"What will happen to it?" Cley asked quietly. Her body ached but she put that fact aside.
"Earth? I imagine the Supras will dream on there." Seeker nipped at the rat with obvious relish.
"Just dream?"
Seeker shook one paw, which it had just burned on the cooking stick. It whimpered at the pain. Cley saw by the hollow look to Seeker's eyes that it had suffered much since she last saw it, but the animal gave no hint in its speech. "Human dreams can be powerful, as we have just witnessed," it said.
For a long moment Cley then saw, through Seeker's strangely boundless talent, the Earth shrink into insignificance. It became a speck inside a great sphere—the same glowing ball she had seen in the struggle.
"What is it?"
"An oasis."
"The whole solar system?"
"An oasis biome, one of billions strewn through the galaxy. Between them live only the magnetic minds. And passing small travelers bound upon their journeys, of course."
"This is your 'higher cause,' isn't it? When Alvin asked if you would help defend human destiny?"
Seeker farted loudly. "He was guilty of the heresy of humanism."
"How can that be heresy?"
"The narcissistic devotion to things human? 'Man is the measure of all things?' Easily."
"Well, he has to speak for his species."
"His genus, you mean, if you would include yourself."
Cley frowned. "I don't know how close to them I am. Or what use they'll have for me now."
"You share the samenesses of your order, which are perhaps the most important."
"Order?"
"The order of primates. A useful intermediate step. You possess the general property of seeing events in close focus. Your ears hear sounds proportional to the logarithm of the intensity. Otherwise you could not hear a bee hum and still tolerate a handclap next to your ear. Or see both by moonlight and at high noon; your eyesight is the same."
"Those are all damn useful," Cley said defensively. She could not see Seeker's point.
"True, but you also consider time the same way. Your logarithmic perception stresses the present, diminishing the past or the future. What happened at breakfast clamors for attention alongside the origin of the universe."
Cley shrugged. "Hell, we have to survive."
"Yes, and hell is what you would bear if you had continued with your heresy."
She shot Seeker an inquiring look. These were grave words, but Seeker rolled lazily and swung from two vines, using them to cavort in midair with flips and turns and airy leaps. Between its huffs and puffs it said, "You would have prevented our oasis biome from integrating, with your grandiose plans."
Cley felt a spurt of irritation. Who was this animal, to deride humanity's billion-year history? "Look, I might not like Alvin and the rest all that much, but—"
"Your trouble is that contrary to the logarithmic time sense, evolution proceeds exponentially. And the argument of the exponent is the complexity of life-forms."
"And what's that mean?" Cley asked, determined to sail through this airy talk on a practical tack.
"One-celled organisms took a billion years to learn the trick of marrying into two or more. From dinosaurs to Ur-humans took only a hundred million. And then intelligent machines—admittedly, a short-lived experiment—required only a thousand." Seeker did a flip and caught itself on a limb, its tongue lolling.
"You don't seem all that advanced beyond us," Cley said.
"How would you tell? If my kind had evolved into clouds, I couldn't have the fun of this, could I?" Seeker gulped down the rest of the rat.
"Or the fun of dragging me all the way across the solar system?"
"There is duty, too."
"To what?"
"To the system solar. The biome."
"I—" she began, but then a piercing cry burst through her mind.
It was Seranis. Her talent-wail broke like a wave of hopeless grief, discordance boiling with shards of sound.
Cley scrambled away, driven by the mournful, grating power. She nearly collided with a man in the foliage. He gazed blankly at her. Something in his expressionless face reminded her suddenly of her father.
"Who're you?" she asked.
"I have ... no name."
"Well, what—" and then she fully sensed him. Ur-human, a tiny speck of talent-talk purring in him.
You were one of those links I felt, she sent.
Yes. Those of us here . . . have gathered. We are afraid. His feelings were curiously flat and without fervor.
You 're like a child.
I a?n like us. The talent-voice carried no rancor and his face was smooth and unmarked, though that of a full-grown man.
She looked beyond him and saw a dozen like him, men and women of the same height and body-type. You 're me!
In a way, he sent mildly.
From the Ur-humans came a tide of bland assent. They were untouched by time and trouble.
The struggle, how was it? she asked.
A woman sent, Such fun! We had never done anything like that.
"Well, you won't again," Cley said aloud. She preferred the concrete feel of speech to the sensation of dropping stones down a deep well. "But look, what—"
Then she saw the body. The Ur-humans carried it between them in the light gravity. "Alvin!"
Seranis followed the corpse, her face stony, body stiff, emitting no talent-trace at all now.
Cley asked the man, "What happened?"
"He ... gave ... too much." The man-child's throat sounded raw and unused, as though he had seldom spoken before.
Cley gazed into Alvin's open eyes. A blue pattern of burst veins gave them the look of small, trapped seas.
Seranis came last, following the smooth, bland Ur-humans. She said and sent nothing.
Cley looked at Alvin's troubled, fractured eyes and tried to imagine what he had finally faced. She knew suddenly that he had somehow freed her from the Mad Mind's grip. And his cost had been to have his own mind burned away, the brain itself fused.
He had dignity in death and she felt a pang of loss. He had been strange but majestic, in his way. Seeker was wrong; the Supras were still essentially human, though she would never be able to define just what that meant.
In a moment only a heartbeat long she sensed something beyond the kinesthetic effects she had ridden, beyond the explanations she had glimpsed. The coiling complications of ambition, the crazed scheme to tunnel out of their own space-time. . . .
That was part of it, yes.
But she remembered the algae mats of earth's first oceans, billions of years ago. They lived on in the guts of animals, bacteria hiding in dark places where chemistry still kindled without oxygen. She recalled that her own tribe had used them as yeasty agents in the brewing of beer. If such bacteria could think, what would it make of the frothy spume of beer? As catalysts they were certainly taking part in processes transcending themselves, yielding benefits they could not imagine. If they could somehow know, they might well feel immeasurably exalted.
But to those who brewed beer's casual delights, the bacteria were unimaginably far beneath the realm of importance, mere dregs of evolution. And whatever dim perceptions the algae could muster would hardly resemble the true nature of the talk and laughter and argument which swirled through the minds that felt the pleasant effects of that beer.
Her own understandings of what the past struggle had been about—could they be similar? Valid, perhaps, but dwarfed by the unknowable abyss that separated her species from the purposes of entities enormously removed.
Could that bear somehow on what Seeker meant about logarithmic time and exponential growth? That she could not even imagine such a gulf?
The thought caught her for only a single dizzying instant. Then it was gone and she was back in the comfortable, linear progression of events she knew.
She turned away from the body. The Ur-humans milled uncertainly around her. "Seeker, I . . . these people. My people."<
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"So they are," Seeker said noncommitally at her side.
"Can I have them? I mean, take them back?" She gestured up at the transparent dome where the tired but receptive Earth still spun.
"Of course. The Supras could not help them."
"I'll try to bring up just a few of them at first," Cley said cautiously. The enormity of becoming mother to a race struck her. "See how it goes."
"No one tests the depth of a river with both feet," Seeker said.
Seranis had gone on, solemn and silent, not looking back. Cley wondered if she would ever see the Supras again.
The Ur-humans all studied Cley. "Do you think there'll be a place for them?"
"If you make one."
"And you?"
"This is my place." It fanned a greasy claw at the quiet immensities above.
"The—what did you call it?—system solar?"
Seeker's ears flexed and changed from cinnamon to burnt yellow. "She gave birth to humankind and is a third as old as the universe itself. She is the source of life everlasting."
"And you—you're her agent, aren't you?"
Seeker nodded and laughed. Or at least Cley thought it did. She was never really sure of these things, and perhaps that was for the best.
"I suppose it's reassuring, being part of something so large."
Seeker said, "Indeed. Alvin knew of her. But he described her as endless chains of regulatory messages between the worlds, of intricate feedback, and so missed the point."
"What point?"
"Alvin saw only metabolism. He missed purpose." Seeker produced another rat and began to eat.
"Was it 'her'—your system solar—that really destroyed the Mad Mind?"
"Of course."
"What about the Supras?"
"They did as they must. We helped sculpt their uses."
"Which is it?—'she' did it or 'we' did it?"
"Both."
Cley sighed. "Well, did we humans matter at all?"
"Of course. Though not as you imagine."
"You helped me because of your biome, didn't you?"
Seeker seemed to catch the disappointment in her voice. "Truly. But I came to love you. You are an element I had not comprehended."
To cover her emotions (a very human mannerism, she thought wryly) Cley said lightly, "Just doing my part in the system solar."
Seeker said with a grave scowl, "As you did."
"Hey, c'mon, I did have other motives."
"They were incidental." Seeker lunged at a passing bird, missed, and tumbled into a tangle of vines. Cley laughed. Was this the super-being she had seen roving among the planets during the battle? The same creature that now wrestled with vines, sputtering in irritation? Or was there really a contradiction?
"This biome—how come you're so loyal to it?"
"It is the highest form which can evolve from this universe—so far." Seeker kept twisting around in the thick vines to no avail. Even so, it continued in an even, measured tone, "The biome has been implicit in the governing laws since the beginning, and arose here first as intricate networks on ancient Earth."
"So Alvin had part of it right after all."
Seeker thrashed around, getting itself caught tighter. "Only a narrow view."
"You said once you had contact with everything."
Seeker shook its head in frustration. "Everything and the noth-ing."
"What's 'the nothing'?"
Seeker bit into a vine and tore it loose. "When a thinking being chooses to not think for a while."
"The subconscious?"
"The transconscious. Separation into isolated beings is a feature of evolution in the human era and before. I am a fragment of the self-awareness that arose from that early web, and now grows apace."
"Sounds pretty exalted. Seeker After Patterns."
"You are part of it, too," Seeker said softly.
"I don't feel all that cosmic right this minute," Cley said, beginning to notice many aches. Her palms throbbed. She wondered if the Supras had any medical miracles handy.
"The biome is ordinary. Not a big abstraction." Seeker wrestled free of the vines.
"And you're a housekeeper for the system solar?" Cley smiled ruefully.
"In a way. I voyaged once to another biome, and—"
Cley was startled. "Another star?"
"Yes. I journeyed to speak with that far biome. Quite different, it was."
"What's a biome say to another?"
"Little, at first. I had difficulties."
"I thought Seeker After Patterns could do anything."
Seeker made its barking laugh. "Only what my planets allow us."
"They sent you?"
"Yes. Eventually the biomes strewn through the spiral arms will connect. There is much work to be done, to understand those strange beings."
"Biomes are beings?"
"Of course. Evolution proceeds beyond the scope of individuals now, or of species and phyla. Biomes are different orders of beings."
As it said this Seeker no longer looked like an amiable pet. She sensed quiet, eerie powers in it.
"Seeker, you speak as if you are the system solar."
"So we do."
Cley chuckled and cuffed Seeker beneath its ample, matted chin. "Well, so much for words. Whatever won this, and at whatever cost, we're alive."
"Far more important that the biome lives."
"Yes, thank God."
"You are welcome," said Seeker.
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