The City of the Sun (13 page)

There was nothing more that I could do.

And then an arrow, driven with tremendous force, went deep into its right eye and penetrated its brain. Its head went up as if someone had cracked its spine like a whip, and one single convulsion was all the life left in it. Then it was stone dead, and it fell across my chest like a great wet sandbag. It knocked the breath out of me, and I had to fight for air, cursing the awkward filters which seemed to be strangling me as tears squeezed into my eyes and there was a moment of pain in my lungs. Then the breath came back, and I sucked the air gratefully. I felt as if I’d just been beaten up, but I also felt an intoxicating lightness of mind—the relief of being alive.

I managed to heave the corpse of the wolf aside, and sat up.

The battle was over. The enemy was in full retreat. I counted six corpses, including the one beside me, and the first casualty of all was still where it had fallen, still thrashing around in the hopeless attempt to dislodge the arrow from its shoulder.

I didn’t know which of the archers had fired the arrow which saved my life. I said “Thanks” loudly, for all of them. I couldn’t help tempering my gratitude by wondering whether it had been a shot fired purely by reflex. Maybe if they had had a chance to think about it they would have considered it safer to let the beast kill me. It was a sour thought, but I was still feeling very sour.

The Servant didn’t seem to have moved a muscle. He might have been totally oblivious of the whole thing. The oxen, too, were very calm now. They had done their job, neatly and effectively.

I felt bruised, but not any more bruised than I had been before the wolf fell on me. No doubt I was bruised after the crashing fall I’d had. But otherwise I was fine. It was going to be an uncomfortable ride home—always assuming that I didn’t have to walk—but I could stand that.

The Servant came out of his trance, and I saw that the black network was no longer visible on the ox’s neck beneath the shaggy fur. All gone, into the big black spider web under the silvery tunic. The Servant didn’t look any bigger, but as he came to his feet he looked distinctly tired. He was probably near to exhaustion. All the energy to absorb the companion from the injured beast had been provided by
his
system. The parasite had no reserves of its own.

I looked down at the ox.

It was perfectly still. Dead.

Euthanasia without a bullet—the last merciful gift of the departing companion.

I looked into the drawn face of the Servant, and said, yet again: “I’m sorry.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s true. I might have been prepared to let a parasite grow on me...but I won’t surrender myself to the power of tens of thousands of other minds, physically linked to mine. I’d stand to lose everything that I am. There’s no way I’m going to put my identity into a circuit like that.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “You cannot understand. Without experience, there is no way you can know...not simply the truth about
us
...but also the greater truth.”

“Have you ever considered that your God might be something black, with a million tentacles reaching into your minds, manipulating you to its own advantage...deluding you?” It was a bitchy question, but I figured that the time was right for asking it.

“You do not understand,” he repeated.

He was right. Not merely in the sense that his statement was true, but in the sense that he had the commitment of total faith. He was absolutely sure of his own rightness, and any attack upon it, any questioning of it, just bounced off. It was impervious to doubt. His world view was a closed, self-supporting system. Most religious systems are. They make themselves invulnerable to reason by discounting it even as a method of thought.
Faith is what is necessary...reason is just a way of cheating yourself. Even when the data defy your very senses, there’s always a way out.

God moves in mysterious ways.

All gods do. It’s the only way they can work.

Their religiousness was probably inevitable. Belief in God is an elementary form of selflessness—the acknowledgment of responsibility toward a hypothetical Other. In this case the process had worked the other way.... When selflessness and responsibility to a real Other become facts of life, so does God. It is no longer necessary to invent him. He exists.

“You say that you came here to learn about us,” said the dark man. “All that we ask is that you do that—in the only possible way. You
must
open yourself to knowledge of the Self, you must join
with
the Self. Then you will learn. Then you will understand. Your thoughts now are governed by your nightmares. If you cannot control those nightmares, then we are all heading for disaster. You cannot go on thinking with your narrow prejudices. You
must
learn to understand.”

The whole routine just went in one ear and out the other. I’d heard it all before. It was a sales pitch that had been running throughout history. Believe as we do and you will be saved. Continue as you are and suffer eternal damnation. Join us...or there will be strife, and war, and catastrophe. It was a call that never altered, the plea of faith to the doubter.

The only trouble was that there almost always
was
strife, and war, and catastrophe. And right now I could see the situation here on Arcadia heading for a grade-A disaster.
Daedalus
versus the City of the Sun. The genetic engineers versus the almighty parasite.

The last time I’d heard a pitch like the one the Servant had just thrown at me it had been thrown on behalf of the neo-Christian revival, by a boy named Peter, who was my son. As soon as the pitch was made we were lost. Strife followed, as easily and as naturally as night follows day. Now, he and I were virtually strangers. It had happened almost overnight. The only way that even such a tiny disaster as that could have been averted would have been total capitulation on my part. I hadn’t been able to do that. I hadn’t been able to close my world and accept faith as a substitute for reason. Much less could I capitulate with what the Servant was asking me in his capacity of missionary for the Self. There was no way, no way at all, that I was going to put my mind at risk, let it dissolve into some corporate mass.

And that being so, what chance could there be to avoid disaster?

They
obviously still had hope. The arrow had not been released. Another had saved my life. I was free to return to the ship, carrying both the bad news and the urgent plea. But it’s always the faithful whose hope lasts longest. Because they know they’re right, and in their heart of hearts they believe that everyone else must see that they’re right too. Persistent denial comes to seem, in the end, like simple perversity, which they are duty bound to punish...with the clearest of clear consciences.

I looked desperately for a hope to match the Servant’s.

But I, poor doubter, couldn’t find it.

It just didn’t seem to be there.

I got back to the
Daedalus
in the late evening, just as it was getting dark. I stripped off my torn suit in the lock and dutifully underwent the full—and rather uncomfortable—decontamination procedure. Then I put on a new suit. I was certain that it wasn’t necessary, but for the sake of taking not even the slightest chance, and for the peace of mind of the others, it seemed the best thing to do.

There wasn’t exactly a welcoming committee waiting for me. Only three people were in the main cabin—Nathan and Mariel, who were sitting with a pile of paperwork, and Pete Rolving, who was sipping coffee. They did, however, stop what they were doing when I limped in.

“Hello, Alex,” said Nathan. “Have a good trip?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you find anything out at the ship?”

“Not a thing.” I sat down.

“What’s the matter with your leg?” asked Mariel.

“I fell off my trusty steed...right over the horns. It’s nothing. Just stinging a bit from decontamination.”

Her eyes gazed into mine, looking straight through me. She pushed her papers aside.

“I’ll get the others,” she said.

The tone of her voice told Nathan that this was not the time for listening with half an ear. He put his pen down and began to shuffle up the papers into a tidy pile.

“Get me some coffee, will you, Pete?” I said. “In a tube. I don’t feel like sucking too hard.... I’d rather squirt it through.”

He got me a tube. Mariel brought Conrad and Linda out of the lab. They looked as if they’d been working hard for a long time. Karen appeared out of the control room.

I gave them the story quickly, without bothering with any frills. The central fact was what was important. They could draw out the implications as well as I could. They’d be the same implications that had occurred to me in the morning. I was no longer so sure they were the right implications, but they were clear enough.

“They were fools to think they could hide this from us,” said Nathan, when I finished.

“Why?” I replied. “If it hadn’t been for the accident....”

“We’d have guessed,” he said flatly. “All the evidence is there, all pointing in this direction. If it hadn’t been for a natural predisposition in our thinking we’d have seen it right away. That barrier couldn’t have held up for twenty days.”

“I don’t see that it changes things much,” said Mariel. “Surely the central problem remains. Does the parasite have independent sentience or not? Is it active in the group consciousness or passive? Are the people being controlled...governed...manipulated...or not?”

“That may still be the central question,” said Conrad pensively. “But it may now be more difficult. I don’t mean more difficult for us to answer, because we had little enough chance of finding the answer anyhow, but more difficult to ask. It may have lost a lot of its meaning. While we were thinking about individual human minds, like our own, it was easy enough to visualize a situation of freedom and a situation of subservience to an external force or controlling sentience. We were assessing the situation relative to ourselves—using our own existential situation as a kind of baseline.

“Now that baseline is no longer relevant. We’re talking now about a single collective entity...a Self-with-a-capital-S, with all that that implies. If we say now: is the human element of the collective dominant or subservient? we’re trying to decide between two states which are, so far as we’re concerned, just about unimaginable. The question has been removed
entirely
into the realms of the speculative. How can we discuss it meaningfully?”

“Come on,” said Karen. “That’s all high-sounding crap. Never mind philosophical hair-splitting. The question was and is simple enough to ask, even if it isn’t easy to answer. Are the people in control, or aren’t they?”

“No, Karen,” I said, quietly. “Conrad’s right. It was simple enough to say ‘are the people in control?’ when we thought we knew what we meant by ‘the people’...that is, an assembly of individuals, the plural of ‘person.’ But now we don’t know that any longer. ‘People’ is no longer plural, it’s singular. The Self isn’t just a fancy metaphor...it’s something real. We now
know
that the individuals in the city are subservient—that they’re dominated by a consciousness not their own individual consciousness. But we don’t know and can’t know what sort of consciousness that is or how complete its control is. We don’t know that there’s any
difference
between the kind of hive-mind they have and the kind of alien slave master control we hypothesized. Is one really the same as the other? Is the one just as bad, as evil, or just as good and beneficent as the other? What Conrad is trying to point out is that our
judgment
of the situation is no longer meaningful, because we have no basis on which to judge. Of individual slavery or freedom we can meaningfully say that ‘this is bad’ or ‘this is good,’ because we have our own situation and experience as a standard for comparison. Here, we no longer have that.”