Infinity's End Read online

  Edited by

  Jonathan Strahan

  Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1-12

  Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vols 1-4)

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers

  Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

  Godlike Machines

  Mission Critical (forthcoming)

  The Infinity Project

  Engineering Infinity

  Edge of Infinity

  Reach for Infinity

  Meeting Infinity

  Bridging Infinity

  Infinity Wars

  Infinity’s End

  Fearsome Journeys

  Fearsome Magics

  Drowned Worlds

  With Lou Anders

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

  With Charles N. Brown

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  With Jeremy G. Byrne

  The Year’s Best Australian Science

  Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  With Jack Dann

  Legends of Australian Fantasy

  With Gardner Dozois

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  With Karen Haber

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  With Marianne S. Jablon

  Wings of Fire

  EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Including stories by

  Justina Robson

  Alastair Reynolds

  Peter Watts

  Stephen Baxter

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kelly Robson

  Naomi Kritzer

  Paul Mcauley

  Seanan Mcguire

  Linda Nagata

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  Fran Wilde

  Lavie Tidhar

  Nick Wolven

  First published 2018 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Cover by Adam Tredowski

  Selection and “Introduction” by Jonathan Strahan.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Strahan.

  “Foxy and Tiggs” by Justina Robson. © 2018 Justina Robson.

  “Intervention” by Kelly Robson. © 2018 Kelly Robson.

  “Nothing Ever Happens on Oberon” by Paul McAuley. © 2018 Paul McAuley.

  “Prophet of the Roads” by Naomi Kritzer. © 2018 Naomi Kritzer.

  “Death’s Door” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2018 by Alastair Reynolds.

  “Swear Not by the Moon” by Seanan McGuire. © 2018 Seanan McGuire.

  “Last Small Step” by Stephen Baxter. © 2018 Stephen Baxter.

  “Once on the Blue Moon” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. © 2018 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  “A Portrait of Salai” by Hannu Rajaniemi. © 2018 Hannu Rajaniemi.

  “Longing for Earth” by Linda Nagata. © 2018 Linda Nagata.

  “The Synchronist” by Fran Wilde. © 2018 Fran Wilde.

  “Talking to Ghosts at the Edge of the World” by Lavie Tidhar. © 2018 Lavie Tidhar.

  “Cloudsong” by Nick Wolven. © 2018 Nick Wolven.

  “Kindred” by Peter Watts. © 2018 Peter Watts.

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-106-0

  Here, at the end of it all, my thanks once again to Jon, David, Ben, Christian, Adam, and everyone who has made this possible.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE INFINITY PROJECT and Infinity’s End only exist because of the faith shown in them by editor-extraordinaire Jonathan Oliver and the whole Solaris team. My sincere thanks to Jon, David Moore, and Ben Smith for their support and for their hard work on the book you now hold, and for everything else. My thanks also to Adam Tredowski, who has delivered another knockout cover for the series. My sincere thanks, too, to all of the writers who have written stories for the Infinity Project over the past nearly 10 years: Daniel Abraham, Charlie Jane Anders, Eleanor Arnason, Madeline Ashby, John Barnes, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory Benford, Damien Broderick, Tobias S. Buckell, Pat Cadigan, Stephen D. Covey, Indrapramit Das, Aliette de Bodard, Paul Doherty, Thoraiya Dyer, Greg Egan, Ty Franck, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Kameron Hurley, Simon Ings, Gwyneth Jones, Ellen Klages, Nancy Kress, Naomi Kritzer, Barbara Lamar, Rich Larson, Yoon Ha Lee, David D. Levine, Ken Liu, Karen Lord, Karin Lowachee, Ken MacLeod, Paul J. McAuley, Ian McDonald, Sandra McDonald, Seanan McGuire, David Moles, Pat Murphy, Ramez Naam, Linda Nagata, Larry Niven, Garth Nix, An Owomoyela, Dominica Phetteplace, Hannu Rajaniemi, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Justina Robson, Kelly Robson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Pamela Sargent, Karl Schroeder, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Allen Steele, Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross, E. J. Swift, Lavie Tidhar, Genevieve Valentine, Carrie Vaughn, Peter Watts, Fran Wilde, Sean Williams, Nick Wolven, John C. Wright, and Caroline M. Yoachim. And, as always, my thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who has stood with me for all of these years, and extra special thanks to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie, who really are the reason why I keep doing this.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

  Foxy and Tiggs, Justina Robson

  Intervention, Kelly Robson

  Nothing Ever Happens on Oberon, Paul McAuley

  Prophet of the Roads, Naomi Kritzer

  Death’s Door, Alastair Reynolds

  Swear Not by the Moon, Seanan McGuire

  Last Small Step, Stephen Baxter

  Once on the Blue Moon, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  A Portrait of Salai, Hannu Rajaniemi

  Longing for Earth, Linda Nagata

  The Synchronist, Fran Wilde

  Talking to Ghosts at the Edge of the World, Lavie Tidhar

  Cloudsong, Nick Wolven

  Kindred, Peter Watts

  About the Authors

  Leave a Review!

  Also in this Series

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CORE MYTH of science fiction, for as long as I have been reading it and probably since the days of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, is that humanity will, at some point, leave Earth and move outward, first into the solar system, and then on to the stars. Probably no assumption was more essential to the science fiction of the 20th century, and none is being as heavily questioned today.

  Science fiction of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s imagined a period of triumphant stellar colonialism not unlike the imperial expansion of European powers across our own world during the 17th and 18th centuries, often with clear parallels to events from maritime history, where humanity would first reach its moon, then soon after colonise the planets of this solar system, and inevitably head to the stars, to Tau Ceti and beyond, encountering other forms of life and taking a place among the stars.

  This dream of manifest destiny among the stars, with endless growth and expansion and characterised by a deep technolog
ical optimism, reflected a 20th-century experience that must have made it seem that technology could solve all of humanity’s problems, science could answer any of our questions, and that we could go anywhere and do anything. It was, though, predominantly a white middle-class American dream of the future, something that can be clearly seen in the pages of books like Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy or Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, two science fiction novels of the 1950s that feature somewhat similar-seeming projections of life in a solar system colonised by the people you might have met at a Manhattan cocktail party of the time.

  As the 20th century continued, though, and as our scientific knowledge of the solar system around us changed and evolved, that dream changed. Dreams of colonisation became dreams of terraforming and change, of centuries spent claiming land and slowly making it more like home. The science fiction of the early 1990s, heavily influenced by information provided by Voyager and other NASA probes, imagined how Mars could go from a red frontier to a green and ultimately blue home, as it did in Kim Stanley Robinson’s influential Red Mars trilogy, or in Greg Bear’s Moving Mars and a handful of similar novels.

  Of course, science fiction never abandoned its classic dream of expansion—not in the 1970s as SF began to move into bestseller territory, not in the 1980s as cyberpunk became the dominant mode of the day, not in the 1990s when it was confronted by more and more evidence of the difficulty of its task, and not today. Vastly popular series of novels and stories from beloved writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber and many others were read around the world and won major awards, but the assumptions they made felt less and less like the projections of hard (or science-based) science fiction and more and more like a kind of fantasy. Enjoyable, rewarding, and definitely entertaining, but not projections of likely futures.

  Those projects continued to change, and the stories being told continued to evolve. During the first decade of the 21st century, as science fiction slowly began to imagine a more inclusive future, it also seemed to lose faith in the dream of the stars. It seemed harder to believe that the vast gulfs between stars would be crossed, or at least be crossed easily. Writers like Greg Egan imagined sending unimaginably tiny probes between stars containing scans or uploads of humanity and then downloading them in distant places. Time and relativity deemed interstellar expansion would never be easy, though it might still be possible. For a brief period, this notion, and notions like it, occupied science fiction, and for a while colonising the solar system, sometimes portrayed as too small and too fragile to hold all of humanity’s dreams and futures, was set aside.

  It may simply reflect this one reader’s experience, but Kim Stanley Robinson’s magisterial 2312 showed the lack of imagination in that notion. His novel showed a fully colonised solar system once again, one big enough and diverse enough and exciting enough to hold and occupy any possible future we might dream of. And it was a vision we responded to, one that allowed for recognising real problems while giving us space to dream. It also, perhaps, filled in so many of the gaps that it also began to make the solar system look small. If Robinson’s next novel, Aurora, would controversially question the dream of interstellar travel, 2312 still gave us something about which we could dream.

  When I started work on Engineering Infinity in the early days of 2009, none of this was on my mind. I had the simple and enviable task of assembling an unthemed anthology of hard science fiction stories. By the time I was asked to follow it up with what would become Edge of Infinity, though, it had begun to occupy my attention. I wanted to build on the vision of a colonised solar system, to show how it might be lived in. Reach for Infinity attempted to show what the experience of trying to leave Earth might be like, telling tales set during that period of expansion. Bridging Infinity looked at how we might leave our solar system entirely and move out to the stars. The other two books in the Infinity Project, Meeting Infinity and Infinity Wars, collected stories of what would happen when humanity turned inward and focussed on its own physicality and on tales of military conflict respectively.

  When it became clear that the book you’re holding, Infinity’s End, might be the final volume in the Infinity Project, at least for now, I wanted to do something a little different. I asked the writers creating new stories for this book to try to open up the solar system, to look again at its vastness, its incredible scale, and at how humanity in different ways might fit successfully and happily into its nooks and crannies. And being writers who take a challenge where their imaginations will, they did just that and more. They told tales of a humanity that turned back to Earth, leaving the solar system empty; tales that looked out into the depths of interstellar space; and tales of a bustling, occupied, but still huge stage for humanity’s future. Some I’d be delighted to live in and some I would not, but they captured a few of the many different ways we might dream of tomorrow, and I genuinely hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

  Because this is the final volume in this project, I’d like to take a moment here to thank everyone who has been a part of it: from Christian Dunn and Jonathan Oliver, who in a Canadian bar one snowy November day started all of this, and to everyone at Abaddon/Rebellion/Solaris who worked on the books; to each and every one of the dozens and dozens of writers who shared their dreams with us; to cover artists Adam Tredowski and Stephan Martiniere, who made the books so strikingly lovely; and finally to each and every reader who picked up an Infinity book and enjoyed it—thank you. It’s been a joy to do this. I hope to return to infinity someday, but till then I hope that you enjoy this book and ask you to keep an eye out for something new next year around this time, when the Solaris team and I will be bringing you Mission Critical. Till then, good reading!

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Australia

  March 2018

  FOXY AND TIGGS

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  FOXY AND TIGGS were at the scene. The sun beat down out of a merciless noon sky, falling on tourist, tour guide, and body alike. It fell on Foxy’s lustrous fur and Tiggs’ crocodilian green hide and made Tiggs’ arm and crest feathers gleam with the beautiful gothic tones of an oil slick as she carefully picked over the site of the find.

  Foxy shepherded the tourists back into the softly floating cocoon of their tour bus. “Back you go, folks, back you go. Crime scene here. Got to do some investigating and we’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.” She adjusted the lie of her hotel uniform—a dinky little hat with a feather in the band that marked her as a detective inspector and a smart jacket tailored to fit her small body perfectly and provide a harness to hold the items of gear she carried. Her brush waved behind her like a huge duster, rufous red and tipped with soft cream.

  Her nose twitched. The body had been out a few hours and it was starting to stink.

  She wasn’t the only one who thought so. Overhead, a gyre of vultures circled, stacking up one by one as they drifted in across the savannah. On the ground, Tiggs put out a claw to check the pockets of the deceased as the tourists adjusted their eyecams and leaned over the deck rails of the bus to get some good footage. It wasn’t every day you saw a velociraptor investigating a murder, and since this wasn’t on the itinerary or billed as an extra, it was premium gold level XP.

  Foxy strolled up and down over the sandy earth but, as she expected, there were no telltales here to give the game away just yet. No footprints, no tyre tracks, no blow-patterns from hover vehicles. She was going to have to wait for Tiggs’ exemplary nose to give her the facts as it hoovered up local DNA and fibres and compared them with the hotel’s registry of guests and inventory of luggage.

  The tour guide, a regular Earth human with a blonde crew cut and a rather fabulous waxed moustache, anxiously tapped the hull of the bus as he watched with grim fascination.

  “Should I stay here? I mean, this is prime lion country. We’re just lucky the lions didn’t already find him. It is a him, yeah? Well, this is the home country of a particularly large pride right
now. Did he—was he killed by a lion?”

  Foxy watched Tiggs snort as she heard this—people often assumed Tiggs was just an animal or a bot. Foxy got past this by being a humanoid foxling, the size of an eight-year-old child, small and rounded, in every way the picture of a designed but intelligent being. Tiggs was a long four metres of saurian which looked exactly like the park ’saurs you could see in Lands of the Lost, albeit with less feathers and a blunter snout to fit all the telemetrics in. Tiggs enjoyed the anonymity and now played to the crowd as she flexed her hands with their huge hook claws and bent down, jaws open for a wide capture as if to consume the corpse.

  The crowd ooh-ed and the bus rocked back as they recoiled. Tiggs smiled, although only Foxy could tell. Tiggs’ face didn’t have the mobility for expressions, but through their full-encryption powerlinks they were almost one being. They chatted privately as Tiggs stood up and made a show of stalking around, searching the local brush while at the same time picking up a bit of intel for the safari systems since she was there.

  “Dumped from quite a height,” Tiggs said. “Broken bones all post-mortem, some impact bruising and burst lungs full of water. Drowned. Shorts dried out but they were wet when he landed. There’s droplets of salt on the ground and the leaves of this thorn tree here. Impact spread shows a bit of a roll. I’m waiting on the lab getting back to me about the water.”