Cities in Flight

Where that might wind him up, he had no idea. He could only hope that it might be Castle Wolfwhip, and that he would find Anderson and Dulany there—and that the six furious colonists in back of the locked bulkhead would not be able to burn their way out before he got there.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Why Not to Keep Demons

BEFORE the swan boat had been on its slobbering way outward for more than five minutes, the sodium-yellow glare of the city’s dock-side beacon dimmed and vanished as swiftly as if it had been snuffed out. Except for his prisoners, whom he was trying to ignore, Chris was alone in the shell of the boat, like a chick in an egg, with nothing for company but the unfamiliar instruments, the grunting of the engines, and the flash and crash of the eternal storm.

He studied the control board intently, but it told him very little that he did not already know. All the lettering on and around the instruments were in the Cyrillic alphabet—and although the City Fathers expected citizens to be able to speak the Universal Language, up to now they had given Chris not even a first lesson in how to read it. Even so obvious a device as the swan boat’s radio set was incomprehensible to him in detail; after a brief study, he gave up all hope of finding the city’s master frequency and calling for pursuit and aid. He could not even decide whether it was a AFM or a PM tuner, let alone read the calibrations on the dial.

Nevertheless he urgently needed to signal. Above all, he needed to let the city know the details, fragmentary though they were, of the plotting that he had overheard. Running away with the plotters in their own swan boat had been an impulse of desperation, which he was already beginning more and more to regret. If only he had managed somehow to get back on shore, and told somebody in Amalfi’s office what he had learned, pronto!

But the question was, would they have listened, or believed him if they had? Nobody who was anybody aboard the city seemed to want to bother with youngsters until they had become citizens; the adults were all too old, somehow, to be even approachable—and for that matter citizens paid very little attention to passengers of any age.

Of course, Chris could have told the City Fathers what he knew, easily enough—but everything that was told the City Fathers went into the memory cells, which was the equivalent of putting it in dead storage. The City Fathers never took action on what they knew, or even volunteered information, unless directed; otherwise they only held it until it was asked for, which might take centuries.

In any event the die was cast. Now he also needed someone in the city to know where he was going, and to follow him. But among the glittering, enigmatic instruments before him he could find no way to bring that about, nor did he in fact know even vaguely how the city might chase after him if it did know what his situation was. The Tin Cabs operated upon broadcast power which faded out at the city’s perimeter, and to the best of Chris’s knowledge, the city had no ground vehicles capable of coping with shifting, ambiguous, invisible terrain of this kind. Somewhere in storage, true, it did have a limited number of larger military aircraft, but how could you fly one of them in this region of perpetual storm? And even if you could, what would you look for, in a world where even the largest villages and castles produced and consumed so little power that detecting instruments would be unable to differentiate a city from a random splatter of lightning bolts?

The swan boat churned onward single-mindedly. After a while, Chris noticed that it had been at least several minutes since he had had to apply corrections in order to keep the green pip on the cross hairs. Experimentally, he let go of the controls entirely. The pip stayed centered. Some signal—perhaps simply his keeping the pip centered for a given length of time—had cut in an automatic pilot.

That was a help, in a way, but it deprived him of anything to do but worry, and added a new worry to the list: How could he cut the autopilot out of the circuit if he needed to? The pertinent switch was doubtless in plain sight and clearly marked, but again, he couldn’t read the markings. As for his prisoners, they were being disturbingly quiet. In the back of his mind he had been anticipating some attempt to burn through the door—surely they had some sort of hand weapon back there which might serve the purpose—but they hadn’t so much as pounded on it.

He hoped fervently that they were just being fatalistic about their captivity. If their silence meant that they were satisfied with it, that was bad news. The news was bad enough already, for he had no idea what he was going to do with them, or with the boat, when he got to Castle Wolfwhip—

And no time left to invent any plan, for in the next flash of lightning he saw the castle.