From the Ocean from teh Stars (68 page)

patterns; we may think we have free will, but can we be certain of that?

"In any event, the problem was solved. Diaspar has survived and
come safely down the ages, like a great ship carrying as its cargo all that is left of the human race. It is a tremendous achievement in social engi
neering, though whether it is worth doing is quite another matter.

"Stability, however, is not enough. It leads too easily to stagnation,
and thence to decadence. The designers of the city took elaborate steps
to avoid this, though these deserted buildings suggest that they did not
entirely succeed. I, Khedron the Jester, am part of that plan. A very
small part, perhaps. I like to think otherwise, but I can never be sure."

"And just what is that part?" asked Alvin, still very much in the dark,
and becoming a little exasperated.

"Let us say that I introduce calculated amounts of disorder into the
city. To explain my operations would be to destroy their effectiveness.
Judge me by my deeds, though they are few, rather than my words,
though they are many."

Alvin had never before met anyone quite like Khedron. The Jester
was a real personality—a character who stood head and shoulders above
the general level of uniformity which was typical of Diaspar. Though
there seemed no hope of discovering precisely what his duties were and
how he carried them out, that was of minor importance. All that mat
tered, Alvin sensed, was that here was someone to whom he could talk—
when there was a gap in the monologue—and who might give him an
swers to many of the problems that had puzzled him for so long.

They went back together down through the corridors of the Tower
of Loranne, and emerged beside the deserted moving way. Not until they
were once more in the streets did it occur to Alvin that Khedron had
never asked him what he had been doing out here at the edge of the
unknown. He suspected that Khedron knew, and was interested but not
surprised. Something told him that it would be very difficult to surprise
Khedron.

They exchanged index numbers, so that they could call each other
whenever they wished. Alvin was anxious to see more of the Jester,
though he fancied that his company might prove exhausting if it was
too prolonged. Before they met again, however, he wanted to find what
his friends, and particularly Jeserac, could tell him about Khedron.

"Until our next meeting," said Khedron, and promptly vanished.
Alvin was somewhat annoyed. If you met anyone when you were merely
projecting yourself, and were not present in the flesh, it was good man
ners to make that clear from the beginning. It could sometimes put the
party who was ignorant of the facts at a considerable disadvantage.

Probably Khedron had been quietly at home all the time—wherever his
home might be. The number that he had given Alvin would insure that any messages would reach him, but did not reveal where he lived. That
at least was according to normal custom. You might be free enough with
index numbers, but your actual address was something you disclosed
only to your intimate friends.

As he made his way back into the city, Alvin pondered over all that Khedron had told him about Diaspar and its social organization. It was
strange that he had met no one else who had ever seemed dissatisfied
with their mode of life. Diaspar and its inhabitants had been designed
as part of one master plan; they formed a perfect symbiosis. Through
out their long lives, the people of the city were never bored. Though
their world might be a tiny one by the standard of earlier ages, its com
plexity was overwhelming, its wealth of wonder and treasure beyond
calculation. Here Man had gathered all the fruits of his genius, every
thing that had been saved from the ruin of the past. All the cities that had ever been, so it was said, had given something to Diaspar; before
the coming of the Invaders, its name had been known on all the worlds that Man had lost. Into the building of Diaspar had gone all the skill, all the artistry of the Empire. 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 had achieved nothing except survival, and were content with
that. There were a million things to occupy their lives between the hour
when they came, almost full-grown, from the Hall of Creation and the
hour when, their bodies scarcely older, they returned to the Memory
Banks of the city. In a world where all men and women possess an
intelligence that would once have been the mark of genius, there can
be no danger of boredom. The delights of conversation and argument,
the intricate formalities of social intercourse—these alone were enough
to occupy a goodly portion of a lifetime. Beyond those were the great
formal debates, when the whole city would listen entranced while its
keenest minds met in combat or strove to scale those mountain peaks
of philosophy which are never conquered yet whose challenge never
palls.

No man or woman was without some absorbing intellectual interest.
Eriston, for example, spent much of his time in prolonged soliloquies
with the Central Computer, which virtually ran the city, yet which had leisure for scores of simultaneous discussions with anyone who cared to
match his wits against it. For three hundred years, Eriston had been

trying to construct logical paradoxes which the machine could not re
solve. He did not expect to make serious progress before he had used up
several lifetimes.

Etania's interests were of a more esthetic nature. She designed and constructed, with the aid of the matter organizers, three-dimensional
interlacing patterns of such beautiful complexity that they were really
extremely advanced problems in topology. Her work could be seen all
over Diaspar, and some of her patterns had been incorporated in the
floors of the great halls of choreography, where they were used as the
basis for evolving new ballet creations and dance motifs.

Such occupations might have seemed arid to those who did not pos
sess the intellect to appreciate their subtleties. Yet there was no one in
Diaspar who could not understand something of what Eriston and Etania
were trying to do and did not have some equally consuming interest of
his own.

Athletics and various sports, including many only rendered possible
by the control of gravity, made pleasant the first few centuries of youth.
For adventure and the exercise of the imagination, the sagas provided all that anyone could desire. They were the inevitable end product of
that striving for realism which began when men started to reproduce
moving images and to record sounds, and then to use these techniques
to enact scenes from real or imaginary life. In the sagas, the illusion was perfect because all the sense impressions involved were fed directly into the mind and any conflicting sensations were diverted. The entranced
spectator was cut off from reality as long as the adventure lasted; it was
as if he lived a dream yet believed he was awake.

In a world of order and stability, which in its broad outlines had not changed for a billion years, it was perhaps not surprising to find an ab
sorbing interest in games of chance. Humanity had always been fasci
nated by the mystery of the falling dice, the turn of a card, the spin of
the pointer. At its lowest level, this interest was based on mere cupidity
—and that was an emotion that could have no place in a world where
everyone possessed all that they could reasonably need. Even when this
motive was ruled out, however, the purely intellectual fascination of
chance remained to seduce the most sophisticated minds. Machines that
behaved in a purely random way—events whose outcome could never be
predicted, no matter how much information one had—from these philos
opher and gambler could derive equal enjoyment.

And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of
love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of
desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.

Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human
body, in colors ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar, and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was
yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered; or if it had
any meaning outside the mind of man.

And the same was true of love.

☆
CHAPTER SIX

Jeserac sat motionless within a whirlpool of num
bers. The first thousand primes, expressed in the binary scale that had
been used for all arithmetical operations since electronic computers were
invented, marched in order before him. Endless ranks of Is and Os
paraded past, bringing before Jeserac's eyes the complete sequence of all
those numbers that possessed no factors except themselves and unity.
There was a mystery about the primes that had always fascinated Man,
and they held his imagination still.

Jeserac was no mathematician, though sometimes he liked to believe
he was. All he could do was to search among the infinite array of primes for special relationships and rules which more talented men might incor
porate in general laws. He could find how numbers behaved, but he
could not explain why. It was his pleasure to hack his way through the
arithmetical jungle, and sometimes he discovered wonders that more
skillful explorers had missed.

He set up the matrix of all possible integers, and started his com
puter stringing the primes across its surface as beads might be arranged
at the intersections of a mesh. Jeserac had done this a hundred times be
fore, and it had never taught him anything. But he was fascinated by
the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, appar
ently according to no laws, across the spectrum of the integers. He knew
the laws of distribution that had already been discovered, but always
hoped to discover more.

He could scarcely complain about the interruption. If he had wished to remain undisturbed, he should have set his annunciator accordingly.
As the gentle chime sounded in his ear, the wall of numbers shivered,
the digits blurred together, and Jeserac returned to the world of mere re
ality.

He recognized Khedron at once, and was none too pleased. Jeserac

did not care to be disturbed from his ordered way of life, and Khedron represented the unpredictable. However, he greeted his visitor politely enough and concealed all trace of his mild concern.

When two people met for the first time in Diaspar—or even for the hundredth—it was customary to spend an hour or so in an exchange of courtesies before getting down to business, if any. Khedron somewhat offended Jeserac by racing through these formalities in a mere fifteen minutes and then saying abruptly: "I'd like to talk to you about Alvin. You're his tutor, I believe."

"That is true," replied Jeserac. "I still see him several times a week —as often as he wishes."

"And would you say that he was an apt pupil?"

Jeserac thought that over; it was a difficult question to answer. The pupil-tutor relationship was extremely important and was, indeed, one of the foundations of life in Diaspar. On the average, ten thousand new minds came into the city every year. Their previous memories were still latent, and for the first twenty years of their existence everything around them was fresh and strange. They had to be taught to use the myriad machines and devices that were the background of everyday life, and they had to learn their way through the most complex society Man had ever built.

Part of this instruction came from the couples chosen to be the parents of the new citizens. The selection was by lot, and the duties were not onerous. Eriston and Etania had devoted no more than a third of their time to Alvin's upbringing, and they had done all that was expected of them.

Jeserac's duties were confined to the more formal aspects of Alvin's education; it was assumed that his parents would teach him how to behave in society and introduce him to an ever-widening circle of friends. They were responsible for Alvin's character, Jeserac for his mind.

"I find it rather hard to answer your question," Jeserac replied. "Certainly there is nothing wrong with Alvin's intelligence, but many of the things that should concern him seem to be a matter of complete indifference. On the other hand, he shows a morbid curiosity regarding subjects which we do not generally discuss."

"The world outside Diaspar, for example?"

"Yes—but how did you know?"

Khedron hesitated for a moment, wondering how far he should take Jeserac into his confidence. He knew that Jeserac was kindly and well-intentioned, but he knew also that he must be bound by the same taboos that controlled everyone in Diaspar—everyone except Alvin.