Cities in Flight

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 I don’t know what all else. If I had a great big city that I 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 system,” 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 it 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 fort 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.

CHAPTER NINE: The Tramp

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 reflected 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.

“I T WILL PASS. T HE NORMAL HUMAN BEING FEELS AN AVERAGE OF TWENTY SMALL PAINS PER HOUR. I F ANY PERSIST, REPORT TO M EDICAL. ”

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 he 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