A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

  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 children.

  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; Gording’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 pool, 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 Sarash-Zillish 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 Gording’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 compact 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’ll 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 flights 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 Skatholtz 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 pulling him to his feet. Corbell 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. Co
rbell 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 Corbell 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 Sol system…on more of Sol 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 lightspeed. 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. Corbell 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.

  1023 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, Sol 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 Skatholtz 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 Skatholtz.<
br />
  “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 Earthlike world can have Earthlike temperatures. But Sol’s ideal 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.”