Beyond Infinity (21 page)

The Library held only pale shadows of such worlds. But the incident redoubled her resolve to make her work here have some meaning.

Ah, meaning.

To burn libraries was a profound kind of cultural murder. The Library of Life’s destruction combined loss of antiquity’s wisdom with loss of species—nature’s wisdom. In contrast, she thought a lot about short little lives, like those lived by Originals. Hers. For the first time she saw that they had a quality of beauty and tragedy, like waves endlessly breaking to no avail on a golden beach. A shore that would never yield.

Her further work underlined this.

Since far antiquity, societies had saved vast quantities of data, much of it never seen by a human at all. Machines logged information into compressed formats, most of it unreadable except after long detective work. Accessible data, however, led to data mining by historians, making their subject something like a science. Using the Library, they could fast-forward history, cross-correlate over spans that dwarfed human lives, zoom in on critical moments.

Such practices had to bridge what the spatialists called the “chain of migration” from one recording technology to another. Most valued was meta-data, which set the slabs of information in context. Meta-data allowed the artificial intelligences embedded in the Library to keep their “digital artifacts” exercised, translating them through the migration chain and into fresh languages. In turn this left the vast banks of knowledge ready for potential human users.

Now that humanity was much smaller in numbers than in the far past, and longer-lived, the vast majority of all data had never been visited by a real human mind. Machines embedded in the walls kept track of matters beneath the notice of people, such as the inventory that documented and linked every named human who had ever lived.

She was astonished to find this. All human names! She pointed it out to Fanak, who just yawned and said in a lazy drawl, “While a gigantic amount has been written or spoken, culture in the end is the fraction that gets remembered.”

For a full week, she wondered if this was a deep truth or just a joke. With Supras, she was never sure.

Then Fanak invited her to a festivity.

The invitation came out of nowhere, a message on her inboards. Phrased more like a summons than an invitation, but thrilling all the same. Another Supra event! Supras were notoriously not very social. Were they offsetting the aftermath of the Furies? She felt a quickening in herself and did not quite know why.

The “party”—Supras did not use the term, preferring
fratuung,
implying restrained revelry; Cley had to look it up—was in an ornate structure that rose from the valley floor like a luminous wave about to break. Electrolifts took her up into it, past ascending slabs, precise parabolas of arcing orange fountains, a welter of buttresses and columns, some transparent. Sculptures she recognized as vastly ancient hovered in illuminated spaces. Some were empire-style, with noble brows eyeing infinite prospects, while others evoked landscapes that could not be Earthly. Colossal battles were caught frozen at their climax, a huge holocrystal showing the latter phases of the era in contrast. This was time-sculpture, she recalled, a craft sometimes confused with real history. Propaganda of sufficient age became art.

Fanak greeted her with an embrace, signaling that this event was Not Work, in case an Original did not grasp the concept. She gave him a twist of a smile in return and caught from him a musk that told her more than she wanted to know just now.

Frowning, she put the moment aside. They were alone—easy to do in the labyrinth of cool columns and moist recesses—and she saw that the building knew him but not her. A steady radiance followed Fanak, an attendant glow that enhanced him in a ruddy nimbus. Neither Rin nor Kata sported this; was it an honor, or cosmetic? The radiance drew him subtly out of the surrounding gloom as the embedded intelligences here tracked his eye movements. Answering light sprang forth to illuminate whatever interested him. At the moment, that was her. This radiance, she saw, framed him for her as well, making him loom masterfully.

All intended for her. She would have to disregard it.

He showed her the view from a wall that seemed to ooze away…showing the plain below, the sprawling devastation of the Library, the ramparts of mountains rising to an azure sky. “Here,” he said, and in a twinkling the floor, too, seeped away under her feet. Despite herself and her resolve not to be impressed, she gave a quiet gasp.

The plain worked with patterns—shot with light, humming with purpose, alive beneath the sands. She was seeing the dumb physical world above, and beneath, the living intelligences that lay embedded in this ancient valley. All of it was aware, sentient in some sense. And…

“Beautiful,” she sighed. “So much…”

“This is how I think of the far past,” Fanak said with a studied, casual air.

“Buried…”

“Yes. Patterns laid down long ago, giving forth a view of the world we cannot fully comprehend. Beyond the mere slabs and indices we study. Huge.”

“To know it…how can we?”

“I thought to show it to you, just to make plain that there is much the Ancients”—he made the capital obvious with his tone—“gave us. Things large and subtle.”

“If they could make this, then…”

“It is all we can know of them.”

“Another recording.”

“Perhaps. Or an intelligence we cannot grasp.”

She turned to him, close now, feeling his presence like an aroma. “Do we
know
that?”

He smiled, slow and ambiguous. “Of course not. Nothing at such a remove, across hundreds of millions of years, can be sure.”

He led her across a plaza, talking swiftly and intently. They approached a pond of water, right to the edge. Cley hung back, but Fanak just strode forward, not even looking down. He did not hesitate, putting his shod foot out and down—and the water firmed up under his step.

“What…?”

She had jerked back and now hastened to catch up, her shoes finding a cushioned surface almost like skin. The surface had a ceramic sheen beneath her foot but, a short distance away, lapped like ordinary water. “How…?”

Distracted, Fanak murmured, “Ummm? Oh, molecular lattice response.”

Which meant less than nothing to her, but…“What if we wanted to swim?”

“We would tell it.”

They crossed the pond and stepped off onto stone, and the pond reverted to water behind them. How was it done? She looked back at it, but of course, Fanak did not.

Here came the Supra crowd. As they entered a long hall, a frisson went through the stately figures that were dining at floating tables. Fanak stopped to survey the room, opened his jacket, and put his hands on his hips. She had seen this in her own kind, making the sihouette loom suddenly larger and more forbidding—or so it had been in the forest.

The effect seemed the same here. Fanak was a man of social stature, and lesser Supras, she noted, lingered around the periphery. She immediately guessed why: They were hoping to renew alliances and gain new friends without challenging the Fanaks at the center of the room.

And she and Fanak were at the center, socially and geometrically. She felt a flush of pleasure at the attention she got merely as his companion. Frank speculation worked in the surrounding faces. Pursed lips on the women, especially. Cley was unique but still an Original. Some faces plainly said that; after all, peacocks do not show their feathers for dogs.

Passing a couple, she heard, “What I cannot create I do not understand.” A laugh. “
This
I know: Someone cooked up an Original soup, I’m told.”

Followed immediately by “Isn’t it always that way?”

Then, “Can’t let them out without supervision, can we?”

And, “Domesticated, they are quite nice.”

Cley wheeled on them. “What I do not create I do not appreciate,” she spat back. And stalked away. Not a bad exit, she thought.

She turned to the food—a welcome escape. Meat without bones, skin, gristle, or fat—because it was made somewhere from elemental compounds, not grown in nature. Eggs innocent of the belly of a bird. She ate a bit, trying to suppress the anxiety seeping up in her. Her Meta scorned unnatural food. No help—she cast aside a delicacy, took a sip of fogwine, fumed, turned back into the crowd.

“Let’s…let’s go back out,” she implored Fanak.

He instantly caught her unease. “Of course.”

In the darkness above the valley she sighed with relief. “I’m really not up to all this.”

He slid his arms around her while still looking outward at the view. “You can be.”

The pulse of him was immediate. She looked into his face and could not get her breath. Only moments before she had seen the Supras as much like her kind, but now the difference between them welled up in her, pulse quickening from both fear and desire in equal measures. She remembered Kurani and the leaping, sudden passion, wanted it to be that way again, to be caught up and carried downstream, sweaty and joyful and possessed by something greater…

And she pushed him away. “I… I can’t.”

He hid his feelings behind a formal “I see. I am sorry.”

“No, don’t be; it’s me, really.” Hands in the air, trying to express something beyond words.

“I assumed…”

“Maybe I’m not…ready.” That wasn’t right; there was something worse brewing in her, but she could not say what it was.

“I am sorry.”

He turned away, and she bolted for the Supra crowd within. Maybe she could just blend in. Her heels clicked anxiously, echoes from the high stone walls taunting her. She hurried into the long hall, steps ahead of Fanak, and abruptly stopped at the entrance.

There was no one in the room she could truly talk to. With these people she would always be on guard, seeking, uncertain. Not safe, not accepted. That possibility had vanished with the searing deaths of the Meta.

Abruptly, flooding into her memory came the experience of reading a word for the first time. That had been a jolting revelation. Hidden meanings had leaped out from the world, forever changing it.

Now she knew something equally powerful but could not say what it was—only that Fanak had all the things that drew her to some Supra men, but the experience was not the same now. And she could not say why.

She stepped without thinking into a crowd of them who were immersed in a pale yellow mist. It clung to her as she passed through them and felt in the air a ghostly silence. It wrapped about her, and she moved among the Supras, who were saying things aloud and in Talent-talk but somehow distantly, as though she were at the other end of the room from them in a fashion she could not quite fathom. They did not look directly at her but knew she was there. She breathed in the yellow fog and felt a gathering tension.

She yawned.

This caught their attention. They looked at her for a long moment as she felt suddenly vulnerable, her jaw wide and mouth gaping like a fool.

Had she ever seen a Supra yawn? No. In school hadn’t she read somewhere? And here came the inboard reference seeker, which whispered that
of course a yawn brought more oxygen, but as well
yawning seemed to be a way of communicating changing environmental or internal conditions to others, possibly as a way to synchronize behavior, most likely a vestigial mechanism that has lost its significance in selection. Supras have omitted the reflex
—and she shut it off, for now those near her were smiling, some with hands held over mouths, not wanting to laugh.

She turned and fled from the obliging yellow fog, from the ripple of stifled laughter that followed her out of the crowd like a wave.

She breathed in the air, laced with something she had never savored before. All about her, the party swirled. Supras, a few Ur-humans, many variants in between—all from different eras in the eon-long explorations of evolution. She escaped onto a parapet. Below stretched the eroded valley, ancient beyond measure.

She felt it come rushing up at her. This desert plain was a baked-dry display table covered with historical curiosities. What vexed currents worked, when different ages sought to conspire! And she was pinned
here,
firmly spiked by the bland, all-powerful, infuriating, unthinkingly condescending
reasonableness
of the Supras.

Cley pressed her palms to her ears. The din of Talent-talk drummed on. Some point was in contention, laced in logics she could not follow. As soon as they got through with their labyrinthine logic, they might notice her again.

Notice. And talk down to her. Reassure her. Treat her like a vaguely remembered pet.

No wonder they had not recalled the many varieties of dogs and cats, she thought bitterly. Ur-humans had served that purpose quite nicely.

There was no one here who was…her. Her people… Hard River Meta and all the others. All gone. They had labored under the distant direction of the Supras since far, time-shrouded antiquity, tending the flowering biosphere. The Supras had known enough to let them form tribes, to work their own small will upon the forest. But drawn out of that fragile matrix, Cley gasped like a beached fish.

The Talent-talk drummed, drummed, drummed.

She staggered away, anger clouding her vision. Conflicts that had been building in her burst forth, and she hoped the blizzard of Talent-talk hid them. But she could avoid them no longer herself.

Even Kurani—
she had felt with him a near-equality, yes. And that had made her earlier passion possible—born, she saw now, of her innocence. And her ignorance of their differences. An innocence she had lost now.

She was like a bug here, scuttling at the feet of these distracted supermen. They were kind enough in their cool, lopsided fashion, but their effort to damp their abilities down to her level was visible—and galling. Longing for her own kind brimmed in her.

…drummed…drummed…drummed…

Her only hope of seeing her kind again lay in these Supras. But a clammy fear clasped her when she tried to think what fresh Ur-humans would be like.

Laboratory-made. Bodies decanted from some chilly crucible. Her relatives, yes, even clones of her. But strangers. Unmarked by life, unreared. They would be her people only in the narrow genetic sense.