Beyond Infinity
Chapter One
The attack had come in a savage, fire-bright moment.
It began with strange droplets coasting on the air, shimmering,
murmuring. Floodlights had ringed a gray, chipped slab, where she
worked with Kurani. Recently opened passages far into the Library
labyrinth had yielded complicated new puzzles in data-slabs. They
were reading out a curious string of phrases in a long-dead
language, from a society that had reached the peak of mathematical
wisdom, or so the historians said.
The floating, humming motes distracted her. Unlike the familiar
microtech that pervaded the Library performing tasks, these shifted
and scintillated in the hard spotlight glare.
Kurani ignored them. His powers of concentration were vast and
pointed. He had just discovered that these ancient people had used
numbers not as nouns or adjectives, but to modify verbs, words of
action. Instead of "see those three trees," they would say something
like, "the living things manifesting treeness here act visibly as a
collection divided to the extent of three."
She remembered Kurani's furrowed brow, his quizzical interrogation
of distant resource lib ... read full excerpt from Beyond Infinity ebook
