Bridging Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

Mx Ashe looked coldly at Dhaka. “We’re still in the middle of building a Ring around the sun, Mx Miriam. I’m sure my successors on the Board will have it all figured out by the next time we wake you up. We understand the concerns raised, but after all, people have invested trillions in this project. Our lawyers are in the process of responding to all requests and lawsuits, and we will stand by the final ruling of the courts.”

  Euclid spoke quickly, blunt in his desperation. “Can’t you reconsider, find another project to invest in? Earth’s a mess, we all know it, but we always thought we’d have something to come back to.”

  “I’m sure a man of your means could afford a plot on New Earth –” Mx Ashe began.

  “I’ve seen the pricing,” Vega cut in dryly. “Musicians don’t make as much as you think.”

  “What about the cohorts?” Jeni said sadly. “No-one in the cohorts will be able to afford to go back.”

  Mx Ashe stepped back from the verbal bombardment. “This is all speculation. The cohorts are still under contract to work on the Glitter Ring. Once they have finished, negotiations about their relocation can begin. Now, if you will excuse me, have a good night and enjoy the party!”

  Euclid watched despondently as the CEO walked away briskly. The Rovers stood silently around him, their faces sombre. Kumi was the first to speak. “Now I understand the nostalgia kick.”

  The SDC, now with the MME

  You and I both know

  They don’t stand for you and me

  THERE WAS STILL a tour to play. The band moved from Elysium City to Electris Station, then Achillis Fons, where they played in front of the Viking Museum.

  The long-sleep on the way to Mars had been twenty-five years. Twenty-five years off, one year on. That was the shift the Rock Devils Cohort and Consociation Fusion had agreed to, the key clause in the contract Euclid had signed way-back-when in an office built into the old New York City sea wall.

  That gave them a whole year on Mars. Mx Ashe may have shut them down, but Euclid wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

  Kumi started fretting barely a month in.

  “Jeni stepping out with one of the VIPs,” he told Euclid.

  “She’s nineteen. What you expecting? A celibate band member? I don’t see you ignoring anyone coming around when we breaking down.”

  Kumi shook his head. “No Baba, that’s one thing. This is the same one she’s seeing. Over and over. Since we arrived here. She’s sticky sweet on him.”

  “Kumi, we got bigger things to worry about.”

  “Earth, I know. Man, look, I see why you’re upset.” Kumi grabbed his hand. “I miss it too. But we getting old, Baba. I just pass sixty. How much longer I could do this? Maybe we focus on the tour and invest the money so that we can afford to go back some day.”

  “I can’t give it up that easy,” Euclid said to his oldest friend. “We going to have troubles?”

  Back when Euclid was working the rocks, Kumi had taken him under his wing. Taught him how to sing the old songs while they moved their one-person pods into position to drill them out. Then they’d started singing at the start of shifts and soon that took off into a full career. They’d traveled all through the Belt, from big old Ceres to the tiniest cramped mining camps.

  Kumi sucked his teeth. “That first time you went extempo back on Pallas, you went after that foreman who’d been skimping on airlock maintenance? You remember?”

  Euclid laughed. “I was angry. The airlock blew out and I wet myself waiting for someone to come pick me up.”

  “When you started singing different lyrics, making them up on the spot, I didn’t follow you at first. But you got the SDC to fire him when the video went viral. That’s why I called you Baba. So, no, you sing and I’ll find my way around your words. Always. But let me ask you – think about what Ashe said. You really believe this fight’s worth it?”

  Euclid bit his lip.

  “We have concerts to give in the Belt and Venus yet,” he told Kumi. “We’re not done yet.”

  FIVE MONTHS IN, the Martians began to turn. The concerts had been billed as cross-cultural events, paid for by the Pan-Human Solar Division of Cultural Affairs and the Martian University’s division of Inter-Human Musicology Studies school.

  Euclid, on stage, hadn’t noticed at first. He’d been trying to find another way to match up MME with “screw me” and some lyrics in between. Then a comparison to Mars and its power, and the people left behind on Earth.

  But he noticed when this crowd turned.

  Euclid had grown used to the people of the big planets just sitting and listening to his music. No one was moving about. No hands in the air. Even if you begged them, they weren’t throwing their hands out. No working, no grinding, no nothing. They sat in seats and appreciated.

  He didn’t remember when they turned. He would see it on video later. Maybe it was when he called out the ‘rape’ of Earth with the ‘red tape’ of the SDC-MME and made a visual of ‘red’ Mars that tied to the ‘red’ tape, but suddenly those chair-sitting inter-cultural appreciators stood up.

  And it wasn’t to jump.

  The crowd started shouting back. The sound cut out. Security and the venue operators swept in and moved them off the stage.

  Back in the green room, Jeni rounded on Euclid. “What the hell was that?” she shouted.

  “Extempo,” Euclid said simply.

  Kumi tried to step between them. “Zippy –”

  “No!” She pushed him aside. Dhaka, in the corner of the room, started disassembling the Delirium, carefully putting the pieces away in a g-force protected aerogel case, carefully staying out of the brewing fight. Vega folded his arms and stood to a side, watching. “I damn well know what extempo is. I’m young, not ignorant.”

  Everyone was tired. The heavy gravity, the months of touring already behind them. “This always happens. A fight always come halfway through,” Euclid said. “Talk to me.”

  “You’re doing extempo like you’re in a small free concert in the Belt, on a small rock. But this isn’t going after some corrupt contractor,” Jeni snapped. “You’re calling out a whole planet now? All Martians? You crazy?”

  “One person or many, you think I shouldn’t?”

  Euclid understood. Jeni had been working pods like he had at the same age. Long, grueling shifts spent in a tiny bubble of plastic where you rebreathed your own stench so often you forgot what clean air tasted like. Getting into the band had been her way ‘off the rock’. This was her big gamble out of tedium. His too, back in the day.

  “You’re not entertaining people. You’re pissing them off,” she said.

  Euclid sucked his teeth. “Calypso been vexing people since all the way back. And never mind calypso, Zippy, entertainment isn’t just escape. Artists always talking back, always insolent.”

  “They paid us and flew us across the solar system to sing the song they wanted. Sing the fucking song for them the way they want. Even just the Banana Boat Song you’re messing with and going extempo. That shit’s carved in stone, Euclid. Sing the damn lyrics.”

  Euclid looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “That song was never for them. Problem is it get sung too much and you abstract it and then everyone forget that song is a blasted lament. Well, let me educate you, Ms Baptiste. The Banana Boat Song is a mournful song about people getting their backs broken hard in labor and still using call and response to help the community sync up, dig deep, and find the power to work harder ’cause dem ain’t had no choice.”

  He stopped. A hush fell in the green room.

  Euclid continued. “It’s not a ‘smile and dance for them’ song. The big planets don’t own that song. It was never theirs. It was never carved in stone. I’ll make it ours for here, for now, and I’ll go extempo. I’m not done. Zippy, I’m just getting started.”

  She nodded. “Then I’m gone.”

  Just like that, she spun around and grabbed her bass.

  Kumi glared at Euclid. “I promised her father I’d
keep an eye on her –”

  “Go,” Euclid said calmly, but he was suddenly scared that his oldest friend, the pillar of his little band, would walk out the green room door with the newest member and never come back.

  Kumi came back an hour later. He looked suddenly old... those raw-sun wrinkles around his eyes, the stooped back. But it wasn’t just gravity pulling him down. “She’s staying on Mars.”

  Euclid turned to the door. “Let me go speak to her. I’m the one she angry with.”

  “No.” Kumi put a hand on his shoulder. “That wasn’t just about you. She staying with someone. She’s not just leaving the band, she leaving the cohort. Got a VIP, a future, someone she thinks she’ll build a life with.”

  She was gone. Like that.

  Vega still had her riffs, though. He grumbled about the extra work, but he could weave the recorded samples in and out of the live music.

  Kumi got an invitation to the wedding. It took place the week before the Rovers left Mars for the big tour of the asteroid belt.

  Euclid wasn’t invited.

  He did a small, open concert for the Rock Devils working on Deimos. It was just him and Vega and fifty miners in one of the tear-down areas of the tiny moon. Euclid sang for them just as pointedly as ever.

  So it’s up to us, you and me

  to put an end to this catastrophe.

  Them ain’t got neither conscience nor heart.

  We got to pitch in and do our part

  ’cause if this Earth demolition begin

  we won’t even have a part/pot to pitch/piss in.

  TOURING IN THE Belt always gave him a strange feeling of mingled nostalgia and dissonance. There were face-to-face reunions and continued correspondence with friends and relatives of their cohort, who shared the same times of waking and long-sleep, spoke the same language and remembered the same things. But there were also administrators and officials, who kept their own schedule, and workers from cohorts on a different frequency – all strangers from a forgotten distant past or an unknown near-present. Only the most social types kept up to date on everything, acting as temporal diplomats, translating jokes and explaining new tech and jargon to smooth communication between groups.

  Ziamara Bouscholte was social. Very social. Euclid had seen plenty of that frivolous-idle behaviour from political families and nouveau-nobility like the family Jeni had married into, but given that surname and the fact that she had been assigned as their tour liaison, he recognised very quickly that she was a spy.

  “Big tours in the Belt are boredom and chaos,” he warned her, thinking about the argument with Jeni. “Lots of down time slinging from asteroid to asteroid punctuated by concert mayhem when we arrive.”

  She grinned. “Don’t worry about me. I know exactly how to deal with boredom and chaos.”

  She didn’t lie. She was all-business on board, briefing Vega on the latest cryptography and answering Dhaka’s questions about the technological advances that were being implemented in Glitter Ring construction. Then the butterfly emerged for the concerts and parties as she wrangled fans and dignitaries with a smiling enthusiasm that never flagged.

  The Vesta concert was their first major stop. The Mighty Slinger and his Rovers peeked out from the wings of the stage and watched the local opening act finishing up their last set.

  Kumi brought up something that had been nagging Euclid for a while. “Baba, you notice how small the crowds are? This is our territory, not Mars. Last big tour we had to broadcast over Vesta because everything was sold out.”

  Vega agreed. “Look at this audience. Thin. I could excuse the other venues for size, but not this one.”

  “I know why,” Dhaka said. “I can’t reach half my friends who agreed to meet up. All I’m getting from them are long-sleep off-shift notices.”

  “I thought it was just me,” Kumi said. “Did SDC-MME leave cohorts in long-sleep? Cutting back on labour?”

  Dhaka nodded. “Zia mentioned some changes in the project schedule. You know the Charter’s not going to waste money feeding us if we’re not working.”

  Euclid felt a surge of anger. “We’ll be out of sync when they wake up again. That messes up the whole cohort. You sure they’re doing this to cut labour costs, or to weaken us as a collective?”

  Dhaka shrugged. “I don’t like it one bit, but I don’t know if it’s out of incompetence or malice.”

  “Time to go,” said Vega, his eyes on the openers as they exited stage left.

  The Rovers drifted on stage and started freestyling, layering sound on sound. Euclid waited until they were all settled in and jamming hard before running out and snagging his mic. He was still angry, and the adrenaline amped up his performance as he commandeered the stage to rant about friends and lovers lost for a whole year to long-sleep.

  Then he heard something impossible: Kumi stumbled on the beat. Euclid looked back at the Rovers to see Vega frozen. A variation of one of Jeni’s famous riffs was playing, but Vega shook his head not me to Dhaka’s confused sideways glance.

  Zia’s voice came on the sound system, booming over the music. “Rock Devils cohort, we have a treat for you! On stage for the first time in twenty-five years, please welcome Rover bassist Jeni ‘Zippy’ Baptiste!”

  Jeni swooped in from the wings with another stylish riff, bounced off one of the decorated pylons, then flew straight to Kumi and wrapped him in a tumbling hug, bass and all. Prolonged cheering from the crowd drowned out the music. Euclid didn’t know whether to be furious or overjoyed at Zia for springing the surprise on them in public. Vega smoothly covered for the absent percussion and silent bass while Dhaka went wild on the Delirium. It was a horrible place for a reunion, but they’d take it. Stage lighting made it hard to tell, but Jeni did look older and... stronger? More sure of herself?

  Euclid floated over to her at the end of the song as the applause continued to crash over them all. “Welcome back, Zippy,” he said. “You’re still good – better, even.”

  Her laugh was full and sincere. “I’ve been listening to our recordings for twenty-five years, playing along with you every day while you were in long-sleep. Of course I’m better.”

  “You missed us,” he stated proudly.

  “I did.” She swatted a tear out of the air between them with the back of her hand. “I missed this. Touring for our cohort. Riling up the powers that be.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Now you want to shake things up? What changed?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Twenty-five years, Baba. I have a daughter, now. She’s twenty, training as an engineer on Mars. She’s going to join the cohort when she’s finished and I want more for her. I want a future for her.”

  He hugged her tight while the crowd roared in approval. “Get back on that bass,” he whispered. “We got a show to finish!”

  He didn’t bother to ask if the nouveau-nobility husband had approved of the rebel Rover Jeni. He suspected not.

  IN THE GREEN room Jeni wrapped her legs around a chair and hung a glass of beer in the air next to her.

  “Used to be it would fall slowly down to the floor,” Jeni said, pointing at her drink. “They stripped most of Vesta’s mass for the Ring. It’s barely a shell here.”

  Dhaka shoved a foot in a wall strap and settled in perpendicular to Jeni. She swirled the whiskey glass around in the air. Despite the glass being designed for zero gravity, her practiced flip of the wrist tossed several globules free that very slowly wobbled their way through the air toward her. “We’re passing into final stage preparations for the Ring. SDC-MME is panicking a bit because the projections for energy and the initial test results don’t match. And the computers are having trouble managing stable orbits.”

  The Glitter Ring was a Dyson Ring, a necklace of solar power stations and sails built around the sun to capture a vast percentage of its energy. The power needs of the big planets had begun to outstrip the large planetary solar and mirror arrays a hundred years ago. Overflight and shadow rights for solar ga
thering stations had started turning into a series of low-grade orbital economic wars. The Charter had been created to handle the problem system-wide.

  Build a ring of solar power catchments in orbit around the sun at a slight angle to the plane of the solar system. No current solar rights would be abridged, but it could catapult humanity into a new industrial era. A great leap forward. Unlimited, unabridged power.

  But if it didn’t work...

  Dhaka nodded at all the serious faces. “Don’t look so glum. The cohort programmers are working on flocking algorithms to try and simplify how the solar stations keep in orbit. Follow some simple rules about what’s around you and let complex emergent orbits develop.”

  “I’m more worried about the differences in output,” Jeni muttered. “While you’ve been in long-sleep they’ve been developing orbital stations out past Jupiter with the assumption that there would be beamed power to follow. They’re building mega-orbitals throughout the system on the assumption that the Ring’s going to work. They’ve even started moving people off Earth into temporary housing in orbit.”

  “Temporary?” Euclid asked from across the room, interrupting before Dhaka and Jeni got deep into numbers and words like exajoules, quantum efficiency, price per watt and all the other boring crap. He’d cared intimately about that when he first joined the cohort. Now, not so much.

  “We’re talking bubble habitats with thinner shells than Vesta right now. They use a layer of water for radiation shielding, but they lack resources and they’re not well balanced. These orbitals have about a couple hundred thousand people each, and they’re rated to last fifty to sixty years.” Jeni shook her head, and Euclid was forced to stop seeing the nineteen year old Zippy and recognise the concerned forty-four year old she’d become. “They’re risking a lot.”

  “Why would anyone agree?” Vega asked. “It sounds like suicide.”

  “It’s gotten worse on Earth. Far worse. Everyone is just expecting to hit the reset button after the Glitter Ring goes online. Everyone’s holding their breath.”