Edge of Infinity (33 page)

I loved every second of it.

Skanda had been as good as his word. He’d paid up front. With the money now in my account, I wouldn’t need to work for years. He’d even picked up the tab on
Moonlighter
’s repair bill.

Did I dare wonder where all this wealth was coming from?

Sort of. But then again I didn’t really care. Obviously, he was rich. But then there were millions of rich people in the system – who else was paying for the voidships?

When I was working, deep into it, Skanda would retire to
Moonlighter
’s bridge and conduct long-range business. He didn’t seem to mind whether I listened in or not. Only slowly did I get any kind of inkling into the kind of work he was involved in, and what it meant for me.

Meanwhile, layer by layer, the face of David unmasked itself. Even as the work progressed, I knew there was never a time when it couldn’t all end in ignominy. The best probes and surveys weren’t infallible, and nor were my tools and methods. The rock was riddled with the usual number of weaknesses, the scars and fractures of ancient collisions. Some of these were obligingly close to the planes and contours where I meant to cut anyway, as if the rock was trying to shed itself of everything that wasn’t the head of David. Others were at treacherous opposition to my plans. A slight misalignment of a shaped charge, a misdirected laser blast, and I could shatter David’s cheek or brow beyond repair.

Sure, I could fix that kind of damage easily enough. But I’d never stoop so low. That was for hacks like Yinning and Tarabulus. And I doubted Skanda would settle for second best. If he was going to create the head of David, it had to be as flawless as Michelangelo’s original.

And it would be. Gradually the scalp and face came free. David’s chin and jaw were as yet still entombed in rock; the effect was to give the youth an old man’s beard. That wouldn’t last. I was chipping the beard away in house-sized chunks, a curl at a time. Another month, I reckoned, and then we’d be done with this crude shaping. Three months, perhaps, to bring David to completion. Four or five at the longest.

And it would be magnificent. No one had done such a thing as this. I imagined some future civilisation stumbling on this painstakingly shaped rock, a million or billion years from now, as it tumbled around the Sun. What would they make of the blank-eyed visage? Would they have the faintest inkling of the eager little creatures who had brought it into being?

Even with the bots, the work took its toll. Between cutting stints, when I was too tired to supervise the machines, I’d float with Skanda in the observation bubble. We’d be goggled up, our naked bodies intertwined.

I’d seen my share of the system, but Skanda had been places I’d only dreamed of visiting. I kept telling myself not to worry about the future, just to enjoy the moment, this time we had together. When the rock was done, there’d be nothing to keep Skanda with me. Even with the money in my account, I was just a rock cutter.

But Skanda made me wonder. With the goggles on, he’d show me things. Industrial flows; streams of processed matter on their way from launcher to customer. “That one,” he’d say, directing my eye to a tagged procession of cargo pellets, shot out from a catapult on some iceteroid. “That’s on its way to Mars. Slower than shipping it bulk, but cheaper in the long run. No engines, no guidance – just celestial mechanics, taking it all the way home.”

“You own that flow?”

He’d kiss me, as if to say
don’t trouble yourself with such matters
. “In a tediously complicated sense, yes.”

“People like you,” I said, “put people like me out of work.”

Skanda smiled. My face bulged back in the mirrored globes of his goggles. “But I’m putting you
in
work now, aren’t I?”

It wasn’t just industry and economics. Orbits lit up, coloured bands arcing away like the racetracks of the gods. Worlds flowered in the darkness. Not just the major planets, of course, but the minor ones: Ceres, Vesta, Hidalgo, Juno, Adonis, dozens more. In turn, each world had its gaggling court of fellow-travellers. We watched moons, habitats, stations, shuttles and ships. The goggles painted designations, civil registrations and cargo summaries.

“I’ll take you to Venus Deep,” he said. “Or Ridgeback City on Iapetus. I know a great place there, and the views... have you ever seen the skimmers plunge through Jupiter’s spot, or the reef cities under Europa?”

“I’ve never even been to Europa.”

“There’s so much to see, Loti. More than one life could ever encompass. When we’re done with this... I hope you’ll let me show you more of the system. It would be my privilege.”

“I’m just a rock cutter from Titan, Skanda.”

“No,” he said, firmly enough that it was almost a reprimand. “You’re infinitely more than that. You’re a true artist, Loti. And you have a gift that people aren’t going to forget in a hurry. Take my word on that.”

Stupid thing was, I did.

B
Y THE TIME
Ingvar steers me to another part of the quadrangle, the band has given up for the night. Most of the skaters have surrendered to the cold. There are only a couple left, perhaps the best of them, orbiting each other like a pair of binary pulsars.

“They say they aren’t dynamically stable,” Ingvar comments, looking up through the dome. “Something to do with Triton’s influence, I think. The rings of Saturn aren’t stable either, not on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. But they’ll outlast these many times over. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“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.

“H
OW 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.”