Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  As the memory banks told the story (without the pictures and sounds and other sensations, which, though they were so vivid as to become at once a part of Chris’s immediate experience, could not possibly be reproduced in print), it went like this:

  “The exploration of the solar system was at first primarily the province of the military, who alone could demand the enormous sums of money necessary for space travel under rocket power, which is essentially a brute force method of propulsion directly dependent upon how much power is thrown away. The highest achievement of this phase was the construction of a research and observation station upon Proserpine II, the second satellite of the most remote of all the planets from Sol. Proserpine Station was begun in 2016; it was, however, still not completed when it was abandoned temporarily twenty-eight years later.

  “The reasons for the abandonment of Proserpine Station and all other solar system colonies at this time may be found in the course of contemporary Terrestrial politics. Under the relentless pressure of competition from the USSR and its associated states, the Earth’s Western culture had undertaken to support a permanent war economy, under the burden of which its traditional libertarian political institutions were steadily eroded away. By the beginning of the twenty-first century it was no longer realistically possible to see any difference between the rival cultures, although their outward forms of government continued to be called by different names. Both were police states in which the individual citizen had lost all right to juridical defense, and both operated under a totally controlled economy. In the West, the official term for this form of public policy was “anti-Communism”; in the East it was called “anti-Fascism,” and both terms were heavily laden with mob emotion. The facts of the matter, however, were that neither state was economically either fascist or communist, and that as economic systems neither fascism nor communism has ever been tried in recorded Terrestrial history.

  “It was during this period that two Western research projects under the direction of the Alaskan senator Bliss Wagoner discovered the basic inventions upon which the second phase of spaceflight was to be based. The first of these was the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator, now known as the spindizzy, which was almost immediately developed into an interstellar drive. The second was ascomycin, the first of the anti-agathics, or death-postponing drugs. The first interstellar expedition was launched from the Jovian satellary system in 2021 under Wagoner’s personal direction, although Wagoner himself was arrested and executed for his complicity in this ‘treasonable’ event. Though no record exists of the fate of this expedition, it is certain that it survived, since the second expedition, more than three hundred and fifty years later, found the planets of the stars of the local group well scattered with human beings speaking recognizable Terrestrial languages.

  “At this time an attempt was made to settle the rivalry between the two power blocs by still another personal pact between their respective leaders, President MacHinery of the Western Common Market and Premier Erdsenov of the USSR. This took place in 2022, and the subsequent Cold Peace provided little incentive for space flight. In 2027 MacHinery was assassinated, and Erdsenov proclaimed himself premier and president of a United Earth; however, Erdsenov was himself assassinated in 2032. During this same year, an underground Western group calling itself the Hamiltonians succeeded in escaping from the solar system in a large number of small spindizzy-powered craft which they had built from funds collected secretly to finance a supposed new American revolution, thus leaving behind the vast majority of their followers. No survivors of the Hamiltonian exodus have thus far been found; they succeeded, however, in escaping the Terror, the world-wide pogrom by which a united Earth government was actually established for the first time.

  “One of the first acts of this government, now called the Bureaucratic State, was the banning in 2039 of spaceflight and all associated sciences. The existing colonies on the planets and satellites of the solar system were not evacuated home, but were simply cut off and abandoned. The consolidation of the State proceeded rapidly, and historians generally agree that the fall of the West must be dated no later than the year 2105. Thus began a period of systematic oppression and exploitation unmatched on Earth even by the worst decades of the Roman Empire.

  “In the meantime the interstellar exiles continued to consolidate new planets and to jump from star to star. In 2289, one such expedition made its first contact with what proved to be a planet of the Vegan Tyranny, an interstellar culture which, we now know, had ruled most of this quadrant of the galaxy for eight to ten thousand years, and was still in the process of expanding. The Vegans were quick to see potential rivals even in these unorganized and badly supplied colonists, and made a concerted attempt to stamp out all the colonies. However, the distances involved were so vast that the first real engagement of the Vegan War, the battle of Altair, did not occur until 2310. The colonial forces were defeated and scattered, but not before inflicting sufficient damage to set back the Vegans’ timetable for razing the colonial planets—permanently, as it turned out.

  “In 2375, the spindizzy was independently rediscovered on Earth and the Thorium Trust’s Plant Number Eight used it to wrench its entire installation from off the ground and leave the Earth, using the plant as a self-contained spaceship. Other plants followed, and shortly thereafter, whole cities. Many of these were driven to leave as much by the permanent depression which had settled over the Earth as by the long-established political repressions of the Bureaucratic State. These escaping cities quickly found the earlier Earth colonies among the nearby stars, to which they provided badly needed industrial strength, and with whom they joined forces against Vega. The outcome was both triumphant and shameful. In 2394 one of the escaping cities, Gravitogorsk-Mars, now calling itself the Interstellar Master Traders, 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. The capital world of the Tyranny, Vega II, was invested in 2413 by a number of armed cities, including IMT, whose task it was to destroy the many orbital forts surrounding the planet, and by the Third Colonial Navy under Admiral Alois Hrunta, who was charged with occupying Vega II in the event of its surrender. Instead, Admiral Hrunta scorched the planet completely, and led the Third Navy off into an uncharted quadrant with the intention of founding his own interstellar empire. In 2451 the colonial court found him guilty in absentia of atrocities and attempted genocide, and an attempt to bring him to justice culminated in 2464 in the battle of BD 40° 4048’, which was destructive but completely indecisive for both sides. The same year Alois Hrunta declared himself Emperor of Space.

  “The Exodus of Earth’s industrial power had by now become so marked that the Bureaucratic State no longer had a productive base upon which to rest, and it is generally agreed that it collapsed in 2522. In the same year there began the police interregnum, a limited government deriving its powers from a loose confederation based roughly upon the ancient United Nations, but without sufficient popular base or industrial support to control the economy. Realizing, however, that the only hope for the restoration of economic health to Earth lay in the colonists and the free cities, the confederation proclaimed an amnesty for everyone in space, and at the same time instituted a limited but systematic program for the policing of those nomad cities which had begun to prey upon colony planets or upon each other.

  “The confederation is still the only operative government in this arm of the galaxy. The poisoning of Alois Hrunta in 3089 was followed by the rapid Balkanization of the Hruntan Empire, which was never even at its best highly cohesive, and although there is at present self-styled Emperor of Space, Arpad Hrunta, his realm does not appear to be of any importance. Effectively, today, law and order in Arm II are provided by the Earth police, and its economy is supported by the migrant cities. Both systems are haphazard and inefficient, and often operate at cross purposes.

  “It is imp
ossible to predict when better methods will emerge, or what they will be.”

  CHAPTER FIVE: “Boy, You Are Dumb!”

  WHILE THE memory cells chattered and called up dreams, the immense city soared outward among the stars, at what seemed like a breakneck pace after the tentative first explorations of Scranton within the local group. The streets were thronged 24 hours a day with myriads of people hurrying on unimaginable errands; and in addition to the constant flitting of Tin Cabs, there was often the distant but edgy roar of subway trains coursing through tunnels bored through the very granite keel of the city. All of this activity seemed purposeful and even cheerful, but it was also extremely bewildering.

  Chris’s schooling left him very little time to explore it. Not all of his education was machine education, either, for, as he slowly realized, no one really learns anything through hypnopaedia; machine teaching at its best enables the student to accumulate nothing better than facts; it does not show how to tie them together, let alone how to do something with them. To train the intelligence—not just the memory—a real human tutor is required.

  The one assigned to Chris, a stocky, fierce, white-haired woman named Dr. Helena Braziller, was far and away the best teacher Chris had ever encountered in his life—and far and away the worst taskmaster. The City Fathers wore him out only by taxing his memory; whereas Dr. Braziller made him work.

  “The fundamental equation of the Blackett-Dirac scholium reads as follows:

  where Pis magnetic moment, U is angular momentum, C and G have their usual values, and B is a constant with the value 0.25 approximately. A first transform of this identity gives:

  which is the usual shorthand form of the primary spindizzy equation, called the Locke Derivation. Blackett, Dirac and Locke all assumed that it would hold true for large bodies, such as gas-giant planets and suns. Show on the blackboard by dimensional analysis why this assumption is invalid.”

  As far as Chris was concerned, the answer could have been much more simply arrived at; Dr. Braziller could just have told him that this relationship between gravitation and the spin of a body applied only to electrons and other submicroscopic objects, and disappeared, for all practical purposes, in the world of the macrocosm; but that was not her way. Had she only told him that, it would have come into his mind as a fact like any other fact—for instance, like the facts that the memory cells of the City Fathers were constantly pouring into his ears and eyes—but by her lights he would not have understood it. She wanted him to repeat not only the original reasoning of Blackett, Dirac and Locke, but to see for himself, not just because she told him so, where they had gone astray, and hence why a natural law which had first been proposed in the gas-lit, almost prehistoric year of 1891, and was precisely formulated as the Lande Factor in 1940, nevertheless failed to lift so much as a grain of sand off the Earth until the year 2019.

  “But Dr. Braziller, why isn’t it enough to see that they made a mistake? We know that now. Why repeat it?”

  “Because that’s what all these great men have labored toward: so that you could do it right, yourself. Up until about the thirteenth century, nobody in the world except a few dedicated scholars could do long division; then Fibonacci introduced the Arabic numbers to the West. Now, any idiot can do what it took a great mind to do in those days. Are you going to complain that because Fibonacci found a better way to do long division, you shouldn’t be required to learn why it’s better? Or that because a great inventor like Locke didn’t understand dimensional analysis, you should be allowed to be just as ignorant, after all these years? They spent their lives making things simple for you that were enormously difficult for them, and until you understand the difficulties, you can’t possibly understand the simplifications. Go back to the blackboard and try again.”

  Being in a “live” class had its compensations, though; and one of these was Piggy Kingston-Throop. Piggy—his real name was George, but nobody ever called him that, not even Dr. Braziller—was not much of a prize as a friend and companion, but he was the only member of the small class who was exactly Chris’s age; all the others were much younger. From this Chris deduced that Piggy was not a student, which turned out to be true.

  Piggy seemed glad enough to encounter someone who was as retarded as he was, whatever the reasons, and who knew less than he did about a great many subjects which were commonplaces to him. And in many ways he was quite a pleasant sort of fellow; blond, plump and affable, with a ready wit and a tendency to be unimpressed by almost everything that other people considered important. In this last, he made a particularly good foil for Chris, who in his ignorance and in the strangeness of his situation often could not help but be earnest to the point of grimness over what later turned out to be trivia.

  Not that Chris allowed these differences over value judgments always to be resolved in Piggy’s favor; they quarreled over them almost from the beginning. The first of these tangles, which soon proved to be a model for the others, involved the subject of the antiagathic drugs.

  “You’re going to be a citizen, aren’t you, Piggy?”

  “Oh, sure. I’m all set.”

  “I wish I were. My trouble is, I don’t even know what I want to do—let alone what I’m good at.”

  Piggy turned and stared at him. They had paused on the way from school on the Tudor Tower Place bridge leading over 42nd Street. Long ago, the view from here across First Avenue to the East River had been blocked by the UN Building, but that had been demolished during the Terror, and there was nothing to mark where it had stood but a plaza; and on the far side of that, starry space itself.

  “What do you mean, do?” Piggy said. “Oh, maybe you’ll have a little trouble, what with not having been born here. But there’s ways around that. Don’t believe everything they tell you.”

  Like many of the things Piggy said, fully 80 per cent of this speech meant nothing to Chris. In self-defense, he could do nothing but answer the question. “You know all this better than I do. But the laws do say pretty clearly that a man has to be good for something before he’s allowed to become a citizen and be started on the drug treatments. Let’s see; there are supposed to be three ways to go about it; and I ought to have them straight, because I just had them put into my head a few days ago.”

  He concentrated a moment. He had discovered a useful trick for dredging up the information which had been implanted in his mind from the memory cells: If he half closed his eyes and imagined the grey gas, in a moment he would begin to feel, at least in retrospect, the same somnolence under which the original facts had been imparted, and they would come back in very much the same words. It worked equally well this time; almost at once, he heard his own voice saying, in a curious monotone imitation of the City Fathers:

  “‘There are three general qualifications for citizenship. They are: (1) Display of some obviously useful talent, such as computer programming, administration, or another gift worth retaining, as opposed to depending upon the accidents of birth to provide new such men for each succeeding generation; (2) a demonstrable bent toward any intellectual field, including scientific research, the arts and philosophy, since in these fields one lifetime is seldom enough to attain masterhood, let alone put it to the best use; and (3) passage of the Citizenship Tests, which are designed to reveal reserves and potentials in the late-maturing eighteen-year-old whose achievement record is unimpressive.’ No matter how you slice it, it doesn’t sound easy!”

  “That’s only what the City Fathers say,” Piggy said scornfully. “What do they know about it? They’re only a bunch of machines. They don’t know anything about people. Those rules don’t even make sense.”

  “They make sense to me,” Chris objected. “It’s a cinch the antiagathics can’t be given to everybody—from what I hear, they’re scarcer than germanium. On Scranton, the big boss wouldn’t even allow them to be mentioned in public. So there’s got to be some way of picking who gets them and who doesn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Wel
l, to begin with, because a city is like an island—an island in the middle of the biggest ocean you can think of, and then some. Nobody can get on, and nobody can get off, except for a couple of guys now and then. If everybody gets this drug and lives forever, pretty soon the place is going to be so crowded that we’ll all be standing on each other’s feet.”

  “Ah, cut it out. Look around you. Are we all standing on each other’s feet?”

  “No, but that’s because the drugs are restricted, and because not everybody’s allowed to have children, either. For that matter, look at you, Piggy—your father and your mother are both big wheels on this town, but you’re an only child, and furthermore, the first one they’ve been allowed to have in a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Leave them out of this,” Piggy growled. “They didn’t play their cards right, I’ll tell you that. But that’s none of your business.”

  “All right. Take me, then. Unless I turn out to be good for something before I’m eighteen—and I can’t think what it would be—I won’t be a citizen and I won’t get the drugs. Or even if I do get to be a citizen, say by passing the Tests, I’ll still have to prove myself useful stock before I’m allowed to have even one kid of my own. That’s just the way it has to be when the population has to be kept stable; it’s simple economics, Piggy, and there’s a subject I think I know something about.”

  Piggy spat reflectively over the railing, though it was hard to tell whether or not he was expressing an opinion, and if so, whether it referred to economics alone or to the entire argument. “All right, then,” he said. “Suppose you get the drugs, and they let you have a kid. Why shouldn’t they give the kid the drugs too?”

  “Why should they, unless he qualifies?”