2010: Odyssey Two o-2
Page 25
Epilogue: 20,001
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
Only during the last few generations have the Europans ventured into the Farside, beyond the light and warmth of their never-setting sun, into the wilderness where the ice that once covered all their world may still be found. And even fewer have remained there to face the brief and fearful night that comes, when the brilliant but powerless Cold Sun sinks below the horizon.
Yet already, those few hardy explorers have discovered that the Universe around them is stranger than they ever imagined. The sensitive eyes they developed in the dim oceans still serve them well; they can see the stars and the other bodies moving in their sky. They have begun to lay the foundations of astronomy, and some daring thinkers have, even surmised that the great world of Europa is not the whole of creation.
Very soon after they had emerged from the ocean, during the explosively swift evolution forced upon them by the melting of the ice, they had realized that the objects in the sky fell into three distinct classes. Most important, of course, was the sun. Some legends – though few took them seriously – claimed that it had not always been there, but had appeared suddenly, heralding a brief, cataclysmic age of transformation, when much of Europa's teeming life had been destroyed. If that was indeed true, it was a small price to pay for the benefits that poured down from the tiny, inexhaustible source of energy that hung unmoving in the sky.
Perhaps the Cold Sun was its distant brother, banished for some crime and condemned to march forever around the vault of heaven. It was of no importance except to those peculiar Europans who were always asking questions about matters that all sensible folk took for granted.
Still, it must be admitted that those cranks had made some interesting discoveries during their excursions into the darkness of Farside. They claimed – though this was hard to believe – that the whole sky was sprinkled with uncountable myriads of tiny lights, even smaller and feebler than the Cold Sun. They varied greatly in brilliance; and though they rose and set, they never moved from their fixed positions.
Against this background, there were three objects that did move, apparently obeying complex laws that no one had yet been able to fathom. And unlike all the others in the sky, they were quite large – though both shape and size varied continually. Sometimes they were disks, sometimes half-circles, sometimes slim crescents. They were obviously closer than all the other bodies in the Universe, for their surfaces showed an immense wealth of complex and ever-changing detail.
The theory that they were indeed other worlds had at last been accepted – though no one except a few fanatics believed that they could be anything like as large, or as important, as Europa. One lay toward the Sun, and was in a constant state of turmoil. On its nightside could be seen the glow of great fires – a phenomenon still beyond the understanding of the Europans, for their atmosphere, as yet, contains no oxygen. And sometimes vast explosions hurl clouds of debris up from the surface; if the sunward globe is indeed a world, it must be a very unpleasant place to live. Perhaps even worse than the nightside of Europa.
The two outer, and more distant, spheres seem to be much less violent places, yet in some ways they are even more mysterious. When darkness falls upon their surfaces, they too show patches of light, but these are very different from the swiftly changing fires of the turbulent inner world. They burn with an almost steady brilliance, and are concentrated in a few small areas – though over the generations, these areas have grown, and multiplied.
But strangest of all are the lights, fierce as tiny suns, that can often be observed moving across the darkness between these other worlds. Once, recalling the bioluminescence of their own seas, some Europans had speculated that these might indeed be living creatures; but their intensity makes that almost incredible. Nevertheless, more and more thinkers believe that these lights – the fixed patterns, and moving suns – must be some strange manifestation of life.
Against this, however, there is one very potent argument. If they are living things, why do they never come to Europa?
Yet there are legends. Thousands of generations ago, soon after the conquest of the land, it is said that some of those lights came very close indeed – but they always exploded in sky-filling blasts that far outshone the Sun. And strange, hard metals rained down upon the land; some of them are still worshipped to this day.
None is as holy, though, as the huge, black monolith that stands on the frontier of eternal day, one side forever turned to the unmoving Sun, the other facing into the land of night. Ten times the height of the tallest Europan – even when he raises his tendrils to the fullest extent – it is the very symbol of mystery and unattainability. For it has never been touched; it can only be worshipped from afar. Around it lies the Circle of Power, which repels all who try to approach.
It is that same power, many believe, that keeps at bay those moving lights in the sky. If it ever fails, they will descend upon the virgin continents and shrinking seas of Europa, and their purpose will be revealed at last.
The Europans would be surprised to know with what intensity and baffled wonder that black monolith is also studied by the minds behind those moving lights. For centuries now their automatic probes have made a cautious descent from orbit – always with the same disastrous result. For until the time is ripe, the monolith will permit no contact.
When that time comes – when, perhaps, the Europans have invented radio and discovered the messages continually bombarding them from so close at hand – the monolith may change its strategy. It may – or it may not – choose to release the entities who slumber within it, so that they can bridge the gulf between the Europans and the race to which they once held allegiance.
And it may be that no such bridge is possible, and that two such alien forms of consciousness can never coexist. If this is so, then only one of them can inherit the Solar System.
Which it will be, not even the Gods know – yet.
Acknowledgements
My first thanks, of course, must go to Stanley Kubrick, who a rather long time ago wrote to ask if I had any ideas for the 'proverbial good science-fiction movie'.
Next, my appreciation to my friend and agent (the two are not always synonymous) Scott Meredith, for perceiving that a ten-page movie outline I sent him as an intellectual exercise had rather wider possibilities, and that I owed it to posterity, etc., etc.
Other thanks are due to:
Señor Jorge Luiz Calife of Rio de Janeiro, for a letter which started me thinking seriously about a possible sequel (after I'd said for years that one was clearly impossible).
Dr Bruce Murray, past Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, and Dr Frank Jordan, also of JPL, for computing the Lagrange-1 position in the Io-Jupiter system. Oddly enough, I had made identical calculations thirty-four years earlier for the colinear Earth-Moon Lagrange points ('Stationary Orbits', Journal of the British Astronomical Association, December 1947) but I no longer trust my ability to solve quintic equations, even with the help of HAL, Jr., my trusty H/P 91OOA.
New American Library and Hutchinson & Co., publishers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for permission to use the material in Chapter 51 (Chapter 37 of 2001: A Space Odyssey) and also quotations in Chapters 30 and 40.
General Potter, US Army Corps of Engineers, for finding time in his busy schedule to show me around EPCOT in 1969 – when it was only a few large holes in the ground.
Wendell Solomons, for help with Russian (and Russlish).
Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and the incomparable John Williams, for inspiration whenever it was needed.
C. P. Cavafy for 'Waiting for the Barbarians'.
While writing this book, I discovered that the concept of refuelling on Europa had been discussed in a paper, 'Outer planet satellite return missio
ns using in situ propellant production', by Ash, Stancati, Niehoff, and Cuda (Acta Astronautica VIII, 5-6, May-June 1981).
The idea of automatically exponentiating systems (von Neumann machines) for extraterrestrial mining has been seriously developed by von Tiesenhausen and Darbro at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (see 'Self-Replicating Systems' – NASA Technical Memorandum 78304). If anyone doubts the power of such systems to cope with Jupiter, I refer them to the study showing how self-replicating factories could cut production time for a solar power collector from 60,000 years to a mere twenty.
The startling idea that gas giants might have diamond cores has been seriously put forward by M. Ross and F. Ree of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, University of California, for the cases of Uranus and Neptune. It seems to me that anything they can do, Jupiter could do better. De Beers shareholders, please note.
For more details on the aerial life forms that might exist in the Jovian atmosphere, see my story 'A Meeting With Medusa' (in The Wind From the Sun). Such creatures have been beautifully depicted by Adolf Schaller in Part 2 of Carl Sagan's Cosmos ('One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue'), both book and TV series.
The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa, beneath ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian tidal forces that heat Io, was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland in the magazine Star and Sky ('The Europa Enigma', January 1980). This quite brilliant concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably NASA's Institute of Space Studies' Dr Robert Jastrow), and may provide one of the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission.
And finally: Valerie and Hector, for providing the life-support system; Cherene, for punctuating every chapter with sticky kisses; Steve, for being here.
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA JULY 1981-MARCH 1982
This book was written on an Archives III microcomputer with Word Star software and sent from Colombo to New York on one five-inch diskette. Last-minute corrections were transmitted through the Padukka Earth Station and the Indian Ocean Intelsat V.
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