Cities in Flight

MIRAMON shifted nervously in the chair, the great black saw-toothed feather stuck into his topknot bobbing uncertainly. It was a testimonial to his confidence in Amalfi that he sat in it at all, for in the beginning he had squatted, as was customary on his planet. Chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods.

“I myself do not believe in the gods,” he explained to Amalfi, bobbing the feather. “It would be plain to a technician, you understand, that your city is simply a product of a technology superior to ours, and you yourselves are men such as we are. But on this planet, religion has a terrible force, a very immediate force. It is not expedient to run counter to public sentiment in such matters.”

Amalfi nodded. “From what you tell me, I can believe that. Your situation is unique, to the best of our knowledge. What, precisely, happened when your civilization fell?”

Miramon shrugged. “We do not know. It was over eight thousand years ago, and nothing is left but legend. There was a high culture here then—the priests and the scientists agree on that. And the climate was different; it got cold regularly every year, I am told, although how men could survive such a period is difficult to understand. Besides, there were many more stars—the ancient carvings show thousands of them, although they fail to agree on the details.”

“Naturally. You’re not aware that your sun is moving at an abnormally fast relative speed?”

“Moving?” Miramon laughed shortly. “Some of our more mystical scientists are of that opinion—they maintain that if the planets move, so must the sun. It is an imperfect analogy, in my opinion; after all, planets and suns are not otherwise alike as far as we can see. And would we still be in this trough of nothingness if we were moving?”

“Yes, you would—you are. You underestimate the size of the Rift. It’s impossible to detect any parallax at this distance, although in a few thousand years you’ll begin to suspect it. But while you were actually among the other stars, your ancestors could see the motion very well, by the changing positions of the neighboring suns.”

Miramon looked dubious. “I bow to your superior knowledge, of course. But, be that as it may—the legends have it that for some sin of our people, the gods plunged us into this starless desert, and changed our climate to perpetual heat. This is why our priests say that we are in hell, and that to be put back among the cool stars again, we must redeem our sins. We have no heaven as you have defined the term; when we die, we die damned; we must win ‘salvation’ right here in the mud while we are still alive. The doctrine has its attractive features under the circumstances.”

Amalfi meditated. It was reasonably clear, now, what had happened, but he despaired of explaining it to Miramon—hard common sense sometimes has a way of being impenetrable. This planet’s axis had a pronounced tilt, and the concomitant amount of libration. This meant that, like Earth, it had a Draysonian cycle: every so often the top wobbled, and then resumed spinning at a new angle. The result was a disastrous climatic change. Such a thing happened on Earth roughly once every twenty-five thousand years, and the first one in recorded history had given birth to some extraordinarily silly legends and faiths—sillier than those the Hevians now entertained, on the whole.

Still, it was miserably bad luck for the Hevians that a Draysonian overturn had occurred almost at the same time that the planet had begun its journey across the Rift. It had thrown a very high civilization, a culture just entering its ripest phase, forcibly back into the Interdestructional period without the slightest transition.

The planet of He was a strange mixture now. Politically the regression had stopped just before barbarism—a measure of the lofty summits this race had scaled before the catastrophe—and was now in reverse, clawing through the stage of warring city-states. Yet the basics of the scientific techniques of eight thousand years ago had not been forgotten; now they were exfoliating, bearing “new” fruits.

Properly, city-states should fight each other with swords, not with missile weapons, chemical explosives, and supersonics—and flying should be still in the dream stage, a dream of flapping wings at that, not already a jet-propelled fact. Astronomical and geological accident had mixed history up for fair.

“What would have happened to me if I’d unlocked that cage?” Amalfi demanded abruptly.