The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [36]
Alvin began to walk towards the nearest of the tunnels. He had gone only a few paces when he realised that something was happening to the ground beneath his feet. It was becoming transparent. A few more yards, and he seemed to be standing in mid-air without visible support. He stopped and stared down into the void beneath him.
‘Khedron!’ he called. ‘Come and look at this!’
The other joined him, and together they gazed at the marvel beneath their feet. Faintly visible, at an indefinite depth, lay an enormous map—a great network of lines converging towards a spot beneath the central shaft. They stared at it in silence for a moment; then Khedron said quietly: ‘You realise what this is?’
I think so,’ replied Alvin. ‘It’s a map of the entire transport system, and those little circles must be the other cities of Earth. I can just see names beside them, but they’re too faint to read.’
‘There must have been some form of internal illumination once,’ said Khedron absently. He was tracing the lines beneath his feet, following them with his eyes out towards the walls of the chamber.
‘I thought so!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Do you see how all these radiating lines lead towards the small tunnels?’
Alvin had noticed that besides the great arches of the moving ways there were innumerable smaller tunnels leading out of the chamber—tunnels that sloped downwards instead of up.
Khedron continued without waiting for a reply.
‘It would be hard to think of a simpler system. People would come down the moving ways, select the place they wished to visit, and then follow the appropriate line on the map.’
‘And what happened to them after that?’ asked Alvin. Khedron was silent, his eyes searching out the mystery of those descending tunnels. There were thirty or forty of them, all looking exactly the same. Only the names on the map would have enabled one to distinguish between them, and those names were indecipherable now.
Alvin had wandered away and was circumnavigating the central pillar. Presently his voice came to Khedron, slightly muffled and overlaid with echoes from the walls of the chamber.
‘What is it?’ called Khedron, not wishing to move as he had nearly succeeded in reading one of the dimly visible groups of characters. But Alvin’s voice was insistent, so he went to join him.
Far beneath was the other half of the great map, its faint web-work radiating to the points of the compass. This time, however, not all of it was too dim to be clearly seen, for one of the lines, and only one—was brilliantly illuminated. It seemed to have no connexion with the rest of the system, and pointed like a gleaming arrow to one of the downward-sloping tunnels. Near its end the line transfixed a circle of golden light, and against that circle was the single word LYS. That was all.
For a long time Alvin and Khedron stood gazing down at that silent symbol. To Khedron it was a challenge he knew he could never accept and which, indeed, he would rather did not exist. But to Alvin it hinted at the fulfilment of all his dreams; though the word LYS meant nothing to him, he let it roll around his mouth, tasting its sibilance like some exotic flavour. The blood was pounding in his veins, and his cheeks were flushed as by a fever. He stared around this great concourse, trying to imagine it as it had been in the ancient days, when air transport had come to an end but the cities of Earth still had contact with one another. He thought of the countless millions of years that had passed with the traffic steadily dwindling and the lights on the great map dying