Beyond Infinity (6 page)

Their reptilian sub-brains, tucked around the nerve stem, preserved a taste for ritual and violence. Surrounding that, other facets of their brains brought an emotional tang to all thoughts—this an invention of the early mammals. Together these two ancient remnants gave humans their visceral awareness of the world. Such simple elements, yet they worked together in ways that stunned the mind.

As the furry creature watched the flowering night, it wondered if the battle above marked the emergence of something fearsome and strange and not human. Those coiled maneuvers were not from minds it knew.

Could it be sure? Humanity’s neocortex wrapped around the two animal brains in an unsure clasp, to be sure. In some eras that grip had slipped, unleashing powerful bursts of creativity, of madness, of squandered energy. The neocortex did hold sway with its ancient gray sagacity, directing its reasoning power outward into the world. But always the deeper minds flowed to their own rhythms.

Some forms of the human species had integrated this divided brain after heroic struggle. Others had reengineered the neocortex until it mastered the lower two levels with complete, unceasing vigilance. In human history, all manner of contrivances had seemed to be the answer. In the end, the species had decided to keep all its major variants. It now preserved all the human variations, including Originals.

The creature that wondered at the night had a very different mind. It came from nearly a billion years more of design beyond this Original’s, forged both by Darwinnowing and by careful human pruning. Misgivings stirred in that mind now. The broad face wrinkled with complex, unreadable expressions. From its feral legacy it allowed itself a low, moaning growl colored with unease.

It had little guidance. Very little of humanity’s history had survived the rub of millennia. In any case, much of that tangled record, shot through by discordant voices, would not have been comprehensible to the creature.

Still, it sensed that it was witnessing in the streaked sky not a mere passing incident, but the birth of a savage new age. The vast flashes and ugly contortions that worked across the silent sky could not be the mere trails of spacecraft. Forces struggled to be born up there.

Something vast was coming. Yet the creature knew also that some of the night’s furious energies came from human machines and intentions.

Since the Primordials, who came even before the simple Ur-human form that labored to live nearby, humanity’s greatest adversary had not been the unthinking universe, but itself.

Now the sky worked with strangeness. A fresh evil had arrived. But from where?

T
HE WOMAN DREAMED
for two days.

She thrashed sometimes, calling out hoarsely, her words slurred beyond comprehension. The creature carefully moved her to the shade of some tall trees whose branches formed curious curls like hooks at the very top. It foraged for simple fruit and held slices to the woman’s mouth so the juice would trickle down her swollen throat. For itself, meals of small animals sufficed, after the first night’s reptile feast. It caught these simply by keeping still for long periods and letting them wander within reach. This was enough, for it knew how to conserve strength while never letting its attention wander from the woman’s weak but persistent rhythms of regrowth.

The uses of fantasy are many, and healing is not the least of these. She slept not merely because this was the best way to repair herself. Behind her jerking eyelids, it knew, a thin layer outside the neocortex brain was rerunning the events that had led to her trauma. This sub-brain integrated emotional and physiological elements, replaying her actions, searching for some fulcrum moment when she might have averted the calamity.

Nothing worked. It sensed that there was some comfort in knowing, finally, that nothing would have changed the outcome. When she reached this conclusion, a stiffness left her. Her body softened into deeper sleep. Some memories were eventually discarded in this process as too painful to carry, while others were amplified in order to attain a kind of narrative equilibrium. This editing saved her from a burden of remorse and anxiety that, in earlier forms of humanity, would have plagued her for years after.

In the second day she momentarily burst into a slurred song. At dusk she awoke. She looked up into the long, tapered muzzle of her watcher and asked fuzzily, “How many…lived?”

“Only you, that I can sense.” The creature’s voice was low and yet lilting, like a bass note that had worked itself impossibly through the throat of a flute.

“No…?” She was quiet for a time, studying the green moon that swam beyond the sharp mountains. She cried and finally said weakly, “The Supras…”

“They did this?”

“No, no. I saw something strange. Distorted air. Refractions, I guess. Then…” She shivered.

“A murderous fire.”

“More…more than fire.” Another shiver. “Most of the Supras were engaged…far away. I thought they would help us.”

“They have been busy.” It gestured at the southern horizon. In the twilight’s dim gleam a fat column of oily smoke stood like an obsidian gravestone.

Her eyes widened. “What’s…?”

“It has been there for days.”

“Ah.” She closed her eyes then and subsided into her curious, eyelid-fluttering sleep. For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human.

The next day she got up. Creaking unsteadily, she walked to the stream, where she lay facedown and drank for a long time. Ribs firm, arm supple and whole. One finger was missing from her left hand, but she insisted on helping the creature forage for berries and edible leaves. She spoke little. They took shelter when silvery filigrees flashed across the sky. She flinched. But this time there were no rolling booms, no searing bolts, as she remembered from before. She did not speak of what had happened, and her companion did not ask.

In the undergrowth they came upon three humans crisped to ashes. She wept over each. “I never saw such weapons before,” she said. “Like living flames.”

“Your enemy took care to thoroughly burn each.”

She sifted through the shattered bones. “They were like geometries, polygons. They cast down bolts, explosions…”

At the evening meal she sang again the hypnotic slow song she had pushed up out of her dream state before. There were phrases about her Meta, about a Supra (male, from the case-form of her sentences, but unnamed). Her somber voice hung and wavered on the long notes. Then her eyes abruptly filled, and she rushed off into the night. Later she sheepishly returned, her mouth attempting a crooked smile. The need to cover emotion was a quirk of humans, pointless to the raccoon-creature.

On the morning of the third day she broke a long silence with “I am Cley. Do you use names?” She guessed that the creature did not use names among its own kind; it was not among the animals who mimicked men.

“I have been called the Seeker After Patterns.”

“Well then, Seeker, I thank you for—”

“Our species are allies. Nothing need be said.” Seeker dipped its large head. The movement seemed unnatural to it, awkward. Cley realized with a pang that Seeker had studied humans enough to attempt this gesture, invoking humbleness.

“Still, I owe so much.”

“My species came long after yours, though based upon a small creature of equally ancient origin.”

“You are…?”

“We are formally referred to as procyons. A later variety of human shaped us. I believe my kind benefited from your struggle.”

“I doubt we did you much good.”

“Life builds upon life. You Ur-humans were but fossils when we first walked.”

They gathered berries in silence. Seeker could stand entirely on its hind legs, using its forepaws as nimbly as Cley’s hands. Its bulk deceived Cley at first, so she was startled by its speed. With single-minded zest it scooped many small fish from the cold, giggling stream that rushed over black pebbles. They ate the yellow-green fish without using a fire and stayed well back among the trees.

Cley ate with relish. She had processed her deep sense of loss through several nights now, and the searing pain of it ebbed. Color returned to her cheeks. The sad tug of memories slowly lost its immediate grip on her mind. Her life, so wondrous before, was now brutally spare.

A thousand questions rose. How was her Meta? The Library?

If only she could truly remember. She sensed that her undermind was blocking memories, to ease her recovery. She had flashing images, framed in fear and burning dreams.

The attack had come in a savage, fire-bright moment.

It began with strange droplets coasting on the air, shimmering, murmuring. Floodlights ringed a gray, chipped slab where she worked with Kurani. Recently opened passages far into the Library labyrinth had yielded complicated new puzzles in data slabs. They were reading out a curious string of phrases in a long-dead language, from a society that had reached the peak of mathematical wisdom—or so the historians said.

The floating, humming motes distracted her. Unlike the familiar microtech that pervaded the Library, performing tasks, these shifted and scintillated in the hard spotlight glare.

Kurani ignored them. His powers of concentration were vast and pointed. He had just discovered that these ancient people had used numbers not as nouns or adjectives, but to modify verbs, words of action. Instead of “see those three trees,” they would say something like, “the living things manifesting treeness here act visibly as a collection divided to the extent of three.”

She remembered Kurani’s furrowed brow, his quizzical interrogation of distant resource libraries as he struggled with this conceptual gulf. These Ancients had used number systems that recognized three bases—10, 12, and 5—and were rooted in the body, with its five toes and six fingers. Being so grounded in the flesh, what insights did the Ancients reach in far more rarefied pursuits? Scholars had already found a deep fathoming of the extra dimensions known to exist in the universe. The slab before Cley and Kurani spoke of experiments in dimensional transport, all rendered in a strangely canted manner.

Cley kept her focus as tightly wrapped around this problem as she could. She found such abstractions engulfing.

But the motes…and suddenly she looked up at a new source of light. The motes were tumbling in a field of amber glitter. Sharp blue shards of brilliance lanced into her eyes. The motes were not microtech but
windows
into another place, where hard radiance rumbled and fought.

She turned to Kurani to warn him—

And the world was sliced. Cut into thin parallel sheets, each showing a different part of Kurani, sectioned neatly by a mad geometer.

But this was not illusion, not a mere refraction in the air. He was divided, slashed crosswise. She could see into his red interior, organs working, pulsing. She stepped toward him…

Then came the fire, hot pain, and screaming. She remembered running. The motes swept after her, and she was trying to get away from the terrible screams. Only when she gasped for breath did she realize that the screams had come from her.

She made herself stop. Turned, for a moment that would haunt her forever. Looked back down a long, stony corridor that tapered to infinity—and Kurani was at the other end, not running. Impaled on blades of light. Sliced. Writhing.

And then, to her shame, she turned and ran away. Without another backward glance. Terrified.

The memory came sharply into her. The bare fossil outlines of later events swelled up, filling her throat, the past pressing to get out.

Finding a dozen members of a neighboring Meta cowering in a passageway. Fidgeting with fear. They had to shout themselves hoarse in the thundering violence.

Then the booming eased away. Crackling energies came instead.

The other Naturals said the attacks raged through all the valleys of the Library. They were being pursued by a rage beyond comprehension. Let the Supras fight it if they could.

They would be hunted like rats here. She agreed—they had to get out, into the forest.

The seething air in the passageway became prickly. A sound like fat frying grew near. No one could stand and wait for it.

She went down a side tunnel. The other Originals fled toward the main passage. Better to run and hide alone than in a straggling rabble. But the tunnel ceiling got lower as she trotted, then walked, finally duckwalked.

She cowered far back in the tunnel, alone in blackness. Stabs of virulent lightning forked in the distance and splashed the tunnel walls with an ivory glow. Getting closer. In one of the flashes she saw tiny designs in the tunnel wall.

Her fingers found the pattern. Ancient, a two-tiered language. A…combination? Plan?

She extruded a finger into a tool wedge and tracked along the grooves. It was telling a tale of architectural detail she could not follow very well, reading at high speed through the tool. She sensed a sense-phrase, inserted in the middle of an extended brag about the design. It referred to an inlet—or maybe outlet. A two-valence, anyway. Okay, okay, but where?

More snapping flashes, emerald now. Nearer. Could they
hear
her?

She inched farther into the tunnel. Her head bumped the ceiling; the rough bore was narrowing. In another quick glimmer, followed by an electrical snarl, she saw a web of symbol-tracks, impossible to follow.
So damn much history!
Where’s the door?

She scrunched farther in. The web tapered down into a shallow track, and she got her finger wedge in.
Ah! Codes.
She twisted, probed—and the wall flopped open into another tunnel.

She crawled through, trying to be quiet. A glowing brown snake was coming after her down the tunnel. She slammed the curved hatch in its face.

Pitch black. At least the lightning had shown her what was going on. She sat absolutely still. Faint thunder and a trembling in the floor. This tunnel was round and…a soft breeze.