The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [62]
No one had ever known the full talents and functions of this machine. To some extent, indeed, it had become the Master’s alter ego; without it, the religion of the Great Ones would probably have collapsed after the Master’s death. Together they had roved among the star clouds on a zig-zag trail which led at last, certainly not by accident, back to the world from which the Master’s ancestors had sprung.
Entire libraries had been written about that saga, each work therein inspiring a host of commentaries until, by a kind of chain reaction, the original volumes were lost beneath mountains of exegesis and annotation. The Master had stopped at many worlds, and made disciples among many races. His personality must have been an immensely powerful one for it to have inspired humans and non-humans alike, and there was no doubt that a religion of such wide appeal must have contained much that was fine and noble. Probably the Master was the most successful—as he was also the last—of all mankind’s messiahs. None of his predecessors could have won so many converts nor had their teachings carried across such gulfs of time and space.
What those teachings were neither Alvin nor Hilvar could ever discover with any accuracy. The great polyp did its best to convey them, but many of the words it used were meaningless and it had a habit of repeating sentences or whole speeches with a kind of swift mechanical delivery which made them very hard to follow. After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on ascertainable facts.
The Master and a band of his most faithful followers had arrived on Earth in the days before the cities had passed away, and while the Port of Diaspar was still open to the stars. They must have come in ships of many kinds; the polyps, for example, in one filled with the waters of the sea which was their natural home. Whether the movement was well received on Earth was not certain; but at least it met no violent opposition, and after further wanderings it set up its final retreat among the forests and mountains of Lys.
At the close of his long life, the Master’s thoughts had turned once more towards the home from which he had been exiled, and he had asked his friends to carry him out into the open so that he could watch the stars. He had waited, his strength waning, until the culmination of the Seven Suns, and towards the end he babbled many things which were to inspire yet more libraries of interpretation in future ages. Again and again he spoke of the ‘Great Ones’ who had now left this universe of space and matter but who would surely one day return, and he charged his followers to remain to greet them when they came. Those were his last rational words. He was never again conscious of his surroundings, but just before the end he uttered one phrase that had come down the ages to haunt the minds of all who heard it: ‘It is lovely to watch the coloured shadows on the planets of eternal light.’ Then he died.
At the Master’s death, many of his followers broke away, but others remained faithful to his teachings, which they slowly elaborated through the ages. At first they believed that the Great Ones, whoever they were, would soon return, but that hope faded with the passing centuries. The story here grew very confused, and it seemed that truth and legend were inextricably intertwined. Alvin had only a vague picture of generations of fanatics, waiting for some great event which they did not understand to take place at some unknown future date.
The Great Ones never returned. Slowly the power of the movement failed as death and disillusion robbed it of its disciples. The short-lived human followers were the first to go, and there was something supremely ironic in the fact that the