Edge of Infinity (36 page)

“Breathe, darling.” Etienne waved her hand.

Jordan glared at her.

Etienne watched, as though weighing how much her protection might be worth. What came out of her mouth, though, was “Roses? Really?”

“What, I don’t seem the type?” Jordan raised an eyebrow. “This specialist, Etienne. He’s got roses traced to stock from the Gardens of Albarède, from Chandigarh, he’s got an Autumn Damask that would make your heart ache. I wanted something of my own up here. Something just beautiful.” She sighed, and drank. “Everything on the frontier is so damn
practical
. So, so am I.”

“Numbers and figures and madmen and dreamers,” Etienne said. There was a fondness to her tone that Jordan wasn’t used to hearing. “They got us here and they’ll get us through. So it’ll take a few extra years.”

“It’ll take a few extra years to scale crop production back to normal,” Jordan said. She shook her head. “Longer than that for roses. So much for dreamers, huh? One little explosion, and boom.” She mimed an explosion with one hand. “Bleeding rainbows in geosynchronous orbit. We were barely bringing up enough water for me to claim a surplus in the first place; where do we go from here?”

“Where do we ever?” Etienne said.

“Raxel says living in space means bleeding Earth dry.”

Etienne massaged her drink with her fingers, then crossed her legs and her arms. “Jordan Owole, do you think people up here will pay back your water if they can?”

Jordan shrugged. “I think I do. But –”

“Then let’s tell Earth the same damn thing.” Etienne shrugged. “One day it’ll all pay out. We’ll bring them some nice comets for their troubles, or whatever they need from us. It’s big out here. Full of possibilities.”

“Have you looked at space?” Jordan asked. “It’s not full, it’s empty.”

“There’s more out here than there’ll ever be down there,” Etienne said. “It just takes a little getting to.”

“That’s the problem.”

Etienne gave an exaggerated sigh. “You know, you’re damn cynical for a spacer, Jordan. It’s a wonder you ever got your feet off the ground.” She extended her leg, pushed off in one graceful motion, and caught Jordan’s shoulder. “Darling, it’s space. We help each other or we float dead into nothing. You share your water and every spacer worth a breath of air and a bag to drink will dip in to make your dreams come true. I guarantee it.”

Jordan gave a sad, sidelong smile. “You mean you’ll henpeck them until they agree to your terms.”

Etienne put a hand to her heart. “Why, Jordan,” she said. “How well you know me.”

J
ORDAN WAS GOING
through the seed logs when her callpad blipped with a message, and she reached over to open it without looking. She hit the button for the text-to-audio option, and it read
IMAGE FILE FILENAME PROMISE.

That got her to glance over.

It was a rose. Hand-rendered, rotating on three axes. She checked the message data, traced it back to a doctor in the colony at Tsiolkovskiy. There was no message attached.

She studied it for a while. She didn’t know the doctor, though she’d heard his name around. They’d never interacted.

She might have questioned that further, but she was interrupted by another message blip. Another rose, this one in oil pastels.

Four minutes later, another.

They kept coming. One by one, diverging from art to factoids, to photos and personal recollections, memories of scent-rich Earth. She watched as the number climbed past thirty, past sixty, past a hundred.

“Oh, hell,” Jordan said, and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. She reached over and typed Marcus’ number into the callpad. “Marcus –”

A new message flashed onto her screen.

She opened it. This one was text, and the speech option read it dutifully out. Jordan read along with it.

Marcus connected on his end, his face popping up on the vid channel.
“Ms. Owole?”

“Etienne can get a message to my sister on Earth,” Jordan read, tracing the words on her screen.

“That’s great!”
Marcus said.
“Trust Etienne. What are you going to say?”

Jordan took a long, deep breath.

“I’ll say, ‘Still love you, still miss you, and enjoy the gardens at Sangerhausen,’” she said. “And Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

She closed the images, and braced herself against the coming dry spell. “Tell Raxel we’re putting our faith in her, for this one. And start scaling down. Make ready to distribute our water.”

THE PEAK OF ETERNAL LIGHT

Bruce Sterling

H
E PROFOUNDLY REGRETTED
the Anteroom of Profound Regret.

The Anteroom was an airlock of blast-scarred granite. The entrance and the exit were airtight wheeled contraptions of native pig-iron. In the corner, a wire-wheeled robot, of a type extinct for two centuries, mournfully polished the black slate floor.

One portal opened with a sudden
pop
.

Lucy was there, all in white, and rustling. His wife was wearing her wedding dress.

Pitar was stunned. He hadn’t seen this scary garment since they’d been joined in wedlock.

Lucy stopped where she stood, beside her round, yawning, steely portal. “You don’t like my surprise for you, Mr. Peretz?”

Pitar swallowed. “What?”

“This is my surprise! It’s my anniversary surprise for you! I carefully warned you that I had a surprise.”

Pitar struggled to display some husbandly aplomb. “I never guessed that your surprise would be... so dramatic! For my own part, I merely brought you this modest token.”

Pitar opened his overnight bag. He produced a ribboned gift-box.

Lucy tripped over, ballerina-like, on her tip-toes.

They gazed at one another, for a long, thoughtful, guarded moment.

Silence, thought Pitar, was the bedrock of their marriage. As young people, it was their sworn duty to fulfil a marital role. Every husband had to invent some personal mode of surviving the fifty-year marriage contract. Marriage on Mercury was an extended adolescence, one long and dangerous discomfort. Marriage was like sun-blasted lava.

Why, Pitar wondered, was Lucy wearing her wedding dress? Had she imagined that this spectral show would please him?

He knew her too well to think that Lucy was deliberately offending him – but he’d burned his own black wedding-suit as soon as decency allowed.

Seeing colour returning to his face, Lucy pirouetted closer. “You bought me a gift, Mr. Peretz?”

“This anniversary gift was not ‘bought,’” Pitar said, swallowing the insult. “I
built
you this gift.” He offered the box.

Lucy busied herself with the ribbon, then tugged at the airtight lid.

Pitar took this opportunity to study his wife’s wedding gown. He had never closely examined the ritual garment, because he had been far too traumatised by the act of marrying its occupant.

There was a lot to look at in a wedding dress. Technically speaking, in terms of its inbuilt supports, threading, embroidering, seams, darts and similar fabric-engineering issues, a wedding dress was quite a design-feat.

Also, the dress fit Lucy well. His wife was a woman of 27 years, yet still with the bodily proportions of a bride of 17. Was she conveying some subtle message to him, here?

Lucy peered into her gift box, and shook it till it jingled. “What are these many small objects, Mr. Peretz?”

“Madame, those golden links snap together. Once assembled, they will form a necklace. The design of the necklace is based on the ‘smart sand’ used for surface-mining. It’s rather ingenious engineering, if I may say that about my own handiwork.”

Lucy nodded bravely. Struggling with her wedding-skirt, she poised herself inside a spindly cast-glass chair. She tipped the gift-box and shook it, and an army of golden chain-links scattered, ringing and jingling, across the black basalt table.

Lucy examined the scattered links, silently, obviously at a loss.

“They all fit together, and create a necklace,” Pitar urged. “Please do try it.”

Lucy struggled to link the necklace segments. She had no idea what she was trying to achieve. The female gender was notorious for lacking three-dimensional modelling skills.

The ladies of Mercury were never engineers. The ladies had their own gender specialties: food, spirituality, child-rearing, life-support, biotechnology and political intrigue.

Two links suddenly snapped together in Lucy’s questing fingertips. “Oh!” she said. She tried to part the links. They swivelled a bit, but they would shatter sooner than separate. “Oh, how clever this is.”

Pitar stepped to the table and swept up a handful of links. “Let’s assemble them together now – shall we? Since you are wearing your wedding dress today – it would be surely be proper, thematically, if you also wore this newly-assembled wedding necklace. I’d like to see that, before we part.”

“Then you shall see it,” she said. “Mr. Peretz, a woman’s wedding necklace is called a ‘mangalsutra.’ That’s a tradition. It’s women’s sacred history. It symbolises devotion, and two lives that are joined by destiny. That’s from the Earth.”

Pitar nodded. “I’d forgotten that word, ‘mangalsutra.’”

The two of them sat in their glass chairs, and laboured away on the mangalsutra, joining the gleaming links. Pitar felt pleased with the morning’s events. He’d naturally dreaded this meeting, since a tenth anniversary was considered a highly significant date, requiring extra social interaction between the spouses.

Conjugal visits were sore ordeals for any Mercurian husband. To accomplish a visit to his wife, Pitar had to formally veil himself, arm himself with his duelling baton, and creep into the grim and stuffy ‘Anteroom of Delightful Anticipation.’

At this ceremonial airlock between the genders, Lucy would greet him – generally, she was on time – and say a few strained words to him. Then she would lead him to the Boudoir.

No decent man or woman ever spoke a word inside the Boudoir. They silently engaged in the obligatory conjugal acts. If they were lucky, they would sleep afterward.

In the morning, they underwent another required interaction, parting within this ceremonial Anteroom of Profound Regret. Marriage partings were commonly best when briefest.

Anniversary days, however, were not allowed to be brief. Still, assembling the necklace was a pleasing diversion for both of them. It kept their nervous fingers busy, like eating snack food.

When they said nothing, there were no misunderstandings.

Pitar noted his wife’s smile as her golden necklace steadily grew in length. No question: his clever gift plan had met with success. During their decade of marriage, his wife had let slip certain hints about traditional marriage necklaces. Womanly relics, once prized among the colony’s pioneer mothers, a sacred female superstition, vaguely religious, peculiar and mystical, whatever-it-was that women called it – the ‘mangalsutra.’

Of course Pitar had improved this primitive notion – brought it up-to-date with a design-refresh – but if Lucy had noticed his innovation, she had said nothing about it.

“Sit close to me now, Mr. Peretz!” Lucy offered.

“With that grand wedding dress, I’m not sure that I can!”

“Oh, never mind these big white skirts, my poor old dress doesn’t matter anymore! Wouldn’t you agree?”

Pitar knew better than to foolishly agree to this treacherous assertion, but he moved his glass chair nearer his wife’s chair. The chair’s curved feet screeched on the polished slates.

Lucy glanced at him, sidelong. “Mr. Peretz, do I look any older now?”

Pitar busied himself with the links of the necklace. He knew what he was hearing. One of those notorious female jabs that made male life so hazardous.

This provocation had no proper answer. To say “no” was to accuse Lucy of still being a callow girl of seventeen. This meant that ten years of their marriage were capped with an insult.

But to reply “yes” to Lucy, was to state that she had, yes, visibly aged – what a crass mis-step that would be! Lucy would swiftly demand to know what dark threat had wilted her beauty. Arsenical rock-dust fever? A vitamin imbalance in her skin? The ladies of Mercury were forever forbidden the radiance of the Sun.

The light gravity of Mercury shaped the very bones of its women. Lucy had narrow shoulders. A long, loose spine, and a very long neck. Her sleek, narrow hips were entirely unlike the broad, fecund, wobbling hips of a woman from Earth.

Pitar himself was a native son of Mercury. He too had long, frail bones, and had mineral toxins in his liver. As a man, he knew for a fact that he did look older, after ten years of marriage. He certainly wasn’t going to broach that subject with her, however.

Dangerous questions were a woman’s way to fish for insults. Hell lacked demons like Mercurian women scorned. Any rudeness, any act of dishonour, provoked endless feral scheming within the airlocked hothouse of their purdah. Intrigues would ensue. Scandals. Duels. Political schisms. Civil war.

“How very many golden links!” Lucy remarked, blinking. “Your mangalsutra necklace will reach from my neck to the floor!”

“Five hundred and seven links,” said Pitar through reflex.

“Why so many, Mr. Peretz?”

“Because that is the number of times that you and I have occupied this Anteroom of Profound Regret. Including this very day, our tenth anniversary day, of course.”

Lucy’s hands froze. “You
counted
all our conjugal liaisons?”

“I didn’t have to ‘count’ them. They were all in my appointments calendar.”

“How strange men are.”

“We did miss some scheduled appointments. Because of illness, or the pressure of business. Otherwise, logically, there would be five hundred and twenty links on our tenth anniversary.”

“Yes,” Lucy said slowly, “I know that we missed some appointments.”

Another silence ensued. The mood had darkened somewhat. They busied themselves with the marriage chain. At last it was complete.

Lucy linked the open ends with the catch that Pitar had provided – a modest, simple loop of big studded rubies. One long, golden, serpentine, female adornment. Lucy draped the chain repeatedly around her tapered neck.