Read The City of the Sun for Free Online Page A

them. The talent isn’t like tuning in a radio to people’s thought waves. I’ve met blanks before...but this one is a sort of positive blank. No...that’s wrong...don’t for God’s sake start thinking about mind-shields and things like that. It isn’t that kind of thing at all.... Most of what I pick up, you see, is peripheral. It’s the fringes of what people say—the things they mutter under their breath, the commentary on their own actions, their unvoiced reactions to what they see and hear. But there seems to be nothing of that in his face. As if his mind were... still ...completely settled...ordered.”
    “I saw his eyes narrow,” I told her. “When he first saw you. Do you think he can sense your talent? Maybe he....”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so. I think that it just didn’t fit in with his calculations—three people and two mounts. That’s what I’m trying to say about him. He calculates everything. Every move, every thought. It’s precise. No ragged edges for me to pick up on the borders of verbal communication.”
    “Mechanical,” I said.
    “If you like.”
    “Like a robot.”
    The mount was walking forward with precisely measured strides. I was just holding the rein limply. The beast knew where it was going. It knew what it was doing. It moved like a machine. A robot.
    She couldn’t see my face, and there were two layers of plastic between us, but she knew me pretty well by now. She didn’t need all the frills to use her talent on me.
    “Something’s frightened you,” she said.
    “You’re dead right,” I told her. “I’m half inclined to duck out of this party right now. I’ve got a very nasty feeling.”
    I was harboring a thought which struck me as being one of the worst I’d ever harbored. I was thinking that if the parasite cells could mimic all kinds of host cells, that probably included brain cells too. And I was just wondering what might be the implications of a parasite that could turn itself into a mimic of a thinking human brain.
    I 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