The City of the Sun. Brian Stableford

didn’t have to explain to Mariel. She was getting it all by mental osmosis.

      “Puppets...?” she said. Somehow, despite the suit, she managed to whisper.

      “I don’t know,” I said. “But if....”

      My fears piled up like pennies. Only minutes before I’d been prepared to discount the possibility that Nathan or I might have contacted a stray parasite cell drifting around on the morning breeze and it wouldn’t have worried me much if I’d found out that I had. But I was worrying now.

      Darkness was falling, and that certainly didn’t help. Fears always seem worse in the dark. There were a good many stars beginning to peep through in the sky, and the afterglow was dying slowly, but I couldn’t see the ground that we were traveling over. The oxen plodded on, absolutely sure of themselves.

      “Take it easy,” I told Mariel. “The time’s right for nightmares. All these ideas are just ghosts oozing out of the dark recesses of my imagination.”

      “I know that,” she said.

      “So let’s stay calm and look at the situation as it is. Let’s not let our fears make prior judgments.”

      I was talking to myself as much as to her, and she knew that. She didn’t resent it.

      It took as long to descend the hill on which the Daedalus stood and to toil up the long slope to the crown of the next hill as it had in the early morning. Personally, I’d sooner have walked on my own feet than ridden the rather repulsive creatures that had been laid on as transport. But in making contacts there has to be a little give and take, and I suffered gladly for the cause.

      I studied the patterns that the stars made in the sky, looking for the brighter lights that were Arcadia’s neighbor planets. She had no moons but this solar system was fairly crowded as solar systems go. There was one beautiful evening star, and I picked out one other close by in the curve of the ecliptic across the night sky, but that was all.

      When we came to the crest of the hill, however, there was something else to look at. Even in darkness, the City of the Sun commanded attention, shining with a vast array of tiny lights that stretched across its great staggered disk to vanish in the distance.

      There were lights on the rims of the walls and lights in the streets, as well as lamps lighting thousands of windows. Most of the lamps were oil-fired, but the lights on the walls were gaslights, burning whiter and brighter. They showed up the white of the walls and made the whole city seem aglow.

      “Impressive, isn’t it?” I said to Mariel.

      “It’s so big,” she murmured. “Did a few thousand people really manage to build that in a few decades? Without heavy machinery...without even any source of power except their muscles and the oxen, and whatever they could improvise.”

      “You can do a lot in a hundred years,” I said. “If you set your mind to it. They had all the resources Earth could give them. No bulldozers, but a lot of suggestions as to how to make do without.”

      Even so, she was right. It was quite something for a few thousand people to knock together in a few decades, starting from scratch. It must have taken a great many people a great deal of their lives. And all of their dedication and commitment. The colony had certainly gone single-mindedly about realizing its Utopian fantasies. And with the parasites bleeding off all the spare energy the while....

      It might not be too good to be true, I thought, but it’s surely too good to have been that simple.

      There were a few lantern lights bobbing in the fields like will-o’-the-wisps, but it was too dark to see what the people who carried them might be doing. The great majority had finished for the day and gone home. To what? Rest and play.... Or more work?

      “I think they’re still building it,” I said. “I think they’ll be building it for a long time to come. The gross work is finished, but inside...there must be a long way to go...so much still to be done.”

      “Especially,” she said, “if they are writing all the wisdom of the ages on the seven great walls.”

      “They may be copying the City of the Sun,” I said, “but I can’t see them taking their model quite that seriously.”

      But as it turned out, I was wrong.