Read Online Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online Page B

useless detail that Sonomulia still hoarded. These groaning ridges had risen during a time when the greatest of all human religions bloomed on their flanks. That faith had converted the entire world, had plumbed the philosophic depths of the then-human soul, and now was totally forgotten. Only the Keeper of Records knew the name of that belief, Rin commented, and he had not bothered to unveil that dusty era. The furious causes and grand illusions of the past were like the ghosts of worn, vanquished mountain ranges, too, now sunk beneath the seas of sand.
    Cley gazed across the broad plains of desert. For so long they had been like the winding sheets of Earth’s corpse, and now were being forced back by forest. Sandy wastes still lapped at the jewel of Sonomulia. She saw as they swept southward that from distant Illusivia a long finger of a river valley pointed into the desert, reaching crookedly toward Sonomulia.
    The green reconquering of the planet proceeded around its girth, and at this sight a sensation swept over her of sudden lightness, of buoyant hope. The loss of her Meta fell away from her for at least one moment, and she basked in the spectacle of her world, seeing for the first time its intricate wholeness.
    Something moved on the far curved horizon, and she pointed. “What’s that?”
    “Nothing dangerous,” Rin answered.
    At the limits of her telescope vision she could make out a long, straight line that pointed nearly straight down. Her eyes followed the line up into the dark vault of space, dwindling away. So large! The Supras certainly could work miracles. It seemed to move, and then she lost it in distant clouds. Rin ignored her, his brooding eyes flicking among the many dense thickets of data that the ship’s walls offered him.
    “Where are we going?”
    He blinked as though returning from some distant place. “To hell and back.”
    When she frowned, puzzled, he smiled. “An ancient phrase. Come, I’ll show you where hell does dwell on Earth for the moment.”
    They plunged down through a storm wrack that was speeding around the equator. Clouds, fat and purpling with moisture, speckled the air’s high expanse. In the last few years she had felt their winds and rain more often as moisture spread through the parched ecosphere. Orange spikes forked upward, tapering fingers stretched toward the stars. The planet was acting like a vast spherical capacitor, endlessly adjusting its charges between soil and sky. The ionosphere’s shell would disperse these energies—a dynamo the Supras tapped, she knew, though she did not know how.
    The craft swooped through dappled decks of fog and down, across vistas of windswept sand. Seeker put its tapered hand in hers and murmured, “Wait.” She shot it a quick questioning glance. Its bandit-mask markings around the large eyes seemed to promise mischievous revelations. Rin apparently noticed nothing except the walls’ sliding arrays.
    “See?” He summoned up a continent-wide view of the desert. A network of red lines appeared slowly, images building up like pale blood vessels pulsing beneath a sallow skin. “The old subway tunnels, leading to cities that once lived.”
    “When?”
    “More years ago than you could count if you did nothing else throughout your life.”
    She stared. The display showed wispy lattices of streets beneath the shifting sands, the shadows of cities whose very names were lost. “So many…”
    “I had a hand in excavating those subways,” Rin said wistfully. “In each, there were cryonic jackets filled with the corpses of their greatest, the luminaries who had earned passage into the future. They thought it would be better, more suited to their talents.”
    She blinked. “But—these subways are long! Some pass through mountain ranges, crossing continents.”
    “Yes, and each corpse represented the best minds of whole eras.”
    “Such potential!”
    “So many wild cards.” Rin grimaced.
    “If we could revive