Second Ending (17 page)

"No, sir," said Sister.

But the suspicion would not leave him. He was remembering a discussion he had had with Sister a long time ago, about kindness, and lying, and puns. Certainly she had never made anything remotely resembling a pun, but she had done a few things which were meant to be kind. Maybe…

"Are you telling the truth?" he asked sharply.

"Yes, sir," said Sister again.

"If you are, that's what you would say," Ross said thoughtfully. "And if you are lying that is still what you would say." His voice became suddenly harsh. "But remember this. I want no wars, no matter how good the reasons appear for having them. That is an order!"

"I understand, sir."

"And to keep your busy little minds out of mischief," he went on, more quietly, "I have a job for you. It will require considerable time and effort, but when built will give me much more pleasure than any review or war games…"

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…

Ross envisaged a palace to end all palaces, a slender shining tower a mile high possessing the internal capacity of a large city. The structural material would be transparent, allowing an unimpeded view in all directions while at the same time blocking off the heat and glare from the sun. Architecturally it would be simple and esthetically pleasing, as a whole and in its internal subdivisions, which should blend with and at the same time accentuate their contents. Furnishing his palace might be an even longer job than building it, because he wanted it to house reconstructions of all the famous sculptures, paintings, tapestries and other art treasures of the world. And at the earliest possible moment he wanted to be moved into the new structure. He was growing tired of always waking in his underground room, and when the new building was complete he wanted the old hospital closed up.

"Only the works which have been illustrated or adequately described in material found by the original search robots can be reproduced," Sister said when he had finished speaking, "paintings relatively easily and the three-dimensional works with more difficulty. Much original research in structural methods will be necessary, and as we lack the intuitive reasoning processes of human beings the project will take a long time."

"I've got plenty of that," said Ross easily. The He would have fooled a human, he thought, much less a robot.

He remained awake for three weeks on that occasion, watching from the control dome the colonies of pale green sea grass undulating along the ocean bed, and extending his requirements regarding the size and contents of the palace. Possibly he sounded a little on the megalomaniac side to Sister, but he hoped that she would not realize that all the amendments were designed solely to extend the time necessary to complete the project. For the truth was that he did not care at all about art treasures or a splendid crystal tower which soared a mile into the sky. All he wanted was that his frozen, sleeping body be transferred from its safe subterranean crypt to somewhere more… vulnerable.

When he returned to Deep Sleep it was with the memory of a gigantic crescent moon and the hope that Sister and the others would not miss him too much when he was gone.

Time passed.

Ninety-seven million miles away the sun grew old and small and hot. On Earth the icecaps finally disappeared, the seas never cooled and, with the rise in temperature, the molecular motion of gases saw to it that the planetary atmosphere leaked slowly into space. The moon continued to spiral in, pulling up tides which forced the sea grass even deeper into the ocean and caused many more significant mutations to occur, until it entered Roche's Limit and broke up. What the war had done to the planet was like a pinprick to what happened then.

Not all of the moon fell on Earth, only enough to raise the sea level by three hundred feet and open a few large cracks in the crust from which lava and superheated steam poured for many hundreds of years, and changed the planetary surface out of all recognition. Most of it remained in orbit, grinding itself into smaller and smaller pieces until Earth had a ring system to rival Saturn's.

Ross awoke to find the base of his tower one hundred feet below sea level, the local topography unrecognizable, and a night that was as bright as day. The rings blazed across the sky, dimming all but the brightest stars, a celestial triumphal arch. Every wave in the sea threw back a reflection which made it seem that his tower rose out of an ocean of rippling silver. And joining the blazing sky with the dazzling sea were the thin white tendrils of the shooting stars.

"How did the palace escape?" asked Ross bitterly.

He found himself lost after the first three words of
 
the explanation, but the answer seemed to be some kind of force field, or repulsion field. "… And I regret to say, sir," Sister ended, "that the sea grass was unable to survive the catastrophe."

"Too bad," said Ross.

There was a long silence; then Sister suggested showing him around. It was mainly in order to please the robots who had built it rather than from curiosity that he agreed. He felt terrible.

Every synonym for magnificent, opulent and awe-inspiring could have been used to describe the palace in which he now lived. It was vast, but comfortable; grandiose, but in perfect taste. Like a museum with fitted carpets, thought Ross ironically. But he was tremendously impressed, so much so that he did not mention to Sister the one minor, but maddeningly constant, error. In all the otherwise perfect reproductions of great paintings, regardless of how the original Old Masters had painted them, the faces and bodies had been given a deep, rich tan coloring with a background hint of green.

It was exactly the shade they had used in the blowup of Alice's picture, and he remembered telling Sister that it had been perfect. Which was probably the reason that they had given everyone the same complexion. After the first few days, however, he became accustomed to it.

Strangely, Sister made no objection when he asked to Deep Sleep.

The centuries passed like single cards in a riffled deck. He awoke to a sea which steamed all night and boiled all day. The air was a white, superheated fog from which there fell a constant, scalding rain. Altogether it was a monotonous, depressing sight and after the first day Ross stopped looking at it. Instead he wandered the vast halls and corridors, over floors so smooth and mirror-polished that there were times when he felt he would fall through them onto the ceiling, or across carpets so thick in the pile that it was like walking in long grass, like a silent and resplendent ghost. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was more often to the Tailor than to Sister. His thoughts and mood were reflected in his dress.

There was the black uniform, severely cut and edged with the bare minimum of silver braid, and the long, ankle-length cloak with the single silver clasp at the throat which went with it; that was the uniform of brooding tragedy. Then there was the white uniform that was heaped with gold braid, decorations and a Noble Order represented by the scarlet ribbon which made a broad, diagonal slash across the chest. A cloak of ermine and purple went with that one, and a crown. That was the dress of a man who, literally, owned the world. And then there were the shapeless white jacket and trousers which had been the uniform of a working Doctor…

Sister did not like his wearing that uniform, neither did she approve of his requests that some of the robots be given human shape, using plastic foam on a humanoid form. Such activities were psychologically undesirable, she said. And it was Sister who, on the eighteenth day since his latest awakening, suggested that he go into Deep Sleep again.

He wondered about that and, because no subjective time at all elapsed during suspended animation, he was still wondering about it when he was revived.

The sun had become an aged, malignant dwarf whose glare had left Earth a desiccated corpse. The seas had long since boiled away into space and with them had gone the air. The atmosphere which remained was too rarefied to check the meteorites which still fell from the rings. The sky was black; all else — the sun, the rings, the cracked, dusty earth — was a searing, blinding white. A high-pitched humming sound pervaded every room and corridor in the palace, and he was informed that it was produced by mechanisms laboring to keep the internal temperature at a level comfortable to its human occupant, and that the noise was unavoidable. An even more disquieting occurrence was that Sister no longer accompanied him wherever he went.

The reason given was that she had other duties to perform.

Three days later, while wandering about on the lower levels, he found her stopped outside the door to one of the sub power rooms. She was not simply in a state of low alert; she seemed completely lifeless. Nothing that Ross could do, from shouting to beating on her shiny casing with hands and feet, elicited a response. For the first time the realization came that she — it — was only an involved piece of machinery rather than a near-human servant and friend. It made him feel suddenly afraid, and lonelier than ever. He thought regretfully, I have been wasting Time…

The two years spent in the blackened, smoking world, when he had worked, studied and initiated the first robot search for surviving life, had been happy and at the same time something of which he could feel proud. Even happier had been his second awakening, to the fresh, green world he had brought into being, with that world-girdling vacation with Sister and the A17. But within a few days he had given in to despair and talked Sister into putting him to sleep again. Since then his life had been a series of disjointed episodes in a violently changing world. To him only a few days had passed since the two robot aircraft had crashed — he was still sorry about that — and the seas had started to boil. Why, his body still retained the tan from the vacation!

Recently — recently? — Sister had deliberately avoided giving him the exact figures, but he knew that countless millions of years had passed while he aged a few weeks. At the present rate the very universe could live and die, and he would still be in his early twenties, still living and still wanting to sleep farther into the future, while around him stretched eternal blackness and the cold, lifeless cinders of the stars.

He should have faced up to reality millions of years ago, when his sea grass was crawling about the ocean bed and exhibiting the first stirrings of intelligence, and he should have lived out his life then. Probably he would not have accomplished anything, but at least he would have tried. Just as Pellew, Courtland and the others had tried. He thought again of those great old men who had taken it in turns to stand solitary watch over the hospital's dwindling Deep Sleepers. They had faced loneliness and despair also, and at times they must have reached the brink of madness, but they had not stopped trying until they had stopped living. He had thrown their lives away along with his own.