The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [108]
“For everything there is a season,” the Earth brain had replied. “There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice. When the long winter is over, man will return to an Earth renewed and refreshed.”
And so, during the past few centuries, the whole terrestrial population had streamed up the equatorial towers and flowed sunward toward the young oceans of Venus, the fertile plains of Mercury’s temperate zone. Five hundred years hence, when the sun had recovered, the exiles would return. Mercury would be abandoned, except for the polar regions; but Venus would be a permanent second home. The quenching of the sun had given the incentive, and the opportunity, for the taming of that hellish world.
Important though they were, these matters concerned the Starholmer only indirectly. Its interest was focused upon more subtle aspects of human culture and society. Every species was unique, with its own surprises, its own idiosyncrasies. This one had introduced the Starholmer to the baffling concept of negative information—or, in the local terminology, humor, fantasy, myth.
As It grappled with these strange phenomena, the Starholmer had sometimes said despairingly to Itself: We will never understand human beings. On occasion, It had been so frustrated that It had feared an involuntary conjugation, with all the risks that entailed. But now It had made real progress. It could still remember Its satisfaction the first time It had made a joke, and the children had all laughed.
Working with children had been the clue, again provided by ARISTOTLE.
“There is an old saying: the child is father of the man. Although the biological concept of ‘father’ is alien to us both, in this context the word has a double meaning—”
So here It was, hoping that the children would enable It to understand the adults into which they would eventually metamorphize. Sometimes they told the truth; but even when they were being playful (another difficult concept) and dispensed negative information, the Starholmer could now recognize the signs. . . .
Yet there were times when neither the children nor the adults, nor even ARISTOTLE, knew the truth. There seemed to be a continuous spectrum between absolute fantasy and hard historical facts, with every possible gradation between. At one end were such figures as Columbus and Leonardo and Einstein and Lenin and Newton and Washington, whose very voices and images had sometimes been preserved. At the other extreme were Zeus and Alice and King Kong and Gulliver and Siegfried and Merlin, who could not possibly have existed in the real world. But what was one to make of Robin Hood and Tarzan and Christ and Sherlock Holmes and Odysseus and Frankenstein? Allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, they might well have been actual historic personages. . . .
The Elephant Throne had changed little in three and a half thousand years, but never before had it supported the weight of so alien a visitor. As the Starholmer stared into the south, It compared the half-kilometer-wide column soaring from the mountain peak with the feats of engineering It had seen on other worlds. For such a young race, this was truly impressive. Though it seemed always on the point of toppling from the sky, it had stood now for fifteen centuries.
Not, of course, in its present form. The first hundred kilometers were now a vertical city—still occupied at some widely spaced levels—through which the sixteen sets of tracks had often carried a million passengers a day. Only two of those tracks were operating now; in a few hours, the Starholmer and Its escorts would be racing up that huge, fluted column, on the way back to the Ring City that encircled the globe.
The Holmer everted Its eyes to give telescopic vision, and slowly scanned the zenith. Yes, there it was—hard to see by day, but easy by night when the sunlight streaming past the shadow of Earth still blazed upon it. The thin, shining band that split the sky into two hemispheres was a whole world in itself, where half a billion humans