Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 Read online

  The fog hesitated, buzzed angrily, and then purred away in search of more tasty banquets.

  "They seek to find and alter," Seeker said. "Not merely eat."

  "How can you tell?" she asked wonderingly.

  "In my age there were many forms which lived by chemical craft. They work on molecules themselves, transforming crude minerals into elegant usefuls."

  Cley shivered. "They make my skin crawl."

  "These are obviously designed to aid the lichen in their gnawing, preparing the ground for life."

  "I never saw them before."

  "They ferret out their molecular cuisine at the edge of the forest. Your kind inhabited the deep woods."

  "I hope—"

  "No more talk. Quickly now."

  They ran hard. Seeker stopped often and crouched forward, listening to the ground. Cley needed the time to adjust her blood chemistry. The rhythms of walking helped key in hormonal cues to stop her menstrual cycle and increase endurance. She kept glancing at the sky where the galactic center was rising. Its gossamer radiance was unwelcome; she felt exposed.

  Loping along a steep hillside. Seeker said, "They come now."

  "The Supras?" she asked.

  "More than them."

  "You can tell that from listening to—"

  Seeker crouched, its snout narrowing, ears flaring. It was absolutely still and then was instantly moving, even faster this time. She ran to catch up. "What—"

  "Ahead," it called.

  Her breath rasped as they struggled up a narrow draw. A deep bass note seemed to come from everywhere until she realized that she felt it through her feet. A peak above them cracked open with a groan and abruptly a geyser shot straight up. Tons of water spewed high in the air and showered down. Fat raindrops pelted them.

  Seeker called, "A fresh river. The rock strain has grown for days and so I sought the outbreak. It will afford momentary shelter."

  The droplets hammered at Cley. Seeker made an urgent sign. Through the spray of water overhead she saw rainbow shards of radiance cascade across the sky.

  "Searching," Seeker said.

  "Who is?"

  "What, not who. That which destroyed the Library."

  They watched as a filigree of incandescence stretched and waxed. Through the geyser's mist the shifting webbed patterns glowed like a design cast over all humanity. Cley had seen this beautiful tapestry before—seen it descend and bring stinging death to all she loved. Its elegant coldness struck into her heart with leaden solidity. She had managed to put aside the horror but now here it was again. Those luminiscent tendrils had tracked and burned and nearly killed her and she longed to find a way to strike back. War. The ancient word sang in her thumping pulse, in flared nostrils, in dry taut lips.

  She stood with her clothes sticking to her in the hammering rain, hoping that this momentary fountain had saved them. How long could the mists shield them?

  But now among the flexing lightning darted amber dots—craft of the Supras, spreading out from the Library. She had long expected to see them pursuing her, but they were not searching the ground. Instead they moved in formations around the gaudy luminescent ripples.

  Seeker looked bedraggled, its coat dark with the wet. "Down," it said firmly.

  They scrambled into a shallow cave. The river-forming geyser spread a canopy of fog, but Cley adjusted her sight to bring up the faint images she could make out through the wisps. She and Seeker watched the intricate dodge and swerve of Supra ships as they sought to enclose and smother the downward-lancing glows.

  "Water will hide us for a while," Seeker said.

  "Are they after the Library again?"

  "No. They seem to—there."

  A streamer broke through an amber pouch spun by Supra ships. It plunged earthward and in a dazzling burst split into fingers of prickly light. These raced over the mountains and down into valleys like rivulets of a tormented river in the air. One orange filament raced nearby, ripe with crackling ferocity. It dwelled a moment along the way they had come, as if sniffing for a trail, and then darted away, leaving only a diminishing flurry of furious pops.

  The Supras seemed to have caged in the remaining bright lacings. The thrusts broke into colors and roiled about the sky like quick, caged fire turned back by flashes from the Supras.

  Then the sky ebbed as if a presence had left it. The amber Supra ships drifted back toward the Library.

  "We are fortunate," Seeker said.

  Cley said, "That was a cute trick with the water."

  "I doubted it would work."

  "You gambled our lives on—?"

  "Yes."

  "Good thing you don't make mistakes."

  "Oh, I do." Seeker sighed with something like weariness. "To live is to err."

  Cley frowned. "C'mon, Seeker! You have some help, some connection."

  "I am as mortal as you."

  "What're you connected to?" she persisted.

  It lifted one amber shoulder in a gesture she could not read. "Everything. And the nothing. It is difficult to talk about in this constricted language. And pointless."

  "Well, anyway, that'll keep the Supras busy. They've already figured out how to fight the lightning."

  "It searched for us, knowing we had escaped."

  "How could it?"

  "It is intelligence free of matter and has ways we cannot know." Already Seeker moved on, slipping on some gravel and sprawling, sending pebbles rattling downslope. But it got back up, fatigue showing in its eyes, and moved on in a way that was once called "dogged," but now had no such description, for there were no longer any dogs.

  Scrambling over the ridgerock, Seeker added, "And should not know."

  25

  They made good time. The geyser sent feathery clouds along the backbone of the mountain range. These thickened and burst with rain. The air's ferment hid them and brought moist swarming scents.

  The parched Earth needed more than the water so long hidden in deep lakes. Through the roll of hundreds of millions of years its skin of soil had disappeared, broken by sunlight and baked into vapor. The Supras had loosed upon these dry expanses the lichen, which could eat stone and fart organic paste. Legions of intricately designed, self-reproducing cells then burrowed into the noxious waste. Within moments such a microbe corps could secrete a rich mire of bacteria, tiny fungi, rotifers. Musty soil grew, the fruit of microscopic victories and stalemates waged in every handful of sand around the globe. Soil itself flourished like a ripe plant.

  Seeker said they should skirt along these working perimeters of the forest. The biting vapors made Cley cough, but she understood that the shifting brown fogs also cloaked their movements against discovery from above. The night sky had cleared of Supra ships.

  They slipped into the shadows of the enveloping woods, but Cley felt uneasy. Soon they looked down on the spreading network of narrow valleys they had traversed. She could see the grasp of life had grown even since she had observed it from Alvin's flyer.

  Broad green patches lay ready to serve as natural solar-energy stations. Already some followed the snaking lines of newborn streams, growths cunningly spreading through the agency of animals. Such plants used animals often, following ancient precept. Long ago the flowers had recruited legions of six-legged insects and two-legged primates to serve them. Tasty nectar and fruit seduced many into propagating seeds. The flowers' radiant beauty charmed first humans and later other animals into careful service, weeding out all but the lovely from gardens; a weed, after all, was simply a plant without guile.

  But it was the grasses that had held humanity most firmly in thrall for so long, and now they returned as well. Already great plains of wheat, corn and rice stretched between the forks of river-valleys, tended by animals long bred for the task. Humanity had delegated the tasks of irrigation and soil care. As the Supras had revived species, they re-created the clever, narrowly focused intelligences harbored in large rodents. These had proved much more efficient groomers of the grasses
than the old, cumbersome technology of tractors and fertilizers.

  Cley felt more at home now as they trekked through dense woods. She kindled her hormones and food reserves to fend ofi^ sleep and kept up the steady pace needed to stay with Seeker, who showed no signs of fatigue. 1 he forest resembled no terrain that had ever existed before. Assembled from the legacy of a perpetually fecund biosphere, it boasted forms separated by a billion years. The Supras had reactivated the vast index of genotypes in the Library with some skill. Few predators found easy prey, and seldom did a plant not find some welcoming ground after the lichen had made their mulch.

  Still, all had to struggle and adjust. The sun's luminosity had risen by more than ten percent since the dawn of humanity. The rub of tides on shorelines had further slowed the planet's whirl, lengthening the day by a fourth. Life had faced steadily longer, hotter days as the crust itself drifted and broke. In the Era of Oceans the wreckage of continental collisions had driven up fresh mountains and opened deep sutures in the seabeds—all as patient backdrop to the frantic buzz of life's adjustments to these immense constraints. Species rose and died because of minute tunings of their genetic texts.

  And all the hurried succession and passionate ferment was a drama played out before the gaze of humanity—which had its own agenda.

  Over the past billion years the very cycles of life on Earth had followed rhythms laid down by governing intelligences. For so long had Nature been a collaboration between Humanity and Evolution that the effects were inseparable. Yet Cley was startled when they came upon a valley of silent, trudging figures.

  "Caution," Seeker whispered.

  They were crossing a foggy lowland ripe with the thick fragrance of soil-making lichen. Out of the mist came shambling shadows. Cley and Seeker struck a defensive pose, back to back, for the stubby forms were suddenly all around them. Cley switched to infrared to isolate movements against the pale, cloudy background and found the figures too cool to be visible. Ghostly, moving warily, they seemed to spring everywhere from the ground.

  "Robots?" she whispered, wishing for a weapon.

  "No." Seeker peered closely at the slow, ponderous shapes. "Plants."

  "What?" Cley heard now the squish squish as limbs labored to move.

  "See—they unhinge from their elders."

  In the murky light Cley and Seeker watched the slow, deliberate pods separate from the trunks of great trees. "Plants led, once," Seeker said. "From sea to land, so animals could follow. Flowers made a home for insects—invented them, in my view."

  "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.

  26

  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.