From the Ocean from teh Stars (100 page)

accompanied him, for there are times when a man must be apart even
from his closest friends.

He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village
would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but
a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life. Diaspar had no need of him
now; the ferments he had introduced into the city were working swiftly,
and nothing he could do would accelerate or retard the changes that were happening there.

This peaceful land would also change. Often he wondered if he had done wrong, in the ruthless drive to satisfy his own curiosity, by opening
up the ancient way between the two cultures. Yet surely it was better
that Lys should know the truth—that it also, like Diaspar, had been partly founded upon fears and falsehoods.

Sometimes he wondered what shape the new society would take. He
believed that Diaspar must escape from the prison of the Memory Banks,
and restore again the cycle of life and death. Hilvar, he knew, was sure
that this could be done, though his proposals were too technical for Alvin to follow. Perhaps the time would come again when love in Diaspar was
no longer completely barren.

Was
this,
Alvin wondered, what he had always lacked in Diaspar— what he had really been seeking? He knew now that when power and
ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings
of the heart. No one had really lived until they had achieved that synthesis of love and desire which he had never dreamed existed until he
came to Lys.

He had walked upon the planets of the Seven Suns—the first man to
do so in a billion years. Yet that meant little to him now; sometimes he
thought he would give all his achievements if he could hear the cry of a
newborn child, and know that it was his own.

In Lys, he might one day find what he wanted; there was a warmth
and understanding about its people, which, he now realized, was lacking
in Diaspar. But before he could rest, before he could find peace, there
was one decision yet to be made.

Into his hands had come power; that power he still possessed. It was
a responsibility he had once sought and accepted with eagerness, but
now he knew that he could have no peace while it was still his. Yet to
throw it away would be the betrayal of a trust.

He was in a village of tiny canals, at the edge of a wide lake, when
he made his decision. The colored houses, which seemed to float at
anchor upon the gentle waves, formed a scene of almost unreal beauty.

There was life and warmth and comfort here—everything he had missed
among the desolate grandeur of the Seven Suns.

One day humanity would once more be ready for space. What new
chapter Man would write among the stars, Alvin did not know. That would
be no concern of his; his future lay here on Earth.

But he would make one more flight before he turned his back upon
the stars.

When Alvin checked the upward rush of the ascending ship, the city was
too distant to be recognized as the work of Man, and the curve of the
planet was already visible. Presently they could see the line of twilight, thousands of miles away on its unending march across the desert. Above
and around were the stars, still brilliant for all the glory they had lost.

Hilvar and Jeserac were silent, guessing but not knowing with cer
tainty why Alvin was making this flight, and why he had asked them to
come with him. Neither felt like speech, as the desolate panorama un
folded below them. Its emptiness oppressed them both, and Jeserac felt
a sudden contemptuous anger for the men of the past who had let Earth's
beauty die through their own neglect.

He hoped that Alvin was right in dreaming that all this could be
changed. The power and the knowledge still existed—it needed only the
will to turn back the centuries and make the oceans roll again. The water was still there, deep down in the hidden places of the Earth; or if neces
sary, transmutation plants could be built to make it.

There was so much to do in the years that lay ahead. Jeserac knew
that he stood between two ages; around him he could feel the pulse of
mankind beginning to quicken again. There were great problems to be faced—but Diaspar would face them. The recharting of the past would
take centuries, but when it was finished Man would have recovered almost
all that he had lost.

Yet could he regain it all? Jeserac wondered. It was hard to believe that the Galaxy would be reconquered, and even if that were achieved,
what purpose would it serve?

Alvin broke into his reverie, and Jeserac turned from the screen

"I wanted you to see this," said Alvin quietly. "You may never have
another chance."

"You're not leaving Earth?"

"No; I want nothing more of space. Even if any other civilizations
still survive in this Galaxy, I doubt if they will be worth the effort of find
ing. There is so much to do here; I know now that this is my home, and
I am not going to leave it again."

He looked down at the great deserts, but his eyes saw instead the
waters that would be sweeping over them a thousand years from now.
Man had rediscovered his world, and he would make it beautiful while
he remained upon it. And after that—

"We aren't ready to go out to the stars, and it will be a long time
before we can face their challenge again. I have been wondering what
I should do with this ship; if it stays here on Earth, I shall always be
tempted to use it, and will never have any peace of mind. Yet I cannot
waste it; I feel that it has been given into my trust, and I must use it for
the benefit of the world.

"So this is what I have decided to do. I'm going to send it out of the
Galaxy, with the robot in control, to discover what happened to our an
cestors—and, if possible,
what
it was they left our Universe to find. It
must have been something wonderful for them to have abandoned so much
to go in search of it.

"The robot will never tire, however long the journey takes. One day our cousins will receive my message, and they'll know that we are wait
ing for them here on Earth. They will return, and I hope that by then we
will be worthy of them, however great they have become."

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 recognized 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 po
tentially 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 cer
tain, Vanamonde's evolution toward self-consciousness had been acceler
ated by his contact with the philosophers of Lys. They had great hopes
of future co-operation with the childlike supermind, believing that they
could foreshorten the aeons which his 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 forever. Somehow it had leaked into his mind, during that indescrib
able and unsharable contact he had had with Vanamonde. Did Vana
monde 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 that 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 toward 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.

Arthur C. Clarke was born and educated in England. He took a degree, with First Class Honors, in physics and in pure and applied mathematics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and has twice been chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. He is also a member of the British Sub-Aqua Club and has engaged in underwater exploration and photography along the Australian Great Barrier Reef and the coast of Ceylon, where he now lives. Since turning to full-time writing in 1951, Mr. Clarke has published ten novels, more than two hundred articles and short stories, and twelve works of nonfiction. His most recent novel is
A Fall of Moondust. Holiday
magazine summed up the opinions of his millions of readers when it called him "the colossus of science fiction."

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