Free Beyond Infinity by Gregory Benford Page B

Survivors, blinded by the Furies, staggered to their tasks, unwilling to sit idle. An elaborately gowned matron screamed that she sought her family’s stored bequest, hammering at a burned compartment. Animals trotted by, speaking in their slanted tongues of horrors none could explain, tongues hanging between guttural words. Grim attendants exploded dangerously teetering arches, slamming the architecture of antiquity into powder.
    “So much…gone.” She instinctively stepped nearer to Rin.
    “Not all, we hope.”
    The teams of ceramo-bots moved in precise ranks, so methodical that even the hubbub of fighting the fires could not fracture their lines. They surged on wheels and legs and tracks, churning the loose soil as they pushed large mounds of grit and gravel into the open troughs where flames still licked. She could see where explosions had ripped open the long trenches. The Furies had scoured out the deep veins of the planet’s accumulated genetic wisdom. The bots were like insect teams automatically hurrying to protect their queen, preserving a legacy they could not share.
    Cley could scarcely take her eyes from the towering pyre of rising, roiling gray smoke, the heritage of numberless extinct species vanishing into billowing wreaths of dead carbon.
    The machines automatically avoided the three of them as they walked over a low gravel hill and into an open hardpan plain. Rin did not bother to move aside as battalions of bots rushed past them. Cley realized that this was an unconscious tribute to the static perfection he knew in Sonomulia, where such error did not occur. The machines came shooting past, deflecting sidewise at the last instant before collision, then reforming their precise columns as they sped away. Seeker flinched visibly at the roar and wind of the great machines, dangerously close.
    Cley saw that the dead sands had already advanced here, drifting across the smoky remains of humanity’s efforts. Supras hurried everywhere, ordering columns of machines with quick stabs at handheld instruments.
    “The fight goes no better,” Rin said sourly. “We are trying to snuff it out by burying the flames. But the attackers have used some inventive electromotive fire that survives even burial.”
    “The arts of strife,” a woman’s whispery voice came, sardonic and wistful.
    Cley turned and saw a tall, powerfully built woman some distance away. Yet her voice had seemed close, intimate.
    “Rin!” the woman called, and ran toward them. “We have lost a phylum.”
    Rin’s stern grimace stiffened further. “Something minor, I hope?”
    “The Myriasoma.”
    “The many-bodied? No!” Creases of despair flitted across his face.
    Cley asked, “What are they?”
    Rin stared grimly into the distance. “A form my own species knew, long ago. A composite intelligence which used drones capable of receiving electromagnetic instructions. The creature could disperse itself at will.”
    Cley looked at the woman uneasily, feeling an odd tension playing at the edge of her perceptions. “I never saw one.”
    “We had not revived them yet,” Rin said. “Now they are lost.”
    Seeker said, “Do not be hasty.”
    “What?” He cast Seeker an irritated glance.
    “This is not the only place where life brims.”
    Rin ignored it, his gaze boring into the tall, stately woman. “You are sure we lost all?”
    The woman said, “I hoped there would be traces, but…yes. All.”
    Cley heard the woman and simultaneously felt a deeper, resonant voice sounding in her mind. The woman turned to her and said slowly, enunciating the words so that they came through the echoes in her mind’s ear, “You have the Talent, yes. Hear.”
    This time the woman’s voice resounded only in Cley’s mind, laced with strange, strumming bass notes: We—or as you would say, I—I am Kata, a Supra who shares this.
    “I, I don’t understand,” Cley said. She glanced at Seeker and Rin but could not read their looks.
    We Supras recreated