The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [63]
The great polyp had become the Master’s last disciple for a very simple reason. It was immortal. The billions of individual cells from which its body was built up would die, but before that happened they would have reproduced themselves. At long intervals the monster would disintegrate into its myriad separate cells, which would go their own way and multiply by fission if their environment was suitable. During this phase the polyp did not exist as a self-conscious, intelligent entity—and here Alvin was irresistibly reminded of the manner in which the inhabitants of Diaspar spent their quiescent millennia in the city’s memory banks.
In due time some mysterious biological force brought the scattered components together again, and the polyp began a new cycle of existence. It returned to awareness and recollected its earlier lives, though often imperfectly as accident sometimes damaged the cells which carried the delicate patterns of memory.
Perhaps no other form of life could have kept faith so long to a creed otherwise forgotten for a thousand million years. In a sense, the great polyp was a helpless victim of its biological nature. Because of its immortality, it could not change, but was forced to repeat eternally the same invariant pattern.
The religion of the Great Ones, in its later stages, had become identified with a veneration of the Seven Suns. When the Great Ones stubbornly refused to appear, attempts were made to signal their distant home. Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten how to learn and a robot which had never known how to forget.
As the immeasurably ancient voice died away into the still air, Alvin found himself overwhelmed by a surge of pity. The misplaced devotion, the loyalty that had held to its futile course while suns and planets passed away—he could never have believed such a tale had he not seen the evidence before his eyes. More than ever before the extent of his ignorance saddened him. A tiny fragment of the past had been illuminated for a little while, but now the darkness had closed over it again.
The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial. This fantastic tale of the Master and the Great Ones seemed like another of the countless legends that had somehow survived from the civilisations of the Dawn. Yet the very existence of the huge polyp, and of the silently watching robot, made it impossible for Alvin to dismiss the whole story as a fable built of self-delusion upon a foundation of madness.
What was the relationship, he wondered, between these two entities, which though so different in every possible way had maintained their extraordinary partnership over such aeons of time? He was somehow certain that the robot was much the more important of the two. It had been the confidant of the Master and must still know all his secrets.
Alvin looked at the enigmatic machine that still regarded him steadily. Why would it not speak? What thoughts were passing through its complicated and perhaps alien mind? Yet, surely, if it had been designed to serve the Master, its mind would not be altogether alien, and it should respond to human orders.
As he thought of all the secrets which that stubbornly mute machine must possess, Alvin felt a curiosity so great that it verged upon greed. It seemed unfair that such knowledge should be wasted and hidden from the world; here must lie wonders beyond even the ken of the Central Computer in Diaspar.
‘Why won’t your robot speak to us?’ he asked the polyp, when Hilvar had momentarily run out of questions. The answer was one he had half expected.
‘It was against the Master’s wishes for it to speak with any voice but his, and his voice is silent now.’
‘But it will obey you?’
‘Yes; the Master placed it in our charge. We can see through its eyes, wherever it goes. It watches over the machines which preserve this lake and