Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  But maybe it made engineering sense. Bicycles had appeared in the world because the mine-shafts were expanding. Ever-active robots, steadily gnawing new courses through the planet’s richest mineral seams. The world was growing methodically.

  Modern Mercury was no longer that old, cramped world where people lurked in chambers and airlocks, and walked only a few hundred metres. Robots were ripping through the planet’s crust, and behind them came human settlers, as always on Mercury. That was common sense, and no conservative could deny that.

  “I could build a bicycle,” Pitar declared. “I could fabricate and print one. Not a ladylike kind, of course – but a proper transportation machine.”

  “With your bicycle helmet, you wouldn’t have to wear your veil anymore,” Lucy said eagerly. “No one would know that it was you, on your bicycle... except for me, of course, because, well, I always know it’s you.”

  “Then it’s settled. I’ll set straight to work! I’ll give you a progress report, next time we meet.”

  They shook hands, and departed through their separate iron doors.

  AN OFFICIAL DAY of mourning had been declared for the late Colonel Hartmann Srinivasan DeBlakey. As a gesture of respect toward this primal Mercurian pioneer, his mourning period occupied an entire ‘Mercurian Day.’

  Colonel DeBlakey had been an ardent calendar reformer. To thoroughly break all cultural ties with Earth, DeBlakey had struggled to reform Mercurian pioneer habits around the 88-day ‘Mercurian Year’ and the 58-day ‘Mercurian Day.’

  Of course, DeBlakey’s elaborate, ingenious calendar scheme had proved entirely hopeless in practice. Human beings had innate 24-hour biological cycles. So, the practical habits within a sunless, subterranean city had quickly assumed the modern, workaday system of three 8-hour shifts.

  But DeBlakey had never surrendered his cultural convictions about calendar reform, just as he had fought valiantly for spelling reform, gender relations and trinary computation. DeBlakey had been an intellectual titan of Mercury. In acknowledgement of his legacy, it was agreed that gentlemen would wear their mourning veils for one entire Mercurian Day.

  Being a mere boy of eight, Pitar’s son, Mario Louis Peretz, wore only a light scarf, rather than the full male facial veil. Mario had his mother’s good looks. Mario was a fine boy, a decent boy, a source of proper pride. Life in his juvenile crèche was entirely ruled by women, so Mario had refined and dainty habits: long hair, painted fingernails, a skirt rather than trousers, everything as it should be.

  Through his mother’s gene-line, young Mario was closely related to the late Colonel DeBlakey. So it was proper of Mario to attend the all-male obsequies, up on the planet’s surface.

  Of course Pitar had to accompany his son as his paternal escort. The blistering, airless surface of Mercury was tremendously hostile and dangerous. It was therefore entirely proper for children.

  Pitar hadn’t worn his spacesuit in two years – not since the last celebrity funeral. For his own part, young Mario Louis sported a brand-new, state-of-the-art suitaloon. His mother had bought this archigrammatical garment for him, and Lucy had spared no expense.

  The boy was childishly delighted with his fancy get-up. The suitaloon had everything a Mercurian boy could desire: a diamond-crystal bubble-helmet, a boy-sized life-support cuirass, woven nanocarbon arms and legs, plus fashionable accents of silver, copper, gold and platinum. Mario was quite the little lordling in his suitaloon. He tended to caper.

  The crowd of male mourners queued to take the freight elevators to the Peak of Eternal Light.

  “Dad,” said Mario, gripping Pitar’s spacesuit gauntlet, “did Colonel DeBlakey ever fight duels?”

  “Oh, yes.” Pitar nodded. “Many duels.”

  “Martial arts are my favourite subject at the crèche,” Mario boasted. “I think I could be pretty good at fighting duels.”

  “Son,” said Pitar, “duelling is a serious matter. It’s never about how strong you are, or how fast you are. Men fight duels to defend points of honour. Duelling supports propriety. You can lose a duel, and still make your point. Colonel DeBlakey lost some duels. So he had to apologise, and politically retreat. But he never lost the respect of his peers. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?”

  Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.”

  Thanks to some covert intrigue – his mother’s, almost certainly – Mario was allowed into the elevator along with the casket of his revered ancestor. DeBlakey’s casket was simply his original, pioneer spacesuit. This archaic device was so rugged, solid and rigid that it made a perfect sarcophagus.

  The old elevator, like the old spacesuit, was stoic and grim. It was crammed with suited gentlemen and boys, veiled behind their faceplates.

  No one broke the grave solemnity of the moment. At last, the shuddering, creaking trip to the surface was over.

  Pitar followed the economic news, so he was aware of the booming industrial developments on the surface. But to know those statistics was not the same as witnessing major industry at first hand.

  What a vista of the machinic phylum! He felt almost as much sheer wonderment as his eight-year-old son.

  The cybernetic order, conquering Mercury, algorithmically pushing itself into new performance-spaces... It had crisply divided its ubiquity into new divisions of spatial and temporal magnitude!

  The roads, the pits, the mines, the power-plants and smelters, the neatly assembled slag... The great, slow, factory hulks... the vast caravans of ore-laden packets... the dizzying variety of scampering viabs, and a true explosion of chipsets.

  And, at the nanocentric bottom of this semi-autonomous pyramid of computational activism, the smartsand. Amateurs gaped at the giant hulks – but professionals always talked about the smartsand.

  Entropy struck these machines, as it did any organised form. Machines that veered from the wandering Mercurian twilight zone were promptly fried or frozen. Yet the broken systemic fragments were always reconstituted, later. No transistor, gasket or screw was ever abandoned. Not one fleck of industrial trash, though the cratered landscape was severely torn by robot mandibles.

  The human funeral procession marched toward the solemn Peak of Eternal Light.

  This grandiose polar mountain never passed within solar shadow. The Peak of Eternal Light was the most famous natural feature of Mercury, the primal source of the colony’s unfailing energy supply.

  At the Peak’s frozen base, which was never lit by the Sun, was a great frosty glacier. This glacier was the only source of water on or within the planet.

  This glacier had been formed over eons by the bombardment of comets. Steam as thin as vacuum had accumulated in this frozen shadow, layering monatomically. Those towering layers of black ice, the product of billions of years, had seemed enough to quench the thirst of a million people.

  Nothing left of that mighty glacier today but a few scarred ice-blocks, slowly gnawed by the oldest machines.

  The polar glacier had, in fact, vanished to quench the thirst of a million people. This ancient ice had passed straight into the living veins of human beings.

  This planetary resource was whittled down to a mere nub now. Yet one had to look here, to know that. The polar glacier existed in permanent darkness. Only the radar in Pitar’s suit allowed him to witness the frightening decline.

  Most of the men ignored this ghastly spectacle. As for his own son, the boy took no notice at all. The shocking decline in polar ice meant nothing to him. He had never seen the North Pole otherwise.

  And what had the old man, the dead man, said about that crisis? Ever the visionary, he’d certainly known it was coming.

  The dead pioneer had said, in his blunt and confrontational way, “We’ll just have to go fetch some more ice.”

  So, they had done as the dead man said. The people of Mercury had built a gigantic manned spacecraft, a me
tallic colossus. A ship so vast, so overweening in scale, that it might have been an interstellar colony – were such things possible.

  Robots had hauled this great golden ark to the launch ramp, and sent this gleaming dreadnought hurtling off toward the cometary belt. There to commandeer and retrieve some vast, timeless, life-enhancing snowball.

  Of course, there had been certain other options – rather than a gigantic, fully-manned spacecraft. Simpler, more practical tactics.

  For instance, thousands of tiny robots might have been launched out in vast streams, to go capture a comet.

  Then as the comet whirled round and round the blazing, almighty bulk of the Sun, the robots could have chipped off small chunks of comet frost, and sent those modest packets to the Mercurian surface. At the cost of a few small, fresh craters – nothing much, compared with the giant mining pits – clouds of cometary steam would have arisen. Puffs of comet vapour, drifting north, to freeze onto the original great glacier, there at the base of the Peak of Eternal Light.

  This would have been a quiet, tedious, patient, and gentle way to replenish the vanished glacier. A nurturing restoration of the status quo. Mercurian women favoured this tactic.

  But to espouse this idea had some dark implications. It implied, strongly, that Mercury itself should never have been settled by human beings. Were men worthless, was that the idea? Why not abolish mankind, with all its valour, its honour, its urge to explore – and have Mercury remain a mine-pit infested with the mindless and soulless machinic phylum?

  That idea was blasphemy – and there was no reconciling these factions. The civil division there was as distinct as frozen night and blazing day. This tremendous struggle – a primal issue of resources and politics – had almost broken the colony.

  As tempers rose, a compromise was urged by certain moderates, whom everyone ignored. Why not just buy some ice? Admit that Mercury faced a water crisis beyond its power, and buy ice from foreigners.

  The asteroids had plenty of ice. What sense did it make to design a weird horde of ice-robots? Why create some swaggering Mercurian flagship, at such crippling cost? Just abandon honour and autonomy, abandon foolish pride, and pay foreigners. There were merchants out there already, willing to trade for metals. If one could call those weird entities ‘people.’

  After much bloodshed, feuding, disgraces, regrettable excesses, the manned explorers had won the civil war. Why? Because they had claimed the mantle of the traditional values. Then these conservative fanatics had climbed aboard their new golden spacecraft, and promptly abandoned Mercury with all its long traditions.

  The field of honour had settled nothing, thought Pitar. Because those traditions were fictions – irrational retrodictions, modern political interpretations of lost historical realities.

  The values of Colonel DeBlakey were much wilder than anyone cared to remember. DeBlakey, and the men of his generation, were fantastic visionaries. DeBlakey, the Mercurian hero, cared nothing for colonising Mercury. He saw Mercury as a mere stepping-stone to colonising the Sun.

  In his arcane, two-hundred-forty-year lifespan, this great man had advanced his philosophy in vast, scriptural detail. Endlessly writing, preaching, planning, designing, and theorising. Pitar had read a few million of these hundreds of millions of words. Very few ever did.

  As the mourners gathered in their artificial twilight at the mountain’s base, Pitar realised that he was attending the last public airing for DeBlakey’s great pioneer ideology.

  Mercurian celebrities delivered their funeral orations – eloquent, careful, and well-considered. Yet DeBlakey’s titanic legacy was much too large for their tiny gestures. The mourners clearly desired to be brief – for the radiation on the surface made that wise. Yet a lifespan of a quarter of a millennium was no easy thing to summarise.

  DeBlakey’s schemes had to do with interstellar settlement: mankind’s manifest destiny in the galaxy. “Taming the stars,” as he put it. Such were the progressive visions that racked the great man’s brain, as the early Mercurian colonists crouched in their stone closets, half-suffocated and sipping toxic comet water.

  DeBlakey was scheming to mine Mercury, fully develop the machinic phylum, and then march gloriously forth to mine the Sun. To dwell within the Sun, living in Eternal Light. To thrive in Eternal Light, without any shadow of any planet’s bulk, forever.

  Because, while Mercury certainly had gold, silver, platinum, and transuranic metals – sometimes scattered on the cratered surface in gleaming pools – the Sun possessed every element.

  Imaginary star-redoubts would whip through the Sun’s tenuous atmosphere at a hyper-Mercurian speed, sifting out water, carbon, metals – anything mankind needed – directly from the solar cloud. These visionary sun-forts would be vast magnetic bottles, all tractor beams and photon traps, with living, golden cores.

  Once mankind had taught the machinic phylum to dwell within the atmospheres of stars, no further limits would ever trouble mankind. Above all, there would be no limits to the settler population. Dutiful women, living for centuries, would raise and acculturate hundreds of children, each one trained to star-spanning pioneer values.

  At this singular rate of population explosion, the Sun would soon support hundreds of billions of people. Trillions of citizens, manning millions of colonies. So many colonies, so cybernetically capable, that they would seize command of the Sun.

  With such titanic energy resources, interstellar flight would become a corollary, a mere logical detail. Tamed solar flares would magnetically fling new colonies, hurtling at near-light-speed, into the atmospheres of the nearest stars.

  Any species that could dwell within stars would swiftly dominate the galaxy. Spreading algorithmically, exponentially, resistlessly, galactically. Men who understood this had no need to search for Earthlike planets, that illusion of meagre fools. They would dwell forever within the machinic phylum, each superhuman soul a peak of eternal light.

  There was a certain fierce logic to DeBlakey’s cosmic plans. If not entirely pragmatic, they were certainly aspirational. Driven by such fierce and boundless human will, the machinic phylum would explode across the universe.

  However, DeBlakey was mortal, and therefore dead. To the serious-minded, sensible people actually living today within the planet Mercury, his dreams seemed arcane, farfetched, absurd... And now, his funeral eulogists were trying to come to terms with all of that. To settle all of that, to bury all of that. They were gently folding this man’s wild pioneer dream into the harmless legendry of everyday Mercurian existence.

  Pitar’s boy tugged at his gauntleted arm. These high-flown orations had the boy bored stiff. “Dad.”

  Pitar opened a private channel. “What is it? Do you need a bathroom? Use the suit.”

  “Dad, can I go fight now? That’s Jimmy over there, he likes to fight.”

  “No sparring during funerals, son.”

  Mario grimaced at this reproof. He rubbed exoatmospheric dust from his diamond bubble-helmet. “Dad, when they build the new colony at the South Pole, will we go there?”

  “Mario, there’s no water at the South Pole. There are hills of Eternal Light there, so there’s plenty of energy, but fate put no glaciers for us in that place. It’s uninhabitable.”

  “But our space heroes will come back some day, and bring us a water-comet. Then will we go?”

  “Yes,” said Pitar. “We would go. There would be new opportunities there, more than in this old colony. The South Pole would mean a different life, new social principles. Yes, we would go there. I would take you with me. And your brothers, too – because you’ll have brothers someday.”

  “Would Mom go with us?”

  “Son, in nine years you’ll be married yourself. I’ll arrange that. And believe me, that’s sure to complicate your agenda.”

  “Mom would go to a new colony. She wants to invent a new way of life. She told me that.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, she told me! She really means it.�
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  Pitar drew a breath within his helmet. “We are, after all, a pioneering people. That is our true heritage, and I’m proud that you are witnessing all this. You’ll live a very long time, my son, so be sure to remember this day, and all it means. This world belongs to you. It was given to you. And don’t you ever forget that.”

  Another speaker took the rostrum at the funereal plateau. This elder had to walk with robot assistance, and though he said little enough, he spoke at the droning rate of the very wise. A dreadful thing to hear.

  Mario could not keep his peace. “Dad, will there be other boys like me at the South Pole?”

  Pitar smiled. “Of course there will. A society with no youth has no future. If the people of Earth had sent their children into space, instead of just foolish astronauts, they would have spread throughout the worlds. Instead, they sank into their mud. That’s not your heritage, because those people have no moral fibre. That’s why they don’t matter now, and we do.”

  Mario struggled to scratch his nose through his bubble-helmet. Of course this feat was impossible. “Dad, do Earth people stink? Jimmy says they stink.”

  “I’ve never met one personally, but they do have wild germs in their bellies. Earth people can emit some unpleasant odours, and that’s a fact.” Pitar cleared his throat inside his spacesuit. “The Earth people don’t care much for us, either, mind you – they call us ‘termites.’”

  “‘Termites’, Dad, what does that mean?”

  “Termites are subhuman social beasts. Wild animals. Never properly gardened like our animals.”

  “Dad, how big are termites?”

  “I really don’t know, about the size of a housecat, I guess. If some man ever calls you a ‘termite,’ you slap his face and challenge him, understand? That puts a swift end to that nonsense.”