Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (55 page)

 
          
 
It was Seranis. Her talent-wail broke like a
wave of hopeless grief, discordance boiling with shards of sound.

 
          
 
Cley scrambled away, driven by the mournful,
grating power. She nearly collided with a man in the foliage. He gazed blankly
at her. Something in his expressionless face reminded her suddenly of her
father.

 
          
 
"Who're you?" she asked.

 
          
 
"I have ... no name."

 
          
 
"Well, what—" and then she fully
sensed him.
Ur-human, a tiny speck of talent-talk purring in
him.

 
          
 
You were one of those links I felt, she sent.

 
          
 
Yes. Those of us here . . . have gathered. We
are afraid. His feelings were curiously flat and without fervor.

 
          
 
You 're
like a child.

 
          
 
I a
?n
like us. The talent-voice
carried no rancor and his face was smooth and unmarked, though that of a
full-grown man.

 
          
 
She looked beyond him and saw a dozen like
him, men and women of the same height and body-type.
You 're
me!

 
          
 
In a way, he sent mildly.

 
          
 
From the Ur-humans came a tide of bland
assent. They were untouched by time and trouble.

 
          
 
The
struggle,
how was
it?
she
asked.

 
          
 
A woman sent,
Such
fun! We had never done anything like that.

 
          
 
"Well, you won't again," Cley said
aloud. She preferred the concrete feel of speech to the sensation of dropping
stones down a deep well. "But look, what—"

 
          
 
Then she saw the body. The Ur-humans carried
it between them in the light gravity. "
Alvin
!"

 
          
 
Seranis followed the corpse, her face stony,
body stiff, emitting no talent-trace at all now.

 
          
 
Cley asked the man, "What happened?"

 
          
 
"He ... gave ... too much." The
man-child's throat sounded raw and unused, as though he had seldom spoken
before.

 
          
 
Cley gazed into
Alvin
's open eyes. A blue pattern of burst veins
gave them the look of small, trapped seas.

 
          
 
Seranis came last, following the smooth, bland
Ur-humans. She said and sent nothing.

 
          
 
Cley looked at
Alvin
's troubled, fractured eyes and tried to
imagine what he had finally faced. She knew suddenly that he had somehow freed
her from the Mad Mind's grip. And his cost had been to have his own mind burned
away, the brain itself fused.

 
          
 
He had dignity in death and she felt a pang of
loss. He had been strange but majestic, in his way. Seeker was wrong; the
Supras were still essentially human, though she would never be able to define
just what that meant.

 
          
 
In a moment only a heartbeat long she sensed
something beyond the kinesthetic effects she had ridden, beyond the
explanations she had glimpsed. The coiling complications of ambition, the
crazed scheme to tunnel out of their own space-time. . . .

 
          
 
That was part of it, yes.

 
          
 
But she remembered the algae mats of earth's
first oceans, billions of years ago. They lived on in the guts of animals,
bacteria hiding in dark places where chemistry still kindled without oxygen.
She recalled that her own tribe had used them as yeasty agents in the brewing
of beer. If such bacteria could think, what would it make of the frothy spume
of beer? As catalysts they were certainly taking part in processes transcending
themselves, yielding benefits they could not imagine. If they could somehow
know, they might well feel immeasurably exalted.

 
          
 
But to those who brewed beer's casual
delights, the bacteria were unimaginably far beneath the realm of importance,
mere dregs of evolution. And whatever dim perceptions the algae could muster
would hardly resemble the true nature of the talk and laughter and argument
which swirled through the minds that felt the pleasant effects of that beer.

 
          
 
Her own
understandings of what the past struggle had been about—could they be similar?
Valid, perhaps, but dwarfed by the unknowable abyss that separated her species
from the purposes of entities enormously removed.

 
          
 
Could that bear somehow on what Seeker meant
about logarithmic time and exponential growth? That she could not even imagine
such a gulf?

 
          
 
The thought caught her for only a single
dizzying instant. Then it was gone and she was back in the comfortable, linear
progression of events she knew.

 
          
 
She turned away from the body. The Ur-humans
milled uncertainly around her.
"Seeker, I . . . these
people.
My people."

 
          
 
"So they are," Seeker said
noncommitally at her side.

 
          
 
"Can I have them? I mean, take them
back?" She gestured up at the transparent dome where the tired but
receptive Earth still spun.

 
          
 
"Of course.
The
Supras could not help them."

 
          
 
"I'll try to bring up just a few of them
at first," Cley said cautiously. The enormity of becoming mother to a race
struck her. "See how it goes."

 
          
 
"No one tests the depth of a river with
both feet," Seeker said.

 
          
 
Seranis had gone on, solemn and silent, not
looking back. Cley wondered if she would ever see the Supras again.

 
          
 
The Ur-humans all studied Cley. "Do you
think there'll be a place for them?"

 
          
 
"If you make one."

 
          
 
"And you?"

 
          
 
"This is my place." It fanned a
greasy claw at the quiet immensities above.

 
          
 
"The—what did you call it?—system
solar?"

 
          
 
Seeker's ears flexed and changed from cinnamon
to
burnt
yellow. "She gave birth to humankind and
is a third as old as the universe itself. She is the source of life
everlasting."

 
          
 
"And you—you're her agent, aren't
you?"

 
          
 
Seeker nodded and laughed. Or at least Cley
thought it did. She was never really sure of these things, and perhaps that was
for the best.

 
          
 
"I suppose it's reassuring, being part of
something so large."

 
          
 
Seeker said, "Indeed. Alvin knew of her.
But he described her as endless chains of regulatory messages between the
worlds, of intricate feedback, and so missed the point."

 
          
 
"What point?"

 
          
 
"Alvin saw only metabolism. He missed
purpose." Seeker produced another rat and began to eat.

 
          
 
"Was it 'her'—your system solar—that
really destroyed the Mad Mind?"

 
          
 
"Of course."

 
          
 
"What about the Supras?"

 
          
 
"They did as they must. We helped sculpt
their uses."

 
          
 
"Which is it?—'she' did it or 'we' did
it?"

 
          
 
"Both."

 
          
 
Cley sighed. "Well, did we humans matter
at all?"

 
          
 
"Of course.
Though not as you imagine."

 
          
 
"You helped me because of your biome,
didn't you?"

 
          
 
Seeker seemed to catch the disappointment in
her voice.
"Truly.
But I came to love you. You
are an element I had not comprehended."

 
          
 
To cover her emotions (a very human mannerism,
she thought wryly) Cley said lightly, "Just doing my part in the system
solar."

 
          
 
Seeker said with a grave scowl, "As you
did."

 
          
 
"Hey, c'mon, I did have other
motives."

 
          
 
"They were incidental." Seeker
lunged at a passing bird, missed, and tumbled into a tangle of vines. Cley
laughed. Was this the super-being she had seen roving among the planets during
the battle? The same creature that now wrestled with vines, sputtering in
irritation? Or was there really a contradiction?

 
          
 
"This biome—how come you're so loyal to
it?"

 
          
 
"It is the highest form which can evolve
from this universe—so far." Seeker kept twisting around in the thick vines
to no avail. Even so, it continued in an even, measured tone, "The biome
has been implicit in the governing laws since the beginning, and arose here
first as intricate networks on ancient Earth."

 
          
 
"So Alvin had part of it right after
all."

 
          
 
Seeker thrashed around, getting itself caught
tighter.
"Only a narrow view."

 
          
 
"You said once you had contact with
everything."

 
          
 
Seeker shook its head in frustration.
"Everything and the noth-ing."

 
          
 
"What's 'the nothing'?"

 
          
 
Seeker bit into a vine and tore it loose.
"When a thinking being chooses to not think for a while."

 
          
 
"The
subconscious?"

 
          
 
"The transconscious.
Separation into isolated beings is a feature of evolution in the human era and
before. I am a fragment of the self-awareness that arose from that early web,
and now grows apace."

 
          
 
"Sounds pretty exalted. Seeker
After
Patterns."