Beyond Infinity Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Abbenford Associates

  All rights reserved.

  Aspect

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.hachettebookgroupusa.com.

  First eBook Edition: April 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54293-7

  Contents

  Part I: Growing Up Original

  1. Cley

  2. Being Natural

  3. First Love, of Sorts

  4. The Semi-Infinite Library

  5. Growing Up Fast

  Part II: A Universe in Ruins

  1. Allies and Evil

  2. Lessons of Pain

  3. Aftermath

  4. The Library of Life

  5. A Larger Topology

  6. To Dance on Time

  Part III: Around the Curve of the Cosmos

  1. Morphs

  2. The Obscurantists

  3. Tubeworld

  4. The Fleshy Birds

  5. Taking Flight

  6. Quagma

  7. The Black Brane

  Part IV: The Malign

  1. The Multifold

  2. The Saintly

  3. Damage

  4. The Discovery of Forever

  5. Flight

  6. Biologic

  Part V: The System Solar

  1. Prey

  2. Pinwheel

  3. Jonah

  4. Leviathan

  5. Editing the Sun

  Part VI: A Mad God

  1. The Captain of Clouds

  2. Skysharks

  3. The Living Bridge

  4. Continents Alive

  5. Homo Technologicus

  6. Blue Barnacles

  Part VII: Malign Attentions

  1. The Prison of Time

  2. Closed Curves of the Timescape

  3. The Meta-Universe

  4. The Heresy of Humanism

  Afterword

  Also by Gregory Benford

  Fiction:

  The Martian Race

  Eater

  The Stars in Shroud

  Jupiter Project

  Shiva Descending (with William Rostler)

  Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)

  A Darker Geometry (with Mark O. Martin)

  Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Against Infinity

  Cosm

  Foundation’s Fear

  Artifact

  Timescape

  The Galactic Center Series

  In the Ocean of Night

  Across the Sea of Suns

  Great Sky River

  Tides of Light

  Furious Gulf

  Sailing Bright Eternity

  Nonfiction:

  Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia

  To Arthur Clarke, without whom . . .

  PART I

  GROWING UP ORIGINAL

  Thought shall be harder,

  heart the keener

  courage the greater,

  as our might lessens.

  — “The Battle of Maldon”

  Tenth Century A.D.

  1

  CLEY

  AT TIMES CLEY thought that she was, well, a bit too intense. She seemed to have too much personality for one person and yet not enough for two.

  Perhaps the cause lay in her upbringing. She had been most attentively raised by her Meta, an ancient term for the meta-family. Hers had several hundred loosely related people clustered in ever-shifting patterns. It provided an overview, a larger vision of how to grow up.

  The Meta had spotted her as a wild card early on. It made no difference. Though hers, the Hard River Meta, was entirely, deliberately populated by Naturals—those without deep-seated connections to external machine intelligences—not many were Originals. Cley was an Original of particularly primordial type, based on genes of great vintage. Other Originals carried genes that had passed through revisions so many times that, by comparison, Cley’s genetic suite was a fossil.

  This gave her a kind of status. Not many true Originals walked the Earth, though the historians who pestered her early education said there had once been billions of them afoot. Billions! There were hardly a tenth that many now in all Earthly humanity. Not that she cared much about such numbers. Mathematics was a fossil art. Few in her time bothered to scale those heights of analysis with their majestic, abstruse peaks that the ancient civilizations had climbed, marked as their own, and finally abandoned as too chilly, remote, and even inhuman.

  She cared far more for things close by, not abstractions. That was the gift of living in Hard River Meta—the natural world, custom-made for Naturals. They had enough technology to be comfortable but did not waste time tending to it. Nobody much cared about events beyond the horizon.

  She had dozens of good friends and saw them daily. Children had jobs that meant something—farming, maintenance, big-muscle stuff—and nobody lorded it over others. Leadership rotated. Kids tried on jobs like clothes. Her life was one of small, steady delights.

  She was happy, but— The filling in of the rest of that sentence would, she knew quite early, occupy the rest of her life. And she knew even then that the things she sought in life could disappear even as she reached for them, the way a fist went away when she opened her hand.

  She suspected her antic energy came from a heavy genetic legacy. She belonged to the narrowest class of the Ur-humans—a genuine Original, and as such, something of a puzzle to her Meta of Naturals and much-revised Originals. A rarity.

  She knew herself to be something of a hothouse plant. Not an orchid, no. More like a cactus, feverishly flowering under the occasional passing cloudburst. Anyone who showered her with attention got her one-plus-some personality, ready or not. She wore people out.

  Especially, she tired her fellow Naturals in their orderly oatmeal lives. She secretly suspected that she also carried some Supra genes, or maybe some of the intermediate breeds of human that had been in vogue through the last several hundred million years. She tried to find out if this might be so, but hit the stone wall of Meta security, whose motto in most matters genetic was “Best not to know.”

  So she watched herself for telltale signs of intermediate forms. Nobody would help her, and she was too close to herself to be objective—and who wasn’t? A stutter she developed at age nine—could that be a sign? She worried endlessly. Bit off fingernails, even when they were part of her extendable tools. Chewed her lip. Then the stutter went away. Another sign?

  She felt as though she might very well spend the rest of her life with her button nose pressed against the glass of a room where she should be, only she couldn’t find the door.

  Her Meta never told her exactly who her parents were. There were Moms, which stood for mother of the moment, who tended to her upbringing for years, then handed her off to another Mom. All her previous Moms stayed in the background, ready to help.

  She only knew for sure that some pair among the sixty or so in her Meta had given birth to her genetically. But which pair? She had often wondered. It was usually reassuring that the genetic parents sometimes did not themselves recall—and sometimes it was not reassuring at all.

  But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.” For a long while Cley had thought this an exaggeration. Now she was not so sure she could even do it.

  The troubling question was, when was growing up over? Maybe never.

  So she took her earliest Mom as a model. That Mom was a stocky, affable woman of wide smile and high cheekbones. Cley had good, trim cheekbones like hers but had grown to be slim, tall, muscular, small-breasted. Were these diff
erences clues to her father’s genes? She wished she had gotten more cleavage and an easier manner. But even Cley knew that gene combinations were not so simple.

  In late childhood, when she first started to fret over such matters, she had mentioned her vague ideas about her father to her then-nominal Mom, who said, “You don’t need to know, dear, and anyway, he’s far away.”

  “How far?”

  “See the horizon?”

  “Beyond those mountains?” She had never been that far.

  “You’re looking at the wrong part of the view.”

  This she did not understand at all, and so she pestered Mom for days. Only once did Mom’s patient smile fade. “You’ve had something caught crosswise in you all week, my girl.”

  “But I need to know—”

  “You need to get inside there and turn it right-wise. Go meditate a bit.”

  She liked meditation, the feeling of lifting off the stolid, solid Earth and soaring up a solemn mountain of herself. It was satisfying. Three members of her Meta did little else. But it wasn’t for her. It made her feel wonderfully at peace, but eventually even peace got boring. She felt a restlessness that she hoped reflected the horizon-hopping aspect of her father.

  “Was he like me?” she would ask Mom.

  Mom gave her an arched eyebrow, no more. “Oh, yes, he was plenty self-full.”

  To be full of self the Meta discouraged. Naturals were supposed to embody the primordial art of merging with the ancient world of forests and animals, to lose themselves in it. Naturals were to stay where and what they were, merging with the ample lands being reshaped by higher folk.

  The word stung Cley.

  “Self-full?” she fretted to one of her girlfriends. They were lying out on a fused stone parapet, lazily watching piping work-birds build their cute layer houses. It seemed a good time for gal-pal talk. “Really?”

  “Um,” the friend said tactfully. “Maybe a little self-absorbed; could be, yup.”

  “But is that really bad?”

  “Y’know, worrying about it is self-full in itself.”

  “Uh . . . Oh.” Caught in a logical trap. “Let’s talk about something else, then.”

  Privately, she thought that having the spirit to leave the Meta was, well, a way of making oneself . . . better. Different. Another idea the Meta discouraged.

  But then, there were Supras around, glimpsed as they passed through the Meta’s territory on their mysterious, important business. Supras were reminders that some people really were more than you. Worse, Supras were better in ways that were not even easy to put a finger on. Even the Supra children of her age were daunting. They ignored her, of course.

  Cley had no more species politics than a bird, and not even one of the smart birds, either. Still, being snubbed went beyond theory, straight to the gut. So she inverted the snobbery, in her mind making Originals the true, secret elite, and the Supras into just afterthoughts. That worked, for a year or two.

  The whole subject—sociogenetics, her inboards classified it when she went to them for background—was far too complicated. And ancient, as well. The torrent of information from her inboards made her think about it with a curious, dispassionate distance. She guessed that was how real grown-ups thought. It was a bit sobering to know that so much wisdom was buried in her spine somewhere, ready to leap into her head whenever she prompted the inboard summons.

  The means of making a fresh person were so complex, she learned, that old ideas like simple parenting, with strictly assignable designer DNA, were useless. Meta loved her, brought her to the verge of first maturity, and so fell heir to the usual blame for the traumas everyone suffered just in getting that far.

  Many women in her Meta Mommed Cley, as their time came available and their interest allowed. Some years it was smiling, big-breasted Andramana, and other years it was lean, cool, analytical Iratain. Others, too, maybe half a dozen—each fine in their moments, then receding into the background as others came to the fore.

  The Meta’s men provided fathering, too, but here the usual Meta scheme went awry. Her friends liked this, and it seemed to work for them. Like them, she was supposed to gain judgment from these multiple fatherings, to see what men were like in general, and work on her attachment strategies in light of this.

  Instead, she just got confused. They were all so different, each with pluses and minuses and no clue to how Cley could ever choose what worked best. So much for theory.

  By accident, and persistent questioning thereafter, she learned that her genetic father had left the Meta for undisclosed reasons when she was three years old. She consulted her inboards, learned some techniques for memory mining, and plumbed her own childhood. She recalled some dim sensations of him: a dark musk, deeply resonant voice, and scratchy whiskers (an affectation, apparently quite ancient). That was all, but it was enough.

  So, thinking it absolutely natural, she awaited his return. She dreamed about it sometimes—a weighty presence descending from the sky, usually, like angry thunderheads brimming with ribbed light. She worked on making herself wonderful for him, anticipating his grand homecoming, their reunion as a family. Occasionally, a new male would join the Meta, and she always wondered if maybe this new set of smells and sounds was her one true father.

  She could not be sure, of course, because the Meta kept genetic fatherhood and motherhood quite secret. Not so much because it was hugely significant, though. Just policy. People would put too much weight on those old, simple connections, so best be done with them. Mothers, though, were usually too close to disguise; the Meta didn’t even try. Everybody needed a Mom, a daily presence, essential as oxygen, but a father could be vague. Better for a young girl to view all men on an equal footing and learn to objectively assess men’s abilities as fathers. She would probably choose a new Meta, and her own pairings, using those standards someday.

  Her Meta felt that genetic details were totally beside the point anyhow. What mattered, truly, was the Meta and its work. The Meta was the family of all. Humans did not reproduce like animals, after all, anchored in primordial musk and pairings.

  Cley wasn’t having any of this, though she never said so. Her gut feelings won out over all inherited wisdom. She simply kept making herself wonderful for her father, sure he would show up. And of course, when he did, she would know.

  Her true genetic mother might be within arm’s reach at any moment, in the milling Meta culture, but that had no claim on her attention. Her mother’s identity was a conventional puzzle, dulled by overuse and close familiarity with all her Moms. Father, though—now there was true, singing mystery.

  He grew daily in her imagination, as the placid Natural males around her all fell short of what she felt a father should be. She loved him; she worshiped him; she built whole stories around his exploits. “Dad’s Dangerous Days,” chapter thirty-seven.

  By this time, no man who ever came into the Meta matched up to the specifications of her father, so she was quite sure that he had never returned. He was off somewhere over the forested horizon, having Original adventures.

  She sat dutifully through the ritual experiences of a Meta upbringing, honestly enjoying them but knowing deep down that they were preliminaries to the moment when she would really know, down deep—when her father returned.

  She did wonder, as her years stacked up, why this yearning never fastened upon her mother mystery. To raise it brought an odd pang of disloyalty to her nominal Mom. But the issue did not have heft, did not wrap itself in the shadowy shroud of the father. Obviously. Though she sometimes wondered why this was so.

  Was the uniqueness of his puzzling absence, affecting only her of all her Meta, part of her own Originality? Was this oddness part of what made hernot just another Natural? No one else seemed to long to go over the horizon.

  When she spoke about this with any of the adults in her Meta, they carefully reasoned with her, taking ample time. And it all seemed straightened out, crystal clear . . . until she left the room. Then
she would run free again, down the hallways of her mind, banging on doors, eager to explore, ready with her latest father story to tell, a story that was somehow about Cley as well.

  She had noticed early on that everyone had some sort of story to tell, not about fathers but about themselves. So she got one, too. Fashioned from oddments, nothing too fancy. She was just an Original after all, no more, a genetic form roughly close to the variety that had started civilization off so long ago that to express it took an exponential notation. Not much material to start with. So she stuck to emotions.

  Her story was about the father, of course, only cloaked in Meta language. Yearnings, feelings of a destiny lying ahead of her. Fairly common stuff, she thought. Her life story did not quite seem to belong to her, though. She used it to get close to people, and she did care about them . . . but relating ostensibly personal substories about herself seemed to be like offering them for barter. In return for . . . what? She was not sure.

  So people—first from her Meta, then from allied Metas—came into her life, shaped it, and departed, their bags already packed. She wondered if everyone experienced life this way—if others came in, introduced themselves, exchanged confidences, and then milled around in their lives until they found an exit. She valued them terribly at the time, but they left only smudged memories.

  After a while she started dining out on the delightful details of people she knew, things they did. Other people were so much easier to talk about. She had sharpened her powers of observation while looking for her father. The step from watcher to critic was easy, fun. People were the most complex things in the world, ready-made for stories. Exotica like the slow-walking croucher trees and skin-winged floater birds were fun but, in the end, had no stories. The natural world usually didn’t. It was just there. She suspected that civilization had been invented to make more stories.

  And after a while, she came to feel that most others deserved her implied tribute: They really were more interesting than she was. Sometimes she felt like saying to strangers, “Hello, and welcome to my anecdote.”

  The electric leer of artfully crafted memory guided her. People remembered one another because they recalled stories, for stories made the person. With the myriad ways to remember, from embedded inboards to external agent-selves, there were endless fertile ways to sort and filter and rewrite the stories that were other people’s lives. At times, she soon noticed, people constructed stories that were missing parts, as if the business of being themselves did not hold their full attention. Shoddy work. She was much, much better at it.