Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “‘Great things’ which earned you banishment to Mars.” Wei was over-familiar with Kendrick’s file. He was one of the youngest of a generation of entrepreneurs and engineers who had used the Jolts, a succession of climate-collapse shocks on Earth, as an opportunity; they had produced huge, usually flawed schemes to stabilise aspects of the climate, from sun-deflecting mirrors in space to gigantic carbon-sequestration plants in the deep oceans – schemes that, as had been revealed when the prosecutions started, had made their originators hugely wealthy, no matter how well they worked, or not. Even now, Wei thought, Kendrick probably carried around much of that wealth embedded in the very fabric of his body, in genetic therapies, cybernetic implants.

  “Can you not see, Mr Kendrick, that if I allow you a role in influencing the ‘strategic goals’ of this community, as you call them, suspicions will inevitably arise that you are simply reverting to type?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “I’m more interested in the common benefit than my own personal gain. Believe that or not, as you like. Sell this under your own authority if it makes you feel better.” Then he shut up.

  In the lengthening silence, Wei was aware of a seed of curiosity growing in his own mind, a seed planted by Kendrick. He suppressed a sigh. The man was a good salesman, if nothing else. “Tell me, then. What is the second kind of structure that could be built with your bricks?”

  Kendrick glanced out of the window. “The monument.”

  “The cairn?”

  “Look at it. It’s kind of impressive, in its way. Everybody adds to it. I’ve seen the school kids climbing the ladders to add on another couple of rocks.”

  Wei shrugged. It had been one of his initiatives to build up the cairn of Cao Xi as a cheap way to unite the community, and to remember a great hero.

  “But how tall is it?” Kendrick asked now. “A hundred metres? Listen – there were pyramids on Earth taller than that. And this is Mars, Mr Mayor. Low gravity, right? We ought to be able to build a pyramid three or four hundred metres tall, if we felt like it. Or...” Another expertly timed pause.

  Wei felt himself being drawn in. This must have been how the Heroic Generation made their plays, he thought. The sheer ambition of the visions, the scale – the chutzpah, to use one of Kendrick’s own words – it was all dazzling. “Or what?”

  “Or we use my bricks. There were cathedral spires on Earth over a hundred and fifty metres tall. Here on Mars –”

  “Spires?”

  “Just imagine it, Mr Mayor.” Kendrick could clearly see he had Wei’s interest. “If nothing else, you need something to keep me busy, and maybe a few other miscreants. You can’t send me back to Earth, can you?”

  Wei could not; that was no longer an option. A post-Jolt redistribution was shaping the home planet now; in China and around the rest of the world, whole populations were being displaced north and south from the desiccating mid-latitudes, and the central government had told the Martian colonists that they needed to find their own solutions to their problems. Yes, this would use up spare labour.

  And meanwhile Wei had long had an instinct that the first humans living on Mars should be doing more than merely surviving.

  “A spire, you say?”

  Kendrick grinned, and produced a slate with more diagrams. “You’d start by digging foundations. Even on Mars, a tree would need roots as deep as it is tall...”

  KENDRICK’S ROVER WAS waiting for Wei outside the lock from the Summertime Vault. It was mid-morning and a break in the school timetable; at this time of day, as usual, most of the colony’s hundred children were running around the big public space that dominated the Vault, many of them low-gravity tall, oddly graceful. They were full of energy and life, and Wei, feeling old at forty-seven, regretted having to turn his back on them.

  But Kendrick was waiting for him, his oddly youthful face full of calculation, eager as ever to draw Wei into his latest schemes.

  To Wei’s surprise, he and Kendrick were alone in the rover when it pulled away from the lock. “I didn’t know you were permitted to pilot one of these.”

  Kendrick just grinned. “There’s a lot of stuff in this town that goes on under your personal radar, Mr Mayor. Don’t sweat it. I’ve made a lot of friends here, a lot of contacts, and I call in favours every now and then.”

  Wei glanced back at the heavy brick shoulders of the Summertime Vault, under its mound of rock and dust. “You have accumulated these favours ever since we let you become so influential in the colony’s destiny.”

  “I’m doing no harm – you’ve got to admit that. Everybody benefits in the end. Xue Ling helped fix me up with this, actually.”

  “She isn’t your personal assistant. She merely volunteered to –”

  “I know, I know.” Kendrick looked away, hastily, as if seeking to close down the subject. “It’s the way the world works. Don’t sweat about it.”

  Wei was sure Kendrick knew he disapproved of his relationship with Xue Ling, such as it was. The spurious glamour of the man seemed to draw in Xue Ling, as it drew in others. Wei didn’t believe that Kendrick intended to push this too far. Nor did he suspect that Kendrick would succeed if he tried; Xue Ling, twenty-two years old now, was engaged to be married. But still, something about Kendrick’s interest in Xue Ling didn’t feel right, to the paternal instincts Wei hoped he had developed over the last six years as the girl’s foster parent.

  Heading out of town, they drove past the new Cao Xi monument. The old heap of rubble had long been demolished to make way for Kendrick’s spire, a lofty cone nearly four hundred metres tall – nearly three times the height of the tallest cathedral spires of medieval Europe, though constructed with much the same materials and techniques, of brick and mortar over a frame of tall Martian-grown oak trunks. The usual gaggle of protestors was gathered here, at the foot of the unfinished monument. Kendrick let the rover nose through their thin line, and Wei peered out, forcing an official smile for the benefit of any imagers present. Some were protesting because of the diversion of materials into what they called “Wei’s Folly,” and it did Wei no good to point out that the building of the spire had kick-started the development of whole industries in the colony. Others protested because of the spire’s echoes of the Christian west. And still others protested simply because they had liked the old cairn, the mound of stones they and their children had worked together to build up.

  Kendrick, typically, ignored the people and peered up at the spire: slim, tall, already a monument impossible on Earth, at least with such basic raw materials. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  “Magnificent for you,” Wei murmured. “Is this how it was for the Heroic Generation? You build your monuments, overriding protests. You persuade the rest of us they are essential. And you grow fat on the profits, of one kind or another.”

  “Binglin, my friend –”

  “Don’t speak to me like that.”

  “Sorry. Look – maybe I push my luck at times. But the reason I get away with it is, you’re right, because you need what I do. You have the Vaults now, a huge expansion of space above what would have been possible. And that helps everybody, right? I’ve heard you talk of the Triangle. I read the news in the slates. I do pay attention, you know...”

  The Triangle was the latest economic theory, of how Earth, Mars and asteroids could be linked in a mutually supportive, positive-feedback trade loop. The asteroids were a vital source of raw materials, mined cleanly for a starving Earth. So Earth, or rather the Chinese Greater Economic Framework down on Earth, exported expertise and high-tech goods out into space, and got asteroid resources back in return. Mars, with its rapidly expanding colonies, served as a source of labour and living space for the asteroid development agencies, and in return received the raw materials it needed, particularly the volatiles of which the planet was starved.

  But Mars’s local administrators, Wei among them, were concerned that Mars should not be a mere construction shack on the edge of the asteroid belt. So a deliberate effo
rt was being made to turn Mars’s new communities, including Fire City, into hotbeds of communications, information technology, and top-class education. The dream was to start exporting high-quality software and other digital material both to the asteroids and to Earth – a dream that was already, after a half-decade of intensive development and salesmanship, beginning to pay off.

  Kendrick was right. To achieve these goals, Mars needed room, human space, to grow its populations. Kendrick had managed to spot a kind of gap in the resource development cycle, and to fill it with his brick constructions. But that didn’t make him necessary, in any sense. Not as far as Wei was concerned.

  Soon the centre of Fire City was far behind, and they passed the last colony buildings, the big translucent domes that sheltered the artificial marshland that was the hub of the city’s recycling system. Then they drove through fields covered with clear plastic, where scientists were experimenting with gen-enged wheat and potatoes and rice, growing in Martian soil. Further out still the fields were open, and here banks of lichen stained the rocks, green and purple: the most advanced life forms on Mars, before humans arrived. Some of these lichen, which were some kind of relation to Earth life, were being gen-enged too, more experiments to find a way to farm Mars.

  Beyond the lichen beds, at last they were out in the open, in undeveloped country. Even so, they were still well within the walls of Mendel crater. And as the humming rover bounced over the roughly made track, Wei began to make out a slim form, dead ahead. It was a kind of tower, skeletal, with a splayed base. He peered forward, squinting through the dusty air. “What is that?”

  Kendrick grinned. “What I brought you out here to see, Mr Mayor. You ever heard of the Eiffel Tower? In Paris, France. It was pulled down during a food riot in the 2060s, but –”

  “Stop the rover.” As the vehicle rolled to a halt, Wei leaned forward, peering out of the blister window. Already they were so close that he had to tip back his head to see the peak. “What is its purpose?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “It’s a test. A demonstration, of what’s possible to build with steel on Mars. Just as the spire –”

  “Steel? Where did you get the steel from?...” But of course Wei knew that; the city’s new metallurgy plant, already up to industrially useful capacity, was pumping out iron and steel produced from hematite ore, the primary commercial source of iron on Earth, and an ore so ubiquitous on Mars it was what made the planet red. “You diverted the plant’s production for this?”

  “Diverted – yeah, okay, that’s the right word. Look, this is just a trial run. The steelworkers were keen too, to learn welding techniques in the Martian air, and so on... When it’s proved its point, we will tear it down and put the materials to better use.”

  “And that point is?”

  “To see how high we can build, of course. We’re still far from the tower, you don’t get a sense of scale from here. Listen: that thing is almost eight hundred metres tall. Nearly three times the height of Eiffel, on Earth. That good old Martian gravity. This thing is already taller than any building on Earth until the late twentieth century. Think of that! Can you feel how it draws up the eye? That’s the magical thing about Martian architecture. It baffles the Earthbound instinct.”

  “You erected this without my knowledge.”

  “Well, people live in holes in the ground here. You could get away with building almost anything you like, out in that big open Mars desert.”

  “You are showing this to me now. Why?”

  “I told you, this is a trial run. Just like the spire.”

  “For what?”

  “The monument of Cao Xi, Mark III. You need to keep expanding, Mr Mayor. My brick has filled a gap, but in future, Martian steel, Martian glass, and Martian concrete are going to be the way to do it. But why keep burrowing into the ground? What way is that to bring up a new generation? Oh, I know we need to think about shielding, but...”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Tell me you can’t guess. Tell me you aren’t inspired. I know you by now, Wei Binglin.” Kendrick pointed to the brownish sky. “No more cairns or spires, no more non-functional monuments. I’m telling you we should build a place for people to live. I’m telling you that we should build, not down – up.”

  THE CHAIRMAN OF the review committee, appointed directly by New Beijing on far-off Earth, was called Chang Kuo, and as the meeting came to order for its second day he regarded Wei and Kendrick solemnly. This conference room was deep underground, buried in the floor of the Hellas basin, which was itself eight kilometres beneath the Mars datum. Wei reflected that it would have been impossible for this place, the Chinese administrative capital, buried at the deepest point on Mars, to have been further away in spirit from what he and Kendrick were trying to build at Fire City.

  Yet the room was dominated by a hologram, sitting in the centre of this circular room, a real-time relayed image of the Obelisk, as people were calling it, an image itself as tall as a human being. The real thing was already more than a kilometre tall, a great rectangular arm of steel and glass reaching to the Martian sky. And the damage done by the meteorite strike was clearly visible, a neat circular puncture somewhere above the three-hundredth level: the disaster was the reason for this review.

  The room shuddered, and Wei thought he heard a boom, deep and distant.

  “What the hell was that?” Kendrick had lapsed into his native English. “Sorry, I meant –”

  He looked alarmed, to Wei’s unkind satisfaction. “It was a nuclear weapon, detonated far beneath the fragmented floor of the Hellas crater. I would not have thought that a Heroic-Generation engineer like you would have been frightened by a mere firecracker.”

  “Why are they setting off nukes?... Oh. The terraforming experiments.”

  “You heard about that. Well, of course you would.”

  “Xue Ling showed me some of the documentation. Don’t blame her. I pushed her to leak me the stuff. Blame her pregnancy; it’s making her easier to handle.” But his smile was secretive, reluctant.

  Wei thought he understood. Xue Ling, now twenty-eight years old, married and with child, had been campaigning to be allowed to leave Fire City – to come here, in fact, to Hellas, where she felt she could carve out a more meaningful career in administration than was possible back home. Her husband too, now a senior terraforming engineer, was having to commute to Hellas and back. It made sense in every way to Wei to allow her to go.

  Every way but one: Kendrick.

  There were other communities who were after Kendrick now, other opportunities, clandestine or otherwise, he might be tempted to pursue. Probably part of his long-term game plan had always been to manoeuvre himself into a position where such opportunities would turn up. But it would be disastrous for Fire City if he were allowed to leave before the tower was finished – and disastrous, too, for Wei himself, of course, who had become so closely identified with the project, even in the eyes of these mandarins at Hellas. So Kendrick could not be allowed to leave. How, though, to keep him?

  Xue Ling still seemed to be important to Kendrick, and therefore was a hold on him. Conversely she was a conduit of information to Wei, about his difficult, unpredictable, rogue of an ally. Regretfully, then, if Kendrick must be kept here, Wei could not allow Xue Ling to leave. He assured himself that greater concerns, the good of the community as a whole, were paramount over her wishes. Besides, he told himself, it was better for Xue Ling herself, whether she knew it or not, after the chaotic start to life she had endured, to stay close to what had become the nearest thing to home: close to her father, to himself...

  The chairman, Chang Kuo, had spoken to him.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Could you repeat that?”

  “I said that this is the second day of our review of the project, of this Obelisk, as the popular media are calling it – or Wei’s Folly, as I believe your own people refer to it. We must come to a verdict soon as to whether to allow the project to continue.”

  Wei sa
id carefully, “Yesterday we reviewed the practical value of the tower. The living space it will afford. The stimulus it has given to local industries, to the development of skills and technologies specialised to Martian conditions. It is a great challenge, and as a people we are at our best when we rise to challenges.”

  “Citizens have died. Its absurd vulnerability to meteorite strikes –”

  Just as Mars’s thin air was no barrier to solar ultraviolet, so it did not screen the ground from medium-sized meteorite impacts, as Earth’s thick atmosphere shielded the mother lands.

  Kendrick said confidently, “That is a problem that can be solved, with warning systems, orbital deflection, laser batteries –”

  “Ha! A typical Heroic-Generation answer. All at great expense, no doubt. Already the Obelisk project is distorting the whole of the regional economy. There are those who say it is a mere grandiose folly.”

  Kendrick stood up, eliciting gasps of shock at his ill manners. “Grandiose? Is that what you think this is, grandiose, a mere gesture? Mr Chairman, the point of the Cao Xi Tower is to give this current generation a dream of their own. To give them something more to do than fulfil the dreams of their parents...” He looked at Wei.

  Wei knew how the argument should go now. They’d rehearsed it often enough. He even agreed with it, up to a point: Everybody wants to be a pioneer. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi! Either that, or an inhabitant of the settled world of the future, living on a terraformed Mars, or at least under a dome big enough to cover Taiwan – big enough to allow children to grow without visible walls around them. Nobody wants to be in one of the middle generations, you see. Nobody wants to be a settler. It is this cadre’s tragedy to be that settler generation. But settlers need dreams too. We aren’t building this tower because it’s sensible. We do it precisely because it’s a grand gesture – even grandiose, yes. For children who can’t dream of journeying to Mars, for they were born on Mars, this is their goal, their monument. Their chance to leave a legacy for history...