Arthur Clarke - The Lost Worlds of 2001

The well down which he was sinking was perhaps five hundred feet deep, and ended in one of the underwater patios of this amphibious city. He could see, fading away into the blue distance, lines of open structures which he could only describe as roofless-and largely wall-less– buildings. The creatures he had called suckerfish were swimming in and out of these submarine apartments; most of them were moving under their own power, but a few were operating small torpedolike machines. Bowman had never imagined that he would one day see fish riding scooters; and even when he contemplated this thought, it still didn't seem funny.

The suckerfish were very inquisitive, they gathered around in scores, peering into the ship, and they spiraled up with him when Discovery started to rise again, past that vista of radiating tunnels.

The hole in the water widened as it approached the surface; he seemed to be emerging from a kind of stationary whirlpool in the center of a small lake. There were smaller whirlpools orbiting around it, like planets around the sun, and Bowman wondered if they were part of a mobile, liquid sculpture. He could not imagine what other purpose they fulfilled.

And then he was flying over what must have been a residential area, for beneath him were roads that rolled briskly along like moving belts, between wide-spaced buildings no two of which were of the same design-or even, as he presently realized, built to the same scale. Some would not have looked out of place in a housing estate on Earth, but there were others that resembled small chemical processing plants and were presumably occupied by creatures with peculiar domestic requirements. Some were made for giants; others for beings who could hardly be larger than pygmies. And there was one wide, flat pancake of a building whose roof was not more than two feet from the ground….

As Bowman passed over this suburban area-though, in reality, the whole city was a giant suburb-he caught tantalizing glimpses of the life it housed. It was obvious that, to some of its inhabitants, privacy meant absolutely nothing; their homes were as transparent as goldfish bowls. Once he looked into a room where three iridescent beetles, as large as a man, were standing around a bowl of redly fuming liquid, sipping it through flexible trunks or proboscises. In another, dozens of things like giant grubs were busily weaving a web around a cocoon that must have been ten feet long, and vibrated slightly from time to time.

And he saw more of the intelligent plants, standing in troughs of green mud, and swaying ecstatically as they absorbed the rays from a brightly shining globe. Even as he watched, one of the creatures seemed to explode in a cloud of mist, which resolved itself into tiny white parachutes. As they drifted slowly to the ground, Bowman realized that he had witnessed birth and death, but not as humans knew either.

Now the city, with all its meaningless wonders, its mind-wracking vistas, and its fantastic inhabitants, was falling behind him; he could relax once more with the spectacle of those calm, magnificent peaks, gilded by the faintly aureate glow of the eternal dawn. Discovery was moving past them at a considerable speed, racing along the edge of night.

The sky ahead was changing; there was a mist spreading across the horizon, thickening into a great river of cloud. It seemed to form somewhere out in the darkness, and then to flow toward the line of day. Quite abruptly, it plunged downward, in an immense and silent cataract flanked by two of the mountain towers-a slow-moving Niagara , five miles high and fifty miles across. The illusion of falling water was almost perfect; but this avalanche of mist slid down the sky with a dreamlike lethargy, and merged without a splash into the unruffled sea.

The mountain-towers dropped behind him, and the last light of the sun faded from the sky. (How many millions of years, he wondered, since it had shone upon this land?) But the white rainbow of the rings, and two large crescent moons, provided plenty of cold illumination, he could see clear to the horizon, and it seemed that he was flying over a vast snow field rather than a sea of clouds. He had once orbited across the Antarctic under a full moon, only a hundred miles up; it required little effort to imagine that he was back there, waiting to exchange greetings with Mirny or McMurdo….

He passed one mountain, and that a very strange one. It jutted up above the clouds like a giant iceberg-though no structure of ice could possibly be so tall, or so transparent. He could see far into its interior, which was laced with veins of some dark material; though he could not be certain, it seemed that some of these veins pulsed slowly, giving him the impression that he was looking into a gigantic anatomical model. Or perhaps it was not a model, but the real thing, whatever that might be; but this was a thought on which he did not care to dwell.

Then there was only the level sea of cloud-and, just once, a great glowing patch like the lights of a city hidden by the overcast. Presently it too fell astern, and he was alone under the arches of the rings, and the utterly alien stars.

He had now almost completed one half-circuit of this world, and was nearing the center of the nightside. It was easy to tell this, for the great bite taken out of the rings by the eclipsing shadow of the planet was now exactly overhead; he was as far from the forest of the sky plants as he could travel, while still remaining on this world. If he continued on this course, he would be heading back into the day.

Something was eclipsing the stars-something utterly black, rising swiftly up the sky. For an instant he thought it was a mountain, Lying directly in his path; but no natural substance could soak up light as did this column of Stygian darkness. He caught only the faintest gleam from the mingled rays of the two moons, glancing upon fluted, cylindrical walls like polished ebony; and even as Discovery hurtled into the thing, beyond all possibility of avoidance, a long-forgotten line of poetry surged up from the depths of his memory. He found himself repeating desperately, like an incantation to ward off disaster: "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower came."

Then the Dark Tower was upon him, and his only regret was that he had seen so much and learned so little.

There was no impact and no sound, but the stars and the clouds were gone. Instead, the ship was moving through an infinite lattice of softly glowing lights-a misty, three-dimensional grid which appeared to have neither beginning nor end. For a moment Discovery seemed to coast forward on its own momentum; then it began to fall.

Faster and faster, the arrays of light went flickering by, as Discovery plunged downward at ever-accelerating speed. Without astonishment-for he was now beyond such an emotion-Bowman saw that the nodes of luminescence were passing through the solid walls of the ship as they raced upward; indeed, he could see them streaming through his own body.

Now he was falling through the grid so swiftly that the individual knots of light could no longer be seen; they were merely pulsations in the lines that went flickering vertically past. He must have descended for miles; by this time, surely, he was far below the surface of the planet– if he was moving through real space at all.

Suddenly, the shining lattice was gone; he was falling toward darkness, out of a dully glowing sky. And on that darkness, the ship came at last to rest.

It was a place without horizons, or any sense of scale. A hundred feet or a hundred miles above his head was a flat, endless plane, very much like the surface of the red dwarf star from which he had emerged into this solar system. It was cherry red, and little nodules of brighter luminescence appeared at random, wandered around for a while like living things, and then faded out into the glowing background. If Bowman had possessed a trace of superstition, he could easily have imagined that this was the roof of Hell. There was no mark to show how he had passed through it, to enter this underworld.