Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (35 page)

 
          
 
"But why . . . ?"

 
          
 
"Every step was an improvement in
reproduction," Seeker said. "Here is another."

 
          
 
"I never heard—"

 
          
 
"This came long after my time, as I came
after yours."

 
          
 
Plants had long suffered at the appetites of
rodents and birds,
who
ate a thousand of the seeds for
each one they accidentally scattered. Yet plants held great power over their
animal parasites; the replacement of ferns by better adapted broad-leaved trees
had quickly ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Plants' age-old strategy lay in
improving their reproduction, and throughout the Age of Mammals this meant
hijacking animals to spread their seeds. When ponderous evolution finally found
an avenue of escape from this wastefulness, plants elected to copy the
primates' care in tending to their young.

 
          
 
Cley approached one of the stubby, prickly
things. It was thick at the base and moved by jerking forward broad, rough
appendages like roots. They looked like wobbly pineapples out for a slow
stroll. Each great tree exfoliated several walkers, which then moved onto
wetter ground enjoying better sunlight. Cley thought of eating one, for the
resemblence to pineapples was striking, but their sharp thorns smelled to
Seeker of poison. Farther up the valley they found a giant bush busily
dispatching its progeny as rolling balls, which sought moist bottomland and
warmth.

 
          
 
They kept to the deep canyons. Cloaking mist
gave some shelter from the Supra patrols, which now crisscrossed the sky.
"They do not know this luxuriance well," Seeker remarked, clicking
its sharp teeth with satisfaction. "Nor do their robots."

 
          
 
Cley saw the truth in this, though she had
always assumed that the mechanical wonders were of an innately higher order.
Humanity had long managed the planet, tended the self-regulating soup of soil
and air, of ocean and rich continents. Finally, exhausted and directionless,
they had handed this task over to the robots, only to find after more millions
of stately years that the robots were intrinsically cautious, perhaps even to a
fault.

 
          
 
Evolution shaped intelligences born in silicon
and metal as surely and steadily as it did those minds which arose from carbon
and enzymes. The robots had changed, yet kept to their ingrained Mandate of
Man: to sustain the species against the wearing of the world. It had been the
robots, then, who decided that they could not indefinitely manage a planet
moist with organic possibility. A miserly element in them decreed that the
organic realm should be reduced to a minimum. They had persuaded the leaders of
the crumbling human cities to retreat, to let the robots suck Earth's already
dwindling water into vast basaltic caverns.

 
          
 
So the Supras' servants had for hundreds of
millions of years managed a simple, desiccated Earth.

 
          
 
"Machines feared the small, persistent
things," Seeker explained that night. "Life's subtle turns."
They had camped around a bris-thng bush that gave off warmth against the chilly
fogs.

 
          
 
"Couldn't they adjust those?" Cley
asked. She had seen the routine miracles of the robots. It was difficult to
believe those impassive, methodical presences could not master even this rich
world with their steady precision.

 
          
 
"You can swallow the most fatal poisons
indefinitely if they are in a few parts per trillion," Seeker said slowly.

 
          
 
As she grew to know this beast it had come to
seem more approachable, less strange. Yet a cool intelligence lurked behind its
eyes and she never quite knew how to take what it said. This ready use of
numbers, for instance, was a sudden veer from its usual eloquent brevity.

 
          
 
"The robots must know that."

 
          
 
"True, but consider ozone. A poisonous
gas, blue, very explosive—and a thin skin of it over the air determines
everything."

 
          
 
Cley nodded. Through the long afternoon of
Earth the ozone layer had been leached away countless times. Humanity's
excesses had depleted the ozone again and again. Oscillations in the sun's
luminosity had wrenched the entire atmospheric balance.
Once
a great meteor had penetrated humanity's shields when they had fallen into
neglect, and very nearly destroyed civilization.
All this lay buried in
ancient record.

 
          
 
Seeker yawned. "The robots worried over
managing such delicate matters. So they simplified their problem."

 
          
 
"They seem in control here."

 
          
 
"They fear what they cannot master."

 
          
 
"But they did master much—
Alvin
made them revive the biosphere."

 
          
 
"And bring the chaos of biologic."

 
          
 
Seeker lay back with a strange thin grin and scratched
its ample blue belly. Wreaths of jade mist curled ripely over the heat bush.
Small animals had ventured into a circle around the black shrub as its steady
warmth crept through the air. Few animals feared either Cley or Seeker; all
species had for so long been clients and partners. They even seemed to
understand Seeker's lazy talk. Cley suspected they were hypnotized by the
luxuriant singing tones of Seeker's voice, ready yet eloquent. The circle had
relaxed as though the bush was a campfire. A true fire, of course, would have
risked detection by the Supras.

 
          
 
Cley listened as Seeker described the world
view of its kind. Long after the Ur-humans, some beasts had risen to
intelligence and had engraved in their own genes elements of racial memory. To
instill in wise species a concern for their fragile world it had been the
custom for many millions of years to "hard-wire" a respect for
evolution and one's place in it. This had become
a social
cement as deeply necessary as religion had been to the earliest human forms,
and even in the Ur-humans.

 
          
 
"Many organisms lorded over the
Earth," Seeker said, "beginning with gray slimes, moving on to pasty
blind worms, and then to giant oblivious reptiles—and all three persisted
longer than you Ur-humans." Seeker snorted so loudly it alarmed her.
"We do not know if the dinosaurs had religion."

 
          
 
"And your kind?"

 
          
 
"I worship what exists."

 
          
 
"Look, our tribe chose not to try to
learn all that dead history— we had a job to do."

 
          
 
"And a good one."

 
          
 
"Right," she said with flustered
pride. "Tuning the forests so they'd make it in spite of all this junk in
the air, the plants slugging it out with each other—this isn't a biosphere yet,
it's a riot!"

 
          
 
"But a fruitful
one."
Eyes twinkling, it fished a piece of fruit from some hidden
pouch of its fleshy fur. Seeker grinned, a ferocious sight. The moods of the
beast were easier for her to read now and she shared its quirky mirth.

 
          
 
And she saw Seeker's argument. The robots had
helped humanity accent its intelligence and ensure the immortality of all in
Diaspar. But to make the world work the robots had to run a skimpy, dry
biosphere whose sole pinnacle was a palsied, stultified
Man
.

 
          
 
A fat, ratlike thing with six legs ventured
nearer the bush. Instantly a black cord whipped through the damp air and
wrapped around the squealing prey. A surge dragged the big rodent into a maw
that suddenly opened near the bush's roots. After it closed on its supper Cley
could hear the strangled cries for several moments. Evolution was still at
work, pruning failures from the gene pool with unblinking patience.

 
          
 
Next morning the fog began to clear. Seeker
kept studying the sky. They had made steady progress climbing the flanks of the
saw-toothed mountain range, and now the terrain and rich fauna resembled the
territory where Cley had grown up. She searched the distant ridgelines for
hints of lookouts. Hers was not the only tribe of Ur-humans, and someone else
might have escaped, despite
Alvin
's certainty. She asked Seeker to tune its nose to human tangs, but no
traces stirred the fitful breezes.

 
          
 
Twice they sought cover when flying foxes
glided over. By this time surely the Supras would have sent their birds to
reconnoiter, but neither
her
nor Seeker's even sharper
vision could make out any of the ponderous, wide-winged silhouettes.

 
          
 
They were watching a vast covey of the
diaphanous silvery
foxes
bank and swoop down the
valley currents when Seeker motioned to her. Distant rumblings came, as though
the mountains above them rubbed against a coarse sky. The foxes reacted,
drawing in their formation like silver leaves assembling a tree.

 
          
 
Blue striations frenzied the air. The few
remaining clouds dissipated in a cyclonic churn.

 
          
 
Cley said, "What—"

 
          
 
Sheets of yellow light shot overhead. A wall
of sound followed, knocking Cley against Seeker. She found herself facedown
among leaves without any memory of getting there.

 
          
 
All around them the forest was crushed, as
though something had trampled it in haste. Deep booms faded slowly.

 
          
 
An eerie silence settled. Cley got up and
inspected the wrenched trees, gagging at fumes from a split stinkbush. Two
flying foxes lay side by side, as though mated in death. Their glassy eyes
still were open and jerked erratically in their narrow, bony heads.

 
          
 
"Their brains still struggle,"
Seeker said. "But in vain."

 
          
 
"What was that?"

 
          
 
"Like the assault before on your
people?"

 
          
 
"Yes . . . but this time"—she swept
her hand to the horizon of mangled forest—"it smashed everything!"

 
          
 
"These foxes took the brunt of it for
us."

 
          
 
"Yes, poor things . . ." Her voice
trailed off as the animals' bright eyes slowed, dimmed,
then
closed.

 
          
 
"It does not know precisely where we are,
so it sends generous slabs of electrical energy to do their work."

 
          
 
Seeker gently folded the two foxes into its
palm and made a slow, grave gesture, as if offering them to the sky. When
Seeker lowered its claws Cley could not see the foxes and they were not on the
ground or anywhere nearby.

 
          
 
"What—"

 
          
 
Seeker said crisply, "I judge we should
shelter for a while."