Beyond Infinity (33 page)

Seeker grinned. “You truly have no idea, my dear human.”

“No, I mean, it was—like being licked with a rasping, wet tongue that
wouldn’t quit
!” Her voice had gotten away from her at the end, letting out the brittle, heart-stopping fear she felt.

Seeker looked unimpressed. “Humans are not good at diving into the pools of others’ minds.”

“Especially Originals?”

“I was not going to mention…”

“Okay, and I’m not an Original anyway, right?” She held up her fingers and extruded two bony tools. “These don’t look like anything that got worked out on the plains of Afrik.”

“Yes. You are as Original as humans get. The records are spotty.”

“Well, I guess. These fingers are tekky, not evolved. I’ll bet the captain’s a product of engineering, too.”

This, even little children learned. That rapid selection pressure operated on what already existed. It added capability to minds, layering rather than snipping away parts that worked imperfectly. The human brain was always retrofitted, and showed its origins in its cumbersome, layered workings. The captain had arisen from some engineering she could not imagine. Especially its mind.

“But didn’t you feel it, too?” she asked.

“I do not have precisely your Talent.”

“What did the captain do after I fainted?”

“Scattered like a flock into which a hunter has fired a shot.”

“Huh. Maybe it didn’t know how to tell me without overloading me.”

“Perhaps. I have seen captains before. This was different.
Ah—
”

Seeker snagged a ratlike creature that was passing, and bit off its fat tail. The rat squealed and hissed, and Seeker put it gently back down. As the rat scampered away, Seeker munched on the tail. “A delicacy,” she explained. “They grow tasty tails so that the rest of them is let go.”

“It’ll live?”

“Within days it will sport another luscious tail.” Seeker smacked her lips over a morsel, holding out the last to Cley. “Some of my kind cultivate them.”

“No rat’s ass for me, thanks. You were saying something about the captain…?”

“It was odd.”

“How?”

“I have never seen one worried before.”

Cley bit her lip, memories stirring. She had felt sour filigrees of the captain’s anxiety. Yet already the sharp, vibrant images were trickling away. She suspected that her kind of intelligence was simply unable to file and categorize the massive infusion she had received, and so was sloughing it off.

“The Supras it could deal with,” she said. “It fears the Malign, though.”

Seeker nodded. “The Malign is fully arrived, then.”

“Fully?”

“All components knit together.”

“I caught something about that from the captain.” She frowned, troubled, eyes distant. “Sheets of fine copper wire wrapping around blue flames…”

“Where?”

“Somewhere further out from here. Where it’s cold, dark. There was a feeling of the Malign spreading over whole stars. Suns…like campfires.”

“It is expanding.” Seeker clashed claws together, a gesture of sly menace that somehow made her look more human.

Cley told Seeker what she had glimpsed in the captain’s mind. In fading retrospect, much of it was a tapestry of rediscovered history.

The Malign’s strange sentience had been confined to the warped space-time near a huge black hole. Only the restraining curvature there could hold it in place for long. This had been done uncounted eons ago—a feat accomplished by humanity in collaboration with elements and beings she could not begin to describe. Around the black hole orbited a disk made of infalling matter, flattened into a thin plate, spinning endlessly. The inner edge of the disk was gnawed into incandescent ferocity by the compressive clawing of the hole’s great tidal gradients. There the Malign had been held by the swirl and knots of vexed space-time. Matter perpetually entered the disk at its outer rim, as dust clouds and even stars were drawn inward by friction and the shredding effects of the hole’s grip.

“Think of it as…well, like a bored god,” Cley added. “Trapped for long enough to drive it insane, if it wasn’t already.”

Seeker’s eyes were veiled. “Some say it was mad even before.”

Cley tried to describe the rest, awkwardly. By design, the Malign had been forced to swim perpetually upstream against this flux of matter, caught in the thick disk. If it relented, it would have been carried by the flow to the very inner edge of the disk. There it would have been sucked farther in, spiraling down into the black hole.

That had been the prison and torture of the Malign. It had been able to spare nothing in its struggle to survive. And that is all that had saved the rest of the galaxy from its strange wrath.

“But it escaped,” Seeker said.

“It…diffused.” The odd word popped into her head, summoned by the fading images from the captain. “It is made of magnetic fields, and they diffused across the conducting disk. That took a very long time, but the Mind managed it.”

“Now it has reformed?” Seeker frowned. “Where was the hole?”

“It was the biggest humanity could find—at the center of the galaxy.”

“So legend says,” Seeker said pensively.

“I
think
it was humanity that did it, but the captain used another word, something about the Singular.”

“Um. Another legend. The Singular is a construction, emerging from an event the Ancients termed the Singularity. First the Quickening precipitated changes in what some humans made of themselves. The Singularity was one of the more successful of those leaps, and it created the Singular.”

“What is it?”

“It is what part of humanity became. A structure made of folded space-time itself. Some humans augmented themselves to beyond the others’—your—perception. Then they, with others from far stars, made the fold.”

“Sounds…well,
difficult
is too mild a word.”

“It was an act that transcended our space-time. Somehow those Ancients went beyond our infinities. They were—or are—both part of the Singular and its cause. I admit I do not follow these matters well.”

“Maybe nobody can.”

“The Singular helped to make the Multifold. How, no one any longer knows. But no alliance against the Malign could have succeeded without the Multifold to counter its powers. We do not even know exactly how the Multifold did so.”

“The Library was crammed with history—”

“But not enough,” Seeker finished for her.

They both looked out through the transparent pressure membrane. The vibrant glow of a million suns wreathed the center of the galaxy in its bee-swarm majesty. Yet at the center of all that glare dwelled an utter darkness, Cley knew. Ten billion years of galactic progression had fed the hole. It sucked dust from passing clouds. Stars that swooped too close to it were stripped and sucked in. Each dying sun added to the compact darkness, the dynamical center about which a hundred billion stars rotated in the gavotte of the galaxy.

Cley whispered, “But we’re so far from there.”

Seeker said, “We could have fled. Outward, into the galactic fringes.”

“Ummm. Wouldn’t it be safer to get as far away as possible?”

“Yes. But not responsible.”

“So now it’s loose?”

“And has been moving outward, bringing catastrophe, over twenty-eight thousand light-years. One possibility is that its malignancy is being played out, to weaken it as it travels so far into the hinterlands of the galaxy.”

“It knows that the Quickening, and then the Singularity—”

“Both were human-made, yes. But they also contained the workings of others, of alien forms. And the Quickening was a very long time ago. The galaxy has rotated four times since then.”

“How can we defend against it?”

“With difficulty.”

“That’s one possibility, you said. What’s another?”

“That we were placed here as a sentinel, to warn others.”

“Who?”

“I do not know.”

Cley grimaced. “Hard to warn somebody when you don’t know who that might be.”

“There is yet one more possibility.”

“What?”

“That we are here as a sacrifice.”

Cley said nothing. Seeker went on. “Perhaps if the Malign finds and destroys us—humanity and its consorts, whom it thinks of as its imprisoners—it will be content.”

The offhand way Seeker said this chilled Cley. “What’s all this
about
?”

“My phylum believes that the Malign wants to hasten the era when another universe, on another brane, collides with ours.”

“How can that happen?”

“Our brane moves like a flat plate along a string, in a higher dimension. Another brane is approaching along that string. When they collide, matter and energy annihilate.”

“Leaving nothing?”

“Leaving fields. And magnetic fields, which comprise the Malign, will survive to dominate whatever comes to pass after the collision.”

Cley rolled her eyes. “How in hell can this Malign move the branes around?”

Seeker licked its black lips. “Here you exceed my knowledge. Except that it can, and the Multifold could prevent this. But to truly use all its powers, in concert with others, the Multifold must access its primordial elements.”

“Uh-oh. Elements that were put into place by Originals.”

Seeker shrugged. “Perhaps the Supras know.”

“Well, then, let them fight the Malign. I want out of it.”

“There is no way out.”

“Well, moving further from the sun, out to Venus, sure doesn’t seem so smart. That’s where the Malign is accumulating itself.”

Seeker studied the stars, bright holes punched in the pervading night. “Your Talent made you too easy to find on Earth. Here you blend into the many mind-voices.”

Cley opened her mouth to disagree and stopped, feeling a light, keening note sound through her thoughts. She blinked. It was a hunting call, she knew immediately—a flavor that eons had not erased, as though from some fierce raptor swooping down through velvet air, eyes intent on scampering prey below.

She glanced back at the smoldering glow of the galactic center. Against it were black shapes, angular and swift, growing. Not metal, like Supra ships, but green and brown and gray. “Call the captain!”

“I have,” Seeker said.

As Cley watched the approaching sleek creatures, she saw that they were larger than the spaceborne life she had seen. It was far too late to avoid them, even if the Leviathan could have readily turned its great bulk.

Skysharks,
Cley thought, the word leaping up from her buried inboard vocabulary. The term fit, though she did not know its origin. They were elegantly molded for speed, with jets for venting gases. Solar sails gave added thrust, but the lead skyshark had reeled in its sails as it approached, retracting the silvery sheets into pouches in its side. Cupped parabolas fore and aft showed that it had evolved radar senses. These, too, collapsed moments before contact, saving themselves from the fray.

Cley gasped as they dove straight in. The first of them came lancing into the Leviathan without attempting to brake. It slammed into the skin aft of the blister that held Seeker and Cley. They could see it gouge a great hole in the puckered hide.

Shrieks came through the foliage. Cley’s ears popped. Outside, the sleek skysharks banked and fought small defenders. A great head bit deep into a small opponent. Muscular, powerful jaws worked. Throats swallowed. Cley watched the first few plow headlong into the mottled hide of the Leviathan and wondered why they would risk such damage merely for food. But then her ears popped again, and a
whoosh
rushed by.

“They’re breaking the seals!”

“Yes,” Seeker said calmly, “such is their strategy.”

“Shouldn’t we run?”

“Where?”

“But they’ll kill everything aboard.”

“Not all, no. They penetrate inward a few layers. This lets the outrushing air bring to them the smaller animals.”

“Then, let’s—”

“No time. Watch.”

Cley watched a skyshark back away from the jagged wound it had made. A wind blew the backdrop of stars around, the only evidence of escaping air. Then flecks and motes came from the wound, a geyser of helpless, wriggling prey. The skyshark caught each with its quick, wide mouth, seeming to inhale them.

Cley had to remind herself that these gliding shapes with their cool, soundless, artful movements were actually carrying out a savage attack, remorseless and efficient. Weightless vacuum gave even death a quality of silent grace. Yet the beauty of threat shone through, a quality shared alike by the grizzly, falcon and rattler. Her ears popped again. “If we lose all our air…”

“We should not,” Seeker said, though plainly she was worried, her coat running with swarthy spirals. “Membranes close to limit the loss.”

“Good,” Cley said uncertainly. But as she spoke, a wind rose, sucking dry leaves into a cyclone about them.

“That should not happen,” Seeker said stiffly.

“Look.”

Outside, two skysharks were wriggling into older gouges. Waves rippled along their sleek torsos. Air had ceased to stream from the holes, so the beasts could enter easily. Others withdrew from the rents they had torn after only a few vicious bites. They jetted along the broad sweep of skin, seeking other weak points. In their tails were nozzled and gimbaled chambers. She saw a bright flame pucker and flare. Her inboards told her this was hydrogen peroxide and catalase, combining in shaped rear chambers. Puffs and streamers pushed the muscular bodies adroitly along the rumpled brown hide. It was a mad harvest. From the gaping gashes where skysharks had entered came fresh puffs of air. Some carried animals tumbling in the thinning gale, and skysharks snapped these up eagerly.

“The sharks that went inside—they must be tearing up those membranes,” Cley shouted against the rising shriek. “That vacuums out the protected areas.”

Seeker braced herself against the gathering winds. “A modified tactic. Even if those inside perish, their fellows benefit from the added game. Good for the species overall, despite the sacrifice of a few.”

“Not much consolation.” Already it was getting harder to suck in a breath.

“I am becoming concerned, yes.”