Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  Gedda was examining the canvas, shaking her head slowly. Her skull was small and sleek, bird-light in its cranial architecture. Her body form was diaphanous, with her core nervous system embedded within layers of translucent anatomy, with her veined and colour-tinted wings folded back on themselves.

  “Is that your idea of composition, Sakura? That mountain’s all wrong. You’ve got it much too far over.”

  “Clearly no one ever told him about the rule of thirds,” Tristan said confidentially, cupping a hand to the side of his mouth.

  “It’s a methane berg, not a mountain. Look, I appreciate seeing both of you—I really do. But you can forget any ideas about talking me out of my decision.”

  Gedda rolled closer to the canvas. “I see you’ve put her in the picture again?”

  “Her?” Tristan asked.

  “His nameless watcher. The woman he shoves into every one of his landscapes, as if he can’t bear to let the composition stand on its own merits.”

  Tristan cocked his head, reappraising the canvas. “I suppose the colours aren’t too bad. We shouldn’t be too hard on him. It can’t be that easy getting paint to work in this ball-freezing cold.”

  Sakura began to unloosen the screws holding up the easel. “Now that the art critics have had their say, can we agree that the door threshold is my business alone?”

  “It’s too low,” Tristan said.

  “One in a thousand? Don’t be such a hypocrite. You face worse odds than that when you go prancing around on cliff faces. Same with Gedda with her flying.”

  “That’s different,” Gedda said. “Tristan chooses his sports, just as I chose to fly. There’s a risk, which we’ve both done our best to minimise, and that’s the price we pay for having fun. But you’ve instructed the door to kill you.”

  “Did you argue with Sartorio this way, when he set his threshold ten times lower than mine?”

  “No,” Tristan said. “But we should have. There isn’t a day when I don’t miss him.”

  “Me as well,” Gedda said. “And we’re not going to make the same mistake twice.”

  “She’s right,” Tristan said, moving to help him pack away the painting equipment. “Undo the setting, Sakura. This is just a phase. You’ll get over it soon enough, and realise that there’s still plenty to live for.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You’re not really committed,” Gedda said. “You wouldn’t be painting if you didn’t think there was a reason to go on.”

  “You don’t understand,” Sakura said.

  “Damn right we don’t,” Tristan answered.

  “I’m older than either of you. That’s plain just from the memories that came through my winnowings. I remember bits of history you two have only read about. The argosies. Cities on Venus. The Change Wizards and the Great Dominions. The fact is that I’ve seen and done more than either of you, and I’ve started to sense the limits.” Sakura finished boxing the canvas, protecting the still-wet paint. “There are only so many permutations of experience a human nervous system can process. I don’t ever want to be bored. I’m not bored just yet, but I can feel boredom stalking me, and I’m not going to give it a chance of catching up.”

  “We have to argue him out of this,” Gedda said urgently, rolling forward. “My flying tournament on Jupiter is in six months—it’s the reason I’m locking in this anatomy for the time being, so that I can get an edge over Malec. But between now and then we can show Sakura the sights again—shake him out of his rut.”

  “It’s more than a rut.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Tristan said, clapping his hands. “You just need to let your friends take care of you. It’s settled, old man—you’re ours until Jupiter!”

  “Nothing’s settled!” Sakura exclaimed, but with the exasperated good humour of someone well aware that they were on the losing side of an argument.

  His friends looked each other. Tristan hoofed at the ground. Gedda flexed her beautiful wings, facets of pastel colour splintering out of them. “We’ll turn you,” she said, with a fierce conviction. “Come with us, and you’ll remember that life’s worth living until the last bitter drop.”

  GEDDA EXTENDED A hand through the membrane of her excursion bubble, touching the destination panel on the left side of the door. At her touch, coloured motifs and symbols glowed against the door’s black surface, becoming a blur as she sped through branching menus. Worlds, dwarf planets, moons, minor bodies flickered by in an ever-accelerating shuffle.

  Sakura, standing a few paces behind, politely averted his gaze. He had agreed to indulge his friends.

  “There,” Gedda said, withdrawing her arm and rolling back. “It’s locked in for the next three transits.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Sakura asked Tristan.

  “My idea, this one, actually—the timing was too good to resist. But Gedda approved, and she gets to choose the next one.” Tristan settled a confiding arm on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, old man—I won’t inflict anything too weird on you.”

  Gedda went through first. Her excursion bubble contracted by about a third, allowing her to roll into the doorframe, through the yielding grey surface, until it puckered tight. Tristan and Sakura stepped back from the upright cylinder of the door, looking up at the glass column that stretched into the lowering clouds. A few seconds passed and then a bright bolt shot up the column and away, gathering tremendous speed in the few instants that it was visible.

  Sakura waited a few heartbeats. She would already be beyond the atmosphere, her nervous system buffered against the acceleration, speeding to some other place in the system.

  The doorway chimed and pulsed to indicate readiness for the next transit, with Gedda’s settings still holding.

  “Go,” Tristan said.

  “After you, I think,” Sakura answered. “Trust me—I’m not going to back out this early in the game.”

  Tristan accepted this pledge and walked through the surface. After a few moments he also shot up the tube and away into space, close on Gedda’s metaphorical heels. Knitters would already be dismantling and reforging Tristan’s anatomy, remodelling neural connections so that the transition from one body form to another felt entirely seamless.

  Sakura, alone now, had the door to himself. It was just him, the door, the raised area of ground on which it had been constructed, the winding staircase leading up to it, a landscape of low hills and lakes stretching away into misty, sepia-stained distance, a little drizzle touching his skin from the east.

  The rain was composed of long-chain hydrocarbons; the atmosphere was cold and poisonous, the thick clouds reducing the daylight to a sullen orange. To Sakura’s senses, though, the rain was invigorating, the temperature pleasant, and the quality of light restful, suggestive of morning mists in the hills of Honshu or Tuscany.

  There had been a time when Sakura had resisted these adaptive tweaks, regarding them as somehow false or counterfeit, but in recent centuries his views had softened. No alien organisms had evolved on Titan—or anywhere in the Adaptasporic Realm besides Earth—but if they had, and over time had gained senses and minds, then surely they would have ended up apprehending Titan in distinctly similar terms, enjoying its gentle rains, soothing airs and mellow light.

  Sartorio had been a purist, Sakura reflected, and would not have approved. In Sartorio’s view, you either met the solar system on human terms, with all its beauty and ugliness unfiltered, or you were indulging in tragic self-deception.

  “Why not make the sky blue, and be done with it?” Sartorio would ask, mockingly.

  Sakura was thinking of his old friend—their old, mutual friend—as he stepped through the door.

  There was the usual instant of disconnection, an abeyance in his thought processes that was both briefer than sleep and oceanically deeper, and then he was elsewhere in another body, knitted for him during the transit.

  He stepped out into darkness. He felt rocky ground under his soles. Two legs this tim
e, ending in feet rather than hooves. His friends were present, although it took a few seconds for his eyes to adapt to the darkness. Gedda was unchanged, still a winged angel in an excursion bubble. Tristan was bipedal, reverting to something close to baseline anatomy. He was a glassy stick-figure, echoing Gedda’s core anatomy, with layers of translucence shrouding their central nervous systems.

  Sakura inspected his own forearm, seeing the same translucence: skin, muscle, bones and nerve turned gel-like with a tinting of different hues.

  Overhead was a bowl of stars. Nothing to smell or taste, just vacuum beyond the synthetic membrane of his skin and an invigorating coldness when he tried to draw in a breath.

  “All right, do I get twenty guesses? Somewhere rocky, not ice-dominated. Callisto, maybe, but since we’re going to Jupiter soon enough, I don’t think you’d bring me there immediately. And is that Mars overhead? I think we must be quite a bit closer to the Sun. Ceres, maybe, except that horizon looks a little too far away—assuming you haven’t shrunk me down to a doll. Earth’s moon, then, or just possibly...” Sakura bent down and scooped up a loose pebble, watching it drop back to the ground. “Mercury, if I had to stake my life on it.”

  Gedda pouted. “You’re no fun.”

  “Don’t blame me for being good with worlds—I’ve seen enough of them.”

  “We’re near the terminator,” Tristan said. “The Sun will be rising very shortly, and we don’t want to miss it.”

  Gedda raced ahead, rolling and bouncing from one low ridge to another. Tristan strode on, and Sakura followed. After a few minutes of gradual ascent, they reached an overlook with a series of ledges poised over a near-vertical cliff face, and far below them a flat black plain stretched all the way to the horizon.

  “Sit down here,” Tristan said, picking his way to one of the ledges, precariously close to the sheer drop of the cliff. He squatted with his legs dangling over the edge, and Gedda rolled to a halt with her bubble just fitting in the available space.

  Sakura settled down between his friends. “I hate to break it to you, but this won’t be my first Sunrise.”

  “Sunrise is the end of the show, not the start of it,” Gedda said, in a gently chiding tone. “For now, just sit still and wait. Keep your eyes at the default amplification level too—you’ll thank me for it later.”

  “All right.” Sakura forced patience upon himself. “About your tournament, by the way. Is winning against Malec really the only thing that’s driving you?”

  “Malec thinks he’s better, and he hasn’t been shy about advertising his opinion. Mouthing off at every chance. At Jupiter I get the chance to even the record.”

  “Until the time after that. Sooner or later he’ll beat you in some other tournament and you’ll be back where you started. Where’s the end to it, Gedda?”

  She examined him with a puzzled look. “Does there need to be an end?”

  “She enjoys her flying,” Tristan said. “Better to indulge in an activity that was already pointless from the start, like competitive flying, rather than one that only turned out to be pointless much later on, like figuring out your Null Model.”

  “And what keeps you going, exactly?”

  “Insulting my friends. Making new ones, to compensate for the ones I already insulted just a bit too much. You’d be surprised how much work those activities demand of me—it’s practically a full-time occupation.”

  “In fairness, you’re getting very good at it.”

  Tristan tensed, leaning forward. “It’s starting, Gedda.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Very definitely.”

  “What, exactly?” Sakura asked.

  “Just look,” Tristan said.

  It began incredibly faintly, with a barely perceptible blue-green glow playing on the arc of the horizon. Slowly it pushed fingers of light towards them, extending across the dark plain. They were not straight, like radial spokes, but rather approached in a series of angular, dog-legged progressions, like the trail left by a lightning strike in an atmosphere. The blue-green fingers faded. But almost immediately, a ruby-pink aura was forming on the horizon again, and beginning to extend itself across the plain.

  “What are they?” Sakura asked.

  “The entire plain’s riddled with primordial lava tubes,” Tristan said. “Very old, for the most part—billions of years, probably as far back as the Late Heavy Bombardment. There’s glass in some of these tubes, shock-formed silica, and in places the veins are thick enough, and extensive enough, to function as natural light-pipes. The Sun pumps light into them over the horizon, and it leaks around the curve of Mercury and reaches us ahead of the Sunrise itself. Where the tubes are broken, or the glass veins lie very close to the surface, the light escapes back into space. You’d never get an effect like this on a planet with an atmosphere, since the airglow would smother it long before the Sun pushed above the horizon. That’s half the mystery. What no one really understands—yet—is why the colours vary, or why the show’s never the same from one ’rise to the next.”

  The ruby-pink fingers had reached nearly all the way to the base of the cliff under them, and still more colours were brewing on the horizon. Emeralds this time, and as his eyes became better accustomed, Sakura began to pick out branches and forks of other hues, chasing away from the main display.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Gedda asked. “Strange and unpredictable. How wonderful to have something we don’t fully understand, this late in the day.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Sakura said. “Just because we haven’t figured out how something works, doesn’t mean that we couldn’t. I could take a stab at it right now. Those glassy veins are probably doped with impurities, filtering the light to varying degrees. As for the unpredictability—well, it’s Mercury, it’s still seismically active, so there are bound to be ever-changing stress patterns in that plain, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the light has to take a different path from one cycle to the next, never mind the fact that the Sun angle will change due to the axial tilt...”

  “Spoken like a true Null Theorist, crushing the joy out of life,” Gedda said.

  “I never said it wasn’t beautiful,” Sakura replied, putting on an affronted look. “It is. I didn’t expect this.”

  “They found it about a thousand years ago,” Tristan said, standing up. “During one of the early exploration missions, I think. Then it was forgotten by the time they built cities across half of Mercury.”

  Sakura nodded, remembering—dimly—a time when the inner worlds, from Mercury to Mars, had been dense with human settlement. The vogue had shifted, though. Over the last few centuries there had been a move to return these places to something closer to their pristine conditions. There was room for trillions of people further out, with no need to swelter so close to the Sun.

  “Where are you going?” Gedda asked as Tristan began to climb up and off the ledge.

  “Over to that finger,” Tristan said, pointing to a spur of rock jutting out from the cliff at right angles, a couple of hundred metres to the right. “I think I can get to it without too much difficulty.”

  “Watch your step,” Gedda said.

  While the play of colours continued, and with Tristan picking his way to the finger, Gedda moved her excursion bubble next to his crouched form. “We go back quite some way, Sakura,” she said, dropping her voice so that the conversation would be local. “Not as far as some, I know. But long enough for me to think I had some sense of what made you tick.”

  “You do. I’m a very simple soul.”

  “Do you remember a talk we had once? It would have been on Oberon, I think, or maybe Nereid. I was the one feeling listless and you told me you’d never have that problem, not while you had the great edifice of the Null Model to drive you on.”

  Sakura tucked his knees tighter to his chest. “I don’t remember that conversation.”

  “I’m offended. It meant a great deal to me.”

  “If it happened at all, I must have lost it
in one of my winnowings. Don’t blame me for that: I know you’ve had your share.”

  “Perhaps winnowings are the solution, then. Instead of setting that door threshold so low, and rolling the dice on death each time you step through, you could just submit to a harsher degree of winnowing.”

  “And lose myself in a series of little deaths, rather than one big one?”

  “At least we’d still have you.”

  After a silence he replied: “I was wrong about the Null Model—I just didn’t see it at the time. None of us did. We were so hung up on constructing our perfect system of knowledge that none of us stopped to think what we’d do when we were finished.”

  Gedda flicked her attention to Tristan, who was working his way along a very narrow traverse to reach the finger.

  “Do you know for sure that you’re done?”

  Sakura shook his head slowly, smiling. “I could take apart that plain and work out what makes it behave as it does, why it varies from cycle and cycle, and I’d stake my life and yours that there isn’t anything in it that contradicts the Null Model.”

  “But then there wouldn’t be a plain anymore.”

  “There’s that,” Sakura admitted.

  Tristan had reached the finger. They could only just make out his translucent form as he monkeyed out from the cliffside.

  “Don’t fall!” Gedda called.

  “I think I’m just in time,” Tristan answered, arms spread wide for balance. The finger narrowed along its length, and he had to step gingerly for the last few paces.

  “Exactly how old are you, Sakura?” Gedda asked.

  “I don’t remember. I lost track in one of my early winnowings, and I never bothered running a self-audit. Does it matter?”

  “I’d like to know why you keep putting that watcher in your paintings. Then maybe we’d know you a bit better.”

  “And know what to fix?”

  “Watch this!” Tristan called.

  A fiery yellow glow swept in across the plain, following a jagged, branching path. It was brighter than any of the patterns they had seen before and Sakura guessed that the Sun must be close to the horizon, pumping more and more light into the glass channels, but also close to overwhelming the display with its own intensity. Now Tristan arched his back and threw back his head, and between one instant and the next he became consumed by the same fiery yellow. It was glowing out of him, turning him into an exultant human star.