The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  I wondered, briefly, how a medium-sized creature like a man could support so much parasite, when a large creature like an ox could apparently support so little.

  The leader walked his mount back to the group, passing between my beast and Nathan’s, and then going through the corridor opened up by the attendants. We followed him, the archers being left to bring up the rear.

  “There’s something very odd about that man,” murmured Mariel, her voice blurring slightly because of the suit.

  “Apart from his being a eunuch, you mean?”

  She turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder at me. She hadn’t picked that up.

  “He’s got a mind like a brick wall,” she said. “I can’t read him at all.”

  “He hasn’t got what you might call an expressive face,” I agreed. “But give it time.”

  “It’s more than that,” she insisted. “There are some people it’s difficult to read, sure. I have to be able to look at them for a while, or touch them. The talent isn’t like tuning in a radio to people’s thought waves. I’ve met blanks before...but this one is a sort of positive blank. No...that’s wrong...don’t for God’s sake start thinking about mind-shields and things like that. It isn’t that kind of thing at all.... Most of what I pick up, you see, is peripheral. It’s the fringes of what people say—the things they mutter under their breath, the commentary on their own actions, their unvoiced reactions to what they see and hear. But there seems to be nothing of that in his face. As if his mind were...still...completely settled...ordered.”

  “I saw his eyes narrow,” I told her. “When he first saw you. Do you think he can sense your talent? Maybe he....”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think that it just didn’t fit in with his calculations—three people and two mounts. That’s what I’m trying to say about him. He calculates everything. Every move, every thought. It’s precise. No ragged edges for me to pick up on the borders of verbal communication.”

  “Mechanical,” I said.

  “If you like.”

  “Like a robot.”

  The mount was walking forward with precisely measured strides. I was just holding the rein limply. The beast knew where it was going. It knew what it was doing. It moved like a machine. A robot.

  She couldn’t see my face, and there were two layers of plastic between us, but she knew me pretty well by now. She didn’t need all the frills to use her talent on me.

  “Something’s frightened you,” she said.

  “You’re dead right,” I told her. “I’m half inclined to duck out of this party right now. I’ve got a very nasty feeling.”

  I was harboring a thought which struck me as being one of the worst I’d ever harbored. I was thinking that if the parasite cells could mimic all kinds of host cells, that probably included brain cells too. And I was just wondering what might be the implications of a parasite that could turn itself into a mimic of a thinking human brain.

  I didn’t have to explain to Mariel. She was getting it all by mental osmosis.

  “Puppets...?” she said. Somehow, despite the suit, she managed to whisper.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But if....”

  My fears piled up like pennies. Only minutes before I’d been prepared to discount the possibility that Nathan or I might have contacted a stray parasite cell drifting around on the morning breeze and it wouldn’t have worried me much if I’d found out that I had. But I was worrying now.

  Darkness was falling, and that certainly didn’t help. Fears always seem worse in the dark. There were a good many stars beginning to peep through in the sky, and the afterglow was dying slowly, but I couldn’t see the ground that we were traveling over. The oxen plodded on, absolutely sure of themselves.

  “Take it easy,” I told Mariel. “The time’s right for nightmares. All these ideas are just ghosts oozing out of the dark recesses of my imagination.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “So let’s stay calm and look at the situation as it is. Let’s not let our fears make prior judgments.”

  I was talking to myself as much as to her, and she knew that. She didn’t resent it.

  It took as long to descend the hill on which the Daedalus stood and to toil up the long slope to the crown of the next hill as it had in the early morning. Personally, I’d sooner have walked on my own feet than ridden the rather repulsive creatures that had been laid on as transport. But in making contacts there has to be a little give and take, and I suffered gladly for the cause.

  I studied the patterns that the stars made in the sky, looking for the brighter lights that were Arcadia’s neighbor planets. She had no moons but this solar system was fairly crowded as solar systems go. There was one beautiful evening star, and I picked out one other close by in the curve of the ecliptic across the night sky, but that was all.

  When we came to the crest of the hill, however, there was something else to look at. Even in darkness, the City of the Sun commanded attention, shining with a vast array of tiny lights that stretched across its great staggered disk to vanish in the distance.

  There were lights on the rims of the walls and lights in the streets, as well as lamps lighting thousands of windows. Most of the lamps were oil-fired, but the lights on the walls were gaslights, burning whiter and brighter. They showed up the white of the walls and made the whole city seem aglow.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” I said to Mariel.

  “It’s so big,” she murmured. “Did a few thousand people really manage to build that in a few decades? Without heavy machinery...without even any source of power except their muscles and the oxen, and whatever they could improvise.”

  “You can do a lot in a hundred years,” I said. “If you set your mind to it. They had all the resources Earth could give them. No bulldozers, but a lot of suggestions as to how to make do without.”

  Even so, she was right. It was quite something for a few thousand people to knock together in a few decades, starting from scratch. It must have taken a great many people a great deal of their lives. And all of their dedication and commitment. The colony had certainly gone single-mindedly about realizing its Utopian fantasies. And with the parasites bleeding off all the spare energy the while....

  It might not be too good to be true, I thought, but it’s surely too good to have been that simple.

  There were a few lantern lights bobbing in the fields like will-o’-the-wisps, but it was too dark to see what the people who carried them might be doing. The great majority had finished for the day and gone home. To what? Rest and play.... Or more work?

  “I think they’re still building it,” I said. “I think they’ll be building it for a long time to come. The gross work is finished, but inside...there must be a long way to go...so much still to be done.”

  “Especially,” she said, “if they are writing all the wisdom of the ages on the seven great walls.”

  “They may be copying the City of the Sun,” I said, “but I can’t see them taking their model quite that seriously.”

  But as it turned out, I was wrong.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The walls seemed to flow and ripple in the unsteady light of the gas lamps and the yellow glow of the multitude of oil-fired lanterns. The outer face of the outermost wall had been smooth, but the outer surface of the second wall was not. As we entered the city through a great gate which opened to admit us and then closed behind us we could look ahead along a wide thoroughfare which led uphill to the second wall and another gate. Around the gate and extending away on either side until buildings blocked our view the wall was decorated with sculpted tiles. Their color was pure white, and from the top of the distant hill, by the diffuse light of the morning sun, they had been quite invisible. But now their lines were etched in shadow, and the wall was completely covered by their “writing.”

  At first, I thought that they might be abstract decorations, simply for adornment, but as we climbed the hill on our plodding mount
s it became abundantly clear that this judgment was ill-made. Each tile was perhaps two feet in diameter—they were stacked twenty deep, and a rough calculation suggested to me that each row probably contained twenty thousand tiles, assuming that they extended all the way around the wall. That made four hundred thousand tiles on this wall alone. There were still five more—albeit getting smaller and smaller in circumference as we neared the center. That added up to a lot of tiles. If there were a thousand stonemasons each carving one a day....

  My mind gave up the calculation in favor of boggling. But I knew that no one mounts several million tiles on the walls of his city just so that they’re not so boring to look at. If this was art for art’s sake these people went in for aesthetics in a very serious way.

  At close range, I saw that they were pictographs...highly stylized images. At first it struck me as silly, but then I wasn’t so sure. If I were charged with the task of writing all the wisdom of the world on a wall how would I start? Not by starting in the top left-hand corner and copying out the Encyclopedia International from the famous German river Aa all the way through to the infamous zymotic diseases. In all likelihood, I’d put aside cultural chauvinism and forget phonetic writing altogether. I might use something more like the old Chinese system. After all, they weren’t just expert pictographers...they also went in for the building of big walls.

  The pictographs weren’t the wisdom of the ages, I decided...but they had to be there to symbolize the wisdom of the ages. Every picture an idea...and all the ideas that they thought important assembled together, classified and ordered. Not just for decoration, then. A higher aim, of sorts. It sure looked more impressive than a data bank of microfilms and fiches. A work of art indeed.

  But why? I wondered.

  I couldn’t read the pictographs. That was something that would have to be learned—maybe by every child born in the city...if it were humanly possible for a child to learn the secrets of several million pictographs in a few short years. Or even in a lifetime.

  Nobody could, I murmured, under my breath.

  “Nobody could what?” asked Mariel.

  “Learn the meaning of all those pictographs,” I said. “It’s impossible. What’s the use of having all the wisdom in the world written out in the open in letters two-feet high if no single person could ever learn enough to make sense of it all?”

  “Perhaps they’re not meant to learn it all,” she said. “Perhaps it’s up there in letters two-feet high to remind them that no one person could learn it all—to remind them all how dependent they are on others.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, without sarcasm.

  “You think it’s true?” she asked.

  “I don’t know whether it’s true,” I told her, “but it’s a neat theory.”

  We passed beneath the second gate, and entered the second circle. Ahead loomed the third wall, and it came as no surprise to see it tiled in similar fashion to the second. I looked back to see if the inner face of the wall were similarly adorned, but there was no inner face—the buildings of the city grew out of the inner wall, square blocks stacked atop one another in calculated asymmetry, three or four stories high with catwalks connecting the sections of the uppermost level and ladders between levels. It was impossible to say where one building “ended” and another “began”—there were just units in wayward piles. It reminded me strongly of a hollow “artificial mountain” that I’d once seen in a zoo, made for monkeys to live in.

  “Think of the time and effort involved in building and decorating those walls,” said Mariel. “It wouldn’t be a matter of man-hours...whole man-lives. People whose contribution to the colony consisted solely of a few thousand tiles hacked out of soft white stone.”

  “Not necessarily,” I told her. “This may be one of those Marxist Utopias where no one is a sculptor but everyone sculpts. Maybe everyone in the colony has contributed his tile, or his group of tiles. Perhaps they’re monuments as well as ideas. A substitute for gravestones. Maybe they are gravestones, and everyone who ever lived in the city is entombed in its walls. We’ll find out, in time.”

  There is a well-known illusion which seems to make the edges of long straight roads converge as you look along them. The main highway of the City of the Sun, however, really did get narrower as we went along it. Its pavements really did aim to meet, and not at an imaginary, infinitely distant point but at a point which was geometrically defined with absolute precision—the dead center of the city. As we toiled up the hill, therefore, the buildings drew closer on either side. Through the unglazed windows of the upper stories we could see lamplight reflected from ceilings, but that, alas, was just about all we could see of the home life of the citizens. The ground floor units had fewer windows, and these tended to be either dark or curtained. There were no open doors. No one came to the windows to look at the peculiar visitors dressed in plastic bags. Even the people we passed on the road gave us no more than cursory and quite incurious glances. It wasn’t that we were being deliberately ignored—just that no one seemed to have any particular interest in us.

  “Can you read them?” I asked Mariel.

  “I get something,” she said, “but it’s so vague, so strange. I get the feeling that they all know about us, that we’re familiar. I know that gossip spreads fast and the news that we’ve landed is probably all over the city...but none of them seem to want to know more. They see us, they recognize us, that’s it. They seem hardly reactive—not simply to us, but even to the things in their own environment. Look at the way they move, and the way they hardly seem to interact with one another. If they were like zombies that would be more understandable, but I don’t think they are zombies. They’re conscious and aware, I’m sure of it, but their consciousness is so settled, so certain.... Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “If they really were robots,” I said, “then they couldn’t think for themselves. They’d be automata. But this automatism is facultative. They could think and react if they wanted to, but they don’t. They have no curiosity.”

  “That’s it,” she confirmed. “That’s what I mean. That’s what I get from watching them and trying to read them.”

  Perfectly ordered minds, I thought. Total confidence in both self and environment. As if....

  As if they really did know everything.

  Not just all the wisdom known to man, but all the wisdom possible. Such total security could only be an illusion. Couldn’t it?

  “Whatever the parasite is doing,” I said to Mariel, “it isn’t just sitting on their backs keeping them company. If it hasn’t taken them over completely—and there’s too much here that’s human for me to believe that—then it’s certainly given them a lot more control over their own minds than we have.”

  One thing that struck me particularly was the cleanness of the road along which our beasts of burden trudged. There were drains set in the angle of the pavement and the road surface itself, protected by stone grilles. The holes were quite small, but they seemed to have collected virtually no detritus. They didn’t smell of anything particularly noxious. We were at the end of a working day, on what was presumably the busiest street in the city, used by people, oxen, carts and carriages, but there was no mess.

  Orderly minds, I thought, orderly bodies, orderly habits. Even the yaks are toilet trained.

  I thought of the title of a paper: “Solutions to the Sewage Problem in Classical Utopian States.” Knowing the UN, though, they’d never let me publish. They’d classify it secret.

  We passed into the fifth circle, and saw that the penultimate wall was as fully developed as all the rest.

  “It’s not so hot, now I come to think about it,” I said. “Every wall in New York has a covering of graffiti six layers thick. And New York is much bigger than this place.”

  “In New York,” observed Mariel, “they use spray cans, not chisels.”

  “Maybe we’d better not talk about this back home, then,” I said. “We might give them idea
s.”

  There was hardly any traffic on the road. We passed a couple of ox-drawn covered carts on their way down the hill, but we saw no one else riding, and no carriages. Everyone who was going anywhere was going on foot, and even the pavements were not thronging with people by any means. The incurious pedestrians were all capped in black, and they all seemed to be slimly built. Their heights were various but none was very tall. The great majority of the tunics were white, but I saw a few of the yellow tunics which had seemed most common in the fields. Some wore pale blue, some pale brown in various shades. There was no difference in dress which would have allowed me to differentiate between the sexes...in fact there seemed to be almost no way to differentiate. The tunics were gathered in at neck and waist, but tended to stand out from the body in stiffish folds in between. It wasn’t easy to pick out the line of a breast. It should have been a great deal easier to pick out the line of a pregnancy, but I saw none. Of course, it was dark, and the street lighting wasn’t particularly efficient. The worst of it was that the crowds were silent. There were no conversations. Like commuters in any city in America or China or Africa or Australia they all passed by without the merest hint of greeting or caring. There was no way for me to measure what proportion of the total population had silvery voices.

  It wasn’t easy to draw inferences from what we saw.

  Eventually, we reached the final circle—the arena within the final wall. Here the gate was closed, and two men dressed in pale green had to emerge from small doors within to haul back the two wooden battens. I half expected to find this innermost circle to be a glorified football stadium with gigantic banks of seating and a small central area where visitors occasionally got fed to the lions. Instead, there were gardens, planted with trees and exotic plants, laid out with a careful and artistic lack of symmetry.