Читать книгу The City of the Sun - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER FOUR

It was a long day inside the ship, waiting for something to happen. My patience wore pretty thin, not helped by the fact that having to wear a protective suit inside precludes just about every chance you might have of being comfortable. I wasn’t convinced that the suit was necessary—it seemed to me unlikely that the parasite reproduced via aerial spores, although communal protozoa characteristically reproduce by fragmentation of the community and binary fission of individual cells. However, with something like this I wasn’t prepared to take chances. We had to take every possible measure to protect the rest of the crew from even the smallest risk.

We didn’t particularly expect a fast decision, but by the time that Pete announced the approach of strangers dusk was falling, and we felt that they’d overdone it somewhat.

I took a quick look at the screen to see what was happening—it was the same dark-skinned man with what looked like the same six archers in attendance. One of the archers was leading two spare mounts. Behind me, I heard Nathan say: “Suit up, Mariel.”

“Is that wise?” I asked.

“Mariel’s the best way we have of getting a lot of information fast,” he said. “I want to get on top of this one quickly—I want to know just what their attitudes are toward us, this parasite, and life in general.”

“They’ve only brought two spare mounts. Maybe they’ll hold us to two visitors.”

“In that case,” he said, “you stay.”

Mariel had paused to hear the beginning of the exchange, but now she set off for the lock to get a suit.

“Oh no,” I said. “This is my play as much as it is yours. Those parasites are my business...and I want to get a line on this just as much as you do. I’m coming in with you.”

He ducked the issue. “They probably brought two mounts because they’re expecting two of us,” he said. “You can ride with Mariel...you’re the only one of us who’s had practice riding all manner of weird creatures. You help her and I’ll manage on my own.”

He turned away as soon as he finished, not leaving me space to argue. I cursed silently and followed him, thinking: At least I get to see how you explain why we’re now all dressed up in plastic bags.

But I was wrong. He didn’t explain. He just stepped out of the lock and went to meet our silver-clad friend as if nothing could be more natural than wearing a plastic bag. I watched the dark man/woman’s eyes narrow slightly in surprise, but he/she made no reference to the matter. Politeness is a wonderful thing.

“You may come to the city,” he/she said. “The Ego will interrogate you. Then the Self will decide whether you are to stay.”

Then he/she saw Mariel coming out of the lock behind us.

His/her only comment was: “Two of you must ride together.”

The archers were waiting with the spare mounts at the same respectful distance they had maintained during our morning meeting. But now we could approach them. I set off with an eager stride, glancing up at the dark man/woman as I passed his/her placid beast. He/she looked back, his/her face quite impassive and his/her body apparently quite relaxed.

Nathan lagged a few paces behind and fell into step with Mariel.

I heard her say: “Nothing...I can’t read anything.”

“Stay with it,” he said. “Relax and take your time.”

Their voices sounded a little hoarse filtered through the vocal apparatus of the suits, which made whispering a little difficult.

My attention was fixed ahead, though. As I came closer to the naked archers I took a good long look at the way the parasite extended itself over the body. I also checked what I hadn’t been quite sure of earlier in the day—the absence of pubic hair. The hair was missing, of course...but it wasn’t all that was missing.

The archers were all of full adult size—five and a half to six feet tall. They had neither beards nor wrinkles, and it wasn’t easy to make a guess at their ages, but none of them were children. But the ones I could see, though definitely male, had sexual organs that were either undeveloped or vestigial. In brief, no balls.

I looked back over my shoulder at the man in the silver tunic. Man he was, I decided. The silvery voice which went with the clothes had simply never broken.

It was something I might have anticipated, at least as one of a number of possibilities, but somehow the thought just hadn’t crossed my mind. It came as a shock, now.

I arrived at the waiting mounts, and the archer passed the reins to me. I said “thanks” but he didn’t seem to be paying any attention. Now I was close, it struck me what a long way it was from the ground to the ridge of the shaggy back. There was no stirrup to help me up. I’d ridden a lot of animals in my time, including some extremely tall camels, but nothing as weird as this creature. And camels will bend down for you if you ask them nicely.

I passed one of the reins to Nathan and stood back, quite happy to let him take first crack at getting aboard. He’d done most things in his long and colorful life—maybe including riding camels—but when you do just about everything you don’t get much practice at anything in particular. I was wondering how he’d go about it.

I should have guessed.

“Give me a leg up, will you?” he said.

I sighed, and let him put his knee into the palm of my hand, then boosted him up. I did the same for Mariel. She took a handful of mane and offered her other hand to me. Somehow, with that assistance, I contrived to end up on the beast’s back sitting just behind her. We’d never have managed it but for the perfect docility of the mounts themselves.

I watched Mariel part the mane with her gloved fingers to expose the tracing of black lines against the skin. They were very thin lines, with no gathering at any point into a considerable mass. But on the backs of the archers, I saw, from the base of the neck extending like the silhouette of a bird with wings spread wide, was a large expanse of parasite tissue...a kind of shallow hump.

I wondered, briefly, how a medium-sized creature like a man could support so much parasite, when a large creature like an ox could apparently support so little.

The leader walked his mount back to the group, passing between my beast and Nathan’s, and then going through the corridor opened up by the attendants. We followed him, the archers being left to bring up the rear.

“There’s something very odd about that man,” murmured Mariel, her voice blurring slightly because of the suit.

“Apart from his being a eunuch, you mean?”

She turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder at me. She hadn’t picked that up.

“He’s got a mind like a brick wall,” she said. “I can’t read him at all.”

“He hasn’t got what you might call an expressive face,” I agreed. “But give it time.”

“It’s more than that,” she insisted. “There are some people it’s difficult to read, sure. I have to be able to look at them for a while, or touch them. The talent isn’t like tuning in a radio to people’s thought waves. I’ve met blanks before...but this one is a sort of positive blank. No...that’s wrong...don’t for God’s sake start thinking about mind-shields and things like that. It isn’t that kind of thing at all.... Most of what I pick up, you see, is peripheral. It’s the fringes of what people say—the things they mutter under their breath, the commentary on their own actions, their unvoiced reactions to what they see and hear. But there seems to be nothing of that in his face. As if his mind were...still...completely settled...ordered.”

“I saw his eyes narrow,” I told her. “When he first saw you. Do you think he can sense your talent? Maybe he....”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think that it just didn’t fit in with his calculations—three people and two mounts. That’s what I’m trying to say about him. He calculates everything. Every move, every thought. It’s precise. No ragged edges for me to pick up on the borders of verbal communication.”

“Mechanical,” I said.

“If you like.”

“Like a robot.”

The mount was walking forward with precisely measured strides. I was just holding the rein limply. The beast knew where it was going. It knew what it was doing. It moved like a machine. A robot.

She couldn’t see my face, and there were two layers of plastic between us, but she knew me pretty well by now. She didn’t need all the frills to use her talent on me.

“Something’s frightened you,” she said.

“You’re dead right,” I told her. “I’m half inclined to duck out of this party right now. I’ve got a very nasty feeling.”

I was harboring a thought which struck me as being one of the worst I’d ever harbored. I was thinking that if the parasite cells could mimic all kinds of host cells, that probably included brain cells too. And I was just wondering what might be the implications of a parasite that could turn itself into a mimic of a thinking human brain.

I didn’t have to explain to Mariel. She was getting it all by mental osmosis.

“Puppets...?” she said. Somehow, despite the suit, she managed to whisper.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if....”

My fears piled up like pennies. Only minutes before I’d been prepared to discount the possibility that Nathan or I might have contacted a stray parasite cell drifting around on the morning breeze and it wouldn’t have worried me much if I’d found out that I had. But I was worrying now.

Darkness was falling, and that certainly didn’t help. Fears always seem worse in the dark. There were a good many stars beginning to peep through in the sky, and the afterglow was dying slowly, but I couldn’t see the ground that we were traveling over. The oxen plodded on, absolutely sure of themselves.

“Take it easy,” I told Mariel. “The time’s right for nightmares. All these ideas are just ghosts oozing out of the dark recesses of my imagination.”

“I know that,” she said.

“So let’s stay calm and look at the situation as it is. Let’s not let our fears make prior judgments.”

I was talking to myself as much as to her, and she knew that. She didn’t resent it.

It took as long to descend the hill on which the Daedalus stood and to toil up the long slope to the crown of the next hill as it had in the early morning. Personally, I’d sooner have walked on my own feet than ridden the rather repulsive creatures that had been laid on as transport. But in making contacts there has to be a little give and take, and I suffered gladly for the cause.

I studied the patterns that the stars made in the sky, looking for the brighter lights that were Arcadia’s neighbor planets. She had no moons but this solar system was fairly crowded as solar systems go. There was one beautiful evening star, and I picked out one other close by in the curve of the ecliptic across the night sky, but that was all.

When we came to the crest of the hill, however, there was something else to look at. Even in darkness, the City of the Sun commanded attention, shining with a vast array of tiny lights that stretched across its great staggered disk to vanish in the distance.

There were lights on the rims of the walls and lights in the streets, as well as lamps lighting thousands of windows. Most of the lamps were oil-fired, but the lights on the walls were gaslights, burning whiter and brighter. They showed up the white of the walls and made the whole city seem aglow.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” I said to Mariel.

“It’s so big,” she murmured. “Did a few thousand people really manage to build that in a few decades? Without heavy machinery...without even any source of power except their muscles and the oxen, and whatever they could improvise.”

“You can do a lot in a hundred years,” I said. “If you set your mind to it. They had all the resources Earth could give them. No bulldozers, but a lot of suggestions as to how to make do without.”

Even so, she was right. It was quite something for a few thousand people to knock together in a few decades, starting from scratch. It must have taken a great many people a great deal of their lives. And all of their dedication and commitment. The colony had certainly gone single-mindedly about realizing its Utopian fantasies. And with the parasites bleeding off all the spare energy the while....

It might not be too good to be true, I thought, but it’s surely too good to have been that simple.

There were a few lantern lights bobbing in the fields like will-o’-the-wisps, but it was too dark to see what the people who carried them might be doing. The great majority had finished for the day and gone home. To what? Rest and play.... Or more work?

“I think they’re still building it,” I said. “I think they’ll be building it for a long time to come. The gross work is finished, but inside...there must be a long way to go...so much still to be done.”

“Especially,” she said, “if they are writing all the wisdom of the ages on the seven great walls.”

“They may be copying the City of the Sun,” I said, “but I can’t see them taking their model quite that seriously.”

But as it turned out, I was wrong.