Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (29 page)

But it was not these that Leon was
interested in; he walked purposefully toward the gleaming oval that dominated
the clearing, and spoke a few words to the engineer who was standing beside it.
There was a short argument; then the other capitulated with fairly good grace.

‘It’s not fully loaded,’ Leon explained as
he helped Lora up the ramp. ‘But we’re going just the same. The other shuttle
will be down in half an hour, anyway.’

Already Lora was in a world she had never
known before – a world of technology in which the most brilliant engineer or
scientist of Thalassa would be lost. The island possessed all the machines it
needed for its life and happiness; this was something utterly beyond its ken.
Lora had once seen the great computer that was the virtual ruler of her people
and with whose decisions they disagreed not once in a generation. That giant
brain was huge and complex, but there was an awesome simplicity about this
machine that impressed even her nontechnical mind. When Leon sat down at the
absurdly small control board, his hands seemed to do nothing except rest
lightly upon it.

Yet the walls were suddenly transparent –
and there was Thalassa, already shrinking below them. There had been no sense
of movement, no whisper of sound, yet the island was dwindling even as she
watched. The misty edge of the world, a great bow dividing the blue of the sea
from the velvet blackness of space, was becoming more curved with every passing
second.

‘Look,’ said Leon, pointing to the stars.

The ship was already visible, and Lora felt
a sudden sense of disappointment that it was so small. She could see a cluster
of portholes around the centre section, but there appeared to be no other
breaks anywhere on the vessel’s squat and angular hull.

The illusion lasted only for a second. Then,
with a shock of incredulity that made her senses reel and brought her to the
edge of vertigo, she saw how hopelessly her eyes had been deceived. Those were
not portholes; the ship was still miles away. What she was seeing were the
gaping hatches through which the ferries could shuttle on their journeys
between the starship and Thalassa.

There is no sense of perspective in space,
where all objects are still clear and sharp whatever their distance. Even when
the hull of the ship was looming up beside them, an endless curving wall of
metal eclipsing the stars, there was still no real way of judging its size. She
could only guess that it must be at least two miles in length.

The ferry berthed itself, as far as Lora
could judge, without any intervention from Leon. She followed him out of the
little control room, and when the air lock opened she was surprised to discover
that they could step directly into one of the starship’s passageways.

They were standing in a long tubular
corridor that stretched in each direction as far as the eye could see. The
floor was moving beneath their feet, carrying them along swiftly and
effortlessly – yet strangely enough Lora had felt no sudden jerk as she stepped
onto the conveyer that was now sweeping her through the ship. One more mystery
she would never explain; there would be many others before Leon had finished
showing her the
Magellan
.

It was an hour before they met another human
being. In that time they must have travelled miles, sometimes being carried
along by the moving corridors, sometimes being lifted up long tubes within
which gravity had been abolished. It was obvious what Leon was trying to do; he
was attempting to give her some faint impression of the size and complexity of
this artificial world that had been built to carry the seeds of a new
civilisation to the stars.

The engine room alone, with its sleeping,
shrouded monsters of metal and crystal, must have been half a mile in length.
As they stood on the balcony high above that vast arena of latent power, Leon
said proudly, and perhaps not altogether accurately: ‘These are mine.’ Lora
looked down on the huge and meaningless shapes that had carried Leon to her
across the light-years, and did not know whether to bless them for what they
had brought or to curse them for what they might soon take away.

They sped swiftly through cavernous holds,
packed with all the machines and instruments and stores needed to mould a
virgin planet and to make it a fit home for humanity. There were miles upon
miles of storage racks, holding on tape or microfilm or still more compact form
the cultural heritage of mankind. Here they met a group of experts from
Thalassa, looking rather dazed, trying to decide how much of all this wealth
they could loot in the few hours left to them.

Had her own ancestors, Lora wondered, been
so well equipped when they crossed space? She doubted it; their ship had been
far smaller, and Earth must have learned much about the techniques of
interstellar colonisation in the centuries since Thalassa was opened up. When
the
Magellan
’s sleeping travellers reached their new home, their success
was assured if their spirit matched their material resources.

Now they had come to a great white door
which slid silently open as they approached, to reveal – of all incongruous
things to find inside a spaceship – a cloakroom in which lines of heavy furs
hung from pegs. Leon helped Lora to climb into one of these, then selected
another for himself. She followed him uncomprehendingly as he walked toward a
circle of frosted glass set in the floor; then he turned to her and said:
‘There’s no gravity where we’re going now, so keep close to me and do exactly
as I say.’

The crystal trap door swung upward like an
opening watch glass, and out of the depths swirled a blast of cold such as Lora
had never imagined, still less experienced. Thin wisps of moisture condensed in
the freezing air, dancing around her like ghosts. She looked at Leon as if to
say, ‘Surely you don’t expect me to go down
there
!’

He took her arm reassuringly and said,
‘Don’t worry – you won’t notice the cold after a few minutes. I’ll go first.’

The trap door swallowed him; Lora hesitated
for a moment, then lowered herself after him.
Lowered?
No; that was the
wrong word; up and down no longer existed here. Gravity had been abolished –
she was floating without weight in this frigid, snow-white universe. All around
her were glittering honeycombs of glass, forming thousands and tens of
thousands of hexagonal cells. They were laced together with clusters of pipes
and bundles of wiring, and each cell was large enough to hold a human being.

And each cell did. There they were, sleeping
all around her, the thousands of colonists to whom Earth was still, in literal
truth, a memory of yesterday. What were they dreaming, less than halfway
through their three-hundred-year sleep? Did the brain dream at all in this dim
no man’s land between life and death?

Narrow, endless belts, fitted with handholds
every few feet were strung across the face of the honeycomb. Leon grabbed one
of these, and let it tow them swiftly past the great mosaic of hexagons. Twice
they changed direction, switching from one belt to another, until at last they
must have been a full quarter of a mile from the point where they had started.

Leon released his grip, and they drifted to
rest beside one cell no different from all the myriads of others. But as Lora
saw the expression on Leon’s face, she knew why he had brought her here, and
knew that her battle was already lost.

The girl floating in her crystal coffin had
a face that was not beautiful, but was full of character and intelligence. Even
in this centuries-long repose, it showed determination and resourcefulness. It
was the face of a pioneer, of a frontierswoman who could stand beside her mate
and help him wield whatever fabulous tools of science might be needed to build
a new Earth beyond the stars.

For a long time, unconscious of the cold,
Lora stared down at the sleeping rival who would never know of her existence.
Had any love, she wondered, in the whole history of the world, ever ended in so
strange a place?

At last she spoke, her voice hushed as if
she feared to wake these slumbering legions.

‘Is she your wife?’

Leon nodded.

‘I’m sorry, Lora. I never intended to hurt
you …’

‘It doesn’t matter now. It was my fault,
too.’ She paused, and looked more closely at the sleeping woman. ‘And your
child as well?’

‘Yes; it will be born three months after we
land.’

How strange to think of a gestation that
would last nine months and three hundred years! Yet it was all part of the same
pattern; and that, she knew now, was a pattern that had no place for her.

These patient multitudes would haunt her
dreams for the rest of her life; as the crystal trap door closed behind her,
and warmth crept back into her body, she wished that the cold that had entered
her heart could be so easily dispelled. One day, perhaps, it would be; but many
days and many lonely nights must pass ere that time came.

She remembered nothing of the journey back
through the labyrinth of corridors and echoing chambers; it took her by
surprise when she found herself once more in the cabin of the little ferry ship
that had brought them up from Thalassa. Leon walked over to the controls, made
a few adjustments, but did not sit down.

‘Goodbye, Lora,’ he said. ‘My work is done.
It would be better if I stayed here.’ He took her hands in his; and now, in the
last moment they would ever have together, there were no words that she could
say. She could not even see his face for the tears that blurred her vision.

His hands tightened once, then relaxed. He
gave a strangled sob, and when she could see clearly again, the cabin was
empty.

A long time later a smooth, synthetic voice
announced from the control board, ‘We have landed; please leave by the forward
air lock.’ The pattern of opening doors guided her steps, and presently she was
looking out into the busy clearing she had left a lifetime ago.

A small crowd was watching the ship with
attentive interest, as if it had not landed a hundred times before. For a
moment she did not understand the reason; then Clyde’s voice roared, ‘Where is
he? I’ve had enough of this!’

In a couple of bounds he was up the ramp and
had gripped her roughly by the arm. ‘Tell him to come out like a man!’

Lora shook her head listlessly.

‘He’s not here,’ she answered. ‘I’ve said
goodbye to him. I’ll never see him again.’

Clyde stared at her disbelievingly, then saw
that she spoke the truth. In the same moment she crumpled into his arms,
sobbing as if her heart would break. As she collapsed, his anger, too,
collapsed within him, and all that he had intended to say to her vanished from
his mind. She belonged to him again; there was nothing else that mattered now.

For almost fifty hours the geyser roared off
the coast of Thalassa, until its work was done. All the island watched, through
the lenses of the television cameras, the shaping of the iceberg that would
ride ahead of the
Magellan
on her way to the stars. May the new shield
serve her better, prayed all who watched, than the one she had brought from
Earth. The great cone of ice was itself protected, during these few hours while
it was close to Thalassa’s sun, by a paper-thin screen of polished metal that
kept it always in shadow. The sunshade would be left behind as soon as the
journey began; it would not be needed in the interstellar wastes.

The last day came and went; Lora’s heart was
not the only one to feel sadness now as the sun went down and the men from
Earth made their final farewells to the world they would never forget – and
which their sleeping friends would never remember. In the same swift silence
with which it had first landed, the gleaming egg lifted from the clearing,
dipped for a moment in salutation above the village, and climbed back into its
natural element. Then Thalassa waited.

The night was shattered by a soundless
detonation of light. A point of pulsing brilliance no larger than a single star
had banished all the hosts of heaven and now dominated the sky, far outshining
the pale disc of Selene and casting sharp-edged shadows on the ground – shadows
that moved even as one watched. Up there on the borders of space the fires that
powered the suns themselves were burning now, preparing to drive the starship
out into immensity on the last leg of her interrupted journey.

Dry-eyed, Lora watched the silent glory on
which half her heart was riding out toward the stars. She was drained of
emotion now; if she had tears, they would come later.

Was Leon already sleeping or was he looking
back upon Thalassa, thinking of what might have been? Asleep or waking, what
did it matter now …?

She felt Clyde’s arms close around her, and
welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she
belonged; her heart would not stray again.
Goodbye, Leon – may you be happy
on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But
think of me sometimes, two hundred years behind you on the road to Earth
.

She turned her back upon the blazing sky and
buried her face in the shelter of Clyde’s arms. He stroked her hair with clumsy
gentleness, wishing that he had words to comfort her yet knowing that silence
was best. He felt no sense of victory; though Lora was his once more, their old
and innocent companionship was gone beyond recall. Leon’s memory would fade,
but it would never wholly die. All the days of his life, Clyde knew, the ghost
of Leon would come between him and Lora – the ghost of a man who would be not
one day older when they lay in their graves.