Beyond Infinity (36 page)

“How’d they do it?”

“By cycling asteroids, passing them by worlds over many millions of years. The Dons emerged from their labyrinths—for they preferred living underground, no one knows why—to regulate these slowly building outward tugs.”

“Umm. This Mars looks better off than Earth.”

“True, for no humans have meddled with it for nearly a billion years. Once it, too, was desert.”

This Cley flatly refused to believe, for Mars was a carpet of rich, many-colored convolutions. Earth might have been like this, she imagined, without the endless tinkering by the human forms that came before the Supras, and the eras of desert-loving bots. “Can we live there?”

“Oh yes—but we must pass on. It is too dangerous for us.”

Seeker pointed. Along the ring, filaments of orange and blue twisted. They shot up and down the towers, as though seeking a way in.

Cley whispered, “Lightning.”

“It searches,” Seeker said.

She could see magnetic storms rolling in from beyond Mars, blowing against the ring like surf from an immense ocean. “Can it damage the ring?”

“It may destroy all of that great creature, if it thinks you are there.”

“Damn! The Malign is everywhere!”

“Spreading, always spreading. When we left Earth, it had penetrated sunward only momentarily, and at great cost. Now it hunts amid the worlds. It roves and probes. This Leviathan must have seemed a likely target.” Seeker’s brow crinkled with concern. “It has even learned to muster packs like the skysharks.”

Cley bit her lip in exasperation. “Things are getting worse fast.”

“This is as we wish,” Seeker said mildly.

“Huh? Why?”

“If it hid among the stars, we could never be sure of its demise.”

Cley shook her head. “You think you can kill it?”

“Not I.”

“Who can?”

“Everyone, or no one.”

C
LEY AWOKE WITH
a start, uneasy, almost as if something—or someone—had been watching her… That nebulous disquiet vanished as she saw they had company. A furry thing was sitting on Seeker’s shoulder, whispering. Seeker answered in a whisper, glanced at Cley. The furry thing went on talking, and Cley admired the elegance of it, the sculpted head and graceful body. Then it glanced her way, eyes widened—and it was gone in a flash.

“What was that?”

Seeker said, “One of the intelligent cats.”

“I heard they were wiped out in a war with us.”

“They were—on Earth. So they fled here.”

“Housecats in space. Sorry I spooked it. I’d have liked to hear it talk.”

“They do not speak to humans, ever.”

“Why?”

“You tried to render them extinct.”

“Not me. And they’re just pets, after all.”

“They are major figures in the intellectual life of Leviathan.”

“Cats? Say, what was it telling you?”

“About another Original.”

Cley blinked, startled. “Here?”

“Not far.”

“Let’s go!”

The cat was correct in how close the other Original had been. The hiding place he or she had used, in a dense, snaggy stand, must have been within sight of her and Seeker. Cley had no idea how they’d evaded the procyon’s nose and ears. Whoever it was had obviously left recently and hastily—the leaves crushed by his passage still wept slow, pearly tears from broken edges. And he was moving fast, away from her and Seeker. Fleeing? Why?

The pursuit took hours, and she was sweaty and tired when she found him. A man, tall and leanly muscular, and he didn’t want to talk. He was definitely running
from
her—his speed only increased when he glanced behind. Cley pursued him through the foliage, leaving Seeker behind. She cornered him in a bower behind a slow-tumbling waterfall. “Hey! I’m one of you!” she called.

He glowered and stayed silent.

He looked vaguely like others in her tribe and Cley tried to compare her own face to his. Could this be…? “We’re Originals, you and me—I can tell! I’m Hard River Meta.”

“I won’t discuss my origins.” He edged away from her, eyes darting, looking for a way out. “We, we should not meet now.”

“Huh? Why?”

“You must…keep focus,” he said reluctantly, eyes averted.

“My Mothers—”

“No! You shouldn’t be talking to me—it’s too dangerous! Leave me alone!” He seemed suddenly scared, maybe even angry, but he didn’t seem angry at her. He gathered himself, tensing…

“But—”

“I do not want to know. You’re with”—a jerk of the head toward the hull—“
them,
Supras. Can’t stand them; that’s why I came out here in the first place. They’re coming. That’s all I need to know.”

“Well, why? What’s wrong…?”

“Logic doesn’t always rule our hearts. But here it should.” To this odd statement he added a sudden look of warm longing, gazing into her eyes. His mouth moved, but no words came out.

“Why can’t we—” she started.

And he was gone, diving headlong into the waterfall. She went after him but quickly lost sight of his brown body in the spray and churn.

They arced outward.

Cley fretted about the man—why had he run away?—but then, despairing of making any sense of it, made herself put the memory aside. Instead, she struggled to understand the incessant activity around her. Her inboards prompted her with darting whispers. She stitched together some understanding of what she had seen in the days that passed.

The original solar system had been a hostile realm, with all worlds but Earth ranging from the dead to the murderous. Then came the fabled, eon-long Reworking by the Dons. That great crafting had left Earth as the nearest child of the sun, Venus next, and then Mars. All were ripe gardens now.

Beyond Mars lay the true center of the great system, the Jove complex. Its gargantuan hub had once been the planet Jupiter. The swollen, simmering superplanet that now sat at the center of Jove glowed with a wan infrared shine of its own. It had been fattened by gobbling up the masses of ancient Uranus and Neptune. The collisions of those worlds had been the most legendary of all the spectacular events in human history.

She could find no images of those gaudy catastrophes. They lay so far in the past now that little record remained, even in the Library.

After its deep atmosphere had calmed, bulging Jupiter’s steady glow had warmed the chilly wastes of its moons. Then Saturn, cycled through many near-miss passes around Jupiter, had been stripped of much of its mass. This gauzy bounty was spread among the ancient moons. A shrunken Saturn of cool blue oceans now orbited Jupiter. After all this prodigious gravitational engineering, the long-lost Saturnian rings were replaced, and looked exactly like the originals.

The baked rock of Mercury had arrived then, spun outward from the sun by innumerable kinetic minuets. Light liquids from Saturn pelted the hardpan plains of Mercury for a thousand years, and now the once barren world swung also around Jupiter, brimming with a curious pink and orange air. Seeker remarked that a particular highly prized delicacy of winged life flew in the russet cloud decks there.

All this had come about through adroit gravitational encounters over millennia. Carefully tuned, each world now harbored some life, though of very different forms. The Jove system hung at the edge of the sun’s life zone. Swollen Jupiter added just enough ruddy infrared glow to make all the salvaged mass of the ancient gas giant planets useful. Beyond Jove wove only the orbits of rubble and ice and, farther still, comets slow-blooming under cultivation.

Cley watched with foreboding the approach of the Jove system’s grand gravitational gavotte. Just as they were drawn to the true vital center of the solar system, so would be the Malign.

About her the Leviathan regrew itself, moist mysteries abounding, but the springlike fervor of its renewal did not lighten Cley’s mood. Seeker was of little help; she dozed often and seemed unworried about the coming conflict. To distract herself, Cley peered out from the transparent blisters, trying to fathom the unfolding intricacies outside.

She had to overcome a habit of thought ingrained in all planetborne life. Space was not mere emptiness, but the mated assets of energy, matter, and room. Planets, in contrast, were inconvenient sites, important mostly because on their busy surfaces life had begun.

After all, unruly atmospheres whip up dust, block sunlight, rust metals, hammer with their winds, overheat and chill, rub and worry. Gravity forced even simple land-roving life forms to use much of their bodies just to stand up. Even airless, rotating worlds robbed their surfaces of sunlight half the time. And nothing was negotiable: Planets gave a fixed day and night, gravity, and atmosphere. Life had to adjust to the iron rule of inertia.

In contrast, constant sunlight flooded the weatherless calm of space. Flimsy sheets could collect high-quality energy undimmed by roiling air. Cups could sip from the light rush of particles spewed out by the sun—a wind that fluttered but never failed. Asteroids offered ample mass without gravity’s demanding grip. Just as an origin in tidepools did not mean that shallow water was the best place for later life, planets inevitably became backwaters, as well.

Biological diversity demands room for variation, and space had an abundance of sheer volume to offer the first spaceborne organisms. Apparently, humans had crafted the first of these, then lost control as evolution took charge. These earliest forms had sported tough but flexible skins, light and tight, stingy with internal gas and liquids. Evolution used their fresh, weightless geometries to design shrewd alternatives to the simple, cylindrical guts and spines of the Earthborne.

Cley expected to see fewer of the free-roving spaceforms as the Leviathan glided outward. Instead, the abundance and pace of life quickened. Though sunlight fell with the square of distance from the sun, the available volume rose as the cube. Lessening energies traded off against more free volume in which to experiment.

Evolution’s blind craft had filled this swelling niche with myriad forms. Spindly, full-sailed, baroquely elegant, they swooped around the Leviathan.

But inside, the great being teemed with an even greater profusion of life, or “animated water,” as Seeker put it. Her explorations took her into odd portions of the Leviathan. She ambled along shallow lakes and even across a shadowy, bowl-shaped desert. She found a chunky iceball the size of a foothill, covered with harvesting animals. The Leviathan had captured this comet nucleus and was paying out its fluid wealth with miserly care.

She paid a price for her excursions. Humans had not been privileged among species here since well before Sonomulia was a dream. Twice she narrowly escaped being a meal for predators that looked very much like animated thornbushes. The second one was a damned near miss. Cley turned back, or rather, completed her circumnavigation of the Leviathan. Somewhat the worse for wear, she found Seeker just where she had left her days before, and the beast tended to her cuts, bites, and scratches.

Cley had done some thinking. Not having a soul to talk to actually helped, somewhat to her surprise. “Why are you helping me, Seeker After Patterns?” she asked as Seeker licked a cut.

Seeker took her time answering, concentrating on pressing her nose along a livid slash made by the sharp-leaved bushes. When she looked up, the cut had sealed so well, only a hairline mark remained. “To strengthen you.”

Cley laughed. “Well, it’s sure as hell working. Weightlessness has given me muscles I didn’t know I had.”

“Not your body. Your Talent.”

She blinked in the pale yellow sunlight that slanted through the bowers. “I was wondering why I keep hearing things. That last thornbush—”

“You caught its hunt pleasure.”

“Good thing, too. It was fast.”

“Can you sense any humans now?”

“No, there aren’t…” Cley frowned. “Wait, something… Why, it’s like…”

“Supras.”

“How’d you know?”

“The time is drawing close.”

“Time for what?”

“The struggle.”

“You weren’t just giving this li’l Talent of mine a chance to grow, were you? You’re taking me somewhere, too.”

“To Jove.”

“Sure, but I mean… Oh, I see. That’s where it’ll happen.”

Seeker lounged back, tongue lolling. “Humans have difficulty in understanding that Earth is not important now. The system’s center of life is Jove.”

“So the Malign has to win there?”

“There may be no winning.”

“Well, I know what losing will be like.” Cley thought of the ashen bodies of all the people she had ever loved.

Seeker shook her big head—a human gesture, a politeness she recognized now. “It is because we do not know what losing would be like that we resist.”

“Really? Look, it stomped on us as if we were bugs.”

“To it, you are.”

“And to you?”

“Do not insects have many uses? In my view they are far more seemly in the currents of life than, say, just another species of the Chordata.”

“Cor what?”

“Those who have spinal cords.”

Irked, Cley said, “Well, aren’t you just another spinal type?”

“True enough. I did not say I was more important than you.”

“You compared us Ur-humans—me!—with insects.”

“With no insects, soon there would be no humans.”

Exasperated, Cley puffed noisily, sending her hair up in a dancing plume. “The Supras sure got along without them, living in their dear, dead old Sonomulia.”

“The Supras are not of your species.”

“Not human?”

“Not truly.” Seeker finished ministering to her wounds and gave her an affectionate lick on the chin. “Nor as tasty.”

Cley eased her blouse gingerly over her cuts. “I have to admit, I pretty much felt that way myself. Except the taste part.”

“They cannot be true companions to you.”

“They’re the only thing left.”

“Perhaps not, after we are done.”

Cley sighed. “I’m just concentrating on avoiding that Malign.”

“It will not care so greatly about you after you have served.”

“Served? Fought, you mean?”

“Both.”

She felt a light trill streak through her mind. At first she confused it with warbling birdsong. But then she recalled the sensation of blinding, swift thought, conversations whipped to a cyclonic pitch…“Supras. They’re coming.”