Beyond Infinity (24 page)

“You can swallow the most fatal poisons indefinitely if they are in a few parts per trillion,” Seeker said in what seemed a neutral tone, considering that it was writing off millions of years of heartfelt labor.

Cley cocked an eyebrow. As she grew to know this beast, it had come to seem more approachable, less strange. Yet a cool, distant intelligence lurked behind its eyes, and she never quite knew how to take what it said. Or what its agenda was. This ready use of numbers, for instance, was a sudden veer from its usual eloquent brevity.

“The bots must know that.”

“True, but consider ozone. A poisonous gas, blue, very explosive—and a thin skin of it over our air determines everything.”

Cley nodded. Through the long afternoon of Earth the ozone layer had been leached away countless times. Humanity’s excesses had depleted the ozone again and again. Oscillations in the sun’s luminosity had wrenched the entire atmospheric balance. Once a great meteor had penetrated humanity’s shields when they had fallen into neglect, and very nearly destroyed civilization. All this lay buried in ancient record.

Seeker yawned. “The bots worried over managing such delicate matters. So they simplified their problem.”

“No messy oceans to worry about anymore?” she chuckled.

“Great error, seen up close, can look like true greatness.”

“The bots seem in control here.”

Seeker clashed its teeth irritably. “They fear what they cannot master.”

“But they did master much—Rin made them revive the biosphere.”

“And bring the chaos of biologic.” Seeker yawned and lay back with a strange, thin grin and then with great relish scratched its ample amber belly. Wreaths of jade mist curled ripely over the heatbush. Small animals had ventured into a circle around the black shrub as its steady warmth crept through the air. Few animals feared either Cley or Seeker; all species had for so long been clients and partners. They even seemed to understand Seeker’s lazy talk. Cley suspected they were hypnotized by the luxuriant, singing tones of Seeker’s voice, reedy yet eloquent. The circle had relaxed as though the bush were a campfire. A true fire, of course, would have risked quick detection by the Supras.

“What’s your alternative, eh?” Cley jabbed it with a thick-skinned fruit. She had found bunches of the long, curved food today, and they had eaten many after peeling away the yellow skins. Cley found the mealy shaft pleasant, augmented with sacs of pungent juice. The phallic shape was cause for a few jokes, too.

Cley toyed with one as she listened to Seeker describe the worldview of its kind. Long after the Ur-humans, some beasts had risen to intelligence and had engraved in their own genes the elements of racial memory. To instill in wise species a concern for their fragile world, it had been the custom for many millions of years to “hard-wire” a respect for evolution and one’s place in it. This had become a social cement as deeply necessary as religion had been to the earliest human forms, and even in the Ur-humans.

“Don’t think this was news. Many organisms lorded over the Earth, not just you,” Seeker said, “beginning with gray slimes, moving on to pasty blind worms, and then to giant, oblivious reptiles—and all three persisted longer than you Ur-humans.” Seeker snorted so loudly it alarmed her. “We do not know if the dinosaurs had religion.”

“And your kind?”

“I worship what exists.”

“Look, our tribe chose not to try to learn all that dead history—we had a job to do.”

“And a good one.”

“Right,” she said with flustered pride. “Tuning the forests so they’d make it in spite of all this junk in the air, the plants slugging it out with each other—this isn’t a biosphere yet; it’s a riot!”

Seeker yawned. “But a fruitful one.” Eyes twinkling, it fished a piece of fruit from some hidden pouch of its fleshy fur and grinned—a ferocious sight. The moods of the beast were easier for her to read now, and she felt its quirky mirth.

And she saw Seeker’s argument. In antiquity, knowledge gained from the bots had helped humanity accent its intelligence and ensure the immortality of all in Sonomulia.

But to make the world work, the bots had to run a skimpy, dry biosphere. Moisture troubled them, so they labored over a hundred million years to bring forth a yawning desert. That arid world’s sole pinnacle was a palsied, stultified mankind. Now the Supras were trying to change all that, shifting beneath the massive weight of history.

As the night chilled, she felt around them the scurryings of small feet. The animals of the night called to one another, rising in chorus, sounding to Cley horrific—like a chorus of squalling fat babies being thrown one by one off a cliff. These were not her woods, no.

A fat, ratlike thing with six legs ventured nearer the bush. Instantly, a black cord whipped out and wrapped around the squealing prey. A surge dragged the big rodent into a maw that suddenly opened near the bush’s roots.

After it closed on its supper, Cley could hear the strangled cries for several moments. Evolution was still at work, pruning failures from the gene pool with unblinking patience.

N
EXT MORNING THE FOG
began to clear. Seeker kept studying the sky. They had made steady progress climbing the flanks of the saw-toothed mountain range, and now the terrain and rich fauna resembled the territory where Cley had grown up.

She searched the distant ridgelines for hints of lookouts. Hers was not the only tribe of Ur-humans, and someone else might have escaped, despite Rin’s certainty. She asked Seeker to tune its nose to human tangs, but no traces stirred the fitful breezes.

Twice they sought cover when flying foxes glided over, their ballooned arm-wings shining against the sky. By this time surely the Supras would have sent their birds to reconnoiter, but in the blank blue bowl above, neither her nor Seeker’s even sharper vision could make out any of the ponderous, wide-winged silhouettes.

They watched a vast covey of the diaphanous silvery foxes bank and swoop down the valley currents. Seeker motioned to her. Distant rumblings came, as though the mountains above them rubbed against a coarse sky. The foxes reacted, drawing in their formation like silver leaves assembling into a ghostly tree.

Blue striations frenzied the air. The few remaining clouds dissolved in a cyclonic churn.

Cley began, “What…?”

Sheets of boiling yellow light shot overhead. A wall of hard sound followed, knocking Cley against Seeker. She found herself facedown among piney needles without any memory of getting there.

All around them the forest lay crushed, as though an enormous thing had trampled it in haste. Deep booms faded slowly in the sky. An eerie silence settled. Cley got up and inspected the wrenched trees, gagging at fumes from a split stinkbush. Nearby, two flying foxes lay side by side, as though mated in death. Their glassy eyes were still open and jerked erratically in their narrow, bony heads.

“Their brains still struggle,” Seeker said. “But in vain.”

“What
was
that?”

“Like the assault before on your people?”

“I suppose…but this time”—she swept her hand to the horizon of mangled forest—“it smashed everything.”

“Impatience, perhaps.” Seeker lifted a snapped wing.

“The foxes took the brunt of it for us.”

“Poor things…” Her voice trailed off as the animals’ bright eyes slowed, dimmed, then closed. “They died of electrodynamic overload, I guess.”

“Our pursuer does not know precisely where we are, so it sends generous slabs of electrical energy to do its work. And brute-force shock waves to squash.”

Seeker gently lifted the two foxes and made a slow, grave gesture, as if offering them to the sky. A long moment passed. When Seeker lowered its claws, Cley could not see the foxes, and they were not on the ground or anywhere nearby.

“What…?”

Seeker said crisply, “I judge we should shelter for a while.”

They climbed swiftly up the rough rise to a large stand of the tallest trees Cley had ever seen. Long, fingerlike branches reached far up into the air, hooking over at the very end, as if blown by a wind on high. Yet there was no breeze at all here. She felt exposed by moving to higher ground, closer to the sky that spat death. From here she could see distant banks of purple clouds that roiled with spokes of virulent light. Filaments of orange arced down along long curves.

“Following the magnetic field of Earth,” Seeker said when she pointed them out. “Probing.”

Cley saw why the Supras had sent no searching birds. Far away, quick darts of blue and orange appeared—probably, she judged, over the Library of Life. And in her mind she felt a dim sense of frenzied struggle.

“The Talent,” she said. Seeker looked quizzically at her. “I can feel…emotion.” She remembered Seeker’s remark: “You do not have emotions; emotions possess you.” What must it be like not to feel those deep, elemental surges? Or did Seeker sense something utterly different? “The Supras are fighting…worried…afraid.”

“The being above keeps them busy while it searches.”

They moved on quickly. Cley wanted to get over the highest peak and then work her way along the broad-shouldered mountains, toward where she had lived. She had the image of it all in her head from the flight with Rin, and she felt a powerful urge to return to the familiar. When she said this, Seeker replied flatly, “They would seek you there in time.”

“So? They’ll look everywhere.”

“True,” Seeker said, and she thought she had won a small point. But it sniffed the wind and pointed with its twitching nose. “Come this way.”

“Why?” Her home grounds lay the opposite way.

“You wished to find Ur-humans.”

“My people?”

“Not yet.”

“Damn it, I want my kind.”

“This way lies your only hope of eventual community.”

How could it be so sure? “Seeker, you know what I want,” she said plaintively.

“I know what you need.”

She kicked at a rock, feeling frustrated, confused, exhausted. “And what’s that?”

“You need to come this way.”

They moved at a steady trot. Cley had always been a good runner, but Seeker got ahead without showing signs of effort. When she caught up, it had stopped beside a big, gnarled tree and was sniffing around the roots. Seeker took its time, moving cautiously, and Cley knew enough by now to let it have its way.

A large bush nearby gave off an aroma of cooked meat, and Cley watched it cautiously. A small mudskipper rat with an enlarged head came foraging by, smart enough to know that Cley and Seeker were usually no threat to it. It caught the meat smell and slowed, tantalized. It lingered…and the bush popped. Spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away. Another victory for the plants; the rat would carry the seed, nurturing it in return for its narcotic sap, until it died. Then a fresh bush would grow from the rat’s body. Cley had seen this little drama many times, and considered catching the rat for meat, and not incidentally for the narcotic, but Seeker said, “Come.”

Ruins loomed before them. “Once a great city,” Seeker remarked as they went quickly through lanes between crumbling majesties. Headless statues stood shrouded in their inky cloisters. Undermined monoliths had been tumbled by burrowing worms and now stretched like accusing giant fingers pointing at the rest of the forlorn city. Weeds sprouted in spaces where once-important people had proclaimed that their presumptions were imperishable.

Cley sucked in a breath and smelled that indefinable dusty air that tells of history. She had learned from one of her Moms the sweet sadness that came from acknowledging the long perspective of human eras. To know even a sliver of the past was to grieve at what had been lost. Here, slow attritions had wasted once-grand prospects. Technologies now lost had erected ramparts slanting valiantly across the air; great leaders had ruled from them; crowds had listened in hushed reverence…and later eras had mined their marbles for lime to use in mortars.

“A city…” She had heard of them, of course. “So many people, close-packed.”

“Your kind apparently enjoys the crowding.”

“I… I can sort of see why it might be exciting. Like a never-ending party.”

“Um.” Seeker grimaced. “Just the sort of horror I imagined, yes.”

“Now all gone.”

“There are the two Supra cities, still ringed by desert. I have not gone there in several centuries.”

“Lost.” She remembered one of her Moms saying ruefully, “I started out with nothing and still have most of it left.” Had she seen these ruins?

The silent testimony of these bulwarks made her anxious to move on. Melancholy does not come easily to the young. The softened sorrows of the blunted spires blended sweetness with their sours—a taste difficult to acquire on short notice.

She caught up to Seeker as they left the looming presence of the ancient works, dodging among bulwarks. Two paces behind the hastening animal, Cley caught quick movement in the corner of her eye, turned—and a lethal gray wedge launched itself at Seeker. It missed. Seeker had ducked at the right instant. The blur of motion landed, turned. It was the Semisent smartdog.

Seeker ran a few steps. Cley stopped, and the dog leaped at her. She took a blow to the forehead. She toppled backward, smacked her skull in the dirt. Rattled, she tried to roll left, more or less away from the attacker, and felt a heavy blow on her back. A weight pressed her down. Something was standing on her. Facedown, she breathed in dust and the heavy, musky stench of the creature on top of her.

She tried to slip out from under—heaved, butted up, squirmed in choking dust—but the weight stayed. She was helpless, terrified. The dust in her mouth and nostrils was turning to clotting, gritty mud; her head spun…
Breathe!
She wriggled around to get a look up and saw the jowly muzzle of the Semisent above her right ear. The enormous dog head drooled on her neck. But it was looking around, not at her.