Cities in Flight

Karst by the elbow.

“It—is nothing,” she said.

He shook her off. “You have built a city over one of night,” he repeated. “You speak the Engh tongue, as we do on feast days. You speak to such as me, with words, not with the whips with the little tags. You have fine clothes, with patches of color of fine-woven cloth.”

It was beyond doubt the longest speech he had ever made in his life. The clay on his forehead was beginning to streak with the effort.

“You are right,” Amalfi said. “We are from Earth, though we left it long ago. I will tell you something else, Karst. You, too, are of Earth.”

“This is not so,” Karst said, retreating a step. “I was born here, and all my people. None claim Earth blood—”

“I understand,” Amalfi said. “You are of this planet. But you are an Earthman. And I will tell you something else. I do not think the Proctors are Earthmen. I think they lost the right to call themselves Earthmen long ago, on another planet, a planet named Thor Five.”

Karst wiped his callused palm against his thighs. “I want to understand,” he said. “Teach me.”

“Karst!” the woman said pleadingly. “It is nothing. Wonders pass. We are late with the planting.”

“Teach me,” Karst said doggedly. “All our lives we furrow the fields, and on the holidays they tell us of Earth. Now there is a marvel here, a city raised by the hands of Earthmen, there are Earth-men in it who speak to us—” He stopped. He seemed to have something in this throat.

“Go on,” Amalfi said gently.

“Teach me. Now that Earth has built a city on the Barrens, the Proctors cannot hold knowledge for their own any longer. Even when you go, we will learn from your empty city before it is ruined by wind and rain. Lord Amalfi, if we are Earthmen, teach us as Earthmen are teached.”

“Karst,” said the woman. “It is not for us. It is a magic of the Proctors. All magics are of the Proctors. They mean to take us from our children. They mean us to die on the Barrens. They tempt us.”

The serf turned to her. There was something indefinably gentle in the motion of his brutalized, crackle-skinned, thick-muscled body.

“You need not go,” he said, in a slurred Interlingua patois which was obviously his usual tongue. “Go on with the plowing, does it please you. But this is nothing of the Proctors. They would not stoop to tempt slaves as mean as we are. We have obeyed the laws, given our tithes, observed the holidays. This is of Earth.”

The woman clenched her horny hands under her chin and shivered. “It is forbidden to speak of Earth except on holidays. But I will finish the plowing. Otherwise our children will die.”

“Come, then,” Amalfi said. “There is much to learn.”

To his complete consternation, the serf went down on both knees. A second later, while Amalfi was still wondering what to do next, Karst was up again, and climbing up onto the Barrens toward them. Hazleton offered him a hand, and was nearly hurled like a flat stone through the air when Karst took it; the serf was as solid and strong as a pile driver, and as sure on his stony feet.

“Karst, will you return before night?”

Karst did not answer. Amalfi began to lead the way back toward the city. Hazleton started down the far side of the rise after them, but something moved him to look back again at the little scrap of farm. The woman’s head had fallen forward again, the wind stirring the tangled curtain of her hair. She was leaning heavily into the galling traces, and the plow was again beginning to cut its way painfully through the stony soil. There was now, of course, nobody to guide it.

“Boss,” Hazleton said into the throat mike. “Are you listening, or are you too busy playing Messiah?”

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t think I want to snitch a planet from these people. As a matter of fact, I’m damned if I will!”

Amalfi didn’t answer; he knew well enough that there was no answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There was no place else to go.

The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything but the stony and now unharvestable soil.

The city was old—unlike the men and women who manned it, who had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations docket. He got it, and in bells—big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to the day six hundred years ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city’s ancient subways since the managership of deFord. That had been the first time the younger Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints and wistful recollections of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and urgently.

Amalfi sighed. In the end, it appeared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi’s city for two things only. One: The city had a long Violations docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it. Two: The city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and blacker city had done centuries before—the city which had perpetrated the massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops and surviving Okies alike.

Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc—the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its own.

If the cops would let it. The Magellanic Clouds were, of course, moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of Okies—and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the majority of the spacefaring cities—the greater the urge would become to track down the last few stragglers.

Amalfi had no faith in the ability of a satellite star cloud to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than Amalfis city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If …

Amalfi put the earphone on again. “Question,” he said. “Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary techniques in time?”

The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from their eternal mulling over the past. At last they said:

“YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS CLOUD. REMEMBER THOR FIVE.”

There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to. There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought that atrocity had made good its escape to this Cloud; it had all happened a long time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi’s own city in expiation of that still- burning crime.

Remember Thor V. No city would be safe until that raped and murdered world could be forgotten. Not even out here, in the virgin satellites of the home lens.

“Boss? Sorry, we didn’t know you were busy. But we’ve got an operating schedule set up, as soon as you’re ready to look at it.”

“I’m ready right now, Mark,” Amalfi said, turning away from the boards. “Hello, Dee. How do you like your planet?”

The girl smiled. “It’s beautiful,” she said simply.