Cities in Flight

“Yes and no. They can’t forbid the Mayor anything. But if he goes against their judgment more often than they’re set to tolerate, they can revoke his office. That’s never happened here, but if it does, we’ll have to sit still for it. If we don’t, they’ll stop the machinery.”

“Wow. Isn’t it dangerous to give machines so much power? Suppose they had a breakdown?”

“If there were only a few of them, that would be a real danger; but there are more than a hundred, and they monitor and repair each other, so in fact it will never happen. Sanity and logic is their stock in trade—which is why they can accept or reject the results of any election we may run. The popular will is sometimes an idiot, but no human being can be given the power to overrule it; not safely. But the machines can.

“Of course, there are stories about towns whose City Fathers ran amok with them. They’re just stories, like Piggy’s ‘Lost City’—but they’re important even when they’re not true. Whenever a new way of living appears in the universe, the people who adopt it see quickly enough that it isn’t perfect. They try to make it better, sure; but there are always some things about it that can’t be changed. And the hopes and fears that are centered on those points get turned into stories.

“Piggy’s myth, for instance. We live long lives in the cities, but not everybody can have the gift. It’s impossible that everyone should have it—the whole universe isn’t big enough to contain the sheer mass of flesh that would accumulate if we all lived and bred as long as we each wanted to. Piggy’s myth says it is possible, which is untrue; but what is true about it is that it points to one of the real dissatisfactions with our way of living, real because nothing can be done about it.

“The story of the runaway City Fathers is another. No such thing has ever happened as far as I know, and it doesn’t seem to be possible. But no live man likes to take orders from a bunch of machines, or to think that he may lose his life if they say so—but he might, because the City Fathers are the jury aboard most cities. So he invents a cautionary tale about City Fathers running amok, though actually he’s talking not about the machines at all—he’s warning that he may run amok if he’s pushed too far.

“The universe of the cities is full of these ghosts. Sooner or later somebody is going to tell you that some cities go bindlestiff.”

“Somebody has,” Chris admitted. “But I didn’t know what he meant.”

“It’s an old Earth term. A hobo was an honest migratory worker, who lived that way because he liked it. A tramp was the same kind of fellow, except that he wouldn’t work—he lived by stealing or begging from settled people. In hobo society both kinds were more or less respectable. But the bindlestiff was a migrant who stole from other migrants—he robbed their bindles, the bags they carried their few belongings in. That man was an outcast from both worlds.

“It’s common talk that some cities in trouble have gone bindlestiff—taken to preying on other cities. Again, there are no specific instances. IMT is the town that’s most often mentioned, but the last we heard of IMT, she wasn’t a bindlestiff—she’d been outlawed for a horrible crime on a colony planet, but technically that makes her only a tramp. A mean one, but still only a tramp.”

“I see,” Chris said slowly. “It’s like the story about City Fathers going crazy. Cities do starve, I know that; and the bindlestiff story says, ‘How will we behave when the pinch comes?’”

Anderson looked gratified. “Look at that,” he said to Carla. “Maybe I should have been a teacher!”

“Nothing to do with you,” Carla said composedly. “Chris is doing all the thinking. Besides, I like you better as a cop.”

The perimeter sergeant sighed, a little ruefully. “Oh, well, all right. Then I’ll give you only one more story. You’ve heard of the Vegan orbital fort?”

“Oh, sure. That was in the history, way back.”

“Good. Well, for once, that’s a real thing. There was a Vegan orbital fort, and it did get away, and nobody knows where it is now. The City Fathers say that it probably died when it ran out of supplies, but it was a pretty big job and might well have survived under circumstances no ordinary city could live through. If you ask the City Fathers for the probabilities, they tell you that they can’t give you any figures—which is a bad sign in itself.

“Now, that’s as far as the facts go. But there’s a legend to go with them. The legend says that the fort is foraging through the trade lanes, devouring cities—just the way a dragonfly catches mosquitoes, on the wing. Nobody has actually seen the fort since the scorching of Vega, but the legend persists; every time a city disappears, the word goes around, first, that a bindlestiff got it, and next, that the fort got it.

“What’s it all about, Chris? Tell me.”

Chris thought for a long time. At last he said: