The City of the Sun (11 page)

“Some of these animals out here don’t have companions,” I observed. “Are they immune? Is there some kind of natural check on the spread of the parasite in the wild?”

I didn’t really expect much of an answer to that. I knew he wasn’t going to tell me anything he might know about immunity. But what he did say was very strange.

He said: “Nothing here is shaped by the Self.”

I had to think about that for a moment or two, and he tried to generate some distance between us by urging his mount to the left. I shoved mine in the same direction.

“Are you saying that even the parasitized beasts out here are different in some way from these domesticated ones?” I asked. “Do you mean to say that you also count the beasts of burden in your idea of the Nation’s Self?”

“We are one Nation,” he replied. It wasn’t exactly a flat
yes
, but it wasn’t a flat
no.
And surely, if I was wrong, a flat
no
would have served.

Votes for oxen,
I thought.
And why the hell not? They pull the ploughs and the carts.

But oxen were stupid. If ox plus companion added up to something semi-intelligent, the extra contribution could only come from the black dendrite. But how? If the wild oxen out here, parasitized or not, were excluded, what was different about the domestic oxen.

Human hosts die,
I thought.
Dendrites don’t.

I looked down at the neck of my trusty steed, wondering if the network of thin black lines might once have been the Servant’s Uncle Harry. Or Uncle Harry’s companion, to be strictly accurate. If it was, it had lost an awful lot of weight...unless the internal ramifications of the ox-dendrites were much more extensive than the internal ramifications of the man-parasites....

It was all pure speculation. There was so much speculation. If only one small piece would fall into place perhaps we could sort out the truth from its welter of concealing illusions, and everything would come together. Just one small extra factor...the one that the people of the City of the Sun were so determined to hide from us until the day when they could offer us understanding.... Until the day when understanding might come far too late, if our worst fears were halfway justified.

The Servant had moved away again.

Gentle rain began to fall from above. It didn’t bother me—I was dressed for it. It didn’t seem to bother the Servant or our cohort of guards, either. The naked archers seemed quite oblivious to wind and water. Whether this was because the parasite enhanced their temperature regulation or whether they were just stoical there was no way to tell. Raindrops settling on the visor blurred my vision, and I wiped them away with my hand. A couple soaked into the leaf-filter and I sucked them through. It took a lot of sucking for a very small payoff.

Which seemed to symbolize our present situation as regarded coming to terms with Arcadia’s colony.

“I thought you people didn’t bother so much about keeping warm,” I said.

“The night will be cold,” said the dark man, affably. “The fire will help to keep us dry. And it will discourage predators. You still have an hour before dark. This is what you came out here to see. Look around.”

I took the hint. I was dry anyhow. And I had come to see whatever there was to be seen. Somehow, in the rain it didn’t seem like such a good idea. What could picking over the bones of an old spaceship tell me?

There were birds nesting in the articulations of many of the metal limbs. There were a lot of droppings scattered on the ground, suggesting that our arrival had disturbed quite a crowd of small mammals. I searched assiduously for anything that might offer some insight into the years during which the ship had been stripped—a piece of imperishable plastic with something written on it...even graffiti on the skeletal struts. As I looked and didn’t find anything I began to feel a little stupid. But I had to keep looking for one small piece of evidence that might reveal the fact that I was trying to discover: whether the people in the city were, in fact, all the people living on Arcadia. If there were other men here—men without black spider web companions—they, too, must come here to plunder what they could from the wreckage.

I wanted to think that they might exist. Since I had seen the herds earlier in the day, where parasitized beasts mingled with unparasitized beasts, I had—rightly or wrongly—been encouraged to hope. But I needed something else that could ignite that hope into a real possibility. I needed a
sign.
I didn’t really know what kind of sign I was looking for, but I was damned if I was going to miss it for want of looking.

But night fell, and I had nothing.

I returned to the shelter and the fire, my plastic outer skin running with tiny rivulets of rainwater.

“You found nothing,” said the Servant.

“I found nothing,” I confirmed.

“We will go back in the morning.”

I gave him a dirty look, but he didn’t appreciate it. All expressions came alike to him.

“We’ll see how things look in the morning,” I replied.

He didn’t ask me what I was looking for. Perhaps he thought he knew. Or perhaps he thought I didn’t.

They had brought food with them, in packs slung across the hindquarters of the oxen. I’d brought my own rations, properly sterilized and liquefied, in containers that looked like big toothpaste tubes. They brewed up some of their insipid tea using rainwater, and offered me a bowl. I took it, just to be sociable.

They had no sleeping bags, and were content, when the time came, to stretch themselves on the ground as they were—the archers naked, the Servant in his silvery tunic. I was wearing my sleeping bag.

I couldn’t sleep at first, but listened to the noises of the night. There were bird calls—pleasant, fluting notes, and the occasional harsh screech that immediately made me think
owl.
I heard a distant barking noise, too, carried on and on by a series of throats, that might or might not have been the dreaded wolves.

The rain stopped sometime around midnight. I remember thinking that it was a good thing the local day was a whole forty minutes shorter than a standard day, and that the night would therefore be a little shorter. It was the first good thought I’d had regarding local time, which had hitherto seemed to be against us. Twenty times forty minutes is more than thirteen hours...thirteen hours less time to make headway before our deadline expired and we were into phase two of the operation.

As I lay in the dark, some distance away from the red glow of the fire, I couldn’t help thinking that here was a golden opportunity for the Servant and his henchmen to make a play. I was alone, not expected back for some time. It would be an easy job to overpower me, open up the suit, introduce infective material.

But then what? A take-over takes time. They could never use me as a vector to get the stuff into the ship...not without turning me into an automaton utterly subject to the will of a black dendrite—or their wonderful Self. And to do that, they’d presumably have to tip their hand by letting the stuff grow all over me....

They were stupid thoughts—the kind of half-rational ideas that always surface as you sink below consciousness toward sleep. They lacked sense and they lacked force, but there was no way I could keep them at bay.

Ultimately, though, they lost their feeble grip on me and I was asleep.

I woke into the first bright light of day.

The fire was nothing now but a pile of ash smoldering idly away. One of the archers was squatting before it, peering through the smoke into the distance. The others were asleep—or still, at any rate.

The sky was clear now, with only a few white clouds drifting on a mild breeze.

The archer looked up as I approached, without any obvious interest.

“Anything happen during the night?” I asked.

“A wolf came,” he said laconically. “A scout for the pack. It went away.”

“You didn’t shoot at it?”

“I didn’t see it. I smelled it.”

“Will it be back?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked out at the expanse of the plain. There was a great deal of tall grass hereabouts, with a multitude of ragged bushes and twisted trees breaking through in clumps. It looked desolate and empty, except for small birds in the branches and high in the sky.

The dew was already rising.

I took out another tube of tasteless but nutritious mush, and began squirting it through the filter. In the meantime I walked the length of the ship, covering much the same ground as I had the previous night, but seeming to see it better now. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and tried to gather my senses, with my hopes somewhat renewed. When I got back to the fire the others were all awake, and the Servant was coaxing the fire back to life in order to make more tea. I passed by, determined to further the investigation. I paused here and there to sort through the debris littering the ground—the useless remnants of cannibalized machines. There was no shortage of rubbish, but most of it would only interest archaeologists excavating the site in a thousand years time. They could have a fine old time identifying every last nest of printed circuits with the aid of a microscope. I wanted artifacts slightly more recent then these. Arrowheads that were not city arrowheads...tools made out of large bones, that could only have come from beasts like the oxen....

But I was wasting my time. I had made the trip for nothing.

“All right,” I said to the Servant, finally. “Let’s go home.”

We mounted up and set off on the long ride home. My legs were stiff and we hadn’t gone far before I began to ache. The Servant, as he had the day before, urged his mount forward to take the lead, and when I tried to come up level with him he edged away. Mentally cursing him I coaxed my own animal sideways, trying to get closer.

The animal responded, as always, to the pressure of my hands and heels, but all of a sudden was halted in mid-stride.

I was catapulted forward. With neither saddle nor stirrups my position was precarious enough without sudden stops. I went head-first in an inglorious swan dive over the beast’s head. The tip of one of the coiled horns caught my right leg just above the knee and I felt both the plastic of my suit and the cloth of my one-piece being ripped. I twisted slightly in flight and came down on my left shoulder, rolling over to avoid breaking either my neck or my back. The fall shook me up badly.

The ox also came down with a hell of a thump, but it had veered the other way in tripping and it didn’t roll on top of me—if it had, or if one of its hooves had caught me, I might have been seriously hurt. As it was, I got away with bruises and a long scratch on my leg which bled a little but wasn’t deep enough to cause any significant anguish. I was okay...but the beast wasn’t.

I sat up, feeling very dazed, and saw the animal trying to rise. Its right foreleg was broken—the bone must have snapped clean through. The leg was flapping in a rather sickening manner. The poor creature had put its foot into the mouth of one of the multitudinous burrows that riddled the heath while I had been trying to urge it closer to the Servant’s mount.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. Then I looked up.

The Servant had already dismounted, and he was quick to reach the stricken beast. The ox relaxed, and stopped trying to get up. It lay back as the Servant examined the broken leg. The archers, still mounted, formed a ring around us.

The dark man turned to stare hard at me, and for once there was an expression on his face...an expression of muted fury. I was still dazed and bewildered. But I came very rapidly to my senses when I saw that one of the archers was notching an arrow to his bow...and aiming straight between my eyes.

“Now wait a minute,” I said thickly. “It wasn’t my fault! It was an accident!”

The archer had paused. But it wasn’t because of anything I’d said. He was hesitating...waiting for a decision. I didn’t see how he was going to get one. The Self was a full day’s ride away.

At last,
I thought,
I get to witness some spontaneity. Decision-making ad lib.

I only wished that I weren’t the victim of the decision.