Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  The ghost materialised beside her. It looked at the roiling red and purple skies, and for a moment they both saw Saturn and its rings as it rose in the heavens above.

  “It’s beautiful,” the ghost of Abu Nasr said.

  Rania looked at him sideways. The ghost flickered in out and of her field of vision. She turned her eyes back to the flight path. The storm had lashed down on the Kraken Sea, lightning flashing over the bays and alcoves of the shoreline, and for a moment she thought she saw a fleet of black ships illuminated on the waves, sailing away from the Mayda Insula.

  Rania tilted the plane and swooped in a long curve south, away from the storm. She looked down on her world, the quiet and the splendour of that land of methane lakes and seas. It wasn’t perfect. Nowhere was. But it was home.

  “Yes,” Rania said. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  CLOUDSONG

  NICK WOLVEN

  THE LEGATE SUITE on Warren had all the newest amenities: ambient engineering, mood-adaptive algorithms, even morphifoam furniture that took any shape you chose—so long as it was curvy, soft, and indistinguishable from a finely sculpted blob. Of course, the specs were ancient and the style absurdly retro, but out in the wilds of the Darkling zone, what could an interworld legate expect?

  Anander Flyte’s only complaint was that he had nothing good to smash. No door to slam, no plants to topple. Not even a desk to pound a filebook on. He could throw a waterbulb at the wall, but it only bounced.

  Anander threw it anyway. “I can’t believe they would do this. It is absolutely intolerable.”

  From the exit valve, Maximilian watched in his palace-guard pose, chest out, eyes ahead, hands tucked with defiant dignity behind his back.

  “They know we’re on a schedule. Do they think this is some kind of company junket?” Anander pounded the chair until it assumed a new shape, spindly and elaborate, a cat’s cradle of morphifoam tensegrity. He gave it a wallop.

  The structure crumpled. Sprang back.

  Most unsatisfying.

  “Do they think I came here to poke my nose in a hole, sniff the local flavors of dirt? To tour some shadowy, half-lit hollow? This isn’t a sightseeing trip.”

  “Nevertheless.” Maximilian managed to accentuate his ramrod posture—a slight sucking in of the stomach, an incremental clench of the buttocks—conveying not only impatience, but disapproval. “According to the terms of the agreement—”

  “Oh, spare me the terms.” Anander quit abusing the furnishings and scooped up the fallen waterbulb. He popped the straw and sipped. The suite opted for calming imagery, waterscapes, a rhythmic roar. “It wasn’t I who set the terms, Max. Why should I be the one to sort this out?”

  Despair stifled him as he thought, for the eightieth time that hour, of the tremendous blow to his fortunes. Failure! At this stage in his career. And not only a failure, but the most critical, epical, apocalyptic, humiliating insult a legate could receive...

  It was unthinkable. Anander snapped a finger at the wall, demanding an ambience suited to his mood. The room obliged with a view of Jovian storms.

  “What exactly is their objection, anyway?”

  Maximilian brought his arms from behind his back, revealing twenty-four long, thin fingers, each with far too many joints. Amazing, Anander thought, what the man can communicate with only a subtle flick of those digits. But this was the gift of the secretarial orders. They were neurally wired for uptightness.

  Maximilian gestured at the walls, dimming the room to a semblance of sylvan shade.

  “The Darklings,” said Maximilian, now dappled with leafy shadow, “have re-evaluated their earlier position. They say Project Snowfall cannot be allowed to go ahead as planned.”

  “But they signed an agreement!” Seeing Maximilian’s expression, Anander hurried on, “And when did they come to this great epiphany?”

  His secretaid sighed. “They held a council, it seems, while your shuttle was en route. The assembly voted to annul the agreement.”

  “Did they give a thought, perchance, to how this would be received by the InterOrbital administration? The inner worlds? My superiors? To the effect it would have on my—”

  Anander stifled his rage. A wind had gathered in the virtual underbrush, sweeping the scenery of simulated trunks, disturbing the bower of morphifoam branches, even fretting the slicked-down locks of Maximilian’s impeccable hair. The room had picked up his suppressed emotions.

  “What are they claiming, Max?”

  The secretaid cleared his throat. “The Darklings say, Anander, that Project Snowfall cannot proceed because...” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Because they believe the affected area to be inhabited.”

  Winds, real and virtual, shrieked around the room. The mock-forest dissolved in a whirl of leaves. Maximilian’s hair became a brown flurry.

  And Anander Flyte, to his delighted surprise, discovered it was actually possible, with enough frenzied passion, to beat even the most resilient morphifoam chair to a quivering pile of pulp.

  “Now, that,” he roared, spiking the waterbulb, “that is completely crazy.”

  THE INNER WORLDS of the solar system had many salient advantages. Bright, dense, mineral-rich, they were humankind’s natural habitat.

  But they had hazards. Foremost: radiation. The billion-year brush of invisible death that swept away air and water with it, flensing the friable stuff of life from naked rock.

  Mars needed water. Ganymede needed water. The Floating Cities of the interplanetary void, they definitely needed water.

  Even Earth could have used a new icy moonlet to feed the sweet clear stuff of life to its growing cloud of orbital junk.

  Once upon a time, long ago, superheated cities on an overwarmed Earth had towed icebergs from polar seas, anchoring them offshore, freshening inhabitants with the cool wet winds of weather-hacked microclimates. Epic ice transport: it was a venerable profession.

  The asteroid belt had ice, but it was locked up in a patchwork of minipols, city states, and feudal regimes. A confederacy of dunces: those reckless colonizers had polluted their turf with experimental bacteria, unlicensed replicators, poisonous spores of ersatz life. You couldn’t kick a rock out there without running a thousand environmental checks.

  Sensing a crisis, the government at InterOrbital had crunched the numbers. Factoring current rates of resource discovery, planned terraforming schemes, projected trends of population increase—plus those great underestimated hydrosinks, thermal regulation, and radiation shielding—they had prophesied total systemic collapse within two thousand years.

  But there remained a vast and accessible reservoir...unclaimed, unexplored, effectively infinite.

  The plan was superhumanly farsighted. Munchers—minute, fast-traveling, densely programmed replicators—would invade the many icy pebbles of the Kuiper Belt. Multiplying from a selected point of origin, the tiny machines would convert the vast snowfield to a swarm of guided projectiles. All preprogrammed with two directives: to propagate through the rocks of the solar hinterlands, and to later outgas in explosive fashion, altering the subtle dance of orbits, sending a supply of comets wheeling toward the inner worlds.

  In one thousand years, the first would arrive.

  Within two thousand, more. And still more. And ever more—in a cascade that harnessed the power of exponential increase to combat the solar system’s enormous emptiness.

  The munchers had been programmed. The launchers were set to deploy. A project ninety years in the planning had reached its final stage.

  Yet.

  There remained one tiny, almost trivial hassle.

  The Kuiper Belt was unclaimed. But to reach it...to send out the munchers, reel in the comets...to make the sky rain watery manna for futurity’s generations...

  For this, it would be necessary to transit the outer orbits. The distant wilds, far past the frontiers of the moon dwellers, far, far past the reach of IO jurisdiction, out in the blackness and the cold of the remote territories,
where the constellations of the great strange beyond overwhelmed the bright pinprick of Sol, and the deeps of the inhospitable universe yawned to swallow the frail human ego.

  In the grand chronology of the solar clock, time was running out. And Anander Flyte had come with pomp and haste to wrangle a final territorial concession, here at the limit of human survival, the boundary of law, the edge of imagination—

  Where the Darklings lived.

  “ARE YOU READY, Legate?”

  Anander could become, with help from certain technological tweaks, master of his emotions. He felt for his pressure point, jamming a thumb under his jaw. The room settled as his frustration abated.

  “What can I look forward to?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.” With fingers like crab legs, Maximilian straightened his hair. “I believe the Darklings have planned a demonstration.”

  “Have they offered terms? Prepared a statement? Given us any sense of their position?”

  “As I understand, Legate, they mean to take you on a tour.”

  Somewhere in the depths of his cortex, Anander’s anger stirred. “A tour?”

  “They don’t wish to risk an interorbital incident. They believe that persuasive measures, properly applied, will win you over to their point of view.”

  “And convince me to pass a death sentence on the solar system?”

  Maximilian shrugged. Anander shut his eyes. He was here for a reason. He was the best diplomat InterOrbital had on staff.

  The Darklings themselves had requested him.

  Before setting out on his mission, Anander had prepared himself in body and mind for feats of superhuman diplomacy.

  He had spliced a connectome for heightened social intelligence.

  A round of surgery, a weekly injection, daily doses of sensory reinforcement...

  The rewiring of a brain’s neural net was one of InterOrbital’s subtlest arts. Anander’s new, delicate weave of synapses and associations gave him uncanny powers of concentration, a talent for improvisation, and a certain clarity of mind.

  The treatment also made him subject to mental spasms—patterns of association that collapsed into recurring cycles, entered catastrophic feedback loops, gravitated to strange attractors of neural phasespace. In layman’s terms, Anander was obsessive. Recurring thoughts afflicted him.

  He clenched his fists.

  Two Martian years out, two back. My genius wasted on a Hail Mary mission. The peak period of my diplomatic career, burned up in an embodied crawl to nowhere. And for what? To be rebuffed by a mob of savages?

  “The Darklings are waiting, Legate.”

  Anander controlled himself. “Send them in.”

  Anander, as a courtesy, dimmed the lights. The exit valve opened. And the Darklings came through.

  Even without his neural modifications, Anander could appreciate InterOrbital’s dilemma. By any reasonable measure—population, wealth, power—the inner worlds outclassed the solar system’s far-flung colonies. Distance was their adversary. They couldn’t project their power. The Darklings—remote settlers—were undisputed masters of the outer orbits.

  Diplomacy was essential. But diplomacy was hard. Communications latency marred every virtual assembly. Someone had to travel out here—someone embodied, corporeal, human—to make an in-person appeal.

  So, yes, Anander appreciated the importance of his task.

  That didn’t make it any easier.

  The Darklings entered in a tangled clump, scurrying across the morphifoam floor. To inworlders, they were a semimythical people, bizarrely modified bogeymen inhabiting a wild frontier. Anander had been tutored in their culture.

  He knelt to address the furry mass.

  “Reverend Elders of Warren! I, Anander Flyte, bring greetings to you from the members of the InterOrbital Assembly.”

  The Darklings murmured in welcome. Even these remote people spoke the common tongue. Words, however, were of secondary importance. Among Darklings, touch was the chief form of communication. And not the brusque handshakes of Earth. Contact, for Darklings, was an intimate dance of plucks, brushes, pinches, and caresses. It could be... unsettling.

  And there were so many of them.

  “As the Assembly’s chosen legate to the outer worlds,” Anander continued, “I humbly beseech you to remember the treaty that was filed thirty Martian years ago. And I beg you to consider the welfare of your distant neighbors in the inner orbits—”

  The mass of bodies at his feet stirred. Anander found it hard to believe the huddle consisted of many separate beings. He counted eleven...twelve individuals, all with the same pert, furry faces. They were lemur-like in form: tufted ears, long tails.

  A member of the group spoke. “We understand, Anander Flyte. We watch your lives in the visionglass. We know what you desire.”

  “Then you must know—” Anander began.

  “Your viral machines must not infect the iceworlds, inworlder. Life, intelligent life, dwells in the clouds above the lower planets. We have listened to the heavens. We have heard their song.”

  Anander remembered that the Darklings viewed the solar system as a hierarchy. Below, from their perspective, lay the rocky planets: archaic, backward, semibarbaric. Higher up were the gasworlds, numinous and enlightened. Higher still, one came to the heavenly clouds of the greater orbits, full of mystical dust and interstellar wind.

  Like all cosmologies, this one had its superstitions.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” Anander said, “that there are aliens living in the Kuiper Belt—out there in the middle of nothing?”

  The Darklings spoke as a group, many answering at once. “Not aliens. It is the Old Ones who live there. The ancient people, who first flew to the clouds.”

  Anander lifted wondering eyes to Maximilian.

  “It seems to me,” the secretaid said, “that the Darklings believe human beings to be living in the Kuiper Belt. A sort of Lost Tribe legend. It’s a common bit of folklore, even in the gasworlds. The moonfolk of Uranus believe—”

  “I know what they’re saying, Max. But how can I possibly—” Anander turned back to the Darklings. “You have to understand, it’s impossible for anyone to be living out there. There’s so little energy from any natural source. A few drips and drabs of radiation, most of it of the killing kind. Anyone generating the power necessary to sustain human life—it would take engineering on a massive scale. Our surveys would detect it.”

  The Darklings withdrew their hands: a gesture of negation.

  “The Old Ones live. They are superhuman, yes. But your instruments would not have detected them.”

  “But you can’t simply assert this. Violating the treaty, canceling the project...trillions of lives are at stake. Without proof—”

  A tremor passed through the huddle of furred bodies. Something moved rapidly through two dozen hands. Anander made out two joined, slim tubes.

  A viewing scroll. He pulled the tubes apart, revealing the screen, and thumbed the switch to a slow speed.

  The contents slid by: thousands of tiny dots.

  “What am I looking at here?” The Darklings were hushed in the presence of their sacred document. Anander looked from face to furry face. “Is this some sort of code? An encrypted signal?” Tentative fingers plucked at his robe. “Am I supposed to understand this?”

  “It is the voice of the Old Ones,” a dozen mouths murmured in response.

  “How can I know that? What does it say? Have you deciphered it? Have you any idea where it came from?”

  Palms patted him, toes poked him, tiny noses tapped his legs. With surprise, Anander realized the Darklings were ushering him toward the door. Reassuring murmurs rose from the group.

  “We have prepared...”

  “...a presentation...”

  “You must meet...”

  “...the interpreters.”

  “They will...”

  “...make all clear.”

  As he stumbled to the exit, Anander glanced in alarm
at Maximilian. “Are we really going along with this?”

  “It would seem,” said the secretaid, moving to join the group, “that we have little choice.”

  ANANDER AND MAXIMILIAN clambered up a dim, twisting tunnel, fumbling along the sculpted rock walls.

  Far from the friendly climes of the inner worlds, the Darklings were aficionados of subterranean living. Their habitats were typical moonlets, spinning balls of excavated rock. But unlike the dwellers of the Inner Belt, the Darklings made no attempt to simulate greener pastures in their artificial caves. There were no ersatz suns, no lakes or forests. Nothing resembling open sky.

  Only tunnels. Warm, dim, and cozy.

  Somewhere in humanity’s genetic heritage lay a deep-seated instinct for close quarters. Call it a touch of ancestral claustrophilia. With successive tweaks to the human genome, each generation of Darklings had doubled down on those inherited tendencies. Darkling society and Darkling physiology favored the pleasures of intimate contact. They loved to cuddle, to huddle, to nest. A day in their life was like a group massage at an excellent slumber party.

  The tunnels themselves tended toward labyrinthine complexity. After fifteen turns, Anander gave up tracking the route, letting the Darklings guide him with their furry hands.

  “Where exactly is it that we’re going?”

  “Inward,” Maximilian said behind him. “Toward the center of the asteroid.”

  Anander sighed. It didn’t take a genius to notice that the rotational gravity had dropped as they climbed the sloping rock passages. But it hadn’t dropped much by the time they turned and entered a large apartment.

  Like all Darkling habitations the place was dimly lit, roughly hewn, and scattered with glowing niches and pits that simulated the throb of firelight. Anander’s head brushed the ceiling. He was surprised to discover accommodations suited to an inworld habitation: morphifoam furniture, a Martian media box, even the luxury of an old-fashioned bed. The chambers were divided by swinging doors, an extreme gaucherie in Darkling society.