The City and the Stars

by Arthur Charles Clarke

  It was not unpleasant walking with the wind behind them, and they soon reached the end of the tunnel. A wide-meshed filigree of stone prevented them from going farther, which was just as well, for they stood on the brink of nothingness. The great air duct opened on the sheer face of the tower, and below them was a vertical drop of at least a thousand feet. They were high upon the outer ramparts of the city, and Diaspar lay spread beneath them as few in their world could ever have seen it.

  The view was the obverse of the one that Alvin had obtained from the center of the park. He could look down upon the concentric waves of stone and metal as they descended in mile-long sweeps toward the heart of the city. Far away, partly hidden by the intervening towers, he could glimpse the distant fields and trees and the eternally circling river. Further still, the remoter bastions of Diaspar climbed once more toward the sky.

  Beside him, Alystra was sharing the view with pleasure but with no surprise. She had seen the city countless times before from other, almost equally well-placed vantage points-and in considerably more comfort.

  «That’s our world-all of it,» said Alvin. «Now I want to show you something else.» He turned away from the grat-ing and began to walk toward the distant circle of light at the far end of the tunnel. The wind was cold against his lightly clad body, but he scarcely noticed the discomfort as he walked forward into the air stream.

  He had gone only a little way when he realized that Alystra was making no attempt to follow. She stood watching, her borrowed cloak streaming down the wind, one hand half raised to her face. Alvin saw her lips move, but the words did not reach him. He looked back at her first with astonish-ment then with an impatience that was not totally devoid of pity. What Jeserac had said was true. She could not fol-low him. She had realized the meaning of that remote circle of light from which the wind blew forever into Diaspar. Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness-the world of the desert-the world of the Invaders.

  Alvin walked back to join her and was surprised to find that she was trembling. «Why are you frightened?» he asked. «We’re still safely here in Diaspar. You’ve looked out of that window behind us surely you can look out of this one as well!»

  Alystra was staring at him as if he was some strange mon-ster. By her standards, indeed, he was.

  «I couldn’t do it,» she said at last. «Even thinking about it makes me feel colder than this wind. Don’t go any farther, Alvin!»

  «But there’s no logic in it!» Alvin persisted remorselessly. «What possible harm would it do you to walk to the end of this corridor and look out? It’s strange and lonely out there but it isn’t horrible. In fact, the longer I look the more beautiful I think-»

  Alystra did not stay to hear him finish. She turned on her heels and fled back down the long ramp that had brought them up through the floor of this tunnel. Alvin made no attempt to stop her, since that would have involved the bad manners of imposing one’s will upon another. Persuasion, he could see would have been utterly useless. He knew that Alystra would not pause until she had returned to her com-panions. There was no danger that she would lose herself m the labyrinths of the city, for she would have no dif-ficulty in retracing her footsteps. An instinctive ability to extricate himself from even the most complex of mazes had been merely one of the many accomplishments Man had learned since he started to live in cities. The long-extinct rat had been forced to acquire similar skills when he left the fields and threw in his lot with humanity.

  Alvin waited for a moment, as if half-expecting Alystra to return. He was not surprised at her reaction only at its violence and irrationality. Though he was sincerely sorry that she had gone, he could not help wishing that she had re membered to leave the cloak. It was not only cold, but it was also hard work moving against the wind which sighed through the lungs of the city. Alvin was fighting both the air current and whatever force it was that kept it moving. Not until he had reached the stone grille and could lock his arms around its bars, could he afford to relax. There was just sufficient room for him to force his head through the opening, and even so his view was slightly restricted, as the entrance to the duct was partly recessed into the city’s wall.

  Yet he could see enough. Thousands of feet below, the sunlight was taking leave of the desert. The almost horizontal rays struck through the grating and threw a weird pattern of gold and shadow far down the tunnel. Alvin shaded his eyes against the glare and peered down at the land upon which no man had walked for unknown ages.

  He might have been looking at an eternally frozen sea. For mile after mile, the sand dunes undulated into the west, their contours grossly exaggerated by the slanting light. Here and there some caprice of the wind had carved curious whirlpools and gullies in the sand, so that it was sometimes hard to realize that none of this sculpture was the work of intelligence. At a very great distance, so far away indeed that he had no way of judging their remoteness, was a range of softly rounded hills. They had been a disappointment to Alvin; he would have given much to have seen in reality the soaring mountains of the ancient records and of his own dreams.

  The sun lay upon the rim of the hills, its light tamed and reddened by the hundreds of miles of atmosphere it was traversing. There were two great black spots upon its disc; Alvin had learned from his studies that such things existed, but he was surprised that he could see them so easily. They seemed almost like a pair of eyes peering back at him as he crouched in his lonely spy hole with the wind whistling ceaselessly past his ears.

  There was no twilight. With the going of the sun, the pools of shadow lying among the sand dunes flowed swiftly together in one vast lake of darkness. Color ebbed from the sky; the warm reds and golds drained away leaving an antarctic blue that deepened and deepened into night. Alvin waited for that breathless moment that he alone of all man-kind had known-the moment when the first star shivers into life.

  It had been many weeks since he had last come to this place, and he knew that the pattern of the night sky must have changed meanwhile. Even so, he was not prepared for his first glimpse of the Seven Suns.

  They could have no other name; the phrase leaped un-bidden to his lips. They formed a tiny, very compact and astonishingly symmetrical group against the afterglow of sun-set. Six of them were arranged in a slightly flattened ellipse, which, Alvin was sure, was in reality a perfect circle, slightly tilted toward the line of vision. Each star was a different color; he could pick out red, blue, gold, and green, but the other tints eluded his eye. At the precise center of the forma-tion was a single white giant-the brightest star in all the visible sky. The whole group looked exactly like a piece of jewelry; it seemed incredible, and beyond all stretching of the laws of chance, that Naure could ever have contrived so perfect a pattern.

  As his eyes grew slowly accustomed to the darkness, Alvin could make out the great misty veil that had once been called the Milky Way. It stretched from the zenith down to the horizon, and the Seven Suns were entangled in its folds.

  The other stars had now emerged to challenge them, and their random groupings only emphasized the enigma of that perfect symmetry. It was almost as if some power had de-liberately opposed the disorder of the natural Universe by setting its sign upon the stars.

  Ten times, no more, the Galaxy had turned upon its axis since Man first walked on Earth. By its own standards, that was but a moment. Yet in that short period it had changed completely-changed far more than it had any right to do in the natural course of events. The great suns that had once burned so fiercely in the pride of youth were now guttering to their doom. But Alvin had never seen the heavens in their ancient glory, and so was unaware of all that had been lost.

  The cold, seeping through into his bones, drove him back to the city. He extricated himself from the grating and rubbed the circulation back into his limbs. Ahead of him, dow
n the tunnel, the light streaming out from Diaspar was so brilliant that for a moment he had to avert his eyes. Outside the city there were such things as day and night, but within it there was only eternal day. As the sun descended the sky above Diaspar would fill with light and no one would notice when the natural illumination vanished. Even before men had lost the need for sleep, they had driven darkness from their cities. The only night that ever came to Diaspar was a rare and unpredictable obscuration that sometimes visited the park and transformed it into a place of mystery.

  Alvin came slowly back through the hall of mirrors, his mind still filled with night and stars. He felt inspired and yet depressed. There seemed no way in which he could ever escape out into that enormous emptiness-and no rational purpose in doing so. Jeserac had said that a man would soon die out in the desert, and Alvin could well believe him. Perhaps he might one day discover some way of leaving Diaspar, but if he did, he knew that he must soon return. To reach the desert would be an amusing game, no more. It was a game he could share with no one, and it would lead him nowhere. But at least it would be worth doing if it helped to quench the longing in his soul.

  As if unwilling to return to the familiar world, Alvin lingered among the reflections from the past. He stood before one of the great mirrors and watched the scenes that came and went within its depths. Whatever mechanism produced these images was controlled by his presence, and to some extent by his thoughts. The mirrors were always blank when he first came into the room, but filled with action as soon as he moved among them.

  He seemed to be standing in a large open courtyard which he had never seen in reality, but which probably still existed somewhere in Diaspar. It was unusually crowded, and some kind of public meeting seemed to be in progress. Two men were arguing politely on a raised platform while their supporters stood around and made interjections from time to time. The complete silence added to the charm of the scene, for imagination immediately went to work supplying the missing sounds. What were they debating? Alvin wondered. Perhaps it was not a real scene from the past, but a purely created episode. The careful balance of figures, the slightly formal movements, all made it seem a little too neat for life.

  He studied the faces in the crowd, seeking for anyone he could recognize. There was no one here that he knew, but he might be looking at friends he would not meet for cen-turies to come. How many possible patterns of human physiog-nomy were there? The number was enormous, but it was still finite, especially when all the unesthetic variations had been eliminated.

  The people in the mirror world continued their long-for-gotten argument, ignoring the image of Alvin which stood motionless among them. Sometimes it was very hard to be-lieve that he was not part of the scene himself, for the illu-sion was so flawless. When one of the phantoms in the mirror appeared to move behind Alvin, it vanished just as a real object would have done; and when one moved in front of him, he was the one who was eclipsed.

  He was preparing to leave when he noticed an oddly dressed man standing a little apart from the main group. His movements, his clothes, everything about him, seemed slightly out of place in this assembly. He spoiled the pattern; like Alvin, he was an anachronism.He was a good deal more than that. He was real, and he was looking at Alvin with a slightly quizzical smile.

  Five

  In his short lifetime, Alvin had met less than one-thousandth of the inhabitants of Diaspar. He was not surprised, therefore, that the man confronting him was a stranger. What did surprise him was to meet anyone at all here in this de-serted tower, so near the frontier of the unknown.

  He turned his back on the mirror world and faced the intruder. Before he could speak, the other had addressed him.

  «You are Alvin, I believe. When I discovered that someone was coming here, I should have guessed it was you.»

  The remark was obviously not intended to give offense; it was a simple statement of fact, and Alvin accepted it as such. He was not surprised to be recognized; whether he liked it or not, the fact of his uniqueness, and its unrevealed po-tentialities, had made him known to everyone in the city.

  «I am Hedron,» continued the stranger, as if that explained everything. «They call me the Jester.»

  Alvin looked blank, and Khedron shrugged his shoulders in mock resignation.

  «Ah, such is fame! Still, you are young and there have been no jests in your lifetime. Your ignorance is excused.»

  There was something refreshingly unusual about Khedron. Alvin searched his mind for the meaning of the strange word «Jester»; it evoked the faintest of memories, but he could not identify it. There were many such titles in the complex social structure of the city, and it took a lifetime to learn, them all.

  «Do you often come here?» Alvin asked, a little jealously. He had grown to regard the Tower of Loranne as his personal property and felt slightly annoyed that its marvels were known to anyone else. But had Khedron, he wondered, ever looked out across the desert or seen the stars sinking down into the west?

  «No,» said Khedron, almost as if answering his unspoken thoughts. «I have never been here before. But it is my pleasure to learn of unusual happenings in the city ,and it is a very long time since anyone went to the Tower of Loranne.»

  Alvin wondered fleetingly how Khedron knew of his earlier visits, but quickly dismissed the matter from his mind. Diaspar was full of eyes and ears and other more subtle sense organs which kept the city aware of all that was happening within it. Anyone who was sufficiently interested could no doubt find a way of tapping these channels.

  «Even if it is unusual for anyone to come here,» said Alvin, still fencing verbally, «why should you be interested?»

  «Because in Diaspar,» replied Khedron, «the unusual is my prerogative. I had marked you down a long time ago; I knew we should meet some day. After my fashion, I too am unique. Oh not in the way that you are; this is not my first life. I have walked a thousand times out of the Hall of Creation. But somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many.»

  There was an irony about Khedron’s speech that left Alvin still floundering. It was not the best of manners to ask direct personal questions, but after all Khedron had raised the subject.

  «I’m sorry about my ignorance,» said Alvin. «But what is a Jester, and what does he do?»

  «You ask ‘what,’» replied Khedron, «so I’ll start by telling you ‘why.’ It’s a long story, but I think you will be in-terested.»

  «I am interested in everything,» said Alvin, truthfully enough.

  «Very well. The men-if they were men, which I sometimes doubt-who designed Diaspar had to solve an incredibly complex problem. Diaspar is not merely a machine, you know-n is a living organism and an immortal one. We are so ac-customed to our society that we can’t appreciate how strange it would have seemed to our first ancestors. Here we have a tiny, closed world which never changes except in its minor details, and yet which is perfectly stable, age after age. It has probably lasted longer than the rest of human history-yet in that history there were, so it is believed, countless thou-sands of separate cultures and civilizations which endured for a little while and then perished. How did Diaspar achieve its extraordinary stability?»

  Alvin was surprised that anyone should ask so elementary a question, and his hopes of learning something new began to wane.

  «Through the Memory Banks, of course,» he replied. «Diaspar is always composed of the same people, though their actual groupings change as their bodies are created or de-stroyed.»

  Khedron shook his head. «That is only a very small part of the answer. With exactly the same people, you could build many different patterns of society. I can’t prove that, and I’ve no direct evidence of it, but I believe it’s true. The designers of the city did not merely fix its population; they fixed the laws governing its behavior. We’re scarcely aware that those laws exist, but we obey them. Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot chang
e outside of narrow limits. The Memory Banks store many other things outside the patterns of our bodies and personalities. They store the image of the city itself, holding its every atom rigid against all the changes that time can bring. Look at this pavement-it was laid down millions of years ago, and countless feet have walked upon it. Can you see any sign of wear? Unprotected matter, however adamant, would have been ground to dust ages ago. But as long as there is power to operate the Memory Banks, and as long as the matrices they contain can still control the patterns of the city, the physical structure of Diaspar will never change.»

  But there have been some changes,» protested Alvin. «Many buildings have been torn down since the city was built, and new ones erected.»

  «Of course-but only by discharging the information stored in the Memory Banks and then setting up new patterns. In any case, I was merely mentioning that as an example of the way the city preserves itself physically. The point I want to make is that in the same way there are machines in Diaspar that preserve our social structure. They watch for any changes, and correct them before they become too great. How do they do it? I don’t know-perhaps by selecting those who emerge from the Hall of Creation. Perhaps by tampering with our personality patterns we may think we have free will, but can we be certain of that?»

  «In any event, the problem was solved. Diaspar has survived and come safely down the ages, like a great ship carrying as its cargo all that is left of the human race. It is a tremendous achievement in social engineering, though whether it is worth doing is quite another matter.

  «Stability, however, is not enough. It leads too easily to stagnation, and thence to decadence. The designers of the city took elaborate steps to avoid this though these deserted build-ings suggest that they did not entirely succeed. I, Khedron the Jester, am part of that plan. A very small part, perhaps. I like to think otherwise, but I can never be sure.»