Ian McDonald - Ares Express

“Like knots so big they pull the shape of the cloth into something else.”

“Like sewing a big sheet of fabric into a jacket or a shirt or a wedding waistcoat. That orph…”

The precise perimeter of the circular crazy-zone was sharp in Sweetness’s memory. Like stepping from one world into another, she had thought. Right and wrong. It was another way of being this world. And what of that other place Uncle Neon took her? Was she taken to other-world, or was other-world erected around her, and the set struck when she left?

“Its little string-machines all agreed to go mad and decided that reality was something else.”

“They switched on an alternative reality.”

A new image now, of the cloud-sized heaven machine decreeing its doom on the defective earth-builder and restoring the world to normality. But who decreed what was normal? Who minted the consensus? Normal ordained that girls don’t drive trains. Consensus said, the only daughters of illustrious Engineer Domieties marry Stuards with stainless steel kitchens and good prospects.

“We’ve got a consensus reality now, so any breaches have to get cleared up right quick, but in the earliest days of the manforming they used the technique all the time to speed things up. They’d run a model of an alternative world where, say the atmosphere was working better, or there were bacteria, or soil, or even plants, and when the model got complex enough, the model would become reality. Otherwise it would’ve taken thousand of years and we’d be up to our asses in ice, if we could even breathe at all.”

Sweetness’s mind was wringing with that same painful twist she recalled from Pastor Jhingh and his eleven-dimensional visualisations. If the machines could think like that, could see all those dimensions unfolding out of each other, then maybe it was right to call them angels.

“So, what is it you actually see ?”

“Most people don’t know this, but humans can see on the quantum level no problem at all. We could do it out here. It’s good and clear at night. I’d drive about twenty kays away and light a match, and you could see it. That would be like one single photon reaching your eye, and one photon is seeing quantum.”

Please don’t feel you have to demonstrate , Sweetness thought.

“You know a lot about this.”

“It’s good to study the things that make us different.”

“So,” Sweetness said. “You see things not on the quantum level, but on the vinculum scale?”

“That’s the way I was born. That’s why I can see what you people call the angels, because I can see them thinking. All those tiny tiny little vinculum calculations. I can see their minds glowing.”

“And this Harx boy.”

“To be able to see on the vinculum level involves vinculum processes. He can see me, seeing them. But he can see better. He can see anywhere in the universe, because it’s all entangled.”

“Okay,” Sweetness said carefully. “I can get this. I think. But tell me, how come you see Little Pretty One? I’m telling you, she is not a machine. She is my sister, and she lives in mirrors, and she gives me good advice, most of the time, when she can be bothered talking.”

“And she’s sitting right behind you looking over your shoulder and smiling at me.”

“You know something,” Sweetness said, truly savouring the sudden rush of emotion. “I really hate it when you talk about her like that.”

“Sorry.”

“She talks to me. All you do is see her.”

Nothing was said for several kilometres of rocky red desert.

“She’s not a machine,” Sweetness reminded Serpio.

“I know.”

A minute or so further on, Sweetness pressed her sharp little chin on Serpio’s shoulder and said into his ear, “So how does she fit into all your big theory, then?”

“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “That’s why I want to ask Harx.”

“So that’s where we’re going.”

“Yeah.”

“To this guru preacher boy.”

“Devastation Harx, yes.”

“Ah,” said Sweetness on the back of a stolen bike with at least a hundred and fifty kilometres of desert around her in any direction. “Ah. Yes. I get it now. So I’ve walked out on my family and my home and my impending marriage and come out here with just the stuff on my back into the ass-end of nowhere and the only one you’re really bothered about is something I can’t even see that’s hanging off my ribcage. Can I ask you one question?”

“Whatever.”

“Did you ever really fancy me at all?”

Serpio stopped the bike. Dead square stopped. Middle of nowhere.

Oh Mother’a’grace , Sweetness thought. I’ve gone and done it, haven’t I? Why why why why do I have to go that one question too deep?

Serpio got off the bike. Shaking life into saddle-sore limbs, he walked away. Clinging to the superstructure, Sweetness watched him go.

“Serpio!”

No answer.

“Where are you going?”

No answer.

“What’re you doing?”

Back turned to her, he looked out upon a vista of sweeping dunes.

“I’m sorry!”

Dunes are dunes are dunes. What are you looking at, what are you seeing? Nothing, I bet, except not me .

“I said, I’m sorry!”

Unmoved, like the dark blue sky.

“I said!” Top of her lungs. “I’m sorry!”

She yelled so loud the desert heard her. Sand shifted on the sloping face of a big dune, ringed by minions. Shift triggered slide, triggered chain slippages that cascaded up into micro-avalanches into dust rivulets into flowing deltas into sheet-floods of sand. The dune face was shedding away before the power of her voice, disintegrating into scabs and floes. The dune was moving. It was stirring in its bed and rising up.

It had heard her. It was coming to get her, loud-mouthed little tyke who dared disturb the monumental solitude of the deep desert. It would fill her mouth and voice box and lungs with silencing sand.

No. Impossible. Dunes don’t walk. They crawl, over whole seasons. If a dune moves, it is because a buried something beneath it is moving. The slipping curtains of sand flashed tantalises of bright metal, curved plastic, knobbled ridges. The something was very big. It was not buried in the dune. It was the dune. It had lain here and gone to sleep and woken up caked in sand. Something like a lost city was rising out of the Big Red. It lifted clear of the other, lesser dunes. It left a circular crater a good ore train in diameter. Higher it rose. The flying city was the shape of a great, flat, upturned saucer, crazy with racing sand. Through veils of dust raining off its rim like monsoon from an umbrella, Sweetness glimpsed complex forms beneath the dome, like the folds and ruches of fungi that hide under the sobriety of their caps. She shaded her eyes with her hand as the thing reached the zenith and eclipsed the sun.

“Oh my God!” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th exclaimed as the flying thing passed over her head. It moved to the south, hovered over a flat expanse of rocky grit, settled slowly. The sun was full on it, and it was a magnificent creature, carapaced like a beetle with iridescent greens and electric blues, underneath busy with bulbous, insect-eyelike excrescences, manipulator arms and whirring rotors. Claw feet unfolded, tested the terrain, found it faithful. The flying object settled on its legs. The fans were stilled. An intimidating set of polished black mandibles that could have devoured houses by the district opened; an alabaster pont reached out and touched ground.

Sweetness stood mumchance.

Serpio was already running for the pont. He turned, extended a hand to Sweetness.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”