Ares Express (23 page)

Sauntering blithely into this war came Kathy Haan, ROTECH payroll number 2821332HSB. No mystery what side she was on. The AIs were the perfect form of life. They were the total mortification. They were the inevitable God made in Man's image. She had no reservations telling it abroad. “They will win,” she would insist, her skin so tightly drawn over her cheekbones that it was as translucent and luminous as parchment. “They must. They are better than us. They have no meat.”

She was weird and no one took her seriously, but ROTECH on war footing could tolerate no sedition. Kathy Haan, Our Lady of Tharsis emergent, was to have her contract terminated. It was a critical moment in contemporary management practice. Had security pulled her out of the canteen there and then, marched her to the gates, one on each armpit, a thousand years of history would have been radically different. One rumour, one word leaked from on high, sent ripples across the multiverse.

She still had friends. Meat friends she could not bring herself totally to despise and who would not despise her, despite what she had done to herself. They caught the rumour and slow-curved it to her workstation.

That afternoon, while her mind was out at Mars toiling away under skies scored by battle-lasers, Kathy Haan's meat friends managed to open both wrists from thumb-joint to elbow with two loops of twistlock nanofibre. She bled to death in under two minutes. With no body to come back to, her mind
stayed on Mars. She had accomplished her spiritual purpose. She had achieved total mortification. She was pure mind, free from the dross of meat. A minor league spiritual entity, she flitted from machine to machine until one day she bounced into a memory matrix to find new emotions, perceptions, comprehension, memory, speed of analysis, depth of apprehension, memories of other lives, alternative existences rushing away from her like the perspectives of an infinite glass cathedral. She had gatecrashed the neural architecture of an AI.

It could have crushed her like a midge. That the Archangelsk PHARIOSTER did not was initially because it thought this strange new array of perceptions was a subset of itself. By the time it realised that this memory of meat and day jobs and lust for the great sky was an
alien
, it had come to like the odd memories of
embodiment
(that Kathy Haan, forty percent on her way to being St. Catherine of Tharsis now, had derided as fleshy and vile) and treated its uninvited guest as an interesting pet. A conversation starter at AI parties. Thus Kathy Haan drifted, like her martyred namesake, into becoming an intermediary between heaven and earth. The AIs laid out their conditions. The attacks would end; in return they would desist from further unsanctioned reality destabilisation. This world they were making would be a sanctuary for their kind, a gift from the people of the Motherworld to this new species it had inadvertently created. In return, they would complete the terraforming and maintain control of the ecosystems. The uploaded consciousness of Kathy Haan was beamed back to gross earth to negotiate. ROTECH, of course, refused to recognise her. She was legally dead. Dead girls don't do diplomacy. The soul of Kathy Haan was held in a ring of superconducting copper/niobium/carbon ceramic in a Sao Paulo physics faculty, circling endlessly, timelessly at the speed of light. For ten objective years—mere moments subjectively—she orbited there while the AIs tested Motherworld's keenest and most expensive legal minds. A compromise was thrashed out: humanity would cede recognition of the angel intelligences and cease hostilities, but in return it wanted settlement rights on the new world. The world had never been meant for angels. It had always been meant for humans. What need had disembodied intelligences for a material gob of terraformed mud? Perhaps, but with segregation. Humans the soil, angels the orbital
approaches. And they would maintain the planetary control systems. And the planetary defences? Further tusslement. Five years more St. Catherine of Tharsis circled in relativistic oblivion, then woke after what seemed a short, refreshing sleep to find herself…

“Creator, saviour, mediator,” Sweetness said, cutting short the story. “We all know this.” She had never had much patience for courtroom dramas. Her heroes had always been picaresque: prospectors, rogue engineers, dune-bums, travelling wise-men. On the track, they had never been faced with the problem of their mode of transport becoming less and less substantial with every passing kilometre. The deck beneath her boot soles was gooey as taffy left on the ground after a canton fair.

“Yes, we all know you know,” the traveller said testily. “I'd've thought you would have had a personal interest in the characters, that's all. I imagined that a girl of your background would have had some interest in
process
over
destination
.”

“I'm a story, I'm all process,” Sweetness said and reminded herself that there was indeed a destination beyond the point at which the traveller and his track-yacht faded into improbability. Out there, up there, Devastation Harx with Little Pretty One in a jar no, she corrected herself. Catherine of Tharsis. The object of this homily. This—shift worker turned patron saint.

“One thing,” Sweetness asked. “Why'd she do it?”

“To which of the many events in the life of Our Lady of Tharsis might you be referring?” the doctor asked. Sweetness could see the light through him, like a bright-coloured milk-smoothie in an oddly shaped glass.

“Why did she, you know, hook up with me? Be my sister?”

The traveller looked over his small spectacles at her in exactly the way the Head Magister of the School of the Air had when Sweetness had given him some particularly Sweetness-like answer over the picture link.

“She's a saint. She does what she likes.”

“That's a really weak answer.”

“Yes, but it's also the only correct one,” the traveller said, and with that, he popped like a bubble. Doctor, spectacles, twinkle in eye, mustachios, buttoned chair and brass poop-rail. The wheel vanished under her hand, the brass brake lever evaporated. The steering binnacle faded into the red horizon. One
trade became two. The bogie disappeared into quantum mist, but Sweetness's momentum was real.

She threw her arms up to protect her head, curled instinctively into a foetal ball, but hit hard and fast. Sweetness rolled twelve times along the hard concrete sleepers. She cried out, feeling ribs bend, muscles tear, skin split. She came to on her back, panting painfully, staring at the sky. The kites were the last to become impossible, blowing away in the high air like wisps of cloud before the thermocline of a warm front.

Alive, then. And panting, and hurting—a lot. And horns. Horns horns horns. Train horns. Get out of my way horns. Big and loud and Oh Dear Mother'a'mercy,
close
.

She sat up.

The train was on top of her. If she tried to get up, if she tried to run, if she tried to roll to left or right, it would smash her like a bug, guillotine her on the rails. She threw herself flat on the trackbed as the sweep of the cow-catcher rushed over her. Tokamaks yelled, bogies thundered; the wind howled, Sweetness closed her eyes and yelled back. The din of heavy metal seemed to go on for longer than any train should be. She opened her eyes. Through the whirling grit and sand she saw wheel sets blur over her face. A blink: for an instant, another face looked down into hers: a freeloader, clinging spreadeagled to the understructure. She remembered another face, looking up at hers, out of the dark, clinging to the side of an ore-truck as she eased the safety back on her djubba-stick. Pharaoh. Memory and name came in instant, then this fellow hitcher was swept on to his own personal destination.

“Oh God!” Sweetness screamed at the hurtling steel. “Enough! Enough adventure, all right?”

The train heard her and swished its caboose over her head and left her, gasping and grit-blind, prone on the upline of the Big Red mainline. Sweetness Asiim Engineer counted ten, fifteen, twenty deep breaths before she sat up. A hundred sleepers down the track was her bag of essential things. Over her shoulder, the train curled around a long, slow right-hander toward the mountains that looked somehow lower and more weatherworn than the ones she remembered from moments ago. And the sky was paler, the clouds less pink, the desert grubbier, less pristine, scruffy with scrub planting. Most
real, and insistent that she was back on the hard, mundane baseline, was the gnaw of hunger in her belly.

“I'm starving!” Sweetness shouted at the wilderness.

You can never grow fat on miracle food, or slaked by other-world's water.

Her cheek smarted from the steel-burn where she had tumbled on to this same rail, a world away. Her arms ached pink with sun-sear.

“Mother'a'mercy, I am back,” she declared, then made sure she could heave herself to her feet—just—and hobbled down the track to reclaim her pack. As she checked the contents, she remembered Psalli's spell for Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness.

Reality-manipulating time-travellers chasing the shade of a green man across alternate futures and pasts, fixing time just to suit you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

That worked as Aid Beyond Comprehension.

The spell had one shot left in it. The warm, unpredictable desert wind eddied around her and, sudden, strong as memory, Sweetness smelled
water
. Her nose guided her. She turned to face upline. There, at the very edge of the heat-haze, was that the shadow of a cloud dropping dark on the desert? Did the red turn green, like the colour blindness test her brother had failed, but would be an Engineer none the less? In that red-green were there flecks of black? Might they be buildings, houses, streets, a town?

Smell is the oldest, deepest and surest sense. Yes, it said, and trusting its instincts, Sweetness shouldered her pack and tramped steadfastly up the long line toward the cloud shadow.

a
t some point in its recent history, Solid Gone, population 2125, elevation 2124, had offended the weather. World was rising in brilliant reds and ochres, skeined through with imperial purples and mood indigos, around Sweetness as she turned off the mainline on to the two-rut track down which the finger-board pointed.
Thither Solid Gone.
But over Solid Gone a small, shapely cloud hovered, so firm and exact Sweetness felt a shudder of association with Devastation Harx's airmobile cathedral. Evening air brushed the nape of her neck; the cloud hung in defiance of all winds, seemingly moored over the small desert town. Not one drop of rain had it ever cast. The earth beneath it was dry as a Poor Quadrentine's crack, penumbral, deathly. Sweetness rested her bag a moment on the wooden nameboard, studied the grey array of dead solar trees, languid wind-pumps and adobes clumped around the taller cylindrical buildings of the civic centre, then hitched her bag and marched down the slight slope across the terminator. A blind woman could have told the moment she stepped under the cloud. A stifling, draining heat sucked sweat from Sweetness's pits and the pluck from her pith. She stopped, shook her head, suddenly reluctant to walk on, to turn and go back, to do anything intentional at all. As a kid, she had told and told and told her parents that she couldn't take antihistamines to combat the zone-allergies she had suffered from—it's always pollen season somewhere in the world, for trainpeople. They made her woozy, they stuffed her head with socks and lint, made her eyes red and her limbs heavy as if she had been dropped down Motherworld's gravity hole. Child'a'grace and Naon Engineer had made her take them anyway, and it was all exactly as she had described it to them. But Solid Gone was twenty times that.

Solid Gone was a town-shaped case of myalgic encephalopathy.

There were people here. They sat on their wooden verandahs, dressed in
drab, turd-like colours. They were of a variety of ages, but all seemed old. Their bodies had no bearing, they slumped and sagged, slack sack-folk. They half-listened to wirelesses set up on beer crates; or semi-attended to the ornate bong-pipes carved from desert gypsum which had been Solid Gone's name and fame, once; or spent moments studying crossword puzzles and Star-prize Wordsearch magazines before deciding it was too much effort and lolling back in their deckchairs. Even more than a flick of attention to the passing colourful stranger was too much effort. A tip of the chin, a slight declination of the head, were all the welcomes Sweetness received to Solid Gone.

The intricately terraced and irrigated weedfields had turned to dust and blown away years before. The wirelesses were all tuned off station, playing a sinister, whispering amalgam of livestock prices, rural politicians, failed comedians, phone-ins about infidelity. Talk talk talk. A chatter of spectres. Not a minim of music. The heat and drone sat on Sweetness's shoulders like grey luggage. Drear. Heat. Weight. With every step she imagined the colour draining from her clothes; a thread here, a button there, a seam, a panel, whoops! a whole sleeve, gone dirt.

“Hey!”

She felt she must make some sound, test her voice on the thick air to be sure it was still working. A barefoot kid lolling on a slatted wooden recliner lifted the brim of his hat.

“How do I get to the town centre?”

The kid lifted a thumb, jerked it left.

In the days of civic pride, before this communal affliction of the spirit, Solid Gone had built a small but elegant bourse around a cobbled central plaza. Here the weekly weed markets and meerschaum exchange had met in the colonnaded arcades, sheltered from the dehydrating sun and blow-in, vagrant sand. Sellers in smocks and veils had uncovered their piles of sweet-scented leaf, dealers in cartwheel hats and duster coats bent over the fragrant carpets, sniffing, crumbling fronds between their fingers, heating the powder up in small solar-lens censers, wafting the fumes to their faces. Hands had been struck, oil-paper packets of dollars slapped down into palms; vests of pockets stuffed with bales of pressed leaf. Once. Now plaza and bourse had been reserved for a single, new tenant.

Numb, almost dumb, Sweetness Asiim Engineer stopped in her tracks to stare. The camperbus was suspended ten metres above the cambered cobbles. A thick metal chain fastened each corner to massive staples on the cornices of the adjacent exchange buildings. The bus's wheels sagged on their leaf springs. There were little gritty oil-pools on the cobbles. Amazed by this wonder in the heart of lethargy, Sweetness circled round for a better view. There was a device on the truck's roof; some kind of satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing, aimed at the churning grey centre of the stationary cloud. On the back was a complex transformer unit, clumsily mounted on the luggage rack. The power-pack crackled and dripped fat sparks to the cobbles, where they skittered back and forth before running inevitably down to earth. Ninety degrees more, and the far side of the bus was a swirl of spray-paint graphics that challenged the creeping drab of Solid Gone. Sweetness studied the clouds of angels and jazz musicians and puce and lilac curving things that looked like visual representations of the result of Solid Gone's former trade for several minutes before she untangled the words:
Sanyap Bedassie, Cloud-Cineaste
. In the middle of this gaudiness was the black rectangle of an open door. In the middle of the open door sat a young man, dark hair, ratty goatee of the type grown from necessity not fashion. He wore black pants that tapered at the cuffs. Foreshortening made his feet look the size of grain trucks. They were shod in loafers—
Preeds of
(scuff) read the labels on the soles: no socks. His ankles were painfully big-boned, and skinny. His feet swung in counterpoint.

He looked down and noticed Sweetness.

“Hey! You! Get out of here!”

Sweetness gaminely cocked her head to one side to study him.

“Didn't you hear me?” The young man waved a weak-looking fist. “Get out, go on! You still got some colour about you.”

“You Sanyap Bedassie?” Sweetness squinted up in a way she knew made her look cute whether she liked it or not.

“Who the hell else do you think I'd be?”

“Don't know. Seen a lotta weird stuff recently, so now I ask everyone. I'm Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

The man Bedassie looked thoughtful.

“That's a good mouth-filling name. That ought to keep you safe.”

“What? My name?”

“It's got strength in it. The weak things go first.”

“What're you talking about? What you doing up there anyway? You the town paedophile or something?”

“It's the plague.”

“Plague? I'm out of here if there's plague.”

“Yes. You should. Go on. Go now.”

“That's why you're up there. You're the plague…If you've given me something…”

“I'm not the cause. I'm the cure.”

Sweetness looked up at the face looking down at her between the Preeds guttees, at the bondage-bus hanging in its chains, at the hovering cloud like a cup of sour ash soup, at the pillared plaza for something that would offer an explanation of what she was seeing.

“This is all mad,” she challenged the visible world. An acid grumble in Sweetness's stomach reminded her of physiological reality. Place your bets: plague, or starvation in the desert. “You got anything to eat? Can't rightly say how long since I last ate.”

“Not much,” the man in the bus said. “They only feed me twice a day.”

“Anything'll do.”

“Hang on a wee moment, then.” He rolled over into the dark on the van, reappeared a moment later lying on his belly, right arm aiming a torpedo-shaped bread-roll down at Sweetness.

“I don't eat the bread, I've got gluten allergy. Don't know why I held on to this, usually I chuck them out for the hawks. Must've had a premonition.”

He speared it down, Sweetness took it in cupped hands, tore it apart, crammed it into her mouth. It was stale; each mouthful was like soil, but it was food, it filled bellies. When she had finished, she looked around the elegant arcades.

“How do they get it up to you?”

“Pulley and a basket.”

Sweetness pondered this a moment, then jumped to the inevitable next question.

“So what about, you know?”

“Let's say, I wouldn't go round the other side of the van.”

“Fair enough,” Sweetness said. “So just what did you do, then?”

“Nothing. My job. Entertained the people. Showed them humours and horrors, gods and monsters, all human life. And for that, they pay me with industrial grade chains and bread-rolls in a bucket.”

“Have you some problem with straight answers?”

The man laughed. He looked as if the laugh had surprised him, like an ex-smoker hacking in the morning. Stuff still down there.

“No. No, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. I have absolutely no problem with straight answers. This is as straight as they can come in this place.”

Sweetness huffed in frustration and instead tried to scry some truth from the fluorescent curvery on the side of the truck.

“So, what does a cloud-cineaste do, anyroad?”

At which a bell began to clang, leaden and mean as a miser's funeral.

“You're about to find out,” Sanyap Bedassie said, glancing up. Sweetness looked where he looked. Down each of the avenues that radiated out from the zocalo's cardinal points, Solid Gone's citizenry was advancing. Young and old, male and female, sick and halt, a slow, spreading wave of brown and drab, like a terminus honey-wagon unburdening itself of a cargo of nightsoil. They lurched in time with the tolling of the iron bell. Hup! hayfoot, hup, strawfoot. Another metaphor came to Sweetness's mind: the nasties that Sle and Rother'am liked to watch in Sle's cubby when they thought no one else was about, munching
nimki
, faces bathed blue in the zombie-light, snickering at the dismemberments. No: these trans-dead had a purpose, a lust, a blood-hunger. These people just came, and came, and came, closing their doors neatly behind them, safely pocketing their keys, falling into step, spreading sludgily across the cobbles, filling all available space. They nudged against Sweetness as if she was not there. Soft jostles. They did not even smell of anything. Ghosts have no scent.

“What's going on?” she called up at the hoisted van but Sanyap Bedassie had slipped inside. The last citizen took up his place in the square. Every face was upturned to the cloud of gloom. The power generators hummed;
electricity arced blue as burning Belladonna brandy around the porcelain insulators. The sense of something-about-to-happen was palpable as a summer sandstorm. The satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing on the roof unfolded like a night-blooming flower. Aerials ran up, dishes spun out like petals, cooling vanes fanned forth. A soft
oooh
ran through the people as a translucent pink erectile thing slid priapically out of the centre of the blossom of dishes and aimed itself at the coiled heart of the hot grey cloud.

Sweetness was entranced. Even if it did nothing more, the sheer drama of the unfolding bizarre technology would have been worth standing in this square with a cricked neck. But it did not do nothing more. It did a definite something. Power peaked to a sharp, ozoney, bone-buzzing crescendo: a pink beam stabbed the soft underbelly of the cloud.

Later, Sweetness would swear that the cloud flinched.

The grey folds and pleats of cloud billowed downward, threatening the cornices and photon-towers of Solid Gone. Sweetness lifted her arms in front of her face: she could feel the heat from the unnatural cloud, then the curds rolled back and, as they did, she saw them change shape. No, not change shape.
Take
shape. The cloud mass was folding into figures, a man and woman, god-sized, seated behind a curving desk. Behind them, a complicated kind of a wall, with a window in it, which seemed to look out on a still-indistinct but altogether other scene. The base of the cloud was shaped into massive, three-dimensional images, hanging over the burghers of Solid Gone. As the cloud gained shape, it also gained colour. Rivulets of hue, like prismatic lighting, ran from the place where the beam pinkly penetrated the cloud, stained the mist-figures, intermingled, formed new colours, gave movement and character to the grey icons.

“Oh my Mother'a'grace,” Sweetness Asiim Engineer exclaimed. “It's the seven o'clock news.”

Huge as hills, Sanka Déhau and Ashkander Beshrap, DFLP Belladonna's Little Miss Bright'n'Breezy and Mr. Big Truth, smiled down on the adoring faces of Solid Gone. Behind them, their famous Eye on the World opened a window into greater depths of the enchanted cloud, showing an image of sleek black Corvettes rolling up at an imposing flight of steps, disgorging waving people in formal dress and being valet-parked.

“Wow,” said Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

The cloud convulsed again, throbbed like distant hill-thunder, then spoke.

“Regional leaders have arrived in Molesworth for the inauguration of the new Gubernator, Cossivo Beldene, whose Unity Rising Party won a landslide victory. However, the Anarchs of Deuteronomy and Grand Valley declined the invitation, citing undeclared funding by the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family and rumoured links to the Human League anti-machinist terror group,” Ashkander Beshrap said in his famous if-you-can't-trust-me-who-can-you-trust? newsreader's voice that shook the rooks from the roof-tiles.