Ian McDonald - Ares Express

While they were just thoughts, Sweetness had known her last two words were unforgivable. Two fingers poked clean and hard in the cataract. But she said them anyway, and whatever had begun at Great Oxus, they ended. From here on she was on her own. For a moment she thought Serpio might hit her. Devastation Harx, too, read the balled aggression in shoulders and neck and fists.

“I think it’d be better if you left us for a while,” he said. “We’ll meet up with you when Ms. Engineer is in sweeter humour.”

Face twisting as it does when you are hurt badly enough to cry but damned if you will in public, Serpio turned and walked with over-deliberate casualness down the curving corridor. He stopped once, to call back.

“So you thought about sleeping with me, then?”

“Like I said, it’s all one big chapter of bad mistakes.” They just kept coming out of her mouth, badder and badder and badder.

“Well, I didn’t. And I’ll tell you this, I wouldn’t if you were the last woman in the world.”

“You would say that!” Sweetness sent her final dart cannoning round the corridor walls after him. She did not see if it struck. Her and Harx now. That was always the way he intended to play it, she realised. Play it, and me. She said, feistily, “So, how do you achieve this prodigy?”

“With the help of your invisible friend,” Devastation Harx said. “Who, as you’ve probably guessed, is considerably more powerful than you thought, and definitely not your Siamese twin sister. I think it’s time you got to see what she’s really like. This way.”

A section of ash pivoted under his palm. Sweetness stepped through the wall after Devastation Harx, and into her selves. Dozens of Sweetnesses. A multiplicity of Sweetnesses. A plethora, a myriad, a host, a horde, an infinite regress of Sweetnesses.

“Woo,” she said, immersed in mirrors.

“I did say there was a great spirituality in reflections,” fifty Devastation Harxes said at once.

For the first few minutes Sweetness took the rare opportunity to study herself from every aspect. She frowned at her eyebrows. She tugged critically at her hair. She rolled her shoulders to try to make better of her boobs. She tightened, relaxed, tightened, relaxed her ass-cheeks and seemed pleased at the result. She looked down at her foreshortened self in the floor mirrors and grinned. She waved to her selves. She made faces. She struck attitudes. She led a dozen Sweetnesses in a step-perfect dance. Then she remembered she was supposed to be feeling angry about Serpio the Bastard, and asked, “Where’s the way out?”

“It’s around somewhere,” Devastation Harx’s voice said behind her. She spun. All she caught of him were twenty left sleeves, hands and sticks vanishing kaleidoscopically into the corners where mirrors met.

“Hey!”

“I seem to be over here.” Far off among the reflections of Sweetnesses and the reflections of mirrors, a Devastation Harx homunculus waved.

“You wait for me, right?” Sweetness ran toward the distant image. The mirrors were nested chamber within chamber. Sweetness pounded between the pivoting mirrors. Thousands of other selves fled on every side. Panels opened and closed, slid apart, slid to behind her, but always Devastation Harx was a tiny, beckoning figure in the mirror within the next mirror within the next. She pursued, he fled without moving. A voice called her name. Her voice. She stopped dead. The walls rearranged themselves around her.

“Who?” she asked. One of her reflections did not move its lips. Sweetness went up to it. It remained motionless among the shifting selves.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s mirrors, isn’t it?”

Sweetness frowned, studied the apparition.

“What happened to the rules? Rules are, you’re supposed to wear…”

“What were you wearing yesterday, fashion victim? Sweetness, listen, this is not…”

“Ms. Engineer…”

The unfamiliar distracted her. Devastation Harx suddenly stood at her elbow. He turned on his side, became one dimensional, vanished into a line of silvering as a mirror panel pivoted away from her. Sweetness saw reflections of the dark, elegant man flick mirror to mirror to mirror into the infinite regress of the maze. She turned back to her familiar.

“Ell Pee.”

All the Sweetness Asiim Engineers moved their lips in perfect synch.

“Don’t mess me around.”

I’m not , said a voice behind her. Sweetness whirled.

“Where are you?”

She was alone with her seeming selves. She moved slowly. Her images moved with her. Mirror panels swung, opening brief gateways into deeper illusion.

Raise your left arm , Little Pretty One whispered. A hundred Sweetnesses said aye. One did not. As Sweetness moved toward her twin, the panel slowly turned Little Pretty One away from her.

“No!” she shouted. It was then that she discovered that the mirrors reflected sound as well as light. Her yell focused back on her from a hundred reflecting surfaces, amplified and distorted and phase shifted so that waves of roar broke over her, sent her cowering, like the rare times when the ionospheric interceptors stooped low to practise terrain-kissing manoeuvres over the empty quarters of the pole.

As Little Pretty One turned away from her, Devastation Harx turned toward her.

“Okay. I’m not finding this funny. So, this is what happens. You stop messing around with Little Pretty One, then you get me out of here.”

“Hm,” Devastation Harx mused. “Part two, absolutely. Soon as I possibly can; frankly, my dear, you’re a trying guest. No manners, at all. Part one, well, I’m afraid not. I need your alleged twin.”

Sweetness , came softly bouncing from several directions at once, like an experiment in quantum optics. This time Sweetness was not distracted. She punched out, straight left, hard, right between the eyes. Devastation Harx’s head exploded. Sweetness cried out. The mirror disintegrated into a thousand shards of herself. They fell in a tinkling crash. Blood counted down Sweetness’s bunched knuckles and dropped to the floor. She sucked her fluids, tasted brass and sweetness.

“And no respect for the property, either,” Devastation Harx chided, from deep within the mirror maze.

“Where are you?” Sweetness yelled.

Here , said a still small voice in the head. Sweetness closed her eyes, turned around until the voice seemed to speak squarely to her.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Help me,” Little Pretty One said. “He’s trying to draw me out of you, lose me among the mirrors.”

“What? Who? Harx? Why?”

“I guess you could say, I’m not exactly who you think.”

“He said…”

“Look, are we going to argue this, or are you going to try to find me?”

“I can’t even find myself, never mind you.”

Sweetness opened her eyes. She confronted herself, multiplied. A thousand Sweetnesses waltzed and turned in the maze of mirrors. She gave a hiss of exasperation, fingers knotted in her hair.

“Mother’a’mercy!”

She noticed her shirt cuffs. A shrug; the desert-dusty, sweat-ringed shirt was slipped off. Two sharp tugs tore off the sleeves. One she wrapped around her bleeding knuckles. Nine hundred and ninety-nine bare-armed bloody Sweetnesses stared at each other. At the very left corner of the very rear rank, one stood with buttoned cuffs, finger-perfect.

“I see ya!” Bare arms raised, Sweetness bulled her way through mobs of illusions. She seized the edges of mirrors and wrestled döppelgangers aside. She crashed headlong through phalanxes of images. Always, she kept the Sweetness in yesterday’s clothes square before her. Mirror by mirror, it receded, but Sweetness was faster and surer.