Ares Express

by Ian McDonald

  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.

  ROTECH cyber-warriors, the youth elite of the most ancient Technician families, arrowed on their arm-wings through the vastnesses of the orbital habitats, racing for the kill switches on the reality-shapers. A few even made it. Most were arrested or shredded by nano-engineered constructor-bots. Some were probabilised away into indescribable, and naturally lethal, alternative universes, others simply disinvented as the angels picked realities where their grandparents were gay.

  “Very few of us ever make a truly original invention,” the traveller commented from his chair.

  The AI wars began. Fleets of light-sail battle-yachts swept down out of the sun; suicide-crews of grim-eyed teenagers readied their brain-bombs and logic lasers and fingered their rosaries. Most knew they would never make it back to this reality. The angels, which had already begun to rank themselves into orders and sub-orders according to processing power, met them with point-defence lasers and tight-focus reality warps that dropped ships and crews into a far distant, prematurely nova-ed sun. Broadsides of needle-drones spewed nebulae of nanoprocessors in the paths of the hijacked orbital habitats, the Lorarchs and Cheraphs met them with suites of counterprocessors. Dog ate dog. Near-space became a planetary immune system as the microbe-machines duked it out. A gentle rain of dead and frantically mutating nanoids rained down on the scabby green lowlands of the new world. Brilliant but acned boy-cybermages with unpleasant personal habits jammed code in attempts to plumb ever-deeper mysteries of the eleven dimensions of the vinculum field. A shamanic war of languages with power over reality was fought in the orbital marches and the project housing blocks and underground code-runner sodalities of Paris and Delhi and Montevideo. People vanished, were transformed, met strange and bloody fates, became wonders, defected, were mortified or assumed into heaven, died in savage shootouts or by computer-arranged accidents. The lads loved it, though it ate them like sugar. Governments, under pressure from the globalismes and financial Bunds that were the true lords of the earth, threatened ROTECH with the termination of the New World project. ROTECH reminded the industrials and the money men that if it fell, they fell under it, and it was coming from a very great height.

  Sauntering blithely into this war came Kathy Haan, ROTECH payroll number 2821332HSB. No mystery what side she was on. The AIs were the perfect form of life. They were the total mortification. They were the inevitable God made in Man's image. She had no reservations telling it abroad. “They will win,” she would insist, her skin so tightly drawn over her cheekbones that it was as translucent and luminous as parchment. “They must. They are better than us. They have no meat.”

  She was weird and no one took her seriously, but ROTECH on war footing could tolerate no sedition. Kathy Haan, Our Lady of Tharsis emergent, was to have her contract terminated. It was a critical moment in contemporary management practice. Had security pulled her out of the canteen there and then, marched her to the gates, one on each armpit, a thousand years of history would have been radically different. One rumour, one word leaked from on high, sent ripples across the multiverse.

  She still had friends. Meat friends she could not bring herself totally to despise and who would not despise her, despite what she had done to herself. They caught the rumour and slow-curved it to her workstation.

  That afternoon, while her mind was out at Mars toiling away under skies scored by battle-lasers, Kathy Haan's meat friends managed to open both wrists from thumb-joint to elbow with two loops of twistlock nanofibre. She bled to death in under two minutes. With no body to come back to, her mind stayed on Mars. She had accomplished her spiritual purpose. She had achieved total mortification. She was pure mind, free from the dross of meat. A minor league spiritual entity, she flitted from machine to machine until one day she bounced into a memory matrix to find new emotions, perceptions, comprehension, memory, speed of analysis, depth of apprehension, memories of other lives, alternative existences rushing away from her like the perspectives of an infinite glass cathedral. She had gatecrashed the neural architecture of an AI.

  It could have crushed her like a midge. That the Archangelsk PHARIOSTER did not was initially because it thought this strange new array of perceptions was a subset of itself. By the time it realised that this memory of meat and day jobs and lust for the great sky was an alien, it had come to like the odd memories of embodiment (that Kathy Haan, forty percent on her way to being St. Catherine of Tharsis now, had derided as fleshy and vile) and treated its uninvited guest as an interesting pet. A conversation starter at AI parties. Thus Kathy Haan drifted, like her martyred namesake, into becoming an intermediary between heaven and earth. The AIs laid out their conditions. The attacks would end; in return they would desist from further unsanctioned reality destabilisation. This world they were making would be a sanctuary for their kind, a gift from the people of the Motherworld to this new species it had inadvertently created. In return, they would complete the terraforming and maintain control of the ecosystems. The uploaded consciousness of Kathy Haan was beamed back to gross earth to negotiate. ROTECH, of course, refused to recognise her. She was legally dead. Dead girls don't do diplomacy. The soul of Kathy Haan was held in a ring of superconducting copper/niobium/carbon ceramic in a Sao Paulo physics faculty, circling endlessly, timelessly at the speed of light. For ten objective years—mere moments subjectively—she orbited there while the AIs tested Motherworld's keenest and most expensive legal minds. A compromise was thrashed out: humanity would cede recognition of the angel intelligences and cease hostilities, but in return it wanted settlement rights on the new world. The world had never been meant for angels. It had always been meant for humans. What need had disembodied intelligences for a material gob of terraformed mud? Perhaps, but with segregation. Humans the soil, angels the orbital approaches. And they would maintain the planetary control systems. And the planetary defences? Further tusslement. Five years more St. Catherine of Tharsis circled in relativistic oblivion, then woke after what seemed a short, refreshing sleep to find herself…

  “Creator, saviour, mediator,” Sweetness said, cutting short the story. “We all know this.” She had never had much patience for courtroom dramas. Her heroes had always been picaresque: prospectors, rogue engineers, dune-bums, travelling wise-men. On the track, they had never been faced with the problem of their mode of transport becoming less and less substantial with every passing kilometre. The deck beneath her boot soles was gooey as taffy left on the ground after a canton fair.

  “Yes, we all know you know,” the traveller said testily. “I'd've thought you would have had a personal interest in the characters, that's all. I imagined that a girl of your background would have had some interest in process over destination.”

  “I'm a story, I'm all process,” Sweetness said and reminded herself that there was indeed a destination beyond the point at which the traveller and his track-yacht faded into improbability. Out there, up there, Devastation Harx with Little Pretty One in a jar no, she corrected herself. Catherine of Tharsis. The objec
t of this homily. This—shift worker turned patron saint.

  “One thing,” Sweetness asked. “Why'd she do it?”

  “To which of the many events in the life of Our Lady of Tharsis might you be referring?” the doctor asked. Sweetness could see the light through him, like a bright-coloured milk-smoothie in an oddly shaped glass.

  “Why did she, you know, hook up with me? Be my sister?”

  The traveller looked over his small spectacles at her in exactly the way the Head Magister of the School of the Air had when Sweetness had given him some particularly Sweetness-like answer over the picture link.

  “She's a saint. She does what she likes.”

  “That's a really weak answer.”

  “Yes, but it's also the only correct one,” the traveller said, and with that, he popped like a bubble. Doctor, spectacles, twinkle in eye, mustachios, buttoned chair and brass poop-rail. The wheel vanished under her hand, the brass brake lever evaporated. The steering binnacle faded into the red horizon. One trade became two. The bogie disappeared into quantum mist, but Sweetness's momentum was real.

  She threw her arms up to protect her head, curled instinctively into a foetal ball, but hit hard and fast. Sweetness rolled twelve times along the hard concrete sleepers. She cried out, feeling ribs bend, muscles tear, skin split. She came to on her back, panting painfully, staring at the sky. The kites were the last to become impossible, blowing away in the high air like wisps of cloud before the thermocline of a warm front.

  Alive, then. And panting, and hurting—a lot. And horns. Horns horns horns. Train horns. Get out of my way horns. Big and loud and Oh Dear Mother'a'mercy, close.

  She sat up.

  The train was on top of her. If she tried to get up, if she tried to run, if she tried to roll to left or right, it would smash her like a bug, guillotine her on the rails. She threw herself flat on the trackbed as the sweep of the cow-catcher rushed over her. Tokamaks yelled, bogies thundered; the wind howled, Sweetness closed her eyes and yelled back. The din of heavy metal seemed to go on for longer than any train should be. She opened her eyes. Through the whirling grit and sand she saw wheel sets blur over her face. A blink: for an instant, another face looked down into hers: a freeloader, clinging spreadeagled to the understructure. She remembered another face, looking up at hers, out of the dark, clinging to the side of an ore-truck as she eased the safety back on her djubba-stick. Pharaoh. Memory and name came in instant, then this fellow hitcher was swept on to his own personal destination.

  “Oh God!” Sweetness screamed at the hurtling steel. “Enough! Enough adventure, all right?”

  The train heard her and swished its caboose over her head and left her, gasping and grit-blind, prone on the upline of the Big Red mainline. Sweetness Asiim Engineer counted ten, fifteen, twenty deep breaths before she sat up. A hundred sleepers down the track was her bag of essential things. Over her shoulder, the train curled around a long, slow right-hander toward the mountains that looked somehow lower and more weatherworn than the ones she remembered from moments ago. And the sky was paler, the clouds less pink, the desert grubbier, less pristine, scruffy with scrub planting. Most real, and insistent that she was back on the hard, mundane baseline, was the gnaw of hunger in her belly.

  “I'm starving!” Sweetness shouted at the wilderness.

  You can never grow fat on miracle food, or slaked by other-world's water.

  Her cheek smarted from the steel-burn where she had tumbled on to this same rail, a world away. Her arms ached pink with sun-sear.

  “Mother'a'mercy, I am back,” she declared, then made sure she could heave herself to her feet—just—and hobbled down the track to reclaim her pack. As she checked the contents, she remembered Psalli's spell for Aid Beyond Comprehension in a Time of Direness.

  Reality-manipulating time-travellers chasing the shade of a green man across alternate futures and pasts, fixing time just to suit you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th.

  That worked as Aid Beyond Comprehension.

  The spell had one shot left in it. The warm, unpredictable desert wind eddied around her and, sudden, strong as memory, Sweetness smelled water. Her nose guided her. She turned to face upline. There, at the very edge of the heat-haze, was that the shadow of a cloud dropping dark on the desert? Did the red turn green, like the colour blindness test her brother had failed, but would be an Engineer none the less? In that red-green were there flecks of black? Might they be buildings, houses, streets, a town?

  Smell is the oldest, deepest and surest sense. Yes, it said, and trusting its instincts, Sweetness shouldered her pack and tramped steadfastly up the long line toward the cloud shadow.

  at some point in its recent history, Solid Gone, population 2125, elevation 2124, had offended the weather. World was rising in brilliant reds and ochres, skeined through with imperial purples and mood indigos, around Sweetness as she turned off the mainline on to the two-rut track down which the finger-board pointed. Thither Solid Gone. But over Solid Gone a small, shapely cloud hovered, so firm and exact Sweetness felt a shudder of association with Devastation Harx's airmobile cathedral. Evening air brushed the nape of her neck; the cloud hung in defiance of all winds, seemingly moored over the small desert town. Not one drop of rain had it ever cast. The earth beneath it was dry as a Poor Quadrentine's crack, penumbral, deathly. Sweetness rested her bag a moment on the wooden nameboard, studied the grey array of dead solar trees, languid wind-pumps and adobes clumped around the taller cylindrical buildings of the civic centre, then hitched her bag and marched down the slight slope across the terminator. A blind woman could have told the moment she stepped under the cloud. A stifling, draining heat sucked sweat from Sweetness's pits and the pluck from her pith. She stopped, shook her head, suddenly reluctant to walk on, to turn and go back, to do anything intentional at all. As a kid, she had told and told and told her parents that she couldn't take antihistamines to combat the zone-allergies she had suffered from—it's always pollen season somewhere in the world, for trainpeople. They made her woozy, they stuffed her head with socks and lint, made her eyes red and her limbs heavy as if she had been dropped down Motherworld's gravity hole. Child'a'grace and Naon Engineer had made her take them anyway, and it was all exactly as she had described it to them. But Solid Gone was twenty times that.

  Solid Gone was a town-shaped case of myalgic encephalopathy.

  There were people here. They sat on their wooden verandahs, dressed in drab, turd-like colours. They were of a variety of ages, but all seemed old. Their bodies had no bearing, they slumped and sagged, slack sack-folk. They half-listened to wirelesses set up on beer crates; or semi-attended to the ornate bong-pipes carved from desert gypsum which had been Solid Gone's name and fame, once; or spent moments studying crossword puzzles and Star-prize Wordsearch magazines before deciding it was too much effort and lolling back in their deckchairs. Even more than a flick of attention to the passing colourful stranger was too much effort. A tip of the chin, a slight declination of the head, were all the welcomes Sweetness received to Solid Gone.

  The intricately terraced and irrigated weedfields had turned to dust and blown away years before. The wirelesses were all tuned off station, playing a sinister, whispering amalgam of livestock prices, rural politicians, failed comedians, phone-ins about infidelity. Talk talk talk. A chatter of spectres. Not a minim of music. The heat and drone sat on Sweetness's shoulders like grey luggage. Drear. Heat. Weight. With every step she imagined the colour draining from her clothes; a thread here, a button there, a seam, a panel, whoops! a whole sleeve, gone dirt.

  “Hey!”

  She felt she must make some sound, test her voice on the thick air to be sure it was still working. A barefoot kid lolling on a slatted wooden recliner lifted the brim of his hat.

  “How do I get to the town centre?”

  The kid lifted a thumb, jerked it left.

  In the days of civic pride, before this communal affliction of the spirit, Solid Gone had
built a small but elegant bourse around a cobbled central plaza. Here the weekly weed markets and meerschaum exchange had met in the colonnaded arcades, sheltered from the dehydrating sun and blow-in, vagrant sand. Sellers in smocks and veils had uncovered their piles of sweet-scented leaf, dealers in cartwheel hats and duster coats bent over the fragrant carpets, sniffing, crumbling fronds between their fingers, heating the powder up in small solar-lens censers, wafting the fumes to their faces. Hands had been struck, oil-paper packets of dollars slapped down into palms; vests of pockets stuffed with bales of pressed leaf. Once. Now plaza and bourse had been reserved for a single, new tenant.

  Numb, almost dumb, Sweetness Asiim Engineer stopped in her tracks to stare. The camperbus was suspended ten metres above the cambered cobbles. A thick metal chain fastened each corner to massive staples on the cornices of the adjacent exchange buildings. The bus's wheels sagged on their leaf springs. There were little gritty oil-pools on the cobbles. Amazed by this wonder in the heart of lethargy, Sweetness circled round for a better view. There was a device on the truck's roof; some kind of satellite-dish/projector/death-ray/telescope/panopticon thing, aimed at the churning grey centre of the stationary cloud. On the back was a complex transformer unit, clumsily mounted on the luggage rack. The power-pack crackled and dripped fat sparks to the cobbles, where they skittered back and forth before running inevitably down to earth. Ninety degrees more, and the far side of the bus was a swirl of spray-paint graphics that challenged the creeping drab of Solid Gone. Sweetness studied the clouds of angels and jazz musicians and puce and lilac curving things that looked like visual representations of the result of Solid Gone's former trade for several minutes before she untangled the words: Sanyap Bedassie, Cloud-Cineaste. In the middle of this gaudiness was the black rectangle of an open door. In the middle of the open door sat a young man, dark hair, ratty goatee of the type grown from necessity not fashion. He wore black pants that tapered at the cuffs. Foreshortening made his feet look the size of grain trucks. They were shod in loafers—Preeds of (scuff) read the labels on the soles: no socks. His ankles were painfully big-boned, and skinny. His feet swung in counterpoint.