Beyond Infinity (14 page)

The present Library of Life told of the vast experiments that had yielded such strange fruit as Seeker, but not how those had been achieved. In a way, working here was an expedition of self-discovery, for Cley herself was not a true lineal descendant of the ancient genomes, and certainly not a scrupulously true Original. Nobody was, in all of present humanity. Those precise genes had been scrubbed, edited, or enhanced long ago.

And what would be the point of reproducing the stubby fingers and blurred senses of the far past? Cley could not imagine working without her extruding fingers, inboards, and sculpted internals. But Original she was, as a point of pride. Of course.

“Something’s…coming.” Seeker’s ears pricked up. “That earlier incident—the seashell, remember? Several days ago?”

“I wasn’t here,” Cley said, looking up. Was that a cool, dry breeze stirring her hair again? In the heat of the day? “Some sort of vandalism, I heard.”

“I wish it had been something so innocuous. Look—” Seeker pointed.

Blobs and rods floated nearby. Slick, red and white, shimmering. A faint moaning…

The cutting stench again…

The microslab Cley was working on vanished.

She looked up into a hovering mass of sickly green, shot through with glowing crimson dots. It emitted a low moan. “Morph!” she cried, tumbling backward.

Several more shelves of slabs disappeared. “Damn! It’s taking our stuff!”

Seeker was there immediately, springing at the Morph. In its lean paws it held a gray equipment tarp. It wrapped the tarp around the churning Morph and scampered around the shape, pulling. “Grab the end!” Seeker called.

Cley caught the tail of the tarp, and Seeker grabbed both ends, jerking them together. It made a bag around the Morph. “Hold—hold—it!”

Seeker grappled with the tarp. It poked and jerked. Cley got a bear hug around the violently struggling package. The Morph punched her in the nose, and she punched back.

Cley felt a sickening swerve. “What—”

Something yanked on them… The world dwindled dizzily—and they were flying.

It was as if immense objects swept through a high, vaulted space that they could see only in quilted, opalescent shades. An immense cathedral of perceptions speeded by. Passages yawned, beckoned, fell away. No gravity tugged at her, and then a huge force knocked the breath from her lungs, plunged her down and then jerked her aside; something shrieked—and was gone.

Cley shook her head. She felt herself floating. Seeker hung nearby, curled up. Shadows slid by. Ground came rushing up, branches of stubby trees—she snapped off pieces as she plunged, tumbling—and she hit. Hard.

She and Seeker were buried in shredded fronds, branches, and pancakes of fungi. Seeker snarled and snapped and thrashed.

Cley looked around. Purpling growths in a tangled gray-green forest shimmered in the vanilla glow. Light seeped from the ground, not from above. They had fallen through the spotty, lavender canopy that hovered above on snaky vines. Debris like helical fronds, fruit of their plunge, lay around them.

“What the—”

“Later.” Seeker spit out a vine it had attacked.

They got to their feet, checked, found no broken bones. It had been over an hour, by Cley’s inboard time meter, yet they had seemed to fall only for frightened moments.

They got themselves in order. She had tears in her unisuit. Seeker, of course, never wore clothes; its fur was an elaborate signaling medium for its species, using codes no human was privileged to know. But the shiny coat was matted and fouled with fungi. It scraped away at its neck with a stick.

“I have wrenched my spine,” Seeker said calmly.

“Lie down. Here—”

“I shall work with myself.” It sat and with great care extruded a tool from its paw and then inserted the point into its neck. Long silent moments passed as Seeker panted, eyes fixed, delicately carrying out a repair. Then it wriggled, jerked—and smiled. “Done. Repaired.”

They stood amid tangled vegetation, light gleaming up from the hard ground. A persistent breeze sighed.

“What…happened?” Cley asked.

“Maybe we got sucked along when the Morph escaped from our space.”

“So where are we?”

“Ummm… This place has a curious curve to it,” Seeker said.

Cley looked at the forest rising to right and left, disappearing into an ivory mist overhead. A drop spattered in her eye from a frond overhead. “We’re in a bowl, I guess. Never mind the sightseeing—what
happened
?”

Seeker chuckled, showing pointed teeth. “I do not know. My ‘sightseeing’ is the only plausible way we shall answer your question. I do not see anyone who is likely to tell us what this place is.”

Seeker was the puzzle lover, Cley more practical; most archeo teams had such a balance. Cley decided to stick to the practical.

She studied the luminous ground. The light here seemed eternal, seeping through the odd, stony soil beneath them. The soil itself was like ground glass held together with translucent, moist webs. The twisted trees grew in the stuff.

A steady breeze stirred the canopy of limbs, fronds, leaves, and pads. The trees were strange: some rough, others smooth; impossible leaves, improbable branches. Small animals made rustling excursions nearby.

“Evolution finds its convergent ways,” Seeker whispered.

The air clung thick, moist, and milky as Cley drew in breaths. Carefully they explored back and forth along the “axis” of the tubular forest, away from the upward curvature, but found no large clearings. This took hours, and they learned very little. They both wearied, and finally found some comfort in a bed made of the tree leaves.

“We knew something strange was afoot,” Seeker said, lounging back. It was always good at taking its ease when there was no point in not. “Recall, one of the big symbols at the Library of Life site entrance was a huge seashell, beautifully shaped into a detailed spiral, of precious luster metal. Then that one day it disappeared. Sheared off from its mount, somehow. Mysterious. You were off exploring the Library’s labyrinths days later, I recall, when it popped back into existence. I heard the sound, went running. No ordinary person returned it—the spiral just came back, its connection at the shear point flawless.”

Cley frowned, not getting it. “I heard there was something funny, yes.”

“More than that. It had been lifted, I believe, out of our three-dimensional—three-D—space. When it returned, it was not quite the same.”

“A Morph took it?“

“The way you could pluck an ant off a sheet of glass.” Seeker gazed at Cley significantly. “That same ant you could see from above, or below, just by lifting the glass over your head. From such a superior perspective, it will appear differently, yes?”

Cley’s frown deepened. Another Seeker puzzle, one of their games with each other. The miasma of advanced physics. Seeker frowned.

Despite herself, Cley tried to live up to Seeker’s standards.
Original
had to mean something, right? And how much
did
this beast know? Still, Cley did have a little mathematics, so: “Ah, the spiral was backwards; that’s it.”

“Indeed. None of us noticed it at first.”

Cley brightened. “I see! Same as the ant on glass. If you look at a spiral from below, it goes from right-handed to left-handed. “

Seeker looked proud of her—an odd expression, but Cley could read such nuances now. Seeker said carefully, “I suppose the four-D Morphs took our spiral, passed it through our three-D universe, then pivoted it about their dimension. That left it reversed when they so kindly returned it to us.”

“As a warning?”

“The signature of the Morphs—had we read it right.”

“Which we didn’t.”

“They showed us who they were, free of the constraints of language or symbols.”

“Polite—a calling card. But why did they attack us, steal the slabs?”

Seeker shrugged. “We do not know that they were the Furies.”

“But from a higher dimension…”

“Which harbors many things. These Morphs—could they be like us? They also study human origins? A mere glancing guess; I apologize.”

“Um. That would explain a lot… It’s easy to think others aren’t like us, just because they’re mysterious. Maybe they’ll give our slabs back.”

“Why do they not give
us
back?” Seeker’s fur swirled in a pattern Cley could not read. “I suspect our being dropped here was an incidental.”

“Sure didn’t
feel
incidental.”

“This seems to be some sort of place between our three-D universe and their four-D one. We may have gotten sheared off into it, while the Morphs were passing through.”

“This place is
between
three-D and four-D?”

Seeker shrugged. “I reason by analogy—a classic human trick, which I borrow frequently.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Thieves do not offer thanks. Nor did our Morphs.”

“What’s between dimensions?”

“A space contrived for passage? I do not know. If they have built a roadway between dimensions, perhaps this is the ditch beside that roadway. Forgive the analogy.” It tipped a claw to its forehead and laughed.

“So we’re ditched?”

Seeker waved its hands broadly. Leathery and black, they were in their fully deployed posture, tapering to thin fingers of great delicacy. “And perhaps our slabs are, too.”

“That Morph looked pretty agitated.”

“In a hurry to get back, it dropped us.”

“But
where
?”

“You humans made your reputation by pushing beyond the horizon. I suggest such a strategy here.”

“Huh? There
is
no horizon.”

“An axis, then.” Seeker pointed. “A preferred direction.”

“Ummm…like a tube?”

“Somewhere in this odd world, there must be a place where the connection to our three-D universe gets manufactured. Not necessarily nearby, I suppose. The Third Fabricant era used quagma-driven geometric bridges for trade purposes—this seems a similar construct. We were inducted here by some curious property of the quagma, so I suppose.”

“Quagma? Sounds dangerous.”

“So is all of life. Something made us fall into this, some agency—”

“Or something that lives here.”

“Intelligent life seems unlikely in such a narrow place,” Seeker said distantly. “Plants, at best.”

“Why? The Morphs have all our three dimensions, plus extra to play with.”

“Ummm. We are fond of carbon, thinking it the root of life. True enough—here, in ordinary three-D. But in four-D, there are more choices for molecules to make, ways to hook to each other. Carbon might take longer to form life-helping compounds.”

Cley shrugged. “Sure, but there might be more available, too.”

“With that I cannot argue. Then there is the problem of what an intelligent organism might look like in four-D. In three-D the design is obvious…”

“Human?”

Seeker laughed. “You tool users are all alike. No, you and I are both mere tubes. Body bags filled with modified seawater. Food goes in; waste gets pushed out. Not elegant, but it works—always. That is the basic design blessed by our three dimensions.”

“Ugh! I’d like to think we’re more than that.”

“I am speaking of basic body design—nothing personal.” But Seeker grinned the mock-fiendish grimace that meant it was enjoying this—as usual, for mysterious reasons.

“What’s a four-D tube look like, then?”

“They might well have a greater surface area for a given volume…” Seeker screwed up its long mouth, obviously trying to visualize. “That ratio rises as dimension increases, I gather. Brain and heart—if they have one—could be kept deep inside, for safety, and digestion done on the outside.”

“A gut as outside skin? Ugh!”

“Ours are ‘outside’ our bodies, too, geometrically—simply connected to our skins. Lying along a tube, tucked nicely in the middle, where we can’t see them work.”

“That’s how I like it.”

“I doubt the design emerged to satisfy our sensibilities.”

“What use would digestion on the outside be?”

“Easier flow of air and fluids,” Seeker said. “One could treat ‘the runs,’ as you term them, directly, inspecting the tissues by eye.”

Cley tried to imagine this and failed. More immediate needs intervened. She sniffed, sampled, and finally, out of hunger, nibbled at some seeds they had found on bushes. Bland, but no bad effects. Pretty soon, she wished there were a lot more of them.

“I think we should determine the geometric properties of this place,” Seeker said decisively.

“How? Measurement?”

“Geometry is a global property, not local. We must travel.”

“Me, I’m more interested in finding some fresh water, getting a splash in the face, a drink.”

“I smell water upslope—there.”

Seeker led her a surprisingly short way to a dense clump—shadowed, moist. Bending over a pool, Seeker quickly fetched a fat fish-creature from the shallows and began eating. Fastidious, it carefully washed each piece of flesh before popping the morsel into its ample, black-rimmed mouth. The fish was a slim tube, a design forced by fluid mechanics and survival, no matter where.

Cley saw that the pool was a pond, curving up under dense boughs. She stripped and plunged in. Luxury! Cool and sweet.

In the pool she watched Seeker disappear into the snaky mat, moving with surprising speed. The trunks warped behind it into a puckering pattern…almost, she thought, as though the things were enclosing and digesting Seeker…

No matter. She swam with splashing abandon.

When she came out, feeling far brisker, Seeker was gone.

“Damn!” She never quite got used to the ways of the bright animals. At least the ferrets didn’t just disappear. You kept thinking of them as humanlike, but their greatest asset lay in their difference. Seeker needed time by itself, she guessed, and wanted to explore, so it just vanished, and might be gone for a moment or a month.

Cley sighed, feeling suddenly quite alone and cold and friendless. She would not have watched Seeker scamper away into the forest of purple-speckled, knotted trunks, and not then followed. Seeker knew that and, knowing the human propensity to argue, had simply evaporated.