Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (54 page)

 
          
 
The Mind's ambition, to escape the bands of
space-time itself, was born of humanity. And lacing through the pain were
streaks of ancient guilt.

 
          
 
Alvin
had known this, she saw. That was some of
the weight he carried.

 
          
 
The Mind had come from a substrate of magnetic
beings, too. She felt them now, ponderous and eerie.

 
          
 
They brimmed throughout the solar system. Their
intelligences were neither higher nor lower than humans', for they were not
born from evolutionary forces which had driven humanity to solve problems. They
had survived by altering their perceptions. How this happened Cley could not
fathom.

 
          
 
But for a sliding instant she caught a glimpse
of humanity, from their view.

 
          
 
A great eagle hung in black space, near a
sulfurous planet, its wings flapping long and lazy. Diamond-sharp eyes glinted.
The beak hung slightly open, as though about to call out a booming song. She
watched the flex of the immense feathers for a while as muscles bulged beneath
the wings. Only then did she see that the bird flew between the planet behind
it and toward a sun in the distance, a star red and hairy with immense
chromatic flares.

 
          
 
And across the span of the immense wings
nestled small, fevered mites. At one wingtip rose pyramids. Mountains capped in
white framed broad plains, which in turn lead to silvery, spiky cities.
Across the wingspan lay ages of greatness and long nights of
despair.
But always the ferment, the jutting towers of boundless
ambition, the dusty ruins brought by wear and failure. At the far wingtip a
fogged land lay, just beyond her ability to make out detail.

 
          
 
Humanity.
All who had
ever carried the gleam kindled behind the searching eyes—they were there.

 
          
 
Gathered in time's long
tapestry, aback the eagle.
They milled and fought and saw only their
limited moment. They did not know that they flew between unreadable spheres, in
the perfumed air of vast night.

 
          
 
As the bird flapped past her, it turned. The
glinting black eyes looked at her once, the beak opened slightly. Then it
turned away and flew on.
Intent.
Resolute.

 
          
 
There came a moment like an immense word on
the verge of being spoken.

 
          
 
And then it was over.

 
          
 
She sat up. The vines holding her were like
rasping hot breaths.

 
          
 
She vomited violently.
Coughed.
Gasped.

 
          
 
Brown blood had caked thick and crusty at her
wrists. Her fingernails had snapped off. The tips were buried in her palms.
Numbly Cley licked them clean.

 
          
 
"Have a rat," Seeker said. It held
up a green morsel on a forked stick.

 
          
 
Alvin
!

 
          
 
She shook her head and was sick again.

 
          
 
"It's done," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"I . . . Who won?"

 
          
 
"We did."

 
          
 
"What . . . what . . ."

 
          
 
"Losses?"
Seeker paused as though listening to a pleasant distant song.
"Billions of lives.
Billions of
loves, which is another way to count."

 
          
 
She closed her eyes and felt a strange dry
echo of Seeker's voice. This was Seeker's talent. Through it she witnessed the
gray, blasted wastes that stretched throughout the solar system. Bodies crushed
and scorched.
Leviathans boiling away their guts into vacuum.
Moons melted to slag.

 
          
 
"The Mad Mind?"

 
          
 
"Eaten by us," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Us?"

 
          
 
"Life.
I'he Galactic Mind."

 
          
 
She
Still
caught
frayed strands of Seeker's ebbing vision. "You see it all, don't
you?"

 
          
 
"Only within the solar
system.
The speed of light constrains."

 
          
 
"All life?
On all the worlds?"

 
          
 
"And between
them."

 
          
 
"How can you do that?"

 
          
 
Seeker pricked up its outsized ears. Waves of
amber and yellow chased each other around its pelt. "Like this."

 
          
 
"Well, what's that?''

 
          
 
"This."

 
          
 
In a glimmering she saw fragile, lonely Earth,
now the most blighted of all the worlds. But it had been diminished by humans,
she saw; the Mad Mind had not injured it. Sentinel Earth had played its role
and now could return to obscurity.
Or greatness.

 
          
 
"What will happen to it?" Cley asked
quietly. Her body ached but she put that fact aside.

 
          
 
"Earth?
I
imagine the Supras will dream on there." Seeker nipped at the rat with
obvious relish.

 
          
 
"Just dream?"

 
          
 
Seeker shook one paw, which it had just burned
on the cooking stick. It whimpered at the pain. Cley saw by the hollow look to
Seeker's eyes that it had suffered much since she last saw it, but the animal
gave no hint in its speech. "Human dreams can be powerful, as we have just
witnessed," it said.

 
          
 
For a long moment Cley then saw, through
Seeker's strangely boundless talent, the Earth shrink into insignificance. It
became a speck inside a great sphere—the same glowing ball she had seen in the
struggle.

 
          
 
"What is it?"

 
          
 
"An oasis."

 
          
 
"The whole solar
system?"

 
          
 
"An oasis biome, one of
billions strewn through the galaxy.
Between them live only the magnetic
minds. And passing small travelers bound upon their journeys, of course."

 
          
 
"This is your 'higher cause,' isn't it?
When
Alvin
asked if you would help defend human
destiny?"

 
          
 
Seeker farted loudly. "He was guilty of
the heresy of humanism."

 
          
 
"How can that be heresy?"

 
          
 
"The narcissistic devotion to things
human
? '
Man is the measure of all things?'
Easily."

 
          
 
"Well, he has to speak for his
species."

 
          
 
"His genus, you mean, if you would
include yourself."

 
          
 
Cley frowned. "I don't know how close to
them I am. Or what use they'll have for me now."

 
          
 
"You share the samenesses of your order,
which are perhaps the most important."

 
          
 
"Order?"

 
          
 
"The order of primates.
A useful intermediate step.
You possess the general
property of seeing events in close focus. Your ears hear sounds proportional to
the logarithm of the intensity. Otherwise you could not hear a bee hum and
still tolerate a handclap next to your ear. Or see both by moonlight and at
high noon; your eyesight is the same."

 
          
 
"Those are all damn useful," Cley
said defensively. She could not see Seeker's point.

 
          
 
"True, but you also consider time the
same way. Your logarithmic perception stresses the present, diminishing the
past or the future. What happened at breakfast clamors for attention alongside
the origin of the
universe.
"

 
          
 
Cley shrugged. "Hell, we have to
survive."

 
          
 
"
Yes,
and hell
is what you would bear if you had continued with your heresy."

 
          
 
She shot Seeker an inquiring look. These were
grave words, but Seeker rolled lazily and swung from two vines, using them to
cavort in midair with flips and turns and airy leaps. Between its huffs and
puffs it said, "You would have prevented our oasis biome from integrating,
with your grandiose plans."

 
          
 
Cley felt a spurt of irritation. Who was this
animal, to deride humanity's billion-year history? "Look, I might not like
Alvin and the rest all that much, but—"

 
          
 
"Your trouble is that contrary to the
logarithmic time sense, evolution proceeds exponentially. And the argument of
the exponent is the complexity of life-forms."

 
          
 
"And what's that mean?" Cley asked,
determined to sail through this airy talk on a practical tack.

 
          
 
"One-celled organisms took a billion
years to learn the trick of marrying into two or more. From dinosaurs to
Ur-humans took only a hundred million. And then intelligent
machines—admittedly, a short-lived experiment—required only a thousand."
Seeker did a flip and caught itself on a limb, its tongue lolling.

 
          
 
"You don't seem all that advanced beyond
us," Cley said.

 
          
 
"How would you tell? If my kind had
evolved into clouds, I couldn't have the fun of this, could I?" Seeker
gulped down the rest of the rat.

 
          
 
"Or the fun of dragging
me all the way across the solar system?"

 
          
 
"There is duty, too."

 
          
 
"To what?"

 
          
 
"To the system solar.
The biome."

 
          
 
"I—" she began, but then a piercing
cry burst through her mind.