The City of the Sun. Brian Stableford
Since everyone else was interrupting him, I thought I might as well get in on the act. “I don’t know,” I said, quickly. “But we’d better do as he says. Quickly. And no one comes out again without protective clothing. We’ll suit up in the lock so that we don’t risk carrying anything inside. Isolation. I don’t want that stuff growing on me, and if I’ve already picked up a spore of some kind I don’t want to infect everyone else aboard the Daedalus. This could be serious.”
I was moving even as I spoke. I wasn’t particularly worried—I’d been infected with parasites of all shapes, sizes and colors in my time. I’d even picked up alien parasites occasionally during the last three years—ectoparasites aren’t so fussy about what kind of flesh they chew their way into. Alien worms and fungi itch just the same as our parasitic brethren on Earth. However, there was a certain niggling anxiety in my mind. This was one hell of a parasite, if appearances could be trusted. And it had no real right to be infecting humans so easily and so copiously as this. The survey team hadn’t promised a bug-free world—there are always a few local pests that are adaptable enough to bother people—but on the other hand, the survey team hadn’t dropped the slightest hint about anything like this.
Nathan had to walk pretty quickly to catch up with me.
“You think we might have picked it up already?” be said. “From the air?”
“I’d rather not take chances,” I told him. “Black isn’t my color. But once we’ve been through decontamination and suited up, we’re as safe as we can be. Let’s do that first, and then we’ll be free to worry about everything else.”
I caught his eye as we marched back up the slope, and I could see in his face that he thought—as I did—that there would still be a lot that warranted worrying about.
CHAPTER THREE
Nathan told the rest what had happened. He told it neatly and economically—but there really wasn’t all that much to tell. When he asked me if I had anything to add all I could say was: “It wasn’t exactly the greatest first contact in history.”
“You were in on it,” he pointed out. “I didn’t notice your telling contribution.”
I smiled, sweetly.
“This parasite...,” said Conrad.
“Ah,” I said, turning to him. “The matter in hand.”
It really wasn’t an appropriate time for levity, but I felt the need of a little levity to lighten my mood. I hadn’t seen much of Arcadia so far, but what little I had seen I hadn’t liked.
“It’s obviously not debilitating,” said Conrad. “The man who spoke to you seemed perfectly fit and healthy.”
“Well,” I said—and now I abandoned the levity—“if it was a man, I’d have to be cautious about guaranteeing certain aspects of his health. But if it was a woman, she was probably okay. A flat chest doesn’t count as a debility.”
“You really don’t know whether it was a man or a woman?” asked Karen.
I shook my plastic-sheathed head. “I wouldn’t even be prepared to make a statement about the archers,” I said. “And they were naked. They were too far away, and they were riding some rather hairy beasts bareback.”
“Why should they be naked?” Linda wanted to know. “You say that the people in the fields wore clothing.”
That particular guess fell into Nathan’s field of competence. I let him take it. “At a guess,” he said. “The clothing wasn’t so much for protection from the elements as a designation of rank. The one who spoke to us had a garment made out of very distinctive cloth. He obviously had some authority.”
“But not all that much,” I commented. “He had to report back. To the Ego, and to the Self...which may be the same person or organization, or two different ones.”
“Curious names,” observed Conrad.
“Ominous names,” Nathan corrected him.
I knew what he meant. We could have shrugged off “king,” or “master” or “parliament” or almost anything else familiar. Even “metaphysicus” wouldn’t have bothered us, because we’d looked up The City of the Sun and knew that that was what the top man in the romance was called. But “Self” and “Ego” weren’t words you’d normally associate with government, and it had seemed to me that the dark man—or woman—had such a precise way of speaking that it wasn’t safe to assume that the terms weren’t in some way specifically meaningful.
“It might just be a case of Utopian pretentiousness,” said Karen. “These people seem to have gone in for pretentiousness, judging by your description of the city.”
“This is a weird one,” I said, meditatively, inspecting my fingernails beneath the plastic gauntlet. “I think it might be weirder than we yet imagine.”
“Suppose they come back and tell us that they’ve decided to refuse our application,” said Linda. “What then?”
“Well,” I said. “It’ll be nothing new. We don’t exactly seem to be welcome wherever we go. The colonies haven’t rolled out a single red carpet so far, although they did give us a good dinner on Floria before they started shooting.”
“We’ve got to find out what’s happening here,” said Nathan. “Whether they appreciate our being here or not.”
“That plastic suit won’t stop an arrow,” I said, flatly.
“Never mind that,” said Conrad. “There’s no point in wasting time in speculative meandering when there’s real work to be done. For one thing, we have to try to identify this parasite. The survey team probably recorded its presence as a parasite of the herbivores, or some other local species. If we must speculate, let’s speculate as to why they weren’t infected.”
“They were only here fourteen months,” I reminded him. “And not precisely here, either—we’re several hundred miles from site prime...over a thousand, I think. There are any number of versatile parasites among the communal protozoa.... This particular one was probably a good deal rarer where the survey team spent the greater part of their time than it is here. But you’re right about identifying it.... Linda—can you feed in the data we have and get the computer to check against the classification tables? Get it to sort out data cards on anything that fits the basic description.”
Linda nodded, and went into the lab to start work on the problem. Once we had the cards codifying the survey team’s reports on various suspects we’d be able to get a better idea of what we were dealing with.
The computer didn’t take long to do the sort, and it finally belched forth four cards printed with abbreviated jargon. Linda tossed them to me, and I skimmed through them rapidly.
“I was afraid of that,” I murmured.
“What?” asked Nathan.
“Here we have four parasites which form black dendritic webs on the outer skin of their hosts. But all four hosts are small mammals of no economic importance or ecological interest. Rabbits and field mice, as near as damn it.”
“So?”
“They didn’t find it in association with the oxen,” I said, patiently. “If they had, they’d have taken a lot more interest in it. The oxen are useful, valuable animals. Their diseases were a matter of considerable import in assessing the potential of a colony here—their presence provided a possible source of meat, transport and farm labor. But who’s interested in rabbits and field mice? The survey team did no more than a routine bioscan on this lot, whereas if they’d found it among the oxen—from which the people here presumably caught it—they’d have looked at it much more closely.”
“Didn’t they realize it might infect humans?” asked Mariel.
I shook my head as I studied the cards more