Bridging Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  “So, where do you go from here?” Enescu asked her.

  “Kyrgyzstan,” Dory said.

  “I think I felt my eyebrows go up half a millimetre,” Enescu said.

  “Your eyes definitely widened,” Dory told her. It was true.

  “Damn, who did you piss off, Jesus?”

  “His dad, actually.”

  “Good one,” Enescu said. “I’m stealing it.”

  “Use it in good health. Actually, I don’t mind. I’ve never been to Kyrgyzstan.”

  “Is there even room? I caught the news earlier. It looks like wall-to-wall refugees. Is Recruitment counting on signing up a lot of people who have nowhere to go?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t actually work for Recruitment,” Dory said politely. “I mean, I do, but I’m a consultant, not a salaried employee.”

  A tiny indentation appeared over Enescu’s right eyebrow; her eyes looked up as if she could actually see it. “Aha! I felt that. Thank God, I should be able to make funny faces by dinner time. What do you consult on?”

  “I specialise in population movements due to environmental change, either sudden or over some period of time, like maybe a decade.”

  “Specialise how? What do you do, observe? Predict? Enable?” Enescu’s eyes widened again. “I was going to say ‘prevent’ but that ship has left the dock and it ain’t coming back.”

  Dory hesitated. “I cope,” she said finally. “I figure out how to cope. As part of a team, of course, not just me by myself.”

  “So how do you cope?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out. How the refugees can cope, how the already established population can cope. And how everyone around them can cope. It ripples out a very long way.”

  “I’m sure.” Enescu gave a short laugh. “Recruiting them to live in space could be a pretty good solution.”

  “I agree,” Dory said, “but first, they have to cope.”

  “Oh.” Enescu blinked at her. “I’m sorry, I guess I don’t really understand what you do. I thought I did.”

  “It’s okay,” Dory said. “It’s like time.”

  “And the Value system?” Enescu’s eyes twinkled.

  KYRGYZSTAN WASN’T WALL-TO-WALL refugees – Enescu had apparently confused it with one of the ’stans on the other side of the Caspian Sea. But its population had risen quite a bit and it would continue to increase as temperatures in parts of the Indian subcontinent went from difficult to impossible. Dory split her time between two groups, one looking at possible channels for the flow of migration and the other trying to measure the strain energy at various destinations. Her last two weeks she spent with a team commissioned by a multi-nation consortium to design underground living space ‘not in theory but in fact’, unquote. The engineers, Dory included, had a good laugh about that. As if we ever work any other way, said the foreperson, an androgyne named Revere Evershed. Her/his original specialty had actually been landscapes and s/he was always trying to get more green space into every design.

  Seriously, you people don’t realise how much green you’re used to in your life, s/he said when someone challenged one of her/his ideas for an oasis/parklet. Even if you’re completely urban. You see it and you don’t even know you’re seeing it. You’ve got trees growing up out of the sidewalks, you’ve got flowering shrubs all over apartment complexes and office buildings, inside and out. In Manhattan – hell, there’s friggin’ ivy climbing the Empire State Building –

  That’s an urban myth, said one of the geologists. Those photos are all fakes.

  Evershed was unmoved. Okay, if that isn’t real, it oughtabe. Getting daylight in is only half the solution. If they don’t see it shining on living things other than themselves, they’re all gonna turn into Morlocks.

  About half the team, Dory included, got the reference. Evershed looked at those who hadn’t and shook her/his head sadly. The benefits of a classical education cannot be overstated, s/he said. I’d make you all read The Time Machine as homework but there aren’t enough hours in the day already for what they want us to do.

  Dory hoped Evershed never found out she was only familiar with some of the later film adaptations; judging from the micro-expressions she’d picked up, she wasn’t alone. Still, she thought Evershed was right and before she left, she invited her/him for coffee at a café in the nearby village.

  “I know all about the Habitats project,” Evershed told her. They were sitting outside at a small metal table that had seen much better days, most likely in the previous century. The mismatched wooden chairs looked even older but were surprisingly solid, and just as uncomfortable. “They’ve sent headhunters at me a few times, once since I’ve been here. I guess you make it twice...”

  Dory considered telling him/her this hadn’t been a headhunting assignment for her and decided not to, at least for the moment. Making people feel sought-after was never a bad thing. “I believe in the project,” she said. “I believe it can work, I believe it will work. And I believe you’re just what they need.”

  “I’m flattered but I’m committed. As you know.”

  Dory couldn’t resist. “And as you know, Bob, I do.” They laughed together. “But you’re not nailed to the ground permanently,” she went on. “When your contract expires – or when they replace you with ‘a fresh perspective’, whichever – and you’re looking around for your next job, try looking up.”

  Evershed flicked a glance at the sky, which was clouded over, featureless and vague. “Leave everything I’ve ever known, die in space? What about my family?”

  “I thought you didn’t have children.”

  Evershed grinned in a way that reminded Dory of a very old drawing of a smiling cat she’d seen once. “What if I did?”

  “That might be a harder sell,” Dory admitted a bit sheepishly.

  “Aren’t you recruiting families?”

  Dory hesitated. “Nobody’s turning them away. But things get complicated when not all the parents or guardians want to emigrate. There have also been cases where everyone in the immediate family is good to go but other relatives file a legal restraint to keep the minors on Earth. Usually because they didn’t want to lose their grandchildren. A few minors have requested emancipation, some because they want to stay on Earth, but most because they don’t. Some places have made it illegal to take anyone under the age of consent into space with intent to remain permanently, even if there’s no conflict and the whole family is ready for launch. If they can’t consent to sex, they can’t consent to an elective life-altering procedure.”

  Evershed gave a small laugh. “I get the reasoning but that’s gonna end up biting something it wasn’t supposed to.”

  “It already has,” Dory assured him, “and it’s a mess. There’s nothing in the known universe that could persuade me to be a lawyer.”

  “Hey, a lawyer’s just an engineer wearing roller skates and a straitjacket.” Evershed laughed again. “A lawyer told me that one.” The androgyne’s smile faded. “I’ve spent my whole life solving problems here. I think I’m too old to change.”

  “I doubt you’re much older than I am,” Dory said. “Do you really want to spend the rest of your working life figuring out the best way to bury people alive?”

  Evershed winced. “I wish everyone would stop referring to it like that. We’re solving the problem of survival in a hostile environment. Is it really so different from the Habitats project? You can live underground on Earth or in a pressurised can in outer space, which I’d say is a much more hostile environment. And what about Mars? Everybody there lives underground. What’s so great about being ‘buried alive’ there?”

  “If you ask me, nothing,” Dory said. “If you ask the colonists, they’ll say it’s the lighter gravity. Physical activity is different when you weigh a little over a third of what you do on Earth. They have their own versions of baseball and dance. They’ve also reinvented pinball, with humans instead of balls, which really brings in the tourists. Some people would rather
go to the moon, where the gravity’s less than half of Mars. But they actually don’t let you bounce around as much there.” She smiled. “I prefer no gravity myself.”

  “You’re doing this to lose weight?”

  Dory had lost count of the number of times she’d heard that joke but she laughed with Evershed anyway. “Actually, I’m in it for the new challenges. New problems that need solving. During the relatively brief time I spent in the Habitats orbiting Jupiter, I could actually see their society taking shape.”

  “Habitats, plural? How many are there?”

  “Three, so far. They’re still in progress but people have moved in. And as they go on building and adding to them, there’ll be more.”

  “What if there aren’t?” Evershed asked. “What if they build these great big tin cans – excuse me, Habitats – and people decide they’d rather be underground on Earth than live in a space can millions of miles away from everything they’ve ever known?”

  Dory shrugged. “There’s more than one way to get more people. They’re already having kids out there.”

  Evershed looked shocked. “Do they adapt babies right after birth or wait till they’re toddlers?”

  Dory shook her head. “Epigenetics – kids’re born adapted.”

  The androgyne stared, then finished the rest of her/his coffee in one go. “That may not play well down here. Messing with Mother Nature like that.”

  “But screwing up the climate so much that people have to live underground, nobody has a problem with that,” Dory said a bit sourly.

  “I didn’t say I felt that way. But it’ll be one more thing making recruitment harder for you. ‘Space-humans give birth to mutant monster babies’ – there hasn’t been click-bait that good in, I don’t know, thirty years, Maybe fifty. You’ll have your work cut out for you.”

  “Well, not me personally,” Dory said. “I’m on contract with JovOps Recruitment; in exchange for services rendered, they’ll cover surgical adaptation all the way through to recovery and then make sure I end up in a place where they need people like me.”

  “You can get work anywhere, down here or up there. You’re an engineer.”

  “I’m a civil engineer,” Dory corrected him. “Out there, that’s a lot more than infrastructure. Although I don’t ignore infrastructure, which is why I’d really like to get you out of the dirt, too. Will you think about it?”

  “How the hell do you plant a garden with no gravity? You’d have to pack the dirt too tightly to keep it from just –” s/he raised both hands and wiggled his fingers. “Disintegrating? Diffusing?”

  “A number of different growing mediums have been developed,” Dory told him. “Or media, I guess it should be. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

  Evershed smiled with half his/her mouth. “I’ve been busy. But never mind. If you’re happy to go, I’m happy for you. But I’ve got my hands full here. If not me, who?”

  “And if not now, when?” The quick rejoinder earned her a smile of genuine approval. Nothing like a classical education – or half-classical at least – to make someone take you seriously, she thought. “They need people who understand the importance of green spaces well enough to fight for them.”

  “And if I’m fighting for them out at Jupiter, who’s going to fight for them here?”

  Dory took a breath. “When they realise they need more grass and trees and whatnot, they can order some and have it delivered in a few days. Out there, they’d have to wait for it to grow. It’ll save a lot of time if you get them to put in enough in the first place. Not to mention all the people who won’t need mess for lack-of-green anxiety or whatever it is.” She took a chip out of her pants pocket and held it out to her/him. “Just have a look at this. It’s not a sales-pitch,” she added in response to the look on his/her face. “It’s the journal l kept of my time in space. There’s a lot of selfie stuff but it’s never just me and I only mention it because you might think I look a lot younger. I didn’t use any cosmetic filters – not even a little correction. Everybody looks younger when the Earth isn’t constantly trying to suck them down into its core.”

  Evershed made her wait almost ten seconds before s/he finally took the chip. “So it really isn’t just weight loss – it’s rejuvenation, too.”

  “It kinda is, but not how you’d think,” Dory said. “Just think about it, okay?”

  Evershed told her s/he would.

  DORY SPENT THE next three weeks with two hundred other engineers in an idea exchange, talking about tension, compression, and shear in both formal and informal human structures, and those conditions most likely to result in buckling. She hadn’t devoted so much time to vapour since she’d gotten her first degree and it made her feel weird. Not that she wasn’t happy to learn about other people’s experiences, and she actually thought they could have done with half a dozen anthropologists rather than three. But Dory had come to feel that you could spend the rest of your life talking about what-ifs and what-nexts and probably never get through them all, plus you’d miss the living through the experience in real life, with real people. Three weeks had never felt so long.

  Her last week was open time. She said a few final goodbyes to her oldest friends, with mixed results. It wasn’t as easy to tell with people that you were doubling the strain energy as it was with inanimate materials. Carleen, whom she had roomed with as an undergrad, actually believed Dory subconsciously wanted someone to talk her out of going into space.

  “Why would you think that?” Dory asked her as they stood in the doorway of her apartment.

  “Because I already tried to talk you out of it,” Carleen said, exasperated. “Why else would you come back?”

  “Because you’re one of my oldest friends,” Dory said.

  “But subconsciously –”

  “I don’t think so,” Dory told her. “And if it is, well, my subconscious isn’t driving – I am. The subconscious doesn’t get a vote.”

  “Figures,” Carleen said. “You’re the one who thinks you can engineer people into a society.”

  “No, I don’t. Human structures find their own shape,” Dory said. “I just observe. With any luck, I can find points of equilibrium, even if they change from moment to moment. Which happens more often than not. It’s extremely complicated when every member of a structure always has six degrees of freedom.”

  “You mean six degrees of separation,” Carleen said.

  Back when they’d been at school, Dory had corrected her on this over and over, explaining that the six degrees of freedom meant something could move in six directions perpendicular to each other. It wasn’t that hard to understand but Carleen just couldn’t seem to retain it and Dory had no idea why. It certainly wasn’t because she was stupid. Dory was about to go over it for her again, then thought better of it. Carleen wasn’t stupid – she just wasn’t an engineer.

  “Yeah, sure,” Dory said. “Separation.”

  “Which I guess is your idea of freedom.” Carleen blew out a short breath. “If you change your mind, let me know. But don’t call me from the shuttle two minutes before lift-off and beg me to come get you, because they’ll never let me into the launch area.”

  Dory imagined her own sad smile was a mirror of Carleen’s.

  “Just do me one favour,” Carleen added.

  “If I can,” Dory replied.

  “Could you just... walk away? I can’t stand the symbolism of closing the door on you. You go, and I’ll shut the door after you get to the elevators.”

  Really not an engineer, Dory thought as she left.

  Much later, after she had made the transfer from the shuttle to the orbiting way station where she would wait for her transport to Jovian space, she got a message notification. The time-stamp indicated it had been sent only a few minutes before launch. She hesitated to read it, wondering if it was from Carleen; it felt great to be weightless again and she didn’t want to ruin it with more angst.

  But the message was from Evershed: Got fired. Do
n’t know how you saw it coming. Thinking of doing more gardening. What are the seasons like up there? Do seasons even exist up there? I should know but I’ve been busy. Millions of questions.

  She clicked on reply, thinking about how structures might find their own shapes when every component always had six degrees of freedom.

  LATER, HANK WOULD remember how much she had liked the sunshield swallow, even at first glance.

  And she liked her first view of Venus, too, what she could see of it from the Venera station, orbiting hundreds of kilometres above the shining cloud tops.

  But then she had been just ten years old. It was only as she grew up, later, that she came to dislike so much what happened when her mother had put those two lovely things together.

  For her mother, though, for Jocelyn Lang Poole, this tremendous planetary spectacle had only been a beginning. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” she’d said.

  Hank had stood there with her mother at the scuffed window of the elderly habitat. Venera was a chain of modules, old and much reused, now strung out in a belt around a gleaming bowl of solar-energy collectors and spun up for gravity. Inside everything was as smart as you’d find on Earth, the very walls as responsive to a touch or a word as Hank’s own bedroom back in London. But even so, Hank thought, equipped with the sensitive nose of a ten-year-old, you could smell the age of the place, smell the grease and the dirt and the electric tang of antique machineries – smell the sweat of the generations of vanished cosmonauts who had assembled this place, it was said, all of four hundred years ago.

  On the other hand Hank was used to the presence of great age; her father, a teacher in London, had once told her she was sensitised to it. After all, her own mother was two hundred and fifteen years old. Hank was the only member of the fourth ‘litter’ of children Jocelyn had raised during those long years, as she liked to say.