Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I’m already on it,” Bai said.

  “You’re the daughter of Wen, Egil and Ye, aren’t you? We met at the centenary celebrations last year. You’d just turned seventeen, as I recall.”

  “I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.”

  “Fixing some machine that’s thrown a glitch is one thing. Confronting a stranger who tried to sneak past traffic control is quite another. Your best option is to stay aloft, do a wide area grid search. If you don’t find anything, you can help us on the ground when we get there.”

  “I’m already on the ground,” Bai said.

  She remembered that meeting vividly. Tall and slender, dressed in a sheath the exact indigo tint of Uranus’s South Pole, Lindy had just returned from the Saturn system, where she’d spent two years studying biome construction. She hadn’t been much older than Bai—twenty, twenty-one—but she’d seemed impossibly elegant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Everything Bai yearned to be. She’d barely glanced at Bai while their parents exchanged a few pleasantries, and now here she was, muscling in, giving Bai instructions and telling her it was for her own damn good.

  “If you’re worried about salvage, you can rest easy,” Lindy said. “It’s obvious that you have first claim on the lifepod.”

  “I’m worried that its passenger could be hurt, or worse. And right now I’m the only person who can help them,” Bai said, and cut the channel, locked her helmet and cracked the hopper’s bubble canopy, and swung out and down.

  The lifepod was empty all right, and when Bai asked her suit to handshake with its mind, hoping to find out where it had come from and who its passenger was, she discovered that it was as dead as a stone. Its systems weren’t powered down, the suit reported. They had been wiped. Purged. Nothing was left but a flicker of charge in its batteries.

  Bai circled the pod, fingertip-skimming over and under splintered stems draped with crumpled canopies like fallen black sails, searching for boot prints or some other trace of the passenger, failing to find anything. Nothing moving under trees fringing either side of the smashed clearing, nothing moving anywhere in the absolute quiet stillness of vacuum.

  If the pod’s passenger had for whatever reason decided to put some distance between themselves and the crash site, there was only one place within easy walking distance: a refuge that stood on the rim of a secondary crater about ten kilometres northwest. If she had crash-landed in a remote unpopulated area with no resources but a p-suit, Bai thought, and didn’t want to wait around for rescue or maybe didn’t want to be rescued, that was absolutely where she would head.

  She knew she should wait for backup, but Lindy’s patronising tone had got under her skin. And anyway, it was a matter of clan pride to prove that she could find the passenger without the help of any damn Gartens. So she tuned into the refuge’s directional beacon, pulled up a map, and set off.

  The silence and stillness seemed deeper under the umbrella trees. Bai was hyperalert as she ankled along, picking her way between interlocking arcs of trees, trying to keep the beacon dead ahead and searching for boot prints in crunchy dust that was everywhere littered with fallen scales, porcelain white toothy triangles the size of her helmet visor. Every so often her insulated boots kicked one at exactly the right angle and it sailed away in a long, low, frictionless arc. Every so often she disturbed a pocket of loose dust that spurted up in a waist-high geyser and settled out so slowly that if she looked around (as she increasingly did, gripped by a growing unease) she saw a diminishing row of ghostly pillars stitched along her path.

  The ground rose and fell in low swales; umbrella trees thickened all around. The top layer of a vast factory that was mostly underfoot, extruded by pseudohyphal networks of nanomachines that extracted processed organic material from the rock-hard ice of the forest floor, and mined metals, rare earths and phosphates from the moon’s crust.

  The stems of the trees glowed faintly in infrared and their canopies shone more brightly overhead, radiating excess heat into the chill vacuum, and the ground between them was tiger-striped with faint sunlight and pitch-black shadow. Even with her suit’s various enhancements, Bai couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred metres in any direction, but she plodded on, time ticking away, too stubborn and prideful to give up the search.

  She was two kilometres from the refuge, and Lindy Garten and her crew were due to arrive in less than thirty minutes, when she was ambushed. Everything happened in a bare second. A sudden flurry of movement off to one side, something flying out from behind the broad stem of a grandmother tree, and the reflexes of Bai’s suit took over before she could react, tangling the attacker in a net a moment before the shock of impact, firing tethers that spun her in a hard stop that rattled her head inside her helmet.

  The passenger flew away in the opposite direction, ricocheting off trees in headlong flight. Bai had to walk a long way, following a trail of fresh-fallen scales, before at last she spotted them. They lay unmoving, forced into a foetal ball by the net’s contraction, didn’t reply when Bai identified herself on the common band. Fearing the worst, she knelt and rolled them onto their back, and rocked back on her heels when she saw the emaciated face behind the visor of their helmet, teeth bared in a lipless grin, eyes sunk deep in sockets and taped shut.

  “I THOUGHT SHE was dead,” Bai told her mother on the flight back to the scale-harvesting camp. “But then I managed to handshake with the clunky interface of her suit and found she was in cold sleep. I guess the pod assembled a suit around her after it crash-landed, and the suit tried to walk her towards the refuge. But its batteries were almost exhausted when I caught up with it, and I think its mind was damaged too. That could be why it attacked me. It didn’t understand that I’d come to help. So I disabled its motor functions and fed it just enough power to keep its life support going until the hopper arrived, and here we are, free and clear.”

  There was a pause, a little under six seconds, while this zipped at light speed from Oberon to Titania, where Bai’s clan and most people in the Uranus system lived, and her mother’s reply zipped back. The two moons were presently on opposite sides of the planet, a million kilometres apart, but there was no escaping Bai’s mother, who’d pinged her as soon as she’d found out about the escapade, and not to shower her with praise and congratulations.

  “You didn’t know who was in that lifepod, why it crash-landed where it did,” she said to Bai. “And you went chasing off into the forest without telling anyone what you were doing. What were you thinking? But I suppose you weren’t.”

  “I was the first to arrive at the crash site,” Bai said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  Even though she knew that things could have gone very differently if her suit hadn’t been so quick and clever, she was convinced that she’d done the right thing. If she hadn’t found her when she did, the woman’s suit might have run out of power. She might have died.

  But as usual Bai’s mother had other ideas, saying, “You should have waited until the Gartens arrived.”

  “I didn’t need their help to find her.”

  “And I suppose you think that you don’t need their help now. Even though their camp has better medical facilities.”

  Yes, there was definitely a familiar edge to her voice. Bai’s mother, Wen Phoenix Minnot, was seventy-three years old, a clan elder, grand and chilly and remote. Bai was the youngest of her six children, a late addition to the family after Wen married a second husband. Lately, she seemed to be perpetually annoyed by her youngest daughter’s restlessness, which was why Bai had been packed off to supervise the scale-harvesting camp on Oberon. She wanted to live on another world? Here was her chance. A moon much like Titania, but somewhat smaller and with even fewer people. Where she could gain useful experience in field engineering. Where living in a trailer habitat in the middle of nowhere (almost everywhere on Oberon was the middle of nowhere) with only machines for company would make her realise what she was missing, back home. Where nothing ever happened.
<
br />   Except that now it had.

  “The Gartens would have taken all the credit,” Bai said. “Like they took the pod.”

  “Whoever this woman is, she isn’t a trophy,” Wen said.

  “Tell that to Lindy Garten.”

  Lindy had told Bai that she’d quote unquote secured the lifepod after it had been abandoned in place. Bai was pretty sure Lindy had ratted her out to her mother too. The responsible adult dealing with the hot-headed kid’s screw-up, scoring points in the perpetual competition between clans for social superiority.

  “She did the right thing, and made a full report to the peacers,” Wen said. “While you more or less kidnapped this unfortunate woman.”

  “She has a name,” Bai said. “Xtina Groza. At least, that’s the name on her suit ID tag. As for the rest—why she was in that lifepod, why she came here—I guess she can tell me when she wakes up.”

  Wen ignored that, saying, “I’m very disappointed in you, child. I hoped that overseeing the scale-harvesting operation would teach you something about duty, responsibility and common sense. I can see that it has done nothing of the kind. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back to the camp, to make sure that this woman gets the best treatment we can provide until the peacers arrive.”

  Sure enough, a freshly printed avatar was standing at the edge of the landing pad when the hopper touched down. A hollow plastic shell in roughly human form, with feet like suction cups and claws for hands, it stepped forward and lifted Xtina Groza from the cargo rack and set off towards the trailer before Bai had finished powering down the hopper.

  The trailer’s little revolving airlock could only take one person at a time. Bai went through first, and there was a moment, while she was hauling Xtina Groza’s rigid pressure suit out of the lock, when she thought of shutting the avatar outside—the thing was running semi-autonomously because of the time lag, she’d be able to do it before it could react. But she was already in more than enough trouble, so she dutifully spun the lock around and waited for the avatar to cycle through so her mother could tell her what to do next.

  Wen ordered the doctor thing to extrude itself from the trailer’s wall, told Bai she had found instructions for manually opening the antique hardshell suit. The avatar stood at Bai’s back while she warmed the suit to room temperature and worked through the checklist of latches, snap fasteners and ring and plug connectors. At last, she lifted the helmet from the neck ring, removed the bulky life support pack, gloves and chestpiece, and tugged down the long zip of the inner lining.

  Xtina Groza was swaddled in a yellow, close-woven, elasticated undergarment that clung to the blades and ridges of her long-limbed, painfully thin body. A hank of black hair, coarse and glossy with grease, was pulled back from her face and lay across her left shoulder; a small black disc lay between her flattened breasts. The machine that had been regulating her metabolism during cold sleep, Bai’s mother said. Old tech.

  Bai unclipped the lines that had been feeding the woman drugs and nutrients, her catheter and breathing tube. Her skin was clammy but not chilled, and a faint pulse was visible under the angle of her jaw. She was no longer in true cold sleep; her suit had been trying to wake her.

  The avatar carried her to the doctor thing, which immediately wrapped her from head to toe in its shroud and got to work, and Wen told Bai that she needed to take the pressure suit outside.

  “It’s powered down. And in pieces.”

  “It’s an old combat model,” Wen said, her voice coming from the avatar’s unmoving transparent face. “I don’t know what it’s capable of and neither do you. Go on, now.”

  No point arguing, and besides, Bai had an idea. After her own suit had assembled itself around her, she piled the helmet, gloves and other loose pieces inside the shell of Xtina Groza’s suit and hauled it through the lock and whistled up a sled and rode across to the refinery, where she stuffed the suit inside an unused storage tank. Out of sight, and so on. If the peace police forgot to ask about it, and her mother forgot to remind them, Bai could try to hack into its mind, find out everything it knew about its owner. It was only a token rebellion and probably wouldn’t come to anything, but it put a little bounce in her gait as she trekked back to the trailer.

  The doctor thing was still ticking away to itself as it assessed and stabilised the comatose woman. It took a while. Bai munched a sprouted bean wrap and sipped a bulb of tea, tried her best to ignore the impassive avatar. The adrenalin high of the search and rescue had drained away. She was tired and cross-grained, felt that she was being punished for doing the right thing. At least the results of the doctor thing’s analyses and diagnostic tests were worth the wait.

  Xtina Groza was somatically and genetically female, apparent age around twenty-five, chronological age unknown. Trace analysis suggested that she had been in cold sleep a long time. A minimum of seventy years, maybe more. Which would have been interesting in itself, but there were also the gene mods. As well as the usual adaptations to life in low gravity, with minor variations in their genetic code that suggested Xtina Groza had been born in the Saturn system, there were mods that weren’t in any catalogue, implants in the visual cortex of her brain and her brainstem, and a mesh of fine threads woven through her musculature.

  Bai and her mother agreed that the combat suit, the mods and implants, and the length of time she’d been in cold sleep strongly suggested that Xtina Groza had been involved in the Quiet War. Most Outers had taken the high road of passive resistance, but some cities and settlements had fought back against Earth’s Three Powers Alliance in the brief fierce clash, and a few pockets of rebels had actively resisted the subsequent occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems. Xtina Groza might be one such, a soldier enhanced for speed and strength and survival, and Bai had an idea, she thought a good one, which could explain how this woman had ended up in a lifepod that had only just now crash-landed on Oberon.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Quiet War, a group of self-styled Free Outers had fled from the Saturn system and briefly settled on Titania (the gala where Bai had met Lindy Garten had been part of the celebrations on the hundredth anniversary of their arrival) before moving even further out. One of them, Macy Minnot, Bai’s great-grandmother, had been a defector from Greater Brazil; another had been Macy’s husband, Newton Jones, scion of an influential clan from Saturn’s moon Dione—Bai and Wen’s clan. It was possible, Bai told her mother, that Xtina Groza had been a member of the resistance, sent to recruit the Free Outers to her cause. But her ship had run into trouble, or perhaps it had been involved in a fire fight with the Three Powers expeditionary force that had come looking for the Free Outers, and she’d escaped in her lifepod and somehow it had not been picked up. Orbiting Uranus for decades in a highly eccentric path that took it far from the planet most of the time, before at last it had come close enough to Oberon to attempt a landing.

  “The pod took a last chance at saving its passenger,” Bai said. “And because it didn’t realise that the war was long over, it wiped all its records in case it was captured by the enemy.”

  “It’s a nice story,” Wen said. “But at the moment we don’t know enough to know if it’s anything more than that.”

  “When she wakes up, we can ask her directly.”

  “She isn’t going to wake up for a while,” Wen said, the time delay giving it the weight of a carefully considered reply rather than something that had already been decided without consulting Bai. “The doctor thing will keep her in an induced coma until the peacers arrive.”

  Bai started to say something, forgetting in her anger about that damn delay, but her mother hadn’t finished, anticipating her objections, telling her that the woman possessed military mods, she was an unknown quantity, it wouldn’t be safe to wake her until she was in a secure place.

  “She isn’t my prisoner,” Bai said, unable to help herself.

  “I know you want to know everything there is to know about her. It’s only natural that you do. And yo
u will, soon enough. Meanwhile, you’ll have to learn how to be patient. And you should get some rest. You’ve had quite the day, and you’ll need to be at your best when the peacers arrive.”

  So that was that. As usual, her mother was treating her like a child, taking charge, making decisions without bothering to consult her. All she could say, in token protest, was that when the peacers came she wanted to go back with them. “You said that I needed to learn about responsibility. Well, I feel responsible for Xtina Groza because I saved her life. Making sure that she’s transported safely to Titania is the least I can do for her.”

  If she turned out to be a genuine hero of the resistance, the peacers wouldn’t be able to hold the woman long. And she would need a place to stay when they let her go. Bai could invite her to stay in one of the clan’s guest apartments, help her, listen to her stories. They’d become friends, and maybe Bai could leave with her, when the time came.

  She elaborated this fantasy while she drifted to sleep in the curtained niche. It was an echo of the stories she’d told herself as a child, stories about the places she’d visit and the wonders she’d see when she was old enough to travel the solar system. She hadn’t thought then that she’d end up on Oberon, where hardly anyone lived and nothing ever happened. But something had happened now, all right, and it would change everything...

  When she woke, just a few hours later, the doctor thing was still humming and clicking at the other end of the trailer’s living space, Xtina Groza was still motionless under the doctor thing’s shroud, and the avatar’s soap-bubble statue was still standing guard. Except that now it was controlled by Ye, the oldest of Bai’s fathers.

  “Why don’t you have some breakfast,” he said, “and tell me all about your adventure.”