A wrold out of time B

She joined a despondent rabble. Some tried to talk to her in gibberish. She watched the elevator rise . . . and sink again with another prisoner.
None spoke her language.
The elevator never stopped rising and falling, bringing prisoners down, rising empty. The styles of those about her were wildly different; they continued to change with every new prisoner. There was no provision for feeding the prisoners.
It became obvious: Nobody had been here long enough to become hungry.
The twelth to descend was not a prisoner. A Girl of eleven dropped to just above their heads. Small machines floated around her. One, a silver wand mounted in a larger base, twitched this way and that like a nervous hound eager to be loosed. The Girl was naked, and strangely decorated: Transparent butterfly wings sprang from her shoulders. She called in a sweet, peremptory, oddly accented voice, "Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, are you there?"
So Mirelly-Lyra returned to the world after perhaps a quarter of an hour of subjective time.

Her hosts were half a dozen children, all Girls. The Girl who had come for her, Choss, was in some ways the leader. Their social organization was complex.
Their minds were not the minds of children. They walked like the Lords of the World. Mirelly-Lyra's translator gave Corbell her emotional inflections as well as her words. The emotions were awe and fear and hatred. These were not little girls. They were Girls, neuter and immortal. They were arrogant and indulgent by turns, and Mirelly-Lyra learned to obey them.
They trained her with the floating silver wand. . . a variant of the silver cane she carried much later. The box she carried constantly at her belt was the same translator she carried now. They made her wear it long after she knew the language. They thought her accent ugly.
It grated on her to think that they regarded her as a social inferior. Later she changed her mind. They regarded her as a house pet, a prized property that could do tricks.
With the children she watched shows put on by other groups of children. Some they attended live. Others were broadcast as threedimensional illusions, like holovision sets arbitrarily large. Once they floated in interplanetary space for hours, and Mirelly-Lyra wondered at the grim intensity with which Choss's Girls watched a dull and repetitious planetarium show. She understood their rapt concentration later, during the voting.
But most of the shows were bids for prestige. Some of the bulky floating widgets that followed her around were cameras and emotional sensors. Mirelly-Lyra was another show. Because of her, the prestige of Choss's group was high.
Her medicines had retarded, but not prevented, menopause. The change in her body was a near-killing blow to Mirelly-Lyra's faith in herself. She was a trained seal, and aging. One thing kept her going. Somewhere out there was dictator immortality.
At first she welcomed the chance to talk to the Girls. But that was the trouble: Mirelly-Lyra did all the talking. Her own questions were not answered. Questions the Girls put to her she was expected to answer in full. If she didn't lecture at length they became annoyed.
Then, once, she found Choss in an indulgent mood.
"Choss told me that the dictators took care of their own medical problems," said Mirehly-Lyra. "The dictators were ruled by the Boys, who made shows with them and saw to it that chemicals in their food kept them from having children. I think Choss was jealous that the Boys would not let Girls play with the dictators. I'm telling this badly," she said suddenly. "These Girls were all older than I. They were decadent aristocrats, not children."
"Yeah. I get the impression the Girls and the Boys stayed apart."
"Yeah, and that made it difficult for me. The Boys and Girls, they didn't have sex to hold them together. They were two separate States on Earth, each with its territory and its rights. They must have been separate for a long time. Choss said that the Girls ruled the sky and the Boys ruled the dictators. I would have to go to the Boys to find out about dictator immortality."
"The Girls ruled the sky?" That sounded like nonsense, but...
"Choss said so. I think it was true, Corbel. I saw them vote not to move the Earth! We watched an astronomical light show, and then there were hours of discussion, and they voted!
"But I was more concerned with dictator immortality. Choss promised to learn what I wanted from the Boys. I was valuable to them, Corbel. They gained prestige from the stories I told and the shows they made about me." Anger crackled in the translator's voice as Mirelly-Lyra relived evil memories. "They were forever amused by what I did not know. Other groups of Girls began reviving other prisoners. After many years I decided that Choss had done nothing to get me what I wanted. I would have to reach the Boys."
"It figures."
"What?"
"Choss couldn't go to the Boys. They'd claim you as a dictator. Their property."
"I. . . never thought of that. I was a fool."
"Go on."
"The Boys held the land masses of the southern hemisphere. They had built heated domes in the south polar continent. They held two other continents and many islands. But the Girls ruled more useful land, and more power too, if they really ruled the sky. I knew that the Earth had been moved. There were times when Jupiter shone so brilliantly that one could see the banding and pick out the moons. I was afraid of these Girls. I was trying to find a safe way to steal an aircraft, but I waited too long.
"One day Choss told me that they were tired of me, that I must go back in zero-time. I was no longer a new thing. I took a plane that night. They let me fly a long way before they brought me back with the autopilot. I learned that they had made a show of my escape."
"Fun people, your Girls. They put you back in the box?"
"Yes. They let me keep my translator. It was the only thing they did for me. Later they lowered two Boys they had caught during a fight. The Girls had given them soul whips," she said with grim amusement, "and I was the only one who could talk to them."
"Soul whip?"
"I used one to make you docile. It didn't work. A few more applications may help."
"Finish your story."
"We waited a long time. Nobody came to free us. Finally the machinery stopped. Everything was killing-hot. The Boys ruled us with the soul whip, and I was their translator, but there was little cooperation. Some of us lived to reach the southernmost continent. There they were captured by Boys, all but me. I fled back across the water alone.
"It was a long time before I learned enough to feel myself safe. I had to learn what could be eaten, what foods would not spoil, how to hide from storms: all things you wifi have to learn, too. I was old when I could begin searching again. For ten years I searched for dictator immortality through the ruins the Boys and Girls left me. Then I emptied out my small zero-time storage place and went into it to wait for. . . you."
"Nice try."
"When you are young again, then mock me!"
"I don't expect that will happen."
"We can't give up."
Corbell laughed. "I can give up. I guess I don't believe in your dictator immortality. Have you ever seen anyone get young?"
"No, but-"
"Do you even know what makes people get old? Fires don't burn backward, lady."
"I am not a doctor. I only know what anyone knows. Inert molecules gather in the cells to clog them, like . . . like silt and garbage and the poisons of industry gather in a great inland sea, until the sea becomes a great inland swamp. The cells become less . . . active. Some die. One day there are too few active cells living too slowly. Other inert matter accumulates to block the veins and arteries .
but I have medicines to dissolve them."
"Cholesterol, sure. But getting the dead stuff out of a living cell without killing it would be something else again. I think you were hoaxed," said Corbell. "Choss and her friends acted like nasty children. Why not your Boy lawyer too? Remember, you asked the Girls. They didn't raise the subject."
"But why?"
"Oh, just to see what you'd-"
"No!"
"Everyone dies. Your lawyer's dead. Choss is dead. Even civilizations dlie. There was a civilization here that could move the Earth. Now there's nothing."
After a longish silence came the calm voice of the translating box. "There are Boys where you're going. I tried to talk to them once. They know nothing of dictator immortality."
"Do they know what happened to civilization?"
"You said it yourself. There were two States on Earth. They must have fought."
"It could have happened." War between the sexes had always seemed silly to Corbell. Too much fraternizing with the enemy, haha. But if sex didn't hold them together?
"The Boys know nothing," she repeated. "Perhaps there was never dictator immortality in the south polar continent."
"You've got a one-track mind. If it ever existed, you found it in every city in the world. Used up. Rotted."
"One year, Corbell."
Might as well try it. . . "How does this sound? Let me use your medicines. I can travel faster and look further if I'm young and healthy."
Another long pause. Then, "Yes, that makes sense."
"I thought you'd say no." Here was his chance! But . . . "Nuts. No, I just can't risk it. You scare me too much. This way at least I get a year."
She screamed something that was not translated. The receiver went dead.
A year, he thought. In a year I'll be dug in so deep she'll never find me at all.


CHAPTER 6 THE CHANGELINGS

I
Corbell came to the Antarctic shore in near darkness. The vanished sun had left dark red splashed across the northern horizon, and a red-on-red circle that was Jupiter's night side. To east and west he picked out tiny Jovian moons. Ahead, dark woods caine down to a dark shore.
The trees came at him, spreading out.
Then the smooth ride was bouncing Brownian motion, and the car was dodging tree trunks at maniac speed. He gripped the padded bar to keep himself from bouncing around inside. He dared not close his eyes. The chase scenes through Four City should have burned away his capacity for terror, but they hadn't, they hadn't.
The old trees forced their way through a tangle of burgeoning life, vines, underbrush, big mushrooms, everything living on each other. A pair of huge birds ran screaming from the car. The c~ rode high, but branches slashed at its underside.
The forest thinned. . and showed masonry half hidden in vines. The car was already racing through Sarash-Zillish. Soil and grass and small bushes had invaded the streets. If this was Three City-if this
was the Antarctic source of industrial activity Peerssa had sensed from orbit-then it was far gone.
The car was slowing. Thank God. It scraped slowly over crackling brush, stopped in the open, and sank. Corbell got out onto moist grass. He stretched. He looked about him.
In the darkness it was barely possible to pick out two distant curved wails of hexagonal filigree where a dome must have stood. Corbell found no sign of the great black cube, the subway station, that had been the center of every city he'd seen so far.
He was parked beside what must be World Police Headquarters: a great wall of balconies and dark windows, with a row of large circular holes at the top, holes big enough to be access ports for flying police cars.
There must be weapons in there.
But there was certainly food in the park, and Corbell was faint with hunger. With some reluctance he climbed back into the car and tapped out the number Mirelly-Lyra had given him: inverted L, inverted L, nameless squiggle, delta.

Like the woods beyond the city, the park was spreading into the streets. The car stopped over a patch of tangled vines. He stepped out, having precious little choice, and found himself thigh-deep in the tough vines. They pulled him back like a nest of snakes. He waded out.
Hunger had never done anything for Corbell's disposition. It made him irritable, unfit to live with.
A wall of greenery twice his height ended just ahead of him. On the theory that there was a real wall under that tangle of vines, Corbell walked to the end, turned, and entered the park proper.
There was no obvious difference. It was as dark as the inside of a mouth. Jupiter's horizontal light couldn't reach through trees and buildings. Corbell wished for a flashlight, or a torch; but he didn't even have a match. CORBELL Mark II, bare-ass naked against the wilderness, would not be hunting prey tonight.
But fruit, now. . . these could be fruit trees. The Norn had said they were. Corbell stood beneath a tree and ran his hands through the branches. Something round bounced against his wrist.
It was pear-shaped, bigger than a pear, with thick, rough skin. With his teeth he stripped some of the covering away. He bit into creamy avocado flesh, milder in taste than avocado.
He ate it all. He threw away the skin and pit and felt through the branches for another.
A furry tentacle dropped familiarly around his neck.
Corbell grabbed. Sharp teeth closed between his neck and shoulder. The pain sickened him. His closing right hand slipped along fur, was stopped by a thickening . . . a head. He wrenched at it. The teeth came loose, the tentacle came loose and immediately wrapped new loops around his forearm. By starlight he saw a small snarling face. He was strangling a cat-tail.
The little beast could as easily have torn his eyes or his jugular. It was trying to bite him now. Even so, he didn't especially want to kill it.
He banged its head against a branch. Its grip loosened. A pitcher's fastball gesture flung it away. It coiled on the ground, lifted a head to study him. He was too big. It went away. He had suffered a muscletissue wound, but it wasn't bleeding badly. Stifi, it hurt. Corbell sent a curse to follow the cat-tail. He found and ate two more avocados. Good enough. He went back to the car, locked himself in, and went to sleep.

the first day
Corbell made his breakfast on tiny apples and apple-sized grapefruit. The cat-tails had disappeared. He sat quietly while he ate, and was rewarded. Squirrels (maybe; they moved fast) popped into view and vanished. A bird ran out of the woods, stopped short in front of him-it was as tall as his shoulder, dressed in the autumn colors of a turkey-squawked in terror and fled.
Presently he picked up a thick branch, knobbed at the end. A machete was what he really had in mind, but the club had a nice heft. He went exploring.
The park was a jungle of delights. He found fruit trees and nut trees and trees that grew fist-sized warty things whose taste he would have to try, later. Pineapples and coconut palms fought for room. String beans grew on vines that were strangling some of the trees. On a hunch Corbell pulled up some smaller plants and found fat roots:
potatoes or carrots or yams, maybe. He was seeing them by reddened light; for a million years they had been adapting to that reddened light and the twelve-year Antarctic day; of course they were unrecognizable. But they might be edible, if he could cook them, if he could start a fire. Or find one.

The ground floor of World Police Headquarters was clean and empty. Corbel found no dead bodies, no guns left lying about, no uniforms. Even the desks were gone. He was disappointed. He had hoped at least to clothe himself.
He tried an elevator. It worked.
Over several hours of exploring he found that the twenty-story building was bare to the walls, from the empty hangars under the rooftop landing pad, to the wonderfully filigreed cells in the fifth through seventh floors, to the offices on the second. Nothing remained that wasn't part of the structure itself.
But the elevators worked. He kept looking.
Where desks had been he found slots for trash. He tracked them to their outlet: metal trash cans, empty. He carried a can out to the car. It was the closest thing he'd found to a cooking pot. Now if he could find water. . . and fire.
He'd already been through the big room on the tenth floor. There was an acre of flat surface in here: tabletop along all four sides, a big square table in the middle with bins under it, doors with shelves behind them. Now, searching more carefully, he opened long panels and found knobs under them. He turned all the knobs as far as they could go, hoping to turn on a burner. This could be a kitchen.
He went down to the car. He came back with a generous armful of dried grass, and the club.
Most of the kitchen mechanisms must have stopped working. A snug and solid door proclaimed a cupboard to be a refrigerator. Some of the flat surfaces had to be griddles; but they weren't hot. A small glass door with a shelved recess behind it was hot. An oven. Corbell stuffed the grass into it, and waited . . . and waited . . . while the grass smoldered . . . smoldered more . . . and, suddenly, burned. He opened the door and set the club in the burning grass. When the grass burned out the knob on the end was barely smoldering. By then Corbell had found an exhaust fan. He let that blow on the coals until he had a small flame.

The rain started as he reached the car.
The car refused to move unless the doors were closed . . . with the club inside with Corbell, smoldering. The small flame had gone out. The rain fell tremendously, as if it wouldn't stop until the world was all water. Smoke inside and rain outside: Corbell couldn't see at all.
Fortunately the ride was short. The car settled over the exact same patch of tangled vines. Corbell pushed the trash can out into the rain, but he stayed in the car with the doors open, blowing on the coals.
The afternoon rain went on and on. When the club stopped smoldering Corbell didn't care. All the wood in the park would be soaked by now. He waded out into the wet and got his dinner of assorted fruits before the light was quite gone.
Again he slept in the car. A cramped, damp, wakeful night followed a miserable day. In this jungle of delights, this wilderness in which everything that grew seemed intended to serve man, Corbell had failed to make fire even with the help of a kitchen oven. Robinson Crusoe would have sneered.
But the cat-tail bite was healing. No fever: He had escaped rabies and tetanus.
Tomorrow. Try again tomorrow.

the second day
was bigger, better, faster. He took the car to World Police Headquarters. He carried two armfuls of damp scavenged wood into an elevator and up to the kitchen. He put them in the oven. He'd forgotten to turn it off yesterday; it saved him time now. He turned on the exhaust and left.
A little searching found him a second trash can. He took it up. The logs were smoldering, burning in places, but still wet. He left them to it. The kitchen was full of smoke, despite the exhaust fan.
Impatience got to him. There were not even flames on the blackened logs now. He opened the oven door, letting in air. The gasses caught with a soft whoosh. Corbell leapt back slapping at his hair and eyebrows; but no, they hadn't caught.
He had to tear a door off a narrow cupboard. It was the only tool
he could find. With the door he harried the logs out of the oven and into the trash can. He took the cupboard door along, too. Flat metal, it might serve somehow.
His way back to the park was slower. Three times he had to open a door to let out the smoke; each time the car slowed as if it had rammed invisible taffy. But he got back, and maneuvered the trash can out of the car into the patch of vines, under a threatening sky. The logs had gone to coals.
He turned the can on its side and braced the bottom higher than the lip. He pushed the coals into a pile at the back. He found more wood, not too damp, which he set in the trash can to be dried by the heat. When the warm rain opened up on him it didn't bother him. It was not especially uncomfortable, and now his fire was safe.
This time a million years ago. . . this time two miffion years ago Corbell the spaceman had already crossed tens of thousands of light-years, and at the core of the galaxy was skirting the edge of a black hole massive as a hundred million suns. Corbell the naked savage went forth to hunt his dinner.
Living things rustled around him, but he saw nothing. It didn't matter. He didn't have anything to kill with, not so much as a kitchen knife. He kept his eyes open for another club while he pulled up roots. He pulled up quite a number of different roots. He'd roast them all, and taste them.
He spent more time gathering nuts. The rain stopped. This rain seemed regular enough: starting just after noon, lasting two or three hours. It was nice to be able to count on something. In the customary red sunset light he sat down to cook his dinner.
He had to throw away half the roots. He got, in rough and approximate terms, one potato, one very large beet, a combination yam and carrot, and a more nearly pure yam. He burned most of the nuts, but some survived, and were delicious. He went back for more.
Then night was upon him. He set the trash can upright and set some dead tree limbs in the coals, and settled down to sleep in a patch of nearly dry moss.

the third day
Corbell half woke in darkness. He felt fur and a warm spot against his back, but elsewhere he was chilled. He curled more tightly around himself and went back to sleep.
Sometime later the memory snapped him awake. Fur? There was nothing against his back now. A dream? Or had, a friendly cat-tail stretched against him for warmth? The touch hadn't wakened him fully. He and Mirabelle used to share their king-sized bed with a kitten, until the kitten became a tomcat and started behaving like one.
Well, he was awake now. He did easy exercises until the stiffness was gone. He breakfasted on fruit; what else? Perhaps he ought to be looking for nests, and eggs.
The fire was still going. He built it up with twigs, then went looking for larger pieces. He wished for an ax. The little stuff burned too fast, the big stuff was too heavy to move, and he would soon use up all the dead limbs in the area. He spent part of the morning dragging a huge limb to his replenished fire. After he had tilted the trash can on its side and pushed the big end of the limb into it, he decided he'd created a fire hazard. He moved the whole arrangement onto a nearly buried outcropping of granite.
It was meat he hungered for. If he could find a straight sapling perhaps he could fire-harden it into a spear-provided he could sharpen a point. What he really needed was a knife, he thought. For that alone it was worth exploring Sarash-Zilhish.

Four crossed commas brought the car to the Sarash-Zihish Hospital. Corbell recognized it at once. From outside it was identical to the Four City Hospital.
Civilization must have become awfully stereotyped before its collapse. Corbell fantasized a great pogrom in which all the world's architects had died. Afterward humanity had been reduced to copying older buildings detail for detail. It didn't make a lot of sense. He'd look for other reasons for the duplication he saw everywhere.
Inside, the place kept reminding him of his nightmare flight from Mirelly-Lyra. Clean corridors, doors with no handles, cloud-rug.
The only difference was the lack of a vault. He found a central place, a two-story room lined with shelves and occupied by a computer that must be diagnostic equipment. But there was no vault door and no double "phone booth." No precautions against thieves. No mummified losers.
If Mirelly-Lyra had not lied, the Boys had owned this city. They would not have needed to steal dictator immortality. Only dictators- adults-would need that.
He found more locked doors. . . which would open with a kick. He found an operating room: two flat tables with straps attached, and clusters of jointed arms above them, tipped with scalpels and suction tubes and needles and clamps. The metal showed the stains of neglect and age.
The stiffly extended insectile arm: That was his target. Corbel climbed up on a table, leaned out to grip the arm at its end. He swung outward and hung suspended. The arm sagged, then broke in the middle and dropped him to the floor.
Corbell the hunter left the hospital carrying three feet of metal spear with a scalpel at the end.

Again the rains caught him on the way back. He made his way to his fireplace, checked to see that the fire was still going, then sat down to wait it out. There were several inches of water in his other trash barrel.
He was killing time by trying to shave-very carefully, but the weight of the handle was awkward and he wasn't doing a good job of it-when he saw the giant turkey. It was pecking under a nut tree, looking bedraggled and unhappy. He froze. It hadn't seen him. He debated as to whether he might sneak up on it. Probably not.
He eased forward onto the balls of his feet, spear held lightly in both hands.
He sprinted. The bird looked up, squawked, turned and fled. Cotbell swung the spear and chopped at its foot. The bird stopped to peck at whatever had bitten it. Corbell chopped again, at the neck, and felt the satisfying shock in his shoulders.
The bird was hurt and in panic. It ran in clumsy circles, squawking, while Corbell chased it. He got two more shots at the neck, and then he had to stop, gasping, his pulse thundering in his ears. The bird was spouting blood. It hadn't slowed down, but its ifight was Brownian motion, sheer blind panic.
It had not gone far when Corbell recovered his breath and resumed the chase. He was moving in for the kill when the bird turned and ran straight at him. A lucky swing as he sprawled backward, and the bird was headless. It ran right over him and kept going.
He tracked it until it fell over.
The patch of bare rock was nearly dry. Corbell spilled his fire across it, added more wood, then went back for the bird. He pulled
feathers until he was exhausted, rested, pulled more feathers. He opened the bird's belly and cleaned it, tugging two-handed at internal organs, his feet braced on rough rock.
The cupboard door from the police station became his griddle. He fried the liver on it, and ate it while parts of the rest of the bird were roasting. Afterward he worked at cutting into the joints. He couldn't build his fire big enough to roast the whole bird, but he could roast a drumstick. And broil thick slices of breast on a stick.
Meat! It was good to taste meat again. There was far too much for tonight. He had roasted both drumsticks; he could eat them cold tomorrow. He could cut up parts of the carcass and boil them for soup, in the other trash can, with some of the roots.

II
The northeast was turning gray, but in the black northwestern sky one star still glowed. Corbell had watched it on several nights. It did not twinkle and it did not move against the stellar background. That made it a planet, a big object dimly lit, possibly the world whose skewed orbit had disturbed Peerssa.
Now it twinkled; now it was marginally brighter. Corbell blinked. Just his imagination? Now it was fading before the coming dawn. . . . Corbell closed his eyes. He didn't want to wake up. There was no special reason why he should. He wasn't hungry or uncomfortable.
He'd learned much about the empty city during these past twenty days, but there were mysteries still to be explored. His encampment had become comfortable. He had a fireplace, a soup pot, and the car for shelter. He had tools: He had used the scalpel to carve wooden cooking implements. He didn't need clothes. For two full days he had practiced throwing rocks, and taken his reward in squirrel meat. Yesterday he had killed another giant turkey, his third.
Big deal.
Obscurely depressed, he curled tighter in his bed of moss.
Corbell the architect and Corbell the interstellar explorer seemed equaly dead. In his pride he had called himself a naked savage, but he wasn't that. A savage has his duties to the tribe, his tribe's duties to him. He has legends, songs, dances, rules of conduct, permitted and unpermitted women, a place for him when he grows old. . . but Corbel was alone. He could make fire-with the help of a super-
sophisticated kitchen. He could feed himself-now that practically everything he could touch was edible.
Some park. In the beginning it must have held only food plants and meat animals. City surrounding a farm. The cat-tails could hardly have survived, vain and decorative though they were, in the presence of real predators.
Domed cities. Mirelly-Lyra had spoken of the Boys building domed cities, here in land that the more powerful Girls hadn't held. But of course: Sarash-Zilish must have been domed against blizzards and subzero cold, before the world turned unaccountably hot. As for the "park," the Boys could hardly have grown beans and citrus fruit in the permafrost outside.
The Girls ruled the sky, controlled Earth's orbit. They must have made a mistake somewhere. What could have turned Jupiter into a minor sun? It must have shocked the Girls as badly as it later shocked Peerssa. It must have; because the change left Boy territory habitable and made Girl territory into scalding deserts, overturning a balance of power tens or hundreds of thousands of years old.
Corbell shifted, then sat up. It was the present that ought to concern him. .
Three cat-tails were tearing at his turkey carcass. When he moved they jolted to attention. Corbell reconsidered his first intention. They were eating the raw meat; they had left the roasted drumsticks alone. That left plenty of meat for Corbell.
They studied him: three snakes with solemn cat faces, furred in brown and orange intricately patterned; as beautiful as three butterscotch sundaes. Corbell smiled and gestured hospitably. As if they understood, they went back to their meal.
Breakfast: He ate fruit and drumstick meat and thought about coffee. Afterward he tended his fire. The scalpel was razor-sharp despite age and eighteen days of blunting, but it was no ax. He went far afield to find wood. The exercise was good. Decades in the cold-sleep coffin had preserved him better than he had hoped; he'd gone soft despite the exercises, but the savage life was toning him up. He took the other trash can to what had been a fountain and was now a pond, ifiled it with not especially clean water, dragged it back and wrestled it into place over the fire.
He turned to the turkey carcass. He cut chunks small enough to fit the trash can. Meat gnawed by cat-tails went in, and so did bare
bones. While it heated he foraged for roots to flavor the soup. Potatoes. Carrot-yams. He'd found nothing that resembled an onion, unfortunately. He added beans and, experimentally, a couple of grapefruit. He stirred it all with a wooden paddle.
As usual, noon looked like sunset, which was endlessly disconcerting. Corbell rested. The water was beginning to bubble. Granite was uncomfortable beneath his buttocks. Corbell was mildly depressed, and he couldn't understand why. .
And then he did.
Last day of a camping trip. You've worked your tail off; your belt has come in a notch and a half; you haven't had to think much; you've seen some magnificent scenery; there were damn few people on the trails, and they didn't rub your nerves. It's been good. But now it's back to work. .
Mirelly-Lyra knew where he was.
He was healthier than he'd known. He could live a Jovian year, if nothing killed him; the tourist in him liked that thought. The mad old woman had promised him one year, an Olde Earth year. He could believe as much of that as he cared to, but a sane man would choose the jungle.
Could a man survive in the jungle outside Sarash-Zillish? It would depend. Corbell had come to Antarctica in either spring or fall of a year twelve years long. An Olde Earth year from now the day might last twenty-three hours, or one. It would be much warmer than this, or much colder.
For the world still had its tilt and its twenty-four-hour rotation. Odd that the Girls had not corrected that. . . but maybe they were traditionalists. Much odder that they had not moved Earth further out from the growing heat of Jupiter. What concerned Corbell was this: He could not take a world twenty degrees colder, not without clothing, and an endless night might drive him mad.
Soup odors were beginning to permeate the wood smoke.
This sense of urgency was silly. He had a year to get moving. He could make foraging expeditions to the edge of the city. Keep his camp here. Whatever was out beyond the domes had had to be imported. How dangerous could it be? It might well be thousands of square miles of Sarash-Zillish Park.
An endless vacation. And he could use it. In his second life CORBELL Mark II had suffered enough future shock to kill a whole cityful of Alvin Tofflers.
Tomorrow, then. He could take the car as far as the hospital; it was near a standing fragment of dome. Then into the wild with spear and drumstick over either shoulder, if the drumstick kept that long without refrigeration.
He remembered to scrape some of his fire into his trash-can fireplace. He stretched out on the warm granite. .

Warm rain hammered at him. He turned over fast, rose to hands and knees and coughed out a tablespoonful of rainwater. First time that had happened. His bonfire must be out, but had the soup cooked first? Was rain getting into his fireplace?
He looked up, and forgot all of these crucial questions.
A dozen or so Boys-approximately a big boy scout troop, but uniformed only in breechclouts-squatted in a circle around Corbell and his fire. They were passing around a drumstick bone, nearly clean by now, while they watched him. As if they had been watching him in perfect silence for hours.
Their hair was rich where they had hair. On some it was black and woolly, on others black and straight, dripping to their shoulders. The crowns of their heads were bald but for a single tuft on the forehead. They ignored the pounding rain and watched, half smiling.
"I should have known," said Corbell. "The cat-tails. They're half tame. All right." He made a sweeping gesture. "Welcome to the Kingdom of Corbell-for-himseif. Have some soup."
They frowned, all of them. One got up: a long, lanky Boy, a budding basketball player, Corbell would have judged. He spoke.
"Sorry," said Corbell.
The Boy spoke again. Command and anger: That was no boy's voice, though it was high-pitched. Corbell was hardly surprised. These were the Boys, Mirelly-Lyra's immortals.
"I don't speak your language," Corbell said slowly, with an instinct that went against sense: The natives will understand if you speak slowly and clearly.
The Boy came forward and slapped him across the face.
Corbell hit him flush in the mouth. His right cross hit ribs instead of solar plexus, and the following left missed completely, somehow. Then the whole circle converged on him.
His memory thereafter was a little hazy. There was weight on his knees and forearms. Granite ground into his back. The basketball star sat on his chest and spoke the same senteilce over and over through a split lip. He would say it, and wait, and slap Corbel twice, and say it again. Corbell replied with obscenities. He could feel the bruises now.
The tall Boy got off his chest. He said something to the others. They all frowned down at Corbell. They discussed the matter in complex consonants spat like mouthfuls of watermelon seeds.
Corbell's head still rang; it had been beaten against granite. Four Boys were stil sitting on his forearms and knees. Rain splashed in his eyes. It all tended to muddle his thinking.
Did they think he was a strayed dictator? But Corbell was showing his age. They couldn't-wrong! No dictator immortality here. The dictators must grow old as Corbell had grown old.
The discussion ended. Four Boys got off Corbell. He sat up rubbing his arms. One took a theatrical pose, pointed at the ground before him, and spat one harsh word. Stay! or Heel! His message was plain, and Corbell was in no shape to run.
The tall Boy still studied Corbell as if trying to make up his mind. The others clustered around Corbell's soup pot. They scooped soup into halves of coconut shells. The tall Boy finally offered him something else, a ceramic cup from his belt. Corbell waited for room, then moved in.
He sat (gingerly, favoring the bruises) and drank. Cat-tails moved among the tribe like a plague of snakes; rubbed against ankles, and were petted; tore at the raw turkey carcass, what was left of it. Corbell felt fur against his ankle. He stroked a pure-black cat-tail. A rumbling vibration went through his shin.
Shall we say that Corbell has been captured again? Or, Corbell asked himself, shall we say that Fate has given me guides through Antarctica? Put that way, the decision was easy. . .

III
The soloist sang in a strong, rich tenor. He sang to background music: eight Boys humming in at least four parts, one more beating with turkey bones on Corbell's trash-can fireplace. Alien music, improvised, overly complex against the simple melancholy tune.
Corbell listened open-mouthed, the back of his neck tingling. He
had feared this, and it was true: Three million years had increased human inteffigence.
The night after his capture he had tried singing as a way to enhance his entertainment value. Since then he had sung medleys of advertising jingles, or theme songs from movies, or the clean and dirty folk songs he and Mirabelle had sung on the boat: songs three million years out of date. But the Boys liked them.
They didn't like it when he repeated a song they'd heard before. He wondered why, but he obeyed their wishes.
"Oh, we got a new computer, but it's quite a disappointment," Ktollisp sang, "cause it always gives this same insane advice: Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny hands for milking mice!" The flavor or mockery in his singing was for Corbell. He couldn't know what the words meant. But his pronunciation was accurate.
Corbell had sung that song once.
Beside him was the Boy who had attacked him that night a week ago, the leader in some respects. Skatholtz was broad of nose and lip, woolly-haired, long-limbed and emaciated-looking. He might have been a black preteen, but for the partial baldness and the prison pallor he shared with the others. He said in English, "He sings well, do you think?" and laughed at what he found in Corbel's face. "Now you know."
"You remember everything. Everything! Even whole songs in another language!"
"Yes. You need to learn my speaking more than I need to learn your speaking, but I learn yours first. This is why. You are different, Corbell. Older. I think you are older than anything."
"Almost anything."
"I will teach you how to talk. When you tell your tale, we all want to listen. I make a mistake with you. Do you know why I hit you? We thought you are only a dikt who broke with rules. You did not-" Skatholtz jumped suddenly to his feet. He stood at parade rest for a moment; then he shrank back, hands raised half in supplication, half to ward a blow.
"I didn't cringe," said Corbell.
"Yes, cringe. It is a formal show of respect."
Ktollisp sang, "So we got an expert genius and he rewrote all the programs, but we always got results that looked like these: Oh, you
need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny license plates for bees."
It was pink-and-black dusk in the park. The Boys had returned early this day. They spent most of every day in Sarash-Zillish, going through buildings like a flock of wild birds. Exploring, Corbell had thought. Savages swarming through ruins they could tiot understand.
He'd soon lost that illusion. A pair of Boys had escorted him outside the hospital operating room while the others worked inside. When he was allowed back in, Corbell's scalpel-spear had been reattached. The many-jointed arms above the operating table were carefully carving a phantom patient.
He was not allowed to watch repairs, but he had seen the results. The refrigerator in the police building, restored. A factory tested, run through its cycle until it had built two "phone booths." The Boys did Corbell the signal honor of letting him test the booths. He had not tried to balk. Another factory had produced a bathroom, a complete unit with pool and sauna. The Boys had repaired and tested the city lighting. Now the sides of many buildings glowed with soft yellowwhite light. Others remained dark. The effect was eerie: a city-sized chessboard.
They lived like savages, but apparently it was from choice.
In camp Corbell had done his share of the work, hauling firewood and digging up roots. They had given him a loincloth, but they would not give him a knife to replace his scalpel-spear. He still didn't know what place he held among them. He feared the worst. They were too intelligent. They would see him as a lesser being, an animal.
He needed them. It wasn't just company he needed. He could not travel safely until he knew something about this new continent.
The boy was singing all the verses, to the muted laughter of his companions. Corbell said, "Sooner or later I'll run out of songs. Sooner."
Skatholtz shrugged. "It is all the same. We leave here when light comes again. We go to other . . . tribes? To tell them that SarashZilish is ready for the long night. You come with us."
"Night? Is it night that's coming?" Had he landed in autumn, then?
"Yes. So you came from space, unready! I thought that. Yes, the long day is ended and the short day-nights are with us and the long night comes near. In the long night we live in the city. Hunters go to
the forests around, and food will keep in the cold boxes. In day we live more as we like."
"What's it like out there?"
"You will see." Skatholtz picked up a passing cat-tail and stroked its fur. "We have time to teach you some speaking," he said, and he switched to the language Corbell had tagged Boyish. Corbell was agreeable. He enjoyed language lessons.

Morning: They moved out. There was incredibly little fuss. They all seemed to wake at once. Soup had been simmering all night, made to Corbel's recipe, which they liked. Breakfast was soup in coconut shells. They picked up pots, cloth, the fire starter, half a dozen edged weapons. One, an albino Boy with pink eyes and cottony golden hair, handed Corbell twenty pounds of jerked meat wrapped in cloth. They left.
Corbell woke fully, marching the rest of the way. He had to drive himself to keep up, though the Boys made no attempt to set a steady pace. They ambled. Some dodged into buildings, then jogged to rejoin the tribe.
Savages they were not. They carried an idiosyncratic variety of edged tools, no two alike: scimitars, machetes, sabers, shapes that had no name, all with carefully sculpted handles. They had made the jerky the way Corbell would have, in an oven set on Low. The cloth they carried was indestructible stuff as thin as fine silk. Krayhayft's flashlight/fire starter projected light of variable intensity, in a conical beam or a beam no thicker than a pencil.
Organized they were not. But they had broken camp in minutes! They tramped through silent streets. Ingrowths of jungle grew thicker about them, until the city became jungle. They passed a straight tree trunk that Corbell suddenly realized was vine-wrapped metal. He looked up to see where it joined other members in a hexagonal array: a part of the old dome.
The jungle bore fruit: small oranges, breadfruit, several kinds of nuts. The Boys ate as they walked, and picked raw nuts to replace the roasted nuts they carried. They talked among themselves. Corbell couldn't follow their conversation; it went too fast.
He strode along in their midst, keeping the pace he'd set himself. Incredible, the way his old body bad healed! Tomorrow the aches would come; tomorrow he might not be able to move, except he'd
damn well better. Today he felt fine. He felt like a scoutmaster leading his troop. Memo: Don't test your authority.
Three hours or so into the hike. . . and that could almost be a fight developing up ahead. Skatholtz and another Boy were spitting syllables at each other with unwonted vehemence.
Last night's singer loped to join them. Ktoffisp was a burly, bigchested Boy with Skatholtz's black man's features and everybody's pale skin. He snapped one word at the two and they shut up.
Ktol!isp looked about him; frowned; pointed. The troop went off in that direction. They found a clearing, a few bushes growing on otherwise bare ground. Corbell watched, not understanding, as the troop formed a circle and Skatholtz and the other Boy stepped into it.
What was this, a duel? The two dropped their knives and breechclouts (no pubic hair). They circled like wrestlers. The challenger kicked at Skatholtz's heart. Skatholtz swerved clear . . . and now it was happening too fast to follow. Fists and feet and elbows struck to kifi: a momentary hold broken by an elbow between the eyes, the challenger kicked off balance and handspringing clear; Skatholtz jumping full over a bush and then using it as a shield. It looked like a damned dance! But Skatholtz was favoring one leg, and the other Boy was circling faster. He was going to run him down.
He caught a kick in the face as he closed. Skatholtz moved in for the kill.
Ktoffisp barked one word.
The bloody-nosed Boy cringed before Skatholtz, held the pose a moment, then straightened.
Everyone got up and started moving again. Someone else was carrying Skatholtz's cumbersome pack of cloth. His opponent was grinning and wiping at a bloody nose.

In midafternoon Skatholtz said two words Corbell recognized. He said, "Stop talk."
They did. Now the silence of their march was uncanny.
Skatholtz dropped back to walk beside Corbell. Very quietly he said, in Boyish, "You walk too loudly."
"I can't help it. Are we hiding from something?"
"From dinner we hide. Earlier was too early. We did not want to carry food so far. If something moves, let me know."
Corbell nodded. He didn't expect to see anything. It would be
months before his brain could train his eyes to see what the Boys could see in familiar territory. The keen-eyed Indian sees things the white man can't, but only in his own environment.
Two Boys transferred their loads to others and slipped away. Corbell couldn't see where they had gone. . . but presently there was a weird and terrifying sound, like a clarinet screaming for help. Every Boy instantly moved off the trail to flatten against a tree. Corbell copied them.
The tortured clarinet sounded nearer. They heard branches snapping. What would emerge? A tentacled monster, descendant of aliens enslaved by a younger, space-traveling State?
The monster burst from the trees. It was crippled, its forelegs running blood, hamstrung. The Boys followed it, first the hunters and then the rest, slashing at its hind legs.
A baby elephant!
Corbell caught up in time to see it die. It was murder; it left him sick to his stomach. He fought his squeamishness and moved close to examine the corpse. The beast was wrinkled and marked by old scars. No baby, this. It was an adult elephant four feet tall at the shoulder.
He asked Skatholtz, "Can I help?"
"You may not butcher. I cannot let you touch a knife. You are not a dikt, Corbell. You are nothing we know."
"Today I kill nobody." He meant it as a joke, but he didn't know enough Boyish to phrase or inflect it that way.
Skatholtz said, "And tomorrow? I think you make fiction-to-entertain, but lives might end if I am wrong. Do you understand my speech?"
"I will learn." He knew that Skatholtz was using baby talk for his benefit.
"Do you know the chkint?"
"Elephant. When I was young they were bigger, higher than your head at the shoulder." He wondered how elephants had come to Antarctica. Not as meat animals, surely. Maybe there had been a zoo. .
Skatholtz looked dubious. "There are larger beasts in the sea, but how could such a beast live on land, without support? Still . . . I have wondered why the elephant's legs are so thick. Was it to support larger weight?"
"Yes. The legs were more thick when I was young. The beast was the biggest on land. Five million years ago-"~ he had divided by twelve, for Jupiter years "-there were beasts far larger. We have found the bones turned to rock in the earth."
Skatholtz laughed skeptically and left him.
Having finished butchering the elephant, they departed. Corbell carried a rack of ribs for awhile, but it slowed him down. A disgusted tribesman finally took it away from him.
The forest ended.
Far across a prairie of waving yellowish-red vegetation, Corbell saw a last sliver of the departing sun. Jupiter was a pinkish-white disk, rising.
Here they made camp. Presently Corbell ate roasted elephant for the first time in his life. He was too tired to sing for his supper. Someone was telling a story-it was Krayhayft, who had oriental eyes and gleaming white patches in his straight black hair-and the others were listening in intense concentration, when Corbell dropped off to sleep.

They tramped all the next day through waving pinkish-yellow grain. Corbell judged it wheat. "Who grows this?" he asked Skatholtz, and was answered with laughter.
Wheat took cultivation, didn't it? Maybe it had been gene-altered. Four gene-altered cats still lived among the tribe; they took their turns riding the necks of various tribesmen. A wheat that grew wild would be worth having: more useful than a cat that was all tail.
All day Corbell saw kangaroos and ostriches bounding through the wheat. They were fast and wary. Once there was a lone man with a spear, far ahead, a pale figure at a dead run behind a fleeing ostrich. The pair was long gone when the tribe got there.
Late in the day Krayhayft found the tracks of something large. The tribe followed. Near sunset their quarry came in sight: a big, shambling mass that ran from them on four legs until it turned at bay on two.
It was a bear. Its skin was hairless and yellow but for a mane of thick white fur. A nude polar bear? And no dwarf, either. It waddled toward the hunters and tried to maul them with its great claws; but it was fighting Homo superior in the prime of health and youth. They danced around it, slashing. It fought on long after it should have bled to death.
They ate bear meat that night, while the cat-tails hunted at the edge of firelight. Jupiter was full, banded and orange.
Corbell was dozing with a full belly when Ktollisp dropped beside him. He spoke slowly, enunciating. "Do you sing tonight?"
"If I choose, then no."
"Acceptable. What was this about growing grain?"
"The grain we used didn't grow without human help."
"Like Skatholtz, I do not read your face well. If this is fiction-forentertainment, you do it well. We will be sorry to lose you."
"How do you Lose me?" The Boy might mean only that dikta die sooner or later, like cat-tails.
No. Ktollisp said, "When we reach the dikta, we lose you."
Corbell hadn't counted on that. "How many days?"
"Four. Five if we stop for amusement somewhere. You wifi like the dIcta, Corbel. There are men and women and the making of new Boys between them. They have a city and some country around, but they are not smart enough to make the machines go. In day we fix the things that go wrong at night."
"They're not smart enough? They are the same. . . kind you are. Their heads should be built the same."
"They have the brain, the stuff inside the heads, just like us. They do not have the time. We do not tell them how to fix machines. They do not live long enough to learn, and they might break the machines learning, and we punish them if they leave. So they stay in the dIcta place. They need us. We know where to find them. We must know this because we must bring new boys to the tribes."
"What happens to the. . . small ones not boys?"
"The girls? They grow. Some boys grow too. We choose the best, the smartest and the strongest, one from each tribe for each year, and we send them back to the dikta. We do not do the thing to them that makes them stay the same forever."
Planned breeding for superior Boys. . . and it would tend to cow the young Turks, to the benefit of the leaders. Corbell said, "There must be a lot more women than men."
Ktollisp grinned. "You like that?"
Anger tied his tongue. "You-you joke! I die of being too old soon! I can't make more Boys!"
Ktollisp had Corbell by the hair, his knife was drawn, before Corbell could do more than gasp. He slashed-slashed away a thick handful of Corbell's hair and held it before his eyes. "Your lies are for the newly born. We are offended," he said. "Can you lie as to this?" The thin white hair he held in firelight was dark brown for half an inch at the roots.
Corbell gaped.
The tribe surrounded him. They must have been listening all the time. Yes, they looked offended. Skatholtz said, "No dikt grows hair like that. You have found the dikta way to live long like Boys, that we know only in tales. We must know what and where it is."
Corbell had forgotten his Boyish, every word. In English he cried, "I haven't the remotest idea!"
Ktollisp slapped him.
Corbell tried to block with his arms. "Wait, wait. You're right, I must have taken dikta immortality. I just don't know where. Maybe, maybe it's in something I ate. The dikta did a lot of gene engineering. They made the cat-tails and the wild wheat. Maybe they made something that grows dikta immortality, something that grows in SarashZillish. Listen, I didn't know it was happening! I can't see my own hair!"
Skatholtz was gesturing the rest back. "You could not feel your youth returning?"
"I thought I was. . . getting adapted to the rough life. I spent like a hundred and thirty years in a cold-sleep tank, ten years at a time
my years, not yours. I couldn't know what it did to me. Listen, there's an old woman who's been searching every city in the world for dikta immortality. If she doesn't know, how could I?"
"We know nothing of this woman. All right, Corbell. Tell your story. Leave nothing out."
He had been sleepy. Now he was scared boneless-and still boneweary-and in that state Corbell told his life's story. Whenever he paused for breath Skatholtz spat complex phrases in Boyish, translating.
Telling savages about a black hole at the center of a galaxy was easier than he had expected. Telling Mirelly-Lyra's tale was wearing. They kept backing him up for points she hadn't mentioned, for points she hadn't even noticed in her thirst for dictator immortality. They found her lack of curiosity incomprehensible.
Questions. What had he eaten? Drunk? Breathed? Could immortality have been in the bath in One City? It was a mistake to mention
the Fountain of Youth . . . but no, the dikta themselves used baths.
Dawn came and Corbell was still talking. "It could have been any of the things I tried. The fruits, the nuts, the roots, the meat. The soup, even; I mean the combination of a lot of things plus the heat. Hell, it could even be the water in the fountain."
Skatholtz stood and stretched. "We can find out. When we return to Sarash-Zillish we will take a dikt. Shall we go?"
"Go?" Corbell saw that the other Boys were getting up, collecting gear. "Oh, please! I'll fall over!"
"You are stronger than you think, Corbell. For too long were you a dikt sick with age."
They marched.
The wheat-covered prairie went on forever. They camped early, after the afternoon rain. Corbell sprawled in the wet earth and slept like a dead man.

IV
He woke early. A cat-tail had crawled along his ribs, lilting the warmth, tickling him. It mewed in protest as he rolled away. There was more protest from his overused muscles.
The fire had died. Jupiter, white with a thin red crescent edge, made the night seem bright.
Well, I'm in trouble again, he thought. Imagine my amazement. Everyone in the world wants dictator immortality, and they all think I've got it, and they're all half right. Why do the Boys want it? Maybe they want to destroy it. It's the biggest difference between them and the dikta.
He let his hand stroke the orange cat-tail. It draped itself over his knee and rumbled contentedly.
What is it? If it's edible it's in Sarash-Zillish. Everything I ate in Four City, Mirelly-Lyra ate too. One kind for women and one for men? and man's immortality doesn't affect women at all? 1 don't believe it.
So something in the park holds dictator immortality, in the sap or the juice or the blood, and I ate it. What did she eat when she searched Sarash-Zillish? The Boys eat almost no vegetables-and vegetarians eat no meat-but she led me both, and fruit toe'. Insects? I don't eat insects.
If I could get her to Sarash-Zillish, I'd know. Watch her. See what she doesn't eat.
The stars were bright tonight. A few unwinking stars had a pinkish tinge: small Jovian moons. The Boys were sprawled far from where the fire had been. A Boy on guard looked around as Corbel sat up. It was Krayhayft, the only Boy with white in his hair.
Heady smells reached Corbell. Wet earth and growing things, traces of young supermen who hadn't washed recently, a ghost of broiled meat that Corbell hadn't shared: suddenly he was hungry. And suddenly he was elated.
"What the hell am I complaining about?" he whispered. The cattail stopped purring to listen. "I'm young! If nothing else works I can outrun the bitch! I should be dancing in the streets, if I could find a street."
Young again! That made twice. If he could find out how he did it, he could stay young for the rest of his life. Everybody's dream. And even if he couldn't-the grin died on his face. Now he had fifty years to protect, half a century of lifespan that the Norn would rip from him if he couldn't show her the Tree of Life in Sarash-Zillish.
Something that tasted funny? Everything tasted funny. Different soil. Three million years of change.
It was too damn simple anyway. Immortality? and you drink it like fruit juice? An injection might have been more plausible, if he had received any kind of injection. Or . . . had he inhaled it like marijuana, in the smoke from the wood of a carefully gene-tailored tree?
"Corbell. Do you enjoy the morning?"
Corbell jumped violently. The sentry's approach had been perfectly silent. He settled beside Corbell. By Jupiter light the pale threads gleamed in his hair. Corbel had wondered at the grace with which he moved: Krayhayft who carried the fire starter, Krayhayft the storyteller.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-one," said Krayhayft.
"That's old," said Corbell. Jupiter years. "I wonder why you aren't the leader."
"The old ones learn to avoid that chore . . . and to avoid the fighting that goes with it. Skatholtz can beat me. Skill in fighting has an upper limit. One is born with one's greatest possible strength."
"Corbel, I think I have found your spacecraft."
"What?"
"There." The Boy was pointing low on the northern horizon, where a few stars glowed in the gray-black of coming dawn. One showed pink among blue-tinged stars. "The one that might be a moon except that it does not move. Is that your spacecraft?"
"No. I don't know where my ship went. Don Juan wasn't ball-like. It would look more like a thick spear."
Krayhayft was more puzzled than disappointed. "Then what is it? I have seen it twinkle oddly. It does not move, but it grows more bright every night."
"The whole system of worlds is messed up. I can't explain it. I think that's the next world out from Jupiter."
"I wish it had been your spacecraft," said Krayhayft. He fell to studying the steady point of light. Entranced.
The cat-tail slithered from Corbell's knee and disappeared into the grain. Corbell saw two more low shadows slipping after it.
A cat screamed. Simultaneously something much bigger vented a much lower, coughing roar. Krayhayft shouted, "Alert!"
It bounded out of the grain and leapt at Corbell's throat: something as big as the biggest of dogs. Corbell threw himself to the side. He saw a spear plant itself solidly in the open mouth, and then the Boys were on it. It was a dwarf lion, male, magnificently maned. It died fast. Even the first spear might have killed it.
Corbell got up, shaken. "The female could be out there."
Skatholtz said, "Yes," and joined the others who were fanning out into the grain. Corbell, spearless and superfluous, stayed where he was.
Presently he noticed something small in the path the lion's charge had left through grain. He found a small butterscotch-sundae corpse. The other cat-tails had returned to the fire. They seemed unusually subdued.

At dawn he helped two Boys build a fire. He saw the reason later, when four more trekked in with ostrich eggs. They set the eggs on the coals, carefully cut the tops off and stirred the contents with spear hafts.
Scrambled eggs! Still no coffee.
Corbell strode along in pink sunlight, feeling good. The slapping-
around was a bitter memory, with bruises to corroborate it, but he set next to it another memory: Ktoffisp's fist holding white hair with dark-brown roots. Oh, for a mirror! He was a slave, if not worse. But he was young! With an outside chance to stay that way a long time.
They had crossed a row of big, badly weathered rocks, oddly textured, big as houses and bigger. Now the land sloped down. . . and Corbell found Skatholtz marching beside him. Skatholtz said in English, "What do you know of the Girls?"
There was a Boyish word for girl-child and another for dikta woman, but Girl was a third word, and it carried a certain emphasis.
Corbell answered, "Mirelly-Lyra told me something about them. There was a balance of power between Boys and Girls, and somehow it fell apart."
"By her tale, the Girls ruled Boys as Boys rule dikta."
"No. Look at it with more care. The Girls ruled the sky; they could move the world. By implication they controlled the weather. They couldn't change the world's rotation, but they could decide how far the world should be from the sun. In fact, they first moved the world because the sun was getting too hot.
"The Boys ruled the dIcta. They could see to it that no more Boys or Girls were born." An interesting role reversal, that. "In itself that isn't a lot of power, not in a crowded world where everyone expects to live forever anyway-"
"But our land was less rich! The tales tell it so!"
"Yeah. Look at it from the other direction. Suppose the Boys let the dikta breed like rabbits-breed fast. They kill most of the girlchildren and hide most of the boy-children. The boy-children grow up. They get dikta immortality as long as they behave. Now the Boys have an army. They invade."
The land had leveled out. Ahead it sloped upward again. Skatholtz mulled it over, then: "Our tales tell nothing of this."
"That's because it never happened. The Boys couldn't feed such an army. Poor land. So the balance of power lasted-oh, tens of thousands of your years."
"I see, partly. I am not used to thinking like this. What went wrong? Somehow the Girls lost control."
"Yeah. Weather?"
"Our tales tell of a great thawing. When green things grew for the first time in our land, the Girls tried to take it. The thaw happened
when the Girls grew too proud. In their pride they lost a moon, and with the moon they lost their power."
Corbell laughed. "They lost a moon? Hey, just how accurate could those tales be after. . . a hundred thousand years?"
"We live long. We remember well. Details may be lost, but we do not add fiction."
The land sloped upward. In the distance Corbell could see another line of big, melted-looking rocks.
"A moon. It sounds completely silly, but. . . Peerssa told me the moons of Jupiter were out of their orbits, but that's not too strange. Dropping the world into their midst could have done that. But he also said Ganymede is missing completely."
"Ganymede?"
"The biggest moon. Hell, I don't see how it fits in."
"And the sun is too hot, you said, and King Jupiter is too hot."
"And the weather is screwed up," said Corbell. "It all comes down to a change in the weather. It wiped out the balance of power. Then the Boys wiped out the Girls."
"We tell tales of that war. Weapons as strong as a meteor strike! Look, Corbell, such a weapon was used here." Skatholtz swept an arm behind him.
They had crossed a shallow dish-shaped depression a couple of miles across, rimmed by these half-melted. . . "Just a minute," said Corbell. He dropped his load of jerky and scrambled up a rock twenty feet high and of oddly uniform texture. There at the top he found lines of rust red making a great Z: the remains of a girder.
"These were buildings," he said. "It must have been a Boy city."
"When I was young I wanted to use weapons like that." Skatholtz laughed boyishly. "Now I cringe at what they must have done to the weather. But we destroyed the Girls."
"They did you some hurt, too." Corbell climbed down from the melted building. They'd have to trot to catch up to the tribe.
"The tale tells that they destroyed us," said Skatholtz. "I never understood that saying."
Corbell and Skatholtz marched on in silence for a time. Boys chattered ahead. It was just past noon, too early to hunt. Very far away, a great brown carpet flowed away from the noise they were making:
thousands of animals too distant to recognize, too numerous to count.
Skatholtz said in Boyish, "Soon we reach the border to the great water. A day's march broad is that border. Thea word is-" Corbell learned the words for shore and sea. "The near village holds a pleasant surprise," and Skatholtz used another unfamiliar word. "I can't describe it. We must do work for it."
"All right." In his youth Corbell had never liked muscle work. But oh, it was good to have the muscles now! He asked, "Why were we talking English?"
"Because I must know you. I must learn when you are telling fiction."
Corbell chose not to protest the injustice. "I wonder about the cattails."
"What do you wonder?"
"In Sarash-Zilish they rule. Here there are things bigger and more violent. How can they live?"
"Soon or late a predator kills them. Until then they are pleasant to keep near. Soon or late, everything dies except Boys."
"Before this evil you control your rage skillfully. Will we find more cat-tails among the dikta?"
"No. We never leave cat-tails with the dikta."
"Why?"
"It isn't done."
Corbell let it drop. There was a thing he dared not ask yet, but he would have to find out. How carefully were the adults guarded?
The dikta place was the second place Mirelly-Lyra would look for him. He couldn't stay long. The moment she saw him dark-haired, that moment he would have to produce dictator immortality.
And maybe he could. One simple test. . . made carefully! He did not want the Boys chopping down the Tree of Life!

V
They reached the village at noon. It was a strange blend of primitive and futuristic: an arc of baths, identical to the bath Corbell had found by the shore in One City, half surrounding the village square, and surrounded in turn by sod huts and granaries. There was great variety among the sod structures; but they matched. The village as a whole was beautiful.
Corbel was beginning to get the idea. The ancient factories would build the Boys buildings for certain purposes. It was very easy
to go on using them century after century. For other purposes they made their own, and lavished labor and ingenuity on them. He was not entirely surprised when Krayhayft spoke for the tribe, and called it "Krayhayft's tribe." He who spoke for the vifiage had Krayhayft's strange grace, and gray in his long golden hair.
They worked all that afternoon. A couple of Boys of the village went with them to supervise, shouting their orders with malice aforethought. Corbel and Krayhayft's tribe used primitive scythes to reap grain from the fields and carry it in bundles into the village square, until there was a great heap of it there, until the Boys of the village were satisfied.
After their labor the Boys went whooping to the baths. Corbell waited his turn with impatience. He went the full route, bath and steam and sauna and back to the bath, this time with the Jacuzzistyle bubble system turned on. When he emerged it was dark. They were starting dinner.
The "surprise" Skatholtz had promised was bread, of course. Several kinds of bread, plus rabbit meat the villagers had hunted. Corbell ate his fill of all the varieties of bread. The taste brought on a nostalgic mood. His eyes were wet when Ktoffisp had finished singing Corbell's version of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."
The bread had surprised him less than the "phone booth" at one end of the arc of baths. He dithered . . . but Skatholtz knew he knew about "phone booths." While Krayhayft started one of his long tales, Corbell sought out Skatholtz and asked him.
The skeletal boy grinned. "Were you thinking of leaving us through the prilatsil?"
"Not especially."
"Of course not. Well, you've guessed right. This village trades their grain for other bread-makings all across the land."
"I didn't think the prilatsil would send anything that far."
"The land is crossed by a line of prilatsil, close-spaced. Do you think we would handle emergencies by traveling on foot? Look." Skatholtz drew a ragged E @ V
< U P j
)f@e serious re serious reason to travel, these lines of prilatsil exist. Since the time of the Girls they have been used four times
more, if tales have been lost. We keep them in repair."
Corbel kept his other questions to himself. He hoped he would not
have to use the prilatsil. They were too obvious. They would be guarded.
When the tribe left in the morning, they carried loaves of bread in their cloth bags. There had been an exchange: Three of Krayhayft's tribe had stayed behind, and three villagers had replaced them. No big deal was made of it, and Corbell had to examine faces to be sure it had happened.

Now there was no more grain. The land dropped gradually for twenty miles or more, and ended in mist. Nothing grew on it but dry scrub. Off to the right of their path was a cluster of sharp-edged shapes, promontories all alone on the flat lifeless ground.
Nature sometimes imitates that regular, artificial look. Corbell asked anyway.
"They are artificial," Skatholtz told him. "I have seen them before. I have my guess as to what they are, but. . . shall we look at them? Some of Krayhayft's tribe have not seen them."
The troop veered. The structures grew larger. Some lay on their sides, disintegrating. But the nearest stood upright, its narrow bottom firmly set in the ground. The tribe clustered beneath a great curved wall leaning out over their heads.
"Ships," said Corbell. "They carried people and things over water. What are they doing so far from the ocean?"
"Perhaps there was ocean here once."
"Yeah . . . yeah. When the world got so hot, a lot of the ocean went into the air. This used to be sea-bottom mud, I think."
Krayhayft said, "That fits with the tales. Can you guess what they might have carried?"
"Too many answers. Is there a way in?"
He didn't understand when Krayhayft untied the fire starter from his belt. He would have stopped him otherwise. Krayhayft twisted something on the fire starter, pointed it at the great wall of rusted metal.
The metal flared. Corbell said nothing; it was already too late. He watched the thin blue beam spurt fire until Krayhayft had cut a wide door.
The metal slab fell away. Tons of mud spilled after it. Aeons of dust and rainwater. . . They waded up the mud slope, joking among themselves, and Corbell followed.
The hull was one enormous tank. There were no partitions to prevent sloshing. Corbell sniffed, but no trace of the cargo remained. Oil? Or something more exotic? Or only topsoil for the frigid Antarctic cities? Topsoil wouldn't slosh around. .
The surprise was on deck and above deck. Masts! There was no place here for human sailors. There were only proliferating masts reminiscent of clipper ships, and cables all running to a great housing at the bow. A housing for motors and winches and a computer.
The hull had appeared to be sound; the masts were in fine shape. But time had reduced the computer to garbage. That was a pity. It was as big as Don Juan's computer, which had housed Peerssa's personality. Conceivably it could have told them a great deal.

They marched down into the fog, and the fog swallowed them.
Corbell heard regular booming sounds that he failed to interpret. Then, suddenly, they had reached the sea. Breakers roared and hissed across a rocky shore.
They rested. Then, while others collected brush for a fire, three of the Boys swam out into the breakers with spears and the rope. It looked inviting. The water would not be cold. But Corbell had seen the Boys hunt, and he wondered what toothy prey waited for them.
Two came back. They swam ashore with the rope twitching behind them and collapsed, panting heavily, while others dragged the rope in with its thrashing burden. They beached twelve feet of shark. The third Boy didn't come back.
Corbell couldn't believe it. How could immortals be so careless of their lives?
The Boys were subdued, but they held no kind of formal ceremony. Corbell ate bread that night. He had no stomach for shark. He had seen what came out of the shark's stomach.
He lay long awake, puzzling it out. He had been old and young and middle-aged, in no intelligible sequence. With any luck he would stay young. He had fought for his life and his life-style against the massed might of the State; he had never given up, not with all the excuse in the world.
Did they get tired of too much life?
Corbell didn't doubt that they could build machines to kill off the sharks. The factories that kept turning out identical bedrooms and
baths and offices were a tribute to their laziness; but they were also briffiant. Then why were the sharks still here?~ Tradition? Maschismo?
In the morning the Boys were cheerful as ever. In the afternoon they reached the dikta.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE DICTATORS

I
Six City, Dikta City, showed first as a bar of shadow along the shoreline, then as half a mile of blank wall with a low windowed structure peeking above the center. Dikta City showed its back to the approaching Boys.
As they rounded the end of the wall Corbell saw its face. Dikta City was a single building, four stories tail, half a mile long, and as wide as a luxury hotel. 1ts façade looked north toward the sea and the sun, and was rich with windows and balconies and archways. Between city and sea was a semicircle of low wail over which the tops of trees were visible. A garden.
The dikta were emerging through an arch in the low garden wall. In scores now, they waited.
Dikta City could never have been under a dome. It was the wrong shape. It must have been built late, specifically to house the adults, long after Antarctica became a hothouse and the seas receded across the continental shelf. Topsoil must have been spread over the salt dunes, and walled against the winds. Fish from the sea, and whatever the walled garden produced, would be the only sources of food for miles around.
It would be difficult to leave this place, Corbell thought.
A couple of hundred dikta waited until the Boys were a few yards away, until Corbell had counted seven men among a horde of women. Then they cringed, all of them at once. They held the cringe as Krayhayft stepped forward.
"We come to repair your machines," Krayhayft said, "and to take your boy-children to ourselves."
"Good," said one among them. He had a white beard and shoulder-length white hair, very clean and curly. He straightened from the cringe, as did all the others . . . and now Corbell was impressed by their general health and dignity. They didn't act like slaves; the cringe had been a formality. Corbell wondered what would have happened if he had cringed naturally, that fourth day in Sarash-Ziffish. The Boys might have killed him as an escapee.
All of the dikta were studying Corbell.
Krayhayft noticed. He spoke at length in a voice that carried. Corbell couldn't follow everything he said, but he was telling a condensed version of Corbell's history. The spaceflight, the long voyage, some complex phrases that might have related to relativistic time-compression; the flight from Mirelly-Lyra . . . no mention of the mad dikta woman's motives. No mention of dikta immortality. Corbell was sure of that; he listened for it.
The old man listened and laughed; he was vastly entertained. At the end of the narrative he came forward and said, "Welcome to our refuge, Corbell. You will have interesting things to tell us. I am Gording. Do I speak slowly enough?"
"A pleasure to meet you, Gording. I have a lot to learn from you. Yes, I can understand you."
"Will you join us tonight, then? We have room in the Dikta Place for many more children. It will be instructive to see what your children are like."
"I-" Corbell choked up. The women were examining him and speculating in whispers. It wasn't just his browline, though even the women were half bald. His brown-and-white hair must have caught their attention too . . . and his answer was rudely delayed. "I'm happy you accept me for that important purpose," he said.
What he was was nervous. Abruptly he was very conscious of his near-nakedness. The dikta were entirely naked.
One of the women-her long black hair was just showing gray- said, "It must be long since you made children with a woman."
Corbell laughed. Divide by twelve: "A quarter of a million years." What she asked then raised laughter. Corbell shook his head. "I may have forgotten how. There is only one way to know."

He helped the Boys set up camp.
A grove of trees occupied the center of the semicircular garden within the wall, which was far more orderly than the jungle in Sarash-Zillish. The Boys set up camp under the trees, and built their fire with wood brought by dikta women.
"You may go to the dikta," Skatholtz told him then, "but you must not tell them of dikta immortality." It didn't seem to occur to him that he might be disobeyed.
"What about my hair? I know damned well they noticed it."
Skatholtz shrugged. "You are an early type of dikt from before stories were told. Tell them all dikta once grew hair like yours. If any learn what you know, their minds will be. . . all that they know will be taken from them."
"I'll keep my mouth shut."
Skatholtz nodded. Corbell was dismissed.
The prospect of an orgy was making Corbell jumpy. He had tried to lie with a woman three million years ago, in the State dormitory, the night before they took him to the Moon to board Don Juan. All those staring eyes had cowed him, left him impotent. It might be the same tonight.
But he had half an erection now.
Dikta City's ground floor was a row of long, hall-like public places, each roomy enough for two hundred. The dining room was one of these. It had some of the trappings of a cafeteria. Corbell found trays and utensils at one end of a counter; a dozen women and a man cooked food in large batches and served it as the line passed. Others finished eating and took their places. Weird differences: The single utensil was a large plastic spoon with a sawtoothed cutting edge, and the metal trays floated at elbow level, sinking slightly under the weight of food.
Food was a variety of vegetables cooked in elaborate combinations with very little meat; in that sense it was like Chinese cooking. The old man named Gording escorted Corbell through the routine. Tables were of different sizes, seating four to twelve. At a table for six with Gording and four women, Corbell had a fair chance of following a conversation.
They asked him about his hair. He told them Skatholtz's lie, and expressed surprise at their monochromatic hair and receding hairlines. Maybe they believed him.
Observing his dinner companions up close, he noted that, like the Boys, they showed pallid, almost translucent skin, coupled to all the shapes natural to human beings: noses broad or narrow, lips thick or thin, bushy eyebrows or eyes with epicanthic folds, or both; bodies burly and invulnerable or slender and fragile.
"Vitamin D?"
He'd spoken aloud. They looked at him, waiting.
"It's only a theory," Corbell tried to explain. "Once all dikta were dark brown, when the sun was hot and bright. Some dikta went far north, where it was so cold that they had to cover themselves or die." They were smiling nervous incomprehension, but he went doggedly on: "Our skin makes a thing we need, from sunlight. When dikta cover themselves for warmth, their skin must let more sunlight through, or they die. My people grew lighter skin. I think it was the same with your people, after the sun turned red."
They were still smiling. "Dark brown," Gording said. "Your tale is strange, but our skin does make a life-chemical, kathope."
"But how do you live in the long night?" Almost six years!
"Kathope seed. We press it for the oil."
Escaping Dikta City should have been easy during the long night, when the Boys all gathered in Sarash-Zillish. But fugitives would have to carry their own kathope seed. . . yeah, and Boys would tear it up if they found it growing anywhere but here or in Sarash-Ziffish. Corbell was beginning to worry. Maybe he really was trapped.
He asked about the coming festivities.
"We take sex in company," T'teeruf told him. At a wild guess she was sixteen or so, her face heart-shaped, her eyes large and expressive, her mouth full and made for laughter, her hair a tightly coiled ruff. Even she was half bald. "Sex is the only pleasure we have that the Boys can't ever understand. That, and giving birth." Her eyes dropped shyly. "I haven't done that yet."

II
The orgy hall (what else could you call it?) was an afterthought. It seemed the Boys hadn't thought of putting one in when they built Dikta City. The dikta had repaired the omission by building a kind of infinity sign on the roof, composed of twelve of the mass-produced triangular bedrooms arranged like two pies of six wedges each, with two baths set between. They had knocked out all the inner walls. The small toilets that belonged to the bedrooms still had doors (at least the dikta kept that form of privacy!), but the closets didn't, and the "phone booths" had been ripped out. Of course.
When Corbell arrived there were dikta on every horizontal surface, beds and couches and coffee tables, and more coming in. Half a dozen women gestured invitation from one of the beds. Corbell accepted.
His nervousness left him quickly. Rippling water bed and warm woman-flesh formed his pillows, and it was altogether delightful. Out of courtesy and because she was nearest, he lay with an older woman first. She expressed no disappointment, but he was too quick and he knew it. After all that time, to hurry. . . and still it felt like a mighty victory. "I gave this up forever," he said, and thanked her with his eyes.
Now he beat his chest and warbled the Challenge of the Great Ape, and took a woman with pronounced oriental features and warm, skilled hands. This time it was longer, better. The partial baldness of these women made them more exotic. Their breasts were alike, large in diameter but flattened; even in older women they did not sag.
They asked him about his sensations. Even with his wife, Corbell had had difliculty analyzing his own reflexes, and he had trouble now. They probed delicately, with questions and with stroking fingertips, exploring his ancient nervous system and telling him about their own.
A younger man joined them. Two women left, were replaced by two more. Corbell scratched T'teeruf's back while she was in sexual congress with the other man. Was he through for the night?
Evidently not- The man was using his hands and toes, attempting to satisfy five
Women at a time, reminding Corbel of old paintings from India. Egotist! But it seemed fair, given the proportion of women to men.
When inspiration came, Corbell tried those variations himself. It took some concentration . . . and he had never been in practice. He was tentative, a bit clumsy.
One of the women asked him about it. He told her. One woman to a man. . . monogamy. . . no children's immortality. . . The faces around him closed down like masks, and the woman changed the subject.
He hardly noticed. He was drunk on the hormones bubbling in his blood. He watched the other man and two women, trying to follow what they were doing, but it all came out as a tangle of arms and legs.
"There are lost skills," T'teeruf told him a bit wistfully. "Positions used in free-fall. Now they exist only in the tales."
He tried the sauna (crowded) and the bathtub (crowded). Hot water churned with bubbles and the currents generated by a couple on the far side: Gording and the older woman who had been his first since the corpsicle tank. Wet women rubbed against him. A watersplashing war erupted and died out. Corbell and a young woman with golden hair made love, sitting cross-legged in the tub facing each other.
That was when he looked up and saw the Boys: half a dozen of them seated on the edge of an open airwell with their feet hanging down toward the tub. They passed comments to each other while they enjoyed the show. Ktoffisp caught him looking and waved.
The girl's eyes followed Corbell's upward, then dropped in disinterest. Okay, it didn't bother her . . . When Ktol!isp waved again, Corbell waved back.
In the bedroom in One City there had been an old videotape of two couples demonstrating lovemaking positions. Even then Corbell had sensed the presence of an audience. Now he knew. They had been there at the coffee table: Boys or Girls watching borrowed dikta, or even (how old was that tape?) Boys and Girls mixed, before the great rift.
The orgy's impetus dwindled. Now half of Dikta City clustered on the beds and couches and coffee tables in half of the bedroom complex, questioning Corbell. His audience thinned as some left by the stairwell; others went by twos and threes to the other half of the multiple-bed complex and came back later. Corbell talked on and on.
The first man to see the bottom of the universe, he had his audience at last. Euphoria!
Suddenly he was yawning uncontrollably.
No, they didn't use the bedrooms for sleeping. They slept in a ground-floor room. Gording volunteered to walk him over. The fresh air cooled his damp body and cleared his head. The stars were slightly misted over. Gording pointed to a steady pink-tinged star in the north. "Corbell, you came from space recently. What is that?"
"A world like a little Jupiter. It shouldn't be there, but it is."
"It grows brighter, but it does not move against the pattern of fixed stars."
"That bothered Krayhayft, too." It was brighter, wasn't it? "Listen, I'm too tired to think."
The sleeping room was a kind of greenhouse. The sleeping surface was tall grass, living grass, already covered by bodies. Gording and Corbell found space, lay down and slept.

The sun shining through glass walls woke him. Four women were still curled on the grass, isolated. The rest were gone.
He had daydreamed of nights like last night, when he was much younger. Without the bald heads, of course. So what? He was lucky they saw him as human. Lucky he could still see them as human, too. Their bodies hadn't changed much. Their minds had changed more; they seemed geniuses. . . and they seemed placid in their slavery.
If they hadn't freed themselves from the Boys in all those aeons, how could Corbell? Corbell remembered that there was a possible answer. . . which had to be tested.

A ceremony was in progress at the Boy encampment. Eight dikta males (he must have missed one yesterday) were presenting five boychildren to the tribe. Of the three cupbearers, Krayhayft who seemed to be the oldest now seemed to be in charge. The rest of the Boys watched solemnly. Three carried the remaining cat-tails around their necks.
Corbell decided against joining them; he took a place by himself and kept his mouth shut. His chance would come.
The children appeared to be five to seven years old. They were overawed and immensely proud. Of the adults, it was Gording who named each child and described him: his strength, his accom
plishments, his habits good and bad. For a moment Corbell thought one of the children was being rejected, and that didn't fit his preconceptions at all. Then he realized that the boy-child's name had been rejected. He was being given a new one.
The ceremony broke up suddenly. The boy-children stayed with the Boys; the men went off talking together. Krayhayft called to Corbell. "I know that walk and that look."
Corbell went over.
"The walk means you have used muscles in unaccustomed labor. I know the bright smile and red eyes, too."
Corbell grinned. "You're right."
"You had fun?"
"You'll never know."
"I never will. Some of the boy-children we take try to be the best so that they can be dikta. Do you believe that?"
"Sure. Did you?"
Krayhayft scowled. "It didn't matter. I was not best at anything. I burnt food. My spear missed the prey. I don't like to remember that long ago. I remember that I wanted to go home. What does a yearling know of the difference between living five years or six, and living forever?"
"And sex?"
"What does a yearling know of sex? What does a Boy know of sex? He can only watch." Krayhayft grinned suddenly. "Last night was the first time I ever saw-" He beat his chest with his fists and gave an ululating yell.
"I was a little crazy."
"That seems normal."
"What happens next? How long do you stay here?"
"If some machine needs to be repaired, we stay. Otherwise we leave tomorrow. We have many tribes to meet, to tell them that we have made Sarash-Zillish ready for them."

Time was constricting for Corbel, but he dared not hurry. At the moment he had nothing at all to do. And everyone else was busy.
On the second floor the Boys had opened what might be a power generator. They ordered him away from their secrets.
In another room women wove cloth of exceptional beauty and color. "During the long night we cover ourselves," one told him. She
refused to teach him how to weave. "The thread might cut off some of your fingers."
"It's that strong?"
"What would be the point of making cloth less durable?"
He stole a loop of the thread, held it a moment, then put it back. Sure, it'd make wonderful strangling cord, but where would he hide it?
He wound up in the kitchen/dining room complex, serving food and watching the cooks. He had been a pretty good cook once, but no sane chef would try to use someone else's kitchen without exploring it first. And it was bad news. The implements and measuring spoons were unfamiliar, of course. But the basic foods and the spices were also unfamiliar. If he intended to pay his way here, he would have to learn to cook all over again.
In midafternoon a woman offered to relieve him at the serving counter. She took a second look and said, "You are unhappy."
"Right."
"I am Charibil. Can I help?"
He couldn't tell her all his problems. "There's not much here I'm good for."
"Men don't have to work if they don't want to. You do have one useful talent. You can make greater the variety of traits among us."
Their gene pool was a little skimpy, yeah. Though there was variety. Charibil herself had the epicanthic fo!d and delicate features of an oriental, though she was Corbell's height. The uniformity was there too: pa!e skin, breasts wide and flat, half-bald scalp and curly black topknot, slender frame.
She jumped suddenly to her feet. "Come to the orgy room, Corbell. You need cheering up. Is it displacement from your tribe that bothers you? Or fear of the ancient dikt and her cane?"
"All of the above. Right, I need cheering up."
If he thought to be alone with Charibil, he was wrong. She called to three friends as they passed, and one joined them; and then a small golden-haired woman invited herself into the group; and four women presently reached the bedroom complex with Corbel. Others were there: a man and a single woman who seemed to want to be alone. Charibil and the other women suddenly picked Corbell up by arms and legs, swung him wide and slung him through the air, laughing at his startled "Hey!"
The surface surged as he splashed down, surged again as they joined him. He laughed with them. For a moment, the laugh caught in his throat.
There was a mirror over the bed.
He couldn't have missed that last night . . . and he hadn't. The others had those mobile sculptures over them. Had the women noticed anything? Corbell pulled Charibil against him, rolled onto his back with her on top. . . and looked up at himself.
Long, thinning white hair sprang from a military haircut in chestnut brown, in the damndest hairdo Corbell had ever seen. In the face there were frown lines around the mouth and eyes. He saw a lean, well-muscled, middle-aged version of one well known to him: a certain brain-wiped State criminal.
They'd noticed his tension. They turned him over and massaged it away. The kneading of muscles gradually became eight hands caressing him. . . and Corbell was seduced twice, to his own amazement. He felt that he was faffing in love with four women: an impossible thing for CORBELL Mark I. In post-coital sadness Corbell knew at last that Corbel was dead. .
He distracted himself with questions.
"No, all nights are not like last night," Charibil told him. "The men would tire of us. Last night was special. We stayed away from this place for five short days. We like to give the Boys something to watch."
"Why?"
"Why? They rule us, and they live forever, but there is one joy they can't know!" she gloated.
You can live forever! It was on the tip of his tongue . . . but instead he said, "What do the men do when they're not up here? I mean, if they don't work-"
"They make decisions. And, let me see: Privatht is perhaps our finest cook. Cording deals with the Boys in all matters; in fact he is with them now. Charloop makes things to teach and entertain children-"
"Gording is in the Boy camp?"
"Yes, he and the Boys had some important secret to discuss. They wouldn't-"
"I've got to be there." Corbell rolled off the bed. If Gording and the cat-tails had come together, then Corbell had to be there too. "I'm sorry if I'm being rude, but this is more important than I can tell you." He left. Behind him he heard tinkling laughter.

III
It was near sunset. Boys and boy-children were roasting a tremendous fish over coals. Ktollisp was telling them a tale. The children were making much of a pair of indolent furred snakes. Corbell looked for Gording's white hair.
He found Gording and Krayhayft and Skatholtz a good distance from the main group. They were spitting Boyish too fast for Corbell's understanding. He caught the word for Girls, and his own word Ganymede. And he saw the third cat-tail curled in an orange spiral on a rock almost behind Skatholtz.
They saw him. Gording said, "Good! Corbell's sources of knowledge are different from ours."
Krayhayft scoffed. "He did not even see the implications."
Skatholtz said, "Gording is right. Corbell, in one of our tales there is a line with no meaning. The tale tells of the war between Girls and Boys. The line tells that each side destroyed the other."
Corbell sat down cross-legged next to Skatholtz. "Could this have something to do with our strayed planet?"
"Yes, with the mere fleck of light that grows brighter but does not move against the background of fixed stars. Do you understand what that might mean?"
He'd been assuming that that dot of light was the banded gas giant Peerssa had shown him; but that didn't have to be true. If something in the sky grew brighter without moving . . . grew closer, with no shift sideways?
"It's coming down our throats!"
"Well phrased," said Skatholtz.
But it was monstrously unfair that Corbell should have found eternal youth just before the end of the world! "You're guessing," he said.
"Of course. But the Girls ruled the sky," Krayhayft said. "When the Girls knew they had lost, they may have aimed your missing Ganymede on a long path to smash the world."
He couldn't let this moon thing distract him. When his chance came he had to be ready. But did it matter? What if Don Juan had brought him home just in time to face impact with a lost moon!
"Wait a minute. Why not a short path?"
Krayhayft shrugged. Skatholtz said, "Who can know the mind of a Girl? They are long dead."
"They weren't stupid. The longer the path, the more chance the moon would miss the world. It's been-" Divide by twelve. "-a hundred thousand years, after all."
"We do not know how they moved worlds. How can we know what difficulties they faced? Perhaps the long path was their only choice."
Corbell stood up. He stretched, then sat down on the smooth rock behind him: a big boulder with a cat-tail sleeping on top, well behind his head. He braced his feet against a smaller, half-buried boulder.
"I don't like it. I don't like my place in it. Any minor design change in Don Juan and I could have been back a hundred thousand years sooner or later. What are the odds I'd get here just in time for all the excitement?"
Gording laughed at him. "What an odd bit of luck, that I should be alive at this time!"
"And I!" Skatholtz cried.
Corbel flushed. "Could the tale have meant something else?"
"Of course. No detail is given," Skatholtz said.
"Okay. The Girls knew they'd had it. They were looking for revenge . . . but why in the sky? They must have lost control of the sky already. Otherwise they would have put the Earth back where it belonged, further from Jupiter, where it wouldn't get too much heat. So they couldn't have thrown a moon at Earth, long path or short path."
"The moon is coming anyway," said Krayhayft.
But Skatho!tz said, "Let him speak."
"Did I tell you what Mirelly-Lyra told me? She-" he tripped on the Boyish phrases, then, "she left zero-time with a thousand prisoners. Some of them lived to reach this place. She says the Boys took them, but she escaped."
"You've lost the thread of thought," Krayhayft reproved him.
"No, it fits in. Look, if the Girls were that close to ruined, there wasn't much they could do. But if the Boys were keeping all the dikta in the same place, the Girls could wipe them out."
And as he said it he knew he was right. They all saw it. . and their minds were better than his. Without the dikta there would be no
more Boys. Only a dwindling population of immortals dying one by one, by accident and boredom and act of God.
"Your Mirelly-Lyra escaped," said Skatholtz, "because there were too few Boys left to hunt her down. The new dikta became pampered pets, they who had been criminals in pre-history." He barked bitter laughter. "But the moon still comes. If it is a random result of the Girls' loss of control, still it could destroy us. Even a near miss-" His Boyish went into high gear. . . and the others joined in. . . faster and faster. . . excluding Corbell. Suddenly the Boys got to their feet and left. They had excluded Cording, too.
For an instant Gording let his fury show. . . and then he relaxed. And Corbel tested his footing. Butt on smooth rock, feet in front of him against rock that seemed steady . . . and he dared not look behind him.
"It would not do," Gording said bitterly, "for Boys to discuss such important matters with a dikt."
"What was that about?"
"They must choose, you see. If the moon strikes the world, time ends. But if the moon comes by mischance, it may still pass close by the world. Tides. Earthquakes."
"Oh. Dikta City's right on the ocean. They'll have to move you."
"Move us how? Where? They can't let us go free. We are their treasure, their source, their valued property." Gording was angry already: almost angry enough to strike out at the nearest target.
Now: "Maybe they'll just take some women, the best they can find. Mate them with the boy-children. There's no scarcity of Boys. They can wait till the stock builds up again. After all, they have to be fairly careful with their breeding, considering that their original stock was a bunch of rejects from-"
Unexpectedly soon, unexpectedly fast, Gording leapt for his throat. Corbell pushed hard against the rock, kicked himself out from under Gording's leap. He reached over his head.
Startled from sleep, the cat-tail tried to leap away. Corbell's hand closed on its tail.
Gording hit ground and came at him again, face calm, hands outstretched for murder. He wasn't quick enough. Corbel swung the cat-tail into his face. The beast's teeth closed in Cording's neck. In that moment of distraction Corbell swung a haymaker at his jaw.
Gording jerked aside. The cat-tail was a tight fur collar, its teeth
were still in his neck, but he hadn't been as distracted as Corbell had thought. Hopelessly off balance himself, Corbell watched the old man set himself and lash out.
The hard fist sank into his solar plexus. Corbel doubled over. Lightning exploded at the nape of his neck.

His belly hurt. . . his neck hurt. . . he was curled on his side in crushed strawberries. He tried to uncurl.
They were standing around him, a lot of Boys looking down. Skatholtz was shaking his head and smiling. "Magnificent, Corbe!!!"
"Then," said Corbell, "why am I lying on the ground hurting? Never mind." He uncurled a little more. Cording stood relaxed, his hand covering the flesh torn by cat-tail teeth. He showed no inclination to resume hostilities.
Corbell said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Maybe it's jealousy. You're all like . you're all smarter than I am, and it shows."
There was blood beneath the hand Gording held to his neck. He breathed heavily. He said, "I understand. You were careless with an unfamiliar language. I should not have taken offense. It will be best if I rejoin the dikta for tonight." He turned away and took two stumbling steps before hands closed on his arms.
Krayhayft was smiling. His hands made a wiping motion. "That won't serve. You can't go back to them, Cording. What would they think when your hair changed color?"
Cording laughed. "It was worth trying."
Corbell said, "Shit!"
"No, no, Corbell, you did a fine job of acting. It was the set of your muscles that betrayed you everywhere. I couldn't know why you wanted me to attack you, and I had to find out."
"I'm sorry. I couldn't think of any other way. I still don't know. . ."
Krayhayft said, "We'll know soon enough. The logic holds. A cattail bit you some days before we found you. We saw the mark. Our tradition is that the dikta may not enjoy the company of cat-tails. We know that long ago it was possible to change the nature of a living thing, and we know that it was done to cat-tails. Why should they not make dikta immortality as Boys make spit? But we'll watch you as we go, Cording, to see if you grow young.
"And as we go, Corbell, we will think of some useful punishment for your deception. Abeady I have an idea.
"And we go now."

IV
By dead of night the tribe moved along the shore. They carried neither food nor water. Jupiter showed a bright gibbous disk above the dark sea. The mystery planet showed too, near Jupiter. Corbell picked out other moons, and a moon shadow on Jupiter's banded face.
One of the children had gone to sleep and was being carried. The others asked a thousand questions of laughing Boys. Corbell listened to the answers. Details of the march ahead . . . other bands of Boys
wondrous machines . . . the gathering in Sarash-Zillish . nothing he hadn't heard or guessed.
He waited his chance to talk to Gording alone. It never came. Cording marched at the head of the line, under escort. When Corbell tried to catch up he was barred with spear butts.
By morning they were thirsty.
By noon they were very thirsty, and loud were the complaints of the boy-children. Cording was showing the strain of unaccustomed hiking, but he showed it silently, in the slight weave to his walk and the occasional stumble.
In the afternoon they reached a river. The splashing was loud as Boys and boys drank and then swam. Here they camped. Corbell and others caught fish with makeshift hooks and lines of thread that might have come from Dikta City. Corbell was not allowed to clean his fish; he was not allowed a knife.
And this was the thread that would make wonderful strangler's cord, if it didn't cut the strangler's fingers. As he considered his fishline he caught Krayhayft grinning at him. Krayhayft held out his hand. Corbell put the fishline in it.
The river had cut a deep gorge into the former sea bottom, leaving high, sheer cliffs of layered sandstone. All day they followed the twisting, beautifully colored walls. At sunset, where the cliffs constricted and took a sharp turn, they came on a hidden village. The village occupied both sides of the river, joined by a wide bridge. Beyond the village the desolation continued to the horizon.
The villagers made them welcome and fed them. Corbell entertained with a medley of advertising jingles. Afterward Krayhayft began a tale while Corbell made himself comfortable against a convenient boulder.
It seemed to him that the village was a well-placed trap.
If dikta followed a band of Boys from Dikta City, they would have to go around the village, climbing cliffs to do it and leaving traces of themselves, and into more desolation. Unless they wanted to risk raiding the village.
There was a "phone booth" at one end of the bridge. The bridge was a wide arch of prestressed concrete or something better, its lines singularly beautiful. It was the only sign of advanced technology among basic and primitive structures.
There had been bread and corn with tonight's fish. There must be a working "phone booth" here to bring them. But was that a working booth? It was too blatant. It might be a trap.
A voice behind Corbel's ear whispered, "We will not let you use the prilatsil."
Corbel turned to stare rudely at the intruder. He had not been watching the booth.
The Boy was of the village: a pink-eyed, golden-haired albino with a narrow ferret face. He almost lost his footing as he squatted next to Corbell. His loincloth was animal skin.
He was young, then. Corbell had learned to tell. The older Boys were never awkward, and they did not brag of their kills by wearing the skins. He grinned and said, "Try it if you like. We would bruise you."
"I think they'll bruise me anyway," Corbell said. He'd been wondering about Krayhayft's "punishment." Damn Krayhayft. Corbell would be a bag of nerve ends before the blade fell.
"Yes. You lied," said the golden Boy. "I am to be there when punishment comes."
"Sadist," Corbell said in English.
"I can guess the meaning. No. We do not make pain for pleasure, only for instruction. Your pain will be instructive to you and to us." The Boy chuckled gloatingly, making a liar of himself, and got up.
Now, what was that all about? Corbell expected to die as soon as Gording began to grow young. He knew too much. Or would they only wipe his memory? He shivered. It would still be death, though it would let them use the ancient felon's genes.

They left carrying provisions. One of the boy-children stayed behind. Half a dozen villagers came with them, including the young albino.
The continental shelf had been wider in this area. It was still barren. The day was nearly over before they reached, first fruit trees, then cornfields. They camped in the corn.
They passed a larger tribe on the third day. For a time Krayhayft's tribe mingled with Tsilliwheep's tribe, exchanging news. Tsilliwheep was a strange one: large, pudgy, sullen-faced, a classic schoolyard bully with pure white hair. He issued no orders and he mingled with nobody. When his tribe veered away it took two of Krayhayft's tribe and two boy-children.
They passed single human beings at a distance. "Loners," Skatholtz told Corhell. "They tire of others around them. For a time they go alone. Krayhayft has done it six times."
"Why?"
"Maybe to know if they stifi love themselves. Maybe to know that they can live without help. Maybe they want to give up talking. Tsilliwheep will be a loner soon, I think. He had the look. Corbell, it is very bad manners to speak to a loner, or interfere with him, or offer him help."
Through waist-high corn they marched. In early afternoon a herd of dwarf buffalo passed, tens of thousands of them, blackening the land and raising continuous rolling thunder. The trampled path was a quarter hour's march across: corn churned into the dirt along with the corpses of aged buffalo unable to keep up. For the first time Corbell saw vultures. Vultures had survived unchanged.
Skatholtz bent their path to take them through a ruined city. An earthquake, or Girl weaponry, had shattered most of the buildings, and time had weathered all the sharp edges. Corbell saw sandblasted public prilatsil; he ignored them. He'd seen no evidence that power was still coming to this ruin.
Boys had made a semipermanent camp at the far edge of the ruined city. Krayhayft's tribe joined them, and contributed ears of corn to their dinner. Corbell saw what they were using for cooking.
What the locals had mounted on rocks above their fireplace was a
piece of clear glass seven feet across, curved like an enormous wok: a good enough frying pan except for the dangerous jagged edges. It had to be a piece of a bubble-car.

On the fourth day they passed two tribes, and joined with them for a time, and left them behind. With the second of these groups went the last two boy-children. Corbell couldn't help wondering if that related to his situation. There are things you don't do in front of cliiidren.
Gording was having less trouble keeping up. If the chance came, the old man would be able to run . . . but running wouldn't do it. The Boys were faster. Corbell wanted transportation.
"Phone booths" didn't send far enough. Useful for hiding in a city, but not for reaching safety; not unless he could get into the emergency-transport network Skatholtz had diagrammed for him. A car would be better. Or . . . what did the Boys use to lower a dozen bedrooms onto the roof of Dikta City? A giant helicopter? Some big flying thing, anyway.
He wouldn't find any of those things outside a city. Maybe they existed in Sarash-Zillish alone. He would reach Sarash-Zillish too late; Cording's hair would be showing black by then.

Past noon on the fifth day. Far across the corn they watched a loner hunting. Sprint, walk a bit, sprint, walk: The loner must be tired. But the kangaroo was exhausted. Hop and waddle, hop and waddle, look back at the closing loner, hop hop hop! Until at last it waited for the loner to walk up and kill it.
Krayhayft's tribe veered to give the loner room, but the loner had other plans. He did a fast butchering job on the kangaroo, slung the meat over his shoulder and loped to join the tribe at an angle.
He was dirty. He bled where the kangaroo had snapped at his forearm. He had lost his loincloth somewhere. But he grinned, white flashing through the dirt, and he talked at electric-typewriter speed. Corbell caught some of it. He'd been out a year and a half, since the end of long night the previous year . . . had gone places, done things, seen wonders. . . had studied the kchint herds from hiding, knew more of them than any Boy. . . his rapid speech ran down as his eyes locked on Corbell.
Corbell tried to listen to what the Boys were telling the loner about him. Unfamiliar words, and the sudden drumming of the afternoon rain, made understanding impossible. But the wanderer derived much amusement from what he was hearing.
When the afternoon rain ended, the clearing sky disclosed reaching towers whose tops sketched a dome shape.
They camped a mere hour's distance from what seemed an intact city. The loner had cleaned the mud out of his hair, revealing it as brown streaked with white, and had found a loincloth. He did all the talking that night. Was that why Boys turned loner? Nothing to talk about anymore?
Corbell slept badly. The towers made a broken arc against the stars. If he could break loose, to reach the city alone. . . But every time he looked around him someone was watching him. As if they could read his mind.

V
Parhalding was bigger than Sarash-Zillish. Moth and rust had done their work. . . and invading soil and grass and trees and vines. The buildings still stood, most of them. Their flat roofs sprouted green heads. Grapevines and blackberry vines swathed their waists. Corn and wheat grew mixed where soil was shallow. Where soil and water could pooi, there were gnarled old trees bearing varied fruit and walnuts.
Corbell picked what looked like a puffy lemon. (The limbs of the tree were thick and low-its green head touched vines swarming to the second story of a building with empty windows-but Boys climbed like monkeys, and they were too close, and watching.) The fruit tasted like lemonade, like lemon with sugar.
Parhalding was what an abandoned city looked like. In SarashZillish he had taken the state of preservation for granted. Foolish. He should have been looking for caretakers.
The vines bulged oddly near the corner, and something glinted within the bulge. Light shifted as he walked. . . and Corbell became certain that there was a bubble-car under the bulge. How badly damaged? Corbell caught Cording's fraction-of-a-second glance. Had anyone else caught it? The Boys couldn't know everything. . .
But the tribe had clumped inward as they walked. He might have thought they were afraid of ancient ghosts. They converged to a corn-

New file

pact mass with Corbell in the middle, and it was Corbell who was afraid.
That building ahead: no vines, no green top. Someone had maintained it. Corbell knew it by its shape: a hospital.
The hospital's big double doors opened for them. Now the dozen Boys around Corbell were close enough to trip over one another, though they didn't. Indirect lighting came alive slowly, showing an admissions desk, a shattered picture window with a few curved transparent teeth still in it, cloud-rug and sofas cleaned of slivers; and a wall covered by twin polar-projection maps with the polar ice caps prominent.
A panicky choking sound pulled his eyes around. Corbell saw yesterday's loner fall to his knees in the doorway. His head was gone. His neck jetted bright blood.
Gording was at bay. The albino stood bent-legged and snarling between Gording and the double doors. As the young albino came at him, Gording threw a rock, sidearm, to miss. Corbell tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The rock passed behind the albino's neck, turned sharply and circled his throat. Gording jerked hard on the other rock still in his hand.
Then it made sense. The albino screamed without sound and clawed at the air between them. His neck parted cleanly. The doors opened for the headless corpse as it stumbled backward. Gording brushed past it and was gone.
Corbell became aware that two Boys were holding his arms. And the rest were charging after Gording.
Corbell's military training was far in the past, but he remembered. Stamp down along the shin; the enemy doubles up, you twist and bring your elbow up- His captors faded like ghosts from his blows, and a swinging arm caught him precisely across the eyes. He was dizzy and half blind as they led him up flights of stairs.
"They'!! have him soon," he heard Skatholtz say.
"He's got thread. We'll have to test every doorway," said Krayhayft. "Thread is too near invisible, and if it caught a Boy across the throat-come, Corbell."
They had climbed four ifights of stairs and gone down a corridor. Corbell looked into an operating room. Four tables, and spidery metal arms above them.
"Nooo!" Corbell thrashed. Your pain will be instructive to you
and to us. They were going to dissect him! They pulled him to an operating table and fastened him spread-eagled, face up.
"You can't be sure you know everything I know," he called to Krayhayft's receding back. Nuts, he was gone. But Skatho!tz hoisted himself to sitting position on another table.
"Skatholtz, if you destroy my brain, you lose the only viewpoint that isn't just like your own! Now think about that!"
"We're not going to ruin your brain. At least I think we're not. There is that risk."
"What are you going to do?"
"We're going to entertain each other."
Then Krayhayft came jogging back with a flask of . . . blood plasma? Clear fluid, anyway. He reached over Corbell's head and nested it somehow among the tool-tipped steel arms.
Corbell thought, Tell them about the car! He swallowed the idea. If his sympathy lay with anyone besides himself, it was with the dikta. Let Gording escape if he could.
A spidery steel arm descended. Its hypodermic tip hesitated above him, then dipped into his neck. Krayhayft's strong hands held his head immobile for an endless time. Then the hypo withdrew and the arm retracted into its nest.
Corbell waited. Would the stuff put him to sleep? Or only paralyze him?
But Skatholtz was releasing his arms and ankles and puffing him to his feet. Corbe!l swayed. The stuff was doing something to him.
They took him up three more flights of stairs and down a corridor and into a small theater. They dropped him into a cloud-rug chair. Dust puffed up around him. He sneezed and tried to get up, but he was too dizzy. Something was happening to his mind.
Krayhayft was at work behind him somewhere.
The theater went dark.
Lights glowed in the dark, infinitely far away. Stars: the black sky of interstellar space. Corbell found familiar constellations, distorted
and then something told him where he was.
"RNA! You shot memory RNA into me! You dirty sons of bitches," he cried in English. "You did it again!"
"Corbell-"
"What'll I be this time? What have you made me into?"
"You'll keep your memory," said Skatholtz, also in English. "You'll remember things you never lived through. You'll tell us. Watch the show."
He was nearly sixty light-years from Sol, viewing what had been the State. A voice spoke in a language Corbel had never heard. He didn't try to understand it. He watched with a familiar fascination. Good-bye, CORBELL Mark II, he thought in the back of his mind. In thin defiance, But I'm still a lousy loser.
Certain stars glowed more brightly than others. . . and planetary systems circled them, greatly enlarged for effect. Now all but two of these systems turned sullen red-turned enemy. These were the worlds that had turned against the State.
One of the red systems sparkled and faded into the background, its colony destroyed.
The two neutral systems went red.
Another system faded out.
The view closed on So! system . . . on more of So! system than Corbell had known, with three dark gas giants beyond Pluto, and countless swarming comets.
Fleets of spacecraft moved out toward the renegade colonies. Other fleets invaded. Sometimes they came like a hornet's nest, many ships clustered around a Bussard ramjet core. Sometimes like a Portuguese man-of-war: thousands of ships as weights around the fringe of a great silver light-sail. Early fleets included hospital ships and return fuel; later there were massive suicide attacks.
It went on for centuries. The State utopia became a subsistence civilization, turning all its surplus energy to war. The fleets moved at just less than !ightspeed. News of success or failure or need for reinforcements moved barely faster. The State was Boys and Girls and dictators all united for the common good. Corbel hurt with the loss of that unity.
He watched a beam of light bathe Sol system: laser cannon firing from Farside colony. Farside launched warships by light-sail at terrific accelerations. The ships dropped their sails and decelerated most of the way to Sol, arriving just behind the beam itself, long before the State could prepare. Corbell squirmed in his chair; he wanted to cry warning. For the State beat the invaders back, but failed to stop their hidden treachery.
The war continued. Farside, economically ruined by its effort, fell before the counterattack. It took a man's lifetime . . . too much time, before Astronomy noticed what the Farside traitors had done in the dark outside their dazzling light beam, in the distraction provided by the invasion.
The State had looked for the light of fusion spacecraft, not the dim watery light of a new planet. The trans-Plutonian planet called Persephone had had a peculiar orbit, tilted nearly vertical to the plane of the solar system. Its new path had already taken it deep into the system.
1 028 tons of hydrogen and hydrogen-compound ices were aimed to strike the sun at solar-escape velocity. Earth's oceans would boil. .
The State did what it could. Tens of thousands of fusion bombs, So! system's entire armory, were set off at the dawn side of Persephone, just above the atmosphere. A thick rind of the planet's atmosphere peeled away and streamed off like a comet's tail, its mass pulling at Persephone's dense core. A streamer of gas far more massive than the Earth broke free, and rounded the sun, and sprayed back toward the cometary halo.
If the bombs could have been placed earlier, Persephone's core would have done the same. It was rock and iron, yellow-hot, and it glowed X-ray hot as it streaked into the solar photosphere and disappeared.
The sun grew bright.
Oceans shrank, crops withered, tens of millions died before the State could place a disk of reflecting tinsel between Earth and Sol. It was a temporary measure. The sun's new heat was permanent, at least on the human scale of time. Fusion would run faster in Sol's hotter interior. The buried heat would leak to the photosphere and out.
The State had one chance for survival. It could move the Earth by the method Farside had used to stop Persephone cold in its orbit.
"Do you understand what you're seeing?"
Corbell made a shushing gesture. "Yeah."
"Good. We were afraid. The light show and the bottled memory are both very old. They date from the end of the rule of the Girls. They have been stored in zero-time for. . . perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps more. We feared they must have decayed," said Skatholtz.
"So you tried it on me." But his anger seemed impersonal, remote.
The State had had to abandon the Mercury mines: a serious industrial handicap. Nonetheless they were building something out there in the asteroid belt-something huge, like a starship big enough to carry the whole human race to safety. But no, that wasn't it. Corbell was fascinated. He knew it might be the memory RNA, but he was fascinated anyway. He hardly heard what Skatho!tz was saying:
"It was sensible, Corbell. The Girls who made the light show ruled the sky. You are familiar with such things. Do you know now who hurled a moon at us?"
"Not yet. Shut up and let me. .
They had finished the thing. Two tubes, concentric, each a hundred miles long; the inner tube a mile wide, with thick walls of complex construction; the outer tube thinner and twice as wide. At one end, a bell-shaped rocket nozzle. At the other . . . Corbell knew more than he was seeing. Reworked military laser cannon, and vents, and a flared skirt, and thick stubby fins, there at the bottom end. Now temporary liquid hydrogen tanks were attached. Now the structure moved under its own power . . . it was a tremendous fusion motor. . . moving outward, circled by tiny ships. . . yeah.
Corbell said, "How do you climb down off an elephant?"
"Should I know that?"
"You don't climb down off an elephant. You climb down off a duck."
"Why?"
"It's so much safer. How do you move the Earth?"
Small wonder if the light show meant little to Skatholtz. Watching the construction of the motor-in the naked sunlight and sharp-edged, totally black shadows of space-was bewildering. The diagrams made sense to an architect, but they were only rotating lines to Skatholtz. But without bottled memory and without Corbell's career in space, Skatholtz was still bright enough to make some sense of what he was seeing.
"You move something else," Skatholtz said. "The damage done by the rocket's thrust and by mistakes you might make will not kill anyone if nobody lives on the working body. Then the working body can be moved until the world falls toward it as a rock falls to the ground. What was the working body? Ganymede?"
"Uranus. Can you stop the light show at that picture?"
The lecture froze on an "artist's conception": a blurred, curved
arc of Uranus's upper atmosphere. The motor looked tiny floating there. Corbell said, "You see? It's a double-walled tube, very strong under expansion shock. It floats vertical in the upper air. Vents at the bottom let in the air, which is hydrogen and methane and ammonia, hydrogen compounds, like the air that the sun burns. You fire laser cannon up along the axis of the motor, using a. . . color hydrogen won't let through. You get a fusion explosion along the axis."
"I don't understand all your words. Fusion?"
"Fusion is the way a star burns. You probably used fusion bombs against the Girls."
"Okay. The hydrogen fusions in the middle of the motor-"
"-and the explosion goes out and up. It's hottest along the axis, cooler when it reaches the walls of the motor. The whole mass blasts out the top, through the flared end. It has to have an exhaust velocity way higher than Uranus's escape velocity. The motor goes smashing down into deeper air. You see there's a kind of flared skirt at the bottom. The deep air builds up there at terrific pressure, stops the tube and blasts it back up. You fire it again."
"Elegant," said Skatho!tz.
"Yeah. Nobody's there to get killed. Control systems in orbit. The atmosphere is fuel and shock absorber both-and the planet is mostly atmosphere. Even when it's off the motor floats high for awhile, because it's full of hot hydrogen compounds. If you let it cool off it sinks, of course, but you can bring it back up to high atmosphere by heating the tube with the laser, firing it almost to fusion. Start the light show again, will you?"
Skatholtz barked something at Krayhayft. Corbell watched:
Earth held out, barely. Heat-superconducting cables had to be run to the north polar cap to borrow its cold. The cap melted. Millions died anyway. No children were born; there wasn't shelter for them. It took over a century to drop Uranus into place, six million miles ahead of the Earth in Earth's orbit. The planet accelerated slowly, drawing Earth after it. . . and then sped up, to leave Earth behind, in a wider orbit. They lost the Moon.
The sun expanded via its own internal heat. Light was reddened, but the greater surface lost more heat to space. . . to Earth. By now the Girls had charge of Uranus and the floating fusion motor. They moved the Earth again.
Five times the Earth had to be moved. At one time it was circling
precisely opposite Mars. Later, further out. Internally Sol's fusion furnace had stabilized; but the photosphere was still growing. And the Earth must be moved a sixth time.
With RNA-augmented intuition Corbell said, "Here's where they have their trouble."
The Earth was too warm. There is a region around any stable sun, a rather narrow band in which an Earthilke world can have Earthlike temperatures. But Sol's idea! temperature band had moved too close to Jupiter. The giant world would have pulled Earth out of orbit- perhaps into a collision course.
Put Earth in orbit around Jupiter itself? But the sun's heat output was leveling off. The Earth would suffer a permanent ice age-unless Jupiter could be made to shine hotter.
"I can't figure that last part," said Corbel. "Run it again."
Krayhayft ran it again. Two nearly identical astronomical scenes divided by a wall across space. Corbell watched Uranus pull away from Earth, drop behind Ganymede and coast outward. Ganymede fell . . . twice. In one scene it grazed Jupiter, flaring as it passed through the atmosphere a dozen times, and finally decaying in a prolonged burst of hellfire. In the second scene the fleck of light dropped straight in: one flare, and gone.
"Yeah. They tried to be clever," said Corbell. "They thought they were good enough to do a two-shot. They used Uranus to pull the Earth past Jupiter, slowed it to put the Earth in Jupiter orbit, then dropped Uranus deep into the moon system. The idea was to stop Ganymede almost dead in its tracks. Of course the maneuver fouled up a lot of lunar orbits."
"What went wrong?"
"I'm not sure. The Girls wanted a grazing orbit. Instead the moon dropped straight in. But so what?"
Skatholtz made no answer.
It was hard to think. The deep knowledge of giant fusion pulse-jets and Uranus's atmosphere and interstellar war hadn't been in his head until now. It let him understand the history tape, but when he tried to think with the new data it came out all jumbled. Damn Skatholtz anyway: Why should Corbell tell him anything? But the problem f ascinated him. The RNA carried that fascination . . . and Corbel knew it. . . and couldn't bring himself to care.
"Let's see. Jupiter puts out more heat than it gets from the sun.
That's heat left over from when the planet fell in on itself out of the original dust cloud, four billion years ago-my years. So the planet could hold heat and leak it out for a long, long time. But the energies should be the same no matter what angle the moon fell at."
"This impact, would it cause fusion? Would Jupiter bum?"
"Jupiter's too small to burn like a star. Not enough mass, not enough pressure. But yeah, there'd be a hell of a lot of pressure in the shock wave ahead of Ganymede. And heat."
"Difficult to add up?"
"What?"
Skatho!tz said, "The numbers of the heat made by a grazing fall should be simple. They knew the mass of Ganymede and the height of the fall. The Girls could add up just how much hotter Jupiter would become to warm the world just enough. But. The heat made by fusion is too complicated to add. The Girls made their numbers simple with the grazing orbit. Would the heat added be great?"
Corbell was nodding. "Look: The center of Jupiter is compressed hydrogen, really compressed, to where it acts like a metal. Ganymede drops straight in. The fusion goes on in the shock wave, and it adds, it builds up: The continuous fusion explosion makes the shock wave greater and greater. The heat has been leaking out ever since."
"I can't picture this, Corbell. Does it make sense to you?"
"Yeah. They lost a moon, and it killed them. Uranus was on its way into interplanetary space. The Girls couldn't bring it back in time. Their territory was too hot. They tried to take Boy territory."
Corbell became aware that the show had ended. New memories settling in his brain still dizzied him. But he felt like Jaybee Corbel. His personality seemed intact.
Skatho!tz said, "Then the new moonlike object is Uranus. Some Girls must have survived. What can we do? We don't have spacecraft. We can't build them fast enough. Corbell, could we use your landing craft?"
"No fuel." Corbel laughed suddenly. "What would you do with a spacecraft? Ram Uranus? Or learn to fly it?"
"You're hiding something."
"I don't believe in your Girls. If they survived this long, they would have done something long ago." Uranus's arrival was too dramatically fortuitous. Such a coincidence had to be explained away; and Corbel had thought of an explanation. Well . . . try inisdirec
tion. "Could they have held out in the Himalayas? There's life in some of the high valleys. They'd be a long time building industry there."
"Your place names mean nothing." Skatho!tz helped him stand up. "Can you point out this Himalayas place on a picture of the world? There was one downstairs."

CHAPTER 8 DIAL AT RANDOM

I
The stairway was a long diagonal across the building's glass face. The bannister jogged to horizontal at six landings; otherwise it ran straight down to the admissions room.
Skatholtz and Krayhayft spat Boyish at each other. Corbell caught some of the exchange: Skatholtz telling the tale as it had come from Corbell, Krayhayft checking it against "tales" memorized over several hundred years of life. There was something Italian in the way their hands jumped and their mouths spat syllables; but their faces were blank. Scared, Corbell thought. The "tales" matched too well.
Corbell tried to set his thoughts in order. He'd been given far too much to assimilate all at once.
Girls could have survived this long. Peerssa had found pockets of life in isolated places. But they would have acted! Unbelievable, that Corbell could have returned just in time for their million-yeardelayed vengeance.
He had to escape. It had been urgent. It was more urgent now. Could Boys slide down a bannister? Unlikely that they'd ever practiced. But Corbell hadn't practiced recently. . .
"They were fools," Krayhayft was saying. "They should have chosen several smaller moons to drop one by one."
"You're the fool," Corbell snapped, surprising himself. "It would have taken too long to bring Uranus back each time. It would have fouled up too many orbits. We're talking about a planet ten times as big as the world!"
"So big that the Girls lost track of its path," Krayhayft sneered.
Skatholtz was saying, "The dance of Jupiter's moons is very complex-"
While Corbell was saying, "You arrogant ball-less idiot-"
Casual, contemptuous, Krayhayft's backhand swipe caught him under the jaw and lifted him and flung him back on the steps. "The bottled memory has given you too much of the Girls' view," Krayhayft said.
"And whose fault is that?"
Skatholtz pulled Corbell to his feet. His elbow hurt furiously, but he thought he hadn't broken anything, and that was fiercely important now. Still, it was just as well he hadn't tried the bannister. Two Boys were waiting below them in the admissions room.
They waited for the leaders to descend. One was young, two or three Jupiter years old by Corbell's estimate. He burst into speech as if he wanted to get it over with:
"Gording is still loose. He has not used a prilatsil. The thread he took was mine. He must have brushed against me and taken it from my belt. I didn't notice."
"Where is he?" Skatholtz demanded.
"He went north and east, until we lost his track. Toward the edge of Parhalding."
"It may be he doesn't know about the-" something Corbell couldn't catch. "Search the streets but not the buildings. That way he cannot trap you with thread. He may be trying to reach the Dikta Place on foot. We can stop him then. Or he may try to take a tchiple-" an unfamiliar word. "Look for undamaged tchiples. Damage them. Tell the others now."
The younger Boy ran, eager to be gone.
What was a tchiple? A bubble-car? How did the Boys know whether Gording had used a "phone booth"?
"You must retrace our path," Skatho!tz told the other Boy. "Warn all you meet that a dikt is loose. Gording must not return to the
Ditka Place." He wheeled suddenly and barked, "You are staring, Corbell. Do we fascinate you?"
"Very much. Couldn't Gording use a prilatsil without your knowing?"
"No." Skatholtz smiled. He pointed at the wall map. "That is a picture of the world, isn't it? An old one, made when ice still covered this land."
"Yes. Can I use your spear?"
That was sheer bravado; he wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that Skatholtz handed Corbell his spear. The younger Boys were gone, but Skatholtz and Krayhayft betrayed no obvious tension. Corbell pointed with the haft. "These are the Himalayas, mountains. There are valleys high up, where it is cooler. From orbit I saw green things growing there. Further north, here on the Sea of Okhotsk, energy is being used for industry. It may be only machines left running, but-"
"It could be Girls. Would it be too hot for them? No, the pole is near enough. But you don't think so, Corbel."
"No. Why would they wait so long? How would they build spaceships?"
"We don't know how spaceships are built." Skatholtz looked through the broken picture window, toward where the new planet would appear at dark. "If Uranus is falling free, we can do nothing. If the Girls are guiding it. . . what will they do? Smash the world? Make it cold again and take back their land? You knew Girls, Corbell."
"I knew dikta women."
"There may be Girls still in the world. We can threaten them.
or can we? Uranus will be upon us before we can reach these places. Krayhayft-"
Far down the street, Corbel caught motion. "Your spear," he said, holding it out.
Skatholtz turned to take the spear. In that position he missed seeing what Corbell saw: a bubble-car skimming trees at ninety miles per hour, dropping and slowing.
Krayhayft must have caught something in Corbell's face. He ran forward, crying, "Alert!"
Startled, Skatholtz glanced back.
Corbell jumped out the window.
The Boys had quick reactions. As Corbell crossed the splinters of glass a spear haft rapped his ankles hard, threw him off balance. He curled tight and hugged his knees. Instead of landing on his head he fell on his shoulders in high corn. Skatholtz was coming through the window in a graceful swan dive. Corbell rolled, found his feet and ran.
Krayhayft threw his machete. It slashed viciously at Corbel's calves as it spun past. Krayhayft screamed, "Stop or die!"
Skatho!tz barked from close behind him. "Veto! He knows something!"
Corbell dug in.
The bubble-car had stopped just at the entrance. Through the torn vines that still wrapped it Corbell saw white hair and white beard. Gording reached across to open the door. He was holding a stick against the doorpost. Why?
Hell with it. He threw himself in, thrashed to turn around.
Skatholtz was right there-gaping in horror as he skidded to a panic stop. Corbell slammed the door in his face.
That stick across the door: Gording must have strung thread across the door, and was holding it back with the stick. It could have cut Corbel's hand off. Hell with that, too. "Go!"
"I don't know the codes."
"Oh, for-" Corbell jabbed five times at the compressed hourglass figure. It was the first thing he thought of, and it was good enough:
The World Police Headquarters in Sarash-Zillish. The car surged away.
Corbell looked back-straight into Skatholtz's eyes, before the Boy prudently dropped from the car. He'd lost his spear. It should have been lying in the street behind him, but it wasn't.
Blood was running from Corbell's calves into the spongy stuff that lined the car's interior. Nothing he could do about it. He didn't even have clean cloth to bind his cuts. They stung.
Gording said, "Wind the thread around the rock. Do it now, before you cut yourself."
Corbeil obeyed. The thread was thin as cobweb, hard to find. He was careful. The car jerked to left and right, dodging bushes, trees, random rubble.

II
He had fled from the Norn in a car that was deathly silent except for the wind. But now he heard a low, almost subliminal whine. "How old is this-tchiple? Was it in good shape? I didn't think to ask."
"I don't repair tchiples. They must have safety devices. The Boys who built them expected to live forever. Where are we going?"
"Sarash-Zillish, where the Boys spend the long night. It's got machines we can use, maybe. Next question is, does it have Boys?"
"Not yet, I think. I don't really know."
"We'll have to risk it. My God!" Corbell was staring at something that could have meant his death by stupidity. The disk- "I never thought of it at all. I didn't have a credit disk. How was I
going to run a car?" He asked, "How did you happen to have one?"
"The tales tell that name coins were used when the Girls ruled. I reasoned that when the land thawed, the bodies of the dead would be buried outside the city to make the land fertile. There I fled, and there I dug, and I was right. Boys and Girls must have died by the thousands when the Girls came. I found bones and bones all tangled together, and some wore clothes, and in the clothes I found name coins. I tried them in the slot of a tchip!e. One coin still kept its pattern." He regarded Corbel dubiously. "You did not remember that you would need a name coin?"
Corbel flushed. "There was a lot to think about."
"I might have been luckier in my ally."
"I guess. Thanks for coming back for me."
"I had to, because you made another mistake. Does this car guide itself?"
The car's motion had settled down. Now Corbel saw that they had left Parhalding and were skimming across an endless rippling field of wheat. He said, "Unless Skatholtz's spear. . . yeah, it guides itself."
"Then look at my hair."
There was nothing at a!! peculiar about Gording's hair. It had grown a little tangled, a little greasy, but it was uniformly white. . five days after the cat-tail had bitten Gording.
Gording broke an embarrassed silence. "Will I go back to the dikta? Will I tell them that there is dikta immortality, but Corbel has lost it? We have to find it, Corbell."
"I don't believe it. The cat-tails weren't . . . I don't believe it! Danm it, Gording, there was no kind of injection except that cat-tail bite!"
"Something you ate or drank or inhaled. You may have felt odd afterward. Sick. Elated. Disoriented."
"Getting old is more complicated than that. There are . . . Do you know how people get old?"
Gording sprawled comfortably in his seat, facing Corbel. The old man showed no sense of urgency. "If I knew everything about aging I would make dikta immortality. I know genera! things. Substances build up in the body like . . . the ashes of a dying fire. Some the body can handle without help. It collects them into garbage places for storage and ejects them. Some harmful stuff can be removed from the walls of blood vessels and the tissues of the brain by the right medicines. Dust and smoke that collects in the lungs can be washed away. Without the hospital we would die much faster.
"But some . . . ashes collect in the smallest living parts of the body. No organ can remove them. I can imagine a chemical, a medicine, that would change these substances to other substances that dissolve more easily, without killing the-"
"Without killing the cell. You're just guessing, aren't you? We know there's dikta immortality, but we don't know how it does what it does. How does a Boy's body do it?"
Gording gestured negation: a brushing stroke with the hand. "That's the wrong line of thought. Dikta immortality came first. It must be more primitive, less indirect.-Corbe!!, relax. Nothing can happen until the tchiple stops. We should rest."
"I feel a strong urge to beat my head against something hard. When I think of how I pushed you into jumping me and then threw a cat-tail in your face, teeth first. . ." He didn't know Boyish for I'm sorry.
"How oddly you think. You know what you expected. Young and strong and black-haired Gording would throw his arms around your knees and cry wetly into your incredibly hairy chest and offer you his women. . . ." Gording laughed. "Yes, I know you think that way. No, they are not my women. They are their own, and I am my own, as and when the Boys let us rule ourselves. Do you remember how the women acted when you spoke of one man to every woman?"
"Ah. . . vaguely."
"You must have lived strangely. Don't you know that there are times when a woman doesn't want a man? What does he do then? Borrow a woman whose contract is to another man?" Gording was thoroughly amused.
And his relaxation was contagious. Corbell settled himself lower in the recline chair. He said, "You'll find out, if we get our dikta immortality."
Gording looked startled. "I think you're right. We would have to free ourselves from the Boys. Raise our boy-children to immortal adults. Slowly the number of women to each man would drop toward one. But-" He smiled. "It would take centuries."
They could see the rain sweeping toward them across the wheat. It exploded against the front of the car. Against the thunder of the rain Corbell raised his voice:
"Have you ever tried to escape?"
"We sent scouts. Many were dikta men in their second year, come recently from rejection by the Boys. They were too young to be wise, of course, but they could shave their groins and faces and pass as Boys. Some were brought back with their memories gone. I think the others would have returned if they could. Some women tried to scout for us during the long night. None of them came back."
The rain drummed out the hum of the motor. Corbel asked, "Did you ever think of escaping by sea?"
"Of course, but how could we hide a sea vessel from the Boys? Corbell, you've been across the sea. Is there land? Does life grow there, or is it too hot?"
"There's life, but it doesn't grow as thick as it does here, and it's different life. I know you can eat some of it, because Mirelly-Lyra fed me a fair variety. It was hot there, but not killing-hot. And, listen, I've seen sea vessels big enough to hold all of Dikta City. Whether they stifi float is something else."
"Where?"
"On what used to be the seabed, a short day's march from where the sea is now."
Gording mulled it over. "Three problems. Getting the sea vessel to the sea. The risk we take if the Boys catch us at it. Third and worst, what will we tell our men when they are grown? That we stole them
from immortality? If we find the dikta immortality, Corbel, we can make the dikta flee across the sea."
"It itches at me. I had it all figured out. Briffiantly! Everything pointed to the cat-tails. * . . Listen, are you willing to be bitten again? Maybe it's only the male cat-tails, or only the females, or only the gray striped. Whatever the Boys didn't take along to the Dikta Place."
"Flay me alive if you must. The stakes are high. You'd be dead long since if you didn't guess right sometimes."
Corbell settled further into the spongy material. The drumming rain was a comfortable, homey, safe sound. Presently he fell asleep.
In his dream he was running, running.

III
Something threw him violently forward. Something soft exploded in his face and threw him back. Now pressure pinned him fast while he spun violently head over heels. He tried to get up and found he couldn't so much as twitch a finger. He tried to scream and he couldn't breathe!
Nightmare! Running down the hospital corridors, can't get enough air-the booths in the vault. . . don't work! Out of the vault, searching for instant-elsewhere booths, turn a corner and-the Norn! Paralyzed even to his diaphragm and closed eyelids, his sense of balance gone crazy, he tries again to scream. The cane!
But his scream blew air through . . . through the stuff across his face. He gasped, and some air leaked through, slowly. Porous stuff across his face. Right, and the hospital was a long time ago.
The spinning stopped. He thought he was upside down.
Let's see, he'd been with Gording. . . in a car . . . The pressure was easing up. He thrust forward with his hands. The stuff gave like
a balloon. He worked an arm sideways, found the door, then the handle. Wrestled it open. He squirmed against the porous balloon, edged sideways, and finally dropped out on his head.
The car was upside down in wet, scraggy wheat. It had torn a clear path in its rolling fall. Gording was around in back looking at a broken spear haft that had been jammed under the edge of a close-fitting hood.
"I knew there were safety devices," he said cheerfully.
Relief made Corbell babble. "Too many Great Escapes lately. I'm getting them mixed up. Lord, what a nightmare! For a time there I thought I was back running from Mirelly-Lyra."
Gording looked at him. "She really frightens you, the old dikt."
"She really does. Worse than the Boys. There were some very hairy moments. The city was full of prilatsi!, see, and you never knew where she'd be, or where i'd be. The best I could do was find a prilatsi! and dial at random, over and over, and even then some of them didn't work. And all the time she was tracking my pressure-suit helmet! She's probably still got it. At least. . . I hope she does."
"Why does it matter?"
"I'll tell you as we go." Corbel paused. "For a moment there. . ."
"Something?"
"Something connected in my primitive brain and instantly got lost again. Never mind, it'll come back." Corbell sighted along the line torn through the wheat, then extended the line. "Sarash-Zillish is that way. I wish I knew how far." There were nothing but rolling wheat fields to be seen. "When we come to forest, we're close."
Gording carefully retrieved Skatholtz's broken spear. He found the rock with the thread tied to it, found another rock and rebuilt his weapon. The tchiple's safety balloons had nearly deflated. Gording felt around inside until he had located the plastic disk.
The sun was a fiery flying saucer settling on clouds. They set out into the wet wheat, and Corbel began the tale of how the Girls had lost a moon.
Toward morning they found a stream.
Jupiter had lighted their way in horizontal orange beams that made the land look brighter than it was. Corbell walked into the water before he knew it was there. The stream was shallow and sluggish. Marsh grass was growing in it, possibly a mutant form of wheat or rice.
Corbell knelt to drink. He rubbed his calves to wash away dried blood. When he looked up Gording held a flopping fish in his hands.
"Gording, you're quick!"
"Dinner, such as it is-" He was scaling the fish.
"Do we dare build a fire?"
"No, we must not be seen. We're just the wrong number. We can't pass as Boys at any distance. We'll eat the fish raw."
"No, thanks."
"As you like."
The unwinking point of light had grown no brighter. Odd, that it could have come so fast. But Uranus had been nearing Jupiter in the random orbit the Girls had left it in, when Don Juan arrived in Sol system. He said as much to Gording.
Gording nodded his pale head. "I have not added the numbers, but I think the paths of Jupiter and Uranus must cross forever if it was left free after the Girls dropped Ganymede. . . . But why would they let it free? They would have been trying to turn it, to correct their mistake."
"Maybe they heard there was a war. They took their ships home to bomb the Boys from orbit. They never came back."
Gording had eaten everything but the bones of the fish. He said, "It is unlikely that the Girls waited their revenge for your return. It is unlikely that Uranus, faffing free, crosses the world's path just after your return. I think your explanation is right, Corbell. We must go to Four City and find the old dikt who has your pressure-suit helmet. Otherwise we will see the end of all life."
"I was afraid you'd say that. All right. There's a working tchiple in Sarash-Zillish. It took me there from Cape Horn. I wish I knew the code for getting back. . . but I don't."
"Dial at random?"
"Maybe. I'd like to check the subway system first. There are maps in the subway building." He stood. "Let's go."

Dawn came with a marrow-freezing roar. It whipped Corbell's head around. He faced a dwarf lion, twenty yards away on a rise of ground, roaring challenge.
Skatho!tz's broken spear slapped against his palm. "Attack!" cried Gording, and he charged the Great-Dane-sized beast.
Corbell pelted after him. The lion seemed taken aback. . . but he decided. He charged Gording. Somehow Gording danced aside. The lion turned, broadside to Corbell. Corbell threw all his weight behind the spear, leaned into it as it punched into the lion behind the ribs. The lion screamed, turned and slashed, and missed, because one of its forelegs was unaccountably missing. Gording did his trick again and both the lion's forelegs were gone.
"Now run!" Gording cried.
They ran toward Sarash-Zillish. In the clear air they could see the bluish line where trees began. "Male lion * . . drives the prey .
toward the female," Gording panted.
Corbell looked back and saw something wheat-colored bounding through the tall wheat. A glance at the old man made him say, "You'll wear yourself. . . out. We'll have. . . to fight."
They stopped, blowing.
The female's caution gave them time to breathe. She stalked out of the wheat to find them facing her like statues of athletes, eight feet apart. She roared. They didn't ifinch. She thought it over. She roared again. Corbell stood poised, confident, happy.
The female departed. Twice she looked back, thought it over, and kept going.
Corbel walked now with a silly smile plastered across his face. He couldn't help it. Everytime he let his face relax it came back. Any normal pair of men would have been bragging unmercifully; but Gording clearly considered the incident closed. He didn't even show relief at Corbel's competence. . . which was flattering, in a way.
Finally Corbell said, "Real lions would have torn us up. Why are there so many small versions of big animals?"
"Are there?"
"Yeah. Lions, elephants, buffalo. There must have been about ten thousand Jupiter years of famine here, before the soil turned fertile. The big animals must have starved faster. Or maybe they died of heat prostration: too much volume, not enough surface."
"I believe you. I look at you and I see a different kind of dikt. We have had time to adapt to reddened sunlight and long days and long nights. Animals and plants and dikta. . . and Boys adapted through the dikta. If Uranus widens the world's path now, it will all be lost."
"I know."
"Are you ready to face Mirelly-Lyra?"
"Yeah." Corbel shivered, though the morning was not especially cool. It would get cooler. Corbell tried to visualize six years of night- and saw Mirelly-Lyra stalking him in the dark. He said, "It'd be nice if we could find dikta immortality before we meet her. She'd do damn near anything for that."
"If we ever find it, my turn comes first."
Corbell laughed. "There's bound to be enough of it. Otherwise it would have been. . . guarded."
"Why did you pause?"
"Guarded. The hospital vault in Sarash-Zillish wasn't guarded. Were the Boys that sure a dilct couldn't get to it? It looked just like the other vault except for the guard systems, the vault door and the one-way prilatsi! and the armored glass cubicles in the roof."
"What of it? What if one dikt or three found dikta immortality? The guarded chamber in Four City was protected from dikta by dikta who owned it, or so you assumed."
"I was wrong. Four City was old, but not like Parhalding. More like Sarash-Zillish. I think the Boys built Four City."
The trees were closer now. Fruit trees. Corbel was hungry. He shrugged that off. He had the tail end of something. . *
Ashes of a dying fire. Most of it comes out in the feces and urine but not all of that; urea can build up in the joints and cause
gout. Cholesterol can build up in the veins and arteries. But even when all these are washed away . . . there are still the inert molecules that accumulate in the cell itself.
Picture the miracle that can remove those. Now tell me what it looks like.
"There was nothing to guard!"
"I don't under-"
"There was nothing to guard in Sarash-Zillish. I had it turned around. Heeeyaa! I've got it! Dikta immortality!"
Gording backed away a bit. "You had it once before. What fierce beast is to bite me this time?"
"I don't have to say. I made a fool of myself once. Not this time. Come on." The trees were close and Corbell was hungry.

IV
Corbel walked alone through the streets of Sarash-Zillish. His face itched. His scalp itched. His chest itched. He was trying to ignore an acid stomach.
How did loners walk? He'd seen only one loner close enough to tel. That one had been certain of welcome; his walk had been springy and confident, Boyish. Corbel tried to keep his walk springy and confident.
The windows of Sarash-Zillish were dark. The streets were empty and silent. This whole charade could turn out to be unnecessary, itches and all...
They had filled their beffies with fruit in the forest outside SarashZillish. There Corbel had used the head of the brpken spear to shave his face and his chest and four inches of his scalp around a topknot. Gording had cut away his long white hair. Gording had shaved too, for all the good that would do; there were white-haired albino Boys, but they didn't move like their joints hurt.
Laughing, joking Boys spilled out of a probable department store. Corbel turned a corner to avoid them, just like a loner would, maybe. At a distance he should pass as a loner. Close up, no chance. Dikta immortality be damned, he was no twelve-year-old. He wished Gording were beside him; but that would have torn it. Two was just the wrong number to pass.
The brush clogging the street thickened. Corbell waded into it. Here were tangled vines rising almost vertically to a wall. Corbel turned along its length.
The wall, he found, had a gentle curve to it. Probably it formed a circle or an ellipse. Here there was a break, and near the break the shrubbery thickened and grew taller, as if the park spilled out through the opening. Corbell passed it and kept going. There were park sounds: tree limbs rustling in the breeze, small birds whistling, a sudden loud squawk followed by (Corbel jumped) a burst of laughter. Boys! Boys on the other side of the wall. And the wall opened ahead of him.
Beyond the opening, a twelve-foot Christmas ornament floated above knee-deep vines.
Corbell thought it through. Then, within sight of the car, he began searching for a straight sapling. Most of the bushes were of the wrong kind, but he found one that would do, even if it was a bit short. He hacked at the base with the truncated spear until he could break it loose. He sat down cross-legged. * *
What was keeping Gording?
Gording was well behind him, tracking him. If anyone noticed, two loners happened to be moving in the same direction, their target a reasonable one: the park.
Squatting cross-legged, Corbell disengaged the spearhead from the broken haft and used it to shave the sapling. He barely glanced up as Boys came wading through the tangle in what had been a park gate:
two, five, ten Boys with a giant turkey carcass slung on poles. Where
were they going with that? A kitchen in a nearby building? Effete, that was. He heard a louder voice followed by a pause, and, judging that he had been hailed, he glanced up, held a grinning Boy's eye for a moment, then deliberately went back to his work. Couldn't they see he was alone? A loner would damn well make the first overtures, as and when he felt like it, maybe.
The new halt was shaping nicely. He tried the end against the spearhead. A bit too big. He'd shave it down a little and carve a notch and wedge it in. The rusthng of the Boys diminished, moving across the street, but two quiet, puzzled voices were speaking too near him. He glanced up under lowered brows.
They were near, and looking at him as they talked. The car was- Gording was crouched behind the can
How had he gotten there? Corbel hadn't heard a sound. He must have spotted the car, gone over the wall, circled inside the park and gone over the wall again. Now he crouched, immobile, but looking guilty as hell if anyone should see him.
The tall Boy with hair like a black puffball hailed Corbell again. "Perfunctory apologies because we interrupt. May we examine your work?"
Corbel unfolded his legs and slowly stood up, then sprinted for the car.
The door was open as he had left it. By that much did the Boys fail to intercept him. Gording was ahead of him, sliding in the other door. Corbel slammed his door and clung to the handle, leaning back to hold it shut, while Gording jabbed at the keyboard.
The black-haired Boy ran alongside, pulling at the door, for longer than Corbel would have believed possible. Finally he dropped away.
"You said four of anything," said Gording. "I pushed that." Crossed commas.
"I don't know where that takes us. Let's see if we can change it." He jabbed four times at the crooked pi. "I don't even know if there is a subway terminal here. There's no giant cube. Everywhere else it was a giant cube."
"Rest. If we don't find the subway we still have a tchiple. Dial at random."
"I lost my spear."
"I stifi have the thread."
"That's not what I meant. I thought I was repairing it right. But the way those Boys acted, I must have messed it up somehow. Skip it."

On their crooked run through the city they saw only one other Boy. On the wreck of a skyscraper near the city's center, a lean and ragged loner was mountain-climbing three stories up. As the tchiple zipped beneath him his sunken eyes locked on Corbel's and held them until the tchiple turned a corner.
With the big dark still an Olde Earth year away, one loner and the two bands near the park might well be the total population of SarashZillish. It would be nice to think so. . . but stupid. Sarash-Zillish had to be on that pattern of close-spaced "phone booths." It was too important not to be. Corbel said, "Some of Krayhayft's tribe probably got here ahead of us."
"They won't know where we're going, will they?"
"They don't know why we want to get to Cape Horn. I'd hate to underestimate them."
The car slowed and settled, bending shrubbery, and stopped. They got out. Gording asked, "Where are we?"
The sparse greenery in the street thickened to jungle as it climbed the slope to their right. Corbell sprang to the rounded top of the tchipIe. The patch of citrus jungle was unnaturally flat and rectangular. Some of the trees looked very old.
"I don't know."
"But why did the tchiple bring us here? Where is the subway?"
"It'd be towering over our heads. Every city I've seen, the subway building was a tremendous cube."
Gording joined him on the car. Together they surveyed the rectangle of jungle.
"But a subway is below ground," Gording said. "Why would it need to be so high?"
"I never found out what was in the upper stories. Maybe places of government." Or offices for rent. No way to say that in Boyish.
"Maybe they made a subway and left off the subway building."
The patch of jungle was about as wide as the great cubes in One City and Four City. Corbel said, "Could be. They put a park on it instead. Then the ice cap thawed and a lot of dead dust fell all over everything." Where did they put the entrances, though? Escalators in the center? No, the trees grew thickest there.
Where the ground sloped up from the street, there in midsiope was a dip. Water pooled there, forming a small, dirty, weed-grown pond. Corbell expressed himself under his breath.
"I don't know those words," said Gording.
Corbell pointed. "Under the weeds and the water and the scum and the mud, that's where we'll find steps leading down to the doors. After we dig it out. After we find shovels and dig all that stuff out of there. Then we get to find out if anything still works under all that."

"No?"
"They won't let us." Gording pointed.
The sharp-faced loner was trotting toward them from across the wide street. He carried an oddly curved broad-bladed sword. Well behind him, other Boys spilled out of a building.
"Do you think you can take him with your rocks?"
"No," said Gording. "He's ready. He knows we're dangerous. He'll catch the thread on his blade."
"Into the car, then." They clambered down and in. In frustration Corhell demanded, "~-Iow did they get here so fast?"
"Not by car. Are there prilatsil in Sarash-Zillish'!"
"Oh, sure, that's how they did it."
"Can we use prilatsil?"
"Yeah. Yeah! We won't have to dig! Assuming the damn things still work. The subway hasn't been maintained."
The loner was very close now. Corbell dialed a number he remembered: two commas crossed, S reversed, hourglass on its side, crooked pi. The car sped smoothly away. Eleven Boys watched it go.
"They tracked us somehow. They'll track us again," Corbell said. "We'll have some time, but not much."

From outside it was a copy of the office building in which MirellyLyra had returned Corbell's pressure suit. In this version the elevators worked. Still following the pattern, Corbell tried the third floor.
It held. Lines of office doors, all closed.
"My name coin doesn't open them." Gording reported.
They kicked at doer, it was solid.
Gording asked. "Are there prilatsil not locked behind doors?"
"Yeah. On the roof. The Boys could be there by now."
"Did you at least keep the spear blade?"
Corbell handed it over. Then it occurred to him that there might be indicators for the elevators. He slipped back into the elevator and punched all the buttons. If it stopped on every floor they'd have to check them all. He got out on the fourth floor. As he tiptoed down he heard a pattering above him like a swarm of rats.
Gording had disengaged the thread from the rocks. He had tied one end to the blade and the other to his loincloth. Now he chopped with the blade at the cloud-rug where it ran beneath an office door. "Guard the stairs," he said.
"With what?"
Gording didn't answer, didn't even look up.
Corbell stood barehanded at the stairwell door. The first Boy through would kill him. He knew it. Maybe Gording would get away.
What was Gording doing?
Gording was pushing the blade under the door with his fingers.
He pulled upward on the ends of the loincloth. He heaved. Sounds forced their way between his teeth.
Now he pulled sideways toward the doorjamb.
Now he kicked at if door. It shuddered. Another kick sent it crashing inward. The blade was stronger than the door; the thread had cut the metal around the lock.
Through the office window Corbell glimpsed two Boys working under the tchiple's motor hatch. Then he crowded into the "phone booth" with Gording. When he shut the door there was no light. He opened the door a crack, found the crooked pi and kept his finger on it as he closed the door. He pushed it four times.
Nothing obvious happened.
He opened the door and slipped out into a blackness like the inside of a stomach. He whispered, "We'll have to bet that this is really a subway. Stay here. I'll find the stairs and call you."
"Good," said Gording. Corbell slipped away.
He moved with his hand lightly brushing the wall. Once he found a cloud-rug couch by stumbling over it. He clutched at the stuff to stop his fall, and a sheet of cloud-rug ripped away in his hand. Rotted.
A sound behind him. He said, "What was that?"
Gording didn't answer.
Corbell kept moving. He could feel Mirelly-Lira in the dark. He kept expecting to hit the stairs, but the wall went on and on. He circled another couch ant kept going. There was no sound in this place. Cloud-rug cushioned his feet and blotted up the sound of his breathing.
Stairs!
"Here," he said, no longer whispering.
"Good," Gording said from a foot away. Corbel jumped like a man electrocuted. "A Boy stalked you until I killed him with thread. I think it must have been the loner, from his smell."
"This place may be dead. If the stairs-ah." The stairs moved beneath him. Disoriented, off balance, he sat and let the stairs carry him down into the darkness.
The stairs stopped. Gording said, "What next?"
"Follow the sound of my voice. I know where the cars are; all the way in the back." He walked with his hands in front of him. How was he going to find the right car?
He felt his way around cloud-rug couches.
He brushed a solid wall. Off course. He couldn't hear Gording or anything else. Were there Boys in the dark, stalking him as
Gording stalked them? Was Gording already dead? Corbell was moving too fast, stumbling. Only the very oldest Boys would know the layout of this place; but they wouldn't need to. They'd follow him by his breathing.
He had found the doors.
"Gording!"
Light flashed for an instant at the far end. Where had that come from? Gording called, "All right."
Corbell waited in the dark and the quiet. Presently Gording spoke next to him-"Here!"--felt for Corbell's hand and put something heavy in it. "I robbed the loner. Take his sword. I took his fire starter too. Where is the picture of the world?"
"Along-" Corbel guided Gording's hand "-that wall."
The flashlight beam revealed two polar projections with the ice caps still showing. There were no glowing lights or numbers to mark the routes.
Gording asked, "Which is our door?"
"I don't know."
"The Boys have our tchiple. We can't surrender because we've killed the loner. The Boys may have a way to shut down the prilatsil. Do something, Corbell."
"All right. Give me the name coin." He took it, inserted it in the ticket window. Nothing happened.
He tried the next door. Nothing. He was beginning to panic. But the stairs had worked- The third door let them through. The transparent door to the subway car let Gording through, closed after him, and wouldn't open until Corbell had pulled the disk out and reinserted it. They sat down opposite each other.
"Now we sit here for awhile."
"Al! right."
"I don't know how you can be so calm."
"I risk less than you do. Half a Jupiter year-" he had borrowed Corbell's phrase "-and I'll be dead. Against this I balance dikta immortality and freedom from the Boy rule. Unless. . . Corbel, can we find dikta immortality where we're going? Or will we have to make constant raids on Antarctica?"
"I know it's in Four City. Maybe it's in other places, too."
"The risk is good. Shall we sleep?"
Corbell's laugh was shaky. "Good luck."

V
Gording woke when the door went up. The car slid into the vacuum tunnel; curved downward; straightened out; rolled right; rolled left. So far so good.
Gording, watching his face, relaxed. "I did not want to ask. Where are we going?"
"It doesn't matter. Anywhere there's a . . . picture of the world that lights up. That'!! tell us how to get to Four City."
"A good decision," said Gording, and he went back to sleep.
Maybe he was faking.
But his breathing was very gentle and regular.
Corbell stretched out. He wedged his ankles under a chair arm. There was no sound but Gording's breathing.
Corbel dozed. He twitched and jerked in his sleep: running, running . . . When the car turned upward he came half awake, then dropped off again. But he felt it when the car slowed, and, groggy as he was, he remembered that first ride. He put his hands over his ears, turned to see Gording copy him.
The car stopped.
Doors popped open automatically. Air puffed across them, hot and wet, like boiling maple syrup in the throat. Corbel cried, "Come on!" and went through.
The great ha!! was a ruin. Six or seven stories of the great cube had fallen in, leaving a cross section of whatever was up there; Corbell didn't care. He kept his breathing shallow. The scalding air was thick with a taste and smell half chemical, half mildew. Sweat sprang out in droplets all over his body.
The wall map was cracked across, and dark.
He tried his credit disk in three doors before he found one that worked. Gording pulled at his arm and spoke like a man holding his breath. "Wait! Where does this go?"
"Come on."
They entered the subway car. It didn't help. You can die locked in a steam room, Corbell thought. He stretched out on the row of seats. "Mirelly-Lyra rigged the subway system to take anyone from the hot part of the world straight to her. We can hope she didn't skip this terminal. Lie still and don't try to exercise. Breathe shallow."
He lay on his back and waited. The sweat tickled as it ran down his ribs, but he didn't wipe at it.
Something ticked on. Air blew across him, too warm, and then cooling. Corbel sighed. "The CO2 must have triggered something," he told himself. The air grew coo!, cool.
A long time later Gording said, "I left the fire starter."
"Damn."
Silence then, until the door went up.
There were the usual surges, then the ride straightened out. Corbell tried to sleep again, but something was holding him back. He didn't know what it was until Gording said, "My ears hurt."
That was it. "The car leaks," said Corbell. "Just a chance we had to take. Let's hope we've got enough air to get to the end."
"It hurts. Can I do anything?"
Hey, Gording had never been in an airplane! Corbel said, "Work your jaws." He demonstrated. His ears popped.

The car slowed. It had come sooner than Corbell had expected; but they were both panting, and Gording was uneasy. Corbell felt
guilty satisfaction. It took a lot of unknown danger to disturb Gording.
He covered his ears with his hands and opened his jaws wide, and waited for Gording to do the same. His skin was clammy. He was unbearably tense.
The doors popped open. The air that slapped across them was only warm. Through the door he saw lights dim at the back, cloud-rug humping into couches. He reached for the loner's broad-bladed scimitar.
Motion flickered in the gate. Corbell's brain flashed: Mirelly-Lyra! Too soon! He pulled the car door shut as something darted through the gate. He had what she wanted-they could negotiate.
It was Krayhayft! The gray-haired Boy stopped short. He looked at them through the glass.
He raised the fire starter.
Gording threw himself back toward the inadequate protection of the toilet. Corbel sensed it; but he himself was frozen.
Krayhayft fired past him. Light blazed behind Corbel, and he smelled chemical smoke as part of the couch burned. Krayhayft shouted, "Come out. Or I'll burn off your feet."
Corbel's hand was still on the door. But. . . "I can't do it. You'd chop down the Tree of Life."
For an instant Krayhayft was puzzled. Then, "That's not what we want. We only want to know where it is. Corbel, suppose a disaster wiped out most of the dikta, and the only survivors were half a dozen old ones? We could keep them young and breeding."
"Meanwhile they never get a smell of it."
Flame burst from the rug beside Corbell's right foot. Krayhayft said, "We need your pressure-suit helmet too. Speaking of disasters-" Krayhayft stopped. His face changed.
Corbell had never seen that look on any Boy. It frightened him. Guilt and remorse and fear. Krayhayft moaned, the sound faint through the glass. His eyes darted left and right, seeking. . . escape?
He found it. Brighter than human, he found it at once, and used it. Krayhayft raised the fire starter to his head and fired. Flame burst from that side of his head, then from the other. Krayhayft fell, and kicked spasmodically, and lay still.
Corbell spared himself one flicking glance back. Gording was still hidden, crouched behind the toilet door.
Then Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped through the gate. Shapeless robe, white touched with iridescence, and a withered face within:
The bright eyes fixed on him, and then the cane.
"Mirelly-Lyra! It's me!"
The shock almost kified her. He hoped she would faint. She recovered; she gestured peremptorily with the cane. Come out!
He reached for the scimitar. She gave him just a touch of what had killed Krayhayft. Moaning, he came through.
She spoke gibberish. An old man's voice translated: "You found it. Where is it?"
"Give me the cane and I'll tell you."
Her answer was a wave of guilt and mental agony. Corbell waded through it, hands outstretched for her throat. She backed away. Corbel moaned and caine on. Suddenly she turned something on the cane's handle.
Sleep dragged him down toward the cloud-rug. Sleep and red rage warred in him. He was on his knees, but he waded toward her, two steps, three.

Musty smell.
Soft stuff cradling his cheek.
Mirely-Lyra was in one of the shapeless couches.
Corbell got his arms under him and lifted himself out of the cloudrug. He pulled himself toward her. She tried to cringe back without moving. Terrified.
"I caught her from behind," said Gording. He was seated facing her, holding the silver cane.
The old woman spoke rapidly. An old man's voice translated, "You don't dare kill me. I have something you want."
Corbel got to his feet with some effort. "The pressure-suit helmet," he said. "Give it to me or I'll let you live. . . as you are."
Her mouth compressed. "Immortality first."
"How many settings are there on that cane?"
"Five. Two that kill. Others might kill me. Can you find the helmet then?"
"Probably." Corbell smiled; he saw by her face that he was right. "But so what? I'll make you young. Then I'll kifi you if I don't get what I want." He changed to Boyish. "Hold the cane ready. But I
think she won't try to escape now. We're going to get dikta immortality."
Gording looked dubious.

Corbell wasn't about to trust the Norn in a "phone booth." They wedged themselves into a tchip!e with Mirelly-Lyra between, for a cramped ride through Four City. As the car swerved and darted through glass and concrete rubble, Corbell wondered. Should he have forced the helmet from her first?
Yes. But he couldn't wait that long. He had to know.
They unfolded themselves out of the car. Gording said, "I might have known it would be a hospital."
"Did your hospital have a. . . guarded place on the third floor?"

Mirelly-Lyra was looking up at the glass-mosaic face. "But I searched this place!"
"You were desperate, too," Corbel said smugly. "You just weren't desperate in the right way." He led the way up the stairs. Dust puffed beneath their feet. At the third floor he found two sets of footprints to remind him of his panic flight through these halls. He glanced back; but Mirel!y-Lyra seemed docile enough, and Gording was behind her with the cane.
He turned into the hallway . . . and was lost. "Mirelly-Lyra, where are the 'phone booths'?"
"To your left at the next corner."
They found the line of prilatsil. A moment to orient himself: There was the corner where he'd been hiding when the Norn came to hunt him down. He led off. . . and here was the vault door, open.
Gording said, "They guarded their immortality well."
"Wouldn't you?" Corbell pointed to the skeletons and the hole smashed high up in the wall. "But not well enough. We're lucky they didn't use it and then wreck it. Maybe they thought they'd be back in fifty years."
Gording looked around at the guard emplacements, the empty shelves, the computer console, the pair of "phone booths." "Where is it, if they didn't destroy it? Not through the prilatsil, unless the destination was equally we!! guarded."
"Through the prilatsil. Give me the cane first."
Would Gording balk? He didn't; he handed Corbell the weapon,
then stepped forward to study the pair of glass booths. Only one had a door. He stepped inside.
Mirelly-Lyra snarled something. The box translated: "Are you mocking me?"
Corbell waved the cane under her nose. "Suppose I am?"
She came at him with her fingernails. He didn't bother with the trigger. He rapped her on the head with the cane, twice, before she backed out of range.
Gording had found the button on the post. He pushed it.
Corbell shouted, "Heeeyaa!" The other booth danced with drifting dust motes.
Gording opened the door and said, "Nothing happened."
"Not quite true," said Corbel. To Mirelly-Lyra he said, "You don't have to if you don't want to. You can trust me or not." Gloat, gloat, he mocked himself, and was a little ashamed. But he'd fought for this!
She swallowed whatever words were on her tongue. She was truly desperate. As she entered the booth Corbell caught Gording's eye and pointed to the booth with no door.
The dust floating in the booth suddenly thickened. Gording smiled and said, "Ah."
The Norn had caught it too, but she didn't understand . . . and Corbell was bubbling with it. "Inert molecules from your cells! Chemical medicines won't reach that stuff, but the 'phone booth' does. It takes just those dead molecules and does the instant-elsewhere trick with them. Just the stuff that builds up over ninety years of life. See it now?"
"I don't fee! any different," she said uncertainly.
"You should. I did. It was like I'd caught my second wind. Of course I was moving at a dead run. It's nothing obvious. What did you expect? In a couple of days you'll find dark roots in your hair."
"Red," she said. "Fiery red."
"Where's the helmet?"
She smiled. She still looked like an old woman; but was there something malicious in that smile?

CHAPTER 9 PEERSSA FOR THE STATE

I
The cat-tail sprang from the desk as they entered Mire!ly-Lyra's office. Its grey-and-white face watched them mistrustfully from the safety of a ceiling light fixture.
Corbel's pressure suit sat limp in one of the guest chairs. Gording and Mirelly-Lyra watched him detach the helmet and set it on his head. He cleared his throat and said, "This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State. Come in, Peerssa."
Nothing, nothing, nothing. . . "He's got to be in range by now. Peerssa, dammit, answer!"
Gording pushed the suit aside and took the chair. The silver cane remained fixed on the old woman. She didn't notice. Malice and victory! She gave Corbell the shivers.
Corbel jumped when the cat-tail abruptly dropped from the ceiling into the old woman's lap. It landed soft as a snowflake and coiled there, ears up, watching Corbell make a fool of himself.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, n- The voice came faintly, fading in spots. "Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State calling Jaybee Corbell. Please allow for a delay of sixty-seven seconds in transmission. Corbel, I have a great deal to tell you."
"Yeah, you do! I've got a great deal to tell you, too! I can tell you most of the history of the solar system. Tel me first, have you taken control of the planet Uranus? If so, what do you plan to do with it?" To Gording he said, "I'm asking him now. We'll know in a minute."
"What takes so long?"
"Speed of light. Uranus must be thirty-three and a half lightseconds away."
Gording nodded. He was not impatient. Even his handling of the cane seemed negligent . . . but it never left the old woman. Good. Because she still had that look.
When Peerssa spoke he was irritatingly placid. "Yes, I am guiding a planet I believe to be Uranus. You were right in guessing that this is the solar system. After losing contact with you I flew to investigate the most easily available anomaly, the new planet between Jupiter and Saturn. I found a sateffite with control systems which would respond to-"
"I know all about the motor! The question-" He bit it off. The delay was going to drive him nuts. Peerssa was still talking:
"-my broadcasts. I was able to probe the fail-safe programs first. Otherwise I might have damaged something. Eventually I found an object in the planet's upper atmosphere radiating strongly in the infrared. I found a tremendous motor, a fusion pulse drive clearly intended to move the entire planet. Oh, you know about the motor. All right. I've already started the braking sequence. In twenty-two days Uranus will be inserted into orbit two million miles ahead of the Earth. I'm going to move the Earth further from Jupiter. We'll cool it down to normal."
"Don't do it!" Corbell barked. He remembered uneasily that he had never been sure of Peerssa's motives. "Listen, life on Earth has been adjusting to this situation for a million years or more. If you screw it up now most of the biosphere will die, including what passes for humanity these days."
The old woman already looked younger, if only in a tightening of the muscles in her face, a smoothing of the pouchy look. Corbel looked away from the malicious cat-smile. He lifted the helmet and said in Boyish, "We were right. No coincidence at all. Peerssa dropped me here, then went to look Uranus over. He's going to put everything back the way it was when he left Earth."
Gording stared. "But the ice! The ice would cover-"
"Bear with me a little longer, will you?" He lowered the helmet on Gording's answer.
Peerssa's delayed reply came. "I do not take your orders, Corbel. I take orders from Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, who was once a citizen of the State."
He should have known better, but it took him by surprise. He screamed, "You traitor!"
Mirelly-Lyra threw back her head and laughed.
Corbell laid the helmet on the desk. It took him a moment to find his voice. "No wonder you were smirking. What happened?"
She was thoroughly enjoying herself. "I tried to call your autopilot. No luck. A few days ago I tried again. It may have helped that my translator uses your voice. Peerssa and I talked for many hours about the State, and the world, and you-"
She broke off because Peerssa's reply had arrived. "My loyalty has never wavered, Corbell. Was there ever a time when you could say the same?"
"Drop dead," Corbel told the helmet. "Stand by. Mirelly-Lyra is with us now. We'll try to talk her into changing your orders." To Gording he said, "She rules my autopilot. She rules Uranus. I'm tired."
"You must persuade her not to let it carry out its mission. This is urgent, Corbel."
"I thought of that." Corbell closed his eyes and leaned back.
He could watch it happen. As long as he could survive at all, he would be young. He could watch glaciers cover Antarctica until the ice was a mile thick. He and Mirelly-Lyra could watch the dwarf buffalo and the nude polar bears and the Boys and the dikta flee north until they froze in snowstorms or starved in land baked bare of life or died for lack of the vitamin D in kathope seed.
Maybe that was an angle. Did the old retread want the Earth all for herself? Or would she prefer company? But she'd fled the Boys once, and lived alone. . . hmmm. Where did she get her food? Was there anything she couldn't stand to see extinct?
He opened his eyes. Gording was looking concerned for him. Oddly, so was the old woman.
"Nothing hurts," Gording said. "I was used to things hurting. Sometimes my breath would come short. Always my joints and ten-
dons and muscles ached. Corbell, you've found it. We're young again."
"Yeah. Good."
"Play on her gratitude. I can't talk to her. It has to be you. You're capable. The fate of the world is on your shoulders."
"That's all I need." He closed his eyes for a moment . . . just for a moment. . . and then he asked Mirelly-Lyra, "How do you feel?"
"I fee! good. I fee! strong. Maybe I only want to believe your lie."
"Okay. Pay attention." Corbell set the helmet between them. He talked half for Peerssa's benefit. "The world is baked and dead everywhere except in Antarctica. What's left alive is all tropical stuff evolved for six years of daylight and six years of night. If Antarctica gets covered by ice again everything will die. The ruling population is-" He used the Boyish word. "Boys, eleven-year-olds who live forever. There's a minor population of adults for breeding. The men look like Gording, or younger. They're human. There are some minor changes-" He began to describe them: the pale skin, the receding hairline. .
Mirelly-Lyra regarded Gording without favor. But she must see him as human. The biggest difference, the receding hairline, looked natural on an old man.
He hadn't impressed her yet. He went on: "If we ever expect to get a State established again, it'll be with the adults, the dikta. The Boys are too different. What I'm getting at is, there is a chance. Right now there are about ten women to every man, but in a hundred years it'll be nearly one-to-one." An angle there? He definitely had her attention. "Of course, your role wouldn't be very important at first, with that big an imbalance. But you'd be the only woman with a full head of hair. And the only redhead."
"Just a minute, Corbell. Isn't it true that Boys rule the adults? I don't want to be a slave. And what about the Girls?"
"The Girls are long dead."
"Ahhh." Mirelly-Lyra must have hated the Girls.
"Right. It's Boys and dikta now. We can get the dikta to move here, because we've got the dikta immortality. They'll come. I know where to find a ship."
She was shaking her head, frowning. Now Corbell knew that she'd bought half of what he was selling. Against half-bald women her
great beauty would rule the men who ruled the dikta! But: "How long have the Boys ruled?"
"Ever since you brought the dikta to Antarctica as escaped convicts, whenever the hell that was. Say a million years."
Oncoming youth put music in her laugh. "And now the dikta will break free, that suddenly? The sheep will become wolves because we offer them a sufficient bribe?"
Dammit, she did have a point. He changed languages. "Gording? Will the dikta revolt?"
"Yes."
"They never did before."
"The dangers were too great. The rewards were too small." Maybe. Corbel switched to English. "He says they wifi. I believe him. Now just a minute, let me tell you why. First, they have not been bred for docility. They've been bred to produce a better strain of Boys, and they've got the genes. Second-how do I put this? You know what a cringing man looks like?"
She grinned. She'd seen Corbel cringe, damn her.
"Okay. They cringe. But it's a gesture, a formality. The next second they're walking as tall as ever. The Boys cringe to each other, too. I think the dikta haven't revolted for a million years because the odds weren't right. Now they are."
She sat silent, frowning.
"What did you think you'd get out of Peerssa moving the Earth?"
"I thought . . . We're the last of the State, Corbell. I thought we could start the human race over."
"Adam and Eve, with Eve in charge. Mirelly-Lyra, we'd better hope we can mate with the dikta, because, frankly, I'm terrified of you. I don't think I could get it up."
"Low sex urge?"
"Yeah. Would you like to rule the dikta instead? You'll have one thing going for you. You rule the sky. Once again a Girl rules the sky."
He saw the beginnings of a smile (Corbell forgets that I can rule men with my beauty alone!) and he pushed it home. "But you've got to give Peerssa his orders now. He's already started the braking sequence. Move the Earth now and it's the end of the world."
She leered teasingly. "I should make you wait."
"Peerssa has aheady started the-"
"Give me the helmet."
"Goddamn braking sequence. Here. Wait a minute." He didn't let go of the helmet.
"Corbell? Isn't this what you wanted?"
"I just had the damndest thought." Don't blow this. The fate of the world-shaddup! "Give me a minute to think it through." When a man commands a djinn, he tends to be careful with his phrasing. "All right. Peerssa, I'm going to describe what I want to happen. Then you tell me if you can make the course change, and you tell me what side effects we can expect. After that we can put it up to Mirelly-Lyra.
"I want Cape Horn and the region around it to be about fifteen centigrade degrees cooler."

II
From the roof of the office building they watched Uranus pass.
The planet must be smaller than it had been at Corbell's birth. Its drive was not all that efficient; it must have blown away megamegatons of atmosphere during aeons of maneuvering. For all that, a gas giant planet was now passing two million miles from the Earth.
It was tremendous. It glowed half full near the horizon: a white half-disk touched with pink, banded and roiled with storms, and a night side black against the stars. From the black edge a tiny, intense violet-white flame reached out and out, lighting the night side, expanding, reddening, dissipating.
Mirelly-Lyra said something that was pure music. No wonder she had been able to persuade men to do her bidding. (The old man's voice said, "Glorious.") Her white robe was a shapeless pale shadow in the dark. Corbell stood a little apart from her. Now that she was no longer an old woman, he was more afraid of her than ever. In truth, the Norn now ruled the fate of the world.
Corbell was very twitchy tonight.
He called into the helmet in his hands. "Peerssa, how goes it?" And waited for the response. Nothing, nothing- "Green bird." The autopilot was indecently calm. "It was difilcult to plot a new path that would not intersect a moon, but I did it. Earth's new orbit wifi be somewhat eccentric. Her average temperatare will vary around ten degrees lower."
"Good enough." Corbell set the helmet down. His urge was to call
Peerssa every two minutes. A giant planet faffing that close wasn't glorious, it was terrifying.
She said it again. "Glorious. To think that the State reached such heights! And now there are only savages."
"We'll be back," he said, and laughed too loudly. "Gording doesn't know it, but what he's doing in Dikta City is forming the basis for a population explosion. In three thousand years we'll be building interstellar spaceships again. We'll need them. Earth will be too crowded."
"I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps Gording did. Do you really think the dikta will come? A million years of slavery, after all-"
"They'll have to come." He'd thought it out in all its intricate detail. "In a few months Cape Horn and Four City will be in the Temperate Zone. Plants that grow well in Antarctica will grow well here once we transport them. In Antarctica it'!! be colder than the Boys expect. They'll huddle in Sarash-Zillish through six Olde Earth years of darkness. Meanwhile the dikta will be setting themselves up here."
"Al! very well if the Boys wait. You've said they're very intelligent. They may attack immediately."
"Let them wait a few months and we'll give them a nasty shock! We'll have Peerssa in orbit then. Didn't he tell you? He's got a thing that can blast them from orbit while they try to cross the ocean. They'll think it's the Girls. They'll try to wipe out the Himalaya val!eys and the Sea of Okhotsk. But if they wait long enough .
there's going to be rain, a lot of rain, when the Earth cools off. It'll probably swallow Dikta City. The Boys'll think the dikta drowned."
Uranus jetted violet-white flame. Peerssa's path through Jupiter's moons was a complicated one. The night was vivid with lights: dayside Uranus, the pinpoint flare on Uranus's night side, Jupiter, the swarming moons. The air was hot and humid and redolent with some rare scent, not quite musk, not quite flower shop. Corbell wondered where it came from. Were whales holding a mating season offshore? The air went to his head.
"Corbell?"
"Yeah?"
"What if the dikta are content to grow old gracefully?"
In the dark he could barely make out her impish smile. (Impish? It was that same malevolent smile, with the wrinkles gone. Had it always been merely impish?) He said, "They still won't have a choice."
A nasty thought came to him then, and he made haste to correct himself. "They won't have a choice about coming here. They can take dikta immortality or leave it." All the same, he had manipulated the dikta-for their own good-and would not Peerssa say the same to Corbell? I'd better be right! If they've got complaints in a hundred years, I'll still be there to hear them!
The shadow in the dark asked, "Wifi the dikta men find me beautiful?"
"Yes. Beautiful and exotic. If the women liked me, the men wifi like you."
She turned to him. "But you don't find me beautiful."
"My sex urge is supposed to-"
"That is no answer!" she flared. "You lay with the dikta women!" He flinched back. "If you must know, I've always been a little afraid of a beautiful girl. And I'm scared stiff of you. My hindbrain thinks you're still carrying that cane."
"Corbell, you are well aware that the dikta may not survive the change in their biological rhythms. The sun shows every day in Four City, all through the year." She touched his arm. "Even if they live, we are the last human beings. If we die without children. . ."
He wanted to shrink away, but something in him simultaneously wanted to move closer. He suppressed both urges. "You're moving too fast. There may be dikta women already carrying my children. That'll tell us if they're human-and even if they aren't, they're close enough."
"Let's go inside. The heat-" When he gestured toward the garish intruder in the sky, she tugged at his arm. "If it falls on the Earth, do you really want to be watching?"
"Yes." But he picked up the helmet and followed her. She didn't have the cane anymore. All she had to wave at him was a planet ten times the size of the Earth.
It was cooler in the elevator. Air conditioning. His nerves still tingled, whether from Uranus's passing or from the nearness of the Norn. . . He sniffed suddenly, and had to swallow a laugh. That was what he had smelled on the roof. She had never worn perfume before.
Her hood was thrown back. Her hair was exotic: long, fine white hair flowing out of a fiery red undercoat. Of the wrinkles of age there
were only traces left. Her breasts were . . . exotic, yeah: high and conical, delightfully pointed under the robe. Would the dikta see them as powerfully sensual or as evidence of animal origin?
The elevator had stopped. The doors opened. But Corbel was flattened against the wall, and Mirelly-Lyra wasn't moving, either. She watched him uneasily as he took in great !ungsful of air, using all of his strength to hold himself stifi.
He wanted her. It was a madness in him, and he was terrified. "Perfume," he said, and his voice was a croak.
She said, "Yes. Shame on you for forcing me to such means. If it gives you pleasure to attack my pride, you've won."
"I don't understand!"
"Pheromones. I altered my medical system to make pheromones to affect your sex urge. Pheromones are biochemical cues." She stepped forward, put her hands on his shoulders. "Do you think I wanted it this-" And the touch of her was all it took.
The fastenings on her robe weren't fastened, save one, which ripped. He had more trouble with his own loincloth, his hands were shaking so, and he howled with frustration. She had to do it for him. He took her on the floor of the elevator, quickly, violently. Maybe he hurt her. Maybe he wanted to.
And his head still bubbled with the perfume. He had not had time to notice the differences in her. Now he did. Even fifty thousand years had wrought changes. Her ankles were heavier, her body was thicker in every dimension, than the standard of beauty in 1970 A.D. And she had the damndest eyes, with a tilt that was not oriental.
and a soft woman's mouth. He took her again. She wasn't passive, but she wasn't wholly enjoying it, either; she was frightened of what she had unleashed.
Afterward he was calmer. They moved out of the elevator onto the cloud-rug floor. The third time it was she who mounted him. He tried to hold himself back, to let her find her own way, but when it was over he could see his handprints bone white on her hips. He said, belatedly, "Are you all right?"
She laughed. Stifi straddling him, she ran her hands through her hair. "I'm young. I'!! heal."
"You used an aphrodisiac on me."
"Yes. Aphrodisiac. The pheromones were Peerssa's suggestion."
"What? Peerssa? I'll kill him! He-and you! You used me like a bundle of reflexes, the pair of you!" He wanted to cry. "Not like something that thinks. It's just like that damn cane."
"Forget the damn cane! We have to have children. We're the last ones. What do you want from me, Corbell?"
"I don't know. Ask me when my head starts working again. I want Peerssa dead, I want Pierce the checker dead. Would he kill himself if you told him to?"
"He did what he had to. He has to make the State again. Corbell, isn't this better than the cane? Isn't it?"
"All right, it's better than the cane."
"Then what do you want? Will you mate with me without the pheromones? Shall I tell Peerssa to follow your orders?"
He wanted (he discovered) Mirabelle. He wanted the old ritual: dinner at a new restaurant recommended by friends, and brandy A!exanders afterward, and the king-size bed. They'd bought a water bed a little before the cancer came to tear up his belly. Now here he was on his back in cloud-rug, in a corridor outside an elevator, with the strangest of strange women. "Not your fault," he said. "I want to go home."
She shook her head. "1 want to go home, too. We can't. We have to build our home again."
They were already doing that, Corbell thought. Maybe they'd even do it well. He said, "Even love stories aren't the same. Pheromones! Jesus, what a way to save the world. Will you please fix that translator so it talks to me in your voice?"
"All right. Tomorrow," said an old man's voice.
"And put me in control of Peerssa, if you value my sanity. rm sick of him running my life."
"Now?"
"Tomorrow." One more thing he would have liked to do. He would have !iked to destroy the cane by smashing it repeatedly into Peerssa's brain case. But they might need Peerssa and the cane against the Boys, if they came too soon.
So he rolled aside and looked for his loinc!oth . . . and then, changing his mind, he leaned close to Mirelly-Lyra and inhaled deeply. Uranus must have passed by now, and Earth was on its way into a wider orbit, and world-saving could wait until tomorrow. Maybe the pheromone perfume could be used judiciously, in much smaller quantities. .