Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi’s astonishment, he began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Amalfi growled.

  “See for yourself. If Miramon’s people had ever tangled with the Web in the red world, they would have lost.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, “while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as doornails as we sit here!”

  “And this is a joke?” Amalfi said.

  “Of course it’s a joke, boss. It doesn’t make the faintest bit of difference. We don’t live in that kind of ‘real world’ any more. We have a dose. In two weeks we’ll begin to become dizzy, and lose our hair, and vomit. In three weeks we’ll be dead. And you still don’t see the joke?”

  “I see it,” Amalfi said. “I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four; you mean we’ll live until we die.”

  “I can’t abide a man who kills my jokes.”

  “It’s a pretty old joke,” Amalfi said slowly. “But maybe it’s still funny, at that; if it was good enough for Aristophanes, I guess it’s good enough for me.”

  “I think that’s pretty damn funny, all right,” Dee said with bitter fury. Miramon was staring from one New Earthman to another with an expression of utter bafflement. Amalfi smiled.

  “Don’t say so unless you think so, Dee,” he said. “It’s always been a joke, after all. The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don’t repudiate the last laugh of all. It may be the only legacy we’ll leave.”

  “MIDNIGHT,” the City Fathers said. “THE COUNT IS ZERO MINUS NINE.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Triumph of Time

  As Amalfi opened the door and went back into the room, the City Fathers said:

  “N-DAY. ZERO MINUS ONE HOUR.”

  At this hour, everything had meaning; or nothing had; it depended on what had been worth investing with meaning over a lifetime of several thousand years. Amalfi had left the room to go to the toilet. Now he would never do that again, nor would anybody else; the demise of the whole was so close at hand that it was outrunning even the physiological rhythms of the body by which man has told time since he first thought to count it. Was diuresis as worth mourning as love? Well, perhaps it was; the senses should have their mourners too; no sensation, no thought, no emotion is meaningless if it is the last of its kind.

  And so farewell to all tensions and all reliefs, from amour to urea, from entrances to exits, from redundancy to noise, from beer to skittles. “What’s new?” Amalfi said.

  “Nothing any more,” Gifford Bonner said. “We’re waiting. Sit down, John, and have a drink.”

  He sat down at the long table and looked at the glass before him. It was red, but there was a faint tinge of blue in the liquid too, independent and not adding up to violet even in the bad light of the fluorescents in the midst of dead center’s ultimate blackness. At the lip of the glass a faint meniscus climbed upward from the wine, and little tendrils of condensation meandered back down. Amalfi tasted it tentatively; it was raw and peppery—the Hevians were not great wine-growers, their climate had been too chancy for that—but even the sting of it was an edgy pleasure that made him sigh.

  “We should suit up at the half hour,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’d leave more free time, except that some of us haven’t been inside a space-suit in centuries, and some of us never. We don’t want to take chances on their not being trim and tight.”

  “I thought we were going to be surrounded by some sort of field,” Web said.

  “Not for long, Web. Let me go through this once more, to be sure everybody has it straight in his head. We will be protected by a stasis-field during the actual instant of transition, when time will to all intents and purposes be abolished—it becomes just another coordinate of Hilbert space then. That will carry us over into the first second of time on the other side, after the catastrophe. But then the field will go down, because the spindizzies, which will be generating it, will have been annihilated. We will then find ourselves occupying as many independent sets of four dimensions as there are people in this room, and every set completely empty. The spacesuits won’t protect you long, either, because you’ll be the only body of organized energy and matter in your particular, individual universe; as soon as you disturb the metrical frame of that universe, you, the suit, the air in it, the power in the accumulators, everything will surge outwards, creating space as it goes. Every man his own monobloc. But if we don’t have the suits on for the crossing, not even that much will happen.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so graphic,” Dee complained, but her heart did not really seem to be in it. She was, Amalfi noted, wearing that same peculiarly strained expression she had worn when she had said that she wanted to bear Amalfi a child. Some instinct made him turn to look at Estelle and Web. All their hands were piled up together confidingly on the table. Estelle’s face was serene, and her eyes were luminous, almost like a child waiting for a party to begin. Web’s expression was more difficult to interpret: he was frowning slightly, more in puzzlement than in worry, as if he couldn’t quite understand why he was not more worried than he was.

  Outside, there was a thin whining sound which rose suddenly to a howl and then died away again. It was windy today on the mountain.

  “What about the table, the glasses, the chairs?” Amalfi asked. “Do those go with us too?”

  “No,” Dr. Schloss said. “We don’t want to risk having any possible condensation nuclei near us. We’re using a modification of the technique we used to build Object 4001-Alephnull in the future; the furniture will start to make the crossing with us, but we’ll use the last available energy to push it a micro-second into the past. The result will be that it will stay in our universe. What its fate will be thereafter, we can only guess.”

  Amalfi lifted his glass reflectively. It was silky in his fingers; the Hevians made fine glass.

  “This frame of reference I’ll find myself in,” Amalfi said. “It will really have no structure at all?”

  “Only what you impose on it,” Retma said. “It will not be space, and will have no metrical frame. In other words, your presence there will be intolerable—”

  “Thank you,” Amalfi said drily, to Retma’s obvious bafflement. After a moment the scientist went on without comment: “What I am trying to say is that your mass will create a space to accommodate it, and it will take on the metrical frame that already exists in you. What happens after that will depend upon in what order you dismantle the suit. I would recommend discharging the oxygen bottles first, since to start a universe like our present one will require a considerable amount of plasma. The oxygen in the suit itself will be sufficient for the time at your disposal. As the last act, discharge the suit’s energy; this will, in effect, touch a match to the explosion.”

  “How large a universe will be the outcome, eventually?” Mark said. “I seem to remember that the original monobloc was large, as well as ultra-condensed.”

  “Yes, it will be a small universe,” Retma said, “perhaps fifty light years across at its greatest expansion. But that will be only at first. As continuous creation comes into play, more atoms will be added to the whole, until a mass is reached sufficient to form a monobloc on the next contraction. Or so we see it; you must understand that this is all somewhat conjectural. We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.”

  “ZERO MINUS THIRTY MINUTES.”

  “That’s it,” Dr. Schloss said. “Suits, everybody. We can continue to talk by radio.”

  Amalfi drained the wine. Another last act. He got into his suit, slowly recapturing his old familiarity with the grotesque apparatus. He saw to it that the radio switch was open, but he found that he could think of nothing further to say. That he was about to die suddenly had very little reality to him, in the face of the greater death of which his would be a part. No comment that occurred t
o him seemed anything but the uttermost of trivia.

  There was some technical conversation as they checked each other out in the suits, with particular attention to Web and Estelle. Then the talk died out, as if they, too, found words intolerable.

  “ZERO MINUS FIFTEEN MINUTES.”

  “Do you understand what is about to happen to you?” Amalfi said suddenly.

  “YES, MR. MAYOR. WE ARE TO BE TURNED OFF AT ZERO.”

  “That’s good enough.” He wondered, however, if they thought that they might be turned on again in the future. It was of course foolish to think of them as entertaining anything even vaguely resembling an emotion, but nevertheless he decided not to say anything which might disabuse them. They were only machines, but they were also old friends and allies.

  “ZERO MINUS TEN MINUTES.”

  “It’s all going so fast all of a sudden,” Dee’s voice whispered in the earphones. “Mark, I … I don’t want it to happen.”

  “No more do I,” Hazleton said. “But it will happen anyhow. I only wish I’d lived a more human life than I did. But it happened the way it happened, and so there’s no more to say.”

  “I wish I could believe,” Estelle said, “that there will be no sorrow in the universe I make.”

  “Then create nothing, my dear,” Gifford Bonner said. “Stay here. Creation means sorrow, always and always.”

  “And joy,” Estelle said.

  “Well, yes. There’s that.”

  “ZERO MINUS FIVE MINUTES.”

  “I think we can do without the rest of the countdown,” Amalfi said. “Otherwise from now on they will count every minute, and they’ll do the last one by seconds. Do we want to go out to the tune of that gabble? Anybody want to say ‘yes’?”

  They were silent. “Very well,” Amalfi said. “Stop counting.”

  “VERY WELL, MR. MAYOR. GOOD-BYE.”

  “Good-bye,” Amalfi said with amazement.

  “I won’t say that, if you don’t mind,” Hazleton said in a choked voice. “It brings the deprivation too close for me to stand. I hope everybody will consider it said.”

  Amalfi nodded, then realized that the gesture could not be seen inside the helmet.

  “I agree,” he said. “But I don’t feel deprived. I loved you all. You have my love to take with you, and I have it too.”

  “It is the only thing in the universe that one can give and still have,” Miramon said.

  The deck throbbed under Amalfi’s feet. The machines were preparing for their instant of unimaginable thrust. The sound of their power was comforting; so was the solidity of the deck, the table, the room, the mountain, the world—

  “I think—” Gifford Bonner said.

  And with those words, it ended.

  There was nothing at first but the inside of the suit. Outside there was not even blackness, but only nothingness, something not to be seen, like that which is not seen outside of the cone of vision; one does not see blackness behind one’s own head, one simply does not see in that direction at all; and so here. Yet for a little while, Amalfi found that he was still conscious of his friends, still a part of the circle though the room and everything in it had vanished from around them. He did not know how he knew that they were still there, but he could feel it.

  He knew that there was no hope of speaking to them again; and indeed, as he tried to grasp how he knew they were there at all, he realized that they were drawing away from him. The circle was widening. The mute figures became smaller—not by distance, for there was no distance here, but nevertheless in some way they were passing out of each other’s ken. Amalfi tried to lift his hand in farewell, but found it almost impossible. By the time he had only half completed the gesture, the others had faded and were gone, leaving behind only a memory also fading rapidly, like the memory of a fragrance.

  Now he was alone and must do what he must do. Since his hand was raised, he continued the gesture to let the gas out of his oxygen bottles. The unmedium in which he was suspended seemed to be becoming a little less resistant; already a metrical frame was establishing itself. Yet it was almost as difficult to halt the motion as it had been to start it.

  Nevertheless, he halted it. Of what use was another universe of the kind he had just seen die? Nature had provided two of those, and had doomed them at the same moment. Why not try something else? Retma in his caution, Estelle in her compassion, Dee in her fear all would be giving birth to some version of the standard model; but Amalfi had driven the standard model until all the bolts had come out of it, and was so tired at even the thought of it that he could hardly bring himself to breathe. What would happen if, instead, he simply touched the detonator button on his chest, and let all the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into plasma at the same instant?

  That was unknowable. But the unknowable was what he wanted. He brought his hand down again.

  There was no reason to delay. Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.

  “So be it,” Amalfi said. He touched the button over his heart.

  Creation began.

  AFTERWORD:

  Richard D. Mullen

  THE EARTHMANIST CULTURE: CITIES IN FLIGHT as a Spenglerian History

  OSWALD SPENGLER’S The Decline of the West has been acknowledged by James Blish as one of the sources of CITIES IN FLIGHT. He has said, “My own ‘Okie’ stories were … founded in Spengler.”

  Spengler is a difficult thinker—or at least a difficult writer—as anyone will discover who attempts to make a table similar to the one that appears with this Afterword. Part of the difficulty stems from our tendency to equate cultures with empires and other political units, a delusion from which Toynbee should have freed us even if Spengler did not. A related difficulty lies in the title: “the decline of the West” inevitably suggests “the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,” and one is likely to assume that Spengler is predicting the military conquest of the West rather than merely arguing that the West is in a certain kind of decline. Still another lies in the fact that Spengler uses the words culture and civilization sometimes in such a way that they appear to be synonymous with society, and sometimes as technical terms with opposed meanings. Whatever may be true of things, two words synonymous with a third are not necessarily equal to each other, and we should understand from the beginning that for Spengler, culture and civilization are opposed states in the spiritual history of a society:

  A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. … It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul …. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like the worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust its decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fulness. … [I, 106]

  The West has reached full civilization, and its culture is dead, but its civilization, and its empire, may endure for centuries or millennia.

  Now, the explicit Spenglerianism of CITIES IN FLIGHT is highly dubious in some of its details (see below, #2), and rather absurd overall. The overall absurdity lies in the basic idea of the “cultural morphologist”:

  Chris recognized the term, from his force-feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate it to all other cultures at similar stages, and come up
with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. …

  Spengler never uses the term “cultural morphologist,” and he would surely never have imagined that his work could be put to any such narrow uses. If a culture is an organism, you can make for a culture predictions of the kind that can be made for any organism: e.g., that a baby boy will become a man, not a woman or a horse, and that, barring accidents, the man will pass through middle age to old age and death. To be sure, the more information you have, the more particular you can be in your predictions, but obviously there are limits beyond which you cannot go. Indeed, that there are such limits in anything and everything is perhaps the most fundamental idea of Spengler. As a matter of fact, the cultural morphologists of CITIES IN FLIGHT never actually practice their trade: the various “cultures” with which the heroes deal are never presented with enough fullness to allow for any kind of Spenglerian assessment; the various stories turn on coincidence or on individual psychology and would not be essentially different if explicit references to cultural morphology were entirely eliminated—which could be done by deleting a handful of sentences.

  Although some of the inconsistencies in CITIES IN FLIGHT surely result from authorial forgetfulness, they are too numerous and too prominent to be regarded as anything other than an essential feature of the overall story. Since point of view is rigidly controlled throughout the work, every statement can be attributed to one or another of the various characters. Given this fact, we can make sense of the tetralogy by regarding it, not as a fiction in which a universe has been created by an omniscient, omnipotent author, but as historical narrative with a large admixture of myth; that is, by assuming that behind the sometimes accurate, sometimes erroneous, sometimes mythical narrative there is an actual history.

  Thus, the first volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT gives us an intelligently Spenglerian view of the near future, and the other three, albeit very sketchily, the life story of a Spenglerian culture. In comparison with most science-fiction novels and series, CITIES IN FLIGHT is a very rich work indeed.