Beyond Infinity (38 page)

“Do not be hasty,” Rin said mildly. “This animal is clever, and in this case it showed foresight.”

“How?”

“It was lucky for you that I did not convey you outward by our planned route. We thought it intact. Yet several craft carrying needed Ur-human passengers were destroyed after leaving Earth, and you could well have been among them.”

“What?” Cley’s flare of anger guttered out. “My people?” Cley was so excited, she lost her grip on a vine and had to catch herself.

“Not exactly. We grew them from your helix.”

“You mean they’re—they’re me?”

“Some, yes. Others we varied slightly, to get the proper mix of abilities.”

Cley had feared that the Supras would do this. Would such cooked-up Ur-humans be zombies, shorn of culture, mockeries of her kind? Such disquiets had propelled her to escape before.

“Did any survive?”

“Some.”

“I… I want to see them.”

Rin waved his new hand. “You can when all this is over.”

“Why then?”

“They are dispersed, as a precaution.”

“No! I have a right to be with my own kind.”

“Are you not content with our company?” Rin gestured languidly to his left. Cley saw that while she was so intent, a group of Supras had quietly infiltrated the bowers around them. Kata stood nearby, one eyebrow cocked, studying the leafy cascades with evident distaste. Her clothes had been torn and blackened—in the same engagement as Rin? Already the rips were healing. Smudges dissolved, digested by the glossy fibers.

And her Talent-talk trickled into Cley’s back-thoughts…

Cley sighed. “I’m out of my depth with you Supras. You aren’t human, not the way I know people.”

We are more than human, in your manner of speaking,
Kata sent.

Cley ignored her. “If you have any sense of justice, you’ll let me see my people.”

Justice will come in time,
Kata sent with a tinge of blithe unconcern.

Cley looked at Seeker, who seemed to be absorbed in picking mites from her ruddy pelt. “How long will that be?” she asked, sticking to old-fashioned Original speech.

“Our struggle has already begun,” Rin said. “It is best that you stay with us for the time being.”

Cley blinked. “The fight’s already going on?”
And best for whom?
she thought.

“In a way, it has been going on since long before the rebirth of Originals,” Rin said, coolly gentle.

Cley saw the chinks in his armor now, though—a wounded tilt of his solemn mouth, a refractory glint to his eyes. “Where?”

“The final engagement has begun on the outer rim of the solar system. It now converges here, where the strength of the Jovian magnetic fields can shelter us somewhat, and our reserves are greatest.”

Seeker said, “I suspect the Malign has many tricks we cannot guess.”

Rin nodded. “We are minor players, but some are crucial nonetheless.” He gazed solemnly at Cley. “Especially you.”

C
LEY OPENED HER
mouth to interrogate Rin some more, and her ears popped. Seeker sprang upward, where something was rattling down through the canopy.

“Surround her!” Rin called, and Supras were gliding everywhere. Cley had no idea what to do. Wind whispered in her hair.

A big blue patch shot out of a mossy bank and smacked into her. Instantly it wrapped itself around Cley’s arm.

“Barnacles!” someone shouted.

She fell backward from the impact, hit a branch, and extruded her punch finger tool. It hardened at the tip into a fingernail now needle-thin. Acidic pain shot up her arm. A slurping noise came from it.
Eating my skin?
She stabbed into the thick blue thing. It just grabbed her tighter. At the edge of it a thick, moist mat crept up from her elbow.

The air filled with flying barnacles, slapping themselves onto the Supras. Tumbling chaos. Cley heard a woman scream—not her, she was pretty sure—and men shouting. She kept stabbing, short jabs that met thick resistance. A sheet of pain shot up the arm and froze her throat.

She gasped for breath. Was it injecting some poison…? The air got fuzzy, and sounds hollowed out; motion slowed… Her arm felt so heavy…

She was still trying to breathe, but it took longer and longer. And her finger wouldn’t come unstuck from the thick mat. Purple dots danced in her eyes, blocking her view of the turmoil all around her. But somehow, it did not seem to matter, not now that time was getting slower and slower and…

A bristling bundle fell on the mat, and her arm sagged with the weight. It was Seeker—with impossibly long razor claws out. They did not sink into the blue mass but around it, under. Cley toppled backward, carrying Seeker’s weight into a bower of vines. Seeker’s claws jerked upward, yanking, her mouth spitting anger—and the mat went into seizure. It rippled, flapped, and was free, wriggling in Seeker’s paws.

Cley rolled away. She choked on pollen, and when she could look back, the blue mat was in three pieces. Seeker seemed bent on making it a much larger number, shredding the thing.

Beyond the snarling, rolling fight, Cley saw something else in the air. The captain.

“Leave! You cause…cause…all this!” It was speaking to her, ignoring the Supras, who were cutting and shooting the barnacle-mats. The captain birds hovered and cheeped and darted in a whirl. Its hands and legs blurred, reformed, then lost themselves in a new frenzy. The body barely kept a human shape.

Rin had finished with his and came toward her, then saw the captain. “You! Damn! I said to stand aside.”

“I be…not part…of this…evil.” The voice was reedy, wavering.

“You’re of us.
We made you.
” Rin glared.

“A looong time…ago.”

“If we lose, it will eat you.”

“Not…my…my…quarrel.”

Rin gestured to a Supra woman nearby. “Do it.”

A thin stream of green gas came from the Supra woman’s tubular weapon. It did not spread but instead wrapped itself around the captain. Cley expected the birds to zip away, squawking, but instead they fell silent. In a sudden quiet she could hear the whirring of their wings. The captain’s body solidified, taking on detail—cheek, fingers, ears—she had never seen before. It was the face of an old woman, eyes watery, her face racked by emotions that flitted away with each new second. The mouth worked anxiously, the sum of many flutterings. Tendrils of gas curled up into her nose and tightened about the body. In a moment the old woman was a mummy in a green shroud.

Rin said quietly, “You will sail on. Afford us your provinces and give us succor.”

“I…yes. Yes.”

The captain seemed to fade back into the green background, keeping its shape yet somehow vanishing, as if the living body of the Leviathan were digesting it.

In a moment only silence hung over the bowers. The Supras were tending to their wounded. Seeker was wrapping big moist leaves around Cley’s arm, as Cley finally noticed. The entire arm was red and oozing blood.

No one remarked on the strangeness that had passed by. Cley realized that it was just another skirmish to them.

Cley felt strongly the skittering, frayed skein of Talent-talk that flitted among the Supras from Illusivia. She could pick up nuances, grave worries, a burn of high excitement. Time and practice had enlarged her ability, and she could shield her own thoughts somewhat. She could now trace faint threads of flittering ideas, currents, and implications that came and went in gossamer instants.

The captain’s betrayal, the clumsy assault using the barnacles—all quite expected, the Supras seemed to feel. Not all life forms were united into one coherent front. Even in an alliance, they seemed to say, one occasionally had to rap knuckles.

Later, as they recovered, Cley found Rin among the clumps of Supras. Some had lost sheets of skin to the barnacles. The bodies of dead barnacles showed them to be evolved for the light-gravity regions of Leviathan. Their name came from their habit of sticking to plants and taking flight only when they had prey well positioned. Earthside barnacles, her inboards told her, didn’t attack anything. These, though, were a pack-hunting species, not like any birds Cley had ever seen. In different circumstances, she would have found them elegant and beautiful.

Then she remembered the maroon ray-birds they fought in the Tubeworld. Had evolution converged on the shape? Or did they have a common origin?

She felt the muscular flesh of a dead barnacle-bird. Rin seemed almost glad that the captain had launched them on its ill-considered attack and now was under Supra control. “One more potential trouble out of the way,” he said, lips pale. “We are willing to ally with different life forms, but we enforce loyalty to humankind.”

“Ummm,” Cley said, eyeing the barnacle carcasses. The Supra teams were all working with portable instruments, monitoring, ordering resources into place. The Leviathan was a refuge now, and the battle would center on it.

“What can
I
do in all this?” she asked Rin.

He smiled. As if years of preparation had focused on a single instant, an answer leaped through her mind. Kata was the channel for this, Cley felt, but she had a sense of a chorus of booming voices behind the massive intrusion. A wedge of thought drove itself through her. They were telling her much, but again, it was like trying to take a drink from a fire hose.

“I… I don’t understand…”

“It will take a while to unsort itself in your mind, I’m told,” Rin said.

“So much… What’s this thing, this black brane?”

Rin said slowly, “An ancient term. It is a…a membrane, in a way. Our universe lives upon one. There is another, extending in a higher dimension that is effectively infinite—”

More than infinite,
Kata sent.
It is a dimension which itself spreads into other dimensions. It transcends, it transmutes, it is—

“Transfinite,” Seeker said dryly. “We have had such discussions before, of the categories of thinking beyond infinity. I do not think them profitable at this time.”

Kata looked insulted, sniffed, sent nothing.

Rin gave Seeker a cautious look, as though recalculating the equations for this conversation. “The other membrane houses many intelligences, of course. They learned quite a long time ago—nearly a billion years back—how to transcend dimensions. To come here.”

Cley brightened. “Seeker and I went through that Tubeworld—was that their work?”

“Undoubtedly—and Fanak agrees. The Morphs live on the other brane. This fits the ancient texts.”

Seeker asked, “Why ancient? Why have we been out of touch so long?”

Rin looked uneasy. “It’s a whole other
universe
on the black brane. Societies rise and fall there, just as here. For a while—perhaps not long, by their standards—they fell silent. They do not explain. Or apologize, for that matter.”

“For kidnapping us?” Cley asked.

“They were probably perfecting their methods,” Rin said. “I am unsure if they will even act today.”

“How about
that
, then?” Cley pointed out the dirty transparent dome above them.

A column of twisting sheets was roiling around in the vacuum outside. Luminous, they turned amber, purple, gold. They broke into slices. An intricate geometric artifact spun and wove outside, as if looking for an opening.

But the makers were of another, higher dimension, she reminded herself. They must mean something by this.

“The Morphs at work,” Rin said.

Then Cley remembered suddenly the way Kurani had been cut into sections so exactly—his guts hanging in air, arteries pulsing one last time, a convulsion working down his sweaty skin—and gasped, her pulse pounding.
They do not explain. Or apologize.

“They are finding their way,” Rin said. “Remember that they are strange beyond description.

“I cannot guess what they mean to do,” Seeker snorted, crossing her several arms.

“Nor can we.” Rin smiled ruefully.

I hope for a collaboration, Kata sent. We cannot engage the Malign without the help of the Multifold. Hopeless! And this black brane—it is a strangeness of another sort. Does it know the Singular?

Cley felt a dizzying confusion rise in her. Altogether too much was happening, coming at her so fast—bugs splattering on her conceptual windshield…“What was that, about whether the black brane knows the Singular?”

“We believe so, but we do not know.” Rin carefully chose his words, obviously talking down to Cley. “Our legends held that the Malign was imprisoned in gravitational stasis—the Time Sink, some call it—in the black hole that sits at the galactic center.”

“Time Sink?” She tried to visualize such a thing.

“There is no reference on that. A flaw in notation, apparently.” His earnest precision reminded her that his first love had been Sonomulia’s Library. “History was correct about the Malign’s devastation, though. It knows a way to eat the plasma veils which hang in the galactic arms, leaving great rents where suns should glow. It is a master of diffusion. It levered its way out of the warp of the black hole, using that fulcrum.”

Cley had little idea what this might mean, and little prospect of learning more. This was not her area. “So it’s out in the open and came all this way?”

Rin grimaced. “Yes—twenty-eight thousand light-years. Stories say that the Malign and the Multifold would meet among the corpses of the stars. That will occur when the red dwarf stars die.”

“Which is…?”

“About a hundred billion years from now.”

“Somebody miscalculated.”

“Indeed. The Malign apparently knows more than our Speakers of Astrophysics. Apparently, it feels that the collision must occur here, near Earth, where matters started and must finally end.”

Cley blinked. “Now…”

“That is why we brought you here.”

Cley shook her head, trying to clear it. “I can’t possibly amount to much in all this.”

“So I would have said as well, once.” Rin had settled on a branch, and even in the low spin-gravity the lines in his face sagged. “But you do matter. You Ur-humans had a hand, along with more advanced human forms and alien races, in contributing to both the Malign and the Multifold.”