Cities in Flight

That left nobody to talk to but Dr. Braziller, that fearsome old harpy who seldom spoke in any language but logarithms and symbolic logic. Chris stood off from this next-but-worst choice for weeks; but in the end he had to do it. Though there was nothing physically wrong with him even now, he had the crazy notion that the City Fathers were about to kill him; one more stone of fact on his head and his neck would break.

“And well it might,” Dr. Braziller told him, in her office after class. “Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They’re interested in only one thing: the survival of the city. That’s their prime directive. Otherwise they have no interest in people at all; after all they’re only machines.”

“All right,” Chris said, blotting his brow with a trembling hand. “But Dr. Braziller, what good will it do the city for them to blow all my fuses? I’ve been trying, really I have. But it isn’t good enough for them. They keep right on piling the stuff in, and it makes no sense to me!”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that. But there’s reason behind what they’re doing, Chris. You’re almost eighteen; and they’re probing for some entrance point into your talents—some spark that will take fire, some bent of yours that might some day turn into a valuable specialty.”

“I don’t think I have any,” Chris said dully.

“Maybe not. That remains to be seen. If you have one, they’ll find it; the City Fathers never miss on this kind of thing. But Chris, my dear, you can’t expect it to be easy on you. Real knowledge is always hard to come by—and now that the machines think you might actually be of some use to the city—”

“But they can’t think that! They haven’t found anything!”

“I can’t read their minds, because they haven’t any,” Dr. Braziller said quietly. “But I’ve seen them do this before. They wouldn’t be driving you in this way if they didn’t suspect that you’re good for something. They’re trying to find out what it is, and unless you want to give up right now, you’re going to have to sit still while they look. It doesn’t surprise me that it makes you ill. It made me ill, too; I feel a little queasy just remembering it, and that was eighty years ago.”

She fell silent suddenly, and in that moment, she looked even older than she had ever seemed before … old, and frail, and deeply sad, and—could it be possible?—beautiful.

“Now and then I wonder if they were right,” Dr. Braziller told the heaped papers on her desk. “I wanted to be a composer. But the City Fathers had never heard of a successful woman composer, and it’s hard to argue with that kind of charge. No, Chris, once the machines have fingered you, you have to be what they want you to be; the only alternative is to be a passenger—which means, to be nothing at all. I don’t wonder that it makes you ill. But, Chris—fight back, fight back! Don’t let those cabinetheads lick you! Stick them out. They’re only probing, and the minute we find out what they want, we can bear down on it. I’ll help wherever I can— I hate those things. But first, we have to find out what they want. Have you got the guts, Chris?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try. But I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows, yet. They don’t know themselves—that’s your only hope. They want to know what you can do. You have to show them. As soon as they find out, you will be a citizen—but until then, it’s going to be rough, and there will be nothing that anybody can do to help you. It will be up to you, and you alone.”

It was heartening to have another ally, but Chris would have found Dr. Braziller’s whole case more convincing had he been able to see the faintest sign of a talent—any talent at all—emerging under the ungentle ministrations of the machines. True, lately they had been bearing down heavily on his interest in history—but what good was that aboard an Okie city? The City Fathers themselves were the city’s historians, just as they were its library, its accounting department, its schools and much of its government. No live person was needed to teach the subject or to write about it, and at best, as far as Chris could see, it could never be more than a hobby for an Okie citizen.

Even in the present instance, Chris was not being called upon to do anything with history but pass almost incredibly hard tests in it—tests which consisted largely of showing that he had retained all of the vast mass of facts that the City Fathers were determinedly shoving into him. And this was no longer just history from the Okie point of view. Whole systems of world and interstellar history—Machiavelli, Plutarch, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Pareto, Spengler, Sarton, Toynbee, Durant and a score of others—came marching through the grey gas into his head, without mercy and with apparent indifference to the fact that they all contradicted each other fatally at crucial points.