Catch a falling star, p.18
Catch a Falling Star, page 18
Yet they had gone on—somehow: scrambling, crawling, plodding over ground that was sometimes level and sometimes steep, sometimes bare and rough, sometimes ankle-deep in befouling black cinders. How much further they could continue, he dared not try and guess. His eyes, red with tiredness, focussed on Chalyth and informed him that privation had overlaid her old beauty with a haggard, drawn ugliness. He knew he himself was skeletal and haggard, and he felt an ambition to become a corpse.
And then he realised she was smiling at him—a ghastly smile, cracking the layers of dust on her cheeks into wide ravines, but an unmistakable smile. He forced himself to imitate it, and in the same instant the landscape wavered and shook.
The rock they leaned against trembled, as though Earth had caught an ague. They clutched at one another, cowered, fearing the bombardment of pumice accompanying eruption of one of the innumerable volcanoes on every side > of them, and shut their eyes against the gushing forth of red-hot flecks of dust.
‘ There was a long roaring sound. There was a single crash, followed by a sliding and grinding noise: the dislodgment of a high rock from a precipice, and its coming to rest in a scree beneath as pebbles absorbed the shock of its landing. Then…
Creohan cautiously raised his head and looked. For the space of a dozen heartbeats the world seemed to waver on its axis before he realised that he was not suffering delusions.
Where, an instant before he shut his eyes, there had not been any mountain—only a desolate valley-floor of pumice and curdled lava—there was a mountain. Black. Tremendous. Awe-inspiring. Its sides ran with water, its peak caught the dull sky-gleam like a jewel. It was still growing.
He tried to speak to Chalyth, but the real noise then began, the skull-hammering rage of every thunderstorm that ever was concentrated into this place and this time, the scouring of cliffs back into the sea by every ocean that ever was slamming every pebble that ever was against every boulder that ever was and the mouth he opened to speak and the mouth she opened to answer alike remained open to let out the unison scream that neither of them could hear. The ground vibrated against their feet as though they stood on a monstrous miles-wide drum while the gods of all the human pantheons beat on its skin with thunderbolts for sticks. At last the first streams that had started from the ground washed round their feet, and they fell incontinently down to wallow in the warm contaminated water, weeping tears no less salt, blind terror driving them back to the wet security they had known, and all their ancestors, before they emerged to confront the challenge of the day.
Far off on the horizon, craters belched lava and spilled the hot seed for conception of future mountains.
He was alive. There was a hand linked in his. Bit by suffering bit, Creohan reassembled his identity from the fragments into which he had been shattered. He got awkwardly to his feet and helped Chalyth to stand at his side, both of them knifed to the bone as the icy wind slashed into their wet garments. But neither of them noticed. They simply stared.
After what might have been minutes, or might have been hours, Creohan said—very conscious of the lack of proper words to match this colossal, incredible achievement—”Those were the people we need today! People who could make a mountain lie in wait a hundred thousand years, hiding beneath the ground! Where have they gone, Chalyth?” His voice was anguished. “Where have they gone, now that Earth faces its ultimate destruction?”
Chalyth had no answer, but tugged at his hand and led the way across the broken ground.
As they drew closer, they detected an opening in the side of the mountain, not large—perhaps twice as tall as Creohan—and trapezoidal in shape. Limping, they crossed the rough heaps of rock scattered over the threshold, and saw it gave into a passageway whose walls were illumined by pale blue fluorescence, the colour of a summer sky. Beyond, something huge and powerful pulsed, as though they were entering the veins of a beast and listening to its heartbeat. The air was crisp with a scent of electricity. They ventured inside, and instantly they began to learn. It was not like a Tree of History, this mountain, for it held only one memory which was an explanation, and it was not alive—it was only a gigantic storage device for certain patterned electric currents, which by induction could start other patterns working in a human brain.
“If they could do this,” said Chalyth as she gazed down the vastness of the corridor ahead, “they could move a star.”
“They did” said Creohan, who had gone a few paces further than she. “Be silent., and come with me.”
He linked his arm with hers, and together they hobbled forward into knowledge of the greatest enterprise the human race had ever undertaken.
What name they called themselves, those far-off people had not troubled to record. It was enough that they were men and women of Earth. They had studied, and probed, and explored, being possessed by a great hunger to comprehend the universe. t So they covered the surface of their planet, and plunged > beneath its seas, and trekked into its jungles and across its icecaps; they bored deep into the solid crust of their world, v and soared high through its tenuous atmosphere. £ When—or while, it was not clear—they were engaged in r this, the moon tempted them, so they turned their scrutiny on that also. After the moon, the planets attracted them. They did not decorate the surface of their satellite with coloured vegetation to satisfy a transient whim; nor did they, like the Muve, arrogantly debase celestial bodies to a mere visible index of their rulers’ fate. They were driven by inquisitiveness that at times approached obsession. What lay at the end of their trail of knowledge-collecting they never decided. Perhaps they had a vague idea it might bring happiness; more likely, to Creohan’s way of thinking (for he felt he understood these people), they sought the simple satisfaction of having overcome their own puniness compared to the scale and majesty of the cosmos they inhabited.
Inevitably the time came when they had charted the course of the tides in Saturn’s rings, and seen the sun as a mere speck from the wastes of frigid Pluto, and pierced the blazing gas of the solar atmosphere, and they found themselves on the shore of a gulf so vast that even a ray of light took years to creep across.
Undaunted, they sought a means to defeat the natural laws of the universe. They tried to exceed the pace of those dawdling rays—and failed. There was no hope of ships outstripping light. Nonetheless, they were determined to visit the stars. Speedy, yet too slow, their vessels launched out through interstellar space, and some of them came back, to tell how there were other worlds, and beings who looked at Earth’s sun and saw it as a faint white star.
But to visit even the closest of those worlds might take ten years.
They contrived to lengthen their lifespan artificially, and so proceeded for a while, but the universe was vast, and the galaxy was a mere unit of it, and nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine parts in a million of it were out of reach.
At this time, therefore, some people began to say, “Enough!”
But others did not.
There was a paradox of available time. The best of their ships barely sufficed to carry men across interstellar gulfs, let alone intergalactic ones. Yet it had by then become plain that if only a method could be found, men had all the time they needed to explore the plenum; it would continue to exist for so long that it virtually equated to eternity.
And so it was agreed between the people who cried “Enough!” and those who did not that all the world should unite one last time on a single gigantic project. A ship could not carry sufficient numbers of men through the galaxy—but a planet could. Therefore by using the energies of the stars themselves, they brought another solar system closer to Earth and rendered one of its barren planets habitable, so that those who wished to undertake the most magnificent voyage of all might fly to it and settle there.
Then they set the star to swing on an orbit which would bring it back to Earth in a hundred thousand years, with its harvest of knowledge, and its people.
And that was where the instinct to explore the universe had gone. For the curious, the imaginative, the adventurous, were on that other world. Old habits died hard, and for a few thousands of years alter the departure other men had half-remembered, and tried—out of envy—to emulate that one superlative gesture. The details grew blurred; the citizens of later cultures scoffed at the improbability of legends about moving a star; and at last the very legends were forgotten.
This too they had foreseen, that great people. Therefore they had concealed this mountain, proof against the foolish battering of their descendants who believed more from superstition than honest comprehension that under this range of hills was buried the key to the stars, designed to await the advent of the appointed clay. The electronic patterns circulating in its supercooled memory banks would go on, as near as made no matter, for ever, in the hope that when the time came for a return someone might chance to be nearby, might learn of his race’s ancient glory, and might be glad to be alive.
XXVIII
“It drew us here,” Chalyth croaked. “Creohan, did you feel that? It drew us here, all the way from home I”
They had found themselves outside the mountain again. They had walked blindly, lost in visions that surpassed their wildest dreams. Now, overcome, they clung to one another on the harsh barren ground, gulping in lungfuls of the smoke-tainted air and struggling to make sense of the data which had been crammed into their memories. The sky was nearly dark; they must have spent many hours inside.
Creohan coughed away filthy airborne dust. “Of course it did,” he whispered. “It’ll draw anyone and everyone who learns of the apparent doom of Earth and cares enough to act in an attempt to save it. No matter if they’re in the Antipodes! Maybe this very moment valiant men are paddling the great oceans, or blistering their feet on the hardly-set lava of that volcanic range, following the lines of force which compel meteors to converge above this spot!”
He swallowed effortfully, and added, “I never before in my life decided to obey an omen. Do you realise that? Never! For all I know that idea too was put into my head by—by them, who provided signs and portents suitable for ignorant barbarians in case that was all that were left. And compared to them, are we not barbarians? Look at us, will you? Filthy, shabby, half-starved, limping—wouldn’t we be a fine pair to welcome home our cousins from the sky?”
She drew back and looked at him. After a moment her mouth quirked; his responded; in seconds they were laughing helplessly, having to hold on to one another now for fear they might lose their balance among the loose-piled rocks.
“Ay-ay-ay!” Chalyth forced out at last, her breath wheezing with the exhaustion of insupportable mirth. “What a spectacle we make, indeed! But I don’t think we’d need to feel ashamed. There is still something left here of the old grand spirit which took them to the stars. I think if there were not that mountain would have called to us in vain.”
There was a span of silence. Eventually Creohan said, “I guess, then, we’d better go back.”
“Must we?” Chalyth’s face was grave.
“But we have great news to bring to our friends—”
“Great news?” she interrupted. “Will Roff and Zayla, Hoo and Kiong-la and Paro-mni be glad to have us return and say, There’s no threat after all!’
“But there still may be,” Creohan said. “In a hundred thousand years, who knows what may have happened on that other world? Might not our cousins too have undergone cycles of recurrent savagery, until they like us have forgotten the ancient truths?”
Chalyth shivered, and not from the bite of the wind. “It would be sad… But you’re right, of course. No one must be shielded from the truth. We’ll go, then.”
Still, though, she lingered, gazing up at the now dark sky where only a handful of stars could be seen through the encircling fumes of the volcanic range. Abruptly she stiffened.
“Creohan!” she said in a changed voice. “Look there! A star that is moving!”
“I think all meteors are being drawn towards this place now,” Creohan shrugged.
“Oh, Creohan, I know a meteorite—its quick flash, the faint luminance of its trail. But there is a moving light which does not fade!”
Creohan tilted his head and blinked upwards. It was true. Something was crossing the sky at a majestic pace that shone like a chip of sunstuff, piercing the roiling clouds of volcanic smoke, growing larger as he watched. On the instant, he knew what it must be.
“They’ve not forgotten,” he whispered, and clutched at Chalyth’s arm. “Miracle! Miracle! They’ve not forgotten!”
“What do you mean?” Chalyth cried.
“I mean that can only be one thing. A hundred thousand years ago such ships as that left Earth for another world. Chalyth, Chalyth, what it is to be alive today!”
“Then let’s—” She stumbled over the words. “Let’s not go back! Let’s wait for them. They’ll come here, won’t they? They’ll still remember where this mountain is?”
“Of course we’ll wait,” said Creohan. “If we’d only known, we’d have been waiting for them all our lives.”
The spaceship grew larger in the sky. It was coming down.
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Also by James Blish
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A Torrent Of Faces (with Norman L. Knight)
And All The Stars A Stage
Black Easter
Doctor Mirabilis
Cities in Flight, comprising:
~ They Shall Have Stars
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~ Earthman, Come Home
~ A Clash Of Cymbals (The Triumph Of Time)
Fallen Star (The Frozen Year)
Jack Of Eagles
Midsummer Century
Mission To The Heart Stars
More Issues At Hand
The Day After Judgement
The Duplicated Man (with Robert A. W. Lowndes)
The Issue At Hand
The Night Shapes
The Quincunx Of Time
The Seedling Stars
The Star Dwellers
The Tale That Wags The God
The Warriors Of Day
Titan’s Daughter
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Welcome To Mars!
John Brunner (1934-1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1968
All rights reserved.
The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1968
This eBook first published in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10145 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
John Brunner, Catch a Falling Star
