Beyond Infinity (11 page)

“So that species thought.”

“That’s what the libraries of Sonomulia say,” Kata said with a trace of affronted ire.

“Exactly. They were a wise species, even so.”

“Ur-human?” Cley asked. She would like to think that her ancestors’ lost saga had included friends like Seeker.

Its large eyes studied her for a long moment. “No, they were a breed that knew the stars differently than you.”

“Better?”

“Differently.”

“And they’re completely lost?” Cley asked quietly into a stillness that had come over their conversation. She was acutely aware of the shrouded masses of history.

“They are gone.”

Kata asked suspiciously, “Gone—or extinct?”

“From your perspective, for now,” Seeker said, “there is no difference.”

“Seems to me extinction pretty much closes the book on you,” Cley said lightly, hoping to dispel the tension that had now crept into the air.

“Just so,” Kata said evenly. “The stability of this biosphere depends on keeping many species alive. The greater their number, the more rugged Earthlife is, should further disasters befall the planet.”

“As they shall,” Seeker said, settling effortlessly into its position for walking, a signal that it would talk no more.

Damned insolent animal!
Kata could not shield this thought from Cley, or else did not want to. Cley was shocked.

They left the Library of Humanity in a seething silence, Kata deliberately blocking off her Talent so that Cley could not catch the slightest prickly fragment of her thoughts.

T
HAT EVENING RIN
presided over a grand reception and meal for three hundred, with Cley as guest of honor.

Bots had labored through the day, extruding a large, many-spired banquet hall that seemed to rise up groaning from the soil itself. Its walls were sand-colored but opalescent. Inside, a broad ceiling of overlapping arches looked down on tables that also grew directly from a granite floor. Sky peeked through spaces above. Spiral lines wrapped around the walls, glowing soft blue at the floor and shifting to red as they rose, circling the room, making an eerie effect like a sunset seen above an azure sea.

Tricks of perspective led Cley into false corridors. Sometimes there appeared to be thousands of other guests eating in the distance. Often holes would gape in the floor, and bots would rise through them bearing food, a process she found so unsettling that for a while she stayed apprehensively seated. Despite the cold night air of the desert, the room enjoyed a warm spring breeze scented like the pine forests she knew so well. Her gown scarcely seemed to have substance, caressing her like water, yet it covered her from ankle to neck. Perfect—and a bot had made it in less time than she took to describe her wants.

They ate grains and vegetables of primordial origin, many dating back to the dawn of humanity. These had already been spread through the emerging biosphere, and this meal was the boon of an ample harvest, brought here from crops across the globe. Cley savored the rich sauces and heady aromas but kept her wits about her in conversation with her hosts.

Often their talk went straight by her. Arabesques of Talent-talk slid among percussive verbal punctuations. The Supras of Illusivia tapered their rapid-fire signals to make them comprehensible to Cley. Those of Sonomulia used only the subset of their language that she could follow. They tried to keep the din of layered cross-references simple in deference to her, but gusts of enthusiasm would sweep their ornate conversations into realms of mystifying complexity.

Her worst adolescent uncertainties came back. She compensated—worse,
knew
she was compensating—by fixing them all with her withering, unspoken judgments.

Supra styles in hair and dress varied wildly. They seemed to do this to provoke not regard from one another, but wry amusement.

Beneath it all, this evening, she felt their remorse and anger smoldering. And underlying that ran a stern resolve to recover what they could.

A woman seemed to embody this. Alone, dressed in black, she argued furiously with three men about the Furies. Cley felt the brittle, edged anger from her, the mollifying replies of the men—all without words, for they were using their Talents to convey something between ideas and emotions, beyond her abilities. Yet their faces remained calm and they sipped a fuming drink from long-stemmed glasses. Utterly tranquil, to the eye.

Still, Rin made jokes, forced lightness, even quoting some ancient motto of a scholarly society from the dawn of science.
“Nullius in verba,”
he said dryly, “or, ‘don’t take anyone’s word for it.’ Makes libraries seem pointless, wouldn’t you say?”

Cley shrugged. “I am no student.”

“Exactly! Time to stop studying our history. We should reinvent it.” From an ornate chalice Rin took a long drink of something that steamed blue.

“I’d like to just live my life, thanks,” Cley said quietly.

“Ah,” he said, “but the true trick is to treasure what we were and have done—without letting it smother us.”

Rin smiled with a dashing exuberance Cley had seldom seen among the other Supras. Except for Kurani, she suddenly thought with a pang. Rin waved happily as what appeared to be a flock of giant, scaly birds flew through the hall, wheeled beautifully, and flew straight through the ceiling without leaving a mark. The illusion was startling.

A bundle of complex comments rattled through her in the Talent, about the dinner. Cley sniffed in disdain. Good food was like sex, one of life’s blessings, but they both lost their edge when talked about too much. Better go back to experience, then. She amped up her Talent and ate, feeling to her surprise the synergy between these senses. Down deep, the Talent was not just another way to hold a conversation. It reverberated from other senses, altering the texture of her world.

Her first bite was slow and deep, sinking through layers of thick taste. Onion-sharp, apple-sweet, fishy-rich—but not those flavors, not at all. Something beyond those. Supra food embodied all the feel of both Natural diets, animal and vegetable, and those of manufactured fare. She bit deeper, letting the savors drift through her sinuses and throat. It felt as if she were tasting with her eyes—a startling confusion. Now the salty fish-roe savor did not have to fight for recognition. Then came quick, hot spurts of texture, blending with Talent senses from others. Naturals ate together to talk; those with Talent, to heighten their world through one another. Very well, then.

She inhaled the rest of the cuisine-stack, not caring whether this was correct Supra etiquette. Nor did she allow herself to look at how the others took in the ottoman-sized slices of a cake tower—too tempting. Mingled with the Talent, this stuff was simply too good. To wrap yourself around it required no intellect, but resisting it would take a towering will. Vaguely she remembered something about entire sybaritic civilizations that had ebbed away, seduced by such delights. One of her Moms had told her of a lost year, all memories gone, after the Mom got addicted to a particular Supra gastronomical delight. She decided to leave the Supra treats table for special occasions, since she still intended to retain her ability to walk upright.

Still, it was hard to fight such temptation; she had the nagging thought that it might not come again.

Self-consciousness came tiptoeing in. The Talent buzz was intense, like a migraine hum. She tuned it out. A Supra man glided by with their characteristic smooth carriage, arched an eyebrow with a turn of his upper lip, and they sidled into a conversation. Now,
this
was more like it, she thought. He was named Fanak and was of exactly the same physical variation as Kurani. Something about him made her sing inside—final proof, as if any were needed, that she had a type.

The odd, off-key tone of this party had unsettled her. A pall had hung over their world since the attack, and she suddenly wanted to get out from under the emotional overcast. Do something frivolous and unthinking. So…

Fanak said something mild, a clear opening, and she jumped in. Made a weak joke. Got flustered. Blundered into fake profundity. Laughed it off. Concluded with a roll of the eyes and, realizing that she was coming over as rough, obvious…“I’m Cley—sometimes, I guess, the sort of woman who needs a woman’s touch.”

To his credit, he laughed anyway.

They spoke of trifles, mannerisms—anything except the Library and Furies—and he shrugged off a small recent bit of gossip with “Education may banish ignorance, but nothing can ban stupidity.” She thought this was very amusing, and told him so before she could stop herself. She went on about Seeker and Fanak was interested, asking all sorts of questions about the procyons as a species, which she did not know answers for, so she shrugged and just described Seeker alone, concluding in a rush, to her own surprise, “You need friends to keep you on your feet, and enemies to keep you on your toes.”

“We have plenty of the latter.”

“The—”

“No, we’re enemies enough among ourselves,” he cut her off before she could say anything glaringly obvious. “Supras and Naturals and Compacts and Obscurantists—”

“But we’re not enemies. Not
now
.”

A careless shrug, undeniably appealing. “As long as the Supras run things, of course. But how long will that last?”

A hint of species politics she did not comprehend. “I, uh—”

“You haven’t fully plugged into the Talent yet, my dear. It can eat up your time, I warn you.” A fetching smile. She felt herself wrapping voluntarily around his augmented, extra-sized finger.

“I have a weak Talent, but no other talent.”

“As a unique, you must.”

“Oh, being one of a kind? But you Supras can always make other Originals.”

He gave her a tapered grin, as if making an oblique point. “Suppose we make an exact copy of you. What’s been lost?”

“Nothing, by defin—”

“Uniqueness.”

“Oh. That’s just a word trick.”

“It’s a metaphor, a symbolic mirror. To reflect on a truth—that we may not get the same Original every time we create one artificially. I’d prefer to stick with one like you, who has grown up in the forest, the old way.”

Wasn’t she the only one left? Or was he hinting at something? She saw that he was working around to his point—very Supra. Best to be a naive Natural, then. “You need more Originals?”

“I gather so. Growing our own seems to be in the air.”

“I intend to, uh, make some of my own, eventu—”

“Not enough time. And how could you, alone?”

Despite her affected gaiety, getting stretched rather thin now, she could not find a light and airy way around this question. It had been wearing on her. No simple Original motherhood for her: the genes would have to be tuned, embedded, policed. She was enough of an Original to feel wistful about it, too. No Supra would, she guessed; they were remorselessly analytical. How to counterpunch, then?

“What would you do in my place?”

He was smooth enough to say, “I’m sure I cannot imagine. Luckily, we men are still spared such vexing questions. We do have artificial means, some quite quick.”

Cley wished she could get their conversation back into a flirty, easy air. It had veered this way without her seeing the swerve coming—and then she recognized another Supra signature: one-move-ahead thinking.

She laughed, but it came out like a squeak falling down a well. Fanak made a joke about that, and they were back on track, she feeling relieved, his smile saying that he was happy to be in the company of such a charming lady. She began to relax. Then there was more food passing on bot trays, and Fanak had to mingle, and she did, too. Some quick eye contact, body turns, and postures completed the deal: They would be seeing each other again. Her heart stopped thumping only after an annoyingly long while.

She wished Seeker had come to this bewildering banquet, but the quiet beast had elected to rest. Another puzzle: She could not in all honesty see why Seeker stayed with her when the Supras would probably have let it go free. Lately, its laconic replies had antagonized Kata, and that could make Seeker unwelcome. While Supras had never harmed Ur-humans, she was not sure any such convention governed their relations with distant species. In any case, caution outweighed theory, as mice knew about elephants.

Not to seem a complete dunce, she tried to get back into conversation. Rin was the center of attention, but he looked quickly at her when she sat beside him and asked, “How can you shrug off history?”

He eyed her closely, as if trying to read something inscrutable. Would he pick up the thread of their previous conversation? She needn’t have wondered. He leaned forward, eyes intent and sharp with mirth. “By studied neglect.”

The day of dancing seemed to have released him from some burden she could not guess. “History is such detail! Emperors are like the dinosaurs, their names and antics unimportant.”

Someone called from down the table, “Careful! The Keeper of Records will scold you.”

Rin answered, “No, he will not. He knows we hold aloft time’s dread weight only by keeping a sense of balance. Otherwise it would crush us.”

“We dance on time!” another voice called. “It’s beneath us.”

Rin chuckled. “True, in a way. The roll call of empires is dust beneath our feet…yet we cling to our old habits. Those last.”

“We need some human continuity,” Cley said reasonably. “My tribe tells its tales, keeps its customs—”

“Yes, a pleasant invention. When we recalled you all, it was apparent we could not let you resurrect the old imperial habits.”

Cley frowned. “Imperial…?”

“Of course,” Kata said. “You do not know.” She inhaled a passing fizzy spice cloud, and while her lungs savored it she sent,
We took your genotype from the Age of Empire, when humanity plundered the solar system and nearly extinguished itself.

The Talent-voice of Kata carried both a sting of rebuke and the balm of forgiveness. This irritated Cley, but she struggled to hide it.

“My tribe made no…war.” She had to pause and let her deep-based vocabulary call up the word, for she had never used it before. Comprehending the definition and import of the word took a long moment. With foreboding she permanently tagged it for ready future use.
War
—the very sound was primitive, raw.