Ian McDonald - Ares Express

It had been a hard march, filing up the narrow flanges of one roof-spar, swinging perilously in webbing harness across the huge annular bolt plates where spars joined the huge glass hexagons, then another long shuffle down the next rib to the next pier. One hundred metres out along the first spar Sweetness had discovered the first, and unspoken, rule of a Vertical Boy: Don’t let go of what you’ve got until you have a firm grip on something else. The second rule she knew already. Don’t look down. Shuffle. Swing. Shuffle. Scramble. She watched the nonchalant ease with which the Vertical Boys swung over terrifying gaps, hung one-handed over appalling chasms. It’s easy for them, Sweetness thought. They have no eggs, just lots of cheap and messy seed they can fire where and when they like, all over the place. Be careless with it. Nature is profligate with guys’ life-stuff. Death means nothing to boys that age. Gangs, guns and glory. They imagine themselves gazing down on their own heroic memorials, all their friends and the ones who scorned them and secretly fancied them gathering round and being amazed or sorry or distraught or manly-but-gutted. They hear staunch eulogies, they stand by weeping mothers and girls who could have been girlfriends, in a guy’s way, right? and look at their broken bodies and feel really really good. They can’t understand that death is death, end, terminated, finito : game over. No nothing.

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.