Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Devastation Harx coughed dryly. In the next universe over, Harx II heard the signal of stretching patience and poked his head around the edge of the mirror.

“Oh. There you are. Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Have you been waiting long?”

Harx I stepped into full shot to face Harx II. They were, of course, physically identical, being mere quantum fluctuations of each other: middling height, trim, the grey hair that hue that is known as Distinguished Silver; the refined, slightly feminine features; lips slightly cruel. In manner of dress and disposition they differed radically. Harx I, as ever, was immaculate, expensive, restrained and carried his black swagger-stick with a casual ease that hinted at casual power casually wielded. Harx II seemed slumped, as if drawn in by an inner hollowness, skin waxy and blotched; weary to the very bones. He wore a high-collared uniform with badly pressed pants with a red stripe down the side. The whole looked as if slept in regularly. Harx I often thought of telling his alternate that he looked more like a bell-hop in a Belladonna bidouche than a reality warrior.

“The diversionary tactic was completely successful. Already the lunar assembly lines are dropping the first waves of military units across the equatorial zones. We should have secured local government, constabulary, communication and transport systems within seventy-two hours. We will maintain public order in the transition period.”

“That’s good, that’s good, that’s good.” Harx II’s voice was distracted, wandering. Harx I often suspected that he was taking orders from a clerk in the pay division. “What about the subterranean defence units?”

“They’re only accessible through privileged Synodical codes. Once we secure the compliance of the Anarchs, they’ll cease to pose a threat.”

“And until then, half the planet’s got a ring-side seat on robot wars.” Harx II paused, hacked up a phlegm ball and decorously ejected it. “There’s not going to be much left of your pretty little terraformed world by the time they end. Your people are going to have to rebuild it all, ground up.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is the notion.”

Harx I did thoroughly despise his quantum counterpart. Multiversal war was no excuse for bad dressing.

On that night of heat lightning, Harx had walked into a maze of quantum mirrors and discovered that his world, its peoples, its history, its Five Hundred Founders were all images, distant reflections of a greater, more terrible reality. In the long manforming, ROTECH’s angels had shuffled many realities. In one and one only was there any probability of a habitable world they could share with the humans, a redoubt of diversity and toleration. In all others, there was war. War between the meat and metal, without let or quarter. Total war. War fought across the million realities opened up by the computing power of vinculum theory processors. A war that, in all those other realities, the machines were losing. Across countless universes, the AIs had been exterminated, in many others, driven back, in the rest fighting for their survival as a sentient species. In one and one only they survived, hidden in a fold of improbability from the multiversal Questors of the Human League. This little greened world with its pretty moonring was their final stand. Their red Masada. And, on a hot summer night, an art student had opened a door into the multiverse, called out and received not a welcoming hello to a greater fellowship of all humanity, but the sound of bugles.

“Fight? For you? In a war? What for?” he had asked his scruffy emanation on their third meeting, a night with the insane tlantoon howling about the pinnacles and stacks of Lyx canyon.

“Bucketloads of money,” Harx II hinted.

“I am an artist,” young Harx had said, bristling at the enormity of the insult. “And anyway, physical transfer between universes violates conservation of mass and energy.”

“Information doesn’t,” Harx II said. “We’ve got ideas.”

Two weeks later he was back.

“I’ll take the bucketloads of money,” Harx I said. “Give me your ideas.”

Show time. The external examiners had decorously hitched their gowns of office to step over the threshold into the quantumoculum. Half an hour later they emerged. Two days after that, they delivered their judgement. This was not art. This was a risible fairground side-show, reeking of the fairground midway and the barker’s shout. A third-class degree. The lowest possible award. In all but name, a failure, for in these days of fiscally sound education and league tables of performance, a failed student meant a slashed budget and a faculty reprimand.

“Okay,” Harx II had said. “You want to make money, stuff art. Found a religion. Here’s one we prepared earlier…”

That day Harx I took the name and nature of devastation .

Back in the contemporary corner of the mirror maze, Harx II chewed at his lower lip in that way Harx I loathed so copiously.

“One wee thing, those two artists. They did a lot of a damage. A lot of damage. We can’t afford any more setbacks like that.”

Ironic, that the angels should have recruited his own brother and that brother’s lover as assassins. That they had been sent to destroy him, Harx I had no doubt. Had it been a desert revelation, the angels boiling out of the heat haze to take them up and show them the name and natures of the multiverse, then tell them exactly who they wanted killed, and how to do it? Bloody A-students. Bones in the dust. He’d seen to that. Never underestimate the longevity of professional jealousy.

“Everything is under control.”

Patently untrue, but Harx I had few qualms now about lying to his counterpart. Let the enemy love-bomb him, let them send who or whatever. He had control of the orbital weaponry, his metal soldiers were burning through the upper atmosphere like autumn meteors and, behind this gaudy diversion, he had accomplished his strategic goal: he had stripped the holy codes for the superstring processors out of the St. Catherine entity. Devastation Harx commanded the reality shapers themselves. Nothing could stop him now.

The sound of muffled shouting from the corridor outside gave immediate lie to Harx I’s claim. He whirled. Unregarded, Harx II vanished back into his reality. Last to fade was a puckered frown. His parting words echoed in the mirror maze.

“Just make sure it is.”

More shouting, louder now, and sounds of strife. Voices: Dandeever, calling orders. They were quick, his enemies, but he was ready for them. Mirrors pivoted away from Harx as he hastened from the mirror maze to take command against the attack. Parallel Harxes swung away from him and vanished into the multiverse. One misreflection caught him in midflight. He checked himself, took a cautious step back, seized the edge of the mirror to hold the image. Caught in the silvered glass was a girl, green eyes, brown skin, black curly hair in need of a wash. She wore tattered pants, a sleeveless shirt, an orange track vest. A new addition was the complex pack on her back, and the peculiar gun in her fist.

“You,” Devastation Harx breathed. “Again.”

It was not until Skerry was standing in the open hatch of the United Artists speed dirigible, bungee cords around her ankles, that the thought struck her. What exactly did the soul of St. Catherine of Tharsis look like?

Two minutes to curtain up on The End of the World Show. Somewhere out in the thickening fog, Bladnoch lurked in UA2, the big heavy lifter, dream projector warmed up and ready to transmogrify all this mistiness into saints. In the tower-top penthouse that United Artists had requisitioned as command centre for a truly profane fee, Weill received confirmation of funding from Wisdom and immediately generated a credit transfer to Grand Valley Regional Weather’s account. It had been touch and go with the weather workers. Orbital climate systems had brusquely brushed his request for a hundred percent peasouper off to planetside weather control, but Weill could not rid himself of the feeling that they wanted rid of him quickly, that there were things going on up there not for the eyes of the earthbound. Grand Valley Regional Weather had whined about compensation payments to tower-toppers who paid high premiums for sunny skies and unbroken vistas from their panoramic windows and named a figure. Weill laughed. Grand Valley Regional Weather did not.