Beyond Infinity Read Free

attention. Shoddy work. She was much, much better at it.
    She was intent upon the sliding scale that people showed her. Boys her age would rise from arrogant to impressive in the span of a single sentence and then ooze back down that slope again—and she was never sure just why.
    At times she was not quite certain who she was. When she was with the boys she knew growing up, she often thought that she was more alive for being with them: He thinks; therefore, I am. Afterward, she would enjoy the feeling of having been with a boy and come through it all right, free of awful, embarrassing moments.
    Still, she had the odd feeling of being disconnected: This will be fun to remember; not This is fun now.
    She had the usual simple sexual adventures. Kissing was sometimes like devouring the other person, savoring the sweet, swarthy head meat—no sauce, please. Bright grins, dark excesses. So healthy, everybody said.
    Even then, though, she came to feel that lust lacked, well, depth. Amid the mad moment, she would sometimes think, This reminds me of the time I felt déjà vu.
    But if you couldn’t learn from experience, what was left? Theory. She talked about this with one of the older women in her Meta, who said dryly, “The best definition of intelligence is the ability to learn not from your mistakes but from others’.”
    Cley went away puzzled. She needed not advice but a road map of life.
    So she resolved: Until she knew where she stood, she would continue lying down. Good ol’ sex. It certainly beat running away. That way she had tried, too: hard him, hesitant her.
    There was no cure for such bewilderments. Cley endured them. Get through it, her girlfriends said. But she also endured because she assumed that after the ordeals of adolescence were done, she would get her reward: the clear, smooth calm and blithe confidence that adults surely had. After all, they looked self-assured, didn’t they? Especially the Supras, who were more than adults.
    Soon enough, she was big enough to mistake for an Original adult (smaller than Supras, of course, but more muscular). She had a growth spurt and loomed over her girlfriends. “You’re kinda Supra-sized,” they taunted, not knowing that they were just giving away their envy.
    Then she realized that the Supras didn’t even worry about matters that preoccupied her Meta. One day, three Supras came to talk to her Meta about their ongoing restoration of Earth to a moist, green world. Unfailingly courteous, they spoke of ideas that played out over many centuries. That impressed her enormously. The Supras passed through the forests, nodding politely at the Naturals, the Originals, even taking opticals of them. Of her. She preened and pranced for one, and he grinned. Her heart nearly stopped.
    They were also there to look for something that had fallen from the sky, or so some said. They had assumed that the strange play of lights in the sky, witnessed by all her Meta for over a year, were descending craft from the spaces above. On the mere suggestion, Cley studied up on her inboards about the whole meaning of the myriad lights above. She learned the planets, the many lesser lights, the lot. Even history—not her best subject. There was about the huge landscape of the past an enduring sadness, a note of things known but now lost, that made her pause. So much order built up, so many lives well lived, only to be rendered into dust. That was when she learned what a billion really meant.
    The Supras searched for many days and found nothing. She watched them react to this, peeking from a tree perch she had made at night to get a better vantage on them. They murmured, worried, ignored the Ur-humans. She got bored, even with these supermen. And superwomen, but she ignored them.
    Then one night she woke in her perch. The Supras below were shouting. The sky was alive with twisting luminous shapes. Fire descended from these, igniting the forest down the valley. Helical angers worked across the