Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (37 page)

 
          
 
The ample curve of the planet rose serenely at
the base of the window as she panted. Its smooth ivory cloud decks seemed near
enough to touch . . . but she could not raise her arms.

 
          
 
Along the tapering length of the Pinwheel,
slow, lazy undulations were marching. They came toward her, growing in height.
When the first arrived it gave the nub a hard snap and the trees thrashed on
their vine-teathers. The turbulence which the entire Pinwheel felt had summed into
these waves, which dissipated in the whip-crack at its ends. Tree trunks
thumped and battered but their pressure held.

 
          
 
Seeker licked its lips again without opening
its eyes.

 
          
 
They revolved higher. She could see the
complete expanse of the Pinwheel. It curved slightly, tapering away, like an
infinite highway unconcerned with the impossibility of surmounting the will of
planets. Vines wrapped along it and near the middle a green forest flourished.

 
          
 
The far end was a needle-thin line. As she
watched, its point plunged into the atmosphere. Undulations from this shock
raced back toward her. When these reached her the buffetings were mild, for the
trees were now tied snugly against the underside of the Pinwheel's nub end.

 
          
 
Deep, solemn notes beat through the walls. The
entire Pinwheel was like a huge instrument strummed by wind and gravity, the
waves singing a strange song that sounded through her bones.

 
          
 
The Pinwheel was now framed against the whole
expanse of Earth. Cley still felt strong acceleration into the compartment's
floor, but it was lesser now as gravity countered the centrifugal whirl. Their
air, too, thickened as the tree's walls exuded a sweet-scented, moist vapor.

 
          
 
The spectacle of her world, spread out in
silent majesty, struck her. They were nearing the top of their ascent, the
Pinwheel pointing vertically, as if to bury itself in the heart of the planet.

 
          
 
The Pinwheel throbbed. She had felt its many
adjustments and percussive changes as it struggled against
both
elements
, air and vacuum. Only a short while ago she had thought that
the ravenous green, eating at the pale deserts, waged an epic struggle. Now she
witnessed an unending whirl of immeasurably greater difficulty.

 
          
 
And in a glance she knew that the Earth itself
and the Pinwheel were two similar systems, brothers of vastly different scales.

 
          
 
The Pinwheel was like a tree, quite certainly
alive and yet 99 percent dead. Trees were spires of dead wood, cellulose used
by the ancestors of the living cells that made its bark.

 
          
 
Earth, too, was a thin skin of verdant life
atop a huge bulk of rocks. But far down in the magma were elements of the
ancestral hordes which had come before. The slide and smack of whole continents
rode on a slippery base of limestone, layers built up from
an
infinitude
of seashell carcasses. All living systems, in the large, were
a skin wrapped around the dead.

 
          
 
"Good-bye," Seeker said, getting up
awkwardly. Even its strength was barely equal to the centrifugal thrust.

 
          
 
"What! You're not leaving?"

 
          
 
"We both are."

 
          
 
A loud bang.
Cley
felt herself falling. She kicked out in her fright and only managed to propel
herself into the ceiling. She struck on her neck wrong and painfully rebounded.
Her mind kept telling herself she was falling, despite the evidence of her
eyes—and then some ancient subsystem of her mind cut in, and she automatically
quieted.

 
          
 
She was not truly falling, except in a sense
used by physicists. She was merely weightless, bouncing about the compartment
before Seeker's amused yawn.

 
          
 
"We're free!"

 
          
 
"For a bit."

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"See ahead."

 
          
 
Their vines had slipped off. Freed, their tree
shot away from the Pinwheel. They went out on a tangent to its great circle of
revolution. Already the nub was a shrinking spot on the huge, curved tree that
hung between air and space. She had an impression of the Pinwheel dipping its
mouth into the rich
swamp
of
Earth
's air, drinking its fill alternately from
one side of itself and then the other.

 
          
 
But what kept it going, against the constant
drag of those fierce winds? She was sure it had some enormous skill to solve
that problem, but there was no sign what that might be.

 
          
 
She looked out, along the curve of Earth.
Ahead was a dark-brown splotch on the star-littered blackness.

 
          
 
"A friend," Seeker said.
"There."

 
          
 
They rose with surprising speed. The Pinwheel
whirled away, its grandiose gyre casting long shadows along its woody length.

 
          
 
Despite the winds it suffered, bushes clung to
its flanks. The upper end, which they had just left, now rotated down toward
the coming twilight. Its midpoint was thickest and oval, following a circular
orbit a third of Earth's radius above the surface. At its furthest extension,
groaning and popping with the strain, the great log had reached a distance
two-thirds of the Earth's radius out into the cold of space.

 
          
 
They had been flung off at better than
thirteen kilometers per second. This was enough to take the trees to other
planets, though that was not their destination. They shot ahead of the nub,
watching it turn downward with stately resolution, as though gravely bowing to
necessity by returning to the planet which held it in bondage.

 
          
 
Its lot was to be forever the mediator between
two great oceans which others would sail in serenity, while it knew only the
ceaseless tumult of the air and the biting cold of vacuum.

 
          
 
Cley watched silently, clinging to one of the
sticky patches on the compartment's walls. There was a solemn majesty to the
Pinwheel, a remorseless resignation to the dip of its leading arm into the
battering winds. She saw the snug pocket where they had been moored show a
flare of ivory light—plasma conjured up by the shock of re-entry. Yet the great
arm plunged on, momentum's captive, for its next touchdown.

 
          
 
She saw why it had momentarily hung steady
over the forest; at bottom, the rotation nearly canceled the orbital velocity.
Craft on such a scale bespoke enormous control, and she asked in a whisper,
"Is it intelligent?"

 
          
 
"Of course," Seeker said.
"And quite old."

 
          
 
"To do that ..."

 
          
 
"Forever moving, forever going
nowhere."

 
          
 
"What thoughts, what dreams it must
have.
"

 
          
 
"It is a different form of intelligence
from you—neither greater nor lesser."

 
          
 
"Who made it?"

 
          
 
"It made itself, in part."

 
          
 
"How can anything that big . . . ?"

 
          
 
Seeker spun itself playfully in air, clicking
its teeth in a disjointed rhythm. It seemed uninterested in answering her.

 
          
 
"Alvin and the others made it,
right?"

 
          
 
Seeker yelped in high amusement. "Time is
more reliable than intelligence."

 
          
 
"Somebody planned that thing."

 
          
 
"Some body?
Yes,
the body plans—not the mind."

 
          
 
"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."