Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  I’d been wrong. An upstart rival had undercut my offer and stolen the prospective customer. Moonlighter, meanwhile, needed fuel and repairs. While bots swarmed over the ship, and my bank account trickled down to single digits, I shuttled to Triton to drown my sorrows. That was when I ended up in the Delta Vee Hotel.

  I’ve not been there since; too many ghosts. Like the Cutter and the Torch is now, the place was a popular hang-out with artists and their sponsors. The walls, floor and tables were covered with images and solid projections of work both good and gaudy: asteroids and iceteroids, boulders and rocks, transformed into pieces of art, from the geometric abstracts of Motl and Petit to the hyper-realistic portraiture of Dvali and Maestlin. I knew some of these people; had even worked with some of them back when they trimmed payloads for the big combines.

  My star was on the rise, modestly, but even then I sensed that the bubble couldn’t last. Too much money was changing hands. On my way in, I’d passed Ozymandis, a kilometre-sized rock put into Triton orbit. It was the work of Yinning and Tarabulus, the latest hot properties. I didn’t think much of it. It was a face, shattered and time-worn, with great clefts in the cheeks and deep black craters for eyeholes. Everyone went mad for it, but all I saw was various superficial gimmicks used to conceal a profound absence of technique.

  Yinning and Tarabulus hadn’t come up through the combines; they’d never worked with rock and ice in any other context. Lacking that core of experience, they had to make their work look damaged and ancient, because that was the only way to disguise their screw-ups. They worked against the rock, not with it: couldn’t see the weaknesses in the stone, the planes of failure.

  Fucking amateurs.

  I vowed that if anyone was ever crazy enough to let me loose on a piece of rock that big, I’d cut it perfectly. And I knew I could.

  What I didn’t expect was that I was about to get the chance.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He – whoever he was – meant Neptune. I’d been staring into its face, locked overhead like a vast ceiling ornament. The giant’s purple-blue gloom had turned out to be a perfect match for my funk.

  “If you say so.”

  “I mean it. Look at it, Loti. Barely a ring system worth mentioning, no metastable storms in the atmosphere. Winds, yes. Transient features. But nothing that lasts. Triton’s the only moon of any consequence; the rest are snowballs. Yet it has its own understated magnificence. An undemonstrative grandeur.”

  I still had no idea who was talking, and by that point in the evening even less interest. But when I turned around I found my interest notching up slightly. He was elegant, well-dressed, exceedingly handsome – and definitely not someone I’d seen in the Delta Vee Hotel until now.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Not yet. But I’m hoping we can get to know each other. Work together, I mean. My name is Skanda Abrud. I have a proposition, a proposal for a commission. Are you interested?”

  “That’ll depend on the pay and the duration.”

  He smiled tightly. “I’d have thought you’d have jumped at work. As it happens, the pay will be excellent – at least twenty times what you’ve ever received before, if my suspicions are correct. I’ve also selected my own rock. It’s on a high inclination orbit, but easily reachable. Would you like to see it?”

  This was all too good to be true. I’d been stitched up before, led to think I was on the verge of a life-changing commission.

  “If you feel you must.”

  He made precise right angles of his thumbs and forefingers to frame an image. The space between his hands darkened, clotted with blackness and a near-black lump. The lump was contoured with dim sunlight on one side, picking out craters and ridges in purple-browns. He pulled his hands apart to swell the image. “It’s large, about a kilometre across, but easily within your capabilities. Do you think you could do this for me?”

  I studied the rock, studied his face. I imagined his head fitting inside the rock, waiting to be revealed like a mask in a mould. This, after all, was what most of my clients wanted. Their own face, tumbling around the Sun for the rest of eternity.

  “I’d need to run some scans,” I hedged. “But if there are no nasty surprises, I can probably make you fit.”

  This seemed to throw him. “No. It’s not me that you’d be doing. Good grief, no. Can you imagine the absolute vanity of that?”

  “So who else do you want?” Already I was thinking loved one, lover, heroic ancestor: the usual self-aggrandizing bullshit.

  “That’s easy.” He made another image. It was a male face, that of a young man. Classically proportioned. I guess I’d have recognised it, if my education hadn’t been so patchy.

  “I don’t know it.”

  “You should. What I want, Loti, is for you to carve me the head of Michelangelo’s David.”

  INGVAR HAS LED me to the public ice-rink on the western cusp of Stilt-Town. It’s perverse, really. Massive layers of insulation buttress the city from the surface of Triton, and now they go to all this trouble to create another little square of frozen ground over the city’s floor. Granted, it’s not cryo-cold, it doesn’t need to be, but I still feel an extra bite to the air. Our breath jets out in comet tails. Ingvar keeps stomping her feet and flapping her arms.

  “You had another career once,” she says. “You weren’t always an artist.”

  “Since you seem to know all about me... what’s the point of this talk, Ingvar? Seeing as there’s nothing to stop me walking away right now.”

  “Be my guest. But you know I know something. Those people really died, Loti; I didn’t just make them up. They were claim-jumpers. Not only shouldn’t they have been there, but Authority screwed up in not protecting them when the impactor came in. It’s true there wasn’t much warning, and the planetary defences were not at maximum readiness. They sent ships at the last minute, tried to deflect the impactor...” Ingvar shakes her head. “Didn’t work; not enough time. But the point is I can tie you to the impactor, and show that it was no accident that it hit Naiad. Skanda meant it to happen. And that makes it a crime, not some random accident of celestial mechanics. And also makes you an accomplice.”

  “Fine. Prepare a dossier for Authority. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear from you.”

  “I could do just that. May well do so, in fact.” From across the square, on the other side of the ice-rink, an amateur band is rehearsing on the platform of a white pavilion. Their frostbitten fingers strike a series of duff notes. Ingvar raises her voice over the brassy discord. “Did you like your old line of work?”

  “It paid.”

  In fact it was good work, and I was better than good work. I used to shape ice for the bulk carriers. Take a splinter of comet a couple of kilometres across, chisel it with lasers and plasma and variable yield shaped charges until it had exactly the right profile, the right symmetry and centre of gravity, to be converted into a one-shot payload.

  Handing over a chunk of ice that I’d trimmed, watching as the pusher engines were fixed on at one end, a spiderlike control nexus at the other, witnessing the start of its long, long cruise to the hungry economies of the inner system, there was some satisfaction in that.

  “But then everything changed,” Ingvar said. “Not overnight, obviously, but harder and faster than you’d been expecting. New technologies, new ways of doing things. Decided by people who didn’t know you, didn’t care about you. Men like Skanda Abrud.”

  “I moved with the times.”

  The skaters execute lazy ellipses on the ice. Most of them aren’t very good, but on Triton even the clumsiest achieve a measure of elegance. It occurs to me that I’ve never come to the rink when there are skaters out. A girl launches herself into the air, tucks her arms and executes maybe twenty rotations before her skates touch ice again.

  Sometimes, high above the ecliptic, I’d turn Moonlighter’s main dish away from the system’s hum and bustle and tune in to the cosmic microwave background. The hiss
of creation. That’s what the skaters sound like: an endless and spiralling cosmic hiss.

  Above the quadrangle, Neptune surveys proceedings with serene indifference. I’d sooner forget about Neptune and Naiad. But it’s not easy with that hanging overhead.

  “You just took to art? It was that easy?” Ingvar asks.

  I wonder why she cares. “That or starve. I guess I did all right. Made a living.” I watch an excursion craft slide across the bisected face of Neptune, lit up like a neon fish. “Was making a living, until you interrupted me.”

  “But you’ve had your share of disappointments. Dreams and ambitions that didn’t work out.” The way she says this, I can’t help but wonder if she isn’t, on some level, alluding to the private trajectory of her own career. Licensed investigator: hardly the most glamorous or remunerative profession in the system. Maybe Ingvar had higher hopes than that, a long time ago.

  Sympathy? Not exactly. But a flicker of recognition, nonetheless.

  “We all make the best of things,” I say. “Or try to.”

  “It’s not a bad life, is it? I mean, look at us. We’re on Triton, under Neptune. Watching ice-skating.” Ingvar shivers in her coat. “It’s cold, but we can get warm if want to. There’s food and company when we need it. And it’s like that everywhere. Lovely things to see, places to explore, people to meet. Hundreds of worlds, thousands of towns and cities. Why would anyone not find that enough? Why would anyone want more from life than the system can give them?”

  I can see where this is leading.

  “You mean, why would anyone ever want to leave?”

  “I just don’t understand. But I’ve been there. I’ve been to Jupiter, seen the skydocks, seen the voidships being built. There’s no end of them, no end of volunteers rich enough to buy a slot. Even after what happened.” Ingvar pumps her feet against the ground. From the white pagoda, the amateur band mangles another passage. “What’s wrong with those people?” she asks, and I can’t tell if she’s complaining about the band, or the voidship sleepers, or both.

  SO I TOOK Skanda out to meet his rock.

  The orbit was high-inclination, the rock a long way from the ecliptic. I’d seen the images, but the first up-close viewing was always special.

  “You like it?” I asked him.

  “It’s good. Better than good. It’ll do, won’t it?”

  “It’ll have to.”

  But it was much better than that. I’d swung Moonlighter around the rock a dozen times, mapping it down to thumbnail precision, and scanning deep into its heart. I’d dropped seismic probes to echo-map its core. None of these readings had given the slightest cause for real concern. I could see David’s head in my mind’s eye, visualise exactly where the first cuts would have to go.

  “I didn’t think it would seem so big,” Skanda said. “It’s one thing to see it as an image, another to be here, to feel the dead pull of all that mass. It’s a mountain, falling through space. Don’t you feel that?”

  “It’s a rock.”

  Skanda pushed a hair from my eyes. “You’ve no romanticism,” he chided gently.

  Honestly, I hadn’t meant it to happen this way. I don’t, as a rule, end up sleeping with my clients. When Skanda insisted on accompanying me out to the rock, I’d hit him with my usual terms and conditions. My ship, my rules. There wasn’t much privacy on Moonlighter, but it would be strictly business all the way out and all the way back home.

  So much for that. In truth, Skanda made it too easy. He was charming, effortlessly easy on the eye and knew exactly what he wanted. It was that last quality that I found most attractive of all.

  He’d already had a certain rock in mind. And he needed to be out here, witnessing. Who was I to quibble?

  Very soon the work was underway.

  Bots did my bidding. They peeled away from Moonlighter in eager droves. Some carried lasers and plasma cutters. Some were tunnelling machines, designed to sink boreholes, down which other bots would pack detonation charges. Meanwhile, as the bots toiled, huge cutting arms unfolded from Moonlighter’s flanks. The arms were tipped with various sampling and cutting instruments. Slaved to my telepresence rig, the bots let me work the rock as if it was clay beneath my fingers. That was the part I liked the best. Dirt under my nails.

  Sculpting like Michelangelo.

  If I’d been prepared to cut corners, the way Yinning and Tarabulus worked, I could have shaped that rock in weeks. But doing it the hard way meant months of patient work. Months of just the two of us, stuck in my ship hundreds of light-minutes from civilisation.

  I loved every second of it.

  Skanda had been as good as his word. He’d paid up front. With the money now in my account, I wouldn’t need to work for years. He’d even picked up the tab on Moonlighter’s repair bill.

  Did I dare wonder where all this wealth was coming from?

  Sort of. But then again I didn’t really care. Obviously, he was rich. But then there were millions of rich people in the system – who else was paying for the voidships?

  When I was working, deep into it, Skanda would retire to Moonlighter’s bridge and conduct long-range business. He didn’t seem to mind whether I listened in or not. Only slowly did I get any kind of inkling into the kind of work he was involved in, and what it meant for me.

  Meanwhile, layer by layer, the face of David unmasked itself. Even as the work progressed, I knew there was never a time when it couldn’t all end in ignominy. The best probes and surveys weren’t infallible, and nor were my tools and methods. The rock was riddled with the usual number of weaknesses, the scars and fractures of ancient collisions. Some of these were obligingly close to the planes and contours where I meant to cut anyway, as if the rock was trying to shed itself of everything that wasn’t the head of David. Others were at treacherous opposition to my plans. A slight misalignment of a shaped charge, a misdirected laser blast, and I could shatter David’s cheek or brow beyond repair.

  Sure, I could fix that kind of damage easily enough. But I’d never stoop so low. That was for hacks like Yinning and Tarabulus. And I doubted Skanda would settle for second best. If he was going to create the head of David, it had to be as flawless as Michelangelo’s original.

  And it would be. Gradually the scalp and face came free. David’s chin and jaw were as yet still entombed in rock; the effect was to give the youth an old man’s beard. That wouldn’t last. I was chipping the beard away in house-sized chunks, a curl at a time. Another month, I reckoned, and then we’d be done with this crude shaping. Three months, perhaps, to bring David to completion. Four or five at the longest.

  And it would be magnificent. No one had done such a thing as this. I imagined some future civilisation stumbling on this painstakingly shaped rock, a million or billion years from now, as it tumbled around the Sun. What would they make of the blank-eyed visage? Would they have the faintest inkling of the eager little creatures who had brought it into being?

  Even with the bots, the work took its toll. Between cutting stints, when I was too tired to supervise the machines, I’d float with Skanda in the observation bubble. We’d be goggled up, our naked bodies intertwined.

  I’d seen my share of the system, but Skanda had been places I’d only dreamed of visiting. I kept telling myself not to worry about the future, just to enjoy the moment, this time we had together. When the rock was done, there’d be nothing to keep Skanda with me. Even with the money in my account, I was just a rock cutter.

  But Skanda made me wonder. With the goggles on, he’d show me things. Industrial flows; streams of processed matter on their way from launcher to customer. “That one,” he’d say, directing my eye to a tagged procession of cargo pellets, shot out from a catapult on some iceteroid. “That’s on its way to Mars. Slower than shipping it bulk, but cheaper in the long run. No engines, no guidance – just celestial mechanics, taking it all the way home.”

  “You own that flow?”

  He’d kiss me, as if to say don’t trouble yourse
lf with such matters. “In a tediously complicated sense, yes.”

  “People like you,” I said, “put people like me out of work.”

  Skanda smiled. My face bulged back in the mirrored globes of his goggles. “But I’m putting you in work now, aren’t I?”

  It wasn’t just industry and economics. Orbits lit up, coloured bands arcing away like the racetracks of the gods. Worlds flowered in the darkness. Not just the major planets, of course, but the minor ones: Ceres, Vesta, Hidalgo, Juno, Adonis, dozens more. In turn, each world had its gaggling court of fellow-travellers. We watched moons, habitats, stations, shuttles and ships. The goggles painted designations, civil registrations and cargo summaries.

  “I’ll take you to Venus Deep,” he said. “Or Ridgeback City on Iapetus. I know a great place there, and the views... have you ever seen the skimmers plunge through Jupiter’s spot, or the reef cities under Europa?”

  “I’ve never even been to Europa.”

  “There’s so much to see, Loti. More than one life could ever encompass. When we’re done with this... I hope you’ll let me show you more of the system. It would be my privilege.”

  “I’m just a rock cutter from Titan, Skanda.”

  “No,” he said, firmly enough that it was almost a reprimand. “You’re infinitely more than that. You’re a true artist, Loti. And you have a gift that people aren’t going to forget in a hurry. Take my word on that.”

  Stupid thing was, I did.

  BY THE TIME Ingvar steers me to another part of the quadrangle, the band has given up for the night. Most of the skaters have surrendered to the cold. There are only a couple left, perhaps the best of them, orbiting each other like a pair of binary pulsars.

  “They say they aren’t dynamically stable,” Ingvar comments, looking up through the dome. “Something to do with Triton’s influence, I think. The rings of Saturn aren’t stable either, not on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. But they’ll outlast these many times over. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”