A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

  Well. No hurry. His two-days-plus air reserve was not being used. There was time to explore. And there, far at the back of the lobby, were the stairs he’d expected: broad, well designed by the principles he had learned in his first life, carpeted in cloud-rug. A flight of stairs going down into darkness.

  He went back to tuck his helmet in the crook of his elbow and to retrieve the lens-shaped key/credit card. Then he started down the stairs, playing his helmet lamp ahead of him, humming.

  With her head…tooked…underneath her arm, she wa-a-alks the Bloody Tower…

  The stairs unexpectedly lurched into motion, throwing him backward. He sat up cursing. He hadn’t hurt himself, but…get crippled here and it would be his death.

  Light grew below him.

  At first he thought this was the last gasp of an emergency power system. The light blossomed. When he reached bottom it was bright as daylight. He was in a vast open space with a high ceiling and alcoves he thought were shops: a place with the feel of a European train station, but with touches of sybaritic luxury more appropriate to a palace. There were fountains, and more of the ankle-enveloping rug swelling to rings of couches. Along one entire wall—

  “Peerssa! I’ve found a map!”

  “Please describe it.”

  “It’s two polar projections. Damn, I wish I could show you. The continents are about the way they were when I was in school. These maps must have been made before all that ocean water evaporated. There are lines across them, all from”—he checked—“this point, I think. Most of the lines are dark. Peerssa, the only lines still lighted run to Antarctica and the tip of Argentina and, uh, Alaska.” Alaska had been twisted north. So had the tip of Siberia. “The lines run right through oceans, or under them.”

  He saw that what he’d taken for shops were alcoves with couches and food-dispensing walls. He tried one. When he inserted the plastic disk, a woman’s voice spoke in tones of regret. He tried other slots and got the same reedy voice repeating the same incomprehensible words.

  Next stop? Down there at the far end, that line of doors…

  Thick doors, with slots for credit disks.

  He went back for his pressure suit. The stairs carried him up. How the heck did they handle streams of commuters going both ways? He rode back down with the heavy suit draped over his shoulder.

  There were lighted squiggles on the map, next to the lighted lines. He memorized the pattern that marked the route he wanted: not to the center of the thawed Antarctic continent, but to the nearer shore. Shores get colonized first.

  The doors: Yes, there was the pattern of squiggles he wanted.

  The disk: He found it, turned it blank side up and inserted it.

  The door opened. He retrieved the disk, glanced at it and smiled. The squiggles had changed. He’d been docked the price of a ticket.

  He faced glass within glass within concrete. The end of the subway car protruded slightly from its socket in the wall; it was a circle of glass eight feet across, with an oval glass door in it. Through the glass Corbell saw a cylindrical car lined with seats facing each other and padded in cloud-rug. The front of the car was metal.

  He found a disk-sized slot in the glass door. He used it. The door opened. He entered, and pulled the disk out of the other side. The door closed.

  “Here I am,” he said into the helmet.

  “Where?”

  “In one of the subway cars. I don’t know what to do next. Wait, I guess.”

  “You aren’t going to use the instant-transportation booths?”

  “No, I think that was a dead end. Maybe they were toys for the rich, too expensive to be practical, or too short-range. Why else would there be streets with cars on them? The streets were too good and there were too many cars.”

  “I wondered,” Peerssa said. “Four digits in base eight gives only four thousand and ninety-six possible booth numbers. Too few.”

  “Yeah.” There was room for about eight people, he decided, on benches of cloud-rug tinted at intervals in contrasting pastels to mark off the seats. He found another food dispenser, which spoke to him regretfully when he tried it. Behind a half-door that would barely hide one’s torso, he found a toilet, again equipped with one of the glitteringly clean metal sponges. He tried that too.

  His best guess was that the sponge had an instant-elsewhere unit in it. It cleaned itself miraculously.

  There were arms for the benches. They had to be pulled out of a slot along the back and locked.

  “There is increased power usage from your locus,” said Peerssa.

  “Then something’s happening.” Corbell stretched out on the cloud-rug bench to wait. No telling about departure time. He would wait twenty-four hours before he gave up. His stomach growled.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  The Norn

  I

  Somebody spoke to him.

  Corbell jerked violently and woke with a scream on his lips. Who but Peerssa could speak to him here?

  But he was not aboard Don Juan.

  The voice had stopped.

  Peerssa spoke from his helmet, “I do not recognize the language.”

  “Did you expect to? Play it again for me.” He listened to Peerssa’s recording of a boyish voice speaking in reassuring liquid tones. Afterward he sighed. “If that guy was waiting to meet me himself, what could I tell him? What could he tell me? I’ll probably be dead before I could learn his language.”

  “Your story has wrung my heart. Most of your contemporaries only had one life to live.”

  “…Yeah.”

  “Your self-centered viewpoint has always bothered me. If you could see yourself as—”

  “No, wait a minute. You’re right. You’re dead right. I’ve had more than most men are given. More than most men can steal, for that matter. I’m going to stop bitching.”

  “You amaze me. Will you now dedicate your services to the State?”

  “What State? The State’s dead. My self-centeredness is as human as your fanaticism.”

  The stranger’s voice spoke again, in beautiful incomprehensible words—and Corbell saw him. His face was beyond the car’s forward wall, beyond the metal, as if the metal were transparent. A hologram? Corbell leaned forward.

  It was the bust of a boy, fading below the shoulders. He was twelve or so, Corbell guessed, but he had the poise of an adult. His skin was golden, his features were a blend of races: black, yellow, white, and something else, a mutation perhaps, that left him half bald; he had only a fringe of tightly curled black hair around the base of the skull and over the ears, and an isolated tuft above the forehead.

  The face smiled reassuringly and vanished. The car shot forward and down.

  Corbell was on a roller coaster. He pulled out a chair arm and hung on. The car fell at a slant for what felt like half a minute. Then there was high gravity as car and tunnel curved back to horizontal.

  Light inside, darkness outside. Corbell was beginning to relax when the car rolled, surged to the left; rolled, surged to the right; steadied. What was that? Changing tunnels?

  His ears popped.

  Peerssa spoke. “Your speed is in excess of eight hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating. A remarkable achievement.”

  “How do they do it?”

  “At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tunnel. You are about to pass beneath the Pacific Ocean. Can you still hear me?”

  “Barely.”

  “Corbell, answer if you can. Corbell, answer…” Peerssa’s voice faded completely.

  “Peerssa!”

  Nothing.

  Corbell’s ears and sinuses felt pressure. He worked his jaw. There was no reason to panic, he told himself. Peerssa would pick him up when he reached Antarctica.

  The hissing sound of motion was sleep-inducing. Corbell was tempted to lie down—preferably with his feet forward, because there would be deceleration at the end. To sleep, perchance to dream…What kind of dreams does
the last man on Earth have while traveling beneath the Pacific Ocean at Mach one-and-a-half in a subway system that hadn’t been repaired in hundreds of years? He could be stopped beneath the Pacific, to suffocate slowly, while an almost human ghost reassured him that service would be resumed as soon as possible. Peerssa could wait forever for him to emerge.

  Too much imagination and I’ll scare myself to death. Too little and I’ll get myself killed.

  Corbell worked his jaw to relieve pressure in his ears. Had Peerssa said evacuated? He poked his head into the helmet to see the dials.

  Air pressure was down and still dropping.

  He panted as he worked his way into the pressure suit. “Vacuum tunnel, right,” he gasped. “Stupid, stupid! The car leaks.” And what else had deteriorated in this ancient system of tunnels?

  But now the ride was superlatively smooth. Presently Corbell emptied his bladder; then emptied his suit’s bladder into the toilet. The urine ran boiling through the bowl without leaving a trace. A frictionless surface.

  Hours passed. He dozed sitting up, woke, lay down on his face, didn’t like that, lay down on his back with the backpack a bulge under his shoulders and a chair arm under his head. Better. He slept.

  A surge woke him. He sat up. He sucked syrup…sucked the last of it, and it was almost enough. He felt acceleration; was he going uphill? Half a minute of low gravity, a final surge backward. He felt himself at rest. There was an almost subsonic thump beyond the metal end of the car.

  The glass door, and the metal door beyond it, both popped open at the same time. Corbell had just stood up when the thunderclap slapped him backward.

  Sometimes you would end a long backpacking trip with aches in every muscle and a mind void of everything except the determination to keep walking no matter what. In much the same frame of mind, Corbell got to his feet and limped toward the doors. His ears rang. His head hurt where he’d bumped it on his helmet. He’d twisted his back. He felt stupid: The thunderclap of air slamming into vacuum should not have surprised him.

  “Peerssa!” he called. “This is Corbell for himself. Answer if you can.”

  Nothing. Where the hell was Peerssa? There was nothing blocking him now, was there?

  Corbell shook his head. All he could do was keep wading through the surprises until they stopped him.

  There were dim lights far back in a great open space. He picked out couches and alcoves and the faintly glowing lines of a wall map. Numbers at his chin showed pressure normal or a bit higher, temperature warm but bearable.

  He opened his faceplate.

  The air was warm and musty. He smelled dry rot. He lifted his helmet, sniffed again. A trace of animal smell—

  “Meep?”

  He jumped, then relaxed. Where had he heard such a sound? It was friendly and familiar. Motion caught at his eye, left—

  “Meee!” The beast came questing through dusty cloud-rug.

  It was a snake, a fat furred snake. It came toward him in an S-shaped flow. Its fur was patterned in black and gray and white. It stopped and lifted its beautiful cat’s face and asked again, like a cat, “Meep?”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Corbell.

  Something rustled behind him.

  He forgot the furred snake. He was sleepy, so sleepy that in a moment he knew he would pass out. But there were furtive sounds behind him, and he turned, fighting to stay on his feet.

  Under a hooded robe of white cloth with a touch of iridescence in it: a bent human form…

  While the cat-snake distracted him, she had struck. He saw her in shadow: tall and stooped, gaunt, her face all wrinkles, her nose hooked, her eyes deep-set and malevolent in the shadow of the hood. Her swollen hands held a silver cane aimed at Corbell’s eyes.

  He saw her for a bare moment while the numbness closed over him. He guessed he was seeing his death.

  II

  He was on his back on a form-fitting surface, his legs apart, his arms above his head. The air was wet and heavy and hot. Sweat ran in his crotch and armpits and at the corners of his eyes. When he tried to move the surface surged and rippled, and soft bonds tightened round his wrists and ankles.

  His pressure suit was gone. He wore only his one-piece undersuit, on a world uninhabitably hot. He felt naked, and trapped.

  Light pressed on his eyelids. He opened them.

  He was on a water bed, looking at gray sky through the jagged edges of a broken roof. He turned his head and saw more of a bedroom: curved headboard with elaborate controls, arc of couch with floating coffee table to match.

  These bedrooms must have been mass-produced, like prefab houses. But a tornado had hit this one. The roof and the picture windows had exploded outward.

  The old woman was watching him from the arc of sofa.

  He thought: Norn. Fate in the shape of an old woman. She was vivid in his memory, and so was the silver cane in her hand. He watched her stand and come toward him…and the fur boa round her shoulders raised a prick-eared head and watched him back. It was curled one and a half times around her neck. The tip of its tail twitched.

  Dammit, that was a cat. He remembered a cat like that, Lion, though he’d forgotten the boyhood friend who owned it. Lots of luxurious fur, and a long, rich, fluffy tail. If Lion’s tail had been multiplied by three and attached to Lion’s head, this beast would have been the result.

  But how could evolution cost a cat its legs?

  He didn’t believe it. Easier to believe that someone had tampered with a cat’s genes, sometime in these last three million years.

  The woman stood over him now, her cane pointed between his eyes. She spoke.

  He shook his head. The bed rippled.

  Her hand tightened on the cane. He saw no trigger, but she must have pulled a trigger, because Corbell went into agony. It wasn’t physical, this agony. It was sorrow and helpless rage and guilt. He wanted to die. “Stop!” he cried. “Stop!”

  Communication had begun.

  Her name was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.

  She must have had a computer somewhere. The box she set on the headboard was too small to be more than an extension of it. As Corbell talked—meaninglessly at first, babbling merely to stop her from using the cane—the box functioned as a translator. It spoke to Corbell in Corbell’s own voice, to Mirelly-Lyra in hers.

  They traded nouns. Mirelly-Lyra pointed at things and named them, Corbell gave them his own names. He had no names for many of the things in the room. “Cat-tail,” he called the furred snake. “Phone booth,” he called the instant-elsewhere booth.

  She set up a screen: a television that unrolled like a poster. Another computer link, he guessed. She showed him pictures. Their vocabularies increased.

  “Give me food,” he said when his hunger had grown more than his fear. When she understood, finally, she set a plate beside him and freed one of his hands. Under her watchful eye and the threat of her cane, he ate, and belched, and communicated, “More.”

  She took the plate behind the headboard. A minute or so later she brought it back reloaded, with fruit and a slice of roasted meat, hot and freshly cut, and a steamed yellow root that tasted like a cross between squash and carrot. As he shoveled down the first plateful of food he had hardly noticed what he was eating. Now he found time to wonder: where did she cook it? and to guess that she used the “phone booth” to reach her stove.

  The cat-tail dropped from the old woman’s shoulders onto the bed. Corbell froze. It wriggled across the bed and sniffed at the meat. Mirelly-Lyra thumped it on the chest and it desisted. Now it crawled up onto Corbell’s chest, reared and looked him in the eyes.

  Corbell scratched it behind the ears. Its eyes half closed and it purred loudly. Its belly was hard leather, ridged like a snake’s, but its fur felt as luxurious as it looked.

  He finished his second helping, feeding some of the meat to the cat-tail. He dozed off wondering if Mirelly-Lyra would shake him awake.

  She didn’t. When he woke the sky was black an
d she had turned on the lights. His free hand was bound again.

  His pressure suit was nowhere in sight. Even if she freed him she would still have the cane. He didn’t know if the “phone booth” worked. At the back of his mind he wondered if Peerssa, thinking him dead, had gone on to another star.

  What did she want with him?

  They worked on verbs, then on descriptive terms. Her language was of no form he had ever heard about, but the screen and mechanical memory made it easy for them. Soon they were trading information:

  “Take off the ropes. Let me walk.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I am old.”

  “So am I,” said Corbell.

  “I want to be young.”

  He couldn’t read expression in her voice or in the translator’s version of his own. But the way she’d said that jerked his head up to look at her. “So do I.”

  She shot him with the cane.

  Guilt, fear, remorse, death-wish. He cried and writhed and pulled at his bonds for eternal seconds before she turned it off.

  Then he lay staring at her in shock and hurt. Her face worked, demonically. Abruptly she turned her back on him.

  His thrashings had frightened the cat-tail. It had fled.

  “I want to be young—” and blam! And now her back was rigid and her fists clenched. Did she hide red rage, or tears? Why? Is it my fault she’s old? One thing was clear: She was keeping him tied up for her protection and his own. If she used the cane on him when his hands were free, he might kill himself.

  The cat-tail crawled back onto his chest, coiled, and reached to rub noses with him. “Meee!” It demanded an explanation.

  “I don’t know,” he told the beast now rumbling like a motor on his chest. “I don’t guess I’ll like the answer.”

  But he was wrong.

  She freed one of his hands and fed him. It was more of the same: two fruits, a steamed root, roasted meat. She fed the cat-tail while she was at it.

  The fruit was fresh. The meat was like overdone roast beef sliced moments ago. She had been out of sight behind the headboard for no more than a minute. Even a microwave oven wasn’t that fast, or hadn’t been in 1970. It stuck in his mind…