Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (29 page)

 
          
 
"Truth depends on sense organs,"
Seeker said with what Cley took to be a kindly tinge to its clipped words. Or
was she imposing a human judgment on Seeker's slight crinklings around its
slitted eyes, the sharpening of the peaks of its yellow ears?

 
          
 
"We have records of the long discourses
between your kind and mine,"
Alvin
began. "I studied them."

 
          
 
"A human library," Seeker said.
"Not ours."

 
          
 
Cley saw in Seeker's eyes a gulf, the darkness
that would always hang between species. Across hundreds of millions of years
words were mere signal flares held up against the encroaching night.

 
          
 
"Yes,"
Alvin
said soberly, "and that is what burns.
We know what humans thought and did, but I am coming to see that much history
passed outside human ken."

 
          
 
"Much should."

 
          
 
"But we will regain everything,"
Alvin
said severely.

 
          
 
"You cannot regain time."

 
          
 
Alvin
nodded with wan fatigue. Cley knew fragments
of his history and saw that he had changed in the several centuries since as a
daring boy he had altered human fortunes. One of her own people would have
passed through wisdom and died in the time this man had enjoyed; another sign
of the unknowable distance between the species.
Alvin
's spirit visibly ebbed, as if this flight
had taken him momentarily away from a fact he could not digest.

 
          
 
The ship was landing beside a wall of black
that she at first took to be solid. Then she saw ash-gray coils rising through
sullen clouds and knew that this was the smoky column she had seen for days.

 
          
 
"The Library of Life,"
Alvin
said. "They attacked it with something
like lightning. Bolts that struck and burrowed and hunted. They found the
treasure that ages of wearing winds had not discovered."

 
          
 
"An underground
library?"
Cley asked. Her tribe had once laughed at a Supra who
told them of this practice, the attempt to imprison meaning in fixed substance.
People who lived and worked in the constant flux of the deep woods saw
permanence for the illusion that it was.

 
          
 
"A legacy separated from Diaspar,"
Alvin
said kindly. "The ancients knew its
storehouse would not be needed in my crystal city. But the urge to preserve was
profound in them and so they buried deeply."

 
          
 
"A recurrent human feature," Seeker
said.

 
          
 
"The only way to understand the
past,"
Alvin
countered sharply.

 
          
 
"Meaning passes," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Does transfinite geometry?"

 
          
 
"Geometry signifies. It does not
mean."

 
          
 
Alvin
grunted with exasperation and kicked open
the hatch. The sharp bite of smoke made Cley cough but
Alvin
took no notice of it. They climbed out into
a buzz and clamor of feverish activity. All around the ship worked legions of
robots. Supras commanded teams that struggled up from ragged-mouthed tunnels in
the desert, carrying long cylinders of gleaming glass.

 
          
 
"We're trying to save the last fragments
of the library, but most of it is gone,"
Alvin
said, striding quickly away from the
guttural rumble of the enormous fire. Smoke streamed from channels gouged in
the desert. These many thin, soot-black wedges made up the enormous pyre that
towered above them, filling half the sky.

 
          
 
"What was in there?" Cley asked.

 
          
 
"Frozen life," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Yes,"
Alvin
said, his glance betraying surprise.
"The record of all life's handiwork for over a billion years.
Left here, should the race ever need biological stores
again.
"

 
          
 
"Then that which burns," Seeker
said, "is the coding."

 
          
 
Alvin
nodded bitterly.
"A
mountain-sized repository of DNA."

 
          
 
"Why was it in the desert?" Cley
asked.

 
          
 
"Because there might have come a time
when even Diaspar failed, yet humanity went on. So the Keeper says."

 
          
 
The teams of robots moved in precise ranks
that even the hubbub of fighting the fires could not fracture. They surged on
wheels and legs and tracks, churning the loose soil as they pushed large mounds
of grit and gravel into the open troughs where flames still licked. She could
see where explosions had ripped open the long trenches. Now the fire scoured
the deep veins of the planet's accumulated genetic wisdom, and the robots were
like insect teams automatically hurrying to protect their queen, preserving a
legacy they could not share. Cley could scarcely take her eyes from the
towering pyre where the heritage of numberless extinct species was vanishing
into billowing wreaths of carbon.

 
          
 
The machines automatically avoided the three
of them as they walked over a low hill and into an open hardpan plain. In
oblivious tribute to the perfection he knew in Diaspar,
Alvin
did not bother to move aside as batallions
of robots rushed past them. Seeker flinched visibly at the roar and wind of
great machines, dangerously close.

 
          
 
Cley saw that feelers of grass and scrub trees
had already advanced here, resurgent life licking at the dead sands. Supras
hurried everywhere, ordering columns of machines with quick stabs at hand-held
instruments.

 
          
 
"The fight goes no better," Alvin
said sourly. "We are trying to snuff it out by burying the flames. But the
attackers have used some inventive electromotive fire that survives even
burial
."

 
          
 
"The arts of strife," a woman
commented sardonically.

 
          
 
Cley turned and saw a tall, powerfully built
woman some distance away. Yet her voice had seemed close, intimate.

 
          
 
"Alvin!" the woman called and ran
toward them. "We have lost a phylum."

 
          
 
Alvin's stern grimace stiffened further.
"Something minor, I hope?"

 
          
 
"The Myriasoma."

 
          
 
"The many-bodied?
No!" Despair flitted across his face.

 
          
 
Cley asked, "What are they?"

 
          
 
Alvin stared into the distance, emotion
flickering in his face. "A form my own species knew, long ago.
A composite intelligence which used drones capable of receiving
electromagnetic instructions.
The creature could disperse itself at
will."

 
          
 
Cley looked at the woman uneasily, feeling an
odd tension playing at the edge of her perceptions. "I never saw
one."

 
          
 
"We had not revived them yet," Alvin
said. "Now they are lost."

 
          
 
Seeker said, "Do not be hasty."

 
          
 
Alvin ignored it. "You are sure we lost
all?"

 
          
 
"I hoped there would be traces, but . . .
yes. All."

 
          
 
Cley heard the woman and simultaneously felt a
deeper, resonant voice sounding in her mind. The woman turned to her and said,
"You have the talent, yes. Hear."

 
          
 
This time the woman's voice resounded only in
Cley's mind, laced with strange, strumming bass notes. I am Seranis, a Supra
who shares this.

 
          
 
"I, I don't understand," Cley said.
She glanced at Seeker and Alvin but could not read their looks.

 
          
 
I’ve have re-created you Ur-humans from the
entries in this Library. We further augmented you so that you could understand
us through this direct talent.

 
          
 
"But Alvin didn't—"

 
          
 
He is of Diaspar and thus lacks the talent.
Only we from Lys have the threads of microwave-active magnetite laid down in skull
and brain.

 
          
 
They twine among your — and our — neurological
circuitry. When stimulated by electrical activity, these amplify and transmit
our thoughts. Seranis took Cley's hands and held them up, palms facing, then
slowly brought them to Seranis's temples. Cley felt the voice strengthen. I am
antenna and receiver, as are you.

 
          
 
"I could never do this before!" Cley
said loudly, as if the new talent made her doubt her older voice.

 
          
 
The talent must be stimulated first, since it
is not natural to Ur-humans. Seranis smiled sardonically. It might have helped
your species in your age. We of Lys have it because for so long we lived for
the whole, for our community. This knits us together.

 
          
 
"And Alvin?"

 
          
 
Diaspar is the master of urban mechanism, Lys
of verdant wooded majesty. Their art escapes their boundaries, while ours sings
of our time and community. Diaspar rejected the enveloping intimacy of the
talent, though it is an unending pleasure. And we of Lys pay the price of
mortality for this.

 
          
 
"This talent . . . kills you?"

 
          
 
Seranis smiled wearily. Yes. Stressed so,
inevitably the brain loses structure, substance. This defect of finiteness we
share with you Ur-humans.

 
          
 
Cley knew that she was speaking with the
person who had brought her kind back into the world, yet she could not decide
whether to be angry or grateful. "Then why give it to us, if we did not
have it
before .
..
before
you cooked us up from your Library?"

 
          
 
Did a quick flicker of caution pass in the
tightening of Seranis's lips? For now, let me simply say that we know you well
enough to savor your kinesthetic joys, your quick and zesty sense of the world.
That we lost in Lys.