Beyond the Fall of Night

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "Must've guessed I was running this way," Cley said.

  "They try every fleeting possibility."

  Seeker seemed concerned, though she was seldom sure what meanings attached to its quick frowns, fur-ripplings and teeth displays.

  "I felt something ..."

  "They sought your thought-smell."

  "Didn't know I had one."

  "It is distinctive."

  "You can smell it?"

  "In your species many memories are lodged near the brain's receptors for smell. Scents then evoke memories. I do not share this property."

  "So?" Sometimes Seeker's roundabout manner irked her. She was not sure whether it was suggesting much by saying little, or simply amusing itself.

  "A Supra can remember the savor of your thinking. This act of recollection calls up your talent, makes it stronger."

  "Just by remembering, they make me transmit better?"

  "Something like that."

  Cley could not match this with the odd, scratchy presence she had felt. "Well, they're gone now."

  "They may return."

  "You've got the talent, don't you?"

  "If you cannot tell, then I suppose I do not."

  "Well, yeah, I sure can't pick up anything from you. But—"

  "Let us move away from here. The ship could try again."

  They left the flower zone where they had foraged for a day, supping on thick nectar. Cley did not register a transition but somehow they came into a region with light centrifugal gravity. This was not as simple an inner geometry as the Jonah's. Internal portions of Leviathan spun on unseen axes, and streams flowed along sloping hillsides. The local gravity was never more than a subtle touch, but it gave shape and order to the rampant vegetation.

  They came into a vast chamber with teeming platforms, passageways, tunnels, balustrades, antechambers, all thronged with small animals moving on intent paths. It was a central station for a system of tubes that seemed to sprout everywhere, even high up the walls. The moist air above was crisscrossed by great shafts of filtered sunlight rising from sources near the floor, up to a distant arched ceiling decorated astonishingly—as if to say that this vault was the fulcrum of all—with a projected view of the starscape outside. The galactic center glowed brilliantly.

  Yet all the busy grandeur of this place did not intimidate her; it was even inviting. The scurrying animals were intelligent, in their way, going about swift tasks without giving her more than a glance. Humans were apparently uninteresting, maybe not even unusual— though she doubted that many Supras used Leviathans to journey, given their swift ships.

  She did not dwell on the Supra pursuit. The momentum of events carried her further from her lands, and she had resolved to plunge forward rather than endlessly fret. Perhaps she could find Ur-hu-mans somewhere out here, as Seeker had said.

  Her hunting skills reawakened as she followed Seeker in its unhurried but quick foraging. Seeker ate a lot and seemed to savor the pursuit of small prey for sport, though it devoured mostly plants. It especially enjoyed ripping big fronds to shreds, picking out packets of ripe red seeds.

  The ferment of tangled life around them, extending in all three dimensions throughout Leviathan, captivated Cley. It was so unlike the Supras' carefully tuned projects. As she immersed herself in this complex wealth she understood what had irked and daunted her about the Supras. Their air of superiority had been tolerable, but in their grave manner she felt a cold brush with something she could not name.

  Alvin had been even amusing at times, but the others were leaden and solemn. Seranis had shown Cley their art, and it had been cloaked with images of decay. Cley knew in her bones that this was a fashion, even if shaped by the weight of drowsy centuries, not a rule of nature. Entropy increased, surely, and would doom even the glowing stars. But without the sun's abundance no light would have kindled life. The biota were like skilled accountants, living on the flow of energy, paying all required taxes but never neglecting a loophole. Burning fat in Cley's blood generated entropy, but she managed to excrete entropy even faster in waste heat and waste matter—a miraculous, improbable, but perfectly legal dodging of the second law of thermodynamics.

  She, like whole planets, shed excrement and pollution. But the pollution of one was the meat of another, and she was beginning to see that this truth worked on the interplanetary scale. Surely it worked a persistent magic in Leviathan, and would soon enough on Earth. The Supras had troubled her because they still resonated with the bleak, fixed compass of Diaspar. Alvin did not know life, that spark which hangs between two eternities. In a deep sense the Supras were immortal but not alive.

  She banished these thoughts with a shiver. They trekked through the light gravity of this inner vault, eating berries that swung from animal-snagging palm trees. The sharp fronds could slice off an arm, but Seeker showed her how to confuse the tree's ropy reflexes long enough to snatch berries. They hiked for two days along a broad beach. Seeker catching the yellow fish that thronged the lake. Through clouds Cley could see the lake curling over their heads, kilometers away, describing the vast curve of a rotating cylinder.

  "Why do we keep moving so much?" Cley asked when Seeker marched resolutely on despite gathering gloom. Blades of sunlight ebbed and flowed in the huge cylindrical vault like tides of light.

  "We hide among life."

  "You figure the Supras're still looking for me?"

  "They have gone."

  "Your own mysterious wisdom tells you that?"

  Seeker showed its sparkling teeth, recently cleaned by steaks of yellow fish. "The Supras continue outward."

  "Great. Let's go back to Leviathan's skin, then. I liked the view."

  Actually she wanted to search for the Captain. She had glimpsed humans near the transparent blisters and each time they had seemed to evaporate into the humid jungle before she could pursue.

  Seeker did not comment on her desire to find humans and would not help track them, though she suspected it could sense the smallest animals which swung or padded through the layers of green. For three days they worked their way along these lakes, stopping only to swim and surf. This zone of Leviathan was spinning, yielding curious spiral waves in the lake that worked up and down the shore.

  Two more days, by Cley's inner clock, brought them to the skin. Again Cley could not sense when they left the region of spin-gravity. Fogs had hampered their way, blowing into the Leviathan's recesses, bringing moisture along the paths of the great blades of reflected sunlight that plunged along wide shafts.

  Seeker taught her one of its favorite games. They perched in one of the translucent bubbles in Leviathan's outer reaches, waiting. In the utter vacuum outside strange forms glided and worked. Shelled things like abalone attached themselves to Leviathan's skin. Sometimes they mistakenly triggered a reflex that made the slick skin double-fold inward. When one slipped inside. Seeker would crack it open between its hard-soled feet and gulp the shell's inhabitant with lip-smacking relish.

  Long, black creatures crawled over Leviathan, grazing on the photosynthetic mats which grew everywhere. Cley could see these dark algae mottling the carbuncled skin, occasionally puflSng out spores. The grazers slurped up the brown goo and moved on, the cattle of the skies.

  Seeker tried to entice one close to the translucent layer, whirling and grimacing to attract its attention. The vacuum cow turned its slitted dark eyes toward this display. Bovine curiosity brought it closer. Seeker grabbed for it, stretching the tough, waxy wall with its hands and feet. It managed to hang on to the grazer through the thin skin. Grunting and growhng, Seeker was strong enough to pluck the strugghng cow inward against the atmospheric pressure pushing the envelope out.

  For a moment Cley thought Seeker would manage to drag the grazer far enough in to trigger the folding instability and pluck it through. Seeker yelped with tenor joy. But then the vacuum cow spurted steam, wriggled, and jetted away.

  Seeker gnashed its teeth. "Devilish things."

  "Y
eah, looked appetizing."

  "They are a great delicacy," Seeker said.

  "Pretty resistant, though."

  When Clay stopped laughing at the expression on Seeker's face she glanced to the side—and was startled to find standing there a human form. But only a form, for this was like nothing she had ever seen.

  The face worked with expression, frowns and smiles and wild flaring eyes, all fidgeting and dissolving. The thing seemed demented. Then she saw that she had been imposing her own need to find expression, impose order. In fact the skittering storms rippled and fought all through the body. Colors and shapes were but passing approximations.

  The form took a tentative step toward Cley. She bit her lip. The body jiggled and warped like a bad image projected on a wobbly screen. But this was no illusion. Its lumpy foot brushed aside a stem as it took another step. The fidgeting skin seemed like a mulatto wash that blurred and shifted as the body moved.

  She realized that she could see through the thing. Plants behind it appeared as flickering images. She heard a slight thrumming as it raised an arm with one smooth unnatural motion, not the hinged pull of muscles at the pivots of shoulder and elbow.

  "Aurrouugh," it said, a sound like stones rattling in a jug.

  "It is imitating you, as it did before," Seeker said.

  "What is it?"

  "The Captain."

  "But—it's—"

  "Not all of the Captain, of course."

  "What does he—does it—want?"

  "I do not know. Often it manifests itself in the form of a new passenger, as a kind of politeness. To learn something it cannot otherwise know."

  The shape said, "Yooou waaanteed by maaaany."

  Cley pursed her lips. "Yes, many want to find me."

  "Yooou musssst lee—vah."

  "I, I can't leave. And why should I?"

  "Daaaanger. To meee."

  "You? What are you?"

  The shape stretched its arms up to encompass all the surrounding growth. Its arms ended in stumps, though momentarily a finger or two would sprout at the ends, flutter, and then ease back into the constant flow of the body.

  "Everything? You're everything?" Cley asked.

  "Wooorld."

  Seeker said, "It is the Leviathan. This composite intelligence directs its many parts and lesser minds."

  Cley gaped. "Every part of it adds to its intelligence?"

  "Alvin thought the Phylum Myriasoma was extinct," Seeker said. "He would be happy to see that he is wrong yet again."

  Cley smiled despite her tingling fear. "Supras don't like news like that."

  As she watched, the Captain's legs dissolved into a swarm of bits. Each was the size of a thumb and swam in the air with stubby wings. The Captain was an assembly that moved incessantly, each flyer brushing the other but capable of flitting away at any moment. The individual members looked like a bizarre mixture of bird and insect. Each had four eyes, two on opposite sides of their cylindrical bodies and one each at top and bottom.

  Cley heard the Captain then in her mind. Ihe thrumming whisper of wings she had heard was echoed by a soft flurry of thoughts in her mind.

  You are a danger to me.

  "You? The ship?"

  I am the world.

  And so it must seem to this thing, she reahzed. It somehow governed the immense complexity of the Leviathan and at some level must be the Leviathan, its mind instead of merely its brain. Yet each moment a flying thumb shot away on some mission and others came to merge into the standing, rippling cloud. Beneath its clear message she felt the buzzing of quicksilver thought, the infinitude of transactions the Leviathan must make to keep so vast an enterprise going. It was as though she could listen to the individual negotiations between her own blood cells and the walls of her veins, the acids of her stomach, the sour biles of her liver.

  Cley thought precisely, slowly. How can you be self-aware? You change all the time.

  The shape let its right arm fall off, scattering into clumps that then departed on new tasks. I do not need to feel myself intact, as you do.

  So how do I know who's talking? Cley countered.

  The Captain answered, I speak for the moment. A little while later I shall speak for that time.

  Cley glanced at Seeker but it was watching with only distant interest. She thought. Will that be the same you?

  How could you tell? Or I? I always find that your kind of intelligence is obsessed with knowing what you are.

  Cley smiled. Seems a reasonable question.

  Not reasonable. Reason cannot tell you deep things.

  Cley watched as the shape gradually decomposed into an oblong cloud of the thumb-things. It had made its polite gesture and now relaxed into a wobbly sphere, perhaps to bring its individual elements closer while lowering its surface area. Are you afraid of me? she asked impishly.

  My parts know fear. Hunger and desire, as well. They are a species, like you. But I am another kind of being, and can elude attack by dispersing. I do not know fear for myself but I do know caution. I cannot die but I can be hurt.

  Cley thought of the honeybees she had tended in the forest— satisfying, sweaty labor that now seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Bees had fewer than ten thousand neurons, she knew, yet did complex tasks. How much more intelligent would be a single arm of this cloud-Captain, when its thumb-things united to merge their minds?

  Not hurt by anybody like me, I assume?

  The swarm churned. Yes. I am not vulnerable to destruction of special parts, as are you. Merely by taking away your head, for example, I could leach life from you, rob you of all you know. But each part of me contains some of my intelligence and feels what a part of the world feels.

  Cley felt suddenly the strangeness of this thing hanging before her, bulging and working with sluggish patience as it pondered the Leviathan's intricacies. Another phylum? No, something more— another kingdom of life, a development beyond beings forever separated into inevitable loneliness. In a way she envied it. Each thumb-flyer knew the press of competition, of hunger and longing, but the composite would rise above that raw turbulence, into realms she could not even guess. She glanced at Seeker again and saw that its expression was not of indifference, but of reverence. Seeker had not wanted her to seek the Captain because it was, even for Seeker, a holy being.

  I speak to you now because the world cannot tolerate you, the Captain sent.

  How come you ran away before? Cley asked.

  I needed time to speak to my brothers.

  Other Leviathans? As she framed the thought the Captain's answer came: Other worlds.

  Was there something beyond Leviathans? Cley started to ask but the Captain said, I now understand many recent events and your connection with them. There is an entity called the Mad Mind and it searches for you.

  I know.

  Then know this —

  In a flooded single moment a torrent of sensations, ideas, and conclusions forked through her. She had for an instant the perception of what the mind before her was truly like. The layers of its logic were translucent, so that every fact shone through to illuminate the lacing of concepts on another level. And that light in turn refracted through the lattice of mind, shedding its fitful glow on assumptions lying beneath.

  This was thought without the constraint of the staged human brains. That a property had emerged in the billion years since the era of Ur-humans and now showed the limitations of evolution's blind methods. Rapid selection pressure operated on what already existed, adding capability to minds rather than snipping away parts which worked imperfectly. The human brain was always retrofitted, and showed its origins in its cumbersome workings. The Captain had arisen from a different mechanism.

  But this realization was only a filament tossing on the surge that swamped her. She sagged with the weight of what the Captain had given her, stunned as though by a blow. She was dimly conscious of Seeker leaping forward to cradle her. Then the air clouded with ebony striations and she felt hers
elf dwindling beneath a great dark weight.

  31

  "You can speak it?" Seeker asked, its tilted chin and rippling amber fur patterns showing concern.

  "I, I think so." Cley had slept for many hours. When she revived, Seeker had brought her a banquet of berries and fruits and thick, meaty leaves. Now she tried to explain what she had sensed in the brief collision of minds. Like Seranis, the Captain sent information faster and at greater depth than Cley could handle.

  "But didn't you feel it, too?" she asked.

  "I do not have your talent."

  "What did the Captain do after I fainted?"

  "Scattered like a bird swarm into which a hunter has fired a shot."

  "Huh. Maybe it didn't know how to tell me without overloading me.

  "Perhaps. I have seen Captains before. This was different. Ah—"

  Seeker snagged a ratlike creature which was passing and bit off its fat tail. The rat squealed and hissed and Seeker put it gently back down. As the rat scampered away Seeker munched on the tail. "A delicacy," it explained. "They grow tasty tails so that the rest of them is let go."

  "It'll live?"

  "Within days it will sport another luscious tail." Seeker smacked its lips at a morsel, holding out the last to Cley.

  "No rat's ass for me, thanks. You were saying something about the Captain?"

  "It was odd."

  "How?"

  "I have never seen one worried before."

  Cley bit her Up, memories stirring. She had felt fihgrees of the Captain's anxiety. Already the sharp, vibrant images were trickling away. She suspected that her kind of intelligence was simply unable to file and categorize the massive infusion she had received, and so was sloughing it off.

  "The Supras it could deal with," she said. "It's afraid of the Mad Mind, though."

  Seeker nodded. "The Mind has fully arrived, then."