Cities in Flight Retelling: A Life for the Stars Part 3 - Demons and Ghosts in Space
Chris tried to be a hero and it kind of blew up in his face. Then the city left that storm-planet behind, flew back into space, and things got philosophical real fast.
These three chapters cover a jailbreak from a stone fortress, space mythology that says a lot about human fear, and the return of Chris’s old hometown as a villain. Let’s walk through it.
Chapter 7: Why Not to Keep Demons
Remember how Chris overheard those colonists plotting to take over the city? Well, he made a bold move. He jumped into a swan boat (basically an amphibious vehicle) with the plotters locked in the back, and drove it straight to Castle Wolfwhip where they were holding Sergeants Anderson and Dulany prisoner.
Bold? Yes. Smart? Not really.
The swan boat was on autopilot and Chris couldn’t read the Cyrillic controls. He couldn’t radio the city for help. He couldn’t even turn the thing around. The boat drove itself underwater across a huge lake and docked in a cavern beneath the castle. Four armed men were waiting for him, grinning.
They threw Chris into the same cell as Anderson and Dulany. His guardian was not happy to see him. Not because of sentiment, but because Chris just made everything worse. The two sergeants had a plan, and Chris showing up as a third prisoner complicated things.
But here’s the thing. Chris noticed something in the castle’s audience hall during his “interview” (which involved getting roughed up). Among all the plate armor on the walls, there were two real space suits. And those suits? They belonged to Anderson and Dulany.
The chapter title suddenly makes sense. The baron of Castle Wolfwhip had been keeping trophies from captured Okies. He was basically keeping demon costumes on display. Bad idea.
When lights went out, Dulany picked the lock in the dark. They knocked out the guard. The two sergeants got back into their battle armor. And then they tore the castle apart. Literally. Explosions blew holes through thirty-story walls. Floors collapsed. The baron learned a hard lesson about holding Okie soldiers prisoner. It’s like trying to keep two demons in a corn crib, as Blish puts it.
They flew Chris out of the crumbling castle, got to a swan boat, disabled the remote controls so the colonists couldn’t pull them back, and headed to the city. Anderson read Chris the riot act the whole way back.
The fallout? The city got a worse contract with the colonists. Less money, plus reparations for blowing up the castle. Chris got credit for bravery and imagination, but also a clear message: you caused more problems than you solved.
His friend Piggy saw it differently. He thought the adults were ungrateful hypocrites. “Here you go and do them a big fat favor, and all they can think of to do is lecture you.” Piggy also pointed out, correctly, that if Chris had just stopped the boat at the dock and told the cops what he overheard, the whole mess could have been avoided.
Chris knew Piggy was right. But he also didn’t regret the adventure. Not entirely.
Then Piggy told Chris about the Lost City, a legend among passengers. Supposedly one of the first cities to fly got lost in space, found a perfect planet with a grain that worked as an anti-aging drug, and now cruises around rescuing passengers from other cities. Chris tried to fact-check this with the Librarian (one of the City Fathers machines) and got a classic non-answer. Anti-aging drugs don’t grow naturally, but some precursors do, so technically it’s possible. The Librarian then helpfully listed all the legendary paradise planets from Okie mythology. So much for keeping the question subtle.
Chapter 8: The Ghosts of Space
Anderson found the whole Lost City thing amusing but used it as a teaching moment. And this chapter is really one long, excellent conversation about mythology, fear, and what stories tell us about ourselves.
Anderson explained that the universe of flying cities is full of ghost stories. Not actual ghosts. Stories that people tell because they’re afraid, and they can’t fix the thing they’re afraid of.
The Lost City legend? It exists because not everyone can have the anti-aging drugs. That’s a real problem, and there’s no solution. So people invent a story where everyone gets to live forever. The story is false. But the fear behind it is real.
Stories about City Fathers going crazy and taking over? Never happened. But nobody likes being ruled by machines that can fire your mayor and stop your life support. The story isn’t really about machines going bad. It’s people warning: don’t push me too far.
And then there are bindlestiffs. Anderson explained the old Earth hobo terminology. A hobo works and travels. A tramp travels but won’t work. A bindlestiff steals from other travelers. In Okie terms, a bindlestiff city preys on other cities. The ultimate outcast.
Chris put it all together in a way that surprised everyone, including himself. He figured out that the scariest legend of all, the Vegan orbital fort supposedly eating cities like a dragonfly catches mosquitoes, isn’t just about fear of something bigger. It’s about people fantasizing about destruction. “I’m tired of following rules and working hard and taking orders from machines. If I had a giant unstoppable fort, I’d spend the next thousand years smashing things up.”
Anderson was stunned. Even Carla, his wife, said she’d figured this out long ago but was waiting for the right moment to bring it up. Anderson stomped off to tell the Mayor, banging into doorframes on his way out.
The point Blish makes through Anderson is simple and good: ghosts have nothing to do with the dead. People are always afraid of themselves.
Chapter 9: The Tramp
Chris’s education got harder. The City Fathers were probing for his talents, shoving history and philosophy into his head at a punishing pace. Whole systems of thought: Machiavelli, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee. All contradicting each other. Chris felt like his brain was going to break.
Dr. Braziller, his terrifying teacher, turned out to be his best ally. She told him the City Fathers wouldn’t push this hard unless they suspected he was 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.”
She also dropped something personal. She had wanted to be a composer. But the City Fathers had never heard of a successful woman composer, so they made her a teacher instead. Eighty years later, she still wondered if they were right. It was a rare, human, sad moment from a character who normally spoke in logarithms.
Meanwhile, Piggy was getting desperate too. He tried to get his dad to bias the City Fathers in his favor for citizenship tests. Got shot down. He started disappearing for days, claiming he was spying on adult passengers. Chris didn’t believe any of it. Time was running out for both of them.
Then the real plot kicked in. Anderson told Chris that the city was approaching a new job on a planet called Argus Three. A straightforward mining contract, except there was already another city sitting on the planet. A city that had overstayed its welcome, apparently trying to take over.
By the book, the colonists should call the space cops. But they didn’t want to. Instead, they were offering New York sixty-three million dollars to push the squatter off their planet.
And the squatter? Chris’s old hometown. Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The city that press-ganged him, that killed his brother’s dog, that he escaped from as a scared kid. It was now a tramp city, sitting illegally on a colony planet.
Amalfi called them up. The conversation was brief and hostile. Chris recognized both faces on the screen: a thug named Barney, and Frank Lutz, the city manager who ran Scranton like a snake runs a field. Smart, tricky, no feelings.
Amalfi wanted Chris as an intelligence source. He was the only person on New York who knew Scranton from the inside. Not a vacation, not a reward. A job. And he couldn’t skip school while doing it.
Chris said yes. Because what else was he going to say?
The chapter ends with Anderson warning Chris to stay out of Lutz’s sight. No adventures this time. The stakes just got a lot higher than a castle on a storm planet.
Previous: A Life for the Stars Part 2 Next: A Life for the Stars Part 4