Edge of Infinity (7 page)

Then the object swung down into the tropopause and splashed through the sea of ammonia clouds, and kept falling.

The sealed skiff jerked after. Stormchases felt the heavy crack through the hull as the pontoons broke. He lost light-sight of the sky above as the clouds closed over. He felt as if he floated against his restraints, though he knew it was just the acceleration of the fall defying gravity.

He struggled to bring his manipulator down. The deeper the object pulled him, the hotter and more pressurized – and more toxic – the atmosphere became. And he wouldn’t trust the skiff’s seals after the jar of that impact.

He depressurized and helium-flushed the first cargo capsule.

When it blew, the skiff shuddered again. That capsule was now a balloon filled with gaseous helium, and it snapped upward, slowing Stormchases’ descent – and the descent of the sail-wrapped alien object. They were still plunging, but now dragging a buoyant makeshift pontoon.

The cables connecting the capsule twanged and plinked ominously. It had been the flaw in his plan; he hadn’t been sure they
would
hold.

For now, at least, they did.

The pressure outside the hull was growing; not dangerous yet, but creeping upward. Eyes on the display, Stormchases triggered a second capsule. He felt a lighter shudder this time, as the skiff shed a little more velocity. The
next
question would be if he had enough capsules to stop the fall – and to lift his skiff, and the netted object, back to the tropopause.

His talker babbled at him, his colleagues issuing calls and organising a party for a rescue to follow his descent. “No rescue,” he said. “This is my risk.”

Another capsule. Another, slighter shiver through the lines. Another incremental slowing.

By the Mothergraves,
he thought.
This is actually going to work.

W
HEN HIS SKIFF
bobbed back to the tropopause, dangling helplessly beneath a dozen empty, depressurized capsules, Stormchases was unprepared for the cheer that rang over his talker. Or the bigger one that followed, when he winched the sail containing the netted object up through the cloud-sea, into clear air.

S
TORMCHASES HAD NO
pontoons; his main sail was fouled. The empty capsules would support him, but he could not manoeuvre – and, in fact, his skiff swung beneath them hull-to-the-side, needle-tipped nose pointing down. Stormchases dangled, bruised and aching, in his restraints, trying to figure out how to loose the straps and start work on freeing himself.

He still wasn’t sure how he’d survived. Or
that
he’d survived. Maybe this was the last fantasy of a dying mind –

The talker bleated at him.

He jerked against the harness, and moaned. The talker bleated again.

It wasn’t words, and whatever it
was
, it drowned out the voices of the other miners, who were currently arguing over whether his skiff was salvage, and whether they should come to his assistance if it was. He’d been trying to organise his addled thoughts enough to warn them off. Now he vibrated his membranes and managed a croak that sounded fragile even to his own hearing. “Who is it? What do you want?”

That bleat again, or a modestly different one.

“Are you the alien? I can’t understand you.”

With pained manipulators, Stormchases managed to unfasten his restraints. He dropped from them harder than he had intended; it seemed he couldn’t hold onto the rack. As his carapace struck the forward bulkhead, he made a disgruntled noise.

“Speak Language!” he snarled to the talker as he picked himself up. “I can’t understand you.”

It was mostly an expression of frustration. If they knew Language, they wouldn’t be aliens. But he could not hide his sigh of relief when a deep, coveted voice emerged from the talker instead.

“Be strong, Stormchases,” the Mothergraves said. “All will soon be well.”

He pressed two eyes to the viewport. The clouds around his skiff were bright in the sunlight; he watched the encroaching shadow fall across them like the umbra of an eclipse.

It was the great, welcome shade of the Mothergraves as she drifted out of the sky.

She was coming for them. Coming for
him
.

I
T WAS NO
small thing, for a Drift-World to drop so much altitude. For a Drift-World the size of the Mothergraves, it was a major undertaking, and not one speedily accomplished. Still, she dropped, flanked by her attendant squadrons of flyers and younger Mothers, tiny shapes flitting between her backs. Any of them could have come for Stormchases more easily, but when they would have moved forward, the Mothergraves gestured them back with her trailing, elegant gestures.

Stormchases occupied the time winching in the sail-net containing the alien object. It was heavy, not buoyant at all. He imagined it must skim through the atmosphere like a dart or a flyer – simply by moving so fast that the aerodynamics of its passage bore it up. He would have liked to disentangle the object from the shroud, but if he did, it would sink like a punctured skiff.

Instead, he amused himself by assessing the damage to his skiff (catastrophic) and answering the alien’s bleats on the talker somewhat at random, though he had not given up on trying to understand what it might be saying. Obviously, it had technology – quite possibly it
was
technology, and the hard carapace might indeed be the equivalent of his own skiff – a craft, meant for entering a hostile environment.

Had it been sampling the storm for useful chemicals and consumables, as well?

He wondered what aliens ate. What they breathed. He wondered if he could teach them Language.

Every time he looked up, the Mothergraves’ great keel was lower. Finally, her tendrils encompassed his horizons and when he craned his eyes back, he could make out the double row of Mates fused to and dependent from her bellies like so many additional, vestigial tendrils. There were dozens. The oldest had lost all trace of their origins, and were merely smooth nubs sealed to the Mothergraves’ flesh. The newest were still identifiable as the individuals they had been.

Many of the lesser Mothers among her escort dangled Mates from their bellies as well, but none had half so many as the Mothergraves... and none were so much as two-thirds of her size.

In frustration, Stormchases squinched himself against the interior of his carapace. So close. He had been
so close.
And now all he had to show for it was a wrecked skiff and a bleating alien. Now he would have to start over –

He
could
ask the Mothergraves to release his groom-price to a lesser Mother. He had provided well enough for any of her sisters or daughters to consider him.

But none of them were
she.

He only hoped his sacrifice of resources in order to rescue the alien had not angered her. That would be too much to bear – although if she decided to reclaim the loss from his corpse, he supposed at the very least he would die fulfilled... if briefly.

The talker squawked again. The alien sounds seemed more familiar; he must be getting used to them.

A few of the Mothergraves’ tendrils touched him, as he had so long anticipated. It was bitterest irony now, but the pleasure of the caress almost made it worthwhile. He braced himself for pain and paralysis... but she withheld her sting, and the only pain were the bruises left by his restraints and by impact with the bulkheads of the tumbling skiff.

Now her voice came to him directly, rather than by way of the talker. It filled the air around him and vibrated in the hollows of his body like soft thunder. To his shock and disbelief, she said words of ritual to him; words he had hoped and then despaired to hear.

She said, “For the wealth of the whole, what have you brought us, Stormchases?”

Before he could answer, the talker bleated again. This time, in something like Language – bent, barely comprehensible, accented more oddly than any Language Stormchases had ever heard.

It said, “Hello? You us comprehend?”

“I hear you,” the Mothergraves said. “What do you want?”

A long silence before the answer came. “This we fix. Trade science. Go. Place you give us for repairs?”

T
HE ALIENS – THE
object
was
a skiff, of sorts, and it had as many crew members as Stormchases had eyes – had a machine that translated their bleaty words into Language, given a wise enough sample of it. As the revolutions went by, the machine became more and more proficient, and Stormchases spent more and more time talking to
A’lees
, their crew member in charge of talking. Their names were just nonsense sounds, not words, which made him wonder how any of them ever knew who he was. And they divided labour up in strange ways, with roles determined not by instar and inheritance but by individual life-courses. They told him a great deal about themselves and their peculiar biology; he reciprocated with the more mundane details of his own. A’lees seemed particularly interested that he would soon Mate, and wished to know as much about the process as he could tell.

The aliens sealed themselves in small flexible habitats – pressure carapaces – to leave their skiff, and for good reason. They were made mostly of water, and they oozed water from their bodies, and the pressure and temperature of the world’s atmosphere would destroy them as surely as the deeps of the sky would crush Stormchases. The atmosphere
they
breathed was made of inert gases and explosive oxygen, and once their skiff was beached on an open patch of the Mothergraves’ back for repairs, just the leakage of oxygen and water vapour from its airlocks soon poisoned a swath of vegetation for a bodylength in any direction.

Stormchases stayed well back from the alien skiff while he had these conversations.

Talking to the aliens was a joy and a burden. The Mothergraves insisted he should be the one to serve as an intermediary. He had experience with them, and the aliens valued that kind of experience – and when he was Mated, that experience would be assimilated into the Mothergraves’ collective mind. It would become a part of her, and a part of all their progeny to follow.

The Mothergraves had told him – in the ritual words – that knowledge and discovery were great offerings, unique offerings. That the opportunity to interact with beings from another world was of greater import to her and her brood than organics, or metals, or substances that she could machine within her great body into the stuff of skiffs and sails and other technology. That she accepted his suit, and honoured the courage with which he had pressed it.

And
that
was why the duty was a burden. Because to be available for the aliens while they made the repairs – to play
liaison
(their word) – meant putting off the moment of joyous union again. And again. To have been so close, and then so far, and then so close again –

The agony of anticipation, and the fear that it would be snatched from him again, was a form of torture.

A’lees came outside of the alien skiff in her pressure carapace and sat in its water-poisoned circle with her forelimbs wrapped around her drawn-up knees, talking comfortably to Stormchases. She said she was a female, a Mother. But that Mothers of her kind were not so physically different from the males, and that even after they Mated, males continued to go about in the world as independent entities.

“But how do they pass their experiences on to their offspring?” Stormchases asked.

A’lees paused for a long time.

“We teach them,” she said. “Your children inherit your memories?”

“Not memories,” he said. “Experiences.”

She hesitated again. “So you become a part of the Mother. A kind of... symbiote. And your offspring with her will have all of her experiences, and yours? But... not the memories? How does that work?”

“Is knowledge a memory?” he asked.

“No,” she said confidently. “Memories can be destroyed while skills remain... Oh. I think... I understand.”

They talked for a little while of the structure of the nets and the Mothers’ canopies, but Stormchases could tell A’lees was not finished thinking about memories. Finally she made a little deflating hiss sound and brought the subject up again.

“I am sad,” A’lees said, “that when we have fixed our sampler and had time to arrange a new mission and come back, you will not be here to talk with us.”

“I will be here,” said Stormchases, puzzled. “I will be mated to the Mothergraves.”

“But it won’t be” – whatever A’lees had been about to say, the translator stammered on it; she continued – “the same. You won’t remember us.”

“The Mothergraves will,” Stormchases assured her.

She drew herself in a little smaller. “It will be a long time before we return.”

Stormchases patted toward the edge of the burn zone. He did not let his manipulators cross it, though. Though he would soon enough lose the use of his manipulators to atrophy, he didn’t feel the need to burn them off prematurely. “It’s all right, A’lees,” he said. “We will remember you by the scar.”

Whatever the sound she made next meant, the translator could not manage it.

DRIVE

James S. A. Corey

A
CCELERATION THROWS
S
OLOMON
back into the captain’s chair, then presses his chest like a weight. His right hand lands on his belly, his left falls onto the upholstery beside his ear. His ankles press back against the leg rests. The shock is a blow, an assault. His brain is the product of millions of years of primate evolution, and it isn’t prepared for this. It decides that he’s being attacked, and then that he’s falling, and then that he’s had some kind of terrible dream. The yacht isn’t the product of evolution. Its alarms trigger in a strictly informational way. By the way, we’re accelerating at four gravities. Five. Six. Seven. More than seven. In the exterior camera feed, Phobos darts past, and then there is only the star field, as seemingly unchanging as a still image.