2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke Collection: The Odyssey) Read online

And now it was time to go—though in one sense he would never leave this place where he had been reborn, for he would always be part of the entity that used this double star for its unfathomable purposes. The direction, though not the nature, of his destiny was clear before him, and there was no need to trace the devious path by which he had come. With the instincts of three million years, he now perceived that there were more ways than one behind the back of space. The ancient mechanisms of the Star Gate had served him well, but he would not need them again.

  The glimmering rectangular shape that had once seemed no more than a slab of crystal still floated before him, indifferent as he was to the harmless flames of the inferno beneath. It encapsulated yet unfathomed secrets of space and time, but some at least he now understood and was able to command. How obvious—how necessary—was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1 : 4 : 9! And how naïve to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!

  He focused his mind upon these geometrical simplicities, and as his thoughts brushed against it, the empty framework filled with the darkness of the interstellar night. The glow of the red sun faded—or, rather, seemed to recede in all directions at once; and there before him was the luminous whirlpool of the galaxy.

  It might have been some beautiful, incredibly detailed model, embedded in a block of plastic. But it was the reality, grasped as a whole with senses now more subtle than vision. If he wished, he could focus his attention upon any one of its hundred billion stars; and he could do much more than that.

  Here he was, adrift in this great river of suns, halfway between the banked fires of the galactic core and the lonely, scattered sentinel stars of the rim. And here he wished to be, on the far side of this chasm in the sky, this serpentine band of darkness, empty of all stars. He knew that this formless chaos, visible only by the glow that limned its edges from fire-mists far beyond, was the still unused stuff of creation, the raw material of evolutions yet to be. Here, Time had not begun; not until the suns that now burned were long since dead would light and life reshape this void.

  Unwittingly, he had crossed it once; now he must cross it again—this time, of his own volition. The thought filled him with a sudden, freezing terror, so that for a moment he was wholly disoriented, and his new vision of the universe trembled and threatened to shatter into a thousand fragments.

  It was not fear of the galactic gulfs that chilled his soul, but a more profound disquiet, stemming from the unborn future. For he had left behind the time scales of his human origin; now, as he contemplated that band of starless night, he knew his first intimations of the Eternity that yawned before him.

  Then he remembered that he would never be alone, and his panic slowly ebbed. The crystal-clear perception of the universe was restored to him—not, he knew, wholly by his own efforts. When he needed guidance in his first faltering steps, it would be there.

  Confident once more, like a high diver who had regained his nerve, he launched himself across the light-years. The galaxy burst forth from the mental frame in which he had enclosed it; stars and nebulae poured past him in an illusion of infinite speed. Phantom suns exploded and fell behind as he slipped like a shadow through the cores; the cold, dark waste of cosmic dust which he had once feared seemed no more than the beat of a raven’s wing across the face of the Sun.

  The stars were thinning out; the glare of the Milky Way was dimming into a pale ghost of the glory he had known—and, when he was ready, would know again.

  He was back, precisely where he wished to be, in the space that men called real.

  CHAPTER 47

  Star-Child

  There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.

  He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies—and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.

  A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.

  Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.

  But he would think of something.

  *It was reprinted in my own first anthology, Expedition to Earth.

  *1999 update: I wish I’d laid in a good supply of these cards….

  *(Extract from “Engineer Special Study of the Surface of the Moon,” Office, Chief of Engineers, Department of the Army. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, 1961.)