The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [120]
Alvin fell silent, staring into a future he had shaped but which he might never see. While Man was rebuilding his world, this ship would be crossing the darkness between the Galaxies, and in thousands of years to come it would return. Perhaps he would still be here to meet it, but if not, he was well content.
‘I think you are wise,’ said Jeserac. Then, for the last time, the echo of an ancient fear rose up to plague him. ‘But suppose,’ he added, ‘the ship makes contact with something we do not wish to meet …’ His voice faded away as he recognised the source of his anxiety and he gave a wry, self-deprecatory smile that banished the last ghost of the Invaders.
‘You forget,’ said Alvin, taking him more seriously than he expected, ‘that we will soon have Vanamonde to help us. We don’t know what powers he possesses, but everyone in Lys seems to think they are potentially unlimited. Isn’t that so, Hilvar?’
Hilvar did not reply at once. It was true that Vanamonde was the other great enigma, the question-mark that would always lie across the future of humanity while it remained on Earth. Already, it seemed certain, Vanamonde’s evolution towards self-consciousness had been accelerated by his contact with the philosophers of Lys. They had great hopes of future co-operation with the child-like supermind, believing that they could foreshorten the aeons which its natural development would require.
‘I am not sure,’ confessed Hilvar. ‘Somehow, I don’t think that we should expect too much from Vanamonde. We can help him now, but we will be only a brief incident in his total life-span. I don’t think that his ultimate destiny has anything to do with ours.’
Alvin looked at him in surprise.
‘Why do you feel that?’ he asked.
‘I can’t explain it,’ said Hilvar. ‘It’s just an intuition.’ He could have added more, but he kept his silence. These matters were not capable of communication, and though Alvin would not laugh at his dream, he did not care to discuss it even with his friend.
It was more than a dream, he was sure of that, and it would haunt him for ever. Somehow it had leaked into his mind during that indescribably and unsharable contact he had had with Vanamonde. Did Vanamonde himself know what his lonely destiny must be?
One day the energies of the Black Sun would fail and it would release its prisoner. And then, at the end of the Universe, as Time itself was faltering to a stop, Vanamonde and the Mad Mind must meet each other among the corpses of the stars.
That conflict might ring down the curtain on Creation itself. Yet it was a conflict which had nothing to do with Man, and whose outcome he would never know.…
‘Look!’ said Alvin suddenly. ‘This is what I wanted to show you. Do you understand what it means?’
The ship was now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was a perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Jeserac and Hilvar could see at one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect, and so striking, that they were to remember this moment all their lives.
In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.
London, September 1954—
S.S. Himalaya—
Sydney, March 1955
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Arthur C. Clarke 1956
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The right of Arthur C. Clarke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2001 by
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This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
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