Beyond Infinity (5 page)

One day he took her by the hand and led her into an unused corridor of the Library. He stood at one end far away, a tiny figure, and whispered words of unexpected tenderness that roared along the walls, amplified somehow by ancient acoustics. Into her ears came cherished phrases, ones she was sure she would remember all her life. The secret of these acoustic amplifiers had long been lost. But he knew just how to use it.

He was vast, yet he loved her, too—she knew this with granite conviction. She knew also that to him she must be a familiar type. Electrically primitive, but exhausting. She used that. She seduced him with her intensity, her one-plus-some personality. But she also unnerved him with the instant intimacy she offered, able to turn it on in the pivot of a second.

Their days were electric for her, in the vast Library, laboring in the long, dry valley rimmed by snowcapped peaks. Her world was crisp and sure for the first time. Intoxicating, just to breathe the cutting air.

First loves were the fiercest, she realized. So it couldn’t last. Fair enough. But there was nothing stopping her working on that.

And she was, right up until the attack.

The years teach much that the days never know.

—Emerson

F
ROM HIGH ABOVE,
the naked woman seemed to be dead.

The four-winged bird concluded this as it gyred down through a pale afternoon sky. It wheeled in lazy eights with the woman at the cross point, keeping the unmoving body under its precise gaze. The forewings flapped easily, letting the longer hind wings luxuriate in the warm loft of thermals that rose from the rocky bluff nearby. Its forewings canted wind into the broad, gossamer-thin hind wings, bringing an ancient pleasure.

But then directives ingrained in its deepest genes tugged it back to its assigned task: to find the living humans in this area and summon aid.

The analytic portion of its oddly shaped intelligence decided that this woman, who evidently had not stirred for long hours, was certainly dead. It made this decision not by reason but through the sour smells that rose from the body, a mere few molecules bringing news of corruption and decay.

Once this creature had been a carrion eater, its senses set long before it had come to know reason. It judged automatically the brown stain on the pebbles around her head and the massive bruise that blossomed over her left ribs like a purple sunrise.

Already the bird had seen over twenty dead humans among the trees, most of them charred to ashes and none living. The four-winger had much rugged territory to cover and was running out of time. It glided for a long moment, indecisive as only a considerable intelligence can be, forewings rising as hind wings fell.

A life could hang upon this decision. The organic molecules were few, their message of dried blood and wounds strongly suggesting death. Vexed, it decided not to report this body as a possible candidate. That would take valuable time, and members of this curious, unimpressive subspecies of humans were notoriously fragile. The four-winger peeled away, eyes scanning every minute speck below.

The afternoon shadows lengthened considerably before the woman stirred, her weak gasping lost beneath the chuckle of the nearby stream. Her breath whistled between broken teeth. She rolled fitfully, moaned, and the brown stain spread further.

This sound attracted a six-legged, furred mother making her way with her two cubs along the muddy bank. The woman’s dying might have gained an audience then. But the sleek creatures saw that the woman distinctly resembled those who truly ruled here, though she smelled quite different.

The mother instructed her cubs to note and always warily respect that human form, now broken but always dangerous. She used a language simple in words but complex in positional grammar, inflections giving layers of meaning. She augmented this with deft signs, using her midlegs.

The family’s quick flight downstream sent a tang into a crosswind, and this in turn roused the interest of a more curious creature. This strutting shape was distantly descended from the raccoon, its pelt a rich, symbol-laden swirl of reds and auburn. Behind darting eyes a crafty intelligence quickly assessed the situation from the cover of stingbushes.

It was cautious but not afraid. The revival of its species many millennia ago had built upon an ancient design, with considerable added intelligence. Such human engineering, already ancient, had rendered with fidelity a creature in many ways superior to the pitiful figure it now watched intently.

To it, the most important issue here lay in interlacing the dying woman’s jarring presence with an elaborated meaning of its own life. From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being.

Suddenly, it felt a cusp moment, a branching of possibility that carried weight and tremor. Somehow, this event was crucial. It did not know why, but
why
was a late kind of knowledge, often illuminating but arid, coming long after the intensity of experience.

Surely the violent, vibrant clashes in far valleys, days before, had set the stage for this meeting. The twisting cylinders of acid glow in the sky had seemed to point its padded feet along this path. It could but follow. It sensed that this moment was like a blossom ready to open, to bring into the world a fresh flowering.

At last, and with a proper anticipation of the pattern of events that might spread from its actions like the branches of an infinite tree, unending, the raccoonlike beast padded forward.

It sniffed the woman—sour. The body was evaporating away the pungent waste molecules that came of its futile attempt to heal. Sniffing again for clues, it caught the dull thread of death in the trees beyond. And the sharp bite of fresh dung nearby. It took some satisfaction in this blend: the immediate overlaid the eternal.

It trotted over and explored. The dead were Natural humans. The dung was less interesting but told a small tale of a reptile predator that had passed some hours before. It had hesitated a moment and then decided that the woman was a better prospect for tonight, when she would be safely dead.

The shaggy creature sniffed and smiled, black-lipped. The reptile would be surprised, for the woman could live—with a bit of help.

This information rippled atop the usual background flavorings of sunset: a crisp aroma of granite cooling, the sweet perfume of the eternal beckoning flowers, a musty odor of fungus drawing water up the hills from the muttering stream.

It set to work. The woman’s swollen skull was the worst problem. The optical disk now bulged in both eyes. With long, tapered hands that echoed only faintly their origin in claws, the creature felt the unfamiliar cage of bones beneath the skin and muscle. This early hominid form had antiquated struts and pivots, clearly a preliminary design. The right arm skewed unnaturally awry. Several ribs were cleanly snapped.

Plainly, from the simple body plan—archaic, a patchwork of temporary solutions to passing problems—an Original. Yet long ago, on a middle-aged world, evolution had sanctified these cumbersome measures with success in the raw, natural world.

The creature set about healing the body. It did not know how the woman came to be here or why she was in any way special. But whoever she was, she deserved the service of an allied species, also of some antiquity.

Gingerly it used techniques that were second nature, massaging points in this body that it knew triggered restoring hormones. It used its elbows—an awkward but unavoidable feature still not bettered in nature—to generate healing vibrations. The soft, swollen contusion in the right temple responded to rhythmic squeezing of the spine. It labored on.

The creature could feel pressures slowly relent and diffuse throughout the woman’s head. Her glandular imperatives sluggishly closed internal hemorrhages. Stimuli to the neck and abdomen made her internal organs begin their filtering of the waste-clogged blood. Straightening and setting the arm, temporarily securing the snapped ribs so they would not puncture lungs, perking the bones’ regrowth—all took time.

Dusk brought the rustle of movement to the creature’s large ears, but none of the telltale sounds implied danger. It sat comfortably beside the sprawled woman and slept, though even then with an alertness the woman could never know. At midnight the reptile returned, expecting a dead human. It made a surprised, tasty snack. Fit reward for good labors.

When the woman began to mutter, the creature realized it could understand the slurred words.

“Ah…it sliced, sliced…him…get way!… Keep down…down…no…see us…fire…from the air…”

Much of her talk was garbled fever dreams. From brief moments of coherence the creature came to understand that the woman had been hunted remorselessly from a flyer, along with her tribe, as they fled a library.

Her tribe had not escaped. A dry night breeze coming off the hotter plains to the west brought the scent of charred, ashen flesh. The creature closed its nostrils to the smell.

It was pleasantly surprised that it could understand the woman’s words. The lands here were filled with life forms drawn from two billion years of incessant creation. Some could not fathom the languages of the others. This woman must have been taught, perhaps by genetic tuning, to comprehend the complex tongues more advanced creatures used.

The creature felt that to ingrain such knowledge was an error, a skewed and perhaps arrogant presumption. An early human form such as this might well be confused by such complex, disorienting craft. Language arose from a worldview. The rich web of perceptions that had formed her present tongue could scarcely ride easily in her cramped mental confines.

Normally, it did not question the deeds of the advanced human forms called the Supras. But this badly mauled woman, her skin lacerated and turgid with deep bruises, raised doubts. Perhaps her injuries stemmed directly from…her knowledge?

The killers had gone after all the Naturals. Did they possess some quality the fires sought to exterminate?

After some contemplation, however, it relied on its innate sense. That life was a dusty mirror, reflecting only passing images of truth. Such reflection told it that this woman was here for no ordinary reason. So it sat and thought and monitored her body’s own weak but persistent self-repairing.

The woman lay beneath a night that gradually cleared as cumulus clouds blew in from the west and went on beyond the distant hills, as though hurrying for an appointment they could never meet. The creature sensed rising plumes of water vapor exhaled by the dense jungle and forest. These great, moist wedges acted like invisible mountains, forcing in-blowing air to rise and rain out its wet burden.

A great luminous band rose on the horizon, so bright and varied that it did not seem to be composed of stars, but rather of ivory and ice. Vast ragged lanes of dust sprawled across swarms of piercing lights. It knew this lustrous glory well. These were the shreds of the galactic arm, a last rampart shielding this world from a full view of the galactic center.

It gazed up at this splendor, as enthralled as ever. It knew that Earth had been deflected toward this central hub long ago, before its own kind had fully evolved, when Earth was verdant for the first time. The scope of such an undertaking was beyond the creature’s comprehension. It dimly sensed that the humans of that time had made the sun pass near another star, one that refused to shine in the night.

It knew those events through legend. Since that era, the galaxy had rotated about its center four times. In that far time, a sharp veer around that dead, dark mass had sent the solar system plunging inward toward the great galactic bulge.

The sun had crossed lanes of dust as the galaxy rotated, its spiral arms trailing like those of a spinning starfish. The constellations in Earth’s nights warped and shifted. Ages passed. Life performed its ceaseless self-contortions. Fresh intelligences arose. Strange, alien minds came from distant suns.

The purposes of that time were shrouded in ambiguity. The sun followed a stretched ellipse that looped close to the galactic center. On Earth, a shimmering sphere of light gradually grew in the heavens. To remain near this wheeling bee swarm of ten billion stars, yet another gravitational encounter had proved necessary.

In that time, legend said, the sun had brushed by a giant molecular cloud. Gravity’s tugs rearranged the stately glide of the planets. The precision of those soft collisions had been of such delicacy that the new orbits fit the needs of humanity’s vast engineering enterprises—the dismantling of whole worlds. Such had humans been, once.

Reflecting, the creature found a few planets—the survivors of that epic age of boundless ambition—among the great washes of light that hung above. The sky worked with enterprises unknown. Innumerable comet tails pointed outward from the sun toward gossamer banks of dim radiance. Feeder clouds glowed with dull red energies, dotting the plane where the planets dwelled. Arcs of emerald vapor flowed among the clouds, going about their chemical business. In such a crowded symphony of sky the slow gavotte of worlds seemed a minor theme.

But tonight the heavens stirred with more.

The creature recognized luminous trouble. Staring upward, it watched ruby spheres and perfect golden pyramids flare and dodge and veer. Soundless and involuted, these were the scribbles of swift combat. Without the slightest idea of what they were—though surely they were not ships—it sensed the jagged geometries of war.

Bright traceries faded slowly. Abruptly, fresh abrasions scratched across the sky’s serenity. Soundless, darting violences pursued and died and flared again.

They were the first acts of hostility written on this broad sky for nearly a billion years. Did they arise from the conflicts inherent in the minds of humans—that uneasy anthology of past influences?

The creature sighed.
Ah, humans.