Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  Lay back. Made her breathing regular.

  Still— The struggle raged red through the landscapes of her mind.

  Her link with the Supras, yes—she could feel those. Embedded, they helped smooth the harsh, glancing edges she felt coming to her through a medium she could not comprehend.

  Minds were moving, somewhere. A seethe of thoughts, sensations, and something deeper . . . Ideas grown rank with time and experience, powerful, overbearing—

  This cauldron of sensations was only a fragment of the broadening perspectives which, the Supras said, would open for her in the hours and days of the conflict. She shuddered at the thought.

  These rode in the background of her mind. She had to ignore them. Fly, part of her said. Only by being out of control could she feel that this was part of her work. Her Original self would enter into this strange moment as herself, not as a Supra component . . .

  Back to work. She struggled to get the bubble to let go of the Levathan hull. The chemical signals were complex and having watched Searcher call them up was not enough to get her through it. She tugged and tweaked and then had to bang on the walls to even get the bubble's attention. When she had the sequence right, she had no chance to savor the satisfying pop. She was among the roiling abundance of life and had to learn to navigate. Jove's amber scowl peered over her shoulder as she skimmed away along the Laviathan's skin.

  The skysharks did not notice her, but something small and bullet-shaped did.

  It arrowed at her, a spike emerging at its nose. This lanced through the bubble in an instant. Orange mist puffed from it. The cloud's mere touch ignited flares in her nerves. Hurt reverberated in her nervous system in a searing echo.

  She snatched off her belt and chopped at the spike. It broke. More of the orange fog spurted. Her skin shrieked. The stench was awful. The spike wavered, turned toward her as if it could see—and abruptly jerked back, slipping through the hole it had punched.

  Her ears popped. The vacuum draft sucked most of the ornage mist away and then the bubble self-sealed. She was drifting outward from the Leviathan into a swarm of life.

  And then something huge caught her up and swept her into a place beyond.

  She had anticipated great flares of phosphorescent energy, climactic storms of magnetic violence. There were some, but these were merely sideshow illuminations dancing around the major conflict, like heat lightning on a far horizon.

  For Dawn the struggle called upon her kinesthetic senses—overloaded and strained and fractured, splitting her into shards of disembodied perception. This was all she was capable of grasping.

  Yet each splinter was intensely vibrant, encompassing.

  She felt herself running, once. The pleasant heady rush of sliding muscles. Of speed-shot perspectives dwindling, of slick velocities—and then she was in cold inky oblivion, her sun blocked by moving mountains. These moist shadows coiled with acrid odors. Harsh, abrasive air thrust up her nostrils.

  The ground—like a plain of lead-gray ball bearings—slid by below her invisible feet, tossing like a storm-streaked, grainy sea. Sweet tastes swarmed up her sinuses, burst wetly green—and she tumbled into another bath of rushing impressions. Of receding depths. And then of oily forces working across her skin. It went on and on, a riverrun she could not stanch or fathom.

  But at times she did sense pale immensities working at great distances, like icebergs emerging from a hurricane-racked ocean. Dimly she caught shreds of a childlike mind, incomparably large, and recognized the Multifold. It had prowled the solar system, she saw, blunting the attacks of the Malign. She owed it her life, for surely the Malign would otherwise have found her on her outward voyage.

  Beneath the ragged waves that washed her she felt infinitesimal currents, tiny piping voices. She recognized these as the recently grown Ur-humans, unformed personalities.

  They were all like elemental units in an enormous circuit, serving as components which relayed messages and forces they could no more recognize than a copper wire knows what an electron is.

  And Searcher was there. Not the Searcher she knew, but something strange and many-footed, immense, running with timeless grace over the seamless gray plain.

  Or was it many Searchers?—the entire species, she saw now—a kind which had come long after the Ur-humans and yet was equally ancient now, a race which had strived and lost and strived again, endured and gone on silently, peering forward with a hollow barking laugh, still powerful and always asking as life must, and still dangerous and still coming.

  And something more. She glimpsed it then, a corridor of ruin stretching back to the Ur-humans and lined with the dead who had stood—single minds, alone and finally afraid—against the fall of night. They had died to imprison the Malign and now their work lay in shreds as down that long passage of a billion years there now sped a vast shaggy shape, now compressing itself into this narrow inlet of a solar system—

  "That's it, yes," she said to herself. For she did not know what this place was, transcending the dimensions of her world, skating somehow outside the brane of the ordinary. She was lofting now, high above a seethe that smoldered red and black.

  "You want to make it come for me, to focus here," she said.

  It is our only hope, Rin sent.

  Dawn reached out and suddenly felt Searcher. The huge shape was engaged somehow at levels she could only glimpse. Searcher struggled in what seemed to Dawn to be a crystal sphere—luminous, living. Yet the mote glaring at the sphere's center was a star.

  She felt the plasma beings then. Nets of fields and ionized gas slipped fishlike through blackness. They converged on the Jove system. Great slow-twisting blue lightning worked through the orbiting rafts of life there.

  The mere backwash of this passing struggle scorched broad carpets of spacelife. Lances ruptured wispy beings the size of whole worlds.

  The biting pain of it made Dawn twist and scream. Her eyes opened once to find her fingernails embedded in her palms, crimson blood streaking her arms. But she could not stop.

  Her eyes squeezed shut against her will. A swelling seized her. She felt herself extended, warping the space around her as though she were herself a giant sun, bending rays of light.

  She knew this meant she had somehow been incorporated into the Multifold. But instantly another presence lapped at her mind. She felt herself tucked up into a cranny, snug—then yanked out, spilling into hot, inky murk.

  The Malign had her. It squeezed, as though she were moist fruit and would spit out seeds.

  —an orange, crusty with age, browned and pitted, covered by white maggots sucking at the inner wealth—

  She saw this suddenly, hard and vivid. Her mouth stung.

  I see it now. She had to cleanse the slimy maggots before she could eat. She sent down fire and washed the orange in burnt-gold flame. Screaming, the maggots burst open.

  —and the orange was a planet—

  Seared and pure and wiped free of the very atmosphere which had sustained the soft maggots. Slugs singed to oblivion. They had been scaly, quick of mind. But not quick enough. They had barely comprehended what rushed at them out of the maw at the center of the galaxy.

  I have to live it all. Dawn was the orange and then the fire and then the maggots and then, with long strangled gasps, the fire again.

  It was good to be the fire. Good to leap and fry and crackle and leap again. Forking its fingers up at a hostile sky.

  Better by far than to crawl and mew and suck and shit and die.

  Better, yes, to float and stream and tingle with blue-white fires. To hang in curtains between the stars and be greater than any sun that had ever flared. To roar at the jeweled stars. Better to know and shimmer and reek. To rasp against the puny clots of knotted magnetic fields, butt into their slow waltzes. To jab and hurt and keep on hurting because it is right they obey when the magnetic kernels had ground beneath you, broken, were dust. Better to be a moving appetite again, an intelligence bigger than a galactic arm.

&nb
sp; Pleasure seethed in its self-stink, more raw and muscular with every gathering moment.

  It loved these hideous memories.

  —and she broke away from it for a moment, into what seemed to be cool open space, empty of the skittering violence.

  —Oh! she thought with buoyant relief.

  But it was merely another part of the Malign. Oily and slick and snakelike, it slid over her. Into her ears. Up her vagina. A long, deep, snub-nosed probing for her ovaries. Down her throat, prodding with a fluid insistence. A scaly stench rose and bit into her. Its sharp beak cut and that was when she understood a flicker of what the outside struggle was about.

  Suddenly she could feel abstractions. The partition between thought and sensation, so fundamental to being human, was blown to tatters by the Malign's mad gale. Trapped, she understood.

  The Malign held that this universe was one of many expanding bubbles adrift inside a meta-universe. Ours was but one of the possibilities in a cosmos beyond counting. The great adventure of advanced life-forms, it believed, was to transcend the mere bubble which we saw as our universe. Perhaps there were civilizations of unimaginable essence, around the very curve of the cosmos. The Malign wished to create a tunnel which would prick a hole in our universe-bubble and extend into others.

  And against it came the Singular. For they had ventured into the higher dimensions, learning to fold spongy space-time itself and make mass, to build castles beyond imagination.

  They knew the Malign well, and came to kill it.

  But somehow, in all this, she mattered . . .

  Slimy blackness crept like oily fingers. Easeful ideas soothed into her.

  Here are my works.

  Bodies crushed and scorched.

  Leviathans boiling away their guts into vacuum.

  Gray moons melted to slag.

  Bodies punched and seared and tumbling away into vacuum.

  The Malign told her. Forced her to see through its eyes:

  The Galactic Empire, she saw, had been a festering pile of insects. When she stopped to see them better they were of all shapes, chittering, filled with meaningless jabber.

  Long ago some of these vermin had slipped away, she remembered, through the veils beyond the galaxy. Out, flying through strings of galaxies, across traceries of light. Spanning the great vaults and voids where few luminous sparks stirred.

  Those Empire maggots had vanished, leaving dregs to slump into petrified cities on a desert world.

  And elsewhere in the spiral arms, other races had dwindled into self-obsessed stasis.

  But should the holy, enduring fire follow the Empire across the curve of this universe? Should the Malign pursue?

  She knew instantly that such goals were paltry. The stuff of maggot-minds.

  No—far grander to escape the binds of this universe entirely. Not merely voyage in it. Not simply skim across the sloping warp.

  Follow those who had already lept free, into dimensions beyond the paltry infinity of this place. Ah.

  Dawn struggled but could find no way through the cloying hot ink that oozed into her throat, that seared her bowels. Faintly she felt that these turgid sensations were in fact . . . ideas. She could not comprehend them as cool abstractions. They reeked and banged, cut and seared, rubbed and poked at her.

  And on this stage ideas moved as monstrous actors, capable of anything.

  She understood now—as quickly as she could frame the question—what the madness cloaking her wanted.

  It desired to create deep wells in space-time. Compression of matter to achieve this in turn required the cooperation of many magnetic minds—for in the end, only intelligence coolly divorced from matter could truly control masses and their warps.

  Such a venture risked the destruction of the entire galaxy. Fresh matter had to be created, carved and compacted. This could curve space-time enough to trap the galaxy into a self-contracting sphere, cut off from the universe even as it bled downward into a yawning gravitational pit.

  Only in this way could the Malign escape the universe itself.

  The galaxy could not accept such danger. The magnetic minds had debated the wisdom of such a venture while the Malign was confined. Their discussion had been dispassionate, for they were not threatened. Magnetic intelligences could follow the Malign beyond such geometric oblivion, since they were not tied to the fate of mere matter.

  But the galaxy brimmed with lesser life. And in the last billion years, as humanity slept on Earth, life had integrated.

  Near most stars teemed countless entities, bound to planets or orbiting them. Farther out, between the shimmering suns, the wisps of magnetic structures gazed down on this with a slow, brooding spirit. Their inability to transcend the speed of light except in tiny spots meant that these most vast of all intelligences spoke slowly across the chasms of the galactic arms.

  Yet slowly, slowly, through these links a true Galactic Mind had arisen. It had been driven to more complex levels of perception by the sure knowledge that eventually the Malign would escape.

  So the magnetic beasts could not abandon the matter-born to extinction. They had ruled against the Malign's experiment before, and now they moved to crush the new-risen malevolency before it could carry out the phased and intricate compression of mass.

  Dawn saw this in a passing instant of struggle, while she swam in a milky satin fog—and then immeasurably later, through sheets the colors of bloody brass. She was like a blind ship adrift, with only the gyroscope of her senses of any use.

  The pain began then.

  It soared through her. If she had once thought of herself and the other Ur-humans as elements in an electrical circuit, now she understood what this could mean.

  The agony was timeless. Her jaws strained open, tongue stuck straight out, pink and burning. Her eyes bulged, though still squeezed shut by a giant hand which pinched her nose. She was terrified and then went beyond that to a longing, a need for extinction simply to escape the terror.

  Her agony was featureless. No tick of time consoled her. Her previous life, memories, pleasures—all dwindled into nothing beside the flinty mountain of her pain.

  She longed to scream. Rin! Muscles refused to unlock in her throat, her face. Timeless excruciation made her into a statue.

  —and through her came a bulge, thickening in her, a blunt momentum. She felt what it needed and pushed, letting the deep recesses of her mind gush out, letting the Multifold have the substratum of her Original self. It needed to know how her worn old mental machinery clanked and ground and flared forward. To use her as an ancient tool.

  The pain was now exquisite. It sucked the strata from her. Her cramped way of seeing the world was a language in itself and she finally gave it forth. The her of her blew outward. Was sponged up. Gone.

  Without this We could not traverse.

  It was not any Supra. The voice strummed low and certain. She sensed a distant presence that was embroiled in a terrible vast struggle. A tiny fraction had come to her and taken what she could yield, what she could birth, and now went back into the fray.

  Thank you, we give, to your kind. We leave you as we found you. Enjoy your simple self and do not try to be more. To be like this, ancient and quick, is enough. There are times when We wish we could be so again.

  She heard a scream. Not aloud, but in the Talent.

  It was a human. A Supra. Dying.

  There came a moment like an immense word on the verge of being spoken.

  And then it was over.

  She sat up. The vines holding her were like rasping hot breaths.

  She vomited violently. Coughed. Gasped.

  Brown blood had caked thick and crusty at her wrists. Her fingernails had snapped off. The tips were buried in her palms. Numbly Dawn licked them clean.

  "Have a rat," Searcher said and held up a green morsel on a forked stick.

  Rin! She shook her head and was sick again.

  "It's done," Searcher said.

  "I . . . Who won?"r />
  "We did."

  "What . . . what . . ."

  "Losses?" Searcher paused as though listening to a pleasant distant song. "Billions of lives. Billions of loves, which is another way to count."

  She closed her eyes and felt a strange dry echo of Searcher's voice. This was Searcher's Talent. Through it she witnessed the gray, blasted wastes that stretched throughout the solar system. Worlds blistered, atmospheres belched into vacuum, countless lives gone.

  "The Malign?"

  "Eaten by us," Searcher said.

  "Us?"

  "Life. The Galactic Mind."

  She still caught frayed strands of Searcher's ebbing vision. "You see it all, don't you?"

  "Only within the solar system. The speed of light constrains."

  "You can sense all life? On all the worlds?"

  "And between them."

  "How?"

  Searcher pricked up her outsized ears. Waves of amber and yellow chased each other around its pelt. "Like this." More ear-flicks, and a grin.

  "Well, what's that?"

  "This."

  In a glimmering she saw in her mind's eye fragile, lonely Earth, now among the blighted worlds. Safe . . . for now.

  Searcher shook one paw. She had just burned it on the cooking stick, and whimpered in pain. Dawn saw the hollows beneath Searcher's eyes. There was a weathered, wan look to the age-old racoon face—older, worn gray. Dawn sensed that the animal had suffered much since she last saw her, but there was no hint in its speech. "Human dreams can be powerful . . ." a breath, wheezed out, " . . . as we have just witnessed."

  A moment hovered between them. Dawn saw that they would never be quite the same, she and Searcher. They had each been through something that they could not speak of, or know from the other's perspective. So it was with differing intelligences.

  Maybe that was how it should be. Anyway, it was.

  Other Supras came through the thick foliage.