Cities in Flight (69 page)

Amalfi gathered the consensus of the present eyes around the chart table. Such agreement as he needed from the listeners on New Earth he was able to gather almost as well from the silence.

"I think," he said slowly, "that we have begun already."

It was hot on the Hevian hillside in the post-noon glare of the great Cepheid about which the planet was now orbiting at the respectful distance of thirty-five astronomical units-thirty-five times the distance of old Earth from the Sun. At this distance the star, which had a mean absolute magnitude of plus one, was barely tolerable at the peak of its eight-day cycle; at the bottom of the cycle, when the star's radiation had dropped by a factor of 25, it got cold enough on He to nip one's ears-far from an ideal situation for a predominantly agricultural planet, but the Hevians did not expect to remain in the vicinity for as long as one growing season:

Web and Estelle lay in the long grass of the hillside under the hot regard of that swollen star and slowly got their breaths back. Web in particular was glad for the recess. The morning had begun in sober exploration of Fabr-Suithe, He's greatest monument to its own past, and He's present center of pure philosophy; thus far it was the only place they had found on He which they were allowed to explore by themselves, by both the adult Hevians and their own people. This morning, however, this freedom had had an unexpected but logical consequence: they had found that Fabr-Suithe was also one of the few cities on He where Hevian children were free to roam. Elsewhere there were far too many machines vital to the life of the planet as a whole; the Hevians could not afford the chance that children might get into the works, nor, with their sparse population, could they afford the loss of even a single life.

Web and Estelle had changed into the chiton-like Hevian costume the moment they had been told that they would be allowed to explore the city, albeit in very limited terms, but it did not take the Hevian youngsters long to penetrate this disguise, since Web and Estelle spoke their language only in a most rudimentary way. This language block was in part a nuisance-for although most adult

Hevians spoke the mixture of English, Interlingua and Russian which was the beche-de-mer of deep space, learned long ago from the Okies, none of the children did-but it was also a blessing, since it precluded any extensive interrogation of Web and Estelle about their own world, culture and background. Shortly, instead, they found themselves involved in an elaborate chase game called Matrix, rather like run-sheep-run combined with checkers except that it was three-dimensional, for it was played in a twelve-story building with transparent floors so that one could always see the position of the other players, and. with strategically placed spindizzy and friction-field shafts for fast transit from one floor to another. Web was the first to develop the suspicion that the building had either been designed for the game or had been totally abandoned to it, for the transparent floors were appropriately ruled, and the structure otherwise did not seem to contain anything or to be used for any other purpose.

Web had found the game itself exhilarating at first, but rather baffling too, and he was generally the first player to be eliminated. Had it not been for an impromptu change in the rules, he would have been It in nearly every new round, and even under the aegis of the new rules he did not make a very brave showing. Estelle, on the other hand, took to Matrix as though she had been born in the game, and within half an hour her lanky-legged, slender figure, as bosomless and hipless as any of the boys', was darting in and out of the kaleidoscope of running figures with inordinate grace and swiftness. When time was called for lunch, Web's laboring lungs and bruised ego more than welcomed the chance to escape from the city entirely for the hot stillness of the fallow hills.

"They're nice; I like them," Estelle said, rising to one elbow to attack, meditatively, a gourd-shaped green and silver melon which one of the Hevian boys had given her, apparently as a prize. At the first bite, there was a low but prolonged hiss, and the air around them became impregnated with a fragrance so overwhelmingly spicy that Estelle had to sneeze five times in quick succession. Web began to laugh, but the laughter ended abruptly in a paroxysmal sneeze of his own.

"They love us," he said, wiping his eyes. "You're so good at their game, they've given you a sneeze-gas bomb to keep you from playing it any longer."

The odor diminished gradually, carried off by what little breeze there was. After a while Estelle cautiously put two thumbs into the wound she had made and broke the melon open. Nothing else happened; the odor was now tolerable, and then abruptly became both barely detectable and overpoweringly mouth-watering. Estelle handed him half. He bit into the crisp white pulp more deeply than fie had intended. The result made him close his eyes; it tasted like quick-frozen music.

They finished it in reverent silence and, wiping their mouths on their chitons, lay back. After a while, Estelle said:

"I wish we could talk to them better."

"Miramon can talk to us well enough," Web said somnolently. "He didn't have- to learn our language the hard way, either. They do it here by machine, like we used to do it when we were Okies. I wish we still did it that way."

"Hypnopaedia?" Estelle said. "But I thought that was all dead and done for. You didn't really learn anything that way; just facts."

"That's right, just facts. It didn't teach you to relate. For that you have to have a tutor. But it was good for learning things like 1 x 1 = 10, or the tables in the back of the book, or the 850 words you most need to know in a new language. It used to take only five hundred hours to cram all that stuff into you, by EEG feedback, flicker, oral repetition, and I don't know what all else- and the whole time, you were under hypnosis."

"It sounds too easy," Estelle said sleepily. "The easy parts of things ought to be easy," Web said. "What's the point of having to learn them by rote? That takes too much time. You know yourself that something you can learn- in ten repetitions, or five, it takes some kids thirty repetitions to learn. So you have to sit around through twenty or twenty-five repetitions that you don't need. If there's anything I hate about school, it's drill-all that time wasted that you could actually be doing something with."

Suddenly Web became conscious of a peculiar flopping sound at the crest of the hill behind him. He knew well enough that there were no dangerous animals left on He, but he realized that he had been hearing the sound for some time while he was talking; and the notion occurred to him that his definition of a dangerous animal might not necessarily make a good match with that of a Hevian.

Anyhow, he could hope; he could use a tiger to best, along about now. He twisted quickly to his hands and knees.

"Don't be silly," Estelle said, without moving or even opening her eyes. "It's only Ernest."

The svengali appeared over the crest of the hill and came humping itself through the tall grass in a symphony of desperate disorganization. It gave Web only the briefest of glances, and then bent upon Estelle the reproachful stare of an animal utterly betrayed, but still-it hoped you noticed-firm in the true faith. Web stifled his impulse to laugh, for in fact he could hardly blame the poor creature; since it was as brainless as it was sexless-despite its name-it had been able to contrive no better way of keeping up with Estelle than to follow her through her every move in the Matrix game, a discipline for which it was so magnificently unequipped that it had only just now finished. It was lucky that the children had not counted it as a player, or poor Ernest would have been It to-Web thought with unfocussed uneasiness-the end of time.

"We could sign up for it here," Web said abruptly.

"For what? Hypnopaedia? Your grandmother wouldn't let us."

Web turned around and sat up, plucking a long hollow blade of the bamboo-like grass and sinking his grinding teeth thoughtfully into the woody butt end. "But she isn't here," he said.

"No, but she will be," Estelle said. "And she's a school officer on the New Earth. I used to hear her fighting about it with my father when I was a child. She used to tell him he was out of his mind. She would say, "Why do kids need all this calculus and history now? What good is it to somebody who's going to have to go out and hoe a virgin planet?'. She used to make poor Dad stutter something awful."

"But she isn't here," Web repeated, with a little unwilling exasperation. He had just realized that Estelle's face with its closed eyes, so perfectly in repose in the blue-white light of this one-day-long summer, was lovelier than anything he had ever seen before. He found that he could not go on.

At the same moment, the svengali felt rested enough to take a consensus among the scattered ganglia which served it, however badly, for a brain, and concluded that its long soulful stare at Estelle was doing it no good at all. Simultaneously one of its limbs, which had the whole time been inching in the direction of one of the melon rinds, suddenly passed a threshold and telegraphed back to the rest of the animal the implications of that now faint spicy odor. All the rest of Ernest flowed eagerly into that arm and bunched itself around the rind; and then the polyp was rolling helplessly down the hill, curled into a ball, with the melon rind clutched firmly in the middle. As it rolled, it emitted a small thrilling whistle of alarm which made Web's back hairs stir-it was the first time he had ever heard a svengali make a sound-but it would not let go of its prize; it came to rest in the middle of a rivulet in the valley, and was washed gently downstream out of sight, still faintly protesting and avidly digesting. "There goes Ernest," Web said.

"I know. I heard him. He's such a stupid. But he'll be back. Your grandmother will be here too. Once the Mayor and Miramon and Dr. Schloss and the rest decided to stay on He, because of all the work they have to do here, they had to send home for somebody to take care of us. They don't think we can take care of ourselves. They wouldn't let us go knocking all around a strange planet all by ourselves."

"Maybe not," Web said reluctantly. He tested the proposition; it seemed to hold water. "But why would it have to be grandmother?"

"Well, it wouldn't be Daddy, because he has to stay on New Earth and work on the New Earth part of the problem that we're working on here," Estelle said. "And it wouldn't be your grandfather because he has to stay home on New Earth and be mayor while Mayor Amalfi's here. It wouldn't be my mother because they're not scientists or philosophers and would just clutter up He even more than we're doing. If they're going to fly anyone out here to oversee us, it has to be your grandmother."

"I suppose so," Web said. "That'll put a crimp in us, for sure."

"It'll do more than that," Estelle said tranquilly. "She'll send us home."

"She wouldn't do that!"

"Yes she would. That's the way they think. She'll be practical about it."

"That's not being practical," Web protested. "It's treachery, that's what it is. She can't come all the way here to take care of us on He, just as an excuse to take us off He."

Estelle did not reply. After a moment Web opened his eyes, belatedly realizing that a shadow had fallen across his face. The Hevian boy who had given Estelle the melon was standing above them, deferentially, respecting their silence, but obviously poised to renew the game when they were ready. Behind him, the heads of the other Hevian children bobbed over the hill, obviously wondering what the strangers and their boneless odd-smelling pet would do next, but leaving the initiative to their spokesman. "Hello," Estelle said, sitting up again. "Hello," the tall boy said hesitantly. "Yes?" For a moment he seemed baffled; then, making the best of the situation, he sat down and went on hi as simple a Hevian as he could contrive.

"You are rested. Yes? Shall we play another game?"

"No more for me," Web said, almost indignantly. "Then play Matrix yesterday, tomorrow sometime day. Yes?"

"No, no," the Hevian boy said. "Not Matrix. This is another game, a resting game. You play it sitting down. We call it the lying game."

"Oh. How works it?"

"Everyone takes turns. Each tells a story. It must be a real story, without any truth in it. The other players are the jury. You gain a point for everything in the story that is clearly true. The low score wins."

"I lost about five key words in there somewhere," Estelle said to Web. "How does it go again?"

Web explained quickly. Although his spoken command of the Hevian language was limited to the tenses of past indictable, present excitable and future irredeemable, his vocabulary a thoroughly unbotanical mixture of stems and roots, and his declensions one massive disinclination to decline, he found that he was developing a fair facility at understanding the language, at least when it was being spoken this slowly. It was quite probable that he too had lost five words in the course of the Hevian boy's speech, but he had picked up their meaning from context; Estelle apparently was still trying to translate word by word, instead of striving first to catch the total import of the sentence.

"Oh, I see," Estelle said. "But how do they rate one truth over another? If in my story the sun rises in the morning, and I also say I'm wearing this whatever-it-is, this chiton, do I get docked one point for each?"

"I'll try to ask,"- Web said doubtfully. "I'm not sure I have all the nouns I need."

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 Soy 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."