The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [34]
Khedron’s fingers flickered over the monitor control board, and the screen answered Alvin’s question. The long-vanished city began to expand before his eyes as his viewpoint moved along the curiously narrow streets. This memory of the Diaspar that once had been was still as sharp and clear as the image of the city he lived in today. For a thousand million years, the information circuits had held it in ghostly pseudo-existence, waiting for the moment when someone should call it forth again. And it was not, thought Alvin, merely a memory he was seeing now. It was something more complex than that—it was the memory of a memory.…
He did not know what he could learn from it, and whether it could help him in his quest. No matter; it was fascinating to look into the past, and to see a world which had existed in the days when men still roamed among the stars. He pointed to the low, circular building that stood at the city’s heart.
‘Let’s start there,’ he told Khedron. ‘That seems as good a place as any to begin.’
Perhaps it was sheer luck; perhaps it was some ancient memory; perhaps it was elementary logic. It made no difference, since he would have arrived at this spot sooner or later—this spot upon which all the radial streets of the city converged.
It took him ten minutes to discover that they did not meet here for reasons of symmetry alone—ten minutes to know that his long search had met its reward.
CHAPTER NINE
ALYSTRA HAD FOUND it very easy to follow Alvin and Khedron without their knowledge. They seemed in a great hurry—something which in itself was most unusual—and never looked back. It had been an amusing game to pursue them along the moving ways, hiding in the crowds yet always keeping them in sight. Towards the end their goal had been obvious; when they left the pattern of streets and went into the Park, they could only be heading for the Tomb of Yarlan Zey. The Park contained no other buildings, and people in such eager haste as Alvin and Khedron would not be interested merely in enjoying the scenery.
Because there was no way of concealing herself on the last few hundred yards to the Tomb, Alystra waited until Khedron and Alvin had disappeared into the marbled gloom. Then, as soon as they were out of sight, she hurried up the grass-covered slope. She felt fairly sure that she could hide behind one of the great pillars long enough to discover what Alvin and Khedron were doing; it did not matter if they detected her after that.
The Tomb consisted of two concentric rings of columns, enclosing a circular court. Except in one sector, the columns screened off the interior completely, and Alystra avoided approaching through this opening, but entered the Tomb from the side. She cautiously negotiated the first ring of columns, saw that there was no one in sight, and tiptoed across to the second. Through the gaps, she could see Yarlan Zey looking out through the entrance, across the park he had built, and beyond that to the city over which he had watched for so many ages.
And there was no one else in all this marble solitude. The Tomb was empty.
At that moment, Alvin and Khedron were a hundred feet underground, in a small, box-like room whose walls seemed to be flowing steadily upwards. That was the only indication of movement; there was no trace of vibration to show that they were sinking swiftly into the earth, descending towards a goal that even now neither of them fully understood.
It had been absurdly easy, for the way had been prepared for them. (By whom? wondered Alvin. By the Central Computer? Or by Yarlan Zey himself, when he transformed the city?) The monitor screen had shown them the long, vertical shaft plunging into the depths, but they had followed its course only a little way when the image had blanked out. That meant, Alvin knew, that they were asking for information that the monitor did not possess, and perhaps had never possessed.
He had scarcely framed this thought when the screen came to