Free Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford Page A

have passed through wisdom and died in the time this man had enjoyed—another sign of the unknowable distance between the subspecies.
    But he felt the range of human emotions, still—and visibly. Rin’s spirit ebbed, his face clouding, as if this flight had taken him momentarily away from a fact he could not digest.
    The ship was landing beside a wall of black that she at first took to be solid. Then she saw ash-gray coils rising through sullen clouds and knew that this was the smoky column she had seen for days.
    “The Library of Life,” Rin said. “They attacked it with something like smart lightning. Bolts that struck and burrowed and hunted.”
    She saw the black-crusted gouges and ruptured vaults, polished clean by electric fire. Something had found the treasure that ages of wearing winds had not discovered.
    “All the underground library?” Cley asked. She remembered that her tribe had once shaken their heads at a Supra who told them of this practice, the attempt to imprison meaning in fixed substance. People who lived and worked in the constant flux of the deep woods saw permanence for the illusion that it was.
    “Not all, luckily. Some legacy survived,” Rin said. “The Ancients knew its storehouse would not be needed in my crystal city, Sonomulia. The urge to preserve was profound in them, and so they buried deep.”
    “A recurrent human feature,” Seeker said. “Sealing meaning into stone.”
    “The only way to understand the past,” Rin countered sharply.
    “Meaning passes,” Seeker said.
    “Does transfinite geometry?”
    “Geometry signifies. It does not mean.”
    Rin grunted with exasperation and kicked open the hatch. The wall of soaring smoke bulked like a dark, angry mountain. The smoke’s sharp bite made Cley cough, but Rin took no notice of it. They climbed out into a buzz and clamor of feverish activity. All around the ship worked legions of bots—ceramic and metal, and some of the plasma-discharge swirls. A few Supras commanded teams that struggled up from ragged-mouthed tunnels in the tawny desert, carrying long cylinders of gleaming glass.
    “We’re trying to save the last fragments of the Library, but most of it is gone,” Rin said, striding quickly away from the guttural rumble of the enormous fire. Smoke streamed from channels gouged in the desert. These many thin, soot-black wedges made up the enormous pyre that towered above them, filling half the sky.
    “What was in there?” Cley asked.
    “Frozen life,” Seeker said.
    “Yes,” Rin said, his glance betraying surprise; an animal knew this? “The record of all life’s handiwork for well over a billion years. Left here, should the race ever need biological stores again.”
    “Then that which burns,” Seeker said, “is the coding.”
    Rin nodded bitterly. “A mountain-sized repository of DNA.”
    “Why was it in the desert?” Cley asked.
    “Because there might have come a time when even Sonomulia failed, yet humanity went on,” Rin said. “So the Keeper of Records says.”
    “I…see.” She could scarcely follow his words.
    She had never seen the full panoply of the Supras at work. Iron-dark clouds raced low before a wind that boomed in the valley and whined through the wrecked galleries of the Library. Dust swirled into the cracked caverns that had been kept crisply sterilized for longer than any single species could remember. Stenches—carbon fires, open graves, smoke ripped ragged out of smashed vaults, rotting bodies thawing from the foggy liquid nitrogen, sweaty fear—seemed to coat the very sounds of this hubbub with rank odors. Metal clangs of slinking gray snake-bots, hammers thudding, joints popping, wheels creaking, leaden footfalls of ceramic diggers, voices raised in anger, sobs, whispers, silken pleas, ritual song, hushed prayer.
    Cley turned, looking at the unfolding drama. Women wrapped ancient bodies, kept for rebirth after their freezings and now permitted to thaw out, dead forever.