Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “CARD A CCEPTED. PROCEED.”

  “Question: Do any anti-agathics grow naturally—I mean, do they occur in plants that could be raised as crops?”

  A brief pause. “A PRECURSOR OF THE ANTISLEEP DRUG IS A STEROID SUBSTANCE OCCURRING NATURALLY IN A NUMBER OF YAMLIKE PLANTS FOUND ON EARTH, LARGELY IN CENTRAL IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA . T HIS SAPOGENIN IS NOT, HOWEVER, IN ITSELF AN ANTI-AGATHIC, AND MUST BE CONVERTED; HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT STEROIDS ARE PRODUCED FROM THE SAME STARTING MATERIAL.

  “A SCOMYCIN IS PRODUCED BY DEEP-TANK FERMENTATION OF A MICROORGANISM AND HARVESTED FROM THE BEER. T HIS PROCEDURE MIGHT BROADLY BE DEFINED AS CROP RAISING.

  “A LL OTHER KNOWN ANTI-AGATHICS ARE WHOLLY SYNTHETIC DRUGS. ”

  Chris sat back, scratching his head in exasperation. He had hoped for a clear-cut, yes-or-no answer, but what he had gotten stood squarely in the middle. No anti-agathics were harvested from real crops; but if a crop plant could produce something at least enough like an anti-agathic to be converted into one, then that part of Piggy’s astounding story was at least possible. Unhappily, he could think of no further questions sufficiently indirect to keep his main point of interest hidden.

  Then he noticed that the booth had not returned his card to him. This was quite usual; it meant only that the Librarian, which spent its whole mechanical life substituting free association for thinking, had a related subject it would talk about if he liked. Usually it wasn’t worth while exploring these, for the Librarian could go on forever if so encouraged; all he needed to do now was to say “Return,” and he could take his card and go. But the take-cover alert wasn’t over yet; so, instead, he said, “Proceed.”

  “S UBJECT, ANTI-AGATHICS AS BY-PRODUCTS OF AGRICULTURE. S UB-SUBJECT, LEGENDARY IDYLLIC PLANETS. ” C hris Sat bolt Upright. “A NTI-AGATHICS AS BY-PRODUCTS OF AGRICULTURE, USUALLY IN THE DAILY BREAD, IS ONE OF THE COMMON FEATURES OR DIAGNOSTIC SIGNS OF THE LEGENDARY PLANETS OF NOMAD-CITY MYTHOLOGY. O THERS INCLUDE: E ARTHLIKE GRAVITY BUT GREATER LAND AREA; E ARTHLIKE ATMOSPHERE BUT MORE ABUNDANT OXYGEN; E ARTHLIKE WEATHER BUT WITH UNIFORM CLIMATE, AND COMPLETE ISOLATION FROM EXISTING TRADE LANES. N O PLANET MATCHING THIS DESCRIPTION IN ANY PARTICULAR HAS YET BEEN FOUND. N AMES OFTEN GIVEN TO SUCH WORLDS INCLUDE: A RCADY, B RADBURY, CELEPHAIS …”

  Chris was so stunned that the Librarian had worked its way all the way through “ZIMIAMVIA” and had begun another alphabetical catalogue before he thought to ask for his card back. His question had not been very crafty, after all.

  By the time he emerged from the booth, the storms of Heaven had vanished and the city was once more soaring amid the stars. Furthermore, he was late for dinner.

  So, after all, there had been no secret to keep. Chris told the Andersons the story of his failure to outwit the Librarian; it made the best possible excuse for his lateness, since it was true, and it reduced Carla to tears of helpless laughter. The perimeter sergeant was amused, too, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness beneath his amusement.

  “You’re learning, Chris. It’s easy to think that because the City Fathers are dead, they’re also stupid; but you see that that isn’t the case. Otherwise they would never have been given the power that they wield—and in some departments their power is absolute.”

  “Even over the Mayor?”

  “Yes and no. They can’t forbid the Mayor anything. But if he goes against their judgment more often than they’re set to tolerate, they can revoke his office. That’s never happened here, but if it does, we’ll have to sit still for it. If we don’t, they’ll stop the machinery.”

  “Wow. Isn’t it dangerous to give machines so much power? Suppose they had a breakdown?”

  “If there were only a few of them, that would be a real danger; but there are more than a hundred, and they monitor and repair each other, so in fact it will never happen. Sanity and logic is their stock in trade—which is why they can accept or reject the results of any election we may run. The popular will is sometimes an idiot, but no human being can be given the power to overrule it; not safely. But the machines can.

  “Of course, there are stories about towns whose City Fathers ran amok with them. They’re just stories, like Piggy’s ‘Lost City’—but they’re important even when they’re not true. Whenever a new way of living appears in the universe, the people who adopt it see quickly enough that it isn’t perfect. They try to make it better, sure; but there are always some things about it that can’t be changed. And the hopes and fears that are centered on those points get turned into stories.

  “Piggy’s myth, for instance. We live long lives in the cities, but not everybody can have the gift. It’s impossible that everyone should have it—the whole universe isn’t big enough to contain the sheer mass of flesh that would accumulate if we all lived and bred as long as we each wanted to. Piggy’s myth says it is possible, which is untrue; but what is true about it is that it points to one of the real dissatisfactions with our way of living, real because nothing can be done about it.

  “The story of the runaway City Fathers is another. No such thing has ever happened as far as I know, and it doesn’t seem to be possible. But no live man likes to take orders from a bunch of machines, or to think that he may lose his life if they say so—but he might, because the City Fathers are the jury aboard most cities. So he invents a cautionary tale about City Fathers running amok, though actually he’s talking not about the machines at all—he’s warning that he may run amok if he’s pushed too far.

  “The universe of the cities is full of these ghosts. Sooner or later somebody is going to tell you that some cities go bindlestiff.”

  “Somebody has,” Chris admitted. “But I didn’t know what he meant.”

  “It’s an old Earth term. A hobo was an honest migratory worker, who lived that way because he liked it. A tramp was the same kind of fellow, except that he wouldn’t work—he lived by stealing or begging from settled people. In hobo society both kinds were more or less respectable. But the bindlestiff was a migrant who stole from other migrants—he robbed their bindles, the bags they carried their few belongings in. That man was an outcast from both worlds.

  “It’s common talk that some cities in trouble have gone bindlestiff—taken to preying on other cities. Again, there are no specific instances. IMT is the town that’s most often mentioned, but the last we heard of IMT, she wasn’t a bindlestiff—she’d been outlawed for a horrible crime on a colony planet, but technically that makes her only a tramp. A mean one, but still only a tramp.”

  “I see,” Chris said slowly. “It’s like the story about City Fathers going crazy. Cities do starve, I know that; and the bindlestiff story says, ‘How will we behave when the pinch comes?’”

  Anderson looked gratified. “Look at that,” he said to Carla. “Maybe I should have been a teacher!”

  “Nothing to do with you,” Carla said composedly. “Chris is doing all the thinking. Besides, I like you better as a cop.”

  The perimeter sergeant sighed, a little ruefully. “Oh, well, all right. Then I’ll give you only one more story. You’ve heard of the Vegan orbital fort?”

  “Oh, sure. That was in the history, way back.”

  “Good. Well, for once, that’s a real thing. There was a Vegan orbital fort, and it did get away, and nobody knows where it is now. The City Fathers say that it probably died when it ran out of supplies, but it was a pretty big job and might well have survived under circumstances no ordinary city could live through. If you ask the City Fathers for the probabilities, they tell you that they can’t give you any figures—which is a bad sign in itself.

  “Now, that’s as far as the facts go. But there’s a legend to go with them. The legend says that the fort is foraging through the trade lanes, devouring cities—just the way a dragonfly catches mosquitoes, on the wing. Nobody has actually seen the fort since the scorching of Vega, but the legend persists; every time a city disappears, the word goes around, first, that a bindlestiff got it, and next, that the fort got it.

>   “What’s it all about, Chris? Tell me.”

  Chris thought for a long time. At last he said:

  “I’m kind of confused. It ought to be the same kind of story as the others—something people are afraid of. Like meeting up some day with a planet, like the Vegan system, where the people have more on the ball than we do and will gobble us up the way we did Vega—”

  Anderson’s big fist crashed down on the dinner table, making all the plates jump. “Precisely!” he crowed. “Look there, Carla—”

  Carla’s own hands reached out and covered the sergeant’s fist gently. “Dear, Chris isn’t through yet. You didn’t give him a chance to finish.”

  “I didn’t? But—sorry, Chris. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t know whether I’m through or not,” Chris said, embarrassed and floundering. “This one story just confuses me. It’s not as simple as the others; I think I’m sure of that.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s sensible to be afraid of meeting somebody stronger than yourself. It might well happen. And there is a real Vegan orbital fort, or at least there was one. The other stories don’t have that much going for them that’s real—except the things people are actually afraid of, the things the stories actually are about. Does this make sense?”

  “Yes. The things the stories symbolize.”

  “That’s the word. To be afraid of the fort is to be afraid of a real thing. But what does the story symbolize? It’s got to be the same kind of thing in the end—the fear people have of themselves. The story says, ‘I’m tired of working to be a citizen, and obeying the Earth cops, and protecting the city, and living a thousand years with machines bossing me, and taking sass from colonists, and I don’t know what all else. If I had a great big city that I could run all by myself, I’d spend the next thousand years smashing things up!’”

  There was a long, long silence, during which Chris became more and more convinced that he had again talked out of turn, and far too much. Carla did not seem to be upset, but her husband looked stunned and wrathful.

  “There is something wrong with the apprenticeship system,” he growled at last, though he did not appear to be speaking to either of them. “First the Kingston-Throop kid-and now this. Carla! You’re the brains in the family. Did it ever occur to you that that fort legend had anything to do with education?”

  “Yes, dear. Long ago.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I would have said so as soon as we had a child; until then, it wasn’t any of my business. Now Chris has said it for me.”

  The perimeter sergeant turned a lowering face on Chris. “You,” he said, “are a holy terror. I set out to teach you, as I was charged to do, and you wind up teaching me. Not even Amalfi knows this side of the fort story, I’ll swear to that—and when he hears it, there’s going to be a real upheaval in the schools.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chris said miserably. He did not know what else to say.

  “Don’t be sorry!” Anderson roared, surging to his feet. “Stick to your guns! Let the other guy be afraid of ghosts—you know the one thing about ghosts that you need to know, no matter what kind of ghosts they are: They have nothing to do with the dead. It’s always themselves that people are afraid of.”

  He looked about distractedly. “I’ve got to go topside. Here’s my hurry—where’s my hat?” He roared out, banging one hand against the side of the door, leaving Chris frozen with alarm.

  Then Carla began to laugh all over again.

  CHAPTER NINE: The Tramp

  BUT if the errand on behalf of which Sgt. Anderson had undertaken his rhinoceros-charge exit had really had anything to do with education, Chris had yet to see it reflected in his own. That got steadily harder, as the City Fathers, blindly and impersonally assuming that he had comprehended what they had already stuffed into his head, began to build his store of knowledge toward some threshold where it would start to be useful for the survival of the city. As this process went forward, Chris’s old headaches dwindled into the category of passing twinges; these days, he sometimes felt actively, physically sick from sheer inability to make sense of what was being thrust upon him. In a moment of revulsion, he told the City Fathers so.

  “I T WILL PASS. T HE NORMAL HUMAN BEING FEELS AN AVERAGE OF TWENTY SMALL PAINS PER HOUR. I F ANY PERSIST, REPORT TO M EDICAL. ”

  No, he was not going to do that; he was not going to be invalided out of his citizenship if he could help it. Yet it seemed to him that what he was suffering couldn’t fairly be called “small pains.” What to do, since he feared that Medical’s cure would be worse than the disease? He didn’t want to worry the Andersons, either—he had repaid their kindnesses with enough trouble already.

  That left nobody to talk to but Dr. Braziller, that fearsome old harpy who seldom spoke in any language but logarithms and symbolic logic. Chris stood off from this next-but-worst choice for weeks; but in the end he had to do it. Though there was nothing physically wrong with him even now, he had the crazy notion that the City Fathers were about to kill him; one more stone of fact on his head and his neck would break.

  “And well it might,” Dr. Braziller told him, in her office after class. “Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They’re interested in only one thing: the survival of the city. That’s their prime directive. Otherwise they have no interest in people at all; after all they’re only machines.”

  “All right,” Chris said, blotting his brow with a trembling hand. “But Dr. Braziller, what good will it do the city for them to blow all my fuses? I’ve been trying, really I have. But it isn’t good enough for them. They keep right on piling the stuff in, and it makes no sense to me!”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that. But there’s reason behind what they’re doing, Chris. You’re almost eighteen; and they’re probing for some entrance point into your talents—some spark that will take fire, some bent of yours that might some day turn into a valuable specialty.”

  “I don’t think I have any,” Chris said dully.

  “Maybe not. That remains to be seen. If you have one, they’ll find it; the City Fathers never miss on this kind of thing. But Chris, my dear, you can’t expect it to be easy on you. Real knowledge is always hard to come by—and now that the machines think you might actually be of some use to the city—”

  “But they can’t think that! They haven’t found anything!”

  “I can’t read their minds, because they haven’t any,” Dr. Braziller said quietly. “But I’ve seen them do this before. They wouldn’t be driving you in this way if they didn’t suspect that you’re good for something. They’re trying to find out what it is, and unless you want to give up right now, you’re going to have to sit still while they look. It doesn’t surprise me that it makes you ill. It made me ill, too; I feel a little queasy just remembering it, and that was eighty years ago.”

  She fell silent suddenly, and in that moment, she looked even older than she had ever seemed before … old, and frail, and deeply sad, and—could it be possible?—beautiful.

  “Now and then I wonder if they were right,” Dr. Braziller told the heaped papers on her desk. “I wanted to be a composer. But the City Fathers had never heard of a successful woman composer, and it’s hard to argue with that kind of charge. No, Chris, once the machines have fingered you, you have to be what they want you to be; the only alternative is to be a passenger—which means, to be nothing at all. I don’t wonder that it makes you ill. But, Chris—fight back, fight back! Don’t let those cabinetheads lick you! Stick them out. They’re only probing, and the minute we find out what they want, we can bear down on it. I’ll help wherever I can— I hate those things. But first, we have to find out what they want. Have you got the guts, Chris?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try. But I don’t know.”

  “Nobody knows, yet. They don’t know themselves—that’s your only hope. They want to know what you can do. You have to show them. As soon as they
find out, you will be a citizen—but until then, it’s going to be rough, and there will be nothing that anybody can do to help you. It will be up to you, and you alone.”

  It was heartening to have another ally, but Chris would have found Dr. Braziller’s whole case more convincing had he been able to see the faintest sign of a talent—any talent at all—emerging under the ungentle ministrations of the machines. True, lately they had been bearing down heavily on his interest in history—but what good was that aboard an Okie city? The City Fathers themselves were the city’s historians, just as they were its library, its accounting department, its schools and much of its government. No live person was needed to teach the subject or to write about it, and at best, as far as Chris could see, it could never be more than a hobby for an Okie citizen.

  Even in the present instance, Chris was not being called upon to do anything with history but pass almost incredibly hard tests in it—tests which consisted largely of showing that he had retained all of the vast mass of facts that the City Fathers were determinedly shoving into him. And this was no longer just history from the Okie point of view. Whole systems of world and interstellar history—Machiavelli, Plutarch, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Pareto, Spengler, Sarton, Toynbee, Durant and a score of others—came marching through the grey gas into his head, without mercy and with apparent indifference to the fact that they all contradicted each other fatally at crucial points.

  There was no punishment for failures, since the City Fathers’ pedagogy made failure of memory impossible, and it was only his memory that they seemed to be exploiting here. Instead, punishment was continuous: It lay in the certainty that though today’s dose had been fiendish, tomorrow’s would be worse.

  “Now there you’re wrong,” Dr. Braziller told him. “Dead though they are, the machines aren’t ignorant of human psychology—far from it. They know very well that some students respond better to reward than to punishment, and that others have to be driven by fear. The second kind is usually the less intelligent, and they know that too; how could they not know it after so many generations of experience? You’re lucky that they’ve put you in the first category.”