Cities in Flight

Miramon looked sick. “Probably you would have been killed—or they would have tried to kill you, anyhow,” he said, with considerable reluctance. “That would have been releasing Evil again upon us. The priests say that it was women who brought about the sins of the Great Age. In the bandit cities, to be sure, that savage creed is no longer maintained—which is one reason why we have so many deserters to the bandit cities. You can have no idea of what it is like to do your duty to the race each year as our law requires. Madness!”

He sounded very bitter. “This is why it is hard to make our people see how suicidal the bandit cities are. Everyone on this world is weary of fighting the jungle, sick of trying to rebuild the Great Age with handfuls of mud, sick of maintaining social codes which ignore the presence of the jungle—but most of all, sick of serving in the Temple of the Future. In the bandit cities the women are clean, and do not scratch one.”

“The bandit cities don’t fight the jungle?” Amalfi asked.

“No. They prey on those who do. They have given up the religion entirely—the first act of a city which revolts is to slay its priests. Unfortunately, the priesthood is essential; and our beast-women must be borne, since we cannot modify one tenet without casting doubt upon all—or so they tell us. It is only the priesthood which teaches us that it is better to be men than mud-puppies. So we—the technicians—follow the rituals with great strictness, stupid though some of them are, and consider it a matter of no moment that we ourselves do not believe in the gods.”

“Sense in that,” Amalfi admitted. Miramon, in all conscience, was a shrewd apple. If he was representative of as large a section of Hevian thought as he believed himself to be, much might yet be done on this wild runaway world.

“It amazes me that you knew to accept the key as a trust,” Miramon said. “It was precisely the proper move—but how could you have guessed that?”

Amalfi grinned. “That wasn’t hard. I know how a man looks when he’s dropping a hot potato. Your priest made all the gestures of a man passing on a great gift, but he could hardly wait until he’d got it over with. Incidentally, some of those women are quite presentable now that Dee’s bathed ’em and Medical has taken off the under layers. Don’t look so alarmed, we won’t tell your priests—I gather that we’re the foster fathers of He from here on out.”

“You are thought to be emissaries from the Great Age,” Miramon agreed gravely. “What you actually are, you have not said.”

“True. Do you have migratory workers here? The phrase comes easily in your language, yet I can’t quite see how—”

“Surely, surely. The singers, the soldiers, the fruit-pickers—all go from city to city, selling their services.” Then, much faster than Amalfi had expected, the Hevian reached bottom. “Do you … do you imply … that your resources are for sale? For sale to us?”

“Exactly, Miramon.”

“But how shall we pay you?” Miramon gasped. “All of what we call wealth, all that we have, could not buy a length of the cloth in your sash!”

Amalfi thought about it, wondering principally how much of the real situation Miramon could be expected to understand. It occurred to him that he had persistently underestimated the Hevian so far. It might be profitable to try the full dose—and hope that it wouldn’t prove lethal.

“It’s this way,” Amalfi said. “In the culture we belong to, a certain metal serves for money. You have enormous amounts of it on your planet, but it’s very hard to refine, and I’m sure you’ve never done more than detect it. One of the things we would like is your permission to mine for that metal.”

Miramon’s pop-eyed skepticism was close to comical. “Permission?” he repeated. “Please, Mayor Amalfi—is your ethical code as foolish as ours? Why do you not mine this metal without permission and be done with it?”

“Our law-enforcement agencies would not allow it. Mining your planet would make us rich—almost unbelievably rich. Our assays show, not only fabulous amounts of germanium on He, but also the presence of certain drugs in your jungle—drugs which are known to be anti-agathics.”

“Sir?”

“Sorry. I mean that, used properly, these drugs indefinitely postpone death.”

Miramon rose with great dignity.

“You are mocking me,” he said. “I will return at a later date, and perhaps we may talk again.”