“Met her yet? Not that, either.”
“Ah. I see.” He did too, much and wide, but unfocused, like a distorting lens. Sweetness frequently tripped over Uncle Neon’s nostalgias for futures that might never happen. And sometimes the branching future he picked in this mother of marshalling yards was the mainline ahead.
“They want you wed,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“To a Stuard. A Ninth Avata Stuard, on the Llangonedd run.”
“Mother’a’grace…”
“Don’t worry yourself.”
“Don’t worry myself? You’ve just told me I’m going to blow my wild years brewing samovars of mint tea for Cathar pilgrims.”
Uncle Neon had an appropriately scary laugh. It felt like sand scouring the inside of your skull. Sweetness winced.
“Sweetness, your wild years are far from blown,” he said, and sang an old nursery rhyme about a sailor who sailed across the sky and brought back his love a silver fig and a diamond rattle. He did not sing well, even in death, but Sweetness was patient with relatives. When he had finished she left a polite pause before asking, “Is that it?”
“That what?”
“I’m going to marry a Stuard and my wild years are far from over?”
In the pause that followed, Sweetness imagined the three-bulbed signal light cocked to one side, quizzically.
“Yes. That’s it. Don’t worry, though. Trust me. Now, tell me, how is she?”
By “she,” Sweetness understood Catherine of Tharsis and that she would see no more of her future. She huffed through her nose in exasperation at the unruly oracle.
“The aft containment field still isn’t seating right.”
“Is it making a sound like this?” This being a twittering, hissing whistle.
“More like this.” Sweetness added a tweeting click, on a rising cadence.
Uncle Neon clicked his tongue.
“You want to get that seen to. What are those Deep-Fusion folk about? I don’t know, since I died, she’s gone to pieces. No one has any respect for good machinery any more. He certainly doesn’t. His head’s completely up his arse, and I don’t just mean trains. Look at that poor sow he married—your sainted mother, I mean.” Uncle Neon’s telepathic apology felt like two crossed fingers circling Sweetness’s frontal lobe in blessing. She loved the feeling. It made her purr. “He’s still not talking to her.”
“Not a whisper. He signs.”
Another neural tut.
“It should be you. I’ve always said that. You’d get that field generator set right toute suite.”
“I wouldn’t have let it get into that state in the first place,” Sweetness said proudly. Too many dead-end tracks toppling into glossy green craters were the monuments to sloppy tokamak maintenance. The Tracksters laid fresh rail around them but the blast craters stayed hot for lifetimes, glowing sickly in the high plains night. Thinking of them, Sweetness flared, “But I’m going to marry a poncing Stuard on the God-shuttle and make tea and almond slices, amn’t I?”
“You are?”
“You said you saw it.”
“I see a lot more than I say. That I can say.”
Says who? Sweetness wanted to say but the words were sucked off her lips by the sudden dust wind whipping up around her, a dust she knew was not dust, or rust, but moments. Granulated time. She was being drawn back. The journey home was always quicker and more precipitous than the way out: a swooping giddiness, a rustling blackness, a sense of wings wide enough to wrap the world, and then there; the big big desert and the hot hot sun.
Romereaux was squatting on his heels by the rail, scooping up palmfuls of dust and trickling them through his fingers. Idling time away.
“How do you do that?” he said.
“Do what?” The other place took a moment to blink away, like grit in the eye.
“Whatever it is you do. Wherever it is you go.”
“Go?” Suspicious: what had he seen? “I don’t go anywhere. I mean, you’re there, but you’re not there.”
“But where are you?”
“What’s this about?”
Romereaux shrugged, opened his hand, looked at the earth and small stones clutched there.
“I’m just interested in what you do, where you go.”
“Well don’t be.”
“You’re very defensive.”
“I’ve got to have something for myself.” On a train where five families live on top of each other in a tapestry of territories and societies. “Some place for me.”
“So you do go somewhere.”
“What’s this to you?”
“Nothing. They’ve whistled.”
That brought her up.
“What? How many times?”
“Twice.”
“Mother’a…”
Three whistles and the train left. With or without you. Fare or family. We’ve got a railroad to run, don’t you know? Timetables to keep. As Sweetness sprinted for Catherine of Tharsis, steam plumed up from the calliope mounted where the main boiler joined the tender. The impudent notes of “Liberty Lillian’s Rag” swaggered across the desert as Madre Mercedes Deep-Fusion’s asbestos-gloved fingers hopped across the seething keys. All aboard that’s coming aboard! All a-ground that’s staying behind. Skirt hitched around her thighs, Sweetness pounded down the track. Romereaux passed her effortlessly. Behind them, Uncle Neon closed his amber eye and opened his green eye. Catherine of Tharsis cleared her cylinders with a shout of steam. Cranks flailed, wheels spun. Like a crustal plate shifting, the behemoth began to move.
Sweetness saw Romereaux snatch at the bottom rung of the companionway as it retracted. Then it was past her head and moving in utterly the opposite direction. Sweetness spun on her heel and raced after the receding ladder. House-high wheels churned beside her head. Romereaux crouched on the lowest step, hand outstretched. Mother’a’grace, it was going to be close.
“Romereaux!”
The reaching hand was pulling away. With the dregs of her strength, Sweetness leaped. Romereaux’s hand was an iron manacle around her wrist. Sweetness slammed into the relief valve on the luff housing. Winded, she swung from Romereaux’s grip. Drive shafts hammered beside her ear.
“I can’t…” Romereaux’s face read; youthful strength overstretched by sharp reality. Sweetness swung, tried to kick herself toward the diamond tread of the rung. Nailtips grazed steel. The sleeper-ends beneath her were a blur of concrete. Fall now, and it would be worse than miss the train. She kicked again, reached.
“Ahhh!”
Fingers locked around metal rung. Romereaux pulled her up until both hands had a firm grip. He gathered a fistful of track jacket and floral-print summer frock and hauled Sweetness on to the companionway. Metal scraped bare shin, she paddled with her feet. Boot treads found stair treads.
Home.
“Close one,” Tante Miriamme called, sheets a-folding as Romereaux and Sweetness scurried past her window. “And Sweetness, in the desert? A true lady never forgets her underwear.”
4
Two hundred kilometres up, the orbital mirror caught sunlight from beneath the edge of the world and winked it into Naon Engineer’s eye. Momentarily blinded, he dropped the thread of his argument to the floor of the Confab Chamber.
“Erm…”
“The marriage portion,” svelte, dangerous Marya Stuard hinted.
Blithe and holy, the five-kilometre disk of silverskin wheeled down the orbital marches after the setting sun.
“Oh yes. Of course. What had I suggested?”
“Five thousand dollars in the chest.”