Beyond Infinity (32 page)

No, she decided, the Supras had troubled her because they still resonated with the bleak, fixed compass of Sonomulia. Rin and the other Supras did not know
life,
that spark that hangs between two eternities. Not the way she saw it, anyway. In a deep sense the Supras were immortal, she decided, but not alive as she understood the term.

Then with a shiver she banished these thoughts.
Enough.

They trekked through the light gravity of this inner vault, eating berries that swung from palmy trees. These were not mere passive trees, though; the berries were a lure. The sharp fronds could slice off an arm. Seeker showed her how to confuse the tree’s ropy reflexes long enough to snatch a handful of berries.

There were even lakes. They hiked for two days along a broad beach, Seeker catching the yellow fish that thronged the shore. Through clouds Cley could see the lake curling over their heads, far away, describing the vast curve of a rotating cylinder.

“Why do we keep moving so much?” Cley asked when Seeker marched on resolutely, despite the gathering gloom. Glowing patterns of flickering, deep-reflected sunshine ebbed and flowed in the huge cylindrical vault like tides of light.

“We hide among life. Life moves.”

“You figure the Supras’re still looking for me?”

“They have gone.”

“Your own mysterious wisdom tells you that?”

Seeker showed her sparkling fangs, recently cleaned by steaks of yellow fish. “The Supras continue outward.”

“Great. Let’s go back to Leviathan’s skin, then. I liked the view.”

Actually, she wanted to search for the captain. She had glimpsed creatures that looked vaguely human near the Leviathan’s transparent blisters. Each time they had seemed to evaporate into the humid jungle before she could pursue.

Seeker did not comment on her desire to find humans and would not help track them, though she suspected the procyon could sense the smallest animals that swung or padded through the layers of green. Why? She had learned to not ask too many questions; Seeker liked silence.

For three contemplative days they worked their way along the lake, stopping only to swim and, when the wind rose, to bodysurf. This zone of the Leviathan was spinning, driving curious spiral waves in the lake, which worked up and down the shore.

Two more days of hiking, by Cley’s inner clock, brought them to the skin. Again Cley could not sense when they left the region of spin-gravity. Fogs had hampered their way, blowing into the Leviathan’s recesses. They blew through wide shafts that admitted to the interior great blades of reflected sunlight.

Seeker taught her a favorite game. They perched in one of the translucent bubbles in the Leviathan’s outer reaches, waiting. In the utter vacuum outside, a mere finger’s width away, shelled silvery things like abalone attached themselves to the Leviathan’s skin. From there, a steady perch, they could snag wandering prey.

But sometimes they mistakenly triggered a Leviathan reflex. In a convulsive gulp, the slick skin double-folded inward. Abruptly the predator became prey, crushed in a gassy world it had never known. Disoriented, it would flail about.

When one slipped inside, Seeker would snatch it, crack it open between her hardsoled feet, and gulp the shell’s inhabitant with lip-smacking relish.

“Yes!” Seeker cried. Cley applauded and turned down any offered tidbits.

Long black creatures crawled over the Leviathan, grazing on the photosynthetic mats that grew everywhere. Cley could see these dark algae mottling the carbuncled skin, occasionally puffing out spores. The grazers slurped up the brown sun-worshipping goo of mat life and moved on, the cattle of the skies.

Seeker tried to entice one close to the translucent layer, whirling and grimacing to attract its attention. The vacuum cow turned its slitted dark eyes toward this display. Bovine curiosity brought it closer.

Seeker grabbed for it, stretching the tough, waxy wall with her clutching paw-hands and feet. Grunting, she managed to hang on to the grazer through the thin skin. Seeker was strong enough to pluck the struggling cow inward against the atmospheric pressure pushing the envelope out. For a moment Cley thought the growling Seeker would manage to drag the grazer far enough in, despite all logic, to trigger the folding instability and pluck it through. Smelling victory, Seeker yelped with tenor joy. But then the vacuum cow spurted steam, wriggled, and jetted away.

Seeker gnashed her teeth. “Devilish things.”

“Yeah, looked appetizing.”

“They are a great delicacy. I have been trying to taste one for a very long time.”

“Pretty resistant, though. How long?”

“Three centuries.”

It took a while for Seeker to stop laughing at the expression on Cley’s face. Before Cley could recover, she glanced to the side—and was startled to find standing there a human form. But only a form, for this was like nothing she had ever seen.

The face worked with expression—frowns and smiles and wild, flaring eyes, all fidgeting and dissolving. The thing seemed demented. Then she saw that she had been imposing her own need to find a facial expression, to find order. In fact, the skittering storms rippled and fought all through the body. Colors and shapes were but passing approximations.

The form took a tentative step toward Cley. She bit her lip. Could not breathe.

The body jiggled and warped like a bad holo image projected on smoke. But this was no illusion. Its lumpy foot brushed aside a stem as it took another step. The fidgeting skin seemed like a watercolor wash that blurred and shifted as the body moved.

She realized that she could see through the thing. Plants behind it appeared as flickering images. She heard a slight thrumming as it raised an arm with one unnaturally smooth motion—a swoop, not the hinged pull of muscles at the pivots of shoulder and elbow.

“Aurronugh,” it said—a sound like stones rattling in a jug.

Cley still could not breathe. She was frozen.

“It is imitating you, as it did before,” Seeker said.

A gasp. “What—what is it?”

“You wanted to meet it. The captain.”

“But—it’s…” All along she had just assumed that the captain would be human. She remembered Seeker smiling when she did…

“Not all of the captain, of course.”

“What does he—does it—want?”

“I do not know. Often it manifests itself in the form of a new passenger, as a kind of politeness. To learn something it cannot otherwise know.”

The shape said slowly, “Yooou waaanteed by maaaany.”

Cley took a deep breath and made herself say, “Yes. Many want to find me.”

“Yooou musssst lee-vah.”

“I, I can’t leave. And why should I?”

“Daaaanger. To meeee.”

“You? What are you?”

The shape stretched its arms up to encompass all the surrounding growth. Its arms ended in stumps, though momentarily a stubby finger or two would sprout at the ends, flutter, and then ease back into the constant flow of the body.

“Everything? You’re everything?” Cley asked.

“Wooorld.”

Seeker said, “It is the Leviathan. Composite intelligence. This cloud-captain directs its many parts and lesser minds.”

Cley gaped. “Every part of it adds to its intelligence?”

“Rin thought the phylum Myriasoma was extinct,” Seeker said. “He would be happy to see that he was wrong yet again.”

Cley smiled despite her tingling fear. “Supras don’t like news like that.”

As she watched, the captain’s legs dissolved into a swarm. Each bit was the size of a thumb and swam in the air with stubby wings. The captain was an assembly that moved incessantly, each flyer brushing the other but capable of flitting away at any moment. The individual members looked like a bizarre mixture of bird and insect. Each had six eyes: two pairs on opposite sides of their cylindrical bodies and one each at top and bottom. Hovering. Each thinking, in its own tiny way.

Cley heard the captain then in her mind. The thrumming whisper of wings she had heard was echoed by a soft flurry of thoughts in her mind.

You are a danger to me.

“You? The ship?”

I am the World.

And so it must seem to this thing, she realized. It governed the entwined complexity of the Leviathan and at some level must
be
the Leviathan, its dispersed mind instead of merely its brain. Yet each moment, a flying thumb shot away on some buzzing mission and others flew in to merge with the standing, rippling cloud.

Beneath its clear message she felt the darting of quicksilver thought. She sensed this as a thrumming echo of the infinitude of transactions the Leviathan must make to keep so vast an enterprise going. It was as though she could listen to the individual negotiations between her own blood cells and the walls of her veins, the acids of her stomach, the sour biles of her liver.

Cley thought precisely, slowly,
How can you be self-aware? You change all the time.

The shape let its right arm fall off, scattering into fluttering clumps that then departed on new tasks.
I do not need to feel myself intact, as you do.

“So how do I know who’s talking?” Cley countered aloud.

The captain answered,
I speak for the moment. A little while later I shall speak for that time. Only the I will change, not the me.

Cley glanced at Seeker, who watched with bemused interest. Maybe in three centuries it all got dated. She thought,
Will that be the same you?

How could you tell? Or I? I always find that your kind of intelligence is obsessed with knowing what you are.

Cley smiled.
Seems a reasonable question.

The thing shook.
Not reasonable. Reason cannot tell you deep things.

What can, then?

Those come through the body. Always the body.

Cley watched as the shape gradually, with pops and sighs and slow moans, decomposed into an oblong cloud of the thumb-things. It had made its polite gesture and now relaxed into a wobbly sphere, perhaps to bring its individual elements closer while lowering its surface area.

Are you afraid of me?
she asked impishly.

My parts know fear. Hunger and desire, as well. They are a species, like you. I am another kind of being, able to elude attack by dispersing. I do not know fear for myself, but I do know caution. I cannot die, but I can be hurt.

Cley thought of the honeybees she had tended in the forest—satisfying, sweaty labor that now seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Bees had fewer than ten thousand neurons, she knew, yet did complex tasks. How much more intelligent would be a single arm of this cloud-captain, when its thumb-things united to merge their minds?

Not hurt by anybody like me, I assume?

The swarm churned.
Yes. I am not vulnerable to destruction of special parts, as are you. Merely by taking away your head, for example, I could leach life from you, rob you of all you know. But each part of me contains some of my intelligence and feels what a part of the World feels.

Cley felt suddenly the strangeness of this thing. Hanging before her, bulging and working with sluggish energy, its misshapen head turned at impossible angles as it seemed to ponder the Leviathan’s intricacies. Another phylum? No, something more—another kingdom of life, a development beyond beings like her, forever separated into inevitable loneliness.

In a way, she envied it. Each thumb-flyer knew the press of competition, of hunger and longing, but the composite could rise above that raw turbulence into realms she could not even guess. She glanced at Seeker again and realized that her expression was not truly of indifference but of reverence.

Seeker had not wanted her to seek the captain, because it was, even for Seeker, a holy being. Beyond even three centuries of learning.

I speak to you now because the World cannot tolerate you,
the captain sent.

“How come you went away before? Dissolved?” Cley asked.

I needed time to speak to my brothers.

Other Leviathans?
As she framed the thought, the captain’s answer came lightning-fast:
Other Worlds.

Is there something beyond Leviathans? Something—

Cley had never literally had a thought interrupted in her own mind. Running right over her own sentence-forming, the captain imposed,
I now grasp many recent events. Your connection with them. There is an entity called the Malign, and it reaches for you.

I know.

Then know this…

In a flooded single moment a torrent of sensations, ideas, and conclusions forked through her. She had for an instant the waterfall perception of what the mind before her was truly like. The layers of its logic were translucent, like a building of softly lit glass. Every fact shone up through floors of stacked detail, breaking through to illuminate the denser lattice-lacing of concepts on a higher level. And that piercing light in turn refracted through the web of mind, shedding its fitful glow on assumptions lying buried in a shadowy weave beneath.

She staggered with the impact, trying to wrench away.

A realization came, a thin reed tossing on the crackling surge that swamped her. She sagged with the weight of what the captain had given her, stunned. She was dimly conscious of Seeker leaping forward to cradle her. Then the air clouded with ebony striations, and she felt herself dwindling, falling beneath a towering, dark weight.

“YOU CAN SPEAK?”
Seeker asked, her tilted chin and rippling amber fur patterns showing concern.

“I, I think so.” Cley had slept for many hours, awakening with only a groggy sense of herself. When she revived, Seeker had brought her a banquet of berries and fruits and thick, meaty leaves like slices of spongy bread. Now she tried to explain what she had sensed in the brief collision of minds. Like Kata, the captain sent information faster and at greater depth than Cley could handle.

“It was…thought without a human filter.”

“Um. I get that all the time.”

“No, I meant
really
strange, not like you.”