“Catherine of Tharsis was not one of these.”
Startled from her desert reveries, Sweetness glanced round in time to see doctor, chair, poop-rail, bogie, track, desert, world suddenly turn translucent. She felt the deck beneath her boot soles soften, the reality beneath her feet give like mud. She grabbed for the wheeclass="underline" her fingers sank into it like a wrung sponge.
“H…”
The cry for help got no further than the initial aspirate when all flicked back to colour and solidity.
“What?”
“I hadn’t thought that would happen quite so soon,” the traveller said. “But now it has, I should warn you that it will, with increasing frequency and duration, until eventually it won’t come back at all. The further I get from the source, the less the probability of my existence becomes until it is so close to zero that all this disappears and baseline reality reasserts itself. Quite solidly and probably painfully. Which all just helps to illustrate the point I am trying to make in my little homily.”
“This isn’t real?” Sweetness asked, with a glance at the bobbing kites and the singing rail.
“About eighty—twenty real,” the traveller said. “With occasional quantum fluctuations, and, of course, dropping rapidly with every kilometre. Anyway, St. Catherine.”
“You’ve met her?”
“You meet most people when you travel across time. Anyway, so’ve you.”
“But I didn’t know.”
“That doesn’t matter. It was still her. Anyway…”
The old man told his story. In the very-long-ago, on the edge of deep time, there was a woman who worked with thinking machines. She was neither talented nor pretty nor possessed of any great character or colour. She was a blue-collar worker on the planet-making production line. If you had met her, you would not have liked her. Her colleagues at work could not stand her. She was religious, of that type that doesn’t care about other people’s beliefs or disbeliefs. Her job was to turn up at the plant, sit down in a reclining leather chair in a row of hundreds, put wires into her brain and send her mind out across space to ROTECH’s remote manforming machines in orbit and down on the planet surface and work there making bacteria or steering watery comets on to collision courses or chewing up rock for soil for eight hours, then come back, pull the wires out of her head and go home on the rapid transit to her apartment. It was drudgery, poorly paid, repetitive and tiring work, but in those days, most work was like that.
Sweetness found she could listen to the old man’s voice and trim the sails and handle the brakes and scan the horizon for any oncoming traffic—though she doubted it in this semi-raw reality—and it did not distract from her bliss. If anything, she found it comforting. When I am as old as Grandmother Taal, I shall remember this in every detail, she thought, and then thought about Grandmother Taal and wondered what she was doing and that made her wonder about her father and poor Child’a’grace and even her stupid brothers and what they were doing, were they doing anything, did they in fact miss her at all, had they written her off to fate and steamed off to new contracts and destinations and on such tracks her concentration popped so she had to ask the man to backtrack his story.
“Nn?”
“Haan. Kathy Haan. And she believed in the mortification of the flesh.”
Body and spirit; two entities. That was what her experience of the brain-tap teleoperator technology taught her. A flick of a switch could divorce the two, and like any divorce, one was fair and the other was completely to blame in every way. Flesh had to be fed, wiped and catheterised during her on-shifts. Flesh snored and drooled. Spirit flew with equal ease and grace between a multitude of heavenly and terrestrial bodies. And her work there was God’s work. The making of worlds, the bringing of life out of sterility, the playing with big budget toys, the casting of a veil of faint green across the hard, dry red. And then the overcrowded commuter train and the walk from the station to the apartment tower and all the people politely not staring at the scrawny, chicken-bone girl with the pudding-bowl hair and the nodding head who walked everywhere barefoot. In her apartment which was painted grey and had only one chair and one table and a mattress on the floor and one rail for the two grey shift dresses she wore she would make herself a meal of black beans and rice and in the evening perform fierce asceticism on the polished wooden floor.
“Hold on there; how do you know the inside of her apartment?” Sweetness asked.
“Just checking,” the old man said, and smiled and, like a story-book familiar, his body faded behind the smile as the probability of his existence dropped to another quantum level and reality became glass through which she could see a subtly different landscape of dunes and mountains and tracks. And on down the track a ways, the white curving plume of a head of steam, aimed herward. Horns sang an anonymous warning: Out of my whatever whoever wherever you are. Sweetness reached for the brake. Her fingers passed through it like a memory.
“Then again,” the doctor’s voice said, echoey and God-like, “I may have made it up about the beans and rice.” He rematerialised behind his smile. “Did I miss something?”
Anyway. This Kathy Haan, barefoot and bean-eating, flesh-despising, spirit-dwelling. Grunt terraformer. As her soul bounced around orbit to ground, ground to orbit, orbit to moon, moon to cometary mass-driver, mass-driver to cable-spinner on the Grand Valley Worldroof, she became aware that there were others at work in the service of ROTECH. Shadowy others, deliberately kept at a distance by the Five Hundred Founders because of the astonishing powers they controlled. Human minds could do the spade-work, but the grand design called for the reality-shaping powers of superstring, vinculum-theory artificial intelligences.
“So, dear girl, think about it,” the doctor said, reclining expansively in his buttoned chair and unfolding a fan. “These are machines that speak the fundamental language of reality. They talk quantum talk. What they say, goes. Literally, absolutely. What they say is so important, reality has to go along with it. Now, you’re a rice’n’beans hate-the-meat don’t-look-at-myself-in-the-shower total mortification day-jobber. How are you going to feel about minds in beige plastic cases, that, when they speak, reality goes along with them, because their processing language is built from a syntax of superstrings? This is not sucking fingers. This is not even twisting the titties. This is tying you to the bed and banging it off your ovaries. This is not being able to pee for a week.”
If only, Sweetness thought, the aftershocks of the last reality shift gently subsiding. She scanned the forward horizon again—uselessly, she knew—and tried to calculate how fast and far she would have to dive to get out of the path of five thousand tons of ore-train materialising dead ahead of her. The old boy would have to look after himself, she decided. She would not even have time to yell a warning, and he was too deep in his coils of story to notice anything she might say anyway.
Against the glare of the great wonder, the greater was lost. People were making a world, and as a side-effect creating, almost casually, the species that would inherit it. The angels had been engineered as another set of thinking tools, more powerful than the machines that split soul from meat and spun it out across the solar system to planet four in that they could shuffle endless probable universes in their factorially-large inner states and pick the one closest to ROTECH’s grand scheme, but nonetheless, bits of kit. Devices. Machines. Good and faithful servants. They had not been expected to become sentient. It was not in ROTECH’s plans that they draw up their own Grand Scheme for the world they were terraforming by designer miracle.