This unit was defective. It has been scrapped.
As she repeated the doom, her vision returned. Heaven-machine, orph, plastic other-world place, tracks, Oxus plains, all were gone. The twin queues of trains faced each other across two kilometres of bare earth.
“Wow,” Sweetness said. “That was a blast.”
What did I tell you? Little Pretty One skull-whispered as she slipped back inside her host.
Unsure of exactly what they had witnessed, the people stood staring at the stripped earth. All, but one. The unmistakable prickle of alien eyes on back of neck alerted Sweetness. She turned to see who was impudent enough to seek her out with eyes, and give him a gobful of her best disdain if it was Romereaux. The victim was a short skinny Waymender boy, easy to recognise by his flat, inbred nose. One eye was a milky film, the other stared shamelessly at her hip.
Sweetness put her hands on her hips and leaned back, as she had seen the heroine do in Feisty Grrrl comic.
“Like it, then?”
The kid frowned.
“What’s that hanging off your hip?”
10
His name was Serpio and Sweetness saw in the dawn with him, tailbones chilled and alert against the cold iron of a number five driving wheel. With the dawn the tracksters went out. Hours of talk had left Sweetness post-conversational, ravenous and slightly high; a nudge in the ribs poked her back into reality.
“Look. See?”
It was a sight too splendid to be kept only for the unpopulated dawn hours. The big Waymender train was a caterpillar of windowless service cars, yellow and green, bearing the red globe-and-rails clan colophon. At the touch of sun the cars opened like yawns. Ramps crept forward, tested the temperature of the ground, settled. In the shadows, motors trembled, big machinery woke. With a gleeful shout, the survey buggies leaped into the high plain tallgrass. Their riders were keen-faced, clench-teethed teens. They wore goggles and mouth-scarves. They arrowed out across the pampas drawing tails of rising dust. Ranging lasers flickered mensurations, theodolite mirrors heliographed responses. Next, unfolding like thermophilic insects, the levellers stepped from their cocoons. Clawed feet shook the morning dew from the grass blades. Piggy-backed jockeys pulled levers. Long orang-arms, shovel-handed, scooped and shifted soil. Wheel-heeled graders ponderously descended their ramps, stomped the soil into submission. Surveyors darted around the heavy shanks of the big earth-movers. Watching them, Sweetness wished more than any wish that at that moment she was a badmaash Waymender and not an exalted Asiim Engineer. She wanted scuffed work boots and cut-off T-shirts and heavy gauntlets. She wanted dusty goggles and headscarves that waved their tassels in the dawn wind. She wanted to twist handles and pull levers and have machinery—any machinery—do her bidding. She wanted not to have Narob Stuard approaching over the close horizon in his wedding shirt and hat and vest with the dollar bills pinned all over it.
Almost, she blurted all the things in her heart to Serpio but they stalled on her tongue like a back-country air-fair barnstormer. The grand finale to the show was gearing itself together out of the back three carriages. Roof sections tilted and lifted, bogies swung out and back, gear trains and conveyor racks unfolded. The foremost carriage mounted the centre one like a Swavyn Ecstasy priest his catamite. The rear car completed the unlikely steel troilism by ducking underneath the central car and, by a complex series of extrusions, unfolding itself into tractor treads and bucketwheel booms. So much metal was performing so many unnatural acts that Sweetness’s head reeled with the dynamism of it all, but Serpio’s pride in his people’s work was warm beside her. It meant much to him, and thus to her.
She had learned early—after the wee-est ones had been sent to bed and before the trysters started trysting—that they were fellow oddballs. Outcasts. Bizarres, berefts.
“Like, all the time?”
“When it’s open.”
He didn’t mind her looking into his cataract. It was of a plasticy translucence. You could tap it. It made a kind of fingernailly click, and no pain. He didn’t mind her doing that either.
“Ghosts?”
“And angels. Anything sort of spiritual.”
“That thing.” Sweetness’s chin had jerked in the direction of the extracted orph. “Could you see that? What did it look like?”
“It’s kind of hard to describe what it sees, it’s like things extend out beyond themselves, into other kinds of worlds.”
“Like, tentacles?” Imagining things from two-year-old dreams, which are the big ones that scare you all your life, the dreams of loss and horror and the death of your parents by things with cable wrists and hooks for hands. And red light-bulb eyes. Imagining tendrils coiling out through puckered holes in the universe into mystery.
“No, it’s like I see you and you’re high and wide and deep…” She smiled inside at the warm glow of his eyes measuring her physicality. “But there’s other kinds of like, dimensions, beside those. You go out a long long way. That orph, when I looked at it, it had wings. I mean, they opened like wings, and I think there was some other kind of dimension it lived in some of the time where it could fly with them. They held it up in the air, if you know what I mean.”
She didn’t but the way his lower lip drooped when he was earnest pleased her so much she nodded and asked, slowly, “And when you look at me?”
“Which of you?”
His vision was both exciting and shaming; a striptease of the spirit. He looked at her and saw through his milky film a thing that had been private to Sweetness so long she had almost come to disbelieve in its objective existence. Baring, prying and enviable; Serpio needed no mirror. He looked at the world and his cataract reflected its flipside. But to see it everywhere, for everything you looked at to be populated with angels and ghosts. Too much. Too bright. You would go blind if you had to look at that too long. She could see it in Serpio. There was Trickster beneath that spiky thatch of gelled black hair. She liked it. She wanted to lick it. But she did not trust it. Only a fool or a trackside mark trusts his centavos to Trickster. She did not trust that it was Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th he liked, and not a Little Pretty One she could not see as he saw. She might have brighter eyes. She might have nicer hair. She might have better tits. Maybe he was turned on by whatever junction it was that joined them, meat to spirit.
Maybe it was both of them, together.
Bad thought. She’d only just met him, and he was nice—even if he’d had his Astral House changed by deed poll because of an uncertainty over which side of the Diurnal Line his carriage had been on when his mother heaved and squeezed him into the world. Uncertain house, strange boy, Grandmother Taal had warned.
Later: after the trysters had departed on their missions and before the drinkers achieved horizontal, she asked him, “Were you born with it?”
“No, I got it,” he answered and there was a worm of bitter in it. “There was this old hooker in Plazaville. They said she was a shapechanger—if you wanted to do it with a dog, or a big cat, or like a grazebeast, she’d turn into it for a pile of money. She worked out of this sprayed concrete dome home on the edge of the Rimbauds.” All railway children had heard of Plazaville’s Rimbauds, that iridescent, uncertain industrial district where used tokamak hotcores were stored. At the centre, the energy levels reached such intensity that reality broke down into a blur of many-coloured alternatives, the stories told, but you could never reach there. The power that flowed through the streets would turn you astray, and all the time the radiation was gently basting you. “All the kids used to rip the shit out of her, call her things, do the burning bag trick, throw ball bearings on the roof so they’d run down, you know? It was this real cheap house: there was this one tiny window, like a slit, and we were daring each other to go up and take a jeek in, maybe see her doing someone, or turning into something. So I pulled the card and even though I was scared, in case she was something out of the Rimbauds, I got a crate and went up and stood on it and jeeked in. It was a real tiny window, I could only get one eye.”