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  THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE. Copyright © 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2561-0

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  First eBook edition: September 2001

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Preface

  I. The Palace

  1. Kalidasa

  2. The Engineer

  3. The Fountains

  4. Demon Rock

  5. Through the Telescope

  6. The Artist

  7. The God-King’s Palace

  8. Malgara

  9. Filament

  10. The Ultimate Bridge

  11. The Silent Princess

  II. The Temple

  12. Starglider

  13. Shadow at Dawn

  14. The Education of Starglider

  15. Bodhidharma

  16. Conversations with Starglider

  17. Parakarma

  18. The Golden Butterflies

  19. By the Shores of Lake Saladin

  20. The Bridge That Danced

  21. Judgment

  III. The Bell

  22. Apostate

  23. Moondozer

  24. The Finger of God

  25. Orbital Roulette

  26. The Night Before Vesak

  27. Ashoka Station

  28. The First Lowering

  29. Final Approach

  30. The Legions of the King

  31. Exodus

  IV. The Tower

  32. Space Express

  33. Cora

  34. Vertigo

  35. Starglider Plus Eighty

  36. The Cruel Sky

  37. The Billion-Ton Diamond

  V. Ascension

  38. A Place of Silent Storms

  39. The Wounded Sun

  40. The End of the Line

  41. Meteor

  42. Death in Orbit

  43. Fail-Safe

  44. A Cave in the Sky

  45. The Man for the Job

  46. Spider

  47. Beyond the Aurora

  48. Night at the Villa

  49. A Bumpy Ride

  50. The Falling Fireflies

  51. On the Porch

  52. The Other Passenger

  53. Fade-Out

  54. Theory of Relativity

  55. Hard Dock

  56. View from the Balcony

  57. The Last Dawn

  Epilogue: Kalidasa’s Triumph

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  The Fountains of Paradise

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Vannemar Morgan’s dream is to link Earth to the stars with the greatest engineering feat of all time—a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems . . . while allaying the wrath of God. For the only possible site on the planet for Morgan’s Orbital Tower is the monastery atop the Sacred Mountain of Sri Kanda. And for two thousand years, the monks have protected Sri Kanda from all mortal quests for glory. Kings and princes who have sought to conquer the Sacred Mountain have all died.

  Now Vannemar Morgan may be next . . . .

  “Clarke once again sounds his grand theme . . . man is most himself when he strives greatly, when he challenges the very laws of the universe.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Arthur Clarke is probably the most critically admired of all currently active writers of science fiction . . . awesomely informed about physics and astronomy, and blessed with one of the most astounding imaginations I ever encountered in print.”

  —The New York Times

  “The Fountains of Paradise is the most considerable work of the latter part of Clarke’s career.”

  —Science Fiction Encyclopedia

  “Intellectually provocative.”

  —Newsday

  “Sets the standard for science fiction that is both high-tech and high-class.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Remarkable.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE has more than 100 million copies of his books in print and is credited as an inventor of satellite communications and other technological innovations. His many achievements include a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, recognition as a Grand Master from the Science Fiction Writers of America, numerous Hugo and Nebula awards, and an Academy Award nomination. Sir Arthur C. Clarke lives in Sri Lanka.

  ACCLAIM FOR ONE OF THE LEGENDARY MASTERS OF SPECULATIVE FICTION—INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  • • •

  “Arthur Clarke is probably the most critically admired of all currently active writers of science fiction . . . awesomely informed about physics and astronomy, and blessed with one of the most astounding imaginations I ever encountered in print.”

  —New York Times

  “THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE is the most considerable work of the latter part of Clarke’s career.”

  —Science Fiction Encyclopedia

  “Our most important visionary writer.”

  —Playboy

  “Intellectually provocative.”

  —Newsday

  “Sets the standard for science fiction that is both high-tech and high-class.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Remarkable.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Books by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Fountains of Paradise

  The City and the Stars/The Sands of Mars

  (omnibus)

  The Ghost from the Grand Banks/The Deep Range

  (omnibus)

  Cradle

  (written with Gentry Lee)

  Available from Warner Aspect

  To the still-unfading memory

  of

  LESLIE EKANAYAKE

  (13 July 1947–4 July 1977)

  only perfect friend of a lifetime,

  in whom were uniquely combined

  Loyalty, Intelligence and Compassion.

  When your radiant and loving spirit

  vanished from this world,

  the light went out of many lives.

  NIRVANA PRĀPTO BHŪYĀT

  “Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality.”

  Sri Jawaharlal Nehru

  To the Ceylon Association

  for the Advancement of Science

  Colombo, 15 October 1962

  Introduction

  In the two decades since the 1978 Sources and Acknowledgments was written, there have been some astonishing developments in this particular field of space engineering. The literature is now so extensive that I can no longer keep up with it; I contributed to it myself at the Thirtieth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation at Munich in 1979 (see “The Space Elevator: Thought Experiment or Key to the Universe?” reprinted in Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography, John Wiley & Sons, 1984).

  Perhaps most amazing is the discovery of the material that will make the elevator possible. As I suggested in this novel, it is indeed carbon—but not,
fortunately, diamond. The unexpected and Nobel Prize–winning discovery of the C60 molecule, Buckminsterfullerene, has opened up the prospect of materials hundreds of times stronger than steel. Indeed, one of the first statements made by Smalley and Kroto when they discovered this material was that it could be used to make a space elevator.

  In 1979 I recorded much of the novel on a twelve-inch record (Caedmon, TC 1606). The record sleeve had a long essay about the space elevator, together with a drawing of it reaching from Sri Lanka to geostationary orbit—and by a truly incredible coincidence, these were kindly provided by my old friend Buckminster Fuller! What a tragedy that he never lived to see the discovery of the material bearing his name.

  The space elevator does indeed seem to be an idea whose time has (almost) come. At a recent workshop at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, NASA engineers concluded that “this is no longer science fiction.” (For details, explore their Web site: www.nasa.gov. And that was science fiction when I wrote the novel!)

  One of my most valued possessions is a photograph taken aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis during the first mission (STS 75) to lower a payload on a tether—one small step toward the space elevator. It shows astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman with a copy of this book floating in space beside him. When they returned to Earth, the shuttle crew autographed it and mailed it to me.

  Finally, I’d like to record that I had the great pleasure of meeting the charming inventor of the space elevator, Yuri Artsutanov, in Leningrad during my visit to Russia in 1982 (see my collection of essays 1984: Spring a Choice of Futures), and I am glad that Yuri has now received recognition for his brilliant and daring concept.

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  21 September 2000

  Preface

  “From Paradise to Taprobane is forty leagues; there may be heard the sound of the Fountains of Paradise.”

  Traditional

  Reported by Friar Marignolli, A.D. 1335

  The country I have called Taprobane does not quite exist, but is about ninety percent congruent with the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Though the Sources and Acknowledgments will make clear what locations, events, and personalities are based on fact, the reader will not go far wrong in assuming that the more unlikely the story, the closer it is to reality.

  The name “Taprobane” is now usually spoken to rhyme with “plain,” but the correct classical pronunciation is “Tap-ROB-a-nee”—as Milton, of course, in “Paradise Regained,” Book IV, well knew:

  From India and the golden Chersoness

  And utmost Indian Isle Taprobane . . .

  I

  The Palace

  1

  Kalidasa

  The crown grew heavier with each passing year. When the Venerable Bodhidharma Mahanayake Thero had—so reluctantly—first placed it upon his head, Prince Kalidasa was surprised by its lightness. Now, twenty years later, King Kalidasa gladly relinquished the jewel-encrusted band of gold whenever court etiquette allowed.

  There was little of that here, upon the wind-swept summit of the rock fortress; few envoys or petitioners sought audience on its forbidding heights. Many of those who made the journey to Yakkagala turned back at the final ascent, through the very jaws of the crouching lion that seemed always about to spring from the face of the rock.

  An old king could never sit upon this heaven-aspiring throne. One day, Kalidasa would be too feeble to reach his own palace. But he doubted if that day would ever come; his many enemies would spare him the humiliations of age.

  Those enemies were gathering now. He glanced toward the north, as if he could already see the armies of his half-brother, returning to claim the bloodstained throne of Taprobane. But that threat was still far off, across monsoon-riven seas. Although Kalidasa put more trust in his spies than in his astrologers, it was comforting to know that they agreed on this.

  Malgara, making plans and gathering the support of foreign kings, had waited almost twenty years. A yet more patient and subtle enemy lay much nearer at hand, forever watching from the southern sky.

  The perfect cone of Sri Kanda, the Sacred Mountain, looked very close today as it towered above the central plain. Since the beginning of history, it had struck awe into the heart of every man who saw it. Always, Kalidasa was aware of its brooding presence, and of the power that it symbolized.

  And yet the Mahanayake Thero had no armies, no screaming war elephants tossing brazen tusks as they charged into battle. The High Priest was only an old man in an orange robe, whose sole material possessions were a begging bowl and a palm leaf to shield him from the sun. While the lesser monks and acolytes chanted the scriptures around him, he merely sat in cross-legged silence—and somehow tampered with the destinies of kings. It was very strange. . . .

  The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the King of the still-greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half guest, half hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded Mahinda’s empire bore such crowns, formed of a dazzling, crystalline substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.

  That ivory gleam was only three days’ march away—one along the royal road, through forests and paddy fields, two more up the winding stairway that he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the gods; the ruler of all this land could not.

  But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. Guarded by moat and rampart lay the pools and fountains and pleasure gardens on which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of these, there were the ladies of the rock—the ones of flesh and blood, whom he summoned less and less frequently, and the two hundred changeless immortals, with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no others he could trust.

  Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the brooding menace of the mountain, toward the distant hope of rain. The monsoon was late this season. The artificial lakes that fed the island’s complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year, he should have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them all—which, as he well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father’s name: Paravana Samudra, the Sea of Paravana.

  It had been completed only thirty years ago, after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood proudly beside his father when the great sluice gates were opened and the life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the kingdom, there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that immense, man-made lake when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura, City of Gold, the ancient capital which he had abandoned for his dream.

  Once more the thunder rolled, but Kalidasa knew that its promise was false. Even here on the summit of Demon Rock, the air hung still and lifeless; there were none of the sudden, random gusts that heralded the onset of the monsoon. Before the rains came at last, famine might be added to his troubles.

  “Majesty,” said the patient voice of the Chamberlain, “the envoys are about to leave. They wish to pay their respects.”

  Ah yes, those two pale ambassadors from across the western ocean! He would be sorry to see them go, for they had brought news, in their abominable Taprobani, of many wonders—though none, they were willing to admit, that equaled this fortress-palace in the sky.

  Kalidasa turned his back upon the white-capped mountain and the parched, shimmering landscape and began to descend the granite steps to the audience chamber. Behind him, the Chamberlain and his aides bore gifts of ivory and gems for the tall, proud men who w
ere waiting to say farewell. Soon they would carry the treasures of Taprobane across the sea, to a city younger by centuries than Ranapura; and perhaps, for a little while, divert the brooding thoughts of the Emperor Hadrian.

  * * *

  His robes a flare of orange against the white plaster of the temple walls, the Mahanayake Thero walked slowly to the northern parapet. Far below lay the checkerboard of paddy fields stretching from horizon to horizon, the dark lines of irrigation channels, the blue gleam of the Paravana Samudra—and, beyond that inland sea, the sacred domes of Ranapura floating like ghostly bubbles, impossibly huge when one realized their true distance. For thirty years he had watched that ever-changing panorama, but he knew that he would never grasp all the details of its fleeting complexity. Colors, boundaries altered with every season—indeed, with every passing cloud. On the day that he, too, passed, thought Bodhidharma, he would still see something new.

  Only one thing jarred in all this exquisitely patterned landscape. Tiny though it appeared from this altitude, the gray boulder of Demon Rock seemed an alien intruder. Legend had it that Yakkagala was a fragment of the herb-bearing Himalayan peak that the monkey god Hanuman had dropped as he hastily carried both medicine and mountain to his injured comrades when the battles of the Ramayana were over.

  From this distance, it was impossible, of course, to see any details of Kalidasa’s folly, except for a faint line that hinted at the outer rampart of the pleasure gardens. Yet once it had been experienced, such was the impact of Demon Rock that it was impossible to forget it. The Mahanayake Thero could see in imagination, as clearly as if he stood between them, the immense lion’s claws protruding from the sheer face of the cliff, while overhead loomed the battlements upon which, it was easy to believe, the accursed King still walked. . . .

  Thunder crashed down from above, rising swiftly to such a crescendo of power that it seemed to shake the mountain itself. In a continuous, sustained concussion it raced across the sky, dwindling away into the east. For long seconds, echoes rolled around the rim of the horizon.