The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  “All right,” he said, soothingly. “What you need, we’ll get. When it’s necessary. All I’m saying is that we have to be careful. We don’t know what might happen if we step out through the lock now. The agreement died.”

  “If they’d wanted to play it rough,” I said, “they had plenty of opportunity. They saved my life.... They let me come back here to tell you all what I’d seen. Does that sound like all-out war to you? They still think that they can talk—persuade us to recognize their point of view.”

  “In that case,” said Nathan, “they’ll be along to reopen negotiations, in their own good time.”

  I shook my head, and went back to work. It was the safest and sanest course.

  There was nothing new to do, and nothing to be discovered at this stage. It was just a matter of going on and on...checking, tabulating, looking at results. As the parasite grew on the cultures which permitted it to grow we tested our range of means of killing it. It wasn’t easy to kill.... We found nothing that would neatly excise it from human tissue without wreaking havoc among the human cells as well. That was only to be expected.

  Linda began to produce a list of the simpler molecules characteristic of the parasite’s metabolic pathways. The unfortunate thing was that even at this level there were discrepancies between specimens grown in different tissues. The cells were metabolically versatile. There were still a lot of molecules that were present in every instance, but as we went further up the scale of complexity that list would probably get whittled down dramatically. By the time we got to molecules of such size and delicacy they could easily be singled out for attack there might be very few indeed that were inevitably involved in the creature’s metabolic processes no matter what circumstances it was growing in.

  The hours slid by with remarkable rapidity. Linda went off-shift and Conrad came back on. I let him take over the experiments he’d initiated and I took over from Linda. We ate on the job.

  We didn’t talk. We didn’t get in one another’s way. We’d established something like a perfect working relationship—inside the lab, at least. Outside we speculated, argued, compared ideas. Inside, we worked. When we did talk, it was to pass on information with the maximum efficiency and the minimum fuss. We just didn’t notice the hands of the clock rolling round. I got tired, but I didn’t pay it much attention. Once you settle your body and mind into a rhythm, then all you need is something to keep both your mind and your hands occupied. You can go on almost forever, falling into a kind of mesmeric trance.

  When Linda appeared in the doorway of the lab again I simply assumed that the time had flown and that it was my turn to sleep. I was almost through the door when I noticed that she wasn’t dressed for work, and that she was calling out to Conrad, too.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. I looked up at the clock and saw that it was just before midnight, ship’s time. The shift had three more hours to run.

  “Karen dragged me out of bed. There’s someone outside the ship. And he isn’t from the city.”

  It took a moment to sink in. I still had to change gear, mentally, and the automatic transmission just wasn’t working.

  “Not from the city,” I repeated, trying to make the words divest themselves of their meaning.

  Then I got the point.

  Everyone else was in the main room except for Pete, who was in the control room. There was an image on the screen being relayed by the external camera with the help of light intensification. It showed a man who was exploring, the area around the airlock with his fingertips, as if looking for a door handle or a crevice into which he could insert his fingers. His eyes had the glassy quality of the unseeing.

  I moved round to let Conrad and Linda get into position, and found myself jostling Karen’s elbow.

  “He tripped an alarm with his body heat,” she murmured. “I got a red light, roused Pete. Then everyone else, as soon as we got an image and saw....”

  She didn’t have to go on. It was obvious enough what she’d seen.

  The man had hair...a lot of hair. He was naked to the waist, and the only thing growing on his body, so far as we could see, was thick, curly hair. On his chest and on his back. He wasn’t very big, but he was wiry. His muscles were thick, with no fat on them. The hair on his head grew long, and was tied behind with a ragged piece of cloth. His beard had been hacked short.

  He turned away from the ship’s smooth outer wall as he seemed to hear a sound somewhere nearby, and we saw the whole expanse of his back. There was not the slightest sign of a black spider web.

  He found the rim of the airlock with his fingertips, and tried to get his fingernails into the crack—a stupid, futile gesture, but one which served to communicate to us something of his urgency.

  “It looks,” said Conrad, calmly, “as if the parasite didn’t get them all after all.”

  “You said you saw no sign,” whispered Nathan, to me.

  “I didn’t,” I assured him. “But what does that prove? You can’t draw conclusions from an absence of evidence.”

  He knew that as well as I did. I looked across at him, and saw his brow furrowed in concentration. He was worried. This was something he had not anticipated. The city people had told him that there were no men outside the city. I had found nothing to suggest that there might be. The suspicion that was niggling away at his mind was quite straightforward.

  Was this a trick?

  “That hair didn’t grow overnight,” I said. “And I don’t believe that the city people can just take off their dendrites as if they were shedding a vest.”

  “Let him into the airlock,” said Karen. “We don’t need to let him any farther. We can talk over the intercom. But let him in.... He’s scared. They may be watching the ship.”

  “And those archers are good,” I said. “I wouldn’t reckon on the dark to stop them.”

  “Did you ever hear of the Trojan Horse?” objected Nathan.

  “He doesn’t look Greek to me,” said Karen.

  “All right,” said Nathan, swiftly. “Tell Pete to let him in.”

  With a little effort I could have resented his automatic assumption of command in this situation, but I let it go. He was making the only decision possible.

  We watched the surprise on the hairy man’s face as the outer lock slid back into its bed. He jumped back, and it seemed that he almost turned and ran. But he overcame his reflexes with no more than a moment’s thought, and practically leapt through the opening into the chamber.

  Karen called to Pete, and the outer door slid shut again. The image on the screen changed. It went dead for a second, then showed nothing but blackness. Then Pete switched on the light in the lock, and we saw the visitor cover his eyes with his hands against the brilliance. He slipped into a kind of defensive crouch. As soon as he could bear the glare of the light he peeped out through his fingers, furtively.

  Nathan plugged a microphone into the panel beneath the screen and punched the combination to link it to the speaker in the wall of the decontamination chamber.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  The answer was obviously affirmative. The man in the airlock jumped like a startled hare at the sound. He looked up, and his eyes fixed almost immediately on the speaker. The camera was just above it, and so he seemed to be staring straight at us from the screen. His hair was dark brown, almost black. His skin was tanned and leathery. The trousers which were his only garment apart from moccasins on his feet were made from the hide of one of the creatures we called oxen.

  Before he answered he took another look around—at the shower heads, the controls on the decontamination unit, at the lockers where various pieces of equipment and the suits were stored. But he didn’t touch anything.

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “We can see you by means of a camera,” said Nathan. “I’m afraid there’s no provision for you to see us. But there’s a microphone near the speaker. We can hear you clearly. I can’t let you come any farther. Don’t try to operate the
controls on the inner door—they’re frozen from the control room. You have to stay there. We don’t dare let you in because of the danger of...infection.”

  “I’m not from the city,” he said. “I’m from the north.”

  Nathan glanced at me. I shrugged.

  “You came to find us?” asked Nathan.

  “My name’s Antolin Sorokin,” said the other. “One of our men saw the city people at the ship two days ago. He saw the man in the plastic suit that was with them. We decided that it must mean visitors...from Earth. There was a big meteor some time ago.”

  “Yes,” said Nathan. “That was us.”

  The hairy man didn’t let him go on. “I had to come under cover of darkness,” he said. “The archers might be nearby, though you aren’t in their lands. And I had to come alone. If they knew I was here....”

  Nathan put his hand carefully over the microphone, and turned to Mariel.

  “Is he telling the truth?” he asked.

  There was a moment’s silence. Mariel was staring intently at the image on the screen.

  “Yes,” she said, finally, “I think he is.”

  “But...,” prompted Nathan.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something a little bit odd. His expressions aren’t quite...right. But it’s not necessarily abnormal. I’ve met similar signs before, in people who just aren’t socially...well-adjusted, if you know what I mean.”

  “But he’s not lying?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “And he certainly doesn’t give the impression of being like the people of the city.”

  Nathan uncovered the microphone.

  “Are you saying that the archers would kill you if they knew you were trying to make contact with us?”

  “What do you think?” said Sorokin, harshly. “They shoot on sight. They’d hunt us down and kill every last one of us if they thought they could. But we know the territory better than they do. Did they even tell you that we exist?”

  “No,” said Nathan. “They denied it.”

  “They were afraid you might help us,” said Sorokin.

  I stretched my hand out, leaning across the table.

  Nathan, after a brief hesitation, passed me the microphone.

  “Are you immune to the parasite?” I asked.

  He laughed, but without humor. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we must be. We avoid all possible contact with it, and we eat a lot of meat because we think that it doesn’t like carnivores, but we don’t know that either of those things is what stops us from being affected. Maybe we’re naturally immune, maybe not. But we’re free of the thing, and we do our best to stay free.”

  It was my turn to cover the mike. “If he is naturally immune,” I told Nathan, “it changes things. It changes them a lot.”

  He nodded.

  I gave the mike back to him.

  “How many of you are there?” he asked.

  “Six hundred or so,” replied Sorokin. “We’re not all together. Small groups, mostly. We move around a lot. If we settled we’d be vulnerable.... Those bowmen don’t miss. There may be more of us somewhere else. Every now and again a few set out to go as far away as they can...thousands of miles, to find somewhere that they can settle in safety.”

  “But most of you stay here. Why?”

  “There’s a lot of game in the valley. It’s easy living. We know the country, we know how to survive. Over the mountain...who knows what’s there? But people try, as I say. Maybe I’ll try someday. Maybe we all will. And in the meantime, if things are rough...sometimes we raid the city. Their fields. We always try to steal a little to store up for the winter.”

  “I see,” said Nathan. “And now that you’re here, what do you want from us?”

  “Help,” he replied.

  “What kind of help?”

  “We want you to help in the war against the city,” said Sorokin, as if he were slightly angered by having to spell it out. “What else? You’ve seen them—you know what they are. Surely you’ll help us, won’t you?” There was a sharp note in his voice as it rose in pitch. For a brief second, it almost acquired the note that I associated with the unbroken voice of the dark Servant.

  “If we can,” said Nathan, reassuringly. “And you may be able to help us. We can find out whether you do have natural immunity...and if you do, then perhaps we can give you all the help you need.”

  Promises, promises, I thought.

  “Come back with me now,” urged Sorokin. “We can get away while it’s still dark. I’ll show you how things are up north.”

  Nathan didn’t want to be rushed quite that fast. “What happened in the colony when the parasite first took hold?” he asked. “Can you tell us about it?”

  “I wasn’t even born,” protested the man in the airlock. “I was born in a cave in the hills. Even my father and mother don’t remember. What they say is that the black stuff just appeared and spread like wildfire. They couldn’t find any way to kill it. After a while they got to ignoring it, because it didn’t seem to do any harm. They found out that the black things could link up but it didn’t seem to matter. It was only after eighty or ninety percent of the people were infected that it started getting into people’s minds and linking brains. Then the people who had the disease had no choice but to live with it. They were trapped. My father’s father and others of his generation stayed with the infected people for a long time, but one by one they were still coming down with it.... Nobody could be sure that he was immune. People started to leave. Others were thrown out by the infected ones, who’d taken up a lot of new habits, like vegetarianism, and discovered a whole range of new sins. In the end, they all left...all the ones that weren’t infected. And now we live wild. The war’s been going on for as long as I know and as long as my father knows. They’re not human any more. To them, we’re just carnivores—animals.”

  Even before he’d finished, Nathan had covered up the microphone again, and was checking with Mariel.

  “It sounds reasonable,” he said. “It could all be true. But is it?”

  “You know there’s no way I can be certain,” she said. “I can’t pluck his thoughts right out of his head. I can only pick up what I see. All I can say is that I’ve no reason to think he’s lying. No guarantees.”

  “All right,” he said. “We work on that assumption. Who goes with him?”

  “How about you?” I asked, sarcastically.

  He could have reeled off a dozen convincing reasons, but I already knew the real one. He didn’t want to go because that would leave me in effective command here. He wanted to stay close to the city, and keep his iron grip on events aboard the Daedalus.

  “Are you listening?” said Sorokin, who’d been left dangling in silence.

  “We heard everything,” answered Nathan smoothly. “We’re just holding a brief discussion among ourselves—to decide who comes with you.” He covered the mike again. “Someone’s got to investigate this question of immunity,” he said. “It had better be you, Alex. You said yourself that getting results out of the lab will take time. This new avenue may provide a shortcut. But you can’t take Linda or Conrad with you—they’ll have to keep up the work here.”

  “I’ll go,” volunteered Mariel.

  “I don’t think so,” said Nathan. “There’s still a lot of work here that you’ve already started. Karen can go.”

  “Sometimes,” said Karen, “I resent this constant implication that I’m more expendable than anyone else. I get all the dirty jobs to do.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But you’ll do it. You wouldn’t want me to go out alone to face all the dangers of the wilderness, now would you?”

  “I suppose someone has to look after you,” she muttered. “Get him out of the lock and let’s decontaminate. Then I’ll get suited up and we can join him outside. It’s about time we had a little excitement.”

  Nathan spoke into the mike. “We’re going to turn off the light and open the door,” he said. “Wait out
side. Two of us will join you in a few minutes. You have time to get well away before dawn.”

  The screen went dark, and then Pete switched back to the external camera. We saw Sorokin crouching outside, listening hard to the sounds of the night.

  “Suddenly,” I said, “I feel very tired.”

  “Take a pill,” said Nathan.

  “How?” I replied, bitterly.

  He touched the tip of his tongue to the filters on his own suit. Then he looked at me and grinned.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “You don’t believe in luck,” I reminded him. “And neither do I.”

  “I mean it,” he assured me.

  I didn’t know whether to call it diplomacy or showmanship.

  “While I’m gone,” I said, seriously, “you’ll be sure and not pull any more shifty little tricks, won’t you?”

  “I won’t,” he assured me. He was handing out a lot of assurance. I was almost tempted to ask Mariel whether he was telling the truth.

  But I was afraid of the answer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As soon as the empty lock had gone through the normal decontamination procedure Karen handed me one of two packs that she’d made up, and we went through.

  We emerged into deep darkness. It wasn’t just the effect of coming out of the light—there was a lot of heavy cloud obscuring the stars, and the only light was a very faint glow to the east—the sky’s reflection of the feeble lights of the City of the Sun. We stood still for several moments, trying to acclimatize our eyes as far as was possible. We didn’t dare use a light immediately lest we attract unwelcome attention.