Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (2 page)

 
          
 
For a moment fear crept into his soul—fear
lest after all these ages the Invaders had come again to Earth. Then he too was
staring at the sky, entranced by a wonder he had never hoped to see again. He
watched for many minutes before he went to fetch his infant son.

 
          
 
The child Alvin was frightened at first. The
soaring spires of the city, the moving specks two thousand feet below—these
were part of his world, but the thing in the sky was beyond all his experience.
It was larger than any of the city's buildings, and its whiteness was so
dazzling that it hurt the eye. Though it seemed to be solid, the restless winds
were changing its outlines even as he watched.

 
          
 
Once,
Alvin
knew, the skies of Earth had been filled
with strange shapes. Out of space the great ships had come, bearing unknown
treasures, to berth at the
Port
of
Diaspar
. But that was half a billion years ago:
before the beginning of history the Port had been buried by the drifting sand.

 
          
 
Convar's voice was sad when presently he spoke
to his son.

 
          
 
"Look at it well,
Alvin
," he said. "It may be the last
the world will ever know. I have only seen one other in all my life, and once
they filled the skies of Earth."

 
          
 
They watched in
silence,
and with them all the thousands in the streets and towers of Diaspar, until the
last cloud slowly faded from sight, sucked dry by the hot, parched air of the
unending deserts.

           
 
The lesson was finished. The drowsy whisper of
the hypnone rose suddenly in pitch and ceased abruptly on a thrice repeated
note of command. Then the machine blurred and vanished, but still
Alvin
sat staring into nothingness while his mind
slipped back through the ages to meet reality again.

 
          
 
Jeserac was the first to speak: his voice was
worried and a little uncertain.

 
          
 
"Those are the oldest records in the
world,
Alvin
—the only ones that show Earth as it was before
the Invaders came. Very few people indeed have ever seen them."

 
          
 
Slowly the boy turned toward his tutor. There
was something in his eyes that worried the old man, and once again Jeserac
regretted his action. He began to talk quickly, as if trying to set his own
conscience at ease.

 
          
 
"You know that we never talk about the
ancient times, and I only showed you those records because you were so anxious
to see them. Don't let them upset you: as long as we're happy, does it matter
how much of the world we occupy? The people you have been watching had more
space, but they were less contented than we."

 
          
 
Was that true?
Alvin
wondered. He thought once more of the
desert lapping around the island that was Diaspar, and his mind returned to the
world that Earth had been. He saw again the endless leagues of blue water,
greater than the land itself, rolling their waves against golden shores. His
ears were still ringing with the boom of breakers stilled these thousand
million years. And he remembered the forests and prairies, and the strange
beasts that had once shared the world with
Man.

 
          
 
All this was gone. Of the oceans, nothing
remained but the gray deserts of salt, the winding sheets of Earth. Salt and
sand, from Pole to Pole, with only the lights of Diaspar burning in the
wilderness that must one day overwhelm them.

 
          
 
And these were the least of the things that
Man had lost, for above the desolation the forgotten stars were shining still.

 
          
 
"Jeserac," said
Alvin
at last, "once I went to the
Tower
of
Loranne
. No one lives there anymore, and I could
look out over the desert. It was dark, and I couldn't see the ground, but the
sky was full of colored lights. I watched them for a long time, but they never
moved. So presently I came away. Those were the stars, weren't they?"

 
          
 
Jeserac was alarmed. Exactly how
Alvin
had got to the
Tower
of
Loranne
was a matter for further investigation. The
boy's interests were becoming—dangerous.

 
          
 
"Those were the stars," he answered
briefly. "What of them?"

 
          
 
"We used to visit them once, didn't
we?"

 
          
 
A long pause.
Then,
"Yes."

 
          
 
"Why did we stop? What were the
invaders?"

 
          
 
Jeserac rose to his feet. His answer echoed
back through all the teachers the world had ever known.

 
          
 
"That's enough for one day,
Alvin
. Later, when you are older, I'll tell you
more—but not now. You already know too much."

 
          
 
Alvin
never asked the question again: later, he
had no need, for the answer was clear. And there was so much in Diaspar to
beguile the mind that for months he could forget that strange yearning he alone
seemed to feel.

 
          
 
Diaspar was a world in itself. Here Man had
gathered all his treasures, everything that had been saved from the ruin of the
past. All the cities that had ever been had given something to Diaspar: even
before the coming of the Invaders its name had been known on the worlds that
Man had lost.

 
          
 
Into the building of Diaspar had gone all the
skill, all the artistry of the Golden Ages. When the great days were coming to
an end, men of genius had remolded the city and given it the machines that made
it immortal. Whatever might be forgotten, Diaspar would live and bear the
descendants of Man safely down the stream of Time.

 
          
 
They were, perhaps, as contented as any race
the world had known, and after their fashion they were happy. They spent their
long lives amid beauty that had never been surpassed, for the labor of millions
of centuries had been dedicated to the glory of Diaspar.

 
          
 
This was
Alvin
's world, a world which for ages had been
sinking into a gracious decadence. Of this
Alvin
was still unconscious, for the present was
so full of wonder that it was easy to forget the past. There was so much to do,
so much to learn before the long centuries of his youth ebbed away.

 
          
 
Music had been the first of the arts to attract
him, and for a while he had experimented with many instruments. But this most
ancient of all arts was now so complex that it might take a thousand years for
him to master all its secrets, and in the end he abandoned his ambitions. He
could listen, but he could never create.

 
          
 
For a long time the thought-converter gave him
great delight. On its screen he shaped endless patterns of form and color,
usually copies—deliberate or otherwise—of the ancient masters. More and more
frequently he found himself creating dream landscapes from the vanished Dawn
World, and often his thoughts turned wistfully to the records that Jeserac had
shown him. So the smoldering flame of his discontent burned slowly toward the
level of consciousness, though as yet he was scarcely worried by the vague
restlessness he often felt.

 
          
 
But through the months and the years, that
restlessness was growing. Once
Alvin
had been content to share the pleasures and
interests of Diaspar, but now he knew that they were not sufficient. His horizons
were expanding, and the knowledge that all his life must be bounded by the
walls of the city was becoming intolerable to him.

 
          
 
Yet he knew well enough that there was no
alternative, for the wastes of the desert covered
all the
world.

 
          
 
He had seen the desert only a few times in his
life, but he knew no one else who had ever seen it at all. His people's fear of
the outer world was something he could not understand: to him it held no
terror, but only mystery. When he was weary of Diaspar, it called to him as it
was calling now.

 
          
 
The moving ways were
glittering
with life and color as the people of the city went about their affairs. They
smiled at
Alvin
as he worked his way to the central
high-speed action. Sometimes they greeted him by name: once it had been
flattering to think that he was known to the whole of Diaspar, but now it gave
him little pleasure.

 
          
 
In minutes the express channel had swept him
away from the crowded heart of the city, and there were few people in sight
when it came to a smooth halt against a long platform of brightly colored
marble. The moving ways were so much a part of his life that
Alvin
had never imagined any other form of
transport. An engineer of the ancient world would have gone slowly mad trying
to understand how a solid roadway could be fixed at both ends while its center
traveled at a hundred miles an hour. One day
Alvin
might be puzzled too, but for the present
he accepted his environment as uncritically as all the other citizens of
Diaspar.

 
          
 
This area of the city was almost deserted.
Although the population of Diaspar had not altered for millennia, it was the
custom for families to move at frequent intervals. One day the tide of life
would sweep this way again, but the great towers had been lonely now for a
hundred thousand years.

 
          
 
The marble platform ended against a wall
pierced with brilliantly lighted tunnels.
Alvin
selected one without hesitation and stepped
into it. The peristaltic field seized him at once, and propelled him forward
while he lay back luxuriously, watching his surroundings.

 
          
 
It no longer seemed possible that he was in a
tunnel far underground, the art that had used all Diaspar for its canvas had
been busy here, and above
Alvin
the skies seemed open to the winds of heaven. All around were the spires
of the city, gleaming in the sunlight. It was not the city as he knew it, but
the Diaspar of a much earlier age. Although most of the great buildings were
familiar, there were subtle differences that added to the interest of the
scene.
Alvin
wished he could linger, but he had never
found any way of retarding his progress through the tunnel.

 
          
 
All too soon he was gently set down in a large
elliptical chamber, completely surrounded by windows. Through these he could
catch tantalizing glimpses of gardens ablaze with brilliant flowers. There were
gardens still in Diaspar, but these had existed only in the mind of the artist
who conceived them. Certainly there were no such flowers as these in the world
today.