A Far Sunset

THIRTY-THREE

Paul Marlowe was alone. He had left his companions on the far side of the glacier. Shon Hu was partly snow blind, Zu Shan’s nose had started to bleed because of the altitude, and little Nemo, wrapped in skins so that he looked like a furry ball, had an almost perpetual aching in his bones.

So Paul had left the three of them on the far side of the glacier and had set off alone shortly after dawn. He had told them that, if he had not returned by noon, they must go without waiting for him. He did not think that they could stand another night on the bare, lower slopes of the mountain.

The glacier had looked much more formidable than it really was. His feet and ankles ached a great deal with the effort of maintaining footholds on the great, tilting ice sheets; and from the way his toes felt it seemed as if sharp slivers of ice might have cut through the tough skins that were his only protection. But on the whole, apart from being bruised by innumerable minor falls, he felt he was in reasonable shape.

And now, here he was, standing near the base of one of the mighty metal shoes that supported the three impossibly slender legs of the great star ship. The shoes rested firmly on a broad flat table of rock in the lee of the mountain, and they were covered to a depth of perhaps three metres by eternal ice. The legs themselves were easily twenty metres tall; and the massive hull of the star ship rose all of two hundred metres above them—like a spire. Like the spire of a vast, buried cathedral.

Paul gazed up at the fantastic shape, shielding his eyes against the glow of its polished surface, and was drunk with wonder.

Then the voice that was no voice spoke in his head.

‘I am beautiful, am I not?’

So much had happened that Paul was beyond surprise. He said calmly: ‘Yes, you are beautiful.’

‘I am Aru Re—in your language, Bird of Mars. I have waited here more than fifty thousand planetary years. It may be that I shall wait another ten thousand years before my children are of an age to understand. For I am the custodian of the memory of their race.’

Suddenly, Paul’s mind was reeling. Here he was, a man of Earth, having made a hazardous journey on a strange planet, through primeval forests, across wide savannah, into the mountains and over a high glacier to meet a telepathic star ship. A star ship that spoke in English, called itself the Bird of Mars and claimed to have been in existence for over fifty thousand years. He wanted to laugh and cry and quietly and purposefully go mad. But there was no need of that. Obviously he was already mad. Obviously, the glacier had beaten him and he was lying now—what was left of him—in some shallow crevasse, withdrawn into a world of fantasy, waiting for the great cold to bring down the find curtain on his psychic drama.

‘No, you are not mad,’ said the silent voice. ‘Nor are you injured and dying. You are Paul Marlowe of Earth, and you are the first man resolute enough to discover the truth. Open your mind completely to me, and I will show you much that has been hidden. I am Aru Re, Bird of Mars … The truth also, is beautiful.’

‘Nothing but a machine!’ shouted Paul, rebelling against die impossible reality. ‘You are nothing but a machine—a skyhigh lump of steel, wrapped round a computer with built-in paranoia.’ He tried to control himself, but could not restrain the sobbing. ‘Fraud! Impostor! Bastard lump of tin! ’

‘Yes, I am a machine,’ returned the voice of the Aru Re, insistendy in his head, ‘but I am greater than the sum of my parts. I am a machine that lives. Because I am the custodian and the carrier of the seed, I am immortal. I am greater than the men who conceived me, though they, too, were great.’

‘A machine!’ babbled Paul desperately. ‘A useless bloody machine! ’

The voice would not leave him alone. ‘And what of Paul

Marlowe, voyager in the Gloria Mundi, citizen on sufferance of Baya Nor, Poul Mer Lo, the teacher? Is he not a machine — a machine constructed of bone and flesh and dreams?’

‘Leave me alone! ’ sobbed Paul. ‘Leave me alone! ’

‘I cannot leave you alone,’ said the Aru Re, ‘because you chose not to leave me alone. You chose to know. I warned you to go back, but you came on. Therefore, according to the design, you shall know. Open your mind completely.’

Dimly, Paul knew that there was a battle raging in his head. He did not want to lose it. Because he knew instinctively that if he did lose it he would never be quite the same again.

‘Open your mind,’ repeated the star ship.

With all his strength, Paul fought against the voice and the compulsive power that had invaded his brain.

‘Then close your eyes and forget,’ murmured the Aru Re persuasively. ‘It has been a long journey. Close your eyes and forget.’

The change of approach caught Paul Marlowe off guard. Momentarily, he closed his eyes; and for the fraction of a second he allowed the taughtness to slacken.

It was enough for the star ship. As great spirals of blackness whirled in upon him, he realized that he was in thrall.

There was no sensation of movement, but he was no longer on the mountain of the White Darkness. He was in a black void—the most warm, the most pleasant, the most comfortable void in the universe.

And suddenly, there was light.

He looked up at (down upon? around?) the most beautiful city he had ever seen. It grew—blossomed would have been a better word—in a desert. The desert was not a terrestrial desert, and the city was not a terrestrial city, and the men and women who occupied it—brown and beautiful and human though they looked—were not of Earth.

‘This city of Mars,’ said the Aru Re, ‘grew, withered and died before men walked upon Sol Three or Altair Five. This city, on the fourth planet of your sun, contained twenty million people and lasted longer than the span of the entire civilization of Earth. By your standards it was stable—almost immortal.

And yet it, too, died. It died as the whole of Mars died, in the Wars of the Great Cities that lasted two hundred and forty Martian years, destroying in the end not only a civilization but the life of the planet that gave it birth.’

The scene changed rapidly. As Paul Marlowe looked, it seemed as if the city were expanding and contracting like some fantastic organism inhaling and exhaling, pulsing with life—and death. In the accelerated portrayal of Martian history that he was now witnessing, buildings and structures more than two kilometres high were raised and destroyed in the fraction of a second. Human beings were no longer visible, not even as a blur. Their time span was too short. And every few seconds the desert and the city would erupt briefly into the bright, blinding shapes that Paul recognized from pictures he had seen long ago—the terrible glory of transient mushrooms of atomic fire.

‘Thus,’ went on the matter of fact voice of the Aru Re, ‘did Martian civilization encompass its own suicide … Think of a culture and a technology, Paul Marlowe, as far ahead of yours as yours is ahead of the Bayani. Think of it, and know that such a culture can still be vulnerable as men themselves are always vulnerable … But there were those—men and machines—who foresaw the end. They knew that the civilization of Mars, inherently unstable, would perish. Yet they knew also that, with the resources at their command, three hundred million years of Martian evolution need not be in vain.’

The scene changed, darkened. Without knowing how he knew, Paul realized that he was now gazing at a large subterranean cavern, kilometres below the bleak Martian desert. Here other structures were growing, like strange and beautiful stalagmites, from the floor of living rock. Men and machines scuttled about them, ant-like, swarming. Everywhere there was a sense of urgency and purpose and speed.

‘And so the star ships were built—the seed cases that would be cast off by a dying planet to carry the seeds of its achievement to the still unravaged soil of distant worlds … Here is the rocky bed where I and six other identical vessels were created. It would have been comparatively easy to build star ships that were no more than star ships. But we were created as guardians—living guardians, fashioned from materials almost impervious to the elements and even time itself. Our task was not only to transport, but to nurture and prepare the seed; and when the seed had again taken root, when the flower of civilization had begun to bloom again, it would be our task to restore the racial memory and reveal the origin of that which could now only achieve maturity on an alien soil. Many died that we might be programmed for life. Many remained behind that we might carry the few—the few who were to become as children, their minds cleansed of all sophistication and personal memories so that they might rediscover a lost innocence, learning once more over the long centuries of reawakening, the nature of their human predicament.’

Again the scene accelerated. The star ships grew towards the roof of the cavern. In a silent, explosive puff, the roof itself was blasted away by some invisible force. Two of the star ships crumpled swiftly and soundlessly to lie like twisted strips of metal foil on the floor of a great rocky basin that was now open to the sky. A tiny, thin, blurred snake—that Paul Marlowe knew was a stream of human beings—rippled to the base of each of the remaining star ships. And was swallowed. Then, one by one, each of the silver vessels became shrouded by blue descending aureoles of light. The rock floor turned to brilliant liquid fire as the star ships lifted gracefully and swiftly into the black reaches of the sky.

‘That was how the exodus took place,’ continued the Am Re. ‘That was how the seed-cases carried the seed. Of the five ships that left Mars, one proceeded to Sirius Four, where a great civilization is now maturing; one voyaged to Alpha Centauri One, where the seed withered before it had taken root; another journeyed to Procyon Two, where the seed remains still only the seed, and where there is yet little distinction between men and animals; the fourth vessel, myself, came here to Altair Five, where, it seems, the flower may yet blossom; and the last vessel made the shortest voyage, to Sol Three, the planet you call Earth. Its seed lived and flourished, though the star ship was destroyed, having settled on land that possessed a deep geological fault. It is now more than nine millennia since the island on which the star ship rested was submerged below the waters you know as the Adantic Ocean.’

Paul’s mind was numbed by revelations, traumatized by knowledge, shattered by incredible possibilities. The Mardan scene had faded, and there was now nothing. He floated dreamily and luxuriously in a sea of darkness, an intellectual limbo in which it was only possible to assume ‘sanity’ by actually believing that these fantastic experiences had been communicated to him by a telepathic star ship.

‘Your body grows cold,’ said the Aru Re incomprehensibly, ‘and there is little time left for me to answer the questions that are boiling in your mind. Soon I must allow you to return. But here are some of the answers that you seek. It is true that my mind is a linked series of what you would call computers, but it also stores the implanted patterns of the minds of men long dead. It bears no more relation to what you understand by the term computer than your Gloria Mundi bore to its ancestor, the guided missile. You wish to know how I can speak your tongue and converse of the things you have known. I can speak the language used by any intelligent being by exploring its mind and correlating symbols and images. You wish to know also if I can still communicate with the remaining star ships, the guardians that await the maturation of their seed, as I do. We communicate not by any form of wave transmission that you can understand, but by elaborate patterns of empathy that are not subject to the limiting characteristics of space and time.’

It seemed to Paul that, in the black silence of his head, there was a great drum roll of titanic laughter. ‘Is it so strange, little one,’ said the Aru Re softly and with irony, ‘that even a machine can grow lonely? Also, we need to share the knowledge when the first of the seed brings forth a truly mature fruit. For then there can be no doubt that the scattering of the seed was not in vain … I will answer one more question, and then you must return if you are to live. You are puzzled by the variation in the number of fingers of the race you have discovered. There was some small genetic damage during transit, which caused slight mutations. The variations are of no importance. It matters not in the long sweep of history.’ Again the titanic roll of laughter. ‘In the end, little one, despite their now rigid tabu of the little finger, the far descendants of the Bayani will be as their Martian ancestors were. But perhaps they will have outlived the impulse to self-destruction … Now, farewell, Paul Marlowe. Your mind flickers and your body grows cold … Open your eyes/’

The darkness dissolved; and once more there was feeling— pain and exhaustion and extreme cold.

Paul opened his eyes. He was still standing at the base of one of the metal shoes of the star ship. Had he ever moved from it? He did not know. Perhaps he would never know. He stared about him, dazed, trance-like, trying to accept the realities of a real world once more.

The ache in his limbs helped to focus his mind on practicalities. His limbs were stiff and painful—as if they had been rigid a very long time, or as if he had just come out of suspended animation.

Shielding his eyes, he gazed up at the polished hull of the great star ship and then down at its supporting shoes embedded in eternal ice. That at least was real. He stood contemplating it for some moments.

Then he said sofdy: ‘Yes, you are truly beautiful.’

He had told Shon Hu and the others not to wait for him after mid-day. The sun was already quite high in the sky. He felt weak and shattered; but there was no time to waste if he were to recross the glacier before they attempted to make their own way back to Baya Nor.

Then, suddenly, there was a curious rippling in his limbs—a glow, a warmth, as if liquid energy were being pumped into his veins. He felt stronger than he had ever felt. He could hardly keep still.

Impulsively, and for no apparent reason, he held out his arm—a strange half-gesture of gratitude and farewell—to the high, sun-bright column of metal that was the Aru Re.

Then he turned and set off on the journey back across the glacier.

Zu Shan saw him coming in the distance.

Shon Hu, partly snow blind, could hardly see anything.

Nemo did not need to see. His face wore an expression in which wonder mingled with something very near to ecstasy.

‘Lord,’ he said in Bayani when Paul was only a few paces away, ‘I have been trying to ride your thoughts. There has never been such a strange ride. I fell off, and fell off, and fell off.’

‘I, too, fell off,’ said Paul, ‘perhaps even more than you did.’

‘You are all right, Paul?’ asked Zu Shan anxiously in

English.

‘I don’t think I have felt better for a long time,’ answered Paul honestly.

‘Lord,’ said Shon Hu, ‘I cannot see your face, but I can hear your voice, and that shows me the expression on your face … I am happy that you have found what you have found … The little one told us many strange things, lord, which are much beyond the thinking of such men as I… It is true, then, that you have spoken with Oruri?’

‘Yes, Shon Hu. I have spoken with Oruri. Now let us return from the land of gods to the land of men.’