2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [81]
The horizon was growing brighter, its color changing from gloomy red to yellow to blue to blistering violet. The White Dwarf was coming up over the horizon, dragging its tidal wave of star-stuff behind it.
Bowman shielded his eyes from the intolerable glare of the little sun, and focused on the troubled starscape which its gravitational field was sucking skyward. Once he had seen a waterspout moving across the face of the Caribbean; this tower of flame had almost the same shape. Only the scale was slightly different, for at its base, the column was probably wider than the planet Earth.
And then, immediately beneath him, Bowman noticed something which was surely new, since he could hardly have overlooked it if it had been there before. Moving across the ocean of glowing gas were myriads of bright beads; they shone with a pearly light which waxed and waned in a period of a few seconds. And they were all traveling in the same direction, like salmon moving upstream; sometimes they weaved back and forth so that their paths intertwined, but they never touched.
There were thousands of them, and the longer Bowman stared, the more convinced he became that their motion was purposeful. They were too far away for him to make out any details of their structure; that he could see them at all in this colossal panorama meant that they must be scores — perhaps hundreds — of miles across. If they were organized entities, they were leviathans indeed, built to match the scale of the world they inhabited.
Perhaps they were only clouds of plasma, given temporary stability by some odd combination of natural forces — like the short-lived spheres of ball-lightning that still puzzled terrestrial scientists. That was an easy, and perhaps soothing, explanation; but as Bowman looked down upon that star-wide streaming, he could not really believe it. Those glittering nodes of light knew where they were going; they were deliberately converging upon the pillar of fire raised by the White Dwarf as it orbited overhead.
Bowman stared once more at that ascending column, now marching along the horizon beneath the tiny, massive star that ruled it. Could it be pure imagination — or were there patches of brighter luminosity creeping up that great geyser of gas, as if myriads of shining sparks had combined into whole continents of phosphorescence?
The idea was almost beyond fantasy, but perhaps he was watching nothing less than a migration from star to star, across a bridge of fire. Whether it was a movement of mindless, cosmic beasts driven across space by some lemming-like urge, or a vast concourse of intelligent entities, he would probably never know.
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.
Chapter 44
Reception
The pillar of fire was marching over the edge of the sun, like a storm passing beyond the horizon. The scurrying flecks of light no longer moved across the redly glowing starscape still thousands of miles below. Inside his space pod, protected from an environment that could annihilate him within a millisecond, David Bowman awaited whatever had been prepared.
The White Dwarf was sinking fast as it hurtled along its orbit; presently it touched the horizon, set it aflame, and disappeared. A false twilight fell upon the inferno beneath, and in the sudden change of illumination Bowman became aware that something was happening in the space around him.
The world of the red sun seemed to ripple, as if he were looking at it through running water. For a moment he wondered if this was some refractive effect, perhaps caused by the passage of an unusually violent shock wave through the tortured atmosphere in which he was immersed.
The light was fading; it seemed that a second twilight was about to fall. Involuntarily, Bowman looked