by Ian McDonald
Sweetness thanked the hormones of pubescent boys, that let her play the Fab but Unattainable Warrior Queen with great hair and them her berserkers.
They roosted around her on spars and struts at the end of the grapple arm. Clamps held the cathedral of the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family a short spit away. It filled half the world, an orange moon cratered with scars and punctures. Sweetness had reconnoitred her access points from the vantage of an adjacent roof-spar. You could march whole armies through the holes Cadmon and Euphrasie had blown in the skin. She flexed her aching muscles and gave her pre-invasion team talk.
“Okay, on my word, we go up and in. What we're looking for is a jar thing, about this size, dirty greenish. It's got a lid like a helmet with wings, right? It's probably up at the very top; there's a kind of glassed-over dome thing that seems to be Harx's special place, I reckon he's got it there if he's got it anywhere. Work your way up, the place is all circles, so it's easy to get about in but you can end up going round and round if you're not smart. That jar is what we're here for. Nothing else matters. Not even getting people, get that? Avoid unnecessary combat. That's an order,” she insisted, seeing the looks of disappointment on some of the boys’ faces. “Don't stop for anything. We want to get in and out, quick smart.”
“This fog is great cover,” green tiger-striped Vertical Boy said.
“What fog?”
The boy nodded down. Against the rules, Sweetness looked down between her feet. A raft of cloud boiled up toward her. As she watched, it swirled over her feet, up her legs, swallowed her whole. Sweetness and her strike force were suspended in grey murk.
“Something freaky here,” she said. Then the world lurched. “What the hell is going on?”
“We seem to be moving,” Pharaoh said calmly. Dripping blue arcs, power lines disconnected from the cathedral, swung free and began to retract. Water conduits unplugged, access scaffolds slid backward on their greased bearings. One by one the grapple fingers were releasing their grip. The sounds from inside the airship took on a deeper, more urgent tone. “Harx is casting free.”
“He's what? He can't do that. Signal the others.”
“In this?”
The arm lurched again. Sweetness looked wildly around. Her platoon awaited her command.
“Go go go!” she yelled and, before any of them could move, was diving recklessly out along the gantry, hand over hand, scrambling to beat the relentless release of the claspers. Three. Two. One steel finger now restrained Devastation Harx. Sweetness swung herself on to it as it let go the orange hull. The airship floated free. Sweetness hurled herself across the widening gap, dived through the jagged hole in the skin, rolled and came up looking out at her boy army swinging helplessly away into the grey. Grapple guns popped, fell into the void. One grapnel was firmly hooked into the lip of the wound. Sweetness heard winch motors whine. A hand grasped the ragged edge, another. Fingers strained. Pharaoh's head appeared. Sweetness helped him haul himself into the corridor.
“Well, general,” he said, looking up and down the circular corridor.
“Nothing's changed,” Sweetness said. “We got a job to do. Let's move it on out.” She had heard that too in one of Sle's movies, and always wanted a chance to say it. They moved it on out.
As usual, Devastation Harx's reflection kept him waiting. Being a man with little tolerance of boredom, Devastation Harx amused himself by trying to catch sight of that other, mirror universe his reflection inhabited, into which it went to pass his reports and receive its instructions. As usual, the glass returned the infinite regress of his mirror maze, devoid of its creator.
Why, he thought, is it this Harx that must wait? The fountainhead and inspiration of an entire religion does not stand around tapping his foot for a mere dog soldier, even if that soldier is one of countless billion alternatives enlisted in the multiversal war against the machines.
Harx glanced at his hand to reassure himself of his own solidity. Truth, illusion and selfhood become dubious when you trap mirrors with mirrors. Mirrors could reflect time as easily as images and possibilities. Many a time he had found a new configuration of the maze, brought into temporary alignment by the movements of the mirrors, where he had seen back two and half decades ago to the Collegium of All Arts alternative poised on an overhang of sculpted rock over the deepest part of the canyon of Lyx like a school for apprentice sorcerers. Magic indeed had been worked there. Quantum magic, the only one the universe permits. The deepest, blackest and most baffling of all.
Somewhere in the mirror maze there must be the reflection of that moment when a three-year-old boy from a good, staid grain family of Valturapa picked a face mirror from his mother's dressing table, turned it to the vanity mirror, peeped in to see what reflections of reflections of reflections looked like. There also must be time-reflection of the sudden explosion of a smack on the back of that boy's head, the lace-gloved fingers snatching away the hand-mirror, his crow-face of grandmother bending down, the onion smell of her breath as she told him never never never to look into two mirrors reflecting each other. A boy's soul could be sucked out of him and lost forever in the maze of reflections. Too late, Amma. His soul was already lost in the infinite regress.
He had certainly seen many times the mirror maze he built as his graduation piece, the culmination of four years’ esoteric research in draughty libraries. Fine art and quantum theory. Mirrors could be turned face to face to reflect not infinite regress, but infinite alternative universes, all the possibilities that bubble off from every wave function collapse. Polymers could be doped with the same string-processors that built the neural architectures of ROTECH's reality-reshaping manforming machines and cast into mirrors. Such mirrors could show the dual, uncollapsed state of every photon that impinged on them; a man looking into the infinite regress would see not just himself, but all other possible selves. No two who looked would see the same. Every man his own work of art.
He built the first, ten-mirror quantumoculum in a mad dry season with the hot tlantoon wind blowing in from the high desert, alone, as he had spent most of his study years; a man apart from his fellow students. On a sleepless night with the summer lightning raving around the college's spires, he stepped into the circle of mirrors, lit a paschal candle and looked. At first it eluded him, a shimmering, scampering thing that flitted from mirror to mirror, gone as soon as he tried to fix it in his vision; then he learned the trick of seeing by not-looking, like willing the floaters in the eyeball to be still, and he first encountered this other Harx, this soldier in the panversal war against the artificial intelligences. From him he learned his true name and nature, and the meaning of his existence in this universe.
Devastation Harx coughed dryly. In the next universe over, Harx II heard the signal of stretching patience and poked his head around the edge of the mirror.
“Oh. There you are. Sorry, I didn't hear you. Have you been waiting long?”
Harx I stepped into full shot to face Harx II. They were, of course, physically identical, being mere quantum fluctuations of each other: middling height, trim, the grey hair that hue that is known as Distinguished Silver; the refined, slightly feminine features; lips slightly cruel. In manner of dress and disposition they differed radically. Harx I, as ever, was immaculate, expensive, restrained and carried his black swagger-stick with a casual ease that hinted at casual power casually wielded. Harx II seemed slumped, as if drawn in by an inner hollowness, skin waxy and blotched; weary to the very bones. He wore a high-collared uniform with badly pressed pants with a red stripe down the side. The whole looked as if slept in regularly. Harx I often thought of telling his alternate that he looked more like a bell-hop in a Belladonna bidouche than a reality warrior.
“The diversionary tactic was completely successful. Already the lunar assembly lines are dropping the first waves of military units across the equatorial zones. We should have secured local government, constabulary, communication and transport systems within seventy-two hours
. We will maintain public order in the transition period.”
“That's good, that's good, that's good.” Harx II's voice was distracted, wandering. Harx I often suspected that he was taking orders from a clerk in the pay division. “What about the subterranean defence units?”
“They're only accessible through privileged Synodical codes. Once we secure the compliance of the Anarchs, they'll cease to pose a threat.”
“And until then, half the planet's got a ring-side seat on robot wars.” Harx II paused, hacked up a phlegm ball and decorously ejected it. “There's not going to be much left of your pretty little terraformed world by the time they end. Your people are going to have to rebuild it all, ground up.”
“Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is the notion.”
Harx I did thoroughly despise his quantum counterpart. Multiversal war was no excuse for bad dressing.
On that night of heat lightning, Harx had walked into a maze of quantum mirrors and discovered that his world, its peoples, its history, its Five Hundred Founders were all images, distant reflections of a greater, more terrible reality. In the long manforming, ROTECH's angels had shuffled many realities. In one and one only was there any probability of a habitable world they could share with the humans, a redoubt of diversity and toleration. In all others, there was war. War between the meat and metal, without let or quarter. Total war. War fought across the million realities opened up by the computing power of vinculum theory processors. A war that, in all those other realities, the machines were losing. Across countless universes, the AIs had been exterminated, in many others, driven back, in the rest fighting for their survival as a sentient species. In one and one only they survived, hidden in a fold of improbability from the multiversal Questors of the Human League. This little greened world with its pretty moonring was their final stand. Their red Masada. And, on a hot summer night, an art student had opened a door into the multiverse, called out and received not a welcoming hello to a greater fellowship of all humanity, but the sound of bugles.
“Fight? For you? In a war? What for?” he had asked his scruffy emanation on their third meeting, a night with the insane tlantoon howling about the pinnacles and stacks of Lyx canyon.
“Bucketloads of money,” Harx II hinted.
“I am an artist,” young Harx had said, bristling at the enormity of the insult. “And anyway, physical transfer between universes violates conservation of mass and energy.”
“Information doesn't,” Harx II said. “We've got ideas.”
Two weeks later he was back.
“I'll take the bucketloads of money,” Harx I said. “Give me your ideas.”
Show time. The external examiners had decorously hitched their gowns of office to step over the threshold into the quantumoculum. Half an hour later they emerged. Two days after that, they delivered their judgement. This was not art. This was a risible fairground side-show, reeking of the fairground midway and the barker's shout. A third-class degree. The lowest possible award. In all but name, a failure, for in these days of fiscally sound education and league tables of performance, a failed student meant a slashed budget and a faculty reprimand.
“Okay,” Harx II had said. “You want to make money, stuff art. Found a religion. Here's one we prepared earlier…”
That day Harx I took the name and nature of devastation.
Back in the contemporary corner of the mirror maze, Harx II chewed at his lower lip in that way Harx I loathed so copiously.
“One wee thing, those two artists. They did a lot of a damage. A lot of damage. We can't afford any more setbacks like that.”
Ironic, that the angels should have recruited his own brother and that brother's lover as assassins. That they had been sent to destroy him, Harx I had no doubt. Had it been a desert revelation, the angels boiling out of the heat haze to take them up and show them the name and natures of the multiverse, then tell them exactly who they wanted killed, and how to do it? Bloody A-students. Bones in the dust. He'd seen to that. Never underestimate the longevity of professional jealousy.
“Everything is under control.”
Patently untrue, but Harx I had few qualms now about lying to his counterpart. Let the enemy love-bomb him, let them send who or whatever. He had control of the orbital weaponry, his metal soldiers were burning through the upper atmosphere like autumn meteors and, behind this gaudy diversion, he had accomplished his strategic goal: he had stripped the holy codes for the superstring processors out of the St. Catherine entity. Devastation Harx commanded the reality shapers themselves. Nothing could stop him now.
The sound of muffled shouting from the corridor outside gave immediate lie to Harx I's claim. He whirled. Unregarded, Harx II vanished back into his reality. Last to fade was a puckered frown. His parting words echoed in the mirror maze.
“Just make sure it is.”
More shouting, louder now, and sounds of strife. Voices: Dandeever, calling orders. They were quick, his enemies, but he was ready for them. Mirrors pivoted away from Harx as he hastened from the mirror maze to take command against the attack. Parallel Harxes swung away from him and vanished into the multiverse. One misreflection caught him in midflight. He checked himself, took a cautious step back, seized the edge of the mirror to hold the image. Caught in the silvered glass was a girl, green eyes, brown skin, black curly hair in need of a wash. She wore tattered pants, a sleeveless shirt, an orange track vest. A new addition was the complex pack on her back, and the peculiar gun in her fist.
“You,” Devastation Harx breathed. “Again.”
It was not until Skerry was standing in the open hatch of the United Artists speed dirigible, bungee cords around her ankles, that the thought struck her. What exactly did the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis look like?
Two minutes to curtain up on The End of the World Show. Somewhere out in the thickening fog, Bladnoch lurked in UA2, the big heavy lifter, dream projector warmed up and ready to transmogrify all this mistiness into saints. In the tower-top penthouse that United Artists had requisitioned as command centre for a truly profane fee, Weill received confirmation of funding from Wisdom and immediately generated a credit transfer to Grand Valley Regional Weather's account. It had been touch and go with the weather workers. Orbital climate systems had brusquely brushed his request for a hundred percent peasouper off to planetside weather control, but Weill could not rid himself of the feeling that they wanted rid of him quickly, that there were things going on up there not for the eyes of the earthbound. Grand Valley Regional Weather had whined about compensation payments to tower-toppers who paid high premiums for sunny skies and unbroken vistas from their panoramic windows and named a figure. Weill laughed. Grand Valley Regional Weather did not.
“Okay, I'll get you your filthy money,” Weill growled, then spent five minutes he could not afford trying to track down Synodical Security's Head of Finance through the labyrinth of Wisdom bureaucracy and the planetary communications network only to catch him on an approach shot to the thirteenth at Great Estramadura.
“How much?”
Weill repeated the fee. He heard the sigh.
“It's yours. It's transferring now. Now, if you'd be so kind, I'm about to dormy this hole.”
But Weill's request had put Synodical Security's Head of Finance off his stroke. He sliced his approach, bunkered, took five to get on to the green and threw away the match. The five-million-dollar five iron.
Mishcondereya's plague of nano-flies had liberally dosed the Church of the Ever-Circling Spiritual Family with hallucinogens, there was a clear window of fifteen minutes to get Skerry in and out before the dosages wore off: she crept in on muffled fans, positioning the speed dirigible over what the satellite images had shown was a shattered glass vault at the apex of the cathedral.
In the command tower, Weill relinquished the command chair for Seskinore, fresh from the ritual ablutions which climaxed his preperformance superstitions which included inside out underwear, never wearing anything blue, singing tw
o bars from “The Five O'Clock Whistle” and allowing no one to use the word bishop. Weill considered it a professional challenge to work in as many natural and logical uses of that last, taboo word as possible when he First ADed to Seskinore. The old ham took two puffs of minty breath freshener, sat ponderously down in the Director's chair, cracked his walnut-knuckled fingers and donned his virtuality headset.
“And how are we, boys and girls?”
“Boys and girls are ready to rock-’n’-roll.”
The props were all in place, lighting and SFX up to speed, the actors cued and ready, and now Skerry had seen the gaping hole right through the belly of it all. Precious minutes could be lost sorting through racks of religious paraphernalia. She might have to take a hostage, anathema to Skerry. Threaten nastiness. It was a distinct possibility she might not be able to find the saint at all. Skerry thumbed the cabincom and explained her predicament to Mishcondereya.
“Merde,” Mishcondereya said, crackly over the corn lines. A pause, then, “I'll call Control.” Mishcondereya called Seskinore. Seskinore called Bladnoch out in UA2, who called Weill to call the cave because the old train-witch might have got something about that in that sending. While Weill called the Comedy Cave, Skerry listened to the static on the interphone and tried to make faces out of the swirling patterns. It was a distraction from the stage fright. The fright was a secret she had successfully kept all her professional life: Skerry Scanland Ghalgorm was martyr to that disease of performers. The fear. The shakings; the pacings; the compulsive bouncings of balls on walls; the huddlings in the corner, arms wrapped around knees, rocking and moaning in terror; the discreet throwings up. She recited cantos from the Evyn Psalmody. She performed a Damantine stretch routine, jogged on the spot, chanted tongue-twisters. Anything to push down the dread. On this gig, stage fright could kill you.
