Cities in Flight Retelling: The Triumph of Time Part 3 - Aliens and Holy Wars
These two chapters shift the whole book. Up until now, “The Triumph of Time” was about scientists doing math and old people worrying about the end of the universe. Chapters 4 and 5 bring in two things that make it personal: alien children who are better at life than the adults, and a holy war started by a man who thinks the apocalypse is God’s plan.
Chapter 4: Fabr-Suithe - Playing Games with Aliens
We leave the big questions behind for a while and follow two teenagers: Web (Amalfi’s step-grandson) and Estelle (Hazleton’s granddaughter). They are on the planet He, home of the Hevians, an alien civilization the Okies first encountered centuries ago. The scientists are working on the end-of-universe problem with the Hevians. And the kids? The kids are exploring.
They end up in Fabr-Suithe, the Hevian city of pure philosophy. It is the one place on the planet where children wander freely, because there are no critical machines for them to break. And that is where they run into Hevian kids.
Here’s the thing. The Hevian children don’t speak the common space language. So communication is rough. But kids don’t need words to play. They get pulled into a game called Matrix, a three-dimensional chase game played inside a twelve-story building with transparent floors and spindizzy shafts between levels. Think run-sheep-run combined with checkers, but vertical. Web gets eliminated every round. Estelle is amazing at it.
After the game, they sit on a hillside eating alien fruit that smells like a spice bomb and tastes like frozen music. Web’s pet svengali, a brainless polyp named Ernest, catches up after trying to follow Estelle through every move of the game. The creature rolls down a hill clutching a melon rind and floats away in a stream, still eating.
Then the Hevian kids teach them the lying game. Players take turns telling stories that must be entirely false. The jury penalizes you for anything true. Mentioning what you’re wearing costs one point. A natural law, like the sun rising, costs fifty. There is also a “coup” move: telling something completely true that sounds like a lie. If the jury doesn’t catch you, you win the round.
A nine-year-old Hevian girl named Pyla tries the coup. She tells a riddle about a letter addressed to “Four” that walks on its own feet. Nobody can prove she’s lying. The whole scene is playful and warm, and it carries a serious point underneath.
These children, human and alien, communicate better through games than the adults do through equations. Web and Estelle want to use the Hevian sleep-learning machines to pick up the language faster. But the adults won’t allow it.
And then Dee arrives. Dee is Web’s grandmother, Hazleton’s wife, and she is furious. She calls the Hevians “savages” for letting children use hypnopaedia. She pulls the kids out of the science meetings where Estelle has actually been useful translating between Hevian and human math notation. Miramon politely hands Dee off to his wife and her ladies, which is the Hevian way of saying “women don’t belong in the council room.”
Amalfi watches all of this and thinks something brutal. He and Dee are getting old. Not physically, the anti-agathic drugs still work. But mentally they are done. They have stopped absorbing new experiences. The children and the “savages” are more alive than they are. When the end comes, it is the flexible minds that will matter, not the experienced ones.
Estelle drops one last bomb on her way out the door. The physicists are stuck on a math problem about the two universes colliding. She overhears them and says, casually, “If it’s No-Man’s-Land you have to deal with, why don’t you start with the bullets?” The room goes silent. She might have just solved the problem. But Dee drags her away before anyone can follow up.
Miramon says to Amalfi: “You are letting those children go to waste.”
Amalfi knows he’s right. But he can’t fix it. Dee takes the children home to New Earth, and the betrayal is complete. Web and Estelle go in silence. They know they’ve been robbed of the first real thing they ever wanted, besides each other.
Chapter 5: Jihad - Holy War at the End of Time
Three weeks later, everything falls apart.
Hazleton calls from New Earth, frantic. Dee and the children never arrived. The recall ship vanished. And a religious fanatic named Jorn the Apostle has launched a holy war across the Magellanic Cloud.
Jorn’s followers, the Warriors of God, are mostly farm boys. But they carry dismounted spindizzies as handheld weapons. A spindizzy can manipulate gravity, fling objects into space, level city blocks. In the hands of trained engineers, they are tools. In the hands of frightened teenagers with religious fervor, they are doomsday devices. One nervous kid fires at a shadow, and three blocks are gone.
Jorn’s cause is simple: the scientists on He are meddling with God’s plan for the end of the world. The approaching destruction of the universe is Armageddon, and it is supposed to happen. Anyone who tries to understand it or prevent it is committing blasphemy. New Earth is guilty because it works with the Hevians. So Jorn proclaimed a jihad.
The Warriors overran New Earth without much resistance. Hazleton surrendered because fighting back with spindizzies on both sides would kill tens of thousands. Now the Warriors hold the planet, they hold hostages (Dee, Web, and Estelle), and Jorn’s blockade fleet orbits overhead.
Amalfi sneaks back to New Earth in a tiny proxy ship, lands in Central Park in the old Okie city. Now he is on the ground, alone, in an occupied city, and he needs a plan.
He contacts Jorn the Apostle directly. And the conversation is one of the best scenes in the entire series.
Jorn is old. Really old. He has been off the anti-agathic drugs for decades, maybe always. His face is narrow, bony, deeply lined. He is not a ranting fanatic. He is frighteningly smart.
Amalfi tries to convince Jorn to pull his forces off New Earth. He argues that the planet is a hotbed of Stochasticism, a philosophical movement that could corrupt the Warriors. Jorn sees through it immediately. He knows Amalfi is exaggerating. He knows intellectuals are usually disconnected from regular people.
And then Jorn says something that cuts Amalfi to the bone. “I know well that you are fabulously inventive; but human lives should not hang upon the success of a work of art.”
That single line describes Amalfi’s entire life. Every trick, every con, every clever deal across centuries of Okie survival. All of it was art. And now three lives hang on whether his art is good enough.
Amalfi falls back on a deception. He pretends to be a “Commissioner of Public Safety” and feeds fake reports about Warriors being corrupted by Stochastic philosophy. The idea is to make Jorn paranoid enough to withdraw his troops before they lose their faith. It is a lie built on nothing. The farm boys are immune to philosophy.
But Hazleton takes the seed and runs with it. Within a week, the Warrior officers disarm their own troops. Once a conquering army is disarmed by its own command, it is finished.
The blockade lifts. Dee and the children come home. And Jorn sends one final message: “I am giving you benefit of doubt. You alone know truth. If this defeat solely your invention be sure the end is not yet. But it will be soon.”
Amalfi crumples the message and drops it. Estelle asks if he knows what Jorn means. “Yes,” he says. “But I hope you never do.”
What’s Really Going On
Blish is doing something clever with these two chapters. Chapter 4 is about the gap between generations. The old guard cannot change anymore. They are locked into patterns. The children and the aliens are still growing, still flexible. And the adults actively prevent the children from learning, because change is dangerous.
Chapter 5 is about what happens when the end is near and everyone knows it. Jorn fights to preserve a religious narrative. Amalfi fights to preserve lives. The Warriors fight because their leader told them to. Nobody is thinking about the actual end of the universe. They are all too busy with their small, human conflicts.
Here is the darkest part. Amalfi wins the political fight by lying. He tricks a genuine believer. And Jorn, the “fanatic,” is the one who acts with more honor. He keeps his word about the hostages. He warns Amalfi honestly. He is more truthful than the hero of the story.
The universe is ending, and the smartest man alive is running cons. The most devout man alive is being reasonable. And the most important scientific breakthrough may have come from a teenage girl who was immediately told to leave the room.
That is Blish at his best. No easy answers. No clear villains. Just people being exactly as flawed as people always are, even when the clock is running out on everything.
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