Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  TYCHE TOOK OFF her suit, flung it into a corner and cuddled against the Hugbear in her bed. Its ragged fur felt warm against her cheek, and its fake heartbeat was reassuring. She distantly remembered her Mum had made it move from afar, sometimes, stroked her hair with its paws, its round facescreen replaced with her features. That had been a long time ago and she was sure the bear was bigger then. But it was still soft.

  Suddenly, the bear moved. Her heart jumped with a strange, aching hope. But it was only the Brain. “Go ’way,” she muttered.

  “Tyche, this is important,” said the Brain. “Do you remember what you promised?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were hot and wet. I’m not going to cry like Chang’e, she thought. I’m not.

  “Do you remember now?”

  The bear’s face was replaced with a man and a woman. The man had no hair and his dark skin glistened. The woman was raven-haired and pale, with a face like a bird. Mum is even prettier than Chang’e, Tyche thought.

  “Hello, Tyche,” they said in unison, and laughed. “We are Kareem and Sofia,” the woman said. “We are your mommy and daddy. We hope you are well when you see this.” She touched the screen, quickly and lightly, like a little bunny hop on the regolith.

  “But if the Brain is showing you this,” Tyche’s Dad said, “then it means that something bad has happened and you need to do what the Brain tells you.”

  “You should not be angry at the Brain,” Mum said. “It is not like we are, it just plans and thinks. It just does what it was told to do. And we told it to keep you safe.”

  “You see, in the Great Wrong Place, people like us could not be safe,” Dad continued. “People like Mum and me and you were feared. They called us Greys, after the man who figured out how to make us, and they were jealous, because we lived longer than they did and had more time to figure things out. And because giving things silly names makes people feel better about themselves. Do we look grey to you?”

  No. Tyche shook her head. The Magician was grey, but that was because he was always looking for rubies in dark places and never saw the sun.

  “So we came here, to build a Right Place, just the two of us.” Her Dad squeezed Mum’s shoulders, just like the bear used to do to Tyche. “And you were born here. You can’t imagine how happy we were.”

  Then Mum looked serious. “But we knew that the Wrong Place people might come looking for us. So we had to hide you, to make sure you would be safe, so they would not look inside you and cut you and find out what makes you work. They would do anything to have you.”

  Fear crunched Tyche’s gut into a tiny cold ball. Cut you?

  “It was very, very hard, dear Tyche, because we love you. Very hard, not to touch you except from afar. But we want you to grow big and strong, and when the time comes, we will come and find you, and then we will all be in the Right Place together.”

  “But you have to promise to take your Treatments. Can you promise to do that? Can you promise to do what the Brain says?”

  “I promise,” Tyche muttered.

  “Goodbye, Tyche,” her parents said. “We will see you soon.”

  And then they were gone, and the Hugbear’s face was blank and pale brown again.

  “We need to go soon,” the Brain said again, and this time its voice sounded more gentle. “Please get ready. I would like you to have a Treatment before travel.”

  Tyche sighed and nodded. It wasn’t fair. But she had promised.

  THE BRAIN SENT Tyche a list of things she could take with her, scrolling in one of the windows of her room. It was a short list. She looked around at the fabbed figurines and the moon rock that she thought looked like a boy and the e-sheets floating everywhere with her favourite stories open. She could not even take the Hugbear. She felt alone, suddenly, like she had when she climbed to look at the Great Wrong Place on top of the mountain.

  Then she noticed the ruby lying on her bed. If I go away and take it with me, the Magician will never find it. She thought about the Magician and his panther, desperately looking from crater to crater, forever. It’s not fair. Even if I keep my promise, I’ll have to take it to him.

  And say goodbye.

  Tyche sat down on the bed and thought very hard.

  The Brain was everywhere, but it could not watch everything. It was based on a scanned human brain, some poor person who had died a long time ago. It had no cameras in her room. And its attention would be on the evacuation: it would have to keep programming and reprogramming the grags. She picked at the sensor bracelet in her wrist that monitored her life signs and location. That was the difficult bit. She would have to do something about that. But there wasn’t much time: the Brain would take her for a Treatment soon.

  She hugged the bear again in frustration. It felt warm, and as she squeezed it hard, she could feel its pulse –

  Tyche sat up. She remembered the Jade Rabbit’s stories and tricks, the tar rabbit he had made to trick an enemy.

  She reached into the Hugbear’s head and pulled out a programming window, coupled it with her sensor. She summoned up old data logs, added some noise to them. Then she fed them to the bear, watched its pulse and breathing and other simulated life signs change to match hers.

  Then she took a deep breath, and as quickly as she could, she pulled off the bracelet and put it on the Hugbear.

  “Tyche? Is there something wrong?” the Brain asked.

  Tyche’s heart jumped. Her mind raced. “It’s fine,” she said. “I think... I think I just banged my sensor a bit. I’m just getting ready now.” She tried to make her voice sound sweet, like a girl who always keeps her promises.

  “Your Treatment will be ready soon,” the Brain said and was gone. Heart pounding, Tyche started to put on her suit.

  THERE WAS A game that Tyche used to play in the lava tube: how far could she get before she was spotted by the grags? She played it now, staying low, avoiding their camera eyes, hiding behind rock protrusions, crates and cryogenic tanks, until she was in a tube branch that only had othos in it. The Brain did not usually control them directly, and besides, they did not have eyes. Still, her heart felt like meteorite impacts in her chest.

  She pushed through a semi-pressurising membrane. In this branch, the othos had dug too deep for calcium, and caused a roof collapse. In the dim green light of her suit’s fluorescence, she made way her up the tube’s slope. There. She climbed on a pile of rubble carefully. The othos had once told her there was an opening there, and she hoped it would be big enough for her to squeeze through.

  Boulders rolled under her, and she felt a sharp bang against her knee. The suit hissed at the sudden impact. She ignored the pain and ran her fingers along the rocks, following a very faint air current she could not have sensed without the suit. Then her fingers met regolith instead of rock. It was packed tight, and she had to push hard at it with her aluminium rod before it gave away. A shower of dust and rubble fell on her, and for a moment she thought there was going to be another collapse. But then there was a patch of velvet sky in front of her. She widened the opening, made herself as small as she could, and crawled towards it.

  Tyche emerged onto the mountainside. The sudden wide open space of rolling grey and brown around her felt like the time she had eaten too much sugar. Her legs and hands were wobbly, and she had to sit down for a moment. She shook herself: she had an appointment to keep. She checked that the ruby was still in its pouch, got up and started downwards with the Rabbit’s lope.

  THE SECRET DOOR was just the way Tyche had left it. She eyed the crater edge nervously, but there were no ants in sight. She bit her lip when she looked at the Old One and the Troll.

  What’s wrong? the Old One asked.

  “I’m going to have to go away.”

  Don’t worry. We’ll still be here when you come back.

  “I might never come back,” Tyche said, choking a bit.

  Never is a very long time, the Old One said. Even I have never seen never. We’ll be here. Take care, Tych
e.

  Tyche crawled through to the Other Moon, and found the Magician waiting for her.

  HE WAS VERY thin and tall, taller than the Old One even, and cast a long cold finger of a shadow in the crater. He had a sad face and a scraggly beard and white gloves and a tall top hat. Next to him lay his flying panther, all black, with eyes like tiny rubies.

  “Hello, Tyche,” the Magician said, with a voice like the rumble of the sandworm.

  Tyche swallowed and took out the ruby from her pouch, holding it out to him.

  “I made this for you.” What if he doesn’t like it? But the Magician picked it up, slowly, eyes glowing, held it in both hands and gazed at it in awe.

  “That is very, very kind of you,” he whispered. Very carefully, he took off his hat and put the ruby in it. It was the first time Tyche had ever seen the Magician smile. Still, there was a sadness to his expression.

  “I didn’t want to leave before giving it to you,” she said.

  “That’s quite a fuss you caused for the Brain. He is going to be very worried.”

  “He deserves it. But I promised I would go with him.”

  The Magician looked at the ruby one more time and put the hat back on his head.

  “Normally, I don’t interfere with the affairs of other people, but for this, I owe you a wish.”

  Tyche took a deep breath. “I don’t want to live with the grags and the othos and the Brain anymore. I want to be in the Right Place with Mum and Dad.”

  The Magician looked at her sadly.

  “I’m sorry, Tyche, but I can’t make that happen. My magic is not powerful enough.”

  “But they promised –”

  “Tyche, I know you don’t remember. And that’s why we Moon People remember for you. The space sharks came and took your parents, a long time ago. They are dead. I am sorry.”

  Tyche closed her eyes. A picture in a window, a domed crater. Two bright things arcing over the horizon, like sharks. Then, brightness –

  “You’ve lived with the Brain ever since. You don’t remember because it makes you forget with the Treatments, so you don’t get too sad, so you stay the way your parents wanted to keep you. But we remember. And we always tell you the truth.”

  And suddenly they were all there, all the Moon People, coming from their houses: Chang’e and her children and the Jade Rabbit and the Woodcutter, looking at her gravely and nodding their heads.

  Tyche could not bear to look at them. She covered her helmet with her hands, turned around, crawled through the Secret Door and ran away, away from the Other Moon. She ran, not a Rabbit run but a clumsy jerky crying run, until she stumbled on a boulder and went rolling higgledy-piggledy down. She lay curled up in the chilly regolith for a long time. And when she opened her eyes, the ants were all around her.

  THE ANTS WERE arranged around her in a half-circle, stretched into spiky pyramids, waving slightly, as if looking for something. Then they spoke. At first, it was just noise, hissing in her helmet, but after a second it resolved into a voice.

  “– hello,” it said, warm and female, like Chang’e, but older and deeper. “I am Alissa. Are you hurt?”

  Tyche was frozen. She had never spoken to anyone who was not the Brain or one of the Moon People. Her tongue felt stiff.

  “Just tell me if you are all right. No one is going to hurt you. Do you feel bad anywhere?”

  “No,” Tyche breathed.

  “There is no need to be afraid. We will take you home.” A video feed flashed up inside her helmet, a spaceship that was made up of a cluster of legs and a globe that glinted golden. A circle appeared elsewhere in her field of vision, indicating a tiny pinpoint of light in the sky. “See? We are on our way.”

  “I don’t want to go to the Great Wrong Place,” she gasped. “I don’t want you to cut me up.”

  There was a pause.

  “Why would we do that? There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Because Wrong Place people don’t like people like me.”

  Another pause.

  “Dear child, I don’t know what you have been told, but things have changed. Your parents left Earth more than a century ago. We never thought we would find you, but we kept looking. And I’m glad we did. You have been alone on the Moon for a very long time.”

  Tyche got up, slowly. I haven’t been alone. Her head spun. They would do anything to have you.

  She backed off a few steps.

  “If I come with you,” she asked in a small voice, “will I see Kareem and Sofia again?”

  A pause again, longer this time.

  “Of course you will,” Alissa the ant-woman said finally. “They are right here, waiting for you.”

  Liar.

  Slowly, Tyche started backing off. The ants moved, closing their circle. I am faster than they are, she thought. They can’t catch me.

  “Where are you going?”

  Tyche switched off her radio, cleared the circle of the ants with a leap and hit the ground running.

  TYCHE RAN, FASTER than she had ever run before, faster even than when the Jade Rabbit challenged her to a race across the Shackleton Crater. Finally, her lungs and legs burned and she had to stop. She had set out without direction, but had gone up the mountain slope, close to the cold fingers. I don’t want to go back to the Base. The Brain never tells the truth either. Black dots danced in her eyes. They’ll never catch me.

  She looked back, down towards the crater of the Secret Door. The ants were moving. They gathered into the metal sheet again. Then its sides stretched upwards until they met and formed a tubular structure. It elongated and weaved back and forth and slithered forward, faster than even Tyche could run: a metal snake. The pyramid shapes of the ants glinted in its head like teeth. Faster and faster it came, flowing over boulders and craters like it was weightless, a curtain of billowing dust behind it. She looked around for a hiding place, but she was on open ground now, except for the dark pool of the mining crater to the west.

  Then she remembered something the Jade Rabbit had once said. For anything that wants to eat you, there is something bigger that wants to eat it.

  The ant-snake was barely a hundred metres behind her now, flipping back and forth in sinusoid waves on the regolith like a shiny metal whip. She stuck out her tongue at it, accidentally tasting the sweet inner surface of her helmet. Then she made it to the sunless crater’s edge.

  With a few bounds, she was over the crater lip. It was like diving into icy water. Her suit groaned, and she could feel its joints stiffening up. But she kept going, towards the bottom, almost blind from the contrast between the pitch-black and the bright sun above. She followed the vibration in her soles. Boulders and pebbles rained on her helmet and she knew the ant-snake was right at her heels.

  The lights of the sandworm almost blinded her. Now. She leapt up, as high as she could, feeling weightless, reached out for the utility ladder that she knew was on the huge machine’s topside. She grabbed it, banged painfully against the worm’s side, felt its thunder beneath her.

  And then, a grinding, shuddering vibration as the mining machine bit into the ant-snake, rolling right over it.

  Metal fragments flew into the air, glowing red-hot. One of them landed on Tyche’s arm. The suit made a bubble around it and spat it out. The sandworm came to an emergency halt, and Tyche almost fell off. It started disgorging its little repair grags, and Tyche felt a stab of guilt. She sat still until her breathing calmed down and the suit’s complaints about the cold got too loud.

  Then she dropped to the ground and started the climb back up, towards the Secret Door.

  THERE WERE STILL a few ants left around the Secret Door, but Tyche ignored them. They were rolling around aimlessly, and there weren’t enough of them to build a transmitter. She looked up. The ship from the Great Wrong Place was still a distant star. She still had time.

  Painfully, bruised limbs aching, she crawled through the Secret Door one last time.

  The Moon People were still there, wai
ting for her. Tyche looked at them in the eye, one by one. Then she put her hands on her hips.

  “I have a wish,” she said. “I am going to go away. I’m going to make the Brain obey me, this time. I’m going to go and build a Right Place, all on my own. I’m never going to forget again. So I want you all to come with me.” She looked up at the Magician. “Can you do that?”

  Smiling, the man in the top hat nodded, spread his white-gloved fingers and whirled his cloak that had a bright red inner lining, like a ruby –

  TYCHE BLINKED. THE Other Moon was gone. She looked around. She was standing on the other side of the Old One and the Troll, except that they looked just like rocks now. And the Moon People were inside her. I should feel heavier, carrying so many people, she thought. But instead she was empty and light.

  Uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, she started walking back up Malapert Mountain, towards the Base. Her step was not a rabbit’s, nor a panther’s, nor a maiden’s silky tiptoe, just her very own.

  OBELISK

  Stephen Baxter

  WEI BINGLIN FIRST saw the cairn of Cao Xi, as it happened, during his earliest moments on Mars.

  It came at the end of a long and difficult voyage. Through the last few days of the Sunflower’s approach to Mars, Wei Binglin had been content for the automated systems to bring his ship home. Why not? Since the accident, most of the Sunflower’smanual controls had been inactive anyhow. And besides, Wei no longer regarded himself as deserving the rank of captain at all; in a ship become a drifting field hospital, he was reduced to the role of caretaker, his only remaining duty to bring those who had survived this, his last flight, into a proper harbour.

  So, for the first time in his many approaches to the planet, he let Mars swim out of the darkness before him. In the light of a distant sun, it struck him from afar as a malformed, lopsided, murky world, oddly unfinished, like a piece of pottery by an inadequate student. And yet as the ship entered its parking orbit high above the planet and skimmed around the night side, he saw the colourful layers of a thin but tall atmosphere, a scattering of white in the deeper craters – clouds, fog? – and brilliant pinpricks of light in the night, human settlements, mostly Chinese, a few UN outposts. A world where people were already being born, living, dying. A world where he too, he decided, had come to die.