The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [33]
Already they had gone five hundred million years into the past. Outside the walls of Diaspar, beyond the knowledge of the monitors, it would be a different Earth. Perhaps there might be oceans and forests, even other cities which man had not yet deserted in the long retreat to his final home.
The minutes drifted past, each minute an aeon in the little universe of the monitors. Soon, thought Alvin, the earliest of all these stored memories must be reached and the regression would end. But fascinating though this lesson was, he did not see how it could help him to escape from the city as it was here and now.
With a sudden, soundless implosion, Diaspar contracted to a fraction of its former size. The park vanished, the boundary wall of linked, titanic towers instantly evaporated. This city was open to the world, for the radial roads stretched out to the limits of the monitor image without obstruction. Here was Diaspar as it had been before the great change came upon mankind.
‘We can go no further,’ said Khedron, pointing to the monitor screen. On it had appeared the words: REGRESSION CONCLUDED. ‘This must be the earliest version of the city that has been preserved in the memory cells. Before that, I doubt if the eternity units were used, and the buildings were allowed to wear out naturally.’
For a long time, Alvin stared at this model of the ancient city. He thought of the traffic those roads had borne, as men came and went freely to all the corners of the world—and to other worlds as well. Those men were his ancestors; he felt a closer kinship to them than to the people who now shared his life. He wished that he could see them and share their thoughts, as they moved through the streets of that billion-year-remote Diaspar. Yet those thoughts could not have been happy ones, for they must have been living then beneath the shadow of the Invaders. In a few more centuries, they were to turn their faces from the glory they had won, and build a wall against the universe.
Khedron ran the monitor backwards and forwards a dozen times through the brief period of history that had wrought the transformation. The change from a small open city to a much larger closed one had taken little more than a thousand years. In that time, the machines that had served Diaspar so faithfully must have been designed and built, and the knowledge that would enable them to carry out their tasks had been fed into their memory circuits. Into the memory circuits also, must have gone the essential patterns of all the men who were now alive, so that when the right impulse called them forth again they could be clothed in matter and would emerge reborn from the Hall of Creation. In some sense, Alvin realised, he must have existed in that ancient world. It was possible, of course, that he was completely synthetic—that his entire personality had been designed by artist-technicians who had worked with tools of inconceivable complexity towards some clearly envisaged goal. Yet he thought it more likely that he was a composite of men who had once lived and walked on Earth.
Very little of the old Diaspar had remained when the new city was created; the Park had obliterated it almost completely. Even before the transformation, there had been a small, grass-covered clearing at the centre of Diaspar, surrounding the junction of all the radial streets. Afterwards it had expanded tenfold, wiping out streets and buildings alike. The Tomb of Yarlan Zey had been brought into existence at this time, replacing a very large circular structure which had previously stood at the meeting point of all the streets. Alvin had never really believed the legends of the Tomb’s antiquity but now it seemed that they were true.
‘I suppose,’ said Alvin, struck