Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  “What’s he doing?” Sakura asked, amused and intrigued.

  “He must be standing in the path of a light beam, coming up from the plain,” Gedda said. “We can’t see it until ittouches him, then it bounces through his body in a million directions and lights him up like an ornament.”

  “Like a flashy, cheap ornament.”

  “But you have to give him credit for the timing. He must have done his homework for once. I bet that light beam doesn’t hit that finger every time the Sun comes up, or even one in a hundred times.”

  “All right, Tristan,” Sakura called. “You’ve impressed me. You can climb down now. You’re making me nervous just watching you.”

  “Show’s over anyway,” Tristan said, starting to fade, as if a battery inside him were losing charge. “Here comes the Sun, anyway, spoiling everything.”

  “Without the Sun you wouldn’t have been able to show off!”

  “You have a point, old man.” Tristan started to backtrack, reversing his steps to the relative safety of the cliff and its ledges.

  “Admit it,” Gedda said. “We surprised you with his phenomenon. You didn’t know about it, and you’d certainly never seen it.”

  Sakura made to contradict her, some faint nagging memory insisting otherwise, but he was wise enough to nod gracefully. Tristan had gone to some trouble to make this work, and it would have been churlish to ruin the moment.

  “It was lovely.”

  “Good. But we’re not done with you. Not by a long margin.”

  THEY WENT TO Venus next. Sakura guessed where they were without too much trouble: not many worlds had rocky surfaces, gravity similar to Earth, and atmospheres hot, dense and corrosive enough to test even the sturdiest anatomy. Tristan and Sakura waddled around like upright lobsters, knitted into armoured skin, while Gedda accompanied them in her excursion bubble, breaking off only to put in some flying practise in the high atmosphere, where the pressure and wind forces approximated those at the Jupiter tournament. They were there to visit an artist friend of Gedda’s, a personage called Ossian who curated a menagerie of strange mechanical sculptures, huge walking and ambulating constructions driven only by the wind. No one knew who had made these ungainly, scuttling entities, nor their purpose, but Ossian had set her mind to rebuilding the broken ones, and after a century and a half of painstaking effort, she had overseen the rehabilitation of twenty-two of the shambling artefacts. Many more remained to be fixed, though, and before they could be restored to life, they needed to be organised, their parts separated and categorised into bonelike piles, spread out on a level plateau near Ossian’s dwelling. Gedda, knowing that Sakura had a tinkerer’s mindset, had decided that it would be therapeutic for them all to spend a few weeks helping Ossian, and so it proved.

  Venus was a backwater place now, with fewer than a million permanent inhabitants, most of whom lived far from Ossian’s place on the northern foot slopes of Ra Patera. There had been billions once. People had come to the sky first of all, dwelling in floating cities dozens of kilometres above the sulphurous, heat-haze crush of the surface. Eventually, the cities, straining with over-population, had pushed anchoring taproots down to the surface, and those taproots had become the seeds for the rampant conurbations of the second wave. Finally, there had been efforts at localised terraforming—first with domes, and then with glass-walled cylinders whose open tops projected beyond the upper atmosphere, so that the jewel-hulled argosies of the third wave could come and go with ease.

  The argosies were no more, though, and those paltry terraforming projects were now regarded as the quaint vanities of an earlier age. The governing philosophy of the Adaptasporic Realm was minimum local intervention. Worlds could be colonised, but it was people who had to be shaped to the environment, not vice versa. Humility and coexistence, rather than arrogance and dominance.

  Ossian was a good host, and by the time they left her—and discarded their lobster-bodies—Sakura and his friends had helped resurrect three more sculptures, and Sakura expressed his sincere intention to return and continue the work. Deep down, though, he knew that he had made a thousand similar promises, and rarely held himself to them. He had never been good with promises.

  From Venus, Tristan took them to Mars, where they spent two weeks rambling around a network of Pre-Adapt ruins, marvelling at the glory and hubris of those ancient days. Their anatomies (Gedda excepted, of course) were striding, giraffe-like forms, perfect for picking their way through the dust mounds that had nearly consumed the old settlements. After the busy work of Venus, it was a lazier time, and Sakura was glad to find moments where he could drag out his canvas and paints, held by the doors until he summoned them. Tristan pranced around reciting Shelley, obscurely pleased to have memorised Ozymandias.

  It was Gedda’s turn again after that, and since she needed some atmospheres to play in, they spent a month around Uranus—Sakura and Tristan visiting the moons while Gedda dipped in and out of the cloud decks. Then onto Neptune, and finally Pluto and its environs, where there were salty oceans, and Sakura and Tristan adopted various aquatic or amphibian body plans, depending on local preferences and customs.

  Sakura hardly dared voice it, but somewhere in the fourth month, somewhere between Charon and the lakes of Nyx, he felt a turning in himself. It was a small thing, like the tiniest shift of light on an overcast day, but he registered its change all the same.

  Registered it, noted it, and yet forced himself to hold the door’s threshold at the level he had locked in before Titan.

  It was not time to change it—not yet. But he was at least opening himself to the possibility. Perhaps his friends had been right after all.

  IN THE FIFTH month, not long before they would have to turn back to Jupiter, Tristan pulled strings to get them a close-up view of the Luminal Minds.

  They came out into vacuum and weightlessness, three friends in close-formation excursion bubbles. A dusky radiance lit their bodies, all that remained of the Sun’s glare by the time it had struggled its way out to the frosty, vault-like margins of Trans-Neptunian space. It was a cold yellow eye, still brighter than any star but becoming unquestionably starlike.

  “I don’t see anything,” Gedda said, swivelling around.

  “You won’t—not until we’re much nearer. The Luminals are very dark, despite their name. Crank up your eyes a few logarithmic steps.”

  Tristan had played a minor role in negotiations with the Luminals, helping to draw up a treaty that barred the opening of any more doors between ten and twenty light hours from the Sun for at least the next thousand years. In return for the peace and quiet offered by this gesture, the Luminals agreed to run theoretical simulations of Null Model consequences and also conduct high-redshift observations of early galaxies and proto-galaxies for clients in the warmer parts of the Adaptasporic Realm still clinging to the idea that there was life beyond the solar system.

  They powered into darkness. Sakura and Gedda adjusted their visual sensitivity, taking pains not to look back at the Sun. There were no bright worlds beyond this point, just ice and darkness and then the unthinking void between the edge of the system and the next star, a gulf which had been crossed by a few machines but no living organisms larger than bacteria.

  Gradually, though, something emerged.

  There was a cluster of them—three Luminal Minds in close proximity. Each was fifty thousand kilometres across, and the space between them was about twenty times as great.

  They were spheres made up mostly of nothing. Hundreds of billions of tiny elements organised into a shoal or cloud of distributed processors, with no physical binding. There was a dark, purplish flickering from the Luminal Minds—subliminal straylight from their private cognition.

  Or perhaps a gentle welcome or warning.

  “They have names,” Tristan said. “But if I were to start naming them, we’d be here to the middle of next week. I called them Indigo, Violet and Ultramarine, but that was just my private shorthand. We’re heading int
o Indigo.”

  Sakura’s eyes strained at the limit of their detection threshold, swarming with photon noise and cosmic ray hits.“Is Indigo friendly?”

  “Oh, they’re all friendly. Up to a point. Just don’t say anything rude. Oh, and don’t think anything rude either.”

  “They can read our minds?”

  “I’d rather not find out.”

  Indigo loomed, planet-sized and silent. Stars shone through the vast interstices between its mainly invisible processors. On the glass wall of the excursion bubble, a thickening network of yellow lines showed guestimated structures and avoidance points. The bubble steered itself obligingly.

  Music began to play.

  “What’s that?” Gedda asked.

  “Rachmaninov,” Tristan answered. “I thought you could use a little accompaniment to settle your jitters.”

  “We’re entitled to be a little edgy,” Sakura said.

  “No need, old man. Indigo’s just a baby—barely a hundred years old, which is nothing in Luminal terms. They start really small. To begin with, their nervous systems are fully human, just as complicated and compact as our own. Then they open themselves up, like galaxies spreading apart on a surf of dark energy. The knitters dismantle and convert their biological neurones one by one, making them self-sufficient and vacuum-hardy. Instead of electrochemical signals, they bounce their thoughts around with photons. Gradually, the space between the neurones opens wider. At the same time, they’re adding more and more processing capability, transforming raw matter into additional neurones. Most of these Luminals needed to tear a few comets apart just to get the building materials.”

  “They get more powerful,” Sakura said. “But also slower.”

  “It’s a trade-off they’re willing to make. Luminals are really only interested in talking to other Luminals, so it doesn’t really bother them that they’re thinking at a different rate to the rest of us.”

  “We’re just a nuisance,” Gedda said. “A fast, scurrying nuisance—rats in the basement.”

  “So long as we respect their needs, give them room to think and grow, we can easily coexist—even benefit from each other. I formed quite an attachment to Indigo.”

  A blue flash washed over Sakura.

  “What was that?”

  Tristan laughed. “I think we just ran into a thought! I was trying to avoid getting in their way, but there are so many connection pathways that it’s all but impossible not to intercept the odd transmission. I wouldn’t worry, though. Indigo won’t miss it. If the thought was critical, it’ll wait and re-send once we’ve unblocked the pathway. Probably wasn’t a complete thought anyway, just a constituent process.”

  “Are you sure you got permission for this?” Gedda asked, nerves pushing through her usual sanguinity. “It feels wrong to be inside another person’s mind. I wouldn’t want some tiny organism drifting through my brain, crashing into my thoughts.”

  “They’re used to it,” Tristan said breezily. “The largest and oldest of the Luminals are already more than a light-second across, easily big enough to swallow Earth and its Moon. On that scale, you can’t really legislate against trespassers. Bits of rock and ice are sailing through them all the time.”

  “Exactly how big do they intend to get?” Sakura asked.

  “There’s no danger of them rubbing shoulders just yet, old man. There’s a lot of space out here—a lot of room. Even if the Luminals confine themselves to the space between ten and twenty light hours from the Sun, there’s room for trillions of them—more than all the human beings that have ever lived. They’ll run out of building materials long before they run out of elbow-room.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t turn their eyes to the gas giants,” Gedda said.

  “Or the Sun,” Sakura said. “They barely need the Sun at all, do they, other than something to orbit?”

  “You two are such worriers,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “They’re already hitting the limits, anyway. The largest of them have to deal with non-negligible self-gravitation. They start to collapse under their own mass. The only way around that is to use their own thoughts as light-pressure, counteracting the inward pull.”

  “Like stars,” Sakura said. “Thought-pressure, instead of fusion-pressure. Actually, that’s rather lovely. Your own thoughts, keeping you alive. Never stop thinking, never stop dreaming, or you start to die.”

  “Too weird for me,” Gedda said, giving a theatrical shiver inside her excursion bubble.

  Tristan pushed them further and further into the depths of Indigo. He had some diplomatic business that still needed fine-tuning, some small but necessary closure of detail, and Indigo was the designated ambassador, tasked to speak back into the world of normal humanity. Presently, their excursion bubbles were surrounded by a swarm of macroscopic knitters, congealing closer and exchanging a constant flicker of purple transmissions. Tristan urged calm: these knitters were merely the means by which Luminal Minds such as Indigo gathered additional raw material, harvesting primordial objects as they drifted between the neurones.

  The knitters engulfed the excursion bubbles, blocking out any view of the Sun, the worlds, the stars or the rest of Indigo. Sakura was tense, but he set his faith in Tristan’s reassurance. Tristan might take insane risks with his own survival in the pursuit of thrills, but he would never jeopardise his friends.

  Colours flooded the bubble. Symbols and images jostled against the glass sphere, projected from outside. In places, the bubble began to buckle inward, as if resisting some titanic external pressure.

  “It’s all right,” Tristan called, sounding very distant. “Indigo’s just taking a polite interest in my friends.”

  “Tell Indigo to take a bit less of a polite interest,” Gedda said.

  Structures penetrated the bubble. They burst through without breeching vacuum: radial spikes of self-knitting matter, projecting inward like stalactites. Sakura stiffened, but he had no choice but to surrender and accept his own powerlessness in the face of Indigo’s scrutiny. The spiked structures closed in until they were almost touching his skin, leaving only a Sakura-shaped void between their tips. Then they jabbed, and he felt an instant of cold contact that was too brief and strange to be pain, and in the very next instant Indigo withdrew. The spikes dismantled themselves, retreating back through the bubble, and the bubble’s membrane healed itself without fuss.

  “That was...” Sakura started saying, simultaneously affronted and exulted that he had been the object of such close attention. But he trailed off, lost in wonder at the images now playing across the outside of his bubble. Worlds, cities, bodies—a torrent of experience. Scenes from a life.

  His own.

  AT LAST IT was time for the tournament.

  Sakura, Tristan and a dozen or so close friends were gathered on the observation deck of one of Jupiter’s floating cities, keeping close to the railings and looking down into the turbulent depths far below. Through many flavours of vision they tracked the glittering specks of moving fliers, sculling over the billowing, wind-torn peaks of mountainous cloud formations, six sheer kilometres beneath the city’s keel.

  “Go, girl,” Tristan exclaimed, pumping a fist—he and Sakura had both reverted to baseline anatomy—as Gedda hairpinned one of the aerial marker buoys, executing a very tight and skilful turn.

  “She cuts it fine,” Sakura said, with a knot of apprehension in his stomach.

  “Just fine enough. She’s done well to keep that anatomy locked in; she knows the limit of her wings better than anyone else in the contest. You can’t pick up that sort of thing in just a few days—you’ve got to live and breathe a body to really know it.”

  “I don’t know what drives her.”

  “At least she’s driven by something. Isn’t that enough, just to have something that pushes you on, even if it’s just some petty rivalry with another flier? You watch Malec now.” Tristan leaned over, pointing down to the flier just behind Gedda. “He’s all bluster, but when it comes to
putting his neck on the line, he hasn’t got the nerve. He won’t dare swing in so close to that marker, and he’ll lose about a second on the return because of it. All Gedda has to do is keep making those tight loops and she’ll gain half a circuit on him over the next dozen laps.” He passed a glass to Sakura. “Hold my drink, old man. I’m going to up my wager.”

  “Haven’t you bet enough?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m just getting started.”

  Tristan swaggered off to increase his stake, leaving Sakura alone for a few moments. Looking down at the fliers, tracking their looping circuits, he held one arm outstretched with the thumb and forefinger at right angles, forming half a rectangle. He tilted it around, trying to find a pleasing composition. The colours and formations of the cloud structures were impressive enough, but there was no land down there to anchor the view. Besides, he would not have known where to place his signature watcher.

  Sakura took a sip of Tristan’s drink. He swallowed it into his mouth and throat, detecting a distinct smokiness, followed by an immediate neural buzz. It could not be anything as simple as alcohol, Sakura felt certain, but whatever was in it had been tailored to fool the receptors in his throat, and his brain was quite willing to be dragged along for the ride, a co-conspirator in the age-old ritual of deliberate intoxication.

  For a second he saw himself from outside, like the figure in his paintings, lost in a vaster landscape. His body looked and felt humanoid, but the only authentic part of him was his nervous system, and even that was adulterated. When was the last time he had been biologically human, he wondered? He could take a trip to Earth some time, and have the door knit him a body that was flesh and blood all the way out to the skin. It would be good for old time’s sake. The Himalayas, maybe.