Beyond Infinity (41 page)

“But it broke out…using what?” Cley pressed. “Its final theory?”

Rin nodded. “Somehow, yes. Until then, a single great fact—that the speed of light was a true limit, for the Talent and all else—ordained that the linking of the natural magnetic minds proceeded slowly, all across the galaxy. Nothing large can move faster than light. Or so we thought. The Malign found a way. Somehow.”

“That’s how the Malign finally got out of the galactic center, isn’t it?” Cley asked. She caught thin shouts of alarm in her mind.

“It used the quantum vacuum,” Rin said. His cheeks hollowed again with a cast of relief. He found it comforting, Cley guessed, to be secure in his knowledge.

Rin leaned forward, his eyes soft as he peered into the dying firelight. “On average, empty space has zero energy. But by enclosing a volume with a sphere of conducting plasma, the Malign prevented the creation of waves with wavelengths larger than that volume. These missing waves gave the vacuum a net negative energy and allowed formation of a wormhole in space-time. All such processes are ruled by probabilities requiring great calculation. Yet through that hole the Malign slithered.”

“To our solar system,” Cley concluded.

“Never before has a magnetic mind done this,” Rin said. “It escaped from the prison of time—a feat on such a scale that even the Singular did not anticipate.”

Seeker whispered, “Coincidence, Rin?” This was the first time Cley had ever heard Seeker use his name. There was a tinge of pity in the beast’s voice, or what she took for that.

Rin’s head jerked up. He flicked a suspicious glance at Seeker. “The thought occurred to us, too. Why should the Malign emerge now?”

“Just as you’re getting free of Earth again?” Cley asked.

“Exactly,” Rin said. “So we studied all the physical evidence. Observed the path of damage the Malign has wreaked as it left the galactic center…” He hesitated. “And made a guess.”

Seeker said, “You found something, and your discovery had unforeseen effects.”

Rin’s eyes shifted away from the waning fire, as though he sought refuge in the gloom surrounding them. “So you guessed. Yes, I was in the expedition that found the Multifold.”

Cley whispered, “And…?”

Rin’s voice came to them in the twilight glow as a slow, solemn dirge. “The exuberance of the Multifold was so great at being discovered! We arrived in wormhole craft, arrowing in on the suspected location. What a moment!” His eyes filled with remembered awe.

“It greeted you?” Seeker whispered.

“Too mild a word. Peals of salutation!” His face clouded. “But those magnetic shouts sent enormous magnetosonic twists echoing through the whorls of an entire galactic arm. These reached the Malign in its cage. To see its ancient foes reuniting again sent it into a rage, a malevolence so strong that it exerted itself supremely—and forced its exit.”

They sat silently for a long moment. Cley looked up and out, in search of some consolation. The inky recesses of the Leviathan were unrelieved by the distant promise of stars.

Rin said hollowly, “If I hadn’t been so curious…hadn’t searched the Library’s records, the plots of magnetic fields throughout the galaxy…hadn’t sent the signals…”

Cley said finally, “You didn’t know. Curiosity is built into us humans. And all the lore of the Library of Life did not warn you.”

He smiled mirthlessly. “But I did it. All the same.”

Cley said, “That Singular of yours might have troubled their mighty selves to make a jail that held.”

Rin shook his head. “There is none better in this space-time.”

“Well, damn it, at least they shouldn’t have just left it as a problem to be solved by us.”

Seeker lifted her sniffing snout, seeming to listen to something far away. She said, “Shoulds and mights are of no consequence. The problem has arrived.”

I
N THE END
it was like nothing she had expected or feared.

She lay on a thick brownvine mat deep in the Leviathan, alone, eyes closed. She felt nothing of the rough cords, or of her body. All carefully arranged, Supra-supervised. A circuit element, awaiting the currents.

And then she suddenly could not face the confrontation. “Aaargh!” she muttered, eyelids fluttering open. Not this way. Not as a mere doormat.

She got up and fled the comfy confines. Moved silently through the Leviathan’s ropy jungles, using the light-footed forest ways she had learned as a girl. She probed ahead with her Talent. Avoided a hovering swarm that looked like a partial captain. Sneaked by a few preoccupied figures, hunched over their devices.

Where was Seeker? The Talent could find nothing.

Softly she moved through fretted shadows. One of the transparent blisters hung on the Leviathan’s pebbled wall. They were a lot like the pyramid she and Seeker had used to escape into vacuum. She felt along the capsule’s waxy surface, found an edge. After some fumbling she unzipped the inner skin. It pried open like tough old skin, and a smartvoice said, “Welcome. Which use do you—” and she cut it off as she squeezed in.

Lay back. Made her breathing regular.

The Supras had been wrong about her safety before, after all. So many of them clustered together would make an inviting target for the Malign—with her smack in the middle. And the Leviathan itself was not secure; it could always make another captain, enlist its species against humans—and especially, Cley.

Better to be on her own.

Still… The Talent brought her the brewing battle. The struggle raged red through the landscapes of her mind.

Her Talent now linked her with the Supras, yes—she could feel those coiled, slinky passages. Minds were moving somewhere. A seethe of thoughts, sensations, and something deeper… Ideas grown rank with time and experience, powerful, overbearing…

This cauldron of sensations was only a fragment of the broadening perspectives that the Supras said would open for her in the hours and days of the conflict. She shuddered at the thought.

These rode in the background of her mind. She had to ignore them.
Fly,
part of her said. Only by being
out of control
—their control—could she feel that this was part of her work. Her Original self would enter into this strange moment
as herself,
not as a Supra component. She might not survive this, but she would keep something—simple dignity.

Back to work. She struggled to get the bubble to let go of the Leviathan hull. The touch-signals were complex, and having watched Seeker call them up was not enough to get her through it easily. She tugged and tweaked and then had to bang on the walls even to get the bubble’s attention. She got the sequence right but had no chance to savor the satisfying
pop.
She was among the roiling abundance of life and had to learn to navigate. Jove’s amber scowl peered over her shoulder as she skimmed away along the Leviathan’s skin.

The skysharks did not notice her, but something small and bullet-shaped did.

It arrowed at her, a spike emerging at its nose. This lanced through the bubble in an instant. Orange mist puffed from it. The cloud’s mere touch ignited flares in her nerves. Grinding hurt reverberated in her nervous system in a searing echo.

She frantically hacked at the spike with a hastily extruded augmentation, a pitifully inappropriate data reader. It broke, but so did the spike. Spaceborne life was light, quick, and fragile. More of the orange fog spurted. Her skin shrieked. The stench was awful. The spike wavered, turned toward her as if it could see—and abruptly jerked back, slipping through the hole it had punched.

Her ears popped. The vacuum draft sucked most of the orange mist away, and then the bubble self-sealed, a thin line zipping shut. She was drifting outward from the Leviathan into a swarm of life.

And ahead, suddenly, came a glistening yellow soap bubble. It looked like some of the shapes she had seen on the plain of the Library—twisted signatures of something trying to manifest itself in a lower dimension.

It drifted closer, now inside her own bubble. Mere 3-D barriers meant nothing to a 4-D intelligence. Her skin still itched and twitched from the orange cloud. Pain, she remembered a wise old woman in her Meta once saying, was the world’s way of letting us know that we were really alive, and always playing for keeps.

The burnt-yellow bubble wrapped itself around her, stifling all sound, all motion, and yet letting her mind fly free.

She shut her eyes, opened her Talent…

Kata sent,
The Malign is near. It wants you. We are sending you to time isolation.

“What?” But something swallowed her…

Falling, whirling—and she was in another place.

On a barren brown landscape, dancing.

No hurry, no sense of the dance ever ending.

She spun on one toe, elegant, whirring, and yet the movement was…static.

She was not dancing, but…in the state of dance
.
She now understood something of what Kata and the others might feel when they did their mad, entranced dancing. Did they come to this frozen place? And what was it?

Somehow, she could hold in this state of
being dancing
and still think. Better, think with swift, new clarity.

Ah, yes,
she thought. Someone had said that the higher dimensions did not need to be spatial. There could be two dimensions of time.

Along one time axis, matters were simple—only forward motion was allowed. In two dimensions loops can form. A simple circle in time could wrap around into the past. Or cycle—endlessly.

Moments of future time are as fixed, immutable, as those of the past.
The knowledge came to her all at once. But then, everything
was
all at once, when she looked at it right.

She saw that she had lived in the illusion of sequential time. Her whole lifetime came into being at once, in “an instant”—she was at her birth and at her death and all points in between, seeing them all.

Hello, Cley.
Here she came from the womb fresh and wet, and there she lay dying on fresh white sheets.

The scroll of life did not unwind but rather stood like a painting of a complex landscape, seen at once.

Peer deeper and you will witness more.
But she did not merely see the painting; she
was
it, both in and outside the timescape, standing granite-hard, unmovable in…what?

Only darkness surrounded the timescape, until—she turned her head—there were the others, too, an infinite array of slices parading off into the distance, each a life, a scape, stacked in like folios, in space-time on edge.

For all her life she had moved in her own solid slice—narrow, blind, never sensing the others except when they cut across hers. And the intersections were immutable incidents, also fixed firmly and unshakable. Unavoidable, invariant.

All actions in her life—right/wrong, good/bad—were at one with one another. Knowledge diffused from one act to another just as the contour of a hill knows the slope above, the gravitational and hydrostatic pressures shaping it, and then passes on such pressures to the next point in the grade below. The slant between carried information that shaped static events. Outside time, but alive.

The revelation came arrowing into her, hurting in its simplicity.

She saw that this geometry itself was a measure of the capacity of some channel—
yes,
a conduit through which information flowed from past to future and was
the area of a surface.

So that geometry was not the basis at all but was instead
derived,
a mere thing like the way temperature measured the average energy of some particles. So in turn the shape of space-time was itself a measure of something more fundamental,

Space-time is just another building block.

Her awareness of her own awareness was also an event, frozen. She was
all these Cleys,
backward to birth, forward to…what?

To the end of the timescape she could not see, somehow, for it lay shrouded in a fog with dark striations, churning, not static in the landscape but a moving storm of…possibility. Not the end, not truly fixed yet…

And the landscape snapped away, dwindling, as if she were rising above it. Above all the other stacked lives. Flying, up and out of the space-time universe, into…

The moment. Again. And again. Again.

She—
whoosh
—whirled into another place. The pain of it riveted her, impaled her, left her in a spinning instant.

Out of time-fixed. Into time-flowing.

This was not the brown plain but instead a canyon of shimmering rock. Silent. Within the translucent stone, slow blades of shadow descended, as if a sun were setting somewhere deep within the foggy reaches. Radiance danced within it, like summer’s promise lancing into a watery cavern.

Her mind still spun with the experience just past—or was it happening now? Eternally?—and she frowned and concentrated.

She walked across a rocky shelf and looked down into an abyss that had no end. It tapered away into infinity. And from beyond infinity came toward her a trilling sense of the…
spongy
nature of things in this place.

Air, rock—all had a
give
to them. Moments seemed slippery, too, each sliding into the next. Softly, in absolute silence. Her own footsteps were silent. Her heart thumped faster, but at least she could hear it.

Shards of emerald emerged from the rock, like living presences breaking free. In the air they dissolved into scattershot blue, birds flapping into an opal sky. Without warning, a cliff above twisted in scraping agony, laboring to be born. A sheet of it peeled off, cracking and booming, curling into air like a petal of a huge flower.

She ran, trying to get clear. But the sheet did not fall.

The layer compressed, thinning, complaining in loud
aaaawwwwkkkk
s. Yellow flame shot from it as if a fire baked inside—roaring virulence. Its edges turned crimson and then curled back, blackening. Flares ran along its edges, and—
crack!
—it vanished.

A sharp concussion knocked her flat. She got up against a slight gravity, feeling as if a stick had smacked her in the forehead.