Authors: Gregory Benford
Seeker had other ways of…well, of feeling. Cley studied the snarled growths all around her. They seemed to writhe like sluggish serpents, stirred by a breeze she could not feel…or else they moved on their own. She kept checking nervously behind her.
Silence. She shivered. Seeker never showed true fear—a talent she wished she could share. She suspected that the creature had accepted death in a way the fretful human mind could not. Ancient animals lived without such foreknowledge, or so the conventional wisdom went. Had their indifference, born of ignorance, somehow carried over into Seeker? Shaped from raccoon genetics, amplified and tuned in countless fashions, Seeker and its many companion hybrids carried a quality humans could not readily attain. Death was only one element in their thinking, not an ever-present background drone. Seeker seemed at times oblivious of danger, even in this frightening place, after nearly breaking its neck in a fall…
She stood gazing fruitlessly at the forest where Seeker had vanished. What now? Gauzy alabaster light seeped up from the glassy soil, casting vertical shadows… Though the forest seethed and fretted, it made none of the sounds she associated with vegetation—no sighing, creaking, swishes—except, she now heard, a deep, rolling bass note, at the limit of hearing, like a great, slow breath of some immense beast. The Morphs? Looking for them?
The thought made her wary, and she wished Seeker would reappear, where the slow, swaying pucker in front of her was smoothing out—
She jumped. Something had touched her shoulder.
“Interesting geometry,” Seeker said. It stood nonchalantly at the end of a claw track that led back into the forest behind her.
“What?!”
“I suspected that this was an odd place…”
“How’d you
do
that?”
Seeker grinned, stretching its black gums. “I walked in what I thought was a straight line. But this is a cylinder we are in, my friend. I walked around the entire geometry and came back behind you.”
Cley looked up. “Then above that fog…”
“There is more forest, yes. We could see it, if the air were ever clear here.”
“So it’s a cylinder… How long?”
“Infinite, is my guess. Or maybe it curves around and connects back, eats its tail.”
“If this is just an extra tacked-on dimension, how come my hand is three-D?” Cley waved her hand at the forest. “And these funny trees?”
“My suspicion—and remember, I am only going from zaps and the like—is that this is what is called a
brane,
wrapped around a one-dimensional space.”
Zaps were whole concept nuggets, electronically induced—constellations of ideas that could be imported into a mind, much as a book could be picked up, consulted, put down. Understanding the zap meant ruminating upon it, letting it get integrated with your own thinking. That took time, but much less than old-fashioned learning through the serial input of reading, or even through the parallel processors of eyes and ears through images. Still, if you didn’t “read your zaps,” you knew effectively nothing. Enough to get by at a dinner party with Supras, maybe, but no more.
“So we appear here as three-D things…”
“Because we can move in the brane that folds our three-D bodies into this added dimension.”
“Uhhhh…”
“We are in a ‘reduced space,’ as the jargon has it.”
“We’re
wedged into
this four-D place?”
“In a curious fashion—and only a guess, remember. The Morphs must have known we could fit in this kind of halfway house of dimensionality.”
Cley flipped hair from her eyes, exasperated. “But for what?”
“Because we could comprehend this way? I do not know. Given the difficulties of broaching even simple ideas to the Morphs, I suggest we try to discover that ourselves.”
“Why didn’t the damned Supras do all this?”
Seeker dipped its long nose. “Exploration demands courage.”
“But they went out to the stars!”
“And came back, tails between legs.”
“You’d know more about tails than I would.”
Ferocious grin. “Quite.”
“Um… So we’ve only got one way to go, right?”
“Along the one-D axis of this wrapped-around, three-D space, ummm, yes.” Seeker started that way.
It was a hard trudge. Rough ground, thick air. They foraged for berries, and Cley’s stomach rumbled. Forest crowded in on them; at least there wasn’t much underbrush. This seemed odd, since the light that apparently sustained these plants came from below. Cley wondered aloud about that, but for once, Seeker—who always seemed to have an answer, even if a bit wrong—just shrugged.
“We could be anywhere in this Tubeworld, right? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“This is as roomy a puffed-up one-D world as we could expect,” Seeker said. “Remember, we experience it through a sort of…transform.”
“That ‘brane’?”
“Short for
membrane,
I gather. Like a film at the edge of a higher-dimensional space.”
“I can’t really see that.”
“Nor I—though I suspect this place allows us to perceive a more complex realm, in this tube. It may be like a subway between dimensions.”
“I hope it goes somewhere.”
Seeker nodded ruefully. “Even so, it could be as long along the axis as our space is across—the radius of the universe entire.”
“You mean it’s
infinite
going that way?” She pointed fore and aft along the axis, the two flat directions.
Seeker tut-tutted. “
Infinity
is a term promiscuously tossed about.”
“Okay, okay—large.”
“And note that the breeze always blows the same direction.”
“Right. I wonder if it wraps around this whole cylinder world.”
“Possibly. But what drives the wind?”
“A break somewhere?”
“A disturbance in the geometry? We can only guess. Ummm…the quagma could provide that break. It’s fierce stuff.”
“Okay. But would it drive the air toward itself, or away?”
“I do not know. This is a three-D manifold, speaking mathematically. Not like the spaces we know. It wraps around an extra dimension, a complex brane, I do believe. I christen it Tubeworld.”
Cley laughed. “Look, before we go all puffed up, founding new worlds or such, worry about this: If your Tubeworld really is light-years long, along this axis, then we’d
never
find the quagma that brought us here, that’s doing all this.”
“Well, yes.”
A long silence. Then Cley said, “Y’know, that spiral back at the Library…if we could use that ability, pop things in and out of the extra dimension…”
Seeker’s eyes opened in agreeable surprise. “Ah, interesting.”
“We could reverse the sense of rotation in molecules, make them act differently.”
“Excellent.” Seeker cupped its large, tapered head in a paw. “There might be biological advantages. Some diseases are left-handed because that matches some of our molecules. If we could switch that sense in our bloodstreams, we would become immune.”
“Great—already we’re doctors. Only we have to be sure the Morphs that live here don’t kill us first.”
“I doubt they live here. This is a portal, no more.”
“Yeah, a
ditch.
The bastards who dumped us here—”
“May not have even noticed that we had been sucked along in their wake.”
“Even worse!”
Seeker found a comfortable soil and stretched out. “To be unnoticed? I would think it a blessing, ordinarily.”
“Well, you don’t think like a human!”
“That does seem to be a problem,” Seeker said lightly, and went to sleep.
C
LEY KEPT WAKING
up in the diffuse pearly glow that oozed from the ground. It made her uneasy, and she wondered what made the light. What drove biological processes here? Were there stars, planets? Hidden offstage? If the Morphs made this, they had command of physics in an extra dimension, transcending everything she knew. Not that they were gods, no—she had wrestled with one in the tarp bag, felt its smooth strength jerk and struggle. But vastly strange, yes…
She lay awake and turned these questions over, and then heard odd sounds…growing louder…something coming.
Cley shook Seeker awake. Long reverberations came, building louder. They both stood up. Cley found a stick of satisfying heft to cover her unease.
The sounds seemed to come from all around. Cley discovered that if they turned perpendicular to the long 1-D axis, their bodies amplified the vibrations. Rotating away, the sounds eased. Sound itself was polarized somehow. In their ears sounded a tortured
strooooonnng
that repeated like the beats of a slow, thick heart, its pulses refracted and stretched. She did not like them.
Above the twisted trees, beneath the persistent pearly fog, came a great, flapping shape.
There were no feathers. Instead the dull reddish skin looked like the meat of some undersea creature. Cley thought of historical sensos she’d taken in, of long-ago manta rays, gliding through ancient seas with slow strokes of menace. This thing was larger than any bird she had ever seen. It was at the bottom of a swoop. As it neared them, it coasted back up a lazy, long parabola, disappearing into the mists.
“It’s not dangerous, is it?” Cley asked.
“Did you notice the curved talons on the ends of those wings?”
“Yup. Just looking for reassurance.”
“I offer none.”
Another of the things dipped into view, rose away. The echoing, eerie
strooooonnng, strooooonnng
got thicker, louder.
Abruptly one came again, this time plunging along a deeper curve. Its maroon flesh was now livid with red stripes, as though it was excited. It wheeled above the nearby trees and plunged abruptly—toward them.
Seeker dodged away, but too late. The talons caught in its fur, and the thing lofted Seeker up, disappearing with a single flap of its meaty wings, into the fog ceiling above. Cley could hear nothing. Her heart pounded, and breath rasped in her throat. She crouched against a thick tree. Another of the strange birds dipped below the misty deck, glided, went back up.
Strooooonnng
! Abruptly one appeared again through the fog deck—and Seeker was with it. But now Seeker had its claws dug into the underbelly of the fleshy bird. They wrestled together in air, descending rapidly toward the treetops. Seeker snarled loudly, and a strangled
strooooonnng
came from the vent slits where the creature’s wings joined the tubular body. The creature thrashed, trying to shake itself free. With a shrill, angry cry Seeker leaped away from it, grabbing for a nearby branch—missed—and fell through to the next branch…and another…finally got a hold.
The bird-thing flapped away, sending a harsh, ragged
Strooooonnng!
as it labored up into the mist.
Seeker was in no better mood when it climbed down the crusty bark and slumped, sprawling. “I believe I have learned something,” it said, wheezing.
“I’d love to know what.”
“Attack when it approaches. Use a sharp stick. Also, I understand something of the geometry here.”
“You learned that while it was
carrying you away
?” Cley chuckled; Seeker never ceased to amaze her.
“The flyer goes upward because gravity is lesser there. It lifted me to a curious place where the fog cleared and the breeze was strong—and we were weightless.”
“How’d you get away from its talons?”
“I used the weightlessness. Easy to turn, use the hindlegs. Gouged its eyes; it has four.”
Cley thought she saw the point. “No grav at the center. So we’re inside a
rotating
cylinder?”
“I thought as much, at first. But remember, this is another dimension, not a mere artifact.”
“So gravity goes away at the center of this, well, cylinder, because…?”
“Some sort of symmetry principle at work, I would wager.” Seeker checked itself over, rubbing and licking its pelt.
Cley yawned and looked around uneasily. So far there was no night here, making surprise less easy, but sleep harder. “Those birds couldn’t be the smartest thing in here, I suppose?”
“No. Something rather smarter must have made this place. It has access to this curled-up extra dimension, and ours as well.”
“Then something’s here, and it’s really a full four-D creature? How’ll we recognize it?”
“I suspect it will be a morph form that manifests in this geometry as more cylindrical, to match the boundary conditions.”
Cley blinked. “You were once a mathist, weren’t you?”
“All procyons are, as children.”
“I didn’t learn words like ‘symmetry principle.’ Mathists do.”
“Labels are limiting.”
“Aha! Thought so.”
“I suspect that whatever rules here will be a denizen of a dimension we cannot know—and larger than a bird.”
“Somehow I don’t find that reassuring, friend.”
When they next woke up, Cley’s fears surfaced again. They had been through a lot, and still Seeker seemed unfazed. Maybe it helped, being a mathist.
More immediately, Cley wondered how they could find something to eat. Even Seeker—who seldom seemed victim to the needs of the flesh, unless it wished to be—had a rumbling stomach as it slept. They got up and found yellow seeds hanging like teardrops from the vines. A tiny sample proved tasty and smelled right, so they indulged.
“Should we wait for the smart Morphs to make a move?”
Seeker shook its thick head. “Maybe they have lost us. The intermittent nature of their appearances argues that they do not control the interdimensional access very well.”
“Maybe we should light a fire, or something.”
“Visibility is very short through this fog—though I expect they can see us, if they have overcome the problem of looking down into lesser dimensions. And if they bother.”
“There’s some disadvantage to having an extra dimension?”
“Hyperseeing,” Seeker said. “They see both more and less. First there is the difficulty that for us, light oscillates in a plane and moves forward in the third dimension. In four dimensions, light must oscillate in all three dimensions, then move along a fourth. That makes three-D light hard for a four-D being to sense.”