He spat out the first few drops at once; the taste was terrible. Then, rather ashamed of his instinctive reaction, he forced himself to drink the rest.
That first sip had been enough to identify the liquid. It tasted terrible because it had no taste at all; the faucet was supplying pure, distilled water. His unknown hosts were obviously taking no chances with his health.
Feeling much refreshed, he then had a quick shower. There was no soap, which was another minor inconvenience, but there was a very efficient hot-air drier in which be luxuriated for a while before trying on underpants, vest, and dressing gown from the clothes closet. After that, he lay down on the bed, stared up at the ceiling, and tried to make sense of this fantastic situation.
He had made little progress when he was distracted by another line of thought. Immediately above the bed was the usual hotel-type ceiling TV screen; he had assumed that, like the telephone and books, it was a dummy.
But the control unit on its swinging bedside arm looked so realistic that he could not resist playing with it; and as his fingers touched the ON sensor disk, the screen lit up.
Feverishly, he started to tap out channel selector codes at random – and almost at once he got his first picture.
It was a well-known African news commentator, discussing the attempts being made to preserve the last remnants of his country's wild life. Bowman listened for a few seconds, so captivated by the sound of a human voice that he did not in the least care what it was talking about. Then he changed channels.
In the next five minutes, he got a symphony orchestra playing Walton's Violin Concerto, a discussion on the sad state of the legitimate theater, a western, a demonstration of a new headache cure, a panel game in some Oriental language, a psychodrama, three news commentaries, a football game, a lecture on solid geometry (in Russian), and several tuning signals and data transmissions. It was, in fact, a perfectly normal selection from the world's TV programs, and apart from the psychological uplift it gave him, it confirmed one suspicion that had already been forming in his mind.
All the programs were about two years old. That was around the time TMA-1 had been discovered, and it was hard to believe that this was a pure coincidence. Something had been monitoring the radio waves; that ebon block had been busier than men had suspected.
He continued to wander across the spectrum, and suddenly recognized a familiar scene. Here was this very suite, now occupied by a celebrated actor who was furiously denouncing an unfaithful mistress. Bowman looked with a shock of recognition upon the living room he had just left – and when the camera followed the indignant couple toward the bedroom, he involuntarily looked toward the door to see if anyone was entering.
So that was how this reception area had been prepared for him; his hosts had based their ideas of terrestrial living upon TV programs. His feeling that he was inside a movie set was almost literally true.
He had learned all that he wished to for the moment, and turned off the set. What do I do now? he asked himself, locking his fingers behind his head and staring up at the blank screen.
He was physically and emotionally exhausted, yet it seemed impossible that one could sleep in such fantastic surroundings, and farther from Earth than any man in history had ever been. But the comfortable bed, and the instinctive wisdom of the body, conspired together against his will.
He fumbled for the light switch, and the room was plunged into darkness. Within seconds, he had passed beyond the reach of dreams.
So, for the last time, David Bowman slept.
45 – Recapitulation
There being no further use for it, the furniture of the suite dissolved back into the mind of its creator. Only the bed remained – and the walls, shielding this fragile organism from the energies it could not yet control.
In his sleep, David Bowman stirred restlessly. He did not wake, nor did he dream, but he was no longer wholly unconscious. Like a fog creeping through a forest, something invaded his mind. He sensed it only dimly, for the full impact would have destroyed him as surely as the fires raging beyond these walls. Beneath that dispassionate scrutiny, he felt neither hope nor fear; all emotion had been leached away.
He seemed to be floating in free space, while around him stretched, in all directions, an infinite geometrical grid of dark lines or threads, along which moved tiny nodes of light – some slowly, some at dazzling speed.
Once he had peered through a microscope at a cross-section of a human brain, and in its network of nerve fibers had glimpsed the same labyrinthine complexity. But that had been dead and static, whereas this transcended life itself. He knew – or believed he knew – that he was watching the operation of some gigantic mind, contemplating the universe of which he was so tiny a part.
The vision, or illusion, lasted only a moment. Then the crystalline planes and lattices, and the interlocking perspectives of moving light, flickered out of existence, as David Bowman moved into a realm of consciousness that no man had experienced before.
At first, it seemed that Time itself was running backward. Even this marvel he was prepared to accept, before be realized the subtler truth.
The springs of memory were being tapped; in controlled recollection, he was reliving the past. There was the hotel suite – there the space pod – there the burning starscapes of the red sun – there the shining core of the galaxy – there the gateway through which he had reemerged into the universe. And not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed.
Now he was once more aboard the Discovery and the rings of Saturn filled the sky. Before that, he was repeating his final dialogue with Hal; he was seeing Frank Poole leave on his last mission; he was hearing the voice of Earth, assuring him that all was well.
And even as he relived these events, he knew that all indeed was well. He was retrogressing down the corridors of time, being drained of knowledge and experience as he swept back toward his childhood. But nothing was being lost; all that be had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal.
Faster, faster he moved back into forgotten years, and into a simpler world. Faces he had once loved, and had thought lost beyond recall, smiled at him sweetly. He smiled back with fondness, and without pain.
Now, at last, the headlong regression was slackening; the wells of memory were nearly dry. Time flowed more and more sluggishly, approaching a moment of stasis – as a swinging pendulum, at the limit of its arc, seems frozen for one eternal instant, before the next cycle begins.
The timeless instant passed; the pendulum reversed its swing. In an empty room, floating amid the fires of a double star twenty thousand light-years from Earth, a baby opened its eyes and began to cry.
46 – Transformation
Then it became silent, as it saw that it was no longer alone.
A ghostly, glimmering rectangle had formed in the empty air. It solidified into a crystal tablet, lost its transparency, and became suffused with a pale, milky luminescence. Tantalizing, ill-defined phantoms moved across its surface and in its depths. They coalesced into bars of lights and shadow, then formed intermeshing, spoked patterns that began slowly to rotate, in time with the pulsing rhythm that now seemed to fill the whole of space.
It was a spectacle to grasp and hold the attention of any child – or of any man-ape. But, as it had been three million years before, it was only the outward manifestation of forces too subtle to be consciously perceived. It was merely a toy to distract the senses, while the real processing was carried out at far deeper levels of the mind.