Cities in Flight

“Not that I myself should have been surprised,” Miramon said, from the head of his great council table of black, polished, oily wood. “After all, I myself am still alive, to an age beyond the age of all the patriarchs in our recorded history; which in turn is only a small fraction of the age you gave us to understand you had attained when first we met you. But old habits of thought die hard. We were able to isolate and purify only a few of the anti-agathics produced by our jungle, acting on the hints you had given us, before the jungle died off and the plants which produced those drugs did not prove cultivatable under the new conditions, so we had no choice but to search for ways to synthesize these compounds. We were forced to work very fast, and happily the search was successful by the third generation, but in the meantime the existing supply had sufficed to keep only a few of us alive beyond what we still think of as our normal lifespans. Hence to most of our population, Mayor Amalfi, you are now only a legend, an immortal man of infinite wisdom from beyond the stars, and I have been unable to prevent myself from coming to think of you in much the same way.”

Though he still wore in his topknot the great black barbaric saw-toothed feather of his authority, the Miramon before Amalfi today bore little resemblance to the lithe, supple, hard-headedly practical semi-savage who had once squatted on the floor in Amalfi’s presence, because chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods. His skin was still firm and tanned, his eyes bright and darting, but, though his abundant hair was now quite white, he had settled into that period of life, neither youth nor age, characteristic of the man who goes on anti-agathics only when somewhat past “natural” middle age. His councillors—including Retma, of Fabr-Suithe, which in Amalfi’s time had been a bandit town which had been utterly destroyed during the last struggle before He took flight, but which now, rebuilt in ceremonial pink marble, was the second city of all He—mostly wore this same look. There were one or two who obviously had not been allowed access to the death-curing drugs until they had been in their “natural” seventies, bringing to the council table the probably spurious appearance of sagacity conferred by many wrinkles, an obvious physical fragility, and a sexual neutrality which was both slightly repellent and covertly enviable at the same time—a somatotype which for mankind as a whole had long ago lost its patent as the physiological stamp of hard-won wisdom, but which here among these recent immortals still exerted a queer authority, even upon Amalfi.

“If you managed to synthesize even one of the anti-agathics, you’ve proven yourselves better chemists than anyone else in human history,” Amalfi said. “They’re far and away the most complicated molecules ever found in nature; certainly we’ve never heard of anyone who was able to synthesize even one.”

“One is all we managed to synthesize,” Miramon admitted. “And the synthetic form has certain small but undesirable side-effects we’ve never been able to eliminate. Several others turned out to be natural sapogenins which we could raise in our artificial climate, and modify into anti-agathics by two or three subsequent fermentation steps. Finally there are four others, of very broad usefulness, which we produce by fermentation alone, using micro-organisms grown in nutrient solutions in deep tanks, into which we feed comparatively simple and cheap precursors.”

“We have one like that, the first, in fact, that was ever discovered: ascomycin,” Amalfi said. “I think I will stick to my original judgment. As chemists you people could obviously give all the rest of us cards and spades.”

“Then it is fortunate for us, and perhaps for every sentient being everywhere, that it is not as chemists that we come seeking you,” Retma said, a trifle grimly.

“Which brings me to my main question,” Amalfi said. “Just why did you turn back? I can’t imagine that you would have been seeking me personally, you had no reason to believe that I was anywhere within thousands of parsecs of this area; we last parted company on the other side of the home galaxy. Obviously you must have looped back toward home as soon as you were sure you had centralized control over your spindizzy installation, long before you were much past half-way to the Andromeda galaxy. What I want to know is, what turned you back?”