Beyond Infinity (10 page)

Rin’s kind do not feel it, since immortals rarely need reproduction.

“They do not…make love?”

Seldom. Long ago they altered themselves
—a subcurrent added—(
or perhaps the machines did a little pruning, before the long ages of intelligent artifices waned
)—with a lilting tinge of tinkling laughter—
to avoid the ferment of sexuality. They banished sexual signaling, all the unconscious signs and gestures. Still, I have this trait, and some of my feelings transmitted to you. I—

“Never mind,” Cley said shortly. She ordinarily felt no shame at all about sex and much preferred her present nudity. Clothes robbed her of freedom and a silky sensitivity.

What did bother her was her sudden intense feeling of inferiority. It came welling up, tagged with unsettling embarrassment and riding on her knowledge that her kind was so limited. To the Supras she was a living fossil. A curiosity, no more.

She remembered with some satisfaction that Rin was deaf to the darting Talent-currents and so spoke aloud, though already the thick movements of her throat and tongue were beginning to seem brutish and clumsy. “Why are you so concerned for us?”

“You Ur-humans are valuable,” Rin said cautiously.

Cley arched an eyebrow. “Because we can do grunt labor?”

“You know you have crafts that we later adaptations do not,” Kata said evenly, and aloud in deference to Rin.

“Oh, sure.” Cley held up a small finger, which she quickly transformed into five different tools: needle, connector, biokey, pruner, linkweb. “This wasn’t your add-on?”

“Well,” Kata said carefully, “we did modify a few of them. But Ur-humans had the underlying capabilities.”

Cley’s mouth twisted with ironic humor. “Good thing you gave me this Talent-talk. I can feel that there’s something you don’t want to tell me. That would have breezed by your ordinary Original.”

“You are right.” Rin had missed her tone; he swept his arms to take in the wall of roiling smoke that stood like a solid, ominous barrier. “We’re concerned now because we could lose you all.”

“Lose us?”

She caught thoughts from Kata, but the layers were chopped wedges, fogged by meanings she could sense but not decipher. In the instant between “lose” and “us” she felt a long, stretched interval in which gravid blocks of meaning rushed by her. It was as if immense objects swept through a high, vaulted space that she could see only in quilted shadows. She felt then the true depth and speed of Kata—knew that through this luxuriant Talent she was floating like a dust mote in a tiny illuminated corner of an immense cathedral of ideas, far from the great transept and unaware of labyrinths forever shrouded. Passages yawned far away, reduced by perspective to small mouths, yet she knew instantly that they were corridors of thought down which she could never venture in her lifetime. The hollow silence of these chilly spaces, all part of Kata, held unintelligible mystery.

These people looked human despite their size and odd liquid grace. But now she suddenly sensed that they were as strange as any beast she had seen in the swelling forests—and more dangerous. Yet they stood in the long genetic tradition of her kind, and so she owed them some loyalty. Still, the sheer
size
of their minds…

“We could lose you Ur-humans,” Rin said with what Cley now saw was indulgent patience. “Your species records were obliterated in the attack. Gone, lost. And all other Ur-humans were burned to a crisp. You, Cley, are the last remaining Original copy.”

S
HE WORKED LONG
days in the shattered ruins. It felt good. Simple, hard, sweaty, so that a hot meal and a shower sent her tumbling into bed. Seeker worked alongside, silently learning bits of dexterous craft. In salvaging, scraps become triumphs.

Bots cleared the heavy wreckage, but there were innumerable places where human care and common sense could rescue a fragment of the shattered past, and she was glad to help. The severed finger on her left hand had regrown but was still stiff and weak, so she wanted to exercise it. And she needed time to clear her head, to climb out of a gray abyss of grief.

The attack had been remorseless, grinding. Livid electrical bolts had assaulted one wing of the Library with particular attention, she learned. Shafts had lanced again and again in brilliant skeins of color, hanging for long moments like a malevolent rainbow whose feet shot electrical arrows into the soil.

That wing had housed the Library of Humanity. The Ur-humans had been the oldest form lodged there, and now they and all the many varieties of humanity that had immediately followed them were lost—except for Cley.

The impact of this was difficult for her to comprehend. The bots gave her awkward, excessive deference. The Supras all paid her polite respect, and she felt their careful protection as she worked. In turn, without being obvious, she watched the Supras commanding their bot legions, but did not know how to read their mood.

Then one day a Supra woman suddenly broke off her task and began to dance. She moved with effortless energy, whirling and tumbling, her feet flashing across the debris of the Library, hands held up as if to clasp the sky. Other Supras took up the dance behind her, and in moments they were all moving with stunning speed that did not have any note of rush or frenzy.

Cley knew then that she was watching a refinement of Ur-human rituals that went far beyond anything her tribe had used to defuse inner torments. She could glimpse no pattern to their arabesques but sensed subtle elements slipping by in each movement. It was eerie to see several hundred bodies revolve and spring and bounce and glide, all without the merest glance at one another, without song or even faint music. In the total silence she could pick up no signals from the Talent; they were utterly quiet, each orbiting in a closed curve. The Supras danced without pause or sign of tiring for the rest of the day and through the night and on well into the next morning.

Cley watched their relentless, driving dance without hope of comprehending. Without meaning to, the Supras told her that she was utterly alone. Seeker was no company, either; it gave the Supras only an occasional glance, as if tired from so much exposure to humans in all their confusing forms, and soon fell asleep.

She longed for her own people and tried to leave the Supra compound, but as she approached the perimeter, her skin began to burn and itch intolerably. While the tall, perfect figures whirled through the night, she remembered loves and lives now lost down death’s dark funnel. She tried to sleep and could not. The Talent-speak would not let her alone.

And then, without a sign or gesture, they abruptly stopped…looked around at each other…and wordlessly returned to work. Their bots started up again, and there was never any mention of the matter.

Cley sang to herself the next day as she worked. Her Meta had taught her the sing-therapy, a kind of meditation that transfixed the mind in a simple rhythm while allowing the rest of life to go on its ordinary way. It helped. It would take time to recover from the shock of all that had happened.

Then she knew what she needed now. She found Rin and arranged a quick flight to the forests where her Meta had lived. The reports had been dire, but she wanted to see for herself.

The tawny hills were blackened. Tree stumps jutted on the hills like broken teeth. A giant had stepped on the artful adobe buildings at the Meta center. Farther away, the dwellings were cut and seared. The playground where she had leaped and played was a curious dark color.

The flyer set down there, and a bot sampled the soil for her. The stain was blood. At least someone had cleared the bodies away.

She walked for hours through the woods and along the streams. This was as close to saying good-bye as she would ever get, she realized. The trees absorbed her singing, and no voice came forth in answer.

She flew back to the Library in silence and said nothing for two days more.

At work soon after this, Kata took samples of her hair, skin, blood.
For the Library,
Kata explained.

“But there isn’t much of one anymore.”

Come.

Kata led her and Seeker down through a shattered portal. Cley had lived nearly all her life in the irregular beauties of the forests, where her people labored. She was unprepared for the immense geometries below: the curling subterranean galleries that curved out of sight, the alabaster helicities that tricked her eye into believing that gravity had been routed.

Already we rebuild.

Teams of bronzed bots were tending large, blocky machines that exuded glossy walls. The metallic blue stuff oozed forth and bonded seamlessly, yet when Cley touched it a moment later, the slick surface was rock-hard.

“But for what? You’ve lost the genetic material.” She preferred to speak now rather than use the Talent, for fear of giving away her true feelings.

We can save your personal DNA, of course, and the few scraps we have recovered here. Other species dwell in the forests. We will need your help in gathering them.

Currents from Kata gently urged her to use her Talent exclusively, but Cley resisted, wanting to keep a distance between them. “Good. You’ve read my helix; now let me go—”

Not yet. We have processes to initiate. To recreate your kind demands guidance from you as well.

“You did it without me before.”

With difficulty and error.

“Look, maybe I can find some of my people. You may have missed—”

Rin is sure that none remain.

“He can’t be certain. We’re forest folk, good at hiding.”

Rin possesses a surety you cannot know.

Seeker said in its high, melodious voice like sunlight dancing on water, “Rin moves in his own arc.”

Cley blinked.
Seeker had the Talent.
But didn’t use it…
Was there more than one kind of Talent?

Kata studied the creature carefully. “You perceive him as a segment of a larger topology?”

Seeker rose up on its hind legs, ropes of muscle sliding under its fur, and gestured with both its forelegs and hands—signals Cley could not decipher.

“He first resolved the central opposition between the interior and exterior of Sonomulia,” Seeker said in its curious, light voice. “This, his service, this act, led him outward again, in a starship.”

Kata gaped—the first time Cley had ever seen a Supra impressed. “How could you possibly know…?”

Seeker waved aside her question. “Among the stars he found another barrier, the vacant cage of something great beyond humanity. This spatial barrier he now confronts in his own mind, and seeks to turn it into a barrier in time.”

“I… I don’t understand…” Cley said.

“I do.” Speaking aloud, Kata studied Seeker warily. “This beast sees our motions in another plane. It has pieced together our conversations and ferreted out much. But what do you mean, a barrier in time?”

Seeker’s broad mouth turned downward, the opposite of a human smile. Cley suspected that Seeker was conveying something like ironic amusement, for its eyes darted with a kind of liquid, skipping joy. “Two meanings I offer. He delves backward in time, to evolution’s edge, for the Ur-humans. As well, he seeks something outside of time, a new cage.”

Cley felt a flash of alarm in Kata, who stiffly said, “That is nonsense.”

“Of course,” Seeker said. “But not my nonsense.” It made a dry, barking noise that Cley could have sworn was laughter carrying dark filigrees beneath.

Cley felt a surf of consternation roll over the sea-deep swell of Kata’s mind.

“And next?” Kata asked.

“No cage holds forever.”

“So the…thing…will escape. Will you help us?”

“I have a higher cause,” Seeker said quietly.

“I suspected as much.” Kata raised one eyebrow. “Higher than the destiny of intelligent life?”

“Yours is a local intelligence.”

“We spread once among the stars, and we can do it again.”

“And yet you remain bottled inside your skins.”

“As do you,” Kata said with clipped precision.

“You know we differ. You must be able to sense it.” Seeker rapped the cranial bulge that capped its snout, as though knocking on a door.

“I can feel something, yes,” Kata said guardedly.

Cley could pick up nothing from Seeker. She shuffled uneasily, lost in the speed and glancing impressions of their conversation.

“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”

Kata prodded, “And your kind?”

“We have urges which serve other causes.”

Kata nodded, deepening Cley’s sensation of enormous shared insights, tapering Supra perspectives that led to infinities, and yet that seemed as unremarkable to them as the air they breathed. They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word. So no one spoke clearly. Dimly she guessed that the river run of ages had somehow blurred all certainties, cast doubt on the very categories of knowing. History held counterexamples to any facile rule. All tales were finally slippery, suspect, so talk darted among somber chasms of ignorance and upjuts of painful memory as old as continents, softening tongues into ambiguity and guile.

Seeker broke the long, strained silence between them. “We are allies at the moment; that we both know.”

“I am happy to hear so. I have wondered why you accompanied Cley.”

“I wished to save her.”

Kata asked suspiciously, “You just happened along?”

“I was searching to learn of fresh dangers which vex my species.”

Kata folded her arms and shifted her weight—an age-old human gesture that Cley guessed meant the same to all species: a protective reservation of judgment. “Are you descended from the copies we made?”

“From your Library of Life?” Seeker coughed as though to cover impolite amusement, then showed its gleaming teeth in a broad, unreadable grin. “Genetically, yes. But once you released my species, we took up our ancient tasks.”

Kata frowned. “I thought you were originally companions to a species of human now vanished.”