Chapter 36 Chapter 1 What is this place?

There was no sense of motion, but he was falling toward the unimaginable stars, the stars that shone in the black heart of the moon.No—he was sure there couldn't be stars there. It was too late now, but he still wished he had paid more attention to those theories of hyperuniverse, hyperspace conduits.For David Bowman, they are no longer theories. Maybe the plate of Iapetus wasn't hollow; maybe the "roof" was an illusion or some kind of diaphragm, opened up to let him pass. (But where to let him go?) If he could believe his senses, he was descending vertically, down a large rectangular shaft thousands of feet deep.He was moving faster and faster—but the other end seemed to be the same size and always so far away from him.

Only the stars were moving, very slowly, so it took him a while to realize that the stars were escaping the frame that encloses them.After another moment, the star was clearly expanding and seemed to be rushing towards him with incredible speed.The expansion was not uniform: in the center and the stars seemed to be mostly motionless, while the ones on the edges picked up speed, turning into streaks of lightning before disappearing. The stars are always being replenished, pouring into the center of the star field from apparently inexhaustible sources.What would happen, Bowman wondered, if a star came straight at him?Will it continue to expand and crash directly into a star?But none of them were close enough for him to see the discs; each one eventually moved away from him, flying over the edge of the rectangular frame.

However, the other end of the shaft did not appear to be any closer.It was almost as if the four walls were moving with him, sending him towards an unknown future.Or maybe he didn't move himself, but space slid past him... Four ebony walls slid past him at speeds that could be zero or a million times the speed of light; whatever.He can still think.Even observe.For some reason he seemed neither surprised nor frightened.Instead, he felt a calm anticipation, the same as when space medical personnel experimented on him with hallucination drugs.The world around him is strange and wonderful, but nothing scary.He had traveled hundreds of millions of miles in search of a miracle; now it seemed that a miracle was about to happen.

The rectangle ahead became brighter and brighter.Strips of starlight dimmed in the milky white sky, but the sky was still getting brighter.Now, the cosmic cabin seems to be flying towards a layer of clouds, and the hidden sun evenly reflects a layer of glow. He's almost at the end of the tunnel.The other end, which had always maintained the same vague distance, neither approaching nor receding, suddenly began to obey the ordinary laws of perspective.It was getting closer and wider in front of him.At the same time he felt that he was moving upwards, and wondered for a moment whether he had fallen to the center of Iapetus and was now ascending again towards the other side of the Iapetus.But even before the pod burst out of the tunnel, he had realized that it had nothing to do with Shangwei, or any world experienced by humans.

There was no atmosphere here, for as far as he could see, as far as the flat horizon, he could see everything clearly.The world he was looking down on must have been vast—perhaps much larger than the Earth itself.However, despite the vast area, the surface as far as Bowman's vision can see is mosaiced into artificial lattice patterns of strange colors, and each seam is several miles long.It was as if the giant were playing a jigsaw puzzle with the planets; the centers of the many squares, triangles, and polygons were black shafts with gaping mouths—each one exactly like the pit he had just emerged from.

But the sky above is even stranger--and, in a sense, more thrilling--and it's hard to match the wonder of the ground.For there is not a single star in the vast sky; nor is there the darkness of space.Looking around, there is only a milky soft light, which seems to be boundless.Bowman remembered the "White Night" in Antarctica that he had heard described by others - "like being in a ping pong ball".Those words are quite applicable to the wonderland in front of me, but the interpretation must be completely different.The sky here could be the astronomical effect of dense fog and snow, since it is a pure vacuum.

Later, when Bowman's eyes gradually adapted to the pearly light, he noticed another detail.Unlike the first time he saw it, the sky was not completely empty.Tens of thousands of small black dots spread across the sky, but none of them moved, and there was no fixed pattern. The black spots are very small and difficult to see, but once found, they are clearly distinguishable.They could not help reminding Bowman of a familiar scene, but this association was so difficult to conceive that he refused to believe it at first, and later admitted that it was quite reasonable. The black hole in the white sky turned out to be the stars; what he saw was the backplane of a photograph of the Milky Way.

My God, where the hell have I been?Bowman couldn't help asking himself; even as he posed the question, he felt sure he would never find the answer.It seemed as if the whole universe had been turned inside out; of course this place was no longer human.Although the space cabin was warm and comfortable, he suddenly felt cold and couldn't help shivering.He wanted to close his eyes and stop looking at the pearl-colored space in all directions; but that was a cowardly act, and he still refused to give in. The landscape remained the same, the perforated, faceted planet still spinning slowly below him.He reckoned he was about ten miles above the ground, and should have had no trouble seeing life of any kind.However, there is no living thing in this whole world; intelligent beings have been here, done something here, and are now gone.

Then he noticed that on the flat river about twenty miles away from him, there was a slightly cylindrical broken shell crawling, the wreckage of a huge ship that could be seen at a glance.It was too far away to look closely, and it was out of sight after a few seconds, but he still recognized the broken skeleton and the thin, gleaming metal sheet like a partly peeled orange peel.He wondered to himself, this hulk has been abandoned for thousands of years on this large empty chessboard—and what kind of creature once drove it across the stars. He then forgot about the abandoned ship again; for an object appeared beyond the horizon.

At first the object looked like a flat plate, but that was only because it was flying almost head-on at him.As it approached and passed under him, he saw that it was fusiform and several hundred feet long.Though bands were vaguely discernible all over its body, they were indistinct; the object appeared to be vibrating, or spinning at high speed. Both ends of the object are thin cone-shaped, and the propulsion mechanism cannot be seen.Only one thing is familiar - its color.If it is not a phantom produced by vision, but is indeed a real product of civilization, then its maker may have a connection with human beings.They certainly had no human limitations, however; the whole fusiform object appeared to be made of pure bone.

Bowman turned to watch it being thrown back through the rearview system.The object paid no attention to Bowman, now descending from the sky towards one of the thousands of giant holes.A few seconds later, with a flash of golden light, it swooped down and disappeared into the inner cavity of the planet.Once again Bowman was alone, and under this sinister celestial environment, the isolation from the world was all the more unbearable. Then he found that he was also falling on the mottled ground of the huge world, and straight down was another rectangular pit with a wide mouth.The empty sky closed to him, the clock slowly stopped, and the space capsule he was riding in once again landed between the four sides of the black walls, descending to another group of distant stars.But this time, he was sure he wasn't returning to the Solar System, and a sudden, rare insight - which could also be entirely false - made him realize that this must be something. This must be a kind of cosmic scheduling design, which leads the past star flow into various unimaginable time and space respectively.He was passing through a large transit point in the galaxy.