Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Can’t say I have.”

“You will. Everyone will…”

“Could we maybe do a little less of the big doomy when it all comes down stuff, and just start at the beginning?”

A pause, in which a skittering lizard hoicked itself up on its rear limbs and hot-legged it away over the burning sands.

“You ever listen to the radio real late at night?”

“Of course. Everyone does that.” On the trains it was how you reminded yourself you were young and cute and a kid like hundreds of millions of others out there in the non-moving world. The voices in the dark of your room, close to you in your bed, a dozen different tongues in your ear a night.

“You ever listen to the religious stations?”

Sweetness’s fingers had twirled the dial over the thousands of shouting pleading hectoring lecturing wheedling whining canoodling seducing scolding trumpeting voices jammed one on top of the other in the low medium wave. Her world bred religions like a dog fleas, and they all could afford air-time.

“I’m more a music person, me.” Pertinent to which, Sweetness realised that for an indefinite but long time now the handlebar wireless had played nothing but airglow. Scary biscuits. A place where the radio wasn’t. On the far shore of the airwaves.

“Yeah, well. Anyway, that’s where he found me, in the Godband.”

“You found him, you mean.” A random twiddle of the knobs.

“No. He found me. He was talking right at me.”

“Yah. Right.”

“No. Really. He called me, by name. He said, ‘And this is going out for Serpio Six Tuesday-Duodecember-Twelfth-Raining Sebendary Waymender.’”

“Nah. Someone set you up. One of those…other ones, back there.”

“No. Listen, will you? He saw me, same way as I see your friend there.”

“He had this, spirit-sight? Angel-vision? What the hell do you call it anyway?”

“The sight.”

“This ‘sight,’ so does it have a limit like normal sight, like perspective, or does it just not bother with things like that?”

“It does, but you can train it, and then it’s naturally more highly developed in some than others.”

“Higher spiritual beings. Of course.”

“Look, if you’re going to be cynical…”

“Sorry. I’m an Engineer.”

They passed a tangle of bones and Sweetness thought hard about cynicism in big deserts.

“Go on.”

“He saw me, he knew I had the sight, and he told me the Ever-Circling Family needed the sight to help them in the fight.”

“The sight, and the fight.”

“You can say what you like, but it’s a battle. This whole world’s a battle, it’s been a battle since before it was invented.”

The pause invited the question: “Who’s fighting?”

“Men and angels.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. Believe me. You think this world was made for us? We’re just human shields. They can’t wipe the angels out now because they keep the manforming systems running. Like the magnetic field. This place doesn’t have one, naturally, so there are these huge superconducting magnets up there in orbit. You’ve heard of vanas?”

Sweetness had always thought of the orbital mirrors as too lowly even to be proper angels, until the night in Inatra a spotlight from heaven lit her way home.

“They keep the weather working. This place isn’t like the Motherworld, it doesn’t have that feedback system so the whole thing always stays right for life. Well, not yet. The climate here is simple, like not complex . You wouldn’t know what that means, but basically, if left to its own devices, it would get stuck in a loop and you’d get the same weather over and over and over again. The vanas, they heat the atmosphere up so you get these pockets of randomness, so the climate doesn’t get stuck. That’s just two. There’s thousands, but the point is they keep the whole world alive, and they know it. They don’t need any of that stuff, they’d be as happy if this place was rock and ice, like it was, before, but then they wouldn’t be safe. We make them safe, and that’s why they let us come here.”

“Wait wait wait. What are all these theys and thems ?”

“The angels, of course. Though Harx says you shouldn’t call them that; they’re machines, and machines have souls but no spirits. They can’t be of God, see?”

“Wait wait wait wait. If the angels are machines…”

“Not if.”

“Okay.” No contention: everyone head-knew that what they called angels were, for the most part, leftover manforming machinery, but the conceit persisted because for the most part they lived in heaven—they formed a visible ring around the world—and they carried out unguessable missions on the part of unseen powers for the betterment of humans. “And they’ve no spirits, so what do you and this Harx boy actually see with your sight ?”

He sighed the sigh guys sigh when their thoughts are too much for wee females. Sport, sex, steam or steel, it never failed to kindle the devil in Sweetness.

“It’s theoretical.”

“Go on.”

“How much vinculum theory have you got?”

“The universe is a big brown package all tied up with string.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“I know that . That’s the bollocks you get off the School of the Air. All matter, energy, space and time are different harmonics in eleven dimensional strings, most of which are rolled up smaller than Planck space so all we get are the four we live in rather than lots we wouldn’t know what to do with.” She had always found visualising seven extra dimensions, each containing the ones beneath it, mind-wringing. Then one of her wiser Stabile Tutors, who held seminars in reality, had let her into the secret that everyone else did as well. Good thing. The order of the universe should be mind-wringing. She added, “I’m named after it.”

“What?”

“Octave. Harmonics. String music, all that.”

“What do you know about filament computing?”

Sweetness let go Serpio’s jacket and hunted for other hookholds underneath the bag rack. She made sure he appreciated that she was leaning back, away from him.

“Suppose you just give me the lecture, then?”

After a few miffed moments he said, “All the ROTECH machines use vinculum processing architecture.”

“Spell it,” Sweetness challenged. He did, and continued, “Calculations get done not in two states, like the old quantum machines we got on the trains, but in eleven uncollapsed states. You know…”

“Two impossible things at the same time. Or in this case, eleven.”

“Yeah. But what it really is, deep down, is using the structure of the universe as a computer. So in a sense…”

“The whole universe is a computer.” Or God , she thought of adding, but she was unsure of the small print of Serpio’s theology. If it involved blind hejiras into the Big Red, the devil in the details could be sharp.

“No.”

“Okay.”

“The whole universe has the potential to be in any number of uncollapsed states.”

“This is the ‘Many-worlds’ theory, isn’t it?”

“It is, but this is how it actually works day to day. Most of the time the calculations are very small and neat and they stay down there in the string-level of the universe.”

“Like those little knots in thread you sometimes get if you’re sewing, that don’t stop the needle going through the cloth.”

“Sort of, I suppose. But sometimes if you have to make a lot of calculations, like something really complicated like making a model of an ocean, or an ecosystem, you get what they call coherence. That’s when a whole lot of string potentials are entangled together and all collapse into the same state. Then you can get whole chunks of the big universe switching from one world to another. Like magic.”