For a moment she stared. The thing bearing down on her was as fabulous as a herbragriff or stalking aspanda. They were the creatures of childhood story, the feral duststorms that would blanket entire quarterspheres for weeks, that would carry away whole towns and rearrange landscapes and change the course of rivers and turn lakes into plains. No such monster had visited the world in her or her parents’ generation, not since ROTECH created a suborder of angels to keep the climate sweet. Grandmother Taal had known these creatures, and now Sweetness recalled her lurid descriptions of tracks, trains, crews and passengers buried beneath dunes in a single night, of thrice-painted metal whetted to a naked steel blade, of grazebeasts stripped to polished bone flutes, of trainspersons drowning in dust even as they ran for the presumed safety of their cabs.
“Mother’a’mercy,” Sweetness said, the lone vertical obstacle in the path of the beast as it bore down on her. “He’s got into the weather!” Dust brushed her cheek. The next kiss would be rougher. She had maybe seconds to find cover out here in the middle of all this hugeness. She glanced around her. As she had hoped: the concrete grave of an inspection pit. Cover, of a kind. Of the only kind, she told herself. It would mean running into the face of the storm. So be it.
“Yaaaaaah!” she yelled, and charged the bulwark of dust. She flung herself through the orange wall. The wind threatened to hurl her back for her presumptuousness. Rust-lightning crackled around her as she dived down between the sleepers into the inspection pit. The concrete floor was littered with swarf and scrap train and sun-dried shit from the honey-vents, and hit exceeding hard.
“Oof!” Sweetness gasped, present enough to roll belly down and curl her back against the storm. Instants later, it struck with a shriek like every soul in the Benekasherite purgatory enduring genital torture at once. Darkness. Terrible noise. Dust. Sweetness struggled a handkerchief over her face, knotted it behind her head but the dust had already found its way up her nose, prickling and electrical and scented with dead, dried summers. Red dust caked in the corners of her eyes and behind her ears as she huddled, face down, not looking at the gorgon-face of the storm. She could feel it in her hair, heavy and matting. She’d be an adobe-head for days after this. The almost solid plane of dust drew a sympathetic plaint from the steel rails. Storm-claws plucked at her shirt: Come, fly with me.
“What are you doing, man?” she shouted at her enemy. “Don’t you know it’s going to make everything come apart? Is that what you want? They’re not going to let you, you know.” But, if Harx could access the planetary defences and the climate control system, even God the Panarchic was hog-tied. What was Harx doing to St. Catherine, with what cybernetic torments was he threatening her, what weird stuff makes saints and angels shudder? Planetary patroness she might be, a psychic twin of false pretences, but the reflection of a soul sealed in Devastation Harx’s memory jar was also Little Pretty One, half of Sweetness’s life to date. He was torturing the crippling disappointment of her third birthday party when she did not get the toy Engineer’s outfit; it was her first no-tongue bruise-lipped snog-ette with Axle Deep-Eff at the corroboree steaming. It was the economics exam she had failed spectacularly and cavalierly—there had been a handball match the night before against Darker Star—and the longwave humiliation she had endured before her School of the Air tutor and a continent of fellow pupils. It was the night of the Boletohatchie lay-over she had crept from her cabin up along the star-lit companionways over the dark, simmering hulk of Catherine of Tharsis and her many tribes, and had stolen in to the command bridge to lay her hand for one, electric second, on the brass drive bar. It was the foolish confessed hopes and dreams and unachievable ambitions; the infatuations and infuriations and warm-between-the-thighs moments; the naked lusts and the hopeless rages and the whispered hours of giggle and smut. Out of sheer adolescent embarrassment alone, she had to get her other half back. “I’m not going to let you!” she shouted, arms wrapped around her head.
Fine words, from a nearly-nine on her knees in an inspection pit, buried under a kilometre of duststorm. It was then she noticed the steady rivulets of dust pouring over the corners of the dug-out, forming spreading spill-cones across the concrete floor, slowly burying the pieces of discarded train-innards with the granular tick of the hour-glass. Already it was piling up around her fingers, a sensation at once sexy and enclosing. She could feel it trickling into her shoes.
“Aw, come on,” she implored. It could not end like this: cute, clever, adventurous, resourceful heroines with great (when clean) hair did not end as dust-mummies buried in a railroad shit-pit. Not in a story. This might be the time of levelling, and ashes, and, yes, dust, but it wasn’t the end.
As if it had heard her and been impressed by her argument, the storm abruptly ended. The silence in Sweetness’s ears was so sudden and ringingly hollow she feared for a moment some pressure drop at the eye of the storm had popped her eardrums. She yawned, shook her head. No blood, no pain. No wind. No dust. She rolled on to her back. The slatted sky between the sleepers was clear blue. Sweetness popped her head up like a desert rodent. Upline, downline, north and south. Not even a wisping tail of dust to hint at the storm’s passage. It might never have been. Been it had, for every scrap of rust was scoured off the track ties and the old wooden sleepers had been planed to rounded wedges. A battle had been fought in the high air and, in this round, Devastation Harx had lost and the winds he had summoned were dispersed.
Next round would go to the canvas.
Sweetness heaved herself out of the hole, suspiciously sniffed the air. It was clean and good and wonderfully clear, like clothes beaten by a dhobi boy. With her new clarity of vision, Sweetness now saw an object far on the western horizon, previously obscured by dust and heat haze. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Had she not seen such things before—indeed, spent a night with that man under one—she would have disbelieved her eyes. They told her true. The thing looked like—and therefore was—nothing more than a domestic, fireside companion set—poker, brush, shovel, tongs—big enough to keep hell tended.
An afternoon’s walk brought her to the prodigy. The central column and cap rose like the dome of a great, airy temple. Sweetness walked under it, wondering at the artifacts hanging from its rim. The poker was a sheer steel shaft, thirty metres long, slowly penduluming in the rising evening breeze. The brush bristles had been sadly abraded by the duststorm, lopsided and graded like a Belladonna goondah’s asymmetrical buzz-cut. The shovel could have scooped up hosts of the sinful for the tongs to hold in the white heart of purgatory’s forges. Sweetness steered away from the hungry, pronged jaws. All were polished metal, scoured clean by the dust, brilliant in the evening sun.
Sweetness started as she rounded the corner of the base to find two figures huddled against the plinth. Figures, she presumed, though they were man-shaped bundles of ochre-stained fabric. Dust-mummies, she thought, at which they both moved, shedding clouds of dust. Sweetness took a step back. Out here, jokes and superstitions and impossibilities turned up behind every rock, real and able and eager to do stuff to you. The mummies shuffled to their feet. They beat their wrappings free of dust with their bandaged hands. Sweetness saw then that they wore long duster coats and baggy trader’s pants with thick-wound puttees. The hands then rose to the bulbous brown heads, fiddled for a loose end and streeled off more metres of cloth than Sweetness ever imagined you could wear around your head without suffocating. Obsidian eyeballs glittered; Sweetness relaxed when a few turns more revealed them to be little, round-eye sunspectacles. Faces emerged, one tall and square, the other round and purse-lipped. Both wore identical hairstyles, shaved at the sides, teased up into a flat-topped mesa. They looked dedicated and zealous as they kicked away their discarded binding bands. Sweetness might have been stone to them for all their regard.