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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.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    The walls seemed to flow and ripple in the unsteady light of the gas lamps and the yellow glow of the multitude of oil-fired lanterns. The outer face of the outermost wall had been smooth, but the outer surface of the second wall was not. As we entered the city through a great gate which opened to admit us and then closed behind us we could look ahead along a wide thoroughfare which led uphill to the second wall and another gate. Around the gate and extending away on either side until buildings blocked our view the wall was decorated with sculpted tiles. Their color was pure white, and from the top of the distant hill, by the diffuse light of the morning sun, they had been quite invisible. But now their lines were etched in shadow, and the wall was completely covered by their “writing.”
    At first, I thought that they might be abstract decorations, simply for adornment, but as we climbed the hill on our plodding mounts it became abundantly clear that this judgment was ill-made. Each tile was perhaps two feet in diameter—they were stacked twenty deep, and a rough calculation suggested to me that each row probably contained twenty thousand tiles, assuming that they extended all the way around the wall. That made four hundred thousand tiles on this wall alone. There were still five more—albeit getting smaller and smaller in circumference as we neared the center. That added up to a lot of tiles. If there were a thousand stonemasons each carving one a day....
    My mind gave up the calculation in favor of boggling. But I knew that no one mounts several million tiles on the walls of his city just so that they’re not so boring to look at. If this was art for