Beyond Infinity (16 page)

“Good. I’d just as soon that we’re invisible to them.”

“Not so now. They found us in our three-D universe, so they have overcome that problem. Perhaps they have stripped away one of the three dimensions, so they get a sort of edited version of our light.”

“So they can see, but less than we do?”

“More, I suspect. When we look at a two-D painting, we see everything in it from one viewpoint. A four-D creature can then see everything in a three-D scene, without moving viewpoint.”

“I can’t visualize that.”

“Not in three-D, no. But suppose you go to an art exhibit to see a sculpture of, say, a Supra woman. There are ten copies of it, each one rotated a bit, standing against a wall. You stand in one place and can look at the entire Supra without moving.”

“
You
went to an art gallery?” Seeker had always seemed distantly bemused by human amusements and interests.

“You are surprised? I saw such a sculpture and did not recognize the ten different angles as being the same object.”

“Really? You’re losing your air of omniscience.”

“Good. I am but a three-D creature, just as you.”

T
HEY HIKED ON
farther, with nothing to show for it. The forest just kept repeating itself, long after it had made its point, as though it just might be infinitely long. It seemed to be made of living modules, as if churned out by a living factory somewhere. The oddity of a 1-D add-on to 3-D—pasted in, somehow, with space-time glue a mathist would admire, and still being nonetheless infinite—well, it did not seem amusing to her, not after hours of picking their way through the thick, thorny growths.

Plodding along, hypnotized by the routine, Cley dimly noticed sounds coming closer. And an utter quiet between the notes. Deep bass moans, as if from a huge throat, vaguely familiar… She had heard that before. “Morphs!”

She ran and ducked under a grove of trees. Seeker scampered after. The long, pealing notes got louder. Nothing appeared below the mist level. Louder…

“Should we signal to them?” Cley whispered.

Seeker cocked its head, listening intently. “They may be looking for us, yes—but why? To carry us fully into their four-D universe?”

“Don’t think I’m up for that.”

“Nor I. It would be good to recover the history slabs, if we could.”

“If the Morphs mean to give them back, sure.” The throbbing notes were louder, like a presence in the air above them.

Seeker said, “I vote for staying silent.”

“Um. Me, too.”

The long pulses seemed to press down on them in stretching waves—ominous, unending. Were they hovering above? Cley felt a sudden impulse to shout, “Go away!” It was unbearable.

Dead silence.

This was worse. They studied the slow seethe of fog… Nothing.

“Think they spotted us?” Cley whispered.

“I do not think when there is no point to it.”

“Meaning?”

“Best to wait.” The silence around them was unnatural, no animals stirring, nothing. Cley stood alert, nerves strumming.

Seeker curled itself around a tree trunk, looking like a thick fur collar at its base.

“You’re going to
sleep
?”

“And you are not.”

Which is what happened. Cley could not even doze in the silence. At least Seeker did not snore. When it did awake, the woods had returned to normal. Small scurrying noises came from the ragged brush. A breeze wafted by again. They marched on.

The humidity seemed worse. Heavy drops smacked onto their heads until she made frond hats for them both. Seeker thought of an experiment and got her to bark out short, high-pitched shouts; its throat was not loud enough, it said. Then they stood and listened to a faint whisper of her voice from the opposite direction.

“Wrapping around the cylinder,” Cley guessed. Seeker had timed them, and also knew how far it had gone to circumnavigate the cylinder. From the time interval they got a rough number for the velocity of sound. It was about half of Earth-normal.

Cley nodded. “Interesting, but so what?”

“We should gather information and then see if it is useful. At least we know why the birds could fly so well: thicker air.”

They had seen a few more of the manta-birds dipping down through the mist, but none attacked. Cley resumed foraging. The ruby-colored berries were getting quite tedious as her sole fare, which Seeker supplemented with small animals it caught and devoured raw. Cley stopped and stood still. “Wait, we’ve been stupid.”

Seeker was on the hunt and did not reply. “We should be flying, too!” she shouted.

It took another round of sleep-trudge-sleep before they found what Cley wanted.

The spire of luminous rock was like other outcroppings they had encountered, but larger. More to the point, taller. Crystal Crag, Cley named it. Seeker laughed. “How human, to give a label.”

Seeker laughed again at the large fronds Cley collected, but helped stitch them together with thread made from the tough vines. Cley found some bamboolike trees and used the slim trunks cross-lashed together. The fronds held up well as she fitted them to the frame. The labor tired her and took a “day”—meaning until her eyelids began to droop. They were both losing weight as well as strength here, too.

Deftly Seeker twisted oily branches and gnawed them off. Cley’s embedded tools, extended from her forefingers, proved useful in getting the high-stress connections firmly knitted.

They climbed the rocky spire with care. She could feel gravity weakening as they rose, an odd but welcome sensation. The peak had a rounded, polished crown that made footing tricky. Mist roiled and churned above it.

“No room to get a running start,” Cley said.

“We would find that awkward anyway,” Seeker said, “being of unequal height.” Though Seeker could stand on two feet, it liked to run on all fours, with its hands foreshortened into the ancient, simple paws.

“I’m glad we thought to put in the handholds.” She fitted her fingers into the tight, glovelike sleeves made of bark. Those had taken nearly as much time to make as the whole wing.

“You are hesitating.”

“Yup. If we fall…”

“We will not. Notice that there is a steady updraft from the warmer rocks below.”

“We primates have a big thing about falling.”

Seeker grinned, tongue lolling. “Time to overcome your origins.”

“Hey, your origins were in our labs.”

“Do not remind me.”

Without another word they got into position. A few seconds’ pause, silent…then together they took three short steps off the crown. The first moment was the worst—falling, the fronds filling with a rattle, but no lift. Then they caught a current and slowly leveled off. But no better—the mist still hovered just above their heads. And her arms were starting to feel the ache already.

“Left,” Seeker said.

She leaned that way, and their glider canted. Lurched. Fell a little. Treetops zoomed by below their heels.

“If we tip—”

“More left.”

They veered farther over. The fronds protested with clatters. She jerked them farther over…

A glance down. Snaggy branches and some cushioning fronds…a long way down. If they lost it, started to tumble, best to kick away, curl up—

An ominous splintering crack.

And the left wing came up.

An updraft caught them strongly, boosting them into the mist. Fog everywhere. Now she had no way to judge direction. She was almost grateful for the gathering ache in her arms, because it told her which way was down. Wind whistled around them, churned in her hair. The wing shook, veered, rattled, righted itself in churning currents. A moist tang filled her dry mouth.

Then—light. Dim but clear. They soared above the mist, trailing streamers of it. The turbulence sighed away.

Her arm aches vanished. No weight. She felt giddy, though her stomach still refused to stop clenching.

“We’re at the center,” she said.

“I knew it would work.”

“Glad you did. I kinda lost my faith back there.”

“I never doubted you.”

“I was worried about the laws of this Tubeworld of yours. Whether we had guessed right.”

“It was no guess.” Seeker freed one paw and made a show of stretching its hind legs behind it. Yawned. Stretched. “Though ingenious, your idea, yes. I should have thought of it myself. Here we sit at the center of a barrel made of mist, in no gravity, comfortable. We move with the wind and so feel no breeze.”

“And to think how we plodded along for days.”

“I would rather not.”

T
HEY HAD BROUGHT FOOD,
but not enough.

As Seeker had put it, how to plan for a trip that in principle might be quasi-infinite? They ran out after two days (as Cley’s thumbnail inboard reported). Water they got by slurping up rivulets that condensed and trickled off the wings into the slipstream.

There were problems they had not considered. Defecating in zero g was a source of great amusement for Seeker and some embarrassment for Cley. Luckily, she had thought to make a vine rope when they were building it. This she spooled out until she trailed behind the glider. Tying it to one hand, she managed—barely.

Seeker was not so fastidious. It even invented a sort of water-skiing sport with the rope. When its spread legs gathered in enough of the vagrant currents that wafted in the wake of the glider, it could artfully swoop from side to side, cackling with glee, even giving forth a whoop utterly unlike anything a true, ancient raccoon had ever made. Only when its sideways momentum started rocking the entire glider did Cley yell at it. Seeker urged her to try the stunt, but she did not—until she was taking a pee in the wake and got blown to one side, then had to air-skate in zero g to get back onto the glider. She pretended that it was all intentional.

They began to wonder how they would know they had reached anything of interest. If the fog remained in its curious cylindrical wedge, they could glide over what they sought. And what
did
they seek? Seeker’s best guess was some research station where the quagma-generated geometric gate would stand.

But how big? Would it poke up above the mist?

They kept steady watch, relieving each other in unconscious imitation of the Ancients who crewed the ships that sailed through foggy oceans. Nothing whatever jutted above the mist tunnel. In a way this was good, since they could easily have crashed into an obstacle. The glider held together, but Cley had no illusions about its ability to maneuver, or survive a solid smack.

They saw the meaty birds now and then. The creatures gave off their brooding
strooooonnng, strooooonnng
s well before coming into view, and slowly overtook the glider. How they fed was never clear. Seeker became alarmed when the first of them flapped stolidly within a few lengths of the glider. It braced itself against the struts, claws out—and the bird labored past, scarcely giving them a glance. So did all the others. Apparently, they hunted ground animals—quite large ones, to judge from the immediate attack on Seeker—but considered anything flying in the weightless tunnel not fair game.

“Maybe they never saw anything else up here before,” Cley guessed.

“I doubt so easy a niche would go uncontested,” Seeker said.

A while later she did see a smaller bird scoot up into the wind tunnel—as she thought of it—and dart around. Their glider startled it, and with wildly flapping wings it ducked back into the fog. Now that she listened carefully, she occasionally caught distant squawks and even one odd, strangled cry coming up through the clotted mists. She also wondered why the light here was not much weaker, since they were farther from the ground, but then realized that they got light from the entire Tubeworld perimeter. She and Seeker listened in their utterly quiet glide, getting hungry.

Seeker was puzzled that it had not seen more of the life below in their hiking. “We smell strange to them, I am sure, inducing silence in the local life as we go.”

The mutual sense of strangeness grew. A somber alien feeling came stealing into Cley’s thoughts: the pressing sense of doom here. The featureless fog gave her the sensation of plunging down through an infinite cylinder, confusing her inner ear and bringing momentary bouts of stomach-churning nausea. She learned to swallow back her bile.

Seeker became uneasy as well. This led it to wonder aloud if they might indeed have set out upon an infinite journey, blown by winds that never ceased, circumnavigating the entire 3-D universe in this tacked-on Tubeworld. An idiot’s odyssey.

Long ago the Ancients had realized that the full universe had many dimensions, Cley remembered dimly. Arguments about mathematical symmetry and beauty had decided the issue for the physicists. Seeker wryly remarked that this all came from a primate preference, that the mathematical elegance of the resulting cosmology was “too beautiful not to be true.”

But where were all the extra dimensions? All but three of space and one of time were “rolled up” like tiny scrolls. They had been since the first few shaved seconds of the Origin, the grand emergence of space and time together in one creation.

Curled up, they could not be sensed, even by delicate experiments. Wave one’s hand and it passed through several unseen microdimensions, with no consequence. In ordinary life, the bonus dimensions meant nothing at all. But rolled up to what size? Far smaller than the diameter of an atom, or otherwise the dimensions would show up in the visible spectra that atoms emitted and eyes saw. The span of a single electron was vast compared with the realm where the extra dimensions lay hidden, sleeping.

All this seemed like abstract fictions to Cley, even when Seeker had explained that the idea had led to mathematics that nicely packaged up the fundamental forces, starting with gravity. In theory, the forces then all emerged “naturally”—for the mathematically minded. To Cley, this had verged on the theological…until she had seen her first Morph.

But even those ancient mathists had not envisioned a place like this Tubeworld, a dimension simultaneously near infinite along its cylindrical length, but small enough across to walk around in an hour. So much for theory.