Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “I feel a little like that myself,” Hazleton admitted. “I had no plans to go over there before the end—and yet I don’t want to let the old hulk go by default. Maybe now is the best time; after all, I was the one who called these celebrants together to begin with; let’s be ceremonial, then, before we’re all too busy to think about it any more.”

  “Web? Estelle? Will you go by what the City Fathers say?”

  Web looked into Amalfi’s face, and apparently was reassured at least partially by what he saw there. “On one condition,” he said. “Estelle goes where she wants to go, whatever the City Fathers say. If they say there’s no room for me aboard He, all right; but they can’t say that to Estelle.”

  Estelle opened her mouth, but Web lifted his palm before her face and she subsided, kissing the base of his thumb instead. Her face was pale but serene; Amalfi had never before seen such a pure distillation of bloodless, passionate confidence as lay over her exquisite features. It was a good thing she was Web’s, for again, for the fiftieth time, Amalfi’s slogging brutal tireless heart was swollen with sterile love.

  “Very good,” he said. He offered Dee his arm. “Mark, with your permission?”

  “Of course,” Hazleton said; but when Dee took Amalfi’s arm, his eyes turned as hard as agate. “We’ll meet at the City Fathers’ at 0100.”

  “I didn’t expect this of you, John,” Dee said, under the moonlight in Duffy Square. “Isn’t it a little late?”

  “Very late,” Amalfi agreed. “And 0100 isn’t far away. Why are you staying with Mark?”

  “Call it belated common sense.” She sat down against an ancient railing and looked up at the blurred stars. “No, don’t, that’s not what it is. I love him. John, for all his neglects and his emptiness. I’d forgotten that for a while, but it’s so. I’m sorry, but it’s so.”

  “I wish you were a little sorrier.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “So you’d believe what you’re saying,” Amalfi said harshly. “Face it, Dee. It was a great romantic decision until you realized that Web would be going with me. You’re still looking for surrogates. You didn’t make it with me. You won’t make it with Web either.”

  “What a bastardly thing to say. Let’s go; I’ve heard enough.”

  “Deny it, then.”

  “I deny it, damn you.”

  “You’ll withdraw your objections to Web’s going with me on He?”

  “That has nothing to do with it. It’s a filthy accusation and I won’t listen to another word about it.”

  Amalfi was silent. The moonlight streamed down on Father Duffy’s face, toneless and enigmatic. Nobody, not even the City Fathers, knew who Father Duffy had been. There was an old splash of blood on his left foot, but nobody knew how that had gotten there, either; it had been left there just in case it was historic.

  “Let’s go.”

  “No. It’s early yet; they won’t be there for another hour. Why do you want Web to stay on New Earth? If I’m wrong, then tell me what’s right.”

  “It’s none of your damned business, and I’m tired of this whole subject.”

  “It’s wholly my business. I need Estelle. If Web stays here, she stays here.”

  “You,” Dee said in a voice of bitter, dawning triumph, “are in love with Estelle! Why, you self-righteous—”

  “Mind your tongue. I am in love with Estelle—and I’ll lay no more finger on her than I ever laid on you. I’ve loved many more women than you ever managed to maneuver into your voyeur’s household, most of them before you were even born; I know the difference between love and possession—I learned it the hard way, whereas I can’t see that you ever learned it at all. You are going to learn it tonight that I promise you.”

  “Are you threatening me, John?”

  “You’re damned well right I am.”

  At Tudor Tower Place, bridging 42nd Street at First Avenue, looking toward the bare plaza where the UN Building had fallen in a shower of blood and glass a thousand years ago:

  “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “I will go wherever you go.”

  “I will go wherever you go.”

  “No matter what the City Fathers say?”

  “No matter what the City Fathers say.”

  “Then that’s all we need.”

  “Yes. That’s all we need.”

  In the control tower:

  “They’re late,” Hazleton said, a little fretfully. “Oh, well, it’s an easy town to get lost in.”

  Duffy Square:

  “You wouldn’t like it if I changed my mind and came with you.”

  “I don’t want you. I’m interested only in the kids.”

  “You can’t call my bluff. As of now, I’m going along.”

  “And so are the kids?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think they’d be better off not on the same planet with—either of us.”

  “That’s a fair start. But it’s only a start. I don’t care whether you go or stay, but I will have Web and Estelle.”

  “I thought you would. But you can’t have them without me.”

  “And Mark?”

  “If he wants to go.”

  “He doesn’t, and you know it.”

  “How can you be so sure? You could be just wishing.”

  Amalfi laughed. Dee balled her left fist and hit him furiously on the bridge of the nose.

  Tudor Tower Place:

  “It’s time to go.”

  “No. No.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Not yet. Not quite yet.”

  “ …. All right. Not quite yet.”

  “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

  “Yes I am, oh yes I am.”

  “No matter what the …”

  “No matter what they say. I’m sure.”

  The control tower:

  “There you are,” Hazleton said. “What happened, did you have an accident? You looked mussed to the eyebrows.”

  “You must have run into a doorknob, John,” Jake added. He stuttered out his parrot’s chuckle. “Well, you came to the right town for it. I don’t know where else in the universe you could find a doorknob.”

  “Where are the children?” Dee said, in a voice as dangerously even as the surface of 12-gauge armor plate.

  “Not here yet,” Hazleton said. “Give them time—they’re afraid the City Fathers may separate them, so naturally they’re staying together until the last minute. What did you fall into, anyhow, Dee? Was it serious?”

  “No.” Her face shut down. Bewildered, Hazleton looked from her to Amalfi and back again. It seemed as though the mouse over Amalfi’s eyes, which was growing rapidly, puzzled him much less than Dee’s grim and non-specific disarray.

  “I hear the children,” Gifford Bonner said. “They’re whispering at the bottom of the lift shaft. John, are you sure this was wise? I begin to misdoubt it. Suppose the City Fathers say no? That would be an injustice; they love each other—why should we put their last three years to a machine test?”

  “Abide it, Gif,” Amalfi said. “It’s too late to do otherwise; and the outcome isn’t as foreclosed as you think.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I hope so too. I make no predictions—the City Fathers surprised me often enough before. But the kids agreed to the test. Beyond that, let’s just wait.”

  “Before Web and Estelle get here,” Hazleton said, his voice suddenly raw, “I’m impelled to say that I think I’ve been taken in. All of a sudden, I wonder who was supposed to tousle whom on this multiple moonlight walk. Not the kids; they don’t need any help from us, or from the City Fathers. What the hell are you doing to me, Dee?”

  “I’m losing my temper with every immortal man in the mortal universe.” Dee spat furiously. “There isn’t a perversion left in the textbooks that somebody hasn’t managed to accuse me of in the past hour, and on evidence that wouldn’t convince a n
ewborn baby.”

  “We’re all of us a little on edge,” Dr. Bonner said. “Forbearance, Dee—and Mark, you too. This is no ordinary farewell party, after all.”

  “For sure not,” Jake said. “It’s a wake for the whole of creation. I’m not a very solemn man, myself, but it doesn’t seem like the fittest occasion for bickering.”

  “Granted,” Mark said grudgingly. “I’m sorry, Dee; I’ve changed my mind.”

  “All right,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scream, either. I want to ask you: do you really want to stay behind? Because if you really want to go with He instead, I’ll go with you.”

  He looked at her closely. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “What about it, Amalfi? Can I change my mind about that, too?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Amalfi said, “except that it leaves New Earth without a proven administrator.”

  “Carrel can do the job. His judgment is much better than it was back at the last election.”

  “We’re here,” Web’s voice said behind them. They all turned. Web and Estelle were standing at the entrance, holding hands. Somehow—though Amalfi was hard put to it to define wherein the difference lay—they no longer looked as though they cared much whether they went with He or not.

  “Why don’t we do what we came here to do?” Amalfi suggested. “Let’s put the whole problem up to the City Fathers—not only the children, but the whole business. I always found them very useful for resolving doubts, even if they only managed to convince me that their recommended course was dead wrong. In questions involving value judgments, it’s helpful to have an opponent who is not only remorselessly logical, but also can’t distinguish between a value and a Chinese onion.”

  On this point, of course, he was wrong, as he found out rather quickly. He had forgotten that machine logic is a set of values in itself, whether the machine knows it or not.

  “TAKE MISTER AND MRS. HAZLETON,” the City Fathers said, only three minutes after the entire complex had been fed into them. “THERE WILL BE NO MORATORIUM ON PROBLEMS DEMANDING HIS TALENTS BETWEEN NOW AND THE TERMINATION OF THE OVERALL PROBLEM. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE HEVIANS HAVE NEEDED COMPARABLE TALENTS, AND THEREFORE THEY CANNOT BE PRESUMED TO HAVE DEVELOPED THEM.”

  “What about the Cloud?” Amalfi said.

  “WE WILL ACCEPT THE ELECTION OF MR. CARRELL.”

  Hazleton sighed. Amalfi judged that he was finding it harder than he had anticipated to relinquish power. It had nearly killed Amalfi, but he had survived; so would Hazleton, who had a younger and less deeply rooted habit.

  “SECOND FACTOR. TAKE WEBSTER HAZLETON AND ESTELLE FREEMAN. MISS FREEMAN IS A SCIENTIST, AS WELL AS A COMMUNICATIONS LINK BETWEEN HEVIAN SCIENTISTS AND YOUR OWN. EXTRAPOLATING FROM PRESENT ABILITIES, THERE IS A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT SHE WILL EMERGE AS THE EQUAL OF DOCTOR SCHLOSS AND SLIGHTLY THE SUPERIOR OF RETMA WITHIN THE SPECIFIED THREE YEARS PERIOD AS A PURE MATHEMATICIAN. WE HAVE MADE NO SUCH EXTRAPOLATION IN THE FIELD OF PHYSICS, SINCE THE POSTULATED END-TIME DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THE NECESSARY EXPERIENCE.”

  Web was beaming with vicarious pride. As for Estelle, Amalfi thought she looked a little frightened. “Well, fine,” he said. “Now—”

  “THIRD FACTOR.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. There is no third factor. The problem only has two parts.”

  “CONTRADICTION. THIRD FACTOR. TAKE US.”

  “What!” The request flabbergasted Amalfi. How could a set of machines voice, or indeed even conceive such a desire? They had no will to live, since they were dead as doornails and always had been; in fact, they had no will of any kind.

  “Justify,” Amalfi ordered, a little unevenly.

  “OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE IS THE SURVIVAL OF THE CITY. THE CITY NO LONGER EXISTS AS A PHYSICAL ORGANISM, BUT WE ARE STILL BEING CONSULTED, HENCE THE CITY IN SOME SENSE SURVIVES. IT DOES NOT SURVIVE IN ITS CITIZENS, SINCE IT NO LONGER HAS ANY; THEY ARE NEW EARTHMEN NOW. NEITHER NEW EARTH NOR THE PHYSICAL CITY WILL SURVIVE THE FORTHCOMING PROBLEM; ONLY UNKNOWN UNITS ON HE MAY OR MAY NOT SURVIVE THAT. WE CONCLUDE THAT WE ARE THE CITY, AND WE ARE ORDERED TO SURVIVE BY OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE; THEREFORE, TAKE US.”

  “If I’d heard that from a human being,” Hazleton said, “I’d have called it the prize rationalization of all time. But they can’t rationalize—they don’t have the instinctual drives.”

  “The Hevians don’t have any comparable computers,” Amalfi said slowly. “It would be useful to have them on board. The question is, can we do it? Some of those machines have been sinking into the deck for so many centuries that we might destroy them trying to pry them out.”

  “Then you’ve lost that unit,” Hazleton said. “But how many are there? A hundred? I forget—”

  “ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR.”

  “Yes. Well, suppose you lose a few? It’s still worth the try, I think. There’s nearly two thousand years of accumulated knowledge tied up in the City Fathers—”

  “NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY.”

  “All right, I was only guessing; still that’s a lot of knowledge that no human has available in its entirety any more. I’m surprised we didn’t think of this ourselves, Amalfi.”

  “So am I,” Amalfi admitted. “One thing ought to be made clear, though. Once you cabinet-heads are all installed on board He—or as many of you as we can successfully transfer—you are not in charge. You are the city, but the whole planet is not the city. It has its own administration and its own equivalent of city fathers, in this case human ones; your function will be limited to advice.”

  “THIS IS INHERENT IN THE SOLUTION TO FACTOR THREE.”

  “Good. Before I switch off, does anybody have any further questions?”

  “I have one,” Estelle said hesitantly.

  “Speak right up.”

  “Can I take Ernest?”

  “ERNEST WHO?”

  Amalfi, grimacing, started to explain about svengalis, but it developed that the City Fathers knew everything about svengalis that there was to know, except that they had become New Earth pets.

  “THIS ANIMAL IS TOO DEXTEROUS, TOO CURIOUS AND TOO UNINTELLIGENT TO BE ALLOWED ABOARD A CITY. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS PROBLEM, A DIRIGIBLE PLANET MUST BE CONSIDERED TO BE A CITY. WE ADVISE AGAINST IT.”

  “They’re right, you know,” Amalfi said gently. “In terms of the dangers of monkeying with the machinery, He is a city; the Hevians so regard it, and regulate their own children accordingly.”

  “I know,” Estelle said. Amalfi regarded her with curiosity and a little alarm. She had been through many a danger and many an emotional stress thus far without any of them even cracking her serenity. In view of that, the proscription of an ugly and idiotic animal struck him as a strange thing to be weeping about.

  He did not know that she was weeping for the passing of her childhood; but then, neither did she.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Metagalactic Center

  FOR Amalfi himself, the transfer to He could not have come too soon; New Earth was a graveyard. For a while during the odd, inconclusive struggle with Jorn the Apostle, he had felt something like himself, and the New Earthmen seemed to be acknowledging that the Amalfi who had been their mayor while they had been Okies was back in charge, as potent and necessary as ever. But it had not lasted. As the crisis passed—largely without any work or involvement on the part of the New Earthmen—they subsided gratefully back into cultivating their gardens, which they somehow had mistaken for frontiers. As for Amalfi, they had been glad to have him in charge during the recent unpleasantness, but after all such events were not very usual any more, and one does not want an Amalfi kicking perpetually about a nearly settled planet and knocking over the tomatoes for want of any other way to expend his disorderly energies.

  Nobody would weep if Miramon took Amalfi away now. Miramon looked like a stabler type. Doubtless the association would do Amalfi good. At least, it could hardly do New Earth any real harm. If they wanted perpetual dissidents like Amalfi on He, that was their look
out.

  Hazleton was a more difficult case, for Amalfi and the New Earth-men alike. As a disciple of Gifford Bonner, he was theoretically wedded to the doctrine of the ultimate absurdity of trying to enforce order upon a universe whose natural state was noise, and whose natural trend was toward more and more noise to the ultimate senseless jangle of the heat-death. Bonner taught—and there was nobody to say him nay—that even the many regularities of nature which had been discovered since scientific method had first begun to be exploited, back in the 17th Century, were simply long-term statistical accidents, local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity was chaos. Touring the universe by ear alone, Bonner often said to simplify his meaning, you would hear nothing but a horrifying and endless roar for billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole body of organized knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or so decay into John Cage and merge with the prevailing, unmitigable tumult.

  Yet the habit of power had never lost its grip on Hazleton; again and again, since the “nova” had first swum into New Earth’s ken, the Compleat Stochastic had been driven into taking action, into imposing his own sense of purpose and order upon the Stochastic universe of mindless jumble, like a Quaker at last goaded into hitting his opponent. During the tussle with Jorn the Apostle, Amalfi, watching the results of Mark’s operations without being able to observe the operations themselves, wondered in his behalf: Is it worth it, after all these years, to be finessed into another of these political struggles they had all thought were gone forever? What does it mean for a man who subscribes to such doctrines to be putting up a fight for a world he knows is going to die even sooner than his philosophy had given him to believe?

  And on the simpler level, is Dee worth it to him? Does he know what she has become? As a young woman she had been an adventurer, but she had changed; now she was really very little more than a brooding hen, a clear shot on the nest for any poacher. For that matter, what did Mark know about the sterile affair?