Cities in Flight

Amalfi was forced to abandon his position, which by being so firm had imparted a certain strength to his desire to oppose her, in order to play host. “Did Mark send you, then?”

She laughed. “King Mark sends me on a good many errands, but this wouldn’t be a very likely one for him.” She added bitterly, “Besides, he’s so wrapped up in Gifford Bonner’s group that he ignores me for months on end.”

Amalfi knew what she meant: Dr. Bonner was the teacher-leader of an informal philosophical group called the Stochastics; Amalfi hadn’t bothered to inform himself in detail on Bonner’s tenets, but he knew in general that Stochasticism was the most recent of many attempts to construct a complete philosophy, from esthetics to ethics, using modern physics as the metaphysical base. Logical positivism had been only the first of those; Stochasticism, Amalfi strongly suspected, would be far from the last.

“I could see something had been keeping his mind off the job lately,” he said grimly. “He might do better to study the doctrines of Jorn the Apostle. The Warriors of God control no less than fifteen of the border planets right now, and the faith doesn’t lack for adherents right here on New Earth. It appeals to the bumpkin type—and I’m afraid we’ve been turning out a lot of those lately.”

If Dee recognized this as in part a shaft at the changes in New Earth’s educational system which she had helped to institute, she showed no sign of it.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But I couldn’t persuade him, and I wonder if you could either. He doesn’t believe there’s any real threat; he thinks that a man simple-minded enough to be a Fundamentalist is too simple-minded to hold together an army.”

“Oh? Mark had better ask Bonner to tell about Godfrey of Bouillon.”

“Who was—?”

“The leader of the First Crusade.”

She shrugged. Possibly only Amalfi, as the only New Earthman who had actually been born and raised on Earth, could ever have heard of the Crusades; doubtless they were unknown on Utopia.

“Anyhow, that isn’t what I came here to talk about, either.”

The wall treacher opened and floated the drinks out. Amalfi captured them and passed one over silently, waiting.

She took her glass from him but, instead of sinking down with it as he had half-pictured her doing, she walked nervously back to the door and took her first sip as if she might put it aside and be leaving at any moment.

He discovered that he did not want her to go. He wanted her to walk some more. There was something about the gown she was wearing—

That there were fashions again was a function of being earthbound. One simple utilitarian style had sufficed both men and women all their centuries aloft when there had been the unending demands of the city’s spaceworthiness to keep all hands occupied. Now that the ex-Okies were busily fulfilling Franklin’s law that people will breed to the point of overpopulating any space available to them, they were also frittering away their time with pets and flower-gardens and fashions that changed every time a man blinked. Women were floating around this year of 3995 in diaphanous creations that totaled so much yardage a man might find himself treading on their skirts. Dee, however, was wearing a simple white covering above and a clinging black tubular affair below that was completely different. The only diaphanous part of her outfit was a length of something gossamer and iridescent that circled her throat under a fold of the white garment and hung down between her still delicate, still gently rounded breasts, as girlish in appearance as the day Utopia had sent her out to New York, in a battleship, to ask for help.

He had it. “Dee, you looked just as you look now when I first saw you!”

“Indeed, John?”

“That black thing—”

“A sheath-skirt,” she interpolated helpfully.

“—I noticed it particularly when you came aboard. I’d never seen anything like it. Haven’t seen anything like it since.” He refrained from telling her that during all the centuries he had loved her, he had pictured her in that black thing, turning to him instead of Hazleton. Would the course of history have been any different, had she done so? But how could he have done anything but reject her?

“It took you long enough to notice it tonight,” she said. “I had it made up especially for this evening’s dinner. I’ve been tired of all this float and flutter for a year. Essentially I’m still a product of Utopia, I guess. I like stern clothes and strong men and a reasonably hard life.”

She was certainly trying to tell him something, but he was still adrift. The situation was impossible on the face of it. He was not in the habit of discussing fashion with his best and oldest friend’s wife at an hour when all sensible planet-bound pioneers were abed. He said, “It’s very pretty.”

To his astonishment, she burst into tears. “Oh, don’t be stuffy, John!” She put the glass down and reached for her cloak.