Free Ares Express by Ian McDonald

Further yet, she realised she did not care.
    Pushing through swags of knitted moss, she failed to see the glitter of water and almost fell headlong into the pool. Sweetness grabbed fistfuls of moss, they tore like widow's curtains. She fell to her hands and knees in shallow, metallic-smelling water. Water. She remembered who what where she was. She looked around. The flying tantaliser was gone, of course. She looked up at the sky. It was a shade or two darker than the norm. Verging indigo. She thought of that other strange sky, in the place where Uncle Neon dwelled alone in his steel pole. Was this like that, another other? Was what had fallen on to the Trans Oxiana mainline a circular door, an infinite number of ways in, so that when you were on the other side, you found that it was bigger on the inside than the outside? The twenty-seven heavens of the Panarch were stacked like that, each inside the one below it, each larger than the level that contained it. She had walked a long way; the sun—if that was the sun she knew—was close to the edge of the world.
    A panicky thought. Some doors open only one way. Once through this door, could she get back? Could she even get back to where she could get back from ?
    Something moved in the water. A face, pale, framed by writhing black snakes. St. Catherine preserve us, the Lamia of the Pool. The snakes were black curls. The face was her own. But it was not a reflection. Little Pretty One lay under the shallow water, rising slowly through the rippled surface. A hand thrust out of the water. Sweetness seized it, pulled her psychic twin out of the pond. Little Pretty One was dressed in the work shorts, tie-waist T and big boots Sweetness had worn the day she refused to djubba Kid Pharaoh off the side of the ore-car. Little Pretty One gobbed and hawked out a mouthful of water.
    â€œWhat were you doing in there?” Sweetness asked.
    â€œDrowning, tit-breath,” Little Pretty One spat. “Sweet Mother of sewage…”
    â€œNo, I mean, how did you get here?”
    â€œYou're asking particularly inane questions today,” Little Pretty One said, wringing out the hems of her shorts. She and Sweetness stood facingeach other ankle-deep in the strange water. “Same way I always get anywhere.”
    â€œWhere are we?”
    Little Pretty One squatted, dripping, on a gnarled fist of translucent, spark-speckled polymer. Sweetness found a perch on a swag of liana.
    â€œNow, what would have been a much better question is ‘when’ are we rather than ‘where’?”
    â€œWell, when then?” For a psychic twin, Little Pretty One was damn irritating.
    â€œThat's tricky.” Little Pretty One stretched her fingers out and examined them. “God! Bloody prunes!” She held up wrinkled pads for Sweetness's perusal. “I mean, if you think of time as a railway line, you have a problem. There isn't anywhere but forward or back. Think of it more like a shunting yard…”
    â€œBut one with many thousands of tracks…Done this one before.”
    â€œWhere? When? You didn't tell me.”
    â€œMy uncle.”
    â€œOh. Him. And where is your uncle, exactly?” Little Pretty One looked theatrically around her. “So, did he tell you it's a probability thing?”
    â€œHe didn't tell me anything. I thought it up myself. When I was there.” Conversations concerning invisible relatives tended to the surreal of the metaphysical, Sweetness had found.
    â€œWell, my little mathematician, if you can imagine that the tracks closest to the mainline are more likely than the ones on the outside. Like a train to get on to a track has to roll three dice. So, to get on to the outside tracks you need a three, or an eighteen; it's going to be much easier to get on to the ones where you need a twelve. Except, the odds are way way longer than that. Like rolling a hundred Eagle-Eye-Jacques in a row. Maybe less likely, but the