Ares Express (47 page)

s
kerry clung to the edge of the punctured corridor, riven with sick doubts. Seconds before, she had seen the two young men fight and fall to their deaths. No purpose, no logic, no great cause served, no noble sacrifice. Just the momentary blindness of aggression. Boys and their competition. Fight, and fight to the death.

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

They would still be falling.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How we laughed.

“Bastards!” she suddenly swore, kicking and punching at the jagged exposed metal in the hope it would tear and hurt her. The soft airframe aluminium and plastic bent under her hard hands and feet. “Bastards bastards bastards!”

She was Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm. She could flip and swing and juggle. She could walk tightrope and walk on her hands and walk over fire. She could swing trapeze and sway-pole and do rope tricks that would make your mouth hang open in amazement. She could put both legs behind her neck. She was an entertainer. A provider of simple spectacle and wonder; a Good Night Out. She was not a secret government agent. She was not a Synodical warrior. She did kids' parties. The Anarchs had no place, no place at all, asking her to run the End of the World, fight people, watch people fall to their deaths.

But what of the show, Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm? Always, the show. She took a deep centring breath and called Mishcondereya on the bindi-mike.

“Mish, I've lost her. She's got away.”

Mishcondereya swore. Apparently the only subject her gentleladies' finishing school taught well was Cursing and Advanced Cursing.

“I'm going after her. I need pick-up,” Skerry said.

After a pause clearly meant to be significant, Mishcondereya said, “It may have escaped your attention, but they'd shoot their own shadows back here.”

“Mishcon, I need pick-up. I know we can get her, I know we can get the Catherine artifact.” She saved the Portentous Line for last, though she doubted Mishcondereya had a functioning sense of portent. “If we don't, Harx will.”

Heavy sigh. You love it, Skerry thought. If you hadn't become a state comedian, you would have been a rich-girl terrorist. The action, the toys, the scent of men, the tang of alfresco sex, the adventure. You live it, you love it, you think. But you would think different if you had seen two boys who loved it as much as you, and for the same reasons, earn the bitter pay-off.

“All right, I'm coming in. Give me your fix.”

Buffeted by surface winds—Harx was taking this thing low and fast—Skerry touched her throat jewel. Seconds later, the blunt nose of the sky-yacht nudged into view beneath her. It crept up on the frantically pedalled airship until half its length underhung the much larger orange bulk, like a pilot fish pacing a shark. Skerry waited for Mishcondereya to lock engines. You get one shot at this.

She picked her spot on the skin.

Never a safety net, Skerry?

Arms spread, she swallow dived into the yielding cushion of the gas bag.

 

“I can take her out, one shot,” Sianne Dandeever said, rubbing her still-chafed wrists. His Holiness's rescue party could have come a little more expeditiously. She rested her hand on the heavy Sharps' rifle's wooden stock, casually swung the sights toward the dwindling figure of Sweetness beneath her flying wing. She badly wanted to punish someone for her humiliation. The cathedral's aux-con was an architecturally incongruous glass teat at the apex of the pseudo-classical portico of the Pilgrim's Steps. From here two people could command and fight the full edifice and company.

“You will do no such thing,” Devastation Harx retorted. “We might still
need it, in which case, I want it somewhere I can find it, not spread all over Grand Valley.”

“Do we need it?” Sianne Dandeever asked. “And if we don't, can I have a shot anyway?”

“That we will find out very soon,” Devastation Harx said, taking an orbital uplinker from inside his jacket. Sianne Dandeever blinked at the blasphemous machine. “Oh, for goodness sake woman, even God needs good rolling stock.” In a flicker of data and twittering, the little device reported on the state of his many fronts. In ten minutes he would be out from under this accursed roof, where he could get a once-and-for-all shot at these impudent pranksters in their airships with the partacs. Waves eight and nine were entering the upper atmosphere, the first four squadrons were down, shifted into ground combat configuration and were moving into occupation positions. The global communication network was buzzing with madness and rumour. Let it. Soon and very soon it would be silenced. The more they talked, the more they watched the pretty lights in the sky, the less they would suspect his true strategy. That was the eternal secret of all gods. Keep watching the pretty lights in the sky.

Then, one by one, he would put those pretty lights out. The infiltration of the reality shaping computers was almost complete. The simulacrum was perfect. St. Catherine herself would seem to give the command for the Artificial Intelligences to switch themselves off, then command of the multiverse would pass to its rightful users, the dirty, bustling, conniving, inquisitive, mortal humans.

“She's getting away,” Sianne Dandeever warned.

Harx looked up from his schemes of splendour. He should know where that irritating little girl was going, in case something did go wrong with the protocols and he needed to access the original St. Catherine program. She was almost out of sight, spiralling lower and lower.

“Where are you going, you vexatious child?” Harx mused.

“Go on, your Holiness, just one shot,” Sianne Dandeever.

Then he saw the contrail of steam, the mirror steel lines, the blue and silver of a Bethlehem Ares fusion hauler.

“Of course! So loyal! Sianne, take us down.”

“Down it is.”

Never a question, never a query. He should have tried to get his hand into those thigh-hugging pants.

“We have a train to catch.”

 

In contrast to her departure, Taal Chordant Joy-of-May Asiim Engineer 10th's return to
Catherine of Tharsis
was loud, crowded and chaotic. So many people on the bridge, all wanting her to answer their questions before they answered hers.

“What have you done to yourself?” Her old friend Miriamme Deep-Fusion's voice cut through the babble with the one question everyone wanted answered but were too in awe of the terrible old lady to ask.

“A form of rejuvenation I would not recommend. It is most efficacious, but the price is excessive. Now, enough enough enough. I am senior here, it is you who must answer my questions,” Grandmother Taal said, glad to feel the creak and shift of hull-plates under her square-heeled boots again. “Where is everyone? Where is my son? What has happened to the train?”

A chorus of voices babeled answers. Grandmother Taal held up her hands for silence.

“Mutiny?”

The mutineers looked at each other, all except Grandfather Bedzo, deeply enmeshed in driving his train.

“For Sweetness,” Child'a'grace said.

“Hmph,” said Grandmother Taal. “Well, I suppose it's an exceptional circumstance and my son and that Stuard could well do with a lesson in humility, but I would not condone it as a general course of action.”

Relief was general and unabashed. Into it, Child'a'grace asked, mildly, “So, where exactly is Sweetness Octave?”

Grandmother Taal craned around her to peer out of the window. She pointed.

“There, I suspect.”

Everyone turned to witness a spectacle almost certainly unique in aviation. It was like an animated lesson in marine ecology: big fish eats littler fish eats weeniest fish. Well to the rear was a massive cargo-lift airship, vast
as a cloud. Ahead of it, no less small, was what could only be described as a flying cathedral, vaguely saucer-shaped with heavy Palladian pretensions, incongruously coloured earth-orange. Squeezing out from underneath the cathedral and pushing slowly ahead was a silver trout-shaped aircraft, sleek and streamlined, and in the lead, beating courageously down the sky, was the tiny delta wing of an airfoil. Everyone could see the dark speck hanging beneath it. The whole flying circus bore down on
Catherine of Tharsis
like muscular theology.

“That would be our Sweetness.”

 

Pursuit was good. Challenge was good. Danger was good. Tough flying was good. Everything was good that kept out that final image of Pharaoh and Serpio, locked together, falling through the killing air. Concentrate. Not much longer. Not much further. Line up on that great big beautiful steamy train there. A few hundred metres. Then you'll be home. Then you'll be safe. Then you'll be among people who know you and your story can end and you can go back to your little cubby. Just you and Little Pretty One again.

You can't go back, Sweetness. You're a traingirl, you supped that truth with your mother's milk. You can go everywhere, anywhere, all around the world, but never back. The tracks only lead forward.

She navigated in over
Catherine of Tharsis
. Whoever had their hand on the drive bar was good, matching her speed, compensating in an instant for her wobbles and surges as she carefully spilled lift, lining up on the back of the tender. Twenty metres, ten metres. She wove from side to side of the steam plume, checking her positioning. Up there behind her, she could feel the presence of heavy aerial machinery on the back of her neck. Ignore them. If they want to blow you away, they can do it any time. Concentrate on getting down. Down. Down…

Her toe-tips brushed the top of the tender, an eddy lifted her into the vapour trail. Moment's blindness. She fought for control, stabilised, came in again. Almost almost almost…She tugged on the guy lines simultaneously, spilling lift, and touched down at a run in the middle of the tender. Immediately, figures—people! trainpeople! her people!—came surging off the access ladder, seized her, stripped off her flying harness and carried her down.

Sweetness babbled, recognising the faces of her bearers, trying to touch them, remember them.

“Psalli, Romereaux, Anhinga, it's you. Thwayte, what are you doing here?”

She was borne along a sidewalk up a companionway through a shunting turret. She could feel the train was picking up speed again. Sweetness glanced backward. The cathedral eclipsed half the sky, the little air-yacht almost crushed between the two heavyweights of earth and air. On the driving bridge the people she loved were waiting for her. Her bearers set her down and immediately Child'a'grace hugged her.

“Your hair is needing washing, child,” she remonstrated.

Sweetness plucked at a greasy coil, then all the tension excitement fear confusion horror exhaustion dread wonder puzzlement loneliness hunger sleeplessness vertigo love loss and death of the days since she had ridden away from the grand steaming ruptured. She burst into tears. Her family, Domiety and non-Domiety rushed in to comfort her. Thus only Ricardo Traction noticed the shadow fall over the windows.

“Um, I hate to disturb you, but we seem to have a cathedral on the roof.”

Everyone looked up, the world went red, and they were somewhere else entirely.

R
ed. Red heaven, red earth. Red hills, red soil, red stones. Red sky, red sun, red lines of thin cloud at the close horizon. Bethlehem Ares Class 88 fusion hauler
Catherine of Tharsis
, pride of the fleet, stood in a half-kilometre length of neatly severed track in the middle of endless, featureless red.

Numb silence. Utter dislocation. Then young Thwayte Engineer cried out in sudden pain, clapped hands to ears. In the same instant, everyone became aware of a hissing scream, like steam escaping from a fractured pipe. Scattered papers flew up, across the room like carrion birds and packed themselves against the bottom of the starboard catwalk door.

“We're under vacuum!” Romereaux shouted, however impossible that seemed, and rushed to open an ancient, paint-sealed red box on the bulkhead with a fire-axe.
Catherine of Tharsis
was an old-school hauler, a veteran from the days of the manforming when the air was still thin and dead and Big Stuff needed shifting, and fusion-powered steam locomotives had been a useful way of getting water vapour into the primitive atmosphere. Her inner corridors and habitations had been designed to be pressure tight, however those seals might have perished with time and travel, and she still carried tubes of puncture goop in the Emergency DeePee boxes. Two blows hacked the casing off; Romereaux and Ricardo Traction wove streams of fast-drying foam goop over the bottom of the door, layer upon layer upon acetic-smelling layer until the piercing whistle dwindled to a whisper to nothing.

“Where the hell are we?” Romereaux asked.

A shriek aborted any offers of an answer. Mercedes Deep-Fusion stood pointing a quivery finger at Grandfather Bedzo. The aged aged man was slumped in his seat. His hands swung at his sides, bloated with pooled blood. His eyes were half-open. A thick rope of glossy drool hung from his protruding tongue to his chest. He did not seem to be breathing.

“Is he, is he, is he?” Mercedes stammered.

He looked anyone's definition of dead as dead could be.

Anhinga Engineer, who had trained as a Knight of the Healing Joans, knelt by the old man, felt for pulses, tested for breath.

“He's still alive, just about.”

“Get him to sick bay!” Romereaux ordered.

“We left sick bay back in Axidy, remember?” Anhinga said. Everyone slowly turned round to look at the alien world outside the windows.

“Really, where the hell are we?” Romereaux said sombrely.

Sweetness spoke up.

“Okay, you're not going to like this.”

“We don't like it anyway,” Thwayte Engineer said.

“Well, I think we're in exactly the same place we were. We haven't moved at all. Well, not forward or backward. I think what's happened is, we've moved sideways. Across universes, if you like. Parallel worlds, all a little bit different. Harx sent us further than most. That's why poor ould Bedzo's in the state he's in. The shock of transition. We all blacked out for a moment; he was plugged into the cyberhat, what must it've been like for the whole system to go down when we made the jump?”

“So, he's not driving us out of here,” Ricardo Traction said.

“Looks like no one's driving us out of this one,” Romereaux commented unhelpfully. “There isn't even any air.”

“Harx did this?” Grandmother Taal asked.

“He had these mirrors could look into other universes,” Sweetness went on, aware of how frenetic this would sound in any other circumstance. “It's where he got his power from: he wanted St. Catherine so he could get more of that power by getting hold of the angels that built the world by shuffling through the multiverse until they found the best of all possible worlds.”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa,” Romereaux interrupted. “This goondah has sent us across the multiverse into an alternative of our world?”

“That's what I think.”

“We're buggered.”

“Do you want to know how buggered?” Sweetness said.

“Can it get any worse?”

“I think this is an alternative world where the manforming never happened. That means, no air. Meaning, all the air we have, is in here. Eventually, we'll run out. We've already lost a lot.”

“So, have we a plan for getting back?” the pragmatic Ricardo Traction asked. Diving through that carriage door into mutiny had been the only spontaneous thing he had ever done. Now look where it had landed him. That's what you got for allowing yourself to be whirled up in the mood of the moment.

He led the inquiring expressions at Sweetness.

“Hey, I'm not a vinculum physicist,” she said. Sarcasms and recriminations burned more air. “There's something I want to try, but I need to go to my cubby, right?”

 

Devastation Harx tried to restrain his delight. The symbols on his uplinker were dropping back out of the imaginary plane into the concrete world of integers. Incursion into the multiverse complete. He snapped the plastic lid shut.

“You know, I wasn't entirely sure that would work,” he said to an awed Sianne Dandeever. All chances of worker's playtime banished forever there. Gods don't shag the believers, and with his demonstration of multiversal engineering, he surely qualified for that league.

“We don't need her any more, then,” the faithful lieutenant said, nodding to the place
Catherine of Tharsis
had been.

“Ah, no,” said Devastation Harx.

The Cathedral of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family hovered over a precision-cut half-kilometre circle of other world. The Grand Valley mainline led in, the mainline ran out, in the middle, dead red grit and rocks. The airship still rocked gently from the inrush of air as near vacuum was displaced into atmosphere.

Devastation Harx looked around from the vantage of his high glass pulpit.

“Now,” he said, dusting off his hands, “who else has irritated me today?”

 

How sweet, Sweetness thought. They had kept her cubby unchanged since the day she left. Then again, she thought as she unscrewed the cap of the pyx, it
wasn't as if she had wandered away for years uncountable, and, with most of her stash of precious things in her backsac, there wasn't much to identify a process of change. But it was nice to think they had kept it as a shrine to her.

Sweetness shook out the roll of quantum-plastic mirror and gunge-tacked it to the back of the cubby door.

“You lied to me,” was the first thing Sweetness Asiim Engineer said to her double, dressed, as ever, in what she had been wearing the day before, which was identical to today's apart from the parafoil harness, which Sweetness had forgotten to remove in the rush of it all.

Little Pretty One spread her hands apologetically.

“Yes, but in a very real sense, no.”

“You pretended to be my twin sister; in fact, you're Catherine of Tharsis, the woman who made the world, who, for some reason, decided one day to walk out on heaven and live in a mirror with me. Where's the no in this?”

“Guilty on that count. You'd know about deciding one day to walk out.”

“It's not the same at all.”

“Isn't it? You think it's a thrill-a-nanosecond, living as an AI? Let me tell you, these guys get off on abstract mathematics. The intellectual glory and wonder of infinite prime dimensions. After a millennium or two, a girl gets to thinking, maybe this mortification of the flesh isn't what it's cracked up to be after all. Maybe you get an itch to see what the meat's up to these days. I never was a scientist, you know. I was a construction worker. Strictly blue collar, that was Kathy Haan.”

“Enough enough, all right? So, you thought you'd take a couple of decades' vacation in the flesh, but don't call me sis, you are not my sister.”

Little Pretty One looked at her feet, which, because of the size of the cramped cabin, had been rolled up, but were presumably visible in whatever kind of state she inhabited.

“No, you're right, I shouldn't call you sis. It's a lot closer than that.”

“Don't give me this.”

“In an absolutely real sense, I am you, you are me. You are Kathy Haan, reborn, the best of her, the good in her, the bits that got lost in the madness and the ‘Spirituality.' They were all stored in the matrix whenever I went eternal. They didn't go away. They wanted to come back. They wanted to
live. So, we made a body for them to live in. Me, here in the mirror, that's the rest of you, the unseen part. The divine twin. We are sisters, we are joined, a lot closer than you could ever imagine.”

“I'm a ghost,” Sweetness said wanly. She sat down on her bunk. “You're real, and I'm the ghost in the mirror. My whole life has been lies. Everything I've lived, it hasn't been for me at all. It's been for you.”

“No,” Little Pretty One said with the gentleness of spring rains. “You couldn't be more wrong. You are you. You are living your life, once, for you. I watch, I feel, but I can never get inside your head. I can never share your sense of youness. I can never know your experience of what it is to be a person.”

“This is heavy shit,” Sweetness said after a time, shaking her head.

“Yes, and, in a very real sense, no. You just do what you're doing. So tell me, how has your life been?”

Images of a life thus far. Golden dawn over the high north desert, seen from her forward lookout, the sun rising huge out of the shimmer at the edge of the world so that she seemed to be driving into its very heart. The Great Snow, blowing up from Borealis, when
Catherine of Tharsis
plunged headlong into a huge drift and got stuck and they all sat around in the tea room, drank mint tea, played card games and told stories while the Deep-Fusions tweaked the tokamak thermal output to melt them all free. The first explosion of wonder at Belladonna's Undercroft decked out for the Five Hundred Founders Day celebrations; firmly gripping Child'a'grace's hand as she peered over the edge of the railing down into the kilometre-deep vertical street lined with more shops than anywhere else in the known universe. The first time she got drunk at a corroboree and tried to pull Blasniq Bassareeni and Sle and Rother'am had to drag her off before she disgraced the family name. The first time she toddled away from
Catherine of Tharsis
and looked back and saw her world whole for the first time, a steaming dragon in which she lived. The dealings, the pickups, the drop-offs, the shuntings and couplings, the long slow hauls, the brilliant fast express runs, the hypnotic boredom of the endless straight track up over the north pole, the cleaning and the pride in the brass work and the time the School of the Air teacher had given her the gold star for her essay on the weather. The wonders of desert storms and high
plains lightnings; the rains sweeping in black curtains across the hills of Deuteronomy. The huge nights when you felt you could pull the moonring from the sky and take it for a bracelet, when a hundred stars all started moving at once and you knew it was a Praesidium Sailship, bigger than the runty moon, setting out on its journey to the other worlds and peoples of System. The knowledge that the morning would always bring a new place and time. And more, and more. Hers. All hers. Uniquely, trivially, gloriously, personally, hers.

“Life's been good,” she said thoughtfully, then sat up straight, the old light in her eyes. “No,” she said, “no; I've been lost, starved, shot at, dropped from a great height, betrayed, used, confused, fallen in love twice, crossed deserts, flown through the air, battled duststorms, watched star wars, fought terrible foes, faced down people with the powers of gods, run for my life, been picked up, thrown away, travelled into other universes, fought wars, been shat upon from a very great height, been a story, been fired halfway across the multiverse, it's nowhere near over yet and I haven't a notion how it's all going to end but I have to say this, it's been great. I've had a ball. Your wild things have been having the time of their lives. You don't know what you're missing.”

Little Pretty One smiled a pickled smile.

“You wish you were me, don't you?” Sweetness said.

“You have no idea how much I wish that.”

“Do me a favour then, for this life I've lived for you.”

“Name it.”

“Get us out of here.”

“Ah,” said Our Lady of Tharsis.

“Say again?”

“I was rather hoping you had some ideas on that. You see, I kind of need to get back. You should see what they're doing to my world.”

“I thought you were supposed to be divine.”

“I am. But just because I'm a god, that doesn't mean I'm omnipotent. I can control the reality-shapers, but only if they're there. All there is in that sky are a couple of tatty little moons.”

“So we're stuck. And I've wasted God knows how much valuable air talking to you.”

“I wouldn't say wasted. And I didn't say stuck.”

“You know, I'm not surprised I'm the best of you,” Sweetness said.

The figure in the mirror sighed.

“Now, if you could get me back to our reality again, then I might be able to do something. I'd certainly pull the plug on Mr. Harx's operation, shut down that invasion and, somewhere in between all that, I could probably find time to send you a bit of help.”