Ares Express by Ian McDonald Page B

coloured silk through the pallid skin of her forearms? But her magic had never been respected. It was too useful, despite its limitations. Her clients found creative ways of bringing their woes into its peculiar bailiwick. Had there been someone she could have thanked and cursed, she would have, copiously, but her power was not a gift. It had just happened, the day of her womaning. The best she could work it out was that the power had gone out of her into the brown smear in her pants, then from there to every other brown thing in the world.
    The ore-trucks clunked past. The tail of the beast appeared around the slow bend. Henden Stuard was waiting at the foot of the galley stairs, hat of office outheld in salutation. He whispered into the gosport. Three hundred cars forward, Naon Engineer applied the brakes. The companionway came to a halt with such precision that Grandmother Taal need only step up.
    â€œWhat is your need?” she asked.
    â€œHe is constipated,” suave Henden said.
    Junior Stuard kitchen hands and vegetable peelers bowed out of Grandmother Taal's way as she moved through the galley car to the Pursery. There Brellen Stuard greeted her gravely.
    â€œHe is constipated.”
    Shafto Stuard sat enthroned among golden cushions in the observation box. Light stained by painted glass dappled his strained features.
    â€œIt is eight days now,” Brellen whispered.
    â€œYou have tried dried fruit?” Grandmother Taal said.
    â€œAnd marmalade,” Shafto said, uncomfortably.
    A slight lurch told Grandmother Taal Catherine of Tharsis was under way again. She watched the track unfold from under the bay of the observation box and wondered how it might flavour a family's soul, to be always looking at where you have come from and never where you are going.
    â€œI suggested a hemp bandage, soaked in oil of paraffin,” Brellen said. “But he could not swallow more than a finger of it.”
    â€œNor I,” said Grandmother Taal.
    â€œPlease help me,” Shafto pleaded.
    Grandmother Taal contemplated a moment. It was good for the mystique.
    â€œIt is doable.”
    â€œIs there anything you require?” Brellen asked, head bowed. Mint tea would have been good but Grandmother Taal remembered that once Brellen's Aunt Mae had offered her tea in a smeared glass. Her opinion of the Stuards as a Domiety had never recovered.
    â€œNothing, thank you.” She took out her needle case. “Children are advised not to watch.” She squinted in the stained-glass light to thread the right silk through the proper needle. The track outside, she noted, was now a blur of sleepers. She felt more secure in her power with fast steel beneath her. Immobility troubled Grandmother Taal. She uncapped her fountain pen and bared her forearm.
    â€œTry to be concise, but poignant. It should express all your feeling.”
    Shafto Stuard looked the old woman in the eyes, then took the pen and wrote STRAIN in bad lettering on the veined pale skin.
    â€œVery well.” Grandmother Taal picked up the purple thread and commenced the humming. It had no significance and little tune—a medley of toe-tappers off that All-Swing Radio the young ones listened to—but it kept her voice busy while she embroidered the word strain on to her forearm.
    It still hurt.
    She tried something more closely related to the pain, reading the memories of past magics in the white scarifications of her arms. Those arcs and loops, buried under successive woundings like the surface of a cratered moon, had been that time she moved the big earth-making machine off the line when it had upped and died inconveniently. Easier done, alive and dead. At least the teams slopping brown paint over its orange and blue mottled hide had been spared the moaning and hectoring about fine points of contractural detail endemic among earth-makers. That time the magic had been strong enough, and the paint sufficient to hold it, to flip the