Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (26 page)

 
          
 
"I am going to send this ship out of the
Galaxy, to follow the Empire wherever it has gone. The search may take ages,
but the robot will never tire. One day our cousins will receive my message, and
they'll know that we are waiting for them here on Earth. They will return, and
I hope that by then we'll be worthy of them, however great they have
become."

 
          
 
Alvin fell silent, staring into the future he
had shaped but which he might never see. While Man was rebuilding his world,
this ship would be crossing the darkness between the galaxies, and in thousands
of years to come it would return. Perhaps he would be there to meet it, but if
not, he was well content.

 
          
 
They were now above the Pole, and the planet
beneath them was an almost perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of
twilight, Alvin realized that he was seeing at one instant both sunrise and
sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect and so
striking that he was to remember this moment all his life.

 
          
 
In this Universe the night was Jailing: the
shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But
elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered: and
along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

           
 
The naked woman seemed to be dead. The
four-winged bird which gyred down from a pale afternoon sky thought as much. It
wheeled in lazy eights with the woman at the cross point, keeping the body
under its precise gaze. It flapped easily, luxuriating in the loft of thermals
from the rocky bluff nearby.
Its forewings canted wind into
the broad, gossamer-thin hindwings, bringing an ancient pleasure.
But
then directives ingrained in its deepest genes tugged it back to its assigned
task: to find the living humans in this area and summon aid.

 
          
 
The brighter portion of its oddly shaped
intelligence decided that this woman, who had not stirred for long minutes, was
certainly dead. It made this decision not by reason but by a practical sense
set long before it had come to know reason. The pebbles around her head were
stained dark and a massive bruise had blossomed over her left ribs like a
purple sunrise.

 
          
 
Already the bird had seen over twenty dead
humans among the trees, charred to ash, and none living. It decided not to
report this body as a possible candidate. That would take valuable time, and
members of this curious, unimpressive subspecies of humans were notoriously
fragile.

 
          
 
The four-winger had much rugged territory to
cover and was running out of time. It hung for a long moment, indecisive as
only a considerable intelligence can be, forewings rising as hindwings fell.
Then the four-winger peeled away, eyes scanning every minute speck below.

 
          
 
The afternoon shadows lengthened considerably
before the woman stirred, her weak gasping lost beneath the chuckle of the nearby
stream. Her breath whistled between broken teeth.

 
          
 
This sound attracted a six-legged mother
making her way with two cubs along the muddy bank. The woman's dying might have
gained an audience then. But the sleek creatures saw that the woman distinctly resembled
those who truly ruled here, though she smelled quite differently.

 
          
 
The mother instructed her cubs to note and
always respect that form, now broken but always dangerous. She used a language
simple in words but complex in positional grammar, inflections giving layers of
meaning. She augmented this with deft signs, using her midlegs.

 
          
 
The family's quick flight downstream sent a
tang into a crosswind which in turn roused the interest of a more curious
creature. It was distantly descended from the simple raccoon, its pelt a rich
symbol-laden swirl of red and auburn. This crafty intelligence quickly assessed
the situation from the cover of stingbushes.

 
          
 
It was cautious but not afraid. To it, the
most important issue here lay in interlacing the dying woman's jarring presence
with the elaborate meaning of its own life. From birth it had integrated each
experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—
indeed,
this was the sole purpose of its conscious being.
Such integration was complete and utterly beyond human ability, but emerged
efl^ortlessly, the outcome of events in its evolution scattered through a
billion years. The revival of its species a few centuries before had rendered
with fidelity a creature in many ways superior to the pitiful figure it now
watched intently.

 
          
 
At last, and with proper understanding of the
pattern of events which might spread from its actions like the branches of an
infinite tree, unending, the raccoonlike beast padded forward. It smelled the
woman. There also came the sharp bite of fresh dung nearby where a small
predator had passed some hours before, hesitated a moment, and then decided
that the woman was a better prospect for tonight, when she would be safely
dead. This information rippled atop the usual background flavorings of sunset:
a crisp aroma of granite cooling, the sweet perfume of the eternal flowers,
a
musty odor of fungus drawing water up the hills from the
muttering stream.

 
          
 
The woman's swollen skull was the worst
problem. The optical disk bulged in both eyes. With long, tapered hands that
echoed only faintly their origin in claws, the creature felt the unfamiliar
cage of bones beneath the skin and muscle. The right arm was skewed unnaturally
awry. Several ribs were cleanly snapped.

 
          
 
This specific form taken from the human
spectrum had not existed in the time of the raccoon-creature's origin, so it
was an interesting puzzle. The body's design was archaic, a patchwork of
temporary solutions to passing problems. Yet evolution had sanctified these
cumbersome measures with success in the raw, natural world.

 
          
 
The creature set about healing the body. It
did not know how the woman came to be here or that she was in any way special.
Gingerly it used techniques that were second nature, massaging points in this
body which it knew emitted restoring hormones. It used its elbows—an awkward
but unavoidable feature still not bettered in nature—to generate healing
vibrations. The soft, swollen contusion in the right temple responded to
rhythmic squeezing of the spine. The creature could feel pressures slowly
relent and diffuse throughout the woman's head. Her glandular imperatives
sluggishly closed internal hemorrhages. Stimuli to the neck and abdomen made
her internal organs begin their filtering of the waste-clogged blood.

 
          
 
Dusk brought the rustle of movement to the
creature's large ears, but none of the telltale sounds implied danger. The
creature sat comfortably beside the sprawled woman and slept, though even then
with
an alertness
the woman could never know. When she
began to mutter the creature realized it could understand the slurred words.

 
          
 
"...
get
away .
. . keep down . . . down . . . can't see us . . . from the air . . ."

 
          
 
Much of her talk was garbled fever dreams.
From brief moments of coherence the creature came to understand that the woman
had been hunted remorselessly from a flyer, along with her tribe.

 
          
 
The tribe had not escaped. A dry night breeze
coming off the hotter plains to the west brought the sickly sweet promise of
flesh rotting in tomorrow's sun. The creature closed its nostrils to the smell.

 
          
 
The raccoon-being was pleasantly surprised
that it could understand the woman's words. The lands here were filled with
life-forms drawn from two billion years of incessant creation, and most of them
could not fathom the languages of the others. This woman must have been
taught—perhaps by genetic tuning—to comprehend the complex languages more
advanced creatures used.

 
          
 
The large creature felt that to engrain such
knowledge was an error, a skewed and perhaps arrogant presumption. An early
human form such as this might well be confused by such complex, disorienting
craft. Language arose from a world view. The rich web of perceptions which had
formed her present tongue could scarcely ride easily in her cramped mental
confines.

 
          
 
Normally it did not question the deeds of the
advanced human forms called the Supras. But this badly mauled woman, her skin
lacerated and turgid with deep bruises, raised doubts. Perhaps her injuries
stemmed directly from her knowledge.

 
          
 
After some contemplation, however, its innate
sense that life was a dusty mirror, reflecting only passing images of truth,
told it that this woman was here for no ordinary reason. So it sat and thought
and monitored her body's own weak but persistent self-repairing.

 
          
 
The woman lay beneath a night that gradually
cleared as cumulus clouds blew in from the west and went on beyond the distant
hills, as though hurrying for an appointment they could never meet. The
creature sensed rising plumes of water vapor exhaled by the dense jungle and
forest. These great moist wedges acted like invisible mountains, forcing
inblowing air to rise and rain out its wet burden.

 
          
 
A great luminous band rose on the horizon, so
bright and varied that it did not seem to be composed of stars, but rather of
ivory and ice. Vast ragged lanes of dust sprawled across swarms of piercing
light. These were the shreds of the galactic arm, a last rampart shielding the
galactic center.

 
          
 
The raccoon-beast knew that Earth had been
deflected toward this central hub long ago, before its own kind had evolved,
when Earth was verdant for the first time. The scope of such an undertaking was
beyond its comprehension. It dimly sensed that the humans of that time had made
the sun pass near another star, one that refused to shine in the night.

 
          
 
A sharp veer around that dead, dark mass had
sent the solar system plunging inward toward the great galactic bulge. The sun
had crossed lanes of dust as the galaxy rotated, its spiral arms trailing like
those of a spinning starfish. The constellations in Earth's nights warped and
shifted. Ages passed. Life performed its ceaseless self-contortions. Fresh
intelligences arose. Strange, alien minds came from distant suns.

 
          
 
The purposes of that time were shrouded in
ambiguity. The sun had followed a stretched ellipse that looped close to the
galactic center. A shimmering sphere of light gradually grew in the heavens. To
remain near this wheeling beeswarm of ten billion stars, yet another encounter
had proved necessary. That time, legend said, the sun had brushed by a giant
molecular cloud. Each time, gravity's tugs rearranged the stately glide of the
planets. The precision of those soft collisions had been of such delicacy that
the new orbits fit the needs of further vast engineering enterprises—the
dismantling of whole worlds.
Such had humans been, once.

 
          
 
The raccoon-creature found a few planets—those
which had survived that epic age of boundless ambition—among the great washes
of light that hung above. Innumerable comet tails pointed outward from the sun
toward gossamer banks of dim radiance. In such a crowded symphony of sky the
slow gavotte of worlds seemed a minor theme.

 
          
 
But tonight the heavens stirred with luminous
trouble. Staring upward, the raccoon-creature watched red and orange lights
flare and dodge and veer. Soundless and involuted, these were the scribbles of
swift combat. The bright traces faded slowly.

 
          
 
They were the first acts of hostility written
on this broad sky for nearly a billion years.
As before, they
arose from the conflicts inherent in the minds of humans—that uneasy anthology
of past influences.