Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (41 page)

 
          
 
"If you won't help me, I'll find the
Captain myself."

 
          
 
"Good."

 
          
 
Cley didn't understand this reply, but she was
used to that with Seeker. She grimaced, knowing how hard it would be to find
anything in this vast place.

 
          
 
Seeker said nothing more and seemed to be
distracted. They worked their way upward against the light centripetal gravity
and finally stood on a broad slope made only of great leaves. Sunlight streamed
fierce and golden from an open sky that framed the shrinking moon. Cley knew
that when the Earth had come alive, over five billion years ago, it had begun
wrapping itself in a membrane it made of tailored air and water, for the
general purpose of editing the sun. Buried deep in Earth's forest, she had
never bothered to think of other planets, but now she saw that the moon too had
learned this skill from Earth. There was something fresh and vibrant about the
filmed moon, as though it had not shared the long withering imposed by the
Supras' robots. Where once
maria
meant the dark
blotches of volcanic flows, now true seas lapped at rugged mountains with
snow-dappled peaks. Now Earth's spreading voracious green seemed to mimic its
junior companion in exuberant disequilibrium.

 
          
 
Seeker bent and pressed an ear against a
purple stalk. It nibbled at the young shoots breaking through the slick bark
but also seemed to be listening. Then it sat up and said, "We are bound
for Venus."

 
          
 
"What's that?"

 
          
 
"The planet next out from Earth, second
from the sun."

 
          
 
"Can we live there?"

 
          
 
"I expect the question will be whether we
can avoid death there."

 
          
 
With that Seeker fell asleep and Cley, wary of
the tangled jungle, did not venture away. She watched the Earth and moon
shrink, twin planets brimming against the timeless blaze of the galaxy.

 
          
 
She knew instinctively that the moon was not
merely a sheltered greenhouse maintained by constant outside management. Who
would tend it, after all? For long eons humankind had been locked into its
desert fastnesses. No, the ripeness came from organisms adapting to a material
environment which was in turn made by other organisms. To imagine otherwise—as
ancient humans had— was to see the world as a game with fixed rules, like human
sports, strict and static. Yet even planets had to yield to the press of suns.

 
          
 
The sun had burned hydrogen for nearly five
billion years before Earth evolved a species which could understand that simple
fact, and its implications. Fusing hydrogen made helium, a gaseous ash that
settled to the sun's core. Helium holds in radiation better than hydrogen and
so drove the core temperature higher. In turn hydrogen burned more fiercely.
The sun grew hotter. Unlike campfires, solar furnaces blaze brighter as their
ash gathers.

 
          
 
Earthlife had escaped this dead hand of physics
... for a while. Long before humans emerged, a blanket of carbon dioxide had
helped warm the Earth. As the sun grew hotter, though, life thinned that
blanket to keep a comfortable clime.

 
          
 
But carbon dioxide was also the medium through
which the rich energy of the sun's fusing hydrogen became transmuted into
living matter. It was also the fundamental food for photosynthesis. Thinning
the carbon dioxide blanket threatened that essential reaction. So a jot of time
after the evolution of humans—a mere hundred million years—the air had such
skimpy carbon dioxide that
all of the
plant kingdom
was imperiled.

 
          
 
At that point the biota of Earth could have
radically adjusted their chemical rhythms. Other planets had passed through
this knothole before and survived. But the intelligences which thronged that
era, including the forerunners of Seeker, had intervened.

 
          
 
Moving the Earth further from the solar
furnace would offset the steady banking of the inner fires. This led to the
great maneuvers which rearranged the planets, opening them to fresh uses.

 
          
 
All this lay buried in Diaspar's dusty records
and crossed Cley's thoughts only as a filligree of myth. The much-embellished
stories her tribe had told around campfires taught such things through parable
and grandiose yarns. Her
kind were
not studious in the
strict sense of the term, but their forest crafts had needed an underpinning of
sage myth, the "feel" of why and how biospheres were knit and fed.
Some lore was even hard-wired in Cley at the level of instinctive
comprehension.

 
          
 
So the cloud-wreathed beauty of the twin
worlds made her breath catch, her heart race with a love which was perhaps the
hallmark of true intelligence. As Seeker slept she watched specks climb above
the sharp-edged air of Luna to meet other dabs in a slow, grand gavotte.
Another Jonah approached from Earth. Motes converged on it from eccentric
orbits about the moon. She adjusted her eyes to pick out the seeping infrared
glow that spoke of internal warmth, and saw a greater cloud, a snapshot of
teeming beeswarm wealth. Streamers swung between Earth and moon, endless
transactions of species. A thinner rivulet broke away from the figure-eight
orbits that linked the twins. It trickled inward and Cley—holding a hand
against the sun's glare—saw that it looped toward a thick swarm that clustered
about the sun itself.

 
          
 
She felt then both
awe, that
fear of immensity, and loneliness. She wished her clan could see this, wished
that there were other minds of her cut and shape to share this spectacle.

 
          
 
Her attention was so riveted on the unfolding
sky that she did not hear the stealthy approach of scraping paws. But she did
catch the jostle as something launched itself in the weak gravity.

 
          
 
The shape came at her from behind. She got
only a snatched instant to see it, a thing of sleek-jacketed black and flagrant
reds. It was hinged like a bat at the wings and slung with ball-bearing agility
in its swiveling, three-legged attack.

 
          
 
Claws snatched at the air where Cley had been.

 
          
 
She had ducked and shot sideways, rebounding
from a barnacled branch. Instead of fleeing into unknown leafy wilderness,
where a pack of the attackers might well be waiting, she launched herself back
into the silent, sleek thing.

 
          
 
This it had not expected. It had just seen
Seeker and was trying to decide if this new development was a threat or an
unexpected banquet.

 
          
 
Cley hit it amidships. A leg snapped;
weightlessness makes for flimsy construction. She had flicked two of her
fingers into needles, usually used for the fine treatment of ailing creatures.
They plunged into the flared red ears of the attacker, puncturing the enlarged
eardrums which were its principal sensory organ. The creature
departed,
a squawking blur of pain and anger.

 
          
 
Cley landed on a wide branch, hands ready. She
trembled with a mixture of eagerness and fear which a billion years of
selection had still retained as fundamental to the human constitution. The
foliage replied to her intent wariness with silent indifference.

 
          
 
Seeker awoke, stretching and yawning.
"More food?"

 
          
 
They sighted the Supra ship their third day
out. It came flaring into view from Earthside, as Cley now thought of the aft
layers of the Leviathan.

 
          
 
She and Seeker spent much of their time there,
enjoying the view of the steadily shrinking green moon, resting among a tangle
of enormous flowerlike growths. Near the moon a yellow star grew swiftly. It
became a sleek, silver ship balancing on a thin torch flame.

 
          
 
This had just registered with Cley when Seeker
jerked her back behind an overarching stamen. "Do not move," it
whispered.

 
          
 
The slim craft darted around the Leviathan as
though it were sniffing, its nose turning and swiveling despite being glossy
metal. The torch ebbed and fine jets sent it zooming beyond view along the bulk
of the Leviathan. Cley felt a shadowy presence, like a sound just beyond
recognition. The Supra ship returned, prowling close enough to the prickly
growths to risk colliding with upper stems.

 
          
 
Seeker put both of its large, padded hands on
Cley's face. Seeker had done this before, to soothe Cley when her anxieties
refused to let her sleep. Now the pressure of those rough palms, covered with
fine black hair, sent a calming thread through her. She knew what the touch
implied: let her mind go blank. That way her talent would transmit as little as
possible. Any Supra aboard the ship who had come from
Lys
could pick up her thoughts, but only if
they were focused clearly into perceptible messages. Or so Cley hoped.

 
          
 
The ship held absolutely still for a long
while, as if deciding whether to venture inside. The cloud of spaceborne life
that surrounded the Leviathan had drawn away from the ship, perhaps fearing the
ship's rockets. Its exact cylindrical symmetries and severe gleam seemed
strange and malevolent among the drifting swarms, hard and enclosed, giving
nothing away. Suddenly the yellow blowtorch ignited again, sending the
life-forms skittering away. The ship vanished in moments, heading out from the sun.

 
          
 
"Must've guessed I was running this
way," Cley said.

 
          
 
"They try every fleeting
possibility."

 
          
 
Seeker seemed
concerned,
though she was seldom sure what meanings attached to its quick frowns,
fur-ripplings and teeth displays.

 
          
 
"I felt something ..."

 
          
 
"They sought your thought-smell."

 
          
 
"Didn't know I had
one."

 
          
 
"It is distinctive."

 
          
 
"You can smell it?"

 
          
 
"In your species many memories are lodged
near the brain's receptors for smell. Scents then evoke memories. I do not
share this property."

 
          
 
"So?" Sometimes Seeker's roundabout
manner irked her. She was not sure whether it was suggesting much by saying
little, or simply amusing itself.

 
          
 
"A Supra can remember the savor of your
thinking. This act of recollection calls up your
talent,
makes it stronger."

 
          
 
"Just by remembering, they make me
transmit better?"

 
          
 
"Something
like
that."

 
          
 
Cley could not match this with the odd,
scratchy presence she had felt. "Well, they're gone now."

 
          
 
"They may return."