The Years of the City Read online

  From the classic, The Space Merchants, to the contemporary masterpieces, Man Plus, Jem and Gateway (all winners of major awards), Frederik Pohl has attained the highest level of achievement in science fiction. Known for his wit, social extrapolation and psychological insight, Pohl is a member of the pantheon of SF greats, a contemporary of Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert and Clarke.

  Now, Pohl gives us an extraordinary vision of the future of New York City. Long the symbol of the turmoil, tragedy and promise of our civilization, New York is a remarkable organism that claims the loyalty, the dreams, the attention of everyone who thinks about the future.

  Through the interlocking stories of the generations of several families involved in the city’s progress, Pohl evolves a dazzling image of the future, from the wounded, struggling and belabored behemoth of the day after tomorrow to the double-domed, technologically sophisticated, atmospherically controlled megalopolis of the twenty-first century, where hell-raising hang gliders soar over Central Park and ordinary people solve extraordinary problems:

  Shire Brandon, idealist, social scientist and worried father, who gets the opportunity to tell the power brokers how to solve New York’s worst problems;

  Rinty Feigerman, blind visionary, master builder;

  Jocelyn Feigerman, his conservative wife, who wakes up in another century obsolete;

  Marcus Garvey deHarcourt, schoolboy hero;

  Jeff Bratislaw, construction worker, adulterer, reluctant secret investigator;

  Jamespercy Nutlark, irresponsible hang glider, inconstant lover, courageous when it counts;

  Gwenanda, ordinary citizen and Supreme Court Justice.

  Politicians and prostitutes, slumlords and social scientists, kids, criminals and crazies people the rich tapestry of future history that is The Years of the City, a Frederik Pohl masterpiece.

  * * *

  Frederik Pohl, one of science fiction’s greatest authors, has several times won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the field’s highest honors, for his novels. In addition, he has been honored for the genre classic, The Space Merchants, written in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, has won the Hugo for Best Editor three rimes, is an American Book Award winner, and has been awarded the Prix Apollo in France. In 1982, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Mr. Pohl resides in New York City.

  Copyright © 1984 by Frederik Pohl

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form

  A Timescape Book

  Published by Pocket Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Rockefeller Center

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  New York, New York 10020

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Pohl, Frederik.

  The years of the city.

  I. Title.

  PS3566.036Y35 1984 813'.54 84-128

  ISBN 0-671-49940-8

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  FOR BETTY ANNE HULL

  WITH SEVEN YEARS OF LOVE

  Contents

  Introduction

  I. When New York Hit the Fan

  II. The Greening of Bed-Stuy

  III. The Blister

  IV. Second-hand Sky

  V. Gwenanda and the Supremes

  Introduction

  ALTHOUGH I’VE lived half my life in semi-rural suburbs, and even a few stretches in places as notably unurban as Harlem, Pennsylvania, and Canadian, Texas, I think of myself as a city boy. Actually, I’m even rather proud of it. I like cities. I respect them, and I think they contribute massively to the art, culture, learning and invention of the human race. As things now stand, the world’s cities are obviously having a hard time. I worry that they might become an endangered species, for if the cities are allowed to decline I think it will cost us all dearly.

  Herein these worries—and these hopes, and even prayers—have become a science-fiction novel.

  Since I earn my living by writing science fiction, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the future of cities (and of everything else). In this particular case, however, I can trace the long chain of free association that led to this book to one particular incident after a cocktail party in early 1973. Among the guests was the then Mayor of New York City, John V. Lindsay. As it happened, we left the party at the same time, heading in the same direction, and His Honor courteously offered my wife and me a lift in the official limousine. Science-fiction writers are not bashful. I took the occasion to tell him some of my thoughts about the governance of the city. Somewhere along the line I expressed to him my opinion that he had the hardest job in the world, because New York City seemed to me simply too sprawly and too diverse to be governed by one central authority.

  Nonsense! said Lindsay. New York City’s only problem was its unfairly puny tax base. If the city could only manage to keep its fair proportion of the tax revenues it generates—much of which are bled off by the State of New York to other counties in the state and by the feds to other states of the U.S.A.—the future would be fascinating, exemplary and golden. And he went on to tell me some of his hopes and dreams for the city (none of which appear in this book).

  He just about convinced me. But a few days later the headlines announced that, contrary to expectations, he had decided not to run for another term. So maybe I convinced him a little bit, too.

  —Frederik Pohl

  I AM WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL YOUR

  average New Yorker. I move fast, I talk tough, I breathe soot and carbon monoxide. I live in a place where the garbage trucks and police cars keep me awake all night and it’s worth your life to cross a street, and I pay through the nose to do it—monstrous taxes and preposterous rents are my way of life. I wouldn’t change. This is where the action is. Even if the action turns out to be a good chance of being mugged and a near certainty that my apartment will be robbed every two or three years, I’m part of the action. There’s only one thing that scares me. I’ve seen, every month, some new crime or strike or catastrophe, and what I fear is that some day they’ll all happen together…and that will be the day

  when

  New york

  Hit

  the Fan

  Shire Brandon, thirty-four, was very young to be a widower, but that was what he was. He was a good man, the kind of good man who lets himself be stuck for jury duty when he really could get out of it if he wanted to, and that, too, was what he was doing, though his job needed him. He had a daughter who was thinking a lot about suicide and he lived in a city that seemed to be heading the same way, though not necessarily on purpose. In fact, that was its biggest problem. It seemed to have no collective plan at all, though Brandon thought he knew how to help it design one. Brandon loved them both, inexpertly. With both there was a difficulty in communicating that love. For his daughter, he could not find the words, while the city simply did not listen.

  Perhaps the city was too huge to hear any single voice. New York is big. There’s a square mile of it for every day in the year, almost exactly—there being three hundred sixty-five and change of each. There are five boroughs of the city, each one of which is also a county of the State of New York. There are twenty islands big enough to
build on—it’s almost all islands, you see. For this reason years ago, when Boston put up its Pru, it advertised the skyscraper as the tallest building on the continent of North America. So it was, Manhattan being no part of the main. The Bronx is firmly attached to the continent, but who builds in the Bronx?

  New York is an old city, at least for its hemisphere. It was first visited (first by a European, that is, because dark skins don’t count) by Giovanni Verrazano in 1524 (but he didn’t get to name any of its parts—that was reserved for Henry Hudson eighty years later, because Italians didn’t count either)—unless it was by some stubborn Viking in an oared longboat or some lost Irishman in a wicker curragh. It has been visited many, many times since. By almost everybody. In Washington’s day it was a tiny town and not much worth visiting. He disliked it—would have burned it if the Congress had let him (but he didn’t have to, because rioting New Yorkers did it as soon as he left). Before that, only Indians. And not many of them. Before that—well, it wasn’t any town at all some umpty million years earlier, not only because there weren’t any people to inhabit it but because it lay under some of the biggest damned mountains the planet Earth has ever spawned. They didn’t last. Nothing lasts. The mountains crumbled (they say even Gibraltar may tumble) and the trickle of the rain and the flow of the rivers planed those mountains flat. Twice. More than twice. This planet squeezes mountains out of its crust like a young man pinching a blackhead, and the waters wash them away, everywhere, endlessly. At least, endlessly until the planet cools. And meanwhile, in this “now,” the city’s here, and widely hated, and widely envied, for it is the Big Apple. You listen to the lullaby of (or give your regards to) Broadway’s rhythm, where everybody dances, but sometimes on air on the shores of Collect Pond.

  Because the island of Manhattan is so beautifully surrounded by water, deep and flowing, the original planners saw no need to leave room for parks. Later generations disagreed, so they’re there, lots of them, big ones and beautiful to walk in—if you dare. “Smoke? Hey, smoke?” cry the pushers, scaring the kids off the swings and the seniors away from the cement checker tables. Before Central Park was a park it was a shantytown for the city’s despairing poor. Before Washington Square was a park it was a potter’s field where the anonymous and friendless dead were pushed into the ground out of sight—not very far out of sight, because when the earth-movers came in to beautify it they broke right through the crust and crunched the pauper bones. The White Way is Gayer than ever, with its parade of militants in lavender shirts. There are more rats than people on Manhattan island, and the city trembles ever precariously between bankruptcy and boom. More than one kind of “boom,” to be sure, because when someone has a bomb to plant it is in New York City that they like best to plant it—why would anybody bother to bomb Los Angeles? The city has seen, heard and smelled everything: draft riots and glaciers, garbage strikes and the worse stink of burning slaves, tickertape parades and stock-market crashes. New York is where the money is. To the extent that money is power (a very considerable extent) it is the brass-knuckled fist of might. The United Nations building stands on what was once the city’s biggest slaughterhouse. A car with a DPL plate is parked by every fire hydrant, and the city’s poor are—well, not really poor, if measured against Calcutta or the Latin-American barrios, but certainly impoverished in hope and purpose. Of course there’s crime. There always has been. A Dutchman was scalped on lower Broadway in 1643 by the Indians. The Dutch retaliated, making the score for that particular engagement Indians 1, Dutch 200. If New York is no longer the murder capital of the nation, having lost the crown to places in Florida, Arizona and Texas, it is also not a place where you stroll in the park to view a lunar eclipse, because what gets eclipsed may well be you. New York City is despised. It is feared. It is even often loved, but mostly it is there, a fact too large to be erased. Both “city” and “civilization” come from the same Latin root, civitas, and you can’t have one without the other.

  So here is the city, in this large “now,” and here are some of the people in it, a North Carolina teen-ager getting off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a real-estate developer who thinks of himself as a futurologically sound conserver of urban values, a think-tank employee who believes he knows how to solve all the city’s problems, a terrorist, a child contemplating suicide, a woman with a mission and a really mean tongue, a million, several million others. Sticks and stones don’t make the city. People do. Each one pulls his own way for his own reasons, noble or mean or most often just irrelevant, but there is a vector result that makes it move. It never stops.

  So here are four of those people, three visible and one standing at the window of a hallway across the street to watch what goes on. The one we are looking at most closely now is the one who thinks he knows how to solve all the city’s problems—by means of social inventions—inventions which permit people to get their hands on the levers of government, in particular. That is what he does with his working time, but just now he isn’t working at it because he has been interrupted by the requirements of an earlier social invention. He is on jury duty. He isn’t getting along with that very fast, either, because of another social invention of considerable antiquity. The person across the street has put a bomb in the building. The thinker’s name is Shire Brandon. He has all the foregoing on his mind, plus the fact that his daughter, Jo-Anne, is upset because her mother has disappeared. And, oh, yes, there’s also a garbage strike.

  The trial was a kind of low-key oratorio, indignant yelping from the defendant’s attorney cross-examining, hostile response in a mumbled contralto from the plaintiff on the stand, antiphonal interjections by her lawyer—hardly enough to keep a jury awake, or even the judge, when to the auditory portion of the program was added a divertissement in mime. A policeman came sidling into the courtroom. He moved with that special calm that said that he had a lot to be calm about, and he whispered inaudibly to the bailiff, who muttered to the clerk, who jumped up to tell the judge something the judge was shocked to hear. That was no longer a whisper, though Brandon couldn’t make out the words from the jury box. All the calm had been used up with the patrolman, too. Everybody in the courtroom froze where he was. The judge banged his gavel. “There’s been a phone call,” he said loudly. “We’ve been warned there is a bomb on the premises. Follow the officer out of the building in an orderly way and—and—and wait for further instructions.” Everybody unfroze at once. Choking gasp from the fat woman next to Brandon, scared giggle from the plaintiff’s attorney, and from the black man in the silk suit a loud “Shee-it.” “Move it, God damn it,” bawled the cop, mime no more, and somehow, not with panic but with a lot of confusion, all of them were out the door and down the wide, shallow marble steps and out into the steamy, late-summer New York air.

  No one dawdled. No one protested being herded across the street into the park, although the place stank terribly—most of the grass was covered with ten-foot-high stacks of black plastic garbage bags. The rats had been at them, and maybe the bag ladies and the derelicts from along the Bowery, too, because at least half of them were spilling their contents. Partly in self-defense against the stench, mostly out of pent-up nicotine hunger, Brandon was pulling out his cigarettes as he moved. So were half the others spilling out of the Municipal Building, and as he patted his pockets for a match somebody put a slim Dunhill under his nose. It was the black man in the silk suit. And here, at last, our three New Yorkers are together—or almost together, because Brandon hadn’t seen the third person yet, being busy with introductions to the second one—

  “I’m Dan de Harcourt.”

  “Hello, Mr. Harcourt, I’m—”

  “No, no, not Harcourt, dee Harcourt.”

  —whom he recognized, or almost recognized. Somewhere? Where? Oh, sure. Dan de Harcourt was the one who was always on the telephone in the jury room, while they were all waiting to be called, and Brandon was one of the three, five, sometimes ten people in line waiting for him to get off. What de Harcourt
was doing on the phone so long (when Brandon was anxious to call his office, or even more anxious to call his child) was not clear, although in one of the arguments about that at the head of the line Brandon had heard the word “investments.” You didn’t usually think of a twenty-two-year-old black man as an investor, Brandon thought, but this one looked like money—the silk suit, the Guccis, the whiff of Aramis as he lit Brandon’s cigarette.

  It wasn’t a place for conversation. They were jostled and moved along; the crowd was moving of its own volition, too, as individual members tried to get away from the stink of refuse from the sea-food restaurant, only to find themselves moving toward the garbage of the pizza parlor down the block. On the steps of the Municipal Building uniformed cops and some men in plain clothes—FBI?—were leading leashed dogs inside—explosives sniffers?

  It was a major annoyance for everyone concerned, but it was also exciting. If it hadn’t been for the stink of the garbage, it might almost have been fun. There was a Channel 2 van already in position at the edge of the square, with a cherry-picker camera panning the crowd—there was a very good chance, thought everyone there, that he might turn up on the six o’clock news. Channel 7 had a hand-held camera and somebody familiar—Tom Snyder?—talking to a policeman with a gold shield on the steps of the building, and WPIX’s truck was just edging in. These people wouldn’t be wasting their time on a false alarm—thought everyone in the crowd—and so to the excitement there was added the smallest hint of danger; and everyone put on his best face in case the cameras were turned his way, so that he might join the host of heroes—Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, senators, bankers, bank robbers—who had gone before them to appear on TV cameras in this place.

  Brandon edged his way toward them, like everyone else, though (he told himself) his motives were different, and almost stumbled over a slight elderly man in glasses like the bottoms of pop bottles. “Mr. Feigerman,” he cried, pleased. “I didn’t expect to find you here!”