“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.
“Come on, come on.”
She swept the objective across the featureless terrain, left, right, in, out.
There.
“Oh yes!” She punched the air.
Far off across the redscape, foot wreathed in carbon dioxide mists, the sole vertical in all this monstrous horizontality, was the lone steel pole of a signal light.
Skerry and Mishcondereya stared.
“Did you see what he just did?” Skerry asked.
“I can show you the replay on video if you want,” Mishcondereya said. “I think that kind of proves we lost that one.”
“What happens next?”
“I’ll tell you what happens next,” Mishcondereya said, directing Skerry’s attention to Harx’s predatory, hovering cathedral as it slowly turned on its central axis toward them. She pulled back on the altitude stick, simultaneously floored the drive stirrups. The air yacht bucked like a rodeo llama, shot straight up at forty-five degrees at an acceleration that pressed Skerry deep into her seat upholstery. Mishcondereya commed up Bladnoch, who had taken aboard the rest of United Artists and was waiting with them ten kays up valley in UA2.
“UA2, UA2, execute Plan Curtain Down, repeat, Plan Curtain Down. Harx has control of reality-shaping weapons. Get the hell as far away as fast as you can.” Mishcondereya banked fiercely, levelled off just under Worldroof, opened the fans as far as they would go. “Tell you something. I can’t wait to read the reviews in the morning.”
As she trudged across the frosty dead regolith in her five layers of underwear and radiation-proof suit, Sweetness amused herself by trying to fit all this into being a story. That she still was, was patently evident. You didn’t volunteer to go out the emergency anti-radiation lock wrapped up in borrowed socks, T-shirts and a double layer of baking foil if the laws of narrative weren’t still playing a prominent role in your life. Obviously, she was beyond the False Denouement-Microanticlimax, but was it the Third Act Last-Minute Reversal of Fortunes, or was this ultimate Point of No Return, where things get as bad as they possibly can, and then everything rolls over into the Final Scene?