From the Ocean from teh Stars (90 page)

was a great responsibility, and he felt humbled before it. He marshaled
his thoughts and then began to speak.

His theme was Diaspar. He painted the city as he had last seen it,
dreaming on the breast of the desert, its towers glowing like captive
rainbows against the sky. From the treasure house of memory he recalled
the songs that the poets of old had written in praise of Diaspar, and he
spoke of the countless men who had spent their lives to increase its
beauty. No one, he told them, could ever exhaust the city's treasures, however long they hved; always there would be something new. For a
while he described some of the wonders which the men of Diaspar had wrought; he tried to make them catch a glimpse at least of the loveliness
that the artists of the past had created for men's eternal admiration. And
he wondered a little wistfully if it were indeed true that the music of
Diaspar was the last sound that Earth had ever broadcast to the stars.

They heard him to the end without interruption or questioning. When
he had finished it was very late, and Alvin felt more tired than he could
ever before remember. The strain and excitement of the long day had
told on him at last, and quite suddenly he was asleep.

When he awoke, he was in an unfamiliar room and it was some moments before he remembered that he was no longer in Diaspar. As con
sciousness returned, so the light grew around him, until presently he was
bathed in the soft, cool radiance of the morning sun, streaming through
the now transparent walls. He lay in drowsy half-awareness, recalling the events of the previous day and wondering what forces he had now
set in motion.

With a soft, musical sound, one of the walls began to pleat itself up in
a manner so complicated that it eluded the eye. Hilvar stepped through
the opening that had been formed and looked at Alvin with an expression
half of amusement, half of serious concern.

"Now that you're awake, Alvin," he said, "perhaps you'll at least tell
me what your next move is, and how you managed to return here. The
Senators are just leaving to look at the subway; they can't understand
how you managed to come back through it. Did you?"

Alvin jumped out of bed and stretched himself mightily.

"Perhaps we'd better overtake them," he said. "I don't want to make
them waste their time. As for the question you asked me—in a little while I'll show you the answer to that."

They had almost reached the lake before they overtook the three Senators, and both parties exchanged slightly self-conscious greetings. The Committee of Investigation could see that Alvin knew where it was

going, and the unexpected encounter had clearly put it somewhat at a
loss.

"I'm afraid I misled you last night," said Alvin cheerfully. "I didn't
come to Lys by the old route, so your attempt to close it was quite un
necessary. As a matter of fact, the Council of Diaspar also closed it at
their end, with equal lack of success."

The Senators' faces were a study in perplexity as one solution after
another chased through their brains.

"Then how
did
you get here?" said the leader. There was a sudden, dawning comprehension in his eyes, and Alvin could tell that he had be
gun to guess the truth. He wondered if he had intercepted the com
mand his mind had just sent winging across the mountains. But he said
nothing, and merely pointed in silence to the northern sky.

Too swiftly for the eye to follow, a needle of silver light arced across the mountains, leaving a mile-long trail of incandescence. Twenty thou
sand feet above Lys, it stopped. There was no deceleration, no slow
braking of its colossal speed. It came to a halt instantly, so that the eye
that had been following it moved on across a quarter of the heavens
before the brain could arrest its motion. Down from the skies crashed
a mighty peal of thunder, the sound of air battered and smashed by the
violence of the ship's passage. A little later the ship itself, gleaming splendidly in the sunlight, came to rest upon the hillside a hundred yards away.

It was difficult to say who was the most surprised, but Alvin was the
first to recover. As they walked—very nearly running—toward the space
ship, he wondered if it normally traveled in this meteoric fashion. The
thought was disconcerting, although there had been no sensation of
movement on his first voyage. Considerably more puzzling, however, was
the fact that a day ago this resplendent creature had been hidden be
neath a thick layer of iron-hard rock—the coating it had still retained
when it had torn itself loose from the desert. Not until Alvin had reached the ship, and burned his fingers by incautiously resting them on the hull,
did he understand what had happened. Near the stern there were still
traces of earth, but it had been fused into lava. All the rest had been
swept away, leaving uncovered the stubborn shell which neither time nor
any natural force could ever touch.

With Hilvar by his side, Alvin stood in the open door and looked back at the silent Senators. He wondered what they were thinking—
what, indeed, the whole of Lys was thinking. From their expressions, it
almost seemed as if they were beyond thought.

"I am going to Shalmirane," said Alvin, "and I will be back in Airlee

within an hour or so. But that is only a beginning, and while I am away,
there is a thought I would leave with you.

"This is no ordinary flyer of the kind in which men traveled over the
Earth. It is a spaceship, one of the fastest ever built. If you want to know
where I found it, you will find the answer in Diaspar. But you will have
to go there, for Diaspar will never come to you."

He turned to Hilvar, and gestured to the door. Hilvar hesitated for a
moment only, looking back once at the familiar scenes around him. Then he stepped forward into the air lock.

The Senators watched until the ship, now moving quite slowly—for it had only a little way to go—had disappeared into the south. Then the
gray-haired young man who led the group shrugged his shoulders philo
sophically and turned to one of his colleagues.

"You've always opposed us for wanting change," he said, "and so
far you have won. But I don't think the future lies with either of our
groups now. Lys and Diaspar have both come to the end of an era, and
we must make the best of it."

"I am afraid you are right," came the gloomy reply. "This is a crisis,
and Alvin knew what he was saying when he told us to go to Diaspar. They know about us now, so there is no further purpose in concealment.
I think we had better get in touch with our cousins—we may find them
more anxious to co-operate now."

"But the subway is closed at both ends!"

"We can open ours; it will not be long before Diaspar does the same."

The minds of the Senators, those in Airlee and those scattered over
the whole width of Lys, considered the proposal and disliked it heartily.
But they saw no alternative.

Sooner than he had any right to expect, the seed that Alvin had planted was beginning to flower.

The mountains were still swimming in shadow when they reached
Shalmirane. From their height the great bowl of the fortress looked very small; it seemed impossible that the fate of Earth had once depended on
that tiny ebon circle.

When Alvin brought the ship to rest among the ruins by the lakeside,
the desolation crowded in upon him, chilling his soul. He opened the air lock, and the stillness of the place crept into the ship. Hilvar, who had scarcely spoken during the entire flight, asked quietly: "Why have you
come here again?"

Alvin did not answer until they had almost reached the edge of the
lake. Then he said: "I wanted to show you what this ship was like. And

I also hoped that the polyp might be in existence once more; I feel I owe
it a debt, and I want to tell it what I've discovered."

"In that case," replied Hilvar, "you will have to wait. You have come back much too soon."

Alvin had expected that; it had been a remote chance and he was not disappointed that it had failed. The waters of the lake were perfectly still,
no longer beating with that steady rhythm that had so puzzled them on
their first visit. He knelt down at the water's edge and peered into the
cold, dark depths.

Tiny translucent bells, trailing almost invisible tentacles, were drift
ing to and fro beneath the surface. Alvin plunged in his hand and
scooped one up. He dropped it at once, with a slight exclamation of
annoyance. It had stung him.

Some day—perhaps years, perhaps centuries in the future—these
mindless jellies would reassemble and the great polyp would be reborn
as its memories linked together and its consciousness flashed into exist
ence once again. Alvin wondered how it would receive the discoveries he
had made; it might not be pleased to learn the truth about the Master. Indeed, it might refuse to admit that all its ages of patient waiting had
been in vain.

Yet had they? Deluded though these creatures might have been,
their long vigil had at last brought its reward. As if by a miracle, they
had saved from the past knowledge that else might have been lost forever.
Now they could rest at last, and their creed could go the way of a million
other faiths that had once thought themselves eternal.

☆
CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hilvar and Alvin walked in reflective silence back
to the waiting ship, and presently the fortress was once more a dark
shadow among the hills. It dwindled swiftly until it became a black and
lidless eye, staring up forever into space, and soon they lost it in the great
panorama of Lys.

Alvin did nothing to check the machine; still they rose until the whole
of Lys lay spread beneath them, a green island in an ocher sea. Never
before had Alvin been so high; when finally they came to rest the whole
crescent of the Earth was visible below. Lys was very small now, only an
emerald stain against the rusty desert—but far around the curve of the

globe something was glittering like a many-colored jewel. And so for the
first time, Hilvar saw the city of Diaspar.

They sat for a long while watching the Earth turn beneath them. Of
all Man's ancient powers, this surely was the one he could least afford to lose. Alvin wished he could show the world as he saw it now to the rulers
of Lys and Diaspar.

"Hilvar," he said at last, "do you think that what I'm doing is right?"

The question surprised Hilvar, who did not suspect the sudden doubts
that sometimes overwhelmed his friend, and still knew nothing of Alvin's
meeting with the Central Computer and the impact which that had had
upon his mind. It was not an easy question to answer dispassionately;
like Khedron, though with less cause, Hilvar felt that his own character
was becoming submerged. He was being sucked helplessly into the vortex
which Alvin left behind him on his way through life.

"I believe you are right," Hilvar answered slowly. "Our two peoples
have been separated for long enough." That, he thought, was true, though he knew that his own feelings must bias his reply. But Alvin was still worried.

"There's one problem that bothers me," he said in a troubled voice,
"and that's the difference in our life spans." He said no more, but each
knew what the other was thinking.

"I've been worried about that as well," Hilvar admitted, "but I think
the problem will solve itself in time when our people get to know each
other again. We can't
both
be right—our lives may be too short, and
yours are certainly far too long. Eventually there will be a compromise."

Alvin wondered. That way, it was true, lay the only hope, but the
ages of transition would be hard indeed. He remembered again those
bitter words of Seranis:
"Both he and I will have been dead for centuries
while you are still a young man"
Very well; he would accept the con
ditions. Even in Diaspar all friendships lay under the same shadow;
whether it was a hundred or a million years away made little difference
at the end.

Alvin knew, with a certainty that passed all logic, that the welfare
of the race demanded the mingling of these two cultures; in such a cause
individual happiness was unimportant. For a moment Alvin saw hu
manity as something more than the living background of his own life,
and he accepted without flinching the unhappiness his choice must one
day bring.

Beneath them the world continued on its endless turning. Sensing his
friend's mood, Hilvar said nothing, until presently Alvin broke the si
lence.