Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  How could any sort of industry be possible under these soggy conditions? He could not imagine how even an agricultural society could survive amidst these perpetual torrents, especially since there was very little land area above water on the planet. But then he recalled a little of the history of the colonization of Venus, which had presented somewhat similar problems. There, farming eventually had been taken beneath the sea; but even that needed an abundance of energy, and besides, the people of Heaven hadn’t even gotten that far—they seemed to be living mostly on fish and mudweed.

  He listened as closely as possible to the conversations of the colonists on the docks—not the conversations in English with the Okies, which were technical and unrevealing, but what the colonists said to each other in their own language. This was a gluey variant of Russian, the now dead Universal language of deep space, which the memory cells had been cramming into Chris’s head at a cruel rate almost since the beginning of his city education. It was a brute of a language to master, especially on board a town where it was very seldom used, and perhaps for this reason the colonists, though mostly they were circumspect even in their private conversations, did not really seem to believe that the Okies spoke it; their very possession of it assured them that their history was safely pre-Okie. Quite certainly it never occurred to them that it might be understood, however imperfectly, by a teenage boy standing about the quaysides gawping at their powerboats.

  Between these eavesdroppings and the increasingly rare visits home of his guardian, Chris gradually built up a fuzzy picture of what the colonists seemed to want. As a citizen, he could have asked the City Fathers directly for the text of the contract, but access to this was denied to passengers. In general, however, he gathered that the Archangels proposed to establish an economy like that of Venus, complete with undersea farming and herding, with the aid of broadcast power of the kind that kept the city’s Tin Cabs in the air. The Okies were to do the excavating in the shifting, soaking terrain, and were to build the generator-transmitter station involved. They were also to use city facilities to refine the necessary power metals, chiefly thorium, of which Heaven had an abundance beyond its ability to process. After the economy was revamped, the Archangels hoped to have their own refineries, and to sell the pure stuffs to other planets. Curiously, they also had enough germanium to be willing to pay for the job in this metal, although it too was notoriously difficult to refine; this was fortunate for them, since without any present interstellar trade, they were woefully short of Oc dollars.

  Once the whole operation had rumbled and sloshed out into the field and was swallowed up in the enveloping, eternal storm, Sgt. Anderson’s absences became prolonged, and the number of colonists to be found on the docks also diminished sharply. Now there were only a few of the swamp vehicles—inexplicably called swan boats—to be seen at the end of each day, when Chris was released from school, and these were mostly small craft whose owners were engaged in dickering with individual Okies for off-planet curios to give to their ladies. This commerce also was bogging down rather rapidly, for the single citizen had no use for money, and the lords and franklins of Heaven had few goods to barter. Soon the flow of information available to Chris had almost stopped, frustrating him intensely.

  In this extremity he had an inspiration. He still carried with him a small, cheap clasp knife with a tiny compass embedded in its handle, the last of the exceedingly few gifts his father had ever been able to give him; perhaps it would have status here as an off-planet curio. When the notion first occurred to him, he rejected it with distress at even having thought of it—but when first Sgt. Dulany, and then his own guardian, were officially posted on the “Missing” list, he hesitated no longer. His only remaining doubt was whether or not the compass would work here, amid so much electrical activity (but then it had never worked very well on Earth, either).

  He waited until he saw the lord of a six-man swan boat stalking disappointedly away from a deal he had been unable to close, and then approached him with the knife outstretched on his palm.

  “Gospodin—”

  The man, a huge burly fellow with a face like one of the eternal thunderclouds of his planet, stopped in his tracks and looked down. “Boy? Did you speak?”

  “Yes sir. With your permission, I have here useful tool, earthly in origin. Would my lord care to examine?”

  “But you speak our language,” the man said, still frowning. He took the knife abstractedly; it was plain that he was interested, but Chris’s stumbling Russian seemed to interest him more. “How is that?”

  “By listening, lord. It is very hard, but I am trying. Please see object, it is from Earth, from kolkhoz of Pennsylvania. Genuine antique, touched once by human hands in factory.”

  “Well, well. How does it work?”

  Chris showed him how to pry out the two blades, but his attempts to explain the compass were dismissed with a brusque gesture. Either his command of the language was insufficient to make the matter clear, or the lord already had recognized that such a thing would be useless in the lightning-stitched ether of Heaven.

  “Hmm. Sleazy, to be sure, but perhaps my lady would like it for her charm-necklace. What do you ask for it?”

  “Lord, I would like to drive your swan boat one time, one distance. I ask no more.”

  The colonist stared at him for a long moment, and then burst into deep guffaws of laughter. “Come along, come along,” he said when he had recovered a little. “Sharp traders, you tramps, but this is the best story yet—I’ll be telling it for years! Come along—you have a bargain.”

  Still chortling, he led the way to the dock, where they were both stopped by a perimeter cop who recognized Chris. Between them, the boy and the lord explained the bargain, and the Okie guard dubiously allowed Chris to board the swan boat.

  In the forward cabin of the bobbing cylinder, two other colonists confronted them at once, wearing expressions at once nervous and angry, but the owner shushed them with a swift slash of one hand. He still seemed to be highly amused.

  “It’s only an infant. It traded me a bangle to learn how to mush the boat about. There’s nothing to that. Go on aft; I’ll join you in a minute.”

  To judge by their expressions, the other two still disapproved, but they took orders. The big man sat Chris down in a bucket seat before the broad front window and showed him how to grasp the two handles, one on each side of the half-circle of the control wheel, which were the throttles of the vehicle.

  “It’s not enough simply to turn the wheel, because you must also deliver power to one tread or the other. To do that, you push the handle forward or back, to speed the treads or slow them down. Past the red mark here, the tread will reverse. If you’re not getting any traction, tilt the whole wheel forward on its column; that blows the tanks and allows the boat to settle in the mud. When the ground gets harder, the boat will of course climb up by itself and that will start the pumps; as the pressure in the tanks rises, the steering column tilts back to its original position automatically. Understand me so far?”

  “But can I try?”

  “Well, I suppose so. Yes. I have some talking to do abaft. Let me back the craft away from the pier, and then you can try crawling in a circle just outside the perimeter. Make sure you can always see your city beacon there.”

  “Let me back it up, lord?” Chris said urgently.

  “All right,” the big man said with amused indulgence. “But don’t be rough with it. Gently back of the red line on both throttles. That’s it. Not so fast. Gently! Now into neutral on the left. That’s it; see how it turns around?”

  There was a shout from somewhere in the rear of the vessel, to which the big man responded with a tremendously rapid burst of speech, only a few words of which were intelligible to Chris. “I have to leave for a few minutes,” he added. “Remember, don’t try anything tricky, and don’t lose sight of the beacon.”

  “No, lord.”

  As the boat’s owner left the cabin, Chris caught a few m
ore words, amusedly beginning to relate the story of the dock boy who had picked up a few stammering words of the language and immediately had decided that he was a pilot; then the voices dwindled to a blurred murmur. Chris spent the next few minutes testing the controls of the boat in small jerks and spurts, being as inexpert about it as he could manage, although the machine was really not difficult to master. Then, as directed, he set it to crawling in a fixed circle, counter-clockwise, left the bucket seat, and edged his way back to the door leading to the next chamber.

  He had no idea what it was that he expected to overhear—he was simply avid for more information, to relieve the recent famine. He was certainly unprepared for what he got.

  The men were talking in a rapid patois which differed sharply from the form of the Universal Language which the memory cells had been teaching him, but many phrases were clear and distinct:

  “… can’t be done without keeping the city, that’s all there is to it.”

  “… Disable it? … Don’t even have a blueprint of the machinery, let alone a map.”

  “That can come later, after we’ve occupied … We’ve got thousands of commoners to throw away, but the defenses—It’s essential first to immobilize their Huacu, or whatever they call it here. We can’t afford to fight on their terms.”

  “Then what’s the problem? We’ve got their two chief generals for hostages. We can hold them forever if necessary … Don’t even know the name of Castle Wolfwhip, let alone where it—”

  There the conversation ended abruptly. With a grinding thump, the swan boat hit something and began clumsily to try to climb it. Chris was thrown to the deck, and on the other side of the doorway there was the sound of scrambling and of angry shouting. Then that too was cut off as the bulkhead swung to, of its own inertia.

  Fighting to regain his balance against the blind lurching of the boat, Chris scrambled up, and dogged the bulkhead tightly closed all the way around. Was there any way to lock it, too? Yes, there was a big bolt that could be thrown which would hold the whole series of dogs in place, provided that it could not be unbolted from the other side. Well, he’d have to take his chances on that, though a fat padlock to complete the job would have made him feel more comfortable. Then, he clambered up the tilted, pitching deck to the control seat.

  The boat had been doing its best to travel in a circle, but Chris had failed to realize that mud is a shifting, inexact sort of medium in which to turn a machine loose. The circle had been precessing, and the boat had run head-on into a dock. Okie cops were running toward it.

  Chris reversed both engines, backing away from the city as rapidly as the boat would go, but that was not half as fast as he would have liked. Then he switched the vehicle around, end for end, and set it to whining and sliding squarely into the teeth of the storm, aiming it for the pip on the cross hairs which showed on the control board as its homing signal.

  Where that might wind him up, he had no idea. He could only hope that it might be Castle Wolfwhip, and that he would find Anderson and Dulany there—and that the six furious colonists in back of the locked bulkhead would not be able to burn their way out before he got there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Why Not to Keep Demons

  BEFORE the swan boat had been on its slobbering way outward for more than five minutes, the sodium-yellow glare of the city’s dock-side beacon dimmed and vanished as swiftly as if it had been snuffed out. Except for his prisoners, whom he was trying to ignore, Chris was alone in the shell of the boat, like a chick in an egg, with nothing for company but the unfamiliar instruments, the grunting of the engines, and the flash and crash of the eternal storm.

  He studied the control board intently, but it told him very little that he did not already know. All the lettering on and around the instruments were in the Cyrillic alphabet—and although the City Fathers expected citizens to be able to speak the Universal Language, up to now they had given Chris not even a first lesson in how to read it. Even so obvious a device as the swan boat’s radio set was incomprehensible to him in detail; after a brief study, he gave up all hope of finding the city’s master frequency and calling for pursuit and aid. He could not even decide whether it was a AFM or a PM tuner, let alone read the calibrations on the dial.

  Nevertheless he urgently needed to signal. Above all, he needed to let the city know the details, fragmentary though they were, of the plotting that he had overheard. Running away with the plotters in their own swan boat had been an impulse of desperation, which he was already beginning more and more to regret. If only he had managed somehow to get back on shore, and told somebody in Amalfi’s office what he had learned, pronto!

  But the question was, would they have listened, or believed him if they had? Nobody who was anybody aboard the city seemed to want to bother with youngsters until they had become citizens; the adults were all too old, somehow, to be even approachable—and for that matter citizens paid very little attention to passengers of any age.

  Of course, Chris could have told the City Fathers what he knew, easily enough—but everything that was told the City Fathers went into the memory cells, which was the equivalent of putting it in dead storage. The City Fathers never took action on what they knew, or even volunteered information, unless directed; otherwise they only held it until it was asked for, which might take centuries.

  In any event the die was cast. Now he also needed someone in the city to know where he was going, and to follow him. But among the glittering, enigmatic instruments before him he could find no way to bring that about, nor did he in fact know even vaguely how the city might chase after him if it did know what his situation was. The Tin Cabs operated upon broadcast power which faded out at the city’s perimeter, and to the best of Chris’s knowledge, the city had no ground vehicles capable of coping with shifting, ambiguous, invisible terrain of this kind. Somewhere in storage, true, it did have a limited number of larger military aircraft, but how could you fly one of them in this region of perpetual storm? And even if you could, what would you look for, in a world where even the largest villages and castles produced and consumed so little power that detecting instruments would be unable to differentiate a city from a random splatter of lightning bolts?

  The swan boat churned onward single-mindedly. After a while, Chris noticed that it had been at least several minutes since he had had to apply corrections in order to keep the green pip on the cross hairs. Experimentally, he let go of the controls entirely. The pip stayed centered. Some signal—perhaps simply his keeping the pip centered for a given length of time—had cut in an automatic pilot.

  That was a help, in a way, but it deprived him of anything to do but worry, and added a new worry to the list: How could he cut the autopilot out of the circuit if he needed to? The pertinent switch was doubtless in plain sight and clearly marked, but again, he couldn’t read the markings. As for his prisoners, they were being disturbingly quiet. In the back of his mind he had been anticipating some attempt to burn through the door—surely they had some sort of hand weapon back there which might serve the purpose—but they hadn’t so much as pounded on it.

  He hoped fervently that they were just being fatalistic about their captivity. If their silence meant that they were satisfied with it, that was bad news. The news was bad enough already, for he had no idea what he was going to do with them, or with the boat, when he got to Castle Wolfwhip—

  And no time left to invent any plan, for in the next flash of lightning he saw the castle.

  It was still several miles away, but even at this distance its massiveness was awe-inspiring. There were many towers in the city that were smaller; despite the lack of any adjacent structure with which to compare it, Chris guessed that the black, windowless pile could not be less than thirty stories high.

  At first, he thought it was surrounded by a moat, but that was only an effect of foreshortening brought on by distance. Actually, it stood in the middle of a huge lake, so storm-lashed that Chris could not imagine how the clumsy swan boat could surviv
e on it, let alone make any headway.

  He pulled back on the throttles; but as he had suspected, the boat no longer answered to the manual controls. It plowed doggedly forward into the water. A moment later, the compressed air tanks blew with a bubbling roar, and the lake closed over the boat completely. It was now traveling on the bottom.

  Now he no longer had even the lightning flashes to see by—nothing but the lights inside the boat, which did not penetrate the murky water at all. It was as though the transparent shell had abruptly gone opaque.

  After what seemed a long while—though it was probably no more than ten minutes—the treads made a grinding noise, as if they had struck stone, and the vehicle came gradually to a halt. On a hunch, Chris tried the manuals again, but there was still no response.

  Then the outside lights came on.

  The swan boat was sitting snugly in a berth within a sizable cavern. Through the rills of yellow water draining down its sides, Chris saw that it had a reception committee: four men, with rifles. They looked down into the boat at him, grinning unpleasantly. While he stared helplessly back, the engines quit—

  —and the outside door swung open.

  They put him in the same cell with Anderson and Dulany. His guardian was appalled to see him—”Gods of all stars, Irish, now they’re snatching children!”—and then, after he had heard the story, thoroughly disgusted. Dulany, as usual, said very little, but he did not look exactly pleased.

  “There’s probably a standard recognition signal you should have sent, except that you wouldn’t have known what it was,” Anderson said. “These petty barons did a lot of fighting among themselves before we got here—fleecing us is probably the first project they’ve been together on since this mudball was colonized.”

  “Bluster,” Dulany commented.