Cities in Flight (57 page)

The woman clenched her horny hands under her chin and shivered. "It is forbidden to speak of Earth except on holidays. But I will finish the plowing. Otherwise our children will die."

"Come, then," Amalfi said. "There is much to learn."

To his complete consternation, the serf went down on both knees. A second later, while Amalfi was still wondering what to do next, Karst was up again, and climbing up onto the Barrens toward them. Hazleton offered him a hand, and was nearly hurled like a flat stone through the air when Karst took it; the serf was as solid and strong as a pile driver, and as sure on his stony feet.

"Karst, will you return before night?"

Karst did not answer. Amalfi began to lead the way back toward the city. Hazleton started down the far side of the rise after them, but something moved him to look back again at the little scrap of farm. The woman's head had fallen forward again, the wind stirring the tangled curtain of her hair. She was leaning heavily into the galling traces, and the plow was again beginning to cut its way painfully through the stony soil. There was now, of course, nobody to guide it.

"Boss," Hazleton said into the throat mike. "Are you listening, or are you too busy playing Messiah?"

"I'm listening."

"I don't think I want to snitch a planet from these people. As a matter of fact, I'm damned if I will!"

Amalfi didn't answer; he knew well enough that there was no answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There was no place else to go.

The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything but the stony and now unharvestable soil.

The city was old-unlike the men and women who manned it, who had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations docket. He got it, and in bells-big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to the day six hundred years ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city's ancient subways since the managership of deFord. That had been the first time the younger Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints "and wistful recollections of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and urgently.

Amalfi sighed. In the end, it appeared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi's city for two things only. One: The city had a long Violations docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it. Two: The city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and blacker city had done centuries before-the city which had perpetrated the massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops and surviving Okies alike.

Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc-the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its own.

If the cops would let it. The Magellanic Clouds' were, of course, moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of Okies-and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the majority of the space-faring cities-the greater the urge would become to track down the last few stragglers.

Amalfi had no faith in the ability of a satellite star cloud to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than Amalfi's city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If ...

Amalfi put the earphone on again. "Question," he said. "Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary techniques in time?"

The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from then- eternal mulling over the past. At last they said:

"YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS CLOUD. REMEMBER THOR FIVE."

There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to. There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought that atrocity had made good its escape in this Cloud; it had all happened a long time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi's own city in expiation of that still-burning crime.

Remember Thor V. No city would be safe until that raped and murdered world could be forgotten. Not even out here, in the virgin satellites of the home lens.

"Boss? Sorry, we didn't know you were busy. But we've got an operating schedule set up, as soon as you're ready to look at it."

"I'm ready right now, Mark," Amalfi said, turning away from the boards. "Hello, Dee. How do you like your plant?"

The girl smiled. "It's beautiful," she said simply.

"For the most part, anyway," Hazleton agreed. "This heath is an ugly place, but the rest of the land seems to be excellent-much better than you'd think it from the way it's being farmed. The tiny little fields they break it up into here just don't do it justice, and even I know better cultivation methods than these serfs do."

"I'm not surprised," Amalfi said. "It's my theory that the Proctors maintain their power partly by preventing the spread of any knowledge about farming beyond the most rudimentary kind. That's also the most rudimentary kind of politics, as I don't need to tell you."

"On the politics," Hazleton said evenly, "we're in disagreement. While that's ironing itself out, the business of running the city has to go on."

"All right," Amalfi said. "What's on the docket?"

"I'm having a small plot on the heath, next to the city, turned over and conditioned for some experimental plantings, and extensive soil tests have already been made. That's purely a stop gap, of course. Eventually we'll have to expand onto good land. I've drawn up a tentative contract of lease between the city and the Proctors, which provides for us to rotate ownership geographically so as to keep displacement of the serfs at a minimum, and at the same time opens a complete spectrum of seasonal plantings to us-essentially it's the old Limited Colony contract, but heavily Weighed in the direction of the Proctors' prejudices. There's no doubt in my mind but that they'll sign it. Then-—"

"They won't sign it," Amalfi said. "They can't even be shown it. Furthermore, I want everything you've put into your experimental plot here on the heath yanked out."

Hazleton put a hand to his forehead in frank exasperation. "Oh, hell, boss," he said. "Don't tell me that we're still not at the end of the old squirrel-cage routine- intrigue, intrigue, and then more intrigue. I'm sick of it, I'll tell you that directly. Isn't a thousand years enough for you? I thought we had come to this planet to settle down!"

"We did. We will. But as you reminded me yourself yesterday, there are other people in possession of this planet at the moment-people we can't legally push out. As matters stand right now, we can't give them the faintest sign that we mean to settle here; they're already intensely suspicious of that very thing, and they're watching us for evidence of it every minute."

"Oh no," Dee said. She came forward swiftly and put a hand on Amalfi's shoulder. "John, you promised us after the March was over that we were going to make a home here. Not necessarily on this planet, but somewhere in the Cloud. You promised, John."

The mayor looked up at her. It was no secret to her, or to Hazleton either, that he loved her; they both knew, as well, the cruelly just Okie law-and the vein of iron loyalty in Amalfi that would have compelled him to act by that law even if it had never existed. Until the crisis in the jungle had forced Amalfi to reveal to Hazleton the existence of that love, neither of the two youngsters had more than suspected it over a period of nearly three centuries.

But Dee was comparatively new to Okie mores, and was, in addition, a woman. Only to know that she was loved had been unable to content her long. She was already beginning to put the knowledge to work.

She was certainly not old enough yet to realize that the crisis had passed, leaving behind only a residuum of devotion useless to her and to Amalfi alike. She could not know that the person who had replaced her in Amalfi's mind was Karst; .that Amalfi was now hearing from the lips of the serf the innocent and vastly touching questions which Dee had once asked; that Amalfi had realized that his thousand years of adult life had fitted him to answer not one question, but a thousand. Had anyone suggested to her that Amalfi was only just now coming into his full maturity, she would .not have understood; possibly, she might have laughed. Amalfi had himself smiled when the realization had come to him.

"Of course I promised," he said. "I've delivered on my promises for a millennium now, and I'll continue to do so. This planet will be our home if you'll give me just the minimum of help in winning it. It's the best of all the planets we passed on the way in, for a great many reasons including a couple that won't begin to show until you see the winter constellations here, and a few more that won't become evident for a century yet. But there's one thing I certainly can't give you, and that's immediate delivery."

"All right," Dee said. She smiled. "I trust you, John, you know that. But it's hard to be patient."

"Is it?" Amalfi said, not much surprised. "Come to think of it, I remember when the same thought occurred to me, back on He. In retrospect the problem doesn't seem large."

"Boss, you'd better give us some substitute courses of action," Hazleton cut in, a little coldly. "With the possible exception of yourself, every man, woman, and alley cat in the city is ready to spread out all over the surface of this planet the moment the starting gun is fired. You gave us every reason to think that that would be the way it would happen. If there's going to be a delay, you have a good many idle hands to put to work."

"Use straight work-contract procedure all the way down the line. No exploiting of the planet that we wouldn't normally do during the usual stopover for a job. That means no truck gardens or any other form of local agriculture; just refilling the oil tanks, re-breeding the Chlorella strains from local sources for heterosis, making up our water losses, and so on. The last I heard, we were still using the Tx 71105 strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa; that's too high-temp an alga for a planet with a winter season, like this one."

"That won't work," Hazleton said. "It may fool the Proctors, Amalfi, but how can you fool your own people? What are you going to do with the perimeter police, for instance? Sergeant Andersen's whole crew knows that it won't ever again have to make up a boarding squad or defend the city or take up any other military duty. Nine-tenths of them are itching to throw off their harness for good and all and start dirt farming. What am I going to tell them?"

"Send 'em out to your experimental patch on the heath," Amalfi said, "on police detail. Tell 'em to pick up everything that grows."

Hazleton started to turn toward the lift shaft, holding out his hand to Dee. Then, characteristically, he had a third thought and turned back.

"But why, boss?" he said plaintively. "What makes you think the Proctors suspect us of squatting? And what could they do about it if we did?"

"The Proctors have asked for the standard work contract," Amalfi said. "They knew what it was, they got it, and they insist upon its observation, to the letter- including the provision that the city must be off this planet by the date of termination. As you know, that's impossible; we can't leave this planet at all. But we'll have to pretend that we're going to leave up to the last possible minute."

Hazleton looked stubborn. Dee took his hand reassuringly, but it didn't seem to register.

"As for what the Proctors themselves can do about it," Amalfi said, picking up the earphones again, "I don't know. I'm trying to find out. But this much I do know:

"The Proctors have already called the cops."

Under the gray, hazy light in the schoolroom, neutral light which seemed cast like a cloak along the air rather than to illuminate it, voices and visions came thronging even into the conscious and prepared mind of the visitor, pouring from the memory cells of the City Fathers. Amalfi could feel their pressure, just below the surface of his mind; it was vaguely unpleasant, partly because he already knew what they sought to impart, so that the redoubled impressions tended to shoulder forward into the immediate attention, nearly with the vividness of immediate experience.