Cities in Flight

by James Blish

“Boy, you are dumb! That’s what the Citizenship Tests are for, can’t you see that? They’re an out—an escape hatch, a dodge—and that’s all they are. If you don’t get in any other way, you get in that way. At least you do if you’ve got any sort of connections. If you’re a nobody, maybe the City Fathers rig the Tests against you—that’s likely enough. But if you’re a somebody, they’re not going to be too tough. If they are, my father can fix their wagon—he programs ’em. But either way, there’s no way to study for the Tests, so they’re obviously a sell.”

  Chris was shaken, but he said doggedly: “But they’re not supposed to be that kind of test at all. I mean, they’re not supposed to show whether or not you’re good at dimensional analysis, or history, or some other subject. They’re supposed to show up gifts that you were born with, not anything that you got through schooling or training.”

  “Spindizzy whistle. A test you can’t study for is a test you can’t pass unless it’s rigged—otherwise it doesn’t make any sense at all. Listen, Red, if you’re so sold on this idea that everybody who gets to take the drugs has to be a big brain, what about the guardian they handed you over to? He’s got no kids of his own, and he’s nothing but a cop … but he’s almost as old as the Mayor!”

  Up to now, Chris had felt vaguely that he had been holding his own; but this was like a blow in the face.

  Chris had originally been alarmed to find that his ID card assigned him lodgings with a family, and horrified when the assignment number turned out to belong to Sgt. Anderson. His first few weeks in the Andersons’ apartment—it was in the part of the city once called Chelsea—were prickly with suspicion, disguised poorly by as much formality as his social inexperience would allow.

  It soon became impossible, however, to continue believing that the perimeter sergeant was an ogre; and his wife, Carla, was as warm and gracious a woman as Chris had ever met. They were childless, and could not have welcomed Chris more whole-heartedly had he been one of their own. Furthermore, as the City Fathers had of course calculated, Anderson was the ideal guardian for a brand-new young passenger, for few people, even the Mayor, knew the city better.

  He was, in fact, considerably more than a cop, for the city’s police force was also its defense force—and its Marines, should the need for a raid or a boarding party ever arise. Technically, there were many men on the force who were superior to the perimeter sergeant, but Anderson and one counterpart, a dark taciturn man named Dulany, headed picked squads and were nearly independent of the rest of the police, reporting directly to Mayor Amalfi.

  It was this fact which opened the first line of friendly communication between Chris and his guardian. He had not yet even seen Amalfi with his own eyes. Although everyone in the city spoke of him as if they knew him personally, here at last was one man who really did, and saw him several times a week. Chris was unable to restrain his curiosity.

  “Well, that’s just the way people talk, Chris. Actually hardly anyone sees much of Amalfi, he’s got too much to do. But he’s been in charge here a long time and he’s good at his job; people feel that he’s their friend because they trust him.”

  “But what is he like? ”

  “He’s complicated—but then most people are complicated. I guess the word I’m groping for is ‘devious.’ He sees connections between events that nobody else sees. He sizes up a situation like a man looking at a coat for the one thread that’ll make the whole thing unravel. He has to—he’s too burdened to deal with things on a stitch-by-stitch basis. In my opinion he’s killing himself with overwork as it is.”

  It was to this point that Chris returned after his upsetting argument with Piggy. “Sergeant, the other day you said that the Mayor was killing himself with overwork. But the City Fathers told me he’s several centuries old. On the drugs, he ought to live forever, isn’t that so?”

  “Absolutely not,” Anderson said emphatically: “Nobody can live forever. Sooner or later, there’d be an accident, for one thing. And strictly speaking, the drugs aren’t a ‘cure’ for death anyhow. Do you know how they work?”

  “No,” Chris admitted. “School hasn’t covered them yet.”

  “Well, the memory banks can give you the details—I’ve probably forgotten most of them. But generally, there are several antiagathics, and each one does a different job. The main one, ascomycin, stirs up a kind of tissue in the body called the reticuloendothelial system—the white blood corpuscles are a part of it—to give you what’s called ‘nonspecific immunity.’ What that means is that for about the next seventy years, you can’t catch any infectious disease. At the end of that time you get another shot, and so on. The stuff isn’t an antibiotic, as the name suggests, but an endotoxin fraction—a complex organic sugar called a mannose; it got its name from the fact that it’s produced by fermentation, as antibiotics are.

  “Another is TATP—triacetyltriparanol. What this does is inhibit the synthesis in the body of a fatty stuff called cholesterol; otherwise it collects in the arteries and causes strokes, apoplexy, high blood pressure and so on. This drug has to be taken every day, because the body goes right on trying to make cholesterol every day.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that it’s good for something?” Chris objected tentatively.

  “Cholesterol? Sure it is. It’s absolutely essential in the development of a fetus, so women have to lay off TATP while they’re carrying a child. But it’s of no use to men—and men are far more susceptible to circulatory diseases than women.

  “There are still two more anti-agathics in use now, but they’re minor; one, for instance, blocks the synthesis of the hormone of sleep, which again is essential in pregnancy but a thundering nuisance otherwise; that one was originally found in the blood of ruminant animals like cows, whose plumbing is so defective that they’d die if they lay down.”

  “You mean you never sleep?”

  “Haven’t got the time for it,” Anderson said gravely. “Or the need any longer, thank goodness. But ascomycin and TATP between them prevent the two underlying major causes of death: heart diseases and infections. If you prevent those alone, you extend the average lifetime by at least two centuries.

  “But death is still inevitable, Chris. If there isn’t an accident, there may be cancer, which we can’t prevent yet—oh, ascomycin attacks tumors so strongly that cancer doesn’t kill people any longer, in fact the drug even offers quite a lot of protection against hard radiation; but cancer can still make life so agonizing that death is the only humane treatment. Or a man can die of starvation, or of being unable to get the anti-agathics. Or he can die of a bullet—or of overwork. We Uve long lives in the cities, sure; but there is no such thing as immortality. It’s as mythical as the unicorn. Not even the universe itself is going to last forever.”

  This, at last, was the opportunity Chris had been hoping for, though he still hardly knew how to grasp it.

  “Are—are the drugs ever stopped, once a man’s been made a citizen?”

  “Deliberately? I’ve never heard of such a case,” Anderson said, frowning. “Not on our town. If the City Fathers want a man dead, they shoot him. Why let him linger for the rest of his seventy-year stanza? That would be outrageously cruel. What would be the reason for such a procedure?”

  “Well, no tests are foolproof. I mean, supposing they make a man a citizen, and then discover that he really isn’t—uh—as big a genius as they thought he was?”

  The perimeter sergeant looked at Chris narrowly, and there was quite a long silence, during which Chris could clearly hear the pulsing of his own blood in his temples. At last Anderson said slowly:

  “I see. It sounds to me like somebody’s been feeding you spin-dizzy whistle. Chris, if only geniuses could become citizens, how long do you think a city could last? The place’d be depopulated in one crossing. That isn’t how it works at all. The whole reason for the drugs is to save skills—and it doesn’t matter one bit what the skills are. All that matters is whether or not it would be logical to keep a man on, r
ather than training a new one every four or five decades.

  “Take me for an example, Chris. I’m nobody’s genius; I’m only a boss cop. But I’m good at my job, good enough so that the City Fathers didn’t see any reason to bother raising and training another one from the next generation; they kept this one, which is me; but a cop is, all the same, all I am. Why not? It suits me, I like the work, and when Amalfi needs a boss cop he calls me or Dulany—not any officer on the force, because none of them have the scores of years of experience at this particular job that we do under their belts. When the Mayor wants a perimeter sergeant he calls me; when he wants a boarding squad he calls Dulany; and when he wants a specific genius, he calls a genius. There’s one of everything on board this town—partly because it’s so big—and so long as the system works, no need for more than one. Or more than X, X being whatever number you need.”

  Chris grinned. “You seemed to remember the details all right.”

  “I remembered them all,” Anderson admitted. “Or all that they gave me. Once the City Fathers put a thing into your head, it’s hard to get rid of.”

  As he spoke, there was a pure fluting sound, like a brief tune, somewhere in the apartment. The perimeter sergeant’s heavy head tipped up; then he, too, grinned.

  “We’re about to have a demonstration,” he said. He was obviously pleased. He touched a button on the arm of his chair.

  “Anderson?” a heavy voice said. Chris thought instantly that the father bear in the ancient myth of Goldilocks must have sounded much like that.

  “Yes—Here, sir.”

  “We’re coming up on a contract. It looks fairly good to me and the City Fathers, and I’m about to sign it. Better come up here and familiarize yourself with the terms, just in case: This’ll be a rough one, Joel.”

  “Right away.” Anderson touched the button, and his grin became broader and more boyish than ever.

  “The Mayor!” Chris burst out.

  “Yep.”

  “But what did he mean?”

  “That he’s found some work for us to do. Unless there’s a hitch, we should be landing in just a few days.”

  CHAPTER SIX: A Planet Called Heaven

  NOTHING could be seen of Heaven from the air. As the city descended cautiously, the spindizzy field became completely outlined as a bubble of boiling black clouds, glaring with blue-green sheets and slashes of lightning, and awash with streams of sleet and rain. At lower altitude the sleet disappeared, but the rain increased.

  After so many months of starlit skies and passing suns, the grumbling, closed-in darkness was oppressive, even alarming. Sitting with Piggy on an old pier at the foot of Gansevoort Street, from which Herman Melville had sailed into the distant South Sea marvels of Typee, Ormo and Mardi, Chris stared at the globe of thunder around the city as nervously as though he had never seen weather before. Piggy, for once, was in no better shape, for he never had seen weather before; this was New York’s first planetfall since he had been born.

  How Amalfi could see where he was going was hard to imagine; but the city continued to go down anyhow; it had a contract with Heaven, and work was work. Besides, there would have been no point in waiting for the storms to clear away. It was always and everywhere like this on Heaven, except when it was worse. The settlers said so.

  “Wow!” Chris said, for the twelfth or thirteenth time. “What a blitzkrieg of a storm! Look at that! How far up are we still, Piggy?”

  “How should I know?”

  “D’you think Amalfi knows? I mean really knows?”

  “Sure, he knows,” Piggy said miserably. “He always does the tough landings. He never misses.”

  WHAM!

  For a second the whole sphere of the spindizzy field seemed to be crawling with electric fire. The noise was enormous and bounded back again and again from the concrete sides of the towers behind them. It had never occurred to Chris that a field which could protect a whole city from the hard radiation, the hard stones and the hard vacuum of space might pass noise when there was air outside it as well as inside—but it surely did. The descent already seemed to have been going on forever.

  After a while, Chris found that he was beginning to enjoy it. Between thunder rolls, he shouted maliciously:

  “He must be flying sidewise this time. But he’s lost.”

  “What do you know about it? Shut up.”

  “I’ve seen thunderstorms. You know what? We’re going to be up here forever. Sailing under a curse, like IMT.” The sky ht. WHAM! “Hey, what a beauty!”

  “If you don’t shut up,” Piggy said with desperate grimness, “I’m going to poke you right in the snoot.”

  This was hardly a very grave threat, for although Piggy out-weighed Chris by some twenty pounds, most of it was blubber. Amid the excitement of the storm Chris almost made the mistake of laughing at him; but at the same instant, he felt the boards of the ancient pier begin to shudder beneath them to the tramp of steel boots. Startled, he looked back over his shoulder, and then jumped up.

  Twenty men in full space armor were behind them, faceless and bristling, like a phalanx of giant robots. One of them came forward, making the planks of the pier groan and squeal under the weight, and suddenly spoke to him.

  The voice was blarey and metallic, as though the gain had been turned up in order to shout across acres of ground and through cannonades of thunder, but Chris had no difficulty in recognizing it. The man in the armor was his guardian.

  “CHRIS!” The volume of sound suddenly went down a little. “Chris, what are you doing here? And Kingston-Throop’s kid! Piggy, you ought to know better than this. We’re landing in twenty minutes—and this is a sally port. Beat it—both of you.”

  “We were only looking,” Piggy said defiantly. “We can look if we want.”

  “I’ve got no time to argue. Are you going or not?”

  Chris pulled at Piggy’s elbow. “Come on, Piggy. What’s the sense of being in the way?”

  “Let go. I’m not in the way. They can walk right by me. I don’t have to go just because he says so. He’s not my guardian—he’s only a cop.”

  A steel arm reached out, and steel pincers opened at the end of it. “Give me your card,” Anderson’s voice said harshly. “I’ll let you know later what you’re charged with. If you won’t move now, I’ll assign two men to move you—though I can’t spare the men, and when that winds up on your card you may spend the rest of one lifetime wishing it hadn’t.”

  “Oh, all right. Don’t throw your weight around. I’m going.”

  The bulbous steel arm remained stiffly extended, the pincers menacingly open. “I want the card.”

  “I said I was going!”

  “Then go.”

  Piggy broke and ran. After a puzzled look at the armored figure of his guardian, Chris followed, dodging around and through the massive blue-steel statues standing impassively along almost the whole length of the pier.

  Piggy had already vanished. As Chris ran for home, his mind full of bewilderment, the city grounded in a fanfare of lightning bolts.

  Unfortunately, so far as Chris was concerned the City Fathers took no notice of the landing: his schooling went on regardless, so that he got only the most confused picture of what was going on. Though the municipal pipeline, WNYC, had five-minute news bulletins on tap every hour for anyone who wanted to dial into them, decades of the uneventfulness of interstellar travel had reduced the WNYC news bureau to a state of vestigial ineptitude—the pipeline’s only remaining real function was the broadcasting of the city’s inexhaustible library of music and drama; Chris suspected that most “ of the citizens found the newscasts almost as dim-witted and uninformative as he did. What little meaningful information he was able to garner, he got from Sgt. Anderson, and that was not very much, for the perimeter sergeant was hardly ever home now; he was too busy consolidating the beachhead on Heaven. Nevertheless, Chris picked up a few fragments, mostly from conversations between the sergeant and Carla:

  �
��What they want us to do is to help them industrialize the planet. It sounds easy, but the kicker is that their social setup is feudal—the sixty-six thousand people they call the Elect are actually only free landholders or franklins, and below them there’s a huge number of serfs—nobody’s ever bothered to count them. The Archangels want it to stay that way even after they’ve got their heavy industries established.”

  “It sounds impossible,” Carla said.

  “It is impossible, as they’ll find out when we’ve finished the job. But that’s exactly the trouble. We’re not allowed to change planets’ social systems, but we can’t complete this contract without starting a revolution—along, slow one, sure, but a revolution all the same. And when the cops come here afterward and find that out, well have a Violation to answer for.”

  Carla laughed musically. “The cops! My dear, is that still a three-letter word for you? What else are you? How many more centuries is it going to take you to get used to it?”

  “You know what I mean,” Anderson said, frowning. “So all right, I’m a cop. But I’m not an Earth cop, I’m a city cop, and that makes all the difference. Well, we’ll see. What’s for lunch? I’ve got to go in half an hour.”

  The storm, as predicted, went on all the time. When he had the chance, Chris watched the machinery being uncrated and readied, and followed it to the docks at the working perimeter of the city, beyond which always bobbed and crawled a swarm of the glowing swamp vehicles of the colonists of Heaven. Though these came in all sizes, they were all essentially of the same design: a fat cylinder of some transparent cladding, ribbed with metal, provided on both sides with caterpillar treads bearing cleats so large that they could also serve as paddles where the going underfoot became especially sloppy. The shell was airtight, for buoyancy, but Chris was sure that the vessel could make little or no headway afloat, even if it were equipped somewhere with a screw propeller; under those circum stances it probably could do no more than try to maintain its position as best it could while it radioed for help. It was certainly well studded with antennae. Mainly, it seemed to be designed to shed water, rather than to swim in it.