Cities in Flight (26 page)

Chris was so stunned that the Librarian had worked its way all the way through "ZIMIAMVIA" and had begun another alphabetical catalogue before he thought to ask for his card back. His question had not been very crafty, after all.

By the time he emerged from the booth, the storms of Heaven had vanished and the city was once more soaring amid the stars. Furthermore, he was late for dinner.

So, after all, there had been no secret to keep. Chris told the Andersons the story of his failure to outwit the Librarian; it made the best possible excuse for his lateness, since it was true, and it reduced Carla to tears of helpless laughter. The perimeter sergeant was amused, too, but there was an undercurrent of' seriousness beneath his amusement.

"You're learning, Chris. It's easy to think that because the City Fathers are dead, they're also stupid; but you see that that isn't the case. Otherwise they would never have been given the power that they wield-and in some departments their power is absolute."

"Even over the Mayor?"

"Yes and no. They can't forbid the Mayor anything. But if he goes against their judgment more often than they're set. to tolerate, they can revoke his office. That's never happened here, but if it does, we'll have to sit still for it. If we don't, they'll stop the machinery."

"Wow. Isn't it dangerous to give machines so much power? Suppose they had a breakdown?"

"If there were only a few of them, that would be a real danger; but there are more than a hundred, and they monitor and repair each other, so in fact it will never 'happen. Sanity and logic is their stock in trade-which is why they can accept or reject the results of any election we may run. The popular will is sometimes an idiot, but no human being can be given the power to overrule it; not safely. But the machines can.

"Of course, there are stories about towns whose City Fathers ran amok with them. They're just stories, like Piggy's 'Lost City'-but they're important even when they're not true. Whenever a new way of living appears in the universe, the people who adopt it see quickly enough that it isn't perfect. They try to make it better, sure; but there are always some things about it that can't be changed. And the hopes and fears that are centered on those points 'get turned into stories.

"Piggy's myth, for instance. We live long lives in the cities, but not everybody can have the gift. It's impossible that everyone should have it-the whole universe isn't hi1 enough to contain the sheer mass of flesh that would accumulate if we all lived and bred as long as we each wanted to. Piggy's myth says it is possible, which is untrue; but what is true about it is that it points to one of the real dissatisfactions with our way of living, real be. cause nothing can be done about it.

"The story of the runaway City Fathers is another. No such thing has ever happened as far as I know, and ii doesn't seem to be possible, but no live man likes to take orders from a bunch of machines, or to think that he may lose his life if they say so-but he might. because the City Fathers are the jury aboard most cities. So he invents a cautionary tale about City Fathers running amok, though actually he's talking not about the machines at all-he's warning that he may run amok if he's pushed too far..

"The universe of the cities is full of these ghosts. Sooner or later somebody is going to tell you that some cities go bindlestiff."

"Somebody has," Chris admitted. "But I didn't know what he meant."

"It's an old Earth term. A hobo was an honest migratory worker, who lived that way because he liked it, A tramp was the same kind of fellow, except that he wouldn't work-he lived by stealing or begging from settled people. In hobo society both kinds were more or less respectable. But the bindlestiff was a migrant who stole from other migrants-he robbed their bindles, the bags they carried their few belongings in. That man was an outcast from both worlds.

"It's common talk that some cities in trouble have gone bindlestiff-taken to preying on other cities. Again, there are no specific instances. IMT is the town that's most often mentioned, but the last we heard of IMT, she wasn't a bindlestiff-she'd been outlawed for a horrible crime on a colony planet, but technically that makes her only a tramp. A mean one, but still only a tramp.".

"I see," Chris said slowly. "It's like the story about City Fathers going crazy. Cities do starve, I know that; and the bindlestiff story says, 'How will we behave when the pinch comes?'"

Anderson looked gratified. "Look at that," he said to Carla. "Maybe I should have been a teacher!"

"Nothing to do with you," Carla said composedly. "Chris is doing all the thinking. Besides, I like you better as a cop.."

The perimeter sergeant sighed, a little ruefully. "Oh, well, all right. Then I'll give you only one more story. You've heard of the Vegan orbital fort?"

"Oh, sure. That was in the history, way back."

"Good. Well, for once, that's a real thing. There 'was a Vegan orbital fort, and it did get away, and nobody knows where it is now. The City Fathers say that it probably died when it ran out of supplies, but it was a pretty big job and might well have survived under circumstances no ordinary city could live through. If you ask the City Fathers for the probabilities, they tell you that they can't give you any figures-which is a bad sign in itself.

"Now, that's as far as the facts go. But there's a legend to go with them. The legend says that the fort is foraging through the trade lanes, devouring cities-just the way a dragonfly catches mosquitoes, on the wing. Nobody has actually seen the fort since the scorching of Vega, but the legend persists; every time a city disappears, the word goes around, first, that a bindlestiff got it, and next, that the fort got it.

"What's it all about, Chris? Tell me."

Chris thought for a long time. At last he said:

"I'm kind of confused. It ought to be the same kind of story as the others-something people are afraid of. Like meeting up some day with a planet, like the Vegan system, where the people have more on the ball than we do and will gobble us up the way we did Vega—"

Anderson's big fist' crashed down on the dinner table, making all the plates jump. "Precisely!" he crowed. "Look there, Carla—"

Carla's own hands reached out and covered the sergeant's fist gently. "Dear, Chris isn't through yet. You didn't give him a chance to finish."

"I didn't? But-sorry, Chris. Go ahead."

"I don't know whether I'm through or not," Chris said, embarrassed and floundering. "This one story just confuses me. It's not as simple as the others; I think I'm sure of that."

"Go ahead."

"Well, it's sensible to be afraid of meeting somebody stronger than yourself. It might well happen. And there is a real Vegan orbital fort, or at least there was one. The other stories don't have that much going for them that's real-except the things people are actually afraid of, the things the stories actually are about. Does this make sense?"

"Yes. The things the stories symbolize."

"That's the word. To be afraid of the fort is to be afraid of a real thing. But what does the story symbolize? It's got to be the same kind of thing in the end-the fear people have of themselves. The story says, 'I'm tired of working to be a citizen, and obeying the Earth cops, and protecting the city, and living a thousand years with machines bossing me, and taking sass from colonists, and don't know what all else. If I had a great big city that could run all by myself, I'd spend the next thousand years smashing things up!'"

There was a long, long silence, during which Chris became more and more convinced that he had again talked out of turn, and far too much. Carla did not seem to be upset, but her husband looked stunned and wrathful.

"There is something wrong with the 'apprenticeship sys. tern," he growled at last, though he did not appear to be speaking to either of them. "First the Kingston-Throop kid-and now this: Carla! You're the brains in the family. Did it ever occur to you that that fort legend had anything to do with education?"

"Yes, dear. Long ago."

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I would have said so as soon as we had a child; until then, it wasn't any of my business. Now Chris has said ii for me"

The perimeter sergeant turned a lowering face on Chris. "You," he said, "are a holy terror. I set out to teach you, as I was charged to do, and you wind up teaching me. Not even Amalfi knows this side of the foil story, I'll swear to that-and when he hears it, there's going to be a real upheaval in the schools."

"I'm sorry," Chris said miserably. He did not know what else to say.

"Don't be sorry!" Anderson roared, surging to his feet.

"Stick to your guns! Let the other guy be afraid of ghosts-you know the one thing about ghosts that you need to know, no matter what kind of ghosts they are: They have nothing to do with the dead. It's always themselves that people are afraid of."

He looked about distractedly. "I've got to go topside. Here's my hurry-where's my hat?" He roared out, banging one hand against the side of the door, leaving Chris frozen with alarm.

Then Carla began to laugh all over again.

But if the errand on behalf of which Sgt. Anderson had undertaken his rhinoceros-charge exit had really had anything to do with education, Chris had yet to see it rejected in his own. That got steadily harder, as the City Fathers, blindly and impersonally assuming that he had comprehended what they had already stuffed into his head, began to build his store of knowledge toward some threshold where it would start to be useful for the survival of the city. As this process went forward, Chris's old headaches dwindled into the category of passing twinges; these days, he sometimes felt actively, physically sick from sheer inability to make sense of what was being thrust upon him. In a moment of revulsion, he told, the City Fathers so.

"IT WILL PASS. THE NORMAL HUMAN BEING FEELS AN AVERAGE OF TWENTY SMALL PAINS PER HOUR. IF ANY PERSIST, REPORT TO MEDICAL."

No, he was not going to do that; he was not going to be invalided out of his citizenship if he could help it. Yet it seemed to him that what he was suffering couldn't fairly be called "small pains." What to do, since be feared that Medical's cure would be worse than the disease? He didn't want to worry the Andersons, either-he had repaid their kindnesses with enough trouble already.

That left nobody to talk to but Dr. Braziller, that fearsome old harpy who seldom spoke in any language but logarithms and symbolic logic. Chris stood off from this next-but-worst choice for weeks; but in the end he had to do it. Though there was nothing physically wrong with him even now, he had the crazy notion that the City Fathers were about to kill him; one more stone of fact on his head and his neck would break.

"And well it might," Dr. Braziller told him, in her office after class. "Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city. That's their prime directive. Otherwise they have no interest in people at all; after all, they're only machines."

"All right," Chris said, blotting his brow with a trembling hand. "But Dr. Braziller, what good will it do the city for them to blow all my fuses? I've been trying, really I have. But it isn't good enough for them. They keep right on piling the stuff in, and it makes no sense to me!"

"Yes, I've noticed that. But there's reason behind what they're doing, Chris. You're almost eighteen; and they're probing for some entrance point into your talents-some spark that will take fire, some bent of yours that might some day turn into a valuable specialty."

"I don't think I have any," Chris said dully.

"Maybe not. That remains to be seen. If you have one, they'll find it; the City Fathers never miss on this kind of thing. But Chris, my dear, you can't expect it to be easy on you. Real knowledge is always hard to come by-and now that the machines think you might actually be of some use to the city—"

"But they can't think that! They haven't found anything!"

"I can't read their minds, because they haven't any," Dr. Braziller said quietly. "But I've seen them do this before. They wouldn't be driving you in this way if they didn't suspect that you're good for something. They're trying to find out what it is, and unless you want to give up right now, you're going to have to sit still while they look. It doesn't surprise me that it makes you ill. It made me ill, too; I feel a little queasy just remembering it, and that was eighty years ago."

She fell silent suddenly, and in that moment, she looked even older than she had ever seemed before .. old, and frail, and deeply sad, and-could it be possible?-beautiful.

"Now and then I wonder if they were right," Dr. Braziller told the heaped papers on her desk. "I wanted to be a composer. But the City Fathers had never heard of a successful woman composer, and it's hard to argue with that kind of charge. No, Chris, once the machines have fingered you, you have to be what they want you to be; the only alternative is to be a passenger-which means, to be nothing at all. I don't wonder that it makes you ill. But, Chris-fight back, fight back! Don't let those cabinet-heads lick you! Stick them out. They're only probing, and the minute we find out what they want, we can bear down on it. I'll help wherever I can-I hate those things. But first, we have to find out what they want. Have you got the guts, Chris?"

"I don't know. I'll try. But I don't know."

"Nobody knows, yet. They don't know themselves-that's your only hope. They want to know what you can do. You have to show them. As soon as they find out, you will be a citizen-but until then, it's going to be rough, and there will be nothing that anybody can do to help you. It will be up to you, and you alone."

It was heartening to have another ally, but Chris would have found Dr. Braziller's whole case more convincing had he been able to see the faintest sign of a talent-any talent at all-emerging under the ungentle ministrations of the machines. True, lately they had been bearing down heavily on his interest in history-but what good was that aboard a Okie city? The City Fathers themselves were the city's historians, just as they were its library, its accounting department, its schools and much of its government. No live person was needed to teach the subject or to write about it, and at best, as far as Chris could see, it could never be more' than a hobby for an Okie citizen.

Even in the present instance, Chris was not being called upon to do anything with history but pass almost incredibly hard tests in it-tests which consisted largely of showing that he had retained all of the vast mass of facts that the City Fathers were determinedly shoving into him. And this was no longer just history from the Okie point of view. Whole Systems of world and interstellar history-Machiavelli, Plutarch, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Pareto, Spengler, Sarton, Toynbee, Durant and a score of others-came marching through the gray gas into his head, without mercy and with apparent indifference to the fact that they all contradicted each other fatally at crucial points.

There was no punishment for failures, since the City Fathers' pedagogy made failure of memory impossible, and it was only his memory that they seemed to be exploiting here. Instead, punishment was continuous: It lay in the certainty that though today's dose had been fiendish, tomorrow's would be worse.

"Now there you're wrong," Dr. Braziller told him. "Dead though they are, the machines aren't ignorant of human psychology-far from it. They know very well that some students respond better to reward than to punishment, and that others have to be driven by fear. The second kind is usually the less intelligent, and they know that too; how could they not know it after so many generations of experience? You're lucky that they've put you in the first category."

"You mean they're rewarding me?" Chris squeaked indignantly.

"Certainly."

"But how?'

"By letting you go on studying even when they're not satisfied with your progress. That's quite a concession, Chris."

"Maybe so," Chris said glumly. "But I'd get the point faster if they handed out lollipops instead."

Dr. Braziller had never heard of lollipops; she was an Okie. She only responded, a little primly: "You'd get it fast enough if they decided on a punishment system for you instead. They're rigidly just, but know nothing about mercy; and leniency with children is utterly foreign to them-which is one reason why I'm here."

The city hummed onward, and so did the days-and the months. Only Chris seemed to be making no progress in any visible direction.

No, that wasn't quite true. Piggy was going nowhere, either, as far as Chris could see. But there the situation was even more puzzling and full of complications. To begin with, ever since Chris had first met him, Piggy had been denying that he cared about what happened to him when he turned eighteen; so it was odd-though not entirely surprising-to discover that he did care,, after all. In fact, though his situation appeared to be now quite hopeless, Piggy was full of loud self-confidence, belied in the next breath by dark hints of mysterious plans to cinch what was supposed to be cinched already, and even darker hints of awful things to come if it didn't turn out to be cinched. It was all more than Chris could manage to sort out, especially considering his inability to see more than half a minute into his own future. Some days he felt as though Piggy's old accusation—"Boy, you are dumb!"-were written on his forehead in letters of fire.

Although Piggy said almost nothing about it, Chris gathered that he had already approached his father on the subject of biasing the City Fathers in his favor on the Citizenship Tests, and had been rebuffed with a loud roar, only slightly tempered by the intervention of his mother. There was of course no way to study for the Tests, since they measured nothing but potentials, not achievements; which meant, in turn, that there was no such thing as a pony or a crib for them.

Now, it was obvious, Piggy was thinking back to Chris's adventure on Heaven. Judging by the questions he asked about it, Chris deduced that Piggy was searching for something heroic to do, in order to do it much better than Chris had. Chris was human enough to doubt that Piggy could make a much better showing, but in any event the city was still in space, so no opportunity offered itself.

Occasionally, too, he would disappear after class for several days running. On his return, his story was that he had been prowling around the city eavesdropping on the adult passengers. They were, Piggy said, up to something-just possibly, the building of a secret Dirac transmitter with which to call the Lost City. Chris did not believe a word of this, nor did he think Piggy did either.

The simple, granite-keel facts were that time was running out for both of them, and that desperation was setting in: for Piggy because he had never tried, and for Chris because nothing' he tried seemed to get him anywhere. All around them their younger schoolmates seemed to be opening into talents with the violence and unpredictability of popcorn, turning everything the memory cells fed them into salt and savor no matter how high the heat was turned up. In comparison, Chris felt as retarded as a dinosaur, and just as clumsy and gigantic.

It was in this atmosphere of pervasive, incipient failure that Sgt. Anderson one evening said calmly:

"Chris, the Mayor wants to talk to you."

From anyone else, Chris would have taken such an announcement as a practical joke, too absurd to be even upsetting. From Sgt. Anderson he did not know how to take it; he simply stared.

"Relax-it isn't going to be an ordeal, and besides I didn't say he wanted to see you. Sit back down and I'll explain."

Numbly, Chris did so.

"What's happened is this: We're approaching another job of work. From the first contacts we had with these people, it sounded' simple and straightforward, but of course nothing ever is. (Amalfi says the biggest lie it's possible to tell in the English language is, 'It was as simple as that.') Supposedly we were going to be hired on to do a straightforward piece of local geology and mining-nothing so tricky as changing the whole setup of a planet; just a standard piece of work. You've seen the motto on City Hall?"

Chris had. It read: MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY? It had never seemed very dignified to him, but he was beginning to understand what it implied. He nodded.

"Well, that's the way it's always supposed to be: We come in, we do a job, we go out again. Local feuds don't count; we take no part in them.

"But as we got closer to signing a contract with this place-it's called Argus Three-we began to get hints that we were second corners. Apparently there'd already been one city on Argus, hired to do the job, but hadn't done it well.

"We tried to find out more about this, naturally, to be sure the Argidae were telling a straight story; we didn't want to be poaching on any other city's contract. But the colonists were very vague about the whole thing. Finally, though, they let it slip that the other city was still sitting on their planet, and still claimed to be working on the job, even though the contract deadline had passed. Tell me what would you do in a case like that, if you were Amalfi?"

Chris frowned. "I don't know any other answer but the one in the books. If the planet has an overstayed city, it's supposed to call the cops. All other cities should stay clear, otherwise they might get involved in the shooting, if there is any."

"Right; and this appears to be a classic case. The colonists can't be too explicit because they know that every word they broadcast to us is going to be overheard; but the City Fathers have analyzed what Argus Three has sent us, and the chances are a hundred to one that that other city has settled on Argus Three for good ... in short, that it means to take over the planet. The Argidae don't want to call the cops, for reasons we don't know. Instead, they seem to be trying to hire us to take on this tramp city and clear him out. If we tackle that, there will be shooting, that's for sure-and the cops will probably show up anyhow before it's over.

"Obviously, as you say, the thing to do is get out of the vicinity, fast. Cities ought not to fight with each other, let alone get involved in anything like a Violation. But Argus Three's offering us sixty-three million dollars in metal to slough them off the tramp before the cops arrive, and the Mayor thinks we can do it. Also, he hates tramps-I think he might even have taken on the job for nothing. The fact, anyhow, is that he has taken it."

The perimeter sergeant paused and eyed Chris, seemingly waiting for comments. At last Chris said: "What did the City Fathers say?"

"They said NO in a loud voice until the money was mentioned. After that they ran an accounting of the treasury, and gave Amalfi his head. They had a few additional facts to work from that I haven't told you yet, most of which seem to indicate that we can dispossess this tramp without too much damage to our own city, and very possibly before the cops even hear that anything's happening. All the same, bear in mind that they think of nothing but the city as a whole. If some of us get killed in the process they won't care, as long as the city itself gets off cleanly. They're not sentimental."