Ares Express (5 page)

Sweetness considered the fingers for a long time. Then she laid the djubba-stick on the roofwalk and said, softly, “Hey. You're taking a wild risk, you know.”

The fingers were silent.

“You get all kinds of stuff gassing up off the ore. A kind of relative of mine fell in once when they were unloading. Came out like a teacher's handbag. True. If that thing valves, it'll blow you clear off the car.”

The fingers twitched.

“You know, I wouldn't pick that place at all. Hanging down the side? You want to get gravity working for you, not against you, see? I'd go right up the front, down on the cow-catcher. It's right in front of everyone but it's kind of like a blind spot, you can't see it from the bridge. True. Really. But, well, you're here, so what you need to do, when you fall off, is make sure you
land right between the tracks. That way the train goes right over your head. Mind you, you have to get down kind of fast, you don't want to get anything tangled up in the grit pipes. You could be dragged for like kilometres.”

The fingers twitched in her torch beam.

“So, how long've you been down there?”

Nothing. Then, a whisper almost lost in the wheel rumble, “Since Little Rapids.”

“Mother'a…Your fingers must be coming off.”

“Yes,” came the small reply that was full of knotted nerves and locked sinews and muscles numb to everything but dumb survival. Sweetness came to a decision.

“I'm going to send something down to you. Grab ahold of it.”

“No,” came the answer.

“You what? I'm trying to help you.”

“Don't trust.”

Sweetness was sincerely perplexed at the rejection of her offer of rebellion.

“Why so?”

“Trick. Try to knock me off.”

“Listen, if you've been hanging on there since Little Rapids, you don't need me to knock you off. Sooner rather than later, my friend.”

The train lurched over points. Fingers groaned. Fingers slipped a fraction. Sweetness ducked under the handrail, anchored her feet over the lip of the roofwalk and stretched down over the sloping truck side. One-handed, she aimed the djubba-stick as close as she dared to the fingers.

“This is going to come fast, so don't shy away or anything stupid like that.”

A second lurch threw her aim. The club-head shot within a whisker of the pale soft hand. The fingers almost flinched. Almost.

“Grab hold!” Sweetness shouted. “It'll hold you.”

“Yeah,” came the voice as the fingers felt for the telescopic shaft of the stick. “But can you?”

“I can hold any damn thing,” Sweetness said, affronted. One hand, then the other grasped the stick. The sudden tug almost tore her loose.

“Hang on,” she gritted, to herself. She fumbled for the retract key. And
twist
. The djubba-stick kicked like Nugent Traction's organ as first the hands, then the arms, then between them, a hunger-sunken face beneath the mat of black hair were hauled up over the edge of the car.

He's kind of young
, Sweetness Asiim Engineer thought between the rip in her shoulders and the tear in her calves.
What, just gone eight?

They were almost face to face, lip to lip. Sweetness felt the last of her strength go.

“Grab the rail!” she hissed. He seized it just as the djubba-stick fell from her fingers and clattered down the side of the ore-car into the dark. Sweetness rolled on to her back. The railrat knelt over her, head cocked to one side like an inquisitive songbird.

“Why are you doing this? You could have knocked me clean off.”

“Have,” Sweetness panted. “Plenty. So”—a swallow—“what ya called?”

He was desperately thin. The fall would have snapped his little chicken bones. He had big brown suspicious eyes that mistrusted everything in the universe from under his urchin fringe. He was desperately cute. Worth saving just to look at.

“You saved me, you tell first.”

Sweetness sat up.

“My name,” she said, “is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer. The twelfth.”

“You trainies have big names.”

“So, how big's yours?”

“Pharaoh,” the boy said.

“Pharaoh something? Something Pharaoh?”

“Pharaoh nothing.”

“Just Pharaoh.”

“It's enough, where I come from.”

“And where would that be, little-name?”

“Meridian.”

“That's…”

“I know how far Meridian is.”

Half a planet.

“How?”

“I won the meat lotto.”

“What is this?”

A crossing bell clanged away into the past.

“Everyone puts up a steak. Then the Boss of the Roof draws the feathers.”

“Whoa whoa whoa. Everyone? Who is this?”

“The people. All of them. The underfolk.”

“Ah.” The deep dregs; the faces you glimpsed looking up at you from between the sleepers in Meridian Main; the hands that reached out from under the platform when you dropped a centavo and it rolled over the lip. Small loss to you, to the fingers down there in the access tunnels and bogieways, food and glam and power. “You lived there like for always?”

“This life, the one before it, probably the one after it too.”

“Don't get cute, railrat.”

“We got names for you people, underneath. Anyway, you dropped your punch-stick over the side, remember?”

“Yeah, well I can still pick you up and throw you off.” They knelt, challenging each other under the circling moonring. “So, how old are you?”

“I'm near ten.”

“Had you for younger.”

“How much younger?”

“Younger. So, what steak?”

Kid Pharaoh finger-combed back his lank hair. No left ear, instead, a puckered grin of deaf scar.

“An old woman bought it. She had cancer of the lobe.”

“Don't get a lot of that, cancer of the lobe.”

“Sometimes, when the wind's right, I can hear what she's hearing, in here.” He tapped the earless curve of his skull. “That's how I know who got it, after.”

“What did you win for that?”

“The ticket out. Anywhere. And the golden purse. A thousand dollars.”

A tangential thought demanded Sweetness voice it before it faded.

“So, how many times did you go in for the, ah?”

“Meat lotto? Second time lucky.”

“The first time?”

“A big toe. Don't balance too good.”

“Who got the toe?”

“Don't know. Not much sense in a toe.”

“I suppose there're one's've been up for it a lot of times?”

“Well, there's a kind of natural limit…”

“I suppose so.” Up ahead in the night, Naon Engineer whistled. Three short blasts, one long. Coming up on Juniper. Sweetness felt the great train shudder beneath her, brakes gently gripping.

“So, what happened? I mean, if you had a thousand dollars…”

“Got stiffed.”

“Where?”

“Suniyapa. Three big girls. Must've heard that they give out the Golden Purse with the lotto. They were looking for poor kids riding rich. They had suits. Looked like regular coh-mute-ers. Big damn blakey-toe boots, but.”

“Sorry.”

“What for? You were going to knock me off your train, so? Any road, they throw me off at High Plains and then I hitch a ride on some shit deadheader across Chryse because Mr. Engineer he's expecting to ride the whole rig with me hanging off his lizard and when I don't he dumps me out. Walked three days to Little Rapids.”

“I'm an Engineer,” Sweetness said quietly.

“Yeah, and like I said, you were going to knock me clean off. Anyway, I wait there and one two three trains go by, and then you come along and you're the biggest by a way and I reckon, bigger the train, better to hide, and then one of youse spies me and I have to hide down over the edge, so.”

Sweetness gave him her full regard a moment. She rocked back on her heels.

“So, where's this all going to end?”

“Grand Valley, I'd hoped.” No hesitation. “I'm not comfortable 'cept there's a roof on the sky.”

The brakes were squealing now, biting down hard on raw steel. Within their familiarity, Sweetness was able to make out another sound, a Bassareeni voice, calling over the car tops.

“Quick,” Sweetness ordered. “There.” She pushed Pharaoh toward the gap, mimed with her hands for him to crawl face flat and hushed.

“Down there?” he whispered, peering down the ladder into grinding darkness.

“Down there,” Sweetness hissed. “And be quiet about it.” Railrat Pharaoh slid over the top rung. His upturned face caught the moonslight.

“Hello? Who dat dere?” Chagdi Bassareeni called from too damn close.

“Listen up,” Sweetness hissed down into the dark abyss. “We're pulling up for Juniper. Don't wait for the train to stop, there's always someone looking out when we pull up. Wait until we're dead slow,
dead
dead slow, then do what I told you back there, drop down between the carriages on to the track. There's plenty of room if you lie flat, on your back, not your face. Wait until you can't see the taillights any more, then you're safe. Juniper's a
merde-
hole, but the Xipotle Slow Stopper's through in a couple a days and they've no dignity. You can ride the roof for two centavos. When it gets to Xipotle, it splits; front half goes on to become the Grand Trunk Rapido. Take you right to Grand Valley.”

She glanced over her shoulder. Fat-thighed Chagdi was standing at the far end of the truck, sending his torch beam swinging around like a jive-dancer.

“Got to go. Luck.”

“Thank you. I owe you.”

“You do, but I don't mean to collect, so I'll write it off.”

“Sweetness Octave, why did you do this?”

Heavy feet on steel roof.

“I don't know, I haven't time.”

“I want to know.”

“Okay, okay. I don't like seeing people getting trapped in things they can't get out of. Especially by other people.”

“That'll do.”

“That's all you're getting.”

The face was swallowed by the grating black.
This is the last time I will ever see you, Pharaoh
, Sweetness thought.
Quick and desperate and unprepared.
But all partings should be sudden. Sweetness stood up. Chagdi's beam dazzled her.

“Watch it with that thing.”

“It is you.”

Light-blinded, then night-blinded. Phosphenes flocked like bats across Sweetness's retinas.

“You find anything?”

A soft, gritty thud, then the brakes reached a crescendo. Can't see a smile in the dark.

“Hey, what happened to your djubba-stick?”

“Bastard caught hold of it. Took it with him.”

“You djubba him?”

“Right off.” A whistle and a downward curve of the hand.

“And is he?”

“Couldn't see. Don't think so.”

Plump Chagdi's face resolved out of the dazzle. He looked piqued. He had a reputation for capturing and tormenting caboose vermin and probably resented that his had not been the thumb on the djubba-stick trigger.

“Pity you lost the stick, but.”

“Yeah.” Sweetness sized up the dark gulf she must leap to get back home. “Pity.”

F
orty-two long years on the iron road buys a woman a measure of dignity. When Grandmother Taal made one of her increasingly rare progresses down
Catherine of Tharsis
, she stopped, and the train moved for her.

“Honoured Grandmother,”
Tante
Miriamme cooed from her cubby by the crew companionway. Grandmother Taal grunted acknowledgement and shuffled down another painful step. God smite these shoes.

“Fine morning,
Amma
Taal,” called Finvar Traction, penduluming across the feed pipes and plasma buffers in his abseil harness. No one believed that all this swinging and dangling was necessary to his routine repairs but he clearly enjoyed it and he was one of the sights of the railroad.

“Umph.” Too damn hot in layered skirts and tight-laced bodice on a day like this. Electric blue sky. The hottest colour.

“Regards to thee and thine!” hailed cheery Silva Deep-Fusion, eternally white to the elbows in flour.

Grandmother Taal nodded and grabbed for the handrail as the train jolted over points. Son and heir he might be, but Naon was no part of the Engineer his father had been, in his day. But neither was he cyberhatted into the autonomic systems, the drooling autopilot on the long, boring straights. Grandmother Taal waited for the last creak of brake and huff of steam before stepping down to the ground. A tip of the finger to Prevell Watchman Junior in his shunting turret.

“Grandmo'r!” he yelled in warning. She was already pulling on her track vest. Not so old, nor yet so incontinent, as to forget the laws of the universe.
Catherine of Tharsis
dragged her long load past Grandmother Taal. She fished in her waist purse for her needle case. Her thick thumb opened the leather wallet, felt out the smooth shaft of the delicate obsidian needles, anticipating power and pain. Had they no respect for a woman in her forties, that they
make her stand under hot sun and stitch coloured silk through the pallid skin of her forearms? But her magic had never been respected. It was too useful, despite its limitations. Her clients found creative ways of bringing their woes into its peculiar bailiwick. Had there been someone she could have thanked and cursed, she would have, copiously, but her power was not a gift. It had just happened, the day of her womaning. The best she could work it out was that the power had gone out of her into the brown smear in her pants, then from there to every other brown thing in the world.

The ore-trucks clunked past. The tail of the beast appeared around the slow bend. Henden Stuard was waiting at the foot of the galley stairs, hat of office outheld in salutation. He whispered into the gosport. Three hundred cars forward, Naon Engineer applied the brakes. The companionway came to a halt with such precision that Grandmother Taal need only step up.

“What is your need?” she asked.

“He is constipated,” suave Henden said.

Junior Stuard kitchen hands and vegetable peelers bowed out of Grandmother Taal's way as she moved through the galley car to the Pursery. There Brellen Stuard greeted her gravely.

“He is constipated.”

Shafto Stuard sat enthroned among golden cushions in the observation box. Light stained by painted glass dappled his strained features.

“It is eight days now,” Brellen whispered.

“You have tried dried fruit?” Grandmother Taal said.

“And marmalade,” Shafto said, uncomfortably.

A slight lurch told Grandmother Taal
Catherine of Tharsis
was under way again. She watched the track unfold from under the bay of the observation box and wondered how it might flavour a family's soul, to be always looking at where you have come from and never where you are going.

“I suggested a hemp bandage, soaked in oil of paraffin,” Brellen said. “But he could not swallow more than a finger of it.”

“Nor I,” said Grandmother Taal.

“Please help me,” Shafto pleaded.

Grandmother Taal contemplated a moment. It was good for the mystique.

“It is doable.”

“Is there anything you require?” Brellen asked, head bowed. Mint tea would have been good but Grandmother Taal remembered that once Brellen's Aunt Mae had offered her tea in a smeared glass. Her opinion of the Stuards as a Domiety had never recovered.

“Nothing, thank you.” She took out her needle case. “Children are advised not to watch.” She squinted in the stained-glass light to thread the right silk through the proper needle. The track outside, she noted, was now a blur of sleepers. She felt more secure in her power with fast steel beneath her. Immobility troubled Grandmother Taal. She uncapped her fountain pen and bared her forearm.

“Try to be concise, but poignant. It should express all your feeling.”

Shafto Stuard looked the old woman in the eyes, then took the pen and wrote STRAIN in bad lettering on the veined pale skin.

“Very well.” Grandmother Taal picked up the purple thread and commenced the humming. It had no significance and little tune—a medley of toe-tappers off that All-Swing Radio the young ones listened to—but it kept her voice busy while she embroidered the word
strain
on to her forearm.

It still hurt.

She tried something more closely related to the pain, reading the memories of past magics in the white scarifications of her arms. Those arcs and loops, buried under successive woundings like the surface of a cratered moon, had been that time she moved the big earth-making machine off the line when it had upped and died inconveniently. Easier done, alive and dead. At least the teams slopping brown paint over its orange and blue mottled hide had been spared the moaning and hectoring about fine points of contractural detail endemic among earth-makers. That time the magic had been strong enough, and the paint sufficient to hold it, to flip the cussed thing half a kilometre into an old impact crater. Odd, that the power was not a scalar thing. It had been so much more difficult and painful to change Levant Traction's brown eyes blue for one night of passion with a track surveyor for Lombarghini. Her wrist bore the memory of his few, sweaty hours; the white scar of the word
pretty
.

She glanced down. On the “A.” Blood welled from the stitches, soaked the silk, stiffened. Bad to put in, worse to take out. Brellen looked politely revolted.

“How are we?” Grandmother Taal asked her client.

“I can feel something,” Shafto said with a curious light in his eyes. “Moving.”

“Deep within?” Brellen asked. Shafto nodded. Grandmother Taal kept stitching.

“Oh,” cried Shafto.

“Ah,” murmured Grandmother Taal. Almost there. The downward slash of the “N,” then the blissful ascent to the finish. Done.

“Ohh,” moaned Shafto Stuard. Brellen mopped his brow with a paper coaster.

“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, letting the needle fall and swing on the end of its silk. Blood paraded in thick drips down the thread.

“Oooh,” Shafto said, eyes opening in wonder. “Oohhh.”

“Ah,” said Grandmother Taal, feeling behind her for a chair.

Eeeeeee
, said an entirely new voice.
Eeee. Eeee. Eeeeeeee.
For an instant, puzzlement on every face. Then realisation:
Catherine of Tharsis
herself was crying out, the top-C shriek Grandmother Taal had last heard the night Marya Stuard had driven off the Starke gang.

The emergency whistle.

All hands rushed for their duty stations, never to reach them. A tremendous wrench threw everyone from their places. Shafto was flung hard against the stained-glass bay and went down in a heap. Brellen floundered among golden cushions. Grandmother Taal found herself toppling eyes-first toward her neatly arranged needles. She grabbed at a cupboard handle and twisted herself aside. Cutlery and crockery sprung from racks, a full samovar of tea flung itself from the spirit-burner to spill boiling liquid across the floor. Chairs tumbled, tables capsized, antimacassars flew. Grandmother Taal was rolled toward the spreading stain of scalding tea. Somewhere she was conscious there was a sharp pain in her hip. She would bother with that later; if any of them survived this thing. She kicked her legs and swung herself away from the deadly tea on the hinged door.

What was happening? A wreck? A derailment? Yet more dacoits? God forfend, a head-on, a containment breach? No, not that, the failsafes would blow the tail of the train free and send the locomotive shrieking on ahead to its final thermonuclear immolation.

And it ended. Like that. With as little warning or manners as it had begun. Everyone lay where they had fallen, stunned motionless. The silence was eerily oppressive. Not even the familiar creaks and clicks and hisses of track life.
Catherine of Tharsis
stood on the mainline, inexplicably halted.