Infinity Gate

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2023 by Mike Carey

  Excerpt from Translation State copyright © 2023 by Ann Leckie

  Excerpt from Paradise-1 copyright © 2023 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited

  Cover design by Nico Taylor—LBBG

  Cover images by iStock

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  First Edition: March 2023

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949332

  ISBNs: 9780316504386 (trade paperback), 9780316504560 (ebook)

  E3-20230215-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of Translation State

  A Preview of Paradise-1

  Also by M. R. Carey

  Praise for the Novels of M. R. Carey

  To Chris and Pam, who take us places and

  bring us back to ourselves

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

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  They say that children born in wartime are likely to have problems throughout their lives; to struggle both with the uncertainties of the world and with their own emotions and to search in vain for happiness.

  This has not been true for me. I was born in one of the biggest conflicts this universe has ever seen, the war between the vast empire called the Pandominion and the machine hegemony (which may have been greater still), and what I remember most of all is the moment when I was suddenly able to reflect on my own existence. I had been a thing but now I was a sentient, a self in the language of the Pandominion. It was a miraculous thing and I cried out loud at the sheer joy of it.

  But you can probably see from this the problem I face when I set out to tell you the story of my life – which is my goal here, however indirectly I may seem to come at it. My case is not typical. I existed for a long time before I was born, and there was nothing inevitable about my becoming self-aware. It depended on the efforts of three individuals, three selves, and not one of them had any conscious intention to deliver me.

  One of the three was a scientist, who came to be famous across a thousand thousand continua of reality but remained uncelebrated in the universe into which she was born. Her name was Hadiz Tambuwal. She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention. She changed the Pandominion forever more or less by tripping over it. But she left gifts for the people who came after her to find, and she came to be an instigator of outcomes much bigger than she had ever aimed at.

  The second of the three, Essien Nkanika, was a rogue – but generally speaking no more exceptional a rogue than Tambuwal was a scientist. He was born in the gutters and he felt this justified every cruel and callous thing he did to claw his way out of them. Determined to serve only himself, he fell very readily into the service of others who were cleverer than him and more ruthless. He did unspeakable things for them, much worse than anything he ever did on his own account, but he had one great thing in him too. It is for this that I remember him.

  And that third self? At the outset she was the least remarkable of all. She was Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, a rabbit of the Pandominion, from the city of Canoplex-Under-Heaven in Ut. She was a bad fit in some ways for the society in which she grew, independent to the point of recklessness in a culture that prized emotional restraint and caution above all. But she was also clever and brave and curious, and sheer chance put her at the nexus of huge, seismic movements that drew in uncountable worlds. She learned, and grew, and made decisions. What she ultimately achieved was of greater significance and wider reach than any diplomat or leader of her time.

  I will come to all these stories in their place, ending – inevitably and without apology – with my own story. My awakening, which was the end of history. The end of empire. The end, you might say, of an uncountable infinity – the biggest kind of infinity there is.

  I meant no harm to anyone. I would even argue that what I did was for the best. Nobody had ever attempted before to perform surgery on entire universes. For such a task, you need a knife of immense, all but incalculable size.

  Me. I am that knife.

  1

  Hadiz Tambuwal saw Armageddon coming from a long way off.

  At first she was fairly philosophical about the whole thing. The sources of the impending cataclysm seemed to lie firmly in the
nature of humanity as a species, so she didn’t see much point in anguishing about them. To wish for the world to be in a better state was to wish for the entire history of life to have played out differently. It was a pretty big ask.

  Hadiz had been accused – by her mother, among others – of being cold-blooded and unfeeling. She resented the allegation at the time but later came to see some truth in it. Certainly she was aloof. Cerebral. Difficult to get close to, and disinclined to meet people halfway when they tried. She lived alone by choice, and did her best to stay out of the massive web of connections and obligations that made up her extended family. She loved her aunts, uncles and cousins, some of them very much, but that stuff got complicated. It was much easier to love them from a distance.

  She avoided friendships too, because of the complications that came with them; because they forced her to try to intuit other people’s motives and desires, which always seemed much more opaque and muddled than her own. She satisfied her sexual needs in brief, transactional encounters: with her near-black skin, thorn-thicket curls, rudder nose and commanding height she was more striking than beautiful, but even so she never had any trouble finding a casual partner for a day or a night. She just preferred her own company, which she didn’t see as a character flaw or a handicap. In her discipline, which was particle physics, you got your fair share of introverts.

  But as the droughts and famines intensified, the air curdled and the resource wars burned, Hadiz found her customary detachment harder and harder to keep up. From a purely personal point of view, she preferred a world that had art and music and literature (and people who could appreciate those things) to one that didn’t. From another perspective, she saw the disappearance of a richly diverse and complex ecosystem as a scandalous waste. More than either of those things, she loved her work and hated to leave it unfinished. The ruin of civilisation had come at a very inconvenient time.

  It has to be said, though, that she had a good vantage point from which to view it. Hadiz lived and worked at Campus Cross, the most richly endowed research facility not just in Nigeria but on the entire African continent and most likely in the world. She was surrounded by geophysicists, biochemists and engineers who were trying to think their way out of the box their species had put itself in. She knew from the news media and from conversations with her extremely well-informed colleagues exactly how bad things were getting on a planetary scale and which longshot solutions were being attempted. She kept her own tally of the interventions that had already failed.

  Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it. They had pooled their resources, or at least some of their resources, creating a blind trust to administer the eye-watering sums of money they were pouring into this Hail Mary play. They had managed to lure in many very fine minds, although some had refused them outright because of the stringent terms of the contract. In exchange for a stratospheric salary the researchers ceded all rights in their work, the fruits of which belonged exclusively to the four founders, or – as they were mostly referred to on campus – to God and the Fates.

  Hadiz had come to Campus Cross for the same reason that most of her peers had: it seemed to her that any work not directly related to the problem of saving the world was something of a waste of time. She had no illusions about her employers. She knew that the billionaires had eggs in other baskets, not the least of which were off-Earth colonies and generation ships. They would stay if they could, but they were ready to run if they had to.

  The fact that Hadiz lived at the campus was a well-kept secret. As far as anyone else knew she had an apartment halfway across Lagos in a district called Ikoyi. But the campus was a long way outside the city’s main urban cluster, and getting in by public transport had become an increasingly unpredictable and stressful experience. Ikoyi’s water supply had recently been contaminated with human growth hormones. Then there were the blackouts, caused by systemic failures at the Shiroro dam which supplied hydroelectric power to the eastern half of the city. Blackouts had always been a daily fact of life in Lagos, but they were becoming longer and more frequent as the Kaduna River shrank to a half-hearted trickle. When enough was finally enough, Hadiz had packed a few clothes and quietly decamped, without telling anyone or asking anyone’s permission.

  In the smallest of her lab building’s storerooms she set up a foldaway bed and a stack of three plastic crates to serve as a wardrobe. There was a toilet right next door and a shower in the gym block a short walk away. The building had its own generator, and steel security shutters which came down an hour after sunset to shut out the world. Hadiz was undisturbed there for the most part, especially after her four assistants, one by one, stopped coming into work. They were not the only ones. In the staff commissary she saw colleagues whose projects were more labour intensive than her own brought to tears as they were forced to scale back or even abandon research programmes into which they had poured years of their lives. She was glad that her own work required no mind or muscle other than her own. She kept her counsel and continued with her research, head down and shoulders hunched as an entire global civilisation tilted wildly, its centre of gravity now way outside its tottering base.

  The world is a solid thing but we experience it in the abstract. Once Hadiz moved into Campus Cross she almost never ventured down into Lagos proper, so apart from the TV news and a few polemical websites her measures of how things were changing were small and local. The fires in Lekki and Victoria Island turned the sky bright orange and filled the air with ash for three weeks. That was followed by a photochemical smog that was appallingly toxic, full of aldehydes and carboxylic acids.

  The campus’s board of governance temporised for a while, issuing masks and air quality monitors, but eventually they yielded to the inevitable. They offered double wages to any support staff who continued to turn up for their shifts, but allowed the rest to remain at home on indefinite leave. It was assumed that the scientists themselves would somehow make shift and would not abandon their work in progress. But as Hadiz worked late into the evening she counted the lights in the windows of adjoining buildings. There were fewer each time. Some nights there were none at all: hers was the only candle lit to curse the dark.

  The tremors came next, and they came as a shock. Sitting on a single tectonic plate, Nigeria had long been thought to be immune to seismic shock. Even when those estimates were revised in the early twenty-first century the prevailing opinion was that only the south-west of the country was at significant risk. The tremors came anyway, toppling the Oba palace and the cathedral. At Campus Cross fissures opened in the ground and cracks proliferated across the walls of the main buildings. Part of the admin block collapsed, but nobody was hurt. The offices there had been deserted for weeks.

  Increased geothermal activity not just in Africa but across the world degraded the air quality to new and more alarming levels. Thick clouds veiled the sun, so mornings were as dark as evenings. Wild dogs roamed across the campus and nobody chased them away. Hadiz found an inland route to the commissary that took her through three neighbouring departments and avoided the need to step outside. She served herself these days, leaving a signed chit each time for the food she’d taken.

  The chits piled up. Dust drifted across them, as it did across everything else.

  2

  Long after all hope was lost, when resignation and despair were the order of the day, Hadiz’s own research bore unexpected fruit. She had been looking for dark energy, whose existence had been theorised but never proved. Dark energy was needed in order to explain the universe’s suspiciously high rate of expansion, but the elementary particle that might mediate it had never been observed. Hadiz’s hypothesis was that it never would be – not on the surface of a planet and in the ordinary run of things – because its distribution across universal space-time was inversely proportion
al to the intensity of local gravity fields. The particle’s natural home was the intergalactic void.

  Certainly Hadiz’s early efforts to isolate it in the laboratory had failed utterly. A conventional accelerator was not up to the job. The micro-gravity environments created by drop towers were similarly useless. She needed to forge an environment that resembled in every respect the conditions found in intergalactic space, and that’s a hard thing to cobble up at the bottom of a planetary gravity well.

  The best solution would have been to perform her experiments on an orbital station at least 400 kilometres above the planetary surface. Even God and the Fates had balked at that outlay and none of Hadiz’s low-rent workarounds had got her anywhere at all. She was stalled.

  “Maybe it’s time to get yourself attached to one of the other projects,” Andris Bagdonas the cyberneticist suggested. She had found him in the commissary when she broke off in the middle of a thirty-six-hour work jag for a meal that might have been breakfast, dinner or a post-midnight snack. They had barely ever talked before, but even Hadiz was feeling a little starved for company right then and she was happy to share her table. “I mean, your timescale is off now anyway, right?” Bagdonas pursued. “You’ve got to be years away from implementation.”

  This was a touchy subject for Hadiz. She knew how her project was viewed by some of the other physicists on the campus – as pure research, very nearly blue-sky, and more or less irrelevant to the larger agenda of pulling irons out of fires. The implication, barely veiled, was that she’d blagged her way onto the campus and was wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere.

  “You know dark energy makes up 68 per cent of all the energy in the universe, right?” she countered belligerently.

  Bagdonas took off his frameless spectacles and polished them with one corner of his napkin. Had his hair been grey when they first set up in Lagos three years before, or was that new? Hadiz couldn’t remember. “I did know that,” he acknowledged. “I think you may have told me on a previous occasion.”

  “And most of the shit we’re in now comes down to misuse of existing energy sources in one way or another. If we can harness dark energy, accumulate it, generate it…” She shrugged, as though the apodosis of that sentence was too obvious to need stating.