Cities in Flight Retelling: A Life for the Stars Part 2 - School in Space

Chris deFord just arrived aboard New York City. The real one. Flying through space. And now the city wants to know: what is he good for?

Chapter 4: Schoolroom in the Sky

The transfer from Scranton to New York is something else. Chris sees it from a small rocket-powered gig, and the view hits him hard. An island of towers, tall as mountains, floating in a sea of stars. Behind them, Scranton looks like a bucket of old bolts.

At the perimeter he gets processed. Not by a person, but by the City Fathers. These are the city’s central computers, and they run things. They talk in what Chris thinks of as all capital letters. Perfectly clear speech, but you’d never mistake it for human.

The City Fathers ask him the big question: passenger or citizen?

Here’s the thing. This sounds like a simple choice, but it’s not. A passenger is just along for the ride. A citizen gets something incredible: anti-agathic drugs. The drugs that stop aging. The City Fathers mention casually that the current mayor was born in 2998, and the oldest person on record lived over five hundred years.

Chris does the math. If he lives long enough, maybe he can find his way home someday. He chooses citizen.

But there’s a catch. Citizenship requires proving yourself useful. And to prove yourself useful, you need an education. So Chris gets a white card and a spot in the schoolroom.

The “schoolroom” is not what you’d expect. No desks. No teachers. Just couches and a metal helmet covered in tiny sharp points called a toposcope. They put this thing on your head, fill the room with a dry gray gas that smells like mountain laurel, and pump information directly into your brain. They call it hypnopaedia. Sleep-teaching.

It sounds easy. Just lie there and absorb facts. But it is brutal. Chris sees older students from Scranton get carried out having seizures. They never come back. One day Chris skips his anticonvulsant drink because it tastes bad and makes him sneeze. Next session, the memory banks hit him with a double dose of projective Riemannian geometry. He wakes up with four monitors holding him down mid-seizure. He nearly gets kicked out permanently.

After that, he drinks the stuff. Every time.

The City Fathers pour Okie history into his head. And we get the whole timeline. How humanity developed the spindizzy drive and anti-agathic drugs. How the Cold War turned both East and West into police states that were basically the same thing. How cities started ripping themselves off Earth to escape a permanent depression. How they fought the Vegan Tyranny. How a rogue admiral named Alois Hrunta scorched an entire planet and declared himself Emperor of Space.

It is a lot of history. But the key point is this: the galaxy is a messy, loosely governed place, and the flying cities are basically migrant workers keeping the whole economy going.

Chapter 5: “Boy, You Are Dumb!”

Machine learning only gets you facts. To actually understand things, you need a real teacher. Chris gets Dr. Helena Braziller, and she is terrifying.

She’s a stocky, fierce, white-haired woman who won’t just tell Chris answers. She makes him work through problems the way the original scientists did. When Chris asks why he can’t just know that a certain equation doesn’t work for large objects, she fires back: great inventors spent their lives making things simple for you. Until you understand the difficulties, you can’t understand the simplifications. Go back to the blackboard.

Chris also meets Piggy Kingston-Throop. Piggy is the same age as Chris, blond, plump, and totally unimpressed by everything. His parents are important people in the city. He’s not stupid, just lazy. And he has opinions about how citizenship really works.

Their first real argument is about the anti-agathic drugs. Chris has absorbed the rules: you have to be useful to get them. Three paths to citizenship. Show a useful talent, demonstrate intellectual ability, or pass the Citizenship Tests. Chris takes this seriously.

Piggy does not.

“Boy, you are dumb!” Piggy tells him. The Tests are a dodge, he says. A safety net for people with connections. His father programs the City Fathers, so if the tests are too hard, dad can fix that. The whole system is rigged.

Chris pushes back, but then Piggy lands a real hit. What about Sgt. Anderson, Chris’s own guardian? He’s just a cop, but he’s almost as old as the Mayor. Clearly on the drugs. So much for the “you have to be a genius” theory.

This sends Chris to Anderson for answers. And Anderson explains it simply. The drugs aren’t for geniuses. They’re for saving skills. Any skills. Anderson himself is just a boss cop, but he’s very good at it. Why train a new one every fifty years when you can keep the experienced one? The city needs one of everything, and as long as you’re the best at your thing, you stay.

Anderson also explains how the drugs actually work. Ascomycin gives you nonspecific immunity for about seventy years per shot. TATP blocks cholesterol buildup. Another drug eliminates the need for sleep entirely. Together they don’t make you immortal. They just remove the two biggest killers: heart disease and infection. You can still die from cancer, accidents, bullets, starvation, or overwork.

“There is no such thing as immortality,” Anderson says. “It’s as mythical as the unicorn. Not even the universe itself is going to last forever.”

Then the apartment chimes. A heavy voice comes through. It’s Mayor Amalfi. He’s found work. The city is about to land.

Chapter 6: A Planet Called Heaven

The planet is called Heaven. And it is anything but.

As the city descends, the spindizzy field lights up like a ball of black clouds and lightning. Rain everywhere. Sleet at higher altitudes. Constant thunder. Chris watches from an old pier at the foot of Gansevoort Street, the same pier Herman Melville once sailed from. Chris grew up with thunderstorms on Earth, so he’s having a great time. Piggy, who has never seen weather in his life, is miserable.

They shouldn’t be there. This is a sally port, a military staging area. Sgt. Anderson shows up in full space armor with twenty soldiers behind him. He tells them to beat it. Piggy talks back. Anderson asks for his card. Piggy runs.

The city grounds in a fanfare of lightning bolts.

Heaven’s deal is this: sixty-six thousand people called the Elect run a feudal society with a huge population of serfs nobody has ever counted. They want the Okies to help them industrialize. Build undersea farms, refine thorium, set up broadcast power. They’ll pay in germanium.

But Anderson tells his wife what the real problem is. You can’t industrialize a feudal society without changing the social structure. The Okies aren’t allowed to change planets’ social systems. But finishing this contract will start a slow revolution whether they want it or not. And when the Earth police show up later, New York will have a Violation on its record.

The work rolls out into the endless storm. Anderson and the other squad leader, Dulany, are gone for longer and longer stretches. Then both get posted as Missing.

Chris has to do something. He has one possession of value: a cheap little clasp knife with a compass in the handle. The last gift his father ever gave him. He trades it to a local lord in exchange for a ride in a swan boat, one of the colonists’ swamp vehicles.

The lord thinks it’s hilarious. A dock boy who picked up a few words of the local language and now wants to drive a boat. He shows Chris the controls and goes to the back to talk with his men.

Chris is supposed to drive in circles. Instead, he listens.

And what he hears changes everything. The colonists are talking about occupying the city. About holding Anderson and Dulany as hostages. About immobilizing the city’s defenses. They plan to take New York.

The boat hits a dock. Chris locks the bulkhead door, trapping the colonists in the back. He reverses the boat away from the city and aims it at the swan boat’s homing signal, hoping it leads to wherever Anderson and Dulany are being held.

A kid with no training, no weapons, and no real plan, steering a stolen swamp vehicle into a thunderstorm on an alien world to rescue prisoners he’s not even sure are alive.

That’s where we leave Chris deFord. Fifteen years old, alone in a storm on a planet called Heaven, doing something incredibly brave and probably very stupid.

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