Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “All right, Dad.”

  “Stop chattering now, son. This is the climax, this is the great moment.”

  Bearing their ceremonial staves and halberds, the male elders retreated, with slow step, from the funeral plateau. Sand rose up in waves below the dead man’s catafalque.

  The smartsand formed itself into one grand, pixelated, seething, pallbearing wave.

  An impossible liquid, it reverently rolled up the mountain, bearing the dead man.

  The catafalque crossed the brilliant twilight zone, into Eternal Light.

  The robots shifted their solar reflectors, in unison. The human crowd fell into dramatic, timeless, deep-frozen darkness. Pitar felt his spacesuit shudder, a trembling fit of holy awe.

  The catafalque gleamed like a chunk of the unseen sun.

  The dead man’s suit ruptured from the brilliant heat. Precious steam burst free. One brief, geyserlike, human rainbow, one visionary burst of glorious combustion, spewing like a solar flare.

  Then the ceremony ended. Though the long Mercurian Day had scarcely begun, a spiritual dawn had appeared.

  PITAR SAT ON the rim of a sandbox, within the Great Park of Splendid Remembrance.

  To pursue his design labours, Pitar often came to this site, to carefully sip cognition enhancers and contemplate the metaphysical implications of monumentality.

  The task of his generation was one of reconciliation, the achievement of a deeper understanding. This park had been the battlefield where the worst mass clashes of the civil war had occurred. Bitter, bloody, hand-to-hand struggles, between the polarised factions.

  Some of the colony’s best, most idealistic, most public-spirited men, trapped by harsh moral necessity, had beaten each other to death in this cavern.

  Even women had killed each other in here, when it became clear that the great burden of the ice-hunt would impinge on their personal politics. Women fought in feline ambush, and in martyr operations. Women killed efficiently, because they never wasted effort grasping at the honours of combat.

  The civil war was the closest that the colony had ever come to collapse. Worse than any natural catastrophe: worse than the blowouts, worse than the toxic poisonings.

  The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance was, by its nature, an ancient Mercurian lava tube. This cavern was a natural feature, unplanned by man, untouched by the jaws of machines.

  So it was thought, somehow, that this bloodstained space of abject moral failure was best left to wilderness. To living creatures other than mankind.

  The original settlers had brought genetic material from their homelands on Earth. These vials of DNA had been preserved with care, but never released inside the world, never instantiated as living creatures.

  Today, the Park of Splendid Remembrance was thick with them. These thriving, vegetal entities had exotic shapes, exotic features, and exotic, ancient names. Banyans, jacarandas, palms, ylang-ylang, papayas, jackfruit, teak, and mahogany.

  Unlike the homely, useful algae on which the colony subsisted, these woody species took on wild, unheard-of forms. Under the blazing growlights, rising in the light gravity, rooted in a strange mineral soil, they were the native Mercurian forest. Great, green, reeking, shady, twisted eminences. Bizarre organic complexities: flowering, gnarling, branching, fruiting.

  This wilderness mankind had unleashed was not beautiful. It was vigorous, but crabbed and chaotic. It was, as yet, merely a colonial tangle, a strange, self-choking complex of distorted traditional forms.

  Like all aesthetic issues, thought Pitar, the problem here had its roots within a poor metaphysics. To introduce this ungainly forest, so as to obscure a dark place where human will had failed – that effort was insincere. It had not been thought-through.

  The Great Park of Splendid Remembrance had feared to face the whole truth. So it was as yet neither great nor splendid, because it had shirked the hard thinking required by the authentic Mercurian texture of existence.

  This was Pitar’s own task.

  Sitting in deep thought, Pitar idly drew squares, triangles, circles, within the childish play-box of smartsand. With each stroke of his duelling-club, the smartsand responded and processed. Arcane ripples bounded and rebounded from the corners of the sandbox.

  The computational entities, with which mankind shared this planet, were never intelligent. The machinic phylum, which seemed so clever and vigorous to the untrained eye, was neither alive nor smart. The phylum was merely the phylum; it had no will, no pride, no organic lust for survival, no reason to exist and persist. Without human will to issue its coded commands, the phylum would collapse in an eyeblink, returning to the sunblasted, constituent elements of this world.

  But although the phylum possessed neither life nor intelligence, it did possess an order-of-being. It was not alive, merely processual, yet it had transcended the natural. The phylum was a metaphysical entity, and worthy of respect. Something like the spiritual respect owed a dead body: a thing, yes, inert, yes, of ashes, yes – yet so much more than mere inert ashes.

  The truth, beyond intelligence. There were those who said – the daring thinkers of Pitar’s own generation – that the Sun was self-possessed. Not in the old-fashioned, cranky, archaic, heroic way that visionaries like DeBlakey had once imagined. The Sun was never alive, nor was the Sun intelligent, but the Sun was an entity, metaphysically ordered. The Sun that loomed over tiny Mercury was one Object of the Order of a Star.

  And these thinkers speculated – speculating furthermore, just as bravely daring as their ancestors, though in a more modern fashion – that there were many Orders in the cosmos. Life, and, intelligence, and the processual phylum were just three of those countless Orders.

  These speculative realists held that the Cosmos was inherently riddled with unnatural Orders. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of independent, extropic Orders, each Order unknown to the next, yet each as real and noble as the next, each as important as life or thought.

  Some Orders transpired in picoseconds, other Orders in unknowable aeons. Orders, each as deep and complex and unnatural as life, or cognition, or computation. Entities, autarchic ontologies, occupying the full panoply of every scale of space-time. From the quantum foam, where space disintegrated, to the forever-unknowable scale of the Cosmos, forever outside the light-cone of any instrumentable knowability.

  That was reality.

  There were those who called these idle dreams, but reality was neither neither idle nor a dream. Much scientific evidence had been carefully amassed, to prove the objective existence of extropic Orders. Pitar followed Mercurian science with some care – although he never involved himself in the fierce, bloody duels over precedence and citation.

  Pitar understood the implications of modern science for his own creative work. Any true, sincere monument, any place of genuinely splendid remembrance, would be built in a manner that took reality into a full account. An enlightened peak of moral comprehension.

  This Awareness would transcend awareness. It would respect that ordered otherness, in all its many forms, and do that Otherness honour.

  It might well take him, thought Pitar, centuries to come to workable terms with this professional ambition. But since he had that time, it behooved him to spend his time properly. Such was his duty. This was something that he himself could do, to add to all that had passed before, as a legacy to whoever, or whatever, was to follow.

  Pitar glanced up, suddenly, from the writhing sandpit. His wife had arrived. Lucy was on her bicycle.

  Pitar mounted his own two-wheeled machine. He rode to join her. Pitar rode smoothly and elegantly, because he’d infested his bicycle’s frame with smartsand.

  He hadn’t told his wife about this design gambit; Lucy merely thought, presumably, that he was tremendously good at learning to ride a bicycle. No need to bring up that subject. Enough that he had a bicycle, and that he rode it with her. Deeds, not words.

  His wife’s head was fully encased in her black helmet. Her body was almost suital
ooned by her black, flowing bicycle garb. Mounted on her bicycle, Lucy scarcely looked like a woman at all. More of a dark, scarcely-knowable, metaphysical object.

  But, when Pitar wore his own helmet, he was as anonymous and mysterious as she. So, faceless and shameless, they rode together, tires crunching subtly, on the park’s long grey cinder-path.

  “Mr. Peretz, you looked very thoughtful, sitting there in your sandbox.”

  “Yes,” said Pitar, forbearing to nod, due to the bulk of his helmet.

  “What were you thinking?”

  A deadly female question. Pitar found a tactful parry. “Look here, I have created a new bicycle. See, I am riding it now.”

  “Yes, I saw that you printed a new bicycle, and it’s more advanced now, isn’t it? What happened to your nice old bicycle? You rode that one so gallantly!”

  “I gave that machine to a friend,” said Pitar. “I gave it to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet.”

  His wife’s front wheel wobbled suddenly. “What? To him? How? Why? He beat you in a duel!”

  “It’s true that Mr. DeVenet is a duellist. And it’s true that I lost that duel. But that was eight years ago, and there’s no reason I can’t be polite.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  Pitar said nothing.

  “Why did you do it? You had some reason for doing that. You should tell me that. He insulted me; I should know this.”

  “Let’s just ride,” Pitar suggested.

  Pitar had given the gift to the duellist, because he’d known that there would be trouble about the bicycles. This radical innovation – bicycling – it did damage the institution of purdah. Maybe it did not violate the letter of propriety, but it certainly damaged the spirit.

  Pitar had been confronted on that issue; politely. So Pitar had, just as politely, referred that matter of honour to Mr. Giorgio Harold DeVenet, also the possessor of a bicycle.

  Mr. DeVenet, a brawny and athletic man, was delighted with his new bicycle. As he scorched past mere pedestrians, pedalling in a fury, Mr. DeVenet’s strength and speed were publicly displayed to fine effect.

  Skeptics had questioned Mr. DeVenet’s affection for bicycles. He had promptly forced them to retract their assertions and apologise.

  In this fashion, the matter of bicycles was settled.

  Mr. DeVenet was not so punctilious, however, that he had escaped being seen in the flirtatious, bicycling company of the notorious Widow De Schubert. She was the type who rode through life without a helmet. The widow’s late husband, outmatched and sorely lacking in tact, had already fallen on the field of honour.

  To own a bicycle was not the same as understanding its proper use. At the rate that matters progressed these days, it wouldn’t be long before Mr. DeVenet joined the other victims of the Widow De Schubert. The duellist could batter any number of bicycle skeptics, but to defeat a woman’s wiles was far beyond his simplicity.

  Men who lived by the club fell by the club, a trouble-story far older than this world. Pitar was at peace with these difficult facts of life. The notorious Widow De Schubert was one his wife’s best-trusted friends – but he did not inquire into that tangled matter. Certain things between men and women were best left unspoken.

  His wife lifted her visor by a thumb’s width, so as to be better heard. “Mr. Peretz, I do enjoy these new outings that we have together nowadays. You have given me another gift that I long desired. For that, I am grateful to you. You are a good husband.”

  “Thank you very much for that kindly remark, Mrs. Peretz. That’s very gratifying.”

  “Are you also pleased by our situation today?”

  Given the praise he had just received, Pitar ventured a candid response. “Although modernity has some clear advantages,” he told her, “I can’t say it’s entirely easy. In that very modest bicycle garb, I cannot see your face. In fact, I can’t see anything of you at all. You are a deep mystery.”

  “Beneath this black garment, sir, I wear nothing but my beautiful, golden mangalsutra. I feel so free nowadays. Freer than I have ever felt as a modern woman.”

  Pitar pondered this provocative remark. It had emotional layers and textures closed to mere men. “That’s an interesting data-point, there.”

  “Mr. Peretz, although it was not our own will that united us,” Lucy said, rolling boldly on, “I feel that marriage is an important exploration of a woman’s emotional phase-space. Someday, we two – separated, of course – will look back on these years with satisfaction. You in your way, and me in mine, as that must be. Nevertheless, we will have accomplished a crucial joint success.”

  “You’re full of compliments this afternoon, Mrs. Peretz! I’m glad you’re in such a good mood!”

  “This is not a question of my so-called moods!” his wife told him. “I am trying to explain to you that, now that we possess bicycles, modernity is achieved. It’s time that I faced futurity, and to do what futurity requires from me, I will need your help. It’s time we built another child.”

  “Since honour requires that of me as well, Mrs. Peretz, I can only concur.”

  “Let’s build a daughter, this time.”

  “A daughter would be just and fair.”

  “Good. Then, that’s all settled. These are good times. A good day to you, sir.” She bent to heave at her whirring pedals, and she rapidly wheeled away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  John Barnes has commercially published thirty volumes of fiction, including science fiction, men’s action adventure, two collaborations with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a collection of short stories and essays, one fantasy and one mainstream novel. His most recent books are science fiction novel Daybreak Zero, young adult novel Losers in Space, and political satire Raise the Gipper! He has done a rather large number of occasionally peculiar things for money, mainly in business consulting, academic teaching, and show business, fields which overlap more than you’d think. Since 2001, he has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he has a thoroughly wonderful wife, a wildly varying income, and an unjustifiably negative attitude, which he feels is actually the best permutation.

  Stephen Baxter is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past thirty years. His ‘Xeelee’ sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. He is the author of more than forty books and over a hundred short stories. His most recent books are Iron Winter, the final novel in the ‘Northland’ trilogy, Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice, The Long Earth, the first of two novels co-written with Terry Pratchett, and new short story collection, Last and First Contacts.

  Elizabeth Bear was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She divides her time between Massachusetts, where she lives with a Giant Ridiculous Dog in a town so small it doesn’t even have its own Dunkin Donuts, and western Wisconsin, the home of her partner, Scott Lynch. Her first short fiction appeared in 1996, and was followed after a nearly decade-long gap by fifteen novels, two short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. Her most recent novels are Norse fantasy The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette) and an Asian-inspired fantasy, Range of Ghosts. Coming up is a new short story collection, Shoggoths in Bloom. Bear’s ‘Jenny Casey’ trilogy won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her stories ‘Tideline’ and ‘Shoggoths in Bloom’ won the Hugo, while ‘Tideline’ also won the Sturgeon award.

  Pat Cadigan is the author of about a hundred short stories and fourteen books, two of which, Synners and Fools, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She was born in New York, grew up in Massachusetts, and spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area. She now lives in London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, her Polish translator Konrad Walewski and his partner, the Lovely Lena, and co-conspirator, writer and raconteuse Amanda Hemingway; also, two ghosts, one of which is the shade of Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats (the ot
her declines to give a name). She is pretty sure there isn’t a more entertaining household.

  James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Corey’s current project is a series of science fiction novels called The Expanse. The first two novels in the series are Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War. The third, Dandelion Sky, is scheduled to be released in 2013.

  James is Daniel’s middle name, Corey is Ty’s middle name, and S. A. are Daniel’s daughter’s initials.

  Stephen D. Covey received a Bachelor’s in Physics from Wabash College. As a software and Internet consultant, his clients included the Air Force, Army, and Navy. He was the Director of R&D for Applied Innovation Inc., and has authored several papers on topics ranging from “Optical Ethernet” to “Design Considerations for Space Settlements.” A speaker at various conferences, he has given multiple presentations related to capturing asteroids into Earth orbit. A member of the Asteroid Mining Group, Stephen will chair the Asteroid track at the 2013 International Space Development Conference in San Diego. His educational website about minerals (www.galleries.com) averages 300,000 visitors per month. He also writes science fiction, techno-thrillers, and the futurist (pro-space) blog RamblingsOnTheFutureOfHumanity.com.

  Gwyneth Jones was born in Manchester, England, and is the author of more than twenty novels for teenagers, mostly under the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF novels for adults. She has won two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the Philip K. Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Her most recent books are novel Spirit, essay collection Imagination/Space, and story collection The Universe of Things. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son, a Tonkinese cat called Ginger, and her young friend Milo.