Cities in Flight Retelling: A Life for the Stars Part 4 - Meeting Mayor Amalfi
This is it. The final part of A Life for the Stars. Chris deFord has gone from a farm boy snatched off Earth to someone who actually understands how Okie cities work. And now, in these last three chapters, everything comes together.
Chapter 10: Argus Asleep
New York lands on Argus III, a planet that looks a lot like Pennsylvania. Mountains, pine forests, lakes. Chris would probably feel homesick if he had time for that.
But there’s a problem. Scranton is already here. The same grimy, corrupt city that kidnapped Chris in the first place. They had a mining contract on this planet and completely botched the job. Left a huge ugly scar on the ground. Now New York has the contract instead, and Scranton is just… sitting there. Starving. Refusing to leave.
Chris has been studying Amalfi’s tactics through the city’s history records, and he thinks he understands the mayor’s plan. Amalfi wants to outperform Scranton and starve them out. Do the job well, get paid, and let the failing city wither. It’s a clean strategy. No fighting, no cops, no mess.
Here’s the thing: Chris knows it won’t work.
He knows Scranton. He knows Frank Lutz, their city manager. And desperate people don’t behave logically. Chris actually goes to his guardian, Sergeant Anderson, and lays it all out. Lutz is the kind of guy who has to prove he’s the toughest in any room. He won’t let himself be outbluffed. He’ll fight first and think later.
Chris even suggests a plan. He could sneak into Scranton, contact his old friend Frad, and try to stir up a revolt from the inside. The City Fathers (those all-knowing computers) shut him down. Too risky, they say. Too likely he’d be recognized.
Anderson passes Chris’s concerns up the chain. Amalfi adjusts his approach. He tries using coded language to stall Lutz while keeping the colonists calm. But then Piggy, Chris’s well-meaning but reckless friend, goes and ruins everything. Piggy recruited two women to be “spies” and flew a stolen plane into Scranton, hoping to pull off some kind of movie-hero coup. Lutz didn’t buy it for a second. Now there are three hostages, and Scranton is demanding the entire planet as ransom.
The contract deadline is one week away. And it falls exactly one day before Chris’s eighteenth birthday.
Chris knows, deep in his gut, that Amalfi’s revised plan still won’t work against someone as paranoid and violent as Frank Lutz. If New York moves on Scranton at the last minute, Lutz will kill the hostages before anyone can stop him. It takes five seconds to give that order.
So Chris does something that everyone told him not to do. He sneaks out of the city at night. Nobody stops him. That’s almost worse. It means either they didn’t notice, or they let him go.
Chapter 11: The Hidey Hole
Chris travels light. Two tins of food, a canteen, a change of clothes, and two compasses. He knows these mountains. Pine forests, cold streams, steep ridges. He grew up in country like this. The planet even has a hundred bright stars at night instead of a moon, giving enough light to travel by.
By dawn he’s over the mountain range. He finds a cave, sleeps through the day, then pushes on toward Scranton after dark. When he reaches the city’s edge, he puts on his old Scranton clothes and walks right up to the guards.
“Went to pick mushrooms,” he tells them with a dumb grin. They see the issue clothing and a young kid. They assume he’s one of the soaking pit workers. Those are the guys who get lowered into superheated holes to clean steel ingots. Only the mentally deficient get assigned that job. The guards cuss him out and wave him through.
Chris makes his way to the hiding spot. The “hidey hole” is a space among some crates in a warehouse, the same spot he and Frad used back when Chris was a Scranton laborer. The candle stub is still there.
Frad shows up after work, flashlight in hand. He’d been checking the spot on a hunch, ever since he found out who Scranton was parked next to.
Chris tells Frad the truth. Well, mostly the truth. He’s here to promote a revolution. The word sounds embarrassingly big to him, but that’s what it is. Scranton needs to dump Frank Lutz, and Chris is offering New York’s help in exchange.
The negotiation is tense but honest. Frad knows Lutz has gone off the deep end. Everybody in Scranton knows it. But overthrowing the boss doesn’t solve the bigger problem: they’re broke, starving, and they’ve failed two contracts in a row. Chris offers what he can. New York’s City Fathers could help Scranton reorganize. Amalfi might underwrite their contract with the colonists.
Chris is bluffing on some of this. He doesn’t actually have Amalfi’s permission. He knows he’s in deep water, making promises he has no authority to make. But it’s the only play that might save the hostages and prevent a war.
Frad agrees. He’ll handle Lutz himself. Chris stays hidden.
The waiting is the worst part. Days pass in the dark. Chris loses track of time. Then Frad comes back, looking terrible. Black eye, days of stubble, hollow with exhaustion.
“Come on out. The job’s mostly done.”
What happened to Frank Lutz?
“We got rid of him. The subject is closed.”
Frad’s voice has no emotion at all. Chris doesn’t push it. There are bullet holes in the Tin Cabs on the streets.
Now Chris has to face the part he’s been dreading: telling Amalfi and Anderson what he’s done.
He is scared.
Chapter 12: An Interview With Amalfi
The control room is in the mast of the Empire State Building. Screens, meters, automatic charts everywhere. And in the middle of all this sits Mayor Amalfi.
Chris had imagined someone tall and heroic. Instead, Amalfi is short, barrel-shaped, bald, with a bull neck and enormous hands. He holds a cigar with surprising delicacy. Nobody else in the city smokes, because there’s nowhere to grow tobacco. That cigar is a symbol. It says: this city is wealthy enough that the mayor can have a luxury nobody else can afford.
Amalfi is talking business with Frad, working out the technical details. New York will lend Scranton a “Brood assembly” to replicate City Father computers. In about ten years, Scranton will have its own computer system. New York will recalculate the mining job and underwrite Scranton’s contract with the colonists. Everything Chris had half-promised, half-bluffed about, Amalfi is actually making happen.
Then the mayor turns to Chris.
“I suppose you’re aware, Chris, that this is D-day for you: your eighteenth birthday.”
This is the moment. On his birthday, Chris either becomes a citizen of New York or stays a passenger forever. Amalfi says he has a job for Chris, and he’s been studying it ever since someone first brought it up.
The job needs someone with initiative, boldness, imagination, a willingness to improvise. But also someone with conservative instincts, someone who takes risks to save lives and resources, not waste them. On top of all that, the person needs to be a “cultural morphologist.” That’s a scholar who can look at any civilization, compare it to others at similar stages, and predict how those people will react.
Chris has the character traits already. The skill will come with time and practice. And time is something he’ll have plenty of, now that he’ll be on anti-agathic drugs.
The job? City manager.
Chris stares at Sergeant Anderson. His guardian looks just as shocked. But after a moment, Anderson winks. Chris can barely nod.
“Good,” Amalfi says. “The City Fathers predicted you would, so you were started on the drugs in your first meal of today. Welcome to citizenship, Mr. deFord.”
And just like that, Chris is immortal. He is a citizen. He has a purpose.
He asks about Piggy. Amalfi’s answer is cold: “Too late. He wrote his own ticket. It’s a passenger ticket.” Piggy had boldness but no judgment. He’ll live, but he’ll never be a citizen. It’s a harsh lesson, and Amalfi makes sure Chris understands it. The same trap will always be there for him too.
But the highest moment comes when Frad Haskins, now the new city manager of Scranton, shakes Chris’s hand and says:
“Colleague, let’s talk business.”
Looking Back at A Life for the Stars
This novel does something clever. It’s basically a YA story hidden inside a hard SF universe. Chris starts as a nobody kid from a dirt-poor town, gets dragged into space against his will, and has to figure out a completely new world from scratch. His education is our education. Through his eyes, we learn how Okie cities work, what spindizzies do, why the anti-agathic drugs matter, how the City Fathers think.
It’s also a coming-of-age story that takes its time. Chris doesn’t save the day with some big dramatic action sequence. He saves it by knowing people. By paying attention. By remembering what Frank Lutz was like, and what Frad was like, and understanding that desperate people do desperate things.
And the ending is perfect setup for what comes next. Chris is now city manager of New York, working under Mayor Amalfi. Amalfi is the main character of the next two novels. We’ve just met him, and already you can tell he’s something special. That cigar, those enormous hands, that blunt way of talking. He runs a flying city the way a chess grandmaster runs a board.
Next up: Earthman, Come Home. The long game begins.
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