Beyond Infinity (44 page)

“The Malign?

“Eaten by us,” Seeker said.

“Us?”

“Life. The galactic mind.”

“I was with it. Horrible…” She shook herself to throw off the memory. Her Talent caught frayed strands of Seeker’s ebbing vision. “You…see it all, don’t you?”

“Only within the solar system. The speed of light constrains.”

“You can sense all life? On all the worlds?”

“And between them.”

“How?”

Seeker pricked up her outsized ears. Waves of amber and yellow chased one another around her pelt. “Like this.” More ear flicks, and a grin.

“Well, what’s that?”

“This.”

In a glimmering she saw fragile, lonely Earth, now among the blighted worlds. But it had been diminished by humans, she saw; the Malign had not injured it. Humans had hemmed in its horizons. Sentinel Earth had played its role and now could return to obscurity. Or to greatness.

“What will happen to it?” Cley asked quietly. Her body ached, but she put that fact aside.

“Earth? I imagine the Supras will dream on there.” Seeker nipped at the rat with obvious relish.

“Just dream?”

Seeker shook one paw. She had just burned it on the cooking stick, and whimpered in pain. Cley saw the hollows beneath Seeker’s eyes. There was a weathered, wan look to the age-old raccoonlike face—older, worn gray. Cley sensed that the creature had suffered much since she last saw her, but there was no hint in her speech. “Human dreams can be powerful…,” a breath, wheezed out, “…as we have just witnessed.”

A moment hovered between them. Cley saw that they would never be quite the same, she and Seeker. They had each been through something that they could not speak of, or know from the other’s perspective. So it was with differing intelligences.

Maybe that was how it should be. Anyway, it was.

Cley then saw, through Seeker’s strangely bounded Talent, the Earth shrinking into insignificance. It became a speck inside a great sphere—the same glowing ball she had seen in the struggle.

“What is it?”

“An oasis.”

“The whole solar system?”

“An oasis biome, one of billions strewn through the galaxy. Between them live only the magnetic minds. And passing small travelers bound upon their journeys, of course.”

“This is your ‘higher cause,’ isn’t it?” Cley grimaced. Compared with pain, abstractions were nothing. “I mean, when Rin asked if you would help defend human destiny?”

Seeker farted loudly, grinning. “He was guilty of the heresy of humanism.”

“How can that be heresy?”

“The narcissistic devotion to things human? ‘Man is the measure of all things’? Easily.”

“Well, he has to speak for his species.”

“His genus, you mean, if you would include yourself.”

Cley frowned. “I don’t know how close to them I am. Or what use they’ll have for me now.”

“You share the samenesses of your order, which are perhaps the most important.”

“Order?”

“The order of primates. A useful intermediate step. You possess the general property of seeing events in close focus. Your ears hear sounds proportional to the logarithm of the intensity. Otherwise you could not hear a bee hum and still tolerate a handclap next to your ear. Or see both by moonlight and at high noon—your eyesight adjusts.”

“Those are all damn useful,” Cley said defensively. She could not see Seeker’s point.

“True, but you also consider time the same way. Your logarithmic perception stresses the present, diminishing the past or the future. What happened at breakfast clamors for attention alongside the origin of the universe.”

Cley shrugged. “Hell, we have to survive.” And saying it, she knew that was not enough. She had to grow through all that had happened. She was just a kid, after all. Maybe all humans were.

“Yes, and hell is what you would bear if you had continued with your heresy.”

She shot Seeker an inquiring look. These were grave words, but Seeker rolled lazily and swung from two vines, using them to cavort in midair with flips and turns and airy leaps. Had the Supras moved her back into the Leviathan? Or the extradimensional Morphs? Maybe it didn’t matter. Plenty had happened without her understanding. Right now, that was perfectly fine. She was content just to feel air whispering in and out of her lungs.

Between her huffs and puffs Seeker said, “You humans would have prevented our oasis biome from integrating, with your grandiose plans.”

Cley felt a spurt of irritation. Who was this animal, to deride humanity’s billion-year history? “Look, I might not like Rin and the rest all that much, but—”

“Your trouble is that contrary to the logarithmic time sense, evolution proceeds exponentially. And the argument of the exponent is the complexity of life forms.”

“And what’s that mean?” Cley asked, determined to sail through this airy talk on a practical tack.

“One-celled organisms take billions of years to learn the trick of marrying into two or more. From dinosaurs to Ur-humans took only a hundred million. And then intelligent machines—admittedly, a short-lived experiment—required only a thousand.” Seeker did a flip and caught herself on a limb, her tongue lolling.

“You don’t seem all that advanced beyond us,” Cley said.

“How would you tell? If my kind had evolved into clouds, I could not have the fun of this, could I?” Seeker gulped down the rest of the fat green rat.

“Or the fun of dragging me all the way across the solar system?”

“There is duty, too.”

“To what?”

“To the System Solar. The biome.”

“I—” she began, but then a piercing cry burst through her mind.

It was Kata. Her Talent-wail broke like a wave of hopeless grief. Shards of sound.

Cley scrambled away through raspy vines, driven by the mournful, grating power. She nearly collided with a man in the foliage. He gazed blankly at her. She recognized something in that face…“Who’re you?” she asked.

“I have…no name.”

“Well, what…?” and then she fully sensed him. A tiny speck of Talent-talk purring in him. Ur-human, yes.

You were one of those links I felt,
she sent.

Yes. Those of us here…have gathered. We are afraid.
His feelings were curiously flat and without fervor. Unformed.

Cley sent carefully,
You’re like a…child.

I am like us.
The Talent-voice carried no rancor, and his face was smooth and unmarked, though that of a full-grown man. But no comprehension. No experience. He didn’t even take offense at being compared with a child.

She looked beyond him and saw a dozen like him, men and women of the same height and body type. Her eyes widened.
You’re me!

In a way,
he sent mildly.

From the Ur-humans came a tide of bland assent. They were untouched by time and trouble, she saw. Conjured up in some Supra process, from her DNA. Fast-grown, stamped with some nominal learning and skills. Yet she could not despise them.

The struggle—how was it?
she asked.

A woman sent,
We had never done anything like that.

“Well, you won’t again,” Cley said aloud. She preferred concrete speech to the sensation of dropping stones down the deep well of their emptiness.

A man stepped forward, and she recognized him. From the Leviathan—the one who had fled. He said, “They worked well, after all.”

He was tall and thin and handsome in a way that tugged at her memory. “I was there, some way. And you?”

He grinned, and lines crinkled around his eyes. “They sure hadn’t planned on my being there, and I was a last-minute addition, but yes, I was there, too. The Supras needed the help. You were the core of it, but they needed all the Originals they could get. They tried to get some from a higher dimension—humans who had gone into the Singularity, they were that desperate—but it didn’t work. So they were stuck with us, the home-grown.”

“You’re, you’re…”

“Your father.”

She embraced him silently, her world falling silently away. He was lean and weathered and somehow smelled right. In his high cheekbones and wary eyes she saw something of herself.
So much to learn.

“Wait, you…” She made a guess. “Hey, Seeker!”

The procyon was right there, as if she knew she would be called. Cley asked her, “All the talks we had about my father—you’ve used a lot, been behind a lot, haven’t you?”

Seeker blinked, and Cley rushed on. “This isn’t any kind of coincidence, is it? You agents of the biome—did you arrange this? My father being
here
, of all the unlikely places, I mean?”

“Of course.” She blinked, slow and heavy-lidded. “He was bound to be a wanderer, like you. And the Supras needed Originals to connect with the Singularity. So I arranged for him to be brought to the Leviathan.”

“Huh!” Cley turned back to her father. “Then why did you run away when I saw you?”

He smiled. “You were disturbed enough already. The connection the Supras wanted to make between you and the Multifold—it would have been made more…noisy.”

She admired his understatement. “Noisy?” More like the big bang, speeded up.

“But I needed to at least see you, y’know? The procyons sure weren’t happy when they found out.” His smile edged into a grin—a kid sharing a secret. “They like to think they’re in control, as much as the Supras do. They had a fit about my sneaking off and maybe messing with ‘the Plan.’ Tough.”

Back to Seeker. “He was my
backup
, right?”

Seeker’s silence and features were almost unreadable, but there seemed a trace of discomfort in them.

“Too strong a term,” her father said. “But yes, I was there to help.”

“So much was going on behind my back!” She didn’t like it, but could they be right? Maybe ignorance had helped simplify? She had always thought that knowing was better, but looking into her father’s warm eyes, she was not so sure.

And Seeker—“You led me by the nose, all the way!”

“And not an easy task—your nose is tiny compared with mine. I wanted you to survive what I suspected was coming.”

The simplicity of this somehow brought Cley some peace.

Afterward there was a long inward-looking time she could not remember. Inside her, doors opened and soft breezes blew her thoughts around, high and light. No talk, only a quiet. At the end of it she said to her father, “You went away from the Meta…”

“To see all these things, yep.” His smile was broad but rueful. “Out here. Figure out where we stand in it all.”

“Where do we?”

“Part of the flow. That’s all anybody is. Even Supras.” His disdain colored the name, but he did not lose his smile. She knew there was a whole story lurking there.

And it was…
him. So much to know.
Her heart seemed to swell, tightening her throat. The little girl still in her began, “But look, what—”

Then she saw the body. Some Ur-humans carried it between them in the light gravity. “Rin!”

Kata followed the corpse, her face stony, body stiff, emitting no Talent-trace at all now.

Cley asked a man-child, “What happened?”

“He…gave…too much.” The man-child’s throat sounded raw and unused, as though he had seldom spoken before.

Cley gazed into Rin’s open eyes. A rosy pattern of burst veins gave them the look of small, trapped seas. Blood lakes. Ruin at a cellular level.

Cley sighed. Kata put a hand on Cley’s shoulder but said and sent nothing.

Cley looked at Rin’s troubled, fractured eyes and tried to imagine what he had finally faced. She remembered that she had sensed him, that he had somehow helped her when she was in the Malign’s grip.

She had been the conduit, and he the guardian. And his cost had been to have his own mind burned away, the brain itself fused.

Yet his face held a calm dignity in death. She felt a pang of loss. He had been strange but majestic, in his way. Seeker was wrong; the Supras were still essentially human, though she would never be able to define just what that meant.

In a heartbeat she sensed something beyond the kinesthetic effects she had ridden, beyond the explanations she had glimpsed. The coiling complications of ambition, the crazed scheme to tunnel out of their own space-time…

That was part of it, yes.

But she remembered, too, the algae mats of Earth’s first oceans, billions of years ago. They lived on in the guts of animals, hiding in dark places where chemistry still kindled without oxygen. She recalled that her own tribe had used such yeasty agents in the brewing of beer. If such an organism could think, what would it make of the frothy spume of beer? As catalysts they were certainly taking part in processes transcending themselves, yielding benefits they could not imagine. If they could somehow know, they might well feel immeasurably exalted.

But to those who brewed beer’s casual delights, yeasts were unimaginably far beneath the realm of importance, mere dregs of evolution. And whatever dim perceptions the yeasts could muster would hardly resemble the talk and laughter and argument that swirled through the minds that felt the pleasant effects of that beer.

Her own understandings of what the past struggle had been about—could they be similar? Valid, perhaps, but dwarfed by the unknowable abyss that separated her species from the purposes of entities enormously removed.

Could that bear somehow on what Seeker meant about logarithmic time and exponential growth? That she could not even imagine such a gulf?

The thought caught her for only a single dizzying instant. Then it was gone, and she was back in the comfortable, linear progression of events she knew.

She turned away from the body. The Ur-humans milled uncertainly around her. Her father stood silently, letting her work on this herself. “Seeker, I…these people. My people.”

“So they are,” Seeker said noncommittally at her side.

“Can I have them? I mean, take them back?” She gestured up at the transparent dome where the tired but receptive, pale Earth still spun.

“Of course. The Supras could not raise them alone.”

“I’ll try to bring up just a few of them at first,” Cley said cautiously. Leave some in a stasis bubble, somehow? Bring them out gradually, to be reared? The enormity of becoming mother to a race struck her.