The City of the Sun Read Online Free Page B

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