Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  “You know, if men could fly like birds, I don't think we would really bother doing anything else.” The voice was low and soft and almost accentless. It used the words slowly, as if it weighing and parcelling each. “Everyone, at some time, wonders what it would be like to jump.” Devastation Harx was one of those people who are not what you expect but, when you see them, they so utterly refute your mental image that you can no longer recall what it was you had expected. The face perfectly fitted the voice: late twenties, grey-haired, refined, a hint of epicene to take the edge off crude handsome; lips a little full, as if this face had once belonged to a cruel teen-something who had latterly found a better way. Not over tall, nor over small. Medium framed, no obvious body fat but not gaunt. He had bearing. Poise. A trained stance. He carried his hands as if he knew what to do with them. His left held a black swagger-cane, capped each end with silver. It looked as if it might contain a sword. But best, Sweetness observed, he wore a very killer suit. Soft, light-swallowing black. The frock coat was frogged with silver. His white shirt was clasped with a silver collar brooch. Exactly the same amount of cuff peeped from the coat sleeves. It was not a thing Sweetness had consciously considered until then, but it was now obvious that people who call themselves names like Devastation Harx—he could be no other—need good tailors.

  “I am Devastation Harx,” the elegant man said. He offered a hand. Sweetness looked around for Serpio. He was seated at the table. A moment of panic, then she took the hand and, because the suit was so good, she curtsied.

  “Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.”

  “A fine name. Well, I am delighted to meet you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. And you…”

  He gave a short bow somewhere just off Sweetness's port flank. She squirmed away, frowned. Devastation Harx seemed to be waiting for something from her.

  “Oh. This is, well, I call her Little Pretty One.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Devastation Harx said.

  All right, if that's how you want to play it, Sweetness thought. Nice guy/guy-with-weird-powers.

  But he had nice manners. He pulled a chair out for Sweetness at the horseshoe-shaped table. Without any evident summons, more plum acolytes brought fruit and bread.

  “I'm sure you're hungry. The desert's not exactly conducive to gastronomy.”

  Sweetness fell on the fruit bowl. She noticed that Serpio wasn't eating but the gnaw in her belly said, ask questions later. She gorged. Devastation Harx smiled.

  “This is some burg,” Sweetness said, mouth full of pears.

  “The power of mail order,” Devastation Harx said.

  “You built all this?”

  “From remote religion. We've always had a strong distance-supply industry in our society; School of the Air, Flying Doctors, Travelling Inseminators, Wandering Miracle Shows, the Universal Pantechnicon Catalogue. We're a geographically dispersed people—as I'm sure you appreciate. It was the next logical step, mail-order religion. Why not a Church of the Air? Literally.”

  Sweetness poured a glass of water, held it up to the light, frowned, demurely dropped in a sterilising tablet.

  “It's always wise not to trust the water,” Devastation Harx said indulgently. He watched Sweetness cram down more fruit. “So, your, ah, attachment?”

  Sweetness cleared her gob with chlorinated water.

  “She's my sister.”

  “She is?”

  “We were joined.”

  “You still are.”

  “At birth.”

  “I see. But now you're…”

  “Separated.”

  “But only physically. Not…psychically.”

  “Well, I know she's always there, but I can't see her, not like you can. I can only see her in mirrors.”

  “Yes, that's often the way of it. Mirrors reflect so much more than just crude physical likeness, don't you think? They reflect how we feel about what we are, they reflect truths, they can reflect illusions, they reflect our hopes and fears for the future, the marks of our histories, they show us our selves as we can never see them. A lot of magic for a mere half-silvered glass.”

  “Is this part of your religion or something?”

  “More ‘or something,’” Devastation Harx said. “So, have you had enough yet? Do you want any more?”

  Sweetness looked round at the lifter of peels, skins and cores.

  “No, I think that's me.”

  “Good.” Devastation Harx stood up. “In that case, allow me to take you on the conducted tour. I don't get many visitors and I like to show the old place off. It's not everyone gets a flying cathedral.”

  He was already halfway to the double doors. He extended a hand to Sweetness and Serpio. The doors were already swinging open. Sweetness caught a wisp of plum.

  “So you get all this by mail order?” Sweetness whispered to Serpio as they fell in behind Devastation Harx.

  “It's good value,” Serpio said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Bottom up,” Devastation Harx, ushering his guests into the lift. “Level one, please.” A plum acolyte closed the gates, a second began to turn a crank.

  “You've a lot of these people,” Sweetness commented as the cage swayed then began its descent.

  “It's how things get done,” Devastation Harx. “I'm sure Novice Waymender has told you that we reject unthinking dependence on dumb machines. Here everything is done by human labour.”

  “Everything?”

  The filigree cage was descending through the main lift body; a cavernous chamber ribbed and strutted with lightweight construction beams. Overstuffed bladders of helium were wedged painfully between them like bloated hookers in too-tight suspenders.

  “Stop here,” Devastation Harx commanded. The acolyte pulled on a brass brake and flung the door open on a railed catwalk between the pillowy lift bags. “Come and see.” In places Sweetness had to duck down between straining sacks pushed flatly against each other like inflated breasts.

  “How much did they charge you for this?” she said to Serpio.

  “Three hundred dollars over two years, monthly debit.”

  “I'd ask for my money back.”

  “The dignity of labour,” Devastation Harx announced as he opened a studded door into a teat of a cabin dangling from the rim of the canopy. Twenty acolytes on twenty bicycles pumped away at pedals. Gear trains and drive bands turned a big rotor shaft above Sweetness's head. Through the glass she saw propellers blur. The power units wore plum cycling shorts and sweat bands and the glum look of intense youth. They all looked up and smiled as one as Devastation Harx introduced them as Motility Unit 3. Sweetness shuddered. “Don't be so liberal,” Devastation Harx said. “Do you think any of them would be here if they didn't want to do it? I won't have pressed men around me. Idealism appeals to youth. They take turns. One week on, four weeks off. Democracy of employment. What do you think we are? We should get where we're going by our own efforts, shouldn't we?”

  As the elevator resumed its descent, Devastation Harx said, casually, “So, how do you know it's your sister?”

  “You know your own sister.”

  “Yes. I'm sure you do, but forgive me, you were together for a very little time.”

  Sweetness suddenly felt outnumbered in the small fragile elevator.

  “Has he been telling you stuff about me?”

  “We've been in contact,” Serpio said.

  “You never told me.”

  Serpio tapped his occluded eye.

  “You see,” Devastation Harx continued, “you say she's the ghost of your sister, who tragically died on the operating table but, well, as a rule, religious people don't believe in ghosts.”

  “Well then, what is she?”

  “Remember when I asked you about vinculum theory and string processors?” Serpio said.

  “You told her that?” Devastation Harx said.

  “You should be proud of this one,�
� Sweetness said. “He's got all the stuff off perfect. So, go on.”

  “In a minute,” Devastation Harx said. “Tour continues.”

  The elevator touched bottom. Devastation Harx led his guests along a curving corridor.

  “Post room,” he said, throwing open a door on to a room where people in purple milled around a long table piled with envelopes, labelling machines and plastic crates filled with brochures, tracts and three-fold flyers. All Swing Radio blared. “Heart of the Empire. As soon as we hit Molesworth we'll do a mail-drop.”

  “So you're saying,” Sweetness went on as the door closed on King Jupe and his Mint Juleps, “That my sister isn't my sister at all. That she's some kind of angel that's got attached to me.”

  “Not any sort of angel…” Serpio began and promptly tripped over.

  “Careful,” Devastation Harx admonished. He helped the trackboy up but Sweetness could have sworn she saw the tip of his swagger-stick flick out and tangle itself between Serpio's ankles. “Must be turbulence. You get odd thermals coming up off the old terrain.” He flung open another door. “Central processing.”

  A starkly rectangular room, sinisterly underlit by floor-lights, was filled rank upon rank with wooden prie-dieus. Each bore an acolyte devoutly bent over a wooden abacus. Fingers flicked, beads ricocheted. The air was filled with soft clicking, like a locust army mustering.

  “Simple, efficient and good for eye-hand coordination.”

  The bead-counters did not look up as their guru passed up an aisle. Some moved their lips silently, eyes reading the shifting digits.

  “Data Storage is next door. You haven't signed on for my ‘Be a Master of Memory’ course, have you?” That, to Serpio. To Sweetness: “People don't realise half their potential. Entire human faculties atrophy and rot because we hand them over to machines. That, pretty much in a nutshell, is my philosophy. A human world for a human species.”

  Sweetness looked around at the human calculus.

  “Who feeds everyone?” she asked. “And who makes all the purple gear? And what do you do with the night-soil?”

  Devastation Harx clapped his hands softly in delight.

  “I so enjoy trainpeople. They've such a stubbornly pragmatic bent.”

  “You've got trainpeople?”

  A door at the far end of Central Processing took them back into the circulare corridor. It seemed to Sweetness that it took them back to exactly the point they had left. They processed on.

  “I've got every kind of people. Our motto.” It was inlaid in marquetry in the wooden wall panelling, bird's-eye maple and gnarled walnut on ash.

  “‘We're no angels.’ Hah.”

  “Then again,” Devastation Harx said thoughtfully, “Trainpeople do live a little too close to their machines.”

  “So, what is it with you and these angels, who you say aren't really angels at all, then?”

  “What it is, Ms. Engineer, is, I intend to fight a war against the angels.”

  Sweetness stopped dead.

  “You what?”

  Devastation Harx turned to face her. He rested his hands on the ferule of his cane. Sweetness noticed that Serpio was now standing behind him. Airship, mad-lands, big desert, three kilometres straight down, she thought. How can I make these into an escape plan that doesn't involve me falling to my death?

  “I thought I'd made myself quite clear. I intend to engage these angels—who, as you observed, are nothing of the sort—in battle. And I intend to defeat them.”

  Sweetness laughed. It was louder than she had intended, and nastier.

  “Let me get this straight. There's about two hundred and fifty thousand angels up there? Like so many they make a ring round the world? That's not to mention all the ones that got left behind down here. They've got big sky mirrors and lasers and particle beams and superconducting magnets and probably loads of other stuff I can't even think of. They keep the weather going. They keep the UV from frying us like nimki. They keep the air in. They throw comets around. They go Bedzo and the world disappears. And you go up against these people with an inflatable bouncy church, a mail-order department, a couple of hundred abacuses and a pile of dysfunctional cyclists in purple, and you win?”

  “Yes,” Devastation Harx said in that tone of you-know-nothing-really-nothing adults know infuriates teenagers.

  “I want a parachute, now.”

  “Ms. Engineer…”

  “No, you wait.” She turned to Serpio. “This was not part of the deal. The deal was we both run away from what we hate and we go and get a good life somewhere and maybe we end up together or maybe we don't but whatever, it absolutely did not say I get hijacked by some mail-order messiah in a flying mushroom and end up crisped by partacs. You know something? I think I made a mistake with you, Serpio. I think…I think you arranged all this.” The realisation was marvellous and liberating. There is a strong joy, Sweetness discovered, in understanding your own utter gullibility. “You did! You bastard! You had this all planned. You took one look at me—at us—and it all fitted into some big master plan and you called up Harx-boy here and he said, bring her on. I cannot believe I ever even thought about sleeping with you. And I did. A bit. Not now. You're not a good person. Go and put your purple on, freak-eye.”

  While they were just thoughts, Sweetness had known her last two words were unforgivable. Two fingers poked clean and hard in the cataract. But she said them anyway, and whatever had begun at Great Oxus, they ended. From here on she was on her own. For a moment she thought Serpio might hit her. Devastation Harx, too, read the balled aggression in shoulders and neck and fists.

  “I think it'd be better if you left us for a while,” he said. “We'll meet up with you when Ms. Engineer is in sweeter humour.”

  Face twisting as it does when you are hurt badly enough to cry but damned if you will in public, Serpio turned and walked with over-deliberate casualness down the curving corridor. He stopped once, to call back.

  “So you thought about sleeping with me, then?”

  “Like I said, it's all one big chapter of bad mistakes.” They just kept coming out of her mouth, badder and badder and badder.

  “Well, I didn't. And I'll tell you this, I wouldn't if you were the last woman in the world.”

  “You would say that!” Sweetness sent her final dart cannoning round the corridor walls after him. She did not see if it struck. Her and Harx now. That was always the way he intended to play it, she realised. Play it, and me. She said, feistily, “So, how do you achieve this prodigy?”

  “With the help of your invisible friend,” Devastation Harx said. “Who, as you've probably guessed, is considerably more powerful than you thought, and definitely not your Siamese twin sister. I think it's time you got to see what she's really like. This way.”

  A section of ash pivoted under his palm. Sweetness stepped through the wall after Devastation Harx, and into her selves. Dozens of Sweetnesses. A multiplicity of Sweetnesses. A plethora, a myriad, a host, a horde, an infinite regress of Sweetnesses.

  “Woo,” she said, immersed in mirrors.

  “I did say there was a great spirituality in reflections,” fifty Devastation Harxes said at once.

  For the first few minutes Sweetness took the rare opportunity to study herself from every aspect. She frowned at her eyebrows. She tugged critically at her hair. She rolled her shoulders to try to make better of her boobs. She tightened, relaxed, tightened, relaxed her ass-cheeks and seemed pleased at the result. She looked down at her foreshortened self in the floor mirrors and grinned. She waved to her selves. She made faces. She struck attitudes. She led a dozen Sweetnesses in a step-perfect dance. Then she remembered she was supposed to be feeling angry about Serpio the Bastard, and asked, “Where's the way out?”

  “It's around somewhere,” Devastation Harx's voice said behind her. She spun. All she caught of him were twenty left sleeves, hands and sticks vanishing kaleidoscopically into the corners where mirrors met.

  “Hey!”


  “I seem to be over here.” Far off among the reflections of Sweetnesses and the reflections of mirrors, a Devastation Harx homunculus waved.

  “You wait for me, right?” Sweetness ran toward the distant image. The mirrors were nested chamber within chamber. Sweetness pounded between the pivoting mirrors. Thousands of other selves fled on every side. Panels opened and closed, slid apart, slid to behind her, but always Devastation Harx was a tiny, beckoning figure in the mirror within the next mirror within the next. She pursued, he fled without moving. A voice called her name. Her voice. She stopped dead. The walls rearranged themselves around her.

  “Who?” she asked. One of her reflections did not move its lips. Sweetness went up to it. It remained motionless among the shifting selves.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “It's mirrors, isn't it?”

  Sweetness frowned, studied the apparition.

  “What happened to the rules? Rules are, you're supposed to wear…”

  “What were you wearing yesterday, fashion victim? Sweetness, listen, this is not…”

  “Ms. Engineer…”

  The unfamiliar distracted her. Devastation Harx suddenly stood at her elbow. He turned on his side, became one dimensional, vanished into a line of silvering as a mirror panel pivoted away from her. Sweetness saw reflections of the dark, elegant man flick mirror to mirror to mirror into the infinite regress of the maze. She turned back to her familiar.

  “Ell Pee.”

  All the Sweetness Asiim Engineers moved their lips in perfect synch.

  “Don't mess me around.”

  I'm not, said a voice behind her. Sweetness whirled.

  “Where are you?”

  She was alone with her seeming selves. She moved slowly. Her images moved with her. Mirror panels swung, opening brief gateways into deeper illusion.