Beyond the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke & Gregory Benford

Author:Arthur C. Clarke & Gregory Benford [Clarke, Arthur C. & Benford, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780795324949
Google: va8qAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 24628165
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1990-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

20. The Ur-Humans

The woman dreamed for two days.

She thrashed sometimes, calling out hoarsely, her words slurred just beyond comprehension. The creature had carefully moved her to the shade of some tall trees whose branches formed curious curls like hooks at the very top. It foraged for simple fruit and held slices to the woman’s mouth so the juice would trickle down her swollen throat. For itself small animals sufficed, which it caught by simply keeping still for long periods and letting them wander within reach. This was enough, for it knew how to conserve strength while never letting its attention wander from the woman’s weak but persistent rhythms of regrowth.

The uses of fantasy are many, and healing is not the least of these. She slept not merely because this was the best way to repair herself. Behind her jerking eyelids a thin layer outside the neocortex brain was rerunning the events which had led to her trauma. This subbrain integrated emotional and physiological elements, replaying her actions, searching for some fulcrum moment when she might have averted the calamity.

There was some comfort in knowing, finally, that nothing would have changed the outcome. When she reached this conclusion a stiffness left her and to the watching creature her body seemed to soften. Some memories were eventually discarded in this process as too painful to carry, while others were amplified in order to attain a kind of narrative equilibrium. This editing saved her from a burden of remorse and anxiety that, in earlier forms of humanity, would have plagued her for years after.

In the second day she momentarily burst into a slurred song. At dusk she awoke. She looked up into the long, tapered muzzle of her watcher and asked fuzzily, “How many… lived?”

“Only you, that I can sense.” The creature’s voice was low and yet lilting, like a bass note that had worked itself impossibly through the throat of a flute.

“No…?” She was quiet for a time, studying the green moon that swam beyond the mountains.

She said weakly, “The Supras…”

“They did this?”

“No, no. I saw some humans, like us, in flyers. The Supras were engaged… far away. I thought they would help us.”

“They have been busy.” It gestured at the southern horizon. In twilight’s dim gleaming a fat column of oily smoke stood like an obsidian gravestone.

“What’s…”

“It has been there since yesterday.” The looming distant disaster had strengthened the creature’s resolution.

“Ah.” She closed her eyes then and subsided into her curious, eyelid-fluttering sleep. For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge and survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominids walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition she would not have been by her own judgment a true human.

The next day she got up. Creaking unsteadily, she walked to the stream, where she lay facedown and drank for a long time. One finger was missing from her left hand, but she insisted on helping the creature forage for berries and edible leaves.

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