Edge of Infinity (39 page)

Most of the men ignored this ghastly spectacle. As for his own son, the boy took no notice at all. The shocking decline in polar ice meant nothing to him. He had never seen the North Pole otherwise.

And what had the old man, the dead man, said about that crisis? Ever the visionary, he’d certainly known it was coming.

The dead pioneer had said, in his blunt and confrontational way, “We’ll just have to go fetch some more ice.”

So, they had done as the dead man said. The people of Mercury had built a gigantic manned spacecraft, a metallic colossus. A ship so vast, so overweening in scale, that it might have been an interstellar colony – were such things possible.

Robots had hauled this great golden ark to the launch ramp, and sent this gleaming dreadnought hurtling off toward the cometary belt. There to commandeer and retrieve some vast, timeless, life-enhancing snowball.

Of course, there had been certain other options – rather than a gigantic, fully-manned spacecraft. Simpler, more practical tactics.

For instance, thousands of tiny robots might have been launched out in vast streams, to go capture a comet.

Then as the comet whirled round and round the blazing, almighty bulk of the Sun, the robots could have chipped off small chunks of comet frost, and sent those modest packets to the Mercurian surface. At the cost of a few small, fresh craters – nothing much, compared with the giant mining pits – clouds of cometary steam would have arisen. Puffs of comet vapour, drifting north, to freeze onto the original great glacier, there at the base of the Peak of Eternal Light.

This would have been a quiet, tedious, patient, and gentle way to replenish the vanished glacier. A nurturing restoration of the status quo. Mercurian women favoured this tactic.

But to espouse this idea had some dark implications. It implied, strongly, that Mercury itself should never have been settled by human beings. Were men worthless, was that the idea? Why not abolish mankind, with all its valour, its honour, its urge to explore – and have Mercury remain a mine-pit infested with the mindless and soulless machinic phylum?

That idea was blasphemy – and there was no reconciling these factions. The civil division there was as distinct as frozen night and blazing day. This tremendous struggle – a primal issue of resources and politics – had almost broken the colony.

As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored. Why not just buy some ice? Admit that Mercury faced a water crisis beyond its power, and buy ice from foreigners.

The asteroids had plenty of ice. What sense did it make to design a weird horde of ice-robots? Why create some swaggering Mercurian flagship, at such crippling cost? Just abandon honour and autonomy, abandon foolish pride, and pay foreigners. There were merchants out there already, willing to trade for metals. If one could call those weird entities ‘people.’

After much bloodshed, feuding, disgraces, regrettable excesses, the manned explorers had won the civil war. Why? Because they had claimed the mantle of the traditional values. Then these conservative fanatics had climbed aboard their new golden spacecraft, and promptly abandoned Mercury with all its long traditions.

The field of honour had settled nothing, thought Pitar. Because those traditions were fictions – irrational retrodictions, modern political interpretations of lost historical realities.

The values of Colonel DeBlakey were much wilder than anyone cared to remember. DeBlakey, and the men of his generation, were fantastic visionaries. DeBlakey, the Mercurian hero, cared nothing for colonising Mercury. He saw Mercury as a mere stepping-stone to colonising the Sun.

In his arcane, two-hundred-forty-year lifespan, this great man had advanced his philosophy in vast, scriptural detail. Endlessly writing, preaching, planning, designing, and theorising. Pitar had read a few million of these hundreds of millions of words. Very few ever did.

As the mourners gathered in their artificial twilight at the mountain’s base, Pitar realised that he was attending the last public airing for DeBlakey’s great pioneer ideology.

Mercurian celebrities delivered their funeral orations – eloquent, careful, and well-considered. Yet DeBlakey’s titanic legacy was much too large for their tiny gestures. The mourners clearly desired to be brief – for the radiation on the surface made that wise. Yet a lifespan of a quarter of a millennium was no easy thing to summarise.

DeBlakey’s schemes had to do with interstellar settlement: mankind’s manifest destiny in the galaxy. “Taming the stars,” as he put it. Such were the progressive visions that racked the great man’s brain, as the early Mercurian colonists crouched in their stone closets, half-suffocated and sipping toxic comet water.

DeBlakey was scheming to mine Mercury, fully develop the machinic phylum, and then march gloriously forth to mine the Sun. To dwell within the Sun, living in Eternal Light. To thrive in Eternal Light, without any shadow of any planet’s bulk, forever.

Because, while Mercury certainly had gold, silver, platinum, and transuranic metals – sometimes scattered on the cratered surface in gleaming pools – the Sun possessed every element.

Imaginary star-redoubts would whip through the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere at a hyper-Mercurian speed, sifting out water, carbon, metals – anything mankind needed – directly from the solar cloud. These visionary sun-forts would be vast magnetic bottles, all tractor beams and photon traps, with living, golden cores.

Once mankind had taught the machinic phylum to dwell within the atmospheres of stars, no further limits would ever trouble mankind. Above all, there would be no limits to the settler population. Dutiful women, living for centuries, would raise and acculturate hundreds of children, each one trained to star-spanning pioneer values.

At this singular rate of population explosion, the Sun would soon support hundreds of billions of people. Trillions of citizens, manning millions of colonies. So many colonies, so cybernetically capable, that they would seize command of the Sun.

With such titanic energy resources, interstellar flight would become a corollary, a mere logical detail. Tamed solar flares would magnetically fling new colonies, hurtling at near-light-speed, into the atmospheres of the nearest stars.

Any species that could dwell within stars would swiftly dominate the galaxy. Spreading algorithmically, exponentially, resistlessly, galactically. Men who understood this had no need to search for Earthlike planets, that illusion of meagre fools. They would dwell forever within the machinic phylum, each superhuman soul a peak of eternal light.

There was a certain fierce logic to DeBlakey’s cosmic plans. If not entirely pragmatic, they were certainly aspirational. Driven by such fierce and boundless human will, the machinic phylum would explode across the universe.

However, DeBlakey was mortal, and therefore dead. To the serious-minded, sensible people actually living today within the planet Mercury, his dreams seemed arcane, farfetched, absurd... And now, his funeral eulogists were trying to come to terms with all of that. To settle all of that, to bury all of that. They were gently folding this man’s wild pioneer dream into the harmless legendry of everyday Mercurian existence.

Pitar’s boy tugged at his gauntleted arm. These high-flown orations had the boy bored stiff. “Dad.”

Pitar opened a private channel. “What is it? Do you need a bathroom? Use the suit.”

“Dad, can I go fight now? That’s Jimmy over there, he likes to fight.”

“No sparring during funerals, son.”

Mario grimaced at this reproof. He rubbed exoatmospheric dust from his diamond bubble-helmet. “Dad, when they build the new colony at the South Pole, will we go there?”

“Mario, there’s no water at the South Pole. There are hills of Eternal Light there, so there’s plenty of energy, but fate put no glaciers for us in that place. It’s uninhabitable.”

“But our space heroes will come back some day, and bring us a water-comet. Then will we go?”

“Yes,” said Pitar. “We would go. There would be new opportunities there, more than in this old colony. The South Pole would mean a different life, new social principles. Yes, we would go there. I would take you with me. And your brothers, too – because you’ll have brothers someday.”

“Would Mom go with us?”

“Son, in nine years you’ll be married yourself. I’ll arrange that. And believe me, that’s sure to complicate your agenda.”

“Mom would go to a new colony. She wants to invent a new way of life. She told me that.”

“Really.”

“Yes, she told me! She really means it.”

Pitar drew a breath within his helmet. “We are, after all, a pioneering people. That is our true heritage, and I’m proud that you are witnessing all this. You’ll live a very long time, my son, so be sure to remember this day, and all it means. This world belongs to you. It was given to you. And don’t you ever forget that.”

Another speaker took the rostrum at the funereal plateau. This elder had to walk with robot assistance, and though he said little enough, he spoke at the droning rate of the very wise. A dreadful thing to hear.

Mario could not keep his peace. “Dad, will there be other boys like me at the South Pole?”

Pitar smiled. “Of course there will. A society with no youth has no future. If the people of Earth had sent their children into space, instead of just foolish astronauts, they would have spread throughout the worlds. Instead, they sank into their mud. That’s not your heritage, because those people have no moral fibre. That’s why they don’t matter now, and we do.”

Mario struggled to scratch his nose through his bubble-helmet. Of course this feat was impossible. “Dad, do Earth people stink? Jimmy says they stink.”

“I’ve never met one personally, but they do have wild germs in their bellies. Earth people can emit some unpleasant odours, and that’s a fact.” Pitar cleared his throat inside his spacesuit. “The Earth people don’t care much for us, either, mind you – they call us ‘termites.’”

“‘Termites’, Dad, what does that mean?”

“Termites are subhuman social beasts. Wild animals. Never properly gardened like our animals.”

“Dad, how big are termites?”

“I really don’t know, about the size of a housecat, I guess. If some man ever calls you a ‘termite,’ you slap his face and challenge him, understand? That puts a swift end to that nonsense.”

“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.

P
ITAR 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.