Against the Fall of Night (2 page)

Five minutes later he was in a small, bare room through which a warm wind blew continually. It was part of the tower’s ventilating system, and the moving air escaped through a series of wide openings that pierced the wall of the building. Through them one could get a glimpse of the world beyond Diaspar.

It was perhaps too much to say that Diaspar had been deliberately built so that its inhabitants could see nothing of the outer world. Yet it was strange that from nowhere else in the city, as far as Alvin knew, could one see the desert. The outermost towers of Diaspar formed a wall around the city, turning their backs upon the hostile world beyond, and Alvin thought again of his people’s strange reluctance to speak or even to think of anything outside their little universe.

Thousands of feet below, the sunlight was taking leave of the desert. The almost horizontal rays made a pattern of light against the eastern wall of the little room, and Alvin’s own shadow loomed enormous behind him. He shaded his eyes against the glare and peered down at the land upon which no man had walked for unknown ages.

There was little to see: only the long shadows of the sand-dunes and, far to the west, the low range of broken hills beyond which the sun was setting. It was strange to think that of all the millions of living men, he alone had seen this sight.

There was no twilight: with the going of the sun, night swept like a wind across the desert, scattering the stars before it. High in the south burned a strange formation that had puzzled Alvin before—a perfect circle of six colored stars, with a single white giant at its center. Few other stars had such brilliance, for the great suns that had once burned so fiercely in the glory of youth were now guttering to their doom.

For a long time Alvin knelt at the opening, watching the stars fall towards the west. Here in the glimmering darkness, high above the city, his mind seemed to be working with a supernormal clarity. There were still tremendous gaps in his knowledge, but slowly the problem of Diaspar was beginning to reveal itself.

The human race had changed—and he had not. Once, the curiosity and the desire for knowledge which cut him off from the rest of his people had been shared by all the world. Far back in time, millions of years ago, something must have happened that had changed mankind completely. Those unexplained references to the Invaders—did the answer lie there?

It was time he returned. As he rose to leave, Alvin was suddenly struck by a thought that had never occurred to him before. The air-vent was almost horizontal, and perhaps a dozen feet long. He had always imagined that it ended in the sheer wall of the tower, but this was a pure assumption. There were, he realized now, several other possibilities. Indeed, it was more than likely that there would be a ledge of some kind beneath the opening, if only for reasons of safety. It was too late to do any exploring now, but tomorrow he would come again….

He was sorry to have to lie to Jeserac, but if the old man disapproved of his eccentricities it was only kindness to conceal the truth. Exactly what he hoped to discover, Alvin could not have said. He knew perfectly well that if by any means he succeeded in leaving Diaspar, he would soon have to return. But the schoolboy excitement of a possible adventure was its own justification.

It was not difficult to work his way along the tunnel, though he could not have done it easily a year before. The thought of a sheer five-thousand-foot drop at the end worried Alvin not at all, for Man had completely lost his fear of heights. And, in fact, the drop was only a matter of a yard on to a wide terrace running right and left athwart the face of the tower.

Alvin scrambled out into the open, the blood pounding in his veins. Before him, no longer framed in a narrow rectangle of stone, lay the whole expanse of the desert. Above, the face of the tower still soared hundreds of feet into the sky. The neighboring buildings stretched away to north and south, an avenue of titans. The Tower of Loranne, Alvin noted with interest, was not the only one with air-vents opening towards the desert. For a moment he stood drinking in the tremendous landscape: then he began to examine the ledge on which he was standing.

It was perhaps twenty feet wide, and ended abruptly in a sheer drop to the ground. Alvin, gazing fearlessly over the edge of the precipice, judged that the desert was at least a mile below. There was no hope in that direction.

Far more interesting was the fact that a flight of steps led down from one end of the terrace, apparently to another ledge a few hundred feet below. The steps were cut in the sheer face of the building, and Alvin wondered if they led all the way to the surface. It was an exciting possibility: in his enthusiasm, he overlooked the physical implications of a five-thousand-foot descent.

But the stairway was little more than a hundred feet long. It came to a sudden end against a great block of stone that seemed to have been welded across it. There was no way past: deliberately and thoroughly, the route had been barred.

Alvin approached the obstacle with a sinking heart. He had forgotten the sheer impossibility of climbing a stairway a mile high, if indeed he could have completed the descent, and he felt a baffled annoyance at having come so far only to meet with failure.

He reached the stone, and for the first time saw the message engraved upon it. The letters were archaic, but he could decipher them easily enough. Three times he read the simple inscription: then he sat down on the great stone slabs and gazed at the inaccessible land below.

Rorden, keeper of the records, concealed his surprise when his visitor announced himself. He recognized Alvin at once and even as the boy was entering had punched out his name on the information machine. Three seconds later, Alvin’s personal card was lying in his hand.

According to Jeserac, the duties of the Keeper of the Records were somewhat obscure, but Alvin had expected to find him in the heart of an enormous filing system. He had also—for no reason at all—expected to meet someone quite as old as Jeserac. Instead, he found a middle-aged man in a single room containing perhaps a dozen large machines. Apart from a few papers strewn across the desk, there were no records of any kind to be seen.

Rorden’s greeting was somewhat absent-minded, for he was surreptitiously studying Alvin’s card.

“Alaine of Lyndar?” he said. “No, I’ve never heard of him. But we can soon find who he was.”

Alvin watched with interest while he punched a set of keys on one of the machines. Almost immediately there came the glow of a synthesizer field, and a slip of paper materialized.

“Alaine seems to have been a predecessor of mine—a very long time ago. I thought I knew all the Keepers for the last hundred million years, but he must have been before that. It’s so long ago that only his name has been recorded, with no other details at all. Where was that inscription?”

“In the Tower of Loranne,” said Alvin after a moment’s hesitation.

Another set of keys was punched, but this time the field did not reappear and no paper materialized.

“What are you doing?” asked Alvin. “Where are all your records?”

The Keeper laughed.

“That always puzzles people. It would be impossible to keep written records of all the information we need: it’s recorded electrically and automatically erased after a certain time, unless there’s a special reason for preserving it. If Alaine left any message for posterity, we’ll soon discover it.”

“How?”

“There’s no one in the world who could tell you that. All I know is that this machine is an Associator. If you give it a set of facts, it will hunt through the sum total of human knowledge until it correlates them.”

“Doesn’t that take a lot of time?”

“Very often. I have sometimes had to wait twenty years for an answer. So won’t you sit down?” he added, the crinkles round his eyes belying his solemn voice.

Alvin had never met anyone quite like the Keeper of the Records, and he decided that he liked him. He was tired of being reminded that he was a boy, and it was pleasant to be treated as a real person.

Once again the synthesizer field flickered and Rorden bent down to read the slip. The message must have been a long one, for it took him several minutes to finish it. Finally he sat down on one of the room’s couches, looking at his visitor with eyes which, as Alvin noticed for the first time, were of a most disconcerting shrewdness.

“What does it say?” he burst out at last, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.

Rorden did not reply. Instead, he was the one to ask for information.

“Why do you want to leave Diaspar?” he said quietly.

If Jeserac or his father had asked him that question, Alvin would have found himself floundering in a morass of half-truths or downright lies. But with this man, whom he had met for only a few minutes, there seemed none of the barriers that had cut him off from those he had known all his life.

“I’m not sure,” he said, speaking slowly but readily. “I’ve always felt like this. There’s nothing outside Diaspar, I know—but I want to go there all the same.”

He looked shyly at Rorden, as if expecting encouragement, but the Keeper’s eyes were far away. When at last he again turned to Alvin, there was an expression on his face that the boy could not fully understand, but it held a tinge of sadness that was somewhat disturbing.

No one could have told that Rorden had come to the greatest crisis in his life. For thousands of years he had carried out his duties as the interpreter of the machines, duties requiring little initiative or enterprise. Somewhat apart from the tumult of the city, rather aloof from his fellows, Rorden had lived a happy and contented life. And now this boy had come, disturbing the ghosts of an age that had been dead for millions of centuries, and threatening to shatter his cherished peace of mind.

A few words of discouragement would be enough to destroy the threat, but looking into the anxious, unhappy eyes, Rorden knew that he could never take the easy way. Even without the message from Alaine, his conscience would have forbidden it.

“Alvin,” he began, “I know there are many things that have been puzzling you. Most of all, I expect, you have wondered why we now live here in Diaspar when once the whole world was not enough for us.”

Alvin nodded, wondering how the other could have read his mind so accurately.

“Well, I’m afraid I cannot answer that question completely. Don’t look so disappointed: I haven’t finished yet. It all started when Man was fighting the Invaders—whoever or whatever they were. Before that, he had been expanding through the stars, but he was driven back to Earth in wars of which we have no conception. Perhaps that defeat changed his character, and made him content to pass the rest of his existence on Earth. Or perhaps the Invaders promised to leave him in peace if he would remain on his own planet: we don’t know. All that is certain is that he started to develop an intensely centralized culture, of which Diaspar was the final expression.

“At first there were many of the great cities, but in the end Diaspar absorbed them all, for there seems to be some force driving men together as once it drove them to the stars. Few people ever recognize its presence, but we all have a fear of the outer world, and a longing for what is known and understood. That fear may be irrational, or it may have some foundation in history, but it is one of the strongest forces in our lives.”

“Then why don’t I feel that way?”

“You mean that the thought of leaving Diaspar, where you have everything you need and are among all your friends, doesn’t fill you with something like horror?”

“No.”

The Keeper smiled wryly.

“I’m afraid I cannot say the same. But at least I can appreciate your point of view, even if I cannot share it. Once I might have felt doubtful about helping you, but not now that I’ve seen Alaine’s message.”

“You still haven’t told me what it was!”

Rorden laughed.

“I don’t intend to do so until you’re a good deal older. But I’ll tell you what it was about.

“Alaine foresaw that people like you would be born in future ages: he realized that they might attempt to leave Diaspar and he set out to help them. I imagine that whatever way you tried to leave the city, you would meet an inscription directing you to the Keeper of the Records. Knowing that the Keeper would then question his machines, Alaine left a message, buried safely among the thousands and millions of records that exist. It could only be found if the Associator was deliberately looking for it. That message directs any Keeper to assist the enquirer, even if he disapproves of his quest. Alaine believed that the human race was becoming decadent, and he wanted to help anyone who might regenerate it. Do you follow all this?”

Alvin nodded gravely and Rorden continued.

“I hope he was wrong. I don’t believe that humanity is decadent—it’s simply altered. You, of course, will agree with Alaine—but don’t do so simply because you think it’s fine to be different from everyone else! We are happy: if we have lost anything, we’re not aware of it.

“Alaine wrote a good deal in his message, but the important part is this. There are three ways out of Diaspar. He does not say where they lead, nor does he give any clues as to how they can be found, though there are some very obscure references I’ll have to think about. But even if what he says is true, you are far too young to leave the city. Tomorrow I must speak to your people. No, I won’t give you away! But leave me now—I have a good deal to think about.”

Rorden felt a little embarrassed by the boy’s gratitude. When Alvin had gone, he sat for a while wondering if, after all, he had acted rightly.

There was no doubt that the boy was an atavism—a throwback to the great ages. Every few generations there still appeared minds that were the equal of any the ancient days had known. Born out of their time, they could have little influence on the peacefully dreaming world of Diaspar. The long, slow decline of the human will was too far advanced to be checked by any individual genius, however brilliant. After a few centuries of restlessness, the variants accepted their fate and ceased to struggle against it. When Alvin understood his position, would he too realize that his only hope of happiness lay in conforming with the world? Rorden wondered if, after all, it might not have been kinder in the long run to discourage him. But it was too late now: Alaine had seen to that.