2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [78]
Then he saw that he also was sinking down toward the mottled surface of the giant world, and that another of the rectangular chasms yawned immediately below. The empty sky closed above him, the clock crawled to rest, and once again his pod was falling between infinite ebon walls, toward another distant patch of stars. But now he was sure that he was not returning to the Solar System, and in a flash of insight that might have been wholly spurious, he knew what this thing must surely be.
It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy.
Chapter 42
The Alien Sky
Far ahead, the walls of the slot were becoming dimly visible once more, in the faint light diffusing downward from some still hidden source. And then the darkness was abruptly whipped away, as the tiny space pod hurtled upward into a sky ablaze with stars.
He was back in space as he knew it, but a single glance told him that he was light-centuries from Earth. He did not even attempt to find any of the familiar constellations that since the beginning of history had been the friends of man; perhaps none of the stars that now blazed around him had ever been seen by the unaided human eye.
Most of them were concentrated in a glowing belt, broken here and there with dark bands of obscuring cosmic dust, which completely circled the sky. It was like the Milky Way, but scores of times brighter; Bowman wondered if this was indeed his own galaxy, seen from a point much closer to its brilliant, crowded center.
He hoped that it was; then he would not be so far from home. But this, he realized at once, was a childish thought. He was so inconceivably remote from the Solar System that it made little difference whether he was in his own galaxy or the most distant one that any telescope had ever glimpsed.
He looked back to see the thing from which he was rising, and had another shock. Here was no giant, multifaceted world, nor any duplicate of Japetus. There was nothing — except an inky shadow against the stars, like a doorway opening from a darkened room into a still darker night. Even as he watched, that doorway closed. It did not recede from him; it slowly filled with stars, as if a rent in the fabric of space had been repaired. Then he was alone beneath the alien sky.
The space pod was slowly turning, and as it did so it brought fresh wonders into view. First there was a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, becoming more and more closely packed toward the center until its heart was a continuous glow of light. Its outer edges were ill-defined — a slowly thinning halo of suns that merged imperceptibly into the background of more distant stars.
This glorious apparition, Bowman knew, was a globular cluster. He was looking upon something that no human eye had ever seen, save as a smudge of light in the field of a telescope. He could not remember the distance to the nearest known cluster, but he was sure that there were none within a thousand light-years of the Solar System.
The pod continued its slow rotation, to disclose an even stranger sight — a huge red sun, many times larger than the Moon as seen from Earth. Bowman could look straight into its face without discomfort; judging by its color, it was no hotter than a glowing coal. Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow — incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun.
Dying? No — that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.