Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I’m going to. I really am. I’ve already been to Miranda—that’s one of the other moons? And now I’m working here, on Oberon. It wasn’t exactly my idea, but still.”

  “So it was really your clan’s idea.”

  “Sort of,” Bai said. No point mentioning her mother; it would only complicate things.

  “And what kind of work are you doing here, for your clan?’

  “Harvesting umbrella-tree scales. I guess you don’t know what they are, umbrella trees. They were developed after the war. They’re a kind of vacuum organism.”

  “I know about vacuum organisms.”

  “We have a big forest of umbrella trees here. They extract metals and rare earths from the crust, store them in scales that grow on their stems. I look after the machines that harvest and process scales that the trees have shed,” Bai said, and explained that her clan maintained the umbrella-tree forest for the same reason that other clans were running a borehole project to tap the residual warmth locked in the moon’s core, or administering the little spaceport that no one but the occasional outsystem tourist used.

  “We have to have a presence on Oberon if we want a say in future settlement and development. Otherwise, the Gartens, that’s the largest clan in the system, they’d claim it as their own. They’ve built a big garden at the North Pole, and now they’re roofing over a chasm in the South Pole, planning to build another garden there. They like to plan ahead,” Bai said. “In twenty years the sun will be above the South Pole, and the North Pole, where they are now, will be in darkness. This forest too. My clan are discussing whether they should start planting a new one in the south. So why I’m here, it’s just politics. A silly game.”

  Her mouth was dry, and she took a sip of cold tea. She’d done most of the talking, and Xtina still didn’t look the least bit sleepy, saying that she remembered that the Uranus system was tipped at right angles to the plane of its orbit, so the north poles of the planet and its moons were pointed towards the sun for half its orbital period, the south poles for the other half.

  “And it takes eighty-four years to complete one orbit,” she said. “I didn’t know I knew that until I thought about it. Isn’t that strange? I wonder what else I know. Do you have a ship here?”

  “Just a couple of hoppers.”

  “I mean a real ship. What about these rivals of yours? The Gartens.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so. They have to bring in construction materials they can’t make here.”

  “Ships that can only travel between moons? Or ships that can travel elsewhere?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Bai felt the chasm yawning at her feet again. Xtina couldn’t possibly know about the peacer ship. Could she? And why wasn’t the soporific working? It should have put her under by now.

  “You want to travel. Maybe I can help you,” Xtina said. “Take you on a wanderjahr.”

  “By stealing a ship?”

  “From your rivals. Why not? It would be fun. And a good way of repaying you for saving my life.”

  “Even if we could, the peacers would catch us.”

  “Peacers as in peace police? Don’t worry about them. I suppose you put my suit in a safe place. In case it attacked you again. I couldn’t find it in this little habitat, so it must be outside.”

  Xtina had shed her benign vagueness. She was energised, fully in control of the conversation.

  Bai said, “I’m not going to help you steal a ship.”

  “I can take you wherever you want to go. All you have to do is fetch my pressure suit.”

  Bai met Xtina’s blue gaze. “I don’t think so.”

  She’d stood up to her mother many times. This was a lot harder.

  “If you won’t help me,” the woman said, “maybe I’ll take your suit. See if I can remember how to fly a hopper. How hard can it be, finding the north pole of this little moon?”

  “That’s enough,” someone else said.

  It was the avatar.

  Saying, when Bai and Xtina turned to look at it, “You locked me out, but you didn’t find the back door.”

  “Who am I talking to?” Xtina said, seemingly unperturbed.

  “Wen Phoenix Minnot. Bai’s mother,” the avatar said, and swivelled neatly and with one bound reached the doctor thing at the other end of the couch, snatched something from it. A needle, flashing in its gripping claw.

  “Wait,” Bai said. As far as she was concerned, the comms were still down. “I can handle this.”

  “I took back control only a couple of minutes ago,” Wen said, “but I heard enough to know that you can’t.”

  The avatar took a bounding step towards Bai and Xtina, and Xtina pushed up and shouldered into it, grabbing the claw that held the needle and flipping up and over as they shot backwards, wrapping her legs around the avatar’s waist, twisting its head back and forth. They struck the far wall and rebounded, the avatar’s head came free with a sharp pop, trailing a short spine of gear, and Xtina kicked the rest of it away and caught a wall bracket and hung there.

  “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said. “But the body remembers.”

  Then she flung herself at Bai.

  BAI WOKE THREE hours later, dry-mouthed and headachy. The avatar’s decapitated body sprawled on red moss a little way from her. There was no sign of its head, or of Bai’s suit. When she looked out of a port, she saw that one of the hoppers was gone, too.

  The comms were still down. Truly down; Xtina had locked the back door Wen had used, the back door Bai knew nothing about. No way of raising help, or trying to warn Lindy Aguilar Garten. She fetched tea and a patch to ease the after-effects of the tranquilliser Xtina had injected into her, and waited for the peacers to arrive.

  XTINA GROZA EXPERTLY finessed her disappearance. An antique but potent worm took down traffic control across the Uranus system; by the time everything was back up, the ship she’d stolen from the Gartens’ camp was long gone. It turned up twenty-one weeks later, with a fake registration and a wiped mind, on the landing field of Harper’s Hope, Europa, but there was no trace of Xtina, no clue as to why she had gone there or where she had gone afterwards.

  It wasn’t even clear if Xtina Groza had ever been her real name. There were no records of her in any city or settlement in the Saturn and Jupiter systems, no familial matches to her genome in the gene libraries, and other lines of enquiry likewise dead-ended. Xtina’s pressure suit turned out to be as dumb as a bag of rocks. Bai was pretty sure that it hadn’t been walking Xtina towards that shelter, and hadn’t tried to ambush her either. No, Xtina’s implants and the mesh woven through her musculature had done all that, working her sleeping body like a puppet. As for the lifepod, it had belonged originally to a cargo ship owned by a collective in Paris, Dione, damaged in the Quiet War, and cut up in an orbital graveyard around Saturn’s moon Rhea. The lifepod had been appropriated by the Three Powers Alliance, but there was no record of what had happened to it after that, and any useful information it might have possessed was lost beyond any hope of retrieval. It hadn’t simply shut itself down—its core and subsystems had been consumed by nanites, turned to a silky powder of plastics and metals.

  It was the kind of action a military AI might take if it believed that it was about to fall into enemy hands, supporting Bai’s idea that Xtina Groza had been some kind of soldier, but although Bai interviewed more than two dozen surviving members of the resistance, none of them remembered Xtina Groza, and she failed to find so much as a passing mention of a clandestine mission to Uranus in the official and unofficial histories of the war. And then there was the worm Xtina had used to futz traffic control, which turned out to be very similar to worms deployed by the Pacific Union against the transport, sewage, energy and environmental systems of several cities in the Saturn system. Outer rebels could have isolated it and redeployed it against their oppressors, but Bai knew that she had to try to chase down the other possibility.

  She didn’t get very far. The
reconciliation office in the PacCom’s embassy in Paris, Dione, couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions, and when she reached out directly to the Ministry of Defence in Beijing, she was told that the pertinent records were still sealed, but the case would remain active and she would be contacted if any new information came to light. As if it ever would. After all her research and patient detective work, she still didn’t know why Xtina Groza had ended up at Uranus, what she was, who she had been working for.

  By then, Bai had spent two years searching for clues about Xtina’s identity, travelling amongst the moons of the Saturn and Jupiter systems, taking work wherever she could find it or relying on the kindness of strangers. She didn’t manage to wrangle trips to Mars or to Earth, but there were more than enough wonders in the asteroid belt and the Outer system, an inexhaustible variety of people. She visited Paris, Dione, and Xamba, Rhea, venerable cities with proud histories of resistance during the war and occupation, and Akti, Enceladus, which stepped down the steep, terraced side of Damascus Sulcus and gave access to the inner sea and the tweaked merpeople who lived there, claiming to be the only true inhabitants of the little moon. She made the obligatory pilgrimage to her clan’s Firsthome on Dione too, and rode a yacht across Saturn’s rings, and on Titan trekked through a range of cryovolcanoes to a spent caldera that contained an ancient garden designed by the legendary gene wizard Avernus. She worked on a kelp farm suspended in Europa’s subsurface ocean, spent half a year on Ceres helping to plant a forest around a small briny sea in a habitat that snaked along the bottom of a tented canyon, hitched a ride on a freighter that on a long swing through the asteroid belt called on the Realm of a Hundred Blooms, Ymir, Longreach, and 20897Ballard, otherwise known as Concentration City.

  Some people never quit their wanderjahrs. Became nomads moving from city to city, moon to moon, world to world, taking temporary jobs or making a living as storytellers, poets, or musicians, travelling light, trading information on the wanderjahr whispernet, always thinking of the next port of call. A few wrangled places or worked their tickets on colony ships to the near stars—the ultimate wanderjahr. But after her last lead on Xtina Groza fizzled out in the warrens of Concentration City, Bai decided that her search and her desire for travelling had run their courses. She returned to Titania, and a year later married Lindy Aguilar Garten.

  Her mother’s interference after the rescue of Xtina Groza was the capstone of something that had been building in Bai for a long time. When the peacers finally arrived at the scale-harvesting camp, hours too late, they’d wanted to take her back to Fairyland for questioning; instead, she’d used their comms to make the one call she was allowed by ancient right that predated settlement of the Outer system, and formally asked Lindy to give her aid and sanctuary. After a brief fierce flurry of legal exchanges, culminating in a call from Phoenix Clay Garten, chair of the Subcommittee for Public Order, the peacers capitulated, and flew Bai to the Gartens’ camp.

  At first, Lindy offered to help because it would embarrass the Minot clan and strengthen the Garten’s tenuous claim on Xtina Groza, but their relationship soon deepened into something stronger and more real. Lindy gave Bai advice and support while she was interviewed and reinterviewed by the peacers, and helped her patch up a truce with her parents and the clan elders, and they stayed in touch during Bai’s wanderjahr. In the years after they married, they had two kids, both girls, and Bai went to work for the Commonhold Council, at last taking charge of the Office for Developmental Strategy. Sometimes her job took her outsystem, and as she had during her wanderjahr, she posted messages for Xtina on the public boards of the cities she visited. More out of habit than hope by then, but one day, some sixteen years later, she at last received a reply.

  IT WAS IN Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Bai had a distant connection with the city. Her great-grandmother, Macy Minnot, had been part of a crew quickening a garden sponsored by the Greater Brazilian government, and had defected after discovering that it had been designed to fail, an early episode in a covert campaign to destabilise Outer cities before the Quiet War. The tent of that old garden had been shattered in the brief battle when the city had fallen to the Brazilian/European joint expeditionary force, and still lay open to vacuum, a war monument that sheltered a unique mixed ecology of vacuum organisms, alife plants, and microbes with an ammonium-based metabolism. Bai had come to Rainbow Bridge to discuss setting up something similar on the CHON-rich plains of Oberon, was resting late one evening after an early round of negotiations when someone claiming to be Xtina Groza pinged her, said they could meet at the spaceport terminal, and gave directions.

  Bai sat alone for thirty minutes in a café near one of the terminal’s tall windows, with a view of the field where ships of various sizes sat on raised landing pads in the lion light of Jupiter’s fat globe. She was beginning to wonder if this was some kind of joke or trick when one of café’s antique serverbots deposited a plastic strip as it clanked past her table. Bai barely had time to read the message printed on it before it fizzed into a black puddle.

  She followed her new instructions to a bench near one of the gates to the tunnels that linked the terminal to the landing pads. The woman sitting there didn’t look much like Xtina Groza—black hair, dark skin, green eyes, and about twenty centimetres shorter—but she was dressed in the plain blue suit liner mentioned in the message, and stood up as Bai approached.

  “You got what you wanted,” she said. “Travelling to strange new worlds. Meeting strange new people. But then you scurried home and settled down, just like your parents, and their parents before them. What happened? Wasn’t the free life all you expected it to be? Or did you discover that you weren’t cut out for it?”

  Bai supposed that this was the opening gambit of an attempt to unnerve and dominate her, but she’d dealt with enough bellicose negotiators to know that the best way to win that game was to refuse to play it. “I realised that I could use what I’d learned to make Fairyland and the rest of the Uranus system the kind of place where I wanted to live,” she said. “How about you?”

  “How I live, I can’t tell you too much about that,” Xtina said. The sleeves of her suit liner were rolled back to the elbows; her forearms glittered with the kind of tattoos, abstract patterns in silver and gold and white, favoured by Europan kelp farmers. “Let’s just say it also involves a lot of travelling. It’s odd that our paths haven’t crossed before, especially as you’ve been looking for me.”

  “I gave up looking for you in any serious way a long time ago. Did you ever find out who you were, and where you came from? Or are you still searching?”

  Bai sat on the bench, and after a moment Xtina sat beside her, saying, “If that’s a polite way of asking if I was faking amnesia, I wasn’t.”

  “I was wondering if that’s why you reached out to me after all this time. Because I may know a little about it. About who you once were.”

  “Oh, so you found something, did you, back when you were playing girl detective?”

  Xtina’s eyes had changed colour, but her sharp gaze was exactly as Bai remembered.

  She said, “It was the worm you used when you escaped. The one that took down traffic control.”

  “Wasn’t me. My implants deployed it when I stole that ship, then told me what they’d done.”

  “I discovered that it was like the ones used by the Pacific Community during the Quiet War,” Bai said. “I think that you were born on Earth, with Outer traits and tweaks. You infiltrated Outer society before the war, and carried out acts of sabotage that would make invasion easier when the time came.”

  Xtina shook her head. “No, that’s what the Greater Brazilian spies did. Those funny little clones. I was mostly an observer. A kind of embedded anthropologist. At least, until declaration of war.”

  “Then you do remember.”

  “Not exactly. My implants pointed me towards a memory cache.”

  “On Europa, I suppose. Where you abandoned the ship you stole.”

 
; “I hope that didn’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Not especially.”

  What was losing one ship compared to gaining you, Lindy had once said. And anyway, we got the ship back.

  “The cache was hidden in one of the pumping stations that sift metals from the subsurface ocean,” Xtina said. “That’s where I was working when war broke out. It’s a ruin now. Abandoned in place after catastrophic failure. Apparently, I had something to do with that.”

  “So this cache restored your memories?”

  “Not exactly. It contained a kind of journal written by the person I’d once been. She set it up while she was working at the station and updated it regularly, then and afterwards. I don’t know why. She didn’t leave an explanation. Perhaps she didn’t trust her superiors. Trust isn’t something spies have in any significant quantity. Or perhaps she knew that her memory would be wiped if she was ever arrested or captured, and didn’t want to disappear. Anyway, it told me what I’d been, everything I’d done. I even found out why I’d been sent to the Uranus system.”

  “You were masquerading as an Outer rebel who wanted to join the Free Outers. You planned to betray them to the Three Powers Authority, but something went wrong with your ship before you reached them, or they attacked it, damaged it.”

  After she’d discovered the Pacific Community connection, Bai had worked this up as the most likely scenario.

  “I don’t think it was the Free Outers,” Xtina said. “They were pacifists. Strongly opposed to every kind of violence. And I wasn’t planning to infiltrate them; I was supposed to kidnap one of them. A defector from Greater Brazil.”

  “Macy Minnot.”

  Xtina smiled, pleased by Bai’s shock. “I guess the solar system isn’t as big as we like to think it is.”

  “She was working in Rainbow Bridge when she defected. Is that why you decided to meet me here?”

  Xtina ignored that. “My mission was a covert op, got up by PacCom to further their interests. The Europeans and Brazilians weren’t told about it. After the war, the members of the Three Powers Authority mistrusted each other almost as much as they mistrusted the Outers, tried to gain advantage by espionage, secret deals, and covert ops. The one I was involved in, kidnapping Macy Minnot, was supposed to set back the Free Outers’ cause and embarrass the Greater Brazilians. Maybe the Greater Brazilians found out and tried to turn it around by sabotaging my ship, hoping I’d be captured by the Free Outers and embarrass my masters. Or maybe it was just an accident. Something happened to my ship, anyway, and I ended up in that lifepod. Luckily for you. If I’d been successful, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because you wouldn’t have been born.”