Arthur Clarke - Cradle

A year later moonlight falls on the emerald lake. Several hundred eager, excited, wriggling necks, some royal blue and some pale blue, struggle upward to find the moon. Their heads pivot to face all directions and maybe two dozen separate indentations and orifices can be seen in each face. The necks crane this way, then that way. The silent serpents are searching for something.

From the direction of the moon a bizarre ship approaches on the water. It is large compared to the young serpents, its twin towers standing about eight feet out of the water and about six feet above, on the average, a squarish platform fifteen feet on a side that forms the bottom of the boat. The top surface of this platform is irregular, undulating, and cratered. The platform floats smoothly upon the water.

The ship comes into the middle of the serpents and stops. The serpents divide into two groups according to the color of their necks and then line up on either side of the ship in very orderly rows and columns. A single musical note, a B-flat with a Hautish timbre, comes from the ship. Quickly the note is repeated up and down the rows and columns by each of the serpents on the two sides of the boat. Then a second note issues forth from the ship, also sounding like a flute, and the process repeats itself. For hours the music lesson continues, covering a range of both notes and chords, until some of the serpents on each side lose their voices The exercise concludes with an attempted ensemble performance by the royal bluenecked serpents, but the result is a painful cacophony.

Inside the ship, every note, every movement, every response by the juvenile serpents to the music lesson is carefully monitored and recorded. The ingenious engineering design of the boat is based upon the key controlling elements of the original cradle. However, although segments of gold metallic material (as well as the long black rods and even portions of the fat fish with legs) appear in the computer that runs the ship, the primary constituents of its mass are derived from great quantities of local rock and organic matter taken from the floor of the emerald lake. The ship is the quintessential music teacher, a virtually perfect synthesizer equipped with microprocessors that not only store all the responses of the pupils, but also contain software that will allow experimentation with a range of individualized methods of teaching.

But this sophisticated robot, engineered by the artificial.intelligence packed around the serpent zygotes and made almost entirely of chemical compounds extracted from material found in the neighborhood of the landing point, is itself being watched and studied from afar by test engineers. The current test is in its earliest stages and is progressing splendidly. This is the third different configuration tried for the music teacher, the hardest part of the design of the cradle that will carry the serpent zygotes back to Canthor. The first was an abysmal failure; the embryos developed into adolescents all right, but the teacher was never able to instruct them well enough that they could sing the mating song and reproduce. The second design was better; it was able to teach the serpents to perform the courtship symphony and a new generation of the species was produced. However, this next group of adult serpents was not able subsequently to teach their progeny to sing.

The best of the bioengineering personnel in the Colony were brought in to study this problem. After pouring over quadrillions of bits of accumulated data associated with the development of the serpents and other related species, they found a curious correlation between the degree of nurturing provided by the parent and the resulting ability of that infant, upon reaching maturity, to teach its own offspring. The artificial intelligence package responsible for the first six months of serpent life was then redesigned to include a surrogate mother whose only purpose was to hold and cuddle the fledgling serpents at regular intervals. Subsystem tests proved successful; this slight alteration of the early nurturing protocol produced adult serpents that were able to teach their children to sing.

This demonstration test lasts for more than four millcycles. At the end of the period, the test is declared an unqualified success. A strong, creative serpent population nearing twenty-five thousand fills the artificial lake. Limitations to future growth are only test related. Eventually the test survivors are transported to another locale in the Zoo Complex and the Canthorean serpents are added to the list of species ready for zygote repatriation.

The full moon rises over the placid ocean. Troy stares at the moonbeams, watching them shimmer on the quiet water. Angie appears and stands in the water in front of him. She is wearing a skintight white bathing suit, one piece, and is submerged from the waist down.

She beckons to him and he walks across the damp sand toward the water. He is barefoot and is also wearing a white bathing suit. The water is surprisingly warm. Angie begins to sing. Her magnificent voice enfolds him as Troy draws nearer to her in the light surf.

They touch and kiss. She pulls away and gives him a smile of encouragement. Troy feels himself becoming aroused. Suddenly a siren pierces the air, destroying the calm of the night. Instantly the sea becomes choppy, agitated, full of whitecaps. Troy turns around, alarmed, and glances at the shore. He sees nothing special. He looks back at the ocean. Angie has disappeared. Out in the distance, near the horizon, Troy thinks he sees the beginning of a tidal wave. The siren shrieks again and Troy sees a large shapeless mass riding a nearby wave in the moonlight.

He goes toward the object. The tidal wave is now defined in the distance, filling half his dream screen. The bulky object nearby is a black body dressed in a red muscle shirt and bluejeans. The siren grows louder. Troy rolls the body over and looks at the face. It is his brother, Jamie.

Troy Jefferson bolted upright in bed. his heart pounding furiously, his mind making the transition from the dream world to reality. Outside his duplex apartment a siren raged. He could tell from the frequency change that the police car or ambulance had just sped past his front door. He shook himself and crawled out of bed. The digital clock on the end table read 3:03.

Troy walked to the kitchen. He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of grapefruit juice. He listened to the siren in the distance until it faded away altogether. Then he started back to the small second bedroom where he slept. In the hallway he was stopped by the sound of another siren, this one even louder, that seemed to be coming toward him. For a few seconds he thought the siren was just outside his front door and he recalled, vividly, another siren in the middle of another night. His heart began to pound anew. “Jamie,” Troy said to himself almost involuntarily, “Jamie. Why did you have to die?”

Troy could still see the events of that evening with perfect clarity. Nothing in the first tableau had faded even a little. The beginning memory was the three of them, Jamie, Troy, and their mother, sitting silently at the dinner table, eating fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Jamie had just arrived home from Gainesville for spring break that afternoon and had spent almost an hour, before they had sat down to eat, regaling his fifteen-year-old brother with stories of football and university life. Jamie had been Troy’s idol throughout his childhood. Handsome, intelligent, and articulate, Jamie had also been blessed with incredible physical gifts. As a result, he had been the starting halfback for the Florida Gators in his sophomore year and was being touted as a potential All-American for the following season. Troy had bitterly missed Jamie when he had first gone away to the university, but in the intervening eighteen months he had learned to accept his absence and to look forward to his brother’s holiday visits.