Childhood’s End

by Clarke Arthur

Vindarten could tell him little: this was not his field of knowledge, and he was not particularly curious. From the Overlord’s description, Jan built up a picture of a cyclopean beast living among the asteroidal rubble of some distant sun, its growth uninhibited by gravity, depending for food and life upon the range and resolving power of its single eye.

There seemed no limit to what Nature could do if she was pressed, and Jan felt an irrational pleasure at discovering something which the Overlords would not attempt. They had brought a full-sized whale from Earth — but they had drawn the line at this.

And there was the time when he had gone up, endlessly up, until the walls of the elevator had faded through opalescence into a crystal transparency. He was standing, it seemed, unsupported among the uppermost peaks of the city, with nothing to protect him from the abyss. But he felt no more vertigo than one does in an aeroplane, for there was no sense of contact with the distant ground. He was above the clouds, sharing the sky with a few pinnacles of metal or stone. A rose-red sea, the cloud-layer rolled sluggishly beneath him. There were two pale and tiny moons in the sky, not far from the sombre sun. Near the centre of that bloated red disc was a small, dark shadow, perfectly circular. It might have been a sunspot, or another moon in transit.

Jan slowly moved his gaze along the horizon. The cloud-cover extended clear to the edge of this enormous world, but in one direction, at an unguessable distance, there was a mottled patch that might have marked the towers of another city. He stared at it for a long while, then continued his careful survey.

When he had turned half-circle he saw the mountain. It was not on the horizon, but beyond it — a single serrated peak, climbing up over the edge of the world, its lower slopes hidden as the bulk of an iceberg is concealed below the water-line. He tried to guess its size, and failed completely. Even on a world with gravity as low as this, it seemed hard to believe that such mountains could exist. Did the Overlords, he wondered, sport themselves upon its slopes and sweep like eagles around those immense buttresses?

And then, slowly, the mountain began to change. When he saw it first, it was a dull and almost sinister red, with a few faint markings near its crown that he could not clearly distinguish. He was trying to focus on them when he realized that they were moving…

At first he could not believe his eyes. Then he forced himself to remember that all his preconceived ideas were worthless here: he must not let his mind reject any message his senses brought into the hidden chamber of the brain. He must not try to understand — only to observe. Understanding would come later, or not at all.

The mountain — he still thought of it as such, for there was no other word that could serve — seemed to be alive. He remembered that monstrous eye in its buried vault — but no, that was inconceivable. It was not organic life that he was watching: it was not even, be suspected, matter as he knew it.

The sombre red was brightening to an angrier hue. Streaks of vivid yellow appeared, so that for a moment Jan felt he was looking at a volcano pouring streams of lava down on to the land beneath. But these streams, as he could tell by occasional flecks and mottlings, were moving upwards.

Now something else was rising out of the ruby clouds around the mountain’s base. It was a huge ring, perfectly horizontal and perfectly circular — and it was the colour of all that Jan had left so far behind, for the skies of Earth had held no lovelier blue. Nowhere else on the world of the Overlords had he seen such hues, and his throat contracted with the longing and the loneliness they evoked.