Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  SO I CAME here, aware in a distant way that it could be my last long leap through space. A jump of ten billion years in an impossible instant brought me to the place where home used to be. The campfire called Sol is long cold. The sphere that once contained it has been allowed to decay back into ordinary matter, which clumped and formed new satellites around the cinder at the heart of system. One of these clumps is called ‘Earth’, but is as different from my birthplace as the stars around it.

  As I stepped out of the booth onto this strange world and looked up at the moth-eaten sky, I recognised nothing.

  BUT THERE’S YOU, whoever you are. And you ask me what I remember. And when I am done telling you that, I ask you who you are.

  - Don’t you know me?

  How could I? The universe is a big place, and it’s got a lot bigger recently.

  - Much has changed.

  You don’t need to tell me that.

  - That’s why I was sent here to meet you.

  Who by?

  Sudden hope stirs in my chest.

  Did Cate send you? Do you know where she is?

  - She’s gone. Everyone’s gone.

  They’re dead?

  That’s a crushing thought. Have I jumped too far and skipped over all possibility of success?

  - They’re not dead. They’re just not individuals anymore. You’re the last one standing: the only discrete human in the entire universe. How does that make you feel?

  How am I supposed to feel? Angry? Sad?

  The truth is, I feel nothing but a terrible hollowness. What is the point of living without Cate?

  I have wasted my life.

  - Don’t say that. It’s not true. Not for me.

  What do you know about me?

  - Everything. Does this surprise you? You have been watched over and cared for in a thousand ways while you pursued your mission.

  Why?

  - Your existence matters. You have helped humanity remember. After so long, you see, it becomes easy to forget.

  Not for me.

  - I said those exact same words a moment ago.

  So?

  - I asked you what you remember, and you told me. You remember Cate.

  Of course.

  And I do: the mole on her left clavicle, the way she chewed her nails when she was bored, the nonsense poem she read to me one Spring morning in Bali: “The mouse in the house has two ears on his rear...”

  - But you really don’t know who I am?

  Why does that matter? If it’s so important to you, just tell me.

  - Perhaps I will have to. Answer me one more question first. What was it you did to end your relationship with Cate?

  I stare at you, my interrogator, for a long time. Brown hair tied neatly in a complex bun. Fingers long and folded in front of angular hips. Green eyes that study me all too closely as I struggle with the question.

  Do the details matter?

  They do if you can’t remember them.

  I don’t know the answer to your question.

  How is that possible?

  - I’ll show you.

  IT’S BEEN A long time since I looked in a mirror. What I see is shocking: a bland creature with no distinguishing features, barely any features at all beyond the obligatory ears, nose and mouth. Beige skin that is as hairless as a potato completes the shocking picture.

  I barely hear what you are saying.

  This what I have become, thanks to the tyranny of large numbers.

  Large numbers and small errors, you tell me. Lots of them.

  I LOST TRACK of how many times I have d-matted since leaving Earth. The number is beyond memory. What I also never realized was how many times the machines tried to repair each tiny, everyday glitch and failed, providing an approximation instead of a significant nuance. That approximation is all I am, now.

  But the problem is larger than that. How many times have I unconsciously refreshed my sense of self – reassured myself that I am me – by means of the messages I received from other versions of me? How long since I had even that illusion of certainty to plug those gaps?

  Too much time, and thus I have become this... this shadow of myself, which I do not recognise as me.

  Whoever I even am.

  I do not know my own name. Yet I remember my fingers touching Cate’s on that monument in New Petersburg.

  Beauchamp and...?

  It’s no use. Everything about me has blurred and gone. All I am now is the creature who tried to find Cate – and I cannot even trust even those memories of her, now. Everything has been warped from true, especially those details I pressed closest to my heart for so long. Is the Cate I remember really her?

  Could she be someone else entirely...?

  CATE. YOU’RE CATE. Oh my god.

  - I’m not Cate. She’s gone, remember? There’s only one person left.

  But you said...

  - Exactly. Humanity brought me here to make you whole.

  You’re... me?

  - Yes. And I have been waiting for you my entire life.

  THE ECHO OF Cate’s declaration of love makes me tremble so hard I cannot stand. The other me, the real me, takes me gently into her arms, and holds me as I weep. She kisses my forehead. Her cheek rests lightly against my skin, and I feel an unmeasurable surrender to chance, and to forces far greater than me, and, yes, to something very much like love. Because isn’t that what love is? What you need, whether you knew it or not, versus what you want?

  I feel a warmth rush through me as though somewhere nearby a fire has been rekindled, and I shiver, not realising until now just how cold I’ve felt, alone in the void.

  It’s all right, you tell me. I’m not going anywhere.

  WHERE THICH TIM Nghe stands, there is no time; there is no noise, save for the distant lament of the dead – voices she has once known, Mother, Sixth Aunt, Cousin Cuc, Cousin Ly, the passengers – not crying out in agony, or whispering about how afraid they were, at the very end, but simply singing, over and over, the syllables of a mantra – perhaps they are at peace, lifted into one of the paradises – perhaps they await their rebirth in a red-lacquered pavilion by the Wheel, sipping the tea of oblivion with the same carelessness Thich Tim Nghe now uses to drink her water, drawn from deep spaces...

  In the chorus of the dead, there is one large, looming silence; the voice of the ship, forever beyond her, forever impervious to her prayers and entreaties – but then, wasn’t it always the case?

  FROM THE PLANET, the mindship’s corpse had seemed to loom large enough to fill the sky – hugged tight on a low orbit, held back from plummeting towards the surface only by a miracle of engineering – but, once she was in the shuttle, Yen Oanh realised that it was really quite far away, the pockmarks on its surface blurred and hazy, the distorted paintings on the hull visible only as splashes of bright colour.

  “How long until we arrive?” she asked the disciple.

  The disciple, Hue Mi, was a young woman barely out of childhood, though the solemnity with which she held herself made her seem older. “Not long, Grandmother.” She looked at the mindship without any sense of wonder or awe; no doubt long since used to its presence. The ship, after all, had been dead for eleven years.

  Grandmother. How had she got so old? But then Yen Oanh knew the answer: twenty years of marriage; and another few decades in the Crane and Cedar order, dispatched across the numbered planets to check the spread of the Blue Lily plague in sickhouses and hospitals and private dwellings across the breadth of the Empire, from cramped compartments on the capital to the luxurious mansions of the First Planet, from those who could afford the best care to those who couldn’t.

  Fifty-six years; and only one regret.

  “We don’t often get visitors at this time of the year,” Hue Mi was saying. She was looking at the mass of the ship, looming ever larger in the viewscreen – normally it would be a private display on each passenger’s implants, but Yen Oanh had asked her to make it public.

  “O
h?” Yen Oanh kept her eyes on the ship. The Stone and Bronze Shadow had been small by modern standards. As they approached the sleek hull vanished from view, replaced by a profusion of details: the shadow of a pagoda on the prow; the red fan surrounding the docking bays, and then only splashes of colours on metal, with a faint tinge of oily light. “The order has been here before.” Twice, in fact. She could feel both Sister Que Tu and Brother Gia Minh in the Communion – not saying anything, but standing by, ready to provide her with the information she needed.

  And Yen Oanh had been there too, of course – briefly, but long enough.

  Hue Mi’s face was a closed book. “Of course.” In the communal network – overlaid over Yen Oanh’s normal vision – her hand was branded with the mark of the order, a crane perched in the branches of a cedar tree. Vaccinated then; but it wasn’t a surprise. Everyone was, those days; and it would have been Yen Oanh’s duty to remedy this (and impose a heavy fine), if it hadn’t been the case. “It was... different back then, I’m told.”

  “Very different,” Yen Oanh said. People dying by the hundreds, the Empire and the newly founded order foundering to research a cure or a vaccine or both, the odour of charnel houses in the overcrowded hospitals; and the fear, that sickening feeling that every bruise on your skin was a symptom, a precursor to all the ones blossoming like flowers on the skin; to the fever and the delirium and the slow descent into death.

  At least, now it was controlled.

  Hue Mi didn’t answer; Yen Oanh realised that she was standing still, her eyes slightly out of focus; the contours of her body wavering as though she were no longer quite there – and that the colours on the viewscreen had frozen. A seizure. She hid them well; she’d had another one in the time Yen Oanh had been with her.

  Yen Oanh’s own seizures – like Hue Mi’s, a side effect of the vaccine – were small, and short enough that she could disguise them as access to the Communion; not as bad or as long as the fits that had characterised the plague, the warping of realities that stretched over entire rooms, dragging everyone into places where human thoughts couldn’t remain coherent for long.

  Yen Oanh waited for Hue Mi’s seizure to be over; all the while, the ship was getting closer – closer to the heartroom. Closer to Thich Tim Nghe.

  She didn’t want to think about Thich Tim Nghe now.

  At length, Hue Mi came back into focus, and opened her eyes; the viewscreen abruptly showed the docking bay coming into view, permanently open, with the death of the Mind that had controlled the ship. “We’re here now,” she said.

  Yen Oanh couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?” It was borderline impolite, made only possible because she was much older than Hue Mi, and because she was Crane and Cedar.

  Hue Mi nodded – she didn’t seem to mind. Possibly her teacher was even more impolite than Yen Oanh. “I was older. And back on the planet, watching children run to a pagoda.” She shrugged. “It means nothing.”

  It didn’t. The visions of Blue Lily came from the mind being partially dragged into deep spaces, where time and space took on different significances. Different realities, that was all; not predictions of the future.

  Except, of course, for Thich Tim Nghe. Yen Oanh forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Your teacher does it differently, doesn’t she?”

  Hue Mi grimaced. “Thich Tim Nghe doesn’t get seizures. It’s... you’ll see, if you make it there.”

  “If?”

  “Most people don’t like being onboard.”

  No. She hadn’t thought it would be so easy, after all; that Thich Tim Nghe would be so readily accessible. “Brother Gia Minh?” she asked.

  The Communion rose, to enfold her; a room with watercolours of starscapes and mountains, the walls of which seemed to stretch on forever – the air crisp and tangy, as if she stood just on the edge of winter – and the shadowy shapes of a hundred, of a thousand brothers and sisters who had gifted their simulacrums to the Cedar and Crane order, their memories of all the Blue Lily cases they’d seen.

  Brother Gia Minh was young; perhaps as young as Hue Mi; wearing not the robes of the order, but the clothes of a poor technician, his hands moving as if he were still controlling bots. “Sister,” he said, bowing – then frowning. “You’re on the ship. The dead one.”

  “Yes,” Yen Oanh said. “I need you to tell me what happened, when you were last here.”

  Brother Gia Minh grimaced, but he waved a hand; and the room faded, to be replaced with the arid surface of the Sixth Planet. “Eleven years ago,” he whispered.

  ELEVEN YEARS AGO, Gia Minh was called because he was nearest; and because he could handle bots – he was barely more than a child then, and not yet a member of the Cedar and Crane; merely a frightened boy with the shadow of Blue Lily hovering over him like a suspended sword.

  He’d seen the ship, of course. It was hard to ignore as it slowly materialised above the planet – not all in one go, as he’d seen other mindships do, but flickering in and out of existence, as if not quite sure whether to remain there, as if it still had parts stuck in the deep spaces mindships used for travel. As if...

  He hadn’t dared to complete the thought, of course. But when he’d boarded the ship with Magistrate Hoa and the militia, it came to him again. The corridors felt wrong – he wasn’t sure why, until he ran a hand on the walls, and found them cool, with none of the warm, pulsating rhythm he’d expected. The words in Old Earth characters should have scrolled down, displaying the poetry the ship loved, but they’d frozen into place; some of them already fading, some of them –

  There were marks, on the wall – faded, dark ones, like giant fingerprints smudging characters.

  “Magistrate,” he whispered.

  Magistrate Hoa was watching them too, her eyes wide in the weary oval of her face. “It can’t be.”

  Bruises. All over the walls and the floor and everywhere his gaze rested – and that uncanny coldness around them; and faint reflections on the edge of his field of vision – the characteristic delirium, the images and visions that spilled out from the sick to everyone else present.

  “Plague,” he whispered. “This ship died of Blue Lily.” But mindships didn’t die of Blue Lily; they didn’t die at all – shouldn’t even fall sick unless they were countless centuries old, far beyond what mortals could remember...

  Magistrate Hoa’s face didn’t even move. “Gear,” she said, to one of the militia. “No one is going any further until we are suited.”

  Gia Minh wanted to ask why she’d have gear onboard the shuttle, but of course he knew – all the sick and the dying and the dead, the houses that had become charnels and temples to fear; Seventh Uncle, lying in a room no one dared to enter for fear of sharing his final delirium, the disjointed hints of ghosts and demons, the shadows that turned and stretched and saw you; Cousin Nhu, too young to talk, whimpering until she had no voice left...

  “We’ll have one for you,” Magistrate Hoa said. “Don’t worry.”

  But of course they were already contaminated, possibly; or worse. No one knew how Blue Lily was contracted, or how it spread – breath or touch or fluids, or Heaven knew what. Everyone knew the Empire was foundering; its doctors and apothecaries overwhelmed, its hospitals overcrowded, and still no cure or vaccine for the disease.

  The gear was heavy, and as warm as a portable glasshouse. As they went deeper into those cold, deserted corridors, Gia Minh caught the first hints of the mindship’s delirium – a glimpse of something with far too many legs and arms to be human, running just out of sight; of an older woman bending towards a fountain, in the light of a dying sun...

  Everywhere silence; that uncanny stillness; and a feeling of being watched by far too many eyes; and the sense that the universe was holding its breath. “They’re all dead,” he said; and then he heard the weeping.

  THICH TIM NGHE watches her attendant Vo clean the heartroom; tidying up the cloths wrapped around the empty throne where the Mind once rested.

  “There’s s
omeone coming?” she asks.

  Vo nods. “She’s with Hue Mi now.” He’s a teenager, but he still has ghosts with him – flickering realities around him, the shadows of his own dead, of his own losses – he’s never had Blue Lily, but it doesn’t matter. The virus left its mark on him all the same, through the vaccine he received as a child. Thich Tim Nghe could reach out, and pick images like so many strands of straw from a child’s hair; could disentangle the skeins of his past and follow them forward into his future; tell him if he will find what he has lost; or what he needs to do to regain the happiness of his childhood, before his uncle left his aunt and tore two households apart.

  But Vo has never asked her to see into his future. He knows the cost of it. She gives people what they need, not what they want; and she does it, not to impress people, but to atone, even though there is no atonement for what she has done. To lay the dead to rest, even though they are not her dead; to give hope, even though she has none to share.

  She has helped a scholar find the grave of her lost love; whispered to a bots-handler the words he needed to grasp a career-changing opportunity and leave the planet where his daughters are buried; told a painter when and how to meet his future wife, to found the family he so bitterly missed – given so many things to so many people, a countless chain of the living freed from the weight of the past.

  She doesn’t know why she has those powers; though she suspects that it’s the ship, the death that they almost shared; the deep spaces that still remain accessible onboard, even though The Stone and Bronze Shadow has since long departed.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Her own future doesn’t exist. There is only the past – she watched Mother die, shivering and wasting away while Thich Tim Nghe was still onboard the dying ship; and saw Sixth Aunt’s face change and harden – if she were still alive, she would have cut Thich Tim Nghe off, but she’s dead too, touched by Blue Lily – her face curiously slack and expressionless, all the bitterness smoothed away under the bruises; and Thich Tim Nghe doesn’t know, anymore, what to think about it; if she should weep and grieve, or if she’s simply grown too numb under the weight of her litany of losses to care.