The City of the Sun (17 page)

“Yes,” said Nathan. “That was us.”

The hairy man didn’t let him go on. “I had to come under cover of darkness,” he said. “The archers might be nearby, though you aren’t in their lands. And I had to come alone. If they knew I was here....”

Nathan put his hand carefully over the microphone, and turned to Mariel.

“Is he telling the truth?” he asked.

There was a moment’s silence. Mariel was staring intently at the image on the screen.

“Yes,” she said, finally, “I think he is.”

“But...,” prompted Nathan.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s something a little bit odd. His expressions aren’t quite...right. But it’s not necessarily abnormal. I’ve met similar signs before, in people who just aren’t socially...well-adjusted, if you know what I mean.”

“But he’s not lying?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “And he certainly doesn’t give the impression of being like the people of the city.”

Nathan uncovered the microphone.

“Are you saying that the archers would kill you if they knew you were trying to make contact with us?”

“What do you think?” said Sorokin, harshly. “They shoot on sight. They’d hunt us down and kill every last one of us if they thought they could. But we know the territory better than they do. Did they even tell you that we exist?”

“No,” said Nathan. “They denied it.”

“They were afraid you might help us,” said Sorokin.

I stretched my hand out, leaning across the table.

Nathan, after a brief hesitation, passed me the microphone.

“Are you immune to the parasite?” I asked.

He laughed, but without humor. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we must be. We avoid all possible contact with it, and we eat a lot of meat because we think that it doesn’t like carnivores, but we don’t know that either of those things is what stops us from being affected. Maybe we’re naturally immune, maybe not. But we’re free of the thing, and we do our best to stay free.”

It was my turn to cover the mike. “If he is naturally immune,” I told Nathan, “it changes things. It changes them a lot.”

He nodded.

I gave the mike back to him.

“How many of you are there?” he asked.

“Six hundred or so,” replied Sorokin. “We’re not all together. Small groups, mostly. We move around a lot. If we settled we’d be vulnerable.... Those bowmen don’t miss. There may be more of us somewhere else. Every now and again a few set out to go as far away as they can...thousands of miles, to find somewhere that they
can
settle in safety.”

“But most of you stay here. Why?”

“There’s a lot of game in the valley. It’s easy living. We know the country, we know how to survive. Over the mountain...who knows what’s there? But people try, as I say. Maybe I’ll try someday. Maybe we all will. And in the meantime, if things are rough...sometimes we raid the city. Their fields. We always try to steal a little to store up for the winter.”

“I see,” said Nathan. “And now that you’re here, what do you want from us?”

“Help,” he replied.

“What kind of help?”

“We want you to help in the war against the city,” said Sorokin, as if he were slightly angered by having to spell it out. “What else? You’ve seen them—you know what they are. Surely you’ll help us, won’t you?” There was a sharp note in his voice as it rose in pitch. For a brief second, it almost acquired the note that I associated with the unbroken voice of the dark Servant.

“If we can,” said Nathan, reassuringly. “And you may be able to help us. We can find out whether you do have natural immunity...and if you do, then perhaps we can give you all the help you need.”

Promises, promises,
I thought.

“Come back with me now,” urged Sorokin. “We can get away while it’s still dark. I’ll show you how things are up north.”

Nathan didn’t want to be rushed quite that fast. “What happened in the colony when the parasite first took hold?” he asked. “Can you tell us about it?”

“I wasn’t even born,” protested the man in the airlock. “I was born in a cave in the hills. Even my father and mother don’t remember. What they say is that the black stuff just appeared and spread like wildfire. They couldn’t find any way to kill it. After a while they got to ignoring it, because it didn’t seem to do any harm. They found out that the black things could link up but it didn’t seem to matter. It was only after eighty or ninety percent of the people were infected that it started getting into people’s minds and linking brains. Then the people who had the disease had no choice but to live with it. They were trapped. My father’s father and others of his generation stayed with the infected people for a long time, but one by one they were still coming down with it.... Nobody could be sure that he was immune. People started to leave. Others were thrown out by the infected ones, who’d taken up a lot of new habits, like vegetarianism, and discovered a whole range of new sins. In the end, they all left...all the ones that weren’t infected. And now we live wild. The war’s been going on for as long as I know and as long as my father knows. They’re not human any more. To them, we’re just carnivores—animals.”

Even before he’d finished, Nathan had covered up the microphone again, and was checking with Mariel.

“It sounds reasonable,” he said. “It could all be true.
But is it?
”

“You know there’s no way I can be certain,” she said. “I can’t pluck his thoughts right out of his head. I can only pick up what I see. All I can say is that I’ve no reason to think he’s lying. No guarantees.”

“All right,” he said. “We work on that assumption. Who goes with him?”

“How about you?” I asked, sarcastically.

He could have reeled off a dozen convincing reasons, but I already knew the real one. He didn’t want to go because that would leave me in effective command here. He wanted to stay close to the city, and keep his iron grip on events aboard the
Daedalus
.

“Are you listening?” said Sorokin, who’d been left dangling in silence.

“We heard everything,” answered Nathan smoothly. “We’re just holding a brief discussion among ourselves—to decide who comes with you.” He covered the mike again. “Someone’s got to investigate this question of immunity,” he said. “It had better be you, Alex. You said yourself that getting results out of the lab will take time. This new avenue may provide a shortcut. But you can’t take Linda or Conrad with you—they’ll have to keep up the work here.”

“I’ll go,” volunteered Mariel.

“I don’t think so,” said Nathan. “There’s still a lot of work here that you’ve already started. Karen can go.”

“Sometimes,” said Karen, “I resent this constant implication that I’m more expendable than anyone else. I get all the dirty jobs to do.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you’ll do it. You wouldn’t want me to go out alone to face all the dangers of the wilderness, now would you?”

“I suppose someone has to look after you,” she muttered. “Get him out of the lock and let’s decontaminate. Then I’ll get suited up and we can join him outside. It’s about time we had a little excitement.”

Nathan spoke into the mike. “We’re going to turn off the light and open the door,” he said. “Wait outside. Two of us will join you in a few minutes. You have time to get well away before dawn.”

The screen went dark, and then Pete switched back to the external camera. We saw Sorokin crouching outside, listening hard to the sounds of the night.

“Suddenly,” I said, “I feel very tired.”

“Take a pill,” said Nathan.

“How?” I replied, bitterly.

He touched the tip of his tongue to the filters on his own suit. Then he looked at me and grinned.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You don’t believe in luck,” I reminded him. “And neither do I.”

“I mean it,” he assured me.

I didn’t know whether to call it diplomacy or showmanship.

“While I’m gone,” I said, seriously, “you’ll be sure and not pull any more shifty little tricks, won’t you?”

“I won’t,” he assured me. He was handing out a lot of assurance. I was almost tempted to ask Mariel whether he was telling the truth.

But I was afraid of the answer.

She fired it now without any warning. I tried to shut my eyes against the flare but my reflexes were too slow. The darkness was replaced by painful coruscations and an odd kind of sizzling sensation in my optic nerves. But I, at least, knew what had happened. It had happened to me before. The man pinning me down didn’t and hadn’t. He howled as if he’d been burned, and he jumped back. I staggered to my feet, made clumsy by the weight of the pack on my back. I didn’t know which way to run—I couldn’t even remember which way we’d come. I felt a hand grab at my shoulder, and lashed out with my fist. I felt it connect, and heard an anguished curse.

“It’s me, you cretin!” hissed Karen.

The whisper was as much a mistake as the blow. I was promptly charged down again, and I heard the thud of flailing arms connecting with naked bodies as Karen tried to defend herself. Even blinded, the archers were determined to do their job. They’d recovered from the surprise.

In daylight, Karen’s eyes might have been a big advantage, but it’s only in daylight that the one-eyed man can lord it over the kingdom of the blind. By night, having your optic nerves shocked into submission really doesn’t achieve very much.

In short, despite the spirited defense, we still lost the fight. We ended up pinned down again, and then there was a long wait. I heard noises, but had no idea what was going on.

Then Karen said: “Can you see, Alex?”

“Are you kidding?” I replied, bitterly.

“
They
can. One of them just lit a candle. They recover bloody quickly.”

I sighed. “It’ll come back to me,” I said. “In time. They probably have help in recuperating.”

I felt myself lifted to my feet, and hustled off up the hill.

“Karen?” I asked.

“Right here beside you,” she replied.

“What about Sorokin?”

“They got him too. He hasn’t said a word. He didn’t put up much resistance. But then, he’s blind too...for the time being.”

I didn’t pursue the point. It wasn’t the time to try deciding whether Sorokin was everything he claimed to be and had just been unlucky, or whether he was the Judas goat. Either way, we were on our way to the city. To the dungeons, if they had dungeons.

I felt a touch on my plastic-sheathed arm—the arm that wasn’t on the side where Karen’s voice had come from. The voice that followed up the touch was high and musical.

“I am sorry that it had to be this way,” it said. “But there was no other.”

I wasn’t absolutely sure, but it seemed likely that the man who spoke was the Servant who’d guided me to the relic of the ship.

“Sure,” I said. “God moves in mysterious ways, and if a little bit of stealth and violence seems called for....”

“You should not mock God.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No,” he said. “It is not a threat.”

We staggered on.

“What now?” whispered Karen, in a conspiratorial tone. I guessed that the Servant had retired slightly.

“Oh,” I said, airily. “You know the drill. With one bound Jack was free. Beat them all up a bit, run up the flag, and proclaim that henceforth Arcadia shall be a democratic republic. No trouble. Being blinded makes it a bit more difficult, of course, but no self-respecting hero lets a little thing like that bother him.”