Beyond Infinity Read Online Free PDF Page B

creation were defined by its location just outside where we lived. Amazing, when you recognized the meaning.
    Kurani never used the term, but he certainly used the feelings.
    He liked weather—the more, the better. They always slept with his room opened to the outside when a storm of swollen, angry purple clouds came muscling over the horizon. As the heavens tore at each other, so did the humans. One powerful night, the thunder and lightning came closer and closer together, each booming roar like a commandment, which they followed to the letter. Afterward they lay exhausted and warm and delightfully sweaty, listening to the storm shoulder its way off into the mountains to command someone else. A cleansing rain began to patter down on the balcony outside with the indescribable rich aroma a good rain brought to a fine moment. She close-upped her vision and watched the teardrops plunge to their deaths, pearly in the fine light.
    “Whoosh! Enough to make you believe in God,” he said.
    As if anybody did, except maybe Originals. She whispered, “Or that we and the weather are geared together.”
    “Same thing.” He grinned.
    It wasn’t all about sex, either.
    She firmly believed that people had, as a species, an innate drive to mesh with others—that the sense of self emerged from a web of intimate relations. The Supras seemed to feel that all humans were the outcome of impersonal drives like sex and envy, plus others they could not speak about very well. Maybe they didn’t want to reveal too much, to keep the Supra nature shadowy. Kurani sometimes shrugged, that most hallowed of gestures, as if to convey the gulf between them.
    She clung to the precipice of that gulf and sometimes threw herself across. Or tried.
    Yet she knew already that love could fade. Not so much on its own, but from the efforts of the people experiencing it—so intensely as to, well, to kill it. Love made many naked, unsettled by longing. The pressure was always there. And oppositely, some felt too safe in a relationship and fantasized about something more racy. It was terribly confusing.
    Famously, Naturals longed for the touch of Arts, the earliest artificial forms. She felt some of this herself: the lure of the Primitivo. The earliest human artifice lay in self-decoration—the attraction of the human assembly. Kurani termed this the allure of simple skin. She had always been tantalized by the externals, particularly the styles of cocks, but rumor had it among her Meta that the internals were the truly amazing portion of Art anatomy.
    The longest-running human game lay not in self-ornamentation but in relationships. Kurani taught her a calmer way of looking at these things. This was his way of explaining what Cley and he were about under the covers.
    In his view, the true deep human fantasy was the conviction of safety. Men believed their women were devoted; wives felt that their men were dependable. Both ignored contrary evidence. Each acted to fulfill the other’s belief. When the whole collusive contrivance collapsed, each cried, “This is not the person I thought!” They had merely gotten trapped in the quicksand of protective gray that each laid to trim the rampaging velocity of romantic love.
    Even sex could develop this deadening, out of self-defense. Without a dull patina it was too vivid to sustain for long—dragging one into surrenders, losses of self, immersion in the rhythms and sensations of another. “Same reverse twist for aggression,” he added cryptically.
    She nodded. Love scared anyone. Primates reacted to threat with anger, so they got into fights without knowing why. Or just ran away.
    Cley countered this with her simple sense that the inscrutable other should be an ideal mate. She felt better when she let herself see Kurani as more handsome and valuable than others thought him to be. Her dream man, personified in Kurani, would not let time or routine lessen the intensity of authentic experience: “You keep building