Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (47 page)

 
          
 
"What is this place?" Cley asked.

 
          
 
"Mars," Seeker answered.

 
          
 
"What about Venus?"

 
          
 
Seeker gestured at a blue-white dot.
"Nearby. We do not need it now, so I directed the Captain to bring us
veering close to Mars. We shall gain momentum, stealing from the planet's
hoard, and hasten on."

 
          
 
"Either we're moving very fast, or these
places aren't very far apart."

 
          
 
"Both. All the ancient worlds are now
clustered in a narrow zone around the sun, each finding its comfortable
distance from the fire."

 
          
 
"Looks better off than
Earth."

 
          
 
"True, for no humans have meddled with it
for over a billion years. Once it too was desert."

 
          
 
This Cley flatly refused to believe, for Mars
was a carpet of rich convolutions. Without the Supras and their desert-loving
robots, she imagined, Earth might have been like this. "Can we live
there?"

 
          
 
"We must pass on. It is too dangerous for
us."

 
          
 
Seeker pointed. Along the ring, filaments of
orange and blue twisted. They shot up and down the towers, as though seeking a
way in. Cley could make out the texture of the towers now and with surprise saw
that they were the same woody layers as the Pin-wheel—indeed, that the entire
ring system was a like living, balanced suspension bridge, cantilevered by Mars
out into the great abyss of vacuum.

 
          
 
Cley whispered, "Lightning."

 
          
 
"It searches," Seeker said.

 
          
 
She could see magnetic storms rolHng in from
beyond Mars, blowing against the ring like surf from an immense ocean.
"Can it damage the ring?"

 
          
 
"It may destroy
all of
that
great creature, if it thinks you are there."

 
          
 
"The Mad Mind is everywhere!"

 
          
 
"Spreading, always
spreading.
When we left Earth it had penetrated sunward only
momentarily, and at great cost. Now it hunts amid the worlds. It roves and
probes and has even learned to muster packs like the sky sharks."

 
          
 
"Things are getting worse fast."

 
          
 
"This is as we wish," Seeker said
mildly.

 
          
 
"Huh? Why?"

 
          
 
"If it hid among the stars we could ever
be sure of its demise."

 
          
 
Cley shook her head. "You think you can
kill it?"

 
          
 
"Not I."

 
          
 
"Who can?"

 
          
 
"
Everyone,
or no
one."

 
          
 
They
arced
starward.

 
          
 
The original solar system had been a hostile
realm, with all worlds but Earth ranging from the dead to the murderous.
Then came the fabled, eon-old reworking.
That had left Earth
as the nearest child of the sun, Venus next, and then Mars. All were ripe
gardens now.

 
          
 
Beyond Mars lay the true center of the great
system, the Jove complex. Its gargantuan hub had once been the planet Jupiter.
The swollen, simmering superplanet which now sat at the center of Jove glowed
with a wan infrared sunshine of its own. It had fattened itself by gobbling up
the masses of ancient Uranus and Neptune. The collisions of those worlds had
been one of the spectacular events in human history, though it lay so far in
the past now that little record remained, even in Diaspar.

 
          
 
After its deep atmosphere had calmed, bulging
Jupiter's steady glow had warmed the chilly wastes of its moons. Then Saturn,
cycled through many near-miss passes around Jupiter, had been stripped of much
of its mass. This gauzy bounty was spread among the ancient moons. A shrunken
Saturn of cool blue oceans now orbited Jupiter. After all this prodigious
gravitational engineering, the Saturnian rings were replaced, and looked
exactly like the originals.

 
          
 
The baked rock of Mercury had arrived then,
spun outward from the sun by innumerable kinematic minuets. Light Hquids from
Saturn pehed the hardpan plains of Mercury for a thousand years, and now the
once barren world swung also around Jupiter, brimming with a curious pink and
orange air.

 
          
 
All this had come about through adroit
gravitational encounters consuming millennia. Carefully tuned, each world now
harbored some life, though of very different forms. The Jove system hung at the
edge of the sun's life zone, Jupiter adding just enough ruddy
glow
to make all the salvaged mass of the ancient gas giant
planets useful. Beyond Jove wove only the orbits of rubble and ice, and further
still, comets under cultivation.

 
          
 
Cley watched with foreboding the approach of
the Jove system's grand gavotte. About her the Leviathan regrew itself, but the
springlike fervor of its renewal did not lighten her mood. Seeker was of little
help; it dozed often and seemed unworried about the coming conflict. To
distract herself, she peered from the transparent blisters, trying to fathom
the unfolding intricacies outside.

 
          
 
She had to overcome a habit of thought
ingrained in all planet-borne life. Space was not mere emptiness, but the mated
assets of energy, matter, and room. Planets, in contrast, were inconvenient
sites, important mostly because on their busy surfaces life had begun. After
all, unruly atmospheres whip up dust, block sunlight, rust metals, hammer with
their winds, overheat and chill. Gravity forced even simple landrovers to use
much of their bodies just to stand up. Even airless worlds robbed their
surfaces of sunlight half the time. And nothing was negotiable: planets gave a
fixed day and night, gravity and atmosphere.

 
          
 
In contrast, sunlight flooded the weatherless
calm of space. Flimsy sheets could collect high-quality energy undimmed by
roiling air. Cups could sip from the light brush of particles spewed out by the
sun. Asteroids offered mass without gravity's demanding grip. Just as an origin
in tidepools did not mean that shallow water was the best place for later life,
planets inevitably became backwaters as well.

 
          
 
Biological diversity demands room for
variation, and space had an abundance of sheer volume to offer the first
spaceborne organisms. These had sported tough but flexible skins, light and
tight, stingy with internal gas and liquids. Evolution used their fresh,
weightless geometries to design shrewd alternatives to the simple guts and
spines of the Earthborne.

 
          
 
Cley expected to see fewer of the freeroving
spaceforms as the Leviathan glided outward. Instead, the abundance and pace of
life quickened. Though sunlight fell with the square of distance from the sun,
the available volume rose as the cube. Evolution's blind craft had filled this
swelling niche with myriad forms. Spindly, full-sailed, baroquely elegant, they
swooped around the Leviathan.

 
          
 
Her explorations took her into odd portions of
the Leviathan, along shallow lakes and even across a shadowy, bowl-shaped
desert. She found a chunky iceball the size of a foothill, covered with
harvesting animals. The Leviathan had captured this comet nucleus and was
paying out its fluid wealth with miserly care.

 
          
 
She paid a price for her excursions. Humans
had not been privileged among species here since well before Diaspar was a
dream. Twice she narrowly escaped being a meal for predators which looked very
much like animated thornbushes. She found Seeker just where she had left it
days before, and the beast tended to her cuts, bites and scratches.

 
          
 
"Why are you helping
me.
Seeker
After
Patterns?" she asked as it licked a cut.

 
          
 
It took its time answering, concentrating on
pressing its nose along a livid slash made by the sharp-leaved bushes. When it
looked up, the cut had sealed so well only a hairline mark remained.

 
          
 
"To strengthen
you."

 
          
 
"Well, it's working. Weightlessness has
given me muscles I didn't know I had."

 
          
 
"Not your body.
Your
talent."

 
          
 
She blinked in the pale yellow sunlight that
slanted through the bowers. "I was wondering why I keep hearing things.
That last thornbush—"

 
          
 
"You caught its hunt-pleasure."

 
          
 
"Good thing, too.
It was fast."

 
          
 
"Can you sense any humans now?"

 
          
 
"No, there aren't. . ." She frowned.
"
Wait,
something . . . Why, it's Hke . . ."

 
          
 
"Supras."

 
          
 
"How'd you know?"

 
          
 
"The time is drawing close."

 
          
 
"Time for what?"

 
          
 
"The struggle."

 
          
 
"You weren't just giving this talent a
chance to grow, were you? You're taking me somewhere, too."

 
          
 
"To Jove."

 
          
 
"Sure, but I mean . . . oh, I see. That's
where it'll happen."

 
          
 
"Humans have difficulty in understanding
that Earth is not important now. The system's center of life is Jove."

 
          
 
"So the Mad Mind has to win there."

 
          
 
"There may be no winning."

 
          
 
"Well, I know what losing will be
like." Cley thought of the scorched and mangled bodies of all the people
she had ever loved.

 
          
 
"It is because we do not know what losing
would be like that we resist."

 
          
 
"Really?
Look,
it stomped on us as if we were bugs."

 
          
 
"To it, you are."

 
          
 
"And to you?"

 
          
 
"Do not insects have many uses? In my
view they are far more seemly in the currents of life than, say, just another
species of the Chordata."