Ares Express by Ian McDonald Page B

Sweetness demanded. She was a poor passive listener. She was eye that looked, not ear that heard. Thus, from childhood she had had a fear of going blind, perhaps in whimsical divine punishment.
    â€œThey're processing,” Serpio said.
    Too much. She snatched the binoculars from his grasp, almost throttling Serpio with the thong. The hillock lay a kay and a half west of the mainline—so the ranging equipment on the glasses told her. Good little glasses, light, clever: they focused automatically. She turned them on the twin ant-trains mutually approaching against a backdrop of colossal engineering. Asiim Engineers to the right, Stuards to the left. They leaped into resolution: first Naon Engineer, sweating but superb in the robe, hat and gloves of his mystery. A pace behind him: Child'a'grace, heartbreakingly elegant in her Susquavanna marriage gown, unfaded, unshrunken and unpatched. Like her. So precise were the survey-glasses that Sweetness could even make out her smirk of small pride at her husband's splendour—knowing full he would never see it. Then came brother Sle, sulky still, with the casket that held the bank draft for three thousand dollars; Rother'am, sulkier still. Behind him came a Hire-priest—a spotty adolescent in rented regalia. Sweetness watched his lips move as he rehearsed the sentences and responses. His inexperience would have been inaudible over the sound of the Catherine of Tharsis Inter-Domiety band immediately following. Sweetnesscould hear them parping and cracking notes all the way from her grassy knoll. Non-wedding party, non-musicians straggled after, minor Domiety members and important Septs, the curious, those who liked a bit of a cry, those who wanted any distraction from the mundane nomadism of life on the line. The sides of the waiting trains were hung with religious banners, good-luck ribbons and the faces of those who loved a good wedding. Sweetness swung the glasses widdershins.
    Narob Stuard strode well ahead of his people. It showed nuptial eagerness. He held his chin up, and kept his eyes steely-slitted. The wind rustled the banknotes stapled to his waistcoat and tousled the tassels of his wedding shirt. Every few paces he touched his hand to his wedding hat to steady it against the rising high-plains wind. It seemed to irritate him. He is good-looking, Sweetness thought. But then many men look good walking into the wind, and that's no reason to marry them.
    They hadn't missed her yet. The affiance. On the first meeting between the partners, the bride-soon-to-be was supposed to feign a demure reluctance. But soon they would wonder what was taking her so long with her clips, or her veil, or her garland, and the unmarried girls would be sent to look. They would be sent to look, and a kilometre and a half away on a grassy knoll she realised she had not thought what to do when they did not find her. It was a big thing to realise. It lay in her stomach like morning hunger, or the sway when a train hits a set of points you aren't expecting, or magic hour moments when the edge of the world is just over the sun and the sandstone fingers of the Big Vermilion country are still glowing with the heat of it—you can feel it on your face—and the sky is so blue it aches.
    Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th, the feeling said, at this moment, you are free to do one of two things. You can get up from this bank and go to your cabin and put on your clips and your veil and your garland and go out there to meet your husband-to-be. You can get up from this bank and go to that terrain bike over there and take that bike and this boy and go wherever you want in the world. That's it. That's your two choices. Sorry there ain't no more. That's your lot.
    Sweetness put down the glasses, but it wasn't readjustment to new perspectives that made the world swim around her. It was those two and two-onlychoices, and the certainty that in this moment, she had to decide. The