Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Well, that last question was answered, but all the others were still as puzzling as ever. Did Hazleton’s abrupt decision to go with He after all represent a final relinquishing of the habit of power—or an affirmation of it? It should be visible to a man of Hazleton’s acumen that power over New Earth was no longer even faintly comparable to having power over Okies; it was about as rewarding as being the chaplain of a summer camp. Or he might well have seen that the Jorn incident had proven that Amalfi remained and would remain the figure of power in the minds of the New Earthman, to be turned to whenever New Earth was confronted by a concrete menace; the rest of the New Earthmen had lost the ability to be wily, to plan a battle, to think fast when the occasion demanded it, and would not concede that anybody else still retained those abilities but their legendary ex-mayor—leaving any current mayor, even Hazleton, only the dregs of rule in peacetime when very little rule was needed or wanted. In fact, Amalfi realized suddenly and with amazement, the fraud he had practised upon Jorn the Apostle had been no fraud at all, at least to this extent: that the New Earthmen were content with randomness, just as the Stochastics professed themselves to be, and had no interest in imposing purpose upon it or upon their own lives except as it was forced upon them from outside, either by someone like Jorn, or by someone like Amalfi in opposition to Jorn. So the possibility that Stochasticism would seep into and make soggy the souls of the Warriors of God had been real all along, whether or not the New Earthmen themselves would recognize it as Stochasticism; the times and the philosophy had found each other, and it was even probable that the very erudite Gifford Bonner was only a belated intellectualization of a feeling that had been floating mindlessly about New Earth for many years. Nothing else could account for Amalfi’s and Hazleton’s quick success in selling Jorn the Apostle something that Jorn had at first been far too intelligent to believe—nothing else but the fact, unsuspected by Amalfi at least, and possibly by Hazleton, that it was true. If Hazleton had seen that, then he was relinquishing nothing in abandoning New Earth for He; he was, instead, opting for the only center of power that meant anything in the few years that remained to him and to the universe at large.

  Except, of course, for that unknown quantity, the Web of Hercules; but of course it was beyond Hazleton’s power to opt for that.

  And even Amalfi was becoming infected with the Stochastic virus now. These questions still interested him, but the flavor of academicism which informed them in the face of the coming catastrophe was becoming more and more evident even to him. All that there was left to cleave to was the cannoning flight of the planet of He toward the metagalactic center, the struggle to finish the machinery that would be needed on arrival, the desperate urgency to be there before the Web of Hercules.

  And so Dee’s was—if not the final victory—the last word. It was her judgment of Amalfi as the Flying Dutchman that stuck to him after all his other labels and masks had been stripped off by the triumph of time. The curse lay now, as it always had lain, not in flight itself but in the loneliness that drove a man to flight everlasting.

  Except that now the end was in sight.

  The discovery that the great spiral nebulae, the island universes of space into which the stars were grouped, themselves tended to congregate in vast groups revolving in spiral arms around a common center of density, was foreshadowed as early as the 1950’s when Shapley mapped the “inner metagalaxy”—a group of approximately fifty galaxies to which both the Milky Way and the Andromeda nebula belonged. After the Milne scholium had been proven, it had become possible to show that such metagalaxies were the rule, and that they in turn formed spiral arms curving inward toward a center which was the hub upon which the whole of creation turned, and from which it had originally exploded into being from the monobloc.

  It was to that dead center that He was fleeing now, back into the womb of time.

  There was no longer any daylight on the planet. The route that it was taking sometimes produced a brief cloudy patch in its sky, a small spiral glow in the night which was a galaxy in passage, but never a sun. Even the tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies like umbilical cords-bridges whose discovery by Fritz Zworkyn in 1953 had caused a drastic upward revision in estimates of the amount of matter in the universe, and hence in estimates of the size and age of the universe—provided no relief of the black emptiness for He, not so much as a day of it; intergalactic space was too vast for that. Glowing solely by artificial light, He hurtled under the full spindizzy drive possible only to so massive a vessel toward that Place where the Will had given birth to the Idea, and there had been light.

  “We are working from what you taught us to call the Mach hypothesis,” Retma explained to Amalfi. “Dr. Bonner calls it the Viconian hypothesis, or cosmological principle: that from any point in space or time the universe would look the same as it would from any other point, and that therefore no total accounting of the stresses acting at that point is possible unless one assumes that all the rest of the universe is to be taken into account. This, however, would be true only in tau-time, in which the universe is static, eternal and infinite. In t-time, which sees the universe as finite and expanding, the Mach hypothesis dictates that every point is a unique coign of vantage—except for the metagalactic center, which is stress-free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power.”

  “For instance,” Dr. Bonner suggested, “altering the orbit of Sirius by stepping on a buttercup.”

  “I hope not,” Retma said. “We could not control such an inadvertency. But it is not such a bagatelle as the orbit of Sirius we would be seeking to change anyhow, so perhaps that is not a real danger. What we will be trading upon is the chance—only a slight chance, but it exists—that this neutral zone coincides with such a one in the anti-matter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant.”

  “How big an instant?” Amalfi said uneasily.

  “Your guess is as good as ours,” Dr. Schloss said. “We are counting on about five micro-seconds at a minimum. If it lasts that long it needn’t last any longer for our purposes—and it might last as long as half an hour, while the elements are being recreated. Half an hour would be as good as an eternity to us; but we can put our imprint on the whole future of both universes if we are given only those five micro-seconds.”

  “And if someone else is not already at the core and readier than we are to use it,” Retma added somberly.

  “Use it how?” Amalfi said. “I’m not fighting my way through your generalizations very well. Just what are our purposes, anyhow? What buttercup are we going to step on—and what will the outcome be? Will we live through it—or will the future put our faces on postage stamps as martyrs? Explain yourselves!”

  “Certainly,” Retma said, looking a little taken aback. “The situation as we see it is this: Anything that survives the Ginnangu-Gap at the metagalactic center, by as much as five micro-seconds, carries an energy potential into the future which will have a considerable influence on the re-formation of the two universes. If the surviving object is only a stone—or a planet, like He—then the two universes will re-form exactly as they did after the explosion of the monobloc, and their histories will repeat themselves very closely. If, on the other hand, the surviving object has volition and a little maneuverability—such as a man—it has available to it any of the infinitely many different sets of dimensions of Hilbert space. Each one of us that makes that crossing may in a few micro-seconds start a universe of his own, with a fate wholly unpredictable from history.”

  “But,” Dr. Schloss added, “he will die in the process. The stuffs and energies of him become the monobloc of his universe.”

  “Gods of all stars,” Hazleton said …. “Helleshin! Gods of all stars is what we’re racing the Web of Hercules to become, isn
’t it? Well, I’m punished for my oldest, most comfortable oath. I never thought I’d become one—and I’m not even sure I want to be.”

  “Is there any other choice?” Amalfi said. “What happens if the Web of Hercules gets there first?”

  “Then they remake the universes as they choose,” Retma said. “Since we know nothing about them, we cannot even guess how they would choose.”

  “Except,” Dr. Bonner added, “that their choices are not very likely to include us, or anything like us.”

  “That sounds like a safe bet,” Amalfi said. “I must confess I feel about as uninspired as Mark does about the alternative, though. Or—is there a third alternative? What happens if the metagalactic center is empty when the catastrophe arrives? If neither the Web nor He is there, prepared to use it?”

  Retma shrugged. “Then—if we can speak at all about so grand a transformation—history repeats itself. The universe is born again, goes through its travails, and continues its journey to its terminal catastrophes: the heat-death and the monobloc. It may be that we will find ourselves carrying on as we always did, but in the antimatter universe; if so, we would be unable to detect the difference. But I think that unlikely. The most probable event is immediate extinction, and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.”

  “Ylem?” Amalfi said. “What’s that? I’ve never heard the word before.”

  “The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’m not surprised that you hadn’t heard it before; it’s the ABC of cosmogony, the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow premise. Ylem in cosmogony is an assumption like ‘zero’ in mathematics—something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.”

  “All right,” Amalfi said. “Then what Retma is saying is that the most probable denouement, if dead-center is empty when June second comes, is that we will all be reduced to a sea of neutrons?”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Schloss said.

  “Not much of a choice,” Gifford Bonner said reflectively.

  “No,” Miramon said, speaking for the first time. “It is not much of a choice. But it is all the choice we will have. And we will not have even that, if we fail to reach the metagalactic center in time.”

  Nevertheless, it was only in the last year that Web Hazleton began to grasp, and then only dimly, the true nature of the coming end. Even then, the knowledge did not come home to him by way of the men who were directing the preparations; what they were preparing for, though it was not kept secret, remained mostly incomprehensible, and so could not shake his confidence that what was being aimed at was a way to prevent the Ginnangu-Gap from happening at all. He ceased to believe that, finally and dismally, only when Estelle refused to bear him a child.

  “But why?” Web said, seizing her hand with one of his, and with the other gesturing desperately at the walls of the apartment the Hevians had given them. “We’re permanent now—it isn’t only that we know we are, everybody agrees we are. It isn’t a tabu line for us any longer!”

  “I know,” Estelle said gently. “It isn’t that. I wish you hadn’t asked; it would have been simpler that way.”

  “It would have occurred to me sooner or later. Ordinarily I would have gone off the pills right away, but there was so much confusion about moving to He—anyhow I only just realized you were still on them. I wish you’d tell me why.”

  “Web, my dear, you’d know why if you thought a little more about it. The end is the end, that’s all. What would be the sense of having a child that would live only a year or two?”

  “It may not be that certain,” Web said darkly.

  “Of course it’s certain. Actually I think I’ve known it was coming ever since I was born—perhaps even before I was born. I could feel it coming.”

  “Honestly, Estelle, don’t you know that’s nonsense?”

  “I can see why it would sound that way,” Estelle admitted. “But I can’t help that. And since the end is on the way, I can’t call it nonsense, can I? I had the premonition, and it was right.”

  “I think what this all means is that you don’t want children.”

  “That’s true,” Estelle said, surprisingly. “I never have had any drive toward children—not even much drive toward my own survival, really. But that’s all part of the same thing. In a way, I was lucky; a lot of people are not at home in their own times. I was born in the time that was right for me—the time of the end of the world. That’s why I’m not oriented toward child-bearing—because I know that there won’t be another generation after yours and mine. For all I know, I might even actually be sterile; it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “Estelle, don’t. I can’t listen to you talk like that.”

  “I’m sorry, love. I don’t mean to distress you. It doesn’t distress me, but I know the reason for that. I’m pointed toward the end—in a way it’s the ultimate, natural outcome of my life, the event that gives it all meaning; but you’re only being overtaken by it, like most people.”

  “I don’t know,” Web muttered. “It all sounds awfully like a rationalization to me. Estelle, you’re so beautiful … doesn’t that mean anything? Aren’t you beautiful to attract a man, so you can have a child? That’s the way I’ve always understood it.”

  “It might have been for that once,” Estelle said gravely. “It sounds like it ought to be an axiom, anyway. Well … I wouldn’t say so to anybody but you, Web, but I do know I’m beautiful. Most women would tell you the same thing about themselves, if it were permissible—it’s a state of mind, one that’s essential to a woman, she’s only half a woman if she doesn’t think she’s beautiful … and she isn’t beautiful if she doesn’t think she is, no matter what she looks like. I’m not ashamed of being beautiful and I’m not embarrassed by it, but I don’t pay it much attention any more, either. It’s a means to an end, just as you say—and the end has outlived its usefulness. In my mind, it’s obvious that a woman who would commit a year-old child to the flames would have to be a fiend, if she knew that that’s what she’d be doing just by giving birth. I know; and I can’t do it.”

  “Women have taken chances like that before, and knowingly, too,” Web said stubbornly. “Peasants who knew their children would starve, because the parents were starving already. Or women in the age just before spaceflight; Dr. Bonner says that for five years there the race stood within twenty minutes of extinction. But they went ahead and had the children anyhow—otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

  “It’s an urge,” Estelle said quietly, “that I don’t have, Web. And this time, there’s no escape.”

  “You keep saying that, but I’m not even sure you’re right. Amalfi says that there’s a chance.”

  “I know,” Estelle said. “I did some of the calculations. But it’s not that kind of a chance, my dear. It’s something you might be able to do, or I, because we’re old enough to absorb instructions, and do just the right thing at the right time. A baby couldn’t do that. It would be like setting him adrift in a spaceship, with plenty of power and plenty of food—he’d die anyhow, and you couldn’t tell him how to prevent it. It’s so complex that some of us surely will make fatal mistakes.”

  He was silent.

  “Besides,” Estelle added gently, “even for us it won’t be for long. Well die too. It’s only that well have a chance to influence the moment of creation that’s implicit in the moment of destruction. That, if I make it at all, will be my child, Web—the only one worth having now.”

  “But it won’t be mine.”

  “No, love. You’ll have your own.”

  “No, no, Estelle! What good is that? I want mine to be yours too!.”

  She put her arms around his shoulders and leaned her cheek against his.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I know. But the time for that is over. That’s the fate we were formed for, Web. The gift of children was taken away from us. Instead of babies, we were given universes.”


  “It’s not enough,” Web said. He embraced her fiercely. “Not by half. Nobody consulted me when that contract was being drawn.”

  “Did you ask to be born, love?”

  “Well … no. But I don’t mind. … Oh. That’s how it is.”

  “Yes, that’s how it is. He can’t consult with us either. So it’s up to us. No child of mine born to go into the flames, Web; no child of mine and yours.”

  “No,” Web said hollowly. “You’re right, it wouldn’t be fair. All right, Estelle. I’ll settle for another year of you. I don’t think I want a universe.”

  Deceleration began late in January of 4004. From here on out, the flight of He would be tentative, despite the increasing urgency; for the metagalactic center was as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, and only extreme care and the most complex instrumentation would tell the voyagers when they had arrived. For the purpose, the Hevians had much elaborated their control bridge, which was located on a 300-foot steel basketwork tower atop the highest mountain the planet afforded—called, to Amalfi’s embarrassment, Mt. Amalfi. Here the Survivors—as they had begun to call themselves with a kind of desperate jocularity—met in almost continuous session.

  The Survivors consisted simply of everyone on the planet whom Schloss and Retma jointly agreed capable of following the instructions for the ultimate instant with even the slightest chance of success. Schloss and Retma had been hard-headed; it was not a large group. It included all of the New Earthmen, though Schloss had been dubious about both Dee and Web, and a group of ten Hevians including Miramon and Retma himself. Oddly, as the time grew closer, the Hevians began to drop out, apparently each as soon as he had fully understood what was being attempted and what the outcome might be.

  “Why do they do that?” Amalfi asked Miramon. “Don’t your people have any survival urge at all?”

  “I am not surprised,” Miramon said. “They live by stable values. They would rather die with them than survive without them. Certainly they have the survival urge, but it expresses itself differently than yours does, Mayor Amalfi. What they want to see survive are the things they think valuable about living at all—and this project presents them with very few of those.”