The City of the Sun (8 page)

“Is it over so soon then?” he asked. “I thought it was scheduled to take all night.”

“Maybe it’s only just beginning,” I said.

“No chance of making a break for it,” he mused.

“And if we could?” I said. “If we could all get back to the ship? What then? Take off for Earth and ask them to send out a task force?”

“We can’t fight this thing on our own,” he said. “Can we?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s far too much I don’t know. I don’t like to think of running away from this situation without knowing more.”

“Knowing a little bit more might cost Earth everything we already know,” be reminded me. “We’ve already been criminally stupid—we should have brought a radio set so we could relay everything to Conrad.”

“If we’d only thought,” I said, ironically, “we could have left him sealed orders to be opened only in the event of our failure to return. That’s what they do in melodramas.”

He looked at me soberly. “If this were a melodrama,” he said, “then the parasite’s strategy would be to take over you and me and Mariel, get us to carry it into the ship, then take over everyone else. Then it would fly the ship back to Earth and begin conquering the entire human race. If this were a melodrama.”

“And is it?” I asked him.

He turned and went back inside. I followed, closing the door behind me. Mariel was still sitting on the bed, her back against the wall, watching us closely. She’d heard every word.

“In melodramas,” she said, “evil monsters don’t spend all night making decisions. They always know what to do.”

She had a point. The Self was deciding. That meant there was some ambivalence in the situation.

I laid myself down on one of the giant cushions, flat on my back. It wasn’t very comfortable—certainly not interior sprung. Nathan followed my example, and we all pretended for a few minutes that we were going to sleep. We didn’t have to use the toilet—the suits made provision for such problems—and none of us fancied a wash.

“If nothing else,” said Nathan, not sounding too happy about it, “this could queer our mission beyond hope of redemption. Unless, somehow, we can pull off a miracle.”

What he meant was that our report on this world—if we ever got to make one—was going to put the wind up a lot of people. We’d found colonies on Floria and Wildeblood that were at least semi-successful, and so far we were in a position to make out a moderately good case for the resumption of the space colony program. But if we turned in a story about black spiderweb parasites taking over human beings, robbing men of their manhood and turning the whole colony into a glorified ant hive...prospects wouldn’t look so good. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of persuading the UN to persuade the individual nations that putting money into such a scheme would be worthwhile.

“Even for a disaster,” said Nathan, rambling on for the sake of talking, “you can work up a pretty good story. You can tell a tale of heroism and struggle against great odds, and you can put in a lot of soul-stirring stuff about conquering the star worlds even in the face of huge odds. But for something like this, you can’t do a thing. It makes up its own formula. Pure horror story. Scare sensationalism. Even without the devil’s advocate this would be one hell of a voice against us.”

“What devil’s advocate?” I asked.

“I don’t know who it is, of course,” said Nathan, “but there must be one. Surely you realized that? This mission makes no pretense to be an unbiased fact-finding mission. I’m here to try and gather ammunition for a war of ideas—to try and give Pietrasante what he needs to remount the colony program. It doesn’t make sense that the opposition wouldn’t put a man—or woman—in to prepare a different case.”

“But how would they get him past Pietrasante?” I asked. The idea really was new to me. I just hadn’t ever thought of it before.

“They wouldn’t have to,” said Nathan. “Pietrasante would be forced to agree. You know how committees work, Alex. Balance and compromise.... Always have the cake and eat it too.... Never decide one way or the other if you can have both. He knows there’s a member of the opposition aboard, but to him that’s a fairly ordinary fact of life.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “And I don’t suppose Mariel’s telling.”

You can’t keep secrets from a mind-reader. You just have to rely on the mind-reader to keep them for you. And, of course, she would. No mind-reader could possibly get along in life without a lot of discretion. The
Daedalus
was a smooth-running ship now—we’d all got used to having Mariel aboard. But that smooth running was dependent on Mariel’s integrity. If we so much as suspected that anything she inadvertently picked up from any of us might become common property....

I didn’t insult her by asking her who the devil’s advocate was. Now I looked at the situation coldly, it didn’t really matter. It made no difference at all.

Somewhere inside me, I felt the fear that had gripped me—the fear of the parasite, that is—ebbing slightly as the new anxiety arose. Even if we got away...the mission was dead. What we’d already accomplished was real enough, but the greater purpose...the thing that really
mattered,
at least to me, was lost.

Barring miracles.

I closed my eyes deliberately, trying to pretend even to myself that sleep might be possible. But I knew that even if I could sleep I wouldn’t have pleasant dreams.

“A Servant will escort you,” said the Ego, with perfect equanimity. “When may we expect your decision?”

“This evening,” said Nathan, promptly.

The changes of pace had left me behind a little, but as we mounted up—one beast each, this time—at the spot where we had dismounted the night before, I began to review the situation. We were being given the opportunity to run, if we wanted to. We could take our jumped conclusions back to Earth. But we were also being tempted to stay, with twenty clear days before the crunch. If they were prepared to offer us that much rope, could they possibly be the monsters that our fears had painted them? Or were they simply trying to give us the opportunity to hang ourselves?

We rode downhill with the early morning traffic. It was hardly any more crowded than the previous evening, but it was daylight now, and the white and yellow tunics seemed very bright. There were more ox-carts ahead of us and behind us, some empty but some carrying groups of laborers with agricultural tools. The tools were mostly wooden—only a few had metal blades and tines.

Whether it was because we were going downhill or because the tempo of the beasts’ movements had been deliberately stepped up I’m not sure, but it didn’t take us long to get out of the city. I didn’t get much of a view of the wondrous walls because I had to look back over my shoulder to see the pictographs after we had passed through each gate.

Once outside the city the oxen were encouraged into a gait which might have been their version of a trot, and we covered the country rather more efficiently than we had previously done. Even so, I had no doubt that the animals could have gone a great deal faster had they been encouraged. I was impressed by their docility and their cooperativeness, but somewhat worried about the means by which this had been achieved. To what extent was the parasite modifying their behavior? And to what extent was the “companion” riding the neck of my mount in touch with—and possibly governed by—other companions of other hosts? It was going to be difficult to find out if both the parasite and its hosts were taboo.

The dark man escorted us patiently. He didn’t say anything, and Nathan didn’t try to ask him any questions. This may have been because his mind was on getting back to the ship and nothing else, or it may have been that he couldn’t guide his mount close enough to the dark man’s to make striking up a conversation feasible.

When we got back Karen, Conrad and Linda were all asleep. They hadn’t had our problems, despite the fact that they could have had the grace to worry themselves sleepless over our fate. We didn’t wake them immediately, but got some tubes of liquefied food to squeeze through the filters. Mariel was lucky—after external decontamination she could jettison her suit and get some real food.

I let Nathan tell the story to the others. He gave a blow-by-blow account, not too heavily biased by commentary and inference.

He finished up by saying: “They obviously aren’t scared of us. They’re giving us the chance to run despite the fact that they must have a clear idea of how this situation looks to us. They’re asking for a chance to explain...and I’m not quite sure whether ‘they’ is the people or the things on their backs. Either way, maybe we owe it to them. We need to know more. We have to stay...at least for twenty days.”

“And then?” said Conrad.

I looked round to see if anyone wanted to argue that we should leave right away. Nobody did.

“That depends what we find out in the meantime,” I said.

“You’d seriously consider exposing one of us to infection by this thing?” asked Linda.

“Why not?” I replied. “We can deal with the infection if need be. And their top man is right. The only way we’re likely to be able to understand, fully and accurately, what has happened here, is to experience it.”

“You’re volunteering, I hope?” said Linda.

“Maybe,” I said, refusing to be backed off. “If the situation seems right, maybe I will.”

“You’re going too fast, Alex,” Nathan intervened. “Let’s not start squabbling over the short straw until the occasion presents itself. We have something much more important to decide.”

“But surely we stay,” I said. “That’s already settled.”

“Not that,” he said. “What we have to talk about now is how we can possibly go about trying to find out what we want to know. Put crudely, the question is: are we dealing with alien minds manipulating human bodies, or human minds that have been passively modified, or human minds in association with alien minds, or what? I’m not asking for guesses as to which one.... I’m asking how we could possibly find out. How do we test?”

There was a pensive silence. This was, of course, the crucial question. How do you tell a puppet from a free agent? How do you tell passive modification from active control?

“We’re not allowed to analyze any of the parasite material?” said Linda, asking for confirmation.

“Nor harm any host,” I added.

“In that case,” said Conrad, “all we have is indirect measurement and asking questions. Could we rig up something like an encephalograph to sound out electrical activity in the external bulk of the parasite?”

I shrugged. “Suppose it is pseudo-nervous tissue...and electrically active. That won’t tell us whether it’s independent, let alone sentient.”

“In that case,” said Conrad, shrugging in his turn, “all we have is guesswork...unless we’re prepared to believe what they tell us.”

“There must be
some
way,” said Nathan.

I thought hard. No startling inspiration materialized.

“Without being able to experiment directly...,” I said, hesitantly, “...then I think Conrad’s right. We have to rely on question-and-answer. And our lie detector is, for once, just as likely to be fooled as we are.”

“Perhaps their concessions aren’t quite so generous,” said Conrad. “They’re giving us time...but they’re also giving themselves time. They know we’ll stay for the twenty days—and that could give them twenty days to work out a method of infiltrating the ship, if that’s their aim.”

Nathan scowled as he tried to concentrate on the intricacies of the situation. “It could be,” he said, “that letting the three of us come back here was no more than a shrewd ploy. If they’d held on to us Pete would have lifted the ship—eventually—and they’d have shown their hand for no real gain. This way, they could be giving themselves leeway to mount something rather more ambitious.”

I didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. Nathan had one hell of a suspicious mind. But under the circumstances, what other way was there for it to go? While we didn’t know what was what and couldn’t find out we had to guard against all eventualities. We had to assume that the worst was at least possible, and work out a strategy to cope with it.

“How much information on this stuff is in the survey report, Alex?” asked Nathan. “Assuming, that is, that you’ve picked out the right candidate.”

“I told you. Standard data.”

“What I mean is: is there enough data for us to begin work on preparing something to attack it. Not necessarily a virus...a specific poison.”

I shook my head. “I can tell you about poisons that will destroy just about any kind of living tissue,” I said. “But to identify something that will attack this stuff specifically without a living specimen to work with is impossible. It would
have
to be genetically specific, remember.... This stuff can mimic the cells of its hosts well enough to avoid any ordinary antibiotic. And while we’re on the subject there’s one other thing that you ought to bear in mind.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t bank on our being able to wipe this thing out, even if things do go entirely our way. With a living specimen to work on and the resources of the lab I could devise a way to protect us. But for the people in the city it’s already too late. Quite apart from the psychological dependency—however great or small that may be—there’s the fact that the parasite probably has extensive ramifications inside the body. If we find something that kills parasite cells selectively those people will wake up one morning to find that there’s the detritus of millions of dead cells washing about in their system. Their physiological resources wouldn’t be up to the job of cleaning them out. The breakdown products would be toxic—would poison the host system. The only way those people are going to be freed from parasitism is if the parasite can be persuaded to withdraw an inch at a time. I don’t see how we’d arrange that.”