Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “It was a public bath, Mark says. There’s another one downtown, in the Baruch Houses district, and another one on Forty-first Street beside the Port Authority Terminal, and quite a few others. Mark says they must have been closed up when the city first went aloft. I’ve been using this one to sluice off these women before they’re sent to Medical.”

  “With city water?” Even the thought of such waste made his hackles rise.

  “Oh no, John, I know better than that. The water’s pumped in from the river to the west.”

  “Water for bathing!” Amalfi said. “No wonder the ancients sometimes didn’t have enough to drink. Still, I’d thought the static jet was older than that.”

  He surveyed the Hevian women, who, now that the water was turned off, were huddled in the warmest part of the echoing chamber. None of them shared Dee’s gently curved ripeness, but, as usual, some of them showed promise. Hazleton was prescient, it had to be granted. Of course it had been expectable that the Hevians would turn out to be human. Only eleven non-human civilizations had ever been discovered, and of these, only the Lyrans and the Myrdians had any brains to speak of (unless one counted the Vegans; Earth-men did not think of them as human, but all the non-human cultures did; anyhow, they were extinct as a civilization).

  But to have the Hevians turn over complete custody of their women to the Okies, without so much as a preliminary conference, at the first contact, had been a colossal break. Hazleton had advanced his proposal to use any possible women as bindlestiff-bait years before any Okie could have known that there were people on He at all.

  Well, that was Hazleton’s own psi gift: not true clairvoyance, but an ability to pluck workable plans out of logically insufficient data. Time after time only the seemingly miraculous working-out of some obvious flight of fancy had prevented Hazleton’s being jettisoned by the blindly logical City Fathers.

  “Dee, come to Astronomy with me,” Amalfi said. “I’ve got something to show you. And for my sake, put on something, or the men will think I’m out to found a dynasty.”

  “All right,” Dee said reluctantly. She was not yet used to the odd Okie standards of exposure, and sometimes appeared nude when it wasn’t customary—a compensation, Amalfi supposed, for her Utopian upbringing, which had taught her that nudity had a deleterious effect upon the purity of one’s politics. The Hevian women moaned and hid their heads while she put on her shorts. Most of them had been stoned for inadvertently covering themselves at one time or another, for in Hevian society women were not people but reminders of damnation, doubly evil for the slightest taint of secretiveness.

  History, Amalfi thought, would be more instructive a teacher if it were not so stupefyingly repetitious. He led the way up the corridor, searching for a lift shaft, disturbingly conscious of Dee’s wet soles padding cheerfully behind him.

  In Astronomy, Jake was, as usual, peering wistfully at a galaxy somewhere out on the marches of nowhen, trying to turn spiral arms into elliptical orbits without recourse to the calculations section. He looked up as Amalfi and the girl entered.

  “Hello,” he said dismally. “Amalfi, I really need some help here. How can a man work without machines? If only you’d turn the City Fathers back on—”

  “Shortly. How long has it been since you looked back the way we came, Jake?”

  “Not since we started across the Rift. Why, should I have? The Rift is just a scratch in a saucer; you need real distance to work on basic problems.”

  “I know that. But let’s take a look. I have an idea that we’re not as alone in the Rift as we thought.”

  Resignedly, Jake went to his control desk and thumbed the buttons that moved his telescope. “What do you expect to find?” he demanded. “A haze of iron filings, or a stray meson? Or a fleet of police cruisers?”

  “Well,” Amalfi said, pointing to the screen, “those aren’t wine bottles.”

  The police cruisers, so close that the light of He’s star had begun to twinkle on their sides, shot across the screen in a brilliant stream, contrails of false photons striping the Rift behind them.

  “So they aren’t,” Jake said, not much interested. “Now may I have my scope back, Amalfi?”

  Amalfi only grinned. Cops or no cops, he felt young again.

  Hazleton was mud up to the thighs. Long ribands of it trailed behind him as he hurtled up the lift shaft to the control room. Amalfi watched him coming, noting the set whiteness of the city manager’s face as he looked up at Amalfi’s bent head.

  “What’s this about cops?” Hazleton demanded while still in flight. “The message didn’t get to me straight. We were raided, and all hell’s broken loose everywhere. I nearly didn’t get here straight myself.” He sprang into the room, his boots shedding gummy clods.

  “I saw some of the fighting,” Amalfi said. “Looks like the Moving Day rumor reached the ’stiffs, all right.”

  “Sure. What’s this about cops?”

  “The cops are here. They’re coming in from the northwest quadrant, already off overdrive, and should be ready to land day after tomorrow.”

  “Surely they’re not still after us,” Hazleton said. “And I can’t see why they should come all this distance after the ’stiff. They must have had to use deep-sleep to make it. And we didn’t say anything about the no-fuel drive in our alarm ’cast—”

  “We didn’t have to. They’re after the ’stiff, all right. Someday I must tell you the parable of the diseased bee, but there isn’t time now. Things are breaking too fast. We have to keep an eye on everything, and be ready to jump in any direction no matter which item on the agenda comes up first. How bad is the fighting?”

  “Very bad. At least five of the local bandit towns are in on it, including Fabr-Suithe, of course. Two of them mount heavy stuff, about contemporary with the Hruntan Empire’s in its heyday … ah, I see you know that already. Well, this is supposed to be a holy war on us. We’re meddling with the jungle and interfering with their chances for salvation-through-suffering, or something—I didn’t stop to dispute the point.”

  “That’s bad. It will convince some of the civilized towns, too. I doubt that Fabr-Suithe really believes this is a jihad—they’ve thrown their religion overboard—but it makes wonderful propaganda.”

  “You’re right there. Only a few of the civilized towns, the ones that have been helping us from the beginning, are putting up a stiff fight. Almost everyone else, on both sides, is sitting it out waiting for us to cut each other’s throats. Our own handicap is that we lack mobility. If we could persuade all the civilized towns to come in on our side, we wouldn’t need it, but so many of them are scared.”

  “The enemy lacks mobility, too, until the bindlestiff town is ready to take a direct hand,” Amalfi said thoughtfully. “Have you seen any signs that the tramps are in on the fighting?”

  “Not yet. But they won’t wait much longer. And we don’t even know where they are!”

  “They’ll be forced to locate themselves for us today or tomorrow, of that I’m certain. Right now it’s time to muster all the rehabilitated women you have and get ready to plant them; as far as I can see, that whole scheme is going to pay off. As soon as I get a fix on the bindlestiff, I’ll report the location of the nearest bandit town, and you can follow through from there.”

  Hazleton’s eyes, very weary until now, began to glitter with gratification. “And how about Moving Day?” he said. “I suppose you know that not one of your stress-fluid plugs is going to hold with the work this incomplete.”

  “I know it,” Amalfi said. “I’m counting on it. We’ll spin on the hour. If the plugs spring high, wide, and tall, I won’t weep; as a matter of fact, I don’t know how else we could hope to get rid of all that heat.”

  The radar watch blipped sharply, and both men turned to look at the screen. There was a fountain of green dots on it. Hazleton took three quick steps and turned the switch which projected the new butterfly grid onto the screen.

  “Well, where are they?” A
malfi demanded. That’s got to be them.”

  “Right smack in the middle of the southwestern continent, in that vine jungle where the little chigger snakes nest—the ones that burrow under your fingernails. There’s supposed to be a lake of boiling mud on that spot.”

  “There probably is. They could be under it, surrounded by a medium-light screen.”

  “All right, then we’ve got them placed. But what’s this fountain effect the radar’s giving us? What are the ’stiffs shooting up?”

  “Mines, I suspect,” Amalfi said. “On proximity fuses. Orbital.”

  “Mines? Isn’t that dandy,” Hazleton said. They’ll leave an escape lane for themselves, of course, but well never be able to find it. They’ve got us under a plutonium umbrella, Amalfi.”

  “We’ll get out. And in the meantime, the cops can’t land, either. Go plant your women, Mark. And—put some clothes on ’em first. They’ll cause more of a stir that way.”

  “You bet they will,” the city manager said feelingly. He stepped into the lift shaft and fell out of sight.

  Amalfi went out onto the observation platform of the control tower. From there he could see all the rest of the city, including most of the perimeter, for the tower—it was still called, now and then, the Empire State Building—was the tallest structure in the city. There was plenty of battle noise rattling the garish tropical sunset along most of the northwest quadrant, and even an occasional tiny toppling figure. The city had adopted the local dodge of clearing and gelling the mud at its rim, and had returned the gel to the morass state at the first sign of attack, but the jungle men had broad skis, of some metal no Hevian could have machined so precisely, on which they slid over the muck. Discs of red fire marked bursting TDX shells, scything the air like death’s own winnows. No gas was in evidence, but Amalfi knew that there would be gas before long with the bindlestiff directing the fighting.

  The city’s retaliatory fire was largely invisible, since it emerged below the top of the perimeter. There was a Bethé fender out, which would keep the rim from being scaled until one of the projectors was knocked out, and plenty of heavy rifles were being kept hot. But the city had never been designed for warfare, and many of its most efficient destroyers had their noses buried in the mud, since their intended function was only to clear a landing area. Using an out-and-out Bethé blaster was impossible where there was an adjacent planetary mass—fortunately, since the bindlestiff had such a blaster and Amalfi’s city did not.

  Amalfi sniffed the scarlet edges of the struggle appraisingly. The screen set up beside him did not show an intelligible battle pattern yet, but it seemed to be almost on the verge of making sense. Under Amalfi’s fingers on the platform railing were three buttons which he had had placed there four hundred years ago, duplicating a set on the balcony of City Hall. They had set in motion different actions at different times. But each time they had represented choices of actions which he would have to make when the pinch came. He had never found any reason to have a fourth button installed on either railing.

  Rockets shrilled overhead. Bombs fell from them, crepitating bursts of noise and smoke and flying metal. Amalfi did not look up. The very mild spindizzy screen would fend off anything moving that rapidly. Only slow-moving objects, like men, could sidle through a polarized gravitic field. He looked out toward the horizon, touching the three buttons very delicately.

  Suddenly the sunset snuffed itself out. Amalfi, who had never seen a tropical sunset before coming to He, felt a vague alarm, but as far as he could tell, the abrupt darkness was natural, though startling. The fighting went on, the flying discs of TDX explosions much more lurid now against the blackness.

  After a while there was a dogfight far aloft, identifiable mostly by the exhaust traceries of rockets and missiles. Evidently Miramon’s air force was tangling with Fabr-Suithe’s. The jungle jammered derision and fury at Amalfi’s city without any letup.

  Amalfi stood, watching the screen so intently as to cut the rest of the world almost completely out of his consciousness. Understanding the emerging pattern was hard work, for he had never tried to grasp a situation at such close quarters before, and the blue-coded trajectory of every shell, sketched across the screen in glowing segments of ellipses, tried to capture his exclusive attention, as if they were all planets.

  About an hour past midnight, at the height of the heaviest air raid yet, he felt a touch at his elbow.

  “Boss—”

  Amalfi heard the word as though it had been uttered at the bottom of the Rift. The still-ascending fountain of space mines the bindlestiff was throwing up had just come into the margin of the screen—meaning that O’Brian, the proxy chief, had just located the ’stiff with one of his flying robot bystanders—and Amalfi was trying to extrapolate the shape of the top of the fountain. Somewhere up there in the aeropause, the fountain flattened into a shell of orbits encompassing the whole of He, and it was important to know how high up that shell began.

  But the utter exhaustion of the voice touched something deeper. He said, “Yes, Mark.”

  “It’s done. We lost almost everybody in the party. But we planted the women in a clearing right where a ‘stiff outpost could see them …. What a riot that caused.” A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. “You should have been there.”

  “I’m almost there now. Just getting the picture from a proxy. Good work, Mark …. Better … get some rest.”

  “Now? But boss—”

  Something very heavy described a searing parabola across the screen, and then the whole city turned to a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light of the star-shell faded, the screen showed a formless dim-yellow spreading and crawling, as if someone had spilled paint in the innards of the machine. Amalfi had been waiting for it.

  “Gas alarm, Mark,” he heard himself saying. “Sure to be Hawke-site. Barium suits for everybody—that stuff’s pure death-by-torture.”

  “Yes, right. Boss, have you been up here all this time? You’ll kill yourself running things this way. You need rest more than I do.”

  Amalfi found that he did not have time to answer. O’Brian’s proxy had come upon the town where Hazleton had dropped the women. There was certainly a riot there. Amalfi snapped a switch, backing the point of view off to another proxy which was hovering a mile up, scanning the whole battle area. From here he could see the black tendrils of movement which were files of soldiers moving through the jungle. Some which had been approaching Amalfi’s city were now turning back. Furthermore, new tendrils were being put out from Hevian towns which up to now had taken no part in the fighting—the on-the-fence towns. Evidently they were no longer on the fence, but which side they had jumped to still remained to be seen.

  He snapped the switch again, bringing back a close look at the lake of boiling mud which lay at the base of the mine fountain. Something new was going on there, too: the hot mud was flowing slowly, thickly, away from the center of the lake. Then there was a clear area in the center, as if the lake had suddenly developed a vortex. The clear area widened.

  The bindlestiff city was rising to the surface. It came cautiously; half an hour went by before its periphery touched the lake shore. Then black tendrils stretched out into the tangled desolation of the jungle; the bindlestiff was at last risking its own men in the struggle. What they were after was plain enough, for the files were all moving in the direction of the town where Hazleton had dropped the women.

  The bindlestiff city itself sat and waited. Even against the mass-pressure of the planet of He, Amalfi’s sense of spatial orientation could pick up the unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of spindizzy field under medium drive, doming the seething mud.

  Dawn was coming now. The riot around the town where the women had been dropped dwindled a little. Then one of the task forces from the bindlestiff reached it, and it flared all over again, worse than ever. The ’stiffs were fighting their own allies.

  Abruptly there was no Hevian town in the cent
er of the riot at all. There was only a mushrooming pillar of radioactive gas which made the screen race with interference patterns. The ’stiffs had bombed the town. What was left of the riot retreated slowly toward the lake of boiling mud; the ’stiffs had their women and were fighting a rear-guard action. The news, Amalfi knew, would travel fast.

  Amalfi’s own city was shrouded in sick orange mist, lit with flashes of no-color. The blistering gas could not pass the spindizzy screen in a body, but it diffused through, molecule by heavy molecule. The mayor realized suddenly that he had not heeded his own gas warning, and that there was probably some harm coming to him. He started and moved slightly, and discovered that he was completely encased. What …

  Barium paste. Evidently Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the platform, and instead had plastered him with the paste in default of trying to get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered with a transparent visor, and a feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman barium filter.

  So much for the gas. The heavy tensions in and around the bindlestiff city continued to gather; they would soon be unbearable. Above, just outside the shell of circling mines, the first few police cruisers were sidling down with great caution. The war in the jungle had already fallen apart into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women by the tramps had collapsed all Hevian rivalries. Bandits and civilized towns alike were bent now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies. Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for the bindlestiff to leave—time for it to make off with its pleased and wondering Hevian women, its anti-agathics, its germanium, and whatever else it had managed to garner—time for it to lose itself again in the Rift before the Earth police could invest the planet of He.

  The gravitic field around the bindlestiff city knotted suddenly, painfully, in Amalfi’s brain, and began to rise away from the lake of boiling mud. The ’stiff was taking off. In a moment it would be gone through the rent in the mine umbrella which only the tramps could see.