Free Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford

them—”
    “Oh, we can.”
    “Then we should!” She could not stifle her enthusiasm. “So much talent—”
    “And release energies we cannot know in advance?” He smiled. “These ancients may be dictators of enormous charisma, prophets of vanished religions who will seek to reinvent their faiths, inventors who can bring forth engines of destruction that later human variants erased as too dangerous, artists who can throw our very worldview into crisis—and we cannot tell them apart! The records are long lost.”
    She felt crushed. The stretches of time implied by the problem were numbing. And she knew so little. The cities that now lay beneath the sands, their very shadows implying whole histories…“The subways…”
    “There were vast alternatives to Sonomulia then. Great cities devoted to crafts we abandoned. We did not seize them.”
    “And now?”
    Rin laughed. “Precisely because we have lost so much, there is so much to do. Uncountable! Infinitude!”
    “Because…”
    “We are casting off lethargy at last.” He waved a hand at the screen. “The bots. The dead hand of this static past.”
    To her surprise, Seeker spoke, reedy and melodious. “There are more breeds of infinitude than of finiteness.”
    Rin raised his eyebrows, startled. “You know of transfinites?”
    “You speak of mere mathematics. I refer to your species.”
    Seeker had not spoken to Rin since they entered the ship. Cley saw that the beast was not awed by this sleek, swift artifact. It sat perfectly at ease, and nothing escaped its quick, bright eyes.
    Rin pursed his lips. “Just so, sage. Did you know that your kind evolved to keep humans intellectually honest?”
    Cley could not read Seeker’s expression as it said with a rippling intonation, “So humans think.”
    Rin looked disconcerted. “I… I suppose we Supras, too, have illusions.”
    “Truth depends on sense organs,” Seeker said with what Cley took to be a kindly tinge to its clipped words. Or was she imposing a human judgment on Seeker’s slight crinklings around its slitted eyes, the sharpening of the peaks of its yellow ears?
    “We have records of the long discourses between your kind and mine,” Rin began. “I studied them.”
    “A human library,” Seeker said. “Not ours.”
    Cley saw in Seeker’s eyes a gulf, the spaces that would always hang between species. Across hundreds of millions of years, and chasms of genetics, words were mere signal flares held up against the encroaching night.
    “Yes, and that is what burns,” Rin said soberly. “We know what humans thought and did, yes. But I am coming to see that much history passed outside human ken.”
    “Much should.”
    “But we will regain everything.” Rin slapped a palm down.
    “You cannot regain time.”
    “We can make up for it.”
    Seeker said slowly, with infinite sympathy, “Now time and space alike conspire against you.”
    Rin nodded with wan fatigue.
    Cley felt that she had missed much of this cryptic exchange. She had learned with Kurani to keep her respectful silence, as one both of few years and earlier origins. But this Rin…
    She had realized earlier that she knew fragments of his history. Even among Supras he was famous. Of course, all other human orders knew the Supras better than any other variants. Rin had changed in the several centuries since, as a daring boy, he had altered human fortunes. He had pried the Supra forms from their sequestered city, Sonomulia. The Supra Breakout, as some termed it, was in large part his creation—done with youthful zest, overpowering inertia. Some of that still smoldered in his darting eyes.
    All other human variants were but witnesses to the sudden reemergence of Supra ambition, after their kind had slumbered in their crystal city for uncounted millennia. Once again, Supras thought they could do anything. It might be so. Certainly regreening the world was a good beginning.
    Still, Cley watched him with trepidation. An Original would