Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Nor did Chris have any reason to leave the hole, at least for now. The warehouse itself had a toilet he could visit, and seemed to be unfrequented; and of course it didn’t need a watchman—Who would bother to steal heavy machinery, and where would they run with it? If he was careful not to set any fires with his candles—for the hole, although fairly well ventilated through the labyrinth, was always pitch dark—he would probably be safe until his food ran out. After that, he would have to take his chances … but he had been a poacher before.

  But nothing in his plans had allowed for a visitor.

  He heard the sounds of the approach from some distance and blew out his candle at once. Maybe it was only a casual prowler; maybe even only a strayed child—maybe, at the worst, another refugee from Lutz’s flesh-trading deal, looking for a hole. There were plenty of holes amid the piled-up crates, and the way to this one was so complex that two of them could live in the heap for weeks without encountering each other.

  But his heart sank as he realized how quietly the footsteps were approaching. The newcomer was negotiating the maze with scarcely a false turn, let alone a noisy blunder.

  Someone knew where he was—or at least knew where his hole was.

  The footsteps became louder, slowed, and stopped. Now he could distinctly hear someone breathing.

  Then the beam of a hand torch caught him full in the face.

  “Hell, Chris. Make a light, huh?”

  The voice was that of Frad Haskins. Anger and relief flooded through Chris at the same time. The big man had been his first friend, and almost his name-brother—for after all, Fradley O. Haskins is not much more ridiculous a name than Crispin deFord— but that blow of light in the face had been like a betrayal.

  “I’ve only got candles. If you’d set the flashlight on end, it’d be just as good—maybe better.”

  “Okay.” Haskins sat down on the floor, placing the torch on the small crate Chris used for a table, so that it made a round spot of light on the boards overhead. “Now tell me something. Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Hiding,” Chris said, a little sullenly.

  “I can see that. I knew what this place was from the day I saw you toting books into it. I have to keep in practice on this press-gang dodge; I’ll need it some day on some other planet. But in your case, what’s the sense? Don’t you want to be transferred to a bigger city?”

  “No, I don’t. Oh, I can’t say that Scranton’s been like home to me. I hate it. I wish I could really go home. But Frad, at least I’m getting to know the place. I already knew part of it, back while it was on the ground. I don’t want to be kidnapped twice, and go through it all again—aboard some city where I don’t know even as much about the streets as I knew about Scranton—and maybe find out that I hate it even worse. And I don’t like being swapped, like—like a barrel of scrap.”

  “Well, maybe I can’t blame you for that—though it’s standard Okie procedure, not anything that Lutz thought up in his own head. Do you know where the ‘rule of descretion’ came from?”

  “No.”

  “From the trading of players between baseball teams. It’s that old —more than a thousand years. The contract law that sanctions it is supposed to be a whale of a lot older, even.”

  “All right,” Chris said. “It could even be Roman, I suppose. But Frad, I’m not a barrel of scrap and I still don’t want to be swapped.”

  “Now that part of it,” the big man said patiently, “is just plain silly. You’ve got no future in Scranton, and you ought to know it by now. On a really big town you could probably find something to do—and the least you’ll get is some schooling. All our schools are closed, for good and forever. And another thing: We’ve only been aloft a year, and it’s a cinch we’ve got some hard times ahead of us. An older town would be a darn sight safer—not absolutely safe, no Okie ever is; but safer.”

  “Are you going, too?”

  Haskins laughed. “Not a chance. Amalfi must have ten thousand of the likes of me. Besides, Lutz needs me. He doesn’t know it, but he does.”

  “Well… then … I’d rather stay with you.”

  Haskins smote one fist into the other palm in exasperation. “Look, Red … Cripes, what do you say to this kid? Thanks, Chris; I—I’ll remember that. But if I’m lucky, I’ll have a boy of my own some day. This isn’t the day. If you don’t face facts right now, you aren’t going to get a second chance. Listen, I’m the only guy who knows where you are, yet, but how long can that last? Do you know what Frank will do when he roots you out of a hole full of caches of food? Think, please, will you?”

  Chris’s stomach felt as though he had just been thrown out of a window.

  “I guess I never thought of that.”

  “You need practice. I don’t blame you for that. But I’ll tell you what Frank will do: He’ll have you shot. And nobody else in town’ll even raise an eyebrow. In the Okie lawbook, hoarding food comes under the head of endangering the survival of the city. Any such crime is a capital crime—and not only in Scranton, either.”

  There was a long silence. At last, Chris said quietly:

  “All right. Maybe it is better this way. I’ll go.”

  “That’s using your head,” Haskins said gruffly. “Come on, then. We’ll tell Frank you were sick. You look sick, right enough. But we’ll have to hustle—the gigs leave in two hours.”

  “Can I take my books?”

  “They’re not yours, they’re Boyle Warner’s,” Frad said impatiently. “I’ll get ’em back to him later. Pick up the torch and let’s go—you’ll find plenty of books where you’re going.” He stopped suddenly and glared at Chris through the dim light. “Not that you care where you’re going! You haven’t even asked the name of the town.”

  This was true; he had not asked, and now that he came to think about it, he didn’t care. But his curiosity came forward even through the gloom of the maze, and even through his despair. He said, “So I haven’t. What is it?”

  “New York.”

  CHAPTER FOUR: Schoolroom in the Sky

  THE SIGHT from the gig was marvelous beyond all imagination: an island of towers, as tall as mountains, floating in a surfaceless, bottomless sea of stars. The gig was rocket-powered, so that Chris was also seeing the stars from space in all their jeweled majesty for the first time in his life; but the silent pride of the great human city, aloof in its spindizzy bubble—which was faintly visible from the outside —completely took precedence. Behind the gig, Scranton looked in comparison like a scuttleful of old stove bolts.

  The immigrants were met at the perimeter by a broad-shouldered, crew-cut man of about forty, in a uniform which made all of Chris’s hackles rise; cops were natural enemies, here as everywhere. But the perimeter sergeant, who gave his name as Anderson, did no more than herd them all into separate cubicles for interviews.

  There was nobody in Chris’s cubicle but Chris himself. He was seated before a small ledge or banquette, facing a speaker grille which was set into the wall. From this there issued the questions, and into this he spoke his answers. Most of the questions were simple matters of vital statistics—his name, his age, point of origin, date of boarding Scranton and so on—but he rather enjoyed answering them; the fact was that never before in his life had anyone been interested enough in him to ask them. In fact he himself did not know the answers to some of them.

  It was also interesting to speculate on the identity of the questioner. It was a machine, Chris was almost sure, and one speaking not from any vocabulary of prerecorded words sounded by a human voice, but instead from some store of basic speech sounds which it combined and recombined as it went along. The result was perfectly understandable and nonmechanical, carrying many of the stigmata of real human speech—for example, the sentences emerged in natural speech rhythms, and with enough inflection so that key words and even punctuation could be distinguished—yet all the same he would never have mistaken it for a human voice. Whatever the difference was, he thoug
ht of it as though the device were speaking all in capital letters.

  Even in an age long dominated by computers, to the exclusion, in many cases, of human beings, Chris had never heard of a machine with intelligence enough to be able to construct its speech in this fashion, let alone one intelligent enough to be given the wide discretionary latitude implied by the conduct of this interview. He had never before heard of a machine which referred to itself as “we,” either.

  “HOW MUCH SCHOOLING HAD YOU HAD BEFORE YOU WERE IMPRESSED, M R. DE F ORD?”

  “Almost none.”

  “DID YOU RECEIVE ANY SCHOOLING ABOARD SCRANTON ?”

  “A little. Actually it was only just tutoring—the kind of thing I used to get from my father, when he felt up to it.”

  “I T IS RATHER LATE TO START, BUT WE CAN ARRANGE SCHOOLING FOR YOU IF YOU WISH—”

  “Boy, do I!”

  “T HAT IS THE QUESTION. A N ACCELERATED SECONDARY EDUCATION IS PHYSICALLY VERY TRYING. I T IS POSSIBLE THAT YOU WOULD HAVE NO NEED OF IT HERE, DEPENDING UPON YOUR GOALS. D O YOU WISH TO BE A PASSENGER, OR A CITIZEN?”

  On the surface, this was a perfectly easy question. What Chris most wanted to do was to go home and back to being a citizen of nothing more complicated than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Western Common Market, Terran Confederation. He had had many bad nights spent wondering how his family was doing without him, and what they had thought of his disappearance, and he was sure that he would have many more. Yet by the same token, by now they had doubtless made whatever adjustment was possible for them to the fact of his being gone; and an even more brutal fact was that he was now sitting on a metropolis of well over a million people which was floating in empty space a good twenty light-years away from Sol, bound for some destination he could not even guess. This monstrous and wonderful construct was not going to turn itself into his personal Tin Cabby simply because he said he wanted to go home, or for any other reason.

  So if Chris was stuck with the city, he reasoned, he might as well be a citizen. There was no point in being a passenger when he had no idea where he was going, or whether it would be worth the fare when he got there. Being a citizen, on the other hand, sounded as though it conferred some privileges; it would be worth while knowing what they were. It would also be worth knowing whether or not the two terms the machine had used carried some special technical meaning of which he ought to be wary.

  “Who’m I talking to?”

  “THE CITY F ATHERS.”

  This reply nearly threw him completely off course; he tabled the baker’s dozen of questions it raised only by a firm exercise of will. What was important about it right now was that it told him that he was talking to a responsible person—whatever the meaning of “Person” might be when one is dealing with a machine with a collective personality.

  “Am I entitled to ask questions too?”

  “Y ES, WITHIN LIMITS IT WOULD TAKE TOO LONG TO DEFINE FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS INTERVIEW. IF YOU ASK US QUESTIONS, WE WILL AT PRESENT EITHER ANSWER OR NOT ANSWER.”

  Chris thought hard. The City Fathers, despite their mention of time limitations, waited him out without any evidence of impatience. Finally he said:

  “What’s the most important single difference between a passenger and a citizen?”

  “A CITIZEN LIVES AN INDEFINITELY PROLONGED LIFE. ”

  Nothing they could have said could have been farther from any answer that Chris might have expected. It was so remote from anything he had ever thought or read about that it was almost meaningless to him. Finally he managed to ask cautiously: “How long is indefinitely?”

  “I NDEFINITELY LONG. O UR PRESENT MAYOR WAS BORN IN 2998. T HE AGE OF THE OLDEST CITY MAN OF WHOM WE HAVE ANY RECORD IS FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN YEARS, BUT IT IS STATISTICALLY DEFENSIBLE TO ASSUME THAT THERE ARE SEVERAL OLDER SPECIMENS, SINCE THE FIRST OF THE ANTIDEATH DRUGS WAS DISCOVERED IN THE YEAR 2018.”

  Antideath drugs! The dose was now entirely too big to swallow. It was all Chris could do to cling to the one microgram of it that seemed to have some meaning for him right now: that were he to live a long time—a very long time—he might some day find his way back home, no matter how far he had wandered in the meantime. All the rest would have to be thought through later. He said:

  “I want to be a citizen.”

  “I T IS REQUIRED THAT WE INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE PERMITTED TO CHANGE YOUR MIND UNTIL YOUR EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY, BUT THAT A DECISION TO BECOME A PASSENGER MAY NOT THEREAFTER BE RESCINDED, EXCEPT BY SPECIAL ORDER OF THE MAYOR.” A thin slot which Chris had not noticed until now suddenly spat out upon the banquette a long white card. “T HIS IS YOUR CITY REGISTRATION, WHICH IS USED TO OBTAIN FOOD, CLOTHING, HOUSING AND OTHER NECESSITIES. W HEN IN IS REJECTED ON PRESENTATION, YOU WILL KNOW THAT THE GOODS OR SERVICES YOU HAVE CLAIMED HAVE BEEN DISALLOWED. T HE CARD IS INDESTRUCTIBLE EXCEPT BY CERTAIN SPECIAL TECHNIQUES, BUT WE ADVISE YOU NOT TO LOSE IT, SINCE FOUR TO SIX HOURS WILL ELAPSE BEFORE IT CAN BE RETURNED TO YOU. I T IS PRESENTLY VALIDATED FOR ACCELERATED SCHOOLING. IF YOU HAVE NO FURTHER QUESTIONS, YOU MAY LEAVE. ”

  The accelerated schooling to which the City Fathers had remanded Chris did not at first seem physically strenuous at all. In fact it seemed initially to be no more demanding than sleeping all day might be. (This to Chris was a Utopian notion; he had never had the opportunity to try sleeping as a career, and so had no idea how intolerably exhausting it is.)

  The “schoolroom” was a large, grey, featureless chamber devoid of blackboard or desk; its only furniture consisted of a number of couches scattered about the floor. Nor were there any teachers; the only adults present were called monitors, and their duties appeared to be partly those of an usher, and partly those of a nurse, but none pertinent to teaching in any sense of the term Chris had ever encountered. They conducted you to your couch and helped you to fit over your head a bright metal helmet which had inside it what seemed to be hundreds of tiny, extremely sharp points which bit into your scalp just enough to make you nervous, but without enough pressure to break the skin. Once this gadget, which was called a toposcope, was adjusted to their satisfaction, the monitors left, and the room began to fill with the grey gas.

  The gas was like a fog, except that it was dry and faintly aromatic, smelling rather like the dried leaves of mountain laurel that Bob had liked to add sparingly to rabbit stews. But like a thick fog, it made it impossible to see the rest of the room until the session was over, when it was sucked out with a subdued roar of blowers.

  Thus Chris could never decide whether or not he actually slept while class was in session. The teaching technique, to be sure, was called hypnopaedia, an ancient word from still more ancient Greek roots which when translated literally meant “sleep-teaching.” And, to be sure, it filled your head with strange voices and strange visions which were remarkably like dreams. Chris also suspected that the grey gas not only cut off his vision, but also his other senses; otherwise he should surely have heard such random sounds as the coughing of other students, the movements of the monitors, the whir of the ventilators, the occasional deep sounds of the city’s drivers, and even the beating of his own heart; but none of these came through, or if they did, he did not afterwards have any memory of them. Yet the end result of all this was almost surely not true sleep, but simply a divorcing of his mind from every possible bodily distraction which might have come between him and his fullest attention to the visions and voices which were poured directly into his mind through the shining helmet of the toposcope.

  It was easy to understand why no such distraction could be tolerated, for the torrent of facts that came from the memory cells of the City Fathers into the prickly helmet was overwhelming and merciless. More than once, Chris saw ex-Scrantonites, all of them older than he was, being supported by monitors out of the classroom at the end of a session in a state closely resembling the kind of epileptic fit called “petit mal” … nor were they ever allowed back on their couches again. He himself left the sessions in a curious state of wobbly, wash
ed-out detachment which became more and more marked every day, despite the tumbler of restorative drink which was the standard antidote for the grey gas: a feeling of weakness which no amount of sleep seemed to make up for.

  The drink tasted funny, furthermore, and besides, it made him sneeze. But on the day after he had refused it for the first time, the memory banks decanted a double dose of projective Riemannian geometry, and he awoke to find four monitors holding him down on the couch during the last throes of a classical Jacksonian seizure.

  His education nearly stopped right there. Luckily, he had the sense to admit that he had skipped drinking the anticonvulsant drug the day before; and the records of the patterns of electrical activity of his brain which the toposcope had been taking continued to adjudge him a good risk. He was allowed back into the hall—and after that he was no longer in any doubt that learning can be harder physical labor than heaving a shovel.

  The voices and the visions resumed swarming gleefully inside his aching head.

  In retrospect, Chris found Okie history the least difficult subject to absorb, because the part of it dealing with the early years of the cities, and in particular with what had happened on Earth before the first of the cities had left the ground, was already familiar to him. Nevertheless he was now hearing it for the first time from the Okie point of view, which omitted great swatches which an Earthman would have considered important, and instead brought to the fore for study many events of which Chris had never heard but which obviously were essential for the understanding of how the cities had gone into space and prospered in it. It was, perhaps predictably, like seeing the past life of the Earth through the wrong end of a telescope.