Cities in Flight

CHAPTER ONE: Utopia

As John Amalfi emerged onto the narrow, worn granite ledge with its gritty balustrade, his memory encountered one of those brief boggles over the meaning of a word which had once annoyed him constantly, like a bubble in an otherwise smoothly blown French horn solo. Such moments of confusion were very rare now, but they were still a nuisance.

This time he found himself unable to decide on a name for where he was going at the moment. Was it a belfry, or was it a bridge?

It was, of course, only a matter of simple semantics, depending, as the oldest saying goes, on the point of view. The ledge ran around the belfry of City Hall. The city, however, was a spaceship, much of which was sometimes operated from this spot, and from which Amalfi was accustomed to assess the star-seas that the city sailed. That made it a bridge. But the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats, and there was even one bell still in the belfry, though it no longer had a clapper. The city was still called New York, N.Y., too, but that, the old maps showed, was misleading; the city aloft was only Manhattan, or New York County.

Amalfi’s step across the threshold struck the granite without perceptible interruption. The minute dilemma was familiar: he had been through others of its kind often in the years immediately after the city had taken to the skies. It was hard to decide the terms in which one thought about customary things and places after they had become utterly transformed by space flight. The difficulty was that, although the belfry of City Hall still looked much as it had in 1850, it was now the bridge of a spaceship, so that neither term could quite express what the composite had become.

Amalfi looked up. The skies, too, looked about as they must have in 1850 on a very clear night. The spindizzy screen which completely englobed the flying city was itself invisible, but it would pass only elliptically polarized light, so that it blurred the points which were stars seen from space, and took them down in brilliance about three magnitudes to boot. Except for the distant, residual hum of the spindizzies themselves—certainly a much softer noise than the composite traffic roar which had been the city’s characteristic tone back in the days before cities could fly—there was no real indication that the city was whirling through the emptiness between stars, a migrant among migrants.

If he chose, Amalfi could remember those days, since he had been mayor of the city—although only for a short time—when the City Fathers had decided that it was time to go aloft. That had been in 3111, decades after every other major city had already left the Earth; Amalfi had been just 117 years old at the time. His first city manager had been a man named deFord, who for a while had shared Amalfi’s amused puzzlement about what to call all the familiar things now that they had turned strange—but deFord had been shot by the City Fathers around 3300 for engineering an egregious violation of the city’s contract with a planet called Epoch, which had put a black mark on the city’s police record which the cops still had not forgotten.

The new city manager was a youngster less than 400 years old named Mark Hazleton, who was already as little loved by the City Fathers as deFord had been and for about the same reasons, but who had been born after the city had gone aloft and hence had no difficulty in finding the appropriate words for things. Amalfi was prepared to believe that he was the last living man on board the flying city who still had occasional bubbles blown into his stream of consciousness by old Earthbound habits of thinking.

In a way, Amalfi’s clinging to City Hall as the center of operations for the city betrayed the mayor’s ancient ties to Earth. City Hall was the oldest building on board, and so only a few of the other structures could be seen from it. It wasn’t tall enough, and there were too many newer buildings around it. Amalfi didn’t care. From the belfry—or bridge, if that was what he had to call it now—he never looked in any direction but straight up, his head tilted all the way back on his bull neck. He had no reason to look at the buildings around Battery Park, after all. He had already seen them.

Straight up, however, was a sun, surrounded by starry sable. It was close enough to show a perceptible disc, and becoming slowly larger. While Amalfi watched it, the microphone in his hand began to emit intermittent squawks.

“It looks good enough to me,” Amalfi said, lowering his bald head grudgingly a centimeter or two toward the mike. “It’s a type G star, or near to it, and Jake in Astronomy says two of the planets are Earthlike. And Records says that both of ’em are inhabited. Where there’s people, there’s work.”

The phone quacked anxiously, each syllable evenly weighted, but without any over-all sense of conviction. Amalfi listened impatiently. Then he said, “Politics.”