Onward; parting webs of thick, pulsating vines to be sure she was on the track of the fluttering lure. Bulbs and nodules burst between her fingers, staining them with coloured juices that smelled of stale beer, cinnamon, fresh buttery plastic, window polish, Grandmother Taal’s herb tisanes. One smelled so powerfully of ginger sorbet she remembered from a trip to Devenney on the Syrtic Sea she almost sucked her long fingers. Almost.
Onward: through curtains of transparent lace; along narrow twisting alleys confined between towering crimson tube walls, like the neatly coiled intestines of an eviscerated giant; crawling under umbrella-canopies of ground-kissing mushrooms; through flocks of creatures like tiny silver flies suspended from gossamer balloons that wheeled and darted with surprising agility from the touch of her shadow.
At some point Sweetness remembered that Romereaux was not with her, had never been with her. At another point, she realised she had been walking much much longer than she should have been able to. At yet another, she saw that the edge of the world was a good deal closer than she had expected. Another still, and she discovered she had no idea where she was. Further yet, she realised she did not care.
Pushing through swags of knitted moss, she failed to see the glitter of water and almost fell headlong into the pool. Sweetness grabbed fistfuls of moss, they tore like widow’s curtains. She fell to her hands and knees in shallow, metallic-smelling water. Water. She remembered who what where she was. She looked around. The flying tantaliser was gone, of course. She looked up at the sky. It was a shade or two darker than the norm. Verging indigo. She thought of that other strange sky, in the place where Uncle Neon dwelled alone in his steel pole. Was this like that, another other? Was what had fallen on to the Trans Oxiana mainline a circular door, an infinite number of ways in, so that when you were on the other side, you found that it was bigger on the inside than the outside? The twenty-seven heavens of the Panarch were stacked like that, each inside the one below it, each larger than the level that contained it. She had walked a long way; the sun—if that was the sun she knew—was close to the edge of the world.
A panicky thought. Some doors open only one way. Once through this door, could she get back? Could she even get back to where she could get back from?
Something moved in the water. A face, pale, framed by writhing black snakes. St. Catherine preserve us, the Lamia of the Pool. The snakes were black curls. The face was her own. But it was not a reflection. Little Pretty One lay under the shallow water, rising slowly through the rippled surface. A hand thrust out of the water. Sweetness seized it, pulled her psychic twin out of the pond. Little Pretty One was dressed in the work shorts, tie-waist T and big boots Sweetness had worn the day she refused to djubba Kid Pharaoh off the side of the ore-car. Little Pretty One gobbed and hawked out a mouthful of water.
“What were you doing in there?” Sweetness asked.
“Drowning, tit-breath,” Little Pretty One spat. “Sweet Mother of sewage…”
“No, I mean, how did you get here?”
“You’re asking particularly inane questions today,” Little Pretty One said, wringing out the hems of her shorts. She and Sweetness stood facing each other ankle-deep in the strange water. “Same way I always get anywhere.”
“Where are we?”
Little Pretty One squatted, dripping, on a gnarled fist of translucent, spark-speckled polymer. Sweetness found a perch on a swag of liana.
“Now, what would have been a much better question is ‘when’ are we rather than ‘where’?”
“Well, when then?” For a psychic twin, Little Pretty One was damn irritating.
“That’s tricky.” Little Pretty One stretched her fingers out and examined them. “God! Bloody prunes!” She held up wrinkled pads for Sweetness’s perusal. “I mean, if you think of time as a railway line, you have a problem. There isn’t anywhere but forward or back. Think of it more like a shunting yard…”
“But one with many thousands of tracks…Done this one before.”
“Where? When? You didn’t tell me.”
“My uncle.”
“Oh. Him. And where is your uncle, exactly?” Little Pretty One looked theatrically around her. “So, did he tell you it’s a probability thing?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. I thought it up myself. When I was there.” Conversations concerning invisible relatives tended to the surreal of the metaphysical, Sweetness had found.
“Well, my little mathematician, if you can imagine that the tracks closest to the mainline are more likely than the ones on the outside. Like a train to get on to a track has to roll three dice. So, to get on to the outside tracks you need a three, or an eighteen; it’s going to be much easier to get on to the ones where you need a twelve. Except, the odds are way way longer than that. Like rolling a hundred Eagle-Eye-Jacques in a row. Maybe less likely, but the thing is, it can happen, and you’d be on that track way way out there. It can happen first time, even. Space-like time. Time-like space, but that’s something else.”
Railway children grew up natural relativists, where time and distance were freely interchangeable as they moved at speed across whole landscapes.
“So, where does this when come from?” Sweetness asked. A cellophane rustle. Little Pretty One looked up. Her eyes opened. In a trice she dived back inside Sweetness. She left a damp stain on Sweetness’s shirt and track jeans.
Pink plastic fronds parted. Fingers pushed through. A face followed. Romereaux’s. Sweetness saw him, frond-freckled. Romereaux saw her, waterdappled. And it went crack between them, the thing that had been here every moment in every breath and word and look between them, that they had never dared talk about, that the ways of the Domieties and the customs of the trainfolk and the Forma had denied, but here, in a place outside the Forma, outside the world of laws and formas, they could play. Crack like Uncle Neon in the middle of routine signal maintenance, flashed into somewhere else. Like that Sweetness found her fingers untying the draw strings of his pants. Loosening the elasticated waistband from the crinkled skin. Like that she found her track vest floating in the water, found fingers working up and under her T, found Romereaux’s attempted goatee prickling her chin. Then tongue. Then tongue back and the pants dropped around his ankle like a vanquished battle flag and the discovery that he, too, flouted Domiety prescriptions on underwear.
“Ooh, you filthy bugger,” Sweetness giggled as it kicked hard in her hand like a pet lizard and he just smiled.
“In there.” He nodded at the pool.
“In the water?”
“The water.”
“So, you’ve always wanted to…”
“In water. Ah hah.”
“You are a filthy bugger.”
She unbuttoned her shirt. It fell in surrender like Romereaux’s many-pocketed pants. Sweetness took a step backward. Cool alien water sucked at her heels.
“Hello?”
She turned to stone. Romereaux was paralysed. The windmills wound and the whirligigs whirled and fritillaries frilled while they stood, two statues, too stunned even to pull their clothes on.
“Hello? There’s someone there, isn’t there?”
The little pet house lizard had gone down, limp and sad.