Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02

by Beyond the Fall of Night

  "Huh? No, I mean—"

  "In far antiquity there were beasts designed to forage for icesteroids among the cold spaces beyond the planets. — ooof! — They knew enough of genecraft to modify themselves. — ah! — Perhaps they met other life-forms which came from other stars—I do not know. — uh! — I doubt that this matters; time's hand shaped some such creatures into this. — ooj! —" Seeker seldom spoke so long, and it had managed this time to punctuate each sentence with a bounce from the walls.

  "Creatures that gobbled ice?"

  Seeker settled onto a sticky patch, held on with two legs, and fanned its remaining legs and arms into the air. "They were sent to seek such, then spiral it into the inner worlds."

  "Water for Earth?"

  "By that time the robots had decreed a dry planet. The outer icesteroid halo was employed elsewhere."

  "Why not use spaceships?"

  "Of metal? They do not reproduce."

  "These things'd give birth, out there in the cold?"

  "Slowly, yes."

  "How'd they make Pinwheel? It's not an ice-eater, I can tell that much."

  "Time is deep. Circumstance has worked on it. More so than upon your kind."

  "Is it smarter?"

  "You humans return to that subject always. Different, not greater."

  Embarrassed without quite knowing why, Cley said, "I figured it must be smarter than me, to do all that."

  "It flies like a bird, without bother. And thinks long, as befits a thing from the great slow spaces."

  ''How does it fly? The wind alone—" The question spoken, she saw the answer. As the other arm of Pinwheel rose to the top of its circular arc, she could make out thin plumes of white jetting behind it. She had seen Supra craft do that, leaving a line of cloud in their wake.

  "Consider it a tree that flies," Seeker said.

  "Huh? Trees have roots."

  "Trees walk, why not fly? We are guests inside a flying tree."

  "Ummm. What's it eat?"

  "Some from air, some—" Seeker gestured ahead, along their trajectory. They shot above and away from the spinning, curved colossus. And Cley saw a thin haze now hanging against the black of space, dimmer than stars but more plentiful. There was a halo around the Earth, fireflies drawn to the planet's immense ripe glow. Beyond the nightline the gossamer halo hung like a wreath above Earth's shadow.

  One mote grew as they sped on. It swelled into a complex structure of struts and half-swollen balloons. It had sinews like knotty walnut. Fleshy vines webbed its intersections. Cley tried to imagine Pinwheel digesting this oddity and decided she would have to see it to believe.

  But this minor issue faded as she peered ahead. Other trees like theirs lay fore and aft, some spinning slightly, others tumbling. But all were headed toward a thing that reminded her of a pineapple, prickly with spikes and fur. Around this slowly revolving thing a haze of pale motes clustered.

  "All that . . . alive?"

  "In a way. Are robots alive?"

  "No, of course—are those robots?"

  "Not of metal, no. But even robots can make copies of themselves."

  Cley said with exasperation, "You know what I mean when something's alive."

  "I am deficient in that."

  "Well, if you don't know, I can't tell you," she said irritably.

  "Good."

  "What?"

  "Talk is a trick for taking the mystery out of the world."

  Cley did not know what to say and decided to let sleeping mysteries lie. Their tree convoy was approaching the fog-glow swathing the pineapple.

  Gravity imposes flat floors, straight walls, rectangular rigidities. Weightlessness allows the ample symmetries of the cylinder and sphere. In the swarm of objects, large and small, Cley saw an expressive freedom of effortless new geometries. Necessity dictates form, and the myriad spokes and limbs that jutted from the many shells and rough skins conformed to the demands of momentum.

  She watched an orange sphere extend a thin stalk into a nearby array of cylinders. It began to spin about the stalk. This gave it stability so that the stalk punched surely through the thin walls of its prey. Cley wondered how the sphere spun itself up, and suspected that internal fluids had to counterrotate. But was this an attack? The odd array of rubbery columns did not behave like a victim. Instead, it gathered around the sphere. Slow stems embraced and pulses worked along their crusted brown lengths. Cley wondered if she was watching an exchange, the cylinders throbbing energetically to negotiate a biochemical transaction.

  Their flotilla of trees cut through the insectlike haze of life, passing near myriad forms that sometimes veered to avoid them. Some, though, tried to catch them. These had angular shapes, needle-nosed and surprisingly quick. But the trees still plunged on, outstripping pursuit, directly into the barnacled pineapple.

  But she saw now that only parts of the huge thing seemed solid. There were large caps at the ends which looked firm enough, but the main body revealed more and more detail as they approached. Sunlight glinted from multifaceted specks until Cley realized that these were a multitude of spindly growths projected out from a central axis. She could see the axis buried deep in the profusion of stalks and webbing, like a bulbous brown root.

  She stopped thinking of it as a pineapple and substituted "prickly pear." As they came in above the lime-green crown at one end of the "pear" a wave passed across it. The sudden flash made her blink and shield her eyes. Her iris corrected swiftly to let her see through the glare. The wave had stopped neatly halfway across the cap, one side still green, the other a chrome-bright sheen. The piercing shine reminded her of how hard sunlight was, unfiltered by air.

  "It swims," Seeker said.

  "Where?"

  "Or better to say, it paces its cage."

  "I . . ." Cley began, then remembered Seeker's remark about words robbing mystery. She saw that the shiny half would reflect sunlight, giving the prickly pear a small push from that side. As it rotated, the wave of color-change swept around the dome, keeping the thrust always in the same direction.

  "Hold to the wall," Seeker said.

  "Who, what's—oh."

  The spectacle had distracted her from their approach. She had unconsciously expected the trees to slow. Now the fibrous wealth of stalks sticking out from the axis grew alarmingly fast. They were headed into a clotted region of interlaced strands.

  In the absolute clarity of space she saw smaller and smaller features, many not attached to the prickly pear at all, but hovering like feasting insects. She realized only then the true scale of the complexity they sped toward. The prickly pear was as large as a mountain. Their tree was a matchstick plunging headlong into it.

  The lead tree struck a broad tan web. It struck this membrane and then rebounded—but did not bounce out. Instead, the huge catcher's mitt damped the bounce into rippling waves. Then a second tree struck near the web's edge, sending more circular waves racing away. A third, a fourth—and then it was their turn.

  Seeker said nothing. A sudden, sickening tug reminded her of acceleration's liabilities, then reversed, sending her stomach aflutter. The lurching lasted a long moment and then they were at rest. Out the window she could see other trees embed themselves in the web, felt their impacts make the net bob erratically.

  When the tossing had damped away she said shakily, "Rough . . . landing."

  "The price of passage. The Pinwheel pays its momentum debt this way," Seeker said, detaching itself from the stick-pad.

  "Debt? For what?"

  "For the momentum it in turn receives back, as it takes on passengers."

  Cley blinked. "People go down in the Pinwheel, too?"

  "It runs both ways."

  "Well, sure, but—" She had simply not imagined that anyone would brave the descent through the atmosphere, ending up hanging by the tail of the great space-tree as it hesitated, straining, above the ground. How did they jump off? Cley felt herself getting overwhelmed by complexities. She focused on the present. "
Look, who's this momentum debt paid to?''

  "Our host."

  "What is this?"

  "A Jonah."

  "What's that mean?"

  "A truly ancient term. Your friend Alvin could no doubt tell you its origin."

  "He's not my friend—we're cousins, a billion years removed." Cley smiled ironically, then frowned as she felt long, slow pulses surge through the walls of their tree. "Say, what's a Jonah do?"

  "It desires to swallow us."

  28

  Creatures were already busy in the compartments. Many-legged, scarcely more than anthologies of ebony sticks and ropy muscle strung together by gray gristle, they poked and shoved the cargo adroitly into long processions.

  Though they were quick and able, Cley sensed that these were in a true sense not single individuals; they no more had lives of their own than did a cast-off cell marooned from her own skin.

  She and Seeker followed the flow of cargo out the main port, the entrance they had used in the forest only two hours before. They floated out into a confusing melange of spiderlike workers, oblong packages, and forking tubular passages that led away into green profusion.

  Cley was surprised at how quickly she had adjusted to the strangeness of zero gravity. Like many abilities which seemed natural once they are learned, like the complex trick of walking itself, weightlessness reflexes had been "hard-wired" into her kind. Had she paused a moment to reflect, this would have been yet another reminder that she could not possibly represent the planet-bound earliest humans.

  But she did not reflect. She launched herself through the moist air of the great shafts, rebounding with eager zest from the rubbery walls. The spiders ignored her. Several jostled her in their mechanical haste to carry away what appeared to be a kind of inverted tree. Its outside was hard bark, forming a hollow, thick-walled container open at top and bottom. Inside sprouted fine gray branches, meeting at the center in large, pendulous blue fruit.

  She hungrily reached for one, only to have a spider slap her away with a vicious kick. Seeker, though, lazily picked two of them and the spiders back-pedaled in air to avoid it. She wondered what musk or gestures Seeker had used; the beast seemed scarcely awake, much less concerned.

  They ate, juice hanging in droplets in the humid air. Canyons of light beckoned in all directions. Cley tugged on a nearby transparent tube as big as she was, through which an amber fluid gurgled. From this anchorage she could orient herself in the confusing welter of brown spokes, green foliage, gray shafts and knobby protrusions. Their tree-ship hung in the embrace of filmy leaves. From the hard vacuum of space the tree had apparently been propelled through a translucent passage which Cley could see, already retracting back toward the catcher's mitt that had stopped them. Small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting visible yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, a sense that nothing dwelled too long..

  "Come," Seeker said. It cast off smoothly and Cley followed down a wide-mouthed, olive-green tube. She was surprised to find that she could see through its walls.

  Sunlight filtered through an enchanted canopy. Clouds formed from mere wisps, made droplets, and eager leaves sucked them in. She was kept busy watching the slow-motion but perpetual rhythm of this place until Seeker darted away, out of the tube, and into a vast volume dominated by a hollow half-sphere of green moss. The other hemisphere, she saw, was transparent. It let in a bar of yellow sunlight which had been reflected and refracted far down into the living maze around them.

  Seeker headed straight for the mossy bowl and attached itself to a low plant. Cley awkwardly bounced off the resilient moss, snatched at a spindly tree, and finally reached Seeker. It was eating crimson bulbs that grew profusely. Cley tried some and liked the rich, grainy taste. But her irritation grew as her hunger dwindled. Seeker seemed about to go to sleep when she said, "You brought us here on purpose, didn't you?"

  "Surely." Seeker lazily blinked.

  Angered by this display of unconcern, Cley shouted, "I wanted to find my people!"

  "They are gone."

  "Fow say that, all-powerful Ahin said that, but I want to look for them."

  "Alvin and his kind are good at a few things. Among them is acquiring information. I believe their search was thorough."

  "They missed me!"

  "Only for a while."

  "You said I could find people like me if I followed you."

  "So I believe."

  "I still want to see for myself!"

  "The price of seeing will be death," Seeker said quietly.

  "We've done fine so far."

  "A numerical series can have many terms yet be finite."

  "But—but—" Cley wanted to express her dismay at being snatched away from everything she knew, but pride forced her to say, "—something in the sky wants to kill me, right? So to get away we go into the sky? Nonsense!"

  "I see you are unsettled." Seeker folded its hands across its belly in a gesture that somehow conveyed contrition. "Still, we must flee as far and as fast as we can."

  "Why we?"

  "You would be helpless without me."

  Cley's mouth twisted, irritation and self-mockery mingling. "Guess so, up here. In the woods we'd be even."

  Seeker said nothing and Cley realized it was being diplomatic. In truth, despite all her experience and skills, Seeker had moved through mixed terrains with an unconscious assurance and craft she envied. "Where do we go, then?"

  "For now, the moon."

  "The ..." She had assumed they were arcing above the Earth but would return to it at some distant point. She knew the Supras went to other worlds, too, but she had never heard of her own kind doing so. ". . . for what?"

  "We must move outward and be careful."

  "To save our skins?"

  "Your skin."

  "Guess you don't have skin, just fur."

  "It does not seek my fur."

  "And who is i/.?"

  Seeker leaned back and arranged itself, all six limbs folded in a comfortable cross-legged posture. It began to speak, soft and melodiously, of times so distant that the very names of their eras had passed away. The great heavy-pelted beast told her of how humanity had met greater intelligences in the vault of stars, and had fallen back, recoiling at the blow to its deepest pride. They had tried to create a higher mentality, and their failure was as vast as their intention. They had made the Mad Mind, a being embodied without need of inscribing patterns on matter. And it had proved malignant beyond measure. Only heroic struggle had managed to capture and restrain the Mad Mind. To cage it firmly had been the work of millions, exhausting lifetimes.

  And still the race had striven on, conjuring up a counter to the Mad Mind named Vanamonde. Both dwelled in the depths of far space. But with that last grand act some light had gone out of humanity. Later species of humans had retreated, letting their machines steal the variety and tang from their world, until only the lights of Diaspar burned in the sands that would one day overwhelm all.

  "Cowardly," Cley said.

  "Vain pride," Seeker said.

  "Why? That makes no sense."

  "To think that humans were the pinnacle of creation?"

  "Oh. I see."

  Cley was subdued for most of the voyage to the moon. She had known a bit of Seeker's story, for it was a tribal fable. But the Mad Mind was older now than the mountains she had roved, a gauzy myth told by the Supras. They spoke, too, of Vanamonde, but that equally tenuous entity was said to be strung among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.

  The moon swam green and opulent as they looped outward. Jonah's slight spin gave an obliging purchase to the outer segments of the great vessel, and Cley ventured with Seeker through verdant labyrinths to watch their approach. The lunar landscape was a jagged creation of sharp mountains and colossal waterfalls. These stark contrasts had been shaped by light elements hauled sunward in comets. A film a few molecules thick sat atop the lunar air, holding in a thick mix of gases. The f
ilm had permanent holes allowing spacecraft and spaceborn life access, the whole arrangement kept buoyant by steady replenishment from belching volcanoes. This trap offset the moon's feebler gravitational grasp so well that it lost less of its air than did the Earth.

  The beckoning moon hung nearly directly sunward and so was nearly drowned in shadow until Jonah began to curve toward its far side. For this passing moment the sun, moon and Earth were aligned in geometric perfection, before plunging back along their complicated courses. Cley watched this moment of uncanny, simple equilibrium and felt the paradox that balance and stillness lay at the heart of all change.

  "See," Seeker said. "Storms."

  Cley looked down into the murk and whirl of the bottled lunar air, but the disturbance lay above that sharp division. In the blackness over both poles snaked filaments of blushing orange.

  "Damn." Cley whispered, as though the helical strands could hear. "The Mad Mind?"

  "It probes for us. I had thought it would forage elsewhere first."

  Seeker pointed with its ears at what seemed to Cley to be empty space around Earth. Seeker described how the Earth's magnetic domain is compressed by the wind from the sun, and streams out in the wake. She blinked her eyes up into ultraviolet and caught the delicate shimmer of a huge volume around the planet. She witnessed a province she had never suspected, the realm dominated by the planet's blooming magnetic fields. It was a gossamer ball, crumpled in on the sun side, stretched and shmmed by the wind from the sun into tapering tail. Arcades of momentary fretwork grew and died in the rubbery architecture of the magnetosphere, and she knew that these, too, were the footprints of the Mad Mind. "It's searching there."

  "It relishes the bands of magnetic field," Seeker said somberly. "I hoped it would seek us only in that realm."

  "But it has spread here, too."

  "It must."

  Cley felt a cold shudder. Immense forces lumbered through these colossal spaces, and she was a woman born to pad the quiet paths of sheltered forests, to prune and plant and catch the savor of the sighing wind. This was not her place.

  "It's able to punch through the air blanket?" she asked.