Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  He turned his back abruptly on the derricks and began to walk slowly away from the city. “I feel like a walk,” he said. “Like to come along, Mark?”

  “A walk?” Hazleton looked puzzled. “Why—sure. Okay, boss.”

  For a while they trudged in silence over the heath. The going was rough; the soil was clayey and heavily gullied, particularly deceptive in the early morning light. Very little seemed to grow on it: only an occasional bit of low, starved shrubbery, a patch of tough, nettlelike stalks, a few clinging weeds like crab grass.

  “This doesn’t strike me as good farming land,” Hazleton said. “Not that I know a thing about it.”

  “There’s better land farther out, as you saw from the city,” Amalfi said. “But I agree about the heath. It’s blasted land. I wouldn’t even believe it was radiologically safe until I saw the instrument readings with my own eyes.”

  “A war?”

  “Long ago, maybe. But I think geology did most of the damage. The land was let alone too long; the topsoil’s all gone. It’s odd, considering how intensively the rest of the planet seems to be farmed.”

  They half-slid into a deep arroyo and scrambled up the other side. “Boss, straighten me out on something,” Hazleton said. “Why did we adopt this planet, even after we found that it had people of its own? We passed several others that would have done as well. Are we going to push the local population out? We’re not too well set up for that, even if it were legal or just.”

  “Do you think there are Earth cops in the Greater Magellanic, Mark?”

  “No,” Hazleton said. “But there are Okies, and if I wanted justice, I’d go to Okies, not to cops. What’s the answer, Amalfi?”

  “We may have to do a little judicious pushing,” Amalfi said, squinting ahead. The double suns were glaring directly in their faces. “It’s all in knowing where to push, Mark. You heard the character some of the outlying planets gave this place when we spoke to them on the way in.”

  “They hate the smell of it,” Hazleton said, carefully removing a burr from his ankle. “It’s my guess that the Proctors made some early expeditions unwelcome. Still—”

  Amalfi topped a rise and held out one hand. The city manager fell silent almost automatically, and clambered up beside him.

  The cultivated land began only a few meters away. Watching them were two—creatures.

  One, plainly, was a man—a naked man, the color of chocolate, with matted blue-black hair. He was standing at the handle of a single-bladed plow, which looked to be made of the bones of some large animal. The furrow that he had been opening stretched behind him beside its fellows, and farther back in the field there was a low hut. The man was standing, shading his eyes, evidently looking across the dusky heath toward the Okie city. His shoulders were enormously broad and muscular, but bowed even when he stood erect, as now.

  The figure leaning into the stiff leather straps which drew the plow also was human—a woman. Her head hung down, as did her arms, and her hair, as black as the man’s but somewhat longer, fell forward and hid her face.

  As Hazleton froze, the man lowered his head until he was looking directly at the Okies. His eyes were blue and unexpectedly piercing. “Are you the men from the city?” he said.

  Hazleton’s lips moved. The serf could hear nothing; Hazleton was speaking into his throat mikes, audible only to the receiver imbedded in Amalfi’s right mastoid process.

  “English, by the gods of all stars! The Proctors speak Interlingua. What’s this, boss? Was the Cloud colonized that far back?”

  Amalfi shook his head. “We’re from the city,” the mayor said aloud, in the same tongue. “What’s your name, young fella?”

  “Karst, lord.”

  “Don’t call me ‘lord.” I’m not one of your Proctors. Is this your land?”

  “No, lord. Excuse—I have no other word—”

  “My name is Amalfi.”

  “This is the Proctors’ land, Amalfi. I work this land. Are you of Earth?”

  Amalfi shot a swift sidelong glance at Hazleton. The city manager’s face was expressionless.

  “Yes,” Amalfi said. “How did you know?”

  “By the wonder,” Karst said. “It is a great wonder, to raise a city in a single night. IMT itself took nine men of hands of thumbs of suns to build, the singers say. To raise a second city on the Barrens overnight—such a thing is beyond words.”

  He stepped away from the plow, walking with painful, hesitant steps, as if all his massive muscles hurt him. The woman raised her head from the traces and pulled the hair back from her face. The eyes that looked forth at the Okies were dull, but there were phosphorescent stirrings of alarm behind them. She reached out and grasped Karst by the elbow.

  “It—is nothing,” she said.

  He shook her off. “You have built a city over one of night,” he repeated. “You speak the Engh tongue, as we do on feast days. You speak to such as me, with words, not with the whips with the little tags. You have fine clothes, with patches of color of fine-woven cloth.”

  It was beyond doubt the longest speech he had ever made in his life. The clay on his forehead was beginning to streak with the effort.

  “You are right,” Amalfi said. “We are from Earth, though we left it long ago. I will tell you something else, Karst. You, too, are of Earth.”

  “This is not so,” Karst said, retreating a step. “I was born here, and all my people. None claim Earth blood—”

  “I understand,” Amalfi said. “You are of this planet. But you are an Earthman. And I will tell you something else. I do not think the Proctors are Earthmen. I think they lost the right to call themselves Earthmen long ago, on another planet, a planet named Thor Five.”

  Karst wiped his callused palm against his thighs. “I want to understand,” he said. “Teach me.”

  “Karst!” the woman said pleadingly. “It is nothing. Wonders pass. We are late with the planting.”

  “Teach me,” Karst said doggedly. “All our lives we furrow the fields, and on the holidays they tell us of Earth. Now there is a marvel here, a city raised by the hands of Earthmen, there are Earth-men in it who speak to us—” He stopped. He seemed to have something in this throat.

  “Go on,” Amalfi said gently.

  “Teach me. Now that Earth has built a city on the Barrens, the Proctors cannot hold knowledge for their own any longer. Even when you go, we will learn from your empty city before it is ruined by wind and rain. Lord Amalfi, if we are Earthmen, teach us as Earthmen are teached.”

  “Karst,” said the woman. “It is not for us. It is a magic of the Proctors. All magics are of the Proctors. They mean to take us from our children. They mean us to die on the Barrens. They tempt us.”

  The serf turned to her. There was something indefinably gentle in the motion of his brutalized, crackle-skinned, thick-muscled body.

  “You need not go,” he said, in a slurred Interlingua patois which was obviously his usual tongue. “Go on with the plowing, does it please you. But this is nothing of the Proctors. They would not stoop to tempt slaves as mean as we are. We have obeyed the laws, given our tithes, observed the holidays. This is of Earth.”

  The woman clenched her horny hands under her chin and shivered. “It is forbidden to speak of Earth except on holidays. But I will finish the plowing. Otherwise our children will die.”

  “Come, then,” Amalfi said. “There is much to learn.”

  To his complete consternation, the serf went down on both knees. A second later, while Amalfi was still wondering what to do next, Karst was up again, and climbing up onto the Barrens toward them. Hazleton offered him a hand, and was nearly hurled like a flat stone through the air when Karst took it; the serf was as solid and strong as a pile driver, and as sure on his stony feet.

  “Karst, will you return before night?”

  Karst did not answer. Amalfi began to lead the way back toward the city. Hazleton started down the far side of the rise after them, but something moved hi
m to look back again at the little scrap of farm. The woman’s head had fallen forward again, the wind stirring the tangled curtain of her hair. She was leaning heavily into the galling traces, and the plow was again beginning to cut its way painfully through the stony soil. There was now, of course, nobody to guide it.

  “Boss,” Hazleton said into the throat mike. “Are you listening, or are you too busy playing Messiah?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I don’t think I want to snitch a planet from these people. As a matter of fact, I’m damned if I will!”

  Amalfi didn’t answer; he knew well enough that there was no answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There was no place else to go.

  The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything but the stony and now unharvestable soil.

  The city was old—unlike the men and women who manned it, who had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

  Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations docket. He got it, and in bells—big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to the day six hundred years ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city’s ancient subways since the managership of deFord. That had been the first time the younger Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

  But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints and wistful recollections of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and urgently.

  Amalfi sighed. In the end, it appeared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi’s city for two things only. One: The city had a long Violations docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it. Two: The city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and blacker city had done centuries before—the city which had perpetrated the massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops and surviving Okies alike.

  Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc—the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its own.

  If the cops would let it. The Magellanic Clouds were, of course, moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of Okies—and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the majority of the spacefaring cities—the greater the urge would become to track down the last few stragglers.

  Amalfi had no faith in the ability of a satellite star cloud to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than Amalfis city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If …

  Amalfi put the earphone on again. “Question,” he said. “Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary techniques in time?”

  The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from their eternal mulling over the past. At last they said:

  “YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS CLOUD. REMEMBER THOR FIVE.”

  There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to. There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought that atrocity had made good its escape to this Cloud; it had all happened a long time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi’s own city in expiation of that still-burning crime.

  Remember Thor V. No city would be safe until that raped and murdered world could be forgotten. Not even out here, in the virgin satellites of the home lens.

  “Boss? Sorry, we didn’t know you were busy. But we’ve got an operating schedule set up, as soon as you’re ready to look at it.”

  “I’m ready right now, Mark,” Amalfi said, turning away from the boards. “Hello, Dee. How do you like your planet?”

  The girl smiled. “It’s beautiful,” she said simply.

  “For the most part, anyway,” Hazleton agreed. “This heath is an ugly place, but the rest of the land seems to be excellent—much better than you’d think it from the way it’s being farmed. The tiny little fields they break it up into here just don’t do it justice, and even I know better cultivation methods than these serfs do.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Amalfi said. “It’s my theory that the Proctors maintain their power partly by preventing the spread of any knowledge about farming beyond the most rudimentary kind. That’s also the most rudimentary kind of politics, as I don’t need to tell you.”

  “On the politics,” Hazleton said evenly, “we’re in disagreement. While that’s ironing itself out, the business of running the city has to go on.”

  “All right,” Amalfi said. “What’s on the docket?”

  “I’m having a small plot on the heath, next to the city, turned over and conditioned for some experimental plantings, and extensive soil tests have already been made. That’s purely a stop gap, of course. Eventually we’ll have to expand onto good land. I’ve drawn up a tentative contract of lease between the city and the Proctors, which provides for us to rotate ownership geographically so as to keep displacement of the serfs at a minimum, and at the same time opens a complete spectrum of seasonal plantings to us—essentially it’s the old Limited Colony contract, but heavily weighted in the direction of the Proctors’ prejudices. There’s no doubt in my mind but that they’ll sign it. Then—”

  “They won’t sign it,” Amalfi said. “They can’t even be shown it. Furthermore, I want everything you’ve put into your experimental plot here on the heath yanked out.”

  Hazleton put a hand to his forehead in frank exasperation. “Oh, hell, boss,” he said. “Don’t tell me that we’re still not at the end of the old squirrel-cage routine—intrigue, intrigue, and then more intrigue. I’m sick of it, I’ll tell you that directly. Isn’t a thousand years enough for you? I thought we had come to this planet to settle down!”

  “We did. We will. But as you reminded me yourself yesterday, there are other people in possession of this planet at the moment-people we can’t legally push out. As matters stand right now, we can’t give them the faintest sign that we mean to settle here; they’re already intensely suspicious of that very thing, and they’re watching us for evidence of it every minute.”

  “Oh no,” Dee said. She came forward swiftly and put a hand on Amalfi’s shoulder. “John, you promised us after the March was over that we were going to make a home here. Not necessarily on this planet, but somewhere in the Cloud. You promised, John.”

  The mayor looked up at her. It was no secret to her, or to Hazleton either, that he loved her; they both knew, as well, the cruelly just Okie law—and the vein of iron loyalty in Amalfi that would have compelled him to act by that law even if it had never existed. Until the crisis in the jungle had forced Amalfi to reveal to Hazleton the existence of that love, neither of the two youngsters had more than suspected it over a period of nearly three c
enturies.

  But Dee was comparatively new to Okie mores, and was, in addition, a woman. Only to know that she was loved had been unable to content her long. She was already beginning to put the knowledge to work.

  She was certainly not old enough yet to realize that the crisis had passed, leaving behind only a residuum of devotion useless to her and to Amalfi alike. She could not know that the person who had replaced her in Amalfi’s mind was Karst; that Amalfi was now hearing from the lips of the serf the innocent and vastly touching questions which Dee had once asked; that Amalfi had realized that his thousand years of adult life had fitted him to answer not one question, but a thousand. Had anyone suggested to her that Amalfi was only just now coming into his full maturity, she would not have understood; possibly, she might have laughed. Amalfi had himself smiled when the realization had come to him.

  “Of course I promised,” he said. “I’ve delivered on my promises for a millennium now, and I’ll continue to do so. This planet will be our home if you’ll give me just the minimum of help in winning it. It’s the best of all the planets we passed on the way in, for a great many reasons—including a couple that won’t begin to show until you see the winter constellations here, and a few more that won’t become evident for a century yet. But there’s one thing I certainly can’t give you, and that’s immediate delivery.”

  “All right,” Dee said. She smiled. “I trust you, John, you know that. But it’s hard to be patient.”

  “Is it?” Amalfi said, not much surprised. “Come to think of it, I remember when the same thought occurred to me, back on He. In retrospect the problem doesn’t seem large.”

  “Boss, you’d better give us some substitute courses of action,” Hazleton cut in, a little coldly. “With the possible exception of yourself, every man, woman, and alley cat in the city is ready to spread out all over the surface of this planet the moment the starting gun is fired. You gave us every reason to think that that would be the way it would happen. If there’s going to be a delay, you have a good many idle hands to put to work.”