The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [3]
Alvin tilted the gravity field, rose to his feet, and walked towards the table he had materialised. A bowl of exotic fruit appeared upon it—not the food he had intended, for in his confusion his thoughts had wandered. Not wishing to reveal his error, he picked up the least dangerous-looking of the fruits and started to suck it cautiously.
‘Well,’ said Alystra at last, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘I can’t help it,’ he said a little sulkily. ‘I think the rules are stupid. Besides, how can I remember them when I’m living a saga? I just behave in the way that seems natural. Didn’t you want to look at the mountain?’
Alystra’s eyes widened with horror.
‘That would have meant going outside!’ she gasped.
Alvin knew that it was useless to argue further. Here was the barrier that sundered him from all the people of his world, and which might doom him to a life of frustration. He was always wanting to go outside, both in reality and in dream. Yet to everyone in Diaspar, ‘outside’ was a nightmare that they could not face. They would never talk about it if it could be avoided; it was something unclean and evil. Not even Jeserac, his tutor, would tell him why.…
Alystra was still watching him with puzzled but tender eyes. ‘You’re unhappy, Alvin,’ she said. ‘No one should be unhappy in Diaspar. Let me come over and talk to you.’
Ungallantly, Alvin shook his head. He knew where that would lead, and at the moment he wanted to be alone. Doubly disappointed, Alystra faded from view.
In a city of ten million human beings, thought Alvin, there was no one to whom he could really talk. Eriston and Etania were fond of him in their way, but now that their term of guardianship was ending, they were happy enough to leave him to shape his own amusements and his own life. In the last few years, as his divergence from the standard pattern became more and more obvious, he had often felt his parents’ resentment. Not with him—that, perhaps, was something he could have faced and fought—but with the sheer bad luck that had chosen them from all the city’s millions, to meet him when he walked out of the Hall of Creation twenty years ago.
Twenty years. He could remember its first moment, and the first words he had ever heard: ‘Welcome, Alvin, I am Eriston, your appointed father. This is Etania, your mother.’ The words had meant nothing then, but his mind had recorded them with flawless accuracy. He remembered how he had looked down at his body; it was an inch or two taller now, but had scarcely altered since the moment of his birth. He had come almost fully grown into the world, and would have changed little save in height when it was time to leave it a thousand years hence.
Before that first memory, there was nothing. One day, perhaps, that nothingness would come again, but that was a thought too remote to touch his emotions in any way.
He turned his mind once more towards the mystery of his birth. It did not seem strange to Alvin that he might be created, in a single moment of time, by the powers and forces that materialised all the other objects of his everyday life. No; that was not the mystery. The enigma he had never been able to solve, and which no one would ever explain to him, was his uniqueness.
Unique. It was a strange, sad word—and a strange, sad thing to be. When it was applied to him—as he had often heard it done when no one thought he was listening—it seemed to possess ominous undertones that threatened more than his own happiness.
His parents—his tutor—everyone he knew—had tried to protect him from the truth, as if anxious to preserve the innocence of his long childhood. The pretence must soon be ended; in a few days he would be a full citizen of Diaspar, and nothing could be withheld from him that he wished to know.
Why, for example, did he not fit into the Sagas? Of all the thousands of forms of recreation in the city, these were the most popular. When you entered a Saga, you were not merely a passive observer, as in the crude entertainments of primitive times which Alvin had sometimes sampled. You were an active