Edge of Infinity (19 page)

On the far side of the crater, cased in her extravagantly decorated p-suit, Lexi turned with a bouncing step, asked Mai if she was okay.

“I’m fine!”

“You’re doing really well,” Lexi said, and asked Archie for the fifth or tenth time if they were nearly there.

“It is not far.”

Lexi waited as Mai skirted the rim of the crater with the bobbing shuffle she’d been taught, and they went on. Mai was hyperaware of every little detail in the moonscape, everything fresh and strange and new. The faint flare of Saturnshine on her helmet visor. The rolling blanket of gritty dust, dimpled with tiny impacts. Rayed scatterings of sharp bright fragments. A blocky ice-boulder as big as a house perched in a scatter of debris. The gentle rise and fall of the ridge, stretching away under the black sky where untwinkling stars showed everywhere. Saturn’s crescent looming above the western horizon. The silence and stillness of the land. The stark reality of it.

She imagined her father walking here, under this same sky. Alone in a moonscape where no trace of human activity could be seen.

The last and largest crater was enclosed by ramparts of crooked ice blocks three stories high and cemented with a silting of dust. Archie didn’t hesitate, climbing a crude stairway hacked into the ice and plunging through a ragged cleft. Lexi and Mai followed, and the crater’s bowl opened below them, tilted towards the plain beyond the curve of the ridge. The spark of the sun stood just above the horizon. An arc of light defined the far edge of the moonscape; sunlight lit a segment of the crater’s floor, where boulders lay tumbled amongst a maze of bootprints and drag marks.

“At least we got the timing right,” Lexi said.

“What are we supposed to be seeing?” Mai said.

Lexi asked Archie the same question.

“It will soon become apparent.”

They stood side by side, Lexi and Mai, wavering in the faint grip of gravity. The sunlit half of the crater directly in front of them, the dark half beyond, shadows shrinking back as the sun slowly crept into the sky. And then they saw the first shapes emerging.

Columns, or tall vases. Cylindrical, woman-sized or larger. Different heights, in no apparent order. Each one shaped from translucent ice tinted with pastel shades of pink and purple, and threaded with networks of darker veins.

Lexi stepped down the shattered blocks of the inner slope and moved across the floor. Mai followed.

The nearest vases were twice their height. Lexi reached out to one of them, brushed the fingertips of her gloved hand across the surface.

“These have been hand-carved,” she said. “You can see the tool marks.”

“Carved from what?”

“Boulders, I guess. He must have carried the ice chips out of here.”

They were both speaking softly, reluctant to disturb the quiet of this place. Lexi said that the spectral signature of the ice corresponded with artificial photosynthetic pigments. She leaned close, her visor almost kissing the bulge of the vase, reported that it was doped with microscopic vacuum organisms.

“There are structures in here, too,” she said. “Long fine wires. Flecks of circuitry.”

“Listen,” Mai said.

“What?”

“Can’t you hear it?”

It was a kind of interference on the common band Mai and Lexi were using to talk. Faint and broken. Hesitant. Scraps of pure tones rising and fading, rising again.

“I hear it,” Lexi said.

The sound grew in strength as more and more vases emerged into sunlight. Long notes blending into a polyphonic harmony.

The microscopic vacuum organisms were soaking up sunlight, Lexi said, after a while. Turning light into electricity, powering something that responded to changes in the structure of the ice. Strain gauges perhaps, coupled to transmitters.

“The sunlight warms the ice, ever so slightly,” she said. “It expands asymmetrically, the embedded circuitry responds to the microscopic stresses . . .”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes...”

It was beautiful. A wild, aleatory chorus rising and falling in endless circles above the ground of a steady bass pulse...

They stood there a long time, while the vases sang. There were a hundred of them, more than a hundred. A field or garden of vases. Clustered like organ pipes. Standing alone on shaped pedestals. Gleaming in the sunlight. Stained with cloudy blushes of pink and purple. Singing, singing.

At last, Lexi took Mai’s gloved hand and led her across the crater floor to where the robot mule, Archie, was waiting. Mai took out the pouch of human dust and they plugged it into the spray pistol’s spare port. Lexi switched on the pistol’s heaters, showed Mai how to use the simple trigger mechanism.

“Which one shall we spray?” Mai said.

Lexi smiled behind the fishbowl visor of her helmet.

“Why not all of them?”

They took turns. Standing well back from the vases, triggering brief bursts of gritty ice that shot out in broad fans and lightly spattered the vases in random patterns. Lexi laughed.

“The old bastard,” she said. “It must have taken him hundreds of days to make this. His last and best secret.”

“And we’re his collaborators,” Mai said.

It took a while to empty the pouch. Long before they had finished, the music of the vases had begun to change, responding to the subtle shadow patterns laid on their surfaces.

At last the two woman had finished their work and stood still, silent, elated, listening to the music they’d made.

T
HAT NIGHT, BACK
under the dome of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat, Mai thought of her father working in that unnamed crater high on the rimwall of Amata crater. Chipping at adamantine ice with chisels and hammers. Listening to the song of his vases, adding a new voice, listening again. Alone under the empty black sky, happily absorbed in the creation of a sound garden from ice and sunlight.

And she thought of the story of Fiddler’s Green, the bubble of light and warmth and air created from materials mined from the chunk of tarry ice it orbited. Of the people living there. The days of exile becoming a way of life as their little world swung further and further away from the sun’s hearthfire. Green days of daily tasks and small pleasures. Farming, cooking, weaving new homes in the hanging forest on the inside of the bubble’s skin. A potter shaping dishes and bowls from primordial clay. Children chasing each other, flitting like schools of fish between floating islands of trees. The music of their laughter. The unrecorded happiness of ordinary life, out there in the outer dark.

SAFETY TESTS

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATE
, I’m always fifteen minutes late, even though I live not six metres from the office.

The nearest door is humble enough, with its cryptic sign:
L&R: Employees Only
.

L&R – Licensing and Regulation. Sounds so innocuous, yet everyone is afraid of us.

With good reason, I suppose.

We’re in the main part of the space station, although intuitively, you’d expect us to be on our own little platform along with our ships. I suspect that back in the days before anyone knew how dangerous L&R could be, the office was near the ships, which were probably docked not too far from here.

Now we all know that one pilot misstep could destroy an entire section of the station, so the test ships have their own docking platform far away from here. And L&R remains in its original location partly because it’s safer here, and safety is very, very important.

I step into the office, and take a deep whiff of the bad-coffee smell of the place. It’s almost like home, if a bland white (okay, grey) office with industrial chairs can be home. I say hello to Connie, and put my bag on the back of my chair in the actual office section.

Connie doesn’t say hello. She never says hello. Just once I’d like a “Nice to see you, Dev” or a “You’re late again, Devlin,” or maybe even a three-finger wave. Or a grunt. I’d be shocked if I ever got a grunt.

Today she’s leaning over the counter, dealing with whatever stupidity has walked into the waiting room. There’s a lot of stupidity here, which should worry people, since we’re the last stop between them and sheer disaster. But most people never come to our little bureaucracy. They think it’s better to have someone else operate space-faring vehicles. Which, considering the stupidity that walks through our door... Stupidity that has had one year of classwork, five written tests (minimum score: 80%), five hundred hours’ simulation, three hundred hours’ hands-on training with an instructor, and one solo journey that consists mostly of leaving the space station’s test bay, circling the instruction area, returning to the bay, and landing correctly at the same dock the ship had vacated probably ten minutes before.

And that’s just for the student license, the one that allows practice flights solo in areas inhabited by other space craft.

No automation here. There’s too much at stake, too many important decisions, too much that rests on those five-second impressions we get about other people – that feeling
This guy is piloting a ship? Reeeally?
that you can’t quite describe, but is much more accurate than some computerised test that doesn’t completely get at the complexities of the human emergency response.

Is it any wonder they call my profession high-burnout? The woman who had this job before me died when an actual pilot – a guy who had done supply runs from Earth to the Moon – decided to get a racer’s permit. He came in at the wrong angle, missed the tester’s dock completely, grazed one of our practice cargo vessels, looped, and somehow shut off the environmental controls – all of them – inside the cockpit. My predecessor somehow couldn’t regain control fast enough. She died horribly, the kind of death none of us want and all of us know is possible.

Here’s the key to this job: Get paid and get out. Once you’re promoted to my position, you’ve got maybe five years ahead of you. You get paid commensurately – with the amounts going up for each six months that you stay.

Me, I’ve been at it three years now, and I can feel the wear. That’s probably why I’m always late. I struggle just to get out of the apartment in the morning, wondering what fresh hell awaits me.

Today’s fresh hell – all six of them – sit in chairs in the waiting room. They each clutch a health monitor in one hand, and the small tablet that Connie gives them in the other. They’re told that the tablet will vibrate when it’s their turn, but really the tablet monitors everything that’s illegal to track through the health monitor – DNA, hormone balance, skin secretions. We find out if they have untreated genetic propensities toward schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, if they have too many genes for dementia and its cousins, if they have the markers for high blood pressure, diabetes, and all of those diseases we can treat but which would give our company a significant financial burden, particularly if someone were to suffer a stroke decades before the statistical likelihood because of the stress of our watch.

Yeah, it’s illegal, but we do it, because L&R always gets blamed for failing to weed out the defective ones. We also get blamed if someone goes off the deep end and flies a ship into a space station or just avoids the navigation plan altogether and heads out into the Great Beyond without enough fuel or oxygen or sense. Usually we can catch those idiots before they ruin a ship, kill their passengers or their crew or (worse, in the eyes of many corporations) dump or destroy the cargo.

All of this rests on guys like me. We’re supposed to find these nutballs before they go off the deep end, even if the deep end is five decades from now.

That’s why the illegal monitors. I’ll flunk someone’s ass for a violation they don’t commit if there’re any warning signs at all.

Let them sue. It’ll take forever to go through the courts, and by then, my six years of post-job liability will have waned, and someone else can take the blame for what I did. If they can figure it out. Connie and I cover our tracks pretty well, mostly because she doesn’t get paid as much, will work longer, and has ten times the likelihood of being successfully sued that I do.

Before I arrived, she’s weeded out four, probably sent them back for more training, trying to discourage them. Or maybe they weren’t qualified at all. Not for me to know or to care about, quite honestly. All I know is that by the time I arrive, ten bodies should have been in my waiting room, and I only have six.

Hallelujah. Maybe I can quit early.

And maybe pigs will fly out of my ass on an historic Saturn V rocket, singing the national anthem of the no-longer-existent Soviet Union. Yeah, I’m a space history buff. Yeah, that’s what got me into this job.

That, and an unwillingness to sleep in any bed but my own. I didn’t even want to do cargo runs, no matter how much the bosses begged me. You don’t get to be a Level One Military Pilot – something that happens to only a few of us – without job offers pelting you when you leave the service.

I did my time in zero g. I did my time in danger zones. I signed up here in the hopes that my life would get quiet from now on.

Yeah, right. Quiet.

I didn’t think it through.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a nervous baby pilot on his test flight.

And by the time I figured that out, I had passed the job’s probationary period and I couldn’t escape. I’m stuck here until I Section out (and the tests for a Section 52-Waiver are too complex to fake) or until I serve my time.

I traded one government master for another, one danger zone for dozens, and one headache for countless nightmares, each and every day.

Okay, not countless. Today’s count is six.

Different sizes, different ages, different levels of ambition. There’s the pretty youngish woman who sits at the edge of her chair, clutching the tablet as if she can squeeze it to death. She’s watching everyone and everything. She’s thin, in shape, and has her hair cropped short. Prepared for anything.

Three youngish guys, two muscular, one probably too big to fit into most cockpits. I’ll look at his tablet closely before I ever get him into our test ship. One older guy, salt-and-pepper hair, corded arms, lines around his mouth – probably a retest. Drugs? Alcohol? Health scare? Or maybe he let his license expire. Or someone ordered a flight test for the renewal, which would be odd.