by Ian McDonald
“Oh, yeah.”
“You mentioned this Harx guy. So who is he?”
“He’s holy.”
“That explains it then.”
“Explains what?”
“People who live in deserts are either mad, bad, sad or holy.”
He said nothing for the next twenty kilometres, or so it seemed to Sweetness, hovering on the numb edge of sensory deprivation between the encircling haze and the dank man-odour of Serpio’s shirt. When he did talk, it was in a voice so soft and alien to him that it was as if the sand had spoken.
“He’s not mad or sad or bad, but he is holy.”
It was a major effort of will for Sweetness to pull her soul back from the horizon, to which it had been reeled out by the flat red land and spread into a thin, encircling line.
“Unk?”
“He’s good to me. He helps me. He respects me. I’ve got something that’s useful to him, he needs me. The others; they’ll all see, when he comes. They’ll look up and their mouths, they’ll just fall open like fishes in a bucket, and then they’ll see.”
“I’m a bit unclear about this…”
“Have you ever heard of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“You will. Everyone will…”
“Could we maybe do a little less of the big doomy when it all comes down stuff, and just start at the beginning?”
A pause, in which a skittering lizard hoicked itself up on its rear limbs and hot-legged it away over the burning sands.
“You ever listen to the radio real late at night?”
“Of course. Everyone does that.” On the trains it was how you reminded yourself you were young and cute and a kid like hundreds of millions of others out there in the non-moving world. The voices in the dark of your room, close to you in your bed, a dozen different tongues in your ear a night.
“You ever listen to the religious stations?”
Sweetness’s fingers had twirled the dial over the thousands of shouting pleading hectoring lecturing wheedling whining canoodling seducing scolding trumpeting voices jammed one on top of the other in the low medium wave. Her world bred religions like a dog fleas, and they all could afford air-time.
“I’m more a music person, me.” Pertinent to which, Sweetness realised that for an indefinite but long time now the handlebar wireless had played nothing but airglow. Scary biscuits. A place where the radio wasn’t. On the far shore of the airwaves.
“Yeah, well. Anyway, that’s where he found me, in the Godband.”
“You found him, you mean.” A random twiddle of the knobs.
“No. He found me. He was talking right at me.”
“Yah. Right.”
“No. Really. He called me, by name. He said, ‘And this is going out for Serpio Six Tuesday-Duodecember-Twelfth-Raining Sebendary Waymender.’”
“Nah. Someone set you up. One of those…other ones, back there.”
“No. Listen, will you? He saw me, same way as I see your friend there.”
“He had this, spirit-sight? Angel-vision? What the hell do you call it anyway?”
“The sight.”
“This ‘sight,’ so does it have a limit like normal sight, like perspective, or does it just not bother with things like that?”
“It does, but you can train it, and then it’s naturally more highly developed in some than others.”
“Higher spiritual beings. Of course.”
“Look, if you’re going to be cynical…”
“Sorry. I’m an Engineer.”
They passed a tangle of bones and Sweetness thought hard about cynicism in big deserts.
“Go on.”
“He saw me, he knew I had the sight, and he told me the Ever-Circling Family needed the sight to help them in the fight.”
“The sight, and the fight.”
“You can say what you like, but it’s a battle. This whole world’s a battle, it’s been a battle since before it was invented.”
The pause invited the question: “Who’s fighting?”
“Men and angels.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. Believe me. You think this world was made for us? We’re just human shields. They can’t wipe the angels out now because they keep the manforming systems running. Like the magnetic field. This place doesn’t have one, naturally, so there are these huge superconducting magnets up there in orbit. You’ve heard of vanas?”
Sweetness had always thought of the orbital mirrors as too lowly even to be proper angels, until the night in Inatra a spotlight from heaven lit her way home.
“They keep the weather working. This place isn’t like the Motherworld, it doesn’t have that feedback system so the whole thing always stays right for life. Well, not yet. The climate here is simple, like not complex. You wouldn’t know what that means, but basically, if left to its own devices, it would get stuck in a loop and you’d get the same weather over and over and over again. The vanas, they heat the atmosphere up so you get these pockets of randomness, so the climate doesn’t get stuck. That’s just two. There’s thousands, but the point is they keep the whole world alive, and they know it. They don’t need any of that stuff, they’d be as happy if this place was rock and ice, like it was, before, but then they wouldn’t be safe. We make them safe, and that’s why they let us come here.”
“Wait wait wait. What are all these theys and thems?”
“The angels, of course. Though Harx says you shouldn’t call them that; they’re machines, and machines have souls but no spirits. They can’t be of God, see?”
“Wait wait wait wait. If the angels are machines…”
“Not if.”
“Okay.” No contention: everyone head-knew that what they called angels were, for the most part, leftover manforming machinery, but the conceit persisted because for the most part they lived in heaven—they formed a visible ring around the world—and they carried out unguessable missions on the part of unseen powers for the betterment of humans. “And they’ve no spirits, so what do you and this Harx boy actually see with your sight?”
He sighed the sigh guys sigh when their thoughts are too much for wee females. Sport, sex, steam or steel, it never failed to kindle the devil in Sweetness.
“It’s theoretical.”
“Go on.”
“How much vinculum theory have you got?”
“The universe is a big brown package all tied up with string.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“I know that. That’s the bollocks you get off the School of the Air. All matter, energy, space and time are different harmonics in eleven dimensional strings, most of which are rolled up smaller than Planck space so all we get are the four we live in rather than lots we wouldn’t know what to do with.” She had always found visualising seven extra dimensions, each containing the ones beneath it, mind-wringing. Then one of her wiser Stabile Tutors, who held seminars in reality, had let her into the secret that everyone else did as well. Good thing. The order of the universe should be mind-wringing. She added, “I’m named after it.”
“What?”
“Octave. Harmonics. String music, all that.”
“What do you know about filament computing?”
Sweetness let go Serpio’s jacket and hunted for other hookholds underneath the bag rack. She made sure he appreciated that she was leaning back, away from him.
“Suppose you just give me the lecture, then?”
After a few miffed moments he said, “All the ROTECH machines use vinculum processing architecture.”
“Spell it,” Sweetness challenged. He did, and continued, “Calculations get done not in two states, like the old quantum machines we got on the trains, but in eleven uncollapsed states. You know…”
“Two impossible things at the same time. Or in this case, eleven.”
“Yeah. But what it really is, deep down, is using the structure of the universe as a compu
ter. So in a sense…”
“The whole universe is a computer.” Or God, she thought of adding, but she was unsure of the small print of Serpio’s theology. If it involved blind hejiras into the Big Red, the devil in the details could be sharp.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“The whole universe has the potential to be in any number of uncollapsed states.”
“This is the ‘Many-worlds’ theory, isn’t it?”
“It is, but this is how it actually works day to day. Most of the time the calculations are very small and neat and they stay down there in the string-level of the universe.”
“Like those little knots in thread you sometimes get if you’re sewing, that don’t stop the needle going through the cloth.”
“Sort of, I suppose. But sometimes if you have to make a lot of calculations, like something really complicated like making a model of an ocean, or an ecosystem, you get what they call coherence. That’s when a whole lot of string potentials are entangled together and all collapse into the same state. Then you can get whole chunks of the big universe switching from one world to another. Like magic.”
“Like knots so big they pull the shape of the cloth into something else.”
“Like sewing a big sheet of fabric into a jacket or a shirt or a wedding waistcoat. That orph…”
The precise perimeter of the circular crazy-zone was sharp in Sweetness’s memory. Like stepping from one world into another, she had thought. Right and wrong. It was another way of being this world. And what of that other place Uncle Neon took her? Was she taken to other-world, or was other-world erected around her, and the set struck when she left?
“Its little string-machines all agreed to go mad and decided that reality was something else.”
“They switched on an alternative reality.”
A new image now, of the cloud-sized heaven machine decreeing its doom on the defective earth-builder and restoring the world to normality. But who decreed what was normal? Who minted the consensus? Normal ordained that girls don’t drive trains. Consensus said, the only daughters of illustrious Engineer Domieties marry Stuards with stainless steel kitchens and good prospects.
“We’ve got a consensus reality now, so any breaches have to get cleared up right quick, but in the earliest days of the manforming they used the technique all the time to speed things up. They’d run a model of an alternative world where, say the atmosphere was working better, or there were bacteria, or soil, or even plants, and when the model got complex enough, the model would become reality. Otherwise it would’ve taken thousand of years and we’d be up to our asses in ice, if we could even breathe at all.”
Sweetness’s mind was wringing with that same painful twist she recalled from Pastor Jhingh and his eleven-dimensional visualisations. If the machines could think like that, could see all those dimensions unfolding out of each other, then maybe it was right to call them angels.
“So, what is it you actually see?”
“Most people don’t know this, but humans can see on the quantum level no problem at all. We could do it out here. It’s good and clear at night. I’d drive about twenty kays away and light a match, and you could see it. That would be like one single photon reaching your eye, and one photon is seeing quantum.”
Please don’t feel you have to demonstrate, Sweetness thought.
“You know a lot about this.”
“It’s good to study the things that make us different.”
“So,” Sweetness said. “You see things not on the quantum level, but on the vinculum scale?”
“That’s the way I was born. That’s why I can see what you people call the angels, because I can see them thinking. All those tiny tiny little vinculum calculations. I can see their minds glowing.”
“And this Harx boy.”
“To be able to see on the vinculum level involves vinculum processes. He can see me, seeing them. But he can see better. He can see anywhere in the universe, because it’s all entangled.”
“Okay,” Sweetness said carefully. “I can get this. I think. But tell me, how come you see Little Pretty One? I’m telling you, she is not a machine. She is my sister, and she lives in mirrors, and she gives me good advice, most of the time, when she can be bothered talking.”
“And she’s sitting right behind you looking over your shoulder and smiling at me.”
“You know something,” Sweetness said, truly savouring the sudden rush of emotion. “I really hate it when you talk about her like that.”
“Sorry.”
“She talks to me. All you do is see her.”
Nothing was said for several kilometres of rocky red desert.
“She’s not a machine,” Sweetness reminded Serpio.
“I know.”
A minute or so further on, Sweetness pressed her sharp little chin on Serpio’s shoulder and said into his ear, “So how does she fit into all your big theory, then?”
“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “That’s why I want to ask Harx.”
“So that’s where we’re going.”
“Yeah.”
“To this guru preacher boy.”
“Devastation Harx, yes.”
“Ah,” said Sweetness on the back of a stolen bike with at least a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert around her in any direction. “Ah. Yes. I get it now. So I’ve walked out on my family and my home and my impending marriage and come out here with just the stuff on my back into the ass-end of nowhere and the only one you’re really bothered about is something I can’t even see that’s hanging off my ribcage. Can I ask you one question?”
“Whatever.”
“Did you ever really fancy me at all?”
Serpio stopped the bike. Dead square stopped. Middle of nowhere.
Oh Mother’a’grace, Sweetness thought. I’ve gone and done it, haven’t I? Why why why why do I have to go that one question too deep?
Serpio got off the bike. Shaking life into saddle-sore limbs, he walked away. Clinging to the superstructure, Sweetness watched him go.
“Serpio!”
No answer.
“Where are you going?”
No answer.
“What’re you doing?”
Back turned to her, he looked out upon a vista of sweeping dunes.
“I’m sorry!”
Dunes are dunes are dunes. What are you looking at, what are you seeing? Nothing, I bet, except not me.
“I said, I’m sorry!”
Unmoved, like the dark blue sky.
“I said!” Top of her lungs. “I’m sorry!”
She yelled so loud the desert heard her. Sand shifted on the sloping face of a big dune, ringed by minions. Shift triggered slide, triggered chain slippages that cascaded up into micro-avalanches into dust rivulets into flowing deltas into sheet-floods of sand. The dune face was shedding away before the power of her voice, disintegrating into scabs and floes. The dune was moving. It was stirring in its bed and rising up.
It had heard her. It was coming to get her, loud-mouthed little tyke who dared disturb the monumental solitude of the deep desert. It would fill her mouth and voice box and lungs with silencing sand.
No. Impossible. Dunes don’t walk. They crawl, over whole seasons. If a dune moves, it is because a buried something beneath it is moving. The slipping curtains of sand flashed tantalises of bright metal, curved plastic, knobbled ridges. The something was very big. It was not buried in the dune. It was the dune. It had lain here and gone to sleep and woken up caked in sand. Something like a lost city was rising out of the Big Red. It lifted clear of the other, lesser dunes. It left a circular crater a good ore train in diameter. Higher it rose. The flying city was the shape of a great, flat, upturned saucer, crazy with racing sand. Through veils of dust raining off its rim like monsoon from an umbrella, Sweetness glimpsed complex forms beneath the dome, like the folds and ruches of fungi that hide under the sobriety of their caps. She shaded her eyes with her hand as the thing reached the zenith
and eclipsed the sun.
“Oh my God!” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th exclaimed as the flying thing passed over her head. It moved to the south, hovered over a flat expanse of rocky grit, settled slowly. The sun was full on it, and it was a magnificent creature, carapaced like a beetle with iridescent greens and electric blues, underneath busy with bulbous, insect-eyelike excrescences, manipulator arms and whirring rotors. Claw feet unfolded, tested the terrain, found it faithful. The flying object settled on its legs. The fans were stilled. An intimidating set of polished black mandibles that could have devoured houses by the district opened; an alabaster pont reached out and touched ground.
Sweetness stood mumchance.
Serpio was already running for the pont. He turned, extended a hand to Sweetness.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
13
In the privacy of command, striding alone on his big brass bridge, Naon Engineer decided that the only way out of the situation was to die of shame. There were numerous precedents for this action. No matter that most of them had been performed by ascetics and monastics in order to stymie wars, blight cities or summon monsoons. They had not had their wheels pissed on by Stuards.
Out, quick. Yell “power-up” down the gosport, throw full steam and throttles wide open. Put as many sleepers as possible between you and the bad thing. Old Engineer advice, father to son to son to son. As soon as there was free track, he had bellowed the Deep-Fusion folk to frenzy and spun the wheels. But the Ninth Avata Stuards were ready for him. Two rows, either side of the track. A firing squad. The men had unzipped and unfurled. The women had hoisted their many skirts and aimed. As the looming superstructure of Catherine of Tharsis passed over their heads, they had gushingly anointed the drive wheels.
The track-level cameras spared none of the humiliation.
“Full power!” Naon Engineer thundered at the sweating Deep-Fusioners in their windowless reactor hive. His cheeks were red. Blood seethed in his brainpan. There was a high whining whistle in his inner ears. It blocked out the imagined jeering of the Stuards. “Full power, you slugs snails tortoises infernal turtles!” But heavy trains are slow. It seemed a damned eternity for Catherine of Tharsis to pull away from those two ranks of jeering cooks and waiters.