Ares Express (49 page)

She understood. She waved. The light went out, the vana twisted away and up on its long loop through Grand Valley.

The tattoo on the roof continued. Old
Catherine
could take it. The founding engineers of Bethlehem Ares built well. One hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty. Nice smooth power curve. Enough reserves to make it up to two hundred and eighty, if they didn't hit any upgrades. Decision point was two hundred. Tokamak pressure was peaking high orange. Sweetness began the priming sequence. Deep-Fusion? Who needed them. All you had to do was watch and learn. This little button shut down power to the containment field. This little button overrode the overrides. And this little button got her fine ass right out of here.

One ninety. One ninety-five. Two hundred.

“This is Point of No Return,” Sweetness said. “This is for everyone.” She hit the Emergency Escape button. The lights went to red. Shutters sealed over the windows. Drive rod and navigation ball folded away into the floor. Safety bars enfolded her like overaffectionate aunts. The camera eyes went black. The read-outs blanked. Alone in the red dark, Sweetness heard the serial bangs of the explosive bolts, heavier and harder than Harx's now-sporadic Gatling fire. Then she felt the grapple arms lift the driving cab free of the locomotive. Yellow digits counted down to primary ignition.

Here was the gamble. Here was the place where it could all go so so wrong. A misalignment of the escape rockets, and she wouldn't be thrown clear to the side and back. She'd go straight up and be tangled in Harx's cathedral.

The cab stirred under her. She was moving, but where. Where? Then the rockets kicked in and Sweetness momentarily blacked out under three gees. Burn burn burn burn burn. She was still moving, She was free. Then the rockets burned out and she was falling free. And in that instant, there was a light, brighter even than the light of the Little Pretty One vana, a light that
penetrated even the meshed fingers of the blast shutters, the light of a Class 88 hauler containment field collapsing and a hydrogen fusion tokamak exploding. Then something like a steel fist punched the falling cab as hard as it could, sent it tumbling and Sweetness, strapped in her chair, screaming, crashing down to earth. Then the sudden whump of parachutes unfurling snatched her away from death.

The cab lay on its flank, buried waist-deep in the loam. The parachute, discarded on impact, bowled on the winds of the after-blast like a demon-driven thing across the grazing lands, screaming toward the rim mountains. The internal lights had failed: Sweetness scrabbled, trying to locate the green phosphorescence of the emergency door release. She hurt. She hurt bad. Things bent in there, chipped. But alive. Sort them later. But you could be radiated. The shields have no other purpose than to defend from fusion core detonations, but you were close to the epicentre when the tokamaks blew. Some could have eaten through. It could be burrowing into your bone marrow like maggots. It could be gnawing your genes. Three-headed Engineer children. Siamese twins. The Big C, she thought, completing the downward spiral of sobering possibilities. Hey, it's an occupational hazard of trainfolk. You're alive alive-oh. They can do things with that, these days. It costs but, don't they owe you? You saved the world. You can name your price. A gene-scrub, then that week getting oiled and sunkissed at the spas in Therme.

The back-up power seemed to have failed as well. Swearing, Sweetness Asiim Engineer grubbed around until she found the manual door crank. Every turn dug it into her ribs and brought a fresh oath as she winched the iris slowly open. Indigo sky. Distant bluffs. Green hills. A shower of dust. Sweetness pulled herself up and out, stood on the hull to survey the damage she had dealt. To the west the lower levels of the mushroom cloud were disintegrating but the thunder-head still boiled furiously upward through the hole it had blown in Worldroof, challenging heaven, setting weather patterns fleeing in consternation. Shading her eyes with her hand, she thought she could just make out the lip of the characteristic, fatal blast crater. This world liked craters, Sweetness decided. It could afford another one. Around were embedded mammoth shards of shattered roof-glass, thrust dagger-deep into
the hill-country. She made a complete circuit of the horizon. Scattered across the southern panorama were the tangled, ungainly corpses of the machine army, twisted like burned matches where the sudden cease from St. Catherine had frozen them in the path of the fusion blast. With the seasons the soils would blow over and the green grass grow up and bury the forgotten army. A kilometre or so to the west she found the dazzling silver thread of the mainline. She thanked all her saints; the blast-wind could have carried her any distance, any direction into the wilderness. Sweetness slid down the cab hull on to the grass, headed over meadow flowers and sweet turf to the track. She looked back at all that remained of
Catherine of Tharsis
.

Best to see it as another piece of discarded metal in this junkyard of improbabilities, soon to be covered and forgotten like all the other casualties.

Her home…Her people. What had she done to them?

What only she could do.

Would they believe her when she pleaded story?

She could not look at the silver gingerbread that prettied up the blast shutters, the roaring lion crest, charred, battered. No more Ares Express. The Saint is dead. You killed her, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

Head full of the singing, ringing sound of pushed-down tears, she walked through the robot cemetery to the line. This time, she had a clear indication what direction not to go. Think of it as another re-route job for the Waymenders and a few minutes down-time on the Grand Valley runs. She turned east, to warmth and hope.

Sweetness had walked but a few minutes when she became aware of a bee-drone and moving mote in the eye of the sun. She squinted, peered. An object was driving through the air toward her, a larger object than its direct frontal approach hinted. United Artists' trim little airship emerged to eclipse the light and dropped to a relaxed hover over Sweetness Asiim. A hatch opened, the woman in the green leotard hailed her.

“You want a lift? We owe you.”

“A lift? Where?”

Skerry indicated the whole wide world.

“Wherever you want.”

Sweetness thought about the gift of leaving all the mess for someone else to clear up, climbing up that ramp and dissolving into the anonymous. Then she saw Grandmother Taal, and Child'a'grace, Psalli and Romereaux, still standing there, seeing what she had done, waiting, and still she did not come. Did not ever come. Ran away with the circus. Sometimes even an Engineer cannot ride. Sometimes you have to walk to face it.

“I think I'll walk this one, thank you. But hey!” she shouted as the fans swivelled into lift configuration and the little blimp began to turn. “Tell them I'm all right, will you?”

The taut little woman saluted.

“We will. By the way, in case you were wondering, we did win.”

“That's all right then,” Sweetness called up as the door irised shut, the fans threw dust around her and the airship lifted, turned, dipped its nose to the east and sailed away.

Five hundred paces later, she found the bean. It was balanced on the starboard rail. No natural force could have balanced it there, the fusion wind from Harx's devastation would have carried it away had it been there for any time. Sweetness bent down, studied the dull, white little eating bean. She frowned at the incongruity, then remembered where she had seen such a pulse before. She pocketed it and hiked on up the line, knowing what she would find next.

The skinny wooden spill was stabbed like a
vodun
charm into the dirt between the sleepers. Sweetness knelt, slowly pulled it out by its green tip. It was, she remembered, meant to be pulled slowly, gingerly, with forethought.

“Boy of Two Dusts,” she read. Glancing up, she saw the next stick thrust into the dirt three sleepers up. “Golden Thumb-ring.” She kept it in her hand with Boy of Two Dusts. Within a minute's walk she had a fistful of slim sticks. Half a kilometre upline was a signal relay from which came an unseasonable smell of spring verdure. Suspecting what she would find there, Sweetness walked resolutely up to it.

“I thought it might be you.”

The greenperson sat back on the relay, knees pulled up to chest, forearms resting lightly on them. A loose canvas jellaba covered its body and hid its
face within a deep cowl but the slim-fingered, pale green hands confirmed what the smell of growing suggested. Sweetness dropped the bundle of fate sticks at its scaley feet.

“Story over, then.”

“It is. You are no longer afforded the protection of the universal narrative conventions. You are not the darling of the universe any more.”

Funny way the universe had of showing it, Sweetness thought. She said, “Not even a little after bit? A coda?”

The green person shrugged.

“It reminds me of someone when you do that,” Sweetness said.

“Nice denouement, I must say,” the greenperson said, ignoring her bait. “End with a bang. Always good.”

“Cost
Catherine of Tharsis
. My family's one and only asset, and I blew it up.”

The green person cocked its head to one side, a darting, reptilian motion Sweetness could not read.

“I think you'll find that, despite the mess you've managed to spread across this and neighbouring universes, what passes for the government in this one is not ungrateful,” it said. It looked up from the folds of its cowl, shot a hand from the long, loose sleeve. The face was slit-eyed, scaled. Sweetness thought she saw a forked tongue flicker. The long fingers had stretched into hooks, the knuckles swollen to painful knobs, the nails drawn into tight black claws. Sweetness took the hand. It felt like napped velvet.

“Well, that'll be goodbye then,” the green person said. “I'll not get up if you don't mind, I'm finding standing increasingly uncomfortable as I change. We'll not meet again in this lifetime. Goodbye, it was a good story, I enjoyed you: see you in the next one.”

They shook hands briefly. Then the lizard-hands scooped up the bundle of fortune-telling sticks and snapped it smartly in half.

“You're free now. I give you your fate back. What happens from now on is entirely in your own hands. Your story has ended, your tale has just begun.”

“Thank God for that,” Sweetness Engineer 12th said, and began to walk. Like flies in the heat-haze, she thought she could see objects far down the
track, swimming in the treacherous silver. Resolution and certainty increased with every step she took closer. People, trainpeople, and behind them, that rippling square of black must be the jettisoned tender. But what was that in the deeper haze beyond? A thing like a city, all spires and towers and campaniles. Mirage. Illusion. It could all be lies and magnifications. Should have taken that ride, traingirl. Story's over, if your pride gets you into trouble now, you've only yourself to get you out of it. No different from everyone else then. That should be sufficient. Sweetness jogged forward, trying to penetrate the shimmering. A city, yes, but a narrow one. A linear city? She stopped, laughed out loud, beat her hands off her thighs in realisation. Not a city at all; a factory train. A big smelly minging dirty factory. Now she could see the tell-tale parallel plumes of steam from the separators. They had all come for her. They were all here. All her people. She glanced back, as everyone must. Of course there was no figure squatting by the signal relay, but did she see a scurry of green dart to cover behind a sleeper?

Free to be mundane again.

Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th smiled, shouldered her pack and ran along the line through the green hills of Mars, into the silver shimmer where her people were waiting.

I
an
M
c
D
onald
is the author of many science fiction novels, including
Desolation Road
;
King of Morning
,
Queen of Day
;
Out on Blue Six
;
Chaga
;
Kirinya
;
River of Gods
; and
Brasyl
. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the BSFA Award, been nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award, and has several nominations for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The
Washington Post
called him “one of the best SF novelists of our time.” He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.