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Authors: Gregory Benford

Beyond Infinity (30 page)

BOOK: Beyond Infinity
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“Do you wish to ride back to Earth?”

Cley bit her lip. “I don’t want to go back to the Supras with an apology in my mouth.”

“I agree.” Seeker grinned. “My friend, I sense your foreboding. It is needless. Our deaths need no previews.”

“Thanks for the dollop of optimism.”

“Um. I had thought to catch the vessel now approaching.”

She saw first through the dome a smaller version of their Jonah, arcing up from one of the portal holes in the lunar air layer. Seeker had said that the Jonah was one of the indentured of its species, caged in an endless cycle between Earth and moon. The smaller Jonah dipped into the lunar air, enjoying some tiny freedom. She felt a trace of pity for such living vessels, but then she saw something that banished minor troubles. A great mass came into view, closing with them from a higher orbit.

“What’s…?”

“We approach a momentary mating.”

“Mating? They actually…in flight?”

“They are always in flight.”

“But…that thing, it’s so huge.”

Seeker had found some small wriggling creature. It paused to bite it in half, chewed with an assessing look, and swallowed. Cley remembered the Semisent. Seeker smacked black lips and said, “It is a Leviathan. The small Jonahs are its half-grown spawn. As it swoops closest to the sun, desires well in it, as they have for ages past. We shall simply take advantage of the joy of merging.”

“So we’re part of a sex act?”

“An honor, yes.”

As the great bulk glided effortlessly toward them, she surveyed its mottled blue-green skin, the tangled jungles it held to the sun’s eternal nourishing blare.

Cley could not help but smile. “I think I prefer my lust in smaller doses.”

5
EDITING THE SUN

G
RAND BEINGS COMMUNICATE
through emissaries. Slow, ponderous oscillations began to course through the Jonah. Cley saw a watery bubble pop into space from the Jonah’s leathery skin nearby. It wobbled, seeking definition, and made itself into an ellipsoid.

“Hurry,” Seeker said. “Departure.”

Seeker adroitly tugged her along through green labyrinths. When they came to the flared mouth of what seemed to be a giant hollow root, it shoved her ahead. She tumbled head over heels and smacked into a spongy, resilient pad. Velvet-fine hairs oozing white sap stuck to her. A sharp, meaty flavor clung in her nose. She felt light-headed and realized that the air was thick with a vapor that formed and dissolved and met again in billowing, translucent sheets. Seeker slapped away a rubbery blob as big as a man but seemed unconcerned. A shrill hissing began.

They were drifting down the bore of a narrowing tube. The walls glowed pearly and warm, and she felt the cloying sap cloaking her feet and back.

Seeker snagged a shimmering plate—a plant?—and launched it like an ancient discus toward her. The disk unfurled into a strand, and Seeker jerked on it at the right instant so that it spun around her. The sticky stuff wrapped about her twice, whiplash fast, then twisted away. Seeker caught it on the come-around, pivoted, and slapped the end against a prickly strand. “This may be bumpy.”

Cley was tightly bound. They gathered speed in a swirl of refracting light. Cley held her breath, frightened by the rising hiss around them.

“What—” she began, but a soft, cool ball of sweet sap caught against her mouth when she breathed in. She blew it away and felt Seeker next to her as the wall glow ebbed. The ribbed tube ahead flexed, bulged with a hollow groan—and they shot through into the hard glare of space itself.

The Jonah had blown a rubbery bubble. A sap envelope enclosed them, quickly plumping into a perfect sphere.

“Our Jonah is making love to the Leviathan,” Seeker said, holding her firmly.

“We’re seeds?”

“So we have misled it, yes.”

“What happens when something tries to sprout us?”

“We politely disregard the invitation.”

Such graciousness seemed doubtful. They were closing with a broad speckled underbelly, the Jonah already dwindling behind. The speckles were clusters of ruby-dark froth. The Leviathan was at least ten times the size of the Jonah, giving the sex act an air of elephantine comedy. As they approached, she felt fresh fear; this creature was the size of a small mountain range.

This time they donated momentum to their new host through a web of bubbles that seemed to pop and re-form as they plunged through the mass, each impact buffeting, slowing them. Cley bounced off the elastic walls of their own seed-sphere. Seeker seemed to absorb them and barely move.

When they came to rest amid a bank of green growths, a large needle expertly jabbed at their bubble. Ruby light from the walls gave a hellish, threatening cast to the approaching spiky point. The needle entered; Cley braced herself—but the bubble did not pop. The needle snout seemed to sniff around. The point moved powerfully and was quite capable, Cley saw, of skewering them both. She backed away from it—and Seeker raised a leg and urinated directly onto it. “No, thank you,” Seeker said.

The needle jerked back and fled. Then their bubble popped, releasing them.

Again Seeker led her through a dizzy maze of verdant growths, following clues she could not see. “Where’re we going?”

“To find the captain.”

“Somebody guides this?”

“Doesn’t your body guide you?”

“Well, I sure thought I was in charge.”

“Then please adjust your digestion so that you never fart again.”

“Is that a complaint? I’ll work on it. Where’s this Leviathan going?”

“To the outer worlds.”

“You think we’re safe here for now?”

“We are safe nowhere. But here we hide in numbers.”

Cley dodged a wriggling, slick-skinned teardrop that had sprouted teeth. “You figure the Malign can’t be sure where I am? It tracked me pretty well so far.”

“Here there are many more complex forms than you. They may smother your traces.”

“What about this Talent of mine? Can’t this mind pick up my…well, my Talent-smell?”

Seeker’s mouth twisted judicially. “That is possible.”

“Damn! I wish Kata hadn’t provoked mine to activity.”

“She had to.”

Cley had been following Seeker closely, scrambling to keep up as they bounced from rubbery walls and glided down twisted passageways, deeper into the Leviathan. Seeker’s remark made her stop for a moment, gasping in the sweet, cloying air. “Had to?”

“You will need it. And the Talent takes time to grow.”

Cley wanted to bellow out her frustration at the speed and confusion of events, but she knew by now that Seeker would only give her its sardonic, black-lipped grin. Seeker slowed and veered into crowded layers of great, broad leaves. These seemed to attach to branches, but the scale was so large, Cley could not see where the gradually thickening dark brown wood ended. Among the leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures.

She found that without her noticing any transition, somehow this zone had gained a slight gravity. She fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature. It squashed like a pillow. Then, with a shudder, it died in her hands, provoking a pang of guilt. The cat had wings and sleek orange fur. Her heart ached at the beauty of it.

Seeker came ambling back along a thin branch, saw the bird-cat, and gruffed approval. “You are learning.” With a few movements of its razor claws it had skinned the cat and plucked off gobbets of meat. Cley bit her lip, concentrated on the dripping leaves, and moved on.

The goal of finding the captain faded as she grew hungry. Seeker snatched at tubular insects and crunched them with relish, but Cley wasn’t up to that…yet. It slowly dawned on Cley that this immense inner territory was not some comfortable green lounge for passengers. It was a world, intact and with its own purposes.

Passengers were in no way special. They had to compete for advantages and food. This point came clear when they chanced upon a large ribbed beast lying partly dismembered on a branch. Seeker stopped, pensively studying the savaged hulk. Cley saw that the fur markings, snout, and wide teeth resembled Seeker’s.

“Your, uh, kind?”

“We had common origins.”

Cley could not read anything resembling sadness in Seeker’s face. “How many of you are there?”

“Not enough. Though the numbers mean nothing.”

“You knew this one?”

Seeker gazed at the mess pensively. “Ummmm…yes. I mingled genetic information with it.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I…”

Seeker kicked at the carcass, which was now attracting a cloud of scavenger mites. “It was an enemy.”

“After you, ah, ‘mingled’? I mean…”

“Before and after.”

“But then why did you—I mean, usually we don’t…”

Seeker gave Cley a glance that combined a fierce scowl with a tongue-lolling grin. “Whereas we never think of one thing at a time.”

“Even during sex?” Cley laughed. “Do you have children?”

“Two litters, which I bore with joy.”

“Seeker! You’re female? I never imagined!”

“Not female as you are.”

Cley’s mind whirled around this new, fulcrum fact. Seeker had been looking after her,
like a mother.
At once came rushing in the memories of her own Moms, the warm force of her mothers and Meta. Somehow, she saw, Seeker had known this, how to make contact with Cley at a level below conscious understanding. The trust between them, given and received, had the same deep assurance as that she had shared, and then had wrenched away, with her Moms. Otherwise, Cley might never have gone along on this strange odyssey, no destination known. What else was going on beyond the powers of her observation?

She groped for words. “Well, uh, you’re certainly not male if you bear litters.”

“The choice is not always binary. Simple sex like yours was a passing adaptation.”

Cley chuckled. “Seeker, sounds like you’re missing a lot of fun.”

“You have no idea.” Seeker grinned. “Literally.”

“It’ll take a while to think of you as a she.”

“As it was for me with you. Humans are noted as sexual connoisseurs, and Originals especially so.”

Cley blinked. “My…”

“With enlarged organs as a result of evolutionary selection.”

“Ummmm. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Out of nowhere she made another connection. “That Semisent—you were acting like a mother. Protecting me.”

“I suppose there is some truth in that.”

A faint scurrying distracted Cley. She pushed aside a huge fern bough and saw a human shape moving away from them. “Hey!” she called. The prospect of company lifted her heart; the last few days had made her miss terribly the comforts of simple humanity.

The silhouette looked back and quickly turned away.

“Hey, stop! I’m friendly.”

But the profile blended like liquid into the shifting greens and browns and was gone. Cley ran after it. After blundering along limbs and down trunks she stopped, listening, and heard nothing more than a sigh of breezes and the cooing calls of unknown birds.

Seeker had followed her. “You wished to mate?”

“Huh? No, no, we’re not always thinking about that. Is that what you think? I just wanted to talk to him.”

Seeker said, “You will find no one. And you were sure it was male.”

She dipped her head in salute. “I apologize for thinking you weren’t female.”

“You humans do not enjoy the advantage of extra appendages beyond two, so you make binary choices.”

“But who was that?” She swung on a limb, spun completely around it in the light gravity of this place, and laughed with the joy of it. “Say, that wasn’t an illusion, was it? Like those who killed my tribe and that Rin said were just images?”

“No, that was the captain.”

Cley felt a surge of pride. Humans ran this huge thing.

“Hey, you said my kind was all gone except for me.”

“They are.”

“So this captain is some other kind? Supra?”

“No. I do not think you truly wish to explore such matters. They are immaterial—”

“Look, I’m alone. If I can find any kind of human, I will.”

Seeker tilted its massive head back, raising and lowering its brow ridges in a way that Cley found vaguely unsettling. “We have other pursuits.”

“If you won’t help me, I’ll find the captain myself.”

“Good.” Seeker smiled.

Cley didn’t understand this reply, but she was used to that with Seeker. She grimaced, thinking how hard it would be to find anything in this vast place.

Seeker said nothing more and seemed to be distracted, almost sleepy. Maybe this was routine for it—no, for
her
. They worked their way upward against the slight centripetal gravity and finally stood on a broad slope made only of great leaves. Sunlight streamed fierce and golden, framing the shrinking moon. Cley knew that when the Earth had come alive, over five billion years ago, it had begun wrapping itself in a membrane it made of tailored air and water, for the general purpose of tempering the sun’s blast.

Buried deep in Earth’s forest, she had never bothered to think much of other planets, but now she saw that the moon, too, had learned this skill from Earth. She was beginning to think of worlds as self-aware—larger entities with their own agendas. There was something fresh and vibrant about the filmed moon, and she guessed that it had not shared the long withering imposed by the Supras’ bots. Where once
maria
had meant the dark blotches of volcanic flows, now true dappled seas lapped at rugged mountains with snow-dappled peaks. And once again, Earth’s spreading voracious green could mimic its junior companion in exuberant disequilibrium.

“See there?” Seeker pointed, as if reading her thoughts.

She shielded her eyes against the sun’s glare and looked that way. A barely visible circular film floated inward from Earth, glowing with refracted energy.

“It was put into place long ago, to deflect a fraction of the sun’s glare from our world,” Seeker said admiringly. “It solved the problem of warming for you Originals.”

“Our kind made that?” She was feeling prouder of humans than ever.

“It is less thick than your skin. Of course it worked only for a while.” Seeker brushed her hands together, as if dismissing such obvious measures. “Over there”—another pointed claw—“is a later solution.”

BOOK: Beyond Infinity
13.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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