Beyond Infinity (29 page)

Then the Quickened vanished from view.

Where it/they went, no one knew.

There were endless speculations, of course, layered in the Library down through endless millennia. But no data. No one had ever heard again from those who went, or knew what physical form they had adopted. Or even if they had one.

There were a few scattershot attempts, in both directions. But the transmissions could arrive as floating balls of humidity, of frantic luminosities, of voices shrieking in the empty air. The Quickened were trying, but they almost seemed to be moving away at high acceleration.

One day, known for ages as the Loss, the Quickened simply stopped communicating. Before, their bodies had been living in various space habitats in the outer solar system. Those habitats were found vacant. How the Quickened had left lay in great obscurity.

“Where are they?” Seeker asked, eyes sharp.

“Nobody knows.”

“I am sorry, I thought this was a mystery story.”

“Hey, come on. I only know what I take in.” Thinking,
And how long will it take to digest just what I’ve already got? I used to think adults were so certain, understood how life was supposed to work. It just gets more confusing and complicated!

Seeker slid its black lips up over its teeth, sucking abstractly, eyes distant. “Some of this I did not know.”

“Now, there’s a first.”

“You think me arrogant.”

“Just a know-it-all, is all.”

“Then let us share our ignorance.”

Seeker lolled back, eyes half closed, and wove her a tale. Of a time after the Quickening—it was quite sure of at least that—and of another, far later era.

Humanity had encountered alien minds out among the stars. Some collaborations had proved possible, but much one would expect—trade in ideas, art, philosophy, science—was not. The gulf yawned. Minds bred of different evolutions proved too distant to grasp.

And too often, the aliens died away. Ceased to voyage. Ceased to care, to communicate. Sometimes, ceased entirely. There were ancient accounts of vast species suicides. Others vanished without any explanation.

One large grouping of aliens had proved to be the most inscrutable. They dwelled near the galactic center. They had something resembling religious faith, but the very concept is only a rough fit to what the translators could perceive.

Those strange minds had made what came to be known by humanity as the Malign, though of course, that name bespoke a human view. It was, all records said, a being embodied without need of inscribing patterns on matter. And it had proved malignant beyond measure.

The aliens who had made it vanished in its first, virulent actions. History did not record whether this was their goal, or their comeuppance. In time, the distinction scarcely mattered.

Then the true ferocity of their creation lashed across the galaxy. The witnesses to this era were few, for the Malign’s energies erased all.

Seeker gave only one small example. Uncounted millions of years before, the Malign had directed a white dwarf into a Sol-type star. The dwarf carved its way through, and the star had turned into a thermo-nuclear furnace under the sudden, fierce compression of the dwarf’s added gravitation. The gnawing dwarf ate its way through the fatter star, exploding into view on the other side, carrying forth like fruit of conquest a white-hot disk of incandescence, stolen from the Sol-star’s matter.

An inhabited planet orbiting the Sol-star survived the initial seethe, still bound to its parent, but its atmosphere and then oceans boiled away within hours. The dwarf sped on, carrying its new disk like a brilliant skirt. Following it into the interstellar depths straggled most of the victim system’s planets, borne into eternal chill.

And so the Malign had dealt with many civilizations throughout the hub of the galaxy. Star formation had begun eleven billion years before, at the galactic center. Condensation into young suns propagated outward. Earth’s ordinary star had been born 5.5 billion years before. The galaxy had rotated twenty-five times since the Earth was born, and nineteen since life appeared there.

So the oldest civilizations lay in the great spherical swarm that humans could not even see, through the intervening lanes of dust.

Beginning there, at the galaxy’s hub, and raging outward for millions of years, the Malign had extinguished most of galactic civilization.

All this the Malign achieved with the great Talents that descended from a final theory of the universe. Only the Malign could master this. Indeed, many felt that this ability was the reason the alien minds and human helpers had created the Malign—a greatness beyond their knowing, who would finally understand the universe entire.

This had seemed to happen. Communications showed that the Malign had formulated a Theory of Everything, of infinite, supple nuance.

A long silence followed. Knowing the final answers to myriad questions that the best minds of humanity (and far more) had pondered for uncounted ages—knowing this in full—it moved to eradicate any intelligence that could do the same.

Through uncounted eons, it very nearly succeeded.

And no one knew why.

Humanity had suffered a single encounter with the Malign. A colonized star system, the boldest human venture into the galactic center, had attracted the destroyer’s ravenous attention. Many of the bravest had died then, on the worlds they’d shaped with such loving care, and much of man’s adventurous spirit died with them. Few escaped to tell of what had befallen them—fewer still with intact minds.

That trauma sent them reeling away, back to their stellar system, to hide. It also sent human minds fleeing from the analytical. If the Malign came from the quest for final knowledge, then such knowledge itself had to be abandoned.

Only a few had labored through that dark age. They kept the Library intact, moving it to deep caverns immune to even the vagaries of continental drift. Privation was common, but the greatest poverty was of prospect. Their horizons shrank. They kept their heads down.

No darkness endures forever. This one, the deepest, still did not extinguish the burning light of curiosity flickering in the human skull.

So another great human civilization came and ventured forth. In a mere few million years, it had spanned the stars again. It found ruins left by the Malign. And fugitives as well, most of them machine intelligences. A ramshackle alliance formed. The sphere of human endeavor expanded…and again met the Malign.

It was still foraging.

The tales of that time were now lost. A little came to light, long afterward, pieced together from survivors’ accounts near-mythic in their scope. They were at least as accurate as what survived in the Library’s records, purged of almost all mention of the Malign, by those fearful of another such monster’s creation.

Only heroic struggle had managed to capture and restrain the Malign. To cage it firmly had been the work of billions, exhausting lifetimes. Billions more perished. Countless mortal minds had conjured up a counter to the Malign. A guard was born, named the Multifold. Both dwelled in the depths of far space.

But with that last grand act some light had gone out of humanity. Later subspecies of humans had retreated yet again. They let their machines steal the variety and tang from their world. Their recessional took a million years to play out. Many resisted. But in time only the lights of Sonomulia burned in the sands that would one day overwhelm all.

Seeker sighed. “There is more, but I cannot bear to say it.”

“You’d stop there? Why?”

“Vain pride,” Seeker said.

“Huh? Why? That makes no sense.”

“To think that humans were the pinnacle of creation?”

Cley grimaced. “Oh. I see.”

Cley was subdued for most of the voyage to the moon. She had seen this fresh world hanging in her sky, known it was a fairly recent creation from a remnant of the original. Just as she had known a bit of Seeker’s story, for fragments of it formed a tribal fable based on Supra lore.

But the Malign was older now than the mountains she had roved—far more than just a gauzy myth told by the Supras. They had spoken of the Multifold, too, but that equally tenuous entity was said to be strung like a veil among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.

Those stories had never seemed as immediate or important as the here and now of life in her Meta. Cley struggled to absorb that such a thing as the Malign could actually be real and have any connection to her. That it could want
her
dead, that it had destroyed all those she had loved, was almost beyond belief. But the myth still lived, raged, and ravaged, while her people’s ashes blew on the winds. Those who had been her reality were now crumbling gray ash, slowly reclaimed by the woods she’d known.

The moon swam, green and opulent, as they looped outward. The Jonah’s slight spin gave an obliging purchase to the outer segments of the great vessel, and Cley ventured with Seeker through verdant labyrinths to watch their approach. They spoke little. Cley sensed a momentum to their passage, a drama being played out beyond her understanding. And Seeker would say nothing more of this, for now.

The lunar landscape was a jagged creation of sharp mountains and colossal waterfalls. At the edge of the dusk line, valleys sank into shadows lit by reflected yellow from high peaks. Thick clouds, far higher than any on Earth because of the lesser gravity, glowed like live coals. Raw peaks cleaved the flowing cloud decks, leaving a wake like that of a giant ship. From these flashed lightning, like the blooming buds of blue roses.

These stark contrasts had been shaped by a bombardment of light elements, hauled sunward in comets. To kindle this, a rain had fallen for a thousand years in droplets the size of a human hand. Atop the lunar air sat a translucent film a few molecules thick, holding in a thick blanket of air. The film had permanent holes allowing spacecraft and spaceborne life access, the whole arrangement kept buoyant by steady replenishment from belching volcanoes. This trap offset the moon’s feebler gravitational grasp so well that it lost less of its air than did the Earth. Intact, the moon swam like a single cell in the sun’s warmth.

The fat, beckoning crescent moon hung almost directly sunward and so was nearly drowned in shadow until the Jonah began to curve toward its far side. For this passing moment the sun, moon, and Earth were aligned in geometric perfection before plunging back along their complicated courses. Cley watched this moment of uncanny, simple equilibrium and felt, as she had not in a long while, the paradox that balance and stillness lay at the heart of all change.

One of her Moms had taught that, using examples as humble as a bird’s flight on rising warm winds. Cley had never imagined that the lesson could play out on such an immense scale, in silent majesty.

“See,” Seeker said. “Storms.”

Cley looked down into the murk and whirl of the bottled lunar air. But the disturbance lay above that sharp division. In the blackness over both poles there snaked slow filaments of blushing orange.

“Damn,” Cley whispered, as though the helical strands could hear. “Is that…?”

“The Malign? I suspect so.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Not as directly, no. But whatever it is, I think it probes for us. I had thought the Malign would forage elsewhere first.”

Seeker did not explain further. It pointed with its ears at what seemed to Cley to be empty space around Earth. Seeker described how the Earth’s magnetic domain was compressed by the wind from the sun, and streams out in the wake. Cley blinked her eyes up into ultraviolet and caught the delicate shimmer of a huge volume around the planet. She witnessed a province she had never suspected, the realm dominated by the planet’s sturdy magnetic fields. They made a gossamer ball, crumpled in on the sun side, stretched and slimmed by the wind from the sun into a tapering tail.

Arcades of gossamer fretwork grew and died. In the rubbery architecture of this magnetosphere, roving violences were killing intricate fields, annihilating order. Suddenly, she knew that these crimes were the footprints of the Malign. That had been Seeker’s point. A sullen dread she had been resisting fell upon her like a black weight. “It’s searching there, too.”

“It relishes the bands of magnetic fields,” Seeker said somberly. “I hoped it would seek us only in that realm.”

“But it’s spread here, too.”

“It is vast in a way that seems beyond description.”

“Huh? How?”

“There is mathematics our sort cannot comprehend.”

“Hell, there’s
arithmetic
I had trouble with.”

“Oh?”

“Inboards have their limits.”

Though she chuckled, Cley felt a cold shudder. Immense forces lumbered through these colossal spaces. She was a woman born to pad the quiet paths of sheltered forests, to prune and plant and catch the savor of the sighing wind. These chilly reaches were not for her.

She stiffened her spine. “It’s able to punch through the air blanket.”

Seeker simply poked one ear at the lunar south pole. She shifted down into the infrared and saw faint plumes geyser below the hard curve of the atmosphere. Orange sparks worked there.

Cley felt her pulse quicken. “Damn-all! It’s already breached the air membrane.” She bit her lip and nearly lost her hold on a branch.

“And it can hunt and prey at will, once inside. It follows the lunar magnetic-field lines where it wishes.” Seeker cast off without warning, kicked against an enormous orchid, and shot down a connecting tube.

“Hey, wait!”

She caught up in an ellipsoidal vault, where an army of the clacking black spiders was assembling ranks of oval containers. In the dizzying activity she could barely keep up with Seeker. Larger animals shot by her, some big enough to swat her with a single flipper or snap her in two with a beak, moving in a blur—but all ignored her. A fever pitch resounded through the noisy mob.
So much life. So huge.

Seeker had stopped, though, and was sunning itself just beneath the upper dome.

“What can we
do
?” Even to herself, her words sounded plaintive and lost.