"I leave you to choose the manner of your death."
"You see before you," said Sark Darlin, with a gesture toward his office window, "the realization of a dream that endured for a thousand years. Eighteen generations of long-lived architects have had their part in the dream, and through that window you see the result."
Of course I had seen it before, but I never tired of it. Sark Darlin had reason to be proud. The culmination, this man, of a thousand years of specialization. He was old, and his wife had given him no man-child to carry on the family tradition. The growth of City of the East would die with Sark Darlin, and a little of the sadness of it showed in his face as he beckoned me to the window. I, as his son-in-law, must take up the torch he must relinquish, but I—I was not a Darlin, and the pill was a bitter one for Sark to swallow. Yet he loved me, else he never would have allowed my addresses to his daughter—for that is the law.
His hand was on my shoulder as we stood side by side and gazed from the window. We were in his office on the top floor of the Executive Building, five hundred stories above ground level. Outside the window, the platform for the landing of monopters thrust outward into space. Looking downward beyond the edge of the platform I could see the other platforms below, one at each window, scores and scores of them, like perches before the uncountable doors of some mighty Gargantuan dovecote. Straight across
