Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (56 page)

Brant strolled over to the visitors, trying to look self-assured yet not so aloof as to discourage all contacts. Most of the strangers were about his own age – the older people would be arriving at a more reasonable time.

They looked at him with a frank curiosity which he returned with interest. Their skins were much darker than his, he noticed, and their voices were softer and less modulated. Some of them even had a trace of accent, for despite a universal language and instantaneous communication, regional variations still existed. At least, Brant assumed that they were the ones with accents; but once or twice he caught them smiling a little as he spoke.

Throughout the morning the visitors gathered in the square and made their way to the great arena that had been ruthlessly carved out of the forest. There were tents and bright banners here, and much shouting and laughter, for the morning was for the amusement of the young. Though Athens had swept like a dwindling but never-dying beacon for ten thousand years down the river of time, the pattern of sport had scarcely changed since those first Olympic days. Men still ran and jumped and wrestled and swam; but they did all these things a good deal better now than their ancestors. Brant was a fair sprinter over short distances and managed to finish third in the hundred metres. His time was just over eight seconds, which was not very good, because the record was less than seven. Brant would have been much amazed to learn that there was a time when no one in the world could have approached this figure.

Jon enjoyed himself hugely, bouncing youths even larger than himself onto the patient turf, and when the morning’s results were added up, Chaldis had scored more points than any of the visitors, although it had been first in relatively few events.

As noon approached, the crowd began to flow amoeba-like down to Five Oaks Glade, where the molecular synthesisers had been working since the early hours to cover hundreds of tables with food. Much skill had gone into preparing the prototypes which were being reproduced with absolute fidelity down to the last atom; for though the mechanics of food production had altered completely, the art of the chef had survived, and had even gone forward to victories in which Nature had played no part at all.

The main feature of the afternoon was a long poetic drama – a pastiche put together with considerable skill from the works of poets whose very names had been forgotten ages since. On the whole Brant found it boring, though there were some fine lines here and there that had stuck in his memory:

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins …

Brant knew about snow, and was glad to have left it behind. Sin, however, was an archaic word that had dropped out of use three or four thousand years ago; but it had an ominous and exciting ring.

He did not catch up with Yradne until it was almost dusk, and the dancing had begun. High above the valley, floating lights had started to burn, flooding the woods with everchanging patterns of blue and red and gold. In twos and threes and then in dozens and hundreds, the dancers moved out into the great oval of the amphitheatre, until it became a sea of laughing, whirling forms. Here at last was something at which Brant could beat Jon handsomely, and he let himself be swept away on the tide of sheer physical enjoyment.

The music ranged through the whole spectrum of human culture. At one moment the air pulsed to the throb of drums that might have called from some primeval jungle when the world was young; and a little later, intricate tapestries of quarter tones were being woven by subtle electronic skills. The stars peered down wanly as they marched across the sky, but no one saw them and no one gave any thought to the passage of time.

Brant had danced with many girls before he found Yradne. She looked very beautiful, brimming over with the enjoyment of life, and she seemed in no hurry to join him when there were so many others to choose from. But at last they were circling together in the whirlpool, and it gave Brant no small pleasure to think that Jon was probably watcing them glumly from afar.

They broke away from the dance during a pause in the music, because Yradne announced that she was a little tired. This suited Brant admirably, and presently they were sitting together under one of the great trees, watching the ebb and flow of life around them with that detachment that comes in moments of complete relaxation.

It was Brant who broke the spell. It had to be done, and it might be a long time before such an opportunity came again.

‘Yradne,’ he said, ‘why have you been avoiding me?’

She looked at him with innocent, open eyes.

‘Oh, Brant,’ she replied, ‘what an unkind thing to say; you know it isn’t true! I wish you weren’t so jealous: you can’t expect me to be following you around
all
the time.’

‘Oh, very well!’ said Brant weakly, wondering if he was making a fool of himself. But he might as well go on now he had started.

‘You know,
some
day you’ll have to decide between us. If you keep putting it off, perhaps you’ll be left high and dry like those two aunts of yours.’

Yradne gave a tinkling laugh and tossed her head with great amusement at the thought that she could ever be old and ugly.

‘Even if you’re too impatient,’ she replied, ‘I think I can rely on Jon. Have you seen what he’s given me?’

‘No,’ said Brant, his heart sinking.

‘You
are
observant, aren’t you! Haven’t you noticed this necklace?’

On her breast Yradne was wearing a large group of jewels, suspended from her neck by a thin golden chain. It was quite a fine pendant, but there was nothing particularly unusual about it, and Brant wasted no time in saying so. Yradne smiled mysteriously and her fingers flickered toward her throat. Instantly the air was suffused with the sound of music, which first mingled with the background of the dance and then drowned it completely.

‘You see,’ she said proudly, ‘wherever I go now I can have music with me. Jon says there are so many thousands of hours of it stored up that I’ll never know when it repeats itself. Isn’t it clever?’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Brant grudgingly, ‘but it isn’t exactly new. Everyone used to carry this sort of thing once, until there was no silence anywhere on Earth and they had to be forbidden. Just think of the chaos if we all had them!’

Yradne broke away from him angrily.

‘There you go again – always jealous of something you can’t do yourself. What have you ever given me that’s half as clever or useful as this? I’m going – and don’t try to follow me!’

Brant stared open-mouthed as she went, quite taken aback by the violence of her reaction. Then he called after her, ‘Hey, Yradne, I didn’t mean …’ But she was gone.

He made his way out of the amphitheatre in a very bad temper. It did him no good at all to rationalise the cause of Yradne’s outburst. His remarks, though rather spiteful, had been true, and sometimes there is nothing more annoying than the truth. Jon’s gift was an ingenious but trivial toy, interesting only because it now happened to be unique.

One thing she had said still rankled in his mind. What
was
there he had ever given Yradne? He had nothing but his paintings, and they weren’t really very good. She had shown no interest in them at all when he had offered her some of his best, and it had been very hard to explain that he wasn’t a portrait painter and would rather not try to make a picture of her. She had never really understood this, and it had been very difficult not to hurt her feelings. Brant liked taking his inspiration from Nature, but he never copied what he saw. When one of his pictures was finished (which occasionally happened), the title was often the only clue to the original source.

The music of the dance still throbbed around him, but he had lost all interest; the sight of other people enjoying themselves was more than he could stand. He decided to get away from the crowd, and the only peaceful place he could think of was down by the river, at the end of the shining carpet of freshly planted glow-moss that led through the wood.

He sat at the water’s edge, throwing twigs into the current and watching them drift downstream. From time to time other idlers strolled by, but they were usually in pairs and took no notice of him. He watched them enviously and brooded over the unsatisfactory state of his affairs.

It would almost be better, he thought, if Yradne did make up her mind to choose Jon, and so put him out of his misery. But she showed not the slightest sign of preferring one to the other. Perhaps she was simply enjoying herself at their expense, as some people – particularly Old Johan – maintained; though it was just as likely that she was genuinely unable to choose. What was wanted, Brant thought morosely, was for one of them to do something really spectacular which the other could not hope to match.

‘Hello,’ said a small voice behind him. He twisted around and looked over his shoulder. A little girl of eight or so was staring at him with her head slightly on one side, like an inquisitive sparrow.

‘Hello,’ he replied without enthusiasm. ‘Why aren’t you watching the dance?’

‘Why aren’t you in it?’ she replied promptly.

‘I’m tired,’ he said, hoping that this was an adequate excuse. ‘You shouldn’t be running around by yourself. You might get lost.’

‘I am lost,’ she replied happily, sitting down on the bank beside him. ‘I like it that way.’ Brant wondered which of the other villages she had come from; she was quite a pretty little thing, but would look prettier with less chocolate on her face. It seemed that his solitude was at an end.

She stared at him with that disconcerting directness which, perhaps fortunately, seldom survives childhood. ‘I know what’s the matter with you,’ she said suddenly.

‘Indeed?’ queried Brant with polite scepticism.

‘You’re in love!’

Brant dropped the twig he was about to throw into the river, and turned to stare at his inquisitor. She was looking at him with such solemn sympathy that in a moment all his morbid self-pity vanished in a gale of laughter. She seemed quite hurt, and he quickly brought himself under control.

‘How could you tell?’ he asked with profound seriousness.

‘I’ve read all about it,’ she replied solemnly. ‘And once I saw a picture play and there was a man in it and he came down to a river and sat there just like you and presently he jumped into it. There was some awful pretty music then.’

Brant looked thoughtfully at this precocious child and felt relieved that she didn’t belong to his own community.

‘I’m sorry I can’t arrange the music,’ he said gravely, ‘but in any case the river isn’t really deep enough.’

‘It is farther along,’ came the helpful reply. ‘This is only a baby river here – it doesn’t grow up until it leaves the woods. I saw it from the flyer.’

‘What happens to it then?’ asked Brant, not in the least interested, but thankful that the conversation had taken a more innocuous turn. ‘I suppose it reaches the sea?’

She gave an unladylike sniff of disgust.

‘Of course not, silly. All the rivers this side of the hills go to the Great Lake. I know that’s as big as a sea, but the
real
sea is on the other side of the hills.’

Brant had learned very little about the geographical details of his new home, but he realised that the child was quite correct. The ocean was less than twenty miles to the north, but separated from them by a barrier of low hills. A hundred miles inland lay the Great Lake, bringing life to lands that had been desert before the geological engineers had reshaped this continent.

The child genius was making a map out of twigs and patiently explaining these matters to her rather dull pupil.

‘Here we are,’ she said, ‘and here’s the river, and the hills, and the lake’s over there by your foot. The sea goes along here – and I’ll tell you a secret.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll never guess!’

‘I don’t suppose I will.’

Her voice dropped to a confidential whisper. ‘If you go along the coast – it isn’t very far from here – you’ll come to Shastar.’

Brant tried to look impressed, but failed.

‘I don’t believe you’ve ever heard of it!’ she cried, deeply disappointed.

‘I’m sorry,’ replied Brant. ‘I suppose it was a city, and I know I’ve heard of it somewhere. But there were such a lot of them, you know – Carthage and Chicago and Babylon and Berlin – you simply can’t remember them all. And they’ve all gone now, anyway.’

‘Not Shastar. It’s still there.’

‘Well, some of the later ones are still standing, more or less, and people often visit them. About five hundred miles from my old home there was quite a big city once, called …’

‘Shastar isn’t just
any
old city,’ interrupted the child mysteriously. ‘My grandfather told me about it: he’s been there. It hasn’t been spoiled at all and it’s still full of wonderful things that no one has any more.’

Brant smiled inwardly. The deserted cities of Earth had been the breeding places of legends for countless centuries. It would be four – no, nearer five – thousand years since Shastar had been abandoned. If its buildings were still standing, which was of course quite possible, they would certainly have been stripped of all valuables ages ago. It seemed that Grandfather had been inventing some pretty fairy stories to entertain the child. He had Brant’s sympathy.