Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (3 page)

 
          
 
Alvin
stepped through one of the windows—and the
illusion was shattered. He was in a circular passageway curving steeply upward.
Beneath his feet the floor began to creep slowly forward, as if eager to lead
him to his goal. He walked a few paces until his speed was so great that
further effort would be wasted.

 
          
 
The corridor still inclined upward, and in a
few hundred feet had curved through a complete right angle. But only logic knew
this: to the senses it was now as if one were being hurried along an absolutely
level corridor. The fact that he was in reality traveling up a vertical shaft
thousands of feet deep gave
Alvin
no sense of insecurity, for a failure of the polarizing field was
unthinkable.

 
          
 
Presently the corridor began to slope
"downward" again until once more it had turned through a right angle.
The movement of the floor slowed imperceptibly until it came to rest at the end
of a long hall lined with mirrors.
Alvin
was now, he knew, almost at the summit of
the
Tower
of
Loranne
.

 
          
 
He lingered for a while in the hall of
mirrors, for it had a fascination that was unique. There was nothing like it,
as far as
Alvin
knew, in the rest of Diaspar. Through some
whim of the artist, only a few of the mirrors reflected the scene as it really
was—and even those,
Alvin
was convinced, were constantly changing their position. The rest
certainly reflected something, but it was faintly disconcerting to see oneself
walking amid ever-changing and quite imaginary surroundings.
Alvin
wondered what he would do if he saw anyone
else approaching him in the mirror-world, but so far the situation had never
arisen.

 
          
 
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 toward 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 onto 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 toward 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.

 
          
 
THERE IS
A BETTER WAY
. GIVE MY GREETINGS TO THE KEEPER OF THE
RECORDS.

 
          
 
ALAINE OF LYNDAR

 
          
 
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, Rorden's greeting was somewhat absentminded, 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."