“There is someone there. I’m sure of it. Hello?”
The trance was broken.
“Cock piss bugger bum balls!” Sweetness scooped up her shirt and fled into the pink frond forest while Romereaux struggled, one legged like a stoned stork, to pull on his sodden pants. They were both sliding into their track vests as the figures emerged from the finger-forest on the further shore of the pool.
“Hi there!” Romereaux waved with one hand. The other scraped back his tousled hair.
“Hi yourselves!” called the leader of the other party, a cheery-faced, chubby man in his early tens. With him was a spookily thin girl who squatted on pinched thighs and looked resentful, and a dumb-looking seven-year-old boy whose face said I’m hugely confused here. Track vests and djubba-sticks marked them as track. “Where are you from?”
“Catherine of Tharsis,” Romereaux shouted.
“Back there,” Sweetness added.
“Ah!” cheery-face called. “Bishop of Alves!”
Sweetness knew the train, a good, tough little Class 14 freight hauler. Well-maintained and proud, but definitely second class.
“Where’s yours?” Sweetness asked.
“Back there.” The Bishoper pointed back through the finger-forest. “You walked long?”
“Seems like it. Couldn’t say.”
The Bishoper nodded.
“We must’ve been walking for a couple of hours. This place seems to get bigger the further in you go.”
“I think this is the middle, though,” Sweetness said.
“Thank God,” the chubby man called. “My name is Esquival Nonette D’Habitude Dharati Engineer 5th. Do you mind if we come round?”
“We’ll meet you halfway,” Romereaux said. But neither party took a single step, for with a rushing like the wings of all the angels in the Ekaterina Angelography beating at once, the sun was eclipsed.
Everyone looked up. An edge of something huge and dark, and curved almost as gently as the world, moved over the trainfolk. Projections, protuberances, masts, aerials, unobvious sticking-out bits: then they were in deep shadow. Not darkness: the belly of the great machine was starred with lights. A clutch of those lights unfolded, swept fingers of light across the canopy of the plastic jungle before capturing each of the trainfolk explorers in a personal spotlight.
Sweetness shaded her eyes with her fingers and peered up into the beam. As she had half expected, a voice spoke out of it. As she had also expected, it was big and booming.
“Caution humans,” it said, not in the air, but inside Sweetness’s skull. “This is ROTECH Real-systems Repair Monitor eleven thirty-eight. You are in peril. There has been a reality dysfunction in this sector. You are advised to leave forthwith. Further slippages may result in your being marooned when the breach is repaired. Please follow the moving lights. They will guide you to the exits.”
Sweetness did not listen beyond the fifth word from the sky. Danger, reality breaches, so? ROTECH was here, stooped down from heaven to touch the earth. The people who made the world had come.
9
There was a steaming that night, hosted by the Stuards of Bishop of Alves. Spits were set up, great joints of grazebeast slung on spears and hoisted on to brackets. Women and juniors repaired to a safe distance to prepare salads and flat bread and barrel-up beer while the Deep-Fusion men, in silver heat-refraction suits, orchestrated the superheated steam blasts from the overheat valves, dextrously turning the dripping beeves.
All were invited and by now all was many. Stacked behind Catherine of Tharsis were Count Tassaday, Three Great Shepherds, Doughty Endeavour hauling a dangerously overreacting pulp processor and Lords of the Iron Way with forty carriages of express service passengers now as steaming hot as the cooking roasts. Passengers, of course, could not possibly be invited to a track jamboree. Down the track from Bishop of Alves were the famous Indomitable, then a nameless, low-caste ballast unit from Suvebray—its Domities huddled apart at the steaming and, as Psalli noted, all bearing the sunken chin, bug eyes and bulging, translucent forehead that advertised incest. Most available and despicable of track crimes. Behind the Ballasteros stood the venerable Mountain of Great Peace and a recently refitted JahSpeed!, her pipework and tubes the envy of every Deep-Eff. Bringing up the rear was Freight 128, an ill-omened workhorse, stained with rumours of radiation leaks, bad fortune and piracy on the mainline which only persisted the harder her grim Engineers denied them.
Over all hung the ROTECH machine. Tulsa Engineer, inheritor of Tahram’s contractual mantle and smitten with an inappropriate love of all things airborne, had checked it up in his Big Book of Aircraft and Angel Recognition but it fitted no known format. By day it had been an oppressive presence, like the legendary flying city of Hooverville, torn from its bedrock and sentenced to roam the jet streams as punishment for cheating an angel of the Panarch in a frame of snooker. An obscuration. A total eclipse. A crushing satellite, a steel cloud. By night it was a deeper darkness on the black Oxus sky, a hiatus in the moonring where the belly-lights made up new, geometrically regular constellations. It would have been almost forgettable, but for its activities at the heart of the plastic jungle. This was a tug of war by light; vivid cerises, lilacs and turquoises from on high strove with flashes of vermilion, white and poisonous green from where the surveyors had mapped the mirror pool to be. Occasionally there would be a particularly dazzling exchange and the ground would tremble. It cast a fine, party illumination over the entertainments.
Beef-stuffed chapatti in one hand, mug of small beer in the other, Sweetness was not having a fine time. Small beer, small fun. Romereaux cast a ROTECH-machine-sized shadow over her pleasure. She queued up for her food, he was there, mug in hand by the beer fermentory, not noticing her. On to the musicians’ awning to watch the fingers fly over the keys and strings and the women entice the men to dance; tapping her foot, but Romereaux was talking with Domiety brothers from the other trains with a set to his shoulders that insisted, No dance, never dance. To the beer pavilion for her mug fresh from the teat, and now all his attention was given to shoving a fat chapatti, dripping grease and garlic sauce, sideways into his mouth while the lads laughed and cheered, Go on go on go on you boy! Eventually she turned her back on him but he did not notice that either.
The ground shook, the strongest tremor yet. Venerable matriarchs shrieked and tottered, flagons of petty beer slopped. Great trains swayed on their bearings, a spit of meat capsized in a hurricane of steam. Silver-suited Deep-Fusioners dashed through the billows to right it. Under cover of confusion Sweetness ducked between Bishop of Alves’s drive wheels and crouched in the oily dark, avoiding everyone. A twitch in her side told her that the oil pool between her feet was now inhabited.
“Nice party,” Little Pretty One said. Sweetness offered her the remains of her chapatti. Little Pretty One devoured it decorously with her fine white teeth. “This ain’t bad, this. Any idea how long it is since I last ate anything?”
“Take it all,” Sweetness said. “There’s beer too. You dried out?”
“Some.” Little Pretty One took the pot, sniffed it. “Thanks.” She drained it in one.
“Tell me this, and tell me no more, why do they do it?”