From the Ocean from teh Stars (97 page)

"And you are one of them?"

"Yes," replied Jeserac, showing the nearest approach to bashfulness that Alvin had ever seen or ever would see. "It is not easy, and certainly not pleasant—but it is stimulating."

"How does Gerane work?"

"He is operating through the sagas. He has had a whole series of them constructed, and studies our reactions when we are experiencing them. I never thought, at my age, that I should go back to my childhood recreations again!"

"What are the sagas?" asked Hilvar.

"Imaginary dream worlds," explained Alvin. "At least, most of them are imaginary, though some are probably based on historical facts. There are millions of them recorded in the memory cells of the city; you can take your choice of any kind of adventure or experience you wish, and it will seem utterly real to you while the impulses are being fed into your mind." He turned to Jeserac.

"What kind of sagas does Gerane take you into?"

"Most of them are concerned, as you might expect, with leaving Diaspar. Some have taken us back to our very earliest lives, to as near to the founding of the city as we can get. Gerane believes that the closer he can get to the origin of this compulsion, the more easily he will be able to undermine it."

Alvin felt very encouraged by this news. His work would be merely half accomplished if he had opened the gates of Diaspar—only to find that no one would pass through them.

"Do you
really
want to be able to leave Diaspar?" asked Hilvar shrewdly.

"No," replied Jeserac, without hesitation. "I am terrified of the idea. But I realize that we were completely wrong in thinking that Diaspar was all the world that mattered, and logic tells me that something has to be done to rectify the mistake. Emotionally, I am still quite incapable of leaving the city; perhaps I always shall be. Gerane thinks he can get some of us to come to Lys, and I am willing to help him with the experiment—even though half the time I hope that it will fail."

Alvin looked at his old tutor with a new respect. He no longer discounted the power of suggestion, nor underestimated the forces which could compel a man to act in defiance of logic. He could not help comparing Jeserac's calm courage with Khedron's panic flight into the future —though with his new understanding of human nature he no longer cared to condemn the Jester for what he had done.

Gerane, he was certain, would accomplish what he had set out to do.

Jeserac might be too old to break the pattern of a lifetime, however willing
he might be to start afresh. That did not matter, for others would succeed,
with the skilled guidance of the psychologists of Lys. And once a few
had escaped from their billion-year-old mold, it would only be a question
of time before the remainder could follow.

He wondered what would happen to Diaspar—and to Lys—when
the barriers were fully down. Somehow, the best elements of both must
be saved, and welded into a new and healthier culture. It was a terrifying
task, and would need all the wisdom and all the patience that each could bring to bear.

Some of the difficulties of the forthcoming adjustments had already
been encountered. The visitors from Lys had, politely enough, refused
to live in the homes provided for them in the city. They had set up their
own temporary accommodation in the park, among surroundings which
reminded them of Lys. Hilvar was the only exception; though he disliked
living in a house with indeterminate walls and ephemeral furniture, he bravely accepted Alvin's hospitality, reassured by the promise that they
would not stay here for long.

Hilvar had never felt lonely in his life, but he knew loneliness in Diaspar. The city was stranger to him than Lys had been to Alvin, and
he was oppressed and overwhelmed by its infinite complexity and by
the myriads of strangers who seemed to crowd every inch of space around
him. He knew, if only in a tenuous manner, everyone in Lys, whether
he had met them or not. In a thousand lifetimes he could never know everyone in Diaspar, and though he realized that this was an irrational
feeling, it left him vaguely depressed. Only his loyalty to Alvin held him
here in a world that had nothing in common with his own.

He had often tried to analyze his feelings toward Alvin. His friendship sprang, he knew, from the same source that inspired his sympathy
for all small and struggling creatures. This would have astonished those
who thought of Alvin as willful, stubborn, and self-centered, needing
no affection from anyone and incapable of returning it even if it was
offered.

Hilvar knew better than this; he had sensed it instinctively even from the first. Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something
they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that
the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.

What Alvin was seeking, Hilvar did not know. He was driven by
forces that had been set in motion ages before, by the men of genius who planned Diaspar with such perverse skill—or by the men of even greater
genius who had opposed them. Like every human being, Alvin was in

some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance.
That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it
render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people, he
was so unaccountable a creature that they sometimes forgot that he still
shared their emotions. It needed a stranger from a totally different en
vironment to see him as another human being.

Within a few days of arriving in Diaspar, Hilvar had met more people
than in his entire life. Met them—and had grown to know practically
none. Because they were so crowded together, the inhabitants of the city
maintained a reserve that was hard to penetrate. The only privacy they
knew was that of the mind, and they still clung to this even as they made
their way through the endless social activities of Diaspar. Hilvar felt sorry
for them, though he knew that they felt no need for his sympathy. They
did not realize what they were missing—they could not understand the
warm sense of community, the feeling of
belonging,
which linked every
one together in the telepathic society of Lys. Indeed, though they were
polite enough to try to conceal it, it was obvious that most of the people
he spoke to looked upon him pityingly as leading an incredibly dull and
drab existence.

Eriston and Etania, Alvin's guardians, Hilvar quickly dismissed as
kindly but totally baffled nonentities. He found it very confusing to
hear Alvin refer to them as his father and mother—words which in Lys
still retained their ancient biological meaning. It required a continual
effort of imagination to remember that the laws of life and death had
been repealed by the makers of Diaspar, and there were times when it
seemed to Hilvar that despite all the activity around him, the city was half
empty because it had no children.

He wondered what would happen to Diaspar now that its long isola
tion was over. The best thing the city could do, he decided, was to destroy the Memory Banks which had held it entranced for so many ages. Miracu
lous though they were—perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that
had produced them—they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things. Some of those fears had been based on reality, but others, it now seemed, lay only in the imagination. Hilvar knew a little of the pattern that was beginning to emerge from the ex
ploration of Vanamonde's mind. In a few days, Diaspar would know
it too—and would discover how much of its past had been a myth.

Yet if the Memory Banks were destroyed, within a thousand years
the city would be dead, since its people had lost the power to reproduce
themselves. That was the dilemma that had to be faced, but already
Hilvar had glimpsed one possible solution. There was always an answer

to any technical problem, and his people were masters of the biological
sciences. What had been done could be undone, if Diaspar so wished.

First, however, the city would have to learn what it had lost. Its
education would take many years—perhaps many centuries. But it was
beginning; very soon the impact of the first lesson would shake Diaspar as
profoundly as had contact with Lys itself.

It would shake Lys too. For all the difference between the two cul
tures, they had sprung from the same roots—and they had shared the
same illusions. They would both be healthier when they looked once
more, with a calm and steadfast gaze, into the past which they had lost.

☆
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
he amphitheater had been designed to hold the en
tire waking population of Diaspar, and scarcely one of its ten million
places was empty. As he looked down the great curving sweep from his
vantage point high up the slope, Alvin was irresistibly reminded of
Shalmirane. The two craters were of the same shape, and almost the
same size. If one packed the crater of Shalmirane with humanity, it would
look very much like this.

There was, however, one fundamental difference between the two.
The great bowl of Shalmirane existed; this amphitheater did not. Nor had it ever done so; it was merely a phantom, a pattern of electronic charges,
slumbering in the memory of the Central Computer until the need came
to call it forth. Alvin knew that in reality he was still in his room, and
that all the myriads of people who appeared to surround him were
equally in their own homes. As long as he made no attempt to move
from this spot, the illusion was perfect. He could believe that Diaspar
had been abolished and that all its citizens had been assembled here in
this enormous concavity.

Not once in a thousand years did the life of the city stop so that all its
people could meet in Grand Assembly. In Lys also, Alvin knew, the
equivalent of this gathering was taking place. There it would be a meeting
of minds, but perhaps associated with it would be an apparent meeting
of bodies, as imaginary yet as seemingly real as this.

He could recognize most of the faces around him, out to the limits of
unaided vision. More than a mile away, and a thousand feet below, was the little circular stage upon which the attention of the entire world was now fixed. It was hard to believe that he could see anything from such a

distance, but Alvin knew that when the address began, he would hear and
observe everything that happened as clearly as anyone else in Diaspar.

The stage filled with mist; the mist became Callitrax, leader of the
group whose task it had been to reconstruct the past from the information
which Vanamonde had brought to Earth. It had been a stupendous,
almost an impossible undertaking, and not merely because of the spans
of time involved. Only once, with the mental help of Hilvar, had Alvin
been given a brief glimpse into the mind of the strange being they had
discovered—or who had discovered them. To Alvin, the thoughts of
Vanamonde were as meaningless as a thousand voices shouting together
in some vast, echoing cave. Yet the men of Lys could disentangle them,
could record them to be analyzed at leisure. Already, so it was rumored—
though Hilvar would neither deny nor confirm this—what they had dis
covered was so strange that it bore scarcely any resemblance to the history which all the human race had accepted for a billion years.

Callitrax began to speak. To Alvin, as to everyone else in Diaspar,
the clear, precise voice seemed to come from a point only a few inches
away. Then, in a manner that was hard to define, just as the geometry of
a dream defies logic yet rouses no surprise in the mind of the dreamer,
Alvin was standing beside Callitrax while at the same time he retained his position high up on the slope of the amphitheater. The paradox did
not puzzle him; he simply accepted it without question, like all the other
masteries over time and space which science had given him.

Very briefly, Callitrax ran through the accepted history of the race. He spoke of the unknown peoples of the Dawn Civilizations, who had
left behind them nothing but a handful of great names and the fading
legends of the Empire. Even at the beginning, so the story went, Man
had desired the stars—and had at last attained them. For millions of
years he had expanded across the Galaxy, gathering system after system beneath his sway. Then, out of the darkness beyond the rim of the Uni
verse, the Invaders had struck and wrenched from him all that he had
won.

The retreat to the Solar System had been bitter and must have lasted
many ages. Earth itself was barely saved by the fabulous battles that raged around Shalmirane. When all was over, Man was left with only
his memories and the world on which he had been born.

Since then, all else had been long-drawn anticlimax. As an ultimate
irony, the race that had hoped to rule the Universe had abandoned most
of its own tiny world, and had split into the two isolated cultures of Lys
and Diaspar—oases of life in a desert that sundered them as effectively
as the gulfs between the stars.