The City of the Sun (6 page)

“Can you read them?” I asked Mariel.

“I get something,” she said, “but it’s so vague, so strange. I get the feeling that they all know about us, that we’re familiar. I know that gossip spreads fast and the news that we’ve landed is probably all over the city...but none of them seem to want to know more. They see us, they recognize us, that’s it. They seem hardly reactive—not simply to us, but even to the things in their own environment. Look at the way they move, and the way they hardly seem to interact with one another. If they were like zombies that would be more understandable, but I don’t think they
are
zombies. They’re conscious and aware, I’m sure of it, but their consciousness is so settled, so certain.... Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“If they really
were
robots,” I said, “then they
couldn’t
think for themselves. They’d be automata. But this automatism is facultative. They could think and react if they wanted to, but they don’t. They have no curiosity.”

“That’s it,” she confirmed. “That’s what I mean. That’s what I get from watching them and trying to read them.”

Perfectly ordered minds, I thought. Total confidence in both self and environment. As if....

As if they really
did
know everything.

Not just all the wisdom known to man, but all the wisdom possible. Such total security could only be an illusion. Couldn’t it?

“Whatever the parasite is doing,” I said to Mariel, “it isn’t just sitting on their backs keeping them company. If it
hasn’t
taken them over completely—and there’s too much here that’s human for me to believe that—then it’s certainly given them a lot more control over their own minds than we have.”

One thing that struck me particularly was the
cleanness
of the road along which our beasts of burden trudged. There were drains set in the angle of the pavement and the road surface itself, protected by stone grilles. The holes were quite small, but they seemed to have collected virtually no detritus. They didn’t smell of anything particularly noxious. We were at the end of a working day, on what was presumably the busiest street in the city, used by people, oxen, carts and carriages, but there was no mess.

Orderly minds,
I thought,
orderly bodies, orderly habits. Even the yaks are toilet trained
.

I thought of the title of a paper: “Solutions to the Sewage Problem in Classical Utopian States.” Knowing the UN, though, they’d never let me publish. They’d classify it secret.

We passed into the fifth circle, and saw that the penultimate wall was as fully developed as all the rest.

“It’s not so hot, now I come to think about it,” I said. “Every wall in New York has a covering of graffiti six layers thick. And New York is
much
bigger than this place.”

“In New York,” observed Mariel, “they use spray cans, not chisels.”

“Maybe we’d better not talk about this back home, then,” I said. “We might give them ideas.”

There was hardly any traffic on the road. We passed a couple of ox-drawn covered carts on their way down the hill, but we saw no one else riding, and no carriages. Everyone who was going anywhere was going on foot, and even the pavements were not thronging with people by any means. The incurious pedestrians were all capped in black, and they all seemed to be slimly built. Their heights were various but none was very tall. The great majority of the tunics were white, but I saw a few of the yellow tunics which had seemed most common in the fields. Some wore pale blue, some pale brown in various shades. There was no difference in dress which would have allowed me to differentiate between the sexes...in fact there seemed to be almost no way to differentiate. The tunics were gathered in at neck and waist, but tended to stand out from the body in stiffish folds in between. It wasn’t easy to pick out the line of a breast. It should have been a great deal easier to pick out the line of a pregnancy, but I saw none. Of course, it was dark, and the street lighting wasn’t particularly efficient. The worst of it was that the crowds were silent. There were no conversations. Like commuters in any city in America or China or Africa or Australia they all passed by without the merest hint of greeting or caring. There was no way for me to measure what proportion of the total population had silvery voices.

It wasn’t easy to draw inferences from what we saw.

Eventually, we reached the final circle—the arena within the final wall. Here the gate was closed, and two men dressed in pale green had to emerge from small doors within to haul back the two wooden battens. I half expected to find this innermost circle to be a glorified football stadium with gigantic banks of seating and a small central area where visitors occasionally got fed to the lions. Instead, there were gardens, planted with trees and exotic plants, laid out with a careful and artistic lack of symmetry.

There was a square apron of pavement, where we all dismounted. From the inner face of the last wall grew the same higgledy-piggledy mass of square cells with ladders and balconies and catwalks, but instead of stretching out toward the center it formed only an inner ring—a kind of encrustation on the great white expanse. A few of the people I could see moving on the catwalks were dressed in green—the others were archers.

The mounts were led away to what was presumably a stable—a long, tall rectangular building distinctly different from the human habitations. The man in the silvery tunic led us into the gardens along a path inlaid with mosaic tiles. The archers didn’t follow.

There were birds fluttering about in the trees, but they didn’t call out. There was no wind to rustle the branches and so the slight, scratchy sound of the moving birds was all that held back the silence. But now the clip-clop of the ox’s feet was no longer beneath and around me I could hear faint sounds emanating from distant parts of the city—or perhaps from chambers underneath it. Faint, anonymous, arrhythmic sounds.

In the middle of the gardens—presumably at the geometric center of everything—there was a stone building, shaped like a tetrahedral pyramid but stepped with balconies and gabled windows.

Our guide opened the main door and motioned us inside, then followed us. The ground floor extended the whole way across the building, with no internal walls, though there were three rows of thick stone pillars supporting the rest of the building and two wide spiral staircases. There was no carpet and no chairs, but at the farther end of the huge chamber there were what looked like a series of parallel curved rows of cushions. We didn’t get a chance to have a closer look because we were taken to one of the staircases. Still without opening his mouth, the dark man indicated that we should go up.

The first floor had corridors and ordinary rooms. We went up to the second, which was considerably smaller in extent owing to the slope of the pyramid’s sides. Here there seemed to be one corridor leading away in two directions, with a set of rooms on its outer side but only one within the inner wall. We were shown into the odd one, and here our guide finally abandoned us, closing the door quietly behind us.

The room wasn’t large. It was triangular, with a low ceiling. The three angles of the triangle were curtained off. In the center of the floor was a set of six cushions, arranged to approximate a circle. There was no other furniture save for a low table, on which stood an assortment of crockery. There were four cups—or possibly soup bowls—with handles like pans. There was also a teapot, and a bowl containing some kind of dried fruit. No milk jug, no sugar bowl. A thin wisp of steam was rising from the spout of the teapot.

A man stepped out of the curtains protecting the farthest angle of the room. They rippled together behind him. He looked to be old but well-preserved. He was tall and thin. He had a long neck and a deep jaw, which gave the impression that the top part of his body was elongated unnaturally. The black parasite grew over his skull almost to the brow ridges, and gathered on either side of his neck almost to meet at the Adam’s apple. His tunic was black, too, and in the dim light—the room was lit by three oil lamps set in alcoves in each of the three walls—it was difficult to be sure where the garment ended and the growth began. His forearms were bare, and the network of black line seemed to enclose them like extensions of his sleeves. Only his sandals, which were brown, contrasted with the extensions of the parasites. He was brown-skinned, but his eyes had a hint of oriental canthus. His eyes were beady and black.

He moved forward fluidly, seeming perfectly relaxed. There was the ghost of a welcoming smile about his lips.

“Please sit down,” he said. He gestured with his hand, not offering to shake Nathan’s. Nathan had stepped forward, but quickly altered his movement and sank down rather awkwardly on one of the cushions. I sat on his left, Mariel on his right. Our host took up the position which left a spare cushion to either side of him. I suspected that six cushions had been set out for exactly that reason. I had already noticed that there were four cups instead of three. News had preceded our actual arrival.

“You are the first visitors from elsewhere that our city has ever entertained,” said the man in black, as he picked up the teapot and leaned across the table to begin pouring. “We have no customs prepared for such occasions. I am improvising, and I hope not to offend you.”

His voice was thin and reedy. I couldn’t immediately hazard a guess as to whether he was as underdeveloped as the archers or not.

Nathan reassured him that we were quite unoffended, and introduced himself, then Mariel, and finally me.

“I am called the Ego,” said the other. “I have no personal name—I gave that up in taking my place. It has been decided that I should question you. It is necessary that we should know the purpose of your visit.”

“May we question you in return?” asked Nathan.

“You may,” said the Ego, cordially, “but there are certain answers which I am bound to withhold at this time. I hope that this will not cause offense.”

Nathan diplomatically assured him that this was his city, and that we would abide by his decisions.

I tasted my tea. It didn’t taste much like any tea I’d ever tasted before. But then, I was taking it in through a multileaf filter and sterilizer. I looked up again to see the Ego watching me. Maybe he’d expected me to take the suit off. Maybe that had been the real purpose of offering us the drink.

Nathan and Mariel were also sipping. Small droplets of the liquid began to dribble down the outer surface of their suits beneath the intake. Drinking through a filter is a difficult art to master—it’s easier if you can use specially prepared tubes that squeeze fluid through without wastage.

We ignored the dried fruit, not being able to take solids. The man in black, presumably out of politeness, also left them alone.

While we sipped our clumsy way through a few milliliters of the strange brew, we all looked closely at our host. He looked back, very closely. There was no sign here of the diffidence of the people in the street. I was never so fully conscious of being studied and
measured.
It was as if he were doing all the staring that his people had failed to do—doing it for them. And yet...it wasn’t really
curiosity.
There was no wonderment, no eagerness in his gaze. His attitude was purely
analytical.

“What is your purpose in coming here?” he asked, when the pause had dragged on a little too long for my liking.

“We are visiting the colonies sent out from Earth more than a hundred years ago,” said Nathan. “Our task is to find out how they have fared. We also offer certain kinds of help to those colonies which need it. We have a genetic engineering laboratory aboard the
Daedalus
—it can help in adapting crops which have not been successful, in combating pests, in controlling any health difficulties which have arisen. When humans move into an alien environment there are always problems of some kind—usually minor ones. Sometimes the colonists do not realize that the problems exist, or that they can be solved. Thus, we offer help, in return for learning about the ways that you have helped yourselves. Other colonies may soon be sent out, and there is a good deal that you could teach us that may be valuable to them.”

It was a pretty enough speech, with some delicate hedging in it. The Ego soaked it all up without changing expression.

“Which nation sent your ship?” he asked.

“The United Nations,” said Nathan. “Things haven’t changed a great deal since you left Earth—since your ancestors left, that is. No one nation has a space program. The UN combines the funds and efforts contributed by all the nations.”

“There is only one Nation here,” said the Ego. I could tell by the way he pronounced the crucial word that it had a capital letter—and presumably a capital significance.

“That is as it should be,” said Nathan, smoothly. “A colony must remain united if it is to flourish.”

The Ego ignored that. I would have ignored it too. A philosophical advertising jingle...a cheap platitude.

“Genetic engineering involves interference with natural processes, does it not?” said the man in black, after another sip from his teacup. I’d abandoned mine, feeling that I’d made the gesture. I didn’t like the stuff well enough to drink it for its own sake.

“Genetic engineering can improve crops and destroy pests,” I said. “It
is
interference, of course. But agricultural development is itself interference. All the crops your fathers brought from Earth were the products of genetic engineering—manipulated for hardiness and high yield.”

“We have a new way of living now,” he said, unperturbed.

I wanted to point out that they still had agriculture, but Nathan nudged me to be silent.

“We would like to study your way of living,” he said.

“Why do you wear these curious clothes?” asked the Ego, bluntly.

The odd thing was that his voice was perfectly even and unaggressive, yet somehow I got the impression he was hostile, that his question about genetic engineering was outright condemnation. I felt defensive, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps Mariel could tell us more about his attitude later.