|
In my mind theater, I hear Patrick Steward or Helen Mirren reading the prologue while the camera sweeps across the ancient deserts toward Diaspar:
Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert's face, but in the street of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. The long winter nights might dust the desert with frost, as the last moisture left in the thin air of Earth congealed -- but the city knew neither heat nor cold. It had no contact with the outer world; it was a universe itself.
Men had built cities before, but never a city such as this Some had lasted for centuries, some for millenniums, before Time had swept away even their names. Diaspar alone had challenged Eternity, defending itself and all it sheltered against the slow attrition of the ages, the ravages of decay and the corruption of rust.
Since the city was built, the oceans of Earth had passed away and the desert had encompassed all the globe. The last mountains had been ground to dust by the winds and the rain, and the world was too weary to bring forth more. The city did not care; Earth itself could crumble and Diaspar would still protect the children of its makers, bearing them and their treasures safely down the stream of time.
The had forgotten much, but they did not know it. The were as perfectly fitted to their environment as it was to them -- for both had been designed together. What was beyond the wall of the city was no concern of theirs; it was something that had been shut out of their minds. Diaspar was ll the existed, all that they needed, all that they could imagine. It mattered nothing to them that Man had once possessed the stars.
Yet sometimes the ancient myths rose up to haunt them, and they stirred uneasily as they remembered the legends of the Empire, when Diaspar was young and drew its lifeblood from the commerce of many suns. They did not wish to bring back the old days, for the were content in their eternal autumn. The glories of the Empire belonged to the past, and could remain there -- for they remembered how the Empire had met its end, and at the thought of the Invaders the chill of space itself came seeping into their bones.
Then they would turn once more to the life and warmth of the city, to the long golden age whose beginning was already lost and whose end was yet more distant. Other men had dreamed of such an age, but they alone had achieved it.
They had lived in the same city, had walked the same miraculously unchanging streets, while more than a billion years had worn away.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
