The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  I think Blegg had expected something like this, or had he just assumed I would try to kill my erstwhile captor? The pressure against the palm of my hand was still the same as I lifted that hand, pointed the gun at the cyborg and pulled back on a trigger I thought I might break if I was not careful. The weapon was something from Earth Central. It is one of the reasons Separatists cannot be tolerated because the fragmentation of human civilization greatly increases the possibility of war and war, with the weapons now available, is unthinkable. The cyborg shot back into the sky with the air seeming to distort around him, then he exploded like a balloon filled with hydrogen. I heard the clang and rattle of a few pieces of metal hitting the ground and was turning away before the fragments of burning flesh did so. Dragon: answers.

  The storm had ceased moments after I killed the cyborg. The black thing must have been controlled by one of the many battle programmes in his enlarged skull. I stepped over what was left of Dawn Keltree and walked towards the three cobra heads.

  “Dragon!” As one the three heads turned towards me I demanded, “I want answers from you!”

  Even as I said it a part of me looked on with a cold assurance; how human, how emotional. The three heads curved over me; three great question marks of flesh.

  “Answers?” came the distant hiss of a voice. Just then Bird came in from the side, a silver flash, and three giant severed heads thudded to the ground like grain sacks. The hiss became a scream as the three pseudopodia retreated into the ground spattering all around the milky fluid that was Dragon’s blood. Those raw ends broke the surface once, twice, giving me an indication of the direction I must go. I followed, not stopping to wonder if I was meant to. Bird was back at my shoulder, my hawk, and we hunted.

  A wilderness of broken rock surrounded me as I followed disturbed earth and occasional pools of Dragon blood. As I walked I admitted to myself that yes answers were important, but that the satisfaction of violence had its place. I looked at the weapon I held and it did not fade from my hand this time. I opened my hand and it stayed affixed to my palm even when I turned it to the ground. This was a weapon that could hurt Dragon, as was Bird, and I wanted to cause hurt. I did not know the extent of Dragon’s involvement with the cyborg. What kind of deal had there been? Was Dragon only observing in its coldly alien way? In the end this did not matter to me. All I knew was that Dragon had allowed this. This was Dragon’s world, even if it was only alien indifference it could be blamed for…I swore as I walked. Whatever. A girl I had quite liked lay in the dirt with her back blown out.

  Four conjoined spheres rose over the horizon like a queue of moons, misty at first then clearing. I trudged on, drawing closer, and closer still, then, in a state of near delirious exhaustion I stood peering into the shadow and darkness under the first of the spheres.

  “You want answers?” hissed the darkness.

  “Not particularly,” I said. I pointed the gun into that darkness and pulled the trigger. The gun collapsed in my hand like burnt paper.

  “Here are answers.”

  Even Bird did not move fast enough. A great saliva drooling head shot out of the undershadows, two sapphire eyes fixed on me. The jaws closed on me just as Bird shot towards the head. I hit the ground and saw the head, severed away, holding the legs and greater part of a human torso in its jaws. I died before I realised they were mine.

  * * * *

  I sat on a flat rock in the Dragon shadows and felt regret for my actions. Dragon, another of whose heads was now drawing away, had been an impartial observer and had just related the full story. The cyborg had come by ship so no one was to blame for his actions but himself and the agent who had informed him of my presence on this world, and she lay dead, killed by an employer who had not known who she was. Blegg had been right about some things and wrong about others. He had warned me at the first that Dragon’s answer might be death. It was, and though I did not realise it, it was the answer I had then been seeking. So much has been restored.

  Blegg believed Bird was an extension of me. Here he was wrong. I am an extension of Bird, a tool she uses, a program she is allowing to run, only slightly altered for the study of this particular civilization. And there have been many others. So why does Bird protect me? She protects me because of the work involved in restoring me. There is no altruism or loyalty involved, she has no feeling for me beyond that one might feel for a useful and well-worn pen knife.

  On this restoration, as on every other one, the memories she had selectively erased because their sheer extent sometimes impaired my function, were returned to me from the master copy. Not fifty years, not three hundred years, and not the millennia I had momentarily glimpsed, and not just one death. These last few centuries with Blegg have been entertaining as he has, time and time again, led me into situations whereby he might learn something about me, about Bird. Perhaps someday he will know.

  I now have little choice but to forget.

  THE SYMPHONIC ABDUCTION, by Hannes Bok

  “I suppose you’ve heard about what happened to my brother Jerry?” Ray Spencer asked me; I shook my head. “The whole family was worried about him for a while: couldn’t tell whether he had sleeping-sickness, or what. All we knew was that he’d gone coma listening to some phonograph records when he was alone in the house. Perhaps the intense emotional effect of the music, plus its stentor, was the cause.

  “When I returned home, he lay cold on the floor in front of the radio-phonograph. The automatic release had shut off the record, but the current was still on, and the volume dial was turned full strength. Nothing I could do would rouse my brother, so—scared—I put him to bed and called a doctor, who had him taken to a hospital for observation. No one could determine what was the trouble, and since we couldn’t afford to keep him at the hospital indefinitely, we brought Jerry back home. And although it wasn’t exactly appropriate, I couldn’t help remembering the story of the Sleeping Beauty whenever I looked into his room and saw him, apparently only napping.

  “Then one day I heard him—still in his trance—whisperingly singing. The indistinct notes were reminiscent of one of Chaikovsky’s ballet pieces. I tried vainly to wake him. He sighed on and on until the faint breath of a voice softened into silence.…

  “When at last he did awake, I had been listening to some continental communiques in the adjoining room, with the door open so that I could look in on him in case of emergency. The program ended and was followed by concert music. I don’t care much for symphony, so I arose and went to the radio to switch it off. At the same time, Jerry stirred: I heard his bed creak. Turning to look his way, I twisted the wrong dial, and the music thundered: my brother began to toss on his bed. Disregarding the racket for a moment in excitement at seeing him move, I ran in to him, shouting, shaking him a little. His hands groped, found mine, and clung to them. Painfully he endeavored to raise himself, dropped back perspiring and panting. Then he screamed—horribly!—as if all Hell’s devils were shovelling all Hell’s coals on him, and opened his eyes, his face taut with dread. He recognized me. In a moment I had soothed him back to normalcy. He was perfectly all right from then on.

  “Or at least we thought so. But since you’re so interested in metaphysics, get him to tell you about the vision he had during his catalepsy. He won’t feel embarrassed; he’s told it to others. Just say that I mentioned it to you.”

  Ray had finished. Later, when I chanced upon Jerry Spencer, I brot him up to my apartment for dinner. The meal over, he smiled at my query concerning his comatose dream, and related:

  “None in my family are as interested in music as I: my belief is that to realize its full magic you must leave off talking—better still, listen to it alone—and, closing your eyes, open your mind to it. Relax—forget yourself. All of my folks poke fun at me when I sit on the floor by the radio during the concert broadcasts, my ears close to the speaker. But that is the only way by which I can really enjoy music. The very loudness, blasting at my hearing, emphasizes the tone-magic, overwhel
ming everything else. And sometimes, if my eyes are shut, I can see fantastic dream worlds, fiery pageants inspired by thundrous harmonies.

  “I had never dared to turn on the amplifier as loud as I’d have wished. My family said that it would annoy the neighbors. So that day when I was alone at home, I thot that then was my chance, if ever, and proceeded to play my favorite record; the first scene of Chaikovsky’s SWAN LAKE ballet, as loudly as possible. The sound was not so deafening as—maddening, or better still, intoxicating. How I Loved it! I sat cross-legged, eyes shut, dreaming, at last absolutely happy. More: ecstatic.

  “The first notes were like an invitation emanating from a lost dimension, calling me, wheedling. Promising haven, peace. The call of the unknown: not the lure of dashing adventure but of mystery, mournful sorcery, epic splendors.…

  “Deep in my heart there’s a sort of innate Slavic sadness which responded to the music’s plaint, and my thought traveled with the melody effortlessly on and on. The warm darkness of my closed eyes lightened to infinities of cold, deep-blue emptiness, through which I felt myself gliding as the theme progressed.

  “Each harmonic burst, every wailing echo, dominated me. My thought was borne farther and farther like a leaf in a tempest.… There were base chords which made my throat quiver, and tears burned under my lowered eyelids. I felt a tingling at my shoulders, and with eyes still closed but discerning by a sort of dream-vision, I half-consciously turned, beheld luminous yellow—draperies?—fluttering behind me, bouying me: like scarf-wings, whipping comet-tails.

  “An instinctive transient fright gripped me, admonishing me to withdraw from this blue region into the calid darkness from which I had come—but the melody’s urge was stronger than my feeble urge to retreat. The azure became flecked with diamond points of light which augmented into great white moons, and from one to another in a vast network rayed pulsing filaments, vascular channels of fluid light.

  “A stupendous chorus of clear unhuman voices, as from diamond throats, emanated from these linked moons, of which the music which had conveyed me was only a distorted, ghostly echo.… In tangible waves this greater music rippled around the webbed moons, beating against me as though to force me away on its tides I know not whither.

  “Beneath me was a limitless tract of grey slime which rose and fell torpidly as with the breathing of a somnolent subterranean thing. The moonlight burned brightly on it, and crawling across it from some remote place came—trees?—snaky-rooted things whose prehensile branches bore, instead of leaves, flexible lenses.… They left behind them red trails on the slime, and excrementory ribbons of thin blue vapor streamed from their topmost appendages. Occasionally they paused to feed, focussing their lenses upon the gelatinous ground, which became luminously white under the concentrated light. The sucking mouths of the serpentine roots absorbed this matter, and red viscosity seeped into the eaten places, greying rapidly under the moon’s effulgence, chemically affected by it.

  “And the trees mated. Gynandrous, they converged in pairs or groups, pressing close together, thrusting their limbs into one enormous cluster, aggregating their lenses into a series of complex, compact forms…shuddering with a violent ardor.… From erectile protuberances rimming the lenses ruby liquid spurted, bursting with incandescence under the condensed moonlight.

  “Spent, drooping, the trees separated, and the radiant orgasmic matter drifted lightly down to the slime, burning fitfully as the trees moved away indifferently.

  “Apparently these flickering radiances fed, for gradually they grew, dulling, becoming opaque, substantial——thrusting out probing roots, developing limbs, wandering like their parents. They snailed onward out of sight, all of them.

  “Silently, a phosphorescent green river raced like a bolt of furcate lightning over the green wastes. It was composed not of water but of myriad tiny luminous crawling insects. A conscious river, altering its tortuous course at will, small streams deviating from the main body and meandering erratically, then rejoining the general current. This river’s end drew into sight, flashed under me and into the distance, leaving fast-greying red paths on the slime.

  “The moon’s music assailed me; simultaneously I felt those man-measures, which had carried me so long, cease, leaving me without a link to my own world—helpless against the inexorable tide of the lunar melody, which, bursting more loudly, swept me higher, through an interstice of the circulatory web, into blue infinity. And there it left me; fading ripples of it would lap me, but were too dissapated then to sweep me farther.

  “I floated aimlessly in the void, it seemed for ages, less a body than a mind, aware of neither hunger nor thirst nor ill of any sort other than a dreadful sapping weariness.

  “There was no way of reckoning time, but after an eternity of loneliness and self-boredom, I heard a glissando of mellow tintinabulations. A troop of small stars flashed toward me like a scattered handful of sparkling white gems, whirling in interweaving dance of enchantment, tinkling glad clear tunes like the babbling of crystal brooks. The joyous, youthful essence of their song so charmed me that I forgot my weariness and vocally ventured to imitate it.

  “At last they broke their circle and swept away, single-file, out of sight, diminishing with distance.

  “For awhile I hummed their song, but with every repetition it lost some of its starry quality and gained a human-ness, earthiness, animalism—until it impressed me no longer beautiful, and I was silent.… Wearily the sluggish ages passed…in the illimitable blue solitudes.…

  “Eventually I heard the man-music, again like a summons—its vibrations piercing the moon-net, receding, drawing me with it. Its power increased with every unit of retregression, dragging me with it. Over the wastes of slime it dragged me, all in a fraction of seconds. Wind tore at me, racketing in my ears, drowning music of both moons and man.

  “In a flash of cataclysm, of cosmic pandemonium, the moons, jostled out of their places by my abrupt passage through the web, strained apart, snapping their pulsant filamental arteries. White, searing drops of blood of light oozed from the severed ducts, hissing as they fell, and splashed on the slime, which heaved torturedly. The crawling trees reared upon their writhing roots, flailing their lensed limbs, and the phosphorescent rivers halted suddenly, piling into swiftly disintegrating mounds.

  “The rain of light blood thinned and ceased: the moons dimmed and plunged earthward, lusterless. As they touched the tempestuously tossing slime, it shrieked stridently, deafeningly—cosmically! An outcry voicing all life’s inherent dread of the horror of pain and death, which arose from all sides, like an auditory vise, tightening upon and crushing me. The blue chaos was wiped away by utter blackness; the shriek weakened, ceased.

  “I opened my eyes, shut them—dazzled by daylight, and opened them again, but cautiously. My brother Ray was standing over me, shaking me, calling my name…AND IT WAS I WHO HAD SCREAMED!”

  THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, by Arthur C. Clarke

  “This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

  “Gladly,” replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. “Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.”

  “I don’t quite understand.…”

  “This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind
while I explain it.”

  “Naturally.”

  “It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We have reason to believe,” continued the lama imperturbably, “that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.”

  “And you have been doing this for three centuries?”

  “Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?”

  The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

  “Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”

  “I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA…and working up to ZZZZZZZZ.…”

  “Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.”

  “Three? Surely you mean two.”

  “Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.”