Ian McDonald - Ares Express

Sweetness shook out the roll of quantum-plastic mirror and gunge-tacked it to the back of the cubby door.

“You lied to me,” was the first thing Sweetness Asiim Engineer said to her double, dressed, as ever, in what she had been wearing the day before, which was identical to today’s apart from the parafoil harness, which Sweetness had forgotten to remove in the rush of it all.

Little Pretty One spread her hands apologetically.

“Yes, but in a very real sense, no.”

“You pretended to be my twin sister; in fact, you’re Catherine of Tharsis, the woman who made the world, who, for some reason, decided one day to walk out on heaven and live in a mirror with me. Where’s the no in this?”

“Guilty on that count. You’d know about deciding one day to walk out.”

“It’s not the same at all.”

“Isn’t it? You think it’s a thrill-a-nanosecond, living as an AI? Let me tell you, these guys get off on abstract mathematics. The intellectual glory and wonder of infinite prime dimensions. After a millennium or two, a girl gets to thinking, maybe this mortification of the flesh isn’t what it’s cracked up to be after all. Maybe you get an itch to see what the meat’s up to these days. I never was a scientist, you know. I was a construction worker. Strictly blue collar, that was Kathy Haan.”

“Enough enough, all right? So, you thought you’d take a couple of decades’ vacation in the flesh, but don’t call me sis, you are not my sister.”

Little Pretty One looked at her feet, which, because of the size of the cramped cabin, had been rolled up, but were presumably visible in whatever kind of state she inhabited.

“No, you’re right, I shouldn’t call you sis. It’s a lot closer than that.”

“Don’t give me this.”

“In an absolutely real sense, I am you, you are me. You are Kathy Haan, reborn, the best of her, the good in her, the bits that got lost in the madness and the ‘Spirituality.’ They were all stored in the matrix whenever I went eternal. They didn’t go away. They wanted to come back. They wanted to live. So, we made a body for them to live in. Me, here in the mirror, that’s the rest of you, the unseen part. The divine twin. We are sisters, we are joined, a lot closer than you could ever imagine.”

“I’m a ghost,” Sweetness said wanly. She sat down on her bunk. “You’re real, and I’m the ghost in the mirror. My whole life has been lies. Everything I’ve lived, it hasn’t been for me at all. It’s been for you.”

“No,” Little Pretty One said with the gentleness of spring rains. “You couldn’t be more wrong. You are you. You are living your life, once, for you. I watch, I feel, but I can never get inside your head. I can never share your sense of youness. I can never know your experience of what it is to be a person.”

“This is heavy shit,” Sweetness said after a time, shaking her head.

“Yes, and, in a very real sense, no. You just do what you’re doing. So tell me, how has your life been?”

Images of a life thus far. Golden dawn over the high north desert, seen from her forward lookout, the sun rising huge out of the shimmer at the edge of the world so that she seemed to be driving into its very heart. The Great Snow, blowing up from Borealis, when Catherine of Tharsis plunged headlong into a huge drift and got stuck and they all sat around in the tea room, drank mint tea, played card games and told stories while the Deep-Fusions tweaked the tokamak thermal output to melt them all free. The first explosion of wonder at Belladonna’s Undercroft decked out for the Five Hundred Founders Day celebrations; firmly gripping Child’a’grace’s hand as she peered over the edge of the railing down into the kilometre-deep vertical street lined with more shops than anywhere else in the known universe. The first time she got drunk at a corroboree and tried to pull Blasniq Bassareeni and Sle and Rother’am had to drag her off before she disgraced the family name. The first time she toddled away from Catherine of Tharsis and looked back and saw her world whole for the first time, a steaming dragon in which she lived. The dealings, the pickups, the drop-offs, the shuntings and couplings, the long slow hauls, the brilliant fast express runs, the hypnotic boredom of the endless straight track up over the north pole, the cleaning and the pride in the brass work and the time the School of the Air teacher had given her the gold star for her essay on the weather. The wonders of desert storms and high plains lightnings; the rains sweeping in black curtains across the hills of Deuteronomy. The huge nights when you felt you could pull the moonring from the sky and take it for a bracelet, when a hundred stars all started moving at once and you knew it was a Praesidium Sailship, bigger than the runty moon, setting out on its journey to the other worlds and peoples of System. The knowledge that the morning would always bring a new place and time. And more, and more. Hers. All hers. Uniquely, trivially, gloriously, personally, hers.

“Life’s been good,” she said thoughtfully, then sat up straight, the old light in her eyes. “No,” she said, “no; I’ve been lost, starved, shot at, dropped from a great height, betrayed, used, confused, fallen in love twice, crossed deserts, flown through the air, battled duststorms, watched star wars, fought terrible foes, faced down people with the powers of gods, run for my life, been picked up, thrown away, travelled into other universes, fought wars, been shat upon from a very great height, been a story, been fired halfway across the multiverse, it’s nowhere near over yet and I haven’t a notion how it’s all going to end but I have to say this, it’s been great. I’ve had a ball. Your wild things have been having the time of their lives. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Little Pretty One smiled a pickled smile.

“You wish you were me, don’t you?” Sweetness said.

“You have no idea how much I wish that.”

“Do me a favour then, for this life I’ve lived for you.”

“Name it.”

“Get us out of here.”

“Ah,” said Our Lady of Tharsis.

“Say again?”

“I was rather hoping you had some ideas on that. You see, I kind of need to get back. You should see what they’re doing to my world.”

“I thought you were supposed to be divine.”

“I am. But just because I’m a god, that doesn’t mean I’m omnipotent. I can control the reality-shapers, but only if they’re there. All there is in that sky are a couple of tatty little moons.”

“So we’re stuck. And I’ve wasted God knows how much valuable air talking to you.”

“I wouldn’t say wasted. And I didn’t say stuck.”

“You know, I’m not surprised I’m the best of you,” Sweetness said.

The figure in the mirror sighed.

“Now, if you could get me back to our reality again, then I might be able to do something. I’d certainly pull the plug on Mr. Harx’s operation, shut down that invasion and, somewhere in between all that, I could probably find time to send you a bit of help.”

“Why don’t you just tell me how?”

“You’re the heroine, you’re supposed to work it out for yourself. All the clues are there.”

“How about a starter?”

Little Pretty One pondered this gracefully for a moment, finger to lips.

“Okay. What’s outside?”

“Bit of rail, lot of dead grass, couple of dead birds, lot of red dirt red rock red sky red hills red clouds…”

Sweetness stopped, mid-litany, kicked in the diaphragm by fierce understanding. She flung open the cubby door, slamming Little Pretty One against the wall, burned precious oxygen hurtling along the corridors and up the steel staircases to the starboard track-observation oriole. The howling cold of the great red desert was starting to penetrate the turret, making her fingers thick and stupid as she fumbled with the opticon.