Nothing was said for several kilometres of rocky red desert.
“She’s not a machine,” Sweetness reminded Serpio.
“I know.”
A minute or so further on, Sweetness pressed her sharp little chin on Serpio’s shoulder and said into his ear, “So how does she fit into all your big theory, then?”
“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “That’s why I want to ask Harx.”
“So that’s where we’re going.”
“Yeah.”
“To this guru preacher boy.”
“Devastation Harx, yes.”
“Ah,” said Sweetness on the back of a stolen bike with at least a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert around her in any direction. “Ah. Yes. I get it now. So I’ve walked out on my family and my home and my impending marriage and come out here with just the stuff on my back into the ass-end of nowhere and the only one you’re really bothered about is something I can’t even see that’s hanging off my ribcage. Can I ask you one question?”
“Whatever.”
“Did you ever really fancy me at all?”
Serpio stopped the bike. Dead square stopped. Middle of nowhere.
Oh Mother’a’grace, Sweetness thought. I’ve gone and done it, haven’t I? Why why why why do I have to go that one question too deep?
Serpio got off the bike. Shaking life into saddle-sore limbs, he walked away. Clinging to the superstructure, Sweetness watched him go.
“Serpio!”
No answer.
“Where are you going?”
No answer.
“What’re you doing?”
Back turned to her, he looked out upon a vista of sweeping dunes.
“I’m sorry!”
Dunes are dunes are dunes. What are you looking at, what are you seeing? Nothing, I bet, except not me.
“I said, I’m sorry!”
Unmoved, like the dark blue sky.
“I said!” Top of her lungs. “I’m sorry!”
She yelled so loud the desert heard her. Sand shifted on the sloping face of a big dune, ringed by minions. Shift triggered slide, triggered chain slippages that cascaded up into micro-avalanches into dust rivulets into flowing deltas into sheet-floods of sand. The dune face was shedding away before the power of her voice, disintegrating into scabs and floes. The dune was moving. It was stirring in its bed and rising up.
It had heard her. It was coming to get her, loud-mouthed little tyke who dared disturb the monumental solitude of the deep desert. It would fill her mouth and voice box and lungs with silencing sand.
No. Impossible. Dunes don’t walk. They crawl, over whole seasons. If a dune moves, it is because a buried something beneath it is moving. The slipping curtains of sand flashed tantalises of bright metal, curved plastic, knobbled ridges. The something was very big. It was not buried in the dune. It was the dune. It had lain here and gone to sleep and woken up caked in sand. Something like a lost city was rising out of the Big Red. It lifted clear of the other, lesser dunes. It left a circular crater a good ore train in diameter. Higher it rose. The flying city was the shape of a great, flat, upturned saucer, crazy with racing sand. Through veils of dust raining off its rim like monsoon from an umbrella, Sweetness glimpsed complex forms beneath the dome, like the folds and ruches of fungi that hide under the sobriety of their caps. She shaded her eyes with her hand as the thing reached the zenith and eclipsed the sun.
“Oh my God!” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th exclaimed as the flying thing passed over her head. It moved to the south, hovered over a flat expanse of rocky grit, settled slowly. The sun was full on it, and it was a magnificent creature, carapaced like a beetle with iridescent greens and electric blues, underneath busy with bulbous, insect-eyelike excrescences, manipulator arms and whirring rotors. Claw feet unfolded, tested the terrain, found it faithful. The flying object settled on its legs. The fans were stilled. An intimidating set of polished black mandibles that could have devoured houses by the district opened; an alabaster pont reached out and touched ground.
Sweetness stood mumchance.
Serpio was already running for the pont. He turned, extended a hand to Sweetness.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
13
In the privacy of command, striding alone on his big brass bridge, Naon Engineer decided that the only way out of the situation was to die of shame. There were numerous precedents for this action. No matter that most of them had been performed by ascetics and monastics in order to stymie wars, blight cities or summon monsoons. They had not had their wheels pissed on by Stuards.
Out, quick. Yell “power-up” down the gosport, throw full steam and throttles wide open. Put as many sleepers as possible between you and the bad thing. Old Engineer advice, father to son to son to son. As soon as there was free track, he had bellowed the Deep-Fusion folk to frenzy and spun the wheels. But the Ninth Avata Stuards were ready for him. Two rows, either side of the track. A firing squad. The men had unzipped and unfurled. The women had hoisted their many skirts and aimed. As the looming superstructure of Catherine of Tharsis passed over their heads, they had gushingly anointed the drive wheels.
The track-level cameras spared none of the humiliation.
“Full power!” Naon Engineer thundered at the sweating Deep-Fusioners in their windowless reactor hive. His cheeks were red. Blood seethed in his brainpan. There was a high whining whistle in his inner ears. It blocked out the imagined jeering of the Stuards. “Full power, you slugs snails tortoises infernal turtles!” But heavy trains are slow. It seemed a damned eternity for Catherine of Tharsis to pull away from those two ranks of jeering cooks and waiters.
The imagined tang of urine filled his nostrils. It would never wash away. Never. Speed. The wind of high velocity might at least blow it somewhere he would not have to smell it. Naon Engineer pushed the lever forward to its uttermost notch. The big fusion engines responded with a howl of power. Catherine of Tharsis was a smoke-fletched arrow shot across the plains of Old Deuteronomy. She ran Mendocello Bank at such a lick that it jumped Marya Stuard’s formal goblets from their racks. Scampering junior sommeliers bumped into each other as they rolled away from grasping fingers. Brimful of the righteous wrath that had defeated the Starke badmaashes, Marya Stuard stormed forward.
“He’s locked himself in,” Child’a’grace said. Marya Stuard was no respecter of sanctums. She beat the door with her fists.
“What d’you think you’re doing, man?”
The twin horns blew.
“I demand to be let in!”
She swayed as the train took a switchover at two hundred and fifty.
“I’m a bloody laughing stock, Engineer! A laughing stock! And people do not laugh at Marya Stuard. Remember who bounced Selwyn Starke and his dacoits!”
“There’s no talking to him,” Child’a’grace said mildly. Marya Stuard stood glaring at the door, as if heat of will could melt a hole in it. It remained obdurately unmelted and unopened. For once defeated, she gave a huff of exasperation and turned on her heel.
“He’ll talk to me, eventually,” she declared. Child’a’grace sighed, still waiting after four years.
Naon Engineer finally ran out of steam on the down-grade to the Muchanga Water Tower. Hands off the throttles. Catherine of Tharsis ghosted to a creaking, heavy halt under the blessing fingers of the water-charger. By now the decision was firm in his mind, and he could face the council of his peers.
“I am destroyed,” he declared to the assembled council of the Domieties. He had had plenty of time to practise the tone of pained humiliation, and he thought he did it really rather well. “The money is forfeit. So be it. A price must be paid, though three thousand dollars, and a lien on our contracts is a heavy burden. But what is heavier still, what is intolerable, is the shame. I cannot bear the disgrace. Cannot bear it, I tell you!” Every eye was on him. “There is only one choice available to me. The stain that besmirches the great name of Engineer can only be expunged by blood. Yes, blood!” A corner-of-eye glance to make sure Marya Stuard was watching, and impressed. Too hard to tell with that fierce little woman. Very well then. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not considerable. “I have studied the family archives, and there is a way that shame may be bought out. Shame for shame, life for life. I declare to you now, for the shame brought on this name by that child, for the urine stains rusting the pure steel of my driving wheels, yes, I will die from shame! A terrible price, yes, but one I bear gladly. Thirteen generations of the name Asiim demand it!” He held aloft his hand in a rhetorical gesture he had once seen in an itinerant tent theatre performance of The Melodrama of the Twelve Just Trappers. It had been a notoriously hammy gig, but trainpeople had never been renowned as critics. He held the pose, flared his nostrils.