Ares Express E-Book

Ian McDonald

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Desolation Road
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 685

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A Mars of the imagination, like no other, in a colorful, witty SF novel, taking place in the kaleidoscopic future of Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Ares Express is set on a terraformed Mars where fusion-powered locomotives run along the network of rails that is the planet's circulatory system and artificial intelligences reconfigure reality billions of times each second. One young woman, Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12th, becomes the person upon whom the future -- or futures -- of Mars depends. Big, picaresque, funny; taking the Mars of Ray Bradbury and the more recent, terraformed Marses of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Bear, Ares Express is a wild and woolly magic-realist SF novel, featuring lots of bizarre philosophies, strange, mind-stretching ideas, and trains as big as city blocks. REVIEWS "Ares Express is a long, adventure-filled, extravagantly colorful, often funny, quite moving, highly imaginative, excellently written story, set on a glorious Mars built partly of sharp-edged Kim Stanley Robinson-style extrapolation, but mostly of lush, loving, Ray Bradbury-style semi-SF, semi-Fantasy, Martian dreams.... I loved it wholeheartedly." – SF Site "Hugo-winner McDonald's virtues have long been underappreciated by major North American publishers... McDonald's fantastic Mars is vividly detailed and owes much to Bradbury's Martian stories. Despite a bit of hand waving around technology that is glibly indistinguishable from magic, this sequel is entirely worthy of its rightly lauded predecessor [Desolation Road]." – Publishers Weekly "One of the strangest, weirdest, fantastic reads of your life." – SF Crowsnest "McDonald is clever, lyrical… snarky, and utterly wondrous. The characters would be completely unbelievable in our world, but in theirs they are inevitable..." – Night Owl Reviews

Leseprobe

Ares Express

Copyright © Ian McDonald, 2001.All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.

The right of Ian McDonald to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Cover design by Dirk Berger.

ISBN 978-1-625670-74-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

Chapter 1

Here comes Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. She is eight, and this is the manner of her coming.

First, you see the sand. It is red and of a particular grain type produced only by wind action. It smells electric; there is much iron in it. It draws lightning out of the occasional clouds; once or twice in a long year, rain. Where the lightning strikes, veins of slag-iron strike deep into the sand. This is rust-sand, strewn profligately about this contourless landscape. Red sand, rust-sand, red dust, a desert of iron studded with ugly stones. The wind never ceases out here on the plains of the high high north. It has teased the sand into steep-sided ridges, long meandering sifs, crescent moon barchans. This is a sinuous, sensual landscape, curves and seductions from the slip-sliding dune-faces to the curve of the close horizon.

A solitary hard erection confronts the soft northern desert of iron. Five metres high, a slim steel shaft, scabbed by the excoriating winds, scarred by summer lightning. It is a natural victim for summer lightning. On top of the shaft, three lights, red topmost, amber in the middle, on the bottom, green. Signal lights. In the middle of a rust-desert.

Now you see the rail. Two perfectly parallel lines of Bethlehem Ares steel, rolled in the mills of New Merionedd, married together by pour-stone sleepers, tied down by figure-of-eight tie-bolts: pinned, plated and bolted. Straight and absolute as a geometrical proposition. Get down. Hunker down — not too low, under this sun your cheek will stick to the hot rail and rip. Just enough to sight along them, gun-barrels aimed at the place where horizon and heat-dazzle meet and melt. Straight and absolute. You can go over the edge of the world and they’ll run straight and absolute for seven hundred kilometres. In the cabs of the big transcontinentals there are red buttons that the engineers must touch every twenty seconds or the brakes will automatically apply. It’s easy to fall asleep over the speed levers out here. It’s a hypnotic land. It draws your soul out through your staring eyes along the twin steel rails, to whatever dwells in the silver shimmer at the edge of the world. Occasional track-side tangles of sand-polished metal prove the dangers that lie in the long straight track.

But we drive ahead of ourselves here. We must stay a while at the signal light, and ask questions. Why signal what? What is there in this dust and rust of any significance? Two things. The first is the passing loop. This patch of desert is the only place within two hundred kilometres where trains may pass and gain access to the single mainline. Here crews exchange ancient brass tokens — part key, part shield — to unlock the line. Conversations too, news and gossip, sometimes family members, or body fluids, if they are the big slow ore-haulers whose timetables allow a little society. The second thing is that, if you look up the line, you will see it part company with itself. This is Borealis Junction: one line drives forcefully on into the snow country of the north pole, where the cold can glue an Engineer’s hand to the throttles as this heat will seal flesh to steel. Up and over the top of the world, and down into the old lands of Deuteronomy and Dioscu: green places replete with grazers and herd-beasts, where every village roof-tree is high and holy with prayer kites. The other line drifts to port until it curves out of sight among the thunderous chasms of Fosse mountains, spanned by treacherous trestle bridges and pour-stone viaducts, that disgorge nerve-wracked Engineers out on to the bleak mesa-lands of Isidy. For half a quartersphere the lines are drawn together by mutual magnetism until they meet once again at Schiaparelli Junction to run westward along the vast synclinorium of Great Oxus and the thousand towns of Grand Valley, where the Worldroof sparkles on the horizon like a reef of morning-lit cloud.

So this signal light is more than an arbitrary stop-go in the wilderness. It is the prefect of line safety, it is guardian of the line tokens, it is the gateway to new landscapes. And, no less than any of these, it is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th’s Uncle.

It is time she made her entrance.

You become aware that the rail burning the sole of your desert boot is trembling. Bend down — don’t touch! Yes. Rail humming. Train coming. You squint under the shade of your hand down the long straight line. What is real and what is potential is still undecided in that haze. But the rails are singing now: a deep, tight, harmonious keening. A sharp dry clack. You have to look around at the nothingness several times before you can see the small but significant change. The points have switched on to the passing loop.

Peer again: shapes moving in the haze, flowing so you cannot be certain it is one thing or many. Silver in silver. Then the shadows flow, silver out of silver: a winged woman, wing-arms folded back, breasts out-thrust, hair streaming in the wind. In your amazement you almost do not notice that the track is roaring. Red dust bounces up from between the sleepers. Now you realise your mistake. This is no angel. Its shadow flows out behind it into a shield of darkness: you are looking at the boiler-cap and figurehead of a great train. A very great train indeed: the faceless land has been playing tricks with your perspective. You had thought the winged woman pixie sized, maybe a medium-grade Amshastria, but close and manageable. No. This silver angel-woman is enormous, the curved prow of the boiler gargantuan. The train is kilometres away. But it is very very big. Airship big. City-block big. Ocean-liner big, if this world had oceans fit for liners. The buffer plates, held out like a prize-fighter’s weaving fists, are three metres across. The cow-catcher, baroquely ornamented with figures from the Ekaterina Angelography, could sweep entire phyla from its path. The eight bogies are each the height of a decent house: the spokes of the drive wheels are the crucified arms of windmills. The drive shafts, the thickness of a thick man’s body, pump with the regular, tireless ease of a Belladonna sweat-house laddie. The headlamp is a monstrous cyclops eye, furious with heat, all revealing. It is hooded now, but with the magic hour, it sends its sheer white shaft kilometres ahead of it, a vanguard of the divine. The steam that blasts from the sharply raked stack is so hot that it travels a third the length of the fusion boiler before it condenses into visibility. This train leaves a pure white contrail downtrack for ten kilometres.

Another glance at that smoke-stack. Down at the base, where it flares into the main caisson, is that a handrail? Are those staircases, is that a balcony? Those gleams of highlight, could they be windows? There, just above the halo of the Bethlehem Ares Railroads angel, is that an arc of glass, like the bridge of a ship? And balancing precariously on the swept-back piston housings, spilling steps and ladders over the buffer cylinders, what else can those be but low buildings? A swathe of bungalows clings to the skirts of Bethlehem Ares Railroads Class 22 Heavy Fusion Hauler Catherine of Tharsis. And there, on that perilous railed-in viewpoint underneath the smoke-stack, is that a figure?

Nearer now. Yes, a sun-brown lank of a female dressed in the uniform orange track vest of her clan over a flirty floral-print frock. A tousle of black curls tosses around her face, combed back from great cheekbones by the speed of passage.

And now you notice how close the train is to you. Too much time spent staring at the girl on the high balcony. It’s on top of you. You should — you must — run. But you cannot. The whole world is quaking to the pound of the engines, and you are transfixed in its track like a hopper in headlights. A steel avalanche rears over you. Crushing death pants in your face. The black and silver angel looms over you like judgement, and turns away. Catherine of Tharsis swings on to the passing loop, tucking her three kilometre tail neatly behind her. Brakes shriek, steel and grit bite and grind. It takes a lot of space for the big transpolars to stop. This is by no means the largest. There are triple-headers hauling ten kilometres out of Iron Mountain. The magic thousand trucks. Those mothers are visible from orbit, like steel rivers.

The caboose clears the points. It’s a frantic congeries of railroad utility and Cathrinist whimsy. No Step Here, with hand-painted round-eyed icons of the Seven Sanctas. Grit boxes and prayer flags, now windless and limp. The Bassareeni are a gaudy people. Socially below the salt, but the Engineers have always got on well with them, outside the Forma. There was a mingling of genes some generations back. The Stuards have never forgiven, never forgotten, but the Stuards are a notoriously anal Domiety.

A trickle, a creep, a hiss of steam. Thirty-three thousand tons of Bethlehem Ares steel balances on two ten-centimetre ribbons of metal under the hot, high sun.

Clunk. The points have switched over again, back to the mainline. The signal light has gone from caution to green. New train coming. But that is not part of your story. Your story is ended here. Your part as observer of these events is complete. Your eyes have shown us what only the desert things and God the Panarchic see, at this forsaken junction in the high polar desert. You are dissolved back into a greater story that begins here, the story of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

Chapter 2

Naon Sextus Solstice-Rising Engineer 11th always experienced a little death when he took his hands off the drive lever. Post coital. He coyly shrugged the thought away — exaggeration — but that first time when his own father Bedzo 10th had taken his hand and laid it on the drive bar, when he lifted it off again, had there not been a tiny damp spot on the fly of his pants?

Twenty years rodding and railing had made him acute to every whisper and vibration of his machine. The fusion fires ebbing in the magnetic pinch-torus was a languid decay, a sorrowful limpening. Flaccid. He was never truly himself while the fusion engines slumbered. He grew distracted and irritable. All his family had learned this decades ago and were wise.

He called up a track report from North West Regional Track at Suvebray. The mottled quartersphere resolved in the projector focus, the mainlines a web of throbbing vessels like the arteries of a womb. The fast Northern Lights Express was still twenty minutes down despite its Engineers rattling every valve up into the ochre on the long Axidy incline. Derailment at Perdition Junction, down to a single track. Damn locals, jammed with commuters and roof-riding goondahs, stopping at every hole in the hedge. Woolamagong! Serendip! Acacia Heights! Atomic Avenue! Naon Sextus was not a man who bore delays with grace. Every lost second felt pared from the exposed end of his life, like hard salt cheese. As a child he had read and memorised timetables. For fun. He snatched the monocular from its peg, peered impatiently down the branchline but even the vantage of the bridge of Catherine of Tharsis could not penetrate the haze.

‘Tcha!’

Casting around for an object on which to flog his annoyance, he noticed through the grille of the catwalk overhead a pair of yellow desert-boot soles. He turned his lenses on them.

‘Mother of plenty, has that child no shame?’

A woman’s voice answered from behind him: Child’a’grace, Mrs Asiim Engineer 11th, floury to the elbows, folding samosas in the domestic galley.

‘What, dearest?’

Firmness was as much a part of Naon Sextus’s character as good timekeeping. Many a time the unexpected voice of his wife had almost tricked him into speaking but he had never lapsed, not once, in four years. He tightened his lips, gave the nasty cough that was the sign for his wife to look at him. Naon Sextus turned from the control board, enough to glimpse Child’a’grace, but not so much that she might think he was looking at her.

No underwear! his fingers said, shaking with indignation.

‘It’s a fine day,’ Child’a’grace commented, deftly sealing a pastry triangle and flipping it into hot fat.

The shame! Naon Engineer signed.

‘Who’s to see?’

Every staring soul on the thirteen twenty-seven Northern Lights Express! For something was emerging from the liquid light dazzle. Due in three and a half minutes! As a coda, his thumbs added, What will they think?

‘They will think,’ said Child’a’grace breezily, here fishing samosa from the fry-bath with a chicken-wire scoop, ‘that there is a fine young woman of nearly nine with the body of an Avata and the impatience of a rat whom you and I both know, husband, should long since have been married.’ She drained the golden oil back into the pan. ‘And if by some chance, the passing winds should blow that skirt up — which they might, for if I remember, it is quite short and floaty — and they see that she wears not underpants, then the more fortune to them and I hope their sleeps are tormented by wants for many a night.’

Before leaving her family at an unnamed water stop under the volcanoes, Child’a’grace had been Susquavanna, a catering people who for two long centuries had hawked hot savouries up and down the platforms of the north-west quartersphere. Pastry was in their genes, like steam in the blood of the Engineers, but she resolutely refused to observe the proprieties of caste, namely the eternal distinction between track and platform. This was deeply grievous to Naon Sextus, a son of his father and his line before him. Truly, the dowry had cleared up the matter of the remortgage, but he frequently wished that Grandmother Taal had matched him with someone a little less platform. But after eleven years, the food was still exciting. The sex can go, the conversation will go, the respect may be trodden into a familiar track of predictability, but by the Mother of Mercies, cooking endures.

But the girl had no underwear, and one under-dignified marriage was enough. Women with no knickers ended married to Bassareenis and dropping their sprogs in the caboose. His fingers prepared to riposte this to Child’a’grace but the shapes were blown away by the sudden slam of the express train’s passing.

Chapter 3

There was a moment that Sweetness Asiim Engineer treasured above all other distinct moments. She had travelled long enough around the globe to admit it as almost sexual, but it was entirely her own. It began with a brief flutter, an intake of breath, a stirring of hair and clothes: the pressure shift. At this point you obtained best effect by closing the eyes and listening to the swelling thunder of wheels. Hold the dread: fight the instinct to look at the source of that unholy noise. Then, the second pressure point: there. Sweetness opened her eyes. The fast train reared like a cliff before her. The world was nothing but steel and steam and blasting, shattering sound. Sweetness unleashed the deep, dark fear: You’re on the wrong track, the points have failed, sixty thousand tons of train are about to meet head on at three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, and you’re right between them!

It would be quick, and glorious.

The mountain aimed itself at her heart and, at the last instant, turned away.

The pressure wave punched her hard, blinded her with steam and dust. Then the slipstream yanked at her: You, come. Sweetness needed no invitation. She leaped after the blur of chrome and black. Along clattering catwalks. Down iron staircases. Across vertiginous gantries, over platforms, hurdling the sprawling legs of brother Sleevel, lolling idle with his best mate Rother’am watching the afternoon pelota on a handheld.

‘Sle.’

‘What? Uh. Just my sister.’

‘Uh.’

Sweetness raced the faces behind the tinted window glass but the faces were always going to win. The wind that dragged her was failing. It dropped her in a little iron-framed oriole high on the side of the starboard tender coupling. She leaned out over the brass railing, raised her hand in salute to the glass observation car, the rattle in the express’s tail. On the open rear balcony was a fine city lady in a sheer lace dress. Wake turbulence tugged her parasol from her fingers. It soared up and away, a bamboo and waxed-paper flying saucer. The city lady looked up, vexed, and in that moment her eyes met those of the black-haired girl in the orange track vest in the wrought-iron carbuncle on the flank of the big hauler.

Lady and train were a thin black snake winding across the red desert. Carried high on the winds, the parasol floated into invisibility. The haze swallowed all. Gone again.

‘You’re a fool to yourself,’ the voice said after a decent interlude. The thunder of wheels had masked his approach, but Sweetness had deduced Romereaux’s presence from his smell. All the Deep-Fusion people had a distinctive musk, like electricity and cool evenings after hot days, or concrete after rain. Sweetness imagined it was what atoms smelled like.

‘You think.’

He was leaning against the turret door in the easy-pleasey way men can when it’s not important for them to be looked at. Romereaux’s people shared hair colour and quality with the Engineers — and body fluids, certain generations ago — but he was slight and pale, with a narrow shadow of attempted goatee. The sun did not get to the Deep-Effs in the heart of the big train.

‘Two hundred years of Engineer tradition says I know what I’m talking about.’

He was a year and a half Sweetness’s senior and, bad genes or not, next corroboree he would marry a Traction daughter off the Class 88 Four Ways. She would miss him.

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

He saw the way she looked down the long straight track and wanted to lie, to promise unpromisable things, but he had never been able to lie to Sweetness in all their years growing up together on Catherine of Tharsis.

‘Sle will be Engineer 12th. You know that.’

She did, she knew it like she knew the sun would rise tomorrow, but she still growled, ‘All Sle’s interested in is pelota and grab ass. And he’s not even any good at them.’

Romereaux smiled palely. She went on.

‘There are other branches of the Domiety have women drivers. The Slipher Engineers. The Great Western folk. Down in New Merionedd every other Engineer is a woman. And couldn’t you just pretend, eh? Couldn’t you just for once tell me, yeah, sure, Sweetness, you’ll drive, you’ll be up there with your hand on the drive lever? Would that be so hard, for once?’

‘Sweetness …’

‘I know.’

He said, ‘Have you been to see your uncle yet?’

‘Mother’a … I near forgot. How long’ve we got?’

‘About five minutes.’

‘I’ll go now, then. You coming?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

Trainpeople, Sweetness thought as she waited for Ricardo Traction to crank down the access ladder. We can go any place we like in the whole wide world but only as long as we stay on the rails.

‘Regards to your uncle!’ Tante Miriamme Traction called from the tiny window of her laundry room as Sweetness hopped down on to the red sand. Stay on the rails. Bad luck will come in the night and climb up through your nose and through your ears if you wander off the safe track. Superstitions, litanies, observations. Casual coincidences that have become baked over years into causes and effects. Believed truths. Like daughters don’t drive. But she still glanced over her shoulder when she could no longer feel the psychic closeness of Catherine of Tharsis on the back of her neck. The big train stood like a black monolith fused out of rust sand.

Romereaux paid his respects first. A quick press of the palm to the sand-scoured shaft of the signal light. Everyone — crew, that was, passengers never counted — on Catherine of Tharsis was related in some way, even the boisterous Bassareenis, but Romereaux’s connection with Uncle Neon was tenuous and he had never really believed that a soul could exist in a railroad signal. That might have been why he had never felt anything but Bethlehem Ares galvanised steel, Sweetness thought. He bowed and stood back.

Sweetness clapped her hands twice. The sound was small and flat in the huge and flat desert. She uncapped the flask she had collected from Madre Marya Stuard and poured a libation of cold tea. It frothed and stained the red sand like urine. Sweetness closed her eyes and boldly pressed her hand against the shaft. As ever, it began with sound-shadow, steel-slither, the hum-thrum of wind and wheels on rails, a memory of a life in rapid motion, twin ribbons of metal singing like the tines of a tuning fork. Her hearing opened like wings, was down at the bottom listening to the strum of the silicon and the songs the stones sing, then up through the wind-tumbled grains, listening to them building into harmonies of sand, a slow sea breaking grain by grain. Outwards still, until she could hear everything contained within the girdling horizon. The rhythms and pulses of her own body joined with the chord of sand song. For a divine moment the great northern desert was a single quantum wave function, modelled in sand like a Shandastria scrying-garden. Sweetness stood at the locus of maximum probability.

She opened her eyes. As ever, she was somewhere else. In this place there were no rails and no train and where the desert met the far mountains the red bled up into the sky. Blood-red sky, a pink zenith. No clouds in that sky, neither hope nor memory of rain. The rocks around her feet were salted with frost. The sand on which she stood seethed with static electricity. In all the world there were only two things, her and the upright of the signal light, rooted obstinately in the alien earth.

Sweetness had always understood three things about this place. First, that neither of them should really be here at all. Second, that it should be as instantly lethal to her as if the soil were acid. Third, that this was their private place, her uncle and her, and that she could never tell anyone about it. Not even her family. It had been bad enough with Little Pretty One. They had talked Flying Therapist. This …

‘Uncle.’

When he spoke, he sounded less like the practical, piratical man she remembered, and more like she imagined God the Panarchic. In a voice that seemed to come from a great distance, he asked, ‘What year is it?’

‘Same as last time.’

‘When was last time?’

‘Duoseptember. The autumn equinox. The Cadmium Valley contract?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Like a sandstorm subsiding. ‘What year is that, exactly?’ She told him. He said, ‘I lose the track, here.’

As she knew that these conversations with her uncle took place outside normal space, Sweetness also understood that they occupied a special time, neither past nor present nor future, but other, real-time inverted. Dream time.

‘So,’ Uncle Neon said. ‘Sle …’

‘Still thinks he’s going to be a big pelota star. ‘Cept he’s got two right feet and a fat gut and his head is fried from too much television and wanking.’

‘He hasn’t married that Cussite girl with the fifteen gold ear-rings, yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Has he … ?’

‘Met her yet. Not that, either.’

‘Ah. I see.’ He did too, much and wide, but unfocused, like a distorting lens. Sweetness frequently tripped over Uncle Neon’s nostalgias for futures that might never happen. And sometimes the branching future he picked in this mother of marshalling yards was the mainline ahead.

‘They want you wed,’ he said.

‘Tell me.’

‘To a Stuard. A Ninth Avata Stuard, on the Llangonedd run.’

‘Mother’a’grace …’

‘Don’t worry yourself.’

‘Don’t worry myself? You’ve just told me I’m going to blow my wild years brewing samovars of mint tea for Cathar pilgrims.’

Uncle Neon had an appropriately scary laugh. It felt like sand scouring the inside of your skull. Sweetness winced.

‘Sweetness, your wild years are far from blown,’ he said, and sang an old nursery rhyme about a sailor who sailed across the sky and brought back his love a silver fig and a diamond rattle. He did not sing well, even in death, but Sweetness was patient with relatives. When he had finished she left a polite pause before asking, ‘Is that it?’

‘That what?’

‘I’m going to marry a Stuard and my wild years are far from over?’

In the pause that followed, Sweetness imagined the three-bulbed signal light cocked to one side, quizzically.

‘Yes. That’s it. Don’t worry, though. Trust me. Now, tell me, how is she?’

By ‘she’, Sweetness understood Catherine of Tharsis and that she would see no more of her future. She huffed through her nose in exasperation at the unruly oracle.

‘The aft containment field still isn’t seating right.’

‘Is it making a sound like this?’ This being a twittering, hissing whistle.

‘More like this.’ Sweetness added a tweeting click, on a rising cadence.

Uncle Neon clicked his tongue.

‘You want to get that seen to. What are those Deep-Fusion folk about? I don’t know, since I died, she’s gone to pieces. No one has any respect for good machinery any more. He certainly doesn’t. His head’s completely up his arse, and I don’t just mean trains. Look at that poor sow he married — your sainted mother, I mean.’ Uncle Neon’s telepathic apology felt like two crossed fingers circling Sweetness’s frontal lobe in blessing. She loved the feeling. It made her purr. ‘He’s still not talking to her.’

‘Not a whisper. He signs.’

Another neural tut.

‘It should be you. I’ve always said that. You’d get that field generator set right toute suite.’

‘I wouldn’t have let it get into that state in the first place,’ Sweetness said proudly. Too many dead-end tracks toppling into glossy green craters were the monuments to sloppy tokamak maintenance. The Tracksters laid fresh rail around them but the blast craters stayed hot for lifetimes, glowing sickly in the high plains night. Thinking of them, Sweetness flared, ‘But I’m going to marry a poncing Stuard on the God-shuttle and make tea and almond slices, amn’t I?’

‘You are?’

‘You said you saw it.’

‘I see a lot more than I say. That I can say.’

Says who? Sweetness wanted to say but the words were sucked off her lips by the sudden dust wind whipping up around her, a dust she knew was not dust, or rust, but moments. Granulated time. She was being drawn back. The journey home was always quicker and more precipitous than the way out: a swooping giddiness, a rustling blackness, a sense of wings wide enough to wrap the world, and then there; the big big desert and the hot hot sun.

Romereaux was squatting on his heels by the rail, scooping up palmfuls of dust and trickling them through his fingers. Idling time away.

‘How do you do that?’ he said.

‘Do what?’ The other place took a moment to blink away, like grit in the eye.

‘Whatever it is you do. Wherever it is you go.’

‘Go?’ Suspicious: what had he seen? ‘I don’t go anywhere. I mean, you’re there, but you’re not there.’

‘But where are you?’

‘What’s this about?’

Romereaux shrugged, opened his hand, looked at the earth and small stones clutched there.

‘I’m just interested in what you do, where you go.’

‘Well don’t be.’

‘You’re very defensive.’

‘I’ve got to have something for myself.’ On a train where five families live on top of each other in a tapestry of territories and societies. ‘Some place for me.’

‘So you do go somewhere.’

‘What’s this to you?’

‘Nothing. They’ve whistled.’

That brought her up.

‘What? How many times?’

‘Twice.’

‘Mother’a …’

Three whistles and the train left. With or without you. Fare or family. We’ve got a railroad to run, don’t you know? Timetables to keep. As Sweetness sprinted for Catherine of Tharsis, steam plumed up from the calliope mounted where the main boiler joined the tender. The impudent notes of Liberty Lillian’s Rag swaggered across the desert as Madre Mercedes Deep-Fusion’s asbestos-gloved fingers hopped across the seething keys. All aboard that’s coming aboard! All a-ground that’s staying behind. Skirt hitched around her thighs, Sweetness pounded down the track. Romereaux passed her effortlessly. Behind them, Uncle Neon closed his amber eye and opened his green eye. Catherine of Tharsis cleared her cylinders with a shout of steam. Cranks flailed, wheels spun. Like a crustal plate shifting, the behemoth began to move.

Sweetness saw Romereaux snatch at the bottom rung of the companionway as it retracted. Then it was past her head and moving in utterly the opposite direction. Sweetness spun on her heel and raced after the receding ladder. House-high wheels churned beside her head. Romereaux crouched on the lowest step, hand outstretched. Mother’a’grace, it was going to be close.

‘Romereaux!’

The reaching hand was pulling away. With the dregs of her strength, Sweetness leaped. Romereaux’s hand was an iron manacle around her wrist. Sweetness slammed into the relief valve on the luff housing. Winded, she swung from Romereaux’s grip. Drive shafts hammered beside her ear.

‘I can’t …’ Romereaux’s face read; youthful strength overstretched by sharp reality. Sweetness swung, tried to kick herself towards the diamond tread of the rung. Nailtips grazed steel. The sleeper-ends beneath her were a blur of concrete. Fall now, and it would be worse than miss the train. She kicked again, reached.

‘Ahhh!’

Fingers locked around metal rung. Romereaux pulled her up until both hands had a firm grip. He gathered a fistful of track jacket and floral-print summer frock and hauled Sweetness on to the companionway. Metal scraped bare shin, she paddled with her feet. Boot treads found stair treads.

Home.

‘Close one,’ Tante Miriamme called, sheets a-folding as Romereaux and Sweetness scurried past her window. ‘And Sweetness, in the desert? A true lady never forgets her underwear.’

Chapter 4

Two hundred kilometres up, the orbital mirror caught sunlight from beneath the edge of the world and winked it into Naon Engineer’s eye. Momentarily blinded, he dropped the thread of his argument to the floor of the Confab Chamber.

‘Erm …’

‘The marriage portion,’ svelte, dangerous Marya Stuard hinted.

Blithe and holy, the five-kilometre disk of silverskin wheeled down the orbital marches after the setting sun.

‘Oh yes. Of course. What had I suggested?’

‘Five thousand dollars in the chest.’

‘Ah, yes.’

A glance at Grandfather Bedzo, drooling in the Remote Steering Cubby under the copper curls of the cyberhat. Tanking up should be straightforward enough a process to entrust to the decrepit old Engineer, but Naon 11th did not like the way the old man’s wall eye was rolling.

‘Plus …’

‘What?’

‘Two per cent on the next five years.’

A beat of fist on the live wood conference table. Grandfather Bedzo started in his decades-deep senescence. He remembered the hard edge of his wife’s hand.

‘Never!’ Grandmother Taal declared. She was a little, pickled kernel of a woman, packed with meat and life and potential. At forty-two she still shunted the weightiest of bargains when the locodores in their red flannel tailcoats came loping in their sedan chairs into the sidings to call the day’s contracts. Her eyes were sharp little black flies. ‘One per cent, over three years.’

Naon Engineer 11th glanced again at his sire. He was banging his foot against a riveted bulkhead in time to the swash of water through the reservoir pipes. Naon prayed the Lords of the Iron Way that Bedzo would resist an incontinence attack. It would make the marriage bargaining so very much harder.

‘One and three quarter per cent and four years.’

Engineer and Stuard matriarchs locked eyes over the bargaining table. On this oval of wood, reputedly an Original Branch from the Tree of World’s Beginning, the Articles of Operation had been signed twelve generations and a billion kilometres back by Engineer and Stuard the First.

‘Were he of your lineage, Tante Marya, I might concur,’ Grandmother Taal said. ‘But this …’

‘Narob,’ piped Salam Serene Stuard, youngest of the Domiety, first time at the big table and blessedly ignorant of the social games the formidable old ladies loved to play. His great-aunt glared at him.

‘ … is a lad of prospects.’ Meaning, and your granddaughter is just a daughter. A womb, a ladder to history. ‘He is Chef du Chemin. He has his own galley.’

‘In stainless steel,’ Youngest Salam said, with some envy. He had only just been promoted to Linen and Tray Service. Grandmother Taal scooped up his unwise attempt to recover coup like a hot nimki from a station tray-hawker.

‘On the Ninth Avata!’ she said.

‘Yes!’ Naon exclaimed, feeling as if he had missed a couple of turns in the game. ‘One and a quarter per cent, and three and a half years!’

‘Naon!’ Mother-to-son voice. ‘You are without doubt the finest throttleman in this quartersphere, but that is exactly the reason men drive and women bargain. Now …’ She turned to her adversary. ‘She is Engineer born in the bone. She has steam in her soul and oil in her heart and iron in her thighs and fusion fire in her eyes, she has left a million used-up kilometres behind her, she is true granddaughter of this grandmother and know this, she will carve up your Chef du Chemin Narob with his own fine knives, in his own stainless steel galley and serve him with a little salt and chilli to his clients and that is why she will go to Ninth Avata for nothing less than one and half per cent for three years and twenty-four months. Stick. Stop …’

But before Grandmother Taal could call stay and seal the deal, Marya Stuard worked her thumbs behind the gold-embroidered lapels of her tunic and called out, ‘Yes, Engineer, but what is she doing now?’

It was an evil blow that ricocheted across the table from open mouth to raised eyebrow, deflected off Naon Engineer’s dismayed brow, through the porthole, two hundred kilometres up into the evening sky to bounce off the reflecting dish of the big vana, as it slid over the terminator into night, back down to earth two and half kilometres north to the Inatra Fillage Number Six Water Storage Cistern in which Sweetness Engineer joyfully swam. She felt it as a prickle of gooseflesh on her bare back as she stroked toward the concrete lip where Psalli sat, toes teasing the water. Sweetness glanced up; the knuckled rim of the escarpment had risen above the sun. That would explain the sudden shiver. Magic hour. The triskelions of the wind-pumps were lazy silhouettes on the deep blue.

‘You going to be much longer?’ Psalli called as Sweetness tumble-turned into another length. She was a solid, sullen-faced creature, a true Traction. At eight-and-not-a-day more she was Sweetness’s closest female contemporary, thus friend, though Sweetness wondered would she have been had their lives been less mobile. She could be a whining cow.

‘You go on back if you’re cold,’ Sweetness said, elbows hooked over the further ledge of the tank.

‘Nah,’ Psalli grunted.

‘Don’t let me stop you, now.’

The girl shrugged her meaty shoulders. Sweetness kicked off from the far end of the cistern. Two strokes brought her sliding in front of Psalli.

‘Why not?’

Psalli glanced beyond the stepped terraces of water tanks to the truck gardens.

‘They won’t bother you,’ Sweetness said.

‘They keep looking and waving.’

‘So? Okay. Then we’ll give them something to look and wave at.’ A heave brought Sweetness out of the water in a cascade of fat drops. Balanced like a gymnast on the narrow lip, she drew herself up to her full one point seven five bare-ass metres. Honey-skin dewed with billion-year-old fossil water. She scraped her hair behind her ears, put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. It pierced the indigo cool of Inatra like a stiletto. All the dark doll figures that had been clinging to the tall foliage at the edge of the irrigation canals turned as one.

‘Hey! Boys! See this?’ Sweetness wiggled her hips. ‘Well, you can never, ever have this.’ She turned a slow cartwheel on the edge of the pool. The watching boys of Inatra were each and every one struck through the eyes so that ever after they could not love right because tattooed on their retinas was a vision of unattainable youth and loss with arcs of old, cold water flicking from its heels. Sweetness bounced upright. ‘Just thought you should know, right?’ The figures slunk away into the greenery.

Hands on hips, she surveyed her conquest. Inatra was a spring-line town, a place of wells and shafts and pumps, of water shivering silkily down mossy runnels from cistern to cistern, of gurgling irrigation canals and sagely nodding yawnagers, of aloof water-towers and lithe brown children who pranced in the rainbow spray from the leaking fill-hoses. Here the gradual tilt of the great Tanagyre plain cracked like a broken paschal biscuit into the kilometre uplift of the Praesoline Escarpment. Here the big fusion locos paused for a long drink of water before the toil up the ramps and switchovers of the Inatra Ascent. Here, while the trains drank, train people played in water.

‘Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer, you have no shame,’ Psalli said.

‘Great, isn’t it?’

By now her piercing, two-finger whistle had penetrated Catherine of Tharsis’s Domiety Chamber and, though weak, it still had enough strength to climb into Marya Stuard’s ear. She smiled. Everyone around the table had as good a guess as her as to its source. She laid her hand palm upright on the polished wood.

‘Three thousand, one point seven per cent and three years thirty months. Stick stop stay.’

She held Grandmother Taal’s look. The old Engineer woman shrugged.

‘Tinguoise.’

‘Major’s Gate.’

‘Ethan Soul.’

The formula was complete. No one living or undead knew its source, neither could they unsay anything it sealed.

‘I’ll contact the Ninth Avata people and have the contract drawn up.’

Marya Stuard rose from the table with her delegation. As she swept out, Child’a’grace muttered, ‘Too cheap.’

Her husband roared.

‘Tell that woman …’ he commanded Grandmother Taal but she had departed in a rustle of many-layered skirts, so he signed, She is only a daughter! His fingers added, Half a daughter.

Child’a’grace rose in a blossom of sudden fury.

‘Never …’

Sorry sorry my mistake, Naon Engineer signed. He had committed a cardinal sin. He knew that he had handled the negotiations badly. His hands might be on the throttles but he was afraid of Marya Stuard. Afeared, and indebted: no one in any of Catherine of Tharsis’s Domieties was let forget that she had single-handedly faced down the notorious Starke gang as they fleeced a carriage of Lewite Pelerines. Her defiance had cost her a needle in the hip that troubled her when it was political for it to do so, but her example had woken the demons in the milk-mannered pilgrims. As one they had risen, seized the dacoits and ejected them at the next mail drop. Marya Stuard herself had been so incensed at the needle in her side that she had laid out old, dreaded Selwyn Starke with a silver salver flung frisbee-style.

‘Some day, and, please God, soon, that woman’s account will be overdrawn,’ Naon Engineer mumbled as he went to clean Grandfather Bedzo’s tubes and change his bags.

Chapter 5

It was full dark now over Inatra. Under the first glimmerings of the moonring, that tumble of orbital engineering that sustained the world’s fragile habitability, Sweetness walked home alone along the tracks. Psalli had made the most of the space caused by Sweetness’s display and slipped off to her cabin before the rude boys drummed up a scrap of courage between them. She walked between the sleeper-ends and the shanties. Sweetmeat and patty vendors roused themselves from their scavenged human-dung smudgefires, then settled back into repose at the sight of an Engineer orange track vest. Androgynously thin boygirls, ungendered by hunger, shook fistfuls of copper charm bangles at her. Good luck, good luck girlie, a prayer on every strand. Sweetness shook her head. The wire was filched from switchgear relays. Aside from the occasional electrocuted bangle-wallah, a prayer on every strand often meant a derailed front end.

Catherine of Tharsis rose from the night, as monolithic as the scarp she was preparing to climb. Riding lights twinkled, windows beckoned. But a whisper turned Sweetness aside at the last booth before home.

‘Sees all hears all knows all. Past present future. Uncurtain the windows of time, lady.’

The voice was a reptilian whisper, but strangely attractive for that; a reptile with a gorgeous jewelled skin, an ornate crest, a coiling blue tongue. An unsuspected seduceability in Sweetness responded. She heard herself say, ‘Oh, all right then. How much is it?’

‘Very little,’ lizard-tongue replied. The booth was a sagging leopard-spotted yurt. As she ducked inside, the door flaps brushed Sweetness’s nape. They felt like skin.

‘It’s kind of little in here.’

Littler than the exterior hinted. She could hardly make out the lizard-lips man across the octagonal table. He seemed small and hairless, his skin oddly dark even among a dark-skinned people. She could have sworn it was green in the dull glow from everywhere and nowhere.

‘Shouldn’t you be asking me to cross your palm with centavos?’ Sweetness asked. The yurt smelled ripely of green and growing, mould and leaf, pistils and fresh-spaded soil.

‘If you like,’ the fortune-teller said. While she fiddled in her hip-bag for silver, he placed a device like an overweight egg-timer on the table. Its upper hemisphere was filled with small white beans. Their progress to the lower hemisphere was prevented by a cheval de frise of spills inserted through a mesh.

‘This do?’

The fortune-teller scooped the trickle of centavos up to his mouth and swallowed them.

‘Should you … ?’

The huckster leaned towards her. He was green and the source of the smell of verdure. He flared his nostrils.

‘You’ve been swimming.’

‘My hair’s wet, o great detective.’

‘You smell of water. Here.’ Quick as a striking rat-snake, he whipped a spine out of the hour-glass. It had a blue tip. Burned on with a hot needle were the words ‘Fulfillingness First Finale’ and ‘One for free’. The little green man studied the motto. ‘Worse places to start.’ He laid the spill on the table. ‘Now, you play. Remove any stick you like, and the aim of the game is not to win, because you can’t win a game like this, but to delay the fall of the beans as long as possible. Then we shall begin our reading.’

‘No problem.’ Sweetness reached for a stick.

‘One rule. Whatever you touch, you must draw.’

‘I get ya.’ She confidently drew the stick at which she had aimed her finger. The first five moves were simple, even mindless; then, as the beans rattled and sagged, it became a true game, with demands of thought and foresight. She sucked her lower lip in concentration and hovered between two spills that crossed deep in the heart of the bean heap.

‘So, how does this work anyway?’

‘You pull the sticks. Gravity supplies the rest.’

‘I mean, how does it tell the future?’

‘How should I know?’ the green man said. ‘All I know is it does.’

Her fingers seesawed, decided, decided again, locked firmly around the spill that stuck out at thirty degrees. She could feel the beans grind over the wood as she withdrew the stick. A lurch. A solitary bean hit the bottom of the future-machine. She found she had been holding her breath, and released it in a relieved sigh.

‘Some beans will always fall,’ the green man said, taking the stick. ‘Hm. Queen’s Canton.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘It is, that’s all.’ He laid it next to the others in an orderly row.

‘I’ve got an uncle can see the future,’ Sweetness said matter-of-factly. She squatted low, hands on the table, eyes level with the web of spills.

‘Indeed?’ said the green man.

‘Though he’d tell you it’s not so much seeing the future, it’s more like having a wider now.’

‘An interesting perspective.’

‘That’s what he says. But then, he is a signal light.’

‘That would give … novel … insights.’

‘He was working on the pylon when he got hit by lightning.’ Sweetness drew a stick like a Belladonna rapieree drawing a swordstick. ‘There!’

‘Bravo,’ said the green man.

Three sticks later there was a click and a sag and all the beans hit the bottom of the jar like goondah-flung pebbles on a widow’s window.

‘Oh,’ said Sweetness. The green man was now crouching, studying the pattern of the remaining sticks. He turned the future-ometer over in his hands. Sweetness noticed that he was frowning. She thought of ploughing.

‘Bone Sandals in parallel with Boy of Two Dusts, crossing Innocent Excesses obliquely. But Boy of Two Dusts overruns Scent of Lavender, then exits hole eight eight, upper right quadrant; the Deserted Quarter.’

‘Meaning?’

The green man raised a finger to his lips. He held the hour-glass up to the light that came from everywhere.

‘See? Golden Thumb-ring is quite, quite horizontal, and in an isolated quadrant; notice that the only stick that approaches it is Eternal Assistance. Your family wants you wed.’

His eyes — which Sweetness noticed had yellow irises — challenged her to be amazed.

‘That’s not hard. A trackgirl, my age? You’re going to have to do better than that.’

‘I don’t see a marriage, though.’

‘That’s more like it. You mean, ever?’

The green man held the future-ometer out to Sweetness.

‘Not within the frame of the story.’

‘What story would that be?’

‘The one you’re in. The one we’re all in. This.’ The green man’s hands cupped the wasp-waisted glass torso. ‘Stories are made up of lives but not all of life is a story. Only parts have the narrative construction, the dramatic energy, the confluence of incident, desire and coincidence that are the elements of story. Within here’ — he again caressed the glass — ‘is the story of your life. Here and here’ — he touched either green-tipped end of a scrying-stick — ‘are where you fade out of the once-upon-a-time and into the happy-ever-after. The rods, of course, go on for ever.’ His fingers described extensions in the air. An instant of other-sight: Sweetness saw them stretching out beyond his reach, through him, through her, through the soft walls of the yurt and the softer walls of night and time. ‘You think that everything that has happened to you in your life thus far has been chance? To be so blessed! Everything you have been leads to this place, this story-jar, this confluence of forces. Of course, you can look at it the other way.’ His chartreuse hands turned the oracle one hundred and eighty degrees. A different phalanx of quills menaced Sweetness. ‘If the universal laws are as reversible as the sages insist, then it is also true that the what-you-will-become influences your decision of what-you-are-now.’

‘And these beans, are they like God’s shit, going to fall on me if I do this or don’t do that?’

The green man pursed his lips.

‘If you consider that, to me, shit is an excellent fertiliser, and to these people, how they warm their lives, maybe. Then again, you could consider them the weight of undecided events that must be shed for the bones of your story to emerge.’

Sweetness cocked her head and folded her arms and looked a challenge from under her fringe of dark curls.

‘Do I get to drive a train or not?’

‘You do a lot of driving.’

‘Driver, or driven?’

The green man rotated a spill between thumb and forefinger.

‘Grey Lady’s Visit, crossing Trumpet of Alves, acute. Both, my dear. Words of advice. Hold on tight to fast-moving objects. Don’t trust too much to appearances; then again, first impressions are lasting impressions. When climbing, look at the hands, not the feet. Be aware that the marvellous is always around you. Don’t discount family. Don’t drop litter. Always expect unexpected assistance. Take a toothbrush and at least one change of underwear. Small change is bulky and too easily rolled out of pockets. Keep notes in your sock. Angels exist, if you know how to use them. Read a little every day. The desert teaches drought, the city bathing. Your body odour is usually worse than you think. Some day, soon, you will cost the world a moon. Your grandmother loves you very much. Easy on the throttle until the cylinders expand. The world is very much more than it seems. When you see green, trust it, for it’s all one with me and I will be there in some form or another. Never pay good money to trackside hucksters.’

The green man pulled the remaining sticks and set them beside the others on the octagonal table. The future was spoken.

‘That’s it?’ Sweetness asked, in case it wasn’t.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ the green man said with the same considering look, as if Sweetness’s every syllable was loaded with wise ore.

‘Keep your eyes open and bring a change of underwear? Anyone could tell you that. What happens to me, where do I go, what do I do, who do I meet?’

‘You want me to give the story away?’ the green man said.

‘This is balls,’ Sweetness Asiim Engineer declared. ‘I want my money back.’

‘Have beans instead,’ the green man said and threw a fistful of legumes at Sweetness’s face. The beans flew apart into dust. Sweetness reeled back from the blinding beige fog that, as it settled, became common Inatra road dust. The soft skin yurt and its resident were, of course, both gone.

‘Hey!’

In the dust at her feet Sweetness saw three gleams of silver. Her coins. A hissing: she looked up: wisps of steam were leaking from Catherine of Tharsis’s shaft couplings. The Ascent beckoned. A flicker in her peripheral vision distracted her; a wink of light, minute as a five centavo piece, floated over the top of the escarpment. Quick as silver it slithered between the wind-pumps, leaped over the zigzags of the Ascent, glimmered across the tank terraces. Every moment it grew in size: over the trucks, gardens, the water-towers and hose gantries, aimed true and proper at Sweetness. Fear and wonder transfixed her. The spotlight from heaven dashed across the sidings, over the cardboard roofs of the poor, swept over Sweetness. And stopped. She was embedded in light. The air about her seemed to sing. Dust rose from the ground. The night smelled electric. Sweetness held out her hand. The three centavos in her palm shone like burning platinum. But she was not afraid. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up the beam to the orbital mirror at its source. The light squeezed tears from her eyes.

‘Thanks, but I got to go now!’

She stepped out of the enchanted circle. The spotlight followed her.

Sweetness giggled nervously.

Be aware that the marvellous is always around you.

She stowed the three centavos in her hip-bag and walked home shrouded in light.

Chapter 6

Shortly 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.’

Afterwards 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.