Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 6 - The March on Earth
In Part 5, we saw the jungle of Okie cities gathering near a red dwarf star, desperate for work. An Acolyte entrepreneur showed up offering terrible wages, things got violent, and Lieutenant Lerner’s cops accidentally blew up a bystander city. Amalfi watched it all and decided it was time to visit Buda-Pesht, the King’s city, in person. He brought Hazleton and Dee along. And now things get political.
Inside the Palace of the Hapsburgs
Buda-Pesht is an old city. Seriously old. The palace has chandeliers and tapestries, an ancient cantilever bridge that nobody uses anymore, and a throne room that predates space flight. When Amalfi, Hazleton, and Dee arrive by aircab, the place is already filling up with mayors from other cities. Something big is happening.
On the way in, a slight man with a worn Slavic face introduces himself. Franz Specht, mayor of Dresden-Saxony. He admired Amalfi’s stand during the wage negotiation and wants to make himself known. Just in case Amalfi needs a friend inside. A quiet move by a smart politician. He asks why Amalfi’s city has no name. Amalfi says they use their name as a weapon, so they keep it in reserve. Specht finds this very interesting and slips away.
The King Makes His Pitch
The throne room is packed. The King stands on the dais, enormous, bald, scarred, and so old his age feels featureless. Amalfi suspects the man took power by force, not by election.
But the King knows how to work a crowd. His voice is like a rockslide rolling downhill. His message is simple: you got pushed around by the Acolytes, and I am going to tell you what to do about it.
The Acolytes are local trash, the King says. Earth would never tolerate their slave wages if Earth was paying attention. But Earth’s cops are spread too thin. So the Okies should go to Earth themselves. A mass march. Thousands of cities flying to the home planet to demand their rights as citizens. Send a signal on the Dirac to all Okies everywhere. Come home. Get an accounting. Any Okie with guts will follow.
It is dramatic. It is bold. And to Amalfi, it is dangerous.
Amalfi’s Counter-Move
Amalfi pushes to the front of the crowd with Dee at his side. He challenges the King directly. “Show, or shut up,” he says. And when the King tries to brush him off with a joke about Vegans, Amalfi climbs right up onto the dais.
Then he does something outrageous. He walks back and sits down on the throne of the Hapsburgs. The King is left standing there looking irrelevant.
From the throne, Amalfi makes his counter-argument. Marching on Earth would be suicide. More than half the cities here have outstanding violations. Flying to Earth means flying straight to the cops. Instead, pool the accumulated knowledge of all three hundred cities. Connect their City Fathers, the massive computers each city carries. The combined data from thousands of planets would put them centuries ahead of everyone else. That knowledge would be the ultimate commodity.
Specht backs him up with a sharp question about whether machines can handle the integration. Amalfi admits they cannot, not alone. Human brains would do most of the work. Two to five years minimum. But the result would be priceless.
The King calls it a waste of time. “Who wants to sit for five years making like a pack of scientists?” he yells.
And here is where Amalfi’s real plan starts to show.
The Vote That Was Rigged Before It Started
Specht asks the one question that should have won everything: who are you? In Okie culture, reputation is everything. Time aloft, successful jobs, the interstellar grapevine. If Amalfi had revealed his city’s name, he probably would have carried the vote.
Hazleton is making frantic hand signals. Tell them, boss. It can’t miss.
But Amalfi only gives his own name. Not the city’s. The crowd shrugs. The King grins. The vote goes ahead, and the March on Earth wins.
Here is the thing. Amalfi wanted it to go that way.
The Real Game
Back on his own city, exhausted and eating a terrible dinner with nothing to drink but cheap Rigellian wine, Amalfi explains everything to Hazleton. The knowledge-pooling plan was never going to work, not really. It sounded good in theory, but Okies are engineers and merchants, not philosophers. They would have gotten restless and the whole thing would have blown up. And the real scope of the project was not two to five years. It was centuries.
Amalfi used the plan as a decoy. By presenting a clearly defined, reasonable-sounding, but less attractive alternative to the March on Earth, he forced the cities to reject it. And by rejecting it, they committed themselves to the King’s plan without realizing they had been led there.
Why? Because New York (that is his city’s real name, by the way) cannot leave the jungle alone. The only way out is in the middle of a mass movement. Amalfi needed the stampede. He just did not want to be the one leading it. Let the King carry that responsibility. Let the King take the blame when things go wrong.
“I Want Off”
Then the conversation takes a hard personal turn. Hazleton confronts Amalfi about their relationship. They used to think alike. Amalfi trained him by withholding information, forcing him to figure things out alone. But now they are diverging. Hazleton is becoming more human. Amalfi is becoming less so. It all started when Dee came aboard.
Amalfi drops the bomb quietly: “Gods of all stars, Mark, don’t you know that I love Dee, too?”
Hazleton goes white. He knew. He just did not want to know that he knew.
And then he says the three words that cannot be taken back in Okie culture: “I want off.”
Those words are final. Absolute. The Okie who says them gives up the stars forever and becomes planet-bound. It can never be refused and never be retracted. Amalfi accepts it immediately. Hazleton will leave at the next port of call. Carrel will be trained as his replacement.
The scene is raw. Hazleton accuses Amalfi of engineering the whole thing just to push him out. Amalfi does not deny or confirm it. They are both losing something they cannot replace, and neither of them can stop it.
Plague, Salvage, and Betrayal
Amalfi moves fast. He sends his city to the silent city on the jungle’s perimeter, the one that claimed to have mass chromatography. When they board it in space suits, they find it dead. Dark streets, no power, air pressure so low they need the suits. And a corpse whose flesh glistens under the flashlight. Plague. Too poor for drugs, disease took them.
But not all of them. A survivor, clearly insane, has mined the building with TDX explosives. One of Amalfi’s men gets killed. The madman calls them vultures and eventually blows himself up rather than surrender.
Meanwhile, the jungle cities fight Lerner’s Acolyte navy. The Okies destroy two cruisers, but it is sloppy. The admiral runs. Lerner calls Earth for reinforcements on the Dirac.
And here is the twist: Amalfi tipped Lerner off in the first place. He contacted the cops through a back channel and told them the cities were organizing for military action. He wanted the jungle to panic and flee, turning the march into a stampede toward Earth. Which is exactly what happens.
Flying a Planet
Amalfi salvages spindizzy drives from the dead city. Hazleton figures it out: they are going to fly another planet.
The target is Hern Six. They will mount the extra spindizzies on the planet, just like they did with He. But this time they need to control the flight. Last time they got carried clean out of the galaxy. Once was enough.
The mass chromatography equipment turns out to be useless, another theory that never worked in practice. But the dead city’s City Fathers still hold the data, and that is worth taking.
Carrel, the young trainee replacing Hazleton, asks: where are we going?
“Home,” Amalfi says.
What Makes This Section Work
This is Blish writing politics, personal betrayal, and military strategy all at once, and making each thread feel connected to the others. The public confrontation in Buda-Pesht is pure theater, with Amalfi sitting on someone else’s throne to make a point he does not even believe in. The private conversation with Hazleton is the emotional center, where centuries of partnership finally crack apart over a woman neither of them can have in the way they want. And the boarding of the dead city is horror, the reality of what happens when Okie cities run out of money and drugs and hope.
Amalfi is playing everyone. The King, the mayors, Lerner, even Hazleton. But the cost is visible. He is tired. He is running out of food and medicine. And his best friend just quit.
The March on Earth has begun. But Amalfi is not marching with it. He is flying a planet instead.
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