Beyond Infinity (20 page)

“Who?”

“Others of my kind.”

Cley grinned. Verbal play was a daily event in her Meta, and she had missed it. “So you’re pretty selfless yourself.”

“Not really.” Seeker gave her a dour look, eyelids drooping. “I am following my intuitions.”

“And you hate it when the holy types do the same. When the work is done, people—or creatures—like that enrich the world. Maybe more than the do-gooders.”

“And they pay the price of pride.”

“So if you’re going to be a saint, forget about being an angel?”

“If you would stand for something, then you cannot stand for just about anything.”

Cley laughed at this, but Seeker did not.

T
HE FURIES CAME
that night.

Cley and Seeker had attended a scent symphony that ran late, among a moderate crowd of mixed humans. They ate and went to sleep. Cley awoke from a dream to find people running past their bunk room deep in the Library. Shouts, crashes, metal slamming into metal—then silence.

She and Seeker crawled into a narrow passageway and stayed silent. Absolutely nothing happened, and then kept on happening. Silence stretched. And she was tired…

Cley jerked awake. Seeker was gone. Footsteps. Voices hollow in the distance. A jabbing, hard
rap-rap-rap
like somebody firing an electrical discharge into the sky.

She crawled out and saw Fanak hurrying along, carrying some tubular instruments. “Can I help?”

He was startled and pointed one of the tubes at her. “I think they are gone.”

“That’s a weapon, isn’t it?”

“Oddly beautiful, isn’t it?” He hefted it, muscles working against a considerable weight. “We made some from old designs.”

“Death comes out this end?”

“A ray of some kind. Curious, how any tool properly made acquires a beauty.”

The tube with handles filled her with a chill dread, but Fanak’s obvious pleasure in the thing made her hold her tongue. “You used this?”

“I fired it at the things. Furies. Forks, some call them. I believe we kept them from the Library.” He said this in an ordinary tone, but she could read the pride behind it. He beckoned, and they mounted the slide to the surface. She spent the journey worrying about Seeker.

She knew the forks were long, curling lances of virulent fire. Smoky pyres showed that long, smoldering grooves scarred the Library’s skin. “They came down from the sky and probed up and down the valley. We fired at them.” Fanak smiled agreeably. “Some blew apart.”

She stood close to him as wind whipped by, howling. In the dark sky skittering joints of light frayed and forked. “Are they still up there?”

“If this time is like last, there will be discharges high in the atmosphere. Accumulated energies playing out, perhaps. But the crucial directing intelligence—from a higher dimension?—is gone.”

“How much damage?”

“Little.” His attention veered toward the dark forest nearby.

She saw it, too—a shape flitting among the cover, short and darting. Something about the gait…“Seeker!”

Fanak had his weapon leveled. She batted it skyward. “No!”

The dodging shape was eluding something. A frying hiss came down over the valley, gathering like static electricity. The nape of her neck rose, tingling.

A sharp
crack
—and a finger of blue force crackled down. It hit the running shape. A high, agonized cry.

The energies in the air seethed, then subsided. Cley blinked away the afterimage of the thin, hard line of electrical violence. She ran into the shadows. Ahead she saw the shape. It was shaggy and limping. It struggled forward, its pelt wrestling with stark colors.

Shouts came from behind her. “Get medical!” she shouted back.

Seeker’s voice was reedy. “I wished…to see…”

“Lie down!”

It rolled onto its back. Blood caked the left rear leg. She pulled aside the matted fur and found a long black cut, burned to a crisp at the raw edges. “How?”

“I saw the forks leave. They were not attacking…so much as searching.” Seeker paused at each phrase, its breath rattling.

“For what?”

“I followed them. To find out.”

With both hands she held the two sides of the burn together to stop blood from oozing out. “Let the Supras do that!”

“They were busy. I am small. Hard to hit.”

“Huh! Doesn’t look like it.”

“They shot at me. Many times. I was not…who they sought.”

“Who, then?”

“More of you.”

“Originals?”

“They revisited your sites. Killed anything…that moved.”

“Like you.”

“I suppose it is…a compliment…to be taken for…a human.”

“This compliment’s going to bleed you to death unless—”

A big Supra came running up, flashed a strong light. She opened her hands and showed him the damage. He muttered, shouldered her aside, and set to work.

Seeker grinned. “Please to sew me. And give water. I will do the rest.”

“How about a fish?” Cley whispered in its ear.

“I like…the oily ones.”

“You lie still.”

“They want you. They must know…not all Originals…dead.”

“How could they?”

“Remember two-D. To them…our three-D is…a picture…you see…all of…at once…from a higher perspective.”

Seeker panted as the Supra worked. Its eyes were not glassy, and it seemed to focus all its energies on the space between it and Cley.

“So they can see everywhere in three-D, inside buildings, inside—”

“Inside people…even.”

“So why didn’t they find me?”

“The Furies are…agents… I believe. Do not have…the perceptions…of the four-Ds.”

“So they knew I was somewhere around here.” She glanced up into the bowl of sky, where vagrant energies worked still. She shivered.

Seeker closed one eye, but the other pinned her with its intensity. “They can tell… Originals…from others.”

“How do you know?” She put a hand on Seeker’s brow—hot and damp. Its breath came ragged but steady.

“They ignored the highers.”

She chuckled. “Don’t tell Fanak that. He thinks he drove them off.”

“They will be…back.”

The Supra was finishing up. He closed the wound with a smart tissue, which meant that the wound could go now without further treatment. The tissue would fall off when its job was done.

Seeker said mildly, “I would like…that fish…now.”

“I’ll go throw a line into a stream as soon as we get you—”

A team ran into the light, coming from the direction of the Library. It was the three of the Order, carrying a sling. They stepped near Cley, and one said loudly, “We heard there were wounded. But this—it is not of us.”

Cley stood up. “Put the procyon in the sling.”

The tallest of them gave her a
Who are you?
glance and started to walk away. Cley jumped after them, caught the tallest by her shoulder, and wheeled her around. “Now!”

“We were told that there are humans, even highers, wounded out here—”

“Now.”

They resumed walking away. The Supra medical stood and watched, doing nothing. Cley saw that Seeker’s other eye had closed. One of the Order said, “We have strict, principled precepts for—”

“Deal with this, then,” Cley said. She extruded a special reading tool she had added a week before. It ended in a hollow data-miner tube.

The three of them froze. The tallest said, “This is a, a…”

“Right. Weapon,” Cley lied.

“Those are not allowed—”

“Pick. Up. The. Procyon.”

“You cannot force us. We do not respond to such as this.”

The Supra medical still did nothing, but she could see in his face a flicker of amusement. She figured he knew the tool but they did not. She stepped forward smartly and pressed it against the forehead of the tallest. “This will not kill you. But you may find it hard to remember your name.”

“I—”

“For a year or two.”

A long silence. The tallest stared straight into Cley’s eyes, and Cley wondered what she would do if this did not work. She could not handle them all in a scramble.

“Very…very well.”

Cley and the medical got Seeker into the sling. One of the three ran off, probably to tell tales. The other two helped Cley carry Seeker back to the Library in stony silence.

Cley just smiled. She thought of singing but decided against it. Too Original.

S
HE TOOK HER COURAGE,
balled it up tight so it would not stick in her throat, and said, “How old are you?”

Fanak had been working with her on a deciphering problem from the ruined Library, and he did not deflect his attention for a long moment. Then he raised his large, angular head from the view on his workplane and looked at her firmly. “We do live longer than you, yes.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It was not what I answered.”

“Supras don’t want to tell us how much longer they live, I’ve noticed.”

“We do all honor privacy, yes?” He smiled very slightly, as if she had committed a minor social gaffe.

“But the very act of bringing back Originals is a moral decision, isn’t it? Knowing they will see the contrast.”

“Would you rather not have been born?” The small smile stayed in place, but the eyes did not join in the mirth.

“Nobody can wish for that! I’m not a simpleton, just an Original. Lowest of the Ur-humans.”

She knew she had irked him somehow, in his strange Supra way, because he got up and started pacing. His heels sent sharp notes ringing from the arched, looming chamber, and his workplane followed obediently, always casting him in a flattering light. In a way she found it reassuring that even an advanced form retained the species’ liking for the oldest physical rhythms, found them restoring. “My expected lifespan is set by accident, not disease or decay.”

“So it’s…”

“We are far safer than when the first Originals walked. In your time, I have read, the accident rate was so high that you would live only a bit over a thousand years, absent disease.”

“So that’s my number?”

“Alas, no—you are a true Original, and so do not have the internal mechanisms I do, to defend against the myriad disorders.” He spoke this crisply, mouth tightening around an uncomfortable fact.

“You’re saying I’ll live—what? A century?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No, no—much more. We can use the old technologies to correct many afflictions you will meet.”

“Several centuries, then?”

“At least.”

“What’s it feel like? To live that long?”

He stopped pacing, and the sudden lapse of the staccato sound gave a hush to his words. “I cannot recall.”

“You can’t remember being centuries old?”

“No.” Noting her astonishment, he smiled a bit more warmly. “You have perhaps already felt the effect. As a baby, a year was like a lifetime to you because it
was
your lifetime. By age ten, each year added only ten percent to your store of years. At a hundred, one percent.”

“So at age thousand, a year is like a few hours to a baby, in, in…”

“In felt experience.” Abruptly he raised his arms and burst into loud song.

“Heaven gives our years of fading strength

“Indemnifying fleetness,

“And those of youth, a seeming length,

“Proportioned to their sweetness.”

She flinched at the power of his voice, completely unlike his ordinary tone. A Supra, singing? She thought only her Meta did. She felt a surge of emotion at this sudden revelation, even though it deepened the mystery. “That was from…”

“An ancient ballad. I came upon it during the research leading up to the first recreation of Originals. It catches the sense of what it must mean to be…well, you.” Then he turned and resumed pacing, his mood shifted, hands now clasped behind his back.
Judicious, guarded,
his body language said.

“I’ve only got three decades, but the years are flickering by faster, yes. So for you—”

“There is a state beyond a thousand years, when one learns to live in the era itself, without heeding memories.”

He said this precisely and firmly, and she knew she should drop the subject.

So she did. And still did not know how old he was.

Still, the conversation reverberated in her memory. She could not resist comparing his distance with her early years. Those she recalled as an idyll: running through sunlit forests, working to harvest fruit in the tanglewood trees, swimming in chilly streams in the promise of a bright spring. Could nostalgia become addictive? Certainly she felt in herself a longing for that time. The weight of knowing that she could not return to that life came upon her more strongly then, and for days she worked steadily but with a sadness riding in her heart.

She tended to Seeker’s recovery. This was less labor than she had anticipated, because the procyon metabolism was far more advanced than her Original mechanisms.

Seeker needed little help, and got irked if she made a fuss. She was so relieved, she laughed at Seeker’s feigned baring of its claws. Still, they looked awfully sharp. “Here, I’ll just—”

“I do have some dignity,” Seeker said irritably, not letting the claws retract.

“Not right now. I’ll just—”

“You are my burden, but I do not have to carry you every moment.” Seeker did not seem to be kidding, either.

“Look, you need—”

“I need you to remain safe. Out of sight.”

“Say, now, I’m a free—”

“You are important, but I do not yet know why.” And that was all it would say. The claws stayed out.

She consoled herself that at least somebody thought she was important. At best, the Supras treated her with polite distraction.

Then one day she felt among a trove of undated artifacts—data stores, biosheets, talismans once deemed priceless—and withdrew a human hand. The shock of meeting so directly another person, unimaginably ancient, sent shivers through her. The hand was heavy, masculine, yet the skin was hennaed, the nails skillfully manicured. Time had blackened its fingers. Somehow, its flesh was preserved with supple fidelity.

After a hesitation, she slipped it into hers, shaking hands with antiquity. With only the hand and half the forearm, she then imagined the whole man—one who strode through bright days, loved and laughed and drank, and knew a world she never would.