Cities in Flight

“The Hevians don’t have any comparable computers,” Amalfi said slowly. “It would be useful to have them on board. The question is, can we do it? Some of those machines have been sinking into the deck for so many centuries that we might destroy them trying to pry them out.”

“Then you’ve lost that unit,” Hazleton said. “But how many are there? A hundred? I forget—”

“ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR.”

“Yes. Well, suppose you lose a few? It’s still worth the try, I think. There’s nearly two thousand years of accumulated knowledge tied up in the City Fathers—”

“NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY.”

“All right, I was only guessing; still that’s a lot of knowledge that no human has available in its entirety any more. I’m surprised we didn’t think of this ourselves, Amalfi.”

“So am I,” Amalfi admitted. “One thing ought to be made clear, though. Once you cabinet-heads are all installed on board He—or as many of you as we can successfully transfer—you are not in charge. You are the city, but the whole planet is not the city. It has its own administration and its own equivalent of city fathers, in this case human ones; your function will be limited to advice.”

“THIS IS INHERENT IN THE SOLUTION TO FACTOR THREE.”

“Good. Before I switch off, does anybody have any further questions?”

“I have one,” Estelle said hesitantly.

“Speak right up.”

“Can I take Ernest?”

“ERNEST WHO?”

Amalfi, grimacing, started to explain about svengalis, but it developed that the City Fathers knew everything about svengalis that there was to know, except that they had become New Earth pets.

“THIS ANIMAL IS TOO DEXTEROUS, TOO CURIOUS AND TOO UNINTELLIGENT TO BE ALLOWED ABOARD A CITY. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS PROBLEM, A DIRIGIBLE PLANET MUST BE CONSIDERED TO BE A CITY. WE ADVISE AGAINST IT.”

“They’re right, you know,” Amalfi said gently. “In terms of the dangers of monkeying with the machinery, He is a city; the Hevians so regard it, and regulate their own children accordingly.”

“I know,” Estelle said. Amalfi regarded her with curiosity and a little alarm. She had been through many a danger and many an emotional stress thus far without any of them even cracking her serenity. In view of that, the proscription of an ugly and idiotic animal struck him as a strange thing to be weeping about.

He did not know that she was weeping for the passing of her childhood; but then, neither did she.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Metagalactic Center

FOR Amalfi himself, the transfer to He could not have come too soon; New Earth was a graveyard. For a while during the odd, inconclusive struggle with Jorn the Apostle, he had felt something like himself, and the New Earthmen seemed to be acknowledging that the Amalfi who had been their mayor while they had been Okies was back in charge, as potent and necessary as ever. But it had not lasted. As the crisis passed—largely without any work or involvement on the part of the New Earthmen—they subsided gratefully back into cultivating their gardens, which they somehow had mistaken for frontiers. As for Amalfi, they had been glad to have him in charge during the recent unpleasantness, but after all such events were not very usual any more, and one does not want an Amalfi kicking perpetually about a nearly settled planet and knocking over the tomatoes for want of any other way to expend his disorderly energies.

Nobody would weep if Miramon took Amalfi away now. Miramon looked like a stabler type. Doubtless the association would do Amalfi good. At least, it could hardly do New Earth any real harm. If they wanted perpetual dissidents like Amalfi on He, that was their lookout.

Hazleton was a more difficult case, for Amalfi and the New Earth-men alike. As a disciple of Gifford Bonner, he was theoretically wedded to the doctrine of the ultimate absurdity of trying to enforce order upon a universe whose natural state was noise, and whose natural trend was toward more and more noise to the ultimate senseless jangle of the heat-death. Bonner taught—and there was nobody to say him nay—that even the many regularities of nature which had been discovered since scientific method had first begun to be exploited, back in the 17th Century, were simply long-term statistical accidents, local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity was chaos. Touring the universe by ear alone, Bonner often said to simplify his meaning, you would hear nothing but a horrifying and endless roar for billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole body of organized knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or so decay into John Cage and merge with the prevailing, unmitigable tumult.