"... You will gather from this that I do not take time-travel very seriously; nor, I think, does anyone else - even the writers who have devoted most effort and ingenuity to it. Yet the theme is one of the most fascinating - and sometimes the most moving - in the whole of literature, inspiring works as varied as Jurgen and Berkeley Square. It appeals to the deepest of all instincts in mankind, and for that reason it will never die. "

Arthur C. Clarke's concern with time travel and time paradoxes was not central. We can meet some stories in his early works, like Time's Arrow or All the Time in the World, but they are rather exceptional. The most fascinating picture of a timeless city has been given in his early but outstanding novel "The City and the Stars" (1956, rev. version of "Against the Fall of Night", 1953).

"That night Davis did not sleep well. He dreamed that he was walking along a road that stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. He had been walking for miles before he came to the signpost, and when he reached it he found that it was broken and the two arms were revolving idly in the wind. As they turned, he could read the words they carried. One said simply: To the Future, the other: To the Past."

"Ashton stared again at the unbelievable shunting engine, the plume of steam frozen motionless above it as if made of cotton wool. He realized now that the clouds were equally immobile; they should have been scudding across the sky. All around him was the unnatural stillness of the high-speed photograph, the vivid unreality of a scene glimpsed in a flash of lightning."

""Just now, Mr. Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I am afraid, irrelevant. You see, your world has no more history to alter.""

""Tell me, Alvin," he (Jeserac) said, "have you ever asked yourself where you were before you were born - before you found yourself facing Etania and Eriston at the Hall of Creation?"
"I assumed I was nowhere - that I was nothing but a pattern in the mind of the city, waiting to be created - like this.""

"The human body had changed not at all in the billion years since the building of Diaspar, since the basic design had been eternally frozen in the Memory Banks of the city..."

"(Jeserac told Alvin:) "... you will be surprised how many people take the world so much for granted that it never bothered them or even crosses their mind..." "

"(Khedron said:) "Diaspar is not merely a machine, you know - it is a living organism, and an immortal one... Here we have a tiny, closed world which never changes except in its minor details, and yet which is perfectly stable, age after age... How did Diaspar achieve its extraordinary stability? ... Through the Memory Banks... Diaspar is always composed of the same people, though their actual groupings change as their bodies are created or destroyed... With exactly the same people, you could build many different patterns of society..."

"(Khedron said:) "...With exactly the same people, you could build many different patterns of society. I can't prove that, and I've no direct evidence of it, but I believe it's true. The designers of the city did not merely fix its population; they fixed the laws governing its behavior. We're scarcely aware that those laws exist, but we obey them. Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot change outside of narrow limits. The Memory Banks store many other things outside the patterns of our bodies and personalities. They store the image of the city itself, holding its every atom rigid against all the changes that time can bring. Look at its pavement - it was laid down millions of years ago, and countless feet have walked upon it. Can you see any sign of wear? Unprotected matter, however adamant, would have been ground to dust ages ago. But as long as there is power to operate the Memory Banks, and as long as the matrices they contain still control the patterns of the city, the physical structure of Diaspar will never change."
"But there have been some changes," protested Alvin. "Many buildings have been torn down since the city was built, and new ones erected."
"Of course (Khedron replied) - but only by discharging the information stored in the Memory Banks and then settling up new patterns. In any case, I was merely mentioning that as an example of the way the city preserves itself physically. The point I want to make is that in the same way there are machines in Diaspar that preserve our social structure. They watch for any changes, and correct them before they become too great. How do they do it? I don't know - perhaps by selecting those who emerge from the Hall of Creation. Perhaps by tampering with our personality patterns; we may think we have free will, but can we be certain of that?...""

"(Khedron daid:) "Stability, however, is not enough. It leads too easily to stagnation, and thence to decadence. The designers of the city took elaborate steps to avoid this, though these deserted buildings suggest that they did not entirely succeed. I, Khedron the Jester, am part of that plan...
... I introduce calculated amounts of disorder into the city... "

"On rare and unforeseeable occasions, the Jester would turn the city upside-down by some prank which might be no more than an elaborate practical joke, or which might be a calculated assault on some currently cherished belief or way of life. All things considered, the name "Jester" was a highly appropriate one. There had once been men with very similar duties, operating with the same license, in the days when there were courts and kings."

"(Jeserac said:)... "We both know that Alvin is a Unique - that he has never experienced any earlier life in Diaspar..." "

""You remember," said the Jester, "that I once told you how the city was maintained - how the Memory Banks hold its pattern frozen forever. Those Banks are all around us, with all their immesurable store of information, completely defining the city as it is today. Every atom of Diaspar is somehow keyed, by forces we have forgotten, to the matrices buried in these walls...."
..."That is no model; it does not really exist. It is merely a projected image of the pattern held in the Memory Banks, and therefore it is absolutely identical with the city itself. These viewing machines here enable one to magnify any desired portion, to look at it life size or larger. They are used when it is necessary to make alterations in the design, though it is a very long time since that was done...""
 

"The city lay spread out beneath him; he looked down upon it like a god..."

"Diaspar might be held in a perpetual stasis by its eternity circuits, frozen forever according to the pattern in the memory cells, but that pattern could itself be altered, and the city would then change with it... "

"The monitor was now recalling its memories at a far higher rate; the image of Diaspar was receding into the past at millions of years a minute, and changes were occurring so rapidly that the eye could not keep up with them. Alvin noticed that the alterations to the city appeared to come in cycles; there would be a long period of stasis, then a whole rash of rebuilding would break out, followed by another pause. It was almost as if Diaspar were a living organism, which had to regain its strength after each explosion of growth.
Through all these changes, the basic design of the city had not altered. Buildings came and went, but the pattern of streets seemed eternal, and the park remained as the green heart of Diaspar."

"Why should anyone accept death when it was so unnecessary, when you have the choice of living for a thousand years and then leaping forward through the millenniums to make a new start in a world that you have helped to shape?....
He (Alvin, studying Lys) found part of his answer among the children, those little creatures who were as strange to him as any of the animals of Lys. He spent much of his time among them, watching them at their play and eventually being accepted by them as a friend. Sometimes it seemed to him that they were not human at all, their motives, their logic, and even their language were so alien. He would look unbelievingly at the adults and ask himself how it was possible that they could have evolved from these extraordinary creatures who seemed to spend most of their lives in a private world of their own."

"The great polyp had become the Master's last disciple for a very simple reason. It was immortal. The billions of individual cells from which its body was built would die, but before that happened they would have reproduced themselves. At long intervals the monster would disintegrate into its myriad separate cells, which would go their own way and multiply by fusion if their environment was suitable. During this phase the polyp did not exist as a self-conscious, intelligent entity - and here Alvin was irrestibly reminded of the manner in which the inhabitants of Diaspar spent their quiescent millenniums in the city's memory Banks."

"As a human mind may dwell for a little while upon a single thought, so the infinitely greater brains which were but a portion of the Central Computer could grasp and hold forever the most intricate ideas. The patterns of all created things were frozen in these eternal minds, needing only the touch of a human will to make them reality."

"(Alvin said to Jeserac:) "... Like Diaspar itself, like this robot - like everything that the builders of the past considered really important - it was preserved by its own eternity circuits. As long as it (the Master's ship) had a source of power, it could never went out or be destroyed; the image carried in its memory cells would never fade, and that image controlled its physical structure.""

"He (Alvin) was driven by forces that had been set in motion ages before, by the men of genius who planned Diaspar with such perverse skill - or by the men of even greater genius who had opposed them. Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people, he was so unaccountable a creature that they sometimes forgot that he still shared their emotions..."

"(Yarlan Zey said:) "It took a thousand years to build the city and all its machines. As each of us completed his task, his mind was washed clean of its memories, the carefully planned pattern of false ones was implanted, and his identity was stored in the city's circuits until the time came to call it forth again.
So at last there came a day when there was not a single man alive in Diaspar; there was only the Central Computer, obeying the orders which we had fed into it, and controlling the Memory Banks in which we were sleeping. There was no one who had any contact with the past - and so at this point, history began.
Then, one by one, in a predetermined sequence, we were called out of the memory circuits and given flesh again. Like a machine that had just been built and was now set operating for the first time, Diaspar began to carry out the duties for which it had been designed....
... The Uniques were our invention. They would appear at long intervals and would, if circumstances allowed them, discover if there was anything beyond Diaspar that was worth the effort of contacting...""

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