by Larry Niven
Two commas crossed; an S reversed; an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends; a crooked pi. The corridors vanished. In blackness he thumbed the door open and stepped out into blackness. A gust of warm, damp wind whipped at him, and at the same time he saw dim light: a slender, hot-pink crescent with the horns down, at eye level.
He stood still while his eyes adjusted. A world took form around him.
He was on a flat roof, looking into a solar eclipse. They must be fairly common these days, with both Sol and Jupiter occluding so much of the sky. But the effect was beautiful, a hot-pink ring lighting sea and city with red dusk. He wished he could stay.
Mirelly-Lyra must be finding his pressure-suit helmet about now.
There were stairs. He would have been happier knowing how tall the building was, but he didn’t. He had to walk all the way to the bottom—and he was reassured to recognize the building that housed Mirelly-Lyra’s office. He paused for a precious moment of rest, then climbed back up three flights. Next question: Had the Norn noticed that the office door wasn’t closed?
The sixth door was open a crack, blocked by a fallen button. The door resisted his weight, then gave slowly, let him in.
They must have turned these offices out like popcorn boxes, he thought. Did it connect to the exploded bedroom? He had bet his life on it. He stepped into the “phone booth” and looked for the intercom panel.
Five buttons? He pushed the top one.
Through the glass door he saw salt dunes running downslope to a distant line of brilliant blue. He was in one of the seashore booths. He pushed the second button.
Back in the office, he pushed number three.
In red-tinged darkness he saw a triangular floor plan, walls and roof exploded outward. A dark doughnut shape, coiled just where he would have stepped on it, raised a white face, questioningly.
He shouted, “Yeeehaa!”
“Meep?”
He jabbed the fourth button down. The startled cat-tail vanished.
Sunken tub, shower…He thought of hot water and comfort and sleep, and the hell with it. Would the old woman set her private zero-time “jail” next to a Turkish bath? Why not? But he pushed the bottom button anyway, to see what there was to see.
Thoughts of sleep returned. His knees sagged. His muscles and bones seemed to be melting. But he saw. Ovens and cupboards to left and right. A long dining table, floating, and lines of floating chairs. The hooded Norn at the far end, and the silver cane foreshortened, end-on. Behind her, shards of a picture window, and a bundle of thick cables running over the sill.
He stabbed two buttons and kicked out at the door.
II
He was trying to remember something. It was urgent.
…See now, I hit an intercom button, then the door button, then kick out. Or the other way around? Intercom, door, kick out. Didn’t wait—couldn’t wait—never thought so fast in my life.
Pressure on his ankles. He thrashed a bit, got his elbows under him to lift his head. The door of the “phone booth” was trying to lift under his ankles. Beyond, the great red sun was almost whole again, a chunk still missing behind black Jupiter. Closer: A desk floated above cloud-rug.
He smiled and closed his eyes.
It was seconds or minutes before he stirred himself. The sun was still cut by Jupiter. He stood on the edge of the door while he looked for something to wedge it.
He’d got out by the skin of his teeth. With the silver cane pushing him down into unconsciousness, he’d hit the intercom button to take him to the office, the button to open the door, then got his legs across the door to wedge it. So far so good, but—
Assume the Norn was still guarding her zero-time device and her drug supply. He hadn’t seen the marvelous machine, he couldn’t even guess what it looked like, but what else could the cables be for? It must be there, and now Mirelly-Lyra knew he was after her drugs. By now she would know that the intercom to the office wasn’t working. She would assume Corbell had blocked the door open.
He couldn’t let the door close. She’d be out of it an instant later, right on his heels.
Corbell began to panic. He’d barred her from the general “phone-booth” system by barring her from the office. She couldn’t use that. She couldn’t come after him in the car; they’d left it here, just outside the entrance. So…yeah. Her fastest route to him was by intercom to the beach. Jog down to someone else’s intercom booth, thence to someone else’s office, dial for this building. By now she could be trotting down from the roof. And he still hadn’t found anything to block the door!
He stripped off his undersuit and wedged it in the door. It was cool for a moment, until the sweat dried on him. Now he was naked—and ashamed; what he saw when he looked down was not a self to be proud of. But who would see him but Mirelly-Lyra? The old woman was probably in no better shape.
His personal possessions had dwindled to an ancient, withered body (stolen) and a single plastic credit card disk (also stolen). He took them down three flights of stairs and out.
The car was where they had left it.
It wouldn’t start. He looked for a key or a key slot. If the Norn had taken the key he would have to walk. He found a slot, empty, and said a bad word before he noticed its size…
The plastic disk fit it perfectly.
The cars must be public taxis. That was convenient. Now, if the cars’ destination codes resembled the booths’, all he had to do was punch for the police station. And get a gun!
As he reached for the keyboard his hands started to shake. Then other muscles were twitching, and suddenly he was in convulsions. Strange noises came from his mouth. In fury and despair Corbell realized that the felon’s corpse had finally failed him; he was dying, and the timing was wrong, WRONG!
Please, no! Not till the battle’s over…
He locked his hands together and forced them at the keyboard. He punched the compressed hourglass, tried again and missed, again and hit, had to stop for a minute. Neck muscles locked and twisted his head backward, agonizingly, and he saw a car coming around the gently curved drive like a homing missile.
The convulsions were getting worse. He stabbed at the hourglass key again, and again, and…He didn’t know how often he’d hit it. When the car began to move he let the convulsions have their way.
Mental agony. Unconsciousness. Now convulsions. Maybe he ought to be compiling a list of what the silver cane wouldn’t do.
It wouldn’t stop a bubble-car. The convulsions eased. Presently he could turn his head. Mirelly-Lyra was far behind him, out of her car, still firing. His motion carried her around the curve of the drive.
He tried to relax. Random muscles locked and released in his legs, his back, his neck, his eyelids. He wasn’t just feeling the aftereffects of the silver cane. He had been through too much nightmare. He was too old for this kind of thing. He had always been too old to play Monster and Villagers through a maze of cityscape with an armed madwoman behind him.
“Come on, calm down,” he whispered. “It’s all over. Unless…” Unless there was a tracking device in Mirelly-Lyra’s dashboard. Or in her cane.
He would still get there ahead of her. Allow, say, one minute to search the police station for a gun. Then cut his losses, get out via the booths, dial at random and keep running.
Oops! The booths didn’t work. He had tried to dial the police station earlier.
The car tilted far over, rounded a corner and was on one of the radial streets. Corbell watched the rear, his chin propped on the back of the seat. It was less unnerving than watching rubble come at him.
He saw the edge of the hexagonal dome go past him. The street ended. He was crossing sand. Corbell turned to see barren salt dunes flowing past him. Far ahead, the blue-and-white line of ocean came toward him.
The car ran straight toward frothing white breakers, crossed them and headed out to sea at something like ninety miles per hour.
III
Corbell’s voice was a r
usty, querulous whine. He didn’t like it. It was interfering with his search.
It said, “All right, Corbell! You won the argument. If your medicines were better you wouldn’t have tried to steal mine. Now let’s talk!”
It wasn’t much of a search. He had hoped that Mirelly-Lyra might have stored food in her car. But he’d opened the glove compartment, and he’d looked under the seats, and where else was there? Slit the upholstery?
Corbell was hungry.
“You’ll find the talking switch on the far right of the panel. Just push it upward. Corbell?”
Sure. And then you’ll track me down and—But Corbell was tempted. He could ask her about food. He could ask her how to turn off the receiver.
The car zipped over the waves toward whatever destination its idiot brain had read from Corbell’s spastic directions. Beneath the edges of a thick gray-black cloud deck, the sun and crescent Jupiter had drifted apart along the horizon. The sun was lower now, its underside flattened.
Something lifted out of the red sunglare. He thought it was a bottle-nosed dolphin until its size registered. It was halfway to the horizon, and lifting like a blimp released! Its head tilted just a bit, and it looked him over while it slowly settled back into the frothing red sea.
A dolphin the size of a whale. So we killed the whales off after all, he thought. And later there was an ecological niche…
“I must guess you’re hearing me, Corbell. I’m tracking you toward the southernmost continent, toward what used to be the Boys’ capital city. You can’t lose me from your path because you can’t leave your car. Talk to me.”
It seemed she was tracking him anyway. He flipped the switch up and said, “Is there any food aboard this car?”
“Hello, Corbell. If you try to steal my drugs again you will kill yourself. I’ve placed traps.”
“Then I won’t.”
“Then we will be searching in separate places. I give you a year to find the dictator immortality. I wish I could give more, but you know my condition. If you will find the drug, I will become your woman. Otherwise I will kill you.”
He laughed. “A difficult choice.”
“You have not seen me when I was beautiful. I am the only woman for you, Corbell. There are no others left.”
“Don’t count on too much. Peerssa says I’m low on sex urge.”
That upset her. “Have you never desired women, Corbell?”
“I was married for twenty-two years.”
“What is married?”
“Mated. Under contract.”
“Was there sex? Did you enjoy it?”
Suddenly Corbell missed Mirabelle terribly. He mourned her, not because she was dead, but because she was gone. And her other half went on and on, through a world grown more and more hallucinatory…If only he could have talked it over with Mirabelle!
“In sex and in all ways, our life was purest ecstasy, as is usual in marriage,” Corbell said with a flippancy he did not feel. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“I had to know.”
Just to stick a pin in her, he said, “Has it ever occurred to you that I might not want the dictator immortality? Maybe I’m content to grow old gracefully.”
“You tried to steal my drugs.”
“You’ve got me there.”
“There is no grace to growing old. One year, Corbell.”
“Hey, don’t hang up. Have you any idea where I’m headed? I don’t even know where we were.”
“There is a continent that covers the South Pole. You are aimed there. As for where we were, there is a continent whose long tip points at the southernmost continent. We were nearly at the tip. I suspect your target to be the city of—” And for a moment her own voice broke through, before his resumed: “Sarash-Zillish, the capital of Earth’s last civilization.”
Departing Cape Horn for Antarctica, he thought. Where in Antarctica?
“What destination did you type?”
He risked telling her. “I was trying to get to the police station. What with the way my muscles were jumping around, I really don’t know what I hit.”
“Could you have struck the key more than four times? Five would send you to World Police Headquarters in Sarash-Zillish.”
“Maybe.” He laughed. “Well, it got me away from you.”
“One year, Corbell.”
In a year he could be dead, though in fact he felt pretty good. The aches, the exhaustion, the twitchies were going away. But the hunger had attained a fine cutting edge. “In an hour I’ll be dead of starvation. Is there any food in this car?”
“No.”
“What do I eat?”
“When you reach Sarash-Zillish, go to the park.” She gave him an address for the keyboard of his taxi. “The park is untended now, but any fruits you find are edible, and most of the animals can be eaten if you can catch them.”
“Okay.”
“You will not find dictator immortality there. There were never adults in Sarash-Zillish.”
“Hey, Mirelly-Lyra. How long have you been looking?”
“Perhaps ten years of my life.”
He was startled. “I got the impression you’d been at it for a century or so.”
“I was unlucky. When the Children revived me from zero-time, they told me they would search out the dictator immortality for me. I had no choice but to believe them, but they lied.”
“There was a vault in the hospital—”
She laughed. “There is a vault in every hospital in every city that remains on Earth. I have searched them all. What vaults haven’t been rifled contain nothing but poisons. The medicines have decayed with time and wet heat.”
“Tell me more. What did you learn about this dictator immortality after you landed, before they locked you up?”
“Almost nothing. Only that it was there.”
“Tell me. Tell me all the wrong answers so I don’t have to waste my time on them.”
IV
The Children had been waiting when Mirelly-Lyra descended from her spacecraft. Her first guess was that they must be the result of a State breeding program. Dignified, self-possessed, articulate, they displayed an adult wisdom she took for supernormal intelligence. Later she realized that it was the result of lifetimes of experience.
She had never seen their like.
They had never seen hers.
There were adults in the world, but they were a separate breed. She never met any, but she gathered that there were no more than a few thousand of them—all dictator class by courtesy, all using the dictator immortality. They kept themselves apart from the billions of children.
Children. Boys and Girls together, integrated. She thought nothing of it then. Later she remembered.
The Children tried her by her own law, for treason. She gained the impression that the proceedings were a farce for their amusement. Perhaps that was paranoia. They were punctilious; they did not mock her; they did not deviate from laws seventy thousand years old. For her part, Mirelly-Lyra kept her dignity at all times, as she was at pains to inform Corbell.
They sentenced her to the zero-time jail.
“Didn’t you ever hear anything about the interstellar colonies?”
“No, nothing.”
“It figures. They must have broken away from the State long before you landed. That’s probably why they fired on you. Not because you were Mirelly-Lyra, but because you were from Earth.”
There was a silence. Then, “I never understood that. Are you saying that the State broke apart?”
“Yeah. It took a hell of a long time, that’s all. The State was a water-monopoly empire.” Corbell was talking half to himself now. “They tend to last forever, unless something comes in from outside and breaks them up. But there wasn’t anything outside the State. The collapse had to wait till the State made its own barbarians.”
Hesitantly Mirelly-Lyra said, “You talk as if you have known many kinds of State.”
“I predate the State. I was a corpsic
le, a frozen dead man. When the State was a century or so old, they…turned a condemned criminal into Jerome Corbell.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Then maybe you know more than I do. How could the State break apart?”
“Look at it this way. First there was the State expanding through the solar system. Later, much later, there were a lot of copies of the State, one for each star, all belonging to one big State run from Earth. Then…well, I’m guessing. I think it was children’s immortality.
“You made a big thing out of the advantages of making eleven year-olds immortal. Okay, fine. What if the other States didn’t accept that? Look at how different your children’s State would be! The other States probably claimed they were the original State. That makes the solar system State heretics—its citizens, unbelievers.”
“What would happen then? Would they stop talking to each other?”
Corbell laughed. “Sure. Right after the war. Right after both sides tried to exterminate each other and failed. That’s got to be the way it happened. It’s inevitable.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
“Then,” she said slowly, “that’s what happened to…”
“What?”
“When they took me out of zero-time there was more than one State on Earth. Maybe that was inevitable, too. Let me tell you.”
The Children led Mirelly-Lyra to the peak of a squat silver pyramid. Widgets of silver and clear plastic floated around her: three-dimensional television transmitters, and weapons that affected the mind and will. They turned off the pyramid; its mirror-colored sides became black iron. They put her in an elevator and sent her down.
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.