2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [68]
There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone homes that Nature had given them, and which doomed them to inevitable death. They would replace their natural bodies as they wore out — or perhaps even before that — by constructions of metal and plastic, and would thus achieve immortality. The brain might linger for a little while as the last remnant of the organic body, directing its mechanical limbs and observing the universe through its electronic senses — senses far finer and subtler than those that blind evolution could ever develop.
Even on Earth, the first steps in this direction had been taken. There were millions of men, doomed in earlier ages, who now lived active and happy lives thanks to artificial limbs, kidneys, lungs, and hearts. To this process there could be only one conclusion — however far off it might be.
And eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis…
But was even this the end? A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.”
And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.
Chapter 33
Ambassador
During the last three months, David Bowman had adapted himself so completely to his solitary way of life that he found it hard to remember any other existence. He had passed beyond despair and beyond hope, and had settled down to a largely automatic routine, punctuated by occasional crises as one or other of Discovery’s systems showed signs of malfunctioning.
But he had not passed beyond curiosity, and sometimes the thought of the goal toward which he was driving filled him with a sense of exaltation — and a feeling of power. Not only was he the representative of the entire human race, but his actions during the next few weeks might determine its very future. In the whole of history, there had never been a situation quite like this. He was an Ambassador Extraordinary — Plenipotentiary — for all mankind.
That knowledge helped him in many subtle ways. He kept himself neat and tidy; no matter how tired he became, he never skipped a shave. Mission Control, he knew, was watching him closely for the first signs of any abnormal behavior; he was determined that it should watch in vain — at least, for any serious symptoms.
Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship’s sound system running at almost painful loudness.
At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays — especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare — or poetry readings from Discovery’s enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.
So he switched to opera — usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely