Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “You should be happy. Something wrong will be put right.”

  “Well, yes. But Naiad was destroyed to make this happen. And those people, too. Given their deaths, I’d rather the end result was a bit more permanent.”

  “It’ll outlast us. That’s probably all that matters.”

  Ingvar’s head bobs in the fur-lined hood of her coat. “Maybe by the time the rings start to dissipate, we’ll have decided we like them enough to want to preserve them. Sure we’d find a way, if we felt it mattered enough.”

  I look at them now. Try to see them through fresh eyes.

  The rings of Neptune.

  They bisect the face of the world like a knife slash, very nearly as magnificent as the rings of Saturn. There always were rings here, I tell myself, but they were little more than smoky threads, all but invisible under most conditions. The ghostly promise of rings yet to come.

  Not so now. The resonant effects of Triton, and its lesser siblings, conspire to divide and subdivide these infant rings into riverine bands. In turn, these concentric bands shimmer with a hundred splendid hues of the most ethereal blue-white or pastel green or jade. There’s a lot of ice and rubble in a moon, even one as small as Naiad, and enough subtle chemistry to provide beguiling variations in reflection and transmission.

  Skanda should have seen this, I think. He’d have known that the rings would be beautiful, a thing of wonder, commanding the awe of the entire system. But he couldn’t have begun to predict their dazzling complexity. The glory of it.

  But then who could?

  “Does it anger you, that he did this to your greatest work?” Ingvar asks. “Let you create the head of David, let you think this would be the thing that made your name, all the while knowing it was going to be destroyed?”

  “I did what I was paid to do. Once my part in it was over, I forgot about David.”

  “Or rather, you forced yourself not to dwell on it. For obvious reasons, in light of what happened. But you always believed it was still out there, didn’t you? Ticking its way round the Sun, waiting to be found. You clung to that.” Ingvar’s tone changes. “Would he have taken credit, do you think? Was that always his intention?”

  “He never said anything about it to me.”

  “But you knew him a little. When the voidship reached the Oort cloud, when he was scheduled to be woken... would he have declared himself responsible? Would he have basked in the fame, knowing he was untouchable, beyond the reach of solar law, or would he have preferred to leave the mystery unsolved?”

  “What do you think?” I ask snidely.

  “From what I’ve gathered of his profile,” Ingvar says, resuming her curious lopsided walk, “He doesn’t strike me as the kind to have settled for anonymity.”

  I’VE LIVED A good and full life since the day he left. I still cut rock. I’ve had many lovers, many friends, and I can’t say I’ve been unhappy. But there are days when the pain of his betrayal feels as raw as if it all happened yesterday. We were nearly done with David – just a couple more weeks of finishing-off, and then the head was complete. It already looked magnificent. It was the finest thing I’d ever touched.

  Then Skanda returned from the bridge, where he’d been conducting business dealings. Nothing about his manner suggested anything untoward.

  “I’ve got to go for a little while.”

  “Go?”

  “Back to the main system. Something’s come up. It’s complicated and it would be a lot easier to resolve without hours of timelag.”

  “We’re nearly done. I don’t usually abandon a piece when it’s this near to completion – it’s too hard to get back into the right frame of mind.”

  “You don’t have to abandon anything. My people... they’re sending out a ship to get me. In fact, it will be here very shortly. You can stay on station, finish the work.”

  He’d made it seem like some unscheduled crisis, something that had blown up at short notice, but deep down I knew that couldn’t be that case. Not if that little ship of his had already been on its way out here for what must have been days.

  I watched it arrive. It was a tiny thing, a beautiful jewelled toy of a spacecraft, porpoise-sleek and not much larger. “An extravagance,” Skanda said, as the craft docked. “It’s just that sometimes I need to be able to move around very quickly.”

  I bottled my qualms. “You don’t have to apologise for being rich. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be paying for the head of David.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.” He kissed me on the cheek, forestalling any objection. “I wish there was some alternative, but there isn’t. All I can promise is that I won’t be long. My ship can get me there and back very quickly. Two weeks, three at the most. Keep on working. Finish David for me, and I’ll be back to see the end result.”

  “Where are you going? You were so keen on being here. I understand timelag, but it hasn’t held you back until now. What’s so important that you have to go away?”

  He touched a finger to my lips. “Every second that I’m here is another that I’m not on my way, doing what has to be done. When I’m back, I’ll tell you everything you want to know – and I guarantee you’ll be bored within five minutes.” He kissed me again. “Keep on working. Do that for me. Remember what I said, Loti. You have a gift.”

  What was the point in arguing further? I believed him. All that talk of the places he’d show me, the things we’d share together – the glamour and spectacle of the entire system, ours for the taking. He’d fixed that idea so firmly in my head that it never once occurred to me that he’d been lying the entire time. I never thought that we’d have a life together; I wasn’t that naïve. But some good months, was that too much to ask for? Venus Deep and the reef cities of Europa. The two of us, the artist and her wealthy lover and sponsor. Who would turn that down?

  “Be fast,” I whispered.

  From the observation bubble, I watched his little ship drop away from Moonlighter. The drive was bright, and I tracked it until it was too faint to detect. By then, I had a handle on his vector. It didn’t mean much – he could easily have been heading to an intermediate stopover, unrelated to his true destination, or just travelling in a random direction to throw me off the scent.

  Both of those things were possible. But so was the third possibility, which was that the vector was reliable, and that Skanda had business around Jupiter.

  And even then I didn’t guess.

  “HOW LONG WAS it before you found out about the voidship?” Ingvar asks.

  “A while. Weeks, months. Does it really matter now?”

  “When he left Moonlighter... was that the last contact you had with him?”

  “No.” The admission is difficult, because it takes me back to the time when I was foolish enough to believe Skanda’s promises. “He called me from Jupiter. Even mentioned the voidship: said a relative of his was being frozen, put aboard for the voyage. That was the emergency. He wanted to be there, to give whoever it was a good send-off.”

  “Whereas the relative was really his wife, and Skanda would soon be joining her. They’d both paid for slots on the voidship. Off to establish a human bridgehead in the Oort cloud. But he hadn’t finished with the head of David, had he? He still had instructions for you. It was still important that the work be finished.”

  “I’d been paid, and I had no reason to doubt that he’d be back.”

  “Other than the completion of the head, what were the instructions?”

  “When his little ship docked, it came with a marker beacon. I was told to fix it onto the head.”

  “And the... function... of this beacon? You never questioned it?”

  I look down. I wish I had something to say.

  Ingvar continues. “The beacon was also a steering motor. Skanda had programmed it to make an adjustment to the rock’s orbit. An impulse, to kick into a collision course for Naiad. He’d calculated everything. The binding energy of the moon, the kinetic energy of the impactor. He knew it
would work. He knew he could shatter that moon and turn it into a ring system around Neptune. The ultimate artistic statement, a piece of planetary resculpting to dwarf the ages.”

  I think things over for a moment. The conversation has been as lopsided as Ingvar’s walk. She’s been asking all the hard questions; now it’s my turn.

  “What’s in it for you? What made you decide that you had to solve this mystery? The entire system thinks the rings were made by accident. What made you think otherwise?”

  Against expectation, Ingvar seems pleased rather than annoyed. “I saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “The head of David. With my own eyes, just before it hit.”

  “You were there?

  All of a sudden, Ingvar looks tremendously old and weary, as if this is the end of some enormous and taxing enterprise, something that has swallowed decades of her life.

  “I was Authority. Pilot of one of the quick reaction ships we sent up to deflect the impactor, as soon as we saw it coming in. I got close enough to see your handiwork, Loti. Too close, as it happens. We were hitting the rock with weapons, trying to adjust its vector or shatter it to rubble. There was an impact, near David’s right eye. My ship was caught in the blast. I lost control; nearly died.” She takes a breath. “My ship was badly damaged. So was I.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Oh, they patched me up well enough after my ship was recovered. More than they could do for my partner. Still, lucky as I’d been, I was never much good to Authority after that. Hence the change of profession.”

  “But you always knew about the head.”

  “So did everyone involved. That couldn’t come out, though. No one could know that people had died on Naiad, because that made us look bad. And no one could know that the impactor had been sculpted, because that made it a crime, not an accident – and if that had come out, it wouldn’t have been long before the rest of it was public as well. Our multiple screw-ups.”

  “Skanda never meant for people to die. He just wanted to do something outrageous.”

  “He succeeded. But as of now, only two people are aware of that. You and me. The question is, what do we do with our knowledge?”

  I wonder if there’s a trap I’m missing. “You’ve spent years putting this together, haven’t you? Tracking down the truth. Finding me, and establishing my involvement. Well, congratulations. You’re right; I was his accomplice. So what if I didn’t know what I was getting into? Authority won’t care about that. Especially as there isn’t anyone else left to blame. You could hand me over now.”

  “I could. But would that necessarily be the right thing to do?” Ingvar studies her boots. “My second career... it’s not as if it’s anything I need to be ashamed of. I’ve worked hard, had my share of successes. Minor cases, in the scheme of things. But I’ve not failed. So what if I’ve done nothing anyone will ever remember me for?”

  “Until now. Turn me in... it could make your reputation.”

  “And yours,” Ingvar nods. “Think of it, Loti. Everything you’ve done, every rock you’ve cut, the entirety of your art, it’s as nothing against the head of David. And the head of David is as nothing against the rings of Neptune. You created something marvellous, a thing of wonder. Beyond Yinning and Tarabulus or anyone else. It was the one time that your life was touched by greatness.” A sudden reverence enters Ingvar’s voice. “But you can’t tell anyone. All you’ll have is the rest of your art, in all its middling obscurity, until the day you die. No fame, no notoriety. And all I’ll have is a limp and the dog days of my second career. The question is: could either of us live with that?”

  “What if I chose not to?”

  “I’d make your name.”

  “As a convicted criminal, locked away in some Authority cell?”

  Ingvar’s shrug suggests that this is no more than a trifle. “Some would make the trade in an instant. Artists have killed themselves for a stab at immortality. No one’s asking that much of you.”

  “And you?”

  “I’d have solved the mystery of the Naiad event. Brought its last living perpetrator to justice. There’d be a measure of acclaim in it for me.”

  “Just a measure?”

  “Some trouble as well. As I said, not everyone would welcome the truth getting out.”

  I shake my head, almost disappointed with Ingvar, that she should give in now. “So you’re saying I have a choice?”

  “I’m saying we both have one. But we’d have to agree on it, I think. No good one of us pulling one way, the other resisting.”

  I look at Neptune again. The rings, the storms, the brooding blue vastness of it all. And think of that temporary star, shining for a few seconds in the constellation Fornax. The light of a voidship, dying in a soundless eruption of subatomic energy. They say they were pushing the engines, trying to outrun the other voidships. Trying to be the first to stake a claim in the Oort clouds. Going for victory.

  They also say no living thing saw that flash; that it was only machines that witnessed it, but that if anyone had been looking toward Fornax, at the right time...

  “It would be something, to be known for that,” I tell Ingvar.

  “It would.”

  “My name would ring down the ages. Like Michelangelo.”

  “That’s true,” she agrees. “But Michelangelo’s dead, and I doubt that it makes much difference to him now.” Ingvar claps her hands against her body. “I’m getting cold. I know a good bar near here, and there are no rock cutters. Let’s go inside and talk it over, shall we?”

  WATER RIGHTS

  An Owomoyela

  IT WAS A beautiful explosion, and in a way Jordan was lucky to have such a good seat. She’d been watching the Earth swell up to fill and exceed her porthole, ignoring the thin strand of the space elevator and the wide modules of its ascender until one of them flashed and spilled its guts in a spray of diamonds.

  The guy next to her, asleep since they crossed inside the moon’s orbit, jerked awake as the skiff fired its slowdown thrusters to stop them, still a kilometre from the elevator station. He leaned over against his straps, gaping at the rainbows glittering beside the ascender. “My god, that’s beautiful. What is that?”

  Jordan’s mouth was dry, her heart going tripletime.

  “Water,” she said. “That’s all our water.”

  BY THE TIME the station took a damage assessment and rousted every security guard posted there, the skiff had gone into an uproar and the complimentary drinks cabinet was locked. By the time the skiff emptied onto the station, the starfield was peppered with emergency vehicles and private Help & Rescue, and guards with nonlethals bristled at the passengers flooding the concourse.

  The queue at the transmission station was long enough that Jordan just pushed off toward the light skiff to Lagrange One, cornering around a couple Earthers who started, all nerves, as she boosted off their shoulders. Poor bastards. If they’d planned on taking the ascender down, acclimating to touch-friendly micrograv was the least of their problems.

  Due to the accident on the ascender, all hydrogen- and oxygen-thrust vehicles out of Hyperion Station have been suspended, announced the PA. Repeat, due to the accident on the ascender...

  Jordan showed her identification to a cluster of guards at the terminal, went up to the kiosk, and sprang the extra expense to board a private module with a transmitter. The module was a closet, compared with the cabins on the ascender; even the micrograv straps seemed superfluous, as there were barely ten centimetres of space left between Jordan’s elbows and the module walls.

  She keyed in the transmission codes for her rig, and a few seconds later Marcus’s face popped onto the screen, dark skin flushed in the rig’s full-spectrum lights.

  “Oh, thank god,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m pretty well shaken and stirred, Marc,” Jordan said. “Listen – put the rig onto emergency water rationing. Stop all the new planting, and restrict personal use as f
ar down as it’ll go.”

  Seconds passed, and she watched Marcus’s expression as he waited for the transmission to reach him. “Already done, Ms. Owole,” he responded. “Soon as we heard the news. Have you heard the latest?”

  “I know they’re suspending H and O ships out of Earth orbit. I’m just glad we do enough business to have photonic corridors from L1 out there.”

  “Yeah, saved by big business,” Marcus said. “L1 is putting a discouragement tax on H-O thrusters. Oh, and Etienne is coming after you.”

  He had the grace to look sheepish, at least. Jordan groaned.

  “Between us and the refuelling stations Galot and Bardroy run, that’s sixty per cent of the water in the near-Earth colonies,” he said. “The next reserve is on Mars, and the next after that is Europa. They’re no help. Didn’t take long for Etienne to come to that conclusion.”

  “And did Etienne’s observation come with demands?”

  Marcus laughed uneasily. “You know it would’ve. Fortunately they’re still crunching numbers on how long we can stretch what we have. Heard anything from Ouranos-Hyperion on repair times?”

  “You know Earthside procedure,” Jordan said. “It’ll be security promises and pointing fingers for a while. Marcus, I haven’t even got a message to Harper yet. She was going to meet me Earthside; god knows what she thinks.”

  She waited a few seconds.

  Then, without waiting for the response, said “They’re calling it an accident. I know they want to keep us from rioting, but do they think we’re stupid?”

  “Jordan.” Marcus pressed his fingers to the camera. “I’m sure she heard that the ascender exploded; she can put two and two together.”

  A pause, as the second half of the message caught him.