Edge of Infinity (17 page)

“All I know is that we follow the railway east, and then we follow his mule,” Lexi said. “Might involve some cross-country hiking. Think you can manage it?”

“Walking is easier than I thought it would be,” Mai said.

When she was young, she’d liked to wade out into the sea as deep as she dared and stand on tip-toe, water up to her chin, and let the waves push her backwards and forward. Walking in Dione’s vestigial gravity, one-sixtieth the gravity of Earth, was a little like that. Another memory of her father: watching him make huge sand sculptures of flowers and animals on the beach. His strong fingers, his bare brown shoulders, the thatch of white hair on his chest, his total absorption in his task.

They had left the military clutter behind, were driving across a dusty plain lightly spattered with small shallow craters. Blocks and boulders as big as houses squatting on smashed footings. A fan of debris stretching from a long elliptical dent. A line of rounded hills rising to the south: the flanks of the wall of a crater thirty kilometres in diameter, according to Lexi. Everything faintly lit by Saturnshine; everything the colour of ancient ivory. It reminded Mai of old photographs, Europeans in antique costumes stiffly posed amongst excavated tombs, she’d seen in the museum in al-Qahira.

Soon, short steep ridges pushed up from the plain, nested curves thirty or forty metres high like frozen dunes, faceted here and there by cliffs rearing above fans of slumped debris. The cliffs, Mai saw, were carved with intricate frescoes, and the crests of the ridges had been sculpted into fairytale castles or statues of animals. A pod of dolphins emerging from a swell of ice; another swell shaped like a breaking wave with galloping horses rearing from frozen spume; an eagle taking flight; a line of elephants walking trunk to tail, skylighted against the black vacuum. The last reminding her of one of her father’s bronze pieces. Here was a bluff shaped into the head of a Buddha; here was an outcrop on which a small army equipped with swords and shields were frozen in battle.

It was an old tradition, Lexi Truex said. Every Christmas, gangs from her clan’s habitat and neighbouring settlements congregated in a temporary city of tents and domes and ate osechi-ryo-ri and made traditional toasts in saki, vodka, and whisky, played music, danced, and flirted, and worked on new frescoes and statues using drills and explosives and chisels.

“We like our holidays. Kwanzaa, Eid ul-Fitr, Chanukah, Diwali, Christmas, Newtonmass... Any excuse for a gathering, a party. Your father led our gang every Christmas for ten years. The whale and the squid, along the ridge there? That’s one of his designs.”

“And the elephants?”

“Those too. Let me show you something,” Lexi said, and drove the rolligon down the shallow slope of the embankment onto the actual surface of Dione.

It wallowed along like a boat in a choppy sea, its six fat tyres raising rooster-tails of dust. Tracks ribboned everywhere, printed a year or a century ago. There was no wind here. No rain. Just a constant faint infalling of meteoritic dust, and microscopic ice particles from the geysers of Enceladus. Everything unchanging under the weak glare of the sun and the black sky, like a stage in an abandoned theatre. Mai began to understand the strangeness of this little world. A frozen ocean wrapped around a rocky core, shaped by catastrophes that predated life on Earth. A stark geology empty of any human meaning. Hence the sculptures, she supposed. An attempt to humanise the inhuman.

“It’s something one of my ancestors made,” Lexi said, when Mai asked where they were going. “Macy Minnot. You ever heard of Macy Minnot?”

She had been from Earth. Sent out by Greater Brazil to work on a construction project in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, she’d become embroiled in a political scandal and had been forced to claim refugee status. This was before the Quiet War, or during the beginning of it (it had been the kind of slow, creeping conflict that has no clear beginning, erupting into combat only at its very end), and Macy Minnot had ended up living with the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. Trying her best to assimilate, to come to terms with her exile.

As they drove around the end of a ridge, past a tumble of ice boulders carved into human figures, some caught up in a whirling dance, others eagerly pushing their way out of granitic ice, Lexi explained that one Christmas after the end of the Quiet War, her last Christmas on Dione, Macy Minnot had come up with an idea for her own sculpture, and borrowed one of the big construction machines and filled its hopper with a mix of ice dust and a thixotropic, low-temperature plastic.

“It’s too cold for ice crystals to melt under pressure and bind together,” Lexi said. “The plastic was a binding agent, malleable at first, gradually hardening off. So you could pack the dust into any shape. You understand?”

“I’ve seen snow, once.”

It had been in the European Union, the Alps: a conference on security of shipping ports. Mai, freshly divorced, had taken her daughter, then a toddler. She remembered Shahirah’s delight in the snow. The whole world transformed into a soft white playground.

“There’s always a big party, the night before the beginning of the competition. Macy and her partner got wasted, and they started up their construction machine. Either they intended to surprise everyone, or they decided they couldn’t wait. Anyway, they forgot to include any stop or override command in the instruction set they’d written. So the machine just kept going,” Lexi said, and steered the rolligon through of a slant of deep shadow and swung it broadside, drifting to a stop at the edge of a short steep drop.

They were at the far side of the little flock of ridges. The rumpled dented plain stretched away under the black sky, and little figures marched across it in a straight line.

Mai laughed. The shock of it. The madly wonderful absurdity.

“They used fullerene to make the arms and eyes and teeth,” Lexi said. “The scarves are fullerene mesh. The noses are carrots. The buttons are diamond chips.”

There were twenty, thirty, forty of them. Each two metres tall, composed of three spheres of descending size stacked one on top of the other. Pure white. Spaced at equal intervals. Black smiles and black stares, vivid orange noses. Scarves rippling in an impalpable breeze. Marching away like an exercise in perspective, dwindling over the horizon...

“Thierry loved this place,” Lexi said. “He often came out here to meditate.”

They sat and looked out at the line of snowmen for a long time. At last, Lexi started the rolligon and they drove around the end of the ridges and rejoined the road and drove on to the habitat of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan.

I
T WAS A
simple dome that squatted inside the rimwall of a circular crater. A forest ran around its inner circumference; lawns and formal flowerbeds circled a central building patchworked from a dozen architectural styles, blended into each other like a coral reef. Mai’s reception reminded her of the first time she’d arrived at her daughter’s arcology: adults introducing themselves one by one, excited children bouncing around, bombarding her with questions. Was the sky really blue on Earth? What held it up? Were there really wild animals that ate people?

There was a big, informal meal, a kind of picnic in a wide grassy glade in the forest, where most of the clan seemed to live. Walkways and ziplines and nets were strung between sweet chestnuts and oaks and beech trees; ring platforms were bolted around the trunks of the largest trees; pods hung from branches like the nests of weaver birds.

Mai’s hosts told her that most of the clan lived elsewhere, these days. Paris. A big vacuum-organism farm on Rhea. Mars. Titan. A group out at Neptune, living in a place Macy Minnot and her partner helped build after they fled the Saturn system at the beginning of the Quiet War. The habitat was becoming more and more like a museum, people said. A repository of souvenirs from the clan’s storied past.

Thierry’s workshop was already part of that history. Two brick kilns, a paved square under a slant of canvas to keep off the rain occasionally produced by the dome’s climate control machinery. A potter’s wheel with a saddle-shaped stool. A scarred table. Tools and brushes lying where he’d left them. Neatly labelled tubs of clay slip, clay balls, glazes. A clay-stained sink under a standpipe. Lexi told Mai that Thierry had mined the clay from an old impact site. Primordial stuff billions of years old, refined to remove tars and other organic material.

Finished pieces were displayed on a rack of shelves. Dishes in crescent shapes glazed with black and white arcs representing segments of Saturn’s rings. Bowls shaped like craters. Squarish plates stamped with the surface features of tracts of Dione and other moons. Craters, ridges, cliffs. Plates with spattered black shapes on a white ground, like the borderland between Iapetus’s dark and light halves. Vases shaped like shepherd moons. A scattering of irregular chunks in thick white glaze – pieces of the rings. A glazed tan ribbon with snowmen lined along it...

It was so very different from the tourist stuff Thierry had made, yet recognisably his. And highly collectible, according to Lexi. Unlike most artists in the outer system, Thierry hadn’t trawled for sponsorship and subscriptions, made pieces to order, or given access to every stage of his work. He had not believed in the democratisation of the creative process. He had not been open to input. His work had been very private, very personal. He hadn’t liked to talk about it, Lexi said. He hadn’t let anyone get close to that part of him. This secrecy had eventually driven them apart, but it had also contributed to his reputation. People were intrigued by his work, by his response to the moonscapes of the Saturn system, his outsider’s perspective, because he refused to explain it. He’d earned large amounts of credit and kudos – tradeable reputation – from sale of his ceramics, but had spent hardly any of it. The work was enough, as far as he’d been concerned. Mai, remembering the sand sculptures, thought she understood a little of this. She asked if he’d been happy, but no one seemed able to answer the question.

“He seemed to be happy, when he was working,” the habitat’s patriarch, Rory Jones, said.

“He didn’t talk much,” someone else said.

“He liked to be alone,” Lexi said. “I don’t mean he was selfish. Well, maybe he was. But he mostly lived inside his head.”

“He made this place his home,” Rory Jones said, “and we were happy to have him living here.”

The habitat’s chandelier lights had dimmed to a twilight glow. Most of the children had wandered off to bed; so had many of the adults. Those left sat around a campfire on a hearth of meteoritic stone, passing around a flask of honeysuckle wine, telling Mai stories about her father’s life on Dione.

He had walked around Dione one year. A journey of some seven thousand kilometres. Carrying a bare minimum of consumables, walking from shelter to shelter, settlement to settlement. Staying in a settlement for a day or ten days or twenty before moving on. Walking the world was much more than exploring or understanding it, Mai’s hosts told her. It was a way of recreating it. Of making it real. Of binding yourself to it. Not every outer walked around their world, but those who did were considered virtuous, and her father was one such.

“Most visitors only see the parts they know about,” a woman told Mai. “The famous views, the famous shrines and oases. A fair few come to climb the ice cliffs of Padua Chasmata. And they are spectacular climbs. Four or five kilometres. Huge views when you top out. But we prefer our own routes, on ridges or rimwalls you’d hardly notice, flying over them. There’s a very gnarly climb close by, in a small crater the military used as a trash dump in the Quiet War. The achievement isn’t the view, but testing yourself against your limits. Your father understood that. He was no ring runner.”

This led into another story. It seemed that there was a traditional race around the equator of another of Saturn’s moons, Mimas. It was held every four years: even taking part in it was a great honour. Shortly after the end of the Quiet War, a famous athlete, Sony Shoemaker, had come to Mimas, determined to win it. She had trained on Earth’s Moon for a year, had bought a custom-made p-suit from one of the best suit tailors in Camelot. Like all the other competitors, she had qualified by completing a course around the peak in the centre of the rimwall of Arthur crater within a hundred and twenty hours. Fifty days later she set out, ranked last in a field of thirty-eight.

Mimas was a small moon, about a third the size of Dione. A straight route around its equator would be roughly two and a half thousand kilometres long, but there was no straight route. Unlike Dione, Mimas had never been resurfaced by ancient floods of water-ice lava. Its surface was primordial, pockmarked, riven. Craters overlapping craters. Craters inside craters. Craters strung along rimwalls of larger craters. And the equatorial route crossed Herschel, the largest crater of all, a hundred and thirty kilometres across, a third of the diameter of Mimas, its steep rimwalls kilometres tall, its floor shattered by blocky, chaotic terrain.

The race was as much a test of skill in reading and understanding the landscape as of endurance. Competitors were allowed to choose their own route and set out caches of supplies, but could only use public shelters, and were disqualified if they called for help. Some died rather than fail. Sony Shoemaker did not fail, and astonished aficionados by coming fourth. She stayed on Mimas, afterwards. She trained. Four years later she won, beating the reigning champion, Diamond Jack Dupree.

He did not take his defeat lightly. He challenged Sony Shoemaker to another race. A unique race, never before attempted. A race around a segment of Saturn’s rings.

Although the main rings are seventy-three thousand kilometres across, a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon, they average just ten metres in thickness, but oscillations propagating across the dense lanes of the B ring pile up material at its outer edge, creating peaks a kilometre high. Diamond Jack Dupree challenged Sony Shoemaker to race across one of these evanescent mountains.