58 pages • 1 hour read
The Nine Billion Names of God
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 10 Summary: “The Wall of Darkness”
The protagonist, Shervane, lives on a planet with one sun called Trilorne. The planet is nearly always light because the sun remains high above the land. Only in the winter does the sun dip down below the horizon in an area called “the Shadow Land” (104). Shervane is curious about his world, wondering what lies in every direction. He has heard legends of ships sailing north only to have to turn around because of the extreme heat of the sun. He wonders if there is such a thing as the “mythical Fire Lands” (105). Because of the position of the sun, “all the inhabited countries of Shervane’s world lay in the narrow belt between burning heat and insufferable cold” (105). Shervane learns about the workings of his world, including the way time passes and how crops are grown and harvested, from his father, Sherval. Shervane’s tutor, an older man named Grayle, teaches him about the philosophical aspects of life.
When Shervane comes of age, Sherval takes Shervane to the top of a small hill and shows him a dark line on the horizon. This, his father explains, is “the Wall” (107). The following spring, Shervane leaves his family and sets out on his journey to discover his world. Along the way he meets an older boy named Brayldon. The boys discuss the Wall at length, both fascinated by it. Brayldon’s uncle approached the Wall as a boy, but when he got close he became too afraid and gave up. Brayldon explains that “my people believe it is the end of the world, and there is nothing beyond” (108). When Shervane pressed for further answers he was met with the theory that the only thing beyond the Wall is “madness” (108), or perhaps the afterlife. Shervane’s desire to know what is beyond the wall consumes him so much that he returns to Brayldon and convinces him to help him get to the Wall.
When they arrive, the Wall is a “monstrous ebony sheet that…seemed to be overhanging and about to crush him beneath its falling weight” (109). Shervane reaches out to touch the wall but can feel nothing as he makes contact. Brayldon and Shervane are frustrated by their inability to determine what the Wall is made of. Shervane longs to be dispossessed of his obsession with the Wall.
When Shervane returns home after two years, he learns that his father passed away in a severe storm. Subsequently, all of his father’s lands and property are left to Shervane, making him the wealthiest man “his land had known for generations” (111). Shervane remains in his homeland until he is middle aged. At this point, Brayldon, now a highly accomplished architect, joins him to discuss their plans for conquering the Wall. Brayldon draws up blueprints for building a staircase to the top of the Wall, and Shervane plans to finance the project with his immense wealth. Together, they visit Grayle who reviews their plans. Shervane will be the only one to cross the top of the Wall, in order to protect others from the potential dangers lurking behind it. Brayldon will be ready with explosives to destroy the staircase if in fact they find something monstrous or dangerous and need to cut off access to it.
Seven years after this the work is finally completed. Shervane is ready to ascend. The story shifts to a scene in which a very aged Grayle pontificates on the origins of the Wall. He suggests that many men before Shervane have experienced the strange sensation of going to the edge of the world only to come back to their starting point. Therefore, “the scientists of the First Dynasty built the Wall to prevent madness from spreading through the land” (114).
Upon reaching the top of the wall, Shervane struggles to understand what he’s looking at: “[H]e was looking across an unbroken black sheet whose width he could not judge” (115). He steps out onto the wall and walks forward. As he walks, he is surrounded by darkness. He keeps Trilorne at his back, and the further he goes the smaller the sun appears. He is afraid of the darkness that continues to grow, but soon he sees a new, faint light in front of him. He walks toward it. As Shervane gets closer to the new light, Trilorne is no longer visible behind him. He realizes that he is walking toward another sun which is “expanding as a moment ago he had seen Trilorne contract” (115).
The story returns to Grayle and Brayldon. Grayle takes a sheet of paper out to demonstrate the meaning of the wall. He explains that it is difficult for the human mind to understand the concept of infinity, but “Along the line of the Wall […] our universe comes to an end—and yet does not” (116). Grayle uses a sheet of paper, bent into a “circular loop” (116). This shows Brayldon that if he were inside the loop, he would never know that the sheet of paper has two sides. As this idea dawns on Brayldon, Shervane expects to see a new sun and different part of the universe, only to find that he has come back to the exact point at which he began.
Once Shervane and Brayldon realize the truth of the Wall, they decide to destroy their work so no one else will have to endure such an existential crisis—for in the end, “the wall possessed no other side” (118).
Story 11 Summary: “No Morning After”
Scientists on the planet of Thaar are trying to decide how to communicate with the humans of Earth in order to tell them that they have 72 hours before the sun explodes and destroys them all. They decide to use telepathy, hoping that someone on Earth will have a mind open enough to receive their communication. That someone turns out to be a rocket engineer named Dr. Bill Cross. Dr. Cross is thinking about his ex-girlfriend and his boss, who just told him that his job is to create missiles, not spaceships. The longer he ruminates the more he drinks, until he is “blind drunk, teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness” (124).
It is in this condition that Dr. Cross begins to hear the communication from Thaar. He assumes it is a drunken hallucination. The disembodied voice from Thaar explains that Earth is in imminent danger: The sun will explode within 74 hours, and if humanity is to survive, Bill must spread the message. Thaar’s scientists established portals all over Earth where humans can take a shortcut through the 37th dimension to find themselves on a planet similar in nature to Earth. Humanity can survive, but it will have to start from scratch on this new planet. Bill thinks his mind is particularly ingenious for coming up with such a hallucination. He continues to respond to what he believes are just voices in his head, telling them that their prediction “would be the best thing that could possibly happen” (126). He goes on to say that the end of the world would solve many problems, such as the Russians and the “high cost of living” (127). He complains about his horrible boss and his cheating ex-girlfriend.
The Supreme Scientist of Thaar can’t believe his bad luck to have penetrated the mind of this human, who isn’t taking his message seriously. He pleads with Bill, “Are all human beings like you?” (127). Thaar realizes it has no chance of saving Earth, and after meeting Bill, it probably has no reason to either. They close the tunnel and leave Bill alone. He staggers over to his last bottle of alcohol and passes out. When he wakes, he is hungover and thinks little about the voices or their message. Three days after his hallucination, the world ends.
Story 12 Summary: “The Possessed”
The Swarm is a mass of disembodied aliens. When their own planet was destroyed by fire, they were forced to flee and search the universe for host bodies. The Swarm has been searching for millions of years, sometimes finding bodies but nothing with intelligence. Without the appropriate host, the Swarm “was helpless—a mere pattern of electric charges, a matrix of order and self-awareness in a universe of chaos” (131).
The Swarm approaches Earth and faces a dilemma: land here and wait for a race to develop which can be inhabited and guided, or continue to search the Universe, possibly in vain. The Swarm chooses to spilt itself into identical twin halves, so that one twin might land on Earth while the other continues to search. They agree to meet again in the future in this valley; the one remaining on Earth will return regularly to check for messengers from the half that is searching.
The Swarm searches Earth, trying to find a host that is common and reproduces rapidly. It settles on small lizards. Generations pass, with no improvement in the intelligence of the lizards. Similarly, the half of the swarm searching the Universe has no luck finding a better planet or host species. After eons, the lizards evolve into warm blooded mammals: A hundred million years pass. Still The Swarm has not heard from its other half, nor has it succeeded in bringing intelligence to its hosts. The Swarm is exhausted and losing the memory of what it was like on its home planet. Yet the desire to reunite with its other half is so strong that it returns to the site of reunion again and again, but “it must travel slowly and painfully in a thousand little bodies” (132).
The longer The Swarm is dispersed among the tiny bodies, its memories fade and it loses “all cohesion” (132). Just as the monkeys which will eventually evolve into humans come into being, The Swarm loses all sense of its intelligence. The only thing left is the “blind urge which still, at intervals which by some strange aberration were becoming ever shorter, drove it to seek its consummation in a valley that long ago had ceased to exist” (133). The narrative shifts forward in time. A man and woman stand holding hands, gazing across a fjord from the bow of a ship. The beautiful night is suddenly disturbed by the sight of “doomed legions” (134) of lemmings who are throwing themselves into the water only to drown. The woman wonders why they do this every few years, and the narrator makes it clear that the lemmings are simply acting out The Swarm’s “urge whose meaning they have never known” (134).
Stories 10-12 Analysis
“Wall of Darkness” is what some refer to as math fiction. The plot moves by exploring two mathematical concepts devised in order to understand the physical nature of infinity. As Shervane comes to the edge of the wall, walks further, then surprisingly returns to his original starting point, Clarke depicts the Klein bottle, a theoretical shape devised by tying two ends of a cylinder together with a twist. Readers can understand the wall as existing at the top of the Klein bottle, preventing people from seeing the infinite loop. When Grayle gives a simple explanation of Shervane’s experience, he uses a piece of paper to create a Möbius strip, which is “an example in two dimensions of what must really occur in three” (121). These mathematical concepts aim to make sense of the question of the nature of the universe. Grayle comments, “how often we have all heard arguments about the size of the universe, and whether it has any boundaries! We can imagine no ending to space, yet our minds rebel at the idea of infinity” (120).
Whether the reader understands or is interested in the mathematical concepts present in the story, the experience of struggling to conceptualize infinity is universal. The story, while interested in math, is more about the human mind and its need to define and label human experiences. The people who came before Shervane understood that walking beyond the wall would bring nothing but misery. They built the wall to protect people from madness which ensues when confronted with the idea that their world is an infinite loop. Ultimately, the story shows readers that people inherently feel drawn to search for answers. Yet, it is the search, not the answer, that brings reward. In this story, Clarke shows that answers can sometimes lead to more confusion, fear, despair, or madness.
At the beginning of “No Morning After,” Clarke comments that “tales of cosmic doom have long been a science fiction staple” (122), but he intends to put a humorous spin on this genre. Clarke imagines a scenario in which intelligent beings from another planet wish to warn the human race about impending destruction. However, they can only gain telepathic access to one man who is so consumed with his petty miseries that he fails to heed the warning. The alien beings continue to remark that Bill cannot possibly represent the nature of all humans, and if he does then humans may not be worth saving. The humorous irony is that Bill’s self-absorbed misery is, in fact, very representative of the human condition. So, the story jokes that the end of Earth as we know it “would be the best thing that could possibly happen” (126).
To fully appreciate “The Possessed,” it is important to know the mythology of the lemming. Lemmings are small furry animals that have puzzled people for centuries. They seem to commit mass suicide, particularly the lemmings of Norway, by jumping off of cliffs and drowning in the ocean. Clarke offers his own creative theory which might explain this odd behavior. The short story posits that an alien life-form inhabited the lemming and for centuries has been trying to evolve its body into intelligent life. Each year, the alien force inside the lemmings makes the pilgrimage to its original valley, only the valley has become a sea. The lemmings are unaware of their now ancient, alien drive toward the valley and find themselves surprised to fall off the cliff into the sea. Two characters watch the lemmings scurry toward the cliff and plunge into the water. They wonder why the animals behave this way. The irony in the story is that the alien life force that came to Earth in search of a creature capable of evolving into an intelligent being is trapped in the lemming, being observed by intelligent humans. This highlights both the unique position that humans occupy as the most evolved group of mammals, while simultaneously illustrating the sheer luck of human evolution.
Unlock all 58 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Arthur C. Clarke
