2001 A Space Odyssey

Chapter 42 - Inferno
Now there was only the red sun, filling the sky from side to side. He was so close that its surface was no longer frozen into immobility by sheer scale. There were luminous nodules moving to and fro, cyclones of ascending and descending gas, prominences slowly rocketing toward the heavens. Slowly? They must be rising at a million miles an hour for their movement to be visible to his eye.

He did not even attempt to grasp the scale of the inferno toward which he was descending. The immensities of Saturn and Jupiter bad defeated him, during Discovery's fly-by in that solar system now unknown gigamiles away. But everything he saw here was a hundred times larger still; he could do nothing but accept the images that were flooding into his mind, without attempting to interpret them.

As that sea of fire expanded beneath him, Bowman should have known fear - but, curiously enough, he now felt only a mild apprehension. It was not that his mind was benumbed with wonders; logic told him that he must surely be under the protection of some controlling and almost omnipotent intelligence. He was now so close to the red sun that he would have been burned up in a moment if its radiation had not been held at bay by some invisible screen. And during his voyage he had been subjected to accelerations that should have crushed him instantly - yet he had felt nothing. If so much trouble had been taken to preserve him, there was still cause for hope.

The space pod was now moving along a shallow arc almost parallel to the surface of the star, but slowly descending toward it. And now, for the first time, Bowman became aware of sounds. There was a faint, continuous roar, broken from time to time by crackles like tearing paper, or distant lightning. This could be only the feeblest echo of an unimaginable cacophony; the atmosphere surrounding him must be racked by concussions that could tear any material object to atoms. Yet he was protected from this shattering tumult as effectively as from the heat.

Though ridges of flame thousands of miles high were rising and slowly collapsing around him, he was completely insulated from all this violence. The energies of the star raved past him, as if they were in another universe; the pod moved sedately through their midst, un-buffeted and unscorched.

Bowman's eyes, no longer hopelessly confused by the strangeness and grandeur of the scene, began to pick out details which must have been there before, but which he had not yet perceived. The surface of this star was no formless chaos; there was pattern here, as in everything that nature created.

He noticed first the little whirlpools of gas - probably no larger than Asia or Africa - that wandered over the surface of the star. Sometimes he could look directly down into one of them, to see darker, cooler regions far below. Curiously enough, there appeared to be no sunspots; perhaps they were a disease peculiar to the star that shone on Earth.

And there were occasional clouds, like wisps of smoke blown before a gale. Perhaps they were indeed smoke, for this sun was so cold that real fire could exist here. Chemical compounds could be born and could live for a few seconds before they were again ripped apart by the fiercer nuclear violence that surrounded them.

The horizon was growing brighter, its color changing from gloomy red to yellow to blue to blistering violet.

The White Dwarf was coming up over the horizon, dragging its tidal wave of star-stuff behind it.

Bowman shielded his eyes from the intolerable glare of the little sun, and focused on the troubled starscape which its gravitational field was sucking skyward. Once he had seen a waterspout moving across the face of the Caribbean; this tower of flame had almost the same shape. Only the scale was slightly different, for at its base, the column was probably wider than the planet Earth.

And then, immediately beneath him, Bowman noticed something which was surely new, since he could hardly have overlooked it if it had been there before. Moving across the ocean of glowing gas were myriads of bright beads; they shone with a pearly light which waxed and waned in a period of a few seconds. And they were all traveling in the same direction, like salmon moving upstream; sometimes they weaved back and forth so that their paths intertwined, but they never touched.

There were thousands of them, and the longer Bowman stared, the more convinced he became that their motion was purposeful. They were too far away for him to make out any details of their structure; that be could see them at all in this colossal panorama meant that they must be scores - perhaps hundreds - of miles across. If they were organized entities, they were leviathans indeed, built to match the scale of the world they inhabited.

Perhaps they were only clouds of plasma, given temporary stability by some odd combination of natural forces - like the short-lived spheres of ball-lightning that still puzzled terrestrial scientists. That was an easy, and perhaps soothing, explanation; but as Bowman looked down upon that star-wide streaming, he could not really believe it. Those glittering nodes of light knew where they were going; they were deliberately converging upon the pillar of fire raised by the White Dwarf as it orbited overhead.

Bowman stared once more at that ascending column, now marching along the horizon beneath the tiny, massive star that ruled it. Could it be pure imagination - or were there patches of brighter luminosity creeping up that great geyser of gas, as if myriads of shining sparks had combined into whole continents of phosphorescence?

The idea was almost beyond fantasy, but perhaps he was watching nothing less than a migration from star to star, across a bridge of fire. Whether it was a movement of mindless, cosmic beasts driven across space by some lemming-like urge, or a vast concourse of intelligent entities, he would probably never know.

He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.