Ares Express by Ian McDonald

but they're machines and even if one machine makes another machine makes another machine, at the bottom of it all, there's a person, not a machine. A human who designed the machine, and programmed it, and gave it a mission and a name and a purpose. They're the ones built the world. They're the ones we should be remembering, not bits of metal and plastic. Those orphs, they're stupid. Big cow-machines. Cows got more sense'n an orph. I tell you, when you've seen as many as I have go ga-ga.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI got a job, see? I don't do nothing, no one does nothing on Iron Lion . I got a job. I guide the train. I stand up there on the fo'c's'le and I look down the track and I see angels boiling off the horizon like dust-devils. Angels? Balls. Tired, bad, mad machines.”
    â€œSt. Catherine…”
    â€œWoman. Like you.” Serpio looked at Sweetness askance from the eavesof his thatch of glossy black hair. “Nah. Not like you. St. Catherine, she was tired, mad, bad too. But she was a woman.”
    â€œWho tells you all this?” An itch of irritation in the voice. She'd only known this boy one party and a night and he was niggling her already.
    â€œHarx,” Serpio said and no more. While Sweetness was still deliberating if the monosyllable was a cough, a name or a Waymender curse, Serpio ducked down to peer through the dust-bunnies billowing up from the big machine's hem. “Down here.”
    Sweetness hunkered down on her hams beside the dark-haired boy. Through the soil and shredded grass, she glimpsed alchemy. The big machine ate soil and shat steel. Two gleaming parallel lines of steel, new forged, shimmering with heat-haze, married together by smoking obsidian sleepers.
    â€œIt's making it straight out of the ground,” Sweetness said, amazed. Serpio nodded the nod of workaday magic, but Sweetness knew her delight had pleased him. Squatting side by side, they watched the steel rails creep across the gap of raw earth. Centimetre by centimetre , Sweetness thought. Measuring the time until the rails are joined. Shortening the gap between me and Narob and his stainless steel kitchen. A joining, and a joining. Grain by grain. Centimetre by centimetre.
    Too dismal a thought by far for a crisp cold clear Deuteronomy morning. Serpio read the sudden gloom in her muscles.
    â€œI'm hungry now. Come on. Let's eat. They'll be barbieing up by now.”
    Under the ribs of a lone umbrella tree the Surveyors had dug firepits and slung spits. The flee-kills were being gutted, skinned, skewered. Cracks and flares of burning fat sent spirals of aromatic black smoke through the leaves of the shade tree. There were three barbecue pits under the tree. At one the Waymender bike girls were gathered, roasting bustards. They greeted Serpio with a toss of the chin, Sweetness with a suspicious glance over their goggles. Sweetness admired and envied their bike gear, the amount of dusty muscle it showed, the casual toughness with which they wore it.
    â€œAnything going?”
    The girl with the biggest muscles spoke. “Might be. Who's that you're with?”
    â€œSweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”
    The leader tried the name out on her tongue, twice.
    â€œSo. Nice hair. You with Squint?”
    â€œI've been talking to him.”
    â€œWell, I suppose someone needs to. There's rail-rabbit if you want some.”
    They took the charred haunch wrapped in old survey charts to the trunk. It tasted to Sweetness like hamadryad thigh. A bike wireless burbled New School Deuteronomy flute-and-tabla and Sweetness thought, In this place, at this moment, I am perfectly happy. It could not last. The ending was exactly as Sweetness had seen in too many incarriage Range-rider movies. The cool touch of shadow, the boots foursquare on the earth, the silhouette blocking out the sun. Three of them, in classic vee-formation. Each could have taken Serpio like a haunch of