
Sin, which in the unthinkable past had flowed through a forest of primeval beauty, and then through a
countless succession of cities, through ancient ages of empires. The City grew about the Sin, and enveloped
it, so that, stone-channelled, it flowed now through the halls of the City, thundering from the tenth to the
fourteenth level in a free fall, and flowing meekly along the channel within the fourteenth, a grand canal which
supplied the City and made it self-sufficient. The Sin came from the outside, but it was so changed and
channelled that no one remembered that this was so. No one remembered the outside. No one cared. The
City was sealed, and had been so for thousands of years.
There were windows, but they were on the uppermost levels, and they were tightly shuttered. The inhabitants
feared the sun, for popular rumor held that the sun was a source of vile radiations, unhealthful, a source of
plagues. There were windows, but no doors, for no one would choose to leave. No one ever had, from the day
the outer walls were built. When the City must build in this age, it built downward, digging a twentieth and
twenty-first level for the burial of the dead... for the dead of the City were transients, in stone coffins, which
might always be shifted lower still when the living needed room.
Once, it had been a major pastime of the City, to tour the lower levels, to seek out the painted sarcophagi of
ancestors, to seek the resemblances of living face to dead so common in this long self-contained city. But
now those levels were full of dust, and few were interested in going there save for funerals.
Once, it had been a delight to the inhabitants of the City to search the vast libraries and halls of art for
histories, for the City lived much in the past, and reveled in old glories... but now the libraries went unused
save for the very lightest of fictions, and those were very abstract and full of drug-dream fancies.
More and more... the inhabitants remembered.
There were a few at first who were troubled with recollections and a thorough familiarity with the halls—when
once it was not uncommon to spend one's time touring the vast expanse of the City, seeing new sights.
These visionaries sank into ennui... or into fear, when the recollections grew quite vivid.
There was no need to go to the lower levels seeking ancestors. They lived... incarnate in the sealed halls of
the City, in the persons of their descendants, souls so long immured within the megalopolis that they began
to wake to former pasts, for dying, they were reborn, and remembered, eventually. So keenly did they recall
that now mere infants did not cry, but lay patiently dreaming in their cradles, or, waking, stared out from
haunted eyes, gazing into mothers' eyes with millennia of accumulated lives, aware, and waiting on
adulthood, for body to overtake memory.
Children played... various games, wrought of former lives.
The people lived in a curious mixture of caution and recklessness: caution, for they surrounded themselves
with the present, knowing the danger of entanglements; recklessness, for past ceased to fascinate them as
an unknown and nothing had permanent meaning. There was only pleasure, and the future, which held the
certainty of more lives, which would remember the ones they presently lived. For a very long time, death was
absent from the halls of the City of Lights.
Until one was born to them.
Only rarely there were those born new, new souls which had not made previous journeys within the City,
babes which cried, children who grew up conscious of their affliction, true children among the reborn.
Such was Alain.
He was born in one of the greatest of families—those families of associations dictated more by previous lives
than by blood, for while it was true that reincarnation tended to follow lines of descendancy, this was not
always the case; and sometimes there were those from outside the bloodline who drifted in as children, some
even in their first unsteady steps, seeking old loves, old connections. But Alain was new. He was born to the
Jade Palace Family, which occupied the tenth level nearest the stairs, although he was not of that family or
indeed of any family, and therefore grew up less civilized.
He tried. He was horribly conscious of his lack of taste, his lack of discrimination which he could not excuse
as originality: originality was for—older—minds and memories. His behavior was simply awkward, and he
stayed much in the shadows in Jade Palace, enduring this life and thinking that his next would surely be