Arthur Clarke: The Fountains of Paradise

Only one thing jarred in all this exquisitely patterned landscape. Tiny though it appeared from this altitude, the grey boulder of Demon Rock seemed an alien intruder. Indeed, legend had it that Yakkagala was a fragment of the herb-bearing Himalayan peak that the monkey god Hanuman had dropped, as he hastily carried both medicine and mountain to his injured comrades, when the battles of the Ramayana were over.

From this distance, of course, it was impossible to see any details of Kalidasa's folly, except for a faint line that hinted at the outer rampart of the Pleasure Gardens. Yet once it had been experienced, such was the impact of Demon Rock that it was impossible to forget. The Mahanayake Thero could see in imagination, as clearly as if he stood between them, the immense lion's claws protruding from the sheer face of the cliff – while overhead loomed the battlements upon which, it was easy to believe, the accursed King still walked.

Thunder crashed down from above, rising swiftly to such a crescendo of power that it seemed to shake the mountain itself. In a continuous, sustained concussion it raced across the sky, dwindling away into the east. For long seconds, echoes rolled around the rim of the horizon. No-one could mistake this as any herald of the coming rains; they were not scheduled for another three weeks, and Monsoon Control was never in error by more than twenty-four hours. When the reverberations had died away, the Mahanayake turned to his companion.

“So much for dedicated re-entry corridors,” he said, with slightly more annoyance than an exponent of the Dharma should permit himself. “Did we get a meter reading?”

The younger monk spoke briefly into his wrist microphone, and waited for a reply.

“Yes-it peaked at a hundred and twenty. That's five db above the previous record.”

“Send the usual protest to Kennedy or Gagarin Control, whichever it is. On second thoughts, complain to them both. Not that it will make any difference, of course.”

As his eye traced the slowly dissolving vapour trail across the sky, Bodhidharma Mahanayake Thero – eighty-fifth of his name – had a sudden and most un-monkish fantasy. Kalidasa would have had a suitable treatment for space-line operators who thought only of dollars per kilo to orbit… something that probably involved impalement, or metal-shod elephants, or boiling oil.

But life, of course, had been so much simpler, two thousand years ago.

His friends, whose numbers dwindled sadly every year, called him Johan. The world, when it remembered him, called him Raja. His full name epitomised five hundred years of history; Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe.

There had been a time when the tourists visiting the Rock bad sought him out with cameras and recorders, but now a whole generation knew nothing of the days when he was the most familiar face in the solar system. He did not regret his past glory, for it had brought him the gratitude of all mankind. But it had also brought vain regrets for the mistakes he had made – and sorrow for the lives he had squandered, when a little more foresight or patience might have saved them. Of course, it was easy now, in the perspective of history, to see what should have been done to avert the Auckland Crisis, or to assemble the unwilling signatories of the Treaty of Samarkand. To blame himself for the unavoidable errors of the past was folly, yet there were times when his conscience hurt him more than the fading twinges of that old Patagonian bullet.

No-one had believed that his retirement would last so long. “You'll be back within six months,” World President Chu had told him. “Power is addictive.”

“Not to me,” he had answered, truthfully enough.

For power had come to him; he had never sought it. And it had always been a very special, limited kind of power – advisory, not executive. He was only Special Assistant (Acting Ambassador) for Political Affairs, directly responsible to President and Council, with a staff that never exceeded ten-eleven, if one included ARISTOTLE. (His console still had direct access to Ari's memory and processing banks, and they talked to each other several times a year.) But towards the end the Council had invariably accepted his advice, and the world had given him much of the credit that should have gone to the unsung, unhonoured bureaucrats of the Peace Division.

And so it was Ambassador-at-Large Rajasinghe who got all the publicity, as he moved from one trouble-spot to another, massaging egos here, defusing crises there, and manipulating the truth with consummate skill. Never actually lying, of course; that would have been fatal. Without Ari's infallible memory, he could never have kept control of the intricate webs he was sometimes compelled to spin, that mankind might live in peace. When he had begun to enjoy the game for its own sake, it was time to quit.

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa's architect had designed now splashed in Johan's own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.

Securing this history-drenched piece of land for his retirement had given Johan more satisfaction than anything in his whole career, fulfilling a dream that he had never really believed could come true. The achievement had required all his diplomatic skills, plus some delicate blackmail in the Department of Archaeology. Later, questions had been asked in the State Assembly; but fortunately not answered.

He was insulated from all but the most determined tourists and students by an extension of the moat, and screened from their gaze by a thick wall of mutated Ashoka trees, blazing with flowers throughout the year. The trees also supported several families of monkeys, who were amusing to watch but occasionally invaded the villa and made off with any portable objects that took their fancy. Then there would be a brief inter-species war with fire-crackers and recorded danger-cries that distressed the humans at least as much as the simians – who would be back quickly enough, for they had long ago learned that no-one would really harm them.

One of Taprobane's more outrageous sunsets was transfiguring the western sky when the small electrotrike came silently through the trees, and drew up beside the granite columns of the portico. (Genuine Chola, from the late Ranapura Period-and therefore a complete anachronism here. But only Professor Sarath had ever commented on it; and he of course invariably did so.)

Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them. He had half-expected that, like his achievements, Vannevar Morgan would be a large, imposing man. Instead, the engineer was well below average height, and at first glance might even have been called frail. That slender body, however, was all sinew, and the raven-black hair framed a face that looked considerably younger than its fifty-one years. The video display from Ari's BIOG file had not done him justice; he should have been a romantic poet, or a concert pianist – or, perhaps, a great actor, holding thousands spell-bound by his skill. Rajasinghe knew power when he saw it, for power had been his business; and it was power that he was facing now. Beware of small men, he had often told himself – for they are the movers and shakers of the world.