The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  I was slightly more surprised when the Servant turned up with four archers. We hadn’t seen much of the archers since our first trip to the city—they’d been discreetly confined to their inner circle barracks. When I asked the Servant what they were needed for, he simply said: “It is dangerous.”

  “What kind of danger?” I asked.

  “Carnivores,” he replied.

  The river valley supported large herds of the yak-deer, and various smaller herbivorous species ranging in size from mice to sheep. There were various carnivores that preyed on them, but the only ones likely to be dangerous to a mounted man were dog-like creatures carelessly labelled “wolves” which hunted in packs.

  “They attack men?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Sometimes it is still necessary to take carts overland to strip metal from the remains of the ships. When we make camp at night, the carnivores come. And if there is injury—the smell of blood on the wind will bring them.”

  “That’s why you have archers? To defend caravans against carnivores?”

  “And to defend the beasts in the fields,” he confirmed.

  “The beasts? Or their companions?”

  His black eyes met mine unwaveringly. “Beast and companion are one,” he said.

  The parasite infested only herbivorous species. No carnivore could have a companion. The people of the city were all vegetarians, although they ate fish and drank milk. They wouldn’t have dreamed of eating any creature that might carry the parasite—or was potentially capable of so doing—and they expressed distaste at the prospect of eating carnivore meat as well, lest they should be consuming second-hand the flesh of a host creature.

  Our ill-assorted party set out in the early hours of the morning—a while before dawn—and followed the river northward. For the first time the all-purpose yak-deer showed me what they could do in terms of speed. I was pleasantly surprised, not so much by the pace, but by the fact that even when they were going at a steady trot they were quite stable. I had anticipated an extremely uncomfortable ride, and expected to pay with soreness for my two-day jaunt into the wilderness, but it wasn’t that bad.

  The Servant led the way, while the archers grouped themselves around me like a guard of honor. I didn’t find it a very satisfactory arrangement, and tried to match strides with the dark man so that conversation would be possible. My mount responded well enough to my urging, but the Servant—without being too obvious about it—kept trying to drift away to a discreet distance. I persisted until he would have had to make it obvious that he was deliberately avoiding me, and finally he capitulated.

  “This is good land,” I said. “Most colonies would have spread out to occupy it—the people coming out from Earth appreciate the space, the room to expand. Why do you stay huddled together in the city, cultivating just enough land to support you?”

  “We are one Nation,” he replied. “We live together.”

  “Staying in one place makes you vulnerable to disaster,” I pointed out. “One bad winter—one blight—any kind of disaster—would have you in serious trouble.”

  “We have enough for our needs,” he said. “There is always more food in the sea.”

  “And what happens as your population expands?” I asked. “Do you keep adding walls to the city, and extending the ring of cultivated land around it? You can’t do that forever.”

  “The Self will decide,” he assured me.

  I had no doubt of it. It would decide to limit population, one way or another. Or it would decide that another city should be built, and another, and another....

  But he wasn’t interested. He just knew that when the question arose it would be answered. I couldn’t understand that lack of interest in future possibilities. How was he motivated if not by anticipation of some kind or another? But his life promised him no rewards that I could understand. He had his role to play and he fulfilled it scrupulously. I was tempted to ask him what his ambitions were, what were his goals in life, but I knew the answer I would get. A blank stare, insulting in its demonstration of lack of comprehension.

  One of us is crazy, I thought, and I wish I was sure it isn’t me.

  The oldest objection to Utopian schemes is that they offer no one the incentive to work. No one depends upon his own efforts, but only on the efforts of the community as a whole. No one does anything for himself, but only for the community as a whole. Cynics say that Utopia can’t work. I agreed with them. Ants and bees can do it, but their communities have but a single mind—the collective identity of the hive.

  Much of what we had seen here on Arcadia suggested that the people had achieved a similar kind of collective identity—their city and their life were very hive-like. But it was difficult to see how association with the parasite had done that to them—or for them. Even if companionship was the biggest kick in the world...even if parasite cells mimicking brain cells gave the host brain new potential and new powers...it was difficult to see how. Unless they were genuinely telepathic. I kept coming back to that possibility. They couldn’t read our minds—that was for sure. And Mariel couldn’t read theirs. I didn’t believe that they could read each other’s thoughts, either. Yet they had this extremely strong sense of social unity, an inordinately powerful empathy not with one another but each with the whole.

  And they all knew that God existed. They knew it, beyond all question. Could that knowledge, I wondered, have its source in the same empathic experience?

  “What happens,” I asked him, “to people who die?”

  His face had relaxed slightly during the silence. Now I saw muscles suddenly tighten. His face was set hard. I knew I was close to the area that the Self had designated as forbidden—the knowledge that was being held back from us until we volunteered for the proper route to understanding.

  “Their bodies are destroyed,” he said.

  “In the gas plant?” I asked. “With the shit and the seaweed?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  It didn’t seem to show much respect. It was logical...perhaps a little too logical. But that wasn’t the key issue. What I really wanted to know was.... “And what happens to the companion?”

  His face was already set hard, and not a muscle flickered now.

  “The companion does not die,” he said. Which was true enough. Communalities never die. Individual cells die, but their death doesn’t affect the whole in the way that the wearing out of cells affects intricately structured organisms.

  “So what happens to it? Does it pull up its roots and wait to be transplanted to a new host?”

  “I cannot answer that question,” he said. At least it was an unequivocal declaration. This is where the barrier comes down. Here are the secrets that we’re hiding from you for the duration of our twenty-day guessing game.

  “And what about the soul of the dead man?” I went on. “Does it get to heaven via the gas generator? Does it rise from the mess to meet its maker?”

  The sarcasm, of course, was wasted—and also a little uncalled-for.

  “The soul,” he replied, “is not changed by death. It is as it always was, in and of the Self.”

  There, again, was the mentality of the hive. The individual is only a part of the whole. The life and mind of the whole is unaffected by the death of the individual. The individual has been a part of the whole, but once dead he is nothing, and the whole is the same. Why should they respect their dead? What do I do with the detritus of a haircut, or with fingernail parings? What do I care about the skin cells that are sloughed off every day? They have been part of me, they are no longer. I am unaltered. But those cells, never had any kind of individual existence. If I were a sentience based in a communal pseudo-organism, would I think the same way? And if I were part of a human society that had somehow acquired the mentality of a communal pseudo-organism, could I then think of my own life in the same terms that I thought of the life of those nail parings or skin cells?

  Maybe.

  But I still couldn’t fathom out ex
actly what might be happening here...what kind of relationship existed between the Arcadians and their parasites. It might be a wonderful partnership, with the black cells giving all kinds of benefits in return for the nutrients they took from their hosts—better control of body and mind, perhaps protection against disease if the parasite’s defensive resources were added to the host body’s. On the other hand, it might be total control of victim by predator—all the same benefits, but worked exclusively by and for the dendrites and their purely hypothetical independent sentiences generated in plagiarized brains.

  Such sentiences, if they did exist, would have some big advantages over their original models. Versatility. And immortality. And the only limitation on their potential and their intelligence would be how big they could grow. How much black parasite tissue could each human support? What kind of extra biomass could the human appetite sustain in addition to its own. I thought back to Earth. I had seen some very big appetites—and I had seen people carrying an awful lot of excess biomass superfluous to—and even endangering—their own requirements.

  Even if it’s true, I thought, it could be worse. Suppose something like this had evolved on Floria, where everything grows to giant size....

  The hills on the west side of the river drew back toward the horizon as we rode, and there was soon a large, flat plain extending away to our left. On the far bank we could still see the moorland beyond the river valley, but the sky was gray and overcast, and the hilltops were blurred by the gloomy cloud.

  The vegetation was strangely patchy, dark and light shades of green contrasting to make a kind of mosaic. Where there were trees they tended to grow in small clumps—there were one or two small woods but no forests. We crossed a number of small streams and gullies which brought water from the farther reaches of the river basin. The river itself was wide here and moved slowly in its course.

  While we stayed close to the river bank we saw plenty of wildlife. I saw several herds of large herbivores—some the same species as the beasts we were riding. We passed among one herd that had come to the river to drink. They showed no sign of fear. I was interested to note that about half the animals had black dendrites visible beneath the shaggy fur. It was possible that some of the other animals were invisibly infected, but I passed close enough to two to be sure that there were no black lines masked by their fur.

  The heath was liberally scattered with burrows that belonged to smaller mammals, and we often saw groups of these feeding in clumps of tall plants, standing on their hind legs and balancing with their tails in order to reach the growing shoots. These creatures were so common that they had to be a major force in maintaining the rather bleak ecological equilibrium in the river valley, stopping the invasion of shrubs and young trees that might take the land toward a forest climax community.

  Twice I saw predators attack the groups while they fed—both times successfully—but these carnivores were as small as their victims: long, lean animals like weasels. There was nothing that looked like a wolf—or even a fox.

  There were no obvious signs to say that humans had ever passed this way before. I judged that the expeditions to recover metal and plastic from the ships must be few and far between nowadays, and there was nothing else to draw the people of the city out this way. The stone that they used in the city came from quarries and cliff faces along the coastline and in the hills to the northeast of the city, on the far side of the river valley. The stone was transported on barges along the coast and up the river.

  As we passed within sight of one of the herds of yak-deer, I steered my way to the side of the Servant again, and said: “If wolves were to appear now, harrying that herd, what would you do?”

  “The archers would kill the wolves,” he replied.

  “And if the pack turned to run—would you pursue them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? They’d only return once you had gone, or find another herd. You couldn’t cheat them of their prey forever.”

  “We cannot prevent every act of slaughter that occurs in the wilderness,” he said, blandly. “If we are nearby, then it is right that we should intervene. But we cannot systematically exterminate the carnivore species.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  I prompted him. “There may come a time when you have the manpower and the time...maybe not to free the whole world of carnivores, but at least to liberate a lot of herds in these lands. Isn’t that a reason for you to expand out here?”

  “That,” he stated, “is for the Self to decide.”

  “But it wouldn’t be against the Self’s principles to mount such a pogrom, would it? If it were possible to exterminate the carnivore populations, drive their species into extinction, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

  “They are carnivores,” he replied.

  He didn’t have the spirit of a true conservationist. His idea of morality—the Self’s morality—didn’t extend to carnivores. I wondered whether he knew that when given the opportunity I was a bit of a carnivore myself. I supposed that he did—these people hadn’t forgotten all that their ancestors had known on Earth, merely shelved it within their minds and discarded some of what they considered to be the dross. But I, at least, was a redeemable carnivore. If pushed, I could live on a vegetarian diet plus fish, just as they did.

  “Some of these animals out here don’t have companions,” I observed. “Are they immune? Is there some kind of natural check on the spread of the parasite in the wild?”

  I didn’t really expect much of an answer to that. I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything he might know about immunity. But what he did say was very strange.

  He said: “Nothing here is shaped by the Self.”

  I had to think about that for a moment or two, and he tried to generate some distance between us by urging his mount to the left. I shoved mine in the same direction.

  “Are you saying that even the parasitized beasts out here are different in some way from these domesticated ones?” I asked. “Do you mean to say that you also count the beasts of burden in your idea of the Nation’s Self?”

  “We are one Nation,” he replied. It wasn’t exactly a flat yes, but it wasn’t a flat no. And surely, if I was wrong, a flat no would have served.

  Votes for oxen, I thought. And why the hell not? They pull the ploughs and the carts.

  But oxen were stupid. If ox plus companion added up to something semi-intelligent, the extra contribution could only come from the black dendrite. But how? If the wild oxen out here, parasitized or not, were excluded, what was different about the domestic oxen.

  Human hosts die, I thought. Dendrites don’t.

  I looked down at the neck of my trusty steed, wondering if the network of thin black lines might once have been the Servant’s Uncle Harry. Or Uncle Harry’s companion, to be strictly accurate. If it was, it had lost an awful lot of weight...unless the internal ramifications of the ox-dendrites were much more extensive than the internal ramifications of the man-parasites....

  It was all pure speculation. There was so much speculation. If only one small piece would fall into place perhaps we could sort out the truth from its welter of concealing illusions, and everything would come together. Just one small extra factor...the one that the people of the City of the Sun were so determined to hide from us until the day when they could offer us understanding.... Until the day when understanding might come far too late, if our worst fears were halfway justified.

  The Servant had moved away again.

  Gentle rain began to fall from above. It didn’t bother me—I was dressed for it. It didn’t seem to bother the Servant or our cohort of guards, either. The naked archers seemed quite oblivious to wind and water. Whether this was because the parasite enhanced their temperature regulation or whether they were just stoical there was no way to tell. Raindrops settling on the visor blurred my vision, and I wiped them away with my hand. A couple soaked into the leaf-filter and I sucked them through. It took a lot of
sucking for a very small payoff.

  Which seemed to symbolize our present situation as regarded coming to terms with Arcadia’s colony.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As the day wore on the country seemed to get wilder. The rain never came down really hard but it was steady, and the clouds from which it came seemed to sink toward the earth while the invisible sun sank toward the western horizon. My guard of honor rode on, so steadfastly and uncomplainingly that I felt like apologizing to them for dragging them out on such a day. But there was nothing to say and nothing to see, and I whiled away the hours looking forward to our arrival in the hope that the stripped-down body of the ship might still offer some shelter.

  We reached the target with a couple of hours to spare before dark. There wasn’t a lot left of what had once been a gigantic machine—a veritable space whale. She’d been built on the moon and then lifted into Earth orbit (gravity was no object so far as her rule-bending drive unit was concerned, but air was—she was built to travel through atmosphere exactly once, on the way down). Her outer hull and most of the bulkheads had been plundered and cannibalized—it was all usable stuff. Everything that could be torn off or ripped out had been. What was left behind was the metal that was impossible to remove—the basic skeleton of the ship and much of the drive unit, plus lots of garbage left over from previous raids. The ground was littered with silica chips and plastic debris too small to improvise into anything useful.

  We took shelter near the drive unit, where there was a ridge of structural material—more of a ledge than a roof, but enough to keep the rain off. Two of the archers went out into the gray murk—to collect wood, the Servant solemnly informed me.

  “It’ll be too wet to burn,” I told him.

  He didn’t deign to answer. He burrowed around in the rain-shadow of the drive unit, and the other archers investigated all the other sheltered cracks and corners, and they assembled a reasonable pile of dead leaves, twigs, tubers and the like that weren’t quite dry, but on the other hand weren’t exactly soaking. One of the archers reached into the quiver where he carried his arrows and produced a block of some waxy substance. He squeezed it between his fingers and spread the detritus around the pile of rubbish, putting the remainder of the block back into the quiver. He then produced a spark-making device along the lines of a tinderbox and ignited the wax. It flared up, lit the pile of rubbish, and soon burned healthily enough for the damp wood brought back by the foragers to be introduced piece by piece without mishap. It would need constant attention to keep it in, but it was shielded from the rain.