Ares Express

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 psychic 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 ovaries. 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.

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 object 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.