Beyond Infinity (37 page)

She felt their presence now as several tiny skittering notes in the back of her mind, mouse-small and bee-quick. “What’ll we do?”

“Nothing.”

“They’re getting close.”

“It is time they did.”

“Should we hide?”

“Not necessary now. Events make their own momentum.”

Seeker gestured at the intricate whirl of light visible through a high, arching dome above the tangled greenery. They were coming in on a sunward orbit, and the Jove worlds lay beneath them like jewels on a black carpet.

Beyond Jupiter’s original large moons there now circled rich, russet-clouded Mercury and shrunken, blue-oceaned Saturn. These radiant dabs swam among washes of bright magenta and burnt gold. Spinning very slowly, these washes were single life forms larger than continents.

Seeker had described some of these in far more detail than Cley could follow. They all seemed to be complex variations on the age-old craft of negotiating sunlight and chemicals into beautiful structures. Seeker implied that these were intelligences utterly different from Earthborne kinds, and she struggled with the notion that what appeared to be enormous gardens could harbor minds superior to her own. Or at least different.

Cley lay back and listened to the steadily waxing burr of Supra talk. She could not distinguish words, but a thin edge of smoldering worry and ice blue alarm came through clearly.

Languidly she dozed and listened and thought. The smears of light that swung throughout the great orbiting globe of Jove reminded her of sea mats formed at the shorelines of ancient Earth. She had learned of them through tribal legend, much of which dealt with the lean perspectives of life.

Sandwiched between layers of grit and grime, even those earliest life forms had found a way to make war. Why should matters be different now? Some microbe mat three billion years before had used sunlight to split water, liberating deadly oxygen. They had poisoned their rivals by excreting the gas. The battle had raged across broad beaches bordered by a brown, sluggish sea. The victorious mats had enjoyed their momentary triumph beneath a pink sky. But this fresh gaseous resource in turn allowed new, more complex life to begin and thrive. Their heirs eventually drove the algae mats nearly to extinction.

So it had been with space. Planetary life had leaped into the new realm, first using simple machines, and later, deliberately engineered life forms. The dead machines had proved to be like the first algae. Instead of excreting oxygen, they brought life—inadvertently at first, then with deliberation. Compound forms arose.

In time the space-dwelling gray machines, adapting solely through unliving self-evolution, retreated. They were driven into narrow enclaves, like the early algae mats.

Out here, bordering the realm of ice, machines had finally wedded with plants to make anthology creatures. This desperate compromise had saved them.

The alliance of the gray mechanical and the living green drove a cornucopia of new forms. Once allied with the virtues of dead mass, synthesis life seethed across the vast volumes with prodigious invention. Nothing could stop—though some tried—the creative destruction of Darwin from fashioning human designs into subtler instruments. For a billion years life had teemed and fought and learned amid harsh vacuum and sunlight’s glare. This opera in the sky played out with little aid from the planets.

Cley had seen several synthesis creatures enter the Leviathan—beings that looked to her like mossy, unfolding furniture or animated blue-steel buildings.

Some time long ago, spaceborne life had begun to compete for materials with the planetary life zones. After all, most of the light elements in the solar system lay in the outer planets and in the cometary nuclei far beyond Pluto. In this competition the rocky worlds were hopelessly outclassed.

From the perspective of space, Cley thought, planetary life looked like those ancient algae mats—flat, vulnerable, trapped in a thin wedge of air, unaware of the great, stretching spaces beyond. And now the true ancient mats survived only in dark enclaves on Earth, cowering before the ravages of oxygen.

Cley referred to her inboards and let the sliding presences of history come into her mind. Given a billion years, planetborne life had done better than the mats. Slowly the planetary biospheres forged connections to spaceborne life through great beasts like the Pinwheel, the Jonah, the Leviathan. But was this only a momentary pause, a temporary bargain struck before the planets became completely irrelevant?

Or—the thought struck her solidly—were they already?

T
HE SUPRAS BOARDED
the Leviathan after protracted negotiation. The captain had appeared before Seeker and Cley, humming and darting madly, alarmed for some reason Cley could not understand. She had to reassure the captain three times that she was indeed the primitive human form the Supras sought.

Only then did the captain let the Supras board, and it was some time before Rin appeared, alone, thrashing his way through the luxuriant greenery. He was tired and disheveled, his usually immaculate one-piece suit stained and dirty.

Then Cley saw that his left arm was missing below the elbow. “What—how…?”

“Some trouble with a minor agency,” Rin said, his voice thin and tight.

She rushed to him, instinctively wanting to help, then felt embarrassed. She felt the stub of his arm. The flesh at the elbow was deeply bruised and mottled with livid yellow and orange spots.

“A little snarly thing,” he said, sitting carefully in a vine netting. “Came at me…in space…as we entered this enormous beast.”

“An animal?”

“A concoction of the Malign.”

“What…?”

“I killed it.”

“What can I do?” The recovery arts of Supras were legendary, but
this
…“Didn’t you bleed? How…?”

“Let it go,” he said, waving her away, mustering more strength in his voice.

“But you’re hurt. I—”

“My arm will take care of itself.” He grimaced for an instant but then recovered with visible effort, his face pale.

She moved to help him, but he turned to keep the severed arm away from her. She frowned with concern. “Well, at least take something for the pain.”

“I have released”—a twinge shook him—“my own metadorphins. Or I can use more powerful agencies…if I chose. But that…would slow regrowth.”

“What do you need?”

“I? Rest. Fluids. But mostly I need you.”

“Me?”

“You we came to take, but there is…little time. Let me recover. Best to stay here. It…” He faded off.

“The Malign?”

He revived with effort. “It destroys our ships, so…best…we stay here…hide.”

“Sleep.” She patted his brow, and his eyes closed.

She couldn’t keep her eyes off the stump. It had already formed a protruding mass of pale cells at its tip. Wheezing, he lay back in a matting of vines and closed his eyes, but she did not believe he slept.

And she felt none of the old surge, the—she had to admit to the word itself—
desire
for him, for his… Supraness. Good; now she understood. Rin had never inspired her oddly free-floating lust, but he had been the exception. Something missing in the chemistry, somehow.

There,
she thought. She had, at last, to admit that she had come out of her girlhood with minimal sexual skills but enormous passions, directed at the Supras. A Supra man fitted neatly into her needs. Her blazingly vivid affair with Kurani had firmly set that nascent pattern, and his loss had left her aching, empty, craving the consolation of the nearest substitute she could find. And it could have been pretty much any Supra man, in the end. Except Rin. It was good to know that there were exceptions.

Kurani had indeed been extraodinary, the best man and Supra she had known. What had been, with him, had been true. No matter how blind or misguided, it had still been true. Small wonder, really, that her heart had been shaped to his mold…

But substitutes for him weren’t enough anymore. She knew them for the pale ghost echoes they were.

And now, only now, could she see her own patterns. Watch that part of her taper away in the rearview mirror of life. For she was finally beyond it. Distance helped. Relief flooded her. She sighed.

Cley watched Rin’s flesh slowly begin to extrude from his elbow. Oily secretions seeped to the surface as the arm seemed to build itself layer by layer, bulging outward. Stubs of bare white bone first inched forth. Then ligaments and tendons accumulated along the bones, fed by swarms of migrating cells like moving, busy lichen. A wave of denser cartilage followed, cementing attachments with muscle fibers that wove themselves as she watched. Then layers of skin fattened in the wake of growth—first a column of pink and then darker shades. Already Rin’s arm was longer by the length of her little finger. Sweat drenched his clothes, but he clenched his teeth and said nothing, muscles standing out in his neck. Then he slept.

Cley sat beside him, fetching water when he awoke and asked. She had taken weeks to recover from her injuries. This man was regrowing a limb in a single, fitful sleep. The gulf between them was quietly impressive.

A long while passed. Seeker had vanished. Rin ate some red nuts when she offered them but refused any more food. He seemed to summon up the materials and energy for regrowth from his own tissues. His strong legs seemed to deflate slightly, as though flesh was dissolving and migrating to his wounded arm. His entire body turned a ruddy brown, flushed with blood. Muscles jerked, and filigrees of color washed over his skin. He moaned occasionally but managed to contain his torment, breathing shallowly.

His hand formed from matted gray cells. Sheets of them made quick rushes, like an invading army, over the muscle and membrane that in turn cloaked bare bone. These invasions flowed directly from his circulatory system, she saw, moving to the working surface and making greasy mats that cured in the sunlight. Over hours they gathered into the fine network of muscles that made the human hand such a marvel of evolution’s art.

She watched as though this were a living anatomy lesson. Bones grew to their fine tips, followed by a wash of cloaking cells. Blue waves of cells settled into place as muscle. Stringy, yellow fat filled in spaces, then got eaten for other uses. Fresh skin had begun to wrap the thumb and fingers before Rin blinked and seemed to be returning to full consciousness. White slabs hardened to make his fingernails, their tips nicely rounded.

She felt a long, slow body-murmur from him through her Talent. Low, like a moan, it seemed to come from a dispersed web, as though she were sensing his entire neuromuscular network. Shared relief flooded her, echoing his near-audible exhalation of tension, as she sensed his sharp pain finally ebbing away. The quiet here made it apparent, growing as she concentrated. Laboring, quickening. Rin’s breath came faster, and his eyes opened at last.

“I… I never saw such,” Cley said.

Rin yawned. “Hmmm… Usually we would take more time.”

“You must be exhausted. I could see your body stealing tissues to build your arm.”

“Borrowing.”

“My people have some ability like that, but nothing nearly so—”

Rin waved his new hand dismissively. “We must talk.”

Seeker appeared nearby. Where had she been all this time? Cley wondered.

Rin seemed to shake off the torpor that had possessed him in a single shake of his head. He stretched his arm experimentally, and joints popped in his wrist and fingers, crisp and sure. For a moment he reminded Cley of a teenager testing his newfound strength. Then he darted a glance at Seeker and said, “So…”

“So what?” Cley countered. She felt, at the very edge of her perception, thin striations of darting Talent-talk.

Rin shook his head and said to Seeker, “You promised you would help keep her safe.”

Seeker yawned. “I did.”

“But you did
not
have permission to take her away from us. And certainly not to escape into the system solar.”

Cley had expected anger from Rin, not this air of precise displeasure. Both he and Seeker glanced at her, as if she were the most likely to explode. Not so, she realized suddenly. She was not truly surprised that Seeker had struck some kind of deal with them back on Earth. Their escape from the Library had gone far better than it should have, as if the Supras had never realized she might leave, let alone have aid in doing so.

Seeker said, “I did not need permission.”

“I should think—”

“After all, who could give it?” Seeker asked lazily.

“She is of our kind. That gives us species rights.”

“You are Homo Technologicus. She is Ur-human, several species removed from you.”

Rin pursed his lips. “Still, we are more nearly related than you.”

“Are you so sure?” Seeker grinned devilishly. “I span the genetic heritage of many earlier forms.”

“I am quite confident that if I read your helix I could easily find many more differences in—”

“Listen, you two,” Cley broke in. “I wanted to get away from that Library. From Supras. So I left. Seeker was just along for company.”

Rin blinked, looked at her for a long moment, and then said calmly, “At least you are safe and have made the journey to where we need you.”

“You intended to bring me here yourself?” Cley asked.

Rin’s mouth played with amused shapes. “Yes, in a ship. Comfortably.”

Cley’s temper flared despite her efforts to maintain the easy calm of a Supra. “What? You planned to bring me here? I could have zipped out here in a ship?”

“Well, yes.” Rin seemed surprised at her question.

She whirled to confront Seeker. “You made me go through all this?”

Seeker worked her mouth awkwardly. “I perceived that as the correct course.”

“Correct? More like damned dangerous. And you didn’t even consult me!”

“You did not know enough to judge,” Seeker said uncertainly.

“I wanted to get away from the Supras, sure, but—”

Seeker backed away. “Perhaps I erred.”

“Perhaps?”

“I believed you needed the journey.” Seeker smiled, though to Cley’s eyes, her expression seemed more uncertain than usual.