by Larry Niven
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 fascinated him. The RNA carried that fascination…and Corbell 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 burn?”
“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?”
Skatholtz 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.
Skatholtz 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.” Corbell 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 Corbell had thought of an explanation. Well…try misdirection. “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.” Skatholtz helped him stand up. “Can you point out this Himalayas place on a picture of the world? There was one downstairs.”
CHAPTER EIGHT:
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-year delayed 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,” Skatholtz 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, mountain
s. 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, Corbell 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!”
Skatholtz 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.”
Corbell 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 tchiple. One coin still kept its pattern.” He regarded Corbell dubiously. “You did not remember that you would need a name coin?”
Corbell 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 Corbell 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 all 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 Corbell has lost it? We have to find it, Corbell.”
“I don’t believe it. The cat-tails weren’t…I don’t believe it! Damn 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 general 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.—Corbell, 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 t
o 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. Corbell 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 still 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, Corbell, we can make the dikta flee across the sea.”
“It itches at me. I had it all figured out. Brilliantly! 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.”