Beyond Infinity (13 page)

“The thing called the Multifold—you have heard of it?”

“Vaguely.”

“It was—
is
, perhaps—greater.”

The chill did not go away. “Is?”

“It may persist.”

“Where?”

“Among the lanes of the galaxy, I have heard.” A significant look. “You do not know this?”

“Uh, no. Should I?”

“You Originals made it. It is your creature.”

She waved a disbelieving hand at Seeker, who peered back at her intently. “How can that be?”

“How can lesser make greater?”

“Well, right—how?”

“It is the wonder of creation.” Seeker grinned mischievously. “Every parent stands perplexed by it. You have not taken the time to notice this?”

“Been busy lately.”

“Great can come forth from lesser. Nature wants that.”

“I thought nature didn’t want, just did.”

Seeker blinked owlishly. “In selecting the laws of nature, one seeks those which allow a flavoring of originality.”

Now she knew Seeker was kidding. “Laws don’t
like
originality. My Meta’s laws didn’t, I know.”

“I meant the emergence of originality. Fresh prospects.”

“Ummm…new stories?” Her Meta had a rigorous story time, when everybody showed up, listened, and anybody spoke who wanted—but they had to tell a story, not just rant. Hominid grooming, somebody’d called it. She still remembered some of those yarns.

“Well put. Most human stories have little survival value today. Once these tales were true. They sit down there in your unconscious, ready to spring out and force surrounding events to make sense.”

She wondered where this was going. But then, she was talking to an…animal. “You don’t think that way? No procyon sagas?”

Seeker hooped and howled so long, she wondered if something was wrong. It reared back, claw-hands jerking, yelping at the air. Then it barked out in a volley of words, “Father, mother, authority, self, childhood, femininity and masculinity, gathering food, circles and squares—divine forms! Somehow useful back on the savannah! Devil/evil, god/goddess/good—how similar such words, even in advanced languages! Sleep, pain, death, communion, number, space and time and big, bad eternity…” And it ended gasping for air, laughing, big shaggy head shaking in disbelief.

“Uh, I guess there’s something…”

“Sorry, sorry.” Seeker recovered, still chuckling as it tried to keep a straight face. “Those are the substratum of human experience, how you construct meaning—in myth, language, religion, art, or artifacts.”

She poked a finger at the cracked and seared ceiling. “Like this Library.”

“A story yearning to be told.”

“Only somebody doesn’t want it told.”

“Ferociously so.”

“Something about…the Multifold?” A guess, but Seeker’s pursed lips told her she had scored.

“It would be best for you to go to the Esthetes now.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere in this labyrinth.” Seeker waved a paw in dismissal.

“Why don’t you go?”

“Humans like to talk.” Seeker was nodding now, ready for one of its naps. Animal naps, she supposed—humans just kept on going, bullheaded to the end. Supras could get by on an hour of just sitting still. One of the best aspects of being Original, she thought, was a thorough, delicious sleep.

She chided, “You don’t?”

“The human channels are narrow. I prefer broader ones. The human habit”—it waved its head in all directions, sweeping up the whole Library—“of stacking its talk into stone and honoring it, I find amusing.”

“It’s a Library, devoted to knowledge…”

“It is an art. And art often has no function; it is an experience, period.” It closed its eyes, sighed. “Go and experience your species Library.”

C
LEY FOUND THE
Obscurantist section, where she had been told she could find an Esthete, by going through the Fabricant wing of the sprawling Library.

She had not ventured there before, because some of the wing was alive with ancient intelligences, embedded in the structure, and said to be of foul demeanor. Suppose you were smart and able, Cley imagined, and yet pinned to one spot forever. Yes, you might get testy. One wall said to her imperiously, “You come as supplicant?” and when she answered ritually from her deep vocabulary, it rebuked her with “You have not the capacity to profit from the wisdom lodged here,” and would say no more.

No matter; at least it did not block the way. That role was very nearly played by the walkway itself. She entered a long hall, whose floor was firm enough at the edge, but which accelerated her forward as she walked to the center. A Supra would not even have noticed this transition of the tiles to a flowing yet firm liquid, but to Cley it was a wonder. Alone, she was free to gape and bend down to touch the grainy fluid that held her up and carried her forward about three times faster than she could walk.

She touched it, and a slow ripple spread to the sides, ebbing away as the floor eased into the solid phase at the edges. She was tempted to ask about it aloud, certain that the wall intelligences would respond, but then thought that it might be the same haughty mind that had brushed her off.

At the end of the hall stood the double arch that announced itself as the Factotum Division—with an Esthete, Tuva, on duty. Even as a pre-Supra, Tuva had many internal improvements and variations beyond Cley, sporting rippling muscles and a gleaming skin thick with sensors. The major, jauntily obvious Esthete advantage was the compressed mental processing, all delivered by embedded processors in the brain and spinal cord. Tuva’s tribe apparently highlighted this. Her robes exposed her upper back, where the thick disks at the top of the spine had cooling fans extruded and ornamented with jewelry.

They made their introductions, Cley asked simple, leading questions, and Tuva silently gathered her resources. Cley opened her inboard social matrix, feeling the surge of energies in her upper lumbar, where Originals carried most of their storage. Her inboards piped out a quick background sketch, to help her avoid making a rude social blunder. Like many Esthetes, Tuva seldom ventured outdoors, since a mild agoraphobia went with their compact minds. Indeed, Esthetes refused to have offices or living quarters on the outside corridors of the Library and would refuse to sit in a chair that backed on an outside wall. The long room had no screens showing comforting views, lighting was remorselessly uniform, and two large desks dominated.

Tuva sat in a chair that rolled easily from one desk to another, adjusting and compiling as she worked through her inboards. Cley could hear data squeaks shooting through the room, startling high whines that her forest-steeped mind read as mousy cries. A glimpse through a doorway showed a small bunk room and a clothes generator. Cley got the impression that Tuva had been in here a very long time—not unusual for Esthetes. She recalled from her shaky knowledge of history, and darting consults with her inboards, that the extreme Esthete form, the Obscurantist persuasion, had become a species of hermits, forsaking all communal connections—to Cley, a horrifying idea—to swim in their eternal data-streams.

“Here,” Tuva announced. Cley felt a squeal feed into her own simple inboard receptors. It would be available after some unconscious processing, eventually conveying to her memory the same level of information that having actually read and digested a subject would leave. Her inboard devices had been developed nearly a billion years before, to preserve sanity in the avalanche of necessary skills and knowledge that came with civilization itself.

“I shall supplement, while you digest,” Tuva said in a flat tone, staring straight at Cley, unblinking. The searchlight intensity of the woman made Cley look away, anywhere but into that rapt gaze. “The history slabs report that in the late Third Fabricant, quagma-driven geometric bridges had been a source of great adventures and even commerce.”

“They
traded
with other dimensions?”

Even Tuva registered mild interest at this. “Apparently. The technology was difficult and dangerous. It figured powerfully in the Quandary, I see.”

Cley nipped back into her inboards. The past was a vast labyrinth of decayed wonders, and she had dozed off often in her history lessons. Time to let her inboard files rummage up a quick background.
Here…

The Quandary was a catch-all name for a shadowy period, when the Fabricants had gone voyaging out into the galaxy—and then come back, shattered. Their culture never recovered from the long, withering conflicts they met out there. A faction of anti-Fabricants had managed to destroy nearly all records of those strange encounters. Some said there were vast battles, well fought but lost, while others held that sheer enormity had finally overwhelmed the Fabricant spirit.

A few scattered records spoke of a construction called the Multifold. A collaboration between humans and other unnamed agencies—aliens, machine intelligences?—it was left as an “edifice hanging between the spiral arms,” as an ancient text put it. All to unknown purposes. Other records spoke of it as “the Greatwork,” a “transfinite ally,” the “ship that sailed the quagma,” and other equally opaque references. She and Tuva traced these down to info-crevices that shed no further light. Cley began to feel that the world of the past was all allusion.

“Ummm,” Cley murmured, covering up her confusion. Her inboards were giving her a running brush-up review, but it was scarcely enough. “If things like quagma were involved, no wonder the Quandary was so spectacular.”

“It is a little-known era. There are many such.”

Cley tried to envision a time when encroachments of other dimensions could be ordinary, everyday. Certainly, she had never heard of them among her Meta, and Supras seemed to have no direct experience with them. Apparently, once humankind had.

Trying to be helpful, Tuva said, “The events were large, and occurred in deep space.”

Cley struggled to conceal her exasperation. “History is fine, but—look!—what’s concerning us is that recently, we’ve been seeing odd blobs, hanging like there was no gravity…”

“Yes. Atypical.”

Tuva went on with a dry summary of how experiments into higher-dimensional physics could cause momentary overlaps that would drift away from the experiment sites. Since a 4-D perspective could move rapidly in 3-D, these manifestations could appear in two distant places very nearly at once.

Cley dutifully listened but finally got overwhelmed. She tossed aside the augmentations Tuva had provided. “That’s all the juice we’re going to get.”

Tuva said strictly, “We should review the salients of this event. There have been reports lately of—”

“I saw some.” Cley got up to go.

“Rin believes you should know this.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Sit.”

The spare, sure woman had a daunting presence, like the weight of shrouded history. Cley sat.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Cley and Seeker set about their labors again, outside in the cool morning. Cley started clicking microexcavation tools to her hand neurals. Good to get back to honest muscle work, after the dry hours with Tuva.

Seeker suddenly froze, then whispered, “Morphs.”

They were mere flashes, lasting seconds. Feeling a bit more sophisticated after Tuva’s rigorous coaching, Cley took little note, once the oddness wore off.

Seeker kept searching the air. Cley liked how the procyon never lost its unending respectful attention to the twists of the world. Not so long ago Cley had aspired to an automatic airy attitude of
The world is odd, yes? Next question
…but had not quite attained it yet. Seeker was a living counterexample this morning, sniffing the air with an expression Cley took for wonderment.

“C’mon, let’s get this stuff cataloged.” She waved away the air-dancing blobs.

They both set about their labors again. Cley felt uneasy, though. The 4-D Morphs had smelled
wrong
. She wondered if this was her ancient hunter-gatherer instincts coming to the fore again: automatic fear of the strange. Such responses had been ironed out of later human subspecies; they had caused innumerable pointless wars. But Seeker’s nose had wrinkled at the stench, too, she recalled. She shook her head and concentrated on her work.

Some of the microscopic slabcasts they studied went as far back as the early millennia, though only in what the Library termed “arrested decay.” They found it exciting to recover genomes and sometimes even whole glassified organisms from Earth’s distant past—especially if they came from before the Age of Appetite and the following Era of Excess.

Theirs was a privileged task. It required both careful attention and a certain skewed way of looking at what they found among the ancient canisters and recording devices. This was where Seeker excelled; nonhuman intelligences were essential in plumbing the currents of the ancient ecospheres. Nature was almost unimaginably complex. Different perspectives were crucial to understanding. The mind riding in that procyon body was as aslant from human minds as anyone had yet created.

Seeker took joy in carefully rooting in the ruins of this, the fifteenth subsurface level of the Library, in the southwestern quadrant. Even here the Furies had wreaked great smoky damage. Seeker enjoyed using its finely articulated yet rugged hands to pry up slab entries and discern their contents.

Cley listened to Seeker’s mutters and smiled. A cool breeze wafted over them, ruffling its fur, provoking from it an uneasy purr.

Cley had gotten used to its oblique intelligence. She could see that forebodings stirred in that mind now; its black lips twisted, and the broad face wrinkled with complex, unreadable expressions. It allowed itself a low growl as it worked.

How to tell damage from erosion? Over the yawning chasm of eons, meanings altered beyond recognition. Seeker had heard of a team that once labored at a site rich in radioactives, gingerly harvesting the lode to great benefit…only to discover that the ancient techciv had thought this richness was a pollutant to be buried, with stern, immense markers to warn off their presumably primitive, ignorant descendants. This had been a source of much comedy.