Cities in Flight

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 boy 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.”

Web had to have this restated to him in increasingly simpler terms before he chanced explaining it in turn to Estelle; but at last he was reasonably sure that both the New Earth players understood the rules of the game. To make assurance doubly sure, he asked the Hevians to begin, so that he and Estelle could become familiar with the kinds of lies which were most admired, and the way the jury of players penalized each inadvertent truth.

The first two stories came close to convincing him that he was being overcautious. At the very least it seemed plain, both from the terms in which the game had been described and the stories as they were told, that the Hevians as a race had little talent for fiction. The third player, however, a girl of about nine who obviously had been bursting with impatience for her turn to come around, stunned him completely. The moment she was called upon, she began:

“This morning I saw a letter, and the address on it was Four. The letter had feet, and the feet had shoes on them. It was delivered by missile, but it walked all the way. Though it is Four for four, it’s triple treble trouble,” she wound up triumphantly.

There was a short, embarrassed silence.

“That doesn’t sound like a lie at all,” Estelle said to Web, relapsing into her own language. “It sounds more like a riddle.”

“That was not fair,” the Hevian leader was telling the nine-year-old at the same time in a stern voice. “We hadn’t explained the rules of the coup.” He turned to Web and Estelle. “Another part of the game is to try to tell a story which is entirely true, but sounds like a lie. In the coup, the jury penalizes you for lying if it can catch you. If you aren’t caught, you have told a perfect truth, which wins the round even over a perfect lie. But it was unfair of Pyla to try for a coup before we’d explained it to you.”

“I challenge once,” Web said gravely. “Is really this morning was? If, then we had had knowed; but we haven’t.”

“This morning,” Pyla insisted, determinedly defending her coup in the face of the group’s obvious disapproval. “You weren’t there then. I saw you leave.”

“How do you know about all these?” Web said.

“I hung around,” the girl said. Abruptly, she giggled. “And I heard you two talking, too, behind the hill.”

Since the whole of her answer was offered in a fluent, though heavily accented Okie beche-de- mer, there were obviously no further questions to be asked.

Web was feeling just barely civil toward females, but he offered Pyla his politest smile. “In that case,” he said formally, “you win. We thank you from our heartmost bottom. This is good news.”

He never did quite make up his mind whether his imperfect knowledge of Hevian made this polite speech come out as “Pullup hellup yiz are ninety” or “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porter-pease?”, or whether he managed to say exactly what he thought he was saying, but to his great astonishment, Pyla burst into tears.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she wailed. “That would have been my very first coup. And you beat me, you beat me.”

The jury was already in a huddle. A few moments later Silvador, the leader, stroked Pyla gently on the temples and said, “Hush now. On the contrary, our Web-friend must be penalized for lying.”

His eyes twinkling, he offered Estelle his arm, and she came to her feet in one sinuous unravelling of the knot she had tied herself into during the lying game.

“The penalty must include our Estelle-friend too,” he added portentously. “You must both come with us, directly to the city, and be—” he struck an executioner’s pose—”put to sleep for a while.”

“No,” Web said. “We have to go.” He clambered stiffly to his feet.

“Please,” Silvador said. “We don’t really mean to punish. You wanted to sleep-learn. We can take you to the sleep-learner. Is that not what you asked this morning? Pyla has two hours coming to her this afternoon. We were going to give it to you; you could learn Hevian and talk to us!”

“But how did we lie?” Estelle said, her eyes dancing.

“Web said it was good news,” Silvador said solemnly, “that his Dee-friend was already here. He told a flat lie about an accomplished fact; that costs 50 points.”

The two New Earth children looked at each other. “Oh, algae and gravity,” Web said suddenly. “Let’s go do it. We’ll see Dee soon enough.”

Dee blew her top.

“What on Earth were you thinking of, John?” she demanded. “How do you know what they teach in hypnopaedia here? How could you let children run around a strange planet without knowing what these savages might do to them?”

“They didn’t do anything to us—” Web said.

“They’re not savages—” Amalfi said.

“I know what they are. I was here the first time, when you were. And I think it’s criminally irresponsible to let savages tamper with a child’s mind. Or any civilized mind.”

“How would you recognize a civilized mind?” Amalfi demanded. But he knew that it was certainly a fruitless question, and possibly a spiteful one. He could see well enough that she was the same girl he had met during the Utopia-Gort affair, the same woman he had loved, the same bright physical image he would cherish to the nearing end of time; but she was getting old, and how do you tell a woman that? The Hevians and the children alike were approaching the end of the world as a new experience, but Dee, and Amalfi, and Mark, and indeed the whole of New Earth were approaching it from age, with the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had no thought but to stave off new experience, to dwell safely in accomplished fact. He himself would not accept that such a thing was to happen; Dee would not let the children learn a new language; they were exhibiting all the stigmata of the onset of old age, and so was their culture. The drugs still worked; physically they were still young; but age was with them nonetheless, and for good. In the long run there was no cheating time and the entropy gradient, nor any hope but that of putting one’s hope into Hevians and other children. The cancer-scarred giant King of Buda-Pesht and the Acolyte jungle had been as old as Amalfi was now when Amalfi had met and bested him, and he had even then settled into an idee fixe; he had been still physically arrested, but mentally he was already used up.

There were only two ways to go toward death; you accept that you are going to die, or you refuse to believe it. To deny that the problem is there is childish, or senile; it lacks the fluidity of adjustment which is that process called maturity; and when children and savages are more fluid at this than you are, you must see that curfew has struck for you and go gracefully. Otherwise, they will bury you, their titular leader, nominally alive.

Dee had not, of course, bothered to answer the question; she simply looked grim. The aborted argument had been conducted mostly sotto voce anyhow, for the rest of the Hevian council-room was deeply embroiled in an attempt to quanticize the amount of gamma radiation which would be produced when the two universes passed through each other, and its degree of convertibility into either of the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had been forced to push her way into the meeting to find Web and Estelle, who by now had become accepted silent partners at such skull-sessions.

“I’m not content with that at all,” Retma was saying. “Dr. Schloss is assuming that a substantial part of this energy will go off as sheer noise, as though the meeting of the two universes were analogous to the clashing of cymbals. To allow that, one has to assume that Planck’s Constant holds true in Hilbert space, for which we haven’t a shred of evidence. One can’t superimpose an entropy gradient at right angles to a reaction which itself involves entropies of opposite sign on each side of the equation.”

“But why can’t you?” Dr. Schloss said. “That’s what Hilbert space is for: to provide a choice of axes for just such an operation. If you have such a choice, the rest is only a simple exercise in projective geometry.”