Beyond Infinity (22 page)

And she would be bound to those new lives in a kind of genetic slavery. She and all her kind would be ever more kindly, politely
owned
by the Supras.

She saw suddenly that her Meta, her Mom, her mysterious father who might yet be alive somewhere—they had all been kept in benign ignorance. The Supras clearly felt that Originals could not be actors on the interstellar stage.

And maybe they were right. But she resented the idea. In her gut she felt that Originals could matter, if they had a chance.

And somewhere, maybe some Ur-humans lived. Maybe her father. They would know the tribal intimacies, the shared culture she longed for.

If they existed, she had to find them.

Yet every nuance of the Supras’ talk suggested a subtle attitude. Not that they would not let her go, no. That they would not see that it was her freedom to choose.
Domesticated, they are quite nice.

Could she…?

They were not all-powerful—she had to keep reminding herself of that. They gave Seeker an edgy respect, clearly unsure of what it represented.

Their very attainments gave them vulnerabilities. Immortals were enormously cautious; accident could still destroy them. Caution could err.

And they could have missed some of her kind in the dense woods.

Nobody from the crystal elegances of Sonomulia or Illusivia could be worth a damn at tracking in the wilderness.

She sucked in a chilly breath. Things slid into place, deep inside.

Very well, then. She would escape.

S
URPRISE AND DIVERSION
are tactics best used swiftly.

In Cley’s case the surprise had to come at the perimeter the Supras had erected around the wrecked Library. Yet she had no idea how to do this.

She confessed her thoughts to Seeker. She was sure that it would not betray her. It seemed unsurprised by her news, or at least to Cley the beast showed no visible reaction, though its fur did stir with amber patterns. She had hoped for some laconic but practical advice. It simply nodded and disappeared into the night.

“Damn,” she muttered in their quarters. Now that she had decided to act, the hopelessness of her situation seemed comic. She was, after all, the least intelligent human here, surrounded by technology as strange to her as magic.

She had fled the party, fled Fanak. Still, from across the dry valley came the enticing sound of music and talk. Even this far away, waves of Talent-talk frothed in her mind, making it difficult to think clearly. Her head ached. Shielding herself from the din was wearying. Dimly she hoped this torrent would also provide cover for her plans.

A loud, groaning explosion rolled through the dark. Seeker was suddenly beside her. “Walk,” it said.

Shouts, flashes of purple radiance, a chain of hollow pops. Luminescent panels flickered out in the distance. Screens of the defense perimeter rippled with amped energies. A babble of confusion. The party was over.

They simply slipped away. Seeker had executed some trick to deflate the screens near the Library. This also, unnoticed and incidentally, deactivated the plain-filled perimeter around the camp. “How’d you do that?” Cley whispered.

“I have been studying their methods for some time,” Seeker said, “using their own Library.”

“Oh. Wait…” Cley took the time to find a small, lethal projector device she had seen one of the Supras put away after demonstrating it. An ancient weapon, scarcely larger than her little finger. The Supras had considered and discarded it in the days after the Furies.

They moved fast. The night seemed to reach out and fold around them. Her heart sang,
Go!

Behind them the complex, transparent geometries of the screens abruptly collapsed. A strange, metallic howl of dying forces echoed over the plain. Seeker’s trick had worked.

For all their mastery of science, the Supras reacted in near-panic to the noisy folding of the screens. They truncated all standing bot orders and directed every effort toward erecting the defenses again.

Cley watched warily as they trotted across the valley floor, to the side nearest the forest. Cley still marveled that they had gotten away at all. “How did you know to…?”

“The moment was approaching,” was all it would say.

“But the bots…”

“They will not expect this now. They never sense the moment in time.”

Silently they moved out of the Supra camp, keeping to the shadows. Everywhere bots hurried to restore the bulwarks of the Library but took no notice of them.

They reached the forest beneath a moonless sky strung with a necklace of dense stars. Cley tweaked her eyesight to enhance the infrared and bring color forth from the pale glow of a thousand suns. Ahead, a slumbering dark. Behind, noisy luminosities.

They ran steadily for the first hour and then slowed as the terrain steepened. Whatever Seeker had used to gain them freedom would not last for long. As she ran, her sobering sense of desolation gave way to resolve. She had been restless under the lofty and distracted restrictions of the Supras. Not for long could she conceal from them her feelings. She suspected that Seeker had sensed her restlessness and had prepared to get the two of them out.

After all, Kata had the Talent, had awakened it in Cley. So in time Kata could read Cley’s simple mind and intentions, and tighten her hold. She had felt the power of them all, back there at the party. They could use her for what they willed. And she would not know the purpose of their subtle moves until it was far too late…

After a while all this complication fell away from Cley, and she gave herself over to the healing exuberance of the forest.
Home.
She knew from Supra talk that her kind were not the true, original humans who had come out of the natural forces of far antiquity. Not the actual first denizens of the forest. But that mattered little. Though her body could be easily modified, as the inclusion of the thought-Talent showed, the Supras had kept her kind true to their origins. The simple enfolding of forest could still reach deeply into her. She was
of
the leafy, fragrant canopy.

Seeker did not slow its rhythmic pace. Its four legs seemed to slide across the ground while its hands swept obstacles aside for both of them. “They must be looking for us now,” Cley said after a long time of silence.

“Yes. My technological trick will soon wear away.”

“What was it?”

Seeker looked at her, opened its slanted mouth, but said nothing.

“Is it something I shouldn’t know?”

“A thing you cannot know.”

“Oh. And you?”

“Me, neither.” Seeker grinned madly, quite happy in their shared ignorance. Cley could never be sure whether the big procyon valued knowledge itself; it was certainly energetically curious. But it also looked askance at much of what it learned, its dour eyes becoming heavy-lidded with skepticism. Combined with the grin, the effect was unnerving.

She was used to Supras making her feel stupid. Seeker, though—whose enhanced kind had come well over a hundred million years after Ur-humans—made nothing of its abilities. But its folksy “Me, neither” somehow made its abilities seem more daunting.

“They can find us, though,” she said. “Supras have so damned many tricks.”

“We must seek concealment.” Seeker pointed up. “Something more works in the sky.”

She looked up and saw only a low, pearly fog. She puffed heavily with the effort of keeping up with Seeker as they plowed through dense thickets. “Why can’t they see us right away?”

“We swim in the bath of life.”

With each step the statement became more true. They moved deep into the embrace of a land bustling with transformation. Fungi and lichens coated every exposed rock. This thick, festering paint worked with visible energy, bubbling and fuming as it ate stone and belched digestive gases into a hovering mist. Where they had done their work, webbed emerald grasses already thrived. The world was being worked over by a technology that must be Supra-inspired.

Cley stepped gingerly through a barren area speckled with bile green splotches, afraid one might attack her feet with its acidic eagerness. Not all the vapors that hung over the fevered landscape were mere bioproducts intended to salt the atmosphere with trace elements. Buzzing mites abruptly rose from a stand of moldyweed and swarmed around them. For a vexed moment Seeker batted them off, and Cley, for once in her own field, said calmly, “Stand still. They’re thirsty.”

The cloud was opalescent in her amped vision, its members each like a tiny flying chip of ice that refracted pale blue starlight. Yet they seemed clever, buzzing with encased fervor and quick skill. They banked in elaborate turns around them. She closed her eyes and inhaled, and sensed that to this cloud they must seem like a mountain of chemical cropland.

Seeker whispered, “What do they—”

“Don’t speak! They’ll smell your stomach lining and plunge down your throat.”

Seeker shut up, and Cley closed her nostrils as well. Tiny wet mouths lapped in specks over her face. She pressed all her orifices tight. The clasping cartilage in her nose had been useful in staving off water losses in the desert of an ancient Earth, in a time only dimly remembered even by the Keeper of Records. Now it kept out the drumming, moist mites as she held her breath for long moments, wondering what the succulent scent of her digestive acids was like. Or maybe she didn’t want to know. She squeezed her eyes shut, gritting her teeth. Once before she had walked into such a swarm, and it surely could not have lasted
this
long… If she could only have the luxury of screaming, just once…

The pearly fog hesitated, buzzed angrily, and then purred away in search of more tasty banquets.

“They seek to find and alter?” Seeker said. It had curled up in a ball, its fur pointed outward, each thick hair with a gleaming point—a bed of tiny knives. “Not merely eat.”

Cley rubbed her exposed skin with leaves from a big fern. The motes had left a glazed finish on her, and her skin cried out in its liberation. “Brrrr!”

Seeker shook itself with visible relish, as though casting off water after a bath. Its ruddy fur knotted and unknotted itself in rippling patterns, an effect Cley had never seen before. But Seeker was back in familiar form, saying distantly, “Is it not true that long ago there were many forms which lived by chemical craft? They worked on molecules, transforming crude minerals into elegant usefuls.”

Cley shivered. “They make my skin crawl.”

“These are obviously designed to aid the lichen in their gnawing. Preparing the ground for life?”

“The Supras have a lot of tricks. I never saw the bugs that bad before.”

“Your kind inhabited the deep woods.”

“Nasty. I hope—”

“No more talk. Quickly, now.”

They ran hard. Seeker stopped often and crouched, listening to the ground. Cley took the pauses to adjust her blood chemistry. The rhythms of walking helped key in hormonal cues to lessen metabolic drains and increase endurance. She chose a voluntary signal to send into herself, concentrated, and made it “stick”—the sensation of a neurochemical lock firmly closing.
This girl’s ready. Bring on your worst.

She kept glancing at the sky, where the galactic center was rising. Awesome, yes. Yet its gossamer radiance was unwelcome; she felt exposed. Nothing between them and the cold eyes of stars, and things that dwelled between.

Loping along a steep hillside, Seeker said, “They come now.”

“The Supras?” she asked.

“More than them.”

“You can tell that just from listening to—”

Seeker crouched, its snout narrowing, ears flaring. It was absolutely still and then was instantly moving, even faster this time. She ran to catch up. “What—”

“Ahead,”
it whispered.

Her breath rasped as they struggled up a narrow draw. A deep bass note seemed to come from everywhere until she realized that she felt it through her feet. A peak above them cracked open with a groan, and abruptly a geyser shot straight up. Tons of water spewed high in the air and showered down. Fat raindrops pelted them.

She staggered. “A weapon?”

Seeker called, “A fresh river. Our cover.”

“I’m getting soaked.”

“The rock strain has grown for days, and so I sought the outbreak. It will afford momentary shelter. Our pursuers cannot see well through moisture.”

Heavy droplets hammered at Cley. Seeker made an urgent sign. Through the spray of water overhead she saw rainbow shards of radiance cascade across the sky.

“Searching,” Seeker said.

“Who is?”

“What, not who. That which destroyed the Library.”

They watched as a filigree of incandescence stretched and waxed. Through the geyser’s mist the shifting webbed patterns glowed like a design cast over all humanity. Cley had seen this beautiful tapestry before, seen it descend and bring stinging death to all she loved. Its elegant coldness struck into her heart with leaden solidity. She had managed to put aside the horror, but here it was again. Those luminescent tendrils had tracked and burned and nearly killed her, and she longed to find a way to strike back.

War.
The ancient word sang in her thumping pulse, in flared nostrils, in dry, taut lips. A part of her loved the sound.

She stood with her clothes sticking to her in the hard rain, hoping that this momentary fountain had saved them.
War.
How long could the mists shield them?

But now among the flexing lightning darted amber dots—craft of the Supras, spreading out from the Library.
War.
She had long expected to see them pursuing her, but they were not searching the ground. Instead they moved in formations around the gaudy, luminescent ripples.

She turned and saw that Seeker looked bedraggled, its coat dark with the wet. “What—”

“Down,” it said firmly.

They scrambled into a shallow cave. The river-forming geyser spread a canopy of fog, but Cley adjusted her sight to bring up the faint images she could make out through the wisps. Shapes of warped geometry skated among one another, aerodynamically impossible, as swift as a thought. She and Seeker watched the intricate dodge and swerve of Supra ships as they sought to enclose and smother the downward-lancing glows.