by James Blish
"ZERO MINUS FIFTEEN MINUTES." "Do you understand what is about to happen to you?" Amalfi said suddenly.
"YES, MR. MAYOR. WE ARE TO BE TURNED OFF AT ZERO."
"That's good enough." He wondered, however, if they thought that they might be turned on again in the future. It was of course foolish to think of them as entertaining anything even vaguely resembling an emotion, but nevertheless he decided not to say anything which might disabuse them. They were only machines, but they were also old friends and allies.
"ZERO MINUS TEN MINUTES."
"It's all going so fast all of a sudden," Dee's voice whispered in the earphones. "Mark, I ... I don't want it to happen."
"No more do I," Hazleton said. "But it will happen anyhow. I only wish I'd lived a more human life than I did. But it happened the way it happened, and so there's no more to say."
"I wish I could believe," Estelle said, "that there will be no sorrow in the universe I make."
"Then create nothing, my dear," Gifford Bonner said. "Stay here. Creation means sorrow, always and always."
"And joy," Estelle said.
"Well, yes. There's that."
"ZERO MINUS FIVE MINUTES."
"I think we can do without the rest of the countdown," Amalfi said. "Otherwise from now on they will count every minute, and they'll do the last one by seconds. Do we want to go out to the tune of that gabble? Anybody want to say 'yes'?"
They were silent. "Very well," Amalfi said. "Stop counting."
"VERY WELL, MR. MAYOR. GOODBYE."
"Goodbye," Amalfi said with amazement.
"I won't say that, if you don't mind," Hazleton said in a choked voice. "It brings the deprivation too close for me to stand. I hope everybody will consider it said."
Amalfi nodded, then realized that the gesture could not be seen inside the helmet.
"I agree," he said. "But I don't feel deprived. I loved you all. You have my love to take with you, and I have it too."
"It is the only thing in the universe that one can give and still have," Miramon said.
The deck throbbed under Amalfi's feet. The machines were preparing for their instant of unimaginable thrust. The sound of their power was comforting; so was the solidity of the deck, the table, the room, the mountain, the world
"I think" Gifford Bonner said.
And with those words, it ended.
There was nothing at first but the inside of the suit. Outside there was not even blackness, but only nothingness, something not to be seen, like that which is not seen outside of the cone of vision; one does not see blackness behind one's own head, one simply does not see in that direction at all; and so here. Yet for a little while, Amalfi found that he was still conscious of his friends, still a part of the circle though the room and everything in it had vanished from around them. He did not know how he knew that they were still there, but he could feel it.
He knew that there was no hope of speaking to them again; and indeed, as he tried to grasp how he knew they were there at all, he realized that they were drawing away from him. The circle was widening. The mute figures became smaller, not by distance, for there was no distance here, but nevertheless in some way they were passing out of each other's ken. Amalfi tried to lift his hand in farewell, but found it almost impossible. By the time he had only half completed the gesture, the others had faded and were gone, leaving behind only a memory also fading rapidly, like the memory of a fragrance.
Now he was alone and must do what he must do. Since his hand was raised, he continued the gesture to let the gas out of his oxygen bottles. The unmedium in which he was suspended seemed to be becoming a little less resistant; already a metrical frame was establishing itself. Yet it was almost as difficult to halt the motion as it had been to start it.
Nevertheless, he halted it. Of what use was another universe of the kind he had just seen die? Nature had provided two of those, and had doomed them at the same moment. Why not try something else? Retma in his caution, Estelle in her compassion, Dee in her fear all would be giving birth to some version of the standard model; but Amalfi had driven the standard model until all the bolts had come out of it, and was so tired at even the thought of it that he could hardly bring himself to breathe. What would happen if, instead, he simply touched the detonator button on his chest, and let all the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into plasma at the same instant?
That was unknowable. But the unknowable was what he wanted. He brought his hand down again.
There was no reason to delay. Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.
"So be it," Amalfi said. He touched the button over his heart. Creation began.
AFTERWORD: THE EARTHMANIST CULTURE: CITIES IN FLIGHT as a Spenglerian History
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West1 has been acknowledged by lames Blish as one of the sources of CITIES IN FLIGHT. He has said, "My own 'Okie' stories were . . . founded in Spengler."
Spengler is a difficult thinker or at least a difficult writer as anyone will discover who attempts to make a table similar to the one that appears with this Afterword. Part of the difficulty stems from our tendency to equate cultures with empires and other political units, a delusion from which Toynbee should have freed us even if Spengler did not. A related difficulty lies hi the title: "the decline of the West" inevitably suggests "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire," and one is likely to assume that Spengler is predicting the military conquest of the West rather than merely arguing that the West is in a certain kind of decline. Still another lies in the fact that Spengler uses the words culture and civilization sometimes in such a way that they appear to be synonymous with society, and sometimes as technical terms with opposed meanings. Whatever may be true of things, two words synonymous with a third are not necessarily equal to each other, and we should understand from the beginning that for Spengler, culture and civilization are opposed states in the spiritual history of a society:
A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of everchildish
An earlier version of this analysis appeared in Riverside Quarterly, and that version is Copyright (c) 1968 by Leland Sapiro. Our thanks to him and to the author for permission to include this revised version in this volume.
humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. ... It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, iariis, states, sciences, and reverts into the protosoul. '. . . The aim once attained the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made actual the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like the worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust its decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fulness. . ... [I, 106]
The West has reached full civilization, and its culture is dead, but its civilization, and its empire, may endure for centuries or millennia.
Now, the explicit Spenglerianism of CITIES IN FLIGHT is highly dubious in some of its details (see below, #2), and rather absurd overall. The overall absurdity lies in the basic idea of the "cultural morphologist":
Chris recognized the term, from his force-feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate it to all other cultures at similar stages, and come up with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. . . . [ALFTS, 233] Spengler never uses the term "cultural morphologist," and he would surely never have imagined that his work could be put to any such narrow uses. If a culture is an o
rganism, you can make for a culture predictions of the kind that can be made for any organism: e.g., that a baby boy will become a man, not a woman or a horse, and that, barring accidents, the man will pass through middle age to old age and death. To be sure, the more information you have, the more particular you can be in your predictions, but obviously there are limits beyond which you cannot go. Indeed, that there are such limits in anything and everything is perhaps the most fundamental idea of Spengler. As a matter of fact, the cultural morphologists of CITIES IN FLIGHT never actually practice their trade: the various "cultures" with which the heroes deal are never presented with enough fullness to allow for any kind of Spenglerian assessment; the various stories turn on coincidence or on individual psychology and would not be essentially different if explicit references to cultural morphology were entirely eliminated which could be done by deleting a handful of sentences.
Although some of the inconsistencies in CITIES IN FLIGHT surely result from authorial forgetfulness, they are too numerous and too prominent to be regarded as anything other than an essential feature of the overall story. Since point of view is rigidly controlled throughout the work, every statement can be attributed to one or another of the various characters. Given this fact, we can make sense of the tetralogy by regarding it, not as a fiction in which a universe has been created by an omniscient, omnipotent author, but as historical narrative with a large admixture of myth; that is, by assuming that behind the sometimes accurate, sometimes erroneous, sometimes mythical narrative there is an actual history.
Thus, the first volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT gives us an intelligently Spenglerian view of the near future, and the other three, albeit very sketchily, the life story of a Spenglerian culture. In comparison with most sciencefiction novels and series, CITIES IN FLIGHT is a very rich work indeed.
1. Blish's Twenty-First Century: The Coming of Caesarism
In the first volume, although the term is not used there, MacHinery is a successful practitioner of what Spengler describes as Caesarism [II, 43135]. Dr. Corsi's reasons for believing that "scientific method doesn't work any more" [TSHS, 1415], although not expressed in Spenglerian terms, are thoroughly consistent with Spengler's discussion of "conclusive" scientific thought [I, 41728]. The volume also devotes some space to an adventist religious movement, the Witnesses, which seems to be a product of that "second religiousness" among the masses
Forgetfulness, alas, did indeed play a role. The volumes were written roughly in the order III, I, IV, II over a period of 15 years (during which I was also writing other books), and inconsistencies crept in despite my best intentions to keep them out. For this edition, I have corrected a large number of those pointed out to me by Dr. Mullen, where I agreed that they were inconsistencies. Where I didn't, I let them stand along with Dr. Mullen's objections to them. J. B. which Spengler considers an inevitable concomitant of Caesarism [II, 31011, 435]. Finally, although Helmuth is wrong about the pyramids, he is correctly Spenglerian in regarding giganticism as evidence that a culture is dead [I, 29195], and his remark on the Martian canali is certainly, on the part of IVIr. Blish, a brilliant Spenglerian touch [TSHS, 1191. All in all, then, the first volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT is a thoroughly Spenglerian work.
2. Blish's Twenty-First Century: Two Cultures or One?
In Blish's universe "historians generally agree that the fall of the West must be dated no later than the year 2105" [ALFTS, 169]. They also agree hi regarding the great conflict of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that between the "West" and the communist alliance (later called the Bureaucratic State), as a conflict between "rival cultures" [ALFTS, 168; ECH, 237241].
It is true that Spengler distinguished between the Russian soul and the Western:
The death impulse . . . for the West is the passion of drive always into infinite space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self till "it" in the man becomes identical with the boundless plain itself. . . . The idea of a Russian's being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down hang of the heavens something that somewhere combines with the plain to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system ... is spiritually contemptible. [II, 295n] We find a similar passage in The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits:
Space flight had been a natural, if late, outcome of Western thought patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite. The Soviets, however, were opposed so bitterly to the idea that they would not even allow their fiction writers to mention it. Where the West had soared from the rock of earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied o be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend [ECH, 238].
If we assume that the time stream of Blish's universe separates from our own sometime around 1950, we will have no occasion to speak of sputnik. Even so, the question still remains whether the Soviets, or the Bureaucratic State, can be said to belong to a Spenglerian culture distinct from that of the West. In the first place, to say so is to reject Spengler's view that Peter the Great succeeded in his Westernizing efforts, that Russia is therefore a part of the Western Civilization, and that communism is merely a continuance of Western influence [II, 19296]. To be sure, Spengler believed that a new culture would be born in Russia in the near future ("to Dostoyevski's Christianity [as opposed to Tolstoi's] the next thousand years will belong" [II, 196]), but the Bureaucratic State can hardly be considered an expression of either Dostoyevski's Christianity in particular or of springtime culture in general. In the second place, Spengler would surely reject the only reason offered by our future historians for considering the cultures distinct: that Russia differs from the West in not having "traditional libertarian political institutions" [ALFTS, 168], for such institutions are neither universal in nor peculiar to the West but are instead the products, in every Snenglerian culture, of fifth political epoch, Revolution and Napoleonism (see the table that appears with this essay). In predicting that the West will reach Caesarism by 2000, Spengler is predicting the end of such institutions in the West utterly without regard to any external conflict. All this being so, it follows that the great conflict between the "West" and the Soviets is simply a struggle between rival power blocs and that we must therefore regard the victory of the Bureaucratic State as establishing the Final Political Form of the Western Culture.3 3. The Life Story of the Earthmanist Culture
The life of the Spenglerian culture begins with the birth of a "myth of the great style" [1, 339]. The new myth develops under two kinds of emphasis: that given it by the nobles and that given it by the priests. In the Western
A wholly valid argument. Nevertheless I have not changed the text, because--particularly in Vol. II was trying to make the point that when two Civilizations come in conflict with one another, the issue is resolved long in advance of formal military victory by each side becoming more like the other. The point would have seemed trivial to Spengler, who points out that all Civilizations are alike in their essential features to begin with; but in our century the process is highly visible once one's attention has been called to it, an opportunity I couldn't (and can't) resist. J. B.
Culture, with its early rivalry between emperor and pope, the opposition between the emphases was very strong. For the Classical Culture the equally strong opposition has been largely obscured by the fact that only the military myth has survived in detail (e.g., in Homer). In the Arabian Culture, where the ruler was ordinarily both emperor and pope, the opposition was of little importance. In the Earthmanist Culture, where again only the military myth the Vegan War has survived in any detail, the opposition seems to be of even less importance in that the myth seems to have been overwhelmingly military rather than priestly. Even so, its purpose would seem to be primarily religious in that it has evidently developed as a means of relieving the Earthmen of a great burden of guilt.
The myth makes it appear that a small number of Earthmen were unaccountably a
ble to prevail over a vast and enormously powerful "tyranny" which deserved to be completely destroyed. The fact must surely be that the Vegan Civilization was in the last stages of its Final Political Form with the concomitant "enfeeblement ... of the imperial machinery against young peoples eager for spoil, or alien conquerors" [Spengler, I, Table iii; cf. the table with this essay]. Though outnumbered a million to one in total population, the Earthmen may well have been able to muster nearly as many fighting men as the Vegans at any given place and time, and they must have come into interstellar space with superior weapons or tactics or both and with ferocity such as the Vegans had perhaps never experienced but for which there are precedents aplenty in the history of Earth, itself, the most cogent being perhaps the destruction wrought in Persia and Mesopotamia by the Mongols of Hulagu. And it was not only Vega II that felt the ferocity of the Earthmen, nor only the Vegans: "In 2394 one of the cities . . . was responsible for the sacking of the new Earth colony on Thor V; this act of ferocity earned for them the nickname of 'the Mad Dogs,' but it gradually became a model for dealing with Vegan planets" [ALFTS, 170]. In sum, at the close of the Vegan War the Earthmen had to choose whether they would be proud or ashamed of what they had done. Their shame brought about the trial of Admiral Hrunta the great figure of the hundred year war, its Agamemnon, its Charlemagne, its Arthur for genocide; their determination to be proud resulted not only in the establishment of the Hruntan Empire but also in the birth of the Earthmanist Culture.
The attempts of the Bureaucratic State to bring Hrunta to justice culminate in the Battle of BD 40deg4048', which is said to have been "indecisive" [ALFTS, 170], but which is quite decisive in that it proves the State incapable of controlling more than a very limited volume of space. Since Hrunta's empire is only "the first of many such gimcrack 'empires' ... to spawn on the fringes of Earth's jurisdiction" [TTOT, 469], we can put down the year of the Battle, 2464, as marking the beginning of the feudal order. Up to this time such Earthmen as have not been under the direct control of the Bureaucratic State have presumably been organized simply as tribes or war bands, each man acknowledging his military superiors only as temporary leaders and feeling loyalty only to the abstract concept of Earth; but now the temporary becomes apparently permanent, and loyalty finds concrete object hi this or that leader or "emperor."