Beyond the Fall of Night

  "But Alvin didn't—"

  He is of Diaspar and thus lacks the talent. Only we from Lys have the threads of microwave-active magnetite laid down in skull and brain.

  They twine among your — and our — neurological circuitry. When stimulated by electrical activity, these amplify and transmit our thoughts. Seranis took Cley's hands and held them up, palms facing, then slowly brought them to Seranis's temples. Cley felt the voice strengthen. I am antenna and receiver, as are you.

  "I could never do this before!" Cley said loudly, as if the new talent made her doubt her older voice.

  The talent must be stimulated first, since it is not natural to Ur-humans. Seranis smiled sardonically. It might have helped your species in your age. We of Lys have it because for so long we lived for the whole, for our community. This knits us together.

  "And Alvin?"

  Diaspar is the master of urban mechanism, Lys of verdant wooded majesty. Their art escapes their boundaries, while ours sings of our time and community. Diaspar rejected the enveloping intimacy of the talent, though it is an unending pleasure. And we of Lys pay the price of mortality for this.

  "This talent . . . kills you?"

  Seranis smiled wearily. Yes. Stressed so, inevitably the brain loses structure, substance. This defect of finiteness we share with you Ur-humans.

  Cley knew that she was speaking with the person who had brought her kind back into the world, yet she could not decide whether to be angry or grateful. "Then why give it to us, if we did not have it before . .. before you cooked us up from your Library?"

  Did a quick flicker of caution pass in the tightening of Seranis's lips? For now, let me simply say that we know you well enough to savor your kinesthetic joys, your quick and zesty sense of the world. That we lost in Lys.

  Cley thought. Lost in lies?

  Seranis blinked and Cley knew she had been understood. The little joke came through in even this strange medium.

  Somberly Seranis said. We believed the great lie about invaders, yes. Some say that is why we are so named.

  "Invaders?"

  Once both Diaspar and Lys believed that humanity fled the stars, before a horde. But the fact — uncovered by Alvin as he ventured out from Diaspar, to Lys and beyond — is that humanity retreated before the knowledge of greater minds among the stars. We tried to evolve even vaster forces, minds free of matter itself. And succeeded. But exhaustion and fear drove us into a wan recessional as cities died and hopes faded.

  An immense sadness ran through these thoughts, long rolling notes that held in Cley's mind like a soulful dirge. These chords were all counterpointed by the pressing world around her—a medley of crackling distant fires, the acrid tang of oily smoke, the hoarse shouts of orders and dismay, the grim grinding of heavy machines.

  She realized Alvin was studying her with interest, and remembered that she had spoken his name. Immediately she had a sense of the chasm that had opened between her and anyone who could not catch the silky speed of this talent, its filmy warmth and cloaked meanings.

  And it brought more still—pure unbidden sensation. Seranis turned to give a spoken order to a machine and Cley felt an echo of the woman's swivel, the catch of indrawn breath, minute pressures and flexes. Still deeper in Seranis burned a slow, sexual fire. The folk of Lys had kept the roiling passions of early humanity, the carnal joy and longing that flushed the mind with goaty rut, calling up the pulsing urgencies laid down in reptile brains on muddy shores.

  Seranis was an adult in a way Alvin would never be. Neither was wrong or right; each subspecies had chosen profoundly different paths.

  "Ah, yes," Cley made herself say, jerking her mind out of the hot, cloying satisfactions of this talent. "I, I . . ."

  "You need say nothing," Alvin said, smiling. "I envy you. More, I need you."

  Ranks of tractor-driven robots roared by them, making talk impossible, slinging pebbles high in the air. Seeker nervously shuffled back and forth, eyeing the gargantuan machines. It had now the look of an animal in strange surroundings, wary and skittish. Cley was concerned for it, but she knew she could do nothing for Seeker without the approval of the Supras.

  "Need me?" she asked. "For what?"

  Alvin said smoothly, "You are a rarity now. That was why I searched."

  The lightning sought our Ur-humans, Seranis put in. Alvin himself looked for the survivors, but . . .

  Cley glanced from Alvin to Seranis, acutely conscious of their casual ease. They were half again as large as she, their chocolate skins vibrant with health. Seranis, though, showed lines in her face which gave it a grave, crinkled geometry. Their clothes rippled to accommodate each movement. An air of unconscious well-being hovered around their sleek resilience. She glanced down at herself: bruised from her injuries, scratched by bushes, skin creased and scabbed and dirty.

  She felt a flickering burst of embarrassment.

  I am sorry, Seranis sent with concern. That was an overlap of my own emotion. Nakedness carries sexual and social signals in Lys.

  Cley asked wonderingly, "The simple baring of skins?" Her people enjoyed the rub of the world on their flesh, but it meant nothing more. For her, passion rose from context, not attire.

  Alvin V kind do not feel it, since immortals do not need reproduction.

  "They do not sex?"

  Seldom. Long ago they altered themselves —a subcurrent added, (or perhaps the machines did a little pruning) with a lilting tinge of amber laughter— to avoid the ferment of sexuality. They banished sexual signaling, all the unconscious signs and gestures. Still, I have this trait, and some of my feelings transmitted to you. I —

  "Never mind," Cley said shortly. She ordinarily felt no shame at all and much preferred her present nudity. Clothes robbed her of freedom and a silky sensitivity.

  What did bother her was her sudden intense feeling of inferiority. It had come welling up, tagged with the unsettling embarrassment and riding on her knowledge that her kind was so limited. To the Supras she was a living fossil.

  She remembered with some satisfaction that Alvin was deaf to the darting talent-currents and so spoke aloud, though already the thick movements of her throat and tongue were beginning to seem brutish and clumsy. "Why are you so concerned for us?"

  "You Ur-humans are valuable," Alvin said cautiously.

  "Because we can do grunt labor?" Cley asked sarcastically.

  "You know you have crafts in dealing with biological systems that we later adaptations do not," Seranis said evenly.

  "Oh sure." Cley held up a small finger which she quickly transformed into five different tools—needle, connector, biokey, pruner, linkweb. "This wasn't your add-on?"

  "Well," Seranis said carefully, "we did modify a few of them. But Ur-humans had the underlying capabilities."

  Cley's mouth twisted with ironic humor. "Good thing you gave me this talent-talk. I can feel that there's something you don't want to tell me."

  "You are right." Alvin swept his arms to take in the wall of roiling smoke that stood like a solid, ominous barrier. "We're concerned now because we could lose you all."

  "Lose us?"

  She caught thoughts from Seranis but the layers were chopped wedges, fogged by meanings she could sense but not decipher. In the instant between lose and us she felt a long, stretched interval in which gravid blocks of meaning rushed by her. It was as if immense objects swept through a high, vaulted space that she could see only in quilted shadows. She felt then the true depth and speed of Seranis—knew that through this luxuriant talent she was floating in a tiny corner of an immense cathedral of ideas, far from the great transept and unaware of labyrinths forever shrouded. Passages yawned far away, reduced by perspective to small mouths, yet she knew instantly that they were corridors of thought down which she could never venture in her lifetime. The hollow silence of these chilly spaces, all part of Seranis, held unintelligible mystery. These people looked human, despite their size and odd liquid grace, but she suddenly sensed that they wer
e as strange as any beast she had seen in the swelling forests. Yet they stood in the long genetic tradition of her kind and so she owed them some loyalty. Still, the sheer size of their minds—

  "We could lose you Ur-humans," Alvin said with what she now saw was indulgent patience. "Your species records were obliterated in the attack. All other Ur-humans were burned to a crisp. You, Cley, are the last remaining copy."

  22

  She worked for long days in the shattered ruins. The robots cleared the heavy wreckage, but there were innumerable places where human care and common sense could rescue a fragment of the shattered past and she was glad to help. The severed finger on her left hand had regrown but was still stiff and weak so she wanted to exercise it. And she needed time to clear her head, to climb out of an abyss of grief.

  The attack had been thorough. Livid bolts had assaulted one wing of the Library with particular attention, she learned. Shafts had descended again and again in brilliant skeins of color, hanging for long moments like a malevolent rainbow whose feet shot electrical arrows into the soil.

  That wing had housed the Library of Humanity. The Ur-humans had been the oldest form lodged there, and now they and all the many varieties of humanity that had immediately followed them were lost—except for Cley.

  The impact of this was difficult for her to comprehend. The robots gave her awkward, excessive deference. The Supras all paid her polite respect, and she felt their careful protection as she worked. In turn, without being obvious, she watched the Supras commanding their robot legions, but did not know how to read their mood.

  Then one day a Supra woman suddenly broke off her task and began to dance. She moved with effortless energy, whirling and tumbling, her feet flashing across the debris of the Library, hands held up as if to clasp the sky. Other Supras took up the dance behind her and in moments they were all moving with stunning speed that did not have any note of rush or frenzy.

  Cley knew then that she was watching a refinement of Ur-human rituals that went far beyond anything her tribe had used to defuse inner torments. She could glimpse no pattern to their arabesques, but sensed subtle elements slipping by in each movement. It was eerie to watch several hundred bodies revolve and spring and bounce and glide, all without the merest glance at one another, without song or even faint music. In the total silence she could pick up no signals from the talent; they were utterly quiet, each orbiting in a closed curve. The Supras danced without pause or sign of tiring for the rest of the day and through the night and on well into the next morning.

  Cley watched their relentless, driving dances without hope of comprehending. Without meaning to, the Supras told her that she was utterly alone. Seeker was no company, either; it gave the Supras only an occasional glance and soon fell asleep. She longed for her own people and tried to leave the Supra compound, but as she approached the perimeter her skin began to burn and itch intolerably. While the tall, perfect figures whirled through the night she remembered loves and lives now lost down death's funnel, tried to sleep and could not.

  And then without a sign or gesture they abruptly stopped . . . looked around at each other . . . and wordlessly returned to work. Their robots started up again and there was never any mention of the matter.

  The next day, as work resumed, Seranis took samples of her hair, skin, blood and urine. For the Library, Seranis explained.

  "But there isn't one anymore."

  Come.

  Seranis led her and Seeker down through a shattered portal. Cley had lived all her life in the irregular beauties of the forests, where her people labored. She was unprepared for the immense geometries below, the curling subterranean galleries that curved out of sight, the alabaster helicities that tricked her eye into believing that gravity had been routed.

  Already we rebuild.

  Teams of bronzed robots were tending large, blocky machines that exuded glossy walls. The metallic blue stuff oozed forth and bonded seamlessly, yet when Cley touched it a moment later the slick surface was rock-hard.

  "But for what? You've lost the genetic material." She preferred to speak now rather than use the talent, for fear of giving away her true feelings.

  We can save your personal DNA, of course, and the few scraps we have recovered here. Other species dwell in the forests. We will need your help in gathering them.

  Currents from Seranis gently urged her to use her talent exclusively, but Cley resisted, wanting to keep a distance between them. "Good. You've read my helix, now let me go out—"

  Not yet. We have processes to initiate. To re-create your kind demands guidance from you as well.

  "You did it without me before."

  With difficulty and error.

  "Look, maybe I can find some of my people. You may have missed—"

  Alvin is sure none remain.

  "He can't be certain. We're good at hiding."

  Alvin possesses a surety you cannot know.

  Seeker said in its high, melodious voice like sunlight dancing on water, "Alvin moves in his own arc."

  Seranis studied the large creature carefully. "You perceive him as a segment of a larger topology?"

  Seeker rose up on its hind legs, ropes of muscle sliding under its fur, and gestured with both its forelegs and hands, complex signals Cley could not decipher.

  "He first resolved the central opposition between the interior and exterior of Diaspar," Seeker said in its curious, light voice. "This he did by overcoming blocks of cultural narrowness, of unknown history, of his people's agoraphobia, of the computers. This inside-outside opposition he then transformed by breaking out, only to meet its reflection in the oppositions between Lys and Diaspar. To surmount this, his spirit convolved it into the opposition of the provincialism of Earth versus the expansiveness of the galaxy itself. And by confronting the Diaspar computers with a paradox in the blocked memory of one of the service robots of Shalmirane. This act led him outward again, in a starship."

  Seranis gaped, the first time Cley had ever seen a Supra impressed. "How could you possibly know—?"

  Seeker waved aside her question. "And so beneath the Seven Suns he found another barrier, the vacant cage of something great beyond humanity. This spatial barrier he now confronts in his own mind, and seeks to turn it into a barrier in time."

  "I ... I don't understand . . ." Cley said.

  "I do." Seranis studied Seeker warily. "This beast sees our motions in another plane. It has pieced together our conversations and ferreted out much. But what do you mean, a barrier in time?"

  Seeker's broad mouth turned downward, the opposite of a human smile. Cley suspected that Seeker was conveying something like ironic amusement, for its eyes darted with a kind of liquid, skipping joy. "Two meanings I off^er. He delves backward in time, to evolution's edge, for the Ur-humans. As well, he seeks something outside of time, a new cage."

  Cley felt a flash of alarm in Seranis, who stiffly said, "That is nonsense."

  "Of course," Seeker said. "But not my nonsense." It made a dry, barking noise that Cley could have sworn was laughter carrying dark filigrees beneath.

  Cley felt a surf of consternation roll over the sea-deep swell of Seranis's mind. "And next?" Seranis asked.

  "No cage holds forever."

  "Will you help us?"

  "I have a higher cause," Seeker said quietly.

  "I suspected as much." Seranis raised one eyebrow. "Higher than the destiny of intelligent life?"

  "Yours is a local intelligence."

  "We spread once among the stars—and we can do it again."

  "And yet you remain bottled inside your skins."

  "As do you," Seranis said with cHpped precision.

  "You know we differ. You must be able to sense it." Seeker rapped the cranial bulge that capped his snout, as though knocking on a door.

  "I can feel something, yes," Seranis said guardedly.

  Cley could pick up nothing from Seeker. She shuffled uneasily, lost in the speed and glancing impressions of their conversa
tion.

  "You humans have emotions," Seeker said slowly, "but emotions possess you."

  Seranis prodded, "And your kind?"

  "We have urges which serve other causes."

  Seranis nodded, deepening Cley's sensation of enormous shared insights that seemed as unremarkable to the others as the air they breathed. They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time's sheer mass shaded every word. Yet no one spoke clearly. Dimly she guessed that the riverrun of ages had somehow blurred all certainties, cast doubt on the very categories of knowing themselves. History held counterexamples to any facile rule. All tales were finally slippery, suspect, so talk darted among somber chasms of ignorance and upjuts of painful memory as old as continents, softening tongues into ambiguity and guile.

  Seeker broke the long, strained silence between them. "We are allies at the moment, that we both know."

  "I am happy to hear so. I have wondered why you accompanied Cley."

  "I wished to save her."

  Seranis asked suspiciously, "You just happened along?"

  "I was here to learn of fresh dangers which vex my species."

  Seranis folded her arms and shifted her weight, an age-old human gesture Cley guessed meant the same to all species: a slightly protective reservation of judgment. "Are you descended from the copies we made?"

  "From your Library of Life?" Seeker coughed as though to cover impolite amusement, then showed its yellow teeth in a broad, unreadable grin. "Genetically, yes. But once you released my species, we took up our ancient tasks."

  Seranis frowned. "I thought you were originally companions to a species of human now vanished."

  "So that species thought."

  "That's what the libraries of Diaspar say," Seranis said with a trace of affronted ire.

  "Exactly. They were a wise species, even so."

  "Ur-human?" Cley asked. She would like to think that her ancestors' saga had included friends like Seeker.

  Its large eyes studied her for a long moment. "No, they were a breed which knew the stars differently than you."