Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (24 page)

Yes,
cold
. It had descended upon the
hottest spot in the solar system, where the temperature never falls below seven
hundred degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was
far, far colder to it than the Antarctic winter would be to a naked man.

We did not see it die, out there in the
freezing fire; it was beyond the reach of our instruments now, and none of them
recorded its end. Yet every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is
why we are not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes
tell us that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon.

How can one explain what we felt, in that
last moment when half our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils
of that huge but immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry
of anguish, a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the
gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since,
that he had witnessed the passing of a giant.

We may have been both the first and the last
of all men to see so mighty a fall. Whatever
they
may be, in their
unimaginable world within the sun, our paths and theirs may never cross again.
It is hard to see how we can ever make contact with them, even if their
intelligence matches ours.

And does it? It may be well for us if we
never know the answer. Perhaps they have been living there inside the sun since
the universe was born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom that we shall never
scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across
the light-years to their cousins in other stars.

One day they may discover us, by whatever
strange senses they possess, as we circle around their mighty, ancient home,
proud of our knowledge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not
like what they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling
upon the skins of worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of
organic life.

And then, if they have the power, they will
do what they consider necessary. The sun will put forth its strength and lick
the faces of its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once
more as they were in the beginning – clean and bright … and sterile.

First published in
Startling Stories
, July 1949

Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky

‘Transience’ is the only one of my short stories to have been set to
music, by the British composer David Bedford. The work was commissioned by the
late Sir Peter Pears, and he performed it with the London Sinfonietta, under
the baton of the composer. The story itself was inspired by one of A. E.
Housman’s poems, which also provided the couplet, ‘What shall I do or
write/Against the fall of night?’ and the title of one of my novels. Bedford’s
oratorio based on my novel
The City and the Stars
will be performed at
the Royal Festival Hall in 2001.

The forest, which came almost to the edge of
the beach, climbed away into the distance up the flanks of the low, misty
hills. Underfoot, the sand was coarse and mixed with myriads of broken shells.
Here and there the retreating tide had left long streamers of weed trailed
across the beach. The rain, which seldom ceased, had for the moment passed
inland, but ever and again large, angry drops would beat tiny craters in the
sand.

It was hot and sultry, for the war between
sun and rain was never-ending. Sometimes the mists would lift for a while and
the hills would stand out clearly above the land they guarded. These hills
arced in a semicircle along the bay, following the line of the beach, and
beyond them could sometimes be seen, at an immense distance, a wall of
mountains lying beneath perpetual clouds. The trees grew everywhere, softening
the contours of the land so that the hills blended smoothly into each other.
Only in one place could the bare, uncovered rock be seen, where long ago some
fault had weakened the foundations of the hills, so that for a mile or more the
sky line fell sharply away, drooping down to the sea like a broken wing.

Moving with the cautious alertness of a wild
animal, the child came through the stunted trees at the forest’s edge. For a
moment he hesitated; then, since there seemed to be no danger, walked slowly
out onto the beach.

He was naked, heavily built, and had coarse
black hair tangled over his shoulders. His face, brutish though it was, might
almost have passed in human society, but the eyes would have betrayed him. They
were not the eyes of an animal, for there was something in their depths that no
animal had ever known. But it was no more than a promise. For this child, as
for all his race, the light of reason had yet to dawn. Only a hairsbreadth
still separated him from the beasts among whom he dwelt.

The tribe had not long since come into this
land, and he was the first ever to set foot upon that lonely beach. What had
lured him from the known dangers of the forest into the unknown and therefore
more terrible dangers of this new element, he could not have told even had he
possessed the power of speech. Slowly he walked out to the water’s edge, always
with backward glances at the forest behind him; and as he did so, for the first
time in all history, the level sand bore upon its face the footprints it would
one day know so well.

He had met water before, but it had always
been bounded and confined by land. Now it stretched endlessly before him, and
the sound of its labouring beat ceaselessly upon his ears.

With the timeless patience of the savage, he
stood on the moist sand that the water had just relinquished, and as the tide
line moved out he followed it slowly, pace by pace. When the waves reached
toward his feet with a sudden access of energy, he would retreat a little way
toward the land. But something held him here at the water’s edge, while his shadow
lengthened along the sands and the cold evening wind began to rise around him.

Perhaps into his mind had come something of
the wonder of the sea, and a hint of all that it would one day mean to man.
Though the first gods of his people still lay far in the future, he felt a dim
sense of worship stir within him. He knew that he was now in the presence of
something greater than all the powers and forces he had ever met.

The tide was turning. Far away in the
forest, a wolf howled once and was suddenly silent. The noises of the night
were rising around him, and it was time to go.

Under the low moon, the two lines of
footprints interlaced across the sand. Swiftly the oncoming tide was smoothing
them away. But they would return in their thousands and millions, in the
centuries yet to be.

The child playing among the rock pools knew
nothing of the forest that had once ruled all the land around him. It had left
no trace of its existence. As ephemeral as the mists that had so often rolled
down from the hills, it, too, had veiled them for a little while and now was
gone. In its place had come a checkerboard of fields, the legacy of a thousand
years of patient toil. And so the illusion of permanence remained, though
everything had altered save the line of the hills against the sky. On the
beach, the sand was finer now, and the land had lifted so that the old tide
line was far beyond the reach of the questing waves.

Beyond the sea wall and the promenade, the
little town was sleeping through the golden summer day. Here and there along
the beach, people lay at rest, drowsy with heat and lulled by the murmur of the
waves.

Out across the bay, white and gold against
the water, a great ship was moving slowly to sea. The boy could hear, faint and
far away, the beat of its screws and could still see the tiny figures moving
upon its decks and superstructure. To the child – and not to him alone – it was
a thing of wonder and beauty. He knew its name and the land to which it was
steaming; but he did not know that the splendid ship was both the last and
greatest of its kind. He scarcely noticed, almost lost against the glare of the
sun, the thin white vapour trails that spelled the doom of the proud and lovely
giant.

Soon the great liner was no more than a dark
smudge on the horizon, and the boy turned again to his interrupted play, to the
tireless building of his battlements of sand. In the west the sun was beginning
its long decline, but the evening was still far away.

Yet it came at last, when the tide was
returning to the land. At his mother’s words, the child gathered up his
playthings and, wearily contented, began to follow his parents back to the
shore. He glanced once only at the sand castles he had built with such labour
and would not see again. Without regret he left them to the advancing waves,
for tomorrow he would return and the future stretched endlessly before him.

That tomorrow would not always come, either
for himself or for the world, he was still too young to know.

And now even the hills had changed, worn
away by the weight of years. Not all the change was the work of nature, for one
night in the long-forgotten past something had come sliding down from the
stars, and the little town had vanished in a spinning tower of flame. But that
was so long ago that it was beyond sorrow or regret. Like the fall of fabled
Troy or the overwhelming of Pompeii, it was part of the irremediable past and
could rouse no pity now.

On the broken sky line lay a long metal
building supporting a maze of mirrors that turned and glittered in the sun. No
one from an earlier age could have guessed its purpose. It was as meaningless
as an observatory or a radio station would have been to ancient man. But it was
neither of these things.

Since noon, Bran had been playing among the
shallow pools left by the retreating tide. He was quite alone, though the
machine that guarded him was watching unobtrusively from the shore. Only a few
days ago, there had been other children playing beside the blue waters of this
lovely bay. Bran sometimes wondered where they had vanished, but he was a
solitary child and did not greatly care. Lost in his own dreams, he was content
to be left alone.

In the last few hours he had linked the tiny
pools with an intricate network of waterways. His thoughts were very far from
Earth, both in space and time. Around him now were the dull, red sands of
another world. He was Cardenis, prince of engineers, fighting to save his
people from the encroaching deserts. For Bran had looked upon the ravaged face
of Mars; he knew the story of its long tragedy and the help from Earth that had
come too late.

Out to the horizon the sea was empty,
untroubled by ships, as it had been for ages. For a little while, near the
beginning of time, man had fought his brief war against the oceans of the
world. Now it seemed that only a moment lay between the coming of the first
canoes and the passing of the last great Megatheria of the seas.

Bran did not even glance at the sky when the
monstrous shadow swept along the beach. For days past, those silver giants had
been rising over the hills in an unending stream, and now he gave them little
thought. All his life he had watched the great ships climbing through the skies
of Earth on their way to distant worlds. Often he had seen them return from
those long journeys, dropping down through the clouds with cargoes beyond
imagination.

He wondered sometimes why they came no more,
those returning voyagers. All the ships he saw now were outward bound; never
one drove down from the skies to berth at the great port beyond the hills. Why
this should be, no one would tell him. He had learned not to speak of it now,
having seen the sadness that his questions brought.

Across the sands the robot was calling to
him softly. ‘Bran,’ came the words, echoing the tones of his mother’s voice, ‘Bran
– it’s time to go.’

The child looked up, his face full of
indignant denial. He could not believe it. The sun was still high and the tide
was far away. Yet along the shore his mother and father were already coming
toward him.

They walked swiftly, as though the time were
short. Now and again his father would glance for an instant at the sky, then
turn his head quickly away as if he knew well that there was nothing he could
hope to see. But a moment later he would look again.

Stubborn and angry, Bran stood at bay among
his canals and lakes. His mother was strangely silent, but presently his father
took him by the hand and said quietly, ‘You must come with us, Bran. It’s time
we went.’

The child pointed sullenly at the beach.
‘But it’s too early. I haven’t finished.’

His father’s reply held no trace of anger,
only a great sadness. ‘There are many things, Bran, that will not be finished
now.’

Still uncomprehending, the boy turned to his
mother.

‘Then can I come again tomorrow?’

With a sense of desolating wonder, Bran saw
his mother’s eyes fill with sudden tears. And he knew at last that never again
would he play upon the sands by the azure waters; never again would he feel the
tug of the tiny waves about his feet. He had found the sea too late, and now
must leave it forever. Out of the future, chilling his soul, came the first
faint intimation of the long ages of exile that lay ahead.