Out here, in this isolating, airless, dizzyingly featureless place, where all you could hear was the sound of your own breathing and the tap of the (strictly rationed) respirator, the expression Point of No Return carried too much additional significance.
What on earth had made people look at this place and think, yeah, we could turn that into a nice habitable little planet?
God, but her feet were cold. And her hands. She flapped her arms, trying to beat heat into them. The suit might be thermal foil, but all it seemed to do was reflect the little external heat from the tiny, wan sun.
Was that really the same sun?
Still less than halfway to the gantry. Her family had thought her head blasted by the interworld transition, like Grandfather Bedzo, but they had no better explanation for the incontrovertible existence of a Transpolaris Traction signal light out in the desert.
Sweetness paused to haul up her arms, hoick up her crotch. The radiation-proof suit was also gas-tight, but it came only in sizes large and extra-large, and she was terrified of tripping over a fold of foil that had drooped around her ankles, ripping the fabric on one of those nasty wind-sharpened stones and dying alone out here in the cold with blood coming out of her ears and eyes.
The one good thing about the Point of No Return, she decided, was that anything after it was an anticlimax, so things could not get any worse than this and they would all be home and happy soon.
Caution abandoned, she ran the last few metres over the ragged rocks to the signal tower, rested her palm against it, took ten, fifteen deep breaths. The libation. You always give him something. She unhooked the flask of mint tea from the Velcro chest patch, uncapped it, poured. The liquid flashed to vapour before it hit the ground.
“Uncle Neon.”
“Sweetness, child!” said the godlike voice in her head, a little startled, as if disturbed from private contemplation. “What a pleasant surprise! How is everyone, what’s the news, it’s been a while since I last heard of all your doings and undoings. Or has it? Is that a new outfit you’re wearing? I must say, it does nothing for you. Wasted your money there.”
“Uncle, I haven’t time to explain. I need you to send a message.”
“Not a foretelling? You don’t want to know about the baby Sle’s going to have with that Cussite girl he hasn’t married yet?”
“Uncle, just send a message, back home.”
A pause. Sweetness could imagine the discourses running through her poor mad uncle’s eotemporal brain: why can’t the child take it herself; back home, where is that, why is that? where is this place I find myself, am I indeed dead, has this all been dreams arcing through my head from that final lightning, am I in heaven or hell or somewhere not quite either?
“What is this message?” Uncle Neon asked.
“It’s not so much a what, as a who,” Sweetness said, unVelcroing the canopic jar and, with ice-numb fingers, fumbling off the lid. “See?” She held the mirror up to the three eyes of the signal lights like an ancient scroll.
“I most certainly do,” said Uncle Neon. “One moment…”
When she rolled it up again, the mirror was empty of any image of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. As she stomped back toward the cordillera-like mass of Catherine of Tharsis, Sweetness turned to hold the roll of plastic film out to the rising wind, like a spinnaker.
“Look for me in mirrors,” had been Little Pretty One’s final whisper before Uncle Neon launched her back down the link that Sweetness alone and always had been able to exploit to bring her to this other world.
She let go of the mirror. The wind caught it and whipped it away like a sail, around and around and over and over, tumbling away, a blink of light, on the eternal gales.
It took ten minutes of concentrated rubbing by Romereaux before sensation returned to her feet and hands and then that was pins and needles that had her hopping in agony around the bridge, oohing and aahing.
“You’re wasting our air,” sour Ricardo said.
“Look, I went out there,” Sweetness said, dancing up and down on her points. “Anyway, help’s coming.”
“Aye, and when?”
Not in the first hour, the hour of confident expectation.
“She’s got a lot to do,” Sweetness explained.
Nor in the second hour, the hour of settling down patiently.
“Maybe he put up more of a fight than she expected,” was Sweetness’s rationalisation.
Nor the third hour either, which, when your air is strictly budgeted, is the hour of creeping doubt.
“There’re all those cybersoldiers, remember,” Sweetness said let’s-not-be-selfishly.
But the help did not come in the fourth hour, nor the fifth hour, nor the sixth hour, when the air is hot and foul and so heavy with carbon dioxide all you can do is sit with your back against the cooling bulkhead and count things over and over and over again.
“Help?” Ricardo croaked.
“I don’t know,” Sweetness said. “I don’t know at all.”
Then the cry came from the window, a little, oxygen-choked croak.
“Out there,” Grandmother Taal stammered. Everyone crawled to the window, heaved themselves up over the sill.
Something like a very small dust-devil was moving across the Big Red, cutting straight across the dirt and red rocks as if possessed of a volition and a destination. It was heading straight for Catherine of Tharsis. Sweetness felt a silly, oxygen-wasting laugh bubble inside her, a laugh she could not keep down, that boiled out of her like her offering tea flashing to vapour as she poured it out.
A bit of help indeed.
The whirlwind rushed up to the side of the train, mounted the boarding ramp, spun along the walkways and stairways until it came to the pressure outlock. Then everyone on the bridge heard a hammering on the lock door.
“Open, in the name of Beelzebub!”
31
The pressure-lock door closed behind the strange little man. He had long white hair tied back at his shoulders with a gold ring and long mustachios which he kept sharply waxed. His eyes were deep and darkly bright. He wore a long desert duster coat and a big-brimmed hat with a ludicrously jaunty feather in its band. On his back was a complex pack of many devices and power cables, including a handy-looking field-inducer tucked into the pocket of his coat and a whirring object that looked like a small sewing machine. He carried around him a translucent bubble of force that seemed to hold his own atmosphere. He twisted a setting ring on the field inducer. The bubble popped audibly. The oxygen-starved people of Catherine of Tharsis smelled purple heathers and autumn seaside. To them, the little man looked a little blurred at the edge, slightly out of focus, like a television picture on the edge of a transmission footprint. They thought it was their foggy minds. Sweetness knew better. The traveller was on the extreme edge of his probability locus. He took a step forward out of the lock, removed his gloves, banged them together, kicked the dust off his battered desert boots, sniffed, grimaced.
“It mings a bit in here.”
He sought Sweetness, doffed his hat and bowed in the formal Old Deuteronomy way to her.
“My dear, Dr. Alimantando, multiversal engineer and transtemporal tourist at your service. I have been expressly purposed by Our Lady of Tharsis herself with the task of taking you anywhere in the multiverse you wish to go.”
“Home would be good,” Sweetness said. “Home would be very good.”
