Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Nevertheless, Amalfi had hardly expected to see the return of He, under wholly controlled spindizzy drive, in barely a century and a half, still faintly, patchily blue-green with cultivation under cloud-banks which glared a brilliant white in the light of a nearby Cepheid variable star. That the wandering body was He had been settled back home on New Earth as soon as Hazleton had been able to identify the wanderer’s advance ultraphone beacon, as Amalfi had predicted; and hardly five minutes after Carrel had brought his ship out of spindizzy drive within hailing distance of the new planet, Amalfi had himself spoken to Miramon, the very same Hevian leader with whom the Okies had dealt one hundred and fifty years ago—to the mutual astonishment of each that the other was still alive.

  “Not that I myself should have been surprised,” Miramon said, from the head of his great council table of black, polished, oily wood. “After all, I myself am still alive, to an age beyond the age of all the patriarchs in our recorded history; which in turn is only a small fraction of the age you gave us to understand you had attained when first we met you. But old habits of thought die hard. We were able to isolate and purify only a few of the anti-agathics produced by our jungle, acting on the hints you had given us, before the jungle died off and the plants which produced those drugs did not prove cultivatable under the new conditions, so we had no choice but to search for ways to synthesize these compounds. We were forced to work very fast, and happily the search was successful by the third generation, but in the meantime the existing supply had sufficed to keep only a few of us alive beyond what we still think of as our normal lifespans. Hence to most of our population, Mayor Amalfi, you are now only a legend, an immortal man of infinite wisdom from beyond the stars, and I have been unable to prevent myself from coming to think of you in much the same way.”

  Though he still wore in his topknot the great black barbaric saw-toothed feather of his authority, the Miramon before Amalfi today bore little resemblance to the lithe, supple, hard-headedly practical semi-savage who had once squatted on the floor in Amalfi’s presence, because chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods. His skin was still firm and tanned, his eyes bright and darting, but, though his abundant hair was now quite white, he had settled into that period of life, neither youth nor age, characteristic of the man who goes on anti-agathics only when somewhat past “natural” middle age. His councillors—including Retma, of Fabr-Suithe, which in Amalfi’s time had been a bandit town which had been utterly destroyed during the last struggle before He took flight, but which now, rebuilt in ceremonial pink marble, was the second city of all He—mostly wore this same look. There were one or two who obviously had not been allowed access to the death-curing drugs until they had been in their “natural” seventies, bringing to the council table the probably spurious appearance of sagacity conferred by many wrinkles, an obvious physical fragility, and a sexual neutrality which was both slightly repellent and covertly enviable at the same time—a somatotype which for mankind as a whole had long ago lost its patent as the physiological stamp of hard-won wisdom, but which here among these recent immortals still exerted a queer authority, even upon Amalfi.

  “If you managed to synthesize even one of the anti-agathics, you’ve proven yourselves better chemists than anyone else in human history,” Amalfi said. “They’re far and away the most complicated molecules ever found in nature; certainly we’ve never heard of anyone who was able to synthesize even one.”

  “One is all we managed to synthesize,” Miramon admitted. “And the synthetic form has certain small but undesirable side-effects we’ve never been able to eliminate. Several others turned out to be natural sapogenins which we could raise in our artificial climate, and modify into anti-agathics by two or three subsequent fermentation steps. Finally there are four others, of very broad usefulness, which we produce by fermentation alone, using micro-organisms grown in nutrient solutions in deep tanks, into which we feed comparatively simple and cheap precursors.”

  “We have one like that, the first, in fact, that was ever discovered: ascomycin,” Amalfi said. “I think I will stick to my original judgment. As chemists you people could obviously give all the rest of us cards and spades.”

  “Then it is fortunate for us, and perhaps for every sentient being everywhere, that it is not as chemists that we come seeking you,” Retma said, a trifle grimly.

  “Which brings me to my main question,” Amalfi said. “Just why did you turn back? I can’t imagine that you would have been seeking me personally, you had no reason to believe that I was anywhere within thousands of parsecs of this area; we last parted company on the other side of the home galaxy. Obviously you must have looped back toward home as soon as you were sure you had centralized control over your spindizzy installation, long before you were much past half-way to the Andromeda galaxy. What I want to know is, what turned you back?”

  “There you are both right and wrong,” Miramon said, with a trace of what could have been pride; it was hard to tell, for his face was extremely solemn. “We obtained reasonably close control of the anti-gravity machines only about thirty years after you and I parted company, Mayor Amalfi. When the full implications of what we had found were borne in upon us, we were highly elated. Now we had a real planet, in the radical meaning of the word, a real wanderer which could go where it chose, settling in one solar system or another and leaving it again when we so decided. By that time we were almost self-sufficient, there was obviously no need for us to become migrant workers, as your city and its enemies had been. And since we were well on the way to the second galaxy in any event, and since there seemed to be absolutely no limit to the velocities we could mount with the huge mass of our planet on which to operate, we chose to go on and explore.”

  “To the Andromeda galaxy?”

  “Yes, and beyond. Of course we saw very little of that galaxy, which is as vast as our home; we think that it is not inhabited by any widespread, space-cruising race such as yours and mine, but in the brief sampling of its stars that we were able to take we might well simply have missed hitting upon an inhabited or colonized system. By that time, in any event, we had made the discovery which was to become the basis of our lives and purposes from then onward, and knew that we should have to return home very shortly. We left the Andromeda nebula for its satellite, the one that you identified for us as M-33 on our old star-tapestries from the Great Age, and thence took the million and a half light year leap to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. It was during our transition from the Lesser to the Greater Cloud that you detected us. That was, to be sure, an accident; we had intended to go directly through into the home galaxy and onward to Earth, where, our experience with you had given us good reason to believe, we might find a reservoir of knowledge great enough to cope with what we had discovered. That our own knowledge was insufficient was never for a moment in doubt.

  “But it is an accident of the greatest good omen that we should have been found again by you as we were returning home, Mayor Amalfi. Surely the gods must have arranged such an accident, which otherwise is impossibly unlikely; for if there is any man not on Earth itself who can help us, you are that man.”

  “You were not once such a believer in the gods, as I recall,” Amalfi said, smiling tightly.

  “Opinions change with age; otherwise what is age for?”

  “So does history,” Amalfi said. “And, whether I can help you or not, it is a lucky accident that you stopped here before carrying on into the home lens. Earth is no longer dominant there. We’ve had considerable difficulty in understanding what actually is going on, the messages that we get from there come pouring in to us in such an enormous garble; but of one thing I’m sure: there’s a huge new imperialism on the rise there, on its way to becoming as powerful as Earth once was, and as Vega was before Earth. It calls itself the Web of Hercules, and what remains of Earth’s interstellar empire doesn’t appear to be putting up much of a resistance against it. If you want my advice, I would suggest that you stay out of the home
galaxy entirely, or you may well be gobbled down whole.”

  There was a long silence around the Hevian council table. At last, Miramon said:

  “This leaves us with little recourse indeed. It may well be that there is no answer, as we have often suspected. Or it may be that the gods have indeed brought us back to the one source of wisdom that we need.”

  “We will know soon enough,” Retma said quietly. “If in that instant there will be time enough to know anything. Or enough of time left thereafter to remember it.”

  “I shall probably be unable to advise you so long as I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amalfi said, impressed in spite of himself by the tone of high seriousness with which the Hevians spoke. “Just what was the discovery that turned you back? What is the forthcoming event that you seem to dread?”

  “Nothing less,” Retma said evenly, “than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.”

  For a while, even after they had explained it to him, Amalfi was so unable to believe that the Hevians had meant what they said that he was prepared to dismiss it as one of those superstitions with which He had been riddled, like many another provincial planet, when the Okies had first made contact with it. That time must have a stop was a proposition that nothing in all his long life had prepared him to accept even for an instant. Even after it became reluctantly clear to him that what Miramon and the Hevians had found in the intergalactic deeps had been a real event with real implications, and one which Amalfi’s own people—particularly Schloss’ group—were prepared to document, event and implication alike, he continued to be unable to do more with it than dismiss it out of hand.

  He said so, at a conference on shipboard which included Miramon, Retma, Dr. Schloss, Carrel, and—by Dirac—Jake and Dr. Gifford Bonner, the latter the leader of that group of New Earth philosophers which Hazleton had recently joined, called the Stochastics. “If what you say is true,” he said, “there’s nothing to be done about it anyhow. Time will come to an end, and that’s that. But the end of the world has been predicted often before, I seem to remember from history, and here we all are still; I can’t credit that so vast a process as the whole physical universe could possibly come to an end in the flicker of an eyelash, and since I can’t believe it, I’m not suddenly going to start behaving as if I did. No more do I see why anyone else should.”

  “Amalfi, you’re quite right! You don’t understand,” Dr. Schloss said. “Of course the end of the universe has been predicted often before. It’s one of those two-pronged choices that any philosopher has to make: either you hold that the universe will at some time come to an end, or else you arrive at the position that it never can; there are intermediate guesses that you can make, that’s where we get our cyclical theories, but essentially they’re simply hedges. If you decided that the universe has a limited lifetime, then you must begin to think about when that life will come to an end, on the basis of whatever data are available to you. We have been agreed for millennia that the universe cannot last forever, however we’ve hedged the agreement, so that leaves us nothing to quarrel about but the date at which we fix the end. And sooner or later, too, the time was going to come when we had enough data to fix even the date without doubt. The Hevians have brought us sufficient facts to do that now; the date is fixed, whatever it proves to be, without cavil or quibble. If we are to talk about the matter intelligently at all, there is a fixed fact with which we must begin. It is not open to argument. It is a fact.”

  “I think,” Amalfi said in a voice of steel, “that you have gone quietly insane. You should listen to the City Fathers for a while on this subject, as I have; if you like, I can give you a Dirac line to them from right here aboard ship, and you can hear some of the memories that they have stored up—some of them dating back long before spaceflight; our city is very old. You should hear particularly the stories about the end of the world which emerge as inevitably as a plant from a seed every time someone takes it into his head to believe that he has a direct wire to the Almighty. Some of the stories, of course, are just jokes, like the many predictions of the end of the world which were made by a man named Voliva, who knew that the Earth was flat; or the predictions of Armageddon that came repeatedly from an Earthly sect called the Believers, which was riding high on Earth during the very decade when both the spindizzy and the anti-agathics were discovered. But high intelligence doesn’t prevent you from falling into this kind of apocryphal madness, either; seven centuries before spaceflight on Earth, the greatest scientist of that time, a man named Bacon, was predicting the imminent arrival of Anti-Christ simply because he was unable to persuade his contemporaries to adopt scientific method, which he had just invented. Furthermore, I may add, in the decade just before spaceflight on Earth, all the best minds of the age saw no future for the human race, and all other air-breathing life on Earth, but complete obliteration in a world-wide thermonuclear war, which over a period of eight years could have broken out within any given twenty-minute period. And in that, Dr. Schloss, they were quite right; their world really could have ended during any one of these twenty-minute periods; the physical possibilities were there, but somehow the world managed to last until spaceflight became only a specter, burned out by starlight, as the ghosts of night-bound peoples evaporate from their mythologies as soon as they’re able to produce light even at midnight simply by tripping a switch.”

  He looked around at the faces of the men drawn up at the ship’s chart table. Few of them would meet his eyes; most of them were looking down at the table itself, or at their own hands. Their expressions were those of men who had been listening to a mass murderer attempting to enter a plea of insanity.

  “Amalfi,” Jake’s voice said abruptly from the Dirac, “the time for forensics is past. This question does not have two sides, except for the right side and the wrong side, and we are going to have to shuck you off as a brilliant advocate for the wrong side. You have done your magnificent best, but since the right side does not need an advocate, you have been wasting your breath. Let me ask the rest of this conference: What shall we do now? Does it appear that, as the Hevians think, there is anything at all that we can do? I am inclined to doubt it.”

  “So am I,” Dr. Schloss said, though there was nothing in his manner to suggest the gloom inherent in his conclusion; he seemed rather to be as intensely interested as Amalfi had ever seen him in his life. “For temporal creatures to hope to survive the end of time is surely as futile as a fish hoping to survive being thrown into a sun. The paradox is immediate, on the surface, and quite inescapable.”

  “No technical problem is ever that insoluble,” Amalfi said in exasperation. “Miramon, if you will pardon me for passing such a judgment—and I don’t care if you don’t—I think you are suffering from the same syndrome as Dr. Freeman and Dr. Schloss: you have grown old before your time. You’ve lost your sense of adventure.”

  “Not entirely,” Miramon said, regarding Amalfi with an expression of grave and hurt disappointment. “We, at least, are not yet convinced that there is no answer; if we do not find it here, we have every intention of continuing to travel in the hope of finding someone with whom we can combine forces, someone who may have some solution to suggest. If we find no one, then we shall continue to seek that solution ourselves.”

  “Good for you,” Amalfi said fiercely. “And by God I’ll go with you. We can’t very well re-enter our own galaxy, but the next one is NGC 6822, that’s about a million light years from here—for you, that’s only a hop. And at least we’d be in motion; we wouldn’t be sitting around here with folded hands waiting for the blow to fall.”

  “That would be motion without purpose,” Miramon said solemnly. “I agree with you that it would be dangerous and unwise to risk any entanglement with the Web of Hercules, whatever that may be; but I can see no better point in cruising from one galaxy to another solely in the bare hope of encountering a high civilization which might be able to help us, and all the rest of the universe with us. We ha
ve that hope, but it cannot be the final goal of our journey; our ultimate destination must be the center of the metagalaxy, the hub of all the galaxies of space-time. It is only there, where all the forces of the universe lie in dynamic balance, that anyone can hope to take any action to escape or to modify the end which is coming. There is, after all, not much time left before that moment is due. And above all, Mayor Amalfi, it is not simply a technical problem; it is an ending which was written organically into the fundamental structure of the universe itself, written in the beginning by what hands we know not; all that we can know now is that it was foreordained.”