HELP! WILL ANYONE WHO HEARS ME PLEASE COME AT ONCE! THIS IS A CORA EMERGENCY!
HELP! WILL ANYONE WHO HEARS ME PLEASE COME AT ONCE!
* * *
She was still calling when the sun came up, and its first rays caressed the summit of the mountain that had once been sacred. Far below, the shadow of Sri Kanda leaped forth upon the clouds, its perfect cone still unblemished despite all that man had done.
There were no pilgrims now to watch that symbol of eternity lie across the face of the awakening land. But millions would see it, in the centuries ahead, as they rode in comfort and safety to the stars.
Epilogue:
Kalidasa’s
Triumph
In the last days of that last brief summer, before the jaws of ice clenched shut around the equator, one of the Starholme envoys came to Yakkagala.
A Master of the Swarms, It had recently conjugated Itself into human form. Apart from one minor detail, the likeness was excellent; but the dozen children who had accompanied the Holmer in the autocopter were in a constant state of mild hysteria, the younger ones frequently dissolving into giggles.
“What’s so funny?” It had asked in perfect solar. “Or is this a private joke?”
But they would not explain to the Starholmer, whose normal color vision lay entirely in the infrared, that the human skin was not a random mosaic of greens and reds and blues. Even when It had threatened to turn into a Tyrannosaurus Rex and eat them all up, they refused to satisfy Its curiosity. Indeed, they quickly pointed out—to an entity that had crossed scores of light-years and collected knowledge for thirty centuries!—that a mass of only a hundred kilograms would scarcely make an impressive dinosaur.
The Holmer did not mind. It was patient, and the children of Earth were endlessly fascinating, in both their biology and their psychology. So were the young of all creatures—all, of course, that did have young. Having studied nine such species, the Holmer could now almost imagine what it must be like to grow up, mature, and die—almost, but not quite.
Spread out before the dozen humans and one non-human lay the empty land, its once luxuriant fields and forests blasted by the cold breaths from north and south. The graceful coconut palms had long since vanished, and even the gloomy pines that had succeeded them were naked skeletons, their roots destroyed by the spreading permafrost. No life was left upon the surface of the Earth. Only in the oceanic abyss, where the planet’s internal heat still kept the ice at bay, did a few blind, starveling creatures crawl and swim and devour each other.
Yet to a being whose home had circled a faint red star, the sun that blazed down from the cloudless sky seemed intolerably bright. Though all its warmth had gone, drained away by the sickness that had attacked its core a thousand years ago, its fierce, cold light revealed every detail of the stricken land, and flashed in splendor from the approaching glaciers.
For the children, still reveling in the powers of their awakening minds, the sub-zero temperatures were an exciting challenge. As they danced naked through the snowdrifts, bare feet kicking up clouds of powder-dry, shining crystals, their symbiotes often had to warn them: “Don’t override your frostbite signals!” For they were not yet old enough to replace new limbs, without the help of their elders.
The oldest of the boys was showing off. He had launched a deliberate assault on the cold, announcing proudly that he was a fire-elemental. (The Starholmer noted the term for future research, which would later cause It much perplexity.) All that could be seen of the small exhibitionist was a column of flame and steam, dancing to and fro along the ancient brickwork. The other children pointedly ignored this rather crude display.
To the Starholmer, however, it presented an interesting paradox. Just why had these people retreated to the inner planets, when they could have fought back the cold with the powers that they now possessed—as, indeed, their cousins were doing on Mars?
That was a question to which It had not received a satisfactory answer. It considered again the enigmatic reply given by ARISTOTLE, the entity with which It most easily communicated.
“For everything there is a season,” the Earth brain had replied. “There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice. When the long winter is over, man will return to an Earth renewed and refreshed.”
And so, during the past few centuries, the whole terrestrial population had streamed up the equatorial towers and flowed sunward toward the young oceans of Venus, the fertile plains of Mercury’s temperate zone. Five hundred years hence, when the sun had recovered, the exiles would return. Mercury would be abandoned, except for the polar regions; but Venus would be a permanent second home. The quenching of the sun had given the incentive, and the opportunity, for the taming of that hellish world.
Important though they were, these matters concerned the Starholmer only indirectly. Its interest was focused upon more subtle aspects of human culture and society. Every species was unique, with its own surprises, its own idiosyncrasies. This one had introduced the Starholmer to the baffling concept of negative information—or, in the local terminology, humor, fantasy, myth.
As It grappled with these strange phenomena, the Starholmer had sometimes said despairingly to Itself: We will never understand human beings. On occasion, It had been so frustrated that It had feared an involuntary conjugation, with all the risks that entailed. But now It had made real progress. It could still remember Its satisfaction the first time It had made a joke, and the children had all laughed.
Working with children had been the clue, again provided by ARISTOTLE.
“There is an old saying: the child is father of the man. Although the biological concept of ‘father’ is alien to us both, in this context the word has a double meaning—”
So here It was, hoping that the children would enable It to understand the adults into which they would eventually metamorphize. Sometimes they told the truth; but even when they were being playful (another difficult concept) and dispensed negative information, the Starholmer could now recognize the signs. . . .
Yet there were times when neither the children nor the adults, nor even ARISTOTLE, knew the truth. There seemed to be a continuous spectrum between absolute fantasy and hard historical facts, with every possible gradation between. At one end were such figures as Columbus and Leonardo and Einstein and Lenin and Newton and Washington, whose very voices and images had sometimes been preserved. At the other extreme were Zeus and Alice and King Kong and Gulliver and Siegfried and Merlin, who could not possibly have existed in the real world. But what was one to make of Robin Hood and Tarzan and Christ and Sherlock Holmes and Odysseus and Frankenstein? Allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, they might well have been actual historic personages. . . .
The Elephant Throne had changed little in three and a half thousand years, but never before had it supported the weight of so alien a visitor. As the Starholmer stared into the south, It compared the half-kilometer-wide column soaring from the mountain peak with the feats of engineering It had seen on other worlds. For such a young race, this was truly impressive. Though it seemed always on the point of toppling from the sky, it had stood now for fifteen centuries.
Not, of course, in its present form. The first hundred kilometers were now a vertical city—still occupied at some widely spaced levels—through which the sixteen sets of tracks had often carried a million passengers a day. Only two of those tracks were operating now; in a few hours, the Starholmer and Its escorts would be racing up that huge, fluted column, on the way back to the Ring City that encircled the globe.
The Holmer everted Its eyes to give telescopic vision, and slowly scanned the zenith. Yes, there it was—hard to see by day, but easy by night when the sunlight streaming past the shadow of Earth still blazed upon it. The thin, shining band that split the sky into two hemispheres was a whole world in itself, where half a billion humans had opted for permanent zero-gravity life.
And up there beside Ring City
was the starship that had carried the envoy and all the other Companions of the Hive across the interstellar gulfs. Even now it was being readied for departure—not with any sense of urgency, but several years ahead of schedule, in preparation for the next six-hundred-year lap of its journey.
That would represent no time at all to the Starholmer, of course, for It would not reconjugate until the end of the voyage. But then It might well face the greatest challenge of Its long career. For the first time, a Starprobe had been destroyed—or at least silenced—soon after it had entered a solar system. Perhaps it had at last made contact with the mysterious Hunters of the Dawn, who had left their marks upon so many worlds, so inexplicably close to the Beginning itself. If the Starholmer had been capable of awe, or of fear, It would have known both, as It contemplated Its future, six hundred years hence.
But now It was on the snow-dusted summit of Yakkagala, facing mankind’s pathway to the stars. It summoned the children to Its side (they always understood when It really wished to be obeyed) and pointed to the mountain in the south.
“You know perfectly well,” It said, with exasperation that was only partly feigned, “that Earthport One was built two thousand years later than this ruined palace.”
The children all nodded in solemn agreement.
“Then why,” asked the Starholmer, tracing the line from the zenith down to the summit of the mountain, “why do you call that column the Tower of Kalidasa?”
Sources and Acknowledgments
The writer of historical fiction has a peculiar responsibility to his readers, especially when he is dealing with unfamiliar times and places. He should not distort facts or events when they are known; and when he invents them, as he is often compelled to do, it is his duty to indicate the dividing line between imagination and reality.
The writer of science fiction has the same responsibility, squared. I hope that these notes will not only discharge that obligation well but also add to the reader’s enjoyment.
Taprobane and Ceylon
For dramatic reasons, I have made three trifling changes in the geography of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. I have moved the island eight hundred kilometers south, so that it straddles the equator—as indeed it did twenty million years ago, and may someday do again. At the moment, it lies between six and ten degrees north.
In addition, I have doubled the height of the Sacred Mountain, and moved it closer to “Yakkagala.” For both places exist, very much as I have described them.
Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, is a striking cone-shaped mountain sacred to the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Christians, and bears a small temple on its summit. Inside the temple is a stone slab with a depression which, though two meters long, is reputed to be the footprint of the Buddha.
Every year, for many centuries, thousands of pilgrims have made the long climb to the 2,240-meter-high summit. The ascent is no longer dangerous, for there are two stairways (which must surely be the longest in the world) to the very top. I have climbed once, at the instigation of the New Yorker’s Jeremy Bernstein (see his Experiencing Science), and my legs were paralyzed for several days afterward. But it was worth the effort, because we were lucky enough to see the beautiful and awe-inspiring spectacle of the peak’s shadow at dawn—a perfectly symmetrical cone visible only for the few minutes after sunrise, and stretching almost to the horizon on the clouds far below.
I have since explored the mountain with much less effort in a Sri Lanka Air Force helicopter, getting close enough to the temple to observe the resigned expressions on the faces of the monks, now accustomed to such noisy intrusions.
The rock fortress of Yakkagala is actually Sigiriya (or Sigiri, “Lion Rock”), the reality of which is so astonishing that I have had no need to change it in any way. The only liberties I have taken are chronological. The palace on the summit was (according to the Sinhalese Chronicle the Culavamsa) built during the reign of the parricide King Kasyapa I (A.D. 478–495). However, it seems incredible that so vast an undertaking could have been carried out in a mere eighteen years by a usurper expecting to be challenged at any moment, and the real history of Sigiriya may well go back for many centuries before these dates.
The character, motivation, and actual fate of Kasyapa have been the subject of much controversy, recently fueled by the posthumously published The Story of Sigiri (Lake House, Colombo, 1972), by the Sinhalese scholar Professor Senerat Paranavitana. I am also indebted to his monumental two-volume study of the inscriptions on the Mirror Wall, Sigiri Graffiti (Oxford University Press, 1956). Some of the verses I have quoted are genuine; others I have only slightly invented.
The frescoes which are Sigiriya’s greatest glory have been handsomely reproduced in Ceylon: Paintings from Temple, Shrine and Rock (New York Graphic Society/UNESCO, 1957). Plate V shows the most interesting—and the one, alas, destroyed in the 1960’s by unknown vandals. The attendant is clearly listening to the mysterious hinged box she is holding in her right hand. It remains unidentified, the local archaeologists refusing to take seriously my suggestion that it is an early Sinhalese transistor radio.
The legend of Sigiriya has recently been brought to the screen by Dimitri de Grunwald, in his production The God King, with Leigh Lawson as a very impressive Kasyapa.
The Space Elevator
This apparently outrageous concept was first presented to the West in a letter in the issue of Science for 11 February 1966, “Satellite Elongation into a True ‘Sky-Hook,’” by John D. Isaacs, Hugh Bradner, and George E. Backus, of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Allyn C. Vine of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Though it may seem odd that oceanographers should get involved with such an idea, this is not surprising when one realizes that they are about the only people (since the great days of barrage balloons) who concern themselves with very long cables hanging under their own weight. (Dr. Allyn Vine’s name, incidentally, is now immortalized in that of the famous research submersible Alvin.)
It was later discovered that the concept had already been developed, six years earlier, and on a much more ambitious scale, by a Leningrad engineer, Y. N. Artsutanov (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960). Artsutanov considered a “heavenly funicular,” to use his engaging name for the device, lifting no less than twelve thousand tons a day to synchronous orbit. It seems surprising that this daring idea received so little publicity; the only mention I have ever seen of it is in the handsome volume of paintings by Alexei A. Leonov and Andrei K. Sokolov, The Stars Are Awaiting Us (Moscow, 1967). One color plate (page 25) shows the “Space Elevator” in action. The caption reads: “. . . the satellite will, so to say, stay fixed in a certain point in the sky. If a cable is lowered from the satellite to the Earth you will have a ready cable-road. An ‘Earth-Sputnik-Earth’ elevator for freight and passengers can then be built, and it will operate without any rocket propulsion.”
Although General Leonov gave me a copy of his book at the Vienna “Peaceful Uses of Space” conference in 1968, the idea simply failed to register on me—despite the fact that the elevator is shown hovering exactly over Sri Lanka! I probably thought that Cosmonaut Leonov, a noted humorist, was just having a little joke. (He is also a superb diplomat. After the Vienna screening, he made quite the nicest comment on 2001 I’ve ever heard: “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice.” Presumably after the Apollo-Soyuz mission he would say “three times.”)
The Space Elevator is quite clearly an idea whose time has come, as is demonstrated by the fact that within a decade of the 1966 Isaacs et al. letter it was independently reinvented at least three times. A detailed treatment, containing many new ideas, “The Orbital Tower: A Spacecraft Launcher Using the Earth’s Rotational Energy,” was published by Jerome Pearson, of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Acta Astronautica for September–October 1975. Dr. Pearson was astonished to hear of the earlier studies, which his computer survey had failed to locate. He discovered them through reading my own testimony to the House of Representatives Committee on Space Science
and Applications in July 1975. (See “The View from Serendip.”)
Six years earlier A. R. Collar and J. W. Flower had come to essentially the same conclusions in their paper “A (Relatively) Low Altitude 24-hour Satellite” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 22, pp. 442–457, 1969. They were looking into the possibility of suspending a synchronous communications satellite far below the natural thirty-six-thousand-kilometer altitude, and did not discuss taking the cable all the way down to the surface of the Earth, but this is an obvious extension of their treatment.
And now for a modest cough. Back in 1963, in an essay commissioned by UNESCO and published in Astronautics for February 1964, “The World of the Communications Satellite” (now available in Voices from the Sky), I wrote: “As a much longer term possibility, it might be mentioned that there are a number of theoretical ways of achieving a low-altitude, twenty-four-hour satellite; but they depend upon technical developments unlikely to occur in this century. I leave their contemplation as an exercise for the student.”
The first of these “theoretical ways” was, of course, the suspended satellite discussed by Collar and Flower. My crude back-of-an-envelope calculations, based on the strength of existing materials, made me so skeptical of the whole idea that I did not bother to spell it out in detail. If I had been a little less conservative—or if a larger envelope had been available—I might have been ahead of everyone except Artsutanov himself.
As this book is, I hope, more a novel than an engineering treatise, those who wish to go into technical details are referred to the now rapidly expanding literature on the subject. Recent examples include Jerome Pearson’s “Using the Orbital Tower to Launch Earth-Escape Payloads Daily” (Proceedings of the 27th International Astronautical Federation Congress, October 1976) and a remarkable paper by Hans Moravec, “A Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhook” (American Astronautical Society Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 18–20 October 1977).