Cities in Flight James Blish

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ways to synthesize these compounds. We were forced to work very fast, and
happily the search was successful by the third generation, but in the meantime
the existing supply had sufficed to keep only a few of us alive beyond what we
still think of as our normal lifespans. Hence to most of our population, Mayor
Amalfi, you are now only a legend, and immortal man of infinite wisdom from
beyond the stars, and I have been unable to prevent myself from coming to
think of you in much the same
way."
Though he still wore in his topknot the great black barbaric saw-toothed
feather of his authority, the Miramon before Amalfi today bore little
resemblance to the lithe, supple, hard-headedly practical semi-savage who had
once squatted on the floor in Amalfi's presence, because chairs were the
uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods. His skin was still firm and tanned,
his eyes bright and darting, but, though his abundant hair was now quite
white, he had settled into that period of life, neither youth nor age,
characteristic of the man who goes on anti-agathics only when somewhat past
"natural" middle age. His councillors-including Retma, of Fabr-Suithe, which
in Amalfi's time had been a bandit town which had been utterly destroyed
during the last struggle before He took flight, but which now, rebuilt in
ceremonial pink marble, was the second city of all He-mostly wore this same
look. There were one or two who obviously had not been allowed access to the
death-curing drugs until they had been in their "natural" seventies, bringing
to the council table the probably spurious appearance of sagacity conferred by
many wrinkles, an obvious physical fragility, and
a sexual neutrality -which was both slightly repellent and covertly enviable
at the same time-a somatatype which for mankind as a whole had long ago lost
its patent as the physiological stamp of hard-won wisdom, but which here among
these recent immortals still exerted a queer authority, even upon Amalfi.
"If you managed to synthesize even one of the anti-agathics, you've proven
yourselves better chemists than anyone else in human history," Amalfi said.
"They're far and away the most complicated molecules ever found in nature;
certainly we've never heard of anyone who was able to synthesize even one."
"One is all we managed to synthesize," Miramon admitted. "And the synthetic
form has certain small but undesirable side-effects we've never been able to
eliminate. Several others turned out to be natural sapogenins which we could
raise in our artificial climate, and modify into anti-agathics by two or three
subsequent fermentation steps. Finally there are four others^ of very broad
usefulness, which we produce by fermentation alone, using micro-organisms
grown in nutrient solutions in deep tanks, into which we feed comparatively
simple and cheap precursors."
"We have one like that, the first, in fact, that was ever discovered:
ascomycin," Amalfi said. "I think I will stick to my original judgment. As
chemists you people could obviously give all the rest of us cards and spades."
"Then it is fortunate for us, and perhaps for every sentient being everywhere,
that it is not as chemists that we come seeking you," Retma said, a trifle
grimly.
"Which brings me to my main question," Amalfi said. "Just why did you turn
back? I can't imagine that you would have been seeking me personally, you had
no reason to believe that I was anywhere within thousands of parsecs of this
area; we last parted company on the other side of the home galaxy. Obviously
you must have looped back toward home as soon as you were sure you had
centralized control over your spindizzy installation, long before you were
much past half-way to the Andromeda galaxy. What I want to know is, what
turned you back?"
"There you are both right and wrong," Miramon said, with a trace of what could
have been pride; it was hard to tell, for his face was extremely solemn. "We
obtained reasonably close control of the anti-gravity machines only about
thirty years after you and I parted company, Mayor [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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