Arthur C Clarke - City And The Stars Page 23

  Twenty-three

  Diaspar was none too pleased to see alvin again. The city was still in a ferment, like a giant beehive that had been violently stirred with a stick. It was still reluctant to face reality, but those who refused to admit the existence of lys and the outside world no longer had a place to hide. The memory banks had ceased to accept them; those who tried to cling to their dreams, and to seek refuge in the future, now walked in vain into the hall of creation. The dissolving, heatless flame refused to greet them; they no longer awoke, their minds washed clean, a hundred thousand years further down the river of time. No appeal to the central computer was of any avail, nor would it explain the reason for its actions. The intended refugees had to turn sadly back into city, to face the problems of their age. Alvin and hilvar had landed at the periphery of the park, not far from council hall. Until the last moment, alvin was not certain that he could bring the ship into the city, through whatever screens fenced its sky from the outer world. The firmament of diaspar, like all else about it, was artificial, or at least partly so. Night, with its starry reminder of all that man had lost, was never allowed to intrude upon the city; it was protected also from the storms that sometimes raged across the desert and filled the sky with moving walls of sand. The invisible guardians let alvin pass, and as diaspar lay spread out beneath him, he knew that he had come home. However much the universe and its mysteries might call him, this was where he was born and where he belonged. It would never satisfy him, yet always he would return. He had gone halfway across the galaxy to learn this simple truth. The crowds had gathered even before the ship landed, and alvin wondered how his fellow citizens would receive him now that he had returned. He could read their faces easily enough, as he watched them through the viewing screen be­fore he opened the air lock. The dominant emotion seemed to be curiosity-in itself something new in diaspar. Mingled with that was apprehension, while here and there were un­mistakable signs of fear. No one, alvin thought a little wist­fully, seemed glad to see him back. The council, on the other hand, positively welcomed him -though not out of pure friendship. Though he had caused this crisis, he alone could give the facts on which future policy must be based. He was listened to with deep attention as he described his flight to the seven suns and his meeting with vanamonde. Then he answered innumerable questions, with a patience which probably surprised his interrogators. Uppermost in their minds, he quickly discovered, was the fear of the invaders, though they never mentioned the name and were clearly unhappy when he broached the subject di­rectly. "If the invaders are still in the universe," alvin told the council, "then surely i should have met them at its very center. But there is no intelligent life among the seven suns; we had already guessed that before vanamonde confirmed it. I believe that the invaders departed ages ago; certainly vanamonde, who appears to be at least as old as diaspar, knows nothing of them."

  "I have a suggestion," said one of the councilors suddenly. "Vanamonde may be a descendant of the invaders, in some way beyond our present understanding. He has forgotten his origin, but that does not mean that one day he may not be dangerous again." hilvar, who was present merely as a spectator, did not wait for permission to speak. It was the first time that alvin had ever seen him angry. "Vanamonde has looked into my mind," he said, "and i have glimpsed something of his. My people have already learned much about him, though they have not yet discovered what he is. But one thing is certain-he is friendly, and was glad to find us. We have nothing to fear from him." there was a brief silence after this outburst, and hilvar relaxed with a somewhat embarrassed expression. It was no­ticeable that the tension in the council chamber lessened from then on, as if a cloud had lifted from the spirits of those present. Certainly the president made no attempt, as he was supposed to do, to censure hilvar for his interruption. It was clear to alvin, as he listened to the debate, that three schools of thought were represented on the council. The conservatives, who were in a minority, still hoped that the clock could be turned back and that the old order could somehow be restored. Against all reason, they clung to the hope that diaspar and lys could be persuaded to forget each other again. The progressives were an equally small minority; the fact that there were any on the council at all pleased and surprised alvin. They did not exactly welcome this invasion of the out­er world, but they were determined to make the best of it. Some of them went so far as to suggest that there might be a way of breaking through the psychological barriers which for so long had sealed diaspar even more effectively than the physical ones. Most of the council, accurately reflecting the mood of the city, had adopted an attitude of watchful caution, while they waited for the pattern of the future to emerge. They realized.. That they could make no general plans, nor try to carry out any definite policy, until the storm had passed. Jeserac joined alvin and hilvar when the session was over. He seemed to have changed since they had last met-and last parted-in the tower of loranne, with the desert spread out beneath them. The change was not one that alvin had expected, though it was one that he was to encounter more and more often in the days to come. Jeserac seemed younger, as if the fires of life had found.1 fresh fuel and were burning more brightly in his veins. De­spite his age, he was one of those who could accept the challenge that alvin had thrown to diaspar. "I have some news for you, alvin," he said. "I think you know senator gerane." alvin was puzzled for a moment; then he remembered. "Of course-he was one of the first men i met in lys. Isn't he a member of their delegation?" "yes, we have grown to know each other quite well. He is a brilliant man, and understands more about the human mind than i would have believed possible-though he tells me that by the standards of lys he is only a beginner. While he is here, he is starting a project which will be very close to your heart. He is hoping to analyze the compulsion which keeps us in the city, and he believes that once he has discovered how it was imposed, he will be able to remove it. About twenty of us are already co-operating with him." "and you are one of them?" "yes," replied jeserac, showing the nearest approach to bashfulness that alvin had ever seen or ever would see. "It is not easy, and certainly not pleasant-but it is stimulating." "how does gerane work?" "he is operating through the sagas. He has had a whole series of them constructed, and studies our reactions when we are experiencing them. I never thought, at my age, that i should go back to my childhood recreations again" "what are the sagas?" asked hilvar. "Imaginary dream worlds," exclaimed alvin. "At least, most of them are imaginary, though some are probably based on historical facts. There are millions of them recorded in the memory cells of the city; you can take your choice of any kind of adventure or experience you wish, and it will seem utterly real to you while the impulses are being fed into your mind." he turned to jeserac. "What kind of sagas does gerane take you into?" "most of them are concerned, as you might expect, with leaving diaspar. Some have taken us back to our very earliest lives, to as near to the founding of the city as we can get. Gerane believes that the closer he can get to the origin of this compulsion, the more easily he will be able to undermine it." alvin felt very encouraged by this news. His work would be merely half accomplished if he had opened the gates of diaspar-only to find that no one would pass through them. "Do you really want to be able to leave diaspar?" asked hilvar shrewdly. "No," replied jeserac, without hesitation. "I am terrified of the idea. But i realize that we were completely wrong in thinking that diaspar was all the world that mattered, and logic tells me that something has to be done to rectify the mistake. Emotionally, i am still quite incapable of leaving the city; perhaps i always shall be. Gerane thinks he can get some of us to come to lys, and i am willing to help him with the experiment-even though half- the time i hope that it will fail" alvin looked at his old tutor with a new respect. He no longer discounted the power of suggestion, nor underesti­mated the forces which could compel a man to act in de­fiance of logic. He could not help comparing jeserac's calm courage with khedron's panic flight into the future,-though with his new understanding of human nature he no longer cared to condemn
the jester for what he had done. Gerane, he was certain, would accomplish what he had set out to do. Jeserac might be too old to break the pattern of a lifetime, however willing he might be to start afresh. That did not matter, for others would succeed, with their skilled guidance of the psychologists of lys. And once a few" had escaped from their billion-year-old mold, it would only be a question of time before the remainder could follow. He wondered what would happen to diaspar and to lys when the barriers were fully down. Somehow, the best ele­ments of both must be saved, and welded into a new and healthier culture. It was a terrifying task, and would need all the wisdom and all the patience that each could bring to bear. Some of the difficulties of the forthcoming adjustments: had already been encountered. The visitors from lys had, politely enough, refused to live in the homes provided for them in the city. They had set up their own temporary ac­commodation in the park, among surroundings, which re­minded them of lys. Hilvar was the only exception; though he disliked living in a house with indeterminate walls and ephemeral furniture, he bravely accepted alvin's hospitality, reassured by the promise that they would not stay here for long. Hilvar had never felt lonely in his life, but he knew lone­liness in diaspar. The city was stranger to him than lys had, been to alvin, and he was oppressed and overwhelmed by its infinite complexity and by the myriads of strangers who seemed to crowd every inch of space around him. He knew, if only in a tenuous manner, everyone in lys, whether he had met them or not. In a thousand lifetimes he could never know everyone in diaspar, and though he realized that this was and irrational feeling, it left him vaguely depressed. Only his loyalty to alvin held him here in a world that had nothing in common with his own. He had often tried to analyze his feelings toward alviti. His friendship sprang, he knew, from the same source th inspired his sympathy for all small and struggling creatur this would have astonished those who thought of alvin as willful, stubborn, and self-centered, needing no affection from anyone and incapable of returning it even if it was offered. Hilvar knew better than this; he had sensed it instinctive even from the first. Alvin was an explorer, and all explor are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest. What alvin was seeking, hilvar did not know. He was driven by forces that had been set in motion ages before, by the men of genius who planned diaspar with such perverse skill ­or by the men of even greater genius who had opposed them. Like every human being, alvin was in some measure a ma­chine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people he was so unaccountable a creature that they some­times forgot that he still shared their emotions. It needed a stranger from a totally different environment to see him as another human being. Within a few days of arriving in diaspar, hilvar had met more people than in his entire life. Met them-and had grown to know practically none. Because they were so crowded together, the inhabitants of the city maintained a reserve that was hard to penetrate. The only privacy they knew was that of the mind and they still clung to this even as they made their way through the endless social activities of dias­par. Hilvar felt sorry for them though he knew that they felt no need for his sympathy. They did not realize what they were missing-they could not understand the warm sense of community, the feeling of belonging which linked every­one together in the telepathic society of lys. Indeed, though they were polite enough to try to conceal it, it was obvious that most of the people he spoke to looked upon him pityingly as leading an incredibly dull and drab existence. Eriston and etania, alvin's guardians, hilvar quickly dis­missed as kindly but totally baffled nonentities. He found it very confusing to hear alvin refer to them as his father and mother-words which in lys still retained their ancient bio­logical meaning. It required a continual effort of imagination to remember that the laws of life and death had been re­pealed by the makers of diaspar, and there were times when it seemed to hilvar that despite all the activity around him, the city was half empty because it had no children. He wondered what would happen to diaspar now that its long isolation was over. The best thing the city could do, he decided, was to destroy the memory banks which had held it entranced for so many ages. Miraculous though they were-perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that had produced them-they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things. Some of those fears had been based on reality, but others, it now seemed, lay only in the imagination. Hilvar knew a little of the pattern that was beginning to emerge from the exploration of vana­monde's mind. In a few days, diaspar would know it too-­and would discover how much of its past had been a myth. Yet if the memory banks- were destroyed, within a thousand years the city would be dead, since its people had lost the power to reproduce themselves. That was the dilemma that had to be faced, but already hilvar had glimpsed one possible solution. There was always an answer to any techni­cal problem, and his people were masters of the biological sciences. What had been done could be undone, if diaspar so wished. First, however, the city would have to learn what it had lost. Its education would take many years-perhaps many a centuries. But it was beginning; very soon the impact of the first lesson would shake diaspar as profundly as had contact with lys itself. It would shake lys too. For all the difference between the two cultures, they had sprung from the same roots-and they had shared the same illusions. They would both be healthier when they looked once more, with a calm and steadfast gaze,, into the past which they had lost.

  Twenty-four

  The amphitheater had been designed to hold the entire waking population of diaspar, and scarcely one of its ten million places was empty. As he looked down the great curving sweep from his vantage point high up the slope, alvin was irresistibly reminded of shalmirane. The two craters were of the same shape, and almost the same size. If one packed the crater of shalmirane with humanity, it would look very much like this. There was, however, one fundamental difference between the two. The great bowl of shalmirane existed; this amphi­theater did not. Nor had it ever done so; it was merely a phantom, a pattern of electronic charges, slumbering in the memory of the central computer until the need came to call it forth. Alvin knew that in reality he was still in his room, him and that all the myriads of people who appeared to surround him were equally in their own homes. As long as he made no attempt to move from this spot, the illusion was perfect. He could believe that diaspar had been abolished and that all. Its citizens had been assembled here in this enormous cavity. Not once in a thousand years did the life of the city stop. So that all its people could meet in grand assembly. In lys" also. Alvin knew, the equivalent of this gathering was taking place. There it would be a meeting of minds, but perhaps as­sociated with it would be an apparent meeting of bodies, as imaginary yet as seemingly real as this. He could recognize most of the faces around him, out to the limits of unaided vision. More than a mile away, and a thousand feet below, was the little circular stage upon which the attention of the entire world was now fixed. It was hard to believe that he could see anything from such a distance, but alvin knew that when the address began, he would hear and observe everything that happened as clearly as anyone else in diaspar. The stage filled with mist; the mist became callitrax, lead­er of the group whose task it had been to reconstruct the past from the information which vanamonde had brought to earth. It had been a stupendous, almost an impossible under­taking, and not merely because of the spans of time involved. Only once, with the mental help of hilvar, had alvin been given a brief glimpse into the mind of the strange being they had discovered-or who had discovered them. To alvin, the thoughts of vanamonde were as meaningless as a thousand voices shouting together in some vast, echoing cave. Yet the men of lys could disentangle them, could record them to be analyzed at leisure. Already, so it was rumored-though hilvar would neither deny nor confirm this-what they had discovered was so strange that it bore scarcely any resem­blance to the hi
story which all the human race had accepted for a billion years. Callitrax began to speak. To alvin, as to everyone else in diaspar, the clear, precise voice seemed to come from a point only a few inches away. Then, in a manner that was hard to define, just as the geometry of a dream defies logic yet rouses no surprise in the mind of the dreamer, alvin was standing beside callitrax while at the same time he retained his posi­tion high up on the slope of the amphitheater. The paradox did not puzzle him; be simply accepted it without question, like all the other masteries over time and space which science had given him. Very briefly, callitrax ran through the accepted history of the race. He spoke of the unknown peoples of the dawn civilizations, who had left behind them nothing but a hand­ful of great names and the fading legends of the empire. Even at the beginning, so the story went, man had desired the stars-and had at last attained them. For millions of years he had expanded across the galaxy, gathering system after system beneath his sway. Then, out of the darkness be­yond the rim of the universe, the invaders had struck and wrenched from him all that he had won. The retreat to the solar system had been bitter and must have lasted many ages. Earth itself was barely saved by the fabulous battles that raged around shalmirane. When all was over, man was left with only his memories and the world on whih he had been born. Since then, all else had been long-drawn anticlimax. As an ultimate irony, the race that had hoped to rule the universe had abandoned most of its own tiny world, and had split into the two isolated cultures of lys and diaspar-oases of life in a desert that sundered them as effectively as the gulfs be­tween the stars. Callitrax paused; to alvin, as to everyone in the great as­sembly, it seemed that the historian was looking directly at him with eyes that had witnessed things which even now they could not wholly credit. "So much," said callitrax, "for the tales we have believed since our records began. I must tell you now that they are false-false in every detail-so false that even now we have not fully reconciled them with the truth." he waited for the full meaning of his words to strike home. Then, speaking slowly and carefully, he gave to both lys and diaspar the knowledge that had been won from the a mind of vanamonde. It was not even true that man had reached the stars. The whole of his little empire was bounded by the orbits of pluto and persephone, for interstellar space proved a barrier beyond his power to cross. His entire civilization was huddled around the sun, and was still very young when-the stars reached him. The impact must have been shattering. Despite his failures, man had never doubted that one day he would conquer the depths of space. He believed too that if the universe held his equals, it did not hold his superiors. Now he knew that both beliefs were wrong, and that out among the stars were minds far greater than his own. For many centuries, first in the ships of other races and later in machines built with borrowed knowledge, man had explored the galaxy. Everywhere he found cultures he could understand but could not match, and here and there he encountered minds which would soon have passed altogether beyond his comprehension. The shock was tremendous, but it proved the making of the race. Sadder and infinitely wiser, man had returned to the solar system to brood upon the knowledge he had gained., he would accept the challenge, and slowly he evolved a plan which gave hope for the future. Once the physical sciences had been man's greatest in­terest. Now he turned even more fiercely to genetics and the study of the mind. Whatever the cost, he would drive him­self to the limits of his evolution. The great experiment had consumed the entire energies of the race for millions of years. All that striving, all that sacrifice and toil, became only a handful of words in cal­litrax's narrative. It had brought man his greatest victories. He had banished disease; he could live forever if he wished, and in mastering telepathy he had bent the most subtle of all powers to his will. He was ready to go out again, relying upon his own re­sources, into the great spaces of the galaxy. He would meet as an equal the races of the worlds from which he had once turned aside. And he would play his full part in the story of the universe. These things he did. From this age, perhaps the most spacious of all history, came the legends of the empire. It had been an empire of many races, but this had been for­gotten in the drama, too tremendous for tragedy, in which it had come to its end. The empire had lasted for at least a million years. It must have known many crises, perhaps even wars, but all these were lost in the sweep of great races moving together toward maturity. "We can be proud," continued callitrax, "of the part our ancestors played in this story. Even when they had reached their cultural plateau, they lost none of their initiative. We deal now with conjecture rather than proved fact, but it seems certain that the experiments which were at once the empire's downfall and its crowning glory were inspired and directed by man. "The philosophy underlying these experiments appears to have been this. Contact with other species had shown man how profoundly a race's world-picture depended upon its physical body and the sense organs with which it was equipped. It was argued that a true picture of the universe could be attained, if at all, only by a mind that was free from such physical limitations-a pure mentality, in fact. This was a conception common among many of earth's ancient re­ligious faiths, and it seems strange that an idea which had no rational origin should finally become one of the greatest goals of science. "No disembodied intelligence had ever been encountered in the natural universe; the empire set out to create one. We have forgotten, with so much else, the skills and knowledge that made this possible. The scientists of the empire had mas­tered all the forces of nature all the secrets of time and space. As our mind's are the by-product of an immensely intricate ar­rangement of brain cells, linked together by the network of the nervous system, so they strove to create a brain whose components were not material, but patterns embossed upon space itself. Such a brain if one can call it that, would use elec­trical or yet higher forces for its operation, and would be com­pletely free from the tyranny of matter. It could function with far greater speed than any organic intelligence; it could endure as long as there was an erg of free energy left in the universe, and no limit could be seen for its powers. Once created, it would develop potentialities which even its makers could not foresee.