Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  The image came through. Amalfi goggled at it.

  “… or after the cops leave. That’s all for now.”

  The image faded. The twisted, hairless man in the ancient metal-mesh cape stood in Amalfi’s memory for quite a while afterwards.

  The Okie King was a man made of lava. Perhaps he had been born at one time, but now he looked like a geological accident, a column of black stone sprung from a fissure and contorted roughly into the shape of a man.

  And his face was shockingly disfigured and scarred by the one disease that still remained unconquered, unsolved, though it no longer killed.

  Cancer.

  A voice murmured inside Amalfi’s head, coming from the tiny vibrator imbedded in the mastoid bone behind the mayor’s right ear. “That’s just what the City Fathers said he would say,” Hazleton commented softly from his post uptown in the control tower. “But he can’t be as naïve as all that. He’s an old-timer; been aloft since back before they knew how to polarize spindizzy screens against cosmic radiation. Must be eight hundred years old at a minimum.”

  “You can lay up a lot of cunning in that length of time,” Amalfi agreed in a similarly low voice. He was wearing throat mikes under a high military collar. As far as the screens were concerned, he was standing motionless, silent, and alone; though he was an expert at talking without moving his lips, he did not try to do so now, for the fuzziness of local transmission conditions made it unlikely that his murmuring would be detected. “It doesn’t seem likely that he means what he says. But we’d best sit tight for the moment.”

  He glanced into the auxiliary battle tank, a three-dimensional chart in which color-coded points of lights moved, showing each city, the nearby sun, and the Acolyte vessels, not to scale, but in their relative positions. The tank was camouflaged as a desk and could be seen into only from behind; hence it was out of sight of any eye but Amalfi’s. In it the Acolyte force showed itself to consist of one trader’s ship and four police craft; one of the latter was a command cruiser, very probably Lerner’s, and the others were light cruisers.

  It was not much of a force, but then, there was no real need for a full squadron here. With a minimum of organization, the Okies could run Lerner and his ward out of the jungle, even at some cost to their own numbers—but where would the Okies run to after Lerner had yelled for navy support? The question answered itself.

  A string of twenty-three small “personal” screens came on now, high up along the curve of the far wall. Twenty-three faces looked down at Amalfi—the mayors of all but one of the class A cities in the jungle; Amalfi’s own city was the twenty-fourth. Amalfi valved the main audio gain back up again.

  “Are we ready to begin?” the Acolyte woman said. “I’ve got codes here for twenty-four cities, and I see you’re all here. Small courage among Okies these days—twenty-four out of three hundred of you for a simple job like this! That’s the attitude that made Okies of you in the first place. You’re afraid of honest work.”

  “We’ll work,” the King’s voice said. His screen, however, remained gray-green. “Look over the codes and take your pick.”

  The trader looked for the voice. “No insolence,” she said sharply. “Or I’ll ask for volunteers from the grade B’s. It would save me money, anyhow.”

  There was no reply. The trader frowned and looked at the code list in her hand. After a moment, she called off three numbers, and then, with greater hesitation, a fourth. Four of the screens above Amalfi went blank, and in the tank, four green flecks began to move outward from the red dwarf star.

  “That’s all we need for Hern Six except for a pressure job,” the woman said slowly. “There are eight cities listed here as pressure specialists. You there—who are you, anyhow?”

  “Bradley-Vermont,” one of the faces above Amalfi said.

  “What would you ask for a pressure job?”

  “One hundred and twenty-four,” Bradley-Vermont’s mayor said sullenly.

  “O-ho! You’ve a high opinion of yourself, haven’t you? You may as well float here and rot for a while longer, until you learn something more about the law of supply and demand. You—you’re Dresden-Saxony, it says here. What’s your price? Remember, I only need one.”

  Dresden-Saxony’s mayor was a slight man with high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his obvious state of malnutrition; at least, he was smiling a little, and his eyes glittered over the dark shadows which made them look large.

  “We ask one hundred and twenty-four,” he said with malicious indifference.

  The woman’s lids slitted. “You do, eh? That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? And you?”

  “The same,” the third mayor said, though with obvious reluctance.

  The trader swung around and pointed directly at Amalfi. In the very old cities, such as the one the King operated, it would be impossible to tell who she was pointing at, but probably most of the cities in the jungle had compensating tri-di. “What’s your town?”

  “We’re not answering that question,” Amalfi said. “And we’re not pressure specialists anyhow.”

  “I know that, I can read a code. But you’re the biggest Okie I’ve ever seen, and I’m not talking about your belly either; and you’re modern enough for the purpose. The job is yours for one hundred—no more.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You’re a fool as well as a fat man. You just came into this hellhole and there are charges against—”

  “Ah, you know who we are. Why did you ask?”

  “Never mind that. You don’t know what a jungle is like until you’ve lived in it. You’d be smart to take the job and get out now while you can. You’d be worth one hundred and twelve to me if you could finish the job under the estimated time.”

  “You’ve denied us immunity,” Amalfi said, “and you needn’t bother offering it, either. We’re not interested in pressure work for any price.”

  The woman laughed. “You’re a liar, too. You know as well as I do that nobody arrests Okies on jobs. And you wouldn’t find it difficult to leave the job once it’s finished. Here now—I’ll give you one hundred and twenty. That’s my top offer, and it’s only four less than the pressure experts are asking. Fair enough?”

  “It may be fair enough,” Amalfi said. “But we don’t do pressure work; and we’ve already gotten in reports from the proxies we sent to Hern Six as soon as Lieutenant Lerner said that was where the job was. We don’t like the look of it. We don’t want it. We won’t take it at one hundred and twenty, we won’t take it at one hundred and twenty-four—and we won’t take it at all. Understand?”

  “Very well,” the woman said with concentrated viciousness. “You’ll hear from me again, Okie.”

  The King was looking at Amalfi with an unreadable, but certainly unfriendly, expression. If Amalfi’s guess was right, the King thought Amalfi was somewhat overdoing Okie solidarity. It might also be occurring to him that the expression of so much independence might be a bid for power within the jungle itself. Yes, Amalfi was sure that that, at least, had occurred to the King.

  The hiring of the class B cities was now all that remained, but nevertheless it took quite a while to get started. The woman, it emerged, was more than a trader; she was an entrepreneur of some importance. She wanted the cities, twenty of them, each for the same identical piece of dirty work: working low-grade carnotite lies on a small planet too near a hot star. Twenty mining cities working upon such a planet would reduce it to as small and sculptured a lump of trash as a meteorite before very many months. The method, obviously, was to get the work done fast without paying more than a pittance for it.

  Then, startlingly, while the woman was still making up her mind, the voice came through. It was weak and. indistinct, and without any face to go with it.

  “We’ll take the job. Take us.”

  There was a murmuring from the screens, and across some of the faces there the same shadow seemed to run. Amalfi checked the tank, but it t
old him little. The signal had been too weak. All that could be made certain was that the voice belonged to some city far out on the periphery of the jungle—a city desperate for energy.

  The Acolyte woman seemed momentarily nonplussed. Even in a jungle, Amalfi thought grimly, some crude rules had to be observed; evidently the woman realized that to take on the volunteer before interviewing the others might be—resented.

  “Keep out of this,” the voice of the King said, so much more slowly and heavily than before that its weight was almost tangible upon the air. “Let the lady do her own picking. She’s got no use for a class C outfit.”

  “We’ll take the job. We’re a mining town from way back, and we can refine the stuff, too, by gaseous diffusion, mass spectrography, mass chromatography, whatever’s asked. We can handle it. And we’ve got to have it.”

  “So do the rest,” the King said, coldly unimpressed. “Take your turn.”

  “We’re dying out here! Hunger, cold, thirst, disease!”

  “Others are in the same state. Do you think any of us like it here? Wait your turn!”

  “All right,” the woman said suddenly. “I’m sick of being told who I do and who I don’t want. Anything to get this over with. File your coordinates, whoever that is out there, and—”

  “File your coordinates and we’ll have a Dirac torpedo there before you’ve stopped talking!” the King roared “Acolyte, what are you paying for this rock-heaving? Nobody here works for less than sixty-that’s flat.”

  “We’ll go for fifty-five.”

  The woman smiled an unpleasant smile. “Apparently somebody in this pest area is glad of a chance to do some honest work for a change. Who’s next?”

  “Hell, you don’t need to take a class C city,” one of the rejected class A’s blurted. “We’ll go for fifty-five. What can we lose?”

  “Then we’ll take fifty,” the outsider whispered immediately.

  “You’ll take a bolt in the teeth! As for you—you’re Coquilhatville-Congo, eh?—you’re going to be sorry you ever had a tongue to flap.”

  There was already a stir among the green dots in the tank. Some of the larger cities were leaving their orbits. The woman began to look vaguely alarmed.

  “Hazleton!” Amalfi murmured quickly. “This is going to get worse before it gets better. Set us up, as fast as you can, to move into one of the vacated orbits close to the red star the moment I give the word.”

  “We won’t be able to put on any speed—”

  “I wouldn’t want us to if we could. It’ll have to be done slowly enough so that it won’t be apparent in any tank that we’re moving counter to the general tendency. Also, get me a fix on that outfit on the outside that broke ranks if you possibly can. If you can’t do it without attracting attention, drop the project at once.”

  “Right.”

  “By Hadjjii’s nightshirt, you’ve got a lesson coming!” the woman was exclaiming. “The whole deal is off for today. No jobs, not for anybody. I’ll come back in a week. Maybe by then you’ll have some common sense back. Lieutenant, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  That, however, proved to be a difficult assignment. There was a sort of wave front of heavy-duty cities between the Acolyte ships and open space, expanding outward into the darkness where the weaklings shivered. In that second frigid shell most of the class C cities were panicking; and, still farther out, the brilliant green sparks of the cities whose promised jobs had just been written off were plunging angrily back toward the main cloud.

  The reception hall was a bedlam of voices, mostly those of mayors trying to establish that they had not been responsible for the break in the wage line. Somewhere several cities were still attempting to shout new bids to the Acolyte woman under cover of the confusion. Through it all the voice of the King whirled like a bull-roarer.

  “Clear the sky!” Lerner shouted. “Clear it up out there, by—”

  As if in response, the tank suddenly crackled with hair-thin sapphire tracers. The static of the scattered mesotron rifle fire rattled audio speakers, cross-hatched the desperate, shouting faces on the screens. Terror, the terror of a man who finds suddenly that the situation he is in has always been deadly, turned Lieutenant Lerner’s features rigid. Amalfi saw him reach for something.

  “All right, Hazleton, spin!”

  The defective spindizzy sobbed, and the city moved painfully. Lerner’s elbow jerked back toward his midriff, and from his ship came the pale guide light of a Bethé blaster.

  Seconds later, something went up in the white agony of a fusion explosion—something so far off from the center of the riot that Amalfi first thought, with a shock of fury, that Lerner had undertaken to destroy Okie cities unselectively, simply to terrorize. Then the look on Lerner’s face told him that the shot had been fired at random. Lerner was as taken aback as Amalfi, and seemingly for much the same reasons, at the death of the unknown bystander.

  The depth of the response surprised Amalfi anew. Perhaps there was hope for Lerner yet.

  Some incredible fool of an Okie was firing on the cop now, but the shots fell short; mesotron rifles were not primarily military instruments, and the Acolytes had almost worked free of the jungle. For a moment Amalfi was afraid that Lerner would fling a few vindictive Bethé blasts back into the pack, but evidently the cop was recovering the residues of his good sense; at least, no more shots came from the command cruiser. It was possible that he had realized that any further exchange of fire would turn the incident from a minor brawl to a mob uprising which would make it necessary to call in the Acolyte navy.

  Not even the Acolytes could want that, for it would end in cutting off their supply of skilled labor.

  The city’s spindizzies cut out. Lurid, smoky scarlet light leaked down the stone stairwell which led out of the reception hall to the belfry.

  “We’re parked near the stinking little star, boss. We’re less than a million miles out from the orbit of the King’s own city.”

  “Good work, Mark. Break out a gig. We’re going calling.”

  “All right. Anything special in the way of equipment?”

  “Equipment?” Amalfi said, slowly. “Well—no. But you’d best bring Sergeant Anderson along. And Mark—”

  “Yes?”

  “Bring Dee, too.”

  The center of government of the King’s city was enormously impressive: ancient, stately, marmoreal. It was surrounded on a lower level by a number of lesser structures of equally heavy-handed beauty. One of these was a heavy, archaic cantilever bridge for which Amalfi could postulate no use at all; it spanned an enormously broad avenue which divided the city in two, an avenue which was virtually untraveled; the bridge, too, carried only foot traffic now, and not much of that.

  He decided finally that the bridge had been retained only out of respect to history. There seemed to be no other sentiment which fitted it, since the normal mode of transportation in the King’s city, as in every other Okie city, was by aircab. Like the City Hall, the bridge was beautiful; possibly that had spoken for its retention, too.

  The cab rocked slightly and grounded. “Here we are, gentlemen,” the Tin Cabby said. “Welcome to Buda-Pesht.”

  Amalfi followed Dee and Hazleton out onto the plaza. Other cabs, many of them, dotted the red sky, homing on the palace and settling near by.

  “Looks like a conclave,” Hazleton said. “Guests from outside, not just managerial people inside this one city; otherwise, why the welcome from the cabby?”

  “That’s my guess, too, and I think we’re none too early for it, either. It’s my theory that the King is in for a rough time from his subjects. This shoot-up with Lerner, and the loss of jobs for everybody, must have lowered his stock considerably. If so, it’ll give us an opening.”

  “Speaking of which,” Hazleton said, “where’s the entrance to this tomb, anyhow? Ah—that must be it.”

  They hurried through the shadows of the pillared portico. Inside, in the foyer, hunched or striding figures moved
past them toward the broad, ancient staircase, or gathered in small groups, murmuring urgently in the opulent dimness. This entrance hall was marvelous with chandeliers; they did not cast much light, but they shed glamor like a molting peacock.

  Someone plucked Amalfi by the sleeve. He looked down. A slight man with a worn Slavic face and black eyes which looked alive with suppressed mischief stood at his side.

  “This place makes me homesick,” the slight man said, “although we don’t go in for quite so much sheer mass on my town. I believe you’re the mayor who refused all offers, on behalf of a city with no name. I’m correct, am I not?”

  “You are,” Amalfi said, studying the figure with difficulty in the ceremonial dimness. “And you’re the mayor of Dresden-Saxony: Franz Specht. What can we do for you?”

  “Nothing, thank you. I simply wanted to make myself known. It may be that you will need to know someone, inside.” He nodded in the direction of the staircase. “I admired your stand today, but there may be some who resent it. Why is your city nameless, by the way?”

  “It isn’t,” Amalfi said. “But we sometimes need to use our name as a weapon, or at least as a lever. We hold it in reserve as such.”

  “A weapon! Now that is something to ponder. I will see you later, I hope.” Specht slipped away abruptly, a shadow among shadows. Hazleton looked at Amalfi with evident puzzlement.

  “What’s his angle, boss? Backing a long shot, maybe?”

  “That would be my guess. Anyhow, as he says, we can probably use a friend in this mob. Let’s go on up.”

  In the great hall, which had been the throne room of an empire older than any Okie, older even than space flight, there was already a meeting in progress. The King himself was standing on the dais, enormously tall, bald, scarred, terrific, as shining black as anthracite. Ancient as he was, his antiquity was that of some featureless, eventless, an antiquity without history against the rich backdrop of his city. He was anything but an expectable mayor of Buda-Pesht; Amalfi strongly suspected that there were recent bloodstains on the city’s log.