The City of the Sun (19 page)
Read The City of the Sun Online
Authors: Brian Stableford
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #sci-fi, #space travel, #arthur c. clarke
“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.
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....
...while 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.
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.”