Cities in Flight

“I know. I heard him. He’s such a stupid. But hell be back. Your grandmother will be here too. Once the Mayor and Miramon and Dr. Schloss and the rest decided to stay on He, because of all the work they have to do here, they had to send home for somebody to take care of us. They don’t think we can take care of ourselves. They wouldn’t let us go knocking all around a strange planet all by ourselves.”

“Maybe not,” Web said reluctantly. He tested the proposition; it seemed to hold water. “But why would it have to be grandmother?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be Daddy, because he has to stay on New Earth and work on the New Earth part of the problem that we’re working on here,” Estelle said. “And it wouldn’t be your grandfather because he has to stay home on New Earth and be mayor while Mayor Amalfi’s here. It wouldn’t be my mother because they’re not scientists or philosophers and would just clutter up He even more than we’re doing. If they’re going to fly anyone out here to oversee us, it has to be your grandmother.”

“I suppose so,” Web said. “That’ll put a crimp in us, for sure.”

“It’ll do more than that,” Estelle said tranquilly. “She’ll send us home.”

“She wouldn’t do that!”

“Yes she would. That’s the way they think. She’ll be practical about it.”

“That’s not being practical,” Web protested. “It’s treachery, that’s what it is. She can’t come all the way here to take care of us on He, just as an excuse to take us off He.”

Estelle did not reply. After a moment Web opened his eyes, belatedly realizing that a shadow had fallen across his face. The Hevian boy who had given Estelle the melon was standing above them, deferentially, respecting their silence, but obviously poised to renew the game when they were ready. Behind him, the heads of the other Hevian children bobbed over the hill, obviously wondering what the strangers and their boneless odd-smelling pet would do next, but leaving the initative to their spokesman.

“Hello,” Estelle said, sitting up again.

“Hello,” the tall boy said hesitantly. “Yes?”

For a moment he seemed baffled; then, making the best of the situation, he sat down and went on in as simple a Hevian as he could contrive.

“You are rested. Yes? Shall we play another game?”

“No more for me,” Web said, almost indignantly. “Then play Matrix yesterday, tomorrow sometime day. Yes?”

“No, no,” the Hevian boy said. “Not Matrix. This is another game, a resting game. You play it sitting down. We call it the lying game.”

“Oh. How works it?”

“Everyone takes turns. Each tells a story. It must be a real story, without any truth in it The other players are the jury. You gain a point for everything in the story that is clearly true. The low score wins.”

“I lost about five key words in there somewhere,” Estelle said to Web. “How does it go again?”

Web explained quickly. Although his spoken command of the Hevian language was limited to the tenses of past indictable, present excitable and future irredeemable, his vocabulary a thoroughly unbotanical mixture of stems and roots, and his declensions one massive disinclination to decline, he found that he was developing a fair facility at understanding the language, at least when it was being spoken this slowly. It was quite probable that he too had lost five words in the course of the Hevian boy’s speech, but he had picked up their meaning from context; Estelle apparently was still trying to translate word by word, instead of striving first to catch the total import of the sentence.

“Oh, I see,” Estelle said. “But how do they rate one truth over another? If in my story the sun rises in the morning, and I also say I’m wearing this whatever-it-is, this chiton, do I get docked one point for each?”

“I’ll try to ask,” Web said doubtfully. “I’m not sure I have all the nouns I need.”

He put the question to the Hevian boy, finding it necessary to be rather more abstract than he wished; but the boy grasped not only the sense of what he was trying to say, but worked his way back to the concrete nouns with impressive insight.

“The jury will decide,” the boy said. “But there are rules. A dress is only a little truth, and costs only one point. Sunrise on a captive planet, like New Earth, is a natural law, that may cost you fifty. On a free planet like He, it may be only partly true and cost you ten. Or it may be a flat lie and cost you nothing. That is why we have the jury.”

Web had to have this restated to him in increasingly simpler terms before he chanced explaining it in turn to Estelle; but at last he was reasonably sure that both the New Earth players understood the rules of the game. To make assurance doubly sure, he asked the Hevians to begin, so that he and Estelle could become familiar with the kinds of lies which were most admired, and the way the jury of players penalized each inadvertent truth.