Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (31 page)

 
          
 
"But there isn't one anymore."

 
          
 
Come.

 
          
 
Seranis led her and Seeker down through a
shattered portal. Cley had lived all her life in the irregular beauties of the
forests, where her people labored. She was unprepared for the immense
geometries below, the curling subterranean galleries that curved out of sight,
the alabaster helicities that tricked her eye into believing that gravity had
been routed.

 
          
 
Already we rebuild.

 
          
 
Teams of bronzed robots were tending large,
blocky machines that exuded glossy walls. The metallic blue stuff oozed forth
and bonded seamlessly, yet when Cley touched it a moment later the slick
surface was rock-hard.

 
          
 
"But for what? You've lost the genetic
material." She preferred to speak now rather than use the talent, for fear
of giving away her true feelings.

 
          
 
We can save your personal DNA, of course, and
the few scraps we have recovered here. Other species dwell in the forests. We
will need your help in gathering them.

 
          
 
Currents from Seranis gently urged her to use
her talent exclusively, but Cley resisted, wanting to keep a distance between
them. "Good. You've read my helix, now let me go out—"

 
          
 
Not yet. We have processes to initiate. To
re-create your kind demands guidance from you as well.

 
          
 
"You did it without me before."

 
          
 
With difficulty and error.

 
          
 
"Look, maybe I can find some of my
people. You may have missed—"

 
          
 
Alvin
is sure none remain.

 
          
 
"He can't be certain. We're good at
hiding."

 
          
 
Alvin
possesses a surety you cannot know.

 
          
 
Seeker said in its high, melodious voice like
sunlight dancing on water, "
Alvin
moves in his own arc."

 
          
 
Seranis studied the large creature carefully.
"You perceive him as a segment of a larger topology?"

 
          
 
Seeker rose up on its hind legs, ropes of
muscle sliding under its fur, and gestured with both its forelegs and hands,
complex signals Cley could not decipher.

 
          
 
"He first resolved the central opposition
between the interior and exterior of Diaspar," Seeker said in its curious,
light voice. "This he did by overcoming blocks of cultural narrowness, of
unknown history, of his people's agoraphobia, of the computers. This
inside-outside opposition he then transformed by breaking out, only to meet its
reflection in the oppositions between
Lys
and
Diaspar. To surmount this, his spirit convolved it into the opposition of the
provincialism of Earth versus the expansiveness of the galaxy itself.
And by confronting the Diaspar computers with a paradox in the
blocked memory of one of the service robots of Shalmirane.
This act led
him outward again, in a starship."

 
          
 
Seranis gaped, the first time Cley had ever
seen a Supra impressed. "How could you possibly know—?"

 
          
 
Seeker waved aside her question. "And so
beneath the Seven Suns he found another barrier, the vacant cage of something
great beyond humanity. This spatial barrier he now confronts in his own mind,
and seeks to turn it into a barrier in time."

 
          
 
"I ... I don't understand . . ."
Cley said.

 
          
 
"I do." Seranis studied Seeker
warily. "This beast sees our motions in another plane. It has pieced
together our conversations and ferreted out much. But what do you
mean,
a barrier in time?"

 
          
 
Seeker's broad mouth turned downward, the
opposite of a human smile. Cley suspected that Seeker was conveying something
like ironic amusement, for its eyes darted with a kind of liquid, skipping joy.
"Two meanings I off^er.
He delves backward in
time, to evolution's edge, for the Ur-humans. As well, he seeks something
outside of time, a new cage."

 
          
 
Cley felt a flash of alarm in Seranis, who
stiffly said, "That is nonsense."

 
          
 
"Of course," Seeker said.
"But not my nonsense."
It made a dry, barking
noise that Cley could have sworn was laughter carrying dark filigrees beneath.

 
          
 
Cley felt
a surf
of
consternation roll over the sea-deep swell of Seranis's mind.
"And next?"
Seranis asked.

 
          
 
"No cage holds forever."

 
          
 
"Will you help us?"

 
          
 
"I have a higher cause," Seeker said
quietly.

 
          
 
"I suspected as much." Seranis
raised one eyebrow.
"Higher than the destiny of
intelligent life?"

 
          
 
"Yours is a local intelligence."

 
          
 
"We spread once among the stars—and we
can do it again."

 
          
 
"And yet you remain bottled inside your
skins."

 
          
 
"As do you," Seranis said with
cHpped precision.

 
          
 
"You know we differ. You must be able to
sense it." Seeker rapped the cranial bulge that capped his snout, as
though knocking on a door.

 
          
 
"I can feel something, yes," Seranis
said guardedly.

 
          
 
Cley could pick up nothing from Seeker. She
shuffled uneasily, lost in the speed and glancing impressions of their
conversation.

 
          
 
"You humans have emotions," Seeker
said slowly, "but emotions possess you."

 
          
 
Seranis prodded, "And your kind?"

 
          
 
"We have urges which serve other
causes."

 
          
 
Seranis nodded, deepening Cley's sensation of
enormous shared insights that seemed as unremarkable to the others as the air
they breathed. They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia,
and time's sheer mass shaded every word. Yet no one spoke clearly. Dimly she
guessed that the riverrun of ages had somehow blurred all certainties, cast
doubt on the very categories of knowing themselves. History held
counterexamples to any facile rule. All tales were finally slippery, suspect,
so talk darted among somber chasms of ignorance and upjuts of painful memory as
old as continents, softening tongues into ambiguity and guile.

 
          
 
Seeker broke the long, strained silence
between them. "We are allies at the
moment, that
we both know."

 
          
 
"I am happy to hear so. I have wondered
why you accompanied Cley."

 
          
 
"I wished to save her."

 
          
 
Seranis asked suspiciously, "You just
happened along?"

 
          
 
"I was here to learn of fresh dangers
which vex my species."

 
          
 
Seranis folded her arms and shifted her
weight,
an age-old human gesture Cley guessed meant the same
to all species: a slightly protective reservation of judgment. "Are you
descended from the copies we made?"

 
          
 
"From your Library of
Life?"
Seeker coughed as though to cover impolite amusement, then
showed its yellow teeth in a broad, unreadable grin.
"Genetically,
yes.
But once you released my species, we took up our ancient
tasks."

 
          
 
Seranis frowned. "I thought you were
originally companions to a species of human now vanished."

 
          
 
"So that species
thought."

 
          
 
"That's what the libraries of Diaspar
say," Seranis said with a trace of affronted ire.

 
          
 
"Exactly.
They
were a wise species, even so."

 
          
 
"Ur-human?"
Cley asked. She would like to think that her ancestors' saga had included
friends like Seeker.

 
          
 
Its large eyes studied her for a long moment.
"No, they were a breed which knew the stars differently than you."

 
          
 
"Better?"

 
          
 
"Differently."

 
          
 
"And they're completely lost?"
Cley asked quietly, acutely aware of the shrouded masses of
history.

 
          
 
"They are gone."

 
          
 
Seranis asked suspiciously, "Gone—or
extinct?"

 
          
 
"From your perspective," Seeker
said, "there is no difference."

 
          
 
"Seems to me extinction pretty much
closes the book on you," Cley said lightly, hoping to dispel the tension
which had somehow crept into the conversation.

 
          
 
"Just so," Seranis said evenly.
"The stability of this biosphere depends on keeping many species alive.
The greater their number, the more rugged Earthlife is
,
should further disasters befall the planet."

 
          
 
"As they shall," Seeker said,
settling effortlessly into its position for walking, a signal that it would
talk no more.

 
          
 
Damned animal! Seranis could not shield this
thought from Cley, or else did not want to.

 
          
 
They left the Library of Humanity in a
seething silence, Seranis deliberately blocking off her talent so that Cley
could not catch the slightest prickly fragment of her thoughts.

 
          
 
That evening
Alvin
presided over a grand meal for three
hundred with Cley as guest of honor. Robots had labored through the day,
extruding a large, many-spired banquet hall which seemed to rise up groaning
from the soil itself. Its walls were sand-colored but opalescent. Inside, a
broad ceiling of overlapping arches looked down on tables that also grew
directly from a granite floor. Spiral lines wrapped around the walls, glowing
soft blue at the floor and shifting to red as they rose, circling the room,
making an eerie effect like a sunset seen above an azure sea. Tricks of
perspective led Cley into false corridors and sometimes there appeared to be
thousands of other guests eating in the distance. At times holes would gape in
the floor and robots would rise through them bearing food, a process she found
so unsettling that thereafter she stayed in her seat. Despite the cold night
air of the desert the room enjoyed a warm spring breeze scented like the pine
forests she knew so well. Her gown scarcely seemed to have substance, caressing
her like water, yet covered her from ankle to neck.