Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 2 - The Duchy and the Rift
Last time, New York landed on Utopia and Hazleton went missing with a local girl. Now things get worse. The city has to deal with a golden-armored space dictator, and then fly into the emptiest stretch of space anyone has ever seen.
Chapter 2: Gort - Welcome to the Duchy of Thugs
Amalfi is in rough shape. Hazleton is gone, a green pilot named Carrel is flying the city, and they have to run an Earth police blockade to reach the Hruntan planet. The cops are furious. They want the city to pay up and leave. But Amalfi pulls out their one shield: a signed contract with the Hruntans. As long as they have a legal contract, the police can’t touch them. The cop on the radio is so frustrated he practically growls.
Here’s the thing about the Hruntans. They run something called the Duchy of Gort, and they are not nice people. When their delegation comes to visit Amalfi, it looks more like a military invasion. A dozen soldiers in red leather and gleaming breastplates march in with mesotron rifles. And between them walks the Margraf Hazca, a giant man covered head to toe in gold. Golden armor, golden beard, golden complexion. He calls himself Vice Regent of the Duchy of Gort under “his Eternal Eminence, Arpad Hrunta, Emperor of Space.”
Amalfi just blinks and says “My name’s Amalfi. Do you sit down?”
That’s Amalfi for you. Seven hundred years old and unimpressed by everything.
The negotiations go bad fast. Amalfi is trying to trade technology for payment. He mentions friction-field generators, which is tech the Hruntans desperately want. And the moment Hazca realizes Amalfi has something valuable, the rifles come out. No more talking about “mutually agreed valuations.” The city has been boarded in a dozen places and is under the guns of four cruisers.
So Amalfi is forced to hand over the technology. But here’s where it gets clever. He sends Carrel to teach the Hruntans how the friction-field works. Carrel gives them real science, real equations, real plans. But the plans have a hidden flaw built in. The generator they’re building can only run in one direction: full positive. Instead of reducing friction between surfaces, it will freeze molecular relationships and make everything stick to everything else.
There’s one problem. Among the Hruntan scientists, there’s a brilliant man named Dr. Schloss who might figure out what Carrel is hiding. Amalfi makes the hard call: Schloss has to be killed. It’s a cold moment. Carrel is shocked. But Amalfi lays it out plainly. They can’t take Schloss into the city because the Hruntans would search for him. There has to be a body. And if possible, the killing should look like it came from one of the rival scientific cliques on Gort.
The assassination plan falls apart though. Schloss is smarter than anyone expected. When he senses danger, he doesn’t wait around. He runs straight to the city and asks for protection. Now Hazleton has returned (with Dee, the Utopian girl), and together they scramble to fix the situation. More people get killed in the confusion. It’s messy political violence, the kind of thing that happens in a barbarian court where everyone is stabbing everyone else in the back already.
Meanwhile, Hazleton tried to stage a dramatic rescue. He brought twenty-five Utopian ships to escort the city out. But Amalfi refuses. He calls it Napoleonism, a gesture from a bad movie. The Utopian ships are outdated. The escape fleet would scatter and most of them would die. And Amalfi already has his own plan in motion.
Dee, the Utopian girl, chooses to stay with the city. This is a big moment. She knows what she’s giving up. Amalfi tells her the people on the city are over a century old, that he himself is nearly seven hundred. That this is a static, wandering life. She says she’ll stay anyway. She’s not a Hamiltonian anymore. She’s an Okie now.
The noon deadline arrives. The Hruntans turn on their new friction-field generator. And everything goes sideways for them, exactly as planned. The field freezes everything in place. People can’t move. Objects float. Rings on fingers start cutting into flesh. Nandor, the Hruntan nobleman, tries to shoot Amalfi but the pistol floats away from his hand.
Amalfi barely escapes. He slides down the outside of a seventy-story building using friction against the walls, burning his hands and forehead raw. It’s one of the most physical, painful scenes in the whole book. He reaches the ground a blistered mess, passes out, and wakes up to Dee tending his wounds.
And then Dr. Schloss, the man Amalfi almost had killed, figures out how to make the broken Lyran invisibility machine work. The whole city goes invisible. They sail right through the police ring, and the cops look straight through them. Irony at its finest. The man they wanted dead saved them all.
But there’s a charge of treason on the books now. The cops will keep looking. Amalfi makes the call that changes everything: “Head for the Rift.”
Chapter 3: The Rift - Crossing the Void
The Rift is exactly what it sounds like. A massive gap between the stars. A valley cut into the face of the galaxy with nothing in it. Above, there’s the empty ocean between galaxies. Below, a distant haze of stars too far away to reach. And in between, nothing. Just darkness.
No human being, no city, has ever crossed it before.
Amalfi figures the police won’t follow. A ship can’t carry enough supplies for the crossing. Only a city that can grow its own food has a chance. The City Fathers estimate the crossing will take 104 years. The city has never gone more than fifty years without touching down on a planet.
The supplies look okay. Oil tanks almost full, Chlorella crops growing, both breeders running. But Amalfi is worried about a hundred things. Fuel decomposition. That Twenty-third Street spindizzy that keeps breaking down. One accident out here and no ship could ever reach them.
Then something appears on the screens. A single star, floating alone in the Rift. A wild star, moving at hundreds of kilometers per second against the general flow. About ten parsecs away from their lead proxy. A possible landing point. Maybe fuel. Maybe food.
But before they can get there, they see something terrible on the outrigger screens. Another city, burning. Being torn apart by lightning. A voice screaming through the static: “We have the fuelless drive. We’re destroying our model and evacuating our passenger. Pick him up if you can. We’re being blown up by a bindlestiff.”
A bindlestiff is a pirate city. The worst kind of Okie. They don’t work for their living. They rob and kill.
The destroyed city had the secret of a fuelless drive, a way to travel without needing power metals. Think about what that means. Right now, Okie cities have to stop at civilized planets to refuel. That’s what keeps piracy in check. But if a bindlestiff gets a fuelless drive, they never have to stop anywhere. They become perfect predators. Amalfi compares it to the age of sailing pirates on Earth. Fueled ships killed piracy because pirates had to come to port for coal. A fuelless drive would bring the pirates back.
The destroyed city launched escape craft. Those craft have nowhere to go except the wild star. So the bindlestiff is probably already there, waiting, hunting for the man who knows the fuelless drive secret.
Amalfi decides they have to go anyway. The city heads for the wild star.
When they arrive, they find a savage tropical planet in its Carboniferous era. Giant ferns, cycads, lizards. And radio signals. Human radio signals. There’s a walled city down there, hidden under jungle camouflage. A native civilization that shouldn’t exist on a planet this isolated.
The city lands, with Amalfi making a dramatic entrance by polarizing the spindizzy screen and flattening the forest for miles around. Of course, the Twenty-third Street spindizzy blows out at the last second and the city drops the final 150 meters in free fall. Hazleton wipes blood from his nose and tells Amalfi that was one dramatic touch too many.
And then a procession comes out of the native city. Children wrapped in red and white cloth strips, dancing and chanting. Men with outstretched hands, bare-chested with symbolic wounds drawn in red chalk. And at the end, a cage full of naked, sick women, drawn by lizards.
The children circle Amalfi. The men circle behind them. Everything goes silent. The tallest man walks forward and places a heavy ornate metal key in Amalfi’s hand.
And that’s where the chapter ends. Amalfi is standing alone in the middle of two circles of strangers on a wild planet in the middle of nowhere, holding a key to a cage full of women, while a pirate city lurks somewhere nearby.
What could possibly go wrong?
These two chapters show Blish at his best. Chapter 2 is political intrigue, court politics, and dirty tricks in a barbarian duchy. Chapter 3 shifts to something completely different: existential dread, the terror of empty space, and a first contact that feels more like a ritual sacrifice. The contrast is what makes this book work. Amalfi goes from outsmarting golden-armored nobles to staring into absolute nothingness, and somehow both situations feel equally dangerous.
Next time we’ll find out what that key opens and what the bindlestiff wants.
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