Cities in Flight

He was astonished to discover that the hull around him was stippled with small holes, real holes with the slip-stream fluting over them. It took him what seemed to be three weeks to realize that the whooping and cheerleading which meant nothing to him was riddling the ship and threatening to kill him at any second.

Someone was shaking him. He lurched to his knees, trying to unfreeze his eyeballs.

“Amalfi! Amalfi!” The voice, although it was breathing on his ear, was parsecs away. “Pick your spot, quick! They’ll have us shot down in a—”

Something burst outside and threw Amalfi back to the deck. Doggedly he crawled to the trap and peered down through the now-shattered glass. The bandit Hevian city swooped past, upside down. The mayor felt a sudden wave of motion sickness, and the city was lost in a web of tears. The second time it came by, he managed to see which building in it had the heaviest guard, and pointed, choking.

The rocket threw its tailfeathers over the nearest cloud and bored beak-first for the ground. Amalfi hung on to the edge of the suddenly blank trap, his own blood spraying back in a fine mist into his face from his cut fingers.

“Now!”

Nobody heard, but Hazleton saw his nod. A blast of pure light blew through the upended cabin, despite the shielding between it and the pile. Even through the top of his head, the violet-white light of that soundless blast nearly blinded Amalfi, and he could feel the irradiation of his shoulders and chest. He would develop no allergies on this planet, anyhow—every molecule of histamine in his blood must have been detoxified in that instant.

The rocket yawed wildly, and then came under control again. The ordnance noises had already quit, cut off at the moment of the flash.

The bandit Hevian city was blind.

The sound of the jets cut off, and Amalfi understood for the first time what an “aching void” might be. The machine fell into a steep glide, the air howling dismally outside it. Another rocket, under the guidance of Carrel, dived down before it, scything a narrow runway in the jungle with portable mesotron rifles—for the bandit towns kept no supersonic no-plant’s-land between themselves and the rank vegetation.

The moment the rocket stopped moving, Amalfi and a hand-picked squad of Okies and Hevians were out of it and slogging through the muck. From inside Fabr-Suithe drifted a myriad of screams—human screams now, screams of rage and grief, from men who thought themselves blinded for life. Amalfi did not doubt that many of them were. Certainly anyone who had had the misfortune to be looking at the sky during that instant when the entire output of the pile had been converted to visible light would never see again.

But the laws of chance would have protected most of the renegades, so speed was vital. The mud built up heavy pads under his shoes, and the jungle did not thin out until they hit the town’s wall itself.

The gates had been rusted open years ago, and were choked with greenery. The Hevians hacked their way through it with practiced knives and cunning.

Inside, the going was still almost as thick. Fabr-Suithe proper presented a depressing face of proliferating despair. Most of the buildings were completely enshrouded in vines, and many were halfway toward ruins. Iron-hard tendrils had thrust their way between stones, into windows, under cornices, up drains and chimney funnels. Poison-green succulent leaves plastered themselves greedily upon every surface, and in shadowed places there were huge blood-colored fungi which smelled like a man six days dead; the sweetish taint hung heavily in the air. Even the paving blocks had sprouted—inevitably, since, whether by ignorance or laziness, most of the recent ones had been cut from green wood.

The screaming began to die into whimpers. Amalfi did his best to keep himself from inspecting the stricken inhabitants. A man who believes he has just been blinded permanently is not a pretty sight, even when he is wrong. Yet it was impossible not to notice the curious mixture of soiled finery with gleamingly clean nakedness. It was as if two different periods had mixed in the city, as if a gathering of Hruntan nobles had been sprinkled with Noble Savages. Possibly the men who had given in completely to the jungle had also slid back enough to discover the pleasures of bathing. If so, they would shortly discover the pleasures of the mud-wallow, too, and would not look so noble after that.

“Amalfi, here they are—”