by Ian McDonald
The eye hatch shot open again. A sigh came from beneath the eye, which was a very dark blue, and showed much sclera.
“Look lady, I just run the depot. If he comes, he comes, if he don’t, he don’t. He’s holy; that’s what holy people do, or don’t do. If you’re that desperate to see him, bluff your way into the bash, whatever. Me, I’ve got orders to fill.”
The eye vanished from behind the hatch. For an instant Grandmother Taal had a powerful perspective view of a corridor of shelves, racked a hundred high, dwindling to a vanishing point that she suspected lay beyond the physical bounds of the building. Tiny figures suspended from rope harnesses floated up and down the mile-long-aisle, filling baskets slung from their waists with religious wares. Then the buff metal slide slammed shut and, by reversing the order of the directions on the waiter’s bill, Grandmother Taal found her way back to Molesworth’s thronged Viking-Lander Plaza.
A clanging tram wormed through the intestinal streets to drop Grandmother Taal at the Rathaus. Down by the stage door an altercation was taking place. It involved the following elements: an eclectic group of four fronted by a stocky young woman with spiky hair—clearly furious—a girl in a spangled bikini with silver boots and hoolie-hoolie feathers in her hair—clearly impatient—and a flatbed truck with the legend “Let ’Em Eat Cake!” printed on a side-tarpaulin and a cylindrical, ziggurat structure on its back. The issue seemed to be this object, which Grandmother Taal concluded must be a cake, of the kind from which girls in spangled bikinis and hoolie-hoolie feathers leap at appropriate moments.
“Let me have a look,” the stocky girl demanded and climbed on to the back of the flat bed. Let ’Em Eat Cakers in formal Patissiers’ Guild bibs stood aside, awed by the biceps swelling from her sleeveless vest. She hugged the uppermost cylinder of the surprise cake and wrestled it until the cords of her throat stood out like guy ropes. Panting, she harangued the master bakers.
“It’s supposed to come off. It doesn’t come off. Why is this? It won’t work if it doesn’t come off. We paid you a lot of money for it to come off.”
Master Baker gave a gesture at once shrug and bow.
“It could have albumenised in the ovening.”
The woman stared at him at if he had suggested public fellatio.
“Albumenised? What is this?”
“Albumen molecules could undergo a lacto-gluten reaction to form a polymer mass,” the baker said. The woman stared at him.
“Over-egged the pudding,” his Prentice explained.
The woman swore and went to her colleagues. The five talked among themselves, with many hand motions and furious glances from the little muscley woman. Sensing as-yet unspecified opportunity, Grandmother Taal moved close. From the frequency with which the word was used, the strong, fierce woman seemed to be called Skerry. A tall, wire-thin man, soft spoken, with skin so black it swallowed light, was her chief supporter in her arguments with a pale, languorous girl with jewellery attached to every part of her body that would bear it and an air that communicated studied artiness even to a trainperson. She was lieutenanted by an older, square-faced man with greying hair whose over-grooming, stiffness of posture and plainly corseted belly advertised ex-vaudeville. The fifth member, a bare-armed, weasel-faced teen with deliberately anarchic hair and dreadful teeth, took no side but neither missed a chance to slide in a sarcasm.
Grandmother Taal took an innocent sidle nearer. Between Skerry’s dogged fury and the luvvie-girl’s—Mishcondereya’s—sighings and soft competence-assassinations, Grandmother Taal deduced that it was of regional, perhaps even planetary importance that silver-boots girlie leap out of the cake just as the Glenn Miller Orchestra struck up the intro to the song they had collected at the Prestaines’ Parcel Depot. Due to albumenisation, or some other error in contemporary baking, this was not going to happen, there now wasn’t time to bake another cake, and this was a Very Bad Thing.
Very Bad Things promised Very Interesting Consequences. Grandmother Taal drew near.
“Excuse me,” she ventured. “If I might interrupt; I may be able to assist.”
Animosities were forgotten. Five faces turned on her. Grandmother Taal forestalled the barrage of comment.
“I just have to know one thing. Is the cake chocolate?”
“Finest forty percent mocha first-melt high-bean mix,” the Master Baker sang out.
“Good!” Grandmother Taal said. “Give me that.”
Dreadful Teeth boy carried a knife in his boot-top. In one motion she scooped it out, unclasped it and before any hand could stop her, carved the word open on the back of her hand. She held the bleeding fist up to the cake. The ziggurat quivered. Molesworth Patissiers stepped back. The great cake heaved. The cake quaked. Bakers abandoned truck. In a spray of crumb, butter-cream and carob frosting, the top of the cake sprang open like the hatch of an overheated boiler. While every head was turned and every mouth open, Grandmother Taal flung the knife square between its owner’s boots. The boy bent to retrieve it, squinted small respect out from under his greasy fringe.
“Impressive, for an ould doll.”
He folded the knife and slid it into the smooth leather with a polished snick. While the bikini maid wriggled into the cake Grandmother Taal made bold to introduce herself.
“You trainies have good names,” he said, with his way of looking toward-but-not-at the person to whom he was speaking that made Grandmother Taal wonder if he were homosexual. “I’m just Weill.” Unused to the pronunciation, Grandmother Taal at first thought it was a self-description. “Neat power. What is it, some kind of family heirloom?”
“Things that are brown only.”
“Hey, that has a kind of…cloacal…potential.” He sucked in his top lip and nodded his head and studied the toe of his left boot. He shifted his feet in sudden decision, fished in his pockets for a card on which he scrawled in handwriting no less dreadful than his teeth. He presented it to Grandmother Taal. It was thick, creamy vellum, scalloped and gold-edged, an invitation to the Inaugural Pleasance of Cossivo Beldene as newly Elected Gubernator of Chimeria and Solstice Landing. Table twenty-five, nine minutes of nine, dress formal.
“Or as formal as you can get,” the ratty Weill said. “Personal guest of Weill, of United Artists.”
A dozen questions sprang to Grandmother Taal’s lips but Weill was already walking away to rejoin his compadres in manoeuvring the cake through the stage door. He turned only to call back to the once-old woman standing in the alley: “It’s all right, it’s official. They won’t bounce you. The others won’t like it but I’m the anarchist one, and I think you should see what you actually put a hand in. It’ll be funny.”
With that the great cake sailed through the double doors into the darkness of the kitchen and Grandmother Taal, gilt-edged invitation in hand, was left standing among Patissiers, doubting the sanity of every soul on the streets of Molesworth.
19
“ In the beginning,” the traveller said, his boots up on the brass pooprail of the track-yacht, “was the word. Or rather, words. A lot of words. A language, but not a human language. A machine language.”
Sweetness Asiim Engineer shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up the invisible bridle lines to the kites, beating bravely through the dark blue sky. The molecule-thin, diamond-string filaments cut the air like razors and the air keened. They moved through a dimension of sound. The bogie sang down the steel rail; the track joints clicked in syncopation under the thrumming wheels; the westerly current cracked and strummed the boxkites. The old man’s mantra-like litany was a counterpoint to the creaking of the axles; the squeal of the brake as Sweetness gently lifted the brass lever to let the bogie take a long, slow right-hander added a descant to the hymn of forward motion.
“Wozzat?”
“Computers, girl. Devices of memory, logic and language. Thinking machines, brains in boxes. Quasimentos. Like unto the shape of a mind. What you people ignorantly call angels. Have you no interest in the history of this erstwhile p
sychic twin of yours?”
Twenty kilometres downtrack, the sun was glinting off the curved steel rail. Ranged along the horizon like an encamped fantasy army, ancient red mountains defended the edge of the world. Dunes broke on either side of her, surfing away into desert shimmer. The sky was a bowl of indigo porcelain, the electric wind streamed her curls back from her cheekbones and Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th understood for the first time that adult thing called ecstasy, and that is brief and incredibly precious and not to be tarnished by talk of history and machines.
“Be thankful that you live in an adolescent civilisation,” the doctor went on, blithely indifferent to Sweetness’s bliss. “We do not balk at miracles and wonders, we have an innate bull-at-a-gate can-doism. And we do take it for granted that we live in a wholly artificial environment. Therefore, we find it hard to identify with the mind-sets of those Five Hundred Founders who looked up at our world in their night sky and conceived the plan of turning it into a second home for humanity. The scale of the task, the boldness of the conception, the sheer marshalling of resources, not to mention the task of wrestling every bit of it out of that terrible gravity-well of theirs—we can’t comprehend it. We think of Motherworld as old, tired, a little decadent. Geriatric. Motherworlders—though I will bet you, Sweetness Engineer, that in all your millions of kilometres you have never met one—are effete, spindly, inbred and epicene. I tell you, child, these were giants among men. And women. Colossi. They had the ambitions and energies of gods. They built worlds. They threw stars down from heaven. In the end, they played with the laws of reality itself. They were mighty folk, the Five Hundred Founders.
“Catherine of Tharsis was not one of these.”
Startled from her desert reveries, Sweetness glanced round in time to see doctor, chair, poop-rail, bogie, track, desert, world suddenly turn translucent. She felt the deck beneath her boot soles soften, the reality beneath her feet give like mud. She grabbed for the wheel: her fingers sank into it like a wrung sponge.
“H…”
The cry for help got no further than the initial aspirate when all flicked back to colour and solidity.
“What?”
“I hadn’t thought that would happen quite so soon,” the traveller said. “But now it has, I should warn you that it will, with increasing frequency and duration, until eventually it won’t come back at all. The further I get from the source, the less the probability of my existence becomes until it is so close to zero that all this disappears and baseline reality reasserts itself. Quite solidly and probably painfully. Which all just helps to illustrate the point I am trying to make in my little homily.”
“This isn’t real?” Sweetness asked, with a glance at the bobbing kites and the singing rail.
“About eighty—twenty real,” the traveller said. “With occasional quantum fluctuations, and, of course, dropping rapidly with every kilometre. Anyway, St. Catherine.”
“You’ve met her?”
“You meet most people when you travel across time. Anyway, so’ve you.”
“But I didn’t know.”
“That doesn’t matter. It was still her. Anyway…”
The old man told his story. In the very-long-ago, on the edge of deep time, there was a woman who worked with thinking machines. She was neither talented nor pretty nor possessed of any great character or colour. She was a blue-collar worker on the planet-making production line. If you had met her, you would not have liked her. Her colleagues at work could not stand her. She was religious, of that type that doesn’t care about other people’s beliefs or disbeliefs. Her job was to turn up at the plant, sit down in a reclining leather chair in a row of hundreds, put wires into her brain and send her mind out across space to ROTECH’s remote manforming machines in orbit and down on the planet surface and work there making bacteria or steering watery comets on to collision courses or chewing up rock for soil for eight hours, then come back, pull the wires out of her head and go home on the rapid transit to her apartment. It was drudgery, poorly paid, repetitive and tiring work, but in those days, most work was like that.
Sweetness found she could listen to the old man’s voice and trim the sails and handle the brakes and scan the horizon for any oncoming traffic—though she doubted it in this semi-raw reality—and it did not distract from her bliss. If anything, she found it comforting. When I am as old as Grandmother Taal, I shall remember this in every detail, she thought, and then thought about Grandmother Taal and wondered what she was doing and that made her wonder about her father and poor Child’a’grace and even her stupid brothers and what they were doing, were they doing anything, did they in fact miss her at all, had they written her off to fate and steamed off to new contracts and destinations and on such tracks her concentration popped so she had to ask the man to backtrack his story.
“Nn?”
“Haan. Kathy Haan. And she believed in the mortification of the flesh.”
Body and spirit; two entities. That was what her experience of the brain-tap teleoperator technology taught her. A flick of a switch could divorce the two, and like any divorce, one was fair and the other was completely to blame in every way. Flesh had to be fed, wiped and catheterised during her on-shifts. Flesh snored and drooled. Spirit flew with equal ease and grace between a multitude of heavenly and terrestrial bodies. And her work there was God’s work. The making of worlds, the bringing of life out of sterility, the playing with big budget toys, the casting of a veil of faint green across the hard, dry red. And then the overcrowded commuter train and the walk from the station to the apartment tower and all the people politely not staring at the scrawny, chicken-bone girl with the pudding-bowl hair and the nodding head who walked everywhere barefoot. In her apartment which was painted grey and had only one chair and one table and a mattress on the floor and one rail for the two grey shift dresses she wore she would make herself a meal of black beans and rice and in the evening perform fierce asceticism on the polished wooden floor.
“Hold on there; how do you know the inside of her apartment?” Sweetness asked.
“Just checking,” the old man said, and smiled and, like a story-book familiar, his body faded behind the smile as the probability of his existence dropped to another quantum level and reality became glass through which she could see a subtly different landscape of dunes and mountains and tracks. And on down the track a ways, the white curving plume of a head of steam, aimed herward. Horns sang an anonymous warning: Out of my whatever whoever wherever you are. Sweetness reached for the brake. Her fingers passed through it like a memory.
“Then again,” the doctor’s voice said, echoey and God-like, “I may have made it up about the beans and rice.” He rematerialised behind his smile. “Did I miss something?”
Anyway. This Kathy Haan, barefoot and bean-eating, flesh-despising, spirit-dwelling. Grunt terraformer. As her soul bounced around orbit to ground, ground to orbit, orbit to moon, moon to cometary mass-driver, mass-driver to cable-spinner on the Grand Valley Worldroof, she became aware that there were others at work in the service of ROTECH. Shadowy others, deliberately kept at a distance by the Five Hundred Founders because of the astonishing powers they controlled. Human minds could do the spade-work, but the grand design called for the reality-shaping powers of superstring, vinculum-theory artificial intelligences.
“So, dear girl, think about it,” the doctor said, reclining expansively in his buttoned chair and unfolding a fan. “These are machines that speak the fundamental language of reality. They talk quantum talk. What they say, goes. Literally, absolutely. What they say is so important, reality has to go along with it. Now, you’re a rice’n’beans hate-the-meat don’t-look-at-myself-in-the-shower total mortification day-jobber. How are you going to feel about minds in beige plastic cases, that, when they speak, reality goes along with them, because their processing language is built from a syntax of superstrings? This is not sucking fingers. This is not even twisting the titties. This is tying you to the bed and banging it off your ov
aries. This is not being able to pee for a week.”
If only, Sweetness thought, the aftershocks of the last reality shift gently subsiding. She scanned the forward horizon again—uselessly, she knew—and tried to calculate how fast and far she would have to dive to get out of the path of five thousand tons of ore-train materialising dead ahead of her. The old boy would have to look after himself, she decided. She would not even have time to yell a warning, and he was too deep in his coils of story to notice anything she might say anyway.
Against the glare of the great wonder, the greater was lost. People were making a world, and as a side-effect creating, almost casually, the species that would inherit it. The angels had been engineered as another set of thinking tools, more powerful than the machines that split soul from meat and spun it out across the solar system to planet four in that they could shuffle endless probable universes in their factorially-large inner states and pick the one closest to ROTECH’s grand scheme, but nonetheless, bits of kit. Devices. Machines. Good and faithful servants. They had not been expected to become sentient. It was not in ROTECH’s plans that they draw up their own Grand Scheme for the world they were terraforming by designer miracle.
When the voice came out of the toolbox, ROTECH at first refused to believe it. Another vinculum-theory probability. A trick of the light, like the face of Jesus in a tortilla, or the voices inside a sea-shell. Screwdrivers do not demand status. T-squares do not require equality of intellectual esteem. Power drills do not submit proposals for their role in the future of the house they help build. The machines were ignored. The process of world-building continued. Then someone pointed out that the voices hadn’t gone away, you know. Then another voice pointed out that what did it matter if this was a vinculum-theory alternative? Most of that planet down there was too, and it was here for keeps. Whether chanced sentient, or grown sentient, sentience was here to stay. That was just sinking in when the last voice observed, in sombre tones, that powers that could make one world could as easily unmake another. Cast it into probabilistic ice age. Greenhouse it to the innermost circle of hell. Uninvent the smart apes, let the dino-babies suck the fat of the land. Grind it into a belt of circling asteroids.