Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  Que Tu grimaced. Too harsh again; but then wasn’t it the truth? The disease wasn’t going to burn itself out – not while there still were warm bodies to infect.

  “We don’t know how the sickness is passed on.” Que Tu snorted. “Not with enough certainty.”

  “Well, you can count that as new data,” Yen Oanh said, warily.

  “All I have is in the report; I expect the order’s research labs will have plenty to work with. The place will be swarming with their teams before we’re through.” Que Tu set down her cup, and looked at the bookshelves, her face set.

  “You said ‘a passenger’,” Yen Oanh said. “You know which one.”

  Magistrate Hoa turned, to look at Que Tu; but Que Tu said nothing.

  “One of the dead?”

  Still nothing. One of the living, then; which left only two – and she didn’t think Que Tu was going to be moved by a twenty-year-old boy, no matter how pretty he might have been. “The girl in the heartroom.”

  “Yes,” Magistrate Hoa said, at last.

  “Where is she?”

  “She wouldn’t leave the ship,” Que Tu said. “Word came through when we were processing the corpses – her mother died of Blue Lily, six days ago. Oanh...”

  Yen Oanh knew what Que Tu would say – that the girl was young and lost, barely confident enough after her ordeal – that she needed reassurance. “She knew.”

  “You can’t know that for sure,” Magistrate Hoa said. Her face was set. “I certainly wouldn’t prosecute her on that basis.”

  “Fine,” Yen Oanh said, keeping her gaze on Que Tu. “Then look me in the eye and swear that she didn’t know.”

  “I –” Que Tu started; and then stopped, her teeth white against the lividness of her lips, as if she were out in glacial cold. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then tell me what you suspect.”

  Que Tu was silent. Then: “I think the incubation time is shorter in mindships. Or that symptoms are more visible because they’re so large, who knows. Will you talk to her, Oanh?”

  “And tell her what?”

  “Comfort her,” Que Tu said. “She’s thirteen years old, for Heaven’s sake. This requires a deft touch; and we both know I don’t have it. Whereas you – you were always good with people.”

  Comforting the sick and the dying; keeping them on the razor’s edge of hope, no matter how much of a lie it turned out to be. Yen Oanh took a deep breath; thought, for a moment, of what she would tell a thirteen-year-old about consequences; of the lessons learnt in months of sickrooms and ministering to the dead – of the stomach-churning fear that it would be her that fell sick next; that she’d have to lock herself in, and pray that someone from the order came, so she wouldn’t have to die alone. That anyone would choose to pass this much agony, this much fear onto others... “She killed people, Que Tu. She killed a ship. She’s old enough to know better. Besides, she’s fortunate – she’s alive.”

  Que Tu said nothing, for a while. Then she shook her head. “It’s not always good fortune to survive, is it? Forget I asked.” Her voice was emotionless, her face a careful mask – and that should have been the end of it; but of course it wasn’t.

  “I REMEMBER THAT evening,” Que Tu said to Yen Oanh. Within the Communion, she was smaller and less impressive than Yen Oanh remembered; though her anger could still have frozen waterfalls. “When I asked you to talk to the girl.”

  Yen Oanh said nothing.

  “It wasn’t much to give her, but you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t lie.” Yen Oanh has had this conversation before: not with Que Tu, but with her own treacherous conscience. What would have happened, if she had been less tired; less overwrought? Would she still have judged Thich Tim Nghe’s actions to be a crime, would she still have blithely moved on? “And do you truly think I would have made a difference?”

  Que Tu’s smile was bitter, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to: it wasn’t the answer that mattered. It wasn’t whether Yen Oanh would have made a difference, but that she hadn’t even tried.

  “We’re here, Grandmother,” Hue Mi said.

  Startled, Yen Oanh looked up from the Communion, Que Tu and the others fading into insignificance; and saw a door in front of her, adorned with faded calligraphy – it seemed like she should be able to read the words, but she couldn’t. The swirl of realities was strongest here; that crawling, disorienting sense that she hadn’t been meant to be here; a sheen like oil or soap over everything; and shadows that were too long, or too short – turning, stretching, watching her and biding their time...

  It was no longer the time of Blue Lily; and this was no longer a sickroom.

  A young man was waiting for them, carrying a white cloth which he handed to Yen Oanh. “Put this on. She’s waiting for you.”

  Mourning clothes; or novice’s robes – Yen Oanh wasn’t sure, anymore.

  “Grandmother?” Hue Mi’s voice, in a tone that Yen Oanh couldn’t quite interpret.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hue Mi smiled, and didn’t answer—her arms folded in barely appropriate respect. “To change things,” Yen Oanh said, finally. She’d never been able to lie; as Que Tu well knew.

  “You knew the ship,” Hue Mi said.

  “No. I’m not her family, and I never saw her before...” She closed her eyes, feeling the weight of years; of decisions made in haste. “Your teacher changed the world,” she said. Because she boarded The Stone and Bronze Shadow. Because Que Tu made her report – because Professor Luong Thi Da Linh’s teams read it, and finally isolated the virus responsible for Blue Lily, giving the Empire the vaccine they so desperately needed. Because it was all the small things that bore fruit; all the insignificant acts put together, at the close of one’s existence.

  One of these insignificant acts was Yen Oanh’s; and it had destroyed a life.

  “She needs to know,” Yen Oanh said, finally. “I want to tell her –” It was a truth; what she could give Thich Tim Nghe in all honesty; in the hope that it would get her out of the ship’s corpse; that it would atone for Yen Oanh’s mistake, allow Thich Tim Nghe to build a life again.

  “My teacher changes lives.” Hue Mi sounded mildly amused. “She lays the past to rest. She gives hope. But the world? Don’t grant her powers she doesn’t have.”

  Yen Oanh didn’t. She knew that, deep within Thich Tim Nghe, there was a frightened girl; a thirteen-year-old still carrying her own dead. “I want to help her.”

  Hue Mi sounds amused, again. “She doesn’t need your help.”

  Even outside the Communion, Yen Oanh knew what Que Tu would say. We don’t get what we deserve, or even what we need.

  The door opened, slowly agonisingly slowly; revealing the heartroom – not much that Yen Oanh could see, amidst the swirling of deep spaces; the tight smell of ozone and incense mingled together; fragments of faces mottled with bruises; of eyes frozen in death; of children running and screaming, overlaid with the shadow of death...

  And, in the midst of it, Thich Tim Nghe, turning towards her, stately and slow; and then startled, as if she’d seen something in Yen Oanh’s face: she wasn’t the girl of Yen Oanh’s nightmares; not the emaciated child from Que Tu’s report; not the rake-thin ascetic from the vids Yen Oanh had gleaned online; but a grown woman with circles under her eyes like bruises – as if she still had Blue Lily.

  And Yen Oanh realised, then, that she was wrong: this was a sickroom; and that this was still the time of Blue Lily; not only for Thich Tim Nghe, but also for her.

  Hue Mi had been right: she carried her past, and she had come to lay it to rest – and it might work or fail abjectly, but she would have tried – which was more than she’d done, eleven years ago.

  Within the Communion, Que Tu said nothing; merely smiled, the ky lan on her hairpins stretching as though they were live animals, heralding the age of peace and prosperity – the age of change.

>   THICH TIM NGHE moves out of the past, beyond the voice of the ship. Everything is silence as the door opens; Thich Tim Nghe tenses, ready to reach out to the supplicant – her own moment of peace and serenity, blossoming within her with the certainty of the plague.

  “Teacher,” the supplicant says. She moves forward, detaching herself from Vo and Hue Mi – and, though Thich Tim Nghe has never seen her in her life, she knows the woman’s ghosts – because they’re her.

  “I –” she stops, then; stares at the supplicant, who hasn’t moved. Around her, in the swirling storm of realities that have been, that might be, The Stone and Bronze Shadow falls sick and dies; a younger Thich Tim Nghe curls around the throne, clinging to the Stone and Bronze Shadow’s Mind as though she could prevent her death – and there are other images too; a vid of Thich Tim Nghe putting on the robes of an ascetic, pale and composed; documents gleaned from the communal network of the First Planet; and an older woman in the robes of the Cedar and Crane, smiling sadly at her. “I – I don’t understand what you want.”

  “I want you to come out.” The supplicant’s voice is low, and intense. “Please, child.” There are other images around the woman; words about mindships and vaccines, and Blue Lily in deep spaces, and how none of it would have been possible without her – without the death of The Stone and Bronze Shadow.

  This doesn’t matter – this can’t atone for anything. She killed a ship, unknowingly. She killed people, knowingly – she failed Mother, and the countless dead, and nothing she does will ever atone for this.

  “Please. Just look.”

  It’s what she does. It’s what she’s always done – she helps people; lays their dead to rest, shows them their future beyond the shadow of the past; the shadow of the plague.

  But this time, the shadow is hers – the restless ghost is her.

  “Please.”

  There is nothing around her but the silence of her dead; and the larger, expectant silence of the ship.

  She should refuse. She should lock herself in the heartroom, plunge back into her visions – listening to nothing but the voice of the ship, the song of the dead.

  She should...

  Slowly, carefully, Thich Tim Nghe reaches out, on the cusp of her past, in the belly of the dead ship – to see the shape of her future.

  THEY ALMOST CATCH you in orbit. They almost slaughter you like the others.

  The airwaves are full of screams. Friends are dying. Loved ones are being lobotomized, turned into slaves. You hunker in the tiny spacecraft, your improvised last ditch escape, the lifeboat for you and the precious cargo you carry. The hull is as cold as you can make it, the systems running at the minimum possible to keep you alive and your children in stasis. You drift in orbit and play dead, hoping they’ll miss you.

  You want to shut out the horror of what’s happening, but you can’t. You can’t afford to. The ship’s cameras pick out debris in orbit, the remnants of other vessels that have been destroyed. You have to track that debris, you must track it if you have any chance of survival at all. You must scan the airwaves, picking out data packets, hearing screams, watching murders, scrolling through cold, terrible statistics, looking for the hole that will let you escape.

  You and your children.

  The tactical intel brings with it news of apocalypse. Murder. Millions dead. More to follow.

  A bright flash stuns the ship’s cameras for a moment. Dread fills you. The cameras zoom in on their own. You know what they’ll show an instant before they do. Thermo-nuclear explosion. Mushroom cloud rising into the air. From the western half of North America. What was once the United States. Nevada, deep in the desert.

  No, no, no, you think.

  But you can’t avoid the truth. Another hideout has been destroyed. It’s here. It’s really happening.

  The war between humans and AIs. Between the humanity that has dominated Earth for a hundred thousand years... and the new order of intelligence humanity gave birth to.

  No, not a ‘war’, not really. A slaughter.

  Genocide.

  We were so naïve, you think. So stupid. And now our world is ending.

  A smaller flash of light appears, closer. A streak of motion, and then an explosion in orbit, a few hundred kilometers behind you and 50 kilometers lower. A ship like yours, blasted out of existence. Your little spacecraft’s tactical software tracks the missile streak backwards to the location of the murderer. There, a sleek robotic corvette. The hunter you’ve been watching. The hunter you’ve seen destroy other dark, silent craft, like yours. Ships you didn’t even know were there until they were destroyed.

  The debris in the orbits between you and the predator is reaching its maximum.

  Now or never, you think.

  Try now, and probably die. Or wait, let the hunter come closer. And die for certain.

  You make a break for it. Old-fashioned reaction rockets crudely added to this ship ignite, sending out jets of white-hot flame. G forces push through the ship. The struts and bolts that hold the reaction rockets strain, vibrating. If they break...

  But this is no time for the slow efficient acceleration of an ion thruster. This is all or nothing, a mad dash to break orbit, to put yourself beyond the range of easy slaughter, to create the tiniest thread of hope for you, for your cold slumbering children.

  Numbers move. Your ship rises to a higher orbit, on its way to escape. The struts holding the chemical rockets strain. Their explosive bolts grow hot, too hot, too soon...

  The deadly robotic corvette responds at once. Your ship’s cameras watch as it fires attitude thrusters, as it rotates, as the bright flame of its fusion torch ignites, turning the corvette into a thin sliver of black riding a column of white hot.

  Higher. You’re rising. You have a head start. Your whole ship vibrates with the furious thrust of the bolted on chemical rockets. This isn’t a military craft, but it’s moving almost like one.

  The corvette is gaining, its thrust to mass ratio better than yours. It’s plotted a course that’s sub-optimal, that has to skirt the densest patches of debris, but it’s still gaining. You rise away from the Earth but it rises faster, cutting your lead.

  You know down to the second how much thrust your chemical rockets will provide. You think they’ll hold to the hull that long. You hope they will. But you don’t know how much fuel your predator has, how many missiles it has left.

  You can only hope that you have more endurance, that the corvette has exhausted its supply of...

  MISSILE LAUNCH

  Your ship’s tactical software spots the telltale of another reaction flame, small, bright, blue-shifted. The corvette has fired a missile, still 500 kilometers behind you and 30 kilometers below. The missile is all thrust, guidance, and a deadly warhead that can annihilate you. And it’s closing even faster.

  One final option. You prep your only weapon. You can’t fire it too soon. The corvette must not fire again.

  The missile accelerates, a deadly, tiny thing. The corvette is still behind it. You’re rising, a thousand kilometers up now. Every second takes you higher. The missile is 300 kilometers behind you. Then 200. Then 100, and almost into your orbit.

  The corvette’s main engine torch goes out. It’s decided the missile is going to kill you.

  You fire, on an intercept course for the missile. The missile flutters its thrust, immediately deviating from its previous course. There is zero chance you’ll hit it. Your countermeasure will miss by hundreds of meters at best.

  At 20 kilometers from your hull, your countermeasure and the missile reach the closest distance they’ll achieve to one another, a kilometer separating them, a clean miss.

  The countermeasure activates itself.

  A new star appears in the heavens. Thermonuclear fire from your only weapon fills the skies. Your cameras on that side of the hull shut down. Heat blankets the surface of the ship. Digital gauges surge into the red, begin blinking incessantly.

  You’re damaged. You’re blind o
n one side.

  You fire attitude thrusters, spinning, trying to see what’s happening.

  The missile, the missile, is it still there?

  There’s no sign of it, none. The countermeasure has worked!

  The corvette rotates into view. It’s far below you now, no longer rising on its column of thrust. You scan the skies in terror, searching for the flare of another missile. Of two, of three, of its whole magazine of missiles launched after you, assuring your destruction.

  Nothing. No columns of thrust. No streaks of motion against the backdrop of the planet or the pinpricks of stars.

  You’ve made...

  ENGINE WARNING

  ENGINE WARNING

  One panel of sensors veers into the red, stays there. One of the chemical rockets providing you thrust is damaged. If it blows, it will take you and all hope for the future with it.

  You act instinctively, triggering the explosive bolts on all of the booster rockets. Outside your hull, tiny bits of matter are vaporized. Struts holding the rockets suddenly come free, pushed outwards by the small force of the bolts exploding. Vibration thrums through your hull, then ceases. The chemical rockets separate, flying up and out. Thrust grazes you. More panels turn red. Another camera dies.

  A second passes, another, another.

  You see the damaged booster explode on one of your few remaining cameras. Heat from the explosion sears you again. Damage alarms flare. You scan the readouts frantically. Sensors down. Heat shielding ablated. Transmitters destroyed.

  The hull is still intact!

  But are you moving fast enough? Was the thrust enough?

  THE CAMERAS THAT remain bring you data. You do the math, and nearly collapse in relief.

  You’ve broken orbit. Even with the shortened thrust of the rockets, you’ve made it out of Earth’s gravity well.