Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  Nicole said, "I am useless for most of that, and if you want me, phone me. Specifications of what I found are on the big screen here."

  "And this is my chance to interview Nicole and record whatever comes up," Stephanie said, and followed her out. Lars said nothing and didn't look at either of them, intent on putting together his "response teams" and "brainstormers" and "issue teams," but Stephanie saw by the set of his shoulders that he was as angry as he permitted himself to be in public.

  Out on the deck, the sky was clear, and after Nicole spoke on her wristcom with the bridge, they turned off running lights; the sky was instantly powdered with stars, with hundreds of minute shooting stars crossing from northeast to southwest.

  "The iron," Stephanie said, staring up at it. "Lars is so terrified that that is what has caused this... um, this whatever this is."

  "Well, he might be right, but that's not a reason for him to be upset, if I'm guessing right. The iron enrichment did what it was supposed to do and took an immense amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, and it fed a lot of people along the way. Nothing to be ashamed of for that."

  "What are you guessing?"

  Nicole extended her hand. "Come on over here; it's more exposed but we can see better. Let me lay out this thought. Before we towed asteroids into orbit around the earth, fastened robots onto them, and started shooting chunks of iron into the atmosphere above the Southern Ocean, what was the main reason why this area wasn't producing much biomass?"

  "Well, lack of iron, obviously."

  "And where did the little bit of iron there was come from?"

  "Meteors. That was the argument for why it was safe to do this. Because the process was completely natural, and they were just ramping it up."

  "There you go. Now just watch and think about all these meteors for a while; see if I can lead you onto my guess. I've got a better grip than you, so let me hold you so you don't have to worry about slipping off."

  Her strong arms gripped around Stephanie's waist, holding her tight, and Nicole's body shielded her from the wind, now coming from astern; she gazed up at the unending procession of shooting stars, streaking down into the atmosphere as the bombardment from the asteroid chunks continued. Some people wanted this shut down as soon as the strange growth started, but there was no proof that the iron was driving it, and the artificial meteor shower has been going on for decades, Stephanie thought. But that's politics and policy, and Nicole doesn't care about those things, so that isn't what she's trying to make me see.

  What does she care about? I barely know her.

  The horizon to horizon smear of stars was streaked everywhere with swift shooting stars. Nicole's arms and body held her warm and safe on the freezing deck. The shooting stars plus the security turned her mind to thoughts of being a small girl, back when father had told her the forest might die from the heat and the dryness, back when she had watched the little screen and seen her father's old friend, Lars, explaining what they would have to do, because there was no longer time for anything gradual...

  That awakened other memories on the screen, of Lars standing with Nicole, the police arresting him, the trial scenes, the moment when he and Nicole came down the steps with arms raised in triumph...

  She thought of the short videos, when she was in grade school, of the solar sail rigs dragging chunks of the iron asteroids, as big as airplane hangars, into Earth orbit, of the toy-truck-like pebblers, tunnelers, melters, and shooters crawling over surface of each chunk of iron like so many swarming termites, of the dozen barrels on each shooter spraying bits of iron, anything in size from a sesame seed to a tennis ball, out at a rate of dozens per minute... Lars's voiceover explaining how a million little meteors a day could cool the Earth, bring back the rains, feed the fish to feed the people...

  Of her graduating class trip, the first time she had been south of the equator, standing on the deck of the big tour ship and watching the iron come in to make the oceans bloom... just a couple of years, then, before she met Lars...

  And Nicole had been here all that time, fresh back to Earth when the plan was announced, walking the seabed and swimming between the icebergs before the first artificial meteors fell...

  Nicole had lived a whole lifetime before hers, and how was she to judge it or understand it? She knew only that she trusted the person holding her, and knew that humaniform and human, daughter of the far planets and daughter of Africa, at least shared wanting to know more than wanting to govern, and placed truth before rules.

  She thought until she said, "You think this is a natural process. Those... um, gasoline trees grow whenever the ocean blooms for long enough."

  "That's what I think," Nicole agreed.

  "What are they for?"

  "Stephanie, evolution doesn't have a purpose; they're not for anything. The question is what they do."

  Stephanie let her back press backward slightly, turning and raising her shoulders for a more secure place in Nicole's hold. She thought for an instant that the warmth on the back of her neck, between cap and collar, was Nicole's breath, then realized she didn't breathe; it was the radiated warmth from her face. "Do you know what they do?"

  "I have one idea that's pretty crazy," Nicole said. "That's why while we've been standing here I've been sending the captain my text about it, and that's why I'm going to hold onto you till we go below."

  "You're predicting something big?"

  "These things rushing up toward the surface are about twenty times as big as the biggest redwood, back before the warming killed them. The safest thing, the almost-Lars-in-its-tepid-chicken-shitness thing, that I can possibly say is, 'I'm predicting something big.'"

  Stephanie said, "I probably shouldn't laugh at him. He's my husband."

  "Didn't mean to put you in an awkward spot. I still love him, myself, and how many ex-wives can say that after a few decades? But he's about safety and security, making the world more certain than it would be otherwise. It's a necessary part of the ecology of life. But so is surprise and amazement and wonder. And considering he married me... and now he's married to you... I think he knows that he needs some of that in his life, too." Her grip tightened, pulling Stephanie closer. "Whatever is about to happen should happen in the next minute."

  The ship barely rocked; overhead, the flurry of meteors continued, dug from the asteroids, fired into the Earth, politically guaranteed forever by the International Fishing Association, as Stephanie had said once in an article. The stars twinkled, and the ocean's surface all around them began to rise into dark pools. The ship's jets fired and Clarke scooted two hundred meters at top speed, almost throwing them to the deck, her stern swinging round to stop her just as quickly with another blast of the jets. As they scrambled to their feet, the dark pools welled up, into swellings, springs, hills of water punching through the thick mat, geysers, immense towers of seawater reaching toward the stars above them.

  Nicole's hands found the hip-belt of Stephanie's parka, and for one absurd second she thought her husband's ex intended to pants her out here. She started to laugh, but the sound was lost in the boom of seawater rushing into the sky; she closed her mouth as water poured down over the deck, and opened her eyes on the sight of immense black columns, far bigger than any skyscraper ever built, rising slowly out of the sea, all around, a forest or a downtown of these mighty pillars.

  Nicole pulled Stephanie down to the icy deck and lay across her, pinning her on her back, yanking the hood of the parka around her ears and screaming "...your hands over your ears!"

  Stephanie's mittens stretched the parka hood tight around her head as she forced them in, covering her ears. The icy sea water poured down around her but with Nicole's chest sheltering her face, she could breathe. Nicole's more than human arms cradled her tight. She had only a moment to think, Now, what?

  The light was blinding, even through closed lids; the shock was worse, and then they were flying, floating, until the sea slammed into Stephanie's back, and she felt the burning sensation.
It was only then that she knew her clothes had been on fire and that she was singed, salt water stinging at burns where the terrible heat and light had blasted away her thick winter clothing and left a pathway to her skin.

  Far under the deadly cold water, she wanted to scream, but Nicole fastened her mouth over Stephanie's, worked some strange trick that opened both jaws, and released Stephanie's breath before giving her a burst of air, unneeded in a fusion-driven humaniform, from Nicole's lungs. Three more times as they rose to the surface, Nicole fed her mouth-to-mouth air; she shuddered with cold, her skull contracted and squeezed her brain terribly, the salt in her bare flesh stung fiercely, but she lived.

  As the water broke around her and she drew a free breath, she felt Nicole grab, slide, push, and a moment later, Nicole's body was pressed against hers inside the oversized parka. Nicole swam on her back, forcing Stephanie's head up into the air, kicking with great force, steering and adjusting with Stephanie's arms along for the ride; she could no more have stopped Nicole from moving the arms than she could have pushed back against a bulldozer.

  Within the parka, the seawater became blood-warm; Nicole had cranked up her fusor and was heating the space inside the coat to keep Stephanie from hypothermia.

  Stephanie shook her head to clear the hair from her face, and gasped, "Thank you."

  "Look up," Nicole said, still stroking. "Look up, don't miss this."

  Stephanie became aware that the black and green sea surface was lighted as if by a spotlight, brighter than day. She arched her back, pressing her belly hard against Nicole's, and looked overhead, into the brilliant welding-arc white lights that filled the sky. She watched, numb with wonder, as the warm, delicate surface of Nicole's skin brushed against her, warming her, rippling with the effort of moving them across the sea, supporting her. Stephanie gazed into the sky, and the brilliant lights grew dimmer and smaller as the distance increased. In a flurry of no more than five seconds, the bright lights all flared for an instant, then dimmed into a faint red glow that faded into the dark of the sky, where the stars were coming out again.

  Nicole shouted "Clarke ahoy!" a few times before one crewman, still fighting a fire in the superstructure, heard her. A few minutes and some hard work with a winch, and they were hustled across the wreckage on the deck, and down into the intact, if scrambled, guts of the ship.

  At the door to Stephanie's and Lars's cabin, Nicole said, "You'll want to be there when I present in a few minutes."

  "Yeah." Stephanie was shaking with the terror of the last few minutes. "Just... hey, thank you."

  "I'm glad there was one human witness, by naked eye, and it was you." Nicole moved to kiss her cheek; Stephanie turned to take it on the mouth. Gently, Nicole turned Stephanie's face away. "You're still married. And this is a stress reaction. Now, take a shower, and I'll have everyone together in the main conference room in a few minutes."

  The meeting was delayed while they stabilized broken bones on two scientists and treated Stephanie's burns, but that gave Captain Pao time to establish that Clarke was "floating, functional, and able to take us home," as she put it, in the opening remarks to the meeting. Besides the scientific and technical people, as many of the crew as did not have other duties were packed in to hear Nicole talk. The captain added, "When I took this job I wondered why a science ship was armoured and equipped like a nukeproof International Patrol disarmer, but I promise I'll never wonder again. We'll limp, but we'll limp clear to Cape Town. For the rest - Nicole?"

  Nicole stood. "I think the first thing you're entitled to know is the answer to what everyone shouted during the burst: what the hell was that? So here goes. I think we've just confirmed one of the main hypotheses about why Martian and Europan life are so similar to Earthly life. The answer is what I called the 'upside-down trees,' what Stephanie calls the 'gasoline trees,' and what I just heard Captain Pao call the 'big rocket bush.' I think it's one path of panspermia - life spreading through space.

  "The seed or spore of the gasoline tree arrived, perhaps, in a chunk of bone, tumbling through our air in a slow enough approach not to burn up or destroy the life it carried, sometime in the last half-billion years. It grew on the sea floor as slowly and coldly as stalactites on a cave ceiling. But now and then, a big meteor shower; or a cloud of interstellar dust; or the temporary capture of an asteroid inside Earth's Roche limit; or the right volcanic eruption, or perhaps the right impact on the moon, caused iron to rain down for a few decades, creating an immense bloom in the Southern Ocean, or one of its ancestor oceans. Or, in this case, the human race, in an increasingly warm soup of its own brewing, decided to clear out centuries of excess carbon dioxide in the air with rapid growth of phytoplankton.

  "When such a bloom persists long enough to fill the waters with life, the gasoline tree releases, or maybe synthesizes, the millions of species that make up the mat. The mat traps everything it can in that huge area of ocean, and drags it all to the centre, where some of the biomass is shredded and put in the bone cavities, and nearly all of it is oxidized for energy to fuel the construction of the bone towers, which are, just as Captain Pao said, rockets.

  "Those rockets have just launched. A sampling of a few billion tons of Earthly life is on its way out beyond the solar system, to wherever it may come down; at a guess, the bone will crumble slowly into small pieces, each still pocketed with Earth life, and most of it will just continue through space forever, but some small fraction will rain down on many worlds as grains and bits, across perhaps as long as a billion years. On already-living worlds, Earth's genetic material will introduce new possibilities; on worlds not yet alive, it will provide many possible bases for a start. In any case, what we have just witnessed is as natural as the swarming of bees, the blowing of cottonwood fluff, or the sudden hatching of shrimp in dry salt lakes after a rainstorm fills them - just on such a long cycle that spring, or the rain, doesn't come very often. We may have similar events from time to time, here or elsewhere. Now -"

  Lars asked, "And what must we do to prevent these eruptions?"

  "What must we do to stop spring?" Nicole said. "Or continental drift? Or beaver pond succession? Lars, a natural process is a natural process; eventually we understand it and fit the way we live around it. Unless you want to go down in history with the people who controlled every forest fire, put levees on every river, and drained every estuary to create beachfronts. You remember how that worked out."

  Letting the autorec pick up the rest of the meeting, Stephanie edited her main story. Her file of possible follow-on ideas grew and burgeoned like... like the mat, she thought. Grab everything and throw it to the centre, wrap it up for others or use it for propellant.

  She didn't always understand Nicole's conversations with the scientists, but she realized Nicole had at least established her explanation of the gasoline trees as the one to beat.

  Meanwhile, Lars, who had looked sick and old at the start of the meeting, seemed to awaken and youthen by the minute. He reminded Stephanie of the way she'd first seen him, down on the floor playing with her and the other children, on the television explaining the plan to cool the planet, defying mobs of protesters during his marriage to Nicole - like the return of the hero she had committed her life to.

  Except maybe committing my life to a hero isn't what I want to do. Except it might be. Except...

  The meeting wound down; on the way out, Nicole touched her shoulder, gently, and murmured, "As the more experienced wife-of-Lars, I want to suggest that you go straight to your cabin. He'll be in there fretting."

  "Didn't take much experience to know that. And thanks for everything."

  Back in the cabin, he was crying, big hard wracking sobs, and she was holding him before she had time to think what to do.

  "I thought I'd lost you," he said. "I thought I'd lost you. Then afterward there wasn't a spare private second to tell you how glad I was you were alive."

  She held him close. "You must be upset, too, that every plan you've made and every
thing you've done to tame the planet is undone now. You have to start all over."

  He sank his pale fingers into her dark curls and guided her face close to his, as if afraid he'd lose sight of her. "Ten thousand interrelated things to put right, right away? Utter chaos where there needs to be order? What's not to like? I've been bored out of my mind ever since the Rapid Sequestration Initiative turned out to work. But I was so afraid I'd lost you. I didn't know what I could do with my life if you weren't there." He kissed her. "I'm declaring that there's nothing to be done until the science team reports, giving them six months, and ordering them to use it all. You and I are going somewhere, somehow, to celebrate the start of another lifetime of chaos and challenge, the best work there is." He kissed her again, slowly and tenderly, as if making sure he remembered. "So this might be our longest vacation for a decade to come. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?"

  "Surprise me," she said.

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  About the Editor

  Jonathan Strahan is editor of more than forty books, including The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2 (with Gardner Dozois), Eclipse Three, Life on Mars, and The Starry Rift.

  A three-time nominee for the prestigious Hugo Award and two-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award, he is also the editor of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year and Eclipse anthology series, Swords and Dark Magic (with Lou Anders); The Locus Awards (with Charles Brown); Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle; Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling; The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson; Fritz Leiber: Essential Stories; four volumes of work by Jack Vance; and many more.