Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02

by Beyond the Fall of Night

  Seeker simply poked one ear at the lunar south pole. She shifted down into the infrared and saw faint plumes geyser below the hard curve of the atmosphere. Orange sparks worked there.

  "It's already breached the air layer." She bit her lip and nearly lost her hold on a branch.

  "And can hunt and prey at will, once inside. It follows the lunar magnetic-field lines where it wishes." Seeker cast off without warning, kicked against an enormous orchid, and shot down a connecting tube.

  "Hey, wait!"

  She caught up in an ellipsoidal vault where an army of the black spiders was assembling ranks of oval containers. In the dizzying activity she could barely keep up with Seeker. Larger animals shot by her, some big enough to swat her with a single flipper or snap her in two with a beak, but all ignored her. A fever pitch resounded through the noisy blur. Seeker had stopped, though, and was sunning itself just beneath the upper dome.

  "What can we do? Ride back to Earth?"

  "I had thought to catch the vessel which now approaches."

  She saw through the dome a smaller version of their Jonah, arcing up from one of the portal holes in the air layer. Seeker had said the Jonah was one of the indentured of its species, caged in an endless cycle between Earth and moon. The smaller Jonah dipped into the lunar air, enjoying some tiny freedom. She felt a trace of pity for such living vessels, but then she saw something which banished minor troubles. A great mass came into view, closing with them from a higher orbit.

  "What's . . ."

  "We approach a momentary mating."

  "Mating? They actually ... in flight?"

  "They are always in flight."

  "But . . . that thing, it's so huge. "

  "It is a Leviathan. Jonahs are its spawn. As it swoops closest to the sun, desires well in it, as they have for ages past. We shall simply take advantage of the joy of merging."

  As the great bulk glided effortlessly toward them she surveyed its mottled blue-green skin, the tangled jungles it held to the sun's eternal nourishing blare.

  Cley could not help but smile. "I think I prefer my lust in smaller doses."

  29

  Grand beings communicate through emissaries. Slow, ponderous oscillations began to course through the Jonah. Cley saw a watery bubble pop into space from the Jonah's leathery skin nearby. It wobbled, seeking definition, and made itself into an ellipsoid.

  "Hurry," Seeker said. "Departure."

  Seeker adroitly tugged her along through green labyrinths. When they came to the flared mouth of what seemed to be a giant hollow root, it shoved her ahead. She tumbled head over heels and smacked into a softly resilient pad. Velvet-fine hairs oozing white sap stuck to her. A sharp, meaty flavor clung in her nose. She felt light-headed and realized that the air was thick with vapor that formed and dissolved and met again in billowing, translucent sheets. Seeker slapped away a rubbery blob as big as a man but seemed unconcerned. A hissing began. They were drifting down the bore of a narrowing tube. The walls glowed with pearly softness and she felt the sap cloaking her feet and back.

  Seeker snagged a shimmering plate and launched it like an ancient discus toward her. The sticky stuff" wrapped around her and Seeker slapped the other end against a denser strand. They gathered speed in a swirl of refracting light. Cley held her breath, frightened by the hectic hiss around them.

  "What—" she began, but a soft cool ball of sap caught against her mouth when she breathed in. She blew it away and felt Seeker next to her as the wall glow ebbed. The ribbed tube ahead flexed, bulged—and they shot through into the hard glare of space. The Jonah had blown a rubbery bubble. A sap envelope enclosed them, quickly making a perfect sphere.

  "The Jonah is making love to the Leviathan," Seeker said, holding her firmly.

  "We're seeds?"

  "So we have deceived it, yes."

  "What happens when something tries to hatch us?"

  "We disregard the invitation."

  Such politeness seemed doubtful; they were closing with the broad speckled underbelly, the Jonah already dwindling behind. The speckles were clusters of ruby-dark froth. The Leviathan was at least ten times the size of the Jonah, giving the sex act an air of comedy. As they approached she felt new fear at the enormity of it; this creature was the size of a small mountain range.

  This time they donated momentum to their new host through a web of bubbles that seemed to pop and re-form as they plunged through, each impact a small buff^eting that sent Cley bouncing off the elastic walls of their own seed-sphere.

  When they came to rest a large needle expertly jabbed at their bubble. The ruby light gave a hellish, threatening cast to everything. The needle entered, seemed to snifl" around, its sharp point moving powerfully and quite capable, Cley saw, of skewering them both— and Seeker raised a leg and urinated directly onto it. The needle jerked back and fled.

  "No, thank you," Seeker said. Their bubble popped, releasing them.

  Again Seeker led her through a dizzy maze of verdant growths, following clues she could not see. "Where're we going?"

  "To find the Captain."

  "Somebody guides this?"

  "Doesn't your body guide you?"

  "Well, where's this Leviathan going?"

  "To the outer worlds."

  "You think we're safe here for now?"

  "We are safe nowhere. But here we hide in numbers."

  "You figure the Mad Mind can't be sure where I am? It tracked me pretty well so far."

  "Here there are many more complex forms than you. They will smother your traces."

  "What about this talent of mine? Can't this Mind pick up my, well, my 'smell'?"

  "That is possible."

  "Damn! Wish Seranis hadn't provoked mine to activity."

  "She had to."

  Cley had been following Seeker closely, scrambling to keep up as they bounced from rubbery walls and glided down curved passageways, deeper into the Leviathan. Seeker's remark made her stop for a moment, gasping in the sweet, cloying air. ''Had to?"

  "You will need it. And the talent takes time to grow."

  Cley wanted to bellow out her frustration at the speed and confusion of events, but she knew by now that Seeker would only give her its savage, black-lipped grin. Seeker slowed and veered into crowded layers of great broad leaves. These seemed to attach to branches, but the scale was so large Cley could not see where the gradually thickening, dark brown wood ended. Among the leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures.

  She found that without her noticing any transition somehow this zone had gained a slight gravity. She fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature. It died in her hands, provoking a pang of guilt. The cat had wings and sleek orange fur. Seeker came ambling along a thin branch, saw the bird-cat, and with a few movements skinned it and plucked off gobbets of meat.

  The goal of finding the Captain faded as both grew hungry. It slowly dawned on Cley that this immense inner territory was not some comfortable green lounge for passengers. It was a world, intact and with its own purposes.

  Passengers were in no way special. They had to compete for advantages and food. This point came clear when they chanced upon a large beast lying partly dismembered on a branch. Seeker stopped, pensively studying the savaged hulk. Cley saw that the fur markings, snout and wide teeth resembled Seeker's.

  "Your, uh, kind?"

  "We had common origins."

  Cley could not read anything resembling sadness in Seeker's face. "How many of you are there?"

  "Not enough. Though the numbers mean nothing."

  "You knew this one?"

  "I mingled genetic information with it."

  "Oh! I'm sorry, I . . ."

  Seeker kicked at the carcass, which was now attracting a cloud of scavenger mites. "It was an enemy."

  "After you, ah, 'mingled'—? I mean . . ."

  "Before and after."

  "But then why did you—I mean, usually we don't . . ."

 
Seeker gave Cley a glance which combined a fierce scowl with a tongue-lolling grin. "We never think of one thing at a time."

  "Even during sex?" Cley laughed. "Do you have children?"

  "Two litters."

  "Seeker! You're female? I never imagined!"

  "Not female as you are."

  "Well, you're certainly not male if you bear litters."

  "Simple sex like yours was a passing adaptation."

  Cley chuckled. "Seeker, sounds like you're missing a lot of fun."

  "Humans are noted as sexual connoisseurs with enlarged organs."

  "Ummmm. I'll take that as a compliment."

  A faint scurrying distracted Cley. She pushed aside a huge fern bough and saw a human shape moving away from them. "Hey!" she called.

  The silhouette looked back and turned away.

  "Hey, stop! I'm friendly."

  But the profile blended into the greens and browns and was gone. Cley ran after it. After blundering along limbs and down trunks she stopped, listening, and heard nothing more than a sigh of breeze and the cooing calls of unknown birds.

  Seeker had followed her. "You wished to mate?"

  "Huh? No, we're not always thinking about that. Is that what you think? I just wanted to talk to him."

  Seeker said, "You will find no one."

  "Who was that? Say, that wasn't an illusion, was it? Like those who killed my tribe and that Alvin said were just images?"

  "No, that was the Captain."

  Cley felt a surge of pride. Humans ran this huge thing.

  "Alvin said my kind was all gone, except for me."

  "They are."

  "So this Captain is some other kind? Supra?"

  "No. I do not think you truly wish to explore such matters. They are immaterial—"

  "Look, I'm alone. If I can find any kind of human, I will."

  Seeker tilted its massive head back, raising and lowering its brow ridges in a way that Cley found vaguely unsettling. "We have other pursuits."

  "If you won't help me, I'll find the Captain myself."

  "Good."

  Cley didn't understand this reply, but she was used to that with Seeker. She grimaced, knowing how hard it would be to find anything in this vast place.

  Seeker said nothing more and seemed to be distracted. They worked their way upward against the light centripetal gravity and finally stood on a broad slope made only of great leaves. Sunlight streamed fierce and golden from an open sky that framed the shrinking moon. Cley knew that when the Earth had come alive, over five billion years ago, it had begun wrapping itself in a membrane it made of tailored air and water, for the general purpose of editing the sun. Buried deep in Earth's forest, she had never bothered to think of other planets, but now she saw that the moon too had learned this skill from Earth. There was something fresh and vibrant about the filmed moon, as though it had not shared the long withering imposed by the Supras' robots. Where once maria meant the dark blotches of volcanic flows, now true seas lapped at rugged mountains with snow-dappled peaks. Now Earth's spreading voracious green seemed to mimic its junior companion in exuberant disequilibrium.

  Seeker bent and pressed an ear against a purple stalk. It nibbled at the young shoots breaking through the slick bark but also seemed to be listening. Then it sat up and said, "We are bound for Venus."

  "What's that?"

  "The planet next out from Earth, second from the sun."

  "Can we live there?"

  "I expect the question will be whether we can avoid death there."

  With that Seeker fell asleep and Cley, wary of the tangled jungle, did not venture away. She watched the Earth and moon shrink, twin planets brimming against the timeless blaze of the galaxy.

  She knew instinctively that the moon was not merely a sheltered greenhouse maintained by constant outside management. Who would tend it, after all? For long eons humankind had been locked into its desert fastnesses. No, the ripeness came from organisms adapting to a material environment which was in turn made by other organisms. To imagine otherwise—as ancient humans had— was to see the world as a game with fixed rules, like human sports, strict and static. Yet even planets had to yield to the press of suns.

  The sun had burned hydrogen for nearly five billion years before Earth evolved a species which could understand that simple fact, and its implications. Fusing hydrogen made helium, a gaseous ash that settled to the sun's core. Helium holds in radiation better than hydrogen and so drove the core temperature higher. In turn hydrogen burned more fiercely. The sun grew hotter. Unlike campfires, solar furnaces blaze brighter as their ash gathers.

  Earthlife had escaped this dead hand of physics ... for a while. Long before humans emerged, a blanket of carbon dioxide had helped warm the Earth. As the sun grew hotter, though, life thinned that blanket to keep a comfortable clime.

  But carbon dioxide was also the medium through which the rich energy of the sun's fusing hydrogen became transmuted into living matter. It was also the fundamental food for photosynthesis. Thinning the carbon dioxide blanket threatened that essential reaction. So a jot of time after the evolution of humans—a mere hundred million years—the air had such skimpy carbon dioxide that all of the plant kingdom was imperiled.

  At that point the biota of Earth could have radically adjusted their chemical rhythms. Other planets had passed through this knothole before and survived. But the intelligences which thronged that era, including the forerunners of Seeker, had intervened.

  Moving the Earth further from the solar furnace would offset the steady banking of the inner fires. This led to the great maneuvers which rearranged the planets, opening them to fresh uses.

  All this lay buried in Diaspar's dusty records and crossed Cley's thoughts only as a filligree of myth. The much-embellished stories her tribe had told around campfires taught such things through parable and grandiose yarns. Her kind were not studious in the strict sense of the term, but their forest crafts had needed an underpinning of sage myth, the "feel" of why and how biospheres were knit and fed. Some lore was even hard-wired in Cley at the level of instinctive comprehension.

  So the cloud-wreathed beauty of the twin worlds made her breath catch, her heart race with a love which was perhaps the hallmark of true intelligence. As Seeker slept she watched specks climb above the sharp-edged air of Luna to meet other dabs in a slow, grand gavotte. Another Jonah approached from Earth. Motes converged on it from eccentric orbits about the moon. She adjusted her eyes to pick out the seeping infrared glow that spoke of internal warmth, and saw a greater cloud, a snapshot of teeming beeswarm wealth. Streamers swung between Earth and moon, endless transactions of species. A thinner rivulet broke away from the figure-eight orbits that linked the twins. It trickled inward and Cley—holding a hand against the sun's glare—saw that it looped toward a thick swarm that clustered about the sun itself.

  She felt then both awe, that fear of immensity, and loneliness. She wished her clan could see this, wished that there were other minds of her cut and shape to share this spectacle.

  Her attention was so riveted on the unfolding sky that she did not hear the stealthy approach of scraping paws. But she did catch the jostle as something launched itself in the weak gravity.

  The shape came at her from behind. She got only a snatched instant to see it, a thing of sleek-jacketed black and flagrant reds. It was hinged like a bat at the wings and slung with ball-bearing agility in its swiveling, three-legged attack.

  Claws snatched at the air where Cley had been.

  She had ducked and shot sideways, rebounding from a barnacled branch. Instead of fleeing into unknown leafy wilderness, where a pack of the attackers might well be waiting, she launched herself back into the silent, sleek thing.

  This it had not expected. It had just seen Seeker and was trying to decide if this new development was a threat or an unexpected banquet.

  Cley hit it amidships. A leg snapped; weightlessness makes for flimsy construction. She had flicked two of her fingers
into needles, usually used for the fine treatment of ailing creatures. They plunged into the flared red ears of the attacker, puncturing the enlarged eardrums which were its principal sensory organ. The creature departed, a squawking blur of pain and anger.

  Cley landed on a wide branch, hands ready. She trembled with a mixture of eagerness and fear which a billion years of selection had still retained as fundamental to the human constitution. The foliage replied to her intent wariness with silent indifference.

  Seeker awoke, stretching and yawning. "More food?"

  30

  They sighted the Supra ship their third day out. It came flaring into view from Earthside, as Cley now thought of the aft layers of the Leviathan.

  She and Seeker spent much of their time there, enjoying the view of the steadily shrinking green moon, resting among a tangle of enormous flowerlike growths. Near the moon a yellow star grew swiftly. It became a sleek, silver ship balancing on a thin torch flame.

  This had just registered with Cley when Seeker jerked her back behind an overarching stamen. "Do not move," it whispered.

  The slim craft darted around the Leviathan as though it were sniffing, its nose turning and swiveling despite being glossy metal. The torch ebbed and fine jets sent it zooming beyond view along the bulk of the Leviathan. Cley felt a shadowy presence, like a sound just beyond recognition. The Supra ship returned, prowling close enough to the prickly growths to risk colliding with upper stems.

  Seeker put both of its large, padded hands on Cley's face. Seeker had done this before, to soothe Cley when her anxieties refused to let her sleep. Now the pressure of those rough palms, covered with fine black hair, sent a calming thread through her. She knew what the touch implied: let her mind go blank. That way her talent would transmit as little as possible. Any Supra aboard the ship who had come from Lys could pick up her thoughts, but only if they were focused clearly into perceptible messages. Or so Cley hoped.

  The ship held absolutely still for a long while, as if deciding whether to venture inside. The cloud of spaceborne life that surrounded the Leviathan had drawn away from the ship, perhaps fearing the ship's rockets. Its exact cylindrical symmetries and severe gleam seemed strange and malevolent among the drifting swarms, hard and enclosed, giving nothing away. Suddenly the yellow blowtorch ignited again, sending the life-forms skittering away. The ship vanished in moments, heading out from the sun.