Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  Devastation Harx tried to restrain his delight. The symbols on his uplinker were dropping back out of the imaginary plane into the concrete world of integers. Incursion into the multiverse complete. He snapped the plastic lid shut.

  “You know, I wasn't entirely sure that would work,” he said to an awed Sianne Dandeever. All chances of worker's playtime banished forever there. Gods don't shag the believers, and with his demonstration of multiversal engineering, he surely qualified for that league.

  “We don't need her any more, then,” the faithful lieutenant said, nodding to the place Catherine of Tharsis had been.

  “Ah, no,” said Devastation Harx.

  The Cathedral of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family hovered over a precision-cut half-kilometre circle of other world. The Grand Valley mainline led in, the mainline ran out, in the middle, dead red grit and rocks. The airship still rocked gently from the inrush of air as near vacuum was displaced into atmosphere.

  Devastation Harx looked around from the vantage of his high glass pulpit.

  “Now,” he said, dusting off his hands, “who else has irritated me today?”

  How sweet, Sweetness thought. They had kept her cubby unchanged since the day she left. Then again, she thought as she unscrewed the cap of the pyx, it wasn't as if she had wandered away for years uncountable, and, with most of her stash of precious things in her backsac, there wasn't much to identify a process of change. But it was nice to think they had kept it as a shrine to her.

  Sweetness shook out the roll of quantum-plastic mirror and gunge-tacked it to the back of the cubby door.

  “You lied to me,” was the first thing Sweetness Asiim Engineer said to her double, dressed, as ever, in what she had been wearing the day before, which was identical to today's apart from the parafoil harness, which Sweetness had forgotten to remove in the rush of it all.

  Little Pretty One spread her hands apologetically.

  “Yes, but in a very real sense, no.”

  “You pretended to be my twin sister; in fact, you're Catherine of Tharsis, the woman who made the world, who, for some reason, decided one day to walk out on heaven and live in a mirror with me. Where's the no in this?”

  “Guilty on that count. You'd know about deciding one day to walk out.”

  “It's not the same at all.”

  “Isn't it? You think it's a thrill-a-nanosecond, living as an AI? Let me tell you, these guys get off on abstract mathematics. The intellectual glory and wonder of infinite prime dimensions. After a millennium or two, a girl gets to thinking, maybe this mortification of the flesh isn't what it's cracked up to be after all. Maybe you get an itch to see what the meat's up to these days. I never was a scientist, you know. I was a construction worker. Strictly blue collar, that was Kathy Haan.”

  “Enough enough, all right? So, you thought you'd take a couple of decades’ vacation in the flesh, but don't call me sis, you are not my sister.”

  Little Pretty One looked at her feet, which, because of the size of the cramped cabin, had been rolled up, but were presumably visible in whatever kind of state she inhabited.

  “No, you're right, I shouldn't call you sis. It's a lot closer than that.”

  “Don't give me this.”

  “In an absolutely real sense, I am you, you are me. You are Kathy Haan, reborn, the best of her, the good in her, the bits that got lost in the madness and the ‘Spirituality.’ They were all stored in the matrix whenever I went eternal. They didn't go away. They wanted to come back. They wanted to live. So, we made a body for them to live in. Me, here in the mirror, that's the rest of you, the unseen part. The divine twin. We are sisters, we are joined, a lot closer than you could ever imagine.”

  “I'm a ghost,” Sweetness said wanly. She sat down on her bunk. “You're real, and I'm the ghost in the mirror. My whole life has been lies. Everything I've lived, it hasn't been for me at all. It's been for you.”

  “No,” Little Pretty One said with the gentleness of spring rains. “You couldn't be more wrong. You are you. You are living your life, once, for you. I watch, I feel, but I can never get inside your head. I can never share your sense of youness. I can never know your experience of what it is to be a person.”

  “This is heavy shit,” Sweetness said after a time, shaking her head.

  “Yes, and, in a very real sense, no. You just do what you're doing. So tell me, how has your life been?”

  Images of a life thus far. Golden dawn over the high north desert, seen from her forward lookout, the sun rising huge out of the shimmer at the edge of the world so that she seemed to be driving into its very heart. The Great Snow, blowing up from Borealis, when Catherine of Tharsis plunged headlong into a huge drift and got stuck and they all sat around in the tea room, drank mint tea, played card games and told stories while the Deep-Fusions tweaked the tokamak thermal output to melt them all free. The first explosion of wonder at Belladonna's Undercroft decked out for the Five Hundred Founders Day celebrations; firmly gripping Child'a'grace's hand as she peered over the edge of the railing down into the kilometre-deep vertical street lined with more shops than anywhere else in the known universe. The first time she got drunk at a corroboree and tried to pull Blasniq Bassareeni and Sle and Rother'am had to drag her off before she disgraced the family name. The first time she toddled away from Catherine of Tharsis and looked back and saw her world whole for the first time, a steaming dragon in which she lived. The dealings, the pickups, the drop-offs, the shuntings and couplings, the long slow hauls, the brilliant fast express runs, the hypnotic boredom of the endless straight track up over the north pole, the cleaning and the pride in the brass work and the time the School of the Air teacher had given her the gold star for her essay on the weather. The wonders of desert storms and high plains lightnings; the rains sweeping in black curtains across the hills of Deuteronomy. The huge nights when you felt you could pull the moonring from the sky and take it for a bracelet, when a hundred stars all started moving at once and you knew it was a Praesidium Sailship, bigger than the runty moon, setting out on its journey to the other worlds and peoples of System. The knowledge that the morning would always bring a new place and time. And more, and more. Hers. All hers. Uniquely, trivially, gloriously, personally, hers.

  “Life's been good,” she said thoughtfully, then sat up straight, the old light in her eyes. “No,” she said, “no; I've been lost, starved, shot at, dropped from a great height, betrayed, used, confused, fallen in love twice, crossed deserts, flown through the air, battled duststorms, watched star wars, fought terrible foes, faced down people with the powers of gods, run for my life, been picked up, thrown away, travelled into other universes, fought wars, been shat upon from a very great height, been a story, been fired halfway across the multiverse, it's nowhere near over yet and I haven't a notion how it's all going to end but I have to say this, it's been great. I've had a ball. Your wild things have been having the time of their lives. You don't know what you're missing.”

  Little Pretty One smiled a pickled smile.

  “You wish you were me, don't you?” Sweetness said.

  “You have no idea how much I wish that.”

  “Do me a favour then, for this life I've lived for you.”

  “Name it.”

  “Get us out of here.”

  “Ah,” said Our Lady of Tharsis.

  “Say again?”

  “I was rather hoping you had some ideas on that. You see, I kind of need to get back. You should see what they're doing to my world.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be divine.”

  “I am. But just because I'm a god, that doesn't mean I'm omnipotent. I can control the reality-shapers, but only if they're there. All there is in that sky are a couple of tatty little moons.”

  “So we're stuck. And I've wasted God knows how much valuable air talking to you.”

  “I wouldn't say wasted. And I didn't say stuck.”

  “You know, I'm not surprised I'm the best of you,” Sweetness sa
id.

  The figure in the mirror sighed.

  “Now, if you could get me back to our reality again, then I might be able to do something. I'd certainly pull the plug on Mr. Harx's operation, shut down that invasion and, somewhere in between all that, I could probably find time to send you a bit of help.”

  “Why don't you just tell me how?”

  “You're the heroine, you're supposed to work it out for yourself. All the clues are there.”

  “How about a starter?”

  Little Pretty One pondered this gracefully for a moment, finger to lips.

  “Okay. What's outside?”

  “Bit of rail, lot of dead grass, couple of dead birds, lot of red dirt red rock red sky red hills red clouds…”

  Sweetness stopped, mid-litany, kicked in the diaphragm by fierce understanding. She flung open the cubby door, slamming Little Pretty One against the wall, burned precious oxygen hurtling along the corridors and up the steel staircases to the starboard track-observation oriole. The howling cold of the great red desert was starting to penetrate the turret, making her fingers thick and stupid as she fumbled with the opticon.

  “Come on, come on.”

  She swept the objective across the featureless terrain, left, right, in, out.

  There.

  “Oh yes!” She punched the air.

  Far off across the redscape, foot wreathed in carbon dioxide mists, the sole vertical in all this monstrous horizontality, was the lone steel pole of a signal light.

  Skerry and Mishcondereya stared.

  “Did you see what he just did?” Skerry asked.

  “I can show you the replay on video if you want,” Mishcondereya said. “I think that kind of proves we lost that one.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I'll tell you what happens next,” Mishcondereya said, directing Skerry's attention to Harx's predatory, hovering cathedral as it slowly turned on its central axis toward them. She pulled back on the altitude stick, simultaneously floored the drive stirrups. The air yacht bucked like a rodeo llama, shot straight up at forty-five degrees at an acceleration that pressed Skerry deep into her seat upholstery. Mishcondereya commed up Bladnoch, who had taken aboard the rest of United Artists and was waiting with them ten kays up valley in UA2.

  “UA2, UA2, execute Plan Curtain Down, repeat, Plan Curtain Down. Harx has control of reality-shaping weapons. Get the hell as far away as fast as you can.” Mishcondereya banked fiercely, levelled off just under Worldroof, opened the fans as far as they would go. “Tell you something. I can't wait to read the reviews in the morning.”

  As she trudged across the frosty dead regolith in her five layers of underwear and radiation-proof suit, Sweetness amused herself by trying to fit all this into being a story. That she still was, was patently evident. You didn't volunteer to go out the emergency anti-radiation lock wrapped up in borrowed socks, T-shirts and a double layer of baking foil if the laws of narrative weren't still playing a prominent role in your life. Obviously, she was beyond the False Denouement-Microanticlimax, but was it the Third Act Last-Minute Reversal of Fortunes, or was this ultimate Point of No Return, where things get as bad as they possibly can, and then everything rolls over into the Final Scene?

  Out here, in this isolating, airless, dizzyingly featureless place, where all you could hear was the sound of your own breathing and the tap of the (strictly rationed) respirator, the expression Point of No Return carried too much additional significance.

  What on earth had made people look at this place and think, yeah, we could turn that into a nice habitable little planet?

  God, but her feet were cold. And her hands. She flapped her arms, trying to beat heat into them. The suit might be thermal foil, but all it seemed to do was reflect the little external heat from the tiny, wan sun.

  Was that really the same sun?

  Still less than halfway to the gantry. Her family had thought her head blasted by the interworld transition, like Grandfather Bedzo, but they had no better explanation for the incontrovertible existence of a Transpolaris Traction signal light out in the desert.

  Sweetness paused to haul up her arms, hoick up her crotch. The radiation-proof suit was also gas-tight, but it came only in sizes large and extra-large, and she was terrified of tripping over a fold of foil that had drooped around her ankles, ripping the fabric on one of those nasty wind-sharpened stones and dying alone out here in the cold with blood coming out of her ears and eyes.

  The one good thing about the Point of No Return, she decided, was that anything after it was an anticlimax, so things could not get any worse than this and they would all be home and happy soon.

  Caution abandoned, she ran the last few metres over the ragged rocks to the signal tower, rested her palm against it, took ten, fifteen deep breaths. The libation. You always give him something. She unhooked the flask of mint tea from the Velcro chest patch, uncapped it, poured. The liquid flashed to vapour before it hit the ground.

  “Uncle Neon.”

  “Sweetness, child!” said the godlike voice in her head, a little startled, as if disturbed from private contemplation. “What a pleasant surprise! How is everyone, what's the news, it's been a while since I last heard of all your doings and undoings. Or has it? Is that a new outfit you're wearing? I must say, it does nothing for you. Wasted your money there.”

  “Uncle, I haven't time to explain. I need you to send a message.”

  “Not a foretelling? You don't want to know about the baby Sle's going to have with that Cussite girl he hasn't married yet?”

  “Uncle, just send a message, back home.”

  A pause. Sweetness could imagine the discourses running through her poor mad uncle's eotemporal brain: why can't the child take it herself; back home, where is that, why is that? where is this place I find myself, am I indeed dead, has this all been dreams arcing through my head from that final lightning, am I in heaven or hell or somewhere not quite either?

  “What is this message?” Uncle Neon asked.

  “It's not so much a what, as a who,” Sweetness said, unVelcroing the canopic jar and, with ice-numb fingers, fumbling off the lid. “See?” She held the mirror up to the three eyes of the signal lights like an ancient scroll.

  “I most certainly do,” said Uncle Neon. “One moment…”

  When she rolled it up again, the mirror was empty of any image of Sweetness Asiim Engineer. As she stomped back toward the cordillera-like mass of Catherine of Tharsis, Sweetness turned to hold the roll of plastic film out to the rising wind, like a spinnaker.

  “Look for me in mirrors,” had been Little Pretty One's final whisper before Uncle Neon launched her back down the link that Sweetness alone and always had been able to exploit to bring her to this other world.

  She let go of the mirror. The wind caught it and whipped it away like a sail, around and around and over and over, tumbling away, a blink of light, on the eternal gales.

  It took ten minutes of concentrated rubbing by Romereaux before sensation returned to her feet and hands and then that was pins and needles that had her hopping in agony around the bridge, oohing and aahing.

  “You're wasting our air,” sour Ricardo said.

  “Look, I went out there,” Sweetness said, dancing up and down on her points. “Anyway, help's coming.”

  “Aye, and when?”

  Not in the first hour, the hour of confident expectation.

  “She's got a lot to do,” Sweetness explained.

  Nor in the second hour, the hour of settling down patiently.

  “Maybe he put up more of a fight than she expected,” was Sweetness's rationalisation.

  Nor the third hour either, which, when your air is strictly budgeted, is the hour of creeping doubt.

  “There're all those cybersoldiers, remember,” Sweetness said let's-not-be-selfishly.

  But the help did not come in the fourth hour, nor the fifth hour, nor the sixth hour, when the air is hot and foul and so heavy with carbon dioxide all you ca
n do is sit with your back against the cooling bulkhead and count things over and over and over again.

  “Help?” Ricardo croaked.

  “I don't know,” Sweetness said. “I don't know at all.”

  Then the cry came from the window, a little, oxygen-choked croak.

  “Out there,” Grandmother Taal stammered. Everyone crawled to the window, heaved themselves up over the sill.

  Something like a very small dust-devil was moving across the Big Red, cutting straight across the dirt and red rocks as if possessed of a volition and a destination. It was heading straight for Catherine of Tharsis. Sweetness felt a silly, oxygen-wasting laugh bubble inside her, a laugh she could not keep down, that boiled out of her like her offering tea flashing to vapour as she poured it out.

  A bit of help indeed.

  The whirlwind rushed up to the side of the train, mounted the boarding ramp, spun along the walkways and stairways until it came to the pressure outlock. Then everyone on the bridge heard a hammering on the lock door.

  “Open, in the name of Beelzebub!”

  The pressure-lock door closed behind the strange little man. He had long white hair tied back at his shoulders with a gold ring and long mustachios which he kept sharply waxed. His eyes were deep and darkly bright. He wore a long desert duster coat and a big-brimmed hat with a ludicrously jaunty feather in its band. On his back was a complex pack of many devices and power cables, including a handy-looking field-inducer tucked into the pocket of his coat and a whirring object that looked like a small sewing machine. He carried around him a translucent bubble of force that seemed to hold his own atmosphere. He twisted a setting ring on the field inducer. The bubble popped audibly. The oxygen-starved people of Catherine of Tharsis smelled purple heathers and autumn seaside. To them, the little man looked a little blurred at the edge, slightly out of focus, like a television picture on the edge of a transmission footprint. They thought it was their foggy minds. Sweetness knew better. The traveller was on the extreme edge of his probability locus. He took a step forward out of the lock, removed his gloves, banged them together, kicked the dust off his battered desert boots, sniffed, grimaced.