Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  He doesn’t yet know it was me that did it.

  I measure the moments between his loss and betrayal. I wonder if he’ll be proud of me anyway.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say, though I’m older than he is now.

  ~ Spiral Arm Prime Axis Museum, Galactic Center ~

  Honored Chronometrist. Breaker of Losses. Momentist. Degenerate. The Horologist B.V. (Beneficence Valorous) Sand’s titles vary according to the proximity of Sol and the Terran planets. However, her impact on how the Spiral Arm uses microseconds, from payment to salvage, is as constant as time itself.

  I HEAR GALEN telling the new crew “Beneficence won’t be a bother,” and I smile, my ear cupped against the door to the navigation room. I am eight. I want to skip, just once, down the metal passageway of the Verdant Nine, but my boots are magnetized to grab the floor.

  The new engineer murmurs another question about the motherless child stomping the gangways in tiny mag boots. Galen’s smooth voice echoes. “Don’t worry. I teach her myself. She’s immaculate.”

  Over the years, new engineers, stevedores, nannies, and galley staff on the Verdant Nine have learned that means I’ll stay out of the way, mostly, that I won’t paint the gangways with Venusian phosphors or ask too many questions. Mostly, I’m learning to steer the ship. It’s going to be mine someday. Galen’s promised.

  He buys wind-up rocket toys from Phobos, bio-luminescent clock kits from Ganymede, the same place he bought my egg long ago.

  He ships parts for navigational modifications with the toys, technology to help the ship go faster and recorders to cover that up. “It’s a game I have with Terran officials,” he says, showing me how to play. “The game is primarily set between the Jovian planets and the galaxy’s greater spiral arm, which is opening up to traders and freight. That means more ships are foldjumping, and everyone must measure where an object in orbit will be at a given moment in relation to all other objects in motion. Time is part of that measurement. That’s what the Consistency’s trying to control—especially as wide-open local spaces became cluttered with objects, all in motion. But their clocks aren’t perfect. In a foldjump, navigation tells you how fast you can go, but not how much time you’ll lose when you pass through a gravity well. Those are very small. The chronometers slow a little with each transit. More moments go missing. Those errors are small too. But, Beneficence, even a tiny loss in a billion-kilometer journey can create an error that is not so small—one percent of a billion kilometers is still a lot of room for things to go wrong.”

  I nod, squinting, trying to see what he means. “But how is that a game?”

  He smiles. “It’s a game because there’s also a lot of room for things to go right. We just need to time things to our advantage, until there’s a better clock available.”

  “Okay,” I agree. Though I’m still hazy on the details. Even at eight, I know that a percent of a billion kilometers is a scary span of space.

  Galen special orders more mag boots to arrive at our next port of call when it looks like I’m growing out of mine. “There’s nothing that tells time better than a child,” he laughs at a rare crew dinner. My tenth birthday. The crew laughs with him.

  Do I mind being a kit-kid? My egg selected from a catalog for intellect, math especially? Delivered by drone, according to Galen? Various nannies who come and go on their transits seem to think it’s normal, so if Galen doesn’t mind, I don’t either. He’s preparing me for greatness; says he didn’t want any interference. That’s why I don’t have siblings and Galen doesn’t have iterations. The whole ship is mine.

  “Watch and learn,” Galen ends a navigation lesson, “and you’ll bring fame to the Verdant Nine. I can only bring us wealth.” His brown eyes glitter with screenlight. The calculations for a high-speed transit from Io to Europa span three panels before us. The ship’s already underway. The real-time numbers change with their trajectory.

  Time and distance equal speed: my first variables.

  The patterns they make, my first toys.

  As we plot the arc that we need to swing for the fastest route, he adds, “You will bring us glory.”

  But I’m still worried. “What if we get lost, like the Anathremon Six?” Somewhere out there in the vast space between moments.

  “That captain got sloppy,” Galen says. “And the Consistency refused to calibrate the Anathremon’s chronometers. They’ve made themselves the standard keepers for system navigation, for safety’s sake. But it’s also another way to control us. We keep track of our own instruments better than the Consistency can. Better than the Anathremon. I make sure our timing doesn’t slip, no matter what. The Consistency doesn’t like it, but I don’t care. You understand? That won’t happen to us. Okay?”

  I nod again and Galen shows me how he calibrates the Verdant Nine’s navigation, then lets me try it myself. The screens seem to gleam with his trust and my data as Galen feeds my calculations to the navigator, then snaps his fingers and lifts me in the air.

  The enormous ship seems to move on my say-so.

  Happy in this moment, I hum a nanny song about the sun. But Galen raises an eyebrow.

  That quiets me to a single word. “Okay.” My voice as serious as I can make it. The tick-tock syllables sound like the ancient clock Galen bought for my berth as a gift. A wooden pendulum, the case painted black and gold.

  But when we arrive on Europa, a gang of Consistency drones meets us at the dock.

  Galen orders the crew to quarters, all but me. I scrunch closer to his side as the drones buzz loudly. Their carapaces bump Galen. Their sonorous chorus echoes displeasure. “We’ve received complaints that your clocks are running fast, Captain Sand. We’ve watched. You are running fast. The dock was not ready for you.”

  Galen only shrugs. “I was teaching Beneficence how to steer.” He gestures at me. “It won’t happen again.”

  The Consistency doesn’t acknowledge a child when it has better prey. “We think you’re playing the margins on early arrivals. Beating your competition, perhaps through illegal means? We’ve refused to synchronize ship chronometers for less. Licensed, standardized System navigation requires standardized clocks. For everyone’s benefit. You could be lost in space without us.”

  Galen makes his denials and, unable to prove anything, the Consistency turns to go.

  “Dad,” I whisper too loudly, “you said it was a game.” His hand squeezes mine hard as the swarm slows. “Okay.” I laugh and hum a sun-song to cover up my error.

  Galen smiles, lips pressed tight. The Consistency moves away, murmuring threats in their wake. “Like you’re not also gambling over microseconds,” Galen mutters to the retreating swarm.

  When they’re gone, he turns and I swallow hard. I’ll always remember how fierce his eyes, unblinking on mine, how he grips my shoulders with his strong fingers. “Time is an advantage, B.V. One that the Consistency and Terran planets control. They’ll do a lot to keep hold of that power. Don’t accept that. Don’t give up. There are people in the Spiral Arm searching for ways to make time better.”

  “Okay,” I say again. It seems the safest word.

  A few moments ago, a lifetime ago, I’d been worried that the Verdant Nine’s engineer would report catching me taking apart a shuttle’s timing device to see how it worked. The mess I’d made, far from immaculate. The engineer had let me help put the shuttle back together, so I’d hoped I was safe. But now I forget that worry, because his eyes are so fierce. I worry about the Consistency instead.

  Galen turns to watch the Ionians offload our shipment of ore. The Verdant Nine made good money on the run, because we got here first. But he drags his fingers through his curly hair. “Let’s go,” he says. “We’ll restock at the next port.” His voice hitches on the word “next.”

  We don’t get my mag boots.

  He’s scared. The Consistency rattled him somehow.

  We don’t go to Jupiter Main as I’d charted, either. He lands at Ganymede North instead—calls my unsuspecting e
gg-mother to come get me.

  Exchanges me for a hold full of fabric and instrumentation.

  “Work hard, and I’ll be back. Won’t be a moment.” Galen hangs a delicate Venusian cloud-clock on a chain around my neck before disappearing into his ship. Before I can find a word of protest. His boots don’t make a sound.

  The doors slip shut, shadows lengthen in the port warehouse, and he doesn’t come back out.

  When the light fades, then Verdant Nine takes off. Fast. He leaves me sitting on a lightcargo trunk I’ve decorated with stickers of all the moons and planets where we’ve called: Neptune, Jupiter, Europa, the outer Oorts.

  My mag boots bang the plastic case, too high to touch the ground. Crew from other ships bustle by, carefully not looking at me, as if I might be catching.

  “Okay,” I finally whisper. I stop staring at the place the Verdant Nine was. I scan the docks, the mist rising cool against the shelter. My eyes begin to ache. Maybe my mother’s face will look familiar, a mirror. I swallow back tears.

  I am immaculate when my mother arrives.

  “All right,” the woman whispers, taking my hand. We look nothing alike, except she has brown eyes too. So does Galen. She pricks my finger to check the match, then smiles. It’s almost enough. “Okay. Just for a little while.”

  ~ Ganymedian Sand Workshop Preserve ~

  In the Galactic Center planets, B.V. Sand is often pictured holding the final Quantum Degeneracy Chronometer (QD3) as a gold orb in her right hand, her calculations in her left. Sometimes, a ticking sound accentuates the immediacy of her accomplishment. These theatrical touches are inaccurate and here, at her home museum, we strive for as much accuracy as possible.

  For instance, the Sand QD3 chronometer is not a gold orb, and it was partly concealed within the deck of the Horologist’s rental ship. Composed of a cooling system and crystal lattice, the archaic structure also contained a series of anti-gravitational meshes, and two unique mechanisms of Sand’s own design. The recording device she truly held is neither spherical nor golden. We can assure you, also, that her calculations were projected before her on her screens. All other “traditional” renderings are inaccurate.

  At the time of the Synchronist’s Challenge, B.V. Sand was two and a half Jovian years of age. Her ship, the Rael, was under Neptunian flag for thirty years, and a Terran-orbit shuttle before that for at least forty years. The Anathremon Sixhad been missing for twenty-two years, the Verdant Nine for almost as long, and the Synchronist’s Challenge had gone unclaimed for twenty Terran cycles.

  Sand’s characteristic off-white tunic and multi-pocket duster, plus her ship-issued and ill-fitting mag boots, made her look like a landsider, especially among the ship’s wiry crew. Her hair, cropped, was bleached to match the duster. The look on her face, unlike the smile in many images, is grim.

  Details, especially of this moment, are important. Witness the threedee here:

  “You should leave with us,” her engineer Enric2 pleads before they take a shuttle back to Triton. “Warre Unkling’s got this wrapped up for Terra. Bookmakers have you at terrible odds. Don’t take our reputations down with you, chasing a ghost.”

  “I will continue,” she replies. “Alone.”

  This is the moment onboard the lightship d-sonnit Raelwhere B.V. Sand—who has lost two time trials already, and both of her own iterations; who is nearly broke; whose collaborators are leaving the ship before it commences its trial—gives up hope and latches on to belief.

  We’ve preserved the seconds in threedee and made shelf-size copies for those who would like to replay the inspiring transformation at home.

  The next moment—one of the seminal points in temporal history—where B.V. Sand discovers her chronometer not only confounds gravity wells, allows for multiple entanglements, and creates a much more exact frequency and distance ratio than traditional methods, but also has the unusual side effect of being able to save and store time—is only available at the Ganymede museum store for an admission fee of twenty-two seconds.

  ON GANYMEDE, IT is six months, then it is two years.

  It is point five parsecs.

  It is one-half light year and gaining—I track the Verdant Nine’s arcs and foldjumps on panels in my Ganymede study—until these disappear.

  The bright spot where they were, the ship’s velocity as it prepared to head for the outer arm forming a smooth arc. Then nothing. They don’t reappear. Did they calculate a jump wrong? Emerge with their bow in a meteor instead of open space? I shiver.

  It is an infinite span of time before I open my eyes and look again. Still nothing.

  Another ten days of sitting blankly through Ganymede history lessons in my mother’s co-op below the ice. Then I receive an incoming message, time stamped twelve days previous. “Work hard, I’ll be back in a moment.”

  My reply message, and all those after, disappear into silence. Lost.

  My mother, Bellaire, who loves mathematics, has a bright laugh, and five iterations—including two fellow mathematicians at the university who come by to distract me with equations and puzzles—eventually looks into my study and clears her throat. “You all right?”

  “I will be,” I answer. “I have to work hard.” Galen told me so.

  I am twelve. I say the same thing when I’m twelve and a half and Bellaire keeps asking.

  I don’t mind her asking.

  Then Bellaire brings home a lightcrate from the port. “Someone sent you clock parts.”

  I tear into the box, looking for a message. There isn’t anything but parts and the spaces between the parts.

  Bellaire shakes her head at the cables and lattices, the cooling systems. “Where will you put these?” She likes the elegance of math. She hates clutter. She’s said that’s why she didn’t want a child, though the idea of some distant immortality beyond iterations charmed her. She didn’t expect the return on her investment, but handles it, and me, with care.

  We’ve established an easy agreement: I don’t make messes.

  Talking with her is like talking with the nannies or the Verdant Nine’s engineer, but better. I like it. She sings sometimes. She lets me study anything I want.

  I study time.

  Moments, seconds, microseconds. The more I learn about them, the more I know this is how to find Galen, or at least how to make good on my promise to him, to make time better. To make him proud.

  In Bellaire’s home, the blue skydome has day and night effects and I can see the stars just like on Galen’s ship. I show my mother the clocks I’ve built from the crate. They keep even time, beating like tiny hearts. Mirroring the Venusian cloud clock around my neck. All synchronized.

  “Hear the spaces between beats? Those are where things fall through.” My father taught me that by disappearing. “I want to keep ships from falling through. Better clocks, better time.”

  “Explain it to me,” Bellaire says.

  “You never wanted a child,” I whisper, suddenly reluctant to show her more.

  Bellaire gathers me up in her arms and I’m shocked by the fierceness of this hug, over all the quick hugs we’ve shared in passing. “That was concept. This is real.”

  A few beats of breath. A moment where I close my eyes and listen to my heartbeat, hers. Then I try to show Bellaire how to synchronize time.

  I entangle two of the quark clocks, then set one at the end of the settlement, and put another on a co-op lightship. “Any two related objects are impacted by time, and driven to separation.”

  My mother smiles, nodding, ignoring the squawk from the co-op owner about the depletion of quantum supplies. “That’s a somewhat old idea.”

  “I agree.” She wins me over by not babying me. Galen never did either. But she doesn’t gleam with pride. What Bellaire offers is warm and constant, but soft.

  I ignore the clocks and do my chores without being asked for a month, basking in the softness. Then, one day beneath the icelight, she asks, “Finish your explanation?” She holds a recorder.
>
  I decide to see if I can make Bellaire proud. I retrieve the data from the outbound ship and pair it with the chronometer that remained on Ganymede. “These two are like modern chronometers that the Consistency provides ships. When they travel, different events impact them, and the clocks return subtly different. The other one will have scrapes where it got banged up in a hold. This one will have weather damage from the ice.” I run my fingers across my ship-regulation short hair, thinking. “Chronometers start off synchronized but after many years, transit-wise, exposure to different gravities, different environments, even crystal lattice clocks need a tune up. And they’ve been going out of synch the whole time, by picoseconds.” I pause and look at the clock data. “At least, that’s how Galen explained it to me.”

  And now Galen and I are traveling apart.

  I send the landbound entangled clock to the recycler.

  Bellaire pulls it from the garbage and sends it, along with my presentation, to her university’s science department. I gain a small grant to study navigation. When I graduate, her eyes meet and hold mine, still soft and warm. “You worked so hard.”

  I can bask in the warmth. But it’s not enough.

  ~ Ganymedian Sand Workshop Preserve ~

  This museum and preserve, two and a half kilometers below the ice, on the shores of sub-glacial lake 17, next to Sand’s mother’s home contains: Two ancient atomic clocks, cooled with lake emissions. One Venetian cloud chronometer (its motions broken during transport and never successfully fixed). A piece of wood supposedly from the original Terran, H4 Marine Chronometer. A Gas Storm Timepiece from one of Jupiter’s stormtribes. (Sand quite likes that one though she cannot get it working consistently.) Sixteen versions of Quantum Degeneracy clock attempts, plus one brass orb model of the final clock, created by Domain Fabergé as a memorial. A threedee depiction of stolen time, developed by the museum. A copy of the original Synchronist’s Challenge, hand-lettered on a commemorative pin. A crystal memorial of Je Yun’s original Galactic Chronometer, and a loop of one of Sand’s iconic personas.