Beyond Infinity Read Free Page A

sky. The Supras trained instruments on these. A fork came down and twirled in the nearby air and skewered one of them. It was a spindly woman. She died noisily.
    Cley did not sleep after that. The next morning the Supras left, stopping to tell the assembled Meta that something wrong was afoot. Something dangerous. That the Supras needed them all to keep on as they had before, not to be concerned with matters they did not understand.
    Cley’s girlfriends thought this was boringly self-evident, but what could they do? Cley found the bare fact that Supras could die, bleed out their lives on the ground, ripped from throat to gut—well, it was at least enlightening. She felt for the first time the electrifying sense of actually living in an important time.
    Then the days simmered down, and she relaxed. She was coming into her womanhood, after all, a more pressing issue.
    So she persisted in her faith, which was, of course, not a dry slate of dictates but a story: that first thing of all, she would pass through schools, then find something she loved doing, meet men and mate with them (no genetic contracts implied, though), experience raptures and delights unknown to mere young people, survive those and learn from them, and then generally move with growing serenity through the ever-expanding world.
    She did manage to finish school. That was as far as her life game plan worked.
2

BEING NATURAL
    A DOLESCENCE CAME UPON Cley unannounced.
    The various shades of humanity above Naturals had dispensed with such sudden advents and halts in the body’s evolution. “Nature’s unwanted punctuations,” they sniffed. They could orchestrate their tides and rhythms like an artfully managed story. So she had not heeded warnings of the Natural progressions, especially the firm events of an Original such as she. Menstruation arrived with startling, well, frankness. She had senso-ed about it, of course, but the sudden flow made her think of a wound, not a grand overture to heart-stopping romance.
    When it first happened, she dipped her head as if in prayer to natural forces, knees knocked together to hold in the embarrassment. As if this were not a blossoming, but punishment for a transgression. She fell to her knees, hands linking fingers, head tilted up to a God she did not believe in. Whatever God made of this, He/She/It did not help. The dark, hot, leaden burn refused to go away.
    There was a simple pharmaceutical cure for all this, of course, and one of the Meta women offered it. Cley automatically rejected it without quite knowing why. And paid the price of discomfort and awkwardness for four months before doing the standard thing.
    One Original frontier crossed, she awaited the virginity event. The Meta was easy-going about sex. With other nearby Metas it gave scrupulously clear classes and instructional aids. These were carefully not erotic, but in their clinical cheer also did not give any good reason to do the thing at all. Abstraction prevailed.
    At this time she invented her own, interior theory of virginity. In her model, virginity was not a single thing, abolished by a single act, but a continuum. She could give away parts of it. After all, wasn’t she a many-sided person, even if a mere Natural?
    With other Naturals she had tussled quite agreeably on lounging chairs, preferring the outdoors. But she had not dispensed any of the fractions in her V inventory, as she termed it to her girlfriends. Knowledge, call it K. Then the equation went, V lost equals K gained.
    Such thinking enlivened her mathist inputs, at least. Her inboard math abilities seized upon any chance to exercise themselves. An array of equations glided before her left eye; tutorials offered themselves; a learned voice whispered. She knew she should take her major inboards out for a romp every now and then, to keep them fresh, but the mathist parts were boring.
    Not that her friends felt that way. “You have to think precisely,” one of them said, “or life’s