Beyond Infinity

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Takes a scientist's imagination to the uttermost ends of time. Set more than a billion years from now, the novel begins with a young woman who yearns to escape the rigid, timeless Earth she knows. So she flees, in the company of an intelligent beast wise beyond recognition. But there are mysterious forces afoot among the planets that she never foresaw. Alien agencies have learned to span parallel universes, ones that lie only a millimeter away but are invisible to any device known to man. Soon these beings confront the travelers and a struggle beyond imagining begins.

Release date: June 2, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 364

Sample

1

CLEY

AT TIMES CLEY thought that she was, well, a bit too intense. She seemed to have too much personality for one person and yet not enough for two.

Perhaps the cause lay in her upbringing. She had been most attentively raised by her Meta, an ancient term for the meta-family. Hers had several hundred loosely related people clustered in ever-shifting patterns. It provided an overview, a larger vision of how to grow up.

The Meta had spotted her as a wild card early on. It made no difference. Though hers, the Hard River Meta, was entirely, deliberately populated by Naturals—those without deep-seated connections to external machine intelligences—not many were Originals. Cley was an Original of particularly primordial type, based on genes of great vintage. Other Originals carried genes that had passed through revisions so many times that, by comparison, Cley’s genetic suite was a fossil.

This gave her a kind of status. Not many true Originals walked the Earth, though the historians who pestered her early education said there had once been billions of them afoot. Billions! There were hardly a tenth that many now in all Earthly humanity. Not that she cared much about such numbers. Mathematics was a fossil art. Few in her time bothered to scale those heights of analysis with their majestic, abstruse peaks that the ancient civilizations had climbed, marked as their own, and finally abandoned as too chilly, remote, and even inhuman.

She cared far more for things close by, not abstractions. That was the gift of living in Hard River Meta—the natural world, custom-made for Naturals. They had enough technology to be comfortable but did not waste time tending to it. Nobody much cared about events beyond the horizon.

She had dozens of good friends and saw them daily. Children had jobs that meant something—farming, maintenance, big-muscle stuff—and nobody lorded it over others. Leadership rotated. Kids tried on jobs like clothes. Her life was one of small, steady delights.

She was happy, but— The filling in of the rest of that sentence would, she knew quite early, occupy the rest of her life. And she knew even then that the things she sought in life could disappear even as she reached for them, the way a fist went away when she opened her hand.

She suspected her antic energy came from a heavy genetic legacy. She belonged to the narrowest class of the Ur-humans—a genuine Original, and as such, something of a puzzle to her Meta of Naturals and much-revised Originals. A rarity.

She knew herself to be something of a hothouse plant. Not an orchid, no. More like a cactus, feverishly flowering under the occasional passing cloudburst. Anyone who showered her with attention got her one-plus-some personality, ready or not. She wore people out.

Especially, she tired her fellow Naturals in their orderly oatmeal lives. She secretly suspected that she also carried some Supra genes, or maybe some of the intermediate breeds of human that had been in vogue through the last several hundred million years. She tried to find out if this might be so, but hit the stone wall of Meta security, whose motto in most matters genetic was “Best not to know.”

So she watched herself for telltale signs of intermediate forms. Nobody would help her, and she was too close to herself to be objective—and who wasn’t? A stutter she developed at age nine—could that be a sign? She worried endlessly. Bit off fingernails, even when they were part of her extendable tools. Chewed her lip. Then the stutter went away. Another sign?

She felt as though she might very well spend the rest of her life with her button nose pressed against the glass of a room where she should be, only she couldn’t find the door.

Her Meta never told her exactly who her parents were. There were Moms, which stood for mother of the moment, who tended to her upbringing for years, then handed her off to another Mom. All her previous Moms stayed in the background, ready to help.

She only knew for sure that some pair among the sixty or so in her Meta had given birth to her genetically. But which pair? She had often wondered. It was usually reassuring that the genetic parents sometimes did not themselves recall—and sometimes it was not reassuring at all.

But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.” For a long while Cley had thought this an exaggeration. Now she was not so sure she could even do it.

The troubling question was, when was growing up over? Maybe never.

So she took her earliest Mom as a model. That Mom was a stocky, affable woman of wide smile and high cheekbones. Cley had good, trim cheekbones like hers but had grown to be slim, tall, muscular, small-breasted. Were these differences clues to her father’s genes? She wished she had gotten more cleavage and an easier manner. But even Cley knew that gene combinations were not so simple.

In late childhood, when she first started to fret over such matters, she had mentioned her vague ideas about her father to her then-nominal Mom, who said, “You don’t need to know, dear, and anyway, he’s far away.”

“How far?”

“See the horizon?”

“Beyond those mountains?” She had never been that far.

“You’re looking at the wrong part of the view.”

This she did not understand at all, and so she pestered Mom for days. Only once did Mom’s patient smile fade. “You’ve had something caught crosswise in you all week, my girl.”

“But I need to know—”

“You need to get inside there and turn it right-wise. Go meditate a bit.”

She liked meditation, the feeling of lifting off the stolid, solid Earth and soaring up a solemn mountain of herself. It was satisfying. Three members of her Meta did little else. But it wasn’t for her. It made her feel wonderfully at peace, but eventually even peace got boring. She felt a restlessness that she hoped reflected the horizon-hopping aspect of her father.

“Was he like me?” she would ask Mom.

Mom gave her an arched eyebrow, no more. “Oh, yes, he was plenty self-full.”

To be full of self the Meta discouraged. Naturals were supposed to embody the primordial art of merging with the ancient world of forests and animals, to lose themselves in it. Naturals were to stay where and what they were, merging with the ample lands being reshaped by higher folk.

The word stung Cley.

“Self-full?” she fretted to one of her girlfriends. They were lying out on a fused stone parapet, lazily watching piping work-birds build their cute layer houses. It seemed a good time for gal-pal talk. “Really?”

“Um,” the friend said tactfully. “Maybe a little self-absorbed; could be, yup.”

“But is that really bad?”

“Y’know, worrying about it is self-full in itself.”

“Uh . . . Oh.” Caught in a logical trap. “Let’s talk about something else, then.”

Privately, she thought that having the spirit to leave the Meta was, well, a way of making oneself . . . better. Different. Another idea the Meta discouraged.

But then, there were Supras around, glimpsed as they passed through the Meta’s territory on their mysterious, important business. Supras were reminders that some people really were more than you. Worse, Supras were better in ways that were not even easy to put a finger on. Even the Supra children of her age were daunting. They ignored her, of course.

Cley had no more species politics than a bird, and not even one of the smart birds, either. Still, being snubbed went beyond theory, straight to the gut. So she inverted the snobbery, in her mind making Originals the true, secret elite, and the Supras into just afterthoughts. That worked, for a year or two.

The whole subject—sociogenetics, her inboards classified it when she went to them for background—was far too complicated. And ancient, as well. The torrent of information from her inboards made her think about it with a curious, dispassionate distance. She guessed that was how real grown-ups thought. It was a bit sobering to know that so much wisdom was buried in her spine somewhere, ready to leap into her head whenever she prompted the inboard summons.

The means of making a fresh person were so complex, she learned, that old ideas like simple parenting, with strictly assignable designer DNA, were useless. Meta loved her, brought her to the verge of first maturity, and so fell heir to the usual blame for the traumas everyone suffered just in getting that far.

Many women in her Meta Mommed Cley, as their time came available and their interest allowed. Some years it was smiling, big-breasted Andramana, and other years it was lean, cool, analytical Iratain. Others, too, maybe half a dozen—each fine in their moments, then receding into the background as others came to the fore.

The Meta’s men provided fathering, too, but here the usual Meta scheme went awry. Her friends liked this, and it seemed to work for them. Like them, she was supposed to gain judgment from these multiple fatherings, to see what men were like in general, and work on her attachment strategies in light of this.

Instead, she just got confused. They were all so different, each with pluses and minuses and no clue to how Cley could ever choose what worked best. So much for theory.

By accident, and persistent questioning thereafter, she learned that her genetic father had left the Meta for undisclosed reasons when she was three years old. She consulted her inboards, learned some techniques for memory mining, and plumbed her own childhood. She recalled some dim sensations of him: a dark musk, deeply resonant voice, and scratchy whiskers (an affectation, apparently quite ancient). That was all, but it was enough.

So, thinking it absolutely natural, she awaited his return. She dreamed about it sometimes—a weighty presence descending from the sky, usually, like angry thunderheads brimming with ribbed light. She worked on making herself wonderful for him, anticipating his grand homecoming, their reunion as a family. Occasionally, a new male would join the Meta, and she always wondered if maybe this new set of smells and sounds was her one true father.

She could not be sure, of course, because the Meta kept genetic fatherhood and motherhood quite secret. Not so much because it was hugely significant, though. Just policy. People would put too much weight on those old, simple connections, so best be done with them. Mothers, though, were usually too close to disguise; the Meta didn’t even try. Everybody needed a Mom, a daily presence, essential as oxygen, but a father could be vague. Better for a young girl to view all men on an equal footing and learn to objectively assess men’s abilities as fathers. She would probably choose a new Meta, and her own pairings, using those standards someday.

Her Meta felt that genetic details were totally beside the point anyhow. What mattered, truly, was the Meta and its work. The Meta was the family of all. Humans did not reproduce like animals, after all, anchored in primordial musk and pairings.

Cley wasn’t having any of this, though she never said so. Her gut feelings won out over all inherited wisdom. She simply kept making herself wonderful for her father, sure he would show up. And of course, when he did, she would know.

Her true genetic mother might be within arm’s reach at any moment, in the milling Meta culture, but that had no claim on her attention. Her mother’s identity was a conventional puzzle, dulled by overuse and close familiarity with all her Moms. Father, though—now there was true, singing mystery.

He grew daily in her imagination, as the placid Natural males around her all fell short of what she felt a father should be. She loved him; she worshiped him; she built whole stories around his exploits. “Dad’s Dangerous Days,” chapter thirty-seven.

By this time, no man who ever came into the Meta matched up to the specifications of her father, so she was quite sure that he had never returned. He was off somewhere over the forested horizon, having Original adventures.

She sat dutifully through the ritual experiences of a Meta upbringing, honestly enjoying them but knowing deep down that they were preliminaries to the moment when she would really know, down deep—when her father returned.

She did wonder, as her years stacked up, why this yearning never fastened upon her mother mystery. To raise it brought an odd pang of disloyalty to her nominal Mom. But the issue did not have heft, did not wrap itself in the shadowy shroud of the father. Obviously. Though she sometimes wondered why this was so.

Was the uniqueness of his puzzling absence, affecting only her of all her Meta, part of her own Originality? Was this oddness part of what made hernot just another Natural? No one else seemed to long to go over the horizon.

When she spoke about this with any of the adults in her Meta, they carefully reasoned with her, taking ample time. And it all seemed straightened out, crystal clear . . . until she left the room. Then she would run free again, down the hallways of her mind, banging on doors, eager to explore, ready with her latest father story to tell, a story that was somehow about Cley as well.

She had noticed early on that everyone had some sort of story to tell, not about fathers but about themselves. So she got one, too. Fashioned from oddments, nothing too fancy. She was just an Original after all, no more, a genetic form roughly close to the variety that had started civilization off so long ago that to express it took an exponential notation. Not much material to start with. So she stuck to emotions.

Her story was about the father, of course, only cloaked in Meta language. Yearnings, feelings of a destiny lying ahead of her. Fairly common stuff, she thought. Her life story did not quite seem to belong to her, though. She used it to get close to people, and she did care about them . . . but relating ostensibly personal substories about herself seemed to be like offering them for barter. In return for . . . what? She was not sure.

So people—first from her Meta, then from allied Metas—came into her life, shaped it, and departed, their bags already packed. She wondered if everyone experienced life this way—if others came in, introduced themselves, exchanged confidences, and then milled around in their lives until they found an exit. She valued them terribly at the time, but they left only smudged memories.

After a while she started dining out on the delightful details of people she knew, things they did. Other people were so much easier to talk about. She had sharpened her powers of observation while looking for her father. The step from watcher to critic was easy, fun. People were the most complex things in the world, ready-made for stories. Exotica like the slow-walking croucher trees and skin-winged floater birds were fun but, in the end, had no stories. The natural world usually didn’t. It was just there. She suspected that civilization had been invented to make more stories.

And after a while, she came to feel that most others deserved her implied tribute: They really were more interesting than she was. Sometimes she felt like saying to strangers, “Hello, and welcome to my anecdote.”

The electric leer of artfully crafted memory guided her. People remembered one another because they recalled stories, for stories made the person. With the myriad ways to remember, from embedded inboards to external agent-selves, there were endless fertile ways to sort and filter and rewrite the stories that were other people’s lives. At times, she soon noticed, people constructed stories that were missing parts, as if the business of being themselves did not hold their full attention. Shoddy work. She was much, much better at it.

She was intent upon the sliding scale that people showed her. Boys her age would rise from arrogant to impressive in the span of a single sentence and then ooze back down that slope again—and she was never sure just why.

At times she was not quite certain who she was. When she was with the boys she knew growing up, she often thought that she was more alive for being with them: He thinks; therefore, I am. Afterward, she would enjoy the feeling of having been with a boy and come through it all right, free of awful, embarrassing moments.

Still, she had the odd feeling of being disconnected: This will be fun to remember; not This is fun now.

She had the usual simple sexual adventures. Kissing was sometimes like devouring the other person, savoring the sweet, swarthy head meat—no sauce, please. Bright grins, dark excesses. So healthy, everybody said.

Even then, though, she came to feel that lust lacked, well, depth. Amid the mad moment, she would sometimes think, This reminds me of the time I felt déjà vu.

But if you couldn’t learn from experience, what was left? Theory. She talked about this with one of the older women in her Meta, who said dryly, “The best definition of intelligence is the ability to learn not from your mistakes but from others’.”

Cley went away puzzled. She needed not advice but a road map of life.

So she resolved: Until she knew where she stood, she would continue lying down. Good ol’ sex. It certainly beat running away. That way she had tried, too: hard him, hesitant her.

There was no cure for such bewilderments. Cley endured them. Get through it, her girlfriends said. But she also endured because she assumed that after the ordeals of adolescence were done, she would get her reward: the clear, smooth calm and blithe confidence that adults surely had. After all, they looked self-assured, didn’t they? Especially the Supras, who were more than adults.

Soon enough, she was big enough to mistake for an Original adult (smaller than Supras, of course, but more muscular). She had a growth spurt and loomed over her girlfriends. “You’re kinda Supra-sized,” they taunted, not knowing that they were just giving away their envy.

Then she realized that the Supras didn’t even worry about matters that preoccupied her Meta. One day, three Supras came to talk to her Meta about their ongoing restoration of Earth to a moist, green world. Unfailingly courteous, they spoke of ideas that played out over many centuries. That impressed her enormously. The Supras passed through the forests, nodding politely at the Naturals, the Originals, even taking opticals of them. Of her. She preened and pranced for one, and he grinned. Her heart nearly stopped.

They were also there to look for something that had fallen from the sky, or so some said. They had assumed that the strange play of lights in the sky, witnessed by all her Meta for over a year, were descending craft from the spaces above. On the mere suggestion, Cley studied up on her inboards about the whole meaning of the myriad lights above. She learned the planets, the many lesser lights, the lot. Even history—not her best subject. There was about the huge landscape of the past an enduring sadness, a note of things known but now lost, that made her pause. So much order built up, so many lives well lived, only to be rendered into dust. That was when she learned what a billion really meant.

The Supras searched for many days and found nothing. She watched them react to this, peeking from a tree perch she had made at night to get a better vantage on them. They murmured, worried, ignored the Ur-humans. She got bored, even with these supermen. And superwomen, but she ignored them.

Then one night she woke in her perch. The Supras below were shouting. The sky was alive with twisting luminous shapes. Fire descended from these, igniting the forest down the valley. Helical angers worked across the 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

ADOLESCENCE 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 just a muddle.” But at the time Cley sensed life as swampy and sexy, so muddle seemed about right.

She had avoided the company of most young women in her Meta. They seemed more attached to the trappings of the world, most of them on their way to being trapped into an attachment, already approved and ordained by the Meta. For Meta reasons, of course: Types naturally attracted one another, as the conventional wisdom had it.

But Cley never got much of a buzz from the men of her supposed type. Nor from those in the nearby classes of human. She had an arranged meeting with a man of the Sigmas, once, which stood in her mind for the whole round-Cley-square-men puzzle. Sigmas were a rare intermediate rank of human who usually went nude. As she bandied nonsense with this one, she noticed that he had no apparent genitalia. There was nothing there at all, not even hair.

He caught her glance and said blandly, “It’s inside.”

“It?”

“The ancient apparatus had several parts, true, but ours is integrated into one shaft.” He smiled, as if describing a mildly interesting toy. “The Original design was not elegant. Um, is not . . . and the danger!” His eyebrows shot up.

“I thought the, uh, older gadget had at least two uses.”

“Of course, but we do not excrete through ours.”

“Uh, you . . .”

“Use the rear exit for both.”

Demurely put, she thought. “And the machinery comes out to play only at recess?”

He laughed quite easily. She was blushing and wished she could stop it, but such control was not available to Originals. “Only as needed, to prevent damage. The shaft generates the semen as well.”

She kept her eyes resolutely on his. “No need to have those messy add-ons dangling out in the air?”

“In you Originals that was a design feature to keep the semen cool. We simply adjust our blood flow, lowering the internal temperature in their vicinity.”

She kept a purely dispassionate expression on her face, afraid to let her lips move for fear they would lapse into a deranged leer, an O of astonishment, or something even worse. Shouting, Show me your plumage! for example. Or, Design feature? Seems more like a bug. But firmly fixing her face, she said instead, “Is it the same . . . otherwise?”

For the first time he displayed a knowing grin. “Larger.”

“Where have I heard that before?” Though in fact she hadn’t.

“To give us an advantage.”

“At?”

“Social and biological.” His tone was bland, but the grin stayed put.

“I’m just all atwitter.”

Absolutely flat: “You should be.”

“You’re too sure of yourself.”

“And you, too unsure.” With that he evaporated, turning away and into the spongelike crowd.

She felt put down, and also lucky, not to know what his next line was.

So it came to be with the other classes and orders of greater-than-thou humans. They were almost jaunty in their arid certainty that their variation on the grand theme was the best, or at least better than the first. Their men plainly felt that she should be bowled over by the chance to enjoy their obliquely referred-to talents, endowments, or superior wiring diagrams. Their women twisted luscious true-red mouths (no cosmetics!) in sour amusement, sure that she was an upstart tart who had wandered out of her rightful level.

Even if they were all scrupulously correct and had pots of advanced abilities, charm was not one of them. The best aspect of their company was that at least it was not addictive.

3

FIRST LOVE, OF SORTS

FOR A LONG time she was terribly aware that everyone knew.

They knew, she imagined, that she, as an Original, was going through the primordial fever pitch of oncoming sexual urges and could do nothing about it. Helpless, swept down the hormonal river.

Plenty of Supra art suggested that they thought Naturals lived close to the deep, musky human sources. Cley didn’t feel all that swept away. Mostly the idea just embarrassed her.

Other times, she was proud of it. She wanted to shout in crowded rooms, “I’m following Nature! Watch!”—and then do nothing, just stand there brimming with primitivo life.

She never did that, of course.

What she did was an intellectual version, in a way, of declaring her Naturalness. Her Originality was steeped in ancient times, so she sought out and took an underling position at the Library of Life. In the Vaults.

They deserved the capital letter—vast, forbidding underground repositories of human history. Though the continents continued to grind and shove away at one another, the Ancients (a collective noun covering more time than linear thinking could encompass) had chosen belowground burial for their legacies. An unconscious repetition of the habit of burying the dead, probably. Primitivo.

And there, amid the claustro-corridors far from sunlight, she met Kurani. He loomed large—physically, mentally, in sheer presence.

Their first job was to unearth a slab that carried intricate data encoded in nuclear spins—a method Kurani termed “savage nouveaux.” The team of eight trained bright beams upon the flinty surface, and machines tracked across the slab, clicking, measuring, sucking up history.

As Kurani passed before one of the spotlights, she felt herself momentarily eclipsed by his shadow, a chill stealing over her suddenly prickly skin. He was, of course, bigger than anybody else in the team, his gait gliding. They had just opened a new Vault, and technology hovered in the air like flies. These microreaders would snap up any data dust that escaped the slab. Amid the buzz he skated on rippling legs, the Supra carriage gliding smooth and sure. Level, hydraulic, supple. “Are the indices noted?” he asked of the air.

Nobody seemed sure who was addressed, so she said, “Done already. Dates unclear—”

“A specialty scheme?”

“It seems so,” she managed.

He orbited toward her, his size bringing full night to shroud her. Craggy, heavy-eyed, the planes of him flat and solid. She wondered how they would rest against anything soft and comforting, and—and did not let herself think any further. “Why did so many of the Ancients think they should redate everything? That some birth or death or collapse of a civilization was so important?”

She ventured, adding to his sentence, “That of course, all human history would ever after be marked from that time.”

“Exactly.” His smile brought the sun back to her shadowed self.

“So what all those eras have in common is the automatic assumption that they are special.”

“Our fault as well.” He smiled slightly, turning his full-bore gaze upon her, and it was like a second spotlight in the narrow Vault.

“You think time begins with you?” It was not a very bright comment, but she had to say something—his eyes were not letting her slide away from them.

“When we meet people, we can’t see them—because we are so busy looking at ourselves to be sure we look all right, in case this should be an important somebody we are just meeting.” He smiled with one raised eyebrow, a common Supra signal that meant idea jump coming up. “The same with meeting deep history.”

To this avalanche of astonishing self-revelation (or was it, with the “we”?), she shot back, “Me, too. I’m thinking that I really suddenly see this person, when what I’m seeing is me reflected in their eyes. Me, proving yet again that I am quick and fascinating and that I can.”

And then, of course, she saw that he had been speaking aloud what he had noticed in her. Very Supra. But still . . .

He laughed, sunrise again. “So you almost envy people who are meeting you? Because they’re getting the full you?”

She nodded furiously, not giving herself enough time to see that she was sledding downhill without a clue. And picking up speed. Supras w. . .