2010 Odyssey Two

THE TRIAL Chapter 7: LUCIFER RISING Epilogue: 20,001
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

Only during the last few generations have the Europans ventured into the Farside, beyond the light and warmth of their never-setting sun, into the wilderness where the ice that once covered all their world may still be found. And even fewer have remained there to face the brief and fearful night that comes, when the brilliant but powerless Cold Sun sinks below the horizon.

Yet already, those few hardy explorers have discovered that the Universe around them is stranger than they ever imagined. The sensitive eyes they developed in the dim oceans still serve them well; they can see the stars and the other bodies moving in their sky. They have begun to lay the foundations of astronomy, and some daring thinkers have, even surmised that the great world of Europa is not the whole of creation.

Very soon after they had emerged from the ocean, during the explosively swift evolution forced upon them by the melting of the ice, they had realized that the objects in the sky fell into three distinct classes. Most important, of course, was the sun. Some legends - though few took them seriously - claimed that it had not always been there, but had appeared suddenly, heralding a brief, cataclysmic age of transformation, when much of Europa's teeming life had been destroyed. If that was indeed true, it was a small price to pay for the benefits that poured down from the tiny, inexhaustible source of energy that hung unmoving in the sky.

Perhaps the Cold Sun was its distant brother, banished for some crime and condemned to march forever around the vault of heaven. It was of no importance except to those peculiar Europans who were always asking questions about matters that all sensible folk took for granted.

Still, it must be admitted that those cranks had made some interesting discoveries during their excursions into the darkness of Farside. They claimed - though this was hard to believe - that the whole sky was sprinkled with uncountable myriads of tiny lights, even smaller and feebler than the Cold Sun. They varied greatly in brilliance; and though they rose and set, they never moved from their fixed positions.

Against this background, there were three objects that did move, apparently obeying complex laws that no one had yet been able to fathom. And unlike all the others in the sky, they were quite large - though both shape and size varied continually. Sometimes they were disks, sometimes half-circles, sometimes slim crescents. They were obviously closer than all the other bodies in the Universe, for their surfaces showed an immense wealth of complex and ever-changing detail.

The theory that they were indeed other worlds had at last been accepted - though no one except a few fanatics believed that they could be anything like as large, or as important, as Europa. One lay toward the Sun, and was in a constant state of turmoil. On its nightside could be seen the glow of great fires - a phenomenon still beyond the understanding of the Europans, for their atmosphere, as yet, contains no oxygen. And sometimes vast explosions hurl clouds of debris up from the surface; if the sunward globe is indeed a world, it must be a very unpleasant place to live. Perhaps even worse than the nightside of Europa.

The two outer, and more distant, spheres seem to be much less violent places, yet in some ways they are even more mysterious. When darkness falls upon their surfaces, they too show patches of light, but these are very different from the swiftly changing fires of the turbulent inner world. They burn with an almost steady brilliance, and are concentrated in a few small areas - though over the generations, these areas have grown, and multiplied.

But strangest of all are the lights, fierce as tiny suns, that can often be observed moving across the darkness between these other worlds. Once, recalling the bioluminescence of their own seas, some Europans had speculated that these might indeed be living creatures; but their intensity makes that almost incredible. Nevertheless, more and more thinkers believe that these lights - the fixed patterns, and moving suns - must be some strange manifestation of life.

Against this, however, there is one very potent argument. If they are living things, why do they never come to Europa?

Yet there are legends. Thousands of generations ago, soon after the conquest of the land, it is said that some of those lights came very close indeed - but they always exploded in sky-filling blasts that far outshone the Sun. And strange, hard metals rained down upon the land; some of them are still worshipped to this day.

None is as holy, though, as the huge, black monolith that stands on the frontier of eternal day, one side forever turned to the unmoving Sun, the other facing into the land of night. Ten times the height of the tallest Europan - even when he raises his tendrils to the fullest extent - it is the very symbol of mystery and unattainability. For it has never been touched; it can only be worshipped from afar. Around it lies the Circle of Power, which repels all who try to approach.

It is that same power, many believe, that keeps at bay those moving lights in the sky. If it ever fails, they will descend upon the virgin continents and shrinking seas of Europa, and their purpose will be revealed at last.

The Europans would be surprised to know with what intensity and baffled wonder that black monolith is also studied by the minds behind those moving lights. For centuries now their automatic probes have made a cautious descent from orbit - always with the same disastrous result. For until the time is ripe, the monolith will permit no contact.

When that time comes - when, perhaps, the Europans have invented radio and discovered the messages continually bombarding them from so close at hand - the monolith may change its strategy. It may - or it may not - choose to release the entities who slumber within it, so that they can bridge the gulf between the Europans and the race to which they once held allegiance.

And it may be that no such bridge is possible, and that two such alien forms of consciousness can never coexist. If this is so, then only one of them can inherit the Solar System.

Which it will be, not even the Gods know - yet.