Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

He thought about that. “An atmosphere, then? It will be damned cold out there, but—”

  “It’s possible. Gershon seems to have found it in a catalogue of Last Small Step targets. It started looking like the last available target of all, which must have attracted his interest. And then he spotted the anomalies, and somehow made the connection with Swift— ”

  “No wonder he went out there. And he has found something exotic, from what you say. But maybe not exotic in the way he’s hoping.”

  “What, then?”

  “How should I know? I’m barely conscious. And now—”

  And now it was time for him to throw up, again.

  Turned out he was right, though, in that first reaction. When we finally got to Voga, it was certainly exotic.

  But nobody calls it Voga anymore.

  FROM LOW ORBIT, it was a ball of rock wrapped in a murky atmosphere under which glistened shallow lakes of some kind of fluid. And it did indeed have two moons, two splinters of rock and ice even less impressive than their parent. All this illuminated in the point light of a Sun giving off only one forty-thousandth its brilliance in Earth’s sky.

  We ran scans. We quickly found that the moons’ orbits closely matched Swift’s descriptions. And Voga’s density was just as I had calculated.

  But Voga wasn’t made of gold. Our neutrino scans revealed it was pretty much like Earth, in fact, an iron core wrapped in a layer of silicate rocks. Just iron and rock, but very densely packed.

  And, from space, it was dull, all but featureless: no mountain ranges, no ocean basins. Very few impact craters, which Salo said was a consequence of a geologically active surface; features like craters wouldn’t last.

  In fact, the only feature on its surface to which the human eye was drawn was a spacecraft, or anyhow its hab-lander module, pretty much similar to ours though larger, and neatly set down close to one pole. We had already spotted Gershon’s interplanetary propulsion unit in high orbit around the planet. Beside the lander, our telescopes revealed, was a trail of footprints in what looked like stiff mud, and a single flag. The Stars and Stripes: flag of a nation that no longer existed, but the flag that had been set on the Moon by Armstrong, and no doubt on Mars by Ralph Gershon, so the Stars and Stripes it had to be.

  There was no immediate sign of Gershon himself. We did download a message from his lander, running on a loop.

  Before we watched the message, we ran through a couple of orbits, and got used to the journey being over, and just took in what we saw.

  “A few things strike me as odd,” I said at length.

  “Go on,” Salo said.

  “All we see down there is iron and silicate rock. The neutrino scans show traces of more exotic substances, heavier metals—there is some gold down there, but no more than you could obtain by mining on Earth. So how come it’s so dense? We’re measuring the mass directly now; the figures don’t lie.”

  “I’m developing a theory,” Salo said slowly. “Maybe the formation of this rock ball was—unusual. Maybe it didn’t form the way Earth did, coalescing out of a Sun-centred cloud of dust and ice—with a few spectacular collisions along the way.

  “Consider an ice giant planet. Uranus, say. Mostly a big ball of gas. But at its heart it has a core, which is like a planet in itself—a rocky planet, like Earth, a ball of iron and rock and maybe some water. An Earth, buried deep inside a heavy atmosphere. In the case of Uranus, the core mass is 60 percent of Earth, the radius 60 percent—”

  I worked the numbers quickly. “Density of about fifteen tonnes per cubic metre. Much more than the Earth. I get the idea. And if somehow you could strip away the outer atmosphere—”

  “We know that happens,” he said. “We’ve seen it in other systems, when some giant exoplanet migrates in too close to its star, and its outer layers are evaporated away by the heat until the core is exposed. You would think that the core, once it was released from that crushing weight, would just explode. But—I’ve been looking it up—in theory, if the atmospheric loss is slow and the core has time to adjust, if the core has the right composition, if something called its finite-state incompressibility is tuned just right—”

  “The core can survive?”

  “Right. For a billion years, maybe. A very slow explosion... This is a pretty small specimen. But maybe it’s a fragment of some larger object. Planetary formation is a big, messy puzzle.”

  “I’m surprised to see it has seas.” I glanced down at the surface below, flat and glistening, hazed with cloud or mist—and, here and there, what looked like mud pools, bubbling. “Puddles, anyhow. And what looks like heat escaping.”

  “Yeah. There’s actually some volcanism up near the poles. Big flat pools of lava, lots of gases venting. The interior must be active, a lot of geothermal heat to lose. And it’s outgassing enough to create an atmosphere. I can see carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia in the lower air. Layers of clouds at different levels. Water too—even puddles of it on the surface, as you say.”

  I glanced at the pinprick Sun. “Liquid water, though. Even if the planet is leaking inner heat—we are a long way from warm here.”

  He tapped the screen. “I think Voga has an extended atmosphere. Hydrogen. Hard for us to see, but a big fat envelope, enough to exert some pressure at the surface, act as a greenhouse, and trap that leaked inner heat. Given time, and enough hydrogen, the world could become as warm as you like. Maybe the planet collected the hydrogen as it migrated out of the solar system—no, dummy, that can’t be right; it would lose the envelope every time it jaunted back into the inner system, as in Swift’s day. And all that volcanic carbon dioxide must react with the hydrogen layer too...” He started to sound excited, his mind working quickly. “So something must be generating fresh hydrogen. And if that’s so—”

  “Yes?”

  “Let me think about it.” He glanced at me. “First things first. We need to deal with Gershon. Presumably the most disappointed man in the solar system. Let’s hear his message.” He tapped a screen.

  And there was Stavros Gershon.

  Yes, I was expecting disappointment. Even desperation. After all, whatever its true nature, Voga hadn’t lived up to his dreams.

  But he didn’t look disappointed to me.

  Gershon stood in a pressure suit, on the surface of Voga, with the Stars and Stripes beside him, and his ship set down neatly on the surface beyond. He was grinning through his visor.

  And he had what looked like explosive, strapped by an elasticated belt around his waist.

  Salo and I shared a glance. Anxiety gnawed my stomach.

  Gershon said now, “Hi, guys. You two in the Malenfant, who trailed me out here, and whoever follows after. I appreciate your efforts, believe me. But you’re too late. This is a recording, and that’s all you’ll ever get from me.

  “Look—I achieved what I came here for. Primarily, anyhow. My own footprints and flags moment, yeah. And I was right about Swift and the anomalous density of this boulder, right? I confirmed this place exists, and established its true nature. Some achievement, in interplanetary geology, and in the history of literature. Even if I didn’t get it quite right.

  “I never thought Voga would be gold! That was just a headline. I did hope it was going to be a mother lode of—something special. Heavy, exotic elements. Radioactive, maybe. A resource lode on the edge of the Solar System, which might have jolted us out of this Pull Back to Earth crap, if not now, some day. Just knowing it was here, on the edge of interstellar space, might have drawn us back... Well. It wasn’t to be.

  “But there is something else I can do, I figure. Another way I can make this place attractive to future visitors.”

  Salo growled, “And make sure you are remembered, and not as a failure...”

  Gershon’s gloved right hand moved to his belt. I sensed Salo tensing up beside me.

  “So this isn’t a fuel lode, but it’s a world, right? A world of rock and water, and carbon and oxygen. A world that’s not so terribly unlike o
urs—maybe as Earth was when it was much younger—but a world without life. And maybe that’s something I can change, right here, right now.” His right hand still on his belt, with his left hand he dug into a pouch and produced a book, an old-fashioned paper volume. “I have here a copy of the Holy Bible, King James version.”

  Salo frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Archaic religious text. Judaeo-Christian, I think. All about how God created the Earth, and everything that lives on it.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  Gershon said, “I know the old religions are out of favour now, but—well, I’m pretty much out of favour myself, aren’t I? So.” Now he raised the Bible in his left hand. “Genesis, Chapter One, Verse 10: ‘And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas, and God saw that it was good.’”

  Salo growled, “No, no, you idiot. I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to blow yourself up, right? But you don’t get it.”

  “‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth; and it was so...’”

  Salo muttered, “And this is a recording. We’re too late, too late.”

  “Too late for what? To save his life?”

  “No! To save the damn planet. Because there is already life here. Don’t you see?”

  I didn’t, not then.

  And neither had Gershon, evidently. Because he finished his reading, closed up the Bible in his left hand, and closed his right hand over a control at his belt.

  “‘And God saw that it was good.’” He smiled.

  All we saw after that was static.

  I GUESS I’LL never fully understand Gershon’s motivation.

  He had no family he was close to, back home. A network of friends whose stipends had funded his mission, I supposed. Or acolytes, folk he dazzled.

  Gershon wanted to be remembered, I guess. And not just as a logically reconstructed trace in an Archive. In a world without heroes, Gershon had grown up in the shadow of his Mars-walking ancestor Ralph, who was an authentic hero, and would never be forgotten. Whereas Stavros had no kids, no enduring achievement on Earth. And he was fifty, a tipping point in anybody’s life. He wanted to be remembered, and not just in a catalogue of grinning Last Small Step adventurers. He wanted more. He wanted to change the world—a world, anyhow.

  I’m no romantic. A child of my more settled times, I guess. But something in me was touched by the wistfulness of his gesture, as if we were remembering a common childhood. Or maybe it was all just a sublimated fear of death.

  In any case our world just doesn’t work like that anymore. We don’t need that kind of hero. We won’t allow it.

  When I reran the recording, I saw that the detonation had blown down Gershon’s flag.

  And, just before the detonation itself, that Gershon had been crying.

  WE BROKE INTO our coffee hoard. That’s how bad we felt.

  But when I had time to think it all over, I had a glimmer of hope. Not for Voga, or Gershon. For us.

  After we had calmed down for an hour or so, I broke the ice. “You were a couple of steps ahead of me there, buddy. Tell me what you meant by saving the planet.”

  “I meant save it from Gershon. Who, I guess, was trying to seed it with Earth life. In his suit there would’ve been caches of blue-green algae. Closing the ecological loops, pumping out oxygen to balance the suit-wearer’s breathing out of carbon dioxide. Release that, I guess he figured, and even in this wan sunlight the algae could start busily photosynthesising, and pumping oxygen into Voga’s air. And Earth life gets a foothold. It might have worked.”

  “Well, is that so bad?”

  “Yes! Because Voga already has life! It must. The hydrogen envelope, remember? That keeps the surface warm, but must get regularly stripped away, as the planet approaches the Sun.”

  “Ah. Right. So, you think, there must be some kind of—of hydrogen-excreting bug down there that replaces the hydrogen in the air.”

  “The way photosynthetic bugs on Earth replenish the oxygen, yes. And the hydrogen layer keeps the whole world warm, including the bugs, until Voga returns to the sunlight once more.”

  “It’s a deep space Gaia, then. Life and geology working together to sustain a living world.”

  “I think so. I’m guessing. The point is, though, that if Earth life does get established here, it will start releasing oxygen, that’s going to react with the hydrogen, to make water—there will be a one-off rain—and the hydrogen greenhouse will shut down for good, and everything will freeze. The Earth bugs too.”

  “Not good.”

  “Indeed. Gershon should have figured it out himself... We’ll have to confirm all this when we go down to the surface. Ideally, by finding some hydrogen-excreting bugs.”

  “Right. And we do have to go down to the surface, don’t we?”

  “We do,” Salo said heavily. “Our primary mission was to get Gershon under control before he harmed the planet. Well, now he has smeared himself all over the place—”

  “We’ll have to go down and clean it all up.”

  “Every scrap,” he said gloomily. “And then we have to wait years until the retrieval crew gets out here, and slog our way home.”

  That was my cue. “Maybe not,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Hm?”

  I nodded at the images of the planet in our screens. “We need hydrogen propellant, right? Well, there’s a big fat layer of it just waiting for us out there. If we could rig up some kind of scoop, I’m thinking, and have Malenfant dip into the outer layers of the atmosphere—”

  His eyes widened.

  “We could cannibalise One Small Step for tankage—”

  “Winifred, you’re a genius.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But a criminal genius. They used to call that technique profac. Mining a world’s air for fuel. It’s illegal now. Because it’s an example of in situ resource utilisation: making your own fuel, and messing up the local environment in the process.”

  “It’s not illegal if we are trying to save our lives.”

  He frowned, evidently thinking hard. “True, but strictly speaking we’re just cutting short an unpleasantly long stay. On the other hand, we are reducing the risk of some malfunction killing us off in the years before the relief crew gets here, aren’t we? Maybe there’s a case... We need legal advice. Where’s the nearest Answerer?”

  “Two hundred AU away.”

  He grinned.

  “We could always send a message—”

  “Shut up.”

  I thought it over. “I wonder if Armstrong used in situ resource utilisation to get back from the Moon.”

  Salo shrugged. “Don’t know. Gulliver did, for sure. Built a canoe to get away from the land of the Houyhnhnms. Used the skin of yahoos to make a sail. But that’s another story. You finished your coffee? Let’s get to work.”

  So we did.

  You know, it’s a shame. If Gershon had stuck to the Last Small Step rules, at least we could have left the standard marker. As it was, Joe Salo scrubbed every square centimetre of rock clean of his footsteps.

  And I took down his flag and brought it home.

  ONCE ON THE BLUE MOON

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  ONE MAN CRADLING one large laser rifle stood in the doorway of the luxury suite. Colette sprawled on the threadbare carpet. Her dad had shoved her behind him when he saw the guy at the door, and she had tripped over the retractable ottoman.

  Good job, Dad, she nearly said, because that was her default response when he did something stupid, but she didn’t say it, because her gaze remained on that rifle. And so did her dad’s.

  Dad had probably wanted her to run into one of the bedrooms, and that would’ve made sense if the guy at the door with the rifle hadn’t seen her, but he had, and then he had said something softly and beckoned at someone else.

  Mom
was standing beside the door, actually threading her hands together. Colette felt both a growing fear and a growing irritation. Fear, because she had probably caused this. Day One, she had swiped one of those stupid tablets that the concierge on this level used to keep track of everything on the ship.

  The lower levels, without the suites, used holographic screens for the guests, or some lazy person could call up a holographic face to make suggestions.

  But here, real people were actually in the passengers’ business, as if the Blue Moon was still one of the most luxurious starliners in the solar system.

  It wasn’t luxurious. It had been luxurious, maybe, in the Good Old Days when her grandparents had been kids. Dad said the ship had a “mystique,” whatever that meant, but Colette had investigated the ship on her own and found the ad that had probably gotten Dad’s attention:

  Travel in luxury at one-thousandth the price!

  Apparently, if you didn’t care what kind of cargo the ship carried, then you could have a luxury suite on your trip from wherever to wherever. Theirs was from a starbase beyond Saturn to some place called Montreal because that was the last boarding school that could handle someone like her.

  All of this had been Mother’s idea, even though all of it had been Colette’s fault.

  Another man arrived at the door. He was small, barely taller than Colette, and she hadn’t reached her full growth yet. (Mother had said that she would when puberty hit, which could be Any Minute Now.) The man had glittering black eyes, a leathery face, and thin lips that quirked upward when he saw her.

  “A kid,” he said, as if he was surprised.

  Colette almost said, I’m not a kid! and then thought the better of it. Maybe she’d get a pass on stealing that tablet. Children couldn’t be responsible for their actions after all.

  “I didn’t realize there was a kid on board,” the man said, musing. “I didn’t think children were allowed on vessels like this.”

  Yeah, Colette had seen that regulation too, and she knew that her dad had gotten it waived. They needed to get to Earth yesterday, or so Mother had said. It was never hard for Dad to get things waived.