Beyond Infinity (23 page)

“Water will hide us for a while,” Seeker said.

“Are they after the Library again?”

“No. They seem to—there.”

A streamer broke through an amber pouch spun by Supra ships. It plunged earthward and, in a dazzling burst, split into fingers of prickly light. These raced over the mountains and down into valleys, like rivulets of a tormented river in the air. One orange filament arced nearby, ripe with crackling ferocity. It dwelled a moment along the way they had come, as if sniffing for a trail, and then darted away, leaving a diminishing flurry of sharp pops.

Seeker said mildly, “Quite close.”

The Supras seemed to have caged in the remaining bright lacings. The thrusts broke into colors and roiled about the sky like quick, caged fire. Trapped. The glinting Supra ships banked and turned back toward the Library.

“We are fortunate,” Seeker said.

Cley nodded. “That was a cute trick with the water.”

“I doubted it would work.”

“You gambled our lives on it.”

“I saw little choice.”

“Good thing you don’t make mistakes.”

“Oh, I do.” Seeker laughed, tongue lolling out of its red lips, and then sighed with something like weariness. “To live is to err.”

Cley frowned. “C’mon! You have some help, right? Some connection.”

“I am alone, like you.”

“What’re you connected to?” she persisted. The Supras were linked to immense machine intelligences far greater than her inboards. Often she had sensed in faint Talent-talk their shadowy messages. It seemed likely that Seeker might have some inboard access to an extended intelligence. Some technologies on Earth were human-crafted and had been made long ago. They were embedded in the world with ancient craft.

Seeker lifted one amber shoulder in a gesture she could not read. “Everything. And the nothing. It is difficult to talk about in this constricted language. And pointless.”

Seeker sat back on its haunches and lowered its head, meaning that it would not budge.

She knew not to press. “Well, anyway, that’ll keep the Supras busy. They’ve already figured out how to fight the lightning.”

“For a while. It searched for us, plainly, knowing we had escaped.”

“How could it?”

“It is intelligence free of matter and has ways we cannot know.” Already Seeker moved on, slipping on some gravel and sprawling, sending pebbles rattling downslope. But it got back up, fatigue showing in its eyes, and moved on in a way that was once called “dogged” but now had no such description, for there were no longer any true dogs.

Scrambling over the ridgerock, Seeker added, “And should not know.”

T
HEY MADE GOOD TIME.
The geyser sent feathery clouds along the backbone of the mountain range. These thickened and burst with rain. The air’s ferment hid them and brought moist, swarming scents.

The parched Earth needed more than the water so long hidden in deep lakes. Through the roll of hundreds of millions of years its skin of soil had disappeared, broken by sunlight and baked into vapor. The sun was hammering ever harder at the planet. Like all stars, it polluted its core with the heavier elements born of marrying hydrogen to hydrogen. As higher elements built, there was less hydrogen fuel at the core. To keep its fires going, a star compressed more under the mass of its outer shells. The burning core raged hotter, and so did the star, and its children, the planets, felt the coming of a heat that would eventually doom them all.

Beside this slow stellar agony, Earth warmed through uncounted millennia. Its ruddy rocks absorbed more carbon dioxide, and humans responded by increasing their release of it. The warmer oceans spun more cloud cover, helping a bit. But the water clouds suffered the arrows of ultraviolet, splitting, their hydrogen increasing its steady leak from the top of the atmosphere.

An ancient experiment had sequestered most of the world’s water underground. This had retained the moisture, letting sandy plains reflect more sunlight than the darker oceans. No doubt it had seemed a good idea at the time.

But now, Cley had learned as a little girl, that strategy was ebbing. Other methods were aloft somewhere beyond view, she knew—but she had not paid strict attention in her classes devoted to such arcane abstractions. The Supras were restoring water to the surface, and the plume that had just sheltered them was one of their staged eruptions. Earth was far too precious to abandon.

The Supras had loosed upon these dry expanses the lichen, which could eat stone and fart organic paste. Legions of intricately designed, self-reproducing cells then burrowed into the noxious waste. Within moments such a microbe corps could secrete a rich mire of bacteria, tiny fungi, rotifers. Musty soil grew, the fruit of microscopic victories and stalemates waged in every handful of mud around the globe. Dirty fogs smelling like sewers layered the air.

Seeker said they should skirt along these working perimeters of the forest. The biting vapors made Cley cough, but she understood that the shifting brown fogs also cloaked their movements against easy discovery from above. They would be just more infrared blotches amid all the ferment.

She could glimpse momentary slices of the night sky, now cleared of Supra ships and the many-fingered lightning. They slipped into the shadows of the enveloping woods, but Cley felt uneasy. They climbed; the air thinned. Panting, hours later, they looked down through dawn’s slanted rays on the spreading network of narrow valleys they had traversed. She could see that the grasp of life had grown even since she had observed it from Rin’s flyer.

Already some fresh forests followed the snaking lines of newborn streams, growths cunningly spreading through the agency of animals. Such plants used animals often, following ancient precept. Long ago the flowers had recruited legions of six-legged insects and two-legged primates to serve them. Tasty nectar and fruit seduced many into propagating seeds. The flowers’ radiant beauty charmed first humans and later other animals into careful service, weeding out all but the lovely from gardens; a weed, after all, was simply a plant without guile.

But it was the grasses that had held humanity most firmly in thrall for so long, and they endured as well. Already great plains of crops stretched between the forks of river valleys, tended by animals long bred for the task. Humanity had delegated the tasks of irrigation and soil care. As the Supras revived species, they re-created the clever, narrowly focused intelligences harbored in large rodents. These had proved much more efficient groomers of the grasses than the prehistoric, cumbersome technology of tractors and fertilizers.

Onward, always. Cley felt more at home now as they trekked through dense woods. She kindled her hormones and food reserves to fend off sleep, just as she had in the Tubeworld. But this would be more grueling, she was sure. Grimly she kept up the steady pace needed to stay with Seeker, who showed no signs of fatigue.

The forest resembled no terrain that had ever existed before. Assembled from the legacy of a perpetually fecund biosphere, it boasted forms separated in their origins by a billion years. The Supras had reactivated the vast index of genotypes in the Library with some skill. Life must not be easy. Few predators found easy prey, and seldom did a plant not find some welcoming ground after the lichen had made their mulch.

Over a billion years, even the seeming constants changed. The rub of tides on shorelines had slowed the planet’s whirl, lengthening the day by a fourth. Life had faced steadily longer, hotter days as the crust itself drifted and broke. In the Era of Oceans the wreckage of continental collisions had driven up fresh mountains and opened deep sutures in the seabeds—all as patient backdrop to the frantic buzz of life’s adjustments to these immense constraints. All had to struggle and adjust. Species rose and died because of minute tunings of their genetic texts. And all the hurried succession and passionate ferment was a drama played out before the gaze of humanity—which had its own agenda.

Over the past billion years the very cycles of life on Earth had followed rhythms laid down by governing intelligences. For so long had nature been a collaboration between humanity and evolution that the effects were inseparable. Yet Cley, a woman of the woods, was startled when they came upon a valley of silent, trudging figures. Not human.

“Caution,” Seeker whispered.

They were crossing a foggy lowland ripe with the thick fragrance of soil-making lichen. Out of the mist came shambling shadows. Cley and Seeker struck a defensive pose, back to back, for the stubby forms were suddenly all around them. Cley switched to infrared to isolate movements against the pale, cloudy background and found the figures too cool to be visible. Ghostly, moving warily, they seemed to spring everywhere from the ground itself.

“Bots?” she whispered, wishing for a hefty weapon.

“No.” Seeker peered closely at the slow, ponderous shapes. “Plants.”

“What?” Cley heard now the
squish, squish
as limbs labored.

“See—they unhinge from their elders.”

In the murky light they watched the slow, deliberate pods separate from the trunks of great trees. Stubby limbs peeled away from their parents and found unsteady purchase on the ground. It was a slow, deliberate birth, moist and eerie in its silence.

Cley had a sudden idea. “Plants led, once,” she whispered, even though she was sure these things could not hear. “From sea to land, so that animals could follow. Flowers made a home for insects—”

“Invented the insects, in my view,” Seeker said.

“But why this…?” She gestured through the heavy fog at the woody forms that worked their limbs forward with grave slowness.

“Every step was an improvement in reproduction,” Seeker said. “Here is another.”

“I never heard—”

“These adaptations came long after my time, as I came after yours.”

Plants had long suffered at the appetites of rodents and birds, who ate a thousand of the seeds for each one they accidentally scattered. Yet plants held great power over their animal parasites; the replacement of ferns by better-adapted broad-leaved trees had quickly ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Plants’ age-old strategy lay in improving their reproduction. Throughout the Age of Mammals this meant hijacking passing animals to spread their seeds.

Cley could see the logic of the shambling shapes that melted in and out of the fog. When ponderous evolution finally found an avenue of escape from this wastefulness, plants elected to copy the primates’ care in tending to their young.

She approached one of the stubby, prickly things. It was thick at the base and moved by jerking forward broad, rough appendages like roots. They looked like wobbly pineapples out for a slow stroll. Each great tree exfoliated several walkers, which then moved onto wetter ground, or to spots enjoying better sunlight. Cley thought of eating one, for the resemblance to pineapples was striking, and reached for one. Standing on hind legs, Seeker dug claws into her shoulder, whispering that their sharp thorns smelled of poison. They moved on, and farther up the valley they found a giant bush busily dispatching its progeny as rolling balls, which sought moist bottomland and warmth. The balls popped out merrily and bounced over obstructions with something like a child’s joy.

Onward.

They passed a region where carbon dioxide welled from the soil, a legacy of the slow churn of continents. Silvery bark peeled from trees, leaving the spindly pines stark white. Just beyond lay a blackened forest. Cley stopped dead. “This… I remember. I came here one summer. Hot Creek Meta lived…there.” She pointed to a ridgeline where stubs of buildings poked at the sky.

Seeker knelt and sniffed. “The burning is nearly ten megaseconds old.”

“What?”

“A third of a year.”

The landscape jumped out at Cley, powerful stored memories overlaying visually from her inboards. She had played and laughed and sweated here. “They’re all…dead.”

“I fear so. At the same time you were injured.”

“Damn… I…” Somehow this made it all come rushing back.

Seeker stood and gently put a paw on her shoulder. “The past is not over. It is not even past.”

There was nothing for it but to go on. They kept to the deep canyons, avoiding exposure to the sky. Cloaking mist gave some shelter from the Supra patrols, which now crisscrossed the sky. “They do not know this luxuriance well,” Seeker remarked, clicking its sharp teeth with satisfaction. “Nor do their bots.”

Cley saw the truth in this, though she had always assumed that the mechanical wonders were of an innately higher order. Humanity had long managed the planet, tended the self-regulating soup of soil and air, of ocean and rich continents. Finally, exhausted and directionless, they had handed this task over to the bots, only to find after more millions of stately years that the bots were intrinsically cautious, perhaps even to a fault.

Evolution shaped intelligences born in silicon and metal as surely and steadily as it did those minds that arose from carbon and enzymes. The bots had changed, yet kept to their ingrained Mandate of Man: to sustain the myriad species against the wearing of the world. It had been the bots, then, who decided that they could not indefinitely manage a planet moist with organic possibility. A miserly element in them had decreed that the organic realm should be reduced to a minimum. They had persuaded the leaders of the crumbling human cities to retreat, to let the bots suck Earth’s already dwindling water into vast basaltic caverns.

So humanity’s servants had for hundreds of millions of years managed a simple, desiccated Earth: the Dry.

“Machines feared the small, persistent things,” Seeker explained that night as they camped next to a heatbush. “Life’s subtle turns.” They had taken shelter under a massive sunflower that, at nightfall, drooped its giant petals over to form a warm tent. Nearby was a bristling bush that gave off warmth against the chilly, fragrant fogs.

“Couldn’t the bots adjust those?” Cley asked. She had seen the routine miracles of the bots. It was difficult to believe those impassive, methodical presences could not master even this rich world with their steady precision.