Read The City of the Sun Online
Authors: Brian Stableford
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #sci-fi, #space travel, #arthur c. clarke
“These people aren’t really people any more, Nathan. What the Self is now is an alien being, in every sense of the word. Sure, it evolved out of humanity, but humanity has ancestors that were apes and insectivores and reptiles and. mud-skipping fish. It took us millions of years to become what we are instead of mud-skipping fish, but in mental terms I think the Self may have come just as far in a few short decades. You can’t measure its kinship with our kind of humanity in years or generations—you have to measure it in terms of change.
“All that’s obvious, but we never tried to take into account its implications. We were stuck with the thought that these people were intrinsically human but had somehow been de-humanized...that although they were now alien they retained inside them the essence of humanity. And because of that we saw what had happened to them as pure evil. If we hadn’t kept on thinking of them as dehumanized, as perverted humanity, we’d never have let our minds fill up as they did with images of horror and nightmares about the conquest of the universe and defense by blanket nuclear bombing. Those ideas would never have entered our head if we’d only seen these aliens—this alien—for what it really is...something that is completely different.
“If we’d accepted the Self’s alienness from the start—if we only
could
have accepted it, somehow—then we would have come out of the ship determined to make contact, to make peace, to establish friendly relations. We’d have been determined to understand it, as far as we could, but we would have known that we couldn’t expect to fully understand. We’d have accepted what we couldn’t know and couldn’t find out as an inevitable reservoir of uncertainty. But because of the attitude we did bring out of the ship that reservoir became a festering pit of fear and horror. Everything that we couldn’t find out became a source of danger, a risk. And because of our attitude, which conjured up these fears, we were on the edge of being ready to take a hand in the extinction of all life on this world.
“If you want to be cynical you can say that we can afford to take a benevolent attitude to aliens like the salamen. You can say that the only reason our attitude to the category ‘alien’ is positive and constructive is that our explorers have never yet found anything alien which poses any kind of a threat to us. You can say that this is different because it
does
seem to pose a threat and that no amount of talking will take away that threat or overcome the risk we’d be taking in not trying to destroy this thing.
“If you want to take that line, I’ll say ‘okay.’ It
is
a risk. But it’s a
necessary
risk...not just here, but everywhere and anywhen. It’s a chance we have to take now, and the next time, and the time after that. How can we possibly use our ability to travel between the stars if we aren’t willing to take risks? How can we do
anything
in life if we aren’t prepared to take chances? Life and history are nothing but long sequences of gambles, and star travel is the biggest gamble of all. There’s no point in having a committee of the UN draw up rules which the universe must conform to in order to allow us to move out into it in perfect safety. What use is it for the UN to say: ‘All right, we’re going out to the stars, we’re going to take humanity into the universe at large, but
only
if we never meet anything that we can’t understand,
only
if we never meet anything we can’t handle,
only
if every strange race we find is completely harmless; we’ll conquer the galaxy, but only if it’s a
nice
galaxy, and only if it behaves itself and doesn’t come up with anything that our labs can’t analyze and destroy, and only if it obeys the law of mediocrity which says that everything which exists must be pretty much the same as here. Those aren’t the terms on which we can make the star worlds ours, Nathan...and I don’t even believe that they’re the terms we ought to hope for.
“You’re frightened by what we’ve found here. So am I. It’s possible that this is the devil’s world, utterly corrupted by something evil and inimical to mankind. It’s possible that this is a world of witches, committed to the destruction of everything we hold dear. It’s possible that unless we burn every last ounce of living flesh on this world that we may lose everything, and that the devil will rule all of Creation. It’s possible, and there’s absolutely no way I can prove to you that it’s not. I’m defending the witches, and automatically become suspect myself. I speak for evil, if evil it is, and therefore must be corrupted myself. There’s no evidence either way because the circumstances rule out the very possibility of there
being
evidence.
“But you can’t proceed on the assumptions you want to apply. It’s not a viable policy for living. There’s no way you can exterminate every last vestige of
risk.
You can’t operate on the principle of rather burning a thousand innocent souls than allowing one minion of the devil to escape. It’s not right, and it’s not practical. We have to face our fears and learn to live with them, Nathan. We have to learn to control our nightmares.”
Throughout the tirade Nathan stood quite impassively. He listened to every word. It went in, and it didn’t just flow out of him. But he didn’t move a muscle, and I knew that the outside of him spoke for the inside as well.
“I know all that, Alex,” he said, quietly. “Nothing here is new. Nothing here is even solid. It’s just a piece of public relations...impassioned rhetoric. I can do it, too. I
will
do it, in almost exactly the same way, back home. I’ll spin such a spell that I’ll win ninety percent of any audience over to your way of thinking. But public relations is like possession, Alex...it’s only nine points of the law. To be able to put over a stunt like that—for it even to be worth
trying
to put over a stunt like that—
I have to have something to sell.
I know that to you, what you’ve said is everything that’s important. As moral philosophy it may be great stuff. But I’m talking about politics and the business of practical persuasion.
“Sure we should face our fears. Sure you can’t go through life waving a gun at everything that alarms you. But you try telling that to a man who’s scared, Alex. Try telling it to the man with the gun. He isn’t going to be convinced, no matter how
right
you are. You have to give him something different. You have to hit his hard head with something just as hard. I’m scared, Alex. I’m playing the part of the man with the gun. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to show me something that will penetrate a thick skull. You’ll have to convince me that I can take what you give me back to Earth and into the UN committee rooms...and you have to persuade me that what you have will work
there,
where all the moral philosophy in the world wouldn’t win the flicker of an eyebrow.”
I knelt down, and I took something out of the pack. It was a small plastic phial—a specimen bottle that had been in a pocket of the packsack when Karen had first picked it up before we left the ship. Now it contained a viscous liquid, milky and lumpy, like runny porridge.
I held it up so that it caught the light.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Truth serum,” I told him.
“So what?”
“I’m down to Earth now,” I said. “I’m talking practical matters. What’s the one force that’s always guaranteed to overcome fear even in the most committeefied mind in the world?”
“Greed,” he said.
I knew he’d get it in one.
“But there’s no way to save the situation that way,” he went on. “Even if we desperately needed a truth serum more than anything else in the universe, there’s no way you could set up a claim for this world because of its trade potential. You know as well as I do that you just can’t carry goods over interstellar distances. There’s no way it can be made economically feasible. Not for a truth serum...or anything else.”
“How about the elixir of life?” I asked.
“They have the elixir of life?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
And then he got the point. He’d been a little slow. I’d been even slower...but I hadn’t had the benefit of such direct prompting.
“You
can
run interstellar trade,” I said, wanting to say it before he could dive in and steal all my lines. “We already do it. The
Daedalus
brings help to the colony worlds. But it’s not material help. It’s all in the head, with a little extra facility laid on in the form of a lab. The one thing you can exchange is
knowledge
...the most basic wealth of all. None of the other colonies have it, or can be expected to develop any worth exporting for hundreds of years. They’re all living on the legacy of Earth, and they won’t get into new patterns of discovery until they’ve used up that legacy in transforming their environment. But Arcadia is different. Arcadia is already into new discoveries...whole new
kinds
of discovery. They have opportunities we could never have, because they’re not the same kind of beings we are. They won’t do much in physics or raw chemistry—not for a long time and maybe not ever. But in biochemistry and in psychochemistry they have facilities for experiment we can never have. This is just a truth serum. We already have ways of getting at or near the truth...and maybe it won’t be long before someone finds a way of countering this one. It’s not particularly important. It’s not worth much in terms of propaganda and getting into thick skulls.
“But tell the hardheaded men with guns that they’ll be blowing up something that has potential enough to produce cures for every ill known to mankind—ills that even our advanced knowledge in genetic engineering hasn’t beaten or even subdued. Tell them that they’ll be blowing up something that might one day be able to offer us immortality...a way to make the human body keep renewing itself forever. Tell them that they’ll be blowing up something that could eventually lead us to a full knowledge of the nature of death, and how to overcome it.”
That gun was still pointing at my midriff.
“Does he mean it?” asked Nathan, quietly, of Mariel.
It wasn’t really a necessary question.
“He means it,” she replied. “And I think he’s telling the truth.”
There are risks and risks. Some risks aren’t worth taking simply because they’re so consummately easy to counter. And that’s why I had to put on yet another plastic suit in the decontamination lock. I was condemned to wearing it for a month. As a precaution. It was a sort of cruel joke by which Nathan paid me back for winning the day. He can’t have taken that much joy in it. What’s sauce for the goose
etc.
I insisted that if I was going to have to seal myself away from the world, so was he. As a precaution, of course. Karen got stuck with it as well...on the grounds that we couldn’t be sure that her suit (and her being) hadn’t been tampered with while we were prisoners in the city. It was all a bit of a farce.
Being in a suit is no fun. You can’t eat properly, sterilized drinks usually taste foul, and there are other pleasures which become downright impossible. There was a certain amount of frustration attendant upon our precautions.
Nevertheless, I still went to Karen’s cabin later that night, for a modest orgy of self-satisfaction in the absence of any other kind. It was good to be together, for the company.
“I was worried,” she confessed to me. “I was really scared. I didn’t really think you could persuade him that we were okay after they’d had us incommunicado for so long and after you told them about Sorokin changing back into a Servant. I have to hand it to you...you really talked a ring round Nathan.”
“He’d have let us back in anyhow,” I told her. “Even without the serum and the clever chat. He’d have taken the chance in the end.”
“I’m not so sure. He can be tough.”
“Sure,” I said. “When we were all inside, and there was only a world beyond the airlock...then he could be tough. We could have flown away and left nothing behind, and stood by with clean hands while the UN debated butchery. We could have kept our consciences under control. Even me—if it had come to the crunch I would have rationalized it, excused it, told myself not to care more than I could bear. That’s the way minds work. But once there were two of us outside, so that in order to take the big decision Nathan would have had to desert us.... Well, the odds were always in our favor. We’re neither of us particularly lovable. I’m obsessive and you’re a bit of a bitch. But in four years we’ve become part and parcel of the people in there. They’ve grown accustomed to us. They wouldn’t abandon us if they could rationalize a policy that would allow them to save us. They’d take the risks...for us.”
“You have far too much faith in human nature,” she said.
“I don’t have any at all,” I assured her. “But I know what motives are made of.”
“What would have happened,” she asked pensively, “if it hadn’t been you that went with Sorokin? Suppose it had been Nathan? Would they still have been so ready to play it straight after they’d heard
his
version of the whole truth and nothing but? And even if they still wanted to play the difficult way...would they have persuaded him?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But with me aboard the ship...you and he outside....”
“Everyone’s expendable.”
“To the UN. Not to me. Not even to Nathan. Nor to you, though you’d be damned before admitting it.”
“Sure,” she said dryly.
“I wouldn’t even abandon the devil’s advocate,” I said, with all the generosity I could find. My soul was overflowing with generosity at that particular point in time. Other times, I might have thought differently about everything.
“Who?” she inquired.
“Whoever the UN put aboard to prepare the opposition case. Nathan pointed out to me that there had to be one, and I accept the logic. It’s not him, or me, or Mariel. I don’t believe it’s Conrad or Pete, either. Conrad was out on the first trip and Pete doesn’t take enough interest. That leaves you or Linda. Mariel knows, of course, but she won’t tell.”