The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  “What happens now?” I asked, consciously echoing Karen’s question to me.

  “We must find out what you know. We must discover what your friends aboard the ship are likely to do, and what effects their actions are likely to have.”

  “You want me to tell you everything.”

  “You will tell us everything.”

  I looked around the room. I still couldn’t see a rack. Or a set of hot irons. Maybe they kept them in a cupboard somewhere.

  “To judge by the way you said that,” I said, dryly, “you have ways of making me talk.”

  He didn’t appreciate the joke, but I heard Karen laugh. She was still at the door of her cell, hanging on to every word. It was a very bitter laugh.

  “We must know the truth,” said the Ego. “The whole truth.”

  “And nothing but the truth,” I muttered. “I presume you have a truth serum.”

  “The Self,” said the man in black, “is in a uniquely privileged position to study the effects of psychotropic drugs. I think you will understand why. You recall that our companion cells are fitted by evolution to be in a constant process of experimentation. The Self has inherited, on a mental level, something of that priority. The biochemical resources of Arcadia’s life system are very rich.”

  “I’ll bet they are,” I muttered. The Self, he said, was only just beginning to realize some of its potentials. Every time it discovered a new problem it opened up a whole new spectrum of possibilities....

  “I’m afraid that I must ask you to take off your suit,” said the Ego. “We do not know what your intriguing filtration system would do to the drug. I give you my word that you will not be...infected...by the companion.”

  I wouldn’t have given twopence for his word of honor. But I didn’t even have two-pence worth of option. In a situation which offers no choice, you might as well give in gracefully.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “I think this is as good as anywhere,” he replied. “And it may be necessary to return you to your cell...afterwards.”

  I went back into the cell, and slowly began to disrobe.

  From somewhere, bang on cue, a Servant appeared with a bowl full of something that looked like runny porridge. Other Servants followed him in. There seemed to be quite a crowd. One of them brought in Karen from next door—she was allowed to keep her suit on. I presumed that in allowing her to be present they were doing me a small favor. I’d have a witness to consult later on about what had happened.

  “The drug will send you to sleep,” said the Ego, softly. “I fear the experience may not be altogether pleasant. Your persona may experience hallucinations of a vivid nature, subconsciously directed. The will, you see, must be detached from the memory, in order that information may be recalled accurately and mechanically.”

  “Forget the introductory lecture,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The Servant handed me the bowl.

  It didn’t taste anything like porridge.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I dreamed that I spent a night on the bare mountain.

  It began with the wind, which howled mournfully in the dark pines, whose branches swung and swirled like dark whirlpools, while the tree spirits danced to the echoing music of the dashing air. The sky above was clear, but the mountain was an oasis in a massive ocean of cloud, protected by some supernatural force from a storm which raged all around with such fierceness that no traveler could possibly have come to the mountain from elsewhere without the aid of a supernatural agency. North, west, south and east the skies were tormented by lightning and the land was curtained by spiteful rain.

  The witches flew through the storm protected by cocoons of impermeable shadow, assured of diabolical safe-conduct, borne aloft by demonic rams or goats, or black horses with flaring eyes, or shovels or batons thick-smeared with their anointments.

  Fires sprang up around the mountain top, which burned violet and blue—fires which clustered round the pines but could not consume them, their flames and heat mere glamour confounding the darkness of God’s night.

  The Master did not fly to the gathering but simply was...born out of the black shadows of the mountain slopes, out of the very flesh of the rock. He was monstrous both in size and form, with great horns like a ram, the beard of a goat and the legs of a great ape. His feet were eagle’s talons and his hindquarters were decorated like a male mandrill’s. Light—white light—danced around his face like a shower of blurred sparks. His flesh was translucent. Beneath the flesh could clearly be seen the yellowed skull and the roundness of the bloody-humored eyes. And there were veins that stood out within the flesh like a vast web of thick, tarry strands, that seemed at once a cage for the inner being and a manifestation of inner decay.

  The flesh of the face, all but invisible, held no expression which could be read or judged. But the eyes sat in the skull, and bulging bloody from their sockets seemed both terrible and melancholic...the fierce, despairing anger of perpetual misery.

  As the witches arrived, one by one, they presented themselves to him, bowed down before him and kissed his parti-colored hindquarters. With their mouths thus embittered they turned to one another, and kissed one another. And their flesh became clear, its opaqueness stolen away by cruel magic, to reveal the whiteness of their bones and the blackness of their veins like grotesque creatures of the sea, writhing and coiling as they moved, splitting and recombining in the bloodlust of the evil kiss.

  There were torments then, as witches who had performed insufficient evil were scourged with knotted ropes until the black veins burst the invisible surface of their lacerated flesh and oozed black blood. And every drop of black that fell remained alive, crawling like a worm into the crevices of the mountainside. All the while the witches cried the agony of their punishment, an echo of the divine retribution which would claim them all in time and send them to the ravages of misery that racked their host.

  The feast, like its master, grew up out of the substance of the rocks. Coarse grass and stones and thorns and acid earth, pine needles and bird droppings, were englamored into meat and bread and sugar and spice. The mountain streams gushed with blood and wine recklessly mixed, and the devil spat fire into the mixture to make it fume. The witches ate, knowing that their fare remained yet what it was, despite appearances, and forced their savage joy to overcome the knowledge.

  Then the celebrants dressed themselves in pantomime robes, became caricatures of priests and acolytes and actors, caricaturing even the caricatures of their own lord which appeared in plays. They performed mockeries, not only of worship but of life and death and mystery, of custom and pleasure and artistry.

  And the devil preached a sermon, with empty, unctuous promises heaped high, calling forth laughter and delight.

  The sky made music for them, the thunder becoming a battery of drums, the wind playing countless flutes in the high branches, and they danced while the devil came among them, taking them one by one to the perverted consummation of their spiritual marriage. His prick, like the flesh of his face, was transparent, like a needle of ice, and he entered them with its terrible coldness, freezing the core of their very being and leaving them with the ecstatic pain of returning fire and feeling. And while they joined their blood flowed free, and mingled as the veins writhed out of the glassy flesh and closed in bizarre union.

  On and on the Sabbat went, encapsulated in time within the sealed midnight moment, protected from the flux of the outer world by abstraction. And the timeless storm that shielded the secret place raged all around and terrorized the land.

  After the dance they laid themselves down, with the devil oozing back into the rock to caress them all simultaneously with stony fingers and thorns. And the witches joined hands and touched their feet to one another’s bodies, so that they became one vast interlocked spider web covering the animate mountain-cap, like a great living cloak.

  They were entranced....

  dreaming their own dream....

  ...whil
e the devil bound his instruments together, with one self and one will, which was his own—utterly evil and utterly damned. He instructed them in wickedness, took their thoughts and instincts and made them subservient to his own fearful passion and mad intellect, scoured their souls in commemoration of the diabolical pact by which they had signed away their humanity in blood...a pact still written in every fiber of their substance.

  I waited, hopelessly, for cockcrow.

  Cockcrow never came.

  For an infinite time, I was lost.

  Later, I found myself night-flying, as they had flown, carried through the eternal storm but concealed from its violence.

  All around me, the world went about its way.

  Like a dead leaf in the vicious wind I was tossed and hurled, but I felt as light as the air itself. The hail and the rain hammered at my body, but the pain was held back, and I felt not the lightest touch. The lightning struck and struck at me, with all the jealousy of enraged divinity, like a maddened cobra.

  Again and again and again....

  But I was numb, through and through. The electric pain could not touch me, could not alarm my flesh in the slightest. Though it stabbed at heart and mind with frenzied desperation I was safe and secure.

  I seemed to be falling rather than flying, but slowly...very slowly....

  The pain that should have made me scream wound itself around me like a living creature, with all its torment reflected back upon itself. I was immune, anaesthetized. Had my skin torn and the blood flowed I could have watched, unworried. I could have watched myself torn apart and hardly cared. Something that was me was safe, and safe forever.

  Looking down as I fell I saw two figures moving through the pines on the slope of another mountain, soaked by the rain and terrified by the thunder.

  I knew their faces, but I couldn’t remember their names.

  As I fell nearer and nearer to the direction of their flight they became clearer and clearer, but I still could not put a name or an identity to them.

  They were heading for the distant mountain, but they could neither reach nor escape the Sabbat. They would run forever, and get nowhere, with the terror too far ahead of them and hope too far behind.

  Just before my fall carried me crashing into the multitudinous needles of the treetops, the vision dissolved. It collapsed, turned liquid, and drained away, its shape and structure altogether gone.

  I realized that I was awake, though my eyes seemed to be glued shut. I didn’t try too hard to open them. I was too exhausted. Instead, I tried to gather my reeling consciousness, to reassemble the shattered fragments of my being. I tried to listen. I tried to feel. I tried to remember.

  I managed to get some sense of integrity again, to recover some sensation of wholeness. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, and the sound it made was I...I...I...I....

  Its beat was measured, not panicked. It was under control.

  I could feel cold air on the skin of my face, and a few droplets of sweat leaving cold scars as they evaporated.

  It was a fantasy, I told myself. Nothing but a fantasy.

  Then I let the monologue continue:

  We lend too much credence to unreal experiences. We are too much affected by fantasies, even in the absence of belief. Belief is only necessary in the absence of understanding. But in the absence of understanding belief is necessary. The one thing we must realize is that we may choose our beliefs. We do not need to let them choose us, seducing us as fantasies.

  If we cannot overcome our fantasies, what hope is there for us? In history, in eternity. Now and forever.

  I opened my eyes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I was lying on the straw mattress, covered by a single blanket. I was aware of being cold but I didn’t really feel it. I was feeling distinctly numb and vague.

  Karen was sitting on the chair beside the bed, with her feet on the top of the table. She was watching me from behind her plastic mask—the mask that looked like a transparent extra skin.

  “Hi,” I said, weakly.

  “Welcome back,” she replied. Her voice was heavy with irony. I presumed that she was annoyed with me for some reason.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What do you think happened? They pretended to be the Spanish Inquisition. You told them everything they wanted to know. You didn’t hold back a thing. Which is more than can be said for your dealings with us.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What did I tell them that I hadn’t mentioned to you?”

  “Something about the mutation rate of the parasite giving it the evolutionary capacity to cope with anything we can make to attack it. Or, to put it another way, even with all the resources of the lab we can’t fight this thing effectively. Now if you’d told Nathan that....”

  “I don’t know for certain that it’s true,” I said, defensively. “It’s just a conjecture. The only way to be sure....”

  “...would be to try. But doesn’t it occur to you that if you’d spilled this previously Nathan wouldn’t have been so ready to believe in Sorokin’s story about immunity? And doesn’t it occur to you that you might have shown a much healthier dose of skepticism? If you’d been as open and honest with us as you were with them, we might not be in this mess?”

  I groaned a little, more for effect than because I felt the need. “The mutation factor is a long-term thing,” I told her. “Immunity would take time to break down. And there’s no reason why the evolutionary potential of the parasite should make the Ego and his friends blasé about the capabilities of our lab. If we did manage to find something to attack the parasite we could do it very effectively, in the short term. In a couple of hundred years the parasite might win back its infective potential.... But that’d be far too late for the Self and the Nation. The whole thing would have to start all over from scratch, with a new generation.”

  “Well,” she said, “they didn’t look scared to me.”

  I tried to sit up, but it was too uncomfortable. “It all depends on how much conscious and direct control they have over the versatility of the parasite cells,” I said. “I don’t know...and maybe they don’t until they’re pushed. It’s possible they can react directly against any attack we might make, without waiting for the laborious routine of mutation and natural selection. If they can...well, all bets are off anyhow. There’s nothing we can do. It’s bombs or nothing. Personally, I’d favor nothing, but I harbor dire suspicions about my fellow men. Especially the political species.”

  “You don’t have to go through the routine,” she said. “I know all about your prejudices.

  “I never believed in truth serum,” I told her, changing the subject. “I thought it was one of those attractive myths, like the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. I thought lying was built into the way the mind works.”

  “Well, you were wrong. I doubt if any human being in the entire history of the race has ever been so utterly frank for such a long period of time as you were over the last couple of hours.”

  “They know all about Nathan’s thinking on the subject?”

  “They do,” she confirmed. “And they got a blow-by-blow account of our rather bitter conversation of the other night, with all lurid quotes intact. You come up smelling of roses, of course. I shouldn’t be surprised if they make you an honorary member. But they now have a very jaundiced view of Nathan and the UN, thanks to your big mouth.”

  “Ah well,” I muttered. “Maybe the serum just preys on one’s inner need to confess. Good for the soul, they say. Doesn’t do a lot for the body, mind. And I had one hell of a nightmare.”

  “Tough,” she said, unsympathetically.

  “What are they going to do about it, now that they know?” I asked.

  “Guess Who is deciding,” she replied. It was the obvious answer. One big orgy of holding hands and swapping circles...thoughts going back and forth through the great network. What kind of decision might the average supermind make, given all the data I could make available t
o it?

  Who could know?

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, ruminatively. I tried to sit up again, but couldn’t. I decided that the failure was an annoyance, and gathered both my wits and my strength for one big surge. Using the back of the chair for leverage I managed to pull myself up. Karen nearly fell over backwards, but managed to save herself by grabbing the table firmly.

  “What doesn’t?” she asked.

  “Truth serum. It makes no sense at all. What do they need a truth serum for? They haven’t got any secrets.... They all have access to one another’s minds. In fact, they all have the same mind, to some degree. Unless there’s a much greater reservoir of individuality than I’d assumed.”

  “You don’t have places like this where there’s perfect harmony,” observed Karen.

  That was true enough. The existence of cells suggests that occasionally people get put in them. And the Servant, when he’d told me he was letting me go, had commented that if it were a wrong decision he’d be punished for it. The way the Ego spoke made it obvious that some degree of individual initiative remained...and where there’s initiative there’s waywardness. It seemed that the people of the city were slightly more than just units of a super-organism. More like units of a super-community, where individual cells still retained viability and a degree of independence, potential if not actual. Which made sense.

  “But why the truth serum?” I asked, again. “Mind-to-mind links cut out a lot of the potential for deception. We know that because we have Mariel. She can read discrepancies between words and thoughts. The link-up between brains must allow these people communication at least to her level of facility. And they have no reason to lie to one another, or to pry one another’s secrets loose. They can’t have developed the drug as a truth serum. Either it was an accidental discovery, or simply part of a whole series of discoveries.... Which implies that they must have done a lot of work on psychotropics in general. Which implies, in turn, that they may have a lot of other cute little biochemical tricks up their sleeve.”