The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  “I thought you people didn’t bother so much about keeping warm,” I said.

  “The night will be cold,” said the dark man, affably. “The fire will help to keep us dry. And it will discourage predators. You still have an hour before dark. This is what you came out here to see. Look around.”

  I took the hint. I was dry anyhow. And I had come to see whatever there was to be seen. Somehow, in the rain it didn’t seem like such a good idea. What could picking over the bones of an old spaceship tell me?

  There were birds nesting in the articulations of many of the metal limbs. There were a lot of droppings scattered on the ground, suggesting that our arrival had disturbed quite a crowd of small mammals. I searched assiduously for anything that might offer some insight into the years during which the ship had been stripped—a piece of imperishable plastic with something written on it...even graffiti on the skeletal struts. As I looked and didn’t find anything I began to feel a little stupid. But I had to keep looking for one small piece of evidence that might reveal the fact that I was trying to discover: whether the people in the city were, in fact, all the people living on Arcadia. If there were other men here—men without black spider web companions—they, too, must come here to plunder what they could from the wreckage.

  I wanted to think that they might exist. Since I had seen the herds earlier in the day, where parasitized beasts mingled with unparasitized beasts, I had—rightly or wrongly—been encouraged to hope. But I needed something else that could ignite that hope into a real possibility. I needed a sign. I didn’t really know what kind of sign I was looking for, but I was damned if I was going to miss it for want of looking.

  But night fell, and I had nothing.

  I returned to the shelter and the fire, my plastic outer skin running with tiny rivulets of rainwater.

  “You found nothing,” said the Servant.

  “I found nothing,” I confirmed.

  “We will go back in the morning.”

  I gave him a dirty look, but he didn’t appreciate it. All expressions came alike to him.

  “We’ll see how things look in the morning,” I replied.

  He didn’t ask me what I was looking for. Perhaps he thought he knew. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t.

  They had brought food with them, in packs slung across the hindquarters of the oxen. I’d brought my own rations, properly sterilized and liquefied, in containers that looked like big toothpaste tubes. They brewed up some of their insipid tea using rainwater, and offered me a bowl. I took it, just to be sociable.

  They had no sleeping bags, and were content, when the time came, to stretch themselves on the ground as they were—the archers naked, the Servant in his silvery tunic. I was wearing my sleeping bag.

  I couldn’t sleep at first, but listened to the noises of the night. There were bird calls—pleasant, fluting notes, and the occasional harsh screech that immediately made me think owl. I heard a distant barking noise, too, carried on and on by a series of throats, that might or might not have been the dreaded wolves.

  The rain stopped sometime around midnight. I remember thinking that it was a good thing the local day was a whole forty minutes shorter than a standard day, and that the night would therefore be a little shorter. It was the first good thought I’d had regarding local time, which had hitherto seemed to be against us. Twenty times forty minutes is more than thirteen hours...thirteen hours less time to make headway before our deadline expired and we were into phase two of the operation.

  As I lay in the dark, some distance away from the red glow of the fire, I couldn’t help thinking that here was a golden opportunity for the Servant and his henchmen to make a play. I was alone, not expected back for some time. It would be an easy job to overpower me, open up the suit, introduce infective material.

  But then what? A take-over takes time. They could never use me as a vector to get the stuff into the ship...not without turning me into an automaton utterly subject to the will of a black dendrite—or their wonderful Self. And to do that, they’d presumably have to tip their hand by letting the stuff grow all over me....

  They were stupid thoughts—the kind of half-rational ideas that always surface as you sink below consciousness toward sleep. They lacked sense and they lacked force, but there was no way I could keep them at bay.

  Ultimately, though, they lost their feeble grip on me and I was asleep.

  I woke into the first bright light of day.

  The fire was nothing now but a pile of ash smoldering idly away. One of the archers was squatting before it, peering through the smoke into the distance. The others were asleep—or still, at any rate.

  The sky was clear now, with only a few white clouds drifting on a mild breeze.

  The archer looked up as I approached, without any obvious interest.

  “Anything happen during the night?” I asked.

  “A wolf came,” he said laconically. “A scout for the pack. It went away.”

  “You didn’t shoot at it?”

  “I didn’t see it. I smelled it.”

  “Will it be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked out at the expanse of the plain. There was a great deal of tall grass hereabouts, with a multitude of ragged bushes and twisted trees breaking through in clumps. It looked desolate and empty, except for small birds in the branches and high in the sky.

  The dew was already rising.

  I took out another tube of tasteless but nutritious mush, and began squirting it through the filter. In the meantime I walked the length of the ship, covering much the same ground as I had the previous night, but seeming to see it better now. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and tried to gather my senses, with my hopes somewhat renewed. When I got back to the fire the others were all awake, and the Servant was coaxing the fire back to life in order to make more tea. I passed by, determined to further the investigation. I paused here and there to sort through the debris littering the ground—the useless remnants of cannibalized machines. There was no shortage of rubbish, but most of it would only interest archaeologists excavating the site in a thousand years time. They could have a fine old time identifying every last nest of printed circuits with the aid of a microscope. I wanted artifacts slightly more recent then these. Arrowheads that were not city arrowheads...tools made out of large bones, that could only have come from beasts like the oxen....

  But I was wasting my time. I had made the trip for nothing.

  “All right,” I said to the Servant, finally. “Let’s go home.”

  We mounted up and set off on the long ride home. My legs were stiff and we hadn’t gone far before I began to ache. The Servant, as he had the day before, urged his mount forward to take the lead, and when I tried to come up level with him he edged away. Mentally cursing him I coaxed my own animal sideways, trying to get closer.

  The animal responded, as always, to the pressure of my hands and heels, but all of a sudden was halted in mid-stride.

  I was catapulted forward. With neither saddle nor stirrups my position was precarious enough without sudden stops. I went head-first in an inglorious swan dive over the beast’s head. The tip of one of the coiled horns caught my right leg just above the knee and I felt both the plastic of my suit and the cloth of my one-piece being ripped. I twisted slightly in flight and came down on my left shoulder, rolling over to avoid breaking either my neck or my back. The fall shook me up badly.

  The ox also came down with a hell of a thump, but it had veered the other way in tripping and it didn’t roll on top of me—if it had, or if one of its hooves had caught me, I might have been seriously hurt. As it was, I got away with bruises and a long scratch on my leg which bled a little but wasn’t deep enough to cause any significant anguish. I was okay...but the beast wasn’t.

  I sat up, feeling very dazed, and saw the animal trying to rise. Its right foreleg was broken—the bone must have snapped clean through. The leg was flapping in a rather sickening manner. The poor creature had put
its foot into the mouth of one of the multitudinous burrows that riddled the heath while I had been trying to urge it closer to the Servant’s mount.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. Then I looked up.

  The Servant had already dismounted, and he was quick to reach the stricken beast. The ox relaxed, and stopped trying to get up. It lay back as the Servant examined the broken leg. The archers, still mounted, formed a ring around us.

  The dark man turned to stare hard at me, and for once there was an expression on his face...an expression of muted fury. I was still dazed and bewildered. But I came very rapidly to my senses when I saw that one of the archers was notching an arrow to his bow...and aiming straight between my eyes.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said thickly. “It wasn’t my fault! It was an accident!”

  The archer had paused. But it wasn’t because of anything I’d said. He was hesitating...waiting for a decision. I didn’t see how he was going to get one. The Self was a full day’s ride away.

  At last, I thought, I get to witness some spontaneity. Decision-making ad lib.

  I only wished that I weren’t the victim of the decision.

  The Servant looked at me long and hard—at my face, at the torn plastic sheathing my leg, at the blood that was staining my one-piece. Then he looked at the beast. It took him a long, long time to make up his mind. Then be just glanced at the archer and shook his head.

  I realized that I was holding my breath, and exhaled gratefully.

  “It was an accident,” I said again. “It could have happened to any of us.”

  The Servant transfixed me with a gaze that was almost venomous. At least I’d gotten a reaction out of him, though it was a reaction I couldn’t immediately understand. The ox would have to be destroyed, of course—the broken leg would finish it. But why should a mishap to a beast cause such an upswell of rage in such an imperturbable individual?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt obliged to say something.

  The Servant was caressing the neck of the injured animal, which was quite quiescent now. Its reaction to the shock and the pain had been damped down...probably by the parasite.

  I remembered what the Servant had implied regarding the beasts being part of the Nation along with the people. Was that the cause of the rage...as if I had caused the death of his brother?

  Suddenly, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen next. I watched the Servant’s hand as it slowed in its gentle movement over the hide where the black network was. The archers dismounted, and settled their mounts as if we were scheduled for a long wait. The Servant knelt down, adjusting his position so that he could be comfortable, and placed his other hand on the neck of the fallen beast.

  Then I saw the black lines on his arm begin to move.

  It was as though they were growing longer, or being stretched. The tips of the filaments that descended as far as the fingers themselves were lifted from the skin and began writhing like worms, very slowly...until they found their way into the matted hair of the beast’s mane, into which they went as if they were searching for something.

  And then I realized what a fool I’d been—what fools we’d all been—for not guessing what should have been obvious, for not realizing exactly what the situation in the City of the Sun was. I realized what the Self had decided to try and conceal from us, until one of us might be prepared to experience it for himself. And I realized why I had almost been shot...not because of the death of the beast but because I was about to witness something that would help me to understand the people of the city far more than I already did...and which would increase my fears proportionately.

  CHAPTER TEN

  We’d been misled by a simple illusion. We saw each man carrying a black dendrite and we’d automatically assumed that each man had a parasite. We’d automatically thought of each dendrite as an entity in its own right, an individual...despite the fact that we knew all along that it wasn’t an organism as such but a community of cells. Split in two, it wouldn’t have been in any way injured...it wouldn’t even have become “two” communities, just one community divided. And you could continue that process of division as far as you liked. You could divide the community into a thousand bits, and it would still be one...it would still retain the ability to connect itself up again.

  While I watched the Servant’s black companion fuse with the part of itself that had been parasitic upon the ox, to draw off the ox’s companion and leave nothing there but a wounded animal, no longer part of the Self, I realized that the City of the Sun was afflicted by only one parasitic community. The entire biomass of all the black dendrites functioned as a single gigantic entity—not so much a pseudo-organism as a super-organism.

  It didn’t take much thought, now that the basic conceptual breakthrough was achieved, to work out how the Self made its decisions. All the people had to do was to hold hands in little groups. The parasite cells would fuse—and their brains would be literally and physically linked up by a multitude of skeins of mimic-nerve tissue. Like telephone exchanges. The brains, united, would form a group mind which would take into itself all the information and all the skills of the various individual minds, and distribute the synthesis around the group, so that each individual mind would become an echo of the whole. When a decision was to be taken the people got together in small groups, each group assessing the situation. Then each member of the group would go and join another group, and the synthesis would continue as groups of groups incorporated the question and distributed assessments and attitudes. It wasn’t necessary for all the people of the city to come together simultaneously, any more than it’s necessary for every single cell in a brain to be active at once. As long as people kept touching and separating, touching and separating, there would be free flow of information and attitudes throughout the population. Effectively, every single mind would have the pooled knowledge and insight of the entire community to draw on.

  No wonder every single man and woman could understand every single one of the pictographs mounted upon the city walls. No wonder they needed only one physical representation of all that they knew and understood...and that only as a means of reinforcement, of constant support and unification of the community. Of course they needed no reference books, no data bank. No wonder their evasion of questions was so absolutely consistent and uniform throughout the city.

  I had marveled about all the features of the life of the people that were significant of a hive mind. But after rejecting telepathy as a hypothesis I had discarded the notion as anything more than a metaphor. Not for a moment had it occurred to me that there could be a physical link between minds, and that the parasite tissue, with its faculties of mimicry and adaptive versatility, could provide such a link.

  Now I saw, and understood.

  They had tried to hide from us how different from us they really were. They had let us think that they were all individuals—unnaturally similar to one another, living in unnaturally perfect order, but still individuals. They did not want us to realize how real their representation of themselves as facets of a single Self actually was. They had hoped to appear harmless...strange, but harmless. They had hoped to persuade us that we stood to lose very little by the experiment of exposing ourselves to infection—allowing the parasite access to our bodies. They hoped to take advantage of our confidence in our medical resources, our genetic engineering facilities.

  But once one of us was infected...sufficiently infected to enable the brain-to-brain linkages to be set up...then we would have been led to the full and complete understanding that was promised. We would have become part of the Self.

  Totally and irrevocably.

  Our minds would be sucked into the group, the group’s mind would have flooded our brains. It would probably take no more than a few moments, once the parasite was established.

  And then our volunteers, whoever they were, would return to the ship full of assurances about there being no danger, nothing at all to worry about. Not slaves or automata, as we
had feared in our primitive way, but merely parts of the Self, engaged in the routine business of Self-interest.

  I dropped my eyes from their fascinated study of the Servant recovering the companion from the doomed ox, and stared instead at the foot-long rent in my protective suit. I felt suddenly very sick...and the feeling had nothing to do with the sight of my blood oozing sluggishly from the scratch that ran across the side of the knee.

  I noticed then that the archers were peering intently westward, staring into the bleak wilderness. The wind was blowing that way...carrying the scent of blood. The beast’s blood, and mine. I recalled the archer’s laconic revelation that there had been a wolf prowling around the camp during the previous night.

  I got slowly to my feet, and walked past the injured ox. The Servant was in a virtual trance, and was as still as a statue.

  “Are the wolves still nearby?” I asked the bowman who’d stood guard before the dawn.

  “They will not have gone far,” he replied.

  “Will they attack?”

  “Possibly.”

  I followed the direction of their gaze with my own eyes, but there seemed to be no movement.