Beyond Infinity (25 page)

A snarling ball of energy hit the Semisent. Ruddy fur seemed to swarm all over the back of it. Seeker dug its claws into the hide, giving angry shrieks and chatters. The Semisent slashed back at the furious procyon, then yelped in pain. Bloodied, the Semisent hunkered down, pressing into Cley, but it was too late. Seeker had anchored itself and then threw all its weight to the side, prying up the mass. Cley scrambled out from under. Up on her knees, she hit the Semisent straight in the muzzle. It fell over, wheezing.

“Damn!” Cley got up as Seeker released its hold. “What was…?!” She spit, trying to clear dust from her mouth. Gingerly she felt her chin, scraped raw when the Semisent slammed her down. Her hands seemed weirdly steady, as if they didn’t belong to her. Surely they should be shaking, from the juddering pulse of her heart.

The hulking gray body of the thing lay sprawled, and its eyes flickered. It was not unconscious, only dazed. Blood oozed from the cuts of Seeker’s claws.

“It has tracked us,” Seeker said. “Some doggy traits remain.”

“Those saintly ones.”

“I agree; they must have sent it.” Seeker stalked around the bulky thing, studying it, stopping at the head. With a forepaw Seeker slapped the cheeks until the eyes steadied and looked out. “You!”

“Uh… I am…” The dull voice came from deep in its barrel chest. It had big doglike haunches and a broad muzzle with powerful jaws. The muscular legs would be good for speed over open ground, Cley saw. The thick, stinking pelt would keep its heat in and water out—a sturdy design. The big mouth panted, paused, tried again. “I was ordered to find you. Stop you.”

Cley felt her forehead. No skin broken, but it ached. The thing must have hit her with its own bony brow. “You could’ve been easier.” The throbbing in her head spoke of more pain to come.

“I was told. You would resist. You did.”

Seeker circled the thing, spitting out whispers of anger, its face compressed around a working mouth. It clenched and unclenched its claws, as if it were fighting down the impulse to sink them again into the thick mass. The Semisent started to get up, and Seeker kicked dirt in its face. The smartdog went into a coughing fit and pawed at its eyes.

“And me?” Seeker demanded.

“You I tried to get first. Thought you would run away after I missed you.”

Seeker blinked in surprise. “You are truly stupid, then.”

“Was to kill you. Not her. Was to find her.”

Seeker asked, “Why kill me?”

“You are crucial, will take her away from Superiors.”

“You mean the Supras?” Cley asked.

“Yes, so you call them. They need you. To regenerate your kind. Make more like you.” The Semisent gave this information warily, eyes shifting from Cley to Seeker and back again.

“They would keep you under paternal tyranny,” Seeker observed.

“Versus your maternal care? Maybe so.” Cley scowled. “What’ll we do with it?”

Seeker jumped atop the Semisent and stood on it, calm returning to its face. “It will have some way of telling the holy ones and the Supras.”

“If it hasn’t already.”

“True. We will have to make quick time now.”

“What’ll we do with it?”

“I see only one course.”

“Yeah, we can tie it to a tree—”

“Do not make trouble. For my masters.” The bulky thing blinked at them. The face seemed to frown, but there were already so many folds in its skin that Cley could not be sure.

“They made plenty for us,” Cley said, “just sending you.”

“I have another solution,” Seeker said—controlled now, almost pitying.

The Semisent studied Seeker with growing concern. “Do not harm me. I am just a messenger.”

Seeker stepped back from the thing. It had somehow acquired Cley’s little projector. “And now you shall be my message.”

It shot the Semisent. The head smacked down, lay still.

Cley sputtered with shock. Seeker favored the direct approach, and few words, but this was too much.

“It was intelligent!” she protested.

“It was a bad idea. And it would have enslaved you to a Supra agenda, as it was itself enslaved.”

“But, but…”

“I had to choose between its life and yours,” Seeker said carefully. “It would have sent a signal; the holy ones would track us, take you back. I could not allow that. That would run counter to the direction events must flow.”

“How can you be sure?”

Seeker grimaced. “You have a quality your kind terms ‘intuition.’ When the unconscious portion of your mind—by far the larger, by the way—knows something, it pops into your aware mind.”

“Sure, every—you mean you don’t?”

“Let us say that I can see more of my own thinking than you do.”

“So you have a feeling for how this whole confusing thing is going?”

“Alas, it is in the portion I cannot see. So I navigate by ‘feel,’ as you say.”

“And you feel you had to kill it?”

“It was sent to capture you and kill me.”

Seeker was slicing the Semisent with its claws, now fully extended. Daintily it handed Cley the projector and set to work cutting away portions of the flanks.

“You’re going to…” Cley could not bring herself to say it.

“I, like you, have a meat tooth.”

“I,
ah
…”

“And I, like nature, do not waste life. It is ordained.”

Cley gasped, her head reeling. This was a Seeker she could not have imagined. “You seem so gentle, so…so… You were sorry about the little flyer foxes…”

“I revere the natural, but this thing is not.” It bit off a slice of raw meat and smacked with relish. “Its taste is its only redeeming quality.”

Cley turned away. “I never know what you’ll do next.”

“Umm. Refreshing, isn’t it?” Seeker swallowed the slice whole.

A
S A GIRL,
she had gotten used to friendships with other girls that began in intense, shared revelations and moved into comfortable small talk. With Seeker there were some early revelations and a lot of hard talk, none of it small. And she was never fully comfortable. Sometimes she could not read its facial expressions, and when she mentioned this, Seeker said, “At my age, I have the face I deserve.”

So she stuck to what she knew, as they moved quickly through the shrouding forests, avoiding the flitting ships above. They passed by colonies of plants that had a social life, communicating through pollen sprays their needs and distresses. Cley could read these from childhood on, and was pleased to find that Seeker asked for instruction. Some of these signals her Meta had adjusted and seen propagated around the globe by genetic invader seed. These were the log crafts her Meta had cherished. They were part of a philosophy the Originals had brought to the world and, with Supra help, had been applying to this latest of many revivals old Earth had seen.

Cley knew these lessons deeply. The chant of her Meta had ingrained them:

Fast learns, slow remembers. The quick, small things instruct the slow and big by bringing change. The big and slow control by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all the attention; slow has all the power. A robust system needs both.

They had recited it every day at breakfast. She yearned for those lost days, gone forever, and the next time they slept, she had dreams about her Moms, her lost life, and of her shadow-faced father.

They set out at morning and quickly became uneasy. Both she and Seeker sensed an ominous tone flavoring the air. Cley had perceptions that linked to the forest, unconscious yet alert. Her alarm bells were ringing. “Stop,” she said. “Sit.”

Seeker sniffed. “I agree.“

“Don’t move.”

Something was seeking them, and it had seeped into the woods. The only way to hide was to be embedded deeper than it was.

They sat with the sun at their backs, so approaching animals had to squint. Cley shed any clothing that wasn’t a natural color, and rubbed the rest and her skin with a sachet of bayberry and pine. She flattened herself against a tree to blend in. Her Meta’s ruddy skin color did not stand out, and she knew to make only measured movements.

Birds nearby gave
chip-chip
calls, alerting all to these strangers squatting below. So she gave back
pish
through clenched teeth, an alarm call of a similar species. To introduce a new sound she made an injured-mouse squeak by sucking the back of her hand. A squat reptile predator came running for a meal, distracting the birds nearby. When it found nothing and went away, the area settled down, the traces of her and Seeker forgotten. Only then could she slowly sense the microbial mat carrying a slow rise and ebb of information.

The world took on a gentle, undulating movement. Leaves rode on the swell of the water, and light glanced along their edges with an ageless rhythm. In the world’s fluency came a tidal movement, massive and yet effortless. She felt a myriad of linked sensations
. A small death among leaves. A gentle current as a twirling leaf descended to the forest floor
.

Within this flux, she sought only to place accents: to make a moment turn
just so
. Seeker followed, a raccoon thumb articulating from a thick-jointed wrist, an eye swiveling in its socket. Like slits in a silk curtain, the quietly gathering sense of place revealed the momentary anatomy of the world beneath its deceptive sheen.

She felt herself and Seeker merge with the woods. And a mere moment later, an inspecting pressure wave swept through the entire forest—probing, prodding, sensing the slight perturbations of dissonance and movement that would have revealed their presence.

The wave washed on. It had missed them.

They kept their positions for a long time. Gradually, the deeply shuttered parts of the woods opened anew, a pressure passed, and they uncoiled their minds from the immersed state they had reached.

Technology can only do so much. The Supras had used the deeply embedded sensors that wreathed the entire planet, integrating the layers of minute data, looking for the fugitives. And they had failed.

“Time to move on,” Cley spoke at last, stretching.

“I agree. We have a meeting.”

“What? With who?”

“With what—but you shall see.” Seeker would say no more.

As they trotted steadily through dense woods, Cley pondered the enigma that was Seeker. Its killing of the Semisent had shocked her, but in so many other ways she and it seemed on the same wavelength. Maybe more than they should, now that she thought about it. Procyons weren’t human, after all.

In the early eras of the many human subspecies, it had been easier. Simpler, Original minds like hers had identified the dark elements of life with the random tragedies that humans suffered, from storm and disease and nature’s myriad calamities. That time lay in the unimaginable past.

Instead, later beings like Seeker saw the world as a place forever in flux. Disasters, rather than being blows against life, were inevitable sways, bringing rejuvenation along with death. Wildfires cleared tree canopies, letting in sunlight. Floods swept silt from gravel beds, renewing river plains and deltas.

Nature’s nature was change. It was not a museum.

“That Semisent…” Cley began, then didn’t know how to frame her question.

“Morality is an artifact of human culture, yes?” Seeker said, not slowing.

“I suppose.”

“You invented it to grease your social relations, back when you lived in troops and hunted and squatted around your first fires.”

“Hey, I don’t go
that
far back.”

Seeker shrugged—not easy to do while trotting quickly. “Your codes apply to yourself, not to animals.”

“You’re an animal.”

“Quite. To us, most human morality is carefully thought-through self-congratulation.”

“Hey, we have a code for other beings, too. Even aliens out in the stars, the Library says.”

She was rather proud of having turned up this fact in her scattershot imbibing of the Library’s trove, and was disappointed when Seeker simply skipped the point, saying, “Some beings lie outside the moral bounds—abominations, you would say.”

“Like what?”

“The Malign.”

“Never met it.”

“You might.”

“So Semisents…”

“To us, abominations.”

Cley let it go. To the procyon’s thinking, artifices like Semisents, if they seemed to Seeker out of the flowing channel of nature, had no rights to exist. She was sure that was why the beast left the half-eaten carcass behind, not trying to hide it at all. “You are my message,” Seeker had said to it. A message left for the Supras to ponder. Seeker played for keeps.

She was thinking about this, enjoying the run, and so went well past Seeker when it stopped.

It had opened the side of a large tree. The horny bark peeled back in curls, and light seeped from within.

This was no surprise to Cley, whose people had often sheltered in the many trees teched for just such use. She squeezed through the narrow slit, and soon the bark closed upon them, crackling, leaving only a wan, phosphorescent glow from the walls to guide them. The tree was hollow. All trees were dead inside, anyway, just big cylinders of past years’ cellulose with living skins. Someone long ago had engineered this huge barrel trunk that built an interior from the compacted dead matter.

She looked up. In this variation there were vertical compartments connected by ramps. U-shaped growths grew all along the walls. Some creature had nearly filled the compartments with large containers, grainy packages of rough fiber.

“Storage,” was all Seeker would say in answer to her questions. “Come.”

Using the U-growths, they climbed up through ten compartments. All were crowded with stacks of oblong, crusty containers. Sweating, Cley hoisted herself up into a large vault, completely empty with a wide transparent wall. Cley thumped the window-wall, and the heavy, waxy stuff gave with a soft resistance. She watched the still trees outside, stately cylinders pointing up into a sky that flickered with traceries of quick luminescence.

The Supras were still searching. Something else, too. A bright flare of momentary combat spoke of a conflict she had seen too much of already. She turned away, glad to be inside thick walls.