Cities in Flight

“Don’t say so unless you think so, Dee,” he said. “It’s always been a joke, after all. The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don’t repudiate the last laugh of all. It may be the only legacy we’ll leave.”

“MIDNIGHT,” the City Fathers said. “THE COUNT IS ZERO MINUS NINE.”

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Triumph of Time

As Amalfi opened the door and went back into the room, the City Fathers said:

“N-DAY. ZERO MINUS ONE HOUR.”

At this hour, everything had meaning; or nothing had; it depended on what had been worth investing with meaning over a lifetime of several thousand years. Amalfi had left the room to go to the toilet. Now he would never do that again, nor would anybody else; the demise of the whole was so close at hand that it was outrunning even the physiological rhythms of the body by which man has told time since he first thought to count it. Was diuresis as worth mourning as love? Well, perhaps it was; the senses should have their mourners too; no sensation, no thought, no emotion is meaningless if it is the last of its kind.

And so farewell to all tensions and all reliefs, from amour to urea, from entrances to exits, from redundancy to noise, from beer to skittles. “What’s new?” Amalfi said.

“Nothing any more,” Gifford Bonner said. “We’re waiting. Sit down, John, and have a drink.”

He sat down at the long table and looked at the glass before him. It was red, but there was a faint tinge of blue in the liquid too, independent and not adding up to violet even in the bad light of the fluorescents in the midst of dead center’s ultimate blackness. At the lip of the glass a faint meniscus climbed upward from the wine, and little tendrils of condensation meandered back down. Amalfi tasted it tentatively; it was raw and peppery—the Hevians were not great wine-growers, their climate had been too chancy for that—but even the sting of it was an edgy pleasure that made him sigh.

“We should suit up at the half hour,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’d leave more free time, except that some of us haven’t been inside a space-suit in centuries, and some of us never. We don’t want to take chances on their not being trim and tight.”

“I thought we were going to be surrounded by some sort of field,” Web said.

“Not for long, Web. Let me go through this once more, to be sure everybody has it straight in his head. We will be protected by a stasis-field during the actual instant of transition, when time will to all intents and purposes be abolished—it becomes just another coordinate of Hilbert space then. That will carry us over into the first second of time on the other side, after the catastrophe. But then the field will go down, because the spindizzies, which will be generating it, will have been annihilated. We will then find ourselves occupying as many independent sets of four dimensions as there are people in this room, and every set completely empty. The spacesuits won’t protect you long, either, because you’ll be the only body of organized energy and matter in your particular, individual universe; as soon as you disturb the metrical frame of that universe, you, the suit, the air in it, the power in the accumulators, everything will surge outwards, creating space as it goes. Every man his own monobloc. But if we don’t have the suits on for the crossing, not even that much will happen.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so graphic,” Dee complained, but her heart did not really seem to be in it. She was, Amalfi noted, wearing that same peculiarly strained expression she had worn when she had said that she wanted to bear Amalfi a child. Some instinct made him turn to look at Estelle and Web. All their hands were piled up together confidingly on the table. Estelle’s face was serene, and her eyes were luminous, almost like a child waiting for a party to begin. Web’s expression was more difficult to interpret: he was frowning slightly, more in puzzlement than in worry, as if he couldn’t quite understand why he was not more worried than he was.

Outside, there was a thin whining sound which rose suddenly to a howl and then died away again. It was windy today on the mountain.

“What about the table, the glasses, the chairs?” Amalfi asked. “Do those go with us too?”

“No,” Dr. Schloss said. “We don’t want to risk having any possible condensation nuclei near us. We’re using a modification of the technique we used to build Object 4001-Alephnull in the future; the furniture will start to make the crossing with us, but we’ll use the last available energy to push it a micro-second into the past. The result will be that it will stay in our universe. What its fate will be thereafter, we can only guess.”

Amalfi lifted his glass reflectively. It was silky in his fingers; the Hevians made fine glass.

“This frame of reference I’ll find myself in,” Amalfi said. “It will really have no structure at all?”