Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We can’t trust it.”

  At 10 kph, Rahiti let Anu operate the controls. She practiced speeding up to 15 kph and down to 5, and tried some slow, gentle swerves. When Rahiti was confident – as confident as he could be, blind and in pain and exhausted – he let her ramp up to 20, then to 30. Finally he let her go to 40. The ride was smoother than he’d hoped.

  “You’re not bad at this,” he said, begrudgingly.

  She sounded pleased. “Thanks.”

  “Just stay sharp. Something could go wrong at any minute.”

  And probably would, just when he was least expecting it. Europa luck. Worst kind of luck in the solar system.

  SIX HOURS AND two hundred and forty kilometres later, Rahiti gave up trying to nap. Every time he drifted off, he would feel a movement in the sled and start to panic. The total darkness scared him to the bottom of his gut, made everything around him sharp and hard. His face hurt and his broken teeth throbbed, but he didn’t want to pop anything but the mildest painkiller in the kit. Couldn’t afford to, not at the risk of clouding his thinking. Abandoning the bunk, he inched his way forward from the sleepsled.

  “My turn to sleep, right?” Anu asked. “I’m exhausted.”

  “You can’t leave. I need your eyes.”

  “Like I’m going to stay up this whole trip,” she scoffed.

  He didn’t answer.

  Sharply she said, “I didn’t sign up to do this whole thing without sleep!”

  “You didn’t sign up at all. If we don’t get there on time –”

  “I know. You lose your money. But seriously. You want me to hallucinate? Go crazy on you? That’s what happens when people don’t sleep.”

  “Help me get these bandages off.”

  Unwrapped and flushed with water, his eyes still proved useless. He wondered, sickly, if his vision was ever going to come back. What use was sitting on a beach with Javinta if he couldn’t see her smile, or watch her trickle sand through her brown fingers?

  “You’re going to have to keep driving,” he told Anu.

  Several more kilometres passed. He sensed that she was thinking up new arguments. Eventually she said, “I know you don’t trust the autopilot, but what if we turn it on, and go really slow, and I nap right here? If something goes wrong, you could wake me up. Otherwise I’m going to go crazy from sleep deprivation.”

  He didn’t actually think two more days without sleep would drive her psychotic. Then again, it probably wasn’t worth testing.

  “Nap for how long?” he asked.

  “Four hours.”

  “Three.”

  “I’ll still be tired.”

  “But we’ll be on time,” he said.

  They slowed to twenty kilometres per hour and engaged the autopilot. Anu went to sleep. Rahiti fretted. Headset plugged in, he made the computer announce their coordinates and speed every three minutes, and the time every ten minutes, and Jesus, who knew three hours could drag like that? He woke Anu up thirteen minutes early. She grumbled but got herself some coffee and increased their speed.

  “So what’s next? Straight line to NPS?” she said around a yawn.

  “Not quite. In five hundred kilometres we’re going to make a turn.”

  “You should let me speed up now that I’m used to it. How fast can I go?”

  He hesitated. “She tops out at fifty.”

  “Then fifty it is.”

  Almost nine hours passed at the improved speed. They drank coffee like it was water and ate from the rations, although Rahiti’s jagged teeth and sore gums hurt with every bite. Anu complained at the lack of vegetarian options. He told her that next time she stowed away, she should bring her own tofu. She synched her music player into the main console. He hadn’t heard of half the bands she liked. He tried not to worry too much about the upcoming segment from Hyperenor to Athene Linea. It was fifty kilometres of criss-crossed lineae. He wouldn’t know until they got there if they’d be forced to do switchbacks, and if Anu’s driving would up to the challenge.

  Four hours from Hyperenor, Anu started talking non-stop about movies, college, and her divorced parents, but mostly about her boyfriend, Ted. Smart Ted, funny Ted, underappreciated Ted, who she’d met through z-mail.

  “If he’s so smart, why’s he doing grunt work at NPS?” Rahiti asked.

  “He’s helping a friend work off his contract. Then he’s going back to Earth to finish school.”

  “He might be totally lying about who is.”

  Anu made an exasperated noise. “You sound like my mother. Besides, you’re no expert on relationships. You haven’t seen your wife in six years.”

  “That’s different. We couldn’t afford two passages.”

  “If she really wanted to be here, she’d be here. I came for Ted –” Anu’s voice halted. Something clicked on the console. “Hey, we’re coming into a snowstorm.”

  He was glad for the change of subject. “There’s no such thing as a snowstorm in a vacuum.”

  “Well, it looks all white across the horizon. Just like falling snow.”

  She slowed to a crawl. Rahiti heard bits of ice sleeting against the cabin. Some larger hailstones hit as well, but none of them sounded big enough to cause damage. Yet. He racked through his memories, trying to figure out what she was seeing.

  “Must be a snow volcano,” he offered. “It’s venting water into space, which freezes and comes down as ice.”

  “It’s about a kilometre in front of us, blocking the way. It goes as far as as far I can see in both directions. It’s beautiful.”

  Rahiti forced himself to think it through. “Hyperenor ridge must have opened up with a fresh crack in the ice. That’s sleet, not snow. Can you see through it at all? If the fissure is small enough, we might just drive fast and cross it.”

  “What if it’s not small?”

  “We’ll fall in and sink to the bottom of the ocean.”

  Anu drew in a sharp breath. “Not funny.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” Rahiti replied. “It’s about sixty miles deep.”

  She let her breath out in a long sigh. “I can’t see through it. Can we drive around it?”

  He recalculated in his head. “If we go northeast, parallel to the fissure, up to Sandus. It’s a lot longer than I wanted to go.”

  “Will the ice here beside the fissure be strong enough to hold us?”

  “Yes,” he said, and hoped real hard.

  She made the turn.

  “Tell me what you see,” he told her.

  “It’s like driving through a snow tunnel – there’s snow rising up on the left, swirling overhead, and then landing on our right. Kinda psychedelic. Mom’s going to die when she sees my vid.”

  The roar from the fissure pummelled Rahiti through the snowcat’s hull and seat. His head started hurting all over again.

  “Sooner or later I’m going to need another nap,” Anu said.

  Rahiti forced himself to sound calm. “Let’s worry about the big deadly crack first, okay?”

  They followed Hyperenor northeast for several hours. Anu periodically informed Rahiti about the diminishing height of the fountain. The snow tunnel narrowed in response, and fatigue strained her voice.

  “It’s past midnight,” she said. “If I were home, I’d be in bed now.”

  “We’ve got five hours until Sandus. That’ll be a good place.”

  Anu made a rude sound. “I’ve had a total of three hours sleep. You try driving all this on three hours sleep.”

  “I would if I could,” he snapped.

  She kept driving.

  They reached Sandus on time, but Anu had bad news: the fissure was still open. “The tunnel is down to about a hundred metres wide. Steady, no sign of letting up. It was maybe a kilometre wide when we first started. Can I sleep now?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “You’re going to have to jump it.”

  Fatigued or not, her response was full of energy. “Absolutely no
possible way!”

  Rahiti replied, “If you don’t jump it, we’re going to have to drive to the next linea two hundred kilometres away and hope it’s closed there. By then I’ll be bankrupt.”

  “But if we jump, we might end up dead. Dead is worse.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” he said.

  “Crazy Samoan,” she said. And then was silent, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “You can do this,” he told her.

  “What do you know?” she grumbled. “I don’t know how.”

  “Bring her into a two-hundred seventy degree turn to the right and get as close to the southern bank as you can. You’ve got to get all the sleds around before you floor it. It’s going to be like jumping over an upside down waterfall. If you don’t hit it perfectly straight and level, we’ll flip over.”

  “You’re not helping my confidence.”

  “Straight and level,” he repeated.

  The sound of the fissure faded as the engine revved up. Sleet pounded on the hull as they passed through the snow wall. He clutched the armrest so hard his fingers ached. A few minutes later they returned through the snow wall as Anu completed the turn.

  “If we die, I’m going to haunt you for the rest of the afterlife,” she said. “Hold the fuck on.”

  She floored the engines. Moments later, the blast of water from the fissure lifted the snowcat off the surface. Rahiti remembered taking Javinta to see an eruption of Manua Loa. She hadn’t wanted to watch and spent most of the time with her head buried against his shoulder, her dark hair silky on his chin. It’s okay, he’d told her. Perfectly safe. Now he remembered the smell of it, and awful white ash pluming into the sky, and the way the whole world seemed on the verge of cracking open.

  No ash here, just ice and snow and the awful sensation of falling until they touched down again. The cat lurched and shuddered but held steady.

  Anu gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “We made it!”

  Rahiti’s heartbeat felt wild in his chest. “You did it.”

  “Yeah, now I get to sleep.”

  “There’s an eclipse in about two hours –”

  “No. I’m the boss now.” She stopped the snowcat. “I’ll be in the back. Wake me up, and I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding.”

  Forty-eight hours since they’d left the equator. Eighteen hundred and twenty five kilometres down, but re-routing to Sandus had added another two hundred. If she slept until the end of the eclipse and they averaged fifty after that, they could still be on time. Barely.

  He’d still have his money.

  Cautiously optimistic, he wrapped himself in a blanket and waited for her to wake up. Exhaustion dragged him down faster than he could fight it. Dreams sucked him under. He was trapped under Europa’s frozen surface, swimming in crystal green water with Javinta. Her dark hair streamed around her head as she swam away from him. Always swimming away. Funny, considering how much she hated the ocean. He opened his mouth to call her name but only scratching noises emerged; persistent and annoying scratching, somewhere outside his dream.

  Something was scratching on the hull.

  RAHITI PULLED HIMSELF upright in the darkness. “Anu?”

  All was quiet but for the hum of the air and power system.

  More scratching.

  “Anu, wake up!” he yelled.

  She shouted back, “Go to hell!”

  “I need you. There’s something outside!”

  He heard her move forward through the tunnel. “If you’re joking –”

  “What do you see out there?”

  She paused. “Nothing. It’s all black. Eclipse, remember?”

  “You should at least see our headlights on the ice.”

  “No. No headlights.”

  He swallowed hard, panic flaring. “Are they on?”

  “Of course –”

  Something scraped against the forward hull, loud and distinctive. Anu stopped talking.

  Rahiti groped at the panel. “Turn on the infrared.”

  A switch flipped. Anu said, “There’s some kind of weird pattern on the windshield. Like a quilt. It’s... moving. Pulsing. Like a heart.” Her voice dropped into a whisper of awe. “It’s something alive, plastered there.”

  “Impossible. There’s no life on Europa –”

  Something flopped on the roof.

  “We discovered it!” Anu said, much louder now, almost giddy. “First aliens ever!”

  Rahiti cursed. At her enthusiasm, at Europa luck, at the gods determined to ruin him. Whatever was scraping at their hull had probably come up through the fissures from Europa’s vast sea. The heat cells must have attracted them.

  Well, if they wanted heat, he’d give them heat.

  “We have a lot of hydrogen and oxygen,” he said. “We’ll have to make a blowtorch and burn them off.”

  “What? You can’t kill them!” Anu exclaimed. “They might be intelligent, they might have a civilisation –”

  “They sound like jellyfish,” he said. “We don’t know what they can do or how much damage they can cause. They could clog up our vents, drip acid through the hull –”

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” she scoffed.

  “You want to take that chance?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to make a blowtorch for you,” she said stubbornly. “If we have water, why don’t we just hose them off?”

  “It’s not that easy. If it freezes on the snowcat, the hull might crack. We’d have to spend the rest of our trip in skinsuits.”

  “But we’d live,” Anu said. “And they’d live. You can’t just kill off the greatest discovery in the history of space exploration.”

  “We can if they’re trying to kill us first.” He reached for his bandages. “If you won’t do it, I will.”

  The immensely good news was that his eyes could distinguish light from dark, and her blurry face, and the general outline of the sled. The bad news was that little details were still beyond his ability – how many fingers she was waving at him, for instance, or which buttons controlled the airlock.

  “I think you’re totally wrong and I disagree with you on every moral and philosophical level,” Anu said. “But I’ll go out there and try to scare them off.”

  Both of them got back into their skinsuits in case the snowcat lost atmosphere. Anu dragged an empty waste container from the sleep sled and filled it with hot water. She climbed into the airlock, cycled it, and opened the outside hatch. A yelp followed.

  Rahiti snapped, “Talk to me!”

  “There’s one right below me. Kind of brown, with a frilly fringe, oval shaped. Like a bathroom rug. My mom’s going to love this picture –”

  “Stop taking vids and hop past it. You’ll be safer away from the warm snowcat.”

  For several moments he heard only her breathing. Then she said, “Okay. I’m away. There’s lots of them. The baby ones are only a metre across, there’s about six of them. Then there are a few teenagers, I guess, two or three metres across. But there’s a big mama one at least five metres wide. She’s on top of the sleepsled. Wait – two of the teenagers just dropped off the snowcat. They’re sliding toward me.”

  “Squirt them with the water.”

  Her voice ratcheted higher. “The water doesn’t work – they like it!”

  She screamed.

  “Anu! Answer me!”

  Her radio clicked off. Rahiti pulled on his helmet, squinted his way to the airlock, and sealed the inner door. Without waiting for the cycle he pulled the handle.

  The computer said, “Warning: Airlock pressure not –”

  “Override!”

  The vacuum alarm sounded as oxygen vented. He unlocked the outer door. A last puff of pressure blew out. A creature that had been crawling up the hull fell away and writhed at the burst.

  “Our air!” he shouted. “They don’t like it!”

  Because of course Europa had oxygen, deep in the seas and thin in its atmosphere, but not concentrat
ed and gaseous, not mixed with nitrogen the way humans liked it, and especially not warm. The creature’s writhing agony reminded him of that time Will didn’t understand “no” and got a face full of pepper spray. Rahiti jumped away from the airlock, trying to make out Anu in the blurry landscape. One of the creatures slammed into him from behind. Rahiti fell on his side under a smothering blanket of pitch darkness. Pain shot through his right leg and hip. He jammed his hand beneath the pulsing mass, found the zipper sealing his mask, and pulled it slightly open.

  His vacuum alarm sounded as he broke the seal. Precious breathing mix leaked out. His ears popped and air drained from his lungs. Stupid, crazy thing to do. But the creature sitting on him dropped off and began to flop as if he’d burned it with a torch. Rahiti re-sealed his facemask, got himself upright, and squinted at the icy blur around him.

  “Anu! Where are you?”

  Something flopped off to his right. He hopped across the icy surface until he found her with one of the aliens covering her head and shoulders. A blast of gas from his mask sent it scurrying away. Rahiti hauled Anu up.

  “Bad alien,” she said groggily. “I think it was going to eat me.”

  “You’re okay now.”

  When they got to the cat he had to use his mask again to send two of the baby aliens wriggling away. His reserve was depleting fast and he was dizzy from losing air in bursts, but he groped at the extra oxygen tanks and cracked the feed valves. Streams blew out in white plumes. He aimed them at the mother alien. The creature shrivelled around the edges and lurched off the sled.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Anu said. “Please?”

  Once inside, with the engine ramping up, Rahiti spun the treads to clear any creatures still attached and then tried to start the train moving. A warning beep sounded from the console. He squinted at the readout, tried to make out what was wrong.

  Anu leaned forward. “Did they chew through something?”

  He was trying to fight off panic. Bone-splintering, heart-ripping panic. It was impossible that they had come all this way and now –

  “The treads are frozen,” he said. “They must have gotten wet when we jumped the fissure. We stopped, and that gave them time to freeze up.”