Best to see it as another piece of discarded metal in this junkyard of improbabilities, soon to be covered and forgotten like all the other casualties.
Her home…Her people. What had she done to them?
What only she could do.
Would they believe her when she pleaded story?
She could not look at the silver gingerbread that prettied up the blast shutters, the roaring lion crest, charred, battered. No more Ares Express. The Saint is dead. You killed her, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.
Head full of the singing, ringing sound of pushed-down tears, she walked through the robot cemetery to the line. This time, she had a clear indication what direction not to go. Think of it as another re-route job for the Waymenders and a few minutes down-time on the Grand Valley runs. She turned east, to warmth and hope.
Sweetness had walked but a few minutes when she became aware of a bee-drone and moving mote in the eye of the sun. She squinted, peered. An object was driving through the air toward her, a larger object than its direct frontal approach hinted. United Artists’ trim little airship emerged to eclipse the light and dropped to a relaxed hover over Sweetness Asiim. A hatch opened, the woman in the green leotard hailed her.
“You want a lift? We owe you.”
“A lift? Where?”
Skerry indicated the whole wide world.
“Wherever you want.”
Sweetness thought about the gift of leaving all the mess for someone else to clear up, climbing up that ramp and dissolving into the anonymous. Then she saw Grandmother Taal, and Child’a’grace, Psalli and Romereaux, still standing there, seeing what she had done, waiting, and still she did not come. Did not ever come. Ran away with the circus. Sometimes even an Engineer cannot ride. Sometimes you have to walk to face it.
“I think I’ll walk this one, thank you. But hey!” she shouted as the fans swivelled into lift configuration and the little blimp began to turn. “Tell them I’m all right, will you?”
The taut little woman saluted.
“We will. By the way, in case you were wondering, we did win.”
“That’s all right then,” Sweetness called up as the door irised shut, the fans threw dust around her and the airship lifted, turned, dipped its nose to the east and sailed away.
Five hundred paces later, she found the bean. It was balanced on the starboard rail. No natural force could have balanced it there, the fusion wind from Harx’s devastation would have carried it away had it been there for any time. Sweetness bent down, studied the dull, white little eating bean. She frowned at the incongruity, then remembered where she had seen such a pulse before. She pocketed it and hiked on up the line, knowing what she would find next.
The skinny wooden spill was stabbed like a vodun charm into the dirt between the sleepers. Sweetness knelt, slowly pulled it out by its green tip. It was, she remembered, meant to be pulled slowly, gingerly, with forethought.
“Boy of Two Dusts,” she read. Glancing up, she saw the next stick thrust into the dirt three sleepers up. “Golden Thumb-ring.” She kept it in her hand with Boy of Two Dusts. Within a minute’s walk she had a fistful of slim sticks. Half a kilometre upline was a signal relay from which came an unseasonable smell of spring verdure. Suspecting what she would find there, Sweetness walked resolutely up to it.
“I thought it might be you.”
The greenperson sat back on the relay, knees pulled up to chest, forearms resting lightly on them. A loose canvas jellaba covered its body and hid its face within a deep cowl but the slim-fingered, pale green hands confirmed what the smell of growing suggested. Sweetness dropped the bundle of fate sticks at its scaley feet.
“Story over, then.”
“It is. You are no longer afforded the protection of the universal narrative conventions. You are not the darling of the universe any more.”
Funny way the universe had of showing it, Sweetness thought. She said, “Not even a little after bit? A coda?”
The green person shrugged.
“It reminds me of someone when you do that,” Sweetness said.
“Nice denouement, I must say,” the greenperson said, ignoring her bait. “End with a bang. Always good.”
“Cost Catherine of Tharsis. My family’s one and only asset, and I blew it up.”
The green person cocked its head to one side, a darting, reptilian motion Sweetness could not read.
“I think you’ll find that, despite the mess you’ve managed to spread across this and neighbouring universes, what passes for the government in this one is not ungrateful,” it said. It looked up from the folds of its cowl, shot a hand from the long, loose sleeve. The face was slit-eyed, scaled. Sweetness thought she saw a forked tongue flicker. The long fingers had stretched into hooks, the knuckles swollen to painful knobs, the nails drawn into tight black claws. Sweetness took the hand. It felt like napped velvet.
“Well, that’ll be goodbye then,” the green person said. “I’ll not get up if you don’t mind, I’m finding standing increasingly uncomfortable as I change. We’ll not meet again in this lifetime. Goodbye, it was a good story, I enjoyed you: see you in the next one.”
They shook hands briefly. Then the lizard-hands scooped up the bundle of fortune-telling sticks and snapped it smartly in half.
“You’re free now. I give you your fate back. What happens from now on is entirely in your own hands. Your story has ended, your tale has just begun.”
“Thank God for that,” Sweetness Engineer 12th said, and began to walk. Like flies in the heat-haze, she thought she could see objects far down the track, swimming in the treacherous silver. Resolution and certainty increased with every step she took closer. People, trainpeople, and behind them, that rippling square of black must be the jettisoned tender. But what was that in the deeper haze beyond? A thing like a city, all spires and towers and campaniles. Mirage. Illusion. It could all be lies and magnifications. Should have taken that ride, traingirl. Story’s over, if your pride gets you into trouble now, you’ve only yourself to get you out of it. No different from everyone else then. That should be sufficient. Sweetness jogged forward, trying to penetrate the shimmering. A city, yes, but a narrow one. A linear city? She stopped, laughed out loud, beat her hands off her thighs in realisation. Not a city at all; a factory train. A big smelly minging dirty factory. Now she could see the tell-tale parallel plumes of steam from the separators. They had all come for her. They were all here. All her people. She glanced back, as everyone must. Of course there was no figure squatting by the signal relay, but did she see a scurry of green dart to cover behind a sleeper?
Free to be mundane again.
Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th smiled, shouldered her pack and ran along the line through the green hills of Mars, into the silver shimmer where her people were waiting.
About the Author
Ian McDonald is the author of many science fiction novels, including Desolation Road; King of Morning, Queen of Day; Out on Blue Six; Chaga; Kirinya; River of Gods; and Brasyl. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the BSFA Award, been nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award, and has several nominations for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Washington Post called him “one of the best SF novelists of our time.” He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.