The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  “So what?” said Karen. “Is there any particular point in this chase?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Is it going to help us get out of this mess?”

  As usual, she wanted to get to the heart of the matter instead of farting around the periphery. I couldn’t blame her.

  “It isn’t,” I agreed. “But nothing is. We are, as they say, at the mercy of the unpredictable. Back at the ship, all kinds of possibilities are still open, but for you and me....”

  I didn’t go on.

  “I don’t know why I come along with you on these jaunts,” she said. “It always ends up like this.”

  It was an unfair comment, but I couldn’t be bothered objecting.

  “Look at it this way,” I remarked. “At least we’ll go together.”

  “I am looking at it that way,” she assured me. “It’s the thought that we might end up much more together than we ever dreamed of that worries me.”

  “The gods are always against you,” I reminded her, “but sometimes.... The ancient Egyptians, you know, had a whole theory of eschatology based on procedures that a dead soul could adopt in order to answer the courts of divine judgment appropriately and get into heaven regardless of its actual record on Earth...a whole religion of lying to the gods and cheating one’s way into heaven. The Book of the Dead consists almost entirely of good advice on how to put one over on the gods.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I really wanted to know that. Or does the story have a moral?”

  “Not exactly,” I told her. “It’s a pretty immoral story.”

  Rumor has it that it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And that was where we seemed to be.

  As if to emphasize the point, the bolts were drawn back and the door opened. It was, of course, the Ego.

  The Self, apparently, had reached its decision. It hadn’t taken very long. Karen didn’t bother to get up and offer him the chair.

  “It is settled,” he said, his thin, reedy voice striking its usual high note. “Will you come with me, please.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that please. It wasn’t the way he usually talked.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “The pyramid. It will be more comfortable. We may talk.”

  “Just talk?”

  “There is no longer any need to be afraid,” he said. “The Self now has a much more accurate appraisal of the situation. It has been decided that we should no longer attempt to adopt you into the Nation.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to let us go?” asked Karen, suspiciously.

  “Certainly,” he said. “When we have made certain things clear to you. Our interests coincide precisely with your own. We wish to avoid disaster. No one wants war. Even Nathan Parrick would rather have peace.”

  “Sure,” I said. “On his terms. I see your point.... You don’t want to be bombed out of existence, which is what will surely happen unless you can come up with something very clever indeed. But you’re left with the problem Nathan handed to me. How do you persuade him that you offer no threat, in the long term, to Earth and the other colony-worlds?”

  “Come with me,” he said. “I will explain to you what you must say. We must trust one another. I will show you how we might build such trust. And I will show you, too, how you can save your mission and renew Earth’s interest in the star worlds.”

  I just gaped. For a moment or two, my only thought was: pull the other one, it has bells on.

  But then I saw what I hadn’t seen before, and realized exactly where there might be potential for saving this godawful situation. I saw, clear as day, just what we had to do to save the status quo and stop both sides from embarking upon a path of policy that might lead to ultimate ruin.

  “Lead the way,” I said. “I think this is going to be worth listening to.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I dismounted, and gave the ox a cheerful pat on the back. Then I went to help Karen down. She was still in her plastic suit, but I’d seen no reason to reassume mine.

  The oxen moved back to rejoin the third, on which the dark-skinned Servant still sat. He turned his mount away, and without any salute of farewell he began to make his way downhill again, the two riderless beasts following.

  I dumped my pack on the ground and took out the radio.

  “All right, Nathan,” I said. “We’re here. We’ll keep a nice safe distance. There’s not a bowman for miles and there are no cards up my sleeve. Come on out.”

  The airlock opened. Nathan and Mariel came out together. They were both suited up.

  And Nathan was carrying a gun.

  I hadn’t told him much over the radio. I wanted the whole issue thrashed out face to face. I wanted him to be able to see me, and for Mariel to be there too, to assure him that I was me, the whole me, and nothing but me. I had assured him that everything would be all right. He didn’t believe me. Yet.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” said Nathan, moving the gun a little to show me what he was talking about. “We have to be sure. I don’t know what kind of a risk is tolerable, but in a situation like this any risk at all is too much.”

  He stayed back beside the open airlock. Karen and I walked toward him. When we were twelve feet away he said: “That’s enough.”

  Mariel came forward, alone. She came right up to me, looking hard into my eyes.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Everything is okay.”

  She touched my cheeks lightly with a plastic-clad forefinger. I don’t think it added anything to the effectiveness of what she was trying to do, but it gave her a little more confidence. It was a kind of ritual.

  She turned away from me to look at Karen. Karen didn’t say anything.

  Mariel turned back, and nodded to Nathan. It was a nod that had a lot to say.

  “Stay where you are,” said Nathan. “They fooled her once before.”

  “But she knows us,” objected Karen. “And she’s not looking at us through a camera.”

  “You’re still going to have to persuade me,” said Nathan. “And whatever you have to say, it had better be good.”

  “Are you implying that you’d use that gun?” I asked, feeling quite relaxed. “Or just that you’d be prepared to abandon us?”

  “I’ll do whatever is necessary,” said Nathan. “I’d hate doing it, but I’d do it.”

  “That’s professionalism,” I said.

  “This isn’t a good time for jokes,” he observed.

  “That’s why I’m trying to be funny,” I told him. “How would you be certain it’s me unless I tried to be funny when it isn’t the time?”

  He conceded me a wry grin. “Yeah,” he said, noncommittally.

  “With friends like ours,” muttered Karen, “nobody needs enemies.”

  “They don’t know we’re friends,” I said. “We were silent for a long time. Then we called in and announced that Sorokin was bait in a trap we’d walked straight into, that we were in the city and had spilled everything, and that we were coming home because everything in the garden was rosy and everything would be just fine, happy ending guaranteed. They’re as suspicious as hell...and who wouldn’t be?”

  “But we’re going to listen,” said Nathan, with a face that would have done credit to a poker player. “And we even came outside to do it. That’s how badly we want to hear an answer, if you can persuade us that there’s one available. But we want to keep the risk to a minimum. I’m making no promises. Unless you can tell us exactly why they let you go...why they haven’t taken all the chances they’ve had....”

  “Because they’re afraid of us,” I said. “Because they’re just about as scared of us as we are of them. Their first thought was to lie to us, cheat us, and capture or destroy us. Just as our first thought was to lie to them, cheat them, and destroy them or render them harmless. They now see things in a more reasonable manner. It’s our turn to do the same.

  “I’ll tell
you why some of our fears are groundless, though that’s a minor point because there’s no way I can prove it to you. These people aren’t embarked upon a historical course that will bring them a spaceship-building technology in two hundred years as a preparatory stage in the conquest of the universe. They don’t want Earth, or other worlds...and they haven’t planned any historical course at all. They haven’t because they realized very quickly that they can’t. They can’t predict what they’ll be doing in fifty years’ time because they don’t know what they’ll be in fifty years’ time. They hardly know what they’ll be the day after tomorrow. They know very little about what they are now. The Self is only just beginning to discover the things it can do, the things it can hope to be. Its development as an entity is utterly unpredictable. It’s like a little child first beginning to be aware of itself and the world that contains it. The only guides it has so far had have misled it, because the guides were the legacy of Earth, meant to pertain to beings of a radically different kind—to individuals, not to a collective communal entity. The Self isn’t concerned with conquering the universe, Nathan—that’s a human power fantasy, based on the urge for one individual to impose his will on others. The Self doesn’t think like that. It isn’t that kind of being.

  “The Self isn’t aiming for high technology and the creation of mechanical slaves to replace human ones. It isn’t oriented in that direction at all. The Self’s interest is almost exclusively itself...its only science is a species of socio-psychology that we simply don’t have because it would be meaningless to us. The nearest we could ever come to it is in the most unrealistic of our Utopian fantasies, imagining a state of social life impossible of practical realization. That’s where the Self started.... That was the only place it had to start. But the City of the Sun was only square one—a conceptual base from which to begin. The walls still stand, but imaginatively and existentially the Self is a long way from that now, and getting further away with every day that passes. It’s already beyond our comprehension. If you want a judgment based on what the Ego has tried to convey to me, the people of the city have more individual responsibility than we feared, but also participate far more fully in collective experience than we believe to be compatible with the first notion.

  “These people aren’t really people any more, Nathan. What the Self is now is an alien being, in every sense of the word. Sure, it evolved out of humanity, but humanity has ancestors that were apes and insectivores and reptiles and. mud-skipping fish. It took us millions of years to become what we are instead of mud-skipping fish, but in mental terms I think the Self may have come just as far in a few short decades. You can’t measure its kinship with our kind of humanity in years or generations—you have to measure it in terms of change.

  “All that’s obvious, but we never tried to take into account its implications. We were stuck with the thought that these people were intrinsically human but had somehow been de-humanized...that although they were now alien they retained inside them the essence of humanity. And because of that we saw what had happened to them as pure evil. If we hadn’t kept on thinking of them as dehumanized, as perverted humanity, we’d never have let our minds fill up as they did with images of horror and nightmares about the conquest of the universe and defense by blanket nuclear bombing. Those ideas would never have entered our head if we’d only seen these aliens—this alien—for what it really is...something that is completely different.

  “If we’d accepted the Self’s alienness from the start—if we only could have accepted it, somehow—then we would have come out of the ship determined to make contact, to make peace, to establish friendly relations. We’d have been determined to understand it, as far as we could, but we would have known that we couldn’t expect to fully understand. We’d have accepted what we couldn’t know and couldn’t find out as an inevitable reservoir of uncertainty. But because of the attitude we did bring out of the ship that reservoir became a festering pit of fear and horror. Everything that we couldn’t find out became a source of danger, a risk. And because of our attitude, which conjured up these fears, we were on the edge of being ready to take a hand in the extinction of all life on this world.

  “If you want to be cynical you can say that we can afford to take a benevolent attitude to aliens like the salamen. You can say that the only reason our attitude to the category ‘alien’ is positive and constructive is that our explorers have never yet found anything alien which poses any kind of a threat to us. You can say that this is different because it does seem to pose a threat and that no amount of talking will take away that threat or overcome the risk we’d be taking in not trying to destroy this thing.

  “If you want to take that line, I’ll say ‘okay.’ It is a risk. But it’s a necessary risk...not just here, but everywhere and anywhen. It’s a chance we have to take now, and the next time, and the time after that. How can we possibly use our ability to travel between the stars if we aren’t willing to take risks? How can we do anything in life if we aren’t prepared to take chances? Life and history are nothing but long sequences of gambles, and star travel is the biggest gamble of all. There’s no point in having a committee of the UN draw up rules which the universe must conform to in order to allow us to move out into it in perfect safety. What use is it for the UN to say: ‘All right, we’re going out to the stars, we’re going to take humanity into the universe at large, but only if we never meet anything that we can’t understand, only if we never meet anything we can’t handle, only if every strange race we find is completely harmless; we’ll conquer the galaxy, but only if it’s a nice galaxy, and only if it behaves itself and doesn’t come up with anything that our labs can’t analyze and destroy, and only if it obeys the law of mediocrity which says that everything which exists must be pretty much the same as here. Those aren’t the terms on which we can make the star worlds ours, Nathan...and I don’t even believe that they’re the terms we ought to hope for.

  “You’re frightened by what we’ve found here. So am I. It’s possible that this is the devil’s world, utterly corrupted by something evil and inimical to mankind. It’s possible that this is a world of witches, committed to the destruction of everything we hold dear. It’s possible that unless we burn every last ounce of living flesh on this world that we may lose everything, and that the devil will rule all of Creation. It’s possible, and there’s absolutely no way I can prove to you that it’s not. I’m defending the witches, and automatically become suspect myself. I speak for evil, if evil it is, and therefore must be corrupted myself. There’s no evidence either way because the circumstances rule out the very possibility of there being evidence.

  “But you can’t proceed on the assumptions you want to apply. It’s not a viable policy for living. There’s no way you can exterminate every last vestige of risk. You can’t operate on the principle of rather burning a thousand innocent souls than allowing one minion of the devil to escape. It’s not right, and it’s not practical. We have to face our fears and learn to live with them, Nathan. We have to learn to control our nightmares.”

  Throughout the tirade Nathan stood quite impassively. He listened to every word. It went in, and it didn’t just flow out of him. But he didn’t move a muscle, and I knew that the outside of him spoke for the inside as well.

  “I know all that, Alex,” he said, quietly. “Nothing here is new. Nothing here is even solid. It’s just a piece of public relations...impassioned rhetoric. I can do it, too. I will do it, in almost exactly the same way, back home. I’ll spin such a spell that I’ll win ninety percent of any audience over to your way of thinking. But public relations is like possession, Alex...it’s only nine points of the law. To be able to put over a stunt like that—for it even to be worth trying to put over a stunt like that—I have to have something to sell. I know that to you, what you’ve said is everything that’s important. As moral philosophy it may be great stuff. But I’m talking about politics and the business of practical persuasion.

  “Sure we should
face our fears. Sure you can’t go through life waving a gun at everything that alarms you. But you try telling that to a man who’s scared, Alex. Try telling it to the man with the gun. He isn’t going to be convinced, no matter how right you are. You have to give him something different. You have to hit his hard head with something just as hard. I’m scared, Alex. I’m playing the part of the man with the gun. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to show me something that will penetrate a thick skull. You’ll have to convince me that I can take what you give me back to Earth and into the UN committee rooms...and you have to persuade me that what you have will work there, where all the moral philosophy in the world wouldn’t win the flicker of an eyebrow.”

  I knelt down, and I took something out of the pack. It was a small plastic phial—a specimen bottle that had been in a pocket of the packsack when Karen had first picked it up before we left the ship. Now it contained a viscous liquid, milky and lumpy, like runny porridge.

  I held it up so that it caught the light.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Truth serum,” I told him.

  “So what?”

  “I’m down to Earth now,” I said. “I’m talking practical matters. What’s the one force that’s always guaranteed to overcome fear even in the most committeefied mind in the world?”

  “Greed,” he said.

  I knew he’d get it in one.

  “But there’s no way to save the situation that way,” he went on. “Even if we desperately needed a truth serum more than anything else in the universe, there’s no way you could set up a claim for this world because of its trade potential. You know as well as I do that you just can’t carry goods over interstellar distances. There’s no way it can be made economically feasible. Not for a truth serum...or anything else.”