Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  He was silent. They all looked at him, even Kendrick, who had sat down beside him.

  “Pan Gu,” he said at last.

  “What was that, Wei Binglin?”

  “I am Pan Gu. Or my colleague is. Pan Gu, who was born in the primordial egg, and grew for eighteen thousand years, and stood up...” He looked around at their blank faces. He wondered how many of them even knew what he was talking about; the culture of Chinese Mars was fast diverging from the old country. He felt old himself. He was only fifty-three. He had already spent a decade of his life working with this man, this monster, Kendrick, and still he was not done.

  One of the mandarins spoke into the silence. “It was always a mistake to allow a pilot to assume a position of administrative power. The hero of the Sunflower! He was always liable to make some such gesture as this. Once a hero, always a hero – eh, Captain Wei?”

  Chang Kuo nodded, stern. “You have certainly bound yourself up to this monument, Wei Binglin. This monument, or folly.”

  “Of course he has,” said Kendrick dryly. “But he can’t stop. We can’t stop...”

  Wei collected himself. “None of us can stop,” he said now, firmly. “The Obelisk is known across the planet, and at home, across the Framework – even in the UN-allied nations, thanks to satellites which image it from orbit. We cannot stop. The loss of face would be too great. That is the foundation of our argument for continuing, and it runs as deep and solid as the foundations we built for the tower itself. Now. Shall we discuss how best to proceed from here?” And he glared at them, one by one, as if daring them to contradict him.

  THE WORD CAME to the two of them as they were having another long, wrangling meeting in Wei’s office, in the old Summertime Vault.

  The call came from her estranged husband, who was in Hellas, and who had in turn received a panicky call from a friend. She was heading for the top of the Obelisk. She had looked desperate as she left her apartment, on the prestigious fiftieth floor.

  So they ran, the two of them, through the underground way to the base levels of the Obelisk, chambers carved into the tower’s massive foundations. Wei was in his late fifties now, Kendrick in his early sixties, and neither was as healthy as he once had been, Wei knew, he himself with an obscure cancer eating at his bones, and Kendrick limping along beside him, his oddly distorted face youthful yet slack, for his expensive implants were, after decades without replacement, beginning to fail.

  At the Obelisk, Wei had a priority card that enabled him to gain access to one of the high status, fast-ascent external elevators. They were both breathless, and stayed silent as the elevator car climbed.

  Soon they rose above ground level, and the car began to crawl its way up one glass-coated side of the building. They were afforded a tremendous view of the city, and of Mars, as they climbed. Yet it was the Obelisk itself that captured the attention, as ever. As he looked up through the elevator’s clear roof, Wei saw the glass face shining in the low, buttery morning sunlight of Mars, climbing on and on, a dead flat plane that narrowed to a fine line and seemed to pierce the sky itself. In a sense it did, for the Obelisk rose above the weather. The shell was complete now, a cage of Martian steel under tension, holding concrete piles in place, all of it glassed over. It was mostly pressurised, though the labour of fitting out its interior would likely go on for years yet. To the external walls were fixed a number of elevator channels, like the one they rode, and inside, a steep staircase wound up within the pressurised hull. That was the other way to ascend the building, to climb up, like ascending a mountain.

  The tower itself reached an astounding ten kilometres into the sky, three times as tall as any conceivable building of the same materials on Earth – and over five times as tall as any building ever actually constructed there. Wei had seen simulations of the sight of it from orbit – he himself had never left the planet, since stepping off the shuttle from the Sunflower. From space it was an astonishing image, slim, perfect, an arm rising out of the chaotic landscape to claw at the sky.

  Ten kilometres! Why, if you laid it flat out, it would take a reasonably healthy man two hours to walk its length. And the walk up the stairs, if you took it, was itself fourteen kilometres long. Mars was a small world, but built on a big scale, with tremendous craters and deep valleys; but only the great Tharsis volcanoes would have dwarfed the Obelisk. Even on the ground, you could see it from hundreds of kilometres away, a needle rising up from beyond the horizon. All of mankind seemed to agree it was a magnificent human achievement, especially to have been constructed so early in the era of the colonisation of Mars.

  And the Obelisk had transformed the community from which it had sprung. Just as Kendrick had predicted, as a result of the forced development that had been required for the building of the tower, Fire City had become a global centre of industry, of the production of steel and glass, even Kendrick’s venerable bricks. There was even talk of moving the planet’s administrative capital here, from the gloomy dungeons at Hellas. Even the city’s name was changing; even that, to ‘Obelisk,’ simply.

  Yet there was still controversy.

  “I received another petition,” Wei said, breaking the silence.

  “About what?”

  “About the water you use up, making your concrete.”

  He shrugged. “We have plenty of water coming up from the aquifer wells now. Besides, what of it? If civilisation falls on Mars, let future generations mine the wreck of the Obelisk for the water locked up in its fabric. Think of it as a long-term strategic reserve.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “I should not be astounded by you any more, but I am. To think on such timescales!”

  “Pah. That is nothing. Order out of chaos,” Kendrick said now, glaring up.

  “What?”

  “Pan Gu. Remember you quoted that name when we were hauled over the coals by those stuffed shirts at Hellas, all those years ago? I looked him up. Pan Gu, a primal deity of very old Chinese myth. Right? Who clambered out of some kind of primordial egg, and stood up, and as he grew he forced earth and sky apart. And after eighteen thousand years, having created order out of chaos, he was allowed to lie down and rest. That’s you and me, buddy. We made this thing. We made order out of Martian chaos. We made Mars human.”

  “Did we? Have we really made such a difference, despite all your arrogant bluster?” As they rose further, Wei looked out, to the Martian landscape opening up beyond the confines of the city, the horizon steadily widening. “Out there. What do you see?”

  Kendrick turned to look.

  Beyond the walls of Mendel, they could see more crater walls, on a tremendous scale but eroded, graven with gullies, and dry valleys snaking between. This was Terra Cimmeria, a very ancient landscape, and a ground that might have baffled even Pan Gu. It dated from the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, when the young worlds were battered with a late bombardment of huge rock fragments, some of them immature planets themselves. That was a beating whose scars had been washed away on Earth, but they had survived on the moon, and on Mars. And here the cratering process had competed with huge flooding episodes, as giant underground aquifers were broken open to release waters that washed away the new crater walls, and pooled on the still-red-hot floors of the impact basins. The relic of all that had endured for billions of years, a crazy geological scribble.

  None of this, Wei thought, had anything to do with humanity. Nor had humanity even begun to touch this primal disorder. And yet there was beauty here. He spied one small crater where a dune field had gathered, Martian dust shaped by the thin winds, a fine sculpture, a variation of crescents. Maybe that was the role of humans here, he thought. To pick out fragments of beauty amid the violence. Beauty like the spirit of Xue Ling, perhaps, who was fleeing from him into the sky.

  Kendrick said nothing. A mere planet, it seemed, did not impress him, save as raw material.

  They passed through a layer of cloud, fine water-i
ce particles. Once they were higher, the cloud hid the ugly ground, and it was as if the Obelisk itself floated in the sky.

  For the last few hundred floors, as the tower narrowed, they had to switch elevators to a central shaft. They hurried down a corridor inhabited only by patient robots, squat cylinders, that worked on a weld. There was no carpet here, and the walls were bare concrete panels; the very air was thin and cold. At the elevator shaft, they had to don pressure suits, provided in a store inside the car itself; pressurisation was not yet guaranteed at higher levels.

  They rose now in darkness, excluded from the world.

  Wei said carefully, “We have not even spoken of why we are here.”

  “Xue Ling, you mean. Neither of us is surprised to find ourselves in this position. Be honest about that, Wei Binglin. You know, I could never...”

  “What? Have her?”

  “Not that,” Kendrick said angrily. “I knew I could never tell her how I felt. Mostly because I didn’t understand it myself. Did I love her? I suspect I don’t know what love is.” He laughed. “My parents didn’t provide me with that implant. But she was something so beautiful, in this ugly place. I would never have harmed her, you know. Even by loving her.”

  “I knew that.”

  Kendrick looked at him bleakly. “And yet you kept her close to me. That was to control me, was it?”

  Wei shrugged. “Once the Obelisk was begun, you could not be allowed to leave.”

  “How could I leave? I’m a criminal, remember. This is a chain gang, for me.”

  “I’ve known you a long time, Bill Kendrick. If you had wished to leave, you would have found a way.”

  “So you nailed me in place with her, did you? But at what cost, Wei? At what cost?”

  The elevator slid to a halt. The doors peeled back to reveal a glass wall, a viewing gallery, as yet unfinished. They were near the very top of the tower now, Wei knew, nearly ten kilometres high, and the horizon of this small world was folded, a clear curve, with layers of the atmosphere visible as if seen from space. To the east, there was a brownish smudge: a dust storm brewing, possibly.

  And there, on a ledge, outside the wall of glass, was Xue Ling. She was aware of their arrival, and she turned. Wei could easily make out her small, frightened face behind her pressure suit visor. She was still only thirty-three, Wei realised, only thirty-three.

  The two men ran to the wall, fumbling with gloved hands at the glass. Wei slapped an override unit on his chest to ensure they could all hear each other.

  “Now you come,” Xue Ling said bitterly. “Now you see me, as if for the first time in my life.”

  Kendrick looked from left to right, desperately. “How do we get through this wall?”

  “What was it you wanted? You, Bill Kendrick, creating a thing of stupendous ugliness to match the crimes you committed on Earth? You, Wei Binglin, building a tower to get back to the sky from which you fell? And what was I, a token in your relationship with each other? You call me your daughter. Would you have treated your blood daughter this way? You kept me here. Even when I lost my baby, even then, and my husband wanted to go back to Hellas, even then...”

  Wei pressed his open palm to the glass. “Ling, please. Why are you doing this? Why now?”

  “You never saw me. You never heard me. You never listened to me.”

  Kendrick touched his arm. “She asked again to leave, to go to Hellas.”

  “She asked you?”

  “She wanted me to persuade you, this time. I said you would forbid it. It was one refusal too many, perhaps...”

  “Your fault, then.”

  Kendrick snorted. “Do you really believe that?”

  “You never saw me! See me now!”

  And she let herself fall backwards, away from the ledge. The men pressed forward, following her descent through the glass. The gentle Martian gravity, which had permitted the building of the Obelisk, drew her down gently at first, then gradually faster. Her breathing, in Wei’s ears, was as if she stood next to him, staying calm even as she fell away, drifting down the face of the tower. He lost sight of her as she passed through the cloud, long before she reached the distant ground.

  VAINGLORY

  Alastair Reynolds

  OFFICIALLY IT’S RUACH City, but everyone calls it Stilt Town. I’ve never liked the place. The amount of time I’ve spent there, it really ought to feel like home. But Stilt Town never stays still long enough to get familiar. Raised above Triton’s cryovolcanic crust on countless thermally-insulating legs, it’s a quilt of independent domed-over platforms, connected by bridges and ramps but subject to frequent and bewildering rearrangements. It’s like a puzzle I’m not meant to solve.

  Still. A drink, a bar, a half-way decent view. There are worst places.

  “Loti Hung?”

  I turn from the window. I don’t recognise the woman who’s just addressed me, but my first thought, strangely, is that she must be Authority. It’s not that she’s wearing a uniform, or looks like any Authority official I’ve ever dealt with. But it’s something in the eyes, tired and pink-tinged as they are. A calm and lucid watchfulness, as if she’s used to studying faces and reactions, taking nothing at face value.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You’re the artist? The rock sculptor?”

  Since I’m sitting in the Cutter and the Torch, surrounded by images of rock art and with my own portfolio still open before me, it’s not a massive deductive leap. But she knows my name, and that’s worrying. I’m nowhere near famous enough for that.

  I tell myself that she can’t be Authority. I’ve done nothing to merit their attention. Cut some corners, maybe. Bent a few rules. But nothing they’d consider worth their time.

  “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “Ingvar,” she says. “Vanya Ingvar.” And she conjures up a floating accreditation sigil and it all falls into place.

  Vanya Ingvar. Licensed investigator. Not a cop, not Authority, but a private dick.

  So my instincts weren’t totally off-beam.

  “What do you want?”

  Her hair is short and gingery and squashed into greasy curls, as if she’s just removed a tight-fitting vacuum helmet. She runs a hand over her scalp, to no avail. “While your ship was in repair dock, I paid someone to run a deep-level query on its navigation core. I wanted to know where you were at a particular time.”

  I almost spill my drink. “That’s totally fucking illegal!”

  She shrugs. “And totally fucking unprovable.”

  I decide I may as well humour this woman for a few more seconds. “So what were you after?”

  “This and that. Mainly, a link to the Naiad impactor.”

  I blink. I’m expecting to hear that she’s tied me to some civil infringement not covered by any statute of limitations. Failure to follow proper approach and docking procedure, that kind of thing. But when she mentions the Naiad impactor, I know she’s got the wrong woman. Some mix-up of names or ship registrations or something. And for a moment I’m almost, almost, sorry for her. She’s rude and she’s had someone snoop around Moonlighter without my permission. That pisses me off. But she looks as if she could use a break.

  “I’m sorry to break it to you, Ingvar. I was nowhere near Naiad when it happened. Matter of fact, I remember watching it on the newsfeeds from a bar in Huygens City, Titan. That’s the other side of the system. Whoever dug into my nav core didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “I’m not talking about your whereabouts at the time of the collision. That was twenty-five years ago. My interest is in where you were twenty-seven years before that. Fifty-two years ago, at the time the impactor’s course was adjusted, to place it on a collision vector for Naiad.” Then she pauses, and delivers her coup de grace, the thing that tells me she’s not just making this up. “According to my investigations, it wasn’t long after you’d met Skanda Abrud.”

  It’s a name I’ve tried hard not to think about for over half a century. And
managed, most of the time. Except for that one occasion when a bright new star shone in Fornax and Skanda forced himself back into my consciousness.

  Now it hurts to say his name.

  “What do you know about Skanda?”

  “I know that he paid you to cut a rock. I also know that when the Naiad impactor hit, one hundred and fifty-two innocent people died. The rest... I think I’d like to hear it from you.”

  I shake my head. “Nobody died on Naiad. Nobody lived there.”

  “That,” Ingvar says, “is only what they want you to think.”

  “They?”

  “Authority. It was their screw-up that allowed those settlers to build their camp on that little moon in the first place. Claim-jumpers. They should have been moved on years earlier.”

  She suggests we leave the Cutter and the Torch, because she doesn’t want anyone listening in on our conversation. At this point, there are a number of possibilities open to me. I could tell her to fuck off. She hasn’t arrested me, doesn’t even have powers of arrest. She hasn’t even threatened to turn me over to Authority, and what good would it do her if she did? I’ve done nothing wrong. I am Loti Hung; I am eighty years old, a middlingly successful rock cutter. That’s all.

  But she’s right about Skanda, and it did happen when she said. And that worries me. I tell myself that nothing bad can happen in Stilt Town. And besides, I want to hear what she has to say.

  So we exit, into the domed-over night. Ingvar walks stiffly, with a lopsided gait. It’s hard to tell, but I doubt that she’s any younger than me. Both of us wear heavy coats and boots, but Triton’s cold still insinuates itself up the stilts, through the city’s floor, into our ancient bones.

  And I tell her about the day I met Skanda Abrud.

  IT WAS HERE, under Neptune. I’d come out to Triton chasing a possible client. Early in my rock-carving days, but not so early that I wasn’t building a small but respectable reputation. Neptune was further out than I’d ever been before, but I figured it was worth the time and the cost.