don't just take the word of sweet old ladies, no matter how good their juju is,” said Mishcondereya, glowing and scrubbed from a showering off all that
nasty
Molesworth grit. She towelled at her hair furiously, began the laborious task of reinserting all her jewellery.

“You see, my dear, your story about the hole in the middle of the line rang true, because it's very far from being the first,” Seskinore said, pouring Grandmother Taal a glass of mint tea. He dropped in a sugar cube, pounded it with a glass rod, gave it three swirls. “My own trade secret. On the circuit, you learn the art of good tea.” It tasted no better than most others, worse certainly than Marya Stuard's. He continued, “Bloody things've been popping up all over the place. Chryse, Tempe, Axidy. Even Grand Valley. Could be hundreds of the things out in the desert we never hear about. Little breakdowns in reality. Some of those orbital processors have been running constantly for well over a thousand years, so they're bound to be showing the strain, and of course they skimp on the maintenance budget. Perfect opportunity for our friend up there to sneak in the back way.”

“Apart from that, we've been keeping an eye on Devastation Harx and his crew,” Weill said, feet up on a padded mound that served as a tea-table. “We keep an eye on most of the apocalyptic religions.”

“This Harx is an apocalypsist?” Grandmother Taal said, sitting primly on an uncomfortable banquette, boots buried up to the ankles in buff fluff.

“I think that's what you'd call someone who advocates all-out war between humans and angels,” said Mishcondereya.

“So how did your misfortunate daughter become involved with such a disreputable villain?” Seskinore asked.

“My granddaughter did not take to an arranged marriage and ran away with a very common Waymender boy, who is also a member of this church,” Grandmother Taal said.

“I ran away and I did all right,” Weill said. “But then, I stayed well away from religions like any sane boy should. Especially ones you have to pay for.”

Mishcondereya flared her nostrils and gave a damp, disdainful flick of her still-wet hair.

“Not too bright, is she, your granddaughter?”

Before Grandmother Taal could riposte, Bladnoch's sofa arm beeped. He bent close to the screen. Taal could make out neither the scratchy jerky images or the muttered words but something had come in on top of his sports channel, something that put furrows in his brow. Skerry was beside him. Grandmother Taal wondered if there might be something between the tall, thin man and the tough little woman.

“Trouble,” Skerry said. “Someone just took out three aerospacers on manoeuvres over Big Vermilion.”

“How?” Mishcondereya asked.

“Partacs,” Skerry said carefully.

“Oh,” said Seskinore. “So, either the angels have gone berserk up there…”

“Or Pastor Harx is cranking up his apocalypse machine,” Weill said.

Perked by the scent of action, Skerry leaped to her feet and pulled an anodised aluminium gosport horn down from the ceiling.

“Full speed ahead there!” she shouted to the engineers. On her word the Class 27 found power deep in its tokamaks and leaped forward, sending the United Artists reeling.

“Excuse me,” Grandmother Taal said, innately adjusting to the surge and sway, “but exactly full speed ahead
where
?”

“To the Comedy Cave,” Skerry said without a flicker of irony.

“Please explain. I am an old lady and have experienced much of late.”

“We're not all improvisers like Weill there,” Mishcondereya said. “You think we make this up as we go along? I tell you, it takes time and a lot of effort to put a good routine together, and a lot of resources. We've got FX teams, costume designers, script consultants, hundreds of extras, all on permanent standby.”

“And my granddaughter?”

“Find Harx, and we'll find her, if I know runaway brides,” Skerry said.

“Oh people,” Bladnoch said, leaning over the arm of his sofa to look out the window, “weather warning.”

Even as he spoke, Grandmother Taal could feel the train slowing from its flat-out gallop. Everyone rushed to the window, faces and hands pressed to the gold-cooled glass. Solstice Landing's magnificent dereliction had been left behind; the United Artists Special now arrowed across the high, unkempt and only-partially manformed high Plateau of Gwyst. Not a clint or a karst or a crater punctuated the monotonous black-sage scrub that gave this country its informal name; the Ashlands. You could see clear to the horizon in any direction. No missing a duststorm out there.

“Correct me if I'm wrong,” Bladnoch said, “but this isn't supposed to be happening.”

“It's big,” said Mishcondereya coolly. Skerry was on the gosport again, hollering at the driver.

“I see it!” he yelled back, voice thin and tinny on the metal tube. “Mother'a'grace, don't you think I see it? No way I'm going through that, lady, timetables or no.”

The train had already slowed from its high cruise to a canter. Brakes squealing as the pads felt the first touch of the dust, the United Artists Special came to a halt in the heart of the Ashlands. Moments later, the storm closed around it like a fist. The carriages went blind. The windows were opaque dark brown panels. The train could have been sealed in terra cotta like a hedgepig for roasting.

Sweetness
, Grandmother Taal thought.
Where are you, what are you doing, are you safe?
She tried to summon up some echo of the psychic resonance of the sending to will a message back to her granddaughter but the electrical properties of the duststorm muffled the will, baffled the higher sensitivities. United Artists sat in the close gloom while Seskinore recounted an interminable epic of his days as a stand-up on the circuit made all the more unendurable by the creepy feeling, there in the hissing twilight, that everyone was dead, killed in a crash when the train jumped points and derailed at four hundred and eighty, and this was the hell to which God the Panarchic consigned state-sanctioned practical jokers.

“Clearing,” Bladnoch said at last and by the time everyone got to the windows to peer through the sand-blasted glass, the last grains of dust had blown away and the sun stood high over Ashlands, ashen no more, for every leaf had been stripped from every black-sage bush.

“Took the paint right off,” Mishcondereya said, again coolly.

“Think what that could do to your beautiful skin,” Weill said.

“Never mind that,” Bladnoch said, craning round to follow the track of the departing storm, “Think what Harx can do if he's got into the weather.”

The train moved on and was soon back to its customary pell-mell, down from the Gwyst into the Banninger. Bladnoch's warning spurred United Artists from their perpetual bickering and sniping to some manner of actions. They formed a creative huddle in a glassed-off office section at the rear of the carriage and spent the remainder of the sun-lit hours in professional level sniping and bickering. Grandmother Taal saw much gesturing and stamping around, finger pointing and table punching and fist clenching. She ate a desultory prepackaged dinner in a plastic compartment tray dispensed from a slot and lip-read oaths that made even a trainfolk Matriarch blench. She squared the two contenders. In the green booth: a flying cathedral, untold catamites, a warehouse full of apparatchiks on ropes and the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis, with which he sought to Trojan Horse his way into the programmes of the angels themselves. In the red pavilion; a trapeze artist with a penchant for indecently short shorts, an alleged maestro who had urinated away his genius for afternoon sports channel tractor-pulls; a wispy performance artist (whatever that might be) with a pierce everywhere but through her ego; a paunchy joke-jockey too piss-poor even for the cruise trains; a ferrety self-proclaimed anarchist whose only chance of defeating the great enemy was through body-odour. Grandmother Taal mused for a time about what type of world it might be when Devastation Harx dethroned the angels. If any were left alive to inhabit it. The Engineers had never in all their genealogy produced a theologian, so Grandmother Taal's conclusion, by the lights of her Domiety, was quite profound: if the Evil One defeats the Panarch, he, by defection, becomes God in all his absoluteness. When he takes the adamantine throne, the universe is remade in its entirety, beginning to end, and every memory with it. What we become, we will remember
always having been. If there are trains in that world, they will still need Engineers. If not, then she would never know what she had been.

With full night outside, the huddle of heads broke up. The leather table and bulkhead wall were covered in fibre-pen scribblings but when the door flew open and United Artists stomped out, everyone went as far from his comrades as the carriage would allow and no one looked at anyone. Skerry paced tightly up and down in the one square metre by the bar, punching her fist into her hand. Bladnoch lay face down on his sofa and flicked on the evening sulky racing from Charnoch Park. Seskinore sat on a pouffe, palms on thighs, tilted his head upward and began to hum, quietly but nasally, hits from
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
. Mishcondereya huddled in a chair, knees pulled to her chest, to practise sulks and pouts and, when she thought someone was looking, let leak the odd hard-done-by tear. Weill picked ferociously at his teeth and, when done with that, slipped off his sandals and peeled white strips of athlete's foot from between his toes.