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.”
“There’s one way we could attack the problem,” said Conrad, quickly. “If we found the means and the opportunity.”
“Which is?” asked Nathan.
“We’d have to find an agent—an innovative gene—that wouldn’t actively destroy the parasite but would immunize against initial infection. If we could attach it to a carrier virus and make it endemic in the population it would protect newborn children against the possibility of parasitism.”
“You can do that?” said Nathan, checking with me.
“We might be able to,” I agreed. “If we had time—a lot more than twenty days. And if we had living cells to work with. And if we had a little luck riding with us. But before there’s any question of our being able to mount such a project there’s the problem of getting the people to cooperate, knowingly or not. While they stick to their conditions we have no chance...and there is, of course, one more unknown factor, which is the resources of the parasite. We may be the genetic engineers but organisms have their own way of coping with difficulties. If each of these black things were an organism, it would be different, but they’re not. Each one is a colony of millions of organisms, with a generation time probably measurable in hours. That’s quite some reservoir of potential for change...for extreme adaptability. We already know that each cell has tremendous versatility. Most of the problems we try to overcome with the aid of our little laboratory are easy. This one might fight back. And it might win. It may be able to develop its own immunity to our immunizing agent just as fast as we can develop it in the lab. Maybe faster.”
I looked at Conrad for support.
He nodded. “All that’s true,” he said. “Nature’s provided this thing with all the resources that technology’s given us. It may conduct its evolutionary experiments without much planning, but it has the equipment to get there anyhow—the opportunity to mount so many trials that errors don’t matter.”
“If this stuff is as versatile as all that and twice as clever,” said Karen, “how come we’re so confident we can defend ourselves against it?”
“Its resources are purely reactive,” I said. “We have to set it the problem before it gets to solve it. It can’t take the offensive. At least, not unless it’s....” I let the sentence hang, realizing the awful possibility.
“Not unless it’s sentient,” Conrad finished for me.
“But that’s exactly what we don’t know,” said Nathan.
“True,” I admitted. “But twenty days is only twenty days.... God Almighty would be pushed to create something capable of breaching the ship and the suits in that time.”
“Not if the rumors about his strenuous working week are true,” said Karen, sarcastically. “In addition to which, it may be that a god—though maybe not an almighty one—is what we’re facing. Nathan quoted something their top man said which suggests that the colonists just might regard this thing as a god.”
“That, at least, we can investigate,” I said. “We’re entitled to ask questions about their beliefs, religious and otherwise. In fact it may be that questions about their beliefs are the only ones that are going to reveal anything significant. If they do believe in an active divine force that might be testimony to the existence of an independent sentience in the parasitic communities.”
“On the other hand,” said Nathan, dryly, “it might not. Plenty of people have held similar beliefs without being dominated by parasites. And on the other hand, even if they don’t believe in any independent active force, that wouldn’t prove that there isn’t one.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Just an idea,” I said. “At least that’s one area where you’re less likely to encounter straightforward lies.”
He shook his head, unconvinced. He was now in a situation where he was prepared to doubt any and all evidence. We might be faced with a situation where any and all evidence was dubious, so perhaps it was fair enough. But once you get into such a morass of doubt how do you ever get out? How can you?
“Should we reconsider our decision?” said Pete, carefully. “If we not only don’t know where we are but don’t know any way that we can get anywhere at all, what’s the point in staying? Maybe we should duck the risks and go home...pass the buck back to the UN.”
“And what would they do?” I inquired.
“One of two things,” said Nathan. “Forget the whole thing. Or send a bomb to cancel the problem out of existence. And either way....”
“Our mission would be a bust. The devil’s advocate is left with a walkover.”
“Probably.”
I looked round the table. “I say we stay,” I said. “I say we have to be prepared to have a go at this thing ourselves. It may be impossible, but it may not. Either way, we must try. Even if there’s a risk.”
“I’m with Alex,” said Nathan. “Anyone else?”
“We’ve nothing to run away from yet but a complicated argument,” said Conrad.
“We have to try,” said Mariel.
That was a majority. If any of the others had seriously considered being a dissenting voice they shelved their plans now. Karen and Linda just nodded, and Pete said: “That’s okay.”
“Then let’s get to work,” said Nathan. “Let’s get what we can before the first deadline. But be careful.”
The mood which dominated the commencement of work was not one of overwhelming self-confidence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
With such a short time to go before the big hurdle had to be jumped (or refused) we had to set to work with determination, and perhaps even a hint of desperation. Conrad and Linda began in the fields,
assessing the agricultural status of the colony, but moved on as soon as they had collected basic data and sufficient specimens for later scrutinization into the city, where they began to investigate diet, hygiene and health. They found the citizens cooperative but not talkative. They were allowed to take blood samples but there was always a Servant in attendance to make sure that the parasite cells weren’t touched. These data were given priority in analysis.
The rest of us also found that we were shadowed just about everywhere that we went by helpful but suspicious Servants. We’d lived with exactly the same problem during our early days on Wildeblood, and we were used to it—but that didn’t make it any less of an imposition. Nathan and Mariel went straight into the city with all kinds of recording apparatus—film and tape. It took them only a couple of days to get a basic record of the situation in glorious Technicolor, and Mariel was left to sort through the film in search of anything helpful while Nathan carried on the interrogation work he’d already begun. The most unenviable part of Mariel’s task was the sorting, classification and filing of the pictographs, but this, too, was given a low priority as too time-consuming for immediate attention. Nathan, of course, asked for help in translating—or perhaps interpreting would be a better word—the pictographs, and this was readily granted. It turned out, however, that anyone he stopped in the street could tell him the meaning of any pictograph. He spent a whole day trying to find the limits of ignorance, and was finally forced to the conclusion, incredibly enough, that everyone in the city really did know the meaning of every single pictograph. Most of the tiles were single words, but some were whole sentences.
“It’s just not possible,” he told me. “A lot of the pictures are more-or-less recognizable images. A lot of the ones that stand for sentences are compounded from simpler ones—and though I haven’t seen more than a tiny fraction I presume that’s generally true. But it gives every man, woman and child in the city—no matter what caste they belong to—a vocabulary of more than a million units. I don’t know how long it takes the small children to learn it but I couldn’t even catch a ten-year-old admitting he didn’t know. Maybe some of them were lying, but every time I asked for confirmation I got it. It is just not possible.”
I had to agree with him.
I had a certain allocation of purely routine work to do as well, of course—several hours every day had to be given to sample collecting and measurement. We were determined that if we had to go home after twenty days we’d have plundered the city of every datum that was available at the surface, to give ourselves at least a chance of drawing more accurate conclusions about what might lie under the surface. But I also involved myself in the confrontation merry-go-round of questions and answers.
I found—as did the others—that in matters of information the people were quite reliable. And they did display the most astonishing range of knowledge. Even children could immediately find the name of any plant or animal or geographical feature. The only limitation I could find even in the knowledge of the children was that it was unrefined—a great many objects might be assigned to one general category. As they got older, they learned to subdivide the categories more and more precisely.
Against this astonishing range of knowledge that was carried in every head had to be set certain curious anomalies. Everyone in the city could read the pictographs, but that was all there was to be read. Nothing else existed. The data bank brought out from Earth had been deliberately destroyed. Nor did the people of the city go in for painting. Either something was chipped into the stone adorning the city walls or it had no existence independent of the minds of the people. The only arts which they had apart from the stone masonry were the performing arts—drama, music, dance. Nothing was ever written down. But they were interested in growing things. Many of the houses that I visited—little, square cubicles with only curtains separating different “rooms”—contained potted plants.
All this, however, was peripheral to our main concern. And when we got beyond mere matters of information, we found ourselves on much trickier ground in asking our questions. Questions, regarding the parasite and matters of belief were evaded quite casually, or answered by rote. Questions about the decision-making process were met with the blanket answer: “The Self decides.” “What is the Self?” conjured forth the reply: “The Self is the collective will of the Nation.” More detailed questions (“How does the Self decide?” “What actually happens when decisions are made?”) called forth blank stares or statements to the effect that: “You do not understand.” That was true. We didn’t. Persistence drew forth the promise that one day we would understand...the day in question being day twenty-one.
Questions relating to religion met a similar defensive wall without any hint of a breach. Everyone in the city believed in God—an apparently unshakable monotheistic belief. But they had no priests, no churches, no sacred writings. There was a pictograph representing the concept of God, and Nathan managed to identify a couple more which related to matters of divine nature. No doubt there were more—and no doubt given time we could extract from the wisdom of the walls all that the people of the city thought it necessary to say about God. But we didn’t have time to learn the meanings of millions of tiles. We needed more direct access to the information, and we couldn’t get it. All we could find out was that they all knew that God existed, and that was enough for them.
“If our questions are being deliberately stonewalled,” I told Nathan, after a couple of days of the run-around, “then it’s the best job I’ve ever seen. Wherever we turn we get the same barrier, the same formulae. If they’re deliberately holding back the whole truth from us then every single person in the city is in on the conspiracy, including children. It’s the most perfect collusion I’ve ever encountered. They all know exactly how much to say, to the very letter. Either this really is the limit of their own concern with the matter, or something very strange is happening here.”
“They could be programmed,” he said. “Every one primed by the puppeteers.”
“Or they could be telepathic,” I said. “With everyone of them having access to the same pool of information and the same set of stalling strategies.”
“Or both,” he added.
“Only they don’t appear to communicate with one another telepathically,” I said. “They use language, like you and me. And if they’re programmed it’s an ultra-complete and perfect job. They still seem very human to me, despite what Mariel says.”
“Appearances,” he declared, “can be deceptive.”
And that statement, of course, represented the farthest shore of knowledge. Beyond it there was only a limitless ocean of uncertainty.
Such is life.
We did manage to find out that their caste system wasn’t hierarchical, unless you counted the Servants and the Ego as “superior.” Even that was in doubt. They had special functions, to be sure—functions that didn’t involve getting their hands dirty—but I never once saw a Servant handing out orders or supervising work. If they had authority they didn’t use it conspicuously. No one, so far as we could tell, had any special privileges attached to his status or his work. The City of the Sun seemed to go in very seriously for Utopian egalitarianism. Everyone took the role allotted to him by the Self...but all our attempts to find out how that allotment was worked came to nothing, lost in the maze of evasions which confounded all our efforts in this area.
We discovered also that the colony had little interest in technological development. They quarried stone but did not mine metal. The gas that lit the lamps illuminating the walls was generated from the city’s wastes and from certain species of seaweed collected along the shore. The oil they used also came from seaweed harvested from the shallow waters that stretched for miles from the river’s mouth. All the metal they used—for their tools, for their chisels, for their gas plant and for a hundred other minor purposes—had originally come from the ships that had brought the colony here in the first place. We expressed some surprise at this discove
ry, asking whether the city wouldn’t have to develop its own supply eventually, but they didn’t have any answer. They didn’t seem very interested in the future.... They had nothing to say about any kind of long-term plan. Nor, for that matter, did they have much interest in the past. We tried to ask searching questions about how and when the present state of affairs had arisen, but they offered no answers. If they had any memory of a time before the parasite, they were keeping it a secret. The one thing they did tell us was where the ships had actually come down.
This, in the absence of any written record of events in the colony or any verbal account of the early days, seemed to me to be a valuable datum. The ships had all come down within a few miles of one another, but some distance inland. Whatever remained of the nearest one was a full day’s ride to the northwest, a long way up the river valley. I suggested to Nathan that one of us, at least, should go up there to investigate. The relic might tell us nothing...but there just might be something of significance to be found there. Nathan didn’t want to waste two days—one riding out, one coming back—in the present circumstances, with time so limited, but I pointed out that with the information blockade so firm anything we might find out by inference from objective evidence was worth going after. In the end, he agreed to my going. I showed a measure of compromise by agreeing to go alone.
I wasn’t unduly surprised that when I explained to the dark man that I wanted to borrow one of the oxen to ride out into the wilderness he promptly volunteered to go with me. Partly, I thought, it was because he wanted to keep an eye on me...but I think he also wanted to keep an eye on the ox. If I were to ride away on a beast that carried the parasite without anyone to see what I was doing....
They seemed very keen to make sure that the conditions we had agreed to were obeyed. They were particularly careful to make sure that none of the black cells were appropriated for study.
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