Beyond Infinity (12 page)

“That was how we wanted it.” Rin smiled as though he were discussing the weather. “We reasoned that at most you might eventually expand for territory, rather than for political gains and taxes, as in the imperial model.”

“We did not realize we were so…planned.” Cley gritted her teeth, hoping that her unease would not leak out through her Talent. This nakedness of her thoughts was proving to be a nuisance.

“We did not interfere with your basic design, believe me,” Kata said kindly. “I merely activated a latency. Your Meta was left untalented by simply never stimulating its use.” She offered Cley a tart fruit and seemed unbothered at its refusal. “Your group loyalty is your species’ most important way to find an identity. It fosters social warmth. Such patterns persist, from a children’s playhouse to a transworld alliance.”

“And how do you work together?”

Rin said, “We do not struggle against each other, for such traits have been very nearly edited out of us. But most important, we have the dubious blessing of a higher goal.”

“What?” Cley demanded.

“Perhaps ‘enemy’ is a better term than ‘goal.’ Until now I would have said that history was our true foe, dragging at our heels as we attempted to escape from it. But now we have met an active enemy from out of history itself, and I must say I find myself filled with eagerness, and a great need, to understand it.”

Rin seemed the youngest of these Supras, though Cley could not reliably read the age of any of these bland, perfect faces. “Enemies? Other Supras?”

“No no! You are recalling those people who supposedly fired at you, who killed your tribe-fellows, who destroyed the Library of Life?”

“Yes.” Cley’s mouth narrowed with the effort of concealing her hate. Primitive emotions would not go well here.

Rin waved a hand. “They were illusions.”

“I saw them!”

“They appeared here, too. I closely examined our records and”—he snapped his fingers—“there they were. Just as you had seen. We were too busy to notice, and so we owe you thanks for observing it.”

“They were real!”

“Extensive study of their spectral images show them to be artful refractions of heated air.”

Cley looked blank. The sensation of being robbed of a clear enemy was like stepping off a stair in darkness and finding no next step. “Then…what…?”

Rin leaned back and cupped his hands behind his neck, elbows high. He gazed up at the clear night, seeming to take great joy in the broad sweep of stars. Many comets unfurled their filmy tails, like a flock of arrows aimed at the unseen sun, which had sheltered in fear behind the curve of Earth.

Rin said slowly, “What heats air? Lightning. But to do it so craftily?”

Kata looked surprised. Cley saw that Rin had told none of this to the others, for throughout the great hall the long tables fell silent.

Kata said, “Electrical currents—that’s all lightning is. But to make realistic images…”

Cley asked, “All to trick us?”

Rin clapped his hands together loudly, startling his hushed audience. “Exactly! Such ability!”

Kata asked quietly, “Already?”

Rin nodded. “The Malign. It has returned.”

“No!” Kata’s mouth sagged.

Rin glanced at Cley. “History, our true foe.”

Kata said wonderingly, “I thought the Quandary had…”

“Nothing is eternal—including prisons.” Rin grimaced.

Cley opened her mouth to ask a question, and Kata sent a jittery, blindingly fast message to all those around her. Before Cley could form a syllable, a blizzard of Talent-talk struck her like a blow. Supras were on their feet, buzzing with speculation. Inside her head percussive waves hammered home.
The torrent…

Again she felt the labyrinth of their minds, the kinesthetic thrust of ideas streaming past, giant complexes of thought, images, word groups—
Malign, Singular, Quandary
—and following immediately, scenes whose features blurred beyond comprehension by sheer mental
speed…

Whirlwinds.

A black roaring against ruby stars.

Purple geysers on an infinite plain.

The plain shrinking until it was a disk, the black sun at its center.

Stars shredded into phosphorescent tapestries.

Spaces cut into strips, geometries wrenched.

A dead black cleft swam at the rim of the bee-swarm gossamer galaxy.

Sliding slices of vibrant color buzzed ominously at the very focus of the spiral arms.

Furious energies erupting from nothingness.

A dizzying sensation of a giant hand squashing her, of smashing accelerations, hard into the flexing mouth of…

She dropped away from darkening thunderheads, fleeing this storm. Withdrawing, she tucked herself into a crevice of her mind.
Too much—I’m taking in too much.

She staggered away from the dinner party. The handsome one, Fanak, gave her a sympathetic smile. By reflex she smiled back, but her face felt as if it were cracking.

Out, into fresh, cool air. The snowy peaks above seemed to tip toward her, full of expectations. The entire valley lay whispering in pale blue-green moonlight. Fires at the Library sputtered, coiling ropes of black into the silvery night.

She sagged against a pillar.
Face it, young one,
she thought.
You’re drowning here, in a sea you can’t even name.

An hour ago she had been hanging on Fanak’s every word, hoping to connect. Now nothing could make her go back in there. She was hopelessly outclassed.

Panting with the mental exertion, she wondered what the people of Illusivia were like when they were alone. Or if they ever were.

Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

—G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology

C
LEY SENSED THEM
first by their stench.

A tangy reek like old bile curled into her nostrils. Then a flat, metallic smell. She had time to sniff, look around—and there was a gaudy sheen near her head. A slick mix of blues and reds. Mats of it spun in the air, humming, immune to gravity.

Then it was gone—
pop
!

Cley’s eyes widened. “That was alive.”

“Morphs, I am told they were once called,” Seeker said in its curious accent, the vowels stretched as the long, black-ribbed mouth lingered over every word. “There is an entry on them in the fragments we found days ago. More than passing strange.”

“Not…” Somehow, she could not speak the word.

“One of the Furies?”

Cley glanced around, her teeth fidgeting across her lips, edgy. They were working outside in slanted morning rays, and ivory clouds were snagged on the distant peaks. She could not bear the smashed and burned corridors below, so she insisted that she and Seeker tote their smashed “finds” up into daylight. Not standard method, but nobody was sticking to rules now.

She breathed deeply to dispel her mood. These last ten days had been restful. Originals notoriously liked simple manual labor, classic big-muscle work, and she had used that to smooth over the jangling tensions left after the Supra dinner party. Seeker had suggested, well before a command came down from the Supras, that they search for records about extradimensional physics. The Furies seemed linked to that, though Cley did not see how.

Search results were spotty. By now they knew that the technology for spanning dimensions had been the grand adventure of the Third Fabricant Age. It had come late in the Uranium Age, which was itself embedded in the high period of interstellar exploration.

Such overlappings were common, and the Library date notations had been confusing. A long period of linear dating mysteriously labeled
A.D.
had a tiny interruption denoted
B.C.E.
Translators found after much struggle that this stood for
Before Common Era
in the language of that time, a subspecies of Arbic. Nobody knew what
A.D.
meant. What made the era “common” was unknown. That they disliked
A.D
.? In any case, sanity had eventually prevailed. Historians apparently saw the virtue of a continuous system, and the
A.D.
system returned. But was it truly connected, with no gaps? No one knew; this was a fine point of classical scholarship, a dusty controversy.

Cley had been quite pleased to find that those eras had been the last pinnacle of Original culture.
Her kind
had found the underlying truths about the entire physical cosmos! That triumph was a crescendo of the human symphony, or so she had heard. The Third Fabricant Age had ushered in the later Natural forms, who then gave way to the myriad later human species. Just absorbing all this made her proud. She had read portions aloud to Seeker, who seemed to choose those moments to fall asleep.

Maybe because it was too confusing?

That there were more than the obvious three spatial dimensions—in fact, thirteen in all—struck her as bizarre. Most of the others were tiny, rolled-up tubes. Nobody could ever tell they were there. Rather abstract…

“Do you smell oiled metal?” Seeker said.

By now Cley knew this was a politeness. Seeker had picked up a faint scent, and charitably assumed that a human could, too. But Originals had little smelling ability, and Supras even less. Civilization did not seem to reward such subtlety. “When the Morph was here?”

“Then—and now again.”

Cley tensed. She liked to think that she was recovering from the Furies, but her body knew otherwise. Crossing the central Library plaza yesterday, a bot had suddenly broken an ancient seal with a loud bang. She hit the stones hard and crawled for cover. When she finally got up and brushed herself off, even the bots were staring at her. Luckily, no Supras were present, or she would have turned her Original deep pink and bolted. She trembled for an hour afterward.

Seeker saw her unease and said softly, “Breathe; sing.” Cley did, in her shaky soprano.

Seeker nodded after Cley had wound down, and said, “I saw a summary of the Third Fabricant Age last night—quite suggestive. Your breed devised a process which relied on a virulent state of matter termed
quagma
—a pun upon
quark,
a species of basic particle manifestation, when they gather into clouds, becoming
plasma
.” Seeker raised both eyebrows. “You humans love your terms! Plasma, an angry gas of things far smaller than atoms. I gather part of the pun is that it is hot beyond imagination.” The procyon blinked owlishly. “The ancient text said that it ‘seared like magma.’ The Ancients liked their little jokes.”

Cley chuckled. Seeker had its bookish side, precise as a pedant. “Look, maybe we should move inside. I’m feeling kinda exposed. ‘Magma’ sounds a lot like the Furies to me.”

“Very well.”

Once they were below, the sour, acrid air swarmed up into her nostrils. Seeker said, “Perhaps you could discover more about the ancients by visiting an Esthete.”

“Who?”

“A human form developed in the Inward Age. They came after you Naturals.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They are seldom admired but much referred to—as they would have preferred.”

“We have some?”

“No Library could work well without a cadre of them.”

Cley lifted an eyebrow. “You speak with authority.”

“I have seen other Libraries.”

“Really? News to me.”

“Each of your subspecies had a way to leave its mark. Most were lost.”

“But the Library—”

“A singular success. Most of the ancient repositories held discards, buried to get them out of the way.”

“Were their records dangerous?” It had never occurred to her that the Library’s contents could be harmful.

“Indirectly, yes. We know the humans of distant eras mostly by their waste. There were once whole continents of it.”

“Ummm. And here I thought the Library was, well, stories about the past.”

“It is, I suppose.” Seeker lounged back. It was not above lecturing—though from what sources, she did not know. “Individual recollections of the past are easily shaped by others. After a while they need have little bearing on the once-lived events.”

“So how can we be sure the ideas we get—”

“The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas.”

Cley smiled, enjoying this. Seeker never ceased to amuse, and she needed that now. “So?”

“Most human repositories intend to frighten people away. Who wants vandals visiting? So they play to emotion rather than to mere cool caution.”

“So?”

“I have seen strewn across this mad planet vast citadels that were once thought to be art. Or objects of reverence. Or expressions of eternal truths—most now unreadable, best knocked down. They were nearly always left on flat, grassy plains, I’ve noticed.”

“Uh, why?”

“I suppose the prehumans who preferred the savannah prospered; those who preferred swamps or highlands did less well.”

“I like living at the edge of the woods.”

“Those are hardwired preferences—like mine, say, for fish caught fresh and struggling from a stream. Delicious!” Seeker rolled its eyes, its claw-hands clenching.

“You have some pretty obvious buttons there.”

“I am—what did that woman call me?—an
animal
!”

“Well, y’know, she didn’t really mean—”

“Oh, but she did.”

“You’re a whole lot more than—”

“I am different from most animals—augmented, but not a human, no. Not that I would want to be.”

“Really?” Once the word was out, she wished she could call it back.

But no, too late—Seeker laughed. “You are so—well,
human
. You always think you are the ultimate.”

“And…we’re not.”

Seeker inspected the ceiling. “It seems unlikely.”

“What’s greater?”

Seeker sat up straight. “Do you truly want to know?”

A chilly caution came, which she brushed aside. “Sure.”