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The lion of comarre


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THE LION OF COMARRE
By Arthur C. Clarke
CHAPTER ONE
Revolt
Toward the close of the twenty-sixth century the great tide of science had almost vanished. The long series of inventions that had shaped and moulded the world for nearly a thousand years was coming to its end. Everything had been discovered. One by one, all the great dreams of the past had become reality.
Civilization was completely mechanized – yet machinery had almost vanished. Hidden in the walls of the cities or buried far underground, the perfect machines bore the burden of the world. Silently, unobtrusively, the robots attended to their masters’ needs, doing their work so well that their presence seemed as natural as the dawn.
There was still much to learn in the realm of pure science, and the astronomers, now that they were no longer bound to Earth, had work enough for a thousand years to come. But the physical sciences and the arts they nourished had ceased to be the chief preoccupation of the race. By the year 2600 the finest human minds were no longer to be found in the laboratories.
The men whose names meant most to the world were the artists and philosophers, the lawgivers and statesmen. The engineers and the great inventors belonged to the past. Like the men who had once ministered to long-vanished diseases, they had done their work so well that they were no longer required. Five hundred years were to pass before the pendulum swung back again.
The view from the studio was breath-taking, for the long, curving room was over two miles from the base of Central Tower. The five other giant buildings of the city clustered below, their metal walls gleaming with all the colours of the spectrum as they caught the rays of the morning sun. Lower still, the checkerboard fields of the automatic farms stretched away until they were lost in the mists of the horizon. But for once, the beauty of the scene was wasted on Richard Peyton II as he paced angrily among the great blocks of synthetic marble that were the raw materials of his art.
The huge gorgeously coloured masses of artificial rock completely dominated the studio. Most of them were roughly hewn cubes, but some were beginning to assume the shapes of animals, human beings and abstract solids that no geometrician would have dared to give a name. Sitting awkwardly on a ten-ton block of diamond – the largest ever synthesized – the artist’s son was regarding his famous parent with an unfriendly expression.
I don’t think I’d mind so much,’ Richard Peyton II remarked peevishly, ‘if you were content to do nothing, so long as you did it gracefully. Certain people excel at that, and on the whole they make the world more interesting. But why you should want to make a life study of engineering is more than I can imagine.
Yes, I know we let you take technology as your main subject, but we never thought you were so serious about it. When I was your age I had a passion for botany – but I never made it my main interest in life. Has Professor Chandras Ling been giving you ideas?’
Richard Peyton III blushed.
Why shouldn’t he? I know what my vocation is, and he agrees with me. You’ve read his report.’
The artist waved several sheets of paper in the air, holding them between thumb and forefinger like some unpleasant insect.

I have,’ he said grimly.’ “Shows very unusual mechanical ability – has done original work in subelectronic research,” et cetera. Good heavens, I thought the human race had outgrown those toys centuries ago! Do you want to be a mechanic, first class, and go around attending to disabled robots? That’s hardly a job for a boy of mine, not to mention the grandson of a World Councilor.’


I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing Grandfather into this,’ said Richard Peyton III with mounting annoyance. ‘The fact that he was a statesman didn’t prevent your becoming an artist. So why should you expect me to either?’
The older man’s spectacular golden beard began to bristle ominously.

I don’t care what you do as long as it’s something we can be proud of. But why this craze for gadgets? We’ve got all the machines we need.



The robot was perfected five hundred years ago: spaceships haven't changed for at least that time; I believe our present communications system is nearly eight hundred years old. So why change what's already perfect?'
That's special pleading with a vengeance!' the young man replied. 'Fancy an artist saying that anything's perfect! Father, I'm ashamed of you!'
'Don't split hairs. You know perfectly well what I mean. Our ancestors designed machines that provide us with everything we need No doubt some of them might be a few per cent more efficient. But why worry? Can you mention a single important invention that the world lacks today?'
Richard Peyton III sighed.
'Listen, Father,' he said patiently. 'I've been studying history as well as engineering. About twelve centuries ago there were people who said that everything had been invented - and that was before the coming of elec­tricity, let alone flying and astronautics. They just didn't look far enough ahead - their minds were rooted in the present.
The same thing's happening today. For five hundred years the world's been living on the brains of the past. I'm prepared to admit that some lines of development have come to an end, but there are dozens of others that haven't even begun.
Technically the world has stagnated. It's not a dark age, because we haven't forgotten anything. But we're marking time. Look at space travel. Nine hundred years ago we reached Pluto, and where are we now? Still at Pluto! When are we going to cross interstellar space?'
'Who wants to go to the stars, anyway?'
The boy made an exclamation of annoyance and jumped off the diamond block in his excitement.
'What a question to ask in this age! A thousand years ago people were saying, "Who wants to go to the Moon?" Yes, I know it's unbelievable, but it's all there in the old books. Nowadays the Moon's only forty-five minutes away, and people like Harn Jansen work on Earth and live in Plato City.
'We take interplanetary travel for granted. One day we're going to do the same with real space travel. I could mention scores of other subjects that have come to a full stop simply because people think as you do and are content with what they've got.'
'And why not?'
Peyton waved his arm around in the studio.

'Be serious, Father. Have you ever been satisfied with anything you've made? Only animals are contented.'
The artist laughed ruefully.

'Maybe you're right. But that doesn't affect my argument. I still think you'll be wasting your life, and so does Grandfather.' He looked a little embarrassed. 'In fact, he's coming down to Earth especially to see you.'
Peyton looked alarmed.

'Listen, Father, I've already told you what I think. I don't want to have to go through it all again. Because neither Grandfather nor the whole of the World Council will make me alter my mind.'
It was a bombastic statement, and Peyton wondered if he really meant it. His father was just about to reply when a low musical note vibrated through the studio. A second later a mechanical voice spoke from the air.
'Your father to see you, Mr Peyton.'

He glanced at his son triumphantly.

'I should have added,' he said, 'that Grandfather was coming now. But I know your habit of disappearing when you're wanted.'
The boy did not answer. He watched his father walk toward the door. Then his lips curved in a smile.
The single pane of glassite that fronted the studio was open, and he stepped out on to the balcony. Two miles below, the great concrete apron of the parking ground gleamed whitely in the sun, except where it was dotted with the teardrop shadows of grounded ships.
Peyton glanced back into the room. It was still empty, though he could hear his father's voice drifting through the door. He waited no longer. Placing his hand on the balustrade, he vaulted over into space.
Thirty seconds later two figures entered the studio and gazed around in surprise. The Richard Peyton, with no qualifying number, was a man who might have been taken for sixty, though that was less than a third of his actual age.
He was dressed in the purple robe worn by only twenty men on Earth and by fewer than a hundred in the entire Solar System. Authority seemed to radiate from him; by comparison, even his famous and self-assured son seemed fussy and inconsequential.
'Well, where is he?'

'Confound him! He's gone out the window. At least we can still say what we think of him.'
Viciously, Richard Peyton II jerked up his wrist and dialled an eight-figure number on his personal communicator. The reply came almost instantly. In clear, impersonal tones an automatic voice repeated endlessly:

'My master is asleep. Please do not disturb. My master is asleep. Please do not disturb. . . .'
With an exclamation of annoyance Richard Peyton II switched off the instrument and turned to his father. The old man chuckled.

'Well, he thinks fast. He's beaten us there. We can't get hold of him until he chooses to press the clearing button. I certainly don't intend to chase him at my age.'
There was silence for a moment as the two men gazed at each other with mixed expression. Then, almost simultaneously, they began to laugh.
CHAPTER TWO

The Legend of Comarre

Peyton fell like a stone for a mile and a quarter before he switched on the neutraliser. The rush of air past him, though it made breathing difficult, was exhilarating. He was falling at less than a hundred and fifty miles an hour, but the impression of speed was enhanced by the smooth upward rush of the great building only a few yards away.
The gentle tug of the decelerator field slowed him some three hundred yards from the ground. He fell gently toward the lines of parked flyers ranged at the foot of the tower.
His own speedster was a small single-seat fully-automatic machine. At least, it had been fully automatic when it was built three centuries ago, but its current owner had made so many illegal modifications to it that no one else in the world could have flown it and lived to tell the tale.
Peyton switched off the neutraliser belt - an amusing device which, although technically obsolete, still had interesting possibilities - and stepped into the airlock of his machine. Two minutes later the towers of the city were sinking below the rim of the world and the uninhabited Wild Lands were speeding beneath at four thousand miles an hour.
Peyton set his course westward and almost immediately was over the ocean. He could do nothing but wait; the ship would reach its goal automatically. He leaned back in the pilot's seat, thinking bitter thoughts and feeling sorry for himself.
He was more disturbed than he cared to admit. The fact that his family failed to share his technical interests had ceased to worry Peyton years ago. But this steadily growing opposition, which had now come to a head, was something quite new. He was completely unable to understand it.
Ten minutes later a single white pylon began to climb out of the ocean like the sword Excalibur rising from the lake. The city known to the world as Scientia, and to its more cynical inhabitants as Bat's Belfry, had been built eight centuries ago on an island far from the major land masses. The gesture had been one of independence, for the last traces of nationalism had still lingered in that far-off age.
Peyton grounded his ship on the landing apron and walked to the nearest entrance. The boom of the great waves, breaking on the rocks a hundred yards away, was a sound that never failed to impress him.
He paused for a moment at the opening, inhaling the salt air and watching the gulls and migrant birds circling the tower. They had used this speck of land as a resting place when man was still watching the dawn with puzzled eyes and wondering if it was a god.
The Bureau of Genetics occupied a hundred floors near the centre of the tower. It had taken Peyton ten minutes to reach the City of Science. It required almost as long again to locate the man he wanted in the cubic miles of offices and laboratories.
Alan Henson II was still one of Peyton's closest friends, although he had left the University of Antarctica two years earlier and had been studying biogenetics rather than engineering. When Peyton was in trouble, which was not infrequently, he found his friend's calm common sense very reassuring. It was natural for him to fly to Scientia now, especially since Henson had sent him an urgent call only the day before.
The biologist was pleased and relieved to see Peyton, yet his welcome had an undercurrent of nervousness.
'I'm glad you've come; I've got some news that will interest you. But you look glum - what's the matter?'
Peyton told him, not without exaggeration. Henson was silent for a moment.
'So they've started already!' he said. 'We might have expected it!'
'What do you mean?' asked Peyton in surprise.
The biologist opened a drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope. From it he extracted two plastic sheets in which were cut several hundred parallel slots of varying lengths. He handed one to his friend.
'Do you know what this is?'
'It looks like a character analysis.'
'Correct. It happens to be yours.'
'Oh! This is rather illegal, isn't it?'
'Never mind that. The key is printed along the bottom; it runs from Aesthetic Appreciation to Wit. The last column gives your Intelligence Quotient. Don't let it go to your head.'
Peyton studied the card intently. Once, he flushed slightly.
'I don't see how you knew.'
'Never mind,' grinned Henson. 'Now look at this analysis.' He handed over a second card.
'Why, it's the same one!'
'Not quite, but very nearly.'
'Whom does it belong to?'
Henson leaned back in his chair and measured out his words slowly.
'That analysis, Dick, belongs to your great-grandfather twenty-two times removed on the direct male line - the great Rolf Thordarsen.'
Peyton took off like a rocket.
'What!'
'Don't shout the place down. We're discussing old times at college if anyone comes in.'
'But - Thordarsen!'
'Well, if we go back far enough we've all got equally distinguished ancestors. But now you know why your grandfather is afraid of you.'
'He's left it till rather late. I've practically finished my training.'
'You can thank us for that. Normally our analysis goes back ten gener­ations, twenty in special cases. It's a tremendous job. There are hundreds of millions of cards in the Inheritance Library, one for every man and woman who has lived since the twenty-third century. This coincidence was dis­covered quite accidentally about a month ago.'
'That's when the trouble started. But I still don't understand what it's all about.'
'Exactly what do you know, Dick, about your famous ancestor?'
'No more than anyone else, I suppose. I certainly don't know how or why he disappeared, if that's what you mean.
Didn't he leave Earth?'
No, He left the world, if you like, but he never left Earth. Very few people know this, Dick, but Rolf Thordarsen was the man who built Comarre.’
Comarre! Peyton breathed the word through half-open lips, savouring its meaning and its strangeness. So, it did exist, after all! Even that had been denied by some.
Henson was speaking again.
'I don't suppose you know very much about the Decadents. The history books have been rather carefully edited. But the whole story is linked up with the end of the Second Electronic Age.Twenty thousand miles above the surface of the Earth, the artificial moon that housed the World Council was spinning on its eternal orbit. The roof of the Council Chamber was one flawless sheet of crystallite; when the members of the Council were in session it seemed as if there was nothing between them and the great globe spinning far below.
The symbolism was profound. No narrow parochial viewpoint could long survive in such a setting. Here, if anywhere, the minds of men would surely produce their greatest works.
Richard Peyton the Elder had spent his life guiding the destinies of Earth. For five hundred years the human race had known peace and had lacked nothing that art or science could provide. The men who ruled the planet could be proud of their work.
Yet the old statesman was uneasy. Perhaps the changes that lay ahead were already casting their shadows before them. Perhaps he felt, if only with his subconscious mind, that the five centuries of tranquillity were drawing to a close.
He switched on his writing machine and began to dictate.
The First Electronic Age, Peyton knew, had begun in 1908, more than eleven centuries before, with De Forest's invention of the triode. The same fabulous century that had seen the coming of the World State, the airplane, the spaceship, and atomic power had witnessed the invention of all the fundamental thermionic devices that made possible the civilisation he knew.
The Second Electronic Age had come five hundred years later. It had been started not by the physicists but by the doctors and psychologists. For nearly five centuries they had been recording the electric currents that flow in the brain during the processes of thought. The analysis had been appallingly complex, but it had been completed after generations of toil. When it was finished the way lay open for the first machines that could read the human mind.
But this was only the beginning. Once man had discovered the mechan­ism of his own brain he could go further. He could reproduce it, using transistors and circuit networks instead of living cells.
Toward the end of the twenty-fifth century, the first thinking machines were built. They were very crude, a hundred square yards of equipment being required to do the work of a cubic centimetre of human brain. But once the first step had been taken it was not long before the mechanical brain was pefected and brought into general use.
It could perform only the lower grades of intellectual work and it lacked such purely human characteristics as initiative, intuition, and all emotions. However, in circumstances which seldom varied, where its limitations were not serious, it could do all that a man could do.
The coming of the metal brains had brought one of the great crises in human civilisation. Though men had still to carry out all the higher duties of statesmanship and the control of society, all the immense mass of routine administration had been taken over by the robots. Man had achieved freedom at last. No longer did he have to rack his brains planning complex transport schedules, deciding production programmes, and balancing budgets. The machines, which had taken over all manual labour centuries before, had made their second great contribution to society.
The effect on human affairs was immense, and men reacted to the new situation in two ways. There were those who used their new-found freedom nobly in the pursuits which had always attracted the highest minds: the quest for beauty and truth, still as elusive as when the Acropolis was built.
But there were others who thought differently. At last, they said, the curse of Adam is lifted forever. Now we can build cities where the machines will care for our every need as soon as the thought enters our minds -sooner, since the analysers can read even the buried desires of the sub­conscious. The aim of all life is pleasure and the pursuit of happiness. Man has earned the right to that. We are tired of this unending struggle for knowledge and the blind desire to bridge space to the stars.
It was the ancient dream of the Lotus Eaters, a dream as old as Man. Now, for the first time, it could be realised. For a while there were not many who shared it. The fires of the Second Renaissance had not yet begun to flicker and die. But as the years passed, the Decadents drew more and more to their way of thinking. In hidden places on the inner planets they built the cities of their dreams.
For a century they flourished like strange exotic flowers, until the almost religious fervour that inspired their building had died. They lingered for a generation more. Then, one by one, they faded from human knowledge. Dying, they left behind a host of fables and legends which had grown with the passing centuries.
Only one such city had been built on Earth, and there were mysteries about it that the outer world had never solved. For purposes of its own, the World Council had destroyed all knowledge of the place. Its location was a mystery. Some said it was in the Arctic wastes; others believed it to be hidden on the bed of the Pacific. Nothing was certain but its name -Comarre.
Henson paused in his recital.
'So far I have told you nothing new, nothing that isn't common know­ledge. The rest of the story is a secret to the World Council and perhaps a hundred men of Scientia.
'Rolf Thordarsen, as you know, was the greatest mechanical genius the world has ever known. Not even Edison can be compared with him. He laid the foundations of robot engineering and built the first of the practical thought-machines.
'His laboratories poured out a stream of brilliant inventions for over twenty years. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. The story was put out that he tried to reach the stars. This is what really happened:
Thordarsen believed that his robots - the machines that still run our civilisation - were only a beginnning. He went to the World Council with certain proposals which would have changed the face of human society. What those changes are we do not know, but Thordarsen believed that unless they were adopted the race would eventually come to a dead end -as, indeed, many of us think it has.
'The Council disagreed violently. At that time, you see, the robot was just being integrated into civilisation and stability was slowly returning - the stability that has been maintained for five hundred years.
'Thordarsen was bitterly disappointed. With the flair they had for attract­ing genius the Decadents got hold of him and persuaded him to renounce the world. He was the only man who could convert their dreams into reality.'
'And did he?'
'No one knows. But Comarre was built - that is certain. We know where it is - and so does the World Council. There are some things that cannot be kept secret.'
That was true, thought Peyton. Even in this age people still disappeared and it was rumoured that they had gone in search of the dream city. Indeed, the phrase 'He's gone to Comarre' had become such a part of the language that its meaning was almost forgotten.
Henson leaned forward and spoke with mounting earnestness.
'This is the strange part. The World Council could destroy Comarre, but it won't do so. The belief that Comarre exists has a definite stabilising influence on society. In spite of all our efforts, we still have psychopaths. It's no difficult matter to give them hints, under hypnosis, about Comarre. They may never find it but the quest will keep them harmless.
Tn the early days, soon after the city was founded, the Council sent its agents into Comarre. None of them ever returned. There was no foul play; they just preferred to remain. That's known definitely because they sent messages back. I suppose the Decadents realised that the Council would tear the place down if its agents were detained deliberately.
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