Beyond Infinity (31 page)

Cley made out a swiftly moving mote. She judged angles and guessed that it came arcing in from the outer depths of the solar system, for it was moving fast with its infall velocity. The tiny twinkle of tumbling light was passing close in to the leading edge of Earth, breathtakingly close but also furiously fast. Suddenly, she saw the point—to tug the planet outward with this fleeting kiss, seducing it with gravity into a small step outward. Uncountable billions of such kisses, to flee the sun’s growing wrath.

She was even more impressed. “And it keeps working…”

“With the fine tuning of those we can hope to meet later.”

“People?”

“You mean humans? No, these crafters work in space itself.”

“All this to make the Earth work a little longer?”

“Editing the sun is not enough.” Seeker bent and pressed an ear against a purple stalk. She nibbled at the young shoots breaking through the slick bark but also seemed to be listening. Then she sat up alertly. “The captain says that we are bound for Venus.”

Ignoring how the procyon knew this, she asked, “The planet next out from Earth?” Her astronomy was shaky, though she had gazed at the night sky with longing.

“Yes, second from the sun.”

“Um. Can we live there?”

“I expect the question will be whether we can avoid death there.”

With that, Seeker fell asleep, as abruptly as ever. Cley, wary of the tangled jungle, did not venture away. She watched the Earth and moon shrink, twin planets brimming against the timeless blaze of the galaxy.

She knew instinctively that the moon was not merely a sheltered greenhouse maintained by constant outside management. Who would tend it, after all? For long eons humankind had been locked into its desert fastnesses. No, the ripeness came from organisms endlessly adapting. To imagine otherwise, as ancient humans had, was to see the world as a game with fixed rules—like human sports, strict and static. Yet even planets had to yield to the press of suns.

She had learned much in the Library, but seeing this silent grandeur made the points far better. The sun had burned hydrogen for nearly five billion years before Earth evolved a species that could understand that simple fact and its implications. Unlike campfires, solar furnaces blaze brighter as their ash gathers.

Earthlife had escaped this dead hand of physics…for a while. Long before humans emerged, a blanket of carbon dioxide had helped warm the Earth. As the sun grew hotter, though, life thinned that blanket to keep a comfortable clime.

But carbon dioxide was also the medium through which the rich energy of the sun’s fusing hydrogen became transmuted into living matter. Thinning the carbon dioxide blanket threatened that essential reaction. So a jot of time after the evolution of humans—a mere hundred million years—the air had such skimpy carbon dioxide that this imperiled all the plant kingdom.

At that point the biota of Earth could have radically adjusted their chemical rhythms. Other planets had passed through this knothole before and survived. But the intelligences that thronged that era, including the forerunners of Seeker, had intervened.

Moving the Earth farther from the solar furnace would offset the steady banking of the inner fires. So came the era known as the Reworking. It led to the great maneuvers that rearranged the planets, opening them to fresh uses. All this lay buried in the Library’s dusty records and crossed Cley’s thoughts only as a filigree of myth.

The much-embellished stories her tribe had told around campfires taught such things through parable and grandiose yarns. Her kind were not studious in the strict sense of the term, but their forest crafts had needed an underpinning of sage myth, the “feel” of why and how biospheres were knitted and fed. Some lore was even hard-wired in Cley at the level of instinctive comprehension. She knew this, too, and was deeply grateful that she would never know which of her ideas came from those depths.

So the cloud-wreathed beauty of the twin worlds made her breath catch, her heart race with a love that was perhaps the hallmark of true intelligence. As Seeker slept, she watched specks climb above the sharp-edged air of Luna to meet other dabs in a slow, grand gavotte. Another Jonah approached from Earth. Attendant motes converged on it from eccentric orbits about the moon.

She adjusted her eyes to pick out the seeping infrared glow that spoke of internal warmth, and saw a greater cloud, a snapshot of teeming bee-swarm wealth. Streamers swung between Earth and moon—endless transactions of species. A thinner rivulet broke away from the figure-eight orbits that linked the twins. It trickled inward, and Cley—holding a hand against the sun’s glare, shutting down her infrared vision entirely—saw that it looped toward a thick swarm that clustered about the sun itself.

She felt then both awe—that reverent fear of immensity—and a hollow loneliness. She wished her clan could see this, wished that there were other minds of her cut and shape to share this spectacle.

Her attention was so riveted on the unfolding sky that she did not hear the stealthy approach of scraping paws. But she did catch the jostle as something launched itself in the weak gravity.

The shape came at her from behind. She got only a snatched instant to see it, a thing of sleek-jacketed black and flagrant reds. It was hinged like a bat at the wings and slung with ball-bearing agility in its swiveling, three-legged attack.

Claws snatched at the air where Cley had been. She had ducked and shot sideways, rebounding from a barnacled branch. In a heartbeat she decided. Instead of fleeing into unknown leafy wilderness, where a pack of the attackers might well be waiting, she launched herself back into the silent, sleek thing.

It squawked. Thrashed. Plainly, this it had not expected.

Cley hit it amidships. A leg snapped; near-weightlessness makes for flimsy construction. She flicked two of her fingers into needles, usually used for the fine treatment of ailing creatures. They plunged into the flared red ears of the attacker, puncturing the enlarged eardrums. From their size, Cley guessed ears were its principal sensory organ. The creature jerked, yowled, and departed, a squawking blur of pain and anger.

Cley landed on a wide branch, hands ready. She trembled with a mixture of eagerness and fear, which a billion years of selection had still retained as fundamental to the human constitution. The foliage replied to her intent wariness with quiet indifference. Silence.

Seeker awoke, stretching and yawning. “More food?”

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

—Oscar Wilde,
Lady Windermere’s Fan

T
HEY SIGHTED THE
Supra ship their third day out. It came flaring into view from Earthside, as Cley now thought of the aft layers of the Leviathan.

She and Seeker spent much of their time aft. They enjoyed the view of the steadily shrinking, cloud-shrouded moon as they rested among a tangle of enormous fragrant flowerpods. Seeker spotted the bright speck first. Near the moon a yellow star grew swiftly. It became a sleek silver ship balancing on a thin torch flame.

This had just registered with Cley when Seeker jerked her back behind an overarching stamen, whispering, “Do not move.”

The slim craft darted around the Leviathan as though it were sniffing. Its nose turned and swiveled despite its being glossy metal. The torch ebbed, and fine jets sent it zooming beyond view along the long, coarse bulk of the Leviathan.

In her mind Cley felt a shadowy presence, like a sound just beyond recognition. A murmur of Talent-talk. The Supra ship returned, prowling close enough to the prickly growths to risk colliding with upper stems.

Seeker put both her large, padded hands on Cley’s face. She had done this before, to soothe Cley when her anxieties refused to let her sleep. Now the pressure of those rough palms sent a calming thread through her.

She knew what the touch implied: let her mind go blank, so her Talent would transmit as little as possible. Any Supra aboard the ship who had come from Illusivia could pick up her thoughts, but only if they were focused clearly into perceptible messages. Or so Cley hoped. After all, she knew little of this.

The ship held absolutely still for a long while, as if deciding whether to venture inside. The cloud of spaceborne life that surrounded the Leviathan had drawn away from the ship, perhaps fearing its rockets. Its exact cylindrical symmetries and severe gleam seemed strange and malevolent among the drifting swarms—hard and enclosed, giving nothing away. Suddenly, the yellow blowtorch ignited again, sending the life forms skittering in all directions. The ship vanished in moments, heading out from the sun.

“They must’ve guessed I was running this way,” Cley said.

Seeker took her paws away. “They try every fleeting possibility.”

Seeker still seemed concerned, though Cley was seldom sure what meanings attached to her quick frowns, fur-ripplings, and teeth displays. “I felt something…”

“They sought your thought-smell.”

“Didn’t know I had one.”

“It is distinctive.”

“You can smell it?”

“In your species many memories are lodged near the brain’s receptors for smell. Scents then evoke memories. Remember where you were as a child and first caught the wonderful bouquet of approaching rain?”

“Oh, yes. I was under a tree…”

“I do not share this property, but I had heard of it.”

“That’s sad. So?” Sometimes Seeker’s roundabout manner irked her. She was not sure whether the procyon was suggesting much by saying little, or simply amusing herself. Maybe both.

“A Supra can remember the savor of your thinking. This act of recollection calls up your Talent, resonates with it, makes it stronger.”

“Just by remembering and broadcasting, they make me transmit better?”

“Something like that.”

Cley could not match this idea with the odd, scratchy presence she had felt. “Well, they’re gone now.”

“They may return.”

“You’ve got the Talent, don’t you?”

Seeker grinned. “If you cannot tell, then I suppose I do not.”

“Well, yeah, I sure can’t pick up anything from you. But—”

“Let us move away from here. The ship could try again.”

They left the flower zone, where they had foraged for a day, supping on thick nectar. Cley did not register a transition, but somehow they came into a region with little centripetal gravity. This place did not have as simple an inner geometry as the Jonah’s. Internal portions of the Leviathan spun on unseen axes, and streams flowed along sloping hillsides that seemed to the eye uphill. The local gravity was never more than a subtle touch, but it gave shape and order to the rampant vegetation.

They came into a vast chamber with teeming platforms, passageways, tunnels, balustrades, antechambers, all thronged with small animals moving on intent paths. It was a central station for a system of tubes that seemed to sprout everywhere, even high up the walls. The moist air above was crisscrossed by great shafts of filtered sunlight rising from sources near the floor, up to a distant arched ceiling.

She could see no obvious biological point to this, or to the transparent membrane that brimmed with a view of the starscape outside. In the middle, the galactic center glowed brilliantly. Earth’s sun had migrated inward from its original orbit, using swing-bys with other suns. Cley knew this from far history but could not imagine how people did it, or why.

Yet all the moist, busy grandeur of this place did not intimidate her; it was even inviting. The scurrying animals were intelligent, in their way, going about swift tasks without giving her more than a glance. Humans were apparently uninteresting, maybe not even unusual. She doubted that many Supras used Leviathans to journey, given their swift ships. She did not dwell on the Supra pursuit. As the momentum of events carried her farther from her lands, she had resolved to plunge forward rather than endlessly fret. Perhaps she could find Ur-humans somewhere out here, as Seeker had said.

It had taken a few restless nights truly to feel this, but now it held firm in her. She remembered the bright-eyed girl who had breathlessly sought the company of Supras, especially the men. That girl seemed very far away now. Yet she lay less than a single summer in the past, her inboards told her.

Her hunting skills reawakened as she followed Seeker in her foraging, unhurried but quick. Seeker ate a lot. She savored the pursuit of small prey and enjoyed the sport of it without remorse, though in fact she devoured mostly plants. She especially enjoyed ripping big feathery grass shoots to shreds, picking out packets of ripe red seeds. Cley watched and learned.

The ferment of tangled life around them, extending in all three dimensions throughout Leviathan, captivated Cley. It was so unlike the Supras’ carefully tuned projects. As she immersed herself in this complex wealth, she finally understood what had irked and daunted her about the Supras. Their air of superiority had been tolerable, but in their grave manner she felt a cold brush with something she could not name…a distance.

Kurani, dear lost Kurani, had been intensely alive, astonishing. He had amused her, an ephemeral Original, by his need to exist in the moment. The other Supras were leaden and solemn. Kata had shown Cley their art, and it had been cloaked with images of decay. It was shaped by the weight of uncountable drowsy centuries, as if already a creeping tide of entropy had doomed the glowing stars.

Her spirit rebelled against this. Without the sun’s abundance no light would have kindled life. The biota were like skilled accountants, living on the flow of energy, paying all required taxes but never neglecting a loophole. Burning fat in Cley’s blood generated entropy, but she managed to excrete entropy even faster in waste heat and waste matter—a miraculous, improbable, but perfectly legal dodging of the second law of thermodynamics.

She, like whole planets, shed excrement and pollution. But in her home forest the pollution of one had been the meat of another. She was beginning to see that this truth worked on the interplanetary scale. Surely it worked a persistent magic in Leviathan, and would soon enough on Earth, with the return of the oceans.