Beyond Infinity (17 page)

Apparently, the Morphs had made this place as a sort of construction shack. Seeker tried to explain why, speaking in 4-D, but it just got Cley more confused.

The sounds from ahead were almost a relief.

Their ghostly glide turned to surges—building fast, slamming them back and forth, making Seeker grab for its grips. A high, keening
shreeeee
pierced the murk ahead and alarmed Cley. It sounded like a buzz saw meeting something it did not like.

“What’s that?”

“The sink for this wind,” Seeker said, holding on. “I hope.”

The idea of a place where the wind went was unsettling. Their wings rattled and wrenched. To Cley they looked suddenly frail.

The vapor around them began to back away, the ivory tunnel they had plunged through for days now opening like a throat into…what?

Suddenly, the mists fell away to all sides, and they shot forward into a lava red chamber. The distant walls glared white-hot. Yellow tongues forked, crackling across the entire expanse, and slammed into the walls with eerie blue-green explosions.

“The quagma factory!” Seeker called over the sudden din—sizzles, roars, percussive blows.

“Where’ll we go?” Cley called.

There were winds now, sudden gales that buffeted them. They plunged, recovered. Sagged. Slewed. Cley barely held on. No gravity, but plenty of vagrant, blunt forces. Grasping surges, pulling like smooth hands…

Her shoulders ached, wrists popped…and on top of it, she was
hungry.
And getting irritable.
One should face one’s fate well fed!

Seeker was swaying like a punching bag, its claws embedded in a bamboolike beam. “Let us—try to—stay in the—middle.”

They were still streaming down the center bore of this place, but now heat pasted into her face like a slap. And ahead was something turning, revolving about a slow, canted axis. It was a ruddy-brown worm, steaming, spinning, livid with spots of ruby radiance from within.

Cley called, “What’s—that…?”

“A big life form—too big to evolve here…must be—one of the engineers.”

“The bastards who dumped us here!” Cley gasped. Her hands locked painfully in their gloves. She was terrified, panting, hot.

At their left a pore grew out of the wall. Sickly white, oily, glistening. It thrust up toward them. Fumes blew off it into her face and bit with acidic pain in her nostrils. Like a swollen wound it ripened. She looked ahead, and the ruddy worm was closer, twisting, much closer, closing with them. Long drum-roll beats surged through the liquid-thick air.

“I cannot tell—if this is—what quagma—would be like—” Seeker was struggling to hold on.

The thing like a pore was almost touching them now, still growing, giving off a fierce heat. Her skin shouted with pain, sizzled, broiling—

A hole opened in the pore. Inside was a dark, sullen blue. The throat of the thing opened like a livid mouth. Greedy.

She screamed. Seeker shouted, but she could not tell what it said. Forces stretched her. Her legs shrieked. Her shoulder joints popped.

Then the pore swallowed them…

…AND THEY SHOT
through into blue spaces of sudden, chilling cool…

…tumbled, twirled about an unseen axis…

The struts beside her splintered, popping away. The wing crumbled…

…and she fell onto a hard black surface. She rolled, gasped, and the air was cool, but
where was Seeker
?—and then Seeker fell on her.

They untangled themselves, got their breath…and stared up at a vast ebony roof seething with rivulets of ivory glow.

“Black branes?” Seeker said. “Perhaps…”

“Which…are?”

“Sheets of space-time. They can wrap around the hidden, tiny dimensions—those for which creation had no true use.”

“Except to build things like
that
?”

“Point taken. This black brane is expanded, like this tubular dimension itself. We are seeing the infinitesimal exploded into the…”

Words seemed to have failed Seeker. “The monstrous, how about?”

It gazed in openmouthed wonder. “True enough.”

“A kernel of truth puffed up into chunks of trouble?” Cley tried to remember what Seeker had said in their long days of cruising. It had been hard staying awake, even though their lives might depend on doing so. “Things that work like black holes, but with dimensions anchored on them?”

Seeker stood erect on two legs, somber, gazing upward. “Or so the ancient theorists believed. These are membranes, cloaking the universe’s squandering of dimensions…” Its voice trailed off.

In a way it was comforting to see Seeker truly impressed. Sometimes she wondered if it had seen everything before. Not this time.

Something was making her dizzy, and it wasn’t just the ideas. “You said…back there…quagma.”

She sat down hard. Rough bumps in the stony stuff that supported them—against a light gravity, she noted abstractly—rasped at her palms. She inhaled the hot, dry air—but at least it was breathable. The thing above might well be the primordial stuff from which God twisted Everything, but she needed a rest.

She hung her head between her knees and breathed steadily, easily, trying to get some equilibrium in all this. Her heart was pounding, nostrils distended. The air stung. And she admitted to herself that she was terrified.

Seeker began speaking, its voice trembling just a bit. She realized that it was trying to wrap some thin, tattered logic around what was happening. Any world was less frightening if some fraction of it made sense. Seeker spoke, words like balm…and she felt her pulse gradually slow. She even began to comprehend some of what Seeker was saying. Or she took some comfort from believing that she did…

Quagma: Everything had once been all seethe and jostle, at the universe’s birth. Heat beyond any human sense of what that short word could possibly mean—it had burst into space-time in a magma of quarks, tiny particles that supped of all the fundamental forces at once. In that infinitesimal era the fundamentals were one, and that superforce could do anything—even alter the balance between the vagrant forces, shape them to a will that could command quagma.

So quagma was the Stuff of All. To master it—to conjure it up for a similar infinitesimal tick of time—gave the power to redesign some wedge of space-time. To make dimensions snake and blur and coil—space-time spaghetti cooked to order. Fuzzy space-time could be knit, sauce added—and all done, perhaps, by a form of life as it dwelled in dimensions that were themselves subject to negotiation.

Or so she gathered. It was all a bit much: terms tossed in as though Seeker knew realms she could not glimpse. Well, maybe it did. The airy spaces of theory were not her proper province.

And she was so hungry…

She said, “So…this is where something from four-D makes a connection…”

“To our universe. This curious little microcosm of modified one-D space, our Tubeworld, is a way station of sorts.”

“An easier way into three-D?”

“A guess, no more. One would need to ask those who are doing all this.”

“The quagma engineers? That huge, ugly brown thing we saw—that was one of them?”

“Seemingly.”

“
Why
are they doing it?”

“Resources? Exploration? Those are the traditional motives of expansionist species such as yours.”

“Not like yours?”

“My kind are artifacts. I—
look
—”

Something had come into the space here, without entering. It simply appeared—a writhing blob of fleshy reds and pinks and salmons, turning like a greasy art object…and reeking.

Cley wrinkled her nose at the queer aroma that came in sour waves from the thing. “Hey—I’ve smelled this kind before.”

“I trust it is not harmful.”

“You trust—it looks like death warmed over.”

“Who would warm it over? Oh, I see, a verbal mannerism.”

“What
is
it?”

“I do not know. Remember that this thing can see whatever we do, from any angle.”

“I wasn’t going to attack it.”

“Wise.”

With the black brane hanging above, fuming, this new element seemed just one more entry in the weirdness ledger. Then the thing jittered with fevered energy. As if restless.

In quick flash-images she saw: purple-green limbs and folds, oozing into glassy struts—elongating, then splitting into red smoke. Leathery oblongs and polyhedrons folded over each other. Twinkling, jarring slices of hard actinic light poked through them. And it all moved as though blurred by slices of time into a jostling hurry…

“We are seeing some aspect of the true, larger four-D,” Seeker said, voice slow with wonder.

“But we still have three-D eyes.”

“I fear this is why none of it makes sense to us.”

She thought about a 2-D being suddenly moving through their own 3-D world, seeing only cross sections of trees and rocks and moving cars…and trying to stitch it into a coherent view. It could make a 2-D symbol or picture, and Cley could understand it as a flat scene. But for the 2-D creature it would be the whole object, not just a photograph.

So it now was for her, maybe? Sensing these things moving past and not getting how they fitted together into something extending away, in another direction the eye could not see. But maybe the mind could glimpse…

“Listen,” Seeker said.

A strange symphony of booms and clatters and screeches came from the air all around them. Seeker covered its ears. “We are getting the sounds as they are in four-D, where the waves spread out in a different way, in packets and eddies.”

Cley waved her arms in frustration—the only thing she could think to do. The deeply resonant vibrations were even coming from
inside
her. “Ah! Ah!”
Playing
her.

“I do not think these waves are harmful.”

“It’s like something speaking in my guts!”

“Music? A voice? We must find a way to speak back.”

Cley was still sitting beneath the black canopy, afraid to stand up. “Look—if Morphs can see us entirely, inside and out, steaming guts and all—well, maybe they’ll notice my whole body getting involved. Inside and out.”

She got up—and whirled, tumbled, capered, feeling like a mad dancer, working off her frustrations. Singing her lungs out, the way she had done so long ago in her Meta. It felt glorious…and left her panting—until something caught her eye.

A rippling fleshy knob floated near her. She wondered if
near
meant anything now. Gingerly she reached out toward it and felt only air…but in her vision her arm telescoped away, growing long and thin—dwindling into the distance down an impossibly long perspective.

The knob grew, flexed, reddened. She reached again—and connected.
To reach across dimensions…

A slick, warm surface. Smooth turning to sticky as she moved her hand down that long tunnel of perspective. Blue spikes poked through the knob’s “skin” as though they grew from it. Hair? She fingered the spikes—hard, hot, strumming with long, low notes like a church organ—but she could only feel these swelling hums, not hear them.

“You may be feeling its…bones,” Seeker said delicately.

“Ooog. I wonder if it minds.”

“When you walk down a street, do you mind if a shadow falls over you? It is a two-D intrusion, of a sort.”

“Look, if this is one of the things that jerked us out of our space, made us do all this, damn near killed us—”

“You wish to be at least understood by it.” Seeker nodded, walking at a stately pace around the strange display, treating it as an art object. But its fur bristled with excitement, too.

“I’m not sure what I want. Maybe…payback.”

“I share your dislike of being treated so casually.”

The oily colors reeked like old mausoleums—then, suddenly, of salty air. None of this made any sense. But then, maybe it couldn’t. She was a flitting shadow in somebody else’s world. How could she talk to shadows, anyhow? Or imagine fearing them? “If I ever get a chance, damn it…”

“I agree. Let us act back upon it.”

“But how?”

“Precisely. I am not feeling terribly powerful at the moment.”

Overhead, the ominous darkness descended.

Sparks and helical neon-bright fibers shot through the air.

Cley crouched, cringed.

“It must be benign,” Seeker said, its composure getting thin. “Else it would not have arranged these bare amenities. Air we can breathe—though a bit thick and dry—and heat we can withstand.”

“Me, I’d prefer to be left alone.”

She knew she and Seeker were carrying on a semblance of a conversation—because to talk was the only human thing in this utterly alien place. There had been so much strangeness for so long, she felt consumed by it, encased in a universe beyond human ken entirely, gyrating to its own bizarre laws. And she was
hungry…

“I sense some change coming,” Seeker said. The air shot through with bright color. The plastic-slick, sour-smelling blobs and sticks that drifted in the space between them and the inky-black brane became dense, fibrous, as though drawing nearer.

Pop!
“Hey, the history slabs!” Cley picked them up where they had clattered on the stony black sheet at her feet. “It’s brought them back.”

The black brane was very close now, radiating a crisp, hard heat…

…a sudden stretching sensation, a sidewise lurch…

…pop…

…and they were standing on sand.

She lost her balance, hit, rolled. The slick blobs were everywhere, churning, churning. But beyond them…“Look!”

Mountains, blue and snow-topped. She recognized them: the valley of the Library of Life. “They put us back.”

She sucked in cool air, fragrant, wonderful. Nearby was a branch excavation of the Library. Nobody was around, but the gear was out and working, most of it automatic. They were a reasonable walk from where they had started, and it seemed to be midday. She wondered how long they had been gone. Did time tick forward at the same rate in higher dimensions?

If the universe had only one dimension of time, that meant it was shared, even among higher dimensions. But if there were two, or even more,
time
dimensions…