Paul gazed up at the fantastic shape, shielding his eyes against the glow of its polished surface, and was drunk with wonder.
Then the voice that was no voice spoke in his head.
‘I am beautiful, am I not?’
So much had happened that Paul was beyond surprise. He said calmly: ‘Yes, you are beautiful.’
‘I am Aru Re—in your language, Bird of Mars. I have waited here more than fifty thousand planetary years. It may be that I shall wait another ten thousand years before my children are of an age to understand. For I am the custodian of the memory of their race.’
Suddenly, Paul’s mind was reeling. Here he was, a man of Earth, having made a hazardous journey on a strange planet, through primeval forests, across wide savannah, into the mountains and over a high glacier to meet a telepathic star ship. A star ship that spoke in English, called itself the Bird of Mars and claimed to have been in existence for over fifty thousand years. He wanted to laugh and cry and quietly and purposefully go mad. But there was no need of that. Obviously he was already mad. Obviously, the glacier had beaten him and he was lying now—what was left of him—in some shallow crevasse, withdrawn into a world of fantasy, waiting for the great cold to bring down the find curtain on his psychic drama.
‘No, you are not mad,’ said the silent voice. ‘Nor are you injured and dying. You are Paul Marlowe of Earth, and you are the first man resolute enough to discover the truth. Open your mind completely to me, and I will show you much that has been hidden. I am Aru Re, Bird of Mars … The truth also, is beautiful.’
‘Nothing but a machine!’ shouted Paul, rebelling against die impossible reality. ‘You are nothing but a machine—a skyhigh lump of steel, wrapped round a computer with built-in paranoia.’ He tried to control himself, but could not restrain the sobbing. ‘Fraud! Impostor! Bastard lump of tin! ’
‘Yes, I am a machine,’ returned the voice of the Aru Re, insistendy in his head, ‘but I am greater than the sum of my parts. I am a machine that lives. Because I am the custodian and the carrier of the seed, I am immortal. I am greater than the men who conceived me, though they, too, were great.’
‘A machine!’ babbled Paul desperately. ‘A useless bloody machine! ’
The voice would not leave him alone. ‘And what of Paul
Marlowe, voyager in the Gloria Mundi, citizen on sufferance of Baya Nor, Poul Mer Lo, the teacher? Is he not a machine — a machine constructed of bone and flesh and dreams?’
‘Leave me alone! ’ sobbed Paul. ‘Leave me alone! ’
‘I cannot leave you alone,’ said the Aru Re, ‘because you chose not to leave me alone. You chose to know. I warned you to go back, but you came on. Therefore, according to the design, you shall know. Open your mind completely.’
Dimly, Paul knew that there was a battle raging in his head. He did not want to lose it. Because he knew instinctively that if he did lose it he would never be quite the same again.
‘Open your mind,’ repeated the star ship.
With all his strength, Paul fought against the voice and the compulsive power that had invaded his brain.
‘Then close your eyes and forget,’ murmured the Aru Re persuasively. ‘It has been a long journey. Close your eyes and forget.’
The change of approach caught Paul Marlowe off guard. Momentarily, he closed his eyes; and for the fraction of a second he allowed the taughtness to slacken.
It was enough for the star ship. As great spirals of blackness whirled in upon him, he realized that he was in thrall.
There was no sensation of movement, but he was no longer on the mountain of the White Darkness. He was in a black void—the most warm, the most pleasant, the most comfortable void in the universe.
And suddenly, there was light.
He looked up at (down upon? around?) the most beautiful city he had ever seen. It grew—blossomed would have been a better word—in a desert. The desert was not a terrestrial desert, and the city was not a terrestrial city, and the men and women who occupied it—brown and beautiful and human though they looked—were not of Earth.
‘This city of Mars,’ said the Aru Re, ‘grew, withered and died before men walked upon Sol Three or Altair Five. This city, on the fourth planet of your sun, contained twenty million people and lasted longer than the span of the entire civilization of Earth. By your standards it was stable—almost immortal.
And yet it, too, died. It died as the whole of Mars died, in the Wars of the Great Cities that lasted two hundred and forty Martian years, destroying in the end not only a civilization but the life of the planet that gave it birth.’
The scene changed rapidly. As Paul Marlowe looked, it seemed as if the city were expanding and contracting like some fantastic organism inhaling and exhaling, pulsing with life—and death. In the accelerated portrayal of Martian history that he was now witnessing, buildings and structures more than two kilometres high were raised and destroyed in the fraction of a second. Human beings were no longer visible, not even as a blur. Their time span was too short. And every few seconds the desert and the city would erupt briefly into the bright, blinding shapes that Paul recognized from pictures he had seen long ago—the terrible glory of transient mushrooms of atomic fire.
‘Thus,’ went on the matter of fact voice of the Aru Re, ‘did Martian civilization encompass its own suicide … Think of a culture and a technology, Paul Marlowe, as far ahead of yours as yours is ahead of the Bayani. Think of it, and know that such a culture can still be vulnerable as men themselves are always vulnerable … But there were those—men and machines—who foresaw the end. They knew that the civilization of Mars, inherently unstable, would perish. Yet they knew also that, with the resources at their command, three hundred million years of Martian evolution need not be in vain.’
The scene changed, darkened. Without knowing how he knew, Paul realized that he was now gazing at a large subterranean cavern, kilometres below the bleak Martian desert. Here other structures were growing, like strange and beautiful stalagmites, from the floor of living rock. Men and machines scuttled about them, ant-like, swarming. Everywhere there was a sense of urgency and purpose and speed.
‘And so the star ships were built—the seed cases that would be cast off by a dying planet to carry the seeds of its achievement to the still unravaged soil of distant worlds … Here is the rocky bed where I and six other identical vessels were created. It would have been comparatively easy to build star ships that were no more than star ships. But we were created as guardians—living guardians, fashioned from materials almost impervious to the elements and even time itself. Our task was not only to transport, but to nurture and prepare the seed; and when the seed had again taken root, when the flower of civilization had begun to bloom again, it would be our task to restore the racial memory and reveal the origin of that which could now only achieve maturity on an alien soil. Many died that we might be programmed for life. Many remained behind that we might carry the few—the few who were to become as children, their minds cleansed of all sophistication and personal memories so that they might rediscover a lost innocence, learning once more over the long centuries of reawakening, the nature of their human predicament.’
Again the scene accelerated. The star ships grew towards the roof of the cavern. In a silent, explosive puff, the roof itself was blasted away by some invisible force. Two of the star ships crumpled swiftly and soundlessly to lie like twisted strips of metal foil on the floor of a great rocky basin that was now open to the sky. A tiny, thin, blurred snake—that Paul Marlowe knew was a stream of human beings—rippled to the base of each of the remaining star ships. And was swallowed. Then, one by one, each of the silver vessels became shrouded by blue descending aureoles of light. The rock floor turned to brilliant liquid fire as the star ships lifted gracefully and swiftly into the black reaches of the sky.