#Tale of smith changes xy hapu Patch

You squint under the shade of your hand down the long straight line. You become aware that the rail burning the sole of your desert boot is trembling. And, no less than any of these, it is Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th’s Uncle.

It is the prefect of line safety, it is guardian of the line tokens, it is the gateway to new landscapes. So this signal light is more than an arbitrary stop-go in the wilderness. For half a quartersphere the lines are drawn together by mutual magnetism until they meet once again at Schiaparelli Junction to run westward along the vast synclinorium of Great Oxus and the thousand towns of Grand Valley, where the Worldroof sparkles on the horizon like a reef of morning-lit cloud. The other line drifts to port until it curves out of sight among the thunderous chasms of Fosse mountains, spanned by treacherous trestle bridges and pour-stone viaducts, that disgorge nerve-wracked Engineers out on to the bleak mesa-lands of Isidy. Up and over the top of the world, and down into the old lands of Deuteronomy and Dioscu: green places replete with grazers and herd-beasts, where every village roof-tree is high and holy with prayer kites. This is Borealis Junction: one line drives forcefully on into the snow country of the north pole, where the cold can glue an Engineer’s hand to the throttles as this heat will seal flesh to steel. The second thing is that, if you look up the line, you will see it part company with itself. Conversations too, news and gossip, sometimes family members, or body fluids, if they are the big slow ore-haulers whose timetables allow a little society. Here crews exchange ancient brass tokens-part key, part shield-to unlock the line.

#Tale of smith changes xy hapu Patch

This patch of desert is the only place within two hundred kilometres where trains may pass and gain access to the single mainline. Why signal what? What is there in this dust and rust of any significance? Two things. We must stay a while at the signal light, and ask questions. Occasional track-side tangles of sand-polished metal prove the dangers that lie in the long straight track.īut we drive ahead of ourselves here. It draws your soul out through your staring eyes along the twin steel rails, to whatever dwells in the silver shimmer at the edge of the world. It’s easy to fall asleep over the speed levers out here. In the cabs of the big transcontinentals there are red buttons that the engineers must touch every twenty seconds or the brakes will automatically apply. You can go over the edge of the world and they’ll run straight and absolute for seven hundred kilometres. Just enough to sight along them, gun-barrels aimed at the place where horizon and heat-dazzle meet and melt. Hunker down-not too low, under this sun your cheek will stick to the hot rail and rip. Straight and absolute as a geometrical proposition. Two perfectly parallel lines of Bethlehem Ares steel, rolled in the mills of New Merionedd, married together by pour-stone sleepers, tied down by figure-of-eight tie-bolts: pinned, plated and bolted. On top of the shaft, three lights, red topmost, amber in the middle, on the bottom, green. It is a natural victim for summer lightning. Five metres high, a slim steel shaft, scabbed by the excoriating winds, scarred by summer lightning. This is a sinuous, sensual landscape, curves and seductions from the slip-sliding dunefaces to the curve of the close horizon.Ī solitary hard erection confronts the soft northern desert of iron.

It has teased the sand into steep-sided ridges, long meandering sifs, crescent moon barchans. The wind never ceases out here on the plains of the high high north. Red sand, rust-sand, red dust, a desert of iron studded with ugly stones.

This is rust-sand, strewn profligately about this contourless landscape. Where the lightning strikes, veins of slag-iron strike deep into the sand. It draws lightning out of the occasional clouds once or twice in a long year, rain. It smells electric there is much iron in it. It is red and of a particular grain type produced only by wind action. She is eight, and this is the manner of her coming.įirst, you see the sand. Here comes Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.