Ares Express (4 page)

S
hortly after four a.m.
Catherine of Tharsis
completed its climb up the Inatra Ascent and dragged the last of its hundred ore-cars over the escarpment lip on to the down-grade into Leidenland. At twenty to five Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th was woken in her narrow bed-box back of the aux-com by a burning tingle along her left flank, hip to floating rib. By the time she was fully awake, Little Pretty One was crouching in the mirror on the cabinette door. As ever, she was dressed in the clothes Sweetness had been wearing the previous day.

“They've done the dirt,” she said without preamble, as was her way.

“What time is it?” Sweetness asked.

“'Bout three hours from Juniper. Look, if you're not interested…”

“You'll tell me anyway.”

Eight and a half years teaches you the moods and toyings of your imaginary friend. But not as much as being joined flesh to flesh, bone to bone, organ to organ, hip to floating rib.

Twins were a blessing among trackpeople: two firm rails on which to run a common life. So when the mountainously pregnant Child'a'grace had felt something stir in her waters and Naon Engineer (then speaking words of love to her) had rushed full-throttle up to the floating Midwife at Dehydration, and the midwife had run her foetoscope over Child'a'grace's belly and pronounced definitely, “twins,” there had been rejoicing. Even if they were girls. So no one had really listened when the midwife added, “They seem close. Very close.”

How close became apparent five months later, in the Obstetrarium of the Flying (as opposed to Floating) Midwife's dirigible, docked like an egg in a cup in an old impact crater just south of the high, lonely Alt Colorado line.

“A girl!” No surprise. “And another girl!” So quickly? Naon Engineer
had peered at the tangle of limbs and blood and tubes. Suddenly it all made visual sense, and he let out a cry of pure superstitious dread.

Siamese twins.

“Seen worse,” said the Flying Midwife, a great, ugly-lovely woman called Moon'o'May as she ran her scanner over the squawling, raisin-faced humans. “See?” Naon Engineer could make nothing of the false-colour images of bones and organs and pulsing things. “Shared kidney—could be a problem with that, later. Same with the ovary. But no neural interconnection. The spinal columns are clear, and the hips are anatomically ideal.”

“So you can separate them,” Naon Engineer said, even as his wife was sweating and smiling and trying to make sense out of the unexpected complexity that had unfolded from her uterus.

“It should be straightforward.”

“Then do it.”

“I'll come back in a year, when they've grown stronger and the organs have settled.”

“No, do it now.”

Afterward Naon Engineer would always justify it by arguing that you could not have twin-trunked creatures obstructing
Catherine of Tharsis
's narrow corridors and gangways. If there were a pressure leak, or, please God, a plasma breach, the creature would not only endanger itself but the lives of every other family member. Child'a'grace, still vertiginous from the birthing drugs, had understood that he feared others might suspect bad genes in the Engineer Domiety. Too close to the tokamaks. Uh huh. And there's a shallow grave, just off the McAuleyburg branch. Oh yes. Well, of course there's nothing left now, the condors get everything. But just you look at the collar bones, and count the vertebrae.

“So,” the Flying Midwife said as she printed out the consent forms and laid the little red squawling thing on the white table under the white lights, “who gets the kidney and who gets the ovary?”

“She gets the kidney.” Naon Engineer pointed. “And she gets the ovary.”

“Okie dokie,” the Flying Midwife said, and called up the surgeon she worked with in Belladonna. He was on a marriage-repair weekend on the canals of New Merionedd, so the locum slipped his hand into the waldoglove and put on the cyberhat. In his windowless office on the fifth underdeep of
Belladonna he waggled his fingers. In an Alt Colorado impact crater, scalpel blades danced over the infants. The robot arms wove, the fingers flashed and at the end of it the one with the kidney lived and the one with the ovary died and in truth there was a shallow grave, by the side of the branchline, unmarked but much spattered by the soft, bloody faeces of condors.

Child'a'grace, half-joyful, half-despairing, hung a mobile of mirrored birds over the survivor's cot and that night, Little Pretty One came into them and watched over her sibling, though the eyes of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th had yet to learn to focus.

That was the story as told by Little Pretty One.

“I just hope you like the smell of hot fat,” the twin ghost said in her bedroom mirror.

Sweetness surged out of her bunk with as great a surge as her tiny couchette would allow.

“Grandmother Taal…”

“She's got powers but she's not omnipotent. She got as good a deal as she could…”

The night, the dust, the gentle rock of the rails beneath her, the warm presence of constant velocity, the background bass hum of the tokamaks, the cool of the ancient waters of Inatra, the reek of dungfires, the verdant perfume of the green man's booth; all drowned out by the rattle of pans and plates and the blatting of orders down the gosport. Sold. To a Stuard.

“
Ninth Avata
?”

“Who told you?”

“My uncle.”

Little Pretty One pouted, put out. She disliked having an oracular rival in the family.

“Did your uncle tell you his name?”

“Tell me.”

“Narob Chi-Ora of the Southern Circle Stuards.”

“Is he?”

“Cute enough. Black hair. Nice ass. Nice eyes too. He'd be kind. He's got ambitions. Catering director for the entire North West Quartersphere. He could get it too.”

After eight years, Sweetness knew that Little Pretty One's
coulds
usually meant
will
. Somewhere in the Panarch's ninety-seven nested heavens, she suspected her ex-Siamese twin had met
others
.

“When?” Heavy question.

“Next corroboree.” Heavier answer. Twice a long year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the Trainpeople gathered on the great sidings of Woolongong flats, ten trains to a track, five hundred tracks. Five thousand noble locomotives, tenders and cabooses decked with bunting and flower garlands and hard-won iron rosettes for speed and endurance and bravery and heavy hauling. Here the Domiety heads boogied and the daughters were traded away. Economies of money and honour were exchanged out on the shimmering flats and, often as not, were that same day lost over card and snooker tables. Commodius vicus of recirculation of the commodifiable. Sweetness had seen the young women in their mothers' dresses, bags in hands, nuptial kerchiefs on their heads. Seen, pitied, resolved never to join.

“Oh God!”

The big ore-load was bound for the foundries of Steel River. Three days deadhead from there up to Shelby to pick up a forest fermenter—raw trees at Shelby, fifteen kinds of liquiplastic and hydrocarbon fuel by the time it decoupled at Wisdom. There, an immediate shunt on to a pilgrim charter to the Murmuring Mountain at Chernowa, then a fast run to Belladonna for a month heading up the pride of Bethlehem Ares Railroads itself, the Ares Express. And after that the sun would stand vertical over the equator and divide the world into equal day and night and she would get to live in a strange man's galley and her black curls would smell forever after of hot fat. So little time, so few kilometres.

“You can't let this happen!”

In the mirror, Little Pretty One spread her hands in the way ghosts do when they tell the living,
I'm a ghost, remember
.

Sweetness did remember. Something else.

“The green man!”

For the first time Sweetness saw Little Pretty One taken aback.

“The what?”

“The green man. He said…”

“You met a green man? Where? I didn't see that. This changes everything.”

He said, I don't see a marriage yet
, was what Sweetness would have said but for the smart rap on the cabin door, followed by the swift, fierce itch that was Little Pretty One exiting the mirror and entering the long scar up her side.

Brother Sle opened the porthole and bellowed.

“Uncle Billy!”

The formula was ancient, irrevocable and universally respected. Not even the Domiety historians agreed who Uncle Billy had been, if he had been any more than legendary, but he had saved generations of Engineers from peril, crime, police, debt, rivals, badmaashes, wanderlust and misjudged relationships. He had warned of threats gross and subtle, shysters, dunners, weighbridgemen, bindlestiffs and freeloaders.

“Whereaway?” Sweetness called.

“Railrat,” Sle answered.

A roofrider. A freeloader. A faredodger. Pausing only to scratch her haunted wound, Sweetness threw on shorts, shoes, shirt. Sle was waiting in the corridor with the flashlight and djubba-stick.

“You be careful with that,” he scolded as Sweetness reacquainted herself with the short, chubby railfolk's weapon.

“What, like this, brother?” She aimed the blunt club-head at Sle. He danced back; the compressed gas charge could shoot out the djubba-stick with force enough to dislodge the most tenacious roof rider.

“Don't waste the gas,” he said sourly. Sweetness gave his retreating back a thumb of disgrace as he exited the port sidewalk. She popped the overhead iris hatch with a gasp of steam and shinned up on to the roofwalk. Up on the roof had always been the place Sweetness had gone to think and feel and be alone, a savoury delicacy on crowded, bustling
Catherine of Tharsis
. Here, on the brilliant nights when the moonring was a diamond prizefighter's belt, Child'a'grace had always known she could find her daughter out of all of a big train's hundreds of hiding places. Sweetness unclasped her hair and shook it out in
Catherine of Tharsis
's eternal slipstream. With the innate grace of the trainborn, she poised herself against the slow rock of the engine. She breathed in the night air. Steam wreathed around her. Several times since sprouting
hair she could sit on, she had come up to take her clothes off and let the white vapour and the night caress her. At first she had felt perverse and sinful. Midnight nudist
and
aspirant engine drier. Then one night, buttoning up her blouse, she had spied Nugent Traction not merely take his gear off, but enjoy a slow, nocturnal wank, launching his effort in an elegant arc over the side of the water tender.

Tonight, an Uncle Billy. Sweetness instinctively checked her tunnel warning beacon, though there was no tunnel within two hundred kays, hitched the djubba-stick to her belt and set off down the gently swaying roofwalk toward the tender.

A sound.

She froze on the top rung of the tender companionway. Her inquisitive torch beam swung hither and yon. Romereaux's grin greeted her from the lee of the main water inflow.

“Don't do that man, I could've djubba-ed you.”

“Sorry, did I spook you?”

“Nah. Course not.”

She saw Romereaux's face change and knew what he was going to say. She did not want to hear it. He did anyway.

“About…”

Sweetness flared.

“How come everyone hears about this before me?”

“I'm sorry…”

Well, Engineers can't marry Deep-Fusion people anyway, so you're scuppered there
, she thought of saying but he really did not deserve words like that so she said, coolly, “Where've you checked?”

“Starboard side's clear. Suleiman is still down port. Chagdi's coming up from the caboose.”

“I'll do the tops of the trucks.”

“Okay.” A pause. “Sweet…”

“Don't talk. Okay?”

It was good and physical to leap over the dark chasms between the ore-cars and flash her torch down among the clanking couplings.

“Come out come out.”

She sent her beam dancing over the angled planes of the truck roof. Behind this one, three hundred more. More distant than she had imagined, another sway of light, Chagdi working his way up.

Father Naon had tried to impress the family horror of railrats on Sweetness but she had seen the indignity of old tramps impaled on signal stanchions and sad goondahs, shaken from the bogies, guillotined in half by the wheels, and the dreadful look in the eyes of the bums as they spat red dust from their mouths and banged red dust from their coats and then saw five hundred kilometres of it on every side of them. Freeloading was stealing but every time she was sent up on the roof Sweetness regretted that she must be part of the punishment. Were tales of the terrible fates of roofriders not told among the indigent orders that breed and were buried under the great termini? Or was whatever they were escaping worth any risk?

Escape.

A noise. Not family this time. The torch beam dodged left. Movement down on the sloping flank of ore-car eleven. Behind the vent stack. Sweetness hurdled the gaps between trucks, light fixed on the hexagonal mound of the vents. Steel mesh clanged beneath her feet. Yes. Yes. There.
Fingers
. She crouched by the handrail, sent her light this way, that. Her right hand unhooked the djubba-stick. Fingers, pale knuckled around the metal vent. Thin fingers, dust ingrained in the knuckles, black jam under the nails.