Cities in Flight Retelling: A Life for the Stars Part 1 - Kidnapped by a Flying City
We’re now in the second novel of Cities in Flight, and the story jumps forward by centuries. The spindizzies exist. The anti-aging drugs exist. And whole cities are ripping themselves off the ground and flying into space to find work among the stars. They call these migrant cities “Okies,” and the Earth they leave behind is broke, used up, and slowly emptying out.
But this time around, we’re not following scientists or politicians. We’re following a kid.
Chapter 1: Press Gang
Meet Chris deFord. He’s sixteen. He lives in a place called Lakebranch, which used to be a resort town but is now just a collection of poachers and people scratching out a living from dirt. His father is a former university professor dying of malnutrition. His brother Bob helps keep the family together. There are little sisters to feed. Life is hard in a way that most of us can only read about.
Chris is sitting on an old railroad embankment, watching the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania get ready to leave Earth forever. The train tracks were torn up long ago and fed to the furnaces. Even the wooden ties got burned for firewood over generations of cold winters. But the embankment is still there, and it gives Chris a front-row seat.
Scranton is a steel town, and there’s no more iron ore left on Earth worth processing. Pittsburgh already claimed Mars. So Scranton has no choice but to go further out, past the solar system entirely, to find planets with iron to work. The city has cleared a wide belt of raw earth around itself. It’s taking the slag heaps along because those might be worth something out there. People, on the other hand, are considered mostly useless. Weight for weight, the slag is worth more.
That line hit me hard. Blish just drops it in there casually. The slag is worth more than people.
Chris has his brother’s dog Kelly with him. Kelly is a mutt, not smart, but loyal in the way that only dogs can be. While Chris watches from the bushes, patrols in yellow hard hats start sweeping the area. They’re looking for people.
Not to warn them. To grab them.
There’s a law, it turns out, that says anyone caught inside the evacuation zone past noon can be “impressed” into service. Basically kidnapped. The patrol finds a gardener in a shack and beats him into submission. Then they spot Chris’s red hair through the bushes. Kelly gives away their position by barking.
What follows is a fight. Not a heroic one. Chris throws punches. Kelly bites the patrol leader’s leg. But there are too many of them. Kelly doesn’t survive it. And Chris, battered and beaten, gets dragged toward Scranton with a heart made of stone.
That’s the exact phrase Blish uses. “A heart made of stone.” It’s simple and it lands perfectly.
Chapter 2: A Line of Boiling Dust
The spindizzy field is already up around the city. It’s invisible, but Chris can see its effect. Heat waves bend around Scranton like it’s inside a bubble. The patrol rushes through the perimeter, and the leader shows Chris why running back is a bad idea. He throws a rock toward the boundary line. The rock shoots straight up and vanishes into the sky with a screeching sound, like a bullet bouncing off metal.
“Fast, huh?” the leader says. “And it’d throw you much farther.”
Then the takeoff alert sounds. A horn so loud it makes the walls vibrate. The ground starts lurching. Chris grabs a doorway frame as the city rocks back and forth like a ship in a storm. But here’s the strange part: those huge rocking movements barely translate into ground vibration. The spindizzy field absorbs most of it.
The valley sinks below them. First the railroad embankment is at street level, then the mountaintops, then the treetops. And then it’s just blue sky, getting darker fast. Stars come out. The sun still shines, but day and night are now meaningless words.
Scranton is in space.
The patrol leader, whose name is Frad Haskins (not Fred, Frad), turns out to be a decent human being. He called a cab not because of his torn-up leg, but because he wanted three minutes alone with Chris to give him advice. Here’s what Haskins tells him: When you meet the city manager, he’ll ask what you know. Tell him something. Anything. Pick the one thing you know best and stick with it. Because if you have nothing to offer, they’ll put you on the slag heaps. And that’s a death sentence in slow motion.
Chris thinks fast. He knows gardening and hunting, but those are useless on a flying city. His father taught economics at the university before it closed. But Chris chooses astronomy. He’s spent years lying in fields, watching stars, reading whatever books he could find. It’s not much, but it’s something.
The city manager, Frank Lutz, is described like a skunk. Not the insult kind. The actual animal kind. Small, sleek, plump, seemingly harmless. And dangerous when you’re not looking. Lutz quizzes Chris. Name the planets. What’s the biggest satellite? What’s the nearest fixed star? (“The Sun,” Chris answers, which is technically correct.) How many months in a light-year? (“Months don’t have anything to do with it. You might as well ask how many weeks there are in an inch.”)
Chris passes the quiz well enough that Lutz sends him to be tested by Dr. Boyle Warner, the city’s astronomer. If he passes, he’s an apprentice. If not, the slag heaps.
Chapter 3: “Like a Barrel of Scrap”
Chris doesn’t really pass. Dr. Warner is kind about it, but the truth is clear: Chris knows some astronomy, impressive for a kid with no real education, but nowhere near enough to actually be useful. Warner takes him on as an apprentice anyway and tries to teach him, but warns Chris that the pretense can’t last forever.
So Chris finds a hiding spot. He’s a poacher’s kid, after all. He finds a warehouse full of heavy mining crates that shifted during takeoff, creating a maze inside. He stashes food and supplies there. He studies by candlelight. He’s preparing for the day when Lutz’s people come looking for him.
But during a visit to Lutz’s court with Dr. Warner, Chris overhears something that changes everything. Scranton has encountered another Okie city, a massive one. Lutz has a plan: he’ll trade away all the “useless” people who were press-ganged aboard, the ones like Chris, in exchange for a few technicians and a course correction toward an iron-bearing star cluster. The people being traded will be disguised as a goodwill gesture. Nobody will mention the real reason: Scranton doesn’t have enough food for everyone.
Chris runs to his hiding spot. But Frad Haskins finds him there. Turns out Haskins knew about the hiding place from day one. And Haskins brings bad news that Chris hadn’t considered: hoarding food on an Okie city is a capital crime. If Lutz finds him here, with cached supplies, Chris gets shot. No questions asked. No trial.
Chris has no choice. He agrees to be transferred.
“Can I take my books?” he asks.
“They’re not yours, they’re Boyle Warner’s,” Haskins says. “Pick up the torch and let’s go. You’ll find plenty of books where you’re going.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, Haskins tells him the name of the city he’s being sent to.
“New York.”
That’s how Part 1 ends. Chris deFord, a sixteen-year-old kid from a dead-end town in a dead-end valley, who got kidnapped by one flying city, is about to be traded like a barrel of scrap to another one. But this time, the city is New York. And in the world of Cities in Flight, New York is the biggest and most famous Okie city of them all.
Things are about to get a lot more interesting for Chris.
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