From the Ocean from teh Stars (71 page)

melancholy; there was too much to do. He turned back to the monitor
screen, set the image of the city wall drifting slowly across it, and began
his search.

Diaspar saw little of Alvin for the next few weeks, though only a few
people noticed his absence. Jeserac, when he discovered that his erstwhile
pupil was spending all his time at Council Hall instead of prowling
around the frontier of the city, felt slightly relieved, imagining that Alvin could come to no trouble there. Eriston and Etania called his room once or twice, found that he was out and thought nothing of it. Alystra
was a little more persistent.

For her own peace of mind, it was a pity that she had become in
fatuated with Alvin, when there were so many more suitable choices.
Alystra had never had any difficulty in finding partners, but by com
parison with Alvin all the other men she knew were nonentities, cast
from the same featureless mold. She would not lose him without a strug
gle: his aloofness and indifference set a challenge which she could not
resist.

Yet perhaps her motives were not entirely selfish, and were maternal
rather than sexual. Though birth had been forgotten, the feminine in
stincts of protection and sympathy still remained. Alvin might appear
to be stubborn and self-reliant and determined to have his own way, yet
Alystra could sense his inner loneliness.

When she found that Alvin had disappeared, she promptly asked Jeserac what had happened to him. Jeserac, with only a momentary
hesitation, told her. If Alvin did not want company, the answer was in
his own hands. His tutor neither approved nor disapproved of this rela
tionship. On the whole, he rather liked Alystra and hoped that her in
fluence would help Alvin to adjust himself to life in Diaspar.

The fact that Alvin was spending his time at Council Hall could only mean that he was engaged on some research project, and this knowledge
at least served to quell any suspicions Alystra might have concerning
possible rivals. But though her jealousy was not aroused, her curiosity
was. She sometimes reproached herself for abandoning Alvin in the
Tower of Loranne, though she knew that if the circumstances were repeated she would do exactly the same thing again. There was no way of
understanding Alvin's mind, she told herself, unless she could discover
what he was trying to do.

She walked purposefully into the main hall, impressed but not over
awed by the hush that fell as soon as she passed through the entrance.

The information machines were ranged side by side against the far wall,
and she chose one at random.

As soon as the recognition signal lighted up, she said, "I am looking
for Alvin; he is somewhere in this building. Where can I find him?"

Even after a lifetime, one never grew wholly accustomed to the com
plete absence of time lag when an information machine replied to an
ordinary question. There were people who knew—or claimed to know—
how it was done, and talked learnedly of "access time" and "storage
space," but that made the final result none the less marvelous. Any ques
tion of a purely factual nature, within the city's truly enormous range of
available information, could be answered immediately. Only if complex
calculations were involved before a reply could be given would there be
any appreciable delay.

"He is with the monitors," came the reply. It was not very helpful,
since the name conveyed nothing to Alystra. No machine ever volunteered more information than it was asked for, and learning to frame
questions properly was an art which often took a long time to acquire.

"How do I reach him?" asked Alystra. She would find what the
monitors were when she got to them.

"I cannot tell you unless you have the permission of the Council."

This was a most unexpected, even a disconcerting, development.
There were very few places in Diaspar that could not be visited by anyone who pleased. Alystra was quite certain that Alvin had
not
obtained
Council permission, and this could only mean that a higher authority
was helping him.

The Council ruled Diaspar, but the Council itself could be overrid
den by a superior power—the all-but-infinite intellect of the Central
Computer. It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a
living entity, localized in a single spot, though actually it was the sum
total of all the machines in Diaspar. Even if it was not alive in the
biological sense, it certainly possessed at least as much awareness and
self-consciousness as a human being. It must know what Alvin was
doing, and, therefore, it must approve, otherwise it would have stopped
him or referred him to the Council, as the information machine had done to Alystra.

There was no point in staying here. Alystra knew that any attempt
to find Alvin—even if she knew exactly where he was in this enormous
building—would be doomed to failure. Doors would fail to open; slide-ways would reverse when she stood on them, carrying her backward in
stead of forward; elevator fields would be mysteriously inert, refusing
to lift her from one floor to another. If she persisted, she would be

gently conveyed out into the street by a polite but firm robot, or else
shuttled round and round Council Hall until she grew fed up and left
under her own volition.

She was in a bad temper as she walked out into the street. She was
also more than a little puzzled, and for the first time felt that there was
some mystery here which made her personal desires and interests seem very trivial indeed. That did not mean that they would be any the less important to her. She had no idea what she was going to do next, but she
was sure of one thing. Alvin was not the only person in Diaspar who
could be stubborn and persistent.

☆
CHAPTER EIGHT

She image on the monitor screen faded as Alvin
raised his hands from the control panel and cleared the circuits. For a
moment he sat quite motionless, looking into the blank rectangle that
had occupied all his conscious mind for so many weeks. He had cir
cumnavigated his world; across that screen had passed every square foot
of the outer wall of Diaspar. He knew the city better than any living
man save perhaps Khedron; and he knew now that there was no way
through the walls.

The feeling that possessed him was not mere despondency; he had
never really expected that it would be as easy as this, that he would find
what he sought at the first attempt. What was important was that he had
eliminated one possibility. Now he must deal with the others.

He rose to his feet and walked over to the image of the city which
almost filled the chamber. It was hard not to think of it as an actual
model, though he knew that in reality it was no more than an optical
projection of the pattern in the memory cells he had been exploring.
When he altered the monitor controls and set his viewpoint moving through Diaspar, a spot of light would travel over the surface of this
replica, so that he could see exactly where he was going. It had been a
useful guide in the early days, but he soon had grown so skillful at setting
the co-ordinates that he had not needed this aid.

The city lay spread out beneath him; he looked down upon it like a god. Yet he scarcely saw it as he considered, one by one, the steps he
should now take.

If all else failed, there was one solution to the problem. Diaspar
might be held in a perpetual stasis by its eternity circuits, frozen forever

according to the pattern in the memory cells, but that pattern could itself
be altered, and the city would then change with it. It would be possible
to redesign a section of the outer wall so that it contained a doorway,
feed this pattern into the monitors, and let the city reshape itself to the
new conception.

Alvin suspected that the large areas of the monitor control board
whose purpose Khedron had not explained to him were concerned with
such alterations. It would be useless to experiment with them; controls
that could alter the very structure of the city were firmly locked and could be operated only with the authority of the Council and the
approval of the Central Computer. There was very little chance that the Council would grant him what he asked, even if he was prepared for
decades or even centuries of patient pleading. That was not a prospect
that appealed to him in the least.

He turned his thoughts toward the sky. Sometimes he had imagined,
in fantasies which he was half-ashamed to recall, that he had regained
the freedom of the air which man had renounced so long ago. Once, he
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 legendary Port of Diaspar. But the Port had been beyond the limits
of the city; aeons ago it had been buried by the drifting sand. He could
dream that somewhere in the mazes of Diaspar a flying machine might still be hidden, but he did not really believe it. Even in the days when
small, personal flyers had been in common use, it was most unlikely that
they had ever been allowed to operate inside the limits of the city.

For a moment he lost himself in the old, familiar dream. He imagined
that he was master of the sky, that the world lay spread out beneath
him, inviting him to travel where he willed. It was not the world of his
own time that he saw, but the lost world of the dawn—a rich and living panorama of hills and lakes and forests. He felt a bitter envy of his un
known ancestors, who had flown with such freedom over all the earth
and who had let its beauty die.

This mind-drugging reverie was useless; he tore himself back to the
present and to the problem at hand. If the sky was unattainable and the
way by land was barred, what remained?

Once again he had come to the point when he needed help, when he could make no further progress by his own efforts. He disliked admitting
the fact, but was honest enough not to deny it. Inevitably, his thoughts
turned to Khedron.

Alvin had never been able to decide whether he liked the Jester. He
was very glad that they had met, and was grateful to Khedron for the

assistance and implicit sympathy he had given him on his quest. There
was no one else in Diaspar with whom he had so much in common, yet
there was some element in the other's personality that jarred upon him.
Perhaps it was Khedron's air of ironic detachment, which sometimes gave Alvin the impression that he was laughing secretly at all his efforts, even
while he seemed to be doing his best to help. Because of this, as well as his own natural stubbornness and independence, Alvin hesitated to ap
proach the Jester except as a last resort.

They arranged to meet in a small, circular court not far from Council
Hall. There were many such secluded spots in the city, perhaps only a
few yards from some busy thoroughfare, yet completely cut off from it.
Usually they could be reached only on foot after a rather round-about
walk; sometimes, indeed, they were at the center of skillfully contrived
mazes which enhanced their isolation. It was rather typical of Khedron
that he should have chosen such a place for a rendezvous.

The court was little more than fifty paces across, and was in reality
located deep within the interior of some great building. Yet it appeared
to have no definite physical limits, being bounded by a translucent blue-
green material which glowed with a faint internal light. However, though
there were no visible limits, the court had been so laid out that there was
no danger of feeling lost in infinite space. Low walls, less than waist
high and broken at intervals so that one could pass through them, man
aged to give the impression of safe confinement without which no one
in Diaspar could ever feel entirely happy.

Khedron was examining one of these walls when Alvin arrived. It
was covered with an intricate mosaic of colored tiles, so fantastically in
volved that Alvin did not even attempt to unravel it.

"Look at this mosaic, Alvin," said the Jester. "Do you notice any
thing strange about it?"

"No," confessed Alvin after a brief examination. "I don't care for it
—but there's nothing strange about
that.'*

Khedron ran his fingers over the colored tiles. "You are not very observant," he said. "Look at these edges here—see how they have become rounded and softened. This is something that one very seldom sees
in Diaspar, Alvin. It is wear—the crumbling away of matter under the
assault of time. I can remember when this pattern was new, only eighty
thousand years ago, in my last lifetime. If I come back to this spot a
dozen lives from now, these tiles will have been worn completely away."

"I don't see anything very surprising about that," answered Alvin.
"There are other works of art in the city not good enough to be preserved
in the memory circuits, but not bad enough to be destroyed outright.