The City of the Sun (3 page)

The weird steeds continued their approach, and the black pattern that decorated the naked archers began to stand out even more clearly as a curious network, branching profusely from a center that was gathered about the neck and upper torso. Some of the branches extended out along the limbs to the hands and feet. It looked rather as if someone had drawn a map of the arterial circulatory system on the outside of each man’s skin. When they were closer still, I realized that the leader was similarly decorated, although the greater part of the decoration was, of course, concealed by his silvery tunic. His skin was very dark, but its apparent blackness was enhanced by the elaboration of the network around his head and over his skull. I realized that all the men were bald, and that the black pate which each of them boasted was in every case the contribution of the dendritic patina.

Briefly, I looked back over the fields, and even at the pedestrians on the city walls. They were too far away to make me certain, but I felt pretty sure that they, too, owed their dark heads to the same cause.

“I don’t think that’s paint,” said Nathan.

I didn’t, either.

Something was growing on their skins—something complex and ordered. The patterns were neatly drawn, the lines were precise. When they came even closer I could see the black stuff—where it was thickest—standing out from the skin in shallow ridges.

There were seven riders in all—six archers and the leader. The six reined in about fifty feet away, jostling for position slightly in the narrow lane. There was only room for two abreast, and they didn’t spread out to trample the green corn in the fields to either side. The leader came on alone, the whites of his eyes seeming strangely prominent in the black-capped, brown-skinned face. Two branches extended from the skullcap down between his eyes to run from either side of his prominent nose out into the cheeks, where they subdivided into tiny ramified webs. Thicker lines ran along his brow ridges, substituting for eyebrows. He seemed to have no bodily hair at all. When I glanced at the naked archers to seek confirmation of this impression I couldn’t see the slightest trace of pubic hair. But the distance was considerable, and I didn’t come to any immediate conclusion.

The dark man’s stare seemed distinctly hostile. I let my hands move away from my sides, and I held the palms open to emphasize their emptiness. Nathan did the same, rather more obtrusively.

As the dark man reined in his mount, he asked: “Do you understand me?” His English was slightly accented but otherwise quite clear. What surprised me, though, was the note of his voice. It was very high-pitched. I thought for one moment that I had jumped too soon to the conclusion that he was male.

There was nothing positive, now I came to look more closely, to identify either sex.

“I understand you,” said Nathan, in reply to his/her question.

“You are from Earth.” It was a statement rather than a question.

“Yes, we are,” said Nathan, slightly surprised.

“A bright meteor passed across the sky yesterday,” stated the high-pitched voice. “Visible even in daylight. It was your starship.”

“Yes,” said Nathan.

The man/woman kept the conversational initiative with consummate ease—Nathan never got a chance to develop his sophisticated and much-practiced opening patter. “You must not come to the city today,” he/she said. “The Self must be made aware of your coming. You must wait. How far away is your ship?”

“A few miles,” said Nathan, “but....”

Buts, however, were not to be allowed. The high-pitched voice cut in quickly: “You must return. If you do not, you will be killed.”

That seemed to me to be pretty straight talking. There wasn’t a lot of room for negotiation in the statement.

“We must tell you why we have come,” said Nathan, quickly. He copied the other’s mode of speech easily. When in Rome....

It seemed that Arcadians didn’t go in a lot for small talk.

“Tell me now,” commanded the man/woman on the beast.

“We have come to help you,” said Nathan, compressing his message somewhat. “We set out from Earth three years ago to visit a series of colonies, to find out about their problems and their progress. Yours is the fourth we have visited. Our expertise and the resources of our ship are at your disposal, and any assistance we can offer in overcoming any difficulties you have encountered will be willingly given. My name is Nathan Parrick, and this is Alexis Alexander, our chief biologist. He is a specialist in ecological management. Do you understand all this?”

The other leaned forward slightly as his/her mount dropped its cumbersome head. As the mane parted slightly around the creature’s neck I saw traces of black beneath the russet fur. Another black web...just like the one that our interrogator wore. If “wore” was the right word.

Nathan’s diplomatic routine suddenly struck me as being slightly stupid. A pleasant, polite rigmarole full of happy assurances and formal greetings. The one question he was really burning to ask he put firmly to one side in the name of protocol.

Excuse me, sir or madam, but why have you got that funny black stuff growing all over you?

To which the obvious answer had to be:
Strange you should ask...I’m desperately curious as to why you haven’t.

In the meantime, he or she had signaled his or her perfect comprehension of what Nathan was saying.

Nathan went on: “We have also come here to study the colony and its way of life. We have a great deal to learn concerning the prospects of colonies on alien worlds. This is information which Earth needs desperately, in order that the risks taken by future colonists may be minimized. We need to know a great deal about the possible pitfalls and dangers....”

The melodious voice cut in again: “That is enough. You will return to your ship now. A Servant will come to you if you are to be allowed to enter the city. If the Ego permits, then you may put your case to him.”

With that, the rider jerked the rein and the beast began to turn away.

“Wait!” said Nathan, quickly. He might as well have been King Canute talking to the tide. The man/woman in the silvery tunic rode back to the archers, who parted to let their leader through, and then turned their own mounts. Not one of them glanced back. They were apparently confident of our compliance.

Nathan stared after them for fully half a minute, and then turned to me. “What...?” he began.

Since everyone else was interrupting him, I thought I might as well get in on the act. “I don’t know,” I said, quickly. “But we’d better do as he says. Quickly. And no one comes out again without protective clothing. We’ll suit up in the lock so that we don’t risk carrying anything inside. Isolation. I don’t want that stuff growing on me, and if I’ve already picked up a spore of some kind I don’t want to infect everyone else aboard the
Daedalus
. This could be serious.”

I was moving even as I spoke. I wasn’t particularly worried—I’d been infected with parasites of all shapes, sizes and colors in my time. I’d even picked up alien parasites occasionally during the last three years—ectoparasites aren’t so fussy about what kind of flesh they chew their way into. Alien worms and fungi itch just the same as our parasitic brethren on Earth. However, there was a certain niggling anxiety in my mind. This was one hell of a parasite, if appearances could be trusted. And it had no real right to be infecting humans so easily and so copiously as this. The survey team hadn’t promised a bug-free world—there are
always
a few local pests that are adaptable enough to bother people—but on the other hand, the survey team hadn’t dropped the slightest hint about anything like
this.

Nathan had to walk pretty quickly to catch up with me.

“You think we might have picked it up already?” be said. “From the air?”

“I’d rather not take chances,” I told him. “Black isn’t my color. But once we’ve been through decontamination and suited up, we’re as safe as we can be. Let’s do that first, and then we’ll be free to worry about everything else.”

I caught his eye as we marched back up the slope, and I could see in his face that he thought—as I did—that there would still be a lot that warranted worrying about.

“Curious names,” observed Conrad.

“Ominous names,” Nathan corrected him.

I knew what he meant. We could have shrugged off “king,” or “master” or “parliament” or almost anything else familiar. Even “metaphysicus” wouldn’t have bothered us, because we’d looked up
The City of the Sun
and knew that that was what the top man in the romance was called. But “Self” and “Ego” weren’t words you’d normally associate with government, and it had seemed to me that the dark man—or woman—had such a precise way of speaking that it wasn’t safe to assume that the terms weren’t in some way specifically meaningful.

“It might just be a case of Utopian pretentiousness,” said Karen. “These people seem to have gone in for pretentiousness, judging by your description of the city.”

“This is a weird one,” I said, meditatively, inspecting my fingernails beneath the plastic gauntlet. “I think it might be weirder than we yet imagine.”

“Suppose they come back and tell us that they’ve decided to refuse our application,” said Linda. “What then?”

“Well,” I said. “It’ll be nothing new. We don’t exactly seem to be welcome wherever we go. The colonies haven’t rolled out a single red carpet so far, although they did give us a good dinner on Floria before they started shooting.”

“We’ve got to find out what’s happening here,” said Nathan. “Whether they appreciate our being here or not.”

“That plastic suit won’t stop an arrow,” I said, flatly.

“Never mind that,” said Conrad. “There’s no point in wasting time in speculative meandering when there’s real work to be done. For one thing, we have to try to identify this parasite. The survey team probably recorded its presence as a parasite of the herbivores, or some other local species. If we must speculate, let’s speculate as to why
they
weren’t infected.”

“They were only here fourteen months,” I reminded him. “And not precisely here, either—we’re several hundred miles from site prime...over a thousand, I think. There are any number of versatile parasites among the communal protozoa.... This particular one was probably a good deal rarer where the survey team spent the greater part of their time than it is here. But you’re right about identifying it.... Linda—can you feed in the data we have and get the computer to check against the classification tables? Get it to sort out data cards on anything that fits the basic description.”

Linda nodded, and went into the lab to start work on the problem. Once we had the cards codifying the survey team’s reports on various suspects we’d be able to get a better idea of what we were dealing with.

The computer didn’t take long to do the sort, and it finally belched forth four cards printed with abbreviated jargon. Linda tossed them to me, and I skimmed through them rapidly.

“I was afraid of that,” I murmured.

“What?” asked Nathan.

“Here we have four parasites which form black dendritic webs on the outer skin of their hosts. But all four hosts are small mammals of no economic importance or ecological interest. Rabbits and field mice, as near as damn it.”

“So?”

“They didn’t find it in association with the oxen,” I said, patiently. “If they had, they’d have taken a lot more interest in it. The oxen are useful, valuable animals.
Their
diseases were a matter of considerable import in assessing the potential of a colony here—their presence provided a possible source of meat, transport
and
farm labor. But who’s interested in rabbits and field mice? The survey team did no more than a routine bioscan on this lot, whereas if they’d found it among the oxen—from which the people here presumably caught it—they’d have looked at it much more closely.”

“Didn’t they realize it might infect humans?” asked Mariel.

I shook my head as I studied the cards more carefully, one by one. “They noted that the parasite was probably capable of infecting a range of compatible hosts. They didn’t realize how wide a range. But even if they had, they might not have considered it important. Most people, remember, don’t just sit back and let things grow all over them. They try to do something about it.”