3001: the final odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science fiction, Adventure, Fiction, General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Space Opera, High Tech, Science Fiction - High Tech, Science Fiction - Space Opera, working, Thirty-first century
ISBN: 9780345423498
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1998-07-15T16:46:12.251000+00:00

3001: The Final Odissey

17 Ganymede

It was unusual for Frank Poole to oversleep, but he had been kept awake by strange dreams. Past and present were inextricably mixed; sometimes he was on Discovery, sometimes in the Africa Tower - and sometimes he was a boy again, among friends he had thought long-forgotten.

Where am I? he asked himself as he struggled up to consciousness, like a swimmer trying to get back to the surface. There was a small window just above his bed, covered by a curtain not thick enough to completely block the light from outside. There had been a time, around the mid-twentieth century, when aircraft had been slow enough to feature First Class sleeping accommodation: Poole had never sampled this nostalgic luxury, which some tourist organizations had still advertised in his own day, but he could easily imagine that he was doing so now.

He drew the curtain and looked out. No, he had not awakened in the skies of Earth, though the landscape unrolling below was not unlike the Antarctic. But the South Pole had never boasted two suns, both rising at once as Goliath swept towards them.

The ship was orbiting less than a hundred kilometres above what appeared to be an immense ploughed field, lightly dusted with snow. But the ploughman must have been drunk - or the guidance system must have gone crazy - for the furrows meandered in every direction, sometimes cutting across each other or turning back on themselves. Here and there the terrain was dotted with faint circles -ghost craters from meteor impacts aeons ago.

So this is Ganymede, Poole wondered drowsily. Mankind’s furthest outpost from home! Why should any sensible person want to live here? Well, I’ve often thought that when I’ve flown over Greenland or Iceland in winter-time…

There was a knock on the door, a ‘Mind if I come in?’, and Captain Chandler did so without waiting for a reply.

‘Thought we’d let you sleep until we landed - that end-of-trip party did last longer than I’d intended, but I couldn’t risk a mutiny by cutting it short.’

Poole laughed.

‘Has there ever been a mutiny in space?’

‘Oh, quite a few but not in my time. Now we’ve mentioned the subject, you might say that Hal started the tradition… sorry - perhaps I shouldn’t - look - there’s Ganymede City!’

Coming up over the horizon was what appeared to be a criss-cross pattern of streets and avenues, intersecting almost at right-angles but with the slight irregularity typical of any settlement that had grown by accretion, without central planning. It was bisected by a broad river - Poole recalled that the equatorial regions of Ganymede were now warm enough for liquid water to exist - and it reminded him of an old wood-cut he had seen of medieval London.

Then he noticed that Chandler was looking at him with an expression of amusement… and the illusion vanished as he realized the scale of the ‘city’.

‘The Ganymedeans,’ he said dryly, ‘must have been rather large, to have made roads five or ten kilometres wide.

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