Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (39 page)

 
          
 
Sunlight filtered through an enchanted canopy.
Clouds formed from mere wisps, made droplets, and eager leaves sucked them in.
She was kept busy watching the slow-motion but perpetual rhythm of this place
until Seeker darted away, out of the tube, and into a vast volume dominated by
a hollow half-sphere of green moss. The other hemisphere, she saw, was
transparent. It let in a bar of yellow sunlight which had been reflected and
refracted far down into the living maze around them.

 
          
 
Seeker headed straight for the mossy bowl and
attached itself to a low plant. Cley awkwardly bounced off the resilient moss,
snatched at a spindly tree, and finally reached Seeker. It was eating crimson
bulbs that grew profusely. Cley tried some and liked the rich, grainy taste.
But her irritation grew as her hunger dwindled. Seeker seemed about to go to
sleep when she said, "You brought us here on purpose, didn't you?"

 
          
 
"Surely."
Seeker lazily blinked.

 
          
 
Angered by this display of unconcern, Cley
shouted, "I wanted to find my people!"

 
          
 
"They are gone."

 
          
 
"Fow say that, all-powerful Ahin said
that, but I want to look for them."

 
          
 
"Alvin and his kind are good at a few
things. Among them is acquiring information. I believe their search was
thorough."

 
          
 
"They missed me!"

 
          
 
"Only for a
while."

 
          
 
"You said I could find people like me if
I followed you."

 
          
 
"So I believe."

 
          
 
"I still want to see for myself!"

 
          
 
"The price of seeing will be death,"
Seeker said quietly.

 
          
 
"We've done fine so far."

 
          
 
"A numerical series can have many terms
yet be finite."

 
          
 
"But—but—" Cley wanted to express
her dismay at being snatched away from everything she knew, but pride forced
her to say, "—something in the sky wants to kill me, right? So to get away
we go into the sky?
Nonsense!"

 
          
 
"I see you are unsettled." Seeker
folded its hands across its belly in a gesture that somehow conveyed
contrition. "Still, we must flee as far and as fast as we can."

 
          
 
"Why we?"

 
          
 
"You would be helpless without me."

 
          
 
Cley's mouth
twisted,
irritation and self-mockery mingling. "Guess so, up here. In the woods
we'd be even."

 
          
 
Seeker said nothing and Cley realized it was
being diplomatic. In truth, despite all her experience and skills, Seeker had
moved through mixed terrains with an unconscious assurance and craft she
envied. "Where do we go, then?"

 
          
 
"For now, the
moon."

 
          
 
"The ..." She had assumed they were
arcing above the Earth but would return to it at some distant point. She knew
the Supras went to other worlds, too, but she had never heard of her own kind
doing so. ". . .
for
what?"

 
          
 
"We must move outward and be
careful."

 
          
 
"To save our
skins?"

 
          
 
"Your skin."

 
          
 
"Guess you don't have skin, just
fur."

 
          
 
"It does not seek my fur."

 
          
 
"And who is i/
.?
"

 
          
 
Seeker leaned back and arranged itself, all
six limbs folded in a comfortable cross-legged posture. It began to speak, soft
and melodiously, of times so distant that the very names of their eras had
passed away. The great heavy-pelted beast told her of how humanity had met
greater intelligences in the vault of stars, and had fallen back, recoiling at
the blow to its deepest pride. They had tried to create a higher mentality, and
their failure was as vast as their intention. They had made the Mad Mind, a
being embodied without need of inscribing patterns on matter. And it had proved
malignant beyond measure. Only heroic struggle had managed to capture and
restrain the Mad Mind. To cage it firmly had been the work of millions,
exhausting lifetimes.

 
          
 
And still the race had striven on, conjuring
up a counter to the Mad Mind named Vanamonde. Both dwelled in the depths of far
space. But with that last grand act some light had gone out of humanity. Later
species of humans had retreated, letting their machines steal the variety and
tang from their world, until only the lights of Diaspar burned in the sands
that would one day overwhelm all.

 
          
 
"Cowardly," Cley said.

 
          
 
"Vain pride," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Why? That makes no sense."

 
          
 
"To think that humans
were the pinnacle of creation?"

 
          
 
"Oh. I see."

 
          
 
Cley was subdued for most of the voyage to the
moon. She had known a bit of Seeker's story, for it was a tribal fable. But the
Mad Mind was older now than the mountains she had roved, a gauzy myth told by
the Supras. They spoke, too, of Vanamonde, but that equally tenuous entity was
said to be strung among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.

 
          
 
The moon swam green and opulent as they looped
outward. Jonah's slight spin gave an obliging purchase to the outer segments of
the great vessel, and Cley ventured with Seeker through verdant labyrinths to
watch their approach. The lunar landscape was a jagged creation of sharp
mountains and colossal waterfalls. These stark contrasts had been shaped by
light elements hauled sunward in comets. A film a few molecules thick sat atop
the lunar air, holding in a thick mix of gases. The film had permanent holes
allowing spacecraft and spaceborn life access, the whole arrangement kept
buoyant by steady replenishment from belching volcanoes. This trap offset the
moon's feebler gravitational grasp so well that it lost less of its air than
did the Earth.

 
          
 
The beckoning moon hung nearly directly sunward
and so was nearly drowned in shadow until Jonah began to curve toward its far
side. For this passing moment the sun, moon and Earth were aligned in geometric
perfection, before plunging back along their complicated courses. Cley watched
this moment of uncanny, simple equilibrium and felt the paradox that balance
and stillness lay at the heart of all change.

 
          
 
"See," Seeker said.
"Storms."

 
          
 
Cley looked down into the murk and whirl of
the bottled lunar air, but the disturbance lay above that sharp division. In
the blackness over both poles snaked filaments of blushing orange.

 
          
 
"Damn." Cley whispered, as though
the helical strands could hear.
"The Mad Mind?"

 
          
 
"It probes for us. I had thought it would
forage elsewhere first."

 
          
 
Seeker pointed with its ears at what seemed to
Cley to be empty space around Earth. Seeker described how the Earth's magnetic
domain is compressed by the wind from the sun, and streams out in the wake. She
blinked her eyes up into ultraviolet and caught the delicate shimmer of a huge
volume around the planet. She witnessed a province she had never suspected, the
realm dominated by the planet's blooming magnetic fields. It was a gossamer
ball, crumpled in on the sun side, stretched and shmmed by the wind from the
sun into tapering tail. Arcades of momentary fretwork grew and died in the
rubbery architecture of the magnetosphere, and she knew that these, too, were
the footprints of the Mad Mind. "It's searching there."

 
          
 
"It relishes the bands of magnetic
field," Seeker said somberly. "I hoped it would seek us only in that
realm."

 
          
 
"But it has spread here, too."

 
          
 
"It must."

 
          
 
Cley felt a cold shudder. Immense forces
lumbered through these colossal spaces, and she was a woman born to pad the
quiet paths of sheltered forests, to prune and plant and catch the savor of the
sighing wind. This was not her place.

 
          
 
"It's able to punch through the air
blanket?" she asked.

 
          
 
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."