So she did. There was purple along the morning edge of the world by the time it was all told. The traveller interrupted often with questions she could not answer. At each of her half-responses, his face grew more grave. He started to roll his mustachios, an unconscious tic of concern.
“So here I am,” Sweetness concluded and the glass room was suddenly lit theatrical red as the edge of the world tipped beneath the upper limb of the sun.
“This is serious indeed,” the traveller said. “Glossing over that the Blessed Lady of Tharsis seems to have chosen to manifest herself as your late twin sister—the ways of deities, by definition, are beyond our consideration—if this Devastation Harx has control of her, he has access not just to the ROTECH command structure, which is bad enough for continued life on this world, but the vinculum processors that helped build the world; and that is bad news for reality, everywhere.”
“This is a problem? You go back in time and stop him.”
“Not so easy.”
“You whizzed this place up out of some other history somewhere, and you can’t kick Devastation Harx?”
“It’s a locality problem. I can strongly affect time-dependent events here, at the centre so to speak, but as I move away, the probability drops off. More than a hundred kilometres in any direction, it’s back to base-line reality. Think of me as a kind of human wave function.”
“So you’re telling me you can’t kick Devastation Harx.”
“I’m telling you that, yes. And anyway, even if I could, it’s not for me to do. You understand why?”
“I think so,” Sweetness said. In the night of words, as the people and events were drawn out her, the act of telling revealed an order, an organic structure in her experiences. She did not impose story on her tale. Story was within, quivering and sinewy in every action, like a speed-dog waiting its turn on the track. Nothing merely happened, every event was connected, one to another, with a unity and clarity. She thought of the green man’s fortune-telling stick, and its implied extension, out of the past, into the future. “It’s the story, isn’t it?”
“You tell me,” the traveller said. When he smiled, as he was doing now, Sweetness was reminded of Uncle Neon, before. And, she thought again, in some ways, after.
“In this story, Sweetness Octave goes across the desert and has lots of big adventures before she tracks down Devastation Harx and his Church boys, rescues Our Lady of Tharsis, saves the world, and hopefully, somewhere in all that, gives Serpio a kicking.”
“That sounds like it.”
“A wee Engineer girl who’s not even allowed to drive a train takes on this guy who can balls about with what’s real and what’s not, and wins?”
“That’s the story. And if I know anything about them, things will get worse before they get better.”
“Only one problem.”
“Which is?”
“How do I get out of the desert?”
“That, I think, is my chapter in your story. Now, you catch a couple of hours’ sleep, and I’ll see what I can engineer.”
Sweetness slept in a brocade-canopied bed in a room with a high, small window looking south on to the great erg. She was shaken from the flocking hallucinations you get just before you drop off by a distinct feeling of other lives rushing through her. Then she gave a twitch and fell headlong into a dream that she was a girl sleeping in a canopied bed with desert wind blowing through her window who dreamed that, in a dream, without any polite warning, the universe abruptly changed. She woke up, and it had.
She lay in a wide pale bed in a high pale room draped with floating swags of pale muslin. The light through the unglazed window told her it was afternoon. The wind no longer smelled of desert, but vegetables fertilised with night soil. Peering through the gauzy layers of muslin, Sweetness thought she saw a ghostly figure by the foot of the bed.
“Hello?”
“Madam?”
Sweetness fought her way out of the fog of fabric. No ghost, but substance, a short, dumpy woman in her early teens, dressed in the ubiquitous pale cheesecloth, with an odd, conical hat that tilted forward.
“Who are you?”
“I am Bennis. I am here to help the madam dress and prepare herself for her journey.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Following the teacher by serving the madam.”
“The teacher? Never mind.”
“Madam.” Bennis lifted Sweetness’s clothes and held them out. They looked very clean and smelled of lavender.
“Are you an acolyte?” Sweetness asked suspiciously.
“I have the honour to be so, yes,” the girl said.
“I’ll dress myself, thanks.”
The traveller was waiting for her down at the tracks. A handful of acolytes, all alike in pale habits and conical hats formed a respectful circle around him. They parted to let Sweetness through.
“Good afternoon good afternoon good afternoon!” the traveller boomed. “I trust we are refreshed and restored? Good good good. Now, is this not a fine device?”
It was indeed; a thing of brass and wood and engraved steel. It stood four square on twin bogies, but Sweetness could not make out any driving wheels, or anything that looked like an engine.
“How?” she asked. The traveller pointed to the sky. Twelve big boxkites flew in three-by-four formation. Sweetness strained to make out bridle lines and tethers, they seemed to hover, unattached by anything but charisma. She did notice a shimmering around the head of carved Lorarch that was the rail-yacht’s figurehead, a halo, like spider silk in the wind. She went for a closer look.
“Don’t get too close,” the traveller warned. “Diamond filament. Take your fingers right off quick smart.”
“Where did it come from?” Sweetness explored the safety of the burnished brass—already hot under the desert sun—and the intricate filigree metal work.
“I invented it, of course,” the man said. “These people tell me I arrived on it five years ago out of a dust storm that had been blowing for an entire season, thus ending the storm and saving their community. In this history, they beat me here by a good decade.”
“Yeah, I meant to ask, just who are these people?”
“Some manner of stylite order, originally. A Cathrinist sect; they’re a pretty peaceable crew. They seem to regard me as a great teacher.”
“The Teacher is a Skandava,” one of the acolytes spoke up, a skinny, hollow-cheeked man.
“A dweller between realities, that is,” a chunky woman beside him clarified.
“There you have it,” the traveller said. “Well, throw up your stuff then.” He stowed Sweetness’s bag in a cubby, then swung himself up on to the running board. He addressed the faithful, jaunty hat in one hand. “So, my good people, I, your great and distinctive teacher, bid you farewell—I have business between dimensions. I cannot say how long I will be engaged on it and when I will be able to return to you, but rest assured, I shall. Look for me in winter storms and summer lightning, in out-of-season whirlwinds and strange dreams. Now, it’s high time we were away.” To Sweetness he added, “Well, are you coming then?”