Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (53 page)

 
          
 
Or was it many Seekers?—the entire species, a
kind which had come long after the Ur-humans and yet was equally ancient now, a
race which had strived and lost and strived again, endured and gone on
silently, peering forward with a hollow barking laugh, still powerful and
always asking as life must, and still dangerous and still coming.

 
          
 
And something more.

 
          
 
Seeker.
It was
engaged somehow at levels she could only glimpse. Seeker struggled in what
seemed to Cley to be a crystal sphere— luminous, living. Yet the mote glaring
at the sphere's center was a star.

 
          
 
She felt the plasma beings then. Nets of
fields and ionized gas slipped fishlike through blackness. They converged on
the Jove system. Great slow-twisting blue lightning worked through the orbiting
rafts of life there. The mere backwash of this passing struggle scorched broad
carpets of spacelife. Lances ruptured beings the size of whole worlds.

 
          
 
The biting pain of it made Cley twist and
scream. Her eyes opened once to find her fingernails embedded in her palms,
crimson blood streaking her arms. But she could not stop.

 
          
 
Her eyes squeezed shut against her will. A
swelling seized her. She felt herself extended, warping the space around her as
though she were herself a giant sun,
bending
rays of
light.

 
          
 
She knew this meant she had somehow been
incorporated into Vanamonde. But instantly another presence lapped at her mind.
She felt herself tucked up into a cranny, snug—then yanked out, spilling into
hot, inky murk.

 
          
 
The Mad Mind had her. It squeezed, as though
she were moist fruit and would spit out seeds.

 
          
 
—an orange, crusty with age, browned and
pitted, covered by white maggots sucking at the inner wealth.—

 
          
 
She saw this suddenly. Her mouth watered. She
had to cleanse the slimy maggots before she could eat. She sent down fire and
washed the orange in burnt-gold flame. Screaming, the maggots burst open.

 
          
 
—and the orange was a planet.—

 
          
 
Seared and pure and wiped
free of the very atmosphere which had sustained the soft maggots.

 
          
 
—and the maggots, singed to oblivion—

 
          
 
They had been four-footed, scaly,
quick
of mind.
But not quick enough.
They had barely comprehended what rushed at them out of the maw at the center
of the galaxy.

 
          
 
Cley was the orange and then the fire and then
the maggots and then, with long strangled gasps, the fire again.

 
          
 
It was good to be the fire. Good to leap and
fry and crackle and leap again.

 
          
 
Better by far than to crawl and mew and suck
and shit and die.

 
          
 
Better, yes, to float and stream and tingle
with blue-white fires. To hang in curtains between the stars and be greater
than any sun that had ever flared.
To roar at the jeweled
stars.

 
          
 
Better to know and shimmer and reek. To rasp
against the puny clots of knotted magnetic fields, butt into their slow
waltzes. To jab and hurt and keep on hurting when the magnetic kernels had
ground beneath you, broken, were dust.

 
          
 
Better to be a moving appetite again,
an intelligence
bigger than solar systems. Pleasure seethed
in its self-stink, more raw and muscular with every gathering moment.

 
          
 
—and she broke away from it for a moment, into
what seemed to be cool open space, empty of the skittering violence.—

 
          
 
Ah, she thought with buoyant relief.

 
          
 
But it was merely another part of the Mad
Mind. Oily and slick and snakelike, it slid itself over her.
Into
her ears.
Up her vagina.
Deep,
deep probing for her ovaries.
Down her throat,
prodding with a fluid insistence.

 
          
 
A stench rose and bit into her. Its sharp beak
cut and that was when she understood a flicker of what the outside struggle was
about.

 
          
 
She suddenly knew that she now could feel
abstractions. The partition between thought and sensation, so fundamental to
being human, was blown to tatters by the Mind's mad gale.

 
          
 
Trapped, she understood.

 
          
 
The Mad Mind held that this universe was one
of many expanding bubbles adrift inside a meta-universe. Ours was but one of
the possibilities in a cosmos beyond counting.

 
          
 
The great adventure of advanced life-forms, it
believed, was to transcend the mere bubble which we saw as our universe.
Perhaps there were civilizations of unimaginable essence, around the very curve
of the cosmos. The Mad Mind wished to create a tunnel which would prick a hole
in our universe-bubble and extend into others.

 
          
 
Slimy blackness crept like fingers. Easeful
ideas soothed into her.

 
          
 
The Galactic Empire, she saw, had been a
festering pile of insects. When she stopped to see them better they were of all
shapes, chitter-ing, filled with meaningless jabber.

 
          
 
Long ago some of these vermin had slipped
away, she remembered, through the veils beyond the galaxy.
Out,
flying through strings of galaxies, across traceries of light.
Spanning
the great vaults and voids where few luminous sparks stirred.

 
          
 
Those Empire maggots had vanished, leaving
dregs to slump into petrified cities: Diaspar.
Lys
.

 
          
 
And elsewhere in the spiral arms, other races
had dwindled into self-obsessed stasis.

 
          
 
But should the holy, enduring fire follow the
Empire across the curve of this universe? Should the Mind pursue?

 
          
 
She knew instantly that such goals were
paltry.
The stuff of maggot-minds.

 
          
 
No—far grander to escape the binds of this
universe entirely. Not merely voyage in it. Not simply skim around the sloping
warp.

 
          
 
Cley struggled but could find no way through
the cloying hot ink that oozed into her throat, her bowels.

 
          
 
She faintly felt that these turgid sensations
were in fact ideas. She could not comprehend them as cool abstractions. They
reeked and banged, cut and seared, rubbed and poked at her.

 
          
 
And on this stage ideas moved as monstrous
actors, capable of anything.

 
          
 
She understood now—as quickly as she could
frame the question—what the Madness cloaking her wanted. It desired to create
deep wells in space-time. Compression of matter to achieve this in turn
required the cooperation of many magnetic minds—for in the end, only
intelligence coolly divorced from matter could truly control it.

 
          
 
The risk of such a venture was the destruction
of the entire galaxy. Fresh matter had to be created and compacted. This could
curve space-time enough to trap the galaxy into a self-contracting sphere, cut
off from the universe even as it bled downward into a yawning gravitational pit.

 
          
 
The galaxy could not accept such danger. The
magnetic minds had debated the wisdom of such a venture while the Mad Mind was
confined. Their discussion had been dispassionate, for they were not
threatened. Magnetic intelligences could follow the Mad Mind beyond such
geometric oblivion, since they were not tied to the fate of mere matter.

 
          
 
But the galaxy brimmed with lesser life. And
in the last billion years, as humanity slept in Diaspar, life had integrated.

 
          
 
Near most stars teemed countless entities,
bound to planets or orbiting them. Further out, between the suns, the magnetic
structures looked down on this with a slow, brooding spirit. Their inability to
transcend the speed of light except in tiny spots meant that these most vast of
all intelligences spoke slowly across the chasms of the galactic arms.

 
          
 
Yet slowly, slowly, through these links a true
Galactic Mind had arisen. It had been driven to more complex levels of
perception by the sure knowledge that eventually the Mad Mind would escape.

 
          
 
So the magnetic beasts could not abandon the
matter-born to extinction. They had ruled against the Mad Mind's experiment
before, and now they moved to crush the newrisen Mind before it could carry out
the compression of mass.

 
          
 
Cley saw this in a passing instant of
struggle, while she swam in a milky satin fog—and then immeasurably later,
through sheets the colors of blood and brass. She was like a blind ship adrift,
with only the gyroscope of her senses of any use.

 
          
 
The pain began then.

 
          
 
It soared through her. If she had once thought
of herself and the other Ur-humans as elements in an electrical circuit, now
she understood what this could mean.

 
          
 
The agony was timeless. Her jaws strained
open, tongue stuck straight out, pink and burning. Her eyes bulged, though
still squeezed shut by a giant hand which pinched her nose. She was terrified
and then went beyond that to a longing, a need for extinction simply to escape
the terror. Her agony was featureless. No tick of time consoled her. Her
previous life, memories, pleasures—all dwindled into nothing beside the giant
flinty mountain of her pain.

 
          
 
She longed to scream.
Alvin
! Muscles refused to unlock in her throat,
her face. Timeless excruciation made her into a statue.

 
          
 
And then without transition she was standing,
water cascading all over her, her hair bunched atop her head, her shoulders and
breasts white with soapy smears. Her prickly flesh shimmered and melted and her
nipples were fat spigots. They snagged bubbles and dripped rich drops. The air
eagerly lapped these teardrops as they fell. Her eyes were closed but she could
see a pulse flutter in her throat, satin moistness slither over her pendulous
breasts.

 
          
 
She knew that this, too, was part of the Mind.
Or a last brushing
kiss
from it. For it was genuinely
mad, and contained within it a skein that humans would see as love, or hate, or
malignant resolve. But these were categories evolved for a species. Ihey no
more described another class of being than violins and drums describe a storm.

 
          
 
Some of its madness was human.
Lodged in magnetic helices lay the mentality of
Man.
Several races had made the Mind and each
left a signature.