3001: The Final Odyssey o-4

by Arthur Charles Clarke

  After that, nothing happened for several minutes, I wondered if it was dead – frozen solid at last.

  Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers opening. In fact I thought they were flowers – each about as big as a man's head.

  Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to unfold. Even then, it occurred to me that no one – no thing – could ever have seen these colours properly, until we brought our lights – our fatal lights – to this world.

  Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly... I walked over to the living wall that surrounded me, so that I could see exactly what was happening. Neither then, or at any other time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain that it was not malevolent – if indeed it was conscious at all.

  There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of unfolding. Now they reminded me of butterflies, just emerging from the chrysalis – wings crumpled, still feeble – I was getting closer and closer to the truth.

  But they were freezing – dying as quickly as they formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like fish stranded on dry land – and at last I realized exactly what they were. Those membranes weren't petals – they were fins, or their equivalent. This was the free-swimming larval stage of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on the sea-bed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of new territory. Just like the corals of Earth's oceans.

  I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now, to a drab brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly, and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it sensed my presence.

  Then I noticed that the stamens – as I'd called them -all carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny star sapphires – or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop – aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I watched, the vivid blue faded, the gems became dull, ordinary stones...

  Dr Floyd – or anyone else who is listening – I haven't much more time; my life-support system alarm has just sounded. But I've almost finished.

  I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand-watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.

  I wondered whether it was too late. For a few minutes nothing happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches around me – and kicked it.

  Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to retreat back to the Canal. I followed it all the way back to the water, encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down, feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath my boots... As it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain strength and energy, as if it knew it was approaching its natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.

  It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bubbled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to see if there was anything to salvage – I don't want to talk about that.

  I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature , I hope they'll name it after me.

  And – when the next ship comes home – ask them to take our bones back to China.

  I'll lose power in a few minutes – wish I knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I'll repeat this message as long as I can...

  This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the destruction of the spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice -

  28 – The Little Dawn

  MISS PRINGLE RECORD

  Here comes the Sun! Strange – how quickly it seems to rise, on this slowly turning world! Of course, of course – the disc's so small that the whole of it pops above the horizon in no time... Not that it makes much difference to the light – if you weren't looking in that direction, you'd never notice that there was another sun in the sky.

  But I hope the Europs have noticed. Usually it takes them less than five minutes to start coming ashore after the Little Dawn. Wonder if they already know I'm here, and are scared...

  No – could be the other way round. Perhaps they're inquisitive – even anxious to see what strange visitor has come to Tsienville... I rather hope so...

  Here they come! Hope your spysats are watching – Falcon's cameras recording...

  How slowly they move! I'm afraid it's going to be very boring trying to communicate with them... even if they want to talk to me...

  Rather like the thing that overturned Tsien, but much smaller... They remind me of little trees, walking on half a dozen slender trunks. And with hundreds of branches, dividing into twigs, which divide again... and again. Just like many of our general-purpose robots... what a long time it took us to realize that imitation humanoids were ridiculously clumsy, and the proper way to go was with myriad of small manipulators! Whenever we invent something clever, we find that Mother Nature's already thought of it...

  Aren't the little ones cute – like tiny bushes on the move. Wonder how they reproduce – budding? I hadn't realized how beautiful they are. Almost as colourful as coral reef fish – maybe for the same reasons... to attract mates, or fool predators by pretending to be something else...

  Did I say they looked like bushes? Make that rose-bushes – they've actually got thorns! Must have a good reason for them...

  I'm disappointed. They don't seem to have noticed me. They'll all heading into town, as if a visiting spacecraft was an everyday occurrence... only a few left... maybe this will work...

  I suppose they can detect sound vibrations – most marine creatures can – though this atmosphere may be too thin to carry my voice very far...

  FALCON – EXTERNAL SPEAKER...

  HELLO, CAN YOU HEAR ME? MY NAME IS FRANK POOLE... AHEM... I COME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND...

  Makes me feel rather stupid, but can you suggest anything better? And it will be good for the record...

  Nobody's taking the slightest notice. Big ones and little ones, they re all creeping towards their igloos Wonder what they actually do when they get there – perhaps I should follow. I'm sure it would be perfectly safe – I can move so much faster – I've just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction – they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary. Let's try again, before they all disappear.

  HELLO THERE THIS IS FRANK POOLE, A VISITOR FROM PLANET EARTH. CAN YOU HEAR ME?

  I HEAR YOU, FRANK. THIS IS DAVE.

  29 – The Ghosts in the Machine

  Frank Poole's immediate reaction was one of utter astonishment, followed by overwhelming joy. He had never really believed that he would make any kind of contact, either with the Europs or the Monolith. Indeed, he had even had fantasies of kicking in frustration against that towering ebon wall and shouting angrily, 'Is there anybody home?'

  Yet he should not have been so amazed: some intelligence must have monitored his approach from Ganymede, and permitted him to land. He should have taken Ted Khan more seriously.

  'Dave,' he said slowly, 'is that really you?'

  Who else could it be? a part of his mind asked. Yet it was not a foolish question. There was something curiously mechanical – impersonal about the voice that came from the small speaker on Falcon's control board.

  YES, FRANK. I AM DAVE.

  There was a very brief pause: then the same voice continued, without any change of intonation:

  HELLO FRANK. THIS IS HAL.

  MISS PRINGLE

  RECORD

  Well – Indra, Dim – I'm glad I recorded all that, otherwise you'd never believe me...

  I guess I'm still in a state of shock. First of all, how should
I feel about someone who tried to – who did – kill me – even if it was a thousand years ago! But I understand now that Hal wasn't to blame; nobody was. There's a very good piece of advice I've often found useful 'Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence' I can't feel any anger towards a bunch of programmers I never knew, who've been dead for centuries.

  I'm glad this is encrypted, as I don't know how it should be handled, and a lot that I tell you may turn out to be complete nonsense. I'm already suffering from information overload, and had to ask Dave to leave me for a while – after all the trouble I've gone through to meet him! But I don't think I hurt his feelings: I m not sure yet if he has any feelings...

  What is he – good question! Well, he really is Dave Bowman, but with most of the humanity stripped away – like – ah – like the synopsis of a book or a technical paper. You know how an abstract can give all the basic information but no hint of the author's personality? Yet there were moments when I felt that something of the old Dave was still there. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's pleased to meet me again – moderately satisfied might be more like it... For myself, I'm still very confused. Like meeting an old friend after a long separation, and finding that they're now a different person. Well, it has been a thousand years – and I can't imagine what experiences he's known, though as I'll show you presently, he's tried to share some of them with me.

  And Hal – he's here too, without question. Most of the time, there's no way I can tell which of them is speaking to me. Aren't there examples of multiple personalities in the medical records? Maybe it's something like that.

  I asked him how this had happened to them both, and he – they – dammit, Halman! – tried to explain. Let me repeat – I may have got it partly wrong, but it's the only working hypothesis I have.

  Of course, the Monolith – in its various manifestations – is the key – no, that's the wrong word – didn't someone once say it was a kind of cosmic Swiss Army knife? You still have them, I've noticed, though both Switzerland and its army disappeared centuries ago. It's a general-purpose device that can do anything it wants to. Or was programmed to do...

  Back in Africa, four million years ago, it gave us that evolutionary kick in the pants, for better or for worse. Then its sibling on the Moon waited for us to climb out of the cradle. That we've already guessed, and Dave's confirmed it.

  I said that he doesn't have many human feelings, but he still has curiosity – he wants to learn. And what an opportunity he's had!

  When the Jupiter Monolith absorbed him – can't think of a better word – it got more than it bargained for. Though it used him – apparently as a captured specimen, and a probe to investigate Earth – he's also been using it. With Hal's assistance – and who should understand a super-computer better than another one? – he's been exploring its memory, and trying to find its purpose.

  Now, this is something that's very hard to believe. The Monolith is a fantastically powerful machine – look what it did to Jupiter! – but it's no more than that. It's running on automatic – it has no consciousness. I remember once thinking that I might have to kick the Great Wall and shout 'Is there anyone there?' And the correct answer would have to be – no one, except Dave and Hal...

  Worse still, some of its systems may have started to fail; Dave even suggests that, in a fundamental way, it's become stupid! Perhaps it's been left on its own for too long – it's time for a service check.

  And he believes the Monolith has made at least one misjudgement. Perhaps that's not the right word – it may have been deliberate, carefully considered...

  In any event, it's – well, truly awesome, and terrifying in its implications. Luckily, I can show it to you, so you can decide for yourselves. Yes, even though it happened a thousand years ago, when Leonov flew the second mission to Jupiter! And all this time, no one has ever guessed...

  I'm certainly glad you got me fitted with the Braincap. Of course it's been invaluable – I can't imagine life without it – but now it's doing a job it was never designed for. And doing it remarkably well.

  It took Halman about ten minutes to find how it worked, and to set up an interface. Now we have mind-to-mind contact – which is quite a strain on me, I can tell you. I have to keep asking them to slow down, and use baby-talk. Or should I say baby-think...

  I'm not sure how well this will come through. It's a thousand-year-old recording of Dave's own experience, somehow stored in the Monolith's enormous memory, then retrieved by Dave and injected into my Braincap – don't ask me exactly how – and finally transferred and beamed to you by Ganymede Central. Phew. Hope you don't get a headache downloading it.

  Over to Dave Bowman at Jupiter, early twenty-first century...

  30 – Foamscape

  The million-kilometre-long tendrils of magnetic force, the sudden explosion of radio waves, the geysers of electrified plasma wider than the planet Earth – they were as real and clearly visible to him as the clouds banding the planet in multi-hued glory. He could understand the complex pattern of their interactions, and realized that Jupiter was much more wonderful than anyone had ever guessed.

  Even as he fell through the roaring heart of the Great Red Spot, with the lightning of its continent-wide thunderstorms detonating under him, he knew why it had persisted for centuries though it was made of gases far less substantial than those that formed the hurricanes of Earth. The thin scream of hydrogen wind faded as he sank into the calmer depths, and a sheet of waxen snowflakes – some already coalescing into barely palpable mountains of hydrocarbon foam – descended from the heights above. It was already warm enough for liquid water to exist, but there were no oceans there; this purely gaseous environment was too tenuous to support them.

  He descended through layer after layer of cloud, until he entered a region of such clarity that even human vision could have scanned an area more than a thousand kilometres across. It was only a minor eddy in the vaster gyre of the Great Red Spot; and it held a secret that men had long guessed, but never proved. Skirting the foothills of the drifting foam mountains were myriad of small, sharply defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottling. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city.

  They were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the metre band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself.

  Nothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes – but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth.

  They were not alone. Moving swiftly among them were other creatures so small that they could easily have been overlooked. Some of them bore an almost uncanny resemblance to terrestrial aircraft, and were of about the same size. But they too were alive – perhaps predators, perhaps parasites, perhaps even herdsmen.

  A whole new chapter of evolution, as alien as that which he had glimpsed on Europa, was opening before him. There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gas-bags. But the balloons were not defenceless; some of them fought back with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like kilometre-long chainsaws.

  There were even stranger shapes, exploiting almost every possibility of geometry – bizarre, translucent kites, tetrahedra, spheres, polyhedra, tangles of twisted ribbons... The gigantic plankton of the Jovian atmosphere, they were designed to float like gossamer in the uprising currents, until they had lived long enough to reproduce; then they would be swept down into the depths to be carbonized and recycled in a new generation.

  He was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of Earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great ballo
ons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organization, were like the sharks in Earth's oceans – mindless automata.

  And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most awesome predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of terrestrial carnivores.

  Like Europa, but on a vastly grander scale, Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Intelligence would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.

  31 – Nursery

  MISS PRINGLE RECORD

  Well, Indra – Dim – I hope that came through in good shape – I still find it hard to believe. All those fantastic creatures – surely we should have detected their radio voices, even if we couldn't understand them! – wiped out in a moment, so that Jupiter could be made into a sun.

  And now we can understand why. It was to give the Europs their chance. What pitiless logic: is intelligence the only thing that matters? I can see some long arguments with Ted Khan over this – The next question is: will the Europs make the grade – or will they remain forever stuck in the kindergarten – not even that – the nursery? Though a thousand years is a very short time, one would have expected some progress, but according to Dave they're exactly the same now as when they left the sea. Perhaps that's the trouble; they still have one foot – or one twig! – in the water.