Cities in Flight

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