From the Ocean from teh Stars (72 page)

One day, I suppose, some other artist will come along and do a better
job. And his work won't be allowed to wear out."

"I knew the man who designed this wall," said Khedron, his fingers
still exploring the cracks in the mosaic. "Strange that I can remember
that fact, when I don't recall the man himself. I could not have liked
him, so I must have erased him from my mind." He gave a short laugh. "Perhaps I designed it myself, during one of my artistic phases, and was
so annoyed when the city refused to make it eternal that I decided to
forget the whole affair. There—I knew that piece was coming loose!"

He had managed to pull out a single flake of golden tile, and looked
very pleased at this minor sabotage. He threw the fragment on the
ground, adding, "Now the maintenance robots will have to do something
about it!"

There was a lesson for him here, Alvin knew. That strange instinct known as intuition, which seemed to follow short cuts not accessible to mere logic, told him that. He looked at the golden shard lying at his feet,
trying to link it somehow to the problem that now dominated his mind.

It was not hard to find the answer, once he realized that it existed.

"I see what you are trying to tell me," he said to Khedron. "There are
objects in Diaspar that aren't preserved in the memory circuits, so I
could never find them through the monitors at Council Hall. If I was to
go there and focus on this court, there would be no sign of the wall we're
sitting on."

"I think you might find the wall. But there would be no mosaic on it."

"Yes, I can see that," said Alvin, too impatient now to bother about
such hairsplitting. "And in the same way, parts of the city might exist that had never been preserved in the eternity circuits, but which hadn't
yet worn away. Still, I don't really see how that helps me. I
know
that
the outer wall exists—and that it has no openings in it."

"Perhaps there is no way out," answered Khedron. "I can promise
you nothing. But I think there is still a great deal that the monitors can teach us—if the Central Computer will let them. And it seems to have
taken rather a liking to you."

Alvin pondered over this remark on their way to Council Hall. Until
now, he had assumed that it was entirely through Khedron's influence
that he had been able to gain access to the monitors. It had not occurred
to him that it might be through some intrinsic quality of his own. Being
a Unique had many disadvantages; it was only right that it should have
some compensations.

The unchanging image of the city still dominated the chamber in which Alvin had spent so many hours. He looked at it now with a new

understanding; all that he saw here existed—but all of Diaspar might
not be mirrored here. Yet, surely, any discordances must be trivial, and,
as far as he could see, undetectable.

"I attempted to do this many years ago," said Khedron, as he sat
down at the monitor desk, "but the controls were locked against me.
Perhaps they will obey me now."

Slowly, and then with mounting confidence as he regained access to
long-forgotten skills, Khedron's fingertips moved over the control desk,
resting for a moment at the nodal points in the sensitive grid buried in
the panel before him.

"I think that's correct," he said at last. "Anyway we'll soon see."

The screen glowed into life, but instead of the picture that Alvin had expected, there appeared a somewhat baffling message:

REGRESSION WILL COMMENCE AS SOON AS YOU HAVE SET RATE CONTROL

"Foolish of me," muttered Khedron. "I got everything else right and forgot the most important thing of all." His fingers now moved with a confident assurance over the board, and as the message faded from the screen he swung around in his seat so that he could look at the replica of
the city.

"Watch this, Alvin," he said. "I think we are both going to learn
something new about Diaspar."

Alvin waited patiently, but nothing happened. The image of the city
floated there before his eyes in all its familiar wonder and beauty—
though he was conscious of neither now. He was about to ask Khedron
what he should look for when a sudden movement caught his attention, and he turned his head quickly to follow it. It had been no more than a
half-glimpsed flash or flicker, and he was too late to see what had made
it. Nothing had altered; Diaspar was just as he had always known it.
Then he saw that Khedron was watching him with a sardonic smile, so
he looked again at the city. This time, the thing happened before his eyes.

One of the buildings at the edge of the park suddenly vanished, and
was replaced instantly by another of quite different design. The trans
formation was so abrupt that had Alvin been blinking he would have missed it. He stared in amazement at the subtly altered city, but even
during the first shock of astonishment his mind was seeking for the an
swer. He remembered the words that had appeared on the monitor screen
—
regression will commence
—and he knew at once what was hap
pening.

"That's the city as it was thousands of years ago," he said to Khed-
ron. "We're going back in time."

"A picturesque but hardly accurate way of putting it," replied the Jester. "What is actually happening is that the monitor is remembering
the earlier versions of the city. When any modifications were made, the memory circuits were not simply emptied; the information in them was
taken to subsidiary storage units, so that it could be recalled whenever
needed. I have set the monitor to regress through those units at the rate of a thousand years a second. Already, we're looking at the Diaspar of
half a million years ago. We'll have to go much further back than that to see any real changes—I'll increase the rate."

He turned back to the control board, and even as he did so, not one
building but a whole block whipped out of existence and was replaced
by a large oval amphitheater.

"Ah, the Arena!" said Khedron. "I can remember the fuss when we
decided to get rid of that. It was hardly ever used, but a great many people felt sentimental about it."

The monitor was now recalling its memories at a far higher rate;
the image of Diaspar was receding into the past at millions of years a
minute, and changes were occurring so rapidly that the eye could not
keep up with them. Alvin noticed that the alterations to the city appeared
to come in cycles; there would be a long period of stasis, then a whole
rash of rebuilding would break out, followed by another pause. It was al
most as if Diaspar were a living organism, which had to regain its strength
after each explosion of growth.

Through all these changes, the basic design of the city had not altered. Buildings came and went, but the pattern of streets seemed eternal, and the park remained as the green heart of Diaspar. Alvin won
dered how far back the monitor could go. Could it return to the founding
of the city, and pass through the veil that sundered known history from
the myths and legends of the Dawn?

Already they had gone five hundred million years into the past. Out
side the walls of Diaspar, beyond the knowledge of the monitors, it would
be a different Earth. Perhaps there might still be oceans and forests,
even other cities which Man had not yet deserted in the long retreat to
his final home.

The minutes drifted past, each minute an aeon in the little universe
of the monitors. Soon, thought Alvin, the earliest of all these stored mem
ories must be reached and the regression would end. But fascinating
though this lesson was, he did not see how it could help him to escape
from the city as it was here and now.

With a sudden, soundless implosion, Diaspar contracted to a fraction
of its former size. The park vanished; the boundary wall of linked, titanic
towers instantly evaporated. This city was open to the world, for the
radial roads stretched out to the limits of the monitor image without
obstruction. Here was Diaspar as it had been before the great change
came upon mankind.

"We can go no further," said Khedron, pointing to the monitor screen.
On it had appeared the words:
regression concluded.
"This must be
the earliest version of the city that has been preserved in the memory cells. Before that, I doubt if the eternity circuits were used, and the
buildings were allowed to wear out naturally."

For a long time, Alvin stared at this model of the ancient city. He
thought of the traffic those roads had borne, as men came and went
freely to all the corners of the world—and to other worlds as well. Those
men were his ancestors; he felt a closer kinship to them than to the people who now shared his life. He wished that he could see them and share their
thoughts, as they moved through the streets of that billion-year-remote
Diaspar. Yet those thoughts could not have been happy ones, for they
must have been living then beneath the shadow of the Invaders. In a few more centuries, they were to turn their faces from the glory they had won and build a wall against the Universe.

Khedron ran the monitor backward and forward a dozen times
through the brief period of history that had wrought the transformation.
The change from a small open city to a much larger closed one had taken
little more than a thousand years. In that time, the machines that had
served Diaspar so faithfully must have been designed and built, and the knowledge that would enable them to carry out their tasks had been fed
into their memory circuits. Into the memory circuits, also, must have
gone the essential patterns of all the men who were now alive, so that
when the right impulse called them forth again they could be clothed in
matter and would emerge reborn from the Hall of Creation. In some
sense, Alvin realized, he must have existed in that ancient world. It was possible, of course, that he was completely synthetic—that his entire
personality had been designed by artist-technicians who had worked
with tools of inconceivable complexity toward some clearly envisaged goal. Yet he thought it more likely that he was a composite of men who
had once lived and walked on Earth.

Very little of the old Diaspar had remained when the new city was
created; the park had obliterated it almost completely. Even before the
transformation, there had been a small, grass-covered clearing at the
center of Diaspar, surrounding the junction of all the radial streets. After-

ward it had expanded tenfold, wiping out streets and buildings alike.
The Tomb of Yarlan Zey had been brought into existence at this time,
replacing a very large circular structure which had previously stood at
the meeting point of all the streets. Alvin had never really believed the
legends of the Tomb's antiquity, but now it seemed that they were true.

"I suppose," said Alvin, struck by a sudden thought, "that we can
explore this image, just as we explored the image of today's Diaspar?"

Khedron's fingers flickered over the monitor control board, and the screen answered Alvin's question. The long-vanished city began to ex
pand before his eyes as his viewpoint moved along the curiously narrow
streets. This memory of the Diaspar that once had been was still as sharp
and clear as the image of the city he lived in today. For a billion years,
the information circuits had held it in ghostly pseudo-existence, waiting for the moment when someone should call it forth again. And it was not, thought Alvin, merely a memory he was seeing now. It was something
more complex than that—it was the memory of a memory.

He did not know what he could learn from it, and whether it could
help him in his quest. No matter; it was fascinating to look into the past and to see a world that had existed in the days when men still roamed
among the stars. He pointed to the low, circular building that stood at
the city's heart.

"Let's start there," he told Khedron. "That seems as good a place as
any to begin."

Perhaps it was sheer luck; perhaps it was some ancient memory;
perhaps it was elementary logic. It made no difference, since he would
have arrived at this spot sooner or later—this spot upon which all the
radial streets of the city converged.

It took him ten minutes to discover that they did not meet here for
reasons of symmetry alone—ten minutes to know that his long search
had met its reward.

☆
CHAPTER NINE

Al
ystra had found it very easy to follow Alvin and
Khedron without their knowledge. They seemed in a great hurry—
something which in itself was most unusual—and never looked back. It had been an amusing game to pursue them along the moving ways, hiding in the crowds yet always keeping them in sight. Toward the end their