«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 their 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 and 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 Alviti. His friendship sprang, he knew, from the same source th inspired his sympathy for all small and struggling creatur 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 instinctive even from the first. Alvin was an explorer, and all explor 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 environment 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 everyone 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 isolation 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. Miraculous 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 exploration 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 a centuries. But it was beginning; very soon the impact of the first lesson would shake Diaspar as profundly as had contact with Lys itself.
It would shake Lys too. For all the difference between the two cultures, 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.
Twenty-four
The amphitheater had been designed to hold the entire 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.