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				 the great game


	Now the long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence
had born born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient
experiment was about to reach its climax.

	Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been
men -- or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they
looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and
loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the
stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched
the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first
faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

	And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious
than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the
fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

	And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

	The great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship
entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand
years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the
deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.

	Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life.
For years they had studied, collected, cataloged. When they had learned all
that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destinies of
many species on land and in the ocean. But which of their experiments would
succeed, they could not know for at least a million years.

	They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. So much remained
to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were
calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would
never come this way again.

	Nor was there any need. The servants they had left behind would do
the rest.

	On Earth the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless
Moon still carried its secret. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice,
the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and
beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge
to their successors. Earth was not forgotten, but another visit would serve
little purpose. It was one of a million silent worlds, few of which would
ever speak.

	And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals.
The first explorers of Earth had long since come the limits of flesh and
blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time
to move. First their brains, and then their thought alone, they transferred
into shining new homes of metal and plastic.

	In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships.
They were spaceships.

	But the age of the Macine-entities wiftly passed. In their ceaseless
experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space
itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of
light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny
of matter.

	Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves;
and on a thousand worlds the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a
while in a mindless dance of death then crumbled into rust.

	They were lords of the Galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They
could roce at will among the stars and sink like a subtle mist through the
very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not
wholly forgotten their origin in the warm slime of a vanished sea.

	And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had
started, so long ago.


				arthur c. clarke

--
                                      WTF
                    high-intensity hypermodern psychobabble
                      http://www.psnw.com/~posterkid/wtf/