Edge of Infinity (18 page)

The race did not involve anything remotely resembling running, but it was muscle powered, using highly-modified p-suits equipped with broad wings of alife material with contractile pseudo-musculatures and enough area to push, faintly, lightly, against ice pebbles embedded in a fragile lace of ice gravel and ice dust. Cloud swimming. A delicate rippling controlled by fingers and toes that would slowly build up momentum. The outcome determined not by speed or strength, because if you went too fast you’d either sheer away from the ephemeral surface or plough under it, but by skill and judgement and patience.

Sony Shoemaker did not have to accept Diamond Jack Dupree’s challenge. She had already proved herself. But the novelty of it, the audacity, intrigued her. And so, a year to the day after her victory on Mimas, after six months hard training in water tanks and on the surface of the dusty egg of Methone, one of Saturn’s smallest moons, Sony Shoemaker and Diamond Jack Dupree set off in their manta-ray p-suits, swimming across the peaks and troughs of a mountainous, icy cloud at the edge of the B ring.

It was the midsummer equinox. The orbits of Saturn and his rings and moons were aligned with the sun; the mountains cast ragged shadows across the surface of the B ring; the two competitors were tiny dark arrowheads rippling across a luminous slope. Moving very slowly, almost imperceptibly, to begin with. Gradually gaining momentum, skimming along at ten and then twenty kilometres an hour.

There was no clear surface. The ice-particle mountains emitted jets and curls of dust and vapour. There were currents and convection cells. It was like trying to swim across the flank of a sandstorm.

Sony Shoemaker was the first to sink. Some hundred and thirty kilometres out, she moved too fast, lost contact with a downslope, and plunged through ice at the bottom and was caught in a current that subducted her deep into the interior. She was forced to use the jets of her p-suit to escape, and was retrieved by her support ship. Diamond Jack Dupree wallowed on for a short distance, and then he too sank. And never reappeared.

His p-suit beacon cut off when he submerged, and although the support ships swept the mountain with radar and microwaves for several days, no trace of him was ever found. He had vanished, but there were rumours that he was not dead. That he had dived into a camouflaged lifepod he’d planted on the route, slept out the rescue attempts, and gone on the drift or joined a group of homesteaders, satisfied that he had regained his honour.

There had been other races held on the ring mountains, but no one had ever beaten Diamond Jack Dupree’s record of one hundred and forty-three kilometres. No one wanted to. Not even Sony Shoemaker.

“That’s when she crossed the line,” Rory Jones told Mai. “Winning the race around Mimas didn’t make her one of us. But respecting Diamond Jack Dupree’s move, that was it. Your father crossed that line, too. He knew.”

“Because he walked around the world,” Mai said. She was trying to understand. It was important to them, and it seemed important to them that she understood.

“Because he knew what it meant,” Rory said.

“One of us,” someone said, and all the outers laughed.

Tall skinny pale ghosts, jackknifed on stools or sitting cross-legged on cushions. All elbows and knees. Their faces angular masks in the firelight flicker. Mai felt a moment of irreality. As if she was an intruder on someone else’s dream. She was still very far from accepting this strange world, these strange people. She was a tourist in their lives, in the place her father had made his home.

She said, “What does it mean, go on the drift? Is it like your wanderjahrs?”

She’d discovered that custom when she’d done some background research. After reaching majority, young outers often set out on extended and mostly unplanned tours of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Working odd jobs, experiencing all kinds of cultures and meeting all kinds of people before at last returning home and settling down.

“Not exactly,” Lexi said. “You can come home from a wanderjahr. But when you go on the drift, that’s where you live.”

“In your skin, with whatever you can carry and no more,” Rory said.

“In your p-suit,” someone said.

“That’s what I said,” Rory said.

“And homesteaders?” Mai said.

Lexi said, “That’s when you move up and out to somewhere no one else lives, and make a life there. The solar system out to Saturn is industrialised, more or less. More and more people want to move away from all that, get back to what we once were.”

“Out to Uranus,” someone said.

“Neptune,” someone else said.

“There are homesteaders all over the Centaurs now,” Rory said. “You know the Centaurs, Mai? Primordial planetoids that orbit between Saturn and Neptune. The source of many short-term comets.”

“Macy Minnot and her friends settled one, during the Quiet War,” Lexi said. “It was only a temporary home, for them, but for many it’s become permanent.”

“Even the scattered disc is getting crowded now, according to some people,” Rory said.

“Planetoids like the Centaurs,” Lexi told Mai, “with long, slow orbits that take them inward as far as Neptune, and out past Pluto, past the far edge of the Kuiper belt.”

“The first one, Fiddler’s Green, was settled by mistake,” Rory said.

“It’s a legend,” a young woman said.

“I once met someone who knew someone who saw it, once,” Ray said. “Passed within a couple of million kilometres and spotted a chlorophyll signature, but didn’t stop because they were on their way to somewhere else.”

“The very definition of a legend,” the woman said.

“It was a shipwreck,” Rory told Mai. “Castaways on a desert island. I’m sure it still happens on the high seas of Earth.”

“There are still shipwrecks,” Mai said. “Although everything is connected to everything else, so anyone who survives is likely to be found quickly.”

“The outer dark beyond Neptune is still largely uninhabited,” Rory said. “We haven’t yet finished cataloguing everything in the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disk, and everything is most definitely not connected to everything else, out there. How the story goes, when the Quiet War heated up, a ship from the Jupiter system was hit by a drone as it approached Saturn. Its motors were badly damaged and it ploughed through the Saturn system and kept going. It couldn’t decelerate, couldn’t reach anywhere useful. Its crew and passengers went into hibernation. Sixty or seventy years later, those still alive woke up. They were approaching a planetoid somewhat beyond the orbit of Pluto, had just enough reaction mass to match orbits with it.

“The ship was carrying construction machinery. The survivors used the raw tars and clays of the planetoid to build a habitat. A small bubble of air and light and heat, spun up to give a little gravity, farms and gardens on the inside, vacuum organisms growing on the outside, like the floating worldlets in the Belt. They called it Fiddler’s Green, after an old legend from Earth about a verdant and uncharted island sometimes encountered by becalmed sailors. Perhaps you know it, Mai.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“They built a garden,” the young woman said, “but they didn’t ever try to call for help. How likely is that?”

Rory said, “Perhaps they didn’t call for help because they believed the Three Powers were still controlling the systems of Saturn and Jupiter. Or perhaps they were happy, living where they did. They didn’t need help. They didn’t want to go home because Fiddler’s Green
was
their home. The planetoid supplied all the raw material they required. The ship’s fusion generator gave them power, heat and light. They are still out there, travelling beyond the Kuiper belt. Living in houses woven from branches and leaves. Farming. Falling in love, raising families, dying. A world entire.”

“A romance of regression,” the young woman said.

“Perhaps it is no more than a fairytale,” Rory said. “But nothing in it is impossible. There are hundreds of places like Fiddler’s Green. Thousands. It’s just an outlier, an extreme example of how far people are prepared to go to make their own world, their own way of living.”

The outers talked about that. Mai told about her life in al-Iskandariyya, her childhood, her father’s work, her work in the Department of Antiquities, the project she’d recently seen to completion, the excavation of a twenty-first century shopping mall that had been buried in a sandstorm during the Overturn. At last there was a general agreement that they should sleep. The outers retired to hammocks or cocoons; Mai made her bed on the ground, under the spreading branches of a grandfather oak, uneasy and troubled, aware as she had not been, in her cubicle in the port hostel, of the freezing vacuum beyond the dome’s high transparent roof. It was night inside the dome, and night outside, too. Stars shining hard and cold beyond the black shadows of the trees.

Everything that seemed natural here – the ring forest, the lawns, the dense patches of vegetables and herbs – was artificial. Fragile. Vulnerable. Mai tried and failed to imagine living in a little bubble so far from the sun that it was no more than the brightest star in the sky. She fretted about the task that lay ahead, the trek to the secret place where she and Lexi Truex would scatter Thierry’s ashes.

At last sleep claimed her, and she dreamed of hanging over the Nile and its patchwork borders of cotton fields, rice fields, orchards and villages, everything falling away, dwindling into tawny desert as she fell into the endless well of the sky...

I
T WAS A
silly anxiety dream, but it stayed with Mai as she and Lexi Truex drove north to a station on the railway that girdled Dione’s equator, and boarded the diamond bullet of a railcar and sped out across the battered plain. They were accompanied by Thierry’s mule, Archie. A sturdy robot porter that, with its flat loadbed, small front-mounted sensor turret, and three pairs of articulated legs, somewhat resembled a giant cockroach. Archie carried spare airpacks and a spray pistol device, and refused to tell Mai and Lexi their final destination, or why it was important that they reach it before sunrise. Everything would become clear when they arrived, it said.

According to Lexi, the pistol used pressurised water vapour from flash-heated ice to spray material from pouches plugged into its ports, such as the pouch of gritty powder, the residue left from resomation of Thierry’s body, or the particles of thixotropic plastic in a pouch already plugged into the pistol. The same kind of plastic Macy Minnot and her partner had used to shape ice dust into snowmen.

“We’re going to spray-paint something with the old man’s ashes,” Lexi said. “That much is clear. The question is, what’s the target?”

Archie refused to answer her in several polite ways.

The railcar drove eastward through the night. Like almost all of Saturn’s moons, like Earth’s Moon, Dione’s orbital period, some sixty-six hours, was exactly equal to the time it took to complete a single rotation on its axis, so that one side permanently faced Saturn. Its night was longer than an entire day, on Earth.

Saturn’s huge bright crescent sank westward as the train crossed a plain churned and stamped with craters. Every so often, Mai spotted the fugitive gleam of the dome or angular tent of a settlement. A geometric fragment of chlorophyll green gleaming in the moonscape’s frozen battlefield. A scatter of bright lights in a small crater. Patchworked fields of black vacuum organisms spread across tablelands and slopes, plantations of what looked like giant sunflowers standing up along ridges, all of them facing east, waiting for the sun.

The elevated railway shot out across a long and slender bridge that crossed the trough of Eurotas Chasmata, passing over broad slumps of ice that descended into a river of fathomless shadow. The far side was fretted with lesser canyons and low bright cliffs rising stepwise with broad benches between. The railway turned north to follow a long pass that cut between high cliffs, bent eastwards again. At last, a long ridge rolled up from the horizon: the southern flanks of the rimwall of Amata crater.

The railcar slowed, passed through a short tunnel cut through a ridge, ran through pitch-black shadow beyond and out into Saturnshine, and sidled into a station cantilevered above a slope. Below, a chequerboard of scablike vacuum organisms stretched towards the horizon. Above, the dusty slope, spattered with small, sharp craters, rose to a gently scalloped edge, stark against the black sky.

Several rolligons were parked in the garage under the station. Following Archie’s instructions, Lexi and Mai climbed into one of the vehicles (Archie sprang onto the flat roof) and drove along a track that slanted towards the top of the slope. After five kilometres, the track topped out on a broad bench, swung around a shelter, a stubby cylinder jutting under a heap of fresh white ice blocks, a way point for hikers and climbers on their way into the interior of the huge crater, and followed the curve of the bench eastward until it was interrupted by a string of small craters twenty or thirty metres across.

Lexi and Mai climbed out and Lexi rechecked Mai’s p-suit and they followed Archie around the smashed bowls of the craters. There were many bootprints trampled into the dust. Thierry’s prints, coming and going. Mai tried not to step on them. Strange to think they might last for millions of years.

“It is not far,” Archie said, responding to Lexi’s impatient questions. “It is not far.”

Mai felt a growing glee as she loped along, felt that she could bounce away like the children in the habitat, leap over ridges, cross craters in a single bound, span this little world in giant footsteps. She’d felt like this when her first grandchild had been born. Floating on a floodtide of happiness and relief. Free of responsibility. Liberated from the biological imperative.

Now and then her pressure suit beeped a warning; once, when she exceeded some inbuilt safety parameter, it took over and slowed her headlong bounding gait and brought her to a halt, swaying at the dust-softened rim of a small crater. Reminding her that she was dependent on the insulation and integrity of her own personal space ship, its native intelligence, the whisper of oxygen in her helmet.