The City and the Stars

by Arthur Charles Clarke

  «You recognize me, I imagine,» said Yarlan Zey.

  «Of course; I have seen your statue a thousand times. You are Yarlan Zey, and this is Diaspar as it was a billion years ago. I know I am dreaming, and that neither of us is really here.»

  «Then you need not be alarmed at anything that happens. So follow me, and remember that nothing can harm you, since whenever you wish you can wake up in Diaspar-in your own age.»

  Obediently, Jeserac followed Yarlan Zey into the building, his mind a receptive, uncritical sponge. Some memory, or echo of a memory, warned him of what was going to happen next, and he knew that once he would have shrunk from it in horror. Now, however, he felt no fear. Not only did he feel protected by the knowledge that this experience was not real, but the presence of Yarlan Zey seemed a talisman against any dangers that might confront him.

  There were few people drifting down the glideways that led into the depths of the building, and they had no other company when presently they stood in silence beside the long, streamlined cylinder which, Jeserac knew, could carry him out of the city on a journey that would once have shattered his mind. When his guide pointed to the open door, he paused for no more than a moment on the threshold, and then was through.

  «You see?» said Yarlan Zey with a smile. «Now relax, and remember that you are safe-that nothing can touch you.»

  Jeserac believed him. He felt only the faintest tremor of apprehension as the tunnel entrance slid silently toward him, and the machine in which he was traveling began to gain speed as it hurtled through the depths of the earth. Whatever fears he might have had were forgotten in his eagerness to talk with this almost mythical figure from the past.

  «Does it not seem strange to you,» began Yarlan Zey, «that though the skies are open to us, we have tried to bury ourselves in the Earth? It is the beginning of the sickness whose ending you have seen in your age. Humanity is trying to hide; it is frightened of what lies out there in space, and soon it will have closed all the doors that lead into the Universe.»

  «But I saw spaceships in the sky above Diaspar,» said Jeserac.

  «You will not see them much longer. We have lost contact with the stars, and soon even the planets will be deserted. It took us millions of years to make the outward journey-but only centuries to come home again. And in a little while we will have abandoned almost all of Earth itself.»

  «Why did you do it?» asked Jeserac. He knew the answer, yet somehow felt impelled to ask the question.

  «We needed a shelter to protect us from two fears-fear of death, and fear of space. We were a sick people, and wanted no further part in the Universe so we pretended that it did not exist. We had seen chaos raging through the stars, and yearned for peace and stability. Therefore Diaspar had to be closed, so that nothing new could ever enter it.

  «We designed the city that you know, and invented a false past to conceal our cowardice. Oh, we were not the first to do that-but we were the first to do it so thoroughly. And we redesigned the human spirit, robbing it of ambition and the fiercer passions, so that it would be contented with the world it now possessed.

  «It took a thousand years to build the city and all its machines. As each of us completed his task, his mind was washed clean of its memories, the carefully planned pattern of false ones was implanted, and his identity was stored in the city’s circuits until the time came to call it forth again.

  «So at last there came a day when there was not a single man alive in Diaspar; there was only the Central Computer, obeying the orders which we had fed into it, and controlling the Memory Banks in which we were sleeping. There was no one who had any contact with the past-and so at this point, history began.

  «Then, one by one, in a predetermined sequence, we were called out of the memory circuits and given flesh again. Like a machine that had just been built and was now set operating for the first time, Diaspar began to carry out the duties for which it had been designed.»

  «Yet some of us had had doubts even from the beginning. Eternity was a long time; we recognized the risks involved in leaving no outlet, and trying to seal ourselves completely from the Universe. We could not defy the wishes of our culture, so we worked in secret, making the modifications we thought necessary.»

  «The Uniques were our invention. They would appear at long intervals and would, if circumstances allowed them, discover if there was anything beyond Diaspar that was worth the effort of contacting. We never imagined that it would take so long for one of them to succeed-nor did we imagine that his success would be so great.»

  Despite that suspension of the critical faculties which is the very essence of a dream, Jeserac wondered fleetingly how Yarlan Zey could speak with such knowledge of things that had happened a billion years after his time. It was very confusing… he did not know where in time or space he was.

  The journey was coming to an end; the walls of the tunnel no longer flashed past him at such breakneck speed. Yarlan Zey began to speak with an urgency, and an authority, which he had not shown before.

  «The past is over; we did our work, for better or for ill, and that is finished with. When you were created, Jeserac, you were given that fear of the outer world, and that compulsion to stay within the city, that you share with everyone else in Diaspar. You know now that that fear was groundless, that it was artificially imposed on you. I, Yarlan Zey, who gave it to you, now release you from its bondage. Do you understand?»

  With those last words, the voice of Yarlan Zey became louder and louder, until it seemed to reverberate through all of space. The subterranean carrier in which he was speeding blurred and trembled around Jeserac as if his dream was coming to an end. Yet as the vision faded, he could still hear that imperious voice thundering into his brain: «You are no longer afraid, Jeserac. You are no longer afraid.»

  He struggled up toward wakefulness, as a diver climbs from the ocean depths back to the surface of the sea. Yarlan Zey had vanished, but there was a strange interregnum when voices which he knew but could not recognize talked to him encouragingly, and he felt himself supported by friendly hands. Then like a swift dawn reality came flooding back.

  He opened his eyes, and saw Alvin and Hilvar and Gerane standing anxiously beside him. But he paid no heed to them; his mind was too filled with the wonder that now lay spread before him-the panorama of forests and rivers, and the blue vault of the open sky.

  He was in Lys; and he was not afraid.

  No one disturbed him as the timeless moment imprinted itself forever on his mind. At last, when he bad satisfied himself that this indeed was real, he turned to his companions.

  «Thank you, Gerane,» he said. «I never believed you would succeed.»

  The psychologist, looking very pleased with himself, was making delicate adjustments to a small machine that hung in the air beside him.

  «You gave us some anxious moments,» he admitted. «Once or twice you started to ask questions that couldn’t be answered logically, and I was afraid I would have to break the sequence.»

  «Suppose Yarlan Zey had not convinced me-what would you have done then?»

  «We would have kept you unconscious, and taken you back to Diaspar where you could have waked up naturally, without ever knowing that you’d been to Lys.»

  «And that image of Yarlan Zey you fed into my mind how much of what he said was the truth?»

  «Most of it, I believe. I was much more anxious that my little saga should be convincing rather than historically accurate, but Callitrax has examined it and can find no errors. It is certainly consistent with all that we know about Yarlan Zey and the origins of Diaspar.»

  «So now we can really open the city,» said Alvin. «It may take a long time, but eventually we’ll be able to neutralize this fear so that everyone who wishes can leave Diaspar.»

  «It will take a long time,» replied Gerane dryly. «And don’t forget that Lys is hardly large enough to hold several hundred million extra people, if all your people decide to come here. I don’t think that’
s likely, but it’s possible.»

  «That problem will solve itself,» answered Alvin. «Lys may be tiny, but the world is wide. Why should we let the desert keep it all?»

  «So you are still dreaming, Alvin,» said Jeserac with a smile. «I was wondering what there was left for you to do.»

  Alvin did not answer; that was a question which had become more and more insistent in his own mind during the past few weeks. He remained lost in thought, falling behind the others, as they walked down the hill toward Airlee. Would the centuries that lay ahead of him be one long anticlimax?

  The answer lay in his own hands. He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live.

  Twenty-six

  There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends. Alvin knew that sadness as he wandered alone through the forests and fields of Lys. Not even Hilvar accompanied him, for there are times when a man must be apart even from his closest friends.

  He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence-indeed a way of life. Diaspar had no need of him now; the ferments he had introduced into the city were working swiftly, and nothing he could do would accelerate or retard the changes that were happening there.

  This peaceful land would also change. Often he wondered if he had done wrong, in the ruthless drive to satisfy his own curiosity, by opening up the ancient way between the two cultures. Yet surely it was better that Lys should know the truth-that it also, like Diaspar, had been partly founded upon fears and falsehoods.

  Sometimes he wondered what shape the new society would take. Ire believed that Diaspar must escape from the prison of the Memory Banks, and restore again the cycle of life and death. Hilvar, he knew, was sure that this could be done, though his proposals were too technical for Alvin to follow. Perhaps the time would come again when love in Diaspar was no longer completely barren.

  Was this, Alvin wondered, what he had always lacked in Diaspar-what he had really been seeking? He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart. No one had really lived until they had achieved that synthesis of love and desire which he had never dreamed existed until he came to LYS.

  He had walked upon the planet of the Seven Suns-the first man to do so in a billion years. Yet that meant little to him now; sometimes he thought he would give all his achievements if he could hear the cry of a newborn child, and know that it was his own.

  In Lys, he might one day find what he wanted; there was a warmth and understanding about its .people, which, he now realized, was lacking in Diaspar. But before he could rest, before he could find peace, there was one decision yet to be made.

  Into his hands had come power; that power he still possessed. It was a responsibility he had once sought and accepted with eagerness, but now he knew that he could have no peace while it was still his. Yet to throw it away would be the betrayal of a trust.

  He was in a village of tiny canals, at the edge of a wide lake, when he made his decision. The colored houses, which seemed to float at anchor upon the gentle waves, formed a scene of almost unreal beauty. There was life and warmth and comfort here-everything he had missed among the desolate grandeur of the Seven Suns.

  One day humanity would once more be ready for space. What new chapter Man would write among the stars,. Alvin did not know. That would be no concern of his; his future lay here on Earth.

  But he would make one more flight before he turned his back upon the stars.

  When Alvin checked the upward rush of the ascending ship, the city was too distant to be recognized as the work of Man, and the curve of the planet was already visible. Presently they could see the line of twilight, thousands of miles away on its unending march across the desert. Above and around were the stars, still brilliant for all the glory they had lost.

  Hilvar and Jeserac were silent, guessing but not knowing with certainty why Alvin was making this flight, and why he had asked them to come with him. Neither felt like speech, as the desolate panorama unfolded below them. Its emptiness oppressed them both, and Jeserac felt a sudden contemptuous anger for the men of the past who had let Earth’s beauty die through their own neglect.

  He hoped that Alvin was right in dreaming that all this could be changed. The power and the knowledge still existed -it needed only the will to turn back the centuries and make the oceans roll again. The water was still there, deep down in the hidden places of the Earth; or if necessary, transmutation plants could be built to make it.

  There was so much to do in the years that lay ahead. Jeserac knew that he stood between two ages; around him he could feel the pulse of mankind beginning to quicken again. There were great problems to be faced-but Diaspar would face them. The recharting of the past would take centuries, but when it was finished Man would have recovered almost all that he had lost.

  Yet could he regain it all? Jeserac wondered. It was hard to believe that the Galaxy would be reconquered, and even if that were achieved, what purpose would it serve?

  Alvin broke into his reverie, and Jeserac turned from the screen.

  «I wanted you to see this,» said Alvin quietly. «You may never have another chance.»

  «You’re not leaving Earth?»

  «No; I want nothing more of space. Even if any other civilizations still survive in this Galaxy, I doubt if they will be worth the effort of finding. There is so much to do here; I know now that this is my home, and I am not going to leave it again.»

  He looked down at the great deserts, but his eyes saw instead the waters that would be sweeping over them a thousand years from now. Man had rediscovered his world, and he would make it beautiful while he remained upon it. And after that-

  «We aren’t ready to go out to the stars, and it will be a long time before we can face their challenge again. I have been wondering what I should do with this ship; if it stays here on Earth, I shall always be tempted to use it, and will never have any peace of mind. Yet I cannot waste it; I feel that it has been given into my trust, and I must use it for the benefit of the world.

  «So this is what I have decided to do. I’m going to send it out of the Galaxy, with the robot in control, to discover what happened to our ancestors-and, if possible, what it was they left our Universe to find. It must have been something wonderful for them to have abandoned so much to go in search of it.

  «The robot will never tire, however long the journey takes. One day our cousins will receive my message, and they’ll know that we are waiting for them here on Earth. They will return, and I hope that by then we will be worthy of them, however great they have become.»

  Alvin fell silent, staring into a future he had shaped but which he might never see. While Man was rebuilding his world, this ship would be crossing the darkness between the galaxies, and in thousands of years to come it would return. Perhaps he would still be here to meet it, but if not, he was well content.

  «I think you are wise,» said Jeserac. Then, for the last time, the echo of an ancient fear rose up to plague him. «But suppose,» he added, «the ship makes contact with something we do not wish to meet…» His voice faded away as he recognized the source of his anxiety and he gave a wry, selfdeprecatory smile that banished the last ghost of the Invaders.

  «You forget,» said Alvin, taking him more seriously than he expected, «that we will soon have Vanamonde to help us. We don’t know what powers he possesses, but everyone in Lys seems to think they are potentially unlimited. Isn’t that so, Hilvar?»

  Hilvar did not reply at once. It was true that Vanamonde was the other great enigma, the question mark that would always lie across the future of humanity while it remained on Earth. Already, it seemed certain, Vanamonde’s evolution toward self-consciousness had been accelerated by his contact with the philosophers of Lys. They had great hopes of future
co-operation with the childlike supermind, believing that they could foreshorten the aeons which his natural development would require.

  «I am not sure,» confessed Hilvar. «Somehow, I don’t think that we should expect too much from Vanamonde. We can help him now, but we will be only a brief incident in his total life span. I don’t think that his ultimate destiny has anything to do with ours.»

  Alvin looked at him in surprise.

  «Why do you feel that?» he asked.

  «I can’t explain it,» said Hilvar. «It’s just an intuition.» He could have added more, but he kept his silence. Thesematters were not capable of communication, and though Alvin would not laugh at his dream, he did not care to discuss it even with his friend.

  It was more than a dream, he was sure of that, and it would haunt him forever. Somehow it had leaked into his mind, during that indescribable and unsharable contact he had had with Vanamonde. Did Vanamonde himself know what his lonely destiny must be?

  One day the energies of the Black Sun would fail and it would release its prisoner. And then, at the end of the Universe, as time itself was faltering to a stop, Vanamonde and the Mad Mind must meet each other among the corpses of the stars.

  That conflict might ring down the curtain on Creation itself. Yet it was a conflict that had nothing to do with Man, and whose outcome he would never know…

  «Look!» said Alvin suddenly. «This is what I wanted to show you. Do you understand what it means?»

  The ship was now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was a perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Jeserac and Hilvar could see at one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect, and so striking, that they were to remember this moment all their lives.

  In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.