The Lost Worlds of 2001

by Arthur C. Clarke

But here was no sign of a nose; even more astonishing, there was no mouth. Apart from those two rather beautiful eyes, placed far apart on a slightly oval head whose long axis was not vertical, but horizontal, the face was quite featureless.

  The general impression conveyed by the five entities, for all their weirdness, was not unattractive. The lovely golden-bronze color of the skin-if it was skin-helped to make them acceptable to human eyes. Bowman had been prepared for far worse-indeed, he had already seen it. He was sure that he would have no difficulty in adapting to these creatures, and perhaps becoming so accustomed to them that after a while the sight of another human being would be a shock.

  Now what? he asked himself. Shall I wait for them to move, or are they waiting for me? They certainly seemed in no hurry, and might have been statues for all the activity they had shown so far.

  Suddenly, there was a curious disturbance around the tallest of the five hominids. The glittering substance covering its left shoulder became humped and puckered; presently Bowman realized that some small, living creature was resting there. After a few ripples, the thing launched itself into the air, waving and fluttering like a tiny flying carpet, or a handkerchief blown before a breeze. It changed color as it flew; when it started, it was indistinguishable from the glittering phosphorescence on which it had been lying, but within seconds it became a gorgeous tapestry of reds and golds. Though it appeared too small, and moved too erratically, to be an intelligent being, it seemed to know where it was going, and presently it fluttered down onto the plastic dome of the capsule. Even at this close range, as he watched it crawling on the other side of his window, Bowman could not classify it in any branch of the known animal kingdom; it was merely an undulating sheet of color.

  He continued to wait, and presently something strange happened to the capsule. The instruments on the little control board went suddenly crazy, the external manipulators flexed themselves as if testing their strength, and there was even a brief burst of power from the jets. It was as if a ghost had entered the machine, tested its operation, and, satisfied that it had discovered all that there was to know, abandoned it like a worn-out toy. But before it went, it operated one last circuit.

  The little flying carpet must have known what was coming, for it abruptly took off and fluttered a few feet away. Seconds later, the emergency hatch blew out, and for the first time Bowman heard the sounds of this alien world.

  Perhaps even the familiar noises of Earth would have seemed unreal, and hard to recognize, after his months in the artificial universe of Discovery. But there was one sound that no man could ever forget, as long as he lived it was the distant murmur of the sea-the eternal dialog between mind and wave.

  It came from all around him-from the ocean that was two or three miles below, and which covered all this strange planet. That ocean, Bowman realized, must be very shallow; even if there was no dry land, there must be many reefs almost breaking the surface, to produce that endless susurration. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that he was standing beside one of the far-off seas of Earth.

  That was not the only sound, though it was the most prominent. There was also the faint sighing of the wind through the alien trees-and, from time to time, a trio of descending bell-like notes. It came from somewhere in the depths of the little wood that covered so much of this flying island; though it was strikingly like the call of a bird, it seemed to have altogether too much power behind it for an avian origin.

  Bowman sniffed cautiously at the air. He felt certain that these creatures would not have exposed him to their atmosphere unless they knew that he could breathe it. To his surprise, he could detect no change whatsoever; the air that flowed into his lungs was all too familiar. He could recognize the capsule's entire spectrum of odors from ozone through oil to sweat and pine-scented disinfectant.

  Then he realized that he was still surrounded by an almost invisible envelope, like the one that had protected him on his journey. He wondered if it would permit him to leave the capsule, he had been offered the invitation and was only too glad to accept it, after all these hours in his cramped little world. He unstrapped himself, climbed out of the pod, and stretched his limbs with relief, while the tiny flying carpet fluttered overhead, circling around and around with obvious excitement.

  Gravity seemed absolutely normal. He walked once around the capsule, getting the stiffness out of his limbs and enjoying this now almost forgotten mode of locomotion; the last time he had walked on an ordinary horizontal surface was a year ago, and unknown trillions of miles away. He felt like an invalid who had just been allowed out of bed after a long illness-reveling in his regained powers, but careful not to overexert them.

  The faintly glimmering envelope, permeable to sounds but not to air, remained always a few feet away, changing its shape to accommodate him. It was as if he were inside a giant soap bubble, whose surface he could never quite reach, or even precisely locate. Presumably this was part of the decontamination procedure, and he wondered if he was a greater danger to this world than it was to him.

  He looked questioningly toward the creatures still standing under the trees, and then, for the first time, one of them moved. It made a simple and unmistakable gesture, with the slowness of a dream, and Bowman realized that his time scale was not the same as theirs. Or perhaps they did not feel the need for haste; perhaps they had eternity at their command.

  The tallest of the five hominids raised its right arm, and the network of glowing threads fell away to reveal a supple golden tube that divided in a rosette of eight symmetrically arranged tendrils, about a foot in length. It was exactly as if the creature's arm terminated in a sea anemone, and Bowman recalled, rather wryly, the arguments he had heard on Earth proving the universality of the hand-or something very much like it. In one of those moments of insight that come when one is confronted with the obvious, he realized where those arguments had gone hopelessly astray.

  The human hand was a superb piece of engineering- but it was compromise. It was still designed to deal with heavy loads, to apply forces and pressures-to do mechanical work. Yet more and more, what was needed was precision and delicacy. Even for Man, the time of breaking branches and chipping flints had long since passed, the time of touching buttons and stroking keyboards had come.

  Here, then, was the end of the hand's evolution. As he looked at those slim tendrils, Bowman was acutely conscious of his own stubby, clumsy fingers, and found himself involuntarily trying to conceal them by clenching his fist.

  Then he realized that the creature was pointing, and he turned his head in the direction that it indicated. To his alarm and surprise, it seemed to be ordering him off the island-asking him to step over the edge of this floating rock, to fall down to the endless ocean miles below.

  As if to reinforce this command, the little flying carpet was fluttering ahead of him, leading the way to the brink of the abyss. It was all very strange, but he still could not believe that any harm was intended to him. He followed his chromatic guide to the edge of the island, and peered cautiously over the side.

  Before and below him was a curving rocky slope, rapidly becoming as steep as the roof of a house, then plunging completely out of sight. Down its face, and starting from a point only a few yards away from his feet, was a wide road of smooth gray material, following the curve of the rock until it too disappeared from view. It had an unmistakable impression of freshness, as if it had just been cut in the flanks of this aerial world.

  Was this some kind of ordeal or test? Bowman asked himself. But that seemed altogether too naive and primitive a concept for a place like this. Then he remembered that he was in the presence of creatures who had mastered gravity; perhaps this downward-plunging road was not what it seemed.

  He took a few gingerly steps along it, and the flying carpet fluttered encouragingly ahead. While he kept his eyes fixed on the pavement, he felt quite secure; so he took a dozen more paces.

  He knew that the road was curving downward, ever more and more st
eeply; yet his senses told him that it was still quite horizontal. But when he risked a glance backward along the way he had come, the path in that direction was unmistakably downhill. There was no question of it; gravity tilted as he walked around this little world; wherever he was, the pavement beneath him was always horizontal.

  He looked ahead-and was almost overcome by vertigo. For now it was the planet above which he was floating that had become crazy; as he walked down towards it, the ocean was a 45-degree slope running up the sky. With a great effort of will he ignored the illusion. After all, he was used to such things in space, Earth had looked like this, when he had been in dose orbit.

  But there was a fundamental difference. Then he had been weightless-there was no direction of gravity. Here there was gravity, and it defied common sense.

  He fixed his eyes on a point only a few yards ahead, and kept walking toward it. Now the trees and terraces on the upper part of the island had vanished completely, hidden by the curve of rock. Because he was looking at the ground, he almost ran into the building that barred his path.

  It seemed as new as the road, which led directly to a rectangular green door just the right size to admit a man. Apart from this entrance, the side turned toward him was quite featureless, some thirty feet wide and fifteen high. And beyond it, a now absolutely vertical wall of water running up and down the sky, was the face of the ocean.

  Somehow, he now found this easier to accept. Horizontal or vertical seas were all right; only the intermediate ones were hard on the nerves. But he did not wish to linger in this strange place for long, standing like a fly on a sheer wall of rock. His brain told him that the powers and forces operating here were not likely to experience any sudden failure; a civilization would hardly build homes in the sky unless it felt utterly secure. His emotions, however, were still those of the primitive jungle ape, afraid that the branch to which he was clinging would snap.

  His race had not yet made infallible machines, therefore, he could not really believe in their existence. The building ahead offered mental security, for it would shut out the view of that impossible sky.

  At the door itself, he paused for a moment, wondering if there was anything that he had left in the capsule, up on the summit of the island. No, there was nothing there that would help; indeed, all the resources of Earth could not aid him here, if the powers of this world were bent on his destruction. He hesitated no longer, but walked steadfastly toward the green door; and it opened silently as he approached.

  [In the next version (Chapters 40 to 42) Kubrick and I were getting close to our goal. We were still involved in fascinating, though dramatically irrelevant-not to say unfilmable-descriptions of extraterrestrial worlds. But we had begun to realize exactly what it was Bowman must meet, at the end of his journey....]

  OCEANA

  Not long afterward, he saw his first city. For some time the color of the ocean had been changing to a lighter hue, as if it was sloping up toward a continental shelf; and presently he was able to pick out markings on the seabed- including faint reticulations that might have been submerged highways. He thought he could see traffic moving along some of them.

  Then the land humped up out of the sea in a great circle about ten miles across, exactly like a Pacific atoll. The ring of land was encrusted with brightly colored buildings, none of them very large or tall, and spaced at wide intervals. Prom a distance the ring-city looked disappointingly ordinary, and there was nothing to tell that it was made by a race other than man. Apart from a few very slim towers supporting wide, circular disks at a considerable height above the ground, there were none of the architectural fantasies that Bowman had half expected. Then he realized that there were only a limited number of sensible ways of enclosing space, which were the same throughout the universe; and there were very few designs, sensible or otherwise, that some enterprising architect had not already tried out on Earth.

  However, the city had one strange characteristic: many of the buildings ran straight down into the sea, as if they had been built for amphibious creatures. There were no vehicles or aircraft, and Bowman was much too far away to glimpse any of the inhabitants.

  But he did see one piquant detail before the circular island passed out of sight. The central lagoon was dotted with small moving objects which, even from this great distance, were quite unmistakable. The last thing that Bowman had ever expected to find on a world of such transcendental science was a sailboat, and the friendly reassuring sight of all that wholly useless activity filled his heart with warmth.

  The sun, still framed within the arches of the rings, continued to sink; now it had almost reached the horizon. Fleeing from it, Discovery had come to the very edge of day-and, it appeared, to the edge of the sea, for the line dividing water from sky was no longer a smooth, unbroken curve. It was splintered into dozens of sawtoothed peaks, as if a range of mountains was rising above the curve of the planet.

  Yet these were no mountains, though they soared straight out of the sea to altitudes higher than the Himalayas. They were too regular and too symmetrical and their leaping towers and buttresses showed a total disregard for the structural laws that natural objects must obey. They marched on either side to north and to south, continuing out of sight as if they would meet again at the antipodes.

  It was a spectacle to steal away the breath, and as he looked at those approaching peaks, already touched with the hues of night, Bowman thought how strange it was that he had reached the first continental landmass at the precise moment of sunset. Then he remembered another odd coincidence-that the circular forest of the skyplanets had been at the exact center of the planet's illuminated disk, directly beneath the sun.

  Then the truth exploded suddenly in his mind. Ages ago this world had lost its rotation, and had come to rest with the same face always turned toward the double star around which it revolved. Now dawn and sunset stood together for eternity on the same unchanging meridian; along it these great peaks were the boundary markers between night and day, and forever faced the sun.

  Discovery had descended below the level of the highest peaks, and was traveling, quite slowly, parallel to them at a distance of several miles. No two of the artificial mountains were identical in design; some were plain and angular, being constructed from a few simple elements, while others were incredibly complex, like Gothic cathedrals or Cambodian temples magnified fifty or a hundred times. There was no indication of age, they could have been built yesterday, or a million years ago. Nor was there any hint of their purpose, or indication that they were occupied. They might have been cities, or machines, or monuments, or tombs-or merely the follies of some omnipotent architect. They did nothing but stand and face that eternal dawn.

  Now he could see, around the base of one of those approaching peaks, a glittering, crystalline fringe, as if intersecting sheets of glass were rising out of the ocean. Discovery was descending toward it; and Bowman saw that, at last, he was entering a city.

  That word was misleading, but he could think of no better one. His first impression was of emptiness and space; there were no packed, scurrying throngs of anxious commuters, no crowded roads and sidewalks. It was some time, indeed, before he could see any sign of life or movement at all.

  The ship was passing between vertical planes of some metallic substance that seemed to change its texture with the angle of view. At one moment it would be as flat and featureless as polished steel then it would become flooded with iridescent, rainbow colors, behaving like a giant diffraction grating. Some areas were transparent; and through these, Bowman first glimpsed one of the city's inhabitants.

  Ironically, yet not surprisingly, it was looking at him. Even on this world, thought Bowman, it could not be a common event for a two-hundred-foot-long alien space vehicle to go drifting past your window....

  The thing was either a robot, or a compound machine organism; it looked like an elegant metal crab, supported on four jointed legs. Each of those legs terminated in a small, fat wheel; presumably the
creature could walk or roll, whichever was more convenient. There was an ovoid body, into which various limbs were now retracted, and the whole was surmounted by a polyhedral head, each facet of which bore a deep-set lens.

  The body never moved, but the head rotated steadily to follow him as he passed by. Bowman tried to look into the room behind the creature, but he could see only a moving patchwork quilt of soft, pastel colors-whether a work of art, or a scientific experiment, he could not guess.

  A little later he saw another of these metal entities, but in quite a different environment. It was in the center of a small circular auditorium or amphitheater, which was flooded with some greenish foam to a depth of two or three feet. Rising out of the foam were little trees, like weeping willows or aspens, whose long, delicate leaves trembled continually, as if afflicted with ague. At the highest point of each stem was something that closely resembled an orchid; but it was an orchid with tiny, staring eyes, and fine tendrils that kept twisting and twining like nervous fingers. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that these were intelligent plants, talking to each other-or to the robot-in some complex sign language.

  Discovery was now drifting between walls of glass or metal that rose straight out of the sea, and immediately ahead was a fountain or waterspout that rose to a height of at least two hundred feet and then fell back into a huge circular moat that surrounded it like a halo. From this moat transparent tubes ran off in several directions, and as he approached, Bowman saw that this was not merely a piece of ornamental hydraulics; it was part of a sea-to-air transportation system.