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ABOARD A CITY. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS PROBLEM, A DIRIGIBLE PLANET MUST BE
CONSIDERED TO BE A CITY. WE ADVISE AGAINST IT.
"They're right, you know," Amalfi said gently. "la terms of the dangers of
monkeying with the machinery. He is a city; the Heviaas so regard it, and
regulate their own children accordingly."
"I know," Estelle said. Amalfi regarded her with curiosity and a little alarm.
She had been through many a danger and many an emotional stress thus far
without any of them even cracking her serenity. In view of that, the
proscription of an ugly and idiotic animal struck him as a strange thing to be
weeping about
He did not know that she was weeping for the passing of her childhood; but
then, neither did she.
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Metagalactic Center
For Amalfi himself, the transfer to He could not have come too soon; New Earth
was a graveyard. For a while during the odd, inconclusive struggle with Jorn
the Apostle, he had felt something like himself, and the New Earthmen seemed
to be acknowledging that the Amalfi who had been their mayor while they had
been Okies was back in charge, as potent and necessary as ever. But it had not
lasted. As the crisis passed-largely without any work
li H
or involvement on the part of the New Earthmen-they subsided gratefully ^back
into cultivating their gardens, which they somehow had mistaken for frontiers.
As for Amalfi, they had been glad to have him in charge during the recent
unpleasantness, but after all such events were not very usual any more, and
one does not want an Amalfi kicking perpetually about a nearly settled planet
and knocking over the tomatoes for want of any other way to expend his
disorderly energies.
Nobody would weep if Miramon took Amalfi away now. Miramon looked like a
stabler type. Doubtless the association would do Amalfi good. At least, it
could hardly do New Earth any real harm. If they wanted perpetual dissidents
like Amalfi on He, that was their lookout.
Hazleton was a more difficult case, for Amalfi and the New Earthmen alike. As
a disciple of Gifford Bonner, he was theoretically wedded to the doctrine of
the ultimate absurdity of trying to enforce order upon a universe whose
natural state was noise, and whose natural trend was toward more and more
noise to the ultimate senseless jangle of the heat-death. Bonner taught-and
there was nobody to say him nay-that even the many regularities of nature
which had been discovered since scientific method had first begun to be
exploited, back in the 17th Century, were simply long-term statistical
accidents, local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity
was chaos. Touring the universe by ear alone, Bonner often said to simplify
his meaning, you would hear nothing but a horrifying and endless roar for
billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole
body of organized knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of
years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or
so decay into John Cage and merge with the prevailing, immitigable tumult.
Yet the habit of power had never lost its grip on Hazleton; again and again,
since the "nova" had first swum into New Earth's ken, the Compleat Stochastic
had been driven into taking action, into imposing his own sense of purpose and
order upon the Stochastic universe of mindless jumble, like a Quaker at last
goaded into hitting his opponent. During the tussle with Jorn the Apostle,
Amalfi, watching the results of Mark's operations without being able to
observe the operations themselves, wondered in his behalf: Is it worth it,
after all these
years, to be finessed into another of these political struggles they had all
thought were gone forever? What does it mean for a man who subscribes to such
doctrines to be putting up a fight for a world he knows is going to die even
sooner than his philosophy had given him to believe?
And on the simpler level, is Dee worth it to him? Does he know what she has [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]