Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

Big, cuddly, endlessly patient Ye was Bai’s favourite parent. He’d always taken her plans for travelling the system seriously; he’d done plenty of travelling himself before he’d married Wen and Egil, Bai’s biological father, and settled down in Fairyland. He possessed the serene calm of someone who had seen so much of worlds that nothing could surprise him anymore, and Bai loved his stories of exotic corners of the outer system and the two years he’d spent working for the Martian Terraforming Authority. They gave her hope that one day she’d be able to see those same places and more besides. Still, she faintly resented that he was babysitting her. No doubt it was Wen’s idea. Even though telling him the story of how she’d found Xtina Groza rekindled something of the excitement and wonder of it, she felt that she was being pandered to.

  “It’s definitely one for the scrolls,” Ye said, which was what he called the clan’s records. “You’re a hero, Bai. I can’t tell you how proud I am.”

  “It isn’t over yet,” Bai said. “And I want to see it through to the end. Find out who she is, and the whole story of how she ended up here. And help her deal with the peacers, and help after they let her go.”

  She sipped from her bulb of tea while waiting for his reply, a lot longer than the time delay.

  “Mmm-hmm. We’ll have to think about that. And see what the peacers have to say about it too. Meantime, you should check the board. One of the harvesters has got itself in a pickle.”

  “As if it matters now.”

  “Of course it matters. You know the Gartens don’t want us here. Any violation of our lease, no matter how small, would give them an excuse to make a complaint to the Commonhold Council. You go on now, and don’t worry about your sleeping beauty. I’ll keep watch. If there’s anything to report, I’ll let you know at once.”

  Bai knew it was busy work got up to distract her, but she was also sort of glad to get out for a few hours. It would give her time to think. To plan. To work out exactly how she could persuade the peacers to let her ride along with Xtina Groza to Titania.

  So without any argument she suited up and headed out on one of the rackety old sleds towards the spot where the harvester had got itself into a jam. Mostly, the machines could be left to work by themselves. Several hundred man-sized, squid-shaped harvesters crawling in long transects across the forest floor, collecting scales shed by the umbrella trees and dumping their loads in the hoppers of runners that transported them to the refinery, where metals and rare earths were extracted for export and the residue was used as a substrate for starter cultures of nanomachines, which the forester rig force-injected into the rock-hard ice to quicken new colonies. Bai monitored every aspect of this activity, fixed machines that damaged themselves beyond the limits of their repair mites, organised movement of the camp to a new area of the forest when a patch had been completely harvested, and supervised the cannon that shot loaded cargo drones into low-energy transfer orbits that eventually intersected with Titania.

  When she wasn’t overseeing all this, carrying out routine maintenance in the camp, or studying for her engineering certificates, she liked to hike through the umbrella-tree forest and climb to the top of the crater’s rimwall and look out at the moonscape. Her favourite route followed the narrow crest of a buttress that rose steeply to the edge of a cirque bitten into the rimwall, with a view across a smashed plain to the curved horizon, notched in the west by one of the long deep canyons that dissected the moon’s surface. Craters everywhere. So many that new craters overlapped or were inside older craters, and everything was dusted with dark red CHON tars that had spiralled in after being knocked off irregular outer moons by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts.

  All around, absolute silence and stillness. No sound but the faint hiss of air in Bai’s helmet, the hum of her suit’s pumps, the flutter of her pulse in her ears. Looking out at the moonscape with her comms turned off, no boot prints on the dusty ground but her own and nothing moving under the black sky, where Uranus’s big beautiful blue globe swam like an exotic jellyfish, and at this latitude and in this season, the cold spark of the sun hung close to the horizon, and Bai felt like the queen of the little world, or the last person in the solar system. A lovely lonely feeling.

  Although she’d been packed off to Oberon because her mother hoped that it would quench her restlessness, it had instead fed her hunger for travel and adventure. The Uranus system was a dull, sparsely settled backwater, and everywhere else the solar system was abloom with what people were beginning to call the Second Renaissance. Established cities and settlements in the Jupiter and Saturn systems had been rebuilt and expanded, and hundreds of new settlements and gardens had been constructed on minor planets, moons, asteroids—even on kobolds out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The great terraforming projects on Mars still had centuries to run, but more than a million people lived there in tented cities and gardens, and forests were being planted out in the lowest parts of the Hellas Basin, where the atmospheric pressure was high enough, now, for liquid water to persist on the surface. There were half a dozen different plans to terraform Venus too, and colony ships and seedships were halfway to some of the near stars and more were being constructed to sustain the outward urge.

  Bai wanted to see some of that with her own eyes. She wanted to visit the clan’s Firsthome on Dione, sample life in the cities of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and the garden colonies of the asteroid belt, sail the polar lakes of Titan, take the scenic railroad down the length of Valles Marineris on Mars, maybe even visit ancient, teeming Earth. Rescuing Xtina Groza was confirmation that she wasn’t meant for an ordinary life. It was the beginning of a wonderful and strange adventure whose ending was excitingly unclear.

  But first, she had to sort out the damn harvester. It had wandered into a narrow steep-sided fracture that zigzagged from a secondary crater and couldn’t work out how to retrace its steps, bumping with futile persistence against the sheer wall where the fracture terminated. A minor fault in its nav system, probably. Bai towed the machine out of the fracture and aimed it at the nearest patch of forest. She watched as it stepped away on its springy tentacles, disappeared into ink-black shadows under the umbrella trees. If it got stuck again, she’d have to bring it in and figure out what had gone wrong, but hopefully it was just a one-off glitch.

  She was halfway back to the camp when an alert overflashed her comms. It was her mother, asking Bai where she was, telling her that there was a serious problem at the camp.

  “We think the woman may have woken up. The avatar went offline and the feed from the doctor thing cut out. We can’t access the camp’s comms either. Which means we can’t see what’s going on, and we can’t print new avatars. We’re trying to get back up inside the comms, but it’s going to take a while. I’ve alerted the peacers. They know what to expect. They’ll go in, do what needs to be done. Meanwhile, I want you to hunker down in place. The woman has already attacked you once. She could take you hostage, or worse.”

  “It was her suit that attacked me, and it was a mistake.” Bai had slowed the sled, was trying to process what she’d been told. It didn’t seem likely that Xtina Groza had woken from her induced coma. Maybe the Gartens had kidnapped her, although that would be a risky and provocative move. Or maybe one of the half hundred hermits and aesthetes scattered across Oberon had heard the chatter about her, decided she was dangerous, or that she was a messenger sent by one of their gods...

  She told her mother this, said that she had to check out the camp. “If someone took her, I’ll find out who it was and where they went.”

  “There was no sign of any intruder before the comms went out,” Wen said. “The peacers will be there soon. Promise me you won’t do anything silly before they arrive.”

  Silly. That stung. As if she was still a little girl. As if she didn’t know what she was doing.

  “I’m cutting my comms,” Bai said. “In case someone is listening in. I’ll be back shortly.”

  She knew that she was being reckless, but she also kne
w that she had to find out what had happened, and drove the rest of the way at full speed, banging over rough ground, swerving around trees, concentrating on steering the sled so she wouldn’t have to think about everything that could go wrong.

  The camp was set up on top of a bare apron of ejecta that had been thrown out from a secondary crater. Bai halted in the shadows at the edge of the forest and used the suit’s optics to scope out the lie of the land. Several runners were frozen in place around the refinery, presumably shut down when the comms had fallen over. Nothing was moving around the white cylinder of the trailer either. The spare sled was parked nearby, and the pair of hoppers stood side by side in the green glow of the lights that circled the landing apron. No sign of any intruders, but they could have come and gone, taking Xtina Groza with them...

  A couple of years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, when she’d officially become an adult, Bai’s clan had given her a round trip to Miranda. One of the moon’s sightseeing attractions was a long ribbon of sheer cliffs more than five kilometres high, Verona Rupes, a big fault scarp created by upwellings of partially melted ices, and like any other tourist Bai had jumped off the end of a platform cantilevered out from one of the highest points. The gravity of Miranda was even lower than the gravity of Oberon or Titania; it took almost six minutes to reach the big target painted at the bottom. But in vacuum free fall, with no air resistance to slow acceleration, the final velocity of that long swooning fall was enough to kill a person, so jumpers were equipped with backpacks that stabilised their fall and fired braking jets during the last ten seconds. The big slam of deceleration was part of the fun.

  Driving out of the shelter of the trees, Bai had the same scary floating sensation she’d felt when she’d stepped off the projection point of that jump platform into absolutely nothing at all. She parked the sled at the refinery and checked the tank in which she’d dumped Xtina Groza’s p-suit; she hadn’t been able to shake off the unsettling idea that it might have switched itself back on and reassembled itself, cut the camp’s comms, and rescued its owner. She felt a cool measure of relief when she saw that it was still there, exactly as she’d left it, and walked all the way around the trailer. No tracks she didn’t recognise, no movement behind the trailer’s lighted ports. She returned to the sled in three long bounds, had a brief conversation with her suit and stuffed a bunch of tethers in its utility pouch and unshipped a long handled wrench from the sled’s tool rack. Took a last look around and ankled up to the trailer’s lock and cycled through.

  The woman, Xtina Groza, sat cross-legged on the floor at the far end of the trailer, the shroud wrapped around her like a cloak. Pale and angular, motionless as the avatar standing at the foot of the doctor thing’s couch. Moving only her eyes to look at Bai, saying, “Who are you? Where is this place?”

  AFTER SETTING DOWN the wrench, moving slowly and carefully to show that she was no threat, and unlocking and lifting off her helmet, Bai introduced herself, told Xtina Groza that this was a scale-harvesting camp on Oberon, explained that she had been inside a lifepod that had crash-landed a couple of hundred kilometres to the northeast.

  “I found you, brought you here. The doctor thing was treating you, and I guess you woke up.”

  The woman’s gaze lost focus for a second; then she shook her head. “I don’t remember any of that. I can’t even remember my name. I try, but it’s always just out of reach.”

  Her voice was soft and husky, her accent stilted in the way people in old-time clips talked.

  “It’s Xtina. Xtina Groza. Or at least, that’s the tag in your suit comms.”

  The woman shook her head again. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. Oberon, though... I know Oberon. It’s one of the big moons of Uranus. But how did I get to Uranus?”

  “You don’t know why you’re here?”

  “I don’t even remember where I came from.”

  She didn’t seem upset. Mildly bemused, maybe.

  “You were in cold sleep a long time,” Bai said. “I suppose it could be a side effect.”

  “Cold sleep? For how long?”

  Bai told her suit to disperse, and said, as its components unlocked and threw themselves to their niches beside the lock, “I’ll fetch some tea and tell you everything I know. But I’m afraid that I don’t know very much.”

  They sat cross-legged on the soft red alife moss that carpeted the trailer’s floor, drinking liquorice tea (“I didn’t know I liked this,” Xtina said) while Bai explained about the lifepod’s crash-landing, how she’d found Xtina being walked through the umbrella-tree forest, asleep inside her pressure suit, how the suit had tried to ambush her.

  “I think it thought I might be an enemy of yours. Or maybe it saw me as a source of power and consumables. It was walking you towards a refuge, but I don’t think it had enough zap to make it.”

  “But you’re not my enemy,” Xtina said.

  Bai wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question. She said, “It wasn’t you. It was your suit. You were asleep. You’d been asleep a long time. I think for around a century.”

  Xtina showed no surprise. Taking a sip from her bulb of tea, she said, “Are you sure?”

  Bai told her that her lifepod and p-suit were antiques, explained about the biochemical markers the doctor thing had found. Hesitated for a moment, torn between prudence and curiosity, then said, “It also found that you have implants. It seems that you were a soldier. Or some kind of combatant, anyway. Involved in the Quiet War.”

  Another pause, another sip of tea. Xtina said at last, “I remember the Quiet War. I remember that the Three Powers Authority won.”

  “They did, for a little while. And then we regained our independence.”

  Another pause. “Well, I don’t remember that. It was a hundred years ago?”

  “A little over.”

  “And I came out here. To Uranus. Do you know why?”

  “Have you heard of the Free Outers?”

  “Is that what the people living here call themselves?”

  “We came later. The Free Outers were what I guess you could call political refugees. They escaped from the Three Powers Authority during the Quiet War, stayed here a little while, moved further out.”

  “You think I might be one? A Free Outer?”

  “I was wondering if you came here because you wanted to join them,” Bai said.

  If she’d guessed right, it would prove to her mother that her so-called fantasies could sometimes be useful.

  But Xtina apologised again, saying, “I wish I could tell you it meant something to me. I wish I knew more. It’s strange. I suppose I should be confused, or upset. Or angry. Instead, it doesn’t seem to matter.”

  Her bony face was hard to read, but she did seem to be amazingly calm. Stoic. If Bai had woken up with no idea of who she was, where she was or why, when she was, she would have lost her mind.

  “The doctor thing gave you all kinds of drugs,” Bai said.

  “Perhaps this doctor thing could give me something that would help me remember who I am.”

  “Do you remember what happened when you woke up?”

  “I thought I was dead. I was wrapped tight inside this blanket, no light, no sound... And when I got free of it, I had no idea where I was. Who I was.”

  “So the doctor thing fell over, and then you woke up.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You don’t remember doing anything to it?”

  “Do you think I did? Because I’m a soldier?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” Bai said cautiously, pierced by a sudden sharpness in Xtina Groza’s gaze.

  She was wondering if the woman was faking her amnesia. Didn’t captured soldiers refuse to give up any information but their name and rank? Maybe she was pretending to have lost her memory so that she didn’t have to reveal her mission. And she definitely wasn’t as vulnerable and confused as she seemed to be: after she’d woken from her induced coma, she’d managed to shut do
wn the doctor thing and futz the comms, which Bai’s suit had been trying to access ever since she’d stepped into the trailer, so far without any success.

  “You and me both,” Xtina said. She had finished her tea, was rhythmically squeezing the bulb in one hand, holding the shroud closed at her throat with the other. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself? Where you live and how you live. This future I’ve somehow ended up in.”

  She was trying to move the conversation away from herself, but Bai went with it. The peacers would be here in little under seven hours. By then, the soporific Bai’s suit had manufactured, a little gel capsule Bai had sneaked into Xtina’s bulb of tea, should have done its work. All she had to do was keep the woman talking, keep her calm, let her know she had nothing to fear, until she fell asleep.

  She explained that there were just ten thousand people in the Uranus system, most of them living on Titania. She talked about Fairyland, how the city had been built by machines before people arrived, how there were many cities and settlements like it scattered across the solar system, some still completely empty, built during the wave of expansion in the heady decades of optimism and confidence that had followed the end of the occupation of the Jupiter and Saturn systems by the Three Powers Authority, and reconciliation between Earth and the Outers. She told Xtina about all the places she wanted to visit, and Xtina said she knew some of the names but didn’t remember if she’d ever visited them; she didn’t even remember where she’d been living before she came here.

  “If you want to leave,” she said, “why not just get on a ship and go?”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “I know it is what young people used to do. Set out on a wanderjahr. See other worlds, meet different people. Something else I didn’t know I knew until I thought about it. You don’t do that, anymore?”

  “It isn’t that easy. In my clan, everyone shares credit and karma, and everyone has a say in how we use it.”

  “If you really wanted to travel to other worlds, I think you’d find a way.”