The City of the Sun. Brian Stableford
birds like skylarks fluttered high in the sky above the hills, sounding high-pitched voices every now and again, but we saw none at close range.
There was a slight moist breeze which gave the morning a slightly raw feeling.
“Very pleasant,” I commented.
“They all look nice,” replied Nathan, with something less than enthusiasm, “but they all seem to have something lurking behind their smiles.”
It seemed that he, too, had been slightly troubled by images on the edge of sleep.
“You could say the same about Earth,” I pointed out.
“It goes double for Earth,” he said. “Or even more so. If these worlds were no better than Earth....”
Once the trace of bitterness had escaped, I felt sure that he’d be back to his old smooth self. “They only called it Arcadia because of this region,” I mused. “This world has some pretty fierce deserts around the equator, and whole continents of tundra. I wouldn’t call it an evolutionary success story, even by Earth’s standards. Not exactly half-hearted, but on the other hand, not wholly hearted, either. Only the sea is really rich with life—oceans like Floria’s, shallow and full of weed, swarming with fish. Big herbivores, too—mammals gone back to the sea for preference. Estuarine cattle. If I were them, I’d have stayed on land. Some of the nastiest predators are in the sea.”
“I don’t intend to do much swimming,” he assured me.
“Of course,” I added, “there are packs of wolves in the hills. Nobody’s entitled to a free and easy life, even here.”
We toiled up the vast slope of the hill that stood between the ship and the city. It was very shallow, but we’d been on the ship for three weeks this time—quite long enough to have the edge taken off our fitness. You don’t put on fat on ship’s food, but it’s still easy for your muscles to get lazy. I felt the walk, in my legs and in my breathing. So did Nathan. The top of the hill seemed to retire discreetly into the distance as we approached it.
“Where are the famed colonial algae?” asked Nathan, indicating with an airy sweep of his hand that he couldn’t see any close by.
“In the sea, mostly,” I told him. “The ones that have come out onto the land are far enough away from the more primitive form not to be describable as algae any more. Even the ones in the sea are called algae only because the colonial mode of organization is limited to the algae back on Earth.”
The colonial algae, on Earth, are a kind of evolutionary backwater. A dead end. Why have an assortment of independently viable cells living in association with little more than the beginnings of a division of functional labor, when you can have a multi-celled organism in which genuine specialization of function can be achieved? The colonial forms, which had persisted here on Arcadia, retained a considerable degree of versatility—especially important among parasitic forms—but didn’t have a lot to recommend them in terms of complexity or efficiency. They were just a freak of nature that natural selection hadn’t gotten around to weeding out. It wasn’t that Arcadia was a young world, compared to Earth—in fact, it was somewhat older—but as on virtually all the colony worlds, the tempo of evolution had been different because of the absence of significant tides. Really, it’s Earth that’s the freak, for being part of a binary system.
“Actually,” I told Nathan, “we can see a few of the colonial protozoans. They’re just not very obvious. There are tufts that look like little pincushions in the grass here and there.”
I directed his attention to the growths in question—no bigger than a fingertip, although each one consisted of millions of individuals.
“I see,” he said. Without enthusiasm.
“And the things that look like brown spider webs around the flowering heads here?” I said, this time pointing to the nearest clump of the yellow flowers.
“I thought they were spider webs,” he said, this time looking a little more closely. “And this one has a spider sitting in the corner.”
“Ah,” I said. “That one is a spider web. But not this one, see? A nice copy, but a different texture and a lighter color. A fly that gets trapped here is eaten by the web, not by the spider.”
“How very economical,” said Nathan. “I always thought that spiders could be made redundant, if only nature tried a little harder.”
With Nathan, that sort of thing passed for a joke.
“If everything on Arcadia vanished except for the colonial protozoans,” I pontificated, “you’d still be able to see everything in ghostly outline. On Earth, the same is supposed to be true of the nematode worms, though no one’s actually tried the experiment. Here, parasitic protozoans have a much greater role to play, thanks to the advantages of colonialism. Do you think there’s a moral there somewhere?”
“Could be,” he said. “If we ever have to fight nematode worms for possession of the galaxy.”
“The colonial protozoans are very adaptable,” I said. “They don’t go in for specialization much. They just crash right on and infect practically anything. They don’t worry too much about survey reports and international finance and political priorities.”
“I believe you,” he said.
Meanwhile, we came at last to the top of the hill, and looked out upon the human world of Arcadia.
The fields were laid out neatly, following the contours of the hillsides. There were few fences but a number of hedgerows had been left as windbreaks. The greater number of the planted areas were green with new crops that were yet a long way from fruition. On an exposed southern face of one of the hills there was a series of groves of fruit trees. There were very few animals visible—no grazing herds, just the occasional pair of creatures that looked, at a distance, something like a cross between a yak and a reindeer. It would be difficult to label them by kind, but as they were undoubtedly used for both riding and plowing it seemed logical to dub them oxen. They suited that name far better than they suited the name ‘horse,’ anyhow.
There were people in the fields, too—several areas were still being planted and others were being combed for weeds. The people were all distant, and mostly seemed to be dressed in simple tunics either white or yellow in color.
But my eye took all that in only for a few seconds. I scanned the scene from horizon to horizon, but the search for detail was cursory as my gaze was dragged back to the one impressive sight—the city.
It was built on a single hill, but like the one we had just climbed it was a large, rounded, shallow hill. It was, I think, too round. No natural hill grew with such geometrical precision. They had sculptured the landscape, moved the earth to create symmetry. Pure showmanship. They had obviously taken their flamboyant architectural gesture seriously. The outer wall seemed quite vast, curving away on either side and then back again, to disappear behind the main, upraised bulk of the city. It was white, and the chalky rock seemed to have been scrubbed clean very recently. It was forty feet high, and thick enough to carry a thoroughfare on its rim. We could see pedestrians, and even riders, making their way around the great perimeter.
We could see almost nothing of what went on behind the walls, but we could see each of the circles rising within one another, telescoped together like a set of cork borers.
Automatically, I counted.
There were seven.
The inmost and highest of all the circles may not have been a wall at all, but we could not see even from our position on top of the hill whether it was roofed over or not. It was too tall—we had to look up to it. It must have been the highest point for many miles. Protruding from somewhere within—or perhaps mounted on top of it—was a thin pylon. I assumed that it must be a lightning conductor.
“It’s not as big as Karen claimed,” commented Nathan.
“True,” I agreed. “She always did tend to overestimate the size of her thumbnail.”