Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  He put the question to the Hevian boy, finding it necessary to be rather more abstract than he wished; but the boy grasped not only the sense of what he was trying to say, but worked his way back to the concrete nouns with impressive insight.

  “The jury will decide,” the boy said. “But there are rules. A dress is only a little truth, and costs only one point. Sunrise on a captive planet, like New Earth, is a natural law, that may cost you fifty. On a free planet like He, it may be only partly true and cost you ten. Or it may be a flat lie and cost you nothing. That is why we have the jury.”

  Web had to have this restated to him in increasingly simpler terms before he chanced explaining it in turn to Estelle; but at last he was reasonably sure that both the New Earth players understood the rules of the game. To make assurance doubly sure, he asked the Hevians to begin, so that he and Estelle could become familiar with the kinds of lies which were most admired, and the way the jury of players penalized each inadvertent truth.

  The first two stories came close to convincing him that he was being overcautious. At the very least it seemed plain, both from the terms in which the game had been described and the stories as they were told, that the Hevians as a race had little talent for fiction. The third player, however, a girl of about nine who obviously had been bursting with impatience for her turn to come around, stunned him completely. The moment she was called upon, she began:

  “This morning I saw a letter, and the address on it was Four. The letter had feet, and the feet had shoes on them. It was delivered by missile, but it walked all the way. Though it is Four for four, it’s triple treble trouble,” she wound up triumphantly.

  There was a short, embarrassed silence.

  “That doesn’t sound like a lie at all,” Estelle said to Web, relapsing into her own language. “It sounds more like a riddle.”

  “That was not fair,” the Hevian leader was telling the nine-year-old at the same time in a stern voice. “We hadn’t explained the rules of the coup.” He turned to Web and Estelle. “Another part of the game is to try to tell a story which is entirely true, but sounds like a lie. In the coup, the jury penalizes you for lying if it can catch you. If you aren’t caught, you have told a perfect truth, which wins the round even over a perfect lie. But it was unfair of Pyla to try for a coup before we’d explained it to you.”

  “I challenge once,” Web said gravely. “Is really this morning was? If, then we had had knowed; but we haven’t.”

  “This morning,” Pyla insisted, determinedly defending her coup in the face of the group’s obvious disapproval. “You weren’t there then. I saw you leave.”

  “How do you know about all these?” Web said.

  “I hung around,” the girl said. Abruptly, she giggled. “And I heard you two talking, too, behind the hill.”

  Since the whole of her answer was offered in a fluent, though heavily accented Okie bêche-de-mer, there were obviously no further questions to be asked.

  Web was feeling just barely civil toward females, but he offered Pyla his politest smile. “In that case,” he said formally, “you win. We thank you from our heartmost bottom. This is good news.”

  He never did quite make up his mind whether his imperfect knowledge of Hevian made this polite speech come out as “Pullup hellup yiz are ninety” or “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porter-pease?”, or whether he managed to say exactly what he thought he was saying, but to his great astonishment, Pyla burst into tears.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” she wailed. “That would have been my very first coup. And you beat me, you beat me.”

  The jury was already in a huddle. A few moments later Silvador, the leader, stroked Pyla gently on the temples and said, “Hush now. On the contrary, our Web-friend must be penalized for lying.”

  His eyes twinkling, he offered Estelle his arm, and she came to her feet in one sinuous unravelling of the knot she had tied herself into during the lying game.

  “The penalty must include our Estelle-friend too,” he added portentously. “You must both come with us, directly to the city, and be—” he struck an executioner’s pose—”put to sleep for a while.”

  “No,” Web said. “We have to go.” He clambered stiffly to his feet.

  “Please,” Silvador said. “We don’t really mean to punish. You wanted to sleep-learn. We can take you to the sleep-learner. Is that not what you asked this morning? Pyla has two hours coming to her this afternoon. We were going to give it to you; you could learn Hevian and talk to us!”

  “But how did we lie?” Estelle said, her eyes dancing.

  “Web said it was good news,” Silvador said solemnly, “that his Dee-friend was already here. He told a flat lie about an accomplished fact; that costs 50 points.”

  The two New Earth children looked at each other. “Oh, algae and gravity,” Web said suddenly. “Let’s go do it. We’ll see Dee soon enough.”

  Dee blew her top.

  “What on Earth were you thinking of, John?” she demanded. “How do you know what they teach in hypnopaedia here? How could you let children run around a strange planet without knowing what these savages might do to them?”

  “They didn’t do anything to us—” Web said.

  “They’re not savages—” Amalfi said.

  “I know what they are. I was here the first time, when you were. And I think it’s criminally irresponsible to let savages tamper with a child’s mind. Or any civilized mind.”

  “How would you recognize a civilized mind?” Amalfi demanded. But he knew that it was certainly a fruitless question, and possibly a spiteful one. He could see well enough that she was the same girl he had met during the Utopia-Gort affair, the same woman he had loved, the same bright physical image he would cherish to the nearing end of time; but she was getting old, and how do you tell a woman that? The Hevians and the children alike were approaching the end of the world as a new experience, but Dee, and Amalfi, and Mark, and indeed the whole of New Earth were approaching it from age, with the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had no thought but to stave off new experience, to dwell safely in accomplished fact. He himself would not accept that such a thing was to happen; Dee would not let the children learn a new language; they were exhibiting all the stigmata of the onset of old age, and so was their culture. The drugs still worked; physically they were still young; but age was with them nonetheless, and for good. In the long run there was no cheating time and the entropy gradient, nor any hope but that of putting one’s hope into Hevians and other children. The cancer-scarred giant King of Buda-Pesht and the Acolyte jungle had been as old as Amalfi was now when Amalfi had met and bested him, and he had even then settled into an idée fixe; he had been still physically arrested, but mentally he was already used up.

  There were only two ways to go toward death; you accept that you are going to die, or you refuse to believe it. To deny that the problem is there is childish, or senile; it lacks the fluidity of adjustment which is that process called maturity; and when children and savages are more fluid at this than you are, you must see that curfew has struck for you and go gracefully. Otherwise, they will bury you, their titular leader, nominally alive.

  Dee had not, of course, bothered to answer the question; she simply looked grim. The aborted argument had been conducted mostly sotto voce anyhow, for the rest of the Hevian council-room was deeply embroiled in an attempt to quanticize the amount of gamma radiation which would be produced when the two universes passed through each other, and its degree of convertibility into either of the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had been forced to push her way into the meeting to find Web and Estelle, who by now had become accepted silent partners at such skull-sessions.

  “I’m not content with that at all,” Retma was saying. “Dr. Schloss is assuming that a substantial part of this energy will go off as sheer noise, as though the meeting of the two universes were analogous to the clashing of cymbals. To allow that, one has to assume that Planck’s Constant holds tr
ue in Hilbert space, for which we haven’t a shred of evidence. One can’t superimpose an entropy gradient at right angles to a reaction which itself involves entropies of opposite sign on each side of the equation.”

  “But why can’t you?” Dr. Schloss said. “That’s what Hilbert space is for: to provide a choice of axes for just such an operation. If you have such a choice, the rest is only a simple exercise in projective geometry.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Retma said, somewhat stiffly. “I’m questioning its applicability. We have no data which suggest that handling the problem in this way would be anything more than an exercise—so whether it would be a simple exercise or a complex exercise is not to the point.”

  “I think we’d better go,” Dee said. “Web, Estelle, please come along; we’re only interrupting, and there’s a lot we have to do.”

  Her penetrating stage whisper rasped across the discussion more effectively than any speech at normal conversational volume could have done. Dr. Schloss’s face pinched with annoyance. For a moment, the faces of the Hevians went politely blank; then Miramon turned and looked first at Dee, and then at Amalfi, slightly raising one eyebrow. Amalfi nodded, a little embarrassed.

  “Do we have to go, grandmother?” Web protested. “I mean, all this is what we’re here for. And Estelle’s good at math; now and then Retma and Dr. Schloss want her to match up Hevian names for terms with ours.”

  Dee thought about it. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it can’t do any harm.”

  This was exactly and expectably the wrong answer, though Web could have had no way of anticipating it. He did not know, as Amalfi knew very well by direct memory, that women on He had once been much worse than slaves, that in fact they had been regarded as a wholly loathesome though necessary cross between a demon and a lower animal; hence he was unequipped to see that Hevian women today were still crucially subordinate to their men, and far from welcome in a situation of this kind. Nor did Amalfi see any present opportunity to explain to Web—or to Estelle, either—why both children must now go. The explanation would require more knowledge of Dee than either of the children had; they would need to know, for instance, that in Dee’s eyes the women of He had been emancipated but not enfranchised, and that for Dee this abstract distinction carried a high emotional charge—all the more so because the Hevian women themselves were obviously quite content to have it that way.

  Miramon settled his papers, arose and walked smoothly toward them, his face grave. Dee watched him approach with an expression of smouldering, resolute suspicion with which Amalfi could not help but sympathize, funny though he found it.

  “We are delighted to have you with us, Mrs. Hazleton,” Miramon said, bowing his head. “Much of what we are today, we owe to you. I hope you will allow us to express our gratitude; my wife and her ladies await to do you honor.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t—I really mean—”

  She had to stop, obviously finding it impossible to summon up in a split second the memory of what she had meant so many years ago, when she had been, whether she was yet aware of it or not, another person. Back then, she had in fact been one of the prime movers in the emancipation of the women of He, and Amalfi had been glad of her vigorous help, particularly since it had turned out to be crucial in a bloody power-struggle on the planet, and hence crucial to the survival of the city—the latter a formula which then had been as magical and beyond critical examination as the will to live itself, and now was as meaningless a slogan and one as far gone in time as “Remember the Bastille”, “Mason, Dixon, Nixon and Yates”, or “The Stars Must Be Ours!” Dee’s first encounter with Hevian women had been in the days when they had been stinking unwashed creatures kept in ceremonial cages; something about Miramon’s present mode of address to her apparently reminded her of those days, perhaps even made her feel the bars and the dirt falling into place about her own person; yet the time gap was too great, and the politeness too intensive, to permit her to take offense on those grounds, if indeed she was aware of them. She looked quickly at Amalfi, but his face remained unchanged; she knew him well enough to be able to see that there would be no help from that quarter.

  “Thank you,” she said helplessly. “Web, Estelle, it’s time we left.”

  Web turned to Estelle, as if for help, in unconscious burlesque of Dee’s unspoken appeal to Amalfi, but Estelle was already rising. To Amalfi’s eyes the girl looked amused and a little contemptuous. Dee was going to have trouble with that one. As for Web, anyone could see plainly that he was in love, so he would require no special handling.

  “What I suggest is this,” Estelle’s father’s voice said, way up in the middle of the air. “Suppose we assume that there is no thermodynamic crossover between the two universes until the moment of contact. If that’s the case, there’s no possibility of applying symmetry unless we assume that the crossover point is actually a moment of complete neutrality, no matter how explosive it seems to somebody on one side or the other of the equivalence sign. That’s a reasonable assumption, I think, and it would enable us to get rid of Planck’s Constant—I agree with Retma that in a situation like this that’s only a bugger factor—and handle the opposite signs in terms of the old Schiff neutrino-antineutrino theory of gravitation. That can be quanticized equally well, after all.”

  “Not in terms of the Grebe numbers,” Dr. Schloss said.

  “But that’s exactly the point, Schloss,” Jake said excitedly. “Grebe numbers don’t cross over; they apply in our universe, and probably they apply on the other side too, but they don’t cross. What we need is a function that does cross, or else some assumption that fits the facts, that frees us of crossover entirely. That’s what Retma was saying, if I understood him correctly, and I think he’s right. If you don’t have a crossover expression which is perfectly neutral anywhere in Hilbert space, then you’re automatically making an assumption about a real No-Man’s-Land. What we’re forced to start with here is No.”

  Estelle stopped at the door and turned to look toward the invisible source of the voice.

  “Daddy,” she said, “that’s just like translating Hevian math into New Earth math. If it’s No-Man’s-Land you have to deal with, why don’t you start with the bullets?”

  “Come, dear,” Dee said. The door closed.

  There was a very long silence in the room after that.

  “You are letting those children go to waste, Mayor Amalfi,” Miramon said at last. “Why do you do it? If only you would fill their brains with the facts that they need—and it is so easy, as you well know, you taught us how to do it—”

  “It’s no longer so easy with us,” Amalfi said. “We are older than you are; we no longer share your preoccupation with the essences of things. It would take too long to explain how we came to that pass. We have other things to think about now.”

  “If that is true,” Miramon said slowly, “then indeed we must hear no more about it. Otherwise I shall be tempted to feel sorry for you; and that must not happen, otherwise we all are lost.”

  “Not so,” Amalfi said, smiling tightly. “Nothing is ever that final. Where were we? This is only the beginning of the end.”

  “Were the universe to last forever, Mayor Amalfi,” Miramon said, “I should never understand you.”

  And so the betrayal was complete. Web and Estelle never heard the stiff and bitter exchange between Amalfi and Hazleton, across the trillions and trillions of miles of seethingly empty space between He and the New Earth, which resulted in Hazleton’s being forced to call his wife home before she antagonized the Hevians any further; nor did they know precisely why Dee’s recall had to mean their recall. They simpy went, mute and grieving, willy-nilly, expressing by silence—the only weapon that they had—their revolt against the insanities of adult logic. In their hearts they knew that they had been denied the first real thing that they had ever wanted, except for each other.

  And time was running out.

  CHAPTER FIVE: Jehad

  THAT con
versation had been unusually painful for Amalfi, too, despite his many centuries of experience at having differences of opinion with Hazleton, ending ordinarily in enforcement of Amalfi’s opinion if there was no other way around it. There had been something about this quarrel which had been tainted for Amalfi, and he knew very well what it was: the abortive, passionless and fruitless autumnal affair with Dee. Sending her home to Mark now, necessary though he believed it to be, was too open to interpretation as an act of revenge upon the once-beloved for being no longer loved. Such things happened between lovers, as Amalfi knew very well.

  But there was so much to be done that he managed to forget about it after Dee and the children had left on the recall ship. He was not, however, allowed to forget about it for long—only, in fact, for three weeks.

  The discussion of the forthcoming catastrophe had at last entered the stage where it was no longer possible to avoid coming to grips with the contrary entropy gradients, and hence had entered an area where words alone no longer sufficed—in fact, could seldom be called upon at all. This had had the effect of driving those participants who were primarily engineers or administrators or both, like Miramon and Amalfi, or primarily philosophers, like Gifford Bonner, into the stance of bystanders; so that the discussions now had been shifted to Retma’s study. Amalfi stuck with them whenever he could, for he never knew when Retma, Jake or Schloss might drop back out of the symbolic stratosphere and say something he could comprehend and use.

  It was being heavy weather in the study today, however. Retma was saying:

  “The problem as I see it is that time in our experience is not retro-dictable. We write a diffusion equation like this, for instance.” He turned to his blackboard—the immemorial “research instrument” of theoretical physicists everywhere—and wrote:

  Over Retma’s head, for Jake’s benefit, a small proxy fixed its television eye on the precise chalkmarks. “In this situation a-squared is a real constant, so it is predictive only for a future time t, but not for an earlier time t, because the retrodictive expression diverges.”