Beyond Infinity (42 page)

A phrase came into her head:
…in anxious equilibrium along the axis of duration…

And she felt the presence of someone, a Supra—yes, Kata. Somehow she had penetrated to this place. Was this crazed landscape part of the battle?

Maybe, she thought, there was no place to flee the struggle. The strangeness would find her even here.

A color like chalk meeting rust flooded around her.
The rock sublimes into a cloud, but do not breathe it.

She held her breath for a long, aching time. Her arms would not move; her lips seemed solid from the cold. The cloud blew by, and she could see again that she was still in the rock canyon. But it had altered.

This is an abode of the Singular,
Kata sent.
They have folded space-time itself until it serves as mass. The two are equivalent, after all. But only at the Quickening did this possibility come into play. It makes a fine haven, yes?

Above her, towers of the stone popped and grew, shivering the pale night above and wrenching the stars apart with restless chaos.

You were right to come here.

“To run away?” Cley spoke.

The Malign has searched for you and now attacks the Leviathan.

She called,
Seeker! Rin!
They did not answer. Were they still in the Leviathan?

She caught a quick sensation of searing fire, unbridled fury. It invaded her, even at this remove. Her sphincters clenched so hard, she gasped. A jumping nervous electricity wormed across her skin, as if seeking an opening.

“I can’t…take this…for long,” she whispered in her pain.

You must. We all must.

S
HE HAD ANTICIPATED
great flares of phosphorescent energy, climactic storms of magnetic violence. There were some, but these were merely sideshow illuminations dancing around the major conflict, like heat lightning on a far horizon.

For Cley the struggle called upon her kinesthetic senses, as Rin had said. He knew what was coming: She would be overloaded and strained and fractured, splitting into shards of disembodied perception. He had told her no more because this was certainly enough, all she was capable of grasping.

Her own perceptions were somehow…bridging. She felt her mind divided, one side focused on a realm of abstractions, the other embedded in her body. Information flowed between them, modulated,
used
—by some agency she could dimly sense, far back in the shadows. But large and slow and massive.

Experience—that was the bridge. Each splinter intensely lived, vibrant, encompassing.

She felt herself running. The pleasant heady rush of sliding muscles. Of speed-shot perspectives dwindling, of slick velocities—and then she was in cold, inky oblivion, her sun blocked by moving mountains. These moist shadows coiled with acrid odors. Harsh, abrasive air thrust up her nostrils.

The ground, like a plain of lead-gray ball bearings, slid by below her invisible feet, tossing like a storm-streaked, grainy sea.

The ground was not dirt. It was alive. Like a lesser dimension beneath her running feet, a carpet of intelligence. She plunged forward, feet pounding, each step making a fluorescent ivory light spray up into the air. Synapses completing.

She was moving ideas between minds utterly different. The carpet was a layer not of stuff but of thought. Hammering feet opened connections. Kinesthetic circuits closed…

Sweetness swarmed up into her sinuses, burst wetly green—and she tumbled into another bath of rushing impressions. Of receding depths. And then of oily forces working across her skin. It went on and on, a river run she could not stanch or fathom.

But at times she did sense pale immensities working at great distances, like icebergs emerging from a hurricane-racked ocean. Dimly she caught shreds of a childlike mind, incomparably large, and recognized the Multifold. It had prowled the solar system, she saw, blunting the attacks of the Malign. She owed it her life, for surely the Malign would otherwise have found her on her outward voyage.

Malign attentions, Kata sent. Cley could think of no reply, could not think at all. It took all of her to focus her puny self upon the river run of events that engulfed her.

Beneath the ragged waves that washed her she felt infinitesimal currents, tiny piping voices. Minds in the oceanic Talent-space, adrift. She recognized these as the recently grown Ur-humans. They floated as howling, unformed personalities, nuggets speckled by dots of kinesthetic tension.

They were all like elemental units in an enormous circuit, serving as components that relayed messages and forces they could no more recognize than a copper wire knows what an electron is.

And Seeker was there. Not the Seeker she knew, but something strange and many-footed, immense, running with timeless grace over the seamless gray plain.

Or was it many Seekers? The entire species, she saw now—a kind that had come long after the Ur-humans and yet was equally ancient now. A race that had strived and lost and strived again, endured and gone on silently, peering forward with a hollow barking laugh, still powerful and always asking, as life must, and still dangerous and still coming.

And something more. She glimpsed it then, a corridor of ruin stretching back to the Ur-humans and lined with the dead who had stood—single minds, alone and finally afraid—against the fall of night. They had died to imprison the Malign, and now their work lay in shreds as down that long passage of a billion years there now sped a vast shaggy shape, now compressing itself into this narrow inlet of a solar system…

“That’s it, yes,” she said to herself. For she did not know what this place was, transcending the dimensions of her world, skating somehow outside the brane of the ordinary. She was lofting now, high above a seethe that smoldered red and black.

“You want to make it come for me, to focus here,” she said.

It is our only hope. You are the only one who has a mature Ur-human mind. The younger ones…

“Don’t work, right?” The floating minds in Talent-space had felt adrift, panicked.

They do not sense the world well enough. Apparently, that must be learned over time.

Cley reached out and suddenly felt Seeker. The huge shape was engaged somehow at levels she could only glimpse. Seeker struggled in what seemed to Cley to be a crystal sphere—luminous, living. Yet the mote glaring at the sphere’s center was a star.

She felt the plasma beings then. Nets of fields and ionized gas slipped, fishlike and silvery, through blackness. They converged on the Jove system. Great slow-twisting blue lightning worked through the orbiting rafts of life there.

Silent slaughter. She felt a horrible screaming through the Talent—and shut it off. Seeing this was enough.

The mere backwash of this passing struggle scorched broad carpets of space life. Lances ruptured wispy beings the size of whole worlds.

The biting pain of it made Cley twist and scream. Her eyes opened once to find her fingernails embedded in her palms, crimson blood streaking her arms. But she could not stop.

Dimly she knew that the Supras were protecting her body—mere body!—in real space. There she floated in a bubble. Here…

Her eyes squeezed shut against her will. A swelling seized her. She felt herself extended, warping the space around her as though she were herself a giant sun, bending rays of light.

She knew this meant she had somehow been incorporated into the Multifold. But instantly another presence lapped at her mind. She felt herself tucked up into a cranny, snug—then yanked out, spilling into hot, inky murk.

The Malign had her. It squeezed, as though she were moist fruit and would spit out seeds—an orange, crusty with age, browned and pitted, covered by white maggots sucking at the inner wealth…

She saw this suddenly, hard and vivid. Her mouth stung.

I see it now.
She had to cleanse the slimy maggots before she could eat. She sent down fire and washed the orange in burnt-gold flame. Screaming, the maggots burst open.

And the orange was a planet.

Seared and pure and wiped free of the very atmosphere that had sustained the soft maggots. Slugs singed to oblivion. They had been scaly, quick of mind. But not quick enough. They had barely comprehended what rushed at them out of the maw at the center of the galaxy.

I have to live it all.
Cley was the orange and then the fire and then the maggots and then, with long, strangled gasps, the fire again.

It was good to be the fire. Good to leap and fry and crackle and leap again. Forking its fingers up at a hostile sky.

Better
by far
than to crawl and mew and suck and shit and die.

Better, yes, to float and stream and tingle with blue-white fires. To hang in curtains between the stars and be greater than any sun that had ever flared. To roar at the jeweled stars. Better to smell and shimmer and reek. To rasp against the puny clots of knotted magnetic fields, butt into their slow waltzes. To jab and hurt and keep on hurting,
because it is right they obey,
when the magnetic kernels had been ground beneath you, broken, and were dust.

Better to be a moving appetite again, an intelligence bigger than a galactic arm.

Pleasure seethed in its self-stink. Excess demanded more of the same… Yes, this was the Malign she sensed. More raw and muscular with every gathering moment.

Eyes closed, her mind saw.

Along the length of a Leviathan, hot fires raged. The living craft writhed like a great beast. Sharp spokes of hellish light blazed and jetted from ruptured ports. Creatures came forth in spouts, twisting in agony as they met vacuum. Flames lived and died along its enormous flanks as their oxygen burned out and space itself claimed them. A great beast died in the eternal night. No sounds could carry its last wails.

A Pinwheel. Turning, ceaselessly turning, but now to no avail. A great hammer had struck through it, bending the long, woody shaft. Now the Pinwheel spun unbalanced, unleashing vibrations that tore at its mahogany ligaments. It turned with majestic energy, one end slipping into the air of a green world—but its centrifugal poise was wrong. Great waves swept from tip to tip. Fragments of brush and branch peeled away. The huge creature was dying of a thousand small subtractions as the fevered wind stripped it. Those aboard launched themselves forth from the topmost tip, seeking higher orbits like passengers jumping into freezing waters from a doomed ocean liner. Along the huge length a shudder ran, as if the very core of the Pinwheel knew what was coming. Yet it must gyre onward, for it knew no other destiny but to kiss the air again and again. Even if the kiss meant death.

Memories.

The Malign loved these hideous memories.

And she broke away from the massive hating presence for a moment, into what seemed to be cool open space, empty of the skittering violence.

Oh!
she thought with buoyant relief.

But no—this was another part of the Malign.

Oily and slick and snakelike, it slid over her. Into her ears. Up her vagina. A long, deep, snub-nosed probing for her ovaries. Down her throat, prodding with a fluid insistence. A scaly stench rose and bit into her. Its sharp beak cut deeply, and that was when she understood a flicker of what the outside struggle was about.

Suddenly, she could
feel
abstractions. The partition between thought and sensation, so fundamental to being human, was blown to tatters by the Malign’s mad gale. Trapped, she understood.

The Malign held that this universe was one of many expanding bubbles adrift inside a meta-universe. Ours was but one of the possibilities in a cosmos beyond counting. The great adventure of advanced life forms, it believed, was to transcend the mere bubble that we saw as our universe. Perhaps there were civilizations of unimaginable essence, around the very curve of the cosmos. The Malign wished to create a tunnel that would prick a hole in our universe-bubble and extend into others.

And against it came the Singular. For they had ventured into the higher dimensions, learning to fold spongy space-time itself and make mass, to build castles beyond imagination.

They knew the Malign well, and came to kill it.

But somehow, in all this, she mattered…

Slimy blackness crept like oily fingers. Easeful ideas soothed into her.

Here are my works. So…

Bodies crushed and scorched.

Leviathans boiling away their guts into vacuum.

A burnt-red corkscrew boring into the pole of Jupiter. The magnetic pressure forced its way down, to the core. Found the metallic hydrogen trapped there. Released it into sunlight, where it fizzed into liquid, into gas, a hard flare cutting the sky.

Gray moons melted to slag.

Ships sliced and spilling blue-green fluids.

Bodies punched and seared and tumbling away into vacuum.

The Malign told her. Forced her to see through its eyes:

The Galactic Empire, she saw, had been a festering pile of insects. When she stopped to see them better, they were of all shapes, chittering, filled with meaningless jabber.

Long ago some of these vermin had slipped away, she remembered, through the veils beyond the galaxy. Out, flying through strings of galaxies, across traceries of light. Spanning the great vaults and voids where few luminous sparks stirred.

The Quickening led them to the Singular, beyond the grasp of the Malign.

Those Empire maggots had vanished, leaving dregs to slump into petrified cities: Sonomulia. Illusivia.

And elsewhere in the spiral arms, other races had dwindled into self-obsessed stasis.

But should the holy, enduring fire follow the Empire across the curve of this universe? Should the Malign pursue? Watch the Singular’s last agonies?

She knew instantly that such goals were paltry.
The stuff of maggot minds.

No—far grander to escape the binds of this universe entirely. Not merely voyage in it. Not simply skim across the sloping warp. Learn from the Singular—and finally kill it, of course.

Follow those who had already leaped free of the brane, into dimensions beyond the paltry infinity of this place.
Ah.