Beyond Infinity (19 page)

“Of course.” As if to erase the thought, he turned sourly to a wall, which brightened with a stunning landscape of waves churning on a silvery night beach. Not a current view—the moon was a shattered remnant. “To us, art is the jewelry of history, no more. To them—who can feel what those Elegants did? Never forget, our human varieties change. Still, how could they take such measures? Commit such…” His voice trailed off as he stared at the ancient silvery beach’s incessant clash against the land.

“Crimes?”

“It is considered too simple to use simple words.”

“Well, I’m simple, so crimes it is.”

He laughed again, a delighted dry chuckle this time. “I wish I could see it that way.”

She saw this for an overture, and maybe it was, but she was not having any, not right now. Figure out why not, later. If ever. Too much going on here.

W
HEN SHE GOT
back to work, Seeker was talking to three spindly figures in stark white wrap-robes. Supras, but of a variety she had not seen. Spindly legs, sharp chins, beady eyes, a sheen on their brows.

“You deem them goodly?” one of them asked.

“Not a category I use,” Seeker said, tight-lipped.

“Foul?”

Seeker shook its head irritably.

“Their purpose?” another probed.

Seeker gave a reasonable imitation of a human shrug.

“These were geometrical objects, in our three dimensions, yet living?” the third asked.

“The way they look to us tells very little,” Seeker said, starting to fidget with its claws and eyeing their throats.

Cley smiled. But these were Supras and probably wouldn’t take Seeker’s hint.

With these three was a Semisent—a smartdog form, four-footed still, but standing half as high as Cley. Furry, muscular, jutting jaw and leathery throat shaped for speech. Its eyes roved over the landscape, keeping up to date, following the conversation but not, of course, taking part.

She nodded toward it—a protocol she had learned as a child. These were forms halfway conscious, good servants, though for her, semisentience was a troubled idea. There were many tests for intelligence, fastening upon features of the human mind: art, analysis, speech, kinesthetics. Whole eras had focused on these aspects, often to the exclusion of others; it seemed that cultures could not hold two ideas in the collective mind at the same time.

An early example was a kind of test, devised out of an anxiety about artificial minds. Many felt they could intuitively sense an intelligence merely by talking to it. For centuries, people quizzed artificial intelligences, guessing whether they were being fooled by another human. Results were muddy. Then Semisents disproved this test quite readily, for their conversation was a stylized human persona. They were completely plausible conversational partners, able to hold forth for hours. Some people even found them charming. They got sexual overtures, along with the dialogue.

The Semisent kinesthetic senses were equally adroit. They could navigate the landscape better than an animal and were quite humanlike, in a limited range. Rumor had it that their sexual invitations were sometimes answered, in a limited fashion.

But the Semisents did not truly carry sentience. A Semisent could do much, tasks beyond number—but it had no abstractions beyond a list of commands and terrains, maneuvers and obstacles. Yet it certainly had some blunted sense of self, the interior model that made it react to changes outside.

In the vast span of great antiquity, someone had played upon the ancient bond between humans and canines to make this type of Semisent. What ancient hunter did not feel a close connection to his dogs and commune with them? This particular uplifting had no doubt informed many a joyous hunt.

Such tinkerings also left a sobering sense of strangeness. The Semi-dogs were both pet and servant, able to talk in simple, slurred speech. Many liked them.

But as this one stood on its four legs, watching, ready to serve, the skating intelligence behind those eyes seemed to Cley only an amplified version of Fanak’s responsive room. The walls had sensed Fanak’s mood, known his likes, shifted its images and scents and sounds to fit. So did the Semisent serve its masters. It breathed, felt the strums of living tissue, and so Cley gave it the tribute a living form gives another. A nod, no more.

And Seeker gave it less. Without a word, Seeker turned its back.

The others did not even notice. Cley insinuated herself into the tight circle around Seeker and turned to the strangers. “You wanted…?” She was getting good results with the unfinished sentences.

“We have come to offer counsel,” two said together.

Cley could not read Seeker’s expression. “Uh, what kind?”

“Moral,” they all said together.

She was picking up scattered Talent-talk, but these three seemed to have a way to shield nearly all of it from her. “Maybe a little early for that,” Cley said. “Gotta know more.”

“It is never too early,” the tallest said severely.

“Error comes from inattention,” added another.

Seeker said shortly, “We have work to do.”

The Semisent caught the edge in Seeker’s voice and padded forward, showing teeth. It growled, low and long.

“Big thunder, no rain,” Seeker said.

Searching for a way to defuse the tension, Cley said, “I could use some help bringing slabs up from the seventeenth floor.”

“We are here to serve, of course,” all three said.

They tried to lecture her, but she wasn’t having any. She put them to some tasks instead. Talk was cheap; sweat mattered here.

They worked fairly well but took a long time to fetch forth the slabs. When a bot team came by, the three gave them stern looks. And Cley still didn’t know what was going on. “Say, who
are
they?” She whispered to Seeker.

“They term themselves the Order. They arrived yesterday—from the other side of the world, they said. A pilgrimage to the Library, to advise.”

This meant little to her. Amid the labor, which took great attention to be sure the more crystalline records did not suffer damage, she found the Semisent padding alongside her. Big, shaggy. “Whom do you serve?” she asked it.

“All.” Its voice was long and slow, the
A
hollow in its barrel chest.

“No, I mean, who are your…companions.”

“Three members of the Order, madam.” The sentence sounded painfully hard to get out, rumbling in its throat. “Madam,” it said again, when she did not speak immediately—apparently, some sort of protocol.

“Uh, the Order is a Meta?”

“No, kindred souls. They, we, are devoted to principled action.”

“Oh. Uh, thank you.”

“Madam is welcome. I am to serve.”

They came up to the surface on an electrostatic lift, and the three of the Order, in their white robes, were straightening the stacks of records. Seeker gave them curt directions. The Semisent approached, but Seeker would not acknowledge it. When the Semisent asked for orders, Seeker addressed instead the nearest member of the Order, and that woman gave the Semisent directions.

This struck Cley as odd, for Seeker never seemed other than contemptuous of hierarchies and stations in society. But Semisents were different, apparently. When she asked Seeker, it said, “They are not worth our time. They are—what was the old term?—partials.”

“Partial how?”

“They have part, only part, of what it takes to be an actor in the world.”

“So? That doesn’t seem to be a sin.”

“The parts are fitted together wrong.”

Seeker would say no more. Cley turned to studying the members of the Order.

They were a sucking blankness. When they came into a room, it seemed emptier. This she had not encountered before, and they came in the next few days, working nearby, to seem the strangest variety of Supra she had known. She began following them closely, as if they were an exhibit.

She had heard of their long tradition. Over the myriad millennia, philosophers had returned again and again to the two great reasons to pursue moral virtue at all. One could improve the world or perfect oneself. These goals struggled against each other, causing countless wars. One view looked outward, the other inward.

Whole societies had echoed this, for in some ways the strivings of the lone person echo in larger social dreams, working themselves out as ideas, governments, crusades, whole cultures.

Or so she thought. That evening, labors done, she mentioned this classroom truism, and Seeker snorted. “The inward journey is dubious, the outer one even more so.”

Cley was surprised. “They’re trying to make a better—”

Another snort. “Can humans find perfection by forgetting the quest itself and serving others?”

“Well, it might be good for the soul—”

Seeker gave her a twisted-mouthed grimace of derision. “Soul? Think about your own experience—very limited though it is. How many people have you known who devoted their lives to others? Beyond simple motherhood, say.”

“Well…a few.” She did not want to get into her mother, her nonfather, and the whole freight of it. But Seeker wouldn’t let it go.

“Did they have beautiful personalities?”

“Well…”

“So, did you spent much of your free time with them?”

She thought. “Uh…no.”

“Yet they had charity in thought and in deed, yes? And patience, probably, and they worried constantly about helping others, alleviating suffering?”

“Oh, yes, but—”

“But those virtues crowded out the ordinary but nonmoral virtues, eh? Like verve and dash, intellectual curiosity?”

“Now that you mention it…”

“Did they ever make a joke?”

“Um, seldom.”

Seeker lolled back against a shattered slab, claws idle, clearly enjoying this. “In my experience—and if I told you how much there is, you would not believe me—I have met two kinds of such good-works saints. Some simply love everyone else without taking notice of the world’s temptations. They are seldom made happy by comforts, art, friends, sports, even family. Their inner lives seem, by what they care about, to be curiously barren.”

Cley had to admit she had known at least two morally earnest people who fit the description. Sincere doers of good works, but…somehow blank.

“Very well.” To Seeker, the human comedy was plainly a continuously running feature. “Then there are the saintly types who like all those things I named. But they sacrifice many or even all of them in the cause of duty. There will always be nuns of either sex, for example, of whatever particular faith attracts such people, in whatever era.”

“Aren’t you being a little hard on them?”

“But is that not what they wish?”

They laughed together. Cley’s mouth twisted in wry recollection. “Y’know, the ones like that I knew suppressed or denied their strongest desires. I had a teacher who had no family. She said it would eat into her time spent in service to her students.”

Seeker said, “Those who teach seem prone to that disorder. They can seem inhuman, after one knows them for a while.”

“Vain, maybe? I knew a preacher of the Apocalypse—don’t ask, it’s a popular church not far from here—whose nose was always in the air. He gave off a whiff of pride in his sacrifice.”

“They seldom have redeeming vices.”

“Like?”

“A taste for bad music, say. Or jokes about themselves.”

“Yeah, uncompromising zeal doesn’t look in the mirror much.” Cley eyed the earnest Order trio, who were talking among themselves as they fitted the slabs into reader sheaths. The impulse to reverence was eternal, as so many Library entries showed. Maybe it was built into the chimpanzee substrate all human variants carried, she thought. Hierarchy extended to the ultimate.

Seeker produced a morsel from a pouch, offered it to Cley, and said, “I knew a physician who remarked that he had forced himself to become an expert on boils in the rectal area, precisely because he found it so hard.”

Cley grimaced and said, “That preacher I mentioned—he didn’t actually believe in a God or anything. But he said we should all aim to be the kind who would get into heaven, anyway.”

“And every atom of self-irony in his body had long vanished.”

“Pretty much. So what’s wrong with the other kind—the ones who seek the perfect self?”

Seeker sat up straight, as if this subject demanded more rigor. “At least they aren’t slaves of the impersonal good. But they veer into beautifully lived lives of minimalism. As if doing without was a good in itself, when logically it leads to death. You starve.”

Cley chuckled and ate another sweetmeat. “So what’s the right way to live?”

“Looking for recipes, are we?”

“What’s the moral way to live when there are so many kinds of people?”

“Bearing your fair share.”

“What’s that?”

“The amount of sacrifice that, if everyone did it, would give the most happiness and least suffering among all the kinds of humans.”

“Pretty mathematical. And nonhumans?”

“Such as me?” Seeker scrunched its mouth into an archly unreadable smile. “You may take me for human, but prepare to be surprised.”

“Isn’t preparing for surprise a contradiction?”

“Exactly! That sense of the paradox of life will get you further up the moral mountain than striving for perfection.” Seeker sniffed. “Or for what you suppose is the good of others.”

Cley frowned. “So why try to do much at all?”

Seeker thought about this a good long while, which surprised Cley. Finally, the creature carefully brushed the long hairs of its glistening russet pelt and said, “Humility is not open to those who want to bring something fresh into the world.”

“Like you?”

“I suppose I am obvious.”

“Hardly. So you can’t be a saint?”

“Scarcely.” Seeker snorted. “That is a human idea.”

“You’re trying to change the world, though.”

“To do the new demands a kind of pride, an arrogance.”

“So what’re we doing here?”

“For now, trying to keep you alive.”

“It’s all about me? Why am I so special?”

Seeker was through jesting. “I wish I knew. So do many others.”