Ares Express by Ian McDonald Page A

rabbit in two hands and bitten him in half. And they wanted to. The bike girls’ gruffness had fronted a sororal affection. These Waymender boys hated him.
    â€œYou don't eat that, Squint.”
    A heavy-soled boot kicked the meat from Serpio's grip. As he reached for it, a lieutenant pushed him over on his side down into the dust and twisted his spine until he was looking up at his chief tormentor.
    â€œBreakfast, boy.”
    The leader carried meat: a roasted pigling penis, smoking hot. Serpio struggled and spat but the two lieutenants had him held firm.
    â€œThis is what you eat, Squint.”
    They pried his mouth open with sharp fingers pressed hard into the angle of the jaw. Serpio kicked and thrashed against the big boy's attempt to shove the pig's penis into his mouth.
    â€œHold him still.”
    They did and it went in. Serpio choked and spat.
    â€œEat it up now.”
    The lieutenants moved his jaw, mocking mastication.
    I know why you are doing this, Sweetness thought. You see him with someone, doing a thing your rules for him do not allow, you see him doing a thing for himself and not asking it from you, and you hate that. She wanted to speak out. She wanted to kick them hard in the balls, go for their eyes. She wanted to stop them doing the thing to Serpio that was for her benefit. But she was off-territory, out-clan. Amongst aliens.
    â€œSalp, let him be.”
    The leader twisted his mouth in a moue of disappointment but the girls had spoken. They were not impressed. It was over. The boys left without a word. Serpio flung the foul pig-thing away from him, spat and spat and spat again. Sweetness went to him but she was afraid to touch him. She did not know the decorum of the Waymender Domiety. To offer a hand in comfort might be a worse insult than that done to him by the bike boys.
    â€œI'm sorry,” she said, feeling how lame the words were on her lips.
    â€œSorry?” Serpio struggled to his feet. “What are you sorry about? What have you done?”
    â€œSorry,” she said again, no better than before.
    Serpio flung soil, kicked grass, dry-spat after his persecutors.
    â€œBastards! Bastards! You think you're something, Salpinge, well, you're nothing! You are nothing!”
    He settled into a damaged, trembling sulk. His world-eye glowed dark.
    â€œIt's over. They're gone.” Sweetness knelt, carefully putting herself between Serpio and his bullies.
    â€œHarx,” Serpio whispered, so quiet and venomous Sweetness almost mistook it for a natural phenomenon.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHe'll show you,” Serpio muttered. “He'll show everyone. You'll all see!”
    â€œWhat is, who is, Harx?” Sweetness asked but he did not hear and she knew the words were not for her. She saw a reflection in Serpio's angel-eye where the sun was not; a glint of silver.
    Serpio stood up. He balled his fists and roared at his tormentors, a howl of energy that drew years of shame and rage and alienation like a vacuum in the soul. Sweetness was not sure she liked boys who howled. Serpio gasped into a hunch of humiliation, but the howl roared on, changing shape and tone, becoming something other, a note, a whistle, a train whistle, coming up the track. She knew that song. She knew the song of every train on the Southern Grand Trunk. An ear within had been listening for it since Little Pretty One told her in the night the name and nature of her intended. The song of the Class 44 single-tokamak fusion hauler Ninth Avata.

F unny, she was to think kilometres later, how simply these things are decided. In all this piece of the Great Oxus there was one upswelling—a shallow, egg-shaped mound a spit or two long and less high, a flaw in the world-making like a bull's-eye in cheap glass—and Sweetness and Serpio were hiding behind it. They lay side by side, belly-flat on the grass, passing a stolen pair of Surveyor's glasses between them.
    â€œWhat are they doing now?”