Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “Use straight work-contract procedure all the way down the line. No exploiting of the planet that we wouldn’t normally do during the usual stopover for a job. That means no truck gardens or any other form of local agriculture; just refilling the oil tanks, re-breeding the Chlorella strains from local sources for heterosis, making up our water losses, and so on. The last I heard, we were still using the Tx 71105 strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa; that’s too high-temp an alga for a planet with a winter season, like this one.”

  “That won’t work,” Hazleton said. “It may fool the Proctors, Amalfi, but how can you fool your own people? What are you going to do with the perimeter police, for instance? Sergeant Anderson’s whole crew knows that it won’t ever again have to make up a boarding squad or defend the city or take up any other military duty. Nine-tenths of them are itching to throw off their harness for good and all and start dirt farming. What am I going to tell them?”

  “Send ’em out to your experimental patch on the heath,” Amalfi said, “on police detail. Tell ’em to pick up everything that grows.”

  Hazleton started to turn toward the lift shaft, holding out his hand to Dee. Then, characteristically, he had a third thought and turned back.

  “But why, boss?” he said plaintively. “What makes you think the Proctors suspect us of squatting? And what could they do about it if we did?”

  “The Proctors have asked for the standard work contract,” Amalfi said. “They knew what it was, they got it, and they insist upon its observation, to the letter— including the provision that the city must be off this planet by the date of termination. As you know, that’s impossible; we can’t leave this planet at all. But we’ll have to pretend that we’re going to leave up to the last possible minute.”

  Hazleton looked stubborn. Dee took his hand reassuringly, but it didn’t seem to register.

  “As for what the Proctors themselves can do about it,” Amalfi said, picking up the earphones again, “I don’t know. I’m trying to find out. But this much I do know:

  “The Proctors have already called the cops.”

  Under the grey, hazy light in the schoolroom, neutral light which seemed cast like a cloak along the air rather than to illuminate it, voices and visions came thronging even into the conscious and prepared mind of the visitor, pouring from the memory cells of the City Fathers. Amalfi could feel their pressure, just below the surface of his mind; it was vaguely unpleasant, partly because he already knew what they sought to impart, so that the redoubled impressions tended to shoulder forward into the immediate attention, nearly with the vividness of immediate experience.

  He waved a hand before his eyes in annoyance and looked for a monitor, found one standing at his elbow, and wondered how long he had been there—or, conversely, how long Amalfi himself had been lulled into the learning trance.

  “Where’s Karst?” he said brusquely. “The first serf we brought in? I need him.”

  “Yes, sir. He’s in a chair toward the front of the room.” The monitor—whose function combined the duties of classroom supervisor and nurse—turned away briefly to a nearby wall treacher, which opened and floated out to him a tall metal tumbler. The monitor took it, and led the way through the room, threading his way among the scattered couches. Usually most of these were unoccupied, since it took less than 500 hours to bring the average child through tensor calculus and hence to the limits of what he could be taught by passive inculcation alone. Now, however, every couch was occupied, and few of them by children.

  One of the counterpointing, sub-audible voices was murmuring: “Some of the cities which turned bindlestiff did not pursue the usual policy of piracy and raiding, but settled instead upon faraway worlds and established tyrannical rules. Most of these were overthrown by the Earth police; the cities were not efficient fighting machines. Those which withstood the first assault sometimes were allowed to remain in power for various reasons of policy, but such cases were invariably barred from commerce. Some of these involuntary empires may still remain on the fringes of Earth’s jurisdiction. Most notorious of these recrudescences of imperialism was the reduction of Thor Five, the work of one of the earliest of the Okies, a heavily militarized city which had already earned itself the popular nickname of ‘the Mad Dogs.’ The epithet, current among other Okies as well as planetary populations, of course referred primarily …”

  “Here’s your man,” the monitor said in a low voice. Amalfi looked down at Karst. The serf had already undergone a considerable change. He was no longer a distorted and worn caricature of a man, chocolate colored with sun, wind, and ground-in dirt, so brutalized as to be almost beyond pity. He was, instead, rather like a fetus as he lay curled on the couch, innocent and still perfectable, as yet unmarked by any experience which counted. His past—and there could hardly have been much of it, for although he had said that his present wife, Eedit, had been his fifth, he was obviously scarcely twenty years old—had been so completely monotonous and implacable that, given the chance, he had sloughed it off as easily and totally as one throws away a single garment. He was, Amalfi realized, much more essentially a child than any Okie infant would ever be.

  The monitor touched Karst’s shoulder and the serf stirred uneasily, then sat up, instantly awake, his intense blue eyes questioning Amalfi. The monitor handed him the anodized aluminum tumbler, now beaded with cold, and Karst drank from it. The pungent liquid made him sneeze, quickly and without seeming to notice that he had sneezed, like a cat.

  “How’s it coming through, Karst?” Amalfi said.

  “It is very hard,” the serf said. He took another pull at the tumbler. “But once grasped, it seems to bring everything into flower at once. Lord Amalfi, the Proctors claim that IMT came from the sky on a cloud. Yesterday I only believed that. Today I think I understand it.”

  “I think you do,” Amalfi said. “And you’re not alone. We have serfs by scores in the city now, learning—just look around you and you’ll see. And they’re learning more than just simple physics or cultural morphology. They’re learning freedom, beginning with the first one—freedom to hate.”

  “I know that lesson,” Karst said, with a profound and glacial calm. “But you awakened me for something.”

  “I did,” the mayor agreed grimly. “We’ve got a visitor we think you’ll be able to identify: a Proctor. And he’s up to something that smells damned funny to me and Hazleton both, but we can’t pin down what it is. Come give us a hand, will you?”

  “You’d better give him some time to rest, Mr. Mayor,” the monitor said disapprovingly. “Being dumped out of hypnopaedic trance is a considerable shock; he’ll need at least an hour.”

  Arnalfi stared at the monitor incredulously. He was about to note that neither Karst nor the city had the hour to spare when it occurred to him that to say so would take ten words where one was plenty. “Vanish,” he said.

  The monitor did his best.

  Karst looked intently at the judas. The man on the screen had his back turned; he was looking into the big operations tank in the city manager’s office. The indirect light gleamed on his shaved and oiled head. Amalfi watched over Karst’s left shoulder, his teeth sunk firmly in a new cigar.

  “Why, the man’s as bald as I am,” the mayor said. “And he can’t be much past his adolescence, judging by his skull; he’s forty-five at the most. Recognize him, Karst?”

  “Not yet,” Karst said. “All the Proctors shave their heads. If he would only turn around—ah. Yes. That’s Heldon. I have seen him myself only once, but he is easy to recognize. He is young, as the Proctors go. He is the stormy petrel of the Great Nine—some think him a friend of the serfs. At least he is less quick with the whip than the others.”

  “What would he be wanting here?”

  “Perhaps he will tell us.” Karst’s eyes remained fixed upon the Proctor’s image.

  “Your request puzzles me,” Hazleton’s voice said, issuing smoothly from the speaker above the judas. The city manager could not be seen,
but his expression seemed to modulate the sound of his voice almost specifically: the tiger mind masked behind a pussy-cat purr as behind a pussy-cat smile. “We’re glad to hear of new services we can render to a client, of course. But we certainly never suspected that antigravity mechanisms even existed in IMT.”

  “Don’t think me stupid, Mr. Hazleton,” Heldon said. “You and I know that IMT was once a wanderer, as your city is now. We also know that your city, like all Okie cities, would like a world of its own. Will you allow me this much intelligence, please?”

  “For discussion, yes,” Hazleton’s voice said.

  “Then let me say that it’s quite evident to me that you’re nurturing an uprising. You have been careful to stay within the letter of the contract, simply because you dare not breach it, any more than we; the Earth police protect us from each other to that extent. Your Mayor Amalfi was told that it was illegal for the serfs to speak to your people, but unfortunately it is illegal only for the serfs, not for your citizens. If we cannot keep the serfs out of your city, you are under no obligation to do it for us.”

  “A point you have saved me the trouble of making,” Hazleton said.

  “Quite so. I’ll add also that when this revolution of yours comes, I have no doubt that you’ll win it. I don’t know what kinds of weapons you can put into the hands of our serfs, but I assume that they are better than anything we can muster. We haven’t your technology. My fellows disagree with me, but I am a realist.”

  “An interesting theory,” Hazleton’s voice said. There was a brief pause. In the silence, a soft pattering sound became evident. Hazleton’s fingertips, Amalfi guessed, drumming on the desk top, as if with amused impatience. Heldon’s face remained impassive.

  “The Proctors believe that they can hold what is theirs,” Heldon said at last. “If you overstay your contract, they will go to war against you. They will be justified, but unfortunately Earth justice is a long way from here. You will win. My interest is to see that we have a way of escape.”

  “Via spindizzy?”

  “Precisely.” Heldon permitted a stony smile to stir the corners of his mouth. “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Hazleton. If it comes to war, I will fight as hard as any other Proctor to hold this world of ours. I come to you only because you can repair the spindizzies of IMT. You needn’t expect me to enter into any extensive treason on that account.”

  Hazleton, it appeared, was being obdurately stupid. “I fail to see why I should lift a finger for you,” he said.

  “Observe, please. The Proctors will fight because they believe that they must. It will probably be a hopeless fight, but it will do your city some damage all the same. As a matter of fact, it will cripple your city beyond repair, unless your luck is phenomenal. Now then: none of the Proctors except one other man and myself know that the spin-dizzies of IMT are still able to function. That means that they won’t try to escape with them; they’ll try to knock you out instead. But with the machines in repair, and one knowledgeable hand at the controls—”

  “I see,” Hazleton said. “You propose to put IMT into flight while you can still get off the planet with a reasonably whole city. In return you offer us the planet and the chance that our own damages will be minimal. Hmm. It’s interesting, anyhow. Suppose I take a look at your spindizzies, and see if they’re in operable condition. It’s been a good many years, without doubt, and untended machinery has a way of gumming up. If they can still be operated at all, we’ll talk about a deal. All right?”

  “It will have to do,” Heldon grumbled. Amalfi saw in the Proctor’s eyes a gleam of cold satisfaction which he recognized at once, from having himself looked out through it often—though never concealing it so poorly. He shut off the screen.

  “Well?” the mayor said. “What’s he up to?”

  “Trouble,” Karst said slowly. “It would be very foolish to give or trade him any advantage. His stated reasons are not his real ones.”

  “Of course not,” Amalfi said. “Whose are? Oh, hello, Mark. What do you make of our friend?”

  Hazleton stepped out of the lift shaft, bouncing lightly once on the resilient concrete of the control-room floor. “He’s a dummox,” the city manager said, “but he’s dangerous. He knows that there’s something he doesn’t know. He also knows that we don’t know what he’s driving at, and he’s on his home grounds. It’s a combination I don’t care for.”

  “I don’t like it myself,” Amalfi said. “When the enemy starts giving away information, look out! Do you think the majority of the Proctors really don’t know that IMT has operable spindizzies?”

  “I am sure they do not,” Karst offered tentatively. Both men turned to him. “The Proctors do not even believe that you are here to capture the planet. At least, they do not believe that that is what you intend, and I’m sure they don’t care, one way or the other.”

  “Why not?” Hazleton said. “I would.”

  “You have never owned several million serfs,” Karst said, without rancor. “You have serfs working for you, and you are paying them wages. That in itself is a disaster for the Proctors. And they cannot stop it. They know that the money you are paying is legal, with the power of the Earth behind it. They cannot stop us from earning it. To do so would cause an uprising at once.”

  Amalfi looked at Hazleton. The money the city was handing out was the Oc dollar. It was legal here—but back in the galaxy it was just so much paper. It was only germanium-backed. Could the Proctors be that naive? Or was IMT simply too old to possess the instantaneous Dirac transmitters which would have told it of the economic collapse of the home lens?

  “And the spindizzies?” Amalfi said. “Who else would know of them among the Great Nine?”

  “Asor, for one,” Karst said. “He is the presiding officer, and the religious fanatic of the group. It is said that he still practices daily the full thirty yogas of the Semantic Rigor, even to chinning himself upon every rung of the Abstraction Ladder. The prophet Maalvin banned the flight of men forever, so Asor would not be likely to allow IMT to fly at this late date.”

  “He has his reasons,” Hazleton said reflectively. “Religions rarely exist in a vacuum. They have effects on the societies they reflect. He’s probably afraid of the spindizzies, in the last analysis. With such a weapon it takes only a few hundred men to make a revolution—more than enough to overthrow a feudal setup like this. IMT didn’t dare keep its spindizzies working.”

  “Go on, Karst,” Amalfi said, raising his hand impatiently at Hazleton. “How about the other Proctors?”

  “There is Bemajdi, but he hardly counts,” Karst said. “Let me think. Remember, I have never seen most of these men. The only one who matters, it seems to me, is Larre. He is a dour-faced old man with a pot belly. He is usually on Heldon’s side, but seldom travels with Heldon all the way. He will worry less about the money the serfs are earning than will the rest. He will contrive a way to tax it away from us—perhaps by declaring a holiday, in honor of the visit of Earthmen to our planet. The collection of tithes is a duty of his.”

  “Would he allow Heldon to put IMT’s spindizzies in shape?”

  “No, probably not,” Karst said. “I believe Heldon was telling the truth when he said that he would have to do that in secret.”

  “I don’t know,” Amalfi said. “I don’t like it. On the surface, it looks as though the Proctors hope to scare us off the planet as soon as the contract expires, and then collect all the money we’ve paid the serfs —with the cops to back them up. But when you look closely at it, it’s crazy. Once the cops find out the identity of IMT—and it won’t take long—they’ll break up both cities and be glad of the chance.”

  Karst said, “Is this because IMT was the Okie city that did—what was done—on Thor Five?”

  Amalfi suddenly found that he was having difficulty in keeping his Adam’s apple where it belonged. “Let that pass, Karst,” he growled. “We’re not going to import that story into the Cloud. That should have been cut from you
r learning tape.”

  “I know it now,” Karst said calmly. “And I am not surprised. The Proctors never change.”

  “Forget it. Forget it, do you hear? Forget everything. Karst, can you go back to being a dumb serf for a night?”

  “Go back to my land?” Karst said. “It would be awkward. My wife must have a new man by now—”

  “No, not back to your land. I want to go with Heldon and look at his spindizzies as soon as he says the word. I’ll need to take some heavy equipment, and I’ll need some help. Will you come along?”

  Hazleton raised his eyebrows. “You won’t fool Heldon, boss.”

  “I think I will. Of course he knows that we’ve educated some of the serfs, but that’s not a thing he can actually see when he looks at it; his whole background is against it. He just isn’t accustomed to thinking of serfs as intelligent. He knows we have thousands of them here, and yet he isn’t really afraid of that idea. He thinks we may arm them, make a mob of them. He can’t begin to imagine that a serf can learn something better than how to handle a sidearm —something better, and far more dangerous.”

  “How can you be sure?” Hazleton said.

  “By analogue. Remember the planet of Thetis Alpha called Fitzgerald, where they used a big beast called a horse for everything— from pulling carts to racing? All right: suppose you visited a place where you had been told that a few horses had been taught to talk. While you’re working there, somebody comes to give you a hand, dragging a spavined old plug with a straw hat pulled down over its ears and a pack on its back. (Excuse me, Karst, but business is business.) You aren’t going to think of that horse as one of the talking ones. You aren’t accustomed to thinking of horses as being able to talk at all.”

  “All right,” Hazleton said, grinning at Karst’s evident discomfiture. “What’s the main strategy from here on out, boss? I gather that you’ve got it set up. Are you ready to give it a name yet?”

  “Not quite,” the mayor said. “Unless you like long titles. It’s still just another problem in political pseudomorphism.”