Beyond Infinity (43 page)

Cley struggled but could find no way through the cloying hot ink that oozed into her throat, that seared her bowels. Faintly she felt that these turgid sensations were, in fact…ideas. She could not comprehend them as cool abstractions. They reeked and banged, cut and seared, rubbed and poked at her.

And on this stage ideas moved as monstrous actors, capable of anything.

She understood now, as quickly as she could frame the question, what the madness cloaking her wanted.

It desired to create deep wells in space-time. Compression of matter to achieve this in turn required the concerted efforts, willing or not, of many magnetic minds—for in the end, only intelligence coolly divorced from matter could truly control masses and their warps.

So the Malign digested those magnetic immanences. And forced their energies to its own desires.

Such a venture risked the destruction of the entire galaxy. Fresh matter had to be created, carved, and compacted. This could curve space-time enough to trap the galaxy into a self-contracting sphere, cut off from the universe even as it bled downward into a yawning gravitational pit.

Only in this way could the Malign escape the brane, as the Singular had done. Join the Singular, which in turn desired the death of the Malign.

In joining it, the Malign would find the means to kill the Singular. Somehow.

The galaxy could not accept such danger. The magnetic minds had debated the wisdom of such a venture while the Malign was confined. Their discussion had been dispassionate, for they were not threatened by the destruction of the galaxy. Magnetic intelligences could follow the Malign beyond such geometric oblivion, since they were not tied to the fate of mere matter.

But the galaxy brimmed with lesser life. And in the last billion years, as humanity slept in Sonomulia, life had integrated.

Near most stars teemed countless entities, bound to planets or orbiting them. Farther out, between the shimmering suns, the wisps of magnetic structures gazed down on these chemical agencies. Scarcely more than packets of moving water, but the magnetics watched them with a slow, brooding spirit. Their inability to transcend the speed of light meant that these most vast of all intelligences took millennia to speak across the chasms of the galactic arms.

Yet slowly, slowly, through these links a true galactic mind had arisen. It had been driven to more complex levels of perception by the sure knowledge that eventually the Malign would escape.

The Magnetics became the highest form—but not the only part—of the galactic mind. The Chemicals still had a role to play. They were quick, vibrant, mortal. They were fascinating and vivid to the Magnetics, whose pace was at best glacial.

Suddenly, Cley realized,
They mean us. Chemicals. Me!

So the magnetic beasts could not abandon the matter-born to extinction. They had ruled against the Malign’s experiment before, and now they moved to crush the new-risen malevolency before it could carry out the phased and intricate compression of mass.

Cley saw this in a passing instant of struggle, while she swam in a milky satin fog—and then immeasurably later, through sheets the colors of bloody brass. She was like a blind ship adrift, with her senses the sole gyroscope of any use.

The pain began then.

It soared through her. If she had once thought of herself and the other Ur-humans as elements in an electrical circuit, now she understood what this could mean.

The agony was timeless. Her jaws strained open, tongue stuck straight out, pink and burning. Her eyes bulged. She shook with terror and then went beyond that to a longing, a need for extinction simply to escape the terror.

Her agony was featureless. No tick of time consoled her. Her previous life, memories, pleasures—all dwindled into nothing beside the flinty mountain of her pain.

She longed to scream.
Rin! Seeker!
She could feel a faint murmur of Rin’s body-net…but it was fading.

Muscles refused to unlock in her throat, her face. Excruciation made her into a statue.

And through her came a bulge, thickening in her, a blunt momentum. She felt what it needed, and
pushed
. Gave, letting the deep recesses of her mind gush out, letting the Multifold have the substratum of her Original self. It needed to know how her worn old mental machinery clanked and ground and slogged forward. To use her as an ancient tool.

Something huge came seeking. She sent the Multifold her skills, shaped in ancient days:
The only way to turn the tide is to be embedded deeper than it is.

She felt herself and the Multifold merge. It was the same sensation she had felt back on Earth, when she and Seeker had sunk into the forest and eluded the Supras. Here the span was vast, but her instinct played out through the Multifold—damping its salients, making it invisible to the Malign.

A moment later, an inspecting pressure wave swept through—probing, prodding, sensing the slight perturbations of dissonance and movement that would have revealed their presence. All the Malign’s energies mounted behind the pressure…

And the wave washed on. It had missed them. Now she sent. The Multifold snapped out of the state she had sent it to. It coiled, struck.

The sensation was not like orgasm but like what came after. The knowledge of something gainfully lost.

But the cost…

The pain was now exquisite. It sucked the strata from her. Her cramped way of seeing the world was a language in itself, and she finally gave it forth. The
her
of her blew outward, was sponged up. Gone.

Without this, we could not traverse.

It was not Kata or any Supra. The voice strummed low and certain. She sensed a distant presence that was embroiled in a terrible vast struggle. A tiny fraction had come to her and taken what she could yield, what she could birth, and now went back into the fray.

The Malign’s agony was terrible. She gave the Multifold her fierceness, then the ancient blood rage that humans carried. That helped. Her pent-up angers arced with purpose, animating the Multifold. She was only a part, but a vital one.

The Malign was coming apart. Its stored energies turned against itself, searing and cutting.

It went on a long time and left her limp. In the end came not a sense of triumph but of tragedy, of gray exhaustion.

Thanks to you. We leave you as we found you. Enjoy your simple self and do not try to be more. To be like this, ancient and quick, is enough. There are times when we wish we could be so again.

She heard a scream. Not aloud, but in the Talent.

It was a human. A Supra. She caught the seeping away of life. Dying. Rin.

And then, without transition, she was standing, water cascading all over her, soggy hair bunched atop her head, her shoulders and breasts white with soapy smears.

She felt this, but it was somehow abstract. An imposed moment.

Her prickly flesh shimmered and melted, and her nipples were fat spigots. They snagged bubbles and dripped rich drops. The air eagerly lapped these teardrops as they fell. Her eyes closed, but she could still somehow sense a pulse fluttering in her throat. A satin moistness slithering over her tender breasts.

She screamed. Coming at her suddenly, this assault was close, intimate—horrifying.

She screamed again. The splashing waterfall vanished in an instant.

She knew that this—this place, this state of mind—it, too, was part of the Malign.

Or a last, brushing kiss from it. For it was genuinely mad and contained within it a skein that humans would see as love, or hate, or malignant resolve. But these were categories evolved for a species. They no more described another class of being than violins and drums describe a storm.

Some of its madness was human. Lodged in magnetic helices lay the mentality of man. Several races had been digested by the Malign, and each left a signature.

Its ambition, to escape the bands of the brane itself, was born in part of humanity. Mankind had helped build the Malign, in arrogance and the need to know, and those qualities had been reflected in what they made. Many species throughout the galaxy, and many of man’s finest and bravest, had fallen—subsumed in the long-ago fight to stop their creation. Many species throughout the galaxy had built the Malign. Lacing through the pain were streaks of ancient guilt.

Rin had known this, she saw. That was some of the weight he carried. Curiosity was never simple.

The Malign had a substrate of magnetic beings, too. She felt them now, ponderous and eerie. They brimmed throughout the solar system. Focused here, they fumed with red anger. Their intelligences were neither higher nor lower than humans’, for they were not born from the evolutionary forces that had driven humanity to solve problems. They had survived by altering their perceptions. How this happened, Cley could not fathom.

She hovered above a bubble of frayed light, a star at its center. A sphere, alive with racing darts of luminescence. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

And suddenly, Seeker was there. With her.

Seeker’s ears flexed and changed from cinnamon to burnt yellow. It gestured at the sphere. “I think it best to call all that the System Solar.”

“What…what…?”

“She gave birth to humankind. She is a third as old as the universe itself. She is a source of life everlasting.”

Cley knew not where she was or what had happened, but…“And you, Seeker, you’re her agent, aren’t you?”

Seeker nodded and laughed. Or at least Cley thought this apparition did. She was never really sure what Seeker meant, and perhaps that was for the best. “From the beginning. We procyons were made for such tasks.”

“I… I suppose it’s reassuring, being part of something so large.”

Seeker said, “It is the foundation of my being.”

Cley
felt
this, a jolt of calm certainty. As though now, here, she could enter into Seeker’s mind.

Seeker waved a paw and went on. “Rin knew of her. But he described her as endless chains of regulatory messages between the worlds, of intricate feedback, and so missed the point.”

“What point?”

“Rin saw only metabolism. He missed purpose.”

“Ah. I—”

In a withering instant, Seeker dwindled down a deep fault line, falling away.

Gone in a moment. Utterly. “Wait!”

But Cley was in the grasp of something else now.

For a sliding instant she caught a glimpse of humanity, from
their
view. The procyons, yes, but something larger, behind them,
in
them.

The grip of something else tightened around her. She blinked and was in another place. A foreboding sense coursed in her, and she felt real panic—
Run!
—but could not move.

A great eagle hung in black space, near a sulfurous planet.

Its wings flapped, long and lazy. Diamond-sharp eyes glinted. The beak hung slightly open, as though about to call out a booming cry. She watched the flex of the immense feathers for a while as muscles bulged beneath the wings. Only then did she see that the bird flew between the planet behind it and a sun in the distance—a star, red and hairy with immense chromatic flares.

And across the span of the immense wings nestled small, fevered mites. At one wingtip rose pyramids. Mountains capped in white framed broad plains, which in turn led to silvery, spiky cities. Across the wingspan lay ages of greatness and long nights of despair. But always the ferment, the jutting towers of boundless ambition, the dusty ruins brought by wear and failure. At the far wingtip a fogged land lay, just beyond her ability to make out detail.
So much history—no Library could know this…

Humanity in its timescape. All who had ever carried the gleam kindled behind searching eyes—they abided there.

Mites. Pests.

Gathered in time’s long tapestry, on the back of the eagle. They milled and fought and saw only their limited moment. They did not know that they flew between unreadable spheres, in the perfumed air of vast night.

As the bird flapped past her, it turned. The glinting black eyes looked at her once; the beak opened slightly. Malignant.

Then it turned away and flew on. Intent. Resolute.

Cley raged.

She sent torrents of herself—
age-old fury, the stuff of the species, an anger out of Afrik so long in coming—
she sent it forth, her own tiny part of the exploding battle…

And she was
in it
at last, in a single fractured eyeblink, caught up in hard momentum, her own small self
linked
to something far larger, but
a part
and now knit fully in, the entire huge moment acting through her as she
felt
the kinship of her kind, of all kinds hominid together and still coming, her very self extracted and sucked into the moment, her inner way of seeing the world somehow uplifted into a big shadowed thing she only glimpsed as it passed—larger than the eagle, more ferocious and yet more kind…

There came a moment like an immense word on the verge of being spoken.

And then it was over.

She sat up. Vines holding her were like rasping, hot breaths. Her wrists were rubbed raw.

“Where’s the bubble? I thought I escaped.”

No answer. A woody, moist smell. She was back inside the Leviathan, feeling…

She vomited violently. Coughed. Gasped.

Brown blood had caked, thick and crusty, at her wrists. Her fingernails had snapped off. The tips were buried in her palms. Numbly Cley licked them clean.

Someone came scrabbling down a vine. “Have a rat,” Seeker said, and held up a green morsel on a forked stick.

R
IN! NO ANSWERING
murmur of his body-net. Nothing.

She shook her head and was sick again.

“It’s done,” Seeker said.

“I… Who won?”

“We did.”

“What…what…?”

“Losses?” Seeker paused as though listening to a distant song. “Billions of lives. Billions of loves, which is another way to count.”

She closed her eyes and felt a strange, dry echo of Seeker’s voice. This was Seeker’s Talent. Through it she witnessed the gray, blasted wastes that stretched throughout the solar system. Worlds blistered, atmospheres belched into vacuum, countless lives gone.