The City of the Sun

by Stableford, Brian

  Then the men from Earth arrive. Torn by the petty jealousies and uncertainties that haunt individual, alienated consciousness, with their emotional reactions and prejudices out of control, they are offended by what they find on Arcadia. Their aim is to destroy the city and the Nation—either to smash the collective hyper-mind and return the people of Arcadia to their primitive state of individual hell, or to obliterate all life from the surface of the world. These men are the most vicious of carnivores, the most wanton of killers.

  After destroying Arcadia they go on to interfere with the divine plan somewhere else.

  Scenario two looked like this:

  On the planet Arcadia, in a pleasant country of temperate climate, colonists from Earth are attacked by the most insidious of enemies—a parasite which digs its way into their very brains. The cellular units of the parasite may connect into a pseudo-organism of any magnitude—into an organization of cells many thousand times the size of the human brain. Furthermore, the cells have the property of mimicry. Once having contacted an organ of such complexity and capability as the human brain the parasite can easily duplicate it and learn to develop similar functions. It acquires the faculties of conscious thought, intelligence and self-awareness, and forms a mind of its own which floods the brains of its victims, reducing their own personalities to helpless subservience to a single Self, which is its own although made in the image of the human individual self. Essentially, the parasite becomes a great brain with several thousand bodies. These bodies are organized by their single mind into a hive-like society with various castes differing according to division of labor. The super-mind has such control over its bodies that it can keep them free from disease and can also control development of various organs—thus many of the castes are made up entirely of males whose sexuality is undeveloped. They are specialized for their work like worker ants. The parasite begins a long program of controlled self-development and evolution preparatory to extending its domination to all other worlds where human colonies exist—and perhaps ultimately to all habitable worlds in the universe.

  Then the men from Earth arrive. Although relatively naive they pose a threat. Firstly, they arrive at a time when the super-mind is still relatively undeveloped, having so far acquired only a fraction of the powers potential to it. Secondly, they have an impregnable base from which to operate, and within it a genetic engineering laboratory potentially capable of producing a living weapon which can destroy the super-mind. The super-mind therefore tries to hide its real nature from the visitors, and attempts to seduce them into accepting parasitism by pretending to be harmless. Once it has taken over one of them, by one means or another, it stands a reasonable chance of getting into the ship, at which point it has won the battle. The men from Earth, although realizing the true state of affairs, hesitate over the proper course of action, giving the super-mind time to plan a winning strategy. The men from Earth are absorbed into the super-mind and carry it back to an unsuspecting Earth, which is conquered with a minimum of trouble.

  After taking over Earth, the super-mind goes on to co-opt the whole universe to itself and, effectively, to become God.

  Maybe, I thought, it already happened once, an unimaginable age ago, and life in the universe as it is today is the wreckage of the last super-mind, which somehow destroyed itself.

  There were other scenarios that came to mind, but not ones that I had to make up. They were real.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on Good Old Earth the Christian Churches became convinced that there was a vast diabolical conspiracy to turn the human race away from God, and that the Devil appeared to his minions at great Sabbats, to which witches would fly from far and wide to celebrate their degeneracy. It was believed that the secret society of witches practiced cannibalism and worked all manner of evil deeds by means of the supernatural power vested in them.

  Thousands of people were tortured and burned.

  Because of a fantasy—an imaginary threat created out of fear and political expediency.

  In the twentieth century on Good Old Earth the Nazis in Germany became convinced that there was a vast conspiracy of Jews secretly dominating the world’s financial and political affairs, and that the Jews were an inferior race preventing the destined masters of the world from coming into their due inheritance.

  Millions of people were tortured and killed.

  Because of a fantasy—an imaginary threat created out of malice and political expediency.

  I realized that something which Nathan had said was true. It was for us to judge. For each and everyone of us. We couldn’t pass judgment on the City of the Sun, because we simply didn’t have the information we needed to reach a reasonable decision. But we could pass judgment on our own actions and our own emotions. We could, and we had to....

  We had to mediate between two collective wills—the assembly of human minds called the UN and the rather different aggregation of minds called the Self. We were stuck between. them. We could step back and let them confront one another directly. Or we could stay where we were, and try to save them from one another.

  We could try to save the Self from the Godless fear of the UN, and we could try to save the UN from the righteous purposes of the Nation’s God.

  Someone touched me on the shoulder.

  It was Mariel, plastic-suited for safety’s sake.

  “They’re watching you through the camera,” she said. “They don’t like your being out here without a suit. Anything might happen. I know why you’re doing it, but it’s not much of a gesture. Come back inside and talk it over. Nathan’s not so absolutely determined as you think. It’s the way he presents things—he always argues to one side or the other, never down the middle. But he’s still open to persuasion. If you can show that there’s nothing to be afraid of you might win him over. But the only way you’re going to do that is to work on the specimen that Linda brought back...and work out a way to fight it. Until we have some kind of defense against this thing, you’re not going to persuade anyone to let it alone.”

  “And once we have the defense?” I said, bitterly. “What’s to stop us using it to attack?”

  “You are,” she said. “If you can reduce our fears. That’s what you’re fighting—not Nathan, or politics, but the nightmares that jump into our minds when we meet certain ideas and see certain signals. You know what I mean. You’ve been through it yourself.”

  I looked up at her, but I could only see a dim silhouette.

  “You voted against trapping the parasitized animal,” I said.

  “I didn’t think it was fair to you. Nathan deliberately held back from raising the issue until you were gone. He was afraid that you’d want to stick to the agreement.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean that I’m with you all the way. I have nightmares too...maybe more than the rest of you. I can read your fears as well as my own. Unless you can kill that fear there’s no way you’re going to save this world.”

  She was dead right, all along the line. I knew it. The only way to persuade anyone that this world should be left alone was to convince them that it posed no threat...or a threat that was bearable. The nightmares had to be vanquished.

  Even mine.

  There was only one thing to do. I went back inside, suiting up in the lock, and went straight to the lab to find out what kind of progress Linda and Conrad had made in their investigation of the parasite cells.

  They’d been working round the clock, working together twelve hours of the day and each taking a six-hour-sleep shift while the other worked alone during the other twelve. In thirty hours they’d accomplished a great deal.

  The parasite cells they were working with were, of course, independent of the pseudo-organism investing the people of the city and their domestic animals, and we couldn’t be absolutely certain that it was the same species, or that even if it were the cells would exhibit exactly the same properties. It was, however, the species that I had singled out from the su
rvey report as being the likely suspect. The rabbit-like creature hadn’t yielded much of the stuff—once the black spiderweb was cut from its epidermis it was difficult to tell which of the internal cells were parasite tissue and which were host tissue. Conrad had already prepared several hundred sections from various parts of the host body, but hadn’t found any definite way to tell the mimic cells from the host cells. Some were obviously invaders, but others looked to be borderline cases, suggesting a full spectrum of mimic accuracy.

  There is, however, one advantage to dealing with communal pseudo-organisms rather than metazoan organisms, and that is that you can slice them up as fine as you like. The little spider web had been split into more than a thousand units, and Conrad had begun a whole series of experiments to discover what kind of tissues the stuff would grow on and how fast. He was using both tissue cultures for in vivo experiments and artificial cultures for in vitro tests. Linda, in the meantime, was running the biochemical analyses.

  One thing that they had already found out—although it really only confirmed the obvious—was that the parasite cells had a chromosome count far in excess of any ordinary protozoan—or even most primitive metazoans. At any one time much of the gene system would be inactive, but versatility was built in to such an extent that it was a very large and complex system. There were thirty-two chromosome pairs—enough to carry the program of a sophisticated vertebrate. This discovery was, in a way, cause for hope. Complex gene systems are always delicately balanced systems, vulnerable to interference. The one problem was that interfering strategically and specifically would require a vast amount of analytical work. Three people with one lab couldn’t possibly do it. We could interfere fairly easily with human gene systems only because two centuries of solid work had already been done on the human genotype and systems modification to give us a flying start. It would take about two centuries to obtain anything like a creative mastery of the parasite’s systems.

  I spent a couple of hours helping Conrad check his experiments, tallying cell growth and cell destruction in the many different cultures. This was the only kind of work where two pairs of hands working together could halve the work—the apparatus Linda was using was geared to the attentions of a single operator.

  It didn’t take long to confirm our suspicion that the parasite was unusually adaptable. In most of the living-tissue cultures the cells not only began to divide with some alacrity, but very soon began to differentiate as the mimic reaction was induced. The parasite took to human-tissue cultures—mostly contributed by Conrad—with somewhat less enthusiasm, but nevertheless the cells grew. Not unnaturally, the cells were far less happy in the ordinary nutrient cultures. A good many of the standard cocktails which would quite adequately support virtually all Earthly ectoparasites encouraged no cell growth whatsoever. Only a few of the most heavily protein-enriched synthetic media allowed the parasite cells to multiply. We sorted out a batch of these and began subdividing them as experimental media for testing various poisons. We also separated out several batches of the human tissue-culture experiments so that we could test the threshold effects of various forms of discouragement. It’s no good finding out how to poison a parasite if you also have to poison the host.

  All this was routine, but unlikely to be important in the long run. It might turn up something useful, but the possibility seemed to me to be slim. There was likely to be only one safe and sure way to inhibit the parasite from infecting people, and that depended on the biochemical analysis. Once we had a thorough profile of the organism’s metabolic processes we would be able to identify anything from a few dozen to a few thousand simple proteins and fatty substances that were sufficiently different from those involved in human metabolic processes to be safe targets for attack. Having identified these, the standard procedure was to tailor short gene systems, usually of less than ten genes, which would program a strong bodily reaction against those substances. These would be incorporated into a virus that could be made endemic in the population, and the virus would then defend its host against infection by any parasite cell whose internal chemical processes involved the target molecules.

  It was a procedure that had worked on other colony worlds, applied either by ourselves or by Kilner’s team. It wasn’t quite foolproof; cellular processes are usually very well confined and the leakage of molecules across the cell wall—both in and out—is often so slow that there is usually a “honeymoon period” before the defending viruses and the invading cells actually go to war. This meant that on one or two occasions when I’d used the technique against protozoan invaders the rate of destruction of the invader cells wasn’t adequate to keep pace with the rate of proliferation and reinfection. Against a communal parasite, however, where the invader cells had to stick together to be fully effective, it ought to work well enough.

  There remained, however, one big doubt in my mind relative to this specific case, and that was the versatility of the parasite cells. There was no way we could estimate the extent to which that versatility applied to the actual metabolic processes of the parasite. Theory said that mimicry is always a superficial phenomenon, never extending to the level of molecular processes...but I was haunted by the fear that this might be the exception that proved the rule.

  Only time would tell. Maybe more time than we had. Linda could obtain a list of target molecules in a matter of days, but you can’t build a virus in days. We would need several weeks, even if we all worked eighteen hours a day every day, to come up with a series of attack viruses. And then we would still have to test them in the tissue cultures. That would only take days, but the results couldn’t be taken as conclusive until we had tested over a much longer period of time—and ideally, until we had tested in the real circumstances, to see if a living person could be protected indefinitely from infection.

  Even after that, there was the mutation rate of the parasite still looming large as a threat to long-term success. It wouldn’t take long for a new strain of parasite to emerge which could confound our viruses. And then a new series of attack viruses would have to be devised. And then a new strain...and then a new series...and so ad infinitum. That’s the way it is with various classes of virus on Earth, and why—even in the twenty-third century—we still have no cure for the common cold.

  I could see all the difficulties looming large, but there was no point in lying down and letting them crush me. When asked to do the impossible the only sensible procedure is to start at the beginning and keep going, in the hope that somewhere en route the impossible will become possible. You can’t afford to be disheartened by the thought of deadlines. If it was anyone’s job to get the deadlines extended it was Nathan’s—he was the diplomat.

  I threw myself into the lab work and tried to set aside the horrors of the general situation. For the time being, there was nothing I could do about them.

  And maybe nothing anyone could do.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Now there were three of us in the lab we altered the sleep shifts to eight hours and took them alternately, so that there were always two of us at work. I took the second eight-hour shift, which didn’t start until early the next morning. When I woke up I paused for a tube of coffee and something to eat.

  Nathan and Mariel were in the central cabin again, still working away at their mounds of paper, with occasional aid from the screen and the computer. They were working on the pictographs, collating the information they’d gleaned. It looked like a long job—and not one that might be immediately fruitful.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” said Nathan.

  “Great,” I muttered, ungraciously.

  “It’s just that...you seem to spend your life in a dream. As if none of this is real to you, just a lot of abstract notions of purely intellectual importance. Sometimes I feel as if I have to go to extremes to make you see that it’s real and immanent.”

  “And that real problems have to be solved practically,” I said. “And we all know what constitutes a practical solution. I know th
e way the world works, Nathan. And I know this is real.”

  “How’s it going in the lab?”

  “How does it ever go? Slowly. Shouldn’t you be out and about, talking to the natives about their broken secrets and their attempted treachery?”

  “Not just now,” he replied. “We’re staying put for a while. Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “I think it’s their move. We know now what they tried to stop us from finding out. We have cause now not to trust them. They were afraid of what we’d think if we knew the truth, and of what we might do. Right...now it’s up to them to stop us from doing it. By persuasion. They have to make some kind of offer. If we went outside...then maybe they’d think it wasn’t necessary to make an offer. Maybe they’d think they could apply a slightly different kind of persuasion. While we’re in here, they’re worrying.”

  “Very devious,” I commented. “And suppose they don’t come to us cap in hand and say they’re sorry?”

  “Then we wait. And keep waiting. You have all you need in the lab. Ultimately you’ll come up with something we can use. Oh, I know it’ll take weeks and months and God only knows how long...and of course you can’t and won’t guarantee your results. But we’ve all the time in the world. We don’t ever have to go out again until we have all the cards we need in our hand. And even if they do reopen negotiations...we’re taking no chances, Alex. None at all.”

  “I might have to go out,” I said, blandly.

  “Why?”

  “Any of a dozen reasons. To get another specimen. To pick up a few mice for experiments on whole organisms. To gather some vegetation as raw material in extracting local proteins. We can’t just wave a magic wand in there, you know. We have to have material to work on. It isn’t easy conducting the kind of operation we’re trying to mount with hardly two grams of specimen...and the fact that it has to be kept isolated at all times from the air of the lab doesn’t help. We’re working all the time through plastic membranes.”