2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [69]
Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.
And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.
Even from its present ten million miles, Saturn already appeared larger than the Moon as seen from Earth. To the naked eye it was a glorious spectacle; through the telescope, it was unbelievable.
The body of the planet might have been mistaken for Jupiter in one of his quieter moods. There were the same bands of cloud — though paler and less distinct than on that slightly larger world — and the same continent-sized disturbances moving slowly across the atmosphere. However, there was one striking difference between the two planets; even at a glance, it was obvious that Saturn was not spherical. It was so flattened at the poles that it sometimes gave the impression of slight deformity.
But the glory of the rings continually drew Bowman’s eye away from the planet; in their complexity of detail, and delicacy of shading, they were a universe in themselves. In addition to the great main gap between the inner and outer rings, there were at least fifty other subdivisions or boundaries, where there were distinct changes in the brightness of the planet’s gigantic halo. It was as if Saturn was surrounded by scores of concentric hoops, all touching each other, all so flat that they might have been cut from the thinnest possible paper. The system of the rings looked like some delicate work of art, or a fragile toy to be admired but never touched. By no effort of the will could Bowman really appreciate its true scale, and convince himself that the whole planet Earth, if set down here, would look like a ball bearing rolling round the rim of a dinner plate.
Sometimes a star would drift behind the rings, losing only a little of its brilliancy as it did so. It would continue to shine through their translucent material — though often it would twinkle slightly as some larger fragment of orbiting debris eclipsed it.
For the rings, as had been known since the nineteenth century, were not solid: that was a mechanical impossibility. They consisted of countless myriads of fragments — perhaps the remains of a moon that had come too close and had been torn to pieces by the great planet’s tidal pull. Whatever their origin, the human race was fortunate to have seen such a wonder; it could exist for only a brief moment of time in the history of the Solar System.
As long ago as 1945, a British astronomer had pointed out that the rings were ephemeral; gravitational forces were at work which would soon destroy them. Taking this argument backward in time, it therefore followed that they had been created only recently — a mere two or three million years ago.
But no one had ever given the slightest thought to the curious coincidence that the rings of Saturn had been born at the same time as the human race.
Chapter 34
The Orbiting Ice
Discovery was now deep into the wide-ranging system of moons, and the great planet itself was less than a day ahead. The ship had long since passed the boundary set by outermost Phoebe, moving backward in a wildly eccentric orbit eight million miles from its primary. Ahead of it now lay Japetus, Hyperion, Titan, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus, Mimas, Janus — and the rings themselves. All the satellites showed a maze of surface detail in the telescope, and Bowman had relayed back to Earth as many photographs as he could take. Titan alone — three thousand miles in diameter, and as large as the planet Mercury — would occupy a survey team for months; he could give it, and all