Cities in Flight Retelling: The Triumph of Time Part 5 - Creation Began

This is it. The final part. The universe is about to end, and every person left alive knows it. The planet He is racing toward the metagalactic center, the exact point where everything started and where everything will finish. There are no more tricks left, no more political games. Just the countdown.

Chapter 7: The Metagalactic Center

Amalfi leaves New Earth behind and he is not missed. The New Earthmen are happy to see him go. They’ve settled into quiet farming lives. They don’t need an old troublemaker knocking over their tomatoes. When there’s danger, they call on him. When the danger passes, they want him gone. It’s the fate of every old warrior. You’re useful in a crisis and annoying in peacetime.

Hazleton comes along too. His reasons are complicated. He’s spent years following the philosophy of Gifford Bonner and his Stochasticism, the idea that the universe is just random noise with occasional blips of order. But Hazleton can’t stop taking action. He can’t stop trying to impose meaning on things. It’s his nature. And with New Earth turning into a retirement community where nobody wants real leadership, the only place left with any power worth having is He.

So they fly. And the sky goes dark.

The route to the metagalactic center passes through intergalactic space. No suns. No daylight. Sometimes a dim spiral glow slides across the sky, a whole galaxy passing by like a cloud, and then it’s gone. The planet He moves through absolute blackness, lit only by its own artificial lights.

Here’s the thing about the metagalactic center. It’s where all stresses cancel out. Every force in the universe pushes equally from every direction, so the center is perfectly balanced. At that spot, small actions produce huge results. Dr. Bonner puts it simply: you could alter the orbit of Sirius by stepping on a buttercup. And that’s the whole plan. If the Survivors can reach the center before the two universes collide, they have a chance. Not to live. But to become something else.

Retma, the Hevian scientist, explains it plainly. Anything that outlasts the moment of destruction, even by five microseconds, carries an energy potential into what comes next. If that surviving thing is just a rock, both universes reform exactly as before. History repeats. But if the surviving thing has willpower and the ability to act, it can choose. Each person who makes it through the crossing becomes a seed for a brand new universe. Every man his own monobloc.

Hazleton hears this and his oldest, most comfortable swear word turns real on him. “Gods of all stars is what we’re racing the Web of Hercules to become, isn’t it?”

Yes. That’s exactly what’s happening.

And Estelle, Web Hazleton’s partner, refuses to have a child. The conversation between them is one of the most painful and beautiful in the whole book. Web wants a baby. They’re permanent now, no longer under the old population taboos. But Estelle says no. What’s the point of bringing a child into a world with one year left? A baby can’t follow the instructions needed to survive the crossing. It would be like putting an infant alone on a spaceship with no one to fly it.

“Instead of babies,” she tells Web, “we were given universes.”

Web says it’s not enough. Not by half. But he accepts it.

The planet decelerates. They reach the center. The instruments go crazy, the spindizzies scream, Miramon cuts the power. Silence. They’re here. The birthplace of everything.

And then the Web of Hercules arrives.

A hundred ships surround them in a sphere a light year across, firing streams of antimatter particles. The sky fills with sickly greenish-yellow light. Radiation counters go from chattering to roaring. Hazleton reads the dosimeters and announces they’ve already taken a lethal dose.

But Miramon has a secret weapon the Hevians never talked about. They knew how to poison electromagnetic fields, the way a catalyst gets poisoned in chemistry. The poison spreads along the enemy’s own carrier waves, eating away at their beams. The sky goes dark again. The Web of Hercules dies. A hundred ships become a hundred empty hulks.

Hazleton starts laughing. Everyone stares at him. He points at the dosimeters. While Miramon was saving them, the radiation killed them all. They have about two weeks before the sickness starts. But the universe ends in ten days.

“I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four,” Amalfi says. “You mean we’ll live until we die.”

It’s an old joke. Maybe the oldest joke. And somehow it’s still funny.

The City Fathers announce midnight. The count is zero minus nine days.

Chapter 8: The Triumph of Time

This is the last hour.

Amalfi comes back from the bathroom. He will never do that again. Nobody will. Every little thing becomes the last of its kind. The last glass of wine. The last conversation. The last moment of sitting in a chair.

Dr. Schloss tells them to suit up. Spacesuits, because after the stasis field goes down, each person will be alone in their own empty set of dimensions. No space, no time, no matter. Just them and whatever they carry. The suit gives them a few seconds of air and energy to work with. And in those seconds, they have to start a universe.

The instructions are strange and specific. Release the oxygen first, to create plasma. Then discharge the suit’s energy. That’s the match that lights the explosion. The resulting universe will be small at first, maybe fifty light years across. But continuous creation will add to it over time.

At zero minus thirty minutes, they put on their suits. Radio chatter goes technical as they check seals and settings, especially for Web and Estelle who have never worn suits before.

At fifteen minutes, Amalfi talks to the City Fathers one last time. “Do you understand what is about to happen to you?” They answer: “Yes, Mr. Mayor. We are to be turned off at zero.” He wonders if they think they might be turned on again someday. They’re just machines. But they’re also old friends. He decides not to say anything that would take that possibility away from them.

At ten minutes, Dee whispers that she doesn’t want it to happen. Hazleton says neither does he. He wishes he’d lived a more human life. Estelle says she wishes there would be no sorrow in the universe she creates. Gifford Bonner tells her then she should create nothing. “Creation means sorrow, always and always.” Estelle answers simply: “And joy.”

At five minutes, Amalfi tells the City Fathers to stop counting. No one wants to go out to a mechanical countdown.

“Very well, Mr. Mayor. Good-bye.”

That single word from the City Fathers, “good-bye,” hits like nothing else in the book. Machines don’t say goodbye. These ones did.

Hazleton can’t bring himself to say it. Amalfi says: “I loved you all. You have my love to take with you, and I have it too.”

Miramon, the Hevian who started the whole journey as a savage in the mud centuries ago, says the last philosophical truth of the old universe: “It is the only thing in the universe that one can give and still have.”

The deck throbs. The machines prepare.

Gifford Bonner starts to say “I think…” and it ends.

There is nothing outside the suit. Not darkness. Nothing. Amalfi can still sense his friends for a moment, like a fading circle, but they drift apart and vanish. He is alone.

He raises his hand to release the oxygen. Then he stops. Why make the same kind of universe that just died? Nature already tried that twice and both copies were doomed from the start. Retma would be careful. Estelle would be compassionate. Dee would be afraid. They would all give birth to safe, familiar versions of what came before. But Amalfi has driven the standard model until every bolt came loose. He’s tired of it.

So instead of following the instructions, he brings his hand down to the detonator button on his chest. One press. Everything he is, suit, air, energy, matter, all of it flashes into plasma at once. No careful sequence. No safe choices. Something completely new. Something unknowable.

He touches the button.

“Creation began.”

Two words. That’s how it ends. That’s how everything begins.

And that’s the end of Cities in Flight. Four novels that started with Cold War politics and anti-gravity research, moved through centuries of flying cities working their way across the galaxy, survived economic collapse and political intrigue and battles with pirates and empires, and ended here. With a man alone in a spacesuit pressing a button to become a universe.

Blish started this series in the 1950s. He was writing about power, about civilization, about what happens when societies get old and tired. And at the very end, he answered the biggest question any writer can ask: what happens when everything is over? His answer: someone stubborn enough presses a button and starts again. Not carefully. Not safely. Just… new.

There is no bigger ending in science fiction. I’ve read hundreds of books and I keep coming back to those two words. Creation began.

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