The City of the Sun (20 page)

“Well,” she said, “they didn’t look scared to me.”

I tried to sit up, but it was too uncomfortable. “It all depends on how much conscious and direct control they have over the versatility of the parasite cells,” I said. “I don’t know...and maybe they don’t until they’re pushed. It’s possible they can react directly against any attack we might make, without waiting for the laborious routine of mutation and natural selection. If they can...well, all bets are off anyhow. There’s nothing we can do. It’s bombs or nothing. Personally, I’d favor nothing, but I harbor dire suspicions about my fellow men. Especially the political species.”

“You don’t have to go through the routine,” she said. “I know all about your prejudices.

“I never believed in truth serum,” I told her, changing the subject. “I thought it was one of those attractive myths, like the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. I thought lying was built into the way the mind works.”

“Well, you were wrong. I doubt if any human being in the entire history of the race has ever been so utterly frank for such a long period of time as you were over the last couple of hours.”

“They know all about Nathan’s thinking on the subject?”

“They do,” she confirmed. “And they got a blow-by-blow account of our rather bitter conversation of the other night, with all lurid quotes intact. You come up smelling of roses, of course. I shouldn’t be surprised if they make you an honorary member. But they now have a very jaundiced view of Nathan and the UN, thanks to your big mouth.”

“Ah well,” I muttered. “Maybe the serum just preys on one’s inner need to confess. Good for the soul, they say. Doesn’t do a lot for the body, mind. And I had one hell of a nightmare.”

“Tough,” she said, unsympathetically.

“What are they going to do about it, now that they know?” I asked.

“Guess Who is deciding,” she replied. It was the obvious answer. One big orgy of holding hands and swapping circles...thoughts going back and forth through the great network. What kind of decision might the average supermind make, given all the data I could make available to it?

Who could know?

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, ruminatively. I tried to sit up again, but couldn’t. I decided that the failure was an annoyance, and gathered both my wits and my strength for one big surge. Using the back of the chair for leverage I managed to pull myself up. Karen nearly fell over backwards, but managed to save herself by grabbing the table firmly.

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“Truth serum. It makes no sense at all. What do they need a truth serum for? They haven’t got any secrets.... They all have access to one another’s minds. In fact, they all have the same mind, to some degree. Unless there’s a much greater reservoir of individuality than I’d assumed.”

“You don’t have places like this where there’s perfect harmony,” observed Karen.

That was true enough. The existence of cells suggests that occasionally people get put in them. And the Servant, when he’d told me he was letting me go, had commented that if it were a wrong decision he’d be punished for it. The way the Ego spoke made it obvious that some degree of individual initiative remained...and where there’s initiative there’s waywardness. It seemed that the people of the city were slightly more than just units of a super-organism. More like units of a super-community, where individual cells still retained viability and a degree of independence, potential if not actual. Which made sense.

“But why the truth serum?” I asked, again. “Mind-to-mind links cut out a lot of the potential for deception. We know that because we have Mariel. She can read discrepancies between words and thoughts. The link-up between brains must allow these people communication at least to her level of facility. And they have no
reason
to lie to one another, or to pry one another’s secrets loose. They can’t have developed the drug
as
a truth serum. Either it was an accidental discovery, or simply part of a whole series of discoveries.... Which implies that they must have done a lot of work on psychotropics in general. Which implies, in turn, that they may have a lot of other cute little biochemical tricks up their sleeve.”

“So what?” said Karen. “Is there any particular point in this chase?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“Is it going to help us get out of this mess?”

As usual, she wanted to get to the heart of the matter instead of farting around the periphery. I couldn’t blame her.

“It isn’t,” I agreed. “But nothing is. We are, as they say, at the mercy of the unpredictable. Back at the ship, all kinds of possibilities are still open, but for you and me....”

I didn’t go on.

“I don’t know why I come along with you on these jaunts,” she said. “It always ends up like this.”

It was an unfair comment, but I couldn’t be bothered objecting.

“Look at it this way,” I remarked. “At least we’ll go together.”

“I
am
looking at it that way,” she assured me. “It’s the thought that we might end up much more together than we ever dreamed of that worries me.”

“The gods are always against you,” I reminded her, “but sometimes.... The ancient Egyptians, you know, had a whole theory of eschatology based on procedures that a dead soul could adopt in order to answer the courts of divine judgment appropriately and get into heaven regardless of its actual record on Earth...a whole religion of lying to the gods and cheating one’s way into heaven. The Book of the Dead consists almost entirely of good advice on how to put one over on the gods.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I really wanted to know that. Or does the story have a moral?”

“Not exactly,” I told her. “It’s a pretty immoral story.”

Rumor has it that it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And that was where we seemed to be.

As if to emphasize the point, the bolts were drawn back and the door opened. It was, of course, the Ego.

The Self, apparently, had reached its decision. It hadn’t taken very long. Karen didn’t bother to get up and offer him the chair.

“It is settled,” he said, his thin, reedy voice striking its usual high note. “Will you come with me, please.”

I didn’t like the sound of that
please
. It wasn’t the way he usually talked.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The pyramid. It will be more comfortable. We may talk.”

“Just talk?”

“There is no longer any need to be afraid,” he said. “The Self now has a much more accurate appraisal of the situation. It has been decided that we should no longer attempt to adopt you into the Nation.”

“Does that mean you’re going to let us go?” asked Karen, suspiciously.

“Certainly,” he said. “When we have made certain things clear to you. Our interests coincide precisely with your own. We wish to avoid disaster. No one wants war. Even Nathan Parrick would rather have peace.”

“Sure,” I said. “On his terms. I see your point.... You don’t want to be bombed out of existence, which is what will surely happen unless you can come up with something very clever indeed. But you’re left with the problem Nathan handed to me. How do you persuade him that you offer no threat, in the long term, to Earth and the other colony-worlds?”

“Come with me,” he said. “I will explain to you what you must say. We must trust one another. I will show you how we might build such trust. And I will show you, too, how you can save your mission and renew Earth’s interest in the star worlds.”

I just gaped. For a moment or two, my only thought was:
pull the other one, it has bells on.

But then I saw what I hadn’t seen before, and realized exactly where there might be potential for saving this godawful situation. I saw, clear as day, just what we had to do to save the
status quo
and stop both sides from embarking upon a path of policy that might lead to ultimate ruin.

“Lead the way,” I said. “I think this is going to be worth listening to.”

She turned away from me to look at Karen. Karen didn’t say anything.

Mariel turned back, and nodded to Nathan. It was a nod that had a lot to say.

“Stay where you are,” said Nathan. “They fooled her once before.”

“But she
knows
us,” objected Karen. “And she’s not looking at us through a camera.”

“You’re still going to have to persuade me,” said Nathan. “And whatever you have to say, it had better be good.”

“Are you implying that you’d use that gun?” I asked, feeling quite relaxed. “Or just that you’d be prepared to abandon us?”

“I’ll do whatever is necessary,” said Nathan. “I’d hate doing it, but I’d do it.”

“That’s professionalism,” I said.

“This isn’t a good time for jokes,” he observed.

“That’s why I’m trying to be funny,” I told him. “How would you be certain it’s me unless I tried to be funny when it isn’t the time?”

He conceded me a wry grin. “Yeah,” he said, noncommittally.

“With friends like ours,” muttered Karen, “nobody needs enemies.”

“They don’t know we’re friends,” I said. “We were silent for a
long
time. Then we called in and announced that Sorokin was bait in a trap we’d walked straight into, that we were in the city and had spilled
everything,
and that we were coming home because everything in the garden was rosy and everything would be just fine, happy ending guaranteed. They’re as suspicious as hell...and who wouldn’t be?”

“But we’re going to listen,” said Nathan, with a face that would have done credit to a poker player. “And we even came outside to do it. That’s how badly we want to hear an answer, if you can persuade us that there’s one available. But we want to keep the risk to a minimum. I’m making no promises. Unless you can tell us exactly why they let you go...why they haven’t taken all the chances they’ve had....”

“Because they’re afraid of us,” I said. “Because they’re just about as scared of us as we are of them. Their first thought was to lie to us, cheat us, and capture or destroy us. Just as our first thought was to lie to them, cheat them, and destroy them or render them harmless. They now see things in a more reasonable manner. It’s our turn to do the same.

“I’ll tell you why some of our fears are groundless, though that’s a minor point because there’s no way I can prove it to you. These people aren’t embarked upon a historical course that will bring them a spaceship-building technology in two hundred years as a preparatory stage in the conquest of the universe. They don’t want Earth, or other worlds...and they haven’t planned any historical course at all. They haven’t because they realized very quickly that they can’t. They can’t predict what they’ll be doing in fifty years’ time because they don’t know what they’ll
be
in fifty years’ time. They hardly know what they’ll be the day after tomorrow. They know very little about what they are now. The Self is only just beginning to discover the things it can do, the things it can hope to be. Its development as an entity is utterly unpredictable. It’s like a little child first beginning to be aware of itself and the world that contains it. The only guides it has so far had have misled it, because the guides were the legacy of Earth, meant to pertain to beings of a radically different kind—to individuals, not to a collective communal entity. The Self isn’t concerned with conquering the universe, Nathan—that’s a human power fantasy, based on the urge for one individual to impose his will on others. The Self doesn’t think like that. It isn’t that kind of being.

“The Self isn’t aiming for high technology and the creation of mechanical slaves to replace human ones. It isn’t oriented in that direction at all. The Self’s interest is almost exclusively itself...its only science is a species of socio-psychology that we simply don’t have because it would be meaningless to us. The nearest we could ever come to it is in the most unrealistic of our Utopian fantasies, imagining a state of social life impossible of practical realization. That’s where the Self started.... That was the only place it had to start. But the City of the Sun was only square one—a conceptual base from which to begin. The walls still stand, but imaginatively and existentially the Self is a long way from that now, and getting further away with every day that passes. It’s already beyond our comprehension. If you want a judgment based on what the Ego has tried to convey to me, the people of the city have more individual responsibility than we feared, but also participate far more fully in collective experience than we believe to be compatible with the first notion.