The City of the Sun. Brian Stableford
impregnable city, with all the knowledge of the world inscribed on its walls. Perfect knowledge and total commitment. Seventeenth century, I think. Written by Tommaso Campanella while imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Are there seven?” asked Linda, with what seemed to be unwarranted pedantry.
“It makes a sort of sense,” said Nathan, ignoring the mundane question. “After all, they came here in search of Utopia. They came determined to build one. Why shouldn’t they adopt the physical plan of one of the classics? A gesture, I suppose. They can’t, of course, have adopted the social system...somewhat out of date, I feel.”
Karen appeared again in the doorway to take a look at the blow-up. Her question, too, was definitely down-to-earth.
“Alive or dead?” she said.
“Alive,” said Nathan, a little more positive than he had any right to be. “That city wasn’t built in a day. The colony’s only been here a hundred years, and that looks like a hundred years’ worth of work to me.”
“What’s its diameter?” I asked.
Karen stepped over to the image on the screen and measured the circle against her thumbnail. Then she paused for rapid calculation.
“Eight miles,” she said. “Give or take a couple, allowing for the blur. Couldn’t get a better image, you see—too much water vapor in the low atmosphere. If the cloud cover was much worse we’d have had to rely on indirect information only the computer could handle. You’re lucky to get this.”
“Thanks,” said Nathan, dryly. “I’m sure we all appreciate your technical expertise.”
“I’m not,” she muttered.
“If there are seven walls,” I said, “there’s about half a mile in between them. And they’re thick walls, to show up so well under such difficult conditions.” I paused to glance at Karen, who merely raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Anyhow,” I went on, “it’s no metropolis.”
“Eight miles across is a pretty healthy size,” objected Nathan. “And the walls needn’t be solid. You could pack a lot of people into that little area. Without the use of skyscrapers.”
The tension had all evaporated now. We were babbling for the sake of it. All the speculation was futile, considering that we’d be landing to make contact before the day was done. We had a place to land, now. We’d found our needle in the haystack. And even if they didn’t answer our signal, they were probably alive and well.
There were plenty of tragedies that we might find yet, but the worst one of all was averted, and we all felt good.
One of the old Utopias, I thought. A gesture.
I liked that. It was evidence of a certain panache on the part of the colonists. After all, Utopia was what the game was all about. A new life in the stars. A better world, to build up from scratch, avoiding all the mistakes that history had made on Earth.
All the avoidable ones, anyhow.
If there were any avoidable ones.
They had named this world Arcadia. They had a little list of nice names for nice worlds, and when the survey teams came back they even had a committee to sit down and choose one that might—just might—be a little more appropriate than the next. It was basically a publicity stratagem. Emigrate to Arcadia sounds a hell of a lot better than Emigrate to Fingleton’s World. Fingleton had been captain of the scout-ship which did the preliminary atmosphere observations. His name was no worse than anyone else’s name (well, not much) but it didn’t quite have the charm of Arcadia. Anyhow, it seemed that the human race was condemned to spend eternity expanding into a universe full of habitable worlds with stupid, banal names. Unless, of course, some brave soul took it upon himself to change his planet’s name to something like Wildeblood.
On reflection, perhaps there was something to be said for Arcadia.
I got up from the table, feeling that I could now relax on my bunk for a while before the landing.
Arcadia and the City of the Sun, I said, silently. Here we come.
CHAPTER TWO
We came down on the flat top of a small hill that was crowned by a tangle of pale vegetation. The external cameras showed us nothing but a great carpet of green dappled with yellow flowers. The vegetation looked to the casual glance like a mixture of gorse and bracken, but somehow softer. The plant life in this region of Arcadia—and practically all over the temperate zones—was fleshy and rubbery. Little grew here that was coarse or thorned or thistled, and little enough—according to the survey team—that was poisoned or unpalatable. The image propagated by the survey team was of a gentle world. Also a rather boring one, painted in pastel shades.
The planet had moved on about its axis, as planets tend to do, and we came down in darkness, with the greater part of the night ahead of us. By ship’s time it was early morning—three or four A.M. and we’d all been up for a long time. We elected to sleep out the darkness and make a start in the local dawn. It might have been pleasant to go out, even in the darkness, to get a breath of the air and see what there was to be seen with the aid of a lantern, but that would have been stupid.
Pete Rolving had to stay on duty anyhow, so he continued to try to contact the city by radio, but if they still had a receiver functioning they were apparently prepared to ignore the signal.
I doubt that anyone slept a great deal—anticipation and sleep don’t mix too well. The imagination can always be relied upon to call up ideas by the score, based on the most inadequate evidence, and few of us have the strength of mind required to tell our imaginative faculties to calm down because the reality will make the speculations redundant in a short enough time. All kinds of notions ran through my mind, conjured up by the city with circular walls...encouraged by the darkness and the stillness and the fact that I was in the borderlands of sleep. My memory kept producing reminiscences of Floria and Dendra and Wildeblood, on all of which worlds we’d had a hard time, at least to start with. But Arcadia, surely, was boring enough to be safe. It had just one marked eccentricity in its life-system—the persistence and evolutionary success of colonial pseudo-organisms alongside metazoan organisms. That, I told myself, was hardly significant. But when the conscious mind descends to the brink of sleep the imagination can follow its own leads. In the sleep of reason, nightmares come....
And I couldn’t avoid a sense of unease that dogged me through the long night.
We rose at dawn, ate quickly, and made ready for the contact. This was Nathan’s area and he took charge, but I volunteered to go with him. It seemed safer for just the two of us to emerge initially from the protection of the ship, and so the rest were left behind to wait for our first impressions.
We stepped out of the lock into a cool, damp morning. There was a slight mist but I judged that it would clear quickly. The sun seemed very large and pale as it clung to the eastern horizon.
The city was hidden from our view by a hill of considerable area but no great height. There would be a long walk down into the shallow valley and up a gentle but extensive slope before we got to the crown of the hill and could look out over the valley in which the city and its cultivated land were situated, along with the river.
The vegetation was knee-deep for thirty meters or so around the ship, but then the yellow flowering plants were less densely packed, and we could pick a way around the worst patches. All the stems were damp, but they didn’t cling to our legs as we walked through and over them. Our boots crushed the sap from the shoots and leaves, and wherever we trod we left footmarks that would remain conspicuous for some considerable time.
The only trees we could see were small, thin and short in the trunk but with many thin branches whose leaves were not yet fully developed. The season was early spring. Many of the species were still in their growing phase, not yet flowering—the domination over the aspect of the landscape which the pale yellow enjoyed would not last for long.
There seemed to be very few insects about, but this, too, I ascribed to the