Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  A peaceful image, for a thing that would kill him in instants. If he went too far in, the winds would rip his tiny craft apart around him. If he got too close to the wall, turbulence could send him spinning out of control.

  When the skiff finally floated serenely amidst the unending gyre, Stormchases opened the siphons. He felt the skiff belly and wallow as the wind filled it, then the increased stability as the filters activated and the capsule filled.

  It didn’t take long; the storm was pumping a rich mix of resources. When the capsule reached its pressurized capacity, Stormchases sealed the siphons again. Still holding his position against the fury of the winds, he tested the responses of the laden skiff. It was heavier, sluggish – but as responsive as he could have hoped.

  He brought her out of the fog of red and grey, under a clear black sky. A bit of turbulence caught his wingtip as he slipped away, and it sent the skiff spinning flat like a spat seed across the tropopause. Other skiffs scattered like a swarm of infant cloud-skaters before a flyer’s dive. Shaken, the harness bruising the soft flesh at his joints, Stormchases got control of the skiff and brought her around on a soft loop. His talker exploded with the whoops of other miners; mingled appreciation and teasing.

  There was his beacon. He deployed pontoons to save energy and skimmed the atmosphere over to exchange capsules.

  Then he turned to the storm, and went back to do it again.

  STORMCHASES HAD SECURED his full capsules and was still re-checking the skiff’s edge-seals, preliminary to popping the craft open, when he caught sight of a tiny speck of a shadow descending along the margin of the storm. Something sharp-nosed and hot enough to be uncomfortable to look upon...

  Stormchases scrambled for the telescope as the speck dropped toward the Deep Storm. It locked and tracked; he pressed two eyes to the viewers and found himself regarding a sleek black... something, a glossy surface he could not name. Nor could he make out any detail of shape. The auto-focus had locked too close, and as he backed it off the object slipped into the edge of the Deep Storm.

  Bigger than a flyer – bigger even than folk and nothing with any sense would get that close to the smeary pall of water vapour without protective gear. It looked a little like a flyer, though – a curved, streamlined wing shape with a dartlike nose. But the wings didn’t flap as it descended, banking wide on the cushion of air before the storm, curving between the scudding masses of the herd of Drift-Worlds.

  It was like nothing Stormchases had ever seen.

  Its belly was bright-hot, hot enough to spark open flame if it brushed oxygen, but as it banked Stormchases saw that the back was cold, black-cold against the warmth of the high sky, so dark and chill it seemed a band of brightness delineated it – but that was only the contrast with the soaking heat from the thermosphere. Stormchases had always had an interest in xenophysics. He felt his wings furl with shock as he realised that the object might show that heat-pattern if it had warmed its belly with friction as it entered the atmosphere, but the upper part were still breath-stealing cold with the chill of the deep sky.

  Was it a ship, and not an animal? A... skiff of some kind?

  An alien?

  Lightning danced around the object, caught and caressed it like a Mother’s feeding tendrils caging a Mate – and then seemed to get caught there, netting and streaking the black hide with rills of savage, glowing vermillion and radiant gold. The wind of the object’s passage blew the shimmers off the trailing edge of its wings; shining vapour writhed in curls in the turbulence of its wake.

  Stormchases caught his breath. Neon and helium rain, condensing upon the object’s hard skin, energized by the lightning, luminesced as the object skimmed the high windswept edge of the clouds.

  With the eyes not pressed to the telescope, he watched a luminescent red-gold line draw across the dull-red roiling stormwall. Below, at the tropopause border of the storm, the other filter-miners were pulling back, grouping together and gliding away. They had noticed the phenomenon, and the smart sky-miner didn’t approach a storm that was doing something he didn’t understand.

  Lightning was a constant wreath in the storm’s upper regions, and whatever the object or creature was made of, the storm seemed to want to reach out and caress it. Meanwhile, the object played with the wall of the storm, threading it like a needle, as oblivious to those deadly veils of water vapour as it was to the savagery of the lightning strikes. Stormchases had operated a mining skiff – valued work, prestigious work, work he hoped would earn him a place in the Mothergraves’ esteem – for his entire fledged life.

  He’d seen skiffs go down, seen daring rescues, seen miners saved from impossible situations and miners who were not. He’d seen recklessness, and skill so great its exercise looked like recklessness.

  He’d never seen anyone play with a Deep Storm like this.

  It couldn’t last.

  IT COULD HAVE been a cross-wind, an eddy, the sheer of turbulence. Stormchases would never know. But one moment the black object, streaming its meteor-tail of noble gases, was stitching the flank of the storm – and the next it was tumbling, knocked end over end like the losing flyer of a mating dogfight. Stormchases pulled back from the telescope, watching as the object rolled in a flat, descending spiral like a coiled tree-frond, pulled long.

  The object was built like a flyer. It had no pontoons, no broad hull meant to maximize its buoyancy against the pressure gradient of the tropopause. It would fall through, and keep falling –

  Stormchases clenched the gunwale of his skiff in tense manipulators, glad when the alien object fell well inside the boundary of the storm-fronting thermal the Drift-Worlds rode. It seemed so wrong: the Mothers floating lazily with their multicoloured sides placid in the sun; the object plunging to destruction amid the hells of the deep sky, trailing streamers of neon light.

  It was folly to project his own experiences upon something that was not folk, of course – but he couldn’t help it. If the object was a skiff, if the aliens were like folk, he knew they would be at their controls even now. Stormchases felt a great, searing pity.

  They were something new, and he didn’t want them to die.

  Did they need to?

  They had a long way to fall, and they were fighting it. The telescope – still locked on the alien object – glided smoothly in its mount. It would be easy to compute the falling ship’s trajectory. Other skiffs were doing so in order to clear the crash path. Stormchases –

  Stormchases pulled up the navigation console, downloaded other skiffs’ telemetry on and calculations of the trajectory of the falling craft, ran his own. The object was slowing, but it was not slowing enough – and he was close enough to the crash path to intercept.

  He thought of the Mothergraves. He thought of his rich cargo, the price of acceptance.

  He clenched his gills and fired his engines to cross the path of the crash.

  Its flat spiral path aided him. He did not need to intercept on this pass, though there would not be too many more opportunities. It was a fortunate thing that the object had a long way to fall. All he had to do was get under it, in front of it, and let the computer and the telescope and the cannon do the rest.

  There. Now. Even as he thought it, the skiff’s machines made their own decision. The sail-cannon boomed; the first sail itself was a bright streamer climbing the stratosphere. Stormchases checked his restrains with his manipulators and one eye, aware that he’d left it too late. The other three eyes stayed on the alien object, and the ballistic arc of the rising sail.

  It snapped to the end of its line – low, too low, so much lower than such things should be deployed. It seemed enormous as it spread. It was enormous, but Stormchases was not used to seeing a sail so close.

  He braced himself, one manipulator hovering over the control to depressurize the cargo capsules strung behind him in a long, jostling tail.

  The object fell into the sail. Stormchases had a long moment to watch the bright sail – dappled in vermilion an
d violet – stretch into a trailing comet-tail as it caught and wrapped the projectile. He watched the streamers of the shroud lines buck at impact; the wave travelling their length.

  The stretch and yank snapped Stormchases back against his restraints. He felt the shiver through the frame of the skiff as the shroud-motors released, letting the falling object haul line as if it were a flyer running away with the bait. The object’s spiralling descent became an elongating pendulum arc, and Stormchases hoped it or they had the sense not to struggle. The shroudlines and the sail stretched, twanged –

  – Held. The Mothergraves wove the sails from her own silk; they were the same stuff as her canopies. There was no stronger fibre.

  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.

  WHEN 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.

  STORMCHASES 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.

  IT 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 a
round 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?”

  THE 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.