From the Ocean from teh Stars (86 page)

him, and when the doors had closed once more, he turned to face his
tutor.

"What do you think the Council will do now?" he asked anxiously.
Jeserac smiled.

"Impatient as ever, aren't you?" he said. "I do not know what my
guess is worth, but I imagine that they will decide to seal the Tomb of
Yarlan Zey so that no one can ever again make your journey. Then
Diaspar can continue as before, undisturbed by the outside world."

"That is what I am afraid of," said Alvin bitterly.

"And you still hope to prevent it?"

Alvin did not at once reply; he knew that Jeserac had read his inten
tions, but at least his tutor could not foresee his plans, for he had none.
He had come to the stage when he could only improvise and meet each
new situation as it arose.

"Do you blame me?" he said presently, and Jeserac was surprised
by the new note in his voice. It was a hint of humility, the barest sug
gestion that for the first time Alvin sought the approval of his fellow men.
Jeserac was touched by it, but he was too wise to take it very seriously. Alvin was under a considerable strain, and it would be unsafe to assume
that any improvement in his character was permanent.

"That is a very hard question to answer," said Jeserac slowly. "I am
tempted to say that all knowledge is valuable, and it cannot be denied that you have added much to our knowledge. But you have also added
to our dangers, and in the long run which will be more important? How
often have you stopped to consider that?"

For a moment master and pupil regarded each other pensively, each perhaps seeing the other's point of view more clearly than ever before in
his life. Then, with one impulse, they turned together down the long passage from the Council Chamber, with their escort still following patiently
in the rear.

This world, Alvin knew, had not been made for Man. Under the glare of the fierce blue lights—so dazzling that they pained the eyes—the
long, broad corridors seemed to stretch to infinity. Down these great passageways the robots of Diaspar must come and go throughout their
endless lives, yet not once in centuries did they echo to the sound of
human feet.

Here was the underground city, the city of machines without which
Diaspar could not exist. A few hundred yards ahead, the corridor would
open into a circular chamber more than a mile across, its roof supported by great columns that must also bear the unimaginable weight of Power

Center. Here, according to the maps, the Central Computer brooded
eternally over the fate of Diaspar.

The chamber was there, and it was even vaster than Alvin had dared imagine—but where was the Computer? Somehow he had expected to meet a single huge machine, naive though he knew that this conception
was. The tremendous but meaningless panorama beneath him made him
pause in wonder and uncertainty.

The corridor along which they had come ended high in the wall of
the chamber—surely the largest cavity ever built by Man—and on either
side long ramps swept down to the distant floor. Covering the whole of that brilliantly lit expanse were hundreds of great white structures, so unexpected that for a moment Alvin thought he must be looking down
upon a subterranean city. The impression was startlingly vivid, and it was
one that he never wholly lost. Nowhere at all was the sight he had expected
—the familiar gleam of metal which since the beginning of time Man had
learned to associate with his servants.

Here was the end of an evolution almost as long as Man's. Its beginnings were lost in the mists of the Dawn Ages, when humanity had first learned the use of power and sent its noisy engines clanking about
the world. Steam, water, wind—all had been harnessed for a little while
and then abandoned. For centuries the energy of matter had run the
world until it too had been superseded, and with each change the old
machines were forgotten and new ones took their place. Very slowly, over
thousands of years, the ideal of the perfect machine was approached—
that ideal which had once been a dream, then a distant prospect, and at
last reality:

No machine may contain any moving parts.

Here was the ultimate expression of that ideal. Its achievement had taken Man perhaps a hundred million years, and in the moment of his
triumph he had turned his back upon the machine forever. It had reached
finality, and thenceforth could sustain itself eternally while serving him.

Alvin no longer asked himself which of these silent white presences
was the Central Computer. He knew that it comprised them all—and
that it extended far beyond this chamber, including within its being all
the countless other machines in Diaspar, whether they were mobile or
motionless. As his own brain was the sum of many billion separate cells, arrayed throughout a volume of space a few inches across, so the physical
elements of the Central Computer were scattered throughout the length
and breadth of Diaspar. This chamber might hold no more than the switch-

ing system whereby all these dispersed units kept in touch with one another.

Uncertain where to go next, Alvin stared down the great sweeping ramps and across the silent arena. The Central Computer must know that he was here, as it knew everything that was happening in Diaspar. He could only wait for its instructions.

The now-familiar yet still awe-inspiring voice was so quiet and so close to him that he did not believe that his escort could also hear it. "Go down the left-hand ramp," it said. "I will direct you from there."

He walked slowly down the slope, the robot floating above him. Neither Jeserac nor the proctors followed; he wondered if they had received orders to remain here, or whether they had decided that they could supervise him just as well from their vantage point without the bother of making his long descent. Or perhaps they had come as close to the central shrine of Diaspar as they cared to approach.

At the foot of the ramp, the quiet voice redirected Alvin, and he walked between an avenue of sleeping titan shapes. Three times the voice spoke to him again, until presently he knew that he had reached his goal.

The machine before which he was standing was smaller than most of its companions, but he felt dwarfed as he stood beneath it. The five tiers with their sweeping horizontal lines gave the impression of some crouching beast, and looking from it to his own robot Alvin found it hard to believe that both were products of the same evolution, and both described by the same word.

About three feet from the ground a wide transparent panel ran the whole length of the structure. Alvin pressed his forehead against the smooth, curiously warm material and peered into the machine. At first he saw nothing; then, by shielding his eyes, he could distinguish thousands of faint points of light hanging in nothingness. They were ranged one beyond the other in a three-dimensional lattice, as strange and as meaningless to him as the stars must have been to ancient man. Though he watched for many minutes, forgetful of the passage of time, the colored lights never moved from their places and their brilliance never changed.

If he could look into his own brain, Alvin realized, it would mean as little to him. The machine seemed inert and motionless because he could not see its thoughts.

For the first time, he began to have some dim understanding of the powers and forces that sustained the city. All his life he had accepted without question the miracle of the synthesizers, which age after age provided in an unending stream all the needs of Diaspar. Thousands of

times he had watched that act of creation, seldom remembering that
somewhere must exist the prototype of that which he had seen come into
the world.

As a human mind may dwell for a little while upon a single thought, so the infinitely greater brains which were but a portion of the Central
Computer could grasp and hold forever the most intricate ideas. The
patterns of all created things were frozen in these eternal minds, needing
only the touch of a human will to make them reality.

The world had indeed gone far since, hour upon hour, the first cave
men had patiently chipped their arrowheads and knives from the stubborn
stone.

Alvin waited, not caring to speak until he had received some further sign of recognition. He wondered how the Central Computer was aware
of his presence, and could see him and hear his voice. Nowhere were
there any signs of sense organs—none of the grilles or screens or emotion
less crystal eyes through which robots normally had knowledge of the
world around them.

"State your problem," said the quiet voice in his ear. It seemed
strange that this overwhelming expanse of machinery should sum up its
thoughts so softly. Then Alvin realized that he was flattering himself; perhaps not even a millionth part of the Central Computer's brain was
dealing with him. He was just one of the innumerable incidents that
came to its simultaneous attention as it watched over Diaspar.

It was hard to talk to a presence who filled the whole of the space
around you. Alvin's words seemed to die in the empty air as soon as he
had uttered them.

"What am I?" he asked.

If he had put that question to one of the information machines in the
city, he knew what the reply would have been. Indeed, he had often
done so, and they had always answered, "You are a Man." But now he
was dealing with an intelligence of an altogether different order, and
there was no need for painstaking semantic accuracy. The Central Com
puter would know what he meant, but that did not mean that it would
answer him.

Indeed, the reply was exactly what Alvin had feared.

"I cannot answer that question. To do so would be to reveal the
purpose of my builders, and hence to nullify it."

"Then my role was planned when the city was laid down?"

"That can be said of all men."

This reply made Alvin pause. It was true enough; the human in
habitants of Diaspar had been designed as carefully as its machines. The

fact that he was a Unique gave Alvin rarity, but there was no necessary
virtue in that.

He knew that he could learn nothing further here regarding the
mystery of his origin. It was useless to try to trick this vast intelligence,
or to hope that it would disclose information it had been ordered to conceal. Alvin was not unduly disappointed; he felt that he had already be
gun to glimpse the truth, and in any case this was not the main purpose
of his visit.

He looked at the robot he had brought from Lys, and wondered how
to make his next step. It might react violently if it knew what he was planning, so it was essential that it should not overhear what he intended
to say to the Central Computer.

"Can you arrange a zone of silence?" he asked.

Instantly, he sensed the unmistakable "dead" feeling, the total blanket
ing of all sounds, which descended when one was inside such a zone.
The voice of the Computer, now curiously flat and sinister, spoke to him:
"No one can hear us now. Say what you wish."

Alvin glanced at the robot; it had not moved from its position.
Perhaps it suspected nothing, and he had been quite wrong in ever
imagining that it had plans of its own. It might have followed him into
Diaspar like a faithful, trusting servant, in which case what he was plan
ning now seemed a particularly churlish trick.

"You have heard how I met this robot," Alvin began. "It must possess priceless knowledge about the past, going back to the days before the city
as we know it existed. It may even be able to tell us about other worlds
than Earth, since it followed the Master on his travels. Unfortunately,
its speech circuits are blocked. I do not know how effective that block is,
but I am asking you to clear it."

His voice sounded dead and hollow as the zone of silence absorbed
every word before it could form an echo. He waited, within that invisible and unreverberant void, for his request to be obeyed or rejected.

"Your order involves two problems," replied the Computer. "One is
moral, one technical. This robot was designed to obey the orders of a
certain man. What right have I to override them, even if I can?"

It was a question which Alvin had anticipated and for which he had
prepared several answers.

"We do not know what exact form the Master's prohibition took,"
he rephed. "If you can talk to the robot, you may be able to persuade it
that the circumstances in which the block was imposed have now changed."

It was, of course, the obvious approach. Alvin had attempted it him-