Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (43 page)

 
          
 
Cley smiled despite her tingling fear.
"Supras don't like news like that."

 
          
 
As she watched, the Captain's legs dissolved
into a swarm of bits. Each was the size of a thumb and swam in the air with
stubby wings. The Captain was an assembly that moved incessantly, each flyer
brushing the other but capable of flitting away at any moment. The individual
members looked like a bizarre mixture of bird and insect. Each had four eyes,
two on opposite sides of their cylindrical bodies and one each at top and
bottom.

 
          
 
Cley heard the Captain then in her mind. Ihe
thrumming whisper of wings she had heard was echoed by a soft flurry of
thoughts in her mind.

 
          
 
You are a danger to me.

 
          
 
"You?
The ship?"

 
          
 
I am the world.

 
          
 
And so it must seem to this thing, she
reahzed. It somehow governed the immense complexity of the Leviathan and at
some level must be the Leviathan, its mind instead of merely its brain. Yet
each moment a flying thumb shot away on some mission and others came to merge
into the standing, rippling cloud. Beneath its clear message she felt the buzzing
of quicksilver thought, the infinitude of transactions the Leviathan must make
to keep so vast an enterprise going. It was as though she could listen to the
individual negotiations between her own blood cells and the walls of her veins,
the acids of her stomach,
the
sour biles of her liver.

 
          
 
Cley thought precisely, slowly. How can you be
self-aware? You change all the time.

 
          
 
The shape let its right arm fall off,
scattering into clumps that then departed on new tasks. I do not need to feel
myself intact, as you do.

 
          
 
So how do I know who's talking? Cley
countered.

 
          
 
The Captain answered, I speak for the moment.
A little while later I shall speak for that time.

 
          
 
Cley glanced at Seeker but it was watching
with only distant interest. She thought. Will that be the same you?

 
          
 
How could you tell?
Or I?
I always find that your kind of intelligence is obsessed with knowing what you
are.

 
          
 
Cley smiled.
Seems a
reasonable question.

 
          
 
Not reasonable. Reason cannot tell you deep
things.

 
          
 
Cley watched as the shape gradually decomposed
into an oblong cloud of the thumb-things. It had made its polite gesture and
now relaxed into a wobbly sphere, perhaps to bring its individual elements
closer while lowering its surface area. Are you afraid of me?
she
asked impishly.

 
          
 
My parts know fear.
Hunger
and desire, as well.
They are a species, like you. But I am another kind
of being, and can elude attack by dispersing. I do not know fear for myself but
I do know caution. I cannot die but I can be hurt.

 
          
 
Cley thought of the honeybees she had tended
in the forest— satisfying, sweaty labor that now seemed to have happened a very
long time ago. Bees had fewer than ten thousand neurons, she knew, yet did
complex tasks. How much more intelligent would be a single arm of this
cloud-Captain, when its thumb-things united to merge their minds?

 
          
 
Not hurt by anybody like me, I assume?

 
          
 
The swarm churned. Yes. I am not vulnerable to
destruction of special parts, as are you. Merely by taking away your head, for
example, I could leach life from
you,
rob you of all
you know. But each part of me contains some of my intelligence and feels what a
part of the world feels.

 
          
 
Cley felt suddenly the strangeness of this
thing hanging before her, bulging and working with sluggish patience as it
pondered the Leviathan's intricacies.
Another phylum?
No, something more— another kingdom of life, a development beyond beings
forever separated into inevitable loneliness. In a way she envied it. Each
thumb-flyer knew the press of competition, of hunger and longing, but the
composite would rise above that raw turbulence, into realms she could not even
guess. She glanced at Seeker again and saw that its expression was not of
indifference, but of reverence. Seeker had not wanted her to seek the Captain
because it was, even for Seeker, a holy being.

 
          
 
I speak to you now because the world cannot
tolerate you, the Captain sent.

 
          
 
How come you ran away before? Cley asked.

 
          
 
I needed time to speak to my brothers.

 
          
 
Other Leviathans?
As
she framed the thought the Captain's answer came: Other worlds.

 
          
 
Was there something beyond Leviathans? Cley
started to ask but the Captain said
,
I now understand
many recent events and your connection with them. There is an entity called the
Mad Mind and it searches for you.

 
          
 
I know.

 
          
 
Then know this —

 
          
 
In a flooded single moment a torrent of
sensations, ideas, and conclusions forked through her. She had for an instant
the perception of what the mind before her was truly like. The layers of its
logic were translucent, so that every fact shone through to illuminate the
lacing of concepts on another level. And that light in turn refracted through
the lattice of mind, shedding its fitful glow on assumptions lying beneath.

 
          
 
This was thought without the constraint of the
staged human brains. That a property had emerged in the billion years since the
era of Ur-humans and now showed the limitations of evolution's blind methods.
Rapid selection pressure operated on what already existed, adding capability to
minds rather than snipping away parts which worked imperfectly. The human brain
was always retrofitted, and showed its origins in its cumbersome workings. The
Captain had arisen from a different mechanism.

 
          
 
But this realization was only a filament
tossing on the surge that swamped her. She sagged with the weight of what the
Captain had given her, stunned as though by a blow. She was dimly conscious of
Seeker leaping forward to cradle her. Then the air clouded with ebony
striations and she felt herself dwindling beneath a great dark weight.

 
          
 
"You can speak it?" Seeker
asked,
its tilted chin and rippling amber fur patterns
showing concern.

 
          
 
"I, I think so." Cley had slept for
many hours. When she revived, Seeker had brought her a banquet of berries and
fruits and thick, meaty leaves. Now she tried to explain what she had sensed in
the brief collision of minds. Like Seranis, the Captain sent information faster
and at greater depth than Cley could handle.

 
          
 
"But didn't you feel it, too?" she
asked.

 
          
 
"I do not have your talent."

 
          
 
"What did the Captain do after I
fainted?"

 
          
 
"Scattered like a bird swarm into which a
hunter has fired a shot."

 
          
 
"Huh. Maybe it didn't know how to tell me
without overloading me.

 
          
 
"Perhaps.
I have
seen Captains before. This was different. Ah—"

 
          
 
Seeker snagged a ratlike creature which was
passing and bit off its fat tail. The rat squealed and hissed and Seeker put it
gently back down.
As the rat scampered away Seeker munched on
the tail.
"A delicacy," it explained. "They grow tasty
tails so that the rest of them is let go."

 
          
 
"It'll live?"

 
          
 
"Within days it will sport another
luscious tail." Seeker smacked its lips at a morsel, holding out the last
to Cley.

 
          
 
"No rat's ass for me, thanks. You were
saying something about the Captain?"

 
          
 
"It was odd."

 
          
 
"How?"

 
          
 
"I have never seen one worried
before."

 
          
 
Cley bit her
Up
,
memories stirring. She had felt fihgrees of the Captain's anxiety. Already the
sharp, vibrant images were trickling away. She suspected that her kind of
intelligence was simply unable to file and categorize the massive infusion she
had received, and so was sloughing it off.

 
          
 
"The Supras it could deal with," she
said. "It's afraid of the Mad Mind, though."

 
          
 
Seeker nodded. "The Mind has fully
arrived, then."

 
          
 
"Fully?"

 
          
 
"All components knit together."

 
          
 
"I caught something about that from the
Captain." She frowned, troubled, eyes distant. "Sheets of fine copper
wire wrapping around blue flames . . ."

 
          
 
"Where?"

 
          
 
"Somewhere further out from here.
Where it's cold, dark.
There was a feeling of the Mad Mind
spreading over whole stars. Suns . . . like campfires."

 
          
 
"It is expanding." Seeker clashed
its claws together, a gesture of sly menace which somehow made it look
professorial.

 
          
 
She told Seeker what she had glimpsed. Much of
it was a tapestry of rediscovered history.

 
          
 
The Mad Mind had been confined to the warped
space-time near a huge Black Hole. Only the restraining curvature there could
hold the Mind in place for long. This had been done eons ago, a feat
accomplished by humanity in collaboration with elements and beings she could
not begin to describe. Around the Black Hole orbited a disk made of infalling
matter, flattened into a thin plate, spinning endlessly. The inner edge of the
disk was gnawed into incandescent ferocity by the compressive clawing of the
Black Hole's great tidal gradients. There the Mad Mind had been held by the
swirl and knots of vexed space-time. Matter perpetually entered the disk at its
outer rim, as dust clouds and even stars were drawn inward by friction and the
shredding effects of the Black Hole's grip.

 
          
 
The Mad Mind had been forced to perpetually
swim upstream against this flux of matter in the disk. If it relented, the Mind
would have been carried by the flow to the very inner edge of the disk. There
it would have been sucked further in, spiraling down into the hole.