Authors: Gregory Benford
She shook her head. Enough.
Morphs danced in the air. Murmured, droned.
Seeker nodded. “I would like to get them to stay until we can profit from this experience.”
She laughed crazily, decompressing. “Profit enough, just staying alive.”
“Nonetheless…” Seeker twisted its muzzle in thought. It walked over to the excavation equipment. It stretched up, found a tray of instruments. The 4-D Morph blobs and sticks were cascading around them with their slick plastic reds and pinks, white strands weaving. Some followed Seeker; the rest stayed with her. They made her uneasy.
Seeker selected a long, deeply curved tool, a horseshoe arch with one sharp, forked tip. It surveyed the variously shaped blobs for a long moment, then seemed to find what it was looking for. A glossy ring-shaped Morph floated near Cley, pulsing gently. Seeker turned with a quick, deft move and plunged the tool with delicate precision through the hole in the Morph’s center. It turned and plunged the tool directly through the nearest blob.
Chaos among the 4-Ds. Seeker batted away one stick and stepped back to survey its work. Carefully Seeker pushed both ends of the tool into the sand, securing the Morph. The blob fluttered and distended. It warped into a rosy plate, then a tube, then a teardrop. Moaning, it eased up the shaft and down the other side of the curve. But its path was blocked there. It oozed around to one side of the tool shaft, then another—but could not break free.
Its companions whirled in a cyclone frenzy. They imploded suddenly, grouping around the anchored blob. Though they strained at it, the shaft would not come free of the hard desert earth.
“I suggest we find help,” Seeker said. It set off at a lope. “We must arrange some more permanent way to trap this portion of the four-D Morph in our dimension.”
Cley ran after the procyon. After days in zero g the solid slap of shoes on soil was a pleasure. “How come the Morphs can’t get the shaft out?”
“I do not know. But a needle can trap a finger in two-D, so…”
“What? You did that on pure hunch?”
“Yes. That surprises you?”
Cley shook her head, grinning in disbelief. “They might’ve killed you.”
“The four-D society must want this connection. I doubted that they would act harshly, once they understood things.”
“Um. Big gamble, Seeker After Patterns.”
“They have risked our lives already, then saved us—only to dispatch us? I thought not.”
As if in testimony, a company of wheeling, floating teardrops and sticks followed them. Cley looked back; the blob was still pinned. “You anchored it in three-D. Like getting your three-D hand stuck on two-D sticky paper.”
“Let us be of speed, to think further. They may devise a way to free that portion of the Morph.”
“So ‘they’ isn’t quite right—it’s one thing?”
“I surmise. Though how can we tell? We have inadequate eyes.”
She thought it through as she gave herself over to the pure pleasure of running in fresh, clean air, unsullied by dimensional ambiguities. Yes, the dimensionally destitute humans in 3-D could not see the dimension above. They had to use a basically 2-D retina, even if it was in a spherical eyeball, to process light—then reconstitute in their brains the 3-D world. A 4-D Morph must have a 3-D eye, then, she reasoned. A sphere that provided the same service, to image the 4-D world. Then one more dimension up, a 5-D being needed a hypersphere to see its world.
To her surprise, riding on her elation, she was beginning to think the way that Seeker could. She could
intuit
4-D, even if she couldn’t see it. Yet.
Meanwhile, Seeker was barking with pleasure as it trotted. It batted away a floating stick, which dutifully bobbed away, then came back to hover. Surrealistic bees, in pink and white…
“Think of what a four-D mind could tell us!” Seeker said. “Truths about our space we could never guess, any more than an ant crossing a table knows that a human is doing calculus there.”
Cley said, “If they care to bother.”
“Why else would the Morphs make that incursion into the rolled-up microuniverse, a tube that size? An experiment! All in aid of getting through to us. Travel among dimensions is not easy—that we have learned the hard way, from this journey.”
“Maybe we should keep it that way.”
“There is no going back from this!”
Cley laughed. Seeker never got this enthusiastic. It was rebounding from the long days of fear, though Seeker would not, of course, admit it. “Suppose there really were a Flatland for two-D beings—what we could tell them! We would be fascinated, too.”
They were nearing a clump of workers, who looked up, puzzled.
“We could get the same richness, literally beyond conception,” Seeker said. “Would that we could talk to the four-Ds.”
Cley laughed again. Home, and already thinking about fresh horizons.
Ah!
Rapture in full 3-D.
Damn the solar system. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.
—Lord Jeffrey
F
ANAK MADE MUCH
of their excursion into the Tubeworld. “This is a powerful clue,” he said earnestly. “Powerful. That they would take
you
—it must mean something.”
Cley looked across Fanak’s workplane, which floated around him in his airy vault. She was trying to read his expression, which was generally a bland blankness. That “take
you
”—did it mean, why would anybody bother with an Original and an animal? Or was she being self-conscious again?
Probably neither. Supras implied tons of things she never glimpsed. In this moody, hollow room it was easy to misread. She felt hushed masses above her here, deep in the shadowed halls of the Library. Fanak was the most erudite of the Supras she knew, so she went to him first with her story. And he had paid more attention to her at that party…which she could hardly remember…“Maybe not. We were outside, easily found. Maybe they were just feeling their way.”
Fanak frowned and got up to pace. His workplane followed, passing through Cley and her chair and reforming on the other side. It seemed to show an ancient map of Earth from the era of human emergence, before the continents merged for the second time. Just incidentally, its glow highlighted the bony planes of Fanak’s face from below, lending him an added gravity. When he cast a glance to the side, it lit that portion of its display and focused light appealingly around the rest of the huge room. “Ummm. Still, every clue is vital.”
“I don’t think this Tubeworld we went to was, well, ancient.”
He swerved, pinning her with his gaze. “How could you know?”
“Well, I don’t, not for sure, but…”
“This is all quite mysterious.” Impatiently he resumed pacing. The obedient workplane followed, lighting objects as he passed, following the direction of his glance. “We have all been deriving all substance possible from the ancients. Not that they were clear! The Third Fabricants knew higher dimensional cultures and dealt with them. Clearly. That seems to have intersected in the same era with the building of the Multifold—though just what that name implies is also mysterious. I believe it was a collaboration between humanity and a—there must be many!—extradimensional culture.”
“How many dimensions is the Multifold, then?” Cley liked Fanak’s directness, his intensity, and a lot else. She knew how to coax a conversation along, even when she did not really understand much of it. Originals picked up such skills.
“Um…more than our three spatials.”
He seemed cautious. “And?”
“There is a hint, in a single frame-text, of an extra time dimension.”
“How could there…?”
“Exactly. Two times? A difficult conceptual landscape.”
He was wearing an artfully made robe that revealed his body in momentary, tantalizing glimpses. His restless pacing made his muscular calves bunch in a pleasing way. She got up and walked toward the other side of his huge quarters. Glancing up at a movement, she saw that she stood beneath sculpted ceilings that told a complex tale in moving figures. The room seemed to demand attention. Information swirled in the walls. And Fanak paced. His workplane kept shadowing him, but he seemed not to notice. She had to keep up with him, and questions seemed the best way.
“And the Malign?” she asked.
“They are united in the historical record with these extra dimensions, yes. But with much confusion.”
She had the distinct impression that he was withholding, but with a Supra it was hard to be sure. And even harder to interrogate them without being blunt. Which, at the moment, she did not wish to do. Their subtleties were beyond her.
“Ah—please wait,” he said.
She watched him receive a silent call and make the pause so many Supras made as they replied. His sudden stillness contrasted with the shifting views of the walls. They were mostly landscapes without people but with foregrounding constructions that seemed alien to her. She knew well the ingrained taste of her kind, for savannahs dotted with trees, ponds, nooks that could shelter—and as well, prospects that promised mystery and wide-ranging movement. Her Original taste was ingrained. She liked canopies and inlets, reassuring shelter. Even better if they stood in contrast to panoramas or waterfalls with nearby openings, yet with cozy spots available.
Fanak’s walls were subtly off for her. The very same sort of landscape gave off different signals. Refuges were shadowy without giving reassurance. The horizons somehow did not beckon, yet she could not say just how. Yet Fanak favored these oddly askew renderings. She felt again the unspoken distance between her and the Supras—and, she admitted, her continuing fascination. They were, well, different. Fundamentally so.
He finished his silent conversation suddenly and resumed his pacing, scowling with renewed energy. The drive of the man captivated her, and she was quite sure by now it was not just the close likeness to Kurani. Except in the face—Fanak had a lean and piercing hunger that in Kurani was more blended, distant. She allowed herself a moment to wonder what he was like in bed. Those thighs…
She shook herself.
How Original!Try not to be a total slut…
Focus, yes. She ventured, “I wonder if the extra time axis could be the source of confusion?”
He laughed heartily, a startling roar that echoed from the archways. The room seemed to still after this, as though it were paying attention. “Good idea. It makes as much sense as anything else I have been digging out.”
“From…?”
“Oh, these are full-sensory historicals. You’ve seen some? From the era when history was thought to be properly a form of drama? Imagine! And all purely senso-ed. You arrive amid a full story line, take what you wish from it, and life in the historical moves on. Subplots and more.” He shook his large head. “What could they have been thinking?”
“So you experienced this… Multifold?”
“I felt and sensed and thought I understood—and then it was gone. Leaving me with an exposure to the era, but little else.”
She kept her distance from him as he walked about his quarters, seemingly oblivious. No chance encounters, at least not yet.
“And the Malign?”
He frowned, hands behind his back as he paced and turned, paced and turned. “Something shadowy. The two are wedded somehow.”
“Nobody knows how?”
He turned abruptly, nearly colliding with her, his eyes boring into hers. “There were librarians much better at this, who knew how to integrate the past records.”
Cley took a step away from him, from his bristling intensity. “The Furies…”
“Killed them all, yes.”
“The Furies, they were…” It was easier to let him fill in the blanks.
“Systematic. Just as when they exterminated the Originals.”
She shuddered at the memory.
The burnt, swollen faces of friends…
“Why?”
Fanak let emotions play across his face, most of them tinged with a subtle, fleeting anguish. “A talent for the thorough? I wish I knew.”
“Maybe they—it, whatever they were—wanted to disable us. Cut us off from…”
“The Multifold, yes.”
“Where is it?”
“No one alive knows. Yet.”
“The Library…”
“We’re trying to make it yield that. From what’s left.”
He wheeled away again, his bare feet slapping upon the ancient, warmed stones. She felt a rush of emotion, a need to comfort him, to embrace, to…“Can I help?”
He stopped, his back to her. “Keep at your work. It is valuable.”
“Seeker and I filed a report on our little adventure. If you need to know more—”
“The scientific types—those we have left—are studying the Morph you pinned. Difficult, difficult. Uncooperative. Capturing that thing was very good work, by the way.”
“Seeker and I did it together.”
“Truly? The procyon? It seems a canny beast.”
“That’s an understatement.”
He turned back to her, eyes veiled. “I think of the procyons as rather like cats.”
“Well, they both like fish.” She kept a blank face; Supras were far too good at reading Originals.
“I meant the air of mystery they manage to suggest in every movement, every glance.”
“With cats it’s all acting.”
“Not among the smart ones.”
Her eyes widened. “There are cats enhanced to our level?”
“To yours, yes, there were.”
“I’ve never seen any. The ordinary sort, yes. I’m a cat person.”
“They were wiped out, the enhanced ones. Too clever by half.”
“When?”
“Several million years ago. I gather there was a…revolt.”
“Over…?
“Art, the Library says.”
“What were they like?”
“No one living has ever talked to one, if that’s what you mean.” He blinked at her owlishly. “The smart cats were large, of course—they needed the brain size—and chose to retain their primordial characteristics.”
“Carnivores?”
“Hunters, yes.”
Cley blinked. She was trying to imagine intelligent hunter cats—their point of view, how they would live. And whom they would mortally offend. Just an intuition, but…“The Elegants did it, then.”